Historical scholarship on Arab nationalism has experienced a conceptual revolution over the last two decades. It is now widely accepted among historians that local identities and loyalties have been crucial components of nationalist thought and action from the very beginning; it is equally well established that the line between nationalism and various elements of Islam is much harder to draw than one might imagine. In addition, there is solid evidence that nationalism across the Arab world took shape, arguably as an unintended consequence, out of sustained interaction among conflicting elite and popular conceptions of political community. Moreover, it turns out to be important to differentiate Arab nationalism as a cluster of ideological principles from Pan-Arabism as a set of diplomatic practices that constituted a basic component of regional statecraft, initially at the time the Ottoman Empire found itself disintegrating and later on as the newly independent states of the Middle East and North Africa experimented with ways to get along simultaneously with one another and with outside powers.

What emerges from all this is a much more subtle and complicated notion of Arab nationalism than the one that I learned as an undergraduate. It is no longer sufficient to familiarize oneself with the ideas of the grand figures of the late Ottoman era and the concurrent nahḍa in order to comprehend the origins, developmental trajectory, and supposed eclipse of Arabism. The writings of such luminaries as ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, Rashid Rida, Satiʿ al-Husri, and Zaki Arsuzi tell us only a small part of a much larger and more exciting story. Each country, and perhaps even every district, had its own distinctive mix of pamphleteers, journalists, and preachers, whose conceptions of order and justice mattered just as much as those of well-to-do politicians and intellectuals. As late as 1925, the redoubtable ʿAbd al-Rahman al-Shahbandar exerted only marginal influence over the provincial activists who organized and carried out the Great Syrian Revolution. What generates nationalism in the Arab states, both in the past and presumably in the present and future, is the clash between the conceptions and activities of the leaders James Gelvin calls the mutanawwirūn and those of the heterogeneous collection of populists, radicals, Islamists, and reactionaries who simultaneously guide and reflect public sentiment.

Yet the arguments that have been advanced by historians of Arab nationalism are rarely if ever evident in the extensive literature on politics and international relations. All too often, the chapter on Arab nationalism simply surveys the succession of grand thinkers. Rare indeed is the textbook that has the audacity to ignore George Antonius's badly outdated analysis and introduce students to more adequate treatments of the topic. Specialist writing hardly fares better: would Adeed Dawisha's Arab Nationalism in the Twentieth Century have received such uniformly laudatory notices had it been assigned to historians instead of political scientists to review?Footnote ¹ I admire Dawisha's writings very much indeed and mean no disrespect. However, when a scholar who analyzes Egyptian foreign policy and the prospects for liberal democracy in Iraq with enviable insight produces a book on nationalism that could have been written in the late 1960s, one has to wonder if deeper problems plague the field.

It goes without saying that it is much harder to explain Arab nationalism now than it was in the old days, and the historians still have not figured it all out. Gelvin's path-breaking work on Syria during the Faisal years lays out the overriding problem: the government and the mutanawwirūn wrestled continuously with popular committees whose platforms, slogans, and flags included all sorts of “political” and “religious” tropes and symbols. There is no easy way to summarize or categorize the ideology of the crowd.

Michael Provence's The Great Syrian Revolt shows that the complexity persisted into the late 1920s. How should we characterize the program that was associated with the influential militia commander Ramadan Shallash? The nationalist elite of the time was so flummoxed that it put Shallash on trial and expelled him from the movement. I trust that the next generation of social scientists and historians of Arab nationalism will do better and will be able to work out some way to incorporate into a coherent package what Provence calls Shallash's “confusing mix of Islam, tribal honor, revenge against French Christians, nationalism, and class warfare.” After all, as Provence points out, it appeared cogent enough at the time to be “enormously popular in Syrian villages and neighborhoods.”Footnote ²

As for Pan-Arabism, it might be just as well to start over from scratch. The term has been used almost indiscriminately to describe Egyptian diplomacy during the 1920s, Syrian foreign policy under the Baʿth, and the formation of the Gulf Cooperation Council. As an analytical concept, it is pretty much useless. Anyone who read Malcolm Kerr's magisterial dissection of The Arab Cold War in school has already realized this. What needs to be remembered as we begin to construct more compelling explanations for inter-Arab affairs is, first, that Pan-Arabism has always been predicated on the existence and perpetuation of autonomous Arab states and, second, that the connection between the diplomacy of individual Arab states and Pan-Arabism might well be analogous to the connection between popular, “local” nationalists and the mutanawwirūn. In other words, Pan-Arabism is almost certain to be less clear-cut than it looks. In addition, it is likely to arise as the unintended consequence of strategic initiatives undertaken by political leaders who are pursuing state-level interests.