Colonial Citizens

COLONIAL CITIZENS: REPUBLICAN RIGHTS, PATERNAL PRIVILEGE, AND GENDER IN FRENCH SYRIA AND LEBANON Elizabeth Thompson COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS

colonial citizens

the history and society of the modern middle east, leila fawaz, general editor

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colonial citizens


Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon

Elizabeth Thompson

columbia university press new york

Thanks to the following institutions for their authorization to reproduce the illustrations in this book: Imperial War Museum for figure 13; Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford for figures 20–22; Direction des Archives, Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris for figures 2–5 and 17; and Princeton University Press, for the map.

Columbia University Press Publishers Since  New York

Chichester, West Sussex

Copyright ©  Columbia University Press All rights reserved Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Thompson, Elizabeth Colonial citizens : republic rights, paternal privilege, and gender in French Syria and Lebanon / Elizabeth Thompson. p. cm. — (History and society of the modern Middle East series) Includes bibliographical references (p. – ) and index. ISBN ––– (cloth). — ISBN ––– (pbk.) . Syria—Social policy. . Syria—Social conditions—th century. . Women—Syria— Social conditions—History—th century. . Syria—History—French occupation, –. . Lebanon—Social policy. . Lebanon—Social conditions—th century. . Women—Lebanon—Social conditions—History—th century. . Lebanon— History—French occupation, –. I. Title. II. Series. .



'.—

–

Case bound editions of Columbia University Press books are printed on permanent and durable acid-free paper. Printed in the United States of America c           p          

To David, with love and gratitude

The History and Society of the Modern Middle East Leila Fawaz, General Editor Andrea B. Rugh, Within the Circle: Parents and Children in an Arab Village Selma Botman, Engendering Citizenship in Egypt Janet Afari, The Iranian Constitutional Revolution Juan Cole, Modernity and the Millennium Elizabeth Thompson, Colonial Citizens: Republican Rights, Paternal Privilege, and Gender in French Syria and Lebanon

contents


Acknowledgments ix Note on Transliteration xi Abbreviations xiii Chronology xv Map of Syria and Lebanon in the Mandate Era

Introduction

xix



Part I War and the Advent of French Rule: A Crisis of Paternity 15 . World War I: Famine, Memory, and a Shattered Social Order  . Soldiers and Patriarchs: Pillars of Colonial Paternalism  . Bureaucrats: Mother France’s Civilizing Mission 

Part II Paternal Republicanism and the Construction of Subaltern Citizens 7 1 . State Social Policy: Constructing a Hierarchy of Citizens . Revolt: The Rise of Subaltern Movements 



Part III Gender and the Legal Boundaries of the Colonial Civic Order 113 . Political Rights: Women’s Suffrage as a Revolutionary Threat  . The Veil and the Dual Legal System  . Civil Rights: Patriotic Motherhood and Religious Law Reform  . Social Rights: Emergence of a Colonial Welfare State 



contents Part IV Gendering the Public: Spatial Boundaries of the Colonial Civic Order 17 1 . Remapping the Urban Landscape  . Street Violence: Regendering an Old Urban Space  . Cinemas: Gendering a New Urban Space  . The Press: Gendering the Virtual Public 

Part V World War II and the Transformation of the Colonial Civic Order 225 . Climax of the Colonial Welfare State  . Claiming Paternity of Independent Republics  . The Making of Postcolonial Citizens 

Appendix  Notes  Bibliography  Index 

Illustrations appear as a group after page 

acknowledgments


It has been a pleasure and a privilege to come to know the women and men who lived during the French mandate in Syria and Lebanon. The opportunity to learn about them was afforded me by the generous support of several institutions and many kind individuals. The Joint Committee on the Near and Middle East of the Social Science Research Council and the American Council of Learned Societies supported my dissertation research, upon which this book is based. Funds from the Middle East Institute at Columbia University, the Harry Frank Guggenheim Foundation, the French Republic’s Bourse Chateaubriand, and the history department at the University of Virginia helped me to start and finish the project. This study would not have been possible without the records left behind by French administrators and stored at the French foreign ministry’s diplomatic archives in Paris and Nantes. Equally valuable were the collections of Arabicand French-language periodicals at the Asad and Zahiriya libraries and French Institute in Damascus, the Bibliothèque nationale annex in Versailles, the British Library, and Harvard College Library. Additional archives and libraries preserved other perspectives that enriched this study: the Historical Documents Center in Damascus; the Jesuit archives in Vanves; the military archives in Vincennes; the Chamber of Commerce and the Maison de l’Orient méditerranéen in Lyon; the Alliance Israélite, the Cujas law library and CHEAM in Paris; the Public Record Office in London; and Middle East Centre at St. Antony’s College and the Centre for Lebanese Studies in Oxford. I am grateful to the staffs at these institutions for their assistance, and especially to Alice Deyab at Harvard, who provided invaluable guidance on women’s periodicals; Nadim Shehadi at Oxford, whose invitation to a  conference on the French mandate connected me with other scholars of the period; Pascal Even, former curator at Nantes, who released many classified documents from the World



acknowledgments

War II period that were essential to my research; and Pierre Fournié at the Quai d’Orsay in Paris, who helped me find many of the illustrations reproduced here. I wish to express, finally, my profound gratitude to the many individuals who gave freely of their time and expertise to help me conceptualize, research and write this book. I owe a great debt to faculty at Columbia University, especially to Atina Grossmann for inspiring the project during a graduate seminar, to Robert Paxton for his guidance on French scholarship, and to Richard Bulliet and Lisa Anderson for their unwaivering encouragement. Abdul-Karim Rafeq at the College of William and Mary has been a true mentor over the years, always ready to comment on drafts, guide research, and retrieve materials on his regular trips home to Damascus. James Gelvin at UCLA was the first to alert me to the existence of the Nantes archives and so to the possibility of undertaking this study. In Damascus, Nazih Kawakibi introduced me to the urban history of the city, Amal Husseini helped me find information on the women’s movement and my dear friend Soura retrieved copies of women’s magazines from the American University of Beirut’s library when I was not permitted to travel to Lebanon. I thank Mark Thomas for help on analyzing financial data and Anne Stinehart for her translations from German. And for help on preparing illustrations for the book, I thank Palmira Brummett, Sarah Graham-Brown, and William Cleveland. The comments of Cynthia Aron, Brian Balogh, Beth Baron, Herbert (Tico) Braun, Nicole Dombrowski, Ellen Fleischmann, Steven Heydemann, Steve Innis, Philip Khoury, and Farzaneh Milani on various drafts of the manuscript clarified and strengthened my argument, as did conversations with Eileen Boris, Jean-Claude David, Randi Deguilhem, Leila Fawaz, Akram Khater, Josh Landis, Elisabeth Longuenesse, Garay Menicucci, Françoise Métral, Birgit Schaebler, and Christian Velud. Support from personal friends, especially Renée Friedman, Ariel Salzmann, and the late and much-missed Estelle Whelan, inspired me and relieved the angst of research and writing. I would never have aspired to become a scholar without the encouragement of my mother, Ruth Thompson, whose support has meant so much to me through the years. I reserve my deepest gratitude for my husband, David Waldner, whose faith and love gave me the courage to carry this project through. Elizabeth Thompson July 

note on transliteration


My guiding principle in transliterating Arabic has been to ease the difficulties of nonspecialist readers. Most Arabic words and names have been rendered into Latin letters according to a simplified version of the system used in the International Journal of Middle East Studies. I have omitted case endings and diacriticals, except the “ ‘ayn,” and I have used the simpler “-iya” suffix instead of “-iyya.” The prefix “al-” is used only when I mention a person’s full name; it is dropped in references to the last name alone. For consistency, I have followed the vocalization of formal Arabic in names that are often pronounced differently in colloquial Arabic; for example, I write “Marja” Square for the place known locally and often written as “Marjeh.” I have departed from this system to use common English spellings of betterknown Arabic words and place names, and to follow the spellings of personal names preferred by many of the Lebanese and Syrians mentioned in the text. Hence, I use “Rose” instead of the strictly transliterated “Ruz” for the woman’s first name. Some inconsistencies inevitably occur. In bibliographical citations, I have used name spellings that appear on articles or books written by Arabs in English or French; however, when the same author published in Arabic, I have used a standard transliteration because that is how the name is listed in library catalogues.

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abbreviations


AHCJ AIU AUB BLIO BLNL BN CCL CHEAM DKZ

FO FL HC IFEAD IJMES LLS MA MAE MAE-Nantes/ MAE-Nantes/ MAE-Paris/

Archives historiques de la Compagnie de Jésus, Vanves Alliance Israélite universelle, Paris American University in Beirut, Jafet Library The British Library, India Office Library and Records, London The British Library, Newspaper Library, London Bibliothèque nationale, newspaper annex, Versailles Archives de la Chambre de commerce et d’industrie, Lyon Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l’Afrique et l’Asie modernes, Paris: Fonds Mémoires du CHEAM Dar al-kutub al-wataniya al-zahiriya [Zahiriya Library], Damascus (Note: many of these documents have since been transferred to the Asad Library) Foreign Office archives, Public Record Office, London Firestone Library, Princeton University Haut Commissariat de la République française en Syrie et au Liban Institut français d’Etudes arabes de Damas, Damascus International Journal of Middle East Studies Syrian–Lebanese lira (currency) Maktabat al-Asad [Asad Library], Damascus Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Paris Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques de Nantes: Fonds Beyrouth Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques de Nantes: Service des Oeuvres françaises à l’étranger Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques, Quai d’Orsay, Paris: Série E-Levant –

 MAE-Paris/ MAE-Rapport

MWT NYPL RMMM SHAT USNA

abbreviations Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques, Quai d’Orsay, Paris: Série Guerre –8— Turquie Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Rapport à la Société des Nations sur la situation de la Syrie et du Liban (annual, –8) Markaz al-watha’iq al-tarikhiya [Historical Documents Center], Damascus New York Public Library, main research branch Revue du Monde musulman et de la Méditerranée Service historique de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes: Section d’Afrique/– Levant National Archives of the United States, Washington D.C. and Suitland, Maryland: Records of the Department of State, Central Files, Record Groups (RG) 8 and 

chronology of principal events in syria and lebanon, 1914–1946 

   

  



  



‒ 

World War I begins Famine starts in Mount Lebanon Faysal and the Entente powers occupy Syria and Lebanon Women’s suffrage debate languishes in the Syrian Congress French occupy Syria after battle of Maysalun Greater Lebanon proclaimed by High Commissioner Henri Gouraud French mandate for Syria and Lebanon assigned by League of Nations Maxime Weygand named high commissioner Lebanese Representative Council rejects women’s suffrage First major Islamic populist group, al-Gharra, founded Maurice Sarrail named high commissioner Syrian Revolt begins Sarrail dismissed, Henry de Jouvenel becomes high commissioner Syrian-Lebanese Communist Party founded Lebanese constitution adopted Henri Ponsot named high commissioner Syrian Revolt ends Nazira Zayn al-Din publishes Unveiling and Veiling Syrian constituent assembly convenes Syrian-Lebanese women’s union conference, Beirut Syrian constitution decreed by Henri Ponsot Women’s union conference, Beirut First Eastern Women’s Conference, Damascus First Syrian elections Lebanese constitution suspended

 

– 



 – 

– 

–





chronology Antun Sa‘ada founds Syrian National Party First employee-only labor unions founded, Beirut Damien de Martel becomes high commissioner Syrian parliament suspended Protective labor laws enacted for women and children Syrian general strike restarts treaty negotiations Constitutional life resumes and National Bloc elected in Syria Rise of proto-fascist youth groups Lebanese constitution reinstated Mandate labor report reveals high unemployment among artisans and women homeworkers Labor movement unites in campaign for comprehensive labor codes Gabriel Puaux named high commissioner French parliament rejects independence treaties Labor codes rejected in Syrian and Lebanese parliaments Protests force repeal of personal status law reforms Parliaments suspended and military rule imposed as World War II begins Hunger marches and bread riots against wartime shortages Puaux replaced by Vichy supporter Henri Dentz Free French and British oust Vichy government, promise independence Georges Catroux heads the renamed Delegation General Mass mobilization of nationalist, proto-fascist, Islamic populist, women’s, labor and Communist movements State adoption of new social welfare commitments Nationalists win elections Shukri al-Quwwatli elected president of Syria and Bishara al-Khuri elected Lebanese president National Pact declared in Lebanon New French Delegate General, Jean Helleu, arrests Lebanese government leaders, sparking mass protests and violence French transfer control of civilian administration to nationalist governments Revolt by Islamic populists in Damascus Women’s suffrage rejected by Lebanese parliament Arab women’s conference in Cairo

chronology  

Violent revolt in Syria Syrian Muslim Brotherhood founded French and British troops evacuate Full independence achieved Labor codes adopted



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Map of Syria and Lebanon in the Mandate Era

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colonial citizens

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introduction


This book is a study of how states and their citizens are constructed under colonialism and then bequeathed to their postcolonial successors. It begins with the proposition that even as colonial peoples waged nationalist battles for independence they inevitably participated in the very political order that they rejected. Linked to that proposition is a second one, that colonizers could not and did not unilaterally impose a system of rule. Colonialism involved, as do most other political systems, constant negotiation of power relationships and identities. Such negotiation often came across the barrels of guns, but it more routinely occurred across desks and tables, and in newspapers and telegrams. Negotiators struck bargains along the way that shaped the powers and responsibilities of the state and the rights and obligations of colonial citizens. The resultant network of power relationships constitutes the colonial civic order, a term I use to designate the broad arena in which states and citizens interact. The civic order embodies norms and institutions that govern relations among citizens and between citizens and the state. It is within the civic order that the terms of citizenship and state power are both expressed and continually renegotiated among agents of the formal state apparatus, its unofficial agents, and their clients. The term civic order is useful because it emphasizes the fluidity of interaction and negotiation, and deemphasizes the boundary between state and society. Indeed, in colonial contexts, clear boundaries rarely existed, as colonizers routinely depended upon indigenous intermediaries to exercise rule. Bargains struck between the state and its mediating agents set the terms of membership in the civic order, and consequently defined terms of citizenship variously for different groups within the population. This book is concerned specifically with the construction of a colonial civic order in Syria and Lebanon, countries created by European powers after the Ottoman Empire was defeated in World War I and governed by the



introduction

French as a mandate, a system of tutelary and temporary rule authorized by the League of Nations. Syria and Lebanon are apt cases for the study of colonial civic orders because they simply did not exist before  as national polities; by the time they achieved independence at the end of World War II, however, basic norms and institutions had been laid that would shape government and citizenship for decades afterward. It is appropriate to view Syrians and Lebanese living under the French mandate as colonial citizens, rather than as passive subjects, in law and insofar as they actively engaged in the definition of their civil status. Citizenship is usually defined as a relationship between the state and individuals governed by legal rights. By  the countries had adopted republican constitutions that explicitly granted basic rights of citizenship to all inhabitants. These constitutions fostered engagement with the state through elected parliaments and rights to free speech and association. Some citizens were able to engage the state more directly than others, who found themselves distanced from contact with the state by mediating authorities. However, because distance and mediation varied so much, and came under constant negotiation, I have in this book eschewed the rigid distinction commonly made between citizen and subject. There was no clear line, in the eyes of contemporaries, that could be crossed from one status to another. I have instead emphasized the fluidity of status, ranging from “subaltern” citizens whose rights were limited by privileged elites to “full” citizens who enjoyed a maximum of rights under the constitutions, subsequent legislation, and state policy. Likewise, I have eschewed a more elaborate definition of citizenship than this one based on law and engagement because most scholarship has been grounded in liberal theory and practice distant from the experience of Syrians and Lebanese in the early twentieth century.1 The following pages instead attempt to draw out conceptualizations of the proper relationship between citizen and state voiced by participants in the mandate themselves. The history of the mandate period in Syria and Lebanon has been told before, by historians to whom I am greatly indebted. Stephen Longrigg wrote the first comprehensive history of French policy in the two countries. Meir Zamir has written histories of mandatory Lebanon from a statist and sectarian perspective, drawing on documents unavailable to Longrigg. Philip Khoury authored the masterwork on the Syrian nationalist movement that opposed French rule and inherited control of the state after .2 No comprehensive political histories have been written, curiously, by the French, although several have been written by Syrians and Lebanese in French and Arabic.3 In addition, specialized studies have enhanced our understanding of social change in the

introduction



period. Particularly important for this book have been two labor histories, one on the Lebanese movement by Jacques Couland, and the other on its Syrian counterpart, by Abdullah Hanna.4 This study is distinct from most of the above in several ways. It rejects a common view of the mandate period as a lacuna, a tragic gap between the fall of the Ottoman Empire and the achievement of full independence from the French. In this nationalist perspective, the period is significant only for the acts of resistance shown or for continuities with the Ottoman past that are often lamented as stagnation. As stated above, I will argue that the period was in fact seminal in laying the foundations of postcolonial states and citizenship. To demonstrate this, I eschew the choice of perspective of either colonizer or colonized in an attempt to capture the dynamics of interaction from both sides. Second, I attempt to wed the often-distinct approaches of social, economic, and political history to gain a synthetic understanding of power, identity, and conflict in the colonial civic order. The following pages argue that the experience of war, economic dislocation, and rapid change in urban social life had as profound an effect on politics as the particular strategies of elite political actors did. The terms of citizenship were hammered out not just in French offices and parliamentary chambers, but also in the daily contact citizens had with the French state and its agents, in schools, streets, public clinics, and post offices. In perhaps the most important departure from the prevailing historiography, I use gender as a primary analytical tool to integrate the many levels of political experience that shaped the colonial civic order. A focus on gender helps tie aspects of social and economic change directly to political developments. Gender tensions originated in the effects of war and economic transformation—particularly the disruption of households and of normal economic support systems—and soon appeared in the particular agendas of nationalist, women’s, labor, and religious movements. Gender anxiety erupted during armed combat with the French in the early s, informed protests against French social policy, especially in education, and became the focus of French confrontations with religious and nationalist elites. A focus on gender also opens a window on the subterranean structures of power that shaped the civic order. Gender hierarchy was a pillar of colonial paternalism, wherein the French and indigenous elites bargained to maintain hierarchies of privilege in colonial society. Privilege was accorded to male intermediary agents of French rule who wielded tribal, religious, class, and household authority. These mediating elites were rewarded for their cooperation with the privilege of power over other citizens: peasants, workers, family



introduction

members and members of religious communities of both sexes, as well as women of every status. Because it so fundamentally defined power, gender became a primary site of conflict and compromise between the French and the Syrians and Lebanese as they variously challenged and defended these paternalistic privileges. In sum, gender offers a unique and valuable lens through which to view politics of the mandate period. The use of gender as a general analytical tool may be puzzling to those readers unfamiliar with developments in gender history since Joan Scott published Gender and the Politics of History in . Scott, and many other gender historians since then, have explored the efficacy of using the concept of gender, meaning the social construction of relations between the sexes, as an equivalent of class, race, ethnicity, and other categories of historical analysis. The results have produced significant rereadings of an array of historical narratives including, for example, those of the French Revolution, British administration in India, and slavery in Virginia.5 Because gender has not yet attained the conceptual definition of other analytical categories like class, which has been developed since the nineteenth century, my gender analysis of mandatory politics shares with these other studies a spirit of experiment and exploration. My intent is not to supplant other analytic lenses used to understand Syria and Lebanon, but rather to expose political patterns obscured by uniquely class, religious, or nationalist perspectives. Gender appears in a second sense in this study as the object, not just the tool, of analysis. In addition to the general question, “What kind of civic order emerged in Syria and Lebanon by independence?,” I ask: “How and why was that civic order gendered?” Women’s citizenship differed from that of men’s, and differed in  from what it had been at the fall of the Ottoman Empire in . This difference, I argue, was constructed during the process of negotiation and conflict over the civic order, and it had much to do with the circumstances of French rule, economic stress, and the discursive repertoires of the labor, nationalist, religious, and women’s movements. Indeed, I argue that the aims and organization of the various male-led movements and the women’s movement can only be understood in the broader context of their competition and alliances with one another. The ways in which the civic order was constructed, and the gravitation toward gender as a site of conflict and compromise among males, weakened women’s political bargaining power and resulted in a regendering of citizenship by . I intend this study as an integrated history that encompasses the experiences of both men and women, and that accounts directly for the differing roles and power relations between them. This is not, then, a women’s history telling a

introduction



separate story about Syrian and Lebanese women. There would be much merit to writing such a history. This is however, to my knowledge, the first and fullest account of Syrian and Lebanese women’s history available in English. Consequently, the following pages will offer relatively more information on women than on men, in order to compensate for the existing imbalance in scholarship. This study will also focus on the histories of other neglected groups, particularly religious, labor, and youth movements, which aimed to redefine male identity much as the women’s movement sought to reform female identity in the civic order. Because so much background is necessary, I have abbreviated the account here of the elite nationalist movements; their story has been told much more fully elsewhere. I have also had to attenuate my general discussions of women, workers, and religion in the period, in order to maintain a focus on those among them who mounted organized efforts to reform the colonial civic order and claim full status as citizens. I have also focused mainly on cities and particularly on the capitals of Beirut and Damascus because that was where citizens mobilized. The rural context for urban politics is important, and it is presented at the outset of this book. Cities boomed with wealth drawn from the countryside and with the influx of rural migrants, some of whom joined the above-mentioned urban social movements. However, peasants did not mount organized movements of their own during the period of French rule, and so did not participate as distinct players in the construction of citizenship.6 They were excluded, in large part, because landowners, tribal chiefs, and the French colluded to silence them. Peasant repression inevitably, if indirectly, shaped the urban process of colonial citizenship-building, for the rural population was solely represented by landed and tribal elites, who participated in urban-based political parties, parliaments, and government administrations. It was only after the French departed in  that peasants emerged as a political force, especially in Syria under the leadership of Akram Hawrani. They would necessarily have to confront the civic order and practices of citizenship already established in the cities. The mandatory roots of rural movements is a story that could and should be more thoroughly studied so as to enhance our understanding of their role in producing the  Ba‘thist revolution in Syria and the Shi‘ite and Druze challenges to Lebanon’s urban elites since the s. This is a hefty task best left for a book devoted to a later period of history. Specifically, the following pages argue that there were three fundamental preconditions for the struggle over the civic order in mandatory Syria and Lebanon: first, the profound dislocation suffered by family households during and after World War I; second, the creation of new, theoretically national



introduction

states; and third, the imposition of French rule. In their combination, these three conditions encouraged linked reactions to the microlevel stress of shifting household economies and gender roles within the family and to the macrolevel reorganization of community and polity. I have called this linked reaction a crisis of paternity. As Part I explains, the crisis of paternity reflected both the destabilization of male authority as heads of households and of the larger community and the concomitant transformation in female roles. It was expressed in ideologies of class, religion, nation and gender, and in often-violent conflicts among citizens and with the French, culminating in  with armed revolt in Syria. By the end of the s, three conflicting models of reconstituted authority emerged and stood in tension with one another, based on paternalistic privilege, republican fraternity, and universal democracy. At the core of each model lay a differing vision of proper gender relations at home and in the civic order. The s saw a shift in the mode of conflict to the politics of organized social movements. The focus of protest also shifted, from simple opposition to French rule to attempts to transform the colonial civic order. The earliest movements were women’s federations and male nationalist parties, both rooted in prewar associations. Religious interests also organized. In Lebanon, the Maronite Church enhanced its longstanding influence through association with the French; in Syria, and to a lesser degree in Lebanon, Islamic populist groups emerged to reclaim influence lost. By the mid-s, labor unions formed with the aid of the growing Communist Party and proto-fascist youth organizations appeared in both countries. The programs of all of these organizations held profound implications for gender relations in the civic order. Gender anxiety was often a motivation for joining them, and the redefinition of fluctuating gender roles was often their primary aim. The French encouraged renegotiation of the colonial civic order by their willingness to engage these increasingly powerful social movements, which staged strikes and demonstrations and sent petitions to the League of Nations in Geneva. Indeed, the French sought to satisfy discrete demands for social rights and political inclusion as a means of diverting calls for outright independence. These negotiations climaxed during World War II, resulting in a fundamental shift in the structure of the civic order. I characterize the revised civic order as a colonial welfare state, wherein paternalistic social aid once bestowed by France through its collaborating intermediaries was gradually transformed into social rights claimed directly upon the state itself. Like that of gender, the concept of a welfare state captures linkages between anxieties in the home and in politics. It also helps us to conceive

introduction



of the political process from the mid-s as one in which groups excluded from the colonial civic order sought not only entry, but also equal status within it. What made citizens’ demands welfarist was that they claimed rights to social benefits directly from the state. Syrians and Lebanese routinely invoked statist models of European social policy to express their grievances against the French. Social rights challenged the paternalism that undergirded the colonial civic order, especially the authority and privileges of the state’s intermediaries: State guarantees of health, education, and family sustenance circumvented these mediators to establish a direct link between state and citizen. These new rights and commitments also carried direct and ambiguous implications for gendered distinctions in citizenship, as they transformed relative rights of males and females in the civic order. In short, Parts II, III, and IV explain how mass movements emerged to challenge the state’s paternalism and how negotiations to reform the civic order often came to a focus in bitter disputes over the gendered legal and spatial boundaries of citizenship. The tension between republican rights and paternal privilege polarized Syrian and Lebanese politics even as the countries moved toward independence during World War II. As Part V shows, once again gender became a primary site of conflict and compromise: Both regimes would attempt to resolve the rights-privilege tension by binding political rivals through gender pacts that marginalized women in the civic order and placed them firmly under male authority. Although nationalist rulers claimed to have resolved the crisis of paternity, post-independence politics would continue to turn upon ideological rivalries rooted in the mandate period. This accounts for women’s enduring inequality as citizens, as the gender pacts in both countries have continued to block legal reforms to their personal status. It is my hope that this book will contribute to the various literatures that have inspired it. Its dual use of gender, both as analytical lens and as object of study, contributes to a range of gender studies. Generally, as discussed above, I hope this book will help advance the use of gender as an analytical concept that can elucidate linkages between the home and the political arena often obscured by lenses of statebuilding, class, ethnicity, and so on. More specifically, I see this book as a part of the growing literature on gender and imperialism, where gender has been used both as a tool to reconceptualize the very nature and process of imperial rule, and as the subject of studies to reveal women’s roles in colonial administration, in resistance movements, and in social reform.7 Most specifically, I intend this book as a contribution to recent trends in Middle Eastern gender history that have sought to displace previous views

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rooted in timeless traditions of religion and patriarchy. I was first inspired to question short-sighted and essentialist explanations of Middle Eastern gender inequality by the works of Deniz Kandiyoti, Marnia Lazreg, and Suad Joseph listed in the bibliography. The recent rise of Islamist movements in the Middle East has prompted new queries into how religious-secular and East-West dichotomies were culturally constructed in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, under the impact of European imperialism and government reform. Of particular concern has been how Middle Eastern women came to be the pivot around which these dichotomies were mobilized in political discourse.8 At the same time, social historians have advanced our knowledge about how women’s status was determined in royal palaces, Islamic courts, the family, the marketplace, artisanal industry, and on the farm. A few histories of women’s movements—which first emerged in the early twentieth century not only in Syria and Lebanon, but also in Turkey, Iran, Egypt and Palestine—have also been recently written.9 While the historical study of Middle Eastern women remains in its infancy and subject to much debate, a few generally accepted trends are now apparent. It is clear that current practices and interpretations of Islamic law governing women’s status emerged only in recent centuries. The law itself did not crystallize until as late as the thirteenth century. It reflected gendered attitudes of the period and of regions once governed by Byzantium and Persia that were not necessarily present in seventh-century Arabia during the Prophet Muhammad’s lifetime. For example, it is not clear that veiling, considered by Islamists today as a requirement for Muslim women, was practiced widely by the first generations of Muslim women. Legal and customary norms excluding women from politics, limiting their spiritual leadership, and denying them the freedom of divorce granted to men certainly date from centuries after the Prophet’s death. On the other hand, it appears that Muslim women have long enjoyed rights to personal property that European women only recently gained. Meanwhile, alternate forms of Islamic practice and belief have in different times and places emphasized greater gender equality than legalistic traditions have. Rural and lower-class women’s lives appear to have differed markedly from those of the urban elites; the former experienced higher divorce and remarriage rates, more choice in marriage partner, but less control of personal property. Sufi (mystical) traditions in Islam have also afforded women a more prominent role in religious affairs than legalistic traditions have. While women were generally excluded from formal religious education and authority, there is evidence that they have informally exerted power to shape their own status. Women of medieval Cairo, for example,

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actively resisted calls for strict seclusion in their homes, and apparently exercised, as late as the seventeenth century, greater freedom of mobility than women in Istanbul did.10 Finally, it is clear that the region’s political and economic transformations under the impact of European imperialism and colonization since the nineteenth century have tended, despite calls for reform, to privilege and reify stricter legalistic traditions for all women. These broad trends in Middle Eastern women’s history will necessarily be revised as more regional histories, like this one, are written. Through its study of Syria and Lebanon, this book attempts to clarify the linkage between colonial rule and the perpetuation and reification of Islamic laws that accentuate inequality between men’s and women’s personal status. It is striking that none of the postcolonial Arab countries, except Tunisia and the former (Marxist) South Yemen, have enacted significant reform to these laws since their independence. As will be suggested here, this common legacy is in fact the product of distinct political processes. The gender bargains struck in colonial Syria and Lebanon differed from those struck in neighboring countries, due to local social and economic conditions and to the specific political interactions between the women’s movement, other social movements, and the state. The second aim of this book is to enhance our general understanding of the social and political history of the interwar period in the Middle East. The period has received much less scholarly attention than either the nineteenth century or the years since World War II. On the one hand, much of what has often been assumed to be postwar phenomena are shown here to have roots in the interwar period. For example, scholars have tended to locate the origins of the Islamist-secularist cleavages in current Middle Eastern politics in the recent travails of nationalist governments, ignoring nationalists’ longstanding rivalry with religious groups in the decades before . On the other hand, the linkages between nineteenth-century Ottoman history and the post-World War I period of nation-states have been studied more thoroughly, but primarily in terms of diplomatic and elite political history. Social, cultural, and economic continuities remained relatively unexplored, aside from a few efforts like Haim Gerber’s essay on the social origins of the modern Middle East, Hanna Batatu’s monumental history of Iraq, and the many recent studies on Palestine. Most lamentable has been the dearth of study on the social impact of World War I on the Middle East, where civilian and military casualty rates often far exceeded those of Europe. The difficulty of bridging the Ottoman and postwar periods is daunting. This book was originally conceived to cover the period –, embracing both the late Ottoman and mandate periods. However, as I began research while a graduate student, I was forced to limit

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the scope of the project due to the magnitude of archival research required, given the paucity of secondary materials available on the mandate period alone. I have thus relied upon the richer secondary literature on the Ottoman and post- periods to knit the history of French Syria and Lebanon to the periods that preceded and followed it. And when possible, I have attempted to suggest lines of inquiry relevant to further research on the interwar histories of other Middle Eastern countries. In particular, this book addresses the historiography of Syria and Lebanon in the interwar period. By organizing this history around the concepts of gender and citizenship, I have rewritten previous historical narratives that have privileged sectarian and class identities. Class transformation was certainly a salient feature of Levantine history between  and . Out of Ottoman reforms and a changing world economy in the late nineteenth century emerged a new urban bourgeoisie and a distinct landowning elite, polarizing the distribution of wealth as never before. The new bourgeoisie threatened the livelihood of the much older petty bourgeoisie of small shopkeepers, but never its existence. In contrast, peasants, by far the largest social group, suffered critically from economic changes and the rise of a landowning class. Many abandoned their lands and migrated to cities or, especially in the case of Lebanese Christians, to foreign countries. Meanwhile, a salaried middle class appeared after the turn of the century, comprised especially of civil servants in expanding government bureaucracies. Nascent industrialization and the expansion of the service sector produced a self-conscious, urban working class by World War II. While nearly all inhabitants of the region speak Arabic as their mother tongue, except for small Kurdish and Armenian minorities, their common linguistic identity is truncated by a remarkable variety of religious affiliations. Most of the mandate’s – million citizens were Muslim, representing about half of Lebanese and  percent of Syrians in the s. The remainder was almost entirely Christian; Jews comprised just one percent of the population, concentrated in Damascus, Aleppo and Beirut. About three-quarters of all Muslims were Sunnis, adhering to orthodox Islamic tradition and dominating all major cities in the region, save Beirut. The remaining Muslims were divided among three principal groups. Shi‘i Muslims were found in both countries but concentrated in southern Lebanon; indeed, the number of Shi‘is approached that of Sunnis in Lebanon and would surpass the latter after World War II. Shi‘is share much with Sunnis in terms of religious practice and belief, differing mainly in their conception of the proper leadership of the community. Two heterodox Muslim sects, rare elsewhere in the Islamic world, counted significant numbers of adherents grouped in tribal societies in the

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mountains of Syria and Lebanon. ‘Alawis (also known as Nusayris) adhere to a secretive doctrine related to Shi‘ism; nearly a quarter-million of them lived mainly in northwestern Syria near Latakia. The Druze follow another sect that branched from Shi‘ism in the eleventh century and live mainly in Mount Lebanon and Jabal Druze (Mount Druze) in southern Syria. Christians were far more splintered as a community. The largest Christian sects were the Greek Orthodox, living in both Syria and Lebanon, and the Maronites, affiliates of Roman Catholicism who maintained their distinct liturgy and who were concentrated in Mount Lebanon. Together they represented more than half of all the region’s Christians in the s. Other Christian sects included Syrian and Armenian Orthodox, and Catholic churches that had split from the Greek, Syrian, and Armenian orthodox communities since the eighteenth century. Very small communities of Chaldean Christians from Iraq, Roman Catholics, and Protestants numbered only a few thousand each. The minority Muslim, Christian, and Jewish communities had enjoyed a large degree of self-government under Ottoman rule, with their own religious laws and courts. The government officially represented the dominant Sunni Muslims in its legal apparatus. Sectarian relations had experienced periods of tension through the centuries, but never the degree of violence that emerged in the mid-nineteenth century because of unstable government and economic change. The  massacres of Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus and later massacres of Armenians in Anatolia that drove them into Syria and Lebanon were virtually without precedent. With the advent of French rule in , the disestablishment of Sunnis, and the new privileges of Catholics and Maronites, would produce new frictions among the various communities in the mandate period. The shifting fortunes of social classes and religious sects have thus dominated historical narratives of the mandate era. Nearly all existing histories of twentieth-century Lebanon, for example, focus primarily on the rivalry between the country’s various Christian and Muslim sects, with some attention to the class basis of those divisions. In the standard account, sectarian relations were aggravated by the French, temporarily healed by a “national pact” between Sunni Muslims and Maronite Catholics in , but later sundered by the system’s inherent clientelism, which spread the benefits of economic development unevenly, to the disadvantage of the country’s populous but rural Muslim sects of Shi‘is and Druze. This would lead to civil war. Historians of Syria have tended to emphasize class somewhat more than sectarianism. As the history is often written, the French practiced divide-and-rule tactics, segregating Syria’s rural Druze and ‘Alawi minorities from the urbanized Sunni Muslim population.

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Sunni elites formed the nationalist movement to reunify the country and capture the state from the French, harnessing it to their own interests as a landowning-industrial class. Sunni elites’ own divided interests (particularly between those of Aleppo and Damascus), their oppression of peasants, and their continued exclusion of ‘Alawis and Druze from politics would fuel the  Ba‘thist revolution. My aim is not to renounce or replace these narratives, but to cast new light on them. The following pages do, in fact, emphasize the interaction of gender, class, and sect within the framework of citizenship-formation. This perspective, I seek to show, redresses several weaknesses in previous studies. First, they have often been teleological, reading motives of principal political actors in terms of the civil wars and revolutions to come. This study looks for political motivation in conditions that prevailed at the time, or immediately before the mandate, as in the First World War. Second, the standard narratives tend to focus on political elites and to ignore the role of state institutions. By omitting or marginalizing other, more populist movements that variously rivaled or allied with nationalists, many previous histories have oversimplified elites’ motives and failed to capture the complexity of the conflict between paternalism and republicanism that animated urban politics in this era. The focus on political elites has also tended to underplay the state’s role in politics. With their emphasis on periods of crisis and on high-level negotiations over independence, constitutions, electoral procedure, and the like, previous studies have ignored the profound impact of routine state practices upon the social lives of the citizenry. This study offers a fuller analysis of the entire urban civic order and of the terms upon which citizenship was defined. Third, these narratives have failed to give a convincing explanation for the political mobilization of sectarian identities. They have tended to ascribe it to French treachery, to the personal ambition of religious leaders, or to the age-old clannishness of the society. While each of these factors may have contributed to sectarianism, the following pages show how gender anxiety expressed in the crisis of paternity can better explain the historical construction of sectarian identity, its popular appeal in this particular period, and the specific programs of sectarian activists. Finally, as the following pages also seek to show, women played an important part in the politics of the mandate. Their almost complete omission from standard narratives has necessarily distorted our understanding of the history of mandatory Syria and Lebanon, precisely because gender issues were so tightly intertwined with class and sectarian issues. As a third aim of this book, I intend my study of colonial citizenship to address various emergent literatures on statebuilding, civil society, and the construction of identity in non-Western regions of the world. As a case of the

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building of a welfare state in a colonial context, this study seeks to contribute to a revisionist literature on comparative welfare states. It problematizes the often teleological treatments of the “origins of the welfare state” that have focused solely on industrialized countries that built vast entitlement programs after World War II. The variant case of welfarism in a colonial context should offer at least a minimal corrective. In particular, this study joins previous ones that have rethought welfarism from a gender perspective. Most of these, too, have focused on industrialized countries. I was surprised to find that many trends revealed in those histories also appeared in French Syria and Lebanon.11 More broadly speaking, I hope readers may find the general discussion of the construction of citizenship in a colonial context provocative. I intend this book to help bring the Middle East into debates about forms of citizenship outside of the context of the liberal nation-state, in imperial, colonial, muliticultural, and religious polities.12 At the very least, I hope this book helps to dispel the popular notion that most Middle Easterners don’t have democracies because they don’t want them. Many Syrians and Lebanese mobilized to demand equality, rights, and political participation, and they did achieve democracy of a kind. That the outcome was so unstable may be attributed to the peculiar dilemmas of right and privilege in French mandatory rule, as the pages that follow will attempt to show. Finally, I wish to say something about my perspective as an American writing a history of foreign countries, particularly those in the Middle East. I do not presume to ask the same questions Lebanese and Syrians might ask of their own history. Nor do I presume to write a version of history that is more correct than they would write. This is, however, a difficult posture to maintain in a situation where there is far more support for historical study of the Middle East outside of the region than inside of it. The cultural and economic legacies of imperialism often still hold in the academic world. In this context, I found the following experience somewhat encouraging. While conducting research in Damascus, a Syrian friend helped arrange interviews with local women for me. As she later explained, she told potential interviewees who were skeptical of an American researcher’s intent, “She [me] will probably get everything wrong, but there will still be material of use to us.” I was gratified by my friend’s candor, and I hope that she and other Syrians and Lebanese may indeed find something of use here. To the degree that I have succeeded in producing a study of mutual interest and value, I am honored and gratified. To the degree that I have failed, I express my profound regret.

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part i


War and the Advent of French Rule: A Crisis of Paternity

A history of Syria and Lebanon in the years of French rule must begin with the devastation of World War I. In November , the Ottoman Empire entered the war on the side of Germany and Austria against Britain and France. The diplomatic outcome of the Great War in the Levant is well known, through films, scholarly books, and innumerable memoirs in Arabic, English, French, and Turkish. The names of T. E. Lawrence, Sharif Husayn, and Prince Faysal, parties to the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans; of Mark Sykes and François Georges-Picot, architects of the region’s territorial division between the British and French; and of Lord Balfour, who promised a Jewish homeland, resound even today. Neglected in most accounts of the war is the profound suffering of the masses and its political consequences. To most villagers and common city folk, the Great War was felt not in the pain of a patriot’s heart, but in an empty stomach and a fearful soul. The great famine of – cast a shadow over their lives for the entire period of French rule. The loss of population and of essential tools and supplies devastated the region’s economy, and it would take nearly a decade to recover. Memories of hunger caused by foreigners and inflicted upon Arabs—mainly Syrian and Lebanese—lasted through the next world war, and were no doubt an important motive to those who fought for national independence and self-determination. The war’s differential impact on people, according to their gender, class, religion, and place of residence, would also shape the patterns of postwar politics.

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The war widened the gap between rich and poor, producing for the first time in the region’s history class-based movements. It also enflamed religious tensions: Christians of Mount Lebanon were hit hardest by famine, fueling their search for security through alliance with the French and a state of their own. And while men suffered the hardships of the battlefront, women were left on their own to support their families, and often to die with their children of hunger. The disruption of male and female roles produced widespread gender anxiety that would fuse with disruptions in the authority of religious leaders and ruling elites to produce a crisis of paternity in postwar politics. To these social and political aftershocks of the Great War was added the imposition of French rule. The French created new states from a congeries of former Ottoman provinces whose residents had not necessarily ever thought of themselves as Syrian or Lebanese. They offered as founding father of these nation-states High Commissioner Henri Gouraud. And they built a new government that intruded into the lives of citizens far more than its predecessor ever had. French rule aggravated the crisis of paternity brought on by the war, which had toppled the Ottoman dynasty that had ruled the region for  years. Syrians and Lebanese were themselves divided on who the proper successor to the Ottoman sultan should be. Some even challenged the need for paternal authority at all. When French policies further threatened the power of many local elites—especially Muslim ulama (clerics), urban notables and tribal shaykhs—violent revolts flared through much of the s. Part One of this book tells the story of the war, the crisis of paternity, and the political bargains that reestablished paternalistic authority in a new, colonial form. In other words, it introduces the process that established, by , a colonial civic order. The term civic order is used here to refer to the institutions and norms that structure state-society interaction. It designates a much larger political space than that occupied by heads of state and parliaments; rather, it traverses the imaginary line between state and society. The civic order encompasses all people who are directly touched by the state—through its military presence, law enforcement, conscription, tax collection, roadbuilding, schools, chambers of commerce, fiscal regulations, labor laws, public

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health services, and the like.1 It is thus the arena where state policy and political power are negotiated among soldiers, politicians, bureaucrats and various social groups. These negotiations effectively establish the bases of authority and terms of citizenship in the nation. As the following chapters will show, the negotiations between the French and the Syrians and Lebanese failed to resolve the crisis of paternity. The colonial civic order that took shape by  rested on an unstable compromise between republican ideals of popular sovereignty and fraternity and paternalistic privileges claimed by both local elites and the French.

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chapter 1


World War I: Famine, Memory, and a Shattered Social Order

The woes of World War I fell upon the Syrian provinces of the Ottoman Empire like a nightmare. Communities, families, and even personal identities were transformed, sometimes beyond recognition. Neighbors and loved ones disappeared by the thousands in the famine or on distant battlefronts. Deprivation among survivors snapped the sinews of power and trust that had once bound family members and communities together. As suffering struck the population unevenly, it cut wide cleavages between rich and poor, Muslim and Christian. The general struggle for food fueled a mad and cut-throat competition between citizen and state, peasant and landlord, consumer and merchant, even parent and child. Gender norms of honor and protection between men and women were also violated. Memories of this world seemingly turned upside down would haunt the postwar era. For many, it would take years to piece together their shattered lives. For all, the subversion of order and authority at home and in the community produced a pervasive crisis of paternity. It all began with hunger, which crept stealthily upon the land through a series of misfortunes. Anis Furayha, a boy of  when the war began, saw a second disaster strike his Mount Lebanon village after the poor harvest of : Swarms of locusts attacked us. When people say that the swarms blocked out the sun they speak truly, with no exaggeration. At ten in the morning the locusts flew and covered the sun. And when the swarms descended upon the fields, they stripped them of everything green. Oh Lord, both famine and locusts? The people fell silent and prayed.1 In the following winter of –, a heavy snow blocked travel to Mount Lebanon. To survive, Furayha made contact with Druze smugglers from the grain-growing region of Hawran, in southern Syria. But it took them  days

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to reach his home of Ras Metn; wheeled vehicles had been requisitioned by the army, as had the train. Few people had the seed or strength to plant new crops that spring. In those harsh months of early , an estimated –, people died on Mount Lebanon.2 Beirut was hit next. In early , everyone with financial means had hopped aboard the last Italian steamers before the port of Beirut was closed. The city’s population fell from , to , by mid-. The horror that befell those who stayed behind was immeasurable. The  harvest was no better than that of  and supply lines to all of Lebanon were cut. Witnesses experienced famine’s morbidity by the individual case, as did Halide Edib, the famous Turkish feminist who ran orphanages in Lebanon in : The first time I heard the cry it echoed and echoed through my brain and heart. It was after a concert in the American College, where I had gone with some teachers, and I had given myself up to the bliss of music. I was driving home through the streets of Beirut back to Der-Nassira, when I heard it: “Dju-an” [I’m hungry]. It was a solitary cry piercing and insistent and cutting the air like a knife. I have heard that “Djuan” so often since.3 The American consul described Beirut’s streets in July  as “filled with starving women and children. . . . In my early evening walks I frequently see people lying dead in the gutter.”4 People suffered acute shortages not only of foodstuffs, but of imported manufactured goods and fuel: most spent the war in cold and darkness.5 Hunger and mortal disease, particularly typhus and malaria, reached far beyond worst-hit Lebanon and far beyond the  armistice. By December , reports reached Cairo that people in Syria’s inland cities were dying by the thousands. A protestant pastor from Minneapolis who visited Syria that winter reported people dying in every street of Damascus. The police chief told him that he received  dead per day, while the mayor claimed that onequarter of the city’s population had disappeared since the start of the war.6 “Starvation and famine [are] everywhere; the men either in military service or in hiding, and the women and children reduced to beggary,” reported the American consul in Damascus in April .7 The cost of food rose so high that people routinely stole bread right out of the hands of customers leaving bakeries and ate orange peels from the street. Stories circulated of women and children going to the door of the city’s most sacred Umayyad mosque to die. By October , hunger had reached as far south as Jerusalem. The death toll

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continued to climb in  and the harvest of  was again a poor one: Bread riots flared in Hama in March , and as late as October  many middleand lower-class families in Aleppo were still going without an evening meal.8 Contemporary attempts to quantify the destruction of human life varied widely, from , to , dead in Lebanon alone and from , to , dead in both Syria and Lebanon. A Dr. Joseph Ziadeh claimed onethird of Mount Lebanon’s population had disappeared from towns like Batrun, where only , residents remained from a prewar population of ,.9 In , George Antonius, the first historian of the Arab revolt and Arab nationalism, estimated that up to , had died of hunger and disease in Greater Syria (including Syria, Lebanon, Palestine and Transjordan) by .10 A recent study drawing on German records supports the higher estimates of about , dead from hunger and disease.11 Antonius, like most Arabs of the time, blamed mainly the Ottomans, and also war profiteers who traded foodstuffs on the black market at high prices. They claimed that the Ottomans’ monopoly on transport and rationing system deliberately funneled food to troops and starved the people. Rumors flew of troops hoarding grain from Mount Lebanon’s Christian majority as retribution for their sympathies with France. Indeed, by late , French soldiers stationed on the island of Arwad claimed that Jemal Pasha, commander of the Ottoman Fourth Army at Damascus, had met with German and Austrian officials the previous year when “the extermination of the Lebanese was decided.”12 The Ottomans, denying any plan to starve the Lebanese, blamed the famine on the Entente’s blockade. This position is supported by German archives, which document extensive Ottoman efforts to provide food to the Lebanese with emergency shipments, rationing, and soup kitchens. These same sources, according to Linda Schilcher, show that some Ottoman policies did aggravate the crisis, but mainly due to accident and ineptitude. Tight fiscal regulations, for example, reduced remittances from overseas relatives that Lebanese families desperately needed to pay rising food costs. And the use of devalued paper currency and forced grain seizures promoted peasant flight and black-marketeering. In effect, the government was simply too weak to control private speculators. As one Ottoman official noted in July , “the economic struggle inside the country led by the rich against the poor was causing more casualties than the war itself.”13 There is also evidence that the British and French knowingly used the famine as a weapon of war. The Entente’s blockade shut down all ports, cutting off a primary supply route to Lebanon, which, with its dense population and mountains, depended heavily on imports of grain even in peacetime. According to

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documents in the French archives, in May  Maronite Archbishop Joseph Darien protested the use of famine for political ends, urging the French consul in Cairo to demand an immediate Entente invasion to save lives. Although the French had by then received reports of up to , deaths, Foreign Minister Aristide Briand spurned the consul’s pleas to invade, arguing that it would only provoke a general massacre. The consul then urged that France break the blockade and ship food to Lebanon. A June  British memo to the foreign ministry, however, flatly rejected the proposal to feed starving civilians: His Majesty’s Secretary of State for Foreign Affairs expresses his earnest hope that the French Government will not encourage any such scheme . . . . the Entente Allies are simply being blackmailed to remedy the shortage of supplies which it is the very intention of the blockade to produce. The British “consider the famine as an agent that will lead the Arabs to revolt,” noted a June  internal French foreign ministry memo. The writer dissented from this view, arguing that distributing food would win greater Arab sympathy for the Entente.14 The British view prevailed, and the blockade lasted until the end of the war. In August , just when the Syrian interior was hit full force by famine, an Istanbul newspaper reported that a French patrol boat had attacked three Ottoman ships carrying grain to Beirut.15 Meanwhile, the British recruited Arab tribes south of Lebanon to join Sharif Husayn’s revolt against the Ottomans, offering them food as an enticement. The revolt further aggravated shortages in Lebanon and Syria by forcing the Ottomans to divert food to its defending army in the south.16 The famine, in all its misery, was not the sole cause of loss of life. The Ottoman military machine was brutal. By late  the Ottomans were conscripting men aged  to , both Muslims and Christians (except those in Mount Lebanon), in an army that recruited . million troops. About threefourths of all adult men were mobilized. Casualties neared one million. Figures on battlefield deaths vary between , and , men. In addition, about , soldiers died of disease, and , others were listed as missing or as enemy prisoners by war’s end.17 Suggesting how military conscription and suffering came to be linked in people’s minds, the Ottoman term for concription, seferberlik (safar barlik in Arabic), became synonymous with famine in local usage. Conditions were so bad that a total of . million troops deserted the Ottoman army. Arab desertions increased to  percent in –, when the Ottomans abolished draft-exemption fees and the Arab Revolt began.18

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Military and civilian casualties among Syrians and Lebanese far exceeded European rates. Antonius estimated that , Arab soldiers from Greater Syria—about one in six adult males living in —never returned from the battlefront: Taking into account losses due to military service, [Greater] Syria’s contribution to the holocaust of the War must have been not far short of half a million lives out of a total population of considerably under four million—a higher percentage, probably, than that of any other belligerent.19 Antonius’s estimate that . percent of the population disappeared in battle and famine may be in fact be low. The higher estimate of , faminedead alone in addition to the , military dead, and the generally accepted prewar population of . million, would place the death rate closer to  percent, or nearly one in six people living in . Both the low and high estimates compare morbidly to the countries considered hardest hit in World War I: France and Germany lost less than  percent of their prewar populations.20 Opportunities to rebel against such dire conditions were slim. First of all, there were few able-bodied men left in the region to organize a substantial revolt. Syrian and Lebanese soldiers were transferred from local bases to battlefronts in Europe, Iraq, and Suez purposely to forestall such an event. Second, Jemal Pasha imposed draconian martial law. Known as the “butcher” (alsaffah), Jemal Pasha was almost universally feared and hated by war’s end. In –,  Syrian and Lebanese well-respected notables were executed for treasonous contacts with Entente powers concerning secession from the empire. To discourage future efforts, Jemal Pasha ordered their public hanging in the main squares of Beirut and Damascus. At the same time, he exiled more than  families from Beirut and Damascus to Anatolia, also on suspicion of collaboration with the French. Exile became a routine method of punishment for political opponents and army deserters alike.21 Ahmad al-Jundi tells of how his father, a court employee in northern Syria, was banished to a small town in Anatolia in late . The entire family made the trip by cart, carriage, and train in winter weather.22 Arab nationalism gained ground as worsening war conditions withered loyalty to the Ottomans. By the last year of the war many Syrians engaged in smuggling and sabotage, in collaboration with the approaching army of Sharif Husayn, led by his son, Prince Faysal. Meanwhile, many Christian Lebanese began to proclaim their hopes for French occupation.

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Collective Memory and the Political Repercussions of Trauma The trauma of war and famine ran deep. While the personal experience of most Syrians and Lebanese remains shrouded, we can begin to understand how their suffering was reconstructed in collective memory through the stories preserved in diplomatic archives, newspapers and magazines, and personal interviews. These sources can provide some clues to prevailing mentalities, particularly in how memories differentiated the experiences of men and women, Muslim and Christian, and rich and poor. On February , , the Beirut daily Lisan al-hal printed on its front page a poem found in the diary of a dead soldier. Entitled “The Smile of Victory,” the poem was dedicated to “the spirit of a mother who had died of hunger” during the Great War. The poet, Da’ud Musa, envisioned two women tending the bodies of men on a battlefield. One came to a wounded soldier and hugged him, saying, “This is my son.” The other put a wreath of flowers on his head and said, “This is my beloved.” The soldier cried out: Oh bride of life, rescue me! . . . O ye, who inspires love of the fatherland, end my pain! I am the only son of my mother, and I am far from her . . . I raced with the beginning of the storm to rescue her, but death came to me before I could reach her. The poem ended with smiles of victory on faces of fallen sons of the fatherland. The soldier cried again: “Though I die, my country lives!” Striking in the poem is the interrelationship of family, gender and patriotism. Martyrdom for the country was bound with sacrifice for the family. The soldier wished to save his mother, but he found in the death that prevented him from doing so a victory for his country. Both mother and son die for the fatherland; however, the poet charted differing paths to martyrdom for men and women. While men die fighting for their country, women achieve martyrdom indirectly, by way of their relationship to men, either by inspiring male patriotism and caring for their slain bodies, or by dying themselves because they have been deprived of male protection. The poem also expressed men’s sorrow and guilt for not protecting their women; the poet-soldier appears to seek forgiveness in confessing that he had tried to rescue his starving mother, but was overcome by death first. For decades after the war, stories circulated of abandoned families expiring silently in lonely villages and in the doorways of mosques and churches. Stories also

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emphasized women’s fear, not just of hunger, but of Ottoman soldiers. Most soldiers stationed in Syria and Lebanon were foreign Turks who routinely knocked on the doors of homes where women were left alone, demanding bread, supplies, and sometimes more. There were even stories of soldiers cutting off women’s hands to steal jewelry.23 Male guilt was sometimes projected back onto female victims, in horror stories of what women supposedly did when left alone. They typically described girls who traded their virtue for food from soldiers and mothers driven mad by the loss of children and spouses. In October  a theatrical troupe staged a play called “The Fall of a Young Girl,” about the heroine’s “surrender to desire and appetite, her torment of shame and degradation, and her repentance.”24 A Beirut man later recalled a story he heard about his grandmother, who went “crazy” after losing first seven children and then her husband, and began walking the streets, naked.25 A late s popular history magazine, Tarikh al-harb al-‘uzma (History of The Great War), featured images of emaciated women and children in its issue on the famine. One portrayed a haggard woman on her knees, clothing torn and revealing a breast, calling, “Oh sons of Syria, bread, bread, bread . . .” (fig. ). Inside, articles told how mothers had emptied their homes of all they could sell to pay for food, and then fled their villages with their children to the cities, in search of food, eating weeds and even dogmeat. In extremity, some mothers were said to have devoured their dead children.26 These war and famine memories evoke a wrenching, nightmarish experience of a world gone awry, of families not simply abandoned and split apart, but actually turned against each other. Men who had prided themselves on protecting their families could no longer do so. Mothers and wives, soldiers’ inspiration for life and love of country, were selling themselves to strangers and devouring their children. Women habituated to social norms of seclusion howled in the streets, naked, or were attacked in their homes by strange men. All social and familial norms seemed suspended. Anxiety about proper gender roles was expressed in these war and famine memories. Such anxiety is suggested in the disjunction between public and private memory. In public and official memory, men tend to be remembered as martyrs who militarily defended the nation, while women are portrayed as martyrs primarily for defending their children. Published photographs of the war routinely portrayed men as soldiers in uniform, and women as helpless victims. Central squares in both Beirut and Damascus were renamed Martyrs’ Square for male nationalists executed there, and annual memorial ceremonies for them are still observed. Few accounts of, and no monuments to, women’s heroic deeds are to be found.

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Personal and private accounts belie this public—and political—rendition, evoking a broader range of experiences that men and women shared in common. Women have individually often recalled their acts of bravery and hard labor during the war, not just their shame and victimhood. In the villages of inland Syria, women and children replaced men absent at the battlefront in farm work. In , Jemal Pasha organized women’s brigades, sent to harvest grain needed by the military in the fertile regions of Adana, the Jordan valley, and elsewhere. Urban women filled in for absent artisans, selling supplies in markets and working in the textile weaving shops that managed to remain open.27 “During the war my family never went hungry because they were in the wool business. . . . When the men were away, that was one of the best ways for women to make money,” recalled ‘Aziza al-Jaza’iri, who lived in Damascus. “Straw merchants used to sell rushes to the women who would make little rush-bottomed stools and sell them. . . . There was practically nothing that women didn’t sell at that time when they took all our men and left us no one.”28 Elite women of both Beirut and Damascus recalled their labors in organizing relief for the hungry, ill, and homeless during the war. They and lower-class women both took daily risks to feed their families by trading in the forbidden black market. They also staged risky demonstrations against the Ottoman government to demand bread. At least one woman is known to have been hanged for political reasons.29 Men’s memories only rarely, privately, or long after the war revealed that they too starved desperately for food. The safar barlik was something only whispered about for years. In a s interview, a Lebanese journalist recalled meeting a man in a Lebanese village elated to find his father had died, because he could now eat that day’s loaf of bread himself. The journalist also recalled seeing men starve in prison, where he had been thrown for writing newspaper articles critical of the Ottoman state.30 Exceptional was a  article written by a Damascene about having nothing to eat while he rode a military train heading to the front at Gallipoli. He and his friends were saved by two poor women selling food at a station in Eskishehir.31 The story of another soldier, Fahmi Tergeman, husband of ‘Aziza al-Jaza’iri quoted above, was published only decades later by his daughter. He recounted how an entire army starved in Gaza until the British took him and his comrades prisoner. Before their final defeat, the Ottoman soldiers had foraged among the dead bodies of British soldiers lying on the battlefield, looking for tins of meat.32 Despite this convergence in private recollections, public memories that stressed men’s and women’s differing experiences would have a profound

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political impact in the postwar period. The imagery of mothers and sons as different sorts of patriots took on a life of its own, and would be ideologically deployed after the war. Men would parlay their battlefield valor during the Great War into political claims, for self-rule and for status as protectors of their women from French men and the French state. Women, too, would recount their often neglected acts of wartime patriotism to make their claims for social and political rights after the war. But the image of women as motherly inspiration for their son-patriots, rather than patriots in their own right, dominated political discourse and colored debates on women’s rights to full citizenship. Images of wild women would also resurface, in criticisms of deviant women who ventured out from behind the protection of men into public and politics.33 Collective memories of wartime trauma also differentiated the experiences of Muslims and Christians. Most letters sent covertly to the French during the war, for example, expressed Christians’ views that Muslims and Turks deliberately caused their plight. While these letters were neither necessarily accurate nor representative of all opinion, they likely reflect a variety of stories and rumors being told by common people in the afflicted regions. Similar opinions were given years later in interviews with survivors.34 A number of letters ascribed Christian suffering to a general Muslim hatred of them. Some, for example, tied the famine to the massacres of Christians in Mount Lebanon and Damascus in . Antoine Eddé, a French informant, reported from Mount Lebanon in the spring of : “The persecutions have begun, and they are only a prelude to a general massacre like that of the Armenians.” Another agent reported that priests and nuns were being arrested in Damascus, where  to  Armenian girls were said to have been sold as slaves to Muslims: “Those who sold them said: ‘Rejoice, oh believers, in the shame of Christians.’ ” He also reported that no Muslims in Jubayl [north of Beirut] had died of hunger, because they received government rations of flour that were denied to Christians.35 A French Lazarist priest in Syria wrote in May : “Apostasies are the order of the day in the cities. How many have given themselves to Muslims, or have given up their honor for a morsel of bread. . . . all of the Turkish officers, Jemal Pasha at their head, can’t have enough Christian girls to sacrifice to their perversions.”36 Other letters saw Christian persecution as a direct result of their ties to France. The secretary of the Maronite patriarch wrote in : “Poor Lebanon, poor Lebanese, sacrificed by vengeance, to punish them for their loyalty to a generous and compassionate mother. But where is this generosity and pity of France?”37

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However, there were alternate discourses in letters that emphasized communal suffering of Muslims and Christians alike, and the Turks as their common enemy. A Mgr. Phares urged the French to support “a holy union” against Turkish tyrants, “uniting Muslims, Catholics, Orthodox, Druze, Ansariehs, and Mutawallis.”38 Mustafa Bey, an informant from a prominent Muslim Damascene family, wrote in : “Discontent in Syria is general and shared by all classes and creeds. The exactions of the government have vexed the peasantry, the educated class is in general disturbed by the tyrannical methods of the Turkish authorities and the better class of ulama [Muslim clergy] are entirely with them.”39 The uncertainties of blame and the political machinations of the Entente powers would perpetuate religious tensions and suspicions after the Ottomans withdrew. The war had undermined trust in a mixed-sect community at its most profound level. If a community would not share food equitably amongst all of its members, was it a community? In , Mount Lebanon had been created as a Christian enclave separate from the surrounding region because of such sectarian mistrust. The famine reinforced Christian sentiments for secession. The fact that Muslims in inland Syria grew the wheat that Christian Lebanese depended upon, and that some Syrian Muslims had hoarded grain meant to be shipped to Lebanon, compounded religious with geographic tensions, and directly contributed to the creation of Lebanon as a separate state in . Alternate memories, of how Muslims had also died, how Christians had also profited from black-markets in grain, and of how states, not neighbors, had disrupted supply lines, were suppressed in the process. There would be, significantly, virtually no public discussion of France’s own role in causing starvation. This was likely due not only to French press censorship, but to a willingness of Arab nationalists to believe the worst about their former Ottoman rulers. Class, like gender and religion, was also a distinguishing factor in collective memory. War and famine had set down a mortal line between rich and poor. Those who died, or who joined the Ottoman army never to return, were the poorest in society. They could not afford to flee on the last Italian steamliners or to pay fees for exemption from the military draft (bedel). The ranks of the poor grew, as inflation of food prices impoverished those who had not been poor before the war. Meanwhile several prominent families, particularly the Lebanese Sursuqs and Asfars, were generally known to have amassed fortunes through grain speculation that boosted prices far beyond what the poor could pay. Stories were told of peasants selling their homes and fields for a simple loaf of bread, and of speculators expropriating entire districts. As one magazine

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recounted, “as for the inhabitants of Nahr el-Deb, they disappeared after having sold everything, even the clock of the church.”40 Even though the French decreed a law to dispossess Lebanese war profiteers who had amassed vast amounts of land, the line between rich and poor remained vivid, in memory as well as reality. One enduring monument to the famine was the plumpness of survivors. As Schilcher put it, for decades afterward politicians “projected an image of success and prosperous generosity to their constituencies by means of quite unabashed personal obesity.”41 Schilcher sees paradoxically both the deepening of class consciousness and the reaffirmation of patron-client ties as a legacy of the famine, for patrons had been a more reliable source of security and nourishment than the state. The complexity of the famine’s social impact has been preserved in the various versions still told of a story about a hungry village chief (agha) in North Lebanon who traded his olive grove to a lord (bey) for a single orange. Landless descendants of aghas told the story to anthropologist Michael Gilsenan to explain the general derangement of the social order, while the agha’s own grandson, now the town’s capitalist-minded mayor, retold it as a farce about the aghas’ self-defeating sense of honor that undercut their material well-being. For peasants, whose ancestors had neither orange nor olive grove to trade, the story depicted the famine as both the epitome of beys’ tyranny and a reminder of the hollow pretensions of aghas’ descendants.42 The emergence of class-based labor unions and political parties would be a significant new trend in the years of the French mandate, but they were slow to emerge. In a  newspaper article, Yusuf Ibrahim Yazbak described meeting a woman with her two starving children at the door of a church, who asked, “Why is there not equality on Earth as there is in Heaven?”43 The encounter motivated him to organize the Lebanese Communist Party. A more typical response to inequality was a  Damascus newspaper editorial that blamed the famine on hoarding and uncooperative attitudes among a population that lacked proper solidarity and patriotism. The editorial called for more charities and urged the wealthy to be more patriotic in almsgiving.44 Rebellion against the rich remained an individual, not organized effort, as evidenced in the rising incidence of banditry and theft after the war.45 The preceding examples offer only a sketch of the preservation and construction of collective memory, one that deserves much more study than can be undertaken here. Indeed, scholars disagree profoundly on the relationships between individual and collective memory, and between memory, culture, and politics.46 With this in mind, we might venture, tentatively, to make some observations about the political implications of war memories in Syria and

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Lebanon. People generally remembered the war as a nightmare, a world gone awry, where the social norms governing gender, religious, and class relations were shattered. While individuals appear to have interpreted the nightmare in a variety of ways, it appears that official, public memory used the nightmare to reaffirm the values of the old social order. To affirm that women belong under the protection of men, stories were repeated about how women left alone went crazy. To affirm past practice of separating Muslims and Christians, famine stories emphasized Christian suffering and Muslim profiteering. To affirm that the interests of rich and poor coincide, profiteering elites were condemned as a criminal aberration. If this observation is correct, then many Syrians and Lebanese resembled other societies that rallied to appeals for a postwar return to “normalcy.” It is perhaps this yearning for normalcy that contributed to the tendency to speak of the safar barlik only obliquely, in hushed tones, as an unmentionable shame. But it is also true that for others, like Yusuf Ibrahim Yazbak, the nightmare was a revelation that discredited the old order and inspired political action.

Shattered Households and the Crisis of Paternity Material conditions, in addition to memory, shaped the political and social impact of the war for years afterward. The war marked the end of an age of auspicious economic expansion. The period between  and  had been one of exceptional stability and prosperity, wrought by Ottoman reforms and the adaptation of local producers and traders to the new conditions of the world economy. The centralized state improved rural security, encouraging farmers to extend cultivation into new lands. With the infusion of French capital, Mount Lebanon’s silk industry boomed, employing more than onethird of its population. Rural wealth enabled urban artisans to cultivate local markets, offsetting the impact of competition from European imports in cities. Meanwhile, European investment in local transport—roads, railroads, and ports—increased trade and the wealth of merchants. A new urban landowning-bourgeoisie emerged that profited most from state largesse and European capitalism. While peasants and workers benefited less, they were apparently able to live healthier lives, evidenced by a population boom of at least  percent in those  years.47 The postwar period appeared far less auspicious to all but the wealthiest. On the one hand, population statistics suggest that people regained a basic level of well-being after the war’s devastation. By the mid-s, Syria’s

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population had reached about . million while Lebanon’s had reached about . million, representing growth of about  percent since , despite the loss of up to a half-million lives during the war.48 Many families clearly managed to raise many children, even though infant mortality remained high. However, agriculture, the basis of the region’s wealth, did not experience so robust a recovery. Many fields lay fallow for a decade after the war. While yields of Syria’s most important crops, wheat and barley, rebounded after , peak harvests in the s barely matched prewar peaks.49 Trouble was further evidenced by large migrations of peasants to the cities, even though there was no new mechanization or intensification of agriculture to push them off the land. Cities grew by far more than the general population growth of  percent. Beirut’s population nearly doubled from its postwar low of about , to more than , in . Damascus, whose population dropped to , after the war, jumped by more than  percent in the next  years to ,. Aleppo grew fastest, partly due to the Armenian settlement, from , in  to , in .50 These booming cities were no paradise for incoming peasants, however. The major industry, textiles, had been dealt a near-mortal blow by the war, and thousands of urban workers lost their jobs. While over the long term the region’s economy would stabilize, in the s it suffered severe trauma. Lingering effects of social dislocation deepened the gulf between rich and poor. While the urban bourgeoisie gradually resumed its business, often with capital that had been safely stored overseas, most families had lost the sources of support they once had. In an unstable economy that underwent multiple structural changes, they found it difficult to reestablish their lives as they had known them before the war. Under this pressure, gender roles within households changed, causing anxiety and contributing to the emergent crisis of paternity. In the aftermath of war, family networks were shattered and female-headed households became common: “Many, too many families are completely disorganized,” lamented a French journal in .51 Most of the more than , Armenian refugees who arrived in Syria and Lebanon after fleeing the  massacres in Anatolia were women and children, unemployed and hungry. Settled in camps outside of major cities, Armenian women supported their families by working in the textile industry or running home-tailoring businesses.52 While there are no records of how many Armenian refugee households were headed by women, French records of Assyrian refugees who settled in Syria in  showed that  percent of “chefs de familles” were women.53

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Numerous Syrian and Lebanese women waited anxiously for their husbands and fathers to return from war. In  a Damascus newspaper published what it called a typical story. A couple named George and Mary had three children. In , when George received a call from the military, he chose to pay the military exemption tax. But his exemption expired, and he was sent to Galicia. Mary received one letter from him, and then no word. Some time later, she received a death notice. Mary wept, and struggled to support her children. None of her relatives could afford to help, so she pulled her eldest son out of school and placed him in a job with a carpenter. When a wealthy widower proposed marriage, Mary was horrified at the thought. But her circumstances had deteriorated so much that, two months after the war ended, she accepted his proposal. Just before the ceremony, however, her husband George miraculously reappeared: He had been taken prisoner in Belgium and the Ottoman death notice had been an error, an error that hurt many during the war.54 Not all women were so lucky. In a  court case, a Damascene woman was convicted and jailed three months for stealing  Turkish gold liras from a neighbor’s house. The woman, Lutfiya bint Mahmud al-Qudsi, described herself as a poor widow without resources. She claimed the money had been left to her by her husband, and that she hid it in the courtyard of their house before she was forced, for reasons of economy, to vacate it. She returned to the house in May , she claimed, to retrieve the money in order to buy a sewing machine and so earn a living.55 Despite its possible untruths, Qudsi’s story is likely representative of strategies many women used—either work as a seamstress or theft—to survive in the absence of male breadwinners. The breakdown of family support systems is further evidenced by the number of children housed in orphanages. The total number of children orphaned during the war is not known, but the Near East Foundation alone cared for , orphans, mostly Armenian, through the mid-s.56 In , Halide Edib ran two orphanages with , children, while a third orphanage built that year in Beirut housed , children. Meanwhile, Shakib Arslan founded three orphanages in the Shuf region south of Beirut. He claimed the Turkish government was supporting thousands of orphaned children.57 After the war, the new governments and private charities built even more orphanages, bringing the total to  in Syria and Lebanon.58 Orphanages had been virtually unknown before the war, as Syrian and Lebanese orphans were usually taken in by relatives. Their appearance gave tragic testimony to the children’s loss not only of their parents, but of grandparents, uncles, and aunts. Even families with both parents had a difficult time. When fathers and

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husbands finally returned, they were often penniless or handicapped, or both. Many families had had to relocate during the war, losing the local infrastructure that kept them afloat. A Druze family that evacuated Mount Lebanon during the famine lived on the edge of poverty in southern Syria, at Jabal Druze, where they bought a small parcel of land. For decades afterward, the father of the family migrated for part of the year to Lebanon to earn additional wages as a manual laborer.59 Armenians were perhaps the most unsettled. Because of local hostility, the , refugees settled in Damascus in  were later relocated to Beirut and Aleppo, where local residents also rejected them. Artisans complained about new Armenian competition in tailoring and shoemaking, while many others complained of too many makeshift peddlers on the streets. Resentment toward the Armenians bespoke the continuing hard times faced by the urban poor.60 Hanna Mina describes the continuing misery of families on the margins of the postwar economy in his autobiographical novel Fragments of Memory. After the war, Mina’s orphaned mother migrated to Mersin in Anatolia with her sister and brother to work as a maid. She had lost an older sister in the safar barlik, and soon lost her brother to pneumonia. She then married Mina’s father, another Syrian refugee, and the family moved back across the border to Latakia, where they lived temporarily with relatives. The family traveled from town to village, back to town and again to village, in search of work. Mina’s father worked as a self-styled shoemaker and at other odd jobs, and at one point hired himself and his family out to raise silkworms, in a sharecropping arrangement that resembled slavery. The family nurtured the worms to perfect maturity, only to find that they could not sell them in the glutted local market. Mina’s parents then forced his sister to work as a maid in their master’s house to pay off their debts. In the late s they moved to another village, where they lived in an abandoned house in exchange for guarding its adjacent granary. That year’s harvest had been bad, and food supplies were short. The book ends with the revolt of villagers at the granary, which went up in flames, leaving Mina’s family again homeless.61 The bad luck of Mina’s family in raising silkworms reflected the general collapse of the silk industry. During the war, most mulberry trees in Lebanon were chopped down for firewood. The silk industry would die finally in the s due to competition from Asian imports and the new “synthetic silk,” or rayon. While wealthy Lebanese landowners were able to replace mulberry trees with olive and citrus trees, poorer farmers could not afford such an investment. Workers on Lebanon’s new citrus plantations were often peasants who had been bought out by the newly enriched urban bourgeoisie.62

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Shortages of material supplies also hampered efforts of rural families to regain their livelihoods. Many families had sold all of their household goods for food. In addition, Jemal Pasha had ordered the confiscation of all wheeled vehicles, animals, wool, leather, nails, hardware items, and the like for military use. Families were stripped of the tools they needed to carry out basic farm tasks like planting and transporting crops and food processing.63 It would take them years to acquire the capital needed to replace these essential items, one reason agricultural production slumped in the s. Meanwhile, in the cities, artisans lost their jobs in the textile industry. Foreign imports accelerated after the war, while rural markets remained depressed. This made it difficult for artisans returning from battlefronts to restart their businesses. Thousands of dyers and weavers in the textile industry were forced to take lower-paid and part-time wage jobs. By the mid-s, the number of urban workers doing informal and part-time work, about ,, was double the number with full-time industrial jobs. Wage levels dropped in the s to half their  buying power. In addition, an estimated , workers, about  percent of the urban industrial labor force, were unemployed.64 The more fortunate men were able to find jobs in the expanding transport sector, as construction workers or truck and taxi drivers, and in the emergent civil service. For example, Fahmi Tergeman, the soldier mentioned above who starved in Gaza, had been a thread-spooler in Damascus’s silk industry before the war. Afterward, he used telegraph skills gained in the Ottoman army to obtain a job in the post office.65 While men faced great difficulty in providing for their families, many women of the lower classes also saw sources of supplementary income that they had once contributed to their households disappear. Before the war, thousands of women did home work for the textile industry, representing onethird of textile workers in  Damascus; by , Damascene women were using , sewing machines at home to produce hosiery.66 Meanwhile, more than , young women on Mount Lebanon had worked in silk mills, earning meager wages that often lifted their families above the line of destitution. Thousands more women, usually older and married, raised silkworms at home. As late as , agents for French firms roamed the Lebanese countryside to buy their cocoons: “Many a housewife adds a small sum to the household income by her diligence in looking after her silkworm shed,” noted a traveler.67 But foreign imports, the collapse of the silk industry, and the construction of the region’s first textile factories swept these women’s jobs away. By , only , to , women worked in silk mills (fig. ).68 Women throughout Syria and Lebanon who had once sold homemade jerseys and

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hosiery were replaced in the early s by a half-dozen knitting factories, which employed only  wage-earners.69 By , the Singer Sewing Company was repossessing the sewing machines that Damascene women rented, because they no longer earned enough income to make their payments.70 In the countryside, peasant women suffered alongside men from the postwar dislocation of agriculture and the demise of cottage industries. With no market for their home crafts, they turned to wage labor in other people’s fields to supplement household income. A  study calculated that , peasants, , of them women, engaged in part-time and seasonal wage work to supplement their income from the land. Like their urban cousins, these women generally earned half the wage-rate of men. An additional , peasants, likely all women, worked as domestic help in the homes of their wealthier neighbors.71 Innumerable families, especially from the mountainous ‘Alawi and Mount Lebanon regions where the silk industry had once thrived, sent their daughters to Damascus and Beirut to work as maids.72 The multiple and rapid shifts in men’s and women’s work opportunities after the war imposed stress on many families, who could no longer depend on old strategies for survival. The customary division of labor in rural families changed if both men and women were forced to work as fieldhands, if they had to send a son or daughter to a distant city to earn wages, or if the whole family relocated to the city. Daughters who worked as maids often became the mainstay of their families. But wives who relocated to the city often lost income once gained through kitchen gardens, chicken-raising, or cottage trades. Likewise, the division of labor in urban families changed as downsized artisans found they could no longer be the family’s main breadwinner. But even as they depended more on the earnings of their wives and daughters, this source of income was jeopardized by imports. Certainly, the majority of men managed to secure employment, although likely at lower wages than they hoped for. The profound instability of the labor market caused increasing social unrest in cities, and as will be seen in Part Two, contributed to the growth of new social movements. Although we do not have many written records from these poorer classes, there is reason to believe that the instability of the labor market contributed to men’s anxiety about their gender identity. Local culture placed great emphasis on a man’s ability to support his family. Indeed, in the dominant Islamic religion, men were required to provide all of their wives’ basic needs. The continued struggle to meet that expectation, following the trauma of having had to abandon their families during the war, likely compounded the crisis of paternal authority in the home.

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In contrast, elite families experienced far more stability in these years, although they faced their own sorts of stress due to changing gender roles in the household. Most elites had not depleted their resources to buy food during the war; indeed, a good portion of them passed the war years in Cairo or other foreign cities. Among those who stayed behind, as we have seen, many profited from the inflated grain trade and from land sales by the poor. As a result, elites had the resources to adapt to postwar economic changes. They enlarged their landholdings and profited from the progressive commercialization of agriculture that displaced so many peasants. French support would further enrich landowners, as the next chapter will show. Merchants and bankers, especially in Beirut, used their still-intact capital reserves to profit from trade in the foreign imports that were so hazardous to artisans. Despite the instability of world markets and structural shifts in the local economy, the landowning bourgeoisie remained quite stable as a class: The family names of urban notables changed little between  and . This is not to say that the war had no effect on these families. Most remarkable was a change in attitudes toward women’s work and education, which had long been discouraged as unrespectable by elites and the middle class. But because World War I had left so many women without means of support, they adopted a more positive attitude, especially among non-Muslims. Formal schooling became for the first time a norm among the daughters of the elite and middle class. And many of them took jobs afterward, working as teachers, typists, telephone operators, salesgirls, shopkeepers and hotelkeepers. Women owned, for example, half the pensions and at least eight hotels in Beirut. In , a Damascene teacher observed a surprising rise in employment among middle-class Jewish girls. Before the war, “a girl from a comfortable family did not work,” she remarked. “Now, because the war ruined so many, there is a change. It is not rare, for example, to see girls of the best families hurry each morning to the government offices of the [French] delegation, or different services of the mandatory power, or to banks, or simply to shops, where they often act as managers.”73 While most women quit their jobs upon marriage, some embarked on professional careers. Female journalists and magazine editors appeared in the s, and the first locally trained female doctors and lawyers began practicing in the s. Another new trend among the younger generation of the elite was to establish separate households from their parents and have fewer children.74 The ideal of the extended household, realized mainly by wealthier families in the past, now faded as young couples in large cities like Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo moved out of their parents’ homes as soon as they could afford it. New quarters

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of these cities featured apartment buildings with one-family flats, where different branches of the family might live as neighbors. The ideal of a large family also faded. The use of birth control and abortion reportedly increased among these elite urban classes in the interwar period, although the general population shunned it.75 Whether this shift toward smaller, nuclear families was occasioned by the war is unclear. However, coupled with the later marriage age of young women who remained in school longer and often took jobs, it represented a significant change in expectations of gender roles within wealthier families. The authority of the family’s male patriarch was loosening among elites, or at least under siege. Magazine articles of the postwar period condemned arranged marriages, vaunting instead a model of companionate marriage in which the couple is introduced before their engagement and given a free choice in partner. Articles also regularly advised young brides on how to be a proper helpmate, rather than a mere servant or ornament for their husbands.76 Young brides living in their own households certainly escaped the domination of mothers-in-law. And if they could afford servants, these wives of the new generation likely enjoyed far more autonomy and free time than their mothers had. In sum, the war had a direct and indirect effect on upper- and middle-class households. While ideas about the need for women’s education and the benefits of their employment and later marriage had floated before the war, the years of privation and trauma appear to have made these ideas more acceptable. Many women had gained experience of autonomy during the war, and were reluctant to relinquish it afterward. They had had to fend for themselves in the absence of men, and had left their seclusion to engage in charity work. Their fathers, husbands, and brothers were clearly more inclined in the postwar period to permit women to attend school, engage in philanthropic activities, and even to work. As subsequent chapters will also show, however, the growing expectation that respectable women might pursue a life outside of the home caused tremendous controversy in an era when male authority was so generally threatened.

Conclusion: Household Origins of a Crisis of Paternity The postwar dislocations and hardships experienced by the vast majority of Syrian and Lebanese families strained a social order already shattered by the years of war and famine. Gender anxieties, religious suspicions, and class resentments that arose during the war continued through much of the s.

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While not everyone suffered, the extremely uneven fortunes of different groups produced a climate of profound uncertainty and social tension. These tensions converged into a general crisis of paternity. The war had shaken the definitions of family and community that people had known, and called into question the paternalistic bases of authority that they had respected. Men who during the war had lost their honor and lost control of their families struggled afterward to reconstitute their authority. The progressive effects of the commercialization of agriculture, and of the saturation of markets with foreign imports, disrupted their households and swept away usual sources of income. The inability of men to provide for their wives shook the basis of what one scholar has called the classic patriarchal bargain, in which women offered their obedience in exchange for security.77 While the war undermined the material bases of security for most families, even among the stable elite it had altered expectations of gender roles. Memories of a world turned upside down would produce both a nostalgia for lost norms and a revolutionary spirit. The war was not the only factor contributing to a crisis of paternity. As the remaining chapters of Part One will show, the advent of French rule magnified the uncertainties felt within families into a general crisis of authority and gender identity in the realm of politics.

chapter 2


Soldiers and Patriarchs: Pillars of Colonial Paternalism

Entente and Arab troops entered Damascus on October , , and Beirut one week later. By month’s end they had occupied Aleppo and Tripoli and signed an armistice with the Ottomans. Military governors were appointed to the various districts, with the French occupying the coast and the British-backed government of Prince Faysal in the Syrian hinterland. When the war ended on November , the military government issued a formal proclamation promising liberation and national governments chosen by the indigenous peoples.1 Syrian and Lebanese Muslim leaders rejoiced and rallied around Faysal’s nascent Syrian-Arab kingdom, while most Christians of Mount Lebanon looked toward the founding of a separate state. Seventeen months later, however, in April , European peacemakers eschewed majority popular opinion and unilaterally awarded the French mandatory rule over the territory, to be split into countries called Syria and Lebanon. The mandate was supposed to be a temporary period of unselfish tutelary rule, preparing the people for self-government in the spirit of Woodrow Wilson’s principles of self-determination. However, the French immediately made it clear that they would rule by force if cooperation was not forthcoming. Within three months the French expelled Faysal, brutally defeating his army on July ,  at Khan Maysalun, west of Damascus. Not everyone opposed French rule. On August , a French-language newspaper in Beirut, Le Réveil, ran front-page photos of the new French high commissioner, General Henri Gouraud, parading through the Lebanese town of Zahla. Balconies along the general’s route were filled with women and girls who sang praises and showered him with flowers. He was greeted by French and Lebanese notables, some of whom bowed and kissed his hand. Gouraud then made a speech praising the Lebanese for their loyalty and welcoming them to France’s colonial family, which also included the occupying army:

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advent of french rule France has always found pleasure in this gift, to see marching by her side her adopted children like her own children. Who could believe that these Moroccans and Senegalese, after having spilled their blood for four years on the battlefield, would sacrifice themselves again yesterday, if France were not a true mother to them?2

Colonial children who were loyal would be rewarded, he continued, and the few traitors who resisted France would be punished. In recompense for Lebanese loyalty, he announced the creation of Greater Lebanon and a new flag, adding a cedar of Lebanon to the French tricolor. “You have two countries, Lebanon and France . . . the colors [of the flag] represent bravery and generosity.” As for the Syrians, Gouraud told his Lebanese audience that he had shown much patience before issuing an ultimatum to Faysal, who had been crowned King of Syria the previous March. At the moment Faysal agreed to accept the French mandate, however, renegade Syrian forces attacked French troops at Tall Kalakh (northeast of Tripoli). It was necessary to make a show of force, Gouraud said, to end this corruption and intrigue. “I did not make war last month on the inhabitants of Damascus. I made war on a bad government,” he said stressing that French troops entered the city without firing a shot. Gouraud neglected to mention the bloody battle at Maysalun, where thousands of Syrians had fought and at least  (some claimed , or more) had died.3 The speech, employing a standard familial colonial discourse, portrayed France as a caring mother, and Gouraud as a stern father. The Lebanese and Syrians were their children. But this was a family in crisis, and these were adoptive parents who had to prove their worthiness to their adopted children. Gouraud apologized for France’s delay in delivering aid to her loyal Lebanese children during the war, and acknowledged that a colonial mother must earn the affections of her colonial children. As a colonial father, Gouraud argued that he was a fair disciplinarian, who gave his Syrian children every chance to obey before punishing them. In the subtext of the speech, however, Gouraud was competing with an alternative father figure, King Faysal. Gouraud promised better government than that of Faysal, who, he implied, could not even control his disobedient children, permitting them to attack France despite his decision to accept the French mandate. But Gouraud acknowledged only part of his competition. He apparently ignored the results of an American fact-finding mission in  that found most Syrians and Muslim Lebanese—and significant portions of Lebanon’s Greek Orthodox and Druze communities—opposed a French mandate. Gouraud also

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ignored the opinion of Christians and Muslims on Mount Lebanon’s Administrative Council, who had called for independence from France just two months before. These latter had been deported, and the council dissolved.4 There was, indeed, a political crisis of paternity in Syria and Lebanon. For  years the region had been part of the Ottoman Empire, a realm defined solely by the House of Osman’s claim to privileged dynastic and spiritual authority. Each sultan had ruled as the father, or shepherd of his flock (raya). While many had rejected their sultan-father during the Arab Revolt, they did not agree on his replacement. Faysal made his bid to be an Arab father, rallying a new generation of nationalists around his prestigious Hashemite dynasty, descended from the Prophet’s own clan. His name was substituted for that of the Ottoman sultan in Friday prayers, even in Beirut.5 But many residents of northern Syria held lingering affinities for union with Anatolia, where the sultan was being challenged by Mustafa Kemal’s rival government in Ankara. Armenian refugees in Aleppo, on the other hand, were suspicious of rule by both Turks and Faysal. And even in Damascus, Faysal had not been universally loved. Among those who disputed Faysal’s paternity were leaders of the city’s prominent families who had tried to form their own government in the days between the Ottoman withdrawal and his arrival with the British. They opposed a dynasty drawn from Arabia, preferring rule by local Syrian notables. Still others opposed Faysal’s secular monarchy in the hope of reviving an Arab caliphate, where a religious patriarch would reign. To these rival claims of fatherhood were added challenges against paternalism itself. Pan-Arabists often employed a rhetoric of a broad Arab fraternity reaching far beyond Faysal’s realm and based not in a royal lineage but in a shared heritage and republican ideals. Urban populists proclaimed popular sovereignty and rejected the hierarchical relations between dynastic ruler and ruled in favor of equality among a fraternal community of male citizens.6 If Faysal was king, he would rule only as a constitutional monarch, in concert with the Syrian Congress and local representative committees. In an even more fundamental challenge, women contested any male monopoly on political power, petitioning the Syrian Congress to permit women’s suffrage. In essence, women favored universal democracy over both fraternal republicanism and the male hierarchy of paternalism. What drove these ideological rivalries was the new phenomenon of mass politics.7 Wartime conscription had fostered a broader concept of identity than had previously existed, when the common peasant or city artisan had had little exposure to the world beyond his or her village or quarter.

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In response to the crisis, Gouraud marshalled all the symbolism at his disposal to enhance his paternalistic claims during his triumphal tour. Le Réveil described Gouraud’s arrival on August  in Damascus, where he stood at the Hijaz railway station flanked by foreign consuls; Muslim, Christian, and Jewish religious patriarchs; military officers, the male heads of the elite Bakri, ‘Abid, and Mu‘ayyad families of Damascus; and two Druze tribal chiefs. Gouraud saluted the flag and decorated several heroic soldiers. As he mounted a horse to parade through the streets, “the crowd pressed forward and women leaned from their balconies in a shudder of emotion that passed through the city.” The next day, Gouraud attended a Catholic mass officiated by the Vatican’s delegate to the Levant and visited the Umayyad mosque, where he promised freedom and tolerance of religion to the assembled Muslim clerics. When they requested amnesty for Faysal’s supporters, however, Gouraud demonstrated his stern paternalism, tersely replying that the guilty must be punished. Indeed, most leaders of populist republican and nationalist groups were handed death sentences.8 On an even more triumphant day for the French, the formal proclamation of Greater Lebanon on September , , Gouraud sat, one sleeve hanging loose (his arm had been lost in battle in World War I) under the portico of his official residence with the Maronite patriarch and the mufti of Beirut seated beside him. Other religious patriarchs, political officials, and soldiers encircled him. Gouraud greeted the assembly thus: “I told you a few weeks ago, at a dangerous moment: The day that your fathers hoped for in vain, and which, happily, you will see shine, is near. That day has come.”9 So the grandest father of all pretended to fulfill the hopes of past generations of Lebanese fathers. A photograph of the event (fig. ), representing the paternal origins of the new state, was distributed on postcards to the population. Gouraud’s role as stern father was ultimately played out not through symbols, but by recourse to force and persuasion. Soldiers were the primary pillar of French rule. The first three high commissioners were all generals in the French military, as armed revolts beleaguered the regime through much of the s. But by  the French would erect two additional pillars of authority. They built a clientele of paternalistic elites—tribal shaykhs, religious patriarchs and rural landowners like those who stood with Gouraud in —who acted as intermediaries of the regime. And they constructed a large bureaucracy that became the civilian face of the regime, dispensing social and economic services. These three pillars anchored French rule. But they by no means pacified all opposition: dissent was channeled after the armed revolts into parliaments that were set up under constitutions required under the

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terms of the mandate. The resultant civic order was a curious and unstable hybrid, combining the colonial method of rule through paternalistic privilege with a political structure based on republican rights and representation. In the rhetoric used by Gouraud, the colonial civic order was a large house with an unruly family, wherein the law laid down by the father was continually challenged and renegotiated by France’s adopted sons—and daughters.

