The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

‘Aflaq, Michel (1910–89)

A leading Arab intellectual, Michel ‘Aflaq was a cofounder and chief ideologue of the Ba‘th Party, which, while largely a secular nationalist movement, incorporated Islam as an elemental feature of Arab identity and culture.

Born into a commercial, middle-class, Orthodox Christian family in a suburb of Damascus in the last years of the Ottoman Empire, ‘Aflaq came of age in the successor state of Syria during the French colonial rule of the interwar period. He was educated in the city’s Orthodox Christian schools until the age of 19, whereupon he earned a scholarship to attend the University of Paris, Sorbonne (1929–34). Exposed to the intellectual and political ferment of Paris in the 1930s, ‘Aflaq was increasingly drawn to nationalism, radical leftist politics, and the ideas of the French philosopher Henri Bergson, whose notion of élan vital is reproduced in ‘Aflaq’s concept of “Arab Spirit.” Returning to Damascus upon completing his studies in history and philosophy, he taught at the city’s main high school and formed, with fellow teacher Salah al-Din al-Bitar (d. 1980), a political discussion group of like-minded students and young professionals.

The discussion group grew in the early 1940s into a political party, the Hizb al-Ba‘th al-‘Arabi al-Ishtiraki (Party of Arab Socialist Rebirth), and it held its first congress in 1947, in which ‘Aflaq was elected ‘amīd (dean) and served as its chief ideologue until his death. Ba‘thism became the state ideology in Syria (1963) and Iraq (1968) and exerted tremendous power over the shape of midcentury nationalism throughout the Arab world, primarily in various Arab unity initiatives. ‘Aflaq’s influence waned in the 1970s with the rise of military dictatorships in both Syria and Iraq and a regional disaffection with nationalism; nevertheless, elements of his thought persist in the region’s political culture, primarily in educational and religious policies.

In ‘Aflaq’s hands, Ba‘thism was less a coherent political system than an eclectic mixture of fascism, Leninism, liberalism, and romantic nationalism. Among its central tenets was the assertion of a secular basis for society, making Arab identity the only prerequisite for membership in an ultramodern, pan-Arab national community. What made an Arab, and by extension the Arab nation, was the “Arab Spirit,” and all Arabs—especially members of non-Muslim minorities, like ‘Aflaq himself—were equal citizens of that nation.

Crucial to ‘Aflaq’s thought, and in a departure from the ideas of other non-Muslim Arab nationalists, is that Islam is the foundation of Arab nationalism. However, in his version, Islam was circumscribed as a discrete historical object and a transhistorical constituent element of the “Arab Spirit”; it could not, however, serve as the basis for a political system. This contrasts markedly with contemporary Salafists and mainstream Islamic theologians in its abandonment of the living and historically transcendent nature of Islam. By historicizing Islam as the definitive cultural practice of the Arab, ‘Aflaq may have asserted a central place for Islam in Arab identity, but that place would be in the service of a largely secular, nationalist, and socialist agenda; any form of Islamic political theory was, by the same measure, inherently illiberal and antimodern.

A valediction he delivered at the Syrian National University in 1943 titled “In Remembrance of the Arab Prophet,” which appears in the 1959 collection of his essays and speeches, Fi Sabil al-Ba‘th (For the cause of the Ba‘th), confirms this role of Islam. ‘Aflaq argued that “to the Arabs, the Islamic movement embodied in the life of [Muhammad] is not merely a historical occurrence . . . rather, it is at the very depths . . . and bound fiercely into the life of the Arab.” He then concluded, “Islam has renewed the Arab nationality and completed it.” Nevertheless, ‘Aflaq’s writings evidenced only a rudimentary understanding of the religion. In practice, Ba‘thists were openly hostile to Islamism and conservative Islam and tended to refuse political accommodation with either, employing Islamic symbols and rhetoric only during moments of political necessity.

A telling example of the way Ba‘thists employed Islam is that upon his death in 1989, it was announced that ‘Aflaq, who had lived in Iraq since 1975, had converted to Islam and taken the first name Ahmad. Although later confirmed by his children, it is widely believed that the conversion was a ploy by the regime of Saddam Hussein (d. 2006) to help bolster its religious credentials in the face of growing Islamist influence following the Iran-Iraq War (1980–88). It also allowed the Ba‘thist state to memorialize the party’s founder in a mosque-tomb complex, a building imbued with more religious significance than a traditional monument. After the 2003 U.S.-led occupation of Iraq, ‘Aflaq’s body was disinterred from the complex, which is situated near Hussein’s former presidential palace and was used as barracks by a contingent of U.S. Marines.