Fayez Sayegh- the Party Years (1938-1947)

by Adel Beshara

  Creating a new political party without swearing an oath of allegiance to its principles.

  Introducing changes to the Party’s program without consulting the members.

  The response concluded with Fayez brazenly announcing his “withdrawal” from the Party (a subtle insinuation that he left of his own accord).

  THE FALLOUT

  If Fayez thought that his “expulsion” or “withdrawal” would cause a mass exodus from the Party, he grossly miscalculated, as the episode passed almost without a hitch. Only a handful of members left the Party, and the rest remained firmly united behind Sa’adeh. Fayez’s assertiveness proved no match for Sa’adeh’s decisiveness. He was more able to present strong and rational arguments than other Party members were, but Sa’adeh always had the right response to every argument. In retrospect, Fayez did not count on Sa’adeh working equally as hard to prevent him from flirting with extraneous ideas inside the Party.

  Fayez made two cardinal mistakes. The first was to go public with the dispute. This opened the floodgates to a tidal wave of criticism and condemnation from elite intellectuals who had been quietly observing the proceedings from the sidelines. Dumbstruck by Fayez’s sudden outburst, they quickly closed ranks and rushed to Sa’adeh’s defense. The unity of the Party was deemed too important to be jeopardized by unnecessarily dragging disagreements. Among the respondents was his former “secretary” and “student”, Labib Yamak Zuwiyya. He tore into Fayez with a most stinging reply:

  Fayez, I wish you had never published your statement because the words you said to me in Dhur al-Shweir last summer still echo in my ears. Have you forgotten that you said, “The Leader is the only person who must be a role model for the whole nation”? Unfortunately, the teacher deviated from the right path and claimed that he had been in the dark. I, your student and friend of yesterday, am sorry to be the first to confront you and say: “Everything you said and claimed is nonsense!” Pretense has blinded you, and pride has destroyed you. I, your student whom you cared for and whom you taught the principles of philosophy, am sorry to tell you that you have been deceitful, concerned with fame, and craving acclaim, and that as a philosopher, you have been an unctuous meddler.18

  The long chain and weight of the responses quickly dispelled any pity for Fayez. It added credence to Sa’adeh’s perspective and brought many borderline members back in line with the Party. It was one thing to disagree with Sa’adeh, but another to attack him publicly. The strong impression of treachery fostered by Fayez’s public announcement obscured the real issue and strengthened the general perception of Sa’adeh as the real protector of the Party. Any sympathy or credibility that Fayez may have had dissipated quickly because of the public announcement.

  The second mistake made by Fayez was his ill-fated decision to drop his bombshell on the very last day. Deserting a battlefield after declaring an intellectual war on an adversary is not exactly smart politics. It is self-defeating, especially when the enemy is an intellectual giant in his own right. By declaring war on Sa’adeh on the day he was due to leave the country, Fayez inadvertently undermined his own cause, as the announcement was seen as a measure of political insensitivity and a gratuitous breach of Party trust unbefitting his record as a person, writer, and public speaker. It made him look weak and desperate. Conversely, it made Sa’adeh look grand and imposing, just the way he liked.

  With Fayez not around to defend himself or to answer questions from the press and the public, a few dissidents were left to pick up the pieces. Genuinely loyal to Fayez, they saw the saga as an opportunity to strike a fatal blow to Sa’adeh. Calling themselves the “Free Nationalists”, they issued a couple of press releases to the an-Nahar newspaper, whose owner-editor, Ghassan Tueini, was a sympathizer and an active member of their ring. The first statement, reiterating Fayez’s announcement of the previous day almost verbatim, appeared on December 11. Another followed on December 18 with a slightly modified theme. This time, the dissenters, seeking new attention, claimed that their disagreement with Sa’adeh was not over existentialism but over Sa’adeh’s “totalitarian” and autocratic style of leadership. The campaign petered out as quickly as it had begun. The dissenters could not rise to the challenge, and like Fayez before them, deserted the battlefield as the sound of their enemy’s artillery approached.

