Read Dreams and Shadows: The Future of the Middle East Online
Authors: Robin Wright
The Baathists, led by Syria’s Alawite minority, identified with the farmers. Hafez al Assad was of peasant stock from the northern mountains. He was born in a two-room house without electricity, the ninth of eleven children. As a child, he worked and played in the fields, and rode a donkey or walked for transport.
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The majority of Alawites were poor, rural, and less educated.
Through the Baath Party, the Alawites got their revenge against Sunni Muslims and Christians who lived in the cities and owned much of the land. The Baathists squeezed out the traditional power brokers—and had their dominance entrenched in law. Article Fifty-three of Syria’s constitution stipulates that at least one half of the members of the People’s Assembly must be workers and peasants.
“So, since we don’t have a liberal heritage in this region, rehabilitating liberalism and democracy will come mainly from people who were Marxists, people who are more aware of political modernism,” Saleh said. “Many of us read about the French, British, Italian, and German experiences. We are historians and thinkers and economists.
“After the Cold War, many became liberals. Some are liberals today in the same way they were Marxists before,” he added, a smile breaking across his face. “They would never have criticized the Soviet Union before. Now, they would never criticize the United States—or at least what it stands for.”
Neither Saleh nor his wife is active in their respective Communist parties. And both now oppose radical political upheaval. “As we have seen in Iraq, ‘regime change’ is easy, but ensuring stability afterwards is very difficult,” Saleh wrote for
The New York Times
in an article entitled “Don’t Rush the Revolution.”
Despite the authoritarian nature of the Syrian leadership, gradual change is preferable to abrupt change. A slower pace would not only provide a better chance at avoiding bloodshed, but would give a larger number of Syrians a chance to gain some experience in public affairs, as many have started doing recently by more openly criticizing the regime.
True democracy requires a maturation process with respect to participation.
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Despite the evolution in his thinking, Saleh still gets summoned occasionally by the Mukhabarat for lengthy questioning. Given the challenges of dissent, I asked Saleh if pressing for change in Syria was worth the costs.
“I think it is,” he said. “We haven’t been able to defeat the regime, but we have participated in saving the dignity of our people. This is the moral capital we need—that some of our people are saying no to dictatorship, no to tyranny.
“It is humiliating when you have such a regime,” he added, “and no one says how bad it is.”
The ultimate redline for politics in Damascus is religion. It is another of Syria’s ironies.
On Easter weekend, I visited the Umayyad Mosque. It is one of the most magnificent settings in the Middle East. Built in the eighth century, it was named after the first dynasty to lead the new Islamic world, which ruled from Spain to India for almost a century. More than 10,000 stonemasons and artisans labored on the mosque for more than a decade. It is the first monumental work of architecture in the Islamic world. In 2001, Pope John Paul II chose it for the first visit by a pope to a mosque since Islam was founded. Like everyone else, he removed his shoes when he entered.
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The grandeur of the mosque’s vast courtyard always reminds me of the great piazzas of Venice and Rome. It bustles: Children slide on stocking feet across the smooth white stone floor. Small groups of women sit and talk. Men stroll. Pigeons peck and flock. The courtyard is surrounded on three sides by an arched arcade; the fourth side is a facade of golden mosaics that leads to a huge prayer hall.
Three of the most influential characters in Middle East history are buried here. The sarcophagus of Saladin, the Sunni leader who died in Damascus in 1193 after forcing European Crusaders out of Jerusalem, is in a tranquil little garden. In a small room off the courtyard is a shrine with the head of Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed. His battle against the Omayyad dynasty in 680
A.D.
symbolized the greatest schism within Islam, dividing Sunni and Shiite. I got caught up in a crush of Shiite pilgrims from Iran trying to touch the shrine. Several chador-clad women brought their children’s clothes to rub against its silver grill.
In the heart of the long prayer hall, the head of John the Baptist is reputedly buried in a domed sanctuary with unusual green glass windows. Muslims revere John as the prophet Yahya; he is mentioned four times in the Koran. Because of the story of his birth to a barren mother and aged father, devout Muslim women sometimes pray in front of his shrine if they are having trouble getting pregnant. On the day I visited, several Muslim women mingled with Christian tourists in front of the tomb.
Politically, Syria is arguably the Arab world’s most secular country, particularly after the fall of Saddam Hussein in neighboring Iraq. Both Syria and Iraq were ruled by the socialist Baath Party, albeit by branches with rival interpretations. Yet underneath, Syria remains a conservative religious society.
“Spiritual wealth is ingrained in the Syrian character,” Mohammed Habash told me when I stopped in to see him at the Islamic Studies Center. Habash, a diminutive but ebullient man, is both a Muslim sheikh and an independent member of parliament. He also hosts popular television shows on religion.
“We believe this land is a cradle of religions,” he explained. “More than one half of the people in the world belong to a religion that has ties to Abraham, Jacob, Isaac, Moses, Jesus, John the Baptist, or the prophet Mohammed and his companions—people who came from Syria or came through Syria. That is why this country is known as Cham Sharif, or Noble Land.”
Article Thirty-five of Syria’s 1973 constitution stipulates that “freedom of faith is guaranteed. The state respects all religions.” It also promises “freedom to hold any religious rites, provided they do not disturb the public order.” Both provisions are selectively observed.
The Old City in Damascus still has a vibrant Christian quarter. During my visit, candy shops were selling big chocolate Easter eggs, while my hotel displayed baskets of pastel-dyed eggs and stuffed Easter bunnies. Because the Orthodox Easter is celebrated later than the Catholic Easter, Syria had two three-day national holidays on sequential weekends to observe both. Christmas is a national holiday too. Syria is still home to almost two million Christians, roughly ten percent of the population. The cofounder of the Baath Party, Michel Aflaq, was a Christian.
