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Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, by Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, editors
14. The Paradoxical in Arab Nationalism
Interwar Syria Revisited
Philip S. Khoury
The study of Arab nationalism, as an ideology and as a system of political and social mobilization, has until recently concentrated on grand narratives constructed by and about elites. The narratives begin with an idea, or rather ideas, emerging in the late nineteenth century and bursting forth, when the time is right, into the organizing and mobilizing principles of a political movement. The ideas that laid the basis for an ideology of Arab nationalism set forth by Arab intellectuals have to do with a language constructed in a particular way, a history also constructed in a particular way, and the supposed "natural rights" that accrue to those who not only recognize their own "peoplehood" but who get others to recognize it as well. The right time was provided by the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire after World War I and the imposition of direct European control on most of the Arabic-speaking provinces.
It is a measure of the dominance of an Arab intellectual and political elite that the history of the Arab world since, say, 1880 has largely been written around the idea of nationalism: When did it emerge? Amongst whom? Why? What was it? Who were nationalists? Who were not? These questions have mostly been posed and answered in reference to the political and intellectual elites of the Arab world. Recently, however, historians under the influence of post-structuralist theory and method have begun to offer alternative readings of the history of Arab nationalism. They are concentrating on those groups that have been treated as historically marginal or passive in the grand narrative: peasants, workers, minorities, tribes, and women. They are elevating these neglected groups to a position of equal importance with elites in the scholarly discourse. In place of a single metanarrative, they are introducing micro- or local narratives to explain how Arab nationalism entered the consciousness of diverse groups in Arab society and, in particular, of marginal or neglected groups. In so doing, they are rejecting the more common totalizing history that assumes the validity of its own truth claims in favor of stories that do not make any truth claims. They are also nonetheless validating the centrality of nationalism as established by the elites. Being nationalist, or not, is still the measure of agency.
The new historians of Arab nationalism depend considerably less on standard literary texts and documents written by elites for elites than on a range of popular texts and oral traditions. Their histories posit that Arab nationalism has never had a single, agreed-upon meaning but, rather, multiple meanings based on how different groups constructed their identities and needs. They argue that although nationalist elites may have superimposed a national identity on all other identities--family, town and village, religion, class, or profession--Arabs formed a multiplicity of societies or groupings each with its own set of identities and interests. Undoubtedly, under the circumstances of European colonialism a number of groups or communities began to construct national identities, but the meanings and strength of these identities likely differed from one group to the next according to their particular usefulness. Moreover these meanings and identities were always shifting; for those trying to follow these shifts, no one meaning or identity is more privileged than the next.
The dilemma for those of us trying to rethink Arab nationalism is that while we are trying to broaden our view as to the groups who participated in shaping Arab nationalism, participate they must. In trying to include the many groups who make up Arab society we may become guilty of overdetermining their behavior, of calling their behavior nationalist because of our needs rather than their realities. This I believe has to do with the present context in which the history of Arab nationalism is being rethought. Just as George Antonius's The Arab Awakening (1938) was written at a historical moment and can be explained in light of that moment, so our rethinking is taking place at a time when the Arab nationalist agenda, whatever it is, is still far from complete. Nationalism in our time provides the only framework to consider the still-pressing questions about sovereignty, about who belongs to the national community, about state structure, and about proper relations with the rest of the world that continue to bedevil the Arab world.
In light of the effort to rethink Arab nationalism, it is particularly important to recognize that the study of interwar Arab nationalism has long faced a fundamental paradox. The nationalist elite was remarkably small at the beginning of the period and not much bigger at its end. It was a very small group to carry the vast weight of national metahistory. To obviate the paradox, some historians assumed that nationalist thinkers and leaders were simply dipping into a great well of unspoken patriotic feeling and national attachment that characterized the population at large. Others assumed passivity or ignorance, meaning unimportance, on the part of non-elites. Still others recognized the paradox but minimized it by assuming an expanding nationalist elite, expanding in terms of number and in terms of social provenance, through the ranks of national education and under the influence of new media.
If we recognize that the expansion was very small indeed, and that other groups hitherto considered marginal or not considered at all in the metahistory of Arab nationalism may have had equal importance in shaping national consciousness, why not just forget about the elite, expanding or not? Well, at the risk of being obvious, because an elite is by definition small, and because it is also by definition (its own, as well as historians') disproportionately influential in shaping events and in shaping how we understand events. In order better to understand how non-elites shaped and were shaped by nationalism in relation to elites, I would like to look at a moment in the development of nationalism amongst the political elite in Syria when that elite expanded in however slight a manner to incorporate new elements with new ideas and new interests. The point is that the nationalist elite was aware of nationalist feelings and constructs different from their own. When they were not able to ignore them or reinterpret them, they tried to co-opt them. The process of doing so tells us something about the nationalist elite, about ideological hegemony, and about available alternatives.
The moment to which I refer lasted from 1933 to 1937. In 1933 young nationalists from all the countries still under British and French Mandate and from Iraq secretly gathered in the Lebanese mountain village of Qarna'il to chart a course of Arab unity. Among those at Qarna'il were recent graduates of the law faculty of Damascus and the expanding secondary schools of Damascus and the other towns of Syria. Their new ideas were associated with what has commonly been referred to in the literature as radical pan-Arabism. Their interests were those of the emerging modern middle classes in Syria and other Arab countries in the interwar period. These ideas and interests were embodied in the League of National Action, the political organization that emerged at Qarna'il. 1 While the league was formed to express dissatisfaction with the current nationalist elite and to challenge its leadership, by 1937 its ideology and, to a considerable extent, the leaguers themselves had been co-opted into the mainstream of the national independence movement led by the older generation of urban politicians in the National Bloc.