  In this regard, Sa’adeh’s response deserves careful study. Instead of joining the battle himself, which would have given the dissenters more attention than they deserved, he sent in a couple of his ‘intellectual generals’: Abdullah Qubersi and Hilmi Maluf. These generals contributed two superb rejoinders which an-Nahar could not refuse to publish having proclaimed itself a champion of “intellectual freedom”.19 Maluf’s rejoinder was particularly engaging because it posited the issue from a dispassionate perspective:

  In the past week, and specifically in the intellectual circles of the country, a clamor could be heard “fight Sa’adeh; fight him because he violated his own fundamental principles; fight him because he wants to superimpose his own philosophy on the country; fight him because he is an enemy of free thinking.” For my part, I tell thee, “Yes, go ahead and fight him. It is your right to fight him with all the power you command, but fight him on anything but on these grounds”.20

  As the protagonists were fighting it out, Sa’adeh looked on with satisfaction and approval. He instructed one of his aides to “advise them [i.e. Free Nationalists] that, despite their resignation, expulsion, and disagreement with the Party’s beliefs, he would award them a Party medal for instigating a splendid ideological intellectual battle in the press, but would never forgive them if they turn the debate into a platform for vituperation and hostile polemic”.21 Obviously, Sa’adeh was reaping good rewards. The campaign gave him plenty of publicity and projected him as a confident and uncompromising leader. Sometimes bad publicity is good publicity in disguise, depending on how it is handled. In this case, contrary to the intended purpose, Sa’adeh came across as highly convivial and open to intellectual discussion rather than as a maniacal dictator. Moreover, by putting others in charge of the exchange, Sa’adeh created the impression that the dissenters’ discord was not with him but with the Party at large.

  Another factor worth considering is the composure of Sa’adeh’s response. Rather than going public about the dispute, as Fayez and his sympathizers did, he pitched his position directly to the Party members. He wrote two instructive articles in the Official Bulletin that quickly helped to dispel any apprehension or lingering doubts. The first article provided insight into the saga based almost entirely on Sa’adeh’s version of events. It gave the Party members some crucial facts that, until then, had been carefully kept under wraps, and it also accentuated the firmness and equanimity shown by Sa’adeh. Fayez himself was not maligned or discredited in any significant way, but he was depicted as a Party renegade who had broken ranks.

  The second article was in the form of an analytical essay on Berdyaev’s doctrine of individual personalism. The Russian philosopher and author of Slavery and Freedom saw every dogma or orthodoxy, whether political, religious, or any other, as the authority of an organized society over a free individual and the free spirit of a person. This was something that he could never accept. To the collectivist Sa’adeh, such a view appeared as not only unreasonable, but as a concept that bordered on the danger of “selfish anarchism”. In a key passage, he wrote:

  Personalism is a very subjective doctrine, a perpetual revolt that propels the individual to object and rebel in order to assert his personality, and for fear that their acceptance of any thought or judgment or convention may be understood as implying acquiescing in a decision stemming from society or the state or God. Disobey and gain! This is the trademark of individual personalism! Disobey and gain; disobey relentlessly to gain even more! It is the golden rule of this unusual creed.22

  In addition to projecting Sa’adeh as a competent writer on philosophical issues, the second article provided the first “ideological”
justification for Fayez’s expulsion based on intellectual considerations rather than personal or internal Party ones. It fostered an aura of relief and satisfaction among the Party’s rank-and-file and helped to consolidate the Party even more firmly behind Sa’adeh. Likewise, it reflected unfavorably on Fayez, who was not there to contest its claims.

  Towards the end of December, Fayez released a detailed monograph on the dispute. Entitled Whither To?, the monograph was circulated to various Lebanese newspapers for maximum impact, but to no avail. By the time it reached the press, public interest in the dispute had more or less fizzled out. Fayez’s absence from the scene and the timing of the monograph’s release on the eve of the Festive Season also contributed to its lukewarm reception. In the end, Whither To? received scant attention and recognition. Fayez’s sympathizers found nothing new in it to be enthusiastic about, and the only newspaper that seemed to care, the dedicated anti-SSNP newspaper Beirut Telegraph, scarcely mattered.

