On 2 August 1928, the members of the Syrian Constituent Assembly gathered to debate the country’s draft constitution. Vice-president Fawzī al-Ghazzī (1891–1929) delivered the opening speech:
After serious consideration, the [drafting] committee has determined that a republic would be the appropriate regime for the present state of the country. Although in a recently independent country kingship appears to be advantageous, because the king can be a beloved figure and some may see this office as apt to unite very different emotions, I believe that this advantage has no value in a time when the principles of patriotism have become more important than anything else, and the homeland has become the most sacred refuge, which brings together everyone […] In addition, kingship can limit ambition, or slow down development and may even endanger the reins of the country. For instance, the French dynastic order installed kings who were not yet twenty-five nor even twenty-one years old. For this reason, with unanimity, the committee has recognized the necessity to conform to the custom of the modern age and the opinion of many modern peoples, hence they have chosen the republican regime for the Syrian territories. The committee has also determined that the president of the republic must be a Muslim because despite constitutions being based on general principles […] it is not possible to overstep local customs. Footnote 1
This dense statement about the new regime form adopted for the new State of Syria, established in 1925, alludes to what we often consider standard features of twentieth-century constitutionalism: nationalism and republicanism. Yet it also reflects specific concerns: the challenge of independence, arguments against kingship, and the importance of electing a Muslim president in deference to ‘local customs’.
The 1920s is an important age in the global history of constitutions. Although political scientists associate constitutions with the nation state, historians emphasise that empires also operated through written and unwritten constitutions.Footnote 2 I focus on the case of post-Ottoman mandate Syria to study the transformation from imperial to international and national systems.Footnote 3 Conventional histories present the story of the 1928 Syrian constitution as a clash between nationalists and French officials, which led to the suspension of the assembly.Footnote 4 In contrast, I describe how Syrian secular nationalists and the French left struggled over agency within the metropolitan and the mandate milieus before imposing a republican regime on post-Ottoman Syria at the expense of monarchists. Importantly, Fawzī al-Ghazzī’s understanding in 1928 was similar to controversial German jurist Carl Schmitt’s definition of the constitution, exactly in the same year, as the decision of the nation ‘over the type and form of its existence’.Footnote 5 Both belong to an emerging ‘decisionist’ paradigm of constitutionalism, which not only interpreted the written constitution as a symbol of national existence but also as a tool of social engineering within the new polities after the First World War.Footnote 6
I argue that global legal history offers a useful perspective for the critical study of such large transformative processes – ‘nation-building’, the changing of territorial status, regime transformation, military occupation, the mandates, ‘imposed constitutionalism’ – because it can unite the tools of international history, area studies, historical sociology, and microhistory.Footnote 7 As Thomas Duve argues, global legal historians can profitably study ‘the formation of legal regimes on a larger spatial scale’.Footnote 8 Global legal history often means the mere collection of geographically diverse authors in a comparative frame to ‘denationalize’ legal history.Footnote 9 As I envisage it, the term ‘global’ conveys the connection (in the form of an event) between international, imperial, and regional-local scales.Footnote 10 This approach helps to historicize what sociologist Rogers Brubaker called the ‘eventful’ perspective about how nations happen during the fragmentation of large polities.Footnote 11 I do not deny the importance of ecological circumstance and the force of capitalism in historical change but post-war administrative ordering is not a purely material process. Global legal history provides analytical tools to describe the local codification of authority within the dynamics of large legal transformations in the twentieth century.Footnote 12
Global legal history defined in this way shows the 1928 Syrian constitution as a standardizing legal event that generated both international and vernacular orders out of empire. I suggest that the distinction between administrative and political orders offers a helpful way to describe how empires adjusted to and interpreted the norms of national self-determination after 1919. The case of Syria provides access to two, connected ‘routes out of empire’.Footnote 13 The first is the transformation of French imperialism. I suggest that administrative law, and not violence, was the fundamental tool of state formation.Footnote 14 The first half of this article tells the story of the administrative, ‘organic law’ of the League’s mandate. I describe how the nineteenth-century organic law became the regulatory wrapping of interwar Franco-Arab sovereignty. Footnote 15 The parti colonial in the French Foreign Ministry considered this international law as the key to perpetuating French domination. Footnote 16 Based on new archival research, I describe how a French metropolitan conflict led to constitutions within the organic law in 1925. The High Commission had to carefully design a Syrian constituent assembly, which opened the way for conflicting local visions over the regime form in 1928.Footnote 17
The second route out of empire was the local, enforced route from the Ottoman Empire to the new Syrian republic. In the second half of the article, I provide a microhistory about making the Syrian constitution. Next to the formation of legal statehood in Western European texts, I suggest we should also look at how vernacular visions of order interacted with international norms.Footnote 18 I apply William Sewell’s definition of a historical event (‘ramified sequences of occurrences’ leading to ‘durable transformation of structures’) to the 1928 Syrian constitutional process.Footnote 19 The republican constitution with a Muslim president was the outcome of a complex local and transregional discussion. To unearth its social construction, I follow Fawzī al-Ghazzī, ‘the father of the constitution’, who secured the republican constitution, and Sheikh Kāmil al-Qaṣṣāb (1873–1954?), a religious educator abroad, who advocated in vain for a Syrian Muslim monarchy under a Saudi prince. They are not the most famous personalities of the age and somewhat arbitrary avatars of ideas but I have chosen them to highlight the Arab post-Ottoman landscape below the framework of the mandate.Footnote 20 In this way, I hope to show that the making of the mandate polity of Syria was connected to the making of Saudi Arabia, too.Footnote 21 This is an important point because we can follow how the partition of Ottoman Syria contributed to the emergence of transregional Syrian activists in search of an independent state. Finally, this enquiry into the relationship between international law and local ‘modes of identification’ is also a study of the differentiation between what is often called ‘the religious’ and ‘the secular’ after the supposed Ottoman ‘ecumenical frame’ was gone.Footnote 22
The statut organique: From imperial to international administration
At the heart of the French mandate was administrative law. This was because the mandate was not a political but an administrative regime.Footnote 23 The first article of the mandate ‘A’ text for Syria and Lebanon required a statut organique, an organic law, ‘in agreement with the native authorities’ to be presented to the League of Nations within three years, by 1926. Footnote 24 Historians, and even legal scholars, often confuse the organic law with the Syrian and Lebanese national constitutions. Footnote 25 Others state that ‘no one had a clear idea about what the statut organique was in 1923’.Footnote 26 However, the French parti colonial knew exactly that it was an administrative law above the local political order. By following the way the Allied Powers re-used the organic law in the League’s legal architecture, I wish to highlight how central was imperial constitutional law for new internationalism.
