An Essay by the Book Review Editor
Eugene Rogan’s “The First World War and its Legacy in the Middle East” 1 and “The Emergence of Nationalism,” 2 by James McDougall are worth commenting on. Rogan’s essay surveys the internal dynamics of Arab society in the first two decades of the twentieth century as Western powers were constructing new forms of colonialism to control (read colonize) the spoils of the Ottoman Empire. McDougall’s essay tackles the diversity and complexity of nationalism in the Arab Middle Eastern and North African countries (MENA) and questions its viability as a force with which to reckon in the contemporary culture of the region. Both essays are part of Part II, “Formations,” in the groundbreaking modern history by Oxford University Press, titled The Oxford Handbook of the Contemporary Middle East and North African History. Edited by Amal Ghazal and Jens Hanssen, this new history of the MENA takes the longer view of the last hundred years of the region’s past to understand the present in the hope for a better, though unpredictable, future. The 2010-2011 and beyond demonstrations, uprisings, and demonstrations, etc. that began in Tunisia and spread to Egypt, Bahrain, Libya, and Yemen took the world by surprise. They have been termed the Arab Spring. To politicians, world and regional leaders, historians, intellectuals, and ordinary citizens, these uprisings and the ensued events shook mainstream perceptions to the core about the passivity of the Arab people. This Handbook assembles a roster of scholars and experts from around the globe who ascribe agency to ordinary people, the agents and makers of history. In 33 original essays, this new historiography of the MENA from below contests the conventional Oxbridge narration of history of the MENA that has dominated the scholarship until now. This is history at its best of “people power,” a contemporary inter-disciplinary history from a decolonial perspective that challenges the Eurocentric bias within the discipline of MENA studies.
Rogan offers an informative survey about the facts of the World War I (WWI) and the secret agreements between the French and the British, plus other powers. The WWI battles between the British forces and the Ottoman army across the MENA are extended to include Saudi Arabia and Yemen, to bring in the participation of Arab soldiers in the Arab Revolt of 1916. Rogan underscores the roles of the Ottomans and the Arab army in the war and contends that the issue of the Ottoman entry into the war has been sidelined in (Western) historiography, which has traditionally focused on the horrors of the Great War (in Europe). Having joined forces with Germany, the Ottoman Sultan launched war against the Allies as jihad, and many Muslims heeded his call. They arose against the British Empire as far as the Crown Colony of Singapore, in 1915. According to Rogan, the Ottoman Sultan moved “a European conflict into the First World War” (p. 95). Mobilizing close to 3 million fighters, the Ottomans succeeded in defeating British troops in the battles of Gallipoli and Kut (in Southern Iraq), which forced the British to retreat. Then, Britain refocusd on Egypt and secretly sought support of the Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, the Sharif of Mecca in Hijaz, known as the McMahon Correspondence. In return for the Anglo-Hashemite agreement, which promised the Sharif an independent Greater Syria under his rule, he aided and supported the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in 1916. Although Arab forces did not succeed against the Ottoman garrison at Medina, they advanced to the north, seizing Aqaba and moving northward to al-Azrak in Transjordan, targeting the Hijaz Railway in Medina and Maʿan. Refocusing on Egypt because of the strategic security of the Suez Canal for the war effort, British forces captured Sinai and Southern Palestine. By March 11, 1917, Baghdad was captured, and on November 2, 1917, the Balfour Declaration was signed secretly by Foreign Secretary Arthur Balfour, promising to aid Zionists in the establishment of a Jewish National Home in Palestine. On December 9, 1917, Sir Edmund Allenby, with the Egyptian Expeditionary Force, entered Jerusalem. The mandate for Palestine was formalized by the League of Nations in 1922 and lasted until May 14, 1948. The day after the withdrawal of British forces, Israel declared its establishment on May 15, 1948. Rogan falls short of calling the Mandate a colonial project. But he does speak of the big impact of WWI on the lives of the Ottoman and Arab people, fighters and civilians alike. Only half of the 3 million Ottoman soldiers returned home; 804,000 were killed; 400,000 wounded; and 250,000 taken prisoner (p. 95). In addition to the trauma of the war and having to feed the armed forces, disease spread; ports were blockaded; and famine ensued. Farming suffered from the locust plague and severe drought. The region’s economy was devastated. These conditions tested Arab loyalty to Constantinople, especially since the Young Turk rule reacted harshly to Arabist dissenters. Arrests, hangings, and exile, as well as summary arrests, were instituted against them. The Ottoman spoils were secretly divided between France and Britain—known as the Sykes-Picot Agreement (1916)—who divided the land arbitrarily on the map, created artificial borders that lacked legitimacy, and invented the Mandate System without consulting the Arabs. Rogan emphasizes that imperial policies destabilized the region, resulting in many stateless peoples, most notable among whom are the Kurds and the Palestinians. A hundred years after WWI, the modern Middle Eastern states continue to suffer from the conflicts created by the Great War; these have lasted through the remaining decades of the twentieth century and into the twenty-first century.
