Someone might object that the more the work tends toward the multiplication of possibilities, the further it departs from that unicum which is the self of the writer, his inner sincerity and the discovery of his own truth. But I would answer: who are we, who is each one of us, if not a combinatoria of experiences, information, books we have read, things imagined? Each life is an encyclopedia, a library, an inventory of objects, a series of styles, and everything can be constantly shuffled, and reordered in every way conceivable.
Italo CalvinoFootnote 1
This essay focuses upon a single short piece, composed by an Arabic-speaking citizen of the Ottoman Empire in the last years of its existence—the Beirut-born Sunni ‘alim, or religious scholar, and editorialist Shaykh Ahmad Tabbarah. A speech on “migration from, and to, Syria” delivered to the “First Arabic Congress”, a gathering of reformist advocates of administrative decentralization from across the “Syrian” provinces of the Ottoman Empire, held in Paris in June 1913, it runs to just ten pages.Footnote 2 Despite its concision, this compound creation, which drew its strength from the fragments of two seemingly incommensurable traditions, may compel us to reconsider the terms in which the production and circulation of ideas in the world beyond Europe has been framed. This has been underpinned, until relatively recently, by a dichotomous stress upon the “diffusionist” and the “endogamous”—analytical categories each as insufficient and fraught with methodological difficulties as the other.Footnote 3 Looking afresh at such processes provides us with the opportunity to consider the meaning, and scope, of “global intellectual history”—that elusive disciplinary creature, amorphous and yet seemingly pregnant with possibility, which scholars have recently sought to pin down, debate and define.Footnote 4
Many have, to be sure, acknowledged the considerable interweaving of intellectual strands in which non-European thinkers of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries indulged. However, few are those who have resisted the temptation to make categorical choices: weighing up the borrowings of their subjects in the balance, they all too easily classify them as either introspective spirits who spurned European modes of reflection, refusing to lose their footing on the familiar ground of autochthonous tradition, or eager neophytes who threw themselves headlong into these novel currents, shedding the trappings of local thought as they went along. But neither Tabbarah nor, indeed, his contemporaries fit easily into the stark binary schemes by which latter-day scholars have parsed the local from the foreign, the “Eastern” from the “Western”, and the traditional from the modern.
It is not that such categories were absent from the thought of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Ottoman literati; on the contrary, they insistently referred to them, finding meaning in these visions of the world. But they also sought to elude the absolute choices they seemingly pressed upon them. The work of Tabbarah, for one, suggests neither complete introspection, a wilful turn away from the winds blowing in from the West, nor wholesale influence—the forceful, overwhelming impact of one tradition upon another. Rather, it seems the product of a process of confluence, of the overlap and intertwining of conceptions of state and society stitched together from a scattered set of sources. In Tabbarah's writings and varied commitments, which straddled the apparently cloistered world of religious learning and the seemingly secular realm of political engagement, there lie clues to an ambidextrousness of thought which confounds the binary conceits of Middle Eastern historiography, long founded upon stark contrasts between the European and the non-European, the novel and the atavistic, and the secular and the religious. This was, for an earlier generation of intellectual historians, a tale of “transition”, not “translation”—and one that remained unfinished.Footnote 5
DIFFUSION AND ITS DISCONTENTS
Scholars long saw the intellectual history of the Middle East as a protracted response to the “impact of the modern civilization” of the West.Footnote 6 The latter, in such a reading, ostensibly took two forms: “wholesale adaptation of Western ideas”,Footnote 7 whose “influence” spread like an “infection” from their birthplaces in Europe,Footnote 8 leaving a “permanent mark” upon the “mind[s]” of Eastern Mediterranean thinkers;Footnote 9 and an introspective turn back towards native traditions—and, in particular, the resources of Islamic learning, which reformers set about renewing. Such ideological divisions, scholars maintained, were more often than not determined by religious differences. On one side stood the “Christian secularists” of the nahda, or literary awakening, men like Shibli Shumayyil and Farah Antun, who flirted with socialism and eagerly embraced the evolutionary pieties of the time; on the other were arrayed Islamic modernists like Muhammad ‘Abduh and Rashid Rida, religious reformers who sought to renew their faith, the better to confront the intrusions of the modern world, by an appeal to the precedent of the salaf al-salih, the “worthy forefathers” of early Islam. While Christians, free of the “incessant pressure to choose” between “modes of thought” which burdened the “Arab Muslim”,Footnote 10 could give themselves over completely to Europe's bourgeois mores and ways of thinking, the “impact” of Western thought “upon the Muslim peoples” was destined to remain “superficial”.Footnote 11
But all, regardless of confession, were stranded between worlds—figures caught between two “closed systems” of thought pitted in a Manichean confrontation. The “new . . . awareness” of the West—whose looming shadow neither its emulators nor its enemies could quite escape—was a “rending experience”, which precipitated both “widening self-consciousness and alienation”.Footnote 12 Christian and Muslim alike faced “constant unrest and self-torture”, for the “foreign . . . ideal[s]” they were called upon to adopt were not just obstacles, which “block[ed] access to trusted spheres of experience”; the very awareness of their alien roots was a “sore that trouble[d] the spirit”.Footnote 13 These were disconcerting visions of Middle Eastern intellectuals as so many Vladimirs and Estragons waiting for modernity, and yet with no way back towards tradition.
