iran: a colonial power

Street protests have erupted in some middle eastern countries in January of this year, particularly in many Iranian cities, and in Sudan, Algeria, and Tunisia as well, where the protests have been the longest and most tenacious thus far. Though the protests were diverse, a common cause was attributed to the high prices for basic daily-needed commodities (beginning with bread), unemployment (particularly among the youth), and disappointing economies stagnating with hyperinflation. However, Iran’s protests, even though they may not be unique, are special due to the country’s rising political and military stardom in the region. In the last decade, particularly since the American withdrawal from Iraq in December 2010, the Arab uprisings in 2011–12, the Syrian civil war since March 2011, and the failure of the Afghani government to stop the expansion of the Taliban, have all contributed, among others, to the rise of Iran’s might in the middle east. From Afghanistan, to Iraq, Syria, Lebanon, and Yemen, Iran was able to construct a geo-military and political “alliance” of sorts, one that has made it a mini-colonial power in the region. It remains to be seen whether such alliance would produce any economic benefits to the concerned populations, particularly to “middle classes” that are more tuned to consumerism than political adventurism. In common jargon, the Iranian geo-military loose “alliance” is described as a Shiʿi consolidation against the political hegemony of Sunni Islam, one that is presumably led by the likes of Saudi Arabia and Egypt, the former derives its wealth predominantly from oil rent, while the second is over-populated and labor abundant. Upon a closer examination, however, what is routinely dubbed as a “Shiʿi alliance” turns out a vague term for a hodgepodge of “Shiʿisms” that by and large are historically unrelated and belong to different social and economic configurations. Iran itself belongs to a majority brand of Shiʿism, that of the Twelver Imamis, and to a social and economic formation that heavily depends on oil rent and its distribution among classes and ethnicities. Like any developing country, Iran is plagued by class inequalities created by rapid and uneven development, particularly touching on the commercialization of land and what is left of traditional agriculture, hence the importance of oil rent in conjunction with political adventurism. Its ethnic composition, by far the most complex in the region, combines under one state the Farsi Twelver Imami majority with Arabs, Kurds, Azeris, Armenians, Turkmen, and Baloch. In Iraq by contrast, the Shiʿi majority, which comes at around 65 percent, and which has been historically dominated by the Arab Sunni minority (20 percent), has been in power only recently thanks to the American occupation in 2003–2010. The Syrian ʿAlawi minority, which has been in power since 1970, could also be looked upon as another brand of Shiʿism, but its social and economic base is very different from the other Shiʿisms in the region and along the Eastern Mediterranean. So is Lebanese Shiʿism, which since the end of the civil war (1975–1990) has been associated with the radical paramilitary Hezbollah organization, which acts as a state within a state. In short, the Iranian political genius consists at bringing different social and economic formations under one informal geo-strategic alliance. But what for exactly? Perhaps one question that begs itself in this regard, in particular in light of the January street protests, is whether the costs of such an Iranian-led informal alliance would pay the bills.

The last big anti-government protests in Iran came in the wake of the disputed reelection of president Mahmoud Ahmadinejad in summer 2009. According to opposition records, more than 73 people were killed back then and over 4,000 were arrested. There are a few major differences this time. The Green Movement in 2009 was led by reform-minded intelligentsia and educated middle class and was concentrated in the streets of Iran’s capital city. This one has been led by mostly working-class young men; there are far fewer people rallying, yet the protests are more widespread across the country. In 2009, the protests were about empowering the reformists. This time, they look and feel anti-establishment, hence against the whole Islamic Republic. Somehow the cost of the informal Shiʿi alliance, constructed in the last decades with paramilitary civil war strategies that involved the best trained Iranian special and intelligence military personnel, are turning against the very foundations of the Islamic Republic itself. What the young men and women were questioning this time in the streets of many Iranian cities is the “usefulness” of what their country has been doing inside and outside Iran since the establishment of the Islamic Republic in 1979. Is the sacrifice worth the economic misery of a large part of the Iranian populace? Should the Republic maintain its moribund paramilitary alliance while people are suffering at home? But if the questioning seems radical, it is nevertheless extremely fragile, as there already are state attempts at the highest level to suffocate it through the services of the Revolutionary Guard and other special paramilitary forces which have become the hallmark of the Republic since the Revolution. Iran has been able to forge its alliance thanks to a country-by-country civil war strategy, betting on all kinds of structural weaknesses among the rogue countries, while avoiding civil war at home. Perhaps the time has come to look inside.