Soldiers: The Era of Military Confrontation, 1920–26 Maysalun was only the beginning of armed resistance to French rule. While it continued to center in Syria, violent revolt would spill occasionally into Lebanon as well. From  to , the French fought a sustained guerrillastyle rebellion in northern Syria. Beginning among local tribes and Turkish soldiers in the ‘Alawi hills of northwestern Syria, the fighting spread along Syria’s northern border under the leadership of Ibrahim Hananu, a former Ottoman bureaucrat and soldier in Faysal’s army who became a national hero for his resistance, alongside the martyr of Maysalun, Yusuf al-‘Azma. The revolt was supported not only by wealthy Aleppines, but also by the rebel Turkish leader Mustafa Kemal and Prince Abdullah of Transjordan. Meanwhile, the French turned much of Syria’s eastern and northeastern desert regions into a military zone to pacify restive nomadic tribes.10 The largest armed revolt—and the last until World War II—was the Syrian Revolt, which began in the south of Syria. In July and August , the leader of the Druze tribe on Jabal Druze, Sultan al-Atrash, raised an army of , troops and captured the provincial capital, al-Suwayda. Soon other regions joined the fight. Causes of the revolt were economic and political. That summer a drought had destroyed crops in the Hawran, aggravating the continued postwar economic disarray. Resentment grew throughout Syria against the effects of the depreciating French franc on local wealth, against French stinginess in spending on education and economic development, and against high unemployment. The Druze, in particular, were also angered by the intrusive political policies of the new French governor, Captain Carbillet, who manipulated tribal factions and threatened the feudal authority of Druze shaykhs with the building of schools and roads and proposals for land reform to benefit peasants. Previously Faysal and the French had respected tribal autonomy, appointing Druze governors who did not contravene tribal patriarchs’ power. Indeed, in  the French had upgraded the Atrash clan to a hereditary nobility, with title of prince (amir).11 The political causes of the revolt thus lay in

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France’s ambivalent methods of rule. Carbillet was an overzealous exponent of a new French policy in the mid-s that rejected General Gouraud’s colonial methods of indirect rule in favor of the interventionist and statist republicanism practiced in France itself. Gouraud, drawing on his previous experience in Morocco, had squarely planted French rule on the shoulders of rural and conservative notables. He cultivated their loyalty by exploiting factions among them and by wooing favorites with such benefits for their districts as roads, medical clinics, schools, and farm loans.12 While fighting rebels in northern Syria, Gouraud had divided the remaining territory into statelets, where tribal elites were privileged in the Druze, ‘Alawi and northeastern Jazira territories, and where conservative, anti-nationalist landowning notables were buttressed in Aleppo and Damascus. Gouraud also wooed religious patriarchs with promises of material and political support. In Lebanon, the General based his power on close ties to the Maronite Church, whose delegates had supported the mandate at the Versailles peace conference. Consequently, the regime was organized around sectarian groups. In  Gouraud decreed the creation of a Lebanese Representative Council, where the  seats were allocated according to the proportions of religious sects counted in the  census.13 Gouraud’s successors as high commissioner, generals Maxime Weygand and Maurice Sarrail, sought to shift French policy from its dependence on mediating, paternalistic elites to a more direct relationship with a broader, middle section of the population. They were responding to sentiment in France that favored, under a newly elected left-wing cabinet, the spirit of self-determination championed by the League of Nations and a French-style, secular republican state in the colonies. Such a state would rule not through favors to mediating elites, but, as Foreign Minister Aristide Briand put it, through respect for the Rights of Man.14 Republicanism would be Weygand’s and Sarrail’s remedy to the crisis of paternity that had plagued Gouraud’s regime. Colonial republicanism, however, was inevitably paternalistic, for the French still positioned themselves as tutors to citizens who had no right to elect or dismiss them, and who were theoretically ignorant of France’s expertise in republicanism. It was more a means of imposing direct French rule over colonial subjects than of granting them rights. In fact, the new republican turn would prove ephemeral, both in Paris and its colonies. In the wake of leftists’ defeat in Paris and revolts in Syria, Morocco, and elsewhere, French colonial policy would soon return to Gouraud’s indirect methods of “association.”15 Weygand, high commissioner in –, sought to foster new middle-class alliances with the regime via economic investment in public works, utilities, agriculture, and industry. He also intended to encourage a new national loyalty

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in Syria and Lebanon to replace older, feudal loyalties and to draw support away from pan-Arab nationalists. In Lebanon, he removed the Maronite Church from direct involvement in decisionmaking, in favor of a more even-handed policy. In Syria, he promoted the development of cotton as an export crop to foster wealth among farmers. In , he permitted Syrian elections to representative councils. And to promote a Syrian nationalism, Weygand decreed the union of the Aleppine and Damascene states in , making Damascus the capital. But there were limits to Weygand’s efforts to broaden political participation. The Druze and ‘Alawi territories were not unified with the rest of Syria. Elections were rigged to favor large rural landowners over urban nationalist elites, causing protest. And when the press became too critical in , Weygand decreed strict censorship.16 While Weygand introduced gradual reforms, his successor, Sarrail, moved more brusquely. A staunch laicist, Sarrail insulted church leaders upon his arrival by his failure to attend the ceremonial occasions that his predecessors had. As he conducted consultations to prepare constitutions required by the mandate charter, Sarrail discouraged delegations of religious patriarchs “to avoid giving them the weight they don’t deserve.” He dismissed the French governor of Lebanon, whom he called a puppet of clerical parties, and sought to abolish confessional quotas in Lebanese elections, changes welcomed by Sunni Muslims but condemned by the Maronite Church.17 He also envisioned France’s role as a counterbalance to the “feudal spirit” that urban political bosses promoted.18 Sarrail’s government moved to elevate the status of peasants and workers with proposals to reform rural taxes and labor laws.19 Far from resolving the crisis of paternity, however, Sarrail’s statist and secular republicanism provoked vigorous defenses of local privilege. Resentful of Sarrail’s efforts to bypass patriarchs, Lebanese Catholic leaders sought to oust him through diplomatic means. Catholic missionaries feared that Sarrail might expel them and close their schools, from which he had already withdrawn the children of French personnel.20 The Vatican representative in Beirut protested to Rome and Paris that Syrians and Lebanese were not ready for a republican regime based on universal suffrage. Stripping Christian patriarchs of their privileges, he argued, was not a step toward republicanism, but rather a fatal capitulation to Muslim rebels: “[The French] are attempting, it seems, to transform into victims the massacrers of Christians, who are the object of their savagery not only because of Muslims’ atavistic fanaticism, but also . . . because of the infidels’ implacable hatred for the Mandatory Power.”21 In response to these protests, Pope Pius XI proposed to beatify eight priests and three Maronites killed in the  massacres in Damascus.22

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The same resentment at being bypassed sparked the Druze revolt and helped it spread into a general rebellion. In early , Druze leader Sultan alAtrash sent a delegation to complain about Captain Carbillet’s interference in their affairs. Sarrail, in keeping with his crusade against feudal exploitation, refused to fire Carbillet. After Druze leaders again tried to meet with French officials, Sarrail had them arrested on July . Meanwhile, Atrash had made contact with nationalists in Damascus, particularly wealthy merchants who marketed grain from southern Syria and lent money to peasants there. Clearly influenced by nationalist ideology, the Druze initiated the revolt a week after the arrests, proclaiming its goal as nothing less than independence and the union of all Syrian territories. Urban nationalists joined soon thereafter. The nationalists, like the Druze, were fighting as much against colonial republicanism as against foreign rule. As Philip Khoury, a leading scholar of Syrian nationalists, has argued, “Their real objective was to shift the balance of power between themselves and the French back in their own direction so as to restore their traditional influence over local politics—an influence which the French had undercut both in the nationalist towns and in the Jabal Druze.”23 While the Arab Revolt had been based upon troops from Iraq and tribes from south of Syria, the Syrian Revolt drew upon the truly Syrian and popular nationalist movement that had emerged in the Faysal era. At its height, the revolt spread well into northern Syria and Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley. Peasants and nomads who had so far seen little benefit from French proposals to redistribute land joined bands organized by their landlords and tribal chiefs. In October , the town of Hama was held for two days by rebels, who received support from landowners opposed to French plans for land reform.24 For months, rebels virtually controlled the Jabal Druze and parts of Damascus and the countryside surrounding it. In November, the spread of armed revolt into Lebanon reignited calls by Sunni Muslims there for union with Syria.25 The French responded with brutal violence and by mobilizing support from rural landowners against the urban and tribal nationalists. In October , French guns and airplanes bombarded Hama, where landowners readily capitulated after the French guaranteed security of their property. At the same time, French bombers and artillery blasted Damascus, destroying entire quarters of the city. Hundreds of women, children, and elderly people were trapped in collapsed buildings, and more than  people were believed killed. The city suffered a second bombardment in May .26 By November , the rebels were almost completely defeated, although sporadic fighting continued in Hama and Jabal Druze into . Casualties were estimated at more than , deaths on both sides.27

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Gender became both a discursive and physical battlefield among these paternalistic rivals. Rebels met French rhetoric of chivalry, honor and protection with accusations of dishonorable conduct and injury to their own honor. Rumors of the rape of Muslim women by French soldiers had circulated as early as  in the Faysal regime’s anti-French propaganda. In May , the official Syrian newspaper published a poem alluding to those rumors: If the brave sons of Syria were to shrink from death on behalf of their fatherland How can our girls protect their honor? How can our people safeguard their souls? How is the nation to be freed from the filth of the enemy?28 Propaganda said to be spread by “Anglo-Turk” agents in northern Syria warned: “The French will rape your women! The Senegalese will kill your children!”29 Rebels were thus addressed as male heads of families whose honor was threatened. The French dislaimed such motives. Le Réveil, in the same issue quoting Gouraud’s adoptive-father speech to the Lebanese, published an article denying rumors of rape during the July  invasion of Syria: “The perfect conduct of French soldiers toward women was especially noticed, and was the object of conversation everyday.”30 Rape and the defense of honor emerged again as themes of nationalist propaganda in the Syrian Revolt. Leaflets called upon villagers to protect Syrian women from French soldiers. One of them alerted the Arab nation to French atrocities in Damascus in May : “Not content to bombard, the French sent a column to pillage houses, rape women, and set fire to the quarter, which is still burning.”31 Charges of rape were also levied against Armenian and Circassian troops used to flush rebels out of Damascus’s southern Maydan quarter.32 Rebel propaganda often called on men to prove their manliness and virility. A Syrian leaflet called the French cowards, and threatened them with images of traditional Arab warriors: “You hide in the city behind your firearms like women, not like fighters. Withdraw with the honor that you still have. If not, we will massacre you with sabres and your blood will flow in streams.”33 Likewise, a Lebanese leaflet sought to rally Christians to the revolt: “Abandon resignation, which is sterile, and run for your sword. . . . You have been complicit with foreigners against your brothers.” Another leaflet called Syrian collaborators in the Damascene courts, which had condemned a rebel to death, a “prostituted government” of spies.34 Rhetorical jousting reached the highest ranks. The high commissioner and

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Sultan al-Atrash made competing claims to be the better paternal provider in appeals to various Druze factions. A leaflet signed by Henry de Jouvenel, who replaced Sarrail in November , said: “Druzes! Why do you fight?. . . . Only France can give you wheat, plumbing, roads and schools. . . . If your wives and children are hungry, if your ruin and defeat are not remedied, this will be not my fault but that of Sultan Atrash.” Atrash, in response, accused the French of depriving men, particularly bedouin, of their livelihoods by closing borders: “Grandsons of the noble Arabs, the day has come that will profit warriors [mujahids]. . . . The colonizers have pillaged us. . . . They have robbed our country’s freedoms of trade and travel.”35 Women also participated in both the physical and rhetorical combat. Urban and rural women were active in street demonstrations and in smuggling weapons, food rations and medicine to rebels, often hiding them under their cloaks (hijab) at French checkpoints. A number of rural women became known for their heroism in gunbattles with the French. Dozens were killed in such battles, while hundreds more were killed during French bombardments of cities. Many others were rendered homeless in the rural fighting, fleeing for safety to cities with their children.36 Even in times of peace, women feared French soldiers. Wadad Qurtas, a Lebanese school director, remembered the beginning of the mandate mainly as the occupation of Beirut streets by foreign soldiers.37 French policemen routinely followed girls in the street, calling “Fatima!” a generic name for Muslim women used in North African colonies.38 Hostility to the French was not only sexualized but also racialized. Senegalese soldiers are often singled out in women’s memories of the mandate period as especially threatening.39 Parents warned girls to avoid them on the streets, and would even keep them home for fear of assault. “When they wanted to scare the children, the French would say ‘The Senegalese will come to you now!’ ” recalled one woman.40 These warnings were of a piece with the racial undertones of rebel leaflets quoted above, referring to the supposed bestiality of Senegalese soldiers, whose “filth” might violate their pure women. As one observer remarked, the French did not grasp the special obligations of the Mandate, but treated the country as if it were a French colony, and the inhabitants as on a level with France’s African subjects; and at least in the early part of the Mandatory period they did not hesitate to express their contempt for the Arabs. The use of Senegalese troops first to expel Faisal and then on garrison duty seems to the Syrians and Lebanese to be a sign of this contempt.41

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For the remainder of the mandate, the Senegalese would become a regular target of nationalist propaganda in sexualized and racialized imagery that fused men’s gender anxieties with outrage at French domination. This imagery reinforced an understanding that the nation was a nation of men, tacitly excluding women. Rooted in the crisis of paternity, it reasserted male protection and control over women. French manliness was wounded, too. In , Abel Moreau, a former French soldier in Syria, published an allegorical novel called La Nuit syrienne. In the story, a pious French soldier named Calvier falls in love with a beautiful Lebanese woman who had been Jemal Pasha’s mistress. According to Calvier, she has the mesmerizing eyes of the serpent that had tempted Eve and a seductive voice that charmed even wild beasts. Calvier spends his entire savings on her, and repeatedly asks her to “swear to me that you didn’t love him [Jemal Pasha].” Not only does she refuse to swear, but she also jilts Calvier as soon as he runs out of money, saying that she would always love a brave soldier like Jemal Pasha more than a weak seminary dropout like him. Calvier, in a frenzy, pushes her off the ledge of a ruined castle to her death. The novel’s not unsubtle message was that France was tragically unsuited to imperial rule, because Frenchmen were too generous and idealistic. The Levant, on the other hand, was a perfidious lover who drained France’s resources. French reaction was to reassert Gouraud’s stern discipline. The revolt made clear that at its base French rule was, and would remain, military rule. Soldiers vastly outnumbered French civilian personnel throughout the mandate period: While the number of French bureaucrats would never rise above , the number of colonial troops rose from , in October , when the Army of the Levant was created, to , in , in response to the rebellions in northern Syria and to , at the start of World War II. Troop levels would fluctuate between these extremes in times of peace and times of trouble. The Army of the Levant consisted of French officers and specialized units commanding troops drawn from North Africa, Madagascar and Senegal. A omit military auxiliary, eventually named the Special Troops, recruited a cross-section of rural volunteers from both countries. It remained small, less than , troops, for most of the s.42 By , the French had consolidated a substantial military, police, and intelligence network to discipline the population. In addition to an average of , military troops and , policemen and gendarmes, hundreds of French spies were dispersed through the territories.43 Troops were called out routinely to quash demonstrations, and martial law was repeatedly declared in cities during periods of unrest. This was the raw face of military occupa-

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tion. As one historian put it, “the level of violence, and the frequency of the incidents, makes chilling reading.”44

Patriarchs: The Rise of Constitutional Governments, 1926–30 The defeat of the Syrian Revolt marked the end of armed resistance, and the start of a new era of politics. Sarrail had been replaced by a civilian high commissioner, Henry de Jouvenel, and civilians would continue to head the mandatory state until . Constitutions were soon drawn up, and elections held in both countries. The religious, class, and gender anxieties that had flared into violence during the revolt were to be, in theory, transmuted into political debate. Indeed, a group of former Syrian rebels formed the National Bloc, a political alliance committed to peaceful negotiation with the French. But the opening of parliaments did not inaugurate democratic government. The revolt had in fact closed the door on the experiments by Weygand and Sarrail to broaden political participation. The French camp and its nationalist opponents alike feared what changes the masses might demand. Together they entered into a pact that reaffirmed the paternalistic pillars of colonial rule first planted by Gouraud. The Syrian Revolt directly shaped the constitutions of both countries. The Lebanese constitution was written in early  in a climate of sectarian tension enflamed by the revolt’s spread into the country. A few months before,  Christians had been killed by renegade Druze rebels in the mountains, sparking months of Muslim-Christian violence. At the same time, many Sunni Muslim leaders began openly to support the revolt and union with Syria. Sarrail’s dismissal by a new right-wing government in Paris had reversed their growing support for a Lebanese state reorganized under Sarrail’s vision of secular, nonsectarian government.45 Sunni support for the revolt further alarmed Maronite leaders, who were already upset by the Druze attacks on Christians and by Sarrail’s efforts to marginalize them in government. As a result, plans for a nonsectarian political system were dropped. Sarrail’s successor, Jouvenel, hurried to appease the Maronites and make their Church the pillar of French rule it had always been. The French also hurried preparation of the constitution in order to impress the League of Nations with a show of liberal policy and offset bad press reports of the revolt. Jouvenel charged the Representative Council to draw up a list of notables and civic leaders to be polled on their preferences for a future government.

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Bowing to pressure from Paris and the Maronite Church, the Council sent  of the  questionnaires distributed in early  to religious patriarchs. Only  responded to the poll. Thirty-two Sunni Muslim leaders refused to participate in it, because they hoped the revolt would soon bring union with Syria. Their abstention was critical, because many Sunnis supported nonsectarianism. Those who responded to the poll, in contrast, favored a republican form of government based on sectarian representation. Under pressure to meet the May deadline, a committee supervised by the French quickly wrote Lebanon’s constitution. Jouvenel and the Council approved the text on May , , and the following day the Republic of Lebanon was proclaimed. The constitution declared Lebanon’s boundaries unalterable. It provided for a parliamentary government dominated by the French high commissioner, who would have the power to dismiss parliament, to annul laws, and even to suspend the constitution, while also retaining control of the military, police and foreign affairs. The relatively weak president, whose main power was to appoint the prime minister, was to be chosen indirectly by a bicameral legislature elected through universal male suffrage. While the constitution assured the right of every Lebanese to hold office, based solely on merit, it also guaranteed, in apparent contradiction, the equitable representation of all sects in the cabinet, the parliament, and the civil service. And it guaranteed respect for each sect’s personal status laws and religious schools. These provisions severely limited the state’s power, while augmenting that of religious patriarchs. They also ensured that politics would turn on sectarian rivalry. When the Maronite Church promoted one of its own to become the first president, all other sects objected. To allay their fears of Maronite domination, Jouvenel pressured the new legislature to elect a Greek Orthodox lawyer, Charles Dabbas. Nonetheless, Sunni Muslim leaders abstained from political participation well into the s. Meanwhile, factionalism and sectarian bickering so paralyzed the government that the French imposed two constitutional amendments in  and  to reduce the legislature to one chamber and increase the power of the president.46 In contrast to Lebanon, in Syria the revolt neither foregrounded sectarianism nor sidelined the opposition. Henri Ponsot, high commissioner from  to , needed to appease nationalists recently defeated on the battlefield. He quashed Jouvenel’s brief initiative to install a monarchy in Syria, and instead organized elections in  for a constitutional convention. A key player in the convention was the National Bloc, which emerged between  and . The Bloc was not a political party united by principles, but rather an association of paternalistic elites. Its leaders were mainly young Sunni Muslims from the

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urban landowning-bourgeoisie that had supported the revolt. Their goal was to gain control of government, and eventually independence, through political negotiation with the French. They were conservative liberals little interested in social and economic reform, which they saw as dangerous to their own interests. Like their opponents who collaborated with the French, Bloc leaders’ power and political goals derived from their status as patrons of personal clientele networks.47 While the French rigged the  election to pack the convention with pliant rural notables, the Bloc managed to dominate the proceedings with its experience in political tactics and speechmaking. First, Bloc leaders defeated the bid for convention president by Ponsot’s hand-picked prime minister, Shaykh Muhammad Taj al-Din al-Hasani, the shrewd and portly son of a respected religious scholar whose conservative clientele included wealthy landowners and ulama (Muslim clerics). Taj’s exclusion paved the way for Bloc member Ibrahim Hananu, hero of armed revolts in northern Syria, to head the committee to draft the constitution. Ponsot tried to derail the Bloc’s success by reintroducing the idea of a Syrian monarchy. Some ulama and other pious Muslims in Syria supported the idea of returning the Hashemite dynasty, so revered in Islam, to power. The monarchists were weakened, however, because they could not agree on a candidate. In the end, both Shaykh Taj and Bloc leaders proved themselves more French than Ponsot. Schooled in the republican ideals of the French Revolution, these erstwhile rivals joined ranks to defeat what had promised to become a new form of tyranny. In August , Hananu’s committee submitted to the convention a draft constitution for a parliamentary republic in many ways similar to Lebanon’s. It provided for a president to be chosen indirectly by a single-chambered legislature elected by universal male suffrage. The president was to appoint a prime minister, who controlled policymaking and the various government ministries. The draft also granted citizens rights to freedom of property, association, speech and conscience, and fair trials; it also provided for obligatory primary education. Although the draft assured the legal equality of all citizens regardless of religion, in a nod to powerful ulama and majority popular sentiment it required the president to be Muslim. It also reserved for religious minorities seats in parliament, but not posts in the civil service. But when debate began on the draft, Ponsot interrupted the convention’s proceedings. Several articles contravened French authority, declaring that Greater Syria, including Lebanon and the Druze and ‘Alawi territories, was indivisible; and that the Syrian president, not the high commissioner, should control foreign affairs and a national army. This assertion of sovereignty was a

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blow to Ponsot, who was already under pressure from the resurgent political right in Paris. With their allies in the Army of the Levant, Parisian conservatives had just unseated both Sarrail and Jouvenel for their liberal tendencies. So Ponsot suspended the convention, and in May  he simply decreed the constitution, revised to protect French power.48 Political uproar ensued, postponing the first elections until late .49 While the nationalists lost their bid for Syrian unity and sovereignty, they nonetheless had managed to play a central role in establishing a nominally republican civic order, against Islamic and monarchist tendencies that would remain strong into the s.50 The resultant Lebanese and Syrian political regimes were not, of course, shaped solely by the immediate circumstances of the revolt. They also reflected past Ottoman practice and French influence. Many Lebanese and Syrian politicians had gained experience in constitutional parliamentary government under the Young Turk regime. The apportionment of parliamentary seats according to religious sect went back further, to the first Ottoman elections of . French influence was exerted not only directly by Ponsot, but also indirectly, by the fact that many politicians were trained in French law schools. Essential attributes of the constitutions—the nonmonarchical, secular, and representational definition of power; the weak presidencies and the factionridden and sluggish parliaments; universal male suffrage; and the emphasis on personal liberties—were also hallmarks of the late French Third Republic. The new constitutions also expanded popular participation beyond Ottoman limits, by replacing the sultan with elected heads of state, omitting Ottoman property requirements for voters, and reducing the minimum voting age.51 But the constitutions also subverted the republican spirit that they proclaimed. While assigning sovereignty to the people, they also granted supreme power to a nonelected official who stood above the law, the French high commissioner, who could decree laws, dismiss parliaments, and even suspend the constitution itself. Furthermore, the two-staged elections, inherited from the Ottoman era, ensured elites’ control of and profit from the electoral system. The routine violation of rules for secret balloting also went back to Ottoman times, and had a similar benefit for elites. In sum, the regimes imagined in the constitutional texts were hardly democratic and barely republics at all. Such was the implicit contradiction between the realities of colonial rule and the vaunted republican ideals of the French civilizing mission. To the French, the parliaments were noisome window dressing. After the departure of Sarrail, they returned with a vengeance to rule through their own clientele of paternalistic elites. In fact, the French fostered a neofeudal landowning class in both Syria and Lebanon with economic and political

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power that far surpassed that of the Ottoman era. In exchange for political loyalty, the French awarded large tracts of Ottoman imperial land to tribal shaykhs, village chiefs, and landlords in the plains of Lebanon and the north and northeast of Syria.52 The French also undertook irrigation projects and extended agricultural credits to benefit these loyal patrons. While ostensibly measures to increase productivity, they aggravated social inequality. In Syria, just six percent of the rural population possessed  percent of all farmland, while the number of small family farms (less than  hectares), declined from  to  percent of all farmland between  and .53 About , families (one-tenth of all landowners) had their land bought out from beneath them. Most peasants became indebted sharecroppers. Similarly, much of Mount Lebanon remained under the quasi-feudal notables who enjoyed French support.54 In exchange for their largesse, the French expected this landed rural elite to discipline peasants. By buttressing the police powers of local landowners and village heads, the French often abetted their routine thievery, violence, and abuse.55 The French also built a clientele of religious patriarchs. Through their schools and weekly sermons, the patriarchs wielded potentially more influence over common people’s sentiments than did elite politicians, and especially nationalists. The French sought to guide patriarchs’ influence with subsidies to their religious schools and charities. Sarrail’s successors also reestablished the routine of state visits to religious leaders, who were regularly included, in return, on guest lists to official functions. In July , during the revolt, top Muslim officials were invited at the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ expense to attend the inauguration of a new mosque in Paris.56 A striking example of French efforts to build religious pillars of rule was their installation of Sulayman Murshid, a popular religious divine, as head of the ‘Alawi state. They granted him lands, tax revenues, control of the courts, and a cache of armaments with which to consolidate his power against urban Sunni nationalists in the region.57 Through their clienteles of landlords, tribal shaykhs, and religious patriarchs, the French operated outside of the framework of constitutional politics to impose their policies and assure their rule. In so doing, they effectively subverted the constitutions’ guarantees of legal equality among citizens. It would be wrong, however, to ascribe the subversion of republicanism to the French alone. Nationalists in both Syria and Lebanon confronted French paternalism not by demanding adherence to republican principles, but by marshalling clienteles of their own. In Syria, the National Bloc and French collaborators were essentially engaged

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in an intra-elite conflict. On both sides, urban bosses from prominent families dating from the late Ottoman era expended their public and private largesse to build personal political networks. In Damascus, Prime Minister Shaykh Taj, appointed by Ponsot in , disbursed large amounts of public funds to woo the ulama and the popular masses with building projects and stipends. Also prominent in Damascus on the moderate/francophile side was the ‘Azm family, descended from powerful Ottoman landowners and governors and still among the richest in Syria. They commanded a hefty patronage network of their own. Their opponent, the National Bloc, was represented in Damascus by scions of notable Muslim families like the Mardams and Haffars, influential among the city’s merchants; the Bakris and Quwwatlis, wealthy landowners who commanded networks of local strongmen in the city’s old quarters; and the Greek Orthodox Khuri brothers, both lawyers with followings among professionals and in the Christian quarter. The Bloc’s Aleppo branch was dominated by wealthy Sunni landowning elites, several of them related by marriage, like Ibrahim Hananu, Sa‘dallah al-Jabiri and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Kayyali.58 In Lebanon, after the  constitution was promulgated, Muslims organized as an interest group to counter Maronite influence and compete for government posts and services. As in Syria, politics organized around political bosses who commanded clienteles of residents of their quarter or district, members of their religious sect, and/or of their extended families. In Beirut, they were drawn from prominent families like the Sunni Bayhums, Salams, and Sulhs; the Maronite Khuris and Eddés; the Catholic Chihas and Pharaons, and the Greek Orthodox Sursuqs, Turads, and Tuenis. The term za‘im (pl. zu‘ama) came into common usage in the s to describe a new type of political boss, who brokered access to state benefits to nurture clienteles. They often fused economic interests with sectarian ones. One of the main reasons Beirut’s Sunni bourgeoisie favored union with Syria is that they were merchants who profited from trade with the hinterland, and so feared the new borders would hurt trade. Maronite leaders who opposed unity with Syria tended to come from landed wealth, and so did not depend on the Syrian hinterland.59 After the Syrian Revolt these elite families, who had long dominated urban politics, colluded with the French in fostering this clientelist system of politics. The system worked to the mutual benefit of both sides, in a paternalistic pact that maintained elites’ dominance and excluded humbler citizens from power in politics. The state’s paternalistic intermediaries were in effect awarded exceptional rights over weaker groups within the population. The French tapped rural patrons to do their police work; that is, to keep the peasants quiet. They tapped urban bosses to control the mob, and religious patriarchs

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to discipline their flocks. In response, opposition leaders made rival claims to represent these same subordinate groups of citizens. The paternalistic pact effected a fundamental inequality of rights that placed a privileged mediating elite between the state and peasants, workers, and women. This is not to say that the public espousal of republican ideals on both sides was insincere. Weygand, Sarrail, Jouvenel, and even Ponsot to a degree were true believers in the great gift France had given the world, but their republicanism was tempered by rightist pressures within their own governments and the brutal necessities of dominating another people. Likewise, Syrian and Lebanese elites who prepared the constitutions had explicitly chosen republics to protect themselves from the tyranny they remembered in the Ottoman sultan, and the abuses of power they currently observed by Egypt’s king. But the protection they sought was from interference with their own class, tribal, and sectarian bases of power, not necessarily the protection of all citizens from all forms of tyranny. In other words, paternalism coexisted in tension with republicanism in the colonial civic order. There is evidence, for example, that the Syrian Revolt itself worked to diminish sectarian and tribal divisions, and to promote a politics based on rights rather than elite patronage. Although the revolt began in the rivalry of Druze clans, the motive for fighting was not solely intra-group loyalty to patriarchal chiefs. Rebel leaflets routinely appealed to the “Arab nation,” and to “brothers,” and “sons” of the nation. Sultan al-Atrash himself used the language of rights: “We make no distinction in religion or sects, as our only aim is to obtain our legal rights which belong equally to the sons of Syria.”60 In appealing to fraternity rather than paternity, rebel propaganda invoked the principles of the French Revolution seemingly abandoned by the high commissioners and their superiors in Paris. One leaflet advised rebels: “Let us fraternize with the French soldiers, and make them understand that they are the sons of the valiant men who mounted a revolution in  for the liberty of weak nations.”61 Lenka Bokova has argued that while French colonizers took from the French Revolution inspiration to dominate others with their civilizing mission, Syrian rebels embraced the revolution’s alternate ideals of liberty and equality.62 The Syrian Revolt and the constitutions transformed the terms in which Syrians and Lebanese conceptualized the crisis of paternity. The multiplicity of political tendencies of the immediate postwar period narrowed by the late s into a conflict between visions of a civic order based on the equal rights in a fraternal republic and those based on the distribution of benefits at the will of a privileged elite. Elite nationalists adopted a limited, paternal

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republicanism primarily as a weapon to expel their unwanted adoptive fathers, the French. But in the process, they unloosed principles chiseled into republican constitutions that their subordinates might use to challenge nationalists’ own privileges. This is exactly what unprivileged citizens would do, as Part Two will discuss. Beforehand, however, it is necessary to address another key factor in the transformation of the crisis of paternity, the colonial state itself, to which we now turn.

chapter 3


Bureaucrats: Mother France’s Civilizing Mission

While Gouraud portrayed himself as a stern father, he had introduced France to Syrians and Lebanese in  as a caring mother. The French state promised to heal not only the physical wounds of war, but also to restore life: Since the arrival of the French, people have stopped dying of hunger in Syria. . . . But it does not suffice to give Syria a weak and miserable life; it is necessary to re-establish her prewar life, and more, to prepare her for the active and organized life of modern nations.1 The responsibilities of such a healing state were legally defined in the League of Nations charter assigned to France in , which charged the French with establishing a fair and equitable judiciary, a public health system that met international standards, and public education. Overall, France was to “enact measures to facilitate the progressive development of Syria and the Lebanon as independent states.”2 In the spirit of the Great Powers’ postwar ambivalence toward colonialism, the mandate was thus conceived as a temporary period of nurture by Mother France for her Syrian and Lebanese children, deemed not yet mature enough to sustain themselves. If soldiers and spies represented the disciplinary, fatherly side of the mandate, then bureaucrats represented Mother France. In their daily tasks of running the government, bureaucrats shouldered the burden of implementing France’s civilizing mission. They were the glue that joined the formal institutions of state with France’s informal networks of indirect rule, including paternalistic intermediaries, missionaries, French concessionary companies, and their various clienteles. By  the French managed to build a relatively efficient and centralized administration, in which the powerful high commissioner’s office in Beirut sent long tentacles into the various states and provinces. Indeed, the

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mandatory state would reach deeper into society, and spend more on social affairs, than the Ottomans ever did or than Faysal could in his -month rule. This centralized bureaucracy had such a powerful effect on the civic order in Syria and Lebanon that the historian must study the two countries together. While maps defined borders, and the constitutions of  and  formally established distinct and separate governments, the High Commission’s bureaucracy knit the two together in broad areas of social and economic policy. Syria and Lebanon were administratively Siamese twins joined at the head. French bureaucrats (like French soldiers) were routinely rotated to posts on either side of the border. No passports were required for travel between the two states. And customs duties, the single largest source of government revenue, were collected and distributed jointly. Other players in the civic order— intermediaries, political opponents, and clients of state services— ultimately engaged with the same government, whether they lived in Syria or Lebanon. However, the bureaucracy did not develop according to the maternal ideals of Gouraud and the mandate charter. The prolonged period of armed resistance and lack of funds from Paris slowed and altered Gouraud’s social vision. The civilian apparatus of French rule instead grew from the competition of varied interests for scarce resources. This chapter will show that the bureaucracy was built as much to distribute patronage to French interests— missionaries, concessionary companies, and the military—as to aid and tutor Syrians and Lebanese. By , maternalism and the notions of temporary tutelage had given way to the spirit of paternalism that had infused the other pillars of French rule.

Origins of the French Mandatory State The origins of the French mandatory state lay in the expediencies of military occupation and war relief. When Gouraud first stepped off a ship at Beirut harbor on November , , more than a year of French occupation had passed. French troops first landed in Beirut on October , , a week after Damascus was occupied, and they rushed to stake their claim to Lebanon. Upon arrival, Colonel de Piépape, military governor of Beirut, faced lingering Ottoman troops and a destitute, famished population, of which the French estimated , would die without immediate aid. Piépape also faced competition from Faysal and the British, whose propaganda and famine relief threatened to sway Lebanese loyalties their way.3 In fact, an Arab government had already raised a flag above Beirut in Faysal’s name. Moreover, Lebanon

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was left with virtually no government, for nearly all Ottoman bureaucrats had fled with their retreating army. But the French were ill-equipped to raise a full-fledged state in October , because their army, still concentrated on the Western Front, had been decimated. Not only had the French few soldiers, doctors, and administrators to spare, but they were also broke: the war had cost them nearly $ billion.4 Nonetheless, the foreign ministry, military, and missionaries linked efforts to ship food to Lebanon and to reassert a French presence that had been lost during the war: “European teachers returned in full ships, some of them even arriving before the army, like the Reverend de Martinprey, rector of the French Faculty of Medicine.”5 Martinprey, a Jesuit who had served as a naval officer on the island of Arwad off the Syrian coast, seized the school’s vehicles and organized soup kitchens in northern Mount Lebanon. The French consul soon engaged other missionaries who had formerly served in the Levant. Father Rémy, a Capucin monk and sergeant in the French intelligence service, built shelters for victims without families, including , orphaned or abandoned children. Father Sarloute, a Lazarist monk, organized famine relief in the southern regions of Mount Lebanon. By November , the foreign ministry, with British help, had organized regular shipments of wheat to the port of Beirut, and established a rationing system. The French had to borrow mules and camels from the British to deliver the food to inland villages. In the first year, they distributed , tons of foodstuffs costing  million francs. By mid-, relief was formally organized into the Supply Service (Service de Ravitaillement), under the direction of the temporary high commissioner, François Georges-Picot.6 French missionaries, concessionary companies, and the military became the nucleus of a new French state devoted almost entirely to social services. Missionaries were invited to establish a school system, seen as an essential means of radiating French influence against competing claims from the British and Faysal.7 They readily filled France’s manpower gap because they were anxious to reclaim their schools, which had been closed by the Ottomans. More importantly, missionaries filled the budget gap. They brought with them funds collected in parishes throughout Europe, which the foreign ministry supplemented with subsidies. By March ,  private schools, run mostly by French missionaries, were holding classes. Local religious schools were also encouraged: the foreign ministry advanced an educational subsidy of , francs to the Maronite patriarch on October , before French troops had even landed at Beirut.8 By May , there were  private (mostly Christian) schools, while only  public schools had been opened. When foreign

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ministry officials protested to Gouraud that “neutral” (public) schools would better foster a rapprochement among Lebanon’s various sects, they were told that it would cost too much: “That is to say, that if we convert the subsidized private schools into those like the local public schools, the cost would be tripled for personnel, quadrupled if we account for general costs, and quintupled if we account for administrative waste.”9 The future public health department similarly grew out of the postwar collaboration between military and missionaries. Epidemics continued well after the war ended. Bubonic plague appeared in Beirut in September  and again in June . In , smallpox, typhoid, malaria, and typhus were still rampant in the Damascus region.10 The military acted first to safeguard the health of French troops, many of whom were returned ill to France. A free clinic was opened in Beirut before the end of , and was soon treating more than  patients a day. A demobilized military bacteriological lab and surgical team were imported from Marseille in February , and soon thereafter a -bed hospital was built in Beirut with furnishings from a hospital in Port Said, Egypt. The military found difficulty in recruiting doctors, however, because most had been decommissioned at the end of the war. To combat cholera in Syrian ports, the nascent health service recruited an engineer who had been posted in Jerusalem.11 Again the French relied heavily on private agents, especially French missionaries, to provide medical care at low cost. The foreign ministry granted subsidies to the Faculty of Medicine at St. Joseph University in Beirut, and turned to the University of Lyon to oversee the reorganization of the medical school in Damascus. Meanwhile, the military cooperated with French businessmen to lay the foundations of a future public works department—an immediate priority: roads and railroads had been so damaged that food could not be delivered to the mountains. In March , General Gamelin, commander of the French Troops of the Levant, organized a civil engineering department in order to “take from the English the use and maintenance of roads, railroads, telephone and telegraph networks, and radio posts in Syria and Cilicia.”12 Eventually, public works projects would be contracted out, most often to French concessionary companies that had operated in the Levant before . For example, the French company that had built many of the region’s railroads before the war was called in early  to replace damaged tracks. Other French companies would electrify cities, expand water and sewage systems, and install the first telephone networks during the mandate period. As with missionaries’ schools, contracting out public services to private agencies cut costs to the French government.

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Likewise, an agriculture department took shape under the dual impulses of war relief and French business lobbies. Even before the wartime blockade was formally lifted, the war ministry in November  approved a shipment of , boxes of silk cocoons in response to appeals from the Lyon Silk Merchants Syndicate to revive the silk industry. The foreign ministry paid , francs for them.13 In January , the military began hiring agricultural engineers “in imitation of the new service in Tunisia.”14 Tractors, fertilizer, and seed were soon brought in to revive cultivation of other crops. At the center of this and other joint government-business efforts was the man who would become Gouraud’s principal advisor, Robert de Caix, publisher of the journal L’Asie française. De Caix and a group of bankers, silk merchants, Jesuits, and educators, especially from the industrial city of Lyon, would form in early  a colonial lobby to promote the profitability of French rule in the Levant to France’s skeptical parliament, which feared new economic burdens.15 Under the influence of the group, later called the Economic Union of Syria, Gouraud and his successors approved the privatization of many public services, and the substitution of French companies for German and other foreign enterprises that had operated in the region before . In violation of the mandate charter, the lobby group sought exclusive rights to economic exploitation in the territories. Indeed, de Caix proposed in March  that the planned Beirut Fair be open only to French businessmen, but was forced to open it to all countries after Dutch, British, and Italian traders complained.16 Nonetheless, the lobby advanced its interests during the mandate by forming close ties with the Lebanese commercial elite in Beirut. The distinction between colony and mandate blurred. In , High Commissioner Weygand met with the Lyon Chamber of Commerce about the city’s investments in Lebanon’s silk industry. A member asked him which products he would prefer for the Syrian display case at the city’s Colonial Museum. Weygand responded, “It will remain empty. Politically, I cannot call Syria a colony.”17

Rise of the Civilian Bureaucracy From these beginnings, Gouraud built a central administration, the High Commission. From late  to , he and de Caix recruited civilian personnel to replace military officers and organized separate departments of public health, public works, education, telephone and telegraphs, and agriculture. These departments all reported directly to Gouraud, and, along with the military and intelligence apparatus, were centrally administered from

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Beirut for all mandated territories. Social services were thus retained as the direct responsibility of the highest level of government. This high level of concern grew out of the high commissioner’s role as chief relief officer after the war. Social relief was also rooted deeply in France’s justifying ideology: Gouraud and de Caix used their relief efforts at the Versailles peace conference to argue France’s worthiness of the mandate. They believed that social and economic investment—the civilizing mission—was as important as the military to the mandate’s success. However, France was in no position to invest heavily in Syria and Lebanon. Gouraud, dismayed by deep budget cuts, resigned his post as high commissioner in August .18 Saddled with war debts, the government in Paris was tight-fisted. While the Germans delayed reparations payments, the French franc plummeted in value from  francs to  francs to the dollar between  and . Meanwhile, the French government was burdened with postwar relief of its own: pensions for , war orphans, more than  million permanently disabled veterans, and thousands of war widows.19 As a result, the Parisian parliament fought tooth and nail to keep the mandate’s budget low, eventually insisting that the mandate pay for itself. This it largely did, except for continuing military subsidies. Budgets remained balanced even during the depression years and World War II. But because of these budget constraints, the highly privatized delivery of public services begun in  continued. Essential public services like utilities and public works were contracted out to French businesses seeking profitable investments. Education and health were similarly delegated to religious groups and missionary orders, which received extra-budgetary subsidies from private charities and the foreign ministry and where nuns worked for a pittance as teachers and nurses. Under Henri Ponsot, high commissioner between  and , the mandatory state took its mature form. At the High Commission’s headquarters in the Grand Serail, the old Ottoman government palace, Ponsot presided over two cabinets, civil and military. Their jurisdiction comprised a dozen departments: diplomatic, legal, financial, military intelligence, General Security police (Sûreté générale), customs, press and information, economics and agriculture, special projects and public education, archeology, hygiene and public assistance, and the post, telegraph, and telephone service. The High Commission directly employed one-third of all French bureaucrats in the Levant.20 They were assigned to the territories at large, in disregard of the political boundaries between them. For example, school inspectors who visited schools in Beirut also visited those in Damascus, and technical personnel, urban planners, and postal administrators freely moved across the regions.

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The High Commission came to command this octopus-like apparatus partly through its control of the hefty Common Interests budget, which amounted to nearly  million Syrian-Lebanese lira (LLS) in , one-third of all government revenues in the mandated territories. Mostly derived from customs duties, Common Interests revenues were spent to pay off the Ottoman debt (through ), and to finance public works, economic development projects, the postal and telegraph systems, and the military auxiliary, the Special Troops. In addition, the High Commission kept a separate administrative budget for personnel, paid for by the French foreign ministry, and disbursed educational and charitable subsidies financed by French parimutuel revenues. Each year the high commissioner’s office would draw up a list of deserving students, schools, hospitals, clinics, orphanages, and cultural programs that would receive these special subsidies.21 The French superimposed this distinctly French layer of government over the local state governments in what became a cumbersome dual system. In ,  French “advisors” were posted in all departments within the local governments, in addition to the  officials responsible directly to the high commissioner. The number of French bureaucrats, fluctuating over time between  and , was relatively large. The level of staffing resembled less the British mandate in Iraq, for example, where a minimum of personnel was posted mainly in Baghdad, than the full-blown British colonial administration in Egypt before the war.22 Moreover, contrary to the spirit of mandatory tutelage, French bureaucrats actually controlled the local governments; no significant action could be taken without their approval. Under them worked, by the mid-s, more than , Syrian and Lebanese civil servants.23 This corps of bureaucrats was relatively new and inexperienced, lacking the skills of the Ottoman bureaucrats who had fled back to Anatolia.24 The French consolidated their hold over the local bureaucracy by recruiting mainly from among graduates of French schools. While French and Arabic were both official languages, French became essential to conducting all but the most mundane affairs of state. Local government was overwhelmingly concerned with any modern mayor’s worries: potholes and police. In , the states, including Lebanon, Syria, and the Druze and ‘Alawi territories, commanded budgets totalling  million LLS, of which % was spent on public works, % on police, % on debt and finance, % on education, % on courts, about % each on post and telegraph and public health, and the remaining % on administration and miscellaneous expenses.25 Local revenues were drawn overwhelmingly from indirect sources like taxes on vice and luxury and fees for business transac-

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tions. The city of Beirut’s largest single source of revenue, for example, was fees from the port, which represented one-fourth of its  budget of , LLS. Well over half of expenditures went to road building and repair, and about one-fourth went to police and administration. Very minor sums were spent on social services: care of paupers, , LLS; museums, , LLS; public instruction, , LLS; numbering of houses and shops and naming of roads, , LLS.26 This civilianized bureaucracy, along with its privatized arms of French missionaries and concessionary companies, thus became the third pillar of French rule. It depended upon and interacted continually with the other two pillars, the military and mediating local elites. As a result, the bureaucracy played a key role in constructing the colonial civic order; that is, in organizing power relations between state and non-state actors by setting norms and practices by which they interacted. Over the course of the mandate these bureaucrats reorganized government finance and the judiciary, built roads and ports, extended agricultural cultivation into new areas, expanded postal and telegraph service, built a new telephone system, and laid the foundations of a public school system.27 The surveys, studies, and reports generated by these bureaucrats came to define the communities of peoples living in the mandated territories. This body of knowledge was far from complete, and far from a perfect reflection of reality: It was collected by French agents who often knew little about the region and it was biased by its pragmatic application in the service of French rule. But it nonetheless became a privileged, hegemonic construction of community and nation that not only competed with, but also influenced, opposing perspectives like those of the nationalists. For example, in the name of modernity and their civilizing mission, the French hired French urban planners to redesign cities. Since Ottoman times, many local elites welcomed and even urged the so-called modernization of urban design and management.28 The French now trained a corps of engineers and planners who assimilated French ideas of urbanism. As in other colonies, the mandatory state built wide avenues and designed spacious suburbs to bring light and air to what they perceived as dark and cramped oriental cities.29 In Beirut, French planners in cooperation with local elites destroyed the old city and inscribed their sectarian view of Lebanese society into quarters segregated by religion.30 Nationalists came to realize that urban renewal was designed primarily to enhance military control and profit French companies. The great beltway built around Damascus, for example, was more than just a modern ring road circumventing city traffic. It sliced a wide swath through the gnarled orchards

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around the city where rebels had camped and launched attacks in the – war.31 National Bloc leader Abd al-Rahman al-Kayyali led a campaign against a similar urban plan for Aleppo, and against the award of most construction contracts to French firms. Aleppines resisted the astonishing array of fees and regulations that French police enforced on nearly every aspect of public life in the city.32 And by the early s citizens in various cities were organizing boycotts against the high rates charged for water, electricity and other public utilities by French concessionary companies seeking profits through their inefficient monopolies. Gouraud had envisioned mandatory rule as the gift of Mother France, an idealized, selfless endeavor in which the benefits of French civilization would be liberally bestowed upon a population of orphans, prostrated by war. To Gouraud, the carrot was the end, the stick of military discipline only a means. In the aftermath of the Syrian Revolt and as result of stingy budgets, however, maternalist ideals were subordinated to paternalist goals and means. The French pursued a path of statebuilding in which financial expediency and ideology favored private French actors over public agencies, and military and diplomatic goals over local needs. Benefits were not bestowed with the selfless love of a mother as Gouraud pretended, but in the self-interest of the father. Military funds and goals were used to define public works projects. Local and foreign intermediaries, motivated by personal interest more than public service, were employed to cut costs. Second-rate bureaucrats from the metropole were hired rather than Frenchmen trained in Arabic, familiar with the region or sympathetic to the higher ideals of mandatory rule. In the end, French advisors did not tutor Syrian and Lebanese bureaucrats in efficient and just methods of rule; rather they tended to dominate them. Discipline, exploitation, and petty dominance adulterated the ethos of healing and preparation for self-rule contained in the idealistic policy goals set at the start.

Conclusion to Part One: Paternalism and the Colonial Civic Order By , the colonial civic order was essentially paternalistic. Paternalism here is defined by two essential attributes. First, it is a system of power defined by the ability to control the distribution of benefits, not by the recognition of rights to benefits. A mediating elite emerges between the state and mass of citizens to broker these benefits by winning privileged access to them from the state, and by using that access to control the unprivileged majority. Second,

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paternalism defines authority as that of the father; that is, as essentially male, and passed down from one male to the next. Male authority thus flows continuously from the formal realm of politics through to the informal politics of the household. These two attributes are inextricably intertwined. In a paternalistic system of rule, the ruler distributes benefits according to his will, not by the right of the ruled, and power is devolved in a mediating hierarchy of males enjoying a priori authority over females and the power to discipline weaker males. Paternalism may be distinguished from patriarchy in its fluid, negotiated nature. Paternalism is historically constructed, and not a timeless structure of relationships. Whereas patriarchy is often described as a rigid, coercive system imposed by force and defined by rigid gender roles, paternalism is generally characterized as having a softer style, wherein male and female, ruler and ruled, continually renegotiate the terms of authority. The iron rod of physical coercion remains, but is hidden in a paternalistic system. Finally, paternalism, as it is used here, bears a complex relationship to fraternalism. While the latter substitutes rights for privilege in the definition of power, it retains the gendered essence of the former, invoking an equal brotherhood of males instead of a male hierarchy.33 In the French mandate of the s, paternalism took on a specific form as a colonial system of power. While the Ottomans had also used mediating elites as pillars of their regime, the late Ottoman state had in fact, through centralizing reforms of the nineteenth century, diminished the power of religious and tribal intermediaries and bound mediating landowners to the state through posts in its bureaucracy. Under the French, the autonomous power of landowning, religious, and tribal patriarchs was given a new lease on life. Also new was the fact that the mandatory state’s soldiers and bureaucrats were foreign. Benefits were bestowed upon Syrians and Lebanese as the gift of a superior civilization, as a carrot to secure sovereignty and as a reward for the good behavior of France’s adoptive children. They were delivered by way of intermediaries who profited in self-interest and in the power they wielded over their clients: concessionaires, missionaries, landlords, religious patriarchs, tribal chiefs, urban bosses, and the like. As subsequent chapters will demonstrate, colonial paternalism also reinforced a gendered hierarchy of power. Very few of the  or so French bureaucrats were female, in part because the French blocked women from careers in the foreign ministry.34 Mediating elites, too, were by definition male, as only men were religious patriarchs, large landowners, and urban bosses. Likewise, the Vatican placed orders of nuns strictly under the control of male missionaries.

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And while the Ottomans had sought to bind both male and female citizens directly to the state, the French reasserted uniquely male privileges. Men were constructed as protectors and representatives of women and children in their families. Women who sought passports, for example, needed the permission of their male guardians. And while civil laws did not require men to live in any particular place, they stated that “the married woman has no other domicile than that of her husband.”35 Indeed, state police were routinely deputized by religious courts to retrieve runaway women at the behest of their fathers and husbands. In addition, nationality laws decreed in  categorically privileged men’s citizenship over women’s. Nationality was defined primarily by blood ties, rather than by birth in the territory; specifically, all children born of a Syrian or Lebanese father were citizens. Women who married a foreigner usually lost their citizenship; men who did so did not. And while the children of a woman with a foreign husband could petition for Syrian or Lebanese nationality, those of a man married to a foreign woman automatically attained their father’s nationality. Likewise, while foreign men had the choice of adopting the Syrian or Lebanese nationality of their spouses, foreign women were obliged to do so.36 In sum, paternalism operated in the mandate as an intertwined system of colonial, gender, class, and religious hierarchies. French trumped Syrian or Lebanese, male trumped female, wealth trumped poverty, and religious office trumped laypeople. Because these chains of power blurred the line between state and society, it is more accurate to view the system in terms of a colonial civic order, rather than solely a colonial state. This colonial civic order did not simply spring from High Commissioner Gouraud’s vision and experience in other French colonies. It was forged through bargains made between the French and local elites during the turbulent s. Indeed, Gouraud’s successors had flirted with bypassing mediating elites. This provoked a storm of protest from Catholics and Maronites in Lebanon, and the Syrian Revolt. Coupled with the political resurgence of the right in France, these protests forced a return to the Gouraud formula, wherein elites were appeased with mediating privileges for laying down their arms and cooperating with the mandatory state. But colonial paternalism was an inherently unstable bargain. World War I had shaken paternal authority at its roots. As we have seen, four elements combined to produce the crisis of paternity: the dislocation of households disrupted male authority over female family members; the war’s aggravation of material conditions strained relations between landlord and peasant, ruler and ruled; the vacuum of power left by the defeated Ottoman dynasty produced a struggle for succession; and new ideologies inspired visions of a civic order based on equality and rights.

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The French occupation aggravated the crisis of paternity with a triple reversal of political norms. First, in its last decades Ottoman rule had become increasingly defined as Islamic rule; now a Christian power asserted supreme authority.37 It is no surprise that rumors flew after the French occupied Damascus that Gouraud had paused at Saladin’s tomb to gloat that Christians had finally avenged the defeat of the medieval Crusaders. (The Syrian resistance had itself invoked the spirit of Saladin to rally support.) Second, Mount Lebanon had been defined and governed as a Christian enclave since the  massacres; now the French created Greater Lebanon with the aim of making that enclave more economically viable. But by incorporating the Muslimdominated coasts and Bekaa Valley, Christians lost their numerical predominance, and their political predominance reignited sectarian rivalry.38 Third, the French occupation clashed with the rising tide of Arab nationalism, which began with the Arab Revolt against the Ottomans and crested with the establishment of Faysal’s Syrian-Arab kingdom. Syrian and Lebanese Arabists not only demanded Arab sovereignty, but the unity of lands splintered into inherently weak states by Europeans after the war. The reversals wrought by French occupation turned many Syrians and Lebanese against not only their adoptive father, but also one another in a conflict among competing visions of the proper civic order. Finally, the adoption of republican constitutions in  and  institutionalized instability in the paternalistic civic order. The constitutions’ republican guarantees of popular sovereignty contradicted the paternalistic methods of colonial rule, where a nonelected and foreign high commissioner wielded supreme power. This contradiction would become a tool for nationalist elites to condemn the French mandate and claim independence. “The Syrian people have aspirations and rights. France has interests and commitments. How can the aspirations and rights of the first be reconciled with the interests and commitments of the second?” wrote a prominent Syrian nationalist, Jamil Mardam Bey. The crux of the problem, he argued, was France’s reliance on mediating cronies. “The mandate reserved all its affection and favours for ignorant people, for mediocre old men,” he wrote. “It was caught in a past which it sought to crystallize once more.”39 The subordination of younger nationalists in the prime of their political lives to French authority in a tightly controlled governmental apparatus aggravated the challenges to male virility expressed during the Syrian Revolt. Syrians in the National Bloc and Lebanese who cooperated with the French by seeking elective office were frustrated by the limits to their power, and were accused by their competitors of weakness and betrayal of the national will.40

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Even as nationalist elites chafed at the contradictions between republicanism and paternalism, constitutional guarantees of individual rights and legal equality among citizens clashed with the structures of colonial paternalism that extended far beyond government offices, where public resources were distributed so as to differentiate the relative power of citizens. While the elites who shared in the writing and adoption of the constitutions may have been comfortable with an equality of privileges assured only to themselves, republican ideals were not so easily contained. Appeals to fraternity, justice, and equality were spread to subordinate citizens in propaganda of the Syrian Revolt and through French textbooks used in schools. It was not long before popular movements would use republican ideals to attack the privileges of mediating elites, including bourgeois nationalists. Class, gender, and religious tensions fueled by wartime trauma and colonial paternalism would spill from unstable households into the streets of changing urban communities, and into debates in the highest political arenas. The remaining chapters of this book will argue that the crisis of paternity generated class, gender, and religious movements that would broaden challenges to the colonial civic order beyond elite nationalists’ focus on independence. And, as will be shown, because of the nature of paternalism, gender lay at the very core of these conflicts.

part ii


Paternal Republicanism and the Construction of Subaltern Citizens

In the postwar period the intimate matters of the household became the target of a sustained and intense public scrutiny. Choices families made on how to allocate their resources became the subject of general debate: how much food families consumed; whether they were giving their babies sterile milk; how clean mothers kept their homes; how much time parents allowed for their sons’ and daughters’ education; whether they depended on children to contribute to household income; whether mothers were spending too much time at work and not enough on caring for their families; whether fathers should be the sole breadwinners, earning a family wage. These and similar issues were debated at political club meetings and ladies’ charity socials, and in government offices, newspapers, and cafes. While such discussions had occurred before World War I, in the context of Ottoman reform and the need to save the empire, the terms of discussion were utterly transformed by the war and the French occupation. As discussed in Part One, the war had shattered many households and prostrated others to an unforgettable base of vulnerability. At the same time, the war marked the end of several decades of prosperity, and opened the door to state intervention in household affairs. However, France’s paternalistic social policy distributed benefits unevenly, aggravating gender, class, and religious tensions that had mounted in the trauma of the war. These factors contributed to the rise of new urban social movements that did not merely discuss social reforms, but organized to demand them from the state as a right, as had never been done under the Ottomans. The

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most important of these were women’s, labor, and Islamic populist movements. They opposed the way social policy subordinated them because of their class, gender, or religious status. Their mobilization disrupted the elite’s political strategies—both France’s paternalism and nationalists’ appeals for unity. Social policy was, as a result, thrust into the center of mandate politics. Debates on the state’s role in promoting social progress invoked broader political questions about the proper nature of the civic order, and about citizenship. The new social movements found inspiration in the language of democratic republicanism in the Syrian and Lebanese constitutions, which contradicted the realities of the paternal republicanism that they confronted. Through the reforms they proposed, they sought to change the terms of membership in the civic order from a hierarchy of privilege to the equality of citizens’ rights. In the perspective taken here, citizenship is defined not only by the political language of constitutions, but also by the social policies of states. All of the points at which people come into contact with the state inevitably shape their citizenship. Citizens’ rights (or lack thereof) are established in the daily practices of government, when a tax collector appears at the door, when a police officer stops a car, or when a public works engineer designs a new street or water system. For a large number of citizens, contact with the state comes mainly through its social policies. Their relative status as citizens is defined when a state school admits their children (or does not), when a government clinic vaccinates a child (or does not) against a disease, or when the state intervenes to stop employer abuses (or does not). Subaltern citizens are defined as those who are systematically placed at a disadvantaged remove from direct state benefits, under the protection and control of privileged mediating elites, by virtue of their class, caste, gender, race, religion, or ethnicity. Subaltern movements may be either left- or right-wing in orientation; they represent any subordinate groups who reject the authority of mediating elites and who seek to raise their status.1 By the mid-s, the women’s, labor, and Islamic populist movements were strong enough to mount a significant challenge to the colonial civic order. Their challenge would shake the twin pillars of paternalism: mediated rule and a gendered hierarchy of power.

chapter 4


State Social Policy: Constructing a Hierarchy of Citizens

The late Ottoman and French mandatory states intervened in the lives of common citizens as never before. While the states claimed to act for the general good, to save the empire or spread civilization, their social policies were not neutral. They implicitly constructed hierarchies of those deemed more or less deserving of state services. In so doing, the states established different social rights for different social groups; that is, they defined a hierarchy of citizenship. French social policies differed from the Ottoman in their amplitude, in their increased dependence on paternalistic mediating agents, and in their ranking of social groups to be served. In reshuffling the civic order, the policies aggravated the regional, class, religious, and gender tensions already created by war and economic change. The political implications of state-imposed social hierarchies were not lost on the people of Syria and Lebanon. As chapter five will show, they would directly influence the shape and goals of emergent social reform movements.

Ottoman Reform: From Imperial Subjects to Imperial Citizens? Since its earliest days, the Ottoman state had played a regulatory role in society, monitoring markets, setting prices, maintaining caravan routes, and supervising artisans’ guilds. However, the state did not spend much on social welfare. Imperial social spending was limited mainly to construction of mosque-school-hospital complexes in major cities and to support for the poor on pilgrimage to Mecca. Basic food supplies were assured through regulations on trade and market prices, and with seizures of grain in times of crisis. Public health consisted primarily of quarantines when epidemics broke out. Most

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expenditures on social welfare—poor relief, medical care and education— were delegated to local charities, which commanded funds from local endowments (awqaf; singular: waqf).1 Only in the late nineteenth century did the Ottoman state begin to intervene in social affairs with large sums of money, when the Tanzimat reforms finally produced an imperial bureaucracy capable of such intervention. Under the  land code, many peasants gained new rights to landownership. During the reign of Abdulhamid II (–), the state extended low-cost agricultural loans to farmers in every province, although the wealthiest tended to benefit most. It also built a skeletal system of state schools throughout the empire, enrolling more than , students in . Istanbul became a mecca of higher education, graduating lawyers, doctors, and civil servants from every province. In regions of the future Syria and Lebanon, Damascus’s first public library was opened under the patronage of governor Midhat Pasha around . The state also financed a rudimentary system of hospitals and schools in Beirut, Syria, and Aleppo provinces: In , it funded six hospitals with  beds, paying the salaries of  physicians and surgeons; by , it funded  primary schools with , students. Medical and law colleges in Damascus were established in the early s. After the  constitutional revolution, the Young Turks expanded education and disbursed significant sums to improve sanitation in cities.2 Ottoman social policy was shaped by essentially paternalistic aims. The state’s preeminent concern was its own survival against mounting European aggression and intervention. Channeling funds particularly to military defense and administration, the state had little surplus to finance broader social reform. Slim budgets combined with political priorities to make the distribution of state benefits uneven. Under Sultan Abdulhamid the goal of state education was primarily to create skilled cadres for the military and civil service. Hence, when schools were built, boys were privileged because their raw manpower was needed by the army and bureaucracy. Schools were also located in cities, where urban elites who might fill bureaucratic posts lived. These same elites were also endowed with other benefits, like land grants and control of agricultural loans, to bind their loyalty to the state. In sum, state social policy created a loyal landowning and bureaucratic class.3 Another motive for state reform was to counteract the erosion of loyalty from within, especially as inspired by foreign missionaries, and especially in the Syrian provinces.4 From the mid-nineteenth century, dozens of European and American religious orders arrived in the empire to bring the benefits of

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their higher civilization, along with their vision of God, to Ottoman subjects. They were most active among religious minorities, like Armenians in Eastern Anatolia and Arab Christians in Palestine, Lebanon, and Syria. They were also supported by the French, British, and Russian governments, which claimed to protect minorities from the tyranny of the Muslim sultan. In response to this interference with its subjects, the Ottoman state built its national schools as a bulwark against foreign subversion, as a direct bond between state and citizen. Curricula featured lessons in Islam and plenty of Ottoman propaganda designed to promote loyalty to the state. According to Selim Deringil, “In the second half of the nineteenth century the Ottoman Empire came into its own as an ‘educator state’ with a systematic programme of education/indoctrination for subjects it intended to mould into citizens.”5 For example, the Maktab ‘Anbar school, founded in Damascus in , offered the sons of notable families both “traditional” subjects like Arabic literature and Islamic studies taught by esteemed ulama of the city, and “modern” subjects, like math, biology and Ottoman history.6 The Young Turks increased emphasis on inculcating citizenship after the  constitutional revolution. To this end, they required education in Turkish in upper levels, a policy opposed by emergent Arab nationalists, including Maktab ‘Anbar students, and regarded by European consuls as Turkish despotism.7 Young Turk policy also expanded the education of girls because mothers were seen as children’s first teachers, and so crucial in inculcating patriotic and modern values among future (male) citizens. Other segments of the population were not wooed by the Ottoman educator-state, either because they were deemed inessential to the state’s survival, or beyond its reach. Few non-Muslims attended the national schools; their health and education was left either to their religious communities or to foreign missionaries. Mount Lebanon was perhaps the most extreme example. Governed as an autonomous province since the  massacres, almost all of its schools and hospitals were built by missionaries and local religious groups. This experience would have a profound effect, not just on Jemal Pasha’s suspicions of subversion during the war, but also upon statecitizen relations in the future state of Lebanon. Also neglected by the state were peasants and workers, who rarely attended school or visited a state hospital. The reform of these groups was not considered vital to state interests. The state did not cultivate direct relations with them as citizens, but rather left them under the control of paternalistic elites. Ottoman labor laws, for example, required workers to join officially sanctioned guilds and prohibited them from organizing against their employers.

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World War I was a critical watershed in the politics of state social intervention. Whereas before  the state had often forced its schools and urban sanitation schemes upon a population indifferent to its aims of social progress, now people demanded state services as their right and their only hope for survival. Jemal Pasha did in fact organize an unprecedented network of soup kitchens, clinics, orphanages, and rationing to support the Syrian and Lebanese population. To the bitter dismay of local people, however, Turkish officials and the military received preference in food rations. During the Suez expedition of , for example, Jemal Pasha requisitioned , camels to carry the biscuits, dates, olives, and water needed to feed his , troops.8 Popular protests against the diversion of local food supplies implicitly claimed sustenance as a right. In the immediate aftermath of war, Faysal’s government made important initial efforts to meet demand for social and economic services, despite handicaps of a low budget, high inflation, and the exodus of trained Ottoman bureaucrats. His government managed to continue war pensions to widows, settle Armenian refugees in camps, and distribute much-needed seed to farmers. A rudimentary public health service attempted to battle epidemics despite a shortage of doctors and facilities. Education was made a top priority, because it was seen as a means of propagating Arab nationalism and loyalty to the state. The state reopened  schools in Damascus and Aleppo (including  schools for girls), as well as the medical and law schools in Damascus. Also established were libraries, chambers of commerce, and an agricultural bank. Unable to tax a war-ravaged population, Faysal personally staged fundraisers and lent support to private initiatives to improve general welfare.9 In sum, until World War I state benefits were bestowed from above, not by right, but in the paternalistic self-interest of the ruling elite. A hierarchy of privilege extended down from those who received the most benefits, state officials themselves, to Muslim elites in major cities, to potential (male) recruits for the military and civil service, and lastly to non-Muslims, women, workers, and peasants. Despite the limits and inequities of state services, for the most part citizens made few claims on the state. This all changed during the war, when the state became the warden of the masses. Faysal’s regime crystallized a new attitude in the wake of the Ottoman state’s abject failure to protect its people. While Faysal could not offer much aid, his state became the magnet for a multitude of social demands. Citizens now expected the state to attend to their welfare.

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Reshuffling the Social Hierarchy under the French As discussed in Part One, the maternal spirit of France’s civilizing mission was soon overwhelmed by paternalism, as the military need to discipline a rebellious population took precedence. The French, like the Ottomans, awarded benefits in the self-interest of the state. Also like the Ottomans, the French used social policy to construct a loyal social hierarchy. Elites were still preferred over peasants and workers; men over women. But in a reversal with serious political consequences, the French altered the hierarchy to privilege Lebanese over Syrians and Christians over Muslims. And while the Ottomans had sought a direct relationship between state and citizen to counter the influence of foreign missionaries’ schools and hospitals, now the French embraced missionaries as mediating agents of the state’s social services. A third change was the extent of the state’s intervention in society. By , the French had expanded state social services far beyond Ottoman limits. The vigor with which the French sought to rearrange social relations would excite much controversy. The following account focuses on public health, education, and economic and labor policy, areas that would provoke the most reaction. From its roots in postwar relief, the French built a public health service with little precedent in the Ottoman era. Local health departments were established in the various states under the direction of the High Commission. The Syrian department, for example, was organized almost single-handedly by a Frenchtrained Syrian doctor, Yusuf ‘Araqtinji.10 In , it began building hospitals and clinics to offer free services to the poor. In , it undertook a systematic study of public health conditions in the Damascus region, surveying marshes, mosquitoes, and the incidence of malaria; the cleanliness of water sources; recent histories of epidemics; and major causes of mortality. It eventually established regular inspections of food vendors, restaurants, schools, and public baths. And as there were only  doctors in Damascus for a population of ,, the medical faculty at the Syrian University was reorganized by French doctors. The number of doctors in Syria more than doubled by  to .11 By , there were  clinics and  hospitals with about , beds in all of the mandated territories. The state ran  of the hospitals directly, more than double the number the Ottoman state had opened, and subsidized many of the private ones. In propaganda, the French boasted of their investment in public health as evidence of their civilizing mission, claiming, “Hygiene wasn’t practiced at all under the Turks.”12 However, many problems were left unaddressed. Epidemics remained so

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widespread through the early s that the French were accused of doctoring health statistics submitted to the League of Nations.13 Newspapers regularly complained of the need for more services, demanding hygiene as a public right.14 And despite the persistence of severe health problems after the war, state budgets for health remained lower than those for police or the postal service, at about three percent of total spending.15 Indeed, the greatest expansion in public health care occurred in the private sector. The High Commission continued to disburse important sums from the French foreign ministry to subsidize missionaries. Two orders of French nuns, the Sisters of Charity and the Sisters of St. Joseph, ran so many clinics, hospitals, and orphanages that they were officially designated as “branches” of the High Commission’s health inspectorate. Another major recipient of state subsidies was the St. Joseph’s medical school in Beirut, run by French Jesuits. In , these and other private agencies received , LLS in extra-budgetary health funding directly from the foreign ministry in Paris. In comparison, the budget for state public health services in all territories amounted only to , LLS.16 Moreover, the reliance on missionaries made access to medical benefits uneven. Lebanon, with its longstanding presence of missionaries, was far better served. While Lebanon had  hospitals, Syria had just  hospitals for a population more than twice as large. The Beirut area alone had  hospitals, nine of them private, and hosted two of the three medical schools in the territories, both of them private (American and French). Syria, in contrast, depended more heavily on state institutions. While half of Syria’s hospitals were public, only five of the  in Lebanon were.17 State education exhibited similar patterns. As in public health, the High Commission presided over state ministries of public instruction and maintained an important role in subsidizing, regulating, and inspecting missionary schools. Like the Ottomans, the French saw education primarily as a vehicle to cultivate loyal cadres in the state bureaucracy. Despite demands for Arabic education, French-language study was made mandatory in state schools, and made a requirement to qualify for state subsidies in private ones. Official curricula with exams leading to the baccalaureate degree were made uniform across the territories, and the baccalaureate became a prerequisite for entrance into universities and the civil service.18 In , the state sent  students to French universities on scholarship. State education expanded dramatically. Enrollment in primary and secondary schools more than tripled between  and , from , to , students in all of the mandated territories. This was a significant increase over Ottoman state school enrollment, which in  had totalled

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only , students in the same area. However, the proportion of students attending state schools did not change: in  as in , only  percent of all primary schools in the region were run by the state.19 The consequence of continued reliance on private schools was that Lebanese and Christians had greater access to education than Syrians and Muslims. Lebanese attended school at more than three times the rate of Syrians: in Syria only . percent of the total population was enrolled in school; in Lebanon, . percent. Meanwhile,  percent of all students were Christian, who represented only  percent of the total population.20 The imbalance resulted mainly from the huge number of private primary schools in Lebanon—,—compared to just  in Syria. Almost all private schools were Christian, either run by local churches or by foreign missionaries. Uncounted in these statistics were nearly  Muslim Qur’anic schools. Mostly in rural Syria, the schools were unfunded, unregulated, and unlicensed by the state, offering limited courses of study on the Qur’an and the Arabic language to about , children under eight years old.21 At first glance, this educational bias appears quite similar to that of the Ottoman era, when state schools were primarily Muslim and private schools Christian, and when schools in Lebanon outnumbered those in Syria. However, there was a crucial difference. The mandatory state subsidized the private, Christian schools heavily, making them in fact quasi-state schools. Drawing on extra-budgetary funds from Paris, the High Commission subsidized about half of all private schools, paying about one-third of their costs. Maronites alone received about one-third of the subsidies granted to local (nonforeign) private schools. Meanwhile, the  French missionary schools depended so heavily on state subsidies that they claimed they would have to close without them.22 While no comprehensive record was kept of subsidies paid to private schools, a  report showed that at least a portion of them totalled , LLS, spent in addition to the . million LLS budgeted for state schools.23 French and Catholic schools also received substantial support from dioceses in France, a source of funding unavailable to Muslim and other private schools. By , the bargain Gouraud had made in  with religious schools appeared cast in stone. As part of a general budget-tightening effort in –, High Commissioner Henri Ponsot flirted with the idea of cutting subsidies to religious schools. Local Catholic and Maronite prelates, as well as French missionaries, alarmed that they had a second Sarrail on their hands, again mobilized their diplomatic skills. They argued that Italian missionaries would gain influence at their expense. Because education was seen primarily as a vehicle for French propaganda, Ponsot was forced to renew the mandatory state’s

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commitment to the subsidies.24 The consequences of the commitment were not lost on contemporaries. Complaints had already been made about the relative shortage of funding for Syrian schools, which resulted in uncleanliness of classrooms, teachers’ corruption, and high fees charged for textbooks.25 The better-funded Lebanese worried publicly that the babel of foreign and religious schools would aggravate the country’s social and political divisions. Lebanon must make its educational system uniform, said one newspaper, to produce “an elite with some homogeneity, the supreme remedy to divided countries.”26 The official sanction of such funding imbalances amounted to the award of greater educational rights to Christian and Lebanese citizens. It also amounted to greater rights for elite classes, since private schools invariably charged fees. And as always, the concentration of state schools in cities situated peasants on lowest rung of educational rights. Economic policies compounded the privileging of Lebanon over the Syrian hinterland. The pace of postwar economic recovery varied regionally. Aleppo seems to have suffered most, due in part to ongoing rebellions. In April , the U.S. Consul wrote: “Owing to the general disorders existing throughout the Aleppo district, all business since December  has been at a complete standstill.”27 Damascus was plagued in the s first by falling prices of the region’s main crops, wheat and apricots, and then by the Syrian Revolt, which prevented the planting of wheat; the government had to stave off famine with emergency imports from Algeria.28 Beirut, in contrast, saw a brisk return to business by the mid-s. The regional difference in wealth was reflected in purchases of automobiles, which barely existed in the region before . In , there were only , automobiles and no gas stations in the entire state of Syria, while in much smaller Lebanon there were , automobiles, and  curbside gas pumps in Beirut alone.29 While external factors like fluctuations in the global economy and foreign tariff barriers played a role in the regional imbalance, French policy did little to correct it. With French funding, Beirut became the preeminent port on the coast and the virtual linchpin of the region’s economy. As a result, the Lebanese bourgeoisie profited heavily from financial and service industries, like import-export firms, banking, shipping, and tourism. In contrast, Aleppo and Damascus suffered declines in trade because the new national boundaries cut them off from their former markets in Turkey, Iraq, and Palestine.30 This bias toward seaborne trade was due partly to the interests of French commercial lobbies (see chapter three) and partly to the influence of francophile commercial interests within Beirut’s bourgeoisie.31 Meanwhile, French efforts to bolster agricultural income in Syria failed, as projects to expand cultivation of

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export cash crops like cotton and silk produced disappointing yields. Drops in world prices in the s further limited farm profits.32 Syrians sought to offset this loss of trade income by promoting industrial development; the French, however, invested little in industry and delayed until the late s tariff reforms that would protect local manufacturers from foreign imports. A nascent industrial sector emerged only in the s, featuring mainly food processing and textile factories, when the French finally raised tariff barriers and the world depression cut competition from imports.33 State labor policy produced its own imbalances. Its most important aspect was the provision of jobs. Although there are no global statistics, there is no doubt that the state itself became the largest single employer in the territories. During the s, workers were hired by the thousands into the public sector— in the civil service; in schools, hospitals and clinics; on public works projects; and in transport. In addition to the more than , bureaucrats, teachers, and police on the state’s civil service payroll, more than , workers were employed by French concessionary companies at the ports, on tramways and railroads, in electric utilities and the telephone service, and in sewage projects. Another , worked for the state’s tobacco monopoly.34 Others worked on the periphery of the state, indirectly dependent upon it; these included teachers, nurses, and support staff in state-subsidized health and educational institutions and the lawyers, accountants, printers, and others who provided support services to public agencies. The French established a tacit pecking order of access to state jobs and other economic benefits. In Lebanon, Christians obtained a disproportionate number of civil service jobs, despite the constitution’s promise of equitable access. Christians were favored not only for political reasons, but simply because more of them were schooled in French schools, and so knew French. Civil service jobs went increasingly to the many Maronites who moved down to Beirut from the mountains during the mandate. Meanwhile, Greek Orthodox and Catholics who had dominated Beirut’s commercial and financial life since the nineteenth century took on important public functions. For example, Michel Chiha, a prominent Catholic banker who helped to write the  constitution, became director of the government’s Banque de Syrie et du Liban.35 Sunni Muslims protested loudly against their relative exclusion from state jobs and economic benefits. Cities where they dominated suffered relative neglect. Sidon, for example, not only received fewer state services but also suffered deeply from the diversion of trade to the port of Beirut.36 The lowest rung in the pecking order went to Shi‘is of the south, who had the least representation in the capital, and so received virtually no jobs and few state benefits. Tensions over these

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imbalances flared at the time of the  census, which showed the population of , to be only . percent Christian and . percent Muslim.37 The results were so disturbing to Christians that no census has been taken in Lebanon since, although it is generally believed that the country became majority Muslim by . Class differentials also characterized state labor policy. Wealthy urbanites enjoyed the highest paying jobs, in the civil bureaucracy and as consultants. On the lowest end of the pay scale were those who took the intermittent public works jobs, upon which many unemployed artisans and displaced peasants relied to feed their families. Road construction was perhaps the most common temporary job offered by the state, which in the s linked the major cities with paved routes suitable for automobiles. The road linking Damascus, Homs, Hama, and Aleppo, for example, was built between  and . To accomplish this expansion, the French continued the Ottoman practice of forced labor. Under nineteenth-century laws, the Ottomans had required most men aged  to  to work up to  days every five years. The French modified this policy by paying low wages to volunteers and those who owed back taxes. One area where poor peasants held an advantage, however, was in recruitment to the Special Troops. Many of those displaced by war rushed to sign up.38 As in Lebanon, French labor policies aggravated sectarian tensions in Syria. ‘Alawi peasants, notoriously destitute and almost universally illiterate, worked as sharecroppers in the French-supported tobacco and silk industries. French policy diverted their discontent into sectarian strife. The head of the ‘Alawi state, Sulayman Murshid, helped to channel sharecroppers’ resentment against their mainly Sunni landlords into a separatist, religion-based movement antagonistic toward Sunni nationalists’ ideology of a unified Syria.39 In the early s, French Jesuits’ success in the religious conversion of some ‘Alawis, who apparently sought thereby to escape the authority of oppressive tribal shaykhs, provoked a political scandal.40 The Special Troops also became a cauldron of sectarian controversy, as ‘Alawi, Druze, Circassian, and Maronite peasants competed to join it as an escape from poverty. Meantime, Sunnis complained that they were relatively excluded from a force routinely used to suppress them.41 In addition to providing jobs, the state also played a potentially important regulatory role in labor affairs. In its capacity to supervise relations between employers and employees, the state was placed at the center of the volatile structural shifts in the labor market after the war. Despite workers’ distress, however, the state resisted taking an active regulatory role. Its anti-labor stance was supported by the influential and virulently anti-union Lyon Chamber of

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Commerce, whose support high commissioners sought.42 No departments of labor were established and no new labor laws were adopted to protect workers dislocated by war, loss of markets, or import competition. Furthermore, the state blocked workers’ attempts to protect themselves from employer abuse, citing a  Ottoman law that forbade employee-only unions and strikes and required all guilds to register with the state. Ottoman labor law, inherited by the mandate, also made no provision for work accident liability, which became a problem with increasing injury rates among public works and concessionary workers. By the s, there were more than  serious work accidents and two or three resultant deaths per year.43 In , the Lebanese parliament (dominated by pro-French, bourgeois delegates) rejected a proposal to hold employers responsible for some accidents because, it was argued, such a law would harm nascent industries.44 The state’s hands-off policy on labor issues was made apparent early, in a  strike in Beirut against the French tramway concessionary company. The workers demanded pay increases, eight-hour days, occasional days off, the right to keep their jobs when they fell ill, and the right to a hearing before being fired. The director of the tramway company complained to High Commissioner Henri Gouraud that the workers had “a nerve” to demand protections similar to those enjoyed by French workers. Gouraud concurred that French protections should not be extended to employees of French companies in Lebanon.45 In –, however, high commissioners Maxime Weygand and Maurice Sarrail considered easing Ottoman restrictions on workers’ right to organize, expanding technical education, and freeing peasants from feudal obligations. Under pressure from the League of Nations to adopt legal guarantees of “humanitarian and egalitarian work conditions for men, women and children,” the High Commission appointed a committee to prepare a new labor code for Syria and Lebanon.46 But after the Syrian Revolt, Ponsot reversed course, in keeping with the general return to paternalism. Repressive laws were stiffened to limit workers’ unionization because the French feared that organized labor would only strengthen the power of rebellious nationalists.47 The republicanism of the new constitutions, it appeared, would not embrace the rights of workers. In sum, the s state significantly expanded benefits in health, education, and labor. However, these policies constructed a hierarchy of citizens based on their location, class, and religion. Lebanese and Christians enjoyed greater access to state-funded health and education, because the s state revived pre-mandatory patterns of funding to French missionaries and local protegés. The educated urban elite also enjoyed privileged access to state-funded schools, universities, and high-paying government jobs. Even nationalist elites

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in Damascus sent their children to French lycées. In contrast, Syrians,’ Muslims,’ and the poor’s greater reliance on direct, unmediated state services, like public schools and health clinics, put them at a disadvantage. Benefits were bestowed at the will of the French, not according to the principle of citizens’ equal rights, and those with links to the state’s network of mediating institutions gained most.

Gender: The Second Pillar of Social Paternalism The gendering of social services cut across all other disparities of region, class, and religion. Women were systematically placed below men in every category, and placed at a greater distance from the state. The state tended to farm out females’ health and education to private agencies, while providing more direct services to men. The state also devalued women’s labor compared to that of men. While these policies appear to follow Ottoman paternalism, there were two important differences. First, because they suffered so much in the war, the sheer number of women who sought state services increased dramatically in the s. As a result, they were incorporated into the civic order, albeit in subordinate terms, more than they had ever been in the Ottoman empire. Second, men lost some of their privileges relative to women, because under the mandate they were no longer potential draftees to the army. In public health, for example, the health of both men and women was secondary to the needs of the French Army of the Levant. Under the direction of the army’s chief medical officer, the health inspectorate devoted far more resources to limiting the spread of venereal disease to troops than to gastroenteritis, which caused high infant mortality among Syrian and Lebanese civilians. Both male and female infants suffered. This did not signify a general gender equity in public health policy, however. Women were identified as the primary locus of disease, and uniquely blamed for infant mortality. The state’s programs for mothers were delegated to two bourgeois ladies’ philanthropies, which were much touted in French propaganda as symbols of Franco-Levantine cooperation, but hardly equipped to address the magnitude of health problems. The first and most prominent philanthropy was the Red Cross, headquartered in Beirut. While a Syrian-Lebanese Red Cross had been founded during the war by emigrants in Latin America, the French placed it under their national service after the war. Between  and , the Red Cross opened Mothers’ Societies (Sociétés Mères) in Beirut, Damascus, Aleppo, Alexandretta and Latakia that treated wounded soldiers, children, pregnant

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women, and the elderly.48 Eventually, the Red Cross would build a network of orphanages, schools, clinics, and first-aid and nurses’ training programs. Second was the Drop of Milk (Goutte de Lait) society, founded in  to supply sterilized milk, food, clothing, and medical advice to the children of impoverished women who practiced “a Syrian infant hygiene that is traditionally deplorable.”49 Heavily subsidized by the state, the program expanded rapidly. In  it distributed , bottles of sterile milk in Damascus and Aleppo. By  it had opened additional clinics in Beirut and Latakia, distributing a total of , bottles to more than , nursing mothers. Women visited the clinics for advice nearly , times that year.50 The Drop of Milk and Red Cross societies were most effective as a political tool, binding elites to the mandatory state. While the French state provided essential funding, prominent French, Syrian, and Lebanese women were recruited to raise additional funds and deliver services. The Drop of Milk, although nominally founded by the Syrian health department, was in fact placed under the direction of honorary president Mme Haqqi Bey al-‘Azm, wife of the governor-general of Damascus. The wives of high commissioners were routinely named honorary president of the Red Cross. Leaders of these organizations became known in the press mainly for their glamorous charity balls that attracted French and local elites. Bourgeois women and female missionaries became, in effect, the foot soldiers of services delivered to women, while men remained the behind-the-scenes generals. Class difference underpinned the maternalistpaternal system. The poor women who were their clients were constructed as dependent beings unable to protect themselves or provide for their own needs. And although the work of private volunteers was laudable, it was hardly sufficient to meet the needs of the ,s of women living in the territories. The only true maternity wards, for example, were also small and privately run. In Beirut, the Jesuit St. Joseph’s medical school ran a maternity that conducted , free consultations and hospitalized  women in ; the American University ran a maternity in the Armenian refugee camps, where  babies were born the same year. In Damascus, the British hospital provided free maternity services to a limited number of women. As for public hospitals, that at the Syrian University also took some maternity cases, while in all of Aleppo, only eight hospital beds were reserved for maternity cases.51 Women received, in general, far less medical care than men. In , women were admitted to Syria’s eight major state-run hospitals , times, far less than men’s , check-ins.52 But there was a clear demand by women for professional medical care. Consulting a doctor became a norm for many urban women, although Muslim

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women in the conservative cities of Hama and Tripoli did so less, because of prejudice against consulting male doctors.53 Elsewhere, women flooded the few free, state-run clinics available in the s (fig. ). In , women made nearly , visits to the six public clinics in Damascus, outnumbering those of men by  percent.54 Women likely visited doctors often because of their childbearing needs. As we have seen, this was an era of large families. Women married young, usually under  years of age, and were pregnant often.55 In , the first year the state produced accurate figures, there were nearly , recorded births in the mandated territories, about  births per , inhabitants—a rate higher than in contemporary Syria.56 Despite women’s clear need for medical treatment, the mandatory state lagged behind neighboring Palestine in developing programs for them, according to an American YWCA director in Beirut, who otherwise praised French efforts to fight disease and build clinics: Special institutions or provisions for women and children are conspicuous by their absence in Syria. There is very little beyond the maternity hospitals in Beirut. The need has apparently not been realized as one of the urgent necessities.57 Most women obviously relied upon midwives, who were not required to hold proficiency licenses. This shortage of programs was particularly unfortunate given high infant mortality rates. In the cities of Damascus, Homs, and Hama in , one-fifth of all deaths were babies under age one, and nearly half of all deaths were children under six years old. In , the situation was only marginally better: . percent of deaths in Syria (excluding Latakia and Jabal Druze) were infants under age one;  percent of deaths were children under age ten. The death rate was worst in the countryside, where women generally expected half of their children to die. Mothers’ death rates were high too. In , the only year for which statistics are available, about five percent of deaths () were women in childbirth in the cities of Damascus, Homs, and Hama.58 In contrast to this generally relaxed attitude toward women’s health care was the aggressive regime of health regulation for prostitutes. Among the first relief efforts organized by the French were workhouses for women without jobs or family. In January , about , women were domiciled in workhouses run by nuns. The primary goal, according to Father Rémy, the principal organizer of French relief, was to shelter the women from debauchery, to which poverty “inevitably” led them.59 Catholic missionaries taught them alternative

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means of supporting themselves, usually sewing (fig. ). In , the state issued new regulations to combat an outbreak of venereal disease among French troops. Prostitutes, dancers, and singers were required to register with local police, carry identification cards, work in designated brothels (maisons de tolérance), and submit to twice-weekly medical exams. Separate hospitals and clinics were built solely for this purpose; women who refused medical examinations were brought to court. To leave prostitution, a woman was required to inform the police, who would then arrange to have her live with a guardian. In , a total of  prostitutes were registered in Syria’s four largest cities, and the anti-venereal hospital in Damascus treated  cases. Treatment with a drug containing mercury reduced the incidence of syphilis dramatically by year’s end. In , Syrian clinics conducted more than , tests on more than , prostitutes, dancers, and singers, treating , cases of venereal disease. Lebanon had only  registered prostitutes, presumably because fewer troops were stationed there.60 In sum, this was a distinctly colonial health plan. While the prostitution laws mirrored those in France, the neglect of maternal and infant care contrasted with the vigorous campaign pursued in Paris to improve prenatal and postpartum medical care.61 In the metropole the French worried about the low number of young males available for military recruitment; they had no similar concern in Syria and Lebanon. The mandate’s health plan was also paternalistic. Syrian and Lebanese mothers were deemed incompetent and in need of constant supervision by bourgeois philanthropists, while single women unguarded by males were subjected to the vice squad. Although the French publicized their health programs with pride, most Syrian and Lebanese women were not in fact sent the message that the mandatory state was their motherly caretaker. The message they received was that they were poor mothers and sexual threats. In education, girls were sent a similarly ambiguous message. While demand for girls’ education grew, the mandatory state virtually ignored it. Mention of women was omitted in a  list of educational goals by the colonial lobby and again in a  policy statement by the mandate’s top school inspector.62 Stingy budgets produced a critical shortage of space in schools and an atmosphere of competition that favored boys’ over girls’ attendance. Interest in girls’ schooling began among late Ottoman elites, who sought to improve mother’s childrearing as a step toward social progress.63 These sentiments grew into popular demand by the s, augmented by concern that women needed job skills to support themselves in the event of another war.64 While only , girls were listed by the Ottoman government in  as enrolled in schools in

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the provinces of Syria, Aleppo, and Beirut, by  more than , were enrolled in the region.65 Despite this evidence of interest, girls’ enrollments continued to lag far behind boys.’ By  girls represented  percent of all students (,), but the proportion varied greatly by region. In Lebanon, where virtually all school-aged boys attended school, only  percent of school-aged girls were enrolled in . In the provinces of Damascus and Aleppo,  percent of boys and  percent of girls were enrolled; in Latakia, . percent of boys and only  percent of girls. Everywhere, however, girls’ enrollment dropped off precipitously at the secondary level: in , only  of , students in Syria’s lycées were female; the proportion in Lebanon was  girls to , boys. Virtually no women attended local universities; the American University of Beirut awarded five bachelor’s degrees to women through .66 The state made even less of a commitment to girls’ education than private schools did. In  Syria, girls represented  percent of students in private primary schools, compared to  percent in public ones; in Lebanon,  percent of private-school students were female, compared to  percent of public-school students. The public-private gap may have reflected the preference of parents, who believed girls’ morality was better protected under the surveillance of nuns.67 But the rising girls’ enrollment in public schools suggests that parents increasingly found them acceptable: The proportion of girls in public schools had nearly doubled since , when just  percent of students in Ottoman state schools of the region were female.68 The state limited girls’ enrollments by not building schools, training teachers or making scholarships available to them. In , there were  boys’ and  girls’ public primary schools in Syria and Lebanon. In the next six years, the state opened  more boys’ primary schools, but only  for girls. In contrast, private educators opened  girls’ primary schools in the same period. Compounding the problem was a chronic shortage of female teachers in public schools. While private schools were mainly religious and employed a large number of foreign (and inexpensive) nuns, public schools depended upon a small pool of female students in teachers’ colleges. In , only  girls compared to  boys were enrolled in the state-run teachers’ colleges at Damascus and Aleppo. In contrast, Lebanon’s private teachers’ colleges enrolled  boys and  girls, many of them destined to teach in private schools.69 Finally, lack of scholarships diminished the number of girls at lycées and universities, which routinely charged tuition fees. In , Syria’s seven state-run lycées enrolled  girls and  boys on scholarships from various sources. While the High Commission awarded women  percent of

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its scholarships ( of ) for higher education in –, many of those went to daughters of French officials.70 As a result of state policy, many girls had no public school to attend in their vicinity. Official policy routed girls into private, and mostly religious schools, while it offered more direct support for public boys’ education. This meant that proportionately more Muslim girls than Muslim boys were forced to attend Christian schools. The greater reliance of girls on private education also colored their status as citizens. Girls’ contact with the state was mediated more through religious elites. Ironically, while the French promoted girls’ religious education in the Levant, the anti-clerical ruling elites of the Third Republic so deplored religious education in their own country that they had outlawed state funding for it. As will be seen in the next chapter, many Syrians and Lebanese held similar suspicions about Christian schools. Women figured even less in state labor policy than in education and health. While women were hired by the state, they were hired in lower numbers and at lower pay. Women participated in road construction, and represented many of the , workers who sorted tobacco and made cigarettes for the state monopoly. Women also worked as low-paid telephone operators for the post and telegraph department and as typists and secretaries in the civil bureaucracy. Female schoolteachers were routinely paid lower salaries than male teachers and forced to leave their jobs when they married. Disparities in pay in the private sector were also tolerated. And while the High Commission became aware by  of the high rate of women’s unemployment, it did little to address the problem.71 A  report found that the number of Syrian and Lebanese women working in industrial and artisanal jobs had dropped by half from , in  to ,. The report blamed the loss of jobs on the collapse of the silk industry, but dismissed the importance of these findings: “The thousands of women who worked in this field [the silk industry] should not be considered unemployed; they only did these jobs intermittently and their wages went almost exclusively to pay for their own clothes and those of their children.”72 The report completely ignored the fact that families had come to rely on women’s supplementary income in a time when many male breadwinners faced cuts in hours and pay. Consequently, few unemployed women benefitted from the state’s job-training programs, although several state-subsidized charities like the Red Cross continued to train women in the dying handicrafts: The Damascus girls’ handicraft school enrolled  students in , turning away many applicants. Like the low female enrollment in state teacher colleges, medical schools only trained a small number of midwives and nurses: a total of  women were enrolled in such programs in , compared to  men in

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medical, pharmacological, dental, and law programs at Syrian University and St. Joseph University.73 As a result, women who lost jobs in artisanal homework had little alternative. They were not hired into the new economic sectors—transport, utilities, heavy industry—at anywhere near the rate that their male peers were. Only , women, as opposed to , men, were listed in  as holding jobs in “modern” industries. Most of these were employed in the tobacco industry and in large textile factories built in Tripoli and Beirut. The women not only faced discrimination, but also encountered serious obstacles to taking the new jobs, which tended to require work outside the home. This was a difficult proposition for women used to working while minding their children. While unmarried women might take jobs in offices and factories, housework even in urban homes with electricity and plumbing was so demanding that it was quite unthinkable for married women to take them.74 Also, the majority of families, Muslims who observed customary seclusion of women, would not permit their daughters or wives to work in mixed-sex workplaces. In sum, even though women’s demand for education and work grew in the s and , the state continued to underfund schools and job training programs for them. Similarly, while great strides were made in the provision of medical services, women’s needs were not even remotely met. Certainly, social attitudes about women’s presence in public contributed to the gender gap in state services, and they will be discussed further in the next chapter. However, it is important to note here that attitudes were inevitably shaped by state policy, which effectively defined men and women differently as citizens. In public health, women were constructed as ignorant, dependent, and the locus of disease in a way that men simply were not. In public schooling, girls’ education was treated as optional rather than a necessity. In labor policy, women’s work was systematically devalued through policies that tolerated lower pay and ignored their unemployment. Women’s participation in the civic order was, finally, more indirect than men’s. Women were routinely placed at a farther remove from the state, where their access to state benefits was often mediated by bourgeois philanthropists, religious elites, and the male guardians to whom they were legally bound. These gendered differences in citizens’ status overlapped with and complemented disparities of class, region, and religion. As the next chapter will show, by the late s subordinated groups began to contest their status as secondclass citizens in the colonial civic order.

chapter 5


Revolt: The Rise of Subaltern Movements

It is perhaps a mundane observation that Syria and Lebanon were not republics of equal citizens. This was the lot of all colonies, as well as many independent countries. What was remarkable in Syria and Lebanon of the s was that the paternalistic order was in a constant state of crisis, destabilized by economic dislocation, state social policy, and the peculiar political arrangements required by the mandate charter. Indeed the state’s inegalitarian reshuffling of the social order, paired with its constitutional promises of republican equality among citizens, produced a yawning gap of inconsistency that invited challenges to the colonial civic order. Into this gap rushed three subaltern movements, representing women, workers, and non-elite Muslims whose civic status was structurally subordinated to mediating elites (men, employers, elite Muslims, Christians, and the French). They were subalterns also in the sense that they had no distinct voice in the civic order. The hegemonic discourse of both the French civilizing mission and elite nationalism (replicated in many histories written since the mandate period) marginalized or ignored their concerns. The new activism of these groups derived from growing consciousness of their subaltern status and of their rights as citizens of republics to demand equality. The subaltern movements coalesced within a broader context of frenzied postwar associationalism. While the Ottomans had registered only  associations in prewar Beirut, for example, the French would register  associations in the city and its environs, and  more in the rest of Lebanon between  and .1 The dizzying array of associations included Ottoman-era charitable, religious, cultural, political, and student clubs, as well as new groups with new aims, devoted to sports, scouting, aviation, protection of animals, human rights, veterans’ affairs, and families’ mutual aid. New, too, were middle-class professional associations organized by surgeons, importers, hoteliers, teachers, lawyers, engineers, journalists, auto mechanics, hairdressers, musicians, artists, and theatrical troupes.

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While Ottoman-era groups tended to be informal gatherings of friends, mandate-era groups became increasingly formalized. The mandatory state’s stiffer licensing laws required from every association a statement of goals, a list of members, and records of fees paid. Formality came also because the groups grew larger. They built links across and between cities, even crossing the Syrian and Lebanese borders, with the use of new communications: the telegraph, the telephone, the train, and the many kilometers of road built by the French. Large groups, unlike the intimate clubs of the prewar era, often assembled strangers. In , the Beirut newspaper al-Bashir published an article urging those who attend meetings to adopt proper etiquette and rules of order: they should arrive on time, should not talk, and should not smoke during the meeting. Meetings often took place in cafes and members’ homes, although increasingly large groups tended to gather in hotels and cinemas.2 These developments made possible true social movements; that is, sustained organizations that recruited large numbers of people based on shared principles. As women’s, workers,’ and Islamic populists’ movements emerged, their orientations changed. Under the Ottoman regime, small women’s societies, labor guilds, and religious groups were closely regulated and firmly bound to the paternalistic social order of the day. They had sought reform within the prevailing norms of patronage, deference, and gender hierarchy. Now, the movements came to emphasize not just general goals of social reform, but their specific identities as subaltern citizens. They challenged the paternalistic norms of state social policy that underprivileged their members in the civic order. They especially criticized the mediating power of men over women, bourgeois employers over workers, missionaries over students, and elite ulama over common Muslims. This chapter introduces the three movements by tracing the history of their organizational development. Their ideologies and political impact on the colonial civic order will be discussed in more detail in the remaining chapters of this book.

Roots in the Era of Ottoman Reform The impulse for reform in the late Ottoman era came not only from the state above, but also from society below. It began in Mount Lebanon, where the mid-nineteenth century arrival of missionaries and European capitalists inspired and frightened local people into organizing their own efforts at social reform. They built educational and cultural societies (jam‘iyat) to compete

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with those of missionaries. As European influence spread, and as social and economic structures began to change, reform societies spread throughout the region. Bourgeois women were among the earliest social reformers. In , the Sisters of Love (Akhawat al-mahabba) was founded in Lebanon. It built a school, a hospital in Damascus, a tuberculosis sanatorium, and a hostel for wayward girls. In the s and s, other women’s groups organized national girls’ schools to compete with missionary schools in Lebanon, Damascus, Tripoli, and Homs. The most prestigious of these was the Flower of Charity (Zahrat alihsan) school and convent funded by the Beirut millionairess Emily Sursuq. While these efforts built upon women’s long-standing activity in philanthropy, they reflected a new spirit. Their primary aim was to uplift the lower classes, particularly poor women, through education and hygiene. Women philanthropists saw themselves, then, primarily as upstanding members of the newly emergent bourgeoisie, and as collaborators in the defensive social reforms led by the Ottoman state. Islamic reform was rooted similarly in education and competition with foreign missionaries, but it differed in relation to the state. The Ottoman state’s expanding role in education and justice had worked to undermine the authority of the Muslim ulama. New schools and courts were staffed by civil servants with European-style training in education and law. Whereas the ulama had once been considered the educated elite of the empire, enjoying wide influence in government and community affairs, by  their authority was considerably reduced, confined mainly to the adjudication of a narrowed range of religious law and the management of religious endowments (awqaf), mosques, and other religious institutions. In reaction to state secularization, an intellectual reform movement emerged among mid-level ulama. The Salafiya movement called for social and spiritual reform within a purified Islam and for unity among Muslims as a defense against European encroachment. Its vision placed the ulama back in the center of public life, and appealed especially to well-educated religious scholars who had not attained prestigious posts. Like women’s groups, these Islamic reformers established schools and charitable societies that obtained state subsidies to further their cause. The most comprehensive system of Muslim private schools was that of the Maqasid foundation in Lebanon, which from  built dozens of schools that still exist today. Salafi reformers also forged ties with Arabists, who also came from a new generation of professionals excluded from Ottoman bureaucracy. They both formed political societies and published their ideas in new magazines, particularly after the  Young Turk revolution.3 Prominent

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among Salafis at this time were Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali, a Damascene Arabist scholar and newspaper publisher; Rashid Rida, an Arabist scholar from Tripoli deeply influenced by the intellectual father of the Salafiya movement, the Egyptian Muhammad ‘Abduh; and Shakib Arslan, a Lebanese Druze prince and journalist exceptional in his belief that the Ottoman empire was the best means to assure Islamic unity and strength.4 Workers had more difficulty in establishing reform groups. Artisanal guilds had adapted to growing market competition in the nineteenth century by altering the master-apprentice relationship. Apprentices gradually became wage laborers with little real expectation of owning their own shops, and masters forged ties with merchant-marketers. The proletarianization of workers continued with the introduction of new industries, as in silk, and with large public works projects undertaken by Europeans, such as the building of railroads and ports. In these sectors, employers substituted unskilled men, women, and children for more highly paid artisans. Workers’ organization was discouraged by Ottoman laws, mentioned in last chapter, forbidding them to organize separately from their masters. Proto-labor unions emerged nonetheless in defiance of the law. Some apprentices and wage laborers mounted illegal protests and strikes against their falling wages and poor conditions of work. In  and , striking weavers in Aleppo actually won wage raises of up to  percent.5 World War I catalyzed important changes in the aims and organizations of women, workers, and Islamic reformers. As will be seen below, it produced the leaders of a self-conscious women’s movement, transformed the elitist Salafiya movement into a populist one, and disrupted labor organization so much as to permit the replacement of guilds with labor unions.

