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Chapter 20

ARISE, O ARABS, AND AWAKE!

ON UNIVERSITY CAMPUSES AND ON TEEMING URBAN STREETS, on the pages of newspapers and in the minutes of literary clubs, the idea slowly took root. An Arab nation had always existed and, through a combination of domestic revolt and international diplomacy, would soon reassert itself in the form of a unified, independent state. The concept of Arabism, it will be recalled, originated in the nationalist ideologies of the West and penetrated the Middle East with the help of mission schools and colleges, many of them American. “I know why the Turks are hated in this country,” Djemal Pasha, the governor of Syria, reproved the American consul in Damascus. “The Syrian Protestant College…breeds contempt for the Turk [and]…the very books used in the institution…breathe this spirit.” Arab Christians, numbers of whom attended those schools, naturally became adherents of nationalism and worked to forge a common bond with the surrounding Muslim majority.

Arab Muslims, however, having long rejected the missionaries’ religious teachings, felt little affection for their secular Western ideas. They already possessed a nation—the Islamic nation (Umma), as embodied by the Ottoman state. Few among them sought a common identity with Christians, much less a chance to join them in impugning Ottoman rule. Rather than secede from the empire, they preferred to attain additional rights within it and to achieve unity not through an alien philosophy but by returning to their native Islam. Rarely defining themselves as Arabs, they remained, first and foremost, Muslims. By contrast, those residents of the Middle East who saw themselves as Arabs primarily, irrespective of their religious affiliation, and who longed for a separate state, remained a tiny minority. It consisted of small groups of Western-educated intellectuals, mostly Christians, in Syria, and Arab expatriates in Europe. The cry “Arise, O Arabs, and awake,” raised by the Syrian Protestant College graduate Ibrahim al-Yaziji in 1868, was, by the turn of the century, still unheeded. 1

That is, until the Young Turk revolution in 1908. The Ottoman Empire, for centuries the bastion of Islam and the protector of Arabic language and culture, was suddenly transformed into a vehicle for imposing secular Turkish identity. The revolution served to strengthen the nationalist inclinations of Arab Christians and, for the first time, forced Arab Muslims to question their allegiance to Istanbul. In secret societies in Cairo, Damascus, and Baghdad, Muslim philosophers such as Abdullah al-Nadim and the young officer Nuri al-Sa‘id joined with their Christian countrymen and discussed the possibility of Arab independence from the Porte. The same year saw mass demonstrations against British rule in Egypt and, in Palestine, the first stirrings of Arab resistance to Zionism.

Though they had profited from the enhanced trade and employment opportunities generated by the new Jewish settlements, Palestinian Arabs had grown increasingly concerned about the rise of Jewish immigration and land purchases. Resentment surfaced in March 1908, when a public celebration of the Jewish holiday of Purim provoked a scuffle with Arab onlookers in Jaffa. At the same time, in Haifa, the editor Najib Nassar founded a new journal, al-Karmil, dedicated to exposing the Zionist threat. Like Nassar, a recent convert from Greek Orthodoxy to Protestantism, most of the early Arab opponents to Zionism were Christian. Not a few of them had acquired their nationalism at American schools and the Syrian Protestant College. They warned of the dangers Zionism posed not only to the Arabs of Palestine but to the Arab nation as a whole.

But Muslim Arabs were also becoming wary of the Zionist challenge. In Palestine, especially, the centuries-old Muslim community feared being cut off from the broader Islamic nation and finding itself a second-class minority in a Jewish state. “The Jews’…right [to Palestine] died with the passage of time; our right is alive and unshakeable,” wrote one of them, Khalil al-Sakakini, from Jerusalem in 1914. “What will the Jews do if the national feeling of the Arab nation is aroused; how will they be able to stand up to [the Arabs]?”

The future of Palestine—and of the Arab Middle East in general—would preoccupy Arab nationalist thinkers as war raged through the region. Arab Muslims in general responded zealously to the Porte’s call for holy war and many thousands of them served in Turkish ranks. While the British managed to spark an Arab revolt against Turkey and to rally many nationalists to its cause, the rebellion was in fact spurred less by Arabism than by the desire to revive a purified Arab caliphate independent of the Westernized Turks. The uprising’s leader, Sharif Husayn, the head of the Hashemite clan and guardian of Mecca, believed that the Arabs could unite only under Islam and not beneath some racial or cultural banner.2

Arab nationalism, though destined to become a tectonic force in the Middle East, remained in an inchoate stage in the years leading up to World War I. The movement was largely confined to the margins of Arab society and ruthlessly suppressed by the Turks. The war, however, helped prepare the ground for a dramatic flowering of Arab nationalism. And while most of these preparations took place in the Middle East, a significant number were also undertaken in the United States by inspired groups of Arab Americans.

