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UNTANGLING SYRIA'S COMPLEX ROOTS OF SECTARIAN RESENTMENT
by Lindsay Gifford
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
October 16, 2012 Tuesday
As the battle lines in Syria have hardened, there is growing consensus
that long-feared sectarian divisions are being played out in a military
arena viewed by combatants as a zero-sum game for survival.
The Alawite minority has been described as returning to a
tried-and-true playbook from the Islamist uprising of the late 1970s -
relying on sectarian solidarities to carry out violent military and
paramilitary campaigns - while the Sunnis have been described as
(finally) rising up against minority rule.
Syria has suffered historically from multiple ethno-sectarian wounds -
Kurdish exclusion, Druze uprisings, the Armenian genocide and diaspora,
Palestinian expulsion, Shiite invisibility, Sunni downward mobility. To
understand why sectarianism is often essentialized as the fundamental
explanation for the massive scale of violence currently enveloping
the country, it is necessary to untangle Syria's complex roots of
sectarian resentment.
The Assad regime dealt with ethno-sectarian wounds through a
combination of policies that - unsurprisingly - elevated its own
minority community and filled the broader sectarian milieu with
paranoia and distrust. One can understand the ruthlessness of the
pro-regime militias only in the light of Alawite historical memory:
of poverty, underdevelopment, labor migration - its dependence on
colonial and military institutions for social integration and its
experiences of second-class citizenship. These memories (and fear of an
unknown future) have helped lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of
civilians during the current conflict, in which an important segment of
Syria's Alawite community has been instilled with fear of annihilation.
When the Baathists came to power in the 1960s, they did so with
the vast support of the population of the Syrian countryside;
land reform broke apart large (mostly Sunni) landowners' plots -
clearing the way for smaller minority ownership - while educational
and military institutions were opened up to minorities as avenues
for upward mobility. The door was thus unlocked for Syria's rural
minorities - then previously excluded because of their geographic
origins and heterodox creeds - to play a central role among the
country's political-economic elite.
Although the conflict has been simplified elsewhere as Sunni versus
Alawite, Syrian society encompasses a complex ethno-sectarian mosaic.
The Alawites and the Druze diverged from Shiite Islam during the
medieval period with their own distinct practices, beliefs, and - in
the case of the Druze - their own sacred text, the Rasa'il al-Hikma
(The Epistles of Wisdom). Syrian Ismailis - a major worldwide mystical
branch of Shiite Islam - are centered around the town of Salamiyya.
Christian communities span Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant
denominations, and some Christian villages continue to speak
neo-Aramaic. Ethnicity, language and sect are intertwined for groups
such as the Armenians, who follow Armenian Orthodox Christianity, and
the Kurds - who are largely Sunni, but also bear an ancient syncretic
tradition of their own (Yazidism). Many sects and denominations
are fundamentally esoteric (such as the Alawites and the Druze)
while others, including Sufi orders, have an esoteric organizational
pyramid - making knowledge about beliefs and practices accessible to
only a select few.
As minorities integrated from the periphery during Assad rule, Alawites
in turn began to see themselves less as heterodox minorities and more
as mainstream Muslims - even being recognized as Shiite by several
fatwas from high-ranking clerics. As they integrated into broader
Syrian society, Alawites (traditionally self-styled as religiously
liberal) gradually adopted greater measures of traditional Islamic
orthopraxy - and as intermarriage between Alawites and Sunnis rose
(a strong indicator of social integration, and previously unknown
in the region), the relations between the two communities were woven
with threads of both resentment and solidarity.
A number of policies unfortunately collided under the Assad regime
that would increase the potential volatility of sectarian relations.
Open dialogue on sectarian interactions was forbidden; the regime
controlled all manner of public discourse through its media outlets
and state-appointed institutions such as state mosques and the Culture
Ministry. Independent community leaders, activists and intellectuals
were continually barred from speaking about sectarian relations - even
if only to build them - through the state's innumerable mechanisms
of coercion.
