New Imagined Community

Advanced media technologies -- satellite technology and the Internet -- have transformed immigrants' relations with their departure and arrival societies. Part I -- "Imagining Nation States from Afar" -- extends Benedict Anderson's model of the nation as an imagined community; discussion focuses on how immigrants are enabled to imagine their native national communities from afar, almost as if they never left their homelands. As a result, new typologies of migrants are created, such as the passive trans-national. A comprehensive analytic framework for the role of advanced media technologies in fostering relations between immigrants and their national communities of origin is presented. In addition the author explores, through biographical research with immigrants of diverse nationalities, the spectrum of responses imagination of national communities from afar invokes among different types of immigrants (the sojourner, the member of an ethnic community and the long-distance national). Part II -- "Imagining the Muslim Nation State from Afar" -- explores how Muslim-Arab religious scholars, envisioning the rise of a global Muslim nation, have developed over the past thirty years a theory that tasks Muslims living in the West with specific duties within the framework of their anticipated global Muslim nation. These Muslim-Arab religious scholars and other advocates were quick to discover the merits of advanced media technologies in enhancing their vision of global Islam. The author's biographical field research was conducted with devout Muslim-Arabs in five mosques in Frankfurt am Main, Germany. His research illustrates how the proliferation of this global Muslim media plays an increasingly important -- albeit yet still limited -- role in shaping the identity of Muslim immigrants. These specific challenges to the foundations of the modern liberal nation state are ripe for discussion given the world-wide concern over immigration and its consequences.

"This is an absorbing and topical book that deserves a wide audience." --Paul Thomas, University of Huddersfield, UK, National Identities, "Countering the popular assumption that satellite television and the internet are turning the world into one global village where national identities erode, Shavit argues that the technology in fact creates a world where instruments essential to the infusion and endurance of national sentiments are extended outside national boundaries, so the imagination of the nation can be nearly as vivid in exile as at home. He considers such topics as the territorial dimension of modern national imageries, national imageries and modern migration, and imagining the homeland from afar. Then he turns to his case study - the Muslim immigrants in the West, advanced technologies in the service of the ummah, European and German contexts of the Muslim nation, and imagining the Muslim nation from afar." --Reference & Research Book News

Uriya Shavit is a fellow at the Moshe Dayan Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies and teaches Middle Eastern Studies at Tel Aviv University. He specialises in the study of Muslim minorities in Europe and of democratic discourses in Arab societies. He is also the author of several articles on Islam in the West and democracy Arab conceptualisation of Western democracy.