Organic laws were administrative instruments of management and autonomy in nineteenth-century composite systems. Composite systems were large organizations – dynastic and republican empires – in which administrative laws (decrees, organic laws, agreements) created and regulated subordinate polities in the long nineteenth century.Footnote 27 Napoleon gave an organic law (statut organique) to codify the French Italian republic.Footnote 28 Russia used a similar instrument in Poland in 1832, after abolishing the Polish national constitution.Footnote 29 The latter half of the nineteenth century saw many organic laws regulating administrative autonomy in Mediterranean intra- and inter-imperial relations. For instance, in 1861 the Great Powers agreed in an organic law (known as règlement organique) to regulate the administrative councils in Mount Lebanon in the Ottoman Empire. This law was the inter-imperial legal architecture of what the Ottomans called a ‘distinguished province’ in Mount Lebanon. Footnote 30 Similarly, the Great Powers developed a statut organique for Ottoman Rumelia, by the terms of the Berlin treaty of 1876. Footnote 31 The Ottoman ambassador also used the term in an 1881 letter to the French Foreign Minister to characterize what is today called the first Tunisian ‘constitution’. At that time, on the brink of French invasion, the ambassador wanted to emphasize that the Tunisian basic law was only an administrative law within the Ottoman Empire, so he asserted Tunis’ Ottoman belonging against French aggression. Footnote 32 In khedivial Egypt, the occupying British authorities used the term ‘the Organic Law’ for the 1883 administrative law of government and the 1913 general law.Footnote 33 The Ottoman government also issued an organic law of the provinces, providing for representative councils, in 1913. The organic law was both a tool for denying sovereignty and for creating limited, distinct territorial authority.
Organic laws have featured in the composite system of the United States of America. Today, the term ‘organic law’ often confusingly means the Proclamation of Independence, the Constitution, and other fundamental texts, in the general sense of ‘basic law’. However, in the nineteenth century there was a clear distinction in the United States between an organic law and the Constitution. The organic law was the administrative code of a single member state – for instance, there was ‘the organic law of the Territories of Wisconsin and Iowa’Footnote 34 – and the Constitution was the basic, sovereign law of the federation. There have been many American legal compendiums which contain ‘the organic law’ of a state and the ‘Constitution’ as two distinct texts.Footnote 35
In 1919, the makers of the new world order borrowed the genre of the organic law for the legal articulation of autonomous territories under the supervision of other states. The organic law was the regulatory guarantee for separate territorial existence, against annexation. For instance, the League of Nations’ Convention specified that a commission would create a statut organique for the former German territory of Memel under the trusteeship of Lithuania. Footnote 36 William Ormsby-Gore, the main British architect of the League’s ‘indirect international supervision’, remarked in a 1920 publication that the supervising power would not be able ‘to amend the organic law without the approval of the League of Nations’.Footnote 37
The design of the class A mandate contained the organic law at its core. The so-called ‘American draft’ (the first blank draft in 1919) required that ‘the Mandatory Power […] undertakes to frame an organic law within (one) year from the date of this Mandate […] in consultation with the native authorities’. In this draft, the organic law was supposed to ‘contain provisions designed to facilitate the progressive developments of [the mandated territory] as a Self-Governing State and the ultimate cessation of this Mandate’.Footnote 38 In December 1920, both the French draft text for Syria and Lebanon and the British draft text for the mandate in Iraq (‘Mesopotamia’) contained the organic law. Only the British draft text for Palestine did not contain such a condition.Footnote 39 The organic law requirement remained among the three fundamental terms of the class A mandates (the other two were bans on military conscription and exploitation of natural resources) that the League’s Assembly recommended to the Council on 18 December 1920.Footnote 40
The Allied Powers realized that the League stepped in the place of empire in the case of the mandate organic laws. In 1923, the French mandate for Syria and Lebanon was the only such mandate to come into being with the organic law requirement. The statut organique was no longer an imperial but rather an international instrument. The text embodying authority above the organic law was the Covenant of the League, not the mandatory power’s own basic law. Recognizing this bind, the British government decided to substitute its 1920 text for the mandate in Iraq with a treaty drawn up in 1922. Yet, even that treaty specified that the Iraqi king agreed ‘to frame an organic law for presentation to the Constituent Assembly’ ‘which shall contain nothing contrary to the provisions of the present treaty’ (article III).Footnote 41 The organic law remained in its original function only in the French mandate text.
Frederick Cooper has argued that decolonization could have led to a federation (or federations), instead of nation states, in 1950s French Africa.Footnote 42 Some decades earlier, during the long military occupation of the Ottoman provinces, the French High Commission actually created a federation of five post-Ottoman small governments in 1922 (the ‘states’ of Damascus, Aleppo, Alawites, Lebanon, and the Druze Mountain). This decentralized ‘States of the Levant’ comprised an administrative union.Footnote 43 The ‘constitution’ of each polity was an ordinance (arrêté) issued by the High Commissioner. However, the legal section of the High Commission relied on the 1913 Ottoman organic law of provinces.Footnote 44 Many bureaucrats, both local and French, derived the legality of Arab administrative councils in the new polities from this Ottoman law. As late as 1937, French jurists recognized that Koranic, Ottoman, and French sources of law created a ‘mosaic of legislations’ in the mandate.Footnote 45 The High Commission considered that the administrative councils in the Ottoman law must be transformed into elected councils at one point in the future.Footnote 46
The federative-administrative form accommodated both French interests and earlier visions of Ottoman decentralization. Before the war, Syrian intellectuals had advocated for administrative decentralization (lā-markaziyya) in the Ottoman Empire after the restoration of the constitution (al-qānūn al-asāsī) in 1908. The 1913 organic law of provinces was the imperial (Young Turk) answer to this advocacy. During and after the war, many continued to propagate the idea of a decentralized polity.Footnote 47 For instance, the master narrative of Arab nationalism starts with the negotiations between McMahon and al-Ḥusayn b. ʿAlī (the Ottoman emir of Mecca) about a giant ‘Arab Kingdom’ in 1915.Footnote 48 However, Sheikh Rashīd Riḍā, a Syrian journalist-activist in Egypt, submitted an explicit counter-proposal to the British Agency in Cairo in 1915. The ‘General Organic Law of the Arab Empire’ was about a constitutional caliphate-federation, which would inherit the Ottoman Arab provinces in a composite system: ‘each province is to be governed by a vali [governor]’. In this draft law, the emirs in the Arabian Peninsula were only ‘subject to the Empire in common affairs’ because the empire was ‘decentralized’. A caliph was to be chosen from among the sharifs of Mecca who also ‘should recognize the organic law of the Empire’. This caliph would have stayed in Mecca. The real political government with a president (!) would have been headquartered in Damascus. However, in the midst of war, the idea of a republican caliphate from a journalist-sheikh had no appeal to the British authorities against the potential of the Emir of Mecca.Footnote 49
