ISLAM AND ARAB NATIONALISM

Many otherwise good and sincere Muslims believe that by supporting the modern Arab national movement, they are promoting the cause of their faith. To them Arab nationalism represents the revolt of the Arab people against foreign domination. They say that since the Arab world is the heart of Dar al-Islam, the struggle for Arab unity is an essential step towards the eventual unity of all Muslims.

If these well-meaning believers were informed as to the true origin, history and ideology of modern Arab nationalism, they would never confuse it with Islam.

It will surprise many to learn that Arab nationalism first became organized more than a century ago in Lebanon under the direct influence and patronage of American Protestant missionaries. The outstanding pioneers of the movement were two Christian scholars, Nasif Yazeji (1800-1871) and Butrus Bustani (1819-1883) whose motto was: “Patriotism is an article of faith.”

After reading Arab history through the lenses of Western scholarship, they reached the conclusion that the essence of Arabic civilization is independent from Islam. Ibrahim Yazeji continued in the footsteps of his father, sky-rocketing to fame when he composed a long, inflammatory ode to Arab patriotism eulogizing the glories of the Arab “race” and inciting rebellion against Turkish rule.

At this point it is necessary to add a few words clarifying the relationship between the Arabs and the 100 Turks. When the power of the Ottoman Empire was supreme, the Arabs were treated on the basis of equality.

Revolt of Muslim against Muslim was unthinkable. Under the “Millet” system, Christian minorities enjoyed religious and cultural autonomy. Unfortunately the entire picture changed as the Ottoman Empire decayed and Turkish leaders replaced the creed of Islam with the most rabid, fanatical aspects of modern Western nationalism. Only after this calamity do we find the Turkish political leaders displaying such an intense contempt for everything Arab.

The Arab nationalist movement received its greatest impetus at the American University of Beirut. Founded by missionaries in 1866 and originally known as the Syrian Protestant College, its influence was soon felt throughout the Middle East. The American University of Beirut can rightly claim the dubious distinction as one of the most powerful weapons in the arsenal of the enemies of Islam. At compulsory daily chapel services as well as in class meetings and discussion groups, Muslim students are subject to constant indoctrination against Islamic values in the most clever, subtle manner. So effective is this anti-Islamic propaganda that by the time these students are ready to graduate, few, if any, are practicing Muslims. Worst of all, it is these same graduates who have for generations assumed the leadership of the Arab world.

One of the first adjacent countries to be affected by this poison was Egypt where many graduates of the American University of Beirut, both nominal Christians and Muslims, sought refuge from Turkish “des101 potism.” Here they were warmly welcomed by Khedive Ismail, the most zealous of the Westernizers whose motto was-“Egypt is a part of Europe!”

The earliest crusader for modern nationalism in Egypt was Lutfi as-Sayyid who was known by his disciples as “the teacher of the generation.”

He urged his countrymen to derive their cultural inspiration from the Pharaohs. “We have no sympathy for pan-Islamism,” he said, “because it is religious and we believe that nationalism and expediency are our only guides for political action.” A famous colleague of Lutfi as-Sayyid was Sa’ad Zaghlul under whose sway disappeared the last trace of Islamic influence from Egypt’s political life. His motto, “Religion for God and country for the people,” has remained the creed of Arab nationalists to this day.

The prevalent view that Muslims must support the Arab nationalist movement to fight foreign imperialism is no doubt the most deceptive fallacy in their propaganda tactics.

A careful study of recent history in the Arab world reveals that far from opposing foreign imperialism, the nationalists have done everything to encourage it.

The most conspicuous example, among numerous others, is the correspondence between Sharif Hussain of the Hejaz and McMahon in 1915 where the latter promised the former a united Arab state from the Euphrates to the Nile if the Arabs would fight with the British against the Turks. Consequently Sharif Hussain committed a political blunder of the first magnitude when he ordered the Arabs during World War I to side with British imperialism against their Tur102 kish Muslim brethren. Thus when misfortune lay the Turks low, the Arabs stabbed them in the back. Both Arabs and Turks have suffered ever since as a result and will continue to suffer so long as the enmity between the two peoples remain. It is safe to assert that had the Arabs set aside their grievances, no matter how justified, and united with their Turkish brethren against the greater enemy, we would have witnessed no Sykes-Picot Agreement and no Balfour Declaration. The Arab world today would be strong and united. Zionism would be extinct and Palestine ours. There would not be more than a million refugees eking out their miserable lives on foreign dole.

