From Nuṣayrīs to ʿAlawīs: The Religiography of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī

Abstract

A disproportionate emphasis on the work of Western European and North American scholars has been a feature of investigations into the development of the academic study of religion. This article seeks to examine how a non-European intellectual, the Syrian Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī (1876–1953), produced and transmitted knowledge about religions in his encyclopedic historical topography of ‘Greater Syria’—the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām (1925–1928). Kurd ʿAlī was a leading figure in the Nahḍa, an intellectual movement that sought to revivify Arab (and for some, Islamic) culture through a rediscovery of its classical heritage and was a proponent of a reformist tendency within Sunnī Islam known as Salafism—often associated with the thought of Jamāl al-Dīn al-Afghānī and Muḥammad ʿAbduh. Kurd ʿAlī’s religiography in the Khiṭaṭ, though grounded in traditional Islamic discourse on the religious other, moves beyond that discourse to privilege the experiences and accounts of insiders. This move from heresiography to religiography is best seen through a close reading of Kurd ʿAlī’s writing on the ʿAlawīs (formerly known as Nuṣayrīs). Kurd ʿAlī’s writing on the ʿAlawīs is also an important witness to a vital phase in the development of that group’s articulation of its own identity in an environment that had been at best indifferent and at worst hostile to its existence.

1. Introduction

Much of the discourse on the development of the academic study of religion has tended to focus on the activities of Western European and North American scholars: an imbalance that reflects wider patterns of asymmetric global power relationships and exclusion (Alles 2008). This article seeks to contribute to redressing this imbalance by examining the religiography of the Syrian intellectual Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī (1876–1953) as found in his encyclopaedic magnum opus, a six-volume historical and topographical study of what has come to be known as ‘Greater Syria’, the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām (1925–1928).1 An examination of Kurd ʿAlī’s work in this field allows us to see how a non-Western intellectual produced and transmitted knowledge about religions in an environment dominated by colonial European powers. In the introduction to the Khiṭaṭ, Kurd ʿAlī gives us some sense of his purpose in writing this work:

Westerners have written masses of books in their languages on the antiquities, civilization, history, economy, and the changing fortunes of this region. But rarely are comprehensive books published by our own people, in our language, and according to our methodology.2

Kurd ʿAlī was a polymathic intellectual: he was one of the leading Arabic-language journalists of his day; an editor of classical texts; a historian; a literary critic; an educationalist; a government minister; and the founder of the Arabic-speaking world’s first language academy (the Arab Academy of Damascus). He was also an exponent of a reformist tendency in Islam that was known as Salafiyya.3 As seen in the quotation above, part of Kurd ʿAlī’s project in writing the Khiṭaṭ was to redress the enormous disparity between knowledge about Syria and Syrians produced by Western Orientalists on the one hand, and knowledge produced by Syrians themselves on the other.4 So, Kurd ʿAlī’s work offers readers one of the first sustained Arab-Islamic responses to Orientalist scholarship and the imperialist project for which that scholarship provided a moral justification. Within this response, Kurd ʿAlī’s religiography is of particular interest given Orientalist scholarship’s reductive and seemingly obsessive overemphasis on the role played by religion, particularly Islam, in Muslim-majority societies: a phenomenon that Rodinson (2002, pp. 104–5) has referred to as theologocentrism.

Kurd ʿAlī published the Khiṭaṭ at what was a critical turning point in the history of Syria and the Arabic-speaking world as a whole: after a long period of decline, the Ottoman Empire (of which Syria had been part for four centuries) had finally collapsed following its defeat in World War I. Arab aspirations towards independence, as exemplified by the Arab Revolt of Sharīf Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī (1854–1931) of Mecca and the short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria ruled by his son Fayṣal (1883–1933), had been frustrated and ultimately betrayed by the victorious European powers who went on to colonize the Arabic-speaking territories of the Empire under the Mandate system put in place by the League of Nations in 1920. The Fourth Aliyah of migration of European Jews to Palestine had just begun and the processes that led to the foundation of the state of Israel in 1948 were well underway. The dissolution of the Ottoman Empire also had a profound significance for Islam as a global religious phenomenon. Since the nineteenth century, the Ottoman Sultan also claimed to be the Caliph: the universal leader of the world’s Muslims—even those who lived outside of the Empire. The Caliphate was abolished by the Grand National Assembly of Turkey in 1924.5

Kurd ʿAlī was a leading figure in the intellectual, cultural and political movement known as the Nahḍa. Conventionally translated as ‘awakening’ or ‘renaissance’, the Arabic word Nahḍa has typically been used to denote ‘the rebirth of Arabic literature and thought under Western influence since the second half of the 19th century’ (Tomiche 1993, p. 900). Implicit in such an understanding of the Nahḍa is a preceding period of decline and decadence from which the Arabic-speaking peoples and their culture emerged following their encounter with the expansionist forces of modern European (mainly French and British) imperialism. The period of decline, so such models posit, began with the Ottoman conquest of the Arabic-speaking lands of the Middle East and ended with the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt.6 While Tomiche (p. 900) acknowledges the existence of ‘reformism’—a movement that ‘sought an internal revision of the Islamic phenomenon’—for her, like many historians of the period, the Nahḍa is ultimately an exogenous movement ‘born out of East-West contact … a liberation and rejection of the shackles of the past, as well as an advance towards modernism as represented by foreign models’ (p. 901). This conception of the Nahḍa as an emancipatory break with a stultifying and limiting tradition is informed by an Orientalist discourse that privileges European conceptions of modernity as a set of ‘conceptual and institutional arrangements in which religion has been marginalised from civil society, state, and politics’ and that assumes an ‘oppositional construction of modern versus traditional, secular versus religious, humanist versus antihumanist, and rational versus irrational’ (Haj 2009, pp. 1–2).7

Kurd Alī’s life and oeuvre, as will be seen, resist such reductive binary constructions of the Nahḍa and Arab intellectual life. In his recent work on the development of Arabic printed-book culture, El Shamsy (2020, p. 5) notes that while there is no unanimously accepted definition of the Nahḍa, it is often presented as being characterized by ‘the large-scale translation of European works into Arabic, the adoption of European genres of literature, and engagement with the modern natural and social sciences.’ An interest in the classical Arab-Islamic past is less frequently encountered in such Western accounts of the Nahḍa, but it is one that for El Shamsy, is a vital one. The Nahḍāwī intellectuals ‘were not, as is often assumed, rejecting the Arabo-Islamic intellectual tradition wholesale in favour of an imported modernity’—rather, their activity sought ‘to reconstruct a classical literature that could serve as the foundation of an indigenous modernity’.8

One of the most concrete political manifestations of the Nahḍa was the rise of Arab nationalism in the Arabic-speaking territories of the Ottoman Empire. There was no single Arab nationalist position: among the nationalists were those who—like Kurd ʿAlī—sought a greater role for the Arabs within the pre-existing structures of the Ottoman Empire and those who fought for complete independence from Istanbul such as the above-mentioned Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī.9

While Kurd ʿAlī is frequently encountered in the footnotes of Orientalist scholarship on the history of late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Syria, outside of the Arabic-speaking world, his work has been rather neglected (with some notable exceptions).10 Tamari (2016, p. 37), for instance, has noted that Kurd ʿAlī is one of ‘least acknowledged pioneers of Arab modernist thought among late nineteenth and early twentieth-century thinkers partly because he is seen, I believe falsely, as a compiler and encyclopedist rather than an original writer’ and characterizes him as ‘one of those rare modern thinkers who can be referred to as a propagator of a synthetic Islamic secular-modernism’.11

This article examines the religiography of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī through a close reading of the chapter of the Khiṭaṭ that he devotes to the religions of Syria. Following this introduction, a brief outline of Kurd ʿAlī’s life that locates him in the intellectual context of the Nahḍa will be provided. This is followed by a discussion of the architecture of the Khiṭaṭ including its sources, composition, formal structure and aims. The focus then moves to the chapter of the Khiṭaṭ that deals with religions. This chapter is to be found in the second of the two parts into which he divides the work: the civilizational history (taʾrīkh madanī). In it, Kurd ʿAlī utilizes a number of strategies to produce and transmit knowledge about the religions of Syria. Particular attention will be given to Kurd ʿAlī’s description of the ʿAlawīs—a group that was, at the time of his writing, undergoing a major change in its self-understanding and presentation to outsiders. The nature of the relationship of the religion of the ʿAlawīs to Islam has long been an issue of contention. The religious status of the ʿAlawīs came to be an especially contentious issue following the assumption of power in 1970 of an ʿAlawī general, Ḥāfiẓ al-Asad (1930–2000), as President of Syria. The issue remains contentious during the ongoing Syrian Civil War, which is sometimes presented as a sectarian conflict.12 A reading of Kurd ʿAlī’s work opens a window into how an Arab intellectual engaged with the religious diversity of Syria and responded to Orientalist discourse and the closely-related colonial occupation and partition of that country.13

2. The Life of Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī

Kurd ʿAlī was born in Damascus in March of 1876 during the final months of the reign of the 32nd Ottoman Sultan, ʿAbd ul-ʿAzīz (r. 1861–1876).14 Syria had been part of the Ottoman Empire since it was conquered by Sultan Salīm I in 1516. By the time of Kurd ʿAlī’s birth, however, the once great empire was in terminal decline. Numerous attempts had been made to reform its institutions, the most recent being the Tanzimat begun by Sultan ʿAbd al-Majīd II in 1839 and which culminated in the granting of the Empire’s first written constitution by Sultan ʿAbd ul-Ḥamīd II on 23 December 1876. However, this first constitutional period was to be short-lived as ʿAbd ul-Ḥamīd suspended it on 14 December 1878, ushering in a long period of territorial loss and increasingly paranoid autocratic rule, described by Antonius (1938, pp. 61–78) as ‘the Hamidian Despotism’. The constitution was restored by the sultan following the Young Turk Revolution of 1908, and following a failed countercoup in 1909, ʿAbd ul-Ḥamīd was deposed by the Young Turks, and replaced by his brother, Meḥmed V. By this time, however, the Ottoman Sultan had become a figurehead wielding no real political power.

