Before This Study: Why Homad Wrote About Rushdi al-Kikhya and the People's Party

Among the conditions that President Gamal Abdel Nasser set in 1958 for accepting union between Syria and Egypt was the dissolution of all political parties and their replacement by a single "national grouping."

Every politician of the day accepted this condition and carried it out willingly and with conviction. I was then a member of the People's Party, which we had founded in 1948 and which was itself dissolved ten years later.

Today forty-three years have passed since the decree dissolving the parties was issued. We had no hand in making it, yet we held ourselves bound by it, because the price the country received in return was a voluntary union between Syria and Egypt, something more precious and more valuable than any local political organization. Forty-three years is long enough for passions to cool and feelings to be held in check, and for events to be looked at with objectivity and integrity.

Yet some of those who have written about that period of our political history have not recovered from the sickness of treating the People's Party and its leader unjustly. Their writing is tainted with bias and strays from the high road of detachment that any fair study must travel. Many people whose judgment I trust have asked me to write, for students of political thought, an analytical study of the events of the historical period I lived through up to the founding of the Syrian-Egyptian union. After giving the idea careful thought, it appealed to me, especially since those events now belong to history. Those who have passed into the embrace of God's mercy have passed, those who have withdrawn into the rest of old age have withdrawn, those who have died in exile have died, the horsemen have dismounted, and the swords lie sleeping in their sheaths.

I decided, however, that this study should be told through the person of Rushdi al-Kikhya and through the People's Party, given the positive role whose burdens the two of them carried for many years. I took part in that role as a founder of the party and as the voice of one current within it, influenced as I was by the ordinary people among whom I was born and raised. In carrying out that role, the man and the party met with troubles that never let up.

I do not dispute that an honest account of events will reflect badly on those who set out to distort them, whether wrongfully or out of ignorance of the facts. That cannot be avoided; it lies in the nature and the logic of things.

I will, however, hold myself to the discipline of impartial research as far as I am able, and I will bind myself, as far as is humanly possible, to every rule of fairness and realism, and keep clear of any intentional offense.

In that spirit I have taken care to document many of the events I relate. What I write from my own personal knowledge comes either from papers I wrote while those events were taking place or from what I have drawn out of the depths of memory and chosen from among its stores.

It is not part of my method to answer what certain authors have written, men who fell victim to their own whims and did violence to the truth, except where this is needed to correct facts that have been distorted, and even then only on a few occasions.

I should point out that this study is not meant to be a personal memoir, whatever the undeniable historical value of memoirs may be. It has, however, been obliged to make room for a certain number of recollections that could not be left out, because anyone who tells of events he witnessed or helped to shape is in the position of a man who steps into the water to cool off. By the plain logic of nature, he cannot help getting wet.

I have chosen to dedicate this study to the man at its center, in recognition of what he sacrificed for his convictions and of all he gave his country, for whose love he held nothing too dear, while disdaining to ask anything at all for himself.

To my friend, the late Rushdi al-Kikhya,

in tribute to his unbending fidelity to principle, for whose sake he endured every kind of hardship and injustice.

Those who helped me complete this book have every right to my sincere thanks and gratitude. I would single out Mr. Ahmad Qanbar, for the documents he placed at my disposal and the valuable observations he offered, which made this heavy trust easier for me to carry.

I am also greatly indebted to the distinguished jurist Mr. As'ad al-Kourani, former head of the Bar Association, who read the manuscript chapter by chapter and offered valuable comments that helped me a great deal in this work.

And God, glory be to Him, is witness to my intent.

The Author