Pan-What?/The Political Legacy of Defining Ethnicity in the Middle East

For well over a millennium, southwestern Asia and North Africa have been regions characterized by ethnic diversity in every sense of the term. Centuries of cultural exchange between various empires that have ruled over Western Asia and the Iranian Plateau accompanied admixture between what once were isolated ethnic pockets in the region, creating a complex gene pool that is often difficult to categorize (as we explored in the last article of this two-part series on Middle Eastern ethnic identity). As tribalism was increasingly eclipsed by other sociological trends in the region, the concept of ethnic identity (although an extremely abstract one) has come to serve as a tool for rousing political or ideological fervor over time. The potential of such movements to foster unity is often just as strong as their potential to be weaponized, which is more than enough reason to analyze the effects of politicizing ethnic affiliations.

In modern history, one of the first attempts at establishing an ethnicity-based ideological current in the Middle East was the movement of Pan-Arabism. With Ottoman rule still presiding over much of the Levant, the Arabian Peninsula, and the Maghreb in the late 19th century, many prominent Arab intellectuals and scholars were concerned about the proliferation of Turkic language and culture throughout the region and its potential to overshadow Arab cultures and dialects  in both religious and secular spheres of society. Two of the most prominent Pan-Arab thinkers were Jurji Zaydan and Sharif Hussein Ibn Ali. Zaydan advocated for the standardization of the Arabic language based on Quranic Arabic, seeking to unite Arab peoples who spoke regional dialects and encourage mutual intelligibility. Fuṣḥá (Modern Standard Arabic) was partially created in an effort to foster a sort of broader ethnic solidarity between Arab peoples from North Africa to the coast of the Persian Gulf, irrespective of more specific religious or tribal tensions. Ibn Ali, who was the Sharif of Mecca at the time, felt increasingly drawn to the idea of an Arab national consciousness that had been espoused by Zaydan and other thinkers, eventually making concrete efforts to create a unified Arab state encompassing most territories with Arab ethnic majorities in southwestern Asia and North Africa. At the height of World War I, Sharif formed an alliance with government officials in the United Kingdom at the height of World War I in order to ensure inhabitants of the Arabian Peninsula that a unified Arab state could be created if there were to be a successful revolt against the Ottomans. Although the United Kingdom and the Allied Powers defeated the Ottoman Empire and Germany in World War I, Britain could not guarantee to Sharif the creation of a unified Arab state in the Arabian Peninsula due to land allocations outlined in the Sykes-Picot agreement. 

The Arab state envisioned by Sharif and Pan-Arab intellectuals never came into fruition, but the nationalistic fervor they espoused among Arabs based on shared ethnic and linguistic ties helped fuel resentment against the Ottomans, whom Arab rebels eventually defeated. Pan-Arabism went on to be a core tenant of anti-imperialist movements that helped foster autonomy and independence across the region. Unfortunately, however, movements like the Ba’athist party in Syria and Egypt or Rashid Al-Gaylani’s National Brotherhood Party were responsible for the persecution of ethnoreligious minorities like Jews and Kurds under the guise of Pan-Arabism. For instance, anti-imperialist Arab nationalist sentiments were weaponized as a rallying cry against Mizrahi Jews, who were eventually expelled from their homes Iraq, Syria, and surrounding nations in the years framing Israel’s War of Independence.

It is not surprising that Southwest Asia, being a region with such complicated notions of ethnic identity due to its genetic and cultural diversity, saw the development of multiple nationalist movements and efforts to create ethnic solidarity among non-Arab peoples. In fact, the Pan-Turkic movement, a movement whose beginnings much resembled those of Pan-Arab thought, was arguably the first modern form of ethnonationalism to appear in Southwest Asia. In the mid 19th century, Islamic Tatar theologians and intellectuals living in the Russian empire established the Jadid movement. The name Jadid, meaning “new” in Arabic, very well reflects the ethos behind the nation that these Turkic intellectuals sought to create: a state unifying all of the ethnically Turkic pockets of Eurasia which would observe a semi-secularized version of the Islamic faith and embrace cultural Westernization. As nationalistic fervor grew in Europe throughout the late 19th century, the Ottoman Empire followed this trend, as well. The Young Turks, a political reform movement in Turkey that sought to overthrow Ottoman Sultan Abdul Hamid II and bring constitutional governance to Turkey, succeeded in its efforts and popularized the idea of Pan-Turkism among the Ottoman public through the Committee of Union and Progress. Turkic peoples living outside of the Ottoman empire started immigrating in modest numbers to the Ottoman empire with the hope of being accepted by a government that strongly advocated ethnic Turkish unity. Despite the seemingly positive connotations of ideas like self-determination and unification in the name of common lineage, Pan-Turkism is a testament to the ever-present danger of pursuing such an endeavor without a sense of inclusivity and tolerance for ethnic variation within a state. The Pan-Turkic movement, engendering a limitless rise in Turkish nationalism in the early 20th century, led almost directly to the horrors of the Armenian genocide, which were undertaken in the name of “purifying” the state of non-Turkic inhabitants. This fact begs us to more carefully contemplate the further implications and moral dangers of calls for ethnic unity and solidarity, and where to draw the line between peaceful unification and violently exclusionary hatred for the other.

