1 The Convergence of Life, Culture and Politics

Fuʾad al-Khatib was born into a rural notable family of Sunni Muslim denomination in the village of Shhim in Lebanon’s Shuf mountains, south of Beirut. His grandfather and father were both Ottoman judges.⁶ Fuʾad attended the Syrian Protestant College (later renamed AUB) from 1904 onwards and published his first articles and poems in the Beirut journal al-Mufīd.⁷ It was migration that turned him into a pan-Arab poet: due to differences with his father, who envisaged a medical career for his son and feared that his strong pro-Arab and anti-Ottoman convictions threatened his safety, Fuʾad first moved in with family members in Jaffa and then moved to Cairo around the time of the Young Turk revolution.

In 1910 he published the first part of his Dīwān and then spent the remaining years before World War I as a teacher at Gordon College in Khartoum in the Sudan.⁸ When war broke out he was in Lebanon for the birth of his second child, his daughter Ihsan, only to flee the Ottoman lands again to escape persecution as an Arab political activist.⁹ He then decided to join Sharif Husain and his Arab Revolt against the Ottoman Empire in the Hejaz. His family, too, was under threat of being deported by the Ottoman military authorities, but the poet managed to get them to join him in the Arabian Peninsula.¹⁰

Altogether, the al-Khatib family story fits perfectly into the grand narrative of the rise of Arab nationalism. Al-Khatib claimed that he was the first Arab from outside the Hejaz to join the Arab Revolt, a fact that – regardless of its veracity – provides an important legitimating element in Fuʾad al-Khatib’s biography. His fame, even if largely vanished today, is based on the fact that he was once known as the “Poet of the Arab Revolution.” Khatib developed a close rapport with the Sherif of Mecca and started to beat the drum of the latter’s fame in prose and poetry, taking over editorship of the Sherif’s newspaper al-Qibla. After the war, he became Husain’s Foreign Minister in the government of the Hejaz. His poems were recited by school children throughout the Arab East.¹¹

Sherif Husain’s rebellion is part of the founding myth of Arab nationalism, representing Arab revolutionary spirit and resilience against the Ottoman enemy, and exemplifying – in line with the mythology shaped during the nahḍa, the Arab literary renaissance period of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries – the final wake-up call to the Arabs to throw off the Turkish yoke. Al-Khatib facilitated the broadcasting of Sherif Husayn’s role in this awakening in the light of nationalist aspirations.¹² For this, the Sherif needed the service of a pan-Arab mind.

The Arab Revolt initiated a lasting relationship between the Hashemites and Fuʾad al-Khatib, and also between his family and Arabia. As a diplomat and senior political adviser, Fuʾad al-Khatib first served Sherif Hussein directly, and then represented the government of the Hejaz in Damascus during Prince, later King, Faysal’s rule over Syria, until al-Khatib left in the wake of the battle of Maysalun that marked the beginning of French rule. He was again at the side of Sherif Hussein’s oldest son ʿAli during his reign over the Kingdom of the Hejaz, and then of his younger brother, the Amir ʿAbdallah of Transjordan, who would later become the first King of Jordan. He was also a friend of King Ghazi of Iraq because he had been his English teacher in the Hejaz. After he fell out with the Hashemites, King Ibn Saʿud of Saudi Arabia remembered al-Khatib as a loyal spokesman of the Arab cause and after World War II honoured him with a post as the Kingdom’s first Ambassador to Afghanistan, where Fuʾad al-Khatib died in 1957. He was buried in his home town Shhim, where weeds overgrow his tomb today.¹³

It is probably fair to say that al-Khatib’s commitment to the Arab nationalist cause made him an uprooted man. He spent only limited periods of time in his home country of Lebanon – usually when he had to gather his thoughts and strength in order to embark on a new political project, or after one of his frequent breaks with a political mentor, writing a great deal of poetry along the way. The periods when he pursued a political agenda were spent in countries other than his own. His life unfurled as a sort of an anti-career of Arab nationalism (unlike that of an Arab notable, a military officer, or a member of the New Effendiyya, the middle class of young professionals), in which he lived the ideals of the pan-Arab Republic of Letters as a nationalist poet and spent his efforts in the service of leaders who for him embodied the pan-Arab cause. He also experienced many of the crucial events in the political history of Arab nationalism either at first hand or indirectly because he was familiar or even friends with the key actors.

