Shukri al-Asali

Shukri al-Asali was born in 1868 in Damascus, belonging to a wealthy and influential landowning family. He studied at the Syrian Protestant College in Beirut and then at the Ottoman Law Academy in Istanbul. He graduated in 1902 and began his career in the provincial bureaucracy of Syria. He served as the district governor of Nazareth in 1910, where he tried to prevent the sale of lands to the Zionists. He resigned from his post to run for the Ottoman parliament, where he was elected in 1911. He became a vocal advocate of Arab rights and a leader of the Syrian liberal opposition. He denounced the discrimination and centralization policies of the Committee of Union and Progress, the ruling party of the Ottoman Empire. He also supported the decentralization and autonomy of the Arab provinces. He was arrested in 1915 by the Ottoman authorities for his involvement in the Arab nationalist movement. He was executed along with other Syrian notables by Jamal Pasha, the Ottoman governor of Syria, on May 6, 1916. He is considered a martyr and a hero of the Syrian national cause.