Analysis of information sources in references of the Wikipedia article "Syrian nationalism" in English language version.
To the Arabs, this same territory, which the Romans considered Arabian, formed part of what they called Bilad al-Sham, which was their name for Syria. From the classical perspective Syria, including Palestine, formed no more than the western fringes of what was reckoned to be Arabia between the first line of cities and the coast. Since there is no clear dividing line between what is called today the Syrian and Arabian deserts, which form one stretch of arid tableland, the classical concept of what constituted Syria had more to its credit geographically than the vaguer Arab concept of Syria as Bilad al-Sham. Under the Romans, there was a province of Syria, with its capital at Antioch, which carried the name of the territory. Otherwise, down the centuries, Syria like Arabia and Mesopotamia, was no more than a geographic expression. In Islamic times, the Arab geographers used the name Arabicized as Suriyah, to denote one special region of Bilad al-Sham, which was the middle section of the valley of the Orontes river, in the vicinity of the towns of Homs and Hama. They also noted that it was an old name for the whole of Bilad al-Sham which had gone out of use. As a geographic expression, however, the name Syria survived in its original classical sense in Byzantine and Western European usage, and also in the Syriac literature of some of the Eastern Christian Churches, from which it occasionally found its way into Christian Arabic usage. It was only in the nineteenth century that the use of the name was revived in its modern Arabic form, frequently as Suriyya rather than the older Suriyah, to denote the whole of Bilad al-Sham: first of all in the Christian Arabic literature of the period, and under the influence of Western Europe. By the end of that century, it had already replaced the name of Bilad al-Sham even in Muslim Arabic usage.
Irredentism is especially applicable to Pan-Arabism, most particularly in so far as the Ba'ath ideology is concerned. This became evident in both Syria and Iraq, which the Ba'th movement had ruled since 1963 and 1970, respectively. The clearly irredentist component of the ten-year long Iraq–Iran War is by no means merely incidental. One of Iraq's explicitly-stated objectives in attacking Iran was its desire to retrieve the border area of Arabistan (which Iran calls Khozistan), along with its Arabic-speaking inhabitants... However, it is Ba'thist Syria which provides a perfect model of Pan-Arab irredentism, viewed through the prism of Syrian nationalism. Besides appealing ritually for an all-Arab union, Syria is searching for an irredentist panacea to its own national trauma (as seen by Ba'thist nationalists). Greater Syria has lost several of its components over the years: Alexandretta (now Hatay) to Turkey in 1939; Lebanon, which became independent in 1945; Israel and the Kingdom of Jordan in 1948; and the Golan Heights to Israel in 1967.
Assad effectively abandoned pan-Arab nationalism in the early 1970s, looking instead to dominate a much smaller area in the Levant; with this, he changed the region's ideological climate.
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