When Egypt & Syria United
Introduction
In 1958, Egypt and Syria formed a political union and united as one country, which was then known as the United Arab Republic (UAR). The UAR was envisioned as a prelude to a Pan-Arab union stretching from North Africa to the Gulf.1 It was formally established in February of 1958, set in motion by Syria’s proposal to former Egyptian President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in turn demanded the immediate dissolution of all Syrian political parties, a process he had already completed in Egypt. At the time, Syrian Ba’athists were fearful of the growing power of the Syrian Nationalist Communist Party and saw the union with Egypt as an opportunity to curb their influence.2 Cairo was declared the capital of the UAR, Nasser was pronounced as president, and Syria was mainly governed through a police state, a legacy it would later inherit.
Historians of Arab nationalism classify the UAR as a “seminal episode in the modern history of the Arab world […] with a significant, lasting impact on the evolution of Arab politics.”3 However, the UAR remains understudied. Scholars in the field have mostly focused on the elite politics and economics of the UAR, overlooking the social and gender history of this period. Using previously unpublished primary sources from the UAR Ministry of Education archives, this essay will examine how the state and its citizens negotiated the cultural, class, and gender dynamics of the former nascent postcolonial nation. Postcolonial nationalism featured prominently in this negotiation, especially in the education sector, which reveals its attempt at both the inclusion and exclusion of different groups. In parallel to a number of postcolonial nationalist projects at that time, these efforts were both classist and gendered, assuming an urban middle-class subject. The development of the UAR was a moment of immense hope for Pan-Arabism, despite it being short-lived. What can we learn from the rise and fall of the UAR, beyond seeing it through a nostalgic collection of lost aspirations?
Ideology & Formation
In many ways, the ideological drives behind the formation of the UAR, despite its focus on Arab unity, were similar to other movements happening around the world at the time. Nasser was one of the proponents of the Third World movement during his leadership of the United Arab Republic. He often repeated the term la Sharqiyya, la Gharbiyya, meaning neither East nor West,4 the catchphrase on which the Bandung and Non-Alignment movements were built. The 1955 Conference and the 1961 movement are frequently referred to as precursors to the Global South movement of formerly colonized nations that would not ally with either the United States or the Soviet Union during the Cold War,5 but instead would forge their own third way.6 As historian Vijay Prashad writes, “The Third World was not a place. It was a project.”7 Many leaders of the Third World movement, of whom we are very familiar with their names, including Ahmed Ben Bella of Algeria, Kwame Nkrumah of Ghana, and Patrice Lumumba of Congo, were also looking to achieve this dynamic. Cairo even became a hub for Afro-Asian solidarity meetings, especially for women. In 1961, Karima Al-Said, the UAR Deputy Minister of Education, welcomed women from thirty-seven countries to the first Afro-Asian Women’s Conference in Cairo.8 Bahia Karam, Secretary of the Women’s Section at the Permanent Secretariat, had traveled to most of the Third World in the preceding years to reach out to women across the Global South.9 Although the UAR was conceived as a transnational state, it never escaped the confines of the modern state. Theorist Partha Chatterjee calls this “Our postcolonial misery,” and argues this misery extended to all postcolonial nation-states.10 The machinery of state formation and economy was where “Western superiority had to be acknowledged, and its accomplishments carefully studied and replicated.”11
Arabness and Arabic became the central cultural education project of the UAR, without recognition of non-Arab minorities such as Nubians, Siwans, and the Beja people in Egypt, and Kurds, Armenians, Assyrians, and Chaldeans in Syria, to name a few. However, emphasizing Arab, as opposed to Islamic, identity was still a more inclusive vision for the region, since it included Christians, Druze, Jews, and Muslims.12 This was consistent with widespread Arabization policies across North Africa and the Arabic-speaking world, which was construed as an anti-colonial, anti-Western initiative.13 As such, the advancement of the Arabic language became a priority for the UAR, and higher education was conducted exclusively in Arabic, even for medicine and the sciences. Students were required to pass the Arabic examination in order to advance to preparatory and secondary school, even if they passed other subjects. State initiatives replaced colloquial, al-‘amiya, or foreign, al-ajnabiya, words with classical Arabic words for technical and medical terms that did not previously have Arabic equivalents.14 Syria, Egypt, and Iraq partook in a large-scale effort to define these words in Arabic so that medical and other schools could be fully conducted in Arabic. The UAR required private schools to hire Arab headmasters, include Arabic language courses, and administer state examinations.15
Focus on Education
The expansion of education under the UAR was emblematic of the postcolonial nation’s constant negotiation of tensions between nationalist, transnational, and religious political priorities. During the three years of the union, the educational system in Egypt and Syria was completely overhauled. As Professor Cati Coe reminds us in her study of state-sponsored educative cultural projects, “Providing education is one of the major functions and sources of legitimacy of most national governments.”16 The foundations of this unified system became the backbone of Syrian and Egyptian education for generations to come.
