Arab nationalism
Arab nationalism (Arabic: القومية العربية, romanized: al-qawmīya al-ʿarabīya) is a political ideology asserting that Arabs constitute a single nation. As a traditional nationalist ideology, it promotes Arab culture and civilization, celebrates Arab history, glorifies the Arabic language as well as Arabic literature, and calls for the rejuvenation of Arab society through total unification.[1] It bases itself on the premise that the people of the Arab world — from the Atlantic Ocean to the Arabian Sea — constitute one nation bound together by a common identity: ethnicity, language, culture, history, geography, and politics.[2][3]
One of the primary goals of modern Arab nationalism is ridding the Arab world of influence from the Western world, and the removal of those Arab governments that are considered to be dependent upon Western hegemony. This form of the ideology is rooted in the undesirable outcome of the Arab Revolt; in successfully achieving their primary goal of dissolving the Ottoman Empire, the Arab rebels simultaneously enabled the partitioning of their would-be unified Arab state by Western powers. Anti-Western sentiment grew as Arab nationalists centralized themselves around the newfound Palestine cause, promoting the view that Zionism posed an existential threat to the territorial integrity and political status quo of the entire region, and that the resulting Arab–Israeli conflict was directly linked to Western imperialism due to the Balfour Declaration.[4][5] Arab unity was considered a necessary instrument to "restoring this lost part" of the nation, which in turn meant eliminating the "relics" of foreign colonialism.[6] Arab nationalism emerged in the early 20th century as an opposition movement in the Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire, later evolving into the overwhelmingly dominant ideological force in the Arab world.[7] Its influence steadily expanded over subsequent years. By the 1950s and 1960s, the charismatic Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser championed Arab nationalism, and political parties like the Ba'ath Party and the Arab Nationalist Movement demonstrated remarkable capabilities for mobilization, organization, and clandestine activities. This ideology seemed to be on the rise across the independent Arab states.
Its influence began to wane in the following decades, with the rise of nation-state nationalism mostly promoted by each Arab state and the emergence of Islamic radicalism filling the perceived void.[8] However, the ideology as a whole began to decline across the Arab world following the decisive Israeli victory in the Six-Day War.[9][10] Although pan-Arab nationalism lost appeal by the 1990s, it continued to exercise an intellectual hegemony throughout the Arab world.[11]
Notable personalities and groups that are associated with Arab nationalism include Faisal I of Iraq, Gamal Abdel Nasser, the Arab Nationalist Movement, Michel Aflaq, Muammar Gaddafi, Saddam Hussein, the Palestine Liberation Organization, and the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party.
History[edit]
Origins[edit]
Throughout the late 19th century, beginning in the 1860s, a sense of loyalty to the "Fatherland" developed in intellectual circles based in the Levant and Egypt, but not necessarily an "Arab Fatherland". It developed from observance of the technological successes of Western Europe which they attributed to the prevailing of patriotism in those countries.[18] During this period, a heavy influx of Christian missionaries and educators from Western countries provided what was termed the "Arab political revival", resulting in the establishment of secret societies within the empire.
The former was also possible with the influence of the intellectual movement produced by the expansion of journalism using a unifying language, with the creation of newspapers in Arabic, as well as the publication of an Arabic dictionary and an encyclopedia during the late 1860s and the early 1870s. This allowed the questioning (albeit limited), of Ottoman power.[19] Accordingly, in the 1860s, literature produced in the Mashriq (the Levant and Mesopotamia) which was under Ottoman control at the time, contained emotional intensity and strongly condemned the Ottoman Turks for "betraying Islam" and the Fatherland to the Christian West. In the view of Arab patriots, Islam had not always been in a "sorry state" and attributed the military triumphs and cultural glories of the Arabs to the advent of the religion, insisting that European modernism itself was of Islamic origin. The Ottomans, on the other hand, had deviated from true Islam and thus suffered decline. The reforming Ottoman and Egyptian governments were blamed for the situation because they attempted to borrow Western practices from the Europeans that were seen as unnatural and corrupt. The Arab patriots' view was that the Islamic governments should revive true Islam that would in turn, pave way for the establishment of constitutional representative government and freedom which, though Islamic in origin, was manifested in the West at the time.[20]