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Being Modern in the Middle East Being Modern in the Middle East REVOLUTION,NATIONALISM, COLONIALISM, AND THE ARAB MIDDLE CLASS Keith David Watenpaugh PRINCETON UNIVERSITY PRESS PRINCETON AND OXFORD Copyright © by Princeton University Press Published by Princeton University Press, 41 William Street, Princeton, New Jersey 08540 In the United Kingdom: Princeton University Press, 3 Market Place, Woodstock, Oxfordshire OX20 1SY All Rights Reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Watenpaugh, Keith David, 1966– Being modern in the Middle East : revolution, nationalism, colonialism, and the Arab middle class / Keith David Watenpaugh.—1st ed. p. cm. Includes bibliographical reference and index. ISBN-13: 978-0-691-12169-9 (alk. cloth) ISBN-10: 0-691-12169-9 (alk. cloth) 1. Arab nationalism. 2. Middle class—Arab countries. 3. Revolutions. 4. Social conflict—Arab countries. 5. Civil society—Arab countries. I. Title. DS63.6.W38 2006 956′.03′08622—dc22 2005021431 British Library Cataloging-in-Publication Data is available This book has been composed in Sabon Printed on acid-free paper. ∞ pupress.princeton.edu Printed in the United States of America 10987654321 For Heghnar Contents Preface and Acknowledgments ix Note on Translation and Transliteration xiii Abbreviations and Acronymns xv ONE Introduction: Modernity, Class, and the Architectures of Community 1 TWO An Eastern Mediterranean City on the Eve of Revolution 31 SECTION I Being Modern in a Time of Revolution: The Revolution of 1908 and the Beginnings of Middle-Class Politics (1908–1918) 55 THREE Ottoman Precedents (I): Journalism, Voluntary Association, and the “True Civilization” of the Middle Class 68 FOUR Ottoman Precedents (II): The Technologies of the Public Sphere and the Multiple Deaths of the Ottoman Citizen 95 SECTION II Being Modern in a Moment of Anxiety: The Middle Class Makes Sense of a “Postwar” World (1918–1924)—Historicism, Nationalism, and Violence 121 FIVE Rescuing the Arab from History: Halab, Orientalist Imaginings, Wilsonianism, and Early Arabism 134 SIX The Persistence of Empire at the Moment of Its Collapse: Ottoman-Islamic Identity and “New Men” Rebels 160 viii • Contents SEVEN Remembering the Great War: Allegory, Civic Virtue, and Conservative Reaction 185 SECTION III Being Modern in an Era of Colonialism: Middle-Class Modernity and the Culture of the French Mandate for Syria (1925–1946) 210 EIGHT Deferring to the A"yan: The Middle Class and the Politics of Notables 222 NINE Middle-Class Fascism and the Transformation of Civil Violence: Steel Shirts, White Badges, and the Last Qabaday 255 TEN Not Quite Syrians: Aleppo’s Communities of Collaboration 279 ELEVEN Coda: The Incomplete Project of Middle-Class Modernity and the Paradox of Metropolitan Desire 299 Select Bibliography 309 Index 317 Preface and Acknowledgements The prevailing image of the Middle East includes neither the middle class nor modernity. Not only popular media, but even a great deal of serious academic writing, portray the region as the definitive realm of irrationality, extrem- ism, and senseless violence, where vast, undifferentiated, and inherently backward societies are ruled by kleptocratic dictators, nationalist dema- gogues, turbaned fundamentalist clerics, or oil-rich petty monarchs. As a consequence, contemporary Middle Eastern social, intellectual, and cul- tural history has been excluded, for the most part, from the global study of class, liberalism, and historical thought. The reasons for this exclusion are manifold and have as much to do with the corrosive political situation in the region as they do with the culture of Middle East studies in the American academy. This book challenges that exclusion not just by writing a history of the middle class of Aleppo in the period 1908–1946, but also by situating that history against the question of modernity in a way that secures a place for contemporary Middle Eastern history in the study of urban soci- ety, class conflict, colonialism, and ideas. Part of that challenge is creating new descriptive vocabularies of geog- raphy: hence my adoption of the term Eastern Mediterranean, which in this work means the cities and countryside facing the sea and bounded at the north by the mountains of Anatolia, the west by Mesopotamia, and the south by the deserts of the Arabian Peninsula. This was a part of the world connected by history, culture, and networks of trade and education that also possessed tremendous linguistic, ethnic, and religious heteroge- neity. About the size of Iberia, it makes more sense as a geographical construct than the Middle East—a term that can describe a much larger and even more diverse area and carries with it residues of colonialism and an obvious Eurocentrism. That said, the issues raised in this book have a larger resonance for that part of the world labeled by Western historical and political thought the “Middle East” and hence its place in the title and other moments in the work. I have also chosen