EGYPT, SYRIA, AND ARAB NATIONALISM
AFTER WORLD WAR
I, France remained in direct control of North Africa from Morocco to Tunisia, but in the Near East, the situation was more varied. Egypt was declared independent in 1922 after a popular uprising against the British, although Britain retained wide latitude to intervene in Egypt’s internal affairs and had almost complete control over its foreign policy and its major source of revenue, the Suez Canal. Though Transjordan, Palestine, and Iraq had been awarded to the British,
and Iraq became independent in 1932, Palestine remained under British rule until after World War II, and in Transjordan Abdullah depended on London’s military support in order to rule an arid territory inhabited by a few hundred thousand bedouin. The French retained Syria and Lebanon and refused to allow either to emerge from mandate status. Saudi Arabia thrived as an independent country under the autocratic Ibn Saud, in part because he was so amenable to Western oil companies investing in the infrastructure necessary to transform the desert kingdom into a petro powerhouse. Non-Arab Iran and Turkey avoided direct European control, and were ruled by modernizing strongmen. Atatürk in Turkey and Reza Shah Pahlavi in Iran instituted a European-style education system, which meant removing the curriculum from the hands of the clerics and the
ulama.
They also stepped up the pace of economic and agricultural reform. They enacted laws to enforce a more modern dress code, especially for women, and the veil—a potent symbol of the old order—was outlawed.
Both Syria and Egypt were centers of Arab nationalism. In Syria, one movement was led by a Christian named Michel Aflaq, who was a founder of the Ba’ath Party. Aflaq had attended French schools, lived in Paris, and studied at the Sorbonne. Though initially more socialist, he later flirted with extreme forms of nationalism modeled on the fascism of Mussolini and Hitler. Aflaq lived a long life, and he witnessed first the victory and then the perversion of his legacy when the 1958 Ba’athist coup in Iraq eventually led to the dictatorship of Saddam Hussein. Though Aflaq wanted to create a modern state, he believed that Islam was a vital component of Arab unity. The irony of a Christian intellectual creating the framework for a nationalist movement that embraced Islam was lost on most at the time (and since), but Arab Christians in Lebanon, Syria, and Palestine were at the forefront of the development of Arab nationalism. Aflaq called Islam “the most precious element of Arabism,” and he enjoined all Arabs, whether Christian or Muslim, to revere Muhammad as a hero.
The West was perceived as an obstacle and an adversary, yet in emulating European nationalism, socialism, and even fascism, Arabs were in some respect cooperating with the West. That may not be a legacy to remember fondly. Ba’athism was only one of many Arab nationalisms, of course, and in Syria alone, there were mainstream nationalist parties that rejected the philosophy of Aflaq. But while many of the principles
of Ba’athism were distasteful and many of its subsequent leaders were corrupt, it was nonetheless a movement born of integration between Muslims and Christians, between the Middle East and the West. Aflaq wasn’t shy about crediting French and German intellectuals for his inspiration, and the Ba’ath Party that he helped create borrowed heavily from both communism and the national socialism that burgeoned in Europe between the wars. Aflaq also defended the rights of the poor and the universal right to free speech, and he called for secular government in the Arab world. He had, at least, a moral compass, compromised though it may have been. Though he lived to see the Ba’ath Party come to power in both Syria and Iraq, and was appointed to a ceremonial ministerial post in Iraq, Aflaq was never comfortable with the politicians who led the party, including Saddam Hussein. In the 1960s and 1970s, Hussein used Aflaq and the Ba’athist label when he thought it convenient and ignored them when they were not.
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Aflaq and Ba’athism were one form of synchronicity with the West. The constitutional nationalist movement in Egypt was another. After World War I, Egypt was still directly governed by the British, but unlike Iraq, it was not part of the Mandate System. Egyptian opposition to the British coalesced around the Wafd Party and its grand old man, Sa’d Zaghlul. Zaghlul succeeded Muhammad Abduh as the leading reformer in Egypt at the turn of the twentieth century, and he was the driving force behind Egyptian independence. After his arrest by the British for organizing protests in 1919, he was deported to Malta. That triggered an uprising, which shook British resolve and led to Egyptian independence in 1922. Zaghlul, promising to decrease the influence of Britain over Egyptian affairs, became prime minister in 1924. While he did not succeed in diminishing the presence of the British in the Suez Canal zone, Egypt was admitted as a full member of the League of Nations in 1937.
