Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (review)

Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire. By James L. Gelvin (Berkeley, University of California Press, 1998) 290 pp. $50.00 cloth $19.95 paper

Divided Loyalties is a sociohistorical and political analysis of a particular episode in the early history of nationalism in the Arab world. The twenty-two-month period under study, extending from the withdrawal of the Ottoman forces northward of Aleppo at the end of World War I to the French occupation of Syria in 1920, is customarily known as the period of "Arab government." The designation suggests that a new sovereign authority replaced Ottoman imperial jurisdiction over Syria, drawing upon consummate Arab nationalist credentials and enjoying legitimacy by its promise of Arab unity. In the conventional view, such promise was frustrated by the avarice and double crossing, and ultimately neo-imperialist tutelage, of Britain and France. What this view obscures, Gelvin maintains and eloquently demonstrates, is the conflict between elite and popular groups concerning the nature of nationalism in Syria during this period.

The analysis revolves around what the author calls Syria's "nationalist dialectic" between 1918 and 1920. On the one hand was Faysal, son of Grand Sharif Husayn (who instigated the wartime "Arab revolt" in the holy places of the Hijaz) and his supporters. Prowess in the war against the Ottomans, sanctimony deriving from his pedigree, and British favor--coupled with the mirage of a unitary Arab state--legitimized Faysal to his elite backers as the leader (and, briefly, the king) in Damascus. His followers included large segments of urban notables, Arab intellectuals, and officers hailing from diverse parts of the Arab world. On the other hand was a grassroots popular movement built on horizontal ties and led by religious figures, merchants, artisans, and local community leaders. This heretofore disregarded popular movement questioned the legitimacy of the Arab government widely and vocally by rallying around a Syrian territorial patriotism.

The task that the author sets for himself in substantiating this dialectic is threefold, constituting the main three parts of the book. First, he analyzes the organizational structure of both the Arab government and the popular committees. Gelvin argues that Faysal's alliance with al-Fatat, the much-celebrated wartime Arab nationalist organization of intellectuals and officers, and the related Arab Club, newly conceived to propagandize for the Arab government, failed to create an effective administration or to command popular allegiance. In contrast, elected local committees, deriving from village and district networks that came to be fully organized in the second half of Faysali rule around a Higher National Committee, managed to mobilize the population in behalf of a nationalist platform.

In the second part, the author posits the "discursive fields" of the two nationalist tendencies by analyzing speeches, manifestoes, slogans, and newspaper articles. He extracts alternative visions of the nation from this reading of the political discourses. The analysis based on press items and French diplomatic archives is highly nuanced and persuasive.

In the third part, Gelvin turns to ritual and celebrations. He closely examines the petition demonstrations staged by the "ritual specialists" of the Arab government and those organized by the popular committees. Even when the very same elements of the population participated in these demonstrations, differences in choreography suggested a new kind of politics in Syria.

Central to the case that Gelvin makes for popular nationalism is the slogan, "Syria within its natural boundaries." A Syrian territorial identity had been voiced since the first half of the nineteenth century in association with notions of autonomy, federation, and even independence by urban intellectuals and notables as well as Christians groups. Yet, such ideas never had wide appeal, much less among the common people. Syria in this earlier conception meant Damascus and Beirut, occasionally incorporating Aleppo and Jerusalem. Syrianism signified either cosmopolitan elitism vis à vis the (other) "Arabs" or a survival...