DAMASCUS/ALEPPO: The three Mohammads are all sure of one thing. "I want to be the imam of a mosque," says 10-year-old Mohammad, on his way home from a lesson in Aleppo's Islamic school. "I want to be a preacher too," chimes his friend, also named after the Prophet, dressed in his finest black gelab. "We like to study the Koran," explains the third Mohammad, also a resident of Syria's second city, "because it's our religion." Syria is witnessing a revival of Islam in public and private life two decades after the secular government fought a bloody campaign to suppress an armed uprising against the state by Islamic extremists.
"The relationship between the government and the direction of Islam is now suitable," said Mohammad Habbash, the country's leading Islamist MP and head of the Islamic Studies Center in Damascus. "We can now speak about what role Islam can play in people's lives." Habbash's recent invitation to lecture army cadets on religious morals - the first time the Syrian military has officially cooperated with Islamist figures since the Baath Party came to power in 1963 - is just one of a series of recent moves to allow Islam into public life.
In 1982, following a three-year armed campaign against the state by the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, security officers ordered the shelling of the central city of Hama, which the Islamist group had declared an Islamic emirate. The offensive resulted in the deaths of an estimated 20,000 people.
Hamed Haji, 73, the muezzin whose call to prayer draws students - like the three young Mohammads - to Aleppo's Islamic school, remembers the violence.
"In the 1980s, bullets hit the minaret," he recalls, pointing up to the pock-marked circles of stone. "And beards were not allowed; but we have more freedoms now."
Indeed, the past few months have seen a number of moves aimed at institutionalizing Islam into Syria's old secular state. Mosques have been reopened between prayer times, the president has begun ending public speeches with invocations to God, and state auditoriums have been used for the country's first Koran reading competition. In February, Syrian protesters burned and looted the Danish and Norwegian embassies in Damascus in a display of anger against the publication of cartoons negatively depicting the Prophet Mohammad. At the time, security officials did little to quell the demonstrations, which were organized by Islamic study centers in the capital. Among citizens, overt signs of religious devotion are becoming more frequent. An increasing number of young women are wearing headscarves, while green flags - representing Islam - adorned private shops on the Prophet's birthday in April.
Though three quarters of Syria's population are Sunni, the ruling party has long drawn its leaders from the minority Alawi sect, an offshoot of Shiite Islam, which - along with Druze and other Muslim sects - makes up just 16 percent of the national population. Pan-Arab and secular, the Baath Party has historically ruled on a domestic platform of protecting the rights of Syria's minorities.
For Habbash, the state's changing approach to Islam comes against a backdrop of regional upheaval since the launch of the US-led "war on terrorism," which has seen Islamist parties winning elections in Egypt, Iraq and the Palestinian territories and an increasingly influential role for long-time Syrian ally and theocratic republic Iran. "The Syrian regime realized it has the same agenda as conservative Islamists," says Habbash. "They've formed an alliance to resist the current US administration's plan to change the region."
However, Aleppo's mufti, Ibrahim Salkeeni, warns that US intervention in the Middle East has also served to radicalize many young Syrians. "American practices in Iraq and Palestine are pushing some young people in Aleppo to become like time bombs - and we don't know when these will explode," he says. "The more the pressure increases, the more explosions there will be."
Syria, however, still considers the Muslim Brotherhood to be an outlawed group. The Brotherhood's exiled leader, Ali Sadreddine Bayanouni, has united with former Syrian Vice President Abdel-Halim Khaddam to lead an opposition group calling for regime change in Damascus. Association with the group is punishable by death.
For Mohammad Akam, professor of Arabic-language studies at Aleppo University, the state's increasing acceptance of Islam's role in society is a welcome development. But, he adds, the new strategy is no substitute for the reform of an outdated political system. "The conflict between the state and the Muslim Brotherhood was actually a conflict of ideologies," he says. "We need a party without ideology. Between secularism and freedom, I prefer freedom. Secularism is a kind of ideology, but democracy is a way of including all." |
LONDON - The exiled leader of Syrias outlawed Muslim Brotherhood on Friday called on President Bashar al-Assad to step down and allow free elections, saying the opposition would resort to civil disobedience if the regime failed to introduce democratic change.