Adel Beshara

Fayez Sayegh - The Party Years 1938-1947 Adel Beshara

This book provides an introduction to the early writings and political activism of Fayez Sayegh, whose passionate and prolific intellectual career was well known within academia and beyond.

Today, Fayez Sayegh is mainly known as an articulate defender of the Palestinian cause at the UN and on American television. However, we have only a faint idea of how and why he chose this life-long trajectory. The answer to the "how and why" lies in the roots that sustained his passion and got him there in the first place: the period between 1938 and 1947 when he was a political activist with the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (or SSNP). This is the period of Sayegh's first intense intellectual development under two distinct and irreconcilable currents: (1) Antun Sa'adeh's nationalism and (2) Kierkegaard-Berdyaev's existentialism.

The tragedy that befell Sayegh when his soul became a battlefield for these two currents is an intrinsic part of this book. Its purpose is to unravel how he managed or mismanaged to disentangle himself from it with special reference to his fallout with Sa'adeh in 1947.