Perhaps the lesson to learn in this regard is that countries like Iraq, Syria, and Lebanon cannot be “on their own” anymore, as autonomous political units, assuming they ever did, and that they can only be governed through the kind of rough “alliance” that the Iranians are proposing, and to which Russia would serve as a political umbrella. This is a new reshaping of the middle east, an unexpected outcome of the street revolts, in which everyone is learning that states cannot be sovereign anymore. The obsession with state security, which has been nurtured by the likes of Nasser and Saddam Hussein, and which meant playing on the weaknesses of other states and societies, while raising the flag of civil war, now gets another turn. Now state security implies a process of collaboration between states, where a regional power like Iran would monitor the process on the ground with experts all over but in small numbers, which makes cost redundant the notion of a full-fledged occupation as was Iraq and as is Afghanistan now under American occupation. Russians and Iranians come in small numbers, bring their experts and mercenaries, impose themselves on the ground, and end up more cost-effective than the traditional colonial powers which have shaped the future of the middle east since Sykes–Picot in 1916.

dominance without hegemony

Syrian wars of domination without hegemony[1]

The Islamic State in Iraq and Sham[2] began as the Iraqi affiliate of al-Qaida during the American occupation of the country (2003–2011), then managed to expand in the Syrian north and east since 2012. It split off with the other “Islamist” (predominantly Syrian) groups, in particular its chief rival the Nusra Front, when Isis leader, operating under the nom de guerre of Abu Bakr Baghdadi, demanded in summer 2013 the bayʿa from Nusra’s chief Abu Muhammad Jūlānī, another one of those war-machines pseudonyms. Had Jūlānī given his bayʿa (“endorsement”) it would have meant the end of the Nusra as an autonomous military unit; but having refused “endorsing” his rival, Isis marginalized itself, in one of its rare military setbacks, in the Aleppo region. There was a time until the end of 2013 when Isis controlled even some of the northern predominantly Kurdish neighborhoods in Aleppo (e.g. Bustān al-Bāsha), and the crucial “gateway” (mamarr) of Bustān al-Qaṣr, but ultimately withdrew when facing mounting pressures. Unconfirmed press reports claim that Isis has become a “wealthy revolution,” with tons of cash at its disposal, operating with a monthly budget of $50 million, and paying its militiamen, which happen to be from very diverse nationalities (including Europeans), a hefty $400 a month, which is at least twice what the others are paying. Here the “other” could mean anything from the Nusra Front, the main rival, or other Islamist groups, or the Free Syrian Army (FSA) for that matter. But while the latter, in all their conflicting configurations, religious or secular, are mostly Syrian, in the sense that were born and raised on Syrian territory, with a wide majority of Syrians into them, Isis by contrast saw its inception in Iraq during the American occupation, and Baghdadi himself was in jail until probably 2010. Its “Syrian” component is barely half of its military force. When Baghdadi declared the caliphate in the first day of Ramadan in early July 2014, he appointed himself as caliph Ibrahim, gave a public sermon in a prestigious Mosul mosque in a defiant gesture to the world-at-large, which marked his first public appearance ever (previous unconfirmed photographs of him during his captivity years were circulated by Iraqi intelligence; the Americans have set a $10-million reward over his head). A week later, as the head of the new “Islamic State,” which is now a “territorial reality,” in addition to being an act of the “imagination,” Baghdadi appointed “governors” (wulāt; s. wālī) over the newly gained ghanīmas (“booty”) of the central “Iraqi provinces.” What is striking here is that he proceeded with appointments that were not “local,” that is to say, were not “Iraqi,” as if the new “caliphate” has a de facto pan-Arab if not “universal” pan-Islamic mission. For example, the Libyan Abu Usama al-Miṣrāṭa (from Miṣrāṭ, Qadhdhāfi’s hometown and tribal area) was appointed as “governor” (wālī) to the Iraqi nāḥiya of Saʿdiyya in the province of Diyāla. But he was ambushed and killed four days later when his convoy was hit by a side bomb in Saʿdiyya, which has been under Isis’s rule for a month. The incident has probably to do with the refusal of the other Sunni militias, which have benefited from Isis’s expansion in June from giving their bayʿa to the self-appointed caliph. Among those groups are “the Naqshabandi group” of ʿIzzat al-Dūrī, who was Saddam’s ex-vice president, and which the Americans had failed to capture; in addition the Army of Anṣār al-Sunna; and the Islamic Army (al-Hayat, Beirut, 10 July 2014). (It was known that the Ottomans appointed administrators and governors in provinces that were not those of their origins, shifting them every few years, in an attempt not to have those governors intermingle more than they should with the local populace.)

