Encyclopedia of Islam

Syria

  

647  J

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and devotees prayed together in a zawiyah, or Sufi 

lodge. Up until the 18th century even the smallest 

Syrian village had its own zawiyah. s

UFism

 had a 

precipitous decline as a practice in the 19th cen-

tury. As Syria’s urban population began to rapidly 

increase and the Ottoman authorities in i

stanbUl

exerted centralizing reforms on its a

rab

 provinces, 

institutionalized Sunni Islam prevailed over more 

heterodox popular forms of religious expression. 

Most of the more than 1 million war refugees who 

have fled i

raq

 for Syria since 2003 are Shii. The 

shrine of Sayyida Zaynab south of Damascus is a 

major pilgrimage site for Iraqi, Iranian, and Leba-

nese Shiis. Zaynab was the daughter of the Shii 

martyr Ali and the granddaughter of the prophet 

Muhammed. Many Iraqi Shiis now live in the 

crowded slum areas adjacent to the shrine.

Christianity has flourished in Syria from the 

earliest times and Christians now make up about 

10 percent of the population. Aramaic was the lan-

guage of early Christianity in Syria and is still used 

in liturgy in the ancient village of Maaloula with 

its Mar Sergius Church dating back to the third 

century 

c

.

e

. Syria was part of the Byzantine Empire 

from 395 to 632 

c

.

e

. during which time most of 

the population converted. The Byzantines imposed 

their own Greek-speaking clergy on the local popu-

lation, creating a schism. Syrians adopted Islam 

gradually and the majority of the population may 

not have become Muslim until the 10th or 11th 

centuries. The main Christian denominations in 

Syria today are Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, 

Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Catholic, Armenian 

Catholic, Maronites, and a variety of smaller Prot-

estant sects. Damascus, Aleppo, and Kamishli near 

the border with t

Urkey

 still have very small Jewish 

communities. The Jewish quarter in the old city of 

Damascus dates back to pre-Christian times.

In the modern period, Syria has suffered 

from foreign domination and 

colonialism

. From 

1516 to 1916, Syria was a province of the Otto-

man Empire. The last years of the empire were 

particularly harsh. The Ottoman sultan Abdul 

Hamid II (1876–1909) stepped up forced con-

scription—even among Syria’s Christians, who 

had formerly been exempt from military ser-

vice. An economic recession and the collapse of 

traditional handicraft industries caused by the 

flooding of local markets with cheap European 

industrial goods created a wave of peasant and 

urban lower-class migration to South America 

and the U

nited

  s

tates

. The repressive policies 

of Abdul Hamid gave rise to a growing opposi-

tion movement among Syria’s newly educated 

professional class who sought promotion of the 

Arabic language in the educational system and 

government administration. After Abdul Hamid 

was deposed by the Young Turk Movement in 

1909, some members of the Syrian opposition 

began calling for complete independence. The 

nascent Arab nationalist movement was ruth-

lessly crushed by the Turkish military authorities 

during World War I. In 1915 and 1916, 33 Arab 

nationalists were publicly hanged in the main 

squares of Beirut and Damascus.

Syria’s present borders are the result of colo-

nial partition sponsored by the British and French 

in the Sykes-Picot Agreement of 1916. Under the 

terms of the agreement, Syria was placed under 

French role as a mandate of the League of Nations. 

a

rab

 armies led by Faysal Husayn, son of the 

Sharif of m

ecca

, entered Damascus in 1918 and 

declared an independent Arab kingdom. At the 

same time, French military forces landed in Syria 

and Lebanon. Faysal’s government was militarily 

defeated by the French in 1920, and the country 

was placed under foreign military rule. The ruth-

lessness of French military and economic policies 

radicalized the Syrian population. In 1925 and 

1926, the Syrians rose in a massive revolt begin-

ning in the Druze mountainous areas in the south, 

then encompassing much of the countryside and 

eventually reaching the urban centers of Damas-

cus and Aleppo. To crush the armed revolt, the 

French employed their foreign legion, aerial bom-

bardment, and even the use of napalm. Almost a 

third of the Syria population became homeless.

