Guerrilla History - How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs w/ Elizabeth Thompson

Episode Date: January 15, 2021

In this episode of Guerrilla History, we are joined by Professor Elizabeth F. Thompson to talk about her new book How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs, about the historic Syrian-Arab Congress of 1920.  Professor Thompson is the Mohamed S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace and Professor of History at American University.  Her book was published by Atlantic Monthly Press, and is available here: https://groveatlantic.com/book/how-the-west-stole-democracy-from-the-arabs/       Guerrilla History is the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history, and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.  If you have any questions or guest/topic suggestions, email them to us at [e-mail]. Your hosts are immunobiologist Henry Hakamaki, Professor Adnan Husain, historian and Director of the School of Religion at Queens University, and Revolutionary Left Radio's Breht O'Shea.   Follow us on social media!  Our podcast can be found on twitter @guerrilla_pod, and can be supported on patreon at https://www.patreon.com/guerrillahistory.  Your contributions will make the show possible to continue and succeed! To follow the hosts, Henry can be found on twitter @huck1995, and also has a patreon to help support himself through the pandemic where he breaks down science and public health research and news at https://www.patreon.com/huck1995.  Adnan can be followed on twitter @adnanahusain, and also runs The Majlis Podcast, which can be found at https://anchor.fm/the-majlis, and the Muslim Societies-Global Perspectives group at Queens University, https://www.facebook.com/MSGPQU/.   Breht is the host of Revolutionary Left Radio, which can be followed on twitter @RevLeftRadio and on Libsyn at https://revolutionaryleftradio.libsyn.com/, and cohost of The Red Menace Podcast, which can be followed on twitter @Red_Menace_Pod and on Libsyn https://redmenace.libsyn.com/.  You can support those two podcasts by visiting by going to patreon and donating to RevLeft Radio and The Red Menace.     Thanks to Ryan Hakamaki, who designed and created the podcast's artwork, and Kevin MacLeod, who creates royalty-free music.      

You remember den, Ben, boo? The same thing happened in Algeria, in Africa. They didn't have anything but a rank. The French had all these highly mechanized instruments of warfare. But they put some guerrilla action on. Hello, and welcome to guerrilla history. the podcast that acts as a reconnaissance report of global proletarian history and aims to use the lessons of history to analyze the present.

I'm your host, Henry Huckamacki, joined by my co-hosts, Professor Adnan Hussein, historian and director of the School of Religion at Queens University in Ontario, Canada. Hello, Adnan. How are you today? I'm great, Henry. And Brett O'Shea, host of Revolutionary Left Radio and co-host of the Red Menace podcast. Hello, Brett. How are you? I'm doing great. We got another exciting one

today. Yes, we do. Today our guest is going to be Elizabeth F. Thompson, the Muhammad S. Farsi Chair of Islamic Peace and Professor of History at American University. Professor Thompson is an expert of social movements and liberal constitutionalism in the Middle East. She's the author of colonial citizens, Republican rights, paternal privilege and gender in French Syria and Lebanon from Columbia books. Justice interrupted the struggle for constitutional government in the Middle East from Harvard Press, and her latest work, which is going to be the topic of today's episode, which is how the West stole democracy from the Arabs, this Syrian Arab Congress of 1920, and the destruction of its historic liberal Islamic alliance. It's out this year from

Atlantic Monthly Press. So I thought that this was a very interesting book because it's a topic that, well, it seems to be a going theme, something that I had not known nearly enough about before looking into it when we had Adnan actually raised the perspective of having Professor Thompson on the show and talking about this topic. So Adnan, why don't I pitch it over to you and we'll have you talk

about kind of what the importance of this book is because I do think that this immediate post-World War one era in the Middle East is incredibly undercover. It's particularly in the West but I also get the feeling that it's just under

covered generally, partially because some of this history was hidden. But why don't we have you talk about what the importance of this work by Professor Thompson was? Well, Henry, you're absolutely right that this is an interesting and important story that hasn't been told. So that's what's great about history. It can be either reinterpreting events that we all know about but getting a new perspective on them or learning something completely new that we didn't understand was taking place. And I think this story and this book really does both those things. Our previous episodes have looked at broad periods and movements and taken a kind of general synthetic view of either the history of Turkey and the problem of authoritarianism or looking at CIA interventions

in particularly the post-war period, looking at the long history of struggle in Nepal. This is a book that's focused very much in its principal events on a particular episode. It's kind of a micro-history. The focus is very different looking at what happened in 1919, 1920 with the Syrian Arab Congress that was established in Damascus after the end of World War I. But it has broad implications and connects to many themes that are of relevance to colonialism, the World War I, and its end, the broader shape of the Middle East, relations between Islam and democracy. These are big, broad questions, but we get to wrestle with them and see how they were

being worked out in a very focused context. And when we do, we discover this episode that really changes a lot of our views and understandings about the region that are based on. romantic popular impressions, maybe if you've seen Lawrence of Arabia and you see the end of that epic movie, gorgeous cinematography, but filled with all kinds of oriental stereotypes that also characterizes the end of World War I and the failure of the Arab revolt to lead to independent democratic nations because of the history of the mandates, a kind of form of colonialism that is established that this book discusses, it's often seen as a result of the inability of the people

of the region themselves to govern themselves because of petty squabbling and pursuing all kinds of, you know, petty interests and not being able to see the larger picture and organize themselves in a responsible fashion to govern themselves. So unfortunately, the tragedy, this is the way the narrative goes is unfortunately they couldn't be given their independence and had to have the League of Nations impose this other form of control over them. And what we'll see in this book and in the discussion with Elizabeth Thompson is that that narrative really fails to take into account some fascinating developments during this period where the Arabs tried to organize themselves and establish a liberal constitutional order. So I think this book is really important.

It's incredibly well written and connects with context of what's going on. It unfolds in a really pleasing sort of way with each part of the story, introducing its characters and what was happening. So it's an enjoyable read, and I think we'll have a really enjoyable conversation. Yeah, great. And I agree that basically the way that we're exposed to this topic is via Lawrence of Arabia. There's very little else out, at least in the mass public, on this period of time and this region other than Lawrence of Arabia, which, as you mentioned, is beautiful as a film, but is just full of Orientalist views. But Brett, I have the impression that probably you had a similar experience with this topic that I did growing up, where this was basically the only exposure that we had was to things like Lawrence of Arabia. What did this book bring to light for you that perhaps you hadn't even considered before? And what do you think the importance of this is, just briefly, because of course we're going to get into this with the professor when she comes on,

but what did this really bring to light for you? And why do you think that this work is so important? Yeah, I mean, I've had like a general understanding of like the partitioning project that, you know, happened in the wake of World War I. But you don't know the nitty-gritty details. And learning about this, as well as learning about Turkey and the Ottoman Empire in a recent episode, really highlights dynamics that get concealed from like Western tellings of what's going on, particularly the differences or the unity between liberals and, you know, Islamists or those of, you know, Muslims that wanted a more religious flavor to the way that they run their society so that's always something that pops up in that episode and as well as this one

and then this just really drives home how you know colonialism and racism and this entire history's entire century is shaped by these things and how they they've operated for centuries to really purposefully hold back the development of the entire world and the logic of that system the logic of european colonialism understanding it in its fine-grained details really helps us understand the world as it is today, and we understand that the logic inherent in the European Colonial Project has led our entire species to where we are today, which is the brink of ecological catastrophe, of constant warfare, of the inability for international cooperation precisely when the problems were facing as a species demand that the most. And so, you know, this is, again, is trying to

put in this dialectical materialist understanding of history where you cannot separate the present from the past. And to understand the history of this region is really an absolute requirement if you are going to think about, let alone opine on the region today. And so, yeah, it's an incredibly important history to understand. Yeah, so I'll basically transition us into the next thing that we want to cover, which is more or less what we want to get out of this conversation with Professor Thompson. And I agree entirely with what both Brett and Adnan were saying. I think that the transition point between why this is important and what we hope to underscore in our conversation is that it's popularly portrayed that the Arabs, as it's portrayed, are ungovernable. They're incapable

of self-governance, let's say. And I think that this work really underscores that that is not necessarily the case. In fact, it is not the case that they're inherently incapable of self-governance. Everyone should inherently understand that, that these are people. There's not some genetic hardwiring in them that makes them incapable of self-governance, but rather it's external forces as well as perhaps kind of chance events that happened internally that have, for the decade since then, basically prevented what we would consider liberal self-governance. So I think that that's something that would be very important for us to underscore with Professor Thompson is how this view of Arabs as incapable of self-governance is historically inaccurate as well as just

philosophically inaccurate. But what do you two think about, what are we hoping to underscore in this conversation? What should we hope to get out of the conversation with Professor Thompson for our listeners who may not have read the book yet? Well, I think there are a lot of important issues that are raised through this history that we could explore further. So one issue is really thinking about, you know, the reconciliation between, you know, Muslim religiosity and desire for the state to somehow represent Muslim values and so on.

And democratic structures and the respect of and inclusion as full citizens, people of different religious or no religious background. This has always been an issue or a question, and the popular sort of understanding and view is that Islam, if you look at political science discourse in the mid-50s and earlier, and of course in the colonial era, the idea that Islam is somehow incompatible with democracy that you can't have the two integrated in a modern state.