What is important here, in the newly established caliphate whose territory stretches over northern Syria and central Iraq, is how a group like Isis, not to mention the other groups which are not to be reduced to their “Islamist” components, “govern” the populations, neighborhoods, towns, villages, tribal areas, which they seem to have “seized” “with ease.” The seizure of entire territories in central “Sunni” Iraq on June 10th comes to mind first in this respect: is such seizure an outcome of military prowess, the tactics of “guerilla” war which faces a much more equipped and organized army than its own (be it Iraqi, Syrian, or American), or has it more to do with a populace which initially suffers from poor systems of representations, has been ruled by “external” forces, including the “national state,” hence is not even a “society” in the first place.

To elaborate, what needs to be questioned is the ability of small militarized groups (experts assume that Isis controls parts of Syria and Iraq with no more than 10,000 to 15,000 well-trained but modestly armed men) to “govern” and “subdue” populations and territories (including tribal areas) which could be even “alien” to them, and with a minimal force which would be no more than 2 to 5 percent of the populations of the conquered territories. This is, in our view, the fundamental aspect of the Syrian wars, which have become since June joined Iraqi–Syrian wars led by militias whose organization is not much in sync with the populations.

Large portions of Syria and Iraq are now controlled by heterogeneous military groups, which in sheer number and equipment seem far below what the Syrian and Iraqi “national” armies have now or had for decades. Such groups come in sorts: some claim to be liberal democratic, like the Free Syrian Army, while the majority are jihadic, with Isis pioneering in this regard. For the most part, however, they do not seem to have anything that even comes close to a political or social “program” to “govern” the territories, tribes, villages, towns, cities and neighborhoods under their control. Their tactics are rather one of pure survival. First of all, in the conquest, withdrawal, and re-conquest, they would never adopt a style of frontal attacks, as regular armies would normally do. (T.E. Lawrence’s art of guerilla tactics against the Turkish soldiers and garrisons in the Hijaz come to mind here as a source of inspiration for understanding such methods; but also the “failures” of the Americans in Vietnam and later in Iraq to “subdue” or “kill” guerilla groups, from the Vietcong to the jihadists.) Second of all, once an area is conquered, they may or may not adopt a harsh style (arrest and torture of “opponents”), but even if they do they tend to be “friendly” with the population at large, not requesting much, as the sources of income tend often, though not always, to originate “from elsewhere.” That’s an important point: controlling a territory which would not de facto generate much income to the conquering group, at least not in the early phase. Thus, some of the resources used in Syria, say, in the northern-central areas of Minbij and Raqqa may come from other regions, for instance, the oil-wealthy region of Dayr al-Zor, or, indeed, from neighboring Iraq (the take over of Mosul, Iraq’s second largest city, was particularly lucrative, bringing close to $500 million in a single day from the city’s banks).

Thirdly, we need to compare and contrast modes of “domination,” “governance,” control—in short, governmentality—between “the state” and “the rebel militias.” What stands as “the state” has been a steady evolution of modes of dominance, at least since the 1960s, which initially consisted of a takeover of the resources of the state by force. At the time, Syria, in spite of a brief but unfortunate union with Egypt, “society” was still fairly liberal and democratic, hence the forced seizure of power by the Baath has ended decades of liberalism. In Iraq, the liberal bourgeois state of the old classes went down with the coup of Abdul-Karim Qasim in 1958, hence the Baath brought a permanent, if not everlasting blow, to that liberalism.

Now that Isis is gone from Aleppo since January 2014, the “opposition” has come under a conglomerate of groups known as the Islamic Front, a rebel coalition dominant in the city and much of northern Syria. The Islamic Front is a fierce and effective opponent of Isis but also, in its Islamist platform and indirect connections with al-Qaida is a different beast than the Free Syrian Army. The FSA, surrendered as it is now in the southern neighborhoods of Salah-u-ddin and Sukkari and Sayf al-Dawla, among others, which had inaugurated the battle for Aleppo back in July 2012 (in the first year of the insurgency, the city remained totally “silent,” as it did in the “great revolt” of 1925), without water, food, and ammunition, is allegedly negotiating with the Asad régime its surrender and withdrawal à la Hama (May 2014), that is, without punishment or retribution. We’ll come later for an explanation as to why the city was taken over by “outside” elements, which negotiated their way by force through the southern neighborhoods, prior to moving east. It remains uncertain how much “local” elements of the popular neighborhoods have “contributed” to the uprising, which adds to that problematic that we have been following regarding the lack of “political autonomy.” I want, for now at least, to underscore that element of “externality” in the war process, and pose the question as to how “local” elements “articulate” with “external” ones coming from the “outside.” Let’s assume for now that, as we’ve witnessed it until the winter of 2011, there were more or less peaceful movements (from Damascus to Hims and Hama) which, facing the military brutality of the state apparatuses, were hijacked by militarized elements outside them, some of which, like Isis, were not even Syrian. Moreover, those peaceful demonstrations, which at some point in summer 2011 in Hama reached the million mark, had no particular organization. Their aim was punctual in the sense that they vaguely aimed at the presidency, even though the popular motto was no less than a “régime change.” For this very reason, the “opposition”-held areas in Aleppo and elsewhere cannot be said to be “opposed” to “the state” as such. There is an ambiguity to those militarized “oppositions” in their relations to the neighborhoods and the other localities which they have seized by force, on the one hand, and their relation to the state on the other; an ambiguity that we need to keep track of in its unraveling.

