{"id":23847,"date":"2016-06-14T19:00:49","date_gmt":"2016-06-14T23:00:49","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/?p=23847"},"modified":"2016-06-15T12:20:18","modified_gmt":"2016-06-15T16:20:18","slug":"asad-petition-1936-bashars-grandfather-pro-unionist-stefan-winter","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/asad-petition-1936-bashars-grandfather-pro-unionist-stefan-winter\/","title":{"rendered":"“The Asad Petition of 1936: Bashar\u2019s Grandfather Was Pro-Unionist,” By Stefan Winter"},"content":{"rendered":"

The Asad Petition of 1936: Bashar\u2019s Grandfather Was Pro-Unionist<\/strong>
\nBy Stefan Winter
\nFor Syria Comment<\/em>, June 14, 2016<\/p>\n

This week marks the 80th anniversary of a now famous petition, supposedly addressed by six \u2018Alawi notables from the Latakia region\u2014including Hafiz al-Asad\u2019s grandfather Sulayman al-Asad\u2014to French prime minister L\u00e9on Blum on 15 June 1936. The six ‘Alawi notables criticize the negotiations undertaken by the Front populaire<\/em> government for the independence of Syria; they decry the \u201cspirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims\u201d against the \u2018Alawis, Jews, Yezidis and other minorities and reject the idea that the Governorate of Latakia (the \u201cAlaouites\u201d) be included in the rest of Syria. They propose that the Alawi State be joined with Lebanon rather than Syria and demand to\u00a0remain under\u00a0French protection.<\/p>\n

\"Screen<\/p>\n

The petition, reportedly registered as document \u201cno. 3547\u201d at the French Foreign Ministry, is translated in Abu Musa al-Hariri\u2019s 1984 monograph Al-\u2018Alawiyyun al-Nusayriyyun: Bahth fi\u2019l-\u2018Aqida wa\u2019l-Tarikh<\/em>, with lengthy excerpts (translated back from the Arabic) appearing in such works as Matti Moosa\u2019s Extremist Shiites: The Ghulat Sects<\/em> (1988), Daniel Le Gac\u2019s La Syrie du general Assad<\/em> (1991), and a host of press articles and internet blogs in recent years. A copy of the original together with the Arabic translation is said to be held by the Asad library in Damascus, and in August 2012, French Foreign Minister Laurent Fabius, reacting to a Syrian diplomat\u2019s negative portrayal of French mandatory rule before the UN, invoked the petition<\/a> as proof of president Bashar al-Asad\u2019s grandfather\u2019s (rather than his great-grandfather\u2019s) pro-French position and reaffirmed that the \u201cofficial\u201d document is preserved in his Ministry\u2019s archives.<\/p>\n

From a historian\u2019s standpoint, however, the petition presents a couple of problems. To begin with, \u201cno. 3547\u201d does not correspond to any actual archive classification (one might expect the Ministry\u2019s holdings to go beyond 4-digit serially numbered items), and no corresponding document has ever been cited in the literature or, indeed, produced by the Minister. The only known image of document \u201cno. 3547\u201d appears to be one provided to Dr. Mordechai Kedar of Bar-Ilan University and published on www.jewishpress.com<\/a> in September 2012, from where it has been copied and circulated on numerous internet sites ever since. Either the image, however, or the document collage, is an obvious fake. Already a cursory glance shows that the purported original on the left, prominently stamped with \u201cno. 3547\u201d in red, is written in a long hand typical of French consular correspondence of the early 19th century or before (and appears to concern a commercial account), whereas the petitions submitted to the French authorities in the 1930s were almost invariably written by typewriter. Even more blatant is the black stamp at the top, spread across both the handwritten document and the Arabic typewritten translation: this is in fact an ancien-r\u00e9gime municipal fiscal stamp (\u201cPetit Papier, [x] sous la feuille, G\u00e9n\u00e9ralit\u00e9 de Paris\u201d)\u2014which clearly displays the classic 3-lily Bourbon coat of arms, a complete impossibility for any document handled by the Third Republic Foreign Ministry in 1936.<\/p>\n

