Arab reform movements

Reformism and Islamic fundamentalism

Nationalism

Pan-Arabism and Arab socialism

The advanced state of decay of the Ottoman Empire was already obvious by the beginning of the 19th century - a century which, having begun with Napoleon Bonaparte's short-lived conquest of Egypt, saw the scope of Ottoman power gradually shrink while the Empire was carved up into zones of influence by the European powers. The deepening economic - and, by extension, military - gulf between the rapidly industrialising countries of western and central Europe on the one hand and the increasingly backward Ottoman Empire naturally encouraged attempts to reform political and economic practices in various parts of the vast area that was or had been ruled by the Ottomans.

At the very heart of the Empire, the early attempts at reform initiated by Sultan Selim III (1789-1807) ended in utter failure. However, after the short reign of Mustafa IV (1807-1808), Mahmud II tackled the difficult task of reforming the deeply conservative state and society of his Empire. His efforts mainly centred on the army, but he died in 1839 a few days after the rout of his forces before the troops of Ibrahim Pasha, son of the governor of Egypt, Muhammad Ali. The latter, an Ottoman military commander of Albanian origin who had been sent to Egypt by Selim III in order to fight Napoleon, had taken power in Cairo as of 1805. His long reign in Egypt saw the most audacious economic reforms anywhere in the 19th century Middle East.

Muhammad Ali (sometimes also transcribed Mehmet Ali, in the Turkish fashion) tried to stimulate the modernisation of agriculture as well as industrialisation in Egypt, taking Europe as his model. Later generations saw him as the father of all modernist currents in Egypt and the broader Arab world, the precursor of Arab reformism, nationalism and the Nahda (the Arab 'renaissance'). His descendants, who ruled Egypt from 1849 until the overthrow of the monarchy in 1952, did not prove capable of pursuing the task of modernisation as boldly as he had. The country fell increasingly under the economic and financial domination of Great Britain, and in 1882 came under direct British rule.

In Tunisia, another reformist experiment was inaugurated by the governor Ahmad Bey (ruled 1837-1855), who abolished slavery and freed the Jews of Tunisia from the economic restrictions which had hitherto been imposed upon them. His efforts mainly centred, however, on the modernisation of the army and the administration. His successors, Muhammad Bey (1855-1859) and Muhammad Al-Sadeq (1859-1882) followed the same path. In 1861, Muhammad Al-Sadeq issued the Arab world's first constitutional laws, establishing a legislative council. But the modernisation of the administration and the economy was a failure, despite the efforts of the reformist chief minister Khayr Al-Din. The economic decay of Tunisia opened the way to direct French domination and occupation, as of 1881 (Treaty of the Bardo).

Meanwhile, back in the Ottoman capital Istanbul, the reformist policies of Sultan Mahmud II were taken up and extended by his successor Abdülmecid (1839-1861). This was the era of the tanzimat, liberal reforms in the fields of law, the administration and education, which also affected the status of the minorities. The most important of these reforms was promulgated in 1856, under pressure from the European powers. At the same time, the Empire was being dealt blow after blow, losing whole swathes of its vast territory bit by bit. Abdülmecid's successor Abdülaziz (1861-1876), following a monetary crisis and uprisings in the Balkan provinces of the Empire, was deposed by Midhat Pasha, who had founded the Young Turk movement in 1868.

Midhat Pasha compelled Sultan Abdülhamid II (1876-1909) to promulgate, on his accession the throne, a constitution modelled on the Belgian constitutional monarchy, which included provisions for the creation of a parliament and the granting of political freedoms. But the new Sultan, faced with the dismemberment of the Empire and the bankruptcy of the state, soon suspended the constitution and broke with Midhat Pasha. As of 1878, he inaugurated an absolutist regime which persecuted the reformists as well as nationalist movements among the minorities and subject peoples of the Empire, in the name of fanatical pan-Islamism combined with a policy of "turkification". However, Young Turk officers linked to European free-masonry forced Abdülhamid II to restore the constitution in 1908, and to abdicate in the following year.

