In his magisterial 1978 account of society, political economy, and revolutionary transformation in nineteenth- and twentieth-century Iraq, The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq, the late Palestinian social historian Hanna Batatu wrote, “Baʿthi beginnings are still to some extent wrapped in obscurity.”Footnote 1 Some of these shadows were brushed aside by Batatu's illuminating analysis.Footnote 2 Those incipient beginnings, meanwhile, should be understood, according to Batatu, as “Michel ʿAflaq writ large.” ʿAflaq was the “authoritative teacher” for Baʿthists in Syria. “ʿAflaq and orthodox Baʿthism,” therefore, “were inseparable.”Footnote 3 Michel ʿAflaq was the driver for the community of teachers, activists, and intellectuals who animated the Baʿth from the founding of the Baʿth Party during the late 1930s and early 1940s until Syrian defense minister Ḥāfiẓ al-Asad seized power in a November 1970 coup d’état. But before the idea of al-baʿth (“resurrection”) was proposed as a concrete agenda for social transformation, before the Socialist Arab Baʿth Party (Ḥizb al-Baʿth al-ʿArabī al-Ishtirākī) began to crystallize, and before the Syrian party-state was constructed, there was a mode of political thought, a linguistic form of commitment, and a kind of aspirational being that I am calling ʿAflaqism (al-ʿAflaqiyya).
Batatu's beginnings are my critical point of entry in this essay as I reconstruct an intellectual genealogy of Baʿthism in modern Syria. Mine is a gesture towards Edward Said's inspiring concept of beginnings, which are good for thinking about non-originary space(s), grounds for a universalizing and humanistic historical becoming.Footnote 4 Beginnings and genealogy are as essential for studying the modern intellectual history of Baʿthism in Syria as they are for rewriting the modern intellectual history of the Middle East. Here I will argue that we must seek the origins of Baʿthism—as opposed to their genealogies—in the evolutionary stage of political Catholicism in interwar France known as personalism. The neo-Thomist political theology that shaped personalism in fin de vingtième siècle France and, later, the left-personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and his Esprit group were foundational antecedents to ʿAflaqism; they also laid the foundations for a twentieth-century Christian humanism with wide-ranging resonance. Wrestling with Michel ʿAflaq as he revitalized what I call “Mounier-ism” (translatable as le mounierisme), and which later spawned a kind of personalism in Arabic (al-shakṣāniyya), scrambles the genealogies of global intellectual history in Arabic.Footnote 5
If this essay places Michel ʿAflaq under the many-splendored lens of global intellectual history, another potential benefit of my analysis here is to catalyze a radical rethinking of the modern intellectual history of nationalisms, revolutions, and histories of the postcolonial. This would contribute, in turn, not only to decolonizing global intellectual history, but also to a decolonial and even uncolonial form of global intellectual history and Middle East studies. What follows is a biographical sketch of Michel ʿAflaq, one important metonym for the history of postcolonial Syria. Then I situate “ʿAflaqism” in an unlikely intellectual-historical tradition, namely that of Emmanuel Mounier, left-personalism, and the Esprit group. ʿAflaqism was steeped in Christian humanist keywords such as the person (man, al-shakhṣ, al-insān) and resurrection (al-baʿth); ʿAflaq offered a more complex imagination of what would be called the Resurrection Party (Ḥizb al-baʿth), commonly known as the Baath.Footnote 6 Finally, I address two central ʿAflaqi concepts: “nationalism” (al-qawmiyya) and “revolution” (al-inqilāb).Footnote 7 Pheng Cheah argues that constitutive philosophical elements from German Romantic nationalism may survive in postcolonial nationalisms in a form that could be reoriented towards potentially liberatory ends.Footnote 8 Less subtle minds misunderstand the Baʿth, through metaphors of violence, ferocity, sectarianism, racism, anti-Semitism, national socialism, fascism, totalitarianism, inhumanity, and even evil. This article aims to repair some of that discursive violence done to postcolonial Syrian history, while also addressing the vexed relationship between global intellectual history and Middle East studies. In the conclusion, I briefly address the moment of ʿAflaq's death. But before ʿAflaq died, he would have to live, and before that, he would have to be born, for the first time at least.
The Student Becomes the Teacher
Michel ʿAflaq was born in 1910 into an Orthodox Christian family in the al-Mīdān quarter of Damascus, which had become the stronghold of embourgeoised notable families who amassed economic power, social status, and political influence over the course of the early modern Ottoman period.Footnote 9 By the turn of the twentieth century, the social and economic clout of the notables had allowed them to broker relationships between Damascus—an Ottoman provincial capital—and the surrounding hinterland, especially the agricultural storehouse of Ḥamā Province in central Syria and the Ḥawrān in southern Syria.Footnote 10 After completing his education in French missionary schools in Damascus, ʿAflaq traveled to France in order to study at the Sorbonne, where he would study until 1932, at which point he returned to Damascus; where he was exposed to intellectual, cultural, and political currents of the day; where he met intellectuals and activists from around the world; and where he connected with students of his generation from the Maghrib as well as the Mashriq. I would argue that ʿAflaq did not go to Paris for his studies in the same way that he traveled there geographically: his having been cultivated within a French imperial space permitted ʿAflaq to move, act, and think between hometown and university city with minimal cognitive dissonance.Footnote 11 Meanwhile, ʿAflaq bonded with Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn al-Bīṭār (1912–80), another Damascene student at the Sorbonne, a Sunni Muslim studying physics while ʿAflaq studied history.Footnote 12 Once home in French Mandate Syria, the two men would both teach at the Tajhīz Academy (al-Tajhīz al-Ūlā). There they built common cause in the milieu of radicalizing opposition to French colonialism and imperialism as well as a budding dissatisfaction with the politics of notables who dominated the nationalist movements throughout Syria.Footnote 13
ʿAflaq and al-Bitar quickly set to organizing study circles that attracted lower-middle-class elements—writers, artists, and teachers, urban intellectuals generally, and not exclusively drawn from Damascus or even Syria—many of whom were both francophone and came from “minority” backgrounds.Footnote 14 During the late 1930s and early 1940s, the groups gradually coalesced, until 1943, with the founding of Ḥizb al-Baʿth (The Party of Resurrection), which started publishing a newspaper under the name al-Baʿth. In 1946 ʿAflaq ran for the Syrian parliament, unsuccessfully, though he would continue to teach, organize, and meditate on the conditions of possibility for radical liberation in the lands of Greater Syria. A major step forward was accomplished when the theories long debated by ʿAflaq, al-Bitar, and Zakī al-Arsūzī were conjoined with the agrarian populism of Akram al-Ḥawrānī, a lawyer and political organizer from Hama: the merger of their ideas and tactics led to the creation of the Socialist Arab Baʿth Party in the early 1950s. Following a period of tumult and instability, which came to a head with the failed experiment of the United Arab Republic (1958–61), an administrative union between Syria and Gamal Abdel Nasser's Egypt, the Baʿth Party took command in a relatively nonviolent coup d’état on 8 March 1963. ʿAflaq himself would remain in Damascus until the “neo-Baʿth” coup of 23 February 1966, when ideological struggle within the Syrian Baʿth Party forced him and al-Bitar to flee the country.Footnote 15 ʿAflaq traveled to Beirut, Brazil, and elsewhere before arriving in his last exile in Iraq, where he died and was laid to rest in 1989.Footnote 16
The time that ʿAflaq spent at the Sorbonne (1928–32) was pivotal to his intellectual formation. The question of what he read, with whom he studied, against whom he argued, and who his direct influences were is difficult to answer, especially given the meager and often contradictory documentary record available. That he was inspired by a wide range of European political and philosophical thought is without question; the volume and diversity of names evoked in his oeuvre—from Ibn Khaldun to Hitler, from Fichte to Gide and Bergson—frustratingly entangles the intellectual genealogy of ʿAflaqism.Footnote 17 What exactly did ʿAflaq learn in Paris, and how might it have affected his subsequent thinking? Can intellectual historians go beyond the “strong” influence of figures that ʿAflaq mentions by name while also considering the “weak attraction” caused by other intellectual forces within the ʿAflaqi field? If so, how might such a reassessment of of ʿAflaqism transform our thinking about the diffusion of ideas through francophonic imperial space, and what, finally, might that teach us about the intellectual history of postcolonial Syria?