These, it is clear, were not simply the delusions of mid-twentieth-century scholars caught up in the grand binary schemes of Anglo-American modernization theory.Footnote 14 The literati and public men of late nineteenth-century and early twentieth-century Cairo, Damascus and Beirut, too, were filled with anxieties about the inhitat, the “decline”, and jumud, or “lethargy”, of their societies, and the dangers of excessive tafarnuj, or Europeanization. And they often cast their choice as one between ihya, the “revivification” of tradition, and iqtibas—literally “lighting one's fire from another”—the emulation of foreign ways of thought. Be that as it may, we should not forget that nahda writers also insistently deployed terms like ta'rib or tamsir to denote the variety of ways in which they appropriated the European texts they worked with, remaking them as they made them Arabic or Egyptian—the meaning of these two words. Far more than just rendering into the classical or vernacular language, these processes often entailed the relocation, and radical reconfiguration, of the works they drew upon. Indeed, iqtibas itself came to connote, for some, not downright imitation or faithful translation, but the refashioning of the text by “transferring the topic from one milieu to another, [and] changing the foreign characters into . . . Orientals”, as the Egyptian playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim later recalled.Footnote 15
Intellectual historians, too, must find ways of addressing the intellectual ambidextrousness that authors like Tabbarah demonstrated—their easy capacity for “stereophonic, bilingual or bifocal” ways of thinking and writing, of appraising and representing the world.Footnote 16 It is only with some considerable difficulty that we can look upon their works, the material from which they were assembled, their composition and the arguments they sought to make, as merely the products of the radiation of a dominant mode of thought from a spot somewhere in an amorphous, reified, West—pieces which are doubly second-order, as undistinguished as they are derivative. Such a diffusionist approach treats ideas as concrete entities, market wares that a consumer might pick up to carry off to another place, while leaving others behind on the stall, rather than ineffable constructs, constantly transforming and shape-shifting as they move through, and across, texts.
And we should be all the more aware of the pitfalls of reification as we attempt to chart the terrain of what some have called “global intellectual history”. It is all too easy to treat the latter as simply another subset of a “global history” hitherto largely concerned with circulatory processes—with travel, transmission and trade. This, in turn, may lead us to favour an approach focused upon “recovering the topography” of particular intellectual networks, and retracing the careers of the “intermediaries” who facilitated the transmission of given “concepts”.Footnote 17 But in privileging material contexts in such a fashion, and foregrounding tales of the movement through the world of well-travelled individuals and objects, we run the risk of losing sight of texts, and the complex processes by which they were formed, reformed and deformed—treating intellectual production as no more than a series of quasi-commercial transactions, exchanges carried out by sundry brokers and “go-betweens”.Footnote 18 There is undoubtedly a great deal to be gained from a cultural history of scholarship capable of illuminating the constant connections between the study and the world outside, ties sometimes obscured by more agoraphobic textual approaches. Indeed, as I will argue below, a consideration of Tabbarah's various professional commitments may help us to understand better the tenor of the words he pronounced in Paris. But such contextualization should not come at the expense of texts themselves.
What is more, this approach can understate the work authors like Tabbarah performed, treating them as little more than receiver–transmitters broadcasting messages back and forth across the cultural divide. As Ilham Khuri-Makdisi has recently argued, non-Western actors “assemble[d] their own visions of social and world order, borrowing, adapting, perhaps plundering ideas . . . and melding them with local practices and ideas”. The elaboration of a distinctive version of “global radicalism” in the eastern Mediterranean was a process not so much of importation as of adaptation, of constant synthesis and renegotiation.Footnote 19 Marwa Elshakry, meanwhile, has noted that “in the Arab East, as elsewhere, Darwin's ideas rarely met with either wholesale acceptance or wholesale rejection; they were often used selectively and piece-meal and reworked”.Footnote 20
These are appealing visions of the intellectual as bricoleur. But, for all their acuity, they remain focused upon the ways in which European thought was fitted to local exigencies and “epistemological, social, and above all, political context[s]”.Footnote 21 While doing away with the more egregious features of a diffusionist intellectual history, their interest is still in the reception and customization of European concepts. There can be no faulting such an approach; all thinkers are to one extent or another receivers, taking on ideas from others, as well as broadcasters sending them on. However, I seek to examine the ways in which Tabbarah engaged in a constant, if often covert, two-way traffic. It is not just that, rather than working with European writings, reformulating their tenets and recapitulating their findings in a series of deferential gestures, he also wrote against them, submitting them to a process of silent revision and reconfiguration. Nor is it simply that his incessant shifts between different genres of address and argument brought into sharp relief the indeterminacy and flexibility of disciplinary boundaries in the early twentieth-century world. Even as he declared his faith in the fact-making power of quantitative expertise and the claims to mastery of European historiography,Footnote 22 Tabbarah was careful to keep his distance from the more “dubious” claims to omniscience of these disciplines of society.Footnote 23
More than this, Tabbarah worked by—surreptitiously—folding non-European notions into European discourses and categories. Moving almost imperceptibly through the cell walls separating disciplines, and worlds, from each other, he shifted—and sometimes elided the differences—between Western social thought and Islamic learning. Significantly, his openness to various conventions, and modes, of European thought was not an irrevocable move away from autochthonous intellectual traditions. Tabbarah treated Islamic jurisprudence and history—disciplines which can hardly be dismissed, with their universalist claims, as mere “local” counterpoints to the global reach of Euro-American thought—not as relics of an inert tradition, but as intellectual wares to be customized to the exigencies of argument. As Alasdair Macintyre and Talal Asad have suggested, a “tradition is an argument extended through time”,Footnote 24 in which the present, far more than a “fleeting moment in a . . . teleology connecting past to future”, is “always at the centre”, its protagonists “reiterating, reinterpreting, and recovering” the resources of past discourse.Footnote 25 And yet I am not convinced, as Macintyre seems to be, that traditions are by definition incommensurable—that any engagement across the lines must be inherently antagonistic, and that recognition of another tradition's worth must necessarily lead to “epistemological crisis” and dissolution.Footnote 26 Tabbarah, I will argue here, treated seemingly discordant bodies of thought as overlapping Venn diagrams whose cross-hatched zones of interaction he inhabited. As much as a magpie picking the shiniest artefacts of Western thought to line his nest, he was a smuggler living in intellectual borderlands, moving contraband cargo across texts, and a ventriloquist imbuing borrowed passages with his own interests and preoccupations. It is to these that I now turn.
