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Laps of Generals. To these dissenters, there is another flashing beacon of Arab unity: the Baath (Renaissance) Party, which dominates the new governments in both Iraq and Syria. The street mobs and impatient young army officers may worship Nasser, but Arab students and intellectuals bow before the creator of Baath, a tiny, beak-nosed, meek-chinned Syrian named Michel Aflak.
Aflak, 53, an Arab Christian who counts his amber worry beads three at a time, shuns crowds and holds no post in any government, makes an incongruous rival to the brash, burly, good-looking Nasser. No crowds have ever shrieked over him, chanted his name or paraded his picture. He lives in a small, cramped Damascus apartment with a frayed carpet, cheap furniture, and clothes drying on a balcony washline. His two infant children toddle about and, last week, clambered on the laps of generals and Cabinet ministers who crowded Aflak's parlor.
The son of a nationalist-minded shopkeeper, Aflak passionately embraced the ideal of Arab unity as a Damascus schoolboy. His education at the Sorbonne in Paris, where he graduated with honors in history, was financed by a successful uncle who had emigrated to Brazil. After a brief teaching career at a Damascus lycee, Aflak resigned in 1942 to devote his life to politics and to his personal creation, the Baath Party.
What Aflak created was a mystic and lyrical hymn to Wahadi Arablya (Arab oneness), and he overflows with such sentiments as "Nationalism is love before everything else," and "A new page is open, the page of those who walk with naked souls as if they were in their own bedroom." He defines revolution as "that powerful psychic current, that mandatory struggle, without which the reawakening of a nation cannot be understood." The Baath slogan, "Unity. Freedom, Socialism," was blandly appropriated by Nasser for his own use, but Nasser has shown no eagerness to take over other Baath tenets, such as free elections, free press, and freedom of speech and assembly.
From Syria. Baathism moved swiftly to Iraq and Jordan, more slowly to Kuwait and Saudi Arabia. Although the party is antibourgeois, most of its adherents come from middle-class intellectuals and small shopkeepers. Baath made conservative governments nervous with its socialism (which is actually a blend of mild Marxism and the New Deal), and was attacked by the Communists as a deviating exponent of weak liberalism. In Syria, during the course of 14 years and nine different coups, the Baath Party bobbed up and down. Not until 1958, when Syria's Communists were plotting an armed takeover, were the Baathists able to stampede Syrian conservatives into accepting unity with Egypt as the lesser evil.