The French Mandate came after 1918, and there were several forms of popular reactions regarding the position on this Mandate, depending on the relationship of the generations to the Ottoman era, the French era, and the Arab Quraysh era, There is a generation that lived through the end of the Ottoman era and witnessed the French era until the end, and there are those who were born after 1918 and lived through the French Mandate and then the national rule with all its flaws and shortcomings, There are those who were born after 1946 and lived through the convulsions, disturbances, and setbacks of the national rule up to this moment.
The first group, who suffered under Ottoman rule, had a positive view of the French Mandate, which clearly contributed to the modernization of the country: roads, schools, judiciary, systems, elections, and relative freedom of opinion, The second group, born after 1918, witnessed many problems, including the establishment of states in Syria, the emergence of nationalist movements such as the Syrian Social Nationalist Party, and the emergence of the Muslim Brotherhood movement, These groups were lost, not knowing where the setbacks were coming from or how to avoid them, The third group, after 1946, is the group that accompanied the increasing decline to the point of the country’s disappearance!
Many members of the third category have recently felt the need to place Syria under trusteeship or mandate, and their humility has reached a suspicious level, Let whoever is willing come, come! Even the thought of the nationality of the trustee has not received the attention of those who want to stop the decline in any way and by any force!
The Syrian state was born after 1918 in the context of the arrangements made by the victorious Allies in the First World War, and Syria was placed under the French Mandate, Here it is necessary to note the difference between the Mandate and colonialism, with regard to the occupation of countries or regions by a foreign state, The Mandate is considered a type of trusteeship to qualify peoples to practice self-governance,These peoples were ruled absolutely by the Quraysh and the Ottomans for fourteen centuries, and they did not have the opportunity to build self-awareness and accumulate sufficient experience to practice self-governance, The Mandate is a very different form from colonialism, as the duration of the Mandate is limited and its tasks are defined, The French Mandate accomplished in a quarter of a century more than the Quraysh colonialism and the Ottoman colonialism accomplished by thousands of times, In fact, the Ottomans and the Quraysh did not accomplish anything during 1400 years except negatives.
The French Mandate cannot be evaluated without comparison with the Ottoman presence, which the majority of Syrians consider one of the ugliest and most despicable forms of colonialism,There are those who consider it one of the most glorious periods in Syrian history, based on a sectarian background, the group of those who acquiesce to the Ottoman Sultanate!!!!! They even consider it better than the era of independence, These people started their passion for the Sultanate because it was Sunni and therefore acceptable from a religious internationalist standpoint. Their starting point is purely sectarian and goes back to the conflicts that occurred 1440 years ago regarding the right to the Caliphate… Umayyads, Abbasids, and others.
The differentiation in evaluating the French era depends on the comparison with the Ottoman era, By comparison, some found that the brutality practiced by the Ottoman Sultanate was incomparable to anything else, as the Ottomans monopolized evil in all its forms, The Caliphate monopolized repression that surpassed the repression of the Janissary Mamluks, These people found in the French Mandate repressive practices that cannot be compared with Ottoman criminality and brutality, despite the French military occupation of the country and despite the presence of the Senegalese unit specializing in suppressing demonstrations, There was a significant decline in the level of brutality, not an elimination of brutality.
The French Mandate replaced the Ottoman law of the jungle with laws that limited chaos and established regulatory constitutions for life in various fields, not only in the cities but also in the desert, where the pace of raids practiced by the “nomadic Arab” tribes in the Ottoman era decreased, In addition, there was a remarkable spread of education and the construction of schools, roads and bridges, The generation of intellectuals who graduated from French and national universities was the generation that contributed for a short period to laying the foundations of the modern Syrian state after independence, Had this period been longer, it was expected that Syria in 1918 would have been different from the Syria we know now, i.e., the Syria of the Umayyads, the Syria of Ibn Taymiyyah and Wahhabi thought!
