The constitution of a country articulates what a modern nation-state conceives itself to be at a particular moment in its history. For example, the United States Constitution, which begins with: “We the People of the United States, in Order to form a more perfect Union, establish Justice,” was drafted a few years after the Revolutionary War, at a time when the founders feared their nascent country might falter.
The preamble to the revolutionary French Constitution of 1791, written after the collapse of the monarchy, also engages in conversation with its historical context. It defines itself as a secular republic, based on the three pillars of liberty, equality and fraternity — principles touted during the French Revolution that continue to define France today.
Closer to Syria in geography and culture is Iraq. In the preamble of its latest constitution, drafted in 2005 after decades of dictatorship and war, the authors take pains to reaffirm Iraq’s identity and pride in its ancient history. “We, the people of Mesopotamia, the homeland of apostles and prophets,” it announces. “Resting place of the virtuous imams, cradle of civilization, crafters of writing, and home of numeration.”
As Syria pivots toward its biggest transition in over half a century and prepares to draft a new constitution — a process that could take three years, according to its de facto leader Ahmad al-Sharaa — the world is waiting to see what universal principles the new country’s laws will hold supreme. How will Syria articulate the preamble to its new constitution? Who does Syria conceive itself to be as a nation at this point in time? What will define the relationship between citizen and state?
To answer these contemporary questions, it’s important to examine the early days, in the era before Syria’s birth as a modern nation-state, when World War I was coming to an end and the Ottoman Empire was on its last legs. It was then, more than a century ago, that Syria’s intellectual elite drafted language for the country’s first constitution. This language, which aimed at that point for a constitutional monarchy, specified the protection of individual rights, religious freedom and freedom of opinion and expression.
Although it seems like a very different historical moment, the context surrounding these ideals is not actually too dissimilar from today’s. Now, like then, there is internal tension between Islamists and secularists, foreign powers vying for influence and ongoing threats to the country’s geographical integrity, in the form of separatist movements and incursions from Turkey and Israel. And in the details of what unfolded a century ago during Syria’s relentless struggle for independence over many years, one finds parallels with the uprising of 2011 that finally rid the country of Bashar al-Assad’s regime just one month ago.
Syria’s new de facto government, so far Islamist but with the promise of transitioning the country toward democratic rule, faces the daunting task of navigating all the foreign interests that stand to help foster or quash Syrians’ hopes for a better future, much as the country’s nationalists did over a century ago. Perhaps particularly surprising in this comparison is the role the United States plays, or doesn’t play, in both inflection points for the country. The opportunity to support the fledgling country in its bid for democracy that was lost a hundred years ago by President Woodrow Wilson’s isolationism might soon be mirrored by the incoming Donald Trump administration, though less because of its isolationism and more as a result of its overt racism and contempt for the Arab world.
A closer look at how Syria navigated complex geopolitics during its first attempt at independence and democracy as we understand them in the modern age is instructive for the present day. The tumult of the time both shaped Syria’s constitutional principles and produced political parties that remain relevant in a post-Assad era. We have much to learn from the processes they went through.
Syrian elites first established a provisional government in Damascus in January 1919, a couple of months after the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the end of the Great War. This government was the culmination of years of seeking autonomy from the Ottoman Empire, of which Greater Syria (modern-day Syria, Lebanon, Palestine/Israel and Jordan, in addition to parts of Turkey and Iraq) was a significant part for 400 years. The new Syrian government was to be a constitutional monarchy, with Sharif Hussein ibn Ali, the Emir of Mecca, as king. Armed with the confidence of an agreement with his wartime ally, Great Britain, Sharif Hussein sent a delegation to the Paris Peace Conference, the prelude to the Treaty of Versailles and the establishment of the League of Nations, to present his case for the new Arab kingdom. The delegation included Hussein’s son, Faisal, and T.E. Lawrence, acting as translator. They demanded immediate and full Arab independence, as spelled out in correspondence that Hussein had negotiated over on behalf of the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans in Greater Syria with Britain’s then-High Commissioner in Egypt, Henry McMahon, which stipulated that Britain recognized and supported the independence of the Arabs within the proposed territories. Hussein’s delegation was ready to give up Palestine to the British and Lebanon to the French, but wanted Damascus and Arabia. They were already aware of the Sykes-Picot Agreement and its ramifications — whereby the British and French were dividing up former Ottoman territory, including Greater Syria, between themselves — and the Balfour Declaration of 1917, in which Britain pledged support for a “national home for the Jewish people” in Palestine.
