The Syrian Civil War: A Contextualization (Part 1)

“Here is the East in its pristine confusion”

Asked about the resurgence of ISIS, Obama offered this in January 2014:

“The analogy we use around here sometimes—and I think it’s accurate—is: if a JV team puts on Lakers uniforms, that doesn’t make them Kobe Bryant.”

You could say a lot about this comment. You could say, from a strictly semiotic standpoint, “Obama really was our first black president,” or, less academically, “this kind of sounds like that Dril tweet.” You could point out how, somewhat ironically, ISIS would make the varsity team not long after this remark, or that, besides the fact that Kobe Bryant really wasn’t such a good player by 2014 (in fact, he tore his achilles the year prior), the kind of reckless, inefficient abandon with which he played actually was pretty ISIS-like.

It is easy to, in keeping with the NBA analogy, dunk on Obama for this remark, but Obama didn’t have such an easy job. From the perspective of a US president, Middle Eastern affairs had lost all illusion of legibility by the mid-2010s. With Saddam Hussein out of the picture, there was no longer a singular, readily identifiable villain with hypothetical WMDs. And with the Arab Spring ebbing, the end of history had been delayed yet again. What was left was a diffuse network of transnational jihadists operating amid the backdrop of bad-but-better-than-ISIS governments. The US seemed to arrive again at a harsh conclusion about the Middle East: there are no solutions, only tradeoffs.

At the core of this new geopolitical reality was the lone holdout from the Arab Spring, Syria, where, after thirteen years of civil war, the dictator Bashar al-Assad fled months ago, to relatively little fanfare.

Because this is a blog, and not a dreadfully boring publication, I will share a story. When I was back home in the US in October, I went to the gym and met a friend from high school. He then introduced me to his friend, who was shipping out to Syria the next day. And admittedly, when hearing this, I think my default reaction was something like, “Huh, that’s still a thing.”

Of course, it is always reassuring to see strapping young men (he could squat many plates) occupying every reach of our American Empire, as the esteemed Dr. Cornel West put it so elegantly. But truthfully, I didn’t know what this guy was doing. Was he there to help tame jihadists? Intercept Iranian missiles? Finally, at long last, get the oil? Did the US even care about Assad anymore?

So I asked him, “What are you doing in Syria?”

And he said, “I don’t even know.”

Here is not a personal account but two impressions, in short succession: a man in an orange jumpsuit rests on his knees in the desert; a man in a black suit stands next to him, Bowie knife in hand, and proceeds to lop his head off. A video of the event is published online. It is not the first such video, but it is an escalation of the genre—not grainy, but amply pixelated; not raw footage, but treated with meticulous post-production. It is one of the most horrific productions in the history of humanity, broadcast over a site founded by American entrepreneurs. Circa writing this, various Qatari-backed expeditions are searching for the bones of this orange jump-suited man, among others.

Another: a boat of Arabs lands; outrage ensues. Politics in Europe cede ground to politicians whose only calling card is not embracing this arrangement. Journalists call them the far-right; they say they are ascendant. Sometimes they are banned from running—for financial violations. Whatever the reason, it is perfectly just: they are a threat to democracy and its Arab constituents, say some authorities. Germany, the UK, and France’s politics degenerate into warring over the morally permissible amount of objection to boats of Arabs landing in Greece. Their economies are sclerotic; their demographics may be dire (some credit is due to France here), but their politics revolve increasingly around attitudes toward many of these migrants.

Some, not all of this, starts in Syria.

Why is it hard to remember Syria, then? Well, let’s say you are a young, socially savvy youth who enjoys taking to the streets—perhaps even “occupying” the occasional “quad.” Who would you rally behind in the Syrian conflict? Assad, a member of the secular, socialistic Ba’athist party and opponent of American imperialism, right? But what about the Kurds, a nomadic, marginalized group with socialist and feminist tendencies? You have to support the Kurds. But wait, if you support the Kurds, you’re just supporting AMERICAN EMPIRE. And would you really want to be at odds with a fine, moderate Muslim nation like Turkey? Hijabs rarely conform to the “my body, my choice” dictate in this part of the world. And what of the Druze? Surely you have thought about the Druze?

