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The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

Author(s): C. Ernest Dawn


Reviewed work(s):
Source: International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 20, No. 1 (Feb., 1988), pp. 67-91
Published by: Cambridge University Press
Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/163586 .
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Int. J. Middle East Stud. 20 (1988), 67-91. Printed in the United States of America

C. Ernest Dawn

THE

FORMATION

IN THE

INTERWAR

OF PAN-ARAB

IDEOLOGY

YEARS

Arab nationalism arose as an opposition movement in Ottoman Syria, Palestine,


and Iraq around the turn of the century. It remained a minority movement until
the Ottoman collapse in 1918, but after the Ottoman defeat it became the
overwhelmingly dominant movement in these territories where, except for some
Lebanese, all successful politicians were Arab nationalists during the interwar
years.' Just what Arab nationalism meant to its proponents at the time, however,
has been difficult to determine. The period only dimly figures in studies of Arab
nationalism. Full studies have been devoted to survivors from the past, Rashid
Rida' and Shakib Arslan, to Satic al-Husri (al-Husari), a relative newcomer
whose greatest prominence was to be in the 1940s and 1950s, and to the Muslim
Brothers, who arrived on the scene even later, whose influence was to lie in the
future, and who, like Rida', were not considered to be primarily Arab nationalists. Otherwise, hardly a scant handful of pre-World War II Arab nationalist
writers, and these from the late 1930s, receive even casual mention.2 This situation undoubtedly results partly from the recent origin of modern Arab studies,
which has naturally influenced students to concentrate on the post-World War II
period to the neglect of the interwar years. Furthermore, major politicians of
that time apparently rarely wrote systematically on politics. Collections of their
speeches seem to be few, and newspaper accounts of their speeches only infrequently contain much beyond the generalities of praising the Arab nation and
exhorting it to fulfill its mission. Despite the reticence of the political leaders, in
the interwar years as in the prewar years there were people who wrote articles
and books devoted to defining the Arab nation and its place in the world. Quite
a few of these authors were associated with major politicians who sought and, at
times, held office in the governments of the region. They attracted little notice in
the West, however, even from the small body of Orientalists, whose concerns
were limited to classical texts and the writings of major literary figures. Consequently, their publications, while in the mainstream of Arab political thought
in the 1920s and 1930s, have been largely overlooked and are rarely to be found
in Western libraries.
Given the present state of scholarship, a representative sample of Arab political publications of the interwar years would be extremely difficult to construct.
But those authors who took part in Arab nationalist political organizations and
activities provide a reasonable starting point. Their publications and the works
? 1988 Cambridge University Press 0020-7438/88 $5.00 +.00

68

C. Ernest Dawn

they refer to are prima facie expressions of Arab nationalist thought. Prominent
among them are such survivors from the prewar years as Muhammad Kurd 'Ali,
Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, and Shakib Arslan. One readily available publication
is the journal of the Arab Academy at Damascus, edited by Kurd CAli, which
published many pertinent articles and reviews of books. Finally, the most important publications for the present purpose are a number of history textbooks that
were designed for use in the schools of Palestine, Syria, and Iraq. All that were
accessible to me have been included in this essay. The earliest was Ta'rikh
filastin, by 'Umar Salih al-Barghuthi and Khalil Tuta (Totah).3 Next appeared
an elementary school text by Muhammad 'Izzat Darwaza, Mukhtasar ta'rikh
al-'arab wa-al-islam.4 This was replaced by the same author's Durus al-ta'rikh
al-'arabi min aqdam al-asmina ila alan.5 Darwaza followed with other elementary school textbooks: Durus al-ta'rikh al-mutawassit wa-al-hadith6 and Durus
al-ta'rikh al-qadim.7 By the end of the 1920s, a more or less standard formulation of the Arab self-view had appeared and received comprehensive statement
in a textbook for the intermediate schools, Ta'rikh al-umma al-'arabiyya, by
Darwish al-Miqdadi.8
These publications are important expressions of Pan-Arab thought. The
authors had long and active careers in association with major Arab nationalist
politicians. Their publications, appearing across the full range of the print media,
from elementary and secondary school texts through trade books to the journal
of the most important Arab learned society outside Egypt, were open to the
notice of the entire literate public. The textbooks exposed many successive
academic classes to Pan-Arab concepts. Barghuthi and Tuta's book was written
for the Palestine schools but, according to A. L. Tibawi, was banned at the
instance of Sir Herbert Samuel. However, the educational system described by
Tibawi and by Humphrey Bowman permitted considerable freedom in the production and adoption of history textbooks to Arab officials and teachers, who
were nationalists to a man. Darwaza's textbooks, in view of their favorable
reviews, their number and many editions, and their author's prominent association with major Palestinian, Syrian, and Iraqi politicians throughout the interwar years, most likely were widely used in Palestine and Syria. According to
Reeva Simon, some of them were used as teaching aids in the Iraqi schools.
Miqdadi's textbook was officially adopted in Iraq. Its prime importance is
attested to by Nabih Amin Faris and Nicola Ziadeh, two prominent Arab
historians and educators who were students during the period. According to
Faris, Miqdadi's text "was selected as the text for the teaching of history in the
secondary schools of Palestine, Syria, and Iraq, where it continued to be the
standard text of Arab youth for several student generations." In the judgment of
Ziadeh, it was "the first history to deal with Arab history on national grounds."9
The publications express a distinct doctrine, with the same thought elements
recurring in author after author. The present state of scholarship does not permit
ascription of first-authorship, tracing of influences, or attribution of sources. The
full statement of the Pan-Arab self-view is found in Miqdadi's textbook. No
other single work and perhaps no other one author includes all elements of the
self-view, but none explicitly rejects any element. The Arab nationalist self-view

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

69

expounded by these writers contains all the elements of the later Ba'thist and
Nasserist self-views, and some avenues of transmission of those elements can be
discerned.
The Arab self-view that emerged in the interwar years was a development of
the Islamic modernist doctrine as expounded by CAbdal-Rahman al-Kawakibi,
who was the acknowledged master.'1 Works by his ideological relatives, the
Damascene Tahir al-Jaza'iri and the Iraqi Mahmud Shukri al-Alusi, were
published and praised. The necessity to modernize and revivify Islam by returning to the true Islam of the Arab ancestors was their central concern, but this
doctrine was merged with a historical view that incorporated the ancient peoples
of the Near East into the Arab nation.
The Arab nation possessed its own peculiar territory comprising many countries, distinct geographical entities, of which the most important were Egypt,
Iraq, Syria, and Arabia. These four lands were the nucleus of the Arab homeland. Syria included the mandated territories of Palestine (and Transjordan),
Lebanon, and Syria, always depicted as an indivisible unity, and sometimes
called Greater Syria. Iraq, (Greater) Syria, and Arabia were especially closely
connected. Barghuthi and Tuta remarked on the Prophet's desire to conquer
Syria and Palestine and "add them to the Jazira, because they are its wing and
its foot is Iraq," and Darwaza noted that Syria and Palestine, bilad al-sha9m, are
connected by a desert to Najd and Iraq. The notion of a nuclear Arab homeland east of Suez was influenced by the American Egyptologist, James Henry
Breasted. In a 1925 publication by Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, Muhammad alShurayqi cited Breasted in connection with the movement of Semites from
"the eastern crescent plain." After the publication of an Arabic translation of
Breasted's textbook in 1926, the concept of the Fertile Crescent, a natural
geographical entity comprising Iraq and Greater Syria, became more popular.
The final stage was reached in the concept of the "Arab Island," which was used
in Miqdadi's textbook. "A living body," of which "the head" is the Fertile
Crescent, "the heart," central Arabia, and "the extremities," the Arabian coastlands from the Gulf of Aqaba to "the Gulf of Basra," the "Island" is "a
geographical unit . . . the cradle of the Arabs and their fortress.""
The Arab homeland was a natural geographical unit, but geography was of
secondary importance. People, not territory, were the decisive element. The
people created the homeland. All lands inhabited by Arabs were Arab. In
Darwaza's words, "The lands of Syria, Iraq, and Palestine were always Arab
because they were filled with Arabs." Territory was made Arab by the expansion
of the Arabs. "The Arab nation spread in different regions of the world."'2
Miqdadi also conceived of the Arab homeland as the territory inhabited by
Arabs, expanding as the Arabs expanded into Asia, Africa, and Europe.13 The
Arab nation's occupation of its homeland was achieved in remote antiquity. All
authors highlighted the movement of Arabs such as the Ghassanids, Lakhmids,
and Nabataeans into the Fertile Crescent long before Islam. They pushed the
Arab migration back as early as possible to the times of Narim Sin, Hammurabi,
the Amalikites, and the Hyksos, all of whom were considered, definitely or
probably, to be Arabs. Darwaza's ancient history text, evidently influenced by

70

C. Ernest Dawn

Breasted's Ancient Times, withdrew the identification of Hammurabi as an Arab,


but Miqdadi retained the probability.14
The ancient pre-Islamic Arabs were only a small part of the glorious history of
the Arabs. The Semitic-wave theory was adapted to push the Arab occupation of
the national territory back to the most ancient times.'5 Muhammad al-Shurayqi
attributed to Breasted a succinct statement of the common view of the interwar
years:
ImmenseSemiticbandsmigratedin prehistorictimesfrom the easterncrescentplain and
marchedwestwarduntil they descendedinto Egyptby way of Sinai and Suez, and some
of them remainedin this region and populatedit. They were the root of the ancient
Egyptianpeople and the foundersof the Egyptiancivilization.Anothersection of them
[went]to Ethiopiaand settledin it. Anothersectionremainedwanderingin North Africa
for a numberof centuriesuntil manybandssettledin variouslocalities,and some of them
reachedthe shores of the Atlantic.The movementof the Arabs at the coming of Islam
was nothingbut the last manifestationof those migrationswhichproducedthe unification
of the Semitic homelands(mawatin) and resurrectedthem in a new Arab homeland
(watan).

Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib's essay developed this theme in detail. According to


him, Arabic was the most advanced and thus the most ancient of the Semitic
languages. The ancient Semitic languages, he asserted, were much like the
modern Arabic dialects, and thus Abraham could wander throughout the Semitic sea. As each Semitic wave moved into a new region, it easily united with the
existing population, including the settlers from preceding waves. The Semites
created the great civilizations of antiquity in their expanded homeland in Asia
and Africa. The Arab wave, the latest, restored the original unity of the Semites.16
Miqdadi explicated the intention of this universal vision of the past by making
the Arabs the national and cultural "heirs of the Semites."'7 The primacy of
language over race in the mingling of populations and the production of the
Arab nation was adopted by all, under the influence, at least in part, of Satic
al-Husri.18

The Arab nation, the culmination and heir of the Semites, established its rights
to the national territories. This achievement was not accomplished without meeting the aggressions of determined enemies. Throughout history, other peoples,
Aryans and Turco-Mongols, had intruded into the Semito-Arab homeland. The
common view of Semito-Arab history implicitly divided it into two periods of
greatness, the ancient Semitic and the Islamic, each followed by two periods of
decline in which the alien dominated. Miqdadi explicitly adopted this approach
and utilized it to explain the Arab predicament in his time and to forecast the
Arab future. "Fourteen centuries ago our ancestors in the regions of the Arab
island experienced what we feel today and suffered pains as we suffer pains
today. The ordeal of imperialism hit them, and enemies surrounded them on all
sides." Thus, Miqdadi equated his own times to the Jahiliyya. In both ages,
imperialism reduced the Arab nation to subjugation, humiliation, and abasement. This emphasis on the identity of the contemporary Arab predicament to
the Jahiliyya led the editor of a play by Miqdadi to give the play the title
"Between Two Jahiliyyas."'9 The title is apt, and it is convenient to refer to the
two periods as the first and second Jahiliyyas.