French officials were also aware of a Syrian assembly’s federative project in occupied Damascus. In July 1919, like in free Weimar at the same time, this assembly had created a constitutional draft (also called ‘the Damascus program’) for the visiting American King-Crane Commission.Footnote 50 The title of the Arabic draft was ‘The Constitution of the United States of Syria’ (Al-Qānūn al-Asāsī li-l-Wilāyāt al-Sūriyya al-Muttaḥida), and it was to be deposited in the League of Nations. The text was a ‘federative’ basic law of a ‘democratic, representative, civic monarchical government’ with Damascus as its capital and Emir Fayṣal, the son of Sharīf al-Ḥusayn, as the king of the monarchical federation. It emphasized regional ‘decentralization’ (lā-markaziyya) and the autonomy of ‘local governments’ in nine states (wilāyāt).Footnote 51 However, nothing came out of this plan as the US withdrew from the League and the French army invaded Damascus and the interior territories in 1920.Footnote 52 Among the flood of petitions to the French government during the occupation, many demanded an independent, ‘decentralized’ Syrian federation of ‘cantons’ with assistance from the League and without a Muslim king, while the Maronite Church in Mount Lebanon advanced its well-known plan for a small Christian polity under French rule.Footnote 53
The organic law was to be the codification of the Federation of the States of the Levant, a French upgrade of the earlier Ottoman administrative solution to Arab demands. This is why, in 1923, when the mandate came into effect at the League of Nations, Prime Minister Poincaré thought that the High Commission would declare the statut organique of the federation.Footnote 54 Poincaré interpreted the ‘agreement’ of the ‘native authorities’ only as a consultation about the already compiled code of this sub-federation.Footnote 55 After what they called ‘the colonial and military’ first phase and the second federative phase, the High Commission considered various groupings of polities for the final ‘political’ phase. The ultimate decision was, however, to maintain separate polities because division was best for French domination and catered to the demands of favoured local groups (the Maronite church, Alawite notables). As the French government prepared to submit the unchangeable organic law to the League of Nations, the High Commission only created the State of Syria, a new polity uniting Damascus and Aleppo, which came into existence on 1 January 1925.Footnote 56
Whose organic law?
George Steinmetz argues that the pre-war German Empire saw a struggle among ‘men on the spot’ and metropolitan officials over the definition of colonial policy; similarly, Edmund Burke III remarks that the pre-war French protectorate in Morocco was ‘shaped by the chaotic collision of multidimensional political forces, rather than being the product of carefully designed French policies’. Footnote 57 The preparation for the League’s organic law opened a similar conflict among French metropolitan politicians in 1925.
First, a struggle ensued in Paris over to whom exactly the statut organique belonged – was it the Foreign Ministry (and its High Commission), the French parliament, or the Syrians? Between 1924 and 1926, a left-liberal coalition (Cartel des Gauches) governed France.Footnote 58 In July 1925, their members of parliament established a committee, led by the Socialist Joseph Paul-Boncour, to take charge of the mandate’s statut organique. The Foreign Ministry panicked. After a debate, the parliamentary committee reluctantly concurred that the High Commission might send out questionnaires to persons they selected.Footnote 59 Some of the answers seemed to be coordinated. Boncour wrote angrily to the ministry that ‘this is not about administering a colony, or establishing a protectorate but rather about organizing a mandate […] based on consultation with the populations, which should not be a deception’.Footnote 60 The High Commission had to request opinions again, now in the name of Boncour’s committee. The original Arabic answers were also sent to Paris this time.Footnote 61
From August to November 1925, Boncour’s committee received over a hundred responses and constitutional drafts, from selected lawyers, religious leaders, and notables in Beirut, Aleppo, Latakia, and Damascus. Many respondents understood the statut organique as a national constitution and indeed an occasion for re-making the mandated space. There were competing proposals for establishing one single state in the mandate, three separate states (Lebanon, Syria, and Alawites), or maintaining the previous federation. ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd al-Kiyālī, the Mufti of Aleppo, suggested one single large republic with a Muslim president. The overwhelming majority demanded elected bodies to produce the statut organique. Some Syrian jurists refused to give their opinion without a constituent assembly, upholding the principle of popular representation. Others happily sent constitutional drafts outlining their personal visions of order.Footnote 62
The ministry’s solution was to keep the two legal domains (the organic law and the new constitutions) separate. They promised locally elected assemblies for Boncour’s parliamentary committee. Adding urgency to this new strategy was the Druze revolt which, for reasons perhaps not unrelated to the questionnaires, was erupting at exactly this time.Footnote 63 But the ministry maintained that the agency in charge to create the statut organique was still the High Commission. That administration should issue a unilateral declaration while the elected assemblies should create the constitutions of the Levantine governments.Footnote 64 In November 1925, Prime Minister Aristide Briand, in agreement with Boncour, affirmed that the Levant states should create their basic laws through elected assemblies. Briand argued that the rights of mandate citizens should be based on the same principles ‘as in the West’. In this way, the statut organique would be just ‘a very large frame’ (un cadre très large), which would contain nothing but the powers of the mandate.Footnote 65
The struggle over the organic law soon became a struggle over the mandate itself between local groups, the French government, and hungry European powers. Between 1925 and 1927, the French army ruthlessly suppressed the Druze uprising which spread to other Syrian cities. The army bombed Damascus and mountain villages. Military courts sentenced rebels to imprisonment and execution, and Damascene political dissidents were sentenced to imprisonment and compulsory residence change to Lebanon.Footnote 66 In the League of Nations, Italy, Germany, and the Soviet Union attacked France for using violence contrary to the ‘sacred trust’ of the mandate. The French government defended the army actions, including the aerial bombing of civilians, in the League’s Permanent Mandates Commission (PMC) in a series of tense, extraordinary meetings in Rome.Footnote 67 Mussolini was eager to acquire the Syrian-Lebanese mandate as the public outrage over the French army atrocities reached Geneva. The French Communists were ready to give independence but nationalist and capitalist groups started to lobby against abandoning the mandate. Footnote 68
