The Syrian Rebellion

168 Pages·2013·0.59 MB·English

by  Fouad Ajami

THE SYRIAN
REBELLION
HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP
ON ISLAMISM AND THE INTERNATIONAL ORDER
Many of the writings associated with this
Working Group will be published by the Hoover
Institution. Materials published to date, or in production, are listed below.
ESSAYS
Saudi Arabia and the New Strategic Landscape
Joshua Teitelbaum
Islamism and the Future of the Christians of the Middle East
Habib C. Malik
Syria through Jihadist Eyes: A Perfect
Enemy
Nibras Kazimi
The Ideological Struggle for Pakistan
Ziad Haider
BOOKS
Freedom or Terror: Europe Faces Jihad
Russell A. Berman
The Myth of the Great Satan: A New Look at America’s Relations with Iran
Abbas Milani
Torn Country: Turkey between Secularism and Islamism
Zeyno Baran
Islamic Extremism and the War of Ideas: Lessons from Indonesia
John Hughes
The End of Modern History in the Middle East
Bernard Lewis
The Wave: Man, God, and the Ballot Box in the Middle East
Reuel Marc Gerecht
Trial of a Thousand Years: World Order and Islamism
Charles Hill
Jihad in the Arabian Sea
Camille Pecastaing
The Syrian Rebellion
Fouad Ajami
The Hoover Institution on War, Revolution and Peace, founded at Stanford
University in 1919 by Herbert Hoover, who went on to become the thirty-
first president of the United States, is an interdisciplinary research center
for advanced study on domestic and international affairs. The views
expressed in its publications are entirely those of the authors and do not
necessarily reflect the views of the staff, officers, or Board of Overseers of
the Hoover Institution.
www.hoover.org
Hoover Institution Press Publication No. 624
Hoover Institution at Leland Stanford Junior University, Stanford, California
94305-6010
Copyright © 2012 by the Board of Trustees of the
Leland Stanford Junior University
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First printing 2012
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ISBN 978-0-8179-1504-9 (cloth : alk. paper)
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The Hoover Institution gratefully acknowledges the following individuals
and foundations for their significant support of the
HERBERT AND JANE DWIGHT WORKING GROUP ON ISLAMISM AND THE
INTERNATIONAL ORDER:
Herbert and Jane Dwight
Beall Family Foundation
Stephen Bechtel Foundation
Lynde and Harry Bradley Foundation
Mr. and Mrs. Clayton W. Frye Jr.
Lakeside Foundation
The Hoover Institution gratefully acknowledges
PRESTON AND C AROLYN B UTCHER
for their significant support of this publication
For Leila, who arrived in the Spring
CONTENTS
Foreword by Charles Hill
Preface and Acknowledgments
ONE : Prologue: The Inheritor
TWO : Come the Mountain People
THREE : The Time of the Founder
FOUR : False Dawn
FIVE : The Boys of Deraa
SIX : The Phantoms of Hama
SEVEN : The Truth of the Sects
EIGHT : Sarajevo on the Orontes
NINE : The Stalemate
TEN : Dreaming of Home: A Note on the Exiles
ELEVEN : Fragments of a Past Mourned and Dreaded
Afterword
Source Notes
About the Author
About the Hoover Institution’s Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on
Islamism and the International Order
Index
FOREWORD
FOR DECADES, THE THEMES of the Hoover Institution have revolved
around the broad concerns of political, economic, and individual freedom.
The Cold War, which engaged and challenged our nation during the
twentieth century, guided a good deal of Hoover’s work, including its
archival accumulation and research studies. The steady output of work on
the communist world offers durable testimonies to that time, and struggle.
But there is no repose from history’s exertions, and no sooner had
communism left the stage of history than a huge challenge arose in the
broad lands of the Islamic world. A brief respite, and a meandering road, led
from the fall of the Berlin Wall on November 9, 1989, to the attacks upon the
United States on September 11, 2001. Hoover’s newly launched project, the
Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and the International
Order, is our contribution to a deeper understanding of the struggle in the
Islamic world between order and its nemesis, between Muslims keen to
protect the rule of reason and the gains of modernity, and those determined
to deny the Islamic world its place in the modern international order of
states. The United States is deeply engaged, and dangerously exposed, in
the Islamic world, and we see our working group as part and parcel of the
ongoing confrontation with the radical Islamists who have declared war on
the states in their midst, on American power and interests, and on the very
order of the international state system.