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

71

Imperialism was economic in motivation. This was a point on which all Arab
nationalists agreed. International commerce was taken to be a chief motivating
force in world history. The rise and decline of cities and peoples was commonly
explained as resulting from the fluctuations of trade, especially international
trade, and the control of the trade routes. The ancient Arabs, in Palmyra, Petra,
the Hijaz, the Yaman, etc., are depicted as becoming rich and famous from their
share in international commerce. This happy situation was radically changed by
the advance of the two great imperialist powers, the Persians and the RomanoByzantines, who seized the Fertile Crescent and southern Arabia in order to
control the trade routes. The Arabs did not benefit from this trade, except for
those few who received bribes and customs in return for providing protection for
the caravans.2
Western European imperialism from the Crusades onward, according to the
unanimous opinion, was economic in motivation. The nobles' desire for booty
and land and the merchants' quest for trade were the underlying causes for which
religion was a cover. The Franks gained more from the Crusades than they lost,
the Muslims lost more than they gained.21 Miqdadi portrayed the new trade
routes to India as weakening the Arabs so that Syria and Egypt fell to the Turks.
All agreed that modern European imperialism, of which British and French
imperialism was the usual example, was motivated by the quest for raw materials
and markets. European imperialist rivalry resulted in war, most notably World
War I, which, Miqdadi asserted, had nothing to do with democracy and freedom. The imperialists exploited the Ottoman and Arab territories by means of
the special privileges for foreigners. The horror stories about foreign contractors
in Egypt were very popular.22The analysis reached a more sophisticated level in
journal articles and in Miqdadi's textbook. Foreign investment and economic
activity was exploitative per se in that the wealth went to foreigners. Economic
nationalism was the goal.23
The Semito-Arab nation had been gravely injured twice by the two imperialisms. The motivation of both imperialisms, ancient and modern, was economic, but economics was not the beginning and end of imperialism. The Arab
confrontation with imperialism was a clash of peoples and cultures. Throughout
the long conflict, the Arabs' dangerous enemy was one, the Aryans, i.e., the
Persians in the East and the Greeks, Romans, and Franks in the West. The
probable inspiration for this schematization was Breasted's Ancient Times, which
distinguished two eternal conflicts, the East-West, or Asia-Europe, and the
Aryan-Semite.24 The East-West struggle was the dominant theme in Barghuthi
and Tuta's book. In their treatment, this conflict began with Alexander's conquests, which could not "be compared to previous conquests, because the
Assyrian, Babylonian, and Egyptian governments were satisfied with no more
than the levying of taxes and political obedience, [whereas the] Greek government aimed at a higher and greater goal, the spreading of its civilization in the
East and the impregnation of the world with Greek ideas and the principles of
Hellenism." In this, the Greeks were succeeded by the Romans, the Crusaders,
the British, and the French. In the long run, the East and the West were equal,
but "the drama of the nineteenth century concluded with the East the slave
of the West politically, intellectually, and economically." The Persians were

72

C. Ernest Dawn

assigned to the East, as in Breasted, but they were also distinguished from the
ancient Semites, classed with the Aryans, and, uniquely among Eastern peoples,
likened to the Europeans.25 Moreover, Barghuthi and Tuta, like Darwaza, employed the Aryan-Semitic conflict and made Persian hostility to the Arabs a
major factor in early Islamic history.26European derogatory contrasts of Semites
with Aryans, e.g., Renan's, were strongly resented.27The East-West and AryanSemite conflicts were fused. Muhammad al-Shurayqi, in a poem and its annotation published in Khatib's book, equated the aggressions of the Aryans against
the Semitic homeland with the struggle between the East and the West, which
had continued for five thousand years until his day.28Miqdadi applied Shurayqi's
formula explicitly and thoroughly by treating Semito-Arab history as an unending conflict between the Semites and the Aryans. But in the 1939 edition,
Miqdadi abandoned the explicit mention of the Semitic-Aryan contradiction.
He did not, however, give up the identification of the Arabs as the culmination
and heirs of the Semitic peoples, which was left in the same important position
that it had held in the first three editions.29
The Semito-Arab nation had been reduced to humiliation twice by Aryan
(Persian and European) imperialism. The goals of the imperialists were economic, and the result was economic exploitation of the Semito-Arabs. But the
successes of the imperialists arose from their ability to subvert Arab culture.
The ancient Arabs were a people with outstanding qualities. The people of the
first Jahiliyya were not barbarians, a description that applied only to the bedouin. Even the bedouin had great intrinsic qualities. When natural conditions
permitted, as among the settled Arabs in Arabia, especially south Arabia, and
the Arabs who migrated periodically into Iraq and Syria, the Arabs created
civilized life. All Arabs, including the bedouin, had noble qualities. Women
enjoyed equality with men. Arabs loved freedom and equality, they possessed
"great excitability, intensity of sensation, and sharpness of intellect." The great
success of the Arabs after the coming of Islam was aided by their natural
qualities.30
The great Arab weakness, which was the source of their abasement, was the
intensity of tribal solidarity ('asabiyya) at the expense of national sentiment,
which led to the raiding and warfare of the pre-Islamic age. Divided against each
other, the ancient Arabs came under foreign influence. The Arab Ghassanids and
Mundhirids fought each other for the sake of the Romans and the Persians.31
Miqdadi especially expounded these themes in detail, highlighting the imperialists' economic exploitation of the Arabs and the associated corruption of
family and social life and the fettering of the people's minds with superstitions.32
These corruptions, in his view, resulted from the exploitation of the common
people by Arab capitalist collaborators with the imperialists.
When Miqdadi wrote his textbook, the condition of the masses and class
relationships had been receiving attention from Arab intellectuals for some time.
Kawakibi discoursed on the oppressions of the rich and the evil of usury, and he
declared that Islam brought to the world socialism, a way of life yearned for by
the major part of the civilized European world, and established its principles.33
One of the most eminent Muslim Arab intellectuals, Shakib Arslan, in a brief

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

73

comment entitled "Socialist Principles in Islam," said, "In the Islamic Shari'a
there are socialist principles, splendid, firm, which differ from the socialist
principles known in Europe because the Islamic socialist principles are stronger,
firmer, more meritorious, since the Muslim must act in accordance with them; in
Europe they are mutually agreed to human regulations, while their existence in
Islam is as divine commands whose execution the Muslim cannot avoid if he
wishes to remain a Muslim." Islamic socialism consisted in the duty of the zakat,
which, Arslan said, if performed would abolish poverty among the Muslims.34
Darwaza did not use the term "socialism," but he stressed the complete equality
of the rich and poor, the lack of class distinction, in early Islam and detailed how
the Prophet established brotherhood in Medina, whereby the Muslims shared
the wealth.35 Kurd 'Ali and others in the journal of the Arab Academy of
Damascus from time to time expressed approval of socialism and "resistance to
the greed of the capitalists."36
Some writers also employed Marxist dialectic. One early suggestion of class
conflict appeared in an article in al-Muqtataf, 5 (May 1910), 427-28. The famous
confrontation of a respected companion of the Prophet, Abu Dharr, with
'Uthman and Mu'awiyya, was depicted as a conflict over "his socialist opinions
with respect to depriving the rich of sole control of their wealth to the exclusion
of the poor." In 1928, an explicitly Marxist interpretation of Islamic history by
Bandali Jawzi appeared, with Khalil Sakakini identified as being responsible for
its publication.37The author, Arab in origin, was a professor at the University of
Baku. Kurd 'Ali summarized the book, accurately, in the following words: "The
first of the principles at which Islam aimed, he [Jawzi] claims, was the spreading
of the spirit of solidarity among its individual members and paying attention to
the wretched classes of the Arabs in the manner of socialism. This is the meaning
which was dominant in the Islamic society in every age, . . . and most of those
who rebelled against the states had socialist aims." Then Kurd 'Ali points out the
book's partisan intent, but he cautiously indicates its merits: "Thus, he apparently serves surreptitiously the Communist regime in the lands whose civilization
has influenced him, and he alleges things about Islam which have never entered
the mind of any Muslim until now. If he has excelled in citing examples which
show his knowledge of Arab and Western speculations, he is weak in his
investigations and his conclusions, mediocre in his elucidation. Whatever the
manner in which he is at variance with the true way of the Muhammadan
religion, and there is some forgiveness for him in it, in his research there is room
for thought. Perhaps researchers will succeed in achieving the results of meticulous investigation in novel subjects such as these."38 In 1931 a collection of
essays attributed to Jamal al-Din al-Afghani was published by Muhammad alMakhzumi. One essay expounded the superiority of Islamic socialism to Western
socialism and recounted in some detail the efforts of Abu Dharr, explicitly
depicted as mobilizing the poor against the exploitations of the rich and the
Umayyads.39
This emerging semi-Marxism culminated in Miqdadi's textbook, which cited
Jawzi's work. Miqdadi explicitly stressed proletarian opposition to the capitalist
collaborators with foreign imperialism in the Hijaz and he depicted Muhammad

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C. Ernest Dawn

as a proletarian revolutionary. He also illustrated the socialist character of early


