Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

by Raphael Lefevre

  At any rate, the victory of the “northern axis” following the leadership crisis of the late 1960s provoked the departure both from the Ikhwan and from Syria of many Damascene Brothers who had remained loyal to Issam al-Attar.30 In the decades following his exile, and as Ba’athist repression of Islamic militants sharply increased, a core group gathered around the Islamic Centre of Brussels and then Aachen, where Issam al-Attar had launched his own movement, al-Tala’i (“The Vanguards”, not to be confused with Marwan Hadid’s al-Tali’a al-Muqatila, “The Fighting Vanguard”). In line with the legacy of the Salafiyya trend in Damascus, al-Tala’i was an intellectual network ideologically following in the footsteps of al-Tamaddun, advocating to Muslim elites in Europe a reform of Islam from within.

  More generally, the Damascene Brothers who left Syria and the Ikhwan in the early 1970s concentrated on spreading daw’a (preaching) across the Arab world, many for instance taking up educational positions in Saudi Arabia and Jordan. This was the case, for instance, with Muhammed Surur Zein al-Abideen and Muhammed al-Abdeh who, having taught Islamic law in Saudi Arabia, left for the United Kingdom where they founded their own movements.31 While working on magazines, Surur creating al-Sunna and Abdeh becoming an editor of al-Bayan, they both argued in favour of a more politically active and socially conservative brand of Salafism inspired by the Wahhabism they had experienced in Saudi Arabia. “What my father, who was a close associate of Muhammed Surur Zein al-Abideen, advocated was a blend of ‘Salafiyya’ creed with Ikhwani-style organization” explained Malik al-Abdeh, the son of Muhammed al-Abdeh and director of the London-based Barada TV. “In many ways, they were already advocating the birth of a sort of Hizb an-Nour [the Salafist party which emerged in post-revolutionary Egypt], an ideological platform with strong Salafi views, stressing their hostility to Shi’ism and their commitment to Sharia law, while at the same time wishing to engage in political activism and prepared to play the game of parliamentary democracy.”32

  Malik al-Abdeh, whose family stems from the “Damascus wing”, created, together with his brother Anas, the Movement for Justice and Development (MJD), in late 2005, a Syrian opposition party based in London. The MJD seeks to emulate the blend of political liberalism and social conservatism put forward by the AKP Party in Turkey. Negatively perceived by an Ikhwani leadership which views it as a creation of the “Damascus wing”, the MJD endorses the legacy of Issam al-Attar even if he does not wish to be too closely associated with it—al-Attar’s associate, Muhammed Hawari, stressing that “both movements are from the same tree but bear different fruits”.33

  The radicalization of the Islamic movement

  If the split in the “Damascus wing” had little to do with the moderate ideological inclination adopted by its members, the split of the early 1970s nonetheless ended up having profound doctrinal and political implications for the Islamic movement. Indeed, the departure of the Damascene members from the rest of the Muslim Brotherhood left an ideological vacuum which would eventually be exploited by more radical Islamic activists.

  At first, however, the organization remained committed to the peaceful approach Issam al-Attar had charted for the Syrian Ikhwan. The Aleppine Abdel Fatah Abu Ghuddah, who had by then taken the reins of leadership, was a respected Islamic scholar who wished to focus the Brotherhood’s efforts on preaching and education (da’wa). This also coincided with a period during which the Syrian Ba’ath, headed by Hafiz al-Assad, was striving to moderate the line it had inherited from his more radical “neo-Ba’ath” predecessors. At the time, the modest efforts undertaken by the Syrian President at opening up the country’s political system were even tacitly supported by the Ikhwan. When local and legislative elections were organized by the regime, in 1972 and 1973 respectively, the Muslim Brotherhood, while not participating directly, supported conservative candidates in Aleppo and Damascus.34 On the surface, therefore, the leadership crisis which had led to the departure of the moderate “Damascus wing” had not yet plunged the entire movement into radicalism.

