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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
4. The Arab Nationalism of George Antonius Reconsidered
William L. Cleveland
Arise, ye Arabs, and awake!" With the placement of this line from Ibrahim al-Yaziji's poem beneath the title page of his book, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement, George Antonius launched his successful "imagining" of the modern Arab nation.
We tend to think of The Arab Awakening as a work of history and its author as an amateur though gifted historian. Most of the attention that has been directed at the book since the early 1960s, when it came under renewed scholarly scrutiny, has concentrated on its historical interpretations: the role of Christian missionaries and Christian Arabs in the awakening; the Arab secret societies and the extent of their influence and membership; the extent of support among the urban Arabs of Greater Syria for the revolt of Sharif Husayn; and the contents and outcomes of the British promises to Husayn. It is entirely proper to view George Antonius as the pioneering historian of a controversial subject. It is also entirely proper to regard him as a historian-advocate who had a case to make.
Until receiving the invitation to participate in this volume, I thought I was thoroughly familiar with all aspects of The Arab Awakening. I considered it a brave and groundbreaking work, but one that was now more representative of its era than of evidential value. However, it appears that Antonius's book is far from being consigned to the category of outmoded classic. Fouad Ajami and Edward Said--to pair two rather different Arab-American perspectives--have recently extolled the book's significance for understanding Arab nationalism. Ajami called it "Antonius's manifesto" and asserted that it foreshadowed "all the grand themes of Arab nationalism." 3 Edward Said proclaimed that "Antonius's The Arab Awakening remains the classic and foundational book on Arab nationalism." 4 These contemporary appreciations of the nationalist thrust of the book, in combination with some of the questions posed by the editors of this volume, have led me to re-evaluate Antonius's contribution to Arab nationalism.
In the first part of this essay, I attempt to examine The Arab Awakening in the context of certain recent theoretical works on nationalism. I also use evidence from Antonius's testimony before the Peel Commission as an additional source for his ideas on the development of the Arab nationalist movement. I am primarily concerned with Antonius's use of language, his manipulation of symbols, and his construction of the foundations of Arab national identity. Because Antonius's language is so crucial to his message, I have not paraphrased him very often, preferring instead to use direct quotations. The second part of the essay examines, in an admittedly preliminary manner, the diffusion of Antonius's ideas.
I should emphasize from the start that I am not concerned here with testing the accuracy of Antonius's historical interpretations. Rather, I wish to examine, in the company of Benedict Anderson and others, Antonius the nationalist. I should also acknowledge that there is possibly something contrived about this exercise. Antonius was, after all, engaged primarily in writing a work of history and did not set out to validate Anderson's hypotheses, to become a subject of Edward Said's "the voyage inward," or to be a reference point for Anthony Smith's "dual dichotomy." It is entirely fair to ask whether the examination of a work on the basis of analytical categories developed decades later does not threaten to misrepresent the original contribution. Yet it may also be argued that if a work is to endure, it must stand up to new readings and convey its core message to later generations. So, while I recognize Antonius first and foremost as a historian, I also think it is legitimate to read him as a nationalist author and to examine his presentation of nationalism in the light of contemporary insights.
Background
George Antonius (1891-1942) brought a formidable combination of skills and experiences to his self-proclaimed task of telling a story, not the least of which was his ability to communicate with the particular audience of British policy-makers he had targeted for The Arab Awakening. By virtue of his own background, he was well-suited to present the history of the Arab national movement in language that such an audience could understand.
Educated at Victoria College in Alexandria and King's College, Cambridge, Antonius served as an official of the British government from 1915 to 1930, first in Alexandria and then for nine years in Palestine. He circulated among and formed friendships with members of the British cultural and political elite both within and outside the Middle East. Whether guiding E. M. Forster around Alexandria, lunching with Sir Herbert Samuel at the latter's London club, or serving as first secretary on Sir Gilbert Clayton's missions to Arabia, Antonius was thoroughly familiar with the outlook of British policy-makers. However, during his service in Palestine he was confronted with personal and professional discrimination and learned, if he had not previously known, that he would never fully transcend the status of native in the eyes of most of his British colleagues.
Antonius was as fluent in Arabic as he was in English, and he built up an extensive network of friends and associates in Cairo, Beirut, Damascus, and Jerusalem. His access to leading participants in the Arab movement, especially Sharif Husayn and his sons, not only opened unparalleled research opportunities for him but also enabled him to pass judgment on matters Arab from the position of authoritative insider.
In The Arab Awakening his vocabulary and reference points are attuned to the literary expectations of his readers, and he ushers them gently into the Arab world with occasional references to classical Greece. Describing the tortuous verbosity of Sharif Husayn's Arabic notes to Sir Henry McMahon, he helpfully suggests to the reader that in comparison to Husayn's prose, "the style of Euphues seems Attic" (p. 167). 5 The anguish of the harassed Jamal Pasha in 1915, surrounded by rumors of Arab nationalist agitation but unable to identify the participants, is amplified with this reference: "Like Polyphemus, he wanted to strike but did not know at whom" (p. 186). That Polyphemus was a crude and violent Cyclops may have been as much an inspiration for Antonius's choice of analogy as the situation itself. Even an Arab tradition that Antonius regards as something of a shortcoming can, through a contorted comparison with the golden age of Greece, be made to appear not so weak after all. Commenting on the positive achievements of the Society of Arts and Sciences founded in Beirut in 1847, Antonius notes that its idea of promoting the spread of knowledge through an organized collective effort "was foreign to the individualistic nature of the Arab whose method of approaching higher learning was akin to that of Plato's Greece" (p. 52). In 1938 what well-placed graduate of the Oxbridge system could fail to appreciate the customary Arab method of approaching higher learning as set forth in this brief aside?
