by Wafa Sultan
Once the weekend was over and we were back in Aleppo, Siham went to visit her family in her home town. I was sitting alone in my room when the bell rang. I went down to the ground floor only to find the young man who had followed me around throughout our visit to Damascus. I wondered, “Is he stalking me?,” as I greeted him, and he proceeded to show me photographs he had taken on the trip. Getting more and more nervous, not being able to figure out what he wanted, I stammered, “Siham’s not here, but I’ll give her the pictures as soon as she gets back.” He answered, “I haven’t come to see Siham. I came to see you, and I brought copies of the pictures as a present for you because you’re in some of them.”
All of a sudden, I didn’t know what was happening to me. Before he had finished speaking, I felt a shock, an electric current flowing through my body. This was the first time in my life as a Muslim woman that I had talked alone with a young man. I was embarrassed and flustered and I asked him to follow me to the students’ cafeteria where we could have tea.
I shall never forget that meeting as long as I live. His name was Morad and he was to become my husband and the father of my children. We met in defiance of the custom that does not permit a young girl to sit in a public place with a young man she does not know. For those few minutes I felt that I was the one breaking with tradition, the one who was more responsible for breaking the rule than he was and it brought with it a sense of sin. But, it was wonderful talking with him over tea, looking at the pictures and, after that, we began to spend more time together. We always met in public places, such as the university cafeteria or the bus, which took us from the campus to the center of town and back again. My relationship with Morad changed my life in Aleppo. It grew to be such a big part of my life that it became difficult to conceal it from Ahmad, Huda, and their family and therein lay the greatest obstacle we faced, for they tried to interfere in every detail of my life as soon as they learned of my relationship with Morad. They threatened to tell my brother and my family, and I—in my usual defiant way—dared them to carry out their threat.
Although Morad was a native of Aleppo and had lived there all his life, he remained an individual who existed apart from the town. His father had been a soldier in the French army during the French occupation of Syria. When the French forces left Syria in 1947, the newly established Syrian national army retained many of the French-trained soldiers but demobilized the older men, including his father. Morad was born in 1953. His father, over forty years old at the time, was delighted at the birth of this first son after two daughters. His father had a friend named George who lived in a neighborhood distant from their own, and this friend happened to be a Christian. George started a business and gave my husband’s father a job as a salesman. The friendship grew as a foundation of mutual trust and respect developed between the two men. For reasons of which my husband is still unaware, his father sensed that his end was near and asked his friend George to take care of his only son should anything happen to him.
His father’s intuitions turned out to be well founded: He died from a heart attack in 1956 when my husband was three years old. His eldest sister married at the age of thirteen, a few months before their father’s death, while the younger sister married a year after his death, when she was eleven. And so, at the age of three, my husband was left to live alone with his mother.
My husband’s mother, from his description of her, was an eccentric woman with a vicious tongue and an unbalanced personality. She fought with George, whom she accused alternately of fraud and greed. Nonetheless, George stuck to the instructions that my husband’s father had given him and insisted on assuming a paternal role, despite the difficulties involved in dealing with Morad’s mother. He used to visit them at least twice a week, bringing presents. George, in his suit, tie, and small felt cap stood out as an obvious Christian among the men of my husband’s childhood quarter, all of whom were Muslim. As a young boy my husband welcomed and enjoyed George’s visits, but at the same time, they were always a source of shame and embarrassment to him. All the local children were Muslim, and they showed him no pity, repeating in his hearing what they heard at home. My husband, as a child, could not bear their constant questioning: “Who’s that Christian?,” “Why do you let him and his family visit you?,” “Aren’t you afraid that he’ll convert you to Christianity?”
The hatred of Christians by the Muslim community and his fondness for George played on my husband’s young mind and his mother used that growing conflict to damage him in a way that only a cruel mother can. As a young widow with limited capabilities living in a society which preys upon its women, she aggravated his sense of shame. When his father died, the family was living in a small wood-and-metal house of the kind left behind by the French army, in an area far from the center of town. After the French left and the Syrian national army had taken control of the barracks, people moved out of these houses, which with time fell into ruin, while their own small homes remained standing among the rubble in an uninhabited military zone about two miles from the nearest residential area. After she was widowed, my husband’s mother had to go out to work in a tobacco factory, leaving home early in the morning and returning only after dark. But when she did come home, her hurtful tongue worked to destroy him, showering him with curses and hitting him as punishment for some task undone. Blind to her son’s already fragile state of mind, she used him as her whipping boy.
As in most cities, what we now call “gentrification” took over and Aleppo’s wealthy residents, on the lookout for less-crowded localities, were quick to move into the area around my husband’s home. The school nearest their house filled up with the children of very wealthy families, and he stuck out among them like a sore thumb. The class differences crushed him. He remembers his mother saying to him: “The houses will creep toward us until the time comes when we are pushed out with nowhere to go but the street.” To this day, whenever he sees a homeless person he hides his face in his hands so as not to imagine himself in his place.