My research affirms the traces of nineteenth-century German idealist philosophy and Romantic nationalism found in ʿAflaq's thought while also rejecting the claim that his ideas were derivative, pale copies of European thought. In the post-Nahda period, from the late interwar period through the mid-twentieth century, a broad range of arabophone and non-arabophone intellectuals adapted concepts drawn from liberal as well as antiliberal traditions of thought, humanist and otherwise. ʿAflaq himself was one latter-day avatar of the Arabic revivalist project known as the Nahda, perhaps one of the last adībs. But one of the most stubbornly persistent tropes in scholarly analysis and popular criticism of ʿAflaq is that he had no coherent intellectual agenda. The eclecticism and disorder of his agitated mind was consistently taken to connote an uncooked political program, which would thereby invalidate or at least simplify and demean his ideas. The latent orientalism of these criticisms notwithstanding, these outmoded approaches fail to account for the ways in which intellectuals and theorists change over time, the extent to which contradiction may be at the heart of their own (and our own) intellectual imagination. After briefly surveying some of the arguments that have been made about ʿAflaq, I turn to consider the ways in which neo-Thomist Catholic thought is detectable in his writings and speeches, ideas that were extremely salient in the interwar Parisian milieu. My primary argument is that the left-personalism of Emmanuel Mounier is a crucial “missing link” in the intellectual genealogy of ʿAflaqism; accounting for this absence can unlock ʿAflaq's occasionally esoteric and eclectic thought.
Arabicized Personalism is not Fascism
Baʿthism is so widely misunderstood that sometimes it can feel as though it has been subjected to willful ignorance and even intentional disinformation. This stems in part from the fact that its fundaments—liberty (ḥurriyya), socialism (ishtirākiyya), unity (waḥdah) are the three primary keywords—have still not been adequately elucidated. Instead, scholars and pundits are mesmerized by the state ideologies and politics of post-1960s Syria and Iraq. Baʿthism tout court is crudely reduced to a second-rate totalitarianism distinguished not only for its violence but also for its slavish subservience to prototypical European forms of communism, Nazism, and fascism. Intellectual historians need better explanations of how and why (il)liberal and (anti)humanist ideas may have appealed to Syrian intellectuals in the first place, and need not shy away from the challenging work of exploring the tensions between emancipatory aspirations and non-liberal political philosophy. “Baathism is one of the last of the grandiose revolutionary ideologies of the mid-twentieth century,” Paul Berman wrote in 2014, the hellish early days of the Syrian civil war, “an ideology like communism and fascism in Europe (both of which exercised a large influence on Baathist thinking), except in an Arab version suitable for the age of decolonization.”Footnote 18 To be sure, Berman is hardly alone in clutching this facile analogy that substitutes “communism” and “fascism” for “Arab Baʿthism.Footnote 19 But is it true that communism and fascism and other European ideologies “exercised a large influence on Baathist thinking”? David Patterson traces an even straighter line from Nazi anti-Semitism to the Iraqi and Syrian Baʿthist regimes: “from the outset the chief spokesmen of the Baath Party introduced an Islamic dimension to the Baathist ideology that was perfectly in keeping with Islamic Jihadism.”Footnote 20 Not only is Patterson overzealous in conflating Arab nationalism and Islamism entirely because of their overlapping positions on the question of Palestine; he also projects onto both a consuming passion for an all-encompassing and eternal “jihadi” quest for world domination. Patterson, who does not appear to read Arabic, therefore flails in his attempt to explain the term inqilāb, a technical term in the ʿAflaqist lexicon, as “psychological revolution,” without ever deigning to explicate what he means by either “psychological” or “revolution.” Patterson understands inqilāb as being central to the “transformation” of “Arab thinking into anti-Semitic national socialist thinking,” in which he concludes that “people's minds and personality … must be transformed and controlled.”Footnote 21 There is little substantive argument to respond to here so I will simply gesture to the work of Gilbert Achcar and others who demolish such spurious and dangerous canards.Footnote 22 But it would be more salutary to establish who ʿAflaq was and what ʿAflaqism is first.
Through an improvised method that I shall call osmotic inference, a means by which the intellectual resonances and philosophical resemblances within a given cultural milieu may be inferred, described, and interpreted, I stage an encounter between ʿAflaq and Emmanuel Mounier. Hopefully this will clarify some aspects of ʿAflaq's writings and speeches that have been unhelpfully labeled “esoteric” or “quasi-mystical” or “eclectic.” My genealogy of ʿAflaqism also limns the path of Pheng Cheah's reading of organismic nationalism, which is to say the influence of Romantic nationalism, organismic vitalism, and social thought on Michel ʿAflaq. The intellectual history of interwar and postcolonial Syria needs to recognize the genealogical affinity between ʿAflaqism and personalism, more specifically the left-personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and his Esprit group. “Aflaq was nominally a Christian from a Greek Orthodox background,” Berman writes, “but, to be honest, Christian influences in his doctrine are hard to see.”Footnote 23 While the first point is an undeniable biographical detail, the latter is only true insofar as one's vision is impaired, blinded to the significant influence that personalism had on a range of Middle East intellectuals, especially “minorities” from the eastern Mediterranean. In order to properly contextualize the genealogy of ʿAflaqism I have in mind, we must switch gears momentarily in order to introduce some of the “Christian” forces that informed ʿAflaq and his Parisian milieu during the interwar period, specifically the tradition of Catholic humanism called personalism.
