(TWOIDEA)

NATION

INTER
NAL

NATIO
RELATIONS REPORT

Introduction:
Nationalism is commonly defined as a love for one's country. Historically, however,

nationalism takes on a far greater meaning. Throughout history, large groups of

people who share a cultural identity (language, customs, history) have felt the
pulling power of nationalistic feeling. The spirit of nationalism also includes the
belief that one's nation is better off as an autonomous state. Autonomy is defined
as a nation governing itself independently from a centralized point. Still another
aspect of nationalism is the willingness to go to extreme measures in achieving
autonomous self-rule. Revolutions, wars, ethnic tension, and other conflicts of
varying degrees have occurred throughout history because of a love for one's
country. The spirit of nationalism has shaped the histories and destinies of many
countries. Nationalism can unite people into cohesive, stable nations. Likewise, it
can tear nations apart which can result in long periods of social upheaval and
political chaos.

Background:
The idea might seem commonplace to modern people, but prior to the French
Revolution, very few Europeans would have embraced then. In those days, Europe
was ruled by dynasties that control large areas and contained many small states.
The Holy Roman Empire, for instance, spread its influence over much of central
Europe. Monarchs often held absolute power, and they expected their people to be
loyal to them rather than to their nations.
Things began to change when the French Revolution crashed onto the European
scene in 1789. The revolutionaries overthrew the monarch in 1792 and placed
power in the hands of France's citizens (or at least some of them). They clearly
defined the rights of citizens and drew up constitutions that expressed their new
ruling principles.
In doing so, they developed a common identity among French people, who began to
be loyal to France as a nation. The national motto 'Liberty, Fraternity, Equality!' rang
out in the streets. The tricolor French flag proudly flew over French territory. Citizens
turned to their legislative bodies and a central, national government for guidance
rather than to a king or to a class of noblemen. Even a standard French language
spread throughout the country, overtaking and replacing regional dialects.
France had become a sovereign nation, and its people grew in their national loyalty.
Many of them believed that their new system was working well, and they were
ready to move out into the world to bring their discoveries to others.
People in other nations looked at what was happening in France and decided that
perhaps the French had the right idea. For example, clubs developed in Great Britain

that adopted the ideas of the French Revolution and tried to apply them to their own
country.

Positives and Negatives of Nationalism:

Both give priority to "us" inside the borders over "them" out there. Both believe that
their country comes first. Both depend for their force on a nation's sense of common
purpose. But negative nationalism uses that commonality to exclude those who
don't share it. Positive nationalism uses it
to expand opportunities for those who do. Positive nationalism constructs a sense of
pride and patriotism among the people and a sense of sacrifice for the country.
Negative nationalism assumes that the world is a zero-sum game where our gains
come at another nation's expense, and theirs come at ours. Positive nationalism
assumes that when our people are better off they're more willing and better able to
add to the world's well-being. History teaches that one of the two faces of
nationalism almost always predominates. A society with a lot of positive nationalism
is more likely to be tolerant and open toward the rest of the world because its
people have learned the habits of good citizenship and social justice.
Nationalism can be integrative. For instance, Germany emerged as an independent
state under nationalism. On the other hand countries can get divided under
nationalism. Nationalism is inherently divisive and it highly glorifies differences. For
instance, Pakistan and India were divided under nationalism. Thus, nationalism has
proven to be a dangerous sport and can cause war between states. Forging a nation
in a specific shape and disregarding those who either do not obey it or cannot fulfil
it will most presumably lead to civil unrest. Examples can be extracted from the
history of most nations just a small collection of recent activities: China (Tibet
conflict), Turkey (Gezi protest), Ukraine (Euromaidan). All of them are caused by the
clash between national interests. The exclusive form of nationalism thus already
bears the seed of conflict.
The positive point of nationalism can be that, negative nationalism can at times
become a unifying force. Nationalism helps in grounding and saving regional
cultural exclusivity and ethnic identification. Good example for this point is Latvia
is having a crisis of migration to Great Britain and Germany. So nationalism can be a
force which can start a dialogue about national values, grounding in motherland
area and keeping this small nation together. Furthermore, it may disdain human
rights of those who do not agree on a certain definition of a nation.