At the Paris Peace Conference, France and Britain focused on two things: extracting war reparations from Germany and dividing war booty among each other from fallen Ottoman territories. Wilson, who was attending the conference as a neutral party, representing the American isolationists of his time, witnessed a tense meeting between his British and French allies. The two heatedly debated how to carve up Ottoman territory, ignoring Wilson’s presence and his invocation of self-governance as a precursor to world peace.
A bemused Wilson finally quipped that he had “never been able to see by what right France and Great Britain gave this country away to anyone.” Wilson had done his due diligence and was well aware of British promises to Arab nationalists and the strong anti-French sentiments in Syria, based on France’s brutal colonial rule in North Africa and the capricious behavior of French authorities in Mount Lebanon. “If France insisted on occupying Damascus and Aleppo, there would be an instant war,” Wilson told his allies. It was a prophetic statement.
In a bid to help his allies do what he felt was the right thing, he suggested sending a commission made up of American, British and French experts to survey the people of Syria. The commission’s objective would be “simply and solely to get as accurate and definite information as possible concerning the conditions, the relations and the desires of all the people and classes concerned; in order that President Wilson and the American people may act with full knowledge of the facts in any policy … concerning the Near East,” as described later by an official statement from the American Mission in Istanbul.
Predictably, the French were not thrilled with the idea. They dragged their feet and delayed forming a French team to join the commission. The British refused to join without the French. An impatient Wilson went ahead and dispatched an all-American team to carry out the commission’s objective. Leading the team were Henry King, a theologian and president of Oberlin College and Charles Crane, a prominent Democrat.
The King-Crane Commission arrived in Greater Syria on June 10, 1919, touching land in Jaffa, Palestine. For the ensuing six weeks, the commission traveled through dozens of towns in Syria, meeting by their own estimates with delegations from over 1,500 villages. It was a whirlwind of American query and innocence abroad, its first foray into Arab lands and first meaningful exchange of ideas and sentiments with a people already enamored of America and its Wilsonian ideals.
“Heartily welcomed everywhere. No doubt of great interest of people, some Bedouin delegates riding 30 hours to meet with the Commission. Gratitude to you (Wilson) and Americans constantly and warmly expressed,” wrote King and Crane to the president.
While in the field, they met with the Syrian National Congress, the provisional government made up at the time of 69 elected representatives from Syria, Lebanon and Palestine, including both Muslims and Christians. The Congress is “acceptable to all Muslims and many Christians,” King and Crane concluded.
During King and Crane’s visit, the Syrian Congress convened in Damascus to formally petition the U.S. to intervene and help Greater Syria transition into an independent nation-state. It reiterated that the Syrian people aspired to independence and bemoaned the idea of a French or British “mandate.” (The term “mandate” was introduced as a euphemism by France and British in the hopes that Wilson would find it less objectionable than the word “colony,” which he did not.) The petition, known as the Damascus Program, gives a glimpse into who Syria saw itself to be at that time and what it conceived itself to represent.
Elizabeth Thompson, a historian of Syria and author of “How the West Stole Democracy From the Arabs,” wrote: “In essence, a Congress dominated by social conservatives embraced Wilson’s democratic revolution in the world order. The Damascus Program echoed demands of peoples across the non-European world in 1919.”
Members of the Syrian Congress addressed the American delegation, opening with:
We the undersigned members of the Syrian General Congress, meeting in Damascus on Wednesday, July 2nd, 1919, made up of representatives from the three Zones, viz., the Southern, Eastern, and Western, provided with credentials and authorizations by the inhabitants of our various districts, Moslems, Christians, and Jews, have agreed upon the following statement of the desires of the people of the country who have elected us to present them to the American Section of the International Commission.
They continued that the people of Greater Syria asked for “absolutely complete political independence” for a united Syria and “that the Government of this Syrian country should be a democratic civil constitutional Monarchy on broad decentralization principles, safeguarding the rights of minorities, and that the King be the Emir Feisal.” Most importantly, as King and Crane highlighted — and not for the first nor last time — they asked that the mandate be interpreted as meaning temporary economic and technical assistance, which they requested from the U.S.
