Scout’s Honour: Contending for Loyalty among the Youth

Abstract

This chapter tackles features shared by scouting in both Syria and Lebanon. These include the main foreign influences from French, British, Italian, and German sources, as well as local political, religious, and military components. The parallel national movements shared a number of features, namely their appropriation of different European models of youth organization, their implication in politics, their intermingling of religion and scouting, as well as their association with fascism and militarism. The foreign influences, which are explored here first, comprised an unlikely mix of French and Anglo–Saxon scouting models alongside Italian and German fascist youth organization. Overall, local scout movements demonstrate the extensive cross-pollination between foreign imports and local innovations, the implication of scouting in politics, and the fluid philosophical underpinnings of the movement as a whole.