Islam with accounts of Muhammad's "Brotherhood" in Medina and of Abu
Dharr, called "a socialist institution" and "the socialist," respectively, in the first
two editions. The socialist element was softened by omitting the term "socialist"
from the last two editions and eliminating the story of Abu Dharr from the 1939
edition, but otherwise class conflict and social reform remained as important
elements of the coming of Islam.40 The story of Abu Dharr evidently became
popular. Shakib Arslan retold the 1910 Muqtataf version of it in 1933.41In the
1950s and 1960s, according to Henri Laoust, Abu Dharr "inspired a very
abundant literature on 'Islamic socialism."'42 Yet Miqdadi and the others who
held similar views were not dialectical materialists. In their writings, it is clear
that culture is the chief determining element.
The capitalist-proletarian contradiction had played its part in the first Arab
awakening. But a proletarian revolution and a communist reconstruction of
society was neither necessary nor desirable. The better solution was the first
Arab awakening, the Islamic awakening, as Barghuthi and Tuta (p. 83) called it
and, in the words of Miqdadi (p. 312), "The Arabs' greatest awakening."
The doctrines of Islamic modernism and revivalism were without challenge.
The first Arab awakening was the result of the action of one man, Muhammad,
who was the great hero in all treatments, but notably in Miqdadi's. All paid
homage to his noble character, but his mission and accomplishment was a divine
miracle. The words of the Muslim Barghuthi and the Quaker Tuta summed up
the universal opinion: The Prophet's "teachings unified the Arabs and ended the
dissension among them with a new bond, i.e., Islam, which was not merely
religious in character but a national, political, social bond which united them
and hurled them into the inhabited world, which they infused with the seed
kernel of its [Islam's] spirit and the seedling of its action." In all the histories,
Islam and Arabness, Muslim and Arab, are constantly conjoined, synonyms. The
Muslim Arab nation, united and reformed, inspired and informed, by Islam,
conquered the civilized world, regaining the historic Arab fatherland. Guided by
the pure reason of Islam, motivated by its love, the Arabs created the just
society, far superior to any other, past, present, or future. They purified the
ancient civilization of its defective elements and carried it to new heights so that
Arab civilization became the wonder of the world. Islam brought power and
glory to the Arab nation.43 The Franks, greatly inferior to the Arabs in civilization, borrowed the essential bases of modern civilizations from the Arabs.44
Islam had brought the Arab nation to greatness, but it did not eradicate the
Arabs' principal defect, which was their great virtue carried to excess, i.e.,
individualism, egoism, and tribal 'asabiyya. Under these influences, Arab Islamic
unity weakened, the desire for wealth gained the upper hand. The caliphs and
leading men in their competition with each other stimulated tribal antagonisms
and warfare and then, more ominously, began to rely on foreigners. Persians
notably, but also Turks and, in Spain, Slavs, became dominant elements. Under
Persian influence, the position of women, the family, Arab culture and society
were corrupted. As the Franks became stronger, first in Spain, then in the East,

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

75

amirs and rulers, competing with each other, began to rely on them and then
became their puppets. Total debasement of Arab culture was the result.45Thus
the noble Arab nation sank into what we may call the second Jahiliyya.
The second Jahiliyya, like the first, resulted from the use of false religion by
the upper classes to shackle the minds of the masses with ignorance and superstition in order to exploit them economically. The misdeeds of large landowners
and notables and the defects of the "feudal regime," as it was designated by all,
were stressed in the textbooks and in reviews or articles by Kurd 'Ali and
Mustafa al-Shihabi.46 That the upper classes had used religious superstition,
including Sufism, to keep the masses ignorant in order to exploit them was the
common doctrine that Barghuthi and Tuta and Darwaza expressed cautiously in
their textbooks. Arslan gave it eloquent expression. Miqdadi expounded the
doctrine explicitly and in detail. False religion provided the means for the upper
classes to exploit and utilize the populace. The rulers, the usurers, and the ulama
collaborated to extirpate religion and fetter the masses with superstition. To
Miqdadi this was especially tragic, for the masses "are the ones who represent to
us the essence of the nation and its mentality."47
The decline of the Arab nation to the state where its populace was bound by
ignorance and religious superstition had begun when the rivalries of the Arab
rulers had led them to rely on foreigners. Reliance on the alien began the
contamination of Arab culture, thus precipitating the painful decline. Barghuthi
and Tuta drew the conclusion from the Arab experience with Persians and Turks
that "any nation which does not attend to its future and preserve its essence is
destined for destruction" (pp. 148-49). Cultural borrowing was a problem for the
Arab nationalist intellectual. Darwaza perhaps emphasized that it was natural
and necessary, although he also pointed to the weakening of the Arab character
that resulted from imitation of the alien. He seems to suggest that cultural
borrowing was beneficial when good things were borrowed in moderation and
when, as had happened in the early centuries of Islam, the Arabs also preserved
their "homely customs" and impressed their language and some of their traits on
the non-Arab cultural lenders.48
In the case of two cultural lenders, the Persians and the West, the unanimous
opinion was that borrowing from them was nearly fatal. Salim al-Jundi expounded the common belief when, arguing for the purification of the Arabic
language, he asserted that Arab decline was due to both Persian and European
cultural influences.49 The Persians and the Europeans, both called Aryans by
Miqdadi and others, were bitterly and adamantly hostile to the Arabs, and
they possessed a quality that made them unique among peoples, namely,
intense national solidarity, 'asabiyya, as opposed to tribal solidarity and egoistic
individualism.
The Persians were commonly portrayed as having been filled with hatred of
the Arabs and a fanatical desire for revenge for the loss of sovereignty and glory.
Thus the Persians took advantage of Arab dissension; indeed they instigated and
nourished it, in order to return power and glory to the Persians. Implicitly, the
Persians are moved by national sentiment.50Miqdadi was explicit concerning the

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Persian desire for revenge on the Arabs and their sowing of discord among them.
He also contrasts the intense national solidarity of the Persians with the individualism and egoism of the Arabs. The Persian weapon was insidious. As a result
of Persian enticement, the Arabs "adopted Persian culture, which weakened their
personality, [while] ... the Persians preservedtheir customs and their language."51
Other Eastern peoples, e.g., Turks, Circassions, or Mongols, are not represented
in similar terms, even though much is made of the damage suffered by the Arabs
when in their strife they relied on these aliens. Only the Europeans are described
in similar fashion.
An innate meanness was ascribed to the Europeans. Barghuthi and Tuta
contrasted Westerners and Easterners. "We Eastern peoples are simple-hearted,
sincere, generous, indulgent; warning of destruction does not arouse us." Therefore, Easterners treated servants as members of the family and were often, like
the caliphs and the amirs of the past, displaced by the latter. In contrast,
Westerners treated servants like servants, dismissing them for the most trifling
mistakes or misdeeds. The Crusaders dishonored the Christian religion and
ignored its teachings, while the Muslims were true to their religion and the
welfare of humanity. The Crusaders were filled with religious fanaticism and
kindled the fire of religious fanaticism between the Muslim and Christian Arabs.
They corrupted the native Christians' creed and infected them with beautiful dreams, which turned out to be mirages. They weakened the Arab national
spirit of Eastern Christians, who became devoted to foreign coreligionists. The
Spaniards were similarly portrayed as stirring up fanaticism against the Arabs,
as moved by hatred for them, and ultimately extirpating them. The Spanish
character was portrayed as surviving Arabization and Islamization, as was also
the case of the Persians. The Crusaders, the Spanish, and the European colonialists always maintained a united front of fanatics in the face of the Arabs, who
unfortunately were so divided that some made alliances with the enemy.52"The
Europeans," Mustafa al-Shihabi wrote, "in their schools, books and associations
instill the most extreme kinds of fanatical loyalty to nationalism in their sons."
According to As'ad al-Hakim racialism, apparently to be found only among
Europeans, was the product of European society and culture.53The Europeans'
fanatical national solidarity was the source of their power and might. Nationalism made Germany, Italy, and America great. Japan showed that non-European
nations could follow the European lead.54
The Europeans, like the Persians, used cultural influence as a weapon.
Accordingly, Western missionaries, Western schools, and Western Orientalism
were dangerous. This was the view even of ardent modernizers who admired
Western civilization, such as Salim al-Jundi, Muhammad Kurd 'Ali, and Sami
al-Kayyali. Darwaza and Miqdadi had a similar opinion. After the Franks failed
in war during the Crusades, Miqdadi believed, they began the missionary movement, "the advance guard for their success in the colonization of the East in the
modern ages." He asserted that missionary schools produced "scorn for the
national culture and affection for the foreigners and their customs, good and
bad." In the opinion of this graduate of the American University of Beirut, "The
American schools are less damaging than others because America has not been

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

77

covetous of colonizing the Near East. Despite that, their effect is obvious in
bringing up doubting, materialistic students."55 Mustafa al-Shihabi said, "The
call to kill the national sentiment in the East by means of the schools and books
of the missionaries and to replace it with the sentiment of the great human
community is the greatest danger to us."56
Except for their fanatical national sentiment and their science, the Europeans
had nothing to offer the Arabs. The enormities of Napoleon's campaign in the
East and of World War I, the duplicity and hypocrisy of Britain, France, and
America received due attention.57 There was no deviation from the Islamic
modernist dogma that modern European civilization was merely the outgrowth
of basic knowledge and, more important, the scientific attitude, rationality,
which the Arabs had bestowed on Europe.58 Some Arabs were anticipating the
collapse of the West. One such was Sami al-Kayyali: "Today, it [the Arab mind]
looks at the world with watchful eyes. It sees combat, it sees conflict, it sees
might
bloody tragedies and painful calamities-and it sees-unfortunately-that
is the origin of right and that weakness is a fable of fables-And must the Arab
mind develop on these principles and draw on these precepts?" Kayyali cited
Max Nordau, Maurice Maeterling, Oswald Spengler, Andre Gide, and Bertrand
Russell as believing that the materialism of the West had brought it to the brink
of collapse. The way was open for the Arabs to assume the role they had played
in the past, to create "the culture of the future which will save the world from its
pain and suffering, from the conflict after conflict which it suffers."59
The great enemy and threat to the Arabs was the West. Membership in the
West belonged unmistakably to Britain and France, but also to America, which,
in contrast to the two great colonial powers, received little attention but did not
escape critical comment. The United States was placed in the same category as
all the other participants in World War I, i.e., an imperialist power going to war
for its commerce and industry, guilty of the same deceit and hypocrisy as the
other imperialist powers. The American missionary schools held the same danger
to Arab culture as the other foreign schools. Darwaza's medieval and modern
history textbook for elementary schools concluded an account of Lincoln's
emancipation of the slaves as follows: "But they continue until now to be
despised in some states and cities of America to the degree that they cannot
dwell or live with the 'white' Europeans."60
Germany, Italy, and Tsarist Russia were imperialist powers, but they received
relatively little attention. Soviet Russia, however, was viewed differently from its
imperialist predecessor. Some Arabs regarded the Soviet Union as an ally of the
Arabs and the Muslims. Among them were Muhammad Rashid Rida' and
Shakib Arslan. They, and Miqdadi, insisted that Islam and communism were
antithetical.6' In the words of Arslan, "[I]f Islam has socialist principles, it has
no connections with communism and therefore cannot be Bolshevized in the
meaning known in Russia." But both Rida', writing in 1919, and Arslan, in
1925, agreed that Muslims and Bolsheviks could cooperate. As Arslan put it,
"The Bolsheviks appear as the enemy of the states of imperialism who are hostile
states to all the Islamic world . .., and it is obvious that the Muslims yearn for
the victory of the Bolsheviks." Islam, he said, "approves of allying with the