Kurd ʿAlī is often presented as an Arab nationalist, though such a classification tout court is perhaps simplistic.15 In any case, Kurd ʿAlī certainly considered himself to be an Arab and spent most of his life in the service of the Arabic language and the literary and intellectual heritage of the Arabic-speaking peoples. This act of self-identification as an Arab is indicative of a very open and inclusive conception of Arabness on Kurd ʿAlī’s part: his paternal grandfather Muḥammad was a Kurdish merchant from Sulaymāniyya who moved to Damascus at the turn of the nineteenth century, while his mother was a Circassian from the Caucasus.16 Kurd ʿAlī made no attempt to hide or even downplay the Kurdish element of his ancestry: indeed, he proudly displayed it as the central element of the unusual and distinctly non-Arab surname that he chose for himself when he began his career as a journalist.17 For Kurd ʿAlī, the key to being Arab was the Arabic language: ‘Whatever is said about the large numbers of people who speak French in Beirut, Hebrew in Jerusalem, and Turkish in Aleppo–and however much their degree of attachment to and love for Arabic differ–the land is purely Arabic and its inhabitants are Arabs’ (1.48).

Kurd ʿAlī’s father, ʿAbd al-Razzāq, though left ‘a poor orphan’ following the death of his Kurdish father from Sulaymāniyya, achieved a relatively comfortable position within the mercantile middle class of Damascus having started his career as a humble tentmaker. The family home was in Zuqāq al-Burghul in the al-Shāghūr quarter of the old city of Damascus. ʿAbd al-Razzāq’s success in business eventually allowed him to buy a small farm in the village of Jisrayn in the Ghūṭa—the fertile countryside to the south and east of Damascus. The income from this family farm afforded Kurd ʿAlī a base of financial security, which he could later supplement with his earnings as a journalist and man of letters, thereby saving him from ‘resorting to deceit and self-abasement to make a living’ (6.346).18 In his study of the politics of Damascus during the final sixty years of Ottoman rule, Khoury (1983, p. 73) notes Kurd ʿAlī’s ‘distinctly lower class social origins’ relative to his peers, while Seikaly (1981, p. 141) observes that he ‘did not belong to the nobility of birth, wealth or learning’. Perhaps conscious of this, Kurd ʿAlī describes his Kurdish ancestors as Ayyūbids—thereby, connecting himself with Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn (Saladin, 1139–1193), Sultan of Egypt and Syria and founder of the Ayyūbid dynasty, who reconquered Jerusalem from the Crusaders in 1187.

As an intellectual, Kurd ʿAlī’s education is central to understanding his life and work. His formation in this regard was a composite one that combined the traditional and the modern; the formal and the informal; and the local and the global. In some ways, this education could be said to have reached its fruition in the publication of the Khiṭaṭ—a work which itself combines and synthesizes different types of knowledge. Kurd ʿAlī’s love of books and the life of scholarship had an early genesis: in the first volume of his memoirs, Kurd ʿAlī offers a vivid description of being brought by his mother at the age of six to visit the home of Shaykh Muḥammad al-Ṭanṭāwī who lived in the Qaymarīya quarter of Damascus. The young visitor was impressed by al-Ṭanṭāwī’s book-lined study and told his mother of his determination to become a scholar just like the shaykh.19 Kurd ʿAlī’s formal education began in 1882 at the Kāfil Sībāy elementary school, where he learned ‘reading, writing, the elements of the Islamic sciences, mathematics and the natural sciences’ (Kurd ʿAlī 6.333). It was here too that Kurd ʿAlī first encountered the man who went on to become the greatest influence on his intellectual development, Shaykh Ṭāhir al-Jazāʾirī, then employed as a government inspector of schools. Even then, the shaykh with the Maghribī accent made a profound impression on the young schoolboy: when told that al-Jazāʾirī was more knowledgeable than his own teacher and had the authority to dismiss the latter, Kurd ʿAlī (1948a, p. 11) again determined to become a learned man himself. The shaykh was an embodiment of power and authority that the acquisition of religious knowledge could bestow on an individual—even one like al-Jazāʾirī whose father had moved to Damascus from his native Algeria in 1846.

In 1886, at the age of ten, Kurd ʿAlī went on to study at the military rüşdiyye of Damascus. The rüşdiyyes were middle schools established by the Ottoman state at the beginning of the Tanzimat period in 1839 and were intended to continue the education completed at elementary schools. The Damascus military rüşdiyye opened in 1875 near the Marja district of Damascus.20 Here, Kurd ʿAlī began to learn Ottoman Turkish, the official language of the Empire. Despite his lack of success in mathematics—something he blamed on his poor eyesight (6.334)—Kurd ʿAlī obtained his rüşdiyye diploma. Kurd ʿAlī’s father also paid for private tuition in French to supplement the poor instruction in that language provided in the rüşdiyye. Kurd ʿAlī furthered his knowledge of French and its literature by studying for two years with the Lazarist Fathers in their Damascus school.21 Thus, Kurd ʿAlī was educated at a traditional Islamic elementary school, a state middle school established as part of Ottoman educational reforms, and a French missionary high school, combining three major intellectual worlds.

An additional, and perhaps the most important, strand to Kurd ʿAlī’s education was his personal study with some of the leading reformist ʿulamāʾ of Nahḍa-era Damascus, most notably the aforementioned Shaykh Ṭāhir al-Jazāʾirī.22 His other teachers included Shaykh Salīm al-Bukhārī (1848–1928) and Shaykh Muḥammad al-Mubārak (1847–1912).23 Though al-Jazāʾirī and al-Bukhārī were reformist ʿulamāʾ, they still followed established and traditional modes of the transmission of religious knowledge through the systematic reading of classic texts with their pupils.24 The ijāza system—whereby a teacher certified that a student had read and mastered a particular text with them—allowed scholars to trace their intellectual lineage through previous generations. Kurd ʿAlī lists the main Islamic discourses he studied with his shaykhs: Arabic language, Arabic literature, rhetoric, sociology, history, Islamic jurisprudence (fiqh), Qurʾānic exegesis (tafsīr) and philosophy.

Kurd ʿAlī (6: 334) also gives credit to his father ʿAbd al-Razzāq for the contribution the latter made to his education: ‘My father, an ordinary man who was practically illiterate, spent a great deal on my education. For years he lavishly bestowed the fees for my professors and he bought me a library of books which was a thing highly regarded at that time in my city.’ Kurd ʿAlī was also an autodidact: His knowledge of French allowed him to read widely in the literature of that language, especially philosophy and sociology from the Enlightenment period onwards. Amongst the French thinkers whose principal works he read he mentions Voltaire, Rousseau, Montesquieu, Taine, Renan, Lavisse, Hanotaux, Boutroux, Le Bon, Brunetière, Petit de Julleville, and Sainte-Beuve. He also read Jeremy Bentham and Herbert Spencer in French translation. His reading in French also took in journals on ‘philosophy, sociology, history, and literature’ (1.335).

