ABSTRACT
The interwar period saw the division of the greater part of the world into a colonized East and a colonizing West, and within the East into partly overlapping Arab and Islamic worlds. The East, the West, the Arab world, the Islamic world, each had its human networks. At the same time, the very concepts of an Arab world and of an Islamic world competed with local nationalisms, with Westernization, and with each other. As a literary figure belonging to the cultural milieus of Beirut, Cairo, and Damascus, and as the Arab amir al bayan, “the prince of eloquence,” Shakib Arslan was strongly connected to the Arab world. As a former student of Muhammad 2Abduh, a close friend of Rashid Rida, and an important contributor to the journal al-Manar, he was a spokesman for the Islamic revival. As a resident of Switzerland, the publisher of the journal La Nation Arabe, and a perpetual anticolonial activist, he was a regular figure at anticolonial congresses and in Paris, Berlin, and Rome.