With North Africa and the Arabian peninsula increasingly under the domination of the West, while most other Arabic-speaking areas languished under the tyranny of the Ottoman Sultan Abdülhamid II, Egypt continued to lead the way, combining reformism, nationalism and Islam. It was above all in reaction to the superiority and domination of the Christian West that this synthesis took form: in order to confront the challenge of the West, it seemed necessary to reform society and Islam itself, which were held to have been debased by Ottoman domination. Paradoxically, the first great figure of this synthesis was an Iranian Shiite, Jamal Al-Din Al-Afghani (1839-1897), who made his home in Cairo in 1871.

Al-Afghani argued for a radical aggiornamento of Islam, taking it towards Western-inspired modernisation but away from the direct domination of the West. He also called for the unification of the Muslim peoples and their liberation from absolutism. His principal disciple was an Egyptian, Muhammad 'Abduh (1849-1905), who in the last years of his life began to tackle the task of carrying out this aggiornamento. Both men were expelled from Egypt, Al-Afghani in 1879 and 'Abduh in 1882, at the insistence of the British, because of their links with nationalist and liberal reformist milieux.

At that time, a wave of anti-colonialist protest was sweeping through Egypt, culminating in the rise to power of Colonel 'Urabi Pasha. Leaning on the army and with the support of the 'ulema, Colonel 'Urabi imposed the creation of a parliament and managed to have himself appointed Minister for War in 1881. Having attempted to bar the British and French fleets from entering the port of Alexandria, he was overthrown by the British military intervention of 1882.

In Paris, Al-Afghani and 'Abduh founded an Islamic society and a journal called Al'Urwat Al-Wuthqa, which they translated as 'The Indissoluble Bond'. However, 'Abduh broke with Al-Afghani in 1892, when the latter returned to Istanbul at the invitation of Sultan Abdülhamid. 'Abduh himself returned to Egypt in 1889, and was later appointed Grand Mufti, a position he held until his death. His audacious fatwas and his major theological work Risalat Al-Tawhid (1897) have earnt him a lasting place in history as the greatest reformer of Islam in the modern period and the figurehead of the Arab 'renaissance', the Nahda.

Muhammad 'Abduh called for a return to the creative and progressive inspiration of the early days of Islam. The reformist school of thought he founded is therefore known as salafiyya or salafism, from the word salaf, meaning 'forefathers'.

This was interpreted as a strict adhesion to original Islam by Rashid Ridha, one of Sheikh 'Abduh's collaborators in the last eight years of his life. After 'Abduh's death, Ridha presented himself as continuing his work. He was in fact the main representative of the conservative trend among 'Abduh's followers. A follower of the very strict Hanbalite school of Islamic law, he joined forces with the Wahhabite movement in the Arabian peninsula and with the Saudi monarchy. Ridha presented the shura (consultation), in the sense of an assembly of 'ulemas, as the Islamic equivalent of parliamentary democracy. He defended the institution of the caliphate.

Rashid Ridha's ideas inspired another Egyptian, Hassan Al-Banna (1906-1949), who founded the Muslim Brotherhood (Al-Ikhwan Al-Muslimun) in 1928. This organisation, which preached a 'return to Islam' and the complete application of the religion as a solution to all social ills, grew to half a million members in Egypt, and spread to Syria and other Arab countries. Making its mark through the struggle against Western domination, and later against Zionism, as well as by condemning social injustice and the monarchy, the Muslim Brotherhood filled the vaccuum left by the Egyptian left's weakness on the social front and by the liberal nationalists' faintheartedness on the national front.

The rise of Nasser and the Free Officers, who outlawed the Muslim Brotherhood as of 1954, caused a serious setback for their movement. The radicalisation of Nasserism and, following it, the broader Arab nationalist movement, meant that the social and national fronts were, so to speak, 'oversubscribed'. This eclipse of Islamic fundamentalism, which from that point on tended to be associated mainly with the Saudi monarchy, only ended with the fall of Nasserism. In the 1980s, the Islamist movement was reborn from its ashes, in various radicalised forms, under the impact of the Iranian revolution.