It is a little-known fact today that there was a time when people of the Arab world genuinely wanted the U.S. to help them govern, if only for a limited time, until the people could stand on their own feet and birth a nation. It was a dreamy proposition, put forth to the president by King and Crane, but it never had a chance in the mind of Wilson and his isolationist American contemporaries. Time and again, King and Crane reiterated their findings that Syrians expected nothing less than the unity of their territory across Greater Syria and total independence from any foreign power. The American duo articulated this sentiment in more than two dozen ways to the international commission, lest France or Britain or anyone else have any doubt about the matter.
In their report, King and Crane made clear that there was a “singularly determined repulsion to becoming a mere colony of any power and against any kind of French Mandate.” There was an “intense desire for unity of all Syria and Palestine and for as early independence as possible,” the report continued, pointing out that the real obstacles to the unity of Syria were the unwillingness of the British to withdraw from Palestine and the French from Beirut and Lebanon. They stressed that Wilson’s 14 points “had made a deep impression upon the Syrian people and lay in the background of all their demands.” The 14 points included a call for open world diplomacy without secret treaties, adjusting colonial claims in favor of self-governance and promoting free and equal trade between nations.
The King and Crane report continued with the opportunities proffered by the war, “not likely to return — to build now in Syria a newer East state on the modern basis of full religious liberty deliberately including various religious faiths, and especially guarding the rights of minorities.” The American duo’s conclusion was crystal clear: “It’s a matter of justice to the Arabs, the recognition of the Arab people and their desire for national expression, and of deep and lasting concern to the world, that an Arab state along modern political lines be formed.”
Alas, it would all fall on deaf ears.
By September 1919, French troops had invaded Syria. France had secured its “mandate” over Greater Syria after all. At least in theory, it was supposed to help the country stand on its feet as a free and independent nation. In reality, of course, France had finally acquired what she felt was rightfully hers, part of her vast empire, a source of her national pride in the face of Britain. To judge by France’s actions over the coming decades, it had no intention of ushering in Syrian independence and every intention of turning Syria into a colony like those in North Africa. But first, it had to quell mass resistance to its resented occupation.
In July 1920, as the French dispatched several thousand troops and marched toward Damascus, the Syrian Congress was still hopeful that it would have a say in shaping its own country, and approved principles that would form the blueprint of the country’s constitution to this day.
Until recently, the available translations into English of this early constitution had been based on the French translation of the original Arabic text. Thompson was the first to publish a direct English translation of the original text, which she translated with the help of Basem Elzaawily, an Arabic translator in Washington, D.C., and Nael Georges, a Syrian constitutional lawyer affiliated with the International Institute for Democracy and Electoral Assistance in Sweden.
According to this translation of the original text, in Syria’s first articulation of its modern nationhood, drafted on July 19, 1920, it aspired to become a constitutional monarchy, declaring a bill of rights typical of a modern democracy. It stated that Syrians were equal before the law, guaranteed personal and religious freedom, freedom of the press and the right to associate and organize.
Indifferent to what the people of Greater Syria wanted, and in a gesture of contempt that captured France’s worldview at the time, Gen. Henri Gouraud marched through Old Damascus to the iconic tomb of Salah al-Din al-Ayyubi (aka “Saladin”), the renowned 12th-century Muslim commander who fought the Crusaders, and kicked it with his military boot, proclaiming out loud: “Awake, Saladin, we have returned. My presence here consecrates the victory of the cross over the crescent.”
In November 1920, Gouraud then proceeded to establish the Damascus state under French colonial rule, quashing Syria’s nascent constitutional draft and exercising all legislative and financial control over the city and its provinces. Damascenes pushed back but, without their nationalists and the elected Syrian Congress — which had been lauded by King and Crane, then disbanded by the French — they found no proper channels through which to voice their grievances. Popular protests ensued. Merchants of the bazaar shuttered their shops, protesting much as they later did (though ever so briefly) in 2012 against the Assad regime. Activists circulated petitions and delivered them to the recently arrived French bureaucrats. In case that was not enough, Damascenes also delivered their petitions to the hands of British and American consuls in Damascus, albeit to no avail. A failed plot to assassinate Gouroud unfolded in 1921, with minor involvement by my great-grandfather Kamel Elass.