Isis’s abandoned headquarters in Aleppo are just across from another large building that serves as the base for Tawhid Brigade, one of the largest of the seven rebel groups that joined ranks together in November to form the Islamic Front. Isis had been present in opposition-held Aleppo since the beginning of 2013, but by the end of the year tensions with rebel groups had reached a crisis. Considering itself a sovereign state, Isis was refusing to accept meditation for any dispute, and it had taken to kidnapping those it considered to be critics or enemies, including people who worked with foreign journalists. Reporters found in its Aleppo abandoned building signs of prisoners being tortured and summarily executed (Matthieu Aikins, The International New York Times, July 8, 2014).

On January 7, Isis carried out a surprise attack on Tawhid Brigade’s headquarters. It was held off. The next day, Tawhid Brigade forces from around the city counterattacked and surrounded the hospital. “We cut them off and prevented them from bringing any support,” said the commander who led the offensive and who goes by the nom de guerre of Abu Assad.

At around 3 a.m., the Isis fighters trapped inside the hospital asked to be allowed to leave the city, and Abu Assad, not wanting further bloodshed, agreed. When he and his men searched the hospital at first light, they discovered that Isis had massacred its captives. “We found a group of bodies every ten meters,” said Abu Assad. Most of them had been shot in the head while bound. Not long after the battle, the rebels had recorded a footage of the liberation of the hospital and its aftermath which was posted on YouTube.

The battle against Isis in Aleppo is part of a larger conflict that started at the beginning of this year, as rebel groups across the northern provinces of Idlib and Aleppo—including the powerful Syrian al-Qaida affiliate, Jabhat al-Nusra—fought a pitched battle to expel Isis. The face-off left the Islamic Front pre-eminent. It controls the key border crossing with Turkey at Azaz and, with its estimated 50,000 to 60,000 fighters, is thought to be the largest and most potent rebel alliance in Syria.

The Islamic Front is entirely Syrian in leadership, and its central goal is to overthrow the Asad régime. Many of the group’s most powerful members—including the Tawhid Brigade and one of the largest factions fighting in the Damascus suburbs, Jaysh al-Islam—are not particularly ideological, and were once allied with the Western-backed Free Syrian Army.

But they are far from secular. The Islamic Front draws on support from pre-war Islamist resistance networks, including wealthy, religious donors across the Muslim world and the Syrian Muslim Brotherhood, and exiled Islamist group, who turned underground in 1982, amid the massacres and destruction of Hama, which pitted at the time the régime of Asad-père against the Brotherhood. (The mini-civil war was initiated in 1979 when allegedly members of the Brotherhood killed dozens of Alawi officers at the Artillery School in Aleppo, turning many of the city’s popular neighborhoods unsafe in their fight against the régime.)

One of the coalition’s key members, Aḥrār al-Shām, has links to al-Qaida’s core leadership, and the Islamic Front as a whole closely coordinates operations with Jabhat al-Nusra.

By the summer of 2014, the Islamic Front, together with Jabhat al-Nusra, and the FSA, are fighting a battle of survival in Aleppo, which has been cleared out of Isis. The régime’s armed forces, which look more and more like a popular militia, with 10,000 plus Lebanese Hezbollah militiamen on their side, not to mention Iranian military “experts,” Russian support and so on, are preparing for a major offensive against Aleppo this winter. That would entail a complete takeover of the eastern and southern popular neighborhoods, and the expulsion of the Islamist militias. Already, we are told, the FSA, which controls its own neighborhoods in the south, where the battle has originally started in 2012, is in negotiation mode with the régime: to surrender with our lives and equipment intact. If such an offensive turns out a “success,” the régime will be left with Isis in the east, its main opponent, and various rebel groups in the Idlib and Hama provinces, not to mention the Damascus–Hims countryside, and the border with Israel.

