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Dr. Syngman Rhee, 1939

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October 26, 1977	GDR Ministry for State Security, 'Note on Information about Increased Activities by Extremist Palestinian Groups' East German intelligence report on relationships and splits within the Palestine Liberation Organization.
October 1977	GDR Ministry for State Security, Main Department XX, 'Entry of a Terrorist Group into the GDR' A Stasi intelligence report on the potential for terrorist activity in Berlin.
October 18, 1977	GDR Ministry for State Security, Main Department XX, 'Increased Activities by Extremist Palestinian Groups in Western Europe' East German intelligence reports that the Popular Front for the Liberation of Palestine may be planning "commando operations" in Western Europe.
March 15, 1977	GDR Ministry for State Security, Main Department XX/AGM, 'Information No. 191/77: Expertise of the Bavarian Administrative Court on the Palestine Question' An intelligence report on West German interest in the PLO.
March 29, 1989	Letter, Koenig to Cdes. Dohlus, Sieber, and Rabenhorst During a meeting with Ethiopian leader Mengistu Haile Mariam, Mikhail Gorbachev underlined the importance of a political solution to the conflict. After an immediate ceasefire, negotiations without preconditions should start, based on the territorial integrity of Ethiopia.
May 11, 1932	Rabindranath Tagore, 'Interview with Jenabe Dashty, Member of Parliament, Persia, 11 May 1932' Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the 1913 literature Nobel Prize laureate, was a leading Bengali-language Indian writer and a truly influential intellectual in the subcontinent, across Asia, and indeed the world. He travelled to more than 30 countries in the America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. He often and perhaps most importantly in Asia talked about Asian civilization: a bloc shared by entities like Japan, India, or Iran that—he here followed Orientalist tropes—was more spiritual than the West. A 1926 visit of his to Egypt impressed Iranian educational officials and diplomats, including the consul-general in Bombay, Jalal al-Din Keyhan, who maintained close relations with that city’s Zoroastrian community. As a result, Tagore was invited to Iran, whereto he flew in 1932 for a month-long country-wide tour. Analyzed in Afshin Marashi’s Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (2020), his tour inter alia included a visit to the tomb, in Shiraz, of one of Iran’s most famous poets, Hafez, and dozens of meetings with regular citizens, intellectuals, and politicians, including an audience in Iran’s capital of Tehran with the country’s ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944; r. 1925-1941). This and one other text contained in the collection are (perhaps revised) transcripts of two conversations Tagore had in Tehran. One was with educators, likely in the garden palace in which Tagore was put up; the other took place during a party at the residence of the known politician, journalist, and secularist thinker Ali Dashti (1897-1982). Certainly the former but perhaps also the latter conversation was facilitated by an English-Persian translator, likely the poet Gholamreza Rashed Yasemi, or Dinshah Irani, a leading Indian Zoroastrian invited with Tagore to Iran, or Jalal al-Din Keyhan, who accompanied Tagore, too. At the time, Iran was in the midst of a sociocultural transformation. While led by the increasingly autocratic Reza Shah Pahlavi, it was initiated and carried by an expanding modern middle class, as Cyrus Schayegh has shown in Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society (2009). This process went hand in hand with a nationalism that was importantly, though not exclusively, focused on Iran’s pre-Islamic past. At that time, the nationalist narrative went, Iran was interwoven with the Indian subcontinent, whose inhabitants are, like Iranians, Aryans—a European term warmly welcomed by many Iranians and Indians. In this simultaneously nationalist and supra-nationalist narrative, that common Indo-Iranian realm was broken only when Semitic Arabs, whom Iranian nationalists often malign, invaded Iran in the seventh century. We thank Afshin Marashi for information provided about the translation practices during Tagore’s journey.
May 3, 1932	Rabindranath Tagore, 'Discussion with Educationists in Tehran, 3 May 1932' Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), the 1913 literature Nobel Prize laureate, was a leading Bengali-language Indian writer and a truly influential intellectual in the subcontinent, across Asia, and indeed the world. He travelled to more than 30 countries in the America, Africa, Europe, and Asia. He often and perhaps most importantly in Asia talked about Asian civilization: a bloc shared by entities like Japan, India, or Iran that—he here followed Orientalist tropes—was more spiritual than the West. A 1926 visit of his to Egypt impressed Iranian educational officials and diplomats, including the consul-general in Bombay, Jalal al-Din Keyhan, who maintained close relations with that city’s Zoroastrian community. As a result, Tagore was invited to Iran, whereto he flew in 1932 for a month-long country-wide tour. Analyzed in Afshin Marashi’s Exile and the Nation: The Parsi Community of India and the Making of Modern Iran (2020), his tour inter alia included a visit to the tomb, in Shiraz, of one of Iran’s most famous poets, Hafez, and dozens of meetings with regular citizens, intellectuals, and politicians, including an audience in Iran’s capital of Tehran with the country’s ruler, Reza Shah Pahlavi (1878-1944; r. 1925-1941). This and one other text contained in the collection are (perhaps revised) transcripts of two conversations Tagore had in Tehran. One was with educators, likely in the garden palace in which Tagore was put up; the other took place during a party at the residence of the known politician, journalist, and secularist thinker Ali Dashti (1897-1982). Certainly the former but perhaps also the latter conversation was facilitated by an English-Persian translator, likely the poet Gholamreza Rashed Yasemi, or Dinshah Irani, a leading Indian Zoroastrian invited with Tagore to Iran, or Jalal al-Din Keyhan, who accompanied Tagore, too. At the time, Iran was in the midst of a sociocultural transformation. While led by the increasingly autocratic Reza Shah Pahlavi, it was initiated and carried by an expanding modern middle class, as Cyrus Schayegh has shown in Who Is Knowledgeable, Is Strong: Science, Class, and the Formation of Modern Iranian Society (2009). This process went hand in hand with a nationalism that was importantly, though not exclusively, focused on Iran’s pre-Islamic past. At that time, the nationalist narrative went, Iran was interwoven with the Indian subcontinent, whose inhabitants are, like Iranians, Aryans—a European term warmly welcomed by many Iranians and Indians. In this simultaneously nationalist and supra-nationalist narrative, that common Indo-Iranian realm was broken only when Semitic Arabs, whom Iranian nationalists often malign, invaded Iran in the seventh century. We thank Afshin Marashi for information provided about the translation practices during Tagore’s journey.