Kurd ʿAlī’s professional life began in the Ottoman civil service as an employee of the Department of Foreign Affairs in 1892 (al-Ṭabbāʿ 2008, p. 19). He continued his education with his shaykhs and his assiduous reading during this period, but he did not remain in government service for long. Like many Nahḍāwī intellectuals, Kurd ʿAlī was to become a journalist. In 1897, he left the Department of Foreign Affairs and joined the staff of Damascus’ first newspaper, the weekly al-Shām (‘Syria’). He spent three years with the newspaper, calling it ‘my first school in journalism’ (6.335). At the same time, Kurd ʿAlī also contributed to the Egyptian journal al-Muqtaṭaf (‘the select’), and it was through the articles that he published in it on history, sociology and literature that he ‘began to become well-known in the world of Arabic literature’ (6.335).25

In 1901, at the age of 26, Kurd ʿAlī—informed no doubt by his engagement with French literature and scholarship—decided to visit Paris travelling by way of Egypt. However, he did not travel beyond Egypt after his friends Rashīd Riḍā (1869–1935) and Rafīq al-ʿAẓm (1865–1925) prevailed upon him to stay in Cairo and edit the twice-weekly newspaper al-Rāʾid al-Miṣrī (‘the Egyptian leader’; al-Dahhān 1955, p. 24). During his stay in Egypt, Kurd ʿAlī became acquainted with many of the key personalities of Egyptian intellectual life, including the religious reformer Muḥammad ʿAbduh—who had been appointed Grand Muftī (the senior religious official) of Egypt in 1899. Kurd ʿAlī attended ʿAbduh’s lectures in al-Azhār as well as attending his weekly private salon (majlis) at his home in ʿAyn Shams. After ten months, Kurd ʿAlī was forced to return to Damascus by the outbreak of a cholera epidemic in Cairo. Back in Damascus, he was to fall foul of the Ottoman censorship laws which became ever more draconian as Sultan ʿAbd ul-Ḥamīd became increasingly paranoid and autocratic. The Ottoman harassment of Arab intellectuals became intolerable for Kurd ʿAlī, so, in 1905, he returned once more to the freer intellectual environment of Egypt, which was outside the Ottoman Empire ruled as it was by the Khedives of the Muḥammad ʿAlī dynasty.

Kurd ʿAlī remained in Cairo until 1908, when the Young Turk Revolution led to the deposition of ʿAbd ul-Ḥamīd and ushered in the Second Constitutional Era of the Empire which was to last until its dissolution following the Treaty of Sèvres of 1920. As well as continuing the publication of his monthly journal al-Muqtabas (‘acquired knowledge’), Kurd ʿAlī founded Damascus’ first daily newspaper, also called al-Muqtabas. From relatively humble beginnings, he had managed ‘to establish himself as one of Damascus’ leading intellectual figures, proprietor and editor of its two leading Arabic publications’ (Seikaly 1987, p. 165). The journal al-Muqtabas was to become ‘the boldest, most coherent, consistent and committed proponent of reform and modernity in Syria prior to World War I’ (Seikaly 1981, p. 128).26 Kurd ʿAlī gives us a sense of his political stance prior to World War I when he states that al-Muqtabas was ‘moderate in its tone and nationalist in its policy; it criticized, as best it could, the problematic areas in the Ottoman administration; it never aimed at separation from the Turks–rather it aimed for the attainment of Arab rights within the larger Ottoman community’ (6.338).

Despite the moderate tone of al-Muqtabas, Kurd ʿAlī encountered further difficulties with the Ottoman authorities. In 1909, following publication of an article in the journal that misquoted the supreme religious official of the Empire (the Shaykh al-Islām), he was forced to flee Syria. During this period of exile, he finally realized his long-held ambition to visit Europe. He spent a year mainly in Paris studying French civilization and meeting intellectuals and politicians—including the above-mentioned Émile Boutroux, then a professor of philosophy in the Sorbonne.27 This period was to provide Kurd ʿAlī with the material for Gharāʾib al-Gharb (‘the wonders of the West’), the riḥla that he published in 1910.28 He returned to Damascus, but his problems with the Ottoman authorities continued when he spoke out against the state’s policy of Turkification of subject peoples (6.334).29 In 1912, Kurd ʿAlī (1948a, pp. 84–98) again fled to Egypt, where he remained for six months until it was safe for him to return to Damascus. He wrote a vivid account of his fourteen-day journey in disguise from Damascus to Egypt. From Egypt in 1913, he was to travel to Europe again, visiting Italy, Switzerland, France, Hungary and Istanbul. While in Rome, he visited the library of the Italian Orientalist and Duke of Sermoneta, Prince Leone Caetani (1896–1926), whose ten-volume Annali dell’Islam, published in 1905, ‘attempted a critical survey, year by year and event by event, of all the historical texts available to him for early Islamic history from the Hijra down to the assassination of ʿAlī in 40 [AH]/661 [CE]’ (Humphreys 1995, pp. 71–72). Kurd ʿAlī spent a month in Caetani’s extensive library, where he assembled much of the documentation which he was to use in the composition of the Khiṭaṭ. The visit to Caetani’s library had been suggested to Kurd ʿAlī by the German Orientalist Martin Hartmann (1851–1919) as a more affordable alternative when he told the latter of his plan to visit the major libraries of Europe in order to consult the necessary sources for the composition of the Khiṭaṭ (Kurd ʿAlī 1948a, p. 311).

The outbreak of World War I was to usher in one of the most difficult times in Kurd ʿAlī’s life. The Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of the Central Powers and came to be dominated by a ruling military triumvirate of Mehmed Ṭalʿat Pasha (1874–1921), Ismāʿīl Enver Pasha (1881–1921) and Aḥmed Jemāl Pasha (1872–1922). Jemāl Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army, which was based in Damascus, became the military governor of Syria. His administration was a brutal and repressive one that earned him the nickname among the Arabs of al-Saffāḥ (‘the blood-shedder’). Those suspected of harboring Arab separatist or nationalist sentiments were arrested and jailed. Many were tried by military tribunals and a number of those were convicted of treason and publicly hanged in Beirut (August 1915) and Damascus (May 1916). Among those executed were friends and colleagues of Kurd ʿAlī. Kurd ʿAlī was himself suspected of treason by Jemāl Pasha, but documents that were seized from the French consulate in Beirut confirmed that Kurd ʿAlī was loyal to the Ottoman Empire.

Jemāl Pasha, recognizing Kurd ʿAlī’s influence, recruited him to co-edit the military newspaper al-Sharq (‘the East’)—along with the Druze amīr Shakīb Arslān (1869–1946)—and to write two riḥlāt: one recounting the visit of a Syrian delegation to Istanbul and the other recording the visit of Enver Pasha to the Ḥijāz. Both were published in Beirut in 1916 and were later disowned by Kurd ʿAlī (1948a, p. 313) who gives some sense of the difficulties he faced as a writer at that time: ‘I was displeased with their contents … they offer a picture of the politics of the day, when writers and poets wrote to assist the Ottoman state at its most critical time’. Elsewhere, he is harsher in his judgement of these two books, decrying them as ‘ugly propaganda for the hated war’ (6.341). Kurd ʿAlī was also dismissive of the newspaper al-Sharq, which he described as a ‘Turco-German newspaper intended purely as propaganda intended to influence the Arab world in particular and the Islamic world in general’ (6.341). He claimed that they were written ‘under duress’ while his friend al-Ziriklī states that Jemāl Pasha obtained Kurd ʿAlī’s cooperation at gunpoint, and that he was haunted by ‘Jemāl’s ghost’ until the end of his days (al-Ziriklī [1979] 2002, 6.203).30

Following Jemāl Pasha’s resignation as commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army and departure from Damascus in 1917, Kurd ʿAlī left the city too and went to Istanbul, intending to become a merchant (as his father and grandfather before him had been) and thereby avoid further ‘enslavement’ by the Turks. This commercial interlude was not a success, as his enemies from the ruling Committee of Union and Progress in the capital frustrated his mercantile efforts out of spite (6.341). Kurd ʿAlī returned to Damascus after its fall to the Allies at the end of September 1918. He had intended to return al-Muqtabas to publication, but was offered the headship of the Ministry of Education in Fayṣal’s short-lived Arab Kingdom of Syria. During this time, he was involved in the foundation of the National Museum of Damascus and reequipped the Ẓāhiriyya Library that had been founded by his mentor al-Jazāʾirī. Following an unspecified disagreement with the government, Kurd ʿAlī resolved to resign from public service. However, he was persuaded to stay, on the condition that he be permitted to transform the ministry into the Arabic-speaking world’s first language academy: the Arab Academy of Damascus (al-Majmaʿ al-ʿIlmī al-ʿArabī bi-Dimashq). The Academy, which was modelled after the Académie française, was established on 8 June 1919, with Kurd ʿAlī as its first president—a position he held until his death in 1953.31

The remaining years of Kurd ʿAlī’s life were comparatively quiet, devoted as they were to the work of the Academy. He served two terms as Minister of Education (1920–1922 and 1928–1931) during the period of the French Mandate. His willingness to cooperate with the French has been judged harshly by some (Moubayed 2006, p. 490), and he could be seen as belonging to a class that Yapp (1996, pp. 89–90) has identified as ‘local collaborators’. His friend, al-Ziriklī ([1979] 2002, 6.203), paints a somewhat more sympathetic portrait of Kurd ʿAlī in this regard: ‘His judgements about people and events were not without confusion… His political life effectively ended with the declaration of World War I, after which he gave up taking risks, joined no associations and worked for no opposition parties. He avoided the life of the masses and the pursuit of covert matters.’ Kurd ʿAlī’s terms as Minister of Education under the French Mandate clearly did not count as meaningful political engagement for al-Ziriklī. Kurd ʿAlī was not unmindful of the criticism his work under the French attracted and states that he was ‘almost certain that the French Mandate was an inevitability’ (6.343). Elsewhere in the Khiṭaṭ (3.175), he speaks of the futility of resisting the advancing French troops in 1920, believing that, had they wanted, they could have taken all of Syria with an army of one-eyed veterans. Kurd ʿAlī made a third journey to Europe, when, as Minister of Education, he took a group of students to study at French universities. He added an account of this journey to a new edition of Gharāʾib al-Gharb, which was published in 1923.

