Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City: Historicism, Journalism and the Arab Nation in the PostOttoman Eastern Mediterranean
Author(s): Keith David Watenpaugh
Source: Social History, Vol. 30, No. 1 (Feb., 2005), pp. 1-24
Published by: Taylor & Francis, Ltd.
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0
Social History Vol. 30 No. I February2005
§
Routledge
& Francis
Taylor
Group
Keith David Watenpaugh
Cleansing the
cosmopolitancity:
the
Arab
historicism, journalism and
in
nation
the
post-Ottomaneastern
Mediterranean*
The people ofAleppo, a city of over a quarter million people located to the south of Anatolia,
opened the Arabic-language official gazette Halab (Aleppo) of 18 April 19I9 to read under the
headline of'al-Nahda al-Carabiyyaal-jadida', 'The new Arab awakening', the initial article in a
series that would tell the history of the Arab Revolt (I9I6--I8).1 These articles, the first on the
subject since the city had been captured by the British Army six months earlier, would explain
how, and more importantly why their home, one of the pre-eminent provincial capitals of the
Ottoman Empire, had ceased being an integral part of that state after four hundred years and
was now to be ruled by the son of a petty notable, Faysal ibn Husayn, from the far-away
Arabian peninsula.
'Several centuries ago a great nation arose', the series began, 'and historians have named it,
"the Arab [nation]".' 2 Wherever these Arabs went, they brought with them enlightenment,
the arts and sciences. However, the Arabs lost control 'of their affairs,and had nothing left but
their language ... and [thus] were bereft of the tools of the nation and denuded of all the
traditions of nationalism (al-wataniyya) and racial solidarity (al-Cunsuriyya).This was a great
disaster,' concluded the author.3 Unlike later writers, primarily George Antonius, whose
influential I938 book The Arab Awakening located the resurrection of this nation in the mid-
*Author's note: portions of this article are
drawn in part from my book, Being Modern in the
Middle East: Revolution, Nationalism, Colonialism
and the Arab Middle Class (Princeton, 2006).
Research for this work was underwritten by a
grant from the Social Science Research Council.
All translationsfrom Arabic,Ottoman Turkishand
Frenchare my own. I thank HasanKayall,Philip
Khoury and Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh for
constructivereadingsof draftversions.
1The earliestaccount of the ArabRevolt I have
been able to find in Aleppo is an ArabBureautract
published in Cairo in 1916, Anonymous, Thawrat
al-'Arab: muqaddimatuha,asbabuha, natai'juha (The
Arab Revolt: Its Origins, Causes and Results) (Cairo,
1916). The author is listed as a member of the
'ArabSociety'. The condition of the paperand the
name of a Hama publishinghouse, Abu al-Fida',
on the binding suggest that it may be a reprint
from the period of union with Egypt. Regardless,
the text in some form may have shapedthe version
publishedin Halab.
2Halab (Aleppo), 18 April 1919.
3ibid.
Social History ISSN 0307-1022 print/ISSN 1470-1200 online © 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
http://www.tandf.co.uk/journals
DOI: Io. o80/o30710242000337260
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Social History
2
VOL. 30 : NO. I
nineteenth-century Arabic literary renaissance of Beirut and linked it with the classrooms of
American Christian missionaries,4 the author of this version, an unnamed state functionary,
found it instead in the period following the reinstatement of the Ottoman Constitution in
1908, the so-called Young Turk Revolution, when 'among the Turks, the idea of oppressing
the Arabs' first appeared.5 Soon, groups of Turkish soldiers in the capitals of Syria and Iraq
'practised oppression and killed patriots'.6 Even though they had announced complete equality
under the law of all 'races and peoples', such equality existed only on paper. Then, 'in the
period of the dreadful war [World War I] ... the opportunity came for the Turk to leave the
Arab and for the Arab to leave the Turk'.7 This potential for an amicable parting dissipated
when the 'Turks fell under the tutelage of Germany and oppressed the people in a way too
horrible to explain, and an atmosphere of despair spread among all the non-Turkish peoples
(al-shuCubal-ghayr turkiyya) like the Armenians, the Greeks and most of all, the Arabs'.8
A few days later, Aleppines learned the root cause of this oppression. Conceding, 'that
[while] the old Turks had been thoughtful, honorable, forbearing and just men, the Unionists
[members of the Committee of Union and Progress]9 and their followers are not the Turks we
knew', 'the modern education' they received had 'poisoned their minds and made them selfish
and aspire to eradicate everyone but themselves'.'0 The editor singled out the cruelty of Cemal
pasha, the Ottoman minister of war and one-third of the ruling Young Turk triumvirate,
whose litany of crimes included the deportation of many notable families and the execution by
hanging of'Arab patriots' in Beirut and Damascus. 'This was the infamous Cemal whom we
know of as al-safah (the Blood Letter),' the author reminded his audience.11 Driven to
extremes by the cruelty of the Blood Letter, Faysal obtained the support of the British and
began the 'liberation of the nation'. 'Prince Faysal', a scion of the 'loftiest house of Arabia - the
Hashemites - who possessed from time immemorial all the blessings and honour of the race'
led the movement in accordance with the wishes of his father, the Sharif of Mecca, Husayn.
England, France, Russia and Italy, the article explained, had recognized Husayn as king of the
Hijaz. The next week's Halab narrated the opening campaign of the revolt and the capture of
CAqaba.12
Since the end of World War I, most popular and academic histories of the period before
and during the Arab Revolt have resembled the account read by Aleppines in the spring of
I919; its basic outline has remained virtually unchanged: Ottoman imperialist oppression,
4George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The
Story of the Arab Nationalist Movement (London,
1938). On Antonius, see William Cleveland, 'The
century civil disorder in the Ottoman Empire's
Balkanprovincesto bring about the revolution of
1908. On the Unionists and their relationswith
Arab nationalismof George Antonius reconsidered' in IsraelGershoniandJamesJankowski(eds),
provincial centres like Aleppo, see Aykut Kansu,
The Revolution of 1908 in Turkey (Leiden, I997);
Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East
(New York, 1997), 65-86.
5Halab (Aleppo), 21 April 19 9.
also Erik J. Ziircher, Turkey:A ModemHistory
(London, I993).
6ibid.
7ibid., 24 April 9 9.
8ibid.
9The Committee of Union
and Progress,
members of which were commonly referred to
'0ibid. This good Turk/bad Turk dichotomy
appearsmost visibly in Zeine Zeine, Arab-Turkish
Relations and the Emergence of Arab Nationalism
(Beirut, I958), especially chap. 5.
"libid.
12Halab (Aleppo), 3 June 91 9.
as the 'Young Turks', was a revolutionary party
that had used the opportunity of turn-of-the-
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February2005
Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
3
Turkification,a struggle by the Arabs to throw off the alien Turkish yoke. The story line
fits neatly into pre-existing European literary genres, especially that of the noble savage
pitted against an inveterate and decadent imperial power; and in a curious sleight of hand,
it employs the well-established literary devices of centuries of prejudice against 'the
Terrible Turk', which meant until the end of the nineteenth century Muslims in general
rather than an ethnic category. The story has even become a permanent fixture of western
popular culture owing to Lowell Thomas's post-war travelling multi-media show, 'With
Allenby in Palestine and Lawrence in Arabia', T. E. Lawrence's own memoir, The Seven
Pillars of Wisdom and, later, David Lean's Academy Award-winning epic 1962 film Lawrence
of Arabia.'3
However, in the months immediately following the armistice in the eastern
Mediterranean theatre (October 1918), those reading these articles in the paper may have
only known bits and pieces of that version of recent events, possibly including the fact that
Cemal pasha had hanged domestic political opponents, or even that the sharif of Mecca, an
appointee of the Ottoman Sultan who, having fallen out of favour, concluded an alliance
with the British to make war on the Ottoman state. Moreover, the Sharif's son, Faysal,
could just as easily have been perceived by sophisticated Aleppines as an alien opportunist
from a provincial backwater who had allied himself with a Christian power against the
legitimate leader of the Muslim community; the image of him as a traitor springing to mind
more freely than that of an authentic leader whose authority rested on the linking of his
status as a descendant of the Prophet Muhammad with a right to lead a war of national
liberation. For the majority of those who read newspapers in Aleppo such an intellectual
leap had no precedent whatsoever.14
Shu'ala, ii, 5 (I921); Kamil al-Ghazzi, Kitabnahr
al-dhahabfi tarikh Halab (The River of Gold in the
nine times and in severallanguagesin the lastsixty History of Aleppo), 2nd edn, 3 vols, ed. by Shawqi
Sha'th and Mahmud Fakhuri (Aleppo, I99I-3)
years. On the film's continuing impact on Middle
East studies see, Steven C. Caton, Lawrence of [original edn, Aleppo, 1923-6]; and Raghib alArabia:A Film'sAnthropology
(Los Angeles, I999). Tabbakh, I'lam al-nubala' bi-tarikhHalab al-shahba'
Also T. E. Lawrence's Revolt in the Desert (New
(Informationon the Notables in the historyof Aleppo the
York, 1927), a best-seller of the late 192os, and his
Gray), 2nd edn, 7 vols and index vol., ed. by
Seven Pillarsof Wisdom (Garden City, N.Y., 1935).