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C. Ernest Dawn

Bolsheviks, seeking help from them against an enemy which is more dangerous
and more injurious...." Turks, Persians, and Afghans had cooperated with the
Soviet Union without catching the fire of Bolshevism.62
The Soviet Union was more than just a partner of convenience in the eyes of
some Arabs who accepted Bolshevism's claim to be the movement of the world's
toilers, the enemy of the basis of imperialism, capitalism. "Bolshevism is the
essence of socialism," Rashid Rida' asserted. "Its intention is the extinction of
the greedy power of the capitalists and their servants, the protecting governments, which promulgate their materialistic laws on the basis of devouring the
rights of the workers in their countries. ... Its intention is that the true government of every people should belong to its majority, i.e., to the workers in
industry, agriculture, etc., when the power of the capitalists and the magnates
who are their partisans is overthrown. They did that in Russia after the fall of
the oppressive and unjust state of the Tsars." Rida' declared his partisanship:
"The Muslims wish for the success of the socialists, success which would abolish
the slavery of peoples-all of them are workers-even as they rebuke them as
they rebuke others for all that is contrary to the Islamic law."63 Darwaza also
wrote favorably of the results of the Bolshevik revolution: "They made a government from the people.... No one possesses private wealth or private property or private factories or lands. Property, land, factories, and wealth all belong
to all the nation under the control of the government, and the government is the
employer of the people, so there are no rich and no poor, no amir and no
pauper, but all are equal in everything, each takes according to his ability and
merit."64

Arslan and Kurd 'Ali went beyond asserting that socialism and communism
shared some of Islam's qualities and goals. Arslan praised the socialists' and
communists' internationalism and racial tolerance. He called attention to the
support that the French Socialists and Communists gave to the workers and
peasants in Algeria and Tunisia. Arslan saw Islam, socialism, and communism as
sharing the same goal, a goal not shared by the Christian West. He explained the
conversion of the Moslems of Russia to Bolshevism with the words, "Hatred of
Bolshevism has not reached the same degree in the Islamic world that it has in
the Christian world, because among Muslims the Bolsheviks have an intercessor,
namely the call to liberate the weak." By "the call to liberate the weak," Arslan
meant more than the liberation of the Muslim countries from the hands of
Western imperialism. He had in mind also the liberation of the Muslim poor
from the Muslim rich. He pointed to the Communist Party's appeal to the poor
of Algeria and Tunisia and the Muslim rich's disregard of their wretched condition and to the Bolshevik revolution by the Muslim proletariat "against the men
of religion, the owners of wealth, the landlords, and the members of the ruling
families" in Turkistan, Azerbayjan, and Kazan. He warned the upper classes
with the words, "We say with intense sorrow that the Muslims, except for a rare
one, have forgotten the zakat, and they have neglected the duties of their
religion. Thus they have prepared the day for the danger of [Western] socialism
and communism, whose principles inevitably will penetrate among them whatever they and the states of imperialism try to do in order to oppose their

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

79

diffusion in the East."65Arslan joined the Muslim upper class to the imperialist
states as opponents of socialism and communism. He had little hope that the
Muslim upper class would check the progress and triumph of Western socialism
or communism by the only existing method, the return to true Islamic socialism.
These judgments were singled out with approval by Kurd 'Ali in his review of
Arslan's book. A year later, reviewing a book on Italian Fascism, he wrote, "The
subject of this book is important... in that Fascism saved Italy from falling into
Bolshevism, i.e., extreme socialism, despite the extreme readiness of the people
for it. It includes the life of Monsignore Mussolini . . and how he succeeded
and influenced his nation ... to lead it to [the goal] which he desired, despite the
strength of the strong old parties."66
In the Pan-Arab self-view elaborated in the interwar years, imperialism was a
key concept, used to join the struggle with Western imperialism to the fight for
true Islamic principles in the Arab countries. The Semito-Arabs had developed
in their natural homeland, occupied in a series of waves from the heartland, and
achieved greatness. But the nation had been locked in unending combat with
Aryan imperialism, which was motivated by materialistic greed. Twice the imperialists, utilizing Arab discord, had intruded into the Arab homeland and nation,
subverted Arab culture, and debased the nation, fettering it with ignorance and
superstition. Arab rulers, capitalists, and feudal landlords collaborated with the
imperialists to exploit the Arab country and people. From this predicament in
the first Jahiliyya, Islam rescued the Arab nation and propelled it to its greatest
achievement. But egoism and tribalism had opened the way for European imperialism to push the Arabs into a new Jahiliyya, in which the upper classes for
their selfish profit collaborated with the aliens, enslaving and exploiting the
masses and thereby weakening the nation. In the struggle with imperialism and
the Arab ruling classes, Bolshevism and European socialism were allies against
imperialism and were closer to true Islam than was Western materialism. But
Western socialism and Bolshevism were also, in the long run, threats, for they
were atheistic and incompatible with Islam. The ruling classes' departure from
true Islam in time would lead to class warfare and possibly the victory of
Bolshevism. The only road to salvation was to return to the true Islam of the
ancestors, which included a divinely ordained socialism. The rich and the rulers
were exhorted to take to the path of true Islam, but little hope was expressed
that the call would be answered. Thus, it was strongly implied, the fight against
imperialism and the revitalization of the Arab nation could succeed only through
the overthrow of the backsliders among the Arab rich and rulers who exploited
the nation as the tools of the imperialists, but, instead of proletarian revolution,
the preferred method was the rule of a strong man like Mussolini, who would
overthrow the establishment and save the nation from Bolshevism.
In the years between the wars, Arab nationalist intellectuals added to the
Islamic modernist Arabism of the prewar years the Semito-Arab version of
history and a semi-Marxism, which included concepts of capitalist imperialism
and class conflict. Although the first of the two elements has no prima facie
connection with class interest, the semi-Marxism might suggest a proletarian
movement. Expressions of concern for the poor and censure of the rich and

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C. Ernest Dawn

forecasts of class warfare need not be and most often have not been evidence of
proletarian status and purpose. The Arab nationalist intellectuals of the interwar
years, who included many survivors from before the war and a number of
newcomers, were, like the prewar Arabists, of solid upper status, from landowning, official, merchant, scholarly families. Just as they were not revolutionary
workers, so they were not of a rising middle class created by changes in the mode
of production that was wresting control from the ruling class of a superseded
mode of production. But the pre- and postwar Arab nationalists were decidedly
engaged in a contest for power, and nationalist doctrine was indisputably a
weapon in this struggle.
Arab nationalism had originated before the war as an opposition movement in
the Ottoman Arab Fertile Crescent. The prewar Arabists were Ottoman Arabs
opposing fellow Arabs who held office in the Ottoman state. The prewar Arabists
were unsuccessful in the contest with the Ottomanist Arabs before the war.
Ottoman collapse in World War I, the British and French Mandates, and
Kemalist abandonment of Ottomanism did not destroy the political dominance
of the Ottomanist Arabs, but these events did leave them with no alternative to
Arabism. Arab nationalism became the creed of all political activists everywhere
in the Fertile Crescent except Lebanon, but the political superiority of the
prewar Ottomanists survived. The Arab nationalist movements against the Mandates and nationalist governments, when such existed, were dominated by preWar Ottomanists lately converted to Arabism. The surviving prewar Arabists
continued to be out of power, in the opposition.67 They were joined by others,
some surviving prewar Ottomanists, some younger newcomers to politics. Through
the 1920s and into the 1930s, they formed a loose network in the Arab Independence Party (the "Istiqlalists") and Syrian-Palestinian Congress Executive
Committee, whose overlapping membership had informal ties with the "oppositionists" in Iraq (Yasin al-Hashimi) and Amin al-Husayni in Palestine.68 This
was the political affiliation of most of the Arabist intellectuals, especially of those
who made most use of semi-Marxism. The Iraqi state schools provided employment for some of them, and Baghdad became a center for developing and
dispersing their ideas.69
In Egypt, too, the political opposition was the first to adopt Arab nationalism.
Because the subject is controversial and has received relatively little scholarly
investigation, it is advisable to treat it in some detail.70 Egypt had provided a
friendly environment for the Syrian intellectuals who developed Arabism from
'Abduh's Islamic modernism. The earliest advocates of Arabism received patronage and support from an eminent Egyptian, Ahmad Taymur.71After the war,
Egypt continued to be the base for some of the Syrian Arab nationalist opposition. Rashid Rida' continued his activities. Most important, Muhibb al-Din alKhatib expanded his. His Salafiyya Press and Bookstore and his journals, the
monthly al-Zahra' and the weekly al-Fath, became perhaps the most important
disseminators of Islamic modernist and Pan-Arab publications. His activities
received vital support from Ahmad Taymur. Khatib and Taymur then went on
to found the Young Men's Muslim Association,72 in 1927, and they were major
influences on, and probably indispensable patrons of, Hasan al-Banna and the

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

81

Muslim Brothers.73These individuals and organizations, the constituents of the


Egyptian Salafiyya revival, were the chief disseminators of the Arab ideology
that the Fertile Crescent intellectuals had developed from 'Abduh's Islamic
modernism. The derivation of Egyptian Pan-Arab thought from that of the
eastern compatriots is obvious.74
A few mainstream Egyptian politicians began to advocate Arabism in the late
1920s. All such were members of the Egyptian opposition, i.e., those opposed to
the Zaghlul-Nahhas connection, which dominated the Wafd and electoral politics throughout the interwar period. The founders and directors of the YMMA
included such prominent Egyptian politicians as 'Abd al-Hamid Sa'id, its president, 'Abd al-'Aziz Jawish (Shawish), and Yahya al-Dardiri, all members of the
National Party.75 They were then followed in the advocacy of Arabism by
politicians and intellectuals affiliated with the more important political parties.76
Muhammad 'Ali 'Aluba, perhaps the first of these to embrace Pan-Arabism,
was a prewar Nationalist who joined the Liberal Constitutionalists. A somewhat
later convert, Muhammad Husayn Haykal, was also a Liberal Constitutionalist,
and the organs of that party were the leading outlets for Arab nationalist articles
among party-affiliated publications. The other leading early advocates of Arabism who were affiliated with major parties were also oppositionists. Mahmud
'Azmi, one of the very first, was an early member of the Liberal Constitutional
Party. He was employed on the editorial staff of the Party organs from their
foundation until 1928, when he defected. After a checkered career, which included association with 'Abbas II, he joined the Wafdist-affiliated journal alJihad and then, in 1935, al-Ruz al-Yusuf al-Yawmiyya, which, beginning as a
Wafdist paper, soon became anti-Wafdist as a result of Wafdist internal conflicts.77 Ibrahim 'Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, perhaps the most prominent among
the first political literati to embrace Arabism, was a member of the editorial staff
of the Liberal Constitutionalist al-Siyasa during the early 1930s; he wrote articles
against the Wafd and, with Haykal, against missionaries, but he lost his position
to a friend of Muhammad Mahmud. He then began writing for al-Balagh, a
journal that was Wafdist-leaning through most of its life, although at the time
Mazini was writing, the publisher and editor, CAbdal-Qadir Hamza, had broken
with the Wafd. Mazini later wrote political articles for both al-Balagh and alAsas, but he was never a Wafdist, although he was a friend of al-Nuqrashi and
inclined toward the Sa'dists.78 A political intellectual who became a prominent
advocate of Pan-Arabism somewhat later, in the 1930s, Zaki Mubarak, began
his political activity as a devotee of the National Party, a loyalty he kept when he
wrote regularly for al-Balagh at times when it was Wafdist.79 The two earliest
and most prominent Wafdist politicians to advocate Arabism, 'Abd al-Rahman
'Azzam and Hamad al-Basil, were among the Wafdists who opposed Nahhas at
least as early as 1930, finally seceding in 1932.80Their Pan-Arab activities began
in late 1931.
The concentration of Arabism in the political opposition is obvious. None of
the major Wafdist or Sa'dist leaders were early advocates of Arabism, and none
were prominent in its advocacy even after it became established in the mid1930s, except for the least secure of them, the Wafdist Makram 'Ubayd.8l

