Arab Historiography 1918-Today

Introduction

“Remember us, oh you living!” are the opening words of Antun Yammin’s firsthand account of World War I, appealing to his fellow countrymen not to forget the victims of the famine that a regime of military confiscation and profiteering had induced in Lebanon and Syria.

“We are Lebanese like you, we are victims of the atrocities of the bloodletting Turks… Shame on you that you don’t note down for us our history recording the disgrace and deprived nature of our tyrannical killers.”

Yammin, a Maronite priest, wrote to counter other publications that were whitewashing the responsibility of the Ottoman army for wartime atrocities. Referring to the Turkish leadership, Yammin said that the “prisons and the gallows attest clearly to their hatred for the Arab race.”¹

This plea to record the history of World War I for the sake of its victims was published in 1919. As a firsthand account, the book is typical for the early Arab historiography of the war. In most Arab lands, Western style academic history writing emerged as a profession only after World War I or even later.² Memoirs thus constitute a significant part of the early historical documentation and commemoration of the war. Moreover, some of the early and most influential scholarly historians of Arab origin wrote their works in English at Western institutions. There is therefore no clear dividing line between a Western and a Middle Eastern school of academic history, or, for that matter, between historiography written in Arabic or by Arabs in other languages. The authoritarian nature of most Arab states determines, too, that the grand narratives that have come out of academic institutions over the 20th century tend to be state and elite centered, not least since those states achieved independence. Many focus on the events that the dissolution of the Ottoman Empire triggered, such as the establishment of the Arab successor states. For Arab nationalists, it was important to present the dissolution of the empire as a consequence of an essential incompatibility between the competing nationalist aspirations of Arabs and Turks, and less as an outcome of the happenstance of war. Hence Yammin’s aversion against the Turks.

This article presents a number of examples for the ways Arab historians, both professional and amateur, have engaged with World War I. They are naturally snippets that hardly do justice to more than a hundred years of Arab writing about the war. Yet they give an impression of the diversity of narratives that people developed based on experiences linked to specific geographies, from the Arab East to the countries of North Africa. They are as diverse as those of any other people that got sucked into the maelstrom of a war that was ultimately of European making.

Justifying Arab Independence

One of the most consequential works of modern Middle Eastern history is The Arab Awakening, the magnum opus of George Antonius (1891-1942), first published in 1939 on the eve of the London Conference debating the future political structures of the Mandate after the Palestine Revolt (1936-1939). It falls into a category of books that used very specific aspects of the war to make arguments about the post-war period. Antonius, born in today’s Lebanon, attended Victoria College in Alexandria and King’s College in Cambridge, and then worked for a number of years in the British administration in Egypt and later in Palestine. His book established a paradigm about the origins of the Arab nationalist movement that went on to dominate historical discussion in East and West for decades. He underlined the role of anti-Turkish secret societies that motivated Arabs to reject Ottoman rule during the war. He argued that Sharif Husayn (1854-1931)’s Arab Revolt had received a broad positive response in the Arab cities. Most importantly, he was the first to publicize the story of British pledges and counter pledges during the war in the correspondence between Husayn and Henry McMahon (1862-1949), the British high commissioner in Egypt, as well as the Sykes-Picot Agreement and the Balfour Declaration.³ Antonius propagated that Arab nationalism was rooted in a deep enmity between Arabs and Turks, which culminated in the execution of Arab leaders in 1915 in Beirut and 1916 in Damascus and the deportation of their families, triggering the outbreak of the revolt. In contrast, the famine in Lebanon and Syria that is central to Yammin’s account appears on a few pages only.⁴ More recently, professional Arab historians have taken nuanced positions about the enmity between Arabs and Turks. One example can be found in Ulrike Freitag’s seminal study of Syrian historiography in the 20th century. The Syrian historian Tawfiq Barru conceded, for example, that the Arab Revolt was not a mass movement at the time. Most Arab Ottoman citizens, conscripted soldiers or otherwise, remained loyal to the empire to the bitter end.⁵

