STATES OF SACRED SURVEILLANCE: ADMINISTRATION AND GOVERNANCE OF WAQF IN THE EVOLUTION OF STATE POWER AND CAPACITY IN SYRIA, 1920-1960

Abstract

This dissertation examines the relationship between pious endowment property, or waqf, and the development of state power and authority in Syria between 1920 and 1960. I argue that waqf was an integral component of the evolution of state power in Syria, and a critical, if overlooked node and driver of how colonial and postcolonial governments developed and implemented critical state capacities and governance, particularly institutional surveillance. This dynamic buttressed the state’s administrative, political and economic power and authority. The 1920-1946 French Mandate in Syria and Lebanon was consequential, but only part of a longer and locally rooted historical process related to late-Ottoman reform. Waqf, its role in society, and people’s relationships to it were fundamentally transformed; waqf also channeled the course and direction of developing forms of state surveillance power. The durability of waqf relative to political regimes provides a unique opportunity to analyze the evolution and development of state capacity in Syria and a potential model with broader applications. These arguments rest on an extensive range of primary and secondary sources in Arabic, French, and English encompassing the official archives of colonial powers, international organizations, the popular press, and memoirs. Furthermore, the original research of this dissertation contributes new empirical sources including oral histories, a cache of unique postcolonial Syrian court records, and materials from a private family archive all of which are analyzed here for the first time. Together, they offer new insights related to Ottoman, French Mandate, French colonial, and postcolonial Syrian history, Islamic pious waqf, and Cold War history as well as the role of surveillance, fraud, gender, and citizenship in these contexts.