In his exposition of Arab nationalism, as with his general references, Antonius uses concepts that are likely to be familiar to his readers. He wraps these concepts in a powerful narrative that leads inexorably to the conclusion that an Arab nation exists and that it, like other nations, ought to be independent and unified.
Components of Nationhood: History, Ethnicity, Language/Culture
It is a given among students of nationalism that the modern nation is often constructed around myths of heroic achievements from earlier times. Antonius engages only sparingly in this practice, possibly because he chooses not to focus on accomplishments associated primarily with Islam. Nevertheless he manages to equate the conquests of the seventh and eighth centuries with revitalization and progress, writing that the twin processes of Islamization and Arabization acted as forces of "cultural evolution" in the conquered territories whose culture at the time was "hybrid and debilitated" (pp. 15-16). Evolution is an important concept for Antonius, and he uses it frequently in describing the stages of the Arab national movement. However, he does not, either in his background chapter or in later sections, draw on a specific mythomoteur of the type Anthony Smith posits. 6 Readers learn that a rich civilization, which Antonius defines as Arab, came into existence, flourished (until the sixteenth century in his account), and was then eclipsed by the Ottoman conquests.
But in subsequent passages, Antonius suggests that the qualities of the earlier Arab entity remained latent. Thus he attributes to Muhammad 'Ali's son, Ibrahim Pasha, an intent "to revive Arab national consciousness and restore Arab nationhood" (p. 29, emphasis added). His terminology may be anachronistic, but his intent is clear--to implant in his reader's mind the idea of a connection between the modern Arab national movement and the glories of the Arab past.
Antonius uses the term "Arab world" to introduce his definition of nationalism. As he explains it, the Arab world was made up of individuals "whose racial descent, even when it was not of pure Arab lineage, had become submerged in the tide of arabisation; whose manners and traditions had been shaped in an Arab mould; and, most decisive of all, whose mother tongue is Arabic" (p. 18). These are Antonius's three main components of Arab nationalism: ethnicity, shared traditions, and language. Throughout most of his book, he fails to define the first, ignores the second (except for the final section on Mandate Palestine), and places most of his emphasis on the third.
Antonius frequently refers to the subjects of his book as "the Arab race." In part the term may be merely a stylistic convention, but, given the definition of Arab cited above, it should also have specific meaning for Antonius. He clearly equates race and nation. For example, another of the objectives he assigns to Ibrahim Pasha is an effort "to regenerate the Arab race," and one of his several charges against the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP) is its assertion of Turkish racial supremacy within the Ottoman Empire (pp. 28, 105). In a more complex usage, Antonius writes that the agitation caused by the appearance of posters in Beirut in 1880 demanding Arab independence served to "translate racial sentiment into a political creed" (p. 89). This passage implies the existence of a prenationalist ethnic identity that becomes true nationalism only when it adopts political objectives. Aside from these selections and the ongoing references to the Arab race, Antonius does not use the concept of ethnicity to further his case for Arab nationalism. This may be because he was either uncomfortable or unfamiliar with theories of race; or because he recognized that Englishmen might be more amenable to cultural than to racial examples of nationhood.
Antonius regards language as the most decisive feature of the Arab nation, and his analysis of the twin concepts of language and culture serves as the foundation for his claims that an Arab nation exists. The contents of his presentation of the Arab awakening in Greater Syria is well-known and need not be reviewed here. However, it will be useful to examine the method by which Antonius builds his case and the emphasis he places on the emergence of a national language.
His starting point is the debased state of the Arabic language in the late eighteenth century and the general "retardment of cultural development" among the Arabs (p. 38). Outlining the lack of educational facilities and the absence of printing presses in Syria, Antonius skillfully sets the foundation for his nationalist argument: "Without school or book, the making of a nation in modern times is inconceivable" (p. 40). Obviously, the converse is also true--with school and book, the making of a nation is possible, and Antonius sets out to demonstrate that the Arabs acquired, in abundance, these two essential building blocks of nationhood. In his treatment of the Arab literary awakening, he might well have been writing a primer for the analyses of Hobsbawm, Smith, and others. Anderson stresses the importance of "national print languages" in the emergence of nineteenth-century European nationalisms, while Hobsbawm argues that the forcing of a common language into print gives it permanence and makes it more eternal than it might actually have been.
Antonius presents the Arabs' acquisition of school and book as a mutually reinforcing process, with assertions that from 1834 onward "the spread of education progressed by leaps and bounds," driven in part by Ibrahim Pasha's desire to sow "the seed of Arab national consciousness" in his school system and by American missionaries who not only founded dozens of schools but "gave pride of place to Arabic" in their instruction and thus contributed to an indigenous "cultural effervescence" (pp. 40, 43). For Antonius, educational expansion represents far more than an increase in literacy; it is the cornerstone of a specifically Arab literary awakening. Moreover, education is, itself, evolutionary and suggests progress. Through their immersion into "school and book," the Arabs were advancing, moving forward to a level of shared cultur al consciousness from which they could legitimately aspire to the final rung of communal evolution--nationhood.
A similar emphasis on the centrality of language and its linkage with communal self-consciousness runs through Antonius's treatment of other facets of the awakening. A noteworthy example is the role he assigns to Butrus al-Bustani. In addition to his other achievements, al-Bustani provided order and conformity to the national language by producing a dictionary and an encyclopedia, precisely the tasks required for the standardization of a modern print language. And, for good measure, Antonius makes sure his readers are aware that Bustani's work was modern by reminding them that the encyclopedia "made full use of the available European sources" (p. 49). For all his emphasis on the indigenous roots of the Arab revival, Antonius at times found it useful to associate the movement with European science.
