The End of Pan-Arabism

The story of pan-Arabism’s retreat goes deeper than Sadat’s policy. Pan-Arabism’s retreat began in 1967 after the Six Day War, which marked the Waterloo of pan-Arabism. The leaders in the Christian community who had known the Arab system and made their peace with it lost to those for whom Arabism and Islam were synonymous, and who believed in their own cultural supremacy and the backwardness of the Arabs. The threat of a partitioned Lebanon is yet another serious challenge to pan-Arabism in a decade of setbacks. The universalisai of pan-Arabism derived to a considerable extent from the universalisai of the Ottoman Empire of which the Arab states had been a part for four centuries. Finally, from 1956 until Nasser’s death in 1970, the power of pan-Arabism derived from the power of charismatic leadership. The passing of pan-Arabism means just that: the end of one set of troubles.