Muhammad Kamal (Aleppo, 1988-92) [original
Also, ElizabethMacCallum,TheNationalistCrusade edn, Aleppo, 1923-6]. In none of these accounts
in Syria (New York, 1928); Stephen H. Longrigg,
does the term 'Arab Revolt' appear; Qastun
Syria and Lebanon under French Mandate (Oxford,
especially saw the Arab kingdom as just another
I958). The trope of Turkification has become a moment in a 'a nightmare of unprecedented terror'
standardfeatureof most Arabic historiographyof that had lasted for much of the previous two
the period. Examples include, 'Ali Sultan, Tarikh decades. For recent and persuasive revisions of this
Suriyya 19o8-I918 (History of Syria: 1908-1918) period see Hasan Kayal, Arabs and Young Turks:
(Damascus, 1987); Tawfiq Biru, Al-'arab wa al-turk Ottomanism, Arabism and Islamism in the Ottoman
fi al-ahd al-dusturial-'uthmani (Arab and Turk in the Empire (Los Angeles, 1997); James Gelvin, Divided
Era of the Ottoman Constitution) (Cairo, I960);
Loyalties:Nationalism and Mass Politicsin Syria at the
'Abdallah Yurki Hallaq, Al-thawrat al-suriyya alClose of Empire (Berkeley, 1998); for the political
lkbrafi rub'qam 1918-1945 (The Great Syrian Revolts outlines of the period see Philip Khoury, Urban
in the QuarterCentury 1918-1945) (Aleppo, 1990).
Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of
4Foralternativeversionsof this sameperiodsee Damascus (Cambridge, 1983) and his Syria and the
the local Aleppine accounts in FathallahQastun, French Mandate: The Politics of Arab Nationalism
'Aleppo: yesterday, today and tomorrow', al- 1920-1945 (Princeton, 1987).
13Lowell Thomas, With Lawrencein Arabia (New
York, 1924), a book that has been reprinted at least
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4
Social History
VOL. 30 : NO. I
More worrying to people reading newspapers in the city at that moment was the now
largely forgotten bloody fratricidal civil war and genocidal campaigns of ethnic cleansing that
had continued after the Armistice throughout the northern half of the province of Aleppo - a
conflict which threatened to spread to the city and would eventually grow to a full-scale
international war. Roving bands of demobilized troops terrorized rural populations, and intercommunal urban warfare between Muslims and Christians would bring complete civil collapse
to the cities of Marash, Adana and 'Aintab. Fleeing the disorder, wave after wave of refugees primarily Armenian and Assyrian Christians - were swelling Aleppo's population and in so
doing inexorably altering its communal balance, social fabric and civil society.15
Likewise, Aleppines saw new borders being drawn around them by the Allied victors of the
Great War, cutting their province in half and dividing them from their economic hinterland.
As a city dominated by merchants, they knew full well that this would drain their commercial
life-blood. Aleppo's inhabitants had to confront their city's demotion from a position of
honour as a premier provincial capital of the Ottoman Empire: Aleppo was the empire's third
city after Istanbul and Izmir, and now it was slated to be subordinate to Damascus in a
truncated new national construct, Syria. For Aleppines, it was a time of extreme anxiety,
exacerbated by the imposition of a novel and alien political leadership supported by foreign
troops of occupation and much-feared Bedouin irregulars.
The didactic format of the serialized account of the Arab Revolt, its 'textbookish' texture,
confirms that from the perspective of the new rulers of the city, Aleppines were not
remembering the past the way that they should. They lacked a correctunderstanding of recent
events, and had not organized these events into an appropriate narrative. With the printed
words in the paper, however, the city's new rulers - a cadre of British-supported Arab
nationalists, returned exiles, ex-Ottoman Army officers from Palestine, Iraq and Arabia and a
few local allies - would seek to fix a version of the past in the popular consciousness, telling the
readers and others how to remember the troubles, changes and horrors of the preceding decade
in an idiom of racial and linguistic purity and ethnic distinction that used a grammar nationalism- novel, though not completely unknown, to the city and the region.
The civic identity of Aleppo, a city whose very nature made it similar to other cities in the
eastern Mediterranean, like Trieste, Salonica Smyrna and Alexandria, did not fit comfortably
into those novel concepts of nation and ethnicity. A tremendous ethnic, religious and
linguistic diversity marked these cities, and while from the perspective of the twenty-first
century such difference is remarkable, before the World War I inhabitants of places like
Aleppo would have expected such difference to exist; indeed, they would have seen this
cosmopolitanism as proof of their city's prominence. As was the case with these other cities,
Aleppo sat astride global trade routes and enjoyed relative fame in the early modem period as a
centre of commerce in luxury goods, attracting merchants from all around the Mediterranean,
from northern Europe, and south and central Asia.16 Jewish traders came to the city from
15An eyewitness account of the chaos and state of
civil war in the aftermath of the British occupation
and the transition to French control is E. Stanley
Kerr, The Lions ofMarash (Albany, 1973).
O60n Aleppo's geo-political links with global
trade routes, see Heinz Gaube and Eugen Wirth,
Aleppo. Historische und geographischeBeitrige zur
baulichen Gestaltung, zur sozialen Organisation und
zur wirtschaftlichenDynamik einer vorderasiatischen
Fernhandelsmetropole.Tibinger Atlas des Vorderen
Orients, Beihefte, Reihe B, no. 58 (Wiesbaden,
I984).
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February2005
Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
5
India,'7 the Sasson family in particular, augmenting an already large indigenous community.
Armenian silk-merchants and weavers arrived from Anatolia or Shah Abbas's imperial capital,
Isfahan.18 Europeans despatched merchant adventurers to the city. Once there, they
established trading houses in any one of the grand urban caravansarieslocated in and around
Aleppo's massive central business district. The Venetians called theirs fondacos, the French,
ichelles and the English, factories.19 Shakespeare's Othello even makes reference to Aleppo,
where he began his career in service to Venice, as he kills himself at the end of the play.
Aleppo's international economic importance waned in the nineteenth century. Nevertheless, it
remained a vibrant and cosmopolitan crossroads of the Old World into the first years of the
twentieth century.20
Ottoman authorities did not enumerate people using moder notions of race or ethnicity,
and instead counted people on the basis of religion (see Table I). However, the population
description from the 1903 edition of Aleppo's SdlInme, the provincial almanac/yearbook,
provides a hint of this continuing cosmopolitanism, as well as changes in the bureaucratic
formulation of difference. 'Now there are in [Aleppo] Muslim Turks, Arabs, Turkomans,
Circassians, Kurds; and from the Christians there are Greek Orthodox, Greek Catholics,
Armenians ... Syriacs ... Maronites, Protestants, Chaldeans, and Latin Catholics... .And there
are Jews. All of the people', proudly concluded the anonymous Ottoman functionary, 'are
generous, smart, hospitable and hardworking.' 21 The comfort the author had with mixing
religious affiliation and seemingly ethnic terms like Arab, Turk, Armenian and Kurd
demonstrates an intriguing moment of hybridization, and suggests that as these ideas acquired
new shades of meaning in the region, they were simply grafted onto pre-existing concepts of
difference. A plurality of the city's inhabitants was Turkish or Arabic-speaking Sunni Muslims
and 30 per cent of the city's population was Arabic-speaking Christians and Jews (both Mizrahi
and Sephardic). By 1922, alongside Beirut, it would become the chief resettlement centre for
more than 50,000 primarily Turkish-speaking Armenian refugees from Anatolia.22 And in a
final parallel with the other cites of the eastern Mediterranean, Aleppo would lose much of this
17SeeWalter P. Zenner, A GlobalCommunity: City Between East and West: Aleppo, Izmir and
The Jews from Aleppo, Syria (Detroit, 2000). The
writings of the Aleppine Sephardic rabbi, Jacob
Saul Dwek, Derekh Emuna (Aleppo, 1913/14)
provide a first-hand account of the history of the
community in the first years of the twentieth
century.
180n the lives of Aleppine Armenians before the
Armenian genocide of I915, see Artawazd Siwr-
meian, Patmut'iwnHalepi Hayots' (Historyof the
Istanbul(London, 1999).
20ibid.On the echellesand their local connections
and interlocutors or Beratlilar,see Francois CharlesRoux, Les Echellesde Syrie et de Palestineau XVIIIe
siecle (Paris, 1928); see also Ralph Davis, Aleppo in
Devonshire Square (London, 1967); Alexander
Russell, The Natural History of Aleppo (London,
I794), 2 vols; Masters, Origins, op. cit.
21SaIlname (Aleppo:
1321
[1903]), 219.
Armenians of Aleppo), 3 vols, vol. 3: 1355-1908
22Sdlndme (Aleppo: 1321 [I903]), 'Population
(Paris, 1950); Ina Baghdiantz McCabe, The Shah's figures of the city of Aleppo extracted from the
Silkfor Europe'sSilver: The Eurasian Tradeof theJulfa census data of the Ministry of Population', 241. On
Armeniansin Safavid Iran and India (Atlanta, 1999).
the politics of Armenian resettlement/assimilation
19Bruce Masters, The Origins of WesternEconomic see my 'Colonial co-operation and the Survivors'
Dominance in the Middle East: Mercantilismand the Bargain- the case of the post-genocide Armenian
Islami Economy in Aleppo, 16oo-1750 (New York,
community of Syria under French mandate'
1988). See especially chap. 3, 'Merchant diasporas in Peter Sluglett et al. (eds), The British and
and trading "nations" ', 72-109; also Edhem Elden,
FrenchMandates in ComparativePerspective(Leiden,
Daniel Goffnan and Bruce Masters, The Ottoman 2004).
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6
Social History
VOL. 30 : NO. I
Table I. Aleppo adult population by religious community
Sect
Female
Male
Total
Muslim*
Greek Orthodox
Greek Catholict
40,398
418
3980
38,235
461
3728
78,633
879
7708
2050
2148
4197
1331
1357
2688
2017
Armenian
Catholict
Syrian Catholict
Maronitet
Io35
982
Armenian
931
787
1718
Chaldeant
Latin Catholict
89
256
113
250
202
60
42
75
55
499
4405
553
1063
4506
Syrian Orthodox
Protestant
Foreignt
Jewish
Strangers
1028
506
135
97
2062
8911
2081
Note: *includes:Sunni, Shiite, Alawite, Ismaili,Yezidi and Druze; tUniate - in communion with the
Roman Catholic Church;*Residentwith origins outside the Ottoman Empire;§Residentwith origins
inside the Ottoman Empire.