In his explanation for the impulse that culminated in the formation of the Syrian Scientific Society in 1857, he stresses the members' love of the emerging national language and their desire to express new ideas in that language. But in describing the significance of the society, he takes a sudden leap from literature to nationalism. He claims that the society brought members of various sects together "in an active partnership for a common end. An interest in the progress of the country as a national unit was now their incentive, a pride in the Arab inheritance their bond. The foundation of the Society was the first outward manifestation of a collective national consciousness" and the society itself was "the cradle of a new political movement" (p. 54). In this brief passage, Antonius manages to inject the society with national self-awareness and to equate the emerging national consciousness with the notion of progress.
I should like to make one final point regarding Antonius's stress on language as the primary component of nationhood. As it is Butrus al-Bustani's devotion to Arabic that earns him praise, so it is T. E. Lawrence's failings in the language that merit criticism and, ultimately, exclusion. Edward Said is correct to note that The Arab Awakening is intended to counteract Lawrence's account and to provide a Western audience with "a native point of view." 8 But Said overlooks the main criterion that Antonius uses to marginalize Lawrence and his work. Gloating twice in the same paragraph over new evidence he has found in Arab sources, Antonius pointedly explains that the faults and inconsistencies contained in Seven Pillars of Wisdom are due to "the inadequacy of his [Lawrence's] knowledge of Arabic and of his acquaintance with the historical background of the Arab Revolt" (p. 320). What could be more exclusionary, more culturally unauthentic, than an inadequate knowledge of the national language and of the story of its revival that Antonius has painstakingly recreated? The achievements of the Arab revolt were the achievements of Arabic speakers, not of an outsider whose accent and use of words ("to say nothing of his appearance") would never enable him to pass as an Arab among Arabs (p. 321). Although Antonius is appreciative of many of Lawrence's talents, Lawrence the impostor masquerading as an Arab is a usurpation that he will not tolerate. Language is too important.
The literary revival was, in Antonius's view, part of a larger nineteenth-century Arab cultural awakening. He is at great pains to portray the original impulse behind this awakening as totally devoid of political objectives. It is as though he was trying to establish the indigenous roots of the Arab cultural movement, to free it from any association with external influences, and thus to show its absolute authenticity. In his testimony before the Peel Commission in 1937 he stated: "It may be of interest to know that the national movement, the Arab national movement, began as a cultural movement, which had nothing to do with politics in its early days or with any of the concepts of nationalism which had begun to appear in Europe. It began entirely independently, as a cultural revival." 9 Antonius reasserted this principle in his book, stating that the forces that had set the Arab movement in motion "were not only of a moral order, unaffected by economic needs or political theories; but they were also forces of spontaneous origin, generated by emotions from within. The movement had derived its ideas from the familiar sources of its environment, long before it took to borrowing the Western notions of political evolution" (pp. 85-86). Later in the same paragraph he writes that the Arab national movement "had sprung in a soil of its own making [and] derived its main sustenance from the earth in which it had roots." Only in the last quarter of the nineteenth century did the "Western concept of nation-state graft itself on the indigenous tree of Arab nationalism." This is a fascinating mixture of terminologies as Antonius attempts to persuade outsiders of the genuineness of the Arab movement by anchoring it in its own environment and demonstrating its original cultural purity. The movement was authentic because it was untainted with political or material motives. However, once it became fully developed culturally, Antonius allows it to borrow "Western notions of political evolution" as it progressed to a higher stage.
The Transition to a Political Movement: Freedom, Independence, and Unity
By presenting the Arabs as possessing a fixed literary language and a mutual awareness of their shared culture, Antonius shows them to be a nation with legitimate aspirations to the requisites of nationhood--freedom and independence. In his approach, the words "freedom/liberation" differ slightly from the term "independence." The latter is a political definition and refers to a sovereign nation state. But freedom/liberation imply a release from oppression, a desire to break free from an imposed culturally alien rule, an act that is in itself an integral stage in the step toward political independence. I do not wish to stretch this terminological distinction too far; of course Antonius employs freedom/liberation and independence to mean similar conditions. But he also makes subtle distinctions between them, always playing to a readership that is likely to be receptive to notions of freedom/liberation in the sense of Delacroix's "Liberty Leading the People" or to an Arab spirit moved by a "passion for freedom" (p. 60).
To justify the Arabs' struggle for freedom, Antonius presents a relentlessly dark image of the forces of oppression from which they suffered. There are no nuances--no politics of the notables--in his view of the Ottoman Empire. It is neither a dynastic nor a multiethnic state; it is only Turkish. And to Antonius, it is self-evident that Turks should not rule Arabs, especially Arabs awakened to their own national identity. From the very beginning, The Arab Awakening views Turkish repression of Arabs as an established characteristic of the Ottoman Empire. Thus Ibrahim Pasha was "a champion of Arab liberation" who inspired the population of Syria with "the prospect of liberty" from "the detested rule of the Turk" (pp. 26-27). Antonius's portraits of the Hamidian and CUP despotisms--which he juxtaposes with accounts of the Arab cultural/political awakening--urgently convey a need for liberation. He views Abdul Hamid's reign as a tyrannical era "scarcely surpassed in history" and further blackens the sultan by listing the failings of his regime in terms that would be particularly repugnant to British readers: corruption of the judicial system; stifling censorship; and a close association with Kaiser Wilhelm II to whom the sultan "held out his hand" and to whose kisses he "lent his cheek" (pp. 64, 78).