\"Kedar1\"<\/p>\n

Not that the subject and tone of the petition in itself are implausible. On the contrary: many \u2018Alawis were in fact opposed to the end of French rule and the eventual inclusion of the \u201cAlaouites\u201d in an independent Syria. The archives of the French Foreign Ministry (the \u201cQuai d\u2019Orsay\u201d), now located in La Courneuve suburb just north of Paris, do contain numerous letters sent by \u2018Alawi and other notables to French government officials in 1936 to lobby against Syrian independence, and some of these do reject the prospect of \u201cMuslim majority rule\u201d in the strongest terms, demand the Alaouites\u2019 inclusion in Lebanon or compare the plight of the \u2018Alawis and Druze to the discrimination suffered by Jewish immigrants settling in Palestine. None of these separatist petitions, however, correspond to \u201cno. 3547\u201d, and none appear to bear the signature of an Asad.<\/p>\n

In Syria, there was a difficult situation with the supply of necessary medicines, asthma medications<\/a> had to be brought from India.<\/p>\n

Historians such as Matti Moosa (who did in fact use the French archives for his book, but can only cite al-Hariri as his source for \u201cno. 3547\u201d) and others have focussed too one-sidedly on these separatist petitions, which supposedly \u201creveal\u201d that the \u201cNusayri leaders feared and detested the Sunnite Syrian nationalists\u201d (Extremist Shiites<\/em>, pp. 286-289). This is unfortunate\u2014because a quick look through the relevant series at La Courneuve shows that there are in reality about as many pro-independence, pro-Syrian-unionist petitions sent by the \u2018Alawis in the 1936 as there are separatist petitions. And sure enough, one of these pro-unionist \u2018Alawi petitions, dated 2 July 1936 or just two weeks after the supposed \u201cno. 3547\u201d, is signed not by Sulayman al-Asad\u2014but by his son \u2018Ali Sulayman al-Asad, i.e. the current president\u2019s grandfather.<\/p>\n

\"Courneuve<\/p>\n

The virulent, 4-page missive, addressed \u201cin exasperation\u201d to the Ministre des affaires \u00e9trang\u00e8res over France\u2019s \u201cnefarious politics of division\u201d, is signed by 86 \u2018Alawi notables in all, including not only the younger Asad (in his capacity as \u201cformer member of the constitutive assembly of the Alaouites\u201d) but also by scions of the Raslan, al-Khayyir and other leading families, as well as Ismail Hawwash, head of the Matawira tribe, past representative on the \u201cconseil f\u00e9d\u00e9ral syrien\u201d and son of \u2018Aziz Agha al-Hawwash, one of the alleged signatories of \u201cno. 3547\u201d. Ridiculing the idea that \u2018Alawis could not live together with their Muslim countrymen, the petition goes on to blast in no uncertain terms those of their compeers who would agitate merely \u201cout of personal ambition\u201d and \u201cbad faith\u201d for the continuation of separate French mandatory rule and thereby impede full Syrian union. (See my forthcoming A History of the \u2018Alawis: From Medieval Aleppo to the Turkish Republic<\/em><\/a>, Princeton University Press, 2016, pp. 260-261 for details). If there is such a thing as a petition \u201cno. 3547\u201d, this one reads like a straight rebuttal.<\/p>\n

Ali Sulayman al-Asad (1875 – 1963) Grandfather of President Bashar al-Asad<\/p><\/div>\n

The \u201cAsad petition\u201d that is actually contained in the French Foreign Ministry archives, in other words, directly contradicts what has often been claimed (including by Laurent Fabius) about the Asads\u2019 attitude toward the French mandate, and therefore raises a number of questions. Should we conclude that \u201cno. 3547\u201d is a forgery, but if so, why would it be on display at the Asad library in Damascus when it casts aspersions on the Asads\u2019 nationalist credentials? Or could it be that both petitions are genuine, and reflect a real political\u2014in fact a generational\u2014conflict within the \u2018Alawi community in 1936, between old-guard separatists like Sulayman al-Asad and \u2018Aziz Agha al-Hawwash, on the one hand, and their unionist sons \u2018Ali Sulayman al-Asad and Ismail al-Hawwash, on the other? This should not come as a surprise, after all, when it is clear that neither the \u2018Alawi nor any other confessional community adopted a single, uniform opinion on French rule and independence, when as careful a historian as Patrick Seale has already shown that many \u2018Alawi figures were indeed \u201cneither Syrian nationalists nor collaborators\u201d but adjusted their stance throughout the mandate period, depending on their changing political and personal circumstances (Asad of Syria: The Struggle for the Middle East<\/em>, pp. 18-23).<\/p>\n

