Negib Azoury

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Negib Azoury , also Neguib , Naguib or Najib Azuri ( Arabic نجيب عازوري Nadschīb ʿĀzūrī , born around 1870 in Lebanon , Ottoman Empire ; died in Cairo in 1916 ), was a Lebanese publicist, anti-Semite, and political activist.

Life

Negib Azoury came from a Syrian Christian upper class family, it is unclear whether Maronite or Catholic . His birth year is believed to be 1870, probably in the village of 'Azur in southern Lebanon.

Azoury studied at Mülkiye in Constantinople and Sciences Po in Paris . In 1898 he was given the post of assistant to the governor of Jerusalem . The French consul general in Jerusalem Ferdinand Wiet, later questioned on the job, was not convinced of the efficiency of his work. In 1904 he married the sister of Bishara Habib, who was employed as a dragoman for the Jerusalem governor; they had a daughter and a son. After a dispute with the governor, Azoury fled to Cairo in 1904 and raised allegations of corruption against the governor and his brother-in-law in a Cairo newspaper. The dispute was rated by third parties as an internal dispute in the upper class over the granting of benefices .

At the end of 1904 Azoury emigrated to Paris, where he published various articles on the political situation in the Ottoman Empire in French.

In 1905, his work Le Réveil de la Nation Arabe dans l'Asie Turque en présence des intérêts et des rivalités des puissances étrangères, de la Curie Romaine et du Patriarcat Occuménique appeared in Paris. Partie asiatique de la Question d'Orient et program de la Ligue de la Patrie Arabe . Excerpts from the pamphlet were translated into Arabic as early as 1905 and circulated as pamphlets in Palestine. The font Le Réveil de la Nation Arabe was first translated as a whole into Arabic in 1975. According to his own information in the book, he prepared other writings on the subjects of Le Péril Juif universel , La Patrie arabe and Les puissances étrangères et la question des sanctuaires chrétiens de Terre Sainte , none of which appeared in the following years. Azoury founded a Ligue de la patrie arabe . There is no information about the number of members. Maybe he was the only member. In addition, Azoury brought out the French-language magazine l'Indépendance arabe in 1907/08 together with the French diplomat Eugène Jung (1863-1936) , of which 18 issues appeared. He was in contact with René Pinon and Ludovic de Contenson in Paris and Cairo .

In 1907, he claimed to the French Foreign Ministry that he represented an Arab Comité nationale or the Ligue de la patrie arabe . His efforts to get commission and money from the Foreign Ministry as an expert for a study in French-controlled North Africa in order to control the independence movements there were unsuccessful. Nonetheless, his writings were received attentively in French diplomacy.

Azoury sympathized with the Young Turks who were in opposition to Abdülhamid II . After an amnesty for political crimes, he applied unsuccessfully in parliamentary elections in the Jaffa district in 1908 with an election manifesto that did not contain any of the theses of his Paris campaign. His electoral defeat was also attributed to his Christian origins. From then on he lived again in Cairo, where he joined the "Egyptian Liberal Party" and for a time acted as the foreign policy spokesman for the "Young Egyptians".

Azoury's main font had the motto on the front page:

Les Pays arabes aux Arabes, le Kourdistan aux Kurdes, l'Armenie aux Armeniens, les pays turcs aux Turcs, l'Albanie aux Albanais, les Iles de l'Archipel a la Grèce et la Macedoine partagée entre les Grecs, les Serbes et les Bulgares .

Anzoury's visions were an end to the Ottoman Empire and the establishment of an Arab empire that would consist of Mesopotamia, Syria, Palestine and the Arabian Peninsula. The Christians in this empire should unite in an Arabic-speaking Orthodox Church. The fourth main point of his writing emphasized the dangers associated with the Zionist movement and Jewish immigration for the Arabs in Palestine, he prophesied a conflict that could not end in coexistence. Azoury followed up on anti-Semitic narratives claiming a world conspiracy of Judaism , and he sought connection with the anti-Treyfusians in France . Azoury's writing was carefully registered by the Zionists in Odessa.

Anzoury campaigned for European support for the Arabs' striving for independence, which he claimed, and discussed in his writing the interests of the major European powers, with his expressed sympathy being the increased influence of France. While it is doubtful whether the writing was noticed in the Arab world, it at least caught the attention of British and French diplomats. The German Arabist Martin Hartmann counted Anzoury among those schemers who fomented local conflicts in the interests of the great powers for money.

Fonts

  • Negib Azoury: Le réveil de la Nation arabe dans l'Asie turque . Paris, 1905

literature

  • Götz Nordbruch : Azoury, Negib , in: Handbuch des Antisemitismus , Volume 2/1, 2009, p. 39f.
  • Martin Kramer : Azoury: A Further Episode . In: Middle Eastern studies, 18, 1982, issue 4, pp. 351-358
  • Stefan Wild : Negib Azoury and his book Le réveil de la nation arabe , in: Marwan Buheiry (Ed.): Intellectual life in the Arab East: 1890–1939 . Beirut: American Univ., 1981, pp. 92-104
  • Neville Mandel: The Arabs and Zionism before World War I . Berkeley: University of California Press, 1976, pp. 49ff.
  • Elie Kedourie: The Politics of Political Liberature: Kawakibi, Azoury and Arabic Political Memoirs and Other Studies . London 1974, pp. 107-123
  • Elie Kedourie: The Politics of Political Liberature: Kawakabi , Azouri and Jung . In: Middle Eastern studies, 8, 1972, issue 2, pp. 227-240

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Biographical information in Stefan Wild, Negib Azoury , 1981. Mandel (1976, page 49) names Beirut or the Vilayet of Sham region as the place of birth .
  2. ↑ Martin Kramer: Azoury: A Further Episode , 1982, p. 353
  3. ↑ a b c Stefan Wild, Negib Azoury , 1981, p. 99
  4. ^ Eugène Jung , at BNF
  5. ↑ René Pinon; Ludovic de Contenson see French Wikipedia
  6. ↑ Martin Kramer: Azoury: A Further Episode , 1982
  7. ^ Neville Mandel: The Arabs , 1976, pp. 64f.
  8. ↑ Martin Hartmann, in: Mitteilungen des Seminare für orientalischen Sprachen zu Berlin, 12, 1909, p. 53. Quoted in Stefan Wild, Negib Azoury , 1981, p. 101, fn. 5
personal data
SURNAME Azoury, Negib
BRIEF DESCRIPTION Lebanese publicist, anti-Semite and political activist
DATE OF BIRTH around 1870
PLACE OF BIRTH Lebanon
DATE OF DEATH 1916
Place of death Cairo