by Adel Beshara
This chapter is divided into two parts: (1) a reconstruction of Fayez’s perspective on the encounter based largely on the account and analysis set out in Whither To?2 and (2) the precise content and actual arguments Fayez deployed, especially the charges of “transgressions” leveled against Sa’adeh in his account. In the process, fundamental issues associated with the SSNP in general and with the affinity between ideology and philosophy in particular will be discussed to determine who was at fault.
FAYEZ’S PERCEPTION OF THE DISPUTE
Fayez located the source of the dispute with Sa’adeh in the cornerstone principle on which Sa’adeh’s leadership had been built. For him, the root problem lay with Sa’adeh’s monopoly on power and the autocratic “abuse” of his constitutional rights. This is the principal argument of Whither To? It is set out in dramatic fashion to convey a sense of urgency and concern about the importance of the matter at the centre of the dispute. Fayez states his point clearly at the start of the tract:
The issue … pertains to the fate and dignity of the nation, in the face of history and eternity. It is concerned with the future of man before his conscience, freedom, and dignity. It is a matter of life and death for the nation, for us, we its sons who forever are seeking its welfare and prosperity.3
In other words, Fayez saw the dispute from a much broader and deeper perspective than Sa’adeh did. For him, the disagreement was not over some minor point, but over fundamental issues that went beyond the Party’s purpose and strategy to the very core of human values and worldviews. He portrays it as a decisive conflict between two irreconcilable perspectives: totalitarianism versus constitutional accountability. Moreover, its causes are laid at Sa’adeh’s doorstep in a bold attempt to make him the real initiator of the dispute. In the process, several grievances concerning Sa’adeh’s style of leadership are documented and brought to our attention.
According to Fayez, the dispute arose because Sa’adeh did not respect his constitutional and leadership prerogatives. He claimed that, by violating his prerogatives, Sa’adeh tended to a totalitarian cult with all the threatening excesses such a cult is known to invite. To prove this, Fayez delved into Sa’adeh’s leadership history to illustrate how it morphed into a dictatorial entity.
The analysis of this history is divided into three distinct but overlapping stages. The first stage stretches from 1932 (the year of the Party’s founding) to the end of World War II and this period is described as the highlight of Sa’adeh’s leadership. He is hailed as a true leader who served the Party with grace and distinction and who did everything according to its constitution and the oath of leadership. Moreover, he is acclaimed as a shining example of the kind of authoritarian charismatic that is often inevitable in crisis-stricken societies seeking to revive amid hostile forces. Behind all this lay a compelling argument toward which Fayez was intentionally gravitating: Sa’adeh was able to perform his duties diligently and with the unflinching backing and respect of the entire Party because he remained within the parameters that defined his leadership:
The “contract” according to which the Party was founded.
The Party’s Constitution, which vested Sa’adeh with legislative and executive powers subject to the terms of the “contract”.
The national cause as spelled out and expounded in the Party’s Aim and Program.
According to Fayez, Sa’adeh’s powers and prerogatives started and ended at these limits. Everything else that lay beyond these limits was non-obligatory. Fayez maintained that (1) Sa’adeh had neither the right nor the power to impose his personal views on Party members and (2) Party members had both the right and the power to accept or reject his personal views. Like everyone else in society, they were entitled to think as freely as they pleased beyond the bounds of the Party’s ideology. This spanned the entire spectrum of intellectual, cultural, philosophical, and personal pursuits. Fayez framed his point as:
In all his research and discussions with the members, especially during the founding stage of the Party, Sa’adeh used to confine his discussion to the principles. He would ask members no more than to believe in these principles and to take them as guidelines in their social, political, and economic thinking and national work. It must be emphasized, though, that, in his capacity as initiator of a comprehensive national renaissance, Sa’adeh took keen interest in intellectual revival, cultural activities, and vital artistic intellectual pursuits. However, this interest did not contain any form of coercion, imposition, or intimidation and, certainly, any element of a comprehensive holistic outlook on life, the universe, and art.4
The second stage of Sa’adeh’s leadership history is the interval between 1945 and 1947 described as the period of inevitable change due to the new political climate created by World War II and the Party’s inability to achieve a breakthrough on both the political and the formal state level. Both factors made a lasting impression on Sa’adeh and forced him to revise some of his perceptions and expectations. According to Fayez, Sa’adeh was also subjected to unexpected turns of events inside the Party that bore even more directly on him and altered his style of thinking. The case of Fakhri Maluf is cited as the trigger in his transformation.5 A high profile Party member respected for his balanced philosophical mind and high integrity, Maluf left the Party in 1944 after converting to Catholicism. He cited irreconcilable differences between his new religious faith and the Party’s secular view of life as the reason for his departure. Through a series of correspondences, Sa’adeh tried to dissuade Maluf from leaving. He pledged and reminded him that the Party does not interfere with religious beliefs or prevent members from practicing religion provided they keep it to themselves. When all efforts failed, Sa’adeh expelled Maluf and quickly filed a detailed report to the Party’s Supreme Council to avert any potential backlash or misunderstanding. In an adjunct to the report, Sa’adeh wrote:
One of the indications of Maluf’s proclivity for deviation is that he was fond of an idea that always tickled his fancies. On many occasions and letters, he repeatedly stated that he would formulate the theological framework of the Syrian Social National doctrine, or the like. In reality, there was and still is an urgent need for many more philosophical and scientific investigation to clarify the depth of the Social National ideology and the robustness of the construction it is erecting with all its facility, beauty, coherency, and high demand.6
Fayez seized on this passage. He believed it contained a vital clue to Sa’adeh’s subsequent change of mind, and he saw it as furnishing some suggestion or proof that Sa’adeh had decided to pick up where Maluf had left off and formulate the theological framework Maluf contemplated:
It appears from this paragraph that the idea that was intriguing Maluf was starting to intrigue Sa’adeh as well. If Sa’adeh had succeeded in defeating Maluf constitutionally and organizationally … Maluf had succeeded in defeating Sa’adeh philosophically, in Sa’adeh’s soul, forcing him to move towards devising the philosophical (theological) basis for the principles of the Party, and to regard this basis as an integral part of the Party’s ideology and, by extension, to consider the “Party’s ideology”, in its new form, both inclusive and indivisible, thus abandoning the distinction that he (i.e., Sa’adeh) had admitted during discussions between the [Party’s] principles and the private philosophy of each nationalist, including himself.7
Tapping into Sa’adeh’s frame of mind, Fayez concluded that his former leader must have experienced some agonizing moments thinking about the philosophical void created by Maluf’s departure. At the minimum, he added, it convinced him of the need to anchor the Party’s ideology in a comprehensive philosophical system and compelled him to start working on this system immediately. Fayez also noticed that, as Sa’adeh gradually moved closer to this aim, his toleration for “freedom of opinion” shrunk to religion: the right to believe in God, Resurrection, and other matters of the afterlife.8 This represented a fundamental break from the previous position when that right extended across the
spiritual, literary, and philosophical spectrum.
Taking the analysis to a higher level, Fayez contended that Sa’adeh changed after realizing that other spiritual and philosophical currents, comparable to that of the Maluf case, existed elsewhere in the Party. The matter came to his attention in 1946 after an exchange of letters with his liaison officer, Ghassan Tueini, during which fundamental philosophical issues were raised and debated. In Fayez’s view, these communications opened Sa’adeh’s eyes to the state of philosophical thinking inside the Party and expedited his ambition to contrive a specific philosophy based on his own personal and private philosophical convictions. Sa’adeh, we are told, proceeded to set out to purify the Party of philosophical diversity and hasten internal philosophical uniformity to avoid further disagreements. For the philosophical-minded Fayez, this entailed not only a stranglehold on freedom of opinion but also an unconditional surrender to a single philosophical outlook.
To prove his point and allow the reader to see the issue comprehensively, Fayez mentioned a letter that Sa’adeh had written at the start of 1947, just prior to his return from exile. Fayez extracted some passages from the letter:
Despite all the great tribulations we have endured over the long years, our faith in each other has remained as strong as ever. You have believed in me as the teacher and guide of the nation and mankind, the planner and builder of the new society and the commander of the new rising forces marching to victory in the name of the teachings (i.e. his teachings) and high ideals. In addition, I believe in you, O ideal nation! You are the teacher and guide of all nations, the builder of the new human society, the leader of the forces of human progress in the name of the new teachings whose life-giving warmth and shining light you bear to all the nations of the world. This light calls on them to discard the doctrine that regards Spirit as the only motor of human progress or Matter as the fundamental basis of human development. It calls them to give up once and for all the idea that the world is by necessity in a state of war in which spiritual forces are continuously fighting with material forces. Finally, it calls them to admit with us that the basis of human development is spiritual-materialist and that superior humanity recognizes this basis and builds the edifice of its future on it. Neither can those who boast about materialistic philosophies dispense with the spirit and its philosophy, nor can those who boast about spiritualistic philosophies dispense with the matter and its philosophy.
The world has come to realize, especially after the last World War, the magnitude of devastation visited upon it by the partial philosophies and one-dimensional ideologies that flourish on sabotage - the philosophy of stifling Capitalism and the philosophy of unruly Marxism that eventually united with its twin, the materialistic Capitalism, in a drive to negate spirit from the world, and the Fascist philosophy of the spirit and its twin, National Socialism, that monopolized the spirit and aimed at the total control of the world nations and their affairs.