So that's an important issue to see how was this being worked out? What were the issues, the sources of tension, both the possibilities and the limitations of this moment in 1920, where people came together representatives from greater Syria, and we'll hear a little bit about the boundaries of greater Syria that included, you know, what is today, Palestine, Israel, Jordan, Syria, parts of Southern Anatolia, and Lebanon, that represented. came together and wrestled with exactly these sorts of questions and tried to deliberate on them so that's an important point that is a continuing question or problem when we think about Islamist parties in you know the 2000s for example in Turkey which we've already discussed but elsewhere for example like in Egypt and I think Elizabeth Thompson was inspired by contemporary events in 2011 to think about this question.

So that'll be worth probing a little further. That's a key kind of question that this book makes a fascinating contribution to. Yeah, and I don't know if we'll get to this in the conversation, but it's just worth sort of noting up front is the, you know, the idea that the Arabs are incapable of governing themselves is obviously not unique to just Arab people. This is the colonial narrative. This is, and if you're an American or a North American, you know, this is how indigenous people have always been seen and viewed.

This is how black folks have been seen and viewed, continue to be on the racist right, and it really highlights the connection between colonialism and modern-day fascism. When we try to understand what are these fascist movements popping up all over Europe and all over North America and the Imperial Corps, where do they come from? You cannot understand that without understanding the colonialist empires and that history and that past and what the entitlement

of white people in the imperial core is rooted in. And that's an interesting and noteworthy thing to highlight. And of course, this is how everybody is treated outside of Europe by European colonialists. I mean, Asians, Latin Americans, Africans, these narratives might shift and they might change a little bit around the fringes, but the basic lens, the basic perspective is always there.

And you're talking about both of you mentioned Lawrence of Arabia and how these things can seep ideologically into popular culture, where you have a beautiful film, a masterpiece in a lot of ways, but what does it do? It tells history from the perspective of the imperialist, and it plays into the Orientalist notions that undermined that entire project. And so once again, you walk away from that movie, not thinking you've picked up some idea about how you should understand that region and that period of time, but you walk away with this sort of Orientalist understanding of, yeah,

they just aren't able to govern themselves, and that's a despicable view. of people that is at the root of so much of our conflict today. And if I could just read this quote really quick, because I think it speaks to these connections and it speaks to Thompson's ability to write so beautifully in some ways. The quote is, I think from the intro, it says, in 1938, CLR James exposed the truce of the Haitian revolution in his classic history, the black Jacobins. Descendants of African slaves had embraced and implemented the ideals of the French revolution, only to have Napoleon Bonaparte trick them and reimpose slavery. Quote, it is on colonial peoples without means of counter-publicity that imperialism practices its

basest arts, James reflected. France crushed the Haitian revolution with brutal vengeance. Not only did Bonaparte fear Haitian leader Toussaint-Lovachor, James wrote, quote, he feared too the French revolution which he and his kind had stifled. White Europeans simply could not accept that, quote, among those blacks whom they rule are men so infinitely their superior in ability, energy, range of vision, and tenacity of purpose. Likewise, the French in 1920 feared the world order promised by the League of Nations. And I think that serves well to take these strands and sort of tie them together.

I think that's fantastic. Brett, to show the connections. She does show that connection, but that's what's important about this history, is to see this not as an isolated episode. It is very interesting in its own context, but also as exposing these dynamics that have patterned world history for this century, for centuries. And I'm hopeful that someday we'll also talk maybe about the Haitian revolution and other revolts against slavery and so on. But that history is so vital. What's great about this is, as you were pointing out, that we get imperialist history in most of our popular media, in Lawrence of Arabia, in a lot of history writing, from that period even. And this really gives us an understanding

and a texture of the people themselves, what were they concerned about, what were their aspirations, how did they see their own futures? And that's what we have to connect with and resurrect. And so I'm really looking forward to this conversation. Yeah, I think that that was a great summary

of bringing it up. And Brett, if I may, as an aside, you did have an episode on the Haitian Revolution on Rev. Left, I think with Alex Avenia, did you not? Absolutely, yeah. One episode could never capture the complexities of that, but yeah, we did for like an hour and a half, two-hour episode on it for sure.

Yeah, it was excellent. I remember it. Thank you. But yeah, I think that another point that you raised, Brett, that really will bring us well into the conversation with Professor Thompson is that otherizing by imperialist powers. As you said, it's a common thread for members of the ruling elite

within the imperial powers to see anyone that is the other as incapable of self-governance. And unfortunately, that narrative isn't just perpetuated by people in the ruling class, but that is also trickled down to people in the imperial power itself, whether they're working class, working poor, just members of the proletariat more generally, they're indoctrinated with this otherizing view of people from other parts of the world that are of different different races, different religions, a different cultural background. And I think that kind of exposing this narrative and dismantling this narrative is really important going into this conversation.

So I think that we'll wrap up this introductory segment now. It will be right back with Professor Elizabeth F. Thompson to talk about her book, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs. We're back on guerrilla history. Now that we've chatted about some of the basics and all of that about the book, let's bring in our guest. Our guest again, for those of you listening, is Elizabeth F. Thompson, the Muhammad S. Farsi, Chair of Islamic Peace and Professor of History at American University. And we're going to be talking about her new book, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs,

the Syrian Arab Congress of 1920, and the destruction of its historical. Liberal Islamic Alliance from Atlantic Monthly Press. Professor Thompson, thank you for coming on to Gorilla History. Thank you for inviting me. It's a pleasure to be here. The pleasure is all ours. So I guess let's start by, I want you to kind of introduce some of the characters that are going to be at play here. So the listeners have some understanding of who is who when we bring them up in the conversation. But even before we bring up the characters that are in this narrative of the story that that you've laid out in your book. Why did you write this book?

As I understand it, you wrote this book after the Tahrir Square protests and basically immediately after the massacres at Rabas Square and Al-Nada Square in Egypt. How did those influence your decision to write this book? Oh, that's a great question. Yeah, going back to 2013. You know, I had been in Cairo in 2011 to observe. and interview people who had been involved in the uprising that toppled Hussein Mabar.

These were people who were at some level conscious of trying to revive what had been lost during the Cold War, that they too, like the peoples of Eastern Europe who had had the color revolutions after the fall of the Berlin Wall, felt that the supports for the dictators, they've been living under should be removed and they should sort of, let's just say, take hold

again of their own history, right? But what struck me in interviewing them in 2011 even, and this is just in Egypt, but I had lived in Syria and visited Syria recently before that, is how little people knew about their own history. If the kind of history you get under a dictatorship is quite sanitized. Of course, doesn't talk a lot about past moments of democracy. And there were sort of false expectations, but also when I returned in 2013, right before the coup, that ended the period of democratic optimism in Egypt, I found that people were quite dejected, feeling that they had, you know, had only a little bit of time, and it had been up to them to invent, or reinvent a democratic culture, and that they had failed to do so. And I think

I wanted, my first motive was, as an outsider who was freer to write, to offer a history to local activists of the civilian heroes in their own history that they'd never learned about that had been censored from their textbooks and from their classrooms and give them a sense that they were standing on the shoulders of those who came before them in a long struggle. So that was my first interest. I had a more academic interest, if you will, and maybe a Middle East specific interest in that the story I discovered as I researched the history of the Arab Congress in 1920 was a story in which the parties that had fallen out and fought one another and so ended

the Arab Spring of 2011 had actually worked together and formed a Democratic coalition back in 1920. And what made me particularly interested to understand is how it was that religious leaders would have consented a hundred years ago to creating and founding a state that was by all means secular and not Islamic, even though they themselves were Muslim leaders. So two motives, I guess. Excellent. So before I have you launch into kind of laying out who the characters are, I really want to just appreciate the point that you said that this book is written for local activists. Are you planning on translating this book into Arabic at some point? Oh, yeah. Okay, great.

I just signed a contract. I'm so pleased. I've signed a contract with a publisher, and I'm hoping it possible within a year. It will appear at least online. The deal we made was that it would be. be available online as well as for a very low price. You know, there's a problem with censorship and much of them in the least right now. And so grabbing things off digitally offline, online seemed to be the better route. So I'm very excited. Excellent. I'm very glad to hear that. So now let's get into the book itself. Would you be willing to lay out kind of who the key players in this narrative are going to be what the significance of them are? Yeah, you did a great job at the

beginning of your book, you had a lineup of basically the people, but for the listeners who might not have read the book yet, could you lay out who some of the key people to understand who they were, are so that when they're listening to this narrative that unfolds, they understand the people's context within us? Sure. The personality they, people are most likely to have heard of was Prince Faisal, who was the son of Sharif Hussein of Mecca, who was featured. in the movie Lawrence of Arabia as the leader of the Northern Arab Army, fighting for independence against the Ottoman Empire. The Arabs in the region of the Eastern Mediterranean had been living for 400 years under the rule of the Ottoman Turks and had for much of that time consented to such rule, but the brutal conditions of World War won. And the clear disregard for Arabs as somehow a lesser race by Turkish leaders had stoked support for independence. And so as the movie showed, Faisal had fought for independence alongside British troops and with perhaps lesser guidance from the famous Lawrence of Arabia, T.E. Lawrence would have us think. So he's number one, Prince Faisal. And the second personality, important personality in the book is a man who's never entered into this narrative about this moment, the Syrian Arab Kingdom after World War I.

