Michael Provence. The Great Syrian Revolt And the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Modern Middle East Series). Austin: University of Texas Press, 2005. $21.95 (paper), ISBN 978-0-292-70680-4; $50.00 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-292-70635-4.
Reviewed by David Commins (Department of History, Dickinson College)
Published on H-Levant (October, 2007)
The Druze Fragment Imagines the Nation
The substance of this concise monograph is less the Great Syrian Revolt (only the first six months receive extensive discussion) than how the transformation of society, economy, and politics gave rise to Syrian nationalism in the Druze hinterland. The reader learns nothing new about Arab nationalism; in fact, Arab nationalism is irrelevant to the revolt without the qualifier "Syrian." Instead, Michael Provence offers an engaging analysis of long-term historical processes and a colorful narrative of the French bumbling that turned Druzes from a "compact minority" into Syrian nationalists coining a distinctive discourse combining patriotism, religion, and tribal honor.
The story begins with the Druze migration and rise to dominance in Jabal Hawran in the wake of Lebanon's 1860 civil war. The Druzes' arrival in southwestern Syria coincided with the region's integration into the world market. European demand for Syrian grain prompted merchants in Damascus's Maydan quarter to forge commercial ties with the Druze, who dominated grain production in Hawran. At the same time, the Ottoman Empire was extending central authority to the periphery by building a transportation and communications network that deepened economic integration. Those parts of the story are familiar to historians. Provence brings a new element to the picture of rural incorporation into Syria's emergent political sphere with his discovery of how the Ottoman military academy in Damascus attracted the sons of rural notability and provided an avenue for their participation in the Ottoman Army in the Balkans and World War I. His sketches of insurgent leaders' paths from obscurity to prominence in the revolt push back several decades the connection that scholars have noted between military education and social mobility for rural Syrians. But how did rustic pupils in the military academy become nationalists? When it comes to the genesis and propagation of Syrian nationalist discourses, the Hashemite Arab Revolt, nationalist agitation during Amir Faysal's reign, and early anti-French resistance were essential. Provence's profiles of insurgent leaders' roles in these movements add new depth to our understanding of how nationalism worked on men from the hinterland. Altogether then, Jabal Hawran's incorporation into a wider economic, social, and political space accounts for why French provocations of Druze notables triggered an uprising that quickly grew into a national revolt.
While the revolt fed on rural-urban integration, it also laid bare deep political fissures that would persist for decades. Provence emphasizes the split between moderate urban absentee landowners, embodied at the time by the People's Party, and a coalition of militant rural notables and urban traders, a division that he notes was common in other post-Ottoman states. In a section called "Urban Agitation," we find little agitation and much moderation in the main cities. Two-dozen wealthy ladies in Damascus met to draft petitions to the League of Nations; an anti-French tract circulated in Beirut. Mostly rural insurgents briefly forced the French to withdraw from Damascus, but when France responded with a savage two-day bombardment, the city's wealthy leadership persuaded the insurgents to leave in order to spare the city further damage. Likewise, in Hamah, a veteran Ottoman officer, Fawzi al-Qawuqji, expelled the French only to depart when propertied town fathers requested that he pull out to prevent the city's bombardment. The French soon devised a policy to split Syrian ranks between compromising notable politicians and rural militants. Thus, the reader gets a clear view of the revolt's social terrain and how the French manipulated it to retain control of urban centers while developing tactics to pacify the countryside. Exactly how the revolt ended is unclear in this telling, as the author's narrative closes in January 1926, a full eighteen months before the final suppression.
Provence scoured French mandate archives, memoirs of Syrian rebels, and the Syrian press to deliver a fine-grained telling of the revolt's rural dimension. A key strength is the author's talent for putting the reader in the terrain of the revolt. He gives vivid descriptions of the setting and course of fighting in Jabal Hawran and the Ghuta villages surrounding Damascus, attesting to his immersion in Syrians memoirs and correspondence and reports from French authorities. Nevertheless, there are some gaps and inconsistencies. For example, the author declares that his research encompassed hundreds of documents on land sales, tax payments, and marriages pertaining to rural Syria. I did not notice any such documents cited in the notes; the discussion of Hawran and Druze society depends on secondary sources. Moreover, the depiction of the countryside could be more coherent and complete. On one hand, Provence refers to "a common rural Arab culture" (p. 22); on the other hand, he describes the "difficult historical relations" that Muslim and Christian Hawranis had with the Druze, in part because the Atrash clan "bullied" Hawranis, some of whom refused to join the uprising or supported the French against the Druze (pp. 88-89). Precisely how the Druze attained a dominant position in Hawran is not set forth, but one senses that at least some of the region's villagers and nomads regarded them as interlopers. This calls into question the precise nature of "a common rural Arab culture." Provence reiterates the subaltern school's call for historians to resist the bias in sources that focus on urban elites and to read those sources for what they tell us about non-elites (p. 22), but the protagonists of his narrative come from the rural notability. It seems the non-elites may have suffered the fate of ordinary villagers in other anti-colonial revolts (Palestine 1936-39), where they found it impossible to win. They risked retribution from the French if they assisted the insurgents: French tactics included expelling and killing villagers, executing rebel prisoners, and heavy aerial bombardment of towns and villages. But if villagers withheld assistance to the rebels, the rebels would steal their animals and provisions.
As for this book's contribution to the literature on nationalism, there is more potential than achievement. There is a nod to Partha Chatterjee's writings on the fragmentary quality of nationalism, but Provence missed an excellent opportunity to build on James Gelvin's work on the elite-popular split in Syrian nationalism during the Faysal period.[1] The class divide that Provence underscores resembles the dynamics that haunted Amir Faysal, torn between the militant popular committees that anticipated the anti-French insurgents and the moderate propertied elite that presaged the mandate-era People's Party and National Bloc. He does bring to light Druze war songs and nationalist proclamations, but discursive analysis gets short shrift. Teasing out their meanings in the Syrian context and comparing them to popular nationalist discourses in other Arab settings would have been welcome.
Notwithstanding such lacunae, specialists and graduate students will read this book with profit, both for the exciting new findings on nationalist currents in the Syrian hinterland and the suggestive implications for comparative study of interwar Arab anti-colonial insurgency.
Note
[1]. James L. Gelvin, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999).
If there is additional discussion of this review, you may access it through the network, at: https://networks.h-net.org/h-levant.
Citation:
David Commins. Review of Provence, Michael, The Great Syrian Revolt And the Rise of Arab Nationalism (Modern Middle East Series).
H-Levant, H-Net Reviews.
October, 2007.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=13750
Copyright © 2007 by H-Net, all rights reserved. H-Net permits the redistribution and reprinting of this work for nonprofit, educational purposes, with full and accurate attribution to the author, web location, date of publication, originating list, and H-Net: Humanities & Social Sciences Online. For any other proposed use, contact the Reviews editorial staff at hbooks@mail.h-net.org.