A quiet death in Beirut...

Damascus was, throughout history, a cosmopolitan city of culture and commerce. It preserved this character during the long Ottoman centuries, even enhancing and sharpening it. Even as the Empire edged toward dissolution, the rise of prominent families and notables within the population of Damascus continued. Among them were the Quwatli family, who migrated from Baghdad to Damascus in the second half of the 1700s.

The Quwatli family, whose main source of wealth was trade, had established very strong trading networks on the Baghdad-Damascus and Damascus-Arabia routes. The district of Shaghur, where they settled in Damascus, was located just south of the historic walls and was home to a considerable number of the city's elite. Consequently, the wealth they acquired also opened the doors for them to the circles of politics, culture, and art. After 1860, members of the Quwatli family, who established farms in Ghouta, one of Damascus's most beautiful districts, began to rise to important positions within the Damascene bureaucracy during the reign of Sultan Abdulhamid II. While Ahmed Quwatli took over the management of the agricultural bank, Murad Quwatli was appointed chairman of the city council, and Hasan Quwatli became president of the Damascus Chamber of Commerce and Agriculture. The family's son, Shukri Quwatli, born on October 21, 1891, would go on to become one of the most significant figures in the modern history of Syria.

Thanks to his family's means, Shukri Quwatli received a distinguished primary education and was sent to Istanbul for higher education in 1908. Having learned Turkish perfectly during the five years he spent in the city, by the time Shukri graduated from the Mekteb-i Mülkiye (Ottoman School of Administrative Sciences) in 1913, the storm that would dismantle the Empire was about to break. Quwatli returned to Damascus and began his duties within the Ottoman bureaucracy, but the following year the balances in the Arab lands would begin to shift, and the young Shukri would find himself caught in the waves of Arab nationalism. Joining the Al-Fatat society, the projection of the Young Turks on the Arab front, Quwatli held no political animosity toward the Ottoman Empire; in the post-war period, he positioned himself alongside the nationalists against the French mandate.

Persistently persecuted by the French, and even having his property confiscated and being sent into exile in 1920, Shukri Quwatli returned to Syria in 1936 and assumed the post of finance minister. His personal stance and his family's influence carried Quwatli to the presidency of Syria in 1943, and during his term the country gained its independence from France (April 17, 1946). However, in 1949, Quwatli was overthrown by a military coup staged by Syrian general Husni al-Za'im, who was backed by Israel, and was sent into exile once again. Returning to his country in 1955, Quwatli again shouldered the responsibility of the presidency, but in 1958 he relinquished his seat for the sake of establishing the "United Arab Republic" under pressure and persuasion from Gamal Abdel Nasser. A new military coup in Syria in 1961 dissolved the union with Egypt; the Baathist coup of 1963 began the most horrifying period in Syria's modern history. Shukri Quwatli went into exile yet again and settled in Beirut. This was his final exile…

The Arab world, having suffered a heavy defeat against Israel in the Six-Day War of 1967, would not quickly shake off the shock of the rout. But one of those who felt the weight of the unfolding process most acutely was Shukri Quwatli. While following developments from his home in Beirut, Quwatli received the news of the occupation of the Golan Heights; following days of severe depression, he died of a heart attack on June 30. The Baathist regime's attempts to prevent his burial in Damascus, in accordance with his will, were overcome through the diplomatic pressure of Saudi Arabia's King Faisal. After a crowded funeral prayer held at the Umayyad Mosque on July 1, Shukri Quwatli's body was laid to rest in the historic Bab al-Saghir Cemetery, located in the district where he was born and had lived.

My reason for remembering and reminding others of Shukri Quwatli—who is still remembered with mercy in Syrians' collective memory as one of the rare stars that shone before the Baathist darkness—was a piece of news that came from Beirut last Wednesday: the last surviving child of Quwatli, Hana Hanım, had breathed her last. Hana Quwatli's body was laid to rest in Baathist-darkness-free Syria, in the Damascus district where she spent her childhood, right next to her father.

The children of Syria are returning to their homeland, one by one. Some on foot, some inside coffins. But in their homeland, which has attained its freedom, all of their hearts are now very much at ease.