2 Pronouncing the Ḍād: Language and Identity

There are two motifs that run through Fuʾad al-Khatib’s opus, from the early years prior to World War I to his death in the 1950s: the identification of Arab ethnicity with the ability to master classical Arabic (“al-ʿarabiyya”), and with the historical, social and geographical location of the purest state of the language as practiced by poets in the Arabian Peninsula before and during the lifetime of the Prophet Muhammad. Al-Khatib’s uprootedness and his movements throughout an Arab realm – physically between Lebanon, Palestine, Egypt, the Sudan, the Arabian Peninsula and Syria as well as Jordan, and imaginatively through every place where people “pronounced the Ḍād” – brought him to a vision in which his true home was his language. It may also be that his perception of the Arabian Peninsula, and especially the Hejaz, of the Jahiliyya and early Islamic periods as a chronotope – a projection of an idealized, historically and geographically defined location intersecting with that of the author – led to his decision to join the Arab revolt, a decision based on an ethnocentric vision of nationalism (as opposed to, for instance, contemporaneous Egyptian or Syrian varieties of Arab nationalism), and conditioned by a self-image as an Arab poet. In other words, for al-Khatib the purity of one’s language depended on an untainted ethnic descent and vice versa.¹⁴

This perception of an ideal state of Arabness already speaks out of Fuʾad al-Khatib’s early poetry. A poem he published in the Egyptian daily al-Ahrām around the time of the Young Turk Revolution in 1908/9 complained about the Arabs’ alienation from their roots, which al-Khatib located in the Arabian Peninsula where those who pronounce the Ḍād resided.¹⁵ Indeed, he took the link between language and the depth of a historically rooted identity very seriously. Stylistically, al-Khatib was a neo-classicist, but a reading of all the poetry al-Khatib wrote in his lifetime reveals that he chose particularly complex poetics in terms of structure and lexicon, with the semantics of his poetic choices subordinated to morphology and sound – at times as if he had chosen antiquated vocabulary and truncation to underline the meandering of his language. In comparison, the poetry of Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932), the Egyptian “Prince of Poets” and the leading voice of Arabic neo-classicism, is easy to read. The predilection for rare words even influenced the prose in al-Khatib’s essays: see for example the muqaddima (foreword) to the second part of his Dīwān, published shortly after his death in 1959, in which the editor added explanatory footnotes to numerous words that, he deemed, required an explanation – a practice quite unusual for a twentieth-century prose text. Even in the first half of the twentieth century al-Khatib’s choice of style was not without alternatives. Free verse and the usage of a modernized vocabulary were used in a repertory of styles at the time. Compare and contrast, for instance, the modernism in the life and work of the Iraqi poet Jamil Sidqi al-Zahawi (1863–1936). Al-Zahawi belonged to an even earlier generation of poet-intellectuals, who tried to distinguish themselves as harbingers of a new age in a period of political and social reform under Ottoman rule.¹⁶ Al-Khatib begged to differ. He even nourished a certain mistrust of print as a medium, preferring the oral presentation of his works because he was sure that anything else would lead to the corruption of his language. When he decided to bring out a second Dīwān shortly before his death – re-issuing the first edition of 1910, which had long been out of print, and adding a second half consisting in large parts of hitherto unpublished material – he explained that he brought a great deal of poems from obscurity to the realm of existence. He had been used to reciting his creations to a small group of friends, and then to command them to oblivion. The little that had been published had therefore been subject to corruption or had been “born out of the first passing utterance,” i.e., transcribed by others. Only recently, he had rethought this habit – maybe out of concern for his legacy, but also due to the encouragement he had received in Saudi Arabia.¹⁷ The stylistic and lexical archaisms, though, and the old-fashioned practice of presenting poetry as recitation for a specific occasion rather than wide distribution via print were clearly a part of the poet’s self-styling.