The Women’s Movement The war and French occupation transformed bourgeois ladies’ charities into a self-conscious subaltern movement. Women’s leaders’ first break with paternalism came with their nationalist opposition to the Ottoman and the French states. Later, they came to recognize that, because of their gender, they did not fully share the privileges of their class. By the end of the s, a SyrianLebanese women’s union emerged that decried state social policies and religious laws that handicapped female citizens, and that attempted to overcome class barriers to represent all women. The politicization of women’s charities began during the war. In , a

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group of prominent Muslim women in Beirut established the Arab Girl’s Awakening Society (Jam‘iyat yaqzat al-fatat al-‘arabiya) which combined girls’ education with a credo to oppose all foreign rule, eventually including that of the Turks. In , women mounted anti-Ottoman demonstrations against bread shortages and the execution of Arab nationalists.6 The Ottomans responded with support for women’s groups, in an effort to reunify the population and to provide war relief. ‘Anbara Salam (–) later recalled how shocked women were when Jemal Pasha called them to a meeting and proposed the project. They seized his offer of funding and soon found themselves gathering hungry children from the streets for baths, medical exams, and lessons in crafts and reading.7 Salma Sayigh (–) ran an orphanage established by Jemal Pasha. In a workshop for the poor and elderly run with state funds by ‘Adila Bayhum (–), nearly , women were employed in textile and carpet weaving and handicrafts. In , the governor of Beirut helped Bayhum, Salam, and Ibtihaj Qaddura (–), among others, found the Muslim Girls’ Club (Nadi al-fatayat al-muslimat). It supported a library and a school for poor girls, and organized art lessons and lectures by prominent poets and religious scholars for Muslim women and girls.8 Meanwhile the Ladies’ Society (Jam‘iyat al-sayyidat) was founded by Julia Dimashqiya (–), a writer and teacher, “to unite Syrian women despite differences in religion” through literary exchanges.9 As the war ended, these and other women activists embraced Faysal’s Arab nationalism.10 With Faysal’s support, Nazik ‘Abid (–), daughter of a former Ottoman bureaucrat, founded the Red Star society, a local variant of the Red Cross, and the Light of Damascus society (Nur al-fayha’), through which she promoted Arabism in a girls’ school and in a magazine of the same name.11 Faysal also sponsored the founding of the Christian Women’s Club in  Damascus by Mary ‘Ajamy (–), a teacher and publisher of a women’s magazine, to promote Arabism among Christians.12 These seven women—Salam, Bayhum, Qaddura, Sayigh, Dimashqiya, ‘Abid and ‘Ajamy— would become the core founders of the women’s movement in the mandate period. With the French occupation nationalist women’s groups were at first marginalized. The mandatory state shut down ‘Abid’s school and Red Star society, and diverted state support to its own French Red Cross and Drop of Milk society. Many nationalist women in Syria begrudgingly joined these groups, dominated by the wives of French officials. “The women who worked with the French in societies were the same women who participated in demonstrations against them,” recalled a Damascene philanthropist.13 Women also pursued

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their own charitable and reform efforts without state sponsorship that they had enjoyed during the war. Lebanon continued to be the center of the most activity:  women’s groups were registered there between  and .14 The number and character of the groups appears linked to ongoing acute social stress. Churches had been a major provider of such charity during the war, and the majority of women’s groups continued to be religious charities emphasizing education and health care for mothers and girls.15 For example, the Orthodox Society of Compassion for Ladies (Jam‘iyat al-shafaqa al-urthuduksiya lil-sayyidat) was established in Beirut by Linda Sursuq in  to support schools for poor girls.16 Among Muslim endeavors, the Islamic Orphanage (Dar al-aytam al-islamiya) was the most important. It was founded in  by a nucleus of women who from the Arab Girl’s Awakening Society, including Ibtihaj Qaddura. The group not only cared for orphans, but also funded a range of activity promoting women’s role in society through waqf foundations that drew revenues from shops in the city’s markets. It was the first such foundation financed mainly by women, and was innovative in that women sat on its board of directors.17 The Syrian Revolt inspired a new wave of activity in Damascus. ‘Adila Bayhum, who moved to Damascus and took the surname al-Jaza’iri after her marriage, organized workshops during the revolt to offer handicraft training to displaced and widowed rural women. In  she helped found, with Nazik ‘Abid and others, the Syrian Woman’s Awakening Society (Yaqzat al-mar’a alshamiya), which like its Lebanese predecessor undertook a variety of social works, including English and sewing lessons for poor girls, hospital visits, and monthly cultural lectures.18 Three years later, Thuraya al-Hafiz (b. ), daughter of a nationalist executed by Jemal Pasha, founded the Women’s Normal School Alumnae association (Jam‘iyat kharijat dur al-mu‘allimat), which provided schooling for poor and orphaned girls. This was the only popular women’s group in Syria at the time, with members drawn from the middle classes rather than the elite.19 Available records offer little information on women’s groups in other Syrian cities until after .20 Many women’s leaders ran Arabist schools, to counter the French influence in state and missionary schools. Teaching was about the only respectable profession open to elite women, and good number of women activists were teachers, including ‘Ajamy, Jaza’iri, Hafiz, Dimashqiya, and Qaddura. In , Jaza’iri helped found the Tree of Culture Society (Dawhat al-adab), which by  opened a girls’ school to offer an Arabic education and produce patriotic female citizens.21 Meanwhile, Mary Kassab continued to run her Syrian People’s School, founded in  Beirut. Kassab also wrote

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magazine articles advocating the standardization of curricula in Lebanon to promote national unity. Dimashqiya, too, campaigned for nationalist education and more girls’ schools, in meetings with parliamentary deputies and in her magazine, The New Woman (al-Mar’a al-jadida).22 Meanwhile, literary salons in both cities sought to foster patriotism, social consciousness, and support for the women’s movement among elite men and women. In Damascus, ‘Ajamy’s salon in the early s attracted prominent male writers and nationalists, including future National Bloc leaders Fakhri al-Barudi and Faris al-Khuri. ‘Ajamy broke social convention by gathering a mixed group of men and women together her home.23 Another gender barrier was broken by the Women’s Cultural Club (Nadwa al-thaqafiya al-nisa’iya), established in the late s, which organized a series of women’s lectures at the all-male bastion of the Arab Academy in Damascus.24 In s Beirut, Dimashqiya’s salon was soon joined by that of Habuba Haddad (–), a pioneering female journalist and a graduate of the American University of Beirut. It attracted writers and politicians not only from Lebanon, but also from Syria, including National Bloc leader and future prime minister Jamil Mardam Bey.25 The range of women’s activities steadily widened beyond charity and education. “Women were not left at home in those days. Society was very sophisticated, focused on nationalist and economic issues,” recalled a former member of the Syrian Woman’s Awakening Society.26 Nationalist women, like their nationalist husbands and fathers, increasingly addressed the state on the social issues that concerned them. They did so both in the spirit of cooperation in matters of mutual concern and in a spirit of opposition and confrontation. Concerning public health, for example, women’s groups joined protests for cleaner streets and better state inspections of bakeries. Bakeries were a paramount health concern because bread was the main staple in most people’s diets. Women’s groups also called on the state to require health exams before marriage, on the same principle that prostitutes were examined: to protect brides from disease. In  Beirut, Adalayd Rishani founded the Society to Stop Crime and Improve Prisons (Jam‘iyat mukafahat al-jarima wa tahsin alsujun), which campaigned for years to improve prison conditions. Rishani herself pounded on the doors of state bureaucrats until she won the right to inspect hygiene in prisons and deliver clean clothing to prisoners.27 Women’s labor issues attracted by far the most attention. In  Beirut, Dimashqiya, Qaddura and others founded the Women’s Revival Society (Jam‘iyat al-nahda al-nisa’iya) to protect women’s handicrafts threatened by imports. The group held three handicraft expositions between  and ,

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the last of which attracted more than , visitors, including some government officials. The Syrian Woman’s Awakening Society in Damascus participated in these exhibitions and also promoted local women’s handicrafts. These labor efforts were not solely directed at self-help: they called upon the state for support. The Women’s Revival, Syrian Woman’s Awakening and Rishani’s Society to Stop Crime petitioned the government to protect female artisans in particular, and traditional handicrafts in general. They also petitioned the government to set limits on women’s work hours, a minimum wage, and higher tariffs on imports.28 Through this variety of activity women’s leaders made a critical transition by the late s. They began to emphasize their identity as women and their collective goal to achieve the right to full participation in the civic order. Their work as educators, philanthropists and writers was no longer simply an expression of social concern, but a vehicle through which they asserted their place in national affairs. This change in orientation occurred gradually, as leaders built linkages among the disparate women’s groups. In , Lebanese women’s groups formed an informal union, which in  became the Women’s Union in Syria and Lebanon (al-Ittihad al-nisa’i fi suriya wa lubnan). Founders included its first president, Labiba Thabit, and Salma Sayigh. Prominent members included old-timers like Qaddura and Jaza’iri and three newcomers: Thuraya al-Hafiz of Damascus and Rose Shahfa and Eveline Bustros, both writers from Beirut.29 The women’s union would become the vanguard of a self-conscious women’s politics, sponsoring regular conferences of its own as well as attending international women’s congresses. The union aspired to represent all women. It was emphatically cross-sectarian, including both Muslims and Christians, and it was adamantly Arab nationalist, uniting both Syrians and Lebanese. It coordinated the activities of its member groups and represented women’s voices in public affairs through petitions, visits to government officials, and street demonstrations. It held its first public conference in  Beirut. That same year another newcomer, Nur Hamada founded the Women’s Arabic and Cultural Assembly (al-Majma‘ al-nisa’i al-adabi al-‘arabi) in Beirut to offer women scholarly lectures and to foster international ties with other women’s organizations. It helped organize the first of several Eastern women’s conferences in .30 These conferences forged bonds among women as women, thereby promoting a gender self-consciousness that was less clearly articulated in prewar charity groups. By the early s, the women’s movement had emerged as a significant presence in the civic order. Its conferences drew increasing press attention. It

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consisted of about  women’s groups with at least  to , full-time, active members, concentrated mostly in Damascus and Beirut.31 Hundreds more women were regularly recruited for special events, like street demonstrations and conferences. As Part Three will illustrate, the union directly confronted paternalism in the colonial civic order by organizing public campaigns for women’s rights, especially in education, health, and labor. Its anti-sectarian nationalism directly challenged the construction of the civic order around sectarian division and mediated hierarchies. In addition, the union campaigned for the reform of paternalistic religious laws on marriage, divorce, custody, and inheritance that limited women’s autonomy and civic participation. This latter issue was in fact critical to the movement’s future, for the union leaders’ agenda and appeal were severely limited by class and custom. Women’s leaders came from a privileged elite that had espoused ideals of social progress before the war, and that took a liberal view toward customary and religious restrictions on women’s behavior. Nazik ‘Abid was not only related to Syria’s first elected president, but also married into a leading, progressive Sunni family in Beirut, the Bayhums. ‘Adila Bayhum, from that same family, married into the al-Jaza’iri family of Damascus, descended from the famous Algerian leader who had been exiled to the city in the mid-nineteenth century. Julia Dimashqiya married the mayor of Beirut. Eveline Bustros, a future women’s union president, was descended from two prominent Greek Orthodox families, the Tuenis and Sursuqs, and married into a third. The men of these families were unusually permissive, in a society where men generally protected family honor by controlling women’s contacts outside of the home. Most women and girls required men’s permission to attend meetings, parties, and school.32 These customs were popularly sanctioned by reference to religious laws. The power of easy divorce granted to men and emphasis on seclusion in Islam may well account for women’s lower activism in Syria. Muslim women feared divorce if they left the home without their husbands’ permission.33 Recruitment to the women’s movement was also likely limited by the social conventions of class. Cradled in the conventions of a more permissive bourgeoisie, the groups were likely inhospitable to women from modest backgrounds who might have otherwise been free to join. Most women’s groups operated much like elite ladies’ clubs that existed in late-nineteenth-century Europe and America, and in contemporary Egypt and Turkey.34 The clubs were in a sense extensions of women’s homes; meetings followed bourgeois rules of etiquette. They made a public role available to women who had the leisure to spare a few hours per week, but who were not in a position to take up full-time philanthropy. The groups’ sources of funding also biased their agendas toward elite

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concerns. They were supported through a combination of personal wealth, patronage, and member fundraising, thereby tying them directly to the urban bourgeoisie and to religious institutions. Women’s leaders sought to make a transition to a more popularly based movement by staging public conferences and demonstrations. However, the transition from charity club to mass movement was as yet incomplete by the early s. And while leaders of the union attempted to unite the many women’s clubs into centrally coordinated movement like that of the National Bloc in Syria, custom and class conspired against consciousness and unity. Initiative remained dispersed among the many local clubs inspired by religious affinities and bourgeois paternalism. The obstacles to expansion and central leadership would weaken the women’s movement vis-à-vis its opponents in the civic order.

The Labor Movement Like women, workers sought a fuller role in the civic order, free from the control of mediating paternalistic elites—in their case, bourgeois employers and French concessionary companies. Unlike women, workers faced fewer obstacles to spreading subaltern consciousness and to recruiting a mass movement. The labor movement developed in spite of, and in reaction to, the state’s repression of workers in the s. Three factors contributed to the transition from guilds that mixed workers and employers to employee-only unions among diverse trades. First, workplaces began to change. The war’s military conscription and economic collapse further disrupted deteriorating masterapprentice relations in old-style artisanal workshops. At the same time more and more workers found jobs in new factories or in public-sector companies, where hierarchical bonds of family and master-apprentice were absent. Second, workers’ stress increased with the prolonged period of labor dislocation and instability after the war. Third, new ideas about the rights of workers spread, primarily due to the organizing efforts of Communists and the influence of the International Labor Organization. The first attempts to organize workers coincided with the start of the mandate. In , railway workers at the French D.H.P. company (Damas-Hama et Prolongements) staged a large strike for higher wages. Tramway and other workers soon followed their example. In , the Lebanese People’s Party was founded by Yusuf Yazbak, a -year-old Communist journalist, and Fu’ad alShamali, an organizer of tobacco workers, in cooperation with Jewish Com-

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munists sent from Palestine. The party advocated labor unions, more support for public education, the liberation of women, anti-sectarianism, and public control over waqf revenues. The following year, the party merged with a separate Armenian Communist organization. The new Communist Party united branches in both Syria and Lebanon, and actively supported efforts of local workers to organize.35 Because of French repression, however, the party would not become a political force in its own right until after . Labor strikes proliferated in the late s. Between  and , workers staged  strikes in Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, and Homs for higher pay and accident insurance, and to protest tax and price levels set by the government. In the vanguard were public-sector workers at ports and in railroad, tramway, and electric companies, along with workers in the tobacco and transport industries. They were joined by many artisans, particularly in textile and shoemaking trades. The number and size of strikes increased in the early s, as wages fell and unemployment rose. By , more than , artisans had gone bankrupt in Damascus alone. In , strikes included  cement factory workers in Tripoli, , Aleppine weavers, and all of the auto drivers and mechanics in Lebanon. In January , , Lebanese drivers and mechanics struck again for four days, an impressive proportion of the transport sector, which employed , Syrians and Lebanese in taxi, trucking, and repair services. Many of the strikers won higher wages and tax reductions, but not accident insurance.36 In the s, workers in other new sectors began to organize. The number of industrial firms in what the French called the “modern” sector more than doubled to  between  and . These included food processing, textile, shoemaking and cement factories, as well as an oil refinery in Tripoli. According to a  government report, these firms employed more than , workers, more than one-quarter of the labor force.37 While industrialization created a new working class, a small, salaried middle class also began to form in cities. In addition to the burgeoning civil service, thousands of clerks, accountants, managers, hotel and restaurant employees, and translators worked in the new banking, trade, and tourism industries, especially in Lebanon. Workers in many of these sectors formed associations. When budget cuts led to the layoff of , Syrian civil servants in –, the dismissed workers formed associations in several cities to mount protests.38 Women were also a small but growing part of the labor movement. In November , for example, several hundred female workers in the tobacco industry picketed government offices in Beirut. Women were not, however, formally organized with male unions. There appears to have been some

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ambivalence on the part of union leaders. Fu’ad al-Shamali, in his  book Workers’ Unions (Niqabat al-‘ummal), called for equal pay for male and female workers, not because it was just, but because employers were hiring women instead of men because their wages were lower. Shamali also called for prohibitions on women’s work in dangerous jobs, which could be construed as a means of excluding them from higher-paying factory jobs. However, the  and  party programs did call for women’s legal, social, and economic equality.39 While strikes were at first spontaneous events, they soon fostered sustained organizations, some of which became employee-only labor unions. Lebanese auto mechanics and drivers formed a national association by , which included both owners and workers. That same year in Aleppo,  drivers and mechanics struck to claim the right to organize a union. In  typesetters and shoemakers in Beirut formed the first true employee-only unions, in defiance of the Ottoman law that still banned them.40 The French continued to maintain that Syrian and Lebanese workers did not deserve protections that their own workers enjoyed, as stated in a  report: “The mandatory power does not feel it necessary to intervene energetically, either to introduce elements of modern labor law in its own administrative organs . . . or to lead the States to a reform of this type.”41 In face of French repression and indifference, unions of various trades forged administrative links that enabled them by the mid-s to mobilize large numbers of workers simultaneously. The labor movement gained further momentum with the reorganization of the Communist Party in the mid-s. The party replaced its longtime president, the Lebanese Shamali, with the Syrian Khalid Bakdash, under orders from Moscow to arabize and broaden the party’s membership from its Armenian base. Consequently the party embraced popular nationalist goals and began publishing magazines and leaflets with translated doctrine and appeals to the French to adhere to their “democratic mission in the world.” The party grew in these years to more than , members and even fielded candidates in Lebanon’s parliamentary elections of  and . 42 Another source of inspiration was from France itself, where Communist, Socialist, and labor union agitation peaked in – to bring down the conservative government. French labor activists visited Syria and Lebanon in  and , when they established the Party for the Defense of Unions and the Press in Syria. Finally, the election of the leftist Popular Front government in Paris in  ended, temporarily, the arrests and censorship that had limited the SyrianLebanese Communist Party’s outreach.43 By the late s, Syrian and Lebanese workers had attained a well-developed

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subaltern consciousness and won virtual recognition of their class-based movement. In Damascus alone, there were  employee-only unions and  mixed unions.44 Although exact figures are not available, it would not be far off the mark to estimate that at least  percent of the estimated , industrial workers were organized. Furthermore, the movement was poised to challenge the paternalistic employment regime enforced by the state since the s. Labor leaders demanded their rights to legal recognition and state protections from employer abuse. The leaders also challenged paternalism more broadly, as women’s leaders did, with their democratic anti-sectarianism, opposed to a civic order divided among fiefs of religious patriarchs. Despite latent class tensions between bourgeois women and labor, they both held the belief that equality would come only through the expansion of social rights, meaning state intervention in social affairs. They thus shared the étatist esprit that fueled depression-era politics around the world.

Islamic Populism While World War I had opened a window of opportunity to the labor and women’s movements, it virtually closed the door upon the Salafi reformers. Elitist Salafi thinkers had predicated their ideas on the possibility of absorbing change coming from Europe into a reformed Islam, as a means of strengthening Islamic civilization. The fall of two Islamic governments, first the Ottomans and then Faysal, strained the credibility of a movement that had never built a popular following anyway. Instead, postwar conditions opened the way for the Salafiya’s opponents, who defended what they saw as inviolable Islamic tradition. These Islamic populists built the social movement that the Salafiya never had. They shared with the other two subaltern movements both nationalism and the determination to raise their status in the colonial civic order. However, they held very different views toward paternalism and the state. Like the Salafi reformers, Islamic populists came mainly from the petty bourgeoisie of merchants, professionals, and mid-level ulama. Indeed, some populists were themselves embittered former Salafis. Also like the Salafis, they sought to reclaim religious authority lost under Ottoman reforms, and now foreign rule.45 But unlike the Salafiya, the new groups recruited popular followings, especially in the poorer quarters of Damascus, Homs, Hama, Aleppo, Latakia, and Tripoli. They sought to call all Muslims back to an Islamic way of life through mass meetings at mosques, popular celebrations of the Prophet’s

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birthday and through their schools, magazines, and good works. As they popularized their message, they began to encroach on elite nationalists’ constituencies. While nationalists continued to speak at mosques and Prophet’s birthday celebrations, only a few remained intimate with religious milieux. Many of them embraced distinctly secularist ideologies. By the s, they were beginning to lose their audiences to Islamic populists, who exploited class antagonisms to pose as defenders of the poor against secularist elites.46 The populists thus challenged Salafi and nationalist claims to represent their elitist Islam as the unifying spirit (‘asabiya) of the nation.47 The religious-secular and populist-elite cleavages had originated before World War I and widened in the Faysal era. After , conservative ulama organized popular opposition to the state’s new secularism and to elitist Salafi doctrine, especially its attack on popular traditions like visits to the tombs of Sufi saints.48 Although they were defeated, their influence revived during Faysal’s rule. Popular militias organized in late  employed an Islamic rhetoric against Faysal’s secularist government. These volunteer militias became the foundation of localist political opposition. In popular quarters of cities, often where rural migrants settled, they provided social welfare services, collected taxes, and even dispensed local forms of justice. But even as they promoted the civil autonomy of fraternal citizens, they also employed an explicitly paternalistic political language, often comparing the king’s role to that of a father, and the duty of the elite toward the poor to that of family members toward one another.49 A few years later, Islamic populist groups would revive the militias’ anti-statist and communitarian ideology. With the imposition of French rule in , a clear ideological break with Salafi reformers occurred. The elitist Salafi reformers emphasized intellectual renewal. They used critical reason (ijtihad) to arrive at basic Islamic principles, stripped of accretions of tradition, that could be applied to the current needs of the community and strengthen it in a rapidly changing world. Islamic populists shared the Salafis’ mission to save Islamic civilization, but they spoke in defensive terms, emphasizing preservation rather than reform. They focused less on abstract legal interpretation than on the promoting a pious Muslim lifestyle, often embracing the traditions that the Salafiya had sought to strip away. And they gave fiery political speeches voicing a far more adamant opposition to foreign influence than the Salafi reformers ever did. The change in the tone of Islamic reform is understandable as an adaptation to a changed, postwar context, where the former security of Muslims under the rule of an Islamic empire had given way to uncertainty under French rule.50

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French control of education, in particular, appears to have sparked the organization of Islamic populist groups. As early as , Lebanese ulama protested against the state’s use of male inspectors in girls’ schools, forcing the French to hire a female inspector.51 In , the French reported opposition to new French missionary schools in Homs led by an Islamic group that included city notables.52 In Hama at the same time, an Islamic society (jam‘iya) was building schools for Muslim boys and girls, and a group called Party of God (Hizb Allah) was formed by dissident, lower-ranking ulama, to the alarm of Muslim elites.53 The most important of these early Islamic populist groups was the Progressive, or Noble, Society (Jam‘iyat al-gharra—referred to hereafter as al-Gharra), founded in  Damascus by a prestigious religious scholar to protest French control of education. Al-Gharra at first focused mainly on building its own Islamic schools. But under the new leadership of Muhammad al-Daqr and ‘Ali al-Daqr, veterans of Faysal-era popular militias, who had ties to the influential Tijaniya Sufi order, al-Gharra built a strong following among the “illiterate” masses in the city’s Shaghur and Maydan quarters. Members wore turbans as a symbol of protest against European influence and waged demonstrations against the mixing of sexes in schools, blaming the state for promoting loose morals throughout society. In the s, new leading members included ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Tabba‘ and Muhammad Sa‘id Sadiq, both Damascene merchants in the ailing textile industry. The Tabba‘ family also had close relations with the Faysal-era militias. Ahmad al-Sabuni, an Aleppine religious leader known for anti-French sermons and protests against the state’s closure of a Qur’anic school also emerged as an al-Gharra leader.54 In the early s, similar groups formed among the petty bourgeoisie of various cities. In Damascus, the Islamic Civilization Society (Jam‘iyat altamaddun al-islami, referred to hereafter as al-Tamaddun) and the Society of the True Islamic Path (Jam‘iyat al-hidaya al-islamiya, referred to hereafter as al-Hidaya) were both founded about . Al-Hidaya’s Damascene leader was Kamil al-Qassar, a merchant, teacher in an Islamic college (madrasa), publisher, and later a judge (qadi). Al-Hidaya also formed branches in Homs and Hama, where the group was suppressed by the French in  for preaching against alcohol and gambling in local cafes. The Hama branch complained to the League of Nations that the French permitted Christian proselytism but unfairly prohibited that of Muslims.55 Al-Tamaddun was unique in that its members were a generation older and more prestigious than those of other groups. Its leaders in  included an Islamic jurisconsultant (mufti), a preacher (khatib), a philologist, a writer, a lawyer and a doctor, all men who had risen from modest origins through education. They opened schools in

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villages outside of Damascus and provided scholarships to poor students. In Aleppo, the Society for Piety and Morals (Jam‘iyat al-birr wa al-ahlaq) raised money to help the poor, and, in , to build an Islamic college.56 These groups engaged in bitter conflicts with French officials over control of waqf foundations, the reform of Islamic law courts, and the right to speak freely at mosques. But it was their education protests that drew the most popular support. Islamic populists spoke directly to Muslims angered by the inversion of the social pyramid under the French. In , a Muslim group in Hama protested against parents who sent their students to the new school run by the Sisters of the Sacred Heart. In , parents in Tripoli pulled nearly all Muslim students out of foreign secondary schools. In , a Hama group mailed  letters to parents, urging them to withdraw their children from foreign schools as well. The letters quoted a French writer who claimed “the best way to destroy the base of Islam is to educate Muslim children in Christian schools.” The same year in Homs, the French confiscated all copies of a tract published by Shaykh Safa Siba‘i, entitled “Call to Truth” (al-Da‘wa ila al-haqq), which condemned missionary schools for aiming to undermine Islamic values.57 In , , people at a rally in Tripoli shouted, “Down with foreign schools, long live national schools!”58 Tripoli Muslims also would wage a campaign throughout the s against the overcrowding of state schools, which were attended mostly by Muslims. As the s progressed, populists forged stronger interurban links among youth. A string of groups carrying the names Youth of Muhammad and Muslim Youth (Shabab Muhammad and Shubban al-Muslimin) emerged in Homs (), Aleppo (), Damascus (), Tripoli (date unknown), and Beirut (). Members were mostly students and teachers, although the Aleppo branch also included some engineers and merchants. The Homs branch, which met in the famous Khalid Ibn Walid mosque, grew to  members in  by recruiting boy scouts under the leadership of Mustafa al-Siba‘i.59 The Damascus branch, based at the prestigious Tajhiz preparatory school, was later said to have been founded in imitation of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. However, the Damascus group clearly originated before the Egyptian Muslim Brothers visited Syria in , for Tajhiz students began publishing a religious magazine, Lisan al-talaba, in .60 Moreover, the Egyptians expressed surprise at finding Syrian groups similar to their own during their visit. And Mustafa al-Siba‘i, who would found the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood in , was studying in Cairo during the s.61 At the same time, Islamic populists engaged directly in nationalist issues, as

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popular discontent grew with the ongoing economic depression and the political stalemate in negotiations for an independence treaty from the French. In December , a group of nearly  Aleppine “Muslim extremists,” as they were called by the French, sent a petition to the League of Nations protesting the suspension of the Syrian parliament.62 In January , shortly before a general strike broke out in Damascus, a lunar eclipse was interpreted by the population as an omen for the new year. According to a frightened Jewish observer: “Youths and fanatics, beating their bodies, paraded in all the streets, [proclaiming that] the hour of Islam’s revival has arrived!”63 The outbreak of Arab revolt in Palestine in April  particularly mobilized populist religious sentiment. Al-Tamaddun, among other groups, supported Palestinian Arabs by collecting and delivering donations.64 Attacks on Jewish residents of Damascus were also reported. National Bloc leaders sought to contain the Islamic populists with appeals for unity of all citizens, regardless of religion.65 The attacks ceased after newspapers reprinted an appeal by Bloc member Fakhri al-Barudi: “The Jews of Damascus live with us and share our rights and duties. Everyone must watch over them as they watch over themselves.”66 The creed (‘aqida) of al-Tamaddun, printed in its journal between  and , may serve to illustrate the ideology of Islamic populism in the period. Its seven articles stated the beliefs to which all members were to subscribe (they are paraphrased here): () a Muslim believes in Muhammad, God and the Qu’ran, which should be read daily; () integrity, virtue and knowledge are the pillars of Islam: the believer must be virtuous with others and spread Islamic knowledge through the Muslim community; () a Muslim has a right to work and earn a living in order to provide for himself, contribute to charity, and support the people of his own country; () a Muslim must support and protect his family, and promise to teach them Islam; he must not send children to schools that don’t respect his beliefs, nor read any books that declare Islam their enemy; () a Muslim must restore the glory of Islam by raising up its people and reintroducing Islamic laws; () Muslims are members of a community bound by the Islamic creed, and so must foster fraternity; () the backwardness (sic) of Muslims is due to their distance from their religion; reform lies in returning to Islam’s teachings.67 Al-Tamaddun and other populist groups must be seen in a transitory continuum between older Salafi thought and the Islamism that emerged after World War II. In contrast to later Islamists, Islamic populists of the s appear not to have made overt claims to control the state, although they did insist on a Muslim ruler. Populists’ concerns were often shared by establishment ulama, who despite their appointment to official posts felt marginalized

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under a non-Muslim ruler. Like the populists, the stodgy Maqasid foundation, dating from the nineteenth century, promoted its Islamic and Arabic education against the French curriculum in Christian schools. Establishment ulama who controlled revenues of the state waqf administration routinely granted subsidies to Islamic populist groups. Nationalists also supported them; the National Bloc, for example, gave subsidies to the Youth of Muhammad in Damascus. In general, high-ranking ulama, nationalists, and populists often collaborated in protests against French meddling in education, the waqf administration, and Islamic law and courts.68 However, Islamic populists remained distinct from elite ulama in their selfconsciousness as subalterns in the civic order. As al-Tamaddun’s creed shows, they sought to defend the rights of those who struggled to support their families in the unstable postwar economy. Like many popular Islamic movements in the Arab world, they posed an alternate vision of the civic order, based on fraternal communalism and opposed to old hierarchies.69 Tamaddun’s creed, for example, made no reference to respect for the authority of elite ulama, but rather preached fraternity and the duty of Muslims to pursue individual study of the Qur’an. Populists apparently rejected the class status of elite ulama, especially their pretensions to be mediators between common Muslims and God and between common Muslims and the state. Populist groups in Damascus viewed with suspicion, for example, the formation of the Society of Ulama (Jam‘iyat al-‘ulama), which stated in its  manifesto that it aimed to restore the former status of elite ulama: “[The ulama] will be the mediators between the nation and the men in power, and they will pass on to the latter the complaints of the former concerning religion and morals.”70 The Society of Ulama would later demand a degree of control over Islamic courts that ulama had not enjoyed even under the Ottomans. Populists feared that the elite ulama’s bid to act as paternalistic mediators between them and the government would only obstruct their own agenda for reform.71 In the s, populist antagonism toward mediated authority would feed into the rise of a new Islamism that preached direct control of the state by Muslims. Indeed, there already was friction between Muslims who rejected separation of state and religion, and those who sought to constitute Muslims as one of several religious communities (millets) autonomous from the state.72 The former group, including Islamic populists and many Syrian ulama, sought a return to the Ottoman system, wherein the state embodied and represented the dominant Muslim community and the non-Muslim millets were subordinated to it. Populist pressure is likely responsible for the Syrian constitution’s requirement that the president be Muslim. The latter group was represented

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by Salafi-minded elite Muslims like those in Lebanon who in  formed a Muslim Council headed by the mufti of Beirut to protect Sunni interests, just as Christian and Jewish millets had done since the Ottoman era. The council presupposed the existence of a secular, nonsectarian state. So, in a way, Islamic populists resembled the labor and women’s movements in their rejection of mediation and their demand for a direct relationship with the state. However, their vision of the state as a religious institution privileging Muslim interests contrasted with women’s and workers’ vision of the state as a secular guarantor of equality and welfare. While Islamic populists clearly opposed one pillar of French paternalism, mediated rule, they upheld the other pillar, gender hierarchy. Their campaigns against state educational policy, for example, primarily targeted girls’ school attendance. In choosing this issue, they tapped an anxiety broadly felt in the population, and especially a resentment against elites who sent their daughters to French schools. Many families of lower status chose to keep their daughters home rather than have them learn French language and culture; they were apparently far more concerned about girls coming under French influence than boys. Families that could afford it sent their daughters to private Muslim and Arab schools like those of the Maqasid foundation and ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri.73 Muslims first protested against girls’ education in secular schools during Faysal’s regime, because of the potential for immoral social mixing between the sexes.74 The same complaint was made repeatedly against the French, not just in the name of morality, but also in the belief that girls’ schools were France’s primary weapon in their attack on Islamic civilization. In , a group of merchants, a pharmacist and a shoemaker in Latakia sent a petition to the Permanent Mandates Commission in Geneva, protesting that: The French authorities seek to offend Muslims in everything they hold dear: they control their waqf foundations . . . they paralyze their Islamic courts . . . finally, they force Muslim girls to gain their education in boys’ schools. A French inspector entered, without permission, classrooms where there were Muslim girls and teachers who respect the law of the veil.75 High Commissioner Damien de Martel, Ponsot’s successor, claimed the classroom intrusion was the result of an accident. But his memo to Paris also revealed the truth of populist worries about France’s intent to undermine the norms that they held to be traditional in Islam. De Martel concluded his

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memo by remarking that the road was still long “to leading numerous elements of the Levantine population to more modern views.”76

Conclusion: Revolt Against the Colonial Civic Order The three subaltern movements reflected the deep faultlines of gender, class, and religious tension that underlay the general crisis of paternity under French rule. Into a political arena dominated by French and nationalist debates over independence, the subalterns inserted the mundane social affairs of families, households, and their neighborhoods. In so doing, they politicized French social policies and they disrupted nationalists’ claims to represent a unified populace. The subalterns had not, by the mid-s, structurally altered the unlevel playing field of the civic order, but they had made their silenced voices heard. They would complicate politics for the remainder of the mandate— and beyond. The subaltern movements shared basic traits. All three represented groups structurally subordinated in the civic order. All three followed a similar trajectory, from small, prewar groups to social movements that, in reaction to French rule and its expansion into social affairs, attracted members in various cities to a common agenda. All three also moved beyond their focus on immediate social needs to articulate the common political interests of their constituents within the wider civic order. Leaders of the movements recognized the subaltern status of their groups and sought to throw off the guardianship of paternalistic intermediaries—be they husbands, fathers, bourgeois employers, or officially sanctioned ulama. They all deployed, in the process, some variant of a fraternal ideal against prevailing paternalism. However, the three movements diverged radically in their levels of consciousness and mobilization and in their visions of citizenship in an ideal, reformed civic order. While women and labor converged in their democratic rhetoric of equal rights and direct relations between state and citizen, they diverged in their attitudes toward gender and class. While bourgeois women’s leaders could not appeal beyond their class, labor unions remained blind to the plight of unorganized women workers. In short, neither group fully appreciated the other’s common subaltern status. Likewise, while Islamic populists and women nationalists shared contempt for French schools, each also saw the other as an enemy. Women’s leaders sought Salafi-style reforms to religious laws that hamstrung their civic participation, while Islamic populists sought to strengthen those very laws as the bulwark of Islamic civilization.

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Finally, the labor movement and Islamic populists sought to recruit the same constituency of the urban lower classes, but on diametrically opposite terms. Labor employed a democratic language of rights and class conflict, while Islamic populists invoked a paternalistic vision of community. The rivalry among the subaltern movements, and their common challenge to paternalism, infused the civic order with a new style of political bargaining. While all three subaltern movements were nationalist, they showed ambivalence toward the nationalist movement, led by the same paternalistic elites who subordinated them. The subalterns were thus caught in a dilemma between rejecting the state, and appealing to the state for reforms that would mitigate elite privilege and promote egalitarian rights. Nationalist elites variously bonded together to preserve their privileges or, especially during elections, tried to attract the support of subaltern groups. Not all subaltern groups were, however, created equal in this new political game. While the labor movement struggled to legalize employee-only unions, Islamic populists and women enjoyed legal recognition of their associations. And while most workers and Islamic populists, being male, enjoyed full legal standing as individuals in the colonial civic order, women did not. Women were legally deprived of the right to vote, and bound by religious law to obey their husbands and fathers; they did not enjoy the civil autonomy that men did. This weakened women’s ability to bargain for their cause at election time, when only the votes of men would be courted by pro-French and nationalist candidates. Subsequent chapters will analyze how women’s dual subalterity—their subordination both to mediating elites and to males—became a central pillar of the colonial civic order. As a result, gender often became the arena for conflict and compromise among competing political groups. The gendered fulcrum to mandate politics will be analyzed first in efforts to redraw the civic order’s legal boundaries (Part Three) and then in conflicts over the its spatial boundaries (Part Four).

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part iii


Gender and the Legal Boundaries of the Colonial Civic Order

Law is a principal means by which the terms of citizens’ participation in the civic order are set. An influential and still useful model is that of T. H. Marshall, who categorized laws affecting citizens’ status into those that establish political, civil, and social rights.1 While Marshall argued that in Britain the state awarded these various rights progressively over a period of centuries, we have seen that the process in Syria and Lebanon was much more compressed and complex. Within their first decade, Syria and Lebanon adopted constitutions that set basic legal boundaries of political rights to vote and hold office; of civil rights to individual freedoms of speech, thought, faith, association and property; and of social rights, mainly to education. And while Marshall’s model assumed that the expansion of rights progressively equalized the status of all citizens, we have already seen that the constitutional era in Syria and Lebanon instead established a hierarchy of citizens. In other words, the legal boundaries of colonial civic order set a variety of gendered, class, and religious obstacles to full participation by all citizens. As in many other countries, citizens challenged these limits on their political, civil, and social rights. Two aspects of this struggle were distinctive in Syria and Lebanon. First, the state was not the sole lawmaker. Under the mandate charter, legal authority was split between the state’s jurisdiction over civil law and religious patriarchs’ supervision of religious law. Second, this dual legal system combined with the crisis of paternity and reshuffling of social hierarchies described in previous chapters to bring conflicts over rights to a focus on issues of gender.

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gender and legal boundaries Dualism in legal authority was rooted in the Ottoman era, when sultans

decreed a body of civil law alongside the Islamic law that had organized life in the Middle East since medieval times. Theoretically, civil law (kanun) was intended merely to supplement Islamic law (shari‘a), but it came to dominate it in the nineteenth century. Under the Tanzimat reforms, the Ottoman state steadily stripped the ulama of the authority they had formerly exercised in commercial, criminal, and other areas of law. These latter were incorporated into civil law codes administered directly by the state in special courts. The residual category of law left to the governance of Muslim and non-Muslim religious officials came to be called personal status law. It concerned mainly matters of marriage, divorce, and inheritance, and was handled in separate religious courts. The Ottoman state retained some influence over these courts by organizing Islamic law into a comprehensive code (the Mecelle) and by controlling the appointments of judges to Islamic courts. But the centralizing state remained jealous of even this degree of legal autonomy, and in its last years attempted to assert further control. For example, in  it decreed revisions to the personal status laws of all religions in a new Family Law and it asserted, for the first time, the power to approve appointments in the Maronite Church, in theory making the Maronite patriarch a functionary of the state much as Muslim ulama were.2 The French mandate inherited this dual legal system, but with a difference. The mandate charter effectively reversed the Ottomans’ drive toward legal unification by fixing strict limits on the state’s power over religious law. The charter explicitly required the French to respect personal status laws and it prohibited them from all interference in the management of religious communities.3 The French did not, for example, have the Ottomans’ power to ratify the elections of Muslim and non-Muslim religious patriarchs by their communities. The French also had little authority, in contrast to the Ottomans, to initiate reforms in personal status law, which was now left entirely in the hands of the ulama and clergy. This stood in sharp contrast to the powers of Mustafa Kemal’s independent state in Turkey, which aggressively completed the Ottoman drive toward unification of all laws in the s by abolishing Islamic law and religious courts altogether.

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The mandate’s dual legal system had profound implications for the definition of citizenship in the colonial civic order. First, it posed religious patriarchs as autonomous legal authorities in competition with the state. There were many grey areas over which the state and religious leaders would fight for jurisdiction. Second, all citizens would not enjoy the same status, because personal status laws varied among the religious sects. Moreover, those aspects of citizens’ status determined by religious law were not a matter of right. Lay members of religious communities had no legislative mechanism that gave them the right to compel changes in religious laws governing marriage, divorce, and inheritance. As a result, many citizens opposed the dual legal system. Many nationalists, for example, viewed the truncation of universal rights by religious law as a fatal obstruction to the creation of a truly national and republican community. But because nationalist elites also found religious leaders useful in building political constituencies, they mounted no serious effort to abolish the dual legal system. It would instead be various subaltern groups who would mount open opposition. Islamic populists favored the abolition of civil law in favor of Islamic law, while Communists were profoundly secularist and anti-sectarian. But it was the women’s movement’s demand for reforms to religious law and equal rights in civil law that ignited the most controversy, fanning the flames of the postwar crisis of paternity. Their demands sent tremors through the entire colonial civic order. They not only threatened the base of religious patriarchs’ power, the dual legal system, but also the power of the state and nationalist elites who depended upon religious support, and the power of all men in all families. Part Three will study, then, not only how the dual legal system restricted women’s citizenship within narrow boundaries, but also, conversely, how a gender perspective may be used to understand the broader process of negotiating the terms of citizenship in the colonial civic order. Most studies on the civic order in Syria and Lebanon have focused on class and sectarianism, and so have elucidated only one pillar of paternalism. A focus on gender conflict, however, reveals the fundamental linkage between both pillars of paternalism: mediated hierarchies of power, and the dominance of men

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over women. Indeed, gender was so fundamental to the civic order that it became a primary arena for all battles to redefine citizens’ rights. Chapters six through eight will examine how women’s efforts to gain political and civil rights excited massive opposition from religious interests and their nationalist allies; chapter nine will examine men’s and women’s more successful campaign to claim social rights against paternalistic privileges, thereby laying the foundation of a colonial welfare state.

chapter 6


Political Rights: Women’s Suffrage as a Revolutionary Threat

In April , three months before the French occupied Damascus, the Syrian Congress discussed a proposal to grant women the vote. The issue came up at the same time that the Congress was handling complaints by “liberated” women about insults and abuse in the souks (markets) of Damascus. Response was quicker on the latter issue. Within a few days, King Faysal’s government issued a warning to would-be street molesters and promised more police patrols in the souks. It also, however, warned women against wearing European-style clothing and advised male guardians to ensure that their women dress properly in public. This reassertion of women’s ambiguous status in public, and their dependence on male guardians, did not augur well for a pro-suffrage decision by the Congress.1 Behind the campaign for women’s suffrage was a contingent of leaders from the nascent women’s movement. Inspired by nationalist ideologies, they sought fuller participation in politics and the struggle for independence. They wanted to prove their patriotism by joining men in military battles and demonstrations against the French. Most fundamentally, they sought to transform their subaltern status as citizens, to strip away the mediating authority of men that separated them from the political arena, and to establish a direct relationship with the state through the right to vote. In the longterm, they hoped their voting power would enable them to demand further freedoms and equality through reforms of personal status laws. These women saw no conflict between political rights and religious obligations, for they justified their claims with the ideas of the Salafi Islamic reformers. They did not anticipate that the gender anxiety and conservative backlash produced by war and French occupation would prompt others to employ different interpretations of religious law to block their attainment of these rights. The women had reason to believe that King Faysal favored their cause. In

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, a group of Lebanese women, including ‘Anbara Salam, had followed Faysal in the harem section of his train to Damascus to submit a petition to him on women’s rights.2 Meanwhile in Damascus, Nazik ‘Abid, Mary ‘Ajamy and others also agitated for suffrage in their women’s magazines. They were no doubt inspired by suffragist movements in postwar Europe and women’s prominent role in the Egyptian rebellion against the British the previous March.3 Because there was no formal suffragist movement, however, we have no way of knowing how representative these women were. That others did share their demand for legal equality is suggested by an answer to the question posed in  by ‘Ajamy’s magazine The Bride (al-‘Arus): Where would you like to have been born? One woman responded: “I wish I had been born in a more advanced country where women can go about their business in fairness and equality.”4 In April  (just as the San Remo conference was awarding France the mandate) a Lebanese delegate to the Syrian Congress, Ibrahim al-Khatib, proposed a limited form of women’s suffrage during debates on the state’s new constitution. Khatib asked that the right to vote be granted to women of a minimum age holding secondary school certificates (estimated to be about two percent of the population). The proposal was seconded by Sa‘dallah al-Jabiri of Aleppo, who would later become a leader of the Syrian National Bloc. Support also came from Shaykh Sa‘id Murad, a religious scholar from Gaza and former professor at the law school in Damascus. (His daughter Fatma in the s would become one of the first female lawyers in Damascus.) Murad argued that the right given to women to testify, to judge, and to be a scholar in Islamic tradition implied a similar right to vote. Da‘as al-Jurjis, another delegate, added that women’s military service during the war was proof of their importance to society. While Faysal’s supporters generally approved of women’s suffrage, his opponents in the Congress, including older, conservative and landowning politicians with religious and French sympathies,5 did not. The opposition was led by Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Kaylani, a francophile from a conservative feudal family in Hama. Kaylani argued to the Congress that even in Europe, where women shared many of men’s activities, few countries gave women the vote. He then asked: “Giving women the right to vote means she has the right to be an ambassador, and do you want female ambassadors?” Jabiri retorted that Syrian women also mix with men, for example in markets. But Kaylani warned that society was too ignorant and immoral, and that men would resist women’s public authority. Interestingly, he acknowledged in his argument the Salafi view that women’s seclusion from public life, or veiling, was not in fact required by religion. But he insisted that most people did not share that view:

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“Veiling as it exists is an innovation, but when some seek to lift the veil, the fools who follow women will be ridiculed.” ‘Adil Zu‘aytar of Nablus agreed that giving women the vote was dangerous: “Every people has its deep-seated customs and traditions, and if its laws don’t conform to them, then it must fear that the laws will lead to revolutions and disturbances.” Indeed, opponents sought to project women’s suffrage as a revolutionary threat to the entire gender hierarchy. Ahmad Qadmani of Damascus claimed women’s suffrage would upset the natural order: “God created her [woman] with half an intellect!” Rashid Rida, the eminent Salafi scholar, argued that the right to vote was predicated on the condition of individual freedom, and so threatened husbands’ control over wives: “Does a woman, under the protection of her husband, have the right to vote if he prohibits her from voting?” Jabiri responded: “Does he have the right to prohibit her from bearing witness in court?” Rida responded in the affirmative. Like other opponents, Rida sought to divert and postpone the issue by calling for more women’s education as preparation. The debate was also colored by the regime’s impending crisis, as the French declared sovereignty over Syria and as opposition grew to Faysal’s attempts to appease them. Populist militias opposed to compromise and to what they perceived as Faysal’s elitist and Europhile modernism attacked women’s suffrage with venom. Posing as representatives of the national will, they denounced the suffrage proposal as akin to the rape of Syria’s purity and integrity by imperialists. Rida argued that allowing women’s suffrage would undermine the authority of the Congress at a time when its political power was being challenged by the militias. “We must fight the reactionaries who want to keep women ignorant, rather than focus on the suffrage issue, which does not derive any benefit now. . . . We don’t have time to open the popular door to the fanatics. . . . [who] will give speeches in mosques and hold meetings against the Congress.”6 Rida’s views were also likely influenced by his membership in al-Fatat, an adamantly pro-independence nationalist group that had once supported Faysal, but now increasingly opposed his compromises with the French. Rida would become president of the Syrian Congress on May , after news of San Remo brought down its pro-Faysal leadership.7 Women’s partisans rallied, but failed to achieve a vote on the issue. Ibrahim al-Khatib threatened to resign from his party because it was so full of ignorance. Riyad al-Sulh, the future Lebanese prime minister, argued that the Congress should vote on principle, not on opinions in coffeehouses. Subhi al-Tawwil of Latakia argued that women don’t have to lift their veils to vote, and, roughly quoting scripture, that an educated woman is worth more than a thousand

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ignorant men. In a long speech, Shaykh Sa‘id Murad scolded opponents for trying to tie suffrage to other issues, like the veil, in order to defeat it. When he remarked that the West justified its rule over the East because the East persisted in legislating the ignorance of half its people (women), six deputies left their seats and a quorum was lost. The Congress postponed further debate on the issue until early July, when the constitution was ratified, but again made no decision. According to the Congress secretary, ‘Izzat Darwaza, there was wide support for the measure, but a knot of opponents blocked debate.8 The constitution was thus ratified without a change to the electoral law. Women’s reaction to the defeat was valiant. They sought to prove their patriotism even as the state fell within the next two weeks. On July , Nazik ‘Abid organized the Red Star society on the model of the Red Cross under Faysal’s patronage. On July , the king awarded her an honorary military rank in the Syrian army (fig. ). A week later, ‘Abid, dressed in her military uniform, led her battalion of Red Star nurses into the fateful battle of Maysalun. When the hero of the battle, War Minister Yusuf al-‘Azma, was mortally wounded, it was the Red Star that treated him. ‘Abid was dubbed the Joan of Arc of the Arabs, after the saint canonized that same year, and was compared to Khawla bint al-Azwar, an ancient Arab war heroine.9 Women took the postponement of the vote as an opportunity to prove their worthiness as citizens. According to the director of the largest girls’ school in Hama: “From that date women showed their true colors and worked actively to raise their intellectual and social status through schools and clubs and by publishing women’s newspapers and magazines . . . until she recovered her spirit.”10 While three women’s magazines had been founded by women before the war, eight more would appear between  and . Women publishers shared a vision of the female reader as an essential player in the nation’s future. Salima Abu Rashid had entitled her  magazine Girl of Lebanon (Fatat Lubnan) to inspire young women to revive the strong morals that had once guided the ancient Lebanese civilization.11 Mary ‘Ajamy revived her journal, The Bride, which she had founded in  with the dedication: To those who believe that in the spirit of woman is the strength to kill the germs of corruption, and that in her hand is the weapon to rend the gloom of oppression and in her mouth the solace to lighten human misery.12 At the same time, ‘Ajamy started her Women’s Literary Club (Nadi al-nisa’i aladabi) to foster a female intelligentsia who could help revive Damascus. She

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wanted to disprove those who believed women were mentally inferior. ‘Ajamy sought more than the vote; she sought the end of paternalism. In her view, women’s rights were natural, and women sought only to regain the rights they once enjoyed in a distant era of matriarchy. In seeming response to Rashid Rida’s claim that women were not individuals deserving of rights, she said: “Some say women are born to serve their husbands. Others say women are born to serve their fathers . . . [I say her rights] exist for herself.”13 Many of the women’s magazines were founded in the spirit of revival generally felt after World War I. Women were inspired by Egyptian women’s magazines, women’s prominent role in the  Egyptian revolution, the attainment of women’s suffrage in Europe and the United States, as well as their own wartime experience.14 In , in Beirut, Julia Dimashqiya founded her magazine, The New Woman (al-Mar’a al-jadida), addressing it “Dear Daughters of My Country.” Dimashqiya rallied her readers to embrace women’s new roles in social and national affairs since the war: “In the world there is an intellectual revolution undertaken by women, and it is a stronger civilizing influence than the French Revolution.”15 Najla Abu al-Lam‘ said she started her magazine, The Dawn (al-Fajr) because she “yearned in this new era for new scientific discoveries, new perspectives and new research.” A leading article in it proclaimed: “Syria cannot stand up and confront current events without the revival of her girls and women and their participation in liberating the country from outdated education and its debilitating effects.”16 Indeed, the magazines asserted that women were uniquely suited to heal social divisions and so strengthen the nation. Nazik ‘Abid promised her women’s magazine, Light of Damascus (Nur al-Fayha’), would help remove the main obstacle to national progress, the conflict between men and women: And even if a male writer and a female writer argue and fight about a subject, they will understand each other and they will arrive at truths worth expressing, and so lift this wretched nation from the ruin of misery to the peak of happiness, and build an impenetrable fortress between them and the sick, measly ideas that shame and despair bequeathed to us.”17 In , Afifa Fandi Sa‘b, publisher of The Boudoir (al-Khidr), proclaimed women’s duty to serve and unite all people in Lebanon, shunning divisive conflicts of identity: “My nationality derives from three roots: my language, my country, and the legacy of Islam.”18 These and other women’s magazines were read and shared by women in

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both Syria and Lebanon, fostering an interurban community that stretched far beyond the intimate world of elite literary salons and that nurtured the blooming women’s movement. Dimashqiya’s The New Woman in Beirut and ‘Ajamy’s The Bride in Damascus were the slickest and most well-known of the magazines. They kept the suffrage issue alive by featuring regular articles on women’s suffrage and women in politics in other countries. Meanwhile, women demonstrated their patriotism by participating in public protests. In April and May , dozens of Damascene women marched at the head of demonstrations against the arrest of a nationalist leader, ‘Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar. Several women were clubbed and arrested by police.19 The suffrage issue was revived in March , this time by the Lebanese Representative Council during a debate on women’s work. A group of young men had complained to the council that too many women were entering the civil service, thereby taking jobs away from men. Women had prepared for the debate by garnering the support of Representative Shaykh Yusuf al-Khazin, a Maronite newspaper owner. When Khazin defended women’s right to government jobs, the debate quickly expanded to consider broader aspects of women’s status. Husayn Bey Qaz‘un agreed with Khazin, noting that women in his home district of the Bekaa Valley shared work on the farm equally with men, and so why shouldn’t urban women help their husbands too? Fadl Bey al-Fadl remarked that since women assisted their husbands in many professions, like commerce and silkworm cultivation, shouldn’t they also help their husbands who are politicians or deputies? Several deputies remarked that many women worked for governments in Europe, India, and elsewhere, and that women had joined the Turkish delegation at the current Lausanne peace talks. One deputy said he agreed with Mustafa Kemal of Turkey that “the chief cause that led to our failure in social organization is our neglect of the women’s issue and her low status . . . the happiness of the country rests on women’s sharing with men in public affairs.”20 Opposing council members rejected these efforts to mold Lebanon’s civic order on foreign models of progressive gender equity and argued that women did not belong in public. Said Nasri Bey ‘Azuri: “Woman was created for the home and in the home she must spend her life.”‘Abbud ‘Abd al-Razzaq, a francophile representative from northern Lebanon, chastised the council for even taking up women’s affairs, since the Lebanese public, he argued, thinks the entire issue shameful. Another representative offered dubious population figures, that , of the , Lebanese population were women, and that educating them all would drain the country’s resources for men.21 Emile Eddé, the future prime minister, also dismissed the issue, asking the council to move on to more important administrative problems.

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The debate ended in a majority decision that women were created as men’s companions and so should share in all of his activities. The council president proposed an increase in the number of girls’ schools to compensate for previous bias toward boys’ schools. He even included a pledge to support women’s magazines, because they were more refined than men’s. And he closed with a promise that with increased education women would soon attain the right to vote and to sit as deputies in parliament. The decision perhaps reflected the liberalism of the new high commissioner, Maxime Weygand; however, as chapter four showed, few girls’ schools would in fact be constructed. A year later the Council took up the promised debate on women’s suffrage. Optimism that recognition of women’s right to work and to education might assure the right to vote, however, proved misplaced. On May , , Shaykh Yusuf al-Khazin, acting again on behalf of women’s leaders, proposed that the small number of educated women be granted the right to vote. Council reaction was largely negative. Opponents of suffrage included Shibl Dammus, a Greek Orthodox representative from the Bekaa Valley who would in  head the committee to draft the Lebanese constitution. Dammus asked Khazin to withdraw his proposal because its presumption of equal rights would require an overhaul of the entire legal system; for example, under Islamic law now in effect, men receive double the share of women in inheritance. Khazin assured him that he did not intend to infringe on men’s rights. Another deputy, Adib Pasha, objected to any tampering with the election law. Khazin replied that it had already been amended to allow foreigners (Armenian refugees) to vote, so why not do the same for educated female citizens? When asked to stand if they supported expunging the word “male” from article eight of the electoral law, only three of the  deputies stood up for women’s suffrage: Khazin, Amir Fu’ad Arslan, and Ibrahim Munthir. Munthir was a well-known scholar in Beirut who had taught Arabic to several women’s leaders, including Salma Sayigh and Mary Yanni, publisher of a women’s magazine. In the record of the session, the three men were registered by the clerk, in a manner apparently intended to shame them, as “Followers of Women.” The door left open in  by the Syrian Congress to women’s electoral participation was now slammed shut by the Lebanese Council. Dimashqiya wrote in her magazine that she was devastated, ashamed to have even hoped for the right to vote.22 Leaders of the women’s movement would nonetheless persevere in proving their patriotism and worthiness as citizens. They took heart, for example, that Fu’ad Arslan had praised women’s patriotism in supporting national industry, through the Women’s Revival Society established in . Women’s house-

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gender and legal boundaries

work, Dimashqiya argued, was as valuable to the nation as men’s office work; moreover, women’s work in the home underpinned all other national industries because it freed men to work outside the home, and it raised new workers.23 And as in so many other countries, Syrian and Lebanese women sought to use their role as defenders of the community (umma) in wartime—both World War I and Maysalun—as a basis for gaining political rights. During the Syrian Revolt in , ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri and other elite Damascene women smuggled food and weapons to men hiding in the orchards outside of Damascus, while peasant women took up arms in rural battles. In , , women marched to the residence of the Syrian head of state to demand the end of French bombardments of the capital city.24 Women’s claims to full citizenship in reward for war service were no mere imitation of contemporary European feminists. Syrians and Lebanese were steeped in the lore of heroic and pious warfare in pre-Islamic and early Islamic Arabia. Elites influenced by Salafi reformist thought looked to the days of the Prophet Muhammad for models of how to behave as Muslims and how to reform their community. In the s, many women’s and general magazines featured biographies of female Arab warriors like Queen Zenobia, who ruled a Syrian kingdom in the Roman era.25 ‘Aisha, the Prophet’s favorite wife, was often recalled for her participation in battles to defend the Muslim community. One female participant at Maysalun reportedly told her brother: “The wife of the Prophet waged holy war [jihad]. How could you go and not me?”26 The Prophet’s first wife Khadija was another Muslim ideal; she was a faithful wife and self-reliant businesswoman.27 These examples were often marshalled in support of arguments that women had once been active citizens with full rights, not only as soldiers, but also as judges and teachers.28 This revisionist view of women’s citizenship in the Prophet’s era rejected the political marginalization of women as a corruption of the Prophet’s original intent.29 Women did manage to convince some men that their battlefield service merited the vote, as we saw in the  debate. Some male nationalists even wrote books and articles about women’s participation in World War I as proof of women’s capacity to serve their nation.30 But as in many countries, including France, male politicians tended to characterize women’s war service as exceptional. They agreed that it was women’s duty toward the community to protect it in times of need; however, they insisted that women return to their natural place in the home in times of peace.31 Their views explicitly rejected women’s Salafi interpretations of the Prophet’s original intent, and instead embraced later Islamic traditions that sanctioned the exclusion of women from politics.

political rights



The postwar shift in the nature of Islamic reformism thus worked against women’s suffrage. Even as women appealed to the ideas of the Salafi movement to justify reforms in their legal status, its influence declined among Muslim scholars and officials. Moreover, women were going beyond what many Salafi scholars would permit, as evidenced by Rashid Rida’s opposition to their suffrage. Rida, who relocated to Egypt after , would oppose other reforms demanded by the Egyptian women’s movement.32 With the rise of Islamic populist groups, the balance of power was shifting toward conservative and populist interpretations. It is not unreasonable to suggest that a deep gender anxiety underlay the shift, provoking ferocious attacks on women who asserted a public presence in the street and in the parliament. As we saw in chapter one, Syrians and Lebanese of the lower classes had suffered far more than elites during the war, and were particularly stressed by guilt about not having fulfilled their gender roles as protective mothers, fathers, and brothers. This anxiety was now compounded by many people’s inability to provide for their families as they had once done. Gender anxiety was expressed in the language of gender difference deployed in the suffrage debates. The reference to rape, revolution, inversion of natural order, and the threat women’s vote posed to the entire legal system suggest a widely held fear of gender reversal, as did the repeated ridicule of men who “followed women.” Rashid Rida’s warning that women’s vote would upset men’s authority over their families must have struck a deep chord. If men were representatives of the family to the state, how could women become representatives of the state? Also at play were the more mundane worries of politicians who owed their status to the prevailing paternalistic system, hence Lebanese opponents’ reluctance to tamper with electoral laws that had been carefully fashioned by the French to assure their election. Mary ‘Ajamy, in a  speech in Beirut, remarked that many men feared women’s progress would come at their own expense. She reminded them that Marie Curie and George Eliot had not abandoned their husbands, but rather cooperated with them.33 The French took a low profile in the suffrage debates, but likely shared similar anxieties: “The decade after the  armistice witnessed an enormous preoccupation with issues of female identity and women’s proper role,” writes Mary Louise Roberts. “The blurring of the boundary between ‘male’ and ‘female’—a civilization without sexes—served as a primary referent for the ruin of civilization itself.”34 The French Senate denied women suffrage in  for the contradictory reasons that some senators wanted to preserve paternal authority in the family, while others, belonging to the laicist Radical Party,



gender and legal boundaries

feared that women voters would be beholden to the paternalistic and antirepublican opinions of the Catholic Church.35 Either way, French politicians, like those in the Levant, viewed women’s enfranchisement as an unwelcome disruption of the civic order. French views were transmitted to Syria and Lebanon through the press. In , the francophile Beirut newspaper Le Réveil published a review of the French novel The False Warrior that agreed with the author, Abel Bonnard, that suffrage would not make women happy because, “In a rudimentary society like ours, the simplicity of the natural order is felt anew, and in the rude duel of the two sexes, woman is exposed to blows more cruel than she can herself wield.”36 While the French did not enter suffrage debates directly, their policy aided and abetted its opponents. The mandate charter, written with French participation, prohibited discrimination according to religion, race,or language, but not gender.37 Within two years of the Lebanese Council’s debate, the Lebanese constitution would be drafted and ratified under French guidance, not only without provisions for women’s suffrage, but also without any formal consultation of women. All males aged  and over were granted the vote. (Article  would, however, contain the previously won guarantee of women’s equal access to civil service jobs.) Similarly in Syria, the  constitution decreed by Ponsot granted universal suffrage only to male voters aged  or more. Women found themselves faced with a painful tradeoff, one that men were never asked to face. In seeking political rights, women were told that they were betraying their religious duty. This was a formidable sacrifice for most women, who considered themselves pious. While women’s leaders situated their claims to citizenship within the compass of religious values, Christian and Muslim religious leaders portrayed their entrance into politics as a negation of their religiously defined roles as wives and mothers. Indeed, conservative Muslims deemed women unpatriotic for wishing to participate in public life, in a world view that increasingly saw all changes in gender roles as the corruptive creep of Westernization against the integrity of Islam and Arab tradition. This dilemma produced a crisis in the women’s movement. Critical to the outcome of the crisis was the appearance of a book by a young Druze woman in , which would rouse the ire of the conservative Muslims so feared by Rashid Rida during the suffrage debate, and to which we now turn.

chapter 7


The Veil and the Dual Legal System

In March , the -year-old daughter of an appeals court judge in Beirut published a -page book of legal and theological scholarship entitled Unveiling and Veiling (al-Sufur wa al-hijab). The book landed like a bombshell in the tidy world of the bourgeois intelligentsia in Lebanon and Syria. The author, Nazira Zayn al-Din, appeared out of nowhere, a young and thoroughly remarkable, if lonely, figure.1 She was not closely associated with either the women’s movement or the literary circles in Beirut. And yet she dared, in stronger terms than anyone before her, to turn the conventions of colonial paternalism on their heads. Zayn al-Din not only condemned the veil, but also asserted her authority, as a Muslim tutored by her father, to speak generally on issues of Islamic law. Zayn al-Din’s pose as an expert in Islamic law was more radical than Nazik ‘Abid’s participation, in military uniform, in the battle of Maysalun eight years before. She even appealed publicly to the French mandatory state to curb the authority of religious patriarchs in civil affairs. Her book went into a second printing within two months,2 and ignited such heated controversy that it redefined the terms of conflict between religious elites and the women’s movement for at least a decade to come. Zayn al-Din called for a spiritual understanding of Islam, whose essence was to promote the freedom and well-being of all Muslims. Following Salafi ideas, she argued that the authority of Islamic law should be restricted solely to those matters addressed in the Qur’an, and further, that innovative interpretation (ijtihad) of Qur’anic verses is acceptable. In particular, she argued that specific privileges granted in the Qur’an to a man over his wife and sisters, as in a man’s greater share of inheritance, should not be generalized to justify men’s universal superiority over all women. Within this general framework, she argued that women’s veiling (hijab) violated the spiritual message of Islam, which generally favored equal rights between men and women.

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gender and the legal boundaries

The veil Zayn al-Din condemned was the piece of crepe or muslin fabric used to cover a woman’s face. Zayn al-Din herself, like other urbanized Druze women, did not cover her face but rather wore a headscarf and long coat down to her ankles (fig. ).3 The veil was worn primarily by urban and elite rural women; peasant women did not generally wear it. Most urban women, even non-Muslims,4 still covered their faces in  as a sign of respectability and religious modesty, but the amount and thickness of coverage was steadily diminishing among elites and Lebanese Christians.5 Interestingly, the most prominent Druze woman of the day, Amira Nazira Janbalat (Jumblatt), adamantly retained her face veil. In an exception to French paternalism, she was the sole female feudal intermediary with the mandatory state, being a great landowner and leader of the rural Druze community in the Shuf region south of Beirut. To avoid controversy, she never met French officials alone and never appeared in public without a veil.6 In a larger sense, however, Zayn al-Din used the veil as a metaphor for the way traditional legal interpretations clouded over the true essence of freedom and equality in Islam. Hers was a direct attack on the twin pillars of paternalism, not just gender hierarchy but also the mediating authority of the ulama: “The freedom of each individual is limited by the boundaries of others’ freedom. No one should overstep the limits of the other, and if one oversteps, the law should return him to his limits.”7 By writing her book Zayn al-Din demonstrated her belief that all Muslims—including women—should have direct access to the law, so as to defend their rights against those who would unfairly bind them. The subject of women’s veiling and seclusion had simmered throughout the decade. In the early s unveiling was linked symbolically to women’s political emancipation. In the  suffrage debate at the Syrian Congress, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Kaylani suggested that granting women the vote would end their seclusion, encourage them to unveil, and corrupt politics with their foolishness. The previous year, Nazik ‘Abid and a delegation of women had indeed lifted their veils while meeting in Damascus with the American King-Crane Commission, sent to poll Syrians and Lebanese about the prospect of French rule. The gesture was intended to emphasize the enlightened political ambitions of Faysal’s Arab government. While ‘Abid had herself photographed unveiled in her military uniform (fig. ), it was said that she was forced to retake the veil after the defeat at Maysalun because of street hecklers.8 Again, however, in the  demonstrations in Damascus to free the arrested nationalist Shahbandar, several more women removed their veils in public for the first time.9

the veil



The issue took on new political salience in the mid-s, when Turkish women began to show their faces, and when Egyptians Huda Sha‘rawi and Saiza Nabarawi staged a public unveiling at the Cairo train station to proclaim the veil “the greatest obstacle to women’s participation in public life.”10 While unveiling was the initiative of Egyptian women, who protested the denial of their right to vote and join parliament in the recent constitution, it was a central project of the Turkey’s Kemalist state. Kemalists saw the destruction of the harem—women’s seclusion, veiling, and segregation from men—as the key to a social revolution that would lift Turkey from the backward East into the modern civilization of the West.11 Syrians and Lebanese felt ambivalence about the role of the state in the veiling issue. There was precedent for it. Like many European states, the Ottoman empire had imposed a visible social hierarchy through clothing laws. In  the reforming Sultan Mahmud II abolished all the varieties of headgear worn by the ruling class, to be replaced by the universal fez, symbol of the state as the sole arbiter of identity.12 The Young Turks followed longstanding Ottoman practice in regulating women’s dress when they issued decrees during World War I permitting women office workers to unveil, but also requiring them to wear long skirts.13 In , Syrians were scandalized and titillated when official Turkish propaganda appeared on the streets of Damascus in the form of postcards. Along with portraits of Mustafa Kemal as the defender of Syria and Turkey against European aggression, there were drawings of “modern” Turkish women, unveiled and showing much leg, while taking carriage and boat rides with male companions. The postcards sold like hotcakes. “I am informed that they attract considerable attention in local feminine circles,” said the American consul.14 Some Syrian and Lebanese women embraced this Ottoman legacy, and looked to the state to enforce unveiling. In , articles in Dimashqiya’s The New Woman lauded Mustafa Kemal for supporting women’s reforms, forecasting that the Turkish state would vanquish “reactionaries.” Dimashqiya even published photographs of unveiled Turkish women activists posing with sympathetic Turkish (male) officials, unusual in that photographs of any Muslim women were rare in the press of the time.15 In , women in another Damascene demonstration, this time protesting the state visit of Lord Balfour (who had promised a Jewish home in Palestine), took the occasion to demand suppression of the veil, to the chagrin of male nationalists who had organized the event.16 However, debate on the veil generally deemphasized the state’s role in the issue. The articles Mary ‘Ajamy published on Turkish reforms, for example,



gender and the legal boundaries

omitted any mention of the state and focused on women’s agency. One ascribed Turkish women’s unveiling to their participation in the war with Greece and to the postwar economic crisis that prompted them to take jobs. Another article, a speech by a prominent Damascene woman, attributed Turkish women’s revival to their higher level of education.17 Typical of women’s magazines was a  article in the Lebanese The Boudoir, which argued for unveiling on grounds of personal health, because the veil impeded breathing.18 Most articles in these magazines made no link whatsoever between veiling and political rights; however, the discussion of women’s choice in veiling in itself became a challenge to paternal authority. While women’s magazines tended to discuss veiling as a matter of personal choice, the male press tended to cast it as an issue to be decided by society as a whole. Most newspapers opposed unveiling through much of the decade.19 For example, al-Muqtabas, published in Damascus by the prominent Salafi intellectual, Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali, ran a series on the topic in . Reasons given in favor of the veil were that it was required by Islam, that it was the sign of Muslim women’s religious modesty, and that unveiling would lead to the loss of all time-honored custom. The paper opined that Syrian women needed more education to bolster their morality before they unveiled.20 Throughout the debate, the various writers assumed that veiling was a matter to be handled by male social engineers, and that women’s unguided and personal decision to unveil would create social and moral chaos. Indeed, in most Muslim homes, men regulated the extent of veiling of women in the family.21 Ambivalence toward the Turkish model, and toward state intervention in general, must be understood in the context of the colonial civic order. Unlike independent Turkey and Egypt (which signed an independence treaty in , although the British retained control of military and foreign affairs), Syria and Lebanon were ruled directly by a foreign, colonial, and Christian power. Mustafa Kemal was able to rally opposition to the religious establishment largely because he was the hero of the Turkish war of independence, which ousted European powers after World War I. Egypt’s nationalist government was unhampered by the mandate charter’s formal protection of autonomous religious legal authority, and the Egyptian women’s movement directly petitioned the state for reforms to personal status law. The power of the religious establishment in Egypt remained strong, however, buttressed by the monarchy.22 It is against this background that Nazira Zayn al-Din’s book was written and received in Syria and Lebanon in . Zayn al-Din faced a dilemma in making her appeal. To whom could she direct it? If Islamic law had deviated

the veil



from Islam’s original principles, would the guardians of that law, the ulama, be likely to change its orientation? And if Islamic law had strayed beyond its proper jurisdiction, who would push it back to its proper boundaries? There was no centralized Islamic authority in Syria and Lebanon, as there was in Egypt’s al-Azhar college. The community of Muslim ulama, as we saw in chapter five, was in  still struggling to adapt to the vacuum left by the Ottomans and was splintered by the rise of the populist movement. Each city and each Muslim sect had its own mufti with no formal hierarchy linking them to a superior authority. The French, however, considered the mufti of Beirut to be supreme in Lebanon, and Shaykh Badr al-Din al-Hasani, the father of the Syrian prime minister, Taj al-Din al-Hasani, to be the leader of Syrian Muslims. Zayn al-Din had little cause to believe this decentralized and fractured community could, or voluntarily would, respond to her appeal. Instead, Zayn al-Din directed her book to the French state as the supreme civil authority. While she had no desire to abolish Islamic law, she made an explicit appeal for the precedence of civil law over religious law in issues of the veil and personal status. She argued that because Qur’anic verses did not clearly require women to cover their faces, and because the spirit of Islam favored freedom over seclusion, Muslim legal experts could claim no jurisdiction in the issue of veiling. She deplored the ulama’s interference on this and other matters not directly addressed in the Qur’an, and called on the state to break up the ulama’s monopoly on personal status law by introducing civil laws that would protect freedoms permitted by Islam. Zayn al-Din did not ignore the fact that the state was colonial and foreign. She anticipated nationalists’ objections by devoting a large segment of her book to justifying French intervention. She framed that intervention in terms of the congruence of Western liberal ideals with Islam’s spirit of freedom, and in the terms of the mandate charter. Having established that veiling was not a religious matter, she argued that state support for unveiling would not violate the charter’s injunction against interference in religious affairs. On the contrary, it was conservative ulama, she argued, who invited illegal French interference in religious affairs by demanding that the state enforce veiling and other un-Islamic inequalities upon Muslim women.23 Furthermore, she argued that veiling and seclusion were inimical to the spirit of the mandate charter, which charged the French with uplifting Syrian and Lebanese society. She compared the “veiled” Muslim world with the “unveiled” world, where reason reigned and where unveiled women were educated and better mothers. As a result of veiling (seclusion), “half of our children die because of mothers’ ignorance.”24



gender and the legal boundaries

In perhaps her boldest move, Zayn al-Din sent ten copies of her book to High Commissioner Henri Ponsot, with an open letter that was reprinted in newspapers. In the letter, she described her book as a sociological study of Islam using the principles of “égalité, liberté, fraternité” to argue for the return of women’s lost rights. She addressed Ponsot thus: Permit me, Excellence, to give you a copy of my book for your high appreciation, because no one would be more qualified than the Honorable Representative of France, Mother of all civilization, of liberty and all light, to extend his strong hand to save the weakened Muslim woman and lift her from the dark abyss of slavery where she was arbitrarily plunged, contrary to the Book of God.25 Zayn al-Din was calling Ponsot to the true ideals of the French Revolution, just as pamphlets in the Syrian Revolt had done. In the remainder of her letter, Zayn al-Din summarized her book’s implications for the state’s social and political policy: that men and women should mix socially because it would foster moral progress; that both sexes should be educated together and at the same level; that Islam calls for democratic government, meaning that both men and women should participate in it and vote; that, in the same democratic spirit, male and female Muslims must be free to study the Qur’an themselves, and not be bound by the interpretations of an official and oppressive class of conservative ulama; and that the Qur’an recommends clothing that is most appropriate for the well-being of all Muslims, regardless of whether it is worn also by non-Muslims, and that Western clothing, including preference of the hat to the fez and unveiling to veiling, has proven most appropriate. Zayn al-Din thus astutely described the existing, paternalistic civic order that assured religious patriarchs power and consigned women to subaltern status. Ponsot, if he ever read the letter, likely recognized the attack on one of France’s principal pillars of rule. The only response Zayn al-Din received was a brief note from a functionary of the High Commission, assuring her that Ponsot regarded her book with great interest.26 But in contrast to policy in their North African colonies, the French in Syria and Lebanon would never make public criticisms of the veil, much less promulgate laws against it. Response was much less lukewarm among sections of the Syrian and Lebanese public. The book inspired a debate that raged for at least two years after its publication. Some reviewers compared her to other revolutionaries, like Mustafa Kemal and the Egyptian Qassim Amin, whose  book The

the veil



Liberation of Woman had made a stir in the Arab world. A review in a Lebanese women’s magazine proclaimed: This woman, Nazira Zayn al-Din, smashed with her gentle fingertips these remaining bonds [on women’s freedom], and from the hills of Lebanon called the Islamic world to social renewal, and her call echoed on the banks of the Barada and the Nile and the Tigris-Euphrates.”27 Support was also offered initially by prominent Muslims like Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali, who was said to order  copies of the book for the Arab Academy in Damascus, which he headed and which published a favorable review in its journal. Likewise, Muhammad Jamil Bayhum, the well-known Lebanese advocate of women’s rights and husband of Nazik ‘Abid, also welcomed the book.28 The official magazine of the Egyptian women’s movement hailed the book as an inspiration to action. Within a year, Zayn al-Din’s book, or at least parts of it, was translated into several languages.29 However, hostile reviews soon overwhelmed initial praise. Interestingly, while one might expect opponents to have dismissed the book as merely a reflection of heterodox, liberal views about women belonging to Zayn al-Din’s own Druze sect, this was not the case. The book was written and received as a criticism of mainstream Sunni Islam. Zayn al-Din’s violation of the codes of paternalism drew bitter invective. Most outrageous, it appears, was her hubris in presuming that a young woman might speak publicly on matters of religious law, and worse, dare to criticize the work of prominent scholars. Even those who supported the book’s premise doubted that a young woman could have such extensive knowledge of scripture and legal interpretation.30 A teacher in Hama proclaimed on the front cover of his book-length response that Zayn al-Din’s book was full of scholarly errors, and written with evil intent to “seduce the sons of Muslims and pave the way for their departure from religion.”31 The mufti of Beirut published a statement on the veil, in oblique but clear reaction to her book, which began: “The issue of the veil is a religious one and the established ulama are the ones authorized to judge this important issue.” He scolded Muslims for deciding the issue themselves, or asking counsel from people not formally trained as ulama. He then proceeded to condemn unveiling: “The call to lift the veil is a call to wickedness” and is a “bad innovation” made by “modern women who smash the pillars of chastity and honor.” Furthermore, the veil “conserves the lineage and makes men’s hearts secure concerning the mother of his children.” 32 In condemning Zayn

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gender and the legal boundaries

al-Din’s scholarly effort, the mufti reaffirmed paternalism both in the family and in religious authority. Zayn al-Din’s most vigorous opponent was Shaykh Mustafa Ghalayini, a professor at the Islamic College of Beirut who would be elected the first president of the Muslim Council later in . Ghalayini was a dangerous foe, in that he had studied with Salafi scholars before World War I and had supported moderate women’s reform, especially the need for their education. He was, however, a controversial figure. Younger members of the Muslim Council would oppose his nomination as Beirut qadi (head judge in Islamic courts) in  because they thought he was a fanatic.33 Zayn al-Din sent Ghalayini a copy of her book, presumably because of his earlier sympathy for women’s education. She may not have appreciated the drastic changes in the thinking of Islamic reformers since the war based increasingly on a reified and essentialist conception of difference between Eastern (Islamic) and Western civilization. Within months Ghalayini published his own book in response, collecting speeches he had made at mosques in the interim. It was a visceral attack. Ghalayini lambasted Zayn al-Din for presuming that she was more intelligent than the “old ulama” against whom she argued. He tore apart her argument, claiming that her Salafi-inspired efforts to reinterpret scripture were simply errors. In a curious twist to his argument, however, Ghalayini acknowledged that the book displayed an impressive breadth of knowledge. This he ascribed to Zayn al-Din’s father, the judge, whom he assumed had helped her write it. But then Ghalayini contradicted himself again. In fact, he said, there were so many mistakes that Zayn al-Din (that is, her father) could not have written the book, after all. He accused Zayn al-Din of treason, of being the dupe of a foreign conspiracy by a secret committee of missionaries and Orientalists who wrote the book to make Muslims doubt their religion, their history, and “their social and national life.” In his view, Zayn al-Din’s revival of the tumult caused by Qassim Amin’s book  years before was simply a plot by missionaries to cause disorder (fitna) in the Muslim world, and so destroy Islam (Qassim Amin had faced similar accusations).34 To save the religion, Ghalayini urged women to obey the dictates of official Islam, and to restrict their lives to their homes and families. Zayn al-Din called foul play. In  she published a second book with commentary on responses to her first: I know, Shaykh Ghalayini, that stirring up feelings against a book by a young woman like me is easy for someone like you, because I don’t have the opportunity to stand on the pulpit [minbar] that you stand on, or

the veil



to speak to the audiences you do, in order to exalt the truths I have offered and to condemn the lies given in response. A noble man doesn’t use a weapon that another does not have at hand.35 Precisely because of the norms of veiling and seclusion that Zayn al-Din criticized, women were discouraged from attending mosques or speaking in public to men. Through the medium of print, however, Zayn al-Din maintained that she had written her book by herself. In an interview in the women’s magazine Minirva, she displayed an ease and depth of thought concerning the book’s argument that suggests she had at least a major role in writing it. She bemoaned the fact that women could not meet religious scholars on an equal footing in legal matters: “Some who hold to the veil took advantage of their religious standing in the public mind and met in mosques, and in every meeting claimed that Nazira wants to destroy the pillars of religion.” And she regretted that by addressing Islamic law, she had fallen into the trap she had hoped women could avoid: “Why don’t men pay attention to these laws of equality . . . [instead of] limiting their concern to the issues of [women’s inequality in] testimony and inheritance? Isn’t that proof of their prejudice toward women, as in their command to veil?”36 Zayn al-Din’s attempt to work from within the tradition of Islamic law, in order to argue for its limits, boomeranged. Scholars like Ghalayini easily dismissed the book’s broader social and political argument by focusing upon narrow legal debates about whether or not Islamic scripture enjoined the veil. In effect, by constructing the veil issue as a legal one, Zayn al-Din had played right into the hands of conservative Muslim scholars, and put herself—and all women—at a disastrous disadvantage. The issue of veiling had bounced back into the court of religious patriarchs more definitively than ever. After , it would be more difficult for lay Muslims, male or female, to write with authority on the issue. Learned ulama had vehemently reclaimed veiling as a matter of religious law, not of personal choice or civil law. The impact of Zayn al-Din’s book was amplified by the nature of the civic order, which was riven not only by anti-colonialism, but also by the dual legal system. Under such circumstances, her appeal to the French mandatory state easily invited charges of treason. The colonial state was simply taboo, off-limits, not a viable instrument of public policy. This produced two variant responses. Ghalayini represented the anti-statism of religious patriarchs who relished their enhanced post-Ottoman autonomy. Ignoring Zayn al-Din’s own injunction against French interference in religious affairs, he condemned her letter to the high commissioner as inviting just such intervention and as a violation of the

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gender and the legal boundaries

mandate charter: “Do Muslim women want their veils removed by the force of sword and gun?”37 Islamic populists’ responses, on the other hand, were statist in spirit. A hostile review of Zayn al-Din’s book in the Damascene newspaper al-Istiqlal, for example, preached the need to reclaim the state from foreign control in order to use it to enforce Islamic tradition against secularist reformers: “What will things come to when Islam ceases to be the official religion of the Syrian state? Indeed, a group of extremists make claims to its powers. They are present before us among students of the republic in Syria, who advocate lifting the veil from the faces of Muslim women, and allowing them to dance in gatherings with men.”38 While some members of the secularist nationalist elite continued to support Zayn al-Din and unveiling, a class divide yawned as popular classes were rallied to the opposition. Islamic populists seized the opportunity in Damascus, after the conservative Shaykh Taj was appointed prime minister in early , to mount violent attacks upon unveiled women. During that spring’s election campaign for Syria’s constituent assembly, which coincided with the publication of Zayn al-Din’s book, candidates wooed the populists and exploited popular piety for votes. Damascene mosque preachers launched so strong and so popular a campaign against unveiling that newspapers feared to criticize them. And in repeated incidents, men threw acid upon elite women who were deemed insufficiently covered or who wore European-style clothing.39 A group of elite women apparently organized in revenge, to spray acid on men wearing Western suits.40 But when several women mounted an anti-veil protest in Damascus’s main Hamidiya market, they met an angry mob.41 In Lebanon, ‘Anbara Salam, the women’s activist, recalled that after Zayn al-Din’s book appeared conservatives campaigned for a return to thicker face veils. As in Damascus, class politics appear to have been at play. In , Salam had made a dramatic statement by giving a lecture, unveiled, to an elite male audience, in an event sponsored by Education Minister Bishara al-Khuri (the future first president of independent Lebanon) to honor a famed Arabic teacher. She had begun the lecture wearing a face veil, but the audience could not hear her voice and asked her to remove it. It was the first public lecture by an unveiled woman before men in either Syria or Lebanon. However, afterward Salam met repeated moral condemnations from conservatives unconnected with the elite Arab nationalist milieu. Town criers bemoaned the destruction of morals in the streets of Beirut and, as in Damascus, men attacked women with acid, razor blades, and iron prongs for not veiling sufficiently.42

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The gravest consequence for the women’s movement, given the fates of Salam and Zayn al-Din, was ascendancy of opinion that women’s voices should not be heard in public. Women had in the s staged a virtual unveiling by making their voices heard through their magazines and conferences.43 While the male press continued to suppress their names, out of supposed deference, and fretted about publishing their photos, women’s magazines since the mids routinely published photographs of female doctors, scientists, writers, philanthropists, teachers, students. This unveiling had been accomplished before  without recourse to justification in Islamic law. Now the law was being used to silence them. As in contemporary France, many men appear to have viewed women’s changing dress and behavior, particularly their increased public presence, as an omen of the revolution that the  suffrage debaters feared and as a threat to civilization itself. As the writers in al-Muqtabas argued, unveiling would unloose female sexuality, and so create social chaos. These views were embedded in Islamic legal scholarship dating from the medieval era,44 and easily deployed by men who sought desperately to maintain their privileged place in the civic order. The  controversy shook the women’s movement’s confidence, even as it sought to regroup after failing to attain suffrage. The magazine Woman (al-Mar’a), in its  inaugural issue, despaired of the chaos women faced in making choices about their lives: Some scholars believe woman’s duty is to keep her instinctive nature, extolling her lack of education as good. . . . others believe women should be equal to men in all aspects of social, political and civic life. . . . The Muslim woman stands before these debates baffled and confused, not knowing which path to take.45 The magazine tried to ease women’s dilemma by offering open debate, publishing articles variously pleading for gradual unveiling, supporting the veil, and rejecting it absolutely as the totem of Arabs’ backwardness in contrast to Turks. Some women in other magazines continued to praise Zayn al-Din for her courage against “reactionaries.”46 Others became defensive about seeking any change in Islamic law. A delegate to a  women’s conference in Beirut defended the exclusion of the veil from its agenda: “Why should we unveil? What benefit is unveiling to society?. . . . I believe Islamic law grants woman all the rights she needs.”47 The politics of the veil continued long after Zayn al-Din’s brief prominence, and became embroiled in the rising nationalist fervor and class tension

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of the early s. Opinions polarized between secular nationalists and religious populists, between those who saw the veil as the cause of backwardness and those who saw it as a bulwark of Islamic culture.48 As street attacks on women continued, elites’ newspapers gradually changed their views to favor unveiling.49 When the Syrian parliament opened in , elite nationalists even invited a contingent of unveiled women to view the proceedings from the gallery.50 In this polarization, class politics merged with a new politics pitting East against West. This was evidenced in fierce debates about men’s headwear that now coincided with those about women’s veils. Younger men rejected the fezzes of their fathers, in favor of “national” headgear such as military berets and kuffiyas. It was also evidenced in the press’s mockery of women who adopted short sleeves and short hair fashionable in Europe.51 In a new twist, a women’s group called the League of Modesty emerged in , in apparent alliance with Islamic populists. Dressed in white shrouds, members policed the streets with scissors and a flask of acid, attacking elite women who wore European fashions.52 The politics of dress thus came to be manipulated in class rivalries. Islamic populists and their following viewed themselves as subalterns in a civic order that privileged a francophile, Westernized elite. There is no little irony that the elitist French collaborator, Shaykh Taj, exploited those subaltern sentiments by courting pro-veiling supporters in the  elections. The women’s movement was caught in this emergent web of class-based, ideological conflict between “East” and “West.” In the early s it had been possible to be both a nationalist and a progressivist who admired European ways and European feminists. After the Nazira Zayn al-Din scandal, it was no longer so. Zayn al-Din’s most vocal critic, Ghalayini, had implied in not so subtle terms that all women’s efforts at liberation were inspired by Western and Christian conspiracy. Bourgeois leaders of the women’s movement fretted over their taste for European fashions, calling on women to wear clothing made only from “national” textiles. Their effort to extricate themselves from the paralyzingly divergent sartorial symbolics of progress, nationalism, and Islamic morality was evident in a resolution drafted by a Lebanese delegate to the  Tehran Eastern Women’s Conference: “Women of the Orient must choose among the mores and customs of the West those which are good and commendable, leaving aside all which is founded on passions.”53 Adopted unanimously to sustained applause, the article was clearly a comfort to women whose lifestyles depended on Western imports. These tensions exploded in public in  Syria. At a February conference in Damascus honoring visiting European feminists, Mary ‘Ajamy declared in

the veil

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her speech that, “The East is not stagnant, as you can easily observe. . . . It had faith in Western culture, but it found that this same culture often provoked a disintegration of faith and morals.” ‘Ajamy, herself a Christian, asserted a specifically Eastern basis for feminism within Islam: “Muhammad granted woman the free disposition of her property, whether she was married or not, and he asked the counsel of his most devoted, intelligent, and daring wives.”54 In a similar spirit, Hayat al-Mu‘ayyad al-Barazi, a Muslim leader of several women’s groups, echoed Zayn al-Din in declaring that the Prophet never imposed the veil on women other than his wives. But when the Dutch visitor called on Eastern women to reject the veil as a symbol of servitude to men, the  unveiled women in the room froze. The atmosphere grew so hostile that the interpreter had to ask her to revise her comment.55 Following the conference, the Islamic populist group al-Gharra issued a statement prescribing head-to-toe coverage for all women, and a leading Damascene newspaper, Alif-Ba’, agreed. The French newspaper in town criticized Alif Ba’s view, and condemned the fact that Damascene women feared violent reprisals if they dropped their veils.56 When Syrian women planned an April trip to an international women’s conference in Istanbul, they faced a peculiar dilemma. While the veil had been constructed in Syria as a symbol of the East, most “Eastern” women who would attend the conference, including Egyptians and Turks, had unveiled since the s. Many Syrian women’s leaders, including ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri, still wore the veil. The exception was Hayat al-Barazi, who admitted to a reporter that social pressure was so intense she would never have unveiled without the support of her father and husband (the current education minister).57 Turkey, on the other hand, vaunted itself as a European country, and had recently awarded women the right to vote. This tension translated into a financial dilemma: Shaykh Taj refused to sponsor the Syrian delegation as official representatives of the state, under the pretext that Arabic was banned at the conference (it was not). In the end, the women decided that those with the financial means would attend the conference on a personal basis. 58 Upon their return in late April, nationalist university students opposed to Shaykh Taj organized a reception.59 Women were still caught between conflicting male demands, leaving little room for them to make the veiling issue their own. The trauma of the veil was felt far more deeply in Syria and Lebanon than in Turkey or Egypt, in part because foreign rule raised the stakes of debate to an all-out confrontation between East and West. Colonial rule not only polarized politics, but also weakened the state, and civil law, as an instrument of reform. In Turkey, as we have seen, the independent state also advocated a

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strict divide between East and West, but promoted the “new woman,” unveiled, as a symbol of the country’s break with its Ottoman past.60 In Egypt, Sha‘rawi’s  unveiling had not started a new controversy, but rather marked the end of a long and gradual process.61 Nationalist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul himself endorsed unveiling, and there was only one demonstration against the veil, in , to protest its lingering requirement at the king’s court. In , the ulama of al-Azhar issued an edict (fatwa) in support of unveiling and by  veils virtually disappeared in urban Egypt.62 The Zayn al-Din controversy reinforced the dual subalterity of Syrian and Lebanese women, wherein the dual legal system buttressed gendered and mediated barriers to their participation in the civic order. The controversy compounded the crisis felt in the women’s movement after the defeat of women’s suffrage, and forced a fundamental change in the movement’s orientation: It would have to define goals that appeared homegrown, not inspired by Western models.

chapter 8


Civil Rights: Patriotic Motherhood and Religious Law Reform

In April , shortly after Nazira Zayn al-Din published her book Unveiling and Veiling, the Syrian and Lebanese women’s union convened its first major conference.1 Held in Beirut, the conference brought together  women’s groups from Syria and Lebanon. The agenda aimed to place women squarely in the center of national cultural life, featuring trips to the national library and national museum and a session honoring the female Lebanese poet Warda Yaziji (–). In that nationalist spirit, the conference passed resolutions demanding use of the Arabic language and teaching of Arab history in schools. Speakers also made reports on running an efficient household, children’s education, and women’s groups’ aid to the sick, elderly, and imprisoned. They called for more girls’ schools and cleaner bakeries. Nur Hamada, founder of the Women’s Arabic and Cultural Assembly, gave a speech calling for a minimum marriage age of , equal inheritance, repression of polygamy, and greater power for women to initiate divorce. At its closing banquet, hosted by Nazik ‘Abid and Muhammad Jamil Bayhum, members discussed means of expanding the women’s movement. ‘Anbara Salam declared that “neither Syrian nor Lebanese women make impossible demands.”2 The list of possible demands was notable for both its inclusions and omissions. The conference capped a decade of mobilization and represented the heart of the women’s movement, celebrating members’ charitable efforts in education and health. Hamada’s speech voiced concerns dear to the readers of women’s magazines, who saw inequalities in marriage and divorce law as the greatest impediments to stable family life and to their ability to perform social service outside the home. Neglected in the three days of discussion, however, was the issue that topped women’s agenda in the early s: There was no call for women’s right to vote, even though the electoral campaign for Syria’s constituent assembly was being waged at the time. Also omitted from the roster of speakers was Nazira Zayn al-Din, whose book was about to go into its second

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printing. Perhaps she was too new a personality. Or perhaps her message was already seen to be too bold, too closely aligned to the old agenda for political rights. The conference was, in fact, no mere culmination of women’s activism since the war; it was a new departure, setting the stage for a shift in the women’s movement’s direction and tactics. We sorrowfully lack documentation that would fully reveal women’s leaders motives. They did not likely foresee, in , the precise trajectory of s politics. However, in hindsight it is possible to see how they adapted to a civic order transformed by the passage of constitutions, where local state governments with parliaments took on a greater role in politics. As politics centered around the two national capitals, the joint women’s union fostered national subunions, based in Beirut and Damascus. The movement would also have to situate itself anew in relationship to the emergence of nationalist political parties, the Constitutional Bloc led by Bishara al-Khuri and the National Bloc in Syria. A new kind of politics would emerge by the mid-s, as these parties vied with the French and their collaborators for the support of the urban masses in staging demonstrations and in electoral contests. Subaltern groups, especially the labor unions and emergent Islamic organizations, were key constituencies that each side wooed. Where would the women’s movement fit among these political players? Women’s leaders appear to have adapted to s by embracing a new ideology. While the two unions remained decentralized federations, a new ethos emerged at the top, which may be termed patriotic motherhood. Patriotic motherhood exalted women’s domestic duties and charity work as national service and advanced demands for women’s civil and social rights in order to accomplish that service. The turn to patriotic motherhood no doubt reflected external ideological influences as well as domestic political calculation. On the one hand, women’s leaders likely heard about movements in India, Egypt, and Europe that embraced maternalist politics in this period.3 On the other hand, patriotic motherhood was also an ideology suited to the movement’s immediate political needs. The twin goals of the new strategy appear to have been: first, to broaden the movement’s appeal and raise recruitment; and second, to help install the nationalist parties in government so that they might use state powers to redraw the gendered legal boundaries of the civic order. Women appear to have believed that their nationalist allies would be able to cut through the dilemmas of the dual legal system that had stymied reform in the s. They did not anticipate, however, that nationalists would betray women’s goals to forge a separate alliance with the very religious interests opposed to women’s inclusion in the civic order.

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The Politics of Patriotic Motherhood, 1928–1936 Social motherhood had been the ideological underpinning of women’s activities since the war. In the early s, the front page of Julia Dimashqiya’s magazine The New Woman had combined its salutation to “daughters of my country” with a Madonna-like picture of a woman holding a baby (fig. ). The magazine regularly printed monthly household budget schedules, recipes for toothpaste, and advice on childhood illness and pedagogy. Mary ‘Ajamy’s journal The Bride, whose name epitomized the view of the family as the core of women’s identity, also featured a regular column on motherhood. These and other women’s magazines stressed that a woman’s motherly duties were essential to the well-being and progress of society. What was new in  was the women’s union’s aim to unify the efforts of socially minded mothers and to situate them in the broader nationalist struggle. There had been tumultuous conflict over the ideological stance of the union when it convened in . Members debated whether the union of Syrian and Lebanese women was intended to promote political unification of the two countries. The French, who licensed all associations, appear to have been concerned that the women’s union was a stalking horse for nationalists. The issue was settled and the union was officially registered after members agreed to shun politics and emphasize the social and cultural aspects of women’s mission.4 Hence, the  conference delegates visited the national library and museum, but not the parliament. We might also understand the new the turn away from politics as a reaction to the failures to achieve suffrage in  and . If men insisted on their role as paternal representatives of the family in politics, then female citizens might seek inclusion in the civic order by becoming patriotic mothers within a separate arena of social affairs. “Motherhood is my profession,” declared Rose Shahfa, a Lebanese women’s union leader, to a group of women college students. “In motherhood a woman has the power to inspire the manliness and strength in her sons to build a new nation.”5 The women’s movement would mount a half-dozen more high-profile conferences between  and , each one elaborating upon the agenda set forth in . The  women’s union conference in Beirut again highlighted family values, adopting resolutions for happiness in marriage and the family and for compulsory primary education, and against ostentatious consumerism, drugs, alcohol, and public prostitution. Eastern Women’s conferences held in Damascus and Tehran in  and  followed similar agendas (fig. ). While neither conference demanded women’s political rights, the  one did demand civil

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and social rights, in the form of greater equality of men and women in marriage, education, work and salaries.6 In a sense, patriotic motherhood was an inversion of the old agenda. Whereas in the early s women sought the vote in order to effect improvements in their lives, they now sought the social reforms as a prerequisite to political rights. Nur Hamada made the new agenda clear, in explaining the resolutions taken at the first Eastern Women’s Conference in Damascus in . Calls for marriage reform, women’s education, and protection of women’s home industries, Hamada said, were intended to help women be better mothers for their country’s benefit, and to advance their ultimate claim to citizenship: What is required for women to progress is that they become perfectly educated; this education is necessary for women as much as for children . . . . Nothing more than ignorance blocks progress and the happiness of men and women. When women know how to raise children, they can demand from men their rights and take them in hand.7 Patriotic mothers, in other words, would earn the right to vote because they would produce patriotic children and contribute to social progress. The rejection of an agenda that had prioritized political rights was explicit. At the February  conference welcoming European feminists, both Mary ‘Ajamy and Hayat al-Barazi offered revisionist histories of the Syrian women’s movement in their speeches, claiming women had not really wanted the vote, and that its discussion in  had been premature. This view, reflecting that of male opponents to suffrage, was a far cry from ‘Ajamy’s earlier claims that women had natural rights equal to those of men, which had been lost through centuries of social decadence. ‘Ajamy now constructed women, not society as a whole, as fundamentally deficient. The women’s revival (nahda) had been an illusion, she concluded. Women’s groups did not really seek true reform, but seemed satisfied with their social events and charities. Her prescription, befitting her profession as a schoolteacher, was more education. Women would be worthy of citizenship only if they improved themselves.8 Given the crisis the women’s movement faced by , the new agenda appeared realistic. First, while individuals like ‘Abid, ‘Ajamy, and Dimashqiya had promoted women’s suffrage, they had attracted no mass following. There had been no sustained campaign by Syrian and Lebanese suffragettes in the s, only a few isolated demonstrations. Most active women remained preoccupied with their educational and charity endeavors. Most other women whom

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the movement sought to recruit were busy mothers in an age of high fertility and large families. The fact that the  and  conferences highlighted motherhood suggests that they were, in part, an effort to unite women around issues that concerned them most. Patriotic motherhood may therefore be seen as an effort to give the women’s movement’s clout, just as the nationalist, labor, and Islamic populist movements were organizing mass bases. Said one delegate to the  Beirut conference: “We know that individual efforts don’t achieve anything in this age, an age of associations.”9 Likewise, women’s leaders may have seen social and civil rights as more attainable, or as ‘Anbara Salam put it, not impossible. It is no doubt due in part to the women’s movement’s advocacy, for example, that the  Syrian constitution made primary education compulsory for both boys and girls. Women’s condemnation of drugs and prostitution coincided with that of religious leaders, particularly the Maronite patriarch, who in the mid-s issued demands that the French suppress them. The social agenda was in effect a move to the political center, away from issues like the veil and the vote that marginalized women and alienated religious leaders from their cause. Women’s leaders were no doubt aware that many women’s charities were supported by religious endowments. Strengthening the support of religious patriarchs, rather than undermining it, might better serve women’s cause. The new agenda also seemed to fit a time of diminished expectations. A Mlle R.P. wrote to the Damascus paper Les Echos in  that times were too uncertain, and that feminism would only rock an already unstable boat. Family life would suffer, said the writer, if women tried to play the double role of professional and housewife.10 A delegate to the  conference in Beirut alluded to intimidation, remarking that there were rumors everywhere that the goals of it [the conference] were a revolt against the veil, demands for rights, and a call for war against men. The conference, I assure you, did not seek anything of the sort. Our conference was ‘social’ more than ‘feminist.’ We limited our discussions to the condition of society and the family only.11 In a similar vein, a nationalist author of the Syrian constitution and supporter of the women’s movement, Fa’iz al-Khuri, wrote in the magazine Woman that fathers’ and husbands’ control over women made it difficult for them to seek political rights: “Equality of women with men in this era and this country is impossible. . . . Women must now direct themselves to improving their household affairs and managing their housework, think of

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nothing but educating their sons and daughters, and wait for equality in the next generation.”12 Not all women’s leaders shared Khuri’s pessimism. They saw no need to wait for equality until their children matured, but only until nationalist governments were established. This was the second component of their ideology of patriotic motherhood: active support of the nationalist opposition. They apparently believed that the support of a vital and unified women’s movement could help nationalists win their struggle against the French, much as women had done in Egypt’s  revolution. Once nationalists controlled the state, they would be able to fulfill women’s demands for rights. Women’s leaders expected that an independent nationalist state would be secular and reform-minded, and would wield greater power over religious law than the French mandatory regime could. Nationalist newspapers like al-Sha‘b in Damascus reinforced this expectation, with numerous articles supporting women’s conferences and rights.13 Particularly in Syria, it appears that leaders of the women’s movement made an implicit deal with nationalists in the early s, in which they promised to postpone their demands until nationalist aims had been won. ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri, leader of the Syrian women’s union, was an exponent of this strategy. According to her daughter, Jaza’iri explicitly adopted a philosophy of independence first, women’s rights next. She believed that pursuit of women’s rights would only divide women from men, and so betray the cause of nationalism. She also believed that nationalists were the only political force strong enough to advance women’s agenda.14 Syrian women activists commonly believed that Zayn al-Din was a traitor for asking the French state for support against religious conservatives.15 That patriotic motherhood was a dramatic shift in policy is further suggested by the stiff criticism it engendered. Stalwarts of the s distrusted the inverted agenda, suspecting that the emphasis on social work and nationalism forsook, rather than nurtured, future political and civil rights for women. In , Georges Phares, editor of Les Echos, compared the Syrian women’s movement unfavorably to European feminism, chastising Syrian women for giving up their pursuit of civil rights and the vote, and for merely collaborating with men in the family and in the interest of national politics.16 Nazik ‘Abid, who had presided over the  conference, renounced the new agenda the following year, urging women to focus on attaining political rights.17 ‘Abid’s husband Muhammad Jamil Bayhum virtually begged women in a  speech at the American University of Beirut to leave off their charity work and literary events to mount a campaign for political rights.18

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The efficacy of patriotic motherhood as a strategy to mobilize women and achieve reforms was called into question even as nationalist agitation crested in the mid-s. On the one hand, the alliance with nationalist elites in both countries appeared to pay off in rallying women to the movement. Hundreds of women, particularly the new generation of female students, joined nationalist demonstrations. During the elections for the Syrian constituent assembly in  for example, Thuraya al-Hafiz, leader of the Women’s Normal School Alumnae association, led a women’s demonstration in conjunction with one organized by the National Bloc in Marja Square.19 On the other hand, when women rushed to claim the political rights that they had deferred, they found that the nationalists and state governments were in no hurry to advance women’s causes; indeed, they even found themselves mocked for proposing reform. In February , a new group named the Women’s Committee for the Defense of Lebanese Women’s Rights petitioned the government to allow women to work as city mayors and judges. The petition reasoned that such experience would prepare women for fuller roles as citizens, both as voters and parliamentary deputies. The Lebanese government, controlled by French collaborators, rejected the appeal. To add insult to injury, the newspaper Les Echos quipped: “One would be curious to know how veiled women might sit as judges, with a veil over their faces.”20 The year  raised women’s hopes, as nationalists finally convinced the French to negotiate independence treaties. The treaties promised just the sort of national governments that women expected would be able to assert civil limits on religious authority. However, in Lebanon, the first elections in years had installed a new government in January under the francophile Emile Eddé. Eddé, who had brushed aside discussion of women’s rights in the Council debates of , was as cool toward the women’s movement as Syria’s leader Shaykh Taj, who had offered only begrudging support for the women’s conferences held in Damascus, and refused to support the women’s delegation to Istanbul in . Nonetheless, the Lebanese women’s union seized the moment when a draft treaty was produced. On the basis of article six, which guaranteed citizens’ political and civil rights without discrimination, Ibtihaj Qaddura, union president, personally submitted a petition to Eddé demanding equal rights with men. Eddé assured Qaddura of his concern for women’s future, but simply pointed out that the constitution limited suffrage to men only. Undaunted, Qaddura approached parliament in early  with another petition arguing that since Lebanese women were citizens, and were half of the national community, they deserved their full rights as citizens. Again, no response.21 In the years remaining before World War II, the Lebanese government, even after the nationalist

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Constitutional Bloc gained a parliamentary majority in , would do nothing to enhance women’s political or civil rights. Nor would the National Bloc government in Syria, elected to power in . By , even ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri had become disillusioned. That year, women had staged nationalist demonstrations of their own against the cession of Alexandretta to Turkey (fig. ). Jaza’iri and  other women from Syria and Lebanon also attended the Eastern Women’s Conference for the Defense of Palestine in Cairo, devoted to support for the ongoing revolt against the neighboring British mandate. Jaza’iri and Eveline Bustros of Lebanon were even elected a vice-presidents of the conference.22 But during her stay in Cairo, while talking with women from other countries, Jaza’iri experienced a change of heart. Until then, she had been committed to the nationalist struggle first, postponing women’s rights to a second, later stage. But she had grown impatient with the National Bloc’s stonewalling on women’s reforms, and now vowed to pursue them simultaneously.23 Indeed, Jaza’iri’s worst fears would be realized early in , when the National Bloc forged an open alliance with religious conservatives against reform of personal status law. The root cause of the nationalists’ betrayal lay in the structure of the civic order, and in the whims of politics that would undermine the independence treaties.

