Ashes of Hama: The Muslim Brotherhood in Syria Read online

  This selective revival of Ibn Taymiyya’s teachings by the Syrian Salafi camp of the nineteenth century greatly contributed to the emergence of a particularly moderate early brand of political Islam in Syria. While local Salafists advocated a return to the practices of Islam’s forefathers, they also preached openness and an understanding of the changes in the modern world. David Commins thus holds that, in Syria, “salafism represented an adaptation to, not a rejection of, social change.”11 This strand of Islamic reformism, influential mainly in Damascus, came to be known as the “Damascus school” in contrast to the “Aleppo school”, which was made up of religious scholars closer to Sufi than Salafi teachings.

  But, as time went by, changing political circumstances also played an important role in fuelling debates on previously under-discussed topics. The late nineteenth century bore witness to a process of increased centralization of power in the Ottoman Empire which denied Arab provinces the degree of autonomy they had previously enjoyed. This was severely criticized by Salafist reformers who started to question the Islamic roots of Ottoman rule in Istanbul, advocating instead that “true” Islam could only be found in the Arab world, the birthplace of Islam. In Syria, two of the most prominent local reformers, Tahir al-Jazairi and Salim Bukhari, took on the task of reviving the Arab heritage of the Ottoman Syrian province. In 1906, another prominent Damascene Salafist, Muhibb al-Din al-Khatib, founded the Arab Renaissance Society in the Syrian capital, thereby also displaying his movement’s commitment to an early form of Arab nationalism.

  In addition, the Syrian Salafis came to embrace political ideas in tune with the mood of the time, such as constitutionalism and political liberalism. Since the 1890s the Salafis had argued in favour of the restoration of a constitutional government in Istanbul. When the Constitution was reintroduced after the Young Turks’ 1908 coup against the Ottoman autocrat Abdulhamid II, the Damascene reformists provided theological backing for it. Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi passionately defended the principles of constitutional government in speeches and writings, contending that it could be interpreted through ijtihad as ensuring the application of precepts such as shura (consultation) and the preservation of public welfare—key Islamic tenets.12 Open to external ideas and debate, the Damascene reformists came to embrace political views embedded in support for political liberalism and for an early form of Arab nationalism.

  The Syrian Salafists’ activism, however, did not please everybody. Their plea in favour of ijtihad on the basis of the argument that local religious leaders brought too many innovations to Islam cast doubt on the ulama’s very competence, legitimacy and authority over Syrian society. The religious establishment was therefore particularly vocal in its criticism of the Islamic reformers—perhaps also because most ulama were then Sufis co-opted by the autocratic Ottoman rulers criticized by the Damascus Salafists.13

  The Salafists’ insistence on developing the use of ijtihad, however, did not mean they thought individual Muslims alone would be able to interpret the scriptures in a way consistent with reason and in reference to the early traditions of Islam. In their view, only qualified scholars should be granted the right to practice ijtihad—a somewhat elitist posture described as “patronizing”14 by the Syrian Salafism expert David Commins. As will be seen in Chapter 5, where the background of the “Damascene Brothers”—those members of the Syrian Ikhwan most active in the capital—is studied, the elitist and chiefly intellectual component of Damascene Salafism was one characteristic of the leadership of Issam al-Attar over the Syrian Brotherhood throughout the late 1950s and 1960s, and one of the reasons behind a crisis of leadership within the Islamic movement. At any rate, the social elitism of the Damascene Salafists was already evident at the turn of the nineteenth century. Their disdain for practices popular at the time, such as Sufism, meant that their intellectual movement was bound to remain marginal. On the fringes, however, there emerged a handful of more populist figures organized in various increasingly influential Islamic societies. While the Salafiyya movement brought a political taste to Islam, these Islamic societies were to become the structures within which a popular version of political Islam would emerge—ultimately laying down the organizational foundation for the rise of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood.

  Politicizing Islam: the rise of the “Islamic populists”

  Jamiat, or societies and clubs dedicated to the promotion of intellectual or political goals, emerged all across the Ottoman Empire throughout the nineteenth century. Most were initially set up to advocate a series of reforms primarily relating to education. For instance, they argued for teaching of courses in the Arabic language and Arab history at a time when the Ottomans wished to pursue “Turkification” policies in their Arab provinces. Naturally, their plea became openly political with time, as their ultimate goal often clashed with Ottoman policies and participated in the rise of a popular Arab nationalist sentiment.

