Before These Memoirs - Part 36: Saudi Arabia's Abolition of Slavery and Prince Faisal's Announcement

Friday the 2nd

Rushdi al-Kikhya, Maarouf al-Dawalibi, and the rest of our brothers from the dissolved People's Party took part in my mother's own funeral procession.

It was the custom among our own people, in those days, for the family of the deceased, or their friends, to hold large dinner gatherings for three days, inviting friends and notables alike, exactly as people invite guests to a wedding or a feast.

I objected to the idea, considering it out of keeping with how large the city had grown and how customs and conventions had evolved, but my own family found my objection strange, telling me that if we did not do as people of our own standing were expected to do, we would become a laughingstock.

And so, to avoid becoming a "laughingstock," we slaughtered the sheep and set the tables, for three nights, filled with a great many people, some we knew, many we did not.

I confess these customs no longer fit today's social reality, and the only thing that keeps them alive at all, if they are indeed still observed in Aleppo, is that "we found our fathers following a certain way, and we follow in their footsteps."

I remained in Aleppo for a week, receiving condolences and comfort, and made a point of returning courtesy visits to some of the friends who had shared in our grief.

I visited Rushdi al-Kikhya at his home in al-Farafira, and we spent two hours alone together. He made it entirely clear to me that he did not support our friend Nazim al-Qudsi's own era.

He said the President of the Republic had called him by telephone several times, but he had excused himself from speaking with him. He also had harsh words for Abdel Nasser, "for never once leaving a single person or party unshattered by his own curses."

He assured me he had withdrawn permanently from all political activity.

Rushdi is a man of real stature, known for his integrity, his sincerity, and his own foresight.

He has grown genuinely "disgusted" with a politics now driven, and its own men moved about, by military factions working behind the scenes.

Dr. Maarouf al-Dawalibi visited me at my own home as well, and stayed with me for four long hours. We spoke frankly with one another, and I may have been harsh with him at times.

I made clear to him that Rushdi al-Kikhya did not support him, and that he himself knew al-Kikhya had withdrawn from all political work. He showed real surprise at this, as though he had never heard it before.

I asked him whether it suited him to find his own support confined to the Communists and the Armenians, who openly declare their own hostility to union.

But the man remains furious with Abdel Nasser, speaking of "his own coup against him," meaning the coup that took place, orchestrated by Abdel Nasser himself, as he claims, against his own government on 28 March 1962, a coup carried out by the very same officers who had carried out the secession and brought both him and al-Qudsi to power in the first place.

After returning to Damascus, I visited the President of the Republic, to thank him for the condolence telegram he had sent me over my mother's death.

Within the ten minutes he set aside for me, he began speaking of the Yemeni coup, dismissing Abdel Nasser's own military intervention in its affairs. He said that once it had failed (his own precise expression was: once he had gotten himself bogged down in it), he turned to America seeking rescue, with King Saud rushing to ask Kennedy for American protection, fearing Egyptian aircraft might bomb his own country in a fit of desperation, just as King Hussein "touched his own head to make sure it was still there" and rushed to beg tender mother England to protect his own throne.

The President concluded by saying: Abdel Nasser's own intervention in Yemen had terrified Saudi Arabia and robbed King Hussein of his own sleep.

America alone remained the true winner.

Given how little time had been set aside for me, I contented myself with reminding him that, as a supporter of Arab unity, as I understood him to be, he ought to have rejoiced at Abdel Nasser's own sacrifice, since through this action he sought to drag Yemen out of its own stone-age imamate era, one with no grasp of the meaning of Arabism nor any sense of civilization at all, into the twentieth century, so that the Yemeni people might finally have the right to determine its own fate, breathe the air of freedom, enjoy education, and thereby turn toward rediscovering its own Arab roots and its own future within the embrace of union.

But President al-Qudsi has no love for words like these.

He has no enemy in this world but Abdel Nasser, even were he to come bearing manna and quails.

He sees no objection whatsoever to walking in the train of the King of Saudi Arabia and the King of Jordan.

Thursday the 8th

The gap between the man of words and the man of deeds exposes those who make empty claims for what they are.

On this day, Abdel Nasser gifted the state of Algeria two naval vessels, to serve as the nucleus of its own future fleet. President Ahmed Ben Bella, head of Algeria's government, conveyed his own state's thanks to the great Arab leader.

No one is unaware of what Abdel Nasser gave Algeria, standing unwaveringly by its side throughout its own struggle, with both material and moral support, to such a degree that he exposed his own country to France's own wrath and fury, driving its Prime Minister Guy Mollet to declare, on one occasion, that victory in Algeria ran straight through Cairo.

On this same day, Dr. al-Qudsi broadcast a flowery statement, calling on the Arab states to "spare the shedding of pure blood."

People laughed, comparing the one who roams free and noble, giving out money and weapons, with the one caged between a Wasif and a Bugha, capable of nothing but words. And how cheap words truly are.

Friday the 9th: Saudi Arabia Abolishes Slavery

A noble gesture, in any case, however long overdue.