The leaguers were a product of an expanding educational system. The number of primary and secondary school students in government institutions nearly doubled during the first half of the Mandate. 2 The boys who went to these schools, though of some means, were generally not the social equals of the elite that provided the leaders of the National Bloc. By 1933 tuition in all government primary schools was free while secondary schools, which charged a yearly fee, also provided some assistance. 3 The provision of scholarships enabled the children of the professional middle classes in the towns, and an increasing number of children from the petty bourgeoisie, most notably the sons of small shopowners and traders, to attend. 4 During the Mandate enrollment in the government school system grew at a quicker pace than it did in private and foreign schools, reaching 50 percent of the total school population in 1933. Nevertheless the growth of public education was hardly dramatic. It was still restricted and almost exclusively available to boys.
In late Ottoman times, there had been only one government secondary school in Damascus, Maktab 'Anbar, located on the inner edge of the Jewish quarter in the old city. Conceived of as a national school, Maktab 'Anbar produced the vanguard of the national independence movement during the Mandate. In 1918 it became known officially as the tajhiz (preparatory school). It remained on the grounds of the 'Anbar Palace and maintained its status as the elite secondary school of Damascus. In 1932, long after it had exhausted its limited space, it was relocated to new spacious quarters with modern laboratories and other facilities in the Europeanized Salhiyya district, not far from the new Parliament building. At this time, the school's enrollment increased by nearly 40 percent to nearly seven hundred teenage boys.
The Damascus tajhiz accepted boarders from as far away as Hama and Homs. Because students paid only a nominal tuition, the tajhiz was not as prohibitive as Maktab 'Anbar had been. Twenty percent of the students in 1933, for example, were exempted from all fees. Nevertheless education during the Mandate retained its elitist status; in the early thirties the Syrian literacy rate was still only 28 percent and only 4 percent of the population had a secondary school education.
The schools were organized on a French model in preparation for the baccalaureate examination. Each government school had one director of French studies and French occupied a prominent place in the curriculum, although the language of instruction was Arabic. The majority of the tajhiz's full-time faculty of twenty-six were trained in Paris; they offered their students excellent instruction in literature, history, mathematics, and sciences, all in the medium of Arabic.
The tajhiz, despite its Frenchified form, became one of the principal centers of nationalist activity during the 1930s. In addition to the study of modern sciences and Western philosophy and literature, students were encouraged to commit to memory the nationalist verse of well-known Arab poets such as the Egyptian Ahmad Shawqi. The history of the Arabs and their fundamental contributions to the progress of world civilization was taught in the most exacting national terms. Because Syria did not enter the interwar years with a host of local intellectuals to whom this young generation could turn, it looked to Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world for intellectual nourishment. This reinforced a national identity stretching beyond Syria's newly imposed frontiers. As this generation reached maturity in the early 1930s, pan-Arabism appeared to undergo a revival.
The National Bloc had recognized the need to harness the energy of teenage boys, usefully concentrated in city schools, in the late 1920s when it formed the Nationalist Youth (al-Shabab al-Watani), the first significant political organization for educated youth in the towns during the Mandate.
The day-to-day politicization and organization of the rising generation of educated youth was the responsibility of a group of lawyers and teachers, men not much older than their young followers. This marked the beginning of a shift on the part of the National Bloc from the old stalwarts of the urban notables, the traditionally educated and attired merchants and religious leaders and the unlettered qabadayat (local bosses) of the popular quarters, to a new set of clients.
Some National Bloc leaders strongly believed that the independence movement required its own militia and looked to the burgeoning Syrian Boy Scout movement as a prototype for the future Syrian army. In 1929 the bloc established its own Boy Scout troop, the Umayyad Troop, and attached it to the newly created Nationalist Youth. Over the next two years the highly politicized Umayyad Troop competed fiercely with the non-affiliated Ghuta Troop, which had been established in 1927. 9 But when Umayyad scoutmasters, through the mechanism of the Nationalist Youth, were obliged to defend publicly the bloc's policy of "honorable cooperation" with the French, which had not visibly advanced the struggle for Syrian independence, scouts in the Umayyad Troop began to defect to the Ghuta Troop. Eventually the Umayyad Troop collapsed. In the meantime the Ghuta Troop led the effort to federate all scouting in Syria, both to acquire a higher level of organization and to become affiliated on international scouting councils. By 1933 Syrian Boy Scouts were grouped into several troops in most Syrian towns and numbered 3,000. Scouts were inculcated with pan-Arabist ideas by their scoutmasters, while the Scouting organization's directors were among those plotting the establishment of the League of National Action. 10
The Syrian University also expanded in this period, and opportunities opened for the brightest high school and university graduates to go to French universities on scholarship in a wide variety of fields, including law, medicine, and teacher training. A significant number of tajhiz graduates went on to study law at the Damascus Law Faculty or in Paris. 11 Some ended up as teachers at the tajhiz of Damascus and Syria's other major cities, while others became teachers in smaller towns and villages. Closely associated with the tajhiz was the Damascus Law Faculty, established in 1919, where many tajhiz graduates went on to study. Not surprisingly, law graduates and school teachers became deeply involved in politicizing the younger tajhiz students.