The solution to the crisis was to create constitutions through elected assemblies – at least in Syria and Lebanon, the two polities explicitly mentioned in the mandate text. In 1926, Henry De Jouvenel, a liberal journalist and the new civil High Commissioner, believed that Lebanese notables had no objection to a subordinated national constitution. Indeed, a Lebanese assembly quickly approved a sectarian, republican constitution (though for a moment there was talk about a monarchy) in May 1926. The Christian representatives insisted to include the mandate terms. The representatives also willingly agreed to a French official participating in the constitutional discussion.Footnote 69
The complex State of Syria, however, should have become a Franco-Ottoman monarchy. De Jouvenel imagined that this polity should become first a kingdom, and only later have elections, be given a treaty, and become independent in a bilateral relationship with France. He constantly referred to the British mandate ‘success’ in Iraq and demanded that France should be more liberal. De Jouvenel appointed Aḥmad Nāmī (1879–1962) as the head of the new Syrian government – and as a potential future king. Nāmī, a rich Circassian Muslim notable, had married one of the last Ottoman princesses, hence his nickname Damad (from the Persian-Ottoman word dāmād, ‘son-in-law’ of the sultan).Footnote 70 In 1926, ‘the Damad-De Jouvenel Agreement’ amounted to a road map (a throne, a constitutional assembly, and a treaty) to replace the mandate with monarchical independence. The timing seemed perfect. 1926 was a year of displaying the composite Muslim dimension of French imperialism, as Yusuf, the reigning sultan of Morocco, visited Paris. Exactly at that moment, in July 1926, De Jouvenel started to lobby for the ‘throne of Syria’ at the Foreign Ministry and for a Muslim monarch. Informally, even the PMC at the League of Nations heard about the monarchical plan. During Nāmī’s tour in August, village people greeted him in Turkish with the traditional Ottoman greeting: ‘Long live my ruler (padişahım çok yaşa)!’ Footnote 71 Nāmī spent large sums on propaganda (tribal petitions in his favour, lobby groups in cities, and employing the qāḍī of Beirut talking to the diaspora) in 1927. Footnote 72 Learning of his scheming, more than two hundred Damascene notables sent a telegram to the Foreign Ministry, requesting the fulfilment of the promise that ‘the form of government should be left to a national assembly, which should be elected’.Footnote 73
The French government worried less about a Franco-Ottoman Syrian kingdom than about the League’s statut organique. That was the key to French rule. Briand warned De Jouvenel that local constitutions could not replace the organic law.Footnote 74 Soon, De Jouvenel opted for a confrontation. He submitted a daring new draft of the organic law to the Foreign Ministry. This draft gave the ‘sovereign’ states the right to create a political federation, to appeal to the Court of International Law in the Hague, and to create a federative council with delegates, but it committed the High Commissioner to authorize the constitutions.Footnote 75 De Jouvenel’s plan was to present this draft to the League as the organic law and to the mandated populations as a treaty.Footnote 76 In August 1926, he gave an ultimatum to the ministry: if he returned to Syria such would be his politics. If the government did not agree, he wrote, ‘they have to send another High Commissioner’.Footnote 77
Unlike the British government, which saw the mandate as an obstacle to British domination in 1920s Iraq, the French parti colonial firmly believed that the mandate was only way to perpetuate French domination in Syria.Footnote 78 They finally could start damage control after the fall of the left-liberal government. They gladly let De Jouvenel go. Returning Prime Minister Poincaré himself annotated De Jouvenel’s draft and deleted all references to sovereignty and ultimate admission to the League of Nations. Footnote 79 New High Commissioner Henri Ponsot dismissed Aḥmad Nāmī from the presidency of Syria, when Nāmī demanded his promised kingship in 1927. Ponsot thought that the promise for a constituent assembly deciding their own political order must be fulfilled to achieve ‘calm’. Footnote 80 This was about more than calm. In Geneva, the League’s PMC constantly enquired about the delayed organic law and Ponsot had to declare in March 1927 that he would achieve it soon. In 1928, the PMC remarked explicitly that a Syrian assembly had to finalize the law.Footnote 81
The creation of the organic law now hinged upon whether an elected assembly in the new State of Syria would create a constitution incorporating the terms of the mandate, like the Lebanese one did in 1926. The High Commission prepared an almost surgical operation. During February-March 1928, High Commissioner Ponsot pardoned several individuals, exiled during the 1925–27 uprising, with whom he initiated a ‘policy of cooperation’ (siyāsat al-taʿāwun) as the Syrians called this course (in private the French officials called it the ‘policy of collaboration’, in public politique d’entente). Ponsot also lifted the state of emergency in Damascus. Most pardoned individuals organized themselves into a loosely defined party, the Syrian National Bloc (al-Kutla al-Waṭaniyya, a local mirroring of the French National Bloc) and entered the elections. The selected pardons, the redrawn electoral districts, the previous military intervention, and heavy secret service surveillance resulted in peaceful elections and a constituent assembly. Ponsot decided ‘to leave them [the Syrian assembly] free to organize and create what they want […] I hope that we would be able to intervene in a useful way and to prevail for common sense’.Footnote 82
By promising freedom, Ponsot avoided reminding the new assembly of the mandate’s organic law. Nationalists started a propaganda about the constitution as a symbol of self-determination. Consequently, the Syrian assembly did not discuss the fact that their constitution and the organic law were two different instruments. Syrian nationalists acted as if they were truly free and created an anti-mandate constitution in the busy summer of 1928. There were six articles that were incompatible with the terms of the mandate, especially the second one which declared the ‘political unity’ of all Syrian territories. The High Commission suspended and soon dissolved the assembly. At the League, PMC members now affirmed privately that an ‘agreement with the native authorities’ did not mean necessarily a vote by elected bodies, now that an elected body had actually created a basic law.Footnote 83 The High Commission’s legal service changed the second article and added an additional one but otherwise kept the draft intact. In May 1930, Ponsot promulgated the Syrian constitution and all the other French mandate laws together. In September, the French government submitted the statut organique, the collection of all these texts, to the League of Nations. The global history of constitutions should include the organic law of the French mandate as the legal connection between the pre-1919 imperial order and the League-world. After all, the organic law now belonged to the League.
