Reem Bailony

TRANSNATIONALISM AND THE SYRIAN MIGRANT PUBLIC: THE CASE OF THE 1925 SYRIAN REVOLT

Abstract
This article explores how the mahjar press of New York City engaged with the Syrian Revolt of 1925. Building upon Benedict Anderson’s well-known theories of imagined and long-distance nationalisms, as well as more recent debates on transnationalism, this article is part of a larger attempt to geographically decenter the study of the 1925 revolt in order to contribute to a better understanding of the ways in which nationalism and anti-colonialism were negotiated through a dialectical relationship between the homeland and the diaspora. It argues that divergent views of the revolt are better understood by framing its construction in the press in terms of: 1.) an expression of trans-border, and yet particular, loyalties, and 2.) a reflection of the diaspora’s ambiguous place in the new international order set up by the League of Nations.

INTRODUCTION

In February 1927, nearly two years after the start of the Syrian Revolt of 1925, Sallum Mukarzil, the editor of the English language journal, The Syrian World, spoke of the "Echoes of the Syrian Revolution in America," and the discordant opinions it stoked among Syrian-Lebanese in the United States. S. Mukarzil noted that while the Syrian Revolt was waning, the conflict among Syrian-Lebanese in the U.S. only seemed to grow fiercer. With a tone of regret, he stated:

…among Syrian immigrants who take part in home conflicts only from a distance and are not governed by feelings of an actual loss or sense of genuine relief at the passing of a crisis, the effect of the controversy is more enduring and the harmful results of dissensions are far more reaching.¹

Mukarzil’s observation points to the power of long-distance politics; being spatially separated from the conflict intensified its effects upon Syrian migrants in New York. This article asks how the mahjar press of New York City engaged with the Syrian Revolt of 1925. Drawing from the Arabic- language periodicals al-Huda, Mir' at al-Gharb, and al-Bayan—as well as the English-language journal The Syrian World—this article puts into dialogue the divergent views of the revolt that developed between 1925 and 1927, revealing the ambiguities of Syrian and Lebanese trans-border politics during the mandate period.² Building upon Benedict Anderson’s well-known theories of imagined and long-distance nationalisms, as well as more recent debates on transnationalism, this article geographically decenters the study of the 1925 revolt. The nationalist and anti-colonialist sentiments of the revolt were negotiated in a dialectical relationship between an imagined homeland and diaspora.

A look at the above-mentioned periodicals brings up a number of points. First, studying the revolt through diaspora reveals its socially constructed and contested character. Although spatially at far lengths from the actual location of the conflict, telegrams and articles narrated the events of the homeland for a diaspora audience. The assumptions and attitudes of émigré intellectuals were diverse and contradictory, framing the revolt as a site of contestation wherein debates over its causes, as well as national and religious identity politics played out.

Furthermore, this article questions the trend towards conceptualizing transnational ties and practices as supranational phenomena which extend above or beyond the nation. The revolt motivated émigré activists to engage homeland politics through fundraising, letter-writing campaigns, and the organizing of political parties and nationalist conventions. Though activists and intellectuals operated in more distant climes whereby their actions sought to transcend geography, such long-distance politics were not transnational in the sense that they superseded national understandings. Syrian-Lebanese in the U.S. rather displayed a “multiplicity of imagined communities, organized along different, often conflicting principles.”³ Such conflicting national understandings in turn reflected an emerging nation-state system that operated along universalistic assumptions, but which produced “isomorphic” nationalist movements.⁴

Nevertheless, the fact that migrants in New York City had stakes in the revolt reveals an ambiguity towards the national project as laid out by the League of Nations. Though the logic of statehood was not questioned, the post-war international order was still regarded as sustaining a French, and more broadly Western, imperial project.⁵ The debates of those Syrians and Lebanese in New York thus highlighted both their multiple interpretations of the self-determination logics of Wilsonian principles, as well as the discordance between many of these interpretations and the practice of French colonial rule. Straddled between the floating discourse of self-determination and the ever-present forces of imperialism, the distinct experiences of the Syrian-Lebanese migrants in New York often manifested itself as support for liberal American interventionism. Ironically though mahjar intellectuals acknowledged the inescapable reality of the League of Nations with respect to the aspirations and future of their homeland, they also worked in ways to subvert the authority of France and the League by criticizing them through the medium of a transnational reading public that targeted more than just Syrian-Lebanese across the world.

The Syrian Revolt of 1925 served to channel competing visions of the contemporary and future Syrian and/or Lebanese nation and state. However, the advocacy of distinct positions and contentious mobilization around them extended far beyond the borders of the French mandate. In fact, Syrian émigrés across the world formed an important set of trans-border circuits.

