Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria

by Raphael Lefevre

  Other terrorist incidents involving jihadist networks struck Syrian territory throughout the decade. In April 2004, a UN building was the target of an attack by radical Islamic militants leading to a shootout with the security forces in the Mezze neighbourhood of the capital, and in July 2005 there was a gun battle between jihadist activists and the police on Mount Qassioun, overlooking Damascus. More crucially, it is suspected that it was terrorists affiliated to Fatah al-Islam, a Sunni Lebanese jihadist organization formerly alleged to be linked with Syrian Intelligence, who carried the battle against the Syrian Ba’ath to one of the places most symbolic of the regime’s might when the headquarters of Military Intelligence were bombed on 27 September 2008. A cable sent afterwards by the US Embassy in Damascus reported on the incident:

  The Syrian government, using tightly controlled press outlets, was quick to blame a Lebanese-based, al-Qaeda affiliated group, Fatah al-Islam; for this attack. Syrian TV broadcast a November 7th programme featuring the confessions of some 20 Fatah al-Islam members, including the daughter and son-in-law of Fatah al-Islam leader Shakr al-Absy, of their involvement in the attack against the prominent military intelligence installation. Syrian and other commentators have noted that the Syrian government allegedly had maintained ties to Shakr al-Absy […]. It remains unclear why this group would have launched an attack against Syrian security elements […]. Since the attack, the regime has attempted to portray Syria as a victim of terrorism rather than a purveyor of it.56

  Indeed, since the 9/11 attacks and, most significantly, since the beginning of the Iraq war, the Syrian regime had striven to portray itself as also targeted by terrorism. Little is known about whether this was the result of a true blowback against the mukhabarat’s longstanding relations with Islamist insurgents in Iraq, local radical Islamic activists or al-Qaeda-affiliated groups such as Fatah al-Islam, or reflected the regime’s interest in acting as a victim of Islamic violence in the framework of the US-led “War on Terror”. At any rate, the regime did its utmost to benefit from the situation by taking the opportunity to seemingly lend a hand to the US on matters related to security co-operation. The minutes of a long meeting held in Damascus by US security officials with their Syrian counterparts, represented by the General Intelligence director, Ali Mamlouk, are in this respect revealing of the Ba’ath regime’s willingness to use its newfound image as a victim of terrorism as a bargaining chip in its relations with America: “Mamlouk pointed to Syria’s 30 years of experience in battling radical groups such as the Muslim Brotherhood as evidence of Syria’s commitment to the fight against terrorism.” Alluding to the “wealth of information” Syria had obtained over the past years while penetrating terrorist groups, Mamlouk declared that “we have a lot of experience and know these groups, this is our area and we know it; we are on the ground and so we should take the lead [in the fight against terrorism],” before concluding “by all means we will continue to do all this but if we start cooperation with you it will lead to better results and we can better protect our interests.”57

  The Syrian regime’s apparent willingness to cooperate with the United States on the security front reflected its longstanding desire to kick-start relations with America. This was made clear during the above-mentioned meeting when a Syrian official declared that “politics are an integral part of combating terrorism” and warned that “listing Syria as a state sponsor of terrorism and including Syria on the list of 14 countries for enhanced screening by the Transportation Security Administration (TSA) creates a ‘contradiction’ when the US subsequently requested cooperation with Syria against terrorism.” Ali Mamlouk concluded the meeting by informing his American counterpart that “in summary, President Assad wants cooperation, we [the security services] should take the lead on that cooperation, and don’t put us on your lists [of states sponsoring terrorism].”58

  Taming political Islam

  While the potential rise of radical Islam in Syria—alongside its violent consequences—may therefore have partially served the regime’s interest in portraying itself as being at the forefront of the “War on Terror”, the Syrian Ba’ath was also quick to realize that its long-term survival paradoxically lay in the encouragement of a more moderate form of political Islam at home. This did not come as a self-evident development since the ideological substance of the Ba’ath came from secularism and, in the early 1980s, the Syrian regime had just come out of a lone struggle against Islamic forces which resulted in the disappearance of virtually all expressions of political Islam for years. Drawing lessons from the bloody struggle, Hafiz al-Assad came to terms with the reality that, whatever the scale of repression, it would never be possible to stifle completely the increasing desire of conservative sections of Syrian society to display their Muslim faith. The Syrian President as well as his successor, Bashar al-Assad, therefore resorted to carrying out policies which, instead of brutally suppressing all expression of political Islam, encouraged the emergence of institutions and personalities which, under the watchful eye of the regime, called for the advent of a “moderate Islam”.

