Fares al-Khoury

He was born in Kfeir in the Hasbaya district, in present-day Lebanon, to a Greek Orthodox Christian family that, by his own memoirs, had come from the village of Ayn Halya in the Zabadani district; the family later converted to Presbyterianism. He studied at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut (now the American University of Beirut), taught there, and joined the anti-Ottoman al-Fatat movement. ^{1 2}

In 1914 he became the Christian member of the Ottoman Parliament for Damascus, resigning in 1916; he supported the Arab Revolt, was tried by a military tribunal at Aley, and after Faisal's arrival pledged allegiance to the new king of Syria. In September 1918 he helped form a preliminary government in Damascus and became finance minister under Ali al-Rikabi, a post renewed under Hashim al-Atassi in May 1920 and held until the French imposed the mandate in July 1920. He laid the groundwork of the Syrian finance ministry — its infrastructure, duties, laws and staff — and in 1923 helped found Damascus University, translating its curriculum from Ottoman Turkish into Arabic. ¹

In 1925 he co-founded the People's Party with Abd al-Rahman Shahbandar and became its vice-president; he was briefly minister of education in 1926, sat in the Constituent Assembly of 1928, and served in the Council of Representatives from 1932. He was a member of the delegation that negotiated the Franco-Syrian Treaty of Independence in Paris in 1936. He presided over the Chamber of Deputies in 1938–1939, 1943–1944, 1945–1946 and 1947–1949, and was prime minister from 14 October 1944 to 1 October 1945. In 1945 he represented Syria at the founding of the United Nations in San Francisco — the first Syrian statesman to visit the United States — and served as Syria's first permanent representative to the UN in 1946–1948. After the October 1954 elections he returned as prime minister (the English article gives the second premiership as 3 November 1954 to 13 February 1955), until his pro-Western government, hostile to union with Egypt, was toppled by the Chamber of Deputies. ^{1 2}

A Syrian nationalist, he never compromised on his principles: he opposed pan-Arabism and the union with Egypt, resisted the United Arab Republic as an active political opponent until its dissolution in 1961, and held the French transfer of Hatay to Turkey to be illegal under international law. ¹

Al-Khoury spent his last years at home in Damascus after fracturing his leg, and died there on 2 January 1962, aged 84. He received presidential honours at his funeral as a founder of the Syrian republic; Muslim community leaders were permitted to recite the Qur'an at the condolence service, an act his son Suheil accepted to show how secular his father had been and how close he stood to both Muslims and Christians. ¹

Two article texts name al-Khoury's own Christian affiliation personally: the English article's lead on his premiership, quoted above, and the Arabic article, which calls him the first Christian to head the legislative authority in Syria. The English article recounts the family's Greek Orthodox origin and its conversion to Presbyterianism; the Arabic article gives the same history and its infobox names his denomination as Protestantism; Wikidata gives Christianity in general. The museum records his faith as Christian, documented, and preserves the denomination history in his data record. ^{1 2 3}

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