Why was Assad so violent?
As an Alawite, the prospect of losing power was a prospect of losing everything
“Assad is finished. What seems left to discover is how much time will be required before he is either killed or flees”. Steve Coll, writing in the New Yorker, July 2012
In December 2013 I was interested in the fact that Bashar Al-Assad was still in power in Syria, more than a year after many people had predicted his inevitable downfall, so I did a bit of research and wrote an article about the resilience of the Alawis - the religious minority that the Assad family belongs to - and the possible reasons for it. (You can find it here.) Since I was living at the time in the Caribbean region, the context for the article was partly those in the Americas that describe themselves as ‘Syrians’. In Trinidad there is a fairly significant Syrian community (many of whom might more accurately be called Lebanese) which includes many of the richest families in the Caribbean region. There are similar communities across much of Latin America including around four million Syrian-Brazilians. Most of these people come from Levantine Christian communities whose ancestors travelled to the Americas as a result of religious persecution in the Ottoman Empire. The available evidence indicates that the total of Ottoman emigrants to the Americas in the period from 1860 to 1914 probably came to 1,200,000, of which nearly ninety per cent were Christians.1
It is well known that Syria’s ruling family and many of its senior military and intelligence officers come from the Alawite minority sect, which has controlled the country since 1966. What is less well known is the fact that as recently as the 1950s, it was common for upper-class Syrian families, mostly urban Sunnis, to have Alawi maidservants. The practice was indicative of the extreme poverty and low status of the Alawis, whose most needy families indentured their daughters to domestic servitude.2 Well into the nineteenth and twentieth centuries the Alawis were on the lowest rung of Syrian society. There is, for example, very little evidence of Alawi emigration to the Americas. This is illustrative of a well-established phenomenon in studies of international migration: the very poorest in society do not migrate, as they lack the resources to do so.
The Alawis’ low status and poverty was in part a reflection of their unorthodox religious views. Whilst the modern Alawi state in Syria has sought to emphasise its connection to Shi’a Islam, Alawis are at the fringes of mainstream Muslim ideology. Within the broad divisions of Shi’a and Sunni Islam are numerous subdivisions of varying degrees of orthodoxy and significance. Of these, Alawis are a marginal group, both numerically and doctrinally. Alawi doctrines date from the ninth century and have their roots in Shi’a Islam but are largely distinct from mainstream Shi’ism. Alawi beliefs and practices appear to have drawn from Christianity and other traditions and involve un-Islamic practices such as the drinking of wine. Alawis celebrate certain Christian festivals, including Christmas, Easter, Pentecost and Palm Sunday and they honour many Christian saints.
Some aspects of Alawism are particularly challenging to mainstream Sunni Islam: Alawis revere ‘Ali Ibn Abi Talib, the fourth Caliph of Islam (from whom they derive the name of their sect). In this they may appear superficially similar to Shi’a Muslims. However, Alawis consider ‘Ali to be a divinity. This is significantly at odds with mainstream Islamic thought, and is considered to be the sin of ‘shirk’, literally, ‘sharing’ one’s devotion with more than one deity, i.e. polytheism. According to the Qu’ran, shirk is an unforgivable sin: “God does not forgive the joining of partners with Him: anything less than that He forgives to whoever He will, but anyone who joins partners with God has concocted a tremendous sin.” (The Qu’ran 4:48)
Syria gained full independence from France in 1946. As a marginal group, ambitious Alawis had an incentive to gravitate towards two relatively classless institutions in post-Independence Syria: the Ba’th party and the army. As the number of Alawis in senior positions in both entities increased, so did the attractiveness of these institutions to greater numbers of Alawis, thereby creating a self-reinforcing tendency. When military coups beset Syria in the late 1960s, the Alawis by 1966 had taken control of Syria, a position they still held until a few days ago.
The implications of a small, historically marginal and theologically unorthodox group holding the reins of power are clear: from the start they have had a strong incentive to shore up their power-base through inter-marriage, self-enrichment and repression of the majority. Where a country’s communities are defined largely by religious affiliation, the orthodox majority (in this case, Sunni Muslims) are also likely to respond to repression with a more ostensibly ‘religious’ identity. This in turn has fed membership and support for religious extremist groups. In 1979 Alawi cadets were murdered in Aleppo by Sunni militants. The Muslim Brotherhood (a Sunni Islamist movement) was blamed and membership of that organisation became a capital offence. In 1982 Hafiz Al-Asad crushed an uprising in Hama led by the Muslim Brotherhood with considerable brutality, according to Amnesty International killing over 25,000, including civilians.
The Arab Spring, which begun with largely peaceful regime change in Tunisia and a troubled transition in Egypt, has long since given way to the harsh Syrian winter. But the study of the marginal and impoverished history of Syria’s Alawi rulers reminds us that Syria’s ruling regime had more to lose, perhaps more so than in other Arab countries. And the events of 1982 serve as a reminder that extreme brutality was a familiar methodology for the Syrian regime.
The history of the Alawi rise to power is in some way the mirror-image of the Christian waves of emigration from Syria to the Americas. Both groups faced persecution within the society. The Christians, with their superior resources and international connections responded to this challenge by emigrating and sending remittances to their community that remained in the East. The Alawis remained in Syria, not because their lives were enviable; they remained because they had little alternative. It is fair to assume that the reverberations of the Arab Spring would have shook Syria, whatever the nature of its regime. We cannot discount the probability that a range of international players would have intervened. However, it is because Syria's Alawi rulers were themselves a marginal group that their response was so determined and so ruthless. Once they had gained power, they couldn't risk losing it.
Kemal Karpat, ‘The Ottoman Emigration to America,’ International Journal of Middle East Studies, Vol. 17, No. 2 (May, 1985), pp. 175-209
Mahmud Faksh, ‘The Alawi Community of Syria: a New Dominant Political Force,’ Middle Eastern Studies, Vol. 20, No. 2 (Apr., 1984), pp. 133-153