Manifesto of a Rationalist

Yet another work to add to the overflowing ranks of studies of ethnicity, of nationalism, and of how nations are made and unmade. Yet another work which wonders whether the ethnic card is instrumentally employed by self-serving leaders who are in the business of pursuing power, or whether ethnic identity is a primordial sentiment which comes along with birth. Yet another work which seeks to pattern ‘Muslim’ nationalism and ethnicity. This work is a manifesto of a rationalist, who has little time and even less patience for ‘less civilized’ [my term] forms of politics. But it is precisely these forms of politics that have come to command the world. As Wieland points out, so called ethnic conflicts have claimed millions of lives after the end of the Cold War, more than 20,000 persons died in Bosnia alone between 1992 and 1995, and 800,000 died in Rwanda in the year 1994. More troublesome is the fact that if ethnicity undermines the state from below, [supra-national] terrorism attacks it from above.