What now for the Alawites?

Tragic Syria returns to the state of nature

[Image: The tragic tale of the eye doctor that longed for England]

Peace at last. His career as the world’s most unlikely murderer finally at an end,. Seeing Bashar Al-Assad walking hand-in-hand with Asma one thinks of what might have been, there in another possible world. Beyond the dimensional barrier, the self-effacing eye doctor would have settled down in his Buckinghamshire manor, slippers on and facing the open fireplace. Reading his dusty copy of Descartes Meditations he would have glanced outside at the frost-kissed English hills, thinking wistfully of Syria, but thankful for his new life. Far from the sectarian madding crowd of his homeland, he could breathe the air of freedom. He could marry for love not for confession. He could bury the debates about Ali’s divinity deep in the recesses of his unconscious. His wife, smiling at her latest oven baked creation, was woman made perfect. A Sunni cipher no more. Just a woman. His woman.

Bashar’s eye practice was going well. There he could be invisible, a well-liked professional, a pillar of the community. His efforts at the Christmas fundraiser were never forgotten and his glorious garden the talk of the village. Most celebrated of all was his donation to fix the leaky Church roof. The Union Jack bunting was out in force, but the British weather had the last laugh. Reading his painstakingly prepared speech, the Heavens began to open, a reminder of the fury back home. The trestle tables were quickly packed away, but no matter. He was liberated. The grey-lit miserable uplands were a small price for freedom. Freedom from sectarian hate. Freedom from his father. Back home upon the settee, his troubles fell away from his brow. For The Great British Bake Off was on and the dough-handed Asma was there to share it with him.

This is the life that Bashar Al-Assad would have wanted. Of this I have little doubt. A murderous, fanatical sectarian doesn’t marry someone of a different faith or encourage secularism. A murderous, fanatical sectarian doesn’t feel most at home on the shopping streets of London and Paris. It is the nature of Syria that led him from Buckinghamshire to butchery. It is a most tragic affair. A land without a nation, where each sect fights mercilessly for survival, is no place for a cultured, liberally-educated physician. In such a land, where minorities are pitted against the reality of political Islam and the infernal Sunni-Shiite hate fest runs riot, there appears but but one possibility: fight or flight. Flight would be humane. The easy decision and perhaps the moral one. But the perfumed scent of home is impossible to deny. The insistent desire to remain in the land of your ancestors and the maddening voice that says resist. We will not surrender to Sunni political Islam, the warrior force that would impose religion, dissolve difference and destroy dignity. We will remain. We will stay eternally in the soil that birthed Western civilization and water our roots in the earth that our grandfathers planted.

But to stay, to fight, to resist, to survive is no vanilla choice. It is no walk down the Brighton promenade nor a Champs Elysées stroll. It is a bloody quest that will stain your hands with blood: and no matter how perfumed the water, the damned spots will never be expunged. In the Syrian matrix, you live in the state of nature and your choice may not be denied. Or at least so you believe: you have power over others or others use it to dominate you. And those that will de facto dominate, democratically, autocratically or worse, are the majority, the Borg-like haters who spread out from Arabia to eliminate the authentic Middle East. And so that you may continue on the land that was promised to your ancestors; and so that your fellow minorities may do likewise; you are forced to become monsters. Violent torturers and vile thugs. Those that launch chemical weapons, electrocute prisoners and rule by fear. You allow foreign theocrats to dominate your land and let madmen with turbans smuggle weapons through your territory. In your battle for Buckinghamshire bliss you become every bit as brutal and hateful as your enemies and you let a different political religion run riot. What has this Arabism turned us into, you cry?

For the Alawites to live, they had to turn into Muslim Arabs. The devil's pact just to be. They don’t pray in mosques. They reject dietary restrictions. And prayer times are flexible. They place Mohammad below Ali, Jesus below Peter, Moses below Joshua and see Ali as God incarnate. They drink wine on festivals, celebrate Christmas, are influenced by the Eucharist and have a version of Ashura reinterpreted. But they are “Muslims” and they are “Arabs”. Survival makes it so. And the Syrian Constitution demands it of its leaders.

We are too quick to judge Middle Eastern minorities. They are what they are because of where they are. When faced with monstrosity, they could become butchers like Bashar or be butchered like the Yazidis. They could be loyal like the Druze or fight for freedom like the Kurds. The Alawites - rejected by conservative Muslims, oppressed by the Ottomans and poverty-stricken in pre-Assadian days - can be understood. To take over the apparatus of State was what they needed to do else they become the latest victim of political Islamist terror. But can they really be excused? In their desire for better days far from Islamist intolerance, did they really have to resort to Baathism? We feel for them. We wish that they could have enjoyed the freedoms of Britain far from the locust swarm that so bitterly plagued them. But there was another way.

They could have fought for independence and for a liberal democratic reality. We know this because not far from Syria the Jews succeeded in doing just that. The Kurds are desperately trying to achieve likewise. In the Middle East, where zombified hatred is knocking at the gates of Constantinople, walls are the only solution. Borders. Safe redoubts fighting to maintain freedom under the most difficult of conditions. The Alawites could have said “no”. Rejecting French partition, they could have built a liberal democratic Alawite enclave and joined common cause with the Kurds, Christians and Druze. They could have taken up arms and protected religious freedom in the manner of European Christian cultures that so influenced the worship of their sect. They could have been inspired by the Zionist resistance. But instead they chose to dominate. Instead of following the example of the Jewish State and helping the Kurds to build theirs, they fostered antisemitism and helped the worst of anti semitic regimes to flourish. They used their nation to attack Israel again and again. They allowed their institutions to be run by Iranian Clerics and let Hezbollah jihadists stalk the streets. They oppressed fellow minorities in Lebanon, making common cause with their own anti-secular enemies. They chose evil when they could have chosen good. There is no Buckinghamshire in the Middle East, but there need not have been an Assadian Syria.

The minorities of Syria now are facing a moment of crisis. A fight for survival against genocide. They are exposed to the evils of Sunni Islamist conformity and analogies with Iraq make the future seem bleak. It is in this Hobbesian State of Nature, they have one choice left: political association. Alawites and their Christian Syrian supporters need to beg forgiveness from the Kurds and join together to build an iron wall against political Islam. Only there, the social contract signed and served, can they truly be free. Behind the barrier, they can build England’s green and pleasant land on the shores of the Mediterranean and religious freedom for all can finally flourish in at least part of the French Mandate. Buckinghamshire realised.

The ignorant say that the Syrian Civil War is over. Really, it has only just begun. And if the experience of Israel is anything to go by, the Alawites, Christians, Kurds and Druze will never be allowed the luxury of peace.