From Ottoman to what kind of order? Al-Qaṣṣāb and al-Ghazzī
Yet Syrians thought that the constitution belonged to them. Having hitherto focused on the seats of mandate in Paris, Geneva, and Beirut, I now turn to Damascus, Aleppo, and even Cairo and Mecca. Changing the scale of enquiry entails also a change from the history of international law to regional microhistory. In this section, I zoom in on Sheikh Kāmil al-Qaṣṣāb and Fawzī al-Ghazzī, two Syrian individuals who perhaps never met, but indirectly clashed over what regime form should be established in the new State of Syria. By retelling the story of the organic law from below I trace how both Syrians considered the constitution a tool of social engineering and how internationalization sharpened their political disagreement.
The making of Syria, at this regional scale, included a conflict among two types of constitutionalism that had originated within the late Ottoman Empire. This conflict was not about territory but about the sources of law in society. Al-Qaṣṣāb and al-Ghazzī received their education in very different Ottoman institutions and about two decades apart. Born into a middle-class Damascene family, al-Qaṣṣāb was trained at the al-Azhar mosque-university in Egypt in the 1890s and established an Islamic school back in Damascus. After 1908, the minor but charismatic sheikh was a critic of the Young Turks, whom he saw as an anti-Arab and anti-Muslim political force in the government of the Ottoman Empire.Footnote 84 The somewhat younger al-Ghazzī was the scion of a rich Damascene family and graduated from the Mekteb-i Mülkiye, the School of Civil Administration in Istanbul in 1913. At the Mülkiye, French was the most important foreign language, and European constitutional and international law were standard subjects.Footnote 85 Al-Ghazzī’s studies coincided with the exciting period of Arab demands for decentralization from the Ottoman government. His classmates were Shukrī al-Quwwatlī and Saʿdullāh al-Jābirī, who also rose to prominence in later Syrian politics.Footnote 86
During the war, the older sheikh and the young bureaucrat fought on opposite sides. In 1913, al-Qaṣṣāb joined a club of elite nationalists in Damascus, who sent him to Cairo to talk to diaspora Syrians, especially to the famous Sheikh Rashīd Riḍā in late 1915, exactly when, as we have seen, this latter was proposed to the British a republican Arab Muslim empire; al-Qaṣṣāb was then sent to Mecca to help the anti-Ottoman Arab revolt during the First World War.Footnote 87 He distributed money in Cairo as early as January 1918 in the name of the ‘Arab government’.Footnote 88 He established lobby organizations with Rashīd Riḍā and other Syrians in Cairo during 1918. As James Gelvin has shown, in late 1919, the sheikh became an important figure in occupied Damascus and rejected any compromise with the Allied Powers. He clashed even with Emir Fayṣal.Footnote 89 As to young al-Ghazzī, he served in the Ottoman army in the Caucasus and in Iraq. He returned to Damascus only in 1919 when the Hashemite-British government appointed him a district inspector.Footnote 90 Since the French-appointed Damascus government recognized Mülkiye graduates as lawyers in 1921, al-Ghazzī could practice law and started to teach international law in the Law Institute at the Syrian University.Footnote 91
Let us see their preferred sources for the post-Ottoman order. Sheikh al-Qaṣṣāb, in March 1920, gave a speech in front of a mass demonstration. ‘In the name of the whole Syrian nation’, he expected the Damascus assembly to declare the complete independence of a democratic Syrian government, and, should they decide to ‘announce’ Amir Fayṣal as king over the country, ‘he should be a constitutional, democratic, just king whose every act must confirm to the law of consultation (al-ḥukm al-shūrī) as the Almighty said: “consult them on the matter”’. Without going into details, he demanded a ‘constitution on the basis of representative, decentralized monarchical rule’ for ‘all of Syria within its known natural boundaries’. His vision was an independent, territorially limited, constitutional Muslim polity, with a king if necessary.Footnote 92 A later critical memoir in the Arabic press portrays al-Qaṣṣāb as leading demonstrations for independence in Damascus with the slogan ‘Muhammad’s religion came by the sword!’Footnote 93
What did it mean to teach international law in occupied Damascus? Al-Ghazzī, for his part, Arabized international law and norms of nationhood in 1922. Al-Ghazzī rushed to publish his lectures because, he claimed, there were no Arabic expressions for Western legal concepts – it appears that he did not want to teach from Turkish and French textbooks. Footnote 94 He called the Ottomans only ‘Turks’ and surveyed the newest legal phenomena induced by the League of Nations.Footnote 95 His lectures told the story of European imperial society, starting with the Roman jus gentium. He painted a legal picture of Syria just before the League’s mandate entered into force. Al-Ghazzī categorized states according to sovereignty: sovereign (mustaqilla), protected (maḥmīya), vassal (tābiʿa), and minor (qāṣira). Footnote 96 He highlighted that ‘minor states’ (al-duwal al-qāṣira) were a category of his own devising and that ‘we choose to call them in such a way to suit their condition’. The minor states were ‘a new kind in the international order’: they were ‘the states which have not yet reached the level of development to be able to govern themselves’. He translated Article 22 about the mandates from the League’s Covenant (he references the ‘Treaty of Versailles’ – ʿAhd Firsyāl) and repeated that the first class of the minor states were ‘those territories (bilād) which were separated from the Ottoman Empire and which achieved that level of development that makes the acknowledgement of their independence compulsory and in which the caretaker government (al-ḥukūma al-waṣīya) remains the tutor until they cannot administer themselves’. Footnote 97 Al-Ghazzī mentioned the League’s Permanent Mandate Commission only as ‘the first department of the secretariat in charge of mandate issues of the German colonies’. Footnote 98
His live lecturing must have been much more critical of the mandate. There is a telling anecdote, recorded by the French secret service. In 1925, during the Druze uprising, al-Ghazzī was banished to Lebanon. Another professor Sāmī al-Mīdānī took over his class in public international law. Some students criticized al-Mīdānī because they wanted him to display ‘more nationalism in the explanation of subjects such as the mandate, colonization, the League of Nations, and the rights of minorities’ like al-Ghazzī did. Violent clashes broke out between students criticizing al-Mīdānī and those defending him. The secret service recommended the class be cancelled. Al-Ghazzī was imprisoned for two months and in 1926 sentenced to a compulsory stay in a Lebanese village and finally in Beirut. Footnote 99
