JAMES L. GELVIN, Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and MassPolitics in Syria at the Close of Empire (Berkeley, Los Angeles, and London: University ofCalifornia Press, 1998). Pp. 342. $50.00 cloth, $19.95 paper.

Abstract

James L. Gelvin's Divided Loyalties: Nationalism and Mass Politics in Syria at the Close of Empire isolates a two-year period, between the end of Ottoman rule and the beginning of the French Mandate, to examine a critical moment in the development of nationalism in Syria. He draws on previously unanalyzed primary source material, including leaflets, newspaper reports and editorials, memoirs, speeches, rumors, and even graffiti, to reveal the processes through which modern nationalisms in the Arab East were created. In doing so, he undermines two basic assumptions in the literature on Arab nationalism (p. 5). First, in contrast to the vision of Arab identity as a long-repressed primordial national consciousness—what political scientist Ronald Grigor Suny terms the “Sleeping Beauty” view—Gelvin shows instead how nationalism was subject to varying interpretations and conflicting visions. For Gelvin, Arab nationalism has “achieved a retrospective homogeneity and coherence” in the scholarly literature, which it did not have historically (p. 7). Second, Gelvin challenges the prevailing view that the phenomenon of Arab nationalism can be adequately captured by way of elite-centric intellectual histories.