TEXT AND CONTEXT
Historians of the Middle East have habitually treated the writings of late Ottoman literati like Tabbarah as what we might call indices of identity. Scanning them for traces of nationalist or proto-nationalist sentiment, they have striven to file them under neat ideological rubrics as exemplars of this or that vision of the confines and characteristics of the political community. Thus Eliezer Tauber has treated Tabbarah as an adherent of “Syrianism”—alongside “Arabism”, “Lebanonism”, and “the early signs of Iraqism”, one of the “four ideological categories” predominant in the late Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces.Footnote 27 Likewise, Fruma Zachs has glossed Tabbarah's Paris speech for evidence that Muslim intellectuals had, by 1914, abandoned an older Islamic universalism, to accept the “territorial concept of Syria” first developed by Christian writers like Butrus al-Bustani and Jirji Yanni. There is no doubt that these scholars are correct in underlining Tabbarah's focus upon the “Syrian region” and its denizens.Footnote 28 However, such readings can only take us so far.
Interpretations that merely seek to place Tabbarah and his ilk on a spectrum of political identities flatten out their often multi-layered sense of political selfhood. Tabbarah, after all, spoke in Paris not just in the terms of parochial patriotism, but also in those of imperial reformism, calling for a “rejuvenated Ottomanism in which all subjects of the empire could find meaning in their shared citizenship”.Footnote 29 Indeed, scholars have come in recent years to look in a new light upon the tensions and dissensions that marked relations between the Committee of Union and Progress (CUP), which seized power in the “Young Turk” revolution of July 1908, and the notables and literati of the Ottoman Empire's Arab provinces. The growing rift between the CUP and its opponents in Beirut, Damascus or Jerusalem, it has increasingly been suggested, was not born of the clash of two antagonistic and mutually incompatible varieties of nationalism—the one stressing the essentially Turkish nature of the imperial polity, the other the cultural distinctiveness and political separateness of its Arab inhabitants.Footnote 30 Rather, it was the product of divergent conceptions of imperial rule, and of the measures required to ensure the survival of an increasingly embattled state, which ran across the lines of language.Footnote 31 On the one hand, the CUP and its allies in both the imperial capital and the provinces favoured centralization, regarding any measure of local autonomy as a dangerous dilution of the state's capacities. On the other, advocates of devolution like the members of the empire-wide Hürriyet ve Itilaf party, or Entente Libérale, formed in 1911, or the predominantly Arab Hizb al-Lamarkaziyya al-Idariyya al-‘Uthmani or Ottoman Administrative Decentralization Party, established by a number of Syrian émigrés in Cairo in late 1912, pinned their hopes for the empire's survival on a decentralized regime allowing the empire's scattered inhabitants to share in the task of government.
It was against the backdrop of these increasingly bitter exchanges on imperial policy, played out in newspapers, pamphlets and public meetings across the empire and the Ottoman diaspora in Egypt, Europe and the Americas, that the “First Arab Congress” was held. Organized by a group of Ottoman Arabs studying in Paris spearheaded by the Beirut-born ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraysi, already a prominent editorialist in his own right, in coordination with the Decentralization Party, it represented the culmination of a series of calls made throughout early 1913 for greater devolution of power to the Syrian provinces of the empire. Indeed, its agenda reflected the central preoccupations of the time: “national life and resistance to occupation”, a call for resilience born of the anger and fear occasioned by the Italian invasion of Libya in 1911 and the continuing morass in the Balkans; “the rights of Arabs in the Ottoman state”, which figures like ‘Uraysi argued had been violated by the CUP's aggressive efforts at centralization; “the necessity of reform on the basis of decentralization”; and “migration to and from Syria”.Footnote 32 It was this latter topic that Tabbarah was tasked with addressing.
Now best remembered as one of the “martyrs” hung on charges of treason by the Ottoman authorities in 1916, Tabbarah has taken his place in the pantheon of Lebanese and Arab nationalism—a fallen hero in the struggle for freedom from the yoke of “Turkish” oppression.Footnote 33 However, he was a prominent member of both the Beirut branch of the Entente Libérale and the Beirut Reform Committee, formed in January 1913 to demand greater devolution of administrative authority.Footnote 34 And, for all his faith in the merits of local autonomy and proud attachment to Syria, he remained a convinced Ottomanist; committed to an inclusive form of imperial citizenship, he tirelessly emphasized “the necessity of the Ottoman bond”, even as he called again and again for fundamental reform of the grand construct of the imperial state.Footnote 35 Such attachments were apparent enough from the names of the newspapers he founded: al-Ittihad al-‘Uthmani, al-I'tilaf al-‘Uthmani, and al-Islah—“The Ottoman Union”, “The Ottoman Entente”, and “Reform”.Footnote 36
Moreover, they were ceaselessly reiterated in the editorials of Tabbarah and acolytes like Salim ‘Ali Salam, Riyad al-Sulh, and Rafiq al-‘Azm. As Tabbarah put it, the “past rule” of the despotic Abdül Hamid “was the cause of the disasters that led to the loss of a third of the empire”; without a “fundamental change in the ways of rule . . . we cannot hope to preserve what remains” of the well-protected domains. But the transition from “despotic” to the CUP's “constitutional” rule had done little to improve matters. The only solution, then, was the implementation of wide-ranging reforms, from the appointment of foreign advisors to local administrations to the extension of the provincial councils’ executive and financial prerogatives, the appointment of local men to administrative positions, and the use of Arabic in schools. For, in what would become a familiar refrain, “decentralized rule” was the only hope of “salvation and safety” for the Ottoman realm. Tellingly, however, Tabbarah sought to obviate criticism of his demands as particularistic sniping. He cited Abdül Hamid's nephew, Prince Sabahaddin, the founder of the League of Private Initiative and Decentralization and one of the leading lights of the “liberal” opposition to his uncle, and insisted that “the Macedonian provinces had lost their voice in calling . . . for what all the remainder of our provinces call for—reform, reform”.Footnote 37 The desire for reform—and decentralization—Tabbarah suggested in no uncertain terms, far from being confined to Syria, was one common to all the Ottoman peoples.
