Cutting short with orientalist prejudices, the volume “Approaches to Political Participation in the Arab Region in the early 20th Century” traces the origins and discussions around democratic principles in some countries of the WANA region in the early 1900s.
The volume “Approaches to Political Participation in the Arab Region in the early 20th Century” is built on the premise that the WANA region has undergone many different political experiences over the past decades. Aspirations for actual democracy and true representation of the people's will were the basis of many 20th century political movements. Looking at the early 20th century, the book draws attention to political, social, economic, and cultural upheavals that had a severe and lasting impact on the region. Doing so, it cuts short with simplistic orientalist narratives of backwardness and dictatorship through providing a detailed analysis based on historical evidence. In this regard, the book can be seen as a challenge of Eurocentric understandings of democracy as well as traditional, orientalist views and myths about the WANA region.
The collection of articles provides a comprehensive and nuanced historical reading of a pivotal era, marked by important events: the fall of the Ottoman Empire, European colonialism and the settler colonization of Palestine.
A Collective Work Uncovering Milestones of Democratic History
The starting point for this project was a conference under the same title as the volume which took place in June 2022 at the French Institute for the Near East (Ifpo) in Amman, Jordan. Abdel Qader Amer, Abdul-Hameed Al-Kayyali and Nora Lafi edited the volume to which eight authors, mainly from the WANA region, contributed and which was published in spring 2024 in Amman (in Arabic). The project has been sponsored and promoted by the Berlin-based research centre Zentrum Moderner Orient (ZMO). It explores the historicity of democracy in Syria, Iraq, Palestine, Jordan and, Tunisia at the turn of the 19th and 20th century. In eight chapters, Nora Lafi, Muhammad Muthafar al-Adhami, Ahlem Hajaji, Abd al-Majid al-Shamaq, Muhammad al-Arnaut, Habib al- Kozdhoughli, Falestine Naïli, and Khaled Bashir focus on selected milestone events and periods which showcase the wish for political reformation by the people.
Building their analysis on various qualitative means such as interviews, ethnographies and empirical evidence from national archives, the authors are able to weave an image that differs from the classical, Eurocentric historiography. Their model emphasizes the democratic aspirations of the people in the region, which colonizing powers sought to destroy and diminish, connecting their imperial enterprises in WANA with claims of protection, modernity, and modernization. The reader can trace a shared hope among Arabs to establish democracy in the region through the mosaic of their voices and experiences. Using the term “Arab” to refer to the local population who wanted to set themselves apart from the Ottoman rule based on religious identity, the authors shed light at the so-called Arabic awakening (nahḍa). This period in the late 19th and early 20th century of intellectual, social, and political development was characterized by a growing awareness of Arab identity, a critique of Ottoman rule, and aspirations for self-determination and modernization, and was met with the realities of World War I (WWI), meaning that the presence of the imperial powers France and Great Britain put an end to nahḍa’s vision of a self-determined future.
The early 20th century – A Turning Point in the Region
The book opens with an examination of a declining Ottoman Empire, exploring how its weakened grip on West Asia and North Africa created a fertile ground for political experimentation, visions, and dreams. In chapter one and two, Nora Lafi and Muhammad al-Arnaut pay close attention to the events in the area of today’s Libya and Syria in the beginning of the 20th century, when people seized the opportunity of the Ottoman Empire's collapse to embark on a collective reimagining of its political destiny in the area of today’s Libya and Syria. One key development of this period was the rise of political parties that advocated for reform and greater representation of the public in parliament. In Syria, these political parties (like the Arab Independence Party) distinguished themselves from those already existing during the Ottoman rule by an agenda that sought to include different ethnicities, religions, backgrounds, and genders. This political pluralism was accompanied by the introduction of basic rights, such as the freedom of speech and press and the protection of minority and tribe rights in Syria and Jordan. Nationalist and independence movements, such as those led by figures like Faisal I. b. al-Hussein († 1933), emerged, each with their own vision for the region’s future, driven by a yearning to revive the region's historical prominence.
In the following chapters, authors such as Abd al-Magid al-Shanq, Falestine Naïli, and Muhammad Muthafar al-Adhami portray the impact of the Young Turk Revolution (1908) that catalyzed political mobilization and its consequences in Jordan, Jerusalem and Iraq. The Young Turk Revolution was a pivotal moment in the history of the Ottoman Empire. This uprising, led by a group of progressive intellectuals and military officers who sought to modernize the empire through constitutional reforms and centralization, excluded the Arab provinces from their consideration. Many Arabs were outraged by this, and a strong Arab nationalist sentiment developed. Central to the discussion of “political awakening” was the aforementioned nahḍa that laid the ground for civic engagement. This “awakening” was transported through newspapers that spurred discussions on modernity, reform, and self-determination.
While those sentiments were very visible in media and public at the time, it was met with the political realities of WWI and shifted power dynamics. The post-war mandate system imposed by the League of Nations, predecessor to the United Nations (UN), consolidated the French and British control of the region. During the beginnings of European colonization in WANA, French and British colonizers divided the region between themselves and exercised power over territories, they themselves created. Democratic experiences were often challenged, and banned by European colonizers, who retained significant control over Arabic political systems and decided on their futures and failures: This power took different forms, ranging from abolishing political attempts for reformation as the infiltration of the Iraqi electoral system outlined in chapter three by Muhammad Muthafar al-Adhami to promoting selected docile leaders to banning and exiling political leaders and kings as Faisal I. b. al-Hussein as described in chapter two. The interplay between Arab leaders and European imperial powers as the Jordanian Prince Abdullah I bin al-Hussein and the British Empire is illustrated in chapter seven. Destroying all possible institutions of self-governance, like the councils of the municipalities in Jerusalem, outlined by Falestine Naïli in chapter six, was another colonial strategy. Additionally, the French colonizers intimidated the locals during elections to discourage them from any participation for fear of repression as shown in Habib Kozdhoughli’s study of Tunisian history in chapter four. The impact of this colonial system continued long after formal independence of the new nation-states and deeply marked the region’s future political scenery.
“Approaches to Political Participation in the Arab Region in the Beginning of the 20th century” deconstructs past myths of backwardness and tyranny and argues convincingly for a historiography that centres political understanding of the people of the era and thus deals with them as politically mature subjects. Finally, this book is an important contribution towards a historiography of WANA that is embedded in a global history.
Abdel Qader Amer, Abdul Hameed El Kayyali and Nora Lafi (eds.), taʾammulāt ḥawla al-mushāraka as-siyāsiyya fī al-minṭaqa al-ʿarabiyya maṭlaʿ al-qarn al-ʿishrīn [Approaches to Political Participation in the Arab Region in the early 20th Century]. al-ān nāshirūn wa-muwazziʿūn, Amman, 2024, 224 pages.
