Noam (Norman) A. Stillman
The Roots of Arab Nationalism

Noam (Norman) A. Stillman | The Roots of Arab Nationalism

- So, first of all, good evening or good afternoon, or if you’re from the other side of the Atlantic, good morning to all who are here. In our last two sessions together, we talked about the rich cultural efflorescence of the Islamic world during the High Middle Ages, and then the long twilight and the decline of the later Middle Ages up to, and just before, the dawn of the modern era. And today, I want to discuss with you one of the significant developments in the Islamic world that arose in the modern era, and was an important spinoff from the encounter with the west, namely the rise of nationalism. And I would hasten to add that no other aspect of modernity, no other western import proved to be more disastrous for the non-Muslim minorities in the Islamic world. Now, the traditional divisions and loyalties in the Muslim world were confessional. Religion was the prime identity. You were Muslim, you were Christian, you were Jew, you were Zoroastrian, you were Druze, that was the prime identity. And the body politic, the ruling authority was, of course, Islamic, and originally united in a single caliphate. And you see here on the map, extending from the borders of India and China in the east to Spain and the Atlantic Coast of North Africa in the west. And later, it divided into regional Islamic states. Still not countries as we know now in modern times, but into larger or smaller empires. And even then, all governance and rulership were part and parcel of the political embodiment of the Ummah, the Muslim community, which it had various names, the Ummah al-Islam, the Peoplehood, if you will, ‘cause Ummah can also be people.

The Ummah al-Islam, the Peoplehood of Islam, the Mamlaka al-Islam, the Kingdom of Islam, and this whole area that you see on the map was the Dar al-Islam, the Domain of Islam. And in fact, all the way up to modern times in traditional Muslim geography, the world is divided into the Dar al-Islam, that part which is ruled and dominated by Islam, and the Dar al-Harb, the World of War, which means that it’s in a continual state. You can make temporary peace with it, but in a continual state of war until it submits and becomes part of the Dar al-Islam. But as the Ottoman Empire, the great last Islamic Empire, which starts in the 13th century in Anatolia and from a very small area, and then grows and grows to encompass much of the Middle East and all of North Africa up as far as Morocco at its height. But as this empire, and we can see it, the next slide, please. There we go. Here, you can see how it develops from that little spot there on the map, and then grows out over the centuries. But in the course of time, it grew weaker and weaker in the 17th and the 18th century and the 19th centuries, and European economic and political penetration became increasingly stronger. And European ideas, and this is where we come to our subject tonight, the European ideas of patriotism and nationalism radically altered the social and the political relations within the Ottoman Empire. Now, it was the Turks who were originally, by the way, from Central Asia, they came in as either slave soldiers, Mamluks, or as Nomad Invaders, which was the case with the Ottomans.

It was the Turks who were the in the Muslim world. And they had the longest and the closest acquaintance with Europe. They boarded right on it, and parts of Europe, the Balkans, and places like Bulgaria and Romania and Hungary were under their rule for extended periods of time. And so they had this acquaintance with Europe, and they were the first to begin to absorb these new ideas. Ottoman Turkey had become the proverbial Sick Man of Europe, as the Europeans called it. Can I have the next slide, please? And there is a 19th century British cartoon showing the Sick Man, “Who says Sick Man now,” as they’re trying to modernise, and that’s why you can see he has a European military coat on with epaulettes and so on, but of course, this is mocking them. And some of the elite in the Ottoman world began looking to the west to see how it might restore itself, how the empire could once again become a major force in the world. And during the 18th century, the Ottomans, the latter part of the 18th century, they opened technical schools with foreign instructors and European textbooks, mostly in French, to modernise. And by the way, up until this time, there was not a printing press allowed in the Ottoman Empire from Muslims. Jews from Spain who left during the Inquistion and the expulsion were allowed to have a printing press, but the authorities said only Hebrew letters were allowed. A little later on, they allowed also Greek Press for the Greek Orthodox Christians, but that was it. There were no printing presses with Arabic scripts yet. And so they bring in foreign instructors and European textbooks to modernise and to restrengthen its weakened military. And as the great Bernard Lewis, great Middle Eastern historian once noted, once they could read a French foreign textbook, they could read other material which was far more explosive and penetrating, as we shall see.