And his name is Sheikh Rashid Riddha, who was much older than Faisal. Faisal, who's a young man in 19, 19, 1920. Ridda was a middle-aged man who sort of portly had been in living in exile from the Ottoman Empire for decades, but writing in favor of constitutional government and in favor of a kind of reformed modern Islam in his own magazine called The Lighthouse in English, which was read from Morocco to Indonesia. So he's a very famous man, and he was very eager to return home to what we call great Syria, that includes Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan today, a region where people's families live in the various cities of that larger region, speak a similar

dialect of Arabic, and have a sense of sharing a region called Greater Syria or in Arabic Al-Adashan. So Rashid Riddhar was a very important figure and would become the president of the Congress. A third person, I'm sure most of our listeners have heard of, is President Woodrow Wilson. And I have a little anecdote about Woodrow Wilson, because while he played a very positive role at the Paris Peace Conference in supporting Arab claims for self-rule, he is known in this country primarily for his segregationist policies in Washington, D.C., and as an air to the racism that had fueled the Jim Crow era in the late 19th century in the United States.

So Woodrow Wilson is a complex character, and I think the moment has been misread by people who too easily want to push him into a two-dimensional figure. I believe that he did sincerely believe that even small nations should have their own governments and should be freed from colonialism. I also do believe, however, that he supported the Arabs because he believed Arabs were white. So Rudra Wilson comes to the Paris Peace Conference with the strength of his famous 14 points seeking a new era based on international law and the rights of nations. It was very hostile to the kind of colonial rule that the British and French actually wanted to impose over the Arabs after World War.

War I. So those are the three main characters, I think, as we go along, and if other names come up, we'll identify them. That's terrific. Thanks so much, Libby, for joining us and giving us that background. It's a wonderful book. I really encourage everyone to get a copy and read it, read so beautifully, and it's a fascinating story. You've taken us to the era of World War I, and of course, people are familiar with World War I, but they think of it as, you know, a struggle between the Allied, you know, British and French, and possibly they may know about the Russians being, at least for the first part of the war, part of the Allied powers and that they opposed Germany. But what they often don't know is about Turkey or at least the Ottoman Empire's

role in it and also how and why some kind of alliance at least seem to immerse. merge between the Arabs struggling for freedom from Ottoman rule that you just mentioned. And so it was called a World War for a reason. And so I'm wondering if maybe you can give us a little bit more of the context in the Middle East of developments and events taking place over the course of World War I so that we appreciate and understand the aftermath that you focused on in the book. Yeah, thank you so much. I'd love to do that.

You know, since we've just covered the centennial of World War I from 2014 to 2018, there's been a wave of new scholarship. And what I'm most pleased about is that the Middle Eastern Theater of the War has taken a more robust place in that narrative now. I've had the fortune to be an editor for an online encyclopedia, which I highly recommend to people. it's called online, no, 1914, 1918 online. And it was produced out of Berlin, free university in Berlin, but it's in English. And the first thing they wanted to do

was globalized World War I. And they called in people like me and Mustafa Aksa Kahl over at Georgetown and a host of historians of the Middle East to help round out. Why? Because the Ottoman Empire had long been a sort of linchpin in the balance of power in Europe

since the 19th century in a politics that diplomatic historians refer to as the Eastern question. And the Eastern question was all about preventing Russia from expanding too far into Europe and upsetting the balance of power in the region. And so the Ottoman Empire had been, for most of the 19th century, an ally of the British. But the British and French,

abandoned the Ottoman Empire at the turn of the century, and leaders were forced to seek the protection of Germany on the opposing side of the war, when they discovered telegrams between the Russians and the British and the French, to the tune of, oh, yes, and when we occupy Turkey, Russia will take Constantinople, modern-day Istanbul, as, you know, the ancient capital of Orthodox Christianity and so on. So the Turks entered the war on the side of the Germans and the Austro-Hungarian Empire against Russia, Britain, and France, and ultimately Italy joined the allies as well. This was a war, as most listeners know, was a war of attrition by industrial powers.

Right? Immediately in 1914, all battle, rose in those trenches in northeastern France and, you know, it was a race to manufacture shells to, you know, shoot at one another and nothing budged in Europe for several years until 1917, 1918, right? So much of the war was fought actually outside the European theater in the Middle East. The Germans wanted to draw away. British and French resources into a fight over the colonies. And so in the region that I study, particularly greater Syria, which we just talked about,

half a million people would die in that war. Syrians had the second highest per capita death rate in the war of any country, outdone only, sadly, by the Serbs. And so even though we are very familiar with a story story about the Europeans, you know, and whole generations of young men being cut down in World War I. In fact, the Ottoman Empire, which was much less industrialized, had to literally work its own population to death. What you remember, or what you may have read about the use of slave labor by the Germans in World War II was present within the Ottoman Empire

during World War I. So this is a guy that is a little bit of background of how the Arabs in the empire, sought to assert their rights and a certain autonomy over their provinces in exchange for their loyalty and their support to this devastating war. But the Ottoman Turks took instead the opportunity during the war to assert more and more centralized control and much more brutal control over the Arab provinces. That is the sort of source of the Arab revolt that is made famous in the movie Lawrence of Arabia. Oh, thanks so much. I guess I'm interested as a consequence of those developments.

Syria, maybe surprisingly for listeners, became a very central question or problem in the peace negotiations afterwards. So we think of the armistice as involving, you know, the disposition of Europe, but a lot of the controversies and a lot of the struggles in the negotiations, as you tell so vividly in the book, made Syria central. So it's interesting. So maybe you can tell us about exactly how and why that was the case and the nature of those competitions for influence and power over this region, you know, were undertaken. That was a surprise to me as well. I, like most of us, was quite familiar with the bitter negotiations over reparations for Germany and how that led to the tragic Treaty of Versailles in June of 1919. But as I read through the original documents on the negotiations that spring,

what jumped out at me was that the negotiations over Syria were as bitter. They stumbled at moments that included a threat by Woodrow Wilson to go back to his ship and sail back across the Atlantic rather than continue speaking with Britain and France over their desire to occupy Syria. And so continued with extremely bitter negotiations between the British and French. over how they might divide Syria up to the point in May of 1919 where similar threats were being made by the French premier against David Lloyd George, the Prime Minister of England. So what was at stake ultimately? And it took a lot of digging through a lot of, you know, diplomatic history written from the point of view of the British and the French, and mostly the British.

I would say that I would be willing to bet that nine out of ten people who have read anything on World War I have read it from a British point of view to learn that really what was at stake in the end was oil. I guess that shouldn't surprise us after the Iraq war, right? But both Britain and France had run short of petroleum during World War I. And Britain did not actually, going into 1914, did not actually have. oil wells in its territory anywhere in the empire. Britain and France both believed, and this is why the draconian Treaty of Versailles was written, they both believed that Germany would fight them again, right, correctly, as we know in retrospect, although I hesitate to draw a straight line between World War I and World War II, but they were bound and determined to assure two things, that they had enough petroleum, because by the end of

the war, tanks had become very important. They take gasoline, planes, and airplanes were becoming important by the end of the war. It was quite clear that they would be instrumental in the next war, right? So they needed oil. They also needed bodies. And so, for example, although George Clemenceau, this is a great irony of history, George Clemenceau was probably the least racist of all the leaders who met in Paris, I mean the European American leaders. He had spent exile from Louis-Nopolitan in the 1860s in New York, outside of France, and had written columns for French newspapers about reconstruction in this country and the great experiment in racial equality. Okay?

So this was not a man who was, you know, unreflectively racist. But he was also a man who left France and wanted to make sure that France would never be occupied again by the Germans. Okay? He had seen the German invasion in 1870 and then again in 1914. So even though many promises had been made to, you know, hundreds of thousands of colonial troops, particularly from North Africa and West Africa, you know, for rights, if not independence, for their service during the war, they weren't going to give them independence because they needed those bodies.

So in the same spirit, right, the British and French were eyeing the information that there was oil in what we know today of as Iraq, right? And so, I'll make a long story short. George Commenceau was not interested in colonizing Syria or the Arab world. Yeah, it was, he had, his politics had always been build strength in France in our hexagon. At home, all right. But he could not ignore the colonial lobby when the colonial lobby was excited by the British machinations in the Middle East. Lord Curzon, former vice-roy of India, had his eye both on Iraq and Syria, and Iraq.

Arabia, right, who wanted to maximize territorial gains that would actually effectively link India to Egypt, which the British already occupied. The French were apoplectic, right, because the British army had been active during World War I in the Middle East only because of a division of labor, right? The French army focused on the Western Front in Europe, and the British would take care of that southern flank in the Mediterranean and the Middle East. It was only by virtue of that arrangement during the war that there were so many British troops in the Middle East poised to make a land grab in 1919. And so it's only because the British were bound to determined to control those oil wells in Iraq that they had to, in the end, make a deal with Clemenceau and the French colonial lobby that they could have Syria.