The last element necessary for understanding how the sheikh and the bureaucrat would indirectly clash in 1928 is the rise of the Saudi power as a new ‘independent’, Muslim alternative to secular Turkey in the post-Ottoman political landscape. For his resistance, a French army court sentenced al-Qaṣṣāb to death and dispossession in late 1920 so he fled to the British mandate. In Amman, he helped to establish the new mandate emirate of Transjordan - only to liberate Damascus. The French and British secret services and Arab observers started to call the fervently militant sheikh and his activist ‘brothers’ (ikhwān) the ‘Independence Party’. The emir had to order them to go to Mecca in 1923 (al-Qaṣṣāb still had the time to publish a moral treatise with the similarly militant Sheikh al-Qassām in Haifa).Footnote 100 This is how al-Qaṣṣāb became the Director of Public Education in the Hijaz when the Saudi fighters occupied this region. He may have participated in the important conference about the caliphate in Mecca in 1926, the first such gathering of Muslim internationalism under Saudi reign, although there is no mention of the caliphate in his available correspondence. (His friend Rashīd Riḍā was a guest of honour). Al-Qaṣṣāb apparently had a political conflict with the new king ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz who acknowledged the League’s mandate system in 1927. The sheikh was soon charged with what a Saudi official called ‘the press issue in Egypt’ and in September 1927 departed on a British passport to Haifa.Footnote 101
The surgical design of the High Commission to create a constituent assembly in Damascus in 1928 further distanced the life-worlds of the sheikh and al-Ghazzī. High Commissioner Ponsot did not pardon al-Qaṣṣāb and so the sheikh had to stay in Haifa and lobby from there through an Arabic press campaign, letters to representatives, and personal emissaries. On the other hand, al-Ghazzī could return to Damascus in March 1928, was elected as a representative, and became a leader in the Syrian National Bloc. He turned out to be a key figure during the assembly’s sessions in the busy summer of 1928. He constantly injected procedural proposals in the sessions, thus helping to create and fill positions with Bloc members in the assembly. Footnote 102 Al-Ghazzī explained once that the National Bloc ‘holds that the constitution is an internal and unilateral act, which establishes the nation’s sovereignty’.Footnote 103
Al-Ghazzī was a widely known republican, secular nationalist. As early as 1923, he had been the speaker of a Damascene delegation that declared to the High Commissioner that they opposed conscription and requested unity, the release of prisoners, and a representative council. Footnote 104 Al-Ghazzī and his friends, such as Saʿdullah al-Jābirī, were staunchly republican. ‘We should imitate the Turks!’ al-Jābirī shouted impatiently once.Footnote 105 In May 1928, even before the constituent assembly started its work, al-Ghazzī declared his secular republicanism in public.Footnote 106 Indeed, his portrait would not be complete without acknowledging his choice of Arabism over religion. He often emphasized that he wanted to educate the youth instead of serving governments. He wanted to organize students to be a nationalist force in protests. Footnote 107 Even in his last public talk in a school in 1929, before his early death, he lectured about the importance of Arabness over Islam and Christianity. Footnote 108
By contrasting the trajectories of al-Qaṣṣāb and al-Ghazzī, we can clearly see how the French administration differentiated vernacular visions of order. In 1920, the uncompromising sheikh demanded Muslim principles for a new polity, while two years later the young bureaucrat-jurist, under French rule, articulated statehood exclusively in terms of European international law. In fact, during these same years, French administrators similarly were divided about the future political order: some suggested a united monarchy with a Muslim – but non-Arab – king while others preferred a federation of republics.Footnote 109 These conceptions came to a head in 1928.
Monarchy or republic? Vernacular politics within international administration
Let us examine the event of constituting the State of Syria in the summer of 1928 within the transregional context. In this context, we can see that the State of Syria and the new Saudi polity were somewhat belated, undecided post-Ottoman regions. Al-Ghazzī and his friends considered the example of secular and republican Turkey. However, the sheikh of the famous Umayyad Mosque in Damascus prayed for a Muslim prince in February 1928. Footnote 110 There was no shortage of Muslim princes in the 1920s; many were interested in ruling a new princely region. Al-Qaṣṣāb himself chose Fayṣal, the second son of new Saudi king ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, for the throne of Syria. This final section narrates the indirect propaganda of the Saudi-related Syrian activists and how, finally, they had to be content with a republic with a Muslim president instead.
There is a forgotten intersection between the Syrian and Saudi constituent processes in the late 1920s. Many in the fragmented Syrian diaspora looked to King ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz for employment and financial support after his emergence as an independent leader.Footnote 111 Lebanese expats and merchants profited from being intermediaries.Footnote 112 Syrians in Mecca evidently formed a loose grouping, with one letter written to al-Qaṣṣāb referring to them as ‘our centre here’.Footnote 113 We can verify this Syrian grouping also from anxious French consular reports.Footnote 114 They were regularly in touch with al-Qaṣṣāb in Haifa, who in turn was in connection with Rashīd Riḍā and Shukrī al-Quwwatlī in Cairo and with the famous mufti Amīn al-Ḥusaynī in Jerusalem.Footnote 115 In their correspondence, Riḍā regularly conveys greetings from his mother and requests that al-Qaṣṣāb should send spices from Palestine – unless this is coded language, it would appear that the two sheikhs were close friends.Footnote 116 The members of this transregional network, loosely affiliated with the Saudi ruler, prepared their own plans about the new State of Syria.
