The Making of an Egyptian Arab Nationalist

Abstract

Thirty years in the making, this ambitious book covers the first forty-three years of the life of Abd al-Rahman Azzam Pasha, the political activist and writer who became the first secretary-general of the Arab League (1945- 1952). Few biographies of public figures in the Arab world have treated their subjects in comparable depth and detail. The Making of an Egyptian Arab Nationalist is essential reading for anyone seriously interested in the complexities of evolving national and religious identities in 20th-century Egypt. Coury sets out to refute interpretations elaborated by such scholars as Elie Kedourie, P. J. Vatikiotis, Nadav Safran, and Richard Mitchell thirty or forty years ago. He argues that their works, reflecting the influence of Orientalism, perpetuated false assumptions that Islam and Arab culture harbored essentialist and atomistic tendencies toward extremism, irrationality, and violence. He maintains that in treating 20th-century Egypt, they set up a false dichotomy between a rational, western-inspired territorial patriotism and irrational, artificial pan- Arab and Islamic movements. Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid's circle before World War I and the Wafd Party in the interwar period represented the first school who opposed British imperialism but were eager to borrow western rationalism, science, secular liberalism, and democracy. In the 1930s this moderate patriotism began to give way before pan-Arab and Islamic movements tainted with the extremism, terrorism, and irrationality which the West has long attributed to Islam. Coury cites hopefully revisionist works by Rashid Khalidi, Philip Khoury, Ernest Dawn, and Hassan Kayali but is dismayed that other recent studies have perpetuated the old, hostile stereotypes. "Martin Kramer's Arab Awakening and Islamic Revival (1996)," he says, "reveals that even the old-fashioned Kedourie-style hysteria, compounded, as it sometimes is, by Zionist rage (Kramer refers to Edward Said as Columbia's 'part-time professor of Palestine') is still alive and well . . . " Coury insists that Azzam's "Egyptian Arab nationalism" sprang from the perspectives, needs, and interests of an upper and middle bourgeoisie facing specific challenges. The rank and file following came from a lower ...