The full version of the text excerpts included here was reprinted in a collection of the works of its author, Abdallah al-Tariqi (1919-1997), who had first published it in its Arabic original in the journal Dirasat ‘Arabiyya and before held it as a speech, in 1965 at the Fifth Arab Oil Conference in Cairo.

Al-Tariqi was born in what would become Saudi Arabia. He was educated at Fuad I (now Cairo) University Egypt (B.S.) and the University of Texas (M.A. in petroleum engineering and geology), and trained for another year in the US oil industry before returning to Saudi Arabia in 1953. The next year, he became Director-General of Petroleum and Mineral Affairs in the Ministry of Finance and National Economy. As such, he was inter alia responsible for relations with the then only oil company in Saudi Arabia, a conglomerate of four US firms called the Arabian American Oil Company (ARAMCO), which had received a concession in 1933, first found oil in 1938, and began extraction from the end of World War II. While taken by the anti-imperialist stance and policies of Egypt President Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970), al-Tariqi in the 1950s was a reformist modernizer. He accepted the royal Saudi political system and the kingdom’s relationship with the United States. But he was determined to greatly improve Saudi oil income and negotiation position vis-à-vis the US company, often upholding as a model Venezuela’s Creole Petroleum Company.

In parallel, he worked for more coordination between oil producing countries, to improve their position vis-à-vis Western companies. In 1957, he helped bring about a Saudi-Iranian oil information exchange agreement. In 1959, he was a driving force behind the First Arab Oil Conference, in Cairo. And there, he, the Venezuelan Minister of Mines and Hydrocarbons Juan Pablo Pérez Alfonzo (1903-1979), and a Kuwaiti, Iraqi, and Iranian delegate concluded a momentous agreement. Though informal, it “marked the first real steps toward creating a common front against the oil companies,” as Daniel Yergin put it in his classic work The Prize (1991). The agreement laid the foundation for the birth of the Organization of Oil Producing Countries (OPEC) in 1960 in Baghdad, analyzed by Giuliano Garavini in The Rise and Fall of OPEC in the 20th Century (2019).

In 1960, too, al-Tariqi became Minister of Petroleum and Mineral Affairs. But in 1962, a clash within the Saudi ruling elite cost him both his post and his ARAMCO board membership. He left Saudi Arabia; co-founded an independent oil consultancy in Beirut; and accentuated his view that oil is a global rather than country-by-country issue that needs a united Arab solution vis-à-vis the West. In parallel, his language became more pointed: he now talked about colonialism. And he embraced the nationalization of oil. This had worked in Latin America in the late 1930s when the US government needed its neighbors’ goodwill as clouds of war were gathering over Europe—but it had failed in Iran where a CIA-led coup removed Prime Minister Muhammad Musaddiq (1882-1967) in 1953, scaring Middle Eastern oil officials until the early 1960s

This is an English translation of a speech originally given in Arabic in 1958 by Gamal Abdel Nasser (1918-1970) and then reprinted in a book published in Cairo.

An officer by training and profession and a participant in the 1952 coup that ended Egypt’s country’s monarchy, Nasser in 1954 became president of Egypt and as such the president of the United Arab Republic (UAR), which was formed with Syria in 1958 and which continued to exist for a decade after Syria left the union in 1961. Having met India’s president Jawahrlal Nehru already in 1954, Nasser began playing an important political role also beyond the Middle East in the 1955 Bandung Conference in Indonesia. His star rose precipitously in 1956, when he nationalized the Suez Canal and when France and Britain had to withdraw their forces from the canal after occupying its northern part in November 1956. Given Egypt’s position in the Middle East and internationally, the US administration was concerned this aggression would play into the hands of its Cold War rival, the Sovet Union. The US forced its NATO allies (and their Israeli colluders) to withdraw—a defeat that Egyptians celebrated as their own anti-imperialist success and that deepened Nasser’s popularity among many Arabs and other decolonizing and postcolonial people.

