Syria’s Ruling Alawite Sect

By Robert Mackey ("The New York Times," June 14, 2011)

Extracted from http://wwrn.org/articles/35580/

As my colleague Anthony Shadid reports, the uprising in Syria “is sharpening sectarian tensions along one of the country’s most explosive fault lines: relations between the Sunni Muslim majority and the minority Alawite sect to which the family of President Bashar al-Assad belongs.”

Because Syria is bordered on two sides by countries that have been torn apart by civil wars in recent decades, Lebanon and Iraq, Syria’s rulers have repeatedly invoked the specter of unrestrained sectarian conflict as a likely outcome should they suddenly lose power, even as a brutal crackdown by the Alawite-led security forces has reportedly exacerbated intercommunal tensions.

To reporters familiar with the civil war in another former part of the Ottoman Empire, Bosnia, the testimony of refugees who fled the violence in northern Syria this week, and arrived in Turkey with accounts of attacks on Sunni villagers by Alawite militias, it seemed quite easy to believe that history could be repeating itself.

In April, just after the uprising began, my colleague Scott Malcomson observed: “The Kurds — roughly 10 percent of Syria’s population — are weighing in, too, this week, with protests across the country’s northeast, where most Kurds live. According to reports, Twitter feeds and the Facebook page called “The Syrian Revolution 2011,” protesters are emphasizing Syrian unity. But if protests spread, they will probably be perceived as sectarian or, in the Kurdish case, ethnic, not least because the government will portray them that way.”

While many non-Muslims are now aware that there is a sectarian divide in Islam between Sunnis and Shiites, it is less commonly known that Syria is ruled largely by members of an esoteric Islamic sect, the Alawites, whose belief in the divinity of Ali, Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, is just one of the reasons that they were oppressed as infidels for centuries by other Muslims.

As Malise Ruthven explained recently in The New York Review of Books, the Alawites of Syria, “who make up only 12 percent of its population, split from the main branch of Shiism more than a thousand years ago.” He then traced the sect’s evolution into a quite distinct community over the centuries:

Before the twentieth century they were usually referred to as Nusayris, after their eponymous founder Ibn Nusayr, who lived in Iraq during the ninth century. Taking refuge in the mountains above the port of Latakia, on the coastal strip between modern Lebanon and Turkey, they evolved a highly secretive syncretistic theology containing an amalgam of Neoplatonic, Gnostic, Christian, Muslim, and Zoroastrian elements. Their leading theologian, Abdullah al-Khasibi, who died in 957, proclaimed the divinity of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and son-in-law, whom other Shiites revere but do not worship. Like many Shiites influenced by ancient Gnostic teachings that predate Islam, they believe that the way to salvation and knowledge lies through a succession of divine emanations. Acknowledging a line of prophets or avatars beginning with Adam and culminating in Christ and Muhammad, they include several figures from classical antiquity in their list, such as Socrates, Plato, Galen, and some of the pre-Islamic Persian masters.

Nusayrism could be described as a folk religion that absorbed many of the spiritual and intellectual currents of late antiquity and early Islam, packaged into a body of teachings that placed its followers beyond the boundaries of orthodoxy. Mainstream Muslims, both Sunni and Shia, regarded them as ghulta, “exaggerators.” Like other sectarian groups they protected their tradition by a strategy known as taqiyya — the right to hide one’s true beliefs from outsiders in order to avoid persecution. Taqiyya makes a perfect qualification for membership in the mukhabarat — the ubiquitous intelligence/security apparatus that has dominated Syria’s government for more than four decades. …

Nusayris believe in metempsychosis or transmigration. The souls of the wicked pass into unclean animals such as dogs and pigs, while the souls of the righteous enter human bodies more perfect than their present ones. The howls of jackals that can be heard at night are the souls of Sunni Muslims calling their misguided co-religionists to prayer.

It does not take much imagination to see how such beliefs, programmed into the community’s values for more than a millennium, and reinforced by customs such as endogamous marriage — according to which the children of unions between Nusayris and non-Nusayris cannot be initiated into the sect — create very strong notions of apartness and disdain for the “Other.”

