Khayri Rida's Journey: Finding the Syrian State in the French Mandate Period

Uh, first of all, I want to thank everybody for showing up. I want to thankour guests for showing up as well.

Uh, we've been going at this now for about 13 years, uh, the the series itself. uh and uh, what we try to do is bring in people who are doing

cutting, cutting-edge work in history so they could discuss not only what they found but how they went about finding it.

And today's guest is no exception to that. Benjamin Thomas White is a senior lecturer in history at

the University of Glasgow in Scotland. He is the author of a wonderful book actually, "The Emergence of Minorities in the Middle East"

which was published by Edinborough University Press in 2012.

The book describes the concept of minority and how it took root actually. Uh, he currently teaches and researches global refugee history.

Uh, his current research focuses on the history of the refugee camp.

Other recent publications include work on the history of humanitarian evacuations and the relationship between humans and

animals in displacement. Um so, today he's going to be revisiting his first love.

His lecture is entitled journey Khayri Rida's Journey; Finding the Syrian State in the French Mandate Period.

Without further ado. Benjamin.

Thank you, Jim, for the invitation uh, and thank you to Christian Rodriguez and Johanna Romero

for uh, organizing everything. Let me get this screen sharing.

At half past seven, in the morning on Tuesday, the 17th of April 1934, Khayri Rida, chief official of the

district of Kürt Dağı, west of Aleppo, got in a car with the district police chief and an official of

the agricultural bank and set out on an inspection tour. It lasted for three and a half days,

took him all over this region of limestone hills just south of the newly drawn frontier between French mandate

Syria and the Turkish Republic.

The report on the tour that he sent to his superior, the governor of Aleppo is seven pages long. It starts

dramatically with an account of how Rida and his colleagues responded to the depredations

of a band of thieves.

But it's mostly more routine with our reports on various sub-district offices totting up registered births

marriages and deaths, praising local officials for keeping their files in order, wagging his finger at those who don't,

and when necessary, requesting additional office furniture.

And the routine as much as the drama makes the report extremely valuable for historians.

When Rida drove through the Kürt Dağı, a couple of years before the Syrian government arabised its name to Jabal al-Akrad.

The Franco-Turkish border delineation committee had only recently committed its work, making the district a part of a new

state called Syria that had been established after the First World War. And in his report we see the bureaucratic apparatus of the Syrian

state reaching down to village level in a way that made that new border meaningful as a lived reality for people

in the region.

It's visible not just in Rida's alarm at the cross border incursions of a band of robbers, but also in his officious attention to bureaucratic procedure.

And in the limited historiography on modern Syria, the Syrian state itself remains one of the great

blind spots especially for the mandate period.

At a time when some of uh, some Syrian archives are inaccessible

and others must be presumed destroyed, Rida's report suggests ways for us to see the Syrian state in the mandate period.

Now what does the historiography of modern Syria gain from following him on his journey?

There are two common problems in accounts of the mandate period.

First, a tendency to take nationalist discourse at its word, accepting that colonialism brought about tamziq al-watan,

the dismemberment of the fatherland, for example, without asking how that fatherland came to be constituted

as a national territory or how people came to believe that it was theirs.

And second, a tendency to assume that the French high commission was the state. But the high commission wasn't a state. The high commissioner was

certainly the dominant political figure in Syria throughout these years and the French military and intelligence services did most of the work of

claiming the monopoly of the legitimate use of violence. But the everyday state in Syria, that's to say an administrative

bureaucracy intervening regularly, excuse me, and increasingly in the social and economic lives of the country's

people was not French, but Syrian.

It was constituted as the administration of a nominally independent state out of Ottoman fabric

and it was staffed by Syrians like Khayri Rida reporting upwards to Syrian ministers.

At the top, French control was heavy-handed, lower down, much less so. And the Syrian nation

that nationalists sought to define, defend, and lead against the French gained its

territorial and institutional existence from the everyday work of bureaucrats, police, or teachers

in cities, towns, and villages from Damascus to the Kürt Dağı.

But it's hard to research the Syrian state in the mandate period published sources like newspapers are preoccupied

with the high politics of the struggle between colonialism and nationalism.

And the surviving archival record at the historical document center in Damascus was fragmentary when I visited it before the civil war,

more gap than archive. And I don't know what's happened to it since then.

