Syria's Forgotten First President Mohammad Ali al-Abed

The story of Syria's first president Mohammad Ali al-Abed is not told in Syrian history books, for a variety of reasons. One is the drama of Syrian history after 1936, when he stepped down. Another is the fact that he came to power with French blessing, making him an easy target for the National Bloc, which dominated Syrian public life from 1936 until 1958. When the Ba'athists came to power in 1963, they systematically excised entire sections of modern Syrian history; anything that came before the socialist revolution, they claimed, was capitalistic, imperialistic, elitist, backward, and ultimately wrong. Any praise of Abed, or his generation of Syrian nationalists, tended to result in harassment by the security services, or jail. As a result, four generations grew up in Ba'athist Syria knowing of no other president than Hafez al-Assad. This article tries to remedy this by shedding light on the career of a forgotten president from pre-Baath Syria.