Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

by Raphael Lefevre

  Often portrayed as the “enemy of religion”, the Ba’ath Party was, however, far from rejecting Islam in its totality. Michel Aflaq, its main ideologue, had been one of the first intellectuals to articulate a systematic explanation of Arab nationalism’s unique relationship with Islam. Despite being a Christian, he argued that the whole Arab nation was inseparably connected with Islam and that Muhammad’s life was the embodiment of “the nature of the Arab soul and its rich possibilities”.3 In an unorthodox twist, the Ba’athist ideologue considered that if the revelation had been given to the Arabs and to no other nation, then surely the Arab world could have faith in its destiny. Islam was also granted an important role in Ba’athist ideology as in Michel Aflaq’s view, the emergence of the Muslim religion marked the birth of a “revolutionary movement that rebelled against a whole system of beliefs, customs and interests”. In a thinly veiled attack on the Muslim Brotherhood, his harshest critique was directed at “those who seem to be the staunchest defenders of Islam” yet are themselves “the most unrevolutionary elements”.4 There is little doubt that, by identifying Islam with Arab nationalism, the Ba’athist ideologue hoped to convince the Arab street that embracing secularism did not mean rejecting religion. But, if Islam had an important place in Ba’athist thought, it was nonetheless a very unorthodox one—considering Islam as crucial not for the truth of its social and religious message but instead as a constitutive element of Arab nationalist consciousness.5 To the religious Sunni community, the Ba’ath Party’s ideology was nothing short of a betrayal of the essence of Islamic doctrine.

  The troubles started as early as April 1964 with a campaign of agitation by prayer leaders who delivered inflammatory speeches against the advent of the secular Ba’athist regime. While street riots spread through most Syrian cities, they came to focus heavily on Hama, a stronghold of religious conservatism, where they took on a violent dimension and shaped the city’s hatred for the Ba’athist regime for decades to come. According to Abdel Halim Khaddam, the Governor of Hama at the time who would rise to the Vice Presidency of the country years later, the troubles in the city began when three local schoolteachers were transferred in the middle of the school year to the far-off city of Deir ez-Zoor by local regime officials who accused them of spreading an anti-secular and, therefore, anti-Ba’athist message to their students.6 Approved by Sheikh Muhammed al-Hamid from his pulpit at the Sultan Mosque, protests intensified in front of the school and quickly transformed into massive street demonstrations uttering slogans asking for the repeal of the decision and the ousting of the Ba’ath Party, the “enemy of Islam”. The demonstrations gradually assumed a brutal dimension when a young Ba’athist militiaman, Munzir al-Shimali, was killed by the crowd, triggering fierce government retaliation.7

  After two days of street fighting, the insurgents, led by a young Islamic activist, Marwan Hadid, took refuge in the Sultan Mosque where they had gathered weapons and ammunitions to resist the security forces. According to Muhammed Riyad al-Shuqfeh, a local leader of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama who would later become head of the organization, Marwan Hadid’s role in the April 1964 crisis was key as, despite repeated calls from the Ikhwan not to take up arms against the regime, the radical Islamic militant was nonetheless able to attract a sufficient number of followers to foment the armed insurrection.8 In an atmosphere remembered as “electric”9 by the former Governor of Hama, Prime Minister Amin al-Hafiz and General Salah Jadid decided to force a breakthrough by ordering the armed forces to bombard the Sultan Mosque, something which would be remembered by many Hamawites and religious Syrians as an act not only of Ba’athist secularism but also unyielding atheism. Strikes and anti-regime protests exploded throughout the country, only calmed by the resignation of General Amin al-Hafiz, associated in the minds of many Syrians with the harsh repression of the Hama riots. After the mediation of Sheikh Muhammed al-Hamid, who strove to find a negotiated solution to the twenty-nine-day crisis, the radical insurgents led by Marwan Hadid finally surrendered.10

