Chapter 1, Part 1: Syria Under the Ottomans, the Caliphate Debate and the 1908 Revolution

Rushdi al-Kikhya was born in the city of Aleppo in 1899 or 1900, and passed into the presence of his Lord in Cyprus on 14 March 1988. He therefore lived some 90 years by the Gregorian calendar.

At the time of his birth Syria was part of the Ottoman Empire, which the Turkish conquerors had built on the ruins of the Seljuk state in Anatolia at the beginning of the fourteenth century. They fought several major wars to establish it, beginning with the capture of Constantinople on 29 May 1453 under Mehmed II the Conqueror, then a bitter war with the Persian Shah Ismail the Safavid in 1514, crowned by victory over the Mamluks at the Battle of Marj Dabiq near Aleppo in 1516. That battle opened the gates of Syria and Palestine to them. From there they pursued the Mamluks into Egypt and entered Cairo, the capital of their kingdom, in 1517.

Tuman Bay, the Mamluk sultan, fell captive to the Ottomans, who hanged him on 21 Rabi' al-Awwal of the year 923 AH (1517 AD).

The seat of the Abbasid caliphate was at that time in Cairo. It had moved there from Baghdad after Hulagu and his Mongol army captured that city on 17 January 1258 and killed the caliph al-Musta'sim Billah.

Some of the Abbasids had fled to Egypt, and Sultan Baybars chose one of them and named him caliph, to lend his own rule some legitimacy. "This illusory caliphate survived in Egypt until the end of Mamluk rule following the Ottoman conquest in 1517."[1]

At the time of the Ottoman invasion the caliph was al-Mutawakkil ala Allah. He was a caliph in name only, with neither power nor strength.

Historians agree that the Abbasid al-Mutawakkil ala Allah ceded the caliphate to the Ottoman sultan.

Dr. Ali Hassoun writes:

"Then the Abbasid caliph al-Mutawakkil ala Allah ceded it to him and handed over to him the noble relics of the Prophet, namely the banner and the mantle. Then Abu Numayy, son of the Sharif of Mecca, came to Egypt, offered his allegiance to Sultan Selim and handed him the keys of the Two Holy Sanctuaries. From that time on he became caliph of the Muslims."[2]

Dr. Zeine N. Zeine writes:

"There is one evident fact, which is that the Ottoman sultans became the heirs of the caliphate. Each sultan was styled Servant of the Two Holy Sanctuaries, after Sultan Selim received the keys of the two holy cities from Sharif Barakat of Mecca as a token of obedience and loyalty. The sultan was given the titles of Ghazi and Warrior in the Path of God, Sword of God, Protector and Refuge of the Believers, and Shadow of God.

"The capital was renamed Islambol instead of Istanbul."[3]

Brockelmann[4] states that Selim "proclaimed himself caliph of the Muslims in the Friday sermon in August 1517, as a caliph who had received the keys of the Kaaba...".

The English historian Shaw writes: "Sultan Selim took the Abbasid caliph with him to Istanbul, and there the caliph ceded the caliphate to him."[5]

A contemporary of Sultan Suleiman, who succeeded his father Selim on the throne in 1520, wrote a book he called "Al-Shaqa'iq al-Nu'maniyya fi Ulama al-Dawla al-Uthmaniyya" (The Anemones: On the Scholars of the Ottoman State), in which he said: "This book was compiled and composed in the shadow of the state of one whom God singled out for His divine favors among the sultans of the mighty Ottoman state, the quintessence of the lords of the caliphate in all the worlds, the glory of Islam and the refuge of the Muslims.."[6]

In their studies, the Orientalists regarded the Ottoman state as the heir of the Islamic caliphate and the guardian of its honor and of the integrity of its lands. The Orientalist Professor Bernard Lewis wrote:

"From its foundation until its fall, the Ottoman state was a state that devoted its strength to advancing the might of Islam and defending it against all outside aggression. For close to six centuries the Ottomans were in constant war against the Christian West.

"When Ottoman historians spoke of the provinces of the Ottoman Empire, they called them the Abode of Islam, and they spoke of its armies as the armies of Islam."[7]

These were the armies that occupied most of the countries of Christian Europe and knocked at the gates of Vienna, capital of its strongest state, and they would almost have overrun all its lands had they not failed to breach the fortifications of that city.

