Antoun Saadeh

Antoun Saadeh Born March 1, 1904 was Mashriqi Politician, Sociologist, Philosopher, and writer. The Son of Lebanese Physician, and Nationalist as well as democracy advocate Khalil Saadeh.

“I was only a child when the Great War broke out in 1914, but I had already begun to perceive and comprehend. The first thing that suddenly occurred to me, having witnessed, felt and actually experienced the affliction of my people, was this question: What was it that brought all this woe to my people?”

Saadeh spent much of his early life asking tough questions and much of the rest of his life seeking solutions. The above quote was written by Saadeh while he was imprisoned in Beirut in 1935 for his anti-colonialist political activities against the French occupation of Syria and Lebanon.

Saadeh firmly believed in the unity of the people of the Mashriq, defined as Palestine, Syria, Iraq, Lebanon, and Jordan. He argued that the foreign occupations in the region were there to sew ethnic, religious, and sectarian division, thus standing in the way of true self-determination for a people whose differences were trumped by their similarities.

Saadeh rejected ethnicity, language, and religion as defining characteristics of a nation. Instead, he believed that a nation is defined through the common development of people inhabiting a specific geographical region. On this grounds, he argued, an Arab in Yafa, an Armenian in Aleppo, an Assyrian in Al-Hasakeh, and a Kurd in Irbil belonged to the same nation.

Saadeh’s belief developed in the aftermath of the Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret treaty between the French and British that carved up the Mashriq, in part, on religious and ethnic lines. It comes as no surprise, then, that he would go in and out of prison multiple times before leaving Lebanon for Brazil in 1939 and not returning until 1947, after the end of the French occupation.

Antoun Saadeh’s philosophy attracted many and would go on to influence Mashriqi cultural and intellectual icons, like singers Fairouz and Zaki Nassif, academics Hishram Sharabi and Fayez Sayegh, poet Adonis, actor Duraid Lahham, and many more.