Sami Moubayed - East of the Grand Ummayad: Freemasonry in Damascus 1868-1968

A fascinating account of a hidden part of Syrian history. Sami Moubayed unveils that many key figures in Syrian nationalist politics were members of the Fraternity, and that from the early 1920s until the late 1950s, Damascus was ruled, almost continuously, by Freemasons. Syrian Freemasonry has never been studied before in such depth.

Nikolaos van Dam

The Struggle for Power in Syria

Sami Moubayed is one of the most prominent, still young historians of Syria. His writings have become even more important today since they help us better understand the richness and deep-rooted values of Syrian society that have moved to the background in this dark decade of destruction. East of the Grand Umayyad is a wellcrafted book based on old documents and oral accounts. It shows once more the tradition of tolerant and open-minded thinking in old Syria that cut across sectarian lines. The Freemasons of Damascus are a prime example of personalities who transcended their primordial roles and based their judgment on conviction and not ascription. An important lesson for todays challenges.

Carsten Wieland

Syria - A Decade of Lost Chances

East of the Grand Umayyad disputes Eurocentric views of global radicalism in general and Freemasonry in particular. Moubayed describes a fraternity that united men of different races and religions across the Americas, Europe, and the Middle East. He then shows how bitter political divisions that were local to Damascus and Beirut tore at and overrode universal fraternal sympathies.

Masons were deeply involved in the cascade of coups that beset Syria after independence. Did these coups weaken the young democracy to the point where the Baath takeover in 1963 and the long political deep freeze that followed were inevitable? Or were they and their Masonic connection entirely incidental?

Moubayeds book wont disappoint readers of Middle East history and global politics. Its also essential reading for those interested in the countrys military takeovers.

Drew H. Kinney

Cradle of Intrigue: The Secret Plots against Syria in the Arab Cold War

Dedication

To Hala, with love

East of the Grand Ummayad: Freemasonry in Damascus 1868-1968 by Sami Moubayed

2017 Sami Moubayed Cune Press, Seattle 2018 First Edition

Hardback ISBN 9781614571599 $29.95

Paperback ISBN 9781614571605 $19.95

Kindle ISBN 9781614571629 $ 9.99

eBook ISBN 9781614571612 $ 9.99

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Moubayed, Sami M., author.

East of the Grand Ummayad : Freemasons in Damascus 1868-1965 / Sami Moubayed.

pages cm

ISBN 978-1-61457-159-9 (hardback) -- ISBN 978-1-61457-160-5

(pbk.)

Freemasonry--Syria--Damascus--History. 2. Freemasons--Syria-- Biography. 3. Syria--History--20th century. I. Title.

HS447.S9M68 2015 366.1095691440904--dc23

2015027034

Contents

Freemasonry books sell like hotcakes in Damascusthey always have. It is the one topic that seemingly everyone thinks they know everything aboutfrom drivers and street vendors to university professors, scholars, and senior figures in the ruling Baath Party. For nearly forty years books on Freemasonry have been in high demand in Damascus bookstores, surpassed only by cookbooks, books of horoscopes, and the Holy Quran.

A handful of Masonic books are cranked out annually and marketed at the Damascus Book Fair, a state-sponsored event hosted by the Ministry of Culture. Their covers often show Masonic tools dripping with blood, side-by-side with the Star of David. This literature accuses the Ancient Craft of destroying Islam, bringing down the Ottoman Empire, and initiating the French occupation of Damascus in the immediate aftermath of World War I. These books say that Freemasons were behind the French bombing of the Syrian capital in 1925 and 1945not to mention the 1948 creation of the State of Israel. More recently, a rising chorus of imaginative journalists and self-proclaimed scholars have accused Freemasonry of triggering the so-called Arab Spring of 2011.

Most of the accusations are made by Baathists, Communists, Marxists, Arab Nationalists, Conservatives, and Islamists. The Palestinian militia Hamas even explicitly warns against Freemasonry in its founding charter. Based in Damascus for many years, the Hamas charter mentions Freemasonry three times, always as a Zionist front with cells of subversion and saboteurs. Humans, after all, love to find scapegoats. They love to blame their disappointments, limitations, and personal weaknesses on others. This is common practice, dating back to the earliest historical records. When people get together in groups it is the same. Nationsrun by ordinary peoplehave also tended to find scapegoats to deflect blame for their mistakes. Freemasonry has been a tailor-made scapegoat for many Syrian and Arab writers, explaining an entire century of failed states and policies. When weak or in doubt, all one had to do is put blame on Freemasons.

Syrian Freemasons meeting in the Old City of Damascus at the turn of the twentieth century. From their attire, the picture includes Muslim clerics, Christian bishops, and urban notables.

Anti-Mason authors usually have an abundance of evidence at their disposal to use when pointing fingers at Freemasonry, much of it from the United States, Britain, and France. The US dollar bill, after all, has the All-Seeing Eye, an old symbol of the Masonic Order. This is the paper money that controls the world.

The first US president, George Washington, was a Freemason, and he wore his regalia when laying the cornerstone of the US Capitol in 1793. A painting of him in Masonic attire is well-known and appears in nearly all Syrian books about Freemasonry. Some of the other Founding Fathers of the United States were also Freemasons. Theodore Roosevelt and Franklin D. Roosevelt were both ranking Freemasons, and so were British monarchs King Edward VII and King George VI. All of them were accused in Syrian books of being agents of world Jewry. Making the anti-Masonic story all the more sensational, Prime Minister Winston Churchill, was also a Freemason who had been initiated at the Studholme Lodge of London in 1909. Surely men of such high caliber must have conspired behind closed doors to create a New World Order.

The Masons membership has included men in every walk of life, from revolutionaries to conservatives, from artists to engineers to army officers and history-making statesmen. Hollywood stars like Douglas Fairbanks and Clark Gable were Masons, and so was the legendary Oliver Hardy, who starred with his partner Stan Laurel in a 1933 parody of the Masonic craft, Sons of the Desert . The timeless Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart was a Freemason, and so were people like Harry Houdini, the renowned illusionist and stunt performer, famed in the early twentieth century for performing gripping escape acts. The crme de la crme of French society was almost entirely ultra-Masonic, with statesmen and philosophers like Lafayette, Voltaire, and Mirabeau all being members of the Ancient Craft. So was Gustave Eiffel, the French civil engineer and architect who constructed the Eiffel Tower in 1889 and Frederic Bartholdi, the French sculptor of the State of Liberty. Freemasonry in the eighteenth century was the child of European Enlightenment, after all, which explains its association with the American and French revolutions.