A Special Chapter - Part 5: Visiting Damascus Citadel Prison and the Widow Who Poisoned Fawzi al-Ghazzi

In the Precincts of Saladin

I carried out one of the duties of official work when I visited the Central Prison in Damascus, housed in a wing of the citadel so famous in Islamic history.

This citadel had once served as the headquarters from which Saladin al-Ayyubi commanded his campaigns against the Crusaders. He came to it after al-Adid had made him vizier in Egypt in 1172, and he took the reins of power in order to unify the Muslims, dropping the name of "the Fatimid Caliph al-Adid" from the Friday sermon and restoring it to the Caliph of Baghdad.

This change in the sermon marked the end of the Shia doctrine's official standing and the public return of the Sunni schools, so that muftis and judges once again drew on them for their rulings and judgments, and it likewise marked the end of the Fatimid state, which had lasted two full centuries.

It was from this citadel that the Muslim commander laid out his strategic plans in his wars against the Crusader armies, which had occupied the fortified strongholds of the Levant, until he wiped them out and razed those strongholds, effectively ending the Crusader presence in the lands of Islam with his resounding victory on Saturday, 4 July 1187, at the historic Battle of Hattin.

To the east of this "barracks," this great commander lay at rest, and one memory called forth another, and one sorrow stirred another.

A painful historical memory came back to me as the prison guards opened its great door for me.

I recalled what I had been taught as a child in school, of the arrogance of the French commander Gouraud, who visited this humble tomb after taking Damascus in 1920, kicked it with his own foot, and said to the remains of its occupant: "Here we are, back again, Saladin!"

As I grew older, I began to doubt the truth of this story. Was it conceivable that a conquering military commander would stoop to gloating over a valiant hero, one toward whom his own people had, in their own history, shown moments of the utmost chivalry and nobility?

I said to myself that God, exalted is He, says:

"So ask the people of the message if you do not know" (Quran 16:43). I turned to my friend, the renowned historian Dr. Nur al-Din Hatoum, to ask him about the truth of this account, and he was generous with me, as scholars tend to be, returning to his own well-stocked library and bringing me the following.

He said that Dr. Tibawi, a Palestinian historian who taught history in Damascus, had written a book in English entitled:

A Modern History of Syria, Including Lebanon and Palestine,

published in London in 1969, in which the author addressed this very story and wrote the following sentence:

"It is related of General Gouraud that, on his first visit to Damascus, in a speech he delivered before Saladin's tomb, he said that his presence there consecrated the victory of the Cross over the Crescent."

The author notes that he took this passage from a book by an American historian, Mr. W. A. Hocking, entitled:

The Spirit of World Politics, New York, 1932.

It has been my habit, especially since being elected a full member of the Arabic Language Academy, that whenever I visited the Zahiriyya Library, attached to our own venerable Academy, I would pass by Saladin's tomb, standing in the courtyard of a neighboring mosque, recite the Fatiha for him, and ask myself why this nation, after him, was struck with such barrenness, becoming like a flock of helpless birds, fought over by birds of prey, ruled over by the dregs of "every tongue and nation, until the storytellers themselves can hardly be understood except through interpreters," in the words of Abu al-Tayyib al-Mutanabbi.

The breath of history seemed to blow over me as I passed through the gate of the courtyard.

The prison warden stood waiting to receive me in his military uniform, along with some of his staff. The prison was, at that time, attached to the Ministry of Interior, an arrangement that runs counter to sound legal logic. Prisons ought properly to be attached to the Ministry of Justice, with their directors drawn from among judges, especially since criminal legislation allows for the release of prisoners who have served three-quarters of their sentence, if the prison director attests that they conducted themselves well throughout their imprisonment.

I made my rounds of its "wings," and was struck by how clean it was, though troubled by the mixing of prisoners of every kind. In their rooms and dormitories, they gathered in circles, living together, day and night, for years on end.