So, at the time of the publication of the Khiṭaṭ, Kurd ʿAlī was at the peak of his intellectual powers. He had spent almost thirty years at the service of the Arabic language both in terms of preserving its literary heritage and intellectual inheritance on the one hand, and promoting it as a suitable vehicle for a society inhabiting a new global reality—often through confrontation with an expanding imperialist Europe on the other. In addition to his voluminous journalism, Kurd ʿAlī had established the Arab Academy of Damascus to help preserve and strengthen the language and its culture. As a Nahḍāwī intellectual, Kurd ʿAlī was an active participant in what Sheehi (2004) has called the formation and articulation of a modern Arab subjectivity. He was comfortable in at least three major languages: Arabic, Ottoman Turkish and French. His composite education had given him a thorough knowledge of the traditional Islamic sciences as well as a number of contemporary European discourses (especially history, philosophy and sociology) for which he had a critical and qualified appreciation. He was an experienced editor and textual critic of classical texts. He had also travelled extensively in Europe to build upon the knowledge he had acquired through his broad reading. Kurd ʿAlī had also worked for all three of the political establishments of the Syria of his day: The Ottoman Empire, Fayṣal’s independent Arab Kingdom of Syria, and most recently, the French Mandate. Much has been made of Kurd ʿAlī’s willingness to serve both the Ottoman Empire and the French Mandate as occupiers; however, it is perhaps more interesting to observe that both of these authorities—as well as Fayṣal’s independent one—sought out his approval and service. The Khiṭaṭ is then the crowning achievement of a long period of scholarship and public life.

3. The Composition and Structure of the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām

The Arabic word khiṭaṭ is the plural of khiṭṭa, which Lane ([1863–1893] 1980, 2.760) defines as ‘a piece of ground, or land, which a man takes to himself, and upon which he makes a mark, in order to its being known that he has chosen it to build there a house’. The plural form, khiṭaṭ, was used to refer to ‘the various quarters of the newly founded early Islamic towns which the Arab-Islamic chiefs laid out … for the population groups which they attracted thither’ (Cahen 1986, p. 22). Subsequently, a specialized genre of historical-topographical writing known as khiṭaṭ emerged which described these quarters and catalogued their contents. These khiṭaṭ works initially sought to provide a limited circle of administrative officials with manuals to facilitate their work. Rosenthal (1968, p. 155) characterizes the khiṭaṭ as ‘reference works that present a wealth of topographical, cultural, historical and economic information neatly arranged and classified.’ Kurd ʿAlī himself identifies the tenth-century Egyptian historian and administrator Ibn Zūlāq (917–997) as the first author to write a khiṭaṭ—the Khiṭaṭ Miṣr. However, the locus classicus of the genre is the khiṭaṭ of the Egyptian historian al-Maqrīzī (1364–1442), which Kurd ʿAlī saw as the finest exemplar of the genre (1.2). Another example of the khiṭaṭ genre closer to Kurd ʿAlī’s own time was that by the Egyptian statesman ʿAlī Pasha Mubārak (1823–1893)—a work that was intended as a modern counterpart of the earlier work of al-Maqrīzī.

The second part of the title, the toponym al-Shām, is equally challenging to the translator. Common Western renderings include ‘Greater Syria’, ‘Historic Syria’ and the Levant. Etymologically, al-Shām is related to the Arabic word shamāl (‘left’ or ‘north’) and has been used at least since the Arab-Islamic conquests of the region in the seventh century to denote the land that was—from the perspective of someone facing east in central Arabia—to the left. In this sense, it is the counterpart of Yemen—the region to the right (yaman) from that same perspective. On the other hand, the word ‘Syria’—and its cognates in other languages—is Greek in origin, though it probably entered Greek from a Semitic source. Kurd ʿAlī himself delimits the area thus: ‘By al-Shām I mean the region that encompasses what the Arabs accept in using this term–namely the land that extends from the waters of the Nile to the waters of the Euphrates, and from the foot of the Taurus mountains to the farthest part of the desert’ (1.2). By the time of the publication of the Khiṭaṭ, the word Syria (Sūrīya) had come to denote an area smaller than al-Shām and could be seen as an exonym tied up with the imperialist projects of France and Britain (and to an extent, that of the Ottoman Empire).32 So, for Kurd ʿAlī, the borders of al-Shām are not those set by outsiders: they are instead the natural borders of sea, mountain, desert and river. Taking both terms together, by calling his work the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām, Kurd ʿAlī is not only asserting the validity of the Arab-Islamic intellectual tradition and demonstrating its continued productivity in the face of an ongoing denigration of it by Orientalists, he is also challenging the imperialist occupation and partition of the region into colonialist statelets. The Khiṭaṭ is a work of both cultural and political self-assertion.

Though Rooke (2006, p. 168) asserts that the title Khiṭaṭ al-Shām is untranslatable, he offers a usefully descriptive placeholder rendering: ‘Geographical-Historical Description of Syria.’33 Kurd ʿAlī outlines his own understanding of the nature of the genre: ‘by khiṭaṭ is meant all that is encompassed by civilization; the study of the division of the land into quarters is the study of its history and civilization’ (1.2). He expands upon this: ‘What really is the khiṭaṭ of al-Shām but the choicest of its events and personalities; reports of the ascent and descent [of dynasties]; and the marvellous phenomena that appeared in past ages–taking those from what time had spared whether written, printed, etched on stone, brick or papyrus?’ (1.2–3). Central to Kurd ʿAlī’s conception of the Khiṭaṭ is how the presence and activity of people have made the land what it is. Two of the words he uses—ʿumrān and ḥaḍāra (both of which can be translated as ‘culture’ or ‘civilization’)—belong to semantic fields that denote human settlement and activity. Kurd ʿAlī is clearly using the term khiṭaṭ in a wider sense than simply the quarters into which cities were divided: for him, the people of Syria have marked out (or ‘quartered’) the land as theirs through their presence on it; their cultivation of its fields; their construction of buildings; and their creation of long-lasting institutions that maintain and transmit knowledge and culture. This ‘marking out’ of Syria (and its recording in the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām) constitutes a demonstration of the territorial integrity of the land as its inhabitants understand it—a refusal to employ the categories of colonialist occupiers or their Orientalist cohorts.

Kurd ʿAlī does not slavishly seek to reproduce the khiṭaṭ genre as found in its classical exemplars: he freely adapts it to suit his particular needs, thereby participating in the dynamic development of Arab-Islamic literary genres whose forms were more flexible to those for whom they were a living tradition than the static artefacts described in the handbooks of Orientalist scholarship (such as Brockelmann’s Geschichte der arabischen Litteratur). Kurd ʿAlī divides the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām into two major sections: volumes 1–3 cover what he calls taʾrīkh siyāsī (‘political history’), while volumes 4–6 cover what he calls taʾrīkh madanī (‘civilizational history’). The political history presents a chronological narrative account of the history of al-Shām from antiquity to the date of the publication of volume 3 (1925).34 The civilizational history, on the other hand, utilizes a thematic arrangement to describe Syria in the author’s present as comprehensively as possible. For instance, there are chapters on agriculture, commerce, industry, roads and waterways, as well as chapters that catalogue the buildings of the cities and towns of al-Shām.35 Kurd ʿAlī’s Syria is presented using these diachronic and synchronic axes. However, the two categories are not entirely watertight. For instance, the first three chapters of the political history are thematic in their arrangement, covering as they do the geography of Syria (1.7–16), the peoples of Syria (1.17–35), and the languages of Syria (1.36–49), the treatment of which Kurd ʿAlī saw as a necessary prolegomenon to the history proper. In the chapter on religions in the civilizational history (6.205–273), the various religious groups are presented in a roughly chronological fashion in terms of their historical emergence and the essays on them also contain narrative material. The political history ends with a chapter on the modern administrative divisions of al-Shām (3.225–232) and another containing the texts of key documents relating to its recent history: from the Sykes–Picot correspondence of 1916 to the Treaty of Ankara of 1921 (3.233–263).