Nationalism can be a way to the economic miracle when people are ready for
everything as revanchists. Germany start of 30th of XX century. The country wanted
revenge. The country was renovated after 1st WW in very short terms. And
nationalism was the main fuel in the mechanism of economic revival. For sure it is
also controversial because they made something worthier but if they wouldnt
stopped in time maybe they will be more strong country than USA now.
Nationalism helps in promoting human skills and special type of character to keep
the glory of nation. Example of USA can be good here: the brave and powerful
patriot this stereotype about American man they built long time ago, but
nationalism is a power, which keeps it still strong. And lot of people can attach the
feeling with the whole nation which is for sure good. On the other hand it can be
used in building strong future symbols as avoid to splitting the country..
Nationalism helps in migration control. Nationalism can be a good force to avoid the
over-migration and total national mixing. Switzerland is multicultural country with
lot of migrants. And the awareness of overfilling the area is also a way to more clear
system of checking people, who want to live there. Also according to local laws
they try to check the people who will stay and make cultural tests about the country
for them, which is also step in education for the majority of them.
All in all, nationalism can be a force of good or be a force of bad things nobody will
not disagree that it is a force.

Muslim Nationalism (TWO-NATION IDEA)

Muslim Nationalism
Muslim nationalism in South Asia did not exist till the end of Muslim rule here. The
decline of the Mughal Empire, rise of British Colonialism, and the political
reassertion of Hindus in India, provided the materials with which Muslim nationalism
would first begin to shape itself. One very important (but often ignored) factor
which helped create a sense of nationhood among sections of Muslims in India: i.e.
the manner in which Urdu began to replace Persian as the preferred language of
Muslims in India.
As Muslim rule receded, immigrants from Persia and Central Asia stopped travelling
and settling in India because now there were little or no opportunities left for them
to bag important posts in the courts of Muslim regimes. The importance and
frequency of Persian ebbed, gradually replaced by Urdu a language which began
to form in India from the 14th century CE. Largely spoken by local Muslims (most of
whom were converts); by the early 19th century, Urdu had already begun to make
its way into the homes of the Muslim elite as well. This helped the local Muslims to
climb their way up the social ladder and begin to fill posts and positions which were
once the exclusive domain of Persian and Central Asian immigrants.

This initiated the early formation of a new Muslim grouping, mostly made-up of local
Muslims who were now enjoying social mobility. But all this was happening when the
Muslim empire was rapidly receding and the British were enhancing their presence
in India. This also facilitated the process which saw the Hindus reasserting
themselves socially and politically after remaining subdued for hundreds of years.
With no powerful and overwhelming Muslim monarch or elite now shielding the
interests of the Muslims in the region, the emerging community of local Muslims
became fearful of the fact that its newly-found enhanced status might be swept
aside by the expansion of British rule and Hindu reassertion. Though many local
Muslims had managed to make their way up the social ladder, the ladder now led to
a place which did not have a powerful Muslim ruler. Thus, the new community was
politically weak. It felt vulnerable and many of its members began accusing the
later-day Mughals of squandering an empire due to their decadence.
Muslims beliefs in India (especially among common Muslims) was such, that it could
be easily molded by the missionaries and the Hindu reformists. To them, only a
strict adherence to Islamic laws and rituals could save the Muslim community from
being completely absorbed by the changing political and social currents and events.
The movements formed by Shariatullah and Syed Ahmad made the mosques and
madrassas the cornerstones of the idea of nationhood among the local Muslims.
British soldiers clash with the mutineers
But they collapsed when the British began to assert their authority. The movements
elicited a surge of passion among many Indian Muslims, but these passions put the
community on a course leading to further alienation and social and political
deterioration, especially after the 1857 Sepoys Mutiny against the British. The
mutiny remembered as a War of Liberation in present-day India and Pakistan
involved an uprising within sections of Hindus and Muslims in the British Army; but
most of its civilian leaders were Muslims from the local Muslim community, and
remnants of the old Muslim elite. After the bloody commotion was brought under
control, the last vestiges of Mughal rule were eradicated.
According to the British whose power grew manifold after the failure of the
rebellion it were the Muslims who had played the more active role in the
rebellion. Consequently, influential British authors such as Sir William Muir began
fostering the myth of the Muslim with a sword in one hand and the Quran in the
other. A Muslim and a Hindu rebel hanged by the British after the Mutiny was
crushed.
Muslim nationalism: The rational turn
British (after 1857) began to investigate the social, political and cultural dynamics
of the religious differences between the Muslims and the Hindus in the region, and
then utilised their findings to exert more control over both the communities. British
authors were squarely criticised by Muslim scholars in India for looking at Islamic
history from a Christian point of view and presenting the legacy of Islam as
something which was destructive and retrogressive.