BACKGROUND

Eyewitnesses and participants of the Syrian Revolt between 1925 and 1927 produced the earliest accounts of the revolt. Their monographs and memoirs articulated various positions—some emphasizing the uprising’s place in the overall Arab cause, others focusing on the revolt as a rural insurrection.⁶ Mandate officials and supporters, for their part, depicted the revolt as fanatical and sectarian. As time passed, the historiography of the revolt was revised as nationalist positions shifted. Whereas earlier works separated rural factions from their urban counterparts, nationalist narratives from within Syria portrayed the revolt as a unified struggle for the independence and sovereignty of the Syrian people. These accounts generally overemphasized the role of the urban elite, neglecting the role of the rural and Druze leadership in maintaining the revolt. With the coming to power of the secular Ba'ath Party in the 1961, the revolt was downplayed as one in a series of revolts that lead up to the establishment of the Ba'ath and their rightful place in Syrian leadership and politics (while the role of Druze was altogether overlooked).⁷ Such accounts were attempts to anachronistically insert the revolt into grander narratives that suited the political climate of the present. After the 1970s, as Arab nationalism waned, the revolt was generally neglected in historiography, or sectarian elements were emphasized—either through the championing of the Druze in Lebanese nationalist history on the one hand, or the stressing of a history of sectarian violence in the region on the other.⁸

Historians of the Middle East writing from outside of Syria situated the revolt in the history of the Syrian mandate. Emblematic of this historiography, Philip Khoury placed the revolt within a wider history of a Syrian-based anti-colonial, nationalist movement against the French. Khoury’s narrative of the mandate period, however, remained within “the politics of the notables” model.⁹ Khoury’s description of the mandate period and the revolt fit neatly into an elitist, urban-based narrative of the emergence of twentieth-century nationalist movements as the logical substitute for an outdated “Ottomanism.” Later accounts have situated the revolt as part of a history of the rural origins.¹⁰ The more recent work by Michael Provence analyzes the revolt through the relationship of the Syrian countryside to the urban centers that participated in the revolt. Provence depicts the uprising as a local Druze rebellion that evolved into a legitimate anti-colonial independence struggle, couched in nationalist discourse. Challenging Benedict Anderson’s elitist approach to nationalism, Provence employs Chatterjee’s subaltern approach to anticolonial nationalism to assert the role of lower-ranking, rural leaders who previously benefited from late-Ottoman military education. In highlighting the Ottoman background contributing to the origins of the revolt, Provence not only challenges the historiographically passé argument that the Arab provinces were institutionally neglected by the Ottomans. More importantly still, Provence also challenges sectarian narratives of the revolt, mainly French accounts depicting the revolt as an anti-Christian, rural rebellion.

Important as contributions like that of Khoury and Provence are, their scope of inquiry is limited to the geographic boundaries of the Syrian mandate.¹¹ The differing interpretations coming out of the diaspora press reveal that what they generally referred to as a nationalist insurgency against French colonialism carry more contested and multifaceted origins beyond the region itself. By stepping out of the territorial boundaries of the mandate of Syria and Lebanon, one finds that appeals for or against the revolt went hand in hand with the long-distance creation of particular nationalist understandings (such as pan-Arab, pan-Syrian, Greater Lebanese or Phoenician nationalism). Activists and intellectuals in the mahjar played an integral role in the nationalist mythologies constructed through the revolt and struggles over its interpretation, setting the boundaries of future nation-states from farther afield.

The cross-border participation of Syrians in the politics of the homeland consequently brings up the question of transnationalism and whether it is a useful tool in analyzing the political activities and intellectual production of these various interlocutors. Benedict Anderson coined the participation of émigré communities in the politics of their homeland as “long-distance nationalism.”¹² As capitalism produced nineteenth century waves of mass migration, so too did it create the transportation and communication technology that enabled immigrants of the twentieth century to uphold loyalty to an imagined community they were at far lengths from. More recently, Rogers Brubaker concludes that despite the “diminished significance of territoriality,” the nation-state remains a “membership association, and the frontiers of membership increasingly extend beyond the territorial boundaries of the state.”¹³ Brubaker responds to presentist understandings of globalization and transnationalism when he argues that these forms of external membership are neither “trans-state,” nor “transnational,” but are better characterized as “transborder nationalism[s].”¹⁴

Brubakers intervenes in the growing ascendency of studies of “globalization” studies. As global capital, trade and communications accelerated in the late twentieth and early twenty-first century, interdisciplinary scholars of migration conceived new ways of understanding the links migrants maintain with their homelands. “Transnational migration,” and “transnationalism,” consequently emerged as conceptual tools to understand migrants’ “multiple and constant interconnections across international borders and whose public identities are configured in relationship to more than one nation-state.”¹⁵ In general, transnationalism as an analytical tool has been framed in two ways. One interpretation depicts transnationalism as a set of horizontal, cross-border relationships typical of international migrants, which ultimately “de-territorialize or extend (rather than undermine) the nation-states they link.”¹⁶ The second approach treats transnationalism as a vertical shift over “accustomed territorial state-level memberships, state-bound national identities, and civic-political claims.”¹⁷ For such scholars, transnationalism is a distinctly twenty-first century phenomenon linked to globalization’s purported corrosive effects on the nation-state.¹⁸ Other scholars of transnationalism point to its broad, variegated and misused application. Calling attention to the phenomenon of conflicting and multiple “imagined communities,” Roger Waldinger and David Fitzgerald argue that “what immigration scholars describe as transnationalism is usually its opposite: highly particularistic attachments antithetical to those by-products of globalization denoted by the concept of ‘transnational civil society’ and its related manifestations.”¹⁹ Furthermore, in a world where nation-states are still bound by formal and institutionalized borders, migrant loyalties and relationships generally cannot supersede the exclusive policies of either the host country or the country of origin.²⁰ While a host of disciplines are turning to globalization as an alternative to nation-state histories, the pages of Syrian-American periodicals around 1925 reinforce the prominent role claimed by nation-state sovereignty, albeit through very particularistic ways.²¹ The particularism of the Syrian-Lebanese community of New York was especially shaped by religious identity.