I suspect that these many nuances add up to a simple fact about Syria for a Western observer: there is little status to be gained by being a “Syria person.” In fact, even if you, taking a brave stand against the last gasps of the last gasps of AMERICAN EMPIRE, had the chutzpah to stick an Assadist flag in your yard, it would surely, with its nondescript pan-Arab colorway, just be confused with a Palestinian one. So it is better to stick to Israel and Palestine, where the moral cleavage is self-evident to any premillennial Christian/postmillennial activist.

But since we live in an age where it is incumbent on all decent people to care about conflicts 7,000 miles away from them, I would argue understanding Syria’s conflict might just be more important. Consider the human toll, noting this is technically still an active conflict: 580,000 deaths, more than 13 million displaced, and 6.7 million refugees forced to flee the country. Though I am not formally a math person, it appears that the population of Palestine does not even match the population of Syrian refugees.

Moralizing aside, Syria is simply interesting in its confusion. It is where Turks, Russians, Persians, Americans, Arabs, Kurds, Druze, Alawites, Ismailis, Christians, Jews, Sunnis, nationalists, Islamists, and the infinite subdivisions thereof intersect. Ethnographically, religiously, and philosophically, it is probably one of the most intricate conflicts in the history of mankind, staged in a place that is said to cradle civilization. So, I thought it would be a good thing to write about.

I make no pretenses of being a Middle East expert, speaking no regional languages, having never visited, and once mistaking Salafism for Sufism. But I did read a lot of helpful books about the conflict, which made me read other books, which made me realize how much context is necessary to even sort of understand what is going on in Syria. Today, I consider Syria’s early divisions and the structures and ideology that helped produce a Ba’athist dictatorship.

Syria: Or, Lines on a Map

French Mandate for Syria and the Lebanon in 1922

“In the lands which are inhabited by a multitude of tribes, it is difficult to establish a state” - Ibn Khaldun, 14th century

“There is little or no territorial nationality. If you ask a Syrian to what nationality he belongs, he will reply … that he is a native of Damascus or Aleppo.” - Gertrude Bell, 1921

You know the story: lines on a map. If there is some far-flung place with lots of ethnic strife and dysfunction and occasionally ethnic cleansing, it can all be traced to some Westerner’s lines on a map. He didn’t speak the language—perhaps he never even visited it—and to the extent that he had opinions about the place, they were the wrong ones. Still, he took out his pen and scribbled some lines on a map. Africa? Lines on a map. India and Pakistan? Lines on a map. Thousands of miles away in the Sinchon District of Seoul, where I sit? Lines on a map.

Syria has its own lines-on-a-map story, and most of these lines were drawn in 1923 (though not all, and this will have implications for Turkey/the Kurds), on the heels of the much maligned Sykes-Picot agreement in 1916, which actually drew no lines. Syria’s lines, though, were particularly tricky because no matter how they were drawn, they could not escape that there was almost nothing resembling the modern Syrian nation anywhere near what is now called Syria. That is one plausible reason the French opted to divide the place now known as Syria into five separate states that lasted until 1936, though post-colonialists prefer to emphasize divide-and-conquer schematics that made everything so much worse. Maybe it did.

What there certainly was in the place now called Syria was a sedentary Sunni‑Arab peasant majority (~55–60 % of the population), nomadic and semi‑nomadic desert tribes (~20 %), Alawite (~11 %) and Druze (~3–4 %) mountain tribes, and a polyglot belt of Christians (~ 12–14 %), Kurds (~ 5–8 %), Armenians (~ 2 %), Circassians (~ 1 %), and Jews (~1 %). That in itself is a gross oversimplification, because among these various groups there are infinite subdivisions, making Syria like a desert—and occasionally a mountain range—of fractals. Zoom in on the Alawites, and you find four competing tribal confederacies. Zoom in on the Christians, and you find followers of the Greek Orthodox, Jacobite, and Maronite Churches. Zoom in on the Kurds, and you find lots of people who don’t even speak the same language, and are maybe even ethnically Arab or Turkish. And so on.

