Zaki al-Arsuzi

Childhood and early life: 1899–1930 Zaki Najib Ibrahim al-Arsuzi was born in 1900 or 1901 to a middle-class family of Alawi origins in Latakia on the Syrian coast of the Ottoman Sultanate. When Turkey first attempted to annex the province of Alexandretta in the early 1930s, al-Arsuzi became one of the most vocal critics of Turkey's policy towards Syria; he became a symbol of the Arab nationalist struggle. In 1939 France, which controlled Syria, ceded the province to Turkey in order to establish an alliance with that state. Al-Arsuzi left the LNA shortly thereafter. Al-Arsuzi moved to Damascus in 1938 and began working on his ideas of Arabism and Arab nationalism. Disillusioned with party politics, he gathered several secondary school pupils to establish a learning group. At the group's meetings, al-Arsuzi would talk about, for instance, the French Revolution, the Meiji Restoration, German Unification and Italian Unification, or about the ideas of Fichte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Oswald Spengler and Henri Bergson. During his stay in Baghdad, al-Arsuzi tried, idealistically, to enlighten Iraqis with his thoughts on Arab nationalism, but returned to Syria disappointed in 1940. On 29 November 1940 al-Arsuzi founded the Arab Ba'ath. While Aflaq and al-Bitar left work to focus on the party organisation, al-Arsuzi worked as a teacher until 1959. By 1944 the majority of Arab Ba'ath members had left the organisation for the more active Arab Ihya Movement (renamed to Arab Ba'ath Movement in 1943). According to one of his associates, al-Arsuzi himself spent a great deal of time living in "extreme poverty", reduced "to a life of penury and persecution" by the French authorities. Al-Arsuzi's popularity within his own ranks lessened after Rashid Ali al-Gaylani's coup in Iraq. While Aflaq and al-Bitar founded the Syrian Committee to Help Iraq to support Iraq during the Anglo–Iraqi War, al-Arsuzi opposed any involvement on the grounds that al-Gaylani's policies would fail. While several Arab Ba'ath members agreed with al-Arsuzi's conclusion, the majority were attracted to Aflaq's romanticism. Another reason for the Arab Ba'ath's failure was al-Arsuzi's deep mistrust of others; when a party member had written a manifesto entitled ''Arab Ba'ath'', al-Arsuzi "saw in it an imperialist plot to block his way to the people". The Arab Ba'ath Movement, led by Aflaq and al-Bitar, was merged into the Arab Ba'ath Party in 1947. During negotiations, Wahib al-Ghanim and Jalal al-Sayyid, not al-Arsuzi, represented the Arab Ba'ath, while Aflaq and al-Bitar represented the Arab Ba'ath Movement. The only policy issue which was discussed in great detail was how socialist the party was going to be. The groups came to an agreement; the Ba'ath movement became radicalised, and moved further to the left. Al-Arsuzi did not attend the founding congress, nor was he given membership in the new party. Later life and death: 1948–1968 After his return from Baghdad in 1940, al-Arsuzi had gained a position teaching philosophy, but he was soon dismissed from it. From 1945 until 1952 he worked again as a secondary teacher, first in Hama and then in Aleppo, and from 1952 until his retirement in 1959, he taught in a teacher training college. In 1963, in the wake of the Sixth National Congress of the Ba'ath Party and the party's gradual alienation from its founders Aflaq and Bitar, Hafez al-Assad arranged for Arsuzi to help with Ba'athist ideological formation in the army, and later ensured that he was granted a state pension. Al-Arsuzi was elected to a seat in the National Command of the Ba'ath Party in 1965. Salah Jadid, the Ba'ath Party strongman at the time, opposed Aflaq's and al-Bitar's leadership of the party and, because of it, wanted al-Arsuzi to replace them as the original founder of Ba'athist thought. Following the Ba'ath Party split of 1966 (the party split into two branches, one Iraqi-led Ba'ath Party and one Syrian-led Ba'ath Party) al-Arsuzi became the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party's main ideologue, while Aflaq was the de jure ideologue of the Iraqi-led Ba'ath Party. From 1966 to 1968 al-Arsuzi acted as al-Assad's and Jadid's personal ideological mentor. Al-Arsuzi died in Damascus on 2 July 1968. ==Al-Arsuzi's thought==

