Although the Allies claimed to fight the Great War in defense of liberal democracy, the process of total war did much to undermine civil liberties and to aggrandize the power of the state over society. Much scholarship on the European theaters of the war has explored its illiberal effects as well as the popularity of Woodrow Wilson himself as he arrived at the Paris Peace Conference. Newer scholarship has expanded our understanding of the war's impact in the Middle East, and Erez Manela's seminal The Wilsonian Moment showed that the ideals of rights for small nations and self-determination of peoples resonated widely in the lands of the defeated Ottoman Empire and Egypt.
This panel raises a question Manela did not raise, whether the postwar was not just a nationalist moment, but also a liberal moment in the Middle East. Our work reflects renewed interest in the lineages of liberal, democratic, and constitutional politics in the region, since the 2011 Arab uprisings, the 2009 Green Revolution in Iran, and the Turkish Gezi Park protests. Scholarship on the pre-war constitutional revolutions in Egypt, Iran, and the Ottoman Empire has flourished. A consensus exists that the coming of war in 1914 undermined these pre-war liberal movements. But virtually no new research has been done on the efforts of Turks, Egyptians, Arabs, and Iranians to revive them after the war. Instead, historians have focused on the collapse of tribunals to try war criminals in Istanbul, the weak defense of the Syrian Arab Kingdom against Allied occupation, the rise of the Pahlevi dictatorship in Iran, and the corruption of the Wafd party in Egypt. These narratives contribute to a larger, misguided image of the Middle East as a region where democratic movements had died a century ago.
Our panelists take a new look at exactly how and why efforts at democratic renewal were defeated in the years 1919-1923 in Turkey, Iran, Egypt, and Syria. We generally agree that there were efforts at such a revival, but that conservative factions opposed them. However, internal opposition was not decisive. Foreign intervention tipped the political scales away from liberal constitutionalists in each case. The long-term effect was to undercut the popularity of liberals as either weak or unwitting collaborators with European imperialism. Politics, not essentials of Middle Eastern or Islamic culture, inhibited the growth of liberal democratic politics in the 20th century.
On March 8, 1920, the Syrian-Arab Congress convened in Damascus to declare independence and crown Faisal king of what it called a “parliamentary monarchy.” In the next four months, deputies from formerly Ottoman territory now governed by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan debated and tentatively ratified a 147-article constitution. Conservative and democratic parties argued over whether the King had the power to dismiss parliament (they decided no), whether Islam should be the state religion (they compromised and only required the King to be Muslim), and whether women should get the vote (no). After long discussion, they also compromised on the degree to which minorities should be guaranteed legislative representation and the amount of autonomy that provinces should enjoy. Even as French troops threatened invasion, debate continued. The Congress accepted the constitution in toto just two weeks before the fateful battle of Maysalun. It withheld final ratification only because deputies feared that King Faisal would then suspend the Congress. Under direct order of the French prime minister, France confiscated Congress papers to deprive Syrians of evidence in any future appeal to the League of Nations.
This paper addresses two linked puzzles unresolved by prior histories of the Syrian Arab Kingdom: why did leading politicians of Greater Syria expend their effort in the critical months of early 1920 to organize a parliamentary assembly and draft a constitution? And how did Syrians disestablish Islam years before the Turkish Republic would—even as a religious leader, Rashid Rida, served as Congress president? To the north, Turkish nationalists had also convened congresses, but these served primarily to mobilize the population for a nationalist war of independence. In contrast to Syria, the 1921 constitution at Ankara retained the Ottoman commitment to Islam as state religion and source of legislation. I argue that because the Allies deprived Syrians of the means to mobilize an army, they decided to mobilize the constitution as a legal weapon for their independence. Appealing to Wilsonian principles, they determined to show their ability to govern themselves without a League of Nations mandate. Foreign pressure thus created an atmosphere conducive to compromise between secularist reformers and conservative Muslims. In its inclusive spirit and in a text that guaranteed civil rights regardless of sect or ethnicity, the 1920 Syrian Constitution remains the most democratic Arab constitution to date. My research relies primarily on Arabic-language memoirs, letters, diaries, and newspapers.
Egyptian demands for independence in 1919 fitted the ‘liberal moment’: the post-war vision of an international order founded on self-determination, representative government, and the end of empires. Nevertheless, Egypt remained bounded by a British legal geography, which in a positive sense meant liberal imperialists imagined Egypt following a path laid out by the ‘white’ settler colonies, including liberal-constitutional self-government. But there was also a negative application of liberal theory in colonial locations like Egypt, India, or Ireland, where nationalism was regarded not as liberal, but as an ethnic or religious extremism incapable of sustaining a pluralistic and thus representative form of government. This type of British response fractured the nationalists into republican, liberal, and conservative factions; as a result, even a ‘liberal’ constitution could deliver a government acceptable to conservative imperialists.
The research focuses on the 1919 revolution and the subsequent processes that led to the formation of authoritarianism in the interwar period. I am bringing together sources from British and Egyptian archives, showing the relationship between the two, including a West-oriented liberal constitutionalism, but other conceptions of sovereignty at this important historical juncture, some according to the geopolitical model of the nation-state, but also references to medieval Islamic or Ottoman political ideology. I will introduce several research items and inspect them from these different perspectives. The research fits the panel theme by indicating the differing views on sovereignty held by Egyptian liberal, democratic nationalists, Egyptian liberal-constitutionalists, Egyptian conservative monarchists, and the British Foreign Office officials responsible for bringing these various groups into some sort of neo-colonial arrangement.