This is also very vague, even in the form of a laundry list, because you’ll notice “tribe” isn’t defined, nor are the living conditions of the vast “Sunni-Arab peasant majority”. To the first point, you could waste six years of your life writing a dissertation about this (and some people do), but to be very reductive, we might say tribes are like political-social corporations—you might even say mini-states—built on common real or imagined ancestry. This is like full-on, “if your cousin killed my cousin, you are indebted to me.” The macro-level takeaway from this is that any empire or state that wishes to incorporate these tribes needs to broker with a tribal leader, because trying to push around individual members, good luck. Assad would probably tell you this from his Moscow penthouse.

To the second point, the sedentary Sunni majority was not a tribe in this sense. They lived in rural, Ottoman-registered villages, paid land taxes to the Sultan, and sometimes deferred to Sharia courts and elected officials on legal matters. What is worth noting, however, is that even the Sunni-Arab peasant majority was more “tribal” than a person living in, say, Britain or France. They might not have known their ancestry six generations back, but they still liked to marry their cousins, paid occasional blood money, and insofar as they are politically conscious, were loyal to a local mukhtar who administered the village for the ruling Ottomans.

The exception to this unwieldy mass of hoi polloi, and the reason I strategically used the word “almost” four paragraphs earlier, were the al-aʿyān, or urban notables. This was a tiny sliver of the population in cities (about .3 percent of the population, I saw somewhere) that made their fortunes through trade and leasing land to the unwieldy hoi polloi. Note that yet again, we run into the same fractal problem, because as it turns out, the urban notables ranged from Muslims to Christians to Jews, and so on, meaning that what bound them was not plausibly religion, but speaking Arabic and being intermediaries with the Ottomans. And actually, this becomes very important to understanding the ideological basis for the rule of the man who just fled to Russia last year, as you will see.

So Syria on the cusp of French colonization was not a nation, but lots of different villages and tribes (that were far less legible than either of these reductive terms suggests) with no overarching sense of history or culture (not least because they were almost all illiterate), but lots of local loyalties, and that made statecraft difficult, and nationhood as you or I would conceptualize it essentially unknown. True, there were some commonalities to be found among these disparate peoples, but to the extent that there was a national consciousness in Syria, it inhered in a tiny urban elite.

Thus, Gertrude Bell, a British colonial office representative who inhabited the region for much of her life, observed in 1920:

The Syrian country is inhabited by Arabic-speaking races all eager to be at each other’s throats, and only prevented from fulfilling their natural desires by the ragged half-fed soldier who draws at rare intervals the Sultan’s pay

Indeed, as Bell suggests, Syria had not come so far from the time of Ibn Khaldun. Well before the Frenchman sketched this triangle of desert and mountain, there was ample discord among the fractals inhabiting it, often along the lines of the Sunni majority cowing the various minorities. And the most important cowed minority in our story is the Alawites, the group to which the Assad family belongs, which gets bandied around a lot in press coverage, but no one ever really explains, so here goes.

See that the Alawites are a tribe and a religion. On the tribal front, they organise themselves into four big, name-reciting confederacies—Kalbiyya (Assad’s tribe, which we will get to another time), Khayyāṭīn, Ḥaddādīn, and Matawīra—each splintered into dozens of village-level clans that still track vendettas, bride-price, and land boundaries through a six- or seven-generation genealogy.

Religiously, they are a Shia offshoot, incorporating lots of Gnostic, Christian, and Neoplatonic influence into their version of Islam. Not only do they believe Ali ibn Abi Talib to be the rightful heir to the Prophet and consider imams divinely appointed (just like vanilla Twelver Shias in Iran), they also believe in a trinity consisting of Ali, Muhammad, and Salman the Persian, a companion of the Prophet who converted to Islam from Zoroastrianism.

