Michel Aflaq
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Michel Aflaq (Arabic: ميشيل عفلق Mīšīl ʿAflaq, born Damascus 1910, died Paris June 23, 1989) was the ideological founder of Ba’athism, a form of secular Arab nationalism.
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[edit] Life
Born in Damascus to a middle class Greek Orthodox Christian family, Aflaq was first educated in the westernized schools of French mandate Syria, where he was considered a "brilliant student."[citation needed] He then went to university at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he first developed his Arab nationalist ideals, eventually attempting to combine socialism with the vision of a Pan-Arab nation. In his political pursuits, Aflaq became committed to Arab unity and the freeing of the Middle East from Western colonialism.
Upon returning to the Middle East, Aflaq became a school teacher and was active in political circles. In September 1940, after France's defeat in World War II, Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar set up the nucleus of what was later to become the Ba’ath Party. The first conference of the Ba’ath Party (in full, the Arab Socialist Ba'ath Party), was to be in 1947.
In 1949, Aflaq served as Syria's education minister for a short period. In 1952, he left Syria, escaping from the new regime, returning two years later in 1954. Aflaq went on to play an important role in the achievement of the unity between Syria and Egypt in 1958.
It was reportedly at this time that Aflaq first came into contact with the young Iraqi Ba’thist Saddam Hussein who had fled to Syria after participating in a failed assassination attempt on Iraqi Prime Minister Abd al-Karim Qasim. Aflaq is said to have formed a close relationship with Hussein and to have assisted him in his promotion to full party member. Aflaq later claimed that he did not meet Hussein until after 1963 [1].
Despite being co-founder of the Ba'ath party, Michel Aflaq had little connection to the government that took power in Syria under that name in 1963. Eventually, the government and he had a falling out and he was forced to flee to Iraq where another Ba’ath Party had taken power. While this party also failed to follow most of ‘Aflaq's teachings, he became a symbol for the regime of Saddam Hussein according to whom Iraq was in fact the true Ba’athist country. In Iraq he was given a token position as head of the party and his objections to the regime were silenced and ignored.
In his writings Aflaq had been stridently in favor of free speech and other human rights and aid for the lower classes. He stated that the Arab nationalist state that would be created should be a democracy. These ideals were never put in place by the regimes that used his ideology. Most scholars see the Assad regime in Syria and Saddam's regime in Iraq to have only employed Aflaq's ideology as a pretense for dictatorship. John Devlin in his "The Baath Party: Rise and Metamorphosis" outlines how the parties became dominated by minority groups who came to dominate their society. Elizabeth Picard takes a somewhat different approach, arguing both Assad and Hussein used Ba’athism as a guise to set up what were in fact military dictatorships.
Though born a Christian, Aflaq believed that Islam provides Arabs with "the most brilliant picture of their language and literature, and the grandest part of their national history." He did not see the confrontation with the West in Muslim versus Christian terms. Arguing that all three great religions originated in the Middle East, he asserted that "religion entered Europe from the outside, therefore it is alien to its character and history." Europeans and Americans, he believed, cannot really be Christian or religious or highly spiritual in the rich way that Arabs can.
Upon his death in 1989 he was given a great muslim funeral. The government of Iraq claimed that on his death he converted to Islam. They also stated that the conversion had not been made public during Aflaq's lifetime because both he and party leaders did not want it to be interpreted politically. A tomb was built for him in Baghdad designed by Chadagee and, according to propaganda that was part of the Iraqi dictator’s continuing policy of using Aflaq’s name to promote his own political purposes, paid for by Hussein personally[1]. The tomb, widely regarded as a work of great artistic merit, was located on the western grounds of the Ba'ath Party Pan-Arab Headquarters, at the intersection of al-Kindi Street and the Qādisiyyah Expressway overpass. That area is today at the far western end of the grounds of US military Base Union III in Baghdad's Green Zone. Although there were rumors and accusations that his tomb was destroyed during the war, the burial chamber and building above it were left completely untouched. Its blue-tiled dome can be seen peeking above the concrete T-walls surrounding the Camp's perimeter.
[edit] Quotes
"A day will come when the nationalists will find themselves the only defenders of Islam. They will have to give a special meaning to it if they want the Arab nation to have a good reason for survival." (In memory of the Arab Prophet, 1 April 1943)
"The connection of Islam to Arabism is not, therefore, similar to that of any religion to any nationalism. The Arab Christians, when their nationalism is fully awakened and when they restore their genuine character, will recognize that Islam for them is nationalist education in which they have to be absorbed in order to understand and love it to the extent that they become concerned about Islam as about the most precious thing in their Arabism. If the actual reality is still far from this wish, the new generation of Arab Christians has a task which it should perform with daring and detachment, sacrificing for it their pride and benefits, for there is nothing that equals Arabism and the honor of belonging to it." (In memory of the Arab Prophet -April, 1943)
[edit] Further reading
- Al-Baath wal Watan Al-Arabi [Arabic, with French translation] ("The Baath and the Arab Homeland"), Qasim Sallam, Paris, EMA, 1980. ISBN 2-86584-003-4
- Al-Baath wa-Lubnân [Arabic only] ("The Baath and Lebanon"), NY Firzli, Beirut, Dar-al-Tali'a Books, 1973
- The Iraq-Iran Conflict, NY Firzli, Paris, EMA, 1981. ISBN 2-86584-002-6
- History of Syria Including Lebanon and Palestine, Vol. 2 Hitti Philip K. (2002) (ISBN 1-931956-61-8)