Source:Sdlname(Aleppo:1321 [1903]),'Populationfiguresof the city of Aleppo extractedfrom the census
data of the Ministryof Population',24I.
cosmopolitan character as international boundaries were drawn around the city, and a
nationalist idealism was imposed upon it.
Seen in this light, while the narrative of the awakening of the Arab nation in the newspaper
was calculated to garner support for the immediate political aspirations of the British-imposed
regime of Faysal and his lieutenants, it also operated as one element of a broader project for
diffusing a specific vernacular of nationalism, in this case Arab nationalism.23 Critically, by
making the appropriate substitutions, tying into linguistic and cultural preconditions,
identifying aspects of an historical narrative, imposing a certain meaning on the salient points
of this narrative and denying or obliterating divergent interpretations and local knowledges,
the paper's editors would translate a metropolitan 'high culture' ideal nationalism into a
parochial version for use in the cosmopolitan city as a prelude to cleansing the city of its 'unArab' components. Wielding the paper as a discursive weapon in the Aleppine milieu, and
elsewhere in the Allied-controlled regions of the eastern Mediterranean, these nationalists
sought to persuade the readers - despite obvious evidence to the contrary - that they belonged
and had always belonged to a 'Syrian' Arab whole by writing the city and its citizens into the
'Arab' nation. The use of the paper as the medium for this project points to the utility of print
media in the non-West, the potential power of a reading public, as well as the growing
currency of discussions about history and the nation in public discourse.
23The phrase is Benedict Anderson's:Imagined Nationalism,revised edn (London,
on the Originsand Spreadof passim.
Communities:
Reflections
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1991),
4-81
February2005
Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
7
Halab's lesson plan also provides telling evidence that, as the newspaper was being published,
people throughout the region were actively seeking to make sense of post-war realities by
using available intellectual and cultural tools. And as the search for meaning unfolded, as was
the case in post-World War I Europe, it informed a larger crisis in civic and class identity.24
The debates and public discourse occasioned by the collapse of Ottoman rule resolved into a
series of deceptively simple questions: what did it - the war, the occupation - all mean, but
also, who are we and where do we belong - or rather, of which whole are we a part? The
writing of history and the adoption of nationalism would serve as tools in answering those
questions. An evolving Arabic historiography that attempted to define the authentic and
inauthentic in Aleppo's past - including, but not limited to, the history of the Arab Revolt sits at the centre of those questions. Crucially, as these questions were answered, they were
rendered in historicist typologies legible only in a modernist light, paralleling developments in
the emergence of rationalist bourgeois historicism in other colonial domains.25
This article reads the process of diffusing, cleansing and historicizing in several episodes as
each appeared in the newspaper during the years it was controlled by functionaries of the
short-lived Arab Kingdom (I9I8-20). Using the paper's serialized history of the Arab Revolt,
its formation and vilification of an 'other' and its creation of external and internal boundaries the very nature of which were often mediated and defined by European colonial Orientalists this essay situates the journal's efforts within the confluence of the interwar spread of European
nationalist idealism and historicist typologies. The text of the paper also brings into relief a
conflict at the heart of the ideological bases of hegemony in the city and the region. Defining
the broader constituent elements of this conflict - a metonymy of antagonism - became a
central feature of public discourse in the post-war Arab Middle East.26The definitions of these
elements emerged through the I920s in the ephemera of bourgeois cultural production:
newspaper articles, museum displays, histories, amateur archaeology, biographical dictionaries
and literary crticism. The definitions sharpened - and were sharpened by - violence, colonial
intrigue and regional military realities. Far from the mere choice between 'Syrianism', 'PanArabism' or loyalty to the new Republic of Turkey as the successor to the Ottoman state, the
form of the debate in places like Aleppo also signalled concerns about religiously sanctioned
authority, the persistence of Ottoman forms of legitimization and questions of citizenship that
were shared by other peoples of the multi-lingual and multi-religious Ottoman eastern
Mediterranean. Those in Aleppo most adept at making meaning in historicist structures
occupied the leading edge of the local discourse, namely, the western-educated middle class,
24JayWinter, Sites of Memory, Sites of Mourning:
The Great War in European Cultural History (Cam-
bridge, I985); see also Daniel J. Sherman, The
Constructionof Memory in InterwarFrance(Chicago,
ments: Colonial and PostcolonialHistories (Princeton,
1993), 94-6.
26The term is Homi Bhaba's: 'The work of
hegemony is itself the process of iteration and
differentiation.It depends on the production of
I999).
25SeeespeciallyRanajitGuha,Dominance
without alternativeor antagonisticimages that are always
Hegemony: History and Power in Colonial India
(Cambridge, 1997), 184-8, and Partha Chatterjee's
produced side by side and in competition with each
other. It is this side-by-side nature, this partial
readingofTarinicharanChattopadhay'smid-nine- presence, or metonymy of antagonism, and its
itihas. effective significations,that give meaning ... to a
teenth-centuryhistoryof'India', Bharatbarser
in
Chatterjeesees in Tarinicharan'speriodizationan politics of struggleas thestruggle
of identifications',
internalization of European historiographical technique. Partha Chaterjee, The Nation and its Frag-
The Locationof Culture (London, 1994),
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29.
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: NO.
I
presumably the target of the paper's persuasion, which, far from uniformly supporting Faysal
and his British allies, still sought to make sense of the ambiguities of their times and what it
meant to live in Aleppo in the wake of the moral, social and political tremors occasioned by
the 'war to end all wars'.
Equally, the editors of Halab sought to 'awaken' that class to what they considered the
essential rightness and rationality of nationalism and to persuade them of the fallacy of their
antediluvian belief that cosmopolitan society was the norm. The iteration of Wilsonian ideals
as axiomatic features of the new world order in the journal highlighted this suasion and
reflected the apotheosis of the nation, something the outcome of World War I, in which
(legitimate) nations had won out against (illegitimate) empires, had verified for many. Yet the
very insistence on the authority of the concept of the nation indicates that such a recognition
of the nation's godhead may not have been commonly understood by Halab's readers. The
argument in favour of the Aleppines as Arabs and Aleppo as an Arab city, however, proceeded
from the assumption that modernity teaches that the individual is of a nation sui generis.
Ultimately, if the 'Arabs' were to be modern then they, too, must have a nation with deep,
ancient and authentic historical roots. Nevertheless, Aleppo's heterogeneous nature became an
obstacle and a problem, something preternatural. The condition of pre-war Aleppo, in which
primarily Arabs were unaware of their 'Arabness', failed to measure up to Halab's version of
modernity.
Moreover, beyond showing the conceptual links between nation, historicism and
modernity, a close reading of Halab is an exercise in the archaeology of an idea: while the
specifics of Arab nationalism would change over the next generation, especially under the
influence of fascism, in its broadest outlines the ideology has changed little from the version in
the paper - especially the elaboration of an instrumentalized Arab history. Beyond the fact that
this was the earliest instance that Arab nationalism operated as state dogma in the eastern
Mediterranean, it was also the first time a diverse urban population would be systematically
exposed to that novel way of thinking about the past, ethnicity and political legitimacy.
Although the idea of the Arab nation had circulated throughout the salons and newspapers of
Beirut and elsewhere, it had little resonance beyond a small circle of Christian intellectuals in
the pre-war period and was certainly not aligned with state bureaucratic and educational
institutions. Nevertheless, while the Arabism of Halab did articulate a formula for liberation
from the Ottoman Empire, by its very nature it also legitimized the European conquest of the
region and the imposition of an alien ideology.
A striking feature of this early presentation is the insistence that the Arab is a non-sectarian
designation and that Muslims, Christians and Jews could be equally Arab and possess the same
right to full citizenship; further, in this version of Arabism, Islam has no role whatsoever in
governance or the bases of legitimate authority. Consequently, in the pages of Halab it is
possible to begin to trace not just the origins of Arab nationalism and a nationalist
historiography, but also to characterize the ideological terrain in which Islamist radicalism in
the Arab world first takes root. Locating the roots of this radicalism in nationalism's heyday
confronts the tendency to collapse Islamism into an undifferentiated blanket anti-modernism
or anti-westernism with origins in the last few decades; with the secular Arabism of Halab in
mind, it should be recalled that Islamism in the Arab world in part emerges as a reaction against
the imperialist division of Ottoman Muslims into separate states and the non-sectarian,
emancipatory and bourgeois dimensions of interwar liberal Arab nationalism.
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Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
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As the British military captured Ottoman territory in 1918, one of the first steps they took to
consolidate their presence was the establishment and subsidy of sympathetic Arabic-language
newspapers like Halab. Foremost among these was al-'Arab (The Arab), begun in Britishoccupied Baghdad in early 1918. These papers were often associated with al-Nadi al-Carabi,the
Arab Club, which British agents likewise aided.27 In the region which shortly became Syria,
two major papers began publication, Halab in Aleppo (9 December 1918) and al-'Asima (The
Capital) in Damascus some weeks later.28 The papers constituted the provinces' official
gazettes. Like the previous official papers of the Ottoman period, namely Firat (Euphrates),
local announcements, train schedules, and official wages and prices filled much of the paper.
When used in concert with the clubs, these two elements created an ideologically sanctioned
way to monopolize public discourse and condition a nationalist understanding of the city's
new status.
On the front page of the first edition of Halab, an article printed in a headline-size font
assured Aleppines of that new status. Thanking Shukri pasha al-Ayyubi, a former Ottoman
officer, Istanbul carpet importer and, at that time, the military governor of Aleppo, for
allowing the paper to publish,29 the editor explained that the paper's pages would serve 'to
explain the new condition, spread knowledge, enliven trade and lead the Arab nation along
the path to prosperity'. A central tenet of this new condition, and a more significant
intervention in the definition of Aleppo, took the form of an official proclamation from the
military administration in Damascus buried on the second page. 'We have made known ... a
ruling concerning the Turks present in the city [Aleppo] and we have advised them to register
their names as soon as possible'.30 The article failed to explain how a 'Turk' was to know he or
she was a Turk; but the remainder of the proclamation made it abundantly clear who was to
stay and who was to go.