This suspiciously-Christian-sounding trinity is not just arcane theology for its own sake, but important for understanding why some Muslims would find the Alawites so disturbing. Notice that Allah earns no explicit mention in this trinity. That is because Alawites believe divinity inheres in Ali, which goes way beyond the typical Shia idea that he was divinely appointed. A nifty idea? Well, if you are a jihadist who adheres to a strict notion of tawhid, and are maybe even a little suspicious of people who are too keen on Muhammad, this is just about the most blasphemous thing imaginable.

But we are getting ahead of ourselves. Even well before the Syrian jihad, holing up in the mountains and taking a Christian theological concept and sticking a Persian in the middle of it did not do much for the Alawites’ reputation in the Sunni Arab parts of the Middle East, and this isn’t even getting into their belief in reincarnation, celebration of Christmas, or their absence of dietary law. So well before the French lines on a map, Alawite communities faced punitive taxation, quasi-feudal land tenure, and episodic military coercion.

The looming question: how did an esoteric Shia tribe come to tyrannize Syria for over 50 years?

To start, if the Sunni majority discriminated against Alawites, the French did not, and were glad to have them, along with Druze and Circassians, in their colonial military. Plausibly, the French wanted groups immunized from majoritarian sympathies, who would not mutiny in the event of a revolt. (Actually, this echoes Ottoman policy of the prior era, when young boys from the Balkans and Anatolia were abducted and trained to serve as janissaries.)

So while ambitious Alawites might not find a path to power in traditional Sunni-dominated spheres like law and medicine, they could in the local, colonial army, Les Troupes Spéciales du Levant. And many Alawites heeded the call. By the late 1930s, Alawites—about 11 percent of Syria’s population—made up roughly 45 percent of Troupes Spéciales enlisted ranks, according to N. E. Bou-Nacklie.

You see where this is heading. Still, this was just one side to Alawite empowerment–the other was that in the post-Ottoman context, new political movements offered inroads to disenfranchised minorities who, in small numbers, were now becoming literate. Among these political movements were socialists, communists, and pan-Arabists. It is the last of these that concerns us, since you surely know enough about the first two.

Pan-Arabism is another one of those terms you hear about, but which no one really explains, though it seems fairly intuitive. In fact, it is much less intuitive than it seems, because it has basically always been a tool for sectarian jockeying, and only occasionally a tool for creating a pan-Arab state (when it suited the interests of the sectarian jockeyers, that is). And to even begin to understand pan-Arabism, we need to understand the plain, mono-Arabism that produced it.

Arabism envisions an Arab-first identity, generally in an Arab state—simple enough. But the nagging question is why would you even need Arabism as such asabiyya (14th century Muslim social science term for social glue), considering Islam maintains the notion of ummah, which puts faith above tribal or ethnic loyalties? Of course, plenty of people in the Middle East are not Muslim, but it’s also true that plenty are not even Arab, and this naturally makes one wonder why Arab identity, rather than Muslim identity, became such an ideological pillar of various dictatorships with Muslim dictators, including the one that fell last year.

As you are beginning to intuit, the development of Arabism has something to do with non-Muslim Arabs—namely, Christians. Traditionally second-class citizens, Christians—and some Jews—rose to become notables in the 19th century, vying with existing Sunni Muslim families. And the simple reason for this was the Tanzimat reforms of the Ottoman Empire.

Actually, I lied. Even before the Tanzimat reforms, the disruption of Sunni urban notables began with the Egyptian occupation of Syria in 1831 under the viceroy-turned-ruler Muhammad Ali. And even this is a lie, because the proximate cause was the Industrial Revolution, and Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, which set lots of wheels, and literally looms, in motion. We might say that at the highest level, then, in the 19th century, a feudal, Sharia order was giving way to a (relatively) liberal, commercial one—what we might call modernity. (Here we are on Ernest Gellner’s turf, and you can read more in Nations and Nationalism.)

So, Egypt’s Ali, cognizant of this burgeoning reality (even if he could not quite articulate it), moved to disarm the local janissaries, conscript youth, and—perhaps most consequentially—open ports to European-backed Christian and Jewish merchants active in the silk and cotton trade. And it was then that the Ottoman Tanzimat Edicts (1839, 1856, 1858, 1864, etc.) consolidated these changes by admitting non-Muslims to courts, electoral councils, and the land registry.

