ABSTRACT
The new leaders thrown up by the war were pan-Arab by nature. They came to politics not through consideration of concrete difficulties or the grind of pressing affairs or daily responsibility, but by way of a doctrine. Their doctrine was compounded of certain European principles which made language and nationality synonymous, of a faith in sedition and violence, and of contempt for moderation. They believed that the Arabs, because they spoke Arabic, a language different from Turkish, were ipso facto entitled to secede from the Ottoman Empire and to form a state where everybody who spoke Arabic would be included. They were not ambitious for the community they knew, or the locality where they were born and reared. The European doctrine of linguistic nationalism with which they were imbued, the oecumenical claims of the Arabian Caliphate the glories of which they aspired to revive, the impetuosity of their youth, and the insignificance of their origins and their prospects alike combined to help them nurse ambitions to which only their dreams could set a bound. As one sympathizer with Arab nationalism, Professor Sir Hamilton Gibb, put it: The Arab nation .. . like all other nations, is not an entity delimited by ethnographical data, nor the fortuitous result of geographical or historical association, but the function of an act of will.’1