  Things were different on the ground, however, where at the grassroots level, resentment was growing against the seemingly passive stance the leadership had taken with respect to Ba’athist rule. Eventually, in 1975 Abdel Fatah Abu Ghuddah handed the organization’s leadership to the more radical, Hama-born Adnan Saadeddine, in a move symbolizing the Ikhwan’s progressive political and ideological radicalization. The new leader’s rise to prominence at the helm of the Muslim Brotherhood gave way to the advent of what some refer to as the “Hama clan”—a group of younger Ikhwani activists whose more hard-line stance would eventually push the organization into an open confrontation with the Syrian Ba’ath. Key amongst them was Said Hawwa, a young Islamic scholar from Hama who is often considered the artisan of the Muslim Brotherhood’s ideological radicalization from 1975 onwards. The main organizer of the January 1973 demonstrations against the “Godless” Ba’ath regime, which had just published a draft Constitution deemed “too secular”, he quickly became the Ikhwan’s main ideologue after Adnan Saadeddine’s takeover of the organization’s leadership. His hatred of the Ba’ath regime’s secular face was coupled with a strong sectarian dimension. Whether in his most widely-read book, Jund Allah (“Army of God”), or in the numerous inflammatory public speeches he gave, Said Hawwa constantly denounced the “infidel Nusayri regime”, unleashing by the same token a wave of Islamic radicalism with sectarian undertones which would significantly alter the nature of the once-peaceful Syrian Ikhwan.35

  Itzchak Weismann, a researcher who studied the radical Islamic scholar’s thought in depth, notes that “in defining his attitude toward the Alawis, Hawwa alludes to a fatwa of Ibn Taymiyya”, and that,

  According to this fatwa, jihad against this sect precedes jihad against polytheists (mushrikun) or against ahl al-kitab [the People of the Book, i.e. the Christian and Jewish communities] as it belongs to the category of jihad against murtaddun [“apostates” who have “left” Islam]. Thus, in Hawwa’s view, Syria is a unique case of a Muslim state that is ruled by a heretical halini government, and in such case he sees no escape from a violent confrontation. The Sunni majority, led by the Islamic movement, must wage an uncompromising war against Assad’s regime and against Alawi dominance in Syria.36

  The popularity of Said Hawwa among the rank-and-file of the Brotherhood became such that, by the mid-1970s, books he had authored. such as Jund Allah, were distributed widely in mosques and underground religious bookshops.

  Thus, while the Muslim Brotherhood’s violent struggle against the Syrian Ba’ath would only be launched in late 1979, the process that led to its radicalization was well under way throughout the 1970s. In this respect, the Muslim Brotherhood’s Hamawite leadership—formally in control of the organization from 1975 to 1980 and the main influence until 1982—seems to have been deeply influenced, both ideologically and tactically, by the growing strength of a particularly radical form of Islamic militancy which had emerged a decade earlier in Hama and was rapidly spreading throughout Syria.

  In this bastion of religious conservatism, the rapidly growing popularity of a jihadist organization born on the fringes of the Ikhwan symbolized a radical trend which would mark the evolution of the Syrian Islamic movement. Early signs indicating the emergence of a jihadist current in Syria could be observed shortly after the Ba’ath regime’s ascent to power. In April 1964, violent clashes erupted in Hama, pitting the authorities against a small group of radicalized Islamic activists who called for a violent overthrow of the “Godless” Ba’ath regime (see Chapter 3). They were led by Marwan Hadid, a charismatic figure whose daring outlook subsequently provided the jihadist literature with a mythology and a role model to look upon (see Appendices for an account of Hadid’s “heroic” behaviour during and after the 1964 Hama riots, written by Sheikh Abdullah Azzam, a Jordanian Islamic scholar who was also the “godfather” of the 1980s international jihad in Afghanistan). Beyond his charismatic leadership, Hadid brought to the Islamic
movement in Syria a vision and a doctrine for action. In the early 1960s, he went to Cairo to study agricultural engineering, and there he befriended Sayyid Qutb, a member of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood whose advocacy of the need to violently confront President Gamal Abdel Nasser seemed appealing to many Syrian Islamic activists disenchanted by the Ikhwani leadership’s peaceful—some said passive—approach to the Ba’ath regime. Upon Marwan Hadid’s return to Hama in 1963, and especially after the 1964 Hama riots which he directed, the “Qutbist ideology” started to spread with increasing pace across the country. But, in order to understand the extent to which Sayyid Qutb’s theories made their way through the Islamic movement in Syria, a brief glance at the conceptual framework introduced by the Egyptian ideologue is needed.