The Islamists are doubtless a minority in the world of Islam. But they are a
determined breed. Their world is the Islamic emirate, led by self-styled
“emirs and mujahedeen in the path of God” and legitimized by the pursuit of
the caliphate that collapsed with the end of the Ottoman Empire in 1924.
These masters of terror and their foot soldiers have made it increasingly
difficult to integrate the world of Islam into modernity. In the best of worlds,
the entry of Muslims into modern culture and economics would have
presented difficulties of no small consequence: the strictures on women, the
legacy of humiliation and self-pity, the outdated educational systems, and an
explosive demography that is forever at war with social and economic gains.
But the borders these warriors of the faith have erected between Islam and
“the other” are particularly forbidding. The lands of Islam were the lands of
a crossroads civilization, trading routes, and mixed populations. The
Islamists have waged war, and a brutally effective one it has to be conceded,
against that civilizational inheritance. The leap into the modern world
economy as attained by China and India in recent years will be virtually
impossible in a culture that feeds off belligerent self-pity, and endlessly calls
for wars of faith.
The war of ideas with radical Islamism is inescapably central to this Hoover
endeavor. The strategic context of this clash, the landscape of that greater
Middle East, is the other pillar. We face three layers of danger in the
heartland of the Islamic world: states that have succumbed to the sway of
terrorists in which state authority no longer exists (Afghanistan, Somalia,
and Yemen); dictatorial regimes that suppress their people at home and
pursue deadly weapons of mass destruction and adventurism abroad (Iraq
under Saddam Hussein, the Iranian theocracy); and “enabler” regimes, such
as the ones in Egypt and Saudi Arabia, which export their own problems
with radical Islamism to other parts of the Islamic world and beyond. In this
context, the task of reversing Islamist radicalism and of reforming and
strengthening the state across the entire Muslim world—the Middle East
and Africa, as well as South, Southeast, and Central Asia—is the greatest
strategic challenge of the twenty-first century. The essential starting point is
detailed knowledge of our enemy.
Thus, the working group will draw on the intellectual resources of Hoover
and Stanford and on an array of scholars and practitioners from elsewhere
in the United States from the Middle East and the broader world of Islam.
The scholarship on contemporary Islam can now be read with discernment.
A good deal of it, produced in the immediate aftermath of September 11,
was not particularly deep and did not stand the test of time and events. We,
however, are in the favorable position of a “second generation” assessment
of that Islamic material. Our scholars and experts can report, in a detailed,
authoritative way, on Islam within the Arabian Peninsula, on trends within
Egyptian Islam, on the struggle between the Kemalist secular tradition in
Turkey and the new Islamists, particularly the fight for the loyalty of
European Islam between those who accept the canon, and the discipline, of
modernism and those who do not.
Arabs and Muslims need not be believers in American exceptionalism, but
our hope is to engage them in this contest of ideas. We will not necessarily
aim at producing primary scholarship, but such scholarship may materialize
in that our participants are researchers who know their subjects intimately.
We see our critical output as essays accessible to a broader audience,
primers about matters that require explication, op-eds, writings that will
become part of the public debate, and short, engaging books that can
illuminate the choices and the struggles in modern Islam.
We see this endeavor as a faithful reflection of the values that animate a
decent, moderate society. We know the travails of modern Islam, and this
working group will be unsparing in depicting them. But we also know that
the battle for modern Islam is not yet lost, that there are brave men and
women fighting to retrieve their faith from the extremists. Some of our
participants will themselves be intellectuals and public figures who have
stood up to the pressure. The working group will be unapologetic about
America’s role in the Muslim world. A power that laid to waste religious
tyranny in Afghanistan and despotism in Iraq, that came to the rescue of the
Muslims in the Balkans when they appeared all but doomed, has given much
to those burdened populations. We haven’t always understood Islam and
Muslims—hence this inquiry. But it is a given of the working group that the
pursuit of modernity and human welfare, and of the rule of law and reason,
in Islamic lands is the common ground between America and contemporary
Islam.
ARNOLD T OYNBEE , the once-acclaimed author of the twelve-volume A
Study of History , wrote that the world had two geostrategic pivots, places
where an endless array of ideas and movements met, clashed, were swirled
around, and then spun off to influence international affairs in all directions.
