The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (16 page)

Even in Egypt, the Western European type of patriotism had only a limited appeal and was much modified by the impact of older and deeper loyalties. It had still less appeal in Iran and the Ottoman Empire, which were ruled by established dynasties upheld by traditional Islamic loyalty. Iran was a country inhabited by a nation with a long and distinguished history, marked off from its neighbors by its language and its Shiite religion. Yet despite the beginnings of a patriotic movement in literature and a nascent interest in the glories of ancient Iran, the majority of Persians seem to have retained a primarily Islamic-albeit Shiite-identity and loyalty and spoke of their country as the "lands of Islam." Amid the mixed population of the Ottoman Empire, patriotism-that is, Ottoman patriotismhad even less chance of success. All over the Middle East, the essential prerequisites of the Western European type of state and loyalty were lacking. There was nothing like the legal and territorial nationality of Great Britain and Switzerland, with their long traditions of ordered liberty and common identity; nothing like the political and centralist patriotism of France, resting on an ancient identity of statehood, country, language, and culture, and infused from the time of the Revolution with new and passionate libertarian ideals. Amid the ethnic confusion, political quietism, and religious collectivism of the Middle East, there seemed little prospect of their emerging.

The ever-fertile continent of Europe had, however, more than one example to offer to its neophytes and disciples elsewhere. In central and eastern Europe in the first half of the nineteenth century, there were no well-defined and old established nation-states like England, France, or Spain. Instead, there were nations and peoples lost in polyglot dynastic empires, divided into small principalities, or subject to alien rule. There were Germans, but no Germany; Poles, but no Poland; Italians, but no Italy; Hungarians, but only a shadow of Hungary. To these peoples, patriotism of the Western European type had little appeal, for it could only bind them to dynastic or foreign masters and perpetuate divisions that were becoming unacceptable. Their deepest loyalty was given not to state or country, but to the nation or people, and was expressed not in patriotism, but in nationalism. The point was made with characteristic vigor and clarity by L. B. Namier:

Here it was not the state that moulded nationality, but a preexistent nationality which postulated a State. The German concept of nationality is linguistic and "racial," rather than political and territorial.... The highest forms of communal life became the basis of West European nationalisms, the myth of the barbaric horde that of German nationalism.'

"The myth of the barbaric horde" is a vivid phrase that can be expressed in Arabic in one word, qawmiyya.

This kind of nationalism was concerned first with independence, unity, and power and only secondarily, if at all, with individual freedom. "One reason for dissatisfaction," wrote Prince Chlodwig zu Hohenlohe-Schillingsfiirst in 1847,

is the nullity of Germany vis-a-vis of other states.... It is sad and humiliating not to be able to say proudly abroad: "I am a German" ... but to have to say: "I am a Kurhesse, Darmstadter, Biickeburger; my Fatherland was once a great powerful country, but is now split into thirty-eight fragments."

Most supporters of pan-Arabism would have recognized and shared the feeling that inspired this remark; most of them would probably also have been willing to endorse the saying of the German liberal leader Bassermann in 1849: "If I knew the unity and future greatness of Germany were to be attained through a temporary renunciation of all the freedoms, I should be the first to submit to such a dictatorship.i'

This kind of nationalism-romantic, subjective, often illiberal and chauvinistic, contemptuous of legal loyalties, and neglectful of personal freedom-corresponded much more closely to conditions in the collapsing polities of the Middle East. It also appealed to much older and deeper instincts of tribal identity, loyalty, and pride. In time, the new ethnic nationalism awoke an overwhelming response among its peoples. As in the countries of its origin, it has aroused passionate loyalties and evoked great efforts and achievements. But it has also again led to the loss-one might even say to the abandonment and renunciation-of political freedom.

