The Algerian Republic: Reactionary Reconstitution and its Consequences (Part 2/2)

The Algerian Republic: Reactionary Reconstitution and its Consequences

Part 2: The Spark of Algeria touches down in the Mashriq​

All sorts of men today heap slander upon the British, but have any of them done for Islam what the British have? Have they defended the holy places, guaranteed the safety of the blessed Land, and protected the pious people of Islam from foreign and subversive creeds? I do not know one of them that did; more often, they are the very men who seek to import chaos to these lands. Let us say it forthrightly: we will part amicably from the British when we both judge it prudent, no sooner and no later.

-Amin al-Husayni

Beneath the weighty rhetoric, what the so-called “Anglo-Mohammaden Commonwealth” amounts to is this: the rapaciousness of the notables will receive official protection from the English, and the notables will in turn subjugate themselves politically and give up their dreams of independence.

-Yusuf Salman Yusuf

Everywhere across the Arab World, the so-called leaders of the people have shamed themselves before the masses by their unmanliness, by their willingness to grovel before the British out of fear they will be unable to lead the broad masses. If they persist in this, this much can be guaranteed: when the day of reckoning comes, they will be treated no differently than the British.

-Gamal Abdel Nasser

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The following entry presents excerpts from Sven Lindqvist’s pathbreaking study in settler-colonialism alongside primary documents from the period under discussion. These documents are placed here by the editors of this compendium, not by Lindqvist.

Excerpts from Sven Lindqvist, Exterminate all the Brutes: An Inquiry into Settler-Colonialism(Stockholm: 1984)​

Every class in the Mashriq remembers a different year as the one in which the ground gave way and history began anew. For the landowners and urban patricians who had inherited the mediating function of the Ottoman a’yan , it came first with the incursion of British troops across the Empire’s southern and eastern borderlands, and then, more menacingly, with the Soviet thrust into Kurdistan, which set a revolutionary power on the middle Euphrates and showed the observant Arab masses what might be won by stripping the notables of their possessions. For the teachers, clerks, and officers whom the state schools had produced more quickly than the new order could absorb them, it came first in the Sterling-driven inflation of the mid-1920s, which dissolved their meagre savings, and then again from the west, from Algeria, where the raising of a European settler-republic on Arab and Muslim land gave their wordless resentment a name: the Nakba. For the fellahin of the fields and the impoverished laborers of the cities, it came from everywhere at once: from the long deglobalizing depression that the crash of 1919 had loosed upon the world, collapsing commodity prices and decimating rural livelihoods; from the flood of British imports across the 1920s, which unmade their traditional ways of life; and, as for the effendi , from the humiliation of Algeria, available to be read either as an affront to Arab dignity or as the culminating crime in a long history of imperialism. The age of the masses was entered through trial and trauma, but to its victims, it did not impart a single lesson.

Legitimacy and Political Form across the Post-Ottoman Mashriq

In the Mashriq, the Great War and its aftermath brought about a gargantuan re-ordering of political space and imperial boundaries. In the space of five years, the British established a permanent presence in the Levant while the Soviets announced a new form of governance and a new language of authority in Kurdistan. More by accident than by design, the Arab world received its first republic in Syria, a fragile token of independent Arab rule, pressured between the two great powers.

The most traditional and recognizable authorities were found in the dynastic kingships of the south and east, the so-called “Hashemite Arc” of Hejaz, Jordan, and Iraq. Lacking any other stable principle of legitimacy, they had, in concert with their British sponsors, recycled the wreckage of the Ottoman past, turning the old discourses of genealogy and religion to a new purpose: the fashioning of a modern “Arab Kingship”, claiming a formal sovereignty compatible with continued British oversight. Their title to rule, insofar as it was advanced explicitly, lay in the descent of Hussein bin Ali, whose ancestors had “guarded” the holy cities of Mecca and Medina for the better part of a thousand years. These dynastic states were the centrepiece of Britain’s Anglo-Mohammaden Commonwealth, the showpiece of a claimed civilizational comity between Anglo-Saxon empire and Islamic traditionalism.

The regional standing of the Hashemite monarchs was secured by three distinct events. The first came in 1924, when Hussein bin Ali of Hejaz warded off a challenge from Ibn Saud and his Wahhabi warriors, who had sought to use the chaos of the First Revolutionary Era to recover the holy cities and consolidate a new Arabian state. The British, mindful of the strategic weight of Arabia, and fearful that Ibn Saud’s zealots might in time turn against the empire, dispatched a substantial detachment drawn from the forces then being withdrawn from India to the Hejaz. At the decisive Battle of Tabuk they joined with the Hejazi armies and routed the disorganized Saudi militia. Ibn Saud was forced to renounce his claims to the region and to cede borderlands in the Najd to both Hussein bin Ali and his son Abdullah I, by then installed as Emir of Jordan. In return, Hussein bin Ali quietly agreed to drop his rumoured caliphal bid, formally endorsing the Istanbul caliphate located in the International Straits Settlement. The Hashemites thus secured concrete territorial-political authority at the expense of their aspirations for a new, Arabic caliphate.