These opportunities in education and in extracurricular organizations certainly played a role in broadening the horizons of some urban youth and in shifting the focus of their activities out of the medieval town quarters into modern, "nationwide" institutions and organizations. As their focus shifted, so did their expectations. But although modern education paved the way for social mobility and afforded middle-class status, middle-class incomes were not guaranteed. The rising but unfulfilled expectations of the newly educated created a reservoir of frustration and antagonism, which only grew during the depression.
The depression did not significantly loosen France's economic hold over Syria. As long as the Syrian-Lebanese lira was pegged to the French franc, the Syrian economy had little room to engage in its own development free of French controls. The devaluation of the franc at this time may have encouraged some Syrian exports, but it also drove up the costs of Western imports valued by the emerging modern middle classes. 12
Syria in 1933 was also in the throes of the most devastating drought since World War I (some said "in living memory"). Famine began to reach alarming proportions as wheat production fell in 1933, on average 16 percent from the previous year, and even more sharply in the breadbasket known as Hawran. In Damascus and other towns, where the general economic crisis had created a large glut on the labor market, the influx of peasants fleeing the deteriorating conditions in the countryside meant banditry in the agricultural areas around the towns and larceny within them. A member of the Jewish National Fund reported that in the spring of 1933 between 25,000 and 30,000 Hawranis fled their lands, 90 percent to Palestine and the remainder to Damascus and Beirut. In Palestine these refugees were absorbed into the Jewish-controlled sector of the labor market, though by the autumn 30 percent had returned home. The same source claimed to have saved peasants from starvation and Syria from massive upheaval. 13 In the absence of local measures to address the problems of loss of agricultural production and unemployment, some Syrians migrated to neighboring Arab countries, expressing by migration a pan-Arabist solution to local economic problems.
The spirit of pan-Arabism implicit in the migrations of peasants was articulated by tajhiz graduates. The issue of pan-Arabism gave ideological shape to the amorphous disillusionment with the National Bloc's policy of "honorable cooperation" and its failure to achieve anything tangible in the way of political autonomy or economic independence. The growing disaffection of some Nationalist Youth members with their leaders and with National Bloc policies in general produced a schism in the Damascus student movement. There were several ways this schism was made manifest. More and more tajhiz students began to boycott the National Bloc leadership's favorite café, the Globe, in favor of the Ghazi café. They gravitated toward a new bookstore, Maktabat al-'Umumiyya, which had been opened by a wealthy merchant and well-known pan-Arabist, forsaking the novelties shop and bookstore on the Rue Rami owned by the principal leader of the Nationalist Youth. And in traditional Middle Eastern manner, headgear distinguished rival youth groups: the increasingly radicalized group of lawyers, doctors, and other professionals who were involved with the Ghuta troop and with the dissenting student movement at the tajhiz began to sport the Iraqi sidara, the army headgear invented by King Faysal and a symbol for pan-Arabist youth, instead of the familiar fez, worn by National Bloc leaders and their followers in the Nationalist Youth. At the most important student congress of the Mandate, held in Hama in February 1932, none of the various resolutions made reference to the National Bloc or Nationalist Youth; they did, however, include the general principles associated with pan-Arabism at this time. 14
By 1933 the bloc's policy of "honorable cooperation," which had governed its strategy vis ˆ vis the French ever since the end of the Great Revolt in 1927 and was focused narrowly on Syrian goals, had achieved nothing. Negotiations for a treaty of independence, not unlike the one Iraq secured from the British in 1930, had collapsed; the French were unwilling to loosen their grip on the country. At the same time the first generation of young men educated in government schools in terms of the glorious history of the Arabs and attuned to intellectual currents outside of their immediate environs came of age. Defections from the Nationalist Youth and the crucial institutions in which it had influence resulted. 15 These defections were particularly visible in the Boy Scouts and the tajhiz. Law students and young lawyers constituted the most vital component of the League of National Action's leadership; students at the tajhiz provided the numbers at the protests, strikes, and boycotts that occurred so frequently in the 1930s in Damascus and the other urban centers of nationalist activity.
Gathered at Qarna'il in August 1933 was a group of nearly fifty radical pan-Arabists from Syria, Lebanon, Transjordan, Palestine, and Iraq, many of whom were activist lawyers and youth leaders in their respective countries. These men were motivated by one goal: to set the national independence movements in the Arab territories on a firmer footing by systematically coordinating their activities. 16 To achieve this goal they founded the League of National Action.
The league was based in Syria but connected to similar parties in the neighboring Arab territories. The new organization embodied the beliefs and ambitions of a new generation of angry young men that had begun to emerge throughout the Arab East. The preference for the term qawmi in its name ('Usbat al-'Amal al-Qawmi) was indicative of the league's orientation; pan-Arabists frequently used qawmiyya to mark a "feeling of loyalty to the whole Arab nation," thus distinguishing it from the term wataniyya--the preference of the National Bloc and the Nationalist Youth--which denoted an attachment to the specific country of one's birth. 17
The league's goals were Arab sovereignty, independence, and comprehensive Arab unity. Unlike the bloc, it emphasized the need for economic development and integration in order to wage a successful struggle against the exploitation of foreign powers and against feudal landlords. With specific reference to Syria, its program demanded the rejection of the policy of "honorable cooperation" and of all attempts to get the people to accept the fraudulently elected parliament and the French-appointed government in Damascus. Its program makes clear that the league was neither socialist nor Marxist-Leninist. For class struggle it substituted national struggle. 18 It was radical in its reformism but its populist tendencies were superficial. The league's program also revealed a strong inclination toward authoritarianism. In this way it was similar to other groups or parties that had recently cropped up in the Arab territories under Mandate, in particular the Ahali group in Iraq and the Istiqlal Party in Palestine. Both also had populist pretensions, stressed economic and political reformism, rejected "class struggle" for "national unity," and had a pronounced authoritarian streak. 19
One of the specific goals of the Qarna'il conference was to master mind the infiltration of all pan-Arabist groupings so as to coordinate their activities and ultimately to lead the drive for Arab independence and unity from Baghdad to Casablanca. With the League of National Action in Syria as the main frontal organization, its members would coordinate the activities of the Istiqlal Party in Palestine, the Ahali group in Iraq, and similar radical nationalist organizations.
