Pan-Arabism
Pan-Arabism
Pan-Arabism is a Western term for the ideological and political project Arabs refer to as Arab nationalism. This project’s central premise is that all those who speak Arabic, from Iraq in the east to Morocco in the west, share a common history, heritage, and culture, and are therefore members of a single nation whose destiny it is to overcome the artificial boundaries imposed by colonialism and achieve independence and unity.
Like all nationalisms, Arab nationalism claims ancient roots but is actually of relatively recent origin. The term Arab was used by neighboring peoples to designate an ethnos based in the central and northern Arabian Peninsula from well before the emergence of Islam in the seventh century CE, and among Muslims the Arabs enjoyed a distinctive status as the people to whom God chose to send his final and most complete revelation, transmitted by an Arab prophet, Muhammad (c. 570–632), in the Arabic language. But in the later Ottoman period, the term was often used by literate urban folk to denote the uncultured nomads of the desert. Premodern identities in what is today called the Middle East were generally framed in religious, kinship, tribal, occupational, and local or regional terms, or in terms of one’s loyalty or subjection to a particular ruler or state, such that before the nineteenth century no one in what is now referred to as the Arab world would have considered oneself an Arab in the modern national sense of the term.
Arab nationalism was a product of the social, cultural, and political transformations that the predominantly Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire underwent in the second half of the nineteenth century and the first decades of the twentieth century. These transformations included the disruptive effects of the region’s growing integration into a Europe-centered world economic and political order; efforts by the Ottoman ruling elite to centralize power and create a modern state that could withstand European encroachment and counter separatist movements among its subject Christian peoples; the spread of modern schools; and the complex encounter with European ideas, institutions, and practices, disseminated and mediated largely through new print media. These processes helped foster what would come to be called the nahda, the Arab cultural “renaissance” that was centered in Ottoman-ruled geographic Syria (encompassing the present-day states of Syria, Lebanon, Israel/Palestine, and Jordan) and in Egypt, which opened the way to a protonational and largely cultural “Arabism.”
After the Ottoman constitutional revolution of 1908, politically active Arabs (largely from the educated upper and middle classes) tended to advocate greater autonomy for the Ottoman Empire’s Arab provinces while remaining loyal to the Ottoman framework, seen as the only bulwark against European colonial domination; only a few marginal groups and individuals went so far as to call for Arab independence from Ottoman rule. But after the outbreak of World War I in 1914, Ottoman repression and centralization, as well as wartime hardships, alienated many Arabs from Ottoman rule. Meanwhile the British, seeking local allies against the Ottomans, established secret links with Husayn (c. 1854–1931), the quasi-autonomous ruler of the holy city of Mecca, who hoped to escape Ottoman control and carve out a state for himself and his Hashemite clan, and through him with Arab nationalist activists in Syria. In 1915, bolstered by Britain’s promise to support postwar Arab independence under Hashemite rule and equipped with British weapons, money, and advisors, the Hashemites and their allies revolted against Ottoman rule in the name of “the Arab nation” and participated in the Allied military campaign that eventually defeated the Ottoman forces.
It was only with the end of Ottoman rule over the Arab provinces that significant numbers of their inhabitants began to see themselves as Arabs in a new national sense, though that identity was never uniform, uncomplicated, or uncontested. Arab nationalist hopes for independence and unity were soon frustrated as the victorious Allies reneged on their wartime promises and instead divided the former Ottoman Arab provinces into several new states ruled by Britain or France as “mandates,” which their new subjects accurately perceived as a thinly disguised form of colonialism. Arab nationalists held fast to their vision of a unified Arab nation; yet over time distinctive national identities (Syrian, Lebanese, Iraqi, Palestinian, and so on) took root in these new states, often in tension with a widespread and persistent but contingent sense of common pan-Arab identity. This tension was further complicated by the fact that many of the new “Arab” states contained substantial minorities that were either non-Arab (e.g., the Kurds in Iraq) or non-Muslim (e.g., Christians in Lebanon), or came to be dominated by minority groups (e.g., the Alawites in Syria, the Sunnis in Iraq).
As the eastern Arab lands won independence from colonial rule in the 1930s and 1940s and many Egyptians began to see their country as part of a wider Arab world, the question of Arab unity came to take center stage. The League of Arab States, established in 1945, proved ineffectual, and in the 1950s the cause of Arab unity was championed by a new pan-Arabist movement based in Syria and Iraq (the Ba‘th, from an Arabic term for “renaissance”) and by the new regime in Egypt led by Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918–1970). Despite the rhetorical commitment of key Arab leaders to pan-Arab unity, however, the only real experiment in unification—the merger of Egypt and Syria into the United Arab Republic in 1958 under Nasser’s leadership—foundered after just three years. Israel’s victory in the June 1967 Arab-Israeli War was a major defeat for the radical Arab nationalism espoused by both Nasser and his Ba‘thist rivals. Thereafter, Pan-Arabism as a political project went into decline, sidelined by authoritarian regimes (whether monarchical or republican) concerned mainly with their own survival and rejected by the Islamist movements that emerged as those regimes’ main opposition.
Nonetheless, thanks to transnational migration, the spread of literacy and mass communications, and more recently pan-Arab satellite television broadcasting, many Arabic speakers today participate in a common cultural-political field in which the same cultural products are consumed and what are perceived to be common problems are addressed, including autocracy, economic underdevelopment, social inequality, the plight of the Palestinians, and U.S. hegemony and intervention. As a result, despite the continuing salience of separate state nationalisms, distinctive local forms of spoken Arabic, the deep divisions within the Arab world, and its failure to achieve even a modicum of equitable economic integration, much less pan-Arab political unity, a variable and contingent but nonetheless significant sense of common Arab identity (and sometimes solidarity) persists.
SEE ALSO Nationalism and Nationality; Pan-Africanism
BIBLIOGRAPHY
Jankowski, James, and Israel Gershoni, eds. 1997. Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East. New York: Columbia University Press.
Kayali, Hasan. 1997. Arabs and Young Turks: Ottomanism, Arabism, and Islamism in the Ottoman Empire, 1908–1918. Berkeley: University of California Press.
Khalidi, Rashid. 1991. Arab Nationalism: Historical Problems in the Literature. American Historical Review 96 (5): 1363–1373.
Khalidi, Rashid, Lisa Anderson, Muhammad Muslih, and Reeva S. Simon, eds. 1991. The Origins of Arab Nationalism. New York: Columbia University Press.
Zachary Lockman