The Formation of Pan-Arab Ideology in the Interwar Years

Arab nationalism arose as an opposition movement in Ottoman Syria, Palestine, and Iraq around the turn of the century. It remained a minority movement until the Ottoman collapse in 1918, but after the Ottoman defeat it became the overwhelmingly dominant movement in these territories where, except for some Lebanese, all successful politicians were Arab nationalists during the interwar years. Just what Arab nationalism meant to its proponents at the time, however, has been difficult to determine. The period only dimly figures in studies of Arab nationalism. Full studies have been devoted to survivors from the past, Rashid Rida⊃ and Shakib Arsian, to Sati⊂ al-Husri (al-Husari), a relative newcomer whose greatest prominence was to be in the 1940s and 1950s, and to the Muslim Brothers, who arrived on the scene even later, whose influence was to lie in the future, and who, like Rida⊃, were not considered to be primarily Arab nationalists. Otherwise, hardly a scant handful of pre-World War II Arab nationalist writers, and these from the late 1930s, receive even casual mention.