Rather than “extending beyond localities that connect to any specific place of origin or ethnic or national group,”²² a glance at the rhetoric of Syrian-Lebanese diaspora communities around 1925 reveals debates over revolt and nationalism that were formulated in part with sectarian particularism in mind—either in opposition to or in support of nationalist loyalties. Diaspora discourses on religious identity, and what it meant to be Christian, Druze, and Muslim or Syrian and Lebanese in the United States were intertwined with diverging attitudes towards the revolt and conflicting visions of national understanding. The cultural turn has given way to studies that have challenged primordial approaches to sectarianism by situating it within the discourses of modernity and nationalism. Though nationalisms of the twentieth century have posited sectarianism as “antithetical to modern national development,” Ussama Makdisi’s study of the sectarianization of the Maronite community of Mt. Lebanon during the late Ottoman period convincingly argues that sectarianism “was Lebanese nationalism’s specific precursor, a formulation of new public political identities which eventually came to find their fullest expression, as well as their deepest contradiction, in the Lebanese state.” ²³ Yet, as the most recent work by Max Weiss illustrates not “all politics and sectarianisms are ultimately derivative of the Maronite experience.”²⁴ Looking at the mandate period, Weiss argues that the Lebanese Shi‘i community became a “sect-for-itself” from above and below –that is through the divide-and-rule policies of the French on the one hand, and on the other, through the subtle ways Shi’a defined their relationship to the state and one another as a distinct community through the recent institutionalization of the Ja‘fari legal school.²⁵ Rather than focusing his study on major moments of conflict, Weiss’s study of sectarianism highlights the agency of everyday people through its production and negotiation in routine practices and demands. Weiss’s work carries implications for a more critical grasp of the ways in which religious identity and sect are negotiated and debated by migrants in relation to the 1925 revolt, as well as the multiple meanings and practices of nationalism that came with it. Hence, as the paper will later illustrate, the Syrian press of New York came to debate the meaning of the Druze identity.

The outwardly sectarian politics of Syrian migrants can also be situated with respect to the assimilationist policies of the United States. Facing racist naturalization laws, Syrian-Lebanese in the United States began to lobby to have themselves considered Caucasian, and therefore “white.” Revealing the flexibility with which Syrians actively engaged homeland politics while also claiming citizenship in the United States, Na‘um Mukarzil, the editor al-Huda (The Guidance) and an ardent activist of Lebanese nationalism, was also one of the organizers in the campaign to gain naturalization for Syrian immigrants. Syrian Christians at first found that they could also use their religion to benefit them in their attempts to convince the court that they were of the “white race” and therefore eligible for citizenship.²⁶ Though they later abandoned this strategy for one which sought to distinguish themselves from Asians and Black Americans, Syrians nevertheless engaged in a debate over to which civilization and race they belonged. ²⁷ Such debates and the stakes of gaining naturalization and acceptance undoubtedly reinforced the role of religion in the particularistic makeup of the mahjari public.

Overall, the ambiguous statehood of the mandates over Syria and Lebanon created a situation still in flux, whereby the very ideas of homeland and home, of nation and belonging, were being debated more than ever before. It is within this context, amidst the tenuous and diverse imaginings of homeland, that émigré intellectuals approached the Syrian Revolt of 1925.

IMAGINED REVOLT

Syrians across and beyond the Americas used newspapers and journals to express and practice cross-border nationalisms. Print media consolidated migrant and activist networks by providing them with a public and global forum to debate ideas and push their agendas. The character of the Syrian Revolt itself was in many ways hinged on the manner it was reported. Al-Bayan, Mir’at al-Gharb, al-Huda and The Syrian World took an active interest in the ways Syrians, and more specifically the revolt, were portrayed in the mainstream press across the world, thereby explicitly connecting the role of journalism and the outcome of the Syrian uprising. A recurring topic in these newspapers was the importance of journalism to politics and social change. In an article entitled “An Unarmed Revolution,” Mir’at al-Gharb (Mirror of the West) expounded the role of Lebanese journalists in challenging French imperialism, and in holding the French accountable during the formation of the Lebanese constitution.²⁸ The author felt that he and other brethren of the press were engaged in a “thawra fikriya” or a revolution of ideas, more powerful than the armed revolt occurring at the same time.²⁹

