Anthony Smith has defined nationalism as “a new religion of the people,” with its own prophets, scriptures, holy days, and rituals. Nationalism, rooted in the triumph of secular ideologies of the l9th and early 20th centuries, clearly demonstrated religious qualities. This panel aims to reconsider the nature of the relationship between religion and nationalism in the Middle East following World War I by considering the following questions: How did religion, religious practices and religious classes address nationalist discourse? Did nationalists, as the creators of nationalist rhetoric, did the authors of nationalist rhetoric couch nationalism in religious terms or symbols, and to what extent did they link national struggles or the nation to religion? Were there any attempts to reform, rationalize, modify or nationalize religious ideas, rituals or organizations? How did religious classes and institutions engage nationalist movements and try to shape their respective politics and economies? What did the rise of national consciousness mean to the religious or sectarian minorities? Our first paper will analyze conflicting views of religion held by exiled Kurdish nationalists living in Syria and Lebanon under French mandatory rule. The second paper discusses an activist network in Latin America that linked the Maronite Church to Lebanese emigrant parties and its impact on Lebanese nationalist ideology and the church during the early Mandate period. Our third paper, focusing on investment in Lebanese energy companies, examines the role of the Maronite Church as a material and rhetorical force in the creation of a distinctively national Lebanese economy within the wider French mandate in the inter-war period. The final paper will offer an analysis of al-Azhar’s role, through student and ulema activism, in the Egyptian anti-colonial movement prior to and during the 1919 revolution, and ways in which such activism blurred the lines between secular nationalism and religion. In presenting both local and trans-global perspectives, the papers will make use of archival documents, periodicals, private collections, interviews, and diaries in Arabic, English, French, Kurmaji Kurdish, and Turkish. In their respective historical contexts, the panelists will demonstrate the fluid dynamics that characterized the reciprocal interaction of religious and nationalist discourse as well as the role of the church in bolstering the emergent state, its policies and economics.
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Dr. Ahmet Akturk
Damascus, Beirut and the Kurdish territories in northern Syria became a new center of the Kurdish nationalism following the failure of Kurdish rebellions in Turkey in 1925 and 1931. Kurdish nationalists, tribal chieftains and ordinary Kurds fled to Syria and Lebanon, then under French rule. From the early 1930s until the end of the French Mandate a Kurdish nationalist group led by Jaladat and Kamuran Ali Baderkhan embarked upon a movement for national reawakening. The primary means to spread their ideas were Kurdish-language periodicals published in Damascus and Beirut. These periodicals are valuable sources for understanding the Kurdish self-view at the time. This paper examines the key place that religion played in Kurdish national identity construction – both conflicting representations of religion as a component of Kurdism and the appropriation of Kurdish nationalism as religion. For nationalist ideologues Islamic identity appears to be a major obstacle for Kurdish national salvation. The religious bond between the Kurds and Turks, the bigotry of Kurdish mullahs and shaykhs, and the blind obedience of the Kurdish masses to the religious classes are addressed in many writings. There is also an emphasis by some intellectuals on Yezidism and Zoroastrianism as more authentic Kurdish religions, as opposed to Islam. Other nationalist writers put Islam to use as a key component of Kurdish identity, and call upon Kurdish madrasa students, mullahs, and shaykhs to join the national movement. Moreover, the nationalists tried to nationalize and rationalize Islam through translating the Quran and Hadith into Kurdish and by demystifying superstitions confused with religious truths by uneducated Kurds. In addition to such negative and positive images of Islam, there is a third tendency in the Kurdish press: to present nationalism as a religion. Kurdish nationalists do not hesitate to use religious concepts to emphasize Kurdish nationalist symbols. Based on the Kurdish press in the Levant, memoirs of the Kurdish nationalists, and the writings of the French orientalists, I will try to analyze those issues in the Kurdish nationalist discourse in comparison with Kemalist Turkish nationalist view of religion in Turkey.
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Matthew Parnell
In March 1919, Egypt erupted in revolution when the British arrested and exiled the nationalist leader Sa’d Zaghlul and three of his Wafdist colleagues. Thousands of Egyptians took to the streets spontaneously demanding an end to British occupation, and calling for Egypt to assume its rightful place amongst modern nation-states in world affairs. Contemporary accounts of the 1919 revolution described the urban demonstrations as initiated by students of the higher schools and al-Azhar, joined by groups of workers, women, and segments of the urban “riff-raff” in the following days.
Within these historical depictions, we find characterizations of sectarian collectiveness represented in the revolutionary street and square as, “al-wahadiyya al-wataniyya,” visually reinforced by revolutionary flags bearing the crescent and the cross. Interestingly, these signifiers have had considerable longevity taking into account the same localized symbols were employed again in the wake of the 25 January unrest to emphasize national and sectarian unity.