Kurd ʿAlī covers the pre-Islamic history of Syria in a single chapter of the taʾrīkh siyāsī (1.50–68). So a period of more than two millennia occupies just 2.4% of the overall historical narrative. By way of contrast, the chapter that follows, on the beginning of the Islamic period in Syria and which covers the thirteen-year period from 626 to 639 CE (1.69–99), occupies some 4% of the historical narrative. There is clearly a major disparity in the amount of coverage given of the pre-Islamic and the Islamic periods of the history of Syria in the Khiṭaṭ. At first glance, one might see this as reflecting the norms of classical Arab-Islamic historiography which tended to manifest less interest in the pre-Islamic period of history than in that after the appearance of Islam. However, Kurd ʿAlī’s practice here is more nuanced, as he explains in the introduction to the Khiṭaṭ:

I took what I obtained from books by Westerners, but I was more interested in referring to what our ancestors (al-aslāf) had written on this subject despite its fragmented nature. I relied on the Arab authors in particular, since every nation is, for the most part, more knowledgeable about its own history than are others. If Western scholars have investigated the history of this region in the pre-Islamic period, excavated its antiquities and monuments, and analysed its languages and dialects, then surely its history after that period is closer to that for which our scholars are a [more fruitful] source’.

(1.3)

So, Kurd ʿAlī’s desire to produce an authentically native historiography does lead to a foregrounding of the historical event of Islam as an interpretative key to understanding the history of Syria.

Rooke (2006, p. 169) notes how recent history (the Ottoman period onwards) takes up more space in the taʾrīkh siyāsī of the Khiṭaṭ (approximately 40% by his reckoning), a depth of coverage that Rooke characterizes as ‘exceptional’ at the time of publication. While in-depth coverage of the Ottoman period may have been rare among Kurd ʿAlī’s contemporary historians, it was certainly not unusual for Arab-Islamic historians to give more space to their own lifetimes. Often, medieval historians would continue the chronicle of an earlier author, presenting their own work as a sequel (dhayl) to the earlier work. Another factor in the more detailed presentation of the Ottoman period (the later part in particular) was Kurd ʿAlī’s direct involvement in it and acquaintance with the individuals and access to contemporary documentary sources.

Kurd ʿAlī places the genesis of the Khiṭaṭ in a series of nine articles that he wrote on the civilization (ʿumrān) of Damascus for the Egyptian journal al-Muqtaṭaf in 1899. The approval with which these articles met encouraged him to broaden his research to cover all of the land of Syria, ‘since a portrait of the capital alone is not sufficient to make sense of the state of the land as a whole’ (1.1). Elsewhere, Kurd ʿAlī tells how his friend Rafīq Bey al-ʿAẓm (1865–1925) wrote to him in 1904, urging him not to dissipate his talents ‘in scattered journals’, but rather to concentrate his efforts in the publication of a single book that would serve his people (Kurd ʿAlī 1948a, p. 344). The writing of the Khiṭaṭ presented Kurd ʿAlī with the perfect vehicle to combine his vast knowledge of the Arabic literary and historiographical traditions with his extensive knowledge of European thought. The work was a monumental production. Kurd ʿAlī offers a terse description of the Khiṭaṭ: ‘a book on the civilisation (madanīya) and history of Syria on the composition of which I spent 30 years, and for which I read almost 1200 volumes in three languages: Arabic, Turkish and French’ (6.346). The undertaking also required a good deal of travel: Kurd ʿAlī (1948a, p. 310) visited libraries ‘both public and private in Syria, Egypt, Medina the Enlightened, Istanbul, Rome, Paris, London, Oxford, Cambridge, Leiden, Berlin, Munich, Madrid and the Escorial’. The exhaustive description of the difficulties faced by the author in the completion of the work is a feature of a number of books from the classical period.

In volume 1 of the first edition of the Khiṭaṭ, Kurd ʿAlī gives a 695-item bibliography of the main sources he employed in the composition of the work (1.11–45). He divides his sources into four sections: (a) Arabic works in manuscript [items 1–186]; (b) Arabic printed books [items 187–559]; (c) Turkish printed books [items 560–594]; and (d) French printed books [items 595–695]. This list is not reproduced in the 1983 Damascus edition of the Khiṭaṭ, which instead has a ten-page bibliography containing only the Arabic sources in a manuscript consulted by Kurd ʿAlī (6.349–359). The anonymous editor states that this is because Kurd ʿAlī did not give precise details of his citations, thereby limiting the usefulness of such a list.

In the introduction to the Khiṭaṭ, Kurd ʿAlī gives us a sense of his purpose in writing it which is worth quoting at length:

The subject matter of the Khiṭaṭ is certainly glorious, and all who wish to know their country to serve and benefit from it must know it… Those who do not have some acquaintance with the treasures their homeland or the deeds of their ancestors are unprepared to effect positive change now or in the future. For who, after all, is better placed to consult the records of the ancestors than their descendants? How can a person love a country that they do not know? How can a person aspire to prosperity–both individually and nationally–while being ignorant of how the past has shaped of their present situation? How is the present understood without the past? And how can a national spirit be born among a people if its history is not truly studied?

(1.3)

Subsequently he noted a specifically nationalist purpose to the work: ‘A people seeking their independence should have a [book of] history to which there can be recourse and which will say to other nations: “This is where I am and this is what I aspire to!”’ (Kurd ʿAlī 1948a, p. 311).

The six volumes of the Khiṭaṭ were first published in Damascus over the four-year period from 1925 to 1928. The first three volumes were all published in 1925, while the remaining three volumes were published (one each per year) in 1926, 1927 and 1928. The six volumes contain just under 2000 pages with a rough estimate of the total word count being around 686,700 words. Each volume is divided into titled chapters, which are in turn divided into titled subsections.

In a review exhibiting typically Orientalist prejudices, Hitti (1926, p. 321) characterizes the Khiṭaṭ as ‘a piecemeal compilation of historical data from varying, and sometimes contradictory, sources’. He singles out the third volume for greater praise than the first two: ‘Here [Kurd ʿAlī] is not only a chronicler, a compiler, but a historian’ (p. 322). In his review of the remaining volumes (Hitti 1931, pp. 178–179), Hitti is even harsher: ‘The work serves a purpose in making accessible to the Arabic reader material hitherto scattered in various sources, but adds very little that is new to our knowledge of the history of Syria and fails to meet the demands of critical scholarship.’ Hitti’s patronizing view ultimately misses the point of Kurd ʿAlī’s book which was endeavoring to work within the established epistemes of the Arab-Islamic intellectual tradition. Kurd ʿAlī was more than familiar with the norms and expectations of Western scholarship: he was personally acquainted with many of the scholars who had produced it, he had visited their libraries, he had read their works, and made use of the critical editions of classical Arabic texts they had produced. Had he wanted to produce a work, such as Hitti’s (1951) own History of Syria–including Lebanon and Palestine within this idiom, he could have.36 A more nuanced and appreciative view of the Khiṭaṭ is offered by Seikaly (2010, p. 738):

It is perhaps not unfair to say that the publication which inaugurated the treatment of the Ottoman Empire and its republican rebirth as an object of serious historical investigation, was Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali’s Khitat al-Sham. Notwithstanding the traditional resonance of the title, this six-volume work was a model of modern historical scholarship in terms of both its methodology and overall conception, covering the political, social and cultural history of Syria from early Muslim times right up to the establishment of the French mandate. At least two of its volumes address in detail the Ottoman era as an integral constituent of Syria’s past that decisively impacted every aspect of its political, socio-economic and intellectual life. In a way, the Khitat charted, or at least anticipated, the course which modern historical writing about Syria’s long Ottoman past was to take.

4. Religions and Denominations

Kurd ʿAlī treats the religions of Syria explicitly in the second major division of the Khiṭaṭ al-Shām: the taʾrīkh madanī. He devotes a lengthy chapter (6.205–273) entitled ‘al-Adyān wa’l-Madhāhib’ (religions and denominations) in its entirety to the topic which occupies 7.6% of the taʾrīkh madanī.37 The title of the chapter warrants some attention. The word adyān is the plural of dīn and is conventionally translated as ‘religion’. However, the word has a long and complex history in Arabic. In the premodern period, it was usually used to refer to Islam as the true religion: the dīn par excellence (see, for instance, Qurʾān 5:3 and 3:19). According to Brodeur (2004, p. 397), it is only in the early twentieth century that the word takes on the plural sense of ‘any religion’ (among which Islam is but one).38 The word madhāhib is the plural of madhhab; and in the more recent discourse of Sunnī Islam, it is usually used to refer to the four major schools of Islamic jurisprudence: the Ḥanafīs, Mālikīs, Shāfiʿīs, and Ḥanbalīs. However, the term has been used historically with a wider range of meanings (on which, see Hallaq 2009, pp. 60–71). Brunner (2004, p. 170) notes its use in the literature of the taqrīb movement, which attempted a rapprochement between Sunnī and Shīʿī Islam. By describing Shīʿī Islam as a fifth madhhab, the differences between Sunnīs and Shīʿīs were de-emphasized and constructed as being no more than the differences between the four Sunnī madhāhib, which, though they differ in some aspects of their Fiqh, tend to recognize each other as validly Muslim. Kurd ʿAlī’s use of the term madhhab may be in this particular ecumenical sense.39