A second key text of the justificatory trend in Arab historiography of World War I is Sati‘ al-Husri (1880-1968)’s Day of Maysalun, first published in 1947. It presents the point of view of a key author of state sanctioned narratives, who converted from being a high-ranking Ottoman educationalist to an Arab nationalist after the war. Born in Aleppo, al-Husri created an Arab nationalist curriculum in the interwar period, serving Faysal Ibn Husayn (1885-1933) during his Arab rule over Syria (1918-1920) and later when he became king of Iraq. Part memoir, part historical study, the Day of Maysalun is an adulation of King Faysal. It glorifies the Arab Revolt as an all-Arab affair. It is, however, also a meticulous study with documentary evidence about the diplomatic machinations with which the British and, with al-Husri’s emphasis, the French strove to protect their respective national interest. At Khan Maysalun, an area along the road connecting Beirut and Damascus, French forces defeated an army of former Ottoman soldiers, fighters of the Arab Revolt and militias recruited in and around Damascus in July 1920, thus ending Faysal’s short-lived Syrian kingdom. The battle belongs to the aftershocks of the Ottoman defeat in the war, but for Husri, it also stood for the ultimate dismantling of the coalition of the Arab Revolt between Ottoman officers and the Hashemites of the Hejaz, later to be reconstructed separately in Iraq and Transjordan.⁶ Despite its dry and documentary style, the book nevertheless established a historical teleology inevitably leading to Hashemite rule. In a similar vein, there is still a regular output of works about the Arab Revolt in the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan legitimizing modern authority even today.⁷

History from Below

Eugene Rogan attests that there are no major monuments or recurring celebrations about the war in the Arab world. He writes that “…the conflict is commemorated as someone else’s war”, the war of the Ottomans that brought hardship to the Arab lands.⁸ Echoing this sentiment is a recent trend among historians, who have taken up writing the history of the war from below. Leila Fawaz’s book A Land of Aching Hearts, which was published for the war’s centennial, centers on personal memory. Fawaz’s references include recollections of her own father’s accounts, and the experience of the people who she calls the “everyday heroes”. Despite little official commemoration, “World War I is very much alive in the memory of what was once ‘Greater Syria’ … but it also holds resonance throughout the entire Middle East.”⁹ According to Fawaz, the war was understood in hindsight as the breaking point and dividing line between an old and a new world, bringing a great deal of social and technological transformation. It also marked a point of nostalgic longing for a prior world that is remembered as more open to diversity and balance between communities of difference.¹⁰ As such, the war marks a rupture inflicted on the region from the outside, rather than confirming the Arab agency that post-Ottoman elites claimed. The works by the Palestinian historian Salim Tamari put particular emphasis on World War I as a liminal period of transition when people of greater Syria underwent a metamorphosis of political, social and personal allegiances and identities between Ottomanism, Arab nationalism and, ultimately, accelerated modernization.¹¹

Antun Yammin’s text features in Fawaz’s book. Najwa al-Qattan, another historian whose work focuses on experiences on the home front, refers to him, too. At the center of a number of al-Qattan’s articles is Safarbarlik. Originally, the term stood for Ottoman military conscription. It also represents the period of Ottoman military rule over Syria and Lebanon during the war and the disastrous famine that resulted from confiscation efforts combined with bad harvests, a time “When Mothers Ate Their Children”.¹² The term Safarbarlik appears outside the larger Syrian context, too, such as in recent works by Saudi authors as a reference to the impact of the siege of Medina by Sharif Husayn’s army of the Arab Revolt. While Syrians and the Lebanese generally hold the Ottoman commander Cemal Pasha (1872-1922) responsible for their suffering,¹³ there is no consensus about who was to blame for the deportations of Medina’s local population, which were ordered by the Ottoman military governor Fakhri Pasha (1868-1948). For some it is an “Ottoman crime”, for others it was Fakhri Bey’s attempt to safeguard the survival of the people who would otherwise have been threatened by starvation. Even Sharif Husayn appears either as a hero of Arab liberation or as a traitor against the caliphate. The position of authors with regard to the Saudi throne may play a role in this choice, too. The royal family is inclined to suppress versions of Saudi history that do not place the house of Sa‘ud front and center.¹⁴ However, the usage of local sources to drive home such points is still rare in the Arabian Peninsula. Unpublished memoirs, oral history, and folk songs feature prominently in the works by Fawaz, Qattan, and Tamari. They offer an alternative to the practice among many historians at regional universities, Saudi or otherwise, to rely on European sources for the history of the war – records that tell little about common people’s experiences.¹⁵