There emerged in Paris and elsewhere around the world during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries a creative attempt to reconcile rejuvenated forms of Catholic tradition with various aspects of modernity. French personalists, for their part, imagined a new kind of Christian humanism, one in which the dignity of the human person could challenge and potentially even transcend the passions and the interests, human nature and divine creation, universalizing forms of community and particularizing forms of identity. The extent to which each individual personalist and the incipient personalist movements managed to strike a balance in this regard in pursuit of a renewed person bounded by community but also mindful of the centrality of the divine varied widely. From the conservative ethnic nationalism of Charles Maurras and Maurice Barrès to the rightist neo-Thomist personalism of Jacques Maritain, and the left-personalism of Emmanuel Mounier and his Esprit circle, a thriving and fractious personalist culture coalesced in interwar Paris that would shape the intellectual history of France but also parts far beyond.Footnote 24 In Zeev Sternhell's enduring formulation, interwar French politics were “neither right nor left.”Footnote 25
Emmanuel Mounier (1905–50) and his circle of affiliates emerged out of the rightward-drifting Catholic modernist circles of L'Action française and L'Ordre nouveau. A new sense of possibility for a different sort of “left-personalism” emerged with Mounier, a politics that emphasized social justice and moral reconstructionism while eschewing the doxa of communism and capitalism, liberalism and fascism. In his influential study of French Catholic leftists, John Hellman paints a picture of Mounier and a domain of political thought that bears a striking resemblance to Michel ʿAflaq and his thinking, one which “drew from the ‘spiritualism’ of Henri Bergson, the heroism of Nietzsche, and the anti-individualism and anti-liberalism of the Catholic tradition.”Footnote 26 But Hellman also explicates how antipathetic Mounier was to Nazism, national socialism, and fascism, even if his “communitarian personalism” drew from “national socialism while anathematizing racism, Hitler, and anti-Semitism.”Footnote 27 Hellman might as well have been discussing ʿAflaq when he explained how Mounier “could be committed to revolution and indifferent to politics, an enthusiastic admirer of the Marxists and an anti-Marxist, a communist sympathizer and an anti-communist, a purist democrat and an authoritarian.”Footnote 28
Mounier set out for Paris from his hometown of Grenoble at about the same time ʿAflaq left Damascus. It is entirely conceivable that they both attended seminars at the Sorbonne given by Bergson; they were likely both exposed to the ideas of André Gide along with contemporary discussions of vitalism, Christian renewal, and nationalism.Footnote 29 Just five years after arriving in Paris in October 1932, Mounier helped to publish the first edition of the celebrated monthly Esprit. ʿAflaq may have seen the journal, owned his own copy, or at the very least been aware of the periodical and its significance. As Jean Louis Loubet del Bayle notes, with respect to the history of “non-conformism” in interwar France, Mounier opened the magazine with a long article introducing his conception of “the primacy of the spiritual” as well as “the necessity to disengage from all the political compromises of the right as well as the left” so that man could move “towards a spiritual revolution that would lead to a general overhaul of values.” The second “doctrinal” point was was to specify, “in philosophical terms, the situation of Man, of ‘the Person’ in relation to the physical world and in relation to society, all the while rejecting idealism and materialism, individualism and collectivism as comparable mistakes [erreurs symétriques].”Footnote 30 In other words, and here is a crucial tension between personalism and liberalism, there was a meaningful difference between man and the individual. The person exists in relation to a concept of community founded upon bonds of solidarity and identity that are metaphysically prior to the general will or social contract of classical liberalism. Pace Samuel Moyn, personalism “was different than individualism, for it championed a figure who was supposed to overcome the destitute atomism of the politics and economics of the nineteenth century.”Footnote 31 Indeed, as I explain below, the monism of Mounier's thought recurs in the writings of ʿAflaq. “Positively,” Loubet del Bayle explains, “this personalism was translated into a double affirmation”:
on the one hand, Man is naturally a social being and cannot reach full bloom without society; on the other hand, however, as a spiritual and free being, Man cannot be reduced entirely to His social destiny, in which He is called to be realized in an original and personal vocation. In this perspective, being completely isolated from society as is the case in individualism is no different than being completely immersed in the community, which is the same manner in which Totalitarian systems would be the mutilation of “the Person.”Footnote 32
Mounier emphasized that “the Person” is a holistic entity that had been trampled upon in the onrush of modernity, one which needed to be recuperated as part of a thoroughgoing humanistic revival. But we should not fail to attend to the relationship between personalism and the left–right political spectrum.
In the inaugural issue of Esprit, Mounier emphasized the “virtues” found on many sides of the right and the left: on the right, there was “honor, good measure, [and] prudence”; on the left, “boldness and peace.”Footnote 33 Simply put, “a Person cannot ever be understood by a Community [une collectivité] or another person as a means to an end.”Footnote 34 Mounier recognized and empowered this person in the context of their place in the social world. “The non-personal [L'Impersonnel] is matter. Every Community itself is a Person among persons [une personne de personnes]; otherwise it is nothing but a number or a force, hence matter. Spiritual = personal.”Footnote 35 What matters here for Mounier and the Mounierists is that the person is neither the individual subject of liberal thought nor the abstract worker or peasant or masses at the heart of socialist, Marxist, and communist ideologies. Rather, the person exists in a more organic, even natural, relationship with the social environment.
My Person is not the same thing as my Individual. What we call the Individual is the diffusion of the Person along the surface of his life, His complacency as he gets lost. My Individual is this imprecise and shifting image, one which is superimposed upon the different characters among whom I float, those from whom I am distracted and from which I am running away. My Individual is the greedy enjoyment of this dispersion, the incestuous love of my singularities, of all this precious profusion which interests none other than me.Footnote 36
Mounier rails against the selfishness of liberalism. “The Person,” by contrast, “is the sum total of Man.”Footnote 37 The person is neither an atom nor an anomic individual, but rather “a unity that is given, not constructed, more vast than what I can see, more interiorized than the reconstructions I attempt to make. It is a presence inside me.”Footnote 38 In the final analysis, two “sicknesses” afflict Mounier's person: individualism and collective tyrannies, the latter in reference to mass movements such as communism and fascism, and mass society of the communist and capitalist varieties. Mounier prescribes a practical cure: “Fight against Individualism; that is to say, against the regimes of anonymity and war. Fight against pagan Personalism in its Anarchist or Fascist modalities. Find a way to conjugate [statut conjugué] the Person and the Community.” Mounier's conclusion here accords with arguments laid out in the pages of Esprit. “These are the front lines [les lignes de force] of our Personalist reconstruction.”Footnote 39
Mounier's theory of personalism became an influential force in Catholic politics around the world, from Poland to Vietnam and beyond.Footnote 40 The history of personalism in the Arabic-speaking world has yet to be written. Mounier's “Personalist reconstruction” is strikingly reminiscent of the Resurrection Party (Ḥizb al-baʿth), the Baʿth Party. The Arabic term al-baʿth can mean many things: resurrection, revival, renaissance, rising, awakening, emanating, or delegating, as in a formal delegation, all of which may have both political and spiritual connotations.Footnote 41 And yet I have only seen two mentions made of the possible influence of Emmanuel Mounier's personalism on ʿAflaq's thought. The first is by Hichem Djaït in a major work on the history and politics of Arab nationalism. “ʿAflaqism is a humanist nationalism,” Djaït notes:
One finds side-by-side influences as far from one another as Hegelianism and the personalism of Mounier. From the young Hegel … one finds the condemnation of abstract universalism, the idea that the nation realizes the universal, and perhaps the concepts of life and destiny, in a general manner a certain historical vitalism. The presence of the intellectual legacy of Mounier is manifested in the idea of the supreme value of man [l'homme], through an attempt at synthesis between humanism and justice, modernity and fidelity to the past.Footnote 42
Second, Wafik Raouf affirmed the traces of Hegel and Mounier identified by Djaït, while also emphasizing the importance of the “vitalism” of Romain Rolland and André Gide, a conceptual foundation that would be developed further by Bergson.Footnote 43 But these passing references cannot do justice to the resonance of Mounier's personalism in ʿAflaq's thought. Indeed, one of the keys to unlocking the mysterious biography of Michel ʿAflaq himself is to trace the genealogies of Baʿthism that run from its origins in Paris and Damascus, through ʿAflaqism and Mounierism, all the way to postcolonial Syria and Iraq.
One fundamental challenge for ʿAflaq scholarship has been the scale of complexity, contradiction, and disorder in his thought, perhaps in his own mind. Batatu was skeptical of ʿAflaq for his “eclectic ideology”: “a mixture of an essentially humanitarian nationalism and aspects of the individualism of the Enlightenment, the democratism of the Jacobins, the youth idealization of Mazzini, the class standpoint of Marx, the elitism of Lenin, and over and above that, a strong dose of Christian spirituality, and a nationalistically interpreted Islam.”Footnote 44 It is correct to note the “logical difficulties,” “romantic style” and “undisciplined eclecticism” in ʿAflaq's thought,Footnote 45 his “undissipated haziness.”Footnote 46 But Batatu betrays a materialist fundamentalism when he dismisses ʿAflaq's neo-Hegelianism; he also pins ʿAflaq to a scholarly standard of coherence and consistency that he would likely never have applied to Marx or Lenin, for example. “ʿAflaq makes no serious attempt to synthesize the ideas that he imbibed,” Batatu bristles.Footnote 47 Nabil M. Kaylani follows this critique of ʿAflaqist eclecticism. “Baʿthist dogma is extremely vague,” Kaylani argues:
It preaches rebellion against socio-political decadence, but does not analyse the nature of the reflected decadent society. It advocates socialism without setting up a real program of social action. It promises a kind of freedom that is elevating to the spirit, but fanciful beyond attainment. And the unity it calls for is wrapped in a thick mantle of romanticism. Baʿthism, therefore, is readily susceptible to individual interpretation. Its emphasis is on revolution, not political construction.Footnote 48
In other words, Batatu and Kaylani accuse ʿAflaq of being a neo-Hegelian, or perhaps a Young Hegelian. Political scientist Leonard Binder was also unimpressed by ʿAflaq's shaggy thought, dismissing his “hodge-podge of vulgarized European philosophies,” which included “the usual reflection of Herder in the view that every nation has a peculiar mission to perform … the Hegelian emphasis on history and national teleology, but instead of the dialectic, a cyclical concept of alternate glory and decline … [and] a reflection … of Rousseau's general will,” and a hint of Bergson's “vitalism.”Footnote 49 It would seem indisputable, then, that such a ragtag jumble of misfit ideas hardly warrants serious intellectual-historical inquiry. My argument differs fundamentally: a rereading of ʿAflaq and ʿAflaqism can lead to a more satisfying understanding of the appeal, but also the inadequacy, of intellectual history in explaining the making of modern Syria. In the history of postcolonial Syria, Michel ʿAflaq is in the eye of the beholder.
