Dawisha's central theoretical contribution inheres in a terminological intervention that purports to carry substantive implications for the study of Arab nationalism. He takes issue with the term Pan-Arabism—the idea of Arab political unity and the movement toward its realization. Against a broad scholarly consensus, Dawisha substitutes for it the term Arab nationalism. In a welcome, unusual gesture, one of the cues determining this definition of his subject is the Arabic language itself. As he observes, the term corresponding to Pan-Arabism (al-עurūba al-shāmiliyya) has appeared in Arabic discourses seldom. The reason for this finding, he suggests, is that the Pan element—prospective political amalgamation—inhered in the simultaneously cultural and political understanding of nationalism so powerful in the Arab Middle East of the 20th century. Dawisha defines Arabism, by contrast, as the “linguistic, religious, historical, and emotional bonds” linking Arabic speakers (p. 13). He defines Arab nationalism (al-qawmiyya al-עarabiyya) as Arabism plus the desire for territorial and political unity. Dawisha stipulates that the desire and sometimes the demand for political unity—referred to by others as Pan-Arabism—inheres in Arab nationalism.

However, if the value of Arab unity started out as “self-evident” (p. 11) or otherwise “natural,” it rapidly became not only forced but utterly anathema to state-centric nationalists. One of the fine contributions of the book is the portrayal of Syrian societal and governmental reticence to relinquish their sovereignty to Egypt, the dominant partner in the United Arab Republic (the only full-fledged experiment in Arab nationalism thus defined). The Arab nationalists whom Dawisha sets as the subject of his study more often than not seek a separation—not only from those people and states that are not Arab, but from each other, even as they speak in reverent tones about the ideal of Arab unity. If actual behaviors are to be the measure, Dawisha by his own lights should regard them as proponents of Arabism, rather than as Arab nationalists.

A further ambiguity persists in the Anglophone literature on Arab nationalism. As Dawisha shows, the ultimately decisive competitor of Arab nationalism was itself a variety of nationalism, namely al-waṭaniyya—those nationalisms in the Arab world predicated on the creation and maintenance of distinct sovereign states, such as those of the kingdoms of Jordan, Saudi Arabia, Tunisia, and, most consequentially for the fate of al-qawmiyya, Iraq. The governments of each of these states resisted Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser's pursuit of the ideal of political unification, regarding it as a menacing irredentism. The crosscutting if not contradictory logics of al-qawmiyya and al-waṭaniyya that Dawisha's historiography ably demonstrates suggest that the proponents of state-centric nationalisms may (and in fact did) espouse Arabism but that they were not Arab nationalists—they were Jordanian, Iraqi, Egyptian, etc., nationalists. The common parlance referring to these nationalisms as “Arab nationalism” obfuscates this distinction.

The standard narrative of Pan-Arabism, which Dawisha repeats as the narrative of Arab nationalism, as an ascent to triumph and a decline into despair, frames Arab nationalism as a single discrete phenomenon, an ideology that experienced a rise and a fall, like a person who grows to maturity before experiencing enfeeblement and eventual death. However, what the standard narrative and Dawisha's wistful assessment of Arab nationalism obscure is that this process may be described best as a transformation rather than as a demise.

The standard narrative risks understating the consequences and continuities of Arab nationalism and the nationalisms of the Arab majority societies of the modern Middle East. It downplays the extent to which Arab nationalism was a condition and a dynamic causal element in the emergence of the plurality of nationalisms in the Arab Middle East, in essence representing its intellectual and political foil. Arguably, neither Egypt nor Syria would be what they are today without that brief period of uneasy union in the United Arab Republic. The Baעth, and the fate of Michel Aflaq's system of thought, that the book treats in a thoughtful manner provides another source of insight into Baעthist Syria and Iraq.

When Dawisha and others state that Arab nationalism “failed,” it is important to recognize that they are adopting the same standards by which its partisans themselves did—or would have—to measure the outcomes of their campaign. However, that metric may or may not be the most appropriate one for an analyst or observer to apply. If the biographical model, as it were, of ideologies were to be held in abeyance, it is not obvious why those standards of success or failure, immortality or death, are the right ones by which to describe or measure ideologies or movements, nor that summary normative assessments (whatever judgment they may render) are informative from either a historical or a social scientific perspective.

The real value of the book rests not in Dawisha's theoretical intervention but in the soundness of his historical research, the conclusions of which he displays in an accessible and engaging format. This book demonstrates how expertise properly exercised can invite and teach the inquiring nonexpert, even as it can satisfy specialists with the solid command of sources that it displays. With a subject as vast and complicated as Arab nationalism, there is no substitute for the kind of scholarly authority that Dawisha projects. With his judicious selectivity of sources and his carefully calibrated mix of the ideational and the material, the political and the social, he produces a study that will be read with profit by students and scholars alike.