  At the time, the Ba’ath Party’s line was still influenced by its historical founders, men such as Michel Aflaq and Salah Eddine al-Bitar, who would temporarily assume the premiership after Amin al-Hafiz’s resignation. Although they were secularists, most of them were nonetheless of Sunni confession and, therefore, had respect for other religious traditions. However, as the balance of power among religious communities inside the army progressively changed in favour of the minorities (see Chapter 4), so did the orientation of the Syrian government. Originally led by the historic civilian founders of the Ba’ath, the regime soon became dominated by men originating from the military, whose minority and often rural background gave them a more radical outlook. Their ascent culminated in General Salah Jadid’s coup in February 1966, after which the regime started to be referred to as the “neo-Ba’ath”11—a term designating the radically left-wing social and economic policies adopted by the Syrian government from 1966 until 1970. The already existing rift between the Islamic opposition and the Syrian Ba’ath only widened with time as religious Sunni Muslims seemed to become the target of a regime intensifying its involvement in the appointment of clerics, bringing the Waqf institutions under increasing government control and prohibiting religious teaching outside the mosques.12

  Only a spark was needed to ignite the situation again. This came when a highly symbolic article written by a Ba’athist officer, Ibrahim Khlas, was published in April 1967 in Jaysh al-Sha’b, the journal of the Syrian army, which inflamed the community of religious Sunni Muslims because of its anti-religious content. In the article, the Ba’athist officer claimed that “until now, the Arab nation has turned towards Allah […] but without success as all [religious] values made the Arab man a miserable one, resigned, fatalistic and dependent. 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.”13 Ibrahim Khlas went on: “the only way to 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 museums of history.”14 Upon the publication of the article, mass anti-regime protests broke out in most Syrian cities. In Damascus, Sheikh Hassan Habannaka, who had turned against the regime after losing a contest for the post of Grand Mufti to Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro, led fierce anti-regime sermons which inflamed the population of the Midan quarter, where the souk closed for days.15 Calm was only restored when, having realized the extent of the alienation the article had engendered, the Ba’athist authorities sacked Ibrahim Khlas, brought him to trial and publicly dismissed the article as being part of a “reactionary Israeli-American plot […] to drive a wedge between the masses and their leadership”.16 The protests, however, represented a growing cultural gap putting an increasingly secular and left-wing leadership at odds with the conservative bastions of Syrian society.

  In November 1970 Hafiz al-Assad, Defence Minister under the “neo-Ba’ath”, launched the “correction movement”—a successful coup attempt against Salah Jadid, with the declared objective of moderating the Ba’athist stance on socioeconomic issues. At first, his arrival in power provided the Islamist opposition with breathing space as the new leader seemed keen to cultivate close links with a constituency that had been humiliated by Salah Jadid. Upon assumption of power, Hafiz al-Assad multiplied the gestures of appeasement towards the ulama and the Sunni Muslim community. He raised 2,000 religious functionaries in rank, increasing their salaries as well, appointed a religious scholar as Minister of Waqfs, encouraged the construction of mosques and revived the Islamic formulation of the presidential oath in the Syrian constitution.17 In addition, the new Ba’athist leader sought to cultivate a public image associated with a personal commitment to Islam. While participating on a regular basis in public prayers and religious ceremonies, he published a special edition of the Quran wi
th himself photographed in uniform on the first page, organized local elections in which the Muslim Brotherhood supported conservative candidates, and personally undertook the ‘Umra to Mecca—the “minor” pilgrimage at an irregular time.18 The official support he obtained from a few co-opted ulama, such as the late Grand Mufti Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro and the Kurdish scholar Said Ramadan al-Buti, was meant to provide an Islamic stamp of approval for the policies of his regime.19 The early years of his leadership were therefore marked by a general improvement of relations between the Islamic opposition and a Ba’athist regime now publicly committed to rectifying its early left-wing secular tone in favour of “preserving the Islamic identity of the country”.20

