Shukri al-Quwatli

1891 - 1967

Three-time Syrian president; Arab nationalist.

Shukri al-Quwatli was born in Damascus to a Sunni Muslim family of prosperous landowners and bureaucrats who made their fortune through agriculture and trade with Abd al-Aziz ibn Abd al-Rahman Al Saʿud in the Arabian Peninsula. He was one of the most important figures in the political life of modern Syria. He received his education in the elite schools of Damascus and his public administration training in Constantinople (now Istanbul). Having no stake in the Ottoman Empire, he joined the secret Arab nationalist society al-Fatat and then the Hashimite-led Arab Revolt in 1916. His underground activities on behalf of the cause of Arab independence during World War I enabled him to emerge as a nationalist hero.

Although al-Quwatli served in the local administration of the Hashimite Prince Faisal I ibn Hussein's Arab government, which was set up in Damascus after the defeat of the Ottoman state, he belonged to a group of avowed anti-Hashimite panArabists who devoted most of their time to the Istiqlal Party (Arab Independence party). Forced to flee Syria after the French invasion of July 1920, al-Quwatli spent the next ten years in exile first in Cairo, which he used as a base for his activities on behalf of the Hashimite-leaning Syrian - Palestine Congress, and then in Europe, primarily Berlin, where he collaborated with other exiled Syrians in anti-French propaganda campaigns. He was
active in supporting the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925 - 1927.

With the French amnesty of 1930, al-Quwatli returned to Damascus. Initially he maintained a low political profile devoting much of his time and energy to business ventures, primarily the processing and exporting of fruits and vegetables. The Syrian Conserves Company, which he founded in 1932, vaulted him into the limelight as an industrialist who promoted Syria's economic interests during a critical phase of its fight for independence.

Following the election of a Syrian parliament in 1932, al-Quwatli joined the National Bloc, Syria's principal nationalist organization from 1927 until the end of the French mandate era. An uncompromising pan-Arabist devoted to the cause of Arab independence, al-Quwatli was soon disenchanted with the bloc's ineffectiveness and its policy of "honorable cooperation" with the French, and he became a leading instigator of the general strike that erupted in Syria on 27 January 1936, and brought commercial and educational life to a standstill for thirty-six days. When the all-bloc government was formed in Damascus in 1936, al-Quwatli served as minister of defense and of finance only to resign two years later. Although he was the leading nationalist politician in Syria during World War II, his anti-French activities forced him to go into exile in Iraq. His connections with Ibn Saʿud, however, made the British apply pressure on the French to accept his return. In the Syrian elections of 1943, he was elected to the presidency of a "formally" independent Syria. His nationalist sentiment, which was beyond reproach, enabled him to remain in office despite the factionalism and scandals that plagued his administration.

In March 1949, al-Quwatli was deposed as president by Colonel Husni al-Zaʿim's successful coup and once again he went into exile, but this time in Egypt, a country on which he came to depend during the rest of his political life. Thanks to Egyptian and Saudi support, he returned to Syria in 1954 after the overthrow of the military regime of Colonel Adib Shishakli. In August 1955, he was elected president of Syria for a third time. By that time, the political landscape in Syria had changed. The class of urban notables from which he hailed and that controlled Syrian politics from the latter part of the nineteenth century through the early years of independence was under attack by new political forces, including al-Baʿth and the communists. Syria's domestic politics was also weak and unstable, and the country itself was at the heart of a struggle for dominance between Hashimite Iraq and republican Egypt on the one hand, and the big powers on the other hand.

Al-Quwatli strongly supported the ideas of an Egyptian - Syrian union in 1957 and 1958. With the consummation of the union and emergence of the United Arab Republic (UAR) in 1958, al-Quwatli's active participation in Syrian politics came to an end. He resigned his post as president to allow Gamal Abdel Nasser, Egypt's charismatic president, to take over the presidency of the UAR. Before his death in 1967, al-Quwatli witnessed the collapse of the UAR in 1961 and the coming to power of a factionalized group of Baʿthist military officers who came in the main from rural Alawi, Druze, and Ismaʿili backgrounds significantly different from the landowning, scholarly, and mercantile Sunni families from which his generation of leaders hailed. The advent of these new groups to power brought with it the re-orientation of Syrian politics, both domestically as well as in the area of foreign relations.

— MUHAMMAD MUSLIH