Syria's Shades of Gray

By William Dalrymple

Published: June 7, 2003

LONDON— The United States has probably never been more engaged in theMiddle East than now, with an American army of occupation in Iraq andPresident Bush promoting a Israeli-Palestinian road map to peace. Yetthe Bush administration has virtually ignored Syria, which physicallylinks Iraq and Israel, except to single it out as a target of occasionalbellicose threats. There has been no question of constructiveengagement with Iraq's most powerful Arab neighbor. Instead Syria isseen merely as an unofficial adjunct to the Axis of Evil, ripe forreform if not outright invasion.

That's unfortunate, because Syria, despite its many justifiablycondemned policies, stands out in the Middle East in one respect thatAmerican policy makers should take into consideration. This aspect ofSyria is most starkly on display at Saidnaya, a large Orthodox monasterynorth of Damascus.

The monastery sits on a great crag of rock overlooking the olivegroves of the Damascene plain, more like a Crusader castle than a placeof worship. But what is most striking about Saidnaya is that on anygiven night, Muslim pilgrims far outnumber Christian ones. When you walkinto its ancient pilgrimage church, you find the congregation consistslargely of heavily bearded Muslim men and their shrouded wives. As thepriest circles the altar, filling the sanctuary with clouds of incense,the men bob up and down on their prayer mats. A few of the womenapproach the icons. They kiss them, then light a candle.

Ordinary Muslims in Syria, it seems, have not forgotten the line inthe Koran about not disputing with the people of the book -- that is,Jews and Christians -- ''save in the most courteous manner . . . and saywe believe in what has been sent down to us and what has been sent downto you; our God and your God is one.''

The religious pluralism that the pilgrimage church represents wasonce not uncommon across the Levant. Throughout the region until veryrecently, villagers of all faiths would converge on the shrines ofChristian saints to ask for children and good harvests. EasternChristians and Muslims lived side by side for nearly one and a halfmillennia because of a degree of mutual tolerance and shared customsunimaginable in the solidly Christian West. From Bosnia to Egypt,Christians and Muslims as well as many other religious minoritiesmanaged to live together. If that coexistence was not always harmonious,it was at least -- with a few notable exceptions -- until the beginningof the 20th century, a kind of pluralist equilibrium.

Only in the last 100 years has that pluralism been replaced by anew hardening in attitudes. Across the former Ottoman dominions, the20th century saw the bloody unraveling of that complex tapestry -- mostrecently in Kosovo and Bosnia, but before that in Cyprus, Palestine,Greece and Turkey. In each of these places pluralism has been replacedby a savage polarization. In dribs and drabs, and sometimes in greattragic exoduses, religious minorities have fled to places where they canbe majorities, and those too few for that have fled the regionaltogether. Only in Syria has this process been firmly arrested: therealone, you still find five or six religious sects coexisting in villagesacross the country.

Since the coalition's victory in Iraq, Syria has frequently beengiven notice that it could well be the next target of American wrath.Yet the Middle East is not a place where the simplistic notion of goodguys and bad guys makes much sense. It is a place of murky moral gray,not black and white. Torture, repression of minorities, the impositionof military law and the abuse of basic human rights happen every bit asfrequently and as unpleasantly in states that are American allies asthey do in states that are not.

Certainly, most would agree that Syria has much to reform. It is aone-party state where political activists are suppressed and the secretpolice fill jail cells with political prisoners who will never comebefore a judge. Violent opposition to the regime is met withoverwhelming force, most horribly in the case of the armed rising of theMuslim Brotherhood in Hama in 1982: the city was sealed off and atleast 10,000 people were killed.

Yet the balance sheet is not entirely one-sided, and with thePentagon busy drawing up invasion plans even as Iraq still contends withpostwar anarchy and the Taliban resurfaces in southern Afghanistan, itis well to consider carefully exactly what would be lost if Syria'spresident, Bashar al-Assad, were to be deposed.

For if Syria is a one-party police state, it is a police state thattends to leave its citizens alone as long as they keep out of politics.And if political freedoms have always been severely and often brutallyrestricted, Mr. Assad's regime does allow the Syrian people cultural andreligious freedoms. Today, these give Syria's minorities a security andstability far greater than their counterparts anywhere else in theregion. This is particularly true of Syria's ancient Christiancommunities.

Almost everywhere else in the Levant, because of discrimination andin some cases outright persecution, the Christians are leaving. Todayin the Middle East they are a small minority of 14 million; in the last20 years at least two million have left to make new lives for themselvesin Europe, Australia and America. Only in Syria has this pattern beenresisted. As the Syrian Orthodox metropolitan of Aleppo, Mar GregoriosIbrahim, told me on my last visit: ''Christians are better off in Syriathan anywhere else in the Middle East. Other than Lebanon, this is theonly country in the region where a Christian can really feel the equalof a Muslim.''

He added: ''If Syria were not here, we would be finished. It is aplace of sanctuary, a haven for all the Christians: for the Nestoriansdriven out of Iraq, the Syrian Orthodox and the Armenians driven out ofTurkey, even the Palestinian Christians driven out by the Israelis'' in1948.

The confidence of the Christians in Syria is something you can'thelp but notice the minute you arrive in the country. This isparticularly so if you arrive from eastern Turkey. There, until veryrecently, minority languages like the Aramaic spoken by Syrian OrthodoxChristians were banned from the airwaves and from schools. ForChristianity in eastern Turkey is a secretive affair, and the governmenthas closed all the country's seminaries.

But cross into Syria and you find a very different picture.Qamishli, the first town on the Syrian side of the frontier, is 75percent Christian, and icons of Christ and images of his mother fillshops and decorate every other car window -- an extraordinary displayafter the furtiveness of Christianity in Turkey.

The reason for this is not hard to find. President Assad isAlawite, a Muslim minority regarded by orthodox Sunni Muslims asheretical and disparagingly referred to as ''little Christians'': indeedsome scholars believe their liturgy to be partly Christian in origin.Mr. Assad's father, Hafez, who was president from 1971 until his deathin 2000, kept himself in power by forming what was in effect a coalitionof Syria's religious minorities through which he was able tocounterbalance the weight of the Sunni majority. In the Assads' Syria,Christians have done particularly well: in his final years, five ofHafez's seven closest advisers were Christians. The Christians areopenly fearful that if the Assad regime should fall, their last realhaven in the Middle East will disappear and be replaced by yet anotherfundamentalist government, as may be the case in Iraq.

All this does not excuse the repressive policies of the Assadregime. But in a region where repression is the rule rather than theexception, it is important to remember that the political rights andwrongs are rather more complex than the neoconservatives and Pentagonhawks are prepared to acknowledge -- or perhaps even know.

Drawing

William Dalrymple is author of ''From the Holy Mountain: TravelsAmong the Christians of the Middle East'' and ''White Mughals: Love andBetrayal in 18th-Century India.''