Elyse Semerdjian
Over the last six months, analysts have shifted from describing the Syrian uprising-cum-civil war as a democratic uprising to highlighting its increasing sectarian dimensions. For those watching closely, sectarian undertones were evident early on. Most distinct were the regime’s attacks against the Sunni neighborhood of Baba Amr during the “Siege of Homs” in February 2012. After Syrian forces leveled the neighborhood, armed militants targeted Homs’s Christian population, which numbered around 800,000. Subsequently, 90 percent of Homs’s Christian population was erased.1 As the uprising increasingly militarized, the politics of revenge became business as usual.
Myth #1: Sectarian conflicts are primordial conflicts
The New York Times is the newspaper of choice for informed American
intellectuals, yet it has promoted numerous myths about sectarianism in
its recent Syria coverage. Many of these myths, including the primordial
nature of interreligious strife, are familiar to American audiences
because they have been used to explain sectarian violence in Iraq since
the U.S. invasion in 2003. Journalist Thomas Friedman repackaged the
primordial argument in his Sept. 7, 2013 article about Syria entitled,
“Same War, Different Country.” The title really says it all: The
particulars of Syria simply do not matter since it is the very same war,
a timeless battle between Sunnis and Shiites witnessed previously in
Iraq. Friedman, considered the Times’s Middle East expert since the
1980’s when he wet his heels as a war journalist, offers an emotional
plea to those skeptical about a possible American intervention in Syria:
“But, please do spare me the lecture that America’s credibility is at
stake here. Really? Sunnis and Shiites have been fighting since the 7th
century over who is the rightful heir to the Prophet Muhammad’s
spiritual and political leadership, and our credibility is on the
line? Really? Their civilization has missed every big modern global
trend—the religious Reformation, democratization, feminism, and
entrepreneurial and innovative capitalism—and our credibility is on the
line? I don’t think so.”3
In this excerpt, Friedman with a wave of his pen dismisses the entire 19th
century—a century that ushered in the modernization of the Ottoman
economy, the development of a nascent feminist movement in the Ottoman
and Arab press, and enhanced political reforms that left most
intellectual communities ripe for democracy after World War I. What is
conveniently forgotten is what came between this intellectual florescence in the 19th century—referred to as an Arab Renaissance (“al-Nahda al-‘Arabiyya”)
by scholars—and the present, when a series of Western interventions
foiled liberal democratic development when and where it took root. In
the case of Syria, a series of covert American operations there
beginning with the toppling of Shukri Quwatli in 1949 ushered in an era
of military dictatorship.4 In spite of these events, Friedman
denies Syria modernity, and issues the most egregious of anachronistic
explanations for the conflict in Syria—that it is grounded in 7th-century rather than modern conditions.
How then do historians understand sectarianism? As a scholar
who has used the Syrian archives extensively since the late 1990’s, I
can say that instances of communal violence between Muslims and
non-Muslims are hard to come by before the targeting of Christians in
the 1850 Aleppo massacres. Historian Ussama Makdisi best reflects
scholarly consensus when he writes, “Sectarianism is an expression of
modernity. Its origins lay at the intersection of 19th-century European colonialism and Ottoman modernization.”5
Published over a decade ago, Makdisi’s work charts the decades
leading up to the first outbursts of violence on Mount Lebanon, noting
the role that Ottoman reforms granting non-Muslims equality played in
creating Sunni resentment. Sectarian violence between the Druze and
Maronite communities of Mount Lebanon in 1860 spread to Damascus where
Christians were attacked, marking the first major regional sectarian
event in Ottoman history. The pogroms intensified in the latter part of
the 19th century. Sultan Abdul Hamid II launched his pogroms
against the Ottoman Armenians (1894-96) in the eastern provinces. These
were followed two decades later with the ethnic cleansing of Armenians,
Greeks, and Assyrians in the eastern provinces, who were killed and
deported en masse.
