Zaki Al-Arsuzi - Legacy

Legacy

Al-Arsuzi's work and thought is almost unknown and barely mentioned in Western scholarship on Arab nationalism. When he is actually mentioned in a text, it is predominantly on his irredentist views of the unified Arab Nation. Although his collected works have been published since the mid-1970s, al-Arsuzi's work on the Arabic language, which is central to al-Arsuzi's nationalist thought, are rarely mentioned at all. The study of al-Arsuzi's ideas in Arabic scholarship also lacking. Academic Yasir Suleiman gives the principal reason for this as the similarity of al-Arsuzi's works to those of Sati' al-Husri, a contemporary. Suleiman goes on to explain Al-Arsuzi's eclipsed legacy as the combination of a number of factors: firstly, in contrast to al-Husri's idea of language, al-Arsuzi's theory is self-defeating because it excluded other theories instead of including them. Secondly, his work was written with an elitist slant, rather than the populist one which al-Husri managed to convey. Thirdly, and in contrast to al-Husri's work, al-Arsuzi's work seemed old-fashioned, due to his use of old words and historical texts; moreover, while al-Arsuzi wrote about the symbolic need of an Arab Nation, al-Hustri wrote about the practical role of an Arab Nation—al-Arsuzi was obscure where al-Husri was transparent. Whereas Al-Husri was able to prove his arguments with empirical data, al-Arsuzi was unable. Thus, Suleiman writes, al-Husri appeared more informed then al-Arsuzi, when really he was not. The lack of empirical data in al-Arsuzi's work made it look parochial at times, while at other times his conclusions bordered on machoistic nationalism, which in turn could be interpreted as racism. Another reason for his "negligible" impact, according to Suleiman, was al-Arsuzi's idea on the need to replace the traditional Arabic grammar system with a new one. The Center for Research and Documentation on World Language Problems agrees with Suleiman's conclusion, but further claims that al-Arsuzi's work was "often far-fetched and 'airy-fairy'".

Several Ba'athists, mostly from the Syrian-led Ba'ath Party, have denounced Aflaq as a "thief"; these critics claim that Aflaq had stolen the Ba'athist ideology from al-Arsuzi and proclaimed it as his own. Whatever the case may be, al-Arsuzi was hailed by Hafiz al-Assad, the Ba'athist leader of Syria, as the principal founder of Ba'athist thought, following the 1966 Ba'ath Party split. The Iraqi branch, however, still proclaims Aflaq as the founder of Ba'athism. Al-Assad has referred to al-Arsuzi as the "greatest Syrian of his day" and claimed him to be the "first to conceive of the Ba'ath as a political movement." The Syrian Ba'athists have erected a statue in al-Arsuzi's honour; it was erected following the 1966 coup. Even so, the majority of Ba'athists still agree that Aflaq, not al-Arsuzi, was the principal founder of the Ba'ath movement. However, Keith David Watenpaugh states that the ideology was developed by a "trio" consisting of al-Arsuzi, Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar, and that there was not one principal founder.