Arise, O Arabs, And Awake! Essay
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Arise, O Arabs, And Awake! Essay
Chapter 20
ARISE, O ARABS, AND AWAKE!
ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES AND ON TEEMING URBAN STREETS, on the pages of newspapers and in the minutes of literary clubs, the idea slowly took root. An Arab nation had always existed and, through a combination of domestic revolt and international diplomacy, would soon reassert itself in the form of a unified, independent state. The concept of Arabism, it will be recalled, originated in the nationalist ideologies of the West and penetrated the Middle East with the help of mission schools and colleges, many of them American. “I know why the Turks are hated in this country,” Djemal Pasha, the governor of Syria, reproved the American consul in Damascus. “The Syrian Protestant College…breeds contempt for the Turk [and]…the very books used in the institution…breathe this spirit.” Arab Christians, numbers of whom attended those schools, naturally became adherents of nationalism and worked to forge a common bond with the surrounding Muslim majority.
Arab Muslims, however, having long rejected the missionaries’ religious teachings, felt little affection for their secular Western ideas. They already possessed a nation—the Islamic nation (Umma), as embodied by the Ottoman state. Few among them sought a common identity with Christians, much less a chance to join them in impugning Ottoman rule. Rather than secede from the empire, they preferred to attain additional rights within it and to achieve unity not through an alien philosophy but by returning to their native Islam. Rarely defining themselves as Arabs, they remained, first and foremost, Muslims. By contrast, those residents of the Middle East who saw themselves as Arabs primarily, irrespective of their religious affiliation, and who longed for a separate state, remained a tiny minority. It consisted of small groups of Western-educated intellectuals, mostly Christians, in Syria, and Arab expatriates in Europe. The cry “Arise, O Arabs, and awake,” raised by the Syrian Protestant College graduate Ibrahim al-Yaziji in 1868, was, by the turn of the century, still unheeded. 1
That is, until the Young Turk revolution in 1908. The Ottoman Empire, for centuries the bastion of Islam and the protector of Arabic language and culture, was suddenly transformed into a vehicle for imposing secular Turkish identity. The revolution served to strengthen the nationalist inclinations of Arab Christians and, for the first time, forced Arab Muslims to question their allegiance to Istanbul. In secret societies in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, Muslim philosophers such as Abdullah al-Nadim and the young officer Nuri al-Sa‘id joined with their Christian countrymen and discussed the possibility of Arab independence from the Porte. The same year saw mass demonstrations against British rule in Egypt and, in Palestine, the first stirrings of Arab resistance to Zionism.
Though they had profited from the enhanced trade and employment opportunities generated by the new Jewish settlements, Palestinian Arabs had grown increasingly concerned about the rise of Jewish immigration and land purchases. Resentment surfaced in March 1908, when a public celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim provoked a scuffle with Arab onlookers in Jaffa. At the same time, in Haifa, the editor Najib Nassar founded a new journal, al-Karmil, dedicated to exposing the Zionist threat. Like Nassar, a recent convert from Greek Orthodoxy to Protestantism, most of the early Arab opponents to Zionism were Christian. Not a few of them had acquired their nationalism at American schools and the Syrian Protestant College. They warned of the dangers Zionism posed not only to the Arabs of Palestine but to the Arab nation as a whole.
But Muslim Arabs were also becoming wary of the Zionist challenge. In Palestine, especially, the centuries-old Muslim community feared being cut off from the broader Islamic nation and finding itself a second-class minority in a Jewish state. “The Jews’…right [to Palestine] died with the passage of time; our right is alive and unshakeable,” wrote one of them, Khalil al-Sakakini, from Jerusalem in 1914. “What will the Jews do if the national feeling of the Arab nation is aroused; how will they be able to stand up to [the Arabs]?”
The future of Palestine—and of the Arab Middle East in general—would preoccupy Arab nationalist thinkers as war raged through the region. Arab Muslims in general responded zealously to the Porte’s call for holy war and many thousands of them served in Turkish ranks. While the British managed to spark an Arab revolt against Turkey and to rally many nationalists to its cause, the rebellion was in fact spurred less by Arabism than by the desire to revive a purified Arab caliphate independent of the Westernized Turks. The uprising’s leader, Sharif Husayn, the head of the Hashemite clan and guardian of Mecca, believed that the Arabs could unite only under Islam and not beneath some racial or cultural banner.2
Arab nationalism, though destined to become a tectonic force in the Middle East, remained in an inchoate stage in the years leading up to World War I. The movement was largely confined to the margins of Arab society and ruthlessly suppressed by the Turks. The war, however, helped prepare the ground for a dramatic flowering of Arab nationalism. And while most of these preparations took place in the Middle East, a significant number were also undertaken in the United States by inspired groups of Arab Americans.