In this syncretism of reformism, nationalism and Islam that made up the political side of the Nahda, the relative importance of each of the three elements varied considerably depending on the time and place. However, there was some convergence in practice between the Syrian Muslim 'Abdulrahman Al-Kawakibi (1849-1902), who called for an Arab Caliph who would be the equivalent of the Pope for Catholics, and the Syrian Christian Negib Azoury (Najib 'Azuri, d. 1916), who called for the creation of one Arab state in Arabia and another in the Fertile Crescent. Both thinkers were representatives of an Arab nationalism that, confronting the power of the Ottoman Empire, somewhat confusedly called for the separation of the spiritual from the temporal.

The First World War brought the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire to its completion. The occupation of Istanbul by the allies in 1920 spelt the end of the sultanate. The Turkish Republic was proclaimed in 1923 under the leadership of the nationalist Mustafa Kemal Pasha, who saved Turkey, within its present frontiers, from being broken up and directly subjected to allied domination. The following year, the Caliphate was abolished as well. Mustafa Kemal, dubbed Kemal Atatürk, remained President of his country until his death in 1938. He installed a dictatorial regime which strove to reform, westernise and secularise Turkey by authoritarian means. The example he set was only of limited influence on nationalists in the Arab world, because of his brutally anti-religious policies and the anti-Arab aspects of his policies of westernisation and 'Turkisation', of which the most striking example was the replacement of Arab characters with the Latin script for the writing of Turkish. Of all subsequent Arab leaders, Tunisian President Habib Bourguiba (ruled 1957-1987) was the most clearly marked by the example of Mustafa Kemal.

The founder of Egypt's Wafd party, Sa'd Zaghlul Pasha (1860-1927), who became the figurehead of the new modernist and liberal phase of Egyptian nationalism after the First World War, was a moderate disciple of Muhammad 'Abduh. Zaghlul's party was born out of the demand for Egyptian independence which was raised in 1918, just after the armistice, and in furtherance of which an Egyptian delegation (wafd) tried to gain admittance to the Versailles Conference.

Even after the official end of the British protectorate, the Wafd's relations with the Egyptian monarchy were stormy, alternating between periods in government and long stretches in opposition. The conflict with the British persisted, since Egypt was still, even on paper, scarcely independent - defence and foreign affairs remained in the hands of the British. In Egypt's controled but nonetheless real democracy, the Wafd shone in the electoral field, winning a parliamentary majority on several occasions. But the party's moderation towards the monarchy and the British, at a time when Egyptian national feeling was exacerbated by the clash with Britain over the Sudan, which Egypt claimed, gradually discredited it.

It was in this context, marked by the riots and widespread arson that afflicted Cairo in January 1952, that a group calling themselves the Free Officers and led by Colonel Jamal 'Abd ul-Naser (Nasser) overthrew King Faruq in July of the same year, placing General Muhammad Najib at the head of the government. The Free Officers' coup opened up a third phase in Egyptian nationalism, which, under the exclusive leadership of Nasser as of 1954, became increasingly radical, anti-imperialist, pan-Arabist and socialistic. Although independent Syria had experienced military coups before Egypt (beginning with the putsch of General Husni Al-Za'im in 1949), the latter's republican coup d'Etat and the later social, economic and political options of Nasserism set a model that was to be imitated in several Arab countries, notably Syria, Iraq, Yemen, Algeria, Libya and Sudan.