Why would Muslims in Istanbul do this, considering the whole dhimmi thing? One reason was that lots of Europeans were rallying behind oppressed Christian minorities and pondering the Eastern Question, as seen in the Greek War of Independence (1821-1829), or the Crimean War (1853-1856), or the many European consuls now roaming the streets of Damascus. Another was simply that to keep pace with their European rivals economically, the Ottomans needed to adapt to a world of market transactions unimpeded by caste and custom.

To give a brief idea of the changes afoot, Eugene Rogan’s The Damascus Events is instructive. In 1852, Rogan notes, a bailiff beat a Jewish landowner to death in a Sharia Court for beating a Muslim sharecropper with a stick over alleged robbery. Normally, bludgeoning peremptory Jews to death in Sharia Courts was how things were supposed to work. But in the consular milieu of the moment, a Prussian objected that this was literal overkill, and Istanbul subsequently had the bailiff, presiding judge, and even governor all removed.

As you can imagine, all of this Levantine minority enfranchisement, on the heels of centuries of dhimma, was something like pulling the bottom block from a wobbly Jenga set of Babel. And so anti-Christian riots erupted in 1850 in Aleppo and 1860 in Damascus, and entire quarters of ancient cities were razed, leading to Turkish and occasionally French intervention, and subsequently even more grabby hands from Istanbul.

What we should see is that, amidst this unrest, notables were becoming more diverse, more mercantile, and more competitive—more European, both in habit and creed. And so the shrewdest of these ascendant Christian notables must have known that to fortify their position against further French and Turkish intervention, and frankly, to not all get killed, they needed something new to bind them. And if they couldn’t agree on the right Abrahamic religion, they could at least agree they were all Arabs and spoke Arabic, ignoring that some were probably Turks or Kurds.

So, on the heels of the Mount Lebanon civil war and Damascus riots in 1860, the Maronite polymath Buṭrus al-Bustānī issued Arabic pamphlets urging wataniyya (homeland loyalty) above religion. These ideas were part of the broader Nahda, or Arab awakening, and would shape the school curricula of notables in ensuing decades. None other than Ba’ath party founder Michel Aflaq, himself a Christian, spoke to this influence when he noted in 1948, “My first sense of belonging was when we read Zaydān’s Fath al-Andalus aloud in the third class at Tajhīz.”

Still, this was Arabism as an elite cultural ideology—Arabism as an elite political ideology lay dormant among most notables through the end of the 19th century, because as long as Ottomanism paid sufficient dividends, why bother? That calculus began to change when, in 1908, the Young Turks launched a new centralization and Turkification campaign that replaced many Syrian officials with Turkish ones. Here, Arabism transformed into Arab nationalism among some of the elites who had been displaced. And case there is any doubt that these people were mostly just trying to preserve status, Philip Khoury in Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism informs us:

Most Damascus Arabists who were of the right age and had the proper qualifications to hold either high or middle-level government posts failed to retain them after 1908 when the CUP began to replace Syrians with Turks in the provincial and central administration

And for professions?

Arabists were actively engaged in intellectual pursuits while Ottomanists generally steered clear of such activities. Journalism and the liberal professions (doctors, lawyers and engineers) were the most common occupations among the Arabists

You see the problem here: Arabism was an intellectual project for elite status games, and did not anticipate a world in which tribesmen would get to play. Here lies the true panoply of Arabism: it was used first by Christian notables to defend themselves against religious rivals, then urban notables against European powers, and finally, it spilled over into the unwieldy hoi polloi and became the ideological scaffolding for two tribal dictatorships.