Instead they would be living peacefully and happily in their ancestral villages and towns.

It is unlikely if Mustafa Kemal Ataturk would ever have been able to assume power. Now Sharif Husain was indeed an astute politician. Judging from the previous behavior of British imperialism, he certainly could not have been so naive as to expect McMahon’s promises to be kept. It is unlikely if he were at all surprised, when at the end of World War I, the French and British divided the spoils of the Ottoman Empire between them. For serving the cause of British imperialism, Sharif Husain was richly rewarded. His son, Amir Faisal, was set on the throne of Iraq while his other son, Abdullah, became King of Jordan. Both enjoyed the magnanimous “protection” of Great Britain. Their slogan was-“The Arabs were Arabs even before Muhammad and Moses!”

The tragedy of Palestine is the tragedy of the entire Muslim world. The nationalists gain the most wide-spread sympathy among the Muslims of all 103 origins by setting themselves up as the chief defenders of Arab rights in Palestine. They have written more voluminous material and devoted more elaborate oratory to this than any other subject. Yet what do we find? Amir Faisal amicably negotiating with Chaim Weizmann and other top-ranking Zionists who were determined to make “Palestine as Jewish as England is English.”

In the decades that followed, the Zionists grew more and more powerful, thanks to many other Arabs of his ilk who reaped enormous profits by selling their land to the Jews. In October 1949 Dr. Zurayk, former Syrian Minister to Washington and rector of the Syrian University in Damascus, published a book about Palestine entitled The Meaning of Disaster.

He writes:

The Jews of Israel are living in the present and look forward to the future while we Arabs still dream of the past. . . . . . . There must be a new society involving a real revolution in the Arab way of thinking and acting.

This society must be democratic and, above all, progressively-minded. To achieve these goals, the following are necessary:

1. The complete elimination of Islamic influences from the State.

2. Emphasis in our educational systems upon the practical and experimental sciences, and

3. Open-mindedness towards the spiritual and intellectual, as well as the material, aspects of Western civilization.

The above quotation eloquently expresses the prevailing view of those nationalists who believe that in order to fight the Zionists, it is necessary to become like them.

In order that there be no confusion left in any 104 mind as to the true relationship between modern Arab nationalism and Islam, we shall let the following quotations speak for themselves.

On the subject of the Arabic language, Ahmad Khaki in the Bulletin of the Egyptian Education Bureau, The Teaching of Arabic, in the May 1947 issue expressed a view which is all too common among the nationalists.

The divergency between the spoken colloquial Arabic of Egypt and the classical written language of the Quran is so great that most of our school children speak and think in one way while they read and write in another. Although the two channels of language, the colloquial and the classical, may meet in most vocabularies, the grammatical rules governing the construction of the written tongue necessitates so many inflections and inversions when spoken as to make the classical Arabic of the Quran incomprehensible to an Egyptian ten-year-old.

So long as colloquial Arabic is the language spoken in the home and so long as it is a medium by which a majority of the subjects in the school curriculum are taught, it will always be the principal living language.

The classical Arabic of the Quran stands alone as an unwanted luxury.

Our young people will not tolerate such a luxury and if it is forced upon them, they will not care whether they acquire mastery over it or not.

Shafik Ghorbal, Director of the Institute of Higher Arabic Studies of the Arab League in Cairo writes the following in his essay: “The Ideas and Movements in Islamic History,” which appeared in the recent book, Islam: The Straight Path, The Ronald Press (New York 1958).

(During the Middle Ages) both Muslims and the Christians …… sought to bring as much as possible of the worldly affairs of their communities under the rule of Divine Law 105 and to make effective what their faiths teach about the origin and destiny of human society. It is generally admitted, however, that the realization of this hope has always been imperfect and even undesirable …… The realization of this hope of a society founded upon religion has been as much of a failure in Islamic society as in Western Christian society …… The real difference between the Islamic and Western societies has been the tendency in the Islamic world to condemn or ignore the secular factors. One of the consequences of this (mistaken) attitude is the absence of terms in the Arabic language for the many human activities and relationships such as church, secular, lay, ecclesiastical, state, political, social.

