Pan-Arabism

It originated in the late 19th century among the Arab regions of the Ottoman Empire, and its popularity reached its height during the peak of Nasserism and Ba'athism in the 1950s and 1960s.

[4] A prominent figure was Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), who played a key role in laying the intellectual foundation for Pan-Arabism.

Zaydan wrote several articles during the early 20th century which emphasized that Arabic-speaking regions stretching from the Maghreb to the Persian Gulf constitute one people with a shared national consciousness and that this linguistic bond trumped religious, racial and specific territorial bonds, inspired in part by his status as a Levantine Christian émigré in 19th century Egypt.

A more formalized pan-Arab ideology than that of Hussein was first espoused in the 1930s, notably by Syrian thinkers such as Constantin Zureiq, Sati' al-Husri, Zaki al-Arsuzi, and Michel Aflaq.

The plan was not popular among the majority of Arabs and fostered distrust among the leaders of the other Middle Eastern countries against Abdullah.

James Jankowski wrote about Egypt at the time, What is most significant is the absence of an Arab component in early Egyptian nationalism.

There have been several attempts to bring about a pan-Arab state by many well-known Arab leaders, all of which ultimately resulted in failure.

Hastily formed under President Nasser's leadership but on the initiative of Syrian leaders who feared a takeover by communists or "reactionaries" and hoped to lead the new entity, the UAR was a unitary state, not a federal union, with its critics seeing this as hardly more than a small country being annexed by a larger one.

The former governments of Iraq and Syria were both led by rival factions of the Ba'ath Party, which, until the fall of the Assad regime in 2024, espoused pan-Arabism.

Problems persisted over a wide range of issues since the inception of pan-Arabist philosophy in the late 1800s, which, until its decline, had kept pan-Arabism on course for causal failure.

The belief held by critics emphasized that pan-Arabism separated itself from the Ummah in that it only promoted Arab unity and ideals, not Islamic ones.

The United Arab Republic, consisting of Egypt and Syria, received ideological burden due to the unfavorable outcome, thus putting pan-Arabism in question.

The victory of Israel in the 1967 Six-Day War and the inability of Egypt and Syria to generate economic growth in some form, also damaged pan-Arabism's credibility.