This was a claim he would reiterate at the Paris conference. Vehemently rejecting the CUP's claims that the congress delegates wished only for “separation” from the Ottoman state, he insisted that “we [the Arabs] . . . were given life by our mothers as Ottomans, and we wish to remain Ottoman”. The truest “proof” of this, he argued, was “our demands for reform”, which might breathe new “life” into both the state and its subjects. Should they really have pined for secession, the Arabs would have simply “let matters go from bad to worse”.Footnote 38 Some might argue that Tabbarah protested rather too much his loyalty. But to regard him merely as a proponent of “Syrianism” is to ignore the greater part of the political thoughts of a man who regarded himself, first and foremost, as a reformist dedicated to the cause of preserving the integrity of the Ottoman realm while improving the representation of its provincial constituents.
Rather than parsing Tabbarah's words for traces of ideological belonging—thus reducing intellectual history to a taxonomical pursuit—we may be better served by a more capacious definition of the political, perhaps more in accordance with the ways in which late Ottoman literati and reformists understood and justified their own varied undertakings. But, in doing so, we should not attempt to cleave text from context, and theory from praxis, privileging one or the other. For, as Quentin Skinner has pointed out, “intellectual history” is not “separate from the history of institutions and behaviour”. Not only is the “legitimation of political practices necessary, through recourse to principles”; the latter must also be applied, tried and tested against the harsh conditions of the world outside.Footnote 39 Tabbarah was no cloistered man of letters, untroubled by the complexities and compromises of public life. But nor was he merely a political entrepreneur, whose busy manoeuvres left little time for reflection on their underlying purpose.
For, like so many eastern Mediterranean men of letters in the years before the First World War, Tabbarah was as much a craftsman and a man of action as an intellectual—he combined with apparent ease the seemingly discordant tasks of the religious educator and political reformer; the intellectual labours of the writer, editor and compiler; and the entrepreneurial work of the publisher, printer and public campaigner. “Despite his work in the arenas of journalism and politics, he never tired of writing, leaving [behind him] a series” of pedagogical works, including manuals of akhlaq, or ethics, for boys and adab, or good behaviour, for girls,Footnote 40 and editing a concordance to the Qur'an,Footnote 41 and an illustrated version of Kalila wa Dimna, the Indian tale rendered into Arabic by Ibn al-Muqaffa’ in the eighth century.Footnote 42 These works were all printed on the presses of his own publishing house, al-Ahliyya, presumably for use in the Madrasa al-‘Uthmaniyya, or Ottoman College, of which he was a dean. The school's 150 or so pupils were taught, alongside compulsory lessons in Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and French, seven broad subjects. These included religious studies, “oratory arts, debating, logic, political economy and moral sciences”; history “from the ancients and the Middle Ages to the modern, the Prophet's life and Arab history”; mathematics; geography; natural sciences; and “drawing, calligraphy and (marching) music”.Footnote 43
Indeed, these various undertakings were all part of a single, vast, enterprise: the formation, whether in classrooms or newspaper columns, of a new subjectivity—more self-possessed, self-consciously modern, and sound in morals, mind, and body—and the thoroughgoing reform of a body politic corrupted by long years of maladministration and foreign depredation were interlinked projects. The point was forcefully made in the pages of al-Mufid, the newspaper established by Tabbarah's compatriot and reformist fellow traveller, ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraysi. “Where does resistance to the danger of ignorance begin”, an anonymous Iraqi contributor asked—“is it our duty to wake the body politic so that it may raise itself up, or should we task the government with reform of its imperfections?” Both, he concluded, were “compulsory tasks”—one could not simply choose one or the other. But what remained beyond doubt was the need to act promptly. Not only did “ignorance corrupt religious truths” and “morality”; more than this, “no community could live, let alone progress, in the twentieth century” while remaining in a state of intellectual ill-preparedness, which left it unable to “defend either its general rights or the particular rights of its sons, whether political, moral, or material”.Footnote 44 Reform of the self and of the state, then, depended on each other: the political community could not change as long as its parts remained unfit for life in the modern age, but nor could there be any hope of subjects thriving should the state fail to provide the appropriate conditions for prosperity—a point Tabbarah would make in his Paris speech.
A FEW WORDS IN PARIS
Tabbarah's pithy contribution to the “First Arab Congress” was not, pace Zachs, simply an attempt to demonstrate the unbroken existence of a Syrian entity. Rather, it sought to come to terms with more recent breaches of the confines of territory through migration, to diagnose the underlying political causes of this problematic rupture of the compact between land and people, and to suggest means for their redress. To be sure, Tabbarah lingered with patriotic pride on the days of “Roman” and “Arab” rule. While Roman Syria had been the “cradle of commerce”, whose “industry and agriculture exuded a glowing brilliance”, the “prosperity” of Syria had shown no signs of abating under Muslim rule—“for two centuries” the “Arab civilization” which had flowered there had been “amongst the wonders of progress”. But his was not a case for continuity, but for radical change and decay through time. It was not long before “the tribes [had] trampled underfoot this blessed land”, “destroy[ing] its institutions of learning, and burn[ing] its centres of industry”. “All” that had once thrived in Syria “was now absent”: its “great cities . . . had become small villages . . . the mountains, once green and populated, were now arid wastes”.Footnote 45 This tribal intrusion had marked the beginning of a long age of drift and degeneration, which had culminated in the main subject of his speech, “migration from Syria”.
