George Antonius

George Habib Antonius, CBE was a Lebanese author and diplomat who settled in Jerusalem. He was one of the first historians of Arab nationalism. Born in Deir al Qamar to a Lebanese Eastern Orthodox Christian family, he served as a civil servant in the British Mandate of Palestine.

Quotes

• The two processes, islamisation and arabisation, were now at work together, but, although intimately interconnected, were by no means identical. Nor did they halt at the same frontiers. Islamisation, essentially a spiritual force, progressed much further aheld and was able to sweep barriers which arabisation, involving material displacement, could not always overstep. Broadly speaking, every country which became permanently arabised became also permanently islamised. But the converse is not true. There arc countries, such as Persia. and Afghanistan, where, notwithstanding a thorough and lasting islamisation, the progress of arabisation remained so restricted as to he, for our purposes, negligible.
  • The Arab Awakening by Antonius, George , 1938 [1]

• Similarly, though not to the same extent, the two aspects of the process of arabisation, namely, the spread of the Arabic language and the infiltration of Arab stock, differed both in range and in reach. There are physical and economic limits to the capacity of a country to admit and absorb migrations from the outside, even when, as happened with those waves of Arab colonisation, the process is carried through by superior force. The spread of the language was not circumscribed by those limitations. While Arabic went on advancing until it had completely enthroned itself, the tide of racial penetration found itself danmned within narrower confines.
  • The Arab Awakening by Antonius, George , 1938 [2]