Noam (Norman) A. Stillman
The Roots of Arab Nationalism
Summary
Nationalism entered the Islamic world in the 19th century in various forms, originating among Syrian Christians. These people were educated in missionary schools in Beirut and pioneered the Arabic cultural revival known as the Nahḍa. The Arab nationalism movement faced opposition from more conservative Muslim Arabs and eventually competed with Pan-Islamism and Islamic Arab nationalism.
Noam (Norman) A. Stillman
Noam (Norman) A. Stillman is Schusterman/Josey Professor Emeritus at the University of Oklahoma and an internationally recognized authority on the history and culture of the Islamic world and on Sephardi and Oriental Jewry. His books include The Jews of Arab Lands: A History and Source Book and The Jews of Arab Lands in Modern Times, among others. He is executive editor of the award-winning Encyclopedia of Jews in the Islamic World. He is chair of the Academic Council of the Association for the Study of the Middle East and Africa (ASMEA) and sits on numerous boards of academic organizations, think tanks, and journals. He came to Israel permanently in 2016 and teaches each spring semester at the Hebrew University.
That’s complicated. Islam has its own, like all religions, have positive and negative views of other religions in any case. But what modern anti-Semitic ideas and mediaeval antisemitic ideas, such as blood libel and so on, do come in with Christians, not necessarily the Protestant missionaries, but, for example, the famous, and I’ll talk about it in the next talk in July, the famous Damascus affair where Jews in Damascus were accused of killing a Catholic missionary monk to take his blood to make matzah for Passover. This was actually propagated at the time by the French Consulate in Syria, who was a vicious antisemite. But yes, Catholic missionaries did bring in some of these ideas already in the 17th and 18th centuries, but they never really took until later. Christians, who became Arab nationalists, many of them did adopt anti-Semitic notions. And I’ll talk about that again next time around. But then what’s interesting in the 20th century is Islamic nationalists also adopted… But that’s a whole ‘nother topic. So I will say, tune in next time, and I will be happy to go over that topic with you.
And that’s very simple, because they’re on the losing end. The powers that really have come to take control of most places are Islamic, and the political philosophies are more pan-Islamist as well. And so, basically, this was a losing… they founded the idea of Arab nationalism. They strongly supported it. But in the end, that was not what wins out.
And interestingly enough, in some places, Shiites go in for more radical movements, communist, socialist and so on. Again, for the same reason that they were suppressed in so many places. Look at Lebanon. The Hezbollah, the Shiite movement, is by far the most radical and the most militant, and alas, at the moment, the most powerful as well.