Also, the empire sent people to Europe to observe and to learn, including to universities. Here again, certain ideas, including modern political ones, begin to penetrate. And one of the ideas that was absorbed was the notion of a new form of loyalty, patriotism, which was a French and British concept, and was different from the central and Eastern European notions of nationalism, which we shall see was also to come into the Muslim world somewhat later. Hubbul Watan Minal Iman. The love of the homeland is an article of faith watan, or vatan in Turkish, watan in Arabic. The word that was now adopted by these new thinkers for homeland actually originally meant your hometown, or the area from once you came. And this love of homeland as an article of faith, it became a popular slogan among the young Ottomans, the Yeni Osmanlilar. If I can have the next one, please? This was a group of Ottoman intellectual, some of them had been in the military and so on, who went to Europe, and as you can see, look very 19th century European, like European gentlemen. And this was a Turkish political and intellectual group in the mid-19th century. Many of them established themselves in London, in Paris, and in other places as well. And this kind of Ottoman patriotism made a few waves in the vast Arabic speaking provinces of the Ottoman Empire. Remember, the Turks ruled over an empire. Most of the population, most of the land was not in Anatolia, and was not made up of people who spoke Turkish. The Arab world was, for the most part, under the Ottomans, and formed a great part of the population. The only Arab land where there was a territorial secular form of patriotism that developed in the 19th century where it made any headway at all was in Egypt. But it should be noted that Egypt was the only country with a real sense of its own identity.

To this day, there were only two Arab countries that have a strong sense of country and are not what the journalists, who had been kidnapped by Shiite militants in Iran in Lebanon years ago, Charles Glass wrote in his book about the Arab. He was covering the Arab world for years, and the book is called, “Tribes With Flags,” that most countries still, even today, don’t have this strong sense of country. Egypt, it’s easy to understand, although it’s a very large country, all the population, with the exception of the delta in the north, is on a six-mile wide, either side of the Nile River. All the rest is uninhabited desert. And if any of you ever go there, you see this right away. But it should be noted that Egypt had this real sense of identity in the 19th century. And this was encouraged by the autonomous rulers of Egypt who were technically under the Ottoman Empire, but really were autonomous. These were the Turkish Khedives who ruled the country after Napoleon left at the end of the 18th century. And , Egypt, for the Egyptians, which was, interestingly enough, a phrase coined by a Coptic Christian but popularised by a Jew who was an Egyptian patriot. Can I have the next slide, please? This is Yaqub Sanu who edited the first, it was a humorous newspaper, but politically oriented, and he called Abou-Naddara, his nickname, Father of the Glasses. It’s like the American expression four-eyes for someone who wears glasses. Can I have the next one, please? And there is his, as you see, his journal, the front page. It was full of cartoons of a political nature.

And he popularised this phrase of Egypt for the Egyptians. Now, the other European model of loyalty that came into the Muslim world, and by the way, I would just say with Egypt that as Egypt modernised in the 20th century, the kingdom of Egypt had all the royal family and the elite were all very secular. And there were Jews and Christians in both the Royal Party and the major non-royalist party as well. But the other European model of loyalty that came into the Muslim world of the 19th century is nationalism. And this was, as I said, of a central and eastern European variety in contrast to this western idea of patriotism. Nationalism is based on the idea of the Volk, or the Nazism, as central Europeans would call it, and it focused on language, on race, and on primitive origins rather than territory or political entity. And this made it quite different from patriotism, which is a love of the homeland. And independence, unity and power were central to this school of thought. And I might, add individual freedoms were secondary. Now, the Turks would develop a nationalism with the Young Turk movement, the Committee of Union and Progress, which came to the fore in the late 19th century and the early 20th century, and would eventually take over and morph into the modern Turkish Republic after World War I. And if I could just have the next image, please. They start out actually having a great deal of popularity with non-Turks, because they’re very super secular. You don’t have a Muslim. You can be a Christian, you can be a Jew, you can be of other extraction and still be part of the state. And this happens to be a picture at the time when they’re coming to power. And it shows you they’re breaking the chains of this Greek woman.