In schools, traditional values were harnessed to state causes, relabeled as secular, and steered into nationalist channels.17 The challenge to the postcolonial nation was the negotiation between ‘tradition,’ or local culture, and ‘modernity,’ remaking each nation in its own image. In creating a ‘third way,’ the UAR fashioned its education system on several models. German, Russian, English, and French were offered as foreign languages in schools. In Al-Khitat al-Dirasiya bi al-Marhala al-Ibtida’iya: Dirasat Muqarana, translated to A Comparative Primary School Study Plan, comparisons of primary school systems between the UAR and India, the Soviet Union, the United States, Sweden, West Germany, France, and England were made, focusing on the number of hours dedicated to each subject, the length of the school day, the number of hours of instruction during the week, and the number of school days during the year.18 Comparing notes between school systems was intended to locate the UAR among influential countries, affirming itself in the global world order, as a center not a periphery. The UAR wanted to show the world that it was at the forefront of advancement and innovation. Most government documents were translated into English and French, and many found their way into the Library of Congress and university libraries across the United States.
The UAR constitution established compulsory universal education for boys and girls. That said, the UAR, and especially Egypt, became a cosmopolitan nucleus for students from all over the Afro-Asian world. Schools, colleges, and universities were free for students from Arab, Islamic, African, and Asian countries.19 In the 1959-60 school year, 14,349 students from 57 countries studied in Egypt. More than 3,000 teachers were sent to 14 countries in Africa and 6 countries in Asia to teach and share practices from the UAR model.20 The educated citizen was perceived to be of service to the nation and the greater cause. But those who did not fit into either the Pan-Arab cause or believe in its goals of a secular nation were excluded from both vision and reality.
Women & Class Divisions
Women were central to building the UAR as cultural producers navigating the terrains between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity,’ as working bodies for a growing economy, and as reproducers of the nation.21 The UAR education project privileged an urban middle-class secular Arab woman, and marginalized rural and non-Arab populations. But Arab women were also benefactors and drivers of the state educational project, not simply objects of control. As anthropologist Lila Abu-Lughod writes, “In the postcolonial world women have become potent symbols of identity and visions of society and the nation.”22 The urban middle-class woman became the model definition of the educated postcolonial Arab woman who embodied the seamless balance between ‘traditional’ and ‘modern,’ but was remade in the image of ‘neither East nor West.’23 She was the third way.
Professor Shenila Khoja-Moolji, in writing about colonial India and postcolonial Pakistan’s education planning, describes the state’s efforts to create a desirable Muslim girl worker-subject-citizen who was neither too Western nor too traditional.24 This framework could be extended to the UAR where this worker-subject-citizen was the idealized urban middle-class woman. The state did not ignore the rest of the women, but they were not idolized in the same way. The middle-class woman would be shown off to the world as the marker of progress, while the rest, mainly women living in rural areas, would be trained in technical fields to assist in agricultural production and used to represent ‘tradition,’ a cultural relic of a time passed.
