The 'Alawis and the Origins of Political Confessionalism in Syria, 1908-1963
Panel 228, 2016 Annual Meeting
On Sunday, November 20 at 8:00 am
Panel Description
The 'Alawi (Nusayri) community of Syria underwent profound social and political changes between the Ottoman constitutional revolution of 1908 and beginning of Ba'th party rule in 1963. Long marginalized by the religious ideology and conversion attempts of the Abdblhamid sultanate, under the more progressive CUP (Young Turk) government the 'Alawis began to reap the benefits of mass public education, participate in local municipal councils and produce a vast new literature of both religious and secular writings that have retrospectively come to be seen as the basis of the "awakening" (yaqza) of the confessional community per se. The 'Alawis' political loyalties were clearly demonstrated during and immediately after World War I, when both the leading 'Alawi landowners of the Antioch region as well as most of the 'Alawi feudal lords of the Syrian coastal highlands were co-opted by the Ottoman authorities, while the 'Alawi rebel leader Salih al-'Ali in coordination with Turkish Kemalist forces led one of the most important insurrections against the French military occupation in the whole region. Following the defeat of Salih al-'Ali in 1921 and the de facto division of the community between the new republic of Turkey, the French mandate of Syria and finally the short-lived independent state of Alexandretta (Hatay), however, the 'Alawi "lesser rural notability" (Hanna Batatu) adopted a wide range of positions vis- -vis the emerging national polities: while some collaborated with French efforts to set up a confessionally-defined autonomous "Alaouites" state in northwestern Syria, only to side with the Syrian unionist National Bloc government in 1936, in Hatay and the Adana-Tarsus region the new Turkish government pursued radical policies of ethnic and linguistic assimilation designed to negate the very essence of 'Alawism. The papers in this panel will examine the forging of an 'Alawi political identity in the early mandate/Turkish republican period from an interdisciplinary perspective, by concentrating on the historical evolution and construction of the newly defined "minority" (Benjamin White) as a political entity, by highlighting the geographic parameters and economic development of the 'Alawi rural hinterland in Syria, and by analyzing the legal basis of the recognition of the 'Alawis as one of Syria's official constituent sectarian communities after 1946. The documentary and fieldwork-based study of 'Alawi political confessional politics in this crucial period, this panel will attempt to demonstrate, is key to an understanding of the dynamics of the sectarian conflict in Syria today.
The history of Syria’s ‘Alawi (Nusayri) community has become a key topic of Ottomanist research in recent years, due in no small part to the increasing sectarianization of the country’s civil conflict. Much of this research has drawn on the central Ottoman archives in Istanbul to concentrate on the community’s changing relationship with the Ottoman state in the nineteenth century, and in particular on its inclusion in the tashih-i akaid (“rectification of belief”) initiative under sultan Abdülhamid in the 1890’s. This paper, part of a larger project on the secular history of this ‘Alawis from the tenth to the twentieth century, will begin by considering late Ottoman policy towards the ‘Alawis as one of social integration rather than religious discrimination, and concentrate especially on the community’s situation during and immediately after World War One. Drawing on Arabic chronicles, local accounts from Cilicia, French diplomatic reports as well as papers from the ATASE (military) archives in Ankara, it will first show that the ‘Alawis were willing to forego their ties with the Arab nationalist movement and instead seek the support and leadership of the Kemalist movement during the Turkish War of Liberation (Kurtuluş Savaşı) in an attempt to maintain a maximum of autonomy in both northwestern Syria and southern Turkey after the dislocation of the Ottoman Empire. Second, drawing on materials from the Turkish Cumhuriyet (republican) archives, it will contrast France’s policies of ethno-confessional differentiation setting up the mandated “Territoire” and later “État des Alaouites” with Turkey’s radical assimilationist policy, whereby education, deportation and even eugenics (orchestrating ethnic intermarriage between ‘Alawi Arabs and Turks) were used to deny the basis of a separate ‘Alawi identity. Both policies, the paper will argue in closing, appear to have failed in the long term to favour the ‘Alawis’ integration into their respective national communities.
Before France settled in Syria, the Alawites were prohibited in town. The geographer Jacques Weulersse highlights their absence in the cities except as servants. The creation of the “Alaouites” State changed their political situation and they were allowed to live in the cities but they still formed an urban minority in Latakia, Tartus, Jableh or Banias at the end of the French Mandate even if they were two thirds of the population of the statelet. In the 1950s, anAlawite urban elite had started to grow especially in Homs and Damascus where many Alawite military figures settled. The creation of public, secular schools in Homs, Latakia and Tartus was the first step toward their social promotion. However, this new generation did not turn out to be pro-French partisan as the Mandate Authorities had expected. The new well-educated Alawite generation joined the Arab nationalist movement and shook the power of traditional notability who, failing to maintain the Alawites State after 1936, preferred to be reunited with Christian Lebanon rather than Sunni Syria.
This paper will focus on the period between the installation of the French Mandate (1920) and the Baathist revolution of 1963. It is based on both French sources (Weulersses, Jalabert and the Vincennes military archives) and Arab (Bou Ali Yassin, Saadeh). During this period the Alawites were migrating to the city and beginning their political rise through the Army (Batatu). How did the Alawite community become structured independently of the traditional notables? We will suggest that it had a very modernist face through the Baath and the Syrian Socialist National Party, but that it also kept a structure inherited from its tribal organization: the assabiyya.
Comparative scholarship on French colonialism has shown how certain preconceived notions of religion and ethnicity informed the politics of divide and rule in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries. French colonial administration in early-twentieth century Syria and Lebanon was predicated on reductive conceptions of the social and religious diversity of the country. The privileging of minority communities under the Mandate, especially the `Alawis of northwest Syria, has been extensively studied with respect to military conscription, political organization, and bureaucratic policies. Less attention has been placed, though, on the cultural imagination of sectarian and religious difference in twentieth-century Syria and Lebanon.
As an esoteric and secretive religious community, the mores and practices of the ʿAlawis served as fodder for fantasy and speculation by scholars, journalists, and other visitors to modern Syria. This paper considers the writing of early-twentieth century French travelers, scholars, journalists, and novelists alongside literary texts by Syrian writers that directly engage with questions of cultural memory in the ʿAlawi community in Mandate Syria and after. By situating the ways in which those earlier foreign observers struggled to comprehend this community against more recent attempts to narrate the history of the ʿAlawis through fiction, this paper contributes to this panel in its collective effort to provide a fuller understanding of religion, sectarianism and social difference in modern Syria.