  When Qutb wrote his immensely influential Ma’alim fi’l Tariq (“Sign-posts”), in the mid-1960s, the Egyptian Ikhwan were undergoing a severe crisis of identity. While they found it difficult to cope with the ideological void following the death a decade earlier of their historic leader Hassan al-Banna, they were also having a hard time dealing with the increasingly heavy repression at the hands of Nasser’s regime. In that context, the Egyptian ideologue brought crucial responses to the unanswered questions of many Muslim Brothers and Islamic youth who proved unable to come to terms with their organization’s hardships. Sayyid Qutb explained the weak state of the Islamic movement by introducing the concept of jahiliyya, or “ignorance”, which after characterizing the pre-Islamic era now seemed to again “contaminate” Muslim societies governed by rulers more inspired by foreign ideologies (socialism, nationalism, secularism) than by a commitment to al-hakimiyya—“God’s sovereign rule on earth”. An “Islamic renewal” would therefore entail a complete change in the attitude and thinking of Muslim societies that were now, in Qutb’s opinion, not yet fully aware of the dangers to the Umma posed by left-wing, secular governments judged as “impious”.

  Besides offering a conceptual framework within which to analyse the growth of the Nasser regime and its consequences, the Egyptian ideologue also proposed a vision of what should be done to alter the situation. He argued that “our first task is to change society in deed, to alter the jahiliyya reality from top to bottom.”37 In his view, since the masses were blinded by ignorance, the restoration of divine law would only be achieved through the work of a vanguard haraka (movement)—a supposedly enlightened group tasked with carrying out the revolution. As to what method such a vanguard should employ, Sayyid Qutb left neither doubt nor ambiguity. “[Jihad] will not be achieved merely by teaching and preaching, for those who inflict the yoke on the necks of the people and who usurp the authority of God on earth will not concede their position through such explanation and sermonising,”38 he stated. “The battle is constant and the sacred combat lasts until Judgment Day.”39 Sayyid Qutb’s advocacy of the use of violence to overthrow Arab regimes judged as “impious” would have far-reaching implications for Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, an organization long committed to preaching and political activism. Gilles Kepel, an expert on radical Islam, explained how, “for the author of Signposts, the propagation of Islam now required a shift of both field and instrument […] The Book was no longer indicated: it was time for the sword. [The Nasserist state] was a jahiliyya regime, which had to be fought the way pagans were fought.”40 Notwithstanding the official rejection of Qutbist thought by the Egyptian Ikhwani leadership—whose leader in the 1960s, Hassan al-Hudaybi, criticized it in a book entitled Preachers, not Judges that he published shortly afterwards—the radical ideologue managed to influence a whole generation of militants until well after his death in 1966.

  The Syrian Marwan Hadid was one of them. His return to Syria in 1963 marked the spill-over of the debate on the immediacy of armed struggle in Syrian Islamic circles. According to Umar Faruk Abdallah, the author of a book on the Syrian Islamic movement, “Hadid came to hold that there must above all be no compromise between Islam and non-Islamic or anti-Islamic systems of government and he also became convinced that the anti-Islamic systems represented by [Nasser] and the Syrian Ba’ath could only be dislodged by armed resistance.” He also contended that “Like Qutb, Hadid was convinced that the Islamic movements would be quashed whether or not they took up arms and that their only hope for survival was to heed the Islamic call of jihad as long as some strength and capacity to fight still remained.”41

  The success of the Qutbist ideology beyond Egypt’s borders resided in the universal message it carried to committed Muslims across the Arab world. Its meaning had particular relevance in Syria, dominated since March 1963 by a Ba’ath Party heavily populated by religious minorities. There, the jahiliyya dimension of secular Ba’athist rule seemed to be quickly converging with the growing sectarian aspect assumed by the struggle against the regime. Syrian activists inspired by Sayyid Qutb revived Ibn Taymiyya’s legacy of anti-Alawism, declaring the sect as takfir (to be excommunicated) and promising to fight what they referred to as “Nusayri dogs” until the very last.

  However, as Marwan Hadid started to call publicly for immediate jihad against the regime in his home town of Hama, he was quickly sidelined by the “Damascus wing” then in control of the Brotherhood’s leadership, which categorically rejected his ideas and did not wish to be associated with him. The split came to the fore when the Syrian jihadist emerged as a charismatic and popular figure in the anti-regime riots of Hama in 1964, as a result of which the Ba’athist rulers forced the Brotherhood’s leader, Issam al-Attar, into exile for not being able to control his troops. Even though Marwan Hadid could count on the tacit support of the prominent Ikhwani members Adnan Saadeddine and Said Hawwa from Hama, the Brotherhood’s leadership—under both the Damascene al-Attar and the Aleppine Abu Ghuddah—was not prepared to endorse his actions, out of fear of further Ba’athist retaliation and their own lack of consensus. The group which Marwan Hadid developed in Hama throughout the 1960s and early 1970s therefore became a “fringe movement on the periphery of the Brotherhood”42—even though the full extent to which “Marwan Hadid’s group”, as it was then known, was close to the Ikhwan’s local leadership in Hama remains unknown.43

