Arab Nationalism and Competing Loyalties: From the 1920s to the Arab Revolt in Palestine

Abstract

This chapter looks at a growing number of voices in the three most important Arab domains of the time—Iraq, Greater Syria, and Egypt—who were declaring themselves to be Arabs, sometimes in conjunction with, at other times to the exclusion of, other identities. Beyond the claims of historical validity, Iraq in the 1920s and 1930s was one of only four countries with a measure of independence, at least in matters of domestic policy. It was in Iraq that the intellectual headquarters of Arab nationalism resided in the person of Sati‘ al-Husri, whose ideas were eliciting a receptive echo among the country’s political elites. Indeed, Husri and other Arab nationalists, many of whom were his disciples, set out to make Iraq the beacon from which Arab nationalist ideas would spread to the rest of the Arab world. The chapter also studies the 1936–1939 Arab revolt in Palestine.