The Commander: Fawzi al-Qawuqji and the Fight for Arab Independence, 1914–1948 by Laila Parsons (review)

Laila Parsons builds her scholarly, readable analysis of the life and times of the Tripoli-born Arab nationalist fighter Fawzi al-Qawuqji (1890–1977) on myriad sources, including access to his private papers, held by his family in Beirut. This is not primarily a biography but rather a political history of the vicissitudes of Arab nationalism as seen through the eyes of a soldier who participated in the end of the Ottoman Empire, the formation of a new Middle East after 1918, and the establishment of Israel in 1948. Qawuqji’s “moment” ended in 1948, after which he played little part in Arab politics and lived out his years in straitened circumstances in Beirut on a minimal pension. This is a soldier’s tale: a boy from a middling background who joined the Ottoman army for an education and career, fought with the Turks, fought against the French in Syria, joined the French army and deserted, went to Saudi Arabia as a military adviser, fought the British in Palestine and Iraq, and finally fought the Israelis in 1948. The 1925 Syrian Revolt was the epiphany for Qawuqji, setting him on the road to anti-colonial rebellion, it seems. Along the way, Qawuqji went into exile in Nazi Germany, married a German woman (Anneliese Müller), was arrested by the Saudis, and was wounded multiple times, including being machine gunned by a British warplane near Palmyra in 1941, leaving a bullet lodged in his head, forcing him to wear a hat indoors in cold weather as the metal of the bullet easily cooled down. Qawuqji was truly a “transnational fighter” for the Arab cause; or, as the Palestine policeman Edward Horne said to this reviewer of Qawuqji, “a born leader — led from the front” (p. 250).

Parsons is sympathetic to her subject but critical, aware that Qawuqji began writing his mobilized memoirs in 1937 for posterity, ones in which he “admits no mistakes of his own” (p. 249). While close to her subject, Parsons tells the story, warts and all, and it is one of successive failures: defeat in the Great War, defeat in Syria, defeat in Palestine and Iraq, and defeat in Israel. Parsons triangulates Qawuqji to wider political change, arguing that Qawuqji did all that he could for the Arab cause but the internal and external challenges were insurmountable. Parsons tackles the charge that Qawuqji was responsible for these failures, and that variously he was a French, British, and Israeli spy, accusations laid at his door by the Palestinian leader Hajj Amin al-Husayni, the Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, who saw Qawuqji as a personal threat. As Parsons concludes:

Scholars writing about the Mufti have shown that accusing people of treachery was part of his standard repertoire and served as one of the many weapons he used to silence his opponents. There is no evidence in any of the hundreds of original sources used for this book to indicate that Qawuqji was a spy for the British

(p. 173).

Qawuqji was excoriating in return, calling Husayni a “coward … ignorant man … a conceited man … Whenever he hears that an influential name has surfaced, he is gripped by a fit of rage and desperation, so he gives his orders to destroy him or assassinate him” (p. 200).

Of course, such intra-Arab squabbling helps to explain the many defeats of this period.

Qawuqji was dynamic and charismatic with his troops, who were loyal in return; he reached beyond notable elites to ordinary people but was hobbled by local politicians who “would support him in public but withhold real resources from him in private, out of fear that those resources might eventually be turned against them” (p. 192). Qawuqji had as much to fear from local Arab rulers — in Iraq he was sent into internal exile in Kirkuk — as he did from the British and French (or...