3 A Language of Strength

For Fuʾad al-Khatib, Arabic was “without a doubt, […] the greatest of the Semitic languages, the widest in scope, and the wisest in usage …,” as he wrote in the aforementioned muqaddima, which he entitled “Min al-ṣaḥrāʾ ilā al-udabāʾ,” “From the Desert to the Literati.” The language created bonds across the lands. The confrontation with Arabic had shown that the Romans and Persians were weak. The word al-Khatib used for “to be weak” is “ʿayya/yaʿayyu,” which also has the additional meaning of “to stammer and stutter.” The powerlessness of the Romans and the Persians (another common term for foreigners, and especially for Persians, that al-Khatib liked to use was “al-aʿājim,” “the non-Arabic speakers,” or “those who speak bad Arabic”) was therefore not only a weakness in battle, but also a weakness of language as compared to the strength and clarity of classical Arabic. However, the poet was not sure if the dissemination of the language from the Arabian Peninsula had been all that beneficial. He complained that the students of his time had turned away from “al-ʿarabiyya” and had become tired of it, as if it showed sophistication in itself when people “talked in words that were not their own and blabbered in useless ways, or boasted in faulty language.” Al-Khatib was clearly proud of his knowledge of the classical lexicon, and showed this off in his poetry, holding up a mirror to the frequent usage of neologisms and loanwords by younger people. He propagated that there should be a clear distinction between original rules and neologisms, as well as inventions in the language, “like between water and a mirage in midday heat.” Most crucially, though, he had someone to blame for the regrettable tendencies among the youth: the narrow-minded people who had regulated the language and taken away its ability to evolve. Though he was not explicit about it, this is probably a reference to the post-conquest grammarians who had shaped Arabic in a tighter cast than the poets of the Jahiliyya with their more flexible and creative usage of the language, probably in line with al-Khatib’s argument that the early grammarians were urbanites and more often than not of non-Arab ethnical background. For him, the journey of the language “from the desert to the literati” (as in the title of the essay) therefore meant a decline.¹⁸

Variations on the theme of what the Arabs had done to their language run through the different stages of al-Khatib’s work. Already the introduction to the early, pre-World War I part of his Dīwān contained a complaint on this topic. Europeans, he wrote, had certainly benefited from Arab culture in the Middle Ages, but without returning the favour. On the contrary, they had even robbed Arabs of their language and “left it stuttering and in rags.” But al-Khatib was even more bitter about the way his own people had treated their heritage, to the extent that they should even be grateful for what had been preserved of it in European museums and libraries:

I wish I knew what our sons will say about us when time passes, and that inertia and disunity are not all they see in our history. Will they send down on us waves of honour or flashes of spite? Our idleness was not enough, we even let go of our literary treasures, and trivialities distracted us from the essence, and we left the books of our fathers in the treasuries of the West, and we remained at ease. It is only good that these treasures did not vanish into oblivion, but that they were taken from our hands to the libraries of Europe, until we started to marvel at our forefathers, and to revive our glory again, and until our own products will be given back to us without delay, and they will serve to elevate scholarship … That yesterday’s finery may return …!¹⁹

4 Ethnic Chauvinism

Before the end of the Ottoman Empire, al-Khatib did not promote a chauvinistic version of ethnocentric nationalism in the sense that he did not yet subscribe to an image that a perceived decline of the Arabs had been due to the influx of “aʿājim” elements, such as the Ottoman Turks. This view became a mainstay of Arab nationalist mythology in the interwar period. In the aforementioned poem “Ālām al-ʿArab …,” a commentary on the Young Turk revolution, al-Khatib stated that the Arabs had initially welcomed the rule of the House of Osman, but he regretted that the Turks no longer did justice to them: “You [Arabs]: there is no fatherland among the Turks – for you, but still they are the lords of the land …”²⁰ In a different poem, he opposed what he perceived as the Young Turks’ Turkification policy, but called for a brotherhood between Arabs and Turks instead.²¹ In yet another poem, which had come out a little over three months before “Ālām al-ʿArab …” in the Egyptian daily al-Ahrām, he expressed worries about frictions between ethnicities in the empire, but confirmed the strong links between them.²²

