An Arab country that’s pro-Western and has a non-Muslim majority? Though it sounds like something that could exist only in an alternate universe, there’s a chance that such a state could emerge from the ongoing conflict in Syria. Alawites make up only 12 percent of the Syrian population, but they overwhelmingly dominate the regime: the family of the tyrant-ruler Bashar al-Assad is Alawite, as are the elite members of the military, the bureaucracy, and the intelligence agencies. The majority of Syria’s population, by contrast, is Sunni Muslim, and the opposition to Alawite rule is overwhelmingly Sunni. When the dust clears in Syria, the Alawites could conceivably beat a retreat to their historic heartland in the northwestern mountains along the Mediterranean. “It is now clear that this is where the Syrian conflict is headed,”
writes
Syrian expert Tony Badran in
Foreign Policy
. “Sooner or later, Assad will abandon Damascus. . . . Reports are emerging of internal population migration as Alawites begin moving back to the ancestral mountains.”
Alawites are sometimes inaccurately described as Muslims. In fact, their religion has as much in common with Christianity and Gnosticism as with Islam. They splintered from Shia Islam more than 1,000 years ago and have been going their own way ever since. They venerate Ali, the cousin of the prophet Mohammed, but they also believe that human beings used to be stars. They don’t pray five times a day as Muslims do. Much of their religion is secret. No one can convert to Alawism: you’re either born an Alawite or forever frozen out of the fold.
Sunni and Shia Muslims have always considered the Alawites infidels. It hardly occurred to anyone that they might be Muslims until the late Lebanese imam Musa Sadr issued a fatwa declaring them Shias in 1974. His ruling had nothing to do with Alawite theology and everything to do with his own political interests and the fact that Syria’s new Alawite ruler, Hafez al-Assad, needed a veneer of Islamic legitimacy. The fiction that Alawites were Muslims later helped cement the Syrian government’s alliance with the Shia theocracy in Iran.
The noxious ideology of Assad’s Alawite regime has nothing to do with Alawism as a religion; it is strictly practical. Its Baathist variety of secular Arab nationalism papers over the deep divisions in Syrian society by subordinating religion and sectarian identity to ethnicity: being an Arab trumps being a Sunni, an Alawite, a Christian, or a Druze. (The Kurds in the northeast are the losers in this equation, and they’re treated accordingly.) Assad’s hostility toward Israel and his alliance with Iran likewise make strategic sense. By championing the Sunni community’s anti-Zionist cause, he has been able to purchase some legitimacy from his cowering subjects. Also, Assad’s sponsorship of terrorism and his status as Iran’s sidekick give Syria much more geopolitical clout than it would otherwise have as a ramshackle, Soviet-style, resource-poor backwater.
Now that the Sunnis have turned against Assad, however, it’s all crashing down, as it was doomed to do sooner or later. At this point, the Syrian national army is little more than a well-armed Russian- and Iranian-backed Alawite militia. If the government falls, the Alawites—and especially the Assad clan—may well try to carve out an enclave where they can be safe, just as many wished to do during the French imperial period between the two world wars. Back then, Alawite leaders asked French authorities for their own Lebanon-sized state along the Mediterranean, with Latakia as its capital. “The Alawites refuse to be annexed to Muslim Syria,” Suleiman al-Assad, grandfather of the current Syrian president, wrote in a letter. “In Syria, the official religion of the state is Islam, and according to Islam, the Alawites are considered infidels. . . . The spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims against everything that is non-Muslim has been perpetually nurtured by the Islamic religion. There is no hope that the situation will ever change. Therefore, the abolition of the [French] mandate will expose the minorities in Syria to the dangers of death and annihilation.”
If Assad survived the creation of a new Alawite country, it would in certain important respects resemble today’s Syria: it would be a metastasizing, Russian- and Iranian-backed terrorist state. A free Alawite state without the Assads in the saddle, however, might be something else entirely. The Alawites won’t be welcome in any regional Sunni club; they’re already unwelcome now. It’s spectacularly unlikely that they would align with the region’s Islamists. And once they’re shorn of their Baathist ideology and the need to appease a Sunni majority, they could gravitate toward the United States, Europe, and possibly even Israel. Just look at what happened to the small Syrian Alawite village of Ghajar at the end of the Six-Day War in 1967, when it found itself marooned in a no-man’s-land between the Israeli-occupied Golan Heights and the Lebanese border. When the residents realized that Israel’s occupation wasn’t going to end any time soon, they had to decide whether to be absorbed by Lebanon or by Israel. They chose Israel. They asked to be annexed, and the Israelis obliged. Later, the residents of Ghajar applied for and received Israeli citizenship.