These 19th-century convulsions are the experience of
modernity in the Middle East. The sectarian discourse continues to
reverberate in the discourse of peddlers of hate, political groups, and
elites that seek to use this rhetoric to mobilize identity for political
gain regionally.
Myth #2: Sectarianism appeared in Syria with Hezbollah and Iran’s involvement
Hezbollah’s entry into Qusayr to support regime forces quickly piqued
the interest of many media pundits and Middle East analysts. On June 1,
2013, the New York Times published an article entitled, “As Syrians
Fight, Sectarian Strife Infects Mideast,” portraying sectarian tensions
as a byproduct of Hezbollah’s alliance with the Syrian army during the
military campaign in Qusayr.
“Fighters are inspired by religious passions rooted in the
seventh-century battles in what is now Iraq over who would succeed the
Prophet Muhammad,” Kamel Wazne, a Beirut-based analyst and
founder of the Center for American Strategic Studies, is quoted as
saying. “After the bitter defeat of the faction that gave rise to the
Shiites, the victors captured the prophet’s granddaughter Zeinab and
took her to Damascus, where Shiites believe she is buried beneath the
gold-domed shrine of Sayida Zeinab.”6
The writer notes the presence of a Shiite shrine in Damascus to
revisit seventh-century history rather than focus on the modern
conditions that produced an unlikely alliance between Hezbollah, a
Twelver Shiite Lebanese militia and political party in Lebanon, and the
Assad regime—a staunchly secular regime comprised of a core of Alawites
(a distinct offshoot of Twelver Shiism). Such an alliance should prompt
the question of how unusual the pairing is rather than its treatment as a
normative fixture of regional politics. Easily assuming the naturalness
of a Hezbollah-Assad alliance only highlights what’s missing in the
conversation, namely, that the regime’s collaborators come from a
variety of social, religious, and economic interests that often have
very little to do with religion. Clearly, coverage rarely highlights the
non-sectarian features of the conflict and instead gravitates towards
easy essentialism and intrinsic religious differences.
In this case, Wazne is the New York Times’s “native informant”
offering authenticity to the narrative while confirming in large part
what the West already thinks about sectarianism and its ancient origins.
The sloppiness in this reasoning can be best appreciated when one
considers the contemporary form sectarianism has taken through a combination
of outside meddling by the U.S. in Iraq and the sectarianism promoted
by traditionalist clerics hailing mostly from Saudi Arabia.
The U.S. invasion of Iraq created a political vacuum and then secured
Iraqi Shiite supremacy (sometimes referred to as the “Shiite Crescent”
by other peddlers of sectarian mythology) after the downfall of Saddam
Hussein, resulting in unparalleled sectarian violence that depleted
Iraq’s ethnic and religious diversity. The U.S. intervention parallels
the 19th-century interventions in Mount Lebanon that produced
the largest sectarian violence for that century. Yet, earlier periods
of anti-Christian violence are dwarfed by the mass exodus of 500,000
Iraqi Christians—half the total population— since the US invasion in
2003, which permanently altered the ethno-religious landscape of Iraq.7
Saudi Arabia and its ideological mainstay Wahhabism have created a
new form of sectarianism in Iraq and now Syria. Saudi Arabia, one of the
major financiers of the armed opposition in Syria, is also home to
sectarian ideologues who advocate for violence against Shiites via
fatwas issued on traditional television programming, YouTube, and
Twitter. This sectarian trend among Sunni clerics has some classical
origins in the writings of Hanbali jurist Ibn Taymiyya (d. 1328), but
have been harnessed in the very modern tensions between Saudi Arabia and
its Shiite minority since the 1990’s. Some of Saudi Arabia’s most
reputable clerics, Abdul-Aziz ibn Baz and Adul-Rahman al-Jibrin, have
openly declared Shiites apostates and informed their audiences that
killing them is religiously justified.8 These fatwas
resurfaced over the last decade during the power struggle in Iraq
between Sunni and Shiites to condone the murder of Shiites. As of April
2013, Saad al-Durihim, a Saudi Wahhabi sheikh, posted a Tweet (a fatweet
perhaps?) in which he said that jihadist fighters in Iraq should adopt a
“heavy-handed” approach and kill any Shiites they can get their hands
own, including children and women.9 Although he claims to be
non-sectarian, Shaykh Adnan al-‘Ar’ur, a Salafi cleric from Hama, has
repackaged much of this earlier anti-Shiite discourse as anti-Alawite
rhetoric in the Syrian struggle. His televised speeches have incited his
supporters to attack pro-regime Alawites and “feed their flesh to
dogs.”10 While the regime has also done much to dehumanize
its political opponents, this particular use of Muslim clerics and their
juridical rulings to peddle sectarian hate, and mobilize political
factions, has its origins in Saudi Arabia, not Syria and Lebanon.