Despite schooling being limited in scope and numbers, it did yield real gains especially in the expansion of a woman’s professional class, more specifically the urban middle class. In the 1960-61 school year in the Egyptian region, for example, the schooling population had doubled in five years to 4 million students, one quarter of which were girls.25 In the Northern Syrian region, the number of girls across educational levels also doubled over the same period.26 Any university graduate was guaranteed a state job after graduation and filled the ranks of state civil servants.27 The percentage of Egyptian women in the labor force increased a substantial 31.1 percent from 1961 to 1969.28 In 1960, the overall unemployment rate in Egypt was 2.2%.29 The expanded state institutions created a demand for more workers to fill these many new positions. UAR educational documents stressed technical education at all levels to funnel more women, and men, into factories and industrial jobs in response to the growing demand for labor. The expansion of healthcare also resulted in a need for women trained as doctors, nurses, pharmacists, and lab technicians. In 1958, the UAR subsidized daycare facilities for working women and ensured that any workplace with more than one hundred employees had a daycare or at least a facility adjacent to it.30 These state feminism policies ensured women could be dedicated to their careers while also maintaining their ‘traditional’ roles as mothers, caretakers, and maintainers of their homes.31 It is this balance of the educated career woman and cultured mother that the state encouraged.
But this ideal Arab woman was not representative of the elite feminism of earlier decades, represented by women like Huda Sha’arawi and Ceza Nabarawi. This was the new middle class of women bureaucrats, state civil servants, lab technicians, teachers, secretaries, and clerks. This middle class was not specific to Egypt or Syria but was shared across the region and in many postcolonial nations resulting in the socialist policies these states undertook. Professor Amy Aisen Kallander writes of this in Tunisia in the 1960s,32 and Professor Nadje Al-Ali discusses similar policies in Iraq.33
Therefore, achieving an equal standard of education for all was not the goal, instead, the state offered an appropriate education based on a child’s class so she could be a productive worker on the one hand and a capable mother on the other. 34 “Education in the provinces was universal. Country girls are encouraged to benefit from it, and such education will take into account the traditions, economic structure, and environment of the community.”35 The ‘rural girl’ would be trained in farming and embroidery, while the ‘rural boy’ would be trained in agriculture or sent to military training, given the conscription policies at the time. The educational plans recognized rural and urban differences, but conspicuously missing was any reference to Egyptian or Syrian non-Arabic speaking minorities.
Conclusion
Over the course of the union, Syrian officers became discontented with increased Egyptian domination. Nasser sent many Egyptians to run the government in Syria and brought Syrian officials to Egypt where they had little influence. Nasser also introduced unequal trade policies and generally treated Syrian officials as his vassals.36 Egyptian goods were sent to Syria freely, but Syrian merchants and businesses were forced to import from Egypt. Former colonial powers also objected to the continuity of the union. Fadiyah Siraj Al-Din’s Al-Gharb wa al-Wahda al-Masriyah al-Suriyah, or The West and the Egyptian-Syrian Union, argues that the United States and Britain actively ensured the failure of the Syrian-Egyptian initiative to curb Arab nationalist influence in the broader region.37 In September 1961, a coup led by military officers in Damascus ended the union, but popular support for the UAR continued in Syria.38
With the Arab defeat of the 1967 war with Israel and the sudden death of Nasser in 1970, the socialist state and its state feminism policies began to disintegrate.39 Anwar El-Sadat’s rule marked the beginning of Egypt’s absorption into neo-liberal capitalism and openness, or infitah, to the West. Middle-class gains began to evaporate. Schools became overcrowded and overburdened with less state investment in the public education system and an explosion of various private schools and tutors. Government jobs, teaching, and nursing positions became less lucrative as neo-liberal policies and private education created a wealthy urban class. However, not all aspects inherited from the UAR completely disappeared. In Syria, a decade after the UAR’s disintegration, Hafez Al-Assad came to power in 1971 and implemented a Nasserist-style state, until his death in 2000.40 Hafez Al-Assad was among a number of Syrian officers transferred to Egypt during the UAR. His rule was outwardly anti-Western and refused the path of infitah that Egypt took.
In the postcolonial world, the attempt to create a system of education that was ‘neither East nor West’ was a formidable challenge. Using the UAR as a case study offers a nuanced understanding of the multiple negotiations that took place around gender, class, and nationalism. Consistent with many postcolonial state projects in the 1960s, the UAR, and later Egypt and Syria, separately uplifted an urban Arab middle-class woman subject at the expense of others, reinforcing class divisions, but also prioritizing Arabness. However, for many men and women, this was a time of opportunity and prosperity. They were aware of the state’s agenda, but also believed in the hope that the postcolonial Pan-Arab moment carried, even if it was elusive.
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The statements made and views expressed are solely the responsibility of the author, and do not represent Fiker Institute.
