by Robin Wright
Muslim extremists were linked to an escalating series of kidnappings, bombings, grenade attacks, and assassinations in the late 1970s. On June 26, 1980, amid a hail of machine-gun fire and grenades, militants tried to assassinate Assad during an arrival ceremony for the visiting president of Mali. Assad reportedly kicked one of the grenades away himself.19
The next day, Syrian troops were dispatched to Tadmur Prison, where they opened fire on inmates. Some 500 prisoners were murdered.20 Within days, the government also introduced Law No. Forty-nine. It made membership in the Muslim Brotherhood “group”—lumping the organization and guerilla cells together—a crime automatically punishable by death.
The confrontation climaxed during a three-week period in February 1982, when a full-scale military offensive by land and air pummeled Hama. People were rounded up in door-to-door searches of hospitals, schools, offices, mosques, shops, and homes. Some were executed on the spot. Amnesty International reported that others were taken to detention centers at the airport, city stadium, and military camps. It also cited local reports that the military flushed containers of cyanide gas into buildings where rebels were suspected of hiding.
To mark an anniversary more than twenty years later, the Syrian Human Rights Committee published a lengthy reconstruction. The Hama massacre, it said, targeted about one-fifth of the city’s 180,000 inhabitants. It noted one particularly chilling account from an unnamed survivor who was among a group of residents driven off in eleven trucks.
I was among a huge number of people, so crowded that we almost could not breathe, and we were taken to Sriheen, where we were ordered to step out of the trucks, so we did as told. First thing we noticed was those hundreds of shoes scattered everywhere on the ground. It was then that we realized that it meant that hundreds of our fellow citizens were killed and we were next to face the same imminent death.
We were searched afterwards and any cash or watches were taken off us. Then the elements of the Syrian authorities ordered us to move forward towards a deeply dug trench, which stretched long. Some of us were ordered to go to another nearby trench. When I stepped forward to my spot by the trench, I saw the pile of bodies in there still tainted by running blood, which horrified me so much that I had to close my eyes and I had to contain myself to avoid falling off. As expected, streams of bullets were fired towards us and everyone fell in their blood into the trenches, whilst the ones who were inside the other trench got shot inside the trench where they stood.21
The unidentified Syrian was shot but survived, according to the account, by waiting until the military drove off and then sneaking away. But some of the injured, he recounted, died “under the weight of the other bodies.”
The heart of Hama’s old city was razed. Parts were bulldozed with bodies still in the rubble underneath.22 To drive home the point, the government clamped down nationwide. Praying within the army was banned. Mosques and their services came under close surveillance.
The sweeping slaughter may have been the single deadliest act by any Arab government against its own people in the modern Middle East. Amnesty International initially estimated the death toll was between 10,000 and 25,000, the vast majority innocent civilians. Syrian human rights groups now claim the loss was between 30,000 and 40,000 people.23 If true, the fatalities could exceed the death toll for each of the five Arab-Israeli wars.24
Yet the savagery did not end the challenge. In the twenty-first century, Syria is again struggling with the role of religion in politics—and religion is increasingly winning.
The Muslim Brotherhood is still widely considered Syria’s most popular opposition, even after a quarter century underground or in exile. All other groups, even pooling their supporters, are comparatively weak—as most are willing to admit. The appeal of an Islamist alternative has also received a big boost from Baathism’s failures over the intervening decades.
Ibrahim Hamidi grew up during the crackdown against the Brotherhood. Hamidi, who was born in 1969, is Syria’s most respected independent journalist. A correspondent for the London-based al Hayat newspaper, he was jailed for six months in 2002 and 2003 for his political coverage. His family had no ties to the Brotherhood, but fear was so pervasive throughout Syria during the crackdown that his family hid their audio cassette of the Koran, which is played by observant Muslims for three days after a death.
“My brothers and I went out and buried the cassette in the field,” he told me. It is still there. Over lemonade at a Damascus café, Hamidi explained the state of play between the regime and Islamists a generation after Hama.