  A few co-opted Sunni Muslim religious scholars, or ulama, were granted privileged access to the regime as a way to make sure that their political loyalty lay on the side of the Syrian Ba’ath. This policy was initiated by Hafiz al-Assad when he built up his ties with Ahmad Kuftaro, a prominent Kurdish alim appointed Great Mufti of Syria in 1964. This long-time supporter of Assad—a self-professed admirer of his “personality and characteristics, his dedication and his steadfastness on the principle of faith”59—was known for his pro-regime statements, granting a stamp of approval to many of its policies. Kuftaro would for instance, go as far as stating that “Islam and the regime’s power to enforce the law are twin brothers”[…] “it is impossible to think of one without the other, Islam is the base and the regime’s power of rule is the protector; after all a thing without a base is destined to collapse and fail, and a thing without a protector will end in extinction.”60 In exchange for his loyalty, Kuftaro was able to run things his own way until his death in 2005, establishing in 1974 the Abu al-Noor centre which quickly became the country’s leading teaching centre for Arabic language and higher Islamic studies. The centre was taken over by his son Salah Kuftaro, who has enjoyed the same level of access to state-controlled media as his father, despite his repeated assertions that secular Arab governments have failed and that an “Islamic democracy” should instead be implemented in Syria.61

  But even more representative of the pro-regime religious scholars who have been co-opted by the Ba’ath is Ahmad Hassoun who, two years after being promoted by presidential decree to the post of Grand Mufti, replacing Ahmad Kuftaro, declared that Bashar al-Assad’s election for a second term was comparable to a “bai’a [oath of allegiance] similar to that of the Prophet.”62 Another prominent cleric is Said Ramadan al-Buti, a Kurdish scholar of Damascene extraction who has been a constant source of support for the Syrian Ba’ath since the late 1970s when he sharply attacked the Muslim Brotherhood and the Fighting Vanguard for having acted “in contradiction with the principles of Islam” and having brought fitna, or civil war, to Syria. Ever since, he has backed the regime’s ban on the establishment of political parties carrying a religious agenda, backing up the regime’s security argument by stating that “there is always the fear that extreme elements will infiltrate such a party and turn it into a tool for sowing dissension and violence in society.”63 In an interview, Salah Kuftaro backed this argument by adding that “our religious community in Syria is always under surveillance by the government and I support that so no extremist[s] sneak in among us.”64

  While the drive behind the regime’s support for institutions and personalities encouraging a “moderate Islam” initially came from Hafiz al-Assad, who in addition to supporting moderate, pro-regime clerics oversaw a great increase in the number of mosques built and gave his name to institutes dedicated to memorization of the Quran, it was his son Bashar who, upon succeeding his father in J
une 2000, brought further momentum to a policy eventually aimed at containing radical expressions of political Islam. One of his first steps as the new President of Syria was to allow female students to wear the hijab, or headscarf, in school.65 Early on in his presidency, he strove to project the image of a leader faithful to Islam and a guardian of the Muslim religion in Syria. The state-controlled media thus regularly reported on his participation in religious holiday prayers in mosques throughout the country. In December 2002, the young President made news when he took part in the service for the last Friday of the month of Ramadan at the Umar Ibn al-Khatab Mosque in Hama.66 Since the city had been the focal point of the Islamic insurrections of the late 1970s and early 1980s, the message conveyed, almost twenty years later to the day, by Bashar al-Assad, was power. Not only was the regime willing to turn a page in the story of its troubled relations with political Islam, it also seemed ready to open a new chapter by embracing parts of the ideology and the sought-after policies of those it had been fighting decades earlier.