But they then take a much more nationalist turn already in they take over the country, overthrow the salt and put back the Constitution, which had only been in effect for two years in the 19th century under stress from the Modernizers. And they now embarked upon a programme of Turkification. That is, you want to be part of this empire, you have to, in a sense, not only speak Turkish, you have to identify as Turkish. And then, of course, things went completely in a different direction after World War I, by the way. Kemal Ataturk, Mustafa Kemal was his name before he was involved with this, and he made Turkey into a strictly secular state, a very nationalist one. One in which non-Muslim, which basically was non-Turks, were not really considered true Turks. But nationalism would emerge in the Arab world also this time in the second half of the 19th century, and it struck resident chords in the 20th century. And its roots, perhaps, maybe may seem somewhat surprising to you. The 19th century was the time of European Muslims. This sympathy was on the rise. Christian missionaries and other do-gooders were establishing schools, clinics, and hospitals in Levant. The Catholics had already been there for more than a century and had also been doing this, but mainly with Christians associated with Rome, like the Maronites of Lebanon, who have their own patriarch, but also see the Pope as the supreme figure.

But the Catholics had been there, as I said, for more than a century. Now, Protestants, mainly English and American, began coming into the Middle East. Now, since evangelising Muslims was a capital offence, both for the missionary and for any Muslim who dared to take on the new religion, because of this, the missionaries efforts were primarily aimed at Christians of the Middle Eastern churches. The many, many Middle Eastern denominations, the Orthodox, the Copts, the Maronites, the Nestorians, and the Assyrians. There are numerous churches which go back all the way to early Christianity. And the missionaries established schools in the major urban centres, and these included colleges and universities, the first modern high-educational institutions in the Arab world. By the way, three of the major universities in Levant, the Catholics also founded one, the Universite Saint-Joseph, in the mid 19th century. But the three great ones today, the major ones are in Egypt, in Beirut and in Turkey, and they were published by Protestants. And in 1864, the Syrian Protestant College became the American University in Beirut. Syria, by the way, the term, going back to the Middle Ages, was basically when I say Levant, it was called Surīyah al-Kubra, The Greater Syria, which what is today Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, and Israel. And in 1864, the Syrian Protestant College came the American University in Beirut. Can I have the next image, please? Here’s one of the central buildings, and it was here that we can see the roots of what became Arab nationalism forming.

It was here that the Nahda, the Arab cultural awakening, the word Nahda means awakening in Arabic, took place. And it was men, Christians, who studied here, or who worked here. Men like Butrus al-Bustani. Can I have that next slide, please? As you see, I date back to a time when the images that we showed were called slides. The next PowerPoint picture. But in any case, here is Butrus al-Bustani. Can I have the next one? Oh, this is the next one? Then it’s the one after this. There it is, it’s just slightly reversed. Nasif al-Yaziji, and now go back one, please. There. The gentleman right after, between him and Butrus al-Bustani. No, up. There we go. Alright, Jurji Zaydan. These men, all of whom were involved, as I said, Butrus al-Bustani had studied at the American University of Beirut. By the way, Butrus al-Bustani had been an orthodox Christian. He converted to Protestantism. And then, remember, prime identity in the Middle East was Confessional. The many people in the Greek Orthodox community were out to kill him. And for two years, he took refuge in the house of an American Methodist minister. In any case, these men promulgated the idea of an Arab people, an Arab nation, united by language, culture and history. Again, remember language, primitive origins. these are prime ideas in nationalism.