So this paper is a practical response to a significant methodological problem: inaccessibility of archives or

non-existence of archives. It's not just about Rida's journey and what it tells us about the everyday state in a rural district

at the edges of the new state of Syria.

It also uses his reports to sketch out the contours of a ghost archive of documents that once existed but are now lost, which give us a sense

of the nature of the Syrian state in the 30s and how it functioned or at least how it

was meant to function.

It considers Rida himself as a self-consciously representative example of a new type of person, the Syrian state bureaucrat. and it tries

to suggest ways of studying that state in the absence of archives. Rida's report is a single seven-page document but read carefully,

it can help us find the Syrian state in the French mandate period.

So what did Rida and his companions see and do as they traveled to Kürt Dağı.

The journey took them from north to south from Bulbul to Rajo to al-Hamam. We'll follow them from north to south proceeding through

four themes as we go: border security, civil affairs, filing systems, and accounting practices.

This sounds like it goes from exciting to less exciting but there's a whiff of scandal over the bureaucratic routine

and accounting practices that should keep things interesting.

A word about the photos first. This isn't Rida's car, but it's only a year or two after his

journey on a road he might have driven along.

The photos I'm using in this presentation are from the Library of Congress in D.C and the Albert Kahn museum near Paris. The

former, a black and white from the mid-30s.

The latter are autochrome about 15 years earlier.

They all show this region around Aleppo in northern Syria in the interwar years. They're prone to orientalize it though.

So if I show an image of women weaving by hand outside beehive houses, it's worth remembering that interwar

Syria wasn't as timeless and unmodern as it appears to be in some of these photo collections.

Interspersed with these photos are extracts from the report photographed for me in 2007 at the Syrian archives.

Now let's start with border security.

This was the first thing Rida wrote about in paragraph one of his carefully numbered and lettered report.

The eastern villagers of his district qada', he wrote,

were exposed to havoc caused by rubber bands crossing over from Turkish territory, easily slipping over the border at night.

These bands most notably the one led by the notorious Ali Karu‘a al-Shirqi carried out active robbery,

plunder, and murder against the persons and properties of Syrian subjects before returning to their base in turkey.

Rida and the gendarme chief accompanying him decided to increase the policing of the border villages but the

permeable border was only part of the problem. More pressing was the attitude of local people.

Ali Karu‘a's wicked gang evidently had plenty of friends on the Syrian side of the new border. Rida and his companions had to summon the

heads of no less than no fewer than 40 villagers and warn them of evil consequences

should they harbor such convicts and fugitives.

Now Rida had a clear sense of the meaning of that border as a jurisdictional barrier between areas of Syrian and Turkish state authority

and also of the meaning of Syrian subjecthood as a legal and political identity informing, entailing conformity with Syrian state law.

But was this understanding shared by villagers living in the kaza he administered?

Perhaps not.

Their sheltering of al-Shirqi his band suggests that they took a different view of the border and of their own status as Syrian subjects.

But precisely through the state practices that individuals like Rida and his companions enacted-

the inspection tool, the stern words to village leaders and the border patrols- the syrianness of this region was

steadily increasing.

The border was becoming more meaningful on the ground and then the lives and minds of the people living near it. And their

status as Syrian subjects was influencing the shape of their lives whether they liked it or not.

This passage also provides our first indication of the ghost archive, as I'm calling it. Rida wrote to

his superior that he had already mentioned many things about the activities of these robbers.

"In the daily reports I have sent you successively in their time."

These daily reports are lost.

His report on the inspection tour was already an isolated fragment when I saw it in 2007.

I think this long opening paragraph about border security is probably the reason it was kept.

But from passing references like these, and we'll hear plenty more of them, we get a sense of what must once have

been a much larger documentary record generated by regular reporting procedures.

Rida's district was one among several in the governorate of Aleppo, which was one among several in Syria.

If every kaymakam like Rida was compiling daily reports and longer occasional documents

for the governor, there must once have been an accumulation of Syrian state documents to mirror the hundreds of boxes of

French documents we can still view in the archives of the high commission.

A large proportion of those documents would have been produced by local officials in small offices

in out of the way places like Bulbul, Rajo, and al-Hamam.