Nationalists’ Betrayal: The Politics of the Dual Legal System While patriotic motherhood was conceived as an adaptation to a paternalistic civic order, it did not account for the particular attributes of that order. It especially did not foresee the political implications of the dual legal system. These factors would not only drive the nationalists into the arms of religious patriarchs, but also make personal status reform all but impossible for the most well-meaning nationalist government. The structure of the civic order predisposed political rivals to play out their conflicts on the field of gender, ensuring that subaltern women would become not just pawns, but sacrificial lambs in political deals. In hindsight, what is most puzzling about the women’s movement’s shift to an ideology of patriotic motherhood was its timing. The agendas of the women’s conferences targeted personal status law just as it was becoming clear how difficult it would be to accomplish such reform. The confidence voiced by Nur Hamada and ‘Anbara Salam at the  conference would be

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shaken within a few months, as protests against Zayn al-Din’s book flared. In , women got a further taste of things to come when a new group of directors of Islamic schools in Damascus, named the Committee for Indigenous Schools, organized Friday meetings to protest the resolutions of the  Tehran conference.24 Despite evidence of mounting resistance, women’s conferences continued to issue calls for reform in laws on marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody. The resolutions calling for personal status reform present a second puzzle. To whom were they addressed? While Lebanese women did petition their government for the right to vote and hold office, there is no indication in available records that the women’s unions ever submitted formal petitions to any governmental authority on personal status reform. Neither is there any record of women’s public demonstrations on behalf of the reforms. Perhaps the resolutions were intended vaguely to influence public opinion through their publication in the press.25 Or it may be that women pursued their agenda informally, through private and personal contacts with politicians, to whom many women’s leaders were related. In either case, the resolutions played directly and disastrously into the hands of conservative elites. The power of established religious interests, not just Islamic populists, grew in the decade after the  conference that articulated patriotic motherhood. By the late s, Muslims were rebuilding power structures dismantled after the Ottoman withdrawal. Official ulama and reform-minded Muslims began to create their own millet-type structures, like the Muslim Council in Lebanon. The Council’s leader, the Beirut mufti, increasingly claimed to represent all of Lebanon’s Muslims. However his claim was challenged when, in the s, Shi‘i Muslims of south Lebanon organized their own millet and separate courts, with French approval.26 In Syria, Islamic populists also began to make claims to authority over public morality that went well beyond the Muslim community, seeking a return to a past era when Islamic law was the virtual common law for the entire community.27 Catholic leaders in Lebanon also began to make claims to universal moral authority that superseded the balkanized sectarian system. The Pope’s decrees against women’s work outside the home and their presence in cafes, immoral movies, gambling, and other issues were routinely printed in newspapers as authoritative statements on social morality. The French believed that Rome was attempting to position itself as the supreme Catholic authority in Lebanon.28 On the other hand, the new Maronite patriarch, Antoine ‘Arida, sought to distance himself from Rome and French Jesuits by routinely asserting himself as the spiritual representative of the whole country. In the mid-



gender and the legal boundaries

s, he waged a campaign against prostitution and juvenile delinquency not just among Catholics, but in the whole population.29 The French both feared and encouraged the organization of religious affairs autonomously from the state. They interpreted the mandate charter’s clause prohibiting religious discrimination as a call for equality among all sects, which they believed should be achieved through the disestablishment of Islam.30 They particularly welcomed the disaggregation of the Muslim community into separate ones for Sunnis, Shi‘is, Druze, and ‘Alawis, because it “weakens the Sunni Muslim bloc.”31 For similar reasons, the French were alarmed in the mid-s by rumors that Greek Orthodox Lebanese were seeking a political alliance with Lebanese Sunnis in favor of union with Syria, and by the cooperation between ‘Arida and the Syrian National Bloc in leading landowners’ protests against the state tobacco monopoly.32 The s were thus a decade of heightened battle between the state and religious leaders for authority. Given the growing rift between the French and religious patriarchs, nationalists saw the opportunity to recruit the latter to their own struggle for independence. As Philip Khoury put it: “Syrian nationalist leaders almost always sided with the religious establishment and the Muslim majority on critical religious issues, many of which became important symbols of opposition to French rule. To have done otherwise would have undercut the support system on which their power base rested.”33 The same might be said for Lebanese politicians, who could not afford to alienate religious sentiments. The francophile Emile Eddé competed with the nationalist Bishara al-Khuri for support from the Maronite Church, which wielded great influence over its flock. Meanwhile, the Sunni Lebanese opposition committed to union with Syria worked to smooth differences between its secular members in Beirut and sectarian Muslim leaders from Tripoli.34 To foster an alliance with religious elites, nationalists would abet patriarchs’ efforts to increase the scope of their religious authority. And because personal status laws were precisely the power base from which religious patriarchs sought to extend their power, the contest would necessarily be played out on legal issues of central concern to the women’s movement. Women’s personal status would be sacrificed to the politics of cooperation between Lebanese and Syrian politicians and religious patriarchs. Such sacrifice had ample precedent, as in the way governments had appeased opponents of the  Ottoman Family Law. An attempt to impose the state’s reformist legal agenda, the law codified personal status laws that had once been left to the discretion of the various religious communities. The law also aimed to enhance Muslim women’s rights in marriage, divorce, and

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inheritance.35 Patriarchs of all three religions protested that it illegally undercut their authority. In Syria, Faysal’s regime abrogated the  Family Law outright, under pressure from Muslim conservatives, who gained reaffirmation of the ban by the mandatory state in . In Lebanon, Jews and Christians won immediate exemption from the French, who sought their support at the outset of the mandate. In , Lebanese Sunni Muslims, likely conservative populists, petitioned for a similar exemption. They complained particularly about article , which required state-appointed arbitrators in divorce cases to protect wives from husbands’ abuse: “How can the destiny of two spouses, bound by divine law, be submitted to the fantasy of one or two arbitrators they didn’t choose?” The Lebanese government denied the petition, however, with the consent of the Beirut qadi and mufti.36 Nonetheless, provisions of the law were routinely ignored. Although article four set Muslim women’s minimum marriage age at , Nur Hamada was still demanding its enforcement in . In both Syria and Lebanon, the decisive factor in the fate of the  law was not a concern for women’s rights, but the affirmation of concord between government officials and religious elites. Governments’ indifference to women’s calls for personal status law reform was thus rooted in their greater interest in appeasing religious patriarchs, who were jealous of their legal autonomy as guaranteed by the mandate charter. In April , for example, Emile Eddé proposed to permit Lebanese civil courts to handle marriage and divorce cases. It was immediately opposed by Christian patriarchs. Two years later, Eddé capitulated, officially ceding legal control to non-Muslim religious courts in areas that most directly related to women’s status: marriage, divorce, inheritance, and child custody. The snub toward the women’s union’s demands for reform was quite clear: The very same law did in fact transfer to the state other areas of Christian law that were unrelated to women’s personal status, in an effort to equalize the jurisdictions of Christian and Islamic courts.37 State control over women’s personal status was apparently sacrificed to appease Christian patriarchs for other diminutions of their powers. The gendered boundaries of this power struggle were further underlined by the fact that the one actual campaign for reform of personal status law in the s was undertaken by the French themselves, and again in blatant disregard of women’s resolutions. Not once, in any of the French documentation on their reform effort, was reference made to the wishes of women.38 And yet, the proposed reforms would create a controversy as big, and as detrimental to the prospect of ever attaining women’s personal status reform, as the Zayn al-Din case had.

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gender and the legal boundaries

The proposals for personal status reform grew out of France’s desire to equalize the status of non-Muslims and Muslims, with the dual object of neutralizing the threat of Islamic populists and of diminishing the autonomy of non-Muslims.39 The initiative actually came from petitions by the Vatican and local Christian patriarchs, who sought greater uniformity in marriage practices and protection from the influence of Islamic law in matters such as inheritance. In  the Conference of [Catholic] Patriarchs issued a joint request to the government asking for changes in rules on engagements, marriage between different Christian sects, alimony, and other matters.40 In , a hitherto unknown Beirut group, presumably Christian, named the Association for the Defense of the Race submitted a petition that also called for uniform marriage laws, including a single minimum marriage age, as a means of promoting marriages and population growth.41 In response, the French in  decreed a statute on religious communities, reaffirming the communities’ legal autonomy and requiring everyone to follow the laws of his or her community. The law drew Muslims’ opposition because it appeared to put them on the same level as other religious groups and to allow for Muslims’ conversion to Christianity, prohibited in Islamic law. So new talks were set up to revise the decree. In late , the new high commissioner, Gabriel Puaux, decreed a revised law “to regulate, on a civil level, the conflicts among religious laws and to permit a unified national life based on the essential equality of personal rights. For too long Islamic law has been arbitrarily imposed on non-Muslims, creating a deep crevice that divides the nation.”42 The  decree required citizens to follow civil law (rather than Islamic, as done since the Ottoman era) in matters not explicitly stated in the laws of their religious community. It also permitted citizens to disavow any religious affiliation, wherein their personal status would be determined solely by civil law. Finally, it imposed a stricter requirement to register marriages with the state.43 In effect, the  law was an assault on the dual legal system; it proposed the standardization of citizens’ civil rights that were heretofore so varied under differing religious laws and even permitted, for the first time, citizens to claim their status solely under civil law. Lebanese Christian patriarchs supported the proposal because it guaranteed equality. But while Christians had much to gain from equality, Muslims stood to lose their dominant status. The French effectively abolished Islamic law as the common law of the land. Huge demonstrations broke out in March  among outraged Muslims in every Lebanese and Syrian city. Mass meetings were organized in

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

mosques, markets closed, and thousands marched in the streets. Sunni, Shi‘i, and Druze Muslims in Beirut, Damascus, Tyre, Tripoli, Tartus, and elsewhere accused the French (correctly) of attempting to downgrade Islam’s status. They protested the law as an illegal intervention into religious affairs. They condemned retention of the  provision permitting Muslims to convert to Christianity. And they rejected state wedding registrations as tantamount to civil marriage, which would permit Muslim women to marry non-Muslims in violation of Islamic law. The Society of Ulama, leader of the protests in Damascus, sent a telegram with  signatures to Puaux demanding repeal of the law. Echoing the anti-Salafi sentiments voiced in the Zayn al-Din affair, its leader, Kamil al-Qassab, proclaimed: “Muslim law is a divine law that cannot be modified.”44 Even the secularist National Bloc joined the protest. The Bloc had won the  Syrian elections because it had pushed the French to negotiate an independence treaty. But in December  the French parliament refused to ratify it. This was a serious blow to the government of Prime Minister Jamil Mardam Bey, which rapidly lost support to dissenting factions. Faced with the imminent demise of his government anyway, Mardam Bey decided to resign as a sign of solidarity with the Muslim protesters. He did so even though his government had supported the  decree and even published it in the official register. In face of the massive protests and increasing violence, Puaux concluded that all reform of personal status law was doomed to failure. In March, he publicly retracted the decree in a radio broadcast.45 Leaders of the women’s movement were no doubt disturbed by nationalists’ support for Islamic populists who incited the protests. While there is no record of women’s reaction to the reform proposal, there may well have been some support for it: A  poll on civil marriage in ‘Ajamy’s The Bride had featured women who advocated civil marriage because it offered them more equal rights.46 On the other hand, many women likely joined the protests in national solidarity. However, the National Bloc’s propaganda undercut any notion of women as direct participants in the political battle. Various Bloc leaflets proclaimed: “France is the enemy of God!” and “The French want to take from you your wives, your daughters, and your children!”47 The phrasing is an example of how, despite the women’s union’s years of nationalist activism, nationalist leaders assumed the voice of men talking exclusively to other men. As in the armed conflicts of the s, male nationalists viewed the confrontation with the French in paternalistic terms, as a rivalry between themselves and French males over sovereignty over women.

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gender and the legal boundaries

Conclusion Patriotic motherhood was a risky adaptation to the s civic order. The gamble paid off insofar as women made their voices heard in conferences and demonstrations, and so inserted their issues into the political agenda. But the strategy also reinforced the twin pillars of paternalism that women opposed. As subalterns in the civic order, women’s weakness lay in their legally imposed deference to men. By choosing to ally along class lines with their relatives among the nationalist elite, women’s leaders masked, and effectively reinforced, the terms of their subaltern status. And, by stressing their service to the nation through motherhood, women were accepting a status of indirect citizenship. Like the mother and sisters who visited the dying soldier on the battlefield in the World War I poem discussed in chapter one, they participated in the nation mainly through their relationship to husbands, brothers, and sons. This was a status that religious patriarchs were all to ready to mediate in the dual legal system. As a result, women ended the decade with no real legal gains. Their civil status remained unchanged, and if anything, locked in an iron cage by the alliance of nationalists with religious conservatives. Moreover, the second aim of patriotic motherhood, recruitment of a mass base for the women’s movement, remained largely unfulfilled. Despite the participation of many women in nationalist rallies, the movement had expanded only modestly beyond its bourgeois-salon core of . To some observers, the movement appeared weak, disorganized and unpopular by the end of the decade.48 The reasons for this will be discussed more fully in Part Four. But as the next chapter will show, one promising opening in the legal boundaries of the colonial civic order was the advance of women’s—and men’s—social rights in the s. In contrast to the stalemate on civil rights, the state was obliged to acknowledge basic rights to public health, education and labor protection.

chapter 9


Social Rights: Emergence of a Colonial Welfare State

Personal status law was not the sole avenue of challenge to paternalism. Present also at the  protests that brought forth the later-aborted independence treaties, and at the  protests against French interference in religious law, was the labor movement. While the women’s union staged conferences as patriotic mothers, labor unions were coalescing into the largest mass movement in the territories. Both groups demanded social rights to education, health, and work. Unencumbered by the mandate charter’s protections of religious law, social rights were governed by civil law and so were open ground for a subaltern challenge. By , as discussed in Parts One and Two, the mandatory state had expanded social services to unprecedented, if still insufficient, levels. Emergency aid and self-justifying beneficence bestowed upon a populace, however, did not constitute social right. Rather, they were the meager fruits of a paternalistic bargain with landed, bourgeois, and religious elites. It was only in the late s and s that popular demand for a sustained state commitment to social welfare was organized by various social groups: labor unions, women’s groups, Communists, civil servants, philanthropists, and even bourgeois nationalists. Social services were claimed by these groups not as an act of French generosity, but as a right that the state was obliged to fulfill for its citizens. Fueled first by the lingering postwar economic stagnation, then by the onset of world depression, demands on the state were boosted by mass politicization in the s. Seminal was the  mass boycott in Damascus and Beirut against foreign-owned electric companies, which after six months forced a significant reduction in rates.1 Through the decade, urban groups organized as never before to express their anger on a variety of issues, not just profiteering by French concessionary companies, but also unemployment, falling wages and school shortages, as well as the dismissal of parliaments and delays in independence treaties.

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gender and the legal boundaries

These protests succeeded, by the eve of World War II, in cracking the edifice of colonial paternalism with the first changes in the legal boundaries of the civic order. Social rights directly assaulted the privileges of mediating elites, for their intent was to bypass the patronage networks of religious patriarchs, local political bosses, and bourgeois employers to establish a direct relationship between subaltern citizens and the state. Subaltern groups invoked the republican principles that lay dormant in the oft-suspended constitutions to assert claims to universal democracy and equal rights of all citizens. Indeed, labor unions and other groups were deeply influenced by the depression-era expansion of social rights in liberal, industrialized countries that were laying the foundations of welfare states. By  the outlines of a colonial welfare state had emerged.

Labor and the Demand for Social Rights Despite the growth of modern industry in the s, urban workers were hit hard by the world depression between  and . Real wages in cities fell by half, in terms of ability to pay for family food each month, as many workers were laid off or forced to cut back their work weeks to three or four days.2 As unemployment reached an estimated  percent, the French continued to deny the problem, while the new industrialists profited from workers’ competition for jobs to keep wages low.3 As strikes multiplied, bringing little relief from employers, workers came to recognize their common grievances and they began to appeal to the state for relief. Aleppo, where nearly half of textile jobs had disappeared during the s, was in the vanguard of this shift. In August , , workers and their families reportedly marched to the office of the high commissioner’s deputy to demand raises.4 The labor movement, along with student groups, was at the center of urban unrest that shook government in both countries in the early s. Industrial strikes, boycotts of electric and tramway companies accused of inflating their rates, protests against budget cuts and layoffs of civil servants and against continued high tax rates contributed to the decision by high commissioners Henri Ponsot and Damien de Martel to suspend the Lebanese and Syrian constitutions and parliaments in  and , respectively. Despite the return to rule by decree, however, the French could not ignore the labor movement’s pressure to redress grievances. Strikes and demonstrations against unemployment finally pressured the state to adopt a major job-creation program. In , de Martel inaugurated a public works program to relieve unemployment, with a budget of  million

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LLS, and ordered a further study to develop import substitution industries. He also increased funding for workers’ technical education. Also in , when Syrian civil servants protested unfair layoffs in state governments, the High Commission intervened to discipline local government officials.5 When civil servants again threatened to strike after the franc was devalued in –, de Martel introduced cost-of-living wage increases for all government employees, including teachers. The state also intervened in labor disputes in the private sector, arbitrating between strikers and their employers. In , for example, the Damascus municipality imposed a pay raise for hosiery workers after a week-long strike, against the protestations of the factory owners.6 Men were not the only activists in the labor movement. A small number of women, especially Lebanese Christians employed in the new textile factories and in the tobacco industry, began unionizing too. By the mid-s the Communist Party opened a women’s wing, attracting some prominent bourgeois women activists like Imilie Faris Ibrahim, a friend of union-founders Ibtihaj Qaddura and Salma Sayigh and a secretary of Nur Hamada’s Women’s Arabic and Cultural Assembly. Women’s groups also intensified their labor efforts, directing their claims, as labor unions did, at the state. Nazik ‘Abid founded a society for working women in  that pressured the Lebanese state to adopt laws to permit sick days, maternity leave, and equal pay. ‘Abid preached that the key to women’s political liberation was their economic independence.7 And in  female teachers in Syria, feeling the economic pinch of the depression, organized to complain that they were paid less than male teachers and to demand repeal of the requirement that they quit their jobs when they married.8 Labor unions also called for safer workplaces and social security. The labor movement’s interests coincided here with those of the various women’s groups. Both sought minimum wages, limited work hours, and safety protection. Their advocacy, combined with pressure from the League of Nations’ International Labor Organization, forced the mandatory state to reverse its longstanding opposition to protective labor laws. In  and , the French drafted and imposed upon the Lebanese and Syrian governments laws that set general standards for industrial hygiene and safety and for the protection of women and children workers.9 The latter laws limited women’s work to eight hours a day, required one day off per week, assured maternity leave, and banned women from workplaces with heavy machinery and dangerous substances. Unions heralded the laws as a first step toward comprehensive labor codes protecting all workers against arbitrary layoffs, long hours, and injury. Agitation for the expansion of labor rights intensified during the heady years of mass protest in the mid-s. The highly mobilized labor movement became

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gender and the legal boundaries

a key player in a new pattern of politics that pitted the French and their collaborators against the nationalist opposition. Each side vied to win the support of the urban masses as pressure for independence treaties and the return of constitutional government mounted. De Martel offered jobs, technical education and salary increases in an effort to focus workers’ attention on his promises of economic development and to divert them away from nationalists’ calls for independence, treaties, and constitutional government. He offered a carrot in  and , with decrees in both Syria and Lebanon to grant unions a limited right to organize.10 The laws were intended to buttress the popular standing of France’s hand-picked heads of government, Shaykh Taj in Syria and Habib Pasha al-Sa‘d in Lebanon. De Martel insisted in speeches that the common people of both countries would be better served by his public works programs than by a return to raucous parliamentary politics of the nationalists. Nationalists were outraged, and in turn sought to cast France as the true enemy and rally workers to their cause.11 In , the Syrian National Bloc convened a congress to dispute De Martel’s claims of economic progress. Aleppine nationalist leader Abd al-Rahman Kayyali published a scathing -page tract, sold in bookstores and sent to the League of Nations, that blamed French policy and favoritism toward French concessions for retardation of the Syrian economy and especially for the lack of jobs.12 Labor leaders thus faced a dilemma similar to that of women who sought personal status reform: to whom to direct their claims? While workers supported the nationalist movement, they knew that many nationalist leaders were also their employers and so unlikely to support their increasingly classconscious claims for rights. In the  Aleppo demonstration for pay raises, for instance, the National Bloc supported the employers, while it was the French deputy who finally negotiated a pay raise for the workers.13 But by openly appealing to the French as arbiters in labor disputes, the movement risked the same accusations of betrayal that Nazira Zayn al-Din’s appeal to Ponsot had garnered. So in the – wave of mass protests, labor cast its lot with the nationalists. Lebanese unrest crested in  around economic issues. Workers joined a range of demonstrations orchestrated by nationalist elites, especially against the tobacco monopoly that was reinstated by de Martel that year. At the same time, supported by both nationalists and Communists, taxi and truck drivers struck against restrictive state regulations. De Martel acted quickly to cut ties between workers and nationalist elites by deploying police, dissolving the drivers’ union, and banishing leading nationalists Riyad al-Sulh and Fakhri al-Barudi from

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Beirut. Workers were also excluded from the January  presidential elections, restricted only to members of parliament, who elected nationalists’ opponent Emile Eddé. Later in , the newly formed (and illegal) labor federation led by typesetters perpetuated the general atmosphere of political revolt through strikes and demonstrations in support of Socialists’ electoral victory in France and of Lebanese independence. In October , widespread strikes for pay raises greeted the devaluation of the franc. This time however, reflecting the leftist sympathies of the Popular Front (elected the previous May), the High Commission responded by ordering a small increase and releasing labor leader Mustafa al-‘Aris from jail.14 Meanwhile in Syria, workers joined merchants and students in staging a -day general strike throughout the country in January–February .15 The labor movement’s ability to organize thousands of workers, especially with the formation of the Damascus Union of Labor Syndicates that summer, complemented the National Bloc’s patronage power to mobilize students and urban quarters through neighborhood bosses. The Communist Party also supported the strike, in keeping with its nationalist turn under the new leadership of Khalid Bakdash.16 While ideological commitment certainly motivated workers, the feebleness of French offers played a part in their decision too. Unemployment remained high, despite public works programs and repeated French denials of the magnitude of the problem. And the – revisions of laws on labor organizing were hollow at the core: while they theoretically permitted unions, they retained Ottoman bans on worker-only associations and labor federations. The return to constitutional government in – appeared at first to ease labor’s dilemma. The French capitulated to the mass protests and agreed to negotiate treaties. In anticipation of independence, they reauthorized parliaments and granted greater autonomy to the Lebanese and Syrian governments. The National Bloc was elected to head the Syrian government in late , and the nationalist Constitutional Bloc would gain a majority in the Lebanese parliament in . The Popular Front in France also contributed to a change in political climate. The Front’s sympathy for social rights revived aspirations abandoned since Sarrail and the Syrian Revolt of establishing true republicanism in Syria and Lebanon. Now, the labor movements did not hesitate to direct their claims to the local states. Although they remained technically illegal, the nascent labor federations began to lobby their parliaments for a comprehensive labor code for all workers, including long-sought protections such as accident insurance, sick pay, and guaranteed pensions. The federations argued that workers deserved a payback for their contributions to the nationalist cause. Like their fellow subalterns in the women’s movement, however, labor



gender and the legal boundaries

leaders were soon disillusioned by their alliance with nationalist elites. The proposed labor codes foundered in parliaments dominated by the bourgeois owners of businesses who employed the union members. In , Syrian unions threatened a general strike when the National Bloc government imprisoned labor leaders for defying the law against employee-only unions. Both state governments eventually backed down, and from then on tolerated workers’ right to organize. But the parliaments continued to stall debate on the labor codes. In Syria, the labor federation staged a general strike in May  and threatened a second one later in the year. Jamil Mardam Bey’s government rushed to assure labor leaders of their sincerity, issuing a decree in January  that formally, and belatedly, authorized worker-only unions. But Mardam Bey’s government fell in February  before voting on the labor code. In Lebanon, unions won minor victories with laws on industrial hygiene and severance pay and a  presidential decree creating a Service for the Protection of Manpower. But bourgeois politicians feared the implantation of French-style socialism and in May  the Lebanese parliament roundly rejected the new service’s proposal for a corpus of social and labor legislation.17 Despite the impasse on the labor codes, the language of workers’ rights had entered parliamentary discourse. The labor movement had aroused workers’ consciousness of their subaltern position and mobilized them not only to make material demands upon their employers, but also to raise their status in the civic order through civil law. Unions had won the informal right to organize and minimum guarantees on severance pay and workplace hygiene, as well as a precedent for maximum hours and safety protections in the laws enacted on behalf of women and children. Through their federations and association with the growing Communist Party, the labor movement’s more than , unionized workers rivaled the power of nationalists’ urban organizations by . It had fundamentally altered politics, by reversing the French’s anti-labor policies and by threatening the mediating power factory of owners and concessionary companies that once stood between them and the state. As World War II loomed, the movement was poised to extract even more rights. The labor movement’s success resonated beyond shop floors to challenge the premises of paternalism throughout the colonial civic order. The Communist Party joined the March  demonstrations, not just to protest the French parliament’s rejection of the treaty, but to protest France’s support of an oppressive, rural mediating class: “The French democratic mission in the world doesn’t consist in protecting reactionaries among feudal lords . . . [who] are criminals that the French Revolution of  would have condemned to capital punishment.”18 Leading unions like the Beirut typesetters also campaigned for

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

republican principles and anti-sectarianism.19 They claimed to represent all subalterns’ right to equality, and denounced ethnic and religious divisions that were reinforced by paternalistic elites like religious patriarchs, tribal chiefs, and some political party leaders. They also claimed to support women workers on an equal footing with men. But while the labor movement’s successes shook one pillar of paternalism, mediated power, their impact on the second pillar, gender hierarchy, was less certain. First, the unions represented only a small portion of working women. Most urban working women—household maids, petty peddlars, at-home seamstresses and lacemakers, and schoolteachers—did not benefit from the pay raises and other benefits won through the s strikes. Second, while the labor protection laws of – were proclaimed by unions as precedents for future laws covering all workers, their immediate impact on women was highly ambiguous. As long as the laws remained in force only for women and children, they effectively defined them as a separate and inferior category of worker. Because employers were reluctant to arrange shorter shifts and better health standards for women, the laws virtually blocked women’s entry into high-paying industrial jobs at a time when their employment in home, silk, and artisanal industries was plummeting. The laws also limited women’s ability to work enough hours to support their families. Government records report that Lebanese families objected to the loss of women’s (and children’s) wages, and that female workers concealed the number of hours they worked from inspectors.20 The labor movement’s broad attack on paternalism was also muted in its effect on women’s subaltern status because of its distance from the women’s movement. There is virtually no existing record of sustained contact between them, outside of the Communist women’s auxiliary. But even there, women’s interests were subordinated to those of class. The labor movement did little in these years to defend women’s right to work from religious attacks. In , for example, a group of Beirut shaykhs petitioned the interior minister to ban women from working in retail shops, because they “offend good morals by working in public.” Two Christian women were subsequently forced to quit their jobs in a lemonade shop located near a mosque.21 Neglect of the issue was likely due not only to general neglect of women’s concerns, but to political strategy as well: labor leaders did not want religious concerns to split the movement. In the March  Syrian protests, Communists said they opposed personal status law reform because it would enflame sectarian divisions that would weaken working-class solidarity. This was a far cry from the party’s  platform, which had explicitly condemned veiling and forced marriage.22

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gender and the legal boundaries

Although nowhere stated as such, we might surmise that similar concerns generally discouraged labor leaders from pursuing overt alliances with the women’s movement. For women’s union leaders, an alliance with labor would have required betrayal of their own class; that is, the economic interests of their fathers and husbands among the nationalist elite. It would have been a very difficult tradeoff to make. Women’s class-based alliance with nationalist elites not only distanced them from the labor movement, but also discouraged women’s crossclass solidarity with other women. This is not to say the women’s movement neglected the plight of poor working women. Bourgeois women who did not work for a living did mobilize to aid their poorer sisters. The Syrian Woman’s Awakening Society, for example, expanded its program to provide work for rural women living on the outskirts of Damascus. Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, a member in the late s, drove into the Damascene countryside weekly to supply women with sewing machines and embroidery materials and teach them to make high-quality bath towels and tablecloths. The society then sold the items at elite charity functions; half of the proceeds went to the women workers, and half to the purchase of more supplies.23 A similar effort, the Encouragement of Lebanese Industry Society (Inhad al-sina‘a al-lubnaniya) was established by the wife of President Emile Eddé, in cooperation with ladies from prominent Beirut families. In  it received lottery revenues from the government to create jobs for  rural artisans, mainly women.24 These efforts sought to ease pain caused by the decline in indigenous industries. But they were also made in the paternalistic spirit of bourgeois philanthropy. The Encouragement of Lebanese Industry, for example, touted itself as a vehicle to “cement a stronger union among Lebanese ladies in service of their country (emphasis added).”25 Poor women were the clients of their bourgeois benefactors, not sisters in subaltern struggle. They were not encouraged to organize on their own behalf. As a result, the women of the urban masses remained an untapped, unorganized resource for either the women’s or the labor movement in the s. In sum, friction among class, religious, and gender identities discouraged a broader alliance among subalterns in the paternalistic colonial civic order. While lack of solidarity likely harmed both movements, the women’s movement appears to have suffered more.The structure of the s civic order had encouraged the Communist-labor movement to abandon women’s rights, just as elite nationalists had, in favor of recruitment opportunities among (male) populist and religious milieux. Even as their strategy of patriotic motherhood made barely a dent in the gendered boundaries of paternalistic privilege set by religious law, women stood to reap little from the comparative success of the

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labor movement in cracking mediated hierarchies of paternalistic power through civil law.

Emergence of a Colonial Welfare State Labor rights were not the only social rights to expand in the s. A broad spectrum of urban society mobilized to claim rights from the state. To justify their claims, these groups invoked both the text of the mandate charter, which required the French to prepare their nations for independence, and the republican spirit of the French Revolution taught in their school textbooks. They increasingly adopted the language of social rights to forge a new basis of citizenship influenced directly by the socialist and statist ideologies of interwar Europe. Claim-making was further inspired by French and nationalist bargaining strategies that emerged within the arena of electoral politics. By , the accumulation of social rights won had sketched the outlines of a veritable welfare state, albeit one distinguished by its colonial setting. Social rights were by no means, in the minds of agitators, the principal goal. Under nationalist leadership, protests were framed primarily in terms of demands for self-government and independence from French rule. Grievances were used to support arguments that the French had violated the terms of the mandate with economic policies that inhibited growth, industrial development and employment, and with chronic shortages of schools and low levels of health care. Many grievances were sent by petition to Geneva, in an effort to convince the League of Nations to cancel France’s mandate because of these violations. In response, High Commissioner de Martel sought to convert these political challenges into bargains over social rights. While the state’s willingness to grant social rights was certainly enhanced by the election of the left-leaning Popular Front government in France, idealism was not likely the main impulse to bargain. As World War II loomed on the horizon and as the treaties languished in the French parliament, the French desperately sought ways to stabilize their hold on Syria and Lebanon. By introducing social policy initiatives, they could exploit the ambiguity latent in the opposition’s demands in order to shore up popular support. For even as the groups rejected the very fact of French rule, they continued to demand more state intervention, not less, in social affairs. Amidst criticism of French language requirements in schools, there were constant calls for more state schools. Amidst criticism of the continued high incidence of disease and

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gender and the legal boundaries

infant mortality, there were calls for the expansion of public health departments. Amidst criticism of an industrial policy favoring concessions to French firms, there were calls for state support of a national economy. The French responded in piecemeal fashion to these specific grievances, and so sidestepped fundamental challenges to their rule. As we have seen, to complaints about unemployment, they created jobs. To complaints about crowded classrooms, they funded more schools. To complaints about poor safety regulations, they stepped up health inspections. In sum, the French responded to the mid-s challenges by transforming their paternalistic policies of social spending into the recognition of citizens’ rights to state protection and support. Social rights were thus the byproduct of a triangular political bargaining process involving the French and their mediating collaborators; religious and nationalist elites in opposition; and the subaltern movements. The first two groups vied for the loyalty of the subaltern urban masses, a rivalry that peaked during elections. As the French cynically diverted nationalist complaints into social rights, so did nationalist elites, seeking to build mass followings, adopt a social agenda that would foster a cross-class, anti-French alliance. Nationalists’ motives were as disingenuous as those of the French, as we saw in their defeat of labor code proposals. Even as nationalist elites spoke the language of social rights, they maintained their power as old-fashioned urban patrons who used their government access to spread benefits to their clients. In the bargaining process, the French were forced to expand their skeletal system of social services far beyond what they had understood to be their commitment when the mandate was assigned. After budget cuts in the early s, state spending, especially by the state of Syria and the Common Interests administration, steadily rose in the late s. For example, the number of civil servants in Syria and Lebanon climbed from , in  to , in .26 And in addition to the legal commitments made to workers, the state made new commitments in public health and education. Between  and , health and education spending rose from . to . percent of the Syrian budget, and from nearly  to  percent of the Lebanese budget.27 A brief look at the expansion of these branches of state social policy will illustrate how, in conjunction with labor law, the foundations of a colonial welfare state were laid. As discussed Part Two, in the s the French had laid the foundations of a public health service, relying heavily on private intermediaries like French missionaries, who received state subsidies to provide clinics and hospital care. The rudimentary system of the s funneled its still-meager resources to

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constituencies most important to stabilizing French rule: the army, urban elites, Lebanese, Christians, and men. Peasants, women, Muslims, and the lower classes, at the time unorganized into mass movements, were relatively neglected. Criticism of this neglect mounted. Women’s groups and newspaper columnists badgered the French to increase funding for public health and to speed responses to epidemics. Workers’ demands for safer workplaces and accident insurance also promoted a broader interest in public health. Unions in the Syrian city of Hama, for example, agitated in  for installation of a sewer system.28 Petitions to the government and League of Nations in turn brought pressure from the international arena. French response to the pressure was modest, but significant. Even as postwar epidemic outbreaks subsided and even as budgets were slashed in the s depression, funding and services for public health expanded. Between  and , annual spending for public hygiene and assistance in Syria and Lebanon increased by  percent, from , LLS to , LLS. In Lebanon alone, public health spending rose by  percent between  and . That the French sought recognition for their support of public health was demonstrated in the fanfare and press coverage of the  openings of a new maternity hospital in Lebanon and an insane asylum in Syria.29 In preceding years, new state-funded anti-tuberculosis sanitoria had also been opened in both countries. In addition, state provision of free hospital care in Lebanon rose by nearly  percent between  and , to , patients treated annually. In Syria, free doctor’s visits at state-run clinics nearly doubled, from , to , between  and .30 The High Commission also undertook a vigorous campaign for disease prevention. The plague was finally eradicated from Beirut after  thanks to a program that destroyed rats. The incidence of trachoma and smallpox was significantly reduced through vigorous school inspections and vaccination programs. Inspections of food vendors and public baths were stepped up, with tens of thousands of sites visited by state inspectors annually. New laws passed in both countries subjected food servers to annual medical exams and set higher penalties for fraudulent claims about food quality. Malaria, however, remained a grave health threat, as hundreds continued to die of the disease each year. Despite pressure from the League of Nations to address the problem, the French insisted that the state could not afford the high cost of draining swamps.31 As important as the quantity of care was the change in public expectation of it. As early as , newspapers like the prestigious al-Muqtabas in Damascus and Le Réveil in Beirut called public health a right of citizens, and an obligation

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gender and the legal boundaries

of the state.32 In the s, common citizens took up the language as well, rejecting France’s characterization of health care as a generous gift. In , for example, the imposing Kawkab hotel in Beirut collapsed, killing  people. Public protest flared as violations of building codes became known. Forty-five relatives of victims petitioned the League of Nations, accusing the French of applying lower building standards in Beirut than in Paris, and of “violating the right of the people.”33 By the end of the decade, government officials themselves adopted the notion that public health was a right. Writing in the quasi-official journal Dimashq in , Dr. Yusuf ‘Araqtinji, founder of Syria’s public health service, stated that sound hygiene laws were “the right of the Syrian people.”34 Popular pressure for state-funded education exploded in , when Lebanese parents, teachers, journalists, ulama and nationalists unseated Prime Minister Emile Eddé after he closed  state schools attended mostly by Muslims, as part of a budget-cutting scheme.35 Although  of the schools were reopened, by the early s thousands of students each year were being turned away in Syria and Lebanon because there was no room in state schools.36 At the start of the  school year, police were called out in Tripoli to suppress a demonstration by students denied admission. Two years later,  parents in Tripoli protested to the League of Nations “in the name of civilization, humanity, and culture” against the distribution of educational funding to local “patriarchs and bishops” while state schools remained overcrowded.37 Nationalists in both countries demanded universal education as not just as a social right, but as a political right—claiming that an educated citizenry is a precondition of democracy.38 Likewise, the women’s union continued to pressure the state for more girls’ schools, in the name of their future patriotic duty as mothers of citizens. Labor unions, too, were among the biggest agitators for a greater state commitment to education, because many of their members were illiterate. They submitted numerous petitions to the state for libraries and trade schools.39 Even religious leaders began using the language of rights, to demand larger state subsidies for their private schools.40 The French defended their policy by claiming that drops in state revenue during the depression prevented the hiring of new teachers, and that localities had failed to contribute their share of funds for school construction, required by a law dating from the Ottoman era.41 However, popular pressure eventually had its effect. In , the French used extra-budgetary funding to open  new government schools in Lebanon, the first new schools in years.42 Moreover, the total number of schools and students in all mandated territories rose by more than  percent in the s, totalling , schools with about , students in . The number of students educated primarily with

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state funds also rose by  percent, to , in state schools and , in the quasi-public French missionary schools regulated and subsidized by the High Commission.43 And even though school expansion did not keep up with demand, education showed the most impressive growth of any category of government spending. Education expenditures rose from .% of all state budgets (. million LLS) in  to .% (. million LLS) in . With the establishment of basic social rights to health, education, and job security, in the form of both legal protection and fiscal commitments from the state, the cornerstone of a colonial welfare state had been laid. The level of state commitment to welfare may be compared to that made by the British and French states prior to World War I, when a host of legislative guarantees and the first financial entitlements were established. But the demand for welfare in Syria and Lebanon more closely approximated contemporary developments in s France and Britain. The term “welfare state” itself had become current in Britain by the late s, while in France the foundations of “l’état providence” were laid with universal unemployment insurance laws in  and . In Syria and Lebanon, women’s groups and labor unions explicitly invoked as their model contemporary events in France, where in – democratic Socialists and Communists joined labor unions to agitate for substantial new state intervention in economy and society, and to bring the Popular Front to power.44 Despite these shared ideologies, the nature of state commitments to welfare differed profoundly from the European cases. The mandatory welfare state was distinctly colonial in the way welfare was funded, in its level of funding, and in the delivery of services to the population. In contrast to social services in metropolitan France, those in Syria and Lebanon were not funded primarily by taxes or other contributions from the middle and upper classes. First, there was little revenue to collect from the thin layer of elites in an unindustrialized country. Second, direct taxes were paid primarily to the local state governments, which spent little on social services. Social spending in the mandates was financed, instead, primarily by the High Commission, through customs revenues and subsidies from Paris. This fiscal arrangement had much to do with the emergence of welfarism in the political context of a confrontation between colonial rulers and a population seeking liberation. Because of this volatile context, the French were unable to levy taxes to pay for social services on the very citizens who called for them. The colonial welfare state was, at its origin, a stopgap measure designed to forestall demands for independence, not the product of an evolutionary social contract binding state and society and involving a commitment to higher taxes.

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gender and the legal boundaries

A related, colonial characteristic of the emergent welfare state was its low level of spending. Because of lack of tax revenues, and because of constant demands in Paris for frugality, public education, health, and labor protections were horribly underfunded compared to European welfare models. However, underfunding of social services, so much criticized at the time, was partly an illusion because state budgets often omitted the huge investments made directly from Paris to private agents and semi-public agencies that provided services at cut-rate costs. And while state spending was low relative to Europe, it was unprecedentedly high in the Syrian and Lebanese context. Local waqf foundations, for example, spent only a fraction of what the state did on education, health, and poor relief.45 Nonetheless, relatively low funding should in no way disguise the fact that this was an emergent welfare state. Common usage often simply equates welfarism with high levels of entitlements. Welfarism is a matter of kind, not quantity, of commitment; it grounds the relationship between the state and its citizens in the language of rights, rather than that of paternalism, and in sustainable legal guarantees rather than occasional gestures of beneficence. This brings us to the third distinctively colonial feature of the Syrian and Lebanese welfare state: its mediated delivery of what were largely state-funded services. In diverting political grievances into social claims, the French turned to the paternalistic constituencies they had cultivated as pillars of their rule: rural landlords and tribal chiefs, missionaries, urban bosses, and religious leaders. These elites became vehicles not only of political control, but also for the delivery of social services. The French in a sense could kill two birds with one stone: the desire to award power to mediators and the need to appease demands for social rights. As a result, especially in Lebanon, the bulk of publicly funded health care and education remained in the hands of private, and usually religious, agencies. Maronite Patriarch Antoine ‘Arida, for example, proposed abolishing public schools altogether, insisting that only autonomous religious sects should oversee the moral upbringing of children. He insisted that religious education was a right of citizens and that state control was a contravention of this liberty. At the same time, he argued that the state should fund the religious schools so as to further national progress.46 As we have seen, however, the corollary of mediated state services was a hierarchical bias in access to state benefits, which tended to favor the urban bourgeoisie, landowners, Lebanese Christians, and males more than peasants, workers, Muslims, and women (see chapter four). Islamic populists, whose views resembled those of ‘Arida, did not receive a fraction of the school subsidies that Maronites did. In contrast, European welfare states were ideologically



social rights

constructed as a means of leveling social inequality and establishing direct state control over society through public institutions. Welfare was practically linked to states’ needs for healthy, literate military recruits and its needs to pacify growing numbers of industrialized urban workers. These conditions did not hold in Syria and Lebanon, where citizens did not generally serve in the army and where the state more urgently needed to appease middle classes and elites who could potentially lead an armed rebellion, as Syrians had done in –. In sum, on the eve of World War II, the bargaining process that had laid the foundations of a colonial welfare state reached a critical juncture, as tensions between right and privilege heightened. French strategy, in diverting calls for political independence with offers of new social rights, had driven a wedge in the cross-class coalitions of , pitting the reigning national bourgeoisie against their erstwhile subaltern allies seeking inclusion in their own right. The national governments were also threatened by religious groups, who sought to preserve their mediating roles. The two-way pull for privilege and right exploded in the  mass protests, which featured both religious and labor groups. The expanding labor movement was poised to make a credible challenge to the mediated and hierarchical structure of the colonial welfare state. Along with women, organized workers intended a far more radical transformation of state obligations and citizens’ rights than had so far been attained.

Conclusion to Part Three The legal boundaries of the colonial civic order underwent fierce renegotiation in the s and s, in a complex, triangulated process of political bargaining among subalterns, paternalistic intermediaries, and the French. The outcome by  was rather contradictory. On the one hand, the preceding chapters may be read as a story of paralysis, failed attempts by the women’s and labor movements to redraw legal boundaries that were guarded jealously by religious, nationalist, and French elites. Gendered legal distinctions, in particular, remained largely intact. Suffrage was still defined as a male prerogative. Citizens’ personal status was still differentiated by religious law. And while some social rights were won, they were vitiated by class and gender privileges that preserved paternalism within the emergent colonial welfare state. On the other hand, the period was one of profound reorientations within the prevailing paternalism. While the assertion of religious authority may

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gender and the legal boundaries

have narrowed the boundaries of state jurisdiction, the demand for social rights conversely broadened the state’s role in the civic order. Moreover, initial gains in social rights posed a challenge to the power of mediating elites. The promise of a more direct relationship between the state and subaltern groups threatened the legal boundaries that privileged mediating elites’ authority. Gendered legal boundaries of the civic order were also simultaneously reinforced and challenged. New was the political attitude that saw women’s lack of suffrage as the bulwark of the entire political and social order. New was religious elites’ exclusive claim to legislate women’s personal status. New was the formal distinction between the rights of female and male workers. Also new, however, was the assertiveness of women in claiming not only civil service jobs, but also equal pay; in not only claiming the right to education, but also enrolling in universities and entering the professions; in forming not only the women’s unions, but also staging public conferences and writing books that rattled ruling elites. Indeed, gender was the Gordian knot of the entire paternalistic edifice, entwined with the sinews of state, religious and class power that bound the civic order together. We have seen how women’s efforts to gain political and civil rights triggered alliances variously among religious and secular mediating elites and the French. We have also seen how gender and class pulled in opposite directions among subalterns, distancing the women’s and labor movements from one another. To understand fully the ways in which gender undergirded the colonial civic order, however, we must look beyond the rarified realm of the law to examine the more mundane arenas where political conflicts were waged and identity was formed. It was clear after  that the sheer numbers of organized (male) workers and Islamic populists made elites and the French heed them. They had shown that they were capable of disrupting public life with massive strikes and demonstrations. It is therefore essential to investigate why, despite its conferences, charity works, and demonstrations, the women’s movement did not expand. While we have seen that class bias and the dual legal system hindered the prospects for such an expansion, they do not provide a complete explanation. Part Four will show how women’s mass mobilization was peculiarly weakened by the gendered construction of the urban public, and how women’s challenges to the spatial boundaries of the colonial civic order became the object of cross-cutting politics of religion and class similar to those surrounding the law.

illustrations 

1. “Oh sons of Syria, bread, bread, bread. . .” In public memories of World War I’s famine, women were often portrayed as having gone mad with hunger. Source: Tarikh al-harb al-’uzma  () p. .

2. Filature de Kreye Thousands of young Lebanese women who had worked in silk mills like this one to help support their families lost their jobs in the s. Source: MAE-Paris.

3. Beyrouth: Proclamation du Grand Liban le er Septembre  At the proclamation of Greater Lebanon in , French High Commissioner Henri Gouraud sat encircled by religious patriarchs, bureaucratic officials and soldiers. This representation of paternal authority was distributed to the population on postcards. Source: MAE-Paris.

4. Salle d’une polyclinique, Syrie,  Mothers were the principal clients of the state’s free medical clinics, such as this one in Syria, where they became subjects of paternalistic discipline. Note the sign requiring identity cards in French, Arabic and Armenian. Source: MAE-Paris.

5. Orphelinat de la filature de Kreye,  After World War I, Catholic missionaries set up workhouses like this one to prevent poor women’s fall into “debauchery.” Source: MAE-Paris.

6. Nazik ‘Abid Nazik ‘Abid, a leader of the women’s movement, wore this uniform while leading a battalion of nurses at the battle of Maysalun in July . Source: Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, p. .

7. Nazira Zayn al-Din Nazira Zayn al-Din shook the tidy world of the bourgeois intelligentsia with her  book Unveiling and Veiling, which called not only for women’s unveiling, but for strict limits to the jurisdiction of Islamic law. Source: Zayn al-Din, al-Fatat wa alshuyukh, frontispiece.

8. First page of al-Mar’a al-jadida, April,  Julia Dimashqiya’s The New Woman featured a Madonna-like mother and child and greeted its readers, “Dear Daughters of My Country.” The ideal of patriotic motherhood inspired the women’s movement after the First World War. Source: al-Mar’a al-jadida  (April ) p. .

9. Cover of al-Naqid, July ,  The Eastern Women’s Conference of  gathered to Damascus delegates from the Middle East and Asia and drew much press attention, like this front cover to the Damascene magazine, al-Naqid. Imilie Faris Ibrahim stands at the bottom right. Source: al-Naqid  (July , ) front cover.

10. Women’s Demonstration in Damascus,  Fifty well-dressed, elite women marched into Syrian government offices in June  to petition against the transfer of Alexandretta to Turkey. The women’s union engaged in many nationalist demonstrations in the s to prove women’s patriotism. Source: Azad Photo and Cinema Co., Damascus.

11. “The World Turned Upside Down—To Each His Turn!” The reversal in gender roles became a theme in the press of the late s and s, expressing male anxiety about women’s seeming invasion of public and political space. Source: Les Echos, March , , p. .

12. “In Union (Marja) Square” Changing patterns of urban public space increased the opportunity for men and women to meet, as satirized in this cartoon from a Damascene magazine. Source: al-Naqid  (July , ) back cover.

13. Street Scene in Damascus, October  A photograph taken in Damascus just after the Ottoman evacuation in  shows numerous poor and unveiled women mingling with men in the streets. Source: Imperial War Museum, London.

14. “The Honeymoon Month and After” The brow-beaten husband and overbearing wife became stock images in s magazines, like this one from Damascus. Source: al-Naqid  (June , ) back cover.

15. “His Wife is Busy!” Wives’ excessive shopping and socializing were lampooned in many magazine cartoons of the 1930s, like this one from Beirut. Source: al-Dabbur  (June , ) p. .

16. “She nudges he aside . . .” Depictions of women’s liberation were often used to titillate male readers. Here, the first man says: “Women do all the jobs of men. Look how she easily she lies on her back beneath the machine.” The second responds: “Between us my friend, this is the normal state of affairs!” The ungrammatical title underlines the sense of old norms being broken. Source: al-Dabbur  (June , ) p. .

17. Gabriel Puaux à Lattaquie,  High Commissioner Gabriel Puaux imitated Vichy leader Marshal Pétain in posing as a stern but caring father figure, as in his  visit here to a girl’s school in Latakia. Source: MAE-Paris.

18. “Here is Our New [National] Emblem ” Al-Dabbur, a Beirut magazine, celebrated Lebanese independence in  with this cover, depicting a pair of male and female citizens and the country’s new emblem on the man’s shield. The woman wears the cap of Marianne, French symbol of democracy. She appears as much a captive as a companion of the male citizen. Source: al-Dabbur  (December , ) front cover.

19. “For the Sake of France” Earlier in , al-Dabbur had printed another cartoon featuring a captive Marianne: She was embraced— or kidnapped—by a leering Senegalese soldier carrying a gun. Source: al-Dabbur  (April , ) p. .

20. Shaykh Bishara al-Khuri, Nov. ,  On November ,  Lebanese president Bishara al-Khuri greeted cheering crowds as founding father of independent Lebanon, alongside his wife, Laure, hailed as mother of the Lebanese. Source: Spears collection, album , Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

21. Women’s Demonstration, Nov.  Hundreds of women marched in Beirut during the November  crisis, often encircled by young men, likely members of the Phalanges libanaises. Source: Spears collection, album , Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

22. Ceremony of Thanksgiving for the Return to Health of the Syrian President, Shukri al-Quwwatli, June  Syrian President Shukri al-Quwwatli addressed citizens upon his return to health and full exercise of power after the May  crisis. Conspicuously absent from the scene were women, including his wife. Source: Spears collection, album ⁄, Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford.

part iv


Gendering the Public: Spatial Boundaries of the Colonial Civic Order

In , a year after Nazira Zayn al-Din published her explosive book on unveiling, the Damascene newspaper Les Echos printed a front-page cartoon depicting a man with a fez on his head and a veil over his face, walking down an arch-covered street. He fumbled along blindly with a cane and a leashed dog, while ahead stood a woman with short hair and a flapper-style dress, waiting impatiently for him to catch up (fig. ). The caption read: “The World Turned Upside Down—To Each His Turn.”1 In , the front page of another Damascene paper featured the article “Let Men Unveil Before Women: Is There in Lebanon a Fully Masculine People Who Defends Honor?” It diagnosed a disease among Lebanese Muslim men that had originated in their humiliation and suffering during World War I, and now debilitated their patriotism, evidenced by their silent surrender to the “rape” of French occupation. The phrase “let men unveil before women” was attributed to one of Lebanon’s few nationalists, who called upon men to demand their honor before permitting women’s liberation. The article opined, “Isn’t it ludicrous that Miss Zayn al-Din writes a book calling for respect of women’s freedom, while no male writer dares to address a word of reproof to the sons of the coast [Lebanese men] for their silence and surrender?”2 The issues of the veil and women’s personal status discussed in Part Three were debated not just in the dry terms of law, but in a climate of men’s fear of demasculinization. Men’s anxiety, as expressed in the press, intertwined the politics of personal gender relations with the politics of the larger civic order.

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Both cartoon and article portrayed shifting relations between men and women as a zero-sum contest that was conducted not just in the home, but also in public. Women’s unveiling, or emergence from seclusion, necessitated the occultation of men; there could be no equilibrium. The cartoon ambiguously suggested either that men were the veiled ones, fumbling blindly toward modernity, or that women’s liberation had handicapped men in a world turned upside down. The article argued that Lebanese men had been triply unmanned, first by the war, then by the French, and now by their own women. The reversal in gender power relations threatened, in the writer’s view, to neutralize (or neuter) men as a political force. Anxiety was expressed not only in the pages of the press, but in the streets of the city as well. While women were denied suffrage, they voted with their feet: Thousands since World War I had begun to leave their homes each day to take up wage-paying jobs, attend school, go shopping, watch a movie, or join nationalist demonstrations. To contemporaries, it was as though floodgates had burst open. Women seemed to be everywhere in the city, invading territory many men claimed as their own.3 The ensuing conflict, which turned quite violent in the s, offers another window on the paternalistic structure of the colonial civic order, and on the efforts of subalterns to transform it. The incidence of men and women spraying one another with acid in  (chapter seven) was merely the leading edge to a new pattern of physical assaults upon women who walked in the street, rode tramcars, went to the cinema, or attended charity balls at hotels. No longer limited to isolated attacks, violence against women became routinized in campaigns by Islamic populists and in the emergence of proto-fascist youth groups who paraded through streets in military gear. Efforts to remasculinize the streets coincided with the reassertion of male control in the press, which printed scathing satires and tales of terror about women who crossed the gendered spatial boundaries of the city. Part Four explores the reasons for the rise of violent gender conflict in the s in the context of rapid structural change in the urban public. Public is

gendering the public



used here to embrace both a physical and virtual dimension. Public space refers to those areas in the physical environment that are shared by anonymous individuals, whether they be owned by the state and designated as such, as in public gardens, or owned privately but explicitly open to anyone who chooses to enter, as in a grocery store or a theater. It is a space where city residents physically encountered fellow members of their urban community. In a secondary and related sense, the public indicates a metaphysical kind of shared and anonymous space, as in public morality and in the urban, national, ethnic, or gender communities imagined in the press.4 In either case, the public is not necessarily defined in opposition to a private sphere. We have seen, for example, that women’s childrearing practices had become very much a public concern, not only in the rhetoric of the women’s movement, but also as the target of state-funded philanthropies. However, it is noteworthy that certain historical actors did attempt to construct a notion of the public that was defined in opposition to domestic space, as opponents of the women’s movement did. Finally, the public, as used here, is distinct from Ju¨rgen Habermas’s public sphere, in that it denotes a wider realm of collective activity in the economic, social, and political spheres than he intends by his bourgeois reading public. Habermas’s distinction between a “private” civil society and the “public” state also fits poorly with conditions in Syria and Lebanon, where, as we have seen, the line between state and society was quite blurred.5 Hence, the definition of the public used here parallels that of the civic order, emphasizing the interaction of state and social realms. The public, like the law, shaped the colonial civic order; it helped to set the boundaries of the norms and institutions that governed relations between citizens and the state. In turn, the public was also bounded by those relations, through state regulations, paternalistic privileges, and the multifarious practices of everyday life. In the mandate era, the boundaries and norms of the urban public were profoundly destabilized by two structural changes. First, the public underwent a massive expansion with the growth of transport and communications,



gendering the public

public services like schooling and health care, new entertainment venues like cinemas and parks, and the publishing of newspapers and magazines. Second, the public became a primary political arena in the s, when parliaments were shut down by the French for half of the decade. Mass demonstrations, market closures, and street battles became the modus operandi of politics, as nationalist elites mobilized their followers in protest, and as subaltern movements, normally excluded from the halls of parliament, seized the streets to voice their dissent. They and the French engaged in turf battles for control over urban space and the virtual public space of the press as a means of claiming power within the civic order. The surge of violence against women in the s appears to have originated, then, not solely in the crisis of paternity born of World War I and French occupation, but also in the remapping of the urban public and in the diversion of politics to the streets. With their rapid and remarkable influx into this volatile postwar public, women became a flashpoint for the various conflicts. They triggered multiple latent tensions on the faultlines of a destabilized and politicized urban landscape. Desperate to establish order in the chaos of street politics, male rivals could find common ground in their shared masculine anxiety. As a consequence, the battle for control of the public by the state, nationalists, religious patriarchs, and subalterns would ultimately be resolved through paternalistic gender alliances. These alliances effectively truncated women’s civil rights to free speech and association, thereby handicapping the women’s movement. The following chapters will examine how men reasserted control over women: first, in nationalists’ and protofascists’ politicization of the streets; second, in religious groups’ battle with the state for regulatory control of the cinema; and third, in the changing representations of gender in the press.

chapter 10


Remapping the Urban Landscape

State reform and economic change reorganized city life in a process that had begun long before, and accelerated under, French rule. Most significant politically were the sheer expansion of the space deemed public and the incription of new class boundaries into the urban landscape. Both of these changes in turn entailed the redrawing of gender boundaries. Public space existed in cities long before the French mandate. Streets, baths, fountains, bakeries, coffeehouses, and markets were accessible generally to the population. Custom, however, regulated access to certain groups, in what was a broad spectrum between the universally public and the most private.1 Gender marked the extremes of the spectrum. Perhaps the most unrestricted, or public, spaces were streets, which elite women avoided altogether and where other women customarily veiled. The most restricted, or private, spaces were the women’s quarters in homes, where unrelated males were never permitted. Between these extremes, there were many gradations of public and private. People generally socialized within their own quarter, among people who were familiar to them. Multiple families might, for example, share a courtyard where space was used in common by a restricted few. Streets, baths, coffeehouses, and other services in a particular urban quarter were customarily used only by its residents or a habitual clientele. The leader of the quarter (mukhtar) or a strongman (qabaday) would regulate the quarter’s customs and intervene against troublesome outsiders.2 Common space was thus shared locally, and was generally not divided by class, as most quarters contained a mix of rich and poor. Likewise, religious divisions were irregular: while cities might have had predominantly Muslim, Jewish, or Christian quarters, most quarters were mixed. Christians and Jews tended to mix with Muslims in bathhouses (provoking periodic reprimands from ulama), and often worked alongside Muslims in shops.3 Gender boundaries to communal space were



gendering the public

more strict, but did not entirely exclude women. While only men customarily gathered in coffeehouses, women turned bathhouses in community centers, where they lounged with neighbors and relatives.4 The wider horizons of the public, binding people unknown to one another, generally stretched no farther than the city limits. People identified themselves as Aleppine or Damascene, and only rarely as Ottoman. Aside from the relatively few soldiers, government officials, traveling merchants, and scholars, and those who managed pilgrimage to Mecca, contact or even knowledge of people outside of one’s home city was limited to relatives who might reside in an ancestral village or another town. Most people, in fact, identified mainly with their own quarter, although there were some spaces where they mixed with the wider urban population. The sense of urban unity was perhaps most strongly felt in the central markets, where people of all quarters might sell and shop with the broadest array of strangers.5 Likewise, the Friday mosque marked the heart of the city, and was its largest assembly space. Like smaller neighborhood mosques, it was used for a variety of communal activities. However, mosques were not unrestrictedly public, since only Muslim males customarily met in them. Christian and Jewish communal life focused separately on their local churches and synagogues. And while there were no formally public parks, certain spaces were customarily open for general leisure. In Damascus, men often lounged along the Barada River (women also did so, at times provoking moral outrage). In both Aleppo and Damascus, families would make picnics in the orchards that surrounded the city.6 In the late nineteenth century, the Ottoman state and European investors began to expand and reshape the urban public. Links among individual urban quarters were strengthened with the construction of tramways in Tripoli, Beirut, and Damascus. Aleppo expanded to the northwest of its walled city from the s onward, where railroad stations anchored new commercial districts and bourgeois quarters. Clocktowers were built in the centers of Aleppo, Beirut, and other cities, marking a new concern with common timekeeping.7 Social horizons also expanded beyond an individual city with increased ease of communication. A French-built carriage road connected Beirut and Damascus in . In the s, the Tripoli-Homs-Damascus and Baalbek-Beirut highways were built. And by the turn of the century, railroads and telegraph networks also linked the cities. The Ottomans and Europeans also built new civic centers in major cities. In Damascus, Midhat Pasha, governor between  and , paved over the Barada River and built a new public garden and courthouse just west of the old city walls. These became the nucleus of the city’s new civic center, Marja Square, built between  and . Marja became the node of the city’s telegraph and

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

tramway lines and featured the Serail (government palace), a large police station, a hospital, a multi-storey office building, and several hotels. To the east of the square, new covered bazaars were built, notably the extensive Hamidiya market (Suq al-Hamidiya), which stretched to the Umayyad mosque. To the west rose the Hijaz railway station and the Victoria Hotel. Marja’s theaters and cafes offered nightly entertainment, including music, circus acts, and dancers. In the late s cafe singers became choice entertainment among elites in Syria and Lebanon.8 In Beirut, private initiatives and foreign capital contributed heavily to changing the urban landscape, particularly in the s economic boom. By the turn of the century, the city’s bustling commercial district revolved around Burj Square (also called Place des Canons or Martyrs’ Square), first built as a public park in . Like Damascus’s Marja, it hosted modern hotels, theaters, and cafes, as well as major tramline stops. In , the new Orosdi-Beck department store and a railway station opened on the city’s northern shore, near the port. A government center was established west of Burj Square, where the Hamidiya fountain was dedicated near the Grand Serail, the Ottoman government headquarters and future seat of the French High Commission. Bordering a working class district, the new square (later named for nationalist leader Riyad al-Sulh) became a gathering ground during Muslim holidays and a major commercial district. World War I hastened the pace of change, as Jemal Pasha demolished whole neighborhoods in Beirut to make way for wide avenues.9 In all three major cities, the new civic centers coexisted with the “madina,” the old city’s central markets, artisanal districts and mosques. But they also gradually transformed the relationship of the quarters to one another, as the tramlines and avenues that radiated from them broke down neighborhood barriers and attracted large numbers of people to gather in one central location. While French urban planning followed Ottoman precedents, it produced distinctively colonial social effects. The French amplified Ottoman efforts to expand the new civic centers and build new extramural quarters. In Damascus this led to a polarization of the “modern” and “traditional” city. The French settled and Europeanized the Salihiya quarter northwest of Marja, where their barracks, Officers’ Club, and lycées were located. Urban elites were attracted to the district’s modern amenities, where together with the French they developed a lifestyle distant from that in the old quarters they left behind. The relationship of domestic and public space changed, for example. Elite families left behind their households built around an internal courtyard for villas and apartments built on wide avenues. There, they took pleasure in gardens built outside the home or strolled in newly created public parks and

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gendering the public

along sunny boulevards. Some elite men took to taking walks and picknicking in public with their wives, although others frowned upon the practice.10 A  cartoon satirized the new potential for male-female interaction in places like Marja Square, showing two flapper-style women being pursued by gentlemen in fezzes (fig. ).11 In contrast, French architects sought to preserve and contain the “traditional” city within the old walls, a policy pursued in other colonial cities. They carefully restored old monuments like the eighteenthcentury ‘Azm Palace and routed automobile traffic away from the old quarters.12 Reciprocally, popular leaders in the old quarters asserted a new conception of “traditional” life there to be protected from French influence. It was in these quarters, for example, that Islamic populists built their schools. Customary processions on religious holidays, especially the Prophet’s birthday, took on a new political meaning as defiant assertions of a lifeworld resistant to colonial interference.13 As France’s headquarters, Beirut followed a slightly different pattern. The old city was entirely obliterated by French urban development, so social polarization progressed not between competing centers, but between the Frenchdominated center and outlying districts. New was the increased presence of foreigners, particularly French. The number of foreigners in Beirut had remained under five percent of the population until World War I, then rose to  percent in the mandate period.14 The French concentrated both west of the center city, along the shoreline between the Grand Serail and the Avenue des Français, and to its south, where the French hospital and St. Joseph University were. Avenues radiating from this center were named for French generals. The Lebanese population of the city was split between the francophile, Christian, bourgeois quarters of Ashrafiya, Sayfi, and Ghabah in the east, integrated into the republican regime, and the popular districts to the west and south, like Musaytba, where a diverse mix of rural migrants settled, and where new sectarian movements catered to residents’ feeling of marginalization in the city. The city’s first bidonvilles sprouted around its neglected edges.15 Ras Beirut, a wealthy enclave around the American University of Beirut at the western end of town, developed its own brand of nationalist, dissident, but elite culture. Beirut’s elites adopted European customs more rapidly than their Damascene cousins did. In relatively prosperous middle-class homes in Damascus, families still slept on bedrolls on the floor and used common utensils at meals eaten by the light of gas lamps; many purchased their first electric lamps, chairs, and sets of dinner plates only in the s.16 In contrast, by the early s Beirut’s bourgeois villas were already equipped with Czech and Belgian bathroom fixtures, German aluminum cooking utensils, and French silver-

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

ware. Toothbrushes were introduced shortly before the war, and by  an estimated  percent of the Beirut population used them. While knives and forks appeared as early as the s, European-style beds and dining tables were generally used by Beirut’s upper and middle classes by . New to the postwar period were the luxuries that electricity could provide: electric doorbells, fans, and refrigerators appeared in elite homes in the s.17 The imported furnishings and gadgetry were not entirely practical, from a social viewpoint. While they offered status and convenience, they also strained budgets. In the mid-s, a Beiruti complained to an American visitor that the conventions of a European lifestyle made it too expensive to play the customary role of hospitable host: With the use of furniture, beds and individual rooms, instead of sleeping on mattresses on the floor, and with the need for dining at tables with knives and forks and china, and the service of meals in courses, instead of sitting on the floor in Arab fashion all gathered around one central tray, it has become very difficult to welcome whole-heartedly and entertain indefinitely any number of guests as we used to do.18 Perhaps because of the increasing cost of home entertainment, homes became more private, and the expanding bourgeoisie began to socialize more in clubs, restaurants, and hotels. In Beirut, the Avenue des Français became crowded with hotels, cafes, cinemas and restaurants. The number of hotels in Beirut nearly doubled from  to , and continued to increase in the s. Beirut’s restaurants also increased in number during the same period, from  to .19 In Damascus, a similar but slower trend ensued: In the s, the new Orient Palace Hotel supplanted the Victoria Hotel as the new bourgeoisie’s preferred spot to socialize, and Marja’s cafe culture migrated northwest toward Salihiya, where it attracted an exclusively rich clientele. The annual balls for the Red Cross and Drop of Milk Society were now held in hotels, glittering affairs noted in the press for their excess of electric lights. In , an article on the winter social season noted that Damascus had become “unrecognizable,” in that the previous year receptions had been held at socialites’ homes and had been “more or less tiring for women,” who had to prepare them. This year, however, the receptions had moved to hotels, clubs and cafes and so were “more gay and chic, and less fatiguing for everyone.”20 While mostly a male milieu, nightlife drew increasing numbers of women, at first foreign and Christian. By the mid-s, even some Muslim women attended mixed-sex charity balls.



gendering the public

The difference in the gendering of elite sociability in Christian-dominated Beirut and Muslim Damascus may be captured by a look at women’s shopping. Bourgeois women in both cities, as we have seen, began spending more of their leisure time outside the home, gathering at one another’s homes to plan charity work and the like. By the s in Beirut, women had stopped asking their husbands’ permission every time they left the home. Whereas men had always done the household shopping, women increasing undertook that task.21 The new consumption lifestyle of the rich also drove them to the stores. Beirut’s downtown shopping districts were identified with “modern” fashion. By , Christian Beirutis had generally adopted Parisian styles of dress. A decade later, both Syrian and Lebanese women wore French high heels.22 And while most Muslim women in Beirut continued to wear veils until the early s, they would pull them off downtown, only to don them again when they returned to their home neighborhoods.23 No such shopping district existed in Damascus. For bourgeois Damascene women, Beirut became the focus of longing, a local Paris where they might shop freely for the latest fashions.24 At home, however, their husbands still did most of the shopping, as it was considered indecent for notable women to walk in the street. However, a prominent sociologist of the day, Kazem Daghestani, blamed Damascene women’s supposed idleness at home for their “morbidity” and tendency toward “lesbian love.” He applauded women’s charity work as a healthy means of ousting women from their pathological nests.25 Clearly attitudes toward space were changing. Women’s quarters of the home, the most private of spaces marking the family’s honor, were now viewed by at least some bourgeois elites as potential dens of idleness and sin. One must be careful, however, to distinguish the Europeanized bourgeoisie from other elites who remained in old quarters and adhered to customary lifestyles, shunning the new trends. Lutfi al-Haffar, a leader of the Syrian National Bloc, for example, never learned French and maintained the family traditions of his native quarter of Shaghur, despite his move to the francophone Salihiya quarter of Damascus. While he permitted his daughter to study at French schools, he kept her under tight supervision at home, much to her dismay. The Haffars, like the middling and lower classes, pursued a very active social life focused on visits, weddings, and holiday celebrations at home with relatives and neighbors. Women often held monthly receptions for other women in their homes.26 While the mandate period saw the full emergence of distinctly bourgeois spaces and lifestyles, it also introduced a new mass culture. What was restricted to the elite in the late Ottoman period now spread to middle and lower classes, as a new phase of capitalist penetration swept in a multitude of

remapping the urban landscape



imported consumer goods and practices. By the mid-s little girls in the mountains of Lebanon wore imported French dresses and by the early s a set of household inventories showed that average families in Syria frequently owned numerous imported or Western-style products: electric irons, imported dress shirts, toothbrushes, aspirin, electric lamps, telephones, packaged cookies, canned meat, tuna and sardines, chairs made of iron and wood, and even some gramophone records.27 Technology underpinned the growth of mass culture, creating wider spaces where individuals might associate. Before the Great War, only the most wealthy could travel to Cairo, Istanbul, and Europe in search of broader cultural horizons. A quarter-century later, railroads, automobiles, and airplanes brought information from the neighboring cities and the farthest reaches of the globe into every quarter of the city. A Lebanese schoolteacher, for example, recalled how her middle-class family took a tour of Hama, Homs, and Damascus by train in .28 Train travel was soon superseded, as airports were built in the major cities and as motor transport boomed. There were virtually no civilian automobiles in the Levant in  (and only a very few before the war); by  there were , registered cars, trucks, buses, and motorcycles.29 Most cars were taxis for hire within or between cities; a trip between Damascus and Beirut in  took only three hours. Many roads were still bad enough, though, that a trip from Beirut to Aleppo took  hours.30 Electricity not only made charity balls glamorous, but expanded the horizons of the urban public with extended tramlines, radio and telephones. Electricity was introduced to Damascus and Beirut before World War I. In , Beirut had only  subscribers for electricity, but by the early s, electrical lines were installed in many Lebanese villages. Aleppo’s first municipal electric plant opened in  and the Hama-Homs plant in .31 With the reception of Cairo radio stations from  and the opening of Radio-Levant in  another new public realm emerged. More than , radios were sold between  and , many of them played continuously in public places like cafes and barber shops. Taxis and buses often paused in villages still without electricity to allow locals to hear broadcasts on their radios.32 Arabic and European classical music, Qur’an readings, and news programs dominated radio programming. Telephones, long restricted to military networks, spread gradually during the s to wealthy homes, individual offices, and public places. By , there were phone booths at most busy intersections of large cities.33 In , more than  million local calls were made from , telephones in the region. An additional . million calls were made between Syrian and Lebanese cities.34

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gendering the public

Also important in fostering mass culture, and mass politics, was the proliferation of popular meeting places. In , the sanitary police designated in Damascus alone  locations as public spaces, including baths, hotels, restaurants, and theaters. Of the total of  public spaces in all of Syria,  were cafes, a time-honored meeting spot. There were also  theaters in the country, concentrated in the cities of Aleppo and Damascus.35 People also met in train stations, libraries, and most of all in the growing numbers of schools. It had been out of encounters in elite schools that the bourgeois nationalist and women’s movements had formed by World War I; in the s, the proliferation of schools would foster much larger middle-class youth movements. The mandatory state constructed a new regulatory apparatus to control these new forms of sociability, which had been largely unforeseen in the Ottoman laws. Automobile licenses and road regulations were issued in the early s.36 The French not only obliged all male citizens to carry identity cards, but also strengthened Ottoman laws regulating public meetings and requiring all associations to register with the state.37 Public buildings were regularly inspected for health, safety, and political violations. Extensive regulations were imposed on all music halls and night clubs. Extreme policing measures were taken after times of rebellion. In , for example, it was impossible for a civilian to obtain a street map of Damascus without making a written request to the municipality.38 In sum, the expansion of public space fostered new and broader forms of socialization, and new forms of conflict. New city centers and their adjacent quarters for elite leisure created new class boundaries, and upset old gender boundaries. The new centers stood as glittering, opposing poles to old city centers focused on the declining artisanal districts and Friday mosques, where religious norms governed sociability, not the pursuit of “modern” fashion and leisure. The graduated spectrum of restricted to unrestricted urban space, where social life concentrated within quarters populated by familiar faces, was now punctuated with novel and confusing new usages of space by people who were strangers to one another. Finally, the state’s growing claims to regulate public morality over widening swaths of urban terrain increasingly pre-empted local authority over communal space in individual city quarters. What had been a presumption of power by the Ottomans became more controversial when the French assumed control of the state. Just as gender had once marked what was most public and most private in urban space, it would become the bounding principle in conflicts over control and use of the new spaces in the cityscape. As women increasingly moved through the city, in pursuit of work, education, leisure or their rights, along

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with them moved the old markers of public and private boundaries. With each footstep women seemed to shake the social and political order. Symptomatic of this disturbance, at a mundane level, was a running debate on where women should walk on sidewalks. The Beirut journal al-Haris answered in  that they should walk at the side of their male escorts, away from the street.39 While gender integration in public was perhaps most remarkable among elites, it also progressed among lower levels of the populace. The postwar influx of rural refugees disrupted norms of sex segregation in popular quarters of cities, as rural women were accustomed to working and to going about unveiled. A photograph taken in Damascus just after the Ottoman evacuation, for example, shows numerous poor and unveiled women milling about the streets alongside men (fig. ). In the coming years, the decline of familybased artisanal businesses sent more women across town to wage-earning jobs, often as housemaids, traveling by foot along streets or by tram or bus, where they mixed with strange men. Likewise, while schools were segregated by sex, girls had to travel to them in unsegregated streets and tramcars. As the subsequent chapters of Part Four will show, women found themselves at the intersection of multiple urban battlefronts, between nationalists and colonizers, between religious and secular interests, and between rich and poor classes. In a curious twist the most radically modernized city, Beirut, which had lost its old center and had long been dominated by Christians, saw the least conflict. Tension flared most violently in cities with the greatest Muslim majority, Damascus, Tripoli, Homs, and Hama, which remained in the s far more segregated according to gender. It was there that “modern” and “traditional” had been constructed in the most polarized, zero-sum terms.

chapter 11


Street Violence: Regendering an Old Urban Space

In  Damascus, police reported routine bumping and grasping of women on the streets by “villainous elements,” which reached the point that, according to a journalist, one “cannot walk with a woman without meeting incidents of this type.”1 By the early s, the daily frictions of changing gender patterns on urban streets multiplied as rising class and religious resentments came to focus on elite women (see Part Three). Into these very same streets were inserted new political tensions, as the primary locus of confrontation between the French and nationalists moved after  from the countryside to the cities. The militarization of civilian streets inscribed existing gender frictions with new political meanings. And conversely, nationalists’ street politics would necessarily be shaped by the gender frictions that prevailed there. This dual development was evident in the staging of nationalist demonstrations, culminating in the mass protests of  and in the rise of proto-fascist, paramilitary youth groups. Both phenomena effected a progressive remasculinization of the streets and mass politics, with profound implications for the women’s movement. While women too, made claims to the streets as a political forum, they would be hampered in their efforts to recruit a mass base to their movement by their male competitors.

Women Confront Paternalistic Street Politics France’s siege mentality since the Syrian Revolt appears to have promoted the violent climate in city streets. Civil protests against corrupt elections and suspended parliaments were routinely met by battalions of soldiers and surprise arrests of leaders. In October , just before Syria’s first parliamentary elections, the American consul remarked that normal political life was impossible in an atmosphere of military occupation:

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For there saunter along the streets of Beirut (and, I presume, of Damascus, Aleppo and other towns of this country) the doughty soldiers of Morocco, the Spahis of Algeria, beautiful specimens from Senegal and even the short, high cheek-boned, slant-eyed fellows from Indo China, always carrying their side arms. What wonderful allies for Mr. Alfred Capone the gentlemen from Morocco would make!2 The racial overtones of the consul’s report may have been peculiarly American, but they echoed the alienation and humiliation of Syrians and Lebanese who daily encountered the French state in the form of thuggish colonial troops, not as enlightened administrators guiding them toward the mandate’s promised political maturity. This impression was deepened when the French suspended Lebanon’s constitution in May , in reaction to the budget crisis and the possibility that a Muslim, Muhammad al-Jisr, might run for president. Syria’s first elected parliament assembled the next month, in June , but sat for only  months. In November  it too was suspended after nationalists blocked a proposed independence treaty perpetuating French influence and Syrian disunity. As nationalist agitation increased from  onward, so did France’s intransigence. With another world war on the horizon, French generals pressured Paris to secure its hold on the Levant’s vital ports and airfields.3 When Syrians finally mounted the  general strike, Subhi Barakat, president of the suspended parliament, wrote the high commissioner: “You did not enter this country as a conqueror in order to consider it your lawful property; and to kill its women, men and children, not for any crimes committed, but because they demand their rights.”4 Veterans of the s rural revolts carried over their gendered rhetoric to the new urban battleground. During the Syrian election campaign in October , nationalists and police battled in the streets of Aleppo because the nationalists had not acquired the necessary permit for their meeting. The French routinely withheld permits for nationalist assemblies and then sent troops to break them up when they were held anyway. At the Aleppo meeting, the popular veteran of the earlier revolts, Ibrahim Hananu, declared: “France has led us to the last degree of degradation, sucking our blood. In the event of the success of her colonization program, she will violate our domiciles and our women.”5 Echoing the language of the s pamphlets discussed in chapter two, Hananu characterized the streets as a battleground for male soldiers and private homes as the final frontier of conquest. Women were the absent prize, the damsels in the castle, in the politics of public space. The marking of private space as female, we have seen, recalled longtime practice in the city. Its

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enduring hold on Syrians’ geographical imagination was expressed in article  of the  constitution, which declared that “the domicile is inviolable,” thus marking women as off-limits to the state.6 But, as we have also seen, times had changed and urban women were no longer secluded in their homes. Not only did many women now leave home without their husbands’ permission to shop, visit friends, or conduct charity programs, but they also participated in urban street demonstrations. In the s, women of prominent families had often led nationalist protests and organized their own marches, braving attack by French soldiers. In the s, Syrian women demonstrated in greater numbers and with more frequency, as the women’s movement committed itself to full alliance with nationalists in the hope that they would be rewarded as patriotic mothers with full citizenship. One contemporary observer estimated there were , women in Damascus alone disposed to participate in nationalist actions, sending petitions to the French and the League of Nations, and turning out for protest marches.7 In , hundreds of Damascene women, especially students and schoolteachers, demonstrated against the rigged parliamentary elections by marching alongside men and riding unveiled in automobiles, braving gunfire exchanged between protesters and police.8 Again in November , elite women protested the suspension of parliament by driving around Damascus in cars, while women in popular quarters joined on foot. In the wealthy Salihiya quarter, demonstrators confronted a company of Senegalese soldiers in front of the parliament building. To defuse the crowd’s anger, the French commander ordered soldiers to distribute the entire inventory of flowers from a nearby florist to the women leading the march. The incident was remembered as “Ladies’ Day.” In the more popular Darwishiya area of the city, however, Shafiqa al-Jabiri, aunt of an official in the education ministry, was killed by a soldier’s bullet.9 Women’s participation in demonstrations apparently confounded both French and Syrian nationalist men. The French, on the one hand, did not even officially recognize women’s presence in the streets. Patrolling soldiers sought to control the streets by routinely asking males to show their national identity cards. However, they could not do the same with female pedestrians, as women were not generally issued identity cards. Women’s nationalist allies, on the other hand, welcomed female demonstrators as symbolic auxiliaries to their protests, but were not prepared when women staged political actions of their own. A  incident in Damascus highlights how the battle to control the streets often came to focus on gender, and how nationalist men hijacked women’s claims to presence in public—and political—space in their paternalistic rivalry with the French. November ,  was the day that the Syrian parliament

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was to reconvene, until High Commissioner Damien de Martel extended its year-long suspension in light of the continuing impasse in treaty negotiations. The National Bloc organized a march to protest the suspension as unconstitutional. During the night of November – pamphlets signed “The Girls of Damascus” were distributed around the city inviting women to join the protest. The next morning, a group of women gathered near the Umayyad mosque, in the heart of the old city. The women led the march of nationalists who gathered from around the country.10 When French police tried to disperse the marchers, they found the women neither meek nor obedient. The women showered police with stones and resisted orders to stop. Police arrested  of the most combative women on charges of organizing an unauthorized demonstration and disturbing public order. Some were also charged, at the Mixed Correctional Court, with assaulting police officers under Article  of the penal code. Called up before the judge, however, the women refused to remove their veils, and so reveal their identities.11 The women were playing neither to nationalists’ nor the French legal system’s script. In a remarkable moment of inversion, the women turned colonial paternalism on its head. Rendered invisible to French officialdom because they carried no identity cards, the women claimed their invisibility as an assertion of their political agency as citizens. The veil became a symbol not of their seclusion, but of their right to march in public. Harsh words were exchanged before the women were finally sentenced by the court: two of them to eight days in jail, six others to various fines. Three were set free. Reaction to the arrests was strong, ultimately engaging officials in Paris and Geneva. It was the first time in recent memory that women had been brought before a court for demonstrating. Groups from Aleppo, Hama, and Homs as well as Damascus petitioned the government and the League of Nations for the women’s release from jail. A telegram signed by about  women expressed the “discontent of Aleppine women with these regrettable acts” and protested the “oppression of women,” by arresting, trying and imprisoning them, as an “attack on the liberty and dignity of the nation.”12 While the women’s petition made no particular distinction between the rights of male and female demonstrators, male petitioners used a gendered language that emphasized the exceptional circumstances of women’s public presence. Eight men from Homs warned de Martel: “Your functionaries must understand that the Arab woman is not like those of other countries. The arrest of Damascene ladies has caused a great commotion.”13 Aleppine men called the arrest of women “an attack on the most sacred traditions of the Muslim Orient.”14 Writers were particularly outraged by the physical treatment of the

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women, who were apparently handcuffed. The cobblers’ union of Hama wrote: “The audacity of the current government and the General Security police with regard to persons of the weaker sex, and the aggression of these police agents against Muslim women . . . has insulted the Syrian Nation.”15 With their references to the “weaker sex” and to Muslims’ honor invested in their women, these petitions implied that men and women did not act on an equal footing in political, public space, and that women’s participation was a departure from religious custom and usual gender roles. This contrasts with women’s claims to deep-seated Arab traditions of women’s public and political participation, as described in chapter six. Indeed, the women’s agency was systematically downplayed as the affair became a contest of honor between French and Syrian men. In his closing statement at the women’s trial, the prosecutor, M. Maugain, condemned the “lack of courage of those who send their women to disrupt the public order and to stone the police in their place.”16 Fakhri al-Barudi, an organizer of the demonstration, accused the French of impugning Syrian men’s honor in a note hand-delivered to Maugain: The injurious words that you addressed to the men of the Syrian Nation in the audience of the Mixed Court . . . impose upon me the duty, in my quality as a deputy of Damascus, to have this letter presented to you. You have accused us of cowardice because women have demonstrated their disapproval of the adjournment of the opening of parliament. . . . You are certainly not ignorant that the participation of women in patriotic demonstrations is one of the great glories of Nations: On her part, the Arab woman has always marched side-by-side with the Arab man especially in difficult situations and struggle against enemies, as history attests! French women themselves have often contributed to the safety of their country. Let us note among them Joan of Arc, Jeanne Hachette and those who offered their most precious jewels to pay the war reparations required by Germany in . In France, you regularly see women join men’s demonstrations, even lead them. However no one has dared, in similar cases, to accuse French men of cowardice.17 Barudi called the French on their colonial hypocrisy. Intent on casting Syria, like their North African colonies, as backward for its repression of women, the French refused to acknowledge that these Syrian women acted in seeming gender parity. To recognize such parity would undermine France’s justification for rule, as mentors of their civilizing mission. Indeed, only a month

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before this incident de Martel himself had told a Paris radio audience that Syrian and Lebanese men were stonewalling France’s enlightened efforts to open girls’ schools because they “try to forbid women all liberties and to keep them uneducated so as to better dominate them.”18 In making his point, Barudi supported the women’s viewpoint by asserting that Damascene streets like Parisian streets were open as a political forum to both genders. But he did not allow his gesture to spin out of control, into a manifesto for women’s equal rights. He closed his letter with an old-fashioned challenge to a duel in atonement for Maugain’s insult to Syrian manhood. The letter skillfully enveloped women’s citizenship within the paternalistic protection of men. Barudi portrayed the secular, modern nationalist as a man protecting his country’s honor, as he would his family’s hearth. The nation was a home, the streets its foyer, and parliamentary deputies like Barudi were its masters. The French were obstreperous guests. The French responded with their own paternalist claims. The Inspector General of Justice, Regis Manset, defended the jail sentences to de Martel, arguing that women as well as men were obliged to respect public order. But Manset also added that the women knew “that it is not a woman’s place to join in demonstrations against the public order and to assault police who try to maintain it.” He explained that Maugain sought to protect women from Syrian men “who didn’t hesitate to incite their wives and daughters to join this demonstration, hardly in keeping with their sex (peu en rapport avec leur sexe), and so expose them to serious troubles.”19 In other words, French men were better guardians of Syrian women than Syrian men were. Like Barudi, Manset regarded the women as minors not responsible for their own actions. This view was in keeping with French policy on national identity cards. The cards were used not only for street checks, but also in all citizen transactions with state officials. By issuing them only to adult men, the French constructed male heads of household as the mediating representatives of women and children in the civic order. Women were not supposed to seek direct contact with the state. As the affair dragged on, de Martel himself was obliged to defend Maugain’s actions to his superiors in Paris. He did so by repeating Manset’s criticism of the women’s unladylike behavior.20 And as Barudi had done, de Martel denied the women’s agency: The public prosecutor’s office was accused in bad faith for stigmatizing the agitators who put women in the front lines of a demonstration and who invoked the principles of Islam to disarm the tribunal in the hearing of these women, who refused to remove their veils and reveal their

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identity. This shows that directors of the National Bloc try to use every chance that presents itself to rally their troops and advance their propaganda.21 Despite lack of evidence to support their claim that male nationalists ordered the women to retain their veils in court, French officials apparently ignored the possibility that it was the women themselves who were manipulating religious symbols for the nationalist cause. The women, for their part, continued to refuse to pay their fines, and were finally amnestied by de Martel in March . Judging from the names of those amnestied, they were mostly young, unmarried women from respectable families, but not from among the leadership of the women’s movement.22 This is evidence that women’s mobilization in  was broadening. Indeed, women participated prominently in the massive  protests in both Syria and Lebanon.23 The street battles in Syria were so brutal that observers called them a revival of the – revolt. In January, the French closed down the National Bloc office in Damascus and arrested Fakhri alBarudi, amidst continued tensions over the suspension of parliament and stalled treaty negotiations. Tens of thousands marched in protest in Damascus and Aleppo, while youths threw bombs at buildings and attacked police with knives. In response, the French declared martial law, and sent soldiers into the streets. Six people were killed and hundreds more were wounded and arrested. Nonetheless, Syrian women braved the streets, and dared once again to stone police after more nationalist leaders were arrested in February.24 Violence died down in Syria soon thereafter with the forced resignation of Shaykh Taj as prime minister. In Lebanon, sympathy strikes flared during the Syrian protests and through spring and summer. Muslim demonstrations for independence and union with Syria broke out in Tripoli, Sidon, and other cities. Full-scale riots erupted in October and November  in Beirut between Sunni Muslims and Christians, both armed with guns and knives, evoking comparisons to the “ bloodbath.” At issue was the independence treaty being negotiated on the coattails of the Syrian nationalists’ victory. The Muslims opposed the treaty’s reinforcement of boundaries with Syria while the Christians supported it. The French again rolled tanks through the streets, and shot at least four protesters dead, wounding scores more.25 Even rural Lebanese women joined the  protests, most notably a woman dubbed “The Virgin,” who led crowds in songs for Syrian unity in the southern village of Bint-Jubayl.26 While most of these women’s demonstrations were mounted in conjunction with those led by male nationalists, toward the end of the decade women

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reasserted their claim to an independent political presence in the streets. In  and , for example, Damascene women organized four protests on their own. In January,  female schoolteachers gathered at the Sultan Selim mosque to protest delays in their paychecks. Before they started their march, however, government officials rushed to the scene. The next month, about  women protested against French rule, veiled for anonymity. They too confronted police, some of them suffering injuries that caused renewed embarrassment to the French. And in June , fifty well-dressed, elite women representing their Committee for the Defense of Palestine and Alexandretta marched into Syrian government offices and presented a petition to the prime minister against plans to transfer the district of Alexandretta to Turkey (fig. ).27 In the summer of , the women’s union mobilized a wide network of women in Damascus’s popular quarters to protest the arrest of nationalist leaders, as the mandatory government moved toward martial law on the eve of World War II.28 The courage of women like these can be appreciated fully only when it is recalled how violent street politics had become in the s. By , the women’s movement had managed to assert a greater collective and political presence in the streets through mobilization of schoolteachers, students, and women from popular quarters. But the movement remained small and elitist in comparison to the mostly male movements of nationalists, workers, and Islamic populists that mushroomed in the late s. Expansion of the women’s movement was clearly hindered by gendered fears of the siegeminded French state. Indeed, when Syrian protests erupted in early  against the nonratification of the independence treaty and personal status reform, the French perpetrated the very violations forecast by Ibrahim Hananu: They sent arresting soldiers into private homes, provoking a flurry of male protest to the League of Nations.29 The message, sent by nationalist men after the November  demonstration, that the streets were too dangerous a place for women appears to have rung loud and clear. That message was soon reinforced by the emergence of proto-fascist, paramilitary groups who augmented the violent, and male, nature of street politics.