U.S.-fortified Shiite rule in Iraq, along with Iranian hegemony
through its alliance with Syria and Hezbollah, have increased the stakes
for Muslim extremist sectarian discourse. One could view this potent
sectarian discourse as foreign policy for the many elites who seek to
facilitate the hegemony of Sunni competitors in the region, Saudi Arabia
and militant Salafism, to combat perceived Shiite gains in the Bush
Administration’s reordered Middle East. Considering these developments,
the seventh century is hardly the context for contemporary violence in
Syria.
Myth #3: Minoritarian rule is beneficial to minorities
One of the most pervasive myths of minoritarian rule, often
propagated by the regimes themselves and their subject populations, is
that it has brought direct benefits to other minorities. Studies have
shown that the financial and political benefits in the case of Syria
were not as profound as claimed. Historian Nora Arissian has documented,
for example, Armenian participation in Syrian politics, which was more
visible prior to the ascendancy of Hafez al-Assad, but gradually
declined after he assumed power in 1970. The myths of inclusion are
quickly dashed as her evidence reveals how Armenians were occasionally
appointed as ministers or military personnel rather than elected into
parliament.11 Marginal Armenian political participation in
Syrian politics is at odds with the durable and diverse political
institutions that exist within the community, where political parties,
clubs, churches, and social committees flourished.
This gradual decline in Armenian participation in Syrian politics
should be taken into account when considering the comments of Andrew
Tabler at the AIPAC-affiliated think-tank, the Washington Institute for
Near East Policy.12 In an interview with NPR, this
much-publicized Syria analyst argued that Christians get “very good
business contracts, positions in government and the Syrian military.” He
continued, “They get preferential treatment and protection of their
places of worship.”13 Surely, both the Assad regimes
continued the Ottoman practice of allowing freedom of worship for
religious communities, but recent scholarship has shown that Christians
were not the major benefactors. In fact, economic concerns were among
the most cited grievances by Armenians who chose to leave Syria over the
last century, according to Simon Payaslian, who estimated that the
population had dwindled to as low as 58,000 by 2012.14 Recent
scholarship by Bassam Haddad highlights the Sunni capitalist elites who
were the primary benefactors of economic opening under Bashar
al-Assad’s neoliberal reforms.15 These benefactors of “crony
capitalism” were a mix of family members, old Sunni bourgeoisie, along
with a new Sunni bourgeoisie class created by the economic reforms of
the last decade.
As recently as 2012, Bashar al-Assad appointed an Armenian woman, Dr.
Nazira Farah Sarkis, as Minister of the Environment, whereas Sunni
elites obtained the higher and more influential offices of Defense
Minister (Mustafa Tlas), Prime Minister (Mustafa Miru), Foreign Minister
(Faruq al-Shar’), and Vice-President of Foreign Affairs (‘Abd al-Halim
Khaddam).16 In the context of marginal Armenian
representation, one could read this singular appointment in 2012 as an
effort to garner the support of Armenians during a period of protracted
fighting when Armenians stayed neutral. The myth of minoritatian rule as
beneficial to minorities has had devastating effects for everyday
Syrians, who are approached as the primary collaborators with the Assad
regime when, in reality, every community has been coopted to one degree
or another in the complex webs of collaboration.
