Greater Syria: The History of an Ambition

by Daniel Pipes

While for many years scholars and journalists have focused on the more obvious manifestations of political life in the Middle East, one major theme has been consistently neglected. This is Pan-Syrian nationalism--the dream of creating a Greater Syria out of an area now governed by Syria, Lebanon, Israel, Jordan, and Turkey. Though not nearly as well known as Arab or Palestinian nationalism and hardly studied in depth, Pan-Syrianism has had a profound effect on Middle Eastern politics since the end of World War I. In Greater Syria , the noted Middle East scholar Daniel Pipes provides the first comprehensive account of this intriguing, important, and little understood ideology.

Genres: Middle East, History

256 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1990

About the author

Daniel Pipes (born September 9, 1949) is an American historian, writer, and political commentator. He is the president of the Middle East Forum, and publisher of its Middle East Quarterly journal. His writing focuses on the American foreign policy and the Middle East. He is also an Expert at Wikistrat.

After graduating with a PhD from Harvard and studying abroad, Pipes taught at a number of universities. He then served as director of the Foreign Policy Research Institute, before founding the Middle East Forum. His 2003 nomination by U.S. President George W. Bush to the board of directors of the U.S. Institute of Peace was protested by Islamists, Arab-American groups, and Democratic leaders, who cited his oft-stated belief that victory is the most effective way to terminate conflict. The Bush administration sidestepped the opposition with a recess appointment.

Pipes has written a dozen books, and served as an adviser to Rudolph Giuliani's 2008 presidential campaign. He was in 2008-11 the Taube Distinguished Visiting Fellow at Stanford University's Hoover Institution.

(Wikipedia)

Reviews

[Raghdan fawakhiri · Rating 1 out of 5]

Let me, sarcastically if you will, start my book by saying:
I don't believe in an American nation, I don't even believe that Texas has any characteristics of a State. Why? Because there are Christians, Jews, Muslims, and atheists; there are Whites, Blacks, Yellows, and Browns; there are people of English ancestry, Irish, Italian, German, and even Spanish and Indian.

I would be dismissed as an idiot!
(Regardless of how many credentials I may have to my name)

The author says it all in this book introduction: Syrians have no characteristics of a nation, and he doesn't even believe in the existence of an Arab nation.
Despite his credentials, he mistakes the sub-national communal identities in the region as defining identities that negate the overarching national identity, shaped by centuries of shared cultural, linguistic, and historical experiences.

But this is not idiocy, it's bigotry and racism, disguised as scholarly research.

I've read the entirety of the book. Historical facts bent to fit the analysis, rather than the other way around.
The tone and substance of the book are set firmly in the introduction: prejudice supersedes judgement, and misapprehension dismaying facts.

In studying history, primary sources are kings.
Here, the author quotes the secondary narrative of the orientalists and the outsiders as supreme, and dismisses primary Syrian narrative, or even ridicules it.
"Syria contains probably the most fractured population in the world", he writes in page 18. Then dismisses, as a joke, the following sentence: "One Pan-Syrian nationalist goes so far as to call the region's heterogeneity its 'trademark'".
I guess that would make it OK for Syrians then to make fun of the American touted 'trademark' of being the melting pot of the world?! (It doesn't)

Notice how this aforementioned "one Pan-Syrian" is left to anonymity by the author, yet when a primary Syrian narrative fits the author's agenda, that source is identified by name: Khairallah (last paragraph on page 19). Ironically, as a Syrian native, I've never heard of this person! But it could be my fault!).

Even geographic facts are distorted, showing deep rooted hatred towards this region. On page 15 he described the area between Euphrates and Tigris (known as the Fertile Crescent) as "a dry region".

I had a rebuttal for almost every sentence of his in this book, with primary knowledge and sources to back me up. But replying with a book of truths, to a book of lies, is a foolish endeavor.
Besides, I don't need to prove to the author and his cohorts, that I and my nation, do -in fact- exist!

All I'll say is an advice not to waste your time reading this book, you won't learn facts, only bigotry.
And if you are a Syrian and want to read this book, just be warned: it will be an extremely infuriating read, and the history contained in it, as selectively biased as it is, can be easily found elsewhere (in fact, the vast majority of the book is merely quotes of other sources, though selectively chosen to fit with the author's thesis).

This book has zero scholarly value, except for those blinded by the author's credentials, but know nothing about the region, its history, and its people, and so lack the ability to see its truth: a racist white-washing Orientalist manifesto.

[Belle Meade School]

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