The Rise of Proto-Fascist Street Violence One day in April , the hubbub of a Damascene market was pierced several times with the cry “Heil Hitler!” as a German businessman saluted his clients. The incident caught the ear of the press, which reported that Hitler’s name had also surfaced a few days earlier in speeches at a nationalist economic confer-

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ence.30 At about the same time, the first Lebanese proto-fascist group emerged in public. The Syrian National Party (Hizb al-qawmi al-suri) was founded in secret in  by a Lebanese emigrant returned from Brazil, Antun Sa‘ada, who first recruited his followers at the American University of Beirut. Sa‘ada used the title führer and a swastika-style cross as an emblem, and adopted a party anthem entitled “Syria, Syria Above All,” set to the tune of “Deutchland Über Alles.” He formulated a uniquely precise ideology aimed at the pillars of colonial paternalism, emphasizing Syrian unity, secularism, and anti-feudalism. By late  the SNP had recruited at least , members, mainly in cities of Lebanon, but also in Syria, Palestine and Transjordan.31 Fascist influence would remodel nationalists’ approach to street politics. Since , Fakhri al-Barudi and other nationalists had been organizing boy scouts into a male youth wing of the Syrian National Bloc called Patriotic Youth. However, members of the youth wing soon rebelled against their elders and formed their own groups. One of these was the League of National Action (‘Usbat al-‘amal al-qawmi), a militant party joined by thousands of students and young professionals, some of whom sported Iraqi-style military caps and staged military-style parades.32 In early , another youth group, more popular in character, adopted the name Iron Shirts (Qumsan al-hadidiya) in imitation of the Bronze Front of the Third Reich and the Iron Guards of Bucharest.33 Fueled by the mass protests of  and , the size and number of protofascist paramilitary groups soon mushroomed in both countries. Abd al-Rahman Kayyali, a National Bloc leader in Aleppo, discreetly sponsored the formation of a branch of the Iron Shirts (known as the National Guards) there. In September , the Iron Shirts hosted a national rally celebrating the independence treaty at Damascus’s race track. More than , spectators—including the entire National Bloc leadership—watched  Iron Shirts march in military formation and distribute flags. More than , Iron Shirts paraded the next month through the city’s main Hamidiya market with flags, horses and motorcycles. By , they counted , members in all of Syria. Simultaneously the Christian-dominated White Badge emerged in Aleppo, promoting separation from Damascus, French loyalty, and opposition to the independence treaty. Pledged to defend Christian interests, it posted guards in front of churches. By October  the White Badge counted , members in Homs, Hama, Antioch and Dayr al-Zur. The smaller White Shirts, a Catholic group in Tripoli and other cities, and the Young Arabs of Homs together counted at least , members.34 Most prominent in Beirut by  were the Phalanges libanaises (Lebanese Battalions), started by Pierre Jumayyil (Gemayel), a pharmacist who had

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admired the youth groups and physical discipline at the  Berlin Olympics, and their Muslim counterparts, the Najjada (Helpers), promoted by Muhi al-Din Nasuli, a leader of the Muslim scouting movement and newspaper publisher. Jumayyil founded the Phalanges in November , following the bloody street clashes in Beirut between Christians and Sunni Muslims. The group recruited , members within a year. Although the Phalanges (which did not adopt its Arabic name, al-Kata’ib, until the s) called for members of all religions, it recruited mainly Maronite men and proclaimed a specifically Lebanese nationalism, in overt conflict with the pan-Syrianism of Sa‘ada’s SNP and the pan-Arabism of the Najjada.35 The Najjada remained the smallest of the three major Lebanese groups. The fascist nature of the groups is debated by scholars.36 While the Iron Shirts used the Nazi salute of an extended arm, its secretary general, Munir al-‘Ajlani, swore at the September  rally that they were neither Nazis nor fascists, but simply nationalists seeking Syrian unity and independence.37 And while racist ideologies characteristic of European fascism were not prominent in the Levantine movement (although anti-Zionism was), the groups emerged in a general atmosphere favorable to other fascist ideals. Since at least  newspapers had been printing Hitler’s speeches and excerpts from Mein Kampf. Hitler and Mussolini were viewed in both Syria and Lebanon as models of strong statebuilders who had lifted their people from poverty.38 Like European fascist groups, those in the Levant represented youthful and lower middle-class rebels against bourgeois rulers like Jamil Mardam Bey in Syria and Emile Eddé in Lebanon, whom they viewed as too ready to accept the status quo. In a limited sense the groups were subaltern movements, for they opposed the power of mediating elites, seeking to substitute the direct loyalty of citizens to the nation for old patron-client ties. Frustrated by economic decline, corrupt French liberalism, and the social upheaval of the decade, the proto-fascist groups adopted the rhetoric of a supra-state nationalism, social discipline, and rapid, state-led economic development. The Najjada’s Nasuli, for example, criticized “moral chaos” in public life and adopted the motto “Arabism Above All” on his newspaper’s masthead, which also printed glowing accounts of German youth’s support of Hitler and the German state’s social discipline.39 In Lebanon, the SNP and Phalanges overtly campaigned on behalf of the poor. In Syria, old notables vigorously opposed the various groups’ recruitment of urban youth because it threatened their own clientele networks. Even National Bloc leaders began to worry about the groups’ growing autonomy.40 Sa‘ada’s SNP especially drew the ire of Arab nationalists in the National Bloc, who called his anti-feudal platform for land reform a lie intended to hoodwink a gullible

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public and his emphasis on Syria’s multi-ethnic heritage an ignorant denial of Arab history.41 Most important for our purposes here, the groups adopted the violent methods and the fetishisms of male physical strength that were associated with fascism. From  onward, they dominated street politics with paramilitary parades that sometimes ended in rowdy brawls and always posed the threat of violence with their military-style uniforms and weapons. The Iron Shirts wore the insignia of a torch-bearing hand and regularly stood guard outside of National Bloc meetings at the Orient Palace Hotel. They employed retired soldiers to train their members in weekly exercises, said to be preparation for revolt if the independence treaty negotiations failed. French police reported the purchase of hundreds of revolvers and , swords made by Damascene artisans to arm the Iron Shirts, paid for in part by the National Bloc.42 The Phalanges likewise held weekly military exercises and marched in the streets wearing khaki, military-style shirts. In November , about  Phalanges members battled Senegalese troops when they staged their first-anniversary parade in violation of the Lebanese parliament’s recent vote to outlaw all paramilitary organizations. Two Phalanges were killed, and Jumayyil himself was wounded. Despite its illegality the Phalanges continued to grow, with populist campaigns on behalf of the poor, to reach , members by .43 The SNP also thrived, despite Sa‘ada’s imprisonment for endangering state security and a general suppression of the group in early  after a clash with French troops. The SNP viewed itself as a people’s army committed to realizing a Greater Syria, and employed terrorism and sabotage to further its ends.44 In particular, the SNP regularly brawled with its ideological rivals, the Phalanges and Najjada; indeed, all of the groups engaged in street battles with one another. In September , Iron Shirts battled the League of National Action in Damascus. The following month, a fight between thousands of nationalist Iron Shirts and separatist White Badges in Aleppo’s main market left three dead and  wounded. In January , Iron Shirts again brawled with the League of National Action, this time in a Hama cafe. By , the Iron Shirts were splitting into factions coopted by rival urban notables, provoking further violence.45 The groups also engaged in turf wars with Islamic populists and Communists, whose propaganda began to highlight anti-fascism. Communities began to complain to local police about the danger of gunfire between rival paramilitary groups, and the “pressure” the groups imposed on their neighborhoods.46 By , the National Bloc reasserted control over the Syrian groups, while the Lebanese state succeeded in repressing the outlawed groups. Despite their short and embattled existence, the proto-fascist groups utterly

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transformed the atmosphere of street politics, not only in their routinization of violence, but in their heightened masculinity. Unlike their Communist archrivals, the proto-fascists did not form female auxiliaries. While Sa‘ada’s party admitted a few female members, Jumayyil’s Phalanges explicitly restricted membership to Lebanese males aged  to . And while women cheered parades of the Iron Shirts from sidewalks and balconies, the group’s April  manifesto welcomed only “sincere young men.”47 One reason women were excluded may have been ideological. The Phalanges’ slogan—“God, Fatherland, Family”—bespoke its commitment to a paternalistic social and political order. Nasuli of the Najjada similarly referred to Beirut as a family, and to the mufti as its father.48 This contrasted with Sa‘ada’s German-style secularism committed to fostering loyalty to a broader collectivity in preference to the family. However, fascist ideology did not exclude women entirely. Nazis in Germany and Fascists in Italy recruited women to their cause, albeit on ambivalent terms.49 They also reached out to girls in the Levant. In August ,  girls and  boys donned fascist uniforms and set sail from Tripoli to Rome; upon their return in October, the girls sang fascist songs as they disembarked.50 Profascist periodicals, such as al-Amali of Beirut and Nasuli’s Bayrut featured articles on girls in the Hitler Youth, whose drills were “naturally” less demanding and whose main role was in social work.51 Indeed, Bayrut was unique in its avid coverage of female soldiers around the world, applauding, for example, a  Turkish law extending the military draft to women, who were quoted as saying “it is our right to help defend our country.”52 There was, in fact, within prevailing paternalistic attitudes, ideological space to permit women’s participation in the movement. A determining factor in the marginalization of women in the proto-fascist movement was the politics of public space: recruitment took place mainly in scouting troops, cafes, high schools, and universities. While there were some girl scout troops, there were, as we have seen, only about a thousand female high-school students in all of Syria and Lebanon. And while some of these were known to organize nationalist groups among themselves, they were nearly all segregated into their own all-female buildings. Although female college students did mix with men, their numbers were even smaller, perhaps a few dozen in all by the late s. As a result, even though Sa‘ada’s party encouraged women to join, women were not normally found in the places where SNP members socialized. Likewise, the League of National Action in Syria moved in all-male social spaces, meeting frequently in cafes that remained beyond the limits of respectability for women. In contrast, the Communists

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gendering the public

recruited in factories, where women of lower classes (most of them also Christian) worked in the same spaces as men. The gendering of public space thus shaped patterns of recruitment during this unprecedented period of mass political mobilization. As damaging to women’s political mobilization was the routinization of violence and the attendant paternalistic attitude toward women in public spaces. As long as French troops were the only soldiers on the street, Syrians and Lebanese could respond by asserting the civil character of the streets, open to all for peaceful political expression, as Fakhri al-Barudi had done in . But the emergence of the proto-fascist youth groups militarized the urban turf on both sides, and women were by definition not soldiers. The streets were constructed as a wartime battlefield, where women might only exceptionally be permitted to join Arab men in their common struggle. But since the streets had become a primary political forum, women’s exceptional status in street actions also marginalized them in politics. While women’s street presence had merely been the target of individual and personal attacks in the s, it took on a broader political meaning in the s. The French, nationalists, and their counterparts among proto-fascist youth positioned themselves collectively as paternalistic guardians of women in the political arena. In their rivalry, the male groups deliberately undercut women’s autonomy, in a virtual betrayal of earlier promises of support to women’s emancipation. In the context of other battles within the civic order, over women’s suffrage, veiling, and the desperate efforts of working men to maintain a family wage, we might read the street nationalism and protofascism of the s as a response to the crisis of paternity. After the guns of the Syrian Revolt were silenced, these male groups sought to rearticulate a political masculinity in face of their effeminization—even rape—by the French. However, the nationalist/proto-fascist regendering of street space was an ambiguous arrangement. As we have seen, women found strategies to subvert paternalism and reassert their agency. And proto-fascists, while paternalistic, embraced a vision of a more “modern,” rationalized society united by a common patriotism and freed of old social constraints. They would in fact support women’s presence in public (under their guidance) against the more extreme aims of religious groups, who sought to exclude women entirely from the new urban public in the name of public morality. We now turn to a space that exemplified that new public, the cinema.

chapter 12


Cinemas: Gendering a New Urban Space

While streets had a long history—as old as cities themselves—of negotiation between the genders and between local and state authority, cinemas were a new form of public space, and so wide open to competing normative and jurisdictional claims. From the late s to the end of the mandate, Christian and Muslim religious groups contested the French state’s regulatory control of cinemas, in essence waging a turf war similar to that waged by nationalists in the streets. While Christians in Beirut campaigned against sexuality on the screen, Muslims in nearly every other city under the mandate campaigned against cinemas as a space of public assembly, and particularly against women’s presence in them. Elite women moviegoers became a lightening rod for religious, class, and anti-imperialist tensions. And because women were relatively weak players in the civic order, their demands for equality would once again be sacrificed to the alliance of paternalistic elites, as nationalists chose to ally with religious leaders against the French state. But more so than in the battles of the streets and the veil, women staunchly stood their ground for their right to go to the movies.

Cinemas as Volatile Public Spaces The first films to be shown publicly in the region were apparently by the pioneering French Lumière brothers, in about , followed by a  show at an Aleppine cafe staged by two wandering entrepreneurs from Anatolia. The first theaters devoted specifically to film screenings opened just before or during World War I.1 Cinema spread steadily after the war and soon became a regular form of urban entertainment. By , Damascus, Beirut, and Aleppo each had three or four cinemas. While German films had dominated wartime



gendering the public

screens, French and American silents conquered them after . Local favorites included Tarzan, cowboy and police serials, and the comedies of the French star Max Linder and Charlie Chaplin, who even planned a publicity stop in Syria in . Film showings were often accompanied by music, typically a drum and clarinet, and by vaudeville-style acts.2 The s brought the talkies to cities and silent films to smaller towns. By ,  of the  cinemas in Syria and Lebanon were equipped with sound projectors.3 American films by then far outnumbered French ones, because local viewers preferred action movies to French romances, and because American companies rented films more cheaply.4 A retired Damascene policeman remembers that as a boy in the s he climbed atop the roof of his apartment building in Marja Square to watch Gary Cooper movies in an open-air theater next door.5 By the s, most newspapers had regular movie columns. And by , there were  cinemas in both countries, holding , seats and selling . million tickets per year. That means , tickets were sold per week, suggesting a cinema-going public of more than , people, concentrated mainly in Beirut, Aleppo, Damascus, and Tripoli.6 The origins of cinemas in the Levant, however, situated them as socially and politically controversial spaces. Like the working-class origins of cinema in the United States, where storefront nickelodeons located in business and entertainment districts offered cheap thrills, the Levantine cinema first appeared in popular milieux, sharing tents with itinerant shadow puppet (karagöz) shows, or temporarily set up in the upper floors of cafes and merchants’ hostels (khans).7 Cinema’s first permanent spaces were located in the new city centers: Burj Square in Beirut, Marja Square in Damascus. Early cinema was thus closely associated with the racy cafe-music-theater culture catering to traveling merchants and elites that thrived in early twentieth century; that is, they were situated on the margins of urban life, spatially outside of residential districts, and culturally outside of the realm of social norms that governed life among the Muslim majority. Many of the earliest proprietors were often foreigners and non-Muslims, minorities in all cities save Beirut. The advent of talkies appears to have further marginalized the cinema in the s, biasing it toward French-educated elites and minorities. While popular classes could and did attend the silents well into the s, only those literate in a foreign language could fully enjoy European and American sound films, most subtitled in French. The regional market was still too small to justify the cost of separate prints with Arabic subtitles. Local film production was minimal, due mainly to lack of capital. Between  and , four silent feature films were made in Syria and Lebanon, but they failed at the box office because of French

cinemas



interference and competition from talkies.8 And while Arabic-language films from Egypt appeared after , only a handful per year were imported until the s. Moreover, cinema was priced beyond the means of the poorer masses. Beirut’s theaters were the most glitzy, and ticket prices there were twice as expensive as those in Damascus, where seats averaged  cents (U.S.) per show in . That represented about one-third of a male artisan’s daily pay; half a day’s pay for a typical female worker.9 The daughter of a Damascene grocer recalls that no one in her family could afford movies, and that their weekly entertainment in the late s was to listen to the famed Egyptian singer Umm Kalthum on the radio Thursday nights.10 In sum, cinema did not take hold in the Levant as a form of mass culture for the impoverished majority, as in the United States, where the poor and non-English-speaking immigrants flocked to nickelodeons. Cinema became instead the trendy entertainment for elites and minorities, thus situating it on the faultline of social tensions that were flaring into violence in the cities of the s. Politically, cinemas also occupied a volatile space. The market was not the only arbiter of who would go to the movies, and of what they would see. Cinemas were appropriated almost immediately by governments for propaganda purposes. The Ottomans, who had built the first formal live theater in Damascus in  as part of their efforts toward social reform, built the Janak Kala’a cinema in Damascus in  to screen war footage and propaganda, and appropriated the Taraqi theater in Aleppo for similar reasons. In  Faysal’s government sponsored a movie party featuring a documentary about his negotiations in Paris.11 Immediately after their occupation, the French sought assembly halls to spread their own propaganda, and found the postwar construction of cinemas to suit their needs.12 Cinemas were used as lecture halls and, increasingly, as venues for French-sponsored charity events. Where no cinemas were available, filmed propaganda could be shown outside under the nightime sky. Yusuf Wehbeh, a retired teacher in Damascus, recalls the first film he saw: footage of French soldiers shown in  by the French army in a local public park.13 Another Damascene recalls great excitement when the  film “Danton,” about the French Revolution, was shown.14 The French foreign ministry also distributed documentary films to schools and orphanages to “modernize youth” and to provide a “corrective to the impression of moral corruption and social decadence” among Europeans given by commercial films.15 In , for example, the French distributed a half-dozen educational films on health to schools, including ones on childrearing and prenatal care intended for female normal school students.16 By the s, the French ran the “Cinéma mobile” program, which projected newsreels of Charles de



gendering the public

Gaulle and Allied troops, along with short comedies and cartoons, to dozens of remote villages where movies had never before been seen.17 Cinema thus became a primary tool of the French civilizing mission. Cinemas also became primary meeting places for political parties. In , the nascent Communist Party held a meeting with workers in Beirut’s new Crystal Cinema.18 The Communists, labor unions and youth groups would continue to hold their meetings in Syrian and Lebanese cinemas. In October , a group of students from Italian schools in Beirut attended a showing of “Napoleon” at the Cinema Empire. They all wore black shirts and yelled “Long live Il Duce!” during the film, provoking a riot between them and other youth in the audience. In , the Iron Shirts made a short film of one of their biggest parades in Damascus.19 Cinemas were also a favorite haunt of the French secret police, who filed reports on audiences’ responses to their propagandistic newsreels and foreign films, particularly those from Italy, Russia, and Germany. In sum, the foreign content of most films and the exploitation of the auditoriums by local parties and French police politicized cinemas. They became a node of confrontation between colonizer and colonized, between Western cultural influence and indigenous audiences. In this, cinemas became unique spaces, quite different from the live theaters that preceded them with mainly Arabic dramas and musical acts. Regulation of these volatile cinematic spaces invoked a familiar pattern of negotiation, wherein the state claimed unilateral jurisdiction, some groups challenged the state’s authority and intervened as mediating authorities, and others sought guarantees of access as direct rights claimed upon the state. In the s, the mandatory state imported French regulations that classified cinema as a morally and politically suspect space, requiring all cinemas to register with police and observe curfews. A  regulation ordered cinemas closed on the eve of religious holidays, similar to cafes and music halls. But the state was also expected to make the cinema accessible to all. The state influenced the price of movie tickets through the taxes levied on them. In , Beirut students mounted a protest march for cheaper ticket prices, claiming them as a right just as they demanded cheaper tramway tickets and electric rates. Police were called in, and the state acquiesced. The students continued, however, to organize boycotts against cinema owners’ “greed and monopoly” in following years.20 The state also regulated film content. In , the French foreign ministry began reviewing all French films sent to their colonies to assure they respected French national interest, traditions, and custom. In , the High Commission formalized its guidelines for film censorship, which had been handled by a minor unit within the General Security police since . The new decree

cinemas



established a permanent censorship board headed by the General Security director and including five members, all French. Every film imported into Syria and Lebanon now had to pass the board’s review, and no appeals were permitted once the board banned a film.21 Censorship guidelines focused on protecting French prestige and on political issues. In , seeking protection against American competition, Paris ordered French film distributors to market only French-language films in French colonies, and asked American companies to dub their films into French.22 French censorship also interfered with attempts at local film production. Syrian and Lebanese filmmakers produced several short documentaries, of the first Syrian parliament in , the  Iron Shirts parade, Emile Eddé’s  election, the death of Lebanese President Charles Dabbas, and several demonstrations and strikes. Fakhri al-Barudi of the National Bloc even planned a film promoting the growth of modern industry.23 These documentaries were routinely cut heavily. In , High Commissioner Sarrail had promised no restrictions on filmmaking in Syria and Lebanon, except for views of military and security installations and activities. However, in , the High Commission tightened those rules, requiring all filmmakers to obtain the prior approval of its office.24 As World War II drew near, French security concerns heightened censorship in reaction not only to the growing power of the nationalist movement, but also to German and Italian propaganda. Depiction of sexual relations between colonizers and colonized proved to be a frequent flashpoint in the politicized arena of the cinema. In , for example, the censorship board banned “Insubordinate Woman” (“L’Insoumise”) because it depicted an “Arabic prince marrying a European girl which he wants to treat as a slave.” When a local film distributor complained, the High Commission defended the ban, claiming the film would incite audiences because it showed the “love of a white woman for an Arab (Mohammedan) and a conflict between the Arabs and European troops.”25 Local audiences, not just the French, rejected the notion of happy union between Europeans and Arabs. In , a French official noted with alarm that an Egyptian film showing “the disastrous consequences of marriage between an Oriental man and a European dancer full of sins and vices” drew large crowds, especially in Aleppo. Audiences applauded especially loudly when the Egyptian husband shot his French wife and her French lover.26 And in  the first Lebanese talkie, “The Ruins of Baalbek” (“Bayn hayakil ba‘labakk”), about a foreign tourist who falls in love with an Arab prince but is blocked from marrying him by his family, passed French censors and actually made a small profit.27

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gendering the public

Cinema, Women and the Regulation of Public Morality Film censorship also intensified because of local pressure from religious leaders. In  the makers of the first Syrian feature, “The Innocent Victim” (“al-Muttaham al-bari’ ”), were forced to reshoot most of the scenes at great cost because ulama protested to French censors against the performance of a Muslim woman as the heroine, despite her family’s approval. Reshot with a German actress, the film, about a band of thieves who terrorized the city in the Faysal era, drew overflow crowds to Marja Square on opening night. Although the film was a hit, the cost of reshooting it had bankrupted the nascent production company.28 Religious protests against cinema were apparently rooted not in anti-colonial passions, but in earlier protests against sexual morality in live theater. In  Damascus, conservative Muslim clerics had campaigned against a high school play about an Arab hero in Andalusia, on the grounds that Islam prohibited fictional representations as lies and that the play portrayed effeminate behavior by boys.29 In , another group of Damascene shaykhs protested to Faysal’s government against a play to be performed for a ladies-only audience. Women were customarily excluded from the city’s theaters. Some ulama of the time argued that women’s theater attendance was immoral because male actors could see their faces in the audience. The governor banned the play just before curtain call and substituted a film, drawing vigorous protest from the female audience.30 In  Beirut, Jesuits organized  Catholic students to protest a play called “Musketeers in the Convent” for its portrayal of lusty nuns and priests. Just as the flirtatious abbot and nuns began to dance with the musketeers, the students stood up and whistled to obliterate the scene. At the second performance, they threw a stink bomb inside the theater. High Commissioner Gouraud supported the students, censored the offensive scenes, and promised to censor any future dramas featuring religious personalities.31 The insistence on clear distinctions between male and female gender roles, the belief that dramas corrupted women more than men, and the general desire to censor portrayals of illicit sexual relations would later inform religious challenges to the state’s regulation of the cinema. Cinema protests would differ from those against live theater, however, in that they came to focus on capturing control of a specific institution, the film censorship board, and in that they became intertwined with colonial politics. These conditions aided in the mobilization of protest campaigns. Catholic protests against cinema’s sexual corruption of women and youth appear to have carried wide influence, particularly among women and students. In  Beirut, the Jesuit newspaper al-Bashir called for stricter

cinemas



censorship to prevent the corruption of youth by movie stars, and proposed a Catholic censorship organization similar to one in France.32 At the same time, Beirut’s Catholic Youth Circle advised parents not to allow their daughters to attend the cinema alone, and better, to take the whole family only to the Circle’s own, pre-censored film showings.33 In , the Eastern Women’s Conference in Damascus passed a resolution demanding strict censorship and minimum age limits to protect children from harmful films.34 In , a group of mothers concerned about cinema’s bad influence on youth petitioned the Lebanese president to increase censorship, but the High Commission intervened to veto their demand.35 Muslim leaders also demanded control over offensive film content. In , the Beirut mufti protested against the film “Adam and Eve,” which had been shown previously in Beirut without complaint. The mufti said a large number of Muslims approached him about the film’s demeaning portrayal of holy personages, in violation of an Ottoman law still in effect. He demanded the appointment of a special censor to guard religious prestige.36 The censorship board took heed and in  banned another film, “The Fortieth Door” (“La Quarantième Porte”), because it featured the kidnapping and abuse of Muslim women and Egyptian drug traffickers. Cecil B. DeMille’s “King of Kings” was similarly banned after protests from Muslims and Jews.37 French resistance to granting religious leaders a direct role in censorship, however, ignited a crisis in June , when Maronite and Jesuit groups in Beirut protested loose morals in the board-approved French film, “Mme Husson’s Rosebush” (“Le Rosier du Mme Husson”), about a village fete for a virgin girl. Reminiscent of earlier protests against the Musketeers play, Catholic clergy demonstrated against the film’s indecent posters, and a Jesuitorganized student group threw stink bombs into the cinema where the film showed. Students continued to interrupt film showings by orchestrating a deafening clamor in the theater, leading to their arrest by police. The uproar forced the censorship board to ban future showings of the film, even though High Commissioner de Martel insisted to his superiors in Paris that it contained only “a few slightly risqué allusions.”38 A month later, the High Commission issued a new censorship decree, in an apparent attempt to appease Catholic concerns about sex and the mufti’s concern about religious prestige. Revised guidelines expanded grounds for censorship beyond those of French national interest to include respect for public order and morals, respect for the sentiments of all religious rites and races, and the protection of youth “from films that might make too strong an impression on the imagination and senses.”39

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But for the Catholics, the issue was not limited to a few understated love scenes. They redoubled their campaign for a direct role in censoring films. In the wake of the Mme Husson crisis, Catholic students in Beirut formed a group called L’Equipe and began publishing a movie magazine, L’Ecran, which published repeated calls for representation of “chefs de famille,” presumably fathers, on the state censorship board. The same demand was voted at the  Congress of Catholic Youth of Syria and Lebanon, attended by  students from all major cities.40 Maronite Patriarch Antoine ‘Arida soon afterward urged French officials to close all cinemas, as well as houses of prostitution. Posing as the ultimate guardian of public morality, he argued that “it is France that perverts our people and introduces immorality to them.”41 The French steadfastly rejected these calls for popular representation as an infringement on state sovereignty, so L’Equipe pursued its aim to uplift the morality of films by other means. Through the s and early s, the group spread beyond Beirut, with branches in Tripoli, Damascus and Aleppo. Through L’Ecran, the group acted as an unofficial censorship board, providing readers with its own film ratings, according to three categories: films suitable for everyone, for adults only, or condemned as wholly immoral. L’Equipe members, in the spirit of the  Congress, regularly threatened cinema owners who scheduled films they considered immoral, and when the owners did not comply, they overturned chairs in their cinemas and mounted boycotts. In January ,  members were arrested for protesting nudity in a film shown at Beirut’s Rex theater.42 As in the United States, it was not only sex on the screen that drew moral censure. Critics viewed the darkened theaters, where strangers mingled away from the public eye, with suspicion, especially when women were involved. Cinemas attracted many women who had never before engaged in public amusements. And also as in the United States, where concern about female moviegoers’ virtue was tied to concern about the passing of Victorian social values, cinemas in the Levant became a magnet for the disparate gender anxieties about the emergence of the new urban public.43 “The cinema hall is the classic place of romantic rendez-vous. . . . It’s a closed, dark bottle where moral and physical fermentations reproduce easily,” declared a censorship advocate to the  Catholic youth congress.44 There were also distinctively colonial attributes to Levantine concerns. In an inversion of the American experience, class tensions came to focus on the supposed debauchery of elite, not lowerclass, moviegoers. According to Muhi al-Din al-Nasuli’s Bayrut newspaper, cinemas were the favored place of foreign women to seduce innocent Lebanese men, corrupting their national loyalty.45 While concerns about mixed-sex

cinemas



audiences in the United States were addressed by providing better lighting in cinemas, concerns in the Levant would ignite violent conflict. Elite female moviegoers in Syria and Lebanon became targets of three vectors of social and political tension, involving gender, class, and colonialism. Women’s film attendance was controversial from the start, because of their exclusion from live theater and because the first films were shown in cafes, by definition male spaces that were off-limits to women. Movies were, apparently, more acceptable for women than live theater. As the  incident suggested, at least that the movies, actors could not see women’s unveiled faces in the audience. With the construction of separate movie theaters, women’s attendance increased. Non-Muslim women began going to the movies with their families in mixed-sex cinemas in Christian neighborhoods, while Muslim women began attending the cinema when owners inaugurated sex-segregated showings. As early as  the Victory (Nasr) theater in Damascus’s Marja Square offered women’s-only matinees every Wednesday afternoon. By the mid-s, there were women’s-only showings in Beirut cinemas three or four times weekly.46 Once they discovered the silver screen, women apparently fell in love with it. Although no contemporary statistics are available on women’s moviegoing, a survey done years after the mandate period suggests that a majority of upperand middle-class women in Beirut had attended a film before , and that by  all of them had. A majority of upper- and middle-class women in Damascus and Tripoli began attending the cinema by , while only a few lower-class women did.47 Nadida Shaykh al-Ard recalled skipping classes on Mondays at the Fransciscan girls’ school in Damascus to attend matinees with her friends, especially movies starring Gary Cooper and Susan Hayward.48 Mysteriously, however, on June ,  a fire broke out in the Victory theater one hour before one of its first women’s matinees, destroying not only the theater, but also the nearby Hotel Royal and about  houses. Twelve people died. Officials determined that the fire was accidental, caused by an overturned lamp in the projection booth.49 Accidental or not, the fire was a portent. Coinciding with the controversy over women’s public presence ignited by Nazira Zayn al-Din’s book on unveiling, it ushered in an era of increasingly violent conflict about female moviegoers. The campaign to exclude women from cinemas was waged in predominantly Muslim cities by Islamic populists. In April , several hundred men in Tripoli petitioned the government to ban women’s access to all entertainment halls. The petition drive was organized by the Muslim Sporting and Literary Society, whose goal, according to the French officials who rejected their plea, was to fight the emancipation of Muslim women.50 The following year in Hama,

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a small conservative city south of Aleppo, religious leaders urged men to prevent their women from going to cinemas and blocked the introduction of a sound projector in one cinema, claiming talking films were even more pernicious than silent ones.51 In Latakia, the Muslim Youth group took up the cause in , distributing flyers that condemned Muslim women moviegoers.52 In July , the Hama governor caused an uproar when he ignored religious leaders and authorized the first women’s matinee in the city. Forty religious shaykhs, notables, and merchants, including members of the Islamic populist group al-Hidaya, demanded that the governor and the chief of the General Security police cancel the show. When they refused, the group tried to close down the city’s main market in protest. Violence erupted when some merchants refused to cooperate, and police were called in to stop it. Leaders of al-Hidaya then sent a telegram to Damascus, threatening the national government with “very grave consequences” if it did not intervene to stop the women’s show. When no reply came, the matinee took place that afternoon under heavy police guard. About  women attended, among them the sisters and wives of the male protesters. A second matinee was scheduled for the next day.53 Undaunted, Islamic populists resumed their campaign and in  the Iron Shirts replaced police as guards at women’s matinees.54 Cinemas were thus drawn into the turf wars among male groups, becoming a gendered and spatial boundary line of their ideological differences. Initial successes at keeping cinema doors open to women were soon reversed. In , conflict reignited in Hama when a number of Muslim women gathered for a women’s matinee showing of the first Egyptian talkie, “Song of the Heart” (“Unshudat al-fu’ad”), filmed in Paris in  and starring the famous female singer Nadra as a nightclub singer who sacrificed her career for her lover. Just as the first images flickered on the screen, local officials burst into the theater with orders from the governor that the film not be shown while women were present. According to French police, Hama’s mufti, Shaykh Said al-Na‘sin, had convinced the governor that “the cinema corrupts the virtue of women.” A few days later, a group of shaykhs met with the governor again to reiterate their objections. In response, the governor informed the cinema owner that he could no longer show films to women without his prior approval. As in , the women of Hama insisted on their right to watch movies. A delegation of them met with the governor’s wife, who failed to convince her husband to withdraw his censorship order.55 Outright prohibitions against Muslim women in cinemas took hold by  in both Hama and Homs, a larger city to the south. In both cities, French police reported that Muslim shaykhs had convinced local governors that the cinema

cinemas

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was “contrary to the decency and modesty that should be the dominant qualities of Muslim women.” The shaykhs were powerful enough in these cities to force local officials to adopt the ban.56 Without documentation from Islamic populists themselves, we can only surmise what they found to be so threatening. It is noteworthy that they objected not only to foreign films, but to Arab ones as well. The scenario of “Song of the Heart” portrayed irregular sexual relations between men and women that Muslim leaders also protested in live Arabic theater, while “The Innocent Victim” had threatened to break all precedent by publicly projecting the image of a Muslim woman. These films also featured women as heroines or in public careers, which might well have offended conservative Muslims’ views of feminine modesty. The cinema protests were also clearly linked to Islamic populists’ contemporary campaigns against unveiling, Muslim girls’ enrollment in foreign schools, and women’s work outside the home. In  for example, al-Gharra sent a delegation to the High Commission in Beirut to protest plans for a mixed-sex charity ball at a local high school and a dance sponsored by the ministry of education at the ‘Abbasiya theater in Damascus.57 Women were transgressing customary spatial boundaries everywhere, and the cinema, associated by origin with the immoral milieu of dance and music acts in cafe-theaters, lay across the most dangerous boundary of all. Finally, in the context of prevailing male rivalries to assert paternalistic protection over women in public, Islamic populists may have been making their own bid as intermediaries between the state and female subalterns. The campaign against female moviegoers climaxed in the capital of Damascus, where the issue coincided with protests against personal status reform. A few months after the March  “Song of the Heart” ban in Hama, the Syrian prime minister and National Bloc leader, Jamil Mardam Bey, announced that he intended to establish an independent, Syrian censorship board, apparently at the request of Islamic populists. Count Ostrorog, the high commissioner’s delegate in Damascus, rejected the proposal as an infringement of France’s sovereignty, particularly as concerned its control of Syria’s foreign relations and trade: Every restrictive measure taken without the authorization of the mandatory authority by an organism that may suffer pressure from fanatical and xenophobic elements risks provoking inconvenient complaints from foreign or French [film] companies. . . . To avoid international complications, the high commissioner has asked me to tell you he can accept only that modifications be brought to the censorship board instituted by himself.58

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The French also apparently feared that local censors would interfere with their use of cinema as a vehicle of their civilizing mission. Commenting sometime later on the ban in Hama, the high commissioner lamented that it put a significant portion of the city beyond the reach of French film propaganda.59 Mardam Bey’s independent censorship board never formed, but the issue was not laid to rest. Elite female moviegoers who filtered into the male terrain of Marja Square, the city’s social crossroads, had by  become primary targets of Damascus’s Islamic populists, topping lists of grievances pronounced in their leaflets and demonstrations. Frustrated by Mardam Bey’s inaction, the populists decided in late  to circumvent the government altogether. A group of them met with the Damascus association of cinema owners, and, like Beirut’s Catholic students, threatened to break all of the furniture in the city’s cinemas if they continued to show films to Muslim women. In January , Islamic populists met again with Mardam Bey and this time secured his support for a national ban on women in cinemas. Mardam Bey desperately needed their support by then, because the French parliament’s rejection of the independence treaty threatened to topple his government. The populists had attained considerable political influence in the Maydan and old quarters of the city that National Bloc leaders had largely abandoned. In an effort to save his government, Mardam Bey chose to appease the populists and promised to ban Muslim women from cinemas by the following Saturday.60 News of the ban provoked a huge outcry from rivals of the Islamic populists among university students. They mounted a demonstration and submitted a petition to the government, which praised cinema as “a means of instruction of civilization.” The students demanded that Mardam Bey retract the ban and substitute a means of censoring films shown to women.61 Curiously, there is no record of protest from the women’s union. Perhaps none was made because its leaders were still begrudgingly committed as patriotic mothers to their nationalist alliance. Or perhaps they were shy of confronting Islamic populists who had hounded them on the veiling issue earlier in the s. While the ban was apparently never enforced by the government, Mardam Bey’s effort to ally with Islamic populists would lead to a second betrayal of the aspirations of the women’s movement, when he resigned the next month in solidarity with the populists’ protest of the personal status law reforms (see chapter eight). The French, too, apparently caved in to religious pressure. As World War II approached and the French sought to strengthen the paternalistic pillars of their rule, they ceded some of their claims to regulate public morality to mediating religious authorities. This was, after all, a role that Muslim ulama and

cinemas



Christian prelates had played long before the mandate, and wished desperately to reclaim.62 While French police had kept cinema doors open in Hama in , they no longer did so in –. And under Maronite pressure, they banned a French film that portrayed a marriage between a Maronite woman and Muslim man, in which a Maronite priest authorized the woman’s family to kill her for her indiscretion.63 In the same spirit, in  the French would appease their Druze supporters by banning the first film to star Asmahan, a popular Syrian-Druze woman singer. Her rebellious image won far more hearts among Arab women than the earlier Druze rebel, Nazira Zayn al-Din, did. “Asmahan was oblivious to Arab culture, past and present, and totally absorbed by her own fatally tragic quest for happiness,” recalls Fatima Mernissi from her childhood in Morocco. “Arab women, forced to dance alone in closed-off courtyards, admired Asmahan for realizing their dreams of hugging a man close in a Western-style dance.”64 Born Amal al-Atrash, Asmahan was a member of the Jabal Druze’s powerful family of the same name. Family leaders protested directly to the High Commission that Asmahan’s role in the film “Victory of Youth” (“Intisar al-shabab”), in which she played a poor singer who married a rich youth against his mother’s wishes, would embarrass them if released in theaters. The High Commission sidestepped the censorship board to impose the ban itself for “political reasons.”65 Although the French pretended that Asmahan herself must favor the ban, they were clearly deferring to her husband Prince Hasan, who at the time of the ban was rewarded for his wartime aid to the French with the post of minister of war.66 The banishment of Asmahan from her home country’s screens recalled the  suppression of another Syrian Muslim heroine in “The Innocent Victim” and capped more than a decade of efforts to assert male control over women in this new form of urban public space. Gender had clearly become central to religious groups’ challenge to the French state for control of public morality in general, and for control of cinemas in particular. Women’s behavior on the silver screen and in the seats of cinemas became the focus of a spectrum of political anxieties. One reason was cinema’s marginal location in urban society, situated in the risqué new downtown entertainment centers that fostered a new kind of public life, promoted often by non-Muslim cinema owners and distributors, and appealing to elites who were increasingly resented by popular classes. Another reason was the unique politicization of cinemas as spaces of both France’s civilizing mission and anti-colonial expression. Finally, the unification of regulations on cinema in a central censorship board made cinema an opportune target for

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political protest. As in the turf wars in the streets, women became the objects of paternalistic rivalries among Syrians and Lebanese themselves, and between them and the French state. To contemporary observers, the stakes of the conflict were high: “The patriarchal family system remains in existence, but its days are probably numbered,” wrote Albert Hourani, the future historian, in . “The process of change is being speeded by one manifestation of Western civilization above all: the film which expresses a way of feminine life, and a conception of relations between men and women, which are far from those prevalent in the Islamic world.”67 Female moviegoers braved many a battle in pursuit of their favorite movie stars, against the message that they were making a dangerous transgression into the new public and that they required a new, political kind of paternalistic protection. Christian women in Beirut ignored Jesuits’ call to attend precensored, Catholic film showings. And Muslim women of Hama, as we have seen, repeatedly courted confrontation with Islamic populists. In Damascus, Nadida Shaykh al-Ard refused to stop going to the movies, even though she and her schoolfriends were once stoned by Islamic populists when they entered a theater.68 The message that transgressive women risked violence would be amplified in the pages of the newspapers and magazines that they increasingly read, and to which we now turn.

chapter 13


The Press: Gendering the Virtual Public

The press was another kind of public space. Periodicals were like cafes-in-print, places the reading public could frequent to pick up information and to entertain themselves. To extend the metaphor further, magazines and newspapers aimed to create and represent a community of like-minded people, much as one might find in a favorite cafe. And as in a cafe-theater show, their headlines and photographs were a stage peopled by characters said to represent an imagined civic order. As a virtual public space, the mandate-era press both reflected and helped to transform gender relations in public and in politics. Like the streets and the cinema, the press underwent its own process of remasculinization in the s, engaging directly in the politics of violence that marginalized women in the civic order.

Expansion and Diversification of the Postwar Print Community The end of World War I and the creation of new states had brought the curtain down on the Ottoman cast of players in the pages of the Levantine press. Young Turks were recast with Young Syrians and Arab nationalists while the Sublime Porte in Istanbul was replaced by the French High Commission in Beirut, or perhaps the Quai d’Orsay in Paris. These actors played on a variety of stages. Periodicals bounded the imagined civic order not only in time—the world today, this week, or this month—but in geographical space. A survey of the names of newspapers founded between  and  reveals the many new competing visions of community: In Damascus, Tongue of the Arabs, New Syria, The East; in Beirut, Bayrut, The Syrian Union, and Youth of the Cedar (referring to Mount Lebanon); in Aleppo, Aleppo, The Syrian Mail, The

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Euphrates, and Northern Syria. In one sense, however, all of these newspapers belonged to the same community. They were all marketed to the general, Arabic-reading and news-hungry public that we may call the print community in Syria and Lebanon.1 The postwar press became a dynamic and uniquely large political forum in an era of rapid expansion. Damascus averaged four new magazines and four new newspapers a year through the mid-s, Beirut slightly more.2 By , more than  Syrian and Lebanese newspapers were being published, in small towns as well as cities. They were joined by more than  specialized magazines devoted to literature, education, political satire, women’s issues, religion, sports, and even the cinema. While many periodicals were short-lived, the number of survivors steadily grew. The number of daily newspapers publishing simultaneously in Damascus, for example, doubled from seven in  to  in .3 The expansion was foundational. Seven of the Lebanese Arabic-language newspapers established in the mandate period, and four others established before and during World War I survived into the s. These included the popular dailies Bayrut, Lisan al-hal, and al-Nahar.4 Syrian papers like Alif Ba’, al-Nidal, and al-Ayyam also established a longterm and loyal public, at least until the  Ba‘th revolution closed them down. The key to the boom was the steady rise in literacy, producing an ever larger reading public. According to French estimates, by the early s nearly all Lebanese Christian males could read and the country’s overall literacy rate was about  percent. Syria’s rate was  percent.5 While dominated by urban elites, the ranks of the literate were expanding among the urban middle and lower classes, who, as chapter four showed, were now sending their children to school. And according to a  survey there were nearly as many literate women as men in the major cities: in Beirut, , men and , women were counted as literate; in Damascus, , men and , women; in Homs, , men and , women.6 Although it is impossible to ascertain exactly how many people regularly consumed periodicals, it appears that  to  percent of the total population did. Publication data supplied by all newspapers and magazines in Syria and Lebanon gave a total circulation in  of more than ,.7 These periodicals, especially newspapers, were generally shared. Each copy of a newspaper was likely consumed by five people, including illiterates, for readers routinely recited newspapers and magazines to friends and family in cafes and homes.8 This suggests a maximum potential print community of , people in . A more realistic estimate might be closer to , if we deduct magazines, which were generally less shared, and also account for the likelihood that a small

the press



set of elite individuals purchased several periodicals every week and for the likelihood that publishers inflated their circulation figures. Nonetheless, the size of the print community grew steadily through , as literacy rose, as the number of periodicals published at a time grew, and as the average daily circulation of Arabic-language newspapers rose from , copies to ,. In ,  Arabic newspapers were published in Beirut, Aleppo, and Damascus alone.9 It is not unreasonable to estimate that by the mid-s the print community in Syria and Lebanon numbered as many as , people, out of a population of . million.10 While small compared to today’s standards, the print community was unprecedentedly large, more than ten times the size of the contemporaneous moviegoing public, and perhaps equal to the size of the nascent radio audience. In its power to propagate images of an ideal society to , or more people, the press played a critical role in the politics of the civic order. Like streets and cinemas, the press hosted turf wars. Major newspapers became organs of the various political parties, offering partisan, contentious, and competing visions of the ideal civic order: In Beirut, the Jesuits’ al-Bashir championed a pro-French, Christian-dominated Lebanon; Bayrut, Muslim Arabism; alNahar, owned by the Greek Orthodox Tueni family, middle-of-the-road Lebanese independence; and Sawt al-Sha‘b was published by the Communist Party. The two main French newspapers divided their loyalties between leading Maronite politicians: L’Orient favored Emile Eddé, while Le Jour was Bishara al-Khuri’s organ. In Damascus, al-Sha‘b and al-Qabas supported the republican nationalism of the National Bloc; Alif Ba’, pan-Arabism with sympathy for the return of Hashemite monarchy; al-Istiqbal, labor interests. The Damascene French paper, Les Echos, was pro-Shahbandar nationalist, opposed to the National Bloc. Newspapers carried on debates about social and political issues, often printing rebuttals to other’s editorials, in an effort to popularize their ideologies and shape public opinion.11 They also, of course, attacked the government, whose censorship powers shaped and often quashed debate. It was not only the French who censored papers; the Syrian National Bloc routinely shut down its opponents’ papers while it ruled in the late s. In its organization as an industry and in the content of its pages, the press mirrored the paternalistic structure of the civic order. As in the pre-World War I era, periodicals were generally run by and aimed at elites; there was no penny press. With exceptions like the Jesuit-run al-Bashir, they tended to reflect the views of the nationalist, secularist elite. Most newspapers were run by bourgeois men, often as family businesses. Reporters and writers were almost all male, although a few female journalists writing for the mainstream press emerged by the late s. Religious, workers,’ and women’s groups, in contrast, generally

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published small magazines (the major exception being the Beirut Communist newspaper, Sawt al-Sha‘b). As in most countries, the structural and ideological biases of these male, elitist newspapers ran counter to social trends that were producing a more universal—cross-class and mixed-sex—readership. Despite their ideological differences, the major newspapers came to portray a common cast of characters in a strict gender hierarchy.12 As in the press worldwide today, photographs and headlines on the front page usually concerned male heads of state, politicians, ideologues, and opposition leaders. The casting directors—publishers, editors, and journalists—moved freely between the worlds of the press and politics, and it was not uncommon for them to seek election to public office. Women were very rarely mentioned, and even more rarely featured in the front pages of newspapers. Women who did appear on front pages tended to be foreign, and featured precisely for their atypical activities: foreign queens and princesses, aviatrixes, beauty pageant winners, movie stars, and (always foreign) female soldiers. It was considered by the male press disrespectful to publish not only photographs of local (and especially Muslim women), but also their names. Following social custom, newspapers referred to women by their husbands’ names instead. The implicit message in this hierarchy of characters, then as now, was that women and their activities were marginal to the civic order. Another reason for the relative absence of women, at least in the s, was that many female writers had chosen to focus their energies on women’s magazines. As discussed in chapter six, women’s magazines proliferated after World War I.13 Between  and ,  magazines were edited by women for women (see appendix). By and large, the women publishers were active in an elite, mixed-sex milieu as members of literary salons, as journalists, as speakers at public events, in schools and in charity organizations. But their magazines were constructed quite self-consciously as a forum distinct from that of the male press. Even as they sought integration into the male worlds of politics and culture, women cultivated a separate sphere where their voices could be heard, unmediated by the paternalistic male press. The women’s press was not merely separate: Women publishers aimed to challenge the dominant press’s imagined civic order. Their magazines differed radically from the male press in staging a full cast of active, patriotic, and talented women. Mary ‘Ajamy’s The Bride featured stories after the war about European suffragettes and Egyptian women’s nationalist demonstrations as models for Syrian women.14 Each issue of Julia Dimashqiya’s The New Woman featured biographies of admirable women, lectures on topics like “Mothers in Civil Society” and activities of local girls in schools and girl scout troops.

the press



Some women publishers explicitly linked women’s struggle to that of other subalterns in the civic order. The Mimas Tree (Dawhat al-mimas), founded in Homs in  by -year-old Mary Abdu Shakra, offered a unique blend of romanticism and labor ideology. Shakra preached the value of work and education in helping women find solace and liberty.15 In her second issue she addressed workers, male and female, directly: Your soul renounces cruelty and seeks equality and fraternity. On your hands are traces of dust that are immortal and testify to the loftiness of your humble soul. . . . You are the renewer and the reformer of social distortion and defect. Women, like workers, were oppressed in a paternalistic society: I saw you in chains and manacles and I was saddened by your condition. I heard you crying from pain, and you were wandering in the path of motherhood . . . I saw you burdened by marriage and husbandly complaints . . . and I hurried toward the light to rescue you from that lethal entanglement.16 Shakra urged women to conquer fear by seeking the solidarity of their sisters, recognizing the gendered social structures that oppress them, and asserting independence from oppressive brothers, husbands and fathers and from excessive household demands. In the s, however, women’s independent vantage point on the civic order abruptly and mysteriously disappeared. Siran Siza’s Armenian Girl (Fatat al-armaniya), founded in Beirut in , was the last women’s magazine of the mandate era. By then, all its predecessors were defunct. Afterward, the only magazine started by a woman was Alfira Latuf ’s The Future (al-Mustaqbal), which was at first labelled a women’s monthly but became a general political magazine.17 At first glance, the demise of the women’s press appears due to an accumulation of accident and misfortune. Three Lebanese women’s magazines were lost when their owners migrated to the Americas with their husbands: Najla Abu al-Lam` ’s The Dawn, Afifa Fandi Sa‘b’s The Boudoir and Mary Yanni’s Minirva. Meanwhile, the most prominent magazines shut down for personal reasons. In the period –, Mary ‘Ajamy simply ran out of money to publish The Bride, and Julia Dimashqiya was said to have given up publishing The New Woman during an illness.18 On a practical level, women’s magazines had

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remained personal enterprises, financed through private funds of elite women and produced largely through their personal efforts. The magazines were consequently quite vulnerable to personal vicissitudes of marriage, migration, illness or poverty. Indeed, the s were a difficult time for all publishers. Many periodicals were bankrupted by loss of advertising and the increased cost of paper due to depreciation of the French franc.19 Moreover, better-financed, glossy women’s magazines from Egypt, which often featured Levantine women, were stiff competition. The Cairo-based Girl of the East (Fatat al-sharq) and Ladies’ and Men’s Review (Majallat al-sayyidat wa al-rijal), for example, were distributed in the Levant in the s and s. But practical problems cannot fully explain why no one took the place of the first generation of Syrian and Lebanese women’s magazine publishers. For there were extremely wealthy women in the movement who could have financed the magazines despite the economic obstacles. There may have been, literally, a generation gap. With the emergence of broader and less personal forms of sociability at public schools, cinemas, and sporting clubs, articles by women who had come of age before World War I may have seemed out of touch with the lives of younger readers. But this does not explain why Mary Shakra, aged  in , and Nadima al-Munqari, aged  in , published magazines similar to those of their elders. Nor does it explain the irony that just as the women’s movement gained momentum with its high-profile conferences between  and , the magazines that had underpinned the interurban linkages of women’s groups faded away. In fact, the magazines’ demise was likely linked to the legal and spatial boundaries that limited the building of a truly popular women’s movement: Readership did not expand because recruitment to the movement did not. The widening pool of literate, middle-class women was simply not purchasing the magazines. There is an element of despair in the magazines’ later articles, and in the subsequent careers of their publishers. Dimashqiya and Habuba Haddad, publisher of The New Life (al-Hayat al-jadida), appear simply to have tired of their journals, diverting their energy to charities and to writing articles for maleowned magazines. Mary ‘Ajamy, who claimed that she gave up the burden of publishing her magazine to devote more time to literature, expressed profound disappointment with what she saw as the lassitude of the women’s movement.20 The rising climate of hostility toward the women’s movement clearly contributed to the closing of one magazine, Nadima al-Munqari’s Woman, which ceased publishing after only two years, in July . The magazine, which Munqari had intended as a forum for open debate (see chapter seven), quickly became a lightening rod for attacks on women’s reform. Like Nazira

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Zayn al-Din, Munqari was accused of ignorance and blasphemy and was denounced for making women’s uninformed opinions public.21 Said Munqari years later, “If [women’s] voice was silenced for a time, it was because it was strange and new, and as a novelty in the eyes of many people, it was a target for controversy and opposition.”22 Given the radical tinge to women’s magazines, one can only imagine the potential reaction of family members should a young woman bring one home. The end of women’s journals did not mean the end of women’s journalism. Younger women, as their elders now did and had done before World War I, eagerly took writing assignments from the male-dominated press. Three Lebanese women stand out. Widad Sakakini emerged in  at age  as a prominent female writer with the publication of a book of essays, al-Khatarat. She would become a regular columnist in magazines like al-Thaqafa and Dimashq, and a noted fiction writer in the s. Rose Shahfa, a leader of the Lebanese women’s movement, also wrote prolifically for a variety of journals. And Imilie Faris Ibrahim contributed articles regularly to al-Tariq, a Communist magazine founded in late , and to many other publications.

Images of Gender Roles in the Press Coincidentally or not, the s brought the women’s page to mainstream journalism. Rearticulating the separate sphere ideology advocated by religious groups and now adopted by patriotic mothers of the women’s movement, newspapers and magazines were increasingly divided into general news, male spaces devoted to crime reports and political affairs, and women’s sections, filled with household tips and cultural items. Al-Haris, a Beirut monthly, introduced a column called “Women’s Studies” in the late s, located with its “Household Tips” behind front matter on politics. Les Echos of Damascus inaugurated a “Women’s and Family Page” by , with articles on hygiene, cooking, weight loss, and sewing.23 A month after its founding in , Bayrut introduced a women’s column on page , with an article on how older women maintain their beauty.24 Likewise, the Beirut satirical weekly al-Dabbur carried columns in the s called “The Male and Female Hornet” (al-Dabbur wa al-Dabbura), and “News of Women’s Affairs,” usually humorous columns written by men about marriage. The women’s pages signalled growing female readership of newspapers, also suggested by the papers’ increasing number of advertisements for imported haircare products, perfumes, household appliances, and the like.

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gendering the public

By  women had in fact achieved a higher profile in the dominant, maleowned press than they had enjoyed in the s. Their names, pictures, and bylines appeared along with those of men, securing women a place in the imagined civic order of mainstream periodicals. Integration, however, was something of a Faustian bargain. Women writers lost a bit of their souls when their articles were enframed in publications financed and edited by men. The range of issues women addressed narrowed dramatically compared to the s women’s magazines, where women were free to write about a variety of topics, including men. While not all women’s stories were written by women, female journalists now wrote almost exclusively about their own sex. Women’s bylines only rarely appeared on pages devoted to political news. Women’s expertise was strictly women, and women’s concerns with family, health, and education; not material for page one. And even on women’s pages, male experts were often featured as doctors giving housewives medical advice, or as scholars interpreting religious texts on women’s proper role in society. Whereas women publishers of the s had used their separate sphere to challenge the gender hierarchy in the mainstream press and in the civic order, by  the women’s sphere was reduced to the second-class status of back pages. While women had secured a place in the dominant press’s virtual civic order, it was the place of a subaltern. And while women had secured a voice in the press’s civic order, it was a degraded voice. The tone of women’s articles was intangibly altered by their new context. For example, as mentioned in chapter eight, Rose Shahfa published an article in the scholarly, pro-fascist Beirut journal al-Amali entitled “Motherhood is my Job.” Similar to articles in the old women’s magazines, it argued that mothers are important to the nation because they are its citizens’ first teachers.25 However, placed alongside other articles published in al-Amali at the time—on Islamic thinkers, medical advice by doctors, positive aspects of Mussolini’s ideology, French ideas on technical education, and the like— Shahfa’s article seems a lightweight, inexpert. Al-Amali’s sympathies with fascism further subverted Shahfa’s activist intent. Her article appeared in context with other articles that praised mothers for staying home and condemned women who meddled in public affairs. A similar alteration occurred with Widad Sakakini’s – articles in Dimashq, a highbrow, civic-minded journal featuring articles by professors at the Syrian University, urban planners, and government officials. The men wrote on topics of citywide interest like new public health programs, a new museum, and racism in Hitler’s ideology. Sakakini’s two articles, in contrast, discussed nontechnical topics about the wives and mothers of war heroes and memories of her education.26 While

the press



Sakakini likely and laudably sought to assert women’s place in the city imagined by editors of Dimashq, her voice was distinctly emotional rather than professional, personal rather than civic-minded. Whether this was by her own choosing, or that of her editor, is unclear. Thus the male press did not merely incorporate women writers, but reconstructed anew the subordination of women in its imagined civic order. The content of stories on and off the women’s pages systematically constructed a citizenry gendered not on the equivalent terms posed by the women’s press, but in terms of hierarchy. Men were rarely portrayed as gendered subjects, while women were staged primarily in terms of their relationship to men. In a survey of more than  articles in the Arabic-language press that mentioned women between  and ,  percent mentioned women primarily in terms of their being mothers or wives. In many of the remaining articles, female subjects were portrayed primarily as men’s sisters, daughters, or lovers.27 This arrangement neatly paralleled the legal and spatial boundaries of the civic order, wherein men were constructed as free agents and representatives of their families in public and politics and women were denied their own identity cards and required to live in the domiciles of their fathers and husbands. Moreover, women’s images in the press were highly normative, falling into four categories of relations with men: the Patriotic Mother, the Good Wife, the Backward Woman, and the Deviant. The Patriotic Mother was called upon to bear many healthy children, particularly boys, and to raise them with high moral standards and loyalty to the nation. The Good Wife was also linked to national welfare, in arguments that a well-ordered home was the cornerstone of a well-ordered polity and that instability between the sexes created national chaos. The Backward Woman was a failed wife and mother whose ignorance retarded the nation’s progress and caused untold social ills. The Deviant, on the other hand, actively subverted social health and progress. These four types were often presented not in the inspirational spirit found in the women’s magazines, but to chastise women for transgressing their natural roles. Mothers, for example, were continually admonished to stay home. In a  article against unveiling, a journal published by Islamic-populist students argued: “She [woman] was created to raise for the fatherland distinguished men and loyal youths who will revive the nation and [Muslim] religion.”28 Men’s magazines typically scolded mothers for spreading germs to their children, just as the French health service had done (see chapter four), and for working outside the home, because their neglect produced weak-willed youth.29 The shift toward negative attitudes during the s was often dramatic. In the early part



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of the decade, the preeminent Syrian journal of education had routinely employed male and female pronouns in reference to teachers—its title was Journal of Men and Women Teachers (Majallat al-mu‘allimin wa al-mu‘allimat)— and opposed the government’s ban on married women teachers.30 In , however, it merged with another journal and changed its name to Journal of Pedagogy and Education (Majallat al-tarbiya wa al-ta‘lim). Not only were women dropped from the title, but reference was made primarily to “men of education” (rijal al-ta‘lim) in its articles. The journal also began publishing articles about how God prefers men and intends women to remain in the home, and about how girls should be educated mainly for their future as housewives.31 Images of the Good Wife also shifted. In the s, ideal models of wives were offered in articles about the Prophet Muhammad’s first wife Khadija and wives of great leaders, like Sultan Suleyman the Magnificent and Benito Mussolini.32 Many of these articles urged wives to be supportive companions rather than obedient slaves to their husbands. By the s, the wifely model was increasingly portrayed in stories about what was perceived as a marriage crisis. Dowries paid to a prospective wife and her family continued to rise despite the depression, making it difficult for young men to marry. In , al-Dabbur humorously proposed “Marriage by Installment” as a solution.33 Many articles also began to criticize changes in wives’ behavior: former slaves were becoming disappointments, not companions. Al-Dabbur published articles on how education made women poor housekeepers and a regular column on why men preferred to remain bachelors.34 The browbeaten husband and overbearing wife became common images. Typical was a  cartoon entitled “Marriage in the Honeymoon Month and After,” published in al-Dabbur’s Damascene counterpart, al-Naqid. While the newlywed couple kisses in a small vignette, the “after” image shows the wife dressed in a negligee and fez straddling her husband’s back, pulling his tie like a horse’s reins and brandishing his cane like a whip (fig. ).35 Wives’ excessive shopping was lampooned in many cartoons. Their extramural activities led to neglect of family and effeminization of men, as another cartoon, “His Wife is Busy!” complained, showing a man walking a baby carriage (fig. ).36 Most striking in the s was the elaboration of the image of woman as Deviant. An extraordinary number of stories that mentioned women did so in the context of sex, violence, or scandal, usually linked to a suspected moral transgression by the woman. The Deviant represented the dark side of the Patriotic Mother and Good Wife. And unlike the Backward Woman who ignorantly failed to raise patriotic children or be a supportive companion to her husband, she willfully violated the normative terms of gender relationships.

the press

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The Deviant model was elaborated on two interconnected levels. First, women became highly sexed in cartoons and photos associated with fashion, beauty products, and glamorous or flirtatious lifestyles of movie stars, flappers, and ladies in gowns at charity balls. While periodicals continued to avoid photographs of Muslim women, by  they had begun publishing not only studio shots of foreign movie stars and beauty queens, but also suggestive drawings of barebreasted women and of short-skirted flappers. Although these images were presented in the pretense of supporting modernity—that the modern woman was sexually free, as opposed to her veiled mother or grandmother—they were clearly suggestive of illicit behavior. The intent was not to demonstrate liberalism but to titillate male readers, as in an al-Dabbur cartoon about a woman repairing a car. A male observer remarks, “Women are doing all men’s jobs: Look how easily she lies on her back beneath the machine.” A second man responds, “Between us, my friend, this is the normal state of affairs” (fig. ).37 Women’s sexuality was also often portrayed as unnatural, and even freakish. In two months of  Les Echos published articles about a hermaphrodite who chose to become male, an “epidemic of virgin mothers” certified by the court as never having had sex, and an epidemic of abandoned babies.38 Second, newspapers took an increasingly lurid interest in accidents, criminal attacks, and other forms of violence visited upon women. About one-fifth of the stories mentioning women printed in the s linked the women with violence. The subtext of these stories was to demonstrate the risks women faced if they ventured outside of the home: women were mentioned repeatedly as being hit by cars, kidnapped, lured into sexual intrigue, and raped.39 In the space of one month in , for example, Bayrut published articles on the search for a lost woman, a woman hit by a car, a woman bitten by a dog, a woman killed by her husband, a woman killed in a car crash, a woman who murdered her husband, a man raping a woman, a neglected elderly woman, and a riot started by women.40 Descriptions of crimes often suggested that the women had invited attack by deviating from norms. A  Damascus paper reported that a brother fatally stabbed his sister, who had left her husband two years before, because he had seen her in suspicious places at the market a week earlier.41 Men’s behavior was not usually described as criminal, but rather that of honorable brothers and husbands who had been provoked by their women’s misdeeds. A story in Bayrut mentioned above emphasized that the man had reason to kill his wife, because he suspected she was unfaithful, and that he then turned himself in to the police.42



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Highly sexed, aggressive women were a danger not only to themselves, but to the nation as well. Bayrut gave big play to a story about an English woman who had allegedly lured a Lebanese youth into marriage and then killed him. The paper editorialized: “We are facing a social danger that threatens the Arab family’s existence, for there are many cultured youth who marry foreign women” and so deplete the race. “He who marries an Arab girl establishes an Arab family and serves the Arab nation.”43 In a similar vein, stories of female spies played on how they used their attractions to lure men into divulging national secrets. A  scandal reported enthusiastically in al-Sha‘b involved a French countess who converted to Islam and went on pilgrimage to Mecca— after having killed her Syrian husband. The story speculated that the woman may have been a British spy.44 The use of women’s images with pornographic or violent references to symbolize social and political decay was not itself new. It was a practice long used in the European press, but only recently exploited in the Levant with the new permissiveness in printing women’s pictures. Lynn Hunt has examined one of the most famous examples of the practice, pornographic pamphlets about Marie Antoinette distributed during the French Revolution. Hunt argues that the pamphlets arose from a fundamental anxiety about queenship as the ultimate form of women’s invasion into the male domain of the fraternal republic: “The queen, then, was the emblem (and the sacrificial victim) of the feared disintegration of gender boundaries. . . . Women acting in the public sphere . . . lost their femininity and with it their very humanity.” Hunt continued, “By attacking Marie Antoinette and other publicly active women, republican men reinforced their bonds to each other.”45 Syrian and Lebanese women were not for the most part aggressive vamps, despite the prevalence of such press images. But we have seen the high levels of gender anxiety produced by the crisis of paternity underpinned and generalized throughout the population with the stresses on households and changes in labor markets. As in the French Revolution, the fixation on the Deviant model in the s press was likely an expression of those anxieties. Syrian and Lebanese republicans were also revolutionaries, rejecting the paternalism of the former sultan, potential kings, and the high commissioner himself. Republicans substituted fraternity for the lack of a paternal authority, and their concept of fraternity has almost always explicitly excluded women.46 The Deviant Woman was also, perhaps, a reflection of contemporary French constructions of women as deviants, with the High Commission’s regulation of prostitutes and mothers (see chapter four), with the use of textbooks on the French republic in schools, and with the flood of postwar novels and



the press

magazine articles from France that expressed a new age of fear about “civilization without sexes.”47 The lurid stories may also be interpreted as tales of caution to the thousands of women who were invading male spaces in the urban landscape during the s. This was not a peculiarly Arab or Muslim phenomenon, but rather one related to the growth of cities and polarization of new bourgeoisies and working classes within them around the world. Mary Ryan and Judith Walkowitz have studied the cautionary tales told to, and told about, women who ventured beyond the domestic sphere in nineteenth-century America and England. Ryan describes, in strikingly familiar terms, the blurring of sexual identity perceived in the expanding American cities of the s: “According to newspaper accounts, the lecherous gaze of men was not confined to a single race and could be found in every quarter of each city. The city streets were littered with voyeurs.” In a twist, dangerous creatures lurking in the streets included women, particularly prostitutes, who lay in wait for men: “Once deprived of the maternal crown of her femininity, the dangerous female lost her humanity as well.” Journalists were shocked and perplexed by the seemingly minimal distinction between the sexes in the slums: “Old and young of both sexes are mingled everywhere. You hardly know the men from the women but for their beards and dress.”48 Walkowitz likewise situates the British press’s fixation on stories about Jack the Ripper in s London within the context of a rapidly changing urban landscape, full of terrains contested by different classes and by the two genders. As in s Beirut and Damascus, London saw the influx of women into previously male spaces. Department stores that attracted bourgeois women, for example, were built near the financial district. According to Walkowitz, newspaper accounts of Jack the Ripper were parables about the immorality of women who walked city streets. The wages of (women’s) sin were death: Reaction to the serial murders was to admonish women to stay home and to call on government to clear away dangerous slums and social deviants.49

Conclusion to Part Four Syrian and Lebanese cities were also colonial cities, adding a twist to British and American phenomena. Many nationalist movements have sought to cordon off the home as a sanctuary of tradition, honor, and order, against the baffling and conflictual transformations of public life in a colonial setting. As Partha Chatterjee suggests in the Indian case, middle-class nationalists’ defensive strategies



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constructed a public-private/male-female dichotomy that created a new colonial patriarchy. While men were forced to interact with the corrupting British in public and politics, women were to preserve India’s soul by remaining isolated at home.50 Similarly in Beirut and Damascus, nationalists and women activists constructed the image of the patriotic mother. Colonial gender anxiety was projected not so much on the poor, but on the elite and particularly on female moviegoers who did who-knows-what in darkened cinemas and on women who went shopping without their husbands’ permission. While many women resisted nationalist men’s efforts to create a colonial paternalism, they could not hold the line against the rising level of street violence, Islamic populists’ campaigns, and the remasculinization of the press. These succeeded in the s in curtailing women’s advance into the public with messages of the dangers they faced. Syrian and Lebanese women could achieve only an ambivalent and marginalized status in public, and so in the civic order. Their role as boundary marker between public and private realms in the city, and their function as pawns in the resolution of rivalries between male groups debilitated their civil rights and so their attempt to build a mass movement. In contrast, the burgeoning male movements of nationalists, Islamic populists, and workers, could assemble, march, and speak with far more freedom. However, women were by no means left out of the new mass politics. Willingly or not, they were ideologically and strategically appropriated by male groups. Because the crisis of paternity remained unresolved, the proper definition of gender roles was integral to the alternative visions of the civic order propounded by newspaper editors, proto-fascists, Catholics, Islamic populists, Communists, and the labor movement. Women’s dual role, as totems of national order and as bargaining chips in political conflicts, would become even more salient in the crucial years of World War II, when the mass movements finally succeeded in transforming the structure of the colonial civic order. It is to this transformation that we now turn.

part v


World War ii and the Transformation of the Colonial Civic Order

The first effect of World War II on Syrians and Lebanese was fear: fear of famine. “In early September  we were preparing for the new school year when the airwaves carried terror to our souls, pounding us all day with news reports of the Second World War,” recalled a Lebanese schoolteacher. “In the next few days, I saw acute pain rise in the breasts of the generation that had lived through the catastrophe of the First War. . . . Work stopped and business dwindled as a wave of profound pessimism engulfed the country.”1 All adults over age  recalled the horror of famine: Fear of its morbid return would reign for the first four years of this war, fueling riots, hunger marches, and opposition movements. Déjà vu struck rulers as well as the ruled. General Georges Catroux, leader of the Free French forces in the Levant in , recalled his earlier term of service in the region. As after the last war, the French were outnumbered by British troops, competing with them for power and prestige through the delivery of foodstuffs. And in  as in , Catroux faced the task of imposing French rule on a hostile population led by many familiar faces among the nationalist opposition. Despite their memories, the French and the Syrians and Lebanese confronted the trauma of war in a manner radically different from  years before. Most salient was the presence of mass movements organized in the s. While women in World War I had typically suffered alone, portrayed in numerous photographs as lone mothers dying of hunger with their children,



world war ii

they entered World War II armed with charitable, educational, and political organizations that would mount incessant protests claiming their right not only to bread, but also to political participation and national independence. And while men in the last war had been drafted into the Ottoman army, this time they stayed home. They too entered the war with highly organized movements that would demand independence, as well as state protection from the war’s hardships. The French position had also changed. In , they had sought to aggrandize their empire; in , they appeared to lose it to the Germans. In June , Catroux and the Free French reconquered Syria and Lebanon from the Vichy government, making them the first major territories reclaimed by the movement Charles de Gaulle had founded a year earlier. According to Catroux, Free France had little materiel, and only moral capital with which to recapture Great Power status.2 The combination of these three wartime phenomena—fear, social solidarity, and French weakness—produced a critical opening for change in the colonial civic order. On one side, economic hardship and fear of famine mobilized thousands, particularly workers and women, who pressured the state to extend social rights to a broader spectrum of society. On the other side, Catroux and the Free French were disposed, by their precarious position, to liberalize the regime. Catroux explicitly revived French bargaining strategies of the s, in which calls for independence were diffused with state initiatives in social policy. Indeed, Catroux flirted, more seriously than had Sarrail in – and de Martel in – before him, with abandoning methods of indirect rule. His policies intended to undermine support for paternalistic elites, opening the way to a liberal regime of equal, individual citizens. By , the revival of street politics and social bargaining produced a significant expansion of the colonial welfare state. The war primed the pump of waters, so to speak, that had risen just before . But Catroux’s strategy would ultimately fail to secure France’s imperial prestige, as elite nationalists swept into power in summer elections of  and seized control of vital government ministries in . Independence brought the longstanding crisis of paternity to a climax, but not to resolution. The civic order

world war ii



was again transformed when nationalist and collaborative elites united as a ruling class. In the absence of French rivals, they no longer had the incentive to court subaltern movements that they had in the mandate era. But the new ruling elite could not entirely ignore subaltern challenges to the legal boundaries of citizenship. The inflated ranks of Communists, labor unions, the women’s movement, and Islamic populists made them formidable political opponents. Syria and Lebanon thus entered independence with a civic order polarized as never before. Once again, gender became a primary battlefield for rival visions of the independent civic order. And again, the resolution of conflicts among male citizens was attained in part through bargains to exclude women from full citizenship. The terms of postcolonial citizenship were thus shaped by the contradictory legacies of French rule—the paternalistic tools of forceful repression and mediated authority, and the egalitarian ideals of republicanism and welfarism. The independent states adopted differing strategies to resolve this tension. While Syrian nationalists opted for paternalistic state corporatism, their Lebanese counterparts pursued a form of liberal republicanism that exaggerated the mandate’s privatized, mediated paternalism. Neither path would succeed in stabilizing an independent civic order still riven by colonial-era cleavages.

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chapter 14


Climax of the Colonial Welfare State

War arrived in Syria and Lebanon not with bullets, but with holes in clothes. Within the first five months plummeting imports opened a huge market in used clothing. Soon, paper shortages cut down the size of newspapers and Damascenes worried that wheat exports to Lebanon would drain their own dwindling stock.1 For a time, though, normal life seemed to continue. In May , the women’s union in Beirut made headlines with a petition to the city government for cleaner public parks and bakeries.2 After the fall of France the next month, however, the region slid into general economic and political crisis. Workers’ and women’s protests—and competition between nationalists and the Free French to satisfy their grievances—forced a radical expansion of the colonial welfare state, which in turn engendered further class and gender conflict.

Social Breakdown and Vichy Repression (1940–41) High Commissioner Gabriel Puaux boasted that it was easy to govern in the first year of the war, as his , French troops were “more than adequate to inspire everyone to respect France’s wishes.”3 Puaux used martial law to arrest labor leaders who mounted strikes against low wages and layoffs, as well as most Communist leaders, by January . Signs of sympathy with the Germans brought further arrests, particularly among the Syrian National Party and Najjada in Lebanon, and nationalist youth groups in Syria. In addition to the stick of military force, Puaux wielded a carrot of  million francs sent from Paris to ensure imports of necessary goods and to stanch unemployment by reviving de Martel’s public works program. Puaux did not, however, revive de Martel’s bargaining policies. The civic order was stilled as it had been in the early s, under military repression.

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world war ii

The war’s second year would not be so calm. The June  occupation of France and inauguration of Vichy rule in Syria and Lebanon aggravated conditions beyond endurance. Funds from France were cut, as was vital trade. The British instituted a shipping blockade, shut off the flow of oil from Iraq to Tripoli’s refinery, and closed borders to markets in Iraq and Palestine. By December, gasoline supplies were so short that sales to taxi drivers were banned. More than , workers were unemployed in Damascus alone, while the cost of living rose to double that of . As bread lines lengthened, despite price controls and rationing schemes, Lebanese life was reduced to a daily focus on acquiring food.4 Although lukewarm to Vichy, Puaux in desperation imitated the fatherly pose of its leader, Marshal Pétain, in radio broadcasts that urged the population to observe its “duties” of work and discipline, and in public appearances like a visit to a girls’ school in Latakia (fig. ). But a primary pillar of France’s claim to rule since World War I, the guarantee of basic welfare, was crumbling. Fearing mass revolt, Puaux lamented, “The inhabitants [of the Levant] had been accustomed by us, perhaps too quickly, to consider the Republic as a wet nurse with an inexhaustible breast.”5 The first hunger marches took place in Aleppo and Damascus in January , shortly after the arrival of Puaux’s Vichy successor, General Henri Dentz. In February, the new leader of the Syrian National Bloc, Shukri al-Quwwatli, seized control of protests against unemployment, high prices, and shortages, and organized a shopkeepers’ strike that spread to all of Syria’s major cities. In the face of French tanks and mass arrests, the strikes spread to Lebanon’s cities in March and April. Also active in both countries were paramilitary youth groups, Islamic populists, Communists, and labor leaders not yet jailed.6 In April, the Phalanges and Najjada, who allied to organize women’s bread protests and to stockpile wheat for the unemployed, staged a major strike against the government. The threat of continued strikes forced Vichy to lower the price of bread and to oust its puppet governments. Emile Eddé was replaced with Alfred Naqqash (Naccache) as president of Lebanon. The new Syrian head of state, Khalid al-‘Azm, promised immediate public works jobs, welfare for youth and workers, an ambitious public health program and increased supplies of food.7 Social pressure and Vichy’s lack of funds had forced the state back to the bargaining table. However, Dentz and his ministers at the same time deployed Vichy’s tenets of order and sacrifice to repulse demands for jobs and a full return to parliamentary government.8 Vichy’s ideology of family, work, and nation resonated with conservative elements in both Syria and Lebanon, where pro-fascist

climax of the colonial welfare state



and pro-German sentiments were widespread. In March , for example, the Lebanese Bar Association rejected the membership application of a woman who had just graduated from law school, explicitly invoking Marshal Pétain’s statements in France that women should devote themselves to the family and leave scarce jobs to men. Dentz and several Lebanese politicians supported the bar’s decision. But critical press coverage apparently forced the bar to revise its ban, to grant membership at least to unmarried women. Three women immediately joined, but faced the prospect of losing their legal practices upon marriage, much as female schoolteachers did.9 Vichy ideology was also profitably exploited by the Jesuits in Lebanon, whose leader, Father Claude Chanteur, was an avid supporter. L’Ecran, the movie magazine of the Catholic youth group L’Equipe, moved closer to the views of Islamic populists in printing a call to censor movies shown to women, blaming films for their loss of sexual morals.10 While this proposal was never implemented, Catholic pressure did convince Vichy censors to impose a new rating system restricting films viewed by children.11 However, Vichy’s police repression, change of governments, and ideology of family and discipline did not secure its rule. Vichy leaders in France undermined their position in the Levant when they moved toward overt collaboration with the Nazis in the spring of , just when fighting in the Balkans raised the Allies’ concern about the Middle East. In May, when Dentz permitted German use of Syrian airfields to support a recent anti-British coup in Iraq, the Allies decided to act. The Vichy government in Syria and Lebanon fell at the hands of a Free French/British invasion in early July .12

Free France and the Revival of the Colonial Civic Order The Free French were even poorer in resources than Vichy had been. Not only did they lack subsidies from the metropole, but they also ruled during the deepest economic slump of the war. Their legal claim to rule was also jeopardized by Vichy’s abandonment of neutrality for collaboration with the Germans, which many Syrians and Lebanese claimed was tantamount to withdrawal from the League of Nations and so to abdication of the mandate. More portentiously, the British, who supplied most of the invading and occupying troops, were unenthusiastic about reinstating full French sovereignty. In response, the Free French claimed to rule as representatives of the True France, still loyal to the League of Nations and committed to the Allies’

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anti-fascist, democratic principles.13 On June , General Georges Catroux had dropped leaflets from airplanes proclaiming the end of the mandate, independence, war relief, and revival of trade with the British-occupied regions of the Middle East; the goal of the invasion, the leaflets stated, “is not to repress your freedom but to assure it, to chase Hitler’s forces from Syria and make your rights, and those of France, respected.”14 Charles de Gaulle, on a visit in August , reaffirmed French rule in the Levant as a bulwark of democracy.15 The Vichy rhetoric of duty was thus replaced by Free France’s promises of social and political rights. Under pressure from de Gaulle, however, Catroux postponed a full return to the parliamentary regime of  as too risky to French interests: democratic symbols would be subordinated to the preservation of empire.16 The Free French were too weak in  to manage a full return to combative politics of the s. Fully one-third of top French bureaucrats and all but , troops had opted to return with Dentz to Vichy France, and their ranks would not be fully replenished until . French tentacles of support among non-state mediating bodies were also attenuated, as most French missionaries were pro-Vichy: Catroux exiled the Jesuit rector of St. Joseph University, Claude Chanteur, to Cairo for continuing to lead his students in prayers for Marshal Pétain.17 Finally, the Free French had little wealth with which to buy local support, for wartime trade losses had nearly emptied the coffers of the Common Interests administration. Total government spending sank in – to less than half of  levels, in real terms adjusted for inflation.18 Wartime trade was to remain severely restricted under the guidance of the Middle East Supply Center (MESC), the regional economic system run from Cairo by the British and Americans. So in the autumn of , Catroux revised his June promise. He proclaimed a conditional independence, wherein martial law was lifted and local governments were granted more autonomy. But he delayed parliamentary elections and appointed interim presidents who would rule by decree: In Syria, Shaykh Muhammad Taj al-Din al-Hasani, prime minister in the late s and early s; in Lebanon, Alfred Naqqash, the prominent Maronite businessman and judge who had been Vichy’s last head of state.19 Catroux also renamed the High Commission to reflect the transition, calling it the Delegation General. It still retained, however, vital control over the military, police and the Common Interests administration, which still provided a modicum of revenues from trade tariffs, foreign concessions in public utilities and transport, the tobacco monopoly, and the Tripoli oil refinery. The colonial civic order soon revived. What occurred was an uncommon

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blossoming of mass politics during wartime, when politics in most other countries was muted. The Free French were forced to liberalize the regime despite their very real fears of mass revolt. As soon as martial law was lifted in late , the mass movements of the s mushroomed as never before in protests against inflation, wage deflation, and food shortages. The politics of bread and wages would be the pivot of a revived process of political bargaining between the Free French and the nationalist opposition, who, in anticipation of the postponed elections, sought to sway the sentiments of the urban masses. The decision to liberalize during the depths of wartime stress would have profound implications for the future of both French rule and the colonial civic order. The years – were the darkest days of wartime hardship, and urban populations, those with the most capacity to upset French rule, were hit hardest. The summer harvest of  was poor, provoking both public panic and government alarm: “Fearing a famine like that of –, all of Mount Lebanon speaks of protests and demonstrations,” French police reported on September .20 Ten days later, similar reports came from Aleppo and Damascus. The  crop would also be poor, and despite MESC food shipments, fear of famine would not subside until the bountiful harvest of June .21 Dairy products, oranges, vegetables, rice, and meat virtually disappeared as many families survived on bread, olives, macaroni, and occasional lentil soup.22 Prices soared far beyond wages: the cost of food rose  percent, while the general cost of living rose about  percent between January  and January . Wages of the working poor consequently lost nearly half of their  buying power.23 Beggars on city streets became so numerous in  that the Syrian government considered outlawing them. At the same time, infant mortality, a primary indicator of public health, peaked throughout the Middle East.24 Hunger marches resumed in September  and quickly turned into bloody bread riots and strikes, peaking in the summer of  and again in the spring of , in all major cities. Communists, labor unions, paramilitary groups, and nationalists took credit for organizing them. The prominence of women in French police reports is also striking: Women led at least ten demonstrations in Beirut and Aleppo during the summer of  alone. Aleppo was shut down in early June  when hundreds of women marched for several days, shouting “We’re hungry, we want bread!” One day, four veiled women carried a coffin on which they had printed the slogan, “Death to Governor Nabih Martini!” Twenty other women marched through the marketplace forcing merchants to close their shops. Several women were injured in scuffles with police. At the

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same time,  women in Damascus staged a rally against hunger and for democracy and independence at the Orient Palace Hotel, while , women and children blocked traffic in Beirut to demand lower bread prices. As late as May , a Muslim woman started a demonstration in central Beirut, forcing shops to close, after officials at city hall dismissed her complaint about poor distribution of flour.25 Thousands of workers also staged increasingly disruptive strikes. French police recorded major work stoppages in nearly every month of –, especially among textile and public sector workers seeking pay raises. Unemployment actually declined in , because the needs of the British military fueled the creation of , jobs. But wages remained low, rising by  at only half the rate of inflation. Workers also protested import-export bans of cotton and silk, which curtailed production.26 With each month, the size and number of labor unions grew, from about , members in  to about , in all of Syria and Lebanon by . As in the s, labor federations coordinated united actions that targeted not just individual employers, but the state as well.27 In the meantime, the Communist Party launched a campaign for a democratic welfare state, posing as a defender of the poor to attract members.28 The party demanded workers’ rights and reform of the regressive tax system to redistribute wealth.29 Communists had gained new legitimacy and the freedom to campaign openly under the rubric of anti-fascism when the Soviets switched to the Allies’ side after the June  German invasion. They gained further popularity through two widely read periodicals: al-Tariq and Sawt al-Sha‘b. In late , the party began to draw crowds of  or more in Damascus and Beirut to rallies held in cinemas and hotel ballrooms. In February , a Beirut rally drew , people, and just before the summer  elections, “monster” rallies in Damascus and Aleppo each drew up to , people. Membership surged from , in  to reach more than , registered members by war’s end, in addition to thousands more sympathizers.30 Labor unions, Communists, and other subaltern movements built organizations that were more centralized and ideologically coherent than those of the nationalists. In Syria Islamic populists united groups that before the war had been scattered in various cities into a centralized movement based in Damascus, forming in – the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood.31 In Lebanon, the Phalanges and Najjada used their campaigns to feed the poor to enhance recruitment. By , the Phalanges abandoned their former proFrench stance and expanded their membership to ,, mostly from

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among the Maronite middle class on Mount Lebanon.32 The Najjada’s membership reached , in .33 The devoutly anti-sectarian SNP reorganized as well, in Sa‘ada’s continued exile, to boost its membership by  to , in both countries, mostly urban students.34 The women’s movement also reorganized and mobilized in unprecedented numbers, as will be discussed below.

The Politics of Bread and Wages (1941–43) In anticipation of mass unrest, Catroux took the initiative in the late summer of  to establish a new department in his cabinet called the Social Section. By September, the section began producing numerous social studies and legislative proposals to provide security and benefits to workers and families.35 Similarly, in early , Catroux founded a Wheat Office under the auspices of the Common Interests administration to regulate the delivery of grain to Lebanon, which still depended on Syria for half of its needs.36 Both initiatives moved toward a substantive redistribution of power in the civic order, because they aimed to bypass paternalistic intermediaries—employers and landowners— to secure direct state contact with poorer citizens. Catroux’s apparent goal, like that of de Martel in the s, was to neutralize the nationalist leadership before the elections. Catroux’s effort to impose grain controls directly on Syrian peasants, however, was thwarted by British minister Edward Spears, who sought to assure MESC control, and by his own handpicked Syrian leader, Shaykh Taj, who demanded sovereignty over a vital national resource. In May , Catroux, Spears, and Taj struck an unstable power-sharing compromise, and the first collections of grain were made by the renamed Cereals Office (Office des Céréales Panifiables). But landowners and peasants balked at state-set grain prices, and hid the grain from Cereals Office collectors. Catroux then proposed to extract the grain by force with French troops. Spears moved quickly to subvert Catroux’s plan. Apparently under his influence, a Congress of Syrian Farmers protested the low official price of wheat, sales to Lebanon, and French control of grain supplies, calling instead for British control.37 Spears then approached the prime minister, Husni al-Barazi, himself a large landowner from Hama, and struck a deal to hold landowners responsible for grain collection from their peasants, under threat of deportation. Spears thus undermined Catroux’s plan for direct rule by reinforcing paternalism in the state’s most important economic sector. In

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compensation for their compliance, Syrian and Lebanese landowners would emerge from the war tremendously enriched by MESC schemes to increase local production, while peasants continued to live at subsistence levels under landlords’ mediating power.38 In the meantime Shaykh Taj, a populist known for his fiery speeches, introduced a system of subsidies that strengthened direct rule in the cities. Employing the rhetoric of the welfare state, Husni al-Barazi proclaimed a cut in bread prices for the poor to half the rate paid by the middle class: “The poorest class will now have the right to bread at  piastres, sold at all bakeries” (emphasis added).39 Shaykh Taj also curried popular support through public works and literacy programs. However, this assertion of direct rule was mitigated by Taj’s coalition of paternalistic mediators like the Society of Ulama, merchants (among them war profiteers), and rural ‘Alawi and Druze leaders. And by manipulating finances, Shaykh Taj plunged the state into debt; the bread subsidy program alone cost – million LLS per year.40 This would become the regime’s Achilles’ heel in bargaining with nationalists. As the prospect of elections brightened, the nationalist opposition mounted an offensive against Shaykh Taj’s conservative coalition. Their opportunity came after Shaykh Taj died in January , his funeral drawing huge crowds of the urban poor. Shukri al-Quwwatli again took leadership of hunger marches from labor unions, women, and others, and allied with middle-class interests to discredit Taj’s populist policies with charges of corruption. Taj’s successor, Jamil al-Ulshi, tried to shore up support among the poor by financing their bread subsidies through a new income tax and by raising the price of bread paid by the middle class. In response, the Bloc organized middle-class students and merchants in a series of strikes in February and March, accusing Ulshi of pocketing the new revenues and of sending needed grain to Lebanon.41 Seven people were killed and at least  wounded by police between March  and , when crowds attacked government offices and stormed bakeries in Damascus. To end the crisis, Catroux dismissed Ulshi on the pretext of disobedience, reinstated the constitution, announced elections in July, and appointed a transitional government.42 Quwwatli and the nationalists had successfully exploited the bread issue to discredit their main opposition in the upcoming elections, but at the cost of more firmly allying their cause with middle-class interests. Syrian bread politics had repercussions in Lebanon, where hunger marchers demanded bread subsidies like those instituted by Shaykh Taj. And like the Syrian National Bloc, Bishara al-Khuri and his Constitutional Bloc pounded Catroux’s head of state, Alfred Naqqash, for ineffectual government.

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In July , Naqqash’s government fell during a general strike in Beirut against bread shortages led by the Najjada, Phalanges, the Committee of Ulama, and the prominent Muslim nationalist Riyad al-Sulh.43 While Catroux had gained little prestige on the bread issue, he exploited to better effect the wage/inflation issue as a means of securing the loyalty of civil servants and the urban masses. Labor unions, especially in Lebanon, acted quickly to push the state’s initiatives far beyond their original intent, and elite nationalists were thrown on the defensive. In late , when the Social Section warned of low morale in the public sector, Catroux decreed significant increases in cost-of-living allowances for civil servants and a minimum wage for all workers in the Syrian and Lebanese public sector.44 Lebanese unions immediately demanded extension of the pay raises to the private sector. When employers blocked such legislation, they staged a series of strikes that crested in March . They finally won a compromise law that granted private sector workers a smaller pay increase. Again in October , when the Lebanese government decreed family allowances to offset inflation for married civil servants, with premiums for one spouse and each child, the unions demanded their extension to all workers. 45 In response, a January  Lebanese law established the Social Affairs Service (Service des Affaires Sociales) to arbitrate labor disputes, prepare labor laws and provide assistance to workers’ families.46 The state’s political motives were made clear in March , when Catroux’s announcement of a return to constitutional government coincided with the Lebanese state’s donation of , LLS to workers’ mutual-aid societies.47 Union demands were met in May , three months before elections, when the Delegation General and Lebanese government promulgated an omnibus wage law that guaranteed workers in commerce and industry higher minimum wages, family allowances, and cost-of-living allowances.48 The Lebanese state, following French recommendations, also granted accident insurance to workers in the public sector and industries deemed public services.49 The May laws were decreed in the fervor of the  election campaign by Ayyub Thabit, interim Lebanese president. Their apparent intent was to sway workers’ support away from the opposition nationalist party, the Constitutional Bloc, which represented a large portion of the commercial-industrial bourgeoisie opposed to the laws. Indeed, like the s labor laws, they were decreed while the bourgeois-dominated parliament was suspended. The laws unleashed strikes throughout Lebanon, as employers resisted workers’ demands to implement their provisions. Workers fought tooth-and-nail, factory-by-factory, to claim their rights.

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Labor legislation was pursued much less vigorously in Syria, due to differing political circumstances. Under pressure from striking unions, Communist rallies, and French labor decrees, Shaykh Taj had promulgated several wage laws in  on severance pay, family allowances, and minimum wage standards. The laws were evidently intended to appeal to workers in large industries owned by members of the National Bloc, for they exempted constituencies loyal to Shaykh Taj: landlords with agricultural workers, employers of domestic servants, and artisanal and family businesses.50 But in , after Taj’s death, there was no Lebanese-style explosion of labor legislation, despite continued worker unrest. The lack of initiative on wage issues was likely due to the fact that the outcome of the elections had been virtually decided with Ulshi’s dismissal in March. `Ata al-Ayyubi, the elderly interim head of state, was on good terms with many National Bloc leaders.51 By mid- Catroux could claim a partial victory, in that the wage increases and bread subsidies had averted the revolt he had so feared two years before. In addition, France’s manipulation of the inflation/wage issue had driven a wedge between its nationalist opposition and urban workers in Lebanon. In Syria, where the urban bourgeoisie was tied much more closely to the landowning elite, bread subsidies had driven a similar class-based wedge. However, the legislation also provoked an unforeseen backlash among conservative interests who read in them the disruption of the social order. As in the past, this dissent targeted gender issues.

Mothers and Women Workers: Disputed Gender Roles in the Family Not surprisingly, issues of inflation, work, and food amplified the gendercentered conflicts of the prewar years, for they directly affected families’ economic strategies. Women of all classes mobilized as mothers and as workers to protect and support their families. While lower-class women joined bread marches, elite women multiplied charities to aid the thousands of families who found it difficult to clothe and feed their children. And as prices soared, women’s contributions to family income also became vital. The war returned employment to thousands of women who had lost jobs in the previous two decades to competition from foreign imports. When the war cut those imports by as much as four-fifths, Syrian and Lebanese women stepped in to produce at home much-needed clothing, handicrafts, and food products. Several thousand more women worked outside the home in the

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tobacco, textile, and food-processing plants that expanded in wartime, especially in Lebanon.52 Free French policy on women’s work was contradictory. On the one hand, they vowed to reverse Vichy’s social conservatism and particularly its discouragement of women’s work. In London, the Free French had set up committees in  to prepare legislation to improve the status of women, children, and families, in an effort to make France “catch up” to other welfare states. Free France’s territories became laboratories for the new spirit. From late  Syrian and Lebanese government agencies advertised jobs for women in clerical and administrative positions.53 In – the Syrian Ministry of Social Affairs subsidized women’s work programs by the Women’s Association for the Encouragement of National Industry, which also began calling for social laws.54 In May  the Lebanese omnibus wage law decreed equal pay and minimum wages for men and women doing the same work, a radical departure from current practices where female factory workers and teachers routinely earned half the wages of men.55 The same month, the Free French publicized a showcase munitions complex called De Gaulle Park, featuring  Lebanese women in white laboratory coats manufacturing truck parts. One was quoted in a newspaper: “I would have been a typist. It’s certainly a more proper job. But here we are well paid and we work under the same social laws as in France.”56 Just before the elections, francophone newspapers proclaimed women’s work as a hallmark of anti-fascism, and the Lebanese head of state warned employers to improve the condition of female workers.57 On the other hand, the labor laws and bread-supply programs also reinforced women’s secondary status as workers and the ideal of the male family breadwinner. Thousands of domestic maids in Beirut were arbitrarily deprived of ration cards in  simply because they couldn’t return to their home villages on distribution day.58 Family allowances, minimum and equal wages, and cost-of-living increases did not apply to the majority of women workers because they were employed at home or in small shops, not in sectors covered by the laws like the civil service and big industrial plants. Women had been excluded from industrial work, it may be recalled, by the government’s own policy under the – protective labor laws. Moreover, family allowances were implicitly awarded only to male breadwinners. Government documents routinely referred to the recipient as the “père de famille” (father of the family), or as his wife or widow. The largest group of female civil servants, schoolteachers, were virtually excluded from family allowances because they were still pressured to quit their jobs when they married.

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Indeed, there was great pressure to exclude women from work entirely. In May , the same time that the Free French promoted De Gaulle Park and promised equal wages, the French-subsidized and Jesuit-run St. Joseph University in Beirut staged a highly publicized, week-long lecture series entitled “The Lebanese Family.” Prominent speakers denounced individualism and called on women to quit their jobs and have more children. While they promoted the family as the pillar of society, they did not criticize state intervention as prewar groups had done. Instead, speakers embraced the welfare state as a primary means of stabilizing paternalistic families, with calls to increase family allowances paid to fathers and to promote marriage and large families. Because the strength of the nation rests on the family, said the director of the Beirut law school, “mothers of large families deserve the gratitude, respect and admiration of the nation.”59 The spirit of Vichy had apparently struck a deep chord of support. That same year, the new Lebanese criminal code outlawed birth control.60 The Free French directly supported the ideal of domestic, patriotic motherhood by appointing Mme Catroux to head a committee coordinating all major charities in the two countries.61 No previous high commissioner’s wife had played such a visible, symbolic role. She was regularly portrayed in newspapers attending Red Cross meetings, visiting military hospitals and soup kitchens, dedicating clinics, and so on. The wife of Lebanese President Alfred Naqqash projected an even stronger maternal image in a December  magazine interview, where she said, “[I have] only two children and I lament it; I love all children and am, myself, a member of a family of  children.” When asked about her volunteer work, she replied, “No, I don’t have very important work, but I seek to aid all who request my help.”62 At about the same time, in Syria, the Free French banned Asmahan’s film, where she starred as a career singer, at her family’s request (see chapter ). It was perhaps no coincidence that Lebanon adopted Mother’s Day as an official holiday in . The day was intended to promote motherhood as a public and patriotic duty, in contrast, a newspaper claimed, to the Syrian habit of confining women to the kitchen.63 Popular culture, however, imbued Mother’s Day with an anti-work ideology that displaced women’s direct role in the civic order in favor of a status mediated through their sons. The newspaper Bayrut recognized the holiday in  by asking: “Wasn’t it mothers who gave birth to heroes . . . who gave us the likes of Moses, Jesus and Muhammad . . . Pasteur, Newton and Shakespeare?. . . . If we honor them today, it’s because we honor the education and principles [that they gave us] and the heroes who die in the name of their mothers in all battlefields.”64 The flip side of praise

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was contempt. The satirical weekly al-Dabbur observed Mother’s Day by announcing that it would withhold honor from mothers who hire nannies, who let their daughters work, and who teach them to dance before teaching them to cook.65 The issue of work split the women’s movement in the months before the elections. In January  Lebanese schoolteachers paradoxically founded the Women’s Social Democratic League to campaign against working mothers, whose child neglect they blamed for a variety of social ills. The League, which established  branches in Beirut and towns of northern Lebanon, was funded primarily by the Free French and Beirut businessmen. Mme Catroux, as honorary president, presided over the opening of the group’s school-lunch program in May . ‘Iffat Qabbani, an officer of the League, called on the state to create jobs for men and to increase their family allowances. “To combat women’s work,” she added, “we must encourage girls to marry, and it will be the husband who will have to provide the needs of the wife.”66 While the women’s unions took no public stance on the issue, Communists actively promoted women’s right to work.67 The party claimed to represent not only peasants and workers, but also “mother-workers.” Communists insisted that work and motherhood need not conflict with one another, in propaganda that posed the mythical model of the Soviet woman who works in the morning, does public service in the afternoon, reads before dinner, and cares for her children in the evening.68 Communist women were at the forefront of the campaign. In early , a group called the Committee for the Defense of Lebanese Working Women personally presented a petition to the Lebanese president and prime minister that condemned bias against women workers, demanded wages equal to those of men, and larger family allowances.69 In Syria two Communist women were especially prominent: Maqbula Shalaq, who in  began attending Syrian University unveiled, and Falak Tarazi, a well-known Syrian journalist active in Damascene women’s clubs.70 They wrote articles for the party’s magazine, al-Tariq, and gave speeches in cities around the country to mixed audiences, exciting little of the controversy that had beset women orators in the s. Shalaq rallied women to leave their homes to fight Nazism, “the enemy of women, freedom and culture.” She argued that work outside the home was crucial to gaining women’s rights because only by working could women buy their own books, and so engage effectively in public debates on women’s status. But Shalaq did not renounce women’s homelife. Childrearing went hand-in-hand with work and politics in women’s mission to help build a new society. The symbol of the melding of

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these two roles, Shalaq argued in a manner reminiscent of Nazira Zayn al-Din, would be the abandonment of the veil, which represented a wall between home and society.71 Tarazi also vaunted the value of women’s work in the home, calling women social “engineers” who would be pillars of the new, postwar society. But the home is not kingdom enough for twentieth-century women, she said in a speech on the  anniversary of the French Revolution. Contrary to the contention of “reactionary” ulama, she averred, women in public would also fulfill their female responsibilities toward home, society, and nation, and not transform themselves into men by doing so.72 In June , a month before the Syrian elections, Tarazi gave an explosive speech to an overflowing Damascene audience that included prominent nationalists like Faris al-Khuri and Jamil Mardam Bey. She condemned attitudes that marginalized women in society and called for immediate bans on polygamy and instantaneous divorce. Most Arab women had the status of mere slaves, she asserted, but the war offered them a ray of hope, an opportunity to show that they can work just as men do. Some journalists mocked Tarazi for her radical ideas, while others praised her “civic courage.”73 In mentioning “reactionary” ulama, Tarazi was likely referring to recent actions by Islamic populists in Damascus, who renewed their crusade against women in public with new vigor. By mid-, al-Gharra was attracting crowds of up to  to its weekly meetings at the Tankiz mosque and, according to British observers, had established “its hold over the illiterate masses.”74 In May , al-Gharra petitioned President Taj al-Din against “the excessive liberty of Muslim women.” The Free French suspected the former Vichy head of state, Khalid al-‘Azm, of exploiting al-Gharra to undermine Shaykh Taj, who promptly cut off state subsidies to the group’s charities.75 That the counterattacks by Tarazi and Falak resonated with Syrian women is evident in the petition submitted by a group of women in Hama in June , asking the government for official authorization to unveil. This unleashed vigorous protests by Islamic populists, and apparently no government support for the women.76 In Damascus at about the same time, Thuraya al-Hafiz led a march of  women to the government palace in Marja Square, where they collectively unveiled. “I stood there and gave a speech in which I averred that the veil we wore was never mentioned in God’s holy book or by the Prophet Mohammad.” She recalled exhorting the crowd: “So as our religion doesn’t ask us to veil ourselves and expects us to show our faces and be men’s equals, we now take the veil off.”77 The taboo on the veiling issue since Zayn al-Din’s  controversy disappeared as war conditions reignited the discourse of rights.