One was the Oxus-Jaxartes Basin (the Pentagon today calls it Af-Pak). The
other, even more extraordinary site is Syria, where civilizations and religions
have jostled one another for millennia, making “a deep mark on mankind’s
subsequent history.”
Who but Fouad Ajami could capture this Syrian uniqueness across ages and
layers of political-cultural complexity? By now we can see that his oeuvre
has taken shape, and works profoundly by interpreting the Arab-Islamic
predicament in our time. The Syrian Rebellion traces the interwoven strands
of religion, politics, personalities, peace, war, revenge, and the heart-stirring
aspirations of an immiserated yet valiant people—all conveyed in
glimmering prose.
The Modern Age has been endowed, and tormented, by the heretofore-
unknown capability of seeing all human history at a glance. We live in a
“museum without walls,” enabling us to recognize the signs of a world-
historical moment, which is what we sense in Syria today. Ever since the
march of imperial Islamic caliphates collapsed in 1924 with the end of the
Ottoman Empire, the peoples of the Middle East have searched without
stability or success for a Muslim identity only to be misruled by colonels, con
men, retrogressive preachers, and royalist autocrats. Reform was a pipe
dream; propaganda in word and intimidation in deed became the currency of
life. And across these decades those outside the region could scarcely recall
a time when the Middle East was neither a problem nor a threat to the rest
of humankind. Thus, as the twenty-first century opened, on September 11,
2001, came the shock of recognition that only “the transformation of the
greater Middle East” could keep the region from falling out of the
international system, lift it from its morass, and offer it a productive role in
world order and progress. The Arab Spring is an awakening to that reality
by a new, youthful population self-portrayed as none of the above oppressive
regimes or movements.
Syria is the cockpit or, in Toynbee’s description, the “roundabout” in which
all the forces face one another and spin off consequences—for good or ill—
around the compass. The Syrian rebellion will be crushed, or it will gain a
foothold; the latter cannot happen without outside support. The wider world
must recognize that it confronts a momentous choice. If the rebels can
survive without succumbing to one or another of the entrenched enemies of
freedom, the transformation of the greater Middle East indeed will be under
way.
Once again, Fouad Ajami does us all a signal service. Here are all the
crosscurrents, all the crimes and conspiracies, all the fatuities and
stratagems—and all the awakened valor of the Syrian people. They, and we,
are fortunate to be guided by the author of this stunningly timely and
consequential book.
CHARLES H ILL
Distinguished Fellow of the Brady-Johnson
Program in Grand Strategy at Yale University;
Senior Fellow, Hoover Institution—
Co-chairman, Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group
on Islamism and the International Order
March 2012
PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
I HAD NOT THOUGHT that I would be writing this book. But a year into
Syria’s torments, the book had emerged. For nearly four decades I had had
no direct access to Syria. I had older memories of it. I had grown up next
door in Lebanon. My mother, in her fashion, was a believer, and the Shia
shrine of Sitt Zaynab, on the outskirts of Damascus, was a place of solace for
her. She thought of Zaynab—Imam Hussein’s sister, who had witnessed and
survived the battle of Karbala in 680—as a fellow sufferer. The shrine was a
permanent place of pilgrimage for my mother, and an older sister of hers
had long settled in Damascus, in a pretty house with a courtyard and a
fountain. We were in and out of Damascus throughout my boyhood, in the
late 1950s. I was entranced by the gardens and orchards that ringed
Damascus then. And Hama, for a boy of Beirut, seemed quaint and
charming, on the banks of the Orontes, with its daredevils jumping into the
river from its famed waterwheels.
The legendary Egyptian Gamal Abdel Nasser had come to Damascus during
that doomed union between Egypt and Syria (1958–1961). Braving my
elders’ wishes, I had made my own (secular) pilgrimage to see the great
man, standing on a distant balcony, taking in the adoration of a Syrian crowd
that was bewitched by him. Yet even then, through the haze of boyhood,
there were things about Syria that could not be missed. There was a
notorious prison, the Mezze, and it stood there as a forbidding reminder that
this was a place that differed from our anarchic Lebanese homeland. It took
no political literacy to know that this was a country prone to intermittent
seizures of power. Beirut looked to the Mediterranean; Damascus was
enclosed and looked to the desert. We had Syrians in our midst, former
officials, a political exile or two, married into our extended family. They had
crossed the border to Lebanon, but brought with them tales of persecution
and political caprice. There was Abu Abdu—an old, retired soldier. I never
knew his full name. He was married to a relative of my mother. He made the
best tea in our neighborhood. He had an old Syrian army coat, which gave
him both warmth and something of a personal flair. Syria didn’t give me
much, Abu Abdu would say, only this coat. In Beirut, he never looked back
on Syria. He said what he thought of it in his refusal to let his sons make the
journey to his native Homs.
