When Europe's Great War engulfed the Ottoman Empire, Arab nationalists rose in revolt against their Turkish rulers and allied with the British on the promise of an independent Arab state. In October 1918, the Arabs' military leader, Prince Faisal, victoriously entered Damascus and proclaimed a constitutional government in an independent Greater Syria. Faisal won American support for self-determination at the Paris Peace Conference, but other Entente powers plotted to protect their colonial interests. Under threat of European occupation, the Syrian-Arab Congress declared independence on March 8, 1920 and crowned Faisal king of a 'civil representative monarchy.' Sheikh Rashid Rida, the most prominent Islamic thinker of the day, became Congress president and supervised the drafting of a constitution that established the world's first Arab democracy and guaranteed equal rights for all citizens, including non-Muslims. But France and Britain refused to recognize the Damascus government and instead imposed a system of mandates on the pretext that Arabs were not yet ready for self-government. In July 1920, the French invaded and crushed the Syrian state. The fragile coalition of secular modernizers and Islamic reformers that had established democracy was destroyed, with profound consequences that reverberate still. Using previously untapped primary sources, including contemporary newspaper accounts, reports of the Syrian-Arab Congress, and letters and diaries from participants, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs is a groundbreaking account of an extraordinary, brief moment of unity and hope - and of its destruction.

An accessible and wide-ranging survey of modern Arab culture covering political, intellectual and social aspects.

The first systematic comparative analysis of political behavior throughout the entire Arab world, from Morocco to Kuwait. In an attempt to explain why the Arab world remains in ferment, Hudson discusses such crucial factors as Arab and Islamic identity, ethnic and religious minorities, the crisis of authority, the effects of imperialism, and modernization. "An impressive work of scholarship on the political culture and changing society of the entire Arab World. The author gives us a good picture of each country as he pursues his general themes of legitimacy, nationalism, Arabism, and the inevitable 'modernization.'"-- Foreign Affairs "Hudson has succeeded brilliantly in surveying and analyzing the entire range of contemporary Arab politics."-- Library Journal "Here for the first time is a really good general textbook of Middle Eastern politics. . . . Hudson has managed to provide detailed information about each Arab country within a sophisticated overall analytical framework, which substantially explains the situation in each country."-- Malcolm H. Kerr, Middle Eastern Studies Association Bulletin "What can be said with certainty is that all those professionally concerned with the Middle East will have to cope with this book in one way or another. . . . What is outstanding is its combination of rigorous analysis and breadth of coverage. If the book's immediate concerns are those of the political scientist, its findings and implications are important to all of us."-- Alan W. Horton, The Middle East Journal

This book is a comprehensive examination of the historical process of social formation that gave rise to the communal consciousness of the Arab nation and determined its sense of identity. It aims to provide a historical context for the assessment of prevailing concepts and suggests hypotheses for the development of modern Arab consciousness. The book firstly traces Arab origins and the formation of Arab societies after the emergence of Islam, assessing the perspectives and factors that shaped the rise of the Arab nation in both practical and intellectual terms. It then examines the beginning of the Arab awakening and the course of its development in the latter half of the nineteenth century and the first two decades of the twentieth, focusing on the emergence of a nationalist perspective in the development of intellectual positions on patriotism and Arabism.

In this seminal study, Jane Hathaway presents a wide-ranging reassessment of the effects of Ottoman rule on the Arab Lands of Egypt, Greater Syria, Iraq and Yemen - the first of its kind in over forty years. Challenging outmoded perceptions of this period as a demoralizing prelude to the rise of Arab nationalism and Arab nation-states in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, Hathaway depicts an era of immense social, cultural, economic and political change which helped to shape the foundations of today's modern Middle and Near East. Taking full advantage of a wide range of Arabic and Ottoman primary sources, she examines the changing fortunes of not only the political elite but also the broader population of merchants, shopkeepers, peasants, tribal populations, religious scholars, women, and ethnic and religious minorities who inhabited this diverse and volatile region. With masterly concision and clarity, Hathaway guides the reader through all the key current approaches to and debates surrounding Arab society during this period. This is far more than just another political history; it is a global study which offers an entirely new perspective on the era and region as a whole.

This volume -- an indispensable contribution to an understanding of contemporary Arab history -- comprises twenty-seven important studies by the eminent Lebanese historian Marwan R Buheiry, who died in London in 1986. In the course of his distinguished career at the American University of Beirut, he published many studies on the political, economic, social, and intellectual history of the modern Arab world, in particular of Lebanon and the Arab East in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. The studies published in this volume revolve around four main themes: European Perceptions of the Orient; The Superpowers and the Arab World; The Economic History of the Middle East; Middle Eastern Intellectual and Artistic History. Many of these studies were first published in French or Arabic translation, this volume publishes the original English text and includes much previously unpublished material. The final chapter includes a selection of 49 photographs from Buheiry's photograph collection.

During the second half of the twentieth century, the Arab intellectual and political scene polarized between a search for totalizing doctrines--nationalist, Marxist, and religious--and radical critique. Arab thinkers were reacting to the disenchanting experience of postindependence Arab states, as well as to authoritarianism, intolerance, and failed development. They were also responding to successive defeats by Israel, humiliation, and injustice. The first book to take stock of these critical responses, this volume illuminates the relationship between cultural and political critique in the work of major Arab thinkers, and it connects Arab debates on cultural malaise, identity, and authenticity to the postcolonial issues of Latin America and Africa, revealing the shared struggles of different regions and various Arab concerns.

How the “recycling” of the Ottoman Empire’s uses of genealogy and religion created new political orders in the Middle East In this groundbreaking book, Adam Mestyan argues that post-Ottoman Arab political orders were not, as many historians believe, products of European colonialism but of the process of “recycling empire.” Mestyan shows that in the post–World War I Middle East, Allied Powers officials and ex-Ottoman patricians collaborated to remake imperial institutions, recycling earlier Ottoman uses of genealogy and religion in the creation of new polities, with the exception of colonized Palestine. The polities, he contends, should be understood not in terms of colonies and nation states but as subordinated sovereign local states—localized regimes of religious, ethnic, and dynastic sources of imperial authority. Meanwhile, governance without sovereignty became the new form of Western domination. Drawing on hitherto unused Ottoman, French, Syrian, and Saudi archival sources, Mestyan explores ideas and practices of creating composite polities in the interwar Middle East and, doing so, sheds light on local agency in the making of the forgotten Kingdom of the Hijaz, Jordan, Egypt, Saudi Arabia, and Syria, the first Muslim republic. Mestyan considers the adjustment of imperial Islam to a world without a Muslim empire, discussing the post-Ottoman Egyptian monarchy and the intertwined making of Saudi Arabia and the State of Syria in the 1920s and 1930s. Mestyan’s innovative analysis shows how an empire-based theory of the modern political order can help refine our understanding of political dynamics throughout the twentieth century and down to the turbulent present day.

Kamrava traces the fateful odyssey of domestic Arab politics from the early 1950, through he upheavals of the Arab Spring, to the present day.