The CUP's greatest prewar misdemeanor was its policy of Turkification. I have previously noted how crucial language and culture are to Antonius's argument for the existence of an Arab nation longing to be fulfilled. The CUP's attempt to force the Arabs "to abandon their cultural aspirations" was, then, tantamount to denying Arab nationhood and made the need for freedom all the more pressing and all the more obvious (p. 107). Confronted with CUP Turkification and centralization, patriotic Arabs formed secret societies that sought "liberation from Turkish or any other alien domination," the latter phrase serving as a reminder that the postwar Mandates constituted a denial of long-standing Arab aspirations for freedom (p. 111). A masterful linking of Arab freedom and Arab independence appears in Antonius's description of the full meaning of Faysal's entry into Damascus in October 1918. It is an especially vivid passage, connecting a number of themes, and shows Antonius at his narrative and nationalist best:
Antonius leaves unstated the full meaning of the "long-dreamt fulfillment," trusting that his readers will be able to make the connections he wishes them to.
Unity of purpose, action, and sentiment are among the principal criteria by which nationalist movements are justified from within and assessed from without. Antonius the historian and Antonius the nationalist are occasionally in conflict on the question of unity. He is too responsible a historian to overlook the fractious tribalism of the Arabian peninsula and Iraq or the sectarian tensions of Greater Syria. But he is too committed to the unifying power of language and culture to allow regional or personal differences to dominate his discussion, and he manages to portray the Arab revolt as a unified national movement of all the Arab regions east of Egypt. 10
He does this by insisting over and over again that the political objectives of the Arab revolt were identical with the larger goals of Arab independence and unity. At one point he argues that despite the existence of certain social and confessional differences between Syria and Iraq, the two regions were unified by virtue of "a common language and culture" (p. 248). To divide them, as the postwar settlement had done, "was in conflict with the natural forces at work," forces that had made the national movement inseparable from the twin forces of Arab unity and independence (p. 249). In this version of the nationalist program, Arab independence was only one part of the intended outcome of the revolt--political unity was equally vital to the participants and "was implicit in the very origins of the national movement" (p. 303). According to Antonius, "that movement was never a regional movement in which Syria wanted independence for Syria, or Iraq wanted independence for Iraq." It was a "movement of the whole Arab race working together to free themselves from Turkish rule and establish the Arab life." 11 In the chapter of The Arab Awakening that treats the postwar settlement, Antonius joins together the words "independence" and "unity" at least a dozen times, never letting his readers forget the full objectives of the revolt or the full dimensions of the Allied betrayal.
Another of his techniques for emphasizing the unity of the Arab movement is to provide the leading members of the founding "national" dynasty, the Hashimites, with impeccable nationalist credentials. He downplays Sharif Husayn's local and personal ambitions and elevates him to the level of selfless leader of the Arab movement at large. From this perspective, Kitchener's vague message to 'Abdullah in 1914 becomes, in Husayn's mind, "an unmis takable invitation to foment a revolt of all the Arabs" (p. 133). In his testimony to the Peel Commission, Antonius completely disassociated Husayn from his local environment and from any personal involvement with Great Britain. He explained that although the Arab revolt started in the Hijaz, it "was not a Hedjazi revolt. It was really a revolt of the countries of Syria, Iraq and Palestine. Primarily it was made, prepared and instigated in these countries, and for various reasons the leadership was entrusted to King Hussein, who was then Sherif of Mecca." 12 It is important for Antonius to locate the origins of the Arab revolt among the bourgeoisie of Greater Syria, the center of the Arab awakening. But it is equally important for him to find a way to tie Husayn to Syria and thus to project a semblance of unity to the revolt.
Antonius views Amir Faysal as both symbol and creator of Arab unity. In one of several compelling episodes featuring Faysal, Antonius portrays him as single-handedly persuading the tribal factions of the peninsula to sink their differences in pursuit of the common goal of emancipation: "infected with his faith," the tribesmen took "an oath to serve as brothers in arms under him for the liberation of all Arabs" (p. 220). Even later in his life, when he was thrust into a narrower role as king of Iraq, Faysal remained attuned to the sentiments he had aroused years earlier and "never lost sight of the broader aims of the Arab Movement" (p. 360).
In addition to portraying a unified leadership in quest of commonly held objectives of political independence and unity, Antonius buttresses his claims for the Arab revolt as a nationalist undertaking with assertions of mass support. It should be noted that he does not, with the exception of a few references to the bedouins' natural love of freedom, emphasize a volk component of the Arab awakening, probably because he is so concerned with establishing the importance of a shared literary language. However, he has no reservations about offering up a background chorus of mass involvement, especially when describing pivotal moments in the movement's history. For example, when the Beirut-based Committee of Reform published a program requesting autonomy for the Arab provinces in 1913, the plan was "greeted with demonstrations of popular favor" in Iraq as well as Syria; and when the leaders of the committee were arrested, popular agitation in Beirut "evoked demonstrations in other parts of Syria" (pp. 113-114). At another crucial juncture toward the end of World War I, when the British Foreign Office issued the so-called Declaration to the Seven pledging support for the independence of the Arab provinces, Antonius claims that "a wave of jubilation swept the Arab world" and that the pledge had a profound impact on "the fervour of the Arab participation in the final offensive" (p. 273). And finally, in his description of popular sentiments on the eve of the announcement of the Mandates in the Treaty of San Remo, Antonius reports the General Syrian Congress's procla mation of the independence of Greater Syria and a similar proclamation for Iraq by Iraqi leaders residing in Damascus. These proclamations, Antonius asserts, "were an expression of the popular will, giving voice to the tenets of the Arab national movement and to the wishes of the populations concerned" (p. 304).
In the examples already cited, Antonius suggests that from the first demands for autonomy in 1913 to the final last-gasp effort to preserve independence, the Arab masses were involved in the movement. He gives the masses agency if not identity, and endeavors to show the existence of a popular will that found fulfillment in the actions of the nationalist leadership. This is a revealing instance of Antonius inventing the nation, of offering the reader "evidence" of mass consciousness of belonging to a nation.
