“Don’t fear the tears from our maternal
eyes.
Away from us grief-making cowards!
When you take up arms we must triumph;
It is for Kings to shed tears.
We gave you life;
Warriors, that life is no longer yours;
All your days belong to the Motherland,
She is your mother before us”
This is an extract taken from Le Chant du depart (The Song of Departure) c. 1794 after the call of Levee en Mass in Revolutionary France.
Arab Nationalism is dichotomies of religious, ideological
and geo-political forces that could have come together towards the end of the
First World War but instead it imploded by its own internal struggle. Such considerations were coupled with selfish
interests that were totally bounded by lack of coherence and with near total absence of common national interest that today still cries out for an Arab
motherland. Far from a heart-felt call of
French solidarity at nation building, the result of The Arab revolt of 1917 saw
a furthering degeneration of the Arab cause towards a pan-Arabian nationalistic unity.
By
contrast, the effect fastened itself to one of greater dominance; British and
French colonialists’ forces in the shape of a Mandatory power (held in trust with curtailed sovereignty), granted to them at The Treaty of Versailles in 1919. It was
to be the new chapter of Middle East subaltern state but subsequently caused one of the
severest damage to territorial and human loss the region would experience for
many years and does so to this day. The damage was further increased after WWII by planting Israel, a Zionist State, marginalising the Palestinians in order to build homes for the displaced European Jews. The
revolt, in the meantime, proved a watershed in Arabian political thinking that went to disengage
the Arabs from Ottoman hegemony that had until then chained them for almost 500 years in
exchange to one sourced from Imperialist forces – Imperial Britain and France.
For many young Arabs this post war age promised to be a new ‘national age’. “The false dawn of freedom from Ottoman power after 1918 – which had led instead to Britain’s regional overrule – might at last give way to the glorious morning of full Arab nationhood.” Having secured a political friendship with the Hashimite kingdoms of Iraq and Jordan in addition to the oil that came with Iraq and Persia the British were able to lever their way over the Egyptian people, at the time comprising more than a third of Middle East population, further validating, in their view, their hold on the Middle East.
The Arab revolt in 1917 was not only to remove the Ottoman
yoke of domination over the Arabs but also to help the British forces in their
continued break-up of what was left of the multi-ethnic Ottoman Empire. At
the time the Ottoman Empire allied itself with Germany as part of the Central
Powers declaring a ‘Jihad’ (Holy War) against Britain, France and Russia. Despite victory Britain reneged on its
promise for Nationalist and independent Arabia and as a result the colonialist
insisted that Arabia was not only unfit for self-government but went on a
carving spree in the nature of the Sykes-Picot agreement, dividing Arabia at
will but with conciliatory additional promise of British assistance against internal revolt and external attack. In the event it
bestowed kingdoms to those most cooperative and least inflexible. Those kingdoms were to no other than
satisfying the narcissist greed of the Hashimite tribe. In the process it was the Saudi Monarch who
seized the holy places of Mecca and Medina from their Hashemite guardians and
turned Hashemite Hejaz into a province of what became Saudi Arabia. As a consequence there developed a rivalry
between Egypt, the Hashemites and the Saudis which was focused on Syria; a
fertile ground even then for religious and regional conflict and prone to outside
influences. Since then there has been a
separation of powers void of a centralised or dominating structure resulted in
an ever widening schism among the Arab nation; increasingly individualistic and
egotistical in ideology.
Arab countries gained independence separately, with
varying anachronistic timing. Such was the
disjointed social and geo-political
nature of the Middle East. Reflecting on
the whole region including Egypt and the Arabic speaking North African
countries one wonders whether there could ever be a social cohesion to an
Arabised nation. To put it more simply at times it seems there is so much
divergence in Arab culture and ideology that even Islam seems unable to bridge
those differences. Although this, however, may be hemmed in the difficulty of
defining an ‘Arab’, regional majority religions, nevertheless, fails to
prove a unifying force but completely aimless and helpless in cohering what
is an otherwise a common Semitic race. One
wonders sometime whether heritage, history or language can ever be the well
spring of weighted ideas to influence Arab ideological unity. It points to the contrary, however, that divisional
religious ideology with Tribal ethno-heritage background is instead igniting
the catalyst; fuelling the diversity and sectarian violence we see today in the
Middle East. Moreover, what is happening in Syria and elsewhere is evidence
that Arab national identity is hollow; a clear evidence therefore that Arab Nationalism
and civilisation has finally been exhausted.
Generally speaking Arab society, chiefly its leadership, is proving effortless and incapable
to exercise its rational stance to override Religion. We are, however left with
a conundrum to draw a typology of what is an Arab because many are entrenched
in the confusion of Islamic and Tribal nationalism for Arabism and holistic approach to nationalism remains totally defunct
of a mother country.