Father Paolo Dall'Oglio of the Deir Mar Musa monastery - an Italian
Jesuit priest who became a community leader working to foster positive
Christian-Muslim relations over the past 30 years - and Sheikh Jawdat
Said of the Syrian Golan are some of the most prominent public figures
who experienced sharp retribution for their work on intersectarian
dialogue under the regime, including arrest of the latter and expulsion
of the former. Followers of these leaders have also been detained
and persecuted. More surprisingly, Salah Kuftaro, director of the
state-sponsored Abu Nur Mosque (colloquially thought of as the national
mosque) and son of the late Grand Mufti Ahmad Kuftaro, was arrested
on June 29, 2009 and detained on multiple charges, including those
related to his collaborations on religious tolerance with Christian
and international leaders - only to be released on Aug. 26, 2010.
For years, these activities had been permitted and even rubber-stamped
by the regime but eventually became too much of an ideological
challenge. Autonomous community institutions were also banned from
taking up the issue of sectarian relations; the Baathists and their
auxiliary divisions were deemed sufficient to keep communal relations
in good health. In reality, sectarian civility was severely stunted
throughout the Assad years precisely because the state co-opted
previously vibrant institutions that cut across society (like the
labor, student and women's unions) under the party banner. Rather
than deal with sectarian tension in a constructive manner, the regime
willfully evaded the issue through superficial political declarations
and exercises; lip service was paid to sectarian harmony in local
election campaigns and state-sponsored interfaith holiday concerts -
only to be banned from the public sphere as a serious social issue
meriting public debate and ongoing community action.
These tensions were something of a guarded "public secret" under the
Assads: something that everyone knew but was forbidden to talk about.
But sectarian hatred is now becoming an acceptable public discourse
among refugees, the internally displaced, and combatants on both
sides. For others, such as the Assad regime and army, the Free Syrian
Army - even the Syrian National Council - this discourse is taking
place behind closed doors but is not palatable as an official line.
The New York Times recently reported that Syrian children in refugee
camps understand the conflict in stark sectarian terms and seek to
avenge Sunni kin by retaliating against Alawites. Aid workers suspect
that Alawites in camps are hiding their identities for their own
safety. Other ethno-sectarian groups are also being drawn into the
imbroglio: The recent Aug. 28 car bombings in Damascus' majority-Druze
suburb of Jaramana have been cited as attempts to generate communal
fears and inspire the formation of self-preservationist Druze
militias. Faced with shallow institutional organization, it is very
difficult for voices of a unified Syria to be heard over those of
deeply embedded sectarian-minded groups.
How can the sectarianism inflamed by the civil war be ameliorated? To
begin, a cease-fire must be implemented to bring an end to the violence
and prevent the accumulation of new vendettas among communities. An
open dialogue of reconciliation must be pursued, the likes of which
were never possible under the Assad regime. Father Paolo Dall'Oglio
reminds us that in order to approach national reconciliation Syrians
must reciprocally acknowledge and validate their tangled historical
memories. He warns Syrians against negating each others' pain and
the wounds of each others' ancestors - wounds which remain fresh
even today, years afterward. The rebuilding of intersectarian trust
is contingent upon this process of acknowledgment and validation.
Ethno-sectarian minorities in Syria carry the patrimony of the
historically autonomous political, military and social institutions
particular to their own geographic territories that made these
groupings into organizing social forces - even among those that might
not fully subscribe to their group's belief system. Unsurprisingly,
whenever a power vacuum has ensued, identity politics have often played
a key role in generating the ideologies, actors and structures which
arise to fill them.
The major combatants thus have strategic interest in generating
their own self-fulfilling prophecies of a "sectarian cataclysm"
- not necessarily a catastrophic inevitability, but a narrative
expedient to the interests of Alawite and Sunni groupings. Regional
history indicates that sect will continue to compete with secularism
on the political stage during any resolution, but it remains to
be seen whether sect will be further institutionalized through a
new constitution (as in Lebanon), or used to unequally distribute
political spoils (as in Iraq).
At the same time, it is important to note that sectarianism is
only part of the explanation for the all-consuming violence of the
civil war. Face-to-face relations at the grassroots level between
members of varied Syrian sects have been deep, meaningful, supportive
and even life-saving. But without the organizational structure to
buttress and maintain these relations, individuals and families become
isolated while more fragile cross-cutting relationships with friends,
colleagues, and neighbors are relegated to past memories.
Lindsay Gifford is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research
Fellow at UCLA and a Visiting Scholar at the University of San
Francisco. She studied in Damascus as a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellow
during 2006-2007. This commentary first appeared at Sada, an online
journal published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress
by Lindsay Gifford
The Daily Star (Lebanon)
October 16, 2012 Tuesday
As the battle lines in Syria have hardened, there is growing consensus
that long-feared sectarian divisions are being played out in a military
arena viewed by combatants as a zero-sum game for survival.
