Israel Gershoni

The first book to present an analysis of Arab response to fascism and Nazism from the perspectives of both individual countries and the Arab world at large, this collection problematizes and ultimately deconstructs the established narratives that assume most Arabs supported fascism and Nazism leading up to and during World War II. Using new source materials taken largely from Arab memoirs, archives, and print media, the articles reexamine Egyptian, Syrian, Lebanese, Palestinian, and Iraqi responses in the 1930s and throughout the war. While acknowledging the individuals, forces, and organizations that did support and collaborate with Nazi Germany and fascist Italy, Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism focuses on the many other Arab voices that identified with Britain and France and with the Allied cause during the war. The authors argue that many groups within Arab societies—elites and non-elites, governing forces, and civilians—rejected Nazism and fascism as totalitarian, racist, and, most important, as new, more oppressive forms of European imperialism. The essays in this volume argue that, in contrast to prevailing beliefs that Arabs were de facto supporters of Italy and Germany—since "the enemy of my enemy is my friend"—mainstream Arab forces and currents opposed the Axis powers and supported the Allies during the war. They played a significant role in the battles for control over the Middle East.

Attraction and Repulsion

Arab Responses to Fascism and Nazism

James Jankowski

Confronting Fascism in Egypt offers a new reading of the political and intellectual culture of Egypt during the interwar era. Though scholarship has commonly emphasized Arab political and military support of Axis powers, this work reveals that the shapers of Egyptian public opinion were largely unreceptive to fascism, openly rejecting totalitarian ideas and practices, Nazi racism, and Italy's and Germany's expansionist and imperialist agendas. The majority (although not all) of Egyptian voices supported liberal democracy against the fascist challenge, and most Egyptians sought to improve and reform, rather than to replace and destroy, the existing constitutional and parliamentary system. The authors place Egyptian public discourse in the broader context of the complex public sphere within which debate unfolded—in Egypt's large and vibrant network of daily newspapers, as well as the weekly or monthly opinion journals—emphasizing the open, diverse, and pluralistic nature of the interwar political and cultural arena. In examining Muslim views of fascism at the moment when classical fascism was at its peak, this enlightening book seriously challenges the recent assumption of an inherent Muslim predisposition toward authoritarianism, totalitarianism, and "Islamo-Fascism."

Dictatorship versus Democracy in the 1930s

Confronting Fascism in Egypt

Amy Singer

Y. Hakan Erdem

This collection of ten essays focuses on the way major schools and individuals have narrated histories of the Middle East. The distinguished contributors explore the historiography of economic and intellectual history, nationalism, fundamentalism, colonialism, the media, slavery, and gender. In doing so, they engage with some of the most controversial issues of the twentieth century. Middle Eastern studies today cover a rich and varied terrain, yet the study of the profession itself has been relatively neglected. There is, however, an ever-present need to examine what the research has chosen to include and exclude and to become more consciously aware of shifts in research approaches and methods. This collection illuminates the evolving state of the art and suggests new directions for further research.

Narrating the Twentieth Century

Middle East Historiographies

James P. Jankowski

Throughout the 20th century, Egyptian nationalism has alternately revolved around three primary axes: a local Egyptian territorial nationalism, a sense of Arab ethnic-linguistic nationalism, and an identification with the wider Muslim community. This detailed study is devoted to the first major phase in the perennial debate over nationalism in modern Egypt--the territorial nationalism dominant in Egypt in the early 20th century. The first section of the book examines the effects of World War I and its aftermath, which temporarily gave rise to an exclusively Egyptianist national orientation in Egypt. Subsequent sections consider the intellectual and political dimensions of Egyptian interwar years. Egypt, Islam and the Arabs is the first volume in a new Oxford series, Studies in Middle Eastern History. The General Editors of the series are Bernard Lewis of Princeton University, Itamar Rabinovich of Tel Aviv University, and Roger M. Savory of the University of Toronto.

Israel Gershoni

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