National ʿAflaqism
In order to elucidate some prominent features of ʿAflaqism, I will now focus on two of his keywords: nationalism (al-qawmiyya), which is itself a fusion of three elements: patriotism (al-waṭaniyya), Arab/ic nationalism (al-qawmiyya), and Arabness (al-ʿurūbah); and revolution (al-inqilāb). The guiding mantra of the Baʿth was “Liberty, Socialism, (Arab) Unity” (al-ḥurriyya, al-ishtirākiyya, al-waḥdah [al-ʿarabiyya]). Some argue that this tripartite slogan is itself a variation on the French Revolutionary motto—Liberté, Égalite, Fraternité. The compact slogan, “A Single Arab Nation with an Eternal Message” (ummah ʿarabiyya wāḥidah dhāt risālah khālidah) introduced auxiliary concepts of “personality” (al-dhāt) “eternity” (al-khulūd), and “mission” (al-risālah), all of which are Baʿthist keywords still in need of scholarly attention.
In “On Arab/ic Nationalism” (Fī al-qawmiyya al-ʿarabiyya), written in 1940 but published in his canonical 1959 collection Fī sabīl al-Baʿth (In the Path of the Resurrection), ʿAflaq offers his interpretation of “Arabness” (al-ʿurūbah).Footnote 50 Arab/ic nationalism is the “soil” out of which all other forms of life can grow: art, religion, politics. Here I learn from Orit Bashkin by distinguishing what I call Arab/ic nationalism (al-qawmiyya) from what is colloquially called patriotism (al-waṭaniyya).Footnote 51 Arabness is articulated in spiritual terms which mirror, analogically, the “Arab/ic nationalism” that exists not only “on the ground,” but also “in the sky.”Footnote 52 This framing could be understood as a form of what Hichem Djaït calls “messianism,” but that would certainly not need to entail that ʿAflaq misrepresented or failed to understand how a materialist analysis would affect his approach to history, identity, and politics. ʿAflaq identifies a fundamental difference between “the organismic body” (al-jism al-ḥayy) and “the mechanical body” (al-jism al-ālī).Footnote 53 This unmistakably echoes what Pheng Cheah calls the “organismic metaphor” at the heart of modern articulations of the nation. German idealism configured a specific national idea, departing from Kant and Fichte through Hegel and Marx. Those idealist theories were traditionally opposed to “civic” or republican theories of national belonging. For Cheah, this conceptualization of the nation as an organism did not inevitably pave the way to racialized, exclusivist, or authoritarian versions of peoplehood, nationhood, and group-ness. On the contrary, Cheah recuperates those intellectual resources such that they may yet have been refashioned and used otherwise, drawn upon in order to serve, for example, as a liberatory critique in anticolonial and postcolonial nationalist discourse. “All political forms that rely on the organismic metaphor,” Cheah writes, “are different models intended to provide the optimal institutional basis for the actualization of freedom.”Footnote 54
ʿAflaq also draws on a universalizing “organismic metaphor” in order to define nationalism. At times he seems to accept the distinction between Europe and what I begrudgingly call the Arab world. Nationalism, for ʿAflaq, “comes to us from abroad rather than springing from deep inside us”; it “causes us to forget our personality [shakhṣiyya] … and dispossesses us of our vital reality, offering us instead meaningless words and abstract symbols [rumūz mujarradah]”Footnote 55:
The pursuit of nationalism after the European fashion distracts us with false hopes and persuades us that we can attain the same state as the powerful European nations [umam] simply by taking on some of their appearances—as if by the stroke of a magic wand—as well as it bequeaths to us the same pathologies and imaginary problems those nations suffer from.Footnote 56
Be that as it may, ʿAflaq doesn't reject nationalism as such, adapting the concept instead: “Shall we render nationalism, which is the foundation of our life, one theory among many, and leave it exposed to the vagaries of logic and taste and sentiment? Even as we call for it today, will it be influenced tomorrow by internationalism and communism, and will we then accept the religious call the day after tomorrow?” ʿAflaq rejects any theory that frames nationalism as being akin to “internationalism” and “communism” or “religion,” which would constitute a “narrow understanding,” and could even amount to an injustice against the “sacrifice” that nationalism requires.Footnote 57 The danger for ʿAflaq, somewhat puzzlingly, turns out neither to be the threat of European colonialism nor the reactionary Arab bourgeoisie, but rather the lure of “pure reason” or “abstract reasoning” (al-tafkīr al-mujarrad), depending on whether one prefers here to translate ʿAflaq the Kantian or ʿAflaq the Hegelian, both of which are core to post-Enlightenment philosophical and political projects. In a quasi-materialist rejection of Hegelian idealism, though, what troubles ʿAflaq most is that people might come to the conclusion that reality is essentially “stagnant” as opposed to dynamic and vital, that reality can be broken down into “constituent parts,” which may then be reconstructed however one chooses. In contrast, “vital reality,” a concept that ʿAflaq developed—whether directly or through osmotic inference—in relation to Gide and Bergson, should be understood as “coherent and harmonious,”
prior to all interpretation, fully independent in itself [dhū fardiyya kāmilah bi-dhātiha]. Abstract reasoning strips things of their flesh and blood, causing them to lose their color and their flavor, to become far from precision and exactitude, to the point where opposites come to resemble one another, and differences are equalized because they have been reduced to words, every word equivalent to every other.Footnote 58
ʿAflaq unequivocally rejects the notion that language constitutes experience. Rather, nationalism and Arabness are rendered ontological, made into states of being.Footnote 59 Arabic nationalists do not have to become nationalists by embracing nationalism “because it is not an idea” per se in the first place.Footnote 60
There is good reason not to identify ʿAflaqism with a tradition of Romantic (“blood-and-soil”) nationalism, however, especially in light of his later elaborations of the concept of inqilāb. In perhaps his best-known statement, no doubt because it was translated into English,Footnote 61 ʿAflaq responds to “questions from students” in 1940 about how nationalism ought to be defined. He expresses concern about widespread misunderstandings of the phenomenon, which were “limited to intellectual knowledge and philosophical inquiry” while failing to incorporate “the power of sinew [quwwat al-ʿaṣab] and the warmth of emotion.” ʿAflaq clarifies that his notion is predicated neither on “blood-based racism [ʿunṣuriyya]” nor on an ethereal “spiritualism” (rūḥiyya) that emerges from “history and shared culture,” at least not entirely on either of these two premises:
The nationalism we are calling for is love above all else. It is the same emotion that binds the individual to his family, because the homeland [al-waṭan] is one big tent, and the nation [al-ummah] is one big family. Nationalism, like every love, fills the heart with joy, spreads hope into the farthest reaches of the soul, and anyone who feels it would want the people to join him in this elation that rises above his narrow selfishness, bringing him closer to the horizon of goodness and fulfillment.Footnote 62
