Friday, March 24, 2023

2023: Hushang - Husri

 


Hushang Shah Ghuri
Hushang Shah Ghuri (1405-1432).  Ruler of Malwa.  He extended the Malwa territories northwards and southwards.  He had a fine taste for architecture, which made Mandu a magnificent town.
Ghuri, Hushang Shah see Hushang Shah Ghuri


Husri, Abu Khaldun Sati‘ al-
Husri, Abu Khaldun Sati‘ al- (Abu Khaldun Sati' al-Husri) (1880-1968).  Leading ideologist and popularizer of Arab nationalism and Pan-Arabism.  Born in 1880 in San‘a, Yemen, to Syrian Arab parents from Aleppo, young al-Husri moved often as his father filled Ottoman judicial posts in Yeman, Anatolia, and Libya.  Since the family spoke Turkish at home, al-Husri learned Arabic late and spoke it with a heavy Turkish accent.  Graduating in 1900 from the Mulkiye Mektebi (Civil Service College) in Istanbul, he spent eight years in the Balkan caldron of competing nationalisms, first as a schoolteacher and later as an Ottoman provincial official.

Although supporting the Committee of Union and Progress army officers who launched the Ottoman (“Young Turk”) Revolution of 1908, he shied away from direct involvement in party politics throughout his life.  His outspoken, even blunt manner often alienated his associates.  Al-Husri moved to Istanbul after the revolution.  He directed the Teacher Training College in Istanbul from 1909 to 1912, edited an Ottoman Turkish education journal, and won recognition as a leading educational reformer.  Rejecting Islamism and Turkish and Arab nationalism, he remained a dedicated secular Ottomanist throughout World War I.

With the effective demise of the Ottoman Empire in 1918, al-Husri switched his allegiance to Arab nationalism and joined Faysal ibn Husayn’s regime in Damascus as director general, then minister, of education.  Fleeing Syria’s French conquerors in 1920, he moved to Iraq when the British made Faysal king there in 1921.  For twenty years in Iraq – as director general of education, editor of an education magazine, head of the Teachers College, dean of the Law College, and director of antiquities – al-Husri promoted Arab nationalism at every opportunity.  He was exiled when Great Britain overthrew Rashid ‘Ali’s nationalist regime in 1941 and moved to Syria, where he arabized the national education system (1944-1946) as the French mandate came to an end.  The following decade he spent in Cairo as cultural adviser to the Arab League and first director of its Institute of Higher Arab Studies.  He retired at the age of seventy-seven in 1957 and died in Baghdad in 1968.

In both the Ottoman and Arab phases of his career al-Husri consistently worked for secular educational reform as a means of instilling patriotism in youth.  Until 1919, he advocated secular Ottoman patriotism, with people of all religions, languages, and ethnic groups joining as equal citizens.  He publicly clashed with Ziya Gokalp, the leading advocate of Turkish nationalism.  However, Ottoman nationalism proved too fragile to resist the centrifugal forces of other nationalisms. 

Al-Husri’s belated conversion to Arab nationalism enabled him to admit the force of linguistic bonds, which he had earlier denied.  Language and common history became the active ingredients of his theory of Arab nationalism.  He believed that despite their fragmentation under Western colonial regimes, Arabic-speakers from Morocco to Iraq and from Syria to the Sudan constituted a single nation (ummah).

Al-Husri so admired the fourteenth century writer Ibn Khaldun – interpreting his concept of ‘asabiyah (social solidarity) as a kind of national bond – that he named his son “Khaldun,” thereby adding “Abu (father of) Khaldun” to his own name.  Otherwise, most of the sources of al-Husri’s thought were Western.  He drew on the writings of French educators, scientific popularizers, and social thinkers, but after 1919 German romantic nationalists best suited his Arab nationalist purpose.  French nationalists had taken their state for granted, whereas German nationalists had believed themselves to be an organic nation long before achieving a unified state in 1871.  Above all, Fichte’s Addresses to the German Nation, penned after the defeat of Prussia by Napoleon in 1806, seemed to al-Husri to speak to a similarly divided and occupied Arab nation.  Like post-1806 German and post-1871 French educational reformers, he wanted the schools to emphasize patriotism, discipline, and self-sacrifice, not individual liberties.

Al-Husri’s emphasis on language and history led him to refute writers who made religion, race, will (as argued by Renan), economic circumstances, or geography the key determinants of national identity.  Unlike his Iraqi contemporary Sami Shawkat, al-Husri had no use for German racial theories.  Roaming freely through modern history, he selected examples to prove his points.

Al-Husri denounced “regional” nationalisms centered on existing states – he was particularly keen to persuade Egyptians of their Arabism – and he considered Pan-Islamism an ineffective distraction.  He took great pains to refute the westward looking Egyptian nationalism of the liberal writer and reformer.

Al-Husri opposed British, American, and other educators who advocated practical and vocational education and autonomy for foreign or minority schools.  While in Iraq, he made concessions to neither the particular needs of the Kurdish minority in the north nor to the needs of the neglected Shi‘a majority in the south.  He resisted proposals to use the various Arabic vernaculars in writing, working instead for standardized curricula and textbooks throughout the Arab world.

Al-Husri’s voluminous works were popular throughout the Arab world, leaving their mark on Ba‘thists and Nasserists, among others.  Unable to imagine Arab unity without Egypt, he backed Nasser in 1961 when Syrian Ba‘thists and others took Syria out of the United Arab Republic.  In 1979, the Iraqi Ba‘thist regime honored him with a commemorative postage stamp, but his determined secularism made him unpopular with those for whom religion is an essential element of their political identity.

Ottoman ideologist, educational reformer, secular Arab nationalist, and pan-Arabist. Saw secular educational reform as a means of instilling patriotism in youth. Developed a theory of Arab nationalism based on common language and history, rather than race, religion, will, economic circumstances, or geography. His works on education and nationalism are popular with Baathists and Nasserists.
Abu Khaldun Sati' al-Husri see Husri, Abu Khaldun Sati‘ al-

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