Days of the Union - The First Year - Part 3: Independence Day, the Yemen Tripartite Union, and the Cabinet's Oath of Office

Saturday, 8 March

Today is an official holiday, one Syria celebrates as its own day of national independence.

On 7 March 1920, the Syrian Congress issued a decision declaring the independence of the Syrian country, in its coastal, inland, and southern (Palestinian) regions, rejecting the claims of world Zionism, and decided as well to choose Faisal bin al-Hussein as king of the country.

On 8 March, he was crowned king of the country, at the headquarters of the Arab Club in Damascus, a building that still hosts lecturers giving public lectures on various fields of science, arts, and letters, in this very same location, near the (new) Damascus governorate building in al-Salihiyah. I had the chance to give several lectures there myself, some on politics, some on criminal law, which I was then teaching at the Syrian University. And so Syria became an independent state, under a monarchical system.

It is regrettable that this system did not last long, and King Faisal was forced to leave Syria under French military pressure, France having declared its own mandate over the country, acting on the decision of the Supreme Allied Council held at San Remo on 1 February 1920, a decision the League of Nations Assembly, meeting in London, upheld with its own resolution dated 24 July 1922, ratifying the mandate instrument France itself had drawn up, to govern our own country under it "in the name of the League of Nations."

But, despite the official holiday, we were summoned to the first meeting of the new government, held at the Guest Palace (Jalaa Street, or Abu Rummaneh, as it is usually called).

Attending the session, alongside the President, were his four deputies, Boghdadi, Field Marshal Amer, al-Hourani, and al-Asali, along with the Minister of Presidential Affairs Ali Sabri, and the Syrian ministers.

The President explained the dimensions of this presidential system, as he intended to apply it, saying clearly that he would handle foreign policy himself, while every minister would have full authority to run his own ministry's affairs, within the bounds of the public interest and the law. He set out the broad lines of the Republic's policy, saying it was a policy of neutrality, leaning neither toward the Western bloc (America and its allies) nor toward the Eastern bloc (the Soviet Union and its allies), and added that he wished to keep watch over capital, so as to be able to steer it, and stressed that the law alone should be the arbiter between the government and the people, and said it was our own duty to secure the common people's basic needs, while luxuries could be left to those able to afford them.

The President received, while we were in the hall, the Yemeni prince Muhammad al-Badr, and we greeted him, and, in the presence of all of us, the treaty of the "Union of the United Arab States" was signed, bringing together the United Arab Republic (Egypt and Syria) and the Mutawakkilite Kingdom of Yemen, ruled by Imam Ahmad, father of our own guest prince, the crown prince.

This treaty provided that the union have a council of twelve members, six of them Yemeni, and six from the Republic, three Egyptian and three Syrian.

The President chose the three Syrians himself: Ihsan al-Jabiri, Riyad al-Maidani, and Adnan al-Azhari.

It is regrettable that this council entered, at once, the very cave of the Sleepers of Ephesus, for we never heard another word of it, until it was dissolved one day.

Among the stories told is that of a Christian who converted to Islam at noon and died by afternoon, of whom a poet said:

"Hannoun gained not a single mustard seed's worth from Islam,

nor did the Christians ever grasp what became of Hannoun."

Prince al-Badr was a young man in the prime of his own life, handsome in appearance, his radiant face adorned with a small black beard, a white turban on his head, and the famous Yemeni dagger at his own waist.

He had visited us in Damascus once before, in the mid-1950s, and I had offered him a large collection of schoolbooks, as a gift, to be distributed among Yemeni pupils, a gift from their Syrian brothers, but he asked me for time to think it over, and later answered that he must decline to accept it, for reasons he never stated.

I later heard from President Gamal Abdel Nasser that the Prince had complained to him of his own father's rigidity and his resistance to every reform, and that he wished to consult him on ridding himself of him, by assassination. The President's answer was firm: he refused any kind of killing whatsoever, and advised him to abandon this idea, out of respect for the sanctity of fatherhood.

Sunday, 9 March

I reported for work today at the Ministry of Justice, at the Palace of Justice, and received well-wishers, to acquaint myself with the judges and administrative officials.

This is the fourth ministry I have held.

I had already held the Ministry of Education (from 9 August 1951 to 28 November 1951), the Ministry of Finance (from 13 September 1954 to 14 June 1955), and then a second term at the Ministry of Education (from 14 June 1955 to 31 December 1956).

The driver, George (the Ministry of Justice's own driver), came for me in a black Pontiac, the car assigned to me, and I rode in it with him and the policeman seated beside him, and we made our way to the Palace of Justice.

When the car stopped before the towering building, overlooking the entrance to the venerable Hamidiyah Souk, standing at a major crossroads, a crowd gathered to see "His Excellency the Minister of Justice," riding in the car with the green license plate, number three. When I moved to step out, the door lock jammed from the inside and would not open, and the policeman had to get out and open it from the outside, and it opened, and I stepped out and greeted the gathered crowd, who greeted me in turn. But I felt a real sense of embarrassment before them, fearing they might think I was too "arrogant and haughty" to condescend to open the car door myself, waiting instead for the policeman to open it for me, for the sake of "keeping up appearances."

