By Hugh Graham, Dec 8, 2012
Only
history can untangle the confused, living hell that is Syria. One of the
most well funded and effective of the many rebel groups fighting to topple the Assad regime
is Al Nusra, a Salafist group explicitly linked to Al Qaeda. Quite naturally,
the US has warned the all-embracing ramshackle Syrian opposition that
association with Al Nusra will cost them US support. Syria’s Al Qaeda franchise
is only one element in an uncomfortable patchwork alliance, a grab-bag of
nationalists, democracy activists, religious groups and other fellow travellers.
And altogether they are likely to bring even more problems if Assad is
overthrown as he surely will be. Even
the units making up the Free Syrian Army have different agendas. It is no
longer clear what many of these groups represent. It is not even clear what
their opponent, the Assad regime stands for.
The Syrian civil war is far more fractured
and confused than the struggles which ended the regimes in Tunisia, Libya and
Egypt. Why? The answer is that Syria, at the precise meeting point of East and
West, is a palimpsest of both.
Literally, a palimpsest is a document that’s
been repeatedly overwritten; alternatively, it’s the visible, layered remains
of generations of ruins in the same place. In Syria, Christian Byzantine rule
left hundreds of sects in its wake and the Islamic Caliphates, which followed,
mostly tolerated them. Ottoman rule was so loose that Islamic sects flourished
on top of all the others. Now those sects are all fighting.
The Alawite sect is the religion of
the ruling Assad dynasty. The Alawites have been in Syria since around 1000AD,
when Shia Muslim sects, the Alawites among them, found refuge in the coastal
mountains of northwestern Syria. There they remain, inward-looking and resolutely
tribal. Tribal networking helped them into the Arab nationalist Ba’ath Party in the 1950s. In fact, the Ba’ath party’s
proto-Fascist ideology lies at the very heart of villainy of the present Assad regime. When Alawite
officers found themselves sidelined from party membership, they launched the series of coups which brought President Assad’s father, Hafez Assad, to
power in 1969. The Assads’ only justification remains the Ba’ath Party. In
Ba’thism, a relic of the 1950s and 1960s, transnational Arab identity precedes
Islam as the unifying force. Arab Nationalism is a thing of the distant past. Now
it defines little but the corruption and cronyism of the Assad regime.
Like the Alawite Shia, other Shia
minorities now live in fear of the country’s Sunni majority. The two main sects of Islam became implacable
enemies after the battle of Karbala in 681 when the Shia were defeated by the
Sunni Ummayad Caliphate (661-750). The Sunni Caliphate, of course, was based in
Damascus, Syria’s present day capital. That is why many Sunnis see the Assads’
Alalwite regime as foreigners, interlopers, a minority ruling a majority.
The Sunnis are also the majority in the
opposition. But the opposition is amorphous. It contains Islamists as well as democrats
and nationalists of all sects and ethnic groups. Even the secular democrats can take some
pride in Syria’s Ummyad Caliphate. Liberal by ancient standards, the Umayyads
respected minorities, synthesized the best of foreign ideas and sponsored the
translations which gave us Greek philosophy.
The relatively moderate Sunni Syrian
Muslim Brotherhood, has chosen logistical support for the opposition over radicalism;
they have, after all, been a target of the regime since Assad senior, Hafez Assad,
had them slaughtered at Hama in 1982.
Opposition Democrats and nationalists can
look back to Syria’s early twentieth century secular governments and resistance
to French colonial rule. With increasing ethnic and religious fragmentation,
the glimmer of a united, democratic Syria at the end of World War One still remains
a promise. In defiance of the French Mandate, the Arab National Government of 1918-1920 united Jews, Christians, Muslims
and others in opposition to European interference, especially attempts by
France to divide and weaken Syria along ethnic lines. In 1925-1926, a decidedly
secular revolt against the French galvanized the national consciousness which led
to independence in 1946. And it was the Druze minority, a group related to the
Shia, who led the revolt and determined its secular character. Today’s Druzes,
wary of all the religious hatreds, have only reluctantly begun to move against
Assad.
Syria’s homegrown Islamists can also claim a
legacy from the 1920s. Despite the secular nationalism of 1918-1920, a sectarian
Sunni identity persisted and strengthened with the revolt of 1925. Some Sunni Islamists lay claim to the Umayyads
and their Islamic purifiers and reformers, like Umar II- not to mention the
expulsion of the Crusaders by Saladin in 1187 and by the Mamelukes in 1291.
Foreign Jihadist fighters are entering Syria
from Lebanon, Jordan and elsewhere and most are Suni fundamentalist Salifists
or “followers of the way of the ancestors.” They too remember the 1925 revolt
if only because foreign fighters from Palestine, Transjordan and Lebanon
provided leadership on the grounds that their homelands were part of ‘Greater Syria,’
a continuing dream of Syrian Islamists.
Among those who fear the Salafists most
are Syria’s Christians. After a long history beginning about 40 AD, the
Christians have become pariahs. In the 17th century, the Ottoman
Sultan accepted France as protector of Syria’s Christians. Many have been seen the Christains as agents of the
West. Once allied the Assad regime, they are now distancing themselves. As Westerners
or collaborators, Christians are being killed by both sides in the civil war.
All the groups vying for power can look back
to some edifying example in Syrian history. Unhappily, their views of the past are
often sectarian, and the dream of a secular, multi-confessional Syria, born in
1918, is being destroyed, ironically, in the name of liberty.
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