The second major event came in 1927. Facing a rising regional nationalism that the Syrian revolt of 1925 had set loose, the British relieved themselves of the burden of direct administration by elevating the emirs of Iraq and Jordan into sovereigns and granting the two states formal independence. The change was substantive: Britain withdrew from the management of internal affairs, entrusting domestic order to the existing dynastic leadership while retaining for itself the cheaper instruments of influence such as the treaty, the subsidy, and the military mission. It opened the way, too, for the slow construction of national armies that could counter-balance the Soviet colossus to the north. In 1929 the monarchs formalized their cooperation in a joint defence agreement, establishing a common purchasing agency to raise the credit that rearmament required. That credit came, as it came everywhere in the Atlantic system, from the United States, whose dollar loans were advanced to be spent on British arms, so that the national armies of the new kingdoms were raised on American credit and equipped from British arsenals, their substantive independence guaranteed, like their thrones, from without.

The third major opportunity for the Hashemite monarchs arose in 1932 from an unexpected quarter, when Ibn Saud’s ancestral seat in Riyadh was raided by his own rebellious Wahhabi soldiers. News from the interior was always scant, but a picture crystallized over the following weeks. The religious-revivalist warriors who had carried Ibn Saud’s conquests across the previous decades had grown embittered by the defeat at Tabuk, and Ibn Saud, hoping to preserve his position and to forestall reprisals from the neighbouring Hashemite states, had estranged them further by curbing their raids. It was Faisal al-Duwaish, at the head of a sizeable faction of the Ikhwan, who took Riyadh and put Ibn Saud to death. In the weeks that followed, those loyal to the dead king rallied around his sons and sought to confront the rebels, whose strongholds lay in the north, only to watch their own forces melt away in desertion. The fragile institutions of the half-made Saudi state had cohered around nothing more durable than the person of Ibn Saud, and they began to dissolve the moment he was gone, the dynasty having never converted its founder’s charisma into an order that might outlive him.

In the end, the Saudi state was undone by the warriors of its own cause, the defeat at Tabuk setting loose an embitterment that the rebels’ knives carried to its conclusion. At first, the Hashemite monarchs looked on uneasily, none persuaded that he commanded the resources to pacify the interior, but a series of spectacular raids on the border towns hardened their resolve and persuaded the British to sanction a campaign of conquest. The mistrust engendered by the Bolivian crisis lent the enterprise its urgency, feeding rumours, largely false, that the Soviets were funding the religious militia. Nor were the monarchs without their own motives: Faisal of Iraq, who governed the most restive population of the three, was eager to shore up his throne through dynastic-territorial aggrandizement, and Ali bin Hussein nourished his own dreams of uniting Arabia.

What followed over 1933 was less a conventional military campaign between trained forces than it was an old-fashioned colonial conquest against ragged and ill-equipped insurgents. Pitched battles were few, and they were settled decisively in favor of the Hashemites, who parcelled out the territory between themselves, portioning out the greatest share to Ali bin Hussein; more troubling was what came thereafter, as the fledgling states, already struggling to bring some semblance of modern administration to their established territories, attempted to assert control over the vast Arabian interior. The techniques were brutal, coercive, and typically borrowed from their British sponsors: the gathering of nomadic populations into concentration camps, mass killings of villagers who nourished Wahhabist rebels, and the haphazard and forced sedenterization of the bedouin desert tribes.

This sat uneasily with both the British and the Americans, who were willing to sanction a war of conquest, but less prepared to dole out the funds necessary for a prolonged occupation. The consequence, predictable enough, was that combination of brutality and incapacity which characterized besieged colonial rulers. Real control was confined to designated garrison towns while the resistance was allowed to operate freely in the inhospitable countryside. Despite the scale of the violence, there was little coverage of the events in the socialist press, otherwise so well-attuned to colonial atrocities; the backwards and fanatical Wahhabis were not seen as sympathetic victims, and the violence was meted out most directly by their fellow Arabs, even if under British supervision.