Tabbarah showed little concern for the anxieties of contemporaries preoccupied by Zionist colonization and the continuing influx of Muslim refugees from the Caucasus and the empire's lost Balkan provinces.Footnote 46 Dealing with “migration to Syria” in a few short, perfunctory, sentences towards the end of his peroration, he dismissed the fears of those who felt that such “admixture would corrupt morals and change the character” of the receiving population, and insisted that “he saw no danger in migration, should it be regulated by a specific regime”.Footnote 47 However, he manifested no such indifference to the outpouring of migrants from the eastern Mediterranean. From a small trickle in the 1880s, this had grown by the time of Tabbarah's speech into a great wave of movement ebbing away from the eastern Mediterranean. By 1914, some 300,000 to 500,000 Ottoman subjects had left the ports of Beirut and Tripoli, scattering across the Americas, Africa, and Australasia.Footnote 48 Tabbarah grasped the demographic significance of this great dispersal, “which has increased year after year to the point that some now put the number of migrants at 550,000”, or more than a sixth of Syria's approximate population.Footnote 49
Furthermore, he seized upon this exodus as the ultimate consequence—and surest symptom—of the misrule blighting Ottoman Syria. In a motif to which he repeatedly returned throughout his speech, “migration is the result of constraints upon living conditions, and [these] are the product of arbitrariness and administrative wrongs”. “Experience had proved”, he insisted, that “no vital questions” could be dealt with by any “nation” if “a political life” had first not been “established”. All Syria's potential natural riches, her “bursting springs and gentle winds and excellent soil”, all her inhabitants’ “readiness for progress” were no use without good rule. He called, then, for the “central government to embark without delay upon reform”. The Unionist government at the helm of the empire, he warned, could no longer deprive its provincial subjects of a “veritable political life” if it wished to stem the demographic haemorrhage sapping the vital strength of the body politic. Only the prospect of “common participation in rule and . . . decentralization [for] each province according to its readiness and needs”, Tabbarah suggested, could foster appropriate living conditions, and restore order to a land convulsed by movement.Footnote 50 In doing so, he deftly brought migration together with the central preoccupation of his audience: the devolution of power to the provincial centres of Ottoman Syria.
TRANSLATIONS AND TRANSGRESSIONS
To buttress his case, Tabbarah seemingly relied on a series of appropriations. Not for nothing did he begin by asserting that “oratory” alone was not sufficient to address the “vital subject” of migration, insisting that any “speech” on the matter was an “account of the unadorned truth, a truth resting upon numbers and strengthened by the pronouncements of learned figures”. His speech was studded with long citations and paraphrases from French sources: first the Larousse dictionary, from which he drew his description of Syria, and the physiocrate Honoré-Gabriel de Mirabeau, then Gustave Le Bon's Civilisation des Arabes, “musiyu [Monsieur] David's history of Syria”,Footnote 51 and finally the travel account of the French physician Louis Lortet.Footnote 52
On the face of it, this seems yet another instance of the late Ottoman fascination with French thought—not least because neither the Larousse nor Le Bon were deemed to need any further introduction, a telling indication of the latter's reach amongst eastern Mediterranean intellectuals of the time.Footnote 53 Indeed, Tabbarah himself christened Paris the “capital of all administrative capitals”, a centre of political learning from which radiated political practices, if only to heap praise upon his fellow Syrians, who “demonstrated” their “development” in “every corner . . . of the earth”, going so far as to attain positions of influence in the city of light, even as they languished in idle poverty in their native land, prevented by the strictures of unjust rule from capitalizing upon its potential.Footnote 54
Moreover, his rhetorical moves hung upon the statistics he provided in support of his case: a precise measure of the surface area of Ottoman Syria, and statistical tables of the contemporary population of its provinces, their demographic density, and the number of Syrian migrants in the United States, Argentina, Brazil, Mexico, Australia, the Philippines, Europe, Egypt and the “remainder of the [world's] regions”. Tabbarah, it is clear, took up the norms and forms of quantitative practice, treating Syria's population as an aggregate whose various parts could be arranged on the page according to the dictums of social science—the latter's neat grids bringing order to the messiness of the world. For a great deal was at stake here. Despite continuing disagreement among “European historians” on the “quantity of Syria's inhabitants”, it seemed clear enough that a land home in ancient times to anywhere between sixteen and twenty million inhabitants now held no more than three million.Footnote 55 Tabbarah took population as an index of progress, regarding any decrease in numbers as marked as that Syria had witnessed as an incontrovertible sign that something ill was afoot—a verdict only confirmed by the onset of mass migration, that demographic drain upon the body politic. For the diagnosis to be correct, one first needed a correct grasp of the symptoms.
Tabbarah could not have been clearer: “whenever the truth divested herself of the garbs of rhetoric, she was herself the adornment of speech and its most useful aspect”. It was this truth, “visible to eyes, and palpable to fingers”, which was required “in our pronouncements and deeds . . . especially as we are in a capital in which there is no doubt that truths are expressed in a different fashion”.Footnote 56 This radical distinction between the intellectual and moral qualities of Paris and those to be found elsewhere can, on one level, be read as a swipe at Tabbarah's political opponents in the CUP—themselves infatuated, of course, with French thought—upon whom he heaped scorn as “rumour-mongers”.Footnote 57 Nevertheless, there is no denying that it also appears a declaration of the superiority of Western learning—which Tabbarah seemingly regarded as a feat of unadorned empiricism, in an apparent abnegation of the traditional qualities of Arabic balagha, or “rhetoric”.