The cession of the caliphate by the Abbasid caliph to the Ottoman sultan is therefore close to certain. A contemporary writer, however, Professor Sati' al-Husri (Abu Khaldun),[8] came out with a contrary opinion, denying that the Abbasid caliph ceded the caliphate to the Ottoman sultan. He based this odd view on the following:

A. That the historian Ibn Iyas, who was a contemporary of the Ottoman conquest of Egypt, "did not mention anything about the caliphate in his book (Bada'i' al-Zuhur)".

B. No Turkish history was written in the reign of Sultan Selim. Feridun Bey did, however, keep a kind of diary at the time, "in which there is not one word about the question of the caliphate".

C. Likewise, the book "Taj al-Tawarikh", the Ottoman history closest to the reign of Sultan Selim, "says nothing about the caliphate".[9]

Anyone who examines Professor al-Husri's statements closely will find that he relies on the "silence" of those he cites. None of them says explicitly that the Abbasid caliph did not cede the caliphate. And silence can only count as evidence where speech was called for.

What is called for here is conclusive proof refuting what the great majority of the early authorities said.

Professor al-Husri himself knows this. He said so himself: "All the history books in common use in the East and the West say that the last of the Abbasid caliphs in Egypt ceded the caliphate to the Ottoman sultan."

Dr. Ahmad Tarabein followed Professor al-Husri's view in his book "Egypt and the Sudan".[10]

Dr. Muhammad Khair Faris[11] wrote me a letter in which he described the Abbasid caliph's cession to the Ottoman sultan as "incorrect", saying: "The first reference to the caliphate appeared in the Treaty of Küçük Kaynarca in the nineteenth century, when the Russians took the Crimean peninsula and the treaty provided that the Muslims of Crimea would remain spiritually subject to the Ottoman caliph. The Constitution of 1876 mentioned the title of caliph for the first time, and Sultan Abdulhamid used this title widely in his policy of building a Pan-Islamic union."

I see no point in debating this strange view, because it rests on no firm evidence. Besides, the sultans of the House of Osman wore the mantle of the great Prophet and carried his noble banner without any "Abbasid heir" objecting to them in the course of six centuries.

And even if we suppose, for the sake of argument, that this cession never took place, the jurists of Islam accepted "rule by seizure" (imarat al-istila'), holding that the Muslims must have at their head a caliph who protects their honor, preserves their religion for them and manages their worldly affairs, for the sake of the safety of the Islamic state and the continuity of its political and religious order.[12] If I may be so bold, I would say that rule by seizure is the remote ancestor of the military coups of our own time.

When the poet Ahmad Shawqi praised Sultan Abdulhamid II for proclaiming the constitution (the Meşrutiyet) in 1908, he addressed him by his title of caliph:

"Glad tidings to all mankind, the far and the near:
The caliphate's protector has shielded it with the constitution."

And when he defeated the Greeks, Shawqi hailed him as Commander of the Faithful:

"Praise be to God, the Lord of the Worlds,
And praise to you, O Commander of the Faithful."

At any rate, this is a side issue that I have touched on in passing, and it is not among the concerns of this book.

What I want to end this chapter with, though, is the point that what gave the Ottomans their place in the hearts of the Arabs, and especially of the Syrians, was that they destroyed the strongholds of the Byzantine danger by taking its capital, Istanbul, defeated the Shiite Safavids, put an end to Mamluk rule as well, and above all raised the banner of the Sunni creed in the land.. The Syrians also received them warmly as caliphs of the Messenger of God, bringer of the tolerant law.. and saw them as the ones who had saved the Islamic caliphate from being lost.

It gladdened the hearts of the Syrians that the Ottoman Sultanate made the book of the Aleppine jurist Muhammad Ibrahim (Multaqa al-Abhur) the reference on which judges had to base their rulings in all the courts of the state.[13]

It should be noted that the caliphate, in its historical origin, was an institution that the Companions created under the pressure of necessity, because the Prophet ﷺ had not named anyone as his successor. "Those who loosen and bind" (ahl al-hall wa al-aqd) among the Muslims present at the Saqifa of Banu Sa'ida chose Abu Bakr to lead the Muslims, and the four Rightly Guided Caliphs bore the title of "caliph".. After that the Umayyads introduced the practice of "designation" (al-ahd), that is, naming a person as heir apparent, so that when the caliph died the heir apparent became his successor.. The Abbasids followed the same path.

Ataturk abolished the office of the caliphate in 1924. On this basis some modern thinkers, such as Abd al-Rahman al-Kawakibi,[14] Mustafa Abd al-Raziq[15] and Abd al-Hamid Ben Badis,[16] held that the office of king could be separated from that of caliph, with the caliphate treated as a "religious authority", in contrast to the view that Islam must be "a religion and a state".