The other political orders of the Mashriq enjoyed, at least for a time, a relatively more quiescent existence. In Palestine, the British had won the enduring support of the established notability, first by denying Zionist aspirations for statehood and then by guaranteeing independence on the notable’s terms. By incorporating Lebanon and Palestine into a single territory, the most important commercial center in the Levant along with the agriculturally vital Beqaa Valley was added to any future Levantine state, giving it a better chance of substantive independence. The largely Christian-Maronite commercial bourgeoisie of Beirut, which had initially opposed the merger, soon found it redounding to their own benefit. With the markets of both Palestine and Syria open to them, Beirut gradually became something more than a mere regional entrepot, entering into competition with Cairo to become the premier Mediterranean anchor of the British Empire. Politically, both the Palestinian notability and Lebanon’s upper classes looked to Syria, which seemed to have found a formula to successfully combine oligarchic Republicanism with traditional social hierarchies. By doing so, they had dispensed with the need for a Monarch and gained the self-confidence necessary to rule both the peasants in the field and the nation in parliament. In Lebanon and Palestine, ethnic particularisms still divided the Christian and Muslim upper classes, but increasingly, these became subordinated to the interest in a strong state. With a timeline for independence set, there was a clear need to build up a state which could ward off the Egyptians - who made their own claims for Arab leadership - and disincentivize the Soviets from interference in Levantine politics. The ultimate hope was to attain primacy over Syria, whether that be through an unequal federation or through the domination of its export market.

In Egypt, the conventional languages of legitimacy were most clearly disjointed. Granted formal independence in the mid-1920s, the British military mission remained well-garrisoned in Cairo, and the nation lacked the independent power to pursue its own foreign policy. Most strikingly, indigenous authority was itself split between a parliament dominated by the accommodationist wing of the nationalist party, who had refused to join the numerous revolts throughout the First Revolutionary Era, and the Egyptian King, whose prestige in the great urban centers was declining rapidly and who knew that he needed the British as a counter-balance against the nationalists. The nationalists themselves, however, were overwhelmingly of a reformist variety; those who had embraced revolution had been imprisoned or otherwise exiled in the First Revolutionary Era, with the consequence that the intellectuals and politicians who were closest to the masses were absent from the party. Legitimacy was claimed both by the nationalist party and the Egyptian King; the latter found some support in the countryside, and the former elicited lukewarm enthusiasm amongst the urban middle-classes, but neither could credibly claim to speak for the nation as a whole. The three-way battle between nationalist parliament, traditional monarchy, and British supervisory authorities did a great deal to discredit all the involved parties, none of whom appeared to possess the unity and majesty of command typical of the conventional ideals of legitimacy.

Two alternative models of statehood were present in the Mashriq’s borderlands, offering themselves up for interested imitators. In Turkey, there was the ethnic supremacist soldier’s state of Ataturk and Gokalp, with its rituals of mass mobilization and talk of national sacrifice. Amputated of its most prosperous territories in the West and the Armenian and Kurdish borderlands in the East, and devastated by the Great War, it hardly presented an appealing model of rule. While some middle-class intellectuals in Syria and Lebanon would occasionally invoke its example, Fascism appeared more as the balm of the defeated than a winning political strategy: this is what became of those whom the Great War offered no mercy.

The Democratic Republic of Kurdistan offered a quite different and significantly more appealing model. The small communist party, based primarily in Mosul, partnered with a larger peasant’s party to conduct the country’s governance. They did so in the name of the long-suffering proletarian and peasant nation. Legitimacy derived ultimately from the will of the nation’s oppressed classes, which it was the task of the two parties to discern and execute: sweeping land reform and appropriation, municipal investment, and elementary welfare and pension schemes were the most visible measures of the government in the 1920s. Less obvious, but no less commented upon, was the reliance of the Kurdish government on Soviet patronage for most of these reforms and the not infrequent interference of the Soviet patron in domestic politics; for some, this compromised the true independence of the Kurdish government, while others, whose thinking was situated in a history of Ottoman regionalism, saw the Soviet Union as a just and beneficent sovereign.

Fractured Sovereignty, Powerless Peoples: Algeria and the Imperial Question

When the first Algerian refugees arrived in Cairo, in the mid-20s, they were not remarked upon frequently, and the Algerian crisis - insofar as it was spoken of as one - was understood as a distant tragedy of a foreign people, no different than the ethnic cleansing of Western Anatolia which had occurred just a few years before. Educated, literate opinion treated it as a regrettable cruelty imposed upon other people of the faith, but as an event which had little bearing for Egyptian politics. This changed in the late 20s as more refugees came into Cairo. These were not poor Fellahin. Those who could afford the journey to Egypt already had some possessions to their name, and they elected to travel to Cairo deliberately, refusing other options which were closer to home. Cairo, the cultural center of the Islamic world, renowned for its universities, for the learnedness of its clergy, acted as a magnet for schoolteachers, journalists, scribes, and doctors.