In truth, the car was an old one, its own lock broken from the inside, so that I had no choice but to wait for someone to open the door for me from outside.

This awkward situation lasted a long while, renewing itself every morning, until God finally opened the way, through the Ministry of Communications, and its own technicians managed to repair the fault in the ailing lock.

At the time, the ministry had only one other car, in even worse condition than this one.

In those days, the Minister of Justice's own authority was limited, for the judiciary had a Supreme Council, chaired by the President of the Supreme Court, made up of two members of the Supreme Court and four of the most senior judges of the Court of Cassation. It was this council's own chairman who proposed the appointment, promotion, transfer, discipline, and removal of judges, with the council itself deciding by absolute majority (Articles 123 and 124 of the 1950 constitution).

And so the Minister of Justice's own authority was confined to heading the public prosecution and the administrative staff, including the inspection, enforcement, and legislative studies departments.

The one thing that served as a link between the minister and the Supreme Judicial Council was that the draft decrees the Supreme Judicial Council adopted were submitted to the Council of Ministers and the Presidency of the Republic through the minister, for ratification or rejection.

I was not unaware of this special arrangement, unlike other ministries, indeed I was glad of it, for I myself had written these very provisions into the constitution, as the constitutional committee's own general rapporteur. I never once felt embarrassed to tell petitioners that I held no authority at all over judges of the bench, for I took real pride in the judiciary's own independence.

When the provisional constitution was issued, on 5 March 1958, it remained silent on repealing the 1950 constitution, and silent on the status of the Supreme Court and the Judicial Council, stating only, in Article 73, that "this provisional constitution shall remain in force until the people's approval of the United Arab Republic's final constitution is announced."

I took up the Ministry of Justice on the basis of this very provisional constitution.

But I never raised the question of whether the 1950 constitution had been repealed or not, for had I concluded it had, in fact, been implicitly repealed by the new Article 73, I would have found myself drawn into a desolate labyrinth. For this reason, I preferred to "let sleeping dogs lie," dealing with it, content and accepted, on this very basis. My own conviction that the judiciary had to remain independent, and the character of the Supreme Judicial Council's own chairman, well known for his integrity, impartiality, and sound administration, no doubt played a real role in my leaning toward this solution. For the record, I note that the President of the Supreme Court and chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council was the great judge Abdul Qadir al-Aswad, a man renowned for his own integrity, honesty, and legal learning.

After the collapse of the union between Egypt and Syria, in September 1961, the 1950 constitution was restored, but the situation changed again under the 1973 constitution, which made the President of the Republic chairman of the Supreme Judicial Council, "to guarantee the independence of the judicial authority" (Articles 131 and 132), with the Minister of Justice acting as his deputy in chairing this council. I would note that the current French constitution provides for similar arrangements, so that the President of the Republic, there too, guarantees the judiciary's own independence.

Among the congratulatory telegrams that reached me, I found one sent by Dr. Mustafa Issa, the only one from a member of the People's Party in Aleppo. They may well have been upset that I was the only one taken into the ministry from Aleppo, and from the People's Party. But this party had, by then, dissolved itself along with the other parties, with everyone's consent and pleasure, and a decree had been issued legally dissolving it.

It is entirely possible that Nazim al-Qudsi's own exclusion from government, after being summoned from Aleppo "for consultation," had some bearing on their own withdrawn stance.

Egypt's ambassador, Mahmoud Riad, assured me that al-Qudsi had indeed been summoned for consultation, but was never offered any post at all.

He told me this over dinner at his own home, that very evening, when he invited me alone, so that I could meet the Egyptian ministers, Sheikh Ahmad Hasan al-Baquri, Kamal El-Din Hussein, and Ali Sabri.

In the "small talk" over coffee, Mahmoud Riad told me that the army had objected to my own entry into the ministry, and remained opposed right up until the very last moment, since it wanted no one from the People's Party at all. He added that the President was convinced the armed forces had to be kept out of politics entirely, and had drawn four officers into the new cabinet, to remove them from their own positions in the army (Abdul Hamid al-Sarraj, Mustafa Hamdoun, Ahmad Abdel Karim, and Amin al-Nafouri), and would continue on this same path, until the army was fully purged of politicized officers.

I did not let the chance pass me by, and spoke with the Minister of Education (for both regions), Kamal El-Din Hussein, about Aleppo University, presenting him with the dangers that would follow from its failure to be established, and he said: it is clear you are a true son of Aleppo.

Monday, 10 March

We were summoned this evening to a session of the Council of Ministers, held under Gamal Abdel Nasser's own chairmanship, and swore the following oath before him:

"I swear by Almighty God to faithfully preserve the United Arab Republic, to look after the people's interests and the safety of the homeland, and to respect the constitution and the law."

Each minister stood before the President and recited the oath's own wording, written in large script on a thick sheet of paper placed on a table before him. After taking the oath, he would step forward to shake the President's hand, receiving his congratulations on the ministry, then step back to his own original place, at which point the next minister, in protocol order, would step forward.