The league's first secretary-general was also chairman of the committee that organized the secret Qarna'il conference. 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Dandashi belonged to the Al Dandash clan of Tall Kalakh but grew up in Tripoli, where he was born in 1905. He had studied law in Brussels and been active there in Arab student politics. Upon his return to Syria, he settled in Damascus to practice law in a firm that included another league leader, 'Adnan al-Atasi, son of Hashim, the President of the National Bloc. By the early 1930s Dandashi had already won a reputation as a courageous and uncompromising champion of the Arab nationalist cause. He was an impassioned orator and extremely popular with high school and law students, young journalists, and café intellectuals.
In its leadership, the league came from the same social milieu as the bloc. The vast majority of its members, however, were either from the poorer branches of these landed and bureaucratic families or were unpropertied, which differentiated them from bloc leaders, of whom more than 60 percent belonged to the urban absentee landlord class. In fact league leaders were almost completely dependent on their salaries in the liberal professions for their livelihood. Seventy percent were either practicing lawyers or instructors of law; the remainder was divided among the other professions. The league incorporated a generation which was, on average, twenty years younger than the bloc leadership. In 1933 their average age was thirty. 20
From the outset the league attempted to organize along the lines of a modern political party. It had a central political council, which provided for the division and distribution of power and the allocation of responsibilities. It had a core of regular dues-paying members, governed by a set of party rules. It also had a political program and its own political mouthpiece, a weekly newspaper called al-'Amal al-Qawmi. And it had several chapters, in Homs, Hama, Dayr al-Zur, and Antioch, which were linked to its Central Council in Damascus. The chapter in Antioch led the struggle against Turkey's ultimately successful efforts to pry away the Sanjaq of Alexandretta from Syria in the late 1930s. 21
The league, however, proved to be anything but a mass-based party. Nor did it ever encourage anything of the sort. Rather, despite its provenance in a slightly broader social milieu than the National Bloc's, or maybe because of it, the league was fiercely elitist. While it actively campaigned for pan-Arab economic integration, it failed to build relations with merchants in the suqs and it neglected the artisans and the unemployed or casually employed in the popular quarters, with whom the bloc maintained ties. The league also made no systematic efforts to build bridges to the Syrian officer corps. 22 This was in part because its young, gifted leaders were often aloof, unwilling to broaden their efforts beyond the institutions from which they themselves had emerged--the tajhiz and the Faculty of Law in Damascus for the most part. In fact, the league adopted a cliquish demeanor, characterized by the young man in a sports jacket sitting at the league's favorite café, proudly displaying the latest edition of the prestigious Cairo newspaper al-Muqattam, or maybe the literary and scientific journals al-Hilal and al-Muqtataf. There, he and his companions spent countless hours sipping strong coffee and plotting courses of action against the most recent French decrees. The average leaguer, in short, lived in a world quite foreign to the one most Damascenes inhabited.
Like the National Bloc, the league pictured political life in its own image. The schools and other modern institutions were the province of leaguers; it was there that their political life took shape and there that their politics were enacted. While Syrian urban politics had begun to move out of the quarters by 1933, the move was by no means complete. Thus the leaguers were even more narrow in their political appeal and outlook than the National Bloc. The older and more experienced bloc leaders, whose own styles were a mix of traditional city patron and modern party man, preserved their links with the popular quarters and their leaders: religious shaykhs, merchants, and qabadayat. Thus instead of toppling the bloc, the crises of the early 1930s, and the League of National Action to which they gave rise, merely provided more grist for the bloc's perpetual factionalism. 23
National Bloc leaders belonged to two urban-based and intertwined groups--absentee landlord and the (non-comprador) commercial bourgeoisie--and included a growing number from the professional middle classes who steered the Nationalist Youth. As men of capital, bloc leaders were among those who had been denied access to foreign capital. Some couched their opposition to the Mandate in terms of a struggle to assert what they believed was their rightful claim to adequate economic consideration from the French. Others believed that their interests were intrinsically incompatible with French and other foreign commercial and financial interests and wanted to break the dominant local alliance of compradors and French capital by laying the foundations of a national economy whose markets would stretch across the Arab world. These latter represented the pan-Arab wing of the bloc and had the strongest ties to like-minded nationalists in other Arab countries. 24 They were known as the Istiqlalis and owed their name to a post-World War I party that had been active in Syria and Palestine during Amir Faysal's reign in Damascus and later during the Syrian Revolt of 1925.
It was the Istiqlalis led by Shukri al-Quwatli who worked most assiduously to co-opt the league between 1933 and 1937. Their aim was two-fold: to contain radical pan-Arabism by absorbing into the bloc some aspects of the league's ideology and some of its most important personnel; and to use the league to gain leverage over bloc moderates who controlled bloc policy and strategy.