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But as the Soviet model of womanhood clashed with the Islamic populists’ and Catholics’ model of the paternal family, gender again became a battleground, now between proponents and opponents of the extension of equal social rights in the colonial welfare state. While Communist leader Khalid Bakdash avowed that his party respected religion, Islamic populists insisted that it was a grave threat. In Homs, violent clashes broke out between Islamic populists and Communists in winter of –, just as Shalaq and Tarazi were joining Khalid Bakdash in Communist rallies.78 Similar violence would spread to Damascus and other cities by .

Conclusion: Climax of the Colonial Welfare State On the eve of the summer  elections, the colonial welfare state had been not only rebuilt from the “scorched earth” Catroux said he had found after Vichy’s departure,79 but also expanded well beyond its  limits. The state had assumed new financial commitments toward the poor masses and new legal guarantees for the protection of workers, in the form of bread subsidies, minimum wages, family allowances, cost-of-living increases, and severance pay. Election pressures and wartime exigencies promoted welfare expansion in other areas as well, particularly public health. In February , the Delegation General inaugurated a new Pharmaceutical Office, which distributed medicines and baby food to the population and policed overpricing by profiteers.80 Most importantly, the May  work accident law formally placed the burden of medical care on employers. Welfare disbursements were quite substantial: In  the Syrian government expected to spend , LLS on family allowances for all civil servants, equivalent to one-third the amount allocated to public health and to . percent of the state’s total budget.81 And while inflation and revenue shortages plummeted state budgets that year to only  percent of  levels (in real terms, adjusted for inflation) spending cuts were made mainly outside of welfare programs. Health and education spending actually rose as a proportion of state budgets from  to  percent between  and . The number of students enrolled in state schools rose in the same period by  percent in Syria, and by  percent in Lebanon.82 In addition, public works became a major welfare agency, as Allied funds were used to hire thousands of workers to improve transport for grain supplies. Regular public works budgets in Lebanon jumped by more than one-third from  to , and with extrabudgetary allocations exceeded  levels by  percent (adjusted

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for inflation).83 Above and beyond regular state budgets, the Allies pumped $ million, or . billion LLS, (adjusted for inflation) into the Syrian and Lebanese economy between  and , spent not only on military needs, but also food subsidies, jobs, and other vital services.84 The new laws and state services armed workers and families with unprecedented rights, despite their origins in often cynical pre-election bargaining. They addressed demands made by the women’s and labor movements for years. They also represented the gravest assault yet on the colonial edifice of mediated, paternalistic rule, as the state intervened directly in employee-worker relations, and on behalf of poor consumers in an economy long dominated by the bourgeoisie. The political horizon once more opened to the transformation of the paternalistic civic order into one in which subaltern citizens might enjoy equal rights and unmediated relations with the state. However, in practice the welfare laws and subsidies still fell short of a full reversal of paternalism because they retained gender distinctions. Due to pressure from religious and other conservative interests, and perhaps due to rulers’ own gender blindness, the welfare measures did not erase the distinction between male and female citizens. Women received fewer benefits and were constructed as dependents on male breadwinners in labor policy, despite legal guarantees of equal pay and the right to work. In sum, the  elections were to be more than a vote for or against the French: They became a referendum on the postcolonial civic order. The expansion of welfare and liberalization of the political arena had mobilized opposing parties in a rivalry to capture control of the now-powerful state, each seeking to implement radically different visions of citizens’ relationship to that state. Workers emerged for the first time as a politically self-conscious movement. “There exists in Syria a conscious working class and it is organized in part into unions. This working class has evolved since the Allies arrived in  into an important class of citizens,” observed a Damascene paper in June .85 The paper Bayrut similarly noted a “social revolution in Lebanon” and urged the government to reconcile the interests of workers and capitalists with new labor laws.86 Simultaneously, wartime economic dislocations undermined paternalism at home, as families came to depend more on women’s income from work. While to many women’s work was an odious necessity, it was increasingly promoted as an ideal, and not just in Free French and Communist anti-fascist propaganda. Images proliferated in newspapers of women around the world working for the war effort. American films, which dominated screens, also promoted the image of Rosie the Riveter. “His

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Girl Friday,” for example, showed in local theaters in the summer of , offering the divorced star reporter played by Rosalind Russell as a model of new womanhood.87 These class- and gender-based challenges to paternalism deeply unsettled many Syrians and Lebanese. Conservative opponents were forced, by , to engage welfarism in the political arena. Alternate forms of social justice and order espoused by Islamic populists and Catholics attained new resonance, as demonstrated in the large audiences for the Lebanese Family lectures and alGharra’s meetings, and in the emergence of the Women’s Social Democratic League. Islamic and Catholic movements embraced the welfarist state, but envisioned its use to buttress a paternalistic society based on male-headed families and the exclusion of women from the public arena. Likewise, even nationalists were forced to give lip service to social welfare, while avoiding the rhetoric of rights. Just before the Syrian election in July , for example, Shukri al-Quwwatli hosted a fundraising event for a new hospital for the poor, declaring: “Unity around humanitarian issues should be carried into politics.”88 However, elite nationalists still fundamentally adhered to their s agenda, which was simply to capture the state from the French and maintain the status quo. Their power depended fundamentally on the control of subalterns through patronage and alliances with other mediating elites; that is, on the pillars of paternalism. They posed perhaps the greatest obstacle to transformation of the civic order. Even as the state had intervened to pacify and woo the masses, it had enriched landowners and the bourgeoisie. Many of them profited from the MESC’s promotion of local agriculture and industry to supply the military and to offset wartime drops in civilian imports.89 These enriched elites, denied formal political power while parliaments were suspended, informally resisted welfarism by refusing to pay new taxes on income and war profits.90 They no doubt correctly saw Catroux’s welfarism as principally a means to undercut the power of the nationalist opposition to French rule. As a result, the future of the colonial welfare state remained tied to the continuance of French rule and Allied spending, unless workers and women could mount a viable, welfare-friendly alternative to the nationalists in the elections. The Free French had reason for optimism. They had managed to postpone elections until , when fear of famine subsided and when the Free French had secured their own security, by rebuilding troop strength and establishing a firm base in Algeria after the Allied invasion of North Africa.

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While Catroux embraced the welfare bargaining required in the peculiar circumstances of wartime electoral politics, his superior Charles de Gaulle clearly chafed at these seemingly wasteful methods of civilian rule: “I came to think his [Catroux’s] desire to charm and his leaning toward conciliation did not always answer to the kind of sword play which was imposed upon him.”91 De Gaulle spoke with the wisdom of hindsight, as the next chapter will show.

chapter 15


Claiming Paternity of Independent Republics

In December  the prominent Lebanese magazine al-Dabbur printed a cartoon on its cover entitled “Here is Our New [National] Emblem” (fig. ). A bare-chested man resembling Pierre Jumayyil of the Phalanges held a long sword in his right hand and a shield in his left. At his feet sat a woman, similarly gazing into the distant future. She posed in a sleeveless gown like a s Hollywood star, wearing a Phrygian cap styled after that of Marianne, symbol of the French Republic. The cartoon celebrated Lebanese independence with the replacement of the mandate’s tricolor by a new flag of red and white bands and a green cedar in the center, emblazoned on the man’s shield.1 This model of paired citizens would have been unimaginable in . Only in the intervening  years had colonial and nationalist propaganda converged on ideals of the male warrior-citizen and his female companion. The cartoon was not, however, merely the natural fulfillment of a quarter-century of political discourse. It expressed but one of many competing visions of citizenship. The cartoon’s use of French symbols appealed mainly to Maronite sentiment, likely offending those of other groups. And its portrayal of male and female as partners in the new nation challenged the primacy of father-son relations in the paternalistic civic order preferred by many. Read more closely, the cartoon expresses the ambivalent and conflicting meanings of gender and democracy in the civic order of . The virile Jumayyil-man poises his phallic sword over the Marianne-woman’s head in a gesture of seeming double-entendre: Marianne, the symbol of democracy, sits at his feet as much like a captive as a mate. Earlier in , al-Dabbur had printed another cartoon featuring a captive Marianne: She was embraced—or kidnapped—by a leering Senegalese soldier carrying a gun at the very same angle as the Jumayyil-man’s sword (fig. ). The caption cynically remarked: “Even black slaves have understood French liberty, as they rally beneath her

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flag and shed their blood for her sake.”2 Together the two cartoons suggest, through familiar racial and gendered metaphor, that colonialism had violated the democratic ideals of the French Revolution, and that Lebanese nationalists had redeemed those pure (white) ideals by freeing Marianne from its (black) clutches. This was, however, a conditional freedom. The Jumayyilman did not set Marianne and her ideals free; rather, they were to be secured behind his sword and shield, under the guardianship of male, nationalist elites. Thus the equal relationship between citizens seen at first glance becomes on the second a hierarchical and gendered one, defining the independent civic order in paternalistic terms. The unstable relationship between right and privilege, freedom and protection, and male and female portrayed in the cartoon also marked the political transition from colonial rule to independence in both Syria and Lebanon. The dual and contradictory impulses of France’s paternalism and republicanism persisted in the political cleavages between mass movements that had been born under the mandatory regime and deepened by the war’s social stresses. The nationalist victors of the  elections, Bishara al-Khuri in Lebanon and Shukri al-Quwwatli in Syria, claimed paternity of independent states as they forced France to relinquish control of civil government. However, both founding fathers immediately met challenges from subalterns who demanded reform of the civic order as part of their independence. Violent political crises in Lebanon in November  and in Syria in May  became crucibles of the postcolonial civic orders. Khuri and Quwwatli both secured their rule through political pacts that appeased religious interests and reaffirmed the paternalistic, gendered boundaries of citizenship that had been set under French rule.

Ambiguous Results of the 1943 Elections The summer  elections were hailed as a resounding victory for elite nationalists, as the new parliaments chose Khuri and Quwwatli as their presidents. In fact, nationalists’ popular support was rather tenuous. They earned their majority of votes from a small electorate. Turnout was surprisingly low for what had been touted as a momentous referendum on the future of French rule: While  percent or more of Syrian voters had turned out in previous elections, only  percent of eligible male adults voted in the first round of the  elections. Beirut’s first-round turnout was only  percent of eligible males, a mere , of the city’s population of nearly ,. Turnout in Lebanon as a whole fell from  percent in  to  percent, a quarter of the

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adult population. Women did not participate in either country; in June the Lebanese women’s union had petitioned President Ayyub Thabit to include a referendum on female suffrage on the summer ballots, but he refused.3 The resulting minority of first-round voters elected an even smaller number of second-round electors: only  in Syria,  of whom voted finally for Quwwatli.4 Voter apathy no doubt derived partly from distrust of the French, although observers said the elections were the fairest ever under the mandate, and British minister Edward Spears himself claimed that British soldiers posted at the polls boosted voter confidence.5 Distrust of the nationalists was also a factor, given available evidence from Damascus. First-round voters in Syria had little idea of what they were voting for. They were left in the dark by censorship, a newspaper strike, and Quwwatli’s refusal either to announce his slate before election day or to commit himself to a particular political platform. He ran his campaign as a personal battle against another faction of elite nationalists, followers of the deceased ‘Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar. Shaykh Kamil Qassab, leader of the Society of Ulama and former supporter of Shaykh Taj, called for a boycott of elections because they would bring to power only “money-grubbing politicians.” Turnout was also exceptionally low among the city’s Christians and Jews.6 In Lebanon campaigns were far more open and platforms more explicit, with all four parties—Khuri’s Constitutional Bloc, Eddé’s National Bloc, Charles Da’ud ‘Ammun’s Popular List, and the Communists—pledging to expand democracy, equality, and social welfare.7 However, sectarianism became an overriding issue when the pro-Eddé interim president, Ayyub Thabit, attempted to engineer Christians’ dominance by assigning them a disproportionate number of parliamentary seats and registering Christian emigrants as voters. When Muslim protests threatened to derail the elections, Catroux returned briefly from his new post in Algiers to dismiss him. Thabit’s replacement, Petro Trad, did not abolish sectarianism, but rather divided the parliament on a fairer ratio of six Christians to five Muslims. Ultimately, the elections turned on the power of Khuri and Eddé to woo their personal clienteles with coffers enriched on both sides by British and French funds. Although Khuri enjoyed more support among the Muslim majority, Beirut and many parts of Mount Lebanon (including many Druze voters) elected enough parliamentary candidates loyal to Eddé to threaten, briefly, Khuri’s election as president.8 There were other signs of dissent from the victorious nationalists’ agenda. Despite the dominance of elite patronage, the relatively penniless

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Communists made a surprising showing. Although they failed to win a parliamentary seat, six pro-Communist candidates earned , votes in all of Syria and Lebanon, nearly  percent (,) of all votes cast in Lebanon alone. Khalid Bakdash qualified for second-round balloting in Damascus, where he earned  votes.9 Most surprising of all was the election in Syria of Akram Hawrani, who rallied peasants in the region of Hama (turnout there was nearly  percent) against large landowning elites with a campaign for just redistribution of wealth.10 Hawrani would later build a movement that would transform the civic order in the s by extending political participation to the countryside. However in , as in previous elections, the two-stage process in which voters were asked to choose electoral lists virtually assured the exclusion of opposition parties. Most newcomers to the Lebanese parliament were relatives or clients of leading political bosses; only a quarter of the deputies were members of a political party. The electoral lists cemented an alliance of urban nationalists with rural landlords and tribal chiefs, who represented more than half of the deputies elected to both parliaments. The Syrian parliament was especially rural in character. While more than half of Lebanese deputies held university degrees, only  percent of Syrian deputies did; moreover,  percent of Syrian deputies had attended no school or only primary school.11 The leaders elected by these parliaments were thus tightly linked to the landowning bourgeoisie. Syrian President Quwwatli owned the prosperous Syrian Conserves Company, where  workers processed fruit from his vast orchards around Damascus. Faris al-Khuri, speaker of parliament, was chairman of a textile firm and a leading partner in the National Cement Company, directed by none other than Finance Minister Khalid al-‘Azm.12 Lebanese President Khuri’s longtime financial backer and brother-in-law was Michel Chiha, a prominent banker tied to French concessionary companies. His brother, Fu’ad al-Khuri, headed several large industrial firms. Both prime ministers, Sulh in Lebanon and Sa‘dallah al-Jabiri in Syria, were career politicians from prominent landowning families of Sidon and Aleppo that were, incidentally, linked by marriage.13 Once in office, these nationalist elites reasserted their conservative social agendas of the s, disappointing those who hoped the return to constitutional government might deliver long-sought rights. In September , Lebanese women reminded President Khuri of Ayyub Thabit’s promise in June that the newly elected government should take up the question of women’s suffrage. But Khuri again withheld commitment to the issue.14 In October, a coalition of Lebanese labor unions petitioned the government to

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enforce the neglected May  labor laws and to increase aid to poor working families. They too received no concrete response. In his inaugural speech earlier in the month, Prime Minister Riyad al-Sulh promised to improve the economy and claimed to support the “legitimate” rights of workers, but only on the condition that they “cooperate with their bosses” in the national interest. This statement effectively rejected the worker-only unions and workers’ rights that had been established in the previous decade. As for women, Sulh said in the same speech, “If the government hasn’t considered widening the political rights of women, in spite of its sympathy for the progressive spirit that inspires some Lebanese ladies who seek these rights, it does make a firm promise to support all social activity they undertake in the service of nation and of humanity.”15 In the Constitutional Bloc’s ideology of national solidarity, women and workers were to remain subordinate helpmates to male elites. Accordingly, Sulh’s cabinet represented leaders of six religious sects, who were to unite Lebanese Christians and Muslims in what was called the National Pact. In announcing the pact during his October  inaugural speech, Sulh proclaimed Lebanon a state with an “Arab face” that was also sympathetic to European (Christian) civilization. In seeming contradiction to a regime built upon the patronage power of sectarian leaders, Sulh called for the future replacement of religious affinities with the unified national loyalty of undifferentiated, fraternal citizens. In private negotiations with Khuri, however, Sulh, who had long fought for union with Syria, had accepted Lebanon as an independent state only if Muslims and Christians shared power in equitable proportions.16 The terms of the pact thus amplified the sectarianism established by the  constitution and evident in the summer electoral campaigns, thereby perpetuating the tension between republican rights and paternal privilege in Lebanese politics. In Syria Quwwatli also made a religious alliance, but eschewed the multiconfessionalism of the Lebanese. Seeking support among the urban poor, apparently against the growing influence of Communists, he had recruited to his electoral list a leader of al-Gharra, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Hamid Tabba‘, and made several campaign speeches at al-Gharra’s meeting place, the Tankiz mosque.17 The National Bloc also subsidized other Islamic populists, like the Youth of Muhammad, whose leader ‘Abd al-Wahhab ‘Azraq was a personal friend of Quwwatli.18 Quwwatli thus recemented the nationalist-Islamist alliance made by Jamil Mardam Bey in . Once elected, Quwwatli packed the government with National Bloc cronies from the Sunni Arab hinterland, excluding Druze and ‘Alawi minorities and purging the bureaucracy of francophile holdovers

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from Shaykh Taj’s regime. In his first postelection speech, delivered in early August  at the Tankiz mosque, he still offered no clear political agenda, but rather proclaimed to his “brother” citizens that in the elections the nation had “given proof of the unity of its classes and its aims.”19 He and Prime Minister Jabiri opposed any economic changes that would strengthen the working class or peasantry, urging the population to withhold its demands until the war ended and full independence was achieved.20 Syrian women and workers apparently acquiesced, for they made no immediate petitions. The only petition was from al-Gharra, whose demand for a moral police squad was ignored.21 The willingness of subalterns to cooperate with elite nationalists’ fictitious unity in a fraternal republic faded quickly. They soon mobilized to redefine the civic order, during and after crises that would challenge bourgeois nationalist elites’ claims to paternity of the independent nation-states. The mobilization of women’s and religious groups will be discussed in this chapter, while that of workers will be taken up in the final chapter.

November 1943 in Lebanon: Constructing a New National Family Government inaction on social affairs was by no means a symptom of political paralysis. Syrian and Lebanese leaders embraced their new power with exuberance and focused their energies on the ultimate political prize, capturing the state from the French. To this end, Sulh’s October  speech included, in addition to enunciation of the National Pact, the virtual proclamation of an independent Lebanese state. The collapse of French rule would be astonishingly swift, due in part to Spears’ avid support of the nationalists, but mostly to France’s own ineptitude. Georges Catroux had left in June to take up a position in the new Free French government at Algiers. With him departed the brief and final effort to uphold French prestige through bargaining around social policy. His successor, Jean Helleu, showed little interest in such a project and instead engaged in brute efforts to withhold power from the newly elected Syrian and Lebanese governments. To these governments’ reasonable and expected demands to revise their constitutions, Helleu stonewalled. To their demands to transfer control of the police, military, and Common Interests, he turned a deaf ear. Helleu’s blunt intractability only raised the stakes. Syrian officials shunned all contact with French advisers posted to their ministries. Defiance was more

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direct in Lebanon. On November , even as Senegalese soldiers surrounded its assembly hall, the Lebanese parliament proceeded unilaterally to amend the country’s constitution, expunging all reference to the French mandate. Deputies proclaimed their fidelity to the Rights of Man and gave Prime Minister Sulh a standing ovation.22 In response, Helleu staged a coup in the early morning hours of November . In an act that outraged the public in its gross violation of publicprivate boundaries, he sent soldiers into the bedroom of President Bishara al-Khuri, while his wife Laure and their children cowered behind another bedroom door hammered by rifle butts. Also roused from his bed was Riyad al-Sulh, whose wife Fa’iza later reported her absolute humiliation at confronting  soldiers in her nightdress and bare feet. Other government officials were arrested and all were imprisoned in the Bekaa village of Rashaya. After sunrise, Helleu made a radio broadcast suspending the constitution and appointing Emile Eddé, who had abstained from the November  vote, head of state.23 The coup precipitated the biggest political crisis of the war years and the most serious armed confrontation with the French since the – Syrian Revolt. Eleven days of protest shut Lebanon down. Crowds poured into the streets of Beirut, ripping down pictures of Charles de Gaulle from public walls, building barricades on the streets and burning several French trucks. Homemade bombs exploded around the city. Truckloads of soldiers roved the avenues, shooting at demonstrators while French planes buzzed overhead. The Phalanges and labor unions organized a general strike by merchants and workers, while women staged protest marches that drew the attention of the international press. On November , a rump government formed in the mountain village of Bshamun, protected by a militia of more than  troops, mostly Druze, who exchanged fire with the French and prepared an attack on Beirut.24 Meanwhile, the general strike spread to other Lebanese cities and to the countryside, where local militias formed and villagers attacked the offices of the French General Security police. In the first few days alone, dozens of Lebanese citizens were sent to hospitals and at least  were killed, including nine schoolboys. Sympathy strikes and demonstrations resounded in Syria, especially among students who shut down the major cities for several days.25 The Lebanese appealed as much to paternalistic authority as to the Rights of Man in justifying their unilateral assertion of independence. Some, like a group of doctors, condemned the coup as “a violation of the democratic principles for which the Allies fight.”26 Students at the American Junior College for Women called for British intervention on the basis of the Atlantic

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Charter, which affirmed “the right of all peoples to choose their own form of government.”27 Communists called the coup “contrary to the principles of the French Revolution.”28 Other protesters, like the Phalanges and a group of Beirut lawyers, emphasized the coup as an attack on national dignity and honor.29 Meanwhile, in many cities protest meetings were held in mosques and churches, where citizens appealed to local religious leaders to redress their moral outrage. In the evident turning point of the crisis, religious patriarchs parried appeals from pro-French and pro-independence delegations and finally demanded the return of the elected government and, in effect, the end of the French mandate. On November  Catroux, flown in again from Algiers, met with the Greek Orthodox bishop to seek his support, while hundreds of men and women marched to the Beirut residences of Maronite Archbishop Ignatius Mubarak and of the mufti, Shaykh Muhammad Tawfiq Khalid, to demand independence. The next day, Catroux traveled to the Bkerke residence of Maronite Patriarch Antoine ‘Arida, who said he shared the popular view that the French had committed a grave error. ‘Arida had, in fact, just previously told a women’s delegation that Lebanon must have complete independence.30 In desperation, Eddé raced to Bkerke on November , where he sought to change ‘Arida’s mind with rumors that the Sulh government had been planning Lebanese union with Syria. Because of this fear, Armenians, Maronites, and Catholics in Beirut and Mount Lebanon were said to have supported Eddé’s appointment on November . In his own last-ditch effort, Catroux met on November  with the mufti, who said the coup had irretrievably damaged France’s position in Lebanon.31 Catroux thus found that France had no indigenous constituency to counterbalance the intense pressure of the British, American, and several Middle Eastern governments to end the mandate. The pillars of colonial paternalism had utterly collapsed in the crisis. Religious patriarchs, who had long lingered in their association with France, had now transferred their support to Khuri’s jailed government. Eddé’s constituency had disintegrated with ‘Arida’s declaration in favor of independence. On November , Catroux made his first public promise to release the prisoners; two days later, the Khuri-Sulh government was reinstated.32 In his memoirs Catroux noted, “Paradoxically, in one night France had built against her the unification of Lebanon in the same national sentiment that she had tried for  years to make the foundation of her position in the Levant.”33 The end of colonial paternalism was by no means the end of Lebanese paternalism. On November , tens of thousands of Lebanese flooded the

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streets around the homes of Khuri and Sulh, welcoming their return in a kind of coronation jubilee. No doubt to many in the crowd the moment represented a resolution of the crisis of paternity after  years of rule by adoptive French fathers. Khuri, addressed in paternalistic manner as Shaykh Bishara, stood on a balcony over the crowd as founding father of independent Lebanon. From then onward, the day would be celebrated as Independence Day, replacing September  when Gouraud had proclaimed Greater Lebanon in . The Lebanese had not only found their true father, but their mother as well. Khuri appeared before the crowd alongside his wife, with whom he had now been properly reunited after so abhorrent a separation (fig. ). At another celebration the next day, Jamal Karam, a leader in the women’s protest marches, proclaimed Laure al-Khuri “mother of the Lebanese people” to great applause.34 It was this sense of family reunited, a paternalism rehabilitated under the National Pact, that likely guided the hand of the artist who drew the National Emblem cartoon for al-Dabbur two weeks later. However, all was not well in the new Lebanese national family. In the political fluidity of the time, the Lebanese debated what sort of family they were to be. The crisis had opened the political arena to subalterns who had been snubbed in the first weeks of the Khuri-Sulh government. As in popular uprisings of the mid-s, November  became an opportunity at least to renegotiate the hierarchy of power in the civic order, if not to abolish paternalism altogether. On the strength of their participation in ousting the French, two groups in particular, the Phalanges and women, joined the debate. Both contested the father-dominated vision of the national family, seeking a greater role for sons, mothers, and daughters. In the end, however, neither group was either willing or able to break completely with paternalistic loyalties to advocate a nonfamilial model of the civic order based on individual rights. The resemblance of the proud male citizen to Pierre Jumayyil in the alDabbur cartoon was perhaps no accident. The Phalanges, with their motto “God, Family, Nation” emblazoned on their petitions, had played a prominent role in the crisis. Along with the Najjada, they had organized the general strike among shopowners, acted as liaisons between the populace and the rump government, and taken up armed defense against French troops. Jumayyil himself was injured and arrested while defending a closed shop. He later claimed, amidst conflicting accounts, that the Phalanges had designed the new Lebanese flag and raised it for the first time over public buildings on November .35 Khuri rewarded the Phalanges (who had by then switched to their Arabic name, al-Kata’ib), by lifting the legal ban imposed on them in . In

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return, the Phalanges reversed their earlier opposition to the National Pact. At the reopening of parliament in December Jumayyil embraced ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Karami, the ardent Sunni leader of Tripoli who now abandoned his demands for union with Syria.36 As an explicitly youth movement, the Phalanges were positioned politically as sons to the nationalist elites’ generation. After the November crisis, they wielded their new power in an effort to transform the father-son relationship into one of fraternal equals. After the November crisis they adopted an antisectarian stance, in spite of their support of Thabit’s plan the previous summer to pack the electorate and parliament with a disproportionate number of Christians. In the spring of  they and their erstwhile rivals, the Syrian National Party, mounted a joint campaign against article  of the  Constitution, which perpetuated sectarianism with its provision that “the sects shall be equitably represented in public employment and the composition of the Ministry.” They argued instead for employment based strictly on merit. However Sulh, who had himself envisioned the demise of sectarian politics in his October speech, blamed pressure from the Maronite patriarch for its persistence.37 ‘Arida and other religious patriarchs were also heroes of November , and they used that power to perpetuate the political influence they had enjoyed under the French. Muslim-Christian hostilities erupted again by May .38 The Phalanges were caught in the contradictions of their own paternalistic discourse of religious fidelity and manly virtues, and would never truly abandon their Christianism.39 That they were ultimately wedded to a paternalistic model of the national family, even as they partially criticized it, was evident in their staging of women’s demonstrations in the November crisis. The relationship between women and men in the new Lebanese national family was more problematic than that of sons and fathers. Women’s protests in November had been organized centrally by Najla Sa‘b of the new Lebanese Women’s Association, which included well-known leaders of the women’s movement like Rose Shahfa, Eveline Bustros, Imilie Faris Ibrahim, Ibtihaj Qaddura, and Nazik ‘Abid Bayhum. Their role was crucial in providing communications while newspapers, telephones, telegraph, and even tramways were cut during the protests. They not only marched to embassies and patriarchs’ residences, but also met daily with wives of the imprisoned officials, received secret directives from their husbands in prison, organized international petition campaigns, and provided first aid to the wounded. They also established contact with women’s leaders in other cities, and recruited hundreds more women from other classes to join street demonstrations.40 Never

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before had Lebanese women’s leaders recruited so many for so sustained a protest. Women had been integral players in a process that brought their country independence, but what would their role be, exactly, in the new independent state? While women’s leaders later trumpeted the crisis as women’s formal entrance into politics, the terms of their initiation apparently slipped from their control in the fluid, improvisional theater of the street. Women made symbolic gestures with contradictory meanings in a drama that simultaneously opened politics to subalterns and reinforced the paternalistic Lebanese family on a national scale. Women’s difficulty in defining their political role lay primarily in the fact that the crisis had begun in a climate of highly charged gender anxiety: The most private and most sacred site of honor, the bedrooms of the country’s most eminent husbands and wives, had been rendered shamefully public.41 Indeed, above all else, it was dishonor that united the fractured Lebanese polity to demand independence. The women’s association itself had employed these terms in their November  telegram to the British prime minister: “We Lebanese ladies of different creeds strongly protest against the hideous aggression and treachery committed against the officials of our independent government . . . and regard this as an insult against our honor.”42 The very same day, Mgr Ignatius Mubarak, Maronite archbishop of Beirut, delivered a speech calling on Muslims, Christians, and Druze to unite and “throw out the traitors—the robbers who violated the sanctuary of the homes of your leaders.”43 In apparent response, two days later an anonymous leaflet appeared to rally support for Eddé by dishonoring Riyad al-Sulh with obscene remarks about his being arrested while in bed with his wife.44 Gender anxiety was evident in the events surrounding women’s marches to embassies and religious patriarchs. On the morning of November , a group of mostly Christian women led by women’s union president Eveline Bustros, an elderly writer and patron of the arts, began marching toward the central Place des Canons (Martyrs’ Square). As they marched, they were surrounded by young men, likely members of the Phalanges, who linked their hands as a protective barrier (fig. ). They soon joined another group of women, mostly Muslim, dressed in black and veiled. “Then an extraordinary thing happened. All the Moslem women together, with one gesture, as if obeying an unvoiced command, threw their veils back over their heads,” wrote Edward Spears. “They were saying that they were Lebanese women, just women who loved their country as much as did their Christian sisters.”45 Spears was likely repeating explanations for the unveiling conveyed to his wife, who met with women’s leaders daily. Muslim women’s unveiling may

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well have been intended to signify their unity with fellow Christian women, in the multisectarian spirit proclaimed by the Lebanese Women’s Association. But their unveiling must also have been understood in the context of controversies over Muslim women’s public presence since the Nazira Zayn al-Din affair in : They were symbolically lifting the veil of paternalism that had distanced them as citizens from direct relations with the state. As an assertion of women’s public identity and claim to a presence in the political arena of the streets, however, their unveiling stood in uneasy tension with their encirclement by male guardians. The procession, now embracing  or more women and as many men and boys including prominent politicians and businessmen, stopped at the British embassy and then proceeded to the American embassy, where it was met by two truckloads of Senegalese soldiers. The confrontation would inspire stories for years to come. As the – soldiers pointed machine guns, rifles and revolvers at their chests, the women sought refuge behind a garden wall, “insulting and spitting (even the best of them) at the troops, and screaming that the Senegalese would shoot,” reported an American eyewitness.46 Eveline Bustros yelled at the French officers who commanded the troops: “Whom are you threatening like lions? Us women, who are only liberating our country. If you are really men, go liberate your own country from your enemies. Shoot your bullets, you cowards!”47 In a twist of gender roles, Lebanese women posed as more manly and more patriotic than French men, who had so far failed to liberate their own country from Nazi Germany. Bustros’s taunt echoed the linkages between nationalism and masculine virility expressed in the propaganda of the  Syrian Revolt. But her rhetorical act of female bravery was undercut by her simultaneous implication that women were not, in fact, true soldiers, and so inappropriate targets for French guns. The November  and  pilgrimages to religious patriarchs were even more ambiguous in meaning. On the th, the Lebanese Women’s Association gathered  women at the invitation of the Phalanges, who recruited them, according one participant, in a strategy much like that of Damascene nationalists in November , because “it was thought that if only women took part in the demonstration, with as few men as possible, the procession will be less liable to be attacked by the armed forces parading the streets.”48 The women marched, again flanked by the Phalanges, to the homes of arrested minister Camille Chamoun and to Archbishop Mubarak. When they proceeded toward the mufti’s residence, they were again ambushed and dispersed by armed troops. Undeterred by the violence, the following day  women paid their visit to Mgr ‘Arida, the Maronite patriarch. Their leader,

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Najla Sa‘b, appealed to ‘Arida’s paternal stature in her defense of the KhuriSulh government: “You, who have always been a loving father, jealous as to his children’s interests, realize that they are one solid block in their determination to protect Lebanon’s freedom and dignity.” In contrast, Rose Shahfa did not deferentially tailor her speech for the patriarch, but rather stressed the crisis as a struggle for democracy: “These things have been done to Lebanon by the nation who was the first to raise the banner of freedom, and to recognize the Rights of Man. . . . Shall we continue to submit to their [French] despotic treatment, while it was they who first taught us to demand our rights?”49 Women’s contradictory appeals to male paternal guardianship and to their equal rights as citizens would work against their efforts to reshape the Lebanese national family. Leaders of the women’s union used the crisis as a springboard to demand an end to gender barriers in the civic order. Echoing the claims made by Nazik ‘Abid in , they argued that women’s battle experience in the crisis proved their patriotism and their right to vote. A women’s delegation visited the reinstated parliament to demonstrate their commitment to political participation. Imilie Faris Ibrahim published an article calling for women’s suffrage as a sign that independent Lebanon would join the “advanced nations,” and condemning its opponents in the government as “more nazi than the Nazis themselves in their denial of us and their theft of our right to run for office.”50 At the same time, women also criticized another pillar of paternalism, sectarianism. Najla Sa‘b and others boasted about how women of all religions had united in protest. Among leaders of the Lebanese Women’s Association, Sa‘b was Druze; Qaddura, Sunni Muslim; Karam, Maronite; and Bustros, Greek Orthodox. They were clearly identifying themselves primarily as citizens of the Lebanese state, unmediated by loyalty to their respective religious patriarchs. The government at first seemed to respond positively. When Bishara alKhuri met with leaders of the Lebanese Women’s Association after his return to office, he praised their role in the independence struggle and promised that “we will not find complete rest until the Lebanese woman occupies her place under the dome of parliament and attains her full, unconditional rights.”51 Afterward, the Sulh government donated funds for a new women’s union headquarters. An important asset to the campaign for women’s rights was none other than the president’s wife, Laure al-Khuri. In March , a group of women in the southern city of Sidon staged a collective unveiling, perhaps in imitation of that in Beirut during the crisis. However, protests against their action shut the down the city, which was, incidentally, Sulh’s political fief.

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Even the Maqasid foundation, long known for its support of women’s education, cancelled the group’s right to meet in its building. In response, Laure alKhuri traveled to Sidon to offer the women encouragement. She announced in a speech that the famous Egyptian women’s leader, Huda Sha‘rawi, would soon visit Lebanon. Khuri had just returned from Egypt where she had made her first official state visit.52 She clearly intended to hold her husband to his promise of women’s rights. But as the Phalanges had also discovered, the dual discourses of paternalism and rights did not mix well with the government of the National Pact. The long-delayed petition for women’s suffrage was finally taken up by parliament in August , five months after Free France decreed women’s right to vote and shortly before Sha‘rawi’s visit. Women may have had reason to expect success, for Riyad al-Sulh had criticized opponents of women’s suffrage in Faysal’s Syrian Congress of . However, a parliamentary committee killed the proposal before it reached the floor for a vote. Committee members argued that women’s suffrage was contrary to Lebanese tradition and to Islam, and that “women were needed in the home rather than in public office.”53 In  as in  and , anti-suffrage debates overtly tied gender hierarchy to religious hierarchy, and implied the divine order would crumble if women attained equal political rights. On a more mundane level, parliamentarians elected along sectarian lines through paternalistic clienteles were likely little disposed to undermine the system that had brought them to power. Women’s marginalization and subordination to male authority would continue to be a cornerstone of the paternalistic edifice reinforced by the National Pact. Indeed, far from fostering the community of undifferentiated citizens envisioned by Sulh, the pact appeared to institutionalize sectarianism by secularizing it, substituting the president for the Maronite patriarch as leader of his community, and the prime minister for the mufti as leader of Muslims. Lebanese women found themselves, as they had during the suffrage debates of , caught in the contradictions of paternalism and republicanism. But unlike , leaders of the women’s movement themselves had participated in the affirmation of the paternalistic civic order, wittingly or not, by accepting male guardians and deferring to the authority of religious patriarchs. It is not clear that they could have choreographed their actions in the November crisis differently. On the one hand, their actions during the crisis may be read as adaptations to a civic order that marginalized them spatially and legally. Since the street battles of the s, women certainly were not free to claim the streets as their own space. And in reality, they were bound to religious authority by the personal status laws they could not reform. On the other hand, the

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symbolic contradictions in their actions also likely reflected women’s own conflicting views of their proper role in the civic order, those of the maternalist Women’s Social Democratic League and those of the rights-oriented women’s union. As in , and despite  intervening years of mobilization, there were no mass suffrage demonstrations before the parliamentary committee made its decision. That the women’s movement was not united in the suffrage cause certainly weakened the bid of the petitioners and strengthened the hand of opponents. The attempt to find a political middle ground for women, through the ideology of patriotic motherhood, had clearly failed to unite women against the powerful and contradictory pulls of paternalistic and egalitarian republicanism. The November crisis was not, however, an unmitigated failure for Lebanese women. As the al-Dabbur cartoon showed, they had, after all, earned a place in the national family, albeit an ambiguous one. Women would face higher obstacles in Syria, where the inclusive metaphor of national family was not prevalent, and where forces for women’s exclusion were much stronger.

May 1944 in Syria: A Gender Pact to Rebind the Civic Order The Khuri-Sulh victory in November  equally benefitted the Quwwatli regime in Syria. Allied pressure forced the French not only to reinstate the Lebanese government, but also to relinquish their administrative power in both countries. On January , , the French surrendered to the national governments the main pillars of their civilian rule: the Common Interests administration and the concessionary companies that controlled most utilities and railroads. The transfer of other ministries followed. By the end of , the only important institutions remaining in French hands were the Special Troops (the locally recruited military), the General Security police, and the Serail building, French headquarters in Beirut since World War I. The French cut their civilian staff in half and as befit their now primarily military presence, replaced the civilian Jean Helleu with General Paul Etienne Beynet.54 Syrian and Lebanese demands for sovereignty were nearly fulfilled. In the meantime, the Syrian nationalist government faced its own baptismal crisis, centered like that in Lebanon on gender issues, when a campaign against women’s unveiling by Islamic populists turned into a virtual armed revolt against the Quwwatli regime. As in Lebanon, the revolt was a theater of street politics that tested the legal and spatial boundaries of citizenship. It

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would result in a tacit gender pact that defined the paternalistic basis of Syria’s postcolonial civic order. The crisis began with what appeared to be a routine protest by the al-Gharra group. On the morning of May , al-Gharra circulated a familiar statement condemning women’s unveiling as immoral and the cinema as an evil influence. In a sign of the group’s growing influence, the statement was read at Friday prayers in mosques throughout Damascus. Saturday morning,  people gathered at al-Gharra’s Tankiz mosque in the city’s central Marja Square. Speakers included the recently elected parliamentarian Shaykh ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Tabba‘, who lived east of Marja in the old Shaghur quarter, and Shaykh Muhammad Ashmar, a popular religious leader in the Maydan, a lower-class quarter outside the walled city and south of Marja. The crowd combined the two shaykhs’ followings among petty-bourgeois merchants, ulama, religious students and recent rural migrants. The shaykhs spoke in anger about a charity ball scheduled that night by the Drop of Milk (Goutte de Lait) society, to which the Muslim wife of the education and defense minister, Rafiqa al-Bukhari, was selling tickets. Appalled that unveiled Muslim women might attend the dance with men, the shaykhs demanded that the government cancel it as an offense to public morality. The city police chief, who attended the meeting, explained that Drop of Milk was mainly a French-Christian society and promised to ask the society to bar admittance of Muslim women to the ball. The audience was not appeased. At : p.m., apparently at Ashmar’s instigation, the crowd poured out of the mosque. Some headed eastward, forcing the city’s main markets to close, while others marched one block westward to the Serail, where they shouted insults at Nasuhi al-Bukhari and other government officials. An unveiled Muslim woman on a nearby tramcar was attacked, but escaped unharmed. Tram service was shut down when  boys stoned another tramcar. The crowd then turned northward toward the upper-class Salihiya quarter, where the ball was to be held at the French Officers’ Club. Their numbers swelled to more than , many carrying guns and knives. Police followed behind on horseback. The crowd threw stones at the club, and then noticed that a ladies’ matinee was showing across the street at the Empire cinema. Reports vary on what happened next. Police claimed that the crowd battered the cinema’s doors with stones and guns and then turned their guns on the police who rushed to protect the women inside, some of whom had fainted. Others, including British informants, claimed the police shot first. There is no doubt that police fired fatal shots at two demonstrators, a religious student from a

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nearby village and a -year-old boy. One policeman was mildly wounded in the face. That evening (May ), Prime Minister Sa‘dallah al-Jabiri and the police chief met and ordered the arrest of the protest’s leaders. Shaykh Ashmar, clearly the most dangerous with his previous experience of leading rebel bands in the – Syrian and – Palestinian revolts, was arrested that night and transported to the desert town of Palmyra. Jabiri also visited Drop of Milk’s leaders to ask that they postpone the ball. This was evidently a shocking request, for the  ball had been a glittering affair, held at the Orient Palace Hotel and hosted by Mme Catroux herself.55 Leaders of the society, who included women’s union president ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri, consented on condition that they might exact revenge: they would withhold distribution of free milk to infants as long as the troubles continued. Indeed, the next morning, May , they turned away  poor mothers, mostly Muslim, telling them instead to “apply to the shaykhs.” The troubles had, in fact, only begun. Officials estimated that up to  percent of the city sympathized with the protest against unveiling. City markets remained closed on Sunday and Monday (May –), as rallies in Maydan mosques vowed to continue the strike until the government released Ashmar. The crowds rejected demands to call off the strike by Interior Minister Lutfi al-Haffar and by delegations of elite merchants and bosses of other city quarters, while shouting down Tabba‘ and another al-Gharra leader, Shaykh Ahmad al-Sabuni, when they made similar appeals. Tabba‘ was apparently no longer in control; he would meet with Parliament Speaker Faris al-Khuri and President Quwwatli on Tuesday to disclaim responsibility. Meanwhile, a violent faction took over in the Maydan, which prepared a siege as rumors spread of a weapons shipment from rural sympathizers south of the city. At this time the revolt appeared to spread beyond Damascus, with protests in Aleppo, where the governor and police chief were dismissed, and in Homs, where Ashmar and al-Gharra had links to local Islamic populists. Most markets in Homs were shut down by a group of shaykhs demanding bans on women’s unveiling and moviegoing, and freedom for Ashmar.56 As prospects for wider support opened, Damascus exploded into armed revolt on Tuesday, May . That morning the government had finally convinced merchants (some informants said with bribes) to open their shops. Police reinforcements mounted security patrols throughout the city, while the largest crowd yet assembled at the Manjak mosque in the Maydan, meeting with representatives of the Druze, Kurds, and Hawran region in the south to rally support. At about  a.m., an estimated , men exited the Manjak

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mosque, carrying guns and grenades. They attacked police posts and set up blockades on the quarter’s northern end. Moving into the central quarters of Shaghur and Marja, they fired guns and lofted hand-grenades at police who tried to cross their barriers. Reopened shops quickly lowered their shutters. A second woman was attacked, wounded in the head by a rogue stone-throwing group, apparently because her veil was too thin. At Marja Square, some rebels encountered a group of old notables, women and children who tried to push them back toward the Maydan.57 The gendarmerie sent in two tanks borrowed from the French to disperse the rebels, killing two. That night, two other Islamic populist groups, students of Youth of Muhammad and the older professionals of al-Tamaddun, prepared leaflets supporting the rebel shaykhs. The government press office, however, blocked their publication. Bread, not guns, finally brought down the revolt. In apparent imitation of the Drop of Milk society, Prime Minister Jabiri announced that if the siege continued, the shaykhs had better find bread for the Maydan, because he would withhold flour rations “unless and until it was fully understood that the government was the sole responsible authority.”58 Since the Syrian government still controlled all flour rations in the wartime economy, the Maydan faced the prospect of starvation. On the morning of Wednesday, May , al-Gharra voted to reopen the town. That afternoon it became clear that the Druze would not aid the Damascus rebels, and the insurgency ended without a reprise of the  revolt. In all, four rebels were killed, at least  policemen and unknown numbers of civilians were wounded, and  people were arrested.59 Popular sympathy for the revolt may be gauged by the fact that the reopened shops closed Wednesday afternoon while the funeral procession of a rebel passed (although they may have closed simply out of fear of more violence). Other signs of support were suppressed, however, by the National Bloc’s control of city quarters through client notables and quarter chiefs. Significantly, the only other Damascene group to show open support for the Maydan was the Kurds, whose quarter was not controlled by the Bloc. There is also some evidence that dissenting politicians within the government had aided the rebels. One of the revolt’s leaders was later identified as an employee at Syrian University. Another official was witnessed by a British informant to have sent his own agents to the Tankiz mosque to help rally crowds. Indeed, British observers reported that many Damascenes had greeted the revolt with the open delight. The rebels’ motivations may be surmised from the political climate of the Quwwatli regime’s first months in office. Al-Gharra’s decision to ally with

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Ashmar and the Maydan was apparently prompted by a sense of betrayal. Quwwatli’s government had ignored the group’s pressure to adopt its program of social reforms, despite their alliance in the summer elections. In frustration, Tabba‘ mobilized his network of students, many of them from nearby villages and popular quarters like the Maydan, to force the government’s hand.60 Populists were also likely provoked by the resurgence of the women’s movement that spring. In late April the women’s union had renewed its registration with the national government. Rafiqa al-Bukhari, a union official, and others openly campaigned against the veil. In Hama, meanwhile, a group of teachers and midwives revived their movement after it had been crushed by Islamic populists in the previous summer’s campaign against women’s moviegoing.61 In the Maydan, class tensions were certainly a major factor. Bread prices rose in the spring of  and the Maydan, among the poorest sections of Damascus, would have been most disgruntled. The poorer classes likely did not forget that Quwwatli had attacked their bread subsidies in his campaign against the French-backed regimes of –. The Maydan had also long been a center of political dissent against the elites of the old, walled city who had now captured the state.62 Maydan resident Kamil Qassab, leader of the Society of Ulama, Shaykh Ashmar, and leaders of the Tamaddun group had been supporters of Quwwatli’s bitterest rival, ‘Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar, as had the Maydan as a whole, the Kurdish quarter, Hawran, and Aleppo.63 Finally, it is worth noting that the Maydan hosted the headquarters of the Faysal Club, whose leaders included several Communists and Michel ‘Aflaq, cofounder of the nascent Ba‘th party and himself the son of a Maydani grain merchant. The club had been closed down a month before the revolt for its anti-government propaganda.64 The spontaneous, poorly planned revolt was the gravest challenge to the National Bloc since the elections. It was the first time that nationalist rulers ordered guns fired upon their fellow Syrians. Prime Minister Jabiri spoke before parliament at the revolt’s height, on May , condemning it as a product of an unpatriotic rabble. President Quwwatli, who was bedridden with illness at the time, made his first public speech about the revolt a month later. Like Jabiri, he avoided discussing the causes of discontent, attributing the revolt to a “rash” movement by “short-sighted” traitors. Quwwatli also emphasized that he was the nation’s supreme legal authority: “Those responsible for the policy of this country will not permit mutinies to be stirred up, no matter what the pretexts may be that cloak them.” Quwwatli’s reassertion of sovereignty came in response not only to Maydanis’ resistance against police, but

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also to fears that the revolt might have triggered a French intervention, and especially to rumors that al-Gharra had declared the Tankiz mosque the nation’s only legitimate authority. Not unsubtly, Quwwatli devoted the remainder of his speech to the imminent transfer of control over the army to his government.65 May  was not, then, the ratification of Quwwatli’s regime that November  had been for Khuri in Lebanon. There had been no common enemy against whom the population could unite. The revolt not only violently polarized dissent, but cost Quwwatli the popular support he had cultivated in the previous summer’s elections through his alliances with Islamic populists. It is noteworthy that the factional, ideological, and class-based sources of dissent came to a focus around gender issues. The immediate cause of the revolt, it may be recalled, was opposition to women’s unveiling and moviegoing. Al-Gharra had renewed its campaign against the women’s movement all spring. Islamic populists were chagrined by the fact that Quwwatli’s government was filled with bourgeois men whose wives socialized publicly in European fashions at cinemas, hotels and clubs. The linkage between gender and class tensions is suggested by the revolt’s geography. Rebels from the poor southern Maydan confronted elites of the northern Salihiya quarter at the social crossroads of the city, Marja Square, not only seat of government, but also the nexus of tramlines and the city’s main entertainment district. Here was where the classes rubbed shoulders, where unveiled women might appear on tramcars and attend matinees. While the French could be blamed for colonizing these central public spaces of the city, alienating them from the culture of popular quarters, al-Gharra had clearly expected that its ally, the National Bloc, might reverse that process. Gender complaints were thus no mere pretext for the revolt, despite the claims of Jabiri and Quwwatli. The condemnation of women’s increasing publicness was integral to the new aims of Islamic populists. In the s their goals had been primarily defensive, to limit state intervention in religious affairs and foreign influence in society. Now they adopted a proactive campaign to control state policy, if not the state itself. Tabba‘’s assumption of political office was a sharp departure from past practice, as were the rumored claims that Tankiz mosque was the sole seat of legitimate authority. The political opening occasioned by independence, and influence from the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood, likely fueled Islamic populists’ ambitions. One of the Egyptian group’s brochures, sent to Aleppo in May , called for all government affairs to be based on Islam and carried out by religiously trained civil servants: “The Qur’an must be the sole source of our

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political, economic, social and legislative life.”66 According to British sources in the Maydan, al-Gharra used veiling as a battering ram, on the assumption that government cooperation on that issue would open the door to more sweeping control over social policy.67 Their social policy was concerned primarily with public morality and uniquely directed at women, with aims to require veils, ban them from cinemas, segregate tramcars and schools, and to enforce the above, a moral police squad. For Islamic populists, ousting the French was only the beginning of a process of purging society from foreign, and even indigenous Christian, influence. They envisioned the postcolonial state as an instrument of return to a perceived past of untroubled tradition, and the heart of that tradition to be in gender relations. Elite nationalists apparently understood that al-Gharra’s protests about women and public morality were part of a fundamental rejection of the republican civic order bequeathed by the French. At issue was liberalism itself: the confrontation pitted individual rights against collective values, the right to privacy against the prerogative of state intervention. Islamic populists made no secret of their contempt for a new law that prohibited anyone from undermining the individual liberty of another. “Shaykhs and ulama consider this decision as absolutely incompatible with the religious principles of the Qur’an,” reported French police on May , at the height of the revolt.68 Jabiri, in his speech the previous day, defended the law and expressed repugnance at the idea of a state that trampled upon the right to privacy in order to impose moral values: “We cannot impose our will on a husband to enforce conduct that is his own affair and that is commanded by his religion. Likewise, we cannot constrain a woman who delivers herself in private to bad morals. If we can catch her in the act, she is subject to severe penalties. Otherwise, can we penetrate into private homes to discover what goes on there?”69 As Jabiri spoke, the parliamentary audience no doubt recalled the French state’s outrageous violation of private bedrooms in Lebanon only six months before. However, even at the height of the crisis, Jabiri sought to appease the Islamic populists. “No previous government has before battled vice, bad morals, and licentiousness as much as ours,” he claimed. He pleaded for a reconciliation of civil and religious authority: “We don’t want the world to see our country as atheist or impious, or divided by class or sect. . . . We have taken measures in every city to prevent attacks on liberty, religion, public safety and the security of the army. We wish that every mosque, every church and every synagogue may open their doors in all liberty and without fear.” Quwwatli echoed Jabiri’s plea for compromise. In his view, there was no contradiction between

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religion and republicanism, only the danger of extremism on either side. “Every right and duty should not go beyond its limits,” he declared in his June speech, ironically echoing Nazira Zayn al-Din’s very different application of the same principle (see chapter seven).70 Quwwatli and Jabiri further appeased Islamic populists with their lenient treatment of them. Tabba‘ and other leaders of al-Gharra were never arrested; nor was the group ever shut down, as many had expected it to be. When a deputy proposed stripping Tabba‘ of his parliamentary immunity from prosecution, Speaker Faris al-Khuri pocketed the motion.71 And by the end of the year Shaykh Muhammad Ashmar was released and back in action in the Maydan.72 In stark contrast, Jabiri made no effort at compromise on women’s rights. In his speech before parliament, he made absolutely no defense of women’s right to choose veiling or unveiling, or of their right to go to the movies. Instead, he implicitly endorsed al-Gharra’s viewpoint by assuring parliament that the charity ball did not offend public morality because Muslim women never attended it. (He omitted the fact that Muslim officials of the women’s union were active members of the society.) Jabiri even denied that unveiling was an issue: Rumors have spread that the Muslim woman wants to unveil. We have observed this matter in all quarters, be it in streets or alleys or in public squares, without finding signs of anything other than what has been known in the past. . . . We asked if there were not associations who pursue this goal in secret, or if there were not persons who have suddenly unveiled in the street. But we found none of that. While it may have been true that during the revolt no Muslim women dared to unveil in public, this statement completely erased the recent history of very public unveiling demonstrations, like that led by Thuraya al-Hafiz and the petition by women of Hama the previous year (see chapter ). Instead of supporting women’s rights, Jabiri portrayed the government as their paternalistic protector, and the police as harem guards at the Empire cinema, “where there was not a single man. . . . Imagine the tragic result in this circumstance if these individuals had been able to penetrate to where the women were. . . . Could we have given them free passage? Never!” he said, in justifying the deaths of the two protesters. In effect, nationalists and Islamic populists forged a tacit gender pact, mirroring the Lebanese National Pact in its intent to reconcile divergent visions of the civic order. In exchange for Jabiri’s silence on veiling, Tabba‘ had

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disavowed support for the violent revolt against the regime. The terms of the gender pact were reaffirmed symbolically during Quwwatli’s June speech. Billed as a ceremony of thanksgiving for his return to health and full exercise of office, the speech was delivered with great pomp as Quwwatli stood on the balcony of the Serail, flanked by ministers in fezzes and saluted from below by boy scouts raising flags in the air. Absent from the scene, and in contrast to the similar pose of the Lebanese president the previous November, was Quwwatli’s wife. Indeed, not a woman was to be seen in photos of the event (fig. ). Mme Quwwatli was to be no Rafiqa al-Bukhari, partaking in public events with mixed-sex crowds. Nor was she to be a Laure al-Khuri, who had even paid an official visit to Egypt. No doubt to al-Gharra’s satisfaction, the Serail, Marja Square, and indeed politics itself, were marked as an exclusively male domain. The gender pact would rebind the fractured postcolonial civic order through the paternalistic exclusion of women. Women were quick to recognize the terms of the pact. On May , the day after Jabiri’s speech, a group of unnamed Muslim women sent petitions to Quwwatli, Jabiri, and Khuri supporting the government’s crackdown on the shaykhs, and also, in patent reaction to the prime minister’s omission, demanding their constitutional rights.73 The sting of Jabiri’s rebuff was all the more sharp in that he had been, like his Lebanese counterpart Riyad al-Sulh, a prominent supporter of women’s suffrage in Faysal’s government. It was also a personal betrayal, for the leading members of the women’s union were wives and daughters of government officials. Women likely recognized the betrayal as a new twist to an old nationalist strategy. In , Fakhri al-Barudi had usurped women’s agency in a street demonstration to pose a rival protector to that of the French. In  Jamil Mardam Bey, Quwwatli’s predecessor as leader of the National Bloc (and now his foreign minister), had agreed to ban women from cinemas and endorse opposition to personal status law reform to save face after the independence treaty failed. Indeed, the man who suppressed the May  revolt, Minister of Interior Lutfi al-Haffar, himself had banned his daughter from the movies, and prevented her from meeting the movie star Asmahan. Haffar, like Quwwatli and other National Bloc leaders, had moved to Salihiya from al-Gharra’s home quarter of Shaghur, but remained personally ambivalent about the new lifestyles there.74 Political expediency likely reinforced Bloc leaders’ paternalistic views on women. In a sense, ruling nationalists were replaying the s contest between the French and religious leaders for authority over public morality. But while the French had rebuffed Islamic populists’ demands, the now-independent

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nationalist government was forced to cut a deal with them. Unlike the French, the nationalists depended on the support of conservative Muslims. Islamic populists had grown stronger during the war, making them a greater political threat than the women’s movement was. Even though women’s groups mobilized many Syrian cities after the May  revolt, 75 the gendered spatial and legal boundaries of the civic order would ensure that they would remain far weaker than the Islamic populists, and that the gender pact would remain intact.

chapter 16


The Making of Postcolonial Citizens

“For the first time in a generation, life has come near normal,” wrote Albert Hourani, a British-Lebanese scholar, from Damascus in the summer of . “[But] the growth of strong opposition has already begun.”1 The transition period between the transfer of civilian powers in  and the final withdrawal of French and British troops in  was a time of both optimism and anxiety. As fear of famine receded, states and citizens alike cast auspicious eyes upon the postwar future. Expectations ran high that independence would purge social and political ills associated with French rule. But even as the Syrian and Lebanese governments hurried to staff and run ministries vacated by the French, many citizens suspected their leaders’ calls for patience masked contempt for true reform.2 Syria and Lebanon’s unusually prolonged transition to independence would profoundly affect the nature of their postcolonial civic orders. Nationalist elites profited politically from the continued occupation of French troops, for fear that France might reassert their rule helped to divert calls for internal reform. The friendlier British presence also bolstered their power indirectly, by posing as a force of repression while nascent governments remained without armies of their own until late . Because Britain’s primary concern was to maintain peace on the Middle Eastern front, the transition to independence could not, and would not, flare into a revolution against the status quo. Subaltern movements pursued their agendas for reform of the civic order through political means. Success would be hampered, however, by their inability to coalesce around a unified program. While women, Islamic populists, Communists, and labor unions all sought greater equality among citizens, they remained divided by their class alliances and ideological differences. Their separate efforts to win piecemeal reforms were often undermined by battles with each other, battles that ruling elites exploited. Discord among subaltern

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movements and the advantages that elite nationalists enjoyed at the helm of state thus blocked substantial change. Neither country discarded its colonial-era constitution; the only substantial revisions were those that purged mention of France. Ruling nationalists not only fortified the inequities of the colonial civic order but also rolled back state commitments to social welfare with self-interested policies of liberalism in Lebanon and statism in Syria. As a result, the terms of citizenship would remain problematic—unstably poised between paternal privilege and republican rights—well after independence in . This assured the perpetuation of the gendered national pacts that subordinated women in the civic order.

The Women’s Movement and the 1944 Cairo Women’s Conference With full independence on the horizon, women in both countries reorganized, revitalized, and renamed their unions in early , becoming the Syrian-Arab Women’s Union and the Lebanese-Arab Women’s Union. The name change betokened their new emphasis on solidarity among all Arab women, which paralleled male nationalists’ efforts at the time to found the Arab League.3 Arab women had begun organizing across national lines with their  conference on Palestine. Abandoning the old Eastern women’s conferences, which had included Iranian, Turkish, and Indian women, they planned, under the leadership of Huda Sha‘rawi, the first Arab Women’s Conference to be held in Cairo in December . It was their first international gathering since the war’s start. As never before, women’s leaders took their conference resolutions to their constituents and their governments, seeking their own fruits of independence. Women’s aspirations for political and civil rights had sunk low by the time they met with Sha‘rawi in September  to plan the Cairo meeting. Women’s leaders in both countries were discouraged by the defeat of the Lebanese suffrage proposal the previous month.4 The Syrian women’s union had accepted Sha‘rawi’s invitation before the May  crisis gave Islamic populists a new lease on life.5 In December, just before the conference opened, the city of Damascus ordered the segregation of women tram riders during the religious holidays, fulfilling a demand long made by the Islamic populists. The influential Damascus newspaper, Alif Ba’, commented that “it was odd that men still sought to shut women in harems and special tramcars when these same women meeting at the conference are demanding to be equal to men and to share government jobs with them.”6

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This climate no doubt accounts for ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri’s defensive tone at a Cairo press conference on December : The first goal of our conference is to reaffirm the cultural, social and economic ties of Arab countries. . . . Our feminist cause comes next; it aims mainly to improve the family and to grant women their full rights . . . . the Syrian woman has general goals and particular goals. For now, she is more concerned with general goals, national goals, than with women’s goals.7 Rose Shahfa, leader of the Lebanese delegation, expressed higher hopes for the conference: “We plan to study women’s postwar situation. The war has, in effect, provoked a social evolution, and the social rights of women will be of the highest importance after the war.” Shahfa also invoked women’s participation in November  to justify their acquisition of political rights: “The Lebanese Women’s Union has taken an active part in the Lebanese political movement, with excellent results. This proves that if women take an interest in political life, they can perform usefully.” Both women, however, dared only to demand partial suffrage. “The Syrian woman demands, with reserve, for the educated woman, the right to enter political life,” Jaza’iri told the press. Shahfa averred, “We believe that the educated woman has more right to political privileges than the ignorant man who enjoys these rights.” Embattled, the women’s unions hunkered down behind familiar barricades of class-based and nationalist alliances. The conference opened with great pomp in ceremonies hosted by the Egyptian king and other luminaries, and in succeeding days it produced a list of resolutions directed at all Arab governments. At the top of the list was the demand for women’s political equality, especially the rights to vote and to hold political office. Next came resolutions to reform personal status law so that women might perform more fully as citizens, including restrictions on men’s abuse of divorce rights, limits on polygamy, and a minimum marriage age of  for girls. To cap their quest for equality, the delegates voted to suppress feminine suffixes to words in the Arabic language. And as patriotic mothers they also called for governments’ commitment to universal, compulsory education and medical care for the poor. The women also acted as diplomatic representatives of their countries, with resolutions in support of Arab unity and of Palestine.8 Meanwhile back in Syria, Islamic populists vigorously protested the threat to masculine prerogative. In Aleppo, a group petitioned President Quwwatli to fight loose morals and ban Muslim women from cinemas, while a December  Friday sermon by Shaykh Muhammad Abu Salih attacked women’s

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rights as forbidden by the Qur’an: “The goal of this feminist agitation is to encourage modernism; that is, impiety, bad morals and the insubordination of woman towards man.”9 Shaykh Muhammad Ashmar, veteran of the May  revolt, joined the crusade by adding his name to a joint manifesto of Damascene Islamic populists sent to parliament and addressed to the entire nation: Your attention is drawn to the grave decisions taken by the women’s conference in Cairo, which concern the supposed rights demanded by women: divorce, suffrage, admission to state offices, abolition of polygamy, etc. . . . The realization of these women’s aspirations would lead to disastrous consequences for the Arab Muslim nation—corruption, loss of energy and of patriotic spirit—and will provoke a dire reaction in Syrian circles. In effect, they declared adoption of the Cairo resolutions a violation of the tacit gender pact cemented the previous May. Establishment ulama evidently concurred. On January ,  the Friday sermon at the country’s preeminent Umayyad mosque condemned the government for even authorizing Syrian women’s attendance in Cairo.10 The women’s union and government were thrown on the defensive. The Syrian delegates assured the press that they had voted against suppression of feminine suffixes in Arabic because they had an “honored place in the Qur’an.”11 The prime minister’s daughter-in-law, Suhail al-Khuri, denounced the entire conference to the press: “The role of woman is not to demand the political rights of man, but to influence public life even as she confines herself to a more intimate and reserved context.”12 The prime minister himself, Faris al-Khuri (who had succeeded Jabiri in October), reiterated those views at a Cairo banquet hosted in March  by Huda Sha‘rawi to celebrate the signing of the Arab League pact. When Sha‘rawi protested that no women delegates had been chosen for the new league, Khuri drew ridicule from fellow guests by responding that woman was merely the “ornament of man” and the “rear guard” to men’s “vanguard” in the army of politics.13 Lebanese women, whose movement was still buoyed by the November  crisis, took a more aggressive approach. Laure al-Khuri, wife of the president, openly supported the Cairo resolutions and called for their immediate adoption. “Why not?” she asked a reporter. “There are already numerous female lawyers and doctors. Why not female politicians?. . . . I can assure you that you will notice our achievements in five years.”14 In April, Rose Shahfa formally

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presented the resolutions to the new prime minister, ‘Abd al-Hamid Karami, who promised to set up a committee to study them. To prove their worthiness as citizens in the meantime, as Nazik ‘Abid had done a quarter-century before, women joined the latest battle against the French. In January , Syrian women turned out in unprecedented numbers in a surge of nationalist demonstrations demanding control of the army and full evacuation of French troops. Jaza’iri’s students at her Dawhat al-adab school joined nearly  other female high school students in a march to parliament and the Serail, demanding specifically to see their archrival, Faris al-Khuri. And as anti-French protests crested with the end of the European war in May,  women representing women’s organizations marched again, proclaiming “the intent of Syrian women to consecrate all their efforts to achieve national independence.”15 Lebanese women joined the May protests too, when veterans of November  reunited in their effort to oust the French. Ibtihaj Qaddura gave a speech at the reunion, proclaiming: “Here is the woman who walks in front of the man, devoting all her energy to service of the nation. Here she is, this revolutionary, who combats oppression and injustice,” she proclaimed. “Woman is no longer made for the home, because the whole world can no longer do without her services.”16 When the May demonstrations turned into gun battles between Syrians and the French, women hurried to join the fight in Hama, Damascus, and elsewhere. As in  they risked death under flying bombs and shells to gather the wounded in the streets and deliver daily meals to hundreds of refugees and rebels. ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri herself was forced to spend a night hiding in Damascene orchards when French bombs blocked her way home. This proved to be the last violent confrontation with the French: Allied pressure forced the French to transfer control of the Special Troops to the states by August. Syrian women felt, as Lebanese women had in November , that they had shown ultimate proof of their patriotism.17 However, by  it became apparent that national liberation would not bring women’s liberation. The Khuri and Quwwatli regimes would never enact either women’s suffrage or reforms of personal status law. Despite women’s display of valor, opponents still argued that citizens should enjoy rights only if they perform military service. This was so laughable an idea for women, in their opinion, that it settled the issue. Others continued to define women’s “natural” role, embodied in religious law, as different from men’s, in arguments that women’s political participation would deform their femininity, destroy the home, and violate the divine order. Some resurrected Islamic scripture (hadith) about the Prophet’s wife ‘Aisha to argue that women’s intervention in politics

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incurs national chaos and disaster.18 Nationalist rulers played to these prejudices. In , when President Quwwatli endorsed the inaugural issue of a new women’s magazine, Woman (al-Mar’a), his advice to women echoed Shaykh Ashmar and others who had condemned the  Cairo conference. While he praised women as mothers and as patriots who fought for independence, he warned them against ambition. Women’s pursuit of education and culture was dangerous, he wrote, “if it is not strengthened by sound morals—morals without culture is better than culture without morals.”19 Although women in both countries intensified their suffrage struggle after , the National Pact in Lebanon and the tacit gender pact in Syria would discourage any change in parliamentary opinion for the duration of the immediate postwar regimes.

Islamic Populists and the Rise of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood In the short term, the Syrian gender pact apparently took the heat off of Quwwatli’s regime. In the months after the May  crisis, Islamic populists turned their attention away from the state to battle the staunchest promoters of secular, democratic government, the Communists. In August , a group of Damascene ulama and shaykhs including Shaykh Ashmar, backed by industrialists and merchants, announced their opposition to the alliance with the Soviet Union, declaring “Communism is dangerous to Islam.” The group attempted to organize workers from all over Syria into non-Communist unions, staging protests particularly against British military employers. In the autumn of , anti-Communist rallies sparked violent clashes between the two groups in Damascus, Homs and Hama.20 The leader of the Youth of Muhammad in Homs, Mustafa al-Siba‘i, reportedly authorized the killing of Communists because they “reveal their women” and “trample on the Qur’an,” and especially because they had convinced some members of his group to defect to their camp. In the violence that ensued, however, it was a Communist who killed one of Siba‘i’s followers.21 In effect, the Islamic populists were fighting battles for the bourgeois nationalist elite, for whom the Communists were not merely a moral danger but an increasingly powerful threat to their class interests. But while the nationalists appeared to have won their battle against Islamic populist rebels, they were in fact fighting an old war. At issue was no longer merely the boundaries of state power but control of the state. By affirming state control over public morality in May , Quwwatli and Jabiri played

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into the hands of the Islamic populists, for the next logical step would be to place in political power those who were experts in Islamic morality, the shaykhs and ulama themselves. The tacit gender pact actually encouraged populists to form a united front of opposition. It immediately cemented the alliance of groups that had supported the revolt: al-Gharra, al-Tamaddun, and the Youth of Muhammad. By the autumn of , police reported that other Islamic populist groups in Damascus were negotiating a formal merger. It was this united front that had issued the manifesto against the  Cairo women’s conference. Meanwhile, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood was being founded in Aleppo. By the end of , Mustafa Siba‘i would establish the Brotherhood’s headquarters in Damascus, uniting groups in all major cities. The Brotherhood would compete as a political party for the first time in the  elections, with an agenda to unseat nationalist elites, recruit lower classes, and revolutionize the civic order on Islamic principles of justice. Siba‘i in this period incorporated elements of socialist ideology in his effort to attract the same constituency that the Communists recruited. (Siba‘i’s own family was split between Islamist and Communist sympathizers, suggestive of the two groups’ common grievances as subalterns.)22 Nationalist elites’ appeasement of Islamic populists had apparently backfired.

Communists and the Labor Movement: The Fight for Labor Codes After the crises of November  and May , labor unions and Communists in both countries renewed their quest to transform the colonial welfare state into democratic welfare states. Even though bread was now plentiful, urban workers still labored long hours for deflated wages, with little security. Indeed, the imminent withdrawal of British troops and reopening of world markets threatened a new wave of unemployment. In the winter of –, Lebanese unions unleashed a wave of major strikes. In an unprecedented unity of purpose, railroad, tramway, electrical, and tobacco workers joined truck and taxi drivers, shoemakers, carpenters, and typographers in demands for government intervention on their behalf. They sought a shorter work day, paid sick leave, higher wages and family allowances, legalization of more unions, and protection from foreign competition. In January, labor federation leader Mustafa al-‘Aris, who had cooperated with the rump government during the November crisis, met with

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President Khuri, Prime Minister Sulh, and the minister of commerce and industry to demand enforcement of existing labor laws and adoption of a full labor code. Workers, too, wanted to enjoy the fruits of independence.23 Meanwhile, the Communist Party held its annual conference in Beirut. The Syrian and Lebanese branches formally separated in light of the impending political independence of the two countries, with Khalid Bakdash head of the Syrian party and Farajallah al-Hilu head of the Lebanese. Both stressed that they sought a democratic, national revolution—not socialist revolution, for which they deemed Syria and Lebanon not yet ready. They jointly demanded full independence, liberal republican regimes, and social and economic reforms.24 In their  May Day speeches, Bakdash and ‘Aris reiterated their call for a welfare state that would offer comprehensive protections for all workers.25 At the end of , Syrian labor unions also began to federate, as Lebanese unions had done. Thousands of textile workers struck around Syria against continuing MESC restrictions on supplies, ending in a bloody confrontation with police in Aleppo. In January , Syrian unions held a national meeting at Syrian University, attended by  delegates and the prime minister, Faris al-Khuri. The nascent labor federation adopted an agenda calling for the right to work, full employment for skilled workers, full legalization of unions, a workers’ savings bank, state technical schools, and comprehensive social security, including free medical care and unemployment, old age, and disability insurance. It also demanded fuller political rights, with seats reserved for workers in parliament and in the Chamber of Commerce and Industry. At the same time, Syrian Communists distributed copies of their new charter, which demanded not only a labor code, but also equality among all citizens; rights to free speech and association; universal education in city and village; free medical care for the poor, especially women and children; liberation of peasants from poverty, and pay raises for civil servants.26 The labor/Communist movement was thus motivated not merely by immediate economic complaints, but by the intent to reshape the civic order into a more level playing field. It was the most powerful democratic force in politics. Communists’ expanding influence among the urban masses sparked street battles not only against Syrian Islamic populists, but also against the Syrian National Party in Lebanon, which they attacked as fascist. In November , an SNP member stabbed to death Edward Shartuni, director of the Communist magazine al-Tariq. Communists suspected the government of supporting the right-wing SNP to counterbalance the influence of the political left.27 Indeed, the turf battles in the streets were mere episodes in the larger war

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against the two governments. Both parliaments stalled on labor code proposals, while state bureaucracies neglected enforcement of existing protective laws. Parliaments had even less incentive to pass labor laws than they did in the s. First, their majorities of rural deputies were not predisposed to sympathize with the urban industrial workforce. Second, unionized workers were concentrated heavily in formerly French concessionary companies. While enhancing workers’ rights against imperialists might have been tolerated as a patriotic act when the French ruled, now that those companies were controlled by the nationalist governments, workers’ rights would only diminish the power of the ruling elite. Third and most important, nationalist leaders felt less pressure to engage in social bargaining now that they did not face electoral rivalry from the Free French and their collaborators. In Syria, Faris al-Khuri announced the National Bloc’s first political agenda in October , a full year after Sulh’s inaugural policy statement in Lebanon. Khuri clearly heard the voice of the Communist/labor movement, for four of his eight points of policy promised to promote national economy and industry while protecting workers and peasants, raising civil servants’ pay, expanding public education, and limiting press censorship. But while he attended the national labor conference in January  and even drew up a draft labor code, Khuri shelved the measure indefinitely, presumably due to opposition from his bourgeois party fellows. The National Bloc promoted state support for industrialization as the vehicle of national progress, but not necessarily as a means to uplift of workers’ condition.28 In Lebanon, the National Pact had fostered an alliance of Christian and Muslim bourgeois interests that were fundamentally unfriendly to the Communist/labor movement. President Khuri’s Constitutional Bloc represented (mainly Christian) financial and international mercantile interests, and dominated the parliament through networks of landowners and local merchants commanded by the two Sunni prime ministers, Riyad al-Sulh and ‘Abd al-Hamid al-Karami. In January , the government banned an Egyptian film called “The Worker,” which portrayed a tyrannical silk mill owner who fired employees for unionizing and demanding their rights.29 Many employers claimed that labor laws adopted under the French no longer applied. While the Lebanese bourgeoisie as a whole was hostile to enhancing workers’ rights, the dominant commercial-financial wing also worked to undermine the very manufacturing firms that employed unionized workers by promoting liberal economic policies favoring international trade over protection of local industry.30 The labor movement countered the stalling tactics of bourgeois politi-

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cians with numerous strikes, demonstrations, meetings, and petitions in  and . The show of strength was at times impressive: During their January  national meeting, , workers marched through Damascus, the largest demonstration in the city’s living memory. In May , the Lebanese labor federation staged a general work stoppage that shut down Beirut and its northern hinterland as well as Zahla and other towns.31 The confrontation turned violent when employers called in police to force strikers they had fired to vacate factories. The state sent in police even though the workers claimed benefits supposedly guaranteed them by law. The right to strike was still not formally recognized. Prominent in the fight were women factory workers in Lebanon. In February and June , police assaulted female strikers at the tobacco monopoly’s headquarters in Furn al-Shubbak, just south of Beirut, and at a Beirut stocking factory, drawing indignant notice in the press. In July and August, police injuries hospitalized two women who were picketing textile factories. And in June , police actually killed a female tobacco worker, Warda Butrus Ibrahim, when she and a group of other female strikers lay down in the road to prevent company trucks from crossing their picket line. The scandal raised protests from unions throughout Lebanon and Syria, as well as from newspapers and several parliamentary deputies. Some labor leaders even proposed making June , the day Ibrahim was killed, a national holiday for workers.32 Indeed, the labor/Communist movement came to represent women’s interests more than ever before. While women were still a minority of factory workers, they were becoming the backbone of textile manufacturing and tobacco and food processing. President Quwwatli’s conserves factory, for example, employed many women.33 And while factory women joined unions, the Communist Party continued to draw higher-class women away from the bourgeois women’s unions. Male and female party members routinely mixed at party headquarters and marched together in parades and demonstrations.34 At the party’s – conference, Rugina Khayyatah, delegate of the women’s section, declared: “The Communist Party is the first party where the Arab woman has found a space to fight for her nation.”35 The killing of Warda Ibrahim in Lebanon and the continued pressure of labor actions in Syria pushed the parliaments to adopt comprehensive labor codes in mid-.36 The codes were a long-deferred victory. They finally legalized employee-only unions and strikes (except against the public sector) and formally codified previous laws on minimum wages, work hours, holidays, sick pay, severance pay, and protections for women and child workers. In addition, Syrians gained the work accident insurance that Lebanese had won from the

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French in . And while women were still classified as an exceptional category of worker, subject to protective laws along with children, they won rights to paid maternity leave and severance pay if they left their jobs to marry. The labor codes appeared to promise a fundamental transformation of the civic order. The state was now officially the watchdog over employer-employee relations. Workers would be able to organize and strike without fear of losing their jobs or police bullets. Optimism was reflected in the rising number of labor unions, which jumped in Syria alone from  to  between  and .37 However, the codes fell short of the democratic welfare state that unions and Communists envisioned. The Syrian law omitted nearly all of the social security measures and the political representation that workers had demanded at their January  national meeting. The codes in both countries excluded peasants and the majority of working women employed in domestic service and small family businesses. Moreover, the government agencies set up to enforce workers’ rights rarely did so. And while disability insurance and pensions were established in principle, no financial mechanism to fund them was created.38 In fact, the governments had written the codes without the consultation of labor leaders, and now used them as a means to control workers. The states had effectively granted themselves the power to intervene directly in union affairs. Workers could no longer choose their unions, because the state now assigned them membership. Nor could they strike at will, for they now had to apply first to state-appointed arbitration committees. Syrian bourgeois nationalists used the law as a means of disciplining workers and modernizing industry.39 The labor code “recognizes only the individual’s right to join a union, but ignores other rights, like their independence from the state,” complained a Syrian scholar in .40 Similarly, a Lebanese scholar observed “the police spirit that governs this law.”41 According to historian Jacques Couland, bourgeois rulers used the Lebanese code “to retain a monopoly and prohibit employees from introducing social issues into politics; that is, prohibit any union intervention that would maintain and improve the democratic regime upon which application of the law depended.”42 In short, the codes were used to block, not to foster, democratic transformation of the civic order.

The Fate of the Colonial Welfare State Just as nationalist rulers had encouraged women’s philanthropy while blocking change in their legal status, so they ostensibly granted workers rights while

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actually securing control over the labor movements. Both states played the paternalistic role they had inherited from the French, but with a difference. While the Syrians adopted France’s statist tendencies, the Lebanese amplified the liberal aspects of mandatory rule. The former suited the Quwwatli regime’s drive to industrialize, while the latter catered to the needs of Beirut’s financial-commercial bourgeoisie. Both approaches were used to slow and even halt expansion of the colonial welfare state. Education was the states’ major focus of social policy in these years. Between  and , the Lebanese state opened nearly  new schools, raising enrollment from , to ,. In –, Syria opened  new state schools and also added about , students to state rolls.43 The number of students in Lebanese state schools would triple by , while the number in Syrian state schools would quadruple by , twice the rate of expansion under the French. But while both Syrian and Lebanese rulers proclaimed citizens’ right to education, they hitched that right to their programs of statist and liberal paternalism. Syrian education adviser Sati‘ al-Husri, veteran of Faysal’s governments in Syria and Iraq,44 revamped the national school curriculum to standardize and arabize it. The purpose of state schools, according to the  reform law, was to ensure that: every individual will develop to be strong in body, good in character, sound in thought, loving to his fatherland, proud of his nationality, mindful of his duties, provided with the information he needs in life, capable of serving his country with his physical and intellectual powers and with his productive efforts.45 While the reform law uprooted the French curriculum, it imitated France’s centralized school system built to foster dutiful citizens loyal to the state.46 The state was to become the paternal teacher to its children and the forger of national unity as envisioned by the National Bloc. In contrast to Syria’s state paternalism, Lebanon retained the mandate era’s mediated paternalism, leaving education largely in the hands of Christian religious patriarchs. The National Pact government, with its entrenched sectarianism, was especially vulnerable to Catholics’ stiff resistance to state control of education. “To make education an instrument of national politics seems to us an insult to human nature,” said one advocate.47 By the s, French missionaries and the Maronite Church had a far greater stake in Lebanese schooling than when they persuaded Gouraud to reopen their schools after World

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War I. The Lebanese thus did little to alter the mandate era’s French-style curriculum or its reliance on private schools. In –, only  percent of Lebanese students attended state schools, compared to  percent of Syrian students. The proportion would rise to only to  percent by . In general, state schools remained a ghetto for poor Muslims and poor villagers of various sects.48 Muslims who had attacked France’s support for the mediated educational system in the s, like Prime Minister Karami himself, found little satisfaction under the independent state. The states’ tepid response to demands for welfare expansion was reflected in their budgets.49 State spending boomed after the war, when inflation leveled off and the resumption of trade boosted tax revenues. Spending on health and education soon surpassed their peak prewar levels and by  Syria was spending eight times what it did in . In fact, however, spending on health and education remained level as a proportion of total state budgets, comparable to their share in the French budgets of the s. The lion’s share of the new, postwar state revenues went instead toward building national militaries and to public works projects that primarily benefitted elites who owned construction firms and whose businesses needed more roads, electricity, irrigation, and so on.50 Indeed, aside from Syria’s massive investment in education, there was no permanent reapportionment of state funding toward welfare, nor was there a significant redistribution of state benefits from rich to poor citizens. The states not only failed to introduce new welfare programs, but actually cut food subsidies, family allowances, and other wartime supplements. In  a Lebanese finance ministry official lamented, “Not only is the relative expenditure on social services low in Lebanon but also the standard of service is very poor.” He praised Sweden, where spending on social services represented  percent of state expenditures, in contrast to Lebanon’s  percent and Syria’s  percent. The official blamed the income tax system, which taxed the wealthy lightly and provided only  percent of state revenues by .51 That same income tax had provoked vigorous protest in  from women’s groups, labor unions and Communists because it unfairly burdened the poor.52 Social policy also did little to alleviate gender inequality, and in some respects even aggravated it. In the early s, the Lebanese state still hired women almost exclusively as secretaries. Women factory workers were still paid less than men and less than the legal minimum wage, and women in most jobs were forced to quit when they married so that employers could avoid paying for maternity leaves. Girls’ enrollment in state primary schools tripled but still represented only one-third of all students, compared to 

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percent in , due largely to the state’s refusal to expand women’s teachertraining and to build as many schools for girls as for boys. In effect, the Lebanese state was practically absent from most women’s lives. The Syrian state performed a bit better by , with state-run mother-child health programs in several cities, girls’ enrollments in state primary schools quadrupling (but also remaining only one-third that of boys’), and minimal court enforcement of equal-pay laws.53 In sum, the drive toward a democratic welfare state effectively halted after . Syria’s state paternalism was not state welfarism; Lebanon’s liberal paternalism did not even pretend to be. There were of course practical obstacles to European-style welfarism: low taxation, low industrialization, and administrative inexperience aggravated by the mass hiring of political clients. But these obstacles did not inform policy. To the contrary, as we have seen, bourgeois nationalists had opposed social reform long before they captured the state. Instead, Syria’s statism and Lebanon’s liberalism represented alternative paths toward decolonization of the welfare state. Both paths preserved and even extended, in variant ways, a spirit of paternalism alongside the rhetoric of rights. Both paths also skirted a third alternative favored by workers, women and some Islamic populists, that of a democratic welfare state that would provide services directly and universally, as a right of all citizens and as a means of levelling disparities of class, gender, and religious affiliation.

Conclusion: The Making of Postcolonial Citizens The transition from colonial rule to independence in Syria and Lebanon prefigured patterns of decolonization followed by many other countries in the s and s. Elite nationalists, or middle-class soldier-nationalists, seized their states claiming to represent the general will of the people, while in fact desperately cutting compromises with, or violently excluding, an array of mass movements that had also emerged in the colonial period. While they promised a new era of national progress and democracy, all too often they instead pursued the self-interest of their own ruling class, or became mired in internal rivalries that perpetuated the paternalism and authoritarianism that were the legacies of the colonial civic order.54 Syria and Lebanon were also unlike many decolonizing countries, in the profound structural contradiction between paternalism and republicanism built into their colonial civic orders. Debate on the political, civil, and social rights of colonial subjects surfaced elsewhere, particularly when resistance

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movements emerged after World War I to demand a share of the new rights being granted to citizens in the democratizing metropoles of the British and French empires.55 But the mandate system had established a distinctive dynamic. Mandates were not simply a form of indirect colonial rule, and residents of mandated territories were not supposed to be colonial subjects at all. Rather, the League of Nations had ordered that they be granted constitutions and court systems to protect the rights of the people. The liberal goals of the mandate charter, however, ignored the exigencies of establishing foreign rule over a population. As we have seen, the French built a parallel regime of power, similar in its basic attributes to their other colonial regimes of indirect rule, based on alliances with paternalistic elites, the promotion of divisive sectarian identities, and the continued threat of brute force. The resulting tension between paternalistic hierarchy and republican principles of equality and rights was perhaps greater in Syria and Lebanon than in their neighboring Middle Eastern mandates: The British established much more overtly paternalistic monarchies in Iraq and Transjordan; in Palestine, their failure to create any sort of unitary government virtually negated the construction of citizenship altogether. The heightened paternalist-republican contradictions of French rule in Syria and Lebanon thus exploded regularly in the streets and climaxed in the armed conflict of May , when the French bombed the Syrian parliament building that they had themselves built. This tension between two types of authority was further aggravated, as we have seen, by the broad social and economic changes unleashed by war and the spread of global markets. The French, and local elites, engaged in an uphill struggle to preserve and strengthen paternalistic structures of authority and community that were crumbling under the weight of sheer economic necessity, the new social configurations of the urban public, and the appeal of new ideologies to an increasingly educated population. Meanwhile, the world wars enriched an urban bourgeoisie that had emerged in the Ottoman era, producing a self-conscious social class that shunned the communal ties that had once bound rich and poor in the cities. City communities were further disrupted with the arrival of peasants fleeing the effects of dislocated, neglected, and feudalized agriculture. As the disruption of households during after World War I spread the demand for girls’ education beyond the elite classes, and as more women took jobs as factory workers, household maids, and schoolteachers to supplement family income, male authority in the family and male control of the urban public were challenged. The vertical ties of paternal authority were strained and broken, in a general crisis of paternity. As a result, the mandatory civic order defined citizenship in highly hetero-

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geneous and unstable terms. First, because of its paternalistic biases, the distribution of rights was far from universal. Only adult males enjoyed the political rights to vote and to hold office; civil rights varied across the population according to religious sect and gender; and social rights were enjoyed only by those with power enough to claim them. Second, Syrians and Lebanese came to define their relationship with the state simultaneously as individual citizens and as members of a group—as male breadwinners, as patriotic mothers of families, as members of a sect guaranteed a certain number of seats in parliament, as clients of political patrons. Those who continued to rely primarily on family or sectarian support systems also came to demand rights from the state, for schooling, for health care, for better wages, for bread. This heterogeneous citizenship was condemned by some, particularly Communists on the left and the SNP on the right, who promoted universal standards of citizenship. It was defended by others who vaunted the value of community identity and preached the need for tolerance and unity at the meta-level of the nation. It would be misleading, however, to assume that most Syrians and Lebanese preferred heterogeneous citizenship. While most did, and still do, take great pride and pleasure in family and community ties, the reincarnation of paternalism in new state institutions was not solely a product of their choice. Paternalism was also a product of the instability and weakness of other alternatives, caused by a colonial state that tightened its budget by relying on religious and elitist intermediaries to offer social services to profoundly unsettled urban populations; that routinely undermined its guarantees to rights by rigging elections and shutting down parliaments; and that repressed political groups that advocated an absolute shift away from privilege, paternalism and sectarianism.56 There was, however, a political convergence before the  elections around support for social rights that might have offset fundamental inequalities among citizens. Even nationalist elites pledged to support equality and social benefits in their campaigns. When they reneged on those pledges after their victory, they unleashed new currents of opposition that once again polarized dissent. Politics again took to the streets, as nationalist elites’ pretense to represent the general will of the people—or in terms used in this book, their pretense to be true fathers of the people—was stripped away. The crisis of paternity remained unresolved, and their sons—and daughters—battled for succession. Paternal republicanism—the refusal to democratize and expand the colonial welfare state, and the persistence of heterogeneous citizenship rights—would contribute to the causes of Syria’s successive coups beginning in  and to the outbreak of civil war in Lebanon in .

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While factors contributing to instability are readily apparent, and are the focus of most studies of postcolonial Syria and Lebanon, countervailing forces of stability and continuity are less noticed. This study has suggested that gender was a crucial site of solidarity and compromise that muted class and religious tensions; gender bargains stabilized the civic order both under the French and in the early years of independence. One reason for gender’s salience was that it directly tied the anxieties faced personally at home with those confronting the society as a whole. Gender issues could thus easily mobilize mass sentiment. Secondly, because gender difference was already built into colonial paternalism, its reinforcement offered a means of stabilizing the independent civic order’s highly contested and unstable boundaries. For example, the crisis of paternity was foremost a crisis of masculinity. While elite nationalists posed as true fathers, subaltern movements sought an alternative to paternalistic hierarchy by posing various models of fraternity. Paramilitary, or proto-fascist, groups organized young men with totems of masculinity like military uniforms, guns, and sports events. Islamic populists vaunted the brotherhood of Muslim men as the proper locus of authority, in contrast to the paternalism of secularist nationalist elites. Communists offered a brotherhood of another kind, among worker-comrades. All three of these movements grew strong because they embraced the ideal of the male breadwinner and defender of the family, and so seemed to link household politics to national politics directly through gender discourse. In short, these subaltern movements organized men into new communities that resuscitated their gender identity. In this perspective, the gender pacts struck by the French and then reaffirmed by the independent nationalist governments may be understood as an attempt to mitigate the rivalry among males and assure loyalty to the state. Resembling bargains so often struck by emergent states, they appeased citizens from whom the state extracted resources by awarding them privileged control over a subaltern group of citizens.57 Just as the French had granted landowners a monopoly over peasants’ status and had awarded Druze and other tribal shaykhs similar unilateral control over their tribal followers, they granted urban men complete dominance over women. In exchange, the French mandatory state extracted from men control over the use of violence, and a modicum of cooperation. This tacit agreement, nowhere recorded as such in documents, was made manifest in times of unrest, when men routinely expressed their dissent by raising the alarm that the French sought to capture or violate their women, as in the  revolt, the Nazira Zayn al-Din affair in , the street battles of the s, the  protests against personal status

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law reform, and the November  coup. The colonial gender pact was renewed by nationalists after the crises of  and . In both cases, the fraternity of male citizens in the republican order was reconciled with paternalism by the virtual exclusion of women. Male gender anxiety fed into women’s own crisis of femininity. Elite women had emerged from World War I with aspirations of rights to fit their changing lifestyles. The core of the colonial gender pact was, however, women’s deprivation of civil and political rights. The ban on women’s suffrage effectively removed them as a viable force at elections. Retention of the dual legal system granted religious leaders control over personal status law, which in turn granted men control over women in their families and in public space, effectively circumscribing recruitment to the women’s movement. This pressure split the movement and so weakened it. The Lebanese women’s union and Communist women in both countries continued to pursue equal rights, but they lost the support of many women who responded to male gender anxiety by adopting an ideology of patriotic motherhood that glorified a tradition of women’s place in the home and a mediated relationship to the public and political arenas. The Women’s Social Democratic League in Lebanon, with its anti-work, pro-male breadwinner ideology, possibly represented a silent majority of women who desperately wished the return of paternalistic protections eroded in the social dislocations since World War I.58 It is not clear, however, whether these silent women simply never heard the women’s unions’ call for rights, whether they shunned the call for fear of men’s reprisals, or whether they actively rejected it; this study has been limited by the paucity of direct documentation on common women’s views. Despite its divisions and handicaps, the women’s movement succeeded remarkably in inserting women’s voices into the debates on citizenship. But because gender was also constructed as a site of conflict and compromise among male actors in the civic order, the women’s movement was structurally incapable of asserting itself against competing movements that might use gender as a bargaining chip. As in so many other countries, the strength of the women’s movement was determined as much or more by its relations with other movements as its inner resources.59 The Syrian and Lebanese women’s unions were weak because they were unable to forge necessary alliances to advance their cause. While Communists supported the rights of women workers, they dropped earlier calls for reforms of women’s legal status from their platforms of the s and s. This was likely due to their fear of sectarian division among workers and their rivalry with Islamic populists for the same lower-class constituency. Likewise, while some elite nationalists clearly did

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support women’s rights, they were dissuaded from enacting them by the need to appease much stronger religious interests. Without alliances, the women’s unions could not hope for parliamentary majorities to reform their legal status. They met greater success in transforming spatial boundaries of the civic order—by the s most Lebanese and most elite Syrian women had unveiled—precisely because such reform did not require approval of formal political institutions. That gender pacts were a defining trait of the colonial and postcolonial civic orders is attested by their durability. The dual legal system survived the Ba‘thist revolution in  and Lebanon’s civil war, with little reform of personal status law. And while Syrian and Lebanese women did finally win the right to vote, the way they achieved it underlines how fundamental gender bargains have been to defining regimes. The governments of both Shukri al-Quwwatli and Bishara al-Khuri crumbled before their legal terms expired, under various political pressures, violence, and charges of corruption. Both of their successors desperately needed to signal a fundamental reform of government. In Syria, Colonel Husni al-Za‘im, whose coup overthrew Quwwatli in , simply decreed limited suffrage for educated women amidst a host of political, military, and social reforms. In Lebanon, Camille Chamoun granted women full suffrage and the right to hold office in a  electoral law designed to curb sectarianism, thereby setting his regime apart from that of Khuri, who in his last desperate days had sought to expand the power of religious courts.60 In each case, gender acted as a primary marker of a change in political direction. Colonial rule mattered a great deal in the gendering of citizenship in modern Syria and Lebanon. A stark contrast is neighboring Turkey, which curbed the power of religious patriarchs, abolished Islamic law, and granted women political and civil rights in the s and s. Turkey was free to do so because it was not colonized and because the fall of empire did not produce the same crisis of paternity in the civic order: The new republic was ruled by a war hero, Mustafa Kemal, who took the surname Ataturk, meaning father of the Turks. “The new woman of the Kemalist era became an explicit symbol of the break with the past,” notes Deniz Kandiyoti.61 Colonialism permitted no such clean break. Indeed, the French worked hard to preserve the bases of paternalistic authority of the past. They augmented the power of the urban landowning bourgeoisie that would seek to defend its privilege at independence through gender pacts, because gender and mediated hierarchy were so closely bound together. Foreign rule also strengthened the hand of conservative Muslims, ancestors of contemporary Islamist movements that continue to pursue a reified Islamic tradition through religious law. Women’s appeals to universalist

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principles of equality and rights were undercut by the early s, with the rise of religion-based discourses of cultural particularity. According to the longtime supporter of the women’s movement, Muhammad Jamil Bayhum, “The women’s revival in Syria saw its pillars knocked out from beneath it by the French occupation, which promoted suspicion of foreigners and a complete diversion to the struggle for independence. Likewise, the women’s revival came to a standstill among Lebanese Muslims.”62 Other former Ottoman provinces in Arab lands, like Egypt and Iraq, shared Syria and Lebanon’s colonial experience and so its legacy of dual legal systems and Islamism that continue to gender citizenship.63 But colonial rule is by no means the sole factor; other political and social conditions also contribute to the construction of citizenship. Just as the terms of citizenship and gender differ between Syria and Lebanon, so are there differences among other Arab countries. Some Arab countries, like those of the Arabian peninsula, did not experience republicanism in either its late Ottoman or colonial guises, producing far more paternalistic civic orders. Others, like Tunisia, broke free of colonial dilemmas to enact substantial personal status reform. There is no space here to carry out such comparisons, although they are dearly needed. It is hoped, however, that this study has helped to challenge the too common assumption that Arabic culture—and Islam—are essentially and ahistorically predisposed toward the inequality of gendered citizenship that prevails today in the Middle East.

appendix


Syrian and Lebanese Periodicals of the Mandate Era

Newspapers and magazines published in Syria and Lebanon during the mandate period were of invaluable use in supplementing data from government archives, particularly in revealing the dynamics of politics and gender in the civic order discussed throughout the book and particularly in chapter , devoted to analysis of the press. It was rather difficult to gather a representative sample of the press in the period. Few of the newspapers and magazines have been preserved on microfilm and most exist in varying states of degeneration in scattered archives. They have not been systematically collected, either. Only in rare cases was I able to find complete runs of a given newspaper or magazine at a given archive. Among the reference works that list the full range of periodicals published in the Syrian and Lebanese mandates, the most useful were Philip de Tarrazi’s Tarikh al-sihafa al-‘arabiya () and Joseph Elias’s Tatawwur al-sihafa al-suriya fi mi’a ‘amm (–) (). A full list of the periodicals consulted may be found in the bibliography. Here are presented two explanatory tables. The first lists the  Arabic-language periodicals consulted for the survey of images of women discussed in chapter . The second presents additional information about women’s magazines, discussed in chapters , , and .

