Are Alawites Muslims?

You’ve got to love the Internet. At last modern technology allows one to bare  body and soul—provided, of course, you hide your face and real name—and suffer virtually no consequences. This is, by the way, what I am about to do today. Please bear with me, and my intentions will soon reveal themselves as I strip naked, metaphorically of course, piece by piece.

Once upon a time, I was surfing the net. I felt bored and drifted to YouTube to run into what was at the time a new clip of Dominique Hourani with the cute name of “Khashooka”. Dominique is certainly no Fairuz, not by a long shot; she nevertheless has what it takes to attract a fairly wide audience in the Arab world thanks to her pleasing voice, playful antics, and youthful beauty. Like many of her peers, she can fluently sing in different accents: Lebanese, Egyptian, Khaliji, and perhaps more. Her clips are fun to watch, particularly after a long and tiresome day.

Watching the girly dances of Dominique and listening to her singing, the last thing to come to mind, at least as far as I’m concerned, would be religion and politics. Yet, this is exactly what I bumped into that day as an added bonus to watching the clip. Allow me to elaborate.

I don’t know about you, but I often look at the number of viewers of a particular clip that interests me and, very briefly, browse through the comments. With a young woman of Dominique’s type, the vast majority of the comments are adoringly enthusiastic; few are negative, needless to say. By the way, I do not, as of yet, have a YouTube account and therefore do not post comments on that site. My comment on that particular clip, or rather my comment on some of its comments, I hereby confine to this blog. Sorry for the lengthy introduction. Let's proceed into the theme of this essay without further ado.

For that particular clip, Khashooka, Dominique chose an accent that I could not readily identify. One commentator (A), evidently smarter than I am, opined that she was singing with a Syrian accent (mind you, Syria has a multitude of accents). A second one (B), not to be outdone, objected that she was using not a Syrian but a Nuṣayrī accent! A third one (C) furiously retorted something very close to “So Alawites are not Syrians then? We will continue to lord it over you for the rest of your life, you animal." 

Now I found, and still do, this brief exchange fascinating. Commentator B, echoing no doubt quite a few Sunnis (perhaps ultra-Sunni, Salafis, and/or Wahhabis), NOT ONLY DID NOT CONSIDER ALAWITES MUSLIMS, HE EVEN RULED THEM OUT AS SYRIANS. Well, at least it sounded this way to Commentator C and yours truly! Viewed through this prism, the outrage of Commentator C was fully justified, his foul language notwithstanding. I might add that it should not take an Alawite to resent and abhor such a racist and bigoted attitude. This is sad, but unfortunately that is the way it is.

Let’s put this little story in its proper context. Back in 1973, a Syrian constitution was proposed that failed to specify that the president should belong to the Muslim faith. There was enough restlessness in the country that President Ḥāfiẓ al-ʾAsad felt obliged to take two landmark steps: the first was to amend the constitution in order to calm the Sunni opposition, and the second was to get the late Imam Mūsā aṣ-Ṣadr of Lebanon to issue a fatwa acknowledging the Alawites as Šīʿā Muslims. Syria has been living with the consequences of those decisions ever since, with no sign that the issue would be buried any time soon.

So let’s resume from the very beginning. The Alawites are certainly Syrians in the full meaning of the word, and, with all due respect to Commentator B, to claim or even imply otherwise would be preposterous, to put it very politely. What about their Islamic identity?

This may sound like a more relevant question, and, excuse me, gentle reader, if I disappoint you, I will not provide an answer, and here are my reasons as to why:

1. It is up to the Alawites, and only to the Alawites, to define their own identity. If they choose to wave the flag of Islam, any sect of Islam, that would be enough for me to consider them Muslims. Should they state that they are Alawites and not Muslims, I would have no objection to that whatsoever. Were they to hide their faith altogether or to have no faith at all, I would not find it problematic in the least. I am a firm believer in liberal values, and to me, everyone should be able to define who he or she is. I will go further and say that an Alawite should also be able to choose the way to be called. If he finds the label Nuṣayrī offensive, for instance, then it behooves me to abstain from using it.

2. It is a disgrace that the Syrian Constitution should address the president’s faith at all. OK, so Alawites are Muslims; what about Christians, Yazidis, Druze, Ismailis, atheists, agnostics, and Jews (hardly anyone of the latter group is left, but that’s another story)? Are they second-class citizens? Since Syria is mostly Muslim, it is unlikely that a non-Muslim would assume the presidency anytime soon, but why does the Constitution have to specify it in writing?

3. Syria is supposedly a modern secular state and is admittedly more tolerant of its minorities than most countries in the Near East. Wouldn’t the logical next step be to separate church from state?

4. The Muslim Brotherhood and similar Sunni groups resent being ruled by what they consider a heretical minority. This is the wrong way to oppose the Syrian regime. There exists no shortage of legitimate objections to the way Syria is governed, its president’s faith (or the lack thereof) is not and should not be one of them. The President owes Syria’s Sunni community respect, not more or less than he would any other Syrian community. He should not have to bow and prostrate in the mosque if he does not want to. Many, if not most, West European leaders are declared atheists, and their peoples don’t seem to mind (to be sure, this is not so in the USA; all American presidents are at least officially devout Christians, some, from all available evidence, genuinely and deeply so, but I digress)*.

To conclude, I would add that the Near East has not moved beyond the religious state yet. We have a Jewish state (Israel), a Wahhabi state (Saudi Arabia), and a Šīʿā state (Iran), to name but a few. Religion as a remedy, however, is bound to kill the patient in Syria, the mosaic of which is such that imposing conformity would shatter an already fragile sectarian balance and quite likely lead to an Iraq- or Lebanon-like scenario. A nightmare to contemplate, let alone live through. I very much doubt that my arguments would impress Commentator B and his ilk, but I felt I had to add my two cents.

* US President George W. Bush and Jacques Chirac of France reportedly once had a discussion about Iraq when Mr. Bush told his French counterpart that a dream-like vision of Gog and Magog was one factor in his decision to invade/liberate Iraq. Monsieur Chirac had to confer with some theologians to understand what the American president was talking about.