1. From Albert Hourani’s foreword to Rashid Ismail Khalidi, British Policy towards Syria and Palestine, 1906 –1914 (London: Ithaca Press, 1980), ii. [BACK]

2. See Ulrich W. Haarmann, “Ideology and History, Identity and Alterity: The Arab Image of the Turk from the ‘Abbasids to Modern Egypt,” IJMES 20 (1988): 175–96. Representative of a segment of modern Turkish opinion on Arabs is İlhan Arsel’s Arap Milliyetçiliği ve Türkler (İstanbul: İnkılap, 1987). [BACK]

3. The Ottoman surrender to the Entente powers and the resignation of the wartime government in October 1918 is generally regarded as the end of the constitutional period. The ouster of the Ottoman dynasty in November 1922 or the declaration of the Turkish Republic in October 1923 constitute equally valid end points. [BACK]

4. Much of the correspondence and minutes of the Committee of Union and Progress, the paramount political organization in this period, is in these categories. [BACK]

5. Karl Deutsch, Nationalism and Its Alternatives (New York: Alfred A. Knopf, 1969), 50. [BACK]

6. Cyril E. Black and L. Carl Brown, Modernization in the Middle East: The Ottoman Empire and Its Afro-Asian Successors (Princeton, N.J.: Darwin Press, 1992), 160. [BACK]

7. For instance, Ömer Kürkçüoğlu’s Osmanlı Devleti’ne Karşı Arap Ba ğımsızlık Hareketi (Ankara: Ankara Üniversitesi Siyasal Bilgiler Fakültesi, 1982) relies predominantly on British archival documents in examining Turkish-Arab relations. Zekeriya Kurşun’s more recent book on the topic constitutes a fresh departure in its use of Arabic published materials and Ottoman newspapers. Yol Ayırımında Türk-Arap İlişkileri (İstanbul: İrfan, 1992). [BACK]

8. The Ottomans conquered Syria and Egypt in 1517–18 and had to abandon all Arab provinces in 1917–18. [BACK]

9. Frank Füredi discusses this problem with respect to Western countries. Mythical Past, Elusive Future: History and Society in an Anxious Age (London: Pluto Press, 1992), 4–7. [BACK]

10. George Antonius, The Arab Awakening: The Story of the Arab National Movement (New York: Paragon, 1979). First published in 1938. [BACK]

11. Zeine Zeine, The Emergence of Arab Nationalism, 3d ed. (New York: Caravan, 1973). First published in 1958. [BACK]

12. Ibid., 132. [BACK]

13. Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1798–1939 (London: Oxford University Press, 1970). Also, “The Arab Awakening: Forty Years After,” in his The Emergence of the Modern Middle East (Berkeley and Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1981), 193–215. [BACK]

14. A. L. Tibawi, A Modern History of Syria (London: Macmillan, 1969). [BACK]

15. “The Ottoman Background of the Modern Middle East,” in Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, 8–11. [BACK]

16. “Ottoman Reform and the Politics of Notables,” in Hourani, The Emergence of the Modern Middle East, 62. [BACK]

17. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Duri, The Historical Formation of the Arab Nation (London: Croom Helm, 1987). [BACK]

18. Ibid., 215. [BACK]

20. Ibid., 148–79. First published in Middle East Journal 16 (1962): 145–168. [BACK]

21. For a more nuanced and concise articulation of these points three decades later, see Ernest Dawn’s “The Origins of Arab Nationalism,” in The Origins of Arab Nationalism, ed. Khalidi et al. (New York: Columbia University Press, 1991). [BACK]

22. Rashid Khalidi, “Social Forces in the Rise of the Arab Movement in Syria,” in From Nationalism to Revolutionary Islam, ed. Said A. Arjomand (Albany: SUNY Press, 1984), 69ff. Also by Khalidi, “Arab Nationalism in Syria: The Formative Years, 1908–1914,” in Nationalism in a Non-National State, ed. W. Haddad and W. Ochsenwald (Columbus, Ohio: Ohio State University Press, 1977); “Ottomanism and Arabism in Syria before 1914: A Reassessment,” in Origins of Arab Nationalism, ed. Khalidi et al.; and “The Press as a Source for Modern Arab Political History: ‘Abd al-Ghani al-‘Uraysi and al-Mufid,” Arab Studies Quarterly 3 (1981). This last article occurs in slightly modified form also in Intellectual Life in the Arab East, 1890–1939, ed. Marwan R. Buheiry (Beirut: American University of Beirut Press, 1981). [BACK]

23. See, for instance, William L. Cleveland, The Making of an Arab Nationalist: Ottomanism and Arabism in the Life and Thought of Sati‘ al-Husri (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1971); Philip Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism: The Politics of Damascus, 1860–1920 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983); and Mary Wilson, King Abdullah, Britain, and the Making of Jordan (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987). [BACK]

24. Thus, in a recent reassessment of the scholarship on the topic, Mahmoud Haddad sees early Arab political nationalism as the outcome of (1) “opposition to Turkish nationalism and Pan-Turkism,” (2) “the Turcocentric Ottomanism of the CUP” (i.e., Young Turk centralization), and (3) prospects of European control of Arab areas. In an attempt to reconcile the different viewpoints on the genesis of Arab nationalism, Haddad urges distinguishing among cultural, social, and political dimensions of Arabism. “The Rise of Arab Nationalism Reconsidered,” IJMES 26 (1994): 213. [BACK]

25. Rifa‘t ‘Ali Abou-el-Haj, Formation of the Modern State: The Ottoman Empire, Sixteenth to Eighteenth Centuries (Albany: State University of New York Press, 1991), 63–64. [BACK]

26. Ibid., 69. [BACK]

27. Şerif Mardin, “Center-Periphery Relations: A Key to Turkish Politics?” in Post-Traditional Societies, ed. S. N. Eisenstadt (New York: Norton, 1972), 175. [BACK]

28. Eric Hobsbawm, Nations and Nationalism since 1780 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990), 73–74. [BACK]

29. Ibid., 86–87. [BACK]

30. Eugene Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914 (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 1976). Weber describes France close to a century after the 1789 Revolution as “an entity formed by conquest and by political and administrative decisions formulated in (or near) Paris” (p. 485) and the French nation “not as a given reality but as a work-in-progress, a model of something at once to be built and to be treated for political reasons as already in existence” (p. 493). [BACK]

31. Hobsbawm, 93. [BACK]

32. Ernest Gellner, Nations and Nationalism (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1983), 1. [BACK]

33. John Breuilly, Nationalism and the State (Manchester: Manchester University Press, 1982), 11. [BACK]

34. See, for instance, Hroch’s “From National Movement to the Fully-Formed Nation,” New Left Review 198 (1993): 6–7. [BACK]

35. Hobsbawm, 12. [BACK]

36. Edward Shils, Center and Periphery: Essays in Macrosociology (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 1975), 11. [BACK]

37. Even though Abdülhamid was not deposed until 1909, the 1908 Revolution marks the end of Hamidian period. [BACK]

38. Bassam Tibi describes the revolt as “the backwards-oriented utopia of an Arab Caliphate coexisting with the aspirations of a modern nation building.” Arab Nationalism: A Critical Enquiry, 2d ed. (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1990), 21. [BACK]