“Why did this young man with an open mind and future plans decide to attack the US in Iraq?” Habash blurted out. “Mukhabarat didn’t order him to; he decided to go on his own. You can find hundreds like him. Why? Because the Bush administration does not understand our people.”
Other powerful Americans were apparently asking for Habash’s help in trying to do just that, however. At the end of the interview, Habash casually quizzed me about the National Prayer Breakfast, a forum held every February in Washington for political, social, and business leaders of the world to break bread together and talk about problems. I gave him my best account of what it was.
“Hillary Clinton invited me this year, but I apologized,” Habash said. “I tried to travel to New York last year, but US security didn’t let me in.”
To my surprise, Musa was leaving at the same time I was. After bidding Habash good-bye, Musa and I walked into the street. Still smiling, he gave me his mobile number, shook my hand, and went on his way.
My unsolicited introduction to Musa was so bizarre that I could not resist asking to meet him again. In an on-the-record, hour-long interview two days later, Musa gave me a blow-by-blow account of waging jihad against US troops during the invasion of Iraq and fleeing back to Syria. His story made little sense and seemed tailor-made to suit the regime’s red lines on this issue. Since he had gone to Iraq in the waning days of Saddam Hussein and returned only a few weeks later, he was technically not one of the famed “Arab fighters” that Damascus denied was crossing the Syrian frontier into Iraq. He certainly was an Islamist, however, and had just joined the new private sector and Islamic-leaning Sham TV as a newscaster. The very fact he was talking about his experience publicly to a foreigner was something new in Syria. And to make matters more bizarre, halfway through the interview, I had a sudden bout of déjà vu that I could not readily explain.
As diplomats and journalists combed the streets of Damascus chasing the “Islamic genie” that had appeared out of Syria’s secular Baathist bottle, the regime of Bashar al-Assad busily reached out to Islam in subtle and unprecedented ways. And it was hard to know what to make of any of it.
Two days in April 2006 epitomized the regime’s efforts to connect with Islam. In Syria, April 7 is Baath Day—the anniversary of the party’s first congress in 1947. Since the Baath Party seized power in 1963, April 7 has been a day of speeches, marches, and banner-filled streets hailing the party’s accomplishments. This time, celebrations were small, few marches were held, and Baath Party flags were hard to find. Party offices held small receptions, serving only cake and soft drinks.
Instead, the Syrian regime waited until April 10—the prophet Muhammad’s birthday—to celebrate. Colorful banners hailing the Prophet’s virtues lined the major thoroughfares of Damascus, people filled the streets, and President Assad prayed with the Baath Party leadership in Damascus’s Hasseby Mosque beside the new Grand Mufti of the Republic, Ahmad Badr al-Din Hassoun—all very strange for a secular state famously carved out of a virtual civil war with the Muslim Brotherhood in the early 1980s. The regime’s first step to engage these rising Islamic sentiments had come on September 1, 2004, with the death of Hassoun’s predecessor, Ahmad Kuftaro. For forty years, Kuftaro served as the ceremonial head of Islam in Syria, staying out of the spotlight in keeping with Syria’s secular orientation. Instead of holding the customary Majlis al-Aala (consultative council) to elect a new mufti from among Syria’s Islamic clergy, the regime waited for eleven months before appointing Hassoun—by presidential decree.
Hassoun began breaking with tradition and pushing Islam back into public life. He met frequently with community leaders, preaching “interfaith dialogue” and the tolerance of Islam. Following the burning of the Danish embassy, Hassoun met and communicated regularly with representatives from the Vatican and Europe. He also prayed often and publicly with President Assad in the grand mosques of Damascus and Aleppo. All of Hassoun’s activities were covered in detail by SANA—the state’s primary propaganda machine.
