Shakib Arslan

Shakib Arslan (25 December 1869 – 9 December 1946) was a Lebanese writer, poet, historian, politician and emir, known as Amir al-Bayan (Prince of Eloquence) for his influential writings: some twenty books, two thousand articles, two collections of poetry and a prodigious correspondence. Influenced by Jamal al-Din al-Afghani and Muhammad Abduh, he became a leading advocate of Islamic unity and of Arab unity, and spent most of the inter-war years exiled in Geneva as the unofficial representative of Syria and Palestine to the League of Nations. ^{1 2}

He was born at Choueifat, near Beirut — the Arabic article pairs the date with 1 Ramadan 1286 AH. A supporter of the pan-Islamic policies of Abdul Hamid II, he argued that the survival of the Ottoman Empire was the only guarantee against the division of the ummah and its occupation by the European imperial powers; for him Ottomanism and Islam were inseparable, and reform of Islam would naturally lead to the revival of the Empire. Exiled by the French Mandate authorities, he settled in Geneva, co-founding and editing the newspaper La Nation Arabe with the Syrian exile Ihsan al-Jabri and writing steadily for the Arab press. He also contributed to Barid al-Sharq, a propaganda newspaper published in Berlin, without personally agreeing with Nazism: in 1939 he wrote that if the Germans proved no better to the Arabs, the Arabs would only have changed masters, and in his diary he expected the Italians to turn Palestine into an Italian colony. ¹

Arslan proposed an interpretation of Islam imbued with political power and moral courage, urging Muslims from Morocco to Iraq to remember their common commitment to Islam despite their differences, and he defended Islam as an essential component of social morality. In this period he wrote his most famous work, Our Decline: Its Causes and Remedies, and contributed to Muhib al-Din al-Khatib's Cairo magazine al-Fath. He married Suleima Alkhas Hatog, a Jordanian of Circassian descent; their daughter May married Kamal Jumblatt, making Walid Jumblatt his grandson. He died on 9 December 1946, three months after returning to Lebanon — the Arabic article pairs the date with 15 Muharram 1366 AH. The sources disagree on the place of his death: the English article's infobox and Wikidata give Beirut, while the Arabic article's infobox gives Choueifat. ^{1 2 3}

Shakib Arslan was born into a Druze family. The English article, citing William L. Cleveland's biography Islam Against the West (1985), states that he always tried to combine his faith with mainstream Islam but later converted to Sunni Islam, establishing himself as an orthodox Muslim serving the interests of Sunni Islam; the Urdu article, citing an Arabic biography of him, states independently that he worshipped in the manner of Ahl al-Sunnah. His faith is therefore recorded in his data record as sunni, on the basis of these two independent sources naming his own affiliation; his Druze birth is recorded as background, not as the value — the museum's faith enum in any case has no druze value. ^{1 4 2}