  Birth of an extremist organization: the Fighting Vanguard

  In the late 1960s, Marwan Hadid and his followers went to the Palestinian fedayeen camps scattered throughout Jordan for military training. When they were forced out of the country after King Hussein destroyed many such camps during the “Black September” of 1970, they returned to Syria with crucial skills and an unyielding determination to fight against the Ba’ath. An al-Qaeda document found during the American raid on Usama Bin Laden’s home in Abbottabad, Pakistan, retraces parts of this little-known episode of Marwan Hadid’s story. “Whatever military experience Hadid had learned in Jordan made him feel confident about himself. Hadid wanted to use his training to do something for his religion. He decided that he could no longer live under the Syrian apostate regime […] and he was able to recruit a number of people so he could begin his work against the Syrian regime”, the document stated, while also pointing out that “Hadid did not want to wait for the right time.”44

  Following the constitutional crisis of 1973, which seemed to confirm the secular orientation of the regime (see Chapters 3 and 4), Marwan Hadid’s views in Islamic circles close to the Brotherhood became influential, to the extent that he managed to gather a sufficient number of committed followers to carry out the targeted killings of prominent members of the Ba’ath security apparatus, not only in Hama but also in Damascus where he had gone into hiding. “By 1974, Marwan Hadid had at his disposal a large number of trained armed cells ready to do anything asked of them,”45 reported Ayman al-Shorbaji, the organization’s field commander in Damascus. Hadid’s “Qutbist” ambition was clear and well summed up in the name eventually given to his group, al-Tali’a al-Muqatila lil-Mujahidin (The Fighting Vanguard of the Mujahidin). By taking the initiative to kill prominent representatives of the regime, he hoped to trigger government retal
iation that would ultimately convince the Brotherhood’s leadership of the inevitability of armed struggle. Muhammed Riyadh al-Shuqfah, an active Brotherhood member in Hama who was to rise to the leadership of the Ikhwan in 2010, recalled his “friendship” with “Sheikh Marwan” and gave more details on the jihadist figure: “he was a brave Islamic militant; he had the temper of a true leader and had much influence on Hama’s youth.” However, “while he had always been part of the local Muslim Brotherhood circle in Hama, he strongly disagreed with the peaceful policy we followed at the time.” “Sheikh Marwan was an enthusiastic member of the Ikhwan but he was not very respectful of the organization’s rules; he wanted the Brotherhood to think less and act more,” he added. “In other words, he ambitioned to revolutionize our organization.”46

  With the help of commando training received from the Palestinian group Fatah in its Jordanian and Lebanese camps, “Marwan Hadid’s group”—as it was known before assuming the name of the Fighting Vanguard (al Tali’a al-Muqatila)—soon became so efficient that the Ba’ath regime concentrated its resources on tracking down its leader, who was arrested in Damascus in June 1975.47 His subsequent death in prison one year later, allegedly due to poisoning, provoked a cry of outrage so loud that it was heard not only from Hadid’s admirers but also from many within the Brotherhood, who admired his courage and lonely struggle and sought revenge for his slaying. Already a myth during his lifetime, Marwan Hadid had become upon his death a true legend for all jihadists, both in Syria and abroad (see Appendices for Abdullah Azzam’s account of the “heroic” way in which the jihadist figure was forced to give up arms). According to Husni Abu, an Islamic militant from Aleppo, it was upon Marwan Hadid’s death that many radicals who had been sensitive to his call for armed struggle but were spread out throughout Syria decided to set up a more coordinated, nationwide organization tasked with carrying on his enterprise.48 From Hama, the militant Abd-us-Sattar az-Za’im took on this task, bringing together the various armed cells which had also sprung up throughout Aleppo and Damascus. The organization soon became highly effective, assassinating Major Muhammad Gharrah in early 1976, the chief of the Hama branch of General Intelligence, most certainly in an act of retaliation for the torture which Marwan Hadid was rumoured to have undergone while in prison.49