Salim Mujais - The Syrian Social Nationalist Party: Its Ideology and History

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party

Its Ideology and History

Salim Mujais

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party
Its Ideology and History

Salim Mujais

Copyright 2019 Black House Publishing Ltd

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced in any form by any electronic or mechanical means including photocopying, recording, or information storage and retrieval without permission in writing from the publisher.

Black House Publishing Ltd
Kemp House
152 City Road
London, United Kingdom
EC1V 2NX

www.blackhousepublishing.com

Email:

To Syria, the Phoenix Land

My daughter has been my guardian against infelicities of content, style, and grammar. She has my love and gratitude.

I also owe a debt of gratitude to Mr. Karl Winn, who offered thoughtful comments and criticism that helped enhance the clarity and coverage of this work.

Antoun Saadeh - Founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party

I n the fall of 1932, five young men met in a modest room in Beirut and took an oath of membership to a new political organization. They were mostly students of the American University in Beirut and their leader, Antoun Saadeh, taught German privately at the University and Arabic to members of the British and American diplomatic corps in Beirut. Three years later, at dawn on November 16, 1935, the security forces of the French Mandatory authority raided that same room and arrested Saadeh and a number of his lieutenants on the charge of forming an illegal clandestine political party. In the interim, the new political organization had grown from the initial five to over a thousand members spread along the Syrian coast from Jaffa to Latakia, into the Lebanon range, and in the hinterland from Jerusalem to Amman, Damascus, Homs and Hama. As the date of the original meeting had not been recorded, the date of the arrest was accepted as a symbolic substitute and November 16, 1932 became the official date of the founding of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP).

The SSNP is sometimes referred to in the Western press by the French mistranslation of its name: Parti Populaire Syrien, or the Syrian Popular Party, abbreviated as PPS. In the Middle East, the Party is commonly referred to simply as the Nationalist Party (al-Hizb al-Qawmi) attesting to the characteristic link between the term nationalism and the perception of the Party by the people of the Fertile Crescent. For the first decade of its existence, the party was known as the Syrian National Party (in Arabic al-Hizb as-Suri al-Qawmi). In the early years of WWII, its founder added the term Social (al-Ijtimai) to the name of the party to characterize its national ideology more clearly, and henceforth the party became known as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (SSNP, al-Hizb as-Suri al-Qawmi al-Ijtimai).

Over the following decades, the SSNP was subjected to ferocious attempts by colonial powers and local governments aimed at eradicating it from political life in the Middle East. Nevertheless, after every onslaught, the SSNP seems to rise from the ashes, and earned the name of the Syrian Phoenix from its determined enemies.

The Syrian Social Nationalist Party is indeed the first organized party in the Middle East to have a definite national doctrine and a well-structured ideology. The Pan-Arab theorist Sati al-Husri, no friend of the SSNP, wrote in the early 1950s: Until now, there has appeared no party in the Arab world that can compete with the SSNP for the quality of its propaganda, which addresses both reason and emotion, or for the strength of its organization, which is effective both overtly and covertly. By virtue of its organization, this party succeeded in creating a very powerful intellectual current in Syria and Lebanon.

The SSNP has played a prominent role in shaping the make-up of the political and intellectual environment of the Middle East through its intimate involvement in political events and its influence on political and cultural discourses in the area. Knowledge of the Party in the Western Hemisphere, however, has remained for a long time limited and distorted, predominantly because of the lack of publications that expound the ideology of the Party and its history. Except for an academic study by an ex-party member, There remains a need, however, for an integrated overview that presents a systematic examination of the ideology of the SSNP and its early history, which is the aim of the present work.

Antoun Saadeh, the founder and leader of the SSNP, was born in the village of Shweir (Mount Lebanon) on March 1, 1904. Antoun Saadeh spent the war years in Mount Lebanon suffering from famine, oppression, and the desolation of his country.

In 1920, Antoun Saadeh travelled to the United States escorting his younger siblings to join his maternal uncle and worked briefly as a railroad inspector before moving to Brazil to join his father. In Brazil, Saadeh assisted his father in publishing a daily paper (al-Jarida) and then a monthly journal (al-Majalla) where he expressed his early and passionate involvement in the issues of nationalism, the destiny of Syria, and its future. During his stay in Brazil, Saadeh was intensely involved in the cultural and political affairs of the Syrian community. He studied independently and learned Portuguese, German, and Russian in addition to French, which he had learned in Cairo before the First World War, and English which he had acquired in Syria before he emigrated. He was widely read in history and the social and political sciences, and taught Arabic language and literature in one of the Syrian communities private colleges.

In 1930, Saadeh returned to Syria determined to bring into existence a political movement that aimed at transforming Syria into a modern viable polity. He acquainted himself with the political and social conditions of the country and expressed his views on national revival and sovereignty in the press and in public lectures. In the fall of 1932, Saadeh founded the SSNP as a secret organization and the Party grew in secret until November 16, 1935, when the French authorities alerted to the presence of the political organization apprehended Saadeh and his lieutenants and imprisoned them. While in prison awaiting trial, Saadeh wrote on December 10, 1935, a statement at the request of his lawyer in which he expounded his reasons for founding the SSNP:

I was an adolescent when World War I broke out, but I had become cognizant of, and sensitive to, the conditions of my people. As I witnessed the woeful condition in which my people were and as I suffered the misery rampant among them, the first question that came to my mind was: What was it that brought all this woe on my people.

After the end of the war, I began looking for the answer to this question and for the solution to the chronic political problems that kept pushing my people into one adversity after another. Obviously, I was not seeking an answer to that question to satisfy a scientific or intellectual curiosity, but rather to discover the most effective means to eliminate the causes of this woe. After an organized preliminary study, I concluded that the absence of national sovereignty was the primary cause of what had befell and what was ailing my nation. This led me to pursue the study of nationalism and societal rights and their genesis. In the process of my study and research I became keenly aware of the importance of the idea of a nation, its meaning and the complexity of the factors from which it emanates.