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The Arab Awakening and Arab Nationalism
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17282 |
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MODERN THOUGHT
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2 / 1990 |
5,071 Words |
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Antony T. Sullivan
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Throughout most of the twentieth century, until only about two decades ago, the regnant political ideology and intellectual commitment of much of the Arab world was Arab nationalism. Cultural renewal, as exemplified by a revivified Arabic language and literature fashioned by scholars in Lebanon during the nineteenth century, stimulated an Arab intellectual awakening that expressed itself soon enough in political activism. Shortly after 1850, Arabs in the Levant began to shake off a stagnation worsened by more than three centuries of Ottoman Turkish rule and to institutionalize an increasingly active intellectual life. Western missionaries offered this awakening important encouragement, and American scholars contributed to its spread among generations of Arab students at the American University of Beirut. The West, indeed, provided the institutional models that Arab nationalists strove mightily to graft upon their own societies from the 1930s to the 1960s, even as they warred against Western imperialism and colonial domination. Their spectacular failure to create modern, powerful states in the Middle East is one primary reason for the recent displacement of Arab nationalism by Islamic fundamentalism. Today, Arab nationalism constitutes something of a lost world of disappointed hopes and shattered dreams.
THE ARAB AWAKENING AND ARAB NATIONALISM: THE CLASSIC FORMULATION
In 1938 George Antonius (1891-1942), a Lebanese Christian of British education who served for many years as a civil servant in the Mandatory Government of Palestine, published his seminal work, The Arab Awakening. This book linked the nineteenth-century Arab cultural renewal with burgeoning political nationalism and for half a century has remained at the heart of debate concerning the meaning of modern Arab history. Today it continues to be especially useful for its illumination of the Arab literary renaissance and of the West's contributions to it.
According to Antonius, cultural renewal had its deepest roots Lebanon; from the start, the schools facilitated it and printing press established by French Jesuit and American Presbyterian missionaries. However, it was the prodigious scholarly productivity of Nasif Yazeji (1800-1871) and Butros Bustani (1810-1883), Antonius maintains, that stimulated a broader intellectual awakening, giving birth to Arab demands for independence from the Ottomans and later from the Western powers.
Both Yazeji and Bustani were Christians, and their important role in the renewal of Arab culture and politics is only one example of the contributions of the Arab Christian minority (especially the Greek Orthodox) to the Arab national movement throughout the past century. Of the two, Yazeji's accomplishments were perhaps more heroic, given his lack of formal education.
Since published books were not widely available in the Lebanon of his youth, Yazeji buried himself in the archives of monasteries where he read, copied, or memorized Arabic manuscripts. His archival research "took him into the heart of the lost world of classical Arabic literature," Antonius writes. "[Yazeji] become the apostle of its resurrection." His own intellectual contribution was primarily as a poet and grammarian. Yazeji purified Arabic of accretions and inconsistencies and wrote widely on rhetoric, logic, and medicine. For American missionaries, he prepared the first manuals for the teaching of Arabic to foreigners. In one-way or another,
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