During the 1857 mutiny, Sir Syed had already established himself as a member of
the scholarly Muslim gentry who had studied Sufism, mathematics, astronomy, and
the works of traditional Islamic scholars. After the Mutiny was crushed and
literature, which cast a critical eye on Muslim history began to emerge, Khan put
forward a detailed proposal which he hoped would not only contest the perceptions
of Islam being formulated by the British, but also help the regions Muslim
community to reassess their beliefs, character and status according to the changes
taking shape around it. Khan reminded the British that Islam was inherently a
progressive and modern religion which had inspired the creation of some of the
worlds biggest empires, which in turn had encouraged the study of philosophy and
the sciences during a period in which Europe was lurking aimlessly in the Dark
Ages. Sir Syed also asserted that the scientific and military prowess of the West
was originally inspired and informed by the scholarly endeavors of medieval Muslim
scientists and philosophers.
According to noted historian, Ayesha Jalal, the concept of both Muslim and Hindu
nationalism was largely the result of British social engineering which they began as
a project after the 1857 Mutiny. The project began when the British introduced the
whole idea of conducting a census. A lot of emphasis was stressed upon the
individuals faith; and the results of the census were then segmented more on the
bases of religion than on economic or social status. Sir Syed was quick to grasp this,
and also the fact that the Hindu majority was in a better position to shape itself into
a holistic community because of its size and better relations with the British after
the 1857 Mutiny.
Sir Syeds thesis correctly theorised that the Muslims needed to express themselves
as a holistic community too, especially one which was positively responsive to the
changes the British were implementing in the social, judicial and political spheres of
India. Nevertheless, this scheme was largely a failure because within the Muslim
communities of the region were stark sectarian, sub-sectarian, class, ethnic and
cultural divisions. And as was seen during Syed Ahmad Barelvis uprising in KP, once
he began to implement his standardised ideas of the Sharia, he faced a fateful
rebellion by his erstwhile supporters who accused him of trying to usurp their tribal
influence and customs.
During the last days of Muslim rule, clerics in Indian mosques had begun to replace
the names of Mughal kings in their sermons (khutba) with those of the rulers of the
Ottoman Empire, as if to suggest that the interests of the Muslims of India were
inherently rooted outside India.Indeed, the ulema had begun to conceive the
Muslims of India as a unified whole, but this whole was not explained as a nation in
the modern context, but as part of a larger Muslim ummah. Sir Syed saw a problem
in this approach. He decried that such an approach went against the changing tides
of history.He was perturbed by three main attitudinal negatives which he believed
had crept into the psyche of the Muslims and were stemming their intellectual
growth, and, consequently, causing their economic and political decline .
They were: decadence; worship of the past; and dogma.
Khan wrote that after reaching the heights of imperial power, Muslims had become
decadent and lazy. When this led to them losing political power, they became

overtly nostalgic about past glories which, in turn, solidified their inferiority complex
(prompted by their current apathetical state in the face of the rise of the West). This
caused a hardening of views in them against modernity and change and the
emergence of a dogmatic attitude. To Syed, the Muslims of India stood still,
unmoving, and, in fact, refusing to move because they believed a great conspiracy
had been hatched against them. He suggested that the Muslims (of India) had lost
political power because they had lost their ability to rule.
He castigated the ulema for forcing the Muslims to reject science. When the ulema
responded by accusing him of creating divisions in a community which they were
trying to unite, he wrote that since he was a reformist, his job was not to unite but
to jolt members of his community by questioning established (but corrosive) social,
intellectual and political norms. He asked the ulema: The Greeks learned from the
Egyptians; the Muslims from the Greeks; the Europeans from the Muslims so what
calamity will befall the Muslims if they learned from the British? He wanted them to
overcome their cultural and theological inertias and embrace what was on offer:
Modern education. To further his argument that Islam was inherently a progressive
religion, and, in essence, timeless (in the sense that it was easily adaptable to everchanging zeitgeists), Khan authored a meticulously researched and detailed
commentary on the Quran.
First issue of a journal which Sir Syed launched in 1870.
He wrote that the codes of belief and spirituality were the main concerns of
religion and that cultural habits (pertaining to eating, dressing, etc.) are mundane
matters for which Islam provides only moral guidance because they change with
time and place.
He believed that if faith is not practiced through reason and wisdom, it can never be
followed with any real conviction. This, to him, had made the ulema dogmatic in
their thinking and hostile towards even the most positive aspects of the changes
taking shape around them.

Enter Afghani
Another modernist tendency which had been introduced among the Muslims of India
in the 19th century was pan-Islamism. One of its earliest advocates was Jamal AlDin Al-Afghani a bright young Afghan ideologist who arrived in India in 1855.
Afghani passionately supported the 1857 Mutiny and was exasperated when it
failed. Unlike the orthodox ulema, Afghani did not see any good in turning inwards
and radically rejecting the modernity associated with British rule. He acknowledged
the supremacy of Western education but emphasised that Muslims should embrace
it to improve their lot and then turn the tables against Western imperialism by
overthrowing it and establishing a global Islamic caliphate.