Today, the world is in need of a new social philosophy that can save it from the arbitrariness and error of these ideologies. The philosophy that the world needs is a philosophy of interaction that unites and combines the entire forces of human society. It is the philosophy that your renaissance offers.9
Thus, according to Fayez, Sa’adeh’s transformation from a national leader to a totalitarian leader was complete. Knowingly or unknowingly, he had detoured the Party on a totalitarian path that imposed severe constraints on the enjoyment of basic rights:
[With this letter] the conversion of Sa’adeh [was] attained. His new philosophy had taken formal shape. In his view at least, his new philosophy (al-madrahiyyah) had become part of his Party’s ideology just as Marxism, Fascism and National Socialism had contrived philosophical systems and embedded them into their ideologies. This philosophy (al-madrahiyyah) and the “Social National ideology”, thus, became Sa’adeh’s rallying cry to his Party, his Party’s rallying cry to his nation, and his nation’s rallying cry to the world.10
Fayez edges even closer to the key idea towards which he had been proposing and navigating the reader. He states that, by marrying his “personal” philosophy with the Party’s ideology, Sa’adeh had created an earthly religion that shares much common ground with religious worship and other forms of political religion. Fayez buttresses his argument by invoking a passage from Sa’adeh’s return speech on March 2, 1947:
After fifteen years of disciplined struggle, unparalleled anywhere else in the world, we stand today as a living nation victorious over all the foreign designs which aimed to keep this nation fragmented into contending denominations and sects, all of which have an equal heavenly origin, and to which our social nationalist teachings came offering a single unified religion designed to raise this nation to their level, to find in them its long-term guidance.11
For Fayez, the unveiling of this “single unified religion” under the appellation of “Social Nationalism” as the official philosophy of the Party marked the beginning of the third and final stage in Sa’adeh’s total transformation. Describing it as a “coup” (inqilab), he argued that Sa’adeh completed the full circle by the single act of “imposing” his vision on the Party in a “revised edition” of its Aim and Program. Fayez invoked the notion of a coup deliberately to convey a sense of “break from” as opposed to “adjustment of” an existing condition. He probably also utilized it to depict the act as a coup in the real sense of the word since it was executed during his absence in the Gold Coast (Ghana). Certainly, Fayez purposely characterized the act as a “coup” to exacerbate the range and magnitude of the changes it occasioned:
It is a fundamental coup that altered the face of the Syrian National Party, its aim and some of its principles, and the significance of its meaning in Sa’adeh’s mind and that of its members. The result was the “Syrian Social National Party” - a new party in every sense of the word: new in its aim and objectives; new in its inception and its legal and constitutional forms; and new in encompassing a total philosophy, an outlook on life, the universe and art, and a specific religious doctrine. It is the philosophy and outlook of Antun Sa’adeh himself, which he had decided to impose on the members of the Party without informing them about the nature of this coup and without alerting them to its occurrence! He did not even bother to explain to them in detail the substance of this outlook, philosophy, and new religion!12
Apart from the problem of magnitude, Fayez also raised the question of the legality or non-legality of the “changes” introduced by Sa’adeh:
[At the end of the day] what matters to me is that an amendment had been made and that this amendment was instigated unilaterally by one of the parties to the “contract” and that this party then proceeded to enforce it on the other party by an unconstitutional decree.13
Fayez claimed Sa’adeh had broken faith with the members and ignored the partnership on which the Party was founded:
The leader had deviated from the principles, plan, and aim of his party. He introduced the amendments at his own discretion and without consulting the members whose view and opinions are a real will and not a shadow of his will. They are a legal will too. The constitutional authority of the leader has no value if he does not respect this will.14
Very rarely had anyone, either inside and outside the Party, dared to call Sa’adeh’s integrity and reputation into question. Even Sa’adeh’s political detractors were careful not to do that. Why did Fayez think of doing something so risky? His emotions may have got the better of him or perhaps it was a consequence of abundant pride and arrogance.
As Fayez continues his narrative description of the “coup” (inqilab), we learn that, in addition to imposing his “personal” philosophy on the Party, Sa’adeh revamped the Party’s administration and machinery (especially the Department of Information and the Department of Culture, which were under Fayez’s control for some years) and reworked the Party’s publications to align them with his philosophical thinking. For Fayez, this was the capping climax of the “coup”.
Apart from subordinating the Party’s institutional agencies to a single philosophy based entirely on “Sa’adeh’s own outlook on life, universe, and the art”, Fayez viewed it as the beginning of the end to philosophical freedom inside the Party. For him, it amounted to an absolute surrender to an exact philosophy under which members had no right to think freely, hold alternative philosophical views, or question key features.
The thought regimentation implied by this surrender seemed too problematic or unnerving for Fayez. Addressing himself directly to Sa’adeh, he wrote:
A person who respects the group for which he is responsible is one who seeks to protect the ability of each member to think freely and absolutely. He presents his theory for the members to discuss and understand and grants every member the right to accept or reject whatever they want. And he who has a sense of respect for his outlook on life, the universe, and the art, and is confident of its validity and accuracy, is not one who tries to imprison his followers in a mental cage. He does not prevent them from exploring any other outlook and he does not preclude any intellectual dialogue between his outlook and other outlooks. On the contrary, he would welcome such a dialogue.15
What mattered even more for Fayez was the dictatorial hegemony that Sa’adeh obtained from all this. By imposing his personal philosophy on the Party, Sa’adeh could now not only suppress any intellectual dissent at his own discretion, but also create a condition whereby any philosophical disagreement with him could be construed as a disagreement with the Party itself. Hence, philosophical difference at the personal or individual level was unthinkable. Any disagreement became a disagreement not with Sa’adeh, but with the Party’s ideology, and thus, between the member and the Party. The implications of such an analogy are obvious.