“In the 1980s, the government started to promote moderate Islam. It wanted to show it was not against all Islam,” he explained. “That was fine then, as the world was different. The Soviet Union still existed.”
“But twenty-five years later, the internal, regional, and international dynamics are all different. The regime’s ideology is not pervasive anymore,” Hamidi said. “And for the first time, Syria is surrounded by Islamic regimes: Turkey, Iraq, Hamas in the Palestinian territories, and the Muslim Brotherhood in Egypt. Many expect the Muslim Brotherhood to win in Jordan in 2007. So now the regime is trying to adapt.”
We met a few days after Syria marked two national holidays—the anniversary of the founding of the Baath Party and the birthday of the Prophet Mohammed. For the first time, the regime celebrated the Prophet’s birth with greater fanfare than the anniversary of the ruling party. Billboards once heralding “progressiveness and socialism” were also being replaced with new admonitions: PRAY TO THE PROPHET, and DO NOT FORGET TO MENTION GOD.25 Assad had recently approved Syria’s first Islamic university as well as three Islamic banks. And Mohammed Habash, the head of the Islamic Studies Center, had been invited to speak on Islam at Syria’s military academy—where praying had been banned twenty-five years earlier.
“The Brotherhood is illegal, and it’s forbidden to talk about it, so no one knows how strong it is,” Hamidi told me. “But the street is definitely more Islamist. There are more scarves, more Islamist books in bookstores, and now more Islamic schools. They’re government-built—but because people want them. That’s also why they allowed Islamic banks, because they found people were reluctant to put their money in regular banks,” he added. “The government is being forced to meet the demands of the people on Islam. Its version is a ‘controlled’ Islam.”
As superficial as it may be, the headscarf is often a barometer of politics in a country that does not take public-opinion polls. In the early 1980s, a distinct minority of women in Damascus wore hejab, or modest Islamic dress. In 2006, a distinct majority in Syria’s most modern city had put it on. They were not black or dreary gray; many were pastels and lively prints. But the fashion still sent a conspicuous signal.
The Brotherhood is the biggest unknown in Syrian politics. The leftists are small but increasingly active. Their agenda is detailed and public. The Brotherhood may have wider support but it is invisible at home. It has name recognition, lofty religious values, and a notorious past, but not much more. Its agenda is vague.
Since there are no known Brotherhood leaders to interview in Syria, I telephoned Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni in London, after I left Damascus. Pictures on the Brotherhood’s Web site show him to be a trim man with short white hair and a short white beard.
Bayanouni was born in 1938 and grew up in a religious family. He joined the movement when he was eighteen. He was imprisoned from 1975 until 1977; one year was in solitary confinement. He left Syria for a conference in France in 1979, just as Damascus cracked down on the Brotherhood, and opted not to go back. He lived in neighboring Jordan for two decades, until he became unwelcome. Then he moved to London. He assumed leadership of the Brotherhood in 1996. But, he stressed, he was operating largely in the dark.
“You assume I know what’s going on inside the country,” he told me. “I don’t.”
The exiled wing calculates its strength largely by tallying the number of people the government admits it has
detained for activities related to the Brotherhood—some 30,000 over the previous fifteen years, by Bayanouni’s count.
Bayanouni is not a cleric. He studied law at the University of Damascus, where he played tennis. “Yes, with female college students,” he told me, with some annoyance, when I asked. “Why not?” He prefers to be described, he added, as a “medal-winning Ping-Pong player.”
Bayanouni has struggled to put a different face on the Brotherhood. He renounced any claim that the movement represented all Syrian Muslims. He issued a new national charter in 2002 and invited secular counterparts to meet to discuss it. He acknowledged “mistakes” in confronting the government in the past.26 He met with Michel Kilo and signed the Damascus Declaration in 2005. He talked to al Jazeera, The Washington Post, National Public Radio, and other international media to make his case for democracy. In 2006, he even met long-serving former Syrian Vice President Abdul Halim Khaddam after he defected; the two agreed to collaborate in a new National Salvation Front.27
“The Brotherhood does not seek to run the country alone,” Bayanouni told me. “After more than forty years of destruction, Syria needs a broad-based government with all the other political forces to rebuild the country. We are looking to share power, not to rule the country.”