A. Survey of Women’s Images in the Arabic Press The following  periodicals were published in Arabic by men. They were selected for breadth, in terms of publishing place and date and content; political, economic, cultural, humorous, religious, educational and legal periodicals are represented. Each entry gives the years of publication surveyed. The survey produced  mentions of women in articles, photos or cartoons.

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appendix Newspapers

Al-Bashir (Beirut) , ,  Bayrut (Beirut) , ,  al-Ikha’ (Hama/Damascus) , – al-Kifah (Damascus) – Lisan al-hal (Beirut) , – al-Muqtabas (Damascus) –, –, – al-Nahar (Beirut) – al-Nahda (Beirut) – al-Sha‘b (Damascus) , – Magazines al-Adib (Beirut)  al-Ahdath (Damascus)  al-Amali (Beirut) – al-Amani (Latakia) – al-Asrar (Beirut)  al-Bahth (Homs)  al-Bayan (Beirut) – al-Dabbur (Beirut) , ,  Dimashq (Damascus)  al-Duhur (Beirut) – Hadiqat al-tilmidh (Aleppo)  al-Hadith (Aleppo) –, , , – al-Haris (Beirut) –, ,  al-Hayat al-zira‘iya (Lebanon) – al-Hikma (Beirut)  al-Hurriya (Beirut)  al-Insaniya (Damascus)  al-‘Irfan (Sidon) –, –, , ,  Jubitir (Baalbek) – al-Kashshaf (Beirut)  al-Lata’if al-‘asriya (Beirut) – Lisan al-talaba (Damascus)  Majallat al-i‘lanat al-suriya (Damascus)  Majallat al-majma‘ al-‘ilmi al-‘arabi (Damascus)  Majallat al-mu‘allimin wa al-mu‘allimat (Damascus) –

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appendix

Majalla al-qada’iya (Beirut)  Majallat al-tarbiya wa al-ta‘lim (Damascus) – al-Masarra (Jounieh) ,  al-Mashriq (Beirut) , – al-Mawrid al-safi (Beirut) – al-Naqid (Damascus) – al-Nashra al-iqtisadiya li al-ghurfa al-tijariya bi dimashq (Damascus) , , ,  al-Nashra al-rasmiya li al-ghuruf al-sina‘iya al-suriya (Damascus) – al-Nibras (Beirut)  al-Qalam (Damascus)  al-Rabita (Beirut) ,  al-Sada al-iqtisadi (Damascus) – al-Shu‘la (Damascus) – Tarikh al-harb al-‘uzma (Beirut)  al-Tariq (Beirut) – al-Thaqafa (Damascus)  al-‘Uyun (Tripoli) –

B. Women’s Magazines Published in Syria and Lebanon to 1946 The actual number of magazines published by women through  is disputed. The table in al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya (pp. –) contains errors and omissions, as does the list in Daghir, Qamus al-sihafa al-lubnaniya, pp. –. I thank Alice Deyab at Harvard for her invaluable help in identifying the magazines. I have identified  magazines founded and published by Syrian and Lebanese women within the mandated territories, of which  were designed primarily for female audiences. The following list, however, should not be regarded as definitive. The designation “women’s magazine,” for instance, is somewhat imprecise. While some magazines published by women in this period labeled themselves “a woman’s monthly” others simply labeled themselves literary journals. Some of the latter resembled those published by men, but also regularly included articles by or about women. Other literary journals, however, appeared to address themselves primarily to women, even when not labeled as such. Some women publishers explicitly sought to blur the line between the women’s press and the general literary press. For example, Fatat lubnan (Girl of Lebanon) published its



appendix

first issue in  with a drawing of a girl reading a book under a cedar tree. Under the title of the journal is written “A Literary, Scientific, and Novelistic Magazine.” On the other hand, in  Alfira Latuf of Tripoli published al-Mustaqbal (The Future), which she called “An Illustrated, Social, Women’s Monthly Magazine.” The magazine soon became known, however, as a general political newspaper. (I have not been able to locate copies of the journal myself. Descriptions of it may be found in Khoury, Mudawwanat al-sihafa al-‘arabi, : , and Sa‘ada, al-Nahda al-sihafiya fi lubnan, pp. , –.) A second limiting factor has been availability. Preservation of these small journals has been even more erratic than that of general periodicals. For this book, I managed to gather incomplete runs of  of the  magazines published mainly for women from a variety of libraries, including those at Harvard, Princeton, and the American University of Beirut, as well as at the Asad National Library in Damascus (see bibliography): Title

Translation

Founder

Date and Place

al-‘Arus Fatat lubnan al-Khidr al-Fajr Nur al-fayha’ al-Mar’a al-jadida Minirva al-Rabi‘ Dawhat al-mimas al-Mar’a Sawt al-mar’a al-hurr a

The Bride Girl of Lebanon The Boudoir The Dawn Light of Damascus The New Woman Minerva The Spring Mimas Tree Woman Free Voice of Woman

Mary ‘Ajamy Salima Abu Rashid Afifa Sa‘b Najla Abu al-Lam‘ Nazik ‘Abid Julia Dimashqiya Mary Yanni Mary Ibrahim Mary Abdu Shakra Nadima al-Munqari Muhammad Farid al-Mawqi‘

Damascus  Beirut  Shuwayfat  Beirut  Damascus  Beirut  Beirut  Damascus  Homs  Hama  Aleppo 

Additional magazines published by or about women, but not consulted for this book, include: Title

Translation

Founder

al-Hasna’ a Fatat al-watan

The Belle Girl of the Fatherland New Life

Jirji Niqula Baz Beirut  Miryam al-Zammar Zahla 

al-Hayat al-jadida

Habuba Haddad

Date and Place

Paris/Beirut 



appendix Mawrid al-ahdath b Fukahat al-jins al-latif a al-Jami‘a b Fatat al-armaniya al-Mustaqbal b Sawt al-mar’a a

Spring of Creation Amina Khuri al-Maqdisi Humor of the Anis ‘Id al-Khuri Gentle Sex The Union Maryam Zaka Armenian Girl Siran Siza The Future Alfira Latuf Woman’s Voice Leb. Women’s Union

Beirut  Beirut  Lebanon  Beirut  Tripoli  Beirut 

a Woman’s magazine published by a man b General magazine published by a woman

In addition to Fatat lubnan, al-Rabi‘ and Minirva did not label themselves as women’s magazines, although their contents and editorial slant suggest that they primarily targeted a feminine audience. All of the magazines founded by women through  ceased publication by the mid-s. A new wave of magazines appeared after . Among these was Munqari’s magazine al-Mar’a, which she revived in  after a -year suspension. See chapters five through eight and chapter  for further detail.

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notes


General note: Books and articles are cited only in short form here. Please see the Bibliography for complete citations.

Introduction . For an overview of current debates on liberal models of citizenship, see Shafir, Citizenship Debates. Feminist, communitarian and multicultural critiques of liberalism’s universal ideals of equal and autonomous citizens resonate with recent attempts to delineate the alternative forms of citizenship in colonial settings. See Mamdani, Citizen and Subject; Conklin, Mission to Civilize; Cooper, Decolonization and African Society, passim; Botman, Engendering Citizenship in Egypt; Freitag, Collective Action and Community; Chatterjee, Nation and its Fragments (esp. ch. ); Mehta, “Liberal Strategies of Exclusion”; Irschick, Dialogue and History (esp. conclusion) and Wildenthal, “Race, Gender and Citizenship.” Charles Tilly offers a useful and succinct discussion of the current flux in definitions of citizenship in his introduction to his edited volume, Citizenship, Identity, and Social History, pp. –. A host of other recent studies on civil society, on the construction of states and nations and on the various forms of subaltern power in colonial societies— too numerous to list here— have laid the groundwork for, and contributed indirectly to, emergent concepts of colonial citizenship. . Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon; Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon and Lebanon’s Quest; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate. . For example, Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban; Boustany, Introduction à . . . Liban moderne; Shu‘ayb, Tarikh lubnan; Hakim, Suriya wa al-intidab; Qarqut, Tatawwur al-haraka al-wataniya; al-Maliki, Min maysalun ila al-jala’ (memoir); and Sharaf, al-Gharaq . . . fi al-dhakira (novel). While there have recently been some specialized studies of the period by French scholars, the



. .

.

.

.

.

. .

.

introduction only recent comprehensive treatment is a beautiful photographic chronology: Fournié and Riccioli, France et le Proche-Orient. Couland, Mouvement syndical; Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya. See Hunt, Family Romance; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches; Sinha, Colonial Masculinity. Scott was, of course, not solely responsible for the methodological transformation in gender history, but her book is widely credited with inspiring broad interest in the project in the s. I was, for example, also inspired by use of gender to explain how the middle class crystallized in early th century England in Leonore Davidoff and Catherine Hall’s Family Fortunes, published in . The only apparent exception is the – Syrian Revolt, where, however, peasants were mobilized mainly by tribal and landed elites, and where the outcome was only to force peasants more firmly under the repressive hand of these elites. See the discussion in chapter two. Influential at an early stage were British and Indian studies of gender and imperialism; for example, Anna Davin’s “Imperialism and Motherhood,” Margaret Strobel’s European Women and the Second British Empire, Lata Mani’s “Contentious Traditions,” and Partha Chatterjee’s Nation and Its Fragments. More recent studies have offered quite interesting perspectives on the gendered motivations and impact of colonial rule. See, for example, Clancy-Smith and Gouda, eds., Domesticating Empire; McClintock, Imperial Leather; Sinha, Colonial Masculinity; and Stoler, “Sexual Affronts and Racial Frontiers.” See, for example, Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam; Baron, Women’s Awakening in Egypt; Göle, Forbidden Modern; Kandiyoti, “Women, Islam, and the State”; Lazreg, “Gender and Politics in Algeria”; Mernissi, Beyond the Veil; Milani, Veils and Words; and Paidar, Women and the Political Process. See, for example, Badran, Feminists, Islam and the Nation; Fleischmann, “Nation and its ‘New’ Women”; Keddie and Baron, Women in Middle Eastern History; Peirce, Imperial Harem; Quataert, “Ottoman Women, Households and Textile Manufacturing”; Sonbol, Women, the Family and Divorce Laws; and Tucker, Women in Nineteenth-Century Egypt. See Andreas Tietze, Mustafa ‘Ali’s Description of Cairo of  (Vienna: Verlag der Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, ) pp. –. I owe a special thanks to Atina Grossmann, whose course on gender and the European welfare state gave birth to this project. Of particular help in my conceptualization were Koven and Michel, “Womanly Duties”; Cohen and Hanagan, “Politics of Gender and Making of the Welfare State”; and Skocpol, Protecting Soldiers and Mothers. On revisionist histories of welfare states, see Baldwin, “Welfare State for Historians.” See, for example, Salzmann, “Citizens in Search of a State”; al-Azmeh, Islams

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and Modernities; Goldberg, “Smashing Idols and the State”; Kandiyoti, “Women, Islam and the State”; Mamdani, Subject and Citizen; Conklin, Mission to Civilize; Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony”; Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments; Crisp and Edmondson, Civil Rights in Imperial Russia; Shafir, Citizenship Debates (entire volume); Taylor, Multiculturalism; Pateman, Disorder of Women; Fraser, Justice Interruptus.

Part 1 Introduction . I have borrowed the term civic order, with modifications, from Isser Woloch, who used it to describe the reorganization of civic life under Napoleon’s postrevolutionary regime in his The New Regime: Transformations of the French Civic Order, –s.

Chapter 1 . Furayha, Qabl an ansa, p. . . Furayha, Qabl an ansa, p. ; MAE-Paris/, vol. 8, “Situation au Liban,” Dec. , ; vol. , “Details sur la tournée de l’agent Koueri au Mont Liban,” March , ; vol. , Defrance to Briand, May ,  and Lansing to Jusserand, June ,. Before the war, a train trip between Beirut and Damascus took  hours; Zahla lay less than half the way along the rail line. Rail service extended to the Hawran, from which a trip to Beirut likely took no more than  hours. . Edib, Memoirs of Halide Edib, p. . . Quoted in Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. . . USNA, RG — Beirut, “Trade and Commerce at Beirut, Syria,” May , . . “La Syrie martyre,” La Croix, March , . . USNA, RG — Damascus, vol. , “Annual Report on Commerce and Industry for .” . al-Shallah, Li al-tarikh wa al-dhikra, pp. –; “La Famine à Alep,” Le Réveil, Oct. , ; Russell, First Modern Arab State, p. . . Quoted in Dahir, Tarikh lubnan al-ijtima‘i, p. . Other estimates from MAEParis/, vol. , report by Comité Central Syrien, Oct. ; “ ‘An bayrut,” Lisan al-hal, Oct. , ; Kurd ‘Ali, Khitat al-Sham, :. . Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. . . Schilcher, “Famine of –,” pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Trabaud to Vice-Amiral, Dec. , .



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. Schilcher, “Famine of –,” pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , message from British embassy-Paris, June ,  and internal memo (illegible signature: Leandon?), June , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , French translation of Shakib Arslan Bey, “Hypocrisy of the Entente Unveiled,” Lloyd Ottoman, Aug. –, . . Schilcher, “Famine of –,” p. . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , ‘’ – juin, Renseignements généraux et particuliers,” and vol. , Morier to Ministère de la Guerre, Dec. ,  and Defrance to Briand, Feb. , ; Young, Marshall Cavendish Encyclopedia, pp. , ; Gray, Chronicle of the First World War, p. ; Antonius, Arab Awakening, pp. , , ; Yapp, Making of Modern Near East, p. . Conscription rates were estimated by the author according to the empire’s prewar population of . million, assuming half of that total was male, of whom half again were aged  to . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Defrance to Briand, Dec. ,  and vol. , Defrance to Ribot, March  and April , ; Antonius, Arab Awakening, pp. –, –; Young, Marshall Cavendish Encyclopedia, p. . . Antonius, Arab Awakening, p. . . S. Tucker, European Powers in the First World War, p. ; Small and Singer, Resort to Arms, p. . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Defrance to Briand, March , ; Antonius, Arab Awakening, pp. –, –, –. . al-Jundi, Lahu al-ayyam, pp. –. . Jihan Musulli, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , ; transcript of interview with Hawa Salameh in Roumieh village, Mount Lebanon, Feb. , in Ajay, “Mount Lebanon and the Wilayah of Beirut,” Appendix I, pp. –; alGhazzi, Shirwal barhum, p. . Al-Ghazzi’s book, based on interviews with men and women who lived during the war, collects their memories in a fictional story told by a teen-aged girl. . As quoted in Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. . See also MAE-Paris/, vol. , letter from a Lazarist father in Syria, May ,  and vol. , “Details sur la tournée de l’agent Koueri au Mont Liban,” March , ; “al-Ju‘ wa al-maja‘a,” Lisan al-hal, Nov. , , pp. –; Kan‘an, Lubnan fi al-harb al-kubra, pp. –. . Interview with “M.B.” transcribed and translated from Arabic to French in Dubar and Nasr, Classes sociales, p. . . “al-Maja‘a fi suriya wa lubnan wa bilad al-suriya,” Tarikh al-harb al-‘uzma  () pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Bulletin politique et militaire no. ,” May , ; Karame, “Le Tissage à Homs,” p. . . Tergeman, Daughter of Damascus, pp. –.

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

. MAE-Paris/, vol. , press clip from al-Ahram, June , ; see chapter five on women’s wartime relief organizations. . Interview with Yusuf Rufayil, Aug. , in Ajay, “Mount Lebanon and the Wilayah of Beirut,” Appendix I, pp. –. . Adib al-Taqi, “Of the Dangers of War,” Al-Shu‘la  (Oct. ) pp. –. See also ‘Udwan, “Safar Barlik,” a play based on poems written by Syrian soldiers during the war. . Tergeman, Daughter of Damascus, pp. –. See pp. – of the original Arabic version of this popular memoir, Ya Mal al-Sham (Damascus: Matabi‘ Alif Ba, ) rd printing. . See chapter . . Ajay, “Mount Lebanon and the Wilayah of Beirut,” Appendix I. Ajay printed transcripts of  interviews with elderly Lebanese men and women conducted in  and . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , undated letter from Antoine Eddé and “Details sur la tournée de l’Agent Koueri au Mont Liban,” March , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , père Lazarite to Cazot, May , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Akl to Darian, Oct. , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Visite du Mgr Pharès,” Aug. , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Defrance to Briand, April , . . “La Réscision des ventes de guerre au Liban,” L’Asie française  (Jan. ) p. . . Schilcher, “Famine of –,” p. . . Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches, pp. –. . Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. ; see also, Ismael and Ismael, Communist Movement, pp. –. . “Mat min al-ju‘,” al-Ikha’, Jan. , , p. . . Rafeq, “Arabism, Society and Economy,” pp. –. . For an overview of recent debates, see “AHR Forum: History and Memory,” The American Historical Review  (Dec. ) pp. –. . Owen, Middle East in the World Economy, pp. –; Issawi, Fertile Crescent, pp. –; Thobie, Intérêts et impérialisme français; Vatter, “Journeymen Textile Weavers”; P. Khoury, Urban Notables and Arab Nationalism, passim; Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants, pp. –. Population growth estimated from a population of .. million in  and . million in . See Issawi, p.  and Owen, p. . . Samman, Population de la Syrie, pp. –; Chamie, Religion and Fertility, p. . . S. Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, pp. –. . McCarthy, Arab World, Turkey and the Balkans, pp. , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Population de l’état de Damas,” and “Evaluation de la population des



1. world war i

états du Levant sous mandat français en ”; USNA, RG — Syria, microfilm LM/roll , Alexander Gibb & Co., “Economic Development of Syria,” (), p. ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs, pp. –. . “La Famine au Liban et l’assistance française . . . ,” L’Asie française  (Jan. ) p. . . USNA, RG —Damascus, vol. , consul to charge d’affairs, Constantinople, Feb. , ; AIU, Archives Liban—dossier I.C., Picciotto to AIU, March , ; Menicucci, “Radical Politics,” p. ; Rouyer, Femmes d’outre mer, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Distribution de blé aux pauvres,” Oct. , . . “Hadith al-‘adad,” al-Ikha’, April , , pp. –. . MWT, al-Mahakim al-Mukhtalita— Criminal Section, Damascus, case J-, Aug. , . . USNA, RG — Beirut, vol. , “Near East Foundation in Syria,” Dec. , . . Edib, Memoirs, pp. , –; MAE-Paris/, vol. , French translation of “Hypocrisy of the Entente Unveiled,” Lloyd Ottoman, Aug. –, . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , HC to MAE/Section écoles, report on French hospitals and orphanages, March , ; carton , “Franciscaines à Alep— Orphelinat,” Jan. ; carton , HC to MAE/Section écoles, Feb. , . . Dubar and Nasr, Classes sociales, p. . . USNA, RG —Beirut, microfilm /roll , “Present Status of Armenians in the French Mandated Territory,” Feb. , ; Menicucci, “Radical Politics”; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. . . Mina, Fragments of Memory. Mina’s portrayal his family’s life mirrors the findings of an early s study of ‘Alawi peasants in Dodd, Controlled Experiment. . Dubar and Nasr, Classes sociales, p. . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Defrance to Ribot, July , ; USNA, RG — Damascus, vol. , consul to Harrington, Jan. ,  and vol. , “Annual Report on Commerce and Industries for ”; RG — Beirut, Hollis to Boston Chamber of Commerce, Nov. , . . USNA, RG , microfilm M, Research and Analysis report no. , “Strategic Survey Sections III, IV, V — Levant States,” p. ; MAE-Rapport () pp. –, –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; S. Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, pp. –. . Tergeman, Daughter of Damascus, pp. –, –. . Reilly, “Women, Property and Production,” pp. –. . Stevens, Cedars, Saints and Sinners, p. ; Ducuosso, L’Industrie de la soie, pp. –; Khater, “She Married Silk,” pp. –. . SHAT, carton N-, “Enquête dans les Etats du Levant sur la situation de principales branches de l’agriculture, ,” p. .

2. soldiers and patriarchs



. S. Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, p. –. . MWT, al-Mahakim al-Mukhtalita, sijill , cases , , , , –, , , , , , , , , , Jan.-April, . . Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. ; Latron, Vie rurale en Syrie, pp. –, –. . Seale, Asad, pp. –. . AIU, Archives Liban—dossier I.C.., Picciotto to AIU, Dec. , ; MWT, alMahakim al-Mukhtalita, sijill , cases –, , , June-Oct. ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , undated lists of hotel ownership. . Daghestani, Famille musulmane, pp. –, –, , –; Dahir, Tarikh lubnan al-ijtima‘i, pp. –. On the decline of patriarchal family structures from the late th century, see Schilcher, “Lore and Reality of Middle Eastern Patriarchy.” . Daghestani, Famille musulmane, p. . Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, p. –; USNA, RG-—Beirut, vol. , letter on the stigma attached to sales of condoms to Stardant Rubber Co., March , . . “al-Mar’a wa al-mar’a al-suriya,” al-‘Irfan  (Nov. ) pp. –; “Intikhab mar’a wa tasarrufha” al-Fajr  (Jan. ) p. ; “al-Bayt,” Dawhat al-mimas  (June ) p. ; “Bayn al-rajul wa al-mar’a,” Jubitir  (Feb. ) pp. –; “al-Hubb wa al-zawaj,” al-Amani  (Jan. , ) pp. –; and “alSa‘ada al-zawjiya,” al-Sha‘b, July , . See also chapter . . Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy,” esp. pp. –.

Chapter 2 . Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –. . “La Proclamation du Grand Liban,” Le Réveil, Aug. , , p. . The paper printed the full text of the speech on Aug. , , in which the quote was modified as follows: “After having spilled their blood for four years, would they give it here again if France were not a mother to them?” Further quotes are from the Aug.  article. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; Tauber, Formation of Modern Syria, pp. , –. . Akarli, Long Peace, pp. –; Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon, pp. –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –. . Russell, First Modern Arab State, p. . . Gelvin, “Social Origins of Popular Nationalism,” pp. –; Tauber, Formation of Modern Syria, pp. –. Gelvin’s Divided Loyalties, published after this book went to press, provides copious detail on the opposition to Faysal.



2. soldiers and patriarchs

. Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” passim; Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” passim. I use republicanism and democracy in overlapping ways in this book. While both signify a political regime based on a popular sovereignty and elected representation, democracy here emphasizes an equality of rights not necessarily present in a republic. We might therefore distinguish democratic republicanism from paternal republicanism. . “Le Général Gouraud à Damas,” Le Réveil, Aug. , , p.  and “Entrée du Général Gouraud à Damas . . . ,” Le Réveil, Aug. , , p. ; Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, pp. –. . Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, p. . . Velud, “Syrie: Etat mandataire,” pp. –, –. . Schaebler, “State(s) Power and the Druzes,” pp. –; Bokova, Confrontation franco-syrienne, pp. –, –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, –; Catroux, Deux Missions, pp. –. . Burke, “Comparative View of French Native Policy,” pp. –. . Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon, pp. –; Catroux, Deux Missions, pp. –, –. . Chevallier, “Comment l’Etat a-t-il été compris,” pp. –; Agulhon, French Republic, pp. –. . Conklin, Mission to Civilize, pp. –, –. . SHAT, carton N , dossier , “Lettre du Général Weygand au sujet de la politique française au Proche-Orient,” Nov. , ; Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon, pp. –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –, –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. , , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Sarrail to MAE, Jan. , , press clip from Victoire, Jan. , , and telegram from  Beirut notables to prime minister-Paris, undated. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sarrail to MAE, Feb.  and March , . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Doulcet to Briand, May , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Giannini to Gasparri, Feb. , , L.C./MAE to Secrétaire général, Feb. , , Doulcet to Briand, Nov. , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Doulcet to Briand, Oct. , . . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. –, ; Bokova, Confrontation franco-syrienne, pp. –. . Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon, pp. –. . SHAT, carton N-, press clip from the Westminster Gazette, May , . . Bokova, Confrontation franco-syrienne, p. . . Poem by Ahmad Shakir al-Karami quoted from al-‘Asima, May , , in Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” p. ; and Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. .

2. soldiers and patriarchs



. SHAT, carton N–, “Rapport d’ensemble sur la Syrie et le Levant,  février .” . “Nouvelles d’intérieur—Damas,” Le Réveil, Aug. , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , translation of a tract signed Shaykh Ahmad Muhiyaddin Shaaban, May , . . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Avis du Comité arabe à la Commission française,” Feb. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , poem distributed in Lebanese provinces, Feb. , , and tract signed by Abu Muhiyaddin Shaaban, April , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , undated leaflets signed Henry de Jouvenel and Sultan al-Atrash. . Sakakini, Insaf al-mar’a, pp. –; al-Razzaz, Musharakat al-mar’a, pp. –; Poulleau, A Damas sous les Bombes, passim. . Qurtas, Dhikrayat –, p. . . Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed, p. . . Tergeman, Daughter of Damascus, p. , and personal interviews in Damascus in : Umm Ahmad, Oct. , and Umm Rima, Aug. . . Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, p. . . SHAT, carton N , “L’Effort militaire français au Levant,” April , ; Bou-Nacklie, “Troupes Spéciales,” pp. –; P. Khoury Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Officiers des services spéciaux détachés comme agents du mandat dans les territoires du Levant,” Aug. , ; SHAT, carton N , “Notice sur les états du Levant sous Mandat français,” ; Fournié, “L’Administration française,” pp. –, annex p. . . Sluglett, “Urban Dissidence in Mandatory Syria,” p. . . Atiyah, “Attitude of the Lebanese Sunnis,” pp. –; Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon, pp. –. . Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, pp. –; Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon, pp. –; Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –; USNA, Internal Affairs of Syria –, microfilm T/roll , Steger to Connelly, Oct. , , translation of Constitution of the State of Syria, May , . . See, for example, “al-Yawm yartafi‘ sawt suriya bil-ihtijaj ‘ala al-dustur,” al-Sha‘b, June , , p. . . Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” pp. –; Elias, Tatawwur al-sihafa alsuriya, pp. –.



2. soldiers and patriarchs

. Kayali, “Elections and the Electoral Process”; Khalidi, “ Election Campaign.” . Gerber, Social Origins, pp. –; Velud, “Syrie: Etat mandataire,” pp. –; Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches, pp. –. . Zakarya, “Syria,” pp. –; al-Siba‘i, Adwa’ ‘ala al-ra’smal, pp. –. . Weulersse, Paysans de Syrie, pp. –; Keilany, “Land Reform in Syria”; Warriner, Land Reform and Development, pp. –. . Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut, pp. –, –, –; Gilsenan, Lords of the Lebanese Marches, pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , HC to MAE, July , . . Seale, Asad, p. . . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, , –, –. . Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut, pp. –, –, –; Khalaf, Lebanon’s Predicament, pp. –; Salibi, Modern History of Lebanon, pp. –. . USNA, RG —Syria, vol. , letter from Sultan Pasha Atrash, Nov. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , leaflet signed Le Comité de libération de Pays Syrien, undated. . Bokova, “La Révolution française”; see also Deguilhem-Schoem, “Idées françaises et enseignement ottoman.”

Chapter 3 . “L’Oeuvre des Français en Syrie,” Le Réveil, Oct. , . . Article , Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, July , , reprinted in Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. . See also articles six, eight, and . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Picot to MAE, Nov. , . . S. Tucker, European Powers in the First World War, p. ; Gray, Chronicle of the First World War, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “L’Enseignement en Syrie pendant la période d’organisation –,” p. . . “La Famine au Liban” L’Asie française  (Jan. ), supplement. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Wick to Gout, Oct. , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , MAE to Pontalis, Oct. , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , MAE to HC, Dec. , , and Chevalley, “Notes sur l’enseignement en Syrie –,” Oct. , . . USNA, RG —Damascus, vol. , Consul to Secretary of State, Oct. , . . SHAT, carton N , “Organisation du service de santé, –”; MAEParis/, vol. , Berthelot to Coulondre, Nov. ,  and “Hygiène générale à Beyrouth,” June , .

3. bureaucrats



. SHAT, carton N , “Organisation du service du génie,” Gamelin to MAE, March , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Syndicat des marchands de soie de Lyon to MAE, Nov. ,  and Ferrand-Guintrand to MAE, Nov. , ; vol. , Ministry of War to MAE, Nov. , ; vol. , Ferrand-Guintrand to MAE, April , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , André to Gout, Jan. , . . “Mission en Syrie: Réception du Général Gouraud,” Comptes rendus des travaux de la Chambre de Commerce de Lyon—Année , pp. –; Seurat, “Le rôle de Lyon dans l’installation du mandat.” . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Agriculture –”; vol. , de Caix to Millerand, March , ; Dahir, Tarikh lubnan al-ijtima‘i, pp. –. . CCL, Fonds Receptions, dossier , “Gen. Weygand,  mai ,” pp. –. . Fournié, “L’Administration française,” pp. –. Gouraud was not succeeded by Weygand, however, until April . . Weber, Hollow Years, pp. –, –. . Fournié, “L’Administration française,” annex, p. ; O’Zoux, Etats du Levant, pp. –; Dahir, Tarikh lubnan al-ijtima‘i, pp. –; Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, pp. –. . MAE-Rapport () pp. –, –. . Fournié, “L’Administration française,” annex, p. ; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. . There were  British bureaucrats employed in Egypt in ; British “advisors” occupied  percent of all higher government posts. See Yapp, Making of the Modern Near East, p. . . MAE-Rapport () p. . . Dankwart Rustow estimated that the Turkish Republic inherited  percent of Ottoman bureaucrats, leaving  percent behind in the provinces outside of Anatolia. See Ward and Rustow, Political Modernization in Japan and Turkey, p. . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –. . Ritsher, Municipal Government, pp. –. . Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –; Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –. . “Intizamhum wa Intizamuna,” al-Muqtabas, Oct. , ; “Il faut nettoyer Beyrouth,” Le Réveil, Aug. , ; “Propos et Pontins: Damas, ville ou village?” Les Echos, Jan. , ; “Tarqi bayrut wa ittisa‘ tijaratha,” al-Masarra  (Feb. ) pp. –; “Tanzim madinat Dimashq,” Dimashq  (Aug. ) pp. –. . Ghorayeb, “Au croisement des cultures urbaines”; Wright, Politics of Design; Prochaska, Making Algeria French. . Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs, pp. –.



3. bureaucrats

. USNA, RG —Damascus, vol. , Report no. , Dec. , ; Danger, “L’Urbanisme en Syrie”; Kallaa, “L’Enchainement ville islamique—urbanisme moderne.” . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “L’Affaire du Dr. Kayyali;” MWT, al-Mukhabarat alfaransiya, vol. , Aleppo . . My definition of paternalism here is my own; however, its formulation was influenced by discussions in the following: Kandiyoti, “Women, Islam and the State”; Khater, “She Married Silk,” pp. –; Joseph, “Gender and Civil Society” and “Elite Strategies for Statebuilding”; Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, passim; Chatterjee, “Colonialism, Nationalism, and Colonized Women”; Brown, Good Wives, Nasty Wenches, pp. –, , passim; Hunt, Family Romance of the French Revolution, pp. –, –, passim; Pateman, Sexual Contract, pp. – and Disorder of Women, pp. –; Scott, Gender and the Politics of History , pp. –; Tilly, “Where Do Rights Come From?” . Reynolds, France Between the Wars, p. . . Arreté  (Syria), Oct. , , articles ,  and . . “Qanun al-jinsiya al-suriya,” al-Muqtabas, Jan. , ; USNA, RG — Syria, microfilm T/roll , “Nationality Laws in Syria and the Lebanese Republic,” Feb. , ; Chamas, Nationalité syrienne, pp. –, –. . Deringil, Well-Protected Domains; Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, esp. ch –. . Zamir, Formation of Modern Lebanon, pp. –. . Jamil Mardam Bey, “The Legacy of Equivocation” (), reprinted and translated in Mardam Bey, Syria’s Quest, pp. x, xvi, xviii. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, passim; Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” pp. –, –; Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. – passim. For a comparative study of masculine gender crisis in the Indian bureaucracy, see Sinha, Colonial Masculinity.

Introduction to Part Two . This definition of subaltern is my own. For an overview of other uses of the term, see Prakash, “Subaltern Studies as Postcolonial Criticism.”

Chapter 4 . Marcus, “Poverty and Poor Relief,” pp. –; Faroqhi et. al., Economic and Social History of the Ottoman Empire, vol. , passim. . McCarthy, Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans, pp. , –; Shaw, History of the Ottoman Empire, pp. –, –, , , –, –;

4. state social policy

.

. . . . . .

. .

. . .

. .

. . .



Tabakoglu, “Ottoman Social Security System”; Tibawi, Modern History of Syria, pp. –; Shamir, “Modernization of Syria”; Salzmann, “Citizens in Search of a State,” pp. –. Gerber, Social Origins, pp. –; P. Khoury, Urban Notables, passim; Salzmann, “Citizens in Search of a State”; Keyder, State and Class in Turkey, pp. –. Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, pp. –; Tibawi, Modern History of Syria, pp. –. Deringil, Well-Protected Domains, p. ; see also Berkes, Development of Secularism in Turkey, p. . al-Murabit, al-Nur wa al-nar fi maktab ‘anbar, pp. –; Deguilhem-Schoem, “Idées françaises et enseignement ottoman,” pp. –. Kayali, Arabs and Young Turks, pp. –, –; Commins, Islamic Reform, pp. –; Kurd ‘Ali, Khitat al-sham : – and : –. Schilcher, “Famine of –,” pp. , –, ; Edib, Memoirs, pp. –; Djemal Pasha, Memories of a Turkish Statesman, pp. –. Rafeq, “Arabism, Society, and Economy,”; Russell, First Modern Arab State, pp. –; Kedourie, England and the Middle East, pp. –; Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” pp. –; P. Khoury, Urban Notables, pp. –. MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Affaires diverses.” MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Rapport sur l’organisation et le fonctionnement des services de l’hygiène et de l’assistance publique en Syrie,” July , ; Etat de Damas, Bulletin médical annuel () pp. – and () p. . “L’Oeuvre sociale de la France mandataire au Levant,” Le Réveil, Dec. , , p. . USNA, RG — Damascus, vol. , despatch  to secretary of state, Oct. , . “Les droits de l’Hygiène,” “Notre eau à tous,” and “Il faut nettoyer Beyrouth,” Le Réveil, Aug.  and , and Oct. , ; “al-‘Asima amam ‘ilm al-sihha,” alBashir, July , ; “Sihhat al-sha‘b bayn al-ihmal wa al-shuhh,” al-Muqtabas, July , . MAE-Rapport () p. ; () p. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Rapport sur l’organisation et le fonctionnement des services de l’hygiène et de l’assistance publique en Syrie,” July , ; MAERapport () p. ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Subventions et secours aux établissements d’Assistance et d’Hygiène.” MAE-Rapport () pp. –. MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Note sur l’instruction publique dans l’Etat de Syrie,” March , . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “L’Enseignement,” ; MAE-Rapport () pp.



4. state social policy

, –, –, , , , , ; McCarthy, Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Recensement de la population libanaise” () and “Population sédentaire de la République syrienne” (). Proportions based on the  Lebanese and  Syrian censuses, showing .% of , Lebanese as Christians and .% of ,, Syrians as Christians, and on  school enrollments of , in Lebanon and , in Syria. Figures exclude the territory of Alexandretta. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , reports by Mlle Saule, May  and June , , and list of schools, May , . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –, ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , décret no.  on subsidies to private schools, , and carton , “Oeuvre d’Orient—Bulletin Avril .” In , , LLS out of a total of , LLS in foreign ministry subsidies to private schools was paid to ten Maronite monsigneurs in Cyprus, Syria, and Lebanon; an additional , LLS was paid to Syrian and Armenian Catholic patriarchs and , LLS to Orthodox patriarchs. Only , LLS was allocated to Muslim educational foundations. . MAE-Rapport () p. ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Subventions et Bourses.” . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Ponsot to MAE, April , ; l’Attaché libanais to MAE, March , ; Ponsot to MAE, Jan. , . . “Su’al,” and “al-Madrasa al-thaniya,” al-Muqtabas, July  and , . . “L’Instruction publique au Grand-Liban,” Le Réveil, Oct. , , p. . . USNA, RG — Aleppo, vol. , “Manufacturing,” April , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Ravitaillement de la Syrie –”; USNA, RG — Damascus, vol. , “Agriculture,” Feb. , ; Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, pp. –; Tibawi, Modern History of Syria, pp. –. . USNA, RG — Aleppo, vol. , “Manufacturing,” despatches of April , Sept.  and Sept. , ; RG — Beirut, vol. , “General Report on Automobiles,” March  and June , ; RG — Damascus, vol. , memo on gas stations, May , . Gasoline was carried from Beirut to Damascus in gallon cans. . Fawaz, “Changing Balance of Forces”; Buheiry, “Beirut’s Role in the Political Economy”; Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, pp. –. . Dahir, Tarikh lubnan al-ijtima‘i, pp. –, –; Owen, “Political Economy of Grand Liban”; Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. –, –. . Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, pp. –; International Bank, Economic Development of Syria, pp. –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –. . Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. –.

4. state social policy



. MAE-Nantes/, carton , Chatti to HC, Dec. , ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. , . . Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs, pp. –; Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –. . Traboulsi, “Etude Economique et Sociale de Saïda.” . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Recensement général de la population libanaise ().” . MAE-Rapport () pp. –, , ; () pp. , ; Bou-Nacklie, “Troupes Spéciales,” pp. –. . Dodd, Controlled Experiment; Seale, Asad, pp. –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –. . MAE-Paris, Ponsot to MAE, Aug. ,  and Jan. , , and Fontenay to MAE, March , ; Université Saint-Joseph, Jesuites en Syrie, : –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. , , –. . Bou-Nacklie, “Troupes Spéciales,” pp. –. Bou-Nacklie found, however, that Sunni representation increased after . . Compte-rendu des travaux de la Chambre de Commerce de Lyon, () pp. –, , () pp. –, () pp. – and –, () pp. – and –, () pp. –, () pp.  and –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Travail des enfants et des femmes dans l’ industrie,” May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Législation du travail” and “Organisation du travail,” ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , workers to director of la Société Anonyme de Tramways et de l’Electricité de Beyrouth, Aug. , ; Director to Gouraud, Aug. , ; Gouraud to Director, Sept. , . . MAE-Rapport () pp. , –; () pp. –; MAE-Nantes/, carton , Thomas to “Mandates,” Feb. , , addendum, p. . . Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Ashekar to MAE, May , , and Perry to MAE, July , ; “Jam‘iyat al-salib al-ahmar,” Lisan al-hal, June , , p. . . Etat de Damas, Bulletin médical annuel () p. . . “Qu’est ce que l’Oeuvre de la Goutte de Lait?” Les Echos, Feb. , , p. ; Etat de Syrie, Bulletin médical annuel () p. ; MAE-Rapport () pp. , , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Réponse au Questionnaire établi par le Conseil national des Femmes françaises”; Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. –. . MAE-Rapport () pp. , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Rapports des Universités et établissements d’enseignement supérieurs,” p. ; Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. –.



4. state social policy

. Etat de Syrie, Bulletin médical annuel () pp. –, –. . Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Réponse au Questionnaire établi par le Conseil national des Femmes françaises.” . Etat de Syrie, Bulletin médical annuel () pp. –, –; MAE-Nantes/, carton , HC to MAE, April , . . Daghestani, Famille musulmane, pp. –; Chatila, Mariage chez les Musulmans, pp. –; Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, p. . . MAE-Rapport () pp. , , ; Samman, Population de la Syrie, p. . Samman notes that the Syrian birth rate dipped during World War II to . per thousand, and rebounded by  to . per thousand. . Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, p. . . MAE-Rapport () pp. , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Rapports des Universités et établissements d’enseignement supérieurs,” p. ; Etat de Damas, Bulletin médical annuel () pp. – and (), appendix; Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, p. ; Dodd, Controlled Experiment, p. . . “La Famine au Liban,” L’Asie française, p. . . Etat de Damas/Syrie, Bulletin médical annuel () pp. –; () pp. –; () pp. –; MWT, al-Mahakim al-mukhtalita— Criminal section, Damascus, case J, Oct. , ; Jousselin, Enquêtes sur la jeunesse delinquante, p. . A separate Lebanese law of Feb. ,  contained the same provisions as outlined here, MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Prostitution/ Moeurs.” . Thébaud, Quand nos grand-mères; Harsin, Policing Prostitution; Corbin, Les Filles de noce. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Voeux adoptés par la section de l’enseignement, et ratifiés par l’assemblée générale du Congrès français de la Syrie (Marseille,  janvier )”; Gabriel Buonoure, “Education française et culture arabe,” Bulletin de l’enseignement  (Dec. ) pp. –. . Faris, al-Najwa ila nisa’ suriya; “Education is the Basis of Success,” al-Nibras  (March ) pp. –; “Halat al-nisa’ al-ijtima‘iya,” al-Muqtabas, Sept. , , p. ; Seikaly, “Shukri al-‘Asali.” . “Hawl ta‘lim al-mar’a,” and “al-Mar’a wa al-‘ilm,” al-Muqtabas, Aug. , , p.  and March , , p. . . McCarthy, Arab World, Turkey and the Balkans, pp. –; MAE-Rapport () pp. , , , . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –, , , –, , –; Ibrahim, al-Haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –. . Da’d Hakim and Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, personal interviews, Damascus, Oct. .



5. revolt

. MAE-Rapport () pp. , , , ; McCarthy, Arab World, Turkey, and the Balkans, p. . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –; () pp. –, , , , , , , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Bourses scolaires /,” and “Communautés et oeuvres ().” . MAE-Rapport () pp. –; () pp. –, . . MAE-Rapport () p. , also pp. –, –. . MAE-Rapport () pp. , , , ; () p. ; () pp. , , . . Hasan, Hadith dimashqi, pp. –.

Chapter 5 . USNA, RG — Beirut, box , file , list of associations received by the American legation, Feb. , . . “Adab al-ijtima‘,” al-Bashir, March , ; “Nahda al-mar’a,” “Dimashq al-sham,” and “Jam‘iyat muqawamat al-sill fi suriya,” Lisan al-hal, Oct.  and , and Nov. , . . Commins, Islamic Reform, pp. –, –, –; Khalidi, “Society and Ideology in Late Ottoman Syria”; Schatkowski, “Islamic Maqased of Beirut.” . Hourani, Arabic Thought, pp. –; Cleveland, Islam Against the West, pp. –. Arslan was mentioned in chapter one for building orphanages and criticizing the Entente blockade. . Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Quataert, Ottoman Manufacturing, p.  and “Ottoman Workers”; Vatter, “Militant Journeymen.” . “al-Mar’a al-‘arabiya wa yazqat al-wa‘y al-qawmi,” al-Tariq  (Feb. , ) p. . . al-Khalidi, Jawla fi dhikrayat, pp. –. . al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. ; Amal al-Jaza’iri, “ ‘Adila Bayhum al-Jaza’iri,” typewritten press release, ; Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, pp. , . I supply vital dates about these women because basic biographical information about them, in contrast to most of the male personalities of the era, are not available in English-language sources. . “Jam‘iyat al-sayyidat,” al-Mar’a al-jadida  (April ) p. ; Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, p. . While Ibrahim gives Dimashqiya’s birthdate as  (Adibat lubnaniyat, p. ), I have generally followed dates given by Sakakini. . “Khitab sahibat al-majalla fi haflat al-muntadi al-nisa’i,” al-‘Arus  (May ) pp. –. . “al-Hawadith al-shahriya li-jami‘iyat nur al-fayha’,” and “Tarikh jam‘iyat nur



5. revolt

al-fayha’,” Nur al-fayha’  (Feb. ) pp. –; Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, pp. –; Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , Damascus, May , . . Bushra Shaykh al-Ard, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . USNA, RG —Beirut, box , file , list of associations received by the American legation, Feb. , . . In  Lebanon, two-thirds of women’s organizations were still religious charities: Woodsmall, Role of Women, p. . . “Jami‘yat al-shafaqa al-urthuduksiya lil-sayyidat,” Lisan al-hal, Feb. , . . al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. . . “Yazqat al-mar’a al-shamiya,” Sawt al-mar’a  (Nov. ) p. ; “al-Jam‘iyat al-nisa’iya fi dimashq,” Majallat al-mar’a  (April ) p. ; Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, pp. –; Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, pp. –. . Hafiz, al-Hafiziyat, pp. –; al-Masri, al-Katibat al-suriyat, pp. , . Masri misdates the founding of the group as  instead of , see “Jam‘iyat alnisa’iya fi dimashq,” Majallat al-mar’a  (April ) p.  and al-Razzaz, Musharakat al-mar’a, p. . . Woodsmall, Role of Women, pp. –; “Taqrir ‘an al-nahda al-nisa’iya bi-suriya,” Bulletin de l’Enseignement  (May ) pp. –. . Amal al-Jaza’iri (Adila’s daughter who now runs the Dawhat al-adab school), personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –. . al-Masri, al-Katibat al-suriyat, pp. –. . Jihan Musulli (current president of the club), personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, pp. –. . Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . Ibrahim, al-Haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –; al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –. . Ibrahim, al-Haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –, –. . al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –, ; Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, p. . . Ibrahim, al-Haraka al-nisa’iya, p. . . This is a rough estimate. The Women’s Literary Club in Damascus claimed  members in , which is likely much larger than most groups. A conservative estimate of average membership may be put at . With about  groups in all cities of Syria and Lebanon, this gives a total of about , active members. But since membership in various groups overlapped tremendously, the actual number of activists might have been as low as . . Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, pp. , , , –. . al-Razzaz, Musharakat al-mar’a, p. .

5. revolt



. For comparison, see Baron, Women’s Awakening; Edib, Memoirs; Baykan, “The Turkish Woman”; Blair, Clubwoman as Feminist; Smith, Ladies of the Leisure Class. . Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Batatu, Old Social Classes, pp. –; Ismael and Ismael, Communist Movement, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Relevé chronologique des grèves survenues depuis l’occupation française jusqu’à fin ” and “Le Mouvement grèvist en ”; Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. , –, –. . Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. , ; MAE-Rapport () pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Etat de Syrie— Compression des depenses du personnel,” Sûreté report , Beirut, June , ; Chatti and Hicheimi to HC, translation, Dec. , ; fired civil servants of Aleppo to HC, Dec. , . . Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Ismael and Ismael, Communist Movement, pp. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Relevé chronologique des grèves survenues” and “Mouvement grèviste en ”; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. , –, –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Régime du travail dans les Etats du Levant sous mandat français,” Oct. , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Parti communiste,” Sûreté reports and Communist policy statement, ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Ismael and Ismael, Communist Movement, pp. –; Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism, pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Influence anti-coloniale en Syrie,” pp. –. . Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –. . Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. –. . Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. , , –; Khalidi, “Society and Ideology in Late Ottoman Syria,” pp. –. . Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” pp. –. . Commins, Islamic Reform, pp. –, –. . Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” pp. –; Gelvin, “Social Origins of Popular Nationalism.” . Russell, First Modern Arab State, p. . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Feer to Picot, March , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , report by Tommy Martin, March , . . “A‘mal al-birr al-islamiya,” al-Muqtabas, Feb. , , p. ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; Bou-Nacklie, “Tumult in Syria’s Hama,” p. .



5. revolt

. “Nouvelle secte à Damas” and “Des Ulemas se plaignent!” Les Echos, May  and June , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté reports on al-Sabuni, Aleppo, June  and , ; FO ––––, “Political Parties,” Oct. , ; Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. –, , , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , al-Hidaya to League of Nations, Aug. , . . Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. –, . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “L’Appel à la Vérité.” . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté reports , , , and weekly bulletin, Nov. , . . FO ––, weekly political summary, Oct. , . . Lisan al-Talaba  (Aug. ). The front cover says it is a religious, moral, cultural, and scientific journal published by a group of students at the Tajhiz school in Damascus. Articles concerned women’s veiling, the Prophet’s birthday, almsgiving in Islam, the Qur’an, and mankind’s need for religion. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Association des Frères musulmans,” May , ; carton , “Les Jeunes de Mohamed,” Sûreté reports, Damascus, Beirut, Homs and Tripoli, – and “Jeunesse musulmane,” Sûreté report, Beirut, July , ; carton , al-Hidaya to League of Nations, Aug. , ; FO ––––, “Political Parties,” Oct. , ; Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. –, –, , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Musulmans extrémistes,” Jan. , . . AIU, Archives Syrie— dossier I.C. Damas, Silver to president, Feb. , . . Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, p. . . AIU, Archives Syrie— dossier I.C.. Damas, Bénozillo to president, April , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –. . “La répercussion des événements de Palestine en Syrie,” Paix et Droit  (May ) p. . The journal was published by the Alliance Israélite. . Reprinted in Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. –. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , HC to MAE, Aug. , ; vol. , “Reform du Statut Personnel,” . The latter report interestingly distinguished between “old Muslims” who didn’t accept a division between state and religion, and “new Muslims” who sought to build organizations autonomous from the state. Both, however, felt the Muslim community had been weakened with the French occupation because the state was no longer the organizing apparatus for Muslim affairs that it had been under the Ottomans. . al-Azmeh, Islams and Modernities, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Politiques musulmanes,” Dec. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Conseil de la communauté musulmane,” Nov. ,



6. political rights

. .

. . .

; FO ––, Gardener Diary, Dec. , ; Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. –. MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Réforme du statut personnel,” . Sakakini, Khatarat, pp. –; personal interviews in Damascus in : Umm Rima, Aug. ; Da‘d Hakim, Oct. ; Khaldoun Alamy, Oct. ; Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, Oct. . Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” pp. , –. MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , Nov. , , translation of telegram to HC, Nov. , . MAE-Nantes/, carton , de Martel to MAE, Nov. , .

Part Three Introduction. . Marshall, Class, Citizenship and Social Development, pp. –. . Assaf, Compétence des tribunaux, pp. –, –, –; Akarli, Long Peace, pp. –. . Articles , , , and  of the Mandate for Syria and Lebanon, July , , reprinted in Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –.

Chapter 6 . al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. ; Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” pp. –. . Harry, “La Syrienne de Jérusalem à Bagdad.” . “Al-Mar’a wa al-wataniya,” al-‘Arus  (Feb. ) pp. –; Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, pp. –. . Reprinted in: “Jawab ‘ala Iqtirah,” al-Ikha’, Oct. , . . Rafeq, “Arabism, Society and Economy,” pp. –. . The suffrage debate quoted here is from Zu‘aytar, “Shaykh min ghazza,” pp. –; the debate is also reprinted in al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka alnisa’iya, pp. –. On the militias see Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, pp. –, –. . Tauber, Formation of Modern Syria, pp. –. . al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. . . Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, pp. –; Bayhum, Fatat al-Sharq, p. ; Charara, Image de la femme, p. ; al-Razzaz, Musharakat al-mar’a, p. . . “al-Nahda al-nisa’iya al-haditha fi suriya wa lubnan,” al-Mar’a – (July , ) p. .

 . . . . . .

6. political rights

“Muqaddima” and “Fatat lubnan,” Fatat Lubnan  (Jan. ) pp. –. “al-Muqaddima,” al-‘Arus  (Dec. ) p. . “al-Mar’a wa al-musawa,” al-‘Arus  (Aug. ) pp. –. Sakakini, al-Khatarat, p. . “al-Nahda al-nisa’iya fi al-‘alam,” al-Mar’a al-jadida  (April ) p. . “Fi Matla‘ al-sana al-thalitha,” and “Naghma lam ta‘tuq ba‘du,” al-Fajr  (Jan. ) pp. , . . Untitled introduction, Nur al-fayha’  (Feb. , ) p. . . “Muqaddima,” al-Khidr,  (July-Aug. ) p. . . USNA, RG — Damascus, consul to secretary of state, May , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –. . “al-Majlis al-niyabi al-lubnani: qarar khatir yuhimm al-mar’a,” al-Mar’a al-jadida  (April , ) p. . . Ibid. None of the censuses taken in the early s was considered reliable, even by the French government; however, no census I have seen even remotely suggested such an imbalance in the population between men and women. . “al-Mar’a al-lubnaniya: fi nazr nuwab al-balad,” al-Mar’a al-jadida  () pp. –. . “Li al-huquq jadida natlubuha,” al-Mar’a al-jadida  () pp. –. . Tresse, “Manifestations féminines,” pp. –. . “Haquq al-mar’a al-‘arabiya qabl al-islam wa ba‘dihi,” Nur al-Fayha’  (Feb. ) pp. –; “al-Mar’a al-jadida wa al-mar’a al-qadima,” al-Mar’a  (Feb. ) pp. –. . Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” pp. –. . “Muhammad wa al-mar’a,” al-Haris  (Feb. ) pp. –; “Khadija,” al-Hadith  (Jan. ) pp. –. . “Haquq al-mar’a al-‘arabiya qabl al-islam wa ba‘dihi,” Nur al-fayha’  (Feb. , ) pp. –; “Al-Mar’a fi waq‘a Karbala,” al-‘Irfan  (Nov. ) pp. –. . Stowasser, “Women and Citizenship in the Qur’an”; Spellberg, “Political Action and Public Example.” . Najib Salim Jabr, “Nahdat al-mar’a,” Lisan al-hal, Oct. , , p. ; Bulus alKhuli, “Naghma lam ta‘tuq ba‘du,” al-Fajr  (Jan. ) pp. –; Rufa’il, A‘mal al-mar’a fi al-harb al-kubra, pp. –. . Gelvin, “Popular Mobilization,” p. –; “Introduction,” and “Double Helix,” in Higgonet, Behind the Lines, pp. –, –. . Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, p. ; Hourani, Arabic Thought, pp. –. . “A‘du makanan li al-mar’a,” al-‘Arus  (May ) pp. –. . Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes, p. . . Hause and Kenney, Women’s Suffrage, pp. –.



7. the veil . “Notes sociales: La fausse guerrière,” Le Réveil, Jan. , . . Article eight, in Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. .

Chapter 7 . Ibrahim, al-Haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –; Nahid, Nisa’ min baladi, pp. –. Nazira’s father was Sa‘id Zayn al-Din. . “Kitab al-sufur wa al-hijab,” al-Bashir, May , . . “al-Anisa Nazira Zayn al-Din,” al-Haris  (May ) p. . . According to historian Abdul-Karim Rafeq, who grew up in Idlib in this period, Christian women in northern Syria wore thin black veils when going to the market, but were discouraged from wearing them at church. . Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, pp. –, ; Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. –. . Nahid, Nisa’ min baladi, pp. –. Nazira Janbalat did, however, pose unveiled for a regal studio photograph in the s. See Graham-Brown, Images of Women, p. . . Zayn al-Din, al-Sufur wa al-hijab, p. . . Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, p. –; Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, pp. –; Howard, King-Crane Commission, p. . . Interview with Sara Shahbandar by Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, p. . . Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, p. . . Göle, Forbidden Modern, pp. –. . Quataert, “Clothing Laws, State, and Society.” . Kandiyoti, “End of Empire,” p. . . USNA, Internal Affairs related to Asia, microfilm series M/roll , Allen to secretary of state, Nov. , . . “al-Mar’a al-turkiya al-jadida,” al-Mar’a al-jadida  () pp. –. . Tresse, “Manifestations féminines,” p. . . “Nahda al-turkiya al-‘asriya,” al‘Arus  (April ) pp. –; “Nisa’ suriya wa nisa’ turkiya,” al-‘Arus  (Oct. ) pp. –. . “Bint al-hijab: bayn al-‘illa wa al-tabib,” al-Khidr  (May ) pp. –. See also the satirical poem on veiling in al-Rabi‘  (March ) pp. –. . Elias, Tatawwur al-sihafa al-suriya, pp. –. . al-Muqtabas: “al-Sufur wa al-hijab,” Nov. , ; “La Sufur wa la hijab,” Dec. , ; “al-Hijab,” Nov. , . . Tergeman, Daughter of Damascus, pp. –; see also Tarcici above.

 . . . . .

7. the veil

Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, pp. –. Zayn al-Din, al-Sufur wa al-hijab, pp. –. Ibid., p. . Reprinted in Le Réveil, May , , pp. –. Translated and reprinted in Zayn al-Din, al-Fatat wa al-shuyukh, part II, p. . . Abdullah Rizqallah Khayr, “al-Sufur wa al-hijab,” Minirva  () p. . . Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, p. ; “Kitab al-sufur wa al-hijab,” Majallat al-majma‘ al-‘ilmi al-‘arabi  (July-Aug. ) pp. –. . Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, p. , note , p. . . Shaykh Maghribi, “Kitab al-sufur wa al-hijab,” Majallat al-majma‘ al-‘ilmi al‘arabi  (July-Aug. ) p. . . al-Jabi, Kashf al-niqab, front cover. . Naja, Bayan mashru‘iyat al-hijab, pp. , –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Conseil communal musulman,” memo on election, Nov. ,  and “Candidature de Mustapha Ghélaini,” report  by Rizkallah, May , ; Commins, Islamic Reform, p. ; Sakakini, al-Khatarat, page “ba” of Ghalayini’s introduction to the book. See also al-Nibras, a religious journal founded by Ghalayini in . . Ghalayini, Nazarat fi kitab, pp. –, , –, . Qassim Amin’s book was rumored to have been written at the urging of Lord Cromer, the British ruler in Egypt; see Ahmed, Women and Gender, p. . . Zayn al-Din, al-Fatat wa al-shuyukh, p. . . “Hadith ma‘ al-anisa Nazira Zayn al-Din,” Minirva  () pp. –. . Ghalayini, Nazarat fi kitab, p. . . “Al-Din al-islami huwa al-din al-rasmi li al-hukuma suriya,” al-Istiqlal, July , , as quoted in Elias, Tatawwur al-sihafa al-suriya, p. . . Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, p. ; letter from Raghib Jabri, Les Echos, Feb. , , p. . . Woodsmall, Muslim Women Enter, p. ; “al-Sufur wa al-hijab,” Minirva  () p. . . Tresse, “Manifestations féminines,” p. . . Salam, Jawla fi dhikrayat, pp. –. . I owe my thoughts here to Milani, Veils and Words, pp. –. . On roots in medieval Islamic thought, see Mernissi, Beyond the Veil, pp. –. . “al-Kalima al-ula,” al-Mar’a  (Oct. ) pp. –. . “al-Maslaha al-kabira,” Minirva  () pp. –. . “Ihda za‘imat al-nahda al-nisa’iya,” al-Naqid  (May , ) p. . . Khalidi, Jawla fi dhikrayat, pp. –.



8. civil rights

. Elias, Tatawwur al-sihafa al-suriya, p. . . USNA, RG — Syria, microfilm T/roll , excerpt from L’Orient, Nov. , . . “Qu’en disent les garçonnes?,” “Les Cheveux coupés devant l’histoire,” and “La Fausse guerrière,” Le Réveil, Nov.  and Dec. ,  and Jan. , ; Lecerf, “La Crise vestimentaire,” pp. –. . Harry, “La Syrienne de Jerusalem à Bagdad.” . Massé, Deuxième Congrès musulman, p. . . “La Femme orientale et occidentale,” Les Echos, Feb. , . . “La Journée du féminisme syrien,” Les Echos, Feb. , , pp. , . . “L’Abolition du ‘voile’ de la femme en Syrie” (part II) and “La Vertu offensée,” Les Echos, April , , p.  and Aug. , , p. . . “L’Abolition du ‘voile’ de la femme en Syrie” (part III), Les Echos, April , , p. ; Amal al-Jaza’iri, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . “Les Féministes damascaines se rendraient à Istanbul . . . ,” Les Echos, April , , p. . . “Des Jeunes gens de Damas demandent l’abolition du voile,” Les Echos, April , , p. . . Kandiyoti, “End of Empire,” pp. –. . Baron, “Unveiling in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt.” . Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, p. .

Chapter 8 . There had been two previous meetings, in  and in , the latter founding the union. . “Le Congrès féminin à Beyrouth,” Le Réveil, June , ; al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwar al-haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. , ; Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, p. . . Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, pp. –; Kumar, History of Doing, pp. –; Koven and Michel, Mothers of a New World. . “al-Mu‘tamar al-nisa’i,” al-Khidr  (May ) pp. –. . “al-Umuma wazifati,” al-Amali  (Jan. , ) pp. –. . “Majlis al-ittihad al-a‘la li al-mu’tamar al-nisa’i al-sharqi al-‘amm,” al-Mar’a  (Jan. ) pp. –; “L’Union générale des femmes de l’Orient,” Bulletin de l’Enseignement  (May ) pp. –. . Massé, Deuxième Congrès musulman, p. . . “al-Nahda al-nisa’iya fi suriya wa lubnan,” al-Thaqafa,  (April , ), pp. –. . “Ihda za‘imat al-nahda al-nisa’iya,” al-Naqid  (May , ), p. .

 . . . .

8. civil rights

“Femmes et féminisme,” Les Echos, Nov. , , p. . “Ihda za‘imat al-nahda al-nisa’iya,” al-Naqid  (May , ) p. . “Ayyatuha al-ukht al-‘aziza,” al-Mar’a  (Dec. ) p. . On support for the  Eastern Women’s Conference see al-Sha‘b, June , , p. ; June , , p. , June , , p. . The paper’s articles on the  conferences also supported women’s rights, including the vote: Feb. ,  and Dec. , , p. . . Amal al-Jaza’iri, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, Bushra Shaykh al-Ard, and Amal al-Husseini, personal interviews, Damascus, Oct. , . . “Et le Féminisme en Syrie,” Les Echos, March , , p. . . “Ila shaqiqati al-mar’a,” Minirva  () pp. –. . “Tatawwur al-qadiya al-nisa’iya fi suriya,” al-Thaqafa  (July , ) pp. –. . Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” pp. –. . “Les Féministes libanaises veulent être juges et maires,” Les Echos, Feb. , , p. . . Ibrahim, al-Haraka al-nisa’iya, p. ; al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka alnisa’iya, pp. –. . Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, pp. –. . Amal al-Jaza’iri, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , Oct. , . . Dahir, Tarikh lubnan al-ijtima‘i, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Conseil communal musulman,” reports –, and “Chiites du Liban,” s reports. . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Réforme du Statut personnel,” Gennardi to HC, , p. . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , Helleu to MAE, Sept. , ; see, for example, al-Bashir: Aug. , ; Feb. , ; April , ; Le Réveil, May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Maronites,” letters and speeches of the patriarch, –; USNA, RG — Syria, microfilm T/roll , “The Jesuits and Lebanon after the Great War,” May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Note sur les questions relatives au statut personnel,” May , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Réforme du Statut personnel,” Gennardi to HC, , p. . . Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . Solh, “Attitude of Arab Nationalists,” p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Loi sur le droit de famille”; Tucker, “Revisiting Reform: Women and the Ottoman Law of Family Rights.”



9. social rights

. MAE-Nantes/, carton , HC to Lebanese délégué, June , . . Assaf, Compétence des tribunaux, pp. –; articles on Eddé’s proposal and patriarchs’ reaction, al-Bashir, April  and , . . Based on a survey of the following dossiers: MAE-Nantes/, carton  and carton ; MAE-Paris/, vols. , , . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , “Réforme du Statut personnel,” Gennardi to HC, , p. ; vol. , de Martel to MAE, March , ; vol. , de Martel to MAE, Dec. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , dossier on background to personal status law. The conference included the Maronite, Greek Catholic, and Syrian Catholic churches. . “La Défense de la Race,” Les Echos, Feb. , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Statut personnel—dossier général,” government editorial printed in al-Bashir, March , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Statut des communautés religieuses,” Arreté /LR, Nov. ,  and Arreté /LR, March , ; USNA, Lebanon –, microfilm /roll , “Status of Religious Communities in Syria and the Lebanon,” despatch , Palmer to Washington, Jan. , , enclosures. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Protestation-Statut communautés,” telegram from Qassab, March ,  and other telegrams dated Feb. and March ; alHakim, Suriya wa al-intidab, pp. –. Qassab was a veteran of the Faysalera populist militias, see Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Statut des communautés religieuses,” Arreté /LR, March , ; Puaux, Deux Années au Levant, pp. –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, –. . “Ajwiba al-iqtirah— ma huwa ra’yik bi-zawaj al-madani?” al-‘Arus  (April ) p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Statut personnel—dossier général,” Puaux to MAE, March ,  and memo, Feb. , . . Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, pp. –.

Chapter 9 . Jovelet, “L’Evolution sociale et politique,” pp. –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . . See chapters one and five. In  and  reports, the French dismissed reports of artisans’ unemployment as inconsequential: MAE-Nantes/, carton



. .

. . . .

.

. . .

. . . .

. .

9. social rights , “Note sur la décadence de l’artisanat, le chômage et les moyens d’y rémédier” and MAE-Rapport (), pp. –. Hanna argues that the French routinely underestimated the number of unemployed: Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –. Longuenesse, “Classe ouvrière en Syrie,” pp. , . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , June ,  and “Requête adressée à Son Excellence le Haut Commissaire, Dec. , ; carton , “Note sur la décadence de l’artisanat . . .” (), pp. , . Longuenesse, “Travail et rapports de production,” p. . “al-Mar’a wa wajibatuha,” al-Mawrid al-safi  (Feb. ) pp. –; Ibrahim, al-Haraka al-nisa’iya, p. ; Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, p. . Majallat al-mu‘allimin wa al-mu‘allimat  (Oct. ) pp. –. MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Travail des enfants . . . ,” Arreté /T, April , , report on Egyptian labor law and “Accidents du Travail,” various reports, –; MAE-Rapport (), Lebanese law of April ,  on children’s and women’s work in industry, pp. –; MAE-Rapport () description of Syrian law, DL , June , , p. . The  Lebanese law (DL ) and the  Syrian law (DL ) revised the  Ottoman corporation law that required unions to include both employers and workers in each industry, subjected them to tight state supervision, and banned federations among workers of differing industries. See Sanadiki, “Mouvement syndical en Syrie,” pp. –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –. Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “L’Affaire Dr. Kayali,” . Longuenesse, “Classe ouvrière en Syrie,” p. . For workers’ nationalist sympathies, see a typesetters’ union pamphlet proclaiming Arab solidarity and the need to build a national economy: “Bayan al-mu‘tamar al-ta’sisi li-‘usbat al-‘amal al-qawmi al-matba‘a al-‘asriya” (Qarnil, Lebanon, )  pp. Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –, –. P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. , –. al-Malla, Safahat min tarikh al-hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. –, –; Jazmati, alHizb al-shiyu‘i al-suri, p. . Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –; Longuenesse, “Classe ouvrière en Syrie” pp. –; Sanadiki, “Mouvement syndical en Syrie,” pp. –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –. MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Parti communiste,” Rafik Rida to League of Nations, March . Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. .

9. social rights



. MAE-Rapport () p.  and (), p. ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Nasr and Dubar, Classes sociales, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , July , . . MAE-Nantes/, “Parti communiste,” Rafik Rida to League of Nations, March ; Ismael and Ismael, Communist Movement, p. . . Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . MAE-Rapport () p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Rapport annuel de la Société pour le relèvement de l’artisanat libanais,” p. . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –. Civil servant figures exclude Alexandretta, which was ceded to Turkey in . . Budgets cited here and in the rest of this chapter are drawn from the Ministry of Foreign Affairs’ annual reports on Syria and Lebanon to the League of Nations, –. . Gaulmier, “Notes sur le mouvement syndicaliste,” pp. –. . MAE-Rapport () pp. –, ; “Les fêtes jubilaires du R. P. Chanteur,” La Croix, May , . . MAE-Rapport () pp. –, ; () pp. , –; () pp. –, –; () pp. –, –, –. . MAE-Rapport () pp. –, , –; () pp. –, . . “Les droits de l’Hygiène,” Le Réveil, Oct. , ; “Sihhat al-sha‘b bayn alihmal wa al-shuhh,” al-Muqtabas, July , , and “Fi sabil al-sihha al-‘amma: suq al-ghanam,” al-Muqtabas, Nov. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , petition dated Dec. , , p. . . “al-Mudiriya al-‘amma li al-sihha wa al-is‘af al-‘amm fi suriya,” Dimashq (Sept. , ) p. . . Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –; Atiyah, “Attitude of the Lebanese Sunnis,” pp. –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. . . ‘’ Enfants éliminés des écoles de l’Etat,” Les Echos, Oct. , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Musulmans de Tripoli: subventions scolaires,” Nov. , ; carton , petition dated Oct. , . . “al-Ta‘lim al-ajnabi wa siyasatu,” al-Sha‘b, March , ; “Ra’y anisa suriya fi al-mar’a wa al-ta‘lim,” al-Naqid  (July , ) p. ; J.A. Babikian, “Civilization and Education in Syria and Lebanon,” (Beirut, ) manuscript housed at the French Institute, Damascus, pp. , –. . Sanadiki, “Mouvement syndical en Syrie,” pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , translation of speech by Maronite Patriarch ‘Arida, Dec. ; Deuxième Semaine Sociale, L’Ecole et l’éducation nationale, p. –. . MAE-Rapport () p. . The argument was repeated in other s



part 4. introduction

annual reports. The French, for their own purposes here, hid behind the requirement of the mandate charter that they respect local laws. . MAE-Rapport () pp. –. . MAE-Rapport () p.  and () p. . . Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –. On women’s use of French and American models, see articles on conferences with French feminists in Les Echos, Feb.  and , , and the repeated references to American women’s movements in al-Mar’a al-jadida (The New Woman) in the s. . In a typical year, , the joint Syrian-Lebanese waqf administration spent , LLS (, francs) on these areas of social services, compared to the more than . million LLS ( million francs) that the states spent on education alone. MAE-Rapport () pp. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Discours prononcé par S.B. Mgr. Antoine Pierre Arida . . . Décembre ,” (translation from Arabic).

Part 4 Introduction . “Le Monde renversé—ou chacun son tour!” Les Echos, March , , p. . . “Li-yasfiru al-rajl qabl al-mar’a: hal fi lubnan sha‘b kamil al-rujula yaghdabu li-karama,” al-Sha‘b, March , , p. . . “al-Mar’a fi al-sinama wa ‘ala al-trutwar wa fi al-‘uzla . . . fi kull makan,” alDabbur, June , , p. . . I am indebted to Benedict Anderson for my initial conceptualization of the virtual public; however, my understanding of nationalism in Syria and Lebanon departs from his explanation of colonial nationalism, which tends to privilege the nationalism of elites who accepted the boundaries set by colonizers, and to de-emphasize the rival nationalisms of competing groups within colonial society. See his Imagined Communities, esp. pp. –, –. . See introduction to Part One. My thinking on these issues has been inspired partly by recent critiques of Habermas and by historical scholarship on the public sphere and the French Revolution: Calhoun, Habermas and the Public Sphere; Landes, Women and the Public Sphere; Goodman, “Public Sphere and Private Life”; and in the forum entitled “The Public Sphere in the Eighteenth Century” in French Historical Studies. Also useful was Cohen and Arato, Civil Society and Political Theory.

10. remapping the urban landscape



Chapter 10 . Marcus, Middle East on the Eve, pp. –. . Deguilhem, “Le Café à Damas,”; al-Jarrah, Ayyami kanat ghaniya, pp. –, , ; Marcus, Middle East on the Eve, p. ; P. Khoury, “Syrian Urban Politics”; Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut, pp. –. . Raymond, Grandes villes, passim; Rafeq, “City and Countryside”; Rafeq, “Craft Organization”; Davie, “L’Espace communautaire orthodoxe”; David, “L’Espace des chrétiens à Alep.” . Hasan, Hadith dimashqi, pp. –; al-Jarrah, Ayyami kanat ghaniya, pp. –; Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, pp. –. . Beyhum and David, “Les Espaces du public.” . Marcus, Middle East on the Eve, pp. –; Rafeq, “Public Morality,” p. . . David, “Les Paysages urbaines d’Alep,” pp. – . al-Shihabi, Dimashq, pp. –, –; Lecerf, “Littérature dialectale.” . Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants, pp. –; Debbas, Beirut, Our Memory, pp. –. . Daghestani, Famille musulmane, p. ; “Damas, la Verte,” Le Réveil, April , . . “Fi Sahat al-ittihad,” al-Naqid  (July , ), back cover. . Gilsenan, Recognizing Islam, pp. –; Wright, “Tradition in the Service of Modernity”; Danger, “Urbanisme en Syrie.” . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; MAE-Nantes/, “Organisation du mouled chez Hadj Mohamed Kabsoueh,” Aleppo, July , , “De la Cérémonie du mouled,” Damascus, Sept. ,  and “Fête du mouled à Damas,” April , . . Fawaz, Merchants and Migrants, p. . . Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs, pp. –. . Hasan, Hadith dimashqi, pp. –. . USNA, RG —Beirut, vol. , letters to Case Electric Corp., Oct ,  and to National Silver Co., Sept. , ; vol. , “Electric Power Development ,” March ,  and letter to United Electrical Mfg. Co., May , ; vol. , letters to Syracuse Washing Machine Co., July , , and to General Kontrolar Co., May , ; vol. , “Plumbing Supply Market,” March , , “Brushes,” Nov. ,  and “Market for Aluminum Kitchen Utensils,” Nov. , . . Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. –. . Daher, “Some Remarks on the Growth of Beirut,” p. . . “Echos mondains,” Les Echos, Jan. , .



10. remapping the urban landscape

. Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, p. ; “al-Mar’a fi al-sinama wa ‘ala al-trutwar wa fi al-‘uzla . . . wa fi kull makan!” al-Dabbur  (June , ) p. . . Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. –. . Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. –; Daghestani, Famille musulmane, pp. –; Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed, pp. , . . AIU, Archives Liban—dossier I.C., Picciotto to AIU, Dec. , . . Daghestani, Famille musulmane, pp. –, –. . al-Kuzbari, ‘Anbar wa ramad, passim; Tergeman, Daughter of Damascus, pp. –; Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, pp. –. . MWT, Awraq Fakhri al-Barudi, dossiers  and  on the “Commission syrienne de recupération des biens pillés,” Sept. ; Stevens, Cedars, Saints and Sinners, p. . . Qurtas, Dhikrayat, pp. , –. . USNA, RG —Beirut, box , annual report, Sept. , ; Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, p. . . Guides Bleus, Syrie-Palestine (), pp. –. . Syria, Recueil des statistiques . . . (–), p. ; Faris, Electric Power in Syria, pp. –, –, –. . USNA, RG —Office of Strategic Services, Research and Analysis Report , pp. , ; Woodsmall, Moslem Women Enter, pp. –. . Himadeh, Economic Organization of Syria, p. . . USNA, RG —Beirut, box , various reports, . . Etat de Syrie, Bulletin médical annuel () p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Service Automobile—Circulation routière,” Arrete /LR, Jan. ,  and memo on contrôle routier, Jan. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sami Sleem to League of Nations, Dec. , , and HC response, Jan. , . . “Si Vous le savez,” Les Echos, Nov. , . . “Ayna timshi al-mar’a,” al-Haris  (Feb. ) p. .

Chapter 11 . “Accostement des femmes,” Les Echos, May , . . USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Lebanon –, microfilm T/roll , Goold to secretary of state, June , . . Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –. . USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Lebanon, microfilm T/roll , Barakat to HC, Jan. ,  (translation by embassy).

11. street violence



. USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Lebanon, microfilm T/roll , Goold to secretary of state, Oct. ,  (translation by embassy). . USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Syria –, microfilm T/roll , “Constitution of the State of Syria,” Steger to Senator Connelly, Oct. , , enclosure no. . Similar language was included in the  Lebanese constitution, found in the same file. . “Et le Féminisme en Syrie,” Les Echos, March , ; Tresse, “Manifestations féminines,” pp. –, . . AIU, Archives Syrie—dossier I.C. Damas, Silberstein to president, Dec. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Requête de M. Toufic a/s de la mort de sa femme,” Nov. -Jan. ; MWT, Awraq Nazih Mu’ayyad al-`Azm, dossier /document ,  speech to the Lawyers’ Club entitled “al-Jala’,” pp. –; Tresse, “Manifestations féminines,” p. . Jabiri’s nephew was Nasib al-Jabiri: see Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , de Martel to MAE, Nov. , . The various documents relating to this incident are collected in the dossier “–: Petitions to the League of Nations.” . MAE-Nantes/, carton , de Martel to MAE, Nov. , , and Manset to de Martel, Nov. , . For similar tactics by Palestinian women, see Fleischmann, “Nation and its ‘New’ Women,” pp. –, –, –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , telegram no. , Nov. , . . Ibid., telegram, Nov. , . . Ibid., telegram, Nov. , . . Ibid., Syndicat des Savetiers à Hama to de Martel, Nov. , . . Ibid., de Martel to MAE, Dec. , . . Ibid., undated letter signed by Barudi, sent by the deputy HC for Syria to de Martel, Nov. ,  (translated from French by author). . AHCJ, Fonds Jalabert—chemise L, “L’Oeuvre française en Syrie et au Liban,” transcript of radio interview, Oct. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Manset to Syrian deputy HC, Nov. , , emphasis added. . Ibid., de Martel to MAE, Nov. , . . Ibid., de Martel to MAE, Dec. , . . French documents named only six of the eleven arrested, those who had been fined but not jailed: Farida Mazhar Bey Kubursi, Ni‘amat Bint Kamal Arzrumli, Maymuna Bint Ahmad Sirmayati, Zaynab Bint ‘Abdu al-Kurdi, Fawziya Bint Ahmad al-Fakhani, and Badriya Bint Shukri Mahasin. . On workers’ participation, see chapter nine. . AIU, Archives Syrie—dossier I.C. Damas, Silberstein to president, Feb. ,



11. street violence

 and Mamane to president, March , ; Tresse, “Manifestations féminines,” p. ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –. . AIU, Archives Liban—dossier I.C. Beyrouth, Penso to president, Nov. , ; Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. , , –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –. . Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” p. . . Tresse, “Manifestations féminines,” pp. –; MAE-Nantes/, carton , petition, June , . . al-Hafiz, al-Hafiziyat, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , petitions from Ihsan Cherif, March , lawyers of Homs, April , Communist Party, April , and Lycée Maaret al-Noman, April , . . “Heil Hitler dans les souks de Damas,” Les Echos, April , , p. . . Yamak, Syrian Social Nationalist Party, pp. –, –; Mendel and Müller, “Fascist Tendencies,” pp. –; CHEAM, report no.  bis, “Chemises de Fer,” pp. –; Wild, “National Socialism,” p. . The CHEAM report claims the SNP had , members in the s. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –; Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” pp. –. . “Les Jeunesses Patriotes forment les ‘Chemises de Fer,’” Les Echos, April , ; “Un Quart d’heure avec Dr. Seifeddine Maamoun,” Les Echos, Aug. , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Note conçernant les formations de ‘Jeunesses nationalistes’ ou ‘Extremistes’ para-militaires dans les Etats du Levant sous mandat français,” July , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “A/S Manifestation des Chemises de fer,” Sept. , ; “Note documentaire sur les formations paramilitaires de la Syrie et du Liban,” Aug. , ; various Sûreté reports on the Chemise de fer and l’Insigne blanc, July -Aug. ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . Entelis, Pluralism and Party Formation, pp. –; Salibi, Modern History of Lebanon, p. ; Petran, Struggle Over Lebanon, pp. –. . Mendel and Müller, “Fascist Tendencies,” pp. - ; Wild, “National Socialism,” pp. –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, –, –. Mendel and Müller agree with Wild that European fascists’ economic ideas appealed to the anti-bourgeois sentiment among youth. Khoury sees the origin of the groups mainly in local social formations, like boy scout troops, and local conditions, particularly the  general strike. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “A/S Manifestation des Chemises de Fer,” Sept. , .

11. street violence



. “Quwat almanya al-haqiqiya bi shababihi al-waththab,” al-Sha‘b, Aug. , , pp. ,  (al-Sha‘b had also published Hitler’s speech at the Reichstag on May –, ); “La hayat li-suriya illa idha nahdat fiha al-zira‘a,” al-Sadan al-iqtisadi  (March , ) pp. –; Wild, “National Socialism,” pp. –. . See Bayrut: Inaugural editorial, July , , p. , “Hitler ma‘bud al-alman,” Aug. –, , p.  and “Hitler’s Views on Women,” Jan. , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté reports, Damascus, Aug. ,  and Aleppo, July ,  and Meyrier to MAE, July  and Aug. , ; CHEAM, report no.  bis, p. ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; Haddad, Phalanges libanaises, pp. –; Davie, Beyrouth et ses faubourgs, pp. –. . “al-Hizb al-suri al-qawmi,” al-Sha‘b, Dec. , , pp. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Foire,” June , ; Sûreté reports, Homs, Sept. , , Hama, Dec. ,  and Damascus, June , Sept.  and Oct. , ; “Les forgerons de Damas préparent deux milles sabres . . . ,” undated press clip. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Phalanges to League of Nations, Nov. , ; Entelis, Pluralism and Party Formation, pp. –, ; Haddad, Phalanges libanaises, pp. –. . Yamak, Syrian Nationalist Party, p. ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , brochure submitted to League of Nations, Aug. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report /s, Damascus, Sept. , , de Martel to MAE, Oct. , , Sûreté report , Aleppo, Oct. , ; Leneveu to Mohafez/Alep, Oct. , , Sûreté reports , Hama, Jan. , , Homs, Jan.  and March , ,  and , Damascus, March  and April , , , Hama, March , ,  and , Aleppo, May  and Sept. , ; carton , petition from l’Insigne Blanc; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté reports ,  and , Damascus, Jan. , May  and July , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report, Damascus, Oct. , ; “Les Jeunesses Patriotes forment les ‘Chemises de Fer,’ ” Les Echos, April , . . Bayrut, front-page editorials July  and , . . De Grazia, How Fascism Ruled Women, pp. –; Koonz, Mothers in the Fatherland, pp. –. . SHAT, carton N-, “Italian Propaganda ().” . “Harakat al-shabab al-almani,” al-Amali  (Feb. , ) pp. –; “Hitler’s Views on Women,” Bayrut, Jan. , , p. . . “Turkish Women Preferred in Army,” Bayrut, Nov. , . p. ; photo of Spanish women soldiers, Bayrut, Aug. , , p. ; “ alf imra’a tuharib fi finlanda,” Bayrut, Jan. , , p. .



12. cinemas

Chapter 12 . Aliksan, Tarikh al-sinima al-suriya, pp. –; Suwayd, Ya Fu’adi, pp. –; Arabi, “History of Lebanese Cinema,” p. . Cinema’s origins are still debated: Arabi dates the first Beirut theater to show films to , while Aliksan dates the first regular film programs in the region to Damascus in . . Hasan, Hadith dimashqi, p. ; Yusuf Wehbeh, personal correspondence, March , . . USNA, RG —Beirut, vol. , “U.S. Survey of Cinemas in Syria and Lebanon,” April , . . Yusuf Wehbeh, personal interview, Oct. , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , HC to MAE, Sept. ,  and Pila/MAE, directive to promote French films, June , . . Abu Riyad Hamdi, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . USNA, RG —Beirut, box , “Motion Picture Conditions—Syria,” Oct. , ; box , “Motion Pictures (Syria and Lebanon),” March , . . Suwayd, Ya Fu’adi, pp. –. . Two films were made in Lebanon, “Mughamarat Ilyas Mabruk” () and “Mughamarat Abu ‘Abid” () by Italian-born Jordano Pidutti, and two in Syria, “al-Muttaham al-bari” () and “Taht sama’ Dimashq” (), by local filmmakers: Dehni, “History of the Syrian Cinema,” pp. –; L. Khoury, “History of the Lebanese Cinema,” pp. –; Aliksan, Tarikh al-sinima al-suriya, pp. –; Arabi, “History of Lebanese Cinema,” pp. –. . USNA, RG —Beirut, vol. , consul to United Pictures Corporation, Sept. , . Wage equivalences based on a  exchange rate of  francs per dollar (Leisner, One Hundred Years of Economic Statistics, pp. –) and average wages of Damascene artisans of – francs for men and – francs for women: MAE-Rapport () p. . . Umm Ahmad, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . Aliksan, Tarikh al-sinima al-suriya, p. ; Gelvin, Divided Loyalties, p. , n. . Gelvin notes that live theater was also highly politicized in the Faysal era (pp. –). . MAE-Paris/, vol. , HC to Pichon, Feb. , . . Yusuf Wehbeh, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . Hasan, Hadith dimashqi, p. . The film was made in Germany by the Russian director Dimitri Buchowetzki: Katz, Film Encyclopedia, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Cinéma au Levant,” HC to MAE, May , , addendum. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Cinéma,” ministre plénipotentaire-Damas to HC,

12. cinemas



June , ; HC to délégué-Damas, May , ; Instruction publique to Chanteur, March , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Rapports du Service d’Information et de Radiodiffusion,” reports from Damascus region, July –,  and from Zouk, Mount Lebanon, Nov. , . . Suwayd, Ya Fu’adi, pp. –. . USNA, RG —Beirut, vol. , “Review of the Press,” quoting an article in Le Jour, Oct. , ; SHAT, carton N-, “Italian Propaganda ()”; MAENantes/, carton , report on Chemises de fer, Damascus, Oct. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Grève  Etc.,” memo on Nov.  events; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. . . Arrêté no. , July , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Pila/MAE to all embassies, June , . . Dehni, “History of the Syrian Cinema,” pp. –; MWT, Awraq Fakhri alBarudi, dossier , letter from Sharikat al-konsirwa al-suriya, Nov. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sarrail to Lebanese governor, Sept. ,  and text of Arrêté no. /L.R., Oct. , . . USNA, Internal Affairs of Lebanon –, microfilm / roll , Brandt to secretary of state, May , . The film, originally titled “Fazel,” was written by Pierre Frondaié and produced by the American Fox Film corporation. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Cinéma au Levant,” HC to MAE, May , , addendum; MAE-Nantes/, carton , délégué-Syrie to HC, March , . The film was entitled “Awlad al-dhawat” (“Sons of the Notables,” in French “Les fils à papa”). . L. Khoury, “History of Lebanese Cinema,” p. ; Arabi, “History of Lebanese Cinema,” pp. –. . Aliksan, Tarikh al-sinima al-suriya, pp. –; Dehni, “History of the Syrian Cinema,” p. . . Commins, Islamic Reform, p. . . “Le Théâtre,” Le Réveil, Oct. , ; Daghestani, ‘Ashaha kullaha, pp. –. . AHCJ, Série Mission du Proche Orient, RPO —Action Catholique, “ ‘Les Mousquetaires au couvent’ et la Jeunesse Catholique de Beyrouth,” , and Fonds Jalabert—paquet II/chemise O, untitled reports, Jan. . . “al-Mushakhkhisat,” al-Bashir, Feb. , . . “Cinéma,” Bulletin du Cercle de la jeunesse catholique, (–) p. . . “Qararat al-mu’tamar al-nisa’i,” al-Naqid  (July , ) p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , conseiller/HC to president of Lebanon, May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “ Sûreté générale,” mufti to president of Lebanon, April ,  (translation).



12. cinemas

. MAE-Nantes/, carton , “ Sûreté générale,” mufti (Mohamed Toufic Khaled) to president of Lebanon, April ,  (translation) and report on “La Quarantième Porte,” April ; “ Sûreté générale,” report on “Les Rois des Rois,” Jan. . . MAE-Paris/, vol. , HC to MAE, June , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Cinéma.” . Arrêté no. /LR, July , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Censure cinématographique –,” report by Cabinet Politique, March , . . AHCJ, Fonds Jalabert—paquet /chemise L, Sautier to Jalabert, April , . . “Bientôt, devant la Cour d’Appel Correctionnelle,” L’Ecran  (Jan. –, ) p. ; AHCJ, Mission Proche Orient, RPO , Congrès de la Jeunesse Catholique, Pour La Famille () pp. –. . Bowser, Transformation of Cinema, pp. –; Hansen, Babel and Babylon, pp. –. . AHCJ, Mission Proche Orient, RPO , Congrès de la Jeunesse Catholique, Pour la Famille (), p. . . “al-Zawaj min al-ajnabiyat,” Bayrut, Aug. , . . Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, pp. –. . Prothro and Diab, Changing Family Patterns, tables VI- and VI-; Tarcici, L’Education actuelle, p. . . Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , . . Le Réveil, June , , , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Politiques musulmanes,” Sûreté report, Tripoli, April , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Cinéma au Levant,” HC to MAE, May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , Latakia, Feb. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , Hama, July , ; de Martel to MAE, Aug. , . . “al-Sayyidat fi al-sinima,” Bayrut, Oct. , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , Hama, March , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Cinéma dans les pays du Levant sous Mandat français.” . “Des Ulemas se plaignent!” Les Echos, June , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Ostrorog to Syrian prime minister, July , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Helleu to Damascus deputy, . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report , Damascus, Jan. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report K, Damascus, Jan. , . . Rafeq, “Public Morality.”



13. the press

. MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Censure cinématographique –,” Couton to Sûreté director on “Yamilé sous les cèdres,” April , . . Mernissi, Dreams of Trespass, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Censure cinématographique –,” Couton to secrétaire général on “Victoire de la Jeunesse,” March , , and secrétaire général to Cinema Empire, March , ; al-Bindari, Mawsu‘at al-aflam al-‘arabiya, p. . . Zuhur, “An Arab Diva”; Spears, Fulfilment of a Mission, pp. –. . Hourani, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –. . Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, personal interview, Damascus, Oct. , .

Chapter 13 . I use the term print community in the spirit of Anderson’s Imagined Communities, wherein print-capitalism fostered communities of readers bound by a common language and the limits of the local publishing market, see esp. pp. –. . al-Mashut, Tarikh al-sihafa al-suriya, pp. –; Elias, Tatawwur al-sihafa alsuriya, pp. –, –. . For more detail on publishing in the late Ottoman and mandate periods, see my dissertation, “Engendering the Nation,” ch. . . Moussalem, Presse libanaise, pp. –. . MAE-Rapport () p. ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Statistique des Illettrés ,” Dec. ,  and ministre/Instruction publique to délégué/HC, Nov. , ; carton , “Recensement général de la population libanaise” (); Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, pp. –. Perhaps because of the postWorld War II rural population boom, literacy rates appear to have remained fairly stable since the s. Alternatively and more likely, the French may have overestimated literacy. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Statistique des Illetrés,” Dec. , . Surveys of the period generally undercounted the total population, and women in particular. The  census, for example, showed nearly , literate men and women in Beirut, compared to the , counted in , a rather unbelievable jump. . MAE-Rapport (), p. . . Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, p. . . Elias, Tatawwur al-sihafa al-suriya, p. ; USNA, RG —Beirut, box , “Motion Pictures,” March , , enclosure no. , list of leading newspapers and magazines; USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Syria –, microfilm LM /roll , “Report on the Press,” Oct. , .



13. the press

. UNESCO estimated that by  newspapers regularly published more than , issues in both countries, with Lebanon’s proportion slightly larger (Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, p. ). This suggests potential consumption by a maximum of , people, and a likely print community of –,. . Méouchy, “Formes de conscience,” p. ; USNA, RG —Beirut, box , “Motion Pictures,” enclosure no. ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Les Journaux libanais de langue arabe à travers leurs tendances électorales,” Aug. , ; Ayalon, Press in the Arab Middle East, pp. –, –. . Content analysis was based on a survey of the  Arabic- and Frenchlanguage newspapers listed in the bibliography. . On the roots of women’s literary revival, see Jurji Nicola Baz, “al-Nahda al-nisa’iya fi suriya,” al-Mawrid al-safi  (June ) pp. –. . “al-Mar’a wa al-wataniya,” “al-Ra’is al-amirki al-ghayad wa al-nisa,’” and “alIjtihad, al-duta wa al-taswit fi faransa,” al-‘Arus  (Feb. ) pp. –, (July ) p. , and (Nov. ) p. ; “Li-hunna wa ‘alayhunna,” al-‘Arus  (May ) pp. –. . “Ila al-Arwah,” Dawhat al-mimas  (April ) p. . . “Ayyuha al-‘amil” and “al-Adab al-nisa’i,” Dawhat al-mimas  (July ) pp. , . . The journal was begun in Tripoli in  and became a daily newspaper in : Y. Khoury, Mudawwanat al-sihafa al-‘arabiya, p. . See Latuf ’s essay in Sa‘ada, al-Nahda al-sihafiya fi lubnan, pp. –. . Sakakini, Sabiqat al-‘asr, pp. , , , ; Sakakini, al-Khatarat, pp. –; Ghurayyib, al-Sihafa al-lubnaniya, p.. . ‘Uthman, al-Sihafa al-suriya, pp. –. . Sakakini, “Evolution of Syrian Women,” p. ; “al-Nahda al-nisa’iya fi suriya wa lubnan,” al-Thaqafa  (April , ) pp. –. . “Bayna al-suhuf wa al-majallat,”al-Duhur  (April ) pp. –. . “al-Majalla bayna madiha wa hadirha,” Majallat al-Mar’a  (April ) p. . . “Page de la femme et de la famille,” Les Echos, March , , p. . . “Min ajlik ya sayyida,” Bayrut, Aug. , , p. . . “al-Umuma wazifati,” al-Amali  (Jan. , ) pp. –. . “Min abtal al-harb,” Dimashq  (Nov. ) pp. –, and “Min dhikrayat alta‘lim,” Dimashq  (June ) pp. –. . This study of women’s images in the press draws on a survey of  Arabic-language newspapers and magazines published by men in Syria and Lebanon, listed in the appendix. . “al-Hijab: al-mar’a wa ma yajibu ‘alayha,” Lisan al-talaba  (Aug. ) p. .

13. the press



. “Sab‘ jara’im tartakibuha al-ummahat nahwa atfalhunna,” Lisan al-hikmah  (Feb. –, ) pp. – and “al-Mar’a al-haditha,” al-Amali  (Oct. , ) pp. –. . “Zawaj al-mu‘allimat,” Majallat al-mu‘allimin wa al-mu‘allimat  () pp. –. . “Shahadat al-mar’a,” and “Kayfa yanbaghi al-bayt al-qawmi al-‘arabi,” Majallat al-tarbiya wa al-ta‘lim  (Dec. -Jan. ) pp. –, and  (April-May ) pp. –. . “Muhammad wa al-mar’a,” al-‘Uyun  (Jan. ) pp. –, reprinted in Majallat al-majma‘ al-‘ilmi al-‘arabi  (April ) pp. –; “Khadija,” alHadith  (Jan. ) pp. –; “Hadith imra’at sulayman al-hakim,” al-Haris  (July , ) pp. –; “Zawjat mussolini,” al-Haris  (June ) pp. –; “Mussolini bayna zawjatihi wa awladihi,” al-Mawrid al-safi  (Nov. ) pp. –. . “al-Zawaj bi al-taqsit,” al-Dabbur  (Jan. , ) p. . . “Ya Latif . . . ‘ala al-madaris,” al-Dabbur  (Oct. , ) p. ; and “Limadha ana a‘zab,” al-Dabbur  (July , ) p. . . al-Naqid  (June , ) back cover. . “Marthu mashghula!” al-Dabbur  (June , ) p. . . “Hiya tuzahim huwa . . . ,” al-Dabbur  (June , ) p. . al-Naqid of Damascus and al-Dabbur of Beirut were prominent in this regard. On May , , al-Naqid printed a full-length drawing of a nude woman on its cover. The highbrow Damascus journal al-Thaqafa published at least two pictures of unclothed women in . Les Echos defended its printing of beauty queens’ photos against objections from its fellow Damascene paper, Alif-Ba’, because it considered the practice modern (Aug. , ). . Les Echos, April , , and Aug.  and , . . The list of articles depicting public places as dangerous for women is long; see, for example, articles in al-Bashir, Feb. , ; al-Naqid, Sept. , ; Bayrut, July , ; July  and Aug. , –, ; al-Nahar, May , ; al-Kifah, Oct. , . . Bayrut, July  and , Aug. , –, , , and , . . “Akh yaqtulu shaqiqa,” al-Sha‘b, May , , p. . . “Rajul yaqtulu zawja,” Bayrut, Aug. –, , p. . . “al-Zawaj min al-ajnabiyat,” Bayrut, Aug. , , pp. , . . “Mughamarat imra’a,” al-Sha‘b, May , . . Hunt, Family Romance, pp. , . . Pateman, Disorder of Women, pp. –. . Roberts, Civilization Without Sexes. French newspapers in the Levant routinely reprinted articles from Paris about “garçonnes” and their taste for



13. the press

short hair and men’s clothes; see also chapter two’s discussion of Abel Moreau’s  novel, La Nuit syrienne. . Ryan, Women in Public, pp. , , . . Walkowitz, City of Dreadful Delight, pp. –, –. . Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments, pp. –.

Part Five Introduction . Qurtas, Dhikrayat –, p. . . Catroux, Dans la Bataille, pp. –. De Gaulle had seized French Equatorial Africa, but failed to capture West Africa the previous year. For rivalry over the empire see Paxton, Vichy France, pp. –, passim, and Catroux Dans la Bataille, pp. –, –.

Chapter 14 . “Nahariyat: al-malabis al-‘atiqa,” al-Nahar, Feb. , , p. ; articles on paper and wheat, al-Nahar, May , , p.  and May , , p. . . “Sayyidat al-ittihad al-nisa’i . . . ,” Bayrut, May –, , p. . . Puaux, Deux Années au Levant, p. . . See short, heavily censored items in Bayrut, Nov. , p. , Dec. , p.  and Dec. , , p. ; AHCJ-Vanves, Fonds Jalabert, paquet V/chemise Q, “Rapport du HC (Gabriel Puaux) au Gouvernement de Vichy sur la situation au Levant,” Nov. , . . Puaux, Deux Années au Levant, pp. –, –. . FO ––, Gardener to FO, April , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté reports, Dec. , March and April, ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. –. . Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –; articles on bread riots and Eddé’s resignation, al-Nahar, April , , , , all p. ; Entelis, Pluralism and Party Transformation, p. . . See, for example, the article on Gen. Arlabosse’s press conference, al-Nahar, Feb. , . p. . . “al-Mar’a wa al-intisab li al-muhama,” al-Nahar, March , , p. , and follow-up story (headline and part of text censored), March , , p. . . “Renouveau,” “Le cinéma et les jeunes filles,” and “Pour un statut du cinéma au Liban,” L’Ecran,  (Oct. –, ) pp. , ;  (Nov. -Dec. , ) pp. , ; and  (March –, ), pp. , .