This book is the closing of a circle. It is an attempt to retrieve that country,
so close yet so far, from books of travel and memoirs, from the daily
dispatches of a people who conquered fear to challenge a despotism of
unspeakable cruelty. When I stepped into the material, I found a rich
literature, and I have drawn on it in this telling. My source notes will retrace
my inquiry. I was lucky for the work of Patrick Seale, Albert Hourani, Hanna
Batatu, Itamar Rabinovich, Philip Khoury, Marius Deeb, Martin Kramer,
Daniel Pipes, Thomas Pierret, Fabrice Balanche, and Eyal Zisser. Itamar
Rabinovich, a good friend of so many years, is unrivaled among the students
of Syrian political history. I am truly grateful for his generosity and wisdom
on the matters explored in this book. Like anyone working on Syria today, I
was reliant on the rich documentation of the blog and electronic journal
Syria Comment , a labor of love by the University of Oklahoma scholar
Joshua Landis. I was lucky for the support and friendship of Professor Henry
Bienen, Dr. Mark Fung, and Leon Wieseltier.
THIS IS A H OOVER BOOK , and I owe so much to many colleagues at the
Hoover Institution. Hoover director John Raisian is a perfect boss, unrivaled
in all my years in the academy. It was John Raisian who persuaded me to
bring a teaching career to an end and join him at Hoover, to read and write.
It is my hope that this work rewards his faith in me. The Shia have a unique
institution, that of marja al-taqlid (the source of imitation). The believers
defer to and imitate a learned jurist, an ayatollah they revere and to whose
judgments they go for binding rulings. I have a source of imitation of my
own, my Hoover colleague and legendary Yale teacher, Charles Hill. My debt
to Charlie is boundless. I take great pride in the association at Hoover with
former Secretary of State George P. Shultz. All of us at Hoover are in the
orbit of this statesman and master of diplomacy. Secretary Shultz, in a rich
and incomparable career, dealt with Syria and Lebanon. It’s my hope that
these pages will ring true to him.
I am indebted to my colleagues at Hoover Press—Marshall Blanchard,
Jennifer Presley, Jennifer Navarrette, and their colleagues—for their
dedication to producing the best of books. Their patience, their skills, and
their innate understanding of how to bring a manuscript to fruition make
one glad as an author to have come knocking at their door. Denise Elson has
been from the beginning our cheerleader. Her great spirit, wise words, and
encouragement have followed every step of this book, as they did a dozen
earlier Hoover books and working papers with which I have been associated.
Jeff Jones has been with us from the launch of our working group, and we
value his dedication and commitment to our project. I could not have hoped
for a more attentive and subtle a copy editor as Ms. Oie Lian Yeh. This book
is better for her collaboration.
This book follows a dozen Hoover books and long papers done under the
auspices of the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism and
the International Order, and behind these two names are the best of patrons
and allies who believed in the need to understand the Greater Middle East
and its contemporary ordeal.
I have left to the end my trusted colleague, Megan Ring. Megan is an
original. There is no source she can’t track down, no demand she can’t
fulfill. We have worked together on previous books and scores of essays. She
now coordinates the Herbert and Jane Dwight Working Group on Islamism
and the International Order. At first glance, the word “coordinate” doesn’t fit
this woman of free spirit. But all those who have worked with her know
better. She is a consummate performer of tasks.
The dedication is for Leila Deluca Ajami, my beloved granddaughter.
Watching the pain of Syria, I saw children her age, boys and girls of five or
six, holding placards and waving Syrian flags, carried atop the shoulders of
their parents. I knew Leila was safe in Brooklyn with her parents. They
weren’t in Homs and Deraa. But for the children there, I thought I owed
them a humble chronicle of their grief—and hopes.
FOUAD A JAMI