The Shaping of the Modern Middle East (15 page)

The first stirrings of the new loyalty in the Middle East took the form of patriotism, not nationalism. They were inspired by the example of Western Europe, particularly of France and England, where nationhood and statehood were combined and where patriotism was the loyalty that citizens owed to their country and normally paid to the government when it fell due. This new conception, which seemed to reinforce and extend the claims of the state to the loyalty of its subjects, at first received some encouragement from Middle Eastern governments; later they found that the transfer of allegiance from a person to an abstraction raised unexpected difficulties.

The term used to convey the idea of country, or more precisely of the French patrie, was the Arab word watan, which has passed, with some changes of pronunciation, into Persian, Turkish, and other Islamic languages. The primary meaning of watan was a person's place of origin or habitation, usually used of a town, village, or at most a province. A person's watan could be the object of sentiment, affection, and devotion, as many passages in classical Islamic literature attest, and is associated with family affection, memories of youth, and home-sickness. From these it is clear that the classical word watan was the equivalent not of the French patrie, but, rather, of the English word "home" in its broader sense. Like "home," it carried a wealth of sentimental associations, notably in the period of the Crusades when so many homes were lost or threatened; like it again, it had no political content.

The use of the word watan (Turkish, vatan) in a political sense, equivalent to the French patrie or the English "country" or the German Vaterland, dates from the late eighteenth century and is clearly due to European influence and example. The earliest occurrence that I have been able to trace in this sense is in a Turkish document, a report by Morali Esseyyid Ali Efendi, who served as Ottoman ambassador in Paris under the Directoire. In a description of the hospitals and homes provided by the French authorities for pensioned and disabled soldiers, he speaks of these men as having striven "in the cause of the Republic [jumhur] and out of zeal for the country [vatan]."' Both words, jumhur and vatan, were old, with roots in classical Arabic. Jumhur had already acquired a political connotation at an earlier date, through Ottoman acquaintance with Venice and other European republics. Patriotism was a new discovery, made known through the French Revolution, and it is doubtful whether Ali Efendi, whose reports do not suggest any great keenness of perception, really understood it. More probably, he, or rather his interpreter, was merely translating literally from a French original, without appreciating its real import.

Nevertheless, the new idea spread, and in 1839 the phrase "love of country" (vatan) even appears in an Ottoman official document, the famous reform edict known as the Rescript of the Rosebower. In 1840 the Turkish diplomat Mustafa Sami, in his Essay on Europe, speaks of "love of country" as one of the praiseworthy qualities of the people of Paris and adduces his own love of country as his reason for publishing this booklet. By 1841 the expression hubb ul-vatan, (love of country) was sufficiently established in its new meaning to appear as the equivalent of patriotism in Handjeri's Turkish-French dictionary, where it is illustrated with a number of phrases expressing patriotic sentiments. In 1851 the Turkish poet and journalist Shinasi, in a letter to his mother, said, "I want to sacrifice myself for my religion, state, country and nation" (din ve devlet ve vatan ve millet). The Crimean War was the occasion for a more militant patriotism and the appearance of the first patriotic poem. By this time the word vatan was in current journalistic usage; in 1866 it even appeared in the name of a new newspaper, the Ayine-i Vatan (Mirror of the Fatherland).'

The appearance of patriotic ideas in Egypt came a little later than in Turkey and was to a large extent the work of Sheikh Rifa`a Rafi` al-Tahtawi. During his stay in Paris from 1826 to 1831, he must have become aware of the significance of patriotism in French life, though he makes little reference to it in his book on France. His patriotic writings came some years later and enjoyed official encouragement. In 1855 he published an "Egyptian patriotic ode" (gasida wataniyya Misriyya) in praise of the new ruler Said Pasha and, in the same year, a collection of "Egyptian patriotic poems" (manzumdt wataniyya Misriyya), inspired by the exploits of the Egyptian contingent sent to help the Turks in the Crimean War. Another patriotic ode greeted the accession of Ismail eight years later, and further wataniyydt (patriotic poems) appeared in 1868 after the return of the Egyptian, actually black, battalion from Mexico, where they had gone as part of Napoleon III's expeditionary force.