Even with godless Marxists? I asked.
“Yes,” he replied, “just as they call in their political discourse for sharing power with all political communities.”
What about freedoms for Christians? “We believe that all ethnic and religious parties in Syria should enjoy complete freedom,” he said.
And Jews? “We don’t differentiate on the basis of religion,” he replied. “Citizenship is the basis of intercommunal relations.”
The most sensitive issue is actually the Brotherhood’s position on other Muslims. The Sunni movement has shied away from acknowledging Alawites, the Shiite offshoot, as equal members in the community of Muslims. The issue is vital to democracy’s viability and avoiding sectarian strife.
Unlike Egypt’s Muslim Brotherhood, which is involved in day-to-day politics, the Syrian branch is now engaged only in talk. It is headquartered more than 2,000 miles from Damascus. Given the movement’s track record, it is impossible to know if Bayanouni’s current spin on policy will bear any resemblance to the Brotherhood’s future practices. Like leaders of the Palestinian and Iraqi diasporas, Syria’s exiles may eventually discover differences with constituents at home. Who knows if Bayanouni would even be retained if the movement were legalized in Syria. He was not elected by the party democratically.
The movement also already has competition from a new Islamic group called Jund al Sham, or Soldiers of Greater Syria, which launched small attacks in Syria in 2005. Its goal, according to pamphlets shown on Syrian television, is to create an Islamic caliphate in the greater Syrian region. Greater Syria includes Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, and Iraq.
The name Jund al Sham is claimed by diverse cells trained in Afghanistan by al Qaeda; they were reportedly dispersed after the United States intervention in 2001. They began reemerging in Syria, Lebanon, and the Persian Gulf sheikhdoms in 2004. In 2005, a Jund al Sham cell claimed credit for a suicide attack on a British school in Qatar.28
Bayanouni claimed the Brotherhood has disavowed all forms of extremism. He alleged that breakaway guerrilla cells were responsible for bloody attacks that led to the Hama showdown. “The Fighting Vanguard claimed they were members, but there was no relationship,” he told me. “We publicly renounced their tactics.”
Those claims elicit mixed reactions even from secular counterparts now willing to do business with the Brotherhood.
Unlike Jund al Sham, the Brotherhood advocates a civilian government, not an Islamic state, Bayanouni said. Authority would be vested in the executive and legislature. The clergy would have no role in political life. Its government would “champion” democratic tenets that “do not conflict with Islamic values.”
“I don’t see a model in the world today for the kind of civilian government inspired by Islam that I’m talking about,” Bayanouni noted. “I completely disagree with what is happening in Iran,”
And Hezbollah? I asked.
“No relations whatsoever,” he replied. “On the contrary, we see Hezbollah as taking extreme positions against the Muslim Brotherhood because of its relationship with the [Syrian] regime.”
And Egypt’s Brotherhood? I asked.
“We frequently hold meetings in Amman and London,” he said. “We belong to the same school. But each conducts its own politics in a local context.”
And Hamas? I asked. Hamas was originally a wing of the Egyptian Muslim Brotherhood. Yet its headquarters was in Damascus, like Hezbollah, courtesy of the Assad government. Islamist politics can get complicated and sometimes even appear contradictory. Islamist parties are not automatically allies.
“Hamas is just like other Islamic movements,” he said. “We’ve had some meetings outside Palestine with people who belonged to the Islamic movement, but we have no relationship with the resistance inside the territories.”
And al Qaeda? I asked.
“Osama bin Laden demonizes the Muslim Brotherhood,” he replied. Bayanouni was in Tampa, Florida, on September 11, 2001, visiting his daughter, he told me. Two of his children came to the United States as students, and both became citizens. His son, with whom I later spoke, lives in North Carolina. Ten of his grandchildren are American citizens.