When reporting on events connected to the revolt, the above-mentioned publications relied on variety of sources. Most journals duplicated articles from prominent newspapers in the Arab world such as al-Ahram, al-Muqattam or Lisan al-Hal.³⁰ Suleiman Baddour’s periodical Al-Bayan (The Explanation), with its mainly Druze readership, had its own correspondent in Lebanon who regularly sent pieces entitled “Syria’s News.”³¹ In some cases, the diaspora press reported on accounts of the revolt found in local papers like the New York Times, the Daily, or the Brooklyn Sun. Twice-removed from the actual revolt, these long-distance accounts often times reflected the language and wording of U.S. writers and journalists. For example, the English-language publication The Syrian World, which claimed to be neutral and open, referred to the revolt as the “Syrian Revolution,” but when referencing dispatches from the New York Times, it described those participating in the revolt as “insurgents” or “marauding bands.”³² Other reports further used labels like “revolutionists,” “nationalists,” “insurgents,” and “gangs.” Although newspapers generally characterized “the rebels” as nationalists, the connotations ranged from positive to negative. Al-Bayan and Mir’at al-Gharb framed the revolt as an anti-colonial, anti-imperialist nationalist uprising, while al-Huda clearly looked down upon the Syrianism associated with it, particularly as it threatened Maronite claims to the sovereignty of Lebanon and the maintenance of a Christian majority there.

Enthusiasts of the revolt often refuted accusations that the revolt was religious or sectarian in nature, and featured numerous columns that attempted to situate the revolt within the framework of Syrian nationalism.³³ The question of whether the revolt was at heart a religious or nationalist struggle developed into an ongoing debate with al-Huda’s publisher Na‘um Mukarzil over his denunciation of the uprising. On more than one occasion, Al-Bayan specifically addressed Na‘um Mukarzil and his politics—denouncing his ideas as divisive “absurdities.”³⁴ In response to accusations of self-serving communal politics, al-Bayan’s articles subscribed to the phrase “Religion belongs to God and the nation to all.” This was the slogan used by Arab nationalist supporters of the short-lived Faysali government in Syria.³⁵ Furthermore, supporters and participants of the “thawra” also attempted to distance themselves from “gangs” who they claimed were comprised of ignorant people who looted and killed Druze and Christian alike.³⁶ Both factions, those supporting the revolt and those against it, used their words to engage in a discursive struggle to convince the diaspora of their opinion. In cases where writers turned to English-language platforms like the New York Times and the Syrian World, they were also aiming at a much broader audience outside of the diaspora itself. The nature of being a diaspora community called upon such intra-relations. In addition, because the future of Syria and Lebanon depended upon the oversight of the French and the League of Nations, the global political situation also necessitated convincing an essentially Western audience of one’s cause.

As briefly alluded to above, the leading publications of the Syrian community in New York differed in their explanations of religious conflict, especially in relation to the events of the revolt. As Druze rebels crossed into the demarcated territory of mandate Lebanon, mixed Druze and Christian villages became sites of contention, both in a real and imagined sense. In particular, the border villages of Rashaya and Hasbaya took up the limelight in the newspapers of Syrian diaspora papers.³⁷ Though the publishers of Mir’at al-Gharb generally sided with the revolt, those contributing to it had more ambiguous feelings when describing the events unfolding in Rashaya. One account written by a publisher of another newspaper entitled al-Tawqi‘ lamented the destruction of Rashaya, the knowledge of which was transmitted through telegrams and articles circulating in “Europe, the Americas and Australia.” Failing to identify the principal offender, the author accuses Druze fighters of occupying the cities and depleting it of all its resources. The rest of the article describes the Christian churches, schools and philanthropic societies for which the village was made so famous.³⁸

On the other hand, al-Bayan countered sectarian discourse with one of communality. Al-Bayan indirectly took on the diaspora and American press³⁹ that claimed that Druze rebels ransacked the village of Rashaya, causing Christian villagers to flee in fear for their lives.⁴⁰ In response, al-Bayan published a letter from a Christian couple who inquired about the safety of their children after they had fled the village with their Druze neighbors. The principle perpetrators in this account were the French army and aircraft, who caused both Druze and Christian villagers alike to flee before the rebel fighters had even reached the village. The letter further describes the protection the couple received from their Druze neighbors. In another account taken from a newspaper in Zahleh, villagers refuted accusations by one writer that Druze rebels attacked Christians in Rashaya, attesting to the protection that the Druze Jamal family offered Christian neighbors as they escaped the French assault.⁴¹ Al-Bayan also featured a similar letter, written by Christians of Rashaya to the president of the Lebanese representative council, emphasizing help received from the same Druze family.⁴² Months after, Mir’at al-Gharb featured an article that shifted the gaze from who was to blame, to who was now responsible for easing the situation. In a letter to the president of the Lebanese parliamentary assembly, residents of Rashaya complained that the government did not live up to its promise of helping victims from Lebanon. The authors, who considered themselves as belonging to Lebanon, did not understand why sixty days after fleeing to Zahleh and Beirut, they were not yet able to return to normalcy. Instead, the letter expressed gratitude to their fellow countrymen in the mahjar for sending donations to the people of Rashaya, without which they would have nothing.⁴³