This, it might be argued, was more than a curt dismissal of the artifices of oratory—though one which was, of course, itself a rhetorical effect. For ‘ilm al-balagha—the science, or knowledge, of eloquence—had developed over the centuries into a body of learning quite different from classical and Christian rhetoric.Footnote 58 While the latter was concerned primarily with the art of persuasion, the former was an essentially hermeneutic discipline. Originating in “predominantly theological discussions” on the i'jaz, or God-given coherence and inimitability, of the Qur'an, it grew in the hands of thinkers like the eleventh-century grammarian ‘Abd al-Qahir al-Jurjani into a more expansive “theory of syntactic stylistics” dedicated to understanding the ways in which the Arabic tongue achieved its effects through subtle shifts in grammatical construction.Footnote 59 Its student was no “speaker”, but an “audience”, learning not just to discourse elegantly, but also to listen intently in the hope of capturing something of the awesome beauty and complexity of the Arabic language.Footnote 60 Moreover, to Jurjani—perhaps the most influential of all Arab rhetoricians—form and meaning were inseparable from one another. To him, “the function of discourse (kalām) [was] the expression of human knowledge”. It therefore followed that its “noblest form . . . is that in which this function is most clearly fulfilled”: knowledge could not be communicated without grammatical exactitude and elegance.Footnote 61
It is difficult to envision that Tabbarah, with his schooling and continuing commitment to education, could not have been aware of such claims. Moreover, they had recently been popularized by his influential peers, the Egyptian mufti Muhammad ‘Abduh and the Syrian-born cleric and journalist Rashid Rida, who provided an introduction to the collected proceedings of the “First Arab Congress” in his capacity as one of the founding members of the Ottoman Administrative Decentralization Party. While Rida prepared a new edition of Jurjani's Asrar al-Balagha, or Secrets of Eloquence, published in Cairo in 1901, ‘Abduh supervised the reprinting of his Dala'il al-I'jaz in 1903. In the introduction to the latter, Rida heaped fulsome praise upon Jurjani's work, insisting that “it is incumbent upon anyone with reason and faith to examine” it, as rhetoric was “stamped with truth”, and enabled the “revelation of evidence and proof”.Footnote 62
This was a view quite different from Tabbarah's essentially negative gloss upon balagha, his insistence that those engaged in the political realm should rely upon the verifiable truths of European social thought and statistical science. For Tabbarah's peremptory dismissal of rhetoric comes perilously close to suggesting that neither the exercise of these faculties, nor the efforts of grammarians to understand the mysterious workings of the Arabic tongue—and its fullest expression in that most perfectly eloquent of works, the Qur'an—were of much significance. While truth remained the ultimate purpose of speech, his was an inquiry not into the immanent power of God, but into the temporal realities of the world and its ways—the workings of states, the capacity of people to produce, and their desire to move. Only quantifiable, certifiable facts could be of use here, rather than the traditional methods of rhetoric.
Tabbarah's denigration of balagha is all the more perplexing when one considers his own practised dexterity in its ways, and evident pride in the Arabic language. Not only did he insist repeatedly that the latter should be used as an official language in the empire's Syrian provinces, arguing that “nations cannot progress save through [using] their own language”.Footnote 63 He also remained dedicated to inculcating its principles in the young. The Ottoman College's curriculum declared that Arabic was its “principal language”, and “allocated compulsory lessons to perfect grammar and inflection and rhetorical sciences” to instil “full command of the Arabic language”. After all, its prospectus insisted, “eloquence and rhetoric” were, alongside “scientific competence . . . self-belief [and] morals and noble affection”, essential prerequisites for “the wide world of work”.Footnote 64
But this apparent turn away from the fundaments of autochthonous knowledge and religious belonging was also evident in other ways. Strikingly, Tabbarah seemingly sought to avoid any overt reference to religion, the Qur'an, hadith, and other resources of Islamic learning, whether orthodox or transgressive. The title of his speech, to be sure, made use of a term to denote migration, al-hijra, which amongst its other, more prosaic meanings, referred quite specifically to the departure of Muhammad and his followers from Mecca to Medina. However, nowhere in the text itself did he use this word, preferring to speak of muhajara, a more neutral cognate—an apparent effort to convey movement through a term less freighted with cumbersome religious overtones.
Moreover, the Suri, the “Syrian” subject to which he so insistently referred throughout, was secular, a political self utterly free of sectarian markers. This contrasted markedly with the conviction, shared by most of his contemporaries, that religion remained for better or worse the chief organizing principle of late Ottoman society, which they regarded as a composite of immiscible sectarian communities. The Beirut Reform Committee, which Tabbarah represented at the Paris conference, enshrined this vision in electing a Muslim president, Muhammad Bayhum, and a Christian vice-president, Yusuf Sursuq, who together headed up a twenty-five-strong commission made up of twelve Muslims, twelve Christians and one Jew.Footnote 65 A compact like this underwrote shared participation in political life—but it also rested upon a conception of confessional communities as discrete units that, for all that they could demonstrate comity, remained separate. By contrast, Tabbarah, despite his predilection for demographic statistics, steered clear of such sectarian arithmetic. The society he sought to display was seemingly a homogeneous, secular, whole. If religion were to play any part, it would be as a private moral imperative, not in a public life expurgated of confessional difference.Footnote 66
GHOSTS IN THE SYNTAX, STITCHES IN THE TEXT
All was not, however, as it seemed. For Tabbarah's speech was imbued with power by the very presence he apparently sought to expunge. While he punctiliously resorted to the noun muhajara to speak of migration as a secular, sociological process, at other moments his syntax hinted at a slippage between the temporal and the religious. The verbal locution he consistently used to conjure up movement was not hājara min—“[he] migrated from”—but hajara. Though cognates, these were not quite synonyms. Rather, a significant semantic gap separated them: while the former was an unloaded term, simply denoting migration, the latter carried a heavier freight, of foregoing, renouncing, dissociating oneself and breaking from a particular location, person or entity. It was in this sense that the verb was used in the Qur'an, to convey not just flight, but also shirking and shunning contact, a breaking of ties born of anger and dissatisfaction—as Tabbarah could not but know.Footnote 67 In using this particular form of the verb, then, he invoked the doctrine of hijra, of flight or exile, though in a self-consciously unorthodox fashion. Though this was still regularly called upon to justify the settlement in Ottoman lands of Muslims from the Balkans and the Caucasus, explicitly regarded as mühacirler, or those who had undertaken hijra, most deemed this obligation had ceased to be relevant after the taking of Mecca. As Muhammad himself had stated, “no migration after the conquest”. None but the worst of abuses could justify the decision to take flight in the eyes of many scholars of the Hanafi school, dominant in the Ottoman Empire. Now, it is true that some, like Ibn al-‘Arabi, had argued that “taking leave of the lands of war for the lands of Islam” remained an obligation, and had outlined further conditions which rendered it permissible and advisable—from the presence of “sorcery” and “heresy” (sibb and bid'a), or “sin” (al-haram) to insalubrity, and “insecurity” of “person” or property.Footnote 68 Others had suggested that a “just infidel” ruler might be preferable to injustice under Islamic rule. But they had come to this ruling under the particular conditions, and compulsions, of Mongol rule—and, in doing so, had called for staying put, not moving on.Footnote 69