The underground rebellion grew and protests in Damascus kept escalating, including a memorable one led by 40 prominent Syrian women with thousands of men marching behind them. The women ululated in unison, producing ringing tones reminiscent of weddings and victories, moving the men into uproarious anti-French chants. “We will buy our independence with blood,” the crowd roared. The French clashed with the protesters, killing several and injuring dozens. More protests and clashes followed, leading to more dead and injured Syrians. The French succeeded in crushing the movement, but only until the Great Revolt.
By the fall of 1925, rebels began agitating again in the orchards that surrounded Damascus, in Ghouta — also an opposition stronghold in the 2011 uprising. Merchants of the ancient souk hung rugs along the biblical Street Called Straight — a nexus of Syria’s historical identity — and all the way through to the ancient souk of Hamidiyeh. Thousands marched, chanting nationalist, anti-French slogans. They turned into the Christian and Jewish quarters throughout the Old City, where they were joined by more protesters.
The French stood down and let the day’s protest fizzle, but the sight of angry Damascenes demanding an end to French occupation frightened the few French residents who lived in Damascus, compelling them to flee to Beirut. The next day, French authorities dispatched Circassian troops, a non-Syrian Christian militia trained and equipped by the French as part of their divide-and-rule policies. The troops, who had emigrated from the north in the second half of the 19th century, arrived at the rebel strongholds in the Ghouta orchards around Damascus. The Circassians destroyed villages, pillaged houses and took prisoners. They killed 24 men and dragged their bodies back to Damascus and dumped them in full view of mortified Damascenes in the center of a public square. And if that didn’t deliver the message to an agitated populace, the Circassians threw the carcass of a dead dog in with the bodies. Later in the day, in a scene that would sadly repeat itself in 2011 and beyond, albeit with different factions, the Circassian militia and French troops were seen selling booty stolen from the villages they had raided earlier. I remember walking through the open-air market dubbed “the thieves’ souk” in Damascus in 2014, inspecting anything from used washing machines to mismatched socks on display for sale curbside. It was an open secret that the merchandise was the detritus of homes raided; the furnishings and personal memorabilia of ordinary Syrian families, looted by Assad’s soldiers and supporters and offered to the highest bidder.
In the pre-dawn hours of Oct. 18, 1925, the revolt reached a peak when rebels broke into the iconic Azm Palace in Old Damascus, an exquisite traditional building, in search of the French commissioner who had made his headquarters there, but happened to be away during this raid. Nonetheless, this was a grave breach of security for the French, already furious with the insurgency. By 10 a.m. the following day, French forces escalated their response to unprecedented proportions, scrambling warplanes and bombing the city from the sky, dispatching tanks and ground artillery, driving them through narrow cobbled streets and shelling neighborhood after neighborhood, killing hundreds and destroying historic landmarks. They peppered shops in the bazaar with bullets, causing insurmountable losses to the city’s merchants. (The bullet holes along the bazaar’s tin metal rooftop are visible to this day.) The attacks sparked international condemnation for their disproportionate use of force against Damascus and, especially, against its densely populated ancient quarters.
A Times correspondent who witnessed the aftermath reported: “In both bazaars (Christian and Muslim), shop after shop was destroyed either by tank machine gun, which riddled the iron shutters as they dashed through, or by shell or by fire.”
The French finally ceased their air and ground attacks on Damascus and other parts of Syria after a few days. They continued their policies of exiling Syrian intellectuals and politicians to prevent the emergence of an organic landscape in which Syrians could develop their nationhood — an approach that Assad would later mimic as well. The Great Rebellion had taken a major blow, and no one wanted another provocation of French fury. Yet in a spirit of defiance that emerged again in the 2011 uprising, Syrians kept agitating for more autonomy. Represented by nationalists, Syria entered what later became known as “honorable negotiations,” a relentless back-and-forth bargaining of positions and power with the occasional threat to take to the streets in mass protests. A significant win came for the nationalists in the summer of 1928, when they wrote the first Syrian Constitution, based on the principles spelled out to King and Crane in 1920. It was a “modern and sophisticated document,” in the words of the historian Philip Khoury, in his book “Syria and the French Mandate.” He says that it recognized the rights of all citizens equally and above sect and religion, except for one regressive point, namely that the president of the republic had to be a Muslim, a condition that remains in the constitution to this day.