Regime efforts to engage rising Islamic sentiments accelerated substantially after the “defection” of Syrian vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam to the opposition on December 30. In a speech to the Arab Parties General Conference in Damascus on March 4, President Assad said that the Arabs derive their strength from “Islam, which is strongly connected with Arabism.” He later said that Islam and Arabism were mutually interdependent and that any political party that ignores either is bound to fail—echoing the words of one of the Baath Party’s founders, Michel Aflaq, and even turning them on their head.
On March 13, Syria held its first competition for reading the Koran in the auditorium of Damascus University—a venue traditionally reserved for Baath Party occasions and presidential speeches. Two weeks later, a ban on mosques that opened between prayer times was lifted to allow for Islamic instruction. A week after that, Aleppo was named the Islamic cultural capital of 2006 amidst great fanfare and, more importantly, open presidential patronage. The city then underwent a major renaissance project, which was funded by donations from pious businessmen.
Then, on April 1, the Syrian military shocked the country when it announced that Islamic clergy would be allowed to enter barracks to talk to soldiers about religion for the first time in forty-three years. Defense minister General Hassan Tourkmani reportedly announced at a conference that the decision was in response to “the thirst for God in the barracks.” Brokering the agreement were none other than Habash and Hassoun.
On April 5, President Assad issued a decree establishing an Islamic college in Aleppo—the center of the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in Syria in the 1980s. Two days after Assad prayed with the Baath Party regional command on the prophet Muhammad’s birthday on April 10, Habash was invited to deliver a lecture on Islamic morals and values to a gathering of the state-dominated National Union of Syrian Students (NUSS).
As journalists and diplomats continued to file stories and cables about the regime’s slide toward Islam, many questions remained concerning the actual makeup of this Islamic wave. Strangely enough, the only people who seemed to have any answers—and would talk about them to foreigners—came via Mohammed Habash.
“Muslims in Syria are certainly becoming more religiously conservative,” Habash had told me during my interview. “Conservatives believe that there is only one way to God and paradise, and others are false … but this doesn’t mean that they have any desire to use violence against others.”
It was hard to know where the line between conservatives and radicals lay, however. Reports of security clashes with takfiri groups—militants who declare other Muslims to be apostates and therefore legitimate targets of terrorism—continued to make their way into the media. All reports originated from “security sources,” who approached local journalists with accounts of state raids on the Soldiers of Damascus Organization for Unity and Jihad. There was considerable speculation that the clashes could have been fabricated for external consumption so as to persuade the United States and Europe to ease pressure on the Syrian regime.
“The groups that traveled to the US and carried out the September 11 attacks were not conservatives; they were radicals,” Habash said. “In Syria, such people are less than 1 percent. Syria has a population of seventeen million, which means that we have one hundred seventy thousand radicals running around. Any injustice they see, they will use violence. You don’t have to ask why they are here—we are in the eye of the storm between the occupations of Iraq and Palestine. They believe the Syrian army should go to Iraq to attack Americans. They have a problem with this regime.”
To counter this trend, Habash advocated what he called “renewal Islam.” “Renewal believes that there is one way to God, but his names are many,” Habash said. “Spirituality is one, but religions are many. There should be no monopoly on salvation, paradise, religion, and the day of judgment.”
While this might have seemed all well and good to the regime, the strange thing is that Habas
h himself admitted that his interpretation had little following in society. “Only about 20 percent of Muslims in Syria are renewal,” Habash said. “The rest are conservative, and their numbers are growing.”
Although seemingly well fitted to the political situation, Habash had no time for the regime’s nemesis, the Muslim Brotherhood. “There is an upsurge of Islam in Syria, but that does not mean people support the Muslim Brotherhood,” Habash said. “They have no chance in Syria because there is a bloody memory from the 1980s. If they find a way back into Syria, they will have to change their name.”
Habash was also rather forthcoming about his ambitions to form a political party under the new parties law—whenever it would be issued of course. “This is my secret; why are you asking me?” Habash said. “I am looking to participate fully in political life. I am not looking for an Islamic party—this would not be beneficial for our country. We don’t need a theocracy, as we cannot achieve real development this way. At the same time, I am looking for some party with an Islamic affiliation. Like the [ruling] Justice and Development Party in Turkey.”