Tabbarah, by contrast, seemed to suggest that the inhabitants of Syria had been compelled by “injustice” to take flight from the Ottoman Empire—the seat of the caliphate. And where his forebears had, unsurprisingly, thought only of Muslims, he intimated that hijra had been forced upon all, regardless of creed. This was, on the face of it, his greatest transgression of all: his translation of the doctrine of hijra from one which applied to Muslims, and which called for their relocation to Islamic lands, into an apologia for the wrenching decision of Christians and Muslims alike to leave their native country. And yet there is something else going on here. Even as Tabbarah seemed to be turning this juridical injunction inside out, transforming it from a prescription for believers into a secular doctrine which might account for the rupture between the Syrian and his native land, it was precisely its religious overtones which lent his argument its particular force. The secular, here, did not so much succeed the religious, as remain dependent upon it.Footnote 70
This deceptive duality pervaded Tabbarah's speech. For even as he dismissed the arts of Islamic rhetoric, he relied upon their particular power to enchant, deploying all the oratorical skills of persuasion he had developed as a man of religion. And even as he occluded all (overt) mention of this religion from his speech, he presumably took to the lectern in the clerical garb in which he was depicted in the conference volume, his clenched fists receding into the sleeves of his long black robes, the speckless white of his turban standing out against his neatly trimmed beard. The register and rhythm of his speech, the tone of his voice as he recited it, the clothes in which he stood and the posture he adopted—all were sounds, and sights, which invoked the particular charisma of the ‘alim, the learned man of religion.Footnote 71 His was a vision of the secular inhabited, and animated, by the religious—a discourse which brought together, and elided the lines between, these two realms.
Tabbarah played much the same double game with his European sources as he did with the resources of Islamic learning. For while he relied on long passages from Le Bon and David to convey a sense of Syria's second golden age in the first centuries of Islam, this was no straightforward translation. Quite the opposite—though Tabbarah, of course, gave scant indication of the ways in which he had tampered with these texts. Le Bon was in no doubt of the causes of Syria's decline. As he put it, “the prosperity of Syria lasted until the divisions which shook the empire of the caliphs. It was then that it began to decrease, but it disappeared entirely only when this land fell under the sway of the Turks”. It was this calamity that had precipitated the “absolute” “ruin” of these lands: “since the heavy hand of the Turks has fallen upon them, even grass no longer grows in these once fertile places”.Footnote 72 These references to the “Turks” Tabbarah carefully excised.
The motives for this bowdlerization seem transparent enough at first glance. Aware as he was of the potentially inflammatory consequences of the racial language running through Le Bon's account, with its virulent dismissals of Turks and Arabs alike, Tabbarah sought to erase this disruptive presence. For all his criticism of the Unionists, patriotic pride in Syria and conception of the empire as a composite of several distinct ethnic elements, as his use of terms like qawm and ‘unsur indicated, he strove at all costs to avoid racial discord between “Turks” and “Arabs”, which would undermine the “Ottoman unity” to which he so strenuously signalled his commitment. The silences and omissions at the heart of his text, as much as its overt declarations, make this clear.
However, Tabbarah had another reason for this occlusion. While Le Bon had simply noted the depopulation and desolation of Syria, Tabbarah tacked on another, resonant, phrase to his peroration: “the owl of ruin”, he wrote, “howled until the land was emptied of its inhabitants and the peoples fled their homelands”.Footnote 73 This was more than simply a figure of speech; it gave a clue as to his working practices to those in his audience struck by the keen bleakness of this image. For this hauntingly apocalyptic vision, woven into Le Bon's text, revealed another borrowing. This image was not his own, but Ibn Khaldun's. In “on how iniquity brings about the ruin of civilization”, the forty-fourth section of the third chapter of the Muqaddima, his grand meditation upon the making and ruin of empires, the latter had noted that the “growth” of a state depended upon “activity and the movement of the people, coming and going in the pursuit of gain and interests”. “Attacks on the property of the people”, if not stopped, could lead only to the gradual disintegration of the social body: first the people would “leave off their work”, and the “markets [would] come to a standstill”; then the inhabitants, “terrified”, would scatter “to the furthest lands, beyond the confines of that state, in search of livelihood”; the “population of the land [would] turn sparse”, its “lands would empty”, its “towns turn to ruin”, and the “disorder of the state” would be complete. To illustrate the deleterious effects of kingly neglect and iniquity, he told a tale, which he attributed to the tenth-century scholar al-Mas'udi, of the Persian king Bahram, son of Bahram, and the man of religion, or Bumdhan. The latter, he recounted, had
shown the king his disapproval of his injustice and habitual indifference to the affairs of state through a parable, which he placed in the mouth of an owl. When the king heard the owl's voice, he asked [the Bumdhan] the meaning of his words, and the Bumdhan told him: the male owl wished to marry a female owl, and she asked him, by means of assurance, for twenty villages ruined in the time of Bahram. And the male owl accepted her request, and told her that should the reign of the king continue it would be easiest to present her with a thousand villages.Footnote 74
Tabbarah, then, carried off a clever ventriloquist's trick. Far from simply leaning upon the authority of Le Bon, he arrayed his words into a distinctively Khaldunian narrative of ruin and degradation, a move which he signalled, however subtly, through his redeployment of the parable of the owl. This, he intimated, was the fate awaiting the Ottoman state, and the Unionists at its helm, should they fail to mend their obdurate ways. Already, the people had begun to abandon the land. Next would follow the inexorable decline of settled life, and then, finally, the collapse of the state—a prospect which seemed far from fanciful in 1913, after the humiliating wars with the Balkan confederation and Italy.
