Recently a
video emerged in which pro-Assad militiamen can be seen beating
and shooting a prisoner to death. What might seem remarkable is
that the militiamen are insulting Islam in the process, mocking the
takbir — that is, the cry of “Allahu akbar” — the Islamic
conception of paradise for martyrs. In the first half of the video,
one of the executioners — disparaging Muhammad — shouts, “F—k
you and your prophet.” Later, another of them yells, “Damn your
God.”
It may come across as odd that pro-Assad militiamen would
disparage the Islamic religion in such a crude manner, but it
should be noted that there are many videos like this in which the
anti-Islamic sentiment takes a more subtle form.
Thus throughout in the course of the civil war there have been
some videos of regime loyalists beating detainees and insisting
that they proclaim that “there is no god except Bashar,” which
reflects not so much cult-worship of Assad as a mockery of the
Shahadah (Muslim declaration of faith, of which the first part goes
“There is no deity but God”).
A particularly striking observation is that these videos
invariably show pro-Assad militiamen whose accents illustrate that
they are Alawites. It may seem odd that Alawites — most frequently
described in media reports as either an offshoot of Shi’ite Islam
or simply a sect of Shi’ism — would disparage Islam, but an
examination of the history of Alawite identity in Syria will
demonstrate that such an attitude towards Islam among pro-Assad
Alawite militiamen and soldiers comes as no surprise at all.
Until around the 1920s, Alawites were known to outsiders by the
term “Nusayris” — named after Muhammad ibn Nusayr, the reputed
founder of the sect in 9th-century Iraq — and they identified
themselves by this name, content with a separate ethnic and
religious identity that was essentially a “neither Shi’ite or
Sunni” position, stemming from the highly syncretic nature of the
traditional faith.
Beginning with the establishment of the French Mandate in Syria
and increasing contact with the outside world beyond the
traditional rural homelands in the northwest mountains, several
writers from the community began to emphasize that they were not
“Nusayris” (a term they rejected as an invention of the sect’s
enemies), but Alawites, emphasizing a supposed connection with
mainstream Islam and Shi’ism in particular.
Yet when it came to the question of whether the “Alawite State”
would be united with the rest of the Mandate to form Syria, five
Alawite community leaders — including Bashar’s grandfather —
went to great
lengths in a memorandum to the French Prime Minister in 1936 to
emphasize distinctness from Islam, even as they consistently
employed the term “Alawite” to describe themselves. Thus they
affirmed that Alawites are considered “infidels” under Islam, and
that a spirit of “fanaticism” is nurtured in Islam against
non-Muslims.
Despite some attempts by Shi’ite clergy in Najaf in the middle
of the 20th century to reach out to Alawites and bring them closer
to the fold of mainstream Twelver Shi’ite Islam, the fact is that
since the end of the French Mandate in 1946, Alawism in Syria has
come to be less associated with identification with an actual
religion and more with a simple bloodline identity, just as many
Jews might practice no religion at all but nonetheless identify as
ethnically Jewish.
This transition was the result of two factors. First, there was
the rise of pan-Arab Ba’athist ideology, which according to Ba’ath
party founder Michel Aflaq (a Greek Orthodox Christian) stipulated
that Islam and Arabism should be inherently bound, but in practice
translated to separation from a religious identity and served as an
alternative for many Alawites seeking to advance themselves in the
Syrian state.
Hence, even before the advent of the Assad dynasty, an Alawite
officer named Ibrahim Khalas could write an article in 1967
disparaging religion and God as concepts to be confined to the
dustbin of history, and trigger outrage from Sunni Muslim and
Christian religious leaders, but not arouse a similar reaction in
the Alawite community.
Further, the ascent of the Assad dynasty with Bashar’s father
Hafez being made president in 1970 led to a two-fold policy of (i)
declaring that Alawites were nothing more than Twelver Shi’ites and
(ii) implementing a process described by Joshua Landis as
“Sunnification.” The latter meant trying to demonstrate that in
religious practice Alawites were no different from orthodox Sunnis,
with a number of mosques built in predominantly Sunni towns.
State propaganda has been keen to portray the Assads as pious
Muslims, with outlets like Syrian Arab News Agency (SANA) always
hailing the occasion on which the president prays in a prominent
mosque to mark a Muslim festival. In fact,
contemporary images of Bashar even emphasize how he prays in
the Sunni manner, with his lower arms folded in prayer rather than
by his sides as happens in the
Shi’ite manner of prayer.
This policy was successful in convincing many Iraqi Shi’ites who
worked in Syria that Alawites were simply fellow Shi’ites, even
though Alawites have often been deemed by orthodox Twelvers in Iraq
as “ghulat” — Arabic for “extremist” — on account of what is seen
as veneration of Ali as a deity in the traditional Alawite faith.
