The Rise and Fall of Arab Nationalism
Review of Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair, by Adeed Dawisha. 340 pp., Princeton University Press, 2002.
Avi Shlaim
The Guardian (March 29, 2003)
Most isms ultimately lead to war, and Arab nationalism is no
exception. Nationalist movements have an in-built tendency
towards extremism and xenophobia, towards self-righteousness on the one
hand and demonising the enemy on the other. History is often
falsified and even fabricated to serve a nationalist political
agenda. It is interesting to note how frequently the phrase
‘forging a nation’ is used because most nations are
forgeries. Indeed, some nations are based on little more than a
mythological view of the past and hatred of foreigners. Arab
nationalism shares some of these negative traits with other nationalist
movements, but there is one basic difference: it is not the ideology of
one nation-state but of the entire region.
Adeed Dawisha has given us a timely, illuminating, and highly readable
overview of the history of the Arab national movement from its origins
in the 19th century to the present. His book combines an analysis
of the ideas of Arab nationalism and their roots in European through
with a fast-moving political narrative, full of dramatic ups and
downs. Dawisha is a Professor of Political Science at Miami
University in Oxford, Ohio – the real Oxford! He grew up in
Iraq during the heyday of Arab nationalism and he brings to the task
rare personal insight as well as mastery of the voluminous Arabic
sources on the subject. There is a great deal of new material
here which not only brings events alive, but also leads to fresh
assessments and a better informed, more critical understanding of the
politics of one of the world’s most volatile and violent regions.
In the debate on the origins of Arab nationalism, Dawisha sides with
the revisionist historians against the more conventional historians,
led by George Antonius. In The Arab Awakening Antonius
articulated the conventional wisdom that during the 19th century a
national identity took roots among the Arabic speaking populations of
the Ottoman Empire and that in World War I this idea developed into a
fully-fledged revolutionary movement. Dawisha argues that the
Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire was originally proclaimed in the
name of Islam, not in the name of Arabism or the Arab nation.
Religious identity was more important than national identity. The
Arab Revolt therefore ought to be excised from the chronicles of Arab
nationalism.
It was only in the aftermath of World War I that the ‘Arab
nation’ emerged as a pertinent concept and Arab nationalism
gradually took the form of a political movement. Education played
a vital part in glorifying the past, in raising political
consciousness, and in kindling a nationalist spirit in a generation of
young Arabs. Intellectuals rather than politicians were at the
forefront of the movement. They borrowed the nationalist idea
from Europe and they used it to try to chart a new path for the Arab
nation.
But the Arab national movement did not sweep all before it. There
were formidable obstacles along its path. In the first place,
there were conflicting identities and competing loyalties to tribe,
sect, region, and religion. Second, there was always tension
between Iraqi, Syrian, Egyptian, and other regional identities and the
larger, all-encompassing Arab identity. The third, and perhaps
most ironic, obstacle to the concept of a coherent Arab nation was the
linguistic diversity in the land of Araby. But the most powerful
competing alternative to the idea of a secular Arab nation was the
concept of a united Muslim Umma or community. Islam was the other
great supranational ideology with a claim to the allegiance of the
great majority of Arabs. Islam had a broader catchment area than
Pan-Arabism because it did not differentiate between Arab and
non-Arab. The Muslim Umma was a unity in which ethnicity played
no part.
Iraq in the inter-war era was in the vanguard of the movement towards
Arab unity. Proponents of Pan-Arabism, like Sati’ al-Husri, hoped
to turn Iraq into the Prussia of the Middle East, into a nationalist
prototype for the rest of the Arab world. Yet Iraq itself was a
severely fragmented country. It was an artificial state, cobbled
together by Britain out of three ex-Ottoman provinces, and bereft of
any ethnic or religious rationale. Iraq lacked the essential
underpinnings of a national bond. The Kurds in the north aspired
to political independence in Kurdistan. Being non-Semitic and speaking
an Indo-European language, the Kurds had little in common with the
Arabs of Iraq apart from their Sunni Muslim faith. It was impossible to
bring them under the umbrella of ‘the Arab nation’ because
they considered themselves ethnically distinct from the Arabs. In their
struggle for independence, however, they were repeatedly frustrated
because they had no friends but the mountains. The Shiites in the
south tended to view Arab nationalism as a Sunni project designed to
reduce them to an insignificant minority in an expanded Sunni Arab
domain. Over half the population was Shiite, yet the politically
dominant group were the Sunnis who constituted barely a third of the
population. Iraq thus provided a foretaste o of the
problems that were to dog the Arab national movement throughout its
history.
In the face of such deep and pervasive divisions, it was a well-nigh
impossible task to achieve the two basic objectives of the Arab
national movement: unity and independence. A third objective was
added in the aftermath of World War II: to keep Palestine in Arab
hands. The first Arab-Israeli war in 1948 war was the crucial
phase in the struggle for Palestine. Arab unity, it was hoped,
would be forged on the anvil of war against the common enemy. It
was the great test for the newly independent Arab states and they
failed it miserably. The inability of these states to coordinate
their diplomatic and military moves was in itself a major factor in the
loss of Palestine. The hopes that shone so brightly when the
Arabs embarked on this ‘battle of destiny’ against the
Zionist intruders, gave way to disillusion and despair over the dismal
wreckage of Arab Palestine. It was the first time that the Arab
states let down their Palestinian brothers, but it was by no means the
last.
If 1948 was the nadir of Arab nationalism, in 1958 the movement reached
its highest peak. In February of that year the United Arab
Republic was established by the merger of Syria and Egypt. On 14
July, a bloody military coup destroyed the monarchy in Iraq and
transformed the country into a radical republic. Iraq was
expected to join the UAR. The pro-Western regimes in Jordan and
Lebanon teetered on the brink of collapse. For a brief moment the
jubilant masses believed that those they considered to be the enemies
of Arab nationalism were about to fall like a row of dominoes. It
was a revolutionary moment in the Middle East but the revolution did
not spread. With hindsight, 1958 was the great turning-point in
Middle East history in which history failed to turn. Since 1958
it has been downhill all the way.
The power generating Arab nationalism was eventually turned off in June
1967. The armies of the confrontation states were roundly
defeated, their territory was occupied, their economies were in ruins,
and the bluster of Arab nationalism was completely deflated. Thirty
five years on, the Arabs have not yet fully recovered from the crushing
defeat they suffered in the second ‘battle of
destiny’. Nor have the Israelis recovered from the
spectacular military victory that launched them on a course of
territorial expansion. Hence the impasse on the Arab-Israeli
front today.
After tracing the rise and fall of Arab nationalism in the 20th
century, Dawisha passes his final verdict. It is
characteristically balanced and fair-minded. There are lights as well
as shadows in the picture he paints. On the one hand, he
recognises the contribution that Pan-Arabism, in it heyday, made to the
regeneration of Arab self-confidence and sense of dignity after long
years of subjugation to colonial rule. On the other hand, he
notes that, by the end of the century, little was left of the goal of
Arab unity but the debris of broken promises and shattered hopes.
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