The delusion of resurrection of the dying: the cautionary tale of the Baath

Yesterday was the anniversary of the founding of the Baath Party. It is a movement that ought to be consigned to history, one that from the day it was founded stayed far from even its own founding claims and brought the Arab peoples nothing but blood, tears and humiliating despotism. It may not be worthy of commemoration, yet when one thinks about it a little, it reminds us how much it rests on instructive experiences we share with it, and invites us to take a look.

It is one of the most influential ideological movements of modern Arab politics. Its full name is the Arab Socialist Baath Party, and it was founded in Damascus on 7 April 1947 on the ideas of Arab nationalism, unity and socialism. Its three most important figures are Michel Aflaq, Salah al-Din al-Bitar and Zaki al-Arsuzi.

THREE PRINCIPLES, ONE CONTRADICTION: FROM UNITY TO DESPOTISM

The ideology of the Baath, which means "resurrection/rebirth" in Arabic, has three basic principles: Arab unity (a single Arab nation), Freedom (liberation from colonialism and foreign influence) and Socialism (a conception of social justice peculiar to the Arab world). Although liberation from colonialism or occupation was one of the Baath's most important slogans, as a state ideology in both Syria and Iraq the two states stood right at the center of international balances. With a very powerful mukhabarat and repressive regimes working against their own peoples, it inflicted the cruelest experiences that Islamic history has seen and could ever see.

FROM THE UMMAH TO THE TRIBE: AN ATTEMPT AT REPLACEMENT

This structure, which remained in power for decades in Syria and Iraq, is not merely a part of Arab political failure, nor a party deviation or an example of authoritarian rule that could be assessed independently of its roots. On the contrary, in essence it is a heavy historical reckoning with an idea that tried to take the place of the concept of the Islamic ummah. The Ottoman caliphate, the symbol of this ummah, was abolished by a great crime, and the Islamic ummah is still living with the consequences of it. Despite this, these nationalist parties failed even to preserve their own internal integrity.

The Baath, one of the most striking experiences of modern Arab political history, is often read as an experience that, while genuinely working for these very principles it claimed, turned into an "authoritarian regime" or a "failed political experience." Yet this reading remains on the surface of the matter. The Baath was essentially much more than a regime: It was a claim, an alternative, an attempt at replacement. That is, an attempt to put another "binding principle" in place of the ummah. This is precisely why the collapse of the Baath offers a powerful lesson in the philosophy of history, not only about the history of two states (Syria and Iraq) but also about the fate of a series of ideas produced in the modern era.

The Baath's basic claim was simple but extremely radical in its consequences: Arabness can take the place of the ummah. Language can substitute for faith. A shared history and culture can form a stronger bond than the unity built by revelation. Although at first glance this claim looks like an innocent cultural belonging, it actually contained a far deeper epistemological and ontological shift. For here the "part" was being made to replace the "whole." Arabness was being removed from its place as an element of the Islamic ummah and an attempt was made to substitute it for the ummah. The Baath was therefore not a resurrection but a contraction; it was a withdrawal from the ummah to the tribe, a regression.

A TURKEY PARENTHESIS: CALLING SHRINKING A RESURRECTION

Just as in the process that had begun in Turkey 25 years before the Arab Baath. In Turkey, in the name of salvation, in the name of independence, in the name of the birth of a nation, a whole vast world that the Caliphate encompassed was given up. By calling withdrawal salvation, shrinking a great victory and the abandonment of claims peace, a confusion of consciousness was brought about. In the course of the process in Turkey, language and alphabet were purged anew as a narrower means of communication, in order to sever the bond with organic parts. A definition of Turkishness independent of and distant from Muslimness was adopted as an identity, as a "resurrection," as a "rebirth," as a Turk's genesis belief. Salman Sayyid had pointed precisely to this connection in Fundamentalism Korkusu (the Turkish edition of A Fundamental Fear). According to him, Kemalism is not a regime peculiar only to Turkey; it is ultimately a West-centered model that was later designed to cleanse Islam from political and social life in countries whose populations are entirely Muslim, especially in the Baath regimes.

Yet the historical experience of Islam had taught us otherwise. The ummah was never an ethnic category; nor was it a linguistic enclosure. On the contrary, it was an order of existence that brought different languages, races and geographies together and integrated them around a single truth. What was decisive here was neither blood ties nor language; what was decisive was the claim to truth. That is why Islam did not place the Arab at the center; it made Arabic a vehicle but did not turn Arabness into a measure of superiority.

FROM "ONE ARAB NATION" TO TWO BAATHS

It was precisely here that the Baath broke. For history tests not slogans but structures. That a movement that set out with the discourse of a "single Arab nation" split within a short time into two separate Baaths was not merely a political divergence but the exposure of the idea's own internal inconsistency. If Arabness had really been a unifying supra-identity, why did the cadres carrying the same ideology become enemies of one another? Why did the same slogan turn into two separate mechanisms of domination in two different states? The answers to these questions show that nationalist discourse is not unifying, but can, under certain conditions, be concealing.

Indeed, the Baath experience has also exposed a trap that modern ideologies often fall into: suppressing differences in the name of unity. Sects, tribes and local identities were not resolved; they were merely postponed, frozen and suppressed. Especially in Syria, it was seen how the discourse of suppressing sects was put into practice as the suppression and crushing of the Sunni majority in the name of the Nusayris. This experience, one of the greatest tragedies the Islamic world has lived through, cannot simply be dismissed as a deviation from a principle. It was nothing less than an occupation in Baathist guise carried out against the Islamic world.

ARABNESS IS ONE OF ISLAM'S CARRIERS, LIKE TURKISHNESS, BUT IT IS NOT A REFERENCE

It is also important to establish the relationship between Islam and Arabness correctly. Islam does not reject Arabness; it accepts it within its natural limits. But it refuses to absolutize it. Arabness is one of the carriers of Islam but is not itself the ultimate reference. The problem begins when this natural belonging is turned into an ideological absolute. This is exactly what the Baath did: It pushed the carrier to the center and the message to the background.

The result was inevitable. The Baath tried to take the place of the ummah but could not produce a depth that could take its place. Nor could it have. For the ummah is not merely an identity; it is an order of meaning. Within it there is justice, there is limit, there is responsibility, there is transcendence. Nationalism, once severed from these elements, can provide a powerful emotional mobilization but cannot found a lasting civilization.

For this reason, the collapse of the Baath is not merely a political event belonging to the past. It is also a warning that is still valid today: Every narrow identity substituted for the ummah ultimately runs up against its own limits. For what holds human communities together is not only a common language or history; it is a shared conception of truth and justice.

And history, sooner or later, reminds us of this.