France mistranslated this point to mean that the constitution required Syria to be a Muslim nation, and used this as a main lever to undermine the Syrian nationalists’ efforts. There were also other (correctly translated) sticking points from France’s perspective. They revolved around language that spelled out the sovereignty of Syria, giving it the right to organize its own army; granting its president the power to conclude international treaties, receive ambassadors and declare martial law; and stating that it declared itself indivisible, with Lebanon, Palestine and Jordan together as a nation under one flag. It was too strong a proclamation of independence for France, which wanted at all costs to hold on to territory, even to the detriment of the human rights that the republic and the West claimed to hold supreme.
The impasse led to a crisis in Syria’s parliament, when the nationalists moved to vote on their drafted constitution as the French high commissioner and his few cronies moved to block the measure. On Aug. 7, the parliament passed the constitution. The French were furious. Paris summoned the high commissioner back to France and sat him down for an earful of warnings and complaints. The democratic ideals to which France aspired and for which it held itself in high regard apparently applied only to France, not the subjects over which she ruled by force. The main opposition to Syria’s move toward independence came from French business interests and right-wing conservatives.
Henri Ponsot, the French high commissioner, returned to Damascus with — as the Syrian saying goes — ears red from a good ear-wringing. He amped up his attempts to undermine the Syrian nationalists and their new constitution. “Honorable negotiations” continued with intermittent mass protests, mostly peaceful, the populace placated by the hope that the nationalists who represented them were making progress against the French occupation.
By 1930, the Great Depression was also affecting Syria, made worse by France’s self-serving economic strategies, like flooding Syria with cheap European imports and effectively killing half the country’s tradecraft in one year; restricting Syrian industry to that which did not compete with French interests and pegging the Syrian pound to the falling French franc. Under fiscal pressures of their own, the French continued levying high taxes on Syrians. Strikes and riots erupted, prompting the French to finally relent on the constitution in the hopes of placating the mounting anger. But by this point, the constitution was not enough. Next door to Syria, in British-administered Iraq, Iraqi nationalists had already secured a promise from London of entry into the League of Nations. Now, the Syrian nationalists started pushing the French toward the same end.
Then World War II started. Syria would escape the worst of it, but the French choke hold and anti-French sentiment were reaching their boiling point, paving the way for independence. At first, the war tightened France’s grip on Syria. In July 1939, during the weeks leading up to the Allies’ declaration of war on Germany, France initiated wartime measures that conveniently undermined any semblance of local governance. In the name of “wartime security,” France suspended the constitution and dissolved parliament in Damascus. It invoked martial law regularly, forcing people to hurry home before dark and stay there. It imposed strict censorship of the press, cracking down heavily on “subversives” it might have tolerated just a couple of years earlier. It ordered shopkeepers to ration foodstuffs and requisitioned Syria’s raw materials for the French military. It commandeered taxis and prohibited the sale of petrol and its derivatives, such as heating oil, for commercial use. It confiscated radios in coffee shops, aiming to prevent patrons from gathering around and listening to German propaganda in Arabic, which was starting to make its way into the Arab world, though this was not as threatening to France’s colonial interests as Fascist intrigue from Italy, which had a better understanding of the Arab world than Germany.
When France fell to Germany in June 1940, opportunities arose for Syrian and Lebanese nationalists to work with the British and Free French to roll back Vichy France from their territories. This began to happen in the summer of 1940, when the Vichy regime overseeing Syria and Lebanon offered their air bases to German forces, who in turn launched attacks from Syria on British positions in Iraq. These attacks provoked the British who, in collaboration with the Free French, invaded and ultimately defeated Vichy Syria.
Syrian and Lebanese nationalists saw this as an opportunity to advance their agenda for independence, sometimes playing on French and British rivalries to score political points. The British promised to support Syrian and Lebanese claims for independence and to push for that end with their French counterparts, who could not yet envision the loss of France’s glory as an imperial power. Under pressure to make a public promise, Charles de Gaulle conceded that France would withdraw its military and administrative personnel from Syria and Lebanon “as soon as the war was over.” If de Gaulle — hardly a stranger himself to colonialism, though yet to show the extremes he would go to in Algeria to preserve French power abroad — wasn’t lying outright, then his statement was a gross exaggeration. He was under political pressure at home to revive La France and her imperial greatness; under pressure also on the war front after losing ground and too much face to Britain. Circumstances would ultimately force him to withdraw from Syria and Lebanon, though not without a final display of fury, destructive though ultimately impotent.