This is why the short-lived Arab Syrian Kingdom of 1920 was not quite as Syrian or Arab as claimed (though verily a kingdom), and when Voltaire’s descendants descended upon it, lots of Arabs were glad to help run roughshod on Damascus. It was a passion project of a sliver of Arab notables defending their status and enjoyed very little popular support, or even probably awareness, given that most people lived in villages and couldn’t read. Similarly, the Syrian Revolt of 1925-7, which would become part of pan-Arabist mythology in the Assadist regime (and scholarly oeuvres), was fought mostly by Druze chaffed at French encroachment on their esoteric religious practices before some other Arabs joined in, mostly because of their own bespoke local grievances. (Perhaps I should add that even the much more mythologized Arab Revolt of WWI was mostly staged for gold, and T.E. Lawrence would tell you this.)

After the fall of the Syrian Arab Kingdom, Arabism became the governing ideology of conservative nationalists in the French Mandate period. Still, it remained insipid fare, and mostly the domain of notables who wanted to go back to being local sheikmakers. They would, of course, get their wish, in the form of a monkey’s paw, when Syria’s disparate states integrated in 1936 and began to decolonize. But alongside parliamentary circles, Arabist ideas were evolving into a more ambitious, pan-Arab vision—a desire to create one giant Arab state.

The brain behind pan-Arabism was Sati' al-Husri’s. Husri himself illustrated the disconnect between the notables and lay people well, considering he spoke French and Turkish before Arabic. And because he was so European and modern, he naturally looked to modern Europe in creating a new pan-Arab ideology. There, two strands of nationalist thought competed—a top-down conception based on statecraft, favored by the French and English, and a bottom-up one resting on sociolinguistics, embraced by the Germans. And this is also probably worth elaborating on, unfortunately.

For the French and English, the nation was obviously an imposition of the state—how could it be a linguistic phenomenon? The English language is a hodge of non-Germanic influences existing alongside non-Germanic languages like Welsh. France, for its part, has weird French-Spanish hybrids like Occitan that persisted into the 20th century, and are even still spoken today in small numbers. What made this arrangement work was that France and England had strong states to bind it all together, and realistically, were places where people couldn’t marry their cousins.

The counterpoint to the French and English experience was the German one. Since Germany did not become a state until the late 19th century, it was necessary to be much more hand-wavy about what it meant to be a nation. In the German conception (Herder and Fichte), nations were organic—the result of linguistic and cultural continuity, not merely lines on a map and statecraft, and replete with biological processes like breathing. Thus, German romanticism and, eventually, more worrying ideas like lebensraum.

Now, you might think that Husri would go with the English and French notion of nationhood, considering that so-called Arabic is actually a bunch of different languages that are often mutually unintelligible.¹ But even German in the 19th century wasn’t really one language, and considering Arabic is referred to as a single language, you can probably glean that he went with the German conception.

He didn’t have any other choice, of course, because the Arab world was not administered by a single autochthonous state like France and Britain. And this is not just arcane political philosophy for its own sake, but important to understanding how pan-Arabism became the vehicle for multiple Arab dictatorships, while never producing much in the way of pan-Arabism. Arab intellectuals were taking German ideas and foisting them onto places where, despite their wishes, tribal, linguistic, and religious divisions did not come close to conforming to the boundaries of the Abbasid Caliphate, or even a single state. Germany, of course, had its own divisions prior to unification, but the Arab world’s certainly ran deeper, while lacking the tools—namely mass literacy—needed to have a chance at overcoming them.

This also helps explain why pan-Arabism became intertwined with other rarified values like socialism. The notion of Arab-first identity likely ranked along the lines of “class consciousness” in terms of the ratio of elite favor to lay-person lived reality. And because it was also a utopian modernist project removed from lay reality, like socialism, it naturally gave way to vanguardism, and eventually full-blown Stalinism.

But Husri was very serious about this German nationalist skin graft, and after the fall of the Syrian Arab Kingdom, he would move to Iraq to complete its sutures. (In case you find this analogy overblown, Husri’s confidantes insisted on calling Iraq a new Prussia.) The move made good sense: unlike the French-dominated Syria, Iraq stayed arms' length from its British colonial handlers, enabling Husri to design an Arab nationalist school curriculum that would produce Arab-first, tribe-second pupils.