Mr. Ruthven also noted that the French, who administered Syria after the collapse of the Ottoman Empire in the early 20th century, encouraged Alawites to join their military force, in part to provide a counterweight to the Sunni majority, which was more hostile to their rule. During the French Mandate, there was even a short-lived Alawite “state” based in and around Latakia, created in 1922. As William L. Cleveland explained in his “History of the Modern Middle East,” the Alawite state was “administratively separate from Syria until 1942.”

Joshua Landis, a professor of Middle East studies at the University of Oklahoma, explained in a blog post about the Alawites this month:

There was considerable tension within the Alawi community over the notion of unity with Syria in 1936, which was mandated by the Franco-Syrian treaty of that year. Part of this tension was the fear that Sunnis would discriminate against Alawis in their courts, as had happened in the past. Under Ottoman law, Alawis were refused the right to give testimony in court because they were not considered to be Muslims or People of the Book.

Fearing for their future in any Syrian state dominated by Sunni Muslims, in 1936 six leading Alawites, including Sulayman al-Assad, the grandfather of Syria’s current president, wrote a letter to Léon Blum, France’s first Jewish prime minister, explaining that their community would “refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria because in Syria the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam the Alawis are considered infidels.”

The authors of the letter even appealed to Mr. Blum’s presumed Zionist sympathies, arguing that the persecution of the Jews in Syria and Palestine would be the fate of all religious minorities if the majority Muslim population was allowed to rule. They wrote:

The spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non‑Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the Mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation, irrespective of the fact that such abolition will annihilate the freedom of thought and belief. …

We can sense today how the Muslim citizens of Damascus force the Jews who live among them to sign a document pledging that they will not send provisions to their ill-fated brethren in Palestine. The condition of the Jews in Palestine is the strongest and most explicit evidence of the militancy of the Islamic issue vis-à-vis those who do not belong to Islam. These good Jews contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force, yet the Muslims declare holy war against them and never hesitated in slaughtering their women and children.

After their appeal to the French prime minister failed to halt plans to integrate the Alawite state into Syria, Mr. Landis explained that from 1936 to 1939, Alawite “religious leaders published a number of pamphlets” declaring that Alawites were Shiites and that any Alawite “who did not recognize Islam as his religion and the Koran as his holy book” would not be considered a member of the sect.

Although the Alawites are recognized as Muslims in Syria today, and rule the country, sectarian considerations still linger just below the surface. As Reuters reported in April, “Although some officers from the Sunni Muslim majority have been promoted to senior ranks, Sunni influence has been weakened and Assad’s brother Maher controls key military units packed with Alawite soldiers.”

All of this makes it interesting to look back now at an essay written in 2006 by a member of the Alawite community for Joshua Landia’s Syria Comment Web site, “What Do Sunnis Intend for Alawis Following Regime Change?”

The author, who used the pseudonym Khudr, observed that many younger members of his community “have not lived the unjust circumstances that our fathers and grandfathers were subjected to by the Sunnis. As such, we do not have the same appreciation as our fathers of the Alawite rule that the late president Hafez al-Assad brought.” He added that there were many reasons to argue for an end to Alawite rule, but also criticized the Syrian opposition for not explaining clearly, “What exactly are your plans for the Alawis after we give up power?” He continued:

Why do answers to this question have to be vague and general? What are your plans for the tens of thousands of Alawis who work in the army and other security apparatuses? What are your plans for the republican guard and the special forces that are staffed primarily by Alawis? Are you going to pay them pensions if you decide to disband their forces? Or will they be fired and dumped on the streets, humiliated and ostracized as the Americans did in Iraq? Do you have any idea of the impact on security such dismissals would engender? Will you be satisfied with a scenario by which these forces remain in their positions in exchange for their giving up political power? …

Syrians refuse to speak openly and honestly about our most important challenges; so much is kept in the dark. But this is no time for “shatara” or dissembling. We must confront and discuss religious and communal issues directly and honestly. If Sunnis really want regime change, then they have to address the Alawi issue head on. Unless the answers to these questions are cleared up by all concerned forces and individuals, Alawis, no matter how dissatisfied and disappointed with the present leadership, will not entertain the idea of regime change; they will not relinquish the ramparts of power.