The Wafd Party remained the dominant force in Egyptian politics for more than three decades. The party was infused with the dignity, probity, and pride of Zaghlul, but it was led by several equally formidable men in the 1930s and 1940s, who were faced with the same challenge of a Britain that was unwilling to yield its control of the canal or Egypt’s foreign policy to a domestic, elected government. Some Egyptian nationalists then turned to Germany as a natural ally in the struggle against the British. It was a classic example of “the enemy of my enemy
is my friend.” The Germans challenged British hegemony in Egypt, especially during the early years of World War II, when the North Africa campaigns of the “Desert Fox,” General Erwin Rommel, threatened to evict Britain from Egypt and the Suez Canal. The Wafd Party, however, resisted an explicit break with the British, and a Wafd prime minister was in fact forced on King Farouk in 1942 when British tanks broke down the gates of Abdin palace and ordered the king to change his government. But while supportive of the British war effort, the Wafd continued to work for full independence. One product of its struggle was the creation of the League of Arab States in 1945, which remained a prominent vehicle for pan-Arab nationalism into the twenty-first century
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The Syrian Ba’ath and the Egyptian Wafd represented two different forms of nationalism. One veered toward socialism, the other emulated English liberalism. The Ba’ath saw nationalism as a force that transcended the artificial borders that separated the Arab world into states. The dream, in fact, was that one day there would be a unified nation—or
umma—
stretching from North Africa to Iraq, encompassing the entire Arabic-speaking world.
Arab nationalism had an uneasy relationship with religion. While Islam was supposed to bind Arabs together, it was neither the only nor the dominant force. It shared space with language, history, and vague notions of race. Christians like Aflaq were often more comfortable with placing Islam at the center of Arab nationalism than Muslims were. Almost all of the leaders of the nationalist independence movements had gone to school in Europe or were educated in schools with a European curriculum. They had been inculcated with the virtues of secular society and the scientific method, and they had been taught to treat traditional religions as bastions of backwardness. Many of them had also studied Islam at a local mosque, and their experiences with neighborhood preachers often reinforced their skepticism. Christians like Aflaq, however, could adopt a more utilitarian attitude. Unburdened by personal ambivalence about Islam, they articulated a vision of an Arab nation that was at once Islamic and tolerant of the People of the Book.
The promise of Arab nationalism, like the promise of the nineteenth-century reform movement, was simple: if the Arabs could find a way to erase the false divisions that separated them, if they could throw off the yoke of European dominance, and if they could demonstrate that they
were capable of governing their own affairs, then there would be an Arab renaissance to rival the court at Baghdad and the glories of Saladin. Turkish nationalism under Atatürk and Iranian nationalism under the shah held out similar promises, though the Turks looked to restore the glories of past Turkish dynasties, and the Iranians the power of Persian monarchs both before and after the advent of Islam.
What happened in the Middle East in the twentieth century helped determine the framework for how Muslims, Christians, and Jews interacted throughout the globe. Even though most of the Muslim world lay outside the Middle East—including hundreds of millions of Muslims in India and Indonesia who had little or no contact with Christians or Jews—the Middle East in the twentieth century was a crucible, as it had been when this story began in the seventh century, nearly fourteen hundred years ago, and as it continues to be today.
THE BIRTH OF ISRAEL AND ITS CONSEQUENCES
THIRTY YEARS
stood between the Balfour Declaration and the birth of the independent state of Israel. For most of those three decades, it seemed unlikely that the outcome would be a Jewish state. Jews in Palestine were a minority living amid Arabs, some of whom were Muslim and some of whom were Christian. In the end, because of a series of decisions made by both Palestinian and Zionist leaders, as well as because of events in Europe and in the world well beyond the control of either, what materialized was a Jewish state vehemently opposed by almost every Arab nation. The creation of Israel in 1948 is one of those rare before-and-after moments, one that disrupted a tenuous balance that had existed between Muslims and Jews from time immemorial and that has yet to be restored.
It is almost impossible to write about the creation of Israel without offending someone. The history has become so politicized and so partisan that there is simply no agreement about the facts. Emotion trumps all else when the subject of Israel is raised, especially in the contemporary Middle East. Israel has become a third rail for rational, sober discourse. If the Holocaust stands as a never-ending rebuke to relations between Christians and Jews, then the intractable conflict between the
Palestinians and the Israelis has come to color not just discussions about Judaism in the Muslim world but discussions about Islam and the West in general.