Once the oath ceremony ended, we sat at a long rectangular table, covered in green velvet, the President seated at its head, his deputies around him, two on each side, then the ministers. Before each chair stood its own occupant's name, according to his own seniority.

It seems they took my own seniority into account, seating me beside the President's deputies, since I had held my very first ministry back in 1951.

Akram al-Hourani was warm toward me when I entered the hall, as a member of the new government.

But my friend "al-Bizri" wore a scowling expression, and greeted me coldly. It seemed he was not entirely comfortable with the presence of this "reactionary" in a progressive cabinet.

I met, for the first time, the "warlords" who had become ministers, and we exchanged greetings devoid of any real warmth, and I left this oath-taking session convinced that I had been forced upon their own hearts and their own presence.

A minister is entrusted with his own ministry, yet the new system binds him to the President of the Republic's own political direction, since it was the President who chose him, not the people, through any popular election.

He is thus the President's own aide and helper, and this is the very nature of the presidential system in one of the greatest republics committed to democracy, the United States of America.

It seems to me that the position of ministers under the presidential system closely resembles their own position in the Islamic eras.

The political thinker and jurist Abu Bakr Muhammad al-Turtushi (an Andalusian Hanbali jurist, born in 451 AH, died in 520 AH in Alexandria) wrote, in his own famous book on ministers, the following:[1]

"Know that the most fortunate of kings is one who has a minister of true sincerity, who reminds him when he forgets, and assists him when he remembers.

The noblest ranks among mankind are prophethood, then the caliphate, then the ministry. The minister is a support in times of crisis, standing, to the king, in the place of his own hearing, sight, tongue, and heart.

As the proverb says: an excellent support is the minister.

The very first sign of a ruler's own inclination, the strength of his judgment, and the soundness of his mind, appears in his choice of ministers, his selection of companions, and his conversation with the wise.

For this reason, we require that a minister be truthful in his speech, just in his faith, trustworthy in his character, insightful in the affairs of his subjects, and that the minister's own inner circle likewise be men of trust and insight. Let the king beware of entrusting the ministry to a base man, for a base man, once elevated, grows arrogant and proud, disowns his own acquaintances, belittles the noble, and becomes a plague upon men of merit.

Since the affairs of the kingdom rest upon the ministry, and the reins of kings lie in the hands of their ministers, the wise have long passed down this saying:

'Do not be deceived by the prince's own affection, if the minister deceives you.

And if the minister loves you, fear not the prince.

How many a thing the prince wished for, only for the minister to dissuade him from it.

The sultan is like a house, and the minister its own door.

And when ministers grow corrupt, the king grows corrupt with them, and when they are sound, so is he.'

This is the very meaning of God's own words: 'And appoint for me a minister from my own family, to strengthen my resolve through him, and let him share in my task.'"

The constitutional jurist Abu al-Hasan al-Mawardi, the Baghdadi Shafi'i scholar who died in 450 AH, wrote the following:[2]

"The word 'wizara' (ministry) is derived in three different ways.

The first: that it is taken from 'wazar,' meaning refuge, as in God's own words, 'No refuge.' meaning no shelter, so named because the king takes refuge in his own minister's judgment and management.

The second: that it is taken from 'wizr,' meaning burden, since he carries the king's own burdens for him.

The third: that it is taken from 'azr,' meaning the back, since the king draws his own strength from his minister, as the body draws strength from its own back."

It would not be too bold to say that these two jurists stand foremost among those who have written on Islamic political thought, and Abu Ya'la al-Farra al-Hanbali, author of the book "al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya," ought to be mentioned alongside them as well.

The council then turned to discussing the Northern Region's own financial and economic affairs.

The star of the session was Khalil al-Kallas, Minister of Economy.

Mustafa Hamdoun, Minister of Labor and Social Affairs, raised the matter of a strike by workers at the spinning and weaving mill company in Damascus, numbering fifteen hundred. This strike proved the source of the very first anxiety to strike the Council of Ministers, in its own first session.

The President asked him: what are their demands? The minister answered that they were demanding equal treatment with the workers of the Five-Man Company. The President asked: and are they receiving the rights the labor law and their own company's own regulations grant them? He answered: yes. The President said: on this basis, you will face a fresh strike every morning, at one company or another. What I believe is right is that the Minister of Interior (al-Sarraj) assist you tomorrow in settling the matter decisively. You will begin by securing the machinery and the spinning and weaving equipment at the company, and refer the instigators to the judiciary at once. As for the workers, give them the choice between returning to their own work immediately or being dismissed. And so the very first strike was settled, by a firm decision from the President himself, one he issued without the smile ever once leaving his own face.

---

Endnotes:

[1] Siraj al-Muluk, edited by Jaafar al-Bayati, Riad El-Rayyes Books, London, 1990, p. 221 and following.

[2] In his book "al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya," Dar al-Kutub al-Ilmiyya, Beirut, p. 24.