I.
2.
3.
The Turks bor in Aleppo and married with Arabs are not to leave these relationships.
The Turks with proprietary or trade relationships who have maintained a good
demeanour during their stay in Aleppo are exempt from deportation.
Turkish civil servants and others who have none of these relationships nor a livelihood are
to depart immediately and the Arab government will assist them and guarantee their
safety.31
The announcement reflected a similar policy in Palestine and the Ottoman province of
Damascus, areas also under British control. However, the heterogeneity of the city's
population did not so easily lend itself to such national distinctions. With few exceptions, the
question of who was an Arab and who was a Turk rarely arose in the city and would have been
considered absurd. Most urbane, literate Aleppines would have bristled at being designated
mere 'Arabs' or 'Turks', terms which in pre-nationalist consciousness connoted backward
desert dwellers or rough country people. Certainly, however, if such a question did arise prior
27. Gelvin, 'Popular Mobilization and the
Foundations of Mass Politics in Syria, I918-I920'
(Ph.D., Harvard University, I99I), 7I.
28SalihaFellache, 'al-'Asima,organe politiqueetude du journal officiel du gouverement du
Fayqal entre fevrier I919 et aout 1920', MA thesis,
University of Bordeaux, iiI, 1994.
29Khoury, Urban, 147-8.
30ibid.
31ibid.
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to the British capture of Aleppo, as it did so increasingly in journalistic exchanges in the period
after 1912, it would not have carried with it the possibility of social exclusion and political
expulsion.32 The proclamation was much more than the implementation of a bureaucratic
measure. Rather, expelling Turks was part of a drive to cleanse the city of now 'unnatural'
elements. It was the first operation of a mechanism that sought to uncover the 'Turk' by
finding the 'Arab'; this Turk was to be the 'not-Arab' and, presumably, vice versa.
The 'Turk' as he emerged from the pages of Halab, the 'old Turks' of the Arab Revolt story
notwithstanding, was an ill-mannered individual, replete with onerous character flaws, intent
on defying moder civilization, intellectually deficient and morally corrupt.33 As the paper
explained in a piece entitled 'The policy of division', 'the Turks controlled the provinces [of
the Ottoman Empire] .. .by sowing enmity between people of different religions and causing
racial disunity (fitna al-Canasir)'and this policy had forced the Allied powers to intervene in the
region. This disunity harmed the Arabs most.
The Young Turk government was gripped by the idea that Anatolian Turkey is the basic
unit of the Turkish Kingdom ... and they convinced themselves that they should
establish in Anatolia a state for their nationals only - no strangers allowed. The question
of the 'Arab and Turk' moved from clubs to the cities and villages of Anatolia. They
accused the Arabs of treason and hatred of the Turks, prejudicing them against them until
the Turks' hearts turned against the Arabs.34
While the 'Turk' causes disunity, the Arab government, the articles concluded, treats all
people equally and unites the Arabs, regardless of religion.
The paper also put the issue of 'Turkish' complicity in communal discord to good use while
reporting on a brief but bloody massacre of Armenian refugees.35 Halab apologized for the
disturbance by making an oblique reference to the Armenian genocide of 1915: 'We and the
Armenians are brothers, we suffered under the same tyranny,' the edition of 27 February 9199
explained.36 On 7 March, a much longer article addressed the same topic: 'It is unfortunate
32An exampleof the expansionof discussionsof
national identity in local public discourse is an
their language is Arabic'; see al-Taqaddum(Aleppo),
13 February 1913.
33Halab (Aleppo), 5 May 1919.
article entitled 'Are we Turks despite ourselves: this
is the result of inaction', in which the editor of the
34ibid., 12 December 1918.
ShukriKanaydir,
350n 26 February 1919 a mob attacked several
(Progress),
newspaperal-Taqaddum
responded to a claim made in the bilingual buildings and shanties housing Armenian refugees
newspaper lisan-i Ahdlf/ Lisan al-Ahali (Voiceof to the north and west of the city. Two hours later
the People) that Aleppo was not an Arab city, but
nearly a hundred Armenians lay dead; British and
Arab army troops wounded or killed about fifty of
rather an Ottoman city, by claiming that his Aleppo
the attackers. The crowd's anger, European
was indeed 'Arab', that state employees were the
only Turks in the city, and that no more than I per observers claimed, grew out of resentment against
cent of the total population spoke Turkish. In a the French-supported Armenian legionnaires
whom the French had organized into armed
strange turn, this paper that had tended to oppose
the political activism of the Sunni Muslim
military units. United Kingdom, Public Record
E 39672/2117/
as
well:
'While
Arabs
embraced
them
as
Office, Foreign Office 371/4179
notability
we could say that the Mudarris,Jabiri, CAdliand the
44. General Headquarters Egypt to War Office, 3
March I919.
other ancient Aleppine families are Turks ... most
36Halab (Aleppo), 27 February 1919.
of them have lived a long time in Arabia and today
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Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
February2005
II
that you soiled your whiteness with the red blood of innocents and the black stain of shame.' It
continued with three questions the individual must ask should a similar situation occur:
*
*
*
Am I doing all I can for the nation?
Am I behaving now like the Turks?
Am I acting in the way an enemy of civilization would act?37
The proper answers to these questions should prevent Aleppines-as-Arabs from committing
such atrocities. As if to reinforce the notion that, recent events not withstanding, the
commitment of atrocities against civilians was a national characteristic of Turks, rather than
Arabs, the paper followed with scrupulous detail the war crime trials of various Young Turks
in Allied-occupied Istanbul.38 Arabs, then, were everything the Turk was not. An article
entitled 'Arab tolerance' that appeared in the summer of I919 invited readers to 'study the
pages of history to see many examples of the tolerance the Arab nation had for those who lived
in it'. Whereupon, they would realize that 'the Arabs are at the forefront of tolerant nations'.39
The paper went on to explain that 'Greeks' and 'Christians' of the Islamic lands of the Middle
Ages had achieved much in the sciences and medicine. 'From this it is known', the article
continued, 'that the nature of the Arabs is not at all what some would call today "bigoted"
(taCassub).'It concluded: 'The history of the Arabs does not bring to mind the disgrace of
bigotry toward the sons of their nation, unlike what is mentioned in the history of other
nations. They [the Arabs] have followed the admonition "religion is to God and the nation is
to the people".' 40
In building this modern national identity, Halab tied the speaking of Arabic to being an Arab
in a simple equation: the Arab speaks Arabic. As the paper assured its readers, reading in
Arabic, 'Arabic is our national language.'41 Yet defining Aleppines in such a way - reinforced
by the fact that Faysal's administration declared Arabic the sole language of state - contradicted
the traditional bilingualism, or even trilingualism of the resident population and overturned six
centuries of practice. It should be recalled that in the antebellum Ottoman eastern
Mediterranean, the use of literary Ottoman Turkish - which no one spoke as a native
language - for affairsof state existed alongside the use of Quranic Arabic - also not spoken as a
native language - for the purposes of religion and law. Nevertheless, the blueprint of nation
used by Halab insisted that the Arabic print-language that had begun to be employed in
newspapers and literature during the last decades of the previous century in places like Istanbul,
Cairo and Beirut was the natural language of the Arabs. In a plebiscitary sense, Arabic did not
suggest itself more readily than Turkish for the native language of the inhabitants of the
Ottoman province of Aleppo. However, in the city of Aleppo, a dialect of Arabic was
probably the most widely spoken language,42 especially among the resident Christian
37ibid.,7 March I9I9.
38ibid.,3I July 1919.
39ibid.,i8 June I919.
and Kurdish,see the multi-volumework by Khayr
al-Din al-Asadi, MasuCatHalab (Encyclopedia
of
Aleppo),8 vols (Aleppo, n.d.). Both this work and
40ibid.
41ibid., 29 October I919.
42Fora measure of the degree to which the patois
the nineteenth-century diary of Na'um Bakhkhash,
Yawmiyyat Halab (Aleppo Diary), 3 vols (Aleppo,
1990), detail the use of a vibrant and useful
of Aleppo had been interpenetratedby various colloquialAleppine Arabic.
languages,primarilyOttoman Turkish, Armenian
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Social History
VOL. 30 : NO. I
population. Nevertheless, the large number of bilingual papers published in the pre-war period
suggests that print-literacy existed equally not only in Arabic and Ottoman, but also in
Armenian.43 Knowledge of languages played a prosaic and functional role in the lives of the
people of Aleppo and such competence had not acquired the all-encompassing cultural and
national determinative value it would have in the framework of nationalism. A truism of the
Ottoman system was that birth in an Arabic-speaking (or Kurdish or Armenian or Turkish for
that matter) household had never barred access to Ottoman sinecures. The political elite of the
Arab nationalists who surrounded Faysal, and Faysal himself, knew Ottoman, Arabic and
various European languages. Despite this, the paper made clear the pivotal role Arabic had in
defining the Arab and further embraced it as a central aspect of the individual constructed by
modernity.44
Given the centrality of Arabic to this ideology, the editors of Halab advocated a systematic
approach to its instruction and correct propagation. An article entitled 'The Arabic language
and the Arab Club' (29 October 1919) outlined five measures to counter 'the weakened
condition in which we see in the instruction of the Arabic language'. The Arab Club, which
had become a centre for adult instruction in Arabic, French and English, served as the locus for
the Arabic language's revival. It would 'spread the Arabic language and ease its instruction for
the sons of the nation'. The first point of the five-measure plan made 'the study of Arabic
compulsory for anyone who comes to study a foreign language at the club. He cannot study
another language until he has mastered Arabic.' The remaining parts of the plan insisted 'that it
is important to study grammar, diction and declamation as well as the history of the Arabs and
of the Arabic language'. A hint to the populist impulses behind such a programme appeared in
the second item, which prioritized scholarships for those who wished to lear Arabic.45
Both the insistence upon a language proper to the Arabs, and the activism to spread and
strengthen that language among Aleppines, derive from two basic requirements of nationalism
itself. First, as understood at the time, nationalism's internationally recognized logic - at least in
theory - demanded a one-to-one correspondence between sovereignty and the collectivity of
a given language's speakers. In conformity with this logic, Halab sought to establish that this
collectivity was pre-existent; it was a necessary precursor to asserting that nation's sovereignty.