In these circles, the young and inexperienced learned the arts of crime, and whatever remained of modesty and restraint in their faces fell away, so that they had scarcely stepped out into free life before they found themselves back again where they had been in their old dormitories.

I heard that they lacked for nothing inside the prison, neither liquor, nor drugs, nor means of gambling, not even weapons, everything having its own price.

In a dormitory on the ground floor, my attention was drawn to a thug holding court at the center of a circle of his companions, with his thick, curled mustache and his sinewy muscles, looking at me with an air of utter indifference, as though he hoped for nothing and desired nothing. I gestured for him to come forward, and he sauntered over to me in a lazy, self-satisfied swagger. I asked him his name and where he was from, and he answered in a harsh voice. I asked him the length of his sentence, and he said, with total coolness: "A hundred years and one." He said it as though boasting of it, or daring me to react, though our own legislation has no such sentence, only hard labor for life or life imprisonment.

I asked the prison warden to have him transferred elsewhere, and placed among those imprisoned for crimes of a similarly repulsive nature. But did he truly carry out his promise to me? That remains the question.

The prison warden then surprised me with a strange request, from a female prisoner who wished to see me. He said she was the widow of the late Fawzi al-Ghazzi. I was seized with great astonishment, and found it very strange indeed that she should still be alive and remain in prison. I learned that her accomplice in this crime, her own cousin, was likewise imprisoned in this same facility. My reaction was strong: I refused to meet with her, and refused even to discuss her case with the warden.

She was the murderer of her own husband, the brilliant Mr. Fawzi al-Ghazzi, drafter of the 1928 constitution, which the French High Commissioner amended and published in 1930, and which remained in force among us until the constitution drawn up by the Constituent Assembly in 1950, of whose committees I served as rapporteur, defending its articles before the sessions of the General Assembly. The assassination of this man, by poison, had a deeply painful effect on the hearts of the citizens, and grief spread across the country and its people.

The Prince of Poets, Ahmed Shawqi, mourned him in a sorrowful ode, in which he praised the deceased and condemned his murderer, saying of her:

She fell in love with beauty's outward show, and found

in genius nothing that could win her love or longing.

So she moved as though her very fingers were an addict's hand,

as though the shadow of poison within her ran like quicksilver.

O Fayha, where upon your gardens now is the rose

whose presence once made the whole world flutter and breathe its fragrance?

I heard that she was later released from prison, and now lives in a neighborhood near the one I live in myself, and that her accomplice was likewise released, both of them benefiting from the mercy of the law.[1]

As I watched the prisoners gathered around tables laden with food, I recalled the families of the prisoners at the Aleppo prison, from the days when I would pass its gate as a schoolboy on my way to secondary school, and how they would sit in their worn, threadbare clothes before great platters of rice and meat, waiting for the guards to open the door and let them bring these platters in to their own imprisoned kin. I asked myself: why do they deprive their own young children of a decent morsel of food, borrowing money, perhaps, or selling off a mattress or some belonging of their own, just to bring a platter of meat and rice to a murderer or a thief, so that he might boast of it before his fellow inmates, lording it over those who have no family left to remember them with such "kindnesses"?

The very next day, I issued a decision forbidding any food from being brought in to prisoners from outside the prison bars. I believe this decision remains in force to this day. It spared poor families further hardship, and deprived prisoners of a comfort they did not deserve. They themselves may well have welcomed it too, since it gave them a "legal" excuse not to burden their own families further, or deprive their own children, allowing them to remain, as we say, "under God's own cover" of dignity.

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Endnotes:

[1] I read, in Mr. Nazir Fansa's book Husni al-Za'im's Days, that al-Za'im issued a decree pardoning this prisoner, "because his heart softened toward her." Al-Za'im's coup, however, took place in 1949, and he himself fell that very same year. I believe the author is mistaken here, since I myself visited the prison in 1958, and she was still there.