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By 1936, however, Arabism had become sufficiently popular to require the


attention of practically all major politicians. Youth organizations that drew their
ideology from Salafiyya sources received patronage and assistance from political
leaders. National Party politicians provided the leadership of the YMMA from
the beginning. 'Aluba, a prewar Nationalist, a founder and long-time member of
the Liberal Constitutionalists, and, finally, a Nationalist once more, at least as
early as 1934 gave support to a new youth organization founded in October
1933, Young Egypt.82The organization combined elements drawn from the Arab
Islamic modernist ideology of the Salafiyya movement with an Egypt-first doctrine, much as the pre-1918 Nationalists had combined Egyptianism with
Ottomanism and Islam.83The organization had some association with both the
Liberal Constitutionalists and the Nationalists.84 King Fu'ad appears to have
provided patronage to Young Egypt as early as 1934.85But the foremost patron
of Arabism among cabinet-level politicians was 'Ali Mahir, chief of the royal
cabinet from July 1, 1935, and prime minister from January to May 1936. He
apparently became a patron of both Young Egypt and the Muslim Brothers in
1935, a practice he continued from that time forward while he held his position
as either prime minister or chief of the royal cabinet.86As prime minister in 1936,
Mahir included the Arab nationalist CAlubaas minister of education. Mahir also
courted two eminent Arab nationalist journalists, Zaki Mubarak and Mahmud
'Azmi.87 Meanwhile, Egyptian popular sympathy for the Palestinian Arabs was
increasingly manifested. From the outbreak of the Arab rebellion in Palestine in
the spring of 1936 on, every Egyptian cabinet found it necessary to make public
statements of support for the Palestinians and to take diplomatic action on their
behalf.88
The Arab nationalists as agents of opposition and dissent had to identify ills,
fix blame, and offer remedy. Prewar Arab nationalism, like its parent, Islamic
modernist Ottomanism, had done this by comparing the Arab present, the Arab
past, and the West. The Arab present was shown to be shameful and humiliating.
Deviation from the Arab past was the cause, return to it the cure. Arab rulers
and obscurantist religious leaders who collaborated with Western imperialism in
corrupting Arab Islam in order to exploit the Arab nation received the blame.
Their displacement by true patriots was necessary to bring about the restoration
of true Islam and the defeat of the hostile West. This prewar Arabist diagnosis of
and prescription for Arab illness formed the heart of postwar Arab nationalist
ideology. Some seem not to have gone beyond it, but others expanded the
ideology by adding the Semito-Arab version of history or by giving a new
emphasis to the socialist element in the genuine original Islam, the sins of the
rich, and the potentially imminent class conflict, or by both. Whatever the mix,
the thrust was the urgency of chastizing and displacing the erring members of the
Arab establishment.
Arab nationalist ideology had obvious utility for the political opposition.
Furthermore, in the Arab polity, as in others, competition for position and its
rewards very often preceded ideological contradiction. Much of the political
cleavage among the Arabs existed over several generations in the form of
continuing rivalries between families and factions. The prewar division between

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

83

Ottomanists and Arabists continued without much change after the war, but the
former, still dominant, adopted the ideology of their unsuccessful opponents.
Manifestly, ideological contradiction was to some extent, as yet indeterminable,
produced by competition for place and its remuneration.89But Arab nationalist
ideology was concerned with more than the sins of the advantaged Arabs. In the
view of the Arab nationalists, these sins were of unequaled importance because
they had caused the Arabs and Islam to fall dangerously behind the Christian
West. In addition to place and its rewards, the Arab nationalists were competing
for the leadership of a human collectivity with its problems and responsibilities.
The Arab nationalists presented themselves as the saviors of the Arabs in a
time of deadly peril. This peril had been discovered and diagnosed by means of
an invidious comparison of the Islamic Arab nation's present with its past and
with the modern Christian West. Such a comparison of the present self, the past
self, and the other was shared by postwar Arabism with its ancestors, prewar
Arabism and modernist Ottomanism, each of which centered on the emotionally
charged expression of the perception that the Islamic Ottoman or Arab self had
been deprived and threatened with extinction by the hostile West. The perceived
failure of the Islamic Ottoman or Arab nation to keep pace with the West
inflicted painful injury on the self-view for which every political contender had to
offer treatment. The appeal to the past for proof that the Ottomans or the Arabs
would once again surpass the West salved the wounds and gave hope for the
future.90But the salve proved to be ineffective, and the hopes were not fulfilled.
Ottoman or Arab military and political relations with the West continued to be
unsatisfactory, and the perception of Eastern backwardness was not dimmed. So
the Western problem remained the hub of Arab politics, the insolvable problem
that demanded solution. In a society or community with such a problem,
opposition and dissent will probably be greater in incidence and intensity than
the degree that is intrinsic to any social interaction and will certainly produce
little cognitive dissonance. The impotence of an establishment in the face of a
universally perceived danger causes some to oppose and dissent and legitimizes
opposition and dissent whatever the cause.
The cleavage between government and opposition among the Arabs survived
the replacement of Ottomanism by Arabism, which the First World War produced, as did the injured Arab self-view, perhaps now intensified by the actual
presence and greater visibility of the West. Thus the internal conflict and the
external relations of the Arabs required further development of Arabist ideology.
The Arab-West conflict had to be conceived in a way that sharpened the notion
of irreconcilable contradiction between the Arabs and the West and strengthened
the assignment of blame for the Arabs' humiliation to Arab collaborators with
the West. It happened that just at this time material for this purpose could be
borrowed from the West. The emerging popular semi-Marxism of Western
historians and political theorists provided material that more sharply delineated
earlier notions of Western imperialism and economic exploitation. The Bolshevik revolution raised hopes in a broad political spectrum of a strong ally
against Western imperialism. The concept of class conflict and collaboration
between propertied Arabs and Western capitalists utilizing corrupted Islam to

84

C. Ernest Dawn

exploit the Arab masses offered new grist for the mill of the opposition. The
Semito-Arab concept, the other main addition, material for which was just then
succinctly stated by Breasted, by expanding the Arab-West conflict into the
Semito-Aryan conflict, heightened the sense of Arab-European antagonism and
strengthened the Arabs' claim to be the most important nation in history. The
new concept also responded to the Zionist threat by asserting Arab priority in
Palestine and by repudiating the appeal that some Zionists were making to a
common Semitic bond between Arabs and Jews.91
In no human collectivity does agreement on some elements of an ideology
guarantee universal acceptance of all elements. Among Arab nationalists, Islamic
socialism was treated in diverse ways. Some appear to have passed over it, but
there does not appear to have been any overt attack on the concept itself. There
were differences in interpretation, however. The Egyptians appear to have paid
less attention to Islamic socialism than the Fertile Crescent intellectuals did and
to have been more restrained in criticism of the established order. One major
Egyptian intellectual, Haykal, espoused a version radically different from that of
Ahmad Husayn, which Haykal denounced as advocacy of class warfare.92In the
successive editions of Miqdadi's textbook, the concept of class conflict underwent a gradual attenuation. The failure of the Kilani movement in Iraq excluded
most of the Iraqi radicals from prominence in Iraqi politics. In the 1940s, when
the Arab League charter member governments officially espoused Pan-Arabism,
Islamic socialism received little attention from government partisans, even in
Syria under Shukri al-Quwatli, who had in prepresidential years been the principal Syrian patron of the radical Islamic socialists.
But the semi-Marxism survived. Not only was it prominent in history textbooks and journals until 1939, but successful political organizations also espoused
it. It remained a fundamental element in the ideology of the Muslim Brotherhood. In the 1930s, the Nawras al-Kilani-Tawfiq al-Shishakli-Akram al-Hawrani
group in Hama stressed the socialistic element, as did other groups connected
with older established oppositionist leaders.93In the Fertile Crescent, the most
important group was the CAsabat al-'Amal al-Qawmi, ostensibly a Pan-Arab
youth organization formed in reaction to the failures and betrayals of the older
generation, but in fact virtually the followings of Yasin al-Hashimi, Shukri alQuwatli, and Amin al-Husayni in Iraq, Syria, and Palestine. Some Iraqi members established close ties with young officers of the developing Iraqi Army.94In
Egypt, Ahmad Husayn's Young Egypt adopted many elements of the full ideology. Iraq continued to be the patron. Educators from Egypt joined Syrians and
Palestinians in the higher schools of Baghdad. The Iraqi capital became the
center of a wide network of radical Arab nationalists, which reached its greatest
extent in the days of the Rashid Ali al-Kilani government. Syrians, Palestinians,
and Egyptians found asylum, employment, and inspiration there. Among them
were Akram al-Hawrani and Zaki al-Arsuzi, a one-time member of the 'Asabat
al-'Amal al-Qawmi and one of the founders of the Ba'th Party, from Syria, and
Mustafa al-Wakil, the Vice-President of Young Egypt.95 From Hawrani's following and the Bacth came the leadership of Syria and Iraq from the 1950s
onward, and many of the Nasserist Free Officers, including Gamal Abdel Nasser

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

85

himself, had been members of Young Egypt in the 1930s.96The other Egyptian
exponent of socialism, the Muslim Brothers, also had many ties with the Free
Officers.97 Not surprisingly, the semi-Marxist version of Pan-Arab ideology
formed in the 1920s provided the basis for both Ba'thist and Nasserist ideology
from the 1950s onward.98
HISTORY DEPARTMENT
UNIVERISTY OF ILLINOIS

