“Britain and France will awaken to the dangers surrounding
them when another world war breaks out, and that immense war will mark the
beginning of the disintegration of the British Empire.” (Al-Rābiṭa
Magazine, Issue 222, March 3, 1934).
Saadeh’s childhood embodied the tragedies of all the children
of the Fertile Crescent — displacement, hunger, destruction, and the
disappearance and scattering of family and friends across the world in search
of safety and stability. The Ottoman Empire neither provided prosperity nor
progress sufficient to keep its people in their homeland; it monopolized trade
routes from the Far East, diverting them through Istanbul to the West, and proved
incapable of defending its empire against Western expansionism aimed at seizing
raw materials such as oil. Thus, Western domination took hold — preventing the
region’s recovery by dividing it, weakening it, subjugating it, and turning its
people into slaves on their own land, consuming the products of the West’s vast
industrial machine.
At the end of the First World War, Antun Saadeh and his
siblings went to stay with their maternal uncles in the United States, awaiting
news of their father, who had been forced to leave Egypt after supporting the
ʿUrabi Pasha revolution. When Dr Khalil Saadeh finally settled in Brazil, he
asked his children to join him there.
Dr Khalil Saadeh had graduated as a surgeon in the last
quarter of the nineteenth century from the Syrian Protestant College
(now the American University of Beirut), alongside such illustrious
contemporaries as Yaʿqub Sarruf, Bishara Zalzal, Shibli
Shumayyil, and Jurji Zaydan — names that would later shine across
the Arab world in politics, literature, medicine, and journalism.
Antun Saadeh could never forget the tragedy of his homeland,
nor could he abandon the nation he regarded as his own mother. He refused to
adapt to his new environment; as long as his country remained unwell, he too
could not be well. He immersed himself in the study of history, sociology,
and international politics, devouring everything related to the building
of national and social states — theories of governance, systems of society and
citizenship, economics, and international relations.
A special bond grew between Antun and his father, who decided
to abandon the medical profession altogether and dedicate himself to writing.
Together — father and son, working entirely alone without assistance — they
founded and published a political newspaper. Antun even learned typesetting,
composing his articles directly by arranging the letters in print. Both devoted
their lives to enlightening their compatriots and guiding them toward the path
of deliverance — the path of building a national state, the only force
capable of confronting Western power and arrogance.
Just as the father had renounced a prestigious and
comfortable life befitting his medical career — he had, in fact, headed a
hospital in Acre before leaving for Egypt — the son likewise abandoned all
material ambition. He chose a life of austerity and utter simplicity, never
pitying himself for a moment, having made an irrevocable decision:
“I must forget my own bleeding wounds so that I may help to
heal the deep wounds of my nation.” (Collected Works, vol. I, p. 43).
