104 A Short History of the Middle East
series of placards in die cities of Syria, demanding in increasingly
violent language the adoption of Arabic as the official language,
the freedom of the press from censorship, self-government for
Syria in union with Lebanon, etc. About 1883, however, the young
conspirators became so nervous of the ubiquitous Ottoman secret
police that they closed down the society and destroyed their re-
cords, while several of the most active members found it prudent to
retire to the tolerance of Egypt under its new British rulers. George
Antonius, who alone records this first incident in the history of
Syrian nationalism, has been at some pains to demonstrate, by
eliciting after some fifty years the testimony of surviving partici-
pants or contemporary Arab observers, that the appeal of this
'enlightened elite' to Arab national sentiment had a widespread
effect;1 but in spite of his argument that their secret activities could
not, in the nature of things, have been fully appraised by the British
consular agents then resident in Beirut, his patriotism seems to have
led him to exaggerate the influence of these pioneers, and the con-
suls' assessment of the movement as 'a damp squib which excited an
apathetic population only to a faint show of curiosity* is borne out
by the sequel. For the next twenty-five years Arab nationalist
activity was conducted in the main from the safe remoteness of
Cairo and Paris. In Syria, except for the temporary excitement
provoked by an agitator who was imprisoned in the 'nineties for
his outspoken denunciations of Ottoman tyranny, the movement
lay prone as though in sleep, held down by Abdul Hamid's
tyranny, and drugged by the opiates of his pan-Islamic policy'.
The resourceful Sultan,2 indeed, besides encouraging the revival
of Muslim sentiment by such measures as the construction of the
Hijaz Railway to Madina, had systematically bestowed benefac-
tions on Arab learned institutions, had spent large sums on the
Muslim Holy Cities, had employed large numbers of Arabs in his
personal service, and had had an Arab battalion in his royal Guards.
In these ways, and through his far-reaching spy-system, the in-
cipient growth of political thought among his Arab subjects was
diverted from a nationalist direction into the safer channel of
"pan-Islam. A number of Christian Arabs, on the other hand, and a
few Muslim modernists, were seduced from their cultural tradition
'•op. cit., 79 ff.
2 He was still regarded by the townsmen of Iraq with Very remarkable
veneration* as late as 1925 (Longrigg, op. cit., 312, n. 1).