For its part Isis controls territories in the central north and the north-east, which since June it has “opened” to Iraq by seizing most of the Iraqi border crossings. What is important for our purposes, from the perspective we have been following, is to document how Isis has tightened its grip on the territories it has controlled in the Syrian north and east: what are the procedures, and how this control is negotiated on the ground with tribes, villages, neighborhoods and cities. A Lebanese reporter, writing from Amman, Jordan, has noted that Isis uses different modes of domination between Syria and Iraq, where the movement had originated during the American occupation. In Iraq negotiations with the tribes and the underground Sunni militias are more “subtle,” in the sense that they take into consideration the latter’s “interests,” not to mention the Sunni–Shiʿi divide which is inexistent in Syria. Thus, the Iraqi Isis takes the others as “partners,” while managing the overall operation. It has adopted, in some ways, the policies that Saddam Hussein, the Americans, and the government of Nuri al-Maliki had opted with those same groups.

In Syria things are a bit different. In light of its June successes at expanding in central “Sunni” Iraq, Isis (now “the Islamic State” pure and simple since the first day of Ramadan) decided to tighten its grip on the Dayr al-Zor region (which has been renamed “wilāyat al-khayr,” the province of goodness, upon the declaration of the caliphate on the first of Ramadan). For one thing, the region is the only oil-producing area in Syria, and Isis managed to control the majority of the oil wells for at least a year, even selling its services to the Asad régime. For another, it wants to establish in every locality a long-term mode of domination: how that is achieved is our concern in this section.

The eastern town of al-Shaḥīl is mostly tribal in its composition, known to have been a stronghold of the Nusra front, for the simple reason that its leader Abu Muhammad Jūlānī comes from there, hence his nom de guerre is supposed to divert attention, while manifesting sympathy for the occupied Golan Heights. In July 2014 Isis forced more than 30,000 inhabitants of Shaḥīl to leave their homes, having already tortured and mutilated Kurdish fighters in the north, and executed opponents in those same areas (al-Hayat, Beirut, July 7, 2014). The London-based Syrian Observatory for Human Rights, the only agency to have documented such executions and the forcing out of populations since 2011, claimed that an additional 30,000 were forced to leave (hijra) in the area of Dayr al-Zor in the towns of Khushām (at least 15,500 inhabitants) and Ṭābiyeh (15,000). Many of the Islamist groups mentioned above gave their bayʿa to “caliph Ibrahim” in the first week of Ramadan upon the latter declaring himself the amīr al muʾminīn, as did the two towns in the second of July. But Isis would nevertheless not permit the inhabitants back until they’ve been “forgiven” (tawbah) for what they did, that is, for having sided with Nusra and fought the Islamic State. To the inhabitants the sine qua non condition of “forgiveness” is only an excuse for a permanent hijra.

On the other hand, having seized all oil fields in Day al-Zor, except for the one located at Ward, which has only one well producing 200 barrels a day, Isis began selling crude oil for SP2,000 a barrel or $12, but it forces those same merchants for selling it at no more than $18 in order to accommodate more popular support in its own areas. However, such prices are much lower than when the oil fields were controlled by various Islamic militias, including Isis, at which time, back in 2013, the militants used to sell the oil at the high price of $30 to $50 a barrel. Isis is also planning to sell gas demijohns in the areas under its control, sprawling from Dayr al-Zor to the eastern suburbs of Aleppo, the Turkish–Syrian frontier, and ʿAyn al-ʿArab, with the exception of areas under Kurdish domination, in addition to the eastern countryside of Hims and Hama, and other areas, the total of which (excluding Iraq) is five times the Republic of Lebanon.

Nor is the management of crony capitalism the only talent that Isis has developed in the larges stretches that it has seized between Syria and Iraq. In early July, in the south of Hasakeh, a city in the north-east with a majority of Kurdish population (together with Assyrians and other Christian minorities), Isis fighters have mutilated the bodies of Kurdish militiamen from “the Units for the protection of the Kurdish people” which were killed in action when Isis attacked villages in the area west of ʿAyn al-ʿArab. The bodies were hanged in public on podiums in the presence of small kids, after exposing the bodies in the Jrāblus area.