Al-Kawakibi, may God have mercy on him, believed the caliphate should be returned to the Arabs and seated in Mecca as a religious institution, with no need for it to be joined to kingship, which is the power to govern.

Because the Ottoman emirate lay close to the Byzantine enemy and was exposed to its threat, it became the one outlet for religious zeal in Islam, and everyone who longed for holy war (jihad) came to it.[17]

Through the Arabs' command of their language, in which the Holy Quran was revealed, which holds the sayings of the Chosen Messenger, and in which the basic works of jurisprudence were written, they enjoyed great standing in the religious posts of judge, mufti, prayer leader and teacher throughout the Sultanate.

It is related that Sultan Suleiman wished, after the conquest of Syria and Egypt, to make Arabic the official language of the Sultanate instead of Turkish, but death overtook him and the idea died with him. Professor Muhammad Kurd Ali comments on this account:

"Had Sultan Selim succeeded in carrying out this wish, the Ottoman state would have been spared great problems in the centuries that followed, many important elements would have joined the Arabs, and the Arabic language would have spread further, so that Istanbul would have become a home for it, as Baghdad, Damascus, Cairo, Carthage and Granada had been."[18]

The system of government in the Sultanate rested on the absolute will of the sultan, for there were no constitutional or legal texts limiting his power to govern, apart from the religious texts of the Book of God or the Sunna of His Prophet that might be raised against him.

It was the sultan who appointed and dismissed ministers and governors, and who directed and carried out the policy of the state, relying in this on people close to him in whose good judgment he trusted.

Syria was divided administratively into three provinces (vilayets) and two mutasarrifates:

A. The Province of Syria

With its seat in Damascus. It included Hama, Homs, the Hauran and the Balqa (al-Karak), and the four districts later attached to Lebanon, namely the Beqaa, Baalbek, Rashaya and Hasbaya.

B. The Province of Aleppo

It included the governorate of Aleppo, Idlib, Antioch, Alexandretta, Marash, Aintab and Kilis.

C. The Province of Beirut

Under it came the governorate of Latakia and the areas of present-day Lebanon (except for the four districts).

D. The Mutasarrifate of Deir ez-Zor

It took in the governorates of the Jazira, the Euphrates and Raqqa.

E. The Independent Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem..

The three provinces and the Mutasarrifate of Jerusalem were distinguished by being tied directly to the capital, Istanbul. This was an advantage that gave them great administrative importance. "There were, however, districts in Syria with administrative privileges that they had gained de facto, when Arab emirs of Yamani, Qaysi, Tanukhi, Ma'ni, Shihabi and Arslani descent came to them after the Islamic conquest.."[19]

By force of proximity and necessity, the Sultanate came to have diplomatic and commercial relations with the world of Europe in particular, and its envoys and merchants saw the intellectual and industrial progress that world had achieved. This direct and peaceful contact could not fail to influence the leaders of the Ottoman state, and they set their sights on modernizing their state, whose limbs had begun to freeze under the law of inertia.

The idea of reform ripened in the mind of Sultan Abdulmejid, son of Mahmud II. He took the advice of his enlightened foreign minister, Fuad Pasha, and in 1839 issued a constitution that contained the basic reforms he had in mind, among them complete equality among the subjects of the Sultanate without distinction of religion or race, and a ban on carrying out death sentences until they had been submitted to him and had received his approval.

This sultan pressed on with his reforms. In 1858 he issued the Penal Code, which he took from the French Penal Code of 1810 after amending it to suit the nature of absolute rule in the Sultanate. His son Sultan Abdulaziz issued the Maritime Commercial Code in 1863, the Majalla (the Islamic civil code) in 1868, and the administrative regulations for the provinces.

Sultan Abdulhamid II carried the movement of legislative reform forward, issuing the Code of Criminal Procedure in 1879 and so paving the way for the constitutional and judicial reforms that followed.

The Arab provinces of Syria, Aleppo, Beirut and Jerusalem kept the right to litigate and plead in Arabic, even though the official language of the country was Turkish, and court judgments continued to be issued there in Arabic, "with nothing translated from them into Turkish except what had to be referred to the Court of Cassation in the capital, Istanbul".[20]

It should be noted that this Sultan Abdulhamid II came to the throne after two painful events:

The first: the deposition of his father, Sultan Abdulaziz, in 1876, and his suicide or murder at the hands of those who deposed him.