NOTES
Author's note: This paper is based in part on research done while the author was a fellow of the
Institute for Advanced Studies of the Hebrew University of Jerusalem. The author alone is responsible for its contents. Bruce D. Craig of the University of Chicago Library located and provided a
copy of the important essay by Rashid Rida' cited in n. 60. An earlier version of this paper was
presented to the annual meeting of the Middle East Studies Association, San Francisco, November
29, 1984.
'C. Ernest Dawn, From Ottomanism to Arabism: Essays on the Origins of Arab Nationalism
(Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1973) (these essays were first published in 1957-1962). The
views of George Antonius, The Arab Awakening (Philadelphia: Lippincott, 1937) and Hans Kohn, A
History of Nationalism in the East, Margaret M. Green, trans. (New York: Harcourt, Brace and
Company, 1939), are still to be found, in whole or in part, and often combined. Zeine N. Zeine,
Arab-Turkish Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism (Beirut: Khayat's, 1958) (new
edition: The Emergence of Arab Nationalism: With a Background Study of Arab- Turkish Relations
in the Near East, Beirut: Khayat's, 1966), departs radically from Antonius with respect to the
nineteenth century, but like him regards Arab separatism as a reaction to the Committee of Union
and Progress Turkification and Turkism. A more subtle version of the same interpretation is given by
A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria, including Lebanon and Palestine (London: Macmillan
and New York: St. Martin's Press, 1969). Bassam Tibi, Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry,
Marion Farouk-Sluglett and Peter Sluglett, ed. and trans. (New York: St. Martin's Press, 1981; the
German original was published in 1971) includes Dawn's findings in a model of rampant eclecticism,
which combines the Antonius and Kohn theses (see esp. pp. 87-89). Dawn's conclusions are
ambiguously accepted by Rashid Ismail Khalidi, British Policy Towards Syria and Palestine, 19061914: A Study of the Antecedents of the Hussein-McMahon Correspondence, the Sykes-Picot
Agreement, and the Balfour Declaration (London: Ithaca Press for the Middle East Center, St.
Anthony's College, Oxford, 1980) and "Social Factors in the Rise of the Arab Movement in Syria,"
From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam, Said Amir Arjomand, ed. (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1984), pp. 53-70; and by Albert Hourani, "'The Arab Awakening' Forty Years
After," The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of
California Press, 1981), pp. 201-3, but both seem to believe that the Arab nationalists had become a
majority or a near majority by 1914 as a result of Arab reaction to CUP policies and to Zionism.
William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and
Thought of Satic al-Husri (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971) and Islam Against the
West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaignfor Islamic Nationalism (Austin: University of Texas Press,
1985), examines in detail the careers of two prominent pre-1918 Ottomanist who converted to
Arabism after the War. Philip S. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of
Damascus 1860-1920 (Cambridge, London, New York: Cambridge University Press, 1983) develops
and expands on Dawn's conclusions with much new material. Elie Kedourie in various articles
collected in The Chatham House Version and Other Middle-Eastern Studies, 1st ed. (London:
Weidenfeld and Nicolson, 1970), esp. pp. 206, 213-19, 287-90, 302-3, 306, 319-20, 324, 330, 333,
338, 342, 369, 378-79, 381, and in Arabic Political Memoirs and other Studies (London: Frank Cass,
1974), esp. pp. 125, 136, 165-66, 168, 178, believes that Arab nationalism was created by the spread

86

C. Ernest Dawn

of European theological and political doctrines, which weakened the hold of Islam and Christianity,
and was established by military officers installed in power by the British after World War I, and
spread by them and the British and by King Faruq and his entourage. Arab nationalism is a postWorld War I phenomenon. Much the same view is set forth by Sylvia G. Haim, "Introduction,"
Arab Nationalism: An Anthology (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1962),
esp. pp. 10, 15, 18-19, 27, 35, 49, 56-61, 70 n. 148, 72 at n. 156. Hisham Sharabi, Arab Intellectuals
and the West: The Formative Years, 1875-1914 (Baltimore and London: The Johns Hopkins Press,
1970), makes no reference to Dawn's essays but in similar fashion depicts the prewar Arab nationalist
political movement as a minority movement composed of privileged persons pursuing office, interest,
and privilege and little different in these respects from their opponents (see esp. 88-89, 115, 116-17,
122, 123).
2Malcolm Kerr, Islamic Reform: The Political and Legal Theories of Muhammad 'Abduh and
Rashid Rida (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1966); Cleveland, al-Husri; idem., Arslan;
Tibi; Richard P. Mitchell, The Society of the Muslim Brothers, Middle Eastern Monographs, 9
(London: Oxford University Press, 1969); Haim, Arab Nationalism; Hazem Zaki Nuseibeh, The
Ideas of Arab Nationalism (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 1956).
3(Jerusalem:Matbaca Bayt al-Muqaddis, 1923.)
41st ed., 2 vols. (Cairo: Matba'a al-Salafiyya, [1924]), 2d ed. (1343H/1924-1344H/1925), 3d ed.
(1344H/ 1925). The first edition has not been available. It is reviewed in Majalla al-Majmac al-Illmi
al- A rabi bi-Dimashq (MMIAD), 4 (1924), 428.
51st ed. (Cairo: Matbca al-Salafiyya, 1348/[1929]), 2d ed. (1350/[1931]), 5th ed. (Haifa: al-Maktaba
al-'Arabiyya al-Wataniyya, [1353]/[1934]), 6th ed. (Damascus: Maktaba al-'Irfa, 1357/1938).
61st ed. (Cairo: al-Matba'a al-Salafiyya, 1349/[1930]), 2d ed. (Haifa: al-Maktaba al-Wataniyya
al-'Arabiyya and Damascus: Matbaca al-Sadaqa, 1352/[1933]), 3d ed. (Damascus: Maktaba al-CIrfa,
1357H/AD1938).
71st ed. (Cairo: Matba'a al-Salafiyya, 1350/[1931]), 2d ed. (Jerusalem: Matba a Dar al-Aytam
al-Islami al-Sana'iyya, 1355/1936).
81st ed. (Baghdad: Matbaca al-Ma'arif, 1350/1931), 2d ed. (1351/1932), 3d ed. (1353/[1934]), 4th
ed. (Baghdad: Dar al-Haditha, 1355/[1936]), rev. ed. (Baghdad: Government Press, 1939). The
fourth edition has not been accessible. Information concerning it has been provided by Dr. Reeva
Simon.
9Abdul Latif Tibawi, Arab Education in Mandatory Palestine: A Study of Three Decades of
British Administration (London: Luzac, 1956), pp. 28-38, 95-97, 193-99; Humphrey Ernest Bowman,
Middle-East Window (London, New York, and Toronto: Longmans, Green and Co., 1942),
pp. 310-14; MMIAD, 4 (1924), 428-29; 11 (1931), 704; Reeva S. Simon, "The Teaching of History in
Iraq before the Rashid Ali Coup of 1941," Middle Eastern Studies, 22 (1986), 42; Nabih Amin Faris,
"The Arabs and Their History," The Middle East Journal (MEJ), 8 (1954), 156-57; Nicola A.
Ziadeh, "Recent Arabic Literature on Arabism," MEJ, 6 (1952), 471.
'?Haim points to 'Abduh's "implicit" "glorification of Arab Islam and . . . depreciation of Ottoman
Islam" (p. 21), and calls Kawakibi "the first true intellectual precursor of modern secular PanArabism" (p. 27), but apparently does not derive Arab nationalism from their thought. Their main
influence was, like that of Afghani and others, to "increase skepticism concerning Islam" among
Muslims (p. 16). Haim believes that real Arab nationalism was an importation from the West at the
time of World War I and that there was no "serious attempt to define [its] meaning" until the late
1930s (p. 35). In order to survive, the newly imported secular Arabism had to become "consonant
with" Islam (p. 54). Sharabi divides the Islamic modernists of most students into reformists (e.g.,
cAbduh) and secularists (e.g., Kawakibi) and assigns to the secularists the position of leading the
Arab nationalist movement before 1914 until the end of the interwar period, when it finally collapsed
in the face of secular Arab nationalism, which had been created by the Lebanese Christians (see esp.
pp. 64, 76-77, 91, 102-3, 107 n. 4, 108-9, 111-12, 118, 122, 123, 128, 131-32, 133). Tibi (pp. 64-68)
holds that Islamic modernism contributed to the formation of Arab nationalism, that Kawakibi was
an "important pioneer of Arab nationalism" (p. 67), but that Arab nationalism was a secular
movement, originating with the Lebanese Christians, "which was eventually to destroy the Islamic
revitalization movement" (p. 68), even though Islam was not abandoned by the Arab nationalists.