By 1930, the Algerian community in Cairo was a little over 15,000 strong. It clustered around the medieval core of the city near the Al-Azhar University, with the North African study hall and portico of the Mosque, the Riwaq al-Maghariba, serving as the informal center of the community, along with the surrounding cafes. This was also where the reformist salafi press was centered. By the early 1930s, Algerian intellectuals had become frequent and vital contributors to both al-Manar and al-Fath, and by the middle of the decade, the “Algerian cause” had broken out from the minority reformist press into such mainstream journals as al-Ahram and al-Muqattam. The culpability of the Algerian Republic and the need for Pan-Arab sympathy with the victims of the Nakba became a well-established consensus, but other questions remained to be litigated between the reformist and mainstream press. What degree of responsibility did Britain bear, as a guarantor of the settler republic? Did the failure of the Egyptian King to intervene demonstrate the limitations of Egyptian power or a servile obeisance to the British? In this battle, the reformist journals waged a slow and arduous but ultimately winning campaign, since the dispossession of Algerians continued apace and the British, whatever their public gestures of condemnation, did not put any brake on the settler republic’s depredations.

The group which came under the most withering criticism, however, was Egypt’s existing nationalist leadership in the Wafd party. Here were men who purported to stand for many of the same ideals as the reformist newspapers, who offered public sympathy to the Algerians but whom, on more than one occasion, were caught participating in the censorship regime’s crackdown on the more radical expressions of Pan-Arab and Pan-Islamist sentiment. They were, whatever their private feelings, structurally incapable of more than symbolic action on this front, and the more trenchant papers attacked not only the men but the system of parcellized sovereignty which ensured that Egypt would remain powerless to confront the settler republic.

Ultimately, the Cairo Effendi, along with their Algerian comrades, formed the core of an alternative nucleus of nationalist opinion that was less beholden to a power politics which required constant compromise with imperial objectives. Several commentators have spoken of a ‘revolt of the Effendi’, but it was, at this point, more a mass desertion of the middle-classes from the customary institutions of political life than it was a formation of an active counter-power: the Wafd party continued to exercise hegemony over parliament, but found its absolute - as opposed to relative - vote declining over the 1930s as the effendi, their true base, grew disillusioned with the system of Egyptian politics. But this withdrawal was not a depoliticization; political activity instead flowed into Algerian aid societies, into medical volunteer corps which travelled to Algeria and Morocco, and into clandestine military channels which eventually encompassed over 10,000 Egyptians in the Interregnum period, though only a fraction of these would join their ‘comrades in the mountains’. They were nonetheless invaluable in provisioning the rebels, the illicit networks of aid proving impossible to control over the long Mediterranean coastline. In concert with the work of IntRevMar’s anti-colonial committee and like-minded societies in the Levant, they ensured that the settler republic exercised only partial control over much of the south.

From Cairo the Algerian cause travelled - by reformist ulema networks, by newspapers, by radio broadcast - into the Levant and Arabia. In Hashemite Jordan and Hejaz, it was absorbed predominantly by the clergy, the one literate social class with some independence from the nascent Hashemite state. For them, what transpired in Algeria was inseparable from the “imprisoned” caliph in Istanbul, who led the Muslim world under British protection. The suggestion that the Husseins should create a new, arabic caliphate should theoretically have bolstered the Hashemites, but this was not a live option open to the actual leaders of Hejaz, and instead served to expose the gap between their pretensions of genealogical descent from the prophet and the constraints placed upon them as British clients. A minority of these men, respectable scions of the Hejazi upper class, began to wonder if in the war against the Wahhabi remnants of Arabia, it was the enemy who stood on the side of the righteous.

In the ethnically mixed areas of Palestine and Lebanon, the ongoing “partnership” with the British was justified to the people in terms of the eventual timeline for independence. The notables and merchants promised freedom within twenty years, and the capaciousness of the language allowed this to be interpreted as freedom from the British, freedom from exploitation and toil, and freedom from humiliation and insult. While the leaders gathered in assemblies, however, it was the British who held the final say. Deferred independence meant, in real terms, that the leadership of Palestine and Lebanon were prevented from issuing more than generic statements of solidarity to Algerians.

Syria, alone among the Arab states, was sovereign in a more than merely formal sense. No foreign garrison stood between its parliament and the Algerian question; here, if anywhere, an Arab state might have acted. That it did not and could not revealed a hollowness at the heart of its sovereignty more damning than any foreign veto. The republic that had dispensed with a king had not thereby enfranchised a people; it had merely substituted the collective, oligarchic rule of the landowning notability for the rule of a King, and the schoolteachers, clerks, and small merchants of Damascus and Aleppo whom the Algerian cause stirred most deeply found no voice in a parliament that spoke for the great families and did not even permit them a vote.