The last prominent ethnonationalist movement to arise in the Middle East was the Pan-Iranist movement. After the collapse of the Qajar dynasty in 1925 in Persia, Iranian intellectuals, socialists, and nationalists all wished for the creation of a democratic state in present-day Iran. Reza Shah Pahlavi’s subsequent seizure of power added fuel to the fire of resentment among teachers and intellectuals who hoped for democracy with territorial integrity. During the British and Soviet invasions of Iran during World War II, student demonstrations decrying the Shah’s tolerance of foreign interference and advocating for unity among Iran’s indigenous inhabitants increased. At first, nationalistic fervor of those involved in the grass-roots pan-Iranist movement saw a different trajectory than Pan-Turkism; people who wished to see an Iranian nation that encompassed all of the Iranian plateau and its surrounding plains often included a wider roster of Iranic peoples in their political advocacy, blurring the lines of absolutist ethnicity-based unification. Of course, a degree of ethnically Persian hegemony and simplification persisted, but earlier Pan-Iranist protests were much less characterized by the violent hatred of minority groups like Assyrians or Armenians in comparison to the sentiments found at nationalist rallies in Turkey. Eventually, the movement for ethnic solidarity among Iranian peoples in a single large nation led to the establishment of the Pan-Iranist party in Iranian parliament during the reign of Mohammad Reza Pahlavi, with the party being led by Mohsen Pezeshkpour and Dariush Forouhar. Although efforts to cooperate with the Pahlavi dynasty to bring Pan-Iranist ambitions to fruition never succeeded, this movement is yet another example of how an increasing sense of awareness for ethnic identity in the Middle East had a notable impact on national consciousness.

However, the most observable legacy of Pan-Iranism did take on a more exclusionary character than the aforementioned protests- and this legacy is found in the word “Iran,” the modern name for the country. Reza Shah Pahlavi, being a Nazi sympathizer at the height of World War II, replaced the name “Persia” with the name “Iran” as suggested by the Nazi pseudoscientist Hans F.K. Günther. Günther claimed that the people of Iran were supposedly “pure-blooded Aryans,” being descendants of the ancient Aryan tribes from the Russian Steppes region - believing (quite reductively, to say the least) that the name “Iran,” literally translating to “Land of the Aryans” in Persian, would be appropriate for the country. Pahlavi’s decision foreshadowed the persecution of Iranian minority groups, such as Jews, that became increasingly violent in the years leading up to the Islamic revolution.

When examining the details of such controversial and large scale movements as Middle Eastern ethnonationalisms, it is always appropriate to investigate their overall purpose and credibility. Digging deeper into this issue and drawing upon the history of ethnic distinction as a phenomenon in southwestern Asia, it is important to ask ourselves what ethnic solidarity in the Middle East even is to begin with, when the entire region is a vibrant, dynamic tapestry of intersecting histories, tribal affiliations, religious ideologies, and cross-cultural interactions. The complex reality of Middle-Eastern demographics greatly contrasts the homogeneity bastioned by any ethnonationalist movement. Of course, in contemplating the idea of ethnic solidarity we cannot forget the post World War I Wilsonian doctrine of Self-Determination that brought independence and joy to many ethnic minorities previously living under the rule of larger umbrella empires. Thus, despite the belligerence of nationalism, the question of ethnically unifying movements’ mutual exclusivity (or possible compatibility) with tolerance is at times difficult to answer. What is certain, however, is that the nuances inherently embedded in the discussion of ethnic identity will only increase as globalization intensifies the pace of diversification around the world.

References

Electricpulp.com. “Encyclopædia Iranica.” RSS, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/fars-iv.

Electricpulp.com. “Encyclopædia Iranica.” RSS, www.iranicaonline.org/articles/iranian-identity-iv-19th-20th-centuries.

“Pan-Turkism.”. “Pan-Turkism.” New Dictionary of the History of Ideas, Encyclopedia.com, 2019, www.encyclopedia.com/history/asia-and-africa/middle-eastern-history/pan-turkism.

Reiser, Stewart. “Pan-Arabism Revisited.” Vol. 37, no. 2, 1983, pp. 218–233. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4326563. Accessed 20 June 2019.

United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, United States Holocaust Memorial Museum, encyclopedia.ushmm.org/content/en/article/iran-during-world-war-ii.