The quality of feeling indexed here (“emotion,” “joy,” “elation,” “goodness”) demands explanation, especially in light of the fact that ʿAflaq contradictorily asserts elsewhere that Arabs do not become nationalists through “the process of love and faith” alone.Footnote 63 Some have argued that this has something to do with ʿAflaq's overreliance on spiritualism as part of his quasi-idealism, or else a naturalist interpretation of a people existing in their proper habitat. “Arabness” (al-ʿurūbah), for ʿAflaq, more precisely, is how one is suppose to translate nationalism into Arabic, just as “Islam” for an Arabic-speaker is the sign for “religion” (al-dīn). Intellectual historians may find these unusual conceptual definitions bracing. But such a historical excavation must precede commentary on the political and ethical significance of ʿAflaq's thought. Emmanuel Mounier's pithy description of identity might be helpful here. “One could almost say,” Mounier writes, in his primer on personalism, “that I only exist to the extent that I exist for another, and, at the limit point: to be is to love [être, c'est aimer].”Footnote 64 What is essential here is the left-personalist equation of love for oneself and one's community, however defined, as well as the relation between person/community, on the one hand, and existence or being, on the other. In fact, as opposed to race-based theories of social belonging or “purely” spiritualist conceptions of human destiny, ʿAflaq pursues the quintessentially personalist aspiration to achieve a “proper humanism” (al-insāniyya al-ṣaḥīḥah) in the face of antihumanist forms of life. The ʿAflaqist truism that Arabic nationalism is “love above all else” appears differently in this light. Indeed, in the same short piece, ʿAflaq champions “sacrifice” and “heroism” and other religio-political concepts as essential elements for the realization of collective nationalist “glory,” virtues that are “psychologically higher” than the selfish pursuit of individual benefit.Footnote 65
This is (Not) a Revolution
ʿAflaq brought together aspects of Romantic nationalism and French social theory in his quest for both a philosophical disposition and political grounds that would help to foster the Arab/ic resurrection. While the Arabic term al-inqilāb means upheaval, overturning, or revolution, in both physical and political senses, it can also connote an overthrow or a transformation of a more abstract sort. In common parlance, the term describes a military putsch or coup d’ état, the type that disrupted Syrian political life more than half a dozen times during the first twenty years of Syrian independence (1946–63). Historian Ofra Bengio claims that the word inqilāb moved from “neutral or negative use in the nineteenth century to positive content in the first half of the twentieth and back to a negative sense in the second half.”Footnote 66 While discussing the wave of successive military coups that roiled postcolonial Syria, Bengio sounds a note of disquiet by suggesting that this “need to classify inqilab as either good or bad,” as she puts it, “attests to the term's ambiguity and to a certain malaise on the part of its users.”Footnote 67 Bengio would seem to be echoing the deceased orientalist Bernard Lewis, who pointed out that the term appeared in Turkish with the Young Ottomans during the 1870s: although it “became the accepted Turkish word for revolution … Its use in Arabic is rare, and when it occurs it is usually derogatory.”Footnote 68 Hanna Batatu argues that ʿAflaq chose the word inqilāb to refer to political revolution rather than the more common term thawrah “because [ʿAflaq] is, as ever, anxious to differentiate his movement from that of the Communists, even in matter [sic] of terminology. His notion, however, also has its own peculiarities. For him [ʿAflaq], the inqilāb is first and foremost a spiritual revolution, a revolution in Arab values, in the Arab way of thinking.”Footnote 69 Batatu correctly identifies the spirituality of ʿAflaq's conception of political transformation; but neglects to mention that the ʿAflaqi inqilāb is not always coextensive with “revolution” in quite the sense Batatu intends. Not all spiritualities and not all spiritualisms are created equal. I prefer to translate al-inqilāb differently, depending on the context, as revolution, overturning, and/or overcoming.Footnote 70
For ʿAflaq, the connection between Arab/ic resurrection (al-baʿth) and the anticipated inqilāb was elucidated in his early essays. In “Ḥizb al-inqilāb” (The Party of Inqilab) (1949), ʿAflaq departs from the premise that in “developed countries” the Party becomes a means to an end when there is close coordination or “integration” between the state and the nation.Footnote 71 This vision of harmonizing state and society as well as state and nation was among the key concepts of Baʿthist thought, indeed, for many Arab/ic nationalist thinkers. With respect to the Arab/ic nation (ummah), by contrast, ʿAflaq looks critically at the state, thinking of it as little more than a “tool,” an “apparatus,” “a body without a soul” (jism la rūḥ fīh).Footnote 72 In this eloquent analogy, ʿAflaq compares the revitalization of a malnourished body to the kick-starting of a social and political movement that can represent what he calls the “soul element.” In his survey of Arab society, ʿAflaq finds “simple people,” as well as more recondite intellectuals, invoking a “password” for him, a palliative concept that would lead to the salvation (al-khalāṣ) of the Arab/ic nation: “the word is inqilāb.”Footnote 73 ʿAflaq's exposure to personalism by what I have been calling osmotic inference might be significant here. In “Programme pour 1933,” the lead editorial in the December 1932 issue of Esprit, Mounier directly addressed revolution as a moral problem:
Revolution is a heavy word, one upon which one may stumble. Let us say again: except for the feeling of the permanent heroic needs of the spirit, there is no revolutionary mysticism in us. Neither that of the philosophers: we believe in eternal truths. Nor that of the politicians: we do not need to prepare the temporal revolution, but to make ourselves prepared for the revolution to come.Footnote 74
ʿAflaq would draw upon this “secular messianist” perspective in his thinking about social and political change.
In the various (mis)readings of ʿAflaq discussed throughout this essay, some identify traces of Ibn Khaldun's concept of “cyclicity,” the seasonal returns of the nomadic to the settled lifestyle, the Bedouin to urban civilization; others recognize the historian's craft of comparing continuity and change over time; and still others encounter a version of post-Hegelian dialectics. Whether ʿAflaq's thought is best described in terms of cyclicity, dualism, or dialectics is an open question. In one iteration of the binary framework that is most reminiscent of Ibn Khaldūn, ʿAflaq argues there have only ever been two eras in Arab history, al-inqilāb (revolution) and al-inḥiṭāṭ (stagnation); he says that this oscillation is “like a law.” Such a bipolar mode of existence is a “distinguishing feature” of “the Arab/ic nation” (ummah). In some ways reproducing contemporary orientalist misconceptions, ʿAflaq avers that there has never been a “middle course” (ḥal wasaṭ) in Arab history, “whereas we know that the history of the European peoples for hundreds of years is an expression of development [taṭawwur] … [whereas] revolution [inqilāb] is the exception.”Footnote 75 Here is a diagnosis of the moribund and corrupt state of Arab society and culture, a picture of ever-present “decline” and “decadence” (inḥiṭāṭ), and a reinscription of European distinctiveness. Whether ʿAflaq understood inqilāb and inḥiṭāṭ as processes or states of being (or both), in other words, it appears that he imagined those concepts could exist in motion or in stasis, though when one becomes the other for ʿAflaq is often unclear.
The struggle for nationalist flourishing by way of the inqilāb requires the manufacture of uniform opinion. ʿAflaq's truth is that “we all feel this feeling, we feel that what we need is not the reform of the state apparatus or the repair of an objective flaw, but rather a deep comprehensive overcoming [inqilāb].” How is this to be achieved? For ʿAflaq, “we must be the nation of revolution [ummat al-inqilāb] before we can accomplish the revolution of the nation [inqilāb al-ummah].” In order to bring about this transformation the Party must be critical of the present reality but somehow divorced from it at the same time. As ʿAflaq puts it, the new Party must be
constituted out of a new type [nawʿ] [of person], one which differs in all ways from the reality that we are rebelling against and wish to be rid of, because the people of revolution [ummat al-inqilāb], which is the Party, must not only prove itself in written goals, not only in what it puts down on paper in terms of programs and methodologies and styles of organization[, but it most also] establish a new rationality [ʿaqaliyya], a new spirit, a new creation.
