Pan-Arab versus Local Nationalism II: al-Husri’s Critique of Antun Sa’ada and his Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP)

Abstract

The Egyptian variety of local nationalism provoked al-Husri’s criticism on two grounds. In the first place, its regional limitation contradicted his own Pan-Arab views, and in the second place, it derived from bourgeois-liberal individualism, while al-Husri virtually sanctifies the community in his theory of nationalism. The Syrian variant of local nationalism differs from the Egyptian one: it was developed largely by Antun Sa’ada, and found its organisational framework in his Syrian Social Nationalist Party (al-Hizb al-Qawmi al-Ijtima’i al-Suri), SSNP.1 At first sight Sa’ada’s germanophile theory of nationalism, which emphasises the notion of the community even more radically than al-Husri’s, seems to differ from the latter only in its denial of the existence of an ‘Arab’ nation, and in its application to the ‘Syrian nation’ whose Arabness Sa’ada disputes. In fact the difference is more fundamental, as will be shown.