Prince Faisal bin Abdulaziz, Prime Minister of the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, announced the following in his own statement, delivered after the new ministers had sworn their oath before King Saud:

"It is well known that slavery as it exists today has long since fallen short of many of the legal conditions Islam itself required for permitting bondage in the first place. Since its very founding, the Saudi state has confronted the problem of slavery and bondage, and has worked, through every gradual means, toward eliminating it, first banning its import and imposing penalties for it, then more recently banning its sale or purchase altogether. The government now finds the occasion suitable to declare the absolute abolition of slavery, and the freeing of every slave. The government will compensate whoever proves entitled to compensation."

And so the last Islamic country freed itself from the tragedy of slavery, a tragedy the rest of the world had freed itself from a century and a half earlier, several international treaties having since been concluded to criminalize it, among them Article 4 of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights (issued in 1948), and the Geneva Convention on Slavery, dated 25 September 1956, specifically concerning the suppression of slavery and the slave trade.

Sunday the 11th

Fears are mounting of possible American or British military intervention in Yemen, now that the revolution has begun putting down firm roots, expanding its own hold and driving royalist forces from their positions, despite the material and military support they continue receiving from Saudi Arabia.

It is certain that the success of a progressive revolution in Yemen threatens Western interests in the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia and in the Gulf sheikhdoms.

I would not be surprised if the Anglo-Saxons carried out such an intervention themselves, to protect their own enormous oil interests in that region, and to defend their own military lines and the alliances they are building along the Soviet Union's own southern flank, meant to encircle it and contain the very capabilities they fear and take so seriously into account.

Should either Western power commit the folly of such an intervention, Egypt would find itself obliged, given its own army's presence in Yemen, to consider itself at war with it, and the spark of war would spread to every corner of the "progressive" Arab world.

A fierce reaction from the Soviet Union must certainly be expected as well.

Monday the 12th

An economic conference "for development" is being held in Aleppo.

Prime Minister Khaled al-Azm and Minister of Economy Dr. Izzat Trabulsi both attended, each delivering a speech on the state of the Syrian economy and its own future. I know Dr. Izzat well. He is a supporter of the free market, and resigned from the governorship of the Central Bank during the union, in protest of its socialist direction. In fairness, I hold him in genuine trust and regard, given his own well-known mastery of financial science and an integrity beyond any shadow of suspicion.

He is, then, in his own natural place here.

The real dispute concerns al-Azm's own direction, since he had once embraced a distinctly "red" leaning, before gradually returning, as circumstances allowed, to his own aristocratic roots.

President al-Azm's speech included the following:

"The state will compensate landowners for their own land (once the study is complete), and will look after the interests of workers, farmers, and civil servants."

And speaking of civil servants, studies are underway to raise their own salaries.

Experience has taught us that the mere mention of the government considering raising civil servants' salaries reflects instantly on the market, in the form of rising prices and hoarding. I have often thought that unless the pay scale is tied firmly to the scale of inflation and rising prices, with strict oversight of price movements to back it up, it would be better not to raise salaries at all than to raise them without any real control over the market's own reaction.

Thursday, 23 November, corresponding to 15 Jumada al-Akhirah 1382 AH

The newspapers carried a piece of news today worth recording in these pages.

The prisoners of Damascus donated the cost of their own meals from last Friday to the Algerian freedom fighters, gathering 749 Syrian pounds, which they presented to the Algerian office in Damascus.

Even prisoners, criminals though they may be, never forgot their own Arab identity, nor lost their own human feeling. I imagine Mohamed al-Ghosairy, Algeria's representative in Damascus, must have shed real tears, accepting this gift, modest in its own amount, yet enormous in its own meaning and significance.

I bear witness that the Syrian people has always stood at the very forefront of the Arab peoples, in enthusiasm and generosity, supporting Arab freedom fighters battling occupiers to win their own countries' freedom and secure their own independence.

Monday the 26th

The large headlines about "the annihilation of the Egyptian aggressors in Yemen" and "the scattered bodies of Egyptian paratroopers around Saada" continue to provoke real disgust. Since when do "progressive" Syrians stand against a people rising up to free itself from the yoke of a petrified regime, one still living in the earliest of centuries?

Is it right, before God and before one's own homeland, to stand against an uprising no one had even dreamed possible, carried out by free revolutionaries seeking to push their own homeland into the procession of civilization, to join the ranks of the liberated Arab states, and free it from a regime "inherited straight from the Stone Age"?

And yet the Syrian regime hypocritically declares its own recognition of the Yemeni revolution, while working in secret to fight against it. He who wears two faces has never once found favor with God.

Foreign Loans to Syria

Reports have gathered these past few days of a series of loans extended to "the Syrian Arab Republic," from various states' own funds, some from the West, some from the East.

France extended a loan of fifty million dollars, equivalent to 190 million Syrian pounds (the dollar being worth less than four pounds at the time), to finance certain development projects.

America extended a loan of 80 million Syrian pounds, to build grain storage silos.