This new order would be one “with no connection” to what ʿAflaq would refer to as “corrupt sick reality.”Footnote 76 Here is a program for total human transformation, at once moral and material. As many have pointed out, ʿAflaq's notions of inqilāb and inqilābiyya are concerned with metaphysics as well as politics, or, better, his spiritual nationalism demands a novel political metaphysics, one that can accommodate both the Christian foundations of personalism and the “genius” of the Arabs, the Arabic language, and Islam, articulated in this new variety of “Arabic nationalism” (qawmiyya). His experience of alienation may be reminiscent of the Marxisant oppositional stance analyzed by Sartre, which had a fundamental impact on the mid-twentieth-century generation of Arab intellectuals.Footnote 77 But as opposed to the experience of subsequent generations of Baʿthists, there is little to indicate that ʿAflaq and the early Baʿthists—Salah al-Din al-Bitar or Zakī al-Arsūzī—were particularly influenced by Sartre or the existentialist project more broadly. This gesture towards the overcoming of the moribund material circumstances that have laid waste to the spiritual glory of man is more reminiscent of Mounier.
It should be clear by now that there are inherent and knotty, though not necessarily irreconcilable, contradictions in ʿAflaq's thought. His Party of the Revolution should be pure, at least at the outset, unblemished, untouched by the corruption of present reality. Rarely does ʿAflaq explicitly or specifically diagnose the state of social, economic, and political affairs, remaining at the level of generalization instead.Footnote 78 At the same time, however, and despite his regularly negative assessment of Arab political, cultural, and intellectual development in relation to Europe and “the West,” ʿAflaq flatly opposes what he perceives as a kind of relativism (al-nisbiyya), arguing that in the struggle to progress from “humiliation to glory” and “from decay to progress [al-ruqīy],” there is no middle ground, only a quantum leap. Reformist agendas are no use in the escape from stagnation and decline: gradual “development means falling backwards.”Footnote 79 It's all or nothing when it comes to the ideologue of the Party of the inqilāb. Such romantic terminology as “glory” (al-majd), “mission” (al-maṣīr), and “heroism” (al-buṭūlah) would rust over time in the lexical machinery of Baʿthism, even as these terms harked back to language invoked by ʿAflaq and his liberal forebears, especially the liberal Ottomanist from Aleppo, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān al-Kawākibī, who distinguished the “glory” (al-majd) of liberty from the “vaingloriousness” (al-tamajjud) of authoritarian tyrants.Footnote 80
In order to bring about the Arab/ic resurrection, there had to be a movement, one that required a new generation conscious of its historic role. ʿAflaqism promoted a communitarian notion of educating and uplifting the unwashed masses, without taking class, geographical background, work sector, or any other social category all that seriously. The desired characteristics of this generation-to-come included “consciousness,” “morals,” and “belief.” With the exception of “consciousness” or “awareness” (al-waʿī), which resonated with certain traditions of political leftism, morality and belief are two pillars of ʿAflaqist thought that fit more comfortably in traditional or conservative political environments, whether of the liberal democratic variety or the religious modernist and even political Islamist camp. Be that as it may, for ʿAflaq “the new generation is the means of revolt [wasīlat al-inqilāb].”Footnote 81 He cautiously distinguished his position from that of communists and other Arab revolutionaries, however, who found in history a process of inexorable unfolding: “the conscious, believing Arab has no need to find a justification for his awakening in the past, but rather he finds it in reality itself, and the proof is the revolutionist new generation [al-jīl al-jadīd al-inqilābī]”.Footnote 82
In a public talk given on 24 February 1950, at the Baʿth Party office in Homs, ʿAflaq presented a more detailed yet also disorienting description of how to understand inqilāb.Footnote 83 First of all, ʿAflaq reintroduced inqilāb as a historical moment with the significance of an epistemological rupture. He wished to dispense with “well-known expressions” and “abstract terms”:
We understand inqilāb as this true awakening that can no longer be denied or doubted, the awakening [yaqẓah] of the Arab spirit in a phase that divides the phases of human history. The inqilāb in its truth is this awakening, the awakening of the spirit that has been buried under the burdens of stagnant corrupt conditions … This spirit, finally sensing the great danger, the decisive danger, rises up in a decisive revolt [intifāḍa ḥāsimah].Footnote 84
The course of human history can only flow in one direction, against the grain of a degraded reality. But the definition of inqilāb itself then begins to bleed into many others. “Rather than being a political or social program, the inqilāb is this first burst of movement, and this powerful psychological current, this struggle [mughālabah] that must take place, without which any resurrection of the nation is incomprehensible.”Footnote 85 The realization of the ʿAflaqist vision of person, community, and society, which would be tantamount to the flourishing of the Arab/ic nation, is only possible through a process of overcoming or overturning. The notion of struggle (ṣirāʿ) runs throughout ʿAflaq's writings, understood as a means to achieve the inqilāb. But “struggle” becomes an overdetermined term in modern Arabic thought, no doubt in part due to ʿAflaq's own inconsistencies and vacillating. “It is true that the inqilāb is an idea but this idea must have people who understand it and believe in it, [who] represent it and then achieve it. Therefore the inqilāb is the living tools of human beings [and] they are the ones who believe in it and who struggle in the path of its realization.”Footnote 86 In other words, ʿAflaq sees inqilāb as “the image for those who believe in it and work towards it, and not a miracle that falls from the sky or an event external to the will and the deeds of human beings,” which is precisely why its achievement requires a vanguard of sorts, a “small group” (al-fiʾah al-qalīlah) capable of disseminating the message.Footnote 87
In this preliminary exploration of the concept we have already encountered inqilāb as both the condition of its own possibility and the achievement of its fullest potential. ʿAflaq becomes somewhat more confused and confusing in turn when he argues that the inqilāb is also the means to that desired end. “The inqilāb therefore is a way, a way to the desired goal, to the sound society we desire. But it is not one path among other paths; rather, it is the only path.”Footnote 88 Both readers and nonreaders of ʿAflaq, ʿAflaqism, and Baʿthism have tended to respond to such language by dismissing a seemingly addled mind, at worst, or throwing up their hands and settling for an explanation of ʿAflaq as the stuffer of fortune cookies rather than as an intellectual with his thought system based on a seriously considered political philosophy.
Those impoverished understandings of ʿAflaqism notwithstanding, ʿAflaq the philosopher would eventually eclipse ʿAflaq the incipient movement organizer when he turned to epistemological matters. His conceptualization of “Arab/ic nationalism” (qawmiyya), which I have been arguing is an articulation of Arabness and of national belonging, and his conceptualization of “revolution” (inqilāb), which may entail both personal and collective sacrifice or “overcoming,” may both be understood as reflections of ʿAflaq's moral commitments to the sanctity and dignity of “the person.” Simply put, inqilāb is “the struggle of truth against reality,” and it is also a “confirmation of the existence of truth. The inqilāb is the struggle of the future against the present.”Footnote 89 This idea of “futurity” can be located at the interface of Mounierist personalism and the ʿAflaqist call for Arab/ic unity.Footnote 90 If ʿAflaq's dialectic positions an obsolete past and a moribund history against the glorious future-to-come, there remains a crucial tension between the spirit of reformism and the quality of more radical demands for social and political transformation.
