Elizabeth F. Thompson. How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its Liberal-Islamic Alliance

• DOI: https://doi.org/10.13169/reorient.7.2.0236
• Published date: 14 December 2022
• Date: 14 December 2022
• Pages: 236-240
• Author: Gehad Hasanin

236 REORIENT

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Thompson, E. F. (2020) How the West Stole Democracy from the

Arabs: The Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of Its

Liberal-Islamic Alliance. London: Grove Press UK.

By Gehad Hasanin, University of Oxford

Elizabeth F. Thompson’s How the West Stole Democracy from the Arabs: The

Syrian Congress of 1920 and the Destruction of its Liberal-Islamic Alliance is an

accessible narrative of Syrians’ aborted experiment with modern democratic gov-

ernance in the wake of World War I. The book traces Arab nationalists’ efforts to

attain an independent, democratic state in Greater Syria (comprising present-day

states of Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel/Palestine), as well as the fateful deci-

sion by the Great Powers and the League of Nations to deny Syrians admission to

the family of nations and reduce them to colonial subjects. The result of this failure

to set aside Western imperial ambitions and racial prejudice, Thompson argues,

was the subsequent Arab disillusionment with universal liberal principles and the

demise of any prospects for democracy.

Central to Thompson’s narrative is the formation, between 1918 and 1920, of a

liberal-Islamic alliance that set the precedent for compromise. Not only had the

alliance secured the commitment of parties with seemingly incommensurable sen-

sibilities and interests (liberals and Islamic traditionalists, Ottoman loyalists and

Arab nationalists, landed notables and new professionals), it had also promised to

keep at bay some of the excesses which later plagued Arab politics, such as author-

itarianism, elitism, and illiberal Islamism. That such a coalition existed proves that

“[t]he true cause of dictatorship and the anti-liberal Islamist threat lies in the

events of a century ago, not in the eternal traits of so-called Oriental culture”

(Thompson 2020: xviii).

The book explicitly targets audiences in policy circles and the media, as well as

Arab activists looking to revive hopes for democracy. In fact, the ouster of

Egyptian president Mohammed Morsi and the subsequent massacre of his sup-

porters in 2013 directly spurred the writing of the book (pp. 371–2). Thompson

attributes the breakdown of democratic transitions in the wake of the Arab upris-

ings of 2011 to the failure of liberals and Islamists to build a coalition akin to the

one formed in Syria in 1919. Elsewhere, she accurately argues that “[o]nly a return

to first principles and recognition of the origins of the cleavage can offer hope of

transcendence” (2019: 14). It is these origins of the “liberal-Islamist schism”

(2019: 1) that How the West Stole Democracy purports to bring to the fore.

Thompson’s foregrounding of colonialism’s role in the present Arab predicament,

as well as her recognition of the need to redress the humiliation inflicted by colonial-

ism for any democratic future to be possible (p. 14), is a move long overdue. Her

DOI:10.13169/reorient.7.1.0236