Of Prophets and Judges

Between 1880 and 1914, approximately 100,000 Arabic-speakers arrived in the United States, settling mainly in the Northeast but also founding smaller communities in every state in the Union. They emigrated from Syria, mostly, but also from southern Anatolia, Palestine, and Egypt, seeking freedom from religious persecution and from famine. Roughly 90 percent of them were Christians, large numbers of whom worked as peddlers, bearing domestic necessities—utensils, thread, matchboxes, candles—to America’s far-flung cities and homesteads. They traveled far, forming notions of their new homeland as romantic as those which Americans traditionally harbored toward the Middle East. “The land of hope…the land of contentment…the land of liberty…where the dreams of men come true,” one of them, Salom Rizk, recalled. “I could see America…looming out of my ignorance, thrusting its huge continental shores…out of the fog that was in me.”

The immigrants may have been happy to leave the troubled Middle East for the peace and opportunities of America, but they remained committed to their native language and culture. Many of these Arab Americans had been educated at missionary schools that emphasized Arabic instruction or else had benefited from the Arabic-language textbooks and dictionaries that the missionaries had produced. As early as 1892, New York had its first Arabic newspaper—Kawkab Amerika (The Star of America)—and by the end of World War I, nine Arabic journals were circulating. Literary societies, meanwhile, sprang up in several American cities and served as laboratories for avant-garde Arab poets, essayists, and playwrights.

Of these, the best known was Gibran Khalil Gibran. Quiet and slight, a mustachioed Maronite from northern Lebanon, Gibran settled in Boston’s impoverished South End in 1895. After returning to Lebanon to complete his Arabic education, Gibran sailed back to the United States during the war and became an activist for Arab liberation. He called on Arab Christians and Muslims to unite in armed struggle against Turkish rule, wondering, “How long are the Cross and the Crescent to remain apart before the eyes of God?” Yet it was his poetry, rather than his politics, that made Gibran famous in his adopted land. Boston society feted him, convinced that his abstract imagery contained poignant insights on love, nature, and God. In searching for his esoteric meanings, though, readers often overlooked the themes of national identity and longing for independence that ran subtly through his verse. “Freedom when it loses its fetters becomes itself the fetter of a greater freedom,” Gibran declared in his epic classic, The Prophet.3

Gibran’s close friend and occasional literary collaborator, Ameen Rihani, may have been less acclaimed artistically but proved far more politically influential. Like Gibran, he was a Lebanese Maronite who, at age twelve, moved with his family to the United States but briefly returned to Beirut to complete his Arabic education. Moved by Washington Irving’s Alhambra, with its mystical evocation of Muslim Spain, Rihani aspired to create a literature of fusion between Arab and Western cultures. “Carry to the East some of the western vigor and bring to the West some Eastern repose,” he exhorted ships departing and entering New York harbor. “Deliver to Egypt and Syria an abundance of your engineering sciences and bring over a heap of its noble Arab traits.” Also, like Gibran, Rihani was passionate about freedom, in particular the “American spirit of freedom” inculcated by the Syrian Protestant College. “Of all the other educational institutions of Syria that encourage this lofty spiritual view…the American College at Beirut stands foremost.”

Dark complexioned and dapper, an orator of spellbinding charm, Rihani proclaimed his love of his New World liberties before Arab American audiences, urging them to help achieve those freedoms for their Middle Eastern homeland. “In a land where…the freedom of the citizen has not yet been realized, one can better serve one’s country from a safe distance,” he explained. Yet it was not safety that Rihani sought, for with America’s entry into World War I, he exhorted all Middle Eastern immigrants to volunteer for combat. “Our first duty is toward our adopted country, whose political ideals will yet be the ideals of every nation in the world,” he proclaimed in a letter to Teddy Roosevelt, adding, “I have never been so proud of being an American citizen as I am to-day.” Rihani’s pride sometimes proved effusive, though, and dangerous. While trying to recruit Syrian and Lebanese immigrants in Mexico to join the American army, the writer was arrested and expelled.

Rihani’s love for the United States was inextricable from his adoration for the Arab world, yet he could also be merciless in criticizing that world’s shortcomings. Ignorance, sectarian factiousness, and religious fanaticism were, in his view, just some of the ill’s endemic to the Middle East. “It was unfortunate that you should allude to some of the defects in Islam at a time when the best people are trying to draw together in the interest of…the Empire,” Howard Bliss, after listening to one of Rihani’s critiques, reproached him. But Rihani’s criticism merely targeted those aspects of Arab society that he felt were in need of radical reform. Such changes would be affected by indigenous movements—one of which, curiously, was Wahhabism, cited by Rihani as “proof of the aptitude of the Arab’s spirit, its liberal aspirations, and the elastic quality of its religious fibre”—as well as by a beneficent United States. “The voice of America…is destined to become the voice of the world.”

The transformation of the Arab people that Rihani envisioned would encounter innumerable obstacles. Among the most trying of these was the release of the Balfour Declaration in November 1917. “The Land of Promise had indeed become a too much promised land,” he chortled. Rihani distinguished between the “native Jews” of Palestine, whom he considered Arabs, and the European Zionists, who were essentially reactionaries, “harking back…to pre-Roman days.” Instead of to Palestine, he suggested that Jewish refugees from Russia move to Texas, a far larger and emptier area, where they could be resettled—so Rihani quipped—“without prejudicing the civil and religious rights of existing non-Jewish communities.”