It was against that background that the Egyptian government further upped its international profile. This now occurred also vis-à-vis Asia and not “only” vis-à-vis Africa, which had been an important arena for the republican regime’s foreign policy from before Bandung. Thus, in 1957 Nasser’s government organized the Afro-Asian People’s Solidarity Conference that, analyzed in Reem Abou-el-Fadl’s “Building Egypt’s Afro-Asian Hub” (2019), led to Cairo housing the secretariat of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Organisation. And in early 1958, it held the Afro-Asian Youth Conference. By this time and in the 1960s, Cairo became a key transnational hub for decolonization movements especially from Africa, as Eric Burton has shown in "Hubs of Decolonization. African Liberation Movements and Eastern Connections in Cairo, Accra and Dar es Salaam" (2019).

The text printed here is Nasser's address to the Afro-Asian Youth Conference, which happened to take place a mere day after the Syrian-Egyptian UAR was formally announced.

The text printed here is the resolution to the Conference for Combatting Fascism held in May 1939 held in Beirut, originally printed in Arabic in an issue of the Beirut-based leftist journal Tali‘a.

Led by leftists, including communists, the conference was a well-publicized and well-attended call for action against Nazism and Fascism. It affirmed an alliance, against Nazi Germany (and Fascist Italy) with France, the Mandate occupier of Lebanon and Syria. At the same time, it insisted on the pressing need for political progress. Most important was the ratification by the French parliament, of the 1936 Franco-Syrian and Franco-Lebanese agreements that, like the 1930 Anglo-Iraqi Agreement, would have ended the Mandate and granted Lebanon and Syria far-reaching sovereignty while preserving key French strategic interests. (Ratification never occurred.) In August 1939, the Soviet-German Molotov-Ribbentrop Pact forced communists to adjust their language also in the French Mandates. Here and in other Arab countries like Palestine and Egypt, a majority of people whose written records we possess and perhaps also many other inhabitants, felt caution if not aversion towards Nazi Germany and Fascism Italy. They disliked how those two states organized their societies; were concerned about those states’ territorial ends in the Middle East (which, however, were in the late 1930s actual only in Italy’s case); and feared especially Nazi racism for potentially targeting them, like the Jews, as “Semites,” as Israel Gershoni’s edited volume Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism: Attraction and Repulsion (2014) and Götz Nordbruch’s Nazism in Syria and Lebanon (2009) show.

At the same time, a considerable minority drew open inspiration from Nazi (and other European extreme rightwing) authoritarianism: its cult of a strong leaders, its emphasis on youth as national(ist) revivers, and its style and organizational forms, including salutes, uniforms, marches, and street brawls. Moreover, a small minority from the later 1930s sought to create a political-military alliance with Germany. Until 1939, Germany prevaricated, loath to provoke Britain, the principal power in the interwar Middle East. Thereafter, it did work with colonized nationalists who, as David Motadel’s “The Global Authoritarian Moment” (2019) has shown, were willing to work with Berlin to become independent. Among them were some Arabs like Hajj Amin al-Husseini (1895-1974), an exiled Palestinian leader whose wartime deeds and open anti-Semitism soon was, in the eyes of many, proof that Arabs in general had supported the Nazis.

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).

An agreement between Lebanon, Jordan, Iraq, Syria and Egypt to cooperate in combating Communism and Zionism.

Report on a secret negotiations between Boswell, Pinkerton and the foreign ministries of Lebanon, Syria, Jordan, Iraq and Egypt regarding anti-communist efforts in the Middle East.

Short report on a Muslim Brotherhood meeting in Beirut in the wake of the assassination of the president of the organization.

Letter from Chehab's friend during his trip to Paris, where he is secretly working on the Greater Syria Project.

The Journalist informer learns that the Communist parties of Algeria and Morocco have invited the communist parties of the rest of the Arab countries to form a group for joint action.

Document regarding the activities of Israeli communists supported by the Israeli government in Arab countries.