The crisis of representation was also, by a logic the notables proved unable to arrest, an enduring barrier to genuine sovereignty. A state that does not represent its people and which cannot claim their allegiance cannot summon them into war. Hemmed in by the Soviet power to the north and the British system that ringed it on every other side, the republic kept no army worth the name. Its independence was a thing of paper, the product of a tacit agreement between the British and the Soviets to retain a buffer state in the Levant. Syrian sovereignty could be exercised against its own peasants but never on behalf of anyone else, and least of all on behalf of the Algerians, for whom Damascus could in the end summon only the same hollow solidarity that the British client states had managed, and for a related reason: because those who governed did so neither with the consent of the people in whose name they spoke, nor in their interest.

If Syria demonstrated the hollowness of a sovereignty without representation, Iraq revealed something more combustible still: the collision, within one state, of a sacred claim to authority and a material complicity that made a mockery of it. Iraq was a Hashemite kingdom like Hejaz and Jordan, and it pressed the same title, the descent of its monarch from the house of the Prophet, the guardianship of the faith, the dignity of an Arab and Islamic crown. But Iraq was a fundamentally different society from Hejaz. It had what the desert kingdoms lacked: cities with a literate middle class, an officer corps schooled in the grievances of the age, a working class gathered at the oil-works, railheads and wharves of Basra, and beneath them all a vast and excluded Shia peasantry, for whom the Sharifian pretension of a Sunni court had never carried the authority it assumed. Into this society the Algerian cause fell not as a distant lament but as an indictment, for the workers of Baghdad could see what the clergy of Amman could only intuit: that the kingdom which styled itself a shield of Islam was itself a wheel in the engine that was grinding Muslim Algeria to dust. The same world-system that drew the grain and the dates of Iraq into the markets of the Atlantic, that armed the kingdom on American credit and bound its fortunes to the imperial order, was the system whose remorseless appetite for land and labour had hollowed the villages of Algeria.

The Hashemite claimed to guard the umma while prospering within the very order that dispossessed it. In Hejaz, this contradiction could be neither perceived nor uttered, there being no class equipped to perceive it, while in Iraq it was perceived and uttered, and it lodged in the consciousness of a middle and a working class who would not forever be content to perceive it in silence. Of all the thrones of the Anglo-Mohammaden settlement, the Iraqi was the one that the Algerian question most surely undermined, because it was the one whose subjects were best able to measure the distance between what their rulers professed to be and what, in the world-system’s iron logic, they were.

Struggling Together Against Empire? Pan-Arab and Socialist Visions of the Mashriq

By 1937, the Algerian catastrophe had become the common property of the Arab world, and the rallying-point of a Pan-Arab sentiment that the socialists of Syria regarded with deep ambivalence. The Party could not ignore a cause that stirred its own swelling base, nor could they afford to surrender it to its rivals. The following appeared in Sawt al-Sha’b*, the Party’s organ, over the name of its young secretary, Khalid Bakdash, already the most formidable orator of the Arab left in Syria. In the Levant, the competition between Pan-Arabists and Socialists was most vicious and partisan, and the following document is one of thousands of bullets fired off in the dispute, an attempt to reframe the meaning and political implications of the Algerian question and to develop the socialists “official line” on it.

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On the True Friends of Algeria

There is not an honest man among us whose heart has not been seized by what the newspapers bring from Algeria. The fellah has been driven from the field his fathers watered, his village emptied to make room for the colonist’s vine. The old men of the faith have been insulted before the eyes of their sons, and the young who stand for the dignity of the old are slaughtered before their families. These are crimes, and the working classes of Syria feel their gravity and share the outrage of the outraged. We socialists are not indifferent to the fate of Algeria. It is, in fact, we socialists who alone have understood her, and if we occasionally display a greater reserve at certain public ceremonials, it is because we alone are aware that those who weep loudest for Algeria understand her least.

Consider how the most privileged choose to present the Algerian tragedy to the Syrian masses. It is set before them as a quarrel of races and of creeds: the European against the Arab, the Cross against the Crescent, the West against Islam. The colonist is hated because he is a European while the fellah is pitied because he is an Arab and a Muslim, and from this it is concluded that the Arabs must close their ranks and cut themselves off from all other peoples and that the believers must stand as one body. This imparts the incorrect lesson.

What was done in Algeria was not done by the European because he is a European. If this was true, the Germans, the Russians, and Italians would not be, as we know they are, the staunchest friends of the Algerian cause, who have given their rifles and steel when they could have chosen to refrain. This crime was committed not by Europeans for Europeans but by imperialism and by capital, which knows neither race nor religion and which hungers only for land and for cheap hands to work it. The colonist did not cross the sea to insult the Prophet or degrade the Arab race but to seize a field and to make the man who had tilled that field his servant for a wage. This is the oldest crime of capital against the toiler: the driving of the peasant from the soil, that another may grow fat upon it.

