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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 20 - 26 April 2000 Issue No. 478
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Heritage Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Letters A kind of Arabism
By Roger Owen *
A new book about the early life of Abdel-Rahman Azzam, the first secretary-general of the Arab League, makes some important points about the Arabism to be found among members of the Egyptian elite before the Second World War. Its author is Ralph Coury, a history professor at Fairfield University in Connecticut, who had the great advantage of being able to conduct extensive interviews with Azzam Pasha between 1969 and 1971 and was also allowed to read copies of his unpublished autobiography.
It is clear from this account that Azzam's own early life had much to do with his emphasis on the history of the Arabs as a unique nation. As a medical student in London he decided to volunteer for service on the Ottoman side during the Balkan War in 1913 and then, two years later, began his over seven year period as an adviser and supporter of the Libyans at the beginnings of their long struggle against the Italian occupation, 1915-1923.
In both places he met numbers of other Arabs and Muslims who had come to fight for the same cause, including some, like the Iraqi, Gaafar Al-Askari, who were to play an important role in the post-war struggle to create independent Arab states. Work in Tripolitania also gave him the opportunity to elaborate some of his ideas about Arab history and Arab nationalism while writing for Al-Liwa Al-Tarabulsi, the newspaper he helped to start in 1919. Just as important, these years made him a ring-side observer of the death throws of the Ottoman Empire and the growth of alternative centres of Arab power in the Middle East.
Azzam's Egyptianness also seems to have been a significant factor. We are told by Coury that those he met were impressed not only by his superior command of the Arabic language but also by the way he presented himself as an eloquent exponent of the vital traditions of Arab culture and learning preserved in Cairo. This was of particular relevance in places like Tripolitania and Cyrenaica without dense historical traditions of their own. From this it is not a large jump to his conclusion that Egypt had a particular role to play as leader of the soon-to-be-independent Arab world.
Once back in Cairo in 1923 it was natural that Azzam should find a way of life which combined his role as a Wafdist member of parliament with visits to other Arab capitals and the development of a web of relationships with the many Arab politicians who had either taken refuge in Egypt or visited it regularly to win Egyptian support for their own anti-colonial struggles. In this way his Arabism continued to be part of his lived experience, as well as providing him with the authority to educate Egyptians about their links with the wider Arab world and, by the 1930s, to advocate a drive for Arab unity led from Cairo.
Coury breaks new ground in his assertion that Azzam's Arabism was part of a wider trend to be observed among members of the Egyptian elite as they sought to bolster their positions against the British, on the one hand, and the more radical local political forces with better-developed social agendas on the other. Viewed from this point of view Arabism represented an assertion of an existing part of Egypt's own national identity as well as an opportunity to expand Egyptian political, cultural and economic interests into the wider Middle Eastern world.
This is an important argument both in its own terms and also because it allows Coury to refute the still influential assertions made by the late Elie Kedourie and others that Egypt's first venture into Arabism did not take place until the late 1930s and was then little more than a ploy by the Palace to increase the prestige of the young King Farouk.
It is unfortunate that Coury's account ends in 1936 when Azzam was sent off to Baghdad as Egypt's first ambassador for it is then that he must first have had to confront problems of state to state relations for which a sense of shared Arabism was rarely a sufficient solution.
Coury is sensitive to the other currents of thought which existed about both Egypt's identity and Egypt's own national interest, just as Azzam appears to have been himself in his endless conversations with members of most of the other significant political groups including the Muslim Brothers and Misr Al-Fatat. Coury is also anxious to show that political Arabism, though a significant feature of Egyptian intellectual life at this period, was still something of quite limited importance for the majority of the elite.
It is here that it seems to me that Coury makes his most vital contribution. Western historians have tended to generate great confusion with their insistence that members of the Egyptian elite experienced great difficulty in trying to decide which of the components of their national identity -- the Egyptian, the Arab or the Muslim -- was the most significant. Indeed, whole books have been written on the subject. One reading of Coury would be that the importance of such debates has generally been exaggerated and that the matter only became of real historical moment when there were concrete political choices to made, something which did not happen until well after the Second World War. In this sense, Egyptians were, for a long time, in the fortunate position of not having to make up their minds. Or, to put it another way, as members of the most economically and politically powerful Arab state they had the luxury of being able to follow Azzam's lead in believing that an emphasis on their Arabism could only be to their country's great advantage.
* The writer is professor of history at the Centre for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard.