  At first, Islamic reformers played a major role in favouring such a trend as the intellectual dynamism unleashed by the Salafiyya movement across the Arab world contributed to the early development of these societies. Prominent Salafists such as Muhammed Abduh and his associate Rashid Rida created influential newspapers and journals, like al-Manar, helping to spread their reformist ideas across the region. In Syria, Tahir al-Jazairi was one of the first to follow their path when, at the turn of the twentieth century, he created the “Benevolent Society”, a jamia whose goal was to establish a library in Damascus tasked with gathering and making public all the major writings of earlier Islamic scholars of Arab descent, such as the Syrian Ibn Taymiyya.15 In 1935, the Damascene Salafists were the main actors behind the birth of al-Tamaddun al-Islami (“the Islamic civilization”). The emergence of this society would mark the spread in Syria of Salafi-oriented Islamic jamiat primarily concerned with spreading Muslim education for boys and girls. By that time, however, the Damascene Salafists were already facing fierce rivalry from the right where a strand of less elitist Islamic activists, downplaying the Salafiyya’s intellectual dimension, was gaining support from ever wider segments of Syrian society.

  While the creed of al-Tamaddun was committed to the grand intellectual aim of seeking the reform of Islam from within, in order to face the challenges of the modern world, a new generation of Muslim activists had indeed emerged whose clear sociopolitical goals gave them a more populist outlook—hence the term “Islamic populists”16 used by the researcher Elizabeth Thomson. Led not by major intellectual figures but instead by schoolteachers, lawyers and local sheikhs, these politically active societies strove to directly lobby the governments of the day to embrace educational reform and to uphold Muslim values. Also, while sharing the Damascene Salafis’ ambition to save Islamic civilization through the spread of Muslim education, these societies appealed to the masses by emphasizing the traditions of Islam instead of focusing on its reform. It is therefore not surprising that many of them had major ties to influential Sufi orders popular in many Syrian cities like Aleppo and Hama. This broad-based appeal enjoyed by Syria’s “Islamic populists” ultimately meant that their influence was not limited to the capital, unlike that of the elitist Damascene Salafists. While Damascus remained the birthplace of influential Islamic societies, such as Jamiat al-Gharra (1924), Jamiat al-Hidaya al-Islamiyya (1936) or Jamiat al-Ulama (1938), many more flourished throughout the country’s other cities. In Aleppo, for instance, the emergence of Dar al-Arqam in 1935 was to represent a crucial development in the Syrian Islamic landscape. In the eyes of many members of the Ikhwan, this society was ultimately to inspire the creation of Syria’s Muslim Brotherhood through the rise of several like-minded groups based in Hama and Homs, among other cities, called the Shabbab Muhammad.17

  To understand the political activism and broad popular support which characterized such societies, a brief look at the sociopolitical circumstances surrounding their creation is needed. The 1920s and 1930s were indeed a time of profound change in the way Syrians led their daily lives. A foreign pow
er, France, dominated much of Syrian political life throughout the Mandate period (1920–46). In addition to the challenge of foreign rule, which aroused strong anti-colonial sentiments, many of the traditions then still regulating Syrian society seemed to be on the verge of being challenged. Many Syrian Sunni Muslims were appalled by the introduction of French-imported secular norms which, in their eyes, threatened the Islamic traditions of the Syrian province. In addition, just as Western social and cultural norms were spreading throughout Syria, feminist circles started to publicly display their growing activism in the capital. Centuries of local traditions were upset in barely a decade. In economic affairs, the small urban traders and local artisans were the primary victims of the growth in foreign trade which seemed only to benefit a few major merchants. In addition, there were shortages of the most basic commodities. A British diplomat in post in Damascus in 1942 reported on bread shortages by pointing out that “bread queues start forming at 3am” while the overall price of wheat rose, in the same year, from £340 to £450 a ton.18 The economic difficulties of the time were sometimes compounded by soaring inflation as urban migration exploded, disrupting the traditional social fabric of many cities by the same token.

  In this context, only a spark was needed to fuel popular discontent. It was the French control of local education that acted as the catalyst, eventually enabling politico-religious jamiat to greatly reinforce their social base among Syrian Sunni Muslims. The most influential of these, al-Gharra (the Noble Society), was explicitly founded in 1924 with the goal of fostering an education for Muslim boys and girls thoroughly in tune with religious ethics. Al-Gharra was, at first, key in building several schools where such education could be received. Over time, the Islamic society’s political agenda became clearer. When the local authorities allowed the building of many missionary Christian schools in Syria throughout the 1920s and 1930s, al-Gharra organized a series of street protests drawing the masses in the capital but also across Syria in cities such as Homs and Hama against what was widely perceived as part of a French plot to undermine Islamic values.19

  One such prominent anti-French demonstration organized by al-Gharra took place in March 1939 when protests broke out throughout the country and slogans such as “France is the enemy of God”20 were heard. Quite crucially, these mass demonstrations followed the introduction of a decree coming from Paris which introduced a “Personal Status Code” putting forward a series of secular reforms meant to replace the existing local traditions and customs in regulating citizens’ lives in their private sphere. The measures included the right for Syrian individuals to disavow their religious affiliation, the obligation to register marriages with the state and the duty to follow civil law on matters related to issues not explicitly stated in the laws of their respective religious communities.21 For many Muslims across Syria, such measures were unacceptable as they reversed centuries-long domination of Islamic law over civil common law. On the whole, according to Philip Khoury, a specialist on Syria during the French Mandate, it seemed as if “the French tried to reduce Islam in Syria to the status of one religion among many.”22

