Chapter 2, Part 3: His Sorbonne Memoirs and Public Lectures
Second: Autobiography
In this area we found only his memoirs from his years as a student at the Sorbonne in Paris, between 1939 and 1945.
Memoirs of an Arab Student at the Sorbonne, 1939-1945
These memoirs record his life while he studied in France, year after year over six years. In them he wrote down his struggles to find lodging, the places he frequented, the plays and films he went to see, the names of the actors and actresses, and his comments on some of the films after summarizing their stories. He described his Syrian companions who were studying in France, their characters and their conduct, the marriages of some of them to Frenchwomen, and the political events France went through during the German invasion.
Anyone who leafs through these memoirs finds the finest details in them: the names of his professors, the kind of lectures he attended in the Faculties of Letters and of Law, the results of the examinations he sat in both faculties, the examining boards and their members, his grades in his legal courses, the kind of food he ate, the rationed prices of certain foodstuffs and how hard they were to come by, the weather, the letters he received from his family, the political jokes that went around about Greece, Italy and Britain during the Second World War, the parties held on special occasions, the doctoral defenses he attended, and the verdicts of the examining boards. He records, for instance, that he attended the defense of Dr. Maarouf al-Dawalibi's thesis on ijtihad in Islamic law, and that when a member of the board asked al-Dawalibi why he had not cited the views of the Orientalists in his thesis, al-Dawalibi replied that it was because they were biased and unreliable.
The memoirs also keep track of the news broadcast on the radio and printed in the French newspapers, of the contacts between states at the time, and of the events taking place in Syria under French occupation, and he commented on some of what the newspapers printed and the news agencies reported.
In his memoirs he described the attacks exchanged between America, Britain, Germany, France and the Soviet Union, and what was happening on Arab soil. He also described the bombing of Paris, by the British among others, and noted Germany's attacks on the Soviet Union and on Britain, the positions of America and Japan, and the statements of Churchill and Roosevelt. He recorded the texts of the documents signed between France, Germany and England. He also wrote of the German, Italian and British offensives in North Africa, and expressed his joy when Germany and Italy issued a declaration recognizing the independence and sovereignty of Egypt. He depicted the real atmosphere of the war waged on French soil by the Germans, the British and the Americans, the curfews in Paris, the liberation of Paris from the Germans, and the behavior of the American soldiers in France, and he recorded the substance of the conference the Allies held, the conference of the Big Three (Moscow, London, Washington), concerning Germany.
He set out the end of Hitler and Mussolini and the surrender of Germany, and he described what happened at the San Francisco peace conference, giving the substance of de Gaulle's address to the French, Churchill's speech from London and Stalin's from Moscow, and he described the resistance of Stalingrad against the Germans.
In recording the speeches of Roosevelt, Churchill, Hitler and Mussolini, he did not neglect the news of the war being fought between Germany, Russia, Britain, England and Italy, or its effect on the economic life and the mood of the French cities he visited and whose restaurants and hotels he frequented, and he mentioned the difficulties he met while looking for a hotel or a safe place to stay.
The author's constant concern was what was happening on Arab soil. He described the events in Algeria against French colonialism, the course of Syria's and Lebanon's independence, and de Gaulle's press conference on the Syrian question.
The memoirs also mention the disputes between the Mufti, Amin al-Husseini, and Rashid Ali al-Gaylani, and how the Germans viewed them. They describe Fawzi al-Qawuqji's visit to Paris and the welcome the students gave him, the meetings he held with Arab students, some of the lectures he gave to North African students, and the training period he spent in some lawyers' offices after obtaining his doctorate.
The memoirs also show his zeal in refuting the historical claims of the Jews to a right of return to Palestine, and his way of explaining this to the French with complete frankness and a deep sense of belonging.
Nor can we forget that the memoirs contain information on writers and on literary and philosophical schools, such as Sartre and existentialism, the poet Corneille, and others.
The reader of these memoirs comes away with a portrait of Dr. Homad: a man serious in his studies, intelligent in his comments, and skillful in depicting the people and events of his time, a patriot of Arab nationalist conviction in his treatment of the political events the Arab homeland was going through, and loyal to his fellow students, some of whom suffered financial hardship during the war because their study allowances did not arrive and their families could not send them money.
Third: From His Public Lectures
He gave a number of public lectures. This is not the place to list them all, but we mention the titles of some of them and the places where they were given. Among these lectures:
1. A lecture at the People's Party hall in Damascus on 19 October 1950 on the new constitution.
2. A lecture at the Faculty of Law of Kuwait University titled "Combating Crime"; the newspaper al-Hadaf published a summary of it on 19 November 1979.
3. A lecture at the headquarters of the Jurists' Association in Damascus on Tuesday, 6 March 1984, at the Association's invitation, titled "The Theory of Causation in Criminal Jurisprudence."
4. A lecture, also at the headquarters of the Jurists' Association in Damascus, titled "Professional Secrecy," on Tuesday, 11 November 1986, at the Association's invitation.
5. A lecture at the invitation of the Arab Club in Damascus titled "Contemporary Shifts in Criminal Thought," on Wednesday, 7 February 1990.
