Bloomberg Would Be Appalled
Bashar al-Assad, the secular President of Syria,
has flirted with Islamic fundamentalists when it suited him in the past, but those days appear to be over. A crackdown that began two years ago after a car bombing in Damascus is rapidly picking up speed. According to the NY Times,
The government has asked imams for recordings of their Friday sermons and started to strictly monitor religious schools. Members of an influential Muslim women’s group have now been told to scale back activities like preaching or teaching Islamic law. And this summer, more than 1,000 teachers who wear the niqab, or the face veil, were transferred to administrative duties.
There's a dissonance worth noting here. Assad is still busy proclaiming his heartfelt support for Islamic fundamentalists abroad, particularly Hamas in Gaza and Hezbollah in Lebanon. But at home, Islamists are better seen and not heard. Preferably not seen, either.
There is speculation that the move to downplay the expression of fundamentalist Islam in Syria and to strengthen the country's secular character is a play for Western approval. That may be the case, but it's hardly inconsistent with Assad's own beliefs or interests. He is a member of the Baathist party and is therefore by definition a secularist whose national goals are diametrically opposed to those of the fundamentalists. His father Hafez responded to a threat by the Islamist Muslim Brotherhood by slaughtering tens of thousands of people in Hama in 1982, effectively crushing the movement for a generation. Bashar is not Hafez, and he has not yet been directly provoked in the way that Hafez was, but he seems at least to have remembered which side he's on.
I've always felt a pang of sympathy for Bashar. He was never supposed to be president. His father groomed his elder brother, Basil, for the succession; Bashar became an ophthamologist and was destined for a quiet life. He was thrust into the role of heir apparent when Basil was killed in a car crash in 1994. He's always looked a little out of his depth up there, and his cozying up to fundamentalists over the past few years -- jarring as it is in view of his father's history with them -- has seemed as much a reflection of his susceptibility to strong winds as cool political calculation. The car bombing in 2008 apparently woke him up to the danger of a flourishing Islamist movement at home.
One interesting element of Bashar's crackdown is the barring this past summer of women wearing the niqab from registration at university, a move that echoes the French ban of the headscarf. A Syrian official, apparently behind a little in his diplomatic studies program, stated baldly that the niqab is "alien" to Syrian society. The Times notes that on Charlie Rose, Bashar was asked to name his biggest challenge. "How we can keep our society as secular as it is today,” he said. “The challenge is the extremism in this region.”
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Re: Bloomberg Would Be Appalled
Sorry, all: I seem to have left out the link for the Times piece on the crackdown. Here it is.
Aug '10
Re: Bloomberg Would Be Appalled
It's important to remember that Islamic fundamentalists are mostly power hungry non-entities. Murderous strife began upon Muhammad's death. Ayatollah Khomeini (1900 - 1989) is their model; a more foolish, cold blooded, conceited anachronism of a human being never lived.
Their one goal is to create, through Sharia Law, a fantasy world of high civilization that never really existed. It's based on the imaginary city of Cordoba, Spain,
"To Cordoba belong all the beauty and ornaments that delight the eye or dazzle the sight. Her long line of Sultans form her crown of glory; her necklace is strung with the pearls which her poets have gathered from the ocean of language; her dress is of the banners of learning, well-knit together by her men of science; and the masters of every art and industry are the hem of her garments...
"When Cordoba was at the height of its flowering there were over 200,000 houses, six hundred mosques, nine hundred public baths, fifty hospitals and several large markets... with 15,000 weavers:
"You could walk through her streets for ten miles in one direction at night, and always have the light of lamps to guide your way. "
Re: Bloomberg Would Be Appalled
This is good news, sort of. (It would be better news if Syria were a functioning democracy in which the mass of the electorate had simply had it up to here with the Islamicists, but Syria is only a functioning democracy in bizarro world.) Now that we've seen that Arab strongmen are indeed able to face down Islamists in their own countries--thank you, Mr. Assad--might it be too much to hope that Barack Obama and Hilary Clinton might finally get as tough with the king of Saudi Arabia as they seem to have delighted in being on, say, Benjamin Netanyahu? If the Saudis turned off the money spigot, Wahabbi Islam would quickly revert to what it was in the first place: a desert sect dear to the Bedouin but to no one else. Might our chief executive and secretary of state at least give that one a try? (Hint for the President: This means resisting the temptation to bow to the king the next time you meet him.)
May '10
Re: Bloomberg Would Be Appalled
There's a parallel with the Cold War and Kirkpatrick's pragmatic notion that right-wing dictatorships are preferable to communist regimes: Arab dictatorships, while brutal, can serve our purposes if they too fear--and therefore work to stifle--Islamism. With Assad, we'll know we're making real progress when this same impulse to confront radicals is directed at his Iranian overlords (which would most likely be manifested in a hesitance to assist Hamas and Hezbollah).
Peter's point about the Saudis is a good one, and, as it happens, there's some progress there as well. The Saudis are now realizing that their deal with the devil--promoting Wahabbism in exchange for the Wahabbists' acquiescence to the House of Saud--is working out as deals with the devil usually do: The devil's getting uppity. The Saudis' crackdown, tepid though it might be, is one of the better developments of the last few years and--who knows?--could lead to "turning off the money spigot" in a decade or three.
It's going to be a long war.
Edited on Sep 6, 2010 at 7:25am