On his mother’s days off, when he would accompany her on shopping expeditions to the local market, he was hurt by the way the stallholders treated her, no matter how cruel she was to him. They took advantage of her foolishness and the fact that she was a woman in a male environment. They overcharged her, and when she tried to bargain with them and accused them of swindling her, they would abuse her, using language which my husband’s young ears could not bear. It was as if they were shouting at her: “Go home and hide yourself away, you shameless creature! Where’s your husband, and how can he allow you to wander around among men like this?” Morad discovered at a very early age the true nature of the world in which he lived and was never able to truly become part of it. His sympathies lay with his mother, the cruel woman who corrupted his own mind, who he saw clearly as a victim of Muslim society.
In high school, he joined the Baath Party, which was trying to recruit the largest possible number of high-school students, and those who came from poor families were the most eager to join. He was attracted to the party because it was a secular organization that—at least on the face of it—attached no importance to religion. The party’s slogans gave them the illusion of hope for a better life and equal opportunities. While still an adolescent he plunged headlong into the political activism of the group and, working with other party members, slowly began to find himself. After school he would go straight to meetings with fellow party members. He had now found what life with his mother had so long denied him. He now had something to live for. The party’s slogans and agenda imbued him with anti-Semitism and incited him against Israel. Brainwashed by the sick culture he had been taken into, he began to believe that killing Jews and throwing them into the sea was his sole reason for living.
He continued to live with his mother but dwelt in his own private world, a world in which he dreamed of a job that would allow him to support himself rather than having to wait for his mother to come home with eggs and bread. He graduated from high school and went to un
iversity to study agricultural engineering. He found work as a teacher’s aide in a primary school, though one thing clouded his happiness as a teacher: the fact that at least an hour a day had to be devoted to teaching the Muslim religion.
When he asked Christian pupils to leave the classroom while this class was in progress, he felt that he was forfeiting his humanity. Many parents complained to the school administration of his shortcomings as a teacher of religious education, but he turned a deaf ear to them as he knew that his membership in the Baath Party put him in a strong position, and these complaints did not cause him to lose a single day’s work. In those days Islam took second place to the Baath Party. From the late 1960s until the mid-1970s Syria went through a phase in which Islam almost entirely lost its influence, at least over schoolchildren and university students. In the mid-1970s the tentacles of the Saudi octopus began to extend gradually into Syrian public life, where they still wreak havoc today.
Morad had a difficult life and I knew that the best thing I could do for him was just to listen carefully anytime he was able to share a painful memory. Once, he said to me, “Listen, Wafa! A woman—my mother—destroyed me, and now I’m looking for another woman—a wife—who can put the pieces back together again! My mother was very well able to demolish me, and I believe that you are just as able to put me back together.” I’m still in the process of trying to put him back together again. I know that many sardonic women joke about this, but I really did marry a wreck of a man who was destroyed by his mother. I’m still trying to repair him. I don’t bear Mo-rad’s mother the slightest grudge, as I don’t consider her responsible for the way she made him suffer. She was merely a victim of her society and its belief system, and my husband was this victim’s own victim.
4.
A Quest for Another God
IN MY FIFTH year at university, in 1979, something happened that changed my life. That year a violent and bloody struggle broke out between the Syrian authorities, as embodied in the ruling family and its dependents, and the terrorists of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood. The Syrian president belongs to the Alawite Muslim community, a minority that derives its name from that of Ali, the Prophet Muhammad’s cousin and the fourth caliph to rule after his death. The Alawites constitute between 15 percent and 20 percent of the Syrian population and are the largest Muslim group in the country after the Sunni majority. The Alawite Hafez al-Assad came to power in the wake of a military coup. He was minister of defense at the time.
Throughout Muslim history the Alawites were the poorest members of Syrian society. Before the Ottoman occupation of Syria, the overwhelming majority of Alawites lived in Aleppo, the town I lived in as a medical student in the north of the country, near the Turkish border. When the Ottoman forces swept through northern Syria they butchered the Alawites, killing most of them. Those who survived fled toward the coast, and eventually settled in the mountains between central Syria and the sea. The deep gullies and tortuous winding terrain of that arid mountain region provided a refuge for the scattered remnant of the fleeing Alawites, who hid in its caves.
In their new habitat the Alawites suffered appalling poverty, neglect, and oppression at the hands of both the Ottoman occupiers and the Sunni majority. Under the French Mandate of Syria they breathed more easily, as it granted them a measure of autonomy.
When the last French forces pulled out of Syria in 1946 the Alawites found themselves worse off than they had been under Ottoman rule. Between 1946, when Syria became in dependent, and 1963, when the Baath Party came to power, the Alawites suffered cruel hardships and ill-treatment. Besieged in their mountain caves they led primitive lives little different from those of people in the Stone Age. No roads linked them to the Syrian coastal towns. Fear that they would be killed, their women raped, and their livestock and crops pillaged kept them confined within their mountain fortress.
