Introduction

In February 1939, a French attempt to reform personal status law in Syria provided an opportunity for Jamil Mardam Bek's discredited National Bloc government to leave office honourably after a succession of failures. A High Commissioner's decree on the issue dated back to March 1936, but had not been enacted. When a new decree, modifying but also resurrecting the original, was promulgated in November 1938, it provoked widespread opposition because it ‘treated the Moslems as one sect among many, and thus struck at the root of the traditional Moslem conception of the State’. As opposition grew over the next months, the Mardam Bek government was able to make the issue a point of honour: instructing the Syrian courts not to apply the new law; asserting the Syrian parliament's authority as sole legitimate source of legislation in Syria, and thereby denying the authority of the High Commission; and, when ordered to back down, resigning instead. This allowed Mardam Bek to regain some of the political legitimacy lost during the Bloc's years in government because of its failure – to name only the gravest issues – to get the treaty ratified by France, to prevent the gradual loss of the Sanjak of Alexandretta, and to impose its own authority on the newly incorporated regions of the Jabal Druze, the Alaouites and the Jazira. With little left to lose, Mardam Bek used the personal status reform issue to regain some of his political standing and resigned ‘on a large wave of public enthusiasm’.

This, roughly, is the account of personal status law reform given in existing political histories of the mandate. The issue is mentioned briefly insofar as it affects the historian's account of nationalist politics, but it is not discussed in or for itself.