In the context of a nationalist revolt initiated by Druze leaders, questions of religious and national identity necessarily arose for both supporters and critics of the revolt. The Syrian World for example, featured a series of articles on religions of the Middle East, the first of which was an article on the history and apparently reclusive nature of the Druze, entitled “Who are the Druzes?”⁴⁴ Al-Bayan also displayed a number of articles on the role of the Druze in the wider Muslim and Syrian communities. Amir Shakib Arslan, leader of the Syrian-Palestinian Congress in Geneva and who was also considered to be the leader of the revolt outside of Syria, wrote on more than one occasion of the historical and Islamic roots of the Druze community, most likely in attempts to bridge the divide between Muslim and Druze in the diaspora as well as to gain more support for the revolt and the cause of Syrian nationalism.⁴⁵ In another article, al-Bayan responded to an article written by Dr. Rashid Taqi al-Din on the history and religion of the Druze.⁴⁶ al-Bayan sought to correct his account, in particular his description of the Druze as a separate religion from Islam. The article goes to great lengths in order to show how similar in belief and practice the Druze were to the Muslims. On the revolt, al-Bayan took on Taqi al-Din’s claim that the Druze had been ready to negotiate with the French were it not for the intervention of Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar, who happened to be a prominent urban and Sunni notable. Thus, the publishers of al-Bayan sought to depict Druze as essential to the revolt, and by extension, to Syrian nationalism and the struggle for independence. Though outwardly expressing support for the wider Syrian nation, such claims also imply the sectarianization of religious communities in their claims over the shape and form of nationalism. Indeed, the broader discussion over Druze identity itself reflected sectarianization by singling out Druze as a distinct confession.

Spatially separated from the events unfolding in Syria, Syrians in the mahjar relied on newspapers and journals from the Arab world, as well as U.S. American newspapers, to remain connected with their homeland. By contributing to the debates surrounding the revolt, Syrian journalists and intellectuals in the mahjar positioned themselves within the geographically demarcated conflict through dialogue and debate that took place through print media and telegram. By suggesting that the revolt was either religious or nationalist in nature, they were actively contributing to the way the events of homeland would be recounted and remembered. The diaspora’s rhetoric concerning the revolt speaks to the long-distance journey through which insurgencies are constructed and narrated into national histories.

LONG-DISTANCE NATIONALISM AND THE QUESTION OF TRANSNATIONALISM

While many Syrian expatriates took an active political interest in both the politics of their homeland as well as their host country – creating political and intellectual networks across nation-state borders – they were nonetheless motivated by nationalist concerns. Foremost on their political agendas was the self-determination and sovereignty of Lebanon and/or Syria. Though Syrian-Lebanese émigrés of the interwar period were pressured to assimilate into their adopted surroundings, and did so to varying degrees, they were also concerned with the politics of their homeland. Through their publications, intellectuals in the mahjar attempted to give shape and form to theretofore unmarked distance by creating a readership that not only connected diaspora and homeland (thereby facilitating “long-distance nationalism”) but also called upon an international response. ⁴⁷ In other words, though their readership transcended nation-state borders their editorials and articles still maintained the nation-state as a primary referent. In this manner, “transnationalism” speaks to Syrian migrants.

Diaspora newspapers also exercised other roles with respect to long-distance nationalism, using philanthropy and political organizing to affect the future of homeland from afar. One way that Syrian migrants saw themselves fulfilling their national duties abroad was through the formation of relief committees that collected donations for those affected by the uprising in Syria and parts of Lebanon. The committees were organized according to specific villages or cities that were hit hard by the fighting, including the bombardment by the French air force. Despite their nationalist rhetoric, relief organizations focused on certain districts or villages. For example, while al-Bayan focused on advertising and reporting on the relief committees specific to the Hawran and Damascus regions, Mir’at al-Gharb promoted committees catering to villages with Christian populations — such as Rashaya, Hasbaya, and Zahleh. These committees also seemed to reflect a Syrian/Lebanese divide with respect to geography, which in itself reflected a debate in diaspora over whether one should identify as Syrian or Lebanese.⁴⁸

Like much else connected to the revolt, philanthropic activities were not without their controversies. The collection of donations sparked a debate on credibility and transparency, as non-supporters of the revolution questioned whether donations were being used to purchase arms for the rebels. On the other hand, supporters attempted to justify philanthropic activities by publishing articles on why donations were necessary, as well as reports on who donated what, as well as when and where the donations were received. They also questioned similar fundraising activities organized by those who favored the French mandate. For example, in the article, “For whom is al-Huda collecting money?” Mir’at al-Gharb casts doubt on N. Mukarzil’s early campaign to collect funds for the victims of Rashaya, Hasbaya and Marj'ayun. ⁴⁹ Under the supervision of his political party, the Lebanon League of Progress, N. Mukarzil formed the “Committee to Help the Lebanese Victims and the Refugees,” and collected more than “half a million dollars.”⁵⁰ In turn, this money was transferred to a committee in the homeland that was headed by Musa Nammur, Speaker of the Lebanese Parliament. Mir’at al-Gharb accused Nammur of dining and socializing with the French as they bombarded the villages in question, and further accused his organization of being “a camouflage committee,” when compared to those organized by migrants originating specifically from these villages.

