Religion and politics in Syria

Very interesting take on this.

http://www.washingtonpost.com/blogs/guest-voices/post/religion-and-politics-in-syria/2012/03/18/gIQAMSzhLS_blog.html

Posted at 10:24 PM ET, 03/18/2012
Religion and politics in Syria
By Wadah Khanfar

Many politicians and journalists are fearful of the future which can be facing the religious minorities in Syria following the revolution. Very often, these fears are expressed in the context of justifying the hesitancy of the US and the international community to arm the Free Syrian Army. It is this hesitancy that has given the Syrian regime the opening to perpetrate heinous massacres against the civilians before the eyes and ears of the world.

The fears about the future of religious minorities, particularly the Alawites, are exaggerated and are unsupported by evidence from modern Syrian history. Neither are they supported by the course of events during the revolution which erupted almost a year ago. There are no precise statistics on the distribution of religious minorities in Syria;however the percentage being widely quoted places Sunni Muslims at 79 percent of a total population of twenty three million. The Alawites constitute nine percent of the population and so too do the Christians, while the remainder is distributed among the other groups such as the Druze and Shi’a.

As the history of the Middle East is so important to understand the reality and in forecasting the future, historical readings give us no solid evidence that we are before a wave of religious sectarian cleansing. The notions of religious or ethnic purity are alien to the history of the region. Syria, like Iraq, Lebanon and other states in the region, contains a mosaic of cultural religious elements which areconsidered the most diverse in the world. Here, the great divine religions co-exist with subsidiary minorities, many of which have become extinct in other parts of the world, but remain present here.

Modern Syria has never witnessed primary religious conflict; tensions have always been the consequence of political manipulation and the sectarian factor was used as a means to exercise dominance and control. Tensions during the early 80s between Sunnis and Alawites were a result of the bloody assault launched by the regime of Assad’s father, Hafiz al-Assad, against the Muslim Brotherhood and resulted in widespread massacres in the Sunni city of Hama where many districts were flattened to the ground. It is totally unfair for the Alawite community to bear the blame of those assaults; it is the Ba’athist regime that has ruled Syria for the last 41 years that should solely bear that blame. Throughout that period, the regime remained keen on systematically entrenching the sectarian aspect for its own ends. Hence, Sunni officers were removed from the leadership of the army and the security agencies. Likewise, other minorities were marginalised and the regime depended almost completely on a section of the Alawite community to exercise its military and security control over the country.

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