Okay, so this is the reason why, I think, the negotiations out of the status of Syria were so stormy. Enter Woodrow Wilson, who was against all colonialism as part of his 14 points, right, and seeking to assure self-determination for the Syrians, and you can see what sparks would have flown behind closed doors in the spring of 1919. Yeah, that's incredibly interesting. I'm sort of going back and forth between what I want to, address next, but let's just go with Woodrow Wilson for now. You mentioned earlier, sort of some of his background, his domestic policies, and sort of like the difference between his

domestic policies and his international ones, except the caveat that, you know, he thought Syrians were white, and that played into his entire vision for what's possible for that, for that area. So can you just talk a little bit about the role that Wilson played in all of this, and not only what he personally thought, but sort of the influences acting upon him that shifted his positions or jostled up against what he personally wanted. Yeah, that's true. You know, he was not a well man, right? Later in 1919, he would have a stroke that would incapacitate him, of course. We also believe that in the early April, a time of great disagreement in the negotiations, particularly over Germany. He probably had the Spanish flu, the influenza of 19,

18, 1919. And as we've been discovering, even with COVID today, you know, these viruses affected brain, right? So given that, he, at first, we know, when he was sailing across the Atlantic to France in December of 1918, that he was discussing ways of handling all the territories that had once been governed by the defeated Ottoman and Austro-Hungarian empires. He had already had visits and made deals with Polish leaders and Czech leaders to have their own independent states. And so when, you know, he learned that Syrians and other peoples, the Turks, other people, the part of the Ottoman Empire also wanted their own states. You know, he felt he had to play an even hand because he had kept promising that all

nations, all nations, true nations of people, would have a right to self-government, right? He was in competition, of course, in that rhetoric with the Soviets. You know, the Bolsheviks had their revolution in 1917 and quickly assured self-determination to the peoples that have been part of the Russian Empire. So he, but his thinking was, because he knew quite well, hadn't learned about the secret deals that the British and French had made during the war to partition the Ottoman Empire. He had already been done thinking of an interim temporary sort of, not exactly,

he didn't want to be a colony, but regime. We would call it nation building today, send in some advice. advisors help them construct their ministry of education in their parliament and their, of course, National Army and so on out of the cinders of war. But he actually told his advisors on that ship crossing the Atlantic that he thought the best advisors or advisory country, what they would call a mandate, would be a Scandinavian country. Scandinavian countries would consider it to be very well run, right, but non-imperialists. that no Scandinavian country would want to colonize these countries in the Middle East,

nor would they have the resources to do so. So his ideal coming into Paris was that his envisioned League of Nations, precursor to the current United Nations, would provide the resources to a small, unambitious country to give neutral advice to a country that just needs to organize itself for independence, right? But that was swept aside by the end of January 1990. And it was not simply David Lord George. It was the Commonwealth members of the British Empire who were allowed representation in these

secret meetings giving the British Empire an inordinate influence, right? So the representatives of South Africa wanted, you know, to directly annex lands in Africa that the Germans had lost during the war. Representatives from Australia and New Zealand wanted to take over Pacific Islands that vacated by the Germans. And so, too, the British and the French immediately said, well, we want to take those lands that have been part of the Ottoman Empire. So that while the League of Nations Covenant promised the Arab countries that they were

a superior form of mandate that would be very temporary and very lightweight, they still were deemed not yet ready for, you know, self-rule and that the Paris Peace Conference would decide who their mandatory power would be. Then Wilson has his stroke and bam, who, you know, the fox is in the chicken, chicken coop and, you know, the British and French immediately assert that they will be the mandatory powers controlling Syria and Iraq and other portions of the Ottoman Empire. So, so Wilson was not. not, as he was not duped by the British and French, as some historians have written. He was not in cahoots with imperial powers, if you read closely the record, but unfortunately,

right, he had come to Paris with a weak hand, at least it seemed, in that the Republicans, the Republican Party, he was a Democrat, the Republican Party had taken over Congress, And they were so hostile, he didn't even bring any representatives of the Republican Party with him. This did not escape the British and the French. And so they saw him as dealing with a weak hand. Just a footnote to that, because we have so much we want to talk about in Syria. But there's a recent book by Adam 2's of Columbia University, a couple years old now, that argues actually Wilson had a much stronger hand than he understood.

it, had he been schooled in the, in finance, which he was not, he was not an economist and he had only a rudimentary understanding. He would have understood the United States had a stranglehold over Europe. The Europeans were far in debt to American banks, and he could have used that as an instrument. But in retrospect, we see he, that was not even on his radar screen. So the British and French were able to take. advantage of Wilson. Just a thought, a note, if you can't, if you don't mind. There is a famous proposal by the Japanese in February of 1919 to insert into the covenant of the League of Nations a clause on racial equality. And here's what gets very interesting coming to Woodrow Wilson.

Because at first, Woodrow Wilson thought that was a great idea, that there should be, the races of the world should be equal. He was a sort of, oh, You know, he thought of himself as a modern progressive southerner, not the Ku Klux Klan type of racist. He admired greatly Booker T. Washington. And the idea that, you know, African Americans could be made equal after being schools of it. They're behind culturally because they've been enslaved,

but after some indeterminate number of decades, they might be ready to carry the full load of full citizenship and so on. So he was not a strict racialist, I mean, biological racialists, right? But he did believe that countries around the world could be brought to the level of whites. He certainly thought that European whites had gained in civilization, a higher standing. And so he was open to the idea that when the Japanese proposed it, things happened. number one he was surrounded by advisors who did not truly believe in his radical vision of equal rights under international law right and we have I can point you guys and if you want a bibliography to go through your podcast I can give it to you right and numbers of books have written particularly in the last decade showing how radical his vision truly was okay but instead around him he had advisors who were anglofiles who were listening to the very racist.

I mean, the people in those negotiations who used the N-word were from the British Empire, not the Americans, okay? And they whispered in his ear that this was not a good idea. And then his own advisor, Colonel House, did remind him that as a Democrat, you know, he was the first Democrat to come to power after the Civil War. And how did he do it? He depended on Southern votes. Not only Southern votes, the truly crucial votes were in California.

And Californians were against immigration from Asia. There were laws on the books since the 1880s, barring immigration of the yellow race to the United States. You've all read probably in high school or grade school stories of how Chinese laborers built our railroad across the continent and so on, right? And the door shut on that immigration. And so Wilson did not want to alienate them because he had his eye on re-election.

to a new term in 1920. So the man was a pragmatic racist, but he was not the black and white racist that he's been portrayed to be. And there, the sort of middle chapters, or actually, yeah, the middle chapters of the book show in a new way how the Syrians understood that there was an opening there by playing themselves as whites. That's a great transitional thought because, you know, this is all interesting, but it takes a westernized look at what was going on. And I think we should move on to what was going on in Syria from the Syrian's perspective at this point. So I guess the transition point would be Wilson was looked at relatively highly by people in the area. could you briefly explain who Fatat were,

what Wilson's influence on that group was, and then transition us into the Syrian Arab Congress, and then perhaps we can get into that aspect of the history and what they thought about governance of themselves at that point in history? Thank you, yes. Absolutely. You mentioned Fatat, F-A-T-A-T, a word meaning youth, really, or young, in Arabic, and it was a movement begun before the war by highly educated young men, they were all men at that time, to seek Arab rights within the Ottoman Empire.

And what I did not know before doing this research is that they knew foreign languages and that they actually had copies of Woodrow Wilson's own textbook on politics. state making, you know, was one of the first kind of real textbooks and political science written. It had gone through many editions since the 1890s, started with, you know, Roman and Greek state building, and of course culminated in the American government, and particularly extolling our federal form of government. And they saw in our federal form of government with states' rights, a model of what they wanted within the Ottoman Empire, you know, so that you would have a Syrian state within the Ottoman Empire. It would control some local revenues.

It would send representatives to Istanbul, right? But as a way of pushing back against the autocratic rule of the Sultan and later during the war against the military regime of the Anturps that wanted to assert direct control. So the Fatak people, quite interesting, they went to law school in France and so on, highly educated. So they go underground during the war and turn against the Turks, ally with people who are in exile in Cairo, people like Sheikh Rashid Riddha,

who forms something called the Syrian Union Party, and draws up a model constitution for a projected independent Syria during the war. And when the war ends, Faisal and his army, enter Damascus in October of 1918, they converge on Damascus to build that government. Faisal declared from the first moment in October 1918 that this would be a constitutional state with an elected government and that as soon as he can, he would convene a Congress to write a Constitution. That Congress was convened in June of 1919 when Woodrow Wilson's own delegation

of a kind of commission of inquiry, it's called the King Crane Commission, after the leaders of the commission, arrived in Syria to interview people on what their political preferences were. Again, in keeping with the idea of self-determination, what kind of government do you want, who would you want to be your mandatory power? And, of course, they all said, never the French. The French had been scheming for decades to take over Syria. And they insisted they wanted independence, but if they had to have a mandatory advisor for a while,

it should be the Americans, because they believe the Americans had no colonial interests in the Middle East. Right? And also because many of the people in that group and the Congress had heard of Wilson, admired Wilson, and had even read his book and wanted to build an American-style federal state. They had a vision of a sort of United States of Arabia, so USA, but it would have been greater Syria as one sort of state within the United States, and then Iraq and then Arabia, the Arabian Peninsula where Faisal's father ruled in Mecca.