The subject became especially heated after the revolt had officially died down, and when it was thought the donations were no longer necessary. In September 1927, al-Huda stated its belief that the donations collected by the “stay-at-homes” was motivated by greed, and was convinced that the “contributions collected to aid the cause of Riffian Abdel Krim and the Hawranian Sultan Pasha have misappropriated the funds.”⁵¹ By highlighting the regional identities of revolt leaders, it suggested that the revolt itself was fatally flawed by particularism rather than reflecting a sense of national unit. Referencing the well-known Egyptian paper Al-Ahram, Al-Huda further alleged that of around the half-million dollars raised, only “a fifth, or possibly a fourth, reached those for whom they were originally intended.”⁵² The stories here inevitably go deeper, but suffice it so say that in discrediting one another, the two sides used philanthropy as a site of contestation wherein they each staked their separate claims to patriotism as well as articulated their opposing visions for the future of Syria and Lebanon.

Monetary investments in the homeland also brought up the question of citizenship, and to what degree Syrians should assimilate into U.S. American society. Sallum Mukarzil felt that the money collected for donations would be better spent on immigrant institutions in America such as a “home newspaper,”⁵³ demonstrating that the notion of where one considered “home” was fluid and at times contradictory. “Home” could be both “here” and “there” at once, or as with the case above, more spatially restricted depending on the context.

Another activity that reflected the long-distance nationalism of Syrian migrants was the development of political parties in the mahjar. The Syrian revolt and the organization of relief committees throughout the United States prompted the formation of a general Syrian Nationalist convention held in Detroit in January of 1926. The purpose of the convention was to organize around the cause of Syrian-Arab nationalism as well as the call for independence.⁵⁴ Syrians from all over the country wishing to participate in the convention selected delegates to represent them in Detroit. The organizers of the convention also hoped to portray a strong image of the Syrian immigrant community to the “West,” and to alert the international public of the injustices of French rule. Using a discourse that called upon the fulfillment of rights and sovereignty, Abbas Abu Shakra, a member of the New Syria Party and secretary of the convention, wrote to the New York Times wishing to “call attention to the fearful and bloody contest that has been raging in French-ruled Syria.”⁵⁵ The convention debated the proceedings of the League of Nations and discussed plans to make their desire for independence heard.⁵⁶ Also concerned with these proceedings, Al-Bayan published telegrams that were directed at conference members. One such telegram by a U.S. American author brought attention to a discussion in the U.S. Senate of the French debt and the financial cost of the mandate. It was hoped that such a discussion would help convince the United States that France should be held responsible for its action in Syria. Though the expressed purpose of the conference was to promote Syrian nationalism and independence, it was also not uncommon for members of the convention to also call upon the significance of the convention being held in the United States—a democratic “free and refined country.”⁵⁷

The Syrian Nationalist convention drew considerable attention when its main backer, the New Syria Party (Hizb Suriyah al-Jadidah), invited Amir Shakib Arslan and others to speak at its meeting held the following year. According to al-Bayan, the purpose of the second convention was to “devise proper means for the advancement of the national cause,” as “an active body in the national movement.”⁵⁸ The New Syria Party, opened chapters across the United States that hosted meetings regarding Syria’s quest for national independence, as well as other matters related to the Arab world such as the case of the Palestine mandate.⁵⁹ Formed after the First World War, the party played an important role in the organization and leadership of the convention, particularly among Druze activists in the United States.⁶⁰ It also petitioned the Ministry of Foreign Affairs in Paris “with telegrams demanding independence from France.”⁶¹ Prior to the arrival of Arslan’s delegation, The Syrian World brought attention to the matter:

What is of especial significance is the focusing of the Syrian revolutionists' interest on the United States for enlisting political support and procuring financial assistance. A general convention of the New Syria Party, representing the Syrian Revolutionistic movement in America has been called to meet in Detroit, Michigan during the month of January, and prominent nationalist leaders have been invited to attend from abroad. Among those who acceptance has been announced are Emir Shekib Arslan, Ihsan Bey Jabery, Nasim Bey Sabaiha and Toufik Yazegi.⁶²

Those opposing the revolt and its call for Syrian unity denounced Arslan as an opportunist for having cooperated with the Ottoman government during World War I. As with the earlier visit of Dr. Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar in 1924, N. Mukarzil urged the readers of his newspaper to “cable the American government asking for their deportation,” and succeeded in putting the delegation “under surveillance.” ⁶³ Al-Huda explained its opposition to the delegation as based upon the most fundamental disagreements over “life, happiness, and liberty,” vowing to oppose them by all legal means.⁶⁴

Through the development of political parties and conventions, social and charitable organizations, as well as newspapers and journals, mahjar intellectuals and leaders participated in long-distance nationalisms. From their location in diaspora, they engaged with different opinions and divergent actions that reflect the ambiguities and contradictions of nationalist ideologies. Adhering to a greater Syrian identity with varying degrees and displaying a wide-range of political viewpoints, the position of these writers and activists from farther afield underscored how they attempted to shape the future of Syria and Lebanon as nation-states.

