Sati' al-Husri

[2] Frequent moving meant that he never received a formal education from a madrasah but instead spent his formative years studying at the Mekteb-i Mülkiye, a public administration college in Constantinople.

After five years in Yanina, he took up a high-ranking administrative position in Macedonia, where the officers who would later form the Committee for Union and Progress (CUP) had a strong presence.

After the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, he was appointed in May 1909 director of the Teachers' Institute, Darülmuallimin in Constantinople, where he initiated major reforms in pedagogy and the public education system.

During this time, he published Al-Qiraa Al-Khaldouniya, the first modern Arabic language primer which was adopted by the ministry of education for about a century.

According to Malik Mufti, his "chief accomplishment was to inculcate into the political and military elites of the country a permanent commitment to the vision of a strong and integrated Iraq destined one day to lead the entire Arab world.

"[6] In 1941 nationalist army officers, from the first generation to have come under the influence of al-Husri's ideas,[7] carried out a coup d'état against the pro-British monarchy and government, briefly installing a pro-Axis regime under Rashid Ali al-Gailani.

In 1943 the newly elected Syrian president Shukri al-Kuwatli invited him to Damascus, then still under the French mandate, to draw up a new curriculum along Arab nationalist lines for the country's secondary education system.

Against the bitter opposition of the French, and the reservations of various political figures, the new curriculum was introduced in December 1944, but the sudden change caused confusion and shortages of the new schoolbooks did nothing to improve its reception.

"[10] Al-Husri's approach to Arab nationalism was influenced by nineteenth-century European thinkers, especially German romantic nationalists such as Herder and Fichte.

He viewed the nation as a living entity, and like other thinkers of his school insisted on its long-standing historic existence, even if its members were unconscious of that or refused to be considered an Arab.

[12] Al-Husri saw localist tendencies as the main obstacle to the realisation of nationalist goals, but he pointed to the German and Italian experiences as indications that they would eventually be overcome.