One of the things that surprised me in Damascus was how many dissidents were talking—among themselves, if not in public—about bringing the Muslim Brotherhood back into the political fold. Part of it was necessity. Other groups have limited prospects without a broader opposition front. Part of it was also a strong Islamic wind blowing through the region. The secular opposition has to be realistic about public preferences.
Syria’s religious leaders—clerics with government approval, including Sunnis who might view the Brotherhood as a rival—have also begun to urge détente. Habash, the parliamentarian, told me he had been urging his colleagues to rescind Law No. Forty-nine, which automatically sentences any Brotherhood member to death.
Other clerics went further. The Father of Light Mosque is a comparatively new facility. It is run by Sheikh Salah Kuftaro. His father, the previous grand mufti of Syria, had hosted Pope John Paul II. The grand mufti died in 2004. At the entrance to the mosque’s administration offices are two giant portraits—one of the late mufti, the other of Bashar al Assad.
The mufti’s son is a burly, confident man who is one of Syria’s most-quoted Sunni clerics. Kuftaro speaks bluntly about politics—and Arab failings. “The nationalist movement has been the dominant force since the beginning of the 1970s, but it has only led to more weakness and backwardness and failure in the Arab world,” he told me. Disillusioned youth—in a country where seventy percent of the population is under age twenty-five—had turned to religion as a substitute.
Kuftaro worried that a great religion should not be “dwarfed” in a political party. “When the Muslim Brotherhood says ‘Islam is the solution,’ here I have reservations,” he said. “Islam is one of the solutions, not the solution. But the reality is that the Brotherhood is part of the spectrum. And today we have to hope for their return—not going back to the state we were in during the 1970s and 1980s in challenging the government.
“No,” the sheikh said. “I wish for these people to come back to participate in rebuilding the country under the canopy of legality. It’s time all parties should sit at the table and discuss reform and democracy.”
In the quest for change, defining reform can be one of the main challenges—and tricks—of government.
In the Middle East, the Arabic word for reform is islah. It is interpreted in different ways. It can mean “change,” as in improving or overhauling. It can also mean, in a more technical sense, simply “repair.” The difference is the abyss between most Arab governments and the agents of change.
Syrians d
ebate it a lot. “If you talk about starting from scratch, you’ll get nowhere here. But if you talk about repair, then you’ll understand what the regime wants,” said Sami Moubeyed, a savvy young political analyst who was engaged to Syria’s most glamorous film star, told me.
“The conflict here,” he said, “is that people want reform, while the government is thinking repair.”
Syria will be one of the two most difficult regimes to democratize. The other is Saudi Arabia. Their governments’ hold on power is absolute. People have the fewest rights or avenues of action. The secret police—and public fear—are the most pervasive. The two regimes have spawned sufficient support networks through family and corruption and by playing on cultural traditions.
To get a sense of the Syrian government’s plans for reform, I went to see Bouthaina Shaaban. Born in 1953, she joined the Baath Party at the age of sixteen. In her forties, she became the regime’s face to the outside world. She rose to power as an interpreter for the two Assad presidents. Her Web site, www.bouthainashaaban.com, features an array of her pictures—standing between Hafez al Assad and Bill Clinton, translating for Bashar al Assad with Tony Blair. Educated in Britain and a specialist on the poetry of Shelley, Shaaban speaks snappy English.
During the rule of Hafez al Assad, Shaaban became an adviser to the foreign ministry.
After Bashar al Assad inherited power, she ended up in the Syrian cabinet. She now embodies the second Assad regime—and an attempt to make up for lost time on issues that make the regime most vulnerable.
In 2003, Shaaban was named minister of expatriates. It was a new post created to try to lure wealthy Syrian expatriates abroad—or at least their resources—back home. Her office is in a building so new that contractor’s paper was still on the elevator the day I visited in 2006. Her ministry has the reputation of being the one government office that reliably answers the phone and gets things done on time—or at all. Syrians can be engaging and hospitable, but the country lacks a sense of energy.