The second: the deposition of his brother Murad as well, only three months after he took the throne.

He therefore feared greatly for himself, and struck with the utmost harshness at anyone in whom he scented a danger to his life or his throne.

Even so, he began his reign by agreeing to the demands of his chief minister, Midhat Pasha, and announced a constitutional life like that practiced in the European countries. He held general elections, from which two representative chambers emerged:

a Chamber of Notables and a Chamber of Deputies (the Meclis-i Mebusan).

Before long, however, he grew weary of the criticism directed at his rule after the Russian attack on the Rumelian and Anatolian fronts, and on 13 February 1878 he decided to dissolve the Chamber of Deputies temporarily and returned to the method of absolute personal rule. He kept the Chamber of Notables, though, because he had chosen its members himself, and it stayed loyal, living up to the hopes its master placed in it.

It was under this reaction that Syria was living when Rushdi al-Kikhya was born.

Small wonder, then, that the European powers looked on the Ottoman Sultanate, which had begun to decline in every field, as a "sick man", as they used to call it, and waited for its death, which they thought was near.

Perhaps the reason the Sultanate's death rattle went on so long was the disagreement among the Western powers over how to divide the estate and how the death should come. That is the curse of one-man rule: it needs the support of its people but fears their awakening to the nature of its regime.. so it works to drug them with falsehoods and with invented victories to distract them.. The people, for their part, were waiting for dramatic events that would change their hard reality. The only way out open to them was a coup by the army that would bring down the sultan and his rule. And that is what happened in 1908. At the head of the "Nezaret of the Zabtiye" (the Ministry of Security), which had the general security administration and the police under it, was Shafiq Pasha al-Kourani, a native of Aleppo. Because of his good reputation, his integrity and his clean hands, the coup leaders did him no harm.[21] Sultan Abdulhamid at first gave in to the wishes of the rebels who had marched on the capital from their base in the city of Salonica, and proclaimed a constitution containing progressive principles by an order issued by him (the Hatt-i Hümayun) on 18 July 1908.

Among the most important principles of this constitution:

1. Every Ottoman, whatever his sect and his race, shall enjoy personal freedom and shall be equal with others in rights and duties.

2. No person may be investigated, detained, imprisoned or punished in any way except in accordance with the provisions of the law.

3. No extraordinary courts or judicial councils may be set up in any manner or under any name.

4. People's homes are protected from intrusion, and they may not be entered except by the means the law lays down.

5. The printing of publications shall not depend on the approval of the government.

The proclamation of the constitution was followed by the sultan's surrender of his private properties to the state. But his forces soon came back and surrounded the Chamber of Deputies on 31 March 1909, and unrest broke out the length and breadth of the country. The forces of the Committee of Union and Progress, led by Field Marshal Mahmud Shevket, advanced from Macedonia, surrounded the sultan's palace in their turn and forced him to abdicate.

Historians have differed widely in how they view the Ottoman Sultanate, and the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II in particular.

Some of them held this state responsible for the backwardness of the Muslims, because it would not accept the scientific progress of the world and stayed sunk in ignorance and weakness, forever looking back to the heritage of the past alone. Others saw it as the state of Islam, which defended Islam against the aggression of its many enemies, and put the causes of backwardness down to outside colonial factors and to stagnant thinking at home caused by people's refusal to accept any reform.

By way of example, the well-known journalist Professor Nasuh Babil wrote the following:

"The fall of the Ottoman Empire was the result of a conspiracy that was deep-rooted, wide in scope and precisely engineered, woven by the mother of all evils, world Zionism. A number of Arab deputies in the Chamber of Deputies had become aware of the Zionist plan and began to make speeches in the Chamber and to write in the newspapers warning of its danger and criticizing the position of the (new) rulers toward it. These men stopped their ears to the alarm bell and rushed to persecute anyone who sounded a warning and called for this terrible plan to be confronted. Hence what Djemal Pasha did cannot clear him of serving as a Zionist agent, especially once it was established that he and his colleagues Enver Pasha, Talaat Pasha, Cavid and others were from the 'Dönmeh', that is, the remnants of the Jews who took refuge in Izmir after the massacres in Andalusia that followed the end of Arab rule there. They were among the founders of the Committee of Union and Progress, which the Zionists fed with their money in order to destroy the Islamic caliphate, weaken Ottoman power and tear the state apart."[22] The leaders of this Committee are also said to have had ties with Masonic circles. Attention is drawn by what Dr. Zeine N. Zeine wrote, citing the British historian Seton-Watson,[23] namely that:

"Enver Pasha was the son of a Polish man who had renounced Islam, Talaat Pasha was a Bulgarian of Hungarian origin who embraced Islam, and Ahmed Rıza was a man half Circassian and half Hungarian."