The new ethnic nationalism came from central and eastern Europe, through several channels. The first carriers were probably the Hungarian and Polish refugees who went to Turkey after the unsuccessful revolution of 1848. Several of them stayed permanently, embraced Islam, and held important posts in the Ottoman service. One of them was Count Constantine Borzccki, later Mustafa Jelaleddin Pasha, who in 1869 published a book in Istanbul, in French, called Les Turcs anciens et modernes. The main part of the book consists of a report and recommendations to the sultan on the current problems of the empire. There is also a historical section, including a survey, based on European orientalist publications, of the earlier history of the Turkic peoples, in which great stress is laid on their positive and creative role. Borzecki is at pains to prove that the Turks are a white race, akin to the peoples of Europe and belonging to what he calls the "Touro-Aryan" race.

Count Borzccki's transposition of Polish nationalism into a Turkish mode was supported by themes borrowed from the works of European Turcology. Some knowledge of the findings of this branch of orientalist scholarship was reaching the Turks through various channels, with significant effects on their conception of their national identity and place in history. The Turks, even more than the Persians or Arabs, had forgotten their pre-Islamic past and had sunk their identity in Islam. The Turcologists-accidentally and incidentally, for the most part-helped restore it to them and launch a new movement, which later came to be known as pan-Turkism. Its main strength was at first not among the Turks of Turkey but among the Turkic subject peoples of the Russian Empire loosely, collectively, and inaccurately called Tatars. In their attitudes toward Russia, they had gone through much the same phases and moods as had the Muslims in India and Egypt toward Britain-sullen withdrawal, response and reform, reaction and rejection. In the schools and universities of Russia, Tatar intellectuals had studied the ancient history and literature of their people and had acquired a sense of pride and identity; they had also encountered the mystical pan Slav nationalism of their masters and reacted against it with a panTurkism of their own.

Tatar exiles and emigres from the Russian Empire brought these ideas to Turkey. At first they encountered a cool reception among the Ottoman Turks, who saw no reason to adopt a doctrine that would disrupt the multinational empire over which they ruled. The great Turkish poet Mehmet Akif was especially vehement against ethnic nationalism, which he saw as fundamentally unpatriotic and irreligious. But times were changing. The loss of province after province in Ottoman Europe to independent national states reduced the scope and indeed the purpose of Ottomanism; the departure of the non-Turkish peoples increased the relative and absolute importance of the Anatolian Turkish core of the empire that remained. The idea began to gain favor of seeking a new base of identity, not the crumbling, polyglot empire of the Ottomans, but a new unity based on the mighty and multitudinous Turkish peoples stretching from the Aegean across Asia to the China Sea.

These ideas were suppressed under Abdiilhamid. They burst into the open after the revolution of 1908 and began to acquire considerable support among the Young Turks. Like the Egyptians, the Turks began to seek sustenance in their past, but it was the past of the Turks, not of Turkey, that interested them. The bounds of historical inquiry were pushed back beyond the Islamization of the Turks to the ancient history of the Turkic peoples in their Central and East Asian homelands. There was still no interest in the preTurkish history of Turkey-in Byzantium or Troy or the ancient states of Asia Minor. This did not come until a generation later.

Turkism is thus a form of nationalism, not of patriotism. The focus of loyalty was not the amorphous Ottoman Empire or the effete Ottoman state, but the vigorous Turkish family of nations, most of whom lived beyond the frontiers of Turkey, "the last independent fragment of the Turkish world," as a pan-Turkist once called it. In 1914 Turkey found itself at war with two great allies against Russia, the imperial power that ruled over most of the Turkic lands and peoples. For the first time, there seemed a serious possibility of achieving the pan-Turkish dream. In the words of the poetsociologist Ziya Gokalp,

After a period of discouragement caused by the defeats of the Ottoman armies in the field, hope flared again after 1917, when the outbreak of revolution and civil war in Russia and the collapse of Russian authority in Central Asia and Transcaucasia seemed to bring the moment of Turkic liberation and unity very near. The leaders of the Turkish republic, which emerged from the ruins of the Ottoman Empire, avoided such entanglements and discouraged such ambitions, preferring instead to concentrate on the immense task of rebuilding their ruined homeland. During the Second World War, there was a brief revival of pan-Turkish propaganda. It was due in the main to Nazi instigation and encouragement and was intended as a weapon in the German war against the Soviet Union. But apart from a few radical right-wing intellectuals, it won little support and disappeared after the defeat of Nazi Germany. The breakup of the Soviet Union and the emergence of five independent Turkic republics reopened the issue, and offered new challenges to the one Turkish state that had never lost its independence and was seen by many as a model of modernization and democracy.