And al-Bustani and al-Yaziji worked on the new Arabic translation of the “Bible” with the American Protestant minister and missionary, Cornelius Van Dyck, and they exalted the Arabic language in a way that Muslims in the Middle Ages had, but not so in later times. And al-Bustani composed the first modern multi-volume Arabic dictionary, the Muhit al-Muhit, the all-encompassing of the all-encompassing. And he helped to foster what we call today modern standard Arabic. That is the Arabic that is written and is read, but only spoken in the way that Latin would be spoken in the Middle Ages prior to Dante and others coming along and making vulgar Latin into Italian, and so forth. Up until that time, old French, old Italian, old Spanish, et cetera, were simply referred to as vulgar Latin. But the societies that do this, that have one written language and one spoken language, this is called di diglossia. These are diglossic societies. And this did not change. Modern standard Arabic became what classical Arabic had been. But people spoke in each country, in each region, different dialects, some of which are as different as one romance language is from another. And the person you see here, Jurji Zaydan, he was a prolific writer. He wrote a multi-volume history of the Arabs in which Islam played a key role, but it was not the essential mark of national identity.

And he edited a periodical Al-Hilal, The Crescent, which, of course, is very much an Islamic symbol, to further propagate his modern ideas. And I should note here that the word Arab had come, which originally was the people in Arabia at the time of Muhammad, and the Muslims who came out of Arabia and conquered this great empire. But within a century or two, as more and more people converted to Islam and many people in various regions adopted an Arabic dialect or the written language for higher purposes, the word Arab had come to mean, primarily, to indicate Bedouin. And that people, aside from their Confessional identity, were basically identified as being from somewhere, their hometown, their region. They were Halabi, Aleppo, Baghdadi, Masili, Egyptian, or actually it was used for someone from Cairo. Riffi in Morocco from the Reef Mountain area of the… No, these were the prime form of identity after the Confessional. And this cultural nationalism went even further when al-Yaziji in 1868 declared that Arabs should free themselves from the Ottoman yoke. Up until this time, it didn’t matter that the Sultan was not an Arab. He claimed also to be the successor to the Caliphs. He was a Muslim, therefore, that made it acceptable. But al-Yaziji now says, “No, they should free themselves from the Ottoman yoke.” And he even said that if he had an army, he would fight the saltan too and bring back Arab as a nation. Now, these new Syrian Christian Pan-Arabists were believers in modern science and Western universal values. They advocated the unity of the nation, the Tawhid, as they called it, which in Islam meant something very much else, the unity of God. And they emphasised the equality of its members irrespective of religious affiliation. They did, however, speak well of Islam and said it had a special role as an historical expression of the Arab nation, but it was not the primary mark of identity.

And I would just point out that this attraction of the idea of Arab nationalism for Christians in the Arab world, we can see a certain parallel with the attraction of socialism and communism in the late 19th and in the first half of the 20th century for Jews in Eastern Europe, because you could not become a pan-Slav. You would never be a Slav, you couldn’t. Mother Russia was closely associated with the Russian Orthodox Church. But a secular, quote, unquote, “International identity” that was being pushed by socialists and communists, this was something which Jews could free themselves from the mark of Cain, if you will. And this is one of the reasons why we shall see that Arab nationalism, that many of the leading thinkers of Arab nationalism, many of the Arab nationalist parties and movements were actually conceived of and headed by people of Christian origin. However, most Muslim Arabs didn’t buy this pan-Arabism. Many of them were outraged by Syrian Christians presuming to be teachers of Arab culture. And Arabic shall not be Christianized. , Arabic shall not be Christianized was a Muslim rallying cry following this. But I should also point out that the pioneers of the newspapers in the Arab world in the 19th century, men like Jurji Zaydan and so on, were Christians. We had one of the Egyptian Jewish nationalists, Yaqub Sanu, Abu Naddara, Mr. Four Eyes, but most of the great newspapers, Al-Ahram and so on in Egypt, should mention Jurji Zaydan moved to Egypt from Beirut in order to be able to express himself freely since Egypt was autonomous from the Ottoman Empire, and could express these Arab nationalist views more safely.