Everyone knows that the Zionists held a congress in the Swiss city of Basel in 1897, at which they approved the first program for creating a national home for themselves in Palestine through Jewish immigration to it and the seizure of its land. This congress adopted four resolutions that were regarded as the foundation for creating the Jewish national home. In summary:

1. To work to establish agricultural colonies (colonies agricoles) in Palestine and to encourage immigration there.

2. To expand the organization of Jews wherever they live in the world by setting up local Jewish organizations.

3. To develop national feeling among the Jews and hinder their assimilation into the nations they live among, so that they do not dissolve into them but remain Zionist Jews ready to emigrate.

4. To work to win the approval of the great powers for supporting the Zionist movement in its efforts to create a national home for the Jews in Palestine.

Regrettably, world Zionism achieved everything it had planned, setting up the State of Israel with the help of the great powers in 1948. Growing numbers of Jews are still pouring into Palestine. The latest and most dangerous wave is the heavy Jewish emigration from the countries of the socialist bloc, whose unity has broken apart, and especially from the Soviet Union, which in 1991 passed a law removing every obstacle in the way of anyone who wished to emigrate. This was a windfall that dropped into the lap of the Jews through the efforts and encouragement of the United States of America!

Professor Babil holds that the reason for the military coup against Sultan Abdulhamid was his refusal of the offer made to him by the leader of the Jews of Salonica and dean of its Dönmeh (Emmanuel Carasso, or Karasu), a Jew of Spanish origin who had come to Salonica and settled there. The Dönmeh (that is, the apostates), the Jews of Salonica, were the main financiers of the Union and Progress movement. They made a show of embracing Islam, but they remained Torah Jews.[24]

The offer included the payment of five million gold pounds as a gift to the sultan's private treasury, and a loan of twenty million gold pounds to the public treasury, interest-free and for an unlimited term, in exchange for the Jews obtaining the Jaffa, Gaza and Red Sea triangle.

The sultan threw this Jew out and humiliated him, whereupon Zionism made ready to overthrow his regime and, from 1896 on, set up cells in the army made up of Dönmeh Jews, and drew certain Turkish officers to its side, enlisting them in its ranks under the banner of calling for reform of the state.

This Jewish leader was one of the members of the delegation the Unionists chose to go in to the sultan after the coup against him and hand him the fatwa deposing him from the throne for his signature, and he signed it in the depths of humiliation.

The other members of the delegation were Lieutenant General Arif Hikmet, the Armenian Aram Efendi and the Albanian Essad Toptani.[25]

The Union and Progress group laid their hands on power, brought in Sultan Reşad, a man of weak character, set him up as sultan under their command and began to govern the country as they pleased. At the top of their program was the Turkification of the peoples subject to their state, first among them the Arab peoples. This program made the Arab intellectuals fear for their language and their national identity.. and they began to close ranks to defend the existence of their nation.

I do not follow Professor Babil in explaining the coup against the Ottoman sultan by Zionist influence alone, but I do not rule it out as one factor among others, including the wish of sincere men to bring about a change of government and to develop the political system.

In my boyhood, and even in my youth, I heard a great deal about how attached the people of my home city of Aleppo were to the Ottoman sultan. Some of them even regarded him as one of God's righteous saints and would not accept any criticism of him.

The source of this feeling was without doubt the view of Abdulhamid as caliph of the Muslims and protector of their honor, and head of the Islamic state.

Because of this cultural backwardness that was spread throughout the Sultanate, people did not know how far it had fallen behind the march of world civilization, which had begun to make its way upward with resolve, diligence and free thought.

Endnotes:

[1] Brockelmann, History of the Islamic Peoples, translated by Nabih Faris and Munir al-Baalbaki, eleventh edition, Beirut 198 [year incomplete in the original], p. 390.

[2] In his book The Ottoman State and Its Foreign Relations, Damascus 1980, p. 49 ff.

[3] In his book The Emergence of Arab Nationalism: A Historical Study of Arab-Turkish Relations, Beirut 1986, p. 25.

[4] Op. cit., p. 448.

[5] In his book History of the Ottoman Empire, published 1978, vol. 1, p. 58.

