In the Lion's Den_ An Eyewitness Account of Washington's Battle With Syria - Andrew Tabler [66]
Hassoun began breaking with tradition and pushing Islam back into public life. He met frequently with community leaders, preaching “interfaith dialogue” and the tolerance of Islam. Following the burning of the Danish embassy, Hassoun met and communicated regularly with representatives from the Vatican and Europe. He also prayed often and publicly with President Assad in the grand mosques of Damascus and Aleppo. All of Hassoun’s activities were covered in detail by SANA—the state’s primary propaganda machine.
Regime efforts to engage rising Islamic sentiments accelerated substantially after the “defection” of Syrian vice president Abdel Halim Khaddam to the opposition on December 30. In a speech to the Arab Parties General Conference in Damascus on March 4, President Assad said that the Arabs derive their strength from “Islam, which is strongly connected with Arabism.” He later said that Islam and Arabism were mutually interdependent and that any political party that ignores either is bound to fail—echoing the words of one of the Baath Party’s founders, Michel Aflaq, and even turning them on their head.
On March 13, Syria held its first competition for reading the Koran in the auditorium of Damascus University—a venue traditionally reserved for Baath Party occasions and presidential speeches. Two weeks later, a ban on mosques that opened between prayer times was lifted to allow for Islamic instruction. A week after that, Aleppo was named the Islamic cultural capital of 2006 amidst great fanfare and, more importantly, open presidential patronage. The city then underwent a major renaissance project, which was funded by donations from pious businessmen.
Then, on April 1, the Syrian military shocked the country when it announced that Islamic clergy would be allowed to enter barracks to talk to soldiers about religion for the first time in forty-three years. Defense minister General Hassan Tourkmani reportedly announced at a conference that the decision was in response to “the thirst for God in the barracks.” Brokering the agreement were none other than Habash and Hassoun.
On April 5, President Assad issued a decree establishing an Islamic college in Aleppo—the center of the Muslim Brotherhood’s uprising in Syria in the 1980s. Two days after Assad prayed with the Baath Party regional command on the prophet Muhammad’s birthday on April 10, Habash was invited to deliver a lecture on Islamic morals and values to a gathering of the state-dominated National Union of Syrian Students (NUSS).
As journalists and diplomats continued to file stories and cables about the regime’s slide toward Islam, many questions remained concerning the actual makeup of this Islamic wave. Strangely enough, the only people who seemed to have any answers—and would talk about them to foreigners—came via Mohammed Habash.
“Muslims in Syria are certainly becoming more religiously conservative,” Habash had told me during my interview. “Conservatives believe that there is only one way to God and paradise, and others are false … but this doesn’t mean that they have any desire to use violence against others.”
It was hard to know where the line between conservatives and radicals lay, however. Reports of security clashes with takfiri groups—militants who declare other Muslims to be apostates and therefore legitimate targets of terrorism—continued to make their way into the media. All reports originated from “security sources,” who approached local journalists with accounts of state raids on the Soldiers of Damascus Organization for Unity and Jihad. There was considerable speculation that the clashes could have been fabricated for external consumption so as to persuade the United States and Europe to ease pressure on the Syrian regime.
“The groups that traveled to the US and carried out the September 11 attacks were not conservatives; they were radicals,” Habash said. “In Syria, such people