And a new and more powerful and widespread force did begin to emerge in the late 19th and earliest 20th century, and this was Pan-Islamic nationalism, which grew out of the ideas of the Islamic reformers and ideologues who rejected westernism. And you can imagine this did not attract Arabic-speaking Christians. This was a direction that was, if you will, conceived of by men like Jamal al-Din al-Afghani. Can I have the next slide, please? No, next one after these. There he is, Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, who died in 1897. Muhammad Abduh, can I have this one next one, please, an Egyptian who died in 1905. And the last one, Rashid Rida, who lives until 1935. And these men called for an Islamic revival. For them, Arab and Islamic weakness was due to the abandoning of the way of the ancestors, the aslaf, the forefathers, and thus they were called the Salafi. And they called for a return to pristine Islam, not for the adoption of Western science, political thought, philosophy and technology. They had to go back to the way of the prophet and his companions. And there were those who saw that this return to pristine Islam as having a concomitant Arab national revival. One such person, can I have that next picture, please, was Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi. He lived to about the age of 40 something, dies in 1902. He was a Syrian Muslim who saw the Arabs as best Muslim nation of all the Muslims. And he called for returning the Caliphate to the Arab Quraysh tribe in Arabia. In this sense, it fits in with Salafis, but with a very strong political bent. Secular Arab nationalism by no means disappeared. And after World War I, there came into existence even more radical social nationalist parties, again, founded by primarily Syrian Christians. For example, next one, please, this is actually, yes, for example, Baathism, the Baath Party, the Renaissance Party was founded by Michel Aflaq, whom you see here. He was Lebanese, studied at the Sorbonne in Paris, and conceived of a socialist Arab nation.

Again, not with confessional requirements. And this eventually, his party, became the ruling party in Saddam Hussein’s Iraq, and in Hafez al-Assad then Bashar al-Assad Syria. Sadam Hussein happened to be a Muslim, but the al-Assad family were Alawites, which were a breakaway like the Druze, really a breakaway independent religious sect from mainstream Islam, although they’re very careful not to say that. And yet another secular Arab nationalist movement in the post World War I era was the so-called Syrian Social Nationalist Party, founded by Antoun Saadeh, can I have that here again, a Christian. He envisaged what he called natural Syria, which was basically the entire Levant should be an Assyrian Arab national entity. Can I have the slide in the next one, please? Here is this huge area. This is, as you can see, it’s basically much of Levant that this was the natural Syria of the Arab nation. But this, of course, never came to fruition. I would just mention that other Christians went and founded secular nationalist groups. George Habash, for example, the founder of the radical popular front for the Liberation of Palestine. And back in 1967, he was also a Christian. So was Nayef Hawatmeh, the founder of the Democratic front for the Liberation of Palestine. He too was a Christian. There were still many others who were like that. And we could devote an entire session to each and every one of these Arab nationalist movements, both the secular and the Islamic. But our topic today was the roots of Arab nationalism. And these later movements were, one might say, what sprouted from those roots in their 19th century Christian missionary Beirut settings. And I will stop here. And now I’m willing to take questions or comments.

Q&A and Comments:

Okay, well, person, no sound, but now has sound. Let’s see, make more sense than where these people were.

Q: Why weren’t Muslims allowed to have a printing press?

