"arab Nationalism Failed Primarily Because Of Intra-arab Rivalries And Disunity." Discuss.

Q) "Arab nationalism failed primarily because of intra-Arab rivalries and disunity." Discuss.

The attempts made throughout the majority of the twentieth century to form a single sovereign Arab state did undeniably fail, with the only political unison of two Arab states coming briefly between 1958 and 1961, during which short time Egypt and Syria combined to form the United Arab Republic (UAR). Although sentiments of Arab unity and a single Arab identity, which were expressed alongside calls for a single state, did result in the founding of the League of Arab States in 1945, a moment of 'maturity' for Arab Nationalism, this was all such ideas were able to achieve as they fell far short of helping to form a single Arab state. The problem therefore, is what to attribute such a failure to. It is evident that disunity and rivalry amongst Arabs was the central issue, but not simply disunity and rivalry whereby Arabs in one country distrust or are rivals with those in another. The creator of disunity was rather the division of loyalties within the Arab world amongst political ideologies, the three primary ones being Local nationalism, Pan-Arabism, the point of focus of this essay, and political Islam. Each of these ideologies was a form of nationalism and as such, each drew supporters according to the belief of the individual as to what the best system of governance in the post-colonial world would be. It was this division of loyalties betweens the competing models of nationhood which ultimately caused the demise of secular Arab nationalism based solely on an Arab, as opposed to an Islamic or local, identity, rather than the simple explanation that Arabs as a people are too diverse culturally, religiously and linguistically to ever form a single state. In summary therefore, divisions and rivalries were responsible for the failure of Arab nationalism, but not on the level of language and culture but on the level of the struggle between political ideologies, which divided the political focus of the Arab world; a struggle in which Arab Nationalism was ultimately to lose out. In order to follow through on the above argument, two key relationships must be examined when trying to explain the failure of Arab-nationalism. The first of these is the interplay between Arab-nationalism and Islam and the second is that which exists between Arab-nationalism and local nationalism. To look at the first of these two divisions, it must be noted that there is a tension between pan-Islamic ideology and that of Pan-Arabism for two fundamental reasons. Firstly, as Adeed Dawisha argues, 'From the very outset, Arab nationalism... had to compete with Islam, the other great supranational ideology.' This competition was a direct one between two ideologies espousing trans-national identities which both hoped would bind the members of their respective groups together. Dawisha goes on to state that as an ideology Islam had to be opposed to Arab-nationalism, simply because ethnicity is not recognised as playing any role in Islam. What Dawisha's argument so aptly highlights, therefore, is that fact that there could be no hope whatsoever of Islamists supporting Arab-nationalists, simply because the former did not recognise the right of the latter to claim leadership in the combined affairs of Arabs because under Islam's ideology, ethnic sub-divisions are irrelevant and only Islam serves as a unifying factor in trans-national politics. What Islamic ideology offered by way of a challenge to Arab-nationalism therefore was that it was a direct opponent in terms of supranational representation. People in the Arabic world were therefore confronted with a choice if they wished to see greater regional unity, a choice between a secular ideology based on ethnicity and a religious one, which decried the ethnic basis of the other. This choice between Arab-nationalism is the first rivalry which hindered the progression of Arab nationalism and would therefore cause divisions in the Arab world and was a central reason for the failure of Arab-nationalism. It was not simply as an alternative supranational ideology that Islam challenged Arab-nationalism and created rivalries within the Arab world, but on the issue of statehood. Sati 'al Husri, a Syrian writer and influential Arab nationalist believed, like all Arab Nationalists, that Arabs 'constitute one nation, and so they have to have a unified state.' Like Pan-Islamists he believed that the boundaries of the Arab states were artificial creations of the imperial powers. Where such reasoning differs from Islamic thought, however, is that the Arab-nationalist idea of a single, sovereign Arab state is rejected in Islamic thought as being an attempt to westernise the Middle East. Bassam Tibi writes thoughtfully on the subject and argues that Islamic nationalist thinkers such as Jamal-al-Din Afghani rejected Westphalian principles of sovereignty as being a product of the expansion of European ideas, and not a model which had any historical grounding in the Middle East. Tibi calls this phenomenon a 'tension between Islam and nationalism as an ideology of the nation state.' What this means in essence is that whilst Islamic nationalists called for a single, sovereign Islamic state, it was to be run along the line of the more regionally historic caliph system, including the implementation of Shar'ia law, rather than on the secular lines put forward by Arab-nationalist. Islamic nationalists were therefore able to claim a greater historical precedence in the region than their Arab nationalist counterparts. Such a fact greatly damaged the credibility of Arab nationalism and served to strengthen the rivalry which existed in the Arab world between Arab and Islam forms of nationalism, a rivalry which contributed greatly to the failure of pan-Arabism. A theory put forward by Youssef Choueiri does contradict such a view by stating that Islam as a religion 'is "an eternal and perfect symbol" of the Arab sprit, its authenticity and its rich potentialities.' Whilst it is clear that an element of religious identity existed in Arab-nationalist thought, it is to exaggerate its influence to suggest as Choueiri does that Islam is a central aspect of a pan-Arab identity. What Islamic nationalism served to do instead was to both act as an alternative supranational entity which could garner Arab loyalties, taking them away from Arab nationalism, and to undermine the Westphalian principle of sovereignty at the heart of pan-Arabic thought. It was this rivalry between secular and religious nationalism which served as one of two rivalries so fundamental in undermining Arab nationalism. The