[6] Tashkopruzade, Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi, Beirut 1975, p. 6.

[7] Cited by Dr. Zeine N. Zeine, op. cit., p. 28.

[8] Born in Sana'a in 1880 to an Aleppine family; his father was working as a judge in Yemen. He studied at the Imperial Mülkiye School in Istanbul and graduated in 1900 with distinction. He taught the natural sciences in secondary schools and was then appointed district governor (kaymakam) of Florina in the province of Monastir (the Balkans), where he came into contact with the leadership of the Reform and Progress movement, which he did everything in his power to support.
After the separation of the Arab lands from the Ottoman state he became a minister in the first cabinet formed by Faisal bin al-Hussein in 1920 under the premiership of Rida Pasha al-Rikabi, and then in the cabinet of Hashim al-Atassi in the same year. Professor al-Husri was among the first in this generation to call for Arab nationalism, and he wrote several works on its foundations and philosophy, the best known being In Defense of Arabism (Beirut 1957) and Studies in Arab Nationalism (1974). In his theory he was influenced by the German theory of nationalism, which rests above all on language and land.
His life and work were studied by the Russian Orientalist Tikhonova in her book "Sati' al-Husri: Pioneer of the Secular Trend in Arab Nationalist Thought".
Its Arabic translation was published in Moscow in 1987 (Progress Publishers). Professor al-Husri worked as an adviser at the Syrian Ministry of Education between 1944 and 1947, then left it after demonstrations against him, and died in Baghdad on 24 December 1968. It was he who set up the "unified secondary school" in Syria, in which he cut the years of secondary study by one, so that the level of education in our country fell a great deal. I therefore set out to correct this mistake in 1951, when I became Minister of Education.

[9] Sati' al-Husri, The Arab Countries and the Ottoman State, lectures given to students of the Institute of Arab Studies, Cairo 1957, p. 33 ff.

[10] P. 43.

[11] Head of the History Department at the Faculty of Arts, Damascus University.

[12] On this see the Shafi'i jurist al-Mawardi, who died in 450 AH, in his book Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya, p. 8; and likewise the Hanbali jurist al-Farra', in his book also called Al-Ahkam al-Sultaniyya. He was a contemporary of al-Mawardi and died in 458 AH.

[13] The Encyclopedia (Da'irat al-Ma'arif) of Butrus al-Bustani, vol. 1, p. 244, says the following about him:
He was born in Aleppo at the end of the fifteenth century AD, went to the Sublime Porte (Istanbul) and died there in 956 AH (1549 AD) at the age of ninety.
He is the most famous of the Ottoman jurists. He has a well-known book called Multaqa al-Abhur, part of which has been translated into French; it has been printed in Beirut by Dar Ihya' al-Turath al-Arabi.

[14] In his book Taba'i' al-Istibdad (The Nature of Despotism).

[15] In his book Al-Islam wa Usul al-Hukm (Islam and the Foundations of Government): A Study of the Caliphate and Government in Islam, Beirut.

[16] Selections by Muhammad Imara, On Islam, Arabism and Secularism, Beirut 1981, p. 128.

[17] Dr. Abd al-Karim Gharaybeh, The Arabs and the Turks: A Study of the Development of Relations between the Two Nations over a Thousand Years, Damascus University 1961, p. 272.

[18] Khitat al-Sham, vol. 1, Beirut, p. 221.

[19] Yusuf al-Hakim, Syria and the Ottoman Era, vol. 1, Dar al-Nahar (second edition), Beirut 1980, pp. 17 and 52.

[20] Yusuf al-Hakim, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 33.
The Court of Cassation (Mahkamat al-Tamyiz) is now the Court of Cassation (Mahkamat al-Naqd). It was also called Mahkamat al-Tamyiz in our country until the union between Syria and Egypt took place, when we adopted the new name (al-Naqd) from the Egyptians.

[21] Yusuf al-Hakim, op. cit., vol. 1, p. 8.

[22] Sahafa wa Siyasa: Suriya fi al-Qarn al-Ishrin (Journalism and Politics: Syria in the Twentieth Century), Riad El-Rayyes Books, London 1987, p. 14.

[23] In his book The Emergence of Arab Nationalism, cited above, p. 86.

[24] Dr. Zeine N. Zeine, op. cit., p. 88.

[25] Dr. Ali Hassoun, The Ottoman State and Its Foreign Relations, al-Maktab al-Islami, Damascus 1980, p. 210.