The historiography explaining developments leading to and during the 1919 revolution focuses exclusively on the nationalist movement, workers, women, and most recently on revolutionary era popular culture. Popular memory and historical studies take al-Azhar, its theology students (as well as churches and synagogues), and religious symbols into account, but the roles and politics played by religious institutions in the anti-colonialist and nationalist movement has not been fully fleshed out.
Utilizing British archival documents, Egyptian and British periodicals from the era, and the diary of the Azhari Shaykh Abd al-Wahhab al-Najjar, this paper will present an analysis of al-Azhar’s neglected contributions by showcasing the political acumen of the ‘ulema to the nationalist debates, by arguing that the ‘ulema served as an essential force in legitimizing the nationalist movement in 1919, and by demonstrating the central role played by al-Azhar’s students and ‘ulema in contributing to the organization, rhetoric, and iconography of the revolution. By engaging these specific points, I will shed a broader light on the fluid dynamics contributing to the reciprocal interaction of the nationalist movement and religion during this important era, and thus provide more insight into the socio-political processes at work in modern Egyptian history.
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Stacy Fahrenthold
In July 1919, Maronite Patriarch Elias Pierre Hoyek arrived in Paris to lead Lebanon's Second Delegation to the Peace Conference, determining his country's post-Ottoman political fate. Advocating for the creation of “Greater Lebanon” under French Mandate, Patriarch Hoyek drew political support not only from the Administrative Council in Baabda but also from sizable pockets of Lebanese Christians in the diaspora. Indeed, Hoyek came to Paris flanked by leaders from two of the diaspora's most active political groups: the Hizb al-Ittihad al-Lubnani headquartered in Cairo, and the Jama'iyah al-Nahda al-Lubnaniya of the Americas. During World War I, these organizations nurtured transnational activist network stretching from Brazil and Argentina to the United States and Egypt, ostensibly representing some 250,000 Lebanese living around the world. By 1919, these two parties cultivated an alliance with the Maronite Church as a means of actualizing their nationalist program “at home,” often at the expense of secular and anti-clerical nationalist parties like Shukry Ghanem's Comite Central Syrien, Khalil Sa'adeh's Hizb al-Dimuqratiya al-Wataniya, or the Syria-Mount Lebanon Liberation League of Ayyub Thabet, Amin Rihani and Gibran Khalil Gibran.
Discussions of interwar Lebanese nationalism usually emphasize Franco-Lebanese relations, relegating the powerful nexus between the Maronite Patriarchate and Lebanese diaspora to the margins. But this alliance between the Church and Christian nationalists living abroad was not only central to the construction of “Lebanese” national identity, it would also prove enduring. From the Peace Conference in 1919, to the declaration of the Lebanese Republic in 1926, and until the Lebanese national census of 1932 (which enumerated Lebanese emigrants alongside residents), Lebanese diasporic parties embraced the Maronite Church as a means of ensuring that they “counted” in the homeland's politics. In turn, the Church depended on political organizations in the diaspora as a source of organizational and ideological sustenance. As a result, Lebanese nationalism during this period was an inherently transnational phenomenon, depending on ties between intellectuals, activists, and clergymen in places as far flung as Sao Paulo, Buenos Aires, and New York.
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Dr. Simon Jackson
This paper, based on original research in French state archives and in the archives of the Maronite Church, examines the political-economic ideas and practices that mediated the relationship between Maronite Christianity and the emerging nationalisms of Bilad al-Sham in the period around the close of World War One.
This was a time when, in the wake of the devastation of the wartime period, questions of national economic viability came to prominence in Beirut, Damascus and Paris, and when many anticipated an imminent renewal of hostilities in economic form – an echo of the blocades and starvation that, as Elizabeth Thompson and others have shown, had characterized the war in the Middle East itself. While the connection between the Maronite Church, the French state and the political project of Greater Lebanon and Greater Syria are well known and often studied, especially in the context of the Faisal regime and the Paris Peace Conference, the economic aspects of these projects are much less studied.
Through an examination of the Maronite Church’s role as an institutional shareholder in infrastructure and energy companies in Mandate-era Lebanon and Syria, and by examining the rhetorical presentation of this role by the Maronite Church, the paper analyzes the way in which this religious institution contributed to the articulation of a newly national Lebanese economy. Through a case study of the Kadisha hydroelectric company in Lebanon, I follow Priya Satia’s work on Iraq during World War One, and argue that modern developmentalism, so often associated with the post-1945 era, in fact has its roots in the inter-war ‘Mandatory’ Middle East. Deploying trans-national and global history methodologies, I also show how Maronite and French actors drew on wider vocabularies of distinctively national economic modernization, such as those generated by the League of Nations, to prophesy a new national prosperity in the 1920s.