ENGAGING THE LEAGUE OF NATIONS AND THE INTERNATIONAL COMMUNITY

Syrians across the globe appealed to the League of Nations and the international community hoping to make headway in their pursuit for an independent and sovereign nation-state. As Erez Manela has shown, Woodrow Wilson’s rhetoric of self-determination had a far-reaching audience beyond the European diplomats at the Paris Peace Conference.⁶⁵ Tapping into the letters and petitions from native politicians and intellectuals in Egypt, India, China and Korea, Manela argues that Wilson’s “promise of a new world order captured imaginations across the world,” comprising an international Wilsonian moment between 1918 to 1919which spurred anti-colonial nationalism across the globe. Manela further argues that this Wilsonian moment “was both international and transnational in its scope,” with the concepts “international” referring to action between nation-states and “transnational” referring to interactions that cross borders “but are not necessarily performed by them.”⁶⁶ While Manela perhaps gives too much credit to Wilson’s ideas in spurring anticolonial movements, his work points to the wider inter- and trans-national contexts to gain statehood recognition through the League of Nations and the “promise of a new world order” after World War I. In dialogue with such processes, Syrian-American journals and newspapers debated the character and viability of this new international order.

Syrian-American journals and newspapers often discussed the nature of nationalism and national duties. In dialogue with compatriots in other corners of the diaspora and in the homeland, they frequently addressed the international community in their pleas for statehood. Though the Syrian diaspora differed with respect to which nation they belonged to and under what conditions a nation achieved sovereignty, that people aspired to nationhood and expressed feelings of national pride was considered to be a given. ⁶⁷ In this light, a recurring feature in many of these journals was the fate of Syria at the League of Nations. Among those with critical stances, Al-Bayan referred to the League of Nations as “nothing but a trap that Europeans set up to entangle the weak.”⁶⁸ For this reason, the article went on, the United States, allegedly aware of the imperialistic schemes of the Europeans, refused with a majority vote to join the World Court, a wing of the League created in 1922. By the same token, Mir’at al-Gharb described the failure of the League of Nations to live up to its original purpose, likening it to a “man who got hit on the top of his head and so became mad.”⁶⁹ At the same time, though, their journals did display a measure of hope in the system. Despite the bleak picture that the Syrian-American Club painted about a report they drafted for consideration by the U.S. Senate, they still expressed a small amount of faith in the covenant of the League of Nations, citing Article 22 that iterated the idea of a mandates system over the former territories of the Ottoman Empire.⁷⁰ As migrants who still claimed belonging to places subordinated within the hierarchy of states set up by the League of Nations, they had limited choices. As Benjamin White has shown, Syrians could outright reject the system, risking being left out of the bargaining process; they could negatively subvert the system by challenging it while still tacitly accepting it as reality; or they could positively subvert it by accepting it and calling upon it to work in its favor.⁷¹

The bombardment of Damascus by the French in October 1925 received widespread international attention, and also pushed Syrians to turn to the United States. ⁷² Killing over 1,500 people, the forty-eight hour bombardment grasped the attention of anti-imperialists and U.S. American isolationists alike.⁷³ In addition, the fact that consular agents and foreign charitable organizations were also affected by the bombardment made the incident a sensitive diplomatic issue.⁷⁴ Newspapers reported on the efforts of Amir Shakib Arslan and the Syrian-Palestinian Congress to petition the Mandate Commission of the League of Nations to look into the actions of the French government in Syria and Lebanon.⁷⁵ It wasn’t only U.S. American isolationists already critical of the League of Nations, however, who condemned the incident. The Foreign Policy Association, which was created in support of Woodrow Wilson and the League of Nations, met in December 1925 to discuss the French mandate in Syria. Members of the association assailed France and General Cabrillet in particular for misunderstanding the significance of the Druze and treating them in a tyrannical fashion. The association called upon the League to send “an impartial commission of inquiry to Syria,” and the maintenance of a permanent resident commission in all mandated territories. It was hoped that such reform would improve the reputation of the League and prove that the “mandate system is not a sham or veiled form of annexation, but a genuine attempt to replace arbitrary imperialism by an elastic but effective form of international control.”⁷⁶ In February 1926, France was summoned to explain its actions in front of the Permanent Mandates Commission in Rome, “for what appeared to be the first time in history.”⁷⁷ In proceedings that dragged on for months, Arslan and his supporters sought to convince the League to curb French control over Syria. Their attempts came to an end in June 1926 when the League voiced its support for the new French High Commissioner Henri de Jouvenal, ultimately meaning “that the question of French rule in Syria” would be pushed aside.⁷⁸