Second, the exclusivity of Arabic as a defining quality of the Arab and the paper's insistence
upon the language's systematic cultivation adhere most closely to an attempt to persuade the
'reading-class' readers that the nation's dimensions included its non-reading class. Arabic might
not have been the native language of all Aleppines but, in this climate of ascendant nationalism,
asserting that Arabic was the language of Aleppines-as-Arabs and creating structures and
institutions that valorized it presented the reading-class with a possible and novel modusvivendi
for social cohesion or inter-class and non-sectarian solidarity. It also served as a basis for
creating a political unit that divided Aleppo from Istanbul and included it with Damascus, an
43SeeFilibdi Tarazi(Philippede Tarazi),Tarikh abundantlyclear:TheMakingofan ArabNationalist:
al-sahafa al-'arabiyya(History of ArabicJournalism),4
vols (Beirut, I933) and Suhayl Malathi, al-Tiba'a wa
al-sahafafi Halab (Printing andJournalismin Aleppo)
(Damascus, 1996).
"William Cleveland's biography of Faysal's
Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of
Satf al-Husri (Austin, I97I). Al-Husri, grew up
speaking Turkish and then, as an adult, learned
Arabic.
45Halab, 29 October I919.
Minister of Education, Sati' al-Husri, makes this
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2005
February
I3
innovation in borders not seen since the collapse of the Mamluk Empire in the sixteenth
century. Such language-based solidarity promised to create, paraphrasingBenedict Anderson, a
useful 'fraternity' of Arabic-speakers.46
In addition to the seemingly objective use of a linguistic device to define Aleppines as Arabs
and Aleppo as Arab, the paper used the words and authority of western diplomats, politicians
and Orientalists to make its case and write the city into a stream of Arab history. Within the
first month of its founding, the Arab Club of Aleppo (who shared leadership with the editorial
board of the paper) hosted Francois Georges Picot and Mark Sykes. The two diplomats toured
Syria in late 1918 and early 1919 delivering speeches calculated to lower local expectations of
complete independence, no doubt in anticipation of the implementation of the territorial
arrangements outlined in the once-secret treaty between France and Britain that the pair had
engineered. Despite this lowering of expectations, their presentations insisted on the existence
of a separate Arab nation that, Picot maintained, had been oppressed 'for four centuries by the
government of Istanbul'.47 Both claimed that the liberation of the Arabs and other peoples
from this oppression had motivated the French, the British and the Italians to make war on the
Turks. The two diplomat-historians depicted the Arabs as a nation among nations: nations that
had joined together to 'end Turkish despotism and return freedom to the people'.48
Picot charged his audience with 'the unification of all Arabs by your efforts, from Aleppo to
the desert, whatever their origins or customs or particular beliefs'. Similarly Sykes, whom the
Arab Club's agenda qualified as the 'great Orientalist' (al-mustashriq al-kabir), assured the
assembly that 'everyone is enthusiastically supporting the Arab Awakening, we know how
great it was in the past and will be in the future'.49 This speech may have been the last one he
ever delivered, as Sykes died a month later in a Paris hotel room, one of the countless victims
of the influenza pandemic that followed the war. These speeches told the members of the club
- and with their re-publication in Halab, the rest of the city - which boundaries the victors
World War One had drawn around them. Their authoritative and prescriptive tone must have
appealed to an audience hungry for external recognition and reinforcement; it conveyed a
sense that the Arab nation had arrived and had joined the exclusive club of nation-states,
nations that had the right to be 'free'. While the definition of this freedom supplied by Picot
and Sykes meant that Arabs should rule Arabs, neither had a commitment to anything other
than complete European domination of the region. Their speeches provide a striking reminder
of the way late colonialism can dupe the colonized through the rhetoric of national liberation.
Each history lesson shared an emphasis on the historical narrative of greatness followed by
decline, oppression and then a reawakening. The opening paragraphsof the paper's history of
the Arab Revolt, 'The new Arab awakening', followed the same plot. The paper assured the
readers, on the authority of Europeans, that an Arab nation did indeed exist; that the Arab,
being the non-Turk, belonged to a people once oppressed and now liberated. Such a narrative
structure is far from unique. 'Borrowed' from European histories of the nineteenth century,
primarily accounts of the Greek revolution or Italian unification, these historicist typologies
were manifested clearly throughout non-western nationalist histories. Consider the example of
nationalist historiography in the Indian subcontinent:
46Anderson, op. cit., 7.
47Halab,2 JanuaryI919.
48ibid.
49ibid.,6 January I919.
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VOL. 30 : NO. I
For Indian nationalists in the late nineteenth century, the pattern of classical glory,
medieval decline, and modern renaissance appeared as one that was not only proclaimed
by the moder historiography of Europe but also approved for India by at least some
sections of European scholarship. What was needed was to claim for the Indian nation the
historical agency for completing the project of modernity. To make that claim, ancient
India had to become the night of medieval darkness. Contributing to that description
would be all the prejudices of the European Enlightenment about Islam ... [in] the new
nationalist history of India would be a stereotypical figure of'the Muslim', endowed with
a 'national character': fanatical, bigoted, warlike, dissolute, and cruel.50
The nationalist history that unfolded in the pages of Halab cast the stereotypical figure of the
'Turk' in the role of the 'Muslim'; the post-Enlightenment vilification of the 'Terrible Turk'
in such an effort proved an easy translation. Yet, beyond strengthening the definition of the
Arab as the non-Turk, such a history functioned, at its very core, to obliterate the Islamic bases
of Ottoman legitimacy. The persistence of this Islamic form of Ottoman legitimacy threatened
the definition of 'freedom' outlined above. Had history depicted the Ottomans ruling merely
as bad Muslims rather than brutal ethnic 'Terrible' Turkish oppressors, the ethnocentric
argument put forward by Faysal and his European allies would have sounded hollow. To take
full advantage of the modernist definition of Arab and Turk, the paper and its masters needed
to obscure the religious bond between Arabic- and Turkish-speaking Muslims, and thereby
disengage the newly imagined ethnicities from a dependence on Islam and preclude, thereby,
the emergence of an anti-imperialist resistance movement phrased in the idiom of inter-ethnic
Islamic solidarity. Such a coincidence of both nationalist and imperialist interests presages the
entire post-colonial ambivalence with Islam itself in Kemalist Turkey and Baathist Syria and
Iraq, where Islam is (or was) both a definitive component of identity, but operates as well as a
marker of an unenlightened and unmodern past.
As the paper continued to create this past, this history of 'we the Arabs', it resorted to
European periodizations and extensive quotations from other Orientalist historians as a key
discursive strategy. It was incumbent upon the Arab nationalists to create a history for the Arab
nation, a narrative in which the Arab 'character' moves through a plot.51 In addition to the
earlier account of the Arab Revolt, the paper also presented the history of the Arabs in a
serialized paraphraseof passages from Gustave Le Bon's 1884 La Civilisationdes Arabes.52In the
22 October I919 edition of the paper, Rushdi Duhna justified this history lesson:
In a French book, I stumbled across a page from the history of Arab civilization and I
wanted to translate it so the readers could be informed about the extent of the efforts
which our grandfathers had expended in the advancement of science and knowledge and
of the great hand they had in the various arts and industry so that they could be an
example to us in our moder life. And we should follow their example and their lead, and
we should not be content only with taking pride in them.53
SoChatterjee,Fragments,
op. cit., I02.
51See Anderson, op. cit., especially chap. 2,
'Cultural roots', 9-36.
52Gustave Le Bon, La Civilisation des Arabes
Egypt, consult Timothy Mitchell, ColonisingEgypt
(Los Angeles, 1991), 123-4.
53Halab (Aleppo), 22 October 1919.
(Paris, 1884). On Le Bon's broaderinfluence in
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Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
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The article, entitled 'Safha min tarikh al-tamaddun al-Carabi'('A page from the history of Arab
civilization'), enumerated a series of mathematical and medical innovations made in the
medieval period by people the author classified as Arabs. The further instalments charted
advances in architecture, metallurgy and agriculture. The last section dealt with commerce,
and highlighted the 'Arab' role in the trade of ivory and gold across the Mediterranean, and of
silk from China.
The editor's use of the Orientalist account conveyed to his readers that the West recognized
something of value in the Arab past. The implication that this past 'ended' in the early modem
period, that is the period before the 'four centuries of Ottoman rule', added a causative
element to the argument: Arab greatness had been extinguished in the morass of Ottoman
decadence. On a functional level, the editor resorted to a French version of 'Arab' history
because he had no alternative. The dominant tradition of local historiography, written in
Arabic and Ottoman, did not periodize history in such a manner. Rather, as preserved in such
texts as the Ottoman almanac, the Salname, Aleppo's history was divided into divinely
ordained periods, namely before and after it became part of the Islamic world,54 or in the case
of Christian Aleppine writers, before and after the birth of Christ.55 Ottoman court histories
periodized the past along dynastic lines or reigns, but the origin of national history as a genre
originated in Europe in the early nineteenth century.56 In other words, to find a history that
separated a national or ethnic Arab history from a Muslim history, and which included Aleppo
in a larger Arab whole, the editor had no choice but to use foreign sources. Ultimately, some
in Halab's audience may have viewed the foreign 'modern' sources as inherently more
authoritative.
