Assad’s Fall Will Lay Ruin to The Alawis’ Once-in-a-Millennium Promised Land

This label would persist for centuries. When the Ottomans stumbled on the Alawis in their mountain redoubts in the 16th century, they branded them al-milla-al-dhalla — “the lost nation” — and promptly forgot about them.

The Alawis’ fortunes began to change when they came down from the mountains to till the farms of absentee Sunni landlords. (“Always go down, never go up,” went the Alawis’ self-improvement mantra, Ajami reports.) Then came the collapse of the Ottoman empire. During the interwar years, under France, Greater Syria was chopped up into political units, with the Alawis assigned their own autonomous zone, dubbed Jebel Ansariyah, with the capital of Latakia.

The Alawis, fearful that they would be victimized within a larger Sunni-dominated Syrian entity, began agitating for the outright independence of an Alawi mini-state. In an extraordinary June 11, 1936 letter to the French government, the Alawi leaders described a “spirit of hatred and fanaticism imbedded in the hearts of the [Sunni] Arab Muslims” who surrounded them. An independent Alawi state, they reasoned, would help protect their group from “annihilation.”

And here is where history becomes surreal (at least in retrospect): In making their case for a safe and independent Alawi homeland, the community’s leaders held up the example of … the Jews.

The “good Jews” in Palestine had “contributed to the Arabs with civilization and peace, scattered gold, and established prosperity in Palestine without harming anyone or taking anything by force,” the Alawis wrote in their letter to the French government. “Yet the Muslims declared holy war against them and never hesitated in killing their women and children, despite the presence of England in Palestine and France in Syria. Therefore, a dark fate awaits the Jews and other minorities in case the Mandate is abolished, and Muslim Syria is united with Muslim Palestine.”

It is notable that in this letter, as in other documents, the Alawis refer to themselves as separate from “Muslims” — i.e., as “minorities,” like the Jews. Equally notable is the second signatory on that 1936 Alawi petition: Sulayman al-Assad, father to former Syrian dictator Hafez Assad, and grandfather to incumbent dictator Bashar Assad. I wonder: What would this apparently Jew-loving Alawi have thought of his anti-Semitic grandson’s 2001 speech to Pope John Paul II, in which the Syrian President claimed that Jews “tried to kill the principles of all religions with the same mentality in which they betrayed Jesus Christ and the same way they tried to betray and kill the Prophet Muhammad”?

In any event, the Alawi petition failed: The independent Syrian state that emerged in 1946 would subsume the Alawis into a Sunni-dominated nation. Yet in the end, the Alawis found a way to seize control of their destiny, anyway.

Seeking a path out of poverty, many Alawis had enlisted in France’s Troupes Speciales de Levant, while the Sunnis disdained this foreign corps. Two decades later, one of those impoverished Alawi enlistees — air force commander Hafez Assad — seized power under cover of a Baathist revolution. Since then, the country has been ruled by an Assad-run Alawi elite, co-operating, where necessary, with useful allies within the Sunni commercial class.

As this Alawi dynasty crumbles — to be replaced by who knows what sort of cobbled together Sunni-dominated autocracy or theocracy — it is worth pausing to consider its historical significance. For the Alawis, Assad-led Syria has been nothing less than an Israel of their own — a promised land for a lonely, persecuted people. No one can defend the barbaric means that Bashar Assad has used to try to protect this status quo. But you can understand why his fellow Alawis are so anxious and fearful as their moment in history slips away.

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