The Assads of Syria: Part 1 — struggle, intrigue and defiance

The name Assad was inextricably linked with Syria’s fortunes since 1970, when Hafez al-Assad (above), while Syrian defence minister, came to power on the back of an intra-party struggle within the ruling Baath Party, culminating in him organising and staging the coup that put him there.

Thereafter he initiated his self-styled ‘corrective movement’ of radical reforms to the Syrian economy, armed forces, foreign policy and government institutions. The man he deposed was his one time comrade, Salah Jadid, who himself had come to power in the wake of a previous intra-party struggle and resulting coup in 1966, thus toppling those who had led Syria’s secession from Egypt in the coup of 1963.

Assad’s ascent, therefore, took place in a country in which the rule of the gun was already embedded within its political culture. It was reflective of a Baathist ideology which embraced a muscular Arab identity in reflex to the humiliating experience of the region at the hands of western colonialism and imperialism.

Under Salah Jadid’s governance, Syria had taken a radical turn, unleashing class war against the Sunni-dominated merchant and economic elite who’d held sway since the country gained its independence from France in 1946. As with Assad, Jadid (pictured below) was an Alawite (Alawi), the minority sect based in Latakia in the north west of the country, where it remains predominant to this day.

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Alawite history had for centuries been one of marginalisation, impoverishment, and at various points persecution within the Arab and Muslim world as followers of the minority religious sect known as Twelver. This is an offshoot of Shia Islam whose adherents believe there have been twelve divinely ordained leaders since the death of the Prophet Muhammad, collectively known as the Twelve Imams.

Alawites are, if not biological, certainly theological and cultural followers of Muhammad Ibn Nusayr, a Shia disciple who split from mainstream Shia Islam in the ninth century over the issue of the identity of the Twelfth Imam, which ended in his excommunication.

The Nusayri, as the sect which adhered to Nusayr’s teachings came to be known, originated in present day Iraq before relocating to present day Syria. Some of their beliefs were considered heresy under the rubric of mainstream Sunni and Shia orthodoxy — i.e. the belief in reincarnation, certain aspects of mysticism, and the deification of Ali among others. As such, over generations the very nomenclature Nusaryi came to be associated with heresy and apostasy in the region. It is why, in the 1920s, the followers of the sect started to embrace the nomenclature Alawite (followers of Ali) instead.

This being said, writer and academic Michael Kerr makes the point in his fine 2015 book, The Alawis of Syria, that in “contemporary Syria, the practice of religion was not of great significance to the Alawi community and certainly not openly so. In fact, while keeping their religion secret, the Alawis displayed a considerable degree of cultural dexterity and social malleability.”

Most crucially, Kerr identifies the fact that contemporary “Alawi identity is by and large a function of the contested nature of Syria’s deeply divided society, influenced by those opponents of the Asad [sic] regime who have tended to frame their challenge to it in terms of communal identity.”

Both Sunni and Shia scholars had, over generations, consistently refused to recognize Alawites as Muslims, a judgment used as justification for their persecution in periods when religious sectarianism was a prominent social and political current in the region.

As Middle-East expert Fabrice Balanche reveals: “In 1920, against the backdrop of conflict between the Alawi and Sunni communities and growing Arab nationalist sentiment which was increasingly articulated in explicitly Sunni-Muslim terms, the French created an Alawite State along Syria’s western ‘Alawi Coast’.”

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The French attempt to carve out an autonomous Alawi state, Balanche goes on, was abandoned in 1936, when it was reintegrated into Syria proper. Despite the attempt, the French had failed to create an educated Alawite elite capable of ruling the Sunni population of their autonomous state.

Moving things forward, the development of an explicitly Alawite identity proceeded in conjunction with the emergence of other identities in such a religiously, tribal, and politically diverse region. Throughout the Middle East the past had long been pitted in a struggle with the present for supremacy when it came to the role of religion, modernity, and multifarious political and social challenges that were its everyday reality; exacerbated always by the historical scars of colonial and imperialist domination.

This was precisely where the role of Baathism in fomenting a political and social consciousness of sufficient strength and breadth to cut across these overlapping identities came to the fore.

As Raymond Hinnebusch outlines: “Alawite Ba’athists would come to play a pivotal role in driving Syrian politics in subsequent years [post United Arab Republic 1958–61]. Emerging from the bottom of Syria’s stratification system and separated from the Sunni ruling oligarchy by reinforcing class and religious cleavages, they constituted a sort of surrogate proletariat — the mobilized social force that had the most to gain from a thorough revolution in Syria.”

Riding a wave of Arab nationalism when at its zenith in the 1960s, a decade during which secularism enjoyed a position of dominance throughout the region it has never enjoyed since, the Syrian Baath Party came into conflict with the country’s Muslim Brotherhood, which enjoyed its own large social base within the country’s Sunni, mostly urban, heartlands. It was a snapshot of the great ideological and political struggle then taking place throughout the Arab world between secular nationalism and politicised Islam for hearts and minds. An idea of the bitterness between those conflicting currents in Syria is revealed in a 1967 article that appeared in a Syrian Army magazine, influenced by the Baath.

It reads in part: “We don’t need a man who prays and kneels, who curbs his head and begs God for his pity and forgiveness. The new man is a socialist, a revolutionary. The only way to the establish the culture of the Arabs and to build Arab society is to create the new Socialist Arab man who believes that God, the religions, feudalism, imperialism, the fat cats and all the values that dominated the former society are nothing but mummies embalmed in the museum of history.”

Ultimately, on the basis that two things cannot occupy the same space at the same time, war with the Muslim Brotherhood was inevitable. This will the subject of Part 2 of this series.

John Wight is a writer and commentator and can be found on medium where this article was originally published