Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair.

• Author: El-Moursi, Mohamed
• Position: Book review

Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century: From Triumph to Despair

By Adeed Dawisha

Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2016, 359 pages, $24.95, ISBN: 9780691169156

Through meticulous research, Adeed Dawisha traces Arab nationalism chronologically from its rise to its fall. The book offers a historical description of Arab nationalism as an artificial construct, starting from its origins in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, and considering different regions, events, advocates of the ideology such as Sati' al-Husri and Jamal 'Abd al-Nasir, and ending with its total absence from the current struggle in the Arab world. Based on both primary and secondary sources, Dawisha successfully provides one of the most comprehensive studies of Arab nationalism to date. His book combines both political science and historical approaches in order to paint a detailed and nuanced portrait of Arab nationalist ideology.

The new edition of the book, which was originally published in 2005, with the edition of a new chapter now consists of twelve chapters without introduction or conclusion. The theoretical framework of the book lies in the first chapter, in which Dawisha tries to sort through the different terminologies related to Arab nationalism. He emphasizes the connection between nationalism and organic political unity, which appears in historical evidence such as Husri's writing or the Nasserist and al-Bath party's experience. There is no Arab nationalism without a desire for Arab political unity. For Dawisha, a nation can be defined as "a human solidarity, whose members believe that they form a coherent cultural whole, and who manifest a strong desire for political separateness and sovereignty" (p. 13). Within this context, the conceptual overlap between Arabism and Arab nationalism can be resolved by considering Arabism as cultural uniformity, while Arab nationalism is Arabism "with the added element of a strong desire (and preferably articulated demands) for political unity in a specified demarcated territory" (p. 13).

In accordance with the aforementioned theoretical framework, Dawisha takes the reader in the second chapter to the pre-WWI world, tracing the sense of Arabism in the nineteenth century up until WWI. A sense of Arabness had been preserved since early Islamic history and through the spread of the Arabic language. With the rise of the Ottomans, the center of Arabic power shifted to the Turks; still, Arabic, as a sacred...