Tuesday's Read: Ma'na an-Nakbah

Zurayq, Qunstantin. Trans. R. Bayly Winder. The Meaning of the Disaster. (Beirut, Khayat's College Book Cooperative, 1956.)

No cover of this short, out-of-print essay was available, so I selected instead a headshot of beloved Syrian scholar Dr. Qunstantin Zurayq* (قسطنطين زريق). Meaning was one of the first critical responses to what was almost immediately dubbed "an-Nakbah," the huge displacement of Palestinians during the 1948 war with the newly-founded State of Israel. Zurayq's essay, originally published and promptly sold out in August of that year, was republished - and also sold out - in a larger edition in October. It was not translated into English until nearly a decade after its first publication, in 1956. Yet Zurayq's articulate response remains a landmark expression of Arab thought at the onset of the now-perpetual series of incursions and reprisals that is the Arab-Israeli conflict.

In Meaning he adopts a reflective, self-critical posture, admonishing Arabs against flailing despair and encouraging rational reflection, national unity and organization, and acknowledgement of the superior tactical and strategic thinking that led the Israelis – whom he always refers to as “the Zionists” – to their dramatic and decisive win. He moreover scolds those who spent the summer enjoying themselves rather than organizing and assisting in the war effort. It is important to remember that at this time the Egyptian Revolution was still a few years off, precipitated in part by disillusionment with the poor performance of the Egyptian military during the war.

Zurayq, one of the more prolific, beloved, and respected Arab intellectuals of the twentieth century, centered much of his life’s work around the problematic of the Arab-Israeli conflict in Arab consciousness. While thematically, intellectually, and conceptually his total oeuvre is impressively wide-ranging and focused primarily on establishing an Arab nationalist identity, the Arab-Israeli conflict represented the consistent crux of his concerns, the topic to which he returned as a constant preoccupation. Zurayq was first and foremost a nationalist and a secularist.[1] Unlike many of his contemporaries, he viewed the West and Westernization almost entirely favorably – with the significant exception of Zionism. Rather than considering colonialism a byproduct – or hallmark - of modernity, he called it an accident, the result of Arab “colonializability.”[2] In this respect, colonial history in the Middle East was a result of weakness, a weakness that can be remedied with systematic, organized, scientifically-grounded thought and action.[3]

---

[1] See, e.g., Atiyeh, George, and Ibrahim M. Oweiss, eds. More than conquerors: Selected addresses delivered at the American University of Beirut 1953-1966. (American University of Beirut Press, 1968), especially the introduction and first two chapters.

[2] Zurayq, al-Wa‘y al-Qawmi, in Abu-Rabi’ Contemporary, 299.

[3] Ibid.

---

*Interestingly, Zurayq is often credited with popularizing the term nakbah - now synonymous throughout the Arabic-speaking Middle East with the 1948 Palestinian refugee crisis - through this essay. Controversial New Israeli Historian Ilan Pappé ((אילן פפה, however, recently alleged that nakbah was originally an Israeli word choice, distributed on leaflets by the Israeli military to Arab villages and towns before invasions in July 1948. (I say controversial here because Ilan Pappé has been so outspoken against the Israeli government, including calling the treatment of Palestinians a systematic "ethnic cleansing" and calling for a boycott of Israeli academics. The latter led the president of the university of Haifa, where he had been employed, to call for his resignation in 2007. Since then, Pappé has worked at the University of Exeter.) Nevertheless, Zurayq's essay remains one of the texts that educated Arabs refer to when discussing the nakbah; it has achieved cultural significance both because of its incisiveness and eloquence, and because of its still-contentious subject matter.

**Zurayq's name, both first and last, may well have the distinction of being transliterated in more different ways than any other. I have also founded him listed under Konstantin Zurayk, Constantine Zureik, Kunstantin Zoureiq, Qustatin Zureiq, and any combination of those. If you are having difficulty finding him, try different spellings in your search. Also, it's worth noting that in Arabic his first name, originally Greek (his family was Greek Orthodox) does not have an "n" (ن) in the first syllable. It is quite common to find transliterations that leave out the "n" as well as those that insert one in order to conform to English and Greek convention.