6. A lecture at the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus titled "Political Asylum," on Saturday, 10 April 1993.
7. A lecture at the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus titled "The Development of Legal Thought on International Criminal Responsibility," on Wednesday, 22 April 1998.
8. A lecture at the Women's Cultural Forum titled "Contemporary Views of the Factors of Crime," on 6 April 1999.
What follows sheds light on a sample of these lectures:
1. The lecture on combating crime: he gave it at the Faculty of Law of Kuwait University, and the newspaper al-Hadaf published a summary of it on 19 November 1979. In it he pointed out that crime was rising in contemporary societies and called it an almost universal phenomenon. He shed light on the legal concept of crime, setting out how legal scholars define it, and cited statistics on crime rates in France, America and some Latin American countries, which showed crime climbing steadily. He mentioned some offenses unknown in the past, such as price manipulation, false advertising, aircraft hijacking and environmental pollution. He also dwelt on international cooperation in combating crime, explaining that the chief crimes calling for international cooperation are trafficking in human beings, that is, trafficking in women for prostitution, drug trafficking, piracy, counterfeiting of national and foreign currency in circulation, terrorism, aircraft hijacking, and the forcible holding of persons.
2. The lecture "The Development of Legal Thought on International Criminal Responsibility": he gave it at the Arabic Language Academy in Damascus in the Academy's 1997-1998 session, and it was published in the Academy's journal (January 1999 issue).
In it he described the condition of the Arabs in the Arabian Peninsula in the pre-Islamic era, and the condition of the world beyond the peninsula at that time. He then explained that humanity has passed through three historical stages. The first, the traditional stage, began with armed clashes at the dawn of humanity and lasted until the end of the First World War, 1914-1918, and the founding of the League of Nations in its aftermath. It was a stage in which no one bore criminal responsibility: the victor was whoever held power, free to dictate whatever terms he wished to the vanquished, and the victim of aggression could only submit. He gave as examples the Jews in ancient history, for their excessive cruelty toward the peoples they brought under their rule, and the Mongols in their sack of Baghdad in 656 AH. Nor were these tragedies new to the stage of our Arab lands, for the hosts of the ancient empires, Greek, Roman, Persian and Pharaonic, had clashed on Arab soil before, and then came the Crusades, which spread destruction, shed blood, set fires and hung black banners in the skies. It was firmly fixed in people's minds that whoever does not kill is killed, and that where power is, right stands.
When the Gallic barbarians overran Rome in 390 BC, its people bought them off with a set amount of gold, paid in humiliation. When the two pans of the scale were level, the barbarian chief threw his heavy sword onto the scale so that Rome would have to add more gold, and said to its notables: "Yes! Woe to the vanquished."
Having drawn this dark picture of relations among the ancient nations, the lecturer qualifies it: "We would be unjust to the truth if we left this black picture of relations among the ancient nations in people's minds without pointing out that human history has known, since the earliest ages, humane thinkers who did not forget that they were children of Adam, that the children of Adam are a unity that cannot be ignored, and that they had no right to destroy themselves with their own hands at the bidding of evil impulses. From this pure starting point Aristotle, in his two books, the Politics and the Nicomachean Ethics, called for 'regarding human society as a natural unity, independent of every religious age, because man is by nature a social animal.'"
Likewise the Stoics brought into their philosophy, for the first time, the term cosmopolite, the citizen of the world, to say that man is the brother of man, in answer to the slogan of the pessimists who say that man is a wolf to man. Plutarch wrote the following about the Stoic Zeno, founder of the Stoic school, the school of the Porch:
"Zeno wrote a book called the Republic, in which he asserted that human society is one, and therefore that people should not be divided into cities and peoples, lest each people adopt laws of its own, because all people are citizens of one world and one cosmic order, the Cosmos, and they must live together in one society, sheltered by the banner of one authority."
The philosopher Seneca did not hide his contempt for the building of great empires on the skulls of the innocent, and said, with rare courage: "I would rather glorify the gods and celebrate their deeds than praise the massacres of Philip and his son Alexander and of others who built their false glory on human blood and on the disasters of mankind, for these unjust tyrants are no different in their destruction from the flood that drowns the plain and kills its people."
Then, amid the darkness of these massacres and tragedies, came tolerant Christianity, raising the banner of the brotherhood of man and the watchword of mercy. Regrettably, the early Church could not take the decisive step of condemning war outright, and at the Council of Nicaea in 325 its fathers resolved on complete solidarity with the fate of the Roman Empire. Then came the Crusades, with all the tragedies they brought.
The call of Islam carried the principles of a humane revolution in human relations. It proclaimed complete equality among the children of Adam and Eve, called for peace and for renouncing war as a way of settling disputes, and urged the path of dialogue. It strictly forbade forcing anyone to embrace Islam without conviction and consent, and the Prophet laid down strict rules of conduct for his armies when they crossed into enemy territory in war, and protected the lives of prisoners of war. Dr. Homad showed in his lecture how the preachers of both these tolerant religions fanned the flames from time to time, and the lecturer stated a firm truth: religion alone does not stir the instincts of killing and aggression, for battlefields have seen armies of a single religion, or of several religions, draw their swords against armies made up of those very same religions, as if declaring by evidence and deed that it is material greed and political interests that stir up wars, not creeds or philosophies.
