New York Times, Some see state's hand in fundamentalist Islam resurgence
ALEPPO, Syria Two decades after Syria ruthlessly uprooted militant Islam, killing an estimated 10,000 people, this most secular of Arab states is experiencing a dramatic religious resurgence.
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Friday prayers draw overflowing crowds. More veiled women and bearded men jostle unharried among pedestrians. Family restaurants near Damascus do not serve alcohol and one shop even has a sign advertising Islamically modest bathing suits.
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Syrian experts on religious matters and others attribute the phenomenon – more creeping than confrontational – to various factors. It is part of the appeal of Islam, particularly in the Arab world, as a means to protest corrupt, incompetent, oppressive governments. The widespread sense that the faith is being singled out for attack by Washington has invigorated that appeal, at a time when the violence fomented by radicals had tarnished political Islam.
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In Syria, some specialists attribute the sudden openness of the phenomenon to a far more local fear. The hasty collapse of the Baathist regime next door in Iraq stunned Syria's rulers, particularly the fact that most Iraqis reacted to the U.S. onslaught as if they were bored spectators. In the face of threats from the United States and Israel, Syria seeks to forge nationalist sentiment with any means possible, experts believe, including fostering the very brand of religious fundamentalism that it once pruned so mercilessly. “This is an attempt at mobilization,” said Abdul Razzak Eid, a well-known political writer in Aleppo. “They want to create an aggressive feeling against the Americans.”
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Experiments at fostering fundamentalist movements to counter some perceived threat can backfire, he and others say. “There is no overt political Islam,” Eid said, “but they are building a base, and the moment they have the chance, they will act to become fanatic, extremist movements.”
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Syria, of course, knows about extremist movements. Increasingly violent skirmishes with the Muslim Brotherhood prompted President Hafez al-Assad to move against it in 1982, sending troops to kill at least 10,000 people and smashing the old city of Hama.
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Hundreds of fundamentalist leaders were jailed, many never seen alive again. Syria's secret services then tracked militants around the world – one reason the government could provide so much information to the United States about Al Qaeda after the Sept. 11 attacks.
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Domestically, though, Assad did two things that helped foster the current resurgence. He built hundreds of mosques, trying to counter the sense among Syria's Sunni Muslims that his minority Alawite sect was religiously suspect. He also founded myriad schools to study the Koran, which Syrians say in recent years dropped the gentle Sufi Islam once prevalent here, replacing it with the more intolerant Wahhabi Islam of Saudi Arabia.
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The official face of Islam in Syria nevertheless appears particularly benign. The country's grand mufti, Sheik Ahmad Kuftaro, who is nearly 90, rarely meets reporters, using his son Salah as his spokesman.
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Salah wears a tie and no beard, greeting visitors from behind a desk whose most prominent picture shows his father meeting Pope John Paul II. “Extremism does not exist unless there is a kind of longstanding oppression against religious people,” he said. “This kind of oppression does not exist here.” Some Syrian intellectuals say militant Islam has peaked. They say the government manipulates the religious resurgence as a safety valve, periodically loosening restraints to see who is involved so they can be monitored.
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Syrian observers also attribute a heavy government hand to the fatwa that the grand mufti issued last spring sanctioning suicide attacks against U.S. forces in Iraq, a ruling that his son now describes as a mistake. Yet questions linger about just what kind of influence the extremists might have. In Aleppo, Sheik Souheb el-Chami, director of the Ministry of Islamic Endowments office, says that he offers periodic guidance on sermons, but that otherwise the prayer leaders write their own.
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Virulent sermons from young mullahs like Sheik Mahmoud al-Ghassi provide an example of the careful line negotiated by the politically inclined. In a recent sermon, he attacked the “atheist dogs” waging war in the region. He painted the U.S. threat of sanctions as part of an Israeli plot to control all from the Nile to the Euphrates.
