Sarbast Nabi
The late Egyptian thinker Samir Amin says that the Spring of the Arab revolutions turned into a spring for Islamist religious movements. Although this talk contains some pessimism, it is based on realistic and correct ground. However, we can explain this statement through the following questions: Why did the current political rejection of the Arab peoples appear as a religious and sectarian one against the existing tyranny? Why did these realistic political transformations that have swept the Arab regimes take on a religious form armed with religious ideologies? Why, among the dozens of ideologies, political theories and modern philosophies that fill the books and are more harmonious and compatible with the spirit of the times, only the religious ideology in its Islamic doctrinal formulation has the popularity and dominance of the awareness rejecting tyranny in Arab societies that have risen against authoritarianism?
In mid-March 2011, a courageous and ambitious elite of Syrian youth called for democratic change. They demonstrated in the center of the capital, Damascus. They represented most of the Syrian civil society, and their political affiliations varied between the leftist, the liberal, and the nationalist. In the end, the repression forces of the regime were able to dispel this rapid protest movement, and arrest its activists, but it marked the beginning of a dramatic and historical transformation in Syria, the results of which have not yet cleared.
At this time, the Islamists and their political wing represented by the Muslim Brotherhood were secretly negotiating with the regime through the Turkish mediator. They were not enthusiastic at this time to protest against the regime, but rather were betting on reconciliation and partnership with it in governing Syria. Despite this, the Syrians continued to reject the regime and continued protests throughout that period.
In the end, after three months of the Syrian people’s uprising against the tyranny of Assad, and after their Turkish patron began to break his intimate relations with the regime and instructed them to engage in conflict and participate, the Muslim Brotherhood and other Islamic movements found no way but to engage in the revolution after realizing that the Syrians had burned all the boats behind them, and that they were intent on overthrowing the regime. However, the Muslim Brotherhood did not only accept the role of partner for themselves, but rather set in mind the goal of taking over the revolution financially and symbolically, and stamping it with their own ideological character. Here, the great “piracy” of the revolution started. This goal was completely consistent with the allegations made by the regime up to this point of the protests as an extremist sectarian movement.
Undoubtedly, most of the “religious” Fridays designated by one dominant party that monopolized the language of the revolution later, served the regime more than anything else. Instead of polarizing the Syrians around the revolution’s demands for democracy and equality, and achieving their political unity, it raised fears and suspicions within society. The crisis of the names of the “Fridays” that the “Syrian revolution” Facebook account dominated at the time and began to impose under limited conditions and options such as the Friday of “Tribes, Khaled Bin al-Walid, Allahu Akbar, …. etc.” reflected a deep political and historical misery in these people’s consciousness. Such names were completely devoid of any comprehensive, common and modern national values, not to mention that they did not serve the context of unifying the forces of the national society in the face of the bloody tyranny.
Thus, they sought to reduce the political conflict in Syria to a cultural and sectarian one, and the aim was to mislead and ignore the structural crisis of the authoritarian regime, and to pave the way for the establishment of a religious and sectarian authoritarianism of another kind. This is what both the regime and the sectarian opposition wanted. Here lies the fatal historical error in the political logic of the opposition, since the day it made the overthrowing of the Bashar al-Assad’s regime its main goal, without paying attention to the need to change the structure of the authoritarian regime.
This is what showed the conflict as if it were a sectarian struggle for positions of influence inside the country. This impression strengthened the two conflicting parties, that used weapons as the only means to reach their goals without a care to its devastating consequences at the societal and humanitarian levels.
The fact is that as soon as the Muslim Brotherhood and many political parties, which aligned with them and the Turkish project, pirated the uprising of the Syrian people, monopolized their sacrifices, borrowed their language, and installed themselves as the sole spokesperson in their name, they have since begun to impose their political and sectarian beliefs and symbols on this historical movement. This raised the implicit fears of the various cultural and religious identities and deepened suspicion of the true intentions of them. As a result, a deep rift arose in the front of rejecting tyranny, and its features have been cleared so far.
In parallel, religious passion and faith, sacred beliefs, principles and slogans dominated the manifestations of the mass protest that the uprising Syrian cities witnessed. It was evident that in expressing their discontent with the political reality, the people were more easily compatible with sacred religious slogans and concepts of faith than modern and explicit political values, such as democracy, human rights and equality. Even in those cases in which they resorted to expressing their modern political demands, such as equality, truth, democracy, and civilization, they only dealt with them independently of their modern reference philosophical contexts, and in return, they referred to their religious connotations. Also, it seemed that the Syrian people revolting against oppression and usurpation of power, were moving in the field of pure faith, at a time when they were already making a new history for themselves, relying on nothing to the times of holiness, and ignoring any sacred value, as it turned out later.
In all cases, when religious sentiment becomes a basic component and form of political ideology, as is the case among the Arab revolutionary crowd, then this sentiment becomes worldly with a deep earthly/humanistic root. It incites and addresses, justifies the role of historical actors, meets the requirements of their desire for conflict and resistance, and expresses their rejection of misery and worldly rupture. Within this practical horizon, we can understand the people’s need for religion and the inspiration of their symbols in expressing their rejection.
A decade after the Syrian uprising, which now appears as a futile and historical tragedy, hundreds of thousands of civilian victims and millions of refugees and displaced people, the failure of international efforts, and in light of economic deterioration and general misery worsening throughout Syria, it seems that the despair to find a solution that goes beyond this bloody dilemma has now become the general feeling of all observers. There is nothing on the horizon except for an endless, bloody, continuous conflict, without eliminating any parties. Could this religious manifestation of the protests or the religious and sectarian belief that dominated the protests in Syria be viewed as a historical oversight, or as a product of an underdeveloped societal awareness of history? Or can it be seen as a historical and political plot that was combined with the abovementioned?
The situation now – after a decade of the uprising and its transformation into a bloody civil conflict – is no longer represented in the crisis of the despotic regime in Syria, but also in the crisis of the Syrian opposition, which shares with the regime a large part of the responsibility towards the victims of the Syrian people, whether because of its arrogance, vanity, the inadequacy of its political discourse, its narrow-mindedness, or even its political opportunism and its mercenarism on the regional parties.