Syrian, look around you, and observe those who weep for Algeria! Ride a half-day to the plain of Hama, and what will you find? The khammes who breaks his body on the agha’s earth and is suffered to keep one part in five of what he raises, and that part already pledged to the moneylender before the grain is cut. Who reduced this man to debt and bondage? Who took the common land of his grandfathers and wrote his own name upon it in the register? It was no European. It was a son of Hama, an Arab and a Muslim, a pasha who subscribes in the morning to the funds for Algeria and flogs his fellahin in the evening. The settler upon the Mitidja and the bey upon the Ghab are brothers in one trade, and that trade is the robbery of the man who works the ground.

Behold the men who flaunt the most affected displays of mourning. Who are they? They are the same effendi , the same beys and notables and men of property who have made the Arab peasant the most wretched creature on the earth. They weep for the fellah of Algeria with one eye while the other watches their own khammes starve. And why? Because the cry of “Arab solidarity” is the most perfect shield the exploiter has ever raised over himself. It binds the robber to the robbed in a false brotherhood of blood. It says to the peasant: forget the whip upon your back, and dream instead of an insult done to your race in a far country. The landlord asks the peasant to be his brother in nationality, so that the peasant shall never discover that his true brother is the toiler of every land, and his true enemy the landlord at his door.

Who, then, is the true friend of the Algerian fellah? Not the Arab pasha who grinds his own. His true friends are the workers of Europe, who stand at this very hour against the same banks and the same companies that raised the colonist’s republic, who have driven these foul men across the sea, knowing that the earth cannot be shared with these brutes. The toiler of Europe and the toiler of Algeria have one enemy and one struggle, and they shall be free together or not at all. To make of Algeria a war of Arab against European is to do the imperialist’s work with one’s own hands, for nothing has ever served the bankers of New York and industrialists of Manchester so faithfully as dividing the working people of the earth by the colour of their skin and the name of their God, that they may never join their hands against the true enemy.

Let the toilers of Syria beware, therefore, of those who would turn the wound of Algeria into a fever of blood and creed. Whatever the words upon their lips, such men are not the friends of Algeria; they are, whether they know it or not, the friends of the British and the Americans. The Algerian fellah will not be avenged by the tears of the landlords and well-to-do, nor by the chauvinist’s cry that sets brother against brother. He will be avenged by the joined hands of the toilers of Algeria and of Syria and of Europe and of every land, who have understood at last that the liberation of the peasant of the Mitidja, the liberation of the khammes of Hama, and the emancipation of the worker at his machine and the peasant in his field are the same struggle.

- Kh. Bakdash

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In the Arab lands of the Mashriq, the two great ideologies to emerge from the maelstrom of the 20th century were Pan-Arabism and Revolutionary Socialism. A third, Pan-Islamic pole gained in weight across the period but was denied institutional form in these years, its potential carriers in Arabia subjected to a campaign of colonization and social control at the hands of the Hashemite monarchs, while the traditional clergy - and with it the language of religious dissidence - had been discredited by the Caliph’s collaboration with the British. Pan-Arabists and socialists, for their part, shared a common enemy and, often enough, a common set of paymasters: vast sums reached the socialists through IntRevMar’s anti-colonial committee, while the Soviet Union kept a hand in the funding of both movements and pressed upon them a strategy of the “broad front.” Yet the front was an uneasy one, and the shared subsidy masked an antagonism that the coming decades would make explosive.

What follows is a survey of how the peoples of the Mashriq, having metabolized the Algerian Nakba, thought about and organized against Empire in the Interregnum. In neither its socialist nor its Pan-Arab form did the post-imperial imagination rest upon the nation-state as its model of sovereignty and legitimacy. The nation-state was held to be too small, too brittle, too weak to survive in a world of empires, as the Syrian Republic, many believed, had aptly demonstrated. The future was imagined instead to lie in large, federative polities, in keeping with a tradition of utopian federalism that reached back to the Arab reformers of the late Ottoman age, who had devised their own decentralized and localist rejoinders to the hierarchies of empire.

Let us consider Pan-Arabism first. In allying with the landowners and the traditional mercantile families of the Mashriq, the British had staked the empire on the continued strength of the most parochial elements of Arab society, failing to appreciate that the very spread of capitalist relations they presided over would, in time, erode the dominance of the rentier classes. The revolt of the effendi, seen in this light, was as much the self-assertion of a newer middle class of clerks, teachers, small merchants, and journalists against its traditional “betters” as it was a revolt against those betters’ complicity in British rule. Pan-Arabist networks, strongest in Cairo and Alexandria where the effendi was numerous, intact, and acutely conscious of itself, functioned as instruments of this class’s power. The characteristic demands of the Pan-Arab movement for land reform, the expansion of schooling, and a developmental program of industry were precisely the demands that would swell their ranks and weaken the power of the notables. In Egypt, Pan-Arab literature and civic associations grew popular well before they assumed any durable institutional form, stitched together over the pre-existing networks of the middle class, the schoolteachers’ associations and their like. In the Levant, Pan-Arabism never attained the hegemony it achieved in Egypt, but it found substantial support nonetheless among the small Palestinian middle class and sections of the literate peasantry, among the urban Sunnis of Lebanon, and among portions of the Syrian peasantry and middle class alike.