Sheikh RifWa's patriotic poems, some of them in simple, martial verse, sing the praises of Egypt, of the Egyptian soldier and army, and of the khedivial dynasty. In his prose works, he develops his patriotic teachings at greater length, citing the tradition that "love of country is part of the faith" and other dicta. Patriotism, for Sheikh Rifa`a, is the bond that holds the social order together; to inculcate it in the young is one of the primary purposes of education. His patriotism is clearly and distinctively Egyptian. It is not Arab, since it does not include the other Arabic-speaking or Muslim countries, and since it does include the ancient Egyptians of pre-Islamic times and even the non-Muslim residents of Egypt in his own day. As far back as 1838, Sheikh Rifa`a had produced the first Arabic translation of a European history of pharaonic Egypt. In 1868 he tried his own hand at a history of Egypt from antiquity up to the Arab conquest, thus ending where all previous Arabic histories of Egypt had begun. His later works are full of a sentiment of pride in the glories of ancient Egypt and of a deep love for his country, which he sees as a living, continuing entity from the days of the pharaohs to his own. This was a new and radical idea in the Muslim world, and it was long before its equivalent appeared in any other Muslim country.

Sheikh Rifa`a's brand of patriotism was sponsored and encouraged by the khedives, who saw, in the emergence of a distinctively Egyptian political personality and loyalty, a support for their own dynastic and separatist ambitions. Members of the khedivial family also helped, for different reasons, to launch another brand of patri otism, that of the Turkish group of liberal patriots known as the Young Ottomans.

The 1850s and 1860s brought important developments. The war had aroused a passionate desire for news and interpretation; the telegraph and the press came to supply them. The strains of the Crimean War and the example of Turkey's Western allies stimulated the growth of patriotism, which found expression in the new and widely read newspaper and magazine press. The Young Ottoman group, formed in 1865 to press for a more liberal political regime in the empire, based themselves from the start on a patriotic as well as a liberal program.

Namik Kemal, the intellectual leader of the group, wrote eloquently in both prose and verse on patriotism-on the greatness of his country and the loyalty owed to it by its citizens. The first leader of the first issue of Hiirriyet (Freedom), the journal published by the exiled liberals in London in 1868, is headed Hubb al-watan min aliman (Love of country is part of the faith), a tradition now becoming popular among the new patriots. The same theme is argued and developed in a series of articles, published both during his stay in Europe and after his return to Turkey in 1870. Kemal went into exile again in 1873, following the too enthusiastic reception of his ardently patriotic play Vatan or Silistre, celebrating an episode in the Crimean War.

The unit of Namik Kemal's patriotism is the Ottoman Empireits sovereign, its territory, its peoples. The word "Turk" appears rarely in his writings and then as a synonym of Ottoman Muslim. The word "Ottoman," as used by him and his contemporaries, is often limited to Muslims, but at other times refers to all the sultan's subjects irrespective of religion or race, who are to be united in a single loyalty. Kemal's conceptions of nation and country are confused, often contradictory, and change during the course of his career. They are overshadowed by his constant loyalty to his religion. Despite his use of the terms "country" and "patriot" and his appeals to his non-Muslim fellow citizens, the entity that he serves is ultimately Islamic. This can be seen most clearly in his many historical writings and allusions. He is uninterested in the history of Turkey before the coming of the Muslim Turks; he is equally uninterested in the history of the Turks before their conversion to Islam. Kemal's Vatan had been ruled in the past by Arab caliphs as well as Turkish sultans, and its sons include Arab and Persian sages as well as Turkish heroes. There is nothing in Kemal's patriotism to resemble the clear sense of identity and continuity of Egypt and the Egyptians expressed in the writings of Sheikh Rifa`a. Kemal was a critic and not a spokesman of the regime, a journalist more than a teacher, but still a member of the ruling group of an empire. The inconsistencies of his ideas are perhaps a measure of their relevance and their reality, in an age of great changes still imperfectly understood.

In several of his essays, Kemal offers his readers reassurance against the dangers of separatism among the many peoples and races of the empire. It is true, he says, that the population of the empire is very diverse. The different peoples are, however, so thoroughly mixed that none of them is strong enough in any region to form a viable separate state or to join an existing one. The only exception is the Arab provinces, which are inhabited by a people of many millions, speaking another language and feeling themselves to belong to another race. They were, however, Muslims, "bound to us by Islamic brotherhood and allegiance to the Caliphatei3 and would not therefore break away in the name of Arabism or the like.