And they would have included the kind of papers that Rida inspected, starting in each case with our next

theme: the civil register. The state's record of births, marriages. and deaths.

Civil affairs, ahwal al-madaniyyah, were the first thing Rida reported on in each sub-district or

nahiah that he visited. In Bulbul. registered births came to 85 recorded in an orderly fashion in conformity with

the census law while deaths came to 33 registered in the original and the duplicate.

Three marriages and one divorce had been recorded.

These recording practices followed on from Ottoman precedence but they were now carried out by and for

the purposes of the Syrian state in accordance with the Syrian census law.

Rida referred to that law and expected his subordinates to follow the procedures it laid out as they went about their work.

And this kind of granular information gathering about the population down to individual level both characterizes and makes possible

the modern developmentalist state. It depends on documenting individual identity and we see the concern to do

that in Rida's complaints about documentary shortcomings at Rajo.

There, the two relevant registers the original and the duplicate, included details of 116 births but 10 of

them didn't give the signature or thumbprint of the person declaring the birth.

There were similar problems with the death register and the marriages.

This is another way in which this isolated surviving document indicates the existence of a vastly larger documentary record.

All of the certificates and registers that Rida mentions and their equivalents in every other sub-district of

office in Syria, all called into being by the sentence law, as well as thousands of communiques from

the interior ministry sent out to every district if not every sub-district.

They all once existed just like my baby's recently produced birth certificate exists in my hand and in Glasgow city council's hands and

etc. Most of that's vanished now. still, Rida's complaint about incomplete or improperly filed documentation

highlight his expectation that the records would indeed be available and complete.

The documentary record of individual identity that states gather isn't just a

matter for the state bureaucracy.

By the mid 20th century state-backed identity documentation made an enormous difference to an

individual's life in Syria as elsewhere. Even in the mandate period, it defined access not only to jobs in

the growing state bureaucracy but also to services such as education.

It's one thing to gather information though, whether about individual subjects or about the activities and transactions

of the local bureaucracy.

Storing it so it can be retrieved, that is filing and eventually archiving it, is quite another.

And Rida was very concerned with orderly filing.

Filing systems are our next theme.

At Bulbul, all was well. The declarations made for the registration of births, marriages, and deaths were not only in conformity with the law,

that's to say complete, signed and stamped, but also placed in their relevant binders. The sub-district office

had 15 of these within which incoming and outgoing correspondence had also been properly filed,

indicating, as Rida said, that the sub-district officer– the mudiriyah– is carrying out his duties and attending

to the matters that are his concern.

Now the fact that Rida numbered individual documents and binders also highlights the very

rudimentary bureaucratic infrastructure then present in a small place like Bulbul.

His final comment about this village noted that the sub-district office had no furniture at all

and asked his boss to allocate if possible a sofa and two wicker chairs.

Now if the office at Bulbul was spartan but orderly, at his other destination, Rajo and al-Hamam, things were less well organized.

We've already seen that the duplicates of many death and marriage certificates

were missing. Declarations of births, marriages, and deaths were at least in the right binders.

Incoming correspondence was not the sub-district office had no ledger to

record its own possession such as furniture, making it impossible to distinguish between the private property of state officials

and the public property of their offices, one of the key distinctions that characterizes the modern bureau, the modern bureaucracy.

And this wasn't just a theoretical problem. the sub-district officer at Rajo was located

in the private home of the previous sub-district chief.

And we'll see in a moment some of the problems that caused.

In al-Hamam, the situation was different again.

The documentation on civil affairs there was complete and correctly filed, but the number of births, marriages, and deaths recorded

was much smaller than the other two offices, where they used a table shown on the screen to show the difference.

And this kind of statistical comparison and this kind of statistical thinking themselves depend on the regular and

orderly collection, storage, and retrieval of census data.

There are key components of policy formation in modern states. And Rida himself interpreted this data,

though not by referring to the sub-district's total population, size, or some other demographic characteristic.

Instead he worried that the sub-district officer in al-Hamam wasn't doing enough to register all

births and deaths.

Whether he feared negligence or deliberate distortion of the figures, the concern itself was reasonable. Only a

few years later, the demonstration of this would literally divide the village.