second of these was between Arab nationalism and its local counterpart and it is to this which we now turn. Whereas the rivalry between Arab nationalism and Islamic nationalism constituted a rivalry between two transnational ideologies, Arab nationalism also faced disunity in as much as people belonging to a perceived "Arab nation" also belonged to independent nation states. Such a dichotomy weakened the position of Arab nationalists by creating a second line of division, after that caused by Islamic nationalism, amongst supporters or would-be supporters. As argued by Choueiri, 'local patriotism, focused on a particular Arab country, such as Egypt, Tunisia or Iraq, preceded the rise of pan-Arabism as a movement embracing the entire Arab world' . The significance of Choueiri's argument is twofold. Firstly, local nationalism served to divide the loyalties of people within Arab countries, with each individual being forced to decide whether they owed their allegiance to their state or whether a pan-Arab state was a better alternative. Secondly, the issue of historical precedence is raised. The notion is that local nationalism had emerged before Arab nationalism, that people had come to see themselves as Lebanese, Iraqi or Jordanian before saw themselves as being part of a larger Arab brotherhood. That being the case, it was extremely difficult for Arab nationalism to gain mass loyalty amongst local populations who had already come to identify themselves as something other than simply Arabic. A case in point of such an argument is Syria. As the home of Sati 'al Husri, it would not be unreasonable to expect that Syria would be a hotbed of Arab nationalism, and indeed it was, playing a large role in the decline of the Ottoman empire and the advocacy of Arab nationalism. Despite this, however, Muhammad Muslih draws attention to that fact that 'despite a common outlook rooted in a consciousness of Arab history, deep cracks began to appear in the Syrian Arab nationalists' edifice.' A central cause in these 'deep cracks' as pointed out by Muslih was loyalty to another common denominator 'namely, the political independence of Syria.' This highlights an essential paradox prevalent in the immediate post World War One Arab world, that whilst mooting eagerly for Arab unity and even for a unified Arab state, the same men were pushing for greater independence for their own state. As Dawisha summarises so well, 'even with those who genuinely believed in the "Arab" ideal, loyalty to the geographical locale in which they lived (al-Watan) always lurked just under the surface' Rather than simple disunity therefore, Arab nationalism can be seen as having failed because of the rival ideologies espoused by its pioneers, namely the conflict of loyalties between local nationalists and Arab nationalist. Whilst the central argument made above has been that it was a division of loyalties-with Arab nationalism having to share its followers with the rival ideologies of Islamic and local nationalism-which was the central reason for the failure of Arab nationalism, it is also appropriate to briefly consider more straightforward or linear causes of intra-Arab disunity, namely sectarianism, language and culture. To take the first of these, there exists in the Arab world a division between Sunni and Shi'a Muslims. Whilst the bulk of the Arab world is Sunni and the majority of Shi'a Muslims hail from Iran, a Persian state, there are sizable Shi'a communities in Iraq, Syria and to a lesser extent in Saudi Arabia. The differences between the two strands of Islam are marked and too numerous to examine here but it is suffice to say that any moves towards a single Arab state would have had to deal with this division in an extremely sensitive manner. It is only of the region's deepest divisions and would arguably have proved the biggest practical source of disunity, as opposed to ideological ones, acting against Arab nationalist sentiment. It is useful to group language and culture as two divisive issues in the Arab world together for the purpose of analysis. Emmanuel Sivan writes that by the 1980's 'the gap between written language and local dialects-which was a sore spot of Arabism in the past-was in the process of being bridged.' This was thanks to the development of a common Arab communications market which had developed slowly over the previous decade. Unfortunately, however, this commonality in which emerged in the 1980's came about long after the most fundamental aspect of Arab nationalism, the single Arab nation state had been abandoned. At the time when the greatest amount of energy was dedicated to Arab nationalism, the ordinary people of the various states would have been hard pushed to communicate with each other, simply because day-to-day dialects are so vastly different and only a small number of people had any great knowledge of high Arabic. This served the twofold purpose of highlighting cultural differences between Arab states, strengthening the cause of local nationalism over Arab nationalism, and also of ensuring that the Arab nationalist ideas coming from 'al Husri and his followers, and written in high Arabic, would be inaccessible to mass audiences. Flags of nations are far easier to show loyalty towards than ideas that can't even be read. To briefly conclude therefore, it is too simple an explanation to say that Arab nationalism failed because of the inherent rivalries and disunity amongst its constituent peoples in the fields of religion, culture and language. What is a more sound argument is that it was the disunity caused by rival ideologies, namely Islamic nationalism and local nationalism which fundamentally undermined the efforts of Arab nationalist to form a single, secular Arab state by drawing loyalties away from 'al Husri's ideas. This argument gains strength if you compare the political progression of the Arab world with that of Europe, where moves are being made towards a political body in the form of the EU which does not constitute a single sovereign state but does have elements of legislative power attached to it. Why should this have succeeded to an extent in Europe but have failed in Arabia? Europe is as, if not more, religiously, linguistically and culturally divided than the Arab world yet enjoys far greater political cohesion. The reason for this in relation to the above argument is that issues such as language and religion can be worked beyond, as they were in both Arabia and Europe, but that the fundamental divisions in ideological loyalties present in the Arab world but not in Europe are much tougher to overcome and as such contributed most significantly to the failure of Arab nationalism.

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