The following month brought a no less devastating shock. As one of its first acts after seizing power in Moscow and signing a separate armistice with Germany, the Bolshevik government published the Allies’ secret agreements on the Ottoman Empire. The world suddenly learned that the powers planned to reapportion the Middle East and that Britain’s beguiling promise to create an independent Arab state—the quid pro quo for the Arabs’ revolt—was baseless. The revelation was devastating for Arab nationalists throughout the Middle East and searingly painful for Rihani. His vision of a strong and united Arab state had been abruptly replaced by a “dream of empire…supported with American money and English bayonets.” Rihani warned of disastrous consequences if the Arabs were denied their liberty—of rebellions and wars into which the United States, torn between domestic political pressures and its expanding Middle East interests, might be dragged.4

Rihani was the Arab answer to Brandeis, a dynamic intellectual who marshaled America’s moral force to advance his nationalist arguments. Similarly secular in outlook, both men were committed to spreading America’s civic faith in the Middle East. Neither saw a contradiction between his loyalty to the United States and advocacy of his people’s independence. Unlike Brandeis, however, with his political connections, strong organizational base, and a possible pool of several million American Jews, Rihani had little access to power and few followers, actual or potential. Nonetheless, Arab nationalism had begun to attract influential sympathizers in the United States, both within and outside of government.

“I have a kindly feeling for the Arabs and my influence will be thrown in their direction whenever they are right,” Colonel House confessed to his diary. Yet the president’s adviser was scarcely alone in viewing Arab political goals sympathetically. A small but politically potent group of industrialists—oilmen, in particular—fearful of Anglo-French competition, also sought a mutually lucrative alliance between the United States and Arab nationalism. State Department careerists, many of them the descendants of the American missionaries who had promulgated Arab nationalism, now joined with the evangelists working in the Middle East to portray Arabism as a long-term American interest. This new and increasingly influential fusion of business, diplomatic, and religious interest was exemplified by Charles Crane, the entrepreneur and philanthropist who became the Arabs’ outstanding champion in America.

Born in Chicago in 1888, the son of a bathroom fixture magnate, Crane quickly tired of the family business and instead cultivated a lifelong fascination with Asia. He was also a religious man, a devoted member of the Presbyterian Church. These two interests converged for Crane in the Middle East, where he served on the boards of Robert College and the Constantinople Women’s College and helped to finance new missions. Cherub-faced but introspective—a Time magazine portrait showed him thoughtfully engaged in Solitaire—Crane was in fact politically shrewd. He supported Taft, a Republican, for president in 1909 and, four years later, became one of Wilson’s most generous contributors. His son Richard served as Robert Lansing’s private secretary.

Crane was also an early advocate of Arab independence and in 1914 sponsored a series of lectures on Arab history and culture at select American universities. If Brandeis saw Zionists as avatars of the hardworking Pilgrim colonists, then Crane subscribed to the popular American image of the Arabs as lovers of liberty and revilers of radicalism, the “Unitarians of the desert.” He served as the patron to several Arab intellectuals, Muslim as well as Christian, including George Antonius, the eminent historian. Antonius would dedicate his seminal study of the Arab nationalist movement, The Arab Awakening, to “Charles R. Crane, aptly nicknamed Harun al-Rashid”—a reference to the illustrious caliph of A Thousand and One Arabian Nights.

Crane’s admiration for the Arabs was rivaled only by his antipathy toward Zionism and Jews. In contrast to the nineteenth-century patrons of American missions, Crane had no ardor for restorationism and nothing but disdain for what he deemed “the menace…[of] the modern, pushy Jew.” A defender of the czar’s anti-Jewish pogroms and an admirer of Henry Ford’s rampages against the “international Jew,” Crane considered the term “anti-Semite” to be a “title of honor.” Though named America’s ambassador to China, Crane was so flagrant in his Jew hatred that President Taft was compelled to rescind the appointment.5

Anti-Semitism did not, however, figure prominently in Arab nationalist thought of this period. On the contrary, activists in the movement often went out of their way to express fraternity with the Jews of the Middle East and, on occasion, even a willingness to coexist with the Zionists. At least one hundred Jews from Baghdad fought with the Arab Revolt and shared in the jubilation when, on October 30, 1918, Turkey finally surrendered.

One month later, World War I came to a close, leaving American policymakers with a welter of postwar conundrums. Among the thorniest of these were the questions relating to the Middle East. Arab nationalism, once insignificant as a political force, could no longer be disregarded, but neither could Zionism. America’s allies Britain and France, whose cooperation was vital for establishing the new world order, also had demands in the Middle East—far-reaching demands. Reconciling all of these concurrent and often conflicting ambitions while maintaining America’s principles and interests was the herculean challenge awaiting Wilson at the international peace conference in Paris. Other Americans would join him there—Brandeis and Frankfurter, Rihani and Crane—a procession of judges and prophets, each aiming to reshape the region in accordance with his party’s goals. Ultimate decisions, however, would continue to reside with Wilson, a president who also saw himself in the Old Testament mode, meting out justice and wrath.