The constitutional order of the State of Syria, despite being within the mandate, was important for these transregional activists. In March 1928, from Mecca, the Saudi official Fuʾād Ḥamza, a ‘brother’, wrote to al-Qaṣṣāb that King ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, after many requests, finally granted them 2000 (British?) pounds. He sent this amount to Amīn al-Ḥusaynī in Jerusalem through Sheikh Rashīd Riḍā. The purpose was not specified (in Ḥamza’s diary, it is simply mentioned in passing together with buying rifles and munitions).Footnote 117 Ḥamza underlined to al-Qaṣṣāb that this money should be used economically because he thought that they would not receive anything from the king in the future. Finally, he sent asked al-Qaṣṣāb to find out ‘the truth about the Syrian situation’. Footnote 118 The French secret service thought that these activists would use the money for propaganda to support a Saudi candidate for the establishment of a Syrian monarchy.Footnote 119
Indeed, al-Qaṣṣāb started a campaign for Fayṣal b. ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz as a candidate for the throne of Damascus. He sent pamphlets to the city but the police confiscated them.Footnote 120 His ally, the Haifa-based paper al-Karmil, started a campaign for Fayṣal,Footnote 121 and al-Qaṣṣāb soon attempted to finance al-Yarmuk, another Haifa-based paper, too.Footnote 122 The influential al-Jāmiʿa al-ʿArabiyya in Jerusalem, edited by an al-Ḥusaynī, also supported establishing a Saudi prince in Syria.Footnote 123 However, the journal Filasṭīn critically reported that ‘only’ the Independence Party members, with al-Qaṣṣāb at their lead, favoured the Saudi option.Footnote 124
The transregional group mobilized all media power they had. Riḍā’s globally influential journal al-Manār from Cairo argued for a Saudi monarchy in Syria. In a monarchist special issue in June 1928, he started with a defence of the Saudis against the leaders of the Indian Khilafa movement. In this forgotten mini-debate, Indian Muslims claimed that kingship was an unwarranted invention in Islam. They wanted the Hijaz to become a republic with a caliph. Rashīd Riḍā opposed this idea. He argued that ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, following the rightly guided caliphs, protected the pilgrimage, and allowed the Hijazis to rule themselves, and that a Hijaz governed by a global Muslim council would be impractical. Next, in a long article titled ‘The New Syrian Government: Kingdom or Republic?’ Ridā asserted that the majority of Syrian public opinion favoured a kingdom. He gave his support to Fayṣal, the son of ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz, but added that a republic would better serve Syria if this emir was not chosen. Riḍā criticized ‘atheists’ (malāhida), who argued against a Muslim king. Riḍā emphasized that a Muslim religious (mutadayyin) king would be better than an atheist for both Christians and Muslims because such a king would not restrict religious practices, Christian or Muslim. Apart from being an honest Muslim, Riḍā added, Fayṣal, like his father, would be able to control the Bedouins. He closed his essay by accusing another diaspora personality, Amīn al-Rīhānī in the US, who favoured a republic and a Christian president, of sectarianism. Footnote 125
The ‘Independence Party’ sent a letter to all deputies in the Constituent Assembly that the police did not confiscate but carefully read. The letter highlighted that ‘Ibn Saud’ had become the head of the ‘Arab cause’ and that a constitutional king from his family would thus be the best for the Syrians. The authors acknowledged that ‘the republic is the progressive regime form’ but they argued that it would cause misery in religiously diverse Syria because only ‘kingship is the guarantee of neutrality in the country’. They thought that the presidential elections would cause disorder and that only a king could save the country from anarchy. The final argument was that a truly constitutional king would not be able to rule, only to reign, and that therefore no one should be afraid of tyranny.Footnote 126 (The deputies may have considered these arguments somewhat weak because exactly in June 1928 King Fuad – a Muslim, constitutional ruler – suspended the Egyptian constitution.)
Religious realpolitik was clearly at play here, as these activists were attached to Islam as the source of legal order and not to the regime form of monarchy. Other monarchist groups tried to acquire a fatwa (Muslim legal opinion) in favour of their preferred regime form. The question they posed was carefully crafted (‘It is known to your Eminences that the principle of government in Islam is consultative government which rests on a king who collects opinions and executes laws. Is it possible to replace this regime form […] with the civil republican form?’)Footnote 127 Al-Qaṣṣāb and Riḍā did not resort to such legal-theological tricks. They advocated a practical choice against secularism. In their conception, Islam followed monarchy, especially a constitutional Saudi one, and not vice versa.
The political construction of the State of Syria shook up the post-Ottoman regional order. Fayṣal, the king in Baghdad, was angry to hear that another Fayṣal was the favourite candidate –worse, one whose father had just chased his family out of Mecca. He told the French consul that appointing a ‘fanatic prince would be a grave danger’ and recommended the appointment of his older brother ʿAlī. Footnote 128 Fayṣal’s main goal was not necessarily to install a Hashemite prince, but to exclude the possibility of a Saudi one. His manoeuvres aimed at re-distributing lands and people. A five-man delegation arrived from Baghdad in Damascus in June 1928. The leader of the delegation Nūrī al-Saʿīd told Ponsot that ‘his main goal was to explain the dangers of the candidature of a Wahhabite prince’. He added that a Hashemite ruler would be best placed to secure close, ‘friendly’ relations between Iraq and Syria. Ponsot replied that a Hashemite candidate would anger the ‘Wahhabites’ and vice versa. In any case, Ponsot underlined that he would not tolerate fervent propaganda and the Syrian assembly appeared uninterested in a new Hashemite king. Footnote 129 The Iraqi delegation soon left Damascus.
High Commissioner Ponsot was also surprised by the support for the Saudi option. In general, French officials appear to have been indifferent towards the regime type in the new State of Syria. They saw the political system only as a necessary element in the management of the population. Ponsot resorted to racist tropes to explain to the Foreign Ministry why ‘educated Syrians’ were turning to ‘tribal Bedouins’: it was ‘a dream of the intellectuals about the heroes of their race: Omar and Moawia [!]’. However, despite his own officials favouring a republic, Ponsot wrote in the same letter that ‘monarchy can give the best stability and strength to the government of a country and can provide permanent support to our action’.Footnote 130 Later, even after the suspension of the assembly, some notables told Ponsot that the assembly should choose a king and that Fayṣal, the Saudi prince, was still the best candidate.Footnote 131
While neither the French officials nor the League intervened directly, the making of the Syrian political order within the administrative regime meant a delimited, constrained space that preferred cooperative actors. Al-Ghazzī and his friends had to investigate the matter. How could they establish a republic among such a whirl of monarchist parties? First, they talked to the ‘independence party’. In early June 1928, al-Ghazzī travelled with fellow republican Saʿdullāh al-Jābirī and others to Baalbek for holiday. The French secret service noted that they met with two ‘agents’ of the exiled Shukrī Quwwatlī, yet another of al-Ghazzī’s classmates in pre-war Istanbul, who was member of the ‘Independence Party’ at the time. After this meeting, there were rumours that they agreed on a Saudi prince for Syria but the secret service noted that this was not the case. Footnote 132 Next, al-Ghazzī had to be sure that when he presented the republican draft everybody – or at least the majority – in the Constituent Assembly would be in line. He regularly invited monarchists (both Damascene and Alepine ones, pro-Hashemites and pro-Saudis) to reconcile their views with the republicans in his house. Footnote 133 High Commissioner Ponsot finally also came out in support of a republic. He feared that a new Arab king, of whatever kind, in Syria would be a risk for French rule in North Africa.