The Alawite minority has been described as returning to a
tried-and-true playbook from the Islamist uprising of the late 1970s -
relying on sectarian solidarities to carry out violent military and
paramilitary campaigns - while the Sunnis have been described as
(finally) rising up against minority rule.
Syria has suffered historically from multiple ethno-sectarian wounds -
Kurdish exclusion, Druze uprisings, the Armenian genocide and diaspora,
Palestinian expulsion, Shiite invisibility, Sunni downward mobility. To
understand why sectarianism is often essentialized as the fundamental
explanation for the massive scale of violence currently enveloping
the country, it is necessary to untangle Syria's complex roots of
sectarian resentment.
The Assad regime dealt with ethno-sectarian wounds through a
combination of policies that - unsurprisingly - elevated its own
minority community and filled the broader sectarian milieu with
paranoia and distrust. One can understand the ruthlessness of the
pro-regime militias only in the light of Alawite historical memory:
of poverty, underdevelopment, labor migration - its dependence on
colonial and military institutions for social integration and its
experiences of second-class citizenship. These memories (and fear of an
unknown future) have helped lead to the deaths of tens of thousands of
civilians during the current conflict, in which an important segment of
Syria's Alawite community has been instilled with fear of annihilation.
When the Baathists came to power in the 1960s, they did so with
the vast support of the population of the Syrian countryside;
land reform broke apart large (mostly Sunni) landowners' plots -
clearing the way for smaller minority ownership - while educational
and military institutions were opened up to minorities as avenues
for upward mobility. The door was thus unlocked for Syria's rural
minorities - then previously excluded because of their geographic
origins and heterodox creeds - to play a central role among the
country's political-economic elite.
Although the conflict has been simplified elsewhere as Sunni versus
Alawite, Syrian society encompasses a complex ethno-sectarian mosaic.
The Alawites and the Druze diverged from Shiite Islam during the
medieval period with their own distinct practices, beliefs, and - in
the case of the Druze - their own sacred text, the Rasa'il al-Hikma
(The Epistles of Wisdom). Syrian Ismailis - a major worldwide mystical
branch of Shiite Islam - are centered around the town of Salamiyya.
Christian communities span Orthodox, Catholic and Protestant
denominations, and some Christian villages continue to speak
neo-Aramaic. Ethnicity, language and sect are intertwined for groups
such as the Armenians, who follow Armenian Orthodox Christianity, and
the Kurds - who are largely Sunni, but also bear an ancient syncretic
tradition of their own (Yazidism). Many sects and denominations
are fundamentally esoteric (such as the Alawites and the Druze)
while others, including Sufi orders, have an esoteric organizational
pyramid - making knowledge about beliefs and practices accessible to
only a select few.
As minorities integrated from the periphery during Assad rule, Alawites
in turn began to see themselves less as heterodox minorities and more
as mainstream Muslims - even being recognized as Shiite by several
fatwas from high-ranking clerics. As they integrated into broader
Syrian society, Alawites (traditionally self-styled as religiously
liberal) gradually adopted greater measures of traditional Islamic
orthopraxy - and as intermarriage between Alawites and Sunnis rose
(a strong indicator of social integration, and previously unknown
in the region), the relations between the two communities were woven
with threads of both resentment and solidarity.
A number of policies unfortunately collided under the Assad regime
that would increase the potential volatility of sectarian relations.
Open dialogue on sectarian interactions was forbidden; the regime
controlled all manner of public discourse through its media outlets
and state-appointed institutions such as state mosques and the Culture
Ministry. Independent community leaders, activists and intellectuals
were continually barred from speaking about sectarian relations - even
if only to build them - through the state's innumerable mechanisms
of coercion.
Father Paolo Dall'Oglio of the Deir Mar Musa monastery - an Italian
Jesuit priest who became a community leader working to foster positive
Christian-Muslim relations over the past 30 years - and Sheikh Jawdat
Said of the Syrian Golan are some of the most prominent public figures
who experienced sharp retribution for their work on intersectarian
dialogue under the regime, including arrest of the latter and expulsion
of the former. Followers of these leaders have also been detained
and persecuted. More surprisingly, Salah Kuftaro, director of the
state-sponsored Abu Nur Mosque (colloquially thought of as the national
mosque) and son of the late Grand Mufti Ahmad Kuftaro, was arrested
on June 29, 2009 and detained on multiple charges, including those
related to his collaborations on religious tolerance with Christian
and international leaders - only to be released on Aug. 26, 2010.