Such key terms sharply differentiating the religious from the secular do not exist or are rendered as approximately as possible although educated Arabs are all aware of what these words stand for …… (pp. 42-43).

Since the beginning of the last century Islamic society has found itself in a critical stage of its development. The period of a hundred and fifty years which began with the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 witnessed the merging of our Islamic society into the world-wide modern society of the present era ……. To become aware of these implications is in my view the greatest single problem of the Islamic society of our day ……. The influence of the West has been so great that even when the Islamic peoples regained their political independence, they have found that a return to the traditional (Islamic) way of life was not possible, even if it were desirable. It cannot be overemphasized that such a return is not desirable, even when lip-service is paid to the (out-moded) traditions of the past (p. 78).

In another recent book, The Ideas of Arab Nationalism, Hazem Zaki Nuseibah, Under-Secretary of the Ministry of the National Economy in Jordan, has this to say:

As a nation in the modern, secular sense, the Arabs have to begin from scratch. In fact, they have to decide¹ 106 who an Arab is.

When religion was the basis of life, an all-embracing value system prescribed the norms, the standards and the criteria of good behavior. These criteria were accepted and applied to all times and places. Thus to cite one example, Umayyad rule is almost universally disparaged in the Islamic historical tradition on account of its supposedly secular orientation.

Quite apart from the fact that most of these historical works were written during the Abbasid period and could not therefore escape the charge of partisanship, there is no denying the fact that the Umayyads outraged the accepted norms of Arab Muslim life because of their secular, if not sacrilegious activities.

A modern Arab nationalist would have to reassess and reinterpret the historical verdict of his forefathers on the record of the Umayyads. In the light of modern nationalist categories, what was once condemned in the Umayyads as villainous secularism must now be lauded as praiseworthy nationalism for the foundation of Umayyad policy was the Arab state principle and Arab fortunes went down with the demise of the Umayyads (pp. 61-62).

The next passage which we shall quote from the sixth chapter of Dr. Zurayk’s book National Consciousness, is an eloquent illustration how the nationalists distort Islamic history to suit their own purpose:

Muhammad was not only the Prophet of Islam but also the architect of Arab unity. Some might say that the bond of religion at that time was predominant over the bond of nationalism and that Islam was stronger than Arabism.

The answer is that it could not have been otherwise in the Middle Ages and this is equally true both in the Islamic East and the Christian West. … But in spite of this, we find a strong Arab consciousness even in the first phase (of Islamic history) when religious sentiment was still at its boiling point. For the Muslims treated the Christians of Taghlib (an Arab tribe) and other (Christian) Arabs more leniently than the non- 107 Arab Christians and some of the Christian (Arab) tribes participated in the early campaigns on the side of the Muslims. This Arab consciousness became stronger following contacts with the non-Arab races …… It intensified further as Arabs (of all faiths) rallied together to repel the attacks of Persians, Turks and other peoples …… If we take into consideration the intellectual environment of the Middle Ages when religious sentiments predominated over every phase of life, we find in these inchoate manifestations, fitting seeds for the Arab’s national life. These seeds have been growing until in the present day, the bond of nationalism is supreme over every other …….. (pp. 128-132).

Let those Arabs who regard the adoption of secular nationalism as the salvation of their people, ponder long over these prophetic words of Ibn Khaldun:

The Arabs are incapable of creating a basis of political unity and stability unless inspired by the Divine Revelation of a Prophet or a follower thereof.

This is because their fierce character, pride, roughness and jealousy of one another, especially in political matters, makes them the most difficult of all peoples to lead since their wishes concord but rarely. Should they, however, adopt the religion of a Prophet or a follower thereof, they have an internal restraint and their pride and jealousy are curbed so that it becomes easy to unite and lead them …… For religion drives out roughness and haughtiness and restrains jealousy and competition. Thus, should there arise amongst them a prophet who calls upon them to follow the ways of God, eschew evil, cling to virtue and unite their wills in support of righteousness, their union becomes perfect and they achieve victory and domination.

(The Muqaddimah, Vol. I, p. 273).