The creation of Israel is a historical Rubicon. On one side is a dynamic past of coexistence and cooperation along with episodes of antagonism and cruelty. On the other is an increasingly simplistic picture of hostile relations between the parties. In short, the creation of Israel led to disturbing revisions of the past in light of the present. Muslims, Christians, and Jews are all guilty of revisionism. Most books about “Muslim intolerance” use the lens of the Arab-Israeli conflict to categorize the entire history of Islam. The vehement anti-Israeli attitudes of the Arab world since the middle of the twentieth century have been beamed backward a millennium and a half into the past, the presumption being that if many present-day Arabs who are also Muslim hate or oppose the Jewish state of Israel, then it must be because of some essential component of Islam. In a similar vein, Muslims tend to collapse Judaism and the state of Israel into one. Detesting the existence of Israel, they implicate Judaism, and thereby forget the coexistence with Jews that marked so much of their shared history.
Increasingly, Muslims and Jews, as well as Western Christians who span the spectrum from the most secular in Europe to the most fundamentalist in the United States, treat the Arab-Israeli conflict as the latest episode in a long war between the faiths. The assumption in the Western world is that Muslims have always opposed the existence of Judaism, and nurtured an animosity toward Christians and the West as well. In the Arab world, the existence of Israel has become a symbol of Arab weakness, proof that the reformers and the nationalists failed in their goal of resurrecting Arab greatness.
Complicating matters even further is the loose use of words and confusion about who is fighting whom and why. There is an Arab-Israeli conflict, which includes Arab Christians who have opposed or fought the state of Israel. Arab Christians in Lebanon, in Israel itself, and in Egypt have at times been the most adamant opponents of Israel, and Christians have been prominent in the leadership of the Palestine Liberation Organization. With each passing decade in the twentieth century, the Arab-Israeli conflict was exported throughout the Muslim world, first as a symbol of the injustice of the West, then as a symbol of
Muslim failure, and finally as a vindication of the Muslim fundamentalist argument about the clash between Islam and the People of the Book.
Muslims thousands of miles from the conflict, in corners of Nigeria, India, Afghanistan, Indonesia, and the Philippines, identified with the Palestinians and came to view the conflict with Israel as the prime example of how far the Muslim world had fallen behind the West. The Palestinians became doppelgängers for all Muslims, and their fate was taken as a painful reminder of the wrong turn that the Arabs had taken. Muslims who had never met a Jew, and who may never have met a Christian, began to view both from the perspective of being an oppressed minority. It didn’t matter whether they were living in a predominantly Muslim society. What mattered was an emerging transnational Muslim identity.
The creation of Israel alone cannot and does not explain the climate of animosity and distrust that has disfigured relations between Muslims, Christians, and Jews since the middle of the twentieth century. The legacy of European intervention and colonialism is at least as important, and the inability of numerous Muslim states to achieve the dreams of both the nineteenth-century reformers and the twentieth-century nationalists is perhaps the crucial element. Had Muslim societies in general, and Arab societies most of all, been able to transform themselves, maintain their sense of identity, and become competitive with the West, then Israel may never have become a lightning rod.
Until 1948, the creation of a state of Israel with a Jewish majority was itself in doubt. The Balfour Declaration had promised a “national homeland,” but that did not necessarily mean a state. The British Mandate for Palestine was supposed to provide not just for the settlement of Jews in Palestine, but for the self-governance of the half-million Palestinian Arabs who lived in the region. In 1922, the British tried to allay Arab concerns and issued a disingenuous statement that His Majesty’s Government had not “at any time contemplated, as appears to be feared by the Arab Delegation, the disappearance or subordination of the Arab population, language or culture in Palestine.”
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But unrestricted Jewish emigration from Europe sparked a violent Arab backlash, which led the British government to restrict the influx of Jews in 1939. British restrictions coincided with the rise of virulent anti-Semitism in Europe, especially in Nazi Germany. That caused more European Jews to emigrate, but they found the British government in Palestine hostile to Jewish settlement.
By the end of the 1930s, the British had managed to alienate both the Arab and Jewish populations of Palestine, and were seen as an adversary by both.