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Transformations of a Memory of Tyranny in Syria: From Jamal Pasha to ‘Id al-Shuhada’, 1914–2000

Since the 1980s, both the public sector and academia have become saturated with references to individual and collective memory. Primarily, this has been attributed to the rise of multiculturalism, the politics of victimization and regret, or the realization that the past can be (re)shaped in the present. Analogously, sociology has moved from the study of social structures and normative systems to that of practice, extending the functionalist characterization of culture as norms, values and attitudes, to culture as the constitutive symbolic dimension of all social processes. This new line of interpretation now also prevails in Middle East scholarship that examines the ways in which modern day regimes view the past. The events of the First World War and the appearance of ‘new’ countries in the Middle East created opportunities for a broad spectrum of reconstructed memories. One such instance is the oppressive government of Jamal Pasha (1914–17) in Syria and Lebanon during the First World War. This episode in Syrian history, which took place immediately prior to the collapse of the Ottoman Empire, the beginnings of the Arab National Movement and the struggle between the Arabs and the Turks, remains a focus of discourse in the Middle East in general and in Syria and Lebanon in particular. Jamal is remembered not only among Arabs but also among Armenians, Kurds and in the Yishuv. In this article I define the social construction of memory as the varieties of transformations through which memories are shaped at different periods. I show how the social construction of memory is used by political elites to advance political interests through the creation of national memories. I consider both individual and collective memory to be structured by political arrangements, and see this as a process rather than a product. In line with other authors, I define collective memory as ‘the gathering of elements of the past, and joining them together by and for the ‘‘public’’. What the public creates is not merely a cluster of individual memories because the whole is greater than the sum of its parts. Collective memory is thus constructed through the actions of enlightened groups and individuals.’ Thus, memory is not fixed or static but fluid. It is ‘not an un-changing vessel for carrying the past into the present, memory is a process, not a thing, and its works differently at different points in time’. It arises out of the activities of elite groups as Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 48, No. 1, 73–88, January 2012