Kemal was wrong on both points, although the proof of his errors lay far in the future. For the time being, the Arab provinces did indeed remain bound by Islamic brotherhood and dynastic loyalty, which meant far more to them than the newfangled notion of Ottoman patriotism. An exception was the Christian Arab elite of Beirut and Lebanon, where patriotic ideas evoked a certain response. As Christians, they were more open to European ideas. But unlike the Armenian- and Greek-speaking Christians of Anatolia and Rumelia, they shared the language and culture of their Muslim neighbors and had no memories of separate national identity. On several occasions, most recently in 1860, they had suffered severely from religious persecution. They therefore had every inducement to favor a patriotic instead of a religious basis of allegiance. If language, culture, domicile, and citizenship were to be the criteria of identity, then the Christian Arabs might hope that their possession of the first three would entitle them to the fourth and would give them the unrestricted, first-class membership that they lacked in the Islamic empire. As early as 1860 Butrus al-Bustani founded a school called al-Madrasa al-wataniyya and addressed his appeals for solidarity and loyalty to his Muslim and Christian compatriots. In 1870 he used the formula "love of country is part of the faith" as the motto of his fortnightly magazine AI-Jinan. Bustani writes as a loyal Ottoman subject, but the watan of which he speaks is Syria, a province of the empire rather than the whole of it. Some Maronite Christians, angered by Muslim persecution and sustained by memories of Lebanese autonomy, even thought of an anti-Ottoman Lebanese patriotism, similar to the movements of the Greeks and Serbs. These were the only stirrings of disloyalty at that time in the Arab provinces, which otherwise remained faithful to the Islamic Ottaman Empire.

Egypt, then, was the only country where territorial, nonconfes- sional patriotism made any headway among a Muslim people. There were many advantages: a country strikingly defined by both history and geography, a vigorous reigning dynasty determined to achieve territorial independence, and a splendid ancient past-the first to be rediscovered and in many ways the most magnificent-to sustain patriotic pride. In 1882 a new and powerful stimulus to patriotic feeling was provided-the British occupation. Even before the coming of the British, the growing feeling against foreigners had found expression in the famous slogan "Egypt for the Egyptians," launched by the Christian journalist Selim Naggash, popularized by the Jewish pamphleteer Abu Naddara, and applied by the Muslim soldier `Urabi Pasha. During the 1870s, several developments in Egypt had led to mounting resentment and improved ways of expressing it. On the one hand, there were a shallow Nile, a weak and spendthrift government, and growing foreign influence; on the other, an expanding newspaper press, improved education, and an influx of writers and intellectuals from the unfree lands of Islamic Asia-notably the panIslamic leader Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and a number of journalists, mostly Christian, from Ottoman Syria. In 1879 a group of Egyptians formed al-hizb al-watani, usually translated as the National party, though Patriotic party would be a more literal rendering. This was followed, after the British occupation, by a series of other societies, associations, and parties, expressing, in various degrees and in different ways, opposition to foreign rule. The most important was the National party led by Mustafa Kamil, the political and intellectual leader of Egyptian resistance at the end of the nineteenth and the beginning of the twentieth century.

It would be a mistake to regard these as purely patriotic national liberation movements. The element of Muslim identity and loyalty was still very strong; it was nourished by the contemporary current of Islamic modernism and revival and sometimes found an outlet in expressions of hostility and mistrust toward non-Muslims. The resistance movements were, however, essentially Egyptian and concerned with the pursuit of Egyptian objectives. They were not antiimperialist, merely anti-British, since Britain was the occupying power in Egypt. Mustaf8 Kamil's pro-French attitude was in no way. affected by French action in North Africa, just as, earlier in the century, Sheikh Rifa`a had been unconcerned with the French conquest of Algeria, which began while he was still in Paris. They were not Arab nationalists either. For Mustafa Kamil and his contemporaries, the greatness of the medieval caliphate was something in which their ancestors participated and in which they might claim a share of pride. It was, however, a dead classical past, much less vivid to them than the newly rediscovered glories of pharaonic Egypt. The Arabs of Asia were foreigners, cousins rather than brothers, and Egyptian writers like `Abdallah Nadim and Mustafa Kamil at times attacked the Syrians settled in Egypt, whom they called dukhald' (intruders). Insofar as their cause was part of a larger one, it was still that of Islam. `Urabi's movement had been directed not so much against foreigners as against the Turco-Circassian elements that dominated the army, the aristocracy, and the court. Under the British occupation, this cleavage seemed less important. Mustafa Kamil, criticizing the `Urabists, accused them of "ethnic hostility" and argued that the Turks and Circassians, long established in Egypt, must be regarded as Egyptianized and as part of the nation.