Shakib Arslan (1869-1946) was an unusual Druze leader, a nobleman known as the "Prince of Eloquence" [Amir Al Bayan], a prolific and influential writer, poet and historian, and an astute Lebanese politician. Though supportive of the Ottoman Empire — a rarity in Syria in the late 19th and the early 20th centuries — Arslan was largely influenced by the epochal ideas of the great Egyptian thinker, Mohammad Abduh. Long before he settled in Switzerland, where he created a powerful mouthpiece known as La Nation Arabe, Arslan travelled extensively, believed in the pan-Islamism espoused by Sultan Abdul Hamid in Constantinople, supported the survival of a dying Ottoman Empire as the last guarantee against the division of the Ummah and vociferously opposed Western colonialism. Notwithstanding inherent incompatibilities between an empire's political aspirations and devotion to a deity, Arslan articulated a vision that saw commonality between Ottomanism and Islam. He assumed that intrinsic religious reforms would naturally lead to the revival of the Ottoman Empire as the victim of secular nationalism gradually succumbed to the rise of the nation-state system throughout the Muslim world.
Political awakening
Born into a powerful Druze clan, Arslan was destined for a position of leadership and benefited from an exposure to Mount Lebanon's Christian communities. He studied at the Sultaniyyah school in Beirut, where he met the Egyptian reformer Shaikh Mohammad Abduh, who influenced him more than any other thinker.
Arslan was appointed governor of Shuwayfat and served his followers in the Shuf Mountains, starting in 1887. Two years later, the young governor went to Constantinople, where he embarked on a writing career. An engagé writer in the style of Albert Camus, Arslan led a group of Druze volunteers to Cyrenaica (modern Libya) in 1911, after Italy invaded the North African territory, then under Ottoman control. His first exposure to Ottoman intrigues was largely negative, which prompted him to return home, only to be elected a member of the Ottoman parliament for Hawran in 1913. A man of action, the young warrior-thinker went to the Balkans on humanitarian missions but also to gauge Ottoman capabilities. A firm believer that only the Porte could successfully face Europe, Arslan overlooked the Ottoman Empire's inherent weaknesses, which led to its demise.
In Lebanon, Arslan opposed Jamal Pasha's stifling policies, mediating as necessary to free imprisoned peasants and politicians alike. He was able to rescue Maronite Patriarch Elyas Hawyik, who refused to pledge obedience to Pasha in Damascus, where the Third Army Corps was headquartered, persuaded Turkish military officers not to seize arms destined for Christian and Druze warriors on the grounds that these weapons were used for self-defence, and secured the return from exile of leading families, including Shaikh Khalil Al Khoury, the father of Lebanon's first president after independence, Shaikh Bishara Al Khoury. Ironically, and consistent with Lebanese traditions, Shaikh Bishara intervened with French authorities to allow Arslan to return from exile in Switzerland to his native land in 1946, a few months before his death.
Arslan's visceral hatred of French and British imperialism caused him a lot more trouble than many fathomed, as he was exiled from Lebanon by French Mandate authorities. Whether his putative sympathies towards Germany were coloured by this revulsion remain to be determined, although it is widely known that he went to Berlin in the summer of 1917. In the German capital, Arslan met several high-ranking officials and earned attention by blaming Allied powers for the famine then spreading throughout Syria. Importantly, he could not find the courage to simultaneously denounce Ottoman officials, whose policies were largely responsible for the starvation.
Arslan moved to Switzerland at the beginning of 1920, from where he observed the collapse of the Ottoman Empire and the rise of secular Turkey. Among the very few Lebanese who rendered as many services to Ottoman officials, Arslan's choice led to his permanent exile, as he witnessed "his military idols smashed [and] his homeland occupied by a foreign power". Still, he never gave up on Arab unity, devoting most of the interwar years in Geneva as the unofficial representative of Syria and Palestine at the League of Nations. It was in Switzerland that his prolific pen was unleashed with gusto.
‘La Nation Arabe'
Geneva proved to be a godsend station for the erudite Druze, as Arslan worked with several Arab leaders who were engaged in independence movements. He took it upon himself to represent the Arabs before the League of Nations, and especially before the League's Permanent Mandates Commission, and made a genuine nuisance of himself. He "bombarded the Mandates Commission with petitions, attended meetings of assorted oppressed peoples, hosted known agitators in his home and published his views in any journal which would print them". Needless to say, his reputation suffered but, starting in 1930, the messenger inaugurated the publication of La Nation Arabe, which sealed his notoriety.
The periodical became an influential mouthpiece, even as critics said Arslan "never made the full passage to Arabism", concentrating instead on "an all-embracing Islamic nationalism, which included but transcended the Arab cause". In 1937, Arslan submitted 28 volumes of his writings on behalf of Arab nationalism to the Syrian ministry of foreign affairs, though Damascus never latched on. Ironically, his participation in the Syrian-Palestinian conference in Geneva (1921), where he was elected general secretary, with Michel Lutf Allah as president and Rashid Reda as vice-president, eventually led to the "Arab Pact" (1923) that established the blueprint for the League of Arab States (1945).
Between 1930 and 1939, Arslan wrote voluminously, including research essays on history, language, literature and translation. He also travelled extensively, with visits to the United States in 1927 to attend the Syrian conference in Detroit and to Moscow the same year to attend the celebration of the tenth anniversary of the October Revolution. In 1931, he was in Jerusalem for the World Islamic Conference, called by Mohammad Ameen Al Hussaini to strengthen Muslim claims on the city. One of his most useful trips was to Tetouan in Algeria during 1934, where he met Messali Al Haj, then a leading nationalist anxious to publish his ideas in the North African Star. He also forged close links with the leader of Tunisia's Neo-Destour Party, Habib Bourguibah who, in 1946, declared: "Arslan lived long enough to see the French defeated and depart from his country and his return as a free man to his homeland. He wished me to return to Tunisia as he returned to Syria and Lebanon."