The French mandate left a legacy of a bifur-

cated body politic that plagued Syria for the rest 

of the 20th century. The French relied on large 

absentee landowners, wealthy merchants, and 

urban notables as their collaborators in admin-

K  648  

Syria

---

istering Syria. The disenfranchised middle class 

and educated professionals were blocked from 

advancing their own interests. Increasingly, those 

who were not the beneficiaries of French political 

and economic patronage turned to new political 

movements with radical anticolonialist ideologies. 

These two political forces would wrestle for control 

of Syria’s governmental apparatus for the first 30 

years of Syria’s existence as an independent state 

after World War II. The dominant ideology of the 

patriotic Syrian bourgeoisie was Arab nationalism 

that espoused a reversal of the colonial partition 

of Arab lands by the Sykes-Picot Agreement, Arab 

political sovereignty over its own territory, and the 

adoption of Arab cultural policies that recognized 

the significance of Islam as the majority religious 

tradition in the region. Every anticolonialist pop-

ular movement that emerged in Syria in the 20th 

century clung to some variant of Arab national-

ism as a basic political principle. The Communist 

Party of Lebanon and Syria, founded in 1928, was 

one of the new uncompromising anticolonialist 

political movements. By the 1950s, it became one 

of the largest and best organized communist par-

ties in the Arab world.

Another of the radical Arab nationalist par-

ties that emerged during the period of the French 

mandate was the b

aath

  p

arty

, founded in 1939 

by two schoolteachers, one Greek Orthodox and 

the other Sunni Muslim. In addition to adhering 

to a basic policy of Arabism, unity, and political 

independence, the party also advocated a vague 

notion of socialism that would evolve in time 

to include land reform, state ownership of key 

economic institutions such as banks, and state 

regulation of the private sector. The Baath finally 

came to power in 1966. From the 1950s through 

1970s, the leadership of the Syrian Baath Party 

was almost exclusively composed of members of 

professions: professors, schoolteachers, doctors, 

lawyers, and military officers—the very people 

who had been thwarted from achieving political 

power and economic advancement by the old rul-

ing classes of landowners, merchants, and urban 

notables. In a military coup in 1970, one Alawi 

air force officer, Hafiz al-Asad, prevailed over 

all other factions in the Baath Party and became 

president of Syria until his death in 2000. He was 

succeeded by his son Bashar al-Asad who remains 

the Syrian president in 2008.

Syria became a key player in Arab regional 

politics. It is a frontline state in the a

rab

-i

sraeli

conFlicts

. Syrian volunteers fought in the 1948 

war in Palestine and, at its conclusion, Syria served 

as one of the countries of refuge for Palestinian 

refugees. i

srael

 occupied the Syrian Golan Heights 

in 1967 and expelled most of the population. More 

of the Golan was occupied in 1973. Today there are 

only about 20,000 Syrians, mostly Druze, left in 

the Israeli occupied part of the Golan Heights. The 

occupied territory has also been populated by about 

20,000 Israeli settlers. Israel declared the unilateral 

annexation of the Golan Heights in 1981.

Syria was a key Middle East regional ally of 

the Soviet Union during the years of the cold war. 

The USSR supplied the country with MIG fighter 

jets and missile systems in order to defend itself, 

but Syria was never allowed to achieve military 

parity with Israel. When Israel mounted a full-

scale invasion of Lebanon in June 1982 and the 

Syrian air force challenged Israeli jets bombing 

its antiaircraft missile defense systems along its 

border with Lebanon, a third of the entire Syrian 

air force was destroyed in only a few hours. Since 

1982 Syria has supported Palestinian factions who 

have rejected peace proposals that fall short of 

full Palestinian national sovereignty in the West 

Bank and Gaza. Syria has opposed regional peace 

initiatives that are bilateral in nature and ignore 

the issue of Syrian sovereignty over the Golan 

Heights. At the same time, Syria has conducted 

secret negotiations with Israel through third-party 

intermediaries and has shown flexibility over pro-

posals for limiting Syria’s return to full sovereign 

control of the Golan by having any future peace 

agreement monitored by international peacekeep-

ing forces, including those of the United States, 

and installing electronic early warning systems.

Syria has played a pragmatic role in Arab 

regional politics. It has been cautious in nurtur-

ing its relations with s

aUdi

  a

rabia

 and the g

UlF

s

tates

. Over the years Saudi Arabia has supplied