A subtheme of unity is organization and intent. Benedict Anderson notes that nationalist myth-makers sometimes engage in a process of modular transfer, ascribing to their national movement the characteristics of other, previously successful, movements. One of the characteristics frequently transferred is the notion of planning. 13 Antonius draws no direct parallels between the Arab national movement and others. However, he does appear to believe that independence movements possess a greater degree of legitimacy if they are planned than if they are spontaneous, and he goes to considerable lengths to portray the Arab movement as a deliberately organized endeavor. In so doing, he grants the Arabs initiative and separates the authentic historical movement from any association with opportunism created by the wartime circumstances. Thus the formation of a secret Arab society in Beirut in 1875 represents "the first organized effort in the Arab national movement" (p. 79, emphasis added). In an overview of developments following 1908, Antonius writes that "the seed of Arab consciousness which had taken root in Syria, threw out shoots into the neighboring Arabic-speaking countries, and finally blossomed forth . . . into a deliberate and widespread agitation" (p. 62, emphasis added). And when he states that during the Arab drive to Damascus in 1918, "the whole countryside had risen on a signal from Faisal," he conveys the impression of an organized network and elaborate advance planning (and of Faysal's unquestioned authority) (p. 237). In another of his several attempts to link Husayn with the larger Arab movement, Antonius relates that Fawzi al-Bakri conveyed to the Sharif an invitation on behalf of "the nationalist leaders in Syria and Iraq" to lead the revolt for "the attainment of Arab independence" (p. 149). This passage implies planning, organization, and intent.
Maps and Borders
Anderson offers a fascinating analysis of the role that "cartographic discourse" can play in the creation of nations. 14 The establishment of borders on paper can lead to the acceptance of them on the ground. Among the most famous sections of The Arab Awakening are those dealing with borders. On the surface it may appear that these frontiers are no more than political bargaining chips or objects of dispute between Sharif Husayn and the Allies. But Antonius is a master at cartographic discourse, and his selection of maps combined with his persuasive text conveys the portrait of an Arab nation in which geographical and cultural space are in total harmony.
Pages 78 and 79 reproduce two of the maps from The Arab Awakening. Their significance is that both maps show identical shaded areas east of Egypt. The eastern Arab world of 1915 covers precisely the same space that it did in the middle ages. The modern nation is rooted in the historical reality of distant centuries. But Antonius goes even further--by captioning the 1915 map with mention of Sharif Husayn's note, he not only shows that the modern nation is an existing entity bordered by the limits of the Arabic language, he also indirectly reminds the reader that this was the nation whose independence Britain promised to recognize.
In the text itself Antonius exercises the full range of his narrative powers to make two main points about the shaded area of map 2: first, that it coincides perfectly with the borders of Arab cultural dominance; and second, that it was defined as the Arab nation by an indigenous historical process, not by the political ambitions of Sharif Husayn or the imperial machinations of Great Britain. Antonius presents these points in four interrelated incidents.
First, he argues that the distribution of a "revolutionary" placard by members of the Syrian Scientific Society in Beirut in 1880 defines the moment when the Arab awakening made the transition from a purely cultural to a nationalist liberation movement. This particular placard is significant because it put forth a political program that included a demand for the independence of a unified Syria and Lebanon. The indigenously driven cultural movement had now produced an indigenously driven demand for political space. In this context the 1880 program was the first manifestation of "a politically independent state resting on a truly national basis" (p. 86).
Antonius finds echoes of 1880 in the program of a later secret Arab society, al-Fatat, founded in 1911. According to his analysis, al-Fatat's objectives were "to work for the independence of the Arab countries and their liberation from Turkish or any other alien domination." This program represented "an unconscious return to the ideals of the Beirut secret society" (p. 111). The spatial demands have been expanded from a unified Syria and Lebanon to the Arab countries. But as Antonius explains the two programs, they appear historically sequential and generated by similar requirements and individuals: patriotic young Arabs fully awakened culturally and politically.
Cartographic discourse becomes more specific with Antonius's introduc tion of the Damascus Protocol of 1915, the document outlining the territorial demands of the Arabs in exchange for a revolt and an alliance with Britain. Antonius uses the Damascus Protocol to make a number of points, only two of which concern us here. First, he implies that the area of desired Arab independence coincided exactly with the shaded area of map 2; that is, with the natural borders of the eastern Arab world. Second, he claims that these territorial demands were drawn up in Damascus by members of al-Fatat and al-'Ahd. Sharif Husayn's role at this stage was simply to convey the document to the British. Thus it was not Sharif Husayn who defined the frontiers of the Arab nation, but the Arab leadership as a whole. And, as map 2 again shows, Husayn's first note to Sir Henry McMahon requested the independence of precisely the same territories that were defined in the Damascus Protocol.
The fourth development in this sequence, and the culmination of Antonius's depiction of the convergence of territory and culture, is found in the majestic opening paragraph of chapter 14.
| The war was won, and for the first time in its history the Arab national movement stood abreast of its destiny. Victory had carried its standard as far north as it had dreamed, to the very confines of its kingdom. Syria had been freed, from Sinai to the Taurus; so had Iraq, up to Mosul; while in the Peninsula itself all that remained of the Turkish power were a few helpless garrisons doomed to surrender. All the Arabic-speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire in Asia were at last rid of the alien yoke that had lain on them for four stifling centuries. It seemed as though the war-god himself, in homage to the role of language in the history of the Movement, had stayed the northward advance on the very watershed of speech, just where Arabic ceased and Turkish began. The area of the Turk's defeat was precisely the area of Arab aspirations, and its frontiers coincided exactly with those defined by the Sharif Husain as the natural limits of Arab independence (p. 276). |
The paragraph requires no gloss. Here is Antonius's grand summary, his hymn to the role of the Arabic language, to Arab unity, and to the harmonious balance of borders and culture. The nation defined in map 2 had been realized; historical destiny was about to be fulfilled.
