No intellectual theme has been more prominent in the Middle East of the twentieth century than the idea of the state. In one way or another, most ideas debated have been closely connected to the ideal form of the state, and nearly all the directions that such a debate could have taken have been probed. The gamut of political theories concerning the state was so wide that it allowed for any ideology, no matter how remote from the society where it was proposed and how thinly connected to its cultural milieu, to find an association with or to curry favour as the ideology of some Middle Eastern group.

It is true that most other countries of the world have witnessed to some extent a similarly wide range of state theories. But a characteristic of the Middle East lay in the difficulty of accepting the classical nation-state which, by the late 1950s, was established in most countries of the world. To date, the reluctance of the debate to deal with nation-states in their present form has been a major indication of the resilience of radically different projections and their claim to order societies in the Middle East according to alternative schemes.

Parallels can of course be found with other areas. South East Asia and Africa have had similar problems of state identity, and the Vietnam and Korean crises, as well as the South-African situation, have seen divisions and controversies which foreshadow and echo the Middle Eastern situation.