In 1945, the Jewish Agency's representative in Washington, DC cautioned in a secret report that Dr. Najla Abu-Izzeddin, the first Arab woman PhD (University of Chicago 1934, BA Vassar College), would "bear watching." Abu-Izzeddin was "the best educated, the most familiar with the United States, and the most articulate" of a cohort of young Arab intellectuals who staffed the newly formed Arab League's information bureaus in London, Jerusalem and Washington. These young luminaries of the Arab world, who had been educated at Anglo-American institutions, were chosen for being "socially acceptable and presentable" in London and Washington. Abu-Izzeddin, considered by many accounts "brilliant," had a peripatetic career as an educator in Beirut, Baghdad and Kuwait from the 1930s to 1950s, and then seemed to drop from sight, although she served on the Board of Directors of the Institute for Palestine Studies from the 1960s until the 1990s. Available sources celebrate Abu-Izzeddin as the usual "pioneering" Arab woman, but as a historical subject she is enigmatic. Trained in physical anthropology, her fieldwork in Lebanon relied on racial categories to make scholarly arguments about the origins of the Druze. An academic by training and temperament, she expended time and effort producing non-scholarly works written in English, aiming her publishing and public speaking toward an English-speaking audience in the 1940s and 1950s, when she lectured in the United States and Saudi Arabia, advocating for the Palestinian and Arab nationalist causes, and promoting her first book, The Arab World: Past, Present and Future. I explore Abu-Izzeddin's role and life as that rarely recognized personality, the female intellectual, and argue that she was, in fact, a public intellectual. An investigation of her personality, intellectual production and work history demonstrate the fraught space occupied by a woman whose liminality emphasizes how she was both outlier, but also emblematic of changing aspirations of highly educated Arab women. Why did she take the career path she did? How was her education in American institutions formative of her intellectual self? What did she see out to achieve in articulating her vision of the causes she promoted? How did she portray that vision to the Anglo-American public she targeted in her writing and speaking? Sources for the paper include oral history, educational transcripts, correspondence, and institutional archives from Vassar College, University of Chicago, and the Syria Mission.

The Arab Studies Program at the American University of Beirut was founded in the summer of 1949. Like other area studies programs at American universities, the ASP, initiated by US foundation funds, provided training and expertise on the region. Thus it had intimate ties to the area studies project that emerged in the West in the middle of the twentieth century fostered by the growth of the social sciences and shaped by the exigencies of World War II and the Cold War. However, AUB’s Arab Studies Program, as an area studies program located within the area it studied, and founded and directed by Constantine Zurayk and Nabih Amin Faris, was significantly different. First, Zurayk and Faris explicitly defined the area of study in terms of the Arab world rather than the Middle East, setting it distinctly apart from programs oriented around the Near or Middle East. Moreover, for its first two decades, the ASP served as a venue and platform for public engagement on the region in the Arabic language. Annual conferences, conducted in Arabic and published in Beirut, provided a venue for prominent intellectuals from around the Arab world to continue what may be described as the work of the Nahda: participants included Taha Husayn speaking on the role of the university, ‘Ali al-Wardi on human resources, and Edmond Rabbath on citizenship. In addition, members of the program like Faris and Ishaq Musa Husayni, aside from pursuing their scholarly work, endeavored to reach popular Arabic and English readerships to promote Arab nationalism, explore Islamic modernism, and, to champion the cause of Palestine—what Faris called the labor of “enlightened patriots.” This paper examines the work of these patriots by drawing on the proceedings of the Arab Studies conferences, reports in the local press, and the archives of AUB and the Rockefeller Foundation. This paper offers view of what area studies could be when practiced within the area, bringing to light the contributions of intellectuals devoted to the region who, in the wake of the nakba, pursued the Nahda, in an entirely new institutional guise, by encouraging public debate and critique within the Arab World as well as abroad.

Over the course of the 20th century, Iraq became a hub of debates and policies relating to the idea of an “Arab World.” These theories and practices were particularly evident in the field of education. From fascist-inspired, government-organized youth organizations to high-brow salons where educators, leaders and functionaries mingled, the concept of the Arab World was bandied about, defined, redefined, and at times taken for granted. Historians have explored the inextricable connection between concepts of the Arab world and ideas of Arab nationalism. Analyses tend to concentrate on Arab nationalism’s origins, validity and staying power. Alternatively, scholars have explored the Arab world’s links to Arab nationalism by investigating how Pan-Arabism overlapped with or opposed Iraqi nationalism. These discussions, however, often elide the ways in which individual and influential thinkers defined the Arab World specifically, as opposed to concepts such as the Arab Nation, Pan-Arabism, Arab nationalism or Arab Homeland. This paper examines how key Arab intellectuals and educators in Iraq conceived of the Arab World from the first decades of the 20th century to the early years of Ba’thist rule. In addition to providing a brief intellectual genealogy of the Arab World as an idea, I argue that a shift from a loose and inclusive Arab World coalesced into a rigid conception of nation states, to be allied in formal ways rather than loose cooperative initiatives. Important thinkers promulgated these changing beliefs through teaching and textbooks in Iraq’s expanding educational system. I analyze Arab educationalists from within and beyond Iraq, including Sati al-Husri, Darwish al-Miqdadi, Matta ‘Akrawi and Fadhel al-Jamali. Using educational journals, memoirs, speeches, scholarly works and textbooks, this paper pinpoints shifts in the idea of an Arab World over time. “Educating the Arab World” examines interpretations of the Arab World, as well as the ways in which those interpretations were presented to Iraqi society through schooling. My approach underscores differences between loosely-defined notions of Arab Unity and the world meant to be united during the Hashemite-era on the one hand and the growing strictness of Ba’th rule and ideology during the 1960s on the other.