The Levant possessed a far more layered structure of class and ethnicity than Egypt, and there Pan-Arabism’s deepest difficulties were revealed. It strained, firstly, to answer the question of how the Christian, Druze, and Jewish minorities would be treated. These were communities for whom an Islamic, Arab nation was at best an uncertain refuge. Most frequently, it offered them conditional membership of the nation, contingent upon their arabization, an answer which was hardly reassuring.

Pan-Arabism could also only speak the idiom of class half-heartedly, a difficulty which lay in its very nature. A cross-class national coalition cannot speak openly in class terms without endangering the unity it so prizes, for to name the class struggle is to set against one another the dissident notable, the enlisted peasant, and the flattered merchant. Pan-arabism might advance, in practice, the interests of the effendi who were its progenitors, but it preferred to employ a national frame which evaded concrete class issues. This constituted its structural distance from socialism, which could speak without restraint of the daily struggle of classes precisely because it was willing to fracture the nation along the very seams Pan-Arabism existed to conceal.

The socialists succeeded in precisely those areas in which these seams were most variegated and glaring, where class oppression could not be covered up by ethnic homogeneity. The two largest and most successful Mashriqi socialist parties of the Interregnum were found in Iraq and Syria, the two states that bordered Kurdistan. Conventional explanations for their success points to proximity alone, and rest on the ease of funneling money, personnel, and resources across the Kurdish frontier. The reality is considerably more complex, and has far more to do with the conjuncture between socialist organizing strategies and the actual social structure of Iraq and Syria, which made these societies uniquely well-fitted to the socialist advance.

Almost everywhere, the upper cadre of socialist leadership was recruited from among the national minorities. This was as true of Egypt, whose relatively weak party was led primarily by acculturated Jews, as it was of Syria, where the commanding heights were staffed by a mixture of Christians, Druze, and Jews. Among the masses, too, the minorities were the most durable base the socialists possessed, since the party was one of the few formations that could reliably be depended upon to defend their interests. The socialists entrenched themselves in the minority communities early, and their propaganda emphasized that they aimed to build a federal “union” of nations that would stretch across the Northern Mashriq, from Palestine to Iraq. All of the socialist parties opposed the Pan-Arab plans for a merger with Egypt that would produce an Arab-dominated state. In Syria, they organized among the Druze peasantry of the south, who felt neglected by the very Republic they had made, and among Kurds, Armenians, and Christians; in Iraq, the party won spectacular gains among the southern Shia urban poor and the radicalized Shia intelligentsia, both excluded from the Hashemite state. Even where it was weaker the same appeal held: in Palestine it converted Labor Zionists who had ceased to believe in the viability of Zionism, and in Lebanon it found its first recruits among the Armenian and Greek Orthodox artisans of Beirut, in trades whose exclusion from the Maronite commercial order had bred a resentment that made them more receptive to the socialists.

It was not the presence of large minority communities alone that made Syria and Iraq fertile ground. These were also societies that lacked the apparatus necessary to monitor, surveil, and suppress a socialist party. The Hashemite state in Iraq had been built hastily from the detritus of the Ottoman administration, and its extensive policing duties in Arabia drained the resources it needed to manage its own core territories. The notable-led republic in Syria lacked the fiscal capacity to raise a large gendarmerie, and the thick webs of tribal and customary authority made it hard for Damascus and Aleppo to extend the state’s coercive reach much beyond the major cities. Regulation could reach the official organs, the named paper and the registered association, but it struggled to locate the broader infrastructure beneath them: the study circle that met as a literary society, the mimeographed sheet that passed from hand to hand across a café table or a workshop bench, the gathering convened under the cover of a wedding or a wake. The public face could be suppressed but the movement behind it proved far harder to find.

Particularly in Syria, which was sworn to neutrality and could not draw upon British intelligence, socialist activity proliferated rapidly, culminating in organizing drives among the rural laborers of the Homs-Hama corridor and their enlistment into informal peasant unions. This was, on the whole, the exception rather than the rule, a measure of socialism’s unusual strength in Syria rather than a pattern that held across the Mashriq, where its support clustered in the cities and drew upon the déclassé effendi and the intelligentsia ruined by inflation as well as upon literate urban laborers. Nowhere was the union of these two strata more visible than in the night schools that multiplied through the poorer quarters of Damascus, Aleppo, and Baghdad, where a teacher whose savings the Sterling inflation had dissolved taught the laborer his letters by lamplight and, with the letters, often enough, the classics of socialist thought, freshly translated into the local language by IntRevMar’s international publishing houses.