Syrians in the United States made their own attempts to call attention to French rule in Syria, going so far as to suggest once again that they would prefer a U.S. American mandate over a French one. Seeing the United States as an independent party, supporters of the revolt called upon the U.S. government to also investigate French actions in Syria. In January 1926, the Syrian-American Club of New York wrote a letter to President Coolidge describing the suffering of the Syrians under the French and stating their preference and confidence for a U.S. American led mandate instead of a French one.⁷⁹ Syrian-American journalists also called attention to the mentioning of Syria in the U.S. Senate, translating a speech by Senator of Wisconsin, Robert La Follette Jr., son of the famous Progressive Robert La Follete,. also known as “Fighting Bob.” La Follette Jr., an isolationist and supporter of labor activism, referenced a report drafted by members of the Syrian-American club, detailing the disastrous situation in Syria.⁸⁰ After failing to secure support at the League of Nations, the leading figure of the Syrian revolt himself Sultan Pasha Atrash even wrote a letter to the Associated Press calling upon the “honorable impartiality” of the United States in hearing the case of the “Druse people.” In addition to pleading for the sympathy and assistance of the people of the United States, Sultan Atrash defended the Druze against allegations of religious “discrimination,” emphasizing the secular nature of the revolt as one seeking to “obtain the legal rights which belong equally to the Sons of Syria, whatsoever they may be.’⁸¹ By turning to the United States, Sultan Pasha and his supporters in the mahjar acknowledged their failed attempts to negotiate with the French as well as to reach a settlement with the League of Nations. And yet by turning to the United States, who they deemed a neutral observer, they also implicitly rejected the terms of the mandate.

Those backing the French mandate generally did so for the very same reasons they opposed the revolt. Historically inclined both culturally and politically towards the French, Maronite elites felt that a French mandate would best serve the interests of their people in the process of forming a Lebanese state. In addition, men like Sallum Mukarzil felt that mandate with all its problems, was the most practical option given the internal and external problems Syria faced, i.e. “fierce religious cleavages,” the educational, social and political disparities of the Syrian people most evident in the “advanced condition of Mt. Lebanon,” as well as its vulnerable position with respect to its “covetous neighbors.” For these reasons, S. Mukarzil believed that it was in the best interest of Syria to put its “complete trust in the League of Nations, which realizing its capabilities, and at the same time its limitations, placed it [Syria] in class A mandates.” ⁸² Yet such support also had its limitations. Over rumors of the transference of the mandate from France to Italy, al-Huda stated:

We did not choose France of all the nations on the earth to enslave us for the sake of its interests and the interests of the traitors of Lebanon. For justice does not make a distinction between a minority and a majority, nor between one religion and another. We shall demand our rights from France before the civilized world, reserving her mandate over us; we shall oblige those of her sons who deal corruptly in Lebanon to respect ‘the free and freeing France’; we shall remain under her protection until we despair of her when we will move from a country of oppression to a country of plenty, freedom and equality.⁸³

On the surface, this passage reveals the contradictory character of Lebanese nationalism. Though Lebanon was deemed to be a safe-haven for Christians of the region, as a modern state established on the foundations such as “justice,” there was no place for the dual categories of minority and majority which had been imposed upon them. This passage also importantly demonstrates that both support and opposition to the revolt were contingent upon the role of colonial subjects and peoples as subordinates in the emerging international system.

In their call for U.S. support, Syrian-Americans expressed conflicted feelings towards the new international order and international institutions in determining their fate. In their cross-border efforts and pleas, the Syrian diaspora reflected the very internationality which defined the political landscape which followed the “first wave of globalization.” By calling for a U.S. American mandate, by petitioning the League of Nations, and by writing letters to U.S. American newspapers, supporters of the revolt also acknowledged the power exercised by this new international order set up by the League of Nations. Though they did not physically take up arms as did those rebelling in the homeland, they nevertheless also attempted to disrupt this order by publicly supporting the revolt and attempting to engage the international public in a debate over the legitimacy of the French in Syria. By insisting that their legal rights as a nation should take precedent over other concerns and interests, they also expressed their theoretical rejection of idea that they were different from other nations, or that they had to meet certain criteria for acceptance into the international ecumene as legitimate state actors.

CONCLUSION

This article has looked at the Syrian revolt of 1925­–1927 through the words of the Syrian-Lebanese press in New York City, and has attempted to demonstrate the significance of diaspora when studying the history of Syria and Lebanon in the post-war period. The differing and contradictory views expressed in diaspora call into question the historiography of the revolt, as well as that of nationalism and transnationalism. The discourse, interest and appeals of Syrian migrant intellectuals and writers reflected a global moment in which the League of Nations epitomized an internationalism that appeared to be the order of the day. Such a moment saw various intellectuals and nationalists making appeals to the global Syrian diaspora, as well as the United States and the international order on behalf of their nationalist movements. Whereas many Syrian and Lebanese nationalists were critical of the League of Nations, seeing it as reinforcing a broader European imperialism, they nevertheless acknowledged that the times called for political organizing on an international scale. Set against the backdrop of 1920s U.S. American history, Syrian-Lebanese in New York City, whether supporting or opposing the revolt, called upon the United States to take a more active role in Syrian affairs by pressuring the League of Nations. This study hence exposes the contested and variegated approaches activists and intellectuals took with respect to nationalism, and reveals just how ironic, ambiguous and yet essential they became to the process of nationalist formation. This contingency was ever more pronounced among Syrian émigré intellectuals who were physically separated from the events of the revolt, but who were nevertheless called upon by various contingent factors to take a stance. Such factors included the proliferation of international and transnational media and institutions, which worked to produce an expansive civic order that reflected the emerging hegemony of the nation-state system—a nation-state system that nevertheless sustained a broader European imperial agenda.

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