Reem Bailony, Syria’s Transnational Rebellion: Diaspora Politics and the Revolt of 1925-1927 (Edinburgh University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Reem Bailony (RM): The impetus for this book grew out of the revolutionary moment of 2011. In the summer of 2011, I was slated to begin preliminary research in Damascus for a dissertation project on another topic. Due to the growing protests in Syria, and out of safety concerns, I decided to reroute my research to the Library of Congress in Washington DC. While exploring the library’s collection of Arabic periodicals, I came across al-Bayan, an Arabic language journal from New York, which was first established in 1911. Run by the Druze editor Sulayman Baddur, al-Bayan had a unique perspective in that it catered to a diasporic Druze and Muslim audience. As I started reading issues from the 1920s, I was immediately impressed by the intense debate around the Syrian Revolt of 1925. As I watched my own Syrian-American community become consumed by news of the 2011 uprising, I decided to change research directions. I wrote the book because I believed there was a transnational story of the 1925 revolt that had yet to be explored, and that could help us better understand the formation of modern Syria and Lebanon in the internationalist era of the 1920s, defined by the League of Nations.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
RM: The book demonstrates how Syrian émigrés (broadly understood as migrants from today’s Syria, Lebanon, and Palestine) engaged in the anti-French politics of the 1925 Syrian Revolt. It demonstrates how Syrians abroad internationalized the revolt, plugged into liberal and alternative (pan-Islamic and Bolshevik) internationalist networks, and debated the meaning of Syrian/Lebanese identity in the throes of revolt and vis-à-vis the French colonial regime. The book features five chapters, each focusing on a different locale or node in this broader transnational story: Geneva, Damascus, Rashaya, Detroit, and al-Azraq. The book ultimately argues that Syrian migrants played a crucial role in claims making around the rebellion—defining its aims, conditioning its financial and discursive reach, and crystalizing a separate Lebanese project, all the while challenging the newly emerging borders of surrounding states-in-formation.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
RM: This is my first book and evolved out of my dissertation research. It builds on some of my earlier articles, which have been published in Mashriq & Mahjar as well as the Arab Studies Journal.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
RM: I believe this book is useful to students of modern Syrian history as well as students of the modern Middle East more broadly. The book adds to a growing historiography that demonstrates that the modern Middle East (the mashriq) was shaped by the mahjar—by migrants and their circulatory routes, ideas, and transnational lives. As the book was also published one hundred years after the start of the 1925 Syrian Revolt, I hope the book is meaningful to a broader Syrian readership interested in the meanings of revolution and rebellion in periods of transition, such as the one we are witnessing today.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
RM: I am currently working on a couple of projects. One is an article-length monograph on Shakib Arslan and his professional relationship to Muhammad Ali al-Tahir. Both men were journalists and exiles of the post-World War I period, staunchly anti-imperialist, and had a brotherly, professional relationship that unfolded across the pages of Cairo’s al-Shura during the 1920s and 1930s. The other is a broader research project on notions and experiences of parenting and childhood in the Syrian mahjar, or diaspora, after World War I.
J: How does your book contend with how scholars of the modern Middle East can understand past, failed, revolutionary moments?
RM: By documenting the multi-modal ways that Syrians of the interwar period engaged in the 1925 rebellion through local and internationalist mobilizations, the book is also a story about how global Syrians of the past partook in archiving a moment of rebellion that was both marginalized by Eurocentrism but also central to the illusions upholding postwar liberal internationalism. Syria’s Transnational Rebellion demonstrates how Syrians both adopted and challenged the liberal internationalist framework to the point of showing how the Western project of the League of Nations was in crisis and called into question by the Syrian rebellion and French Mandatory responses to it. Even when those actors of the past understood that their project would not ultimately bring about an end to the Mandatory regime in that moment, they were cognizant of the fact that they were carving out a space for Syrians and the oppressed in larger European and American discussions about the world order. The epilogue of the book draws parallels between émigré Syrians in 1925 and diaspora Syrians following the 2011 Syrian uprising.
Excerpt from the book (from Chapter 2: “Damascus: Global Reverberations of a City Under Bombs”)
Photographs of Damascus in ruins splashed over a full page of the New York Times on the morning of 15 November 1925. The images of crumbled facades and corpses lined up on pavements portrayed the aftermath of France’s two-day bombardment of the city on 18–20 October 1925. The captions flanking the photographs were just as telling, describing Damascus as ‘the pearl of the Orient, threatened with destruction’. But the devastation of the ‘oldest city in the world’, was more than just a problem for Syria and the French Mandate, it was – as the column asserted – ‘Another problem for the League of Nations.’ As the photographs and captions indicated, the reverberations of the bombardment could be felt across the world, its shockwaves sounded across press headlines, diplomatic dispatches, telegrams and petitions to the League. In that moment, Damascus encapsulated the entire world.
From Damascus to Geneva and further afield to New York, the world connected through the city’s calamity. News articles on the topic frequently conjured Damascus as the world’s ‘oldest inhabited city’ to stress the grave nature of France’s infraction. Worse still, in inflicting such crude violence on a city bearing Biblical significance, France – ‘a Christian nation’ – unsettled Eurocentric understandings of civilisation, particularly as it pertained to its role in a post-war system predicated upon eliminating the violence that brought about the First World War.
Although nationalist narratives have located Damascus at the centre of the revolt, here the city acts as the epicentre for an internationalist dilemma that transpired in large part thanks to Syrian émigrés. The bombardment of Damascus was a test of the novel post-war international order. As global Syrians roused to the brutality of France’s attack, they looked to the League for legal recourse. Leveraging their access to Western powers, migrants made public appeals to the international community to rectify the injustices carried out by the French Mandate. Sending petitions and telegrams to Geneva in the hundreds, the public pressure that Syrian complaints mounted in combination with the global press had the effect of emmeshing the French Mandatory power in a moment of global reckoning. Damascus in ruins made obvious the failure of the Wilsonian promise of self-determination.