Quwatli's own political career established a model for the way the league would be co-opted. 25 He was a latecomer to the bloc leadership, having only been amnestied by the French in 1930 owing to his pan-Arab activities during the Syrian Revolt of the mid-1920s. By that time the National Bloc was unrivalled in its influence over the Syrian independence movement. Although he did not favor the moderate stance adopted by Damascus bloc leaders, which gave them, among all nationalists, nearly exclusive access to French Mandate authorities, he also realized that by remaining locked outside in direct opposition to the Damascus bloc he would always be a marginal political actor. By joining the bloc he hoped to set it on a less compromising course. To gain leverage, Quwatli widened his political base. He had strong followings in a number of popular quarters and among merchants and especially nascent industrialists, but his bloc rivals controlled the Nationalist Youth. Therefore he and other Istiqlalis quietly encouraged defections from the ranks of the Nationalist Youth in the early 1930s. Some defectors eventually became leaders in the League of National Action.
Quwatli knew of the secret gathering of young radical pan-Arabists at Qarna'il in the summer of 1933, and he moved quickly to put the league squarely in his own political orbit, something he pursued quietly for the next three years. Because league leaders were able to ride the wave of pan-Arabist sentiment in this period, they saw no reason to break their sacred principle of refusing to collaborate with the National Bloc; they preferred to work outside the established framework of politics, expanding their organization and promoting Arab unity as the best way of achieving independence. Quwatli managed to advance the co-optation process only slightly before 1936, by helping to bankroll the league's first serious financial enterprise, a national land development company designed to save indebted Syrian landowners from selling their properties on the borders of Syria and Palestine to the Jewish National Fund. When this failed, he placed some league leaders on the board of directors of his own Na tional Conserves Company, one of a number of modern Syrian industries that National Bloc leaders and wealthy merchants had started up after the Syrian Revolt. Because the Istiqlali wing of the bloc made efforts to undermine the dominant alliance of French capital and the comprador bourgeoisie through the vehicle of economic nationalism, league leaders saw a reason to join Quwatli's company board. What they did not at first understand was that claims to economic nationalism also served the bloc and the classes it represented because it kept attention riveted on the French occupation and away from the internal competition and conflicts between classes arising from the uneven spread of capitalist relations in Syria. As long as the French remained in Syria, national struggle took priority over class struggle. 26
New opportunities eventually arose for the co-optation of the league. The first was the sudden death of 'Abd al-Razzaq al-Dandashi in August 1935 in a tramway accident in Damascus. 27 The ensuing competition for the post of secretary-general revealed a previously undetected schism in the leadership between those who wanted the league to stay out of daily government-level politics and those who argued that the league could never have a lasting impact on nationalist politics unless it entered the arena of daily politics. A compromise candidate, Sabri al-'Asali, became the new secretary-general.
As the league's leadership question was being sorted out, Syrians launched in January 1936 a general strike that contributed to the revival of treaty negotiations, this time between the bloc and France. Quwatli was not appointed to the bloc negotiating team in Paris, but he was made vice president in charge of the bloc's internal affairs. In the period between the Syrian delegation's departure for Paris in March 1936 and its return in the fall, he dedicated himself to the task of unifying nationalist ranks by bringing the league under the bloc's wing. Ultimately, he would have liked to form a single national party, but he realized that many of the league's younger and more militant members were still unprepared to join ranks with the bloc. An intensification of the rivalry between the league and the Nationalist Youth did not help matters; after the strike both had established paramilitary branches that battled in the streets of Damascus and other towns. 28
Sabri al-'Asali and Shukri al-Quwatli were a generation apart in age but they had much in common. Both came from notable families in two of the most popular and politically active quarters of Damascus (al-Maydan and Shaghur) and both moved comfortably between the upper level of politics and the urban masses. Moreover, they had worked closely after the Syrian Revolt in the cause of pan-Arabism and especially to enlist the support of the Saudis as a check on Hashimite designs in Syria. 29 Therefore, 'Asali was already sympathetic to the older generation of Istiqlalis headed by Quwatli by the time he was tapped as the league's next secretary-general.
While National Bloc moderates were still in Paris, Quwatli moved quickly to infuse the bloc with more radical elements. He invited 'Asali and two other league stalwarts to join the National Bloc Council in the summer of 1936. His aim was to keep these young militants informed of the treaty negotiations in order to convince them that the delegation in Paris was not compromising Syria's national and territorial integrity. 'Asali accepted the invitation, precipitating a crisis within the league. When league efforts to woo him back to the fold failed, he was expelled from the Secretariat and soon thereafter from the organization itself. In November he ran successfully on the National Bloc's electoral list in Damascus, winning a seat in Parliament.
The league leadership, socially close to the National Bloc leadership, were prime candidates for co-option. Soon Quwatli used the bait of government posts to lure other young radicals into the bloc. More and more league leaders began to break their organization's cardinal principle and serve in the new National Bloc government.
Not only had Shukri al-Quwatli managed to weaken the League of National Action, thus making the National Bloc's ascendancy that much more complete, he had also managed to strengthen his own position at the expense of Jamil Mardam, his main nationalist rival in Damascus. As for the league, it remained active in pan-Arabist politics and especially in organizing Syrian support for the revolt in Palestine, but it no longer posed a serious challenge to the National Bloc's paramount position within the independence movement. What had once been a challenge to bloc leadership from the outside now became part of the factional infighting of the bloc with the Istiqlalis and a younger generation of pan-Arabist ex-leaguers around Shukri al-Quwatli. In fact, the bloc outlived the league, which suffered another major setback when the French outlawed it on the eve of World War Two. It would rear its head time and again during the war years, but by then some of its former leaders from more peripheral Syrian regions had already joined together with other claimants to the mantle of pan-Arabism to form a new political organization, which became known as the Ba'th Party. In the Ba'th, some of the league's personnel and ideas lived on, and it continued to pose a challenge to the National Bloc long after its wartime leader, Shukri al-Quwatli, had become the first President of an independent Syria.