ʿAflaq foresaw the kind of revolutionary transformation enabled by inqilāb as what I translate as a “revolutionist movement” (al-ḥarakah al-inqilābiyya). This revolutionist movement is “the opposite of the reformist movement.” Politicians favor “incremental reform,” writes ʿAflaq, because the “profound substitution” represented by the inqilāb is going to be accompanied by violence. Here is another feature of ʿAflaq's theory of “revolution” that smacks of communism, momentarily, by gesturing towards the seizure of material resources by the revolutionary Arab subject. This “deep substitution” in economic life about which ʿAflaq speaks turns out to signify the “expropriation” or “seizure” of lands from the feudalist classes and those territories’ subsequent redistribution among the peasantry. ʿAflaq opposes “developmentalists” or “gradualists” who strive to protect their own interests by maintaining the status quo; who are wary about any such “deep transformation” of the prevailing economic conditions; who do not wish to see revolutions (and here ʿAflaq uses the term thawrāt), disturbances or dangers; in brief, who prefer “slow incrementalism” (al-taṭawwur al-baṭīʾ).Footnote 91 It is noteworthy that ʿAflaq articulated this perspective on social, political, and moral change before the Baʿth Party merged with Akram al-Ḥawrānī’s mass-based Arab Socialist Union from Ḥamā in 1953. To be sure, ʿAflaq's ideas remained loose sketches rather than an elaborated program or even a legible blueprint.
Although the Baʿth may have appeared to constitute little more than an “intellectual school” at that stage, ʿAflaq was thinking about matters of practical organization. Not only did he criticize “the reactionary parties” that stood in the way of Arab/ic resurrection, but also the “false” progressive forces that claimed to be able to accomplish the goals of unity and liberty and socialism without specifying the mechanism of inqilāb. “The inqilāb in the Arab resurrection is the correct path,” ʿAflaq said, in order “to accomplish its principles and to remain true to those who believe in them.”Footnote 92 Here “remaining true” seems evocative of a certain Christian sense of fidelity and devotion rather than the general call to be honest or upright in one's principles. There can be no success for the Baʿthist inqilāb, according to ʿAflaq, until the “revolutionist” spirit is embodied in the hearts and minds of its supporters but also embedded in social relations.Footnote 93 Without the embodiment of the revolutionary spirit of the Baʿth, individual participants in the movement would remain “passive,” tethered to “principles they believe in without comprehending their consequences and the precise logic of their action.” ʿAflaq holds out hope that the “revolutionist organization” (al-tanẓīm al-inqilābī) will be capable of decisively separating the corrupt present reality—“agitated personality” mixed with “interest-based values” and “reactionary rationality”—from the new insurgent Arab generation that wishes to be liberated from such maladies. But contrary to those who only see a mode of collectivist thinking at work, ʿAflaq identifies the outcome of this process as being “the creation of the Arab individual, the foundation of the new generation, the believing responsible conscious individual,” someone who is no less than a “true effective tool in the movement that will change the history of his nation [ummah].”Footnote 94
Arab/ic resurrection and revolution go hand in hand, but the flourishing of “Arabness” is a condition of possibility for the revolution itself. For ʿAflaq, “Arab resurrection” can be “summed up in the word revolution.”Footnote 95 The practical expression of revolution is “struggle” (al-niḍāl), which “isn't restricted to the political struggle alone” because “the struggle for the Arab is not only a style but rather an end in itself.” It is the means by which
the Arab/ic ummah will struggle with itself, will perhaps overcome itself (in the double sense of mughālabah) after such a long slumber, after growing soft, after that surrender to the easy life, after that distancing from the serious and harsh spirit of life, to bring back to it the desire to wrestle with life and fate, to look at life with a long, deep gaze, to see the value in exertion itself before finding it in the fruits of effort [thamarat al-juhd].Footnote 96
This notion of struggle with and against oneself as well as with and against one's own history was at the core of revolutionary Arab politics during the mid-twentieth century. The dialectical tension between spirit and matter, an echo of Hegelian dualism that ʿAflaq articulates through metaphors that invoke the cause and concept of revolution, including the opposition of “spirit” and “soul” to “forms and appearances,” remained generative but unresolved.Footnote 97 The “struggle” ʿAflaq identified with revolution cannot be transcended by political change alone, however. Even if by some “coincidence or a miracle” it turned out that “the Arabs” should find themselves suddenly liberated from every last one of their “oppressors” and “corrupters,” and if, “by some strange magic,” extant governments were “replaced by virtuous nationalist governments concerned about the common good,” inqilāb would still not have been achieved yet. When revolution fails to address the problem of “the soul,” in other words, political change amounts to little more than a “superficial exchange.” Political transformation ought to open up new horizons of thought, to shake the foundations of lived experience. ʿAflaq insists that individuals, once free in sprit but also embodiments of a practically liberated spirit, must be the instruments of revolutionary praxis.Footnote 98 Mounier once wrote something comparable: “The life of society is a permanent guerilla war [une guerrilla permanente]. Where hostility subsides, indifference grows. The paths of camaraderie, friendship or love seem lost in this immense failure of human brotherhood.”Footnote 99 Mounier's, therefore, is a slightly different conception of struggle. “The world of others is not a garden of delights,” Mounier wrote. “It is a constant provocation to struggle, adaptation, and transcendence. It constantly reintroduces risk and suffering where we are at peace”Footnote 100 This melancholic view of human experience, emotionality, and the (im)possiblity of communion in a world of unceasing struggle is one of the hallmarks of ʿAflaqist discourse as well as some (thought certainly not all) subsequent iterations of Baʿthism. Whether this is a family resemblance, a genetic similarity, or any other metaphor for comparision, the notion of sacrifice in ʿAflaqism is quite similar to what is called sacrifice in Mounierist left-personalism. If this is the case, it might be argued that ʿAflaq's revolution heralded the birth of a new epistemological framework, one adequate to the time of the Baʿth, one that in turn could usher in the birth of new identities, diverse forms of cultural production, a new conception of state and society, and a novel understanding of the postcolonial Arab/ic subject.
What was Baʿthism?
This inquiry has been sparked by a disarmingly simple question that has yet to be adequately answered: what was Baʿthism? A more satisfying account of the making of postcolonial Syria, the nation-state and beyond, would locate the beginnings of Baʿthism within a different genealogy, one that considers the influence of “organismic nationalism” and Mounierist left-personalism. In his dulcet language, Albert Hourani explained the surge of Baʿthism out of the roiling seas of Arabic thought deep in the later period of Hourani's liberal age. In Hourani's words, “the tide of feeling, amongst the young, seemed to be flowing in favour of a more comprehensive Arab nationalism. It was given political form by the Baʿth party.”Footnote 101 Contrary to pundits and historians who cling to rigid and uninformed perspectives on the historical Baʿthist project, Hourani concluded, “a coherent doctrine was implied in its constitution and formulated by its founder, Michel ʿAflaq.”Footnote 102 In order to construct that coherent and readable narrative concerning the historical becoming of Arabic thought in the Nahda, however, Hourani had little choice but to bracket nonliberal traditions of political thought in the decolonizing Arab Middle East, including Baʿthism and other Arab/ic nationalisms.
