INDUSTRY, CONSTITUTIONS, AND NATIONALISM 279
really had-it didn't have an army and didn't command a police force-yet
within two years the Majlis had passed a host oflaws that laid the basis for
free speech, a free press, and a full range of civil liberties in Iran.
Before the third year was up, however, the king pointed cannons at the
parliament building and blew it down, his way of saying: "Let's give the
old ways another chance." The ulama and all the other traditional groups
cheered him on; and this is where matters stood in Iran as World War I
approached.
Meanwhile, a third European phenomenon was seducing minds and hearts
across the Islamic world: nationalism. Iran provided the least fertile soil for
this ideology, perhaps because it was already pretty much a nation-state, or
at least closer to one than any other part of the Islamic heartland. In India,
nationalism began transforming Aligarh modernism into a movement that
would finally give birth to Pakistan. But it was in the Ottoman Empire
and in territories that had once been part of this empire that nationalism
really caught on.
When I say nationalism, I don't mean the nation-state per se. A nation-
state is a concrete geographical fact: a territory with definite borders, a sin-
gle central government, a single set of laws enforced by that single
government, a single currency, an army, a police force, and so on. Nation-
states such as France and England developed spontaneously out of histori-
cal circumstances and not because nationalists conceived of them and then
built them.
The nationalism I'm speaking of was {is} an idea. It didn't develop
where nation-states had formed, but where they hadn't. It didn't describe
what was but what (supposedly) ought to be. The German-speaking peo-
ple came into the nineteenth century as a multitude of principalities and
kingdoms. Italy was similarly divided, and so was the whole of Europe east
of Germany. Nationalism sprouted in these areas.
The seeds of the idea go back to the eighteenth-century German
philosopher Johann Herder, who criticized "enlightenment" philosophers
such as Immanuel Kant. The enlightenment philosophers taught that man
is essentially a rational being and that moral values must ultimately be
based on reason. Since the rules of reason are the same for everyone, at all
times, in all places, civilized people who subdue their passions and let