Various Symbols
The Supreme Sacrifice
Although The Arab Awakening argues a case to which its author is deeply devoted, the work has an air of professional detachment. Indeed, an early reviewer suggested that the "gentle cosmopolitanism" of the book was one of its most engaging features. 15 Yet death becomes a prominent theme in the second half of Antonius's history. These are not gory battlefield deaths but the noble self-sacrificing acts of moral grandeur that Anderson and others associate with the supreme patriotic sacrifice of dying for one's country. 16 In showing that groups of secure, bourgeois Arabs (my terms, not Antonius's) willingly made such a sacrifice, Antonius places the Arab movement for national liberation within the context of other historically acknowledged incidents of selfless patriotism.
This is most evident in his recounting of the executions carried out on the orders of the Ottoman governor, Jamal Pasha, during World War I. Antonius, more I think than any other author, has contributed to the notion of the martyrdom of innocent young Arab patriots at the hands of Jamal Pasha. Although he makes certain to present Jamal Pasha as an instrument of "Turkish" brutality, he is even more concerned with drawing attention to the victims' attitudes. Of the group hanged in Beirut in August 1915, Antonius writes: "most of them were young and died well," adding that their compatriots exalted "their last words at the gallows into a stirring message of patriotic faith" (p. 187).
The second group of victims was no less heroic in accepting its fate for the cause of the Arab movement. As they were driven from Damascus to Beirut for execution, they "whiled the hours of darkness away with hymns to Arab freedom, one cabload answering another, until, as dawn was breaking, the convoy came to a halt in Liberty Square" (p. 189). This is highly romanticized and surely imagined. But it is effective and entirely consistent with the message Antonius wishes to convey--Arabs, like other patriots in the Western tradition, went to their deaths with praises of their country's freedom on their lips. The inspiration for such pure and selfless behavior could only be love of the nation; and for such love to exist, the nation had to exist.
Antonius transfers the aura of individual self-sacrifice into the mainstream of the Arab revolt in his account of Amir Faysal's reaction to the second round of executions. Faysal was in Damascus at the time (early 1916) and, in Antonius's lush depiction, on hearing of the executions uttered a cry of revulsion that "became the battlecry of the Arab Revolt" (p. 190). We learn a few sentences later the details of the battle cry: "Faisal leapt to his feet and, tearing his kufiya from his head, flung it down and trampled it savagely with a cry: 'Tab al-maut ya 'arab!' " (p. 191). Antonius professes that the phrase is virtually untranslatable but suggests that it "amounts to an appeal to all Arabs to take up arms, at the risk of their lives, to avenge the executions in blood" (p. 191). Put another way, the battle cry of the Arab revolt was a call for the same kind of selfless patriotic act in which the martyrs of Beirut and Damascus had engaged. This message was understandable to Antonius's intended readership.
Was an Arab Flag Flying There?
The Arab Awakening mentions an Arab flag three times. The first is completely rhetorical but nonetheless significant. Writing about the 1880 program for independence demanded by the Beirut society, to which I have already referred, Antonius proclaims that the society's program "had not merely unfurled a flag, but, what was more needed still, had set an arrow to point the way" (p. 89). Even if this passing reference to an unfurled flag is only a rhetorical flourish, one can argue that by employing it Antonius, consciously or unconsciously, establishes a marker for the beginning of the existence of an Arab nation. If a flag, even an imagined and purely literary one, exists, so does the nation that it represents.
The second reference to a flag is more pointed and more directed at the independent state that the Arab movement seemed to have achieved. The situation is the eve of the Arab entry into Damascus in October 1918. Antonius carefully prepares the reader by explaining that the Arab forces chose not to take the city at night but instead sent in an advance guard to instruct the city's leaders to set up an Arab government. However, according to Antonius, the advance units had been preempted: an Arab government was already in place and, as the units reached the main square, they "beheld the Arab flag flying. Four hundred years of Ottoman domination had passed into history" (p. 238). The juxtaposition is superb; the Arab flag was flying there and it meant that Arab sovereignty had replaced Turkish.
The final flag reference takes place in the context of the Anglo-French agreement to allow France to occupy the Syrian coast, including the city of Beirut. Antonius offers an account of the proclamation of Arab sovereignty and the raising of the Arab flag in Beirut in October 1918. He goes on, however, to recount that the presence of the flag irritated the French and their complaints prompted Allenby to order "the flag to be removed" (p. 275). This, in turn, caused "an incipient mutiny" among Faysal's troops in Damascus, which the amir put down only with great difficulty.
The literary sequence of the three references is powerful even if unintended--a flag unfurled, a flag flying, and a flag removed--removed by the imperial forces that would, in the end, remove all semblance of the sovereignty symbolized by the flag flying in Damascus. Antonius never describes the flag and does not need to. All that is necessary is to mention its existence and explain the actions that its presence inspired. His readers will know what he means--a flag inspired loyalty and sacrifice because it represented the nation.
Destiny
Antonius employs the term "destiny," with its evocation of the fulfillment of a historical process, to reinforce his claims for the existence of an Arab nation. In an early section on the merger of cultural and political currents, he proclaims that the Arab national movement was "borne slowly towards its destiny on the wings of a renascent literature" (p. 60). In this case, "destiny" can only mean an independent nation-state. Describing Faysal's efforts to persuade the tribes of the Hijaz to terminate their blood feuds and cooperate in the revolt, Antonius claims that Faysal appealed to them in the name of "the destiny of the Arab race" (p. 219). The most powerful image of destiny on the verge of fulfillment is conveyed in the passage opening chapter 14. Here, Antonius links the word "destiny" with specific territory and nationalist terminology. There can be no question as to the nature of the destiny that the Arab movement was about to fulfill.