Bourguibah was a fan and a patron, as were the Egyptian Khedive Abbas Hilmi II (between 1922 and 1931) and Abdul Aziz Ibn Saud, the founder of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, who did not always appreciate fawning for its own sake.
Arab nationalism vs Islamic Ummah
Arslan did not attempt to reformulate Islam because he lacked interest in theology. According to Martin Kramer, it was "not clear whether Arslan remained in any sense a Druze, having declared quite early that he regarded himself a Muslim like all Muslims".
What confused many were his claims that modernity and beliefs could be reconciled and, following Ibn Khaldun, probably viewed religion as a tool for group solidarity to better mobilise the masses against foreign encroachment. There was an element of maslahah (interest) in his theology, which was compatible with another Druze value, namely takiyyah (dissimulation to ensure survival).
William L. Cleveland, who wrote a fascinating book titled Islam Against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (1985), concluded that Arslan's last few years were tragic. Arslan was "impoverished, ill and ignored", he wrote, as Swiss police reports "revealed an ageing man living apart from his wife and son in a residence hotel, passing the days in tearooms with his newspapers, seeing few visitors other than his son, and spending an inordinate amount of time frequenting his bank". Kramer, another student, quotes a letter from Arslan to Al Hussaini, the Palestinian Grand Mufti of Jerusalem who devoted his life to the promotion of Palestinian nationalism, in which the Druze apparently relished that his enemies all died in his lifetime. "I take no malicious joy in death, for I will die as they did," he wrote. "But God made allowance for me, that I might witness the deaths of those who incited aggression and made slander against me." Here was a Druze chieftain dissimulating his innermost sentiments even if he left behind a huge body of works.
Prolific writer
Arslan spent 13 hours every day reading and writing, as he penned hundreds of thousands of words. By his own account, the chief reason to write was to remind Arabs of their past, their rich history full of achievements and their immensely critical contributions to civilisation. Although very knowledgeable about the European world — with a command of French, Arabic and Turkish languages and reading abilities in German and English — Arslan believed that when modernising a society, it was essential to preserve one's identity.
"If we really wish to become Europeanized, in this case we should imitate these people in the way they examine and test things and not to accept a system or a law unless we are sure of its advantages," he wrote in an article on the subject. "If we want to be Europeanized, then we should follow their example and explore all the aspects of civilization and pursue the paths of scientific inquiries to their most recent achievement while maintaining their customs, inclinations, tastes and remaining what they are, namely Europeans. If we really want to become Europeanized, then we should follow their example and remain Arabs," he concluded.
Legacy
In the words of an erudite critic such as Kramer, Arslan was nothing more than "a master of self-promotion".
Yet, and even if he was a self-publicist, Arslan did not just keep his name in print but authored 20 books and an estimated 2,000 articles. His polemical periodical, La Nation Arabe, was widely read throughout Europe at a time when few sympathised with Arab rights.
As such, Arslan managed to raise key questions and wrote a now-famous work, Our Decline: Its Causes and Remedies, which described the reasons why Muslim governments remained weak within the international system. His advocacy of Islam as a political and moral compass sought to reform ossified mechanisms to rekindle solidarity from Morocco to Oman. Cultural and tribal diversities notwithstanding, Arslan hoped that Muslims would reunite if for no other reason than to live by the teachings of their faith. Only such a commitment, he believed, ensured liberation from colonialism.
Dr Joseph A. Kéchichian is an author, most recently of Faysal: Saudi Arabia's King for All Seasons (2008).
Published on the third Friday of each month, this article is part of a series on Arab leaders who greatly influenced political affairs in the Middle East.
Erudite reformist
Born into a leading Druze clan on December 25, 1869, in Shuwayfat, Lebanon, Shakib Arslan could read and write at the tender age of 5, long before he attended public school. In 1877, he and his brother Naseeb were enrolled at the Maronite Hikmah Secondary College in Beirut, which then received the offspring of leading families regardless of religious denomination.
For seven years at Hikmah, Arslan mastered the Arabic language, delved into classical literature with Shaikh Abdullah Al Bustani, who authored the still widely used Al Bustan Dictionary. In 1866, Arslan moved to the Sultaniyyah School in Beirut, which was created by wealthy Muslim business and religious leaders anxious to provide an education that emphasised Islam. It was there that Arslan met Egyptian reformer Shaikh Mohammad Abduh, with whom he formed a long-lasting relationship.
After his father passed away, Arslan was appointed governor of Shuwayfat in 1887 and served for two years. In 1889, the young governor went to Constantinople, where he started writing for several newspapers. Disappointed by Ottoman intrigues, he returned to his beloved Shuf Mountains, where he retook official duties. In 1913, he was elected member of the Ottoman parliament for Hawran and remained at his post until the end of the First World War.
At the start of the Great War, Arslan went to the Balkans, ostensibly to supervise Red Crescent delegations' work on the battlefields but in reality to escape stifling conditions in Tripoli, Libya, where he fought Italian occupation. An admirer of Ahmad Jamal Pasha, whose iron-fisted rule over the Levant led to the Arab Revolt, Arslan opposed many of Pasha's policies. Pasha's brutal expulsion of Syrians to Turkey to unknown fates upset him, though he never disassociated himself from such failed initiatives.
Arslan married Salimah Al Khass, a Circassian woman, who gave him a son, Ghalib, and two daughters, Nazimah and Mayy. Mayy married into another Druze family, where she consented to become the wife of Kamal Junblatt. Walid Junblatt, the present scion of the family, was the product of that union. Arslan died in 1946, a few months after his return to his native Lebanon.