  About one month after the publication of the monograph, Sa’adeh launched a series of lectures on the Party that led to the almost sacred manual The Ten Lectures. Although we cannot ascertain if Whither To? was a factor in triggering the lecture series or if the series started independently, Fayez’s case was referred to in the first lecture wherein Sa’adeh again presented his own side of the story:

  Fayez Sayegh’s case surfaced not after I returned [from exile] but before I did when I received, for the first time, the first and second issues of the “Department of Culture Bulletin”. Two matters quickly caught my attention in the first issue: (1) the violation of the Party’s constitutional laws, and (2) the digression from all the ideological and spiritual mainstays of the Social Nationalist movement.

  When I read the following statements in the editorial section of the Bulletin (“To the reader”) published by the Department of Culture and Fine Arts – “This Bulletin is issued under the supervision of the Dean of Culture”: that the Dean “was the final editor-in-charge of it”; that the Bulletin is “subject to the (unconstitutional) policy of the Dean, rather than to the policy of the Party’s leader [i.e. Sa’adeh], as stipulated in the Party’s constitution; and that the Department has a cultural function of its own independent from the cultural tasks of the Social National movement - and noticed the individualist arbitrariness and irregularity involved, I asked myself: what is the real motive for declaring the Dean’s authority [over the Bulletin] as “final”, which effectively means that neither the Party’s higher councils nor the leader himself has any right to intervene? I considered this behavior a serious breach of the Party’s constitution and institutions and of everything that may affect the unity of its aims: an egocentric tendency leaning strongly towards selfishness, and an ugly individualistic autocracy that pays no heed to either general will or legal constitution.

  Then I read what Fayez Sayegh called “The Basic Declaration of the Bureau of Culture and Fine Arts” published in the first issue of the Bulletin: particularly what he labeled as “the fundamental principles of the Bureau’s policy” in the so-called “Declaration”. It quickly appeared to me that there was a serious digression from the Movement’s outlook, cause, and principles and from the aim of the Syrian Social National Party in that, by his action, Sayegh had divested “culture” of its social national connotation and its attributes and had instead rendered it a “free and independent personal” matter. What’s more, his action stripped the Bureau of any accountability to the Syrian Social Nationalist teachings and made it accountable to “high values” that only the Dean had the right to fathom.23

  After this lecture on January 7, 1948, the affair petered out and the parties withdrew into their own worlds. Fayez went on to complete his PhD in the United States and Sa’adeh continued to lead the Party uncontested. By all accounts, many members were saddened by Fayez’s departure. They lamented his parting as a serious loss to the Party and to the national cause to which he had given so much of his time and effort. However, ultimately, the power of Sa’adeh’s constructive reasoning proved more than equal to Fayez’s challenge, just as it did with the other “transgressors” before him.

  PERSPECTIVE

  The Fayez saga may not have received the attention it deserved, but it was an important episode for all the parties concerned. From the Party’s standpoint, the saga led to the irreplaceable loss of a unique person whose defining qualities were widely admired and who touched many lives. Apart from his outstanding record as a prolific writer and a great orator, Fayez was popular, energetic, versatile, and a talented performer – just the kind of person that every political party with a national agenda would want. This explains why Sa’adeh was eager to retain Fayez, and why Fayez, keenly aware of his skills and experience, stood his ground and would not be moved.

  For Fayez, the saga was a clustered mess that brought about the meteoric demise of his career as a Party cadre. His almost nine years of dedicated service to the SSNP, during which he rose to pinnacles of power and fame in the Party, were wiped out in less than nine weeks. After this, Fayez faded into oblivion as far as SSNP was concerned. His friends and comrades from the Party continued to remember him as a proud and intelligent man, but they never forgave him for his stubbornness and unexpected recalcitrance. Between loyalty to Fayez and loyalty to the Party, the great majority opted for the Party. Given the knowledge and firm belief in the power of ideology he professed, Fayez should have expected no other result.

  The story of the dramatic struggle and ideological conflict between Fayez and Sa’adeh would remain incomplete without a conceptual analysis of the contentious points that divided them. Drawing on both Sa’adeh’s writings and Fayez’s final word on the dispute, Whither To?, an attempt to locate those points and to examine their intricate details will now be made, bearing in mind that ideological differences, by nature, are relative rather than absolute.