Arab Nation Al-Arsuzi's central thought was the unification of the Arab Nation. He believed that the Arab Nation could trace its roots to the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods of Arab history. The historical link to an Arab Nation was more important to al-Arsuzi than it was to other Arab nationalists and Ba'athists. The only way to create a new Arab Nation in the Modern Age was to reestablish a link between the Arab people of the past and those of the present through language—the only true remnant of the old Arab identity. In short, language was the key to regain what had been lost (the Arab Nation) and reinvigorate the Arab identity. Al-Arsuzi believed that the Arabs lost their common identity when they allowed non–Arabs to participate in government. The result was that several laws had non-Arab characteristics—these laws, and other changes brought by non-Arabs, weakened Arab identity. Culture and language Al-Arsuzi paid considerable attention to cultural matters, and Batatu records that the only condition of membership in his organisation was "to write or translate a book contributing to the resurrection [''ba'ath] of Arab heritage." He has been described as a proponent of the "linguistic image of Arab nationalism", and in 1942 published one of his most important works, Abqariyyat al-'arabiyya fi lisaniha (The Genius of Arabic in its Tongue''). His approach was distinguished by its emphasis on philology, but he did also pay attention to problems of the modern state and to questions of democracy and the locus of power. Batatu has also described al-Arsuzi as having a racist outlook, which proved in the end intellectually sterile and unsatisfactory to his followers, and as having been deeply influenced in his thought by the tenets of his Alawi religious background. Al-Arsuzi's definition of language is in contrast to that of Socrates and other thinkers. Nationalism Al-Arsuzi attributed the rise of European nationalism to revolutions in intellectual, social and economic domains. The first revolution came to being under the feudal system, which gave birth to human casual and relative relationships. The second revolution, the Scientific Revolution, led by Nicolaus Copernicus and Galileo Galilei, ended the conception of nature developed during the Medieval Ages. These events created the foundations of modern rationality. On this subject, al-Arsuzi said, "man was qualified to know the truth, since what is constructed by reason can be verified by experiment". Al-Arsuzi summed up this particular view of human behaviour and civilization with René Descartes's words: "Common sense or reason is naturally equal to man". In al-Arsuzi's view, if humans were rational creatures, each would wish to organise themselves according to his or her own sense of reason, and hence would want to take over the affairs of state from oppressors (colonists). The colonists acted as a barrier to such "rational" change. Modern life existed because of two things—science and industry. Science eliminated superstition, and replaced it with facts; and Industry enabled civilization to create a more strong, organised society where liberty, equality and democracy could become permanent. The experiences of the English and French Revolutions proved this; the revolutions gave the individual certain rights, so that the individual "could conduct his own affairs according to his will". The demand for liberty would eventually evolve into the demand for independence, literally nationalism. Nationalism had, according to al-Arsuzi, manifested itself in all walks of life, from the rule of law to the arts; everything in a nation was the manifestation of that particular nation's identity. Al-Arsuzi's thesis marked a dividing line between the Medieval Ages and the Modern Age. ==Legacy==

Al-Arsuzi's work and thought are almost unknown and barely mentioned in Western scholarship on Arab nationalism. When he is actually mentioned in a text, it is predominantly on his irredentist views of the unified Arab Nation. Although his collected works have been published since the mid-1970s, al-Arsuzi's work on the Arabic language, which is central to al-Arsuzi's nationalist thought, is rarely mentioned at all. The study of al-Arsuzi's ideas in Arabic scholarship is also lacking. Academic Yasir Suleiman gives the principal reason for this as the similarity of al-Arsuzi's works to those of Sati' al-Husri, a contemporary. Suleiman goes on to explain Al-Arsuzi's eclipsed legacy as the combination of a number of factors: firstly, in contrast to al-Husri's idea of language, al-Arsuzi's theory is self-defeating because it excluded other theories instead of including them. Secondly, his work was written with an elitist slant, rather than the populist one which al-Husri managed to convey. Thirdly, and in contrast to al-Husri's work, al-Arsuzi's work seemed old-fashioned, due to his use of old words and historical texts; moreover, while al-Arsuzi wrote about the symbolic need of an Arab Nation, al-Hustri wrote about the practical role of an Arab Nation—al-Arsuzi was obscure where al-Husri was transparent. Whereas Al-Husri was able to prove his arguments with empirical data, al-Arsuzi was unable. Thus, Suleiman writes, al-Husri appeared more informed than al-Arsuzi, when really he was not. The lack of empirical data in al-Arsuzi's work made it look parochial at times, while at other times his conclusions bordered on machoistic nationalism, which in turn could be interpreted as racism. Another reason for his "negligible" impact, according to Suleiman, was al-Arsuzi's idea of the need to replace the traditional Arabic grammar system with a new one. The Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems agrees with Suleiman's conclusion, but further claims that al-Arsuzi's work was "often far-fetched and 'airy-fairy'". Several Ba'athists, mostly from the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party, have denounced Aflaq as a "thief"; these critics claim that Aflaq had stolen the Ba'athist ideology from al-Arsuzi and proclaimed it as his own. Al-Assad has referred to al-Arsuzi as the "greatest Syrian of his day" and claimed him to be the "first to conceive of the Ba'ath as a political movement." The Syrian Ba'athists have erected a statue in al-Arsuzi's honour; it was erected following the 1966 coup. Even so, the majority of Ba'athists still agree that Aflaq, not al-Arsuzi, was the principal founder of the Ba'ath movement. Despite this, Keith David Watenpaugh believes Ba'athism was conceived by the "trio" consisting of al-Arsuzi, Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and not one principal founder. ==Selected works==

• The Genius of Arabic in Its Tongue (published 1943) • Al-Umma al-Arabiyya (English: The Arab World, published 1958) • Mashakiluna al-Qawmiyya (English: Our Nationalist Problems, published 1958) ==References==