Ehen the Sanjack of Alexandretta was handed over to the Turkish republic, the significant numerical presence of

Turkish speakers had justified a special administrative status for this bit of French mandate Syria since the french arrived.

And it was ceded to turkey in 1937-38 after a carefully managed plebiscite that overstated their demographic weight.

The new border ran right through al-Hamam.

The rest of the subject district offices paperwork meanwhile was a mess.

"The number of binders is great," Rida lamented, "but for no good reason."

He didn't understand the logic governing the organization of correspondence with governing, government departments or material on

subjects like irrigation or forestry. Documents were anyway filed haphazardly which prevents the person searching from

quickly finding what they were looking for.

Poor administration meant that administrative control was weak. An important part of modern state's work in producing what

James C Scott famously termed legibility of both territory irrigation forestry and of population–census– takes place

within the state bureaucracy itself. In offices like the sub-district office at al-Hamam. First coherent government

structured by legislation like the census law requires local officers to organize their paperwork in ways that

need to be, if not uniform, then at least comparable and mutually comprehensible.

The census law put in place by the Syrian government should produce files

on the census in the ministry of the interior in Damascus, in the offices of each governorate, and in the districts and sub-district

offices where census data was actually recorded and stored.

An official gathering information on irrigation or forestry should be able to find it at whichever

office across the country he visited.

And second within those categories, documents had to be properly filed.

It wasn't good enough for documents on one subject to end up in files about another. It wasn't good

enough for a register of incoming correspondents to not receive a document if the document itself could neither be

found nor accounted for.

And if accounting for documents was important, accounting for money was even more so.

Our final theme is accounting practices. Rida's report provides an insight into the financial functioning of the

Syrian state at local level and also into notions of moral probity, and good character of state

officials, of the reputation of state offices, and of proper relations between them and

the people they governed.

Rida made no comment on accounts at Bulbul, his first stop.

Perhaps because it was so small. But the municipalities of Rajo and al-Hamam evidently had a turnover of tens of

thousands of piasters. Their funds were divided between a strong box or safe for sunduq

and in the case of al-Hamam the Syrian bank.

And at both places there were serious problems with their accounting practices.

At Rajo, the headline figures at least were correct. Incoming revenue, less expenditure totaled twelve

thousand four hundred and sixty three and a half piasters.

And that's how much money was in the strong box. But beyond that the problems began.

Procedures intended to avoid corruption were not being correctly observed. Things like numbering the receipt books, pages,

getting payees to counter sign a receipt stub confirming the sum they'd been paid

so that a local official didn't charge more and pocket the difference.

Rida doesn't identify the specific regulations that stipulated these procedures but he does call them standard practice

al-'adah. Accounts management was also careless and records were incomplete.

And there were some historic mispayments or at least that's how Rida saw them, which reveal more about

how, where, and through whom the local government functioned.

They included an unauthorized purchase of a fire pump by the previous head of the municipality.

Since the municipality and the gendarmerie were both based in his own home. He'd used public funds to protect it

from fire.

Now in major centers like Damascus, modernizing conceptions of the state bureaucracy as an

autonomous set of institutions and public office as distinct from the private individuals who held it

had been manifested architecturally for decades in new public buildings since the

Ottoman period. But in the villages, this process was still in its infancy.

And from rigorous complaints about poor practice, we also get some hints about the personnel of local government,

though here his own report is less than clear.

There were some problem problematic payments to local officials these were disgraceful,

fahish jiddan, he wrote.

An evidence that matters were not proceeding in accordance with the systems and laws in place.

His observations about accounting irregularities show that he had in mind a clear idea

not only of the rules and procedures that should be followed

and the practices that should be observed, but also of what kind of person an

official of the local government should be.

Illegal payments for the building of a lime kiln had been the cause of rumors. Fees paid to the municipality

have not been properly deposited. "This I think damages the reputation of the staff and

opens a space for hearsay and rumors.

Some people were apparently being trusted to pay fees to the municipality

retrospectively but hadn't done so", which as he said

"throws wide open a door of give and take between the municipality and his debtors."

Now to function properly, local government required not just an overarching legal framework like the census law, a bureaucratic

infrastructure like the buildings the staff, the filing systems and correctly observed

procedures and practices.

It also needed the right kind of person to staff its offices.