To interfere in the course of history by denying destiny the chance to run its course is one of the offenses with which Antonius charges Great Britain. To be sure, he also attacks Britain's betrayal of the Arabs on grounds of morality and honor, but his narrative has so carefully set forth the stages of the Arab movement's march toward independence that Britain's intervention can be seen as more than duplicity--it is a disruption of natural historical forces. Had the promises to Sharif Husayn been kept (as Antonius interprets those promises) and the Arabs allowed to govern the territories in which they were culturally dominant, they would have achieved their rightful destiny--"to be like all the nations."
From the 1950s through to at least the 1970s, the words "the classic study by George Antonius" adorned the bibliography of any work aspiring to scholarly status--and many that did not--on a broad range of Middle Eastern topics. What was the process by which The Arab Awakening become so firmly entrenched as an essential source on modern Arab history? How were Antonius's ideas on Arab nationalism absorbed and transmitted? I am not in a position to provide full answers to these questions, but I can present some evidence on how the book was received and offer some suggestions about the channels through which its message was diffused.
In order to appreciate what a revelatory work The Arab Awakening was, it is necessary to imagine a British scholarly and political world in which the contents of the Husayn-McMahon correspondence were largely unknown. It is also important to recall that the book appeared on the eve of the London Conference of 1939. In this setting The Arab Awakening arrived like a bombshell. Within British foreign and colonial office circles as well as among certain members of parliament, it immediately became a cause célbre and led to a whirl of official activity, including the secondment of Antonius to a special subcommittee of the London Conference to assist the British government in producing a definitive English version of the correspondence for publication. As Elizabeth MacCallum concluded in her review, Antonius's work was a text that "has made history as well as recorded it." 17
I admit that this discussion examines The Arab Awakening more in the context of its impact on policy than as a presentation of Arab nationalism, but the two go together. If Antonius's claim that the Arab national movement was cut off at the knees by Britain's betrayal was to acquire credibility, those responsible for the betrayal had to admit some prior knowledge of the agreement with Husayn. Once the correspondence was officially released, thereby verifying one of the crucial but most contentious of Antonius's claims, then his version of the early history of the Arab national movement was more likely to gain acceptance. And, if my arguments in part I of this essay are valid, Antonius's talents as a communicator only enhanced the appeal of his book as the definitive account of the Arab national movement.
In addition to its immediate impact in London, The Arab Awakening received official attention in British and U.S. diplomatic circles. During the early 1940s the Foreign Office provided copies of The Arab Awakening to all British consuls in the Arab world with instructions that they read the book. Antonius was as well-known to U.S. diplomats in the Middle East as he was to the British, and his opinions carried considerable weight with such long-serving U.S. consuls as Paul Knabenshue, Ely Palmer, and George Wadsworth. Knabenshue, the consul in Baghdad, was so impressed with The Arab Awakening that he sent an official dispatch to the Secretary of State urging the State Department to purchase a copy. Drawing on his twenty-seven years of experience in the Arab Middle East and his own extensive research, Knabenshue wrote: "I unhesitatingly pronounce Mr. Antonius' book the best work which has ever been produced on the subject." He praised the book's fairness but also noted its skill in presenting the Arab case, concluding: "It is so thorough and well presented that the Arab delegates at the forthcoming conference in London might well with impunity place it upon the table and rest their case upon it." 18
This is only one opinion and one incident, but I suspect that further research will show that The Arab Awakening, and the perspective it advocated, permeated the circles of U.S. foreign service Arabists over the ensuing decades. In his sensationalist book, The Arabists, Robert Kaplan explores the influences on and attitudes of several generations of American Middle East hands. One of them, Michael Sterner (Harvard class of 1951), recalled in particular the impact of "Antonius's The Arab Awakening, a political classic that got into the bloodstream." 19 Foreign service officers who were inclined to view the Middle East from the Arab perspective were drawn to Antonius's interpretations and may have served as an influential source for the continued diffusion and acceptance of his book.
Another way of testing the success of an author's ability to convey an argument is to examine the book reviews. Such an exercise can be useful because it involves contemporary responses to a work rather than historical revisionism. On the basis of the reviews of The Arab Awakening that I have consulted, Antonius was largely successful in transmitting to his audience the portrait of Arab nationalism that he wished to present. Certainly, the book's reception in Great Britain and the United States assured it wide exposure. It was reviewed in the Times (London) and the major British weeklies, and both the New York Times and the Herald Tribune featured full-page reviews in their weekend editions. In addition, scholarly journals such as The American Historical Review and The American Political Science Review also carried timely reviews.
A few of the reviewers writing for newspapers or weekly magazines tended to assess the book in terms of their own positions on the Arab-Zionist conflict and therefore devoted more attention to Antonius's final pages than to his chapters on the cultural awakening. But in most instances even pro-Zionist reviewers acknowledged Antonius's achievement as a historian and thus implicitly accepted his version of the early Arab national movement. For example, Albert Viton, writing in The Nation, vigorously refuted Antonius's interpretation of events in the Palestine Mandate but nevertheless acknowledged: "Never has the story of the origin and growth of the Arab national movement been told with such brilliance or such a wealth of detail." 20
Some British reviewers with experience in the Arab world, among them H. A. R. Gibb and Freya Stark, regarded the book's documentary revelations with their exposure of Britain's duplicity as Antonius's "greatest service to history." 21 However, Gibb also pointed out the originality of the book's account of the Arab national movement and demonstrated his acceptance of Antonius's version of it by deploring Britain's betrayal of the Arab ideals of unity.