  In the first ten years of Bashar al-Assad’s rule, the regime did more to accommodate conservative Syrian Muslims than at any point before. A religious scholar—not a secular Ba’athist—was appointed as head of the Minister of Awqaf (religious endowments), religious activities could take place in the stadium of Damascus University, soldiers were allowed to pray in their barracks, charitable Islamic foundations such as Zayd were allowed to operate again after years of prohibition, the state sponsored the emergence of a number of institutes dedicated to Islamic studies, and the banking sector was reformed in order to encourage the emergence of Islamic banks. “Before, religion for the regime was like a ball of fire, now they deal with it like it could be a ball of life,”67 a Syrian professor of Islamic studies summed up in 2006. The opinion of the country’s most prominent religious scholar was taken into account more seriously than ever before. In the same year, while the government was on the verge of reorganizing religious education so that students who wished to enter a school of Islamic studies should have at least gone through the basic phase of obligatory teaching, the anger of the clerics was swiftly heard and the regime backed down. In a show of their newfound influence, when Bashar al-Assad received a letter signed by influential religious figures such as Said Ramadan al-Buti, Salah Kuftaro, Mohammed al-Khatib and Osama al-Rifa’i among others, he immediately promised to solve the problem and the reform was aborted.68

  Some analysts suggest that, if the political discourse and practical policies of the Syrian Ba’ath progressively moved in a mildly Islamic direction, it was because, at the time, the regime was faced with mounting internal and external pressures. Externally, Bashar al-Assad’s grip on power threatened to erode in view of warnings from the US that Syria could very well be next on the list after Iraq was invaded in March 2003. Shortly thereafter, the security services’ powerful interests in neighbouring Lebanon partially collapsed with the passing of the Franco-American UN Security Council Resolution no. 1559 which, following the assassination of the Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri, requested that Syria swiftly withdraw its troops from Beirut. The security apparatus also felt directly targeted by the newly-installed Special Tribunal for Lebanon which increasingly seemed to take aim at prominent Syrian figures suspected of involvement in the assassination. Domestically, it took a few years for Bashar al-Assad to impose his own authority not only over the country but also over his own regime. Having succeeded his father as President at barely thirty-five years of age, he was the target of some within the regime who, like former Vice President Abdel Halim Khaddam, resented the hereditary dimension of continued Ba’athist rule under the Assads. The short-lived timid liberalization process which led to the so-called “Damascus Spring” in the early 2000s did not help matters as the regime itself became the main target of the Syrian opposition. In January 2005, Khaddam himself defected from the regime and joined the ranks of the opposition, leaving the regime as if it was about to collapse (see Chapter 8). This is the context in which Bashar al-Assad’s willingness to court religious conservatives throughout the early reign of his rule should be seen.

  In turn, many of the country’s religious men brought their loyalty to the regime. For instance, Muhammad al-Habasch, a leading member of Parliament with a strong religious inclination, supported the regime’s clampdown on opposition leaders participating in conferences in Washington or Paris by stating that “it’s not a suitable time to allow people to travel abroad to participate in opposition conferences, we have to be real.” He also added that he was satisfied to see regime officials moving towards an accommodation with religious forces inside the country, saying, “they realize we need Islamic power, especially at this time.”69 The regime, long secular out of ideology and interest, now seemed to move in a mildly Islamic direction on the model of the ruling AKP in Turkey, a close partner of Bashar al-Assad in his first ten years in power. An Egyptian journalist reported in 2010 on that paradox by observing that “some months ago, a closed seminar on secularism at Damascus University attended by no more than 100 people from the ranks of progressives and democrats was banned by the authorities, while two weeks ago a conservative cleric was allowed to preach in Aleppo, in the north of the country, in a sermon attended by 6,000 people.”70

