Published with the permission of the Historical Documents Centre, Damascus (Document number 16/5381, Inventory 2, State Documents section). [A color version of this figure can be viewed online at journals.cambridge.org/mes]

In February 1939, the Syrian government received two documents from ʿulamaʾ protesting two decrees of the French High Commission that were intended to reform personal status law in Syria: decree 60/L.R. of 13 March 1936 and decree 146/L.R. of 18 November 1938. The first was a petition signed by Muslims from Homs to the Syrian prime minister (pictured)Footnote ¹; the second was a letter from the Damascus Association of ʿUlamaʾ to the Syrian interior minister.Footnote ²

On first reading, the documents are similar in content. The Homs petition lists five specific objections to articles in the decrees, including those that would permit adult Muslims to change their religion and oblige children to follow the father's religion should a marriage end in death or divorce (rather than automatically following the Muslim parent, even if that parent was the mother). The Damascus letter makes seven objections, four of which cover precisely the same ground as the Homs petition. The terms of condemnation are also similar: for the Homs petition, the notion that Syrian law would recognize the marriage of a Muslim woman to a non-Muslim man is “an attack on the shariʿa and a violation of its statutes”; for the Damascus letter, it is “a substitution of God's law and an attack on the Muslims in their religion.” For the former, the decrees “enjoin the unrest of the Islamic world”; for the latter, they have “stirred the Muslims in the other Islamic regions to defend their great religion.”

If their content initially seems similar, however, the documents are very different in form. The Homs petition is handwritten on a single, large sheet of paper, seemingly cut to measure, and personally signed by over 200 individuals (see figure). The letter from the Damascus Association of ʿUlamaʾ is typed on several sheets of paper of regular format; it bears the association's printed letterhead, reference data for filing, and a single signature—that of Kamil al-Qassab, president—over the association's stamp.

These striking differences in form point back to subtler differences in content. The signatories of the Homs petition only describe themselves as “the Muslims”; they give an authoritative opinion on the decrees, but their authority to speak for the whole community is personal, vested in their individual signatures—they are not formally constituted as a representative body. It is the governor's covering letter, not the petition, that describes the authors as “the senior ʿulamaʾ of the city and the elite of its notables.” Their petition is concerned with the implications of reform at a societal level: Islamic law provides for the proper functioning of society, and by contravening Islamic law these reforms would disturb that functioning. Neither the religious courts charged with implementing that law nor the state charged with guaranteeing it are mentioned: the signatories merely ask the prime minister to transmit their petition to the “competent authorities” to bring about the decree's revocation. Islamic law and tradition are the basis of the argument, and the decrees' contravention of these is established by assertion (“the said decree in its entirety contradicts the religion of Islam and its shariʿa”) rather than through specific reference to the texts.

Implicitly and explicitly, al-Qassab's letter makes a more complex argument. The association is self-consciously operating as a modern bureaucratic institution addressing, and seeking to influence, another: the Syrian state. The letter makes specific demands of the state—for example, that the government order the state courts to disregard the reform decrees—and adopts “official” forms to do so: a typed letter on headed paper, from one bureaucratic official (the association's president) to another (the Syrian interior minister). Bracketing the objections raised by the Homs petition, the letter raises three more—all of which relate to the legal relationship between Islam and the state. The reform decrees, it complains, treat the Muslims as a community like any other; they also make the religious head of the community its representative to the public authorities, whereas Islam “does not give this authority . . . to anyone, however great his status.” Moreover, by establishing a supreme court to rule in disputes between different personal status jurisdictions, they place a civil judicial institution of the state above Islamic law.

The state is not only the object of the Damascus letter's demands but also its chief frame of reference. The state's legal existence derived from the League of Nations: the association invokes the League charter. The League's ideal of the self-determination of peoples meant that nation–states had to represent their populations: the association asserts Islam's normative role in Syrian state law not just as the true religion but also—citing that most “state” of instruments, the census—as the religion of a majority of the population. In both content and form, the association's letter is unimaginable outside the context of the modern nation–state.

These two documents were written within days of each other by leading Syrian ʿulamaʾ. Both express Muslim opposition to legal reform. One is self-consciously “modern,” at ease with the existence of a Syrian nation–state and seeking to harness it: the conservatism of a figure like al-Qassab does not imply a rejection of the nation–state or a “problem” with modernity. The other is “traditional” in form and content—though its very “traditional” form may be a conscious choice, because inhabitants of even quite remote parts of bilad al-sham had been directly addressing their government by telegraph since Ottoman times. However, even if the Homs tradition has a much hazier conception of the Syrian state, it is nonetheless addressed, like al-Qassab's letter, to the government of that state—not to the French mandatory authorities. The authors of both documents, unlike many a Christian patriarch, correctly recognized that in the long run the struggle to define Syrian society could only be played out at the level of the Syrian state.