The author of the text from which the below excerpts are taken, Amir Shakib Arslan (1869-1946), was born into a high-standing Druze family in the Ottoman (now Lebanese) village of Shoueifat, near Beirut. He was a prolific writer known as Amir al-Bayan, Prince of Eloquence, as well as a political activist, who “brought to the age of emerging national states the organizing principle of universal Islamic empire,” as William Cleveland put it in Islam against the West: Shakib Arslan and the Campaign for Islamic Nationalism (1985). As long as the Ottoman Empire existed, Arslan believed in, politically worked for, and even fought for that polity, e.g. in the 1914 wartime campaign to capture the Suez Canal in British-occupied Egypt. He supported the pan-Islamic policies, also outside the empire, of the government of Sultan Abdul Hamid II (r. 1876-1909). That is, he believed that strengthening the empire vis-à-vis European powers was crucial for its own survival and for the defense of Islam as a religion and a political force. Vice versa, he believed that a defense of Islam—or, to be more precise, an Islam reformed along the lines outlined by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1838-1897) and Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), whom he knew—would strengthen the Ottoman Empire.After World War I, Arslan made Geneva his base of operations, leading the Syro-Palestinian delegation, which inter alia lobbied the League of Nations. More broadly, he reacted to the shock of the Ottoman Empire’s demise and of the Caliphate’s abolition by becoming, until his death, the world’s perhaps most central post-Ottoman Muslim nationalist activist.
A point in case is the book from which the below excerpts are taken, Li-madha ta’akhkhara al-Muslimun wa-li-madha taqaddama ghairuhum, which he published in Arabic in 1930. Moreover, Arslan not only published prolifically and edited the French-language journal La Nation Arabe. He also corresponded with scores of people and got involved in anti-colonial thinking and activities in many Muslim countries, from Morocco via Syria to Indonesia; thus, he wrote the below text as a long response to a question sent to him by a Muslim living in the Dutch East Indies, present-day Indonesia. To this anti-colonial end, he also worked with Fascist Italy in the 1930s and with Nazi Germany in World War II, causing leftist Arabs like Salim Khayyata—excerpts from whose Al-Habasha al-mazluma [Oppressed Ethiopia] are included in this collection—to bitterly condemn him.
Nadeem M. Qureshi is thanked for permitting us to use excerpts from his English translation of Shakib Arslan’s Arabic book Li-madha ta’akhkhara al-Muslimun wa-li-madha taqaddama ghairuhum (Cairo, 1930), titled Why Muslims Lagged Behind and Others Progressed, published in 2021 by Austin Macauley Publishers (London).
Used by permission of Austin Macauley Publishers Ltd (www.austinmacauley.com).