If wars destroy crops and offspring, they also devour state budgets on a staggering scale. The great French poet Victor Hugo once wondered about the bright future that would await the peoples if peace reigned among them, and said: "In the thirty-two years of a wary peace that we lived through in fear, we nonetheless spent 128 billion francs on arming ourselves. Imagine if these astronomical sums had been spent on caring for the human family, improving agriculture and industry, and nurturing genius and creativity: what would the country be like?"
When Hugo called for working toward a union of the European peoples, the wealthy men of the right said of him that he was raving and close to madness.
The lecturer noted that Hugo used the expression "the international family," spoke of rapprochement among nations, which he saw as the beginning of brotherhood, and said that the day would not be far off when the earth would return to what it had been in the age of Homer's gods, who crossed the world in three strides.
The lecturer then discussed crimes against international peace, war crimes, crimes against humanity and the crime of genocide, examined the foundations of international criminal law and its seven principles, and commented on these principles.
The lecturer observed that the international scene today, regrettably, is full of double standards in the way the great powers deal with the small states, which has cost the small states their faith in a just international community and driven them to rush into buying arms from any source and at any price.
So the slogan "guns before butter," which Hitler proclaimed early in the last century, returns, and spreading fear of the future may well be a deliberate policy to push the small states to arm themselves, so that the arms factories of the great powers are not hit by slump and bankruptcy.
The report on human development issued by the United Nations Development Programme in 1996 shows that the largest market for the arms trade in 1994 was the Arab market.
While the industrial countries spend 1.3 percent of their national output on arms, the countries of South Asia spend 6.2 percent and the South American countries 2.1 percent. The Arab countries, for their part, spend as much as 6.7 percent of their national output on arms.
Statistics show that the first Gulf War, between Iran and Iraq, which lasted eight years, consumed more than half of the sums the two sides had earned since they began exporting oil.
The hidden part of military spending is graver and worse than what is visible, and some states, regrettably, are forced to borrow to obtain weapons and certain electronic, mechanical and food supplies, and pay high interest on their debts.
The lecturer pointed out that the poor bear the consequences of the mistakes of the rich without having the means of protection the rich enjoy: the rich, for example, produce 53 percent of carbon dioxide emissions, while the poor produce only 3 percent.
After reviewing the tragedies of the international scene inflicted on the weaker sections of humanity by those with aggressive and exploitative leanings, the lecturer says that hopes for a better future for humanity in the field of international criminal responsibility still shine, and call on us to hold fast to the threads of hope.
Yet he returns to say: "Nevertheless, certain events of the past and the present cast a dark shadow over contemporary legal thought.
For example, the United States of America dropped its atomic bombs on the Japanese cities of Nagasaki and Hiroshima in 1945, at a time when Japan was on the point of surrender.
This great power also burned crops and livestock in Vietnam, and yet no charge was ever brought against it. All that happened was that an unofficial tribunal chaired by the Briton Lord Russell condemned its actions, a moral and ethical condemnation."
And here is Israel, committing more than one international crime every day, yet it has never been referred to any court... Every time the finger of accusation is pointed at it, America uses its veto to block its condemnation, as though world politics were run with a double standard.
At the end of his lecture the lecturer makes clear that the contempt shown to us certainly stems from our weakness, and that the cause of our weakness is the infighting of authoritarian Arab governments and the entrenchment of hateful regionalism.
It is regrettable that we Arabs have failed to understand the formation of the great international political and economic blocs in our own generation and before our very eyes.
For half a century the countries of Western Europe have been forming an economic union among themselves that now embraces some four hundred million people, and it is moving toward becoming a great political union to protect itself.
Facing it, on the other side of the Atlantic, a great economic market is now taking shape that includes America, Canada and Mexico, and it is moving to bring in the countries of South America to form a single market of nine hundred million people.
In Asia, Japan has become a world economic giant, highly advanced in every field of modern technology, with a staggering surplus in its balance of trade...
Before it stretches the vast Chinese market, which has become a nuclear power and a huge economic market of one billion two hundred million Chinese citizens.
Along China's long borders the Indian market has taken shape, embracing some eight hundred million Indians, protected by destructive nuclear power, and aspiring to become a technological power of world standing.
Russia, heir to the empire of the collapsed Soviet Union, is trying to gather the states that won their independence from it into a single trading market, in the hope of securing a decent life for its peoples in an international struggle that shows no mercy to the idle and the backward.
In the face of these momentous events the Arabs live in bewilderment, fearful of the present and the future, asking themselves with great anxiety what awaits them.
The strange thing is that they do not grasp the lifebuoy that lies within their reach: the conditions of their scattered societies are far better than those of others. They possess every element of a great economic market, and also the components of a sound political bloc, perhaps under a broad union that could restore to us the unity we once had, torn apart by colonial greed and tyranny at home.
We do not know what Dr. Homad, may God have mercy on him, would have said about the events our nation is living through in our own day, when it has lost its compass and can no longer tell enemy from friend.