The use of a European periodization and historicist structures points to a more fundamental
commitment to modernity and to the importation of the logic of the nation itself. In the
paper's various discussions of the progress of the King-Crane Commission through Palestine,
Syria and Cilicia, in panegyrics to the then-President of the United States, Woodrow Wilson,
and most clearly in essays entitled 'Humanity and the nation' or 'The free man', the mimesis of
the rhetoric of nationalist thought is drawn into relief, reinforcing the observation that Aleppo
in I919 had become an ideological battleground in which questions about a political unit's
coterminality with a cultural homogeneity took centre stage. Part of the argument hinged on
the fact of the victory of nation-states in the war, and more deeply on the conclusion that a
rational system of nations represented the best of all possible modern worlds. Halab's articles
turned these ideas into a syllogism. The major premise was the existence of nations; the minor
premise, that the Arabs constituted a nation. However, the subsidiary argument that Aleppines
were, and had always been, Arabs begged the very question the journal sought to answer.
54See, for example, the entry in the last pre- Historyof Aleppo)takes the city's history to the
revolutionary Salname for Aleppo, Salname-yi birth of Christ,and the second volume, Lata'ifalin
VilayetiHalep(OttomanYearbook
for Aleppo)(Alep- hadithfitarikhHalabal-hadith(SweetConversations
po, 1908), 17-2I.
the ModernHistory of Aleppo) carries the story until
55The salient example of this phenomenon is
Mikha'il b. Antun al-Saqqal al-Halabi's nineteenth-century two-volume manuscript (I852-
his presentin pre-warAleppo.
See E. Hobsbawn, Nations and Nationalism
Since1780:Programme,
Myth, Reality(Cambridge,
1938). The first volume, Tara'if al-nadimfi tarikh
I99o).
Halab al-qadim(Rare Pleasantriesin the Ancient
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The articles also shed light on the way in which concepts that enshrined the rights of the
nation, Wilson's 'right to national self-determination' in particular, were understood at an
early moment in their post-war diffusion. The paper's unabashed enthusiasm for Woodrow
Wilson derived from the symbolic value the American president had placed upon the war and
his unreserved endorsement of the rights of the nation. The article which first acquainted
Aleppines with him, entitled 'Rajul al-duniya Wilson' ('Wilson, man of the world'), attributed
his pivotal importance to 'the role he has played in the recent war which changed it into
something of great importance to the future of nations and peoples everywhere'.57 Wilson 'the
Great', the paper continued,
made plain the way to prevent war: each nation must be under the control of itself and
must not remain under the unjust control of others. .. Universal brotherhood prevents
wars, as does the liberation of people from tyranny. If it is true that Noah is the second
father of humanity, because he freed them from the flood, then Wilson is their third
father, because he freed them from the flood of continuing oppression.58
This article told Aleppines not only that they had been unjustly oppressed, but that the key to
peace lay in the alignment of nation and political control. The parallel with Noah is more than
a picturesque hyperbole: the Quran presents Noah as the first prophet of punishment and as a
man who ushered in a new epoch. Wilson, from his ennoblement in the press, had given an
almost supernatural sanction to the construction of the nation in his own period of human
history.
Such rhetoric was calculated to persuade the readers of the historical necessity of the nation.
In addition to arguing that correct social order, peace and justice flow from the establishment
of ethnically homogenous states, this rhetoric also contended that in anything less than the
nation, the individual could not reach his potential. 'When he comes to believe in the
nationalist cause,' read a passage in 'Humanity and the nation', 'he then defends his own life,
because he sees that the nation is the basis of his individual life and being. He sees that all of
what is called happiness in the world is based on the person living in his native nation. He
becomes committed to making his nation free from unnatural rule, that is, rule that is nonnationalist.' 59 In the same vein, the article referred to the naturalness of the nation: 'The fire of
nationalism is a natural fire whose flame is inextinguishable.' 60 The nation, then, far from
being a novel innovation, actually represented the realization of the true state of man's being.
Consequently, opposing it, and dissenting from the modernist nationalist paradigm articulated
in Halab's pages, would have denied both nature and rationality.
The paper's efforts at persuasion, while conceptually tied to the whole nationalist enterprise,
had, in the spring of 1919, a much more immediate rationale: the despatch of a fact-finding
board to the Middle East. Halab greeted the news of the appointment of the King-Crane
Commission itself with enthusiasm.61 Beneath a headline that read, 'The joy of the nation is
57Halab (Aleppo), 20 March 9199.
58ibid.
59Halab (Aleppo), 13 January 1919.
60ibid.
61The progress of the peace talks in Paris had
become stalled as Lloyd George and Clemenceau
locked horns over the settlement of conflicting
British and French imperialist claims on the Middle
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Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
I7
tremendous thanks to the blessed delegation', the paper explained that the Allies 'have
despatched a commission to Syria to study the spirit of the land and learn the needs of the
people and their souls' desire'.62 Dismissing concerns that the commission's results would be
disregarded as 'pure rumour-mongering', it portrayed the commission's purpose in the region
as a type of test:
If the delegation sees in the land the things which are needed by nations for independence
and if it sees true nationalism, co-operation and desire to progress ... then it will not
doubt that the nation is worthy of independence and freedom. It will then gain all the
blessings of freedom given by the nation and nationalism.63
Subsequent articles outlined the measures the people of Syria in general and Aleppo in
particular would need to take in order to meet such a challenge.
Teaching the people to speak a language of nations and nationalism intelligible in the
intellectual framework that gripped the period lay at the heart of this lesson plan. From the
announcement of the commission's formation until its arrival in Aleppo, the paper spilled a
great deal of ink to teach its audience this language. On its pages, the aspects of the imagined
community were spelled out and reiterated in great detail for the readers. The history of the
Arab Revolt ranks among the earliest efforts in this regard: it appeared in the paper alongside
the announcement of the formation of the commission itself, and it created a unified
narrative of the war years that the people with whom the delegation spoke could reproduce
for the commission. Similarly, articles such as 'The united country' (25 April 1919)
introduced the even newer concept of the 'natural boundaries of Syria', a standard European
nationalist trope that figured prominently in the pseudo-populist rhetoric which greeted the
members of the commission.
When the commission arrived in Palestine in June, Halab reprinted its standard
questionnaire as it appeared in a Palestinian paper. This questionnaire asked the locals about
the kind of government they wanted and whom they desired for their leaders. Alongside the
questions, Halab published the correctanswers. As the committee progressed through Palestine
to Beirut and then on to Damascus, Halab's prescriptive efforts intensified, as did the official
efforts of imposing ideological control on the local population. An article unabashedly entitled
'What to tell the international delegation' proved the most salient and explicit example of this
effort. 'The most important thing we can do in these times', it told its readers, 'is follow the
progress of the international delegation so that we can know how they gather together the
East. Wilson, fearing that the conflict would pit
Britain's ally, Faysal, against the small French
presencein the region, proposeda commissionbe
sent to gauge local opinion in the contested areas,
primarilyinland Syria and Palestine. French and
Britishdiplomatsbowed to Wilson becauseof the
president'sunparalleledprestige - though they
objected, contending that public opinion did not
exist in the region. France and Britain withdrew
their delegates from the commission prior to its
departure,signallingtheir supportfor the pre-war
arrangementsof the Sykes-Picotagreement.However, the Americancommissioners,CharlesCrane
(a friend of President Wilson and a millionaire
contributorto the Democraticpartywhose family
had made theirmoney manufacturingtoilet bowls)
and Henry King (the presidentof OberlinCollege)
arrivedin the region in June I919. Longrigg, op.
cit., 89.
62Halab(Aleppo),21 April I919.
63ibid.
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18
Social History
VOL. 30 : NO. I
opinions of the people ... and then we can leave an impression on their consciences'.64 The
article explained that the commission had interviewed various notables, learned men,
journalists and members of religious and cultural organizations. During the interviews that
would take place in Aleppo the paper demanded, 'We must work to be an unbroken chain of
opinions and viewpoints.' 65
It is incumbent upon us, the sons of this land, to bring together [all of those the
commission will interview] and inform them of the unity of beliefs and shared opinions.
We must convince this group not to present the members of the committee with
anything other than a single opinion.66
Thus, by the time the commission arrived in Aleppo from Hama by train on 17 July 1919,
Aleppines knew what they were supposed to say and how to say it before the first question was
asked.67
'What is the ratio of Muslims to non-Muslims in Aleppo?' King and Crane asked the mayor
of Aleppo, Ihsan al-Jabiri, in the published interview of the 21 July I919 edition of Halab.
Stipulating that Jews and Christians made up three-tenths of the population and had
representation according to these numbers, he moved quickly to assert that what the people of
Aleppo wanted was in complete agreement with the programme of the pro-Faysal Syrian
National Congress.68 The Americans received a similar response when they questioned the
representative of the Muslim women of Aleppo, the daughter of the late Nafic pasha al-Jabiri,
Aleppo's senior delegate to the pre-war Ottoman parliament, and Ihsan's niece, Shukriyya alJabiri:
64Halab (Aleppo), 23 June 1919.
included several men from Aleppo. At a meeting
held on 5 June I919 electors of the second degree
from the last Ottoman election had met and chosen
67Halab (Aleppo),
8 July I919. The day Sa'dallah al-Jabiri, the younger brother of Ottoman
following the commission's arrival, Halab published
deputy,Jabiri zade NafiCpasha, Shaykh Riza RifaCi,
the schedule of its planned meetings. In the early Muhammad effendi al-Mudarris (the son of
morning the commission memberswere to meet Mudarris zade Fuad), and two Christian delegates,
the administrativecouncil, followed in half-hour Salim Janbart and Theodore al-Antaki, to represent
time blocks by the qadi, the mufti and leading Aleppo. Rural delegates included members of the
Culama'.Delegations from the various non-Muslim
large landholding families of Hananu, Kikhiya,
Qudsi and Mar'ashli. Meeting in Damascus, the
religious communities of the city, Greek Catholic,
Protestant, Armenian, Syrian Catholic, Chaldean
delegates outlined a response to the King-Crane
Commission that served as the basis for orthodox
and, late in the afternoon, a group of Muslim
women filled subsequent half-hour slots. The Syrian nationalism in the remainder of the interwar
following day they received the mayor, the period. Animated by two concerns - first, that the
administrative council, notables, guildsmen, farmregion was slated for division according to the
ers, tribal shaykhs, sufis, and members of the Arab Sykes-Picot agreement, and second, that France
Club and its youth wing. Such a breakdown of
would become the dominant power in some of its
society may representan Americancomprehension parts - the delegates articulated a series of
of late Ottoman social structure, possibly mediated
resolutions comprehensible in the dominant lanby the commission's advisor Howard Bliss, Preguage of nationalism. The ten-part declaration that
sident of the American University of Beirut.
the congress issued (i July 1919) embraced the
68The Syrian National Congress was a meeting
Wilsonian definition of the post-war world. See
of 'delegates' from the cities of 'Syria' which
Khoury, Urban Notables, op. cit., 88.