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

87

"Barghuthi and Tuta, pp. 2-3, 87 (quotation), 261; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 70; idem,
al-Ta'rikh al-carabi, 1st ed., pp. 308, 927 (hereafter, when the first edition is cited, all editions have
the text unless otherwise noted; when subsequent editions are cited, the text occurs in all subsequent
editions unless otherwise noted); James Henry Breasted, Ancient Times, A History of the Early
World: An Introduction to the Study of Ancient History and the Career of Early Man (Boston, New
York, etc.: Ginn, 1916); Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, Ittijah al-mawjat al-bashariyyafi-jazira al-carab
(Cairo: al-Matba'a al-Salafiyya, 1344/1925), pp. 63-64 (n. 1 to p. 63); Jayms Hanri Birastid, al'Usur al-qadima was huwa tamhid li-dars al-ta'rikh al-qadim wa acmal al-insan al-awwal, Da'ud
Qurban, trans. (Beirut: al-Matba'a al-Amayrikaniyya, 1926), 2d ed. (1930); Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 1, 4,
6, 7, 451. When all editions have the same text, only the second edition is cited. I have dealt more
extensively with Miqdadi in "An Arab Nationalist View of World Politics and History in the InterWar Period-Darwish al-Miqdadi," to appear in The Great Powers in the Middle East: 1919-1939,
Uriel Dann, ed. (London: Holmes and Meier).
'2Al-Ta'rikh al-Carabi,1st ed., pp. 35, 86, 317, 318, 2d ed., pp. 90, 360, 6th ed., pp. 315, 317.
'3Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 1, 451.
14Barghuthi and Tuta, pp. 15, 17-18, 82-83; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 67-68, 71, 73, 76-77;
idem, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 10-13; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-qadim, 1st ed., pp. 70-76; Miqdadi,
2d ed., pp. 12-13, 16-19, 1939 ed., p. 7, is certain that Hammurabi was Arab.
'5Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 3, 7-8, 10-12.
6Khatib, passim, esp. pp. 4-6, 32-35, 46-50, 63-64 (n. 1 to p. 63; quotation from Shurayqi).
'7Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 4-5, 11-13, 17-18, 61-72; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed.,
pp. 3-9; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-qadim, 1st ed., pp. 35-40; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 10-13, 451.
'8Barghuthi and Tuta, pp. 6, 14, 106; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 4-5, 11-14 (Husri's direct
influence is acknowledged, p. 5 n. 1); idem, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., p. 7; idem, al-Ta'rikh alqadim, 1st ed., p. 39; Miqdadi, p. 451.
'9Miqdadi, p. 59; 'Abd al-Malik al-Nashif, ed., Bayna jahiliyyatayn: masrahiyya, by Darwish alMiqdadi (Beirut: Dar al-'Ilm li-al-Malayin, 1967), p. 7.
20Barghuthi and Tuta, pp. 11-13, 17-18; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., 1, 23-24, 61-62, 73-75;
idem, al-Ta rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 15-16, 19, 20, 27-31, 45-46, 51; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 16-21,
31-35; MMIAD, 3 (1923), 186, 317-18; 17 (1942), 311-18, 392-407, 487-500.
2"Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 172-75, 209; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., 11, 80-81; idem, al-Ta'rikh
al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 211, 236; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 332-33, 336.
22Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 257-60; Darwaza, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 255-57, 285, 287-89;
Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 460, 462-63, 488, 503-4; Tiyudur Arunuwitsch Rudhstayn, Ta9rikhmisr qabla
al-ihtilal al-britani wa-bacdahu, 'Ali Ahmad Shukri, trans. (Cairo, 1345/1927), a translation of
Fedor Aronovich (Theodore) Rothstein, Egypt's Ruin: A Financial and Administrative Record
(London: A. C. Fifield, 1910); Shakib Arslan, ed., Hadir al-'alam al-islami, by Luthruf Situdard,
cAjjaj Nuwayhid, trans., 2 vols. (Cairo: Matba'a 'Isa al-Babi al-Halibi, 1343/1925), II, 276 n. 1, 2d
ed., 4 vols. (1352/1933); IV, 244 n. 1; MMIAD, 4 (1924), 423-24; 8 (1928), 245; 9 (1929), 574-75; 10
(1930), 507-8.
23Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 461-62, 511, 519-20; MMIAD, 7 (1927), 177; 8 (1928), 724-25, 730-39; 9
(1929), 407-8; 12 (1932), 719.
24Breasted,pp. 172-74, 177, 181-82, 217-18.
25Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 49-52, 76-77, 104-5, 190 (quotations, pp. 49, 77).
26Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 6, 13, 144, 147, 148, 168-69; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 14; idem,
al-Ta'rikh al-qadim, Ist ed., pp. 126, 131, 146, 200; 2d ed., pp. 18-20, 95, 107, 113.
27E.g., the Marxist writer, Bandali Jawzi, Min ta'rikh al-harakat al-fikriyya fi al-islam, Vol. I:
Min taDrikhal-haraka al-ijtima'iyya (Jerusalem, 1928), pp. 6-7; MMIAD, 9 (1929), 402, 403.
28Khatib,pp. 64-65.
29Miqdadi,2d ed., pp. 11, 312, 332, 483-84; 2d ed., pp. 5-8, 252, 362.
30Darwaza,Mukhtasar, 2d ed., 1, 47, 48-49, 51, 56, 83-84; Miqdadi, 2d ed., 37-38.
3"Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 47, 56-57, 70, 84; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-Carabi,1st ed., pp. 23-25,
37-39, 41-42.
32Miqdadi,2d ed., pp. 22, 27-28, 37, 59-60, 64; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 111-13.

88

C. Ernest Dawn

33Kitib tabai' al-istibdad wa-sari' al-istib'ad, in al-A'mal al-kamila, Muhammad 'Imara, ed.,
(Cairo: al-Hay'a al-Misriyya li-al-Ta'lif wa-al-Nashr, 1970), pp. 374-84, esp. p. 378; for a translation, see Sami A. Hanna and George H. Gardner, Arab Socialism: A Documentary Survey (Salt
Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1969), pp. 217-24, esp. p. 219.
34Hadiral-'alam al-islami, 1st ed., II, 377; 2d ed., IV, 362--63.
35Mukhtasar,2d ed., I, 137-38 (n. I to p. 137); al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 64, 121.
36MMIAD, 5 (1925), 393-94; 11 (1931), 190-91; 13 (1933), 253-54; 15 (1937), 456-65; 16 (1941),
381.
37Seenote 27 above.
38MMIAD, 9 (1929), 125.
39Jamalal-Din al-Afghani, al-A'mal al-kamila, Muhammad 'Imara, ed. (Cairo: al-Mu'assasa alMisriyya al-'Amma li al-Ta'lif wa-al-Nashr, 1968), pp. 414-23 (for Abu Dharr, pp. 421-23); a
translation is given in Hanna and Gardner, pp. 267-74 (Abu Dharr, pp. 273-74).
40Miqdadi, 1st ed., p. 249, 2d ed., pp. 31-32, 60-65, 93, 188, 3d ed., pp. 22, 188, 1939 ed.,
pp. 37-41, 48-49, 75, 159.
4'Hadir al-'alam al-islami, 2d ed., I, 187.
42Les
schisimes dans 'lIslam: Introduction ai une etude de la religion musulmane (Paris: Payot,
1965), p. 6 n. 13.
43Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 83-88, 100-101, 102-4, 108, 113; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., I, 41, 47,
56, 67, 110, 112-14, 115, 131, 141, 164, 196; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 59, 63, 65, 70,
80-81, 85, 86, 90, 102, 113, 116, 138, 140, 147, 152, 186, 230, 233-34, 280, 317; Miqdadi, 2d ed.,
pp. 1, 64-65, 130-33, 142, 173-74, 451; Arslan, 2d ed., I, 28-31.
44Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., II, 106-7, 164, 168; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 181-82;
Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 358-60, 368-71, 376, 424, 445; Arslan, 2d ed., 1, 117-27.
45Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 134-35, 144, 146-49, 216-17; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., II, 26-29,
39-40, 78-79; I, 134, 152-53, 156-58, 160-62, 168-70, 184-85, 187, 196, 210; idem, al-Ta'rikh
al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 186, 193-94, 289; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 138-39, 243, 256-57, 318, 320, 327, 330,
339, 348-50, 472.
46Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 234-37, 252-54, 261-68; MMIAD, 5 (1925), 104; 7 (1927), 177-78, 182;
9 (1929), 80-94; Darwaza, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 212, 259, 297-98, 2d ed., pp. 325-26;
Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 472-92.
47Barghuthi and Tuta, p. 257; Darwaza, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 266-67, 292, 297-98;
Arslan, 1st ed., II, 27-29, 51-52; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 315, 331, 354, 360, 362, 374, 417-18, 472-74,
482-83,492.
48Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., 1, 35, 162, 164; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-Carabi, 1st ed., pp. 103, 132,
160-61,219-20.
49MMIAD, 8 (1928), 720, 721, 723.
5'Arslan, 1st ed., I, 8-9 (n. I to p. 8), 2d ed., 1, 162-63; Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., 1, 128, 206,
II, 3-4, 10, 18-19, 21--24; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-'arahi, Ist ed., pp. 119, 156-57, 171-72, 200-201, 205;
Barghuthi and Tuta, pp. 104-5, 144.
51Miqdadi,2d ed., pp. 243, 245 -46, 312.
52Barghuthiand Tuta, pp. 209-10, 217 (quotation, p. 217); Arslan, 1st ed., I, 21--23 (n. 1 to p. 21),
151-52 (n. I to p. 151); 2d ed., 1, 168, 186-87, 238-39, 329-31; III, 208-342 (esp. 341-42); Darwaza,
Mukhtasar, 2d ed., II, 148: idem, al-Ta-rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., pp. 151, 184, 219, 229-30, 237, 246-50,
270; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 332, 420-22, 433, 438-39.
53MMIAD, 4 (1924), 330-32, 9 (1929), 254-55.
54Miqdadi,2d ed., pp. 451, 493, 520; 3d ed., pp. 509, 521.
55MMIAD, 7 (1927), 433, 436, 438; 8 (1928), 720; 12 (1932), 126; Sami al-Kayyali, al-Fikr al-'arabi
bayna madihi wa-hadirihi (Cairo: Matba'a al-Ma'arif, 1943), pp. 43-44; Darwaza, al-Ta&rikhal'arabi, 1st ed., p. 299; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 337, 494-95.
56MMIAD, 9 (1929), 254-55.
57Barghuthi and Tuta, pp. 47, 98, 242-43, 286-87; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 42, 508-11, 514-17;
Darwaza, al-Ta'rikh al-'arabi, 1st ed., p. 252; 2d ed., II, p. 187.