to write about the middle class because it has been largely invisible to history. Putting a human face on it—the way its mem- bers thought, remembered, organized themselves, related to power, expe- rienced anxiety and joy—is my modest contribution to the creation of a Middle East in which the middle class does more than just survive or x • Preface emigrate, but rather is empowered to construct a peaceful and better world for itself and its children. Moreover, I write about the middle class because I had the opportunity to live in a middle-class community in Aleppo. I watched middle-class families live unremarkable lives of great beauty, community, heartbreak, ambition, and sorrow, and I never could have written this book without their help. In particular I thank the extended Baronian-Homsy-Zobian family, especially Koko Zobian. I am particularly thankful that I met and was able to spend time with Dr. Robert Jebejian before he died in 2001 nearing his ninety-third birthday. Dr. Jebejian was the careful guardian of the history of Aleppo’s vast Armenian community, and he allowed me wander the collection of the Violette Jebejian Library and Archive at will. I am indebted as well to those Aleppines who granted me oral history interviews and shared with me their private collections of books, photo- graphs, and papers. As this book evolved from a UCLA doctoral dissertation in history, senior colleagues helped me to sharpen ideas and ask the right questions, in particular, Afaf Marsot, Hasan Kayal , Philip Khoury, Elizabeth Thompson, Geoff Eley, Palmira Brummett, Virgina Aksan, Kevin Rein- hart, Leila Fawaz, Juan Cole, Kenneth Cuno, Elizabeth Picard, James Gel- vin, Nadine Me´ouchy, Michael Morony, Carole Pateman, and especially, Peter Sluglett. Roger Owen and Cemal Kafadar secured time for me to complete the final revisions of this book as a visiting scholar at Harvard University’s Center for Middle East Studies (2004–2005), and Brigitta van Rheinberg of Princeton University Press made this book a reality. My extended family played a tremendous role in this work, especially my father, who in addition to reading an earlier draft of this book sparked my original interest in the Middle East. He had lived in Iraq and Lebanon for much of the 1950s and remembers these places in a way I imagine any bright American teenager would have in the middle of the last century: confidently optimistic and with real affection for the people who always treated his family with courtesy and kindness. His memories are colored by the exotic and the biblical and reinforced by beautiful trinkets, carpets, antiquities, and most of all by slide transparencies. My father’s slide col- lection is immense. And these images became part of my own memories of childhood. Thus unlike most Americans of my generation, whose earliest child- hood encounters with the Middle East were images of the Iranian hostage crisis, the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, or Hizbullah’s bombing of the ma- rine corps barracks in Beirut, the Middle East I grew up with was a more humane and knowable place, home of real people with hopes and dreams. I have tried to capture in the following pages something of their lives. Preface • xi My deepest gratitude goes to my wife Heghnar Zeitlian Watenpaugh, a brilliant scholar and beloved companion; this work and my life are the richer because of her. I dedicate this book to her. Some of the material in this work is drawn from articles and book chap- ters I have published elsewhere and is used here by permission. “Steel Shirts, White Badges and the last Qabaday: Fascist Forms and the Transformation of Urban Violence in French Mandate Syria” in France, Syrie et Liban, 1918–1846—les dynamiques et les ambiguı¨te´s de la rela- tion mandataire, Nadine Me´ouchy, ed. (Damascus: Institut Franc¸ais d’E´ - tudes Arabes de Damas Press, 2002), 325–347. “Middle-class Modernity and the Persistence of the Politics of Notables in Interwar Syria,” The International Journal of Middle East Studies 35:2 (2003): 257–286. “Colonial Cooperation and the Survivors’ Bargain—The Post-Genocide Armenian Community of Syria under French Mandate,” in The British and French Mandates in Comparative Perspective, Nadine Me´ouchy and Peter Sluglett, eds. (Leiden: Brill, 2004), 597–622. “Cleansing the Cosmopolitan City: Historicism, Journalism and the Arab Nation in the Post-Ottoman Eastern Mediterranean,” Social History 30 (2005): 1–24. The text is followed by a selected bibliography that lists archives con- sulted, several of the more important works on the history of Aleppo, and those used to guide my theoretical discussions of class and modernity. Whenever a source is used for the first time in the text, I have given it a complete footnote. Note on Translation and Transliteration While appearing neutral, any transliteration of Arabic written symbols and speech sounds into a Latin alphabet carries with it the potential for anachronism and political manipulation.

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