14. climax of the colonial welfare state



. Decree /N of June , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , Couton to Bonneau, Nov. , . . Hirszowicz, Third Reich and the Arab East, pp. –; Paxton, Vichy France, pp. –; Catroux, Dans la bataille, pp. –. . For the wars over France’s essential identity, see Lebovics, True France, esp. pp. –. . Catroux, Dans la Bataille, pp. –. . Speech reprinted in Le Matin, Aug. , , pp. –. See also Catroux’s proclamation to the Lebanese in November : Dans la Bataille, p. . . Catroux, Dans la Bataille, pp. – and de Gaulle, Complete Memoirs, pp. –. . Catroux, Dans la Bataille, pp. –; USNA, Internal Affairs of Syria, –, microfilm T/roll , “Ins and Outs of Jesuit Policy in Lebanon,” May , . . Conseil supérieur, Receuil de statistiques,  (), pp. , –; Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. . . Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” p. ; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “La crise du blé a pris des proportions considérables,” Sept. , . . Lloyd, Food and Inflation, pp. –, , –; Wilmington, Middle East Supply Centre, p. . . USNA, RG —Lebanon, box , “Annual Economic and Financial Review (Syria-Lebanon) ,” p. ; RG-—Office of Strategic Services, microfilm M, Research & Analysis report no. , p. ; “Where are Fruits and Vegetables?” al-Nahar, Feb. , , p. ; “Macaroni,” Le Matin, , ; “al-Burtuqal mada hayawiya li al-fuqara’,” Bayrut, April , , p. . . Conseil Supérieur, Receuil de statistiques  () p. ; Jean Godard, “Etude statistique de la situation économique en Syrie et au Liban,” L’Egypte Contemporaine (April-May ) p. . . Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. ; Le Matin, July , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report, June , ; carton , dossier /”Manifestations publiques,” Sûreté reports, June  and July , , May , ; “Fi dimashq al-‘arabiya,” al-Tariq  (July , ) p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Ouvriers –,” Sûreté reports from Damascus, Homs, Aleppo, Beirut, Zahle and Latakia; carton , “Syndicats et Grèves des Ouvriers, ”; carton , “Employés et ouvriers divers.” . Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –, –; Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism, p. .



14. climax of the colonial welfare state

. MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Communistes arméniens” and “Communistes, Informations –.” . FO ––, Gardener Diary, July , . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, May , ; al-Malla, Safahat min tarikh al-hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. –; Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism, pp. –. . Abd-Allah, Islamic Struggle in Syria, pp. –. . FO –, E, “Personalities Report from Lebanon,” Aug. , ; Nantet, Pierre Gemayel, pp. –; Entelis, Pluralism and Party Transformation, pp. –, , –, ; USNA, RG —Office of Strategic Services, microfilm M, “Position and Influence of the Catholic Church in Lebanon,” Nov. , , p. . . Hudson, Precarious Republic, p. . . FO ––, Gardener to FO, April , ; Yamak, Syrian Social Nationalist Party, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Section sociale et des oeuvres de jeunesse,” and “Accidents de travail,” Sept. , reports on minimum wages, Sept.  and Oct. , , memo on family wages, Sept. , ; Godard, “L’Oeuvre politique, économique et sociale,” pp. –. . Arrêté /FL, April , . On Catroux’s explicit desire to revive de Martel’s strategies, see his Deux Missions, p. . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, May  and , and June , . . The story is told from differing points of view in: Spears, Fulfilment of a Mission, pp. –; Catroux, Dans la Bataille, pp. –; and Lloyd, Food and Inflation, pp. –, –. . “La crise du pain est résolue,” Le Matin, March , , p. . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, Oct. , Dec.  and , , and March , June  and Nov. , ; Godard, “L’Oeuvre politique, économique et sociale,” p. ; Catroux, Dans la Bataille, p. –. . Syrian government notice, reprinted in Le Jour, Feb. , , and Godard,”L’Oeuvre politique, économique et sociale,” p. ; USNA, RG — Beirut, box , weekly press review, Feb. , ; FO ––, Gardener Diary, Feb.  and , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . Al-Hakim, Suriya fi al-intidab, pp. –; MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté reports, March  and , ; FO ––, Gardener Diary, March  and , . . FO –––, Note for H.M. Minister, July , ; ––– Part III, Mikkawi to Catroux, July , , Furlonge memo, July ,  and Part IV, Furlonge to Spears Mission, July , ; –––, legation to FO, July , . . Arrêté /FL, Nov. , .

14. climax of the colonial welfare state



. DL /NI of Oct. , ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . . DL /NI of Jan. , ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . . “Qarar bi-insha’ al-makhazin al-ta‘awuniya,” Bayrut, March , , p. . . DL /ET of May , , typescript copy in MAE-Nantes/, carton . . DL /ET of May , ; Arrêté /FC, March , . . DL , on severence and protections against worker layoffs, and DL  on minimum wages, both Nov. , ; Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” p. ; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. . . Advertisement for a female typist, Le Matin, Dec. , , p. ; al-Masri and Wa‘lani, al-Katibat al-suriyat, p. . . “Association féminine . . . ,” Les Echos , Feb. , , p. ; “Activité intellectuelle et artisanale à Damas,” Le Jour, Aug. , . . DL /ET, May , , article . . “Les Femmes libanaises et l’effort de guerre,” Le Jour, May , , p. . . “Travail des femmes,” La Syrie et l’Orient, July , , p. ; “Cinq Questions sur l’Italie” and “Le Destin de la femme arabe,” Les Echos , May , , p.  and June , , p. . . Le Jour, April , , p. . . “La Famille et le droit,” Le Jour, May –, , p. ; on the conference see also April , May , –, . . Khalaf, Lebanon’s Predicament, p. . . Godard, “L’Oeuvre politique, économique et sociale,” p. . . “Visite à Mme la Présidente Naccache,” La Revue du Liban, Dec. , , p. . . “La Journée des mères,” Le Matin, May , , p. . . “ ‘Id al-ummahat,” Bayrut, May , , p. . . “al-Dunya umm!” al-Dabbur  (May , ) p. . . “La Ligue Sociale démocratique féminine ,” (Beirut, ), privately published pamphlet found at the Marguerite Durand library, Paris, p. . . FO ––, “Elections ,” Bakdash’s program, July , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Communistes arméniens,” report on “La Voix du Peuple,” Feb. , ; “Wajib al-mar’a al-‘arabiya . . . ,” al-Tariq  (Aug. , ) pp. –; al-‘Akkari, al-Sihafa al-thawriya, pp. –. . al-‘Akkari, al-Sihafa al-thawriya, p. ; al-Khatib, Tarikh al-haraka al-nisa’iya, pp. –. . Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed, p. ; al-Masri and Wa‘lani, al-Katibat alsuriyat, pp. , .



14. climax of the colonial welfare state

. “al-Mar’a al-‘arabiya,” al-Tariq  (Feb. , ) pp. – and  (March , ) pp. –; “Wajib al-mar’a al-‘arabiya,” al-Tariq  (Aug. , ) pp. –. . “al-Mar’a wa al-bayt wa al-tifl,” and “al-Mar’a wa al-tatawwur,” al-Tariq  (March , ) pp. – and  (Aug. , ) pp. –. . “Le Problème féminin en Orient,” Le Matin, June , , p. ; “Le Destin de la femme arabe,” Les Echos, June , , p. . . FO ––, memo on political parties, Oct. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “al-Gharra”; carton , Sûreté report, Damascus, June , . . “Pour et contre l’évolution féminine,” Les Echos, June , , p. . . al-Hafiz, al-Hafiziyat, pp. –; Shaaban, Both Right and Left Handed, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Communistes, Informations –.” . Catroux, Dans la Bataille, p. . . Arrêté /FC, Feb. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Edel to director of Section sociale, Jan. , ; “L’Indemnité pour charges de famille,” Le Jour, Oct. , . . MAE-Rapport () p. ; Matthews and Akrawi, Education in the Arab Countries, pp. , , , . . Budget data in this paragraph are drawn from: Conseil supérieur, Receuil de statistiques,  () pp. , –, and  (–) pp. –; Lloyd, Food and Inflation, p. . . Lloyd, Food and Inflation, pp. , . The raw figure on Allied spending, $ million, was adjusted for inflation using Lloyd’s own cost-of-living indexes for the period. Equivalency in Syrian-Lebanese pounds was calculated according to the following exchange rates during World War II: .£ sterling/dollar and .LLS/£ sterling, producing a LLS-dollar rate of .. Source of rates: Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p.  and Bidwell, Currency Conversion Tables, p. . . Editorial on labor legislation, Le Matin, June , , p. . . “al-Thawra al-ijtima’iya,” Bayrut, March , , p. . . Movie listings, Le Matin, July , , p. . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, July , . . Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. –, –; USNA, RG — Lebanon, box , “Annual Economic and Financial Review (Syria-Lebanon) ,” p. ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, p. . . In Lebanon, DL  NI of Nov. ,  and DL /NI of Nov. ,  established a war profits tax, which was never implemented (Godard, “L’Oeuvre politique, économique et sociale,” p. ) and was flatly rejected by mer-

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15. claiming paternity

chants (FO –, “Review of the Year  in the Lebanon,” Jan. , ). In Syria, DL /AS of June ,  set an income tax that also drew dispute (FO –––, Prodrome/Beirut to FO, July ,  and FO ––, Gardener Diary, Nov. , , May  and , ). . de Gaulle, Complete Memoirs, p. .

Chapter 15 . al-Dabbur  (Dec. , ), front cover; Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, p. . . al-Dabbur  (April , ) p. ; on the many faces of Marianne in French political discourse, see Agulhon and Bonte, Marianne. . “Pour et contre l’évolution féminine,” Les Echos, June , , p. . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, July , ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Electeurs”; USNA, RG —Damascus, Confidential File /vol. , “July  Elections—Aleppo,” July , , “July  Elections—Damascus,” July , ; Beirut election results, La Syrie et l’Orient, Aug. , ; Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” p. ; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. , ; Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, p. ; Hudson, Precarious Republic, pp. –. . Spears, Fulfilment of a Mission, p. ; American observers of the  Lebanese elections blamed the  percent turnout in Beirut on perceptions that the elections were rigged, as well as a heavy snow: USNA, RG —Syria, microfilm T/roll , Beirut consulate to Washington, Jan. , . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, June  and , July , , , and , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –. . Party platform summaries, La Syrie et l’Orient, Aug.  and , ; FO ––, Bakdash’s program, July , ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –. ‘Ammun, editor of Le Jour, had split from Khuri’s party. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report, Aug. , ; Salibi, Modern History of Lebanon, p. –; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –; Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, pp. –; Catroux, Dans la Bataille, pp. –. . al-Malla, Safahat min tarikh al-hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. , ; Jazmati, al-Hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. , . The Lebanese percentage was calculated on the basis of , votes cast for Communists among an electorate estimated at  percent of the , eligible voters, or , actual voters. Couland, in apparent error, estimated the total number of Lebanese voters at ,, or  percent of the electorate. See MAENantes/, carton , “Electeurs.”



15. claiming paternity

. P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. ; Batatu, Old Social Classes, pp. –. . Khalaf, Lebanon’s Predicament, pp. , –; Hudson, Precarious Republic, pp. –, , –; Winder, “Syrian Deputies,” Part I, p. , and Part II, pp. , . . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, –, ; Sadow-ski, “Political Power and Economic Organization,” pp. –, –. . Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –, ; Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. –, –; USNA, Lebanon/Central files –, microfilm LM /roll , report on Lebanese business leaders, Dec. ; Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut, pp. –, –. . As recalled by Yosr al-Sulh, personal correspondence with her son, Raghid alSulh, Sept. , . . FO –––, Arabic text of Oct. ,  speech, pp. –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –. . See Sulh’s speech, Oct. , , pp. –, in FO ––; Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, pp. –; Na‘mani, “Confessionalism in Balance,” p. . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, July , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Les Jeunes de Mohamed.” . FO ––, translation of Aug. ,  speech; FO ––– and–, dismissal of Damascus governor, Oct. , . . FO –––, speech by Quwwatli to parliament, Jan. ,  (translation); P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . FO ––, Gardener Diary, Oct. , . . FO –––, political officer/Damascus to chancery, Oct. , ,––, Spears to FO, Nov. , ,––, Belgrave to Lascelles, Nov. ,  and––, Spears to FO, Nov. , . . FO –––,–– and––, personal statements of Khuri’s wife and son and report on Mme Riyad al-Sulh; Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, pp. –; “Nisa’ al-istiqlal,” al-Hawadith  (Nov. , ) pp. –. . FO –––,–– and––, reports to Spears, Nov. –; Spears, Fulfilment of a Mission, pp. , , . Most reports of the General Security police are unavailable due to the French state archives’ year privacy rule. . FO ––, reports dated Nov. –, ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , dossier /”General,” Sûreté reports, Damascus, Nov.  and , ; Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –; Spears, Fulfilment of a Mission, pp. –.

15. claiming paternity



. FO –––, telegram from Lebanon Medical Corps, Nov. , . . FO –––, letter to Spears, Nov. , . The Atlantic Charter, declared by the Allies on August , , condemned territorial aggrandizement as a war aim, and vowed restoration of sovereignty after the war. . FO –––, Hélou to Catroux/Spears, Nov. , . . FO –––, Phalanges to Lavalade (n.d.) and––, Naqib al-muhamin to Spears, Nov. , . . Abouchdid, Thirty Years of Lebanon, pp. –; al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur alharaka al-nisa’iya, p. . . FO –––, Spears to London, Nov. , ,–– and–– on Christian support; Salibi, House of Many Mansions, p. . . FO ––, memo to Spears, Nov. , ; Catroux, Dans la Bataille, pp. , –. . Catroux, Dans la Bataille, p. . . Abouchdid, Thirty Years of Lebanon, pp. –. . For alternate accounts see Rabbath, Formation historique du Liban, p.  n. ; Salibi, House of Many Mansions, p. . . FO –––, “Beirut Welcomes Karamé”; Entelis, Pluralism and Party Transformation, pp. –, –, ; Nantet, Pierre Gemayel, pp. –; Haddad, Phalanges libanaises, pp. –; Abouchdid, Thirty Years of Lebanon, pp. –. For  photos of Jumayyil showing a resemblance to the cartoon, see Nantet. . FO –––, Furlonge to H. M. Minister, June ,  and––, “Syrian Popular Party,” March ,  and––, memo on Phalanges and Najjada, April , ; Haddad, Phalanges libanaises, pp. –; Yamak, Syrian Social Nationalist Party, pp. –. . USNA, RG —Office of Strategic Services, microfilm M, Research & Analysis report no. , “Position and Influence of the Catholic Church in Lebanon,” Nov. , ; FO –––, “Political Situation in Lebanon, May ”; Hudson, Precarious Republic, pp. –. . Salibi argues that secularism later became a “confidence game” cynically played by fundamentally sectarian politicians: House of Many Mansions, p.. . Abouchdid, Thirty Years of Lebanon, pp. – passim; Ibrahim, al-Haraka alnisa’iya, pp. –, ; al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. . Information is scarce on the Lebanese Women’s Association. It may, in fact, be an alternate name for the Lebanese Women’s Union. . For a discussion of sexuality as the realm of the most secret and so the most sacred and dangerous, and of the gender anxieties accompanying the transformation of public space in the Lebanon of the s and s, see Gilsenan,



15. claiming paternity

“Sheikhs and the Inner Secrets” and “Forming and Transforming Space” in his Recognizing Islam, pp. –, –. . FO –––, Ladies of Lebanon to prime minister, Nov. , . . FO –––, translated notes taken by a British official during Mubarak’s speech at Collège de la Sagesse, Nov. , . . FO –––, report on Tripoli, Nov. , . . Spears, Fulfilment of a Mission, pp. –. . FO –––, memo by W.W., Nov. , . . “Nisa’ al-istiqlal,” al-Hawadith  (Nov. , ) pp. –; Bustros, Romans et écrits divers, preface. Another version of the story placed the incident on November , near the mufti’s residence, as repeated in al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. . November  is the more likely version, as Bustros was mentioned as leading that demonstration by several witnesses, but not specifically mentioned, to my knowledge, in the November  protest. . Abouchdid, Thirty Years of Lebanon, p. . . FO –––, translated texts of Nov.  speeches provided by the women’s delegation. . “Haquq jadida,” al-Tariq  (Dec. , ) p. . . al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “L’Eveil de la Femme,” Sûreté reports, March , April  and , ; USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Syria –, microfilm T/roll , “Monthly Political Review,” March , . . USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Syria –, microfilm T/roll , “Monthly Political Review—August .” . Longrigg, Syria and Lebanon, pp. –; USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Syria –, microfilm T/roll , airgram A-, Dec. , . . “Goutte de Lait,” Les Echos, Jan.  and March , , p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Damas,” Sûreté report, Homs, May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Damas,” Sûreté report, Maydan, May , . . FO ––, Beaumont memorandum, May , , paraphrase of a report by a Maydan resident. . The preceding account was compiled from the following sources, unless noted otherwise: FO –––, British security mission/Damascus to political officer/Damascus, May ,  and , , “Demonstrations in Damascus,” May ,  and , , and Beaumont memorandum, May , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. , , , , –, –; Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. , –, . . FO-–––, Beaumont memorandum, May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Femmes musulmanes,” Sûreté report, Hama, Feb. ,

16. postcolonial citizens



; carton , “Censure cinématographique,” reports on “Ahlam el-Chebab,” Aug. , Sept.  and Sept. , . . Schilcher, Families in Politics, pp. –. . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –, –; Reissner, Ideologie und Politik, pp. , ; FO ––, Beaumont memorandum, May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Club Fayçal,” Sûreté reports, April  and  and May , ; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. –; Batatu, Old Social Classes, pp. –, –. . FO –––, “Extracts from the Speech of President Quwatli at the Serail on nd June .” . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Association des Frères musulmans,” Sûreté report on intercepted letter addressed to l’Association de la Vertu islamique, Aleppo, May , . . FO –––, Beaumont memorandum, May , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Dévoilement en Syrie,” May , . . All quotes from Jabiri’s May  speech to parliament are from a French translation published in Les Echos, May , , p. . . FO –––, “Extracts from the Speech of President Quwatli at the Serail on nd June .” . FO –––, British security mission to political officer/Damascus, May  and , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Congrès féminin arabe,” Sûreté report, Damascus, Jan. , . . FO –––, “Demonstrations in Damascus,” May , . . al-Kuzbari, ‘Anbar wa ramad, pp. –, –, –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Femmes musulmanes,” Sûreté reports, Homs, Aug. ,  and Latakia, Sept. , .

Chapter 16 . FO ––E, “Situation in Damascus,” July , . . Khalid Bakdash, address to Communist Party congress, Dec. , Jan. , , reprinted in Jazmati, al-Hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. –; Imilie Faris Ibrahim, “Ittisa‘ afaq al-‘amal amama al-mar’a al-lubnaniya,” alTariq (Dec. , ) reprinted in al-‘Akkari, al-Sihafa al-thawriya, pp. –. . “al-Ittihad al-nisa’i al-‘arabi fi dimashq,” al-Qabas, July , , pp. –; MAENantes/, “L’Union féminine arabe,” Feb. , .



16. postcolonial citizens

. Personal interview, Amal al-Jaza’iri, Damascus, Oct. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Congrès féminin arabe,” Sha‘rawi to Mme Adela, June ,  (translation). . As paraphrased in Les Echos, Dec. , , p. . . All quotes from the Cairo press conference are from “Le Congrès féministe du Caire,” Les Echos, Dec. , , p. . . Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, pp. –; MAE-Nantes/, carton , Lescuyer to Bidault, Dec. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Congrès féminin arabe,” paraphrased and translated in Sûreté report, Aleppo, Dec. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Congrès féminin arabe,” Sûreté reports, Damascus, Jan.  and , . . “Litiges de la sexe faible,” Les Echos, Jan. , , p. . . “La thèse de Souheil El-Khoury,” L’Orient, Feb. , , p. . . Quoted in Badran, Feminists, Islam and Nation, p. . . “Mme la Président El-Khoury,” Les Echos, Jan. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Manifestations publiques-I, Damas,” Sûreté report, May ,  and “III-Général,” Sûreté reports, Latakia, Jan. ,  and Damascus, Jan. , Feb. , and March , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “La Ligue féminine libanaise,” Sûreté report , May , . . Personal interview, Nadida Shaykh al-Ard, Damascus, Oct. , ; Sakakini, Insaf al-mar’a, pp. –; al-Razzaz, Musharakat al-mar’a, pp. –; al-Khatib, Tarikh tatawwur al-haraka al-nisa’iya, p. . . Jamal al-Din and al-Khuri, Hawl al-mar’a, pp. –; Zakaria Sibahi, “al-Mar’a wa haqq al-intikhab,” Sawt al-mar’a al-hurr  () pp. –. . “ ‘Atf wa ta’yid,” Majallat al-mar’a  (April ) p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Ouvriers ,” Sûreté reports, Damascus, Aug.  and Nov. ,  and Aug. , ; carton , “Association des Frères Musulmans,” Sûreté reports, Hama, Sept. ,  and Damascus, March , ; carton , “Les Jeunes de Mohamed,” Sûreté reports, Homs, Sept. ,  and Damascus, Sept.-Dec. . . FO ––, “Shebab Muhammad—Homs,” Oct. ,  and weekly summary no. , Nov. , ; al-Malla, Safahat min tarikh al-hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , Sûreté report, Damascus, Oct. , ; carton , “Association des Frères musulmans,” Sûreté reports, Hama, Sept. ,  and Damascus, Feb. , ; Abd-Allah, Islamic Struggle in Syria, pp. –, ; Farzat, al-Hayat al-hizbiya, p. . . Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –.

16. postcolonial citizens



. Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –; Jazmati, al-Hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. , –, –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Ouvriers,” Sûreté reports, March , April , ; Laqueur, Communism and Nationalism, p. ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Ouvriers,” Sûreté reports, Damascus, April  and Jan. ,  and Aleppo, Jan. , , Tartus postal control report on the Jan.  Communist national charter, April ; carton , dossier /”Général,” Sûreté reports, Aleppo, Nov.  and Dec. ,  and Homs, Nov. , ; Sanadiki, “Mouvement syndical,” p. ; Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, p. ; Communist charter reprinted in Jazmati, al-Hizb al-shiyu‘i, pp. –, and translated in Ismael and Ismael, Communist Movement, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , dossier /”Lebanon,” Sûreté report, Beirut, Dec. , ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. , . . Sadowski, “Political Power and Economic Organization,” pp. –, –; P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, pp. , –; FO –––, Faris al-Khuri’s program of Oct. , . . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Censure cinématographique –,” report on “L’Ouvrier,” Jan. , ; “al-‘Amil,” in Bandari, Mawsu‘at al-aflam al-‘arabiya, p. . . Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. –, –, –; USNA, Lebanon/Central files –, microfilm LM /roll , report on Lebanese business leaders, Dec. ; Zamir, Lebanon’s Quest, pp. –; Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut, pp. , –, , –. . Sadowski, “Political Power and Economic Organization,” p. ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –. . MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Ouvriers,” Sûreté reports, Beirut, July  and , ; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. , , –, ; “Wool Workers’ Strike,” L’Orient, Aug. , . . P. Khoury, Syria and the French Mandate, p. . . al-Jarrah, Ayyami kanat ghaniya, pp. –. . al-‘Akkari, al-Sihafa al-thawriya, p. . . Syrian law no.  of June ,  and Lebanese Labor Law, Sept. , . . Sanadiki, “Mouvement syndical,” pp. –; Couland, Mouvement syndical, pp. –. . Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –; Sanadiki, “Mouvement syndical,” pp. –; Hudson, Precarious Republic, pp. –. . Sadowski, “Political Power and Economic Organization,” pp. –, –; Hanna, al-Haraka al-‘ummaliya, pp. –. . Sanadiki, “Mouvement syndical,” p. .



16. postcolonial citizens

. Kamal Bohsali, “Contribution à l’étude de la situation de la classe ouvrière au Liban” (Thèse droit, Paris, ) as cited in Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . . Couland, Mouvement syndical, p. . . Matthews and Akrawi, Education in the Arab Countries, pp. , ; al-Husri, Taqrir ‘an ahwal al-ma‘arif, p. . . Cleveland, Making of an Arab Nationalist, pp. –; Simon, Iraq Between the Two World Wars, pp. – passim. . USNA, RG —Internal Affairs of Syria –, microfilm LM /roll , Syrian law on education, Feb. ,  and embassy translation of law no. , Dec. , ; see al-Husri, Taqrir ‘an ahwal al-ma‘arif for discussion of policy and goals. . Weber, Peasants into Frenchmen, pp. –. The same goals had informed Ottoman educational policy, also influenced by French models. See chapter  and Shaw, History of Ottoman Empire, , pp. –. . AHCJ, “L’Ecole et l’éducation nationale,” booklet summarizing discussions of the Deuxième Semaine Sociale de Beyrouth (April –May , ), p. ; MAE-Nantes/, carton , “Mouvements culturels,” Sûreté report on La Ligue de l’enseignement libre, Sept. , . . Conseil Supérieur, Receuil de Statistiques,  (–) pp. , , ; Hudson, Precarious Republic, p. . . For a more detailed discussion, see my forthcoming article, “The Climax and Crisis of the Colonial Welfare State in Syria and Lebanon during the Second World War” in Steven Heydemann, ed., War, Institutions, and Social Change in the Middle East (Berkeley: University of California Press, ). . Himadeh, Fiscal Policy of Lebanon, pp. –, –, ; Syria, Receuil des statistiques . . . (–), pp. –; Sadowski, “Political Power and Economic Organization,” pp. –; Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. –, –; Hudson, Precarious Republic, pp. –, , . . Himadeh, Fiscal Policy of Lebanon, pp. , –, –. . Editorial and “Les organisations . . . protestent contre l’impôt sur le revenu,” L’Orient, Jan. , , pp. –; “Daribat al-dakhl al-jadida,” al-Tariq  (Feb. , ) pp. –; Jazmati, al-Hizb al-shiyu‘i, p. . . Woodsmall, Role of Women in Lebanon, pp. –, –, –, , ; Syria, Receuil des statistiques . . . (–), p. ; Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building,” pp. –; Sharara, “Women and Politics in Lebanon,” pp. –. . See, for example, Chatterjee, Nation and Its Fragments; Malley, Call from Algeria; Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement; Abdel-Malek, Egypt: Military Society; Batatu, Old Social Classes. . See, for example, Stoler and Cooper, “Between Metropole and Colony,” and

16. postcolonial citizens



Cooper, “Dialectics of Decolonization,” in Stoler and Cooper, eds., Tensions of Empire, pp. –, –; Conklin, Mission to Civilize, pp. –; Berque, Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution, pp. –, –; Berque, French North Africa, passim. . For discussions of heterogeneous citizenship in the post- period, see Johnson, Class and Client in Beirut, pp. –; Khalaf, Lebanon’s Predicament, pp. –; Sadowski, “Ba‘thist Ethics.” For recent debates on the values of heterogeneous and group citizenship, against universalist and individualist liberal models, see Shafir, Citizenship Debates, ch. , , , , –. . See, for example, Tilly, “Where Do Rights Come From?”; Boris, “Racialized Gendered State”; Rogin, “Political Repression in the United States”; Shafir and Peled, “Dynamics of Citizenship in Israel.” . See Kandiyoti, “Bargaining with Patriarchy.” . Cohen and Hanagan, “Politics of Gender”; Koven and Michel, “Womanly Duties.” . Seale, Struggle for Syria, pp. –, –, ; Salibi, Modern History of Lebanon, pp. –; Gates, “Formation of Political Economy,” pp. –. . Kandiyoti, “End of Empire,” p. . . Bayhum, Fatat al-sharq, p. . . Joseph, “Elite Strategies for State Building”; Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam, pp. –.

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I. ARCHIVES, INTERVIEWS AND PERIODICALS This list includes all archives, personal interviews, and periodicals published in Syria and Lebanon during the mandate era that were used for this book. These primary sources are cited in full in the notes, employing abbreviations explained at the beginning of the volume. A. Archival Sources France Alliance Israélite universelle, Paris Archives de la Chambre de commerce et de l’industrie, Lyon Archives historiques de la Compagnie de Jésus, Vanves Bibliothèque nationale, newspaper annex, Versailles Centre des Hautes Etudes sur l’Afrique et l’Asie modernes, Paris Maison de l’Orient méditerranéen, library, Lyon Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques, Nantes Ministère des Affaires étrangères, Archives diplomatiques, Paris Ministère de la Défense, Service historique de l’Armée de Terre, Vincennes

Syria Maktabat al-Asad [Asad Library], Damascus Dar al-kutub al-wataniya al-zahiriya [Zahiriya Library], Damascus Markaz al-watha’iq al-tarikhiya [Historical Documents Center], Damascus Institut français d’études arabes de Damas, Damascus

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bibliography United Kingdom

The British Library, India Office Library and Records, London The British Library, Newspaper Library, London Middle East Centre, St. Antony’s College, Oxford Public Record Office, Kew Gardens, London

United States Harvard College Library, Cambridge Library of Congress, Washington, D.C. National Archives of the United States, Suitland National Archives of the United States, Washington, D.C. New York Public Library, main research branch, New York Princeton University Libraries, Firestone Library, Princeton

B. Personal Interviews (Damascus) Abu Riyad Hamdi (October , ) Bushra and Nadida Shaykh al-Ard (October , ) Amal al-Husseini (September , ) Elaine Imadi (October , ) Amal al-Jaza’iri (October , ) Mahat Farah Khoury (October , ) Nabil Mo‘ammer (October , ) Juliette Ouéchek (November , ) Umm Ahmad (October , ) Umm Rima (August , ) Yusuf Wehbeh (October , )

C. Periodicals Periodical title is followed by place of publication, years consulted, and the library where it was found. Arabic-Language Newspapers al-Bashir (Beirut) , ,  BLIO Bayrut (Beirut) , ,  BLIO al-Ikha’ (Hama/Damascus) , – HC al-Kifah (Damascus) – BLNL

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bibliography Lisan al-hal (Beirut) , – HC al-Muqtabas (Damascus) –, –, – MA al-Nahar (Beirut) – BLIO al-Nahda (Beirut) – HC al-Sha‘b (Damascus) , – MA

Arabic-Language Magazines al-Adib (Beirut)  MA al-Ahdath (Damascus)  MA al-Amali (Beirut) – IFEAD al-Amani (Latakia) – MA al-‘Arus (Damascus) –, –, – HC and MA al-Asrar (Beirut)  MA al-Bahth (Homs)  MA al-Bayan (Beirut) – HC al-Dabbur (Beirut) , ,  IFEAD Dawhat al-mimas (Homs)  MA Dimashq (Damascus)  IFEAD al-Duhur (Beirut) – IFEAD al-Fajr (Beirut)  AUB al-Fata (New York)  AUB Fatat lubnan (Beirut)  AUB Fatat al-sharq (Cairo) , –, – HC and IFEAD Hadiqat al-tilmidh (Aleppo)  MA al-Hadiqa wa al-manzil (Cairo)  DKZ al-Hadith (Aleppo) –, , , – HC al-Haris (Beirut) –, ,  HC al-Hayat al-zira‘iya (Lebanon) – MA al-Hikma (Beirut)  DKZ al-Hurriya (Beirut)  HC al-Insaniya (Damascus)  IFEAD al-‘Irfan (Sidon) –, –, , ,  HC Jubitir (Baalbek) – MA al-Kashshaf (Beirut)  DKZ al-Khidr (Beirut) – DKZ al-Lata’if al-‘asriya (Beirut) – DKZ Lisan al-talaba (Damascus)  MA Ma‘arif dimashq (Damascus) – MA Majallat al-i‘lanat al-suriya (Damascus)  MA Majallat al-majma‘ al-‘ilmi al-‘arabi (Damascus)  HC

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Majallat al-mar’a (Damascus)  FL and HC Majallat al-mu‘allimin wa al-mu‘allimat (Damascus) – MA Majallat al-sayyidat wa al-rijal (Cairo) –, – IFEAD Majallat al-tarbiya wa al-ta‘lim (Damascus) – MA al-Mar’a (Hama/Damascus) – MA al-Mar’a al-jadida (Beirut) , – HC al-Masarra (Jounieh) ,  DKZ al-Mashriq (Beirut) , – MA and HC al-Mawrid al-safi (Beirut) – HC Minirva (Beirut)  AUB-Beirut and – HC al-Naqid (Damascus) – HC al-Nashra al-iqtisadiya li al-ghurfa al-tijariya bi dimashq (Damascus) , , ,  MA al-Nashra al-rasmiya li al-ghuruf al-sina‘iya al-suriya (Damascus) – MA al-Nibras (Beirut)  HC Nur al-fayha’ (Damascus)  HC al-Qalam (Damascus)  HC al-Rabi‘ (Damascus)  HC al-Rabita (Beirut) ,  DKZ al-Sada al-iqtisadi (Damascus) – MA Sawt al-mar’a al-hurr (Aleppo)  HC al-Shu‘la (Aleppo)  MA al-Shu‘la (Damascus) – MA Tarikh al-harb al-‘uzma (Beirut) – MWT al-Tariq (Beirut) – DKZ and HC al-Thaqafa (Damascus)  MA al-‘Uyun (Tripoli) – DKZ al-Zahra’ (Cairo)  MA

French-Language Newspapers La Chronique (Damascus) – BN Les Echos (Damascus) –, –, – BN and BLIO (variously entitled Les Echos de Damas and Les Echos de Syrie) Le Matin (Damascus) – BN Le Jour (Beirut) – BN L’Orient (Beirut)  BN Le Réveil (Beirut) –, , ,  BN La Syrie et l’Orient (Beirut)  BN



bibliography French-Language Magazines

Bulletin de l’enseignement (Damascus) – IFEAD Bulletin d’études orientales (Damascus) – Bulletin de l’instruction publique (Beirut) – IFEAD Bulletin de l’Union économique de Syrie (Paris) – IFEAD Bulletin médical annuel (Damascus) – IFEAD Bulletin officiel des actes administratifs du Haut Commissariat (Beirut) , , , – FL L’Ecran (Beirut and Damascus) – AHCJ Rapport à la Société des Nations sur la situation de la Syrie et du Liban (Paris) –. Microfilm, Andronicus Publishing Company Journal officiel de la République libanaise (Beirut) – NYPL La Revue du Liban (Beirut) ,  BN

II. BOOKS, ARTICLES AND DISSERTATIONS These primary and secondary sources are cited only in short form in the notes to the text; they are presented here in a single list to facilitate cross-referencing. The list does not generally include articles published in Syrian and Lebanese periodicals during the mandate era; these are cited in full in notes. Some authors are listed under variant name spellings: see note on transliteration at the beginning of the volume. Abd-Allah, Umar F. The Islamic Struggle in Syria. Berkeley: Mizan Press, . Abdel-Malek, Anouar. Egypt: Military Society. Trans. by Charles Lam Markmann. New York: Vintage Books, . Abouchdid, Eugenie Elie. Thirty Years of Lebanon and Syria (–). Beirut: Sader-Rihani Printing Co., . Agulhon, Maurice. The French Republic –. Oxford: Blackwell, . Agulhon, Maurice and Pierre Bonte. Marianne: Les Visages de la République. Paris: Gallimard, . Ahmed, Leila. Women and Gender in Islam. New Haven: Yale University Press, . Ajay, Nicholas Z. “Mount Lebanon and the Wilayah of Beirut, –: The War Years.” Ph.D. diss., Georgetown University, . Akarli, Engin. The Long Peace: Ottoman Lebanon, –. Berkeley: University of California Press, . al-‘Akkari, Dahir. al-Sihafa al-thawriya fi lubnan –. Beirut: Dar al-Farabi, .

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Aliksan, Jan. Tarikh al-sinima al-suriya –. Damascus: Manshurat Wizarat al-Thaqafa, . Anderson, Benedict. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origin and Spread of Nationalism. Revised ed. New York: Verso, . Antonius, George. The Arab Awakening. Reprint of  ed. New York: Capricorn Books, . Arabi, Afif J. “The History of Lebanese Cinema –: An Analytical Study of the Evolution and Development of Lebanese Cinema.” Ph.D. diss., Ohio State University, . Assaf, J. G. La Compétence des tribunaux du statut personnel au Liban et en Syrie. Beirut: Imprimerie Khalife, . Atiyah, Najla Wadih. “The Attitude of the Lebanese Sunnis Towards the State of Lebanon.” Ph.D. diss., University of London, . Ayalon, Ami. The Press in the Arab Middle East. New York: Oxford University Press, . al-Azmeh, Aziz. Islams and Modernities. New York: Verso, . Badran, Margot. Feminists, Islam and the Nation: Gender and the Making of Modern Egypt. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Baldwin, Peter. “The Welfare State for Historians.” Comparative Studies in Society and History  (October ) pp. –. Baron, Beth. “Unveiling in Early Twentieth-Century Egypt: Practical and Symbolic Considerations.” Middle Eastern Studies  (July ) pp. –. ———. The Women’s Awakening in Egypt. New Haven: Yale University Press, . Batatu, Hanna. The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq. Princeton: Princeton University Press, . Bayhum, Muhammad Jamil. Fatat al-sharq fi hadarat al-gharb. Beirut: Matba‘at Kalfat, . Baykan, Aysegül C. “The Turkish Woman: An Adventure in Feminist Historiography.” Gender and History  (April ) pp. –. Berkes, Niyazi. The Development of Secularism in Turkey. Montreal: McGill University Press, . Berque, Jacques. Egypt: Imperialism and Revolution. Trans. by Jean Stewart. New York: Praeger, . ———. French North Africa: The Maghrib Between Two World Wars. Trans. by Jean Stewart. New York: Praeger, . Beyhum, Nabil and Jean-Claude David. “Les Espaces du public et du négoce à Alep et à Beyrouth.” Les Annales de la recherche urbaine – (December March ) pp. –. Bidwell, R. L. Currency Conversion Tables: A Hundred Years of Change. London: Rex Collings, .

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al-Bindari, Muna, et. al. Mawsu‘at al-aflam al-‘arabiya. Cairo: Bayt al-Ma‘rifa, . Blair, Karen J. The Clubwoman as Feminist: True Womanhood Redefined, –. New York: Holmes & Meier, . Bokova, Lenka. La Confrontation franco-syrienne à l’époque du mandat –. Paris: Editions l’Harmattan, . ———. “La Révolution française dans le discours de l’insurrection syrienne contre le mandat français (–).” RMMM – () pp. –. Boris, Eileen. “The Racialized Gendered State: Constructions of Citizenship in the United States.” Social Politics (Summer ) pp. –. Botman, Selma. Engendering Citizenship in Egypt. New York: Columbia University Press, . Bou-Nacklie, N. E. “Les Troupes Spéciales: Religious and Ethnic Recruitment, –.” IJMES  (November ) pp. –. ———. “Tumult in Syria’s Hama in : The Failure of a Revolt.” Paper presented to the French Colonial Historical Society, Cleveland, May . Boustany, Fouad L. Introduction à l’histoire politique du Liban moderne. Beirut: Editions FMA, . Bowser, Eileen. The Transformation of Cinema –. Berkeley: University of California Press, . Brown, Kathleen M. Good Wives, Nasty Wenches and Anxious Patriarchs: Gender, Race, and Power in Colonial Virginia. Chapel Hill: University of North Carolina Press, . Buheiry, Marwan. “Beirut’s Role in the Political Economy of the French Mandate –.” Papers on Lebanon, no. . Oxford: Centre for Lebanese Studies, n.d. Burke, III, Edmund. “A Comparative View of French Native Policy in Morocco and Syria, –.” Middle Eastern Studies  (May ) pp. –. Bustros, Eveline. Romans et écrits divers. Preface by Takieddine el-Solh. Beirut: Dar an-Nahar, . Calhoun, Craig, ed. Habermas and the Public Sphere . Cambridge: The MIT Press, . Catroux, Général. Dans la Bataille de Méditerranée. Paris: René Julliard, . ———. Deux Missions en Moyen-Orient (–). Paris: Librairie Plon, . Chamas, Georges. Nationalité syrienne. Damascus, . Chamie, Joseph. Religion and Fertility: Arab-Christian-Muslim Differentials. New York: Cambridge University Press, . Charara, Yolla Polity. L’Image de la femme dans la presse féminine au Liban. Publications du Centre de Recherches, no. . Beirut: l’Université Libanaise, . Chatila, Khaled. Le Mariage chez les musulmans en Syrie. Paris: Presses modernes, .

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index


‘Abbasiya theater,  ‘Abd al-Razzaq, ‘Abbud,  ‘Abduh, Muhammad,  Abdulhamid II, Ottoman sultan (–),  Abdullah, Prince,  ‘Abid, Nazik, , , , , ; as leader of women’s movement, –, , ; as magazine publisher, ; military rank, awarded, ; opposed to patriotic motherhood, ; and suffrage campaign, , , , ; and women’s labor,  Abu al-Lam‘, Najla, ,  Abu Rashid, Salima,  Abu Salih, Shaykh Muhammad, – “Adam and Eve,”  Adib Pasha,  ‘Aflaq, Michel,  Agriculture: Cereals (previously Wheat) Office, ; French policy, , , , –; in Ottoman era, ; poor wartime yields, –, ; after World War I, , , , –; in World War II, – ‘Aisha, , – ‘Ajamy, Mary, ; disillusionment of, , ; as leader of women’s movement, –, –, –; as

publisher of The Bride, , –, , , ; and suffrage campaign, , –,  al-‘Ajlani, Munir,  ‘Alawis, , , ; autonomous state of, in Syria, , , , ; community (millet) and beliefs of, –, ; and conversion scandal, ; as impoverished peasants, , ; revolt against the French,  Aleppo, , , , ; anti-French protests and revolts, , , , , ; Islamic populism in, –, , –, –, ; labor movement in, , ; population of, ; urban planning of, , ; World War I’s impact on, , ; proto-fascist movements in, ,  Aleppo,  Alexandretta, , ,  Algeria, , ,  Algiers, , ,  Alif Ba’, , , ,  al-Amali, ,  America and Americans, see United States American Junior College for Women, – American University of Beirut, , ,

 , , ; women’s enrollment at, ,  Amin, Qassim, –,  ‘Ammun, Charles Da’ud,  Anderson, Benedict, n, n Antonius, George, ,  Arab Academy, ,  Arab Girl’s Awakening Society, see Women’s groups Arab League, ,  Arab nationalism, Arabism and PanArabism, see Nationalism Arab Revolt, , , , ,  ‘Araqtinji, Yusuf, ,  ‘Arida, Antoine, ; campaign against public morality, –, ; and November  crisis, , , – al-‘Aris, Mustafa, , – Armenian Girl,  Armenians, , ; and Communist Party, , ; as minority community, , ; and politics, , , ; as World War I refugees and victims, , , –,  Army of the Levant, see Military, French Arslan, Amir Fu’ad,  Arslan, Shakib, ,  Artisans, see Labor Arwad, island of,  Ashmar, Shaykh Muhammad, –, , , ,  L’Asie française,  Asmahan, see Amal al-Atrash Association for the Defense of the Race,  Associations (jam‘iyat) and associationalism, see Social movements Assyrian refugees,  Atlantic Charter, – al-Atrash, Amal, , ,  al-Atrash, Prince Hasan,  al-Atrash, Sultan, , , , 

index Automobiles and motor vehicles, , ,  Avenue des Français (Beirut), ,  al-Ayyam,  al-Ayyubi, ‘Ata, Syrian head of state (),  al-Azhar college (Cairo), ,  ‘Azm family,  ‘Azm Palace,  al-‘Azm, Mme Haqqi Bey,  al-‘Azm, Khalid, Syrian head of state (–), , ,  al-‘Azma, Yusuf, ,  ‘Azraq, ‘Abd al-Wahhab,  ‘Azuri, Nasri Bey,  Bakdash, Khalid, , , , ,  Bakeries and bread, ; poor hygiene of, , , ; rationing and subsidies to poor, , , , , ; riots and hunger marches, , , , , –, – Balfour, Lord, ,  Banque de Syrie et du Liban,  Barada River, ,  Barakat, Subhi,  al-Barazi, Hayat al-Mu‘ayyad, ,  al-Barazi, Husni, Syrian prime minister (–), ,  al-Barudi, Fakhri, , ; as National Bloc leader, , , ; and women’s rights, –, ,  al-Bashir, , –,  Bathhouses, – Ba‘thist revolution in Syria, , ,  Ba‘th Party,  Bayhum, ‘Adila, see al-Jaza’iri, ‘Adila Bayhum Bayhum, Muhammad Jamil, , , ,  Bayhum family, , 

index Bayrut, , , , ; fascist sympathies of, , ; and women’s press images, , , , –,  Beirut, , , , ; city budget of, ; economic role of, , , ; famine’s impact on, ; French presence in, ; labor movement in, –, –, ; population of, , ; proto-fascists in, –; religious movements in, , , –, , –, ; urban planning in, , –; women’s movement in, – Bekaa Valley, , , , ,  Berlin Olympics (),  Beynet, Paul Etienne, delegate general (–),  Bint-Jubayl,  Bkerke,  Bokova, Lenka,  Bonnard, Abel,  The Boudoir, , ,  Bourgeoisie, petty, , ,  Bourgeoisie, urban and landowning, , , , , , ; and colonial welfare state, –, ; emergence of, ; and Islamic populists, , ; and labor movement, , , –; political divisions among, , , , , , –, ; political unity as ruling class, , –, –; prosperity and new lifestyles of, –, –, –, , ; as social base of women’s movement, , –, , ; see also Landowners; Mediating elites; Nationalist movement Bread riots, see Bakeries and bread Briand, Aristide, ,  The Bride, , , ; demise of, , ; and patriotic motherhood, ; on suffrage, , ,  Bshamun, 

 Budgets, state, –, –, , ; and colonial welfare state, –, –, –; cuts during depression, , –, –, ; limited by French policy, , , , , , ; postcolonial, ; in World War II, , , – al-Bukhari, Nasuhi,  al-Bukhari, Rafiqa, , ,  Bureaucracy, French: as agent of civilizing mission, –, ; dual administration, ; under Free French, ; and gender, –; number of French employed, , , ; Ottoman legacy, , , , , ; as pillar of French rule, , –; see also Civil service; High Commission Burj Square (Place des Canons), , ,  Bustros, Eveline, , , ; and November  crisis, , , ,  Cafes, , , , , ; and early cinema, , , ; as immoral spaces, , , , ; as male spaces, –, ,  Cairo, , , , , , ; women’s conferences in, , – de Caix, Robert,  Caliphate,  Capucins, see Missionaries Carbillet, Captain, –,  Catholic Church and Catholics, , , , , , ; and colonial welfare state, , ; Conference of Patriarchs, ; and education, –; and film censorship, –; population of, ; Vatican (Rome), , , , ,  Catholic Youth Circle, see Youth movements Catroux, Georges, delegate general (–), –, ; and  elec-

 tions, –, –, , ; and Cereals Office, –; and colonial welfare state, –, , ; efforts to impose direct rule, –; and November  crisis, ,  Catroux, Mme Georges, , ,  Censuses, see Lebanon; Population Chamber of Commerce and Industry,  Chamoun, Camille, Lebanese president (–), ,  Chanteur, Father Claude, ,  Chaplin, Charlie,  Charities, Islamic, see Islamic populism; Religious endowments Charities, women’s: as agents of French propaganda, , , ; charity balls and fundraisers, , –, , , –, ; as dominant form of women’s activism, , –, , –, ; Drop of Milk (Goutte de Lait), , , , –; Flower of Charity, ; Islamic Orphanage, ; Orthodox Society of Compassion for Ladies, ; Red Cross, –, , , , ; Sisters of Love, ; in World War I, , , ; in World War II, ; see also Women’s movement Chatterjee, Partha, – Chiha, Michel, ,  Christians, , ;  massacres of, , , , ; and Syrian Revolt, ; and famine in World War I, , –; privileges of, under French, , –, ; support for French, , , –, , , ; as targets of missionary activity, , ; see also Armenians; Catholic Church; Greek Orthodox; Maronite Church; Maronites Christian Women’s Club, see Women’s groups Churches: as assembly spaces, , ; as

index sectarian targets, , ; as sponsors of charities, ,  Cinema, cinemas, movie theaters, , –, ; as assembly space, , –, ; development of, –, ; as propaganda, –, , ; state regulation and censorship of, , –, , ; as threat to patriarchal family, –; as volatile spaces, , –; women’s attendance at, , –, , , –, ; women’s images in, –, –, –, – Cinema Empire,  Circassians, ,  Citizenship and citizens: definitions of, –, , ; bargaining to set terms of, –, –, –, –, –, –, –; gendered representations of, –, –, ; gendered terms of, –, –, –, ; heterogeneity of, –; motherhood as basis of women’s, –, –, ; military service as prerequisite, –, , , , ; nationality laws and identity cards, , –, , ; in Ottoman era, –; paternalistic hierarchy of, –, –, –, –, –; postcolonial, , , –; rights (civil, political and social) of, –, , –, –, –, –, –; and state social policy, –, –, –, , –; women’s claims to full rights of, –, –, –, –, –, –; see also Civic order; Constitutions; Welfare state, colonial Civic order: competing models of, , , , ; definition of, , –, ; establishment of colonial —, –; gender as site of conflict in, –,

index –, –, , , , –, –, –; legal boundaries of, , , –, , –; paternalistic pillars of, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –; paternal-republican tensions in, –, –, –, –; polarization of, , , –, ; postcolonial, , –; role of press in, –; as shaped by state social policy, –, –, –; spatial boundaries of, –, ; subaltern groups’ challenge of, –, –, –, –, –; transformation of, in World War II, –, –; see also Citizenship; Democracy; Paternalism; Paternal republicanism; Public space; Republicanism; Welfare state, colonial Civilizing mission, French, see Colonialism, French Civil service and civil servants, local: employment in, , , , , , ; and Islamic populists, , –; and new middle class, , ; strikes by, , , ; unequal job access in, –, , ; wages of, , , , , ; women in, –, , ; see also Bureaucracy, French Class, social: as basis of new social movements, , , , ; as basis of political divisions, , –, , , –, , –; and colonial welfare state, –; consciousness of, –, , ; and gender attitudes, –, , –; and impact of World War I, –, ; structural transformation of, , , , ; and urban boundaries, , , –; see also Bourgeoisie; Labor movement; Mediating elites; Peasants; Workers Clothing: European fashions in, , ,

 , –; politicization of, –, , , ; shortage of, ; state regulations on, , ; see also Veiling and seclusion, women’s Coffeehouses— see Cafes Colonialism, French: civilizing mission, , –, , , , , ; colonial lobby, , ; concessionary companies, –, , , , , , , , ; French ambivalence about, , , , ; methods of rule, ; strategic goals of, , , –, –; see also France; High Commission; Lyon; Mandate for Syria and Lebanon; Paternalism; State(s), mandatory Colonial welfare state, see Welfare state, colonial Committee for the Defense of Lebanese Working Women, see Women’s groups Committee for Indigenous Schools, see Islamic populist groups Common Interests administration, see State(s), mandatory Communications, ; expansion of, , ; fostering broader associationalism, ; radio and Radio-Levant, , , , , , , ; telephones and telegraph, , , , , ; see also Press; Transportation Communist Party: and – mass protests, –; arabization of, ; arrests of leaders, ; democratic agenda of, , –, , , , ; in elections, , –; emergence of, , ; and fascism, , , , –; and French Communists, ; and Islamic populists, , , –, ; and labor movement, , ; Lebanese People’s Party, –; mobilization in World War

 II, , ; nationalism of, ; and nationalist elites, –, ; publications of, –, , ; rallies, , , , , ; recruitment and membership of, , ; split into Lebanese and Syrian parties, ; and welfare state, , ; and women’s rights, , –, –; women’s wing of, , –, , ; see also Bakdash, Khalid; Labor movement; Workers; Workers, women Concessionary companies, see Colonialism, French Conferences, women’s, , –, ; Arab Women’s Conference (Cairo ), –, ; Eastern Women’s conference (Damascus ), , –, ; Eastern Women’s conference (Tehran ), , , ; Eastern Women’s Conference for the Defense of Palestine (), , ; honoring European feminists (Damascus ), , ; International Alliance of Women, (Istanbul ), ; Women’s Union in Syria and Lebanon (Beirut),  (); , – (); , ,  () Congress of Catholic Youth, see Youth movements Congress of Syrian Farmers,  Constitutional Bloc, , –, ; electoral victories of, , ; and women’s movement, , –, –, –; see also al-Khuri, Bishara Constitutions and constitutional government: adoption of, –; demands to reform, –; French influence on, ; gender and, –, ; and independence, ; Ottoman precedents, ; reinstatement of, , , ; sectarianism and, –, ; suspensions

index of, , , , –, ; see also country listings Cooper, Gary, ,  Couland, Jacques, ,  Crisis of paternity, see Paternity, crisis of Crystal Cinema,  Curie, Marie,  Dabbas, Charles, Lebanese president (–), ,  al-Dabbur, , , , , – Daghestani, Kazem,  Damascus: anti-French protests in, , –, –, –, ; capital of Syria, ; Communist and labor movements in, , –, , –, , ; French occupation of, –; impact of famine on, ; Islamic populists in, –, , , –, –; population of, ; proto-fascists in, –; in Syrian Revolt, ; urban planning of, –, –; women’s movement in, –, –, –,  Damascus Union of Labor Syndicates,  Dammus, Shibl,  “Danton,”  al-Daqr, ‘Ali,  al-Daqr, Muhammad,  Darien, Archbishop Joseph,  Darwaza, ‘Izzat,  Darwishiya quarter (Damascus),  Dawhat al-adab, see Women’s groups, Tree of Culture The Dawn, ,  Dayr al-Zur,  DeMille, Cecil B.,  Democracy and democratic republicanism, , , ; Communist and labor appeals for, , , , , , , ; and constitutions, , ; defini-

index tion of, , n; French promises of, ; as opposed to paternal republicanism, , , n, , –; postcolonial hindrance of, –, , ; women’s appeals for, , , , ,  Demonstrations, boycotts and general strikes: against constitutional suspensions, , ; against French concessionary companies, , , ; Lebanese uprisings of –, –, , ; for national army and French evacuation, ; in November  crisis, –; against personal status law reform, –, , , ; preceding  elections, –; Syrian general strike (), , , , , ; in Syria’s May  crisis, –; against tobacco monopoly, ; see also Bakeries and bread; Demonstrations, women’s; Islamic populism; Labor movement, strikes Demonstrations, women’s, , , ; for French evacuation, ; for nationalist causes, , , , , , –; hunger marches in wartime, , , –; in November  crisis, –; during Syrian Revolt, , ; against veiling, , ,  Dentz, Henri, high commissioner (–), –,  Deringil, Selim,  D.H.P railway (Damas-Hama et Prolongements), , – Dimashq, , , – Dimashqiya, Julia, ; as leader of women’s movement, –; as publisher of The New Woman, , –, , , , –; and suffrage campaign, –, 

 Drop of Milk (Goutte de Lait) society, see Charities, women’s Druze, , , , ; community (millet) and beliefs of, –, , ; French relations with, , –, , , ; and Lebanese civil war, , ; and May  crisis, –; and November  crisis, ; in Syrian Revolt, , , , ; tribal autonomy of, in Syria, –, , ; women, , , ; see also Jabal Druze The East,  East-West dichotomy: ideological constructions of, ; in cinema, ; in Islamic reformism, –, , –; in suffrage debate, , ; in veiling debate, , –, , , – ,  Les Echos, , , , , , ,  Economic Union of Syria,  Economy and economic conditions: crisis in World War II, –, , –; depreciation of franc, , , , , ; dislocation after World War I, , ; European imperialism, effect of, , , , , –, ; expansion before World War I, ; French policy on, , , –, , , –; industrialization, , –, , , , , –, , ; promotion of national economy and industry, –, , , , , ; wartime inflation, –, , –, , , ; world depression, , , –; see also Agriculture; Budgets, state; Labor; Taxes; Welfare state, colonial L’Ecran, ,  Eddé, Antoine,  Eddé, Emile, Lebanese prime minister (–) and president (–),

 , , , ; appointed head of state (), ; elected president (), , , ; and Maronite Church, ; and November  crisis, , , ; and school closures, ; and women’s movement, , , ,  Edib, Halide, ,  Education: budgets, –, , –; constitutional guarantees for, , , ; enrollments, –, –, –, , –; establishment of state system, –, ; under Faysal, ; and French civilizing mission, –, –, –, –; French curriculum and control, , , –, , , –; French subsidies to Christian schools, , , , –, –; League of Nations’ guarantees for, ; in Ottoman era, –, –; postcolonial reforms of, –; as precondition of democracy, ; private and religious schools, –, –, , ; shortage and overcrowding, , ; state policy on, , –, –; unequal access to, , –, ; workers’ technical, –, , ; see also Education, Islamic and women’s; Missionaries; Welfare state, colonial Education, Islamic: Islamic College of Beirut, ; Islamic populists’ schools, –; Maqasid foundation, , , , ; Qur’anic schools, ,  Education, women’s: attitudes toward, , –, , , , ; and citizenship rights, , ; constitutional guarantee of, ; enrollments, –, , ; and Islamic populists, , –; medical training, ; in Ottoman and Faysal eras, –, –; shortage of schools, –, ,

index , ; teachers’ colleges, , ; women’s private and nationalist schools, – Egypt, , , , ; films from, , , , ; unveiling in, , –; women’s magazines from, , , ; women’s movement in, , , , , ,  Elections and electoral system:  election campaign, –, –, –, ; clientelism in, –; French rigging of, , , , ; laws concerning, , –, , , –, ; in Lebanon ,  ();  (); – (); postponed, , ; in Syria, –, , , ,  (); , – (); ,  (); – (); two-stage process, , ; see also Suffrage Electricity, , ,  Eliot, George,  Empire cinema,  Encouragement of Lebanese Industry Society, see Women’s groups L’Equipe, see Youth movements The Euphrates,  al-Fadl, Fadl Bey,  The False Warrior,  Family and households: disruption of, in World War I, , –, –, –; economic strategies of, –, –, –; female roles in, , , –, , , , , , –, –; honor of, , , , , , , , ; lifestyle changes among elites, –, –; male authority in, , , –, , , , , , ; male breadwinner of, , –, ; patriarchal bargain, , n; as political metaphor, –, , –, , , ; pro-natalism, , ;

index structure and size, , –, , ; as target of public policy, , –, –, , –, ; see also Health, public; Marriage; Motherhood; Paternalism Famine: fears of, in World War II, , –; memories of, –; and Syrian Revolt, ; as a weapon of war, –; during World War I (safar barlik), , – Fascism, –, ; see also Mussolini; Nazis and Nazism; Youth movements al-Fatat,  Faysal Club,  Faysal ibn al-Husayn, Prince (later King) (–): and Arab Revolt, , ; populist opposition to, , , ; and women’s movement, , –, ; see also Syria First World War, see World War I “The Fortieth Door,”  Fragments of Memory,  France: Free French government, –, –, ; foreign ministry, , , –, , , , , –, ; imposition of rule, , , ; parliament, , , , ; Popular Front, , , , ; Third Republic, , ; Vichy government, , –, , ; withdrawal, ; see also Colonialism, French; High Commission; Mandate for Syria and Lebanon; Military, French; State(s), mandatory Free French, see France French Officers’ Club (Damascus), ,  French Revolution, , , ; invoked in political debate, , , , , , , ,  Furayha, Anis,  Furn al-Shubbak,  The Future, 

 Gamelin, General,  de Gaulle, Charles, –, , , ,  De Gaulle Park, – Gelvin, James, n Gender: definition and method of analysis of, –; anxiety about identity and roles of, , , –, –, –, –, –, –, , –; and civil rights, –, , –, , –, ; hierarchy of as pillar of paternalism, , –, –, –; and political rights, –, –, –, ; pacts or bargains based on, , , –, –, , –, –; and public space, –, –, ; as site of conflict and compromise in civic order, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –; and social rights, –, –, –, –, , –, ; in Syrian Revolt, –; see also Citizenship; Civic order; Family and households; Motherhood; Patriotic Motherhood; Women’s movement; Workers; Workers, women General Security police (Sûreté générale), , , –, , ,  Germany and Germans, , , , ; influence on youth movements, , ; and Ottoman alliance, , ; in World War II, , , , ; see also Nazis and Nazism Ghalayini, Shaykh Mustafa, –,  al-Gharra, see Islamic populist groups al-Ghuta (orchards around Damascus), , –, , ,  Gilsenan, Michael,  Girl of Lebanon,  Girl of the East, 

 Gouraud, Henri, high commissioner (–), , , ; and civilizing mission, , ; as founding father, , –, , ; methods of rule, ; opposition to labor unions, ; organization of High Commission, –; and religious interests, , , ,  Grand Serail, see Serail Great Britain: in World War I, , ; in World War II, , ,  Great War, see World War I Greek Orthodox, , , , , ; community (millet) and beliefs, , ; and opposition to French mandate, , ,  Habermas, Jürgen,  Hachette, Jeanne,  Haddad, Habuba, ,  al-Haffar, Lutfi, , ,  al-Hafiz, Thuraya, , , , ,  Hama, , , , , ; campaign against female moviegoers in, –; Communists and labor movement in, , ; and Islamic populism, , , ; opposition to women’s movement in, , , ; women’s movement in, , , , , ; youth movements in, ,  Hamada, Nur, , , ; and patriotic motherhood, ; and personal status law reform, ,  Hamidiya market (Damascus), , ,  Hananu, Ibrahim, , ; as National Bloc leader, , ,  Hanna, Abdullah,  al-Haris, ,  al-Hasani, Shaykh Badr al-Din,  al-Hasani, Shaykh Muhammad Taj alDin, Syrian prime minister (–, –) and president (–), ,

index , , ; and  general strike, ; and colonial welfare state, , –, ; and constituent assembly, , ; and women’s movement, , –, ,  Hashemite dynasty, , ; see also Faysal ibn al-Husayn; Husayn, Sharif Hawran, , , ,  Hawrani, Akram, ,  Hayward, Susan,  Health, public: abortion and birth control, , ; budgets, , –; criticism of/demands for, –, , –, ; epidemics, , –, ; expansion of, , , , –, , ; in Faysal’s government, ; infant mortality, , , , , , ; League of Nations’ guarantees for, ; maternity care, –, ; missionaries’ role in, –, , , ; in Ottoman era, –; paternalism of, , ; Pharmaceutical Office, ; prison hygiene, ; regulation of prostitution, –, ; women as clients of, –, ; workplace safety, , , , ; see also Charities, women’s; Missionaries; Welfare state, colonial Helleu, Jean, delegate general (), –,  al-Hidaya, see Islamic populist groups High Commission (later Delegation General), , , ; establishment at Beirut, , –; constitutional powers of, , ; and film censorship, –, , –; labor policy of, –, –; methods of rule, –, , –, ; renamed Delegation General, ; social policy of, –, –, –, –, –; Social Section, , ; see also individual high commissioners

index Hijaz railway station, ,  al-Hilu, Farajallah,  “His Girl Friday,” – Hitler, Adolf, , , ,  Hitler Youth,  Homs, , ; and Islamic populism, , , , , , ; proto-fascists in, ; women’s movement in, ,  Hotel Royal,  Hotels, , ; as assembly spaces, , , , ; see also Kawkab, Orient Palace, Royal, Victoria hotels Hourani, Albert, ; quoted, ,  Households, see Family and households Hunger marches, see Bakeries and bread Hunt, Lynn,  Husayn, Sharif, of Mecca, , ,  al-Husri, Sati‘,  Ibrahim, Imilie Faris, , ; as writer for al-Tariq, ,  Ibrahim, Warda Butrus,  Independence: achievement of, , , –, , ; false promises of, , ; mass protests for, , –, , –, –; treaty negotiations, , –, , , ,  India, , , – Industrialization, see Economy and economic conditions Inflation, see Economy and economic conditions “The Innocent Victim,” , ,  “Insubordinate Woman,”  International Labor Organization, ,  Iraq, , , , ; economic links with, severed, ,  Iron Shirts, see Youth movements Islamic College of Beirut, see Education, Islamic

 Islamic law (shari‘a): development and reform of, , , , ; Mecelle code, ; women as scholars of, , , –; and women’s citizenship, –, –, –; and women’s veiling, –, –, –, ; see also Law and judiciary; Personal status law; Islamic populism; Salafiya movement; Ulama Islamic populism: attitudes toward the state, –, , , –, –; charities of, , , , ; and Communist Party, , –, ; and education, –, –, , , ; emergence of, –; and labor movement, –; and May  crisis, –; nationalism of, –; and nationalist elites, –, –, , , –, –; paternalism of, –; and personal status law reform, , –, ; and petty bourgeoisie, , ; and proto-fascists, , ; and public morality, , , , , , –; and Salafiya movement, –, –, ; and strikes in World War II, ; and Sufism, , ; and ulama, , , –, ; unification of groups, , ; and violence against women, , , ; and women moviegoers, –, , ; and women’s suffrage, , ; women’s sympathy for, ; and women’s veiling and seclusion, –, –, , , –; see also Islamic populist groups; Salafiya movement Islamic populist groups: Committee for Indigenous Schools, ; al-Gharra, , , , , , , , –, ; al-Hidaya, , ; League of Modesty, ; Muslim Youth, , ; Party of God, ; Society for Piety

 and Morals, ; Society of Ulama, , , , ; Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, , , ; al-Tamaddun, , , , , , ; Youth of Muhammad, , , , , ,  Istanbul, , , , ,  al-Istiqbal,  al-Istiqlal,  Italy, , , ,  Jabal (Mount) Druze, , , ; in Syrian Revolt, ,  al-Jabiri, Sa‘dallah, Syrian prime minister (–, –), , , ; and May  crisis, –; and women’s rights, –, – al-Jabiri, Shafiqa,  Jack the Ripper,  Janak Kala’a cinema,  Janbalat (Jumblatt), Amira Nazira,  al-Jaza’iri, ‘Adila Bayhum, , , , ; and  Arab Women’s Conference, ; as leader of women’s movement, –, , , , ; and patriotic motherhood, ,  al-Jaza’iri, ‘Aziza,  Jazira,  Jemal Pasha, ; as commander of Ottoman Fourth Army, – passim, , , , ; and women’s war mobilization, ,  Jerusalem, ,  Jesuits, see Missionaries Jews and Jewish community, , , , ; and Communist Party, –; girls’ employment among, ; population of, ; as target of Islamic populist protests,  al-Jisr, Muhammad,  Joan of Arc, ,  Joseph, Suad, 

index Le Jour,  Journal of Men and Women Teachers,  Journal of Pedagogy and Education,  de Jouvenel, Henry, high commissioner (–), , ; and Lebanese constitution, – Jubayl,  Judiciary, see Law and judiciary Jumayyil, Pierre (Gemayel), ; as leader of Phalanges, –; and November  crisis, –; see also Youth movements, Phalanges libanaises al-Jundi, Ahmad,  al-Jurjis, Da‘as,  Kandiyoti, Deniz, , n,  Karam, Jamal, ,  al-Karami, ‘Abd al-Hamid, Lebanese prime minister (), , , ,  Kassab, Mary, – al-Kata’ib, see Youth movements, Phalanges libanaises Kawkab hotel (Beirut),  al-Kaylani, Shaykh ‘Abd al-Qadir, –,  al-Kayyali, ‘Abd al-Rahman, , , ,  Kemal, Mustafa (Ataturk), , , ; and women’s rights, , , ,  Khadija, ,  Khalid, Shaykh Muhammad Tawfiq,  Khalid Ibn Walid mosque (Homs),  Khan Maysalun, battle of, , , , ,  al-Khatarat,  al-Khatib, Ibrahim, ,  Khawla bint al-Azwar,  Khayyatah, Rugina,  al-Khazin, Shaykh Yusuf, ,  Khoury, Philip S., , , 

index al-Khuri, Bishara, Lebanese president (–), , , , , ; arrested in coup, ; elected president, –; and labor movement, –; and National Pact, ; and women’s movement, , –, – al-Khuri, Fa’iz,  al-Khuri, Faris, Syrian prime minister (–), , , ; and labor movement, , ; and May  crisis, , ; and women’s movement, , ,  al-Khuri, Fu’ad,  al-Khuri, Laure, ; and November  crisis, , ; and women’s movement, –,  al-Khuri, Suhail,  King-Crane Commission, ,  “King of Kings,”  Kurd ‘Ali, Muhammad, , ,  Kurds, ; and May  crisis, , ,  Labor: decline of artisanal sector, –, , , , ; laws, , , , , –, –, –; market, shifts in, –, –; state as employer, –, ; state policy, –, –, –, –, –; statistics, , , , , ; workplace safety, , , ; see also Communist Party; Economy and economic conditions; Labor movement; Workers; Workers, women Labor movement: anti-sectarianism of, , ; campaign for labor codes, –, –; and education, , ; labor federations, –, , ; mutual-aid societies, ; and nationalist elites, –, –, –; and November  crisis, ; Ottoman

 precedents, ; recruitment and membership, –, , ; strikes and demonstrations, , –, –, , –, –; unionization, , , –, ; and women, –, –; see also Communist Party; Workers; Workers, women Ladies’ and Men’s Review,  Ladies’ Society, see Women’s groups Landowners or landlords, , , ; enriched under French, , , –, ; favored in elections, , ; in Syrian Revolt,  Latakia, , , , ,  Latuf, Alfira,  Law and judiciary: courts, , , ; dual legal system, –, , –, –; female lawyers, , ; male privileges in, ; mandate charter’s provisions for, , , , , ; Ottoman precedents, , , , , –; reform of, , , , –; see also Islamic law; Personal status law Lawrence, T.E.,  Lazarists, see Missionaries Lazreg, Marnia,  League of Modesty, see Islamic populist groups League of National Action, see Youth movements League of Nations (and Permanent Mandates Commission), , ; as overseer of mandate, , , , , , ; petitions to, , , , , , , –, ; see also Mandate for Syria and Lebanon Lebanese Bar Association,  Lebanese People’s Party, see Communist Party Lebanese (Arab) Women’s Union, see Women’s groups

 Lebanese Women’s Association, see Women’s groups Lebanon, state of: censuses and population distribution, , , , n; civil war, , , ; constitution, –, , , , ; constitution/parliament suspended, , , –, ; constitution/parliament reinstated, , , , ; economic policy, –; elections, , , ; flag, , , ; Greater Lebanon created, , , ; National Pact, , , , , , , , ; November  crisis, , –; parliament, , , –, , , , , , ; postcolonial liberal paternalism, –; Representative Council, , –, –; Republic of Lebanon proclaimed, ; Service for the Protection of Manpower, ; Social Affairs Service, ; see also State(s), mandatory Liberation of Woman, The,  Light of Damascus,  Light of Damascus society, see Women’s groups Linder, Max,  Lisan al-hal, ,  Lisan al-talaba, ; quoted  Literacy, –,  Literary salons,  London,  Longrigg, Stephen,  Lumière brothers,  Lyon: Chamber of Commerce, , –; Colonial Museum, ; Silk Merchants Syndicate, ; University of, ; see also Colonialism, French “Mme Husson’s Rosebush,”  Magazines, women’s, see Women’s magazines

index Mahmud II, Sultan,  Maktab ‘Anbar school,  Mandate for Syria and Lebanon: charter awarded, , , ; conditions of, , , –, , , –, , ; definition of, ; historiography of period, –, –; loss of, , , , –, , ; violations of, alleged, , –, , –, , , , , –; see also France; League of Nations Manjak mosque, – Manset, Regis,  Maqasid foundation, see Education, Islamic Mardam Bey, Jamil, Syrian prime minister (–), , , , ; alliance with Islamic populists, , , , ; fall of government, ,  Marianne,  Marie Antoinette,  Marja Square (Damascus), , , , ; cinemas in, , , , ; in May  crisis, –, ; in Ottoman era, – Markets and shops (souks): as public space, –, , , ; strikes and closures of, , , , –, –; see also Hamidiya market; Shopping Maronite Church, , , , ; patriarch of, , , , , , ; as pillar of French rule, , , ; and public morality, , –, , ; role in Lebanese politics, , –, , , , , ; see also ‘Arida, Antoine; Catholic Church; Christians Maronites, , , ; community and beliefs of, ; in government and politics, , , , , , –, ,  Marriage: age of, , , , , ;

index civil ceremony proposed, –; demands for reforms in laws on, , , , , , ; encouragement of, , –; gender roles in, , , , –, ; as obstacle to female employment, , , , , , ; see also Motherhood; Personal status law Marseille,  Marshall, T. H.,  de Martel, Comte Damien, high commissioner (–), , , ; and Islamic populists, –; and labor movement, , ; social bargaining of, –, ; and women, –, – Martial law, , , , , ,  Martini, Nabih,  Martinprey, Reverend de,  Martyrs’ squares,  Maugain, M., – Maydan quarter (Damascus), , , , – Maysalun, see Khan Maysalun Mecca, ,  Mediating elites: challenges to power of, , –, –, –, ; clientelism and privileges of, , –, –, , –, , ; and colonial welfare state, –, ; as pillars of colonial paternalism, –, , , –; women as, , –, , ; see also Bourgeoisie; Landowners; Paternalism; Religious patriarchs; Tribal chiefs Mein Kampf,  Mernissi, Fatima,  Middle East Supply Center (MESC), , , , ,  Midhat Pasha, ,  Military, French, , , ; Army of the Levant, , , ; and civilian repres-

 sion, –, –, , –, , ; number of troops deployed, , ; as pillar of colonial rule, , –, –, –; withdrawal of, , ; see also General Security police; Special Troops Millets, see Religious communities The Mimas Tree,  Mina, Hanna,  Minirva,  Minneapolis,  Missionaries: Capucins, ; educational role of, –, –, , ; Jesuits (Society of Jesus), , , , –, , , ; Lazarists, , ; in Ottoman era, –; as mediating elites, –, , , ; as public health agents, –, , ; Sisters of Charity, ; Sisters of the Sacred Heart, ; Sisters of St. Joseph, ; as target of Islamic populist protests, –,  Moreau, Abel,  Morocco and Moroccans, , ,  Mosques: as assembly space, –, –, , –; as male space, –, ; right to free speech in, ; see also Khalid ibn Walid, Manjak, Sultan Selim, Tankiz, and Umayyad mosques Motherhood: as basis of citizenship, –, –, , ; male control and criticism of, –, , , , –, –; as political metaphor for French rule, , –, , ; as target of public policy, , –, , , –; see also Family; Marriage; Patriotic motherhood Mount Lebanon, , , , , ;  massacres in, , ; Administrative Council of, ; as autonomous Ottoman district (mutasarrifiya), ;

 famine in, –, ; and silk industry, – Movie theaters, see Cinemas Mubarak, Archbishop Ignatius, , ,  Mufti of Beirut, , , , ; as Muslim leader of Lebanon, , , ; relations with French, , , ; and veiling issue, – Muhammad, Prophet of Islam, , , , , ; birthday celebrations of, –,  al-Munqari, Nadima, – Munthir, Ibrahim,  al-Muqtabas, , ,  Murad, Shaykh Sa‘id, ,  Murshid, Sulayman, ,  Musa, Da’ud,  “Musketeers in the Convent,” ,  Muslim Brotherhood (Egyptian), , – Muslim Brotherhood, Syrian, see Islamic populist groups Muslim Council, see Ulama Muslim Girls’ Club, see Women’s groups Muslim Sporting and Literary Society (Tripoli),  Muslim Youth, see Islamic populist groups Mussolini, Benito (Il Duce), , , ,  Nabarawi, Saiza,  Nadra,  al-Nahar, ,  Nahr el-Deb,  Najjada, see Youth movements “Napoleon,”  al-Naqid,  Naqqash, Alfred (Naccache), Lebanese president (–), , , – Naqqash, Mme Alfred, 

index al-Na‘sin, Shaykh Said,  Nasuli, Muhi al-Din, , ,  National Bloc (Lebanon),  National Bloc (Syria), , , ; and  general strike, , ; and  mobilization, , ; economic congress of (), , –; elected to head government,  (); – (); formation of, –; and Islamic populists, , , , –, –, –; and labor movement, , –; and May  crisis, –; paternalist policies of, –, , , –; and sectarianism, , , ; and strikes in World War II, ; and women’s movement, , , , , , –, –, –, –; and youth movements, – National Cement Company,  National identity and unity: absence at creation of states, , , , ; bureaucracy’s role in shaping, ; divided by religious affinities, –, , –, , ; and independence, –, , ; in the press, –; promotion of by French, , ; role of education in forming, , , – National Guards, see Youth movements Nationalist movement, elite: Arab nationalism, Arabism and Pan-Arabism, , , , –, , , –, , ; cleavage with Islamic populists, , –; and colonial welfare state, –, , , , , ; emergence of in World War I, , –; inherit rule of mandatory states, –; and labor movement, –, –; Lebanese nationalism, , ; pan-Syrianism, , , ; and religious patriarchs, , –,

index , , ; and Syrian Revolt, , –; and veiling, , , ; women viewed as threat to nation, , , , ; and women’s movement, – passim, , –, –, ; see also Demonstrations; Constitutional Bloc; National Bloc; Youth movements National Pact, see Lebanon Nazis, Nazism, , , , , , ; see also Fascism; Hitler; Youth movements Near East Foundation,  The New Life,  Newspapers, see Press New Syria,  The New Woman, , , , , ; and suffrage campaign, – al-Nidal,  North Africa, , , ,  Northern Syria,  La Nuit syrienne,  L’Orient,  Orientalism and Orientalists, ; see also East-West dichotomy Orient Palace Hotel, , , ,  Orosdi-Beck department store (Beirut),  Ostrorog, Count,  Ottoman Empire and Ottomans, , , , ; in World War I, –, ; Tanzimat reforms in, , , , –, ; social policy in, –, , –, , ; see also Law and judiciary; Mahmud II, Sultan; Young Turks Palestine, , , , , , , ; economic ties with, , ; support for Arab resistance in, , , , ,  Palmyra, 

 Paramilitary groups, see Youth movements Party for the Defense of Unions and the Press in Syria,  Party of God, see Islamic populist groups Paternalism: definition of, –; fatherhood as leadership model, –, , , , –, –; French bolstering of, , –, –, –, ; honor in politics, , , –, –, ; Nazira Zayn al-Din’s attack on, –; Ottoman precedents, ; pacts with and privileges of mediating elites, –, –, –, ,; –, –; pillars of, , –, ; in the press, –, –; in social policy, , –, –, –, –; subaltern revolt against, –, –, –, –; see also Paternal Republicanism; Paternity, crisis of Paternal republicanism, , –, –; as opposed to democratic republicanism, n; tensions between paternalism and republicanism, , –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –, –; see also Democracy; Paternalism; Republicanism Paternity, crisis of: definition and general causes of, –, –, –, ; climax in World War II, –, –; emergence in World War I, –, , ; and public violence, , , , ; and rise of subaltern movements, –, –, –; and Syrian revolt, –, –, –; unresolved, , , –; and women’s suffrage, , – Patriotic motherhood: criticism of, , , ; maternalist ideology of, , , –; roots in World War I and

 famine, , ; as women’s movement’s strategy, –, –, , , ; see also Motherhood Patriotic Youth, see Youth movements Peasants: economic hardships of, , , –; under landlords’ control, , , , –, , –; marginalized in civic order, , , , , ; migration to cities, , , , , , ,  Permanent Mandates Commission, see League of Nations Personal status law: and citizenship, , ; demands to reform, , –, –, , ; development of, ; on divorce, , ; Family Law of , , –; and inheritance rights, , ; on marriage, , , –, , ; perpetuation of, under French, , , ; in postcolonial era, , , –; property rights in, , ; in Tunisia and South Yemen, ,  Pétain, Marshal, , ,  Phalanges libanaises, see Youth movements Phares, Georges,  Photography of women, , , n, , , , ,  Picot, François Georges-, ,  Piépape, Colonel de,  Place des Canons, see Burj Square Ponsot, Henri, high commissioner (–), , , ; and religious schools, –; and Syrian constitution, –,  Pope Pius XI,  Popular Front, see France Popular List,  Population: birth rates, ; distribution by religious sect, –, ; loss during World War I, –; rebound after

index World War I, –; see also Health, public; individual country, city and sect listings Port of Beirut, , , ,  Press, , ; censorship of, , , ; expansion of, ; gendering of, –; paternalism of, –, –; as political forum, –; and print community, –; and veiling issue, – passim, ; and women, , –, –, , , , , , ; see also Communications; Public space and the public; Women’s magazines Prisons and prisoners, see Health, public Prostitution, see Health, public and Public morality Proto-fascist groups, see Youth movements Puaux, Gabriel, high commissioner (–): and personal status law reform, –; and World War II, – Public health, see Health, public Public morality: campaigns against prostitution, –, , , , ; and cinema, , , –, , ; rivalry for authority over, , , , , , –; state regulations on, , ; see also Public space and the public; Religious patriarchs Public space and the public: definition of, –; class boundaries of, –, , ; gender boundaries of, , , – passim, –, –, –, –; as political arena, , –, –, ; regulation of, , , –; remasculinization of, –, –, –; and sectarian relations, –; women’s increased presence in, , –, –, , –, ; women’s voice in, –,

index , , –, , ; violence in, –; see also Civic order; Press; Public morality Public works, , , , , ; employment in, , –, , ; see also Transportation al-Qabas,  Qabbani, ‘Iffat,  Qaddura, Ibtihaj: as leader of women’s movement, , –, ; and November  crisis, , ,  Qadmani, Ahmad,  al-Qassab, Kamil, , ,  al-Qassar, Kamil,  Qaz‘un, Husayn Bey,  Quai d’Orsay, see France, foreign ministry al-Qudsi, Lutfiya bint Mahmud,  Qur’an, The, , , , , , , ,  Qur’anic schools, see Education, Islamic Qurtas, Wadad, , n,  quoted al-Quwwatli, Shukri, Syrian president (–), , , , , , ; alliance with Islamic populists, –, –; elected president, –; and May  crisis, –; and women’s rights, –, – Radio, see Communications Rafeq, Abdul-Karim, n Rape: as metaphor for colonial rule, , , , , ; press accounts of, ; rumors of, in Syrian Revolt,  Rashaya,  Ras Metn,  Red Cross, see Charities, women’s Red Star society, see Women’s groups Religious communities (millets): French policy toward, –; protected by mandate charter, –, ; in

 Ottoman era, , –, ; reorganization of, in mandate era, –, –; see also Armenians, ‘Alawis, Catholics, Christians, Druze, Greek Orthodox, Maronite Church, Shi‘is and Shi‘ism, Sunnis, Ulama Religious conversion, , – Religious endowments (waqf/awqaf), , , , , , ; protests against French control of, , ,  Religious law, see Islamic law; Personal status law Religious patriarchs: challenges to power of, –, –, –; and film censorship, –, –; and November  crisis, , , –; and personal status law reform, –; political alliances and power of, , , , –; relationship to state, –, ; and support of French mandate, , , , ; and women’s movement, –, , –; see also Maronite Church; Catholic Church; Ulama Rémy, Father, ,  Republicanism: of constitutions, –; as direct colonial rule, –; and ideal of fraternity, , , , , , –, , , , , , , ; Marianne, as symbol of, –; religious opposition to, , , , –; Rights of Man, , , ; see also Citizenship; Constitutions; French Revolution; Paternal republicanism; Welfare state, colonial Le Réveil, ,  Rex theater,  Rida, Rashid, , , , ,  Rishani, Adalayd,  Roberts, Mary Louise,  Rome, , ,  “The Ruins of Baalbek,” 

 Russell, Rosalind,  Russia, see Soviet Union Ryan, Mary,  Sa‘ada, Antun, , , ,  al-Sa‘b, Afifa Fandi, ,  Sa‘b, Najla, , – al-Sabuni, Shaykh Ahmad, ,  al-Sa‘d, Habib Pasha, Lebanese president (–),  Sadiq, Muhammad Sa‘id,  Safar barlik, see Famine St. Joseph University, , , ; French Faculty of Medicine at, , , ,  Sakakini, Widad, , – Saladin,  Salafiya movement: decline in mandate era, –, ; ideology of Islamic reform, , ; and Islamic populism, –, –; Ottoman-era roots in, –; and women’s reforms, , , –, –, ,  Salam, ‘Anbara, , , –, , ,  Salihiya quarter (Damascus), , , , , , ,  San Remo conference, ,  Sarloute, Father,  Sarrail, Maurice, high commissioner (–), , , ; anti-sectarianism of, , , ; methods of rule, –, ; and Syrian Revolt, , ,  Sawt al-Sha‘b, , ,  Sayigh, Salma, , ,  Schilcher, Linda, ,  Schools: fostering social movements, , , –, , ; see also Education Scott, Joan,  Scouts and scouting movement, , , , , ,  Second World War, see World War II

index Sectarianism and sectarian relations, –; and French policy, –, –, , , –, ; in Lebanese education, –, –, , –; in Lebanese politics, –, –, , , –, , , , ; opposition to, , , , , , , –; in Syrian politics, , , , , ; in World War I, , – Senegalese soldiers, , , , , ; as targets of racial propaganda, , –, –; see also Military, French Serail, , , , ; Grand Serail (High Commission’s headquarters), , , ,  Service for the Protection of Manpower, see Lebanon al-Sha‘b, , ,  Shaghur quarter (Damascus), , , , ,  Shahbandar, ‘Abd al-Rahman, , , ,  Shahfa, Rose, , , , ; and  Arab Women’s Conference, , –; and November  crisis, ,  Shakra, Mary Abdu, ,  Shalaq, Maqbula, –,  al-Shamali, Fu’ad, ,  Sha‘rawi, Huda, , , , ,  Shari‘a, see Islamic law; Personal status law Shartuni, Edward,  Shaykh al-Ard, Nadida, , ,  Shi‘is and Shi‘ism: community (millet) and beliefs, , –; economic disadvantages of, in Lebanon, ; and Lebanese civil war, ,  Shopping, women’s, , , – Shuf region of Lebanon,  al-Siba‘i, Mustafa, , –

index Siba‘i, Shaykh Safa,  Sidon, , , – Singer Sewing Company,  Sisters of Charity, see Missionaries Sisters of St. Joseph, see Missionaries Sisters of the Sacred Heart, see Missionaries Silk industry, see Textile industry Siza, Siran,  Social movements: definition of, ; growth of associations (jam‘iyat), –, , ; licensing of associations, –, , , ; mobilization in World War II, –, ; rise of mass politics, , –, ; see also Charities, women’s; Islamic populism; and Labor, Nationalist, Subaltern, Women’s and Youth movements Social Section, see High Commission Social services and policy, state: demands to expand, –, –, –, , ; expansion of, , –, , –, –; and hierarchy of citizenship, –, –; High Commission’s emphasis on, –, –; in Ottoman era, , , –; paternalism of, –, –, –; politicized by subaltern movements, –; uneven distribution of, –, –, –, , –; and women, –, , –, –; see also Charities, women’s; Education; Health, public; Labor; Welfare state, colonial Society for Piety and Morals, see Islamic populist groups Society of Jesus (Jesuits), see Missionaries Society of Ulama, see Islamic populist groups Society to Stop Crime and Improve Prisons, see Women’s groups

 “Song of the Heart,” ,  Soviet Union, , , ,  Spears, Edward, , , ,  Special Troops, , , , ,  State(s), mandatory: Common Interests administration, , , , , , ; creation of, , –, , –; governments established, –; joint administration of, , –; limits to authority of, –, –; local government, –; see also Budgets; Bureaucracy; Civil servants; High Commission; Law and judiciary; Lebanon; Mandate; Military, French; Syria Students, see Youth movements Subaltern movements: definition of, , , ; claims to full citizenship by, –, –, –, –, –; emergence of, –, –, ; rivalry and frictions among, –, , –; role in elections of, , , –, –, –, –; see also Citizenship; Islamic populism; Labor movement; Social movements; Women’s movement Suez, ,  Suffrage: attainment of women’s, ; demands for women’s, –, , , , , , –; denials of women’s, –, , , , , , –; constitutional provisions for men’s, , , ; education as prerequisite to women’s, , , , , ; French attitudes toward women’s, –, ; military service as prerequisite for, , , , ; see also Elections and electoral system Sufism and Sufi orders: ties to Islamic populists, , ; women’s status in,  Suleyman the Magnificent, Sultan 

 al-Sulh, Fa’iza,  al-Sulh, Riyad, Lebanese prime minister (–), , , , , ; and labor movement, –, –; and National Pact, , –, , , , ; and women’s rights, , , –,  Sultan Selim mosque,  Sunnis: and anti-sectarianism in Lebanon, , , ; community (millet) and beliefs, , –, –; demand for union of Lebanon and Syria, , –, , ; dominating Syria’s urban-landowning elite, –, –, ; see also Ulama Supply Service (Service de Ravitaillement),  Sursuq, Emily,  Sursuq, Linda,  Sursuq family, , ,  al-Suwayda,  Sweden,  Syria, state of: armed revolts against French, –, –, ; boundaries of, , , , ; constitution of, –, , , , ; elections, –, , , , –, –, ; Faysal’s regime in, –, , , , , ; gender pact in, –, , ; May  crisis, , –; Ministry of Social Affairs, ; parliament, –, , , , –, , –, –, ; postcolonial coups, , ; postcolonial statist paternalism, –; suspension of constitution/parliament, , , –, , ; see also National Bloc; State(s) mandatory Syrian (Arab) Women’s Union, see Women’s groups Syrian Congress: debate on women’s suffrage (), , –, , 

index Syrian Conserves Company, ,  The Syrian Mail,  Syrian National Party (SNP), see Youth movements Syrian People’s School,  Syrian Revolt (–), , –, ; impact on constitutions, –; women’s role in, –, ,  The Syrian Union,  Syrian University, , , ; medical faculty of, , , ; women’s enrollment at, , –,  Syrian Woman’s Awakening Society, see Women’s groups al-Tabba‘, ‘Abd al-Hamid, , ; and May  crisis, –, , ,  Taj or Taj al-Din, Shaykh, see al-Hasani, Shaykh Muhammad Taj al-Din Tajhiz preparatory school (Damascus),  Tall Kalakh,  al-Tamaddun, see Islamic populist groups Tankiz mosque, , , , , ,  Tanzimat, see Ottoman Empire Taraqi theater,  Tarazi, Falak, –,  Tarikh al-Harb al-‘uzma,  al-Tariq, , , ,  Taxes: and colonial welfare state, , ; customs duties, , , , ; on income, , , ; protests against, , , , ; revenues from, –, , , , , ; reforms of, , ; on war profits, ; see also Budgets al-Tawwil, Subhi, – Tehran, ,  Telephones and telegraph, see Communications

index Tergeman, Fahmi, ,  Tergeman, Siham, n Textile industry: decline of artisanal production, , –, , ; modern factories in, ; silk industry, , –, , , ; workers and strikes in, –, , , , , ; see also Economy; Labor; Workers and Workers, women Thabit, Ayyub, Lebanese president (), , ,  Thabit, Labiba,  al-Thaqafa,  Theaters and theatrical performances, , ; and sexual morality, , , , ; see also Cinema Tobacco industry and state monopoly (Régie de Tabacs), , , ; workers and strikes in, –, –, –, ,  Tongue of the Arabs,  Trad, Petro, Lebanese president (),  Transjordan, , ,  Transportation: as booming employment sector, , ; disrupted in World War I, –, ; European investment in, , ; expansion of, , ; see also Automobiles; D.H.P. railway; Public Works Tree of Culture Society, see Women’s groups Tribal chiefs or shaykhs, , , , ; privileges and power of, , , , , ,  Tripoli, , , , ; oil refinery in, , , ; school protests in, , ; Sunni nationalists in, ,  Tunisia, , ,  Turkey, Republic of, , , ; women’s movement and rights in, , , ,

 –, –, ; see also Ottoman Empire and Ottomans Ulama (Muslim clerics): authority lost or threatened, , , , , –, –; Committee of Ulama (Beirut), ; and education, , ; as guardians of public morality, , , –; mufti of Beirut, , –, ; Muslim Council (Beirut), –, , ; relationship to state, , , , –; Society of Ulama (Damascus), , , , , ; ties to Islamic populism, , –, ; and women’s movement, –, –, ; see also Islamic law; Islamic populism; Religious patriarchs; Salafiya movement al-Ulshi, Jamil, Syrian prime minister (), ,  Umayyad mosque, , , ,  Umm Kalthum,  United States, , , , , , ; consuls and embassies, , , , –, ; films, film companies and cinema, , , –, –; KingCrane Commission, , ; in World War II, , ; see also American University of Beirut; American Junior College for Women Unveiling and Veiling, –, –,  Urban notables, see Bourgeoisie, urban and landowning Urban planning and landscape, , –; class boundaries in, , –, , ; gender boundaries in, –, –, –, –; Ottoman, –; see also Public space and the public Vatican, see Catholic Church Veiling and seclusion, women’s: changing

 practices in, –, , , – passim, , ; debates on, –, –, , , –; demonstrations and protests against, –, , –, – passim; and denial of political rights, –, , , , , –; and employment, , ; and family honor, , , , –, ; French policy on, ; in schools, –; women’s use of as political symbol, , , , –; see also Family; Paternalism; Public space and the public Versailles peace conference, ,  Vichy government, see France Victoria Hotel, ,  “Victory of Youth,”  Victory theater,  Violence against women: by police and military, , , , –, , , ; by Islamic populists, , , , ; press accounts of, –; in streets, , , –, , ; in World War I, ; see also Rape; Senegalese soldiers Voting rights, see Elections and electoral systems; Suffrage Wages, see Workers and Workers, women Walkowitz, Judith,  Waqf/awqaf, see Religious endowments Wehbeh, Yusuf,  Welfare state, colonial: definition and historiography of, –, , –, –; emergence of, –; expansion in World War II, , –; and gender, , , –, ; postcolonial dismantling of, –; see also Civic order; Social services and policy Weygand, Maxime, high commissioner (–), –, 

index Wheat Office,  White Badge, see Youth movements White Shirts, see Youth movements Wilson, Woodrow,  Woman, , , ,  Women’s Arabic and Cultural Assembly, see Women’s groups Women’s Association for the Encouragement of National Industry, see Women’s groups Women’s Committee for the Defense of Lebanese Women’s Rights, see Women’s groups Women’s Cultural Club, see Women’s groups Women’s groups: Arab Girl’s Awakening Society, , ; Christian Women’s Club, ; Committee for the Defense of Lebanese Working Women, ; Encouragement of Lebanese Industry Society, ; Ladies’ Society, ; Lebanese (Arab) Women’s Union, , , , , , , –; Lebanese Women’s Association, , , ; Light of Damascus society, ; Muslim Girls’ Club, ; Red Star society, , ; Society to Stop Crime and Improve Prisons, , ; Syrian (Arab) Women’s Union, , , , , , –, –; Syrian Woman’s Awakening Society, , , , ; Tree of Culture Society (Dawhat al-adab), , ; Women’s Arabic and Cultural Assembly, , , ; Women’s Association for the Encouragement of National Industry, ; Women’s Committee for the Defense of Lebanese Women’s Rights, ; Women’s Cultural Club, ; Women’s Normal School Alumnae association, , ; Women’s Revival Society, –, ; Women’s Social

index Democratic League, , , , ; Women’s Union in Syria and Lebanon, , , , ; see also Charities, women’s; Women’s movement Women’s magazines: as challenge to male civic order, –; disappearance of, –; men’s reactions to, , –; as organs of the women’s movement, , –, , , ; and veiling debate, –, , , ; see Appendix for list of titles Women’s movement: anti-sectarianism of, , , , ; class base of, –, , , , ; and Communists, –, , –; diminished expectations of, , , , ; divisions within, –, , , , , ; emergence of, –; and girls’ education, –, , , , ; and labor issues, –, –, –, , , –; and maternalism, –; nationalism of, –, , –, –, , , , –; nationalists’ betrayal of, –, –, –, –, –, –, –; and November  crisis, –; and personal status law reform, , , –, ; and political rights, , –, –, –, –; and public health, , , , ; recruitment and membership in, , –, –, , , –, , –; and veiling, –, –, ; and wartime service, , , , , –, ; see also Charities, women’s; Communist Party; Conferences, women’s; Demonstrations, women’s; Women’s groups; Veiling and seclusion, women’s Women’s Normal School Alumnae association, see Women’s groups

 Women’s Revival Society, see Women’s groups Women’s Social Democratic League, see Women’s groups Women’s Union in Syria and Lebanon, see Women’s groups “The Worker,”  Workers: emergence of working class, , , ; family allowances for, , , , ; in “new” industries, , ; in “old” silk and textile industries, –, ; unemployment of, , , , , , , , ; wages of, –, –, , , , –, , ; see also Civil service; Communist Party; Labor; Labor movement; Workers, women Workers, women: in the countryside, , , ; excluded from modern industries, , ; excluded from welfare benefits, , , ; laws concerning, , , , , , ; maternity leave, , ; among middle class and elites, –, ; opposition to women’s employment, , , , –; participation in labor movement, –, –, ; in public sector, , –, ; schoolteachers, , , , , , ; in silk/textile industry, , –, , , ; in tobacco industry, –, , ; unemployment of, –; wages of, , , , , , –; and women’s movement, –, –, , , ; during world wars, , – Workers’ Unions,  World War I: casualties, –; collective memory of, –, ; and crisis of paternity, –; differential class impact of, –; differential gender impact of, –; differential impact on sects, –; famine (safar barlik)

 in, –; martial law during, , ; Ottoman defeat in, , , ; see also Arab Revolt World War II: end of, ; and expansion of welfare state, –; nationalist elites seize rule during, –, ; Free French/British invasion, ; French/British withdrawal, , ; social mobilization prompted by, –, –; as threat to French rule, , , ; and Vichy regime, – Yanni, Mary, ,  Yazbak, Yusuf Ibrahim, –,  Yaziji, Warda,  Young Arabs, see Youth movements Young Syrians, see Youth movements Young Turks, , , , ,  Young Women’s Christian Association (YWCA),  Youth of Muhammad, see Islamic populist groups Youth of the Cedar,  Youth movements, , , –, ; Catholic Youth Circle, ; Congress of Catholic Youth, ; L’Equipe, , ; Iron Shirts, –, , , ;

index League of National Action, , , ; Najjada, , , , , –, , ; National Guards, ; paramilitary or proto-fascist, , , –; Patriotic Youth, ; Phalanges libanaises (al-Kata’ib), –, , –, , , –; students, , , , , , , , , , , ; Syrian National Party (SNP), –, , , , , ; White Badge, , ; White Shirts, ; women’s participation in, –; Young Arabs, ; Young Syrians, ; see also Scouts and scouting movement Zahla, ,  Zaghlul, Sa‘d,  al-Za‘im, Colonel Husni,  Zamir, Meir,  Zayn al-Din, Nazira, , , , ; as author of Unveiling and Veiling, –; impact on women’s movement, , , –, , –, ; seen as traitor, , ,  Zenobia, Queen,  Ziadeh, Joseph,  Zu‘aytar, ‘Adil, 