A: Ah, very, very good. Very good question. As a off-the-cuff answer, I would say that the Islamic scribes in the end of the 15th century, when the Spanish Jews came in to the Ottoman Empire and into Morocco, that the scribal Union would’ve been put out of business. But I don’t think that’s the deepest answer. I think it is that Islam has a notion of religious innovation. And since the Arabic language was , the language of God and his angels, and since the time of the prophet, all Arabic texts, religious and otherwise, were handwritten that perhaps the idea that this was also, you know, forbidden innovation. By the way, Napoleon brought in a printing press when he came into Egypt in the 1790s, took it out with him when he left. And only the Turkish Khedive, actually it wasn’t Turkish, it was Albanian. Muhammad Ali does allow, around 1816, I don’t have the date in front of me, oppressed to be founded. But this was considered an innovation, and not to be accepted. But also I’m sure the scribes also saw that this would put them out of business.

I have a question here. It is interesting that although Islam forbids human images, the three Islamic founders allowed themselves to be photographed. Yes, but photography came to be generally accepted. And as we say, one of the Yeshivat phrases always was, “Where there’s a rabbinic will, there’s a halakhic way.” And that when religious authorities want something, they can have it.

Q: And Shelly Shapiro asks, “Are there any Arab Christians in the Middle East now? The Copts of Egypt have numbers, but no power.”

A: Yes, there are still Christians in Iraq. Their number went down considerably when Iraq got torn apart by civil wars. They had already gone down, the numbers began to decline already when Iraq became independent. It was a protectorate of Great Britain after World War I. But when it became independent, the Assyrian Christians who had backed the British in World War I wanted autonomy in northern Iraq. And in fact, were massacred by the new Iraqi Army, only two years, I believe, after the country becomes technically independent. But there still were large numbers of Christians, but they have been leaving steadily. Of course, the numbers of Christians in what basically is the Palestine mandate, also have been leaving continually. Places like Bethlehem was a Christian town, Ramallah was a Christian town, and most of the Christians have left. Part of that also comes with modernization. And I talked about the missionaries and other do-gooders, for example, like the Alliance Israelite Univereselle for Jews, brought in modern education, Christians and Jews avail themselves of these educational opportunities. And that gave them a mobility that the average semi-literate or illiterate Muslim did not have. And so you have Maronite Christians going into Africa, going into Latin America. The same with Jews who got modern educations. And again, there still are Christian communities, and there are none left in the Maghreb. They were taken care of by the Almohads, which I talked about in the long twilight. But in Levant, there still are large numbers of Christians in Lebanon. In Syria, actually, because the ruling Baath party is secular, actually, the Christians have been those who stayed there, have been supporters. The problem was that you had ISIS, the Daesh, the Islamic State that came in to Northern Iraq and in to Syria. And many, many of the Christians who were in those regions fled since then.

Q: Ah, yes, Shelly Shapiro has a very good question, which I’m giving another talk in July on antisemitism in the Arab, in the Islamic world. And her question is, “Did Christian missionaries bring along anti-Jewish feelings?”

A: 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.

Are there any other? Any others? Let’s see, oh, yes. Oh, I see. Someone said they’ll be all ears for that.

Q: Ah, “Why was the French the first language in Egypt if you were not an Arab?”

A: Ah, Samuel Denise. The French became the first real language of modern culture in the Islamic world, in part, because the Ottomans, as I said, brought in French military people to teach in their academies and so on. Egypt was a much more Europeanized country, also had a much larger European population, because of the Suez Canal. Remember, the Verdi had the premiere of Aida in Egypt, not in Italy, it was in Egypt. And in any case, the ties between the missionaries, the Catholic missionaries, many of them were French. In fact, the majority of them were French speakers, and the schools were French schools. And so too, for example, with the Alliance Israelite Univereselle, the great first international Jewish philanthropic organisation. But they established a network of schools starting in 1862 in Morocco, which by 1900 extended from Morocco all the way across to Iran. And all of these schools used French as the language of modern education. The British had used the term The White Man’s Burden in their colonial endeavours. For the French, it was the spread of civilization. And French, to them, was the language. And, as I said, we know of one Turkish-Jewish writer writing in the early 20th century writes that by 1900, you had over a hundred thousand people in the Ottoman Empire who could read, write, and think in French. Whereas you probably had, among non-Turks, a handful of people who knew Turkish. So, as I said, French became the premier language because of this activity. Thank you.

