Amir Shakib Arslan

Amir Shakib Arslan (1869–1946) was a Druze prince who was born in Lebanon. Influenced by the reformism of Syed Jamaluddin al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh of Egypt, he was an advocator of Arab nationalism and, like his friend and contemporary, Rashid Reda, believed that the Ottoman Empire must be saved as a way of protecting the Muslim world from the onslaught of Western imperialism in the 19th century CE. His anticolonialist stand had him exiled from his hometown by the French mandate authorities. Shakib Arslan once served as an unofficial representative of Syria and Palestine in the League of Nations. From 1913 to the end of the First World War, he was an elected member of the Ottoman parliament for Houran. Besides being a politician, he was also an accomplished writer, poet and historian and earned the title of Amir al-Bayan (Prince of Eloquence) amongst his contemporaries.

Amir Shakib Arslan had written over 20 books, two thousand articles and many more letters. Between 1930 and 1938, he published La Nation Arabe in Geneva to bring Arab self-assertion and nationalist agendas to the forefront. His most famous tract, published as Our Decline and Its Causes, was a response to a question posed through a letter by Shaykh Muhammad Bisyooni Umran of Borneo on the issue of why Muslims are weak and their European and Japanese counterparts are technologically and scientifically superior. Amir Shakib Arslan’s response was succinct and testifies to the era’s turbulent struggle to make sense of the decline of the Muslim world in the 19th and early 20th century CE.