In the years leading up to WWII and throughout the war, Syria’s political parties started taking shape, laying the ground for the country’s political landscape after independence and, in some ways, until today. Khaled Bakdash, a young Arabized Kurd, rose quickly through the Syrian Communist Party (SCP), which sent him to Moscow to pursue further studies. There, an aide of Stalin groomed him. By 1936, he was back in Damascus to head the SCP. When the war started, Bakdash built his party’s reputation on its active role in underground resistance to Vichy in 1940-41. His party also grew in popularity among Syrian rural folk and laborers, who found themselves standing and waiting in ever-longer breadlines during the debilitating food shortages and growing wartime scarcity.
Also responding to the people’s hardships were loosely organized and religiously motivated groups known as jamaiyat, affiliates of the Muslim Brotherhood. They gained momentum by opposing the imports of Western goods that flooded Syria’s markets and undermined its artisans, condemning the bars that hosted female dancers and served up alcohol — an issue that also made the news last month, when a BBC interviewer asked Syria’s de facto leader Sharaa if he would ban drink.
Yet the most prominent and ultimately most successful political ideology in the post WWII-era was championed by two charismatic Damascenes, Salah al-Din al-Bitar and Michel Aflaq, a Sunni Muslim and an Orthodox Christian, respectively. They captured the popular sentiment that Arabs — or Arab countries, with their multiethnic non-Arab minorities — could unite as one nation. They advanced this by introducing the Arab “universal duty to create an Arab humanism.” Educated in Paris, Aflaq espoused a fresh incarnation of French democratic ideals of democracy based on unity, justice and a strong sense of national identity, derived from Arabism and its interpretation by the populace.
These ideals would influence Syria’s political thinking over the next decades in one variation or another. Aflaq personally oversaw the education of the next generation of political leaders at the Tajhiz, a college preparatory academy located in central Damascus and a hub for Arab nationalism, cultivating generations in the ideology. (Coincidentally, my great uncle Frank, who emigrated to America and settled in Bethesda, Maryland, was one of Aflaq’s high school students at the Tajhiz. Uncle Frank remembered even in old age the “very quiet and well-liked intellectual” who taught him back in the 1930s. Uncle Frank’s memories of his formative years at Tajhiz also capture the complexity and tension between France and the Syrians who resented her rule over them but appreciated the fresh democratic ideals espoused by her intellectuals. Many Syrians sought higher education in France, including Aflaq and later my father, who also attended Tajhiz. And many returned to Syria afterward with an optimistic vision for their country as an independent and democratic modern nation-state.)
In 1939, a renegade from a younger, more radical nationalist movement joined Bitar and Aflaq. His name was Zaki Arsuzi, a Sorbonne-educated Alawite (the sect to which the Assad clan belongs) from a landowning family. It was this union that formed the Baath Party in Syria and Iraq, the party to which both Assad and Saddam Hussein belonged, which remained in power in Damascus until last month.
In the summer of 1944, buoyed by its liberation from Vichy, France started once again to undermine any move by Syrians toward independence. Mass anti-French protests broke out, which seemed only to harden de Gaulle’s resolve to keep his forces in Syria and Lebanon as occupiers. By May 1945, de Gaulle reinforced French garrisons with more Senegalese troops, further upsetting Syrians and Lebanese. But despite France’s every effort to divide and rule, nationalists in both Syria and Lebanon banded together and refused to negotiate an unfavorable exit treaty with the French, who in turn only dug their heels in deeper, forcing escalation of anti-French protests in Damascus, Beirut and other cities. France, still unable to accept the inevitable, resorted to its old tactics. At noon on May 29, La Republique scrambled warplanes and bombed Damascus from the sky; it dispatched tanks and shelled the city from the ground, killing at least 400 Damascenes and leaving heavy destruction in its wake, including to the parliament building. In the sardonic words of the historian Khoury, it was a “bitter reminder of France’s quarter century commitment and education about Western civilization and democracy.”
My mother, who was 5 years old at the time, recalls the constant runs to the underground shelter during those precarious days. “I remember being awakened continuously and carried to the shelter underground, or someone taking my hand and we’d run down the stairs,” she says.