A pattern has therefore emerged which consists in the following: (1) seizure of a territory by force through military might; (2) the territory could be as small as a single neighborhood, a village, a town, a countryside, or as big as Mosul, Iraq’s second-largest city; (3) the technique of warfare consists of guerrilla warfare in small numbers, not frontal attacks (cf. T.E. Lawrence on guerrilla warfare against the Turkish army in the Hijaz); (4) Isis would “share” those conquered territorial units with its “opponents” (Kurds, Nusra Front, FSA, the Islamic Front, all of which have shared territories against their absolute enemy, the Asad régime; however, allegations that Isis is an “offshoot” of the Asad régime seem unfounded; the régime, until recently, with Isis’s expansion in central Iraq has been more “lenient” with the Islamic State, probably because it served as a tool to simultaneously weaken the FSA and Islamic Front; Jūlānī has been released from the jail of Ṣadnāyā at the end of 2011, so that the régime would point fingers at “Islamic terrorism” among opposition ranks) but only if it finds itself in a “weak” position, that is, unable to dominate the others; (5) Isis is more at ease when it is in full control of a territory, rather than sharing it; (6) when it is in a full-control mode, Isis would accept no less than the full “subjugation” of the populations under its control; if the latter had fought against Isis they should ask for repentance (tawbah) and openly give their mubāyaʿa or bayʿa to the new caliph (and the institution of the caliphate); (7) Isis would then establish an “economy of war” in the conquered territories, whereby it would control the most lucrative resources available, beginning with the oil fields, trade routes and businesses. Isis would impose itself as a complete monopoly in a “marginal” capitalist economy where the common people would not be allowed to compete with the master. It would allow anything that would give it the income it needs (its estimated budget allegedly stands at $50 million a month). For example, a member of the Majādhmah tribe in the Minbij area told me that a Turkish cell company decided to plant a reception tower near their village, considering that the only two Syrian cell companies have been for the most part cut off in the north. Isis agrees, only because it receives commissions from the Turks, and the more Syrian consumers buy minutes from the Turkish cell company, the better.

The main point is this: the mode of “domination” remains fairly superficial—at the surface—which only involves “allegiance,” but no new social bonds, no hegemony, class alliances and the like. In short, it is dominance by force but without hegemony. We need to question whether such mode of dominance is in any way different from that that has been instituted by the Baathist state for over half a century, or whether there is anything unique to it.

Let us take as example of the process of negotiation and the economy of war in the province of Dayr al-Zor which is almost fully under Isis’s control.

In early July the people of the town of al-Qūriyyah took to the streets at night to demonstrate their unwillingness to let Isis rule their small town (al-Hayat, 9 July 2014). As reported in al-Hayat, from the London-based Marṣad of Human Rights, negotiations were soon initiated between the elders of the tribes of the western countryside (Khaṭṭ al-Shāmiyyah), and the leaders of the Islamic Brigades, on the one hand, with Isis on the other side. The purpose was to achieve an end to war and settle peace between all parties.

What is interesting here were the conditions (shurūṭ) set by the tribes and the Islamic Brigades—as a single party—for a settlement.

1.     The Islamic Brigades would keep their infrastructure intact in all the western countryside of Dayr al-Zor, but would nevertheless declare their bayʿa to Isis and uphold its banner (rāyah).

2.     The Brigades would not deliver their armaments, heavy or small, to Isis.

3.     Isis would only enter the western countryside in small numbers, to be limited to the “immigrants” (muhājirīn) only, that is to say, from non-Syrian citizenships; thus, Syrian citizens are not welcomed at all.

4.     No one that Isis has on its lists of wanted persons would be arrested.

5.     All parties would agree to fight the [Asad] régime.

6.     The formation of a sharʿi board (hayʾa sharʿiyya) that would be common to Isis and the other parties.

The Marṣad’s “witness” on the ground added that Isis’s prime response was that “there is no negotiation unless the other parties give up all their arms.”

Whatever the outcome of such negotiations, what is interesting here are the conditions set by the tribes and their militias on the ground, that is, the original populations of the western countryside in Dayr al-Zor. What is revealing in the list of the six “conditions” above is that the tribes and their affiliated militias would declare the bayʿa on the proviso that they keep their arms and military infrastructure intact. The bayʿa therefore seems like a minor event, which could be negotiated and exchanged at face value, practically bearing no importance in relation to any essence, which is the military economy of those tribes and their sense of autonomy. Moreover, the insistence on “immigrants”—that is, strangers, which could be Arab, African, Asians, or Europeans—over Syrians points to the fact that the main problem resides in the allocation of power relations among “Syrian” tribes. The bayʿa, therefore, provides that institutional umbrella through which the likes of Isis operate: subjugate groups to Isis’s dominance by giving them rewards which were initially withdrawn from them. In some ways, Isis’s “politics” borrows similar mottos from the Baathist state, not to mention French colonial rule or the Ottomans.