McDougall addresses the emergence of nationalism in oppositional terms to the conventional paradigm of “awakening” or the rising “national consciousness,” stances that fell into defending or attacking the ideology. While conceding that “national consciousness” during the 1950s and 1960s provided fertile ground for decolonization and revolutionary politics, he posits the idea that there was a shift in the 1970s and 1980s. Intellectuals and writers refocused on self-critique, especially of Islamism and the authoritarian regimes that took hold of the newly independent nation-states. According to Ghazal and Hanssen, many intellectuals in Cairo, Beirut, and Baghdad voiced criticisms of the Arab governments in power though they faced state terrorism, assassinations, and imprisonment; they advocated for a return to the nineteenth century Nahda. Moreover, although since the 1940s and 1950s, many Arab countries had demonstrated improvements in literacy levels and education, and women’s rights and professional employment, the four reports of the United Nations Development Programme (UNDP) in 2003, 2004, 2005, and 2009 indicated the increasing poor conditions in the MENA regarding knowledge, political freedom, gendered economics and legal inequality, and lack of human security. The reports concluded that the collaborations between the authoritarian regimes and conservative religious leaders were “unamicable to human development.” 3 A few scholars have even pronounced the “end” of nationalism in the Arab world. However, McDougall suggests that the persistence of nationalism as a strong mass politics warrants recognition. He adds that new scholarship is examining the multiplicities of nationalisms, memories, and imaginaries in relation to the agents who engage these domains. Nationalism, he emphasizes, is diverse and dynamic since its inception in Europe in the late eighteenth century through 1848 and beyond. Then, the issues that played out are “liberalism and constitutionalism; popular sovereignty, social revolution; common language and homeland; heredity, religion, and race” (p. 129). When these ideas spread from Europe to the Ottoman Empire and the MENA by 1915, they developed along the same lines as Europe; but eventually new forms evolved, a synthesis of sorts, driven by specific forces and impersonal agencies, such as capital, communications, education, and the state.
Arab nationalism, McDougall clarifies, is not a reaction against European interventions or the establishment of the state of Israel; nor is it a rebirth of a subconscious identity. He states that the nationalisms created in the various Arab states from within the context of empire are informed by the intersectionality of the social, economic, and cultural changes in the MENA, as well as changes in communication, markets, and mobility. Also, specificities and developments of colonialisms across the MENA need to be considered. For example, while France occupied and created protectorates in Tunisia and Morocco, Algeria was singled out as a French settler colony that became part of France. Syria and Lebanon were given to France as mandates, in which small statelets were created along ethnic and religious lines. Italy landed its troops in Libya and ruled it as a settler colony. Britain, which had occupied Egypt in 1882, granted it a protectorate status and eventually nominal independence, in 1922. The British proceeded to rule Iraq, Transjordan, and Palestine as mandates, dealing with each differently. The mandate in Palestine concluded with the founding of the settler colonial state of Israel; Transjordan was granted a protectorate position in 1921 and independence in 1946; the British were given mandatory powers over Iraq in 1921; it remained under British authority until 1932, after which time the Hashemite Kingdom of Iraq was created, which stayed in power until 1958. Thus, the divergencies in ruling and containing resistance and maintaining order and security, as empire put it, varied across the different countries. Other domains that are part of the picture are the demographics and political parties, ethnicities and religious affiliations, literacy and levels of education, and communication channels within the different countries.
In terms of resistance to colonialism in its various modes, McDougall proposes that resistance was varied and complex as well. Not only was there resistance against the newly established borders, regardless of religious affiliations and ethnic divides. But there was also resistance to the European branch of rational nationalism that was being promoted by the colonizers to implement their schemes of control and dominance. In broad terms, nationalists sought a unified people. The idea of a national waṭan flourished despite colonization. We learn that tIndigenous peoples and scholars have debated two ideas in relation to nationalism: waṭaniyya and qawmiyya. While the former focuses on territorial patriotism, homeland, and its people, the latter refers to pan-Arabism, as advocated by Satiʿ al-Husri, Baʿthism, and Nasserism. Although the forces seem oppositional, they are, in McDougall’s understanding, “twin dimensions of the same, shared language” (p. 138). Since the 1970s, historians have argued for the “end” of pan-Arabism, with it being replaced by radical Islamism. The confrontations between the two camps were harsh, but the opposition is over-simplified. Rather, he puts forward the idea that there are basic tensions between the politics and the culture of nationalism. Frantz Fanon’s distinction between nationalism and national consciousness is an apt analysis to which McDougall refers. In “National Culture,” 4 Fanon states that that it is political nationalism that sees the formation of the nation-state as its end, while national consciousness is more inclusive of other spheres, such as the cultural, economic, and gender issues. National consciousness is not homogenizing. It acknowledges difference, diversity, includes the role of women in the national struggle, and looks toward humanity at large. McDougall is in agreement with Fanon, citing the role of Algerian women in the Algerian Revolution against French settler colonization.
He goes on to note that the gender issue in the MENA had surfaced before the founding of the nation-state. For example, 1919 Egypt and 1930s Palestine witnessed women’s resistance to patriarchy and colonialism. Women’s activities were empowered by the establishment of publishing houses, journalistic platforms, and media networks, such as the daily newspapers, weekly magazines, and the radio. The radio in particular allowed the spread of manipulative language of Arabis across the region. Patriarchy and social conservatism, however, pushed gender equality to the sidelines in favor of preserving and protecting the national community (p. 139). McDougall goes on to say that current scholarship and debate tackle these complexities and tensions within nationalism and political practice, paying attention to people’s ideas and mobility. These new perspectives add layers of analysis to counter the hollow rhetoric of authoritarian, repressive regimes. Time has been instrumental, according to McDougall, in enabling the role of nationalism in the production of interpretations of the past and future. An ongoing rewriting, recasting the past anew, has been happening, one in which social memories and imaginaries of history are re-embedded, to understand the present and creatively work toward the future, though without pinpointing a clear resolution for the question of modernization. He concludes the article by stating that the 2011 Uprisings demonstrated the popular aspirations and hopes for change across several countries in the MENA, each with its local specificity of national symbols and shared aspirations. The conflicts, counter revolutions, subsequent repressions and assassinations, and civil wars in Egypt, Tunisia, and Syria are also evidence of the fault-lines within different nation-states. “Both the force and frailty of nationalism have remained significant factors in the contemporary history of the Middle East” (p. 140).