Independence came in 1946, when my father was about to enter the University of Damascus. The new government began building the administration and the army as the two bastions of national sovereignty. But the 1948 war in Palestine, which Syria participated in, interrupted the project and uncovered its structural and ideological weaknesses.

The university students nonetheless rushed to defend Palestine. My father and his comrades, who were known for their crew cuts, which earned them the sobriquet al-mahaliq (“the crew-cut men”), joined the Arab Liberation Army led by Fawzi al-Qawuqji, the Lebanese military organizer and Arab nationalist. They ultimately witnessed the stunning defeat of the combined Arab armies in Palestine against the so-called “Zionist gangs” and their humiliating retreat beyond the borders of the United Nations partition map. The mahaliq returned to Syria as transformed young men, convinced that Arab regimes had to change after their shameful failure to defend Palestine. What they and countless other young Arabs concluded is that salvation would only come from the unification of the great Arab nation, fragmented as it was into small and powerless states by the colonial scheming of Britain and France.

The fifties were the decade of political activism for my father’s generation. Many of the young and educated joined the parties teeming on the national stage: established and bourgeois parties such as the People’s Party and the National Bloc, along with new and ideological parties such as the Baath Party, the Communist Party, the Muslim Brotherhood, and the Syrian Social Nationalist Party. The mahaliq chose not to belong to any of these parties, even though their pan-Arab beliefs made them lean toward the budding Arab Nationalist Movement. But they practiced politics on the ground by, for instance, rejecting attempts by the country’s military rulers to threaten the autonomy of their college. They once closed the University of Damascus by blocking its access routes in protest over the arrest of Baathist students, chief among them Nureddin al-Atassi, a future mediocre Syrian president, even though the mahaliq were not particularly fond of the Baathists. They did not lift their blockade until the president of the university, the great thinker Constantin Zureiq, promised to pressure the government to release the detainees.

At the end of 1953, the mahaliq attended a graduation ceremony presided over by the president of the republic, the newly minted dictator Adib al-Shishakli, and stood in front of him on the podium with their hands clasped behind their backs, declaring, “I refuse to accept a degree in law in a country that does not respect the rule of law.” They managed to embarrass the Syrian leader before the august audience—an audacious act that landed some of them in prison, though my father escaped by hiding in an acquaintance’s office. In any event, his friends were released after only a few days. Arab dictators at that time still had some political wisdom, and some sense of humor.