  The regime’s softer policies towards renewed expressions of faith by Syria’s Sunni Muslim citizens were made even more apparent by its silence regarding the exponential growth of the Qubaysiyat, a secretive religious movement emphasizing women’s role in Islamic life, whose name comes from its founder Munira al-Qubaysi. Since the 1970s, more than 120 religious education institutes and 600 higher institutes for religious learning have opened, which are affiliated with many of the country’s 9,000 mosques. There are no official statistics on the degree of infiltration of the Qubaysiyat but estimates suggest that, in Damascus alone, these conservative female preachers control eighty religious schools.71 Hence they have been able to oversee the education of many young female students and have subsequently acted in the social sphere in a way that has seen their popularity grow quickly over recent years. Analysing the reason behind their success, the journalist Ibrahim Hamidi explained that beyond “supervising the teaching of hundreds of thousands of school children from an early age and in a conservative manner,” the Qubaysis then “take care of them through charity and people’s contributions, offering some medical services in the Salamah Hospital, which is affiliated with it.” In addition, “The Qubaysis also provide some books on their thought in bookshops they own such as the al-Salam bookshop in the al-Baramikah neighbourhood in the centre of Damascus.” There are also rumours that the wives and daughters of some influential members of Damascene society have been converted to the Qubaysiyat movement. One can therefore assume that the regime is aware of the movement yet does not move against it for fear of alienating a potentially powerful constituency. Such a passive stance is also due to the fact that, according to Muhammed al-Habasch, the most prominent characteristic of this women’s Islamic society has since the 1970s been “their keeping away from politics whether in support of or against the regime.” The group, he says, “has not been involved in any act against the country,” and “the Qubaysis have no political project”72 and instead focus on achieving Islamic unity through enhancing the role of women in Islamic life. According to Thomas Pierret, the women’s Islamic society, long operating in secrecy so as not to upset the security services, was in 2006 allowed to gather in mosques—once again, probably in order to court the conservative religious constituency in the context of a regional crisis.73

  During that year, Syria was coming again under intense regional and international pressure because of its long-time backing of the Shiite Lebanese militia Hizbullah which embodied the resistance to the Israeli invasion of Lebanon in July 2006. Then, as during its opposition to the 1979 Egypt-Israel Treaty, the 1994 Oslo peace process and Israel’s incursions into Palestinian territories as in January 2009, the Syrian regime was always careful to empl
oy a distinctively pro-Palestinian rhetoric, most often couched in Islamic terms. Practically, this policy meant that Damascus had to reach out to Islamic groups throughout the region which were at the forefront of the anti-Israel struggle. Over the past forty years, the Syrian regime has brought key support to explicitly religious Shiite Lebanese militias such as Amal and Hizbullah—most often for strategic reasons linked to the Syrian Ba’ath’s lack of good relations with the PLO. Mohammad Hussein Fadlallah, Hizbullah’s spiritual leader, and Hassan Nasrallah, the organization’s secretary general, have long been regular visitors to the Syrian capital.

  Over the past decade, however, and at least until the Arab uprisings reached Syria in March 2011, the regime has striven to broaden the sectarian scope of its regional partnerships by increasingly supporting Sunni militant groups which, despite their instinctive distaste for the Alawi-dominated Syrian Ba’ath, have shared its anti-Israeli agenda with fervour. The Palestinian Islamic movement has been particularly welcome in Damascus where Islamic Jihad has established its headquarters and Hamas found a safe haven for its most wanted members. The Jordanian Islamic Action Front has also been vocal in its support for the anti-Israel stance of the Syrian Ba’ath. This was particularly paradoxical given the Islamic Action Front’s own affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood movement whose local branch in Syria was so severely crushed by the Ba’ath regime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. But it also reflected the Syrian Ikhwan’s great difficulty, at the time, in convincing their regional partners of the need to support attempts to topple the Ba’ath regime. Reflecting the complex situation into which the regime’s increasingly Islamic discourse and policies had put the Syrian Ikhwan, members of the local branch of the organization were severely criticized at an international Muslim Brotherhood conference in the late 1990s. One of the Jordanian participants in the meeting was reported to have accused them by saying that “Syria is the only Arab state standing up to Israel and granting support to every opposition to the Zionist occupation!” and that accordingly “it is impossible for an Arab or a Muslim to attack it and try to harm it and its leadership.”74 This trend would dramatically change with the advent of the Arab uprisings in Syria after the head of Hamas, Khaled Meshaal, decided to leave Damascus in the wake of Bashar al-Assad’s bloody crackdown on the protesters.