This essay, by contrast, places ʿAflaq, improbably, along a jagged line connecting Enlightenment (Nahda) and nonliberalism to the history of postcolonial Syria. If he managed to cultivate a strain of radical Arab/ic thought from the middle ground of Nahda sensibilities, ʿAflaq's intellectual references to Arab Awakening (al-yaqẓah al-ʿarabiyya), his invocation of “pre-awakening” topoi such as slumber (ghafwah) and softening (istirkhāʾ), along with his erratic experimentation with spatiotemporal concepts such as deviation (inḥirāf) and belatedness (taʾakhkhur), all attest to his embrace of linear progressive historical thinking.Footnote 103 “The Baʿth gave the public wider ambitions, on both the social and national plane,” ʿAflaq said in an interview with the late British journalist and historian Patrick Seale conducted in Beirut on 7 January 1961.Footnote 104 At that point, Syria had not yet been traumatically torn asunder from Nasser's Egypt; the two countries remained conjoined in the United Arab Republic. Up until the 1960s, the Baʿth remained a vanguardist party spearheaded by ʿAflaq, a man often dismissed as a belletristic writer and dilletante. This paper does not fundamentally dispute the long-sustained claim that ʿAflaq was not a mass mobilizer. Nonetheless, ʿAflaqism and the emergent Baʿth were informed in large measure by his capacious and visionary thought, however confused and contradictory it might have seemed at times. A fresh understanding of the intellectual origins of Baʿthism is imperative before historians can begin to rewrite histories of postcolonial Syria in a manner that does not foreclose the horizons of imagination for possible future Syrias yet to come. Although the paradigm of a “liberal age” or “golden age” of Middle East intellectual history has recently received renewed attention, not enough space has been given to rethinking Middle East intellectual history in the decolonial age, by which I mean the various and overlapping currents of thought that coalesced and continue to evolve in the time of the postcolonial Middle East.Footnote 105
Coda: Dancing on the Corpse's Ashes
ʿAflaqism was the soul of Baʿthism, Michel ʿAflaq its first incarnation. Subsequent sectarian polemics would seek to discredit him, to deny his truth, as he was beset by attacks that ranged from politically minded character assassination by intellectual rivals, antipathetic activist groups, and mistrustful military factions to even more violent forms of enmity. ʿAflaq has been reduced to an irrelevant belletrist, pseudo-political philosopher, a quasi-mystical wanderer, an uncategorizable character. Consequently, ʿAflaq and ʿAflaqism were marginalized, maligned, and consigned to misunderstanding, malicious misrepresentation, and eventually exile from Syria and social death in Syrian history. My critical reconsideration and reconstruction of ʿAflaqism between personalism and Arab/ic nationalism are essential for a more convincing and accurate narrative of postcolonial Syria. In this essay I wished to lay the groundwork for future inquiries into the intellectual history of ʿAflaq along with other neglected figures in postcolonial Syria, a scholarly project that would circumvent the historiographical dead ends that reduce ʿAflaq and ʿAflaqism to impenetrable “mystical,” “metaphysical,” or “incoherent” logics. In sum, the aim here is to both gesture and move towards new ways of imagining postcolonial Middle East intellectual history. Emmanuel Mounier spoke of “the primacy of the spiritual,” which he understood as being neither constrained by traditional clerical authority nor limited to the Hegelianism widespread in Third Republic French intellectual culture.Footnote 106 Liberal political thought and historicism fail to capture one of the fundamental aspects of Baʿthist ideology, namely its concern with the “destiny” and “mission” of “the Arab person” over and above the liberty of the private individual subject of liberalism. In language that wouldn't be too far off for someone writing about ʿAflaq, John Hellman describes Mounierism as “a peculiar mixture of violent language and private timidity, full of ringing exhortations to political commitment while wrestling with a deep aversion to politics. [Mounier] was sometimes hot-headed and unjust, often confused, and misunderstanding has been compounded by the rewriting of his personal history at every turn.”Footnote 107 The history and theory of personalism need to be integrated further into a history of ideas that could address but also resist such belabored conceptual frameworks as “diffusion” and “adaptation” or “Eurocentrism” and “indigeneity,” and so on. This essay—and the larger research project from which it is drawn—has aimed to fundamentally refigure Michel ʿAflaq, ʿAflaqism, and the Baʿth more broadly, but also contribute a chapter to the complex global history of personalism.
Some might wonder, how much intellectual nourishment can ever come from such a painstaking search for hardy kernels of insight in the barren soil of Baʿthism? If ʿAflaq's thought is so muddied, as “eclectic” as most analysts have concluded, so internally contradictory and disconnected from real life, what is the point of attempting to reconstruct a coherent worldview out of his scattered works? What good would it do to scour a political–intellectual field that spawned regimes as vile and repressive as those of Hafiz al-Asad and Saddam Hussein? First of all, most simply put, such an approach requires that we read history forwards rather than accepting the canard that the seeds of the Baʿthist dictatorships in Syria and Iraq were planted during the Second World War, only to lie dormant in the intellectual soil of Baʿthism as explicated by ʿAflaq, al-Bīṭār, and al-Arsūzī. I take seriously Pheng Cheah's suggestion that even though decolonizing and postcolonial nationalist discourses may come out of the idealist philosophical tradition, they also harbor liberatory potentialities. “The fact that these ideas received their first elaborate formalization in German,” Cheah convincingly argues, “does not make decolonizing and postcolonial nationalism derivative of a European model. They are comparable responses to a common experience of intense structural transformation.”Footnote 108 With respect to Syria, too, there is value in reconsidering the emancipatory potential of decolonizing nationalism (ʿAflaqism-cum-Baʿthism) before and beyond the institutionalization of postcolonial (statist) nationalism. Second, by considering the delicate relationship between ʿAflaqism and liberalism, on the one side, and authoritarian forms of thought such as fascism and communism, on the other side, one might begin to prefer to situate Michel ʿAflaq both in the history of the “liberal age” in the Middle East, the Nahda, and in the “illiberal age” at the same time. In terms of modern Arab/ic intellectual history, ʿAflaq might thereby be inscribed among the last of the udabāʾ, among what I would call the rem(a)inders of the liberal age, intellectuals who survived the arrival of the post-liberal age. The legacies of the Nahda were no doubt contradictory. The limits of liberalism were tested and occasionally redefined by figures including ʿAflaq, along with supporters of the Baʿth and other post-Nahda forms of politics, ideology, and culture. Third, and perhaps most significantly, the strangeness of ʿAflaq's worldview suggests other genealogies of modern Arab/ic intellectual history that need not be slavish towards Eurogenic disciplinary norms nor restricted by the regnant methodological categories of global intellectual history. An unconsidered world of Arab/ic personalism(s) remains to be discovered by the intellectual historian who wishes to explore some of the richness and diversity of life-worlds in Syria that have mercifully not yet been lost, despite the physical and human wreckage. With a little luck, some of those imaginative and intellectual worlds may yet live on.
But living on is not always so simple. The repressive regimes in Syria and Iraq embraced ʿAflaq and his supporters at different points in history, as visionaries and leaders for a while, but ultimately turned on them when their revolution (inqilāb) was no longer sufficiently radical, suitably focused, or pragmatically efficient. ʿAflaq was exiled from Syria after the Second Baʿth coup in February 1966, then traveled around the world before settling in Iraq, where he would finally be buried, in a mausoleum in Baghdad reminiscent of what I would call Baʿthist aesthetics. The style of the building, which I have only seen in photographs, is at once Islam/ic and Arab/ic. As mentioned above, it is shameful enough that liberal intellectuals who have no meaningful connection to Syria or the Syrian people should have for so long felt at liberty to casually conflate Baʿthism with Nazism, fascism, and totalitarianism. Far worse, and far more disgraceful for the citizenry of the United States of America, was when the regime of George W. Bush seized on the pretense of widespread fear and despairing bloodlust following the heinous terrorist attacks on New York, Virginia, and Pennsylvania on 11 September 2001 in order to militarily destroy the infrastructure of Baʿthist Iraq by establishing a military occupation that would last for years. Baghdad was conquered by the US and its allies in 2003, who set up their command center in what came to be known as the Green Zone. It was in that sector of the capital city that the mausoleum housing the grave of Michel ʿAflaq happened to be found. The site was initially transformed into a recreation center for occupying soldiers, mercenaries, and administrative staff. Later, it was converted into a shopping center.Footnote 109 It isn't clear how profound the biopolitical, intellectual, humanitarian, and cultural shock of the US invasion and occupation of Iraq will turn out to be over the longer term. Still, a more rigorous history of postcolonial Syria and Iraq, of the modern intellectual history of Baʿthism, in particular, would be a more honorable testament to the those who have endured these tragic histories than the forgetting of the desecrated ruins that are Michel ʿAflaq's worldly remains.