Freedom does not extend to Jews, however. For millennia, Damascus’s labyrinthine Old City had a Jewish quarter. But almost all of the 30,000 Jews fled during periodic waves of persecution following Syria’s independence in 1946, Israel’s creation in 1948, and the 1956 and 1967 Arab-Israeli wars. Synagogues were attacked or burned down. Jewish businesses were ransacked. And special identity cards were issued with the word “Jew” in red stamped across them. The last large group of Jews left when Syria lifted the ban on travel during peace talks with Israel in the early 1990s.
Damascus instead became the refuge for Mohammed Oudeh, better known as Abu Daoud, the aging and unrepentant mastermind of the 1972 Munich Olympics massacre of eleven Israeli athletes.
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But no domestic issue rattles the regime more than what Muslims are doing—or thinking—given recent history and current public opinion.
“If you ask me about sentiment on the street, I can tell you that more than ninety percent of Syrians believe in God,” Habash told me.
“But if you ask me about the role of religion in political life, I can tell you that at least fifty percent of Syrians believe religion must play a role in our political life. That’s almost ten million people.”
As in Egypt, the most consistent challenge has come from the Muslim Brotherhood. Unlike Egypt, however, it was not always outlawed. Egypt’s Ikhwan was founded by a disillusioned schoolteacher challenging the elite—and pitted Sunni against Sunni. Syria’s movement was founded by Islamic scholars with ties to the powerful Sunni notables and landowners of Aleppo and Hama—and the clash eventually pitted Sunni against Alawite.
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The Syrian wing was founded in 1945, a year before independence from France. In the 1950s, it was initially part of the legal opposition. In the 1961 parliamentary elections, it won ten seats. It was outlawed after the 1963 coup that brought the Baath Party to power.
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Tensions played out most traumatically in the charming old city of Hama. Syria’s fourth largest city was famed for its quaint labyrinthine streets and the creaking waterwheels along the meandering Orontes River. Its roots date back to the Neolithic Age, several millennia before Christ. But after the 1970 coup that brought Hafez al Assad to power, Hama also epitomized the far end of Syria’s political spectrum:
Hama was a stronghold for the Muslim Brotherhood as well as cells of militant guerrilla groups, like the Fighting Vanguard and Mohammed’s Brigades. The government in Damascus was staunchly secular and socialist.
Hama was traditional; many women wore head scarves; many men, loose tunics. Damascus was a Westernized metropolis of suits and ties.
Hama was dominated by Sunni Muslims, who account for seventy-five percent of Syria’s eighteen million people. The Assad regime was dominated by minority Alawites, an offshoot of Shiite Islam with secretive beliefs that account for eleven percent of the population.
The only common denominator was that both sides were willing to use brutal violence to achieve their goals. The result was a mini-civil war.
Muslim extremists were linked to an escalating series of kidnappings, bombings, grenade attacks, and assassinations in the late 1970s. On June 26, 1980, amid a hail of machine-gun fire and grenades, militants tried to assassinate Assad during an arrival ceremony for the visiting president of Mali. Assad reportedly kicked one of the grenades away himself.
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The next day, Syrian troops were dispatched to Tadmur Prison, where they opened fire on inmates. Some 500 prisoners were murdered.
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Within days, the government also introduced Law No. Forty-nine. It made membership in the Muslim Brotherhood “group”—lumping the organization and guerilla cells together—a crime automatically punishable by death.
The confrontation climaxed during a three-week period in February 1982, when a full-scale military offensive by land and air pummeled Hama. People were rounded up in door-to-door searches of hospitals, schools, offices, mosques, shops, and homes. Some were executed on the spot. Amnesty International reported that others were taken to detention centers at the airport, city stadium, and military camps. It also cited local reports that the military flushed containers of cyanide gas into buildings where rebels were suspected of hiding.
To mark an anniversary more than twenty years later, the Syrian Human Rights Committee published a lengthy reconstruction. The Hama massacre, it said, targeted about one-fifth of the city’s 180,000 inhabitants. It noted one particularly chilling account from an unnamed survivor who was among a group of residents driven off in eleven trucks.
I was among a huge number of people, so crowded that we almost could not breathe, and we were taken to Sriheen, where we were ordered to step out of the trucks, so we did as told. First thing we noticed was those hundreds of shoes scattered everywhere on the ground. It was then that we realized that it meant that hundreds of our fellow citizens were killed and we were next to face the same imminent death.
We were searched afterwards and any cash or watches were taken off us. Then the elements of the Syrian authorities ordered us to move forward towards a deeply dug trench, which stretched long. Some of us were ordered to go to another nearby trench. When I stepped forward to my spot by the trench, I saw the pile of bodies in there still tainted by running blood, which horrified me so much that I had to close my eyes and I had to contain myself to avoid falling off. As expected, streams of bullets were fired towards us and everyone fell in their blood into the trenches, whilst the ones who were inside the other trench got shot inside the trench where they stood.
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The unidentified Syrian was shot but survived, according to the account, by waiting until the military drove off and then sneaking away. But some of the injured, he recounted, died “under the weight of the other bodies.”
The heart of Hama’s old city was razed. Parts were bulldozed with bodies still in the rubble underneath.
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To drive home the point, the government clamped down nationwide. Praying within the army was banned. Mosques and their services came under close surveillance.
The sweeping slaughter may have been the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East. Amnesty International initially estimated the death toll was between 10,000 and 25,000, the vast majority innocent civilians. Syrian human rights groups now claim the loss was between 30,000 and 40,000 people.
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If true, the fatalities could exceed the death toll for each of the five Arab-Israeli wars.
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Yet the savagery did not end the challenge. In the twenty-first century, Syria is again struggling with the role of religion in politics—and religion is increasingly winning.