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Ba'ath Party

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Ba'ath Party

The Ba'ath party was founded in Syria in 1928 by Michel Aflaq (or Michel Aflak) and Salah al-Din Bitar with a pan-Arab nationalist program and elements of both Marxism and fascism.  Aflak and Bitar were influenced by Arab nationalist trends that had begun in time of the Turks, inspired in part by the Islamic and Arab reform ideologies of Jamal al-Din al-Afghani (1839-1897), his student Muhammad Abduh (1849-1905), and Abduh's student, Muhammad Rashid Rida (1865-1935). These thinkers called for a renewal of Islam, with limited borrowing of concepts from the West. Abduh in particular was active in promoting Arab autonomy within Ottoman Turkey, and had placed great hopes in the Young Turks. Rida grew increasingly anti-Western with time, and was a great influence on Hassan El-Banna, who founded the Muslim Brotherhood. While Aflak was a Greek Orthodox Christian, Ba'ath ideology adopted an affinity for Islam, and Pan-Arabists saw one of their goals as asserting the primacy of the Arabs in the Muslim world. It represented fascist and secularist ideas, and attracted support of minorities, particularly Alawi. Pan-Arabism as represented by Gamal Abdel Nasser was a kindred movement. Both Syria and Iraq were ruled by Ba'athist regimes, but the regimes were rivals.  The Lebanese Ba'ath party split from the Syrian party in 1966 and moved to Iraq in 1968. In Iraq, the Ba'ath party was overthrown after the US invasion of 2003.


Synonyms and alternate spellings:  Ba'th, Baath

Further Information: Pan-Arabism Aflaq, Michel History of Islam and the Arabs


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Encyclopedia of the Middle East

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Spelling - Spelling of words in Middle-Eastern languages is often arbitrary. There may be many variants of the same name or word such as Hezbollah, Hizbolla, Hisbolla or Husayn and Hussein. There are some conventions for converting words from Semitic languages such as Arabic and Hebrew There are numerous variant renderings of the same Arabic or Hebrew words, such as "Hizbollah," "Hisbulla" etc. It is not possible to find exact equivalents for several letters. 

Pronunciation - Arabic and Hebrew vowels are pronounced differently than in English. "o" is very short. The "a" is usually pronounced like the "a" in market, sometimes as the "a" in "Arafat."  The " 'A " is guttural.  " 'H "- the 'het ('Hirbeh, 'Hebron, 'Hisbollah') designates a sound somewhat similar to the ch in "loch" in Scots pronunciation, but made by touching the back of your tongue to the roof of your mouth. The CH should be pronounced like Loch, a more assertive consonant than 'het.

The "Gh" combination, and sometimes the "G," designate a deep guttural sound that Westerners may hear approximately as "r." The "r" sound is always formed with the back of the tongue, and is not like the English "r."

More information: Hebrew, Arabic

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