Great Syrian Revolt Research Articles

Citizen Strangers: Identity Labelling and Discourse in the French Mandatory Syria, 1920–1932

This article explores the roles played by Armenian refugees in the politics of identity in Mandatory Syria by examining how their arrival shaped the discourses of inclusion and exclusion. It does so by analysing three key events: the Armenians’ access to citizenship and voting rights (1924–1925), the Great Syrian Revolt (1925–1927), and the arrival of new Armenian refugees (1929–1930) – during which a ‘Syrian’ identity was gradually confirmed against the Armenian newcomers. Making use of discursive narratives by Syrian and Armenian political parties, media outlets and pamphlets, the article demonstrates that the discourse against the Armenian refugees played a decisive role for both hosting and incoming communities to construct mutually excluding national identities. If the Arab nationalists used the anti-Armenian discourse as an opportunity to define a ‘Syrian’ national identity closely identified with Islam and Arabness, similarly, it was used by the Armenian political elite to mobilise Armenian refugees.

Three murders and a mandate: on property and French sovereignty in interwar Syria

ABSTRACT This paper is an investigation into a triple homicide in the French Mandate of Syria in 1925. It first suggests that the official decision to single out the murder of three French land registry employees in the midst of the Great Syrian Revolt, a two-year war against French imperial rule, is revealing of the Mandate’s attempts to legitimize its dominion over Syria. It then argues that the capacity in which the three slain agents operated, as employees tasked with the break-up of mushâ’ properties, is central to their demise. Indeed the Mandate advertised the individualization of mushâ’ holdings (based on a rotation of land use rights) as a rational measure meant to improve living standards in rural Syria. But Syrian rebels also perceived such interventions as an attempt by French authorities to circumvent the Mandate-imposed restrictions to their authority through the construction of what is here called ‘material sovereignty.’

The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian TragedyWe Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from SyriaSyria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee State

The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian TragedyWe Crossed a Bridge and It Trembled: Voices from SyriaSyria: The Making and Unmaking of a Refugee State

OTTOMAN MODERNITY, COLONIALISM, AND INSURGENCY IN THE INTERWAR ARAB EAST

AbstractThe foundations of both Arab and Turkish nationalism lay in the late Ottoman mass education and conscription project and in the region-wide struggle against colonial rule in the 1920s and 1930s. The anticolonial insurgencies of the 1920s and 1930s have passed into history as the formative expressions of new nations: the Turkish War of Independence, the Iraqi revolt of 1920, the Syrian Battle of Maysalun, the Great Syrian Revolt, and the Palestinian uprisings of 1920, 1929, and 1936. But all insurgents of the 1920s had been Ottoman subjects, and many and probably most had been among the nearly three million men mobilized into the Ottoman army between 1914 and 1918. The Ottoman State, like all 19th-century European powers, had made mass education and conscription a centerpiece of policy in the decades before the Great War.

The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Syrian Nationalism. By Michael Provence (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005) 240 pp. $50.00 cloth $21.95 paper

The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Syrian Nationalism. By Michael Provence (Austin, University of Texas Press, 2005) 240 pp. $50.00 cloth $21.95 paper

MICHAEL PROVENCE. The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism. (Modern Middle East Series, number 22.) Austin: University of Texas Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 209. Cloth $50.00, paper $21.95

MICHAEL PROVENCE. The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism. (Modern Middle East Series, number 22.) Austin: University of Texas Press. 2005. Pp. xii, 209. Cloth $50.00, paper $21.95

The Great Syrian Revolt and the Rise of Arab Nationalism

The more things change, the more they stay the same. Any reader of MichaelProvence’s study of the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 might be forgiven suchcynicism. Here is a fine and well-documented example of an earlier attemptby a western power to come to grips with the Middle East – with unfortunateresults. It involved foreigners infallibly confident in themselves andtheir mission, compliant local elites out for self-aggrandizement, insurgentspreaching religious-inflected nationalism, the gulf between all three, and theensuing horror. The Great Syrian Revolt was a pivotal event both for Syriaand for Arabs at large. It allowed the former to conceptualize themselves asa nation while serving as an exemplar for the latter, thereby playing a formativerole in the development of national consciousness in the region. Byinfluencing the Baathist movement two decades later, it had ramificationsfar beyond its failure.Provence devotes much of the first chapter to staking out interesting theoreticalground. Rejecting the notion of insurrection as being largely a battleof ideas directed by intellectuals, he argues persuasively for an approachto the rebellion centered on a rural, rather than an urban, setting and for acasus belli founded on French misrule and economic relations between differingclasses of Syrian society. His central thesis is that the grain tradebetween the Druze in the fertile Hawran region of southern Syria andmiddle-class merchants, mostly from the Maydan quarter of Damascus, wasthe central axis upon which the revolt turned.Such an approach has its drawbacks, namely, the paucity of documentaryevidence from contemporary rural Syria. Much of the latter half of thefirst chapter is devoted to this difficulty. In casting a judicious eye over therange of primary source material, both French and Arabic, Provence ...

The Invention of a Populist Islamic Leader: Badr Al-dìn Al-Hasanì, the Religious Educational Movement and The Great Syrian Revolt

AbstractBadr al-Dìn al-Hasanì (1850-1935) appears in the biographical literature of Syria as its foremost man of religion from World War I to the Great Revolt. This article examines his life and work within the context of the gradual shift of the Syrian ulema of his day from the older "politics of notables" to a new strategy of popular mobilization. It argues that Badr al-Dìn's image was "invented" during the early Mandate by disciples in search of legitimization for their populist agendas of an Islamic educational system and agitation against French rule. They accordingly presented him as a self-standing scholar who transcended all religious divisions, reprimanded "unjust" rulers and supported the Arab cause. This "romantic" image of Badr al-Dìn was to prevail over the alternative image of him as an accommodating religious notable which emerges from the French sources.

A Transnational Dialogue from the Arab-Argentine Immigrant Press

Beyond the geographical borders of the Middle East, discourses and debates about Middle Eastern women played an important role in the Arabic immigrant press inthe Mahjar (diaspora). This article explores the particular case of al-Istiklaal in the final moments and aftermath of the Great Syrian Revolt, “the largest, longest, andmost destructive of the Arab Middle Eastern revolts” (Provence, 2005, p. 12). From its first issue in June 1926 until late 1929, this Arab-Argentine newspaper systematically attacked the French Mandate and advocated for an independent Syria and Lebanon, which should be part of a larger pan-Arab political entity.