Unlike the Muslim modernism pioneered by the likes of Sir Syed Ahmad Khan,
Afghani, and, subsequently, pan-Islamism, viewed Western modernity (especially in
the field of education), as an elixir to regenerate the Muslims not as a way to help
them excel and find a place within colonial settings, but to fully understand and
then eradicate colonialism. Sir Syeds Muslim modernism, however, was largely
interested in the intellectual, social and political fate of the Muslim community of
India. So he thought that Afghanis idea of radically confronting the British would
produce the same demoralising results (for the Muslims) as did the failure of the
1857 Mutiny. Afghani censured Sir Syed for harming the global Muslim cause by
speaking only about Indias Muslims, as if they were separate from the Muslim
communities elsewhere. Afghani was vocal in his denunciations of the orthodox
ulema who were rejecting modern education; however, quite like the ulema, Afghani
too, saw the Muslims as a global community (ummah).
Pan-Islamism was thus inherently anti-nationalist. Unlike later-day panIslamists, Afghani was rather progressive and modernistic in his thinking. More than
seeing Islam as a theistic route to a political revolution, he, instead, saw it as a
slogan to rally Muslims around the world against European imperialism.
Syeds triumph
In 1879 one of Sir Syeds staunchest supporters, the poet and intellectual, Altaf
Hussain Hali, wrote a long poem which passionately forwarded Syeds ideas of
reform and modernity. But the most protuberant aspect of the poem was when Hali
declared the Muslims of India as a separate cultural entity, distinct from other
communities in India, especially compared to the Hindu majority. But Hali explained
that this distinction was not based on any hostility towards the non Muslims of the
region; but on the notion (which Hali believed was a fact) that the Muslims of India
were descendants of foreigners who came and settled here during Muslim rule. By
the late 19th century, many local Muslims had begun to claim foreign ancestry
(Persian, Central Asian and Arabian) mainly because with the erosion of Muslim rule
in India, Muslim empires still existed elsewhere in the Middle East. The claim of
having foreign ancestry was also a way to express the separateness of Indias
Muslims.
Another aspect in this context was the rise of the Urdu language among the
Muslims. Though having (and claiming to have) Persian, Central Asian and Arabic
ancestry was a proud attribute to flaunt; Urdu, which had been the language of
lower Muslims of (North) India, ascended and began to rapidly develop into a
complex literary language. The British didnt have a problem with this. Because the
Persian had been the language of the court during Muslim rule, its rollback
symbolised the retreat of the memory and influence of Muslim rule in India. In 1837,
the British replaced Persian with Urdu (in the northern regions of India) as one of the
officially recognised vernacular languages of India. But in the 1860s, Urdu became a
symbol of Muslim separatism not through the efforts of the Muslims, but, ironically,
due to the way some Hindus reacted to Urdu becoming an official language. The
resultant controversy triggered by Hindu reservations helped establish Urdu as an
additional factor which separated the Muslims from the Hindus.

Syed Ahmad Khan had managed to attract the support and admiration of a growing
number of young intellectuals, journalists, authors and poets. But he was the target
of some vicious polemical attacks as well. The conservative ulema were extremely
harsh in their criticism and one of them even went on to accuse him of being an
apostate. They blamed him for trying to tear the Muslims away from the
unchangeable tenants of their religion, and for promoting Angraziat (Western
ethics and customs) among the believers.
Syed also received criticism from the supporters of Afghanis pan-Islamism. Afghani
himself admonished Khan for not only undermining the idea of global Muslim unity
(by alluding to Muslim nationalism in the context of Indias Muslims only); but he
also censured him for creating divisions between Indias Muslims and Hindus.
Afghani was of the view that Hindu-Muslim unity was vital in India to challenge
British rule in the region. Despite the attacks which mostly came his way through
statements, editorials and articles in the plethora of Urdu newspapers which began
to come up after the proliferation of the printing press in India it were his ideas
which managed to dominate the most prominent dimensions of Muslim nationalism
in India.
According to Ayesha Jalal, Sir Syeds strategic and pragmatic alignment with the
British helped his ideas to make vital in-roads in a more organised and freer manner.
His religious detractors remained stationed in their mosques and madrassahs. And
though their criticism of his ideas was intense, it mostly appeared in rhetorical
articles in newspapers. Consequently, most of his religious opponents could not find
a place in the school that he set up in Aligarh. This school evolved into becoming a
college and then an institution which began to produce a particular Muslim elite and
urban bourgeoisie who would go on to dominate Muslim nationalist thought in India
and decide what course it would take.