What can we learn from this effort to narrate a brief moment in the life of the politics of Arab nationalism? First, our understanding of interwar Syria has been formed to a large extent by our focus on Arab nationalism, whether we have concentrated on its history from above or from below or from somewhere in the middle. Whether we like it or not, nationalism has defined the period. As nationalist elites defined everything in terms of nationalism, so historians have tended to measure all groups by the extent to which they constructed their identities as "national" identities. This is what I mean by ideological hegemony. 30
What is especially trenchant in the case of the League of National Action is that it is best remembered not for its economic programs, which expressed a degree of difference with the interests and programs of the National Bloc, but for its pan Arabism. Pan-Arabism in the interwar period, as in later periods, was a subset of Arab nationalism: many of its defining characteristics were (and in some ways still are) common to Arab nationalism, although it had its own orientation conditioned by the historical realities of the era. Interwar pan-Arabism was stronger in societies that had significant religious and ethnic minorities (Syria, Iraq, Palestine) than in societies that were religiously and ethnically homogeneous (Egypt, Saudi Arabia). 31 It was also more an effect of the difficulties of state formation in the interwar years than it was a cause of those difficulties. 32 It received greatest emphasis and attention in those periods when country-specific independence movements were unable to make progress against the European occupying powers. It called for the political coordination and, ultimately, the unification of all country-specific independence movements as the most effective means of liberating the Arab world from European imperial rule. It offered specific economic and social reform programs that were often absent in the platforms of country-specific independence movements and that were intended to challenge the legitimacy of these other movements and, in particular, the elites that led them. It was almost exclusively an urban phenomenon, one that especially benefited from the improvement in modern transportation and communication links between towns in the Arab East. Its direct appeal was to modern educated individuals and groups. It was fundamentally a secular movement intimately associated in the interwar years with the ongoing Arab cultural revival. It was also intimately associated with the radicalization of interwar Arab politics. 33
In the end, however, pan-Arabism's inattentiveness to the cultural and social needs and traditions of the nonliterate urban and rural masses gave it insufficient strength to wrest control from any of the country-specific independence movements that dominated nationalist politics in the interwar years. Despite the inclusion of ideas of economic reform in pan-Arabism, its attention was focused on distant horizons. It put off effective consideration of immediate and specific local problems for the deferred gratification of a pan-Arabist future. Differences of social provenance that might have given rise to a more broadly conceived nationalist movement in terms of class were left behind in favor of a nationalist movement broadly conceived in terms of territory.
Second, we should rethink factionalism within the framework of the politics of Arab nationalism. In Syria and the French Mandate and elsewhere, I have portrayed factionalism in negative terms, arguing that it rendered nationalist elites ineffective in the face of colonial powers and, after their departure, as rulers. 34 Factionalism was possible, I thought, only because there was such a huge gulf between the nationalist political elite and everyone else. Factionalism was, in short, a luxury conveyed by class and ultimately injurious to class position. Now I am beginning to see that factionalism was a very useful tool with which to incorporate challengers. Factionalism conveys many-sidedness. As long as the bloc was an aggregation of different opinions, interests, and tendencies, it could use its different facets to appeal to rival ideas and groups and incorporate them into the mainstream of the national independence movement. What has often been interpreted to be a congenital weakness in the nature or character of nationalist elites--their being prone to intensive factionalism--may, in fact, have been an asset in the politics of Arab nationalism. This, rather than absolute social and political dominance, may be why the class from which the National Bloc leadership arose felt no compulsion to act as a class during the interwar years.
Our present goal is to rethink nationalisms. We are doing so by attempting to "decenter" the nationalist elite. Nationalism was many things to many people. We know that when different groups demonstrated in the streets or boycotted foreign goods and foreign-owned concessions, the nationalist elites always constructed these events exclusively as expressions of nationalism in support of their own leadership. Those who marched and boycotted, however, may have been motivated by other considerations. What the historically marginal groups that participated in such manifestations actually understood by their acts and aimed at is the secret historians are now trying to unlock. Looking beyond "rethinking nationalisms," we may be able to decenter Arab nationalism itself. This is a sword that cuts two ways. On the one hand, we may be able to recognize more clearly the self-interestedness of the nationalist elites. On the other, we may find that advancing national ideals is not the sole measure of historical agency in the twentieth-century Arab world.
Notes:
Note 1: Much of the material provided on the League of National Action and the political and economic situation in Syria at the time of its establishment appeared originally in Khoury, Syria, chapter 15. Portions of it have been recast to fit the purposes of this essay. Back.
Note 2: MAE (Ministère des Affaires Etrangères, Paris), Rapport à la Société des Nations sur la situation de la Syrie et du Liban, 1924; FO 371/625, vol., 19022, MacKereth to FO, 7 January 1935. Back.
Note 3: R. Montagne, "L'évolution de la jeunesse arabe," CHEAM (Centre de Hautes Etudes Administratives sur l'Afrique et l'Asie Modernes, Paris), no. 244, n. pl. (21 June 1937), 8; Roderic D. Mathews and Matta Akrawi, Education in the Arab Countries of the Near East (Washington, 1949), 325, 340. Back.
