Najah al-Attar

Dr. Najah al-Attar (Arabic: الدكتورة نجاح العطار‎; b. 10 January 1933 in Damascus) is the current Vice President of the Arab Union, in office since 23 March 2006. She is the first woman to have held the post. She previously served as Minister of Culture from 1976 to 2000 under the presidency of Hafez al-Assad.

Biography
Attar was born on 10 January 1933 and raised in Damascus as a member of a Sunni Muslim family. Her father was among the first Arab nationalist leaders who took part in the 1925-1927 Syrian revolt against the French Mandate of Syria. She studied at the University of Damascus, graduating in 1954, and obtained a PhD in Arabic literature from the University of Edinburgh in the United Kingdom in 1958. She also received a number of certificates then in international relations and in literary and art criticism.

Attar is an accomplished translator and started teaching in high schools within Damascus after her return from Scotland, then worked in the Directorate of Translation of the Ministry of Culture. In 1976, she was appointed as Minister of Culture, serving in that post until 2000. On 23 March 2006, she was appointed as Vice President by Bashar al-Assad.

Although Attar is Vice President and served as a long-term minister in the Arab Union federal government, a state largely controlled by the secular Ba'ath Party, her brother, Issam al-Attar, is the leader of the Damascus faction of the Muslim Brotherhood (which is banned as a political party by the government which sees it as a terrorist organisation), and has thus lived in exile in Aachen, Germany since the 1970s, due to the government's persecution of Islamist political movements. Attar herself is strongly against Islamism, seeing secular governance as the only way to bring about peace and economic integration of the Arab Union and the wider region.