And so the Congress convened it that summer to meet with the American delegation, and then they chose a committee to start writing a constitution. But the Congress wouldn't begin debating and really gratifying that constitution until the spring of 1920. Yeah, so drilling down on that a little bit more, can you just actually talk about the constitution that the Syrian Arab Congress sort of spawned? And then also the efforts since then by the Europeans to not only sort of topple it, but also to write it out of history. Absolutely, thank you.

So the constitution came out of the whole thrust of politics that these various groups had been pursuing since before World War I. I have not mentioned, but I think it's important here to mention that there had been a constitutional revolution in the Ottoman Empire in 1908, which restored a constitution that the Sultan had abrogated. and which revised the Constitution to give the Ottoman Parliament more power.

Okay? So many of these people, either they themselves or their fathers, had been members of parliament in Istanbul for the war, right? What's so interesting about the Syrian case compared to the other cases I've learned about as a historian of World War I, both in Europe and the Middle East, is that in the case of Syria, it's almost a singular case of people seeking to restore their democracy. that had crumbled during the war. So often in Europe, you have countries like Britain and France

that had built tremendously powerful war machines and granted much greater power to the central government over the economy and so on, that it was loath to relinquish after the war. And then you had countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia and the newborn Yugoslavia that were, highly nationalist in nature, seeking to really homogenize their populations, their reactions, reactions against the multinational empires of Russia, Austria, and the Ottoman empires that

had ruled them before. They were brutal to their minorities. The League of Nations, some of your leaders may be familiar with this if they have followed European Jewish history, is that the League of Nations had imposed minority treaties on these Eastern European countries to ensure Jewish rights because they were extremely intolerant countries, right? And so the Syrians were amazingly out of touch. They wanted to build a completely tolerant multicultural society. You know, the one thing that bound them together is they spoke Arabic. But you know, in greater Syria, you have a large minority of Christians and it's smaller

but important minority of Jews living there. You have other religious minorities. They're the Druze, an offshoot of Islam. And then you have other ethnicities, Armenians and Kurds and so on. And the idea was they were all, you were going to be equal as a citizen, regardless of your religion. This was absolutely radical. The Ottomans had never permitted that, right? The Ottomans had retained the idea that this is an Islamic empire.

and that Muslims would always have greater privileges than non-Muslims, despite efforts to negotiate that equality, there had always been pushed back. And here, that equality was achieved. All right? The Constitution, unlike any Constitution in the Arab world today, omitted any reference to Islam as an official religion or as a basis for legislation. The king was elected. He had no divine right to rule.

and he swore allegiance to divine laws in the plural, not to Islamic law, unheard of in the Arab world today. And the parliament was granted greater power over the king, controlled the parliament and so on. So in addition, there was a long list of what we would call a bill of rights, guaranteeing freedom of speech, assembly, and so on, assuring everyone a free public education

something that you and I would recognize as a democratic constitution and the remarkable thing was even religious conservatives signed on to it in the spring of 1920 quick follow-up question on that so

as you said the constitution basically disestablished Islam as the official religion of the area the king had to be a Muslim, but it was not intended to be ruled as a Islamic country, and the people did not have an official state religion. But as I understand it, the French intentionally mistranslated article one of the constitution regarding disestablishment of Islam. Would you like to just briefly

bring up that point? I think that that was something that was rather interesting. Yeah, it is quite interesting, and it took me a long time and a lot of checking and rechecking my sources because nobody had written about that. In fact, there had been scholars later from the region who had relied on the mistranslated French version of the Constitution, which read in Article 1 that the religion of the state is Islam, right? A mistranslation of the text in the Arabic, which read the religion of the king is Islam, right? So the French had justified their occupation of Syria on the premise that the, you know, Prince Faisal,

who was, you know, son of the Sharif of Mecca, was going to build a theocracy. And as a Muslim theocracy, it was going to kill the Christians, right? Particularly in Mount Lebanon. just as the Muslim Turks had committed genocide against the Armenians during World War I. So it wasn't an, it was not an accident that it was mistranslated. It was translated in this way to conform with what the French foreign ministry and the military were telling the French Parliament at that time about why they were spending the money to occupy Syria.

And what is greatly unfortunate is that later scholars used that French translation of the Constitution as though it were a true historical record. You know, we are still decades, a hundred years later, clearing away the lies, you know, the official lies that belong to the institution of colonial rule over Syrians, as we are at other parts of the world. Right? This is quite common in post-colonial studies, but it was particularly alarming that even Arabs from that region were relying on that French translation. Why? Because the French, after mistranslated in the Constitution, appeared to have destroyed every Arab original copy of that, that they could get their hands on. Fortunately, one man who was a minister in the government at that time seems to have gotten out of Syria and gone to Amman in Jordan with an original copy. He later published a set of documents belonging to the Syrian Arab Kingdom. And so we have a copy in Arabic of that sort, not an original but published in his book.

Well, that's a fascinating and a great work of history to be able to bring to light, you know, the original text and context. So you did some originalist constitutional development there or investigation. But, you know, it's very interesting that the context for this, of course, is of French using this discourse, Orientalist discourse, about an Islamic threat and raising the specter of the danger. to religious, Christian religious minorities in the region. Of course, this is following, you know, purges and genocide in under the late Ottomans, in Anatolia, and so on. So this is the kind of context that they're claiming that it's impossible for there to be Arab and Muslim governance because it'll be a threat to these religious minorities,

that they won't protect religious minorities. So that's an important component of it. Some might be given to read this as a progressive constitution that arises very much contingently as an aberration from, you know, Islam and Islam's relation to democracy and so on because of those particular circumstances. So I'm wondering if you could perhaps reflect on not only that historical situation that may have helped inform. how they wanted to demonstrate their fitness to this, you know, external audience at the League of Nations and in the Paris Peace Conference of their ability to rule, but also how this may have been embedded in a broader sense of, you know, Islamic thought during this period.

You've told us a little bit about Rashid Breda, but perhaps you can tell us a little bit about how these interesting discussions about sovereignty, popular sovereignty, things that might be surprising for contemporaries for us today, both in the region and outside, to really appreciate and understand that this wasn't just some contingent response politically to the need to establish these more universal rights and protections. How would you parse that? Oh, yeah. You know, there's a great story of Rida being welcomed by a bishop in Cairo in, or I think it was actually Alexandria, in Egypt anyway, after the 1908 constitutional revolution, right, that there was a coming together

of Muslim and Christians and that this was the way forward. He had embraced that constitution. He had spoken in terms of constitutional government for years in his magazine. I did theorize in the book that this was contingent in the sense that he was there. He was seen as enough of an authority. to be able to argue in favor of popular sovereignty and a parliament robust enough to pass legislation to meet the needs of the society of the day without being hemmed in by Islamic law. There certainly were people back then, as there are today, who believed that all of life should be governed by Islamic law.

there's always been. I mean, you're a medieval historian. You've seen them way back when. That's like in any religion. I mean, you can find them in Christianity and any. But Rida had contended with those people for many years before coming to Damascus in 1919 and was equipped to take them on so that when there were discussions, as there were in March of 1920, about, oh, Should there be official religion of Islam, you know, should the king be Muslim and so on, he was able to strike the compromises between very conservative people and people in that Congress who, if given the chance, might well have wanted to establish a republic and do away with a monarchy even. You know, and he put his foot down and said, look, these are people who for 400 years have been, you know, ruled by a Sultan Caliph,

Caliph being the head of Sunni Islam, you know, they'll rise up, you know, and call this, you know, an illegitimate government. If you go that far, let's compromise. And he was part of that compromise that asserted that at least the king, there should be a king and the king should be Muslim. But he was also part of the process that assured that that king did not have much power. okay so there's a little bit like I don't know if anybody's watching the crown right now right but it's a little bit like the the diminishing of power on the part of the British monarchy in favor of constitutional government there so so Rida was extremely important and was somebody who you know was miss has been misunderstood I think read as a rigid

Islamists, which I understand how you could read him as that in his later years. He was very bitter after the French came in. But in 1920, he was not that man. He believed, even as late as August of 1921, after the French had occupied Syria, he went to Geneva. He'd never been to Europe before. He went to Geneva on a ship, you know, across the Mediterranean, and his cabin mate was a Christian friend and thank goodness his Christian friend read French on the you know ship because ridden didn't know French and he wouldn't be able to tell if the dish had pork in it or not so they work together right he goes to he writes in his diary and and I was fortunate enough to get a hold of

coffee at his diary he writes in the diary oh I believe that there are liberals in Europe who are going to protect our rights, who are going to stand up for liberal democracy in the post-war world, because that's what we all fought for. He had devoted a whole issue of his magazine to praising Woodrow Wilson in December 1918, right? He was a man who firmly believe that the basic principles of governance, as well as he could understand them in the Islamic tradition, were congruent with the basic principles of liberalism, right? This comes as a shop to, people who have considered him to be a man who led a very bitter reaction against Europe and the West later in his years. And of course, we can see why, right? I mean, a man who had

put so much faith in the Europeans and in the coexistence of Muslims and Christians on an equal basis, but in the congruence of two great civilizations, and it was a man sort of of the 19th century, you know, there were great civilizations in the world. And to be civilized, they were all, if you boiled it down, based on civilized principles that they share, right? I mean, there were differences in culturally in civilizations, but civilization with a big sea existed, right? And he is disabused of that and disillusioned when the League of Nations refused Syrians appeals to withdraw the French mandate. And it is only at that point that he turned against Europe and turned against the West for having betrayed its own principles, in fact.

