Arab Nationalism • 207ing. Some became scholars and writers. Before long they were leading the
Arabic literary revival, which turned into a nationalist movement, just as
happened to literary movements in some European nations. The growth of
nationalism was also fostered by such American ideas as using the schools to
develop moral character, promoting benevolent activities, and teaching stu¬
dents to create new institutions to fit changing conditions.
According to legend, the first Arab nationalist party was a Beirut secret
society founded around 1875 by five early graduates of the American Uni¬
versity. More recently, careful research by a professor at that institution has
shown that these students, all Christians, were probably seeking the inde¬
pendence of what we now call Lebanon—not the whole Arab world—from
the Ottoman Empire. Anyway, the secret society did not last long. But the
commitment of students and alumni of the American University of Beirut,
in both the nineteenth and the twentieth centuries, has nurtured the ideas
of Arab nationalism and spread them among both Muslim and Christian
speakers of Arabic. The American missionaries hoped to convert Arab
youths to Protestantism through exposure to the Arabic Bible; the unin¬
tended outcome was to make them cherish even more their heritage of
Arabic literature and history. Their secular colleagues taught them to re¬
spect Western ideals of liberalism and democracy, but the students applied
them to building an Arab nationalist ideology. Teachers sow their seed in
unknown soil; their pupils decide what they will cultivate and determine
what posterity will reap.
Muslim Arab Nationalists
But Arab nationalism could not have won Muslim acceptance if all its
advocates had been westernized Christians. The centralizing trend of Ot¬
toman reforms, discussed in Chapter 11, alienated some Arabs, high-
ranking officials as well as local landlords, from what they were coming to
view as a Turkish empire. The first truly Muslim strain within Arab nation¬
alism was a campaign during the 1890s, popularized by a writer named
Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi, to revive the Arab caliphate, preferably in
Mecca. Pan-Islam, strong among Muslims since the 1860s, had urged them
to unite behind the Ottoman sultans. By juggling a few historical facts,
their backers had claimed that the caliphate, maintained in Cairo by the
Mamluks after the Mongol capture of Baghdad in 1258, had been trans¬
ferred to the Ottoman sultans upon their conquest of Egypt in 1517. Some
Muslims may have rejected this claim, for Sunni political theory states that
the caliph must belong to Muhammad's tribe, the Quraysh. The Ottomans