The Baath Party was founded by a group of Syrians—mainly Christians and Alawites—who belonged to the country’s educated elite. The party came into being, in fact, as a reaction against the religious and social persecution that Syrian minorities suffered at the hands of the Sunni majority, and these Muslim and non-Muslim minorities were the main beneficiaries of its founding. For a considerable time after they came to power in 1963, the Baathists made a genuine attempt to rid Syria of its social distinctions and class differences, providing new work opportunities for many, without discrimination. Its original aim was the establishment of a secular Syrian state whose slogan was “religion for God and the homeland for everyone.” Young Alawites soon discovered the Baath Party as a new way of escaping their hardship and poverty and they joined in huge numbers. Some were lucky enough to attain high positions, and Hafez al-Assad, a prominent Baathist who was appointed minister of defense, was one of these.
In the period between the Baath Party’s accession to power in 1963 and the mid-1970s, the Alawites flourished, as did schools and public facilities in their region. Members of the Alawite community flocked to the universities and became almost the best-educated group in the country. But Hafez al-Assad’s accession to power put an end to all this. The tribulations suffered by the minority group to which he belonged had made him fearful and unable to trust anyone outside his own community. It was to this community that he turned in an attempt to safeguard his regime. He encouraged his fellow Alawites to join the army, which, they found, provided them with opportunities for a standard of living they never dreamed of.
Hafez al-Assad’s brother Rifaat established a special military unit called the Defense Companies to protect his brother’s throne. At the same time another Alawite officer named Ali Haydar set up an additional unit called the Special Forces. Both men concentrated on attracting the rising generation of the Alawite community, using promises of high rank as an incentive. This young generation had found a new area of opportunity that attracted it more than education did, and large numbers of them joined both military units, whose basic function was to protect Hafez al-Assad’s throne and regime.
Under Hafez al-Assad the Alawite community, which had been on the verge of becoming the best-educated and most socially aware sector of the Syrian population, began to undergo a process of militarization. As this young generation became militarized, a huge gap opened between the university-educated class, which was fairly well established, and the new, less well educated and less socially aware militarized class. A new struggle broke out between these two classes. Hafez al-Assad began to hunt down members of the educated class and threw large numbers of them in jail.
Once again, this class found itself neglected and oppressed, and those who managed to stay out of prison either left the country or cut themselves off from politics. From his fellow Alawites, Assad expected nothing less than blind obedience and he unsheathed his sharpest weapons against those members of his community who dared to defy him. His fight against them was no less ferocious than his battle with the Muslim Brotherhood, which had been waiting in ambush for him since the first day of his presidency.
When he first came to power, Assad tried to propitiate the Sunni majority so as not to be rejected by it. He attempted to win the support of Sunni clerics and of those with social and economic influence. The mufti* of Syria and other members of the Sunni clergy were among Assad’s closest associates and the most vocal champions of his regime. The Muslim Brotherhood was a terrorist movement, and the vast majority of Sunni Muslims rejected it. The Brotherhood, however, took advantage of the truly appalling corruption that had spread into all areas of public life under Assad. The corruption was taking its toll and Assad used it as a trump card to gain favor with the Alawites. Bribery was rife in government ministries, the standard of living for most Syrians dropped, and wealth became concentrated in the hands of members of the ruling family and a few of its close associates. Though this elite minority included members of a number of different religious communities, most of them were Alawites.
The Baathists, for all their shortcomings, had almost succeeded in smothe
ring the flames of terrorism among the Muslim Brotherhood when the Saudi money that began to shower down upon the organization in the mid-1970s fanned its flames among them once more. I well remember the Baath Party’s decision of 1968, when I was in primary school, that performance in religious studies should not determine the future of primary school pupils the way performance in, for example, mathematics or science did. The party could not do away with religious education altogether, but it could reduce its importance, and this was an important step toward withdrawing religious education from the curriculum. No sooner had the Baath Party made this first move to block Islamic expansion than Hafez al-Assad came to power. As a member of a minority he could not take any further similar steps; on the contrary, his fear of the Sunni majority, the womb which had brought forth the Muslim Brotherhood, made him turn a blind eye to the new Saudi-backed Islamic expansion. A bargain was struck: You turn a blind eye to me, and I’ll turn one to you.
Corruption ran riot in the ranks of the ruling elite just as Saudi Wahhabism ran riot among the masses of the Sunni populace. Both situations got so out of hand that neither party was any longer capable of considering anything beyond its own interests. While the Syrian president and his entourage were smuggling billions of dollars out of the country and living a life of shameless wealth, most Syrians of all denominations were suffering from degrading poverty.
The Sunnis felt that they had been duped, and welcomed the Muslim Brotherhood—well provided with Saudi money and glutted to the point of indigestion with Islamic teachings—not from a hope that it would improve the situation, but from a desire to be avenged on those responsible for it. The entire Alawite community became the scapegoat, and the educated class, most of whose members Assad had thrown into prison because they had dared to defy him, was easy prey for Islamist terrorism. This class had no way of protecting itself, and the Muslim Brotherhood’s secret armed squads hunted down its university-educated members—doctors, engineers, university lecturers, and judges—unmercifully, and murdered them one by one, while Assad’s regime stood by and ignored what was happening.
