Arabic has two words for nationalism, and they pull in opposite directions
In Arabic, qawmiyya means loyalty to one Arab nation stretching from the Atlantic to the Arabian Sea. Wataniyya means loyalty to your own country, such as Egypt or Syria. For much of the 20th century the first word dominated Arab politics. Today, most Arab governments work within the second.
The idea grew out of the Nahda, the 19th-century Arab Awakening under Ottoman rule. From the 1860s, thinkers in the Levant and Egypt, impressed by Western Europe's technical success and crediting it to patriotism, began talking about a fatherland. New Arabic newspapers, a dictionary and an encyclopedia spread a common written language. In 1868 the Lebanese Christian writer Ibrahim al-Yaziji urged Arabs to recover their ancient vitality and throw off Turkish rule, and around 1870 the Syrian writer Francis Marrash was already distinguishing a homeland from a nation defined by language and custom.
Religious reformers fed the movement too. Muhammad Abduh argued that the early Muslims, who were Arabs, had given the world the essentials of modern rational thought, which Europe later borrowed, so reviving true Islam would also revive Arab leadership. In 1911 Arab intellectuals founded a secret society in Paris, al-Fatat, which at first sought autonomy inside the Ottoman state and, after a crackdown, full independence.
The Arab Revolt helped dissolve the Ottoman Empire, but Britain and France then divided its Arab lands, turning the movement against Western imperialism. Thinkers such as Sati' al-Husri defined the nation as those who speak Arabic and feel they belong together, ideas taken up by the Ba'ath Party. In the 1950s and 1960s Egypt's Gamal Abdel Nasser became its figurehead after nationalising the Suez Canal, and Syria, Iraq, Algeria and Egypt made it official policy.
The high tide did not last. Individual states promoted their own national identities, Islamist movements rose, and the heavy Arab defeat in the Six-Day War, followed by Nasser's death, badly damaged faith in unity. By the 1990s pan-Arabism had lost its popular pull, although its ideas continued to dominate intellectual life across the Arab world.
Source: Arab nationalism
