On April 25, 1920, the Allied victors of World War I issued the San Remo agreement. It denied King Faysal’s bid for a sovereign Syrian Arab kingdom, dividing it into mandates to be governed by Britain and France. Surprisingly, politicians in the Kingdom’s capital of Damascus responded by convening a constitutional congress. They chose the leading scholar of Islamic reformism in the Arab world, Rashid Rida, as the congress president. Over the next two months, Faysal’s party debated constitutional articles with its opposition. Issues included the degree of bureaucratic centralization, women’s suffrage, and whether the head of state need be Muslim. The convention had not finished ratifying all articles, however, when the French overthrew Faysal’s regime on July 23, 1920. Existing scholarship on the Faysal era (1918-1920) does not adequately address the significance of the constitutional congress in Middle Eastern history. Using the original Arabic text of the constitution, Rida’s own writings, Arabic memoirs, and press accounts, this paper aims to recuperate the motives of those who convened the congress and to recapture the meaning of their debates. I hypothesize that the congress was a response to the logic of the League of Nations mandate, intended for peoples not yet ready for self-government. Politicians in Damascus sought to demonstrate their ability to establish a modern state, which in their eyes required a constitution. Second, I argue that the constitution was no window dressing. It is a historically significant document that captures political sentiment on the eve of French occupation. It was, most notably, the most democratic constitution to date in the Middle East, wherein the king’s power was significantly limited by the legislative branch. It also united secularists and Islamists around liberal principles. The only overtly Islamic element of the constitution was that the head of state must be Muslim. And yet, Rida pronounced it an Islamic form of government. Rida’s endorsement challenges the view that secular and Islamic politicians had divided into hostile camps before World War I. The political common ground between liberalism and Islamic reform, however, was sundered by France’s invasion. Rida and other Islamic leaders turned their backs on liberalism as a false universal model of justice, as a Trojan horse of European intervention, and as corrosive to local culture. Rida himself returned to Cairo and inspired calls for a new Arab caliphate and for explicitly Islamic politics like that of the Muslim Brotherhood.

1919 was a moment of political possibility in Greater Syria, with the elites of the region viewing the Ottoman Empire’s demise as an opportunity to create their own political future. These elites envisioned a myriad of new political paths for their region, ranging from the formation of an independent Greater Syria linked with a large confederation of Arab states, to the establishment of several separate states with a ‘great power’ helping to modernize each of them. In hopes of heading off British, French, and Zionist designs on the region, these elites used the visit of the King-Crane Commission (a group of Americans who visited Greater Syria in hopes of learning the political aspirations of the region’s inhabitants) as a chance to debate, make public, and eventually consolidate their opinions about the region’s political future (the Damascus Program of July, 1919). Although the report of the King-Crane Commission accurately conveyed the opinions of these elites to the Paris Peace Conference, the Commission wielded no influence over decisions made by the British and French for the region and the optimism of the moment vanished with the formal imposition of imperial rule over a divided Greater Syria. Drawing on heretofore unutilized evidence from the records of the King-Crane Commission and the intelligence reports of the Zionist Commission (who rightly feared that many in the region would oppose Zionism), this paper will examine the diversity of elite visions for the future of Greater Syria in 1919. Although it is true that the varied opinions among the elites of the region and the grander compromise represented by the Damascus Program played little role in the political reorganization of Greater Syria, this paper argues that the articulation of these competing visions for Greater Syria constitute an important moment in the elite conceptualization of the region’s political future that would resurface in various forms in the ensuing years. Studying these unrealized articulations (largely ignored by scholars) offers a counterfactual glimpse of what the region’s future could have been without the British, French, and Zionist imperial interruptions. In a sense, this was the first major flourish of public debate about Greater Syria’s political future and offers a discursive base for the study of the region’s post-Ottoman political evolution.

After 402 years of Ottoman rule in Syria, the Arab government of Amir Faysal in Damascus tried to come to terms with the defeated Turkish government and coordinate military action with it against the common enemy, the French occupiers. An alleged treaty of friendship and military cooperation is mentioned to have been signed between Mustafa Kamal and Amir Faysal on 19 June 1919. This paper, based on Arabic contemporary sources, including memoirs of Syrian rebels who cooperated with the Turks, and also British, American and French diplomatic dispatches examines the authenticity of the alleged treaty and its implementation. In addition to ammunition provided by the Turks, a token Turkish military force approved by Ibrahim Hanano the head of the Syrian rebellion in the north was sent to Syria not to fight but to reassure the Syrians of Turkish support. Hanano had already visited Turkey in July 1920 for coordinating military effort after the Arab government of King Faysal in Damascus had fallen to the French in July 1920. The Turkish force carried a flag showing on one side the Turkish flag and on the other the Syrian flag with a band mentioning Believers are Brothers. When members of this force plundered the Christian village of Suqaylbiyya, in the region of Hamah, Hanano held a tribunal on the spot and executed the culprits with Turkish approval so as not to compromise the public trust in the integrity of the rebellion. Also, with the Turkish ammunition there infiltrated into Syria through Aleppo Bolshevik tracts from Turkey’s Soviet allies which raised the anxiety of Amir Faysal and his British supporters. When Turkey signed a truce with France on 11 March 1921, the Turks stopped their aid to the Syrian rebels who had already lost the support of the Arab government and now faced massive French pressure after the French had concentrated against them the troops they had withdrawn from the Turkish war theatre in Cilicia. The Syrian rebellion in the north petered out and many top rebels sought refuge in Turkey encouraged by Islamic solidarity with the Turks.

Historians of the modern Middle East have begun reexamining the period between the end of Ottoman rule in the Arab provinces and the imposition of European colonialism after WWI, leading to the formation of the new nation states of Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Syria. Rather than regard this period as a strict bifurcation between Ottoman and European rule, where Ottoman loyalties were replaced with new national identities, as Arab nationalist historical narratives have claimed, historians have begun treating these years as a transitory phase, identifying persistent loyalties to the Ottoman empire, locating the existence of popular forms of Arab and Islamic identities, and recognizing that national identities were at a nascent stage of development. One figure that represents the fluidity of this period is Shaykh Abd al-Qadir al-Muzzafar (1894-1949), an Arab activist of the late Ottoman period and of the era of British-ruled Palestine (1917-1948). This paper will examine Shaykh al-Muzzafar’s career from the closing years of Ottoman rule in Palestine when British troops arrived in December 1917 to the formation of the new nation state of Palestine, governed by Britain under a League of Nations Mandate, officially enacted in September 1923. Between these two periods – December 1917 to September 1923 – Shaykh al-Muzzafar’s career represented the liminal nature of this era, as British authority had replaced Ottoman rule, yet, the political direction of the country remained unresolved and different political opportunities remained available. Shaykh al-Muzzafar pursued political options beyond the Palestinian nationalist framework, such as a continued support for the Ottomans, loyalty to an Arab and Islamic identity, and support for the Arab government of Prince Faysal in Syria (1918-1920). During this period, he became active in helping to set up various Arab nationalist groups in Damascus and Jerusalem, a leading member of the main Palestinian nationalist group in Palestine, and a vocal advocate for Ottoman and Turkish support for the Palestinian cause. Based on British colonial records, Arabic newspapers, and memoirs, this paper will argue that Shaykh al-Muzzafar’s career reflected a transitory phase of modern Middle Eastern history, where the end of Ottoman rule in Palestine offered political strategies beyond the nation state dimension, based instead on Arab, Islamic and Ottoman loyalties.