Note 4: Montagne, "L'évolution," 9; Ahmad Hilmi al-'Allaf, Dimashq fi Matla' al-Qarn al-'Ashrin (Damascus, 1976), 169-171. Back.
Note 5: There were less than 40,000 primary and secondary school students in public and private institutions in 1933, or only 2 percent of Syria's total population. MAE, Rapport à la Société des Nations sur la situation de la Syrie et du Liban, 1924, Appendix 4, 95; FO 371/635, vol., 19022, MacKereth to FO, 7 January 1935. Back.
Note 6: Zafir al-Qasimi, Maktab 'Anbar (Beirut, 1967); Munir al-Rayyis, al-Kitab al-Dhahabi lil-Thawrat al-Wataniyya fil-Mashriq al-'Arabi: al-Thawra al-Suriyya al-Kubra (Beirut, 1969) 102; United States, American Consulate at Beirut, "Education in the States of the Levant under French Mandate" (Report for Office of Education, Department of Interior) (Beirut, 1 November 1933), 321. Back.
Note 7: Ibid; L'Asie Française, no. 287 (February 1931), 63. Back.
Note 8: Most conscious of the need to cultivate the educated youth was the National Bloc's Fakhri al-Barudi. Barudi typified the urban nationalist patron in that he came from the landed upper classes, was educated at Maktab 'Anbar (though not in Istanbul afterward), joined Amir Faysal's Arab Army in 1917, served Faysal afterward in Damascus, and maintained a vast urban patronage network among merchants, artisans, and the Damascene intelligentsia. He was a dedicated nationalist, a man of sincere conviction who made the greatest pecuniary sacrifice for the cause of national independence. He was also a great humorist with charm and wit, a fiery orator, a renowned patron of the performing arts, and a popular songwriter. See Fakhri al-Barudi, Mudhakkirat al-Barudi (vols. 1, 2; Beirut/Damascus, 1951-1952); Nahal Bahjat Sidqi, Fakhri al-Barudi (Beirut, 1974); Adham al-Jundi, Ta'rikh al-Thawrat al-Suriyya fi 'Ahd al-Intidab al-Faransi (Damascus, 1960), 555-56; Ahmad Qudama, Ma'alim wa A'lam fi Bilad al-'Arab, vol. 1 (Damascus, 1965), 10; George Faris, Man Huwa fi Suriyya 1949 (Damascus, 1950), 54; Virginia Vacca, "Notizie biografiche su uomini politici ministri e deputati siriani," Oriente Moderno 17 (October 1937): 478; Markaz al-Watha'iq al-Ta'rikhiyya (Damascus), al-Qism al-Khass, Fakhri al-Barudi Papers. Back.
Note 9: The Boy Scout movement in Syria dates from 1912 when two Indian Muslims studying at the Syrian Protestant College founded a troop in Beirut. See Anonymous, "Note sur le Scoutisme musulman en Syrie et au Liban," CHEAM, no. 684 (Beirut, 4 April 1944). Back.
Note 10: Ahmad al-Shihabi, a law student from a prominent family of South Lebanon; 'Ali 'Abd al-Karim al-Dandashi, a member of the Al Dandash clan of Tall Kalakh, who became the Executive Director of the Syrian Federation of Scouting; and Dr. Rushdi al-Jabi, President of the Federation. Anonymous, "Note sur le Scoutisme musulman en Syrie et au Liban," CHEAM, no. 684 (Beirut, 4 April 1944), 1-3. Back.
Note 11: In this sense, the tajhiz could be compared to the Lycée Louis le Grand in Paris, a major feeder school for the Ecole Normale Supérieur. A graduate of the tajhiz who went to Paris for higher education was Salah al-Din al-Bitar. In Paris he met Michel 'Aflaq, who hailed from the same Damascus quarter, al-Maydan, but who had attended a Greek Orthodox school in the Syrian capital. Both returned to Damascus to assume teaching positions at the tajhiz and both were founders of the Ba'th Party with another Paris-educated school teacher, Zaki al-Arsuzi. Hanna Batatu, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq (Princeton, 1978), 724-25. Back.
Note 12: A. S. Bagh, L'Industrie à Damas entre 1928 et 1958: Etude de géographie économique (Damascus, 1961). Back.
Note 13: E. Epstein [Elath), "Notes from a Paper on the Present Conditions in the Hauran," Journal of the Royal Central Asian Society 23 (1936): 612-613; FO 371/2092, vol. 16974, 31 March 1933. Back.
Note 14: Al-Mudhik al-Mubki, no. 163 (11 March 1933), 4; no. 179 (11 July 1933), 8; no. 193 (11 November 1933), 8; no. 191 (28 October 1933), 2. Wearing the sidara was not only a way of criticizing the bloc but also of rejecting the fez because it was a foreign-made product, imported mainly from Czechoslovakia. Later, the league switched from the sidara to a more traditional Arab headdress, the kufiyya. M. (Raymond] O'Zoux, "Les insignes et saluts de la jeunesse en Syrie et au Liban," Entretiens sur l'évolution des pays de civilisation arabe, vol. 2 (Paris, 1938), 100. Fakhri al-Barudi actually tried to promote a scheme for the development of a native Syrian hat that would replace the fez. J. Gaulmier, "Congrès Général des Etudiants tenu à Hama, 1932," CHEAM, no. 46 (1936). Back.
Note 15: Al-Mudhik al-Mubki, no. 103 (21 November 1931), 14. Back.
Note 16: Akram Zu'aytir, "Ittifaq al-'Arab 'ala Wada' Lubnan al-Khass," al-Hawadith (Beirut), no. 978 (August 1975), 66. Back.