What the existence of the unambiguously pro-unionist Asad petition does demonstrate, in any event, is to what extent political myths in current-day Syria are often based on flimsy\u2014or at least partial and very incomplete\u2014evidence, how some writers will purposely concentrate only on the scandalous, irrespective of the archival material available to them, and how bloggers, media commentators and perhaps even the French Foreign Minister will uncritically copy and paste from one another rather than spend 10 minutes actually going through the catalogues at La Courneuve. Spreading unqualified claims about the president\u2019s grandfather, the \u2018Alawis or anyone\u2019s historical loyalties is not a recipe for stability in the current context of Syrian politics. The separatist petition \u201cno. 3547\u201d, if it is indeed authentic, must at the very least be weighed against the very genuine unionist petition that is indeed in the archives.<\/p>\n

Stefan Winter<\/strong> is associate professor of history at the Universit\u00e9 du Qu\u00e9bec \u00e0 Montr\u00e9al (UQ\u00c0M). His previous publications on the \u2018Alawis under Ottoman rule are available on his Academia<\/a> page; A History of the \u2018Alawis: From Medieval Aleppo to the Turkish Republic<\/em><\/a> is due out from Princeton University Press in September 2016. With thanks to Mordechai Kedar, Pascal Bastien, St\u00e9phane Valter and Joshua Landis for their help with this note.<\/p>\n

Addendum <\/strong>(added by Joshua Landis): The following is the shortened text of the disputed 1936 petition published in English translation by Matti Moosa in his book: Extremist Shiites: The Ghulat Sects (1988) pp. 287?88.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Alawite people, who have preserved their independence year after year with great zeal and sacrifices, are different from the Sunni Muslims. They were never subject to the authority of the cities of the interior.<\/p>\n

The Alawites refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria because, in Syria, the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam, the Alawites are considered infidels….<\/p>\n

The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non?Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief…<\/p>\n

The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis?a?vis those who do not belong to Islam…<\/p>\n

We assure you that treaties have no value in relation to the Islamic mentality in Syria. We have previously seen this situation in the Anglo?Iraqi treaty, which did not prevent the Iraqis from slaughtering the Assyrians and the Yezidis.<\/p>\n

The Alawite people are certain that they will find a strong and faithful support for a loyal and friendly people threatened by death and annihilation and who have offered France tremendous services.<\/a><\/p>\n

Here is a more recent publication of the petition in 2013 by “Syria Direct,”<\/a> a “non-profit journalism organization that produces timely, credible coverage of Syria.” It mistakenly identifies the date of the petition as 1926 rather than 1936, but provides a complete translation of the now disputed petition that cannot be located in the French archives.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Asad Petition of 1936: Bashar\u2019s Grandfather Was Pro-Unionist By Stefan Winter For Syria Comment, June 14, 2016 This week marks the 80th anniversary of a now famous petition, supposedly addressed by six \u2018Alawi notables from the Latakia region\u2014including Hafiz al-Asad\u2019s grandfather Sulayman al-Asad\u2014to French prime minister L\u00e9on Blum on 15 June 1936. The six […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"sfsi_plus_gutenberg_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_show_text_before_share":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_type":"","sfsi_plus_gutenberg_icon_alignemt":"","sfsi_plus_gutenburg_max_per_row":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":true,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","enabled":false},"version":2}},"categories":[11,2,54,34,101,300],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-23847","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-alawites","category-asad","category-book","category-france","category-latakia","category-syrian-history"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"yoast_head":"\n"The Asad Petition of 1936: Bashar\u2019s Grandfather Was Pro-Unionist," By Stefan Winter - Syria Comment<\/title>\n<meta name=\"robots\" content=\"index, follow, max-snippet:-1, max-image-preview:large, max-video-preview:-1\" \/>\n<link rel=\"canonical\" href=\"https:\/\/joshualandis.com\/blog\/asad-petition-1936-bashars-grandfather-pro-unionist-stefan-winter\/\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:locale\" content=\"en_US\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:type\" content=\"article\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:title\" content=\""The Asad Petition of 1936: Bashar\u2019s Grandfather Was Pro-Unionist," By Stefan Winter - Syria Comment\" \/>\n<meta property=\"og:description\" content=\"The Asad Petition of 1936: Bashar\u2019s Grandfather Was Pro-Unionist By Stefan Winter For Syria Comment, June 14, 2016 This week marks the 80th anniversary of a now famous petition, supposedly addressed by six \u2018Alawi notables from the Latakia region\u2014including Hafiz al-Asad\u2019s grandfather Sulayman al-Asad\u2014to French prime minister L\u00e9on Blum on 15 June 1936. 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