38 Facts About Zaki al-Arsuzi

Zaki al-Arsuzi was a Syrian philosopher, philologist, sociologist, historian, and Arab nationalist.

Zaki al-Arsuzi's ideas played a significant role in the development of Ba'athism and its political movement.

Zaki al-Arsuzi published several books during his lifetime, most notably The Genius of Arabic in its Tongue.

In Damascus Zaki al-Arsuzi established and headed a group consisting of mostly secondary school pupils who would often discuss European history, nationalism and philosophy.

Shortly after leaving the LNA, Zaki al-Arsuzi established the Arab National Party, an Arab nationalist party with a "defined creed".

Zaki al-Arsuzi made a comeback during the 1960s power struggle in the Ba'ath Party between Aflaq and al-Bitar on one hand and Salah Jadid and Hafez al-Assad on the other.

The key to Arab unification, according to Zaki al-Arsuzi, is through language.

In contrast to the Latin language, Zaki al-Arsuzi argued, Arabic was far less arbitrary and far more intuitive.

Zaki Najib Ibrahim al-Arsuzi was born in 1900 or 1901 to a middle-class family of Alawi origins in Latakia on the Syrian coast of the Ottoman Sultanate.

Zaki al-Arsuzi's mother, Maryam came from a prominent religious family, while his father, Najib Ibrahim was a lawyer.

Zaki al-Arsuzi's father was arrested by Ottoman authorities in 1915 for nationalist activities; Arsuzi later believed that this event triggered his interest in nationalist politics.

Zaki al-Arsuzi's father was imprisoned for a short period before he and his family were sent to internal exile in the Anatolian city of Konya.

Zaki al-Arsuzi studied there from 1927 to 1930, but never obtained a degree from the Sorbonne.

The French authorities in Syria prohibited Zaki al-Arsuzi from teaching his students about European philosophy and the French Revolution among other topics.

In 1934 Zaki al-Arsuzi founded a student club, the Club des Beaux Arts, with the ambition of spreading French culture; the club was frowned upon by the French authorities.

Later that year Zaki al-Arsuzi began his political career in earnest and became a strident Arab nationalist.

When Turkey first attempted to annex the province of Alexandretta in the early 1930s, Zaki al-Arsuzi became one of the most vocal critics of Turkey's policy towards Syria; he became a symbol of the Arab nationalist struggle.

At the group's meetings, Zaki al-Arsuzi would talk about, for instance, the French Revolution, the Meiji Restoration, German Unification and Italian Unification, or about the ideas of Fichte, Friedrich Nietzsche, Karl Marx, Georg Wilhelm Friedrich Hegel, Oswald Spengler and Henri Bergson.

Shortly after leaving the LNA, Zaki al-Arsuzi established the Arab National Party, an Arab nationalist party with a "defined creed".

The party did not last long; Zaki al-Arsuzi left for Baghdad at the end of the year.

Around the same time that Zaki al-Arsuzi founded the Arab Ba'ath another group, led by Michel Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, established the Arab Ihya Movement.

Patrick Seale states that Zaki al-Arsuzi issued pamphlets under the name Al-Ba'ath, Al-'Arabi, while the Arab Ilhya Movement published pamphlets under the name al-Ihya, al-'Arabi.

In June 1941 Zaki al-Arsuzi was exiled from Damascus, three members were arrested and the remaining members fled.

Relations between Aflaq and Zaki al-Arsuzi were bitter at best; Zaki al-Arsuzi accused Aflaq of stealing his party's name.

Zaki al-Arsuzi was forced to move on again in 1949, this time living in Lattakia and later moving to live with his mother in Tarsus.

Salah Jadid, the Ba'ath Party strongman at the time, opposed Aflaq's and al-Bitar's leadership of the party and, because of it, wanted Zaki al-Arsuzi to replace them as the original founder of Ba'athist thought.

From 1966 to 1968 Zaki al-Arsuzi acted as al-Assad's and Jadid's personal ideological mentor.

Zaki al-Arsuzi believed that the Arab Nation could trace its roots to the pre-Islamic and early Islamic periods of Arab history.

Zaki al-Arsuzi's approach was distinguished by its emphasis on philology, but he did pay attention to problems of the modern state and to questions of democracy and the locus of power.

Batatu has described Zaki al-Arsuzi as having a racist outlook, which proved in the end intellectually sterile and unsatisfactory to his followers, and as having been deeply influenced in his thought by the tenets of his Alawi religious background.

Arabic is, according to Zaki al-Arsuzi, an intuitive language; there is "a natural sympathy" between the pronunciation of Arabic words and their meaning: an Arabic word is united with its meaning by definition of a referent, which is absorbed in such an operation.

On this subject, Zaki al-Arsuzi said, "man was qualified to know the truth, since what is constructed by reason can be verified by experiment".

Nationalism had, according to Zaki al-Arsuzi, manifested itself in all walks of life, from the rule of law to the arts; everything in a nation was the manifestation of that particular nation's identity.

Suleiman goes on to explain Al-Arsuzi's eclipsed legacy as the combination of a number of factors: firstly, in contrast to al-Husri's idea of language, Zaki al-Arsuzi's theory is self-defeating because it excluded other theories instead of including them.

The lack of empirical data in Zaki al-Arsuzi's work made it look parochial at times, while at other times his conclusions bordered on machoistic nationalism, which in turn could be interpreted as racism.

The Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems agrees with Suleiman's conclusion, but further claims that Zaki al-Arsuzi's work was "often far-fetched and 'airy-fairy'".

Several Ba'athists, mostly from the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party, have denounced Aflaq as a "thief"; these critics claim that Aflaq had stolen the Ba'athist ideology from Zaki al-Arsuzi and proclaimed it as his own.

Whatever the case may be, Zaki al-Arsuzi was hailed by Hafez al-Assad, the Ba'athist leader of Syria, as the principal founder of Ba'athist thought, following the 1966 Ba'ath Party split.