The times guide to the middle east : the Arab world and its neighbours/ Edit. : Peter Sluglett

320 hal. : ill.; 23 cm

Schumann Christoph, Radikalnationalismus in Syrien und Libanon: Politische Sozialisation und Elitenbildung 1930-1958, Hamburg: Deutsches Orient-Institut, 2001, 354 p.

This is a large and original undertaking, involving several different levels of intellectual enquiry. It is an attempt to understand the phenomenon of radical Arab nationalism by writing a prosopography, or collective biography, of some seventeen of its adherents, based primarily on an analysis of their memoirs (the individuals and their works are listed on  pp. 319-324). Most of the memoirs were published in the 1980s and 1990s, that is, several decades after the events they describe, and Sc..

Will the real nationalists stand up? the political activities of the notables of Aleppo, 1918-1946

The title is borrowed, without permission, but with due acknowledgement, from Joel Beinin’s paper “Will the real Egyptian working class stand up?”, a valuable exposition of the many confusions of definition and meaning in his field. There is probably not quite so much confusion about the definition of the notables of Aleppo, but in all studies of contentious periods, especially contentious periods in the relatively recent past, there is a good deal of room for argument on such matters as who ..