In 1939, Khalid Bakdash, leader of the Syrian Union of Revolutionary Marxists, took the much smaller and poorer Palestinian and Lebanese parties under his wing, folding them into the “Pan-Levantine Federation of Revolutionary Marxists.” The socialists never attained a majority even among their preferred constituencies in the southern Levant, yet with the help of Bakdash, they rose to prominence at a number of sites. Haifa, swelling into a significant secondary port across the Interregnum, had socialists embedded at the crucial points of its workers’ movement, among the stevedores of the deepening harbor and the men of the railway yards. And despite a generally well-enforced ban on its activities, socialist doctrine spread through Beirut and took root in the workshops of its artisans, whose trades the flood of British imports was steadily undercutting.

In Egypt the same factors operated in reverse, and the result was a socialism that never escaped the margins. Egypt possessed no patchwork of threatened minorities to furnish a mass base, its largest religious minority, the Copts, having long since cast its lot with the territorial nationalism of the Wafd, and the socialist leadership, drawn heavily from the acculturated Jews and the foreign-oriented intelligentsia of Cairo and Alexandria, found itself more easily branded as alien, a reproach the movement could never fully answer. Above all, Egypt possessed what Syria and Iraq lacked: an old and capable state, its police long schooled by British supervision in the surveillance of sedition, able to locate and crush a clandestine party as the improvised apparatus of Baghdad and the under-financed gendarmes of Damascus could not. What in the northern Mashriq was a movement embedded in whole communities was in Egypt a movement of circles and cells, earnest and literate but contained.

Finally, we would be remiss not to mention one of the more neglected visions of the Mashriq’s future, which came to the fore just as the Interregnum drew to a close. This was Pan-Syrianism, which proposed a “Syrian” rather than an “Arab” identity, one broad enough to encompass the diverse communities of the Levant. Its vehicle, the Syrian Nationalist Party, was founded by the Lebanese intellectual Antoun Saadeh, himself closely tied to several of the great commercial families of Beirut.

Pan-Syrianism was the youngest of the Mashriq’s political imaginaries and, in a sense, the most paradoxical: an ostensibly anti-imperial nationalism that staked its future on the endurance of the imperial order. Where the communists offered the minorities a revolutionary union reaching east toward Kurdistan and the Soviet power, Saadeh and his patrons offered them a secular Syrian nation reaching west toward Beirut and the sea. For the commercial families who financed the venture it was, above all, a response to the communist penetration of Syria, an attempt to bend the same utopian federalism toward ends more amenable to the Beirut bourgeoisie. It competed, usually successfully, for the loyalty of Palestine’s Jews and Lebanon’s Christians, and the British showed it a purposefully lax hand, in marked contrast to their treatment of Pan-Arabism and Communism. But it made less headway in Syria itself, where it met a persistent skepticism and the suspicion that it was a mask for Lebanese designs. The notables, themselves divided over the prospect of any eventual union with the rest of the Levant, frequently gave it the cold shoulder, and against the well-established socialists it found itself locked in a difficult and often losing battle.

“Dancing on the Edge of a Volcano”: The Mashriq on the Verge of the Great Colonial Crisis

It has become customary to write: it is Algeria which discredited the stale and ossified regimes of the Post-Ottoman Mashriq. In a sense, this is true: it was the arrival of the Algerian tragedy on Mashriqi shores which prompted the revolt of the effendi , which made the socialist movement not a mere struggle for organization for wages but an anti-imperial crusade. But the Algerian crisis did not arrive on a fresh and unmarked slate. It brought home the international crime of imperialism, yes. But more concretely, it exposed the complicity of each client regime in this imperial world-system, laying bare that states which claimed sovereignty possessed none where it most counted. It was only because the legitimacy of the Post-Ottoman states was itself fragile, partial, and contested that Algeria could become the mirror in which the masses glimpsed the true countenance of the Anglo-Mohammaden Commonwealth: not civilizational comity, but a class pact signed in the dark, meant to cover up the indignities of imperial control.

The Mashriq exited the Interregnum Era with its establishments discredited, its radical energies differentiated into rivals funded by the same centers but who struggled to imagine how they could inhabit a shared future, and a wound that united everyone in feeling but nobody in action. There would be a reckoning for the Algerian Republic, yes, but also a reckoning for the Mashriq, as the contradictions of its own political order would be forcefully unravelled.