So now that we have all this context, we understand the internal, the external pressures, we understand the role that the U.S. and Woodrow Wilson played, the Syrian Arab Congress, etc. Your book is titled after all, how the West stole democracy from the Arab. So could you dive down into how exactly the West did steal democracy from the Arabs and then just talk about, you know, the repercussions immediately in its aftermath? And for that that region going forward from that point? Sure. Yeah.

That was, you know, that was my editor. You know, I published with, this is Grove Atlantic, I don't know, you know, there's sort of a lefty press, I suppose. And they were all excited about the story I told there. And so, you know, it was my editor, Morgan Entrican, who came up with the title. And, you know, it existed. And then, you know, I resisted the, you know, as a good Middle East historian, I don't divide the world into East and West. I understand that those are constructions and so on.

But it was in their construction of themselves as the West that the British and the French took it upon themselves to violate the basic spirit of the mandate. The mandate was supposed to be a period of tutelage in which provisional independence was recognized. and in which the Syrians would choose who their advisors would be and instead turned it into an occasion of military invasion and occupation, right, and killing of Syrians and sending them into exile and issuing dozens of death sentences and running a regime of terror in the 1920s. You know, the man, the governor, not the governor, the general, who occupied Damascus in the summer of 1920 quit two years later why because all of a sudden the French parliament said oh we're having some budgetary trouble let's cut funding to Syria really we don't you know want that and he knew

he could not rule Syria without keeping maximum military pressure over it indeed there would be a military militarized armed in Syria in 2025 right so you know they knew that they were We're imposing this mandate against the will of the people and against the spirit of the League of Nations. So that was very clear in the writings and in the letters exchanged amongst the French. And in the idea of theft that comes in the sense of it's more of the sort of like white collar crying theft, you know, covering your tracks by making it look like. it had never existed, you know, and so by using the word stole in my title, I wanted to emphasize that that democracy had existed. They had ratified in toto in a first round of review, that constitution, right, and that that was born of, as I showed, longstanding political activism and

deeply held principles, not, you know, window dressing for Paris in any respect. But the French had to rewrite, that history. I have just been, this is an interesting angle for links to modern day. You know, there are huge controversies in France today about the role of Muslims in the French democracy, in the French Republic, in light of the violent reaction to the cartoons that were published that defamed the Prophet Muhammad. And then they're republishing when the trial, the first round of criminals were being brought to trial and the French president's, you know, a vocal defense of the right to publish these offensive cartoons

and crusade to, you know, modernize Islam for Muslims who can't seem to do it themselves, right? And now it's a whole reorganization of Islamic institutions and leadership within France, right? This is a background to say I got an urgent email from the editor of a lefty academic anti-colonial journal in France and asked me please write up the story of how the French erased evidence of the French, the Syrian Congress and the Syrian Constitution. I have a letter from the French Prime Minister saying destroy every trace of that government so it would not look. like they had destroyed a democracy, right? She pleaded with me, please write that. And do you understand, I need you to write this. Do you understand how many attacks a magazine like mine

gets by people, you know, for criticizing France's colonial past and for upholding a different reading of the relationship between Muslims and Christians, and even allowing for the possibility that the freedom to publish defamatory cartoons about the Prophet Muhammad is a freedom that belongs to the old colonizers

and is an old repertoire of racial you know subversion or you know by the French towards the Muslims in their rule heaven forbid

and so I felt compelled to say yes I have to write that article so I'll expand on the many ways that the French had to then by sleight of hand cover their tracks and make what was a theft look like something that never existed. This is going to be probably an unfair follow-up question, but since you mentioned Macron and given these relatively recent events, I'm going to bring him up as well as a quote from your preface of your book. And I would like your thoughts on Macron overall, recent events as well as what you bring up. in the preface, which I found to be very interesting. You said, quote, a century after the Paris

peace conference, we are at a moment of historical reckoning. Only in 2017 did a French president for the first time declare that colonialism was a crime against humanity. Emmanuel Macron called on this generation to face history and to rethink and redesign a new relationship between France and the people of its former colonies. How do you tie that in with this recent, you know, outlook of Macron towards the formerly colonized people in Islam in France, more generally. And I think Adnan looks like he wants to tag on to this question as well. I just want to follow up a little bit with his recent visit to Lebanon, where he sounded a lot like a neo-colonizer taking responsibility. We will never abandon Lebanon. It's like,

wait a minute, you're not supposed to be in Lebanon anymore. And as a historian of this, you know, kind of French colonial context in Lebanon and Syria. I'm sure you were thinking a lot about the ironies of those statements. But even more, I just wanted to reflect on the fact that why were the French, you know, the pro-colonial party so interested in Syria? Part of it was, well, they had to have something, but they tried to make it very meaningful by referring to the Latin Crusader kingdoms, the Frankish nobility that had established itself as a, as a result of the success of the First Crusade to create this idea that they had a special relationship

and responsibility, particularly for the Eastern Christians there, which is a discourse that they again revive in 19th and early 20th century to justify the mandate. We have to protect the Eastern Christians there. We have a historic connection since the time of the Crusades and so on. So it's interesting how quickly and easily any positive developments are they can be reversed so easily in this context, it seems. Well, you know, Macron is not a university professor. He's a president and he's not been doing well, right?

He's got, he's up against the wall. He is, I supported him when he was elected only because the alternative was Marine Le Pen, right, to his right. So he, you know, all power to him for speaking. truth in 2017. But as the email from this editor in France suggests, the critique of French colonialism has not yet made it into the mainstream, right? And that should not surprise us, right, in a country in the United States anyway, that lives according to at least two radically different realities at the same time. France has long done so, right? macro follows a hundred years after you know a period of in which clemenceau himself anti-colonial was unceremoniously brutally turned out of power right after the peace conference he was you know he was the father of the war you know he was beloved during the war by the soldiers but the colonial lobby and very right-wing politicians profited in the elections following the peace conference.

And that wing of French politics has never gone away. Since the 1890s, you know, the foreign ministry and the military had been given over to the colonial party. You know, I mean, the French Republic was, you know, if you look at French history in the 19th century, the French Republic only came in the last 30 years. century, the monarchists were very strong in that country. And so it is not surprising to me that not only in 1920, but in 2020, that Macron has to play to that script. We won't have time today, but I'll remind listeners who are likely aware and the relevance here of Algeria,

that many leftists, socialists who had defended France and the resistance in the 1940s then fought to keep hold of Algeria, right, in the 1950s, and many people living in France had been expelled from Algeria or their parents had been or their grandparents had been, right? So this is a wound that is reopened regularly, right? that Macron would resort and reach for a very old playbook about individual crimes of, you know, a tiny minority of extremists representing the beliefs of an entire religion is a very sad thing indeed. Indeed. Well, I just thought it might be worth thinking about the aftermath of this moment. You talked a little bit about the contemporary circumstances that impelled you to write this book, but I'm wondering if now reflecting how you would characterize what are the legacies and consequences of this derailing, of the stealing of democracy in that moment?

You mentioned Rida turned to, you know, very anti-West sort of politics after being disillusioned. And I'm sure he was not the only one who thought that maybe these appeals to liberal democracy under the mandate were not going to be fruitful. And whether this had a long-lasting effect on the trajectory, you might say, historically of the relationship between democratic or liberation movements in subsequent periods of Middle Eastern history to our contemporary period. Yeah. Yeah, I mean, mindful that 10 decades have passed, right? And no historian wants to draw a straight line without a lot of intervening variables and events and so on. What I do think is clear. It's two things. Through 1920, I saw, and this includes the 1919 revolution in Egypt, okay, I thought I saw through the region coming out of the period of Ottoman rule. a popular base for liberal democracy.

There were many people who filled the streets of Damascus in support of that Congress, repeatedly in that period. That disappears. These people, these leaders stuck out their necks, they put their political careers on the line to decide to sit down and devise a constitutional monarchy instead of picking up guns in 1920. They had wagered that they could carry through to independence using the new instruments of international law and the rhetoric of rights.