The bayʿa is a sign of loyalty that takes place on a one-to-one basis: not only a specific tribe, but every faction of the tribe (ʿashīra) must specifically declare its loyalty; and so would each faction of the fighting brigades. Which makes the bayʿa a quintessential speech act: an act of declaration where the loyalty of the tribe and its affiliated brigade is openly declared in public. Thus, based on the above report (al-Hayat, 9 July 2014), the “majority” of the “forces on the ground” have openly declared “their bayʿa to the Islamic State and the caliph of all Muslims Abu Bakr al-Baghdadi [a.k.a. Khalifa Ibrahim].” Those “powers” (jihāt, “directive forces”) on the ground are then enumerated one-by-one: the people of the town of Ṣubaykhān, Dablān, Ghuraybah, al-Kashmah, Duwayr; then follows the enumeration of the Jund al-Sham Brigades, a total of 12, whose names include common male or female heroic personalities in Islamic history, locations, or metaphors: al-Muʿtaṣim bi-l-llāh, Nūr al-Islām, Jund Allāh, al-Ḥārith, Khālid ibn al-Walīd, ʿAysha umm al-Muʾminīn, etc. The naming is here important because it is inscribed within the logic of speech act: the point of honor of the party that declares the bayʿa to the caliph and caliphate—and to itself—and that would do everything that it takes to remain “loyal.” But then the bayʿa is characterized by a logic of domination which practically leaves intact the structure of the groups that have “subjugated” themselves to the conquering group, or other tribes or tribal factions, or “the state” for that matter, or in the not-so-remote-past local “administrations” which worked on behalf of the far away Ottoman state.

One should note here that if the tribes and tribal factions (ʿashāyir) have manifested some resistance to Isis, setting at times conditions for their “surrender,” it is because the tribes of the east are better structured and “harder” than the ones in the central-north in the region of Raqqa, which has become Isis’s official headquarters since 2013. In this instance, the fragility and tenuousness of tribal structures makes them vulnerable to the likes of Isis (and to the other Islamic Brigades as well), a vulnerability that was already manifest under the Baathist state for over half a century.

Mustafa al-Burayji, an astute observer located in the city of Raqqa, told al-Hayat (July 11, 2014): “Once Isis has entered the city as a faction, it rushed at finding a partner (rāfid) among the society of tribes in the province, in which it found an easy prey, considering the fragility and tenuousness of those tribes. Which gave the latter the opportunity to look for easy money and status. Isis was in the meantime using a combination of force and promises through its armed men which were kidnapping (abducting) and beheading their opponents at the sight of the shaykhs of the tribes, helped in this by young members of the tribe of Burayj which had given their bayʿa to the organization. That was the beginning of a bayʿa process that took one tribe after another, beginning with Burayj and ending with ʿUjayl, Bu Jāber, Subkhah, ʿAfādilah, Bu ʿAssāf, Hunādah, al-Shibl, al-Sakhānī, al-Ḥuwaywāt, and Zurashmar… That was completed with the tribes east of Aleppo, represented by the Bubnah in Minbij, and the Khaffājah in Maskanah, in addition to the tribal factions of al-Barri, the Ḥadīdiyyīn, and the Nuʿaymāt… The leaders of those tribes and tribal factions were led in the past to manifest their loyalty to then-president Hafiz al-Asad for the sake of some money and racketeering (ṣuṭwa) which his Baathist governments[3] had deprived them of.”

Note how an observer who is resident of the city knows for sure how to name the tribes one by one (the naming of their “affiliated” brigades, however, is quite different), because naming in relation to the bayʿa only happens on a one-to-one basis. That is to say: tribes would not give their “allegiance” collectively, that would be a meaningless act pure and simple. To understand why this is the case, we need to understand that for each bayʿa with one of the tribes or the tribal factions (ʿashāyir) comes an individual “reward” for the tribe in question. The “reward” would invariably give the tribe “privileges” over an area, like the collection of fees, dues, and racketeering schemes. Such “privileges” would be “on behalf” of Isis, or any other group. But what distinguishes Isis from the other military groups is their systematic requirement of the bayʿa, as the sine qua non condition for the survival of the organization in its newly conquered milieus.

