Bashar's Syria: The Regime and its Strategic Worldview Shmuel Bar ...

Bashar’s Syria 401economic situation. The return to Islam is manifest in the wearing of traditional dress, in theplethora of Islamic book stores that have cropped up in Damascus and other cities, and in thegrowth of Islamic Institutes (600 new institutes for memorizing the Quran and madrasas)founded under the auspices of the regime in the time of Hafez al-Asad as a counterbalance tothe Muslim Brotherhood. Another salient phenomenon is the large number of Syrian familiesthat receive charity from Islamic NGOs (estimated at about seventy-five thousand).It is difficult to distinguish between the warnings of the Syrian regime that its downfallwould bring to power radical Islamic movements and the real threat that Islamism poses inSyria. It seems, though, that one of the main motivators of Islamic radicalism in Syria is thelegitimacy crisis that stems from the Alawite nature of the regime. The heterodox natureof the Alawite religion has been the Achilles heel of the regime. Whereas radical Islamistsin other Muslim countries had to prove the individual deviation of their rulers or regimesin order to warrant declaring them as infidels (and hence, legitimizing rebellion), viewingthe Alawites as non-Muslims provides adequate justification for rebellion. Therefore, froman early stage the Asad regime set as one of its primary objectives boosting its Islamiccredentials and the Islamic legitimacy of the Alawites in general. This has been done invarious ways, as noted above. 116The main Islamist force in Syria arguably is the Muslim Brotherhood (MB). Themovement was involved in a bloody uprising against the regime in the late 1970s andearly 1980s, which resulted in the regime’s crackdown in the north of the country and totaldestruction of large parts of the city of Ham’ah in February 1982, with estimated tens ofthousands of civilians killed. The ideology of the Brotherhood at the time based its rejectionof the regime on grounds of being takfir (declaring as heretics). Years after it was totallyuprooted in Syria, the movement began to reach an accommodation with the regime andmany of its exiled leaders returned to Syria. Others drifted away from the focus on Syria. 117Today, the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood officially has renounced the use of violenceagainst the regime and is attempting to create a public image that may facilitate its integrationin the political process of the country, either in the course of “democratization” of the presentregime, or in the wake of its fall and the rise of a coalition of opposition forces. After Bashartook office the MB made efforts to reach out to him. In May 2001, the group prepared a“National Honour Pact,” accepting the democratic process and, for the first time, recognizingthe regime’s legitimacy. Later, in 2004, senior Syrian officials, including Bashar, met withleaders who had ties to the Brotherhood. In the end, however, the negotiations fizzled.The attempt on the part of the MB to project a moderate image focuses on four mainissues: violence (the MB leadership reiterates that it has renounced violence); willingnessto accept a democratic regime in Syria; retraction of the takfir of the Alawites; willingnessto accept the Islamic legitimacy of the Sufi trends, which are relatively strong in Syria;and refraining from calling for the destruction of Israel or taking anti-Semitic positions. Itis not clear, however, to what extent these positions, which are expressed in the PoliticalProgram of the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood” and in interviews with the exiled leader ofthe movement, ’Ali Sader a-Din Bayanouni, 118 are widely accepted by the rank and file ofthe movement or to what extent the mainstream of the MB represents the majority of theIslamic tendency inside Syria.The Islamist trend in Syria, though, is not solely domestically grown. It is encouragedby the double standard of the regime in openly supporting Palestinian Hamas and Jihad andLebanese Hezbollah, while suppressing its own Islamist forces and by identification withthe al Qaeda attacks on the United States.Since the death of Hafez al-Asad, and increasingly since the fall of the Iraqi regime,the infiltration of anti-Alawite and anti-Shi’ite Wahhabi elements into Syria has intensified.