I see those who thanked me. I thank you for, of course, having attended.

Q: “When did this movement change to more radical Muslim nationalism?”

A: Ah, basically, the more radical Muslim nationalism, or Pan-Islamism, struck chords among the masses far earlier, and was always more widespread. However, the modernising elite were not pan-Islamic. Remember that Syria and Iraq were ruled by Baathists who were strictly secular. Saddam Hussein began to sort of adopt some Islamic identity when things were going bad for him, particularly with the war with Iran, and so on and so forth. And also you had when Nasser came to power, and the revolution of the Egyptian military that overthrew King Farouk, they also were secularists and promulgated a pan-Arab, not a pan-Islamic philosophy and identity. However, again, that went by the boards. And Sadat, for example, was a devout Muslim. He had the mark of someone who prays regularly, for example, on his forehead. But people like Nasser and so on, not at all. And there were other areas where you had secular nationalists, Tunisia. Now that has changed entirely with the new President. Algeria, and so on. But again, that is a different topic.

Q: And then I have from Gene Horowitz, the question, “You said that many of the people behind the movement were Christians. When did it change to Muslim orientation?”

A: What prompted the change was that the masses went for a more Muslim orientation. Or the movements that were sometimes founded by Christians, afterwards they were succeeded by Muslim leaders who tried to play both sides, but still trying to keep at least somewhat of the secular philosophy.

Q: Oh, and then James Levy asked, “How come the Christian Arabs are so nationalistic, and yet their numbers are decreasing?”

A: 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 I think I’ve gotten… Oh, wait. Oh, here at the very end.

Q: “Can you comment on the influence of the Western powers political presence in the Middle East on the development of Arab nationalism?”

A: Yes, I would just point out that one of the reasons, and this is another, as I said, all of these could be individual topics, but in the 20th century, the appeal of German national socialism and of the Nazi party was among, aside from the fact that it was militant, aside from the fact that the idea of ethnicity and so on were so important, but also Germany was the enemy of Britain and France who were the major colonial or protectorate powers. And, of course, the Germans worked very hard at spreading this as well. Radio Berlin had Arabic broadcasts every single day. We all know that, of course, those who are familiar with the Arab-Israeli conflict, the Mufti Hajj Amin al-Husayni, eventually takes refuge in Germany, organises the first Muslim SS group in the Balkans, in Bosnia and Herzegovina. And the Western powers had the effect, actually, of it’s not British and French nationalism that begins to get stronger and stronger. Also, I would just, and this’ll come in next talk with the antisemitism, how many of these ideas which were fostered by the German nationalists come into the Arab world and are adopted in 1920s and 30’s. Let’s see, I mentioned the Bethlehem. Yes, there were lots of Christians there. But, as you see, I was once in there for Christmas as well. But, of course, that’s really a thing of the past.

Q: Let’s see. Ah, “Can you tell us the difference between nationalism and patriotism?”

A: Yes, patriotism is the love of country and of the political entity that is the country. Nationalism, as I said, is race, language and primitive origins. And the country itself is actually secondary.

Ah, there’s interesting questions, now that I’m able to scroll down further.

Q: “Were the Sunnis or the Shiites more nationalistic?”

A: 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.

“And then when did,” let’s see.

Q: Honey Stallman asks, “When did Arab secularism give way to Islam?”

