Word: arabism
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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Nuri and Nasser now contend for Arab leadership, but the rivalry between the peoples of the Euphrates and the Nile valleys is actually as old as civilization, which first dawned in their valleys. Then, competing empires reached out from Babylon and Thebes into the land between-the land of the Bible-and as the tides of conquest and reconquest ebbed and flowed, the children of Israel and other would-be neutrals were swept off now to Egyptian bondage, now to Babylonian captivity. Today, though faces in the modern Iraqi and Egyptian crowds often show startling similarity to the classic profiles...
Today's rivalry for Arab leadership is in many respects frankly unequal. After almost four centuries of Ottoman misrule and neglect, Iraq counts fewer than 6,000,000 inhabitants; Egypt has more than 22 million. Egypt is Mediterranean, with a long record of Western influence; Iraq still feels the strong pull of its tribal past...
...Iraq has its geographical unity, its great river valley, and after three generations under a British-created monarch, its own political and economic institutions. Above all, it has oil. Among Arab states, Egypt and Syria lack the oil-creating wealth, Saudi Arabia and the Persian Gulf sheikdoms the economy that can absorb it. Iraq, alone of all Arab nations, has both, and on the wave of its oil royalties it has launched an ambitious program of economic development that is transforming the political balances of the region...
...even the Egyptian embassy questions the Pasha's honesty. Syrian and Egyptian broadcasters have shouted "Traitor" and "Satan," denounced him as a stooge of the British and an Ottoman-style tyrant. He pays no heed. Every Iraqi knows how a half-century ago Nuri leagued with the Arab Patriot Jafar al-Askari to conspire against the Ottoman Turks, then fought on camelback for Emir Feisal in World War I's revolt in the Arabian desert...
...Covenanter. Commissioned a sublieutenant, Nuri rode back to Baghdad, slim, handsome in the mustache sprouted in Constantinople, and fiercely proud of his uniform. He became a platoon commander at a Persian border town, and fell in with Jafar al-Askari, a husky, bull-necked Arab a few years his senior. The two became fast friends, and in 1910, as one member of the family puts it, "they gave each other their sisters." Though in accordance with Arab custom Nuri was not introduced to his bride Naima till the wedding day, Jafar arranged for her to catch a glimpse of Nuri...