Commemorating the “Martyr of Arabism” in Post-Colonial Time and Space: The Symbolic Power of Syrian Staff Colonel Adnan al-Malki’s Remains

On April 22, 1955, Colonel ‘Adnan al-Malki, the Deputy Chief of Staff of the Syrian Army, was assassinated in Damascus. This event initiated a prolonged political crisis and inspired several years of state-orchestrated media drama informed by themes of nationalist martyrdom, victimology, and commemoration. Official actions included the reconfiguration of the post-independence commemorative calendar to include holidays (“Festivals of ‘Adnan”) devoted exclusively to the remembrance of al-Malki, the dedication of a “secular shrine” featuring al-Malki’s blood-soaked uniform at the Homs Military Academy, and renaming in al-Malki’s honor a major traffic artery, public square, and neighborhood in the new, affluent north-western sector of Damascus. Most importantly, the Syrian state staged two lavish funeral processions and memorial services for al-Malki, the second ending with the final internment of his remains in a specially built memorial complex complete with plaza, peristyle, eternal flame, and honor guard, the focal point of the new al-Malki Square. The events of ‘Adnan al-Malki’s life and death were exploited to valorize Syria’s ambitious officer class and reify their preeminent role in Syrian politics, to temporally structure the celebration of Syria’s struggle for independence from the French (and thus redefine collective memory of that experience), to construct a syncretic (secular-Islamic) conception of martyrdom, to instrumentalize a new “heroic,” militarized conception of citizenship, and to justify the “anti-imperialist” reorientation of Syria’s regional and global political posture.

Supplemented by the memoirs of prominent military officers, politicians, and journalists, this paper will draw upon contemporary press coverage of the rituals surrounding the transportation, internment, and commemoration of ‘Adnan al-Malki’s “spiritualized” remains to argue that, in an anxiety-ridden post-colonial environment, ideologically motivated murder produces corpses of “surplus value” that a young and vulnerable state cannot resist exploiting.