1914 -
Syrian politician and political activist.
Akram al-Hawrani was born in Hama, an ancient city in the central plain of Syria and a citadel of landed power and rural oppression. In the 1930s, during the French mandate, he tried to mobilize the landless peasants against their feudal lords. When World War II broke out, he went to Iraq, where he joined Rashid Ali al-Kaylani's 1941 revolt against the British. Having established himself as a champion of agrarian reform, Hawrani was elected to the parliament in 1943, 1947, and 1949. In 1945 he and his shabiba (young men) group seized Hama's garrison from the French, and in early 1948 he fought in the Palestine war on the side of Fawzi al-Qawuqji's Army of Deliverance (jaysh al-inqadh). Hawrani held ministerial portfolios in the governments of Hashim al-Atasi and Adib Shishakli. In 1950 he mobilized his followers in the Arab Socialist party, with headquarters in Hama and branches in other centers. Three years later, Hawrani's party merged with Baʿth to form the Arab Socialist Baʿth party, a coalition of the urban middle class (mainly schoolteachers and government employees) and politicized peasants.
Shishakli's heavy-handedness sent Hawrani into exile in Lebanon. In 1954, after Shishakli's fall, Hawrani returned to Syria, and in 1957 he became president of the parliament. He was a strong advocate of the United Arab Republic (1958 - 1961); in the central cabinet that Gamal Abdel Nasser created for the union government, Hawrani served as vice president and minister of justice. In 1959 he resigned his cabinet posts, disenchanted with the authoritarianism of Nasser and the unstable structure that he created in Syria. After Syria's secession from the union in 1961, Hawrani opposed subsequent Baʿth efforts to re-create the union and tried to reestablish his Arab Socialist party. The Baʿth officers who engineered the coup of March 1963 (Hafiz al-Asad, Salah Jadid, and others) ordered the arrest of Hawrani. When he was released, he went to Lebanon, where he tried to mobilize Syrians opposed to the Asad regime in the National Progressive Front. In many respects, Hawrani was an agent of social change, an energetic activist who roused the peasants, politicized the army, and shook the foundations of the old order.
Bibliography
Batatu, Hanna. Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1999.
Seale, Patrick. The Struggle for Syria: A Study of Post-War ArabPolitics, 1945 - 1958. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1987.
— MUHAMMAD MUSLIH
Encyclopedia of the Modern Middle East and North Africa. Copyright © 2004 by The Gale Group, Inc. All rights reserved.