This is the course of many nation-building processes. But in the 1930s, it was still not obvious that teaching Iraqis, including many ethnic Kurds, the glories of the Abbasid Caliphate was enough to overwrite centuries of tribal loyalties, or even non-tribal disunity. As Adeed Dawisha shows in his excellent Arab Nationalism in the 20th Century (which I am now stealing from, liberally), King Faysal of Iraq remarked that his subjects in 1933 were:

Imbued with religious traditions and absurdities, connected by no common thread, giving ear to evil, prone to anarchy, and perpetually ready to rise against any government whatsoever

Another problem for pan-Arabism was that the largest and most important state in the Arab world, Egypt, was perhaps the most hostile to claims of a common Arab lineage. Egyptians, remember, have so much history that people can’t help but speculate about alien influences on it. So Egyptian intellectuals like Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayed shot down the idea that they were meager Arabs, and textbooks continued to talk more about Narmer’s unification and the pyramids (though no alien influence on them) than mythical Arab ancestors like Adnān or Qaḥṭān.

Even so, one must note that a foundation was being laid, because by the 1930s, more students (though still not most) were becoming literate throughout the Arab states, and whether they were getting pablum about the genius of Avarroes in Iraqi schools or snippets of Napoleonic Code in Syrian ones (it brings me no joy to inform you that the French, though vicious colonizers like the Turks, actually expanded educational opportunities in Syria, including those areas inhabited by the Alawites, unlike the Turks), it was something, whereas before there was basically nothing. And even if deep down you were still wedded to a tribe and knew the back of your third-cousin’s hand, this something was something to work with, especially if you were smart and ambitious but from the wrong tribe, like, say, Saddam Hussein or Hafez al-Assad.

Context nourished the pablum that nourished the wrong tribe, because just about the time the pan-Arabists began to peddle their German notions, something much more offensive than believing in the wrong caliph started to take shape—a Jewish state. By now, the Jews were on their fifth aliyah, which, given what was going on with actual German nationalism, was especially large, and this prompted the Great Revolt of 1936. Here lay the basis for pan-Arabism’s fleeting grassroots success.

In support of the pro-Palestinian outcry, the Arab states came together in 1937 at a British-sponsored conference in Cairo to litigate Jewish settlement, forming a bloc for the first time. The head of the Saudi delegation, Prince Faysil (some relation to King Faysil of Iraq), said as much, noting, “for the first time in our history, we witness this clear manifestation of cooperation and solidarity of the Arab countries. For the first time, we stand united.” It was also on the heels of the revolt that the Sorbonne-educated Syrian intellectuals Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar introduced a party championing socialism and pan-Arabism under the now-familiar banner of Ba’athism. Unlike elite Arabists, they were eager to expand their membership by courting rural citizens.

The Egyptian elite still remained resistant to pan-Arab ideology, but perhaps what Egyptian leaders, including a military upstart named Nasser, were coming to realize was that the indispensability of Egypt to pan-Arabism would make it the natural seat of an Arabic union. This is to say, being just another Arab state in a big Arab union may have held little draw, but being the head of an Arab empire held much more, especially if that empire could quash a neighboring Jewish state. Arab statesmen again convened in Cairo in 1944-1945, this time to establish a league.

The Arab-Israeli War of 1948 illustrated the hollowness of pan-Arabism well: a vast Arab world was still too divided to thwart a smaller, but more cohesive, Jewish one. Ironically, though, it was this very disunity in the face of a shared enemy that became the impetus for the impending pan-Arab moment. Syria’s insipid Arabist parliamentarians had by now fully unyoked from France, leaving the fledgling nation, for centuries mere geography, divided between its notable statesmen and the outsiders who filled their army. A similar story could be found in Egypt. And in the humiliation of the Arab defeat, these military arrivistes capitalized on popular discontent to stage coups in Syria (1949) and Egypt (1952). We might say that these overthrows marked the final evolution of Arabism: from an elite ideology of irredentist notables to one bound up with the ambitions of men from the wrong tribe and class.

1. Yes, most elites like Husri would have shared a knowledge of classical Arabic, but this is akin to elites in medieval Europe knowing Latin—not very relevant to lay reality.