(West) Germany extended a loan of 250 million marks to finance the Euphrates Dam project, with France pledging to provide the rest of the foreign currency the project would need.

The government of Communist China offered financial assistance to our own government, including frozen meat, which did in fact reach our own warehouses, with citizens buying it at one pound, seventy-two and a half piastres per kilogram, noticeably easing the meat shortage.

There is nothing troubling in these loans, so long as they are used for development projects capable of generating enough return to repay their own value to the lending states. But should the projects fail, whether from a lack of sound technical and scientific study, or from being used instead for mere consumption, they will become a heavy burden on the national economy.

Among the consumption-driven loans is the arming of the armed forces, though these are loans whose own economic return is not open to debate at all, since they represent, like the tax of blood itself, a responsibility shared by both state and citizen.

Monday, 10 December

The Teachers' Union in Syria declared a general strike across the country, demanding better living conditions for teachers. Government supporters claim the Teachers' Union leans Nasserist, and that it called this general strike under the pretext of demands that could easily have been discussed through negotiation, while concealing, behind this strike, political aims of its own, namely unsettling the government, spreading chaos across the country, and exposing the state's own being to shocks that might well end in broader movements still.

I confess I am never in favor of civil servants striking, and especially not teachers striking.

I had hoped this would never happen at all, for this is a domain with no place for politics, since it strikes hundreds of thousands of students with real harm, exposing them to the dangers of the street. The Prime Minister issued a stern warning, threatening teachers that his government would consider any teacher who abandoned his own work to have resigned.

He brandished the sword of Article 23 of the Civil Service Law, and the provisions of Law No. 137, dated 8 October 1951, which reads as follows:

Article 1: The Council of Ministers has the right to consider any official, employee, or worker who abandons his own work to have resigned.

Article 2: The Council of Ministers is authorized to fill vacant posts, in accordance with the Civil Service Law's own provisions, without resorting to competitive examination.

Article 3: Officials considered to have resigned may not be restored to their own original posts, nor to any other post within the machinery of the state.

Article 4: Nothing in these provisions shall prevent the application of the provisions of the Penal Code.

It is worth noting that Article 330 of this same Penal Code provides for punishing a striking official with civil dismissal.

In fairness, I myself had a hand in this very law, in proposing it and drafting it.

Mr. Hasan al-Hakim's own government once faced a strike of this kind, perhaps the very first by teachers since independence, and it was an ominous sign indeed, for we were still a young, fragile state, having only won our own independence in 1946 (when the last French soldier left the country), having been defeated alongside our own Arab sisters in Palestine in 1948, having endured three coups in 1949, and had scarcely finished drafting our own constitution in 1951 when the teachers decided to strike. We genuinely feared for the state's own fate, and so the government, with myself serving as Minister of Education, decided to take a firm stand against this sudden threat, so that events would not send us tumbling down some unknown path, and we settled on drafting this very law.

The teachers returned to their own posts that year, as expected.

In this present strike, however, the teachers showed a far stronger obstinacy, perhaps because they mixed politics with the demand for better living conditions, or perhaps because they had grown larger in number and stronger in organization, and so felt no fear at the threat of penalties being waved before them.

The great government took an even firmer step forward, deciding to refer certain members of the union's own council to the courts on 12 December.

On 12 December, President Shukri al-Quwatli announced he would mediate to bring the strike to an end.

But the teachers returned to their own work without need of any mediation, on the 14th of that month, once they had secured promises that their own demands would be studied, and whatever was legitimate among them granted.

Without firmness in applying the law, laxity spreads, and both the powerful and the weak alike come to take advantage of the state.

For a law to be accepted, one the people can genuinely embrace, it must be just.

I once came across a law the Iraqi Revolutionary Command Council passed, No. 840, dated 17 January 1986, amending Article 225 of the Penal Code, which came to read as follows:

1. Whoever publicly insults, by any means, the President of the Republic (Saddam Hussein) or whoever stands in his place, the Revolutionary Command Council, the (Iraqi) Arab Socialist Baath Party, the National Council (the People's Assembly), or the government, shall be punished with life imprisonment and the confiscation of movable property.

2. The punishment shall be death if the insult or assault (the word "assault" was added here, though it did not appear in the preceding criminalizing clause) is committed openly and with the intent of inciting public opinion against the authorities.

3. Whoever publicly insults, by any means, the courts, the armed forces, or any other public authority or government institution shall be punished with imprisonment not exceeding seven years, or with detention, or with a fine.

Had Hulagu himself ruled a dictatorial state in our own time, he would never have dared draft provisions as unjust as these, provisions that elevate the ruling system to the very rank of divinity.

It is no wonder, then, that arrogance drove Saddam, four years later, to pounce on his own neighbor Kuwait, only to be driven out of it by the cannons of the states allied with America, Arab states among them. What is stranger still is that he remains, to this very day, in power, after having brought upon the Arabs the greatest catastrophe ever to befall them, costing them their own wealth and the lives of innocent young men, and exposing their own weakness before the eyes and ears of the entire world.