The chapter consists of fourteen discrete essays and its initially most noteworthy feature is the inclusion of a substantial amount of material written by authors other than Kurd ʿAlī himself.40 He invited seven experts to write on the particular religious groups to which they belonged (6.210). Though Kurd ʿAlī very clearly acknowledges the fact that he has asked experts to write about their own religious groups, he does not explain his rationale for this. It is, nonetheless, a very significant choice: by doing so, he is privileging the expertise and experience of insiders over that of outsiders. However, not all of the essays were written by adherents of the groups described: Kurd ʿAlī commissioned a non-Samaritan—the Muslim Palestinian politician, historian and Qurʾānic exegete Muḥammad ʿIzzat Darwaza (1887–1984)—to write the essay on Samaritanism (6.213–219). Kurd ʿAlī does not explain his decision to ask Darwaza, an outsider, to write this essay, but it likely reflects his belief that there were no sufficiently qualified scholars among the admittedly tiny Samaritan community at the time of writing. However, as a native of Nablus (Hebrew: Shechem)—the center of the Samaritan community—and a prolific historian, Darwaza obviously satisfied Kurd ʿAlī’s requirements.41 Kurd ʿAlī also departs from commissioning insider descriptions by himself, a Sunnī Muslim, writing the essays on four religious groups the nature of whose relationship to Sunnī and Ithnaʿasharī (Twelver) Shīʿī Islam is contested: the Ismāʿīlīs, the ʿAlawīs, the Druze, and the Bābīs.

The order of the essays in the chapter is essentially chronological: Kurd ʿAlī begins with one on ‘the religions of the ancients’ (6.205–210). After this, the ‘Religions of the Book’ are presented: Judaism, Samaritanism, Christianity (in four forms: Eastern Orthodoxy, Catholicism, Maronite Catholicism, and Protestantism), and Islam (in two forms: Sunnī and Ithnaʿasharī or Twelver Shīʿī). Kurd ʿAlī then presents his essays on the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿa, ʿAlawīs, Druze and Bābīs which he prefaces with one on the designation Bāṭinī that he employs to group them together. The lengths of the individual essays seem to have been left to the discretion of the contributors as they are not of uniform length nor do the lengths of the essays correspond to the number of adherents of the groups. For instance, the essay on Judaism is four pages long while that on Samaritanism is seven pages long.

Some of the expert contributors are less well known than others. Dr Sulaymān Tājir, also known as Salomon Tagger, who wrote the essay on Judaism (6.210–213) had been Chief Rabbi (Ḥākhām Bāshī) of Beirut from 1921 to 1923 (Schulze 2001, p. 43). Details on Archimandrite Tūmā Dībū al-Maʿlūf, who wrote the essay on Eastern Orthodox Christianity (6.219–223), have proved to be more elusive.42 He is listed as the author of a treatise on logic, Jadwal fī’l-Manṭiq (al-Maʿlūf 1911), received by, but not reviewed, in Kurd ʿAlī’s journal al-Muqtabas (Kurd ʿAlī 1912, p. 155), where his ecclesiastical title is given as shammās (a rank lower than archimandrite). However, by 1925, he had contributed an article to the journal of the Arab Academy of Damascus (Kurd ʿAlī 1925, pp. 331–333) and had been elevated to the rank of archimandrite.43 Archimandrite al-Maʿlūf’s residence is given there as Balamand in Lebanon—a monastery of the Greek Orthodox Patriarchate of Antioch and All the East.

Fr Luwīs Shaykhū SJ (better known in Western sources as Louis Cheikho; 1859–1927), who wrote the essay on Catholicism (6.223–230), was a Jesuit priest originally from Mardin in Upper Mesopotamia (now in Turkey, approximately 35 kilometres north of the Syrian border). Shaykhū was ordained in the Chaldean Rite of the Catholic Church and spent most of his life in Beirut, where he was based in the Université Saint-Joseph from 1894. Shaykhū founded and edited the journal al-Mashriq (‘the Levant’) in 1898 and produced an enormous body of work during a lifetime of scholarship.44 Escovitz (1983, p. 100) notes that Kurd ʿAlī viewed Shaykhū (along with his Belgian Jesuit colleague, the Beirut-based Henri Lammens, (1862–1937) as representing the worst excesses of Orientalism and ‘crediting the greatest accomplishments of Arabic literature to Christian Arabs, while ignoring the contribution of Muslim Arabs.’ Yet despite his profound disagreement with this aspect of Shaykhū’s scholarship, Kurd ʿAlī still commissioned the piece on Catholicism from him, clearly recognizing the merit of some aspects of the Jesuit’s scholarship as well as his Arabic literary style—always a consideration for Kurd ʿAlī.45 The essay on Maronite Catholicism (6.230–232) was written by Fr Buṭrus Ghālib (1878–1931), a priest (khūrī) of the Maronite Catholic Church from Beirut who had published in Shaykhū’s journal al-Mashriq and the newspaper al-Bashīr (also edited by Shaykhū). The Rev. Asʿad Manṣūr (1862–1941), who wrote the essay on Protestant Christianity (6.232–239), was the author of a history of the city of Nazareth (1924) and Pastor (qass) of the Evangelical Community of Nazareth (al-ʿAwdat 1966).

Two essays on the numerically largest forms of Islam then follow. Shaykh Salīm al-Bukhārī (1851–1928), who wrote on Sunnī Islam (6.239–245), was one of the three key teachers (along with Ṭāhir al-Jazāʾirī and Muḥammad al-Mubārak) whom Kurd ʿAlī singles out by name in his autobiographical appendix to the Khiṭaṭ (6.334).46 Shaykh Aḥmad Riḍā (1872–1953), who wrote on Shīʿī Islam (6.245–250), was from al-Nabaṭiyya in the Jabal ʿĀmil in southern Lebanon and was a key figure in the intellectual and cultural revival of the Shīʿa of that region. He was also a member of the Arab Academy of Damascus.47

Though Kurd ʿAlī offers a broad selection of groups in this chapter, the omissions are also noteworthy. For instance, Kurd ʿAlī did not commission an essay on the (non-Chalcedonian) Syrian Orthodox Church. Given the uniquely Syrian origins of this historic church, such an omission is unusual.48 Kurd ʿAlī also omits the Yazīdīs, whom he refers to as ‘worshippers of Satan’—a designation and imputation rejected vehemently by the Yazīdīs themselves. He explains this omission by stating that there are only two Yazīdī villages on the outskirts of Aleppo and that the bulk of the community lives in Jabal Sinjār near Mosul and thereby outside Syria and the scope of the Khiṭaṭ (6.273). These omissions are in marked contrast to al-Ghazzī ([1923–1926] 1991) who, in the chapter he devotes to religions in his Nahr al-Dhahab, covers both the Syrian Orthodox Church (1.199) and the Yazīdīs (1.205–208).49

5. The Bāṭiniyya

Before examining Kurd ʿAlī’s piece on the ʿAlawīs, it is necessary to look at his use of the term Bāṭinī—the umbrella term he uses to describe them along with the Ismāʿīlīs, Druze and Bābīs. The use of the term Bāṭinī as a heuristic category is indicative of an unstated subject position as a Sunnī Muslim of a textualist bent. The term Bāṭinī is derived from the word bāṭin (‘interior’) and is used to refer to the hidden, inner or esoteric meaning of a sacred text (whether Qurʾān or Ḥadīth) or ritual. This is opposed to the ẓāhir (‘exterior’) or the outer, exoteric meaning or form of a sacred text or ritual. While the ẓāhir is accessible to the majority of Muslims, the bāṭin is accessible only to a select minority of initiates to whom it is transmitted hierarchically. To describe a group as Bāṭinī is also to imply that it in some way privileges the esoteric over the exoteric meaning—a privileging that may involve an abrogation of the exoteric (such as maintaining that the Sharīʿa is no longer binding or necessary). However, Bāṭinī is ultimately a term used by outsiders to describe groups to whom they are often hostile. Like many such exonyms, it is predicated on defining a group on the basis of a phenomenon which it may not view as defining—if indeed they even acknowledge it as a feature of their group at all. So, though a number of groups may acknowledge the existence of a bāṭin and its importance, they do not define themselves as Bāṭinī. The word has most frequently been used pejoratively to describe the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿa by hostile non-Ismāʿīlīs, and Kurd ʿAlī’s use of it in his introductory essay on the Bāṭiniyya is largely consistent with this usage.