  In this context, the community of religious Sunni Muslims could only have been bitterly disappointed when, in January 1973, Hafiz al-Assad published a draft Constitution which provoked a storm of protests and riots all condemning the “irreligiousness” of the document. In fact, while the draft implicitly mentioned Islam by naming the Shari’a (“Islamic law”) as a main source of legislation, it did not include the special status that had been given to it by the 1950 Constitution—which stated that the religion of the head of state should be Islam.21 The protests condemning the “Godless” Ba’athist regime originated again from Hama but quickly spread to other cities before reaching the popular Midan quarter of Damascus, where the influential Sheikh Hassan Habanakah rallied thousands of angry pious Muslims. The Islamic opposition to the draft constitution was coordinated by a young ideologue of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, Said Hawwa, who set up a nationwide network of ulama dedicated to enhancing coordination amongst all Islamic actors.22 According to the researcher Thomas Pierret, Said Hawwa and the Ikhwan envisioned using the Syrian ulama’s anger against the draft Constitution in order to rally them into a more active opposition to the Ba’athist regime.23 Realizing that the Islamic credentials he had been so keen to put forward were on the verge of disappearing, Hafiz al-Assad ordered the Syrian Parliament to add an article stipulating that “the religion of the President of the Republic is Islam”. However, he rejected demands that Islam should be declared as the “state religion” and, in a thinly veiled attack on the Islamist opposition, instead stated that “true Islam should be far removed from narrow-mindedness and awful extremism as Islam is a religion of love, progress, social justice and equality.”24 By that time, the Islamic opposition to Hafiz al-Assad’s rule had come to represent not only a rejection of Ba’athist secularism but also a denunciation of the regime’s increasingly visible Alawi face, which made the debate on the 1973 Constitution all the more prescient.

  A clash of constituencies

  Although the struggle between the Ba’ath and the opposition in the late 1970s and early 1980s was often framed in terms referring either to the “Godless Ba’ath” or to the “fanatical Ikhwan”, it would be a mistake to view the confrontation as one fought on purely religious grounds. Behind the bitterness felt by Sunnis towards the Ba’athist regime lay a more profound socioeconomic resentment which widened the social base of the Islamic opposition. The Ba’ath Party’s ascent to power in 1963 had led not only to a transformation in the status of the Alawis and to the emergence of a secular ideology but also to the complete overturning of the traditional structures of political and socioeconomic power which had dominated Syria for centuries. The new regime had thus upset traditions in every area of life, sidelining an increasingly vocal group of people disaffected by Ba’athist policies and the new rulers.

  One of the most visible aspects of the advent of the new regime for the Syrian population, according to a Ba’athist source who remembered this period, was the “youth” and “inexperience”25 of the new Ba’athist rulers. Politics in Syria, along with the control of the country’s economy, had in fact long been dominated by urban Sunnis from the upper classes. In the post-independence era, the picture had remained broadly similar. As the heroes of the independence struggle against the French had mostly been wealthy Sunni merchants and intellectuals from the urban centres, they inherited the country’s political and economic institutions in 1946 and dominated Syria until the early 1960s.26 However, the political parties they controlled, such as the National Bloc and the Aleppo-based People’s Party, rapidly became discredited by their seeming inability to cope effectively with the many problems facing Syria’s lower and middle classes. In addition, these traditional parties showed little interest in exploiting the potential for mass mobilization which existed in the countryside, where over two thirds of the Syrian population lived. Other newly formed, more radical political groupings such as the Ba’ath, the Syrian Socialist National Party (SSNP) and the Arab Socialist Party were quick to realize the benefits of appealing to this promising yet still untapped potential support base.

  By the early 1950s, the Ba’ath Party had become a vehicle through which many Syrians from modest socioeconomic backgrounds could achieve their political ambitions. The core of Ba’athist politicians in the early 1960s could thus be defined as “those Syrians of the lowest socioeconomic background to whom a high school education was available.”27 For the author Michael Van Dusen, the significant aspect of the 1963 coup was the unprecedented socioeconomic profile of the new rulers. “The real and the only revolution in Syria since independence,” he argued, “has been the transformation of the salient political elites.”28 A study carried out by the researcher Alasdair Drysdale, who tried to come up with an identikit of the typical Ba’athist ruler, confirmed the radical transformation of Syria’s ruling class. While upper-class members of the Aleppo, Hama and Damascus bourgeoisie used to make up the majority of the country’s rulers, after 1963 and, more significantly, following the advent of the “neo-Ba’ath” in 1966, Syria was now ruled by young men of peasant origin, often belonging to a religious minority and geographically coming from the most deprived areas of the countryside, from Latakia but also, in lesser proportions, from Deir ez-Zor and Dar’a.29 A new elite was in place, antagonistic to the traditional holders of power on every account. It was with their deprived origins in mind and a revolutionary Ba’athist ideology in hand that the new rulers were dedicated to overturning the existing traditional socioeconomic and political order.

