Mick Hartley

One of the defining facts of life in Syria, we are told, is the divide between the ruling Alawites and the majority Sunnis. Well, yes and no. As Theo Padnos argues in this article in The New Republic (via) the Alawite religion was, in a sense, killed off by Hafez al Assad, as the Alawites became the shadowy secret movers of the new Baathist police state: 

When I'm in Syria, I often wonder if it’s possible to cancel a religion. In the day time, when police officers might be watching, I ask polite questions of strangers, and I suppose that it must be. At night, I ask other questions—or sometimes I just sit in a dark cafe and listen to rumors—and then I know no one has cancelled Alawism, nor is the idea plausible. The faith lives on. It has mutated under the Assads, and isn’t seen in the open—but then it has always been a secret religion.

Last summer, I had a conversation with a neighbor in Damascus who told me the following story: In 1994, Basil Al Assad, Hafez’s eldest son, was an internationally renowned horseman, a natural leader among his fellows in the army, and the favored child (among five) in the Assad family. No one doubted he would someday rule the country. When he drove his Mercedes into a bridge abutment in January of that year, the Alawis of Syria were shocked into a kind of delirium. For three days the country stopped working, and only recordings of the Koran played on state TV. Schools and hospitals lost their old names and became Basil the Martyr Primary School, Basil the Martyr Eye and Ear Clinic, and so forth. Not long after Basil’s death, a group of young Alawis invaded a cemetery on Baghdad Street, near my neighbor’s house in Damascus. They made for the section reserved for the pilots and soldiers who’d been killed in the wars with Israel—the martyrs plot—and proceeded to smash up the headstones. They destroyed the grave markers of the Sunni and Alawi martyrs alike. My neighbor explained: The Alawi faithful couldn’t abide the thought that Basil would have to share the level of heaven on which martyrs dwell with other, lesser beings.

Recently, reports of incidents similarly tinged with religious feeling have been filtering into Damascus—for instance: Sunni detainees, shot by the Shabeeha, pro-Bashar vigilantes, for refusing to render the Islamic testament of faith as, “there is no god but Bashar,” or for refusing to prostrate themselves over portraits of the president. In Homs, according to some reports, the Alawis have erected a death zone around a minor statue of Hafez Al Assad, and have been shooting those they suspect of approaching this totem with ill intentions.

This is exceptional behavior, of course. In normal times, the Assad worshipers have simply built up their cult in silence, without making a show of their activities. As “Khudr” also observed in his Syria Comment piece, this was important spiritual work for them. Hafez Al Assad’s urging them to behave like Sunnis had the effect of setting them adrift in Syria. Now this obscure sect, formerly confined to the mountains near Latakia, was in need of a home. It turned out that employment in a totalitarian regime accommodated them nicely…