A: Already there was a tension between the two, going back to these figures that I pointed out like Rashid Rida and Muhammad Abduh, and so on, at the end of the 19th century already. And, by the way, these same men were against Islamic reformers. They felt that those people who wanted to remain religiously Muslim, but of a more liberal perspective, they felt these people totally misread the Islamic sources, and that the decline of their world was due to not being like the forefathers. I love Arab proverbs. The Arab Proverbs from the Middle Ages to modern times fill volumes, and very often saying very wise things which people don’t follow. And one of them was, I mentioned the Salafi, the ways of the ancestors. But there’s an Arab proverb that says, how does it go? “People in their own time are more like each other than they are like their forefathers.” But this was not the way they were going.

“I know this last one…” Ah, “I know it’s a bit later, but could you…” Oh, and I see it’s a colleague, actually. “It’s a bit later, but could you say a word or two more about the de-Christianization of the Middle East?” Oh, that is a actually a topic unto itself I could just say for the case of Turkey that even, remember Greece broke away from Turkey already in the 1830s, but there still was a very large Greek population in Anatolia, in Istanbul, in Edirne. And remember, this was all Greece at one time in ancient times. But now, when the Turks went for Turkification during World War II, they passed the Varlık Vergisi laws. These were laws that basically taxed non-Muslim business owners, and industrialists and so on, basically out of existence. And more and more, they found themselves leaving. Also, I didn’t get into this at all, but, for example, the Armenians, the victims of the first modern genocide, they were very much influenced by Protestant missionaries. They adopted an ethnic nationalism. The great historian, when I had the privilege of knowing when I was very young, Ali Kadri at the London School of Economics, he blames the missionaries, particularly the Protestant missionaries, for radicalising so many groups. I’m not sure I would blame them, but I would blame a good deal of western philosophical and political education at radicalising.

And this led, of course, I mean, the genocide of the Armenians, the many other groups, the killing of the Assyrians, the whole Simele, a whole town in northern Iraq was basically exterminated by the Iraqi army in early nine, I think it was 1932 or '34. But in any case, these all led, and, of course, Copts. And I would just also point out, and I’ll end it here, I think I’ve been going over my allotted time, that the Arab is… And, again, this could be a topic of another talk, the Arab-Israeli conflict. Although Arab nationalists of Christian origin sided with the Palestinians, and as I mentioned, the PFLP was founded by a Palestinian Christian, and so on. Nevertheless, as the Palestinian issue, anti-Zionist issue grew in the Arab world. And that was a good deal that was due to the Muftis propagandising, and so on. And again, that’s another topic. Very often anti-Jewish violence, as we see in Cairo in 1945, and again right after September 29th and the partition plan, anti-Jewish violence spills over into anti-Christian violence. And basically because there was this popular notion in Islam, , all Unbelief, that is members of Christians, Jews, Zoroastrians, et cetera, is one big religion. And therefore, an attack against Jews can easily turn in places like Cairo to an attack against the Greek Orthodox and the Copts. And this also led to de-Christianization. Remember, Egypt also had a huge Greek community, which almost completely disappeared. When I first worked in Egypt in 1971, one of the leading art dealers from major museums all over the world was an Egyptian Greek. And a year after we left Egypt, he left Egypt as well and settled in Cyprus. So in any case, those are all of the topics, and I thank you all for your attention.

And, yes, someone did note populism wins out, and, yes, look, I would just say as one more final note, which is from another webinar which was not with lockdown at all, but that if you’ll notice after the massacre that Hamas perpetrated on the 7th of October of last year, none of the major Arab countries criticised Israel at first when it attacked Gaza. In fact, many of them specifically spoke out against the Hamas killings and so on. King of Morocco, Morocco is a country where I have both family ties and professional intellectual ties, and the King of Morocco never said a word against Israel until over two months after the 7th of October when he said Israel was perhaps overdoing it, exaggerating in its response. And that was, of course, after he had marches of thousands of people in Marrakesh, in Casablanca, in Rabat. And that’s when you begin to see a change of voice, but not till then. So that’s one of the things though that Christians feel and that we’re afraid of, that the anti-Jewish sentiments could hurt them as well. And that certainly was true for the Copts of Egypt.

So again, thank you, one and all.