East of the Grand Ummayad: Freemasons in Damascus 1868-1965 by Sami Moubayed

Author:Sami Moubayed [Moubayed, Sami]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: Freemasonry, History, Middle East, Non-Fiction, Secret Societies, Social Science
ISBN: 9781614571605
Google: 9hPRsgEACAAJ
Publisher: Cune Press
Published: 2017-08-14T23:00:00+00:00

Members of the academic faculty of Damascus University in 1925: Sixth from left is author of Syria’s first republican constitution Fawzi al-Ghazzi, who taught at the Faculty of Law, standing next to Faculty Dean Fares al-Khoury, and Rida Said, the University President who was serving as Minister of Education.

Of the Frenchmen in Damascus who flocked into local lodges between 1920 and 1935, most were officially stationed at the High Commission in Beirut. They traveled to Damascus on weekends or for periodic lodge meetings. High Commissioners usually hired staffers who had served with them in French colonies overseas. The first High Commissioner, Henri Gouraud, packed his staff with Moroccan and North African-trained Frenchmen. Two other High Commissioners, Henri Ponsot (1926-1933) and Charles De Martel (1933-1938), both came from the Far East, bringing with them bureaucrats from French Indochina, Bangkok, and Tokyo. These French bureaucrats were the crux of Syria Lodge of 1922.

Syria Lodge was later re-located to a four-story stone building in Khaled Ibn al-Waleed Street in the affluent al-Qanawat district. This was the only lodge built west of Old Damascus. Among its prominent founders was Husni Sabah, a twenty-two-year-old doctor studying for his PhD at the University of Lausanne. Upon returning to Syria, he helped co-found the Syrian University in 1923 and joined Rida Said in translating the Faculty of Medicine’s textbooks from Ottoman Turkish and French into Arabic. He also authored many medical works himself, including a seven-volume tome on internal medicine, before becoming dean of the Faculty of Medicine in 1938.

Five years later, Sabah became president of the Syrian University. He was also the private physician to Syrian President Shukri al-Quwatli in the 1940s. In 1968, a group of veteran Syrian academics elected Sabah president of the prestigious Arab Language Assembly, the highest authority on the Arabic Language for scholars worldwide. He presided over the academy’s publications and gave periodic lectures at Damascus University until his death, at the age of eighty-six, in December 1986.

Among the prominent members of Syria Lodge was the Damascus notable Haqqi al-Azm (1864-1955), an Ottoman-trained politician whose family had supplied the 18th governor of Damascus. Under the French he was appointed governor of the State of Damascus (which included the central cities of Homs and Hama), and in 1932, became Prime Minister of Syria. Azm nominated himself for presidential office twice, with the full backing of French officialdom. The first time was in 1923 when he ran for presidency of the Syrian Federal Council—which included the states of Damascus, Aleppo, and the Alawite Mountain—against his Masonic Brother Subhi Barakat, a notable from Antioch. He was defeated and nominated himself once again, this time for the presidency of Syria in 1932. This time he faced off against the Damascus millionaire Mohammad Ali al-Abed, a non-Mason, and lost one more time.

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