Modernization and the Growth of Nationalism 121
political activities in secret. The first of their secret societies, the
Qahtaniya, was dissolved after one year for fear that it had been
betrayed to the Turks. In Paris seven Muslim students, who
included Jamil Mardam (in 1948 Prime Minister of Syria) and
Awni 'Abdul Hadi (now a Palestine Arab 'elder statesman'),
founded the Young Arab Association, al-Jani'iya al-'Arabiya al-
Fatat, with the object of securing Arab independence from Turkish
or any other foreign rule. The society grew and in 1913 organized
in Paris a six-day congress attended by twenty-four delegates,
eleven of them Christians, drawn mainly from Syria and Iraq
(the Iraqi delegates included Tawfiq as-Suwaidi, Prime Minister
of Iraq during part of 1946). The congress expressed a general
desire to remain within the Ottoman Empire, provided that
home-rule could be secured, and stressed the importance of
preventing European Powers from meddling in the question. In
the same year al-Fatat moved its headquarters to Syria. By this
time its membership had risen to over 2,000, mainly Muslim, and
included Shukri al-Quwwatli and Paris al-Khuri (who in 1948 are
respectively President of Syria, and Syria's representative on the
Security Council of UNO).
Nor was Iraq without its local nationalist stirrings. A Patriotic
Society, founded at Baghdad to expel the Turks and establish an
autonomous government, numbered among its members more
than a hundred army-officers and many local notables; among
those who came to the unfavourable notice of the Turkish authori-
ties were Hamdi al-Pachahji (who was Prime Minister of Iraq
early in 1946). In March 1913 a conference of Arab notables of
Lower Iraq and neighbouring territories was held at Muhammara,
in Persian territory, to work for the independence of Iraq and
Turkish Arabia. In November the Iraqi nationalists made over-
tures to the young Amir Abdul Aziz ibn Sa'ud, who had by now
made himself master of Naj d with an outlet on the Persian Gulf. He
expressed his sympathy for their cause, but could at present do no
more, neutralized as he was strategically by his ancestral enemy,
the pro-Turkish Amir of the Jebel Shammar to the north. The
Turks were partly aware of this growth of nationalist sentiment,
and attempted to disrupt both the Syrian and the Iraqi movements
by offers of high political positions to some of their leading figures;
but though some few were seduced in this way, the Turks were
not prepared to offer any such concessions in the direction of local