Note 17: For a fuller discussion of these terms see Haim, "Islam," 287-298. Back.
Note 18: 'Usbat al-'Amal al-Qawmi, Bayan al-Mu'tamar al-Ta'sisi. Pamphlet (Damascus, 24 August 1933); Muhammad Harb Farzat, al-Hayat al-Hizbiyya fi Suriyya bayna 1920-1955 (Damascus, 1955), 138-140. Back.
Note 19: See Batatu, Old Social Classes; Porath, 1929-1939. Back.
Note 20: Only 40 percent of the bloc leadership belonged to the liberal professions, three-quarters of whom practiced or taught law. For biographical data on League of National Action and National Bloc leaders see Tables 15-1, 15-2, 416-19, and Tables 10-1, 252, 10-2, 254-257, in Khoury, Syria. Back.
Note 21: Its leader was Zaki al-Arsuzi, the Sorbonne-educated school teacher of 'Alawi provenance who was one of the founders of the Ba'th Party in the early 1940s. It drew most of its support from the growing Arabic-speaking intelligentsia in the towns of the Sanjaq. Although the league's principal focus was on preventing a Turkish takeover in the Sanjaq and on continuing the struggle against French rule, it was also committed to breaking the hold of the Sunni landowning class and, in particular, its dominant Turkish element, over the predominantly 'Alawi peasantry. A. Alexandre, "Conflits de l'arabisme et des nationalismes voisins. Le conflit syro-turc du Sandjak d'Alexandrette d'octobre 1936 à juin 1937, vu d'Antioche," in Entretiens sur 1'évolution des pays de civilisation arabe, vol. 2 (Paris, 1938), 105-141. Back.
Note 22: Unlike in Iraq, where the ex-Sharifian officers constituted the most important element for the political elite under the monarchy and where radical Arab nationalist organizations like Nadi Muthanna aligned with factions of the officer corps in the 1930s, in Syria the army officers had little impact on interwar politics. The French dismantled the Sharifian army and jailed or exiled many Syrian officers. At the same time republican nationalists disapproved of the royalist (mainly Hashimite) proclivities of ex-Sharifian officers. In fact, for nearly a century there had been a noticeable absence of a strong military tradition in Syria. The Syrian upper classes disdained military careers and used their wealth and connections to purchase exemptions for their sons. Meanwhile, the French controlled membership in the new native officer corps of the Troupes spéciales, encouraging it to acquire a distinctive minority and rural complexion. See Michael H. Van Dusen, "Intra- and Inter-Generational Conflict in the Syrian Army," Ph.D. Dissertation, The Johns Hopkins University, 1971; for a revisionist interpretation of France's so-called minority policy for the Syrian army, see Nacklie Elias Bou-Nacklie, "Les Troupes Spéciales du Levant: Origins, Recruitment, and the History of the Syrian-Lebanese Paramilitary Forces under the French Mandate, 1919-1947," Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Utah, 1989. Back.
Note 23: Pan-Arabism first became a political football kicked back and forth by warring nationalist factions during the Syrian Revolt as rebels began to face military setback after setback in 1926 and 1927, and blame for the revolt's ultimate failure needed to be apportioned among its exiled leaders. See Philip S. Khoury, "Factionalism among Syrian Nationalists during the French Mandate," International Journal of Middle East Studies 13 (1981): 441-469. Back.
Note 24: Philip S. Khoury, "The Syrian Independence Movement and the Development of Economic Nationalism in Damascus," British Journal of Middle Eastern Studies 14 (1988): 25-36. Back.
Note 25: See Philip S. Khoury, "Shukri al-Quwatli," in Bernard Reich (ed.), Political Leaders of the Contemporary Middle East and North Africa: A Biographical Dictionary (Hamden, CT, 1990), 433-439. Back.
Note 26: Khoury, "Economic Nationalism," 25-36. Back.
Note 27: Ironically, because Dandashi had been late for an appointment on that August day, he decided to take the tram even though there was a major boycott underway of the Franco-Belgian owned Société des Tramways et d'Electricité, which the league strongly supported. Nabih al-'Azma Papers [Syria]. File 5/274. Institute for Palestine Studies, Beirut. Back.
Note 28: The Lion Cubs of Arabism (Ashbal al-'Uruba) belonged to the league and the Steel Shirts (al-Qumsan al-Hadidiyya) to the bloc. See A. de Boucheman, "Les Chemises de Fer." no. 6 bis. CHEAM (1936). Back.
Note 29: l-Jundi, Ta'rikh, 486-487; Vacca, "Notizie," 478. Back.
Note 30: See Katherine Verdery, "Whither 'Nation' and 'Nationalism'?" Daedalus, 122 (Summer 1993): 37-46. Back.
Note 31: Bromley, Rethinking Middle Eastern Politics, 176. Back.
Note 32: 32. Ibid., 174. Back.
Note 33: Pan-Arabism only began to manifest its radicalization in the 1930s, and especially during the Arab rebellion in Palestine in the late 1930s. See Khoury, "Divided Loyalties," 324-348. Back.
Note 34: Khoury, "Factionalism," and Khoury, Syria, chapter 22. See also Salim Tamari, "Factionalism and Class Formation in Recent Palestinian History," in Roger Owen (ed.), Studies in the Economic and Social History of Palestine in the Nineteenth and Twentieth Centuries (Carbondale, IL, 1982), 177-202. Back.
I wish to thank Mary Christina Wilson for the constructive ideas she contributed to this article.
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