When questioned about his motives for writing on “Islamic” topics in the 1930s, the intellectual Taha Hussein refuted popular interpretations that the shift was due to his generation’s disillusionment with “liberalism.” Instead, he argued that all history, including Islamic history, should be subjected to critical scrutiny. “Orientalists were already doing this, so should we have let them monopolize the study of our heritage?” he asked. Likewise, to face colonial attempts to undermine classical Arabic in favour of the colloquial, he called for making the language more accessible by simplifying grammar rules, creating modern dictionaries, and developing new teaching methods. Drawing on primary sources from the Egyptian National Archives, Cairo University, Hussein’s private papers, and the Arabic Language Academy, I will argue that Hussein had internalized one of the Arab Nahda’s central tenets – to face the colonial challenge by “reviving” the classical Arab-Islamic thought while forging strong ties with modern Europe. Unlike earlier nahdawis, however, he believed that only state-funded institutions, like the Faculty of Arts and the Arabic Language Academy, were capable of using the modern research and teaching methods necessary to engage critically with the tradition and take the Nahda project forward. In many of his known public debates, books and lectures, Hussein contributed to this body of “new” scholarship, most notably in his controversial work On Pre-Islamic Poetry (1926). Moreover, as Dean of Arts (1930-2, 1936-9), a civil servant (1939-44) and Minister of Education (1950-2), he played a major role in building these two institutions for the specialized study of adab and the Arabic language. Turning to Hussein the policymaker, I will show the ways in which he tried to diversify authority over the classical tradition and break al-Azhar’s monopoly over it. I will then turn to the organizational measures he took to ensure the stable operation of these institutions within the volatile partisan politics that undermined Egypt’s parliamentary system (1924-1953). While the usual classification of Arab intellectuals into traditionalists and modernists casts Hussein as content to forgo tradition and willing to follow Europe in all paths of life, such binaries fail to explain his serious engagement with classical adab and his dedication to preserving classical Arabic. I will argue that a careful analysis of Hussein’s lifelong engagement with the Faculty of Arts and the Arabic Language Academy could better help us understand not only the history of these institutions, but also the complexity of his intellectual outlook.

Between the Ottoman revolution of 1908 to the rise of Hitler in 1933, American public intellectuals significantly participated in the project of creating an Arab political identity, none more so than Ameen Rihani and Abraham Rihbany. Although Rihani and Rihbany shared somewhat similar backgrounds and were among the most prominent members of the small Arab-American community of the time, they never collaborated. Rihbany, who came from a poor family of laborers and farmers, threw himself into becoming an American gentleman. Rihani, whose father was a well-to-do merchant, relished the life of a free-thinking artist. But more than personality and taste separated the two men. They ultimately had conflicting notions of what defined “the Arab” and even more importantly, how to build an Arab nation. Rihbany, who initially thought of himself as a Syrian, adopted Pan-Arabism at the close of World War I. He also sought to wed his Arab and American identities, arguing that the birth of a viable Arab state required an American midwife. At the Paris peace conference, he pursued his dream and hoped that the United States would assume the role of Mandatory Power for a newly christened Arab nation. The betrayal of Arab nationalism at Paris threw him into despair. Rihani was suspicious of any Western “paternalism,” whether it be French, British or American. His Pan-Arabism predated Rihbany’s and the betrayal at Paris did not paralyze him politically. Instead, with the former Arabic speaking regions of the Ottoman Empire divided into multiple mandates, Rihani sought to achieve a Pan-Arab state by other means. Rihani followed a path that intriguingly mirrors that of Rashid Rida. He came to see Wahhabism and Abdulaziz Ibn Saud’s emerging state of Saudi Arabia as the keys to the eventual triumph of Pan-Arabism. Sources for this paper include the Ameen Rihani papers at the Library of Congress, the Philip Hitti Collection at the University of Minnesota, and a small collection on Rihbany at Harvard Divinity School, as well as the extensive published works of both men.