At Bulbul, Rida spoke well of the subdistrict's officer: "I heard nothing to mar his reputation; his relations with

his superiors are excellent and his links with the police are good but within the bounds of police

regulations."

More surprisingly, Rida made similar observations about the personnel at Rajo,

explaining away the many problems he'd identified as resulting from administrative

inexperience, carelessness, or the actions of past office holders, not as things that could

or should be punished in the present.

And even at al-Hamam where there was extensive evidence of suspicious activity, he was oddly cautious.

A hefty sum had been spent on renovating the baths from which the village took

its name, which were shown in a slide and we way back there.

But without the public works department being consulted or the contract being

put out to tender, in other words, the money had been given to a mate of a local official,

Rida also details but in very confusing terms a curious affair relating to municipal transit fees on fuel supplied by the

Socony vacuum company of New York and Shell Oil in ways that present

details of the case to his superior and something like 20 000 piasters went astray. But leave to the governor of Aleppo, his boss,

the responsibility of deciding what if anything should be done about it. Now, if Rida's discourse about his local

local subordinates reveals an understanding of how a Syrian bureaucrat should be,

his own behavior hints at another distinct bureaucratic type– the back covering official who makes

sure his own conduct cannot be questioned while not rocking the boat

by doing anything about the questionable conduct of others.

And having finished his report with a frankly confusing account of this affair,

Rida left the matter in his superior's hands and signed off.

Now where does all this leave us? Oops.

What have we learned from following Rida on his journey?

His report is enough to give us a sense of the shape in outline of the Syrian state bureaucracy from governor at down to

village level, of its personnel, as well as the laws and procedures that govern their actions or were meant to.

It shows the scope as well as the limits of the state's ambitions and activities

at local level. It gives a more or less explicit insight into a mid-ranking bureaucrat's attitudes to the people he governed,

and an implicit one into their attitudes to being

governed. It suggests Rida's understanding of the sort of person a local official

should be, a local official, excuse me, As well as a sense again implicitly of

the sort of person he actually was. It always was a he in this period to my knowledge. and these

are not merely matters of local interest in the history of the Kürt Dağı.

They help us to understand how the Syrian state became a meaningful presence, unifying a territory now defined as

Syria, By its interventions in the lives of people now defined as Syrians.

Learning more about this would deepen our understanding of the politics of

nationalism in Syria but it would tell us about much more than that.

And some sources do remain accessible that can allow us to explore these lines of inquiry.

For example, in the annual French reports to the League of Nations there is ample, if tellingly skewed detail, on the

activities and budgets of the state under mandates down to the level of municipalities.

In the archives of the high commission, although they've been closed for a

good while now for various reasons, there is a great deal of documentation direct or indirect on the Syrian state

that has been neglected in the historiography that's too focused on the high commission itself and the

political actions of its own agencies, especially its intelligence services and coercive forces.

Literary sources, press sources in Arabic, and oral histories recorded closer to the time

like those Abdullah Hanna recorded in his long career could all be revisited to look beyond

the common focus on nationalist discourse and the anti-colonial struggle.

And a richer and more textured understanding of the political sociology of the Syrian state

would be the result of that inquiry. And it would be worth having not only for what it tells us about

Syria's past, but also for the future. even now years into a gruesome and horrendously destructive civil war,

most Syrian actors are still fighting for the Syrian state that took form not just on the map but on the

ground and in people's minds in the 1920s and 30s.

With the exception of Islamic state now seemingly eliminated as a territorial force,

and the Kurdish YPG whose enclave of Afrin came under Turkish assault as I first started drafting

the article on which this paper is based.

With these exceptions armed actors from the Syrian regime to the Islamist extremes of the opposition have remained committed to

the Syrian nation-state as the locus of their aspirations.

Even Islamist actors that had earlier seemed to share islamic state's disdain for the region's Sykes-Picot borders,

have reverted to a Syrian national framework in recognition of the fact that for most Syrians, that

is the framework that counts. And when the Syrian war finally ends, that is the state that will need to be rebuilt.

And I will stop there. thank you. I want to thank you. That was a wonderful lecture.

And um, this is a good way to kick off the series this year.

Um, so I'm going to leave it with that

Thank you, thank you very much.