And what about Musa, the mystery guest at Habash’s office? When I listened to the interview tape later a couple of times, I still made no sense of his tale of waging jihad in Iraq (and will waste no time explaining it here). Much more interesting, however, were Musa’s surprisingly moderate views concerning a number of recent political issues—for a man that not long ago says he fired a rocket-propelled grenade at a US Army Humvee.
“These Muslims were being stupid when they burned the Danish embassy,” Musa said of the February 4 attacks on the Danish, Swedish, and Chilean embassies in Damascus. He had a relaxed smile and a twinkle in his eye that could give any diplomat or foreign correspondent some glimmer of hope that the Islamic tide sweeping Syria was nothing to worry so much about as to intervene in an Arab country’s internal affairs. “I was among the demonstrators. It was peaceful, but a few people got out of control. The Prophet for Muslims is not the same for Christians. Denmark doesn’t understand that.”
At that moment, I realized it wasn’t déjà vu after all. During my years of working in Egypt in the 1990s, I had often interviewed a prominent researcher and professor at the American University in Cairo named Saad Eddin Ibrahim, then a confidant of Egyptian president Hosni Mubarak and now one of his most outspoken opponents. Ibrahim used to run a foreign-funded program rehabilitating Islamic “terrorists” captured by the state in upper Egypt and around major Western tourist sites. After swearing off violence, former combatants were released from prison and given seed money and soft loans to open small businesses such as cigarette kiosks and sandwich counters. Foreign journalists in search of the story of Islamic fundamentalism in Egypt flocked to Ibrahim, who would boast about the program and arrange interviews with beneficiaries. A few days later, a story would appear in the Western press outlining how the Egyptian government and society recognized its “Islamist problem” and had matters under control.
After fifteen editions of Syria Today, and about a week after the riots, it finally happened: security agents showed up in our office. When Syrian security comes to investigate foreigners, they don’t have a face-to-face meeting with you. Instead, they talk with your Syrian friends about you, which in turn scares your friends to death. Although Leila didn’t say that she had been questioned, her behavior told me all I needed to know.
“Andrew, we have to watch what we are writing,” Leila told me as I walked into her office. She was nervously trying to light a cigarette. “We are responsible for everything anyone writes from here, be it for Syria Today or outside newspapers.”
From day one, we knew that our publication had to make it past the Syrian censors, so we were as careful as we could be concerning red lines. Both Hugh and I could get away with a lot more when we published in the international press.
“What do you mean ‘we are responsible’?” I said.
“I mean things are bad, and anything anyone from Syria Today publishes can be used against us,” Leila said, with a twinge of nervous anger in her voice. “They could close us down.”
The reason to be cautious would become apparent a little later that day, when Hugh, Othaina, and I headed down to the old justice palace to cover an opposition rally. It was March 9, 2006, the forty-third anniversary of the declaration of emergency law in Syria. For the second year in a row, members of the National Union of Syrian Students (NUSS) were busy beating up and chasing off opposition figures that were staging a sit-in in front of the old Ministry of Justice—a stone’s throw away from the radio station where martial law had been declared in 1963, the morning after the Baath Party seized power in a military coup. Multiparty politics in Syria had been suspended that day, all in the name of bringing to an end the raging political instability that had plagued the country since independence in 1946.
A man with gray hair broke from the crowd of demonstrators, arms waving overhead. Scores of student-union protestors were on him like a swarm of bees, shouting “traitor” while beating him with wooden sticks adorned with Syrian flags. As I took a photo of the melee, Hugh and Othaina sized up the situation, notebooks in hand.
“Come on, let’s go talk to that guy!” Hugh said.
Othaina and I looked at each other. Without saying a word, we understood that the worst thing that could happen to this brave man at that moment would be for two foreigners to ask him how he felt about being abused and beaten up. We probably knew the answer anyway.