And, in doing so, he not only invoked his duty and prerogative as a man of religion to speak truth to power—just as the Bumdhan, that sahib al-din, or “master of the faith”, had done. He also hinted at the broader imprint this passage of the Muqaddima had left upon his thought. For upon completing the parable, the Bumdhan had set about explaining its meaning to Bahram. “A king”, he said, may only attain his fullest might and pomp through obedience to the holy law and acting in accordance with its prescriptions”. And only the king, he went on, could ensure “compliance with the holy law in his realms”. But this alone was not enough. The king could hold “no power” without the obedience of “men and communities”—and this, in turn, depended upon their “prosperity”. The “only path to prosperity was cultivation, and the only path to cultivation was justice”.Footnote 75
Here, then, was the germ of Tabbarah's central contention: justice contributed to the fertility of the land; injustice rendered it barren—al-‘adl yufassihuha, wa al-hayf yudayyiquha, as he put it, compressing Ibn Khaldun's circumlocutions into a tidy epigram.Footnote 76 But, as Tabbarah had himself made clear, Ibn Khaldun was not the only source for this claim. Rather, it was also founded upon Mirabeau's dictum, borrowed from Montesquieu: “les pays ne sont pas cultivés en raison de leur fertilité, mais en raison de leur liberté”—“countries are cultivated not according to their fertility, but according to their liberty”. Tabbarah, however, chose to render this last key term with the distinctive maqdar al-amn—the extent of security. In doing so, he allowed a further glimpse of his conception of liberty. This hinged upon freedom from the intrusions of an overweening state regarded not as the guarantor of security, but as the greatest threat to its existence—all the more so if it was a cumbersome and distant central administration, ill-acquainted with the particular conditions of local life. This was redolent both of Ibn Khaldun's warning to acquisitive princes of the dire consequences of their disregard for the untrammelled activities of their peoples, and of Mirabeau's suspicion of “great States, which burden men with the weight” of their “force” and, dissatisfied with holding the “principal resources” of “administration”, wish to take hold of its “finest threads”—echoes which run into each other, until it becomes difficult to tell them apart.Footnote 77
CONCLUSION: NEITHER EAST NOR WEST
The point of Tabbarah's speech, I have suggested here, was a simple one. Only the administrative reform of the Ottoman Empire, and the devolution of authority to its provinces, could halt the demographic haemorrhage which had struck Syria, and reverse the decline of the state. But the circuitous ways in which he made his case reveal a great deal. Reading across traditions, Tabbarah worked by analogy, seeking out family resemblances between bodies of thought historians long considered discordant. He found echoes of the enlightenment physiocrate's insistence upon the relationship between the size of a state's population and its wealth in the medieval social thinker's argument that migration was the surest sign of misrule. And, patching them together and overlaying them, he wove them into an argument which, conventional as it was, drew its strength from the confluence of seemingly disparate streams of thought.
Tabbarah placed himself in the slipstream not just of the lumières—as did contemporaries like ‘Uraysi, who referred to his peers as an “enlightened class”—but also of the Islamic disciplines in which he had been schooled.Footnote 78 We might be tempted, then, to conclude that his was a modernity that luxuriated in its “partial” nature, its deliberately “unsystematic” engagement with East and West alike.Footnote 79 But even as he crossed the bounds of traditions, translating the words of Le Bon into a distinctively Khaldunian narrative, or turning the doctrines of Islamic law into secular dictums, he also cannily worked within their confines, with his correct application of statistics and rhetorical forms. His was a conventional form of transgression—a compound creation which determinedly refused to choose its path, and whose distinctiveness lay not in its intellectual autonomy, but in its very unoriginality, its insistence upon refiguring borrowed bits and strands.
Like Schrödinger's cat, it combined two conditions; at once religious and secular, it did not so much lay the borrowed items upon which it relied for its effect alongside each other, placing them into neat piles—one “European”, the other “Islamic”—as lace them inextricably together, as in a double helix. Indeed, even as he divided the world into “East” and “West”, and praised the latter's achievements, Tabbarah denied the importance of such geographical reckonings, collapsing these separate worlds into a vision of common humanity. The “teacher may have become pupil, and the pupil teacher”, the East lingering in “backwardness”, stifled by misrule, while the West enjoyed the fruits of “progress”. But this was no consequence of insuperable cultural difference, merely of divergent political paths, subject to emendation and amelioration. After all, he asked, “are we descendents of one Adam, and they of another? Or do they have two hearts and two minds, and we only one? No, the world is one, and reason is one in us as it is in them”. A growing asymmetry may have marked power relations between the Sublime Porte and its European neighbours—a reality Tabbarah was only too ready to acknowledge. However, there existed in his eyes no such inequalities in the realm of thought—only a universal capacity for progress, of which there could be no greater proof than the “Syrian's dazzling success in all the civilized countries of the world”.Footnote 80 It is perhaps for Tabbarah, and others like him, that the Iranian filmmaker Abbas Kiarostami wrote these words: “not east / not west / . . . only this spot I am standing on / now”.Footnote 81