November 1930	Shakib Arslan, 'Why Muslims Lagged Behind and Others Progressed' (Excerpts) 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).
February 1927	Statement of the Delegation of the "Etoile Nord Africaine" ("North African Star") by Hadj-Ahmed Messali The presenter of this address, Ahmed Ben Messali Hadj (1898-1974), is known as the “father” of Algerian nationalism, one of whose foremost biographies is Benjamin Stora’s Messali Hadj, 1898-1974 (2012). Having served in the French army in 1918-1921, Messali Hadj for economic reasons moved to Paris. There, he met his French wife, the leftist Emilie Busquant. In 1925, he was recruited to the French Communist Party’s (PCF) colonial commission. In June 1926, he co-founded, and became Secretary General of, the Etoile Nord Africaine (ENA), which at first demanded political and legal equality for France’s Muslim North Africans. As this text shows, demands shifted by February 1927. That month, ENA functionaries including Messali Hadj travelled to Bruxelles. Together with leftists and delegates from three dozen colonized countries, they participated in the founding conference of the League against Imperialism (LAI), which was initiated by the Moscow-headquartered Comintern and organized by the PCF and the German communist Willi Münzenberg; the experience in Bruxelles of one non-Arab delegation, India, has been analyzed in Michele Louro’s Comrades against Imperialism: Nehru, India, and Interwar Internationalism (2020). It was in Bruxelles that Messali Hadj held the below address, speaking ex catedra as his notes had disappeared. The LAI was soon paralyzed by discord between communists and activists for whom allying with communists was a means to an anticolonial end; in 1936, it dissolved. Even so, it was the first truly international attempt to combat imperialism, as shown by the edited volume The League against Imperialism: Lives and Afterlives (2020). As for the ENA, it in 1928 cut its ties with the PCF, being too independent-minded and -organized and vexed that the PCF, following the Comintern line, was moving away from ENA’s ideas about self-determination. In 1929, the French government outlawed ENA. In the 1930s Messali Hadj became closer inter alia to Shakib Arslan, translated excerpts of whose work Why Muslims Lagged Behind and Others Progressed is included in this collection. Even so, in 1936 to early 1937 a rebranded ENA shortly joined the leftist French Front Populaire, but then again was closed down. Messali Hadj reacted by establishing the clandestine Parti du Peuple Algérien (PPA), which—a shift—demanded absolute Algerian autonomy within the French Republic. Condemned by the Vichy government to hard labor in 1941, Messali Hadj returned to Algeria in 1945. He continued to play a leading political role, founding in 1946 a PPA successor, the Mouvement pour la triomphe des libertés démocratiques. But from 1954, his star declined. By 1957, the Front de Libération Nationale, the new organization that in November 1954 started the War of Independence, ravaged the Mouvement National Algérien that Messali Hadj had founded that month, too. Politically neutralized, he stayed in France. He was allowed to return to Algeria only after his death, in 1974, for burial in his hometown of Tlemcen.
1927	Al-kashfiyya khidma wataniyya (Scouting is a National Service) Developed by British officer Robert Baden-Powell (1857-1941) in 1907, scouting was first introduced into the Middle East in 1912, a history analyzed in Jennifer Dueck’s The Claims of Culture at Empire End (2010). It became more known after World War I, with the largest groups first forming in Damascus and Beirut. In the latter, a Sunni, Muhyi al-Din Nusuli, in 1920 founded al-Kashshaf al-Muslim, which in 1922 was recognized by the International Scout Federation (ISF) as the Muslim Scouts of Syria. Earliest recruits were at the school of the American University of Beirut, though most enrolled at the Islamic College (Kulliya Islamiyya) and the schools of the Maqasid Islamic charity organization. During the 1925-1927 anticolonial Syrian Revolt, the French Mandate authorities disbanded the scouting groups, though they soon recovered. In 1927, too, the pro-French Catholic Scouts de France were founded, and small secular French and Jewish units came to life as well. Moreover, scouting picked up speed also outside the French Mandate, e.g. in Egypt and Palestine, as Arnon Degani’s “They were prepared: the Palestinian Arab Scout Movement 1920-1948” (2014) shows. Back in the French Mandate, the Muslim Scouts of Syria and Lebanon joined ranks in 1931. In 1933, there were 45 troops involving 3,000 members. But in 1934 the French authorities clamped down on them, concerned about support for Syro-Lebanese unity. Lebanese and Syrian scouts split. If in the 1930s especially Muslim scouts formed part of a widening organizational involvement of youth in anticolonial nationalist politics, they had seen themselves as nation-building pioneers already in the 1920s. As the below text shows, in their eyes scouting allowed (male) youngsters to develop physical strength, be outdoors and get to know “their” nation’s natural habitat, and hone self-help, leadership skills, and team spirit, among other desirable traits. In this sense the below text, which was printed without a byline in the Beiruti journal al-Kashshaf (The Scout), was complex, not unlike Baden-Powell’s beliefs as expressed in his seminal Scouting for Boys (1908). It meant to strengthen individuals’ self-reliance while simultaneously serving a collective end, in Baden-Powell’s case the British Empire, here the Lebanese-Syrian nationalist cause.