“That’s the story!” Hugh shouted, eyes wide.
In an ideal sense, he was right. But in a country where nationalist sentiments were high due to US and UN pressure, it was often hard to know what to do. If the man wanted to talk to foreigners—and put his neck on the line—that was his choice. But if we approached him, it could be seen as the very treasonous activity of which he was being accused, possibly leading to dire circumstances that could prevent him from enjoying the permanent freedom he sought.
We did not have time to mull it over, however, since the students quickly converged on another target—me.
“We are here to support Syria and President Bashar against the traitors!” one protestor shouted, as the crowd closed in around us. “The West just wants our oil!” I could hear someone whispering the word “American” behind me. Suddenly, a sweaty young man with wild blue eyes, short-cropped hair, and a Syrian-flag bandanna appeared.
“So, an American!” he boomed, strutting like a rooster. The crowd roared. Someone started tugging on the belt of my raincoat, which admittedly would have been more appropriate on Washington’s Dupont Circle than the edge of Damascus’s Old City. I went silent, as did Hugh. Othaina shouted back, “We are journalists for a Syrian magazine!” and whipped out a few copies of Syria Today. The protestors, most with confused expressions, stared at the magazines’ covers.
Not to be cowed, the blue-eyed man raised his arms above his head. “America—fuck America!” he screamed, throwing his arms down. The crowd roared again.
Suddenly a young man appeared, wearing a white baseball cap on which was printed I LOVE SYRIA in English.
“It’s OK,” he said, smiling at me. “Please, this way.”
He made a single motion with his hand, like Moses parting the Red Sea, and the crowd quickly obeyed. We were escorted to the side, and the mob turned its attention toward its next victim.
We decided to visit the nearby office of Damascus Declaration spokesman Hassan Abdel-Azim. It was bustling with activity, packed full of Damascus Declaration members, whom I had interviewed over the last two months; they were all sipping cups of strong tea to calm their nerves. I hardly recognized Abdel-Azim, despite the fact that I had interviewed him recently.
“I can’t see you very well. They smashed my glasses,” Abdel-Azim said, shaking my hand. “They weren’t students who beat us; they were just parrots. They don’t even know what our declaration stands for.”
After the declaration’s announcement the previous October, m
embers of the Syrian opposition slowly came onboard as the Assad regime weathered the heavy political storm of the Hariri investigation. External international pressure, combined with the regime’s lack of a political-reform plan, had old foes putting differences aside and overcoming deep-rooted suspicions.
“If you look at the names who signed the Damascus Declaration, all but one is a Sunni Muslim,” said Fateh Jammous, leader of the Communist Labor Party and an Alawite—the same sect from which the Syrian leadership hails—who signed in the days following the declaration’s announcement. “We don’t accuse them of being sectarian, but we objected at first to the declaration’s references to Islam…. The Syrian bureaucracy is corrupted and cannot be reformed. We don’t need slow reform—we need a rescue operation.”
It was the declaration’s appeal to moderate Islamists in an increasingly Islamized environment that seemed to be giving it staying power. “We have liberal Islamists, political Islamists, and fundamentalist Islamists in Syria,” said Samir Nashar, the spokesperson for the Syrian Free National Party and a member of Syria’s Committee for the Revival of Civil Society. “The difference between them is difficult to distinguish. We need to gather the first two together, as the fundamentalists cannot live with others. They see only in terms of black and white, believers and apostates.”
And with bloodshed in neighboring Iraq filling TV news reports every day, a more liberal-based opposition lacked major appeal. “We tried to organize a parallel liberal rally alongside the Damascus Declaration in November and December,” said the Assyrian Democratic Organization’s Bashir Ishaq Saadi, who finally signed the declaration in February 2006. “Liberal parties in Syria are now very weak. Some of the Kurdish parties were demanding ‘self-determination’ as well. We couldn’t support that.”
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