FINANCIAL TIMES - A History of Modern Syria — the people at the heart of their own story -- ( Kitap tanıtımı)

 FINANCIAL TIMES 

A History  of Modern Syria — the people at the heart of their own story

Daniel Neep’s excellent account corrects the traditional narrative to show a nation surviving and resisting the powers that have vied to dominate it

A large image of President Hafez al-Assad dominates a Damascus street, where banners in support of other candidates are also displayed during elections in 1994 © AFP via Getty Images

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Roula Khalaf, Editor of the FT, selects her favourite stories in this weekly newsletter.

Syria is as ancient, and as complex, as civilisation itself. Lying between antiquity’s great empires of Egypt and Mesopotamia, it functioned as a bridge, sometimes a wall, between them. Rarely a conqueror, it adapted over millennia to invaders from all points on the compass: Egyptians, Sumerians, Hittites, Babylonians, Persians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, Crusaders, Mongols, Turks and French.

All left indelible marks despite their ephemeral presence. On seeing Syria’s historic capital, Damascus, in 1867, Mark Twain reflected, “She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies. Though another claims the name, old Damascus is by right the Eternal City.”

It was only in 1946 that Syria, albeit in truncated form, governed itself after 26 years of French imperial rule. Its freedom of action remained provisional while outsiders — the US and Soviet Union on the global stage, Egypt and Hashemite Iraq within the Arab region — vied to dominate it. The struggle continues today between Turkey and Israel, whose armies occupy respectively the north and the south.

Daniel Neep’s excellent, comprehensive history of “modern” Syria corrects the traditional narrative of a passive Syria by placing its people at the heart of their story. As well as considering “the usual suspects of European colonialism, American imperialism and Soviet expansionism”, he also looks to “seemingly impersonal economic currents” that have played “a crucial yet often overlooked role in remaking modern Syria”.

His account begins in the mid-19th century, during what Turkish historian Selim Deringil calls “the Ottoman twilight”, when sultans in Constantinople grappled with modernising their empire to preserve it from European encroachment.

Ottoman Syria, like Rome’s Provincia Syria before it, was a vast region that encompassed what became modern Syria, Turkey’s Hatay province, Lebanon, Israel-Palestine and Jordan. Its location on the west-east land route from the Mediterranean to the Gulf and the north-south axis between Anatolia and Arabia — with Damascus as the major staging post for pilgrim caravans to Mecca — enriched its merchants and brought traders and adventurers from most of the globe.

Its intellectuals, Neep notes, were by 1860 experiencing a nahda, a renaissance or awakening, that viewed their homeland as distinct from its Turkish rulers and the European powers who would seek to replace them. Their discovery of a distinctive national identity emerged as a decisive factor in forging their history, even as it took account of the non-Arab communities — among them Kurds, Yazidis and Armenians — in their midst.

Tracing the emergence of a Syrian Arab consciousness, A History of Modern Syria portrays autonomous actors either navigating survival under foreign and indigenous rulers or actively resisting them. Neep, a non-resident fellow at Brandeis university, charts the course of the 1916-1918 Arab Revolt that in conjunction with the British invasion from Egypt ended four centuries of Ottoman rule.

Unusually for a western historian, he ignores TE Lawrence, emphasising Prince Faisal of Mecca and the other Arabs who achieved shortlived independence, as the Kingdom of Syria, at the end of the first world war. Elevating Syrian agency over external interference makes for a more nuanced understanding of all that has befallen the country over the past 150 years.

After the French army conquered Damascus in 1920, Syrians resisted, albeit futilely and at great cost. Rebels under Druze chief Sultan Pasha al-Atrash defeated French forces in many battles and almost forced them out of the country during the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925, until French reinforcements arrived and aerial bombardment devastated Damascus and Hama. Yet the legacy of rebellion endured and not just against outsiders. French rule ended only after Britain’s invasion of Vichy-controlled Syria in 1941.

Syrians enjoyed a parliamentary republic from 1946 until 1949, the year Colonel Husni Za’im staged the first of many military coups d’état. Neep provides detailed background on the officers’ conspiracy that overthrew President Shukri al-Quwatli. For reasons he does not state, he fails to mention the CIA, whose Middle East operative Miles Copeland later wrote how the US military attaché cultivated Za’im and “suggested to him the idea of the coup d’état, advised him how to go about it, and guided him through the intricate preparations in laying the groundwork for it.”

The US wanted Syria’s approval for a pipeline to carry the American Aramco company’s oil from Saudi Arabia to the Lebanese coast through Syrian territory. Quwatli was delaying. Za’im signed off on the project as soon as he seized power. He further repaid the CIA by arresting more than 400 Syrian communists.

The American legation’s political officer, Deane Hinton, had condemned the coup as “the stupidest, most irresponsible action a diplomatic mission like ours could get itself involved in . . . we’ve started a series of these things that will never end”. His prophecy proved prescient four months later, when other colonels overthrew and murdered Za’im — setting in train a series of non-democratic transfers of power that ended only with the last coup, that of General Hafez al-Assad in November 1970. Neep explains how each military dictator seized and lost power and how Assad survived numerous coup attempts, uprisings and external subversion to be able to transfer power to his son Bashar when he died in 2000.

In March 2011, protests in a peripheral town, Dera’a, demanded reform of the dictatorial system and escalated into a war seeking Bashar’s overthrow. Fourteen years later, Bashar fled to Moscow and an Islamist regime — Syria’s first — assumed power. Its writ does not extend to the American-backed Kurds in the north-east, the Druze mountain in the south, the Israeli-held south and Islamic State pockets throughout the eastern desert.

The inevitable postwar lust for vengeance led to massacres of members of the Alawite sect to which Hafez and Bashar al-Assad belonged. Islamist militants have attacked Druze citizens in Suweida province, the large Kurdish neighbourhood of Sheikh Maqsoud in Aleppo and Kurdish strongholds in the north-east.

Neep concludes his masterly narrative, “At the outset of the uprising, regime supporters had issued their ultimatum: ‘Assad or we burn the country.’ In the wake of their departure, the Assads had left the nation in ashes.” The war that killed at least 500,000 Syrians and displaced more than half the population ended in December 2024. Other wars, however, have taken its place.

A History of Modern Syria by Daniel Neep Allen Lane £40/Basic Books $35, 704 pages

Charles Glass is the author of ‘Syria: Civil War to Holy War?’

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