Just as Kurd ʿAlī does not explain why he asked Darwaza (an outsider) to write on the piece on the Samaritans, he does not explain why he himself chose to write on the four groups he describes as Bāṭinī and to which he clearly does not belong. Whereas the paucity of qualified Samaritan experts most likely explains the former, this is an unlikely explanation for the latter groups which were and remain far larger numerically. This choice is more likely due to Kurd ʿAlī’s understanding of the nature of the four groups and his belief that secrecy is one of their signal features (6.251). Religious knowledge among the ʿAlawīs and Druze is not usually shared with outsiders or even non-initiates within the groups; and while the Ismāʿīlīs were once a proselytizing group, such efforts had largely ceased by the fall of the Fāṭimid Caliphate in the twelfth century. The Bābīs (and the Bahāʾīs that were later to emerge from them) on the other hand were very open in their sharing of religious knowledge and seeking converts.

Kurd ʿAlī begins this introductory essay with quotations from two of the most well-known Sunnī Muslim works on religious others: al-Milal wa-l-Niḥal (‘the religions and the sects’) of al-Shahrastānī (1076–1153) and al-Farq Bayna al-Firaq (‘the difference between the sects’) of al-Baghdādī (d. 1037).50 These quotations introduce some of the major motifs in pre-modern Muslim writings on such groups: firstly, they practice esoteric interpretation of sacred texts; secondly, though they may claim to be Muslim, they are not, and are in fact hostile to Islam and covertly oppose it; thirdly, they maintain secrecy about their beliefs which are ultimately based upon those of their pre-Muslim forefathers (often identified as Magians); and that the invented category ‘Bāṭinism’ allowed them to disguise and retain these ancestral un-Islamic beliefs inwardly while outwardly seeming to profess Islam. Kurd ʿAlī continues the essay with some historical references from al-Baghdādī to the Qarāmiṭa—a revolutionary Ismāʿīlī movement that flourished in southern Iraq and eastern Arabia. He then reproduces what Daftary (2007, p. 101) describes as the ‘most derogatory and lasting aspect’ of anti-Ismāʿīlī sources: namely, that the true founder of the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿa, and thus the ancestor of the Fāṭimid dynasty, was ʿAbd Allāh b. Maymūn al-Qaddāḥ (whom Kurd ʿAlī, quoting al-Baghdādī, refers to as Maymūn b. Dayṣān, 6.251) a member of the Bardesanians: a Gnostic Christian group founded by Bar Dayṣān (154–222) of Edessa. Ḥamdān Qarmaṭ—after whom the Qarāmiṭa are named—is mentioned as the successor of Maymūn and as having belonged to the Sabians (Ṣābiʾa) of Harran prior to his conversion to Ismāʿīlism. Kurd ʿAlī continues with another quotation from al-Baghdādī in which the latter alleges that the Bāṭiniyya are ultimately atheists who believe in the uncreated and infinite nature of the world and reject belief in prophets and the Sharīʿa, deeming lawful whatever their natures incline them towards. Kurd ʿAlī ends this paragraph with a strange comparison between the Bāṭiniyya and Freemasonry, alleging that both concern themselves primarily with ‘matters of earthly rule and power’ (6.251).51

The essay continues with Kurd ʿAlī’s own words and places the origins of the Bāṭiniyya in the caliphate of ʿAlī ibn Abī Ṭālib (656–661)—so consequently among the Shīʿa. However, Kurd ʿAlī describes them as extremists (Ghulāt)—a term used pejoratively by both Sunnī and Shīʿī writers to refer to those Shīʿa whose veneration of ʿAlī and the Imāms they felt exceeded the proper bounds.52 He continues by describing the gradual adoption of Islam in Syria during the first three centuries of the Islamic era, making reference to Willibald (fl. 720s)—bishop of Eichstätt in Bavaria—who passed through Homs on his pilgrimage to the Holy Land and observed that only half of its population was Muslim. He characterizes Syria during the Islamic period as tending at times towards the Shīʿa, and other times not, describing its varying fortunes under Ṣalāḥ al-Dīn and the Saljūqs. Kurd ʿAlī’s focus then shifts to Aleppo where the rule of the Shīʿī Ḥamdānids in the ninth century he judges to be a cause of the ‘deep-rootedness of Shīʿism’ in northern Syria (6.252). He then quotes an anecdote from the history of Aleppo by Ibn al-ʿAdīm (1192–1262) which describes the revolt in Aleppo and Ḥarrān in 758 of a Shīʿī group called the Rāwandiyya, who declared themselves to be the equals of the angels, and climbed a hill in Aleppo, donned silk clothing and in attempting to fly from the hill, fell to their deaths.

Kurd ʿAlī’s focus then shifts to Palestine in the tenth century, quoting the work of Jerusalemite geographer al-Muqaddasī (d. c. 990), who reports that half the population of the region were Shīʿī and also notes the presence of the Sunnī madhhabs during the period of Fāṭimid expansion following the conquest of Egypt and establishment of the Ismāʿīlī caliphate there. Al-Muqaddasī’s observations are followed by those of the Andalusian traveller Ibn Jubayr (1145–1217), whose Riḥla Kurd ʿAlī quotes at length here. Ibn Jubayr travelled through Syria in 1184 and in his account of Damascus, he notes that the Shīʿa in the region outnumber the Sunnīs and are found in diverse forms including Imāmīs (Ithnaʿasharīs), Zaydīs, Ismāʿīlīs and Nuṣayrīs—to the latter of which Ibn Jubayr attributes belief in the divinity of ʿAlī. The introductory essay on the Bāṭiniyya concludes with a lengthy quotation from one of the famous (or, to some, infamous) fatāwā on the Nuṣayrīs by the Ḥanbalī jurist and theologian Ibn Taymiyya (1263–1328) of Damascus written during the period of Mongol incursions into Mamlūk Syria. Kurd ʿAlī (1950, pp. 360–69) held a high opinion of his fellow Damascene to whom he refers in his introduction of the quotation with the honorific title Shaykh al-Islām (6.253), and whose life and work he describes very positively in his Kunūz al-Ajdād.53 In the portions of the fatwā quoted by Kurd ʿAlī, Ibn Taymiyya describes the Nuṣayrīs as a threat to Islam due to their habitual aid to its enemies and condemns them as apostates. However, it appears that Ibn Taymiyya may not have been particularly well informed on the ʿAlawīs in that he conflates them with the Ismāʿīlīs and ‘other kinds of Qarāmiṭa’.54

The tone of this introductory essay is overwhelming negative, employing as it does not only the problematic outsider category Bāṭinī, but also outsider sources, some of which, like the fatwā of Ibn Taymiyya, are extremely hostile. The essay does not offer a systematic and thorough narrative account of the development of ‘Bāṭinism’, rather it presents readers with a view of how the phenomenon has been viewed by a number of pre-modern writers: a historian, a geographer, a traveller, a jurist and two ‘heresiographers’ writing between the eighth and fourteenth centuries. Kurd ʿAlī has already given a chronological narrative of Syrian history in the taʾrīkh siyāsī, so he can reasonably expect some level of familiarity with this history in broad outline from his readers. The quotations from the classical authors essentially flesh out the bones of the narrative of the taʾrīkh siyāsī. Kurd ʿAlī’s authorial presence in the essay is minimal: he offers no explicit evaluation of his sources, preferring to allow the reader to make their own judgements and draw their own conclusions.

6. The Nuṣayrī-ʿAlawīs

Kurd ʿAlī’s essay on the ʿAlawīs presents a remarkable shift in tone from the introductory piece on the Bāṭiniyya.55 In the title, as well as giving the name by which the group were commonly known to outsiders (Nuṣayrīs), he gives the name which members of the group had begun to use to refer to themselves (ʿAlawīs) in the early 1920s.56 Standard narratives by non-ʿAlawīs often claim that the group changed their name from Nuṣayrīs in the 1920s in an attempt to emphasize their links with Shīʿī Islam and distance themselves from accusations of heresy.57 Winter notes (Winter 2016, p. 4) that the designation Nuṣayrī was never used by the ʿAlawīs themselves in their own writings; its origins lying instead in the heresiographical literature. One of the first Arabic sources to use the term ʿAlawī is the Taʾrīkh al-ʿAlawīyīn (‘history of the ʿAlawīs’) of Muḥammad Amīn Ghālib al-Ṭawīl (d. 1932)—published in Latakia in 1924, and of which Kurd ʿAlī makes extensive use as will be seen below. Kurd ʿAlī is one of the first non-ʿAlawī Arabic intellectuals to adopt the preferred self-designation of the ʿAlawīs so soon after it had begun to be used by the community itself.58

Even though Kurd ʿAlī did not commission an ʿAlawī scholar to write the essay on the group, he does make extensive use of al-Ṭawīl’s above-mentioned Taʾrīkh al-ʿAlawīyīn. Al-Ṭawīl had been an Ottoman functionary, serving as Director of Police in the vilayet of Adana, and was subsequently appointed to the district court of Latakia. The author allegedly wrote the Taʾrīkh al-ʿAlawīyīn in Turkish and later translated it into Arabic, though the Turkish original is not extant (Winter 2016, p. 241).59 Though al-Ṭawīl’s work tends to be characterized as historically unreliable (Friedman 2010, p. 273; Massignon 1934, p. 966), it is a landmark publication: ‘The [Taʾrīkh al-ʿAlawīyīn] despite its many flaws, nonetheless constitutes a pioneering attempt to construct an ʿAlawi identity as such and should probably be seen as the historically most important work of all ʿAlawi literature’ (Winter 2016, p. 241). Kurd ʿAlī also makes use of the personal testimony of an ʿAlawī ʿālim whom he identifies as Shaykh Sulaymān Aḥmad (6.262), and whom he also refers to with the honorific title ustādh (‘professor’). Shaykh Aḥmad was also an honorary member of the Arab Academy of Damascus.

