Essay On Arab Nationalism

The Arabic term ‘urubah, translated as Arabism, defines the feeling and the essence of being an Arab, of speaking Arabic as a mother-tongue and being born in an Arab country. It has an almost magical sense, denoting as well the belonging to the Arab culture and history and even the share of a common fate. Those people belong to the ummah, a community or nation that goes beyond country borders. The Arab fatherland, or al-watan al-‘arabi, describes the huge territory from Morocco in the west to the Persian Gulf in the East, and the wihdah (unity) is the feeling of union that many Arabs have shared through history (Sharabi, 1966, p. 96). This sense of unity, together with other factors, would lead to a movement called Arab nationalism. The purpose of this essay is to analyse Arab nationalism understanding its origins, context, main actors and also the reasons of its failure.

According to George Antonius, a Palestinian Arab Christian author, what we understand by Arab nationalism was born with a group of Christian intellectuals who formed a secret society in Beirut in the 1880s. This society’s aim was to

65). Indeed, despite the fact that Arab nationalism was an ideology strongly influenced by Western standards, its main goal was to liberate the Arabs from Western rule (Tibi, 1997, p. 202). Nevertheless, the Arabs were more concerned about fighting foreign control than thinking about real Arab unity (Mansfield, 1992, p. 223). The boycott of Zionism and the support for Palestine were also some of the main common points of Arab nationalism at that time (Mansfield, 1992, p. 213). But “there was little they could do to help them [the Palestinians] in practical terms, still less to join with them in a common political organisation” (Mansfield, 1992, p.