And their sincere belief that their political principles agreed with those of European liberals. They lost. That door was shut. Dastically so. At the point of many guns and under the bombs of many airplanes, Iraq and Iraq and Syria were both bombed by the British and the French, right? And let's not even begin. We won't ever end our podcast if we talk about the events that occurred in Palestine. Second, amongst themselves, a cleavage opened between those conservative religious leaders

who had been present in the Syrian Congress. who consider themselves secular liberals. So the compromises and the bonds that were forged in the spring of 1920 were not only untethered but they became arch enemies to one another. The liberals were reduced to becoming kind of elite clique that were seen to profit from British and French rule because the British and French always retained the myth that they were going to introduce democratic rule or at least independent rule to their Arab, we'll call them colonies, they weren't really mandates, and including Egypt,

and that the Islamists became Islamists, and they became the populists, right? So the crowds in the streets were gathered by sheikhs who now no longer believed in the congruence of liberal European political principles, and those of Muslims in the Muslim world. And instead we get the rise of the Muslim Brotherhood in the 1930s, which was founded. If you read the founding documents and the writings of Hassan al-Bana,

the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt in 1928, it is founded on the principle that Islam politics are different from European politics and that there is no congruency, right? And he writes a famous letter to the young king in 1936, new king Farouk in Egypt, you know, saying, look at Europe, you know, they're making a mess of things. It was a Europe in world depression, or Europe being taken over by fascist governments. That's no model for us, right? We'll find

justice and good government in Islamic law. And he goes in a direction beyond which even Rida would have wanted to get. But it is that fundamental, cleavage between sort of secular liberalism and a belief in a sort of a kind of Islam of populism, I guess I would call it, but one that was based not the way Rida did, but based on a reading of Islamic law that hemmed in sort of possibilities for a kind of government you would have, that in the end, I think, split and undermined the Arab Spring uprisings of 2011. The Muslim Brotherhood most famously joined a few days late in Tahrir Square in Cairo, right, brought large numbers of people to Tahrir Square, larger numbers than the liberal students and professionals could have done, right? But as soon as Hussein Mubart, the dictator, was deposed, rallied to take all the winnings.

And there were, you know, very few, there were some minor politicians. who tried to build bonds of trust between the sort of secular and Islamic wings, but they did not hold, right? In Syria, too. The beginning of the uprisings in 2011 in Syria were carried on by people who seem to believe in civil democracy, right, but quickly overwhelmed

by self-styled Islamic groups who had no interest in actually working alongside. Now, this is open to some debate, perhaps because we saw some attempts at cooperation in the exiled Syrian coalition, but on the ground, the Islamic groups were not working with the secular groups at all. And I think that that basic distrust, much as in party systems in politics, you might see moments of profound cleavage between the Democratic Party and the Republican Party, say, in the 1930s when FBR took power, for example. It's like an enduring cleavage between those two parties. So I think, and this would belong to another book, obviously. I can't claim it.

But I would not be surprised if we found and could prove that that cleavage that opened up in the 1920s in response to the occupation of Syria opened up a Gulf for decades to come afterward. And yeah, this is fascinating. We're over an hour. I'm going to hand it over to Henry to wrap it up after this. But just sort of finishing that thought, you know, in the past, 10 years after the Arab Spring, we had the Obama administration, drone bombs, almost a proxy war with Russia in the U.S. Trump came in and actually one of the best he was treated by the

liberal media, right, was when he bombed that Syrian airstrip, for example. You have Turkish and Kurdish forces fighting in northern Syria, American bases being put all around northern Syria. So can you just sort of, I know this is a big question, you can be brief about it, but sort of connect this colonialist history up with present-day Syria, particularly in the past decade, and how these mechanisms of neocolonialism, orientalism, and imperialism still operate today. Oh, boy. Yeah. Well, Syria had been, I think, I'll just do it this way. In 1920, I think Syria was the heart, the beating heart of not just without a sham, but this imagined United Arab states,

United States of Arabia that they were imagining by occupying Syria and splitting its peoples up into ethnic minorities sending it into

a civil war basically in the uprising in the 1920s grounding out you know the sort of populist basis of democracy and leaving the space open for a large landowning class by the time they left in the 1940s, right? Syria could no longer play that kind of role that it had played in 1920, okay? It became a plaything in the Cold War between proxies of the Soviet Union and the United

States, an attempt to restore democracy in the 1950s since Syria failed because NATO troops lined up against a left-of-center coalition in 1956-57 that ruled the country. And in defense of their sovereignty, they faithfully threw themselves into the arms of the dictator in Egypt, Gamal Abdin Nasser. And that truly, one historian has called it the hollowing out of any remnant of democratic governance came under Nosser's rule between 1958 and 1961. So it is not surprising that Syria remains the kind of football in proxy wars down to today. And so the Russians swoop in to support an alliance with the Iranians in Syria

and with Hezbollah in Lebanon. The United States shy after two disastrous wars that Afghanistan and Iraq, of course, was not willing to go up against that Russian-backed alliance in Syria. And the Syrian people are suffering to a degree unimaginable. I mean, when I wrote my first book on Syria 20 years ago, we could say that the 500,000 people who died in World War I was a catastrophe unheard of and not to be repeated again in Syria, nay, nay, right?

In World War I, many people were killed, but the cities stood. There are no cities left in Syria, right? There are, before the war, there were four million domiciles, houses in Syria, right? Now, half the population, more than half the population is displaced with millions outside of the country, right? Half of those houses have been destroyed. There are two million domiciles left in Syria. Those people are not going home, you know, entire cities like Aleppo and Hong Kong. have been reduced to rubble, right? And so it is all the more tragic to see from the

viewpoint of a hundred years ago what might have been, you know, that Syria was the jewel in the crown, really, of a new, revived and independent Arab world to be reduced to rubble today. And the preconditions for its weakened role geopolitically in the region and its subsequent role as a football between superpowers. were laid, I think, in the rivalry between the British and the French over Syria in 1920. Excellent. We are just about out of time, and I do want to thank you for your time. But I've got one quick question for you,

and I think that this is going to be for the listeners who haven't yet read your book, but definitely should, listeners, if you haven't read the book yet, go out and get it. It's highly worth your time. It's packed full of information, and it's written in a highly engaging style. So if you haven't read it yet, go get it now. But for the listeners that haven't read it yet when they listen to this interview, a lot of them are really only going to have been introduced to this region and this period of time via the film Lawrence of Arabia.

And we mentioned in the introduction, and we touched on it briefly during the conversation as well. This has a highly orientalist view of the region and this historical kind of event and time period. for those that are listening that have only watched the movie, and that's their only introduction to the region, what would the big lie be and what do you want them to understand? Oh, well, you've seen the movie.

It's a beautiful movie, yes, absolutely. I still show it to my students, you know, sections of it. It's more than three hours long. But look, there's a wonderful two things. And this is the sad part about the movie. There's a wonderful scene early on in the movie in Faisal's tent. where Omar Sharif, the great Egyptian actor, you know, plays a key Arab fighter in the story, you know, almost spits at their British soldier who suggests that they should fall back,

you know, move south, away from the front lines, and learn to fight with some old guns. You know, Faisal is in the tent, right, the same Prince Faisal we were talking about, He says, no, give us artillery. Give us artillery like a Turks artillery. We'll use it and we'll win, right? And the guy says, oh, no, you're not educated enough to use artillery. And Omar Sharif turns to it and says, you know, forget your stupid education. This was the colonial ideology, the racial ideology that you're not ready, you need to be educated.

Just give us the guns, for God's sake, right? We can use the guns. So the movie was able to put its finger on. the lie, you know, that somehow these people are just not civilized enough to pick up a gun and defend themselves, right? But then it ends with an atrocious seat, right, in the Syrian Congress where, A, there are no educated city Arabs, they're only Bedouin, who fight with one another, right, can't fix the water works, you know, they don't know how, have left people dying in a hospital because they're incompetent and disorganized, right? And the implication is,

Thank God, General Allenby, the British have come to restore order, that the Arabs were not able to rule themselves. So, if anything, the takeaway I hope for my book is, oh, wait a second, maybe they could have ruled themselves just fine. Excellent. I think that that's an excellent summary of the problem with that being the only narrative in the West in regards to this region in this time period, and why your book is so critical for further understanding of this time period

in this event, the Syrian Arab Congress as a body. So thank you very much. Again, our guest was Elizabeth F. Thompson, Muhammad S. Farsi, Chair of Islamic Peace and Professor of History at American University. We were just talking about her excellent, excellent book, How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs, the Syrian Arab Congress of 1920, and the destruction of its historic liberal Islamic alliance. Get it from Atlantic Monthly Press. Highly recommended. Thank you, Professor Thompson.

And it was wonderful talking with you. And I know I speak for the guys when I say that it was great to have you on the show. Oh, thank you. Such a pleasure. I'm so glad. And listeners will be right back with the wrap-up conversation on guerrilla history. We're back on guerrilla history. We just had an excellent conversation with.