Before this came to pass, however, the liberal nationalism of Sa'd Zaghlul's Wafd, which represented the more prosperous strata of urban society and which restricted its activities chiefly to electoral and parliamentary politics, was itself imitated in other Arab countries which were fighting for their independence. The equivalent of the Wafd in Syria was the National Bloc (al-Kutla al-Wataniyya), founded in 1928 by Hashem Al-Atassi and Jamil Mardam Bey and led in the 1940s by Shukri Al-Quwatli and Khaled Al-'Azm. The Lebanese Sunni Muslim Riyadh Al-Sulh also belonged to this current; alongside the Maronite Christian Bishara Al-Khuri, leader of the Destour ('constitution') party, Al-Sulh was to lead his country to independence. In Iraq, the movement known as al-Ikha' al-Watani (the 'nationalist brothers') and led by Yasin Al-Hashimi, Hikmat Sulayman, Rashid 'Ali al-Gailani and Kamel Shadirshi, might be classed in the same category. In Tunisia, the liberal nationalist movement was dominated by the Neo-Destour party as of its creation in 1933 under of Habib Bourguiba, who won a leadership battle against the party's general secretary Salah Ben Yusuf. In Morocco, the Istiqlal ('independence') party, which was formed in 1943 when two groups, led by 'Allal al-Fasi and Muhammad al-Wazzani, merged, is the most prominent representative of this school. In Algeria, Ferhat 'Abbas predominated, with his famous Manifesto of 1943.

In competition with liberal nationalism, various radical trends developed, even before the advent of Nasserism. This radical current, which combined a hard-line nationalist, pan-Arabist discourse with socialist-inspired social reformism, mainly targeted the middle classes and poorer strata of society, and peaked at the same time as Nasserism. But Nasserism borrowed its main ideas from the general matrix of this radical Arab nationalism, which was born in the Fertile Crescent.

Aleppo-born Sati' Al-Husri (1880-1969) was briefly Minister of Education in Syria, under the short-lived rule of King Faysal I (1919-1920). When the latter moved on to become King of Iraq, Al-Husri went with him and became Director General of Education between the Wars. Sati' Al-Husri is held to be the most important theoretician of modern Arab nationalism in its most wide-ranging version, covering all the Arabic-speaking countries. It was in this perspective that Al-Husri insisted on the Arabness of Egypt (against, for example, the Egyptian writer Taha Hussayn) and on the leading role that particular country would have to assume in unifying the greater Arab nation, because of its geographical position, its size and its economic and cultural importance. Sati' Al-Husri also developed a conception of pan-Arabism which, although it was founded on language and history and was therefore secular in essence, nonetheless integrated Islam as one of the fundamental component parts of Arab cultural identity.

This modern conception of Arab nationalism and of its relationship with Islam was also taken up by a Christian Syrian, Michel Aflaq (1910-1989), who in 1940 founded, along with Salah Al-Din Al-Bitar, the party of 'Arab resurrection', Al-Ba'th Al-'Arabi. In 1952, this organisation mered with Akram Al-Hurani's Arab Socialist Party to become the Hizb Al-Ba'th Al-'Arab Al-Ishtiriki (the socialist Arab resurrection party), a pan-Arab movement in both its doctrines and its organisational spread. The corollary of this merger was the fusion of the Arab nationalist doctrines that the Ba'th preached with a socialist orientation, which became radicalised by the imperatives of competition with the Arab Communist parties. The latter rejected the theories of pan-Arabism - a rejection made all the more effective by the fact that it was based on a brand of Marxism which was attractive in the same intellectual and plebeian milieux in which the Ba'thists also sought to recruit.

Later, Nasser was also pushed into a fusion of pan-Arabism and socialism - in part by the same imperatives of the competition with Communism, but also by a parallel competition with Ba'thism (in particular after the failure of Egyptian-Syrian unity in 1961), by the imperatives of social conditions in Egypt and by the attraction exercised by the Soviet model of development. This socialist-nationalist orientation became the dominant ideological current in the mass movements of the Arab countries in the 1960s. In addition to the Ba'th Party, the explicitly Nasserist organisations and the regimes inspired by Nasserism, this ideological trend influenced organisations such as the Moroccan UNFP, Algeria's FLN, or Tunisia's Neo-Destour (which changed its name to the Socialist Destour Party). However, this domination of socialist pan-Arabism increasingly gave way to the resurgence of Islamic fundamentalism as of the beginning of the 1970s.