Some Egyptians showed an increasing interest in the idea of representative government for the nation, which was still further stimulated by the Persian and Turkish constitutional revolutions. The Organic and Electoral Laws of 1913 and the Constitution of 1923 were stages in the development of such a program. Their loyalty was to Egypt, patriotic rather than nationalist. They took pride in their Arabic language and culture and in their Islamic religion, but rejected both Arabism and Islamism as the focus of identity and loyalty. For the Arabs of Asia-those of them who had not settled in Egypt-they felt a sympathetic interest based on historical and cultural links, but no common political bond. Their attitude might be described as corresponding roughly to that of an American toward England or, better still, that of a Mexican, proud and conscious of his Aztec past, toward Spain. Mustafa Kamil even condemned the first stirrings of pan-Arabism as a British plot aimed against the Ottoman Empire and caliphate.

This kind of secular, liberal patriotism drew its leaders and spokesmen chiefly from the new professional and semiprofessional class of lawyers, officials, teachers, and journalists. Because of both their education and their function, they were the least traditional and most Westernized of all elements in Egyptian society. For this very reason, they remained isolated from the majority of the Egyptian people, for whose resentments they provided, for a while, an outlet and an instrument, but for whom their aspirations and their ideologies were alien and meaningless. Their failure, disastrous and final, came when their program of national sovereignty and consti tutional government was fulfilled, thus revealing its irrelevance to Egyptian facts and its insufficiency for Egyptian needs. Liberal, secular patriotism languished and died during the bitter struggles of the 1940s. Its corpse was incinerated on 26 January 1952-Black Saturday, when the mob burned the center of Cairo and destroyed some buildings, a society, and a regime. Among the claimants to the inheritance at that time, two predominated: the new pan-Islamism of the Muslim Brotherhood, and the ethnic and communal nationalism of the pan-Arabs, which was spreading from Asia.

Some of the more exuberant exponents of modern Arab nationalism have at various times traced its origins back to Muhammad `Ali, to Saladin, to the caliph `Umar, and to Hammurabi king of Akkad. Without attaching too much importance to such flights of fancy, it must be said that the Arab sense of separate identity is very old and deeply rooted. In pre-Islamic and early Islamic times, the Arabs had a strong ethnic and aristocratic feeling, which, in the cosmopolitan Islamic empire, gave way to a kind of cultural selfawareness based on the common possession of the sacred and scriptural Arabic language. As the philologist al-Tha`alibi (d. 1038) put it:

Whoever loves the Prophet loves the Arabs, and whoever loves the Arabs loves the Arabic language in which the best of books was revealed ... whomsoever God has guided to Islam ... believes that Muhammad is the best of Prophets ... that the Arabs are the best of peoples ... and that Arabic is the best of languages.'

The justified pride of the Arabs in their magnificent language and in the rich and splendid literature it enshrines found frequent expression over the centuries. Arabism as apolitical movement, howeveras a belief that the speakers of Arabic form a nation with national rights and aspirations-dates only from the late nineteenth century, and it was for long confined to small and unrepresentative groups, most of them Christian. The overwhelming majority of Arabs remained faithful to the Ottoman Empire until it was destroyed. The Arabs were Muslim subjects of a Muslim empire. A popular, national movement such as those that impelled the Christian Serbs and Greeks to revolution and liberty did not and could not arise among them. The small groups of intellectuals who preached an Arab renascence found little response; even the British-sponsored revolt in Arabia was neither as successful in its appeal nor as wholehearted in its purposes as the official legend suggests.