Elizabeth F. Thompson. And one of the things that I had forgotten to ask Professor Thompson at the end of our conversation was how the listeners could follow her. And listeners, she has a website that she wants to direct you to. It's elizabethfthompson.org. So if you want to keep up with what Professor Thompson's doing,

just check that out, elizabethfthompson.org. And I'll have that linked in the show notes. But let's kind of tie a bow on this conversation that we had with Professor Thompson. I guess I'll start. I just want to draw out one of the parallels that it kind of took a different root here in Syria than it did in our conversation with Haleal Caravelli in our conversation why Turkey is authoritarian. And that is that here in the Syrian Arab Congress,

we saw that there was a coming together of both secular liberals as well as Islamists. And those groups, despite us and the West, again, West using the term as they would have used it, us in the West would have thought that those groups would have been really opposed to one another and not able to come together and get something very extensive and very detailed put together. I believe what was their constitution, 147 articles, if I'm remembering correctly. It's a really lengthy document. And these two very different groups, secular liberals and Islamists, were able to come together in the Syrian era of Congress

and pass what Professor Thompson describes as a very progressive constitution, the most progressive to date in the entire region. Whereas if you remember from our conversation with Halil Karavelli, and if you haven't listened to that episode, I'd recommend going back and listening to that. The left in Turkey has always pushed away the religious community by basically seeing them as not being enlightened. And that's prevented the left from really ever coming into power for any significant period of time

and really making any critical reforms to the society as a whole. So even though this experience with the Syrian Arab Congress, you couldn't necessarily say it was a success. But it wasn't a success not because of them not being able to come together and put something together. but really that opportunity was stolen from them by the West. So I think that that's something that I want to draw out from those two different conversations, these two different contexts,

when the secular liberals and the Islamist work able to come together, they got through the most progressive constitution to date in the entire region, whereas in Turkey, not having those two groups able to come together has prevented them from ever really taking power are ever making any institutional structural changes within the society. Adnan, what were your thoughts on the conversation? Well, I thought it was a really fascinating story and really enjoyed her elucidation of the consequences

and the implications for the Middle East. I think the two things that we didn't get a chance to talk as much about, one that the book really does deal with and one that I think is part of a larger or longer story, perhaps. The first is about women's rights. So it was a very progressive constitution, but of course there were limitations on it. There were a lot of possibilities, but there were also limitations. And as she tells us in the book, there were conflicts over how far to go, whether to give women the right to vote in this democratic constitutional government that they were trying to establish and set up, and this threatened to really fracture the Syrian Arab Congress.

And although it seems that there would have been a majority in favor of doing that, that they might have lost some of the more conservative delegates, conservative, religiously oriented the delegates who walked out after the discussion when it looked like they would pass that potentially. And so Rashid Riddha brokered some kind of compromise there of ambiguity and actually in the discussion or the debate about whether Islam, for example, could endorse women's equality politically as full citizens, some saying yes, that it did, some saying no, that it was incompatible and having this debate. He said, well, it has nothing to do with Islam, actually, and this is a matter for the people of the region. It's a pragmatic kind of question now whether we should

postpone it. So they essentially postponed it out of pragmatic reasons because of the pressure from the French. They felt unity was more important than taking a stance. But his position, and he was a very influential figure in the Congress, was that it would be up to the people to decide. And so if a majority in the Syrian Arab Congress wanted to establish that, that's what should happen and that it wasn't going to be incompatible with Muslim ethics or Islamic law. And the second kind of area that I wish actually we could talk about more is that this is really about liberal constitutionalism and democracy. And The book really focuses on that, and so we don't get a sense for what were the social inequalities,

popular workers' sorts of consciousness and struggles. In this period, which the book even mentions, there were two really important anti-colonial and anti-imperial thinkers, or people who would put that in the discourse, who were critiquing colonialism around the world that were inspiring figures for those in colonies and in non-Western countries to look to. One, of course, was Woodrow Wilson, and we talked about him quite a lot because he was directly involved here

in the disposition of Syria. But, of course, the other figure is Lenin, and the Russian Revolution also established a principle of anti-imperialism, and Lenin wrote quite extensively about the importance of freeing the colonies and ending imperialism. And in my other podcast,

we had an interview with Elizabeth Tom Thompson, the Mudgellis, I asked about that, and she said at this point there really wasn't much of a kind of class consciousness in that direct politicized way that that would feature later in Syrian politics and in the anti-colonial struggle, but it isn't really that much a part of this early story of the first attempts for independence in this region. But that's something to be interested in. And I hope in the future we'll talk more about worker struggles in the Middle East, as we did when we were discussing the situation in Turkey in its modern history. Certainly. And listeners, make sure to check out Adnan's other podcasts, the Mudge List, where he, as he said, interviewed Elizabeth Thompson on there as well.

So by listening to the two of them, you can get perhaps a little bit more of a nuanced view of the conversation, just by having more time and a different tariff. audience for both of the podcasts. Brett, now I'll pitch it over to you. Give your thoughts on the conversation. Then we'll turn around, give some thoughts on the book, you know, what the reader should be looking for in it. And then we'll have Adnan's thoughts and then I'll wrap it up.

Yeah, cool. I just wanted to bounce off what Adnan was saying about the Bolsheviks and Lenin and self-determination. You know, this entire sort of way of thinking about the world stems in large part out of, you know, Lenin's principled, materialist analysis of imperialism and the subsequent sort of rabid defense of self-determination. And we see how that contrast so sharply with how the West's thinks of the rest of the world, you know, the so-called West, right, the Imperial Corps, if you will. And it's just another layer of irony that we're taught over here in the Imperial Court of you, Lenin, and the Bolsheviks as the bad guys win. So clearly on so many questions, including

this one. They were the good guys, and the imperialist in the so-called West were the objectively the bad guys. Another thing that I like to pull out here is the League of Nations being a precursor to ostensibly international formations that ultimately serve the interests of the Imperial Corps. You can think of the United Nations today. You can think of the IMF and the World Bank. We're presented with these things as if they are truly international and is sort of an extension of democracy to the global level, but at time and time again, they serve as vehicles for the interests first and foremost of the imperialist corps. And that's still as true today as it was back then. And seeing just how these things were given birth, you know, through this attempt at the

League of Nations, I think really highlights that point. One thing we didn't get into on the conversation that would have been interesting, but probably took us too far afield, was what could have been, right? This idea that there could have been a, a, you know, USA in the Middle East, right? This sort of this influence of American federalism that was being taken into account of how to structure that region. That would have been a fascinating, beautiful, and in a lot of ways, right, to see that idea flourish. But of course, it was stomped out by the boots of imperialists. And the last thing I'll just say is at the end when Elizabeth was talking about Syria today and just the,

profound human suffering going on in that country and that region right now as we speak my eyes swelled up with tears i almost i almost had to like you know start brushing tears away from my cheeks because it is just brutal um how this this long legacy has led and still goes on today and who suffers you know it's it's not the rich elites it's the everyday people it's children it's babies and and these are the people that have always suffered the brunt and continue to suffered the brunt of imperialism, neocolonialism, orientalism, and using these places with real human beings, with lives and dreams, as proxy battlefields for larger geopolitical jostlings, you know, in the imperialist sort of arena.

So it's just brutal, and I'll end it with this quote because I think it wraps up a lot of what I'm saying, and it kind of puts a bow on the conversation in the book, she says, quote, in the end, the great powers at the Paris Peace Conference treated their Arab allies worse than their German enemies, imposing terms suffered only by peoples who had been colonized before the war. Syrians experienced firsthand what one legal scholar has called, quote, the sorted origin of international law as a derivative of a colonial order that continues to reinforce rather than uproot the inequality of rights among nations. And I think that really gets at what I want to take away from this and how we have to think

of our battles not as national or regional, but as international in scope and toward the liberation of all human beings from all forms of domination and oppression. I don't think that there's any better way to end this conversation than with that quote, Brett, that was an excellent conclusion. I just want to let the listeners know, remind them, if you haven't read the book yet, go out and get it. Whether or not you're a historian, whether or not you understand academic writing. This is not written for the academic. This is written, as she said, for

activists in the area. This is written for people who want to understand history, not necessarily written for historians. You will understand it. It's a riveting read, and it's so much information and so much that, I mean, I guarantee you don't know it until you read this book. So

please, I'm urging you. Go out and get how the West stole democracy from the Arabs, the Syrian Arab Congress of 1920, and the destruction of It's historic liberal Islamic alliance by Elizabeth F. Thompson from Atlantic Monthly Press. Again, listeners, you can check her out on her website, Elizabeth F. Thompson.org. Keep up with all of her work. I know she's working on two books right now. So go to her website. It's going to be updated with anything else that she comes out with.

So as always, guys, thanks. It's so much fun doing these projects with you. Adnan, how can our listeners follow? you on social media as well as your other projects. Well, they can follow me on Twitter at Adnan A. Hussein, H-U-S-A-I-N. And, of course, if they're interested in a very compatible conversation that goes very nicely with our own today, with Elizabeth Thompson, they can check out the Mudgellis podcast of the Muslim Society's Global Perspectives Project at Queens University, and that's on all the various platforms, but if you want to find the feed, you can go to anchor.fm

slash the dash mudgeless, M-A-J-L-I-S. And I just want to echo with Brett. This was a fantastic conversation and thinking about this moment a century ago in light of what's been happening in Syria really is very consequential for us to see the consequences in some ways and legacies of history and of histories derailed. And Brett, how can the listeners find you and your work? Yeah, for everything I do on Red Menace and Rev. Left Radio, you can just go to Revolutionary LeftRadio.com, our Twitter, our Patreon, our shirts, and both shows can

be found easily through that website. Excellent. As for me, you can follow me on Twitter at Huck 1995, H-U-C-1-995. I also have a Patreon where I break down recent science. research and public health information for people to help me get through the pandemic. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Huck 1995. As for our show, Gorilla History, you can follow the show on Twitter at Gorilla, G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A underscore pod.

And we also have a Patreon where we have some Patreon exclusive content, including some bonus episodes. You can find that at patreon.com forward slash Gorilla History. Again, that's G-U-E-R-R-I-L-A history. Take care, everyone. Solidarity. We hope that you enjoyed the episode. Stay tuned. We'll be back with more guerrilla history very soon. You know,

I'm sorry.