Antun Saadeh

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Antun Sa'adah

Antun Sa'adah (March 1, 1904-July 8, 1949) was a Lebanese nationalist thinker and founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. He rejected Arab Nationalism and indeed the idea that the speakers of the Arabic language formed a single nation, and argued instead for the creation of the state of United Syrian Nation or Natural Syria. Initially he thought of this as equivalent to historic Syria. In a later revision of his premises, he extended it to include Iraq, making up a Syrian homeland that "extends from the Taurus range in the northwest and the Zagros mountains in the northeast to the Suez canal and the Red Sea in the south and includes the Sinai peninsula and the gulf of Aqaba, and from the Syrian sea in the west, including the island of Cyprus, to the arch of the Arabian desert and the Persian gulf in the east." (Kader, H. A.).

Sa'adah rejected both language and religion as defining characteristics of a nation, and instead argued that nations develop through the common development of a people inhabiting a specific geographical region. He was thus a strong opponent of both Arab nationalism and Pan-Islamism. He argued that Syria was historically, culturally, and geographically distinct from the rest of the Arab world, which he divided into four parts. He traced Syrian history as a distinct entity back to the Phoenicians, Canaanites, Assyrians, Babylonians etc. and argued that Syrianism transcended religious distinctions.

A Lebanese Christian (Orthodox) from Dhour Choueir, after completing his education he emigrated to Brazil, joining his father Khalil Sa'adah who was a prominent Arabic-language journalist there. In 1932 he returned to Beirut and began to teach at the American University of Beirut. That year he founded Syrian Social Nationalist Party to oppose the French division of the region and push for unity. From 1935 on, he was repeatedly harassed and imprisoned by the French mandatory authorities, and as a result decided in 1938 to emigrate once again, returning to Brazil. After a short period there, he left for Argentina, where he continued his political journalism.

Sa'adah returned to Lebanon on 2 March 1947, after the country's independence from the French. On July 4, 1949, the party declared a revolution in Lebanon in retaliation to a series of violent intimidations staged by the government of Lebanon against party members. The revolt failed and as he went to Damascus to meet Husni el-Zaim (Republic of Syria ruler at the time), who was supposed to support him as previously agreed, he was handed by el-Zaim to Lebanese authorities. Saadeh and many of his followers were judged by a military court, and were executed. The capture, trial and execution happened in less than 48 hours. Saadeh's execution was at dawn of July 8, 1949.

He published many books, treatises and articles during his life time on a wide range of topics.

He emphasizes the role of philosophy and social science in the development of his social ideology. He views social nationalism, which is his version of nationalism, as a tool to transform traditional society into a dynamic and progressive one. Secularization plays an important role in his ideology. Secularization is taken by him beyond the socio-political aspects of the question into its philosophical dimensions.