  During World War II, “Islamic populists” stepped up their activism in the political sphere. This time they focused their energies on polarizing Syrians for or against a highly symbolic change their society had been undergoing: the emergence of women’s rights. Throughout the French mandate, women in Syria had received education and had become more visible in the public sphere. Some of them were very active figures in the philanthropic and political scene of the day—to the outrage of many religious sheikhs who saw this as the result of Western corruption of Islamic values. But what made women’s rights a deeply controversial and salient issue was the fact that most of those who reached visible positions also happened to belong to Syria’s elite, most often the wives or daughters of politicians or rich merchants. In this context, the struggle launched by the “Islamic populists” against women’s rights gradually came to assume class overtones which made for a particularly explosive cocktail at a time of widening social inequalities among all Syrians.

  The spark came on 11 May 1942 when al-Gharra gathered several hundred people in Damascus to protest against the “laxity of public morals”23 after the wives of leading Damascene families had attended a theatrical show performed in the capital. What the Islamic jamia demanded from the prime minister, who then received a delegation from the group, was nothing short of “prohibiting women from going to cinemas and theatres” as well as the enforcement of “a return to their traditional Islamic code of behaviour and dress.” Clearly, mobilizing in support of “Islamic morals” served the ambitions of al-Gharra, which positioned itself at the vanguard of the defence of traditions and Islamic values against the “corrupting” influence of Western culture. According to a British diplomat at the UK mission in Damascus, al-Gharra’s attitude was nothing less than “the exploitation of religion to serve political ends.”24

  The newfound influence of the “Islamic populists” in the political sphere was made even clearer a few years later when al-Gharra took up the issue of the veil and politicized it to the extent that it would bring the Syrian government to the brink of collapse. As a chief symbol of Islamic tradition, the headscarf had been at the centre of controversy dating back to the late 1920s. It had opposed Nazira Zayn al-Din, a young Syrian feminist critical of the norms of veiling and seclusion, against Mustafa Ghalayini, a prominent Islamic scholar who argued in favour of upholding such traditions. The debate, at first led in elitist circles, spread throughout the Syrian public during the 1930s and 1940s and polarized it along ideological and political lines. While secular nationalist circles viewed unveiling as part of the project for emancipation from a seemingly backward Islamic culture, religious populists saw the headscarf as a symbol of resistance against Western oppression. In the nationalist fever that seized the country during the early 1940s, at a time when the French seemed to be constantly delaying their granting of independence to Syria, the arguments put forward by the “Islamic populists” were bound to be eventually victorious. This was acknowledged by Shukri al-Quwwatli, the leader of the secular National Bloc, who understood the influence of the “Islamic populists” and sought to benefit from it by allying with them. By the time the parliamentary elections of July 1943 came up, he had managed to recruit an al-Gharra leader to his electoral list, Sheikh Abd al-Hamid Tabba, and spoke in terms that appealed to the religious masses.

  This Islamic-nationalist alliance represented a true breakthrough for the emergence of a clearly formulated brand of political Islam striving to push policy-making in a direction consistent with demands not limited to the field of education and morals but also covering politics and identity. In rupture with past practices, the nascent Islamic movement in Syria had come to exert a more direct kind of influence on the state. The alliance was short-lived, however, as its inherent contradictions came to the fore after barely a year, concentrating once again on the issue of the headscarf. Having lent its full support to Quwwatli, al-Gharra expected him to implement at least parts of the educational and social agenda the Islamic society had long since advocated. “The women’s issue was seen as a test: if the government backed al-Gharra’s demands, Tabba and others believed that the rest of al-Gharra’s programs would see the light of the day”,25 as Philip Khoury has explained.

  The occasion for such a test came on 20th May 1944 when Rafiqa al-Bukhari, the wife of the Minister of Education, scheduled the organization of a charity ball at the French Officers’ Club in Damascus. When the leaders of al-Gharra learned that Muslim women might attend the event unveiled and in the company of men, they demanded that the government cancel the ball as an offence against public morality. Violent protests against unveiling erupted throughout Damascus, where estimates suggest they were supported by over 40 per cent of the population, before quickly spreading beyond the capital to reach Aleppo.26 The issue of the veil, ever since the time of Nazira Zayn al-Din, had polarized Syrian public opini
on. By the early 1940s, gender issues and class tensions had partially overlapped—as was visible through the concentration of protests in the disadvantaged Midan and Shagour quarters of Damascus in May 1944. Nationalism was also at play as, for the Islamic populists, upholding traditions such as the veil was the beginning of a process that would ultimately purge Syrian society of foreign influence and oust the French. Despite violent clashes with the police, the protests soon died down when, under intense Islamic pressure, the charity ball in Damascus and the formation of a women’s club in Aleppo were cancelled.27