Considering that the tribes and tribal factions have not for the most part invested themselves in men and equipment in the civil war, the bayʿa comes as the closest “investment” in the war effort. However, the bayʿa would neither entail much submission to the “strong” party, nor an “ideological” commitment of sorts. In effect, the bayʿa entails submission to the party which happens to have controlled the area in question, which in this instance is no one else but Isis; other areas which are controlled by the Nuṣra Front manifest their allegiance to al-Qaida’s leader Ẓawāhiri and his “affiliate” Jūlānī (the latter had already given his bayʿa to the former). In all such instances, however, there is no ideological commitment, but only an organization of power relations whereby the “subjugated” party would receive a modicum of “economic” privileges, but not much in the order of the political and ideological. All of this does not so much point in the direction of Isis’s strength, but more in the direction of the fragmentation of tribal formations, in particular in the central north of the country, more specifically, the territories located between the east of Aleppo up to ʿAyn al-ʿArab. But even where the tribes are stronger, as in the Dayr al-Zor region, along the border with Iraq, the process is in the final analysis not much different. For their part, the likes of Isis and Nuṣra behave as if the tribal structure would not matter much to their own internal organizations, as they approach them from the “outside”—domination without hegemony. To wit, whenever Isis imposes its well famed “Islamic norms,” based on its own self-appointed marjaʿiyya, on a territory, such “norms” leave intact tribal structure, neighborhoods, towns and villages. In short, there is no attempt to “integrate” through newly imposed norms: they only are imposed norms without processes of normalization. Thus, for example, because in the process of the bayʿa what matters first and foremost are the “trusted authorities” (al-thiqāt), Isis has set in Dayr al-Zor an office which is presided by a man from the Burayj tribal faction, which handles more security issues rather than administrative ones.

At times, a tribe’s “strength” might give it additional privileges. For example, the bādiya of Dayr al-Zor hosts some of the most powerful tribes, such as the ʿUqaydāt and Baqqārah, which in turn are composed of several tribal factions (ʿashāyir), and which have not “urbanized” as the Raqqa tribes did. Thus, the “integrity” of the ʿUqaydāt has pushed the Asad-père régime to strengthen its ties with it for 40 years, to the point that the eastern town of al-Muḥsin became known as “the treasury of the officers of the Syrian army.” For his part, Asad-père had crowned his associations with the eastern tribes by marrying his son Maher to the daughter of the chief of the tribal faction of al-Judʿān.

The various bayʿas and counter-bayʿas to either Isis or the Nuṣra did not quell the competition among tribes and their factions, in particular in the presence of oil in the eastern regions, and the advantage that Isis has manifested in its thorough organization across “national” territories and in its control of the Iraqi–Syrian border on both sides. As the tribal chief of the Bū Sarāya noted, “Isis knows how to give the best offer when it comes to oil, which drives competition and fitna among the tribes, which in turn drives some tribes outside the competition because they bear no interest on the matter, such as ours” (al-Hayat, July 11, 2014).

Such “allocations” of revenues, oil or otherwise, which are the property of the Syrian state in the first place, could turn violent. The Dayr al-Zor region thus enflamed when Amer Rafdan, a leading tribesman from the ʿUqaydāt, was shot to death, having turned against Jūlānī for the sake of Baghdādī, endorsing the latter with his full bayʿa. The leader of Isis had in effect approached Rafdan with a lucrative deal apropos oil revenues. The new deal—and bayʿa—gave Isis unprecedented control over the oil wells of Jafrah, Koniko, Khashshām and Jadīd ʿUqaydāt, while leaving tribal equilibrium in limbo, with continuous warfare between the Bū Jāmel, on the Nuṣra side, and the Bakīr, on the Isis side. The “deal” seems to work, therefore, on both sides. Isis (or the Nuṣra for that matter) is unable to exploit the oil resources on its own, without the protection that the tribes could furnish to the wells, and the latter have proven unable to organize on their own to exploit the oil wells.

Such divisions came in conjunction with rifts within the ranks of the Free Syrian Army (FSA) whose Dayr al-Zor military decided to give its bayʿa to Isis, which led the latter to take more oil wells in addition to gas pipelines worth billions of dollars, leading also, out of fear, to more bayʿa among tribes that have thus far been “neutral,” such as the Bū ʿIzz al-Dīn and the Baqqārah. In sum, Isis is now in nearly full control of Dayr al-Zor, its countryside and desert, having subdued to it the Nuṣra, the FSA, and the tribal factions, all through lucrative oil and gas deal, which involve protection of the well and pipelines on one side, and the commercialization of the products on the other. However, with all kind of rifts among the tribes and the militias, and the oil wells nearby, the “eternal peace” is not there yet.

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[1] The title borrows from Ranajit Guha’s concepts of “domination” and “hegemony.”

[2] Both the terms of Islamic State in Iraq and the Levant, or the Islamic State in Iraq and Syria, are inappropriate, as both the Levant and Syria denote meanings that are incongruent with what Sham implies for the purported dawla islāmiyya: the Levant would look like a colonial reality in line with Sykes-Picot, which means “artificial” borders created from the “outside,” through colonial administrators in Paris, London, and elsewhere; while Syria gives the impression of a