In fact, the French officials did not trust the nationalists. Delélée-Desloges, the High Commission representative in Damascus, had created a basic law for the State of Syria as early as January 1928. The ‘Delélée project’ contained several draft texts. There was a declaration in which the State of Syria was recognized as independent and sovereign but the Mandatory Power remained the final arbitrator between Syria and the other mandate states. Second, there was the ‘constitutional law’ of the State of Syria. This text, comprising ninety-seven articles, was based on serious legal comparative work: Delélée compared the Chérifienne monarchical constitution (possibly the 1919 ‘Damascus Program’), a number of mandate and non-mandate Arab constitutions, and the 1875 French constitution. The text declared a republican regime and inscribed the High Commissioner as the final authority. Delélée revised the text in May.Footnote 134
Like Delélée-Desloges, al-Ghazzī preferred to codify a republican regime. The Syrian assembly created their own committee for drafting the text. Al-Ghazzī, as vice-president of the assembly, and legal scholar Fāris al-Khūrī supervised the committee informally. The legal office of the High Commission sent a document – ‘The Most Important Points that a Constitution Must Contain’ – to them. The committee decided to ‘reproduce almost the Faysali constitution’ in a republican form. Footnote 135 But they probably also used the information cautiously supplied by the High Commission men in Damascus. They sent their own draft to Delélée-Desloges in July. He found the territorial articles ‘unacceptable’, other articles ‘impractical’ and others ‘insufficient’.Footnote 136 Delélée-Desloges advised in favour of a preamble that would codify the Mandatory Power’s approval of the constitution.Footnote 137 If the mandate terms were inscribed, a republic in the State of Syria appeared to be just fine for the High Commission. Al-Qaṣṣāb and the Independentists accused al-Ghazzī of presidential ambitions.Footnote 138
In the perspective of the ‘decisionist’ constitutional theory, the cooperation of nationalists with the High Commission carried an inherent contradiction. In 1928, Carl Schmitt in Germany not only argued that the constitution was a decision about sovereignty but also conditioned freedom to this decision. He argued that ‘when an international law contract regulates the government and administration of a third land […] it is a denial of political existence.’ Consequently, for Schmitt, the governments in the mandate A territories ‘cannot have a constitution in a positive sense’.Footnote 139
Al-Ghazzī, this Syrian Schmitt, understood well the contradiction inherent in claiming a constitution as a free decision of the nation while under an international administration. His strategic idea was that the constitution was an instrument to be voted on at the time but to be applied fully only later. Footnote 140 He understood that constitution-making was part of a racist discourse, and Syrians had to ‘prove’ to the League that they were able to create basic laws within the mandate. He was inclined to reach an agreement with the High Commission behind the scenes. He belonged to a small sub-group in the National Bloc who set his sights only on what he might realistically hope to gain from the French. Footnote 141 Yet he could not, or did not want to, stop the inclusion of territorial demands in the assembly’s draft. When in August 1928 Ponsot asked the assembly to delete the problematic articles, al-Ghazzī remarked in a speech: ‘I preached a week ago that [territorial] unity should not be part of the constitution […] because I saw already the clouds in the sky gathering’; but he still continued with the suggestion ‘to vote about not suppressing the six articles’. Footnote 142 The High Commission suspended the sessions on 9 August 1928. A few months later, al-Ghazzī urged his fellow nationalists to reach an agreement but this was in vain.Footnote 143 He could argue no more because his wife, who had an agenda of her own (she was involved in an illicit love affair), poisoned him in the summer of 1929.Footnote 144 After the High Commission’s declaration and the submission of the organic law to the League, Syrians faced a new challenge about running a sovereign, constitutional polity within the continued French administrative regime.
Conclusion
‘Why Abbas Hilmi and why not me?’ asked Syrian ex-president Sheikh Tāj al-Dīn in desperation in June 1933, when a French diplomat enquired yet again about establishing a Syrian monarchy – this time with the ex-khedive of Egypt. Footnote 145 We might assume that the submission of the republican constitution to the League closed the issue. However, there remained significant (pro-Nāmī, pro-Hashemite, pro-Saudi) monarchist organizations in Syrian cities. Non-Syrian Muslim grandees continued to propose themselves to bewildered French officials and the public in the 1930s. The al-Qaṣṣāb grouping also prepared for the future. They thought that the National Bloc achieved only what was convenient for French interests. Ḥamza from Mecca sent his opinion that the struggle between the Syrians and the French would continue because their respective preferred constitutional regimes (al-ashkāl al-dustūriyya) were different. Footnote 146 The imagined throne of Syria remained a precious card in the hands of French diplomacy, too. They used it successfully in the negotiations about the Mosul pipeline’s branch to Tripoli. Footnote 147 A king in Syria – especially a Saudi one – remained a possibility until the 1940s.
I have argued that an event-based approach in global legal history can facilitate the critical study of large transformations, such as the change from imperial (‘inter-polity’) to international and national systems. I have translated the rhetorical tension between empire and nation into the analytical tension between administrative and political methods to generate legal order after 1919. This means two issues for further research. First, historians could investigate administrative, regulatory, non-sovereign practices as forms of domination in the interwar period and later. The event-based perspective could be also used to analyse the making of territorially distinct authority, for instance, in French Algeria and other subordinated territories in the 1940s-1950s and Soviet constituent ordering during the Cold War. Finally, we can rethink ‘decolonization’ as a series of events of administrative reorganization.
Second, historians may study interwar political orders as vernacular forms of legal statehood. Even if critical political scientists prefer Foucauldian or post-Foucauldian definitions of the political, critical historians cannot disregard the social logic of a given period. The indirect clash between young secularists and older Muslim activists over the use of the constitution as a normative instrument of social engineering shows just how important the political order in its classic definition was for post-Ottoman Arab intellectuals. The French parliamentary left empowered a group of elite Syrians to create the basic law in their new polity. Yet the Syrian chapter in the global history of interwar constitutions ended in the compromise that the president had to be a Muslim – until today.
Acknowledgements
I wish to thank Faiz Ahmed, Mohammed Ali, Aziz Al-Azmeh, Dirk Bonker, Miriam Cooke, Frederick Cooper, Laura F. Edwards, Noah Feldman, Malachi Hacohen, Philippe Pétriat, Michael Provence, Sumathi Ramaswamy, Eugene Rogan, Cyrus Schayegh, Tom Welsford, Jill Wuenschel, the anonymous reviewers, and Heidi Tworek. I benefitted from the support of the Josiah Charles Trent Memorial Foundation Endowment Fund and a fellowship at the Paris Institute for Advanced Study (France), with the financial support of the French State, program ‘Investissements d’avenir’, managed by the Agence Nationale de la Recherche (ANR-11-LABX-0027-01 Labex RFIEA+).
Adam Mestyan is assistant professor in the History Department of Duke University. He is currently working on his second monograph, Modern Arab Kingship. Recent publications include Arab Patriotism: The Ideology and Culture of Power in Late Ottoman Egypt (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017) and Primordial History, Print Capitalism, and Egyptology in Nineteenth-Century Cairo (Cairo: Ifao, 2021).