Despite the use of ʿAlawī sources, Kurd ʿAlī begins his essay on the group with a quotation from the Mamlūk administrator and encyclopedist al-Qalqashandī (1355–1418) whom he does not name.60 Al-Qalqashandī’s description of the ʿAlawīs is a relatively neutral one—though he is clearly not an ʿAlawī himself, he describes some of the beliefs and practices of the group (such as he had heard or read) without judgement or condemnation—in what could be characterized as an ethnographic manner. He mentions the doctrine of ʿAlī as a divine incarnation; the relation of Salmān al-Fārisī to this incarnation; the initiatory nature of group; the practice of taqiyya; and the glorification of wine. Kurd ʿAlī moves directly from al-Qalqashandī to al-Ṭawīl’s history which he introduces thus: ‘Their own traditionists said, according to what the author of the Taʾrīkh al-ʿAlawīyīn recorded, …’ (6.260). The quotation from al-Ṭawīl deals with the word ʿAlawī, which he maintains is their original self-designation which they had been forbidden to use for the four-century period from the Ottoman conquest of Syria to the Ottoman defeat in World War I. So according to al-Ṭawīl, rather than being a creation of the French, ʿAlawī is an endonym. He also notes that the derivation of the name Nuṣayrī has been related by some to the mountains in which the community lived, and by others to the above-mentioned Ibn Nuṣayr. Most importantly, though, from an ʿAlawī perspective, the term Nuṣayrī is for them ‘the ugliest of contemptuous words’ (6.261).

Kurd ʿAlī continues his use of al-Ṭawīl’s history by quoting an example of ʿAlawī bāṭinī interpretation of the text from Qurʾān 5:3. According to al-Ṭawīl, though the reference to the completion of the revelation of Islam is understood to refer to the appointment of ʿAlī, certain revelations and teachings remained concealed to protect them. The ʿAlawīs believe, according to al-Ṭawīl, that these secret teachings are what the community transmit from one generation to the next through their process of initiation. Kurd ʿAlī next gives a long list of the names of the numerous clans into which the ʿAlawīs are divided which he has also extracted from al-Ṭawīl (6.261–262), noting that diversity among the ʿAlawīs is clan-based rather than doctrinal.61

Kurd ʿAlī’s final quotation from al-Ṭawīl (6.262) contains a definitive statement on contemporary ʿAlawī religious identity: ‘The ʿAlawīs do not have a special religion or madhhab as some think; rather they are Shīʿī Muslims of the Jaʿfarī madhhab and there is no difference between them and the rest of the Jaʿfarīs.’ Kurd ʿAlī summarizes al-Ṭawīl’s assertions by describing how the latter believes that the ʿAlawīs, the Ithnaʿasharī (Twelver) Shīʿa and the Ismāʿīlī Shīʿa form a unity, differing only in their views on the imamate following Jaʿfar al-Ṣādiq (d. 765). Kurd ʿAlī continues the essay by reporting the views of the above-mentioned ʿAlawī Shaykh Sulaymān Aḥmad which he gathered personally from him as part of his research on the group. The shaykh asserts that the ʿAlawīs are a Shīʿī Muslim community that has endured persecution and disaster for five centuries. These unfortunate circumstances led to a general decline in the community and a failure of leadership by its men of religion. The shaykh characterizes what he sees as the minor difference between the ʿAlawīs and the other Shīʿī Muslims as being environmental and tribal—not arising from them being different religions—and concludes by saying that most historical accounts of the group are prejudiced.

Kurd ʿAlī follows the Shaykh’s words with some ethnographic data on the distribution and numbers of the ʿAlawīs in Syria at the time of writing: ‘The Nuṣayrīs or ʿAlawīs live today in the mountains of Lādhaqiyya, Tripoli and Hama. Small groups of them also live in the Ṣāliḥiyya quarter of Damascus, and in the villages of ʿAyn Fīt, Zaʿūrā and Ghajar [in the Golan region] … the number of ʿAlawīs today exceeds 200,000′ (6.262–263). Then, while admitting that the group has endured persecution over the centuries, Kurd ʿAlī reproduces the well-known anecdote from the Riḥla of the fourteenth-century Moroccan traveller Ibn Baṭṭūṭa that accuses the ʿAlawīs of using the mosques built for them by Sunnī rulers as pens and stables for their livestock. Kurd ʿAlī notes that subsequent attempts by Sunnī rulers to impose the use of mosques on the ʿAlawīs were frustrated by the group who let them fall into ruin. He then makes an observation that typifies the Salafī modernist position: ‘The case of the ʿAlawīs is like that of the other small Islamic groups: whenever they increase in knowledge and education, they return to sound sources [of religion]’ and concludes with a very positive observation: ‘They are generous, proud, brave and noble of character’ (6.263).

Winter (2016, pp. 238–244) describes al-Ṭawīl and Shaykh Aḥmad—Kurd ʿAlī’s two main sources in the essay—as key figures in a phenomenon known as the ʿAlawī Awakening (al-Yaqẓa al-ʿAlawiyya). The ʿAlawī Awakening, like the wider Nahḍa of which it was a part, was an enterprise that sought to revive a community through the promotion of enquiry and knowledge. The ʿAlawīs were also seeking to articulate a religious identity of their own, moving beyond heresiographical constructions of them by outsiders. In incorporating the work of an ʿAlawī historian and an ʿAlawī religious leader into his own literary monument to Syria, Kurd ʿAlī embraces and promotes the goals of the ʿAlawī Awakening and the right of a marginalized religious community to present itself on its own terms. The marked contrast between the tone of the introductory essay on the Bāṭiniyya and that on the ʿAlawīs shows an important development in Islamic writing about religious others: namely, a move from heresiography to religiography.

7. Conclusions

Muḥammad Kurd ʿAlī is a key figure in the development of modern Arabic thought. As the leading figure of the Nahḍa in Syria, Kurd ʿAlī was uniquely placed to participate in the articulation of a new Arab subjectivity. The Khiṭaṭ al-Shām is the product of thirty years of scholarship and specifically aimed to support Syrian aspirations to unity and independence in the face of colonial occupation. Kurd ʿAlī also wrote as a Muslim of the Salafī tendency, and in this regard, his work also sought to contribute to a revivification of Islam through a rediscovery of a spirit of enquiry and embrace of science and reason that the Salafiyya felt it had lost. The Khiṭaṭ al-Shām aimed to represent the reality of Syria as Syrians experienced through the use of native epistemes in the face of the Orientalist scholarship that abetted the colonial project of France and Britain.

For Kurd ʿAlī, religion (dīn) formed an essential component of civilization (madaniyya). In the Khiṭaṭ, he gave expression to the diverse manifestations of religiosity in Syria. This religious diversity was not an obstacle to the unity of the Syrian people:

We in Syria are a single nation, however much those who try may endeavor to sow divisions among us. Religious groups were not and never will be the criterion by which this unity is to be judged. The Maronite, the Catholic, the Orthodox, the Protestant, the ʿAlawī, the Ismāʿīlī, the Hebrew (and all the others) are bound to us by the most binding of all ties: that of a common welfare, a shared homeland, the kinship of race and the bonds of language.’

(6.48)

Kurd ʿAlī utilized a number of strategies to represent Syrian religiosity: (a) he specially commissioned essays on particular religious groups from adherents of those groups; (b) he commissioned one essay from a historian who was not an adherent of the group on which he wrote; and (c) he wrote a number of the essays himself: one on ‘ancient religions’ and four on groups that he refers to as bāṭinī (‘esotericist’) as well as an introductory piece on that particular classification. His willingness to allow adherents of different religions represent those religions is pioneering in its privileging of the experiences and accounts of insiders. The exception to this is his own writing on the so-called Bāṭinī groups. Yet even within this, his essay on the ʿAlawīs is remarkable in that he employs ʿAlawī sources—one of which had been published only four years before he published the final volume of the Khiṭaṭ in which the essay is found. He is also pioneering in using the group’s preferred self-designation ʿAlawī. Kurd ʿAlī’s writing on the ʿAlawīs is particularly important given the on-going controversies about that group’s identity and their role in Syria. His religiography is one that seeks not only to respond to Orientalist scholarship and colonialist disruption, it also seeks move beyond the limitations of the discourse of heresiography to develop a new way of negotiating religious plurality and inner-Islamic difference.