65ibid.
66ibid.
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Cleansing the cosmopolitan city
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Question:Are you representatives of the women of Aleppo?
Answer. Yes. [Shukriyya then presented the chairman with a written statement]
Question: Are you aware of the activities of the women in Beirut and Damascus?
Answer. Of course!
Question: Is this something [i.e. the written statement] you all want?
Answer: It is the only thing in our hearts and thus it is our only answer.
Question:Do you have political experience?
Answer:We do not. But our men have been oppressed and they work all the time to liberate
the nation and we know this.69
On the following day, the delegation of notables led by Murad effendi al-Jabiri, another of
Shukriyya's uncles, met the Americans and told them the same thing.70 An arresting feature
of the commission's visit to Aleppo was that despite the attempt to divide Aleppo along lines
of civil society, one family, the Jabiris, both male and female, had arrogated to themselves
much of the right to speak for Aleppo. The family's role in representing both the city and
several kazas (subdistricts) at the Syrian Congress in Damascus and in the presence of the
Americans signalled its ongoing dominance of local structures of authority. Allying
themselves closely with Faysal, the Jabiri clan had successfully adapted the nationalist
discourse deployed at the congress and in Halab to the 'politics of notables', and then
repackaged it for the Americans.71 In the end, it was as though the subaltern and middle
classes of Aleppo could not be trusted to give the right answers.
In a remarkable departure, Halab published a minor dissension from the position of the Jabiri
clan by the Greek Catholic and Maronite spokesmen and spokeswomen, who 'demanded
complete independence of Syria in her natural borders but also advocated for France's role as
an assisting state'.72 The same article revealed that some groups refused to voice their opinions:
the Protestant delegation (representing primarily Syriac or Armenian converts who had taken
refuge in Aleppo) and the Armenian delegation had demurred 'because we are guests in this
country'.73 The memory of recent episodes of violence, like that of January I919, had no
doubt cowed this population into silence. Most worrying to the animators of Halab was that
religious beliefs, cultural practices, and customs identified the defenders of the faith and guardians
of culture as well as the providers of vital goods and
services with the local upper class.' The term
'natural' leadership in this passage is drawn from the
71See my 'Middle-class modernity and the seminal work of Albert Hourani in his 'Ottoman
persistenceof the politics of notables in interwar reform and the politics of notables' in William R.
Journal of Middle East Polk and Richard L. Chambers (eds), Beginningsof
Syria', The International
Modernization
in the MiddleEast (Chicago, I968),
Studies, xxxv (2003), 257-86. On the politics of
notables, see Khoury, Mandate,op. cit., 13: 'A 4I-68. On the rise of acyan and derebeyler in the
Ottoman period see Halil Inalclk's 'Centralization
relatively high degree of social and religious
uniformity and cohesion in urban society itself and decentralization in Ottoman administration' in
allowed the urban upper class to pose successfully as Thomas Naff and Roger Owen (eds), Studiesin
69al-Nahda (The Awakening)(Aleppo), 24 July
I919.
70Fu'ad al-CAyntabiwith Najwa CUthman, Halab
fi mi'at 'am (One Hundred Years of Aleppo), 3 vols
(Aleppo, 1993), n1,203-4.
a "natural"leadership.In a sense,its dominationof
urban society was "legitimized" because a high
proportion of the population in each town - a
population that, despite the dramatic changes of the
EighteenthCentury Islamic History (Carbondale,
1977), 27-52.
72Halab (Aleppo), 2I July I919.
73ibid.
era, was still very much attachedto its traditional
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20
Social History
VOL. 30 : NO. I
severalleading Muslim representativescalledfor the re-establishmentof the caliphateand the
restorationof the Ottoman empire. Underplayedin the press, this significantgap between
elements of the Muslim notability and the local powerful and business-orientedGreek
Catholic community resembled similar class cleavages in antebellum Aleppo. It also
representeda failure on the part of Halab, despite its procrusteanefforts, to convey and
confirm successfullyto all of its consumersits version of the imaginedcommunity.
In the weeks following the King-Crane Commission's departurefrom the Middle East,
Halab'stone changed precipitously. The conciliatory and co-operative sentiments of the
previous months, when the papermaintainedthat the world had recognizedan Arab nation
and had endowed it with the rightsof all nations,gave way to desperationand an unremitting
insistencenot just on the legitimacyof the Arabgovernmentand the Faysaliregime, but also
on the existenceof Syriaitself.74However, in a tellinglacunaHalab,whose articlesreportedin
detail events in Damascus, Beirut and even Cairo, ignored the undeclaredwar between
reconstitutedOttoman forces and the Frenchand Armenianarmieswhich had begun in late
I919 and raged throughoutthe northernand western partsof the province of Aleppo, well
within what the Arab nationalistshad called 'Syria'snaturalboundaries'.75
The paper's fierce exposition of nationalist idealism was motivated by the growing
consensus in Damascus that the Paris Peace Conference would not resolve in favour of
Hashemitedominanceof Syria,and from a realignmenton the partof Faysalhimself,who had
grown distant from his British allies.76It was no surpriseto the paper'sreaderswhen the
government in Damascus declared independence. When viewed from the West, this
declarationclaimed Syria'sright to be fully independent and free from a mandatorystate.
Within Aleppo, however, a readerof the paper could easily have asked:independentfrom
whom? Certainlythe declarationcould be characterizedas a diplomatictactic to pre-empt
France'sintention to exercise its 'right' to a mandate and take full control of Syria and
Lebanon.However, the paucity of attentionpaid to the conflict in the north shows that the
declarationof independencealso meant a formalseparationfrom the Ottoman Devlet-iAliye,
the Sublime State, and from the Ottoman Sultanas well.
Word of the SyrianCongress'sdecision to declareindependenceand crown Faysalking of
Syriareachedthe readersof Halabin the 18 March 1920 edition of the paper.'This is the day in
which Syria is restored to the Arab community,' began the lead article in the paper, 'a
communitywhich possessesdignity ... this is the day in which Syriansbegin to move towards
74Before World War I, the term 'Syria', a Latin
word of classical origin, applied in late Ottoman
parlance only to the province of Damascus, sometimes called Suriye Vilayeti. More commonly, it
was known as Sham Vilayeti. In medieval Arabic
local dialect as Shawwam, were held in very low
regard. See Yusuf Qushaqji, al-Amthal al-sha'biyya
al-halabiyya (Popular Aleppine Sayings), 2 vols
(Aleppo, I984).
7On this Ottoman resistance, remembered in
geographiesthere exists a region called Biled alSham, the Land of Shem. For Aleppines, while
they may have been in the Bilad al-Sham, as
canonicalaccountsof Turkishhistoryas the 'War
for Turkish Independence',see Zurcher, op. cit.,
144; Feroz Ahmad, The Makingof ModemTurkey
defined by these geographers, there is no evidence
(London, I993), 48.
of Faysalupon
76On the politicaltransformation
his return from Paris see Khoury, Urban,op. cit., 899I.
thatthey identifiedasShami,'of Sham'.Shamionly
meant Damascene, al-Asadi, 5:19. If proverbs can
be consideredevidence of commonly held beliefs,
then for Aleppines, Damascenes, known in the
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February2005
21
security, freedom, the recovery of strength and mastery; their guiding principle is the truth.
Their motto is independence, unity and liberty.' 77 The subsequent paragraphs outlined the
origins of the decision, and recognized the central irony of the colonialist enterprise, namely,
that while the definition of the nation might proceed from the West, such a West had little
interest in a universal application of this definition. 'Rest assured', it continued, 'that our dear
allies, who certified our rights and told us that they would stick to their words ... will want
peace in the East. ... There is no doubt that this promises the speedy advancement of the East
and its further awakening.' 78 A few days later even this muted sarcasm gave way to a direct
assault on what the paper saw as western duplicity:
Some of the covetous sons of the West have received news of the eastern awakenings
with dissatisfaction and they are the very same ones who kept saying that such awakenings
were necessary and supported them.... This East is awakened and does not lack support
from those just men of the West who have raised their voices demanding that we 'render
unto Caesar that which is Caesar's'. 79
Under the banner headline of 'That blessed day', the editors drew more fully the boundaries of
this new nation. 'Today is the day', the article began, 'in which the nation is graced by the
80
holy light of independence.'
