Sorry I don’t find reading from a screen very easy, otherwise I’d have noted it was you, not Le Bor for the Filastin reference, and Jaffa, not Haifa.

There’s a term, ‘Islamo-Christian’, that kicks around… and I can’t quite get my head around Michel Aflaq inventing Pan-Arab nationalism, only to have second class status… unless Christian Arabs were really pretty well integrated. Dhimmis don’t seem to have had it equally bad everywhere.

Btw, devorgilla, if I’m not mistaken you suggested earlier that you were a historian. What is your specialty?

Because I can’t see why on earth Christian Arabs would want to join a religiously inspired national movement based on sharia conceptions of national justice, that’s all.

Unless of course they are really stupid. Or unless they are having the wool pulled over their eyes by persons trying to kid on that Pan-Arabism is secular and democratic.

Hardly. Pan Arab nationalism was never secular or democratic. In the late twenties and thirties it was fascist and nazi and following WW2 and into the cold war when the USSR became the superpower sponsor of Arab states, the pan Arab nationalist movement, without ever rejecting its fascist and nazi beginnings instead fused them with Soviet ‘zionology’ agitprop. FFS, The nazi Haj Amin al Husseini was and is still revered by the “secular” PLO to this day – a PLO which not unlike the Ikhwan or Khomeinist movements has a charter calling for an Islamic state with sharia to be the source of all law.

To the extent that Arab national or pan-national socialism as expressed by say the Baath party, or amongst Nasserists, or among the PLO was of the left, it would be sheer fantasy to imagine that we are speaking of a truly secular, social and democratically accountable left.

As far as the relationship between Arab nationalism and Islamism, there certainly are unresolved and perhaps impassable tensions and rivalries between their ideological outlooks, however, as opposed to a secular versus a religious contest they instead compete to present themselves as the more authentic guarantors of an Islamic jurisdiction than the other.

What Ibnaz highlights is that secular pan-Arab nationalism was probably democratic, including both Muslim and Christian Arabs, and was therefore ‘of the left’, but the early agitation of the Mufti and his followers was undemocratic, racist, and ‘right-wing’. It was founded on the narrow codes of medieval sharia that placed people not as equal citizens but ranked according to the status of their religion; Muslim males being at the top; and Muslim males related to the prophet, at the very top. Hardly Rousseau. What I am seeing, therefore, is that these two strands of ‘Palestinian’ national consciousness are in tension with one another and correspond to radically different and mutually incompatible views of a ‘national’ future.

You’ve caught my drift, johng.

These are indeed my questions. I don’t yet have the answers.
Why should the Mufti’s position be ‘more correct’ than the Ottoman Empire’s? Or vice versa? Life is at it is. The Ottomans were the political authority. Their authority was not uncontested. Was their authority ‘legitimate’ as Rousseau would have it? I doubt it. But their power was a fact, and it was internationally recognised.

And as for the European colonists to the Jerusalem area in the 1890s, why on earth SHOULDN’T they come? They had as much right to come as legal immigrants and asylum seekers have to come to Britain today. Some people might not like that, I agree, but most of us would accept their right. Those who oppose it are a bit right wing, don’t you think? and see their right as ‘threatening’ their position in the local power structure, but most of us would view that as a tad tetchy.

But when immigrants start arriving in droves, as they did in the 1920s and 30s (it was only a trickle before 1900) that rather changes things. Just as today in Britain, the prospect of millions of immigrants is felt to be de-stabilising.

I don’t have the answers (as you seem to have) I am still working on the critical questions.

What an ignoramus you are. These are not my prejudices, but the account given by the majority of scholars. The one offered by you is a maverick one.

In my comment @12:10 am I cited the historian Mustafa Cabha’s work which argued that a pan Arab nationalist consciousness wasn’t “consolidated” among the majority of the Arabic speaking population until the 1929 massacres in Mandate Palestine and that the 1929 massacre was the primary catalyst for that consolidation. As for factors which would lead to the “consolidation” of pan Arab nationalist consciousness, I suggest you look to the quotations I cited from Sati Al Husri and Michel Aflaq in my 12:10 am comment.

As for factors leading to an “emergence” of a Pan Arab nationalist consciousness, I would suggest one look at the European universities (especially Paris), in the 19th century where promising students from the Ottoman Empire were sent by the Sublime Porte for an administrative education, some of whom got caught up in the milieu of radical European nationalistic movements to answer to your question. I would also suggest that the European fervor for nationalistic self-determination was inculcated by some American lecturers (and missionaries) into their students at the American University in Beirut.