God into Deputy

In Damascus this week a 300-lb., illiterate ex-god named Suleiman Effendi Murshed, 38, eased himself for the first time into his seat in the Chamber of Deputies and prepared to think politically. Cannily aligning himself with the moderates, he set out to show the folks back in the bare, brutal hills behind Latakia in northern Syria that their god had done well to trade in his robes for a Deputy's toga. He and every other Deputy, new & old, had one program: independence from the French.

This pig-faced idol of 30,000 trusting Alaouites is sated with life's delights. Huge rolls of fat clutter his chin, hump his neck, swirl around his middle. He has beady, sweaty brown eyes, but, by a quirk of nature, they are spaced nicely apart, giving him an off-center approach to humanness. He lacks all the usual Arab graces, makes up for them in a futile, ostentatious show of wealth. He no longer wears the peasant costume he used when playing the role of latter-day god, appears instead in a dirty white silk suit, two-toned shoes, a striped silk shirt and a shining tarbush.

At his mountain eyrie, 4,500 ft. up in the Alaouite Mountains and built like a Damascus house, TIME Correspondent Harry Zinder visited him, was treated to a gut-busting luncheon, long complimentary speeches, weird music and the sight of seven of his village lovelies prancing mightily as they sang in a throaty, minor key. Suleiman, despite his 18 wives, his 14 children and the fact that doctors give him only two more years because of fatty degeneration of the heart, beamed contentedly. Cabled Correspondent Zinder of Suleiman's lair: "Grim hills step giantlike across rich, fruitful valleys, their sides scarred and pocked by huge, overhanging boulders and ledges. In the morning, mists backed by fresh winds sweep swiftly across the hillsides, casing them in pale blues. Villages hang precariously, hacked out of pure stone. In such surroundings, only local power and force can hold sway; only the number of rifles a tribe can muster means anything. It is no wonder that Suleiman, as a slim youth tending his master's flocks, dreamed godlike visions in these hills. This dream and the native understanding that only power counts is what set him on his vicious trail of plunder, loot and robbery, brought him dubious fame and control of 18 villages--one for each wife--and wealth which he is sinking into Turkish gold and British sovereigns and real estate in Latakia, Damascus and Aleppo. Thus it is that, backed by 15 or 20 thousand rifles, he could proclaim himself 'god' and make the people believe it.

"Today all that is changed. Suleiman is trying to get out from under the heavy-hanging title of 'god,' has dropped the plural speech, started speaking of himself in the third person singular. Those of his people rejoice who feared lest his insatiable appetite for wealth and power might have gobbled even larger sections of northern Syria and made him a frightful monster with a sway beyond his capacity of understanding. ... If Allah is kind and gives him strength to ride out his illnesses, he might even worm his way into the presidency of an independent sovereign Syria."

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