Continuing with the motif of the new day they wrote:
Today the beloved Syria enters its new age; the age of freedom and independence; the
age of happiness. ... Today, Syria has announced to the heads of the [nations] assembled
[at Versailles] that it [Syria] is a unified bloc from east to west, from the desert to the cities,
from the north to the south. ... Today the West and its sons see how the sons of Arab
Syria have awakened to fulfil their nationalist aspirations and to recover their national
honour. They will see this lofty spirit calling upon free nations to aid it. They will see how
Syria is unifiedand thereis no differencebetweenMuslims, ChristiansandJews, ratherall areArab
Syriansdemanding the independent life under the protection of the Arab national banner,
streaming above this land for which they have sacrificed their blood and souls, and that
they have taken with their own hands.81
In as much as Faysal had sought remedies other than a unilateral declaration of independence,
he had nevertheless become the 'captive' of his [Arab] nationalist supporters,82 who honoured
him thus: 'Syria has been brought together by its saviour, Prince Faysal the Great, now
crowned with the crown of a noble king. And Syria has become an independent kingdom
liberated from the occupied enemy territory.' 83
The adoption of the phrase 'occupied enemy territory' and the non-sectarian definition of
Syrian citizenship consciously distanced the new entity, Syria, from Ottoman suzerainty and
77Halab (Aleppo), i8 March
I920.
78ibid.
79Halab(Aleppo),25 March I920.
80Halab (Aleppo), I9 March
81ibid.Emphasis mine.
1920.
82Khoury,UrbanNotables,op. cit.,9I.
83Halab (Aleppo), 19 March I920. The phrase
was itself part of the nomenclatureof the British
post-war government of the region which they
referred to as Occupied Enemy Territory Administration-Turkey (OETA-T).
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22
Social History
VOL.
30
: NO.
I
Muslim political dominance. Like the earlier historical explanations of Aleppo's true past as an
Arab city in an Arab state, this declaration of independence also implied that basic political
mechanisms in the cosmopolitan city would be authorized by a European-style ethnicity rather
than an Ottoman-style absolutism and a supra-ethnic caliphate. This new mechanism, while
appealing to portions of Aleppine society, constituted an innovation in communal relations in
the urban milieu. It would have had an uncomfortable presence in customary Aleppo, as it
signalled a division between 'church and state' unprecedented in the city and is akin to the use
of the rallying cry 'religion is to God and the nation is to the people'.84
Advocating reformist (though in the idiom of modernity, emancipatory) ideas like sectarian
equality may have undermined the credibility of the paper with a customary audience; none
the less, it could still have reflected the view of its 'modern' readers. The wilful obliviousness
which gripped the paper in its drive to ignore what was becoming a real opposition to both the
imperialist drive of France to carve out a western presence in the region and Faysal'sattempt to
create a nationalist, Arab state doubtless undermined its credibility as a 'news' paper, even with
a sympathetic audience.8S The revivified Ottoman resistance taking shape in the province of
Aleppo's northern reaches presented itself as not only a military movement bent on the
expulsion of westerners and the suppression of their Christian allies, but also a drive to reestablish the Ottoman Empire. The French may have posed the most immediate threat to
Hashemite dominance of the fledgling Arab state of Syria, though in the discourse of the
mandate process something like Syria would not necessarily be extinguished. The movement
emanating from Anatolia, by contrast, threatened to rob the nascent Syrian state - as it was
built on the notion of sectarian equality and a linguistic collectivity's sovereignty - of its very
being. If such a movement were successful in attaining its stated goal, no legitimacy
whatsoever would adhere to this self-consciously ethnic nation-state. The conflict presented
Aleppines with a possible alternative to the Arab nationalist government of Damascus, one
which rejected the nationalist logic advocated in the pages of Halab. The choice to suppress
information about the conflict, even an unwillingness to contrast the Arab government with
the anti-imperialist Ottoman movement, is a tacit recognition of the extraordinary symbolic
and actual power that movement had in Aleppo and other places that were considered Arab
even at this early time.
84See Gelvin's discussionof the origins of this
phrase, Divided, op. cit., 18I-6.
H5Apage one New YorkTimesheadline of 15
April I920 exclaimed:'Americansbesiegedin two
Turkish towns; their flag defied; French move to
rescue'. While the Timeseditors focused on the
Americanelement of the story, it certainlyshows
thatinformationtravelledperpetuallyandwith ease
the 125 km from the front lines to Aleppo. Yet on
the day information about the siege of the
American compound in 'Ayntab reached the city,
Halab chose to lead the edition with an exposition
of post-war instability in Germany. The edition
also contains a rare glimpse ofMustafa Kemal (later
Ataturk), though the statement merely makes
mention of his dismissal as inspector general by
the Allied-controlled Ottoman government in
Istanbul and the demand that he break off relations
with a shadowy 'nationalist movement': Halab
(Aleppo), 8 April I920. No further references to
this movement or to Mustafa Kemal appeared in
the paper in the additional three months during
which it was still under the control of the Arab
government. Only a strict censorship regime can
account for the lack of coverage of the ongoing
conflict in the north. The few remaining copies of
other papers in the city at the time confirm this
conclusion. AI-Taqaddum, a paper that tended to
cover the local Christian community, and was
subsidized by the French, ceased in late I919 to
cover it. This silence suggests that to do otherwise
could have resulted in an official sanction of some
kind. A silence about these events exists even today
in much of Syrian Arab nationalist historiography.
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23
The I52nd edition of Halab would prove to be the last published while Faysal sat on the
throne of Syria. A forlorn passage concludes this final day's front-page article:
This is the new spirit of politics in the affairsof the eastern peoples [a realization that the
policies of the Allies were imperialist in nature] and there is no doubt that they will win
their rights and prove victorious against them; if they are committed to the idea of
freedom they will become stronger than their enemies, those with the old spirit, because
[their power] is based upon a pillar of lies that is as fragile as if it were made from the
thread of a spider's web.86
After a three-week hiatus that followed the relatively uneventful French occupation of the city
on 23 July 1920,87 the paper resumed publication with the announcement of martial law in the
city and with new editors (4 August).88 Its new editors retooled this porte-paroleof a Damascuscentred Arab nationalist ideology as a more traditional official gazette for the newly created
and smaller state of Aleppo. Energetic front-page editorials gave way to dry renderings of
administrative codes and official French proclamations.
However, in its brief lifetime, Halab had conditioned the reading-class of Aleppo to an
explanation of the Arab Revolt; more importantly, it situated cosmopolitan Aleppo - the city
and its citizens - within the boundaries of an imagined Arab nation. To facilitate this process, the
paper adopted a didactic stance vis-a-visits readers. At the core of this curriculum stood the need
to teach Aleppines the post-war idiom of power: liberal nationalism, an idiom that would serve
as the linguafranca of a new and thoroughly moder world order. As such, Halab's editors
imported the order's programmatic foundations. Establishing a definition of self was a
fundamental feature of the lesson plan; this definition arose primarily from the identification and
vilification of an 'other', in this case the 'Turk'. The definition also hinged on the use of a
language Arabic - as the definitive aspect of the citizen in this state. By centring sovereignty on
questions of ethnicity, 'race' or language, the paper decentred the role of religion; by adopting a
secular definition of the Arab, the paper equated modernity with non-sectarianism. It insisted
upon the equality of the customarily subordinate, though tolerated, Jews and Christians of
Aleppo with the Muslim ruling group; not only was this something required by the western
victors of the war, it was demanded by the logic of nationalism itself. In so doing the paper's
underlying nationalist ideology made the persistence of the city's cosmopolitanism improbable.
A dominant group rarely sees the broadening of rights as an edifying process. Rather than an
act of awarding equality, it is often interpreted as humiliation and a diminishing of status, and is
frequently seen as theft.89 The prescriptions which Halab advocated were not universally
86Halab (Aleppo), I2 JulyI920.
87Unlike the occupation of Damascus, which
was preceded by a violent encounter between
French,FrenchcolonialandArabtroops(the Battle
of Maysalun),French troops were merely transferred from the ceasefire line in Cilicia to the
precinctsof Aleppo. While the countrysidearound
Aleppo was far from quiet, 'They [the French
Troops] were received with outwardcalm, and in
placeswith expressionsof welcome of which by no
means all were insincere':Longrigg, op. cit., 104;
Gelvin, Divided, op. cit., 135.
88Halab (Aleppo), 4 August I920.
89An instructive analogy is the 'Andalus syndrome', a sense of loss experiencedby Muslimsin
post-independenceIndia.SudhirKakarconcludes,
'For many sensitive members of the [Muslim]
community - including some of its writers,
scholars,and artists- this loss of Muslim power
and glory is explicitly mourned': The Colorsof
Violence:CulturalIdentities,Religion, and Conflict
(Chicago, I996), 130.
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24
Social History
VOL. 30 : NO. I
accepted in Aleppo or in the remainder of the post-Ottoman eastern Mediterranean and may
have seemed hollow to many. Throughout the period, a dissent from nationalism as an
imperialist imposition and from its corollaries of ethnic solidarity and sectarian equality
emerged in the region, which insisted on speaking in an idiom that has echoes in
contemporary Islamist discourse. The choice made by many to continue speaking in this idiom
is the best proof that Halab and other discursive nationalist efforts failed to accomplish their
most basic goal. While the paper may not have succeeded in convincing all of the city's
readers, it nevertheless signalled the permanence in the city's public discourse of a western and
modernist nationalist alternative. The ambivalence towards modernity evidenced in the
counter Islamist vision could only partially reject nationalism as a consonant referent.
Nationalism's peripheral vernaculars had become an undeniable part of the city's fabric.
Le Moyne College, Syracuse,NY
Note on cover illustration
Alleppo clocktower, Bab al-Faraj Square, c. 1890.
As part of the project of modernizing the Ottoman Empire, Sultan Abdiilhamid II (19761909) had clock towers built in every major Ottoman city in the Balkans, Anatolia and the
Arab Eastern Mediterranean. The overt message of these clocks was to provide official sanction
to the adoption of secular, regularized time with standard measure of minutes and hours, in
contrast to the customary practice of dividing daylight and night-time hours by twelve equal
units, which had developed as a tool for accurately identifying the right time for prayer
throughout the day. Equally, the tower emphasized the regularization and centralization of
Ottoman state authority in the second half of the nineteenth century. The clock tower, though
no longer functioning, still stands in Aleppo, Syria, and there are similar towers in Istandbul,
Baghdad and Beirut.
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