  * * *

  1 Gibran Jreige, Haqa’iq Ain al-Istiqlal: Ayyam Rashayya, 4th edition. (Beirut: Dar Amwaj, 2000): 22. It is claimed that the Party played a decisive role in getting Khoury elected to Parliament for the Maronite seat in Mount Lebanon.

  2 The main principles of the Pact were: (1) Lebanon was to be a completely independent state; (2) the Christian communities were to cease identifying with the West, and in return, the Muslim communities were to protect the independence of Lebanon and prevent its merger with any Arab state; (3) Lebanon, though an Arab country, can still maintain its spiritual and intellectual ties with the West; (4) Lebanon, as a member of the family of Arab states, should cooperate with the other Arab states and remain neutral in conflicts among them; and (5) public offices should be distributed proportionally among the recognized religious groups. See Farid el-Khazen, The Communal Pact of National Identities: The Making and Politics of the 1943 National Pact. (Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, 1991).

  3 Nadim Makdisi, The Syrian National Party: A Case Study of the First Inroads of National Socialism in the Arab World. (PhD dissertation, American University of Beirut, 1960): 31.

  4 Ibrahim Yammut, Ḥasad al-Murr: Qssat tafattut qiyadat ḥizb wa-tamasuk ‘aqidah. (Beirut: Dar al-Rukn, 1993): 121.

  5 Makdis, op. cit., p. 31.

  6 Labib Zuwiyya Yamak, The Syrian Social Nationalist Party: An Ideological Analysis. (Harvard University Press, 1966): 61.

  7 Walter L. Brown, (Ed.), Lebanon’s Struggle for Independence, Part II, 1944-1947 (Documentary Publications, North Carolina, 1980): 142.

  8 A. Sa’adeh, Collected Works, vol. 13, (1946): 55.

  9 Ibid.

  10 Suheil Rustom, al-Nidham al-Markazi wa Wihdat al-Amal ( The Central System and Work Uniformity). Beirut: Dar Fikr, 2014, pp. 34-40.

  11 Abdullah Qubersi, Memoirs, Vol. 2. (Beirut: Dar Fikr, 1982): 196.

  12 SSNP, Al-Nashrah al-Rasmiyah lil Harakat al-Qawmiyyah al-Ijtimae’yah. (Beirut: Vol. 1, No. 2, December 1947).

  13 Ibid.

  14 Ibid.

  15 Qubersi, Memoirs, Vol. 2: 199.

 
16 Ibid. 200.

  17 An-Nahar, December 10, 1947.

  18 Reproduced in the “Letters” section of this book.

  19 Seen An-Nahar, December 13 and 19, 1947.

  20 An-Nahar, December 19, 1947.

  21 Shawki Khairallah, Memoirs. (Beirut: Dar al-Jadid, 1990): 95.

  22 A. Sa’adeh, “The School of Selfishness.” (In al-Nashrah al-Rasmiyyah lil Harakah al-Qawmiyyah al-Ijtima’eyah, vol. 1, No. 3, 1948).

  23 See the first lecture in A. Sa’adeh, The Ten Lectures. (Beirut, 1950).

  4

  Disagreement with Sa’adeh

  In ideological or political disputes, the contenders normally slant the facts in their direction or concentrate on details that best serve their ends. They engage in tactics of diversion and encirclement to avoid running into a vulnerable position whereby they can be manipulated easily and portrayed as the villain. Sometimes, the chasm between the contenders may emerge as a result of a misunderstanding of the issues involved, of the incommensurable nature of different moral positions, or simply because the arguments and conclusions are based upon different premises. Specifically, ideological

  … disputes are only able to be settled where there are appropriate criteria that can be brought to bear. [In] disputes between members of the same ideology and in disputes between different ideologies, there are no such criteria.1

  In the Sa’adeh-Fayez case, the impulse to appeal to Party members played an important part in how Fayez and Sa’adeh framed their arguments. Each side attempted to steer the dispute toward the issues that mattered to them or were deemed important for the Party’s future. This created two conflicting perspectives with Sa’adeh locating the substantive core of the dispute in Fayez’s loop for existentialist philosophy and Fayez locating it in Sa’adeh’s tilt towards a totalitarian position. Both arguments are important and complement each other. One cannot look exclusively or even mainly at one and not the other for an explanation.