However, al-Khatib’s ethnocentric nationalism may have facilitated the adoption of a relatively unambiguous anti-Judaism that speaks out of the works addressing the Palestine conflict, which was one of the central topics of his poetry-cum-political-commentary. In the scholarly literature there are many arguments about the nature, origins and chronology of Arab anti-Judaism in the twentieth century and its descent into the lows of anti-Semitism over the past 40 years or so. There is broad agreement that the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 marked a turning point, after which politicians and intellectuals alike were increasingly willing to adopt the language and topoi of European anti-Semitism.²³ Take for example a poem that al-Khatib wrote on the occasion of the outbreak of hostilities between Palestinian militias and the Haganah, as well as Jewish militias in late 1947. The poem opens a chapter in the Dīwān called “For the Sake of Palestine,” and itself is entitled “To Those Who Pronounce the Ḍād,” bringing us back to al-Khatib’s vision of the ethno-linguistic community as a community of fate with a shared responsibility to protect the integrity of the nation against outside intruders. In this, the Jews, who had participated in the linguistic and cultural community of the Arab Middle East for millennia, now became a group that was essentially foreign – al-Khatib apparently making no distinction as to whether they were of European or Middle Eastern and North African origin. He wrote:

In these lines, al-Khatib declared that the Arabs had sole ownership over the Terra Sancta, where “the house” was probably a reference to “Bayt al-Maqdis,” the Temple Mount (though the line about the people circumambulating would rather suggest that the point of reference is the Kaʿba in Mecca). He also presented the Jews as a homeless people, with no roots in the ground, no buried ancestors even, so that they had to claim the shrouds of the dead of others for themselves. He went on:

Depicting the Jews as a homeless people is a European anti-Semitic stereotype, and so is the classic allegation that the Jews were the murderers of Jesus, the Christian Messiah. In a remarkable turn, al-Khatib crossed a line towards the adoption of Christian imagery in the appropriation of a European topos of anti-Jewish exclusion:

First, Jews are presented here in the role of Judas who accepts blood money in exchange for betrayal in the Balfour Declaration and afterwards. Second, the Arab people, in turn, take on the role of Jesus, whose body is Palestine, and though badly beaten conquers death.

Fuʾad al-Khatib’s favourite term for the nation as an ethnic community was “qawm,” which he used in his works both in its original meaning alluding to a tribal-ethnic group, and in the meaning of ‘nation.’ In the course of the interwar period, the original distinction between the patriotic “waṭan,” (fatherland), the ethnocentric “qawm” (as in “qawmiyya,” “nationalism”) and the Islamic “umma” became blurred in common usage; al-Khatib, however, liked to retain the old Arab tribal connotation of the term “qawm” in his predilection for old usages, probably fully aware that his audience would have understood the word as belonging to an ideological nationalist semantic field. Jews, as a “qawm,” were an ethnic nation for al-Khatib. He directed his ire against all of them, not only the Zionists.

5 Conclusion

To sum up, the Arabic language was for al-Khatib a marker for the inseparable bonds that bound together the Arabs as an ethnic community, but it was also a monument highlighting the corruption and decline that his people had gone through since the age of purity in early and pre-Islamic times, embodied especially in the poetry of the Jahiliyya period. He therefore fashioned himself as a poet in the desert, as a bulwark against Arab decline and foreign intrusion, and as a warning that a political awakening of the Arabs would have to be accompanied by a cultivation of the soul, which for him was in the language. However, the anti-Jewish references in his poetry indicate that he was ready to adjust the borders between language, culture, and ethnicity as new lines of conflict were drawn in the interwar Middle East.

Despite his insistence on the classical form and his resistance to modernization and Westernization in the language, al-Khatib was nevertheless a modern man. Through the themes that he chose, and in the media in which he published (despite his apparent aversion to having his work printed), he participated in the formation of Arabic as a modern political vernacular and a vehicle for nationalist ideology. The pan-Arab public sphere was his playing field, even if he rejected some of its stakeholders. Thus, this chapter, presents the agenda of an intellectual to create a linguistic realm based on geography of origin, historical rootedness and religion that offers little room for ambiguity. Al-Khatib’s nostalgia for the Arabs of early Islam, and his burgeoning anti-Semitism are the antithesis of the cultural labour of minority communities for whom Arabic was a language of inclusion rather than of exclusion, as other chapters in this volume show.