How Can We Unite Discordant Hearts!

The policy of dividing the Arab elements and communities goes back to the era of Sultan Abdul Hamid

It was fated for the Ottoman Sultanate to live with its limbs disjointed, from the time when each of the foreign powers set about steering the Ottoman elements and communities in directions of its own choosing — directions calculated to lead to mutual repulsion, so that those powers might attain, in the fullest manner, their share of the inheritance of the "Sick Man."

And when Sultan Abdul Hamid (1876–1909), in the face of this foreign policy, was compelled to take refuge in the Islamic League and began to unite the Muslims around the Caliphate, the discord among the Sultanate's communities increased. For this policy led the non-Muslim communities to regard the Sultan as caliph of the Muslims and not as king over all the Ottomans. And while Europe — Russia and France above all — was laboring to gather the scattered Christian elements and communities in every region of the Sultanate and working to rouse them against it, the Sultan went on applying the policy of dividing the elements by every means; in line with this policy he separated the Bulgarian Church in Sofia from the Orthodox Patriarchate in Istanbul.

Meanwhile the Ottoman Arabs had begun to feel the stirrings of national sentiment from the late nineteenth century onward, under the influence of the foreign missions, schools, and consulates. The Sultan feared the consequences of cooperation between the Muslims among them and their Christian compatriots, whom he regarded as the arms of the foreigners, and he hastened to sow dissension between them — above all in the lands of Syria, which had cut its path toward modern civilization before any other. He likewise continued dividing the Muslims themselves: he would set the Emir of Hail, Ibn Rashid, against the Emir of Riyadh, Ibn Saud; enlist the Sharifs of Mecca against the Imam of Yemen; and stir the latter against the Emir of Asir — this besides casting enmity and hatred between the Kurds and the Armenians, and between the Arabs and their Circassian compatriots.

This policy — the policy of "divide and rule" — which the Sultan pursued, as the foreign powers pursued it toward Muslim and Christian in Turkey, led in the end to

making the meaning of the word "nation" inapplicable to the Ottoman people, given the divergence of its communities and elements in their aspirations and hopes, not to mention their divergence in upbringing and in the directions of their culture.

Hence, no sooner were tongues unbound by the proclamation of the Constitution in 1908 than the hidden thoughts were laid bare, and a frightful disintegration appeared in the ranks, warning that it was impossible for these discordant blocs to remain under the sky of a single homeland.

It was then that we understood the reason for Sultan Abdul Hamid's stand in opposition to the proclamation of the Constitution — the reason which the Unionists, the men of the party of Union and Progress who came to power over the state after Abdul Hamid, made light of, imagining that the mere proclamation of "equality, fraternity, and liberty" would suddenly create a united nation.

And it was then that we repeated the saying: "Verily, you shall not gather grapes from thorns."

The fact is that the "Sick Man," in the expression of the Tsar of Russia, had reached the stage of the death agony, and no policy could save him from death, whether it were a despotic policy or a constitutional one... "and for every term there is a decree."

And after all, the fathers eat sour grapes and the children's teeth are set on edge. Thus the lands of Syria, and Lebanon in particular, which were the stage of the play "divide and rule" — a play in whose performance both the ruling power and the colonizing states took pains — are still affected by the leavings of that painful drama, despite the passing of that power and the country's enjoyment of independence. The peals of the bells of estrangement among the members of one people, which still ring out from time to time, are but echoes of the foreigners' preparation of this gentle people to be a mount for them, on which to reach the goal of their hopes.

— What, then, is to be done?

— There is no way of deliverance from the specter of the black past except by raising the rising generation of the future upon national brotherhood and national aims.

But this is a difficult matter for us so long as certain foreign schools — which were, and remain, the starting point of estrangement among the communities — never cease to take charge of educating our children toward political ends.

And until the authorities in Lebanon give to mastering the education of the young, and directing it upon unblemished national foundations, the care that new Turkey and Iraq have given, I call upon my people to institute compulsory military service; for soldiering, besides being a pressing necessity for Lebanon from the strategic standpoint, is apt to work toward uniting the hearts of the youth as the national schools do.