Conversely, many
Sunnis in Syria came to see Bashar as a fellow Sunni — a
perception strengthened by the fact that his wife Asma is
Sunni.
Even so, the “Sunnification” was no more than cosmetic in terms
of the Alawites’ actual religious beliefs, and if anything only
succeeded in distancing more of them from religion in general. The
result is that there are many Alawites in Syria in particular who
simply deem religion in general to be ridiculous, and are thus
atheists, even if the issue of bloodline may seem important to
them.
Thus it should not be so shocking or incredible to see videos of
pro-Assad Alawite militiamen and soldiers ridiculing Islam as they
torture Sunni detainees. Indeed, with the constant emphasis by the
Assad regime on a narrative of a jihadist opposition from the
beginning of the unrest in Syria, hostility to Islam in line with
the attitudes expressed by Bashar’s grandfather is not to be
unexpected.
This anti-Islamic hostility in turn lends credence to the
narrative of jihadist groups that the Assad regime and forces
aligned with him are “waging war on Islam,” and thus gives
legitimacy to the concept of a “defensive jihad” (to be
distinguished from “offensive jihad,” which in much of traditional
Islamic jurisprudence is the expansion of the domain of Islam
through warfare by the caliph) to protect Muslim brethren from
persecution.
To reinforce this notion of “defensive jihad,” jihadist groups
like the Saudi-backed Salafi jihadist Ahrar al-Sham and the al
Qaeda-aligned Jabhat al-Nusra (JAN) are generally avoiding the
tendency of militant Islamic organizations in other countries (e.g.
the Islamist insurgents in Mali, Somalia, and Iraq, where a concept
of “defensive jihad” is tenuous) to overtly brutalize ordinary
fellow Muslims, and have devoted some effort to winning popular
support with distribution of humanitarian aid, particularly
bread.
Indeed, recently Ahrar
al-Sham released a propaganda video emphasizing this very
aspect of their activities (accompanied by a benign-sounding
nasheed) while allegations
of looting on the part of groups recognizably operating under
the banner of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) in Aleppo have become all
too apparent.
In this context, it should be noted, as Twitter user “Syrian_Scenes” (an account
well worth following) points out, that Arabic news channel
al-Jazeera has routinely misrepresented the likes of JAN,
Suqur al-Sham, and Ahrar al-Sham as operating as part of the
FSA, when in fact they are clearly separate from such
identification.
Indeed, it does not follow from an emphasis on “defensive jihad”
that the jihadist groups are maintaining trouble-free relationships
with non-jihadist rebels opposed to Assad (or even among each
other, for that matter). In fact, the tensions between JAN in
particular and other rebel groupings are
finally coming to more widespread media attention, with a
number of northern rebels interviewed by Martin Chulov of the
Guardian already speaking of the need for an Iraq-style
Anbar Awakening (a key aspect behind the weakening of al-Qaeda’s
power in Iraq from the days of 2005-6) against the likes of
JAN.
On occasion,
hardline foreign fighters and al-Qaeda supporters have
denounced the Free Syrian Army as “apostates” (takfir),
contrasting with the complete rejection of takfir on the
part of other jihadist groups like
Liwaa Islam (hat-tip: “Syrian_Scenes”). JAN has thus far
refrained from invoking takfir against ordinary Sunni
civilians, but that situation will probably change in a post-Assad
environment if it finds people unwilling to accept strict
imposition of Islamic law.
In any case, JAN makes its anti-Alawite sentiment clear,
referring to Alawites as “Nusayris” — a term that is now
considered offensive among Alawites. For instance, in this recent JAN
video, the speaker in the middle of the video refers to Assad
and the “Nusayri apostates [from Islam].”
In short, the above evidence should illustrate that the notion
of a Sunni-Shi’ite conflict is not the only perceived dichotomy at
play in the Syrian civil war,
significant as that concept is in a number of respects. An
Alawite identity mainly based on bloodline but with hostility to
Islam is one strand at work here, and jihadist groups in Syria are
well aware of it and have exploited it to bolster support for a
struggle to overthrow Assad framed as a jihad to defend Islam.
At the same time, one should not be sensationalist and conclude
that a jihadist takeover of Syria is imminent after the fall of the
Assad regime. At most, I expect jihadist groups to have a foothold
in parts of the north and east (particularly Aleppo and Deir
ez-Zor) similar to al-Qaeda’s foothold in the northern Iraqi city
of Mosul.
Instead, the point is to look beyond single paradigms even when
it comes to examining issues like Sunni-Alawite tensions. Further,
the personal rivalries among rival rebel groups — jihadist and
non-jihadist — are becoming ever more intense, and will make the
task of maintaining a united Syria after Assad’s fall all the more
difficult.
To paraphrase pundit Michael Weiss, a “civil war
within the civil war” beckons, but media commentary has paid
insufficient attention to this looming prospect.