Rather than primordial or ancient, sectarianism is the experience of
modernity in the Middle East. It did not make its way into the Syrian
conflict with Hezbollah’s involvement; rather, it has been a widespread
regional issue since the U.S. invasion of Iraq in 2003, and much earlier
if we include Wahhabi sectarian rhetoric from the 1990’s, which
continues to be preached by clerics and militants in the region. The
final myth in this essay—that Christian minorities, and Armenians in
particular, reaped large benefits from the minoritarian regime in
Syria—has been largely absorbed by militants in pursuit of regime
collaborators. The utility of sectarianism as the primary lens for
understanding the conflict is exhausted once the legs upon which its
myths are sustained are removed.
Notes
[1] See Kim Sengupta, “The plight of Syria’s Christians: ‘We left Homs because they were trying to kill us,’” The Independent (Nov.
2, 2012),
http://www.independent.co.uk/news/world/middle-east/the-plight-of-syrias-christians-we-left-homs-because-they-were-trying-to-kill-us-8274710.html;
and Daniel Brode, Roger Farhat and Daniel Nisman, “Syria’s Threatened
Christians,” The New York Times (June 28, 2012),
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/06/29/opinion/syrias-threatened-christians.html?_r=0.
[2] March Lynch, “The Entrepreneurs of Cynical Sectarianism,” Foreign Policy, Nov. 14, 2013.
[3] Thomas Friedman, “Same War, Different Country,” The New York Times, Sept. 7, 2013.
[4] Douglas Little, “Cold War and Covert Action: The U.S. and Syria, 1945-1958,” Middle East Journal 44:1 (Winter 1990).
[5] Makdisi, Culture of Sectarianism, xi.
[6] See http://www.nytimes.com/2013/06/02/world/middleeast/sunni-shiite-violence-flares-in-mideast-in-wake-of-syria-war.html.
[7] See
http://www.csmonitor.com/World/Middle-East/Olive-Press/2013/0910/After-more-than-10-years-of-hardship-Iraqi-Christian-calls-it-quits-on-Iraq.
[8] Vali Nasr, The Shia Revival: How Conflicts within Islam Will Shape the Future (W.W. Norton, 2006), 237.
[9] See “Saudi Wahhabi Sheikh Calls on Iraq’s Jihadists to Kill
Shiites,”
http://www.al-monitor.com/pulse/originals/2013/04/wahhabi-sheikh-fatwa-iraq-kill-shiites-children-women.html.
The original Tweets can be read from April 23, 2013 at
https://twitter.com/Saldurihim.
[10] See http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=C9NA96kVad0 and http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=JW04Vvxx0ac.
[11] See http://www.aztagarabic.com/archives/5558.
[12] See p. 21 of Stephen M. Walt and John J. Mearshimer’s “The Israel Lobby,” http://mearsheimer.uchicago.edu/pdfs/A0040.pdf.
[13] P.J. Tobia and Dalia Mortada, “Why Did Assad, Saddam and Mubarak
Protect Christians?”
http://www.pbs.org/newshour/rundown/2011/10/mid-easts-christians-intro.html.
[14] Simon Payaslian, “Diasporan Subalternities: The Armenian Community in Syria,” Diaspora 16:1-2, 2007, 118.
[15] Bassam Haddad, Business Networks in Syria: The Political Economy of Authoritarian Resilience (Stanford University Press, 2012).
[16] Eyal Zisser, As’ad’s Legacy: Syria in Transition (Washington Square, N.Y.: New York University Press, 2001) 20.
"The Armenian Weekly," January 22, 2014
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