Specific National Histories

In Egypt, World War I was a historical catalyst, too. Classic accounts such as those by ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Rafi‘i (1889-1966) highlight the contrast between official and popular narratives. For Rafi‘i, who was not a trained historian, but became the most influential history writer of his generation, Egyptian history was shaped by a series of people’s revolutions. The Urabi Revolt and subsequent British occupation in 1882 and the 1919 revolution were the major landmarks.¹⁶ The Egyptian Labor Corps plays a central role in the war’s national commemoration. The British sent its local conscripts to Middle Eastern and European battlefields for earthworks and similar tasks. In nationalist historiography, this service created a shared experience that instilled working class Egyptians with a national consciousness, preparing them to revolt in 1919. In the wake of the war’s centennial, nationalist authors went one step further, praising the corps as an incarnation of Egyptian military spirit, thus ignoring that it didn’t participate in actual combat. Memory of the labor corps experiences survived in songs and folktales, however. Recent research has shown that the recruitment efforts and the conditions workers had to endure during their service actually met fierce resistance during the war already. Work stoppages were akin to labor uprisings outside the nationalist paradigm that Rafi’i promoted.¹⁷

Further west, French colonialism created specific conditions for the commemoration of World War I in North Africa. Here, war did not mark the end of empire and disaster on the home front, but it was a catalyst of anticolonial political consciousness. The experiences of several hundred thousand drafted and conscripted Muslims of Algeria, who served in the trenches and factories of mainland France, put into question the “mythology of the benefits of Western civilization”,¹⁸ yet it also intertwined Algerian Muslims stronger than ever before with French society as migrants and veterans who expected recognition and care from the state. Likewise, the French authorities were able to coopt veterans against nationalist trends that emerged in the 1930s. In a long-term perspective, however, the memory of World War I is vastly overshadowed by the Algerian War of Independence, voiding the opportunities for reconciliation that the shared trench experience might have offered.¹⁹

In comparison, Moroccan historians have had less political baggage to carry. Morocco became a French protectorate two years before the war. The sultan endorsed the French war effort to show good will, and local leaders volunteered their men to please him. Approximately 100,000 men served as soldiers and workers in France, nominally as volunteers, but with very little if any grasp of what was at stake in the conflict. Conscripts died for France in Europe, while some of their brethren fought a war of resistance against the French back home. Moroccan historians have started to center the experiences of such men who developed consciousness of the colonial situation, shedding blood on behalf of a different nation than the one they came to see as their own.²⁰

Conclusion

World War I is a watershed event in the history of the Arab lands as a trigger for momentous political and social change. Arab historiography has developed accounts of the war primarily to foster arguments in post-war political debates and to garner political legitimacy for clans and dynasties, but also for the ideological foundations of 20th century Arab politics. This happened primarily in the context of the various forms of Arab nationalism that have undergirded regimes, which relied on elite networking but were nevertheless in need of populist justification. Stories of ethnic antagonism such as that between Arabs and Turks, or historical betrayal as that of the British during the war, served to prop up nominally nationalist governments. Popular memory of shortages, suffering and abuse under wartime rule survived mainly in folktales and non-academic writing. Recently, historians have started to document this history from below and use it to develop alternative readings of the war years that make it possible to write a different history, documenting and analyzing experiences of lower class people with shortages, forced labor, and combat, as well as their responses and long term strategies to receive recognition and, in the case of veterans, compensation.

Peter Wien, University of Maryland