For years, these activities had been permitted and even rubber-stamped
by the regime but eventually became too much of an ideological
challenge. Autonomous community institutions were also banned from
taking up the issue of sectarian relations; the Baathists and their
auxiliary divisions were deemed sufficient to keep communal relations
in good health. In reality, sectarian civility was severely stunted
throughout the Assad years precisely because the state co-opted
previously vibrant institutions that cut across society (like the
labor, student and women's unions) under the party banner. Rather
than deal with sectarian tension in a constructive manner, the regime
willfully evaded the issue through superficial political declarations
and exercises; lip service was paid to sectarian harmony in local
election campaigns and state-sponsored interfaith holiday concerts -
only to be banned from the public sphere as a serious social issue
meriting public debate and ongoing community action.
These tensions were something of a guarded "public secret" under the
Assads: something that everyone knew but was forbidden to talk about.
But sectarian hatred is now becoming an acceptable public discourse
among refugees, the internally displaced, and combatants on both
sides. For others, such as the Assad regime and army, the Free Syrian
Army - even the Syrian National Council - this discourse is taking
place behind closed doors but is not palatable as an official line.
The New York Times recently reported that Syrian children in refugee
camps understand the conflict in stark sectarian terms and seek to
avenge Sunni kin by retaliating against Alawites. Aid workers suspect
that Alawites in camps are hiding their identities for their own
safety. Other ethno-sectarian groups are also being drawn into the
imbroglio: The recent Aug. 28 car bombings in Damascus' majority-Druze
suburb of Jaramana have been cited as attempts to generate communal
fears and inspire the formation of self-preservationist Druze
militias. Faced with shallow institutional organization, it is very
difficult for voices of a unified Syria to be heard over those of
deeply embedded sectarian-minded groups.
How can the sectarianism inflamed by the civil war be ameliorated? To
begin, a cease-fire must be implemented to bring an end to the violence
and prevent the accumulation of new vendettas among communities. An
open dialogue of reconciliation must be pursued, the likes of which
were never possible under the Assad regime. Father Paolo Dall'Oglio
reminds us that in order to approach national reconciliation Syrians
must reciprocally acknowledge and validate their tangled historical
memories. He warns Syrians against negating each others' pain and
the wounds of each others' ancestors - wounds which remain fresh
even today, years afterward. The rebuilding of intersectarian trust
is contingent upon this process of acknowledgment and validation.
Ethno-sectarian minorities in Syria carry the patrimony of the
historically autonomous political, military and social institutions
particular to their own geographic territories that made these
groupings into organizing social forces - even among those that might
not fully subscribe to their group's belief system. Unsurprisingly,
whenever a power vacuum has ensued, identity politics have often played
a key role in generating the ideologies, actors and structures which
arise to fill them.
The major combatants thus have strategic interest in generating
their own self-fulfilling prophecies of a "sectarian cataclysm"
- not necessarily a catastrophic inevitability, but a narrative
expedient to the interests of Alawite and Sunni groupings. Regional
history indicates that sect will continue to compete with secularism
on the political stage during any resolution, but it remains to
be seen whether sect will be further institutionalized through a
new constitution (as in Lebanon), or used to unequally distribute
political spoils (as in Iraq).
At the same time, it is important to note that sectarianism is
only part of the explanation for the all-consuming violence of the
civil war. Face-to-face relations at the grassroots level between
members of varied Syrian sects have been deep, meaningful, supportive
and even life-saving. But without the organizational structure to
buttress and maintain these relations, individuals and families become
isolated while more fragile cross-cutting relationships with friends,
colleagues, and neighbors are relegated to past memories.
Lindsay Gifford is a National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Research
Fellow at UCLA and a Visiting Scholar at the University of San
Francisco. She studied in Damascus as a Fulbright-Hays Research Fellow
during 2006-2007. This commentary first appeared at Sada, an online
journal published by the Carnegie Endowment for International Peace.
From: Emil Lazarian | Ararat NewsPress