  To achieve the socioeconomic transformation of Syria to which the Ba’ath Party was committed, full use was made of tools such as land reform and nationalization. At the time, a popular slogan of the Ba’ath Party was: “The Land to Him Who Works It”.30 From 1963 to 1966, the goal of the Party was therefore twofold. While it strove to keep the promises it had made to its rural constituency, it aimed by the same token to perpetuate the dominance of its peasant leadership over Syria by sidelining once and for all the traditional Syrian economic elite. With the aim of breaking up the existing neo-feudal sociopolitical structures which had previously benefited rich landowners, the Ba’ath Party embarked on a campaign of radical reforms favouring the peasants. First, it drastically accelerated the pace of land expropriations which had been carried out between 1958 and 1961 in the framework of the UAR, thus definitely breaking up the quasi-monopoly of a few rich families over vast Syrian lands.31 This also meant that redistributed land would benefit previously landless peasants, the proportion of whom dropped from 70 per cent to 30 per cent over a short period of time.32

  Secondly, the advent of the more left-wing “neo-Ba’ath” in 1966 ushered in a policy of “state land ownership” through which confiscated land was transformed into state farms and cooperatives. This meant, among other things, that the state would be able to provide credit and production supplies to the peasants, thereby breaking their dependency on rich middlemen and landlords who used to loan them money at substantial interest rates.33 A General Peasants Union was also created, first as an institutional rural grouping aimed at balancing the traditional leadership, before it became a tool for mass mobilization in the hands of the Ba’athist rulers.34 The aggregate effect of the land reforms carried out by the new rulers quickly proved successful. While the landed upper
class numbered 39,640 in 1960, this figure had decreased by a factor of four to 8,360 rural notables by 1970.35

  Having politically sidelined the traditional elite by taking over the country’s institutions in 1963, the Ba’athist rulers had also managed to overturn the economic order on which the old landed elites had been relying for their power. This would prove a crucial factor in encouraging the old elite to support the Islamic insurrection of the late 1970s and early 1980s in a place like Hama—where their political and economic influence was threatened by local Ba’athist authorities of rural extraction, committed to crushing these traditional holders of power. Throughout the 1970s, the Ikhwan strove to appeal to the upper landowning class which had been severely hurt by Ba’athist policies such as land reform and the substitution of state rural credit for private money lending. The networks linking the Brotherhood and the rich landowners, which had been formed in the 1950s through a tacit electoral alliance between the Ikhwan and the Aleppo-based People’s Party, were reactivated. By 1980, the Brotherhood’s programme made it clear that only land already belonging to the state would be distributed to landless peasants in the event of an Islamist takeover. In exchange for such a guarantee, rich notables started to provide money to the Ikhwan and engaged in conspiracies with them in order to topple the Ba’athist regime.36

  In addition to the traditional elite, an increasingly vocal constituency became disaffected by Ba’athist policies: the urban middle classes. The pro-rural bias of the post-1963 rulers had led them to focus on the peasants’ living conditions in the countryside, with policies often coming at the expense of the urban masses which would form the most significant social component of the Islamic opposition to the Ba’athist regime. Traditionally, the Muslim Brotherhood had always been seen as a natural ally of the economically liberal middle class Syrians working in the souk. Religion and economics were deeply intertwined as many low-income sheikhs combined their religious activities with being a petty trader or an artisan. Usually located in the old quarter of the city, the souk was a stronghold of conservatism and a guardian of tradition—values embodied in the activism of the Muslim Brotherhood. For various reasons, this urban-based and religiously-oriented small-trading class rapidly became an important constituency for the Ikhwan. The organization, in turn, emphasized the sanctity of “free enterprise” and “private property”.37 Even though they emphasized their commitment to social justice through “Islamic socialism”, the Brotherhood’s commitment to liberal economic values certainly reflected the interests of its main constituency. A clash of constituency and of ideology was thus bound to happen with the Ba’ath Party which, by 1953, had strengthened the socialist aspect of its programme through an alliance with the left-wing leader Akram al-Hawrani, giving birth to the Arab Socialist Ba’ath Party.