But relief was just around the corner. Syrian delegates protested at the United Nations Conference in San Francisco in 1945, spurring a domino effect of international protests and condemnation of France’s actions. Protests also grew from the Arab League, of which Syria was a founding member in March 1945, creating ripple effects through Arab-British relations and prompting Britain, which still held sway in Syria after it liberated it from Vichy, to order French troops back to their barracks and to assume temporary control. International pressure and a new postwar world order finally broke France’s resolve and her “special claim” to Syria.
In July 1945, less than two months after its vicious bombardment of Damascus, France finally transferred the chain of command of the Troupe Speciales, local recruits from religious minorities, to Syrian and Lebanese counterparts. But France’s military lingered. More cajoling and pressure came from Washington and Moscow, along with ongoing and “patient” Anglo-French negotiations throughout the rest of the summer, fall and well into the winter of 1946, until France finally withdrew its military from Syria, not a minute too soon, thus ushering in the birth of modern-day Syria, though with barely one-quarter of its historical territories intact.
The next constitutional reform came in 1950, and the resulting change achieved two major things. First, it reaffirmed Syria’s place in the “Arab nation,” imagined to span from Morocco to Iraq and from Syria to Sudan — a prelude to pan-Arabism and the fleeting “union” with Egypt that lasted from 1958 to 1961. Second, and perhaps more significant, the constitution declared that “Whereas the majority of the people are believers in the Islamic religion, the Government declares its attachment to Islam, and its ideals.” It adds that “Islamic jurisprudence shall be the main source of legislation.”
This in no way turned Syria into a Sharia-based state. Rather, the country continued to operate in accordance with its Napoleonic Code, with the exception of “personal status laws” that governed marriage, divorce, birth, death and inheritance, which fell to the respective religious communities to which a citizen belonged. This legal landscape continued until the fall of Assad last month, despite numerous attempts by activists to push against the religious power over personal status laws, and numerous other attempts by the religious establishment to encroach on more of the legal code. This tension will remain crucial in the post-Assad era, with the current Islamist transitional government. How it unfolds in the near future remains to be seen.
But whatever happens, the 1950 constitution can serve as a legitimate pre-Assad starting point upon which to build the country’s supreme legal document. This sentiment is also captured by Syria’s current-but-not-yet-official flag, the de facto revolutionary flag with the horizontal tricolor of green, white and black, which was the flag of Syria in 1950, as opposed to the red, white and black tricolor under Assad. The flag flying today above official buildings in Damascus and in Syrian embassies around the world is described in the earlier constitutions as having “three red planets that emit five rays,” though today most people think of them as stars.
The 1950 constitution aimed to establish the following “sacred aims”: “To strengthen an independent judiciary and protect public freedoms,” with public freedoms defined as “the most noble expressions of individuality, dignity and humanity.” It also declared that “freedom of belief shall be guaranteed” and that the people had “the right to assembly” and “to form political parties.” It continued that “The State shall guarantee freedom of opinion and all Syrians shall be entitled to express their views freely in writing, speeches, graphically, or by any other means of expression.”
There have been only few and insignificant amendments to the constitution since then. Although Syria endured numerous bloodless coups and political instability from the date of its independence until it came under the Assad regime in 1970, it thrived with freedom of the press and expression, exchange of political ideas and the organic rise of feminism in the 1950s, when women received universal suffrage and the right to vote.
Moving forward, who will Syria be now? The country is finally free from its executioner and, for Syrians who have endured so much injustice, it would be inconceivable to give up any of the basic rights spelled out so clearly in the early drafts of the country’s constitution over a century ago. The two pivotal battles expected to unfold in the near future will be: How much, if any, separation of church (or mosque) and state will the new constitution enshrine and what will the new Syria officially call itself? Will it continue to be the Syrian Arab Republic, as it has been for decades? Will “Arab” be dropped for “Islamic”? Or, most inclusively, will it be simply named the Republic of Syria? All eyes are on the current transitional government to help ensure that these conversations unfold in a peaceful and transparent manner, engaging all aspects of Syria’s mosaic culture and society.
One can also hope that regional powers like Turkey and the Gulf Arab states will continue to buoy the nascent government, that Israel and the Islamic Republic of Iran will cease their aggression and subversion of the new Syria, and that the U.S. will curtail moves that could abort the fragile hope for a sustainable future. But no matter how the geopolitics play out in the near future, Syrians are finally and once again the authors of our destiny. We cannot go back to the darkness.
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