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

89

58Darwaza, Mukhtasar, 2d ed., II, 106, 107, 164, 187-88; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-Carabi, 1st ed.,
pp. 181, 182; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 386-71; Arslan, 2d ed., I, 117-27.
59Kayyali,pp. 10-11, 83-88, 94-95 (quotations p. 84).
60Darwaza, al- Tarikh al-Carabi, 1st ed., p. 255; idem, al-Ta'rikh al-mutawassit wa-al-hadith, 1st
ed., p. 184 (quotation), pp. 288-89; Miqdadi, 2d ed., pp. 503-4, 510, 517.
61Miqdadi,2d ed., pp. 144, 322-24; for Arslan and Rida', see below.
62Arslan, 1st ed., II, 321 n. 2, 401-2.
63Al-Manar, 21, 5 (Aug. 1919), 252-56 (quotations, pp. 253-54); translation in La penske politique arabe contemporaine, Anouar Abdel-Malek, ed. (Paris: Seuil, 1970), pp. 230-35 (quotations,
pp. 231, 232).
64al-Ta'rikh al-mutawassit wa-al-hadith, 1st ed., p. 296.
65Arslan, II, 1st ed., 299 n. 2, 377, 401.
66MMIAD, 5 (1925), 393-94; 6 (1926), 190-91.
67Dawn, Ottomanism to Arabism, pp. 157-59, 167, 170-74.
68ShakibArslan, al-Sayyid Rashid Rida' aw-ikha' arba'un sana (Damascus: Maktaba Ibn-Zaydun,
1356/1937), pp. 633-38, 642, 645, 647-49, 652-56, 665-66, 670-71, 677-79, 688, 693-94, 697-98,
708; Oriente Moderno (OM) 9 (1929), 413; 10 (1930), 372; 12 (1932), 370-71, 427, 437-38, 487, 497;
13 (1933), 34-55, 127, 183, 340, 570; Y. Porath, The Palestinian Arab National Movement, 2 vols.
(London: Frank Cass, 1974-1977), I, 77-79, 88, 191, 204, 218, 222, 234, 245, 269, 277, 302, II, 32, 36,
51-52, 60, 71, 120, 123, 124, 137, 138, 170, 193, 224, 235, 242, 243, 258, 275, 282, 292, 317 n. 31, 344
n. 71, 334 n. 116, 336 n. 176; Philip S. Khoury, "Factionalism among Syrian Nationalists during the
French Mandate," IJMES, 13 (1981), 441-69.
69SatiCal-Husri, Mudhakkiratifi al-'iraq, 1921-1941, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'a, 1967-68), I,
557; Talib Mushtaq, Awraq ayyami, 2 vols. (Beirut: Dar al-Tali'a, 1968-69), I, 201-2; Simon, pp. 36,
39, 40, 42-43.
70For the best statements of the most sharply opposing views, see Kedourie, Chatham House
Version, pp. 215-18, and Ralph M. Coury, "Who 'Invented' Egyptian Arab Nationalism?" IJMES,
14 (1982), 249-81, 459-79.
7"Anwar al-Jundi, AClam wa-ashab aqlam (Cairo: Dar Nahda Misr li-Tabc wa-al-Nashr, n.d.),
pp. 17-24, esp. 18, 24; Michelangelo Guidi in OM, 11 (1931), 424-27.
72Anwaral-Jundi, AClamal-qarn al-rabic cashr al-hijri (Cairo: Maktaba al-Anjilu al-Misri, 1981),
I, 381-96, esp. 381, 384.
73Mitchell,Muslim Brothers, pp. 5, 322-23.
74Themost extensive treatment of early Egyptian Pan-Arab thought is by Israel Gershoni; see his
"Arabization of Islam: The Egyptian Salafiyya and the Rise of Arabism in Pre-Revolutionary
Egypt," Asian and African Studies (AAS), 13 (1979), 25-57; "The Emergence of Pan-Nationalism in
Egypt: Pan-Islamism and Pan-Arabism in the 1930s," AAS, 16 (1982), 59-94; The Emergence of
Pan-Arabism in Egypt (Tel-Aviv: Shiloah Center for Middle Eastern and African Studies, Tel-Aviv
University, 1981). Important material is contained in Charles D. Smith, Islam and the Search for
Social Order in Egypt: A Biography of Muhammad Husayn Haykal (New York: State University of
New York Press, 1983). On the Muslim Brothers, see also Mitchell, pp. 209-94, and on the YMMA,
see Georg Kampffmeyer, "Egypt and Western Asia," Whither Islam, H. A. R. Gibb, ed. (London:
Victor Gollancz, 1932; reprint New York: AMS Inc., 1973), pp. 103-4, 114-37.
75Forthe founders, see Kampffmeyer, pp. 104-5. For the political affiliations and activities of those
specified here, see Jundi, A'lam wa-ashab aqlam, pp. 212-25, 242-52, 450-57.
76Theearliest Egyptian advocates of Pan-Arabism have been identified by means of the information given in Gershoni, "Arabization of Islam," p. 26 n. 8, p. 27 n. 9, p. 30 n. 19, p. 34 n. 35, p. 41
n. 57; "Emergence of Pan-Nationalism," pp. 61-62 at nn. 2-5, pp. 82-88; Emergence of PanArabism, pp. 38-41, pp. 48-59 at n. 70, p. 53 at n. 86, pp. 56-57 at n. 97, p. 58 at n. 103, p. 75 at
nn. 163-64, p. 107 n. 70, p. 109 n. 86, p. 111 nn. 97, 103, p. 120 nn. 163-64.
77Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Mudhakkirat fi al-siyasa al-misriyya, 2 vols. (Cairo: Maktaba alNahda al-Misriyya, 1951-53), I, 186, 190, 291, 292, 293; Fatima al-Yusuf, Dhikrayat, 3d ed. (Cairo:
Ruz al-Yusuf, 1976), pp. 166-78, 186, 202, 219; OM, 13 (1933), 24, 398-400; 14 (1934), 300-301, 462;

90

C. Ernest Dawn

Marius Deeb, Party Politics in Egypt: The Wafd and Its Rivals, 1919-1939 (London: Ithaca Press,
1979), p. 113 n. 299.
78Haykal, I, 327, 348, 357; Yusuf, pp. 143, 173; OM, 10 (1930), 93; 15 (1935), 472; 16 (1936),
211-12, 239. Ni'mat Ahmad Fu'ad, Adab al-Mazini, 2d ed. (Cairo: Mu'assassa al-Khaniji, 1961),
pp. 165-67.
79Muhammad Mahmud Radwan, Safhat majhula min hayat Zaki Mubarak (Cairo: Dar al-Hilal,
[1974]), pp. 39-51.
80OM,8 (1928), 238; 10 (1930), 319; 11 (1931), 581; 12 (1932), 25; 13 (1933), 275; cf. Coury, "Egypt.
Arab Nationalism," pp. 252-53, 254, 264-65. For somewhat oblique brief notices of the intra-Wafd
conflict, see Afaf Lutfi al-Sayyid-Marsot, Egypt's Liberal Experiment (Berkeley and Los Angeles:
University of California Press, 1977), pp. 134-36, 148-49, 150-55, 159-61; Deeb, pp. 149 nn. 129 and
130, 173-74, 245-48; Janice J. Terry, Cornerstone of Egyptian Political Power: The Wafd, 19191952 (London: Third World Center for Research and Publishing, 1982), pp. 224-26.
8'Gershoni, Emergence of Pan-Arabism, pp. 47, 51, 73; Coury, pp. 253-54.
82James P. Jankowski, Egypt's Young Rebels: "Young Egypt," 1933-1952 (Stanford, Calif.:
Hoover Institution, 1975), p. 19; Deeb, p. 413 n. 377.
83OnYoung Egypt's early ideology, see Jankowski, pp. 13, 44-78; on Ottomanism and Islamism in
pre-1918 Egypt, see idem, "Ottomanism and Arabism in Egypt, 1860-1914," The Muslim World, 70
(1980), 226-59, and Israel Gershoni, "Between Ottomanism and Egyptianism: The Evolution of
'National Sentiment' in the Cairene Middle Class as Reflected in Najib Mahfuz's Bayn al-Qasrayn,"
AAS, 17 (1983), 227-63.
84Jankowski,Egypt's Young Rebels, pp. 9-10, 19-20.
85Ibid.,pp. 18-19.
86Deeb, pp. 339-40, 377, 401 nn. 165-66, 413 nn. 377-78; James Heyworthe-Dunne, Religious and
Political Trends in Modern Egypt, Near and Middle East Monographs, 1 (Washington, D.C.: the
author, 1950), pp. 14, 23, 24, 27; Mitchell, pp. 16, 23; Jankowski, Egypt's Young Rebels, pp. 19,
22-23, 32, 35-36, 39-40; P. J. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (New York: St. Martin's Press,
1978), pp. 78-81.
87Jacques Berque, L'Egypte: imperialisme et revolution (Paris: Gallimard, 1967), pp. 480-81;
Mahmud 'Azmi, al-Ayyam al-mi'a: wizara Ali Mahir Basha, 30 January-9 May 1936 (Cairo:
Maktaba al-Nahda al-Misriyya, [1939]).
88James Jankowski, "Egyptian Responses to the Palestine Problem in the Interwar Period,"
IJMES, 12 (1980), 1-38; idem, "The Government of Egypt and the Palestine Question, 1936-1939,"
Middle Eastern Studies, 17 (1981), 427-53; Coury, "Egypt. Arab Nationalism," pp. 254-55, 462-63.
89Forexamples of apparently opportunistic use of Palestine, see Coury, pp. 255-56.
90To regard the multitudinous expressions of these thoughts by Arab nationalists, including
'Azzam, as "the reflection and reinforcement of a kind of bourgeois self-exultation, [and] a testimony ... to the rising fortunes and potentials of a ruling class," as Coury (p. 470) does, is to ignore
the basing of hopes for the future on visions of the past and the encompassing expression of anguish
over the present. Coury is correct in pointing out the importance of such themes in many nationalist
ideologies. Dawn has never regarded Islamic modernism or Arabism as only or even primarily the
defense of an injured self-view. Of at least equal importance is the competition for office, status, and
influence.
91For Zionist use of the Semitic concept, see Neil Caplan, Palestine Jewry and the Arab Question,
1917-1925 (London and Totowa, N.J.: Frank Cass, 1978), pp. 124, 180; Simha Flapan, Zionism and
the Palestinians (London: Croom Helm, 1979), p. 155.
92Smith, Haykal, pp. 56-57, 120-21, 153-54.
93C. Ernest Dawn, "Ottoman Affinities of 20th Century Regimes in Syria," Palestine in the Late
Ottoman Period: Political, Social and Economic Transformation, David Kushner, ed. (Jerusalem:
Yad lzhak Ben-Zvi and Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1986), pp. 181-82.
94Dawn, "Ottoman Affinities," p. 183; Khayri al-'Umari, Yunus al-Sabcawi: sira siyasi 'isami
(Baghdad: Wizara al-Thaqafa wa-al-Funun, 1978), pp. 48, 61, 63, 64-66; Mushtaq, I, 109 at n. 1, 157,
210-12; Taha al-Hashimi, Mudhakkirat, 1919-1943, Khaldun Sati' al-Husri, ed. (Beirut: Dar alTalica, 1967), pp. 184, 188, 254, 255-62, 272; Mahmud al-Durra, Hayat 'iraqiyya min wara' albawwaba al-sawda' ([Cairo]: al-Hay'a al-Misriyya al-'Amma li al-Kuttab, 1976), pp. 69-71, 100;

Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

91

Munir al-Rayyis, al-Kitab al-dhahabi li al-thawrat al-wataniyya fi al-mashriq al-'arabi, 3 vols.


(Beirut: Dar al-Tali'a and Damascus: Alif-Ba', 1969-77), II, 103-9, 199-202, 227-28, 292; III,
29-30, 32, 34.
95Al-Rayyis, III, 47, 53-55, 60-61, 65-66, 71-72, 74-77, 80-81, 83-84, 100, 101, 105-6, 143, 155,
158-62; al-'Umari, pp. 67-83; al-Hashimi, pp. 283-85, 289-90, 292-93, 299-300, 311, 312-13, 315,
316, 341-42, 353, 356, 358, 363-64, 369, 377, 378, 382-85, 391, 393-94, 398-403, 409; Husri, II, 316;
Mushtaq, I, 401 n. 2; Zaki al-Arsuzi, al-Mu'allifat al-Kamila (Damascus: Matabi' al-Idarah alSiyasiyah li al-Jaysh wa-al-Quwat al-Musallahah, 1972), I, 17; Jankowski, Egypt's Young Rebels,
p. 84; Gershoni, Emergence of Pan-Arabism, pp. 45, 75-76.
96Jankowski,Egypt's Young Rebels, p. 121; Vatikiotis, pp. 67, 74.
97Vatikiotis,pp. 85-87, 93-94.
98Fora model thorough and systematic examination of Ba'thist and Nasserist ideology, see Olivier
Carre, La legitimation islamique des socialismes arabes: analyse conceptuelle combinatoire de manuels scholaires egyptiens, syriens et irakiens (Paris: Presses de la Foundation Nationale des Sciences
Politiques, 1979); see also by the same author, Enseignement islamique et ideal socialiste: analyse
conceptuelle des manuels d'instruction musulmane en Egypte (Beirut: Dar al-Mashriq-Librairie
Orientale, 1974), and "L'Islam politique dans l'Orient arabe," Futuribles, 18 (Nov.-Dec. 1978),
747-63.

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