The tragedy of Makdisi’s narrative comes with the Balfour Declaration in favour of a Jewish ‘homeland’ in
Palestine when a sectarian state for Jews was introduced to the Middle East at the moment when Arabs
were (hopefully) adhering to a new model of non-sectarian secular life
When the Sharif Hussain was negotiating with Colonel Henry McMahon over the future of the Ottoman
Middle East – the all critical correspondence containing Britain’s most outrageous betrayal of the Arabs –
he (Hussain) wrote of how “the Muslim is indistinguishable from the Christian, for they are both
descendants of one forefather”, while McMahon challenged Hussain’s claim to Syria and what is now
Lebanon on the grounds that they were not “purely Arab”. The Christians of the region, in other words,
could not be “Arab” in the eyes of the British.
Hussain’s non-sectarian nationalism was all the more instrumental since it almost coincided with the 1919
constitution of Syria when Hussain’s son Faisal briefly ran his “Arab kingdom”, which guaranteed freedom
of religious thought and religious practices for “all sects” and promised that each community (Christian,
Muslim, Jewish) could administer its own personal status laws and local councils. In the same year, as
Makdisi reminds us, the Egyptian Christian Coptic priest Qommus Sergius preached national unity from
inside the great Al-Azhar in Cairo, the most venerable Muslim religious institution in Egypt, perhaps in the
Arab world.
As a victory gesture, Iraqis hold an
upside-down black flag of Isis outside
the destroyed Al-Nuri Mosque in the
Old City of Mosul (AFP/Getty)This “new” kind of secular nationalism was bursting forth within the Arab world at the same time as
Anatolia was being emptied of its Christian Armenians by the Muslim Turks. Christian Arabs were largely
unaffected and untouched by this act of genocide. Turkish reforms, originally secular in character and at
first welcomed by the Armenian themselves, turned into sectarian nationalism and, I suspect, were already
taking on the aspect of fascism when Ataturk created the Turkish state. Ataturk’s passing was mourned by
the Nazi paper Volkisher Beobachter with a black-fringed front page. This heritage, alas, continues in
Turkey even today.
Few Arabs in the Middle East today dispute the sectarianism which the French, British and later American
empires re-injected into the Middle East. The French ripped Lebanon from Syria and set up minorities –
especially the Alawites – to control Sunni Muslims in Syria. The British were intent on creating a Jewish