The scholarly reviews were generally insightful and less concerned with current events. William Yale grasped Antonius's central argument, writing that The Arab Awakening was "a valuable contribution to the knowledge of the rise of Arab nationalism" and commending its author for his objectivity in writing of "his people's struggle to attain national freedom and unity." 22 Hans Kohn described the theme of the book as "the early history of Arab nationalism" and called it an "indispensable study." 23 Philip W. Ireland's review made all the connections Antonius would have wished. According to Ireland, the author's "account of Arab nationalism" showed that
| the movement has followed familiar patterns. Revival of language and literature, fallen into a state of decay and degeneration, preceded national consciousness. Secret societies, ostensibly for literary or scientific purposes, became forcing beds for nationalism. . . . Attempted forcible Ottomanization by the Young Turks brought resistance, fanned Arab particularism to white heat, and sent the movement underground into secret societies with varied objectives. Arabs executed by the Turks became martyrs to the nationalist cause. 24 |
In this instance, Antonius had clearly conveyed his message. He also conveyed it to the unnamed reviewer in Foreign Affairs who wrote that Antonius "has written the first comprehensive history of the Pan Arab movement, and he has done it with such thorough scholarship that there will be little incentive for anyone else to seek to cover the same ground." 25
Although later scholars found incentives aplenty to cover the same ground and to offer revisions to Antonius's interpretations, his book quickly became accepted as the standard work on the history of the Arab national movement. In this brief account of the reception of The Arab Awakening in England and the United States, I have tried to show that the book was given sufficient, and sufficiently enthusiastic, publicity to enable it to reach a potentially wide audience; and that Antonius had persuaded at least some of his reviewers to accept his version of the rise of Arab nationalism. These are necessary first steps for the wider diffusion of a work and its ideas.
Another important channel for the transmission of ideas is published scholarship. Although scholars eager to disprove Antonius's suggestion that the Arab national movement had any claim to Palestine attacked his book from time to time, his interpretation of the linkage between Arab cultural and political nationalism was largely accepted, or at least largely unchallenged for nearly twenty-five years. One has only to read the contributions in the recently published work, The Origins of Arab Nationalism, to realize the centrality of The Arab Awakening to scholarly discourse on the early history of Arab nationalism. 26
The contributors to that volume do an admirable job of reviewing Antonius's interpretations and offering correctives to them, and I do not intend to repeat their task here. I would, however, like to suggest that the discussions in The Origins of Arab Nationalism stand as an important contemporary testament to George Antonius's achievements as a skilled communicator, an advocate of Arab nationalism, and a dedicated historian.
Notes:
Note 1: The Arab Awakening was originally published in 1938 by the London firm of Hamish Hamilton. The references in this paper are to the Capricorn Books edition of 1965 published by G. P. Putnam's Sons. All subsequent citations of the book have been placed in the body of the text. Back.
Note 2: For an appreciation of both dimensions of Antonius the historian, see Albert Hourani, "The Arab Awakening Forty Years After," in his The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (London, 1981). Back.
Note 3: Fouad Ajami, "The End of Arab Nationalism," The New Republic 23 (August 12, 1991): 23. Back.
Note 4: Edward Said, The Times Literary Supplement, June 19, 1992, 19. Emphasis in the original. Back.
Note 5: This phrase offered Antonius's readers a mixture of Elizabethan and classical references. Euphues was the central character in John Lyly's Euphues, The Anatomy of Wit (1578) and Euphues and His England (1580). The prose of both Lyly and his title figure is verbose and somewhat pretentious. Back.
Note 6: Smith, Ethnic Origins, 58-68. Back.
Note 7: Anderson, Imagined Communities, 67; Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism Since 1870, 61. Back.
Note 8: Edward Said, Culture and Imperialism (New York, 1994), 251. Back.
Note 9: Palestine Royal Commission: Minutes of Evidence Heard at Public Sessions. Colonial, no. 134 (London, 1937), 365. Back.
Note 10: Antonius accepts Egypt's separation from the eastern Arab movement on the grounds that it had generated its own nationalist movement against the British occupation. See Awakening, 100. Back.
Note 11: Palestine Royal Commission, 365. Back.
Note 13: Anderson, Imagined Communities, 156-157. Back.
Note 14: Ibid., 170-178. Back.
Note 15: . Elizabeth MacCallum, The Canadian Forum, (June 19, 1939): 94. Back.
Note 16: See Anderson, Imagined Communities, 144-145. Back.
Note 18: Knabenshue (Baghdad) to Secretary of State, January 5, 1939, National Archives, Washington, D.C. RG 59/867n.01/1409. Back.
Note 192: Robert D. Kaplan, The Arabists: The Romance of an American Elite (New York, 1993), 165. Back.
Note 20: The Nation, (February 25, 1939): 239. Back.
Note 21: Gibb's review appeared in The Spectator, vol. 161 (November 25, 1938): 912; Stark's in The New Statesman and Nation (December 31, 1938): 1130. The review in The Times (London) also stresses Antonius's account of Anglo-Arab diplomacy. Back.
Note 22: The American Historical Review, vol. 44 (1938-39): 908-909. Similar views are expressed by George Rentz in Moslem World, vol. 29 (1939): 292-295. Back.
Note 23: Political Science Quarterly, vol. 54 (1939): 463. Back.
Note 24: American Political Science Review, vol. 33 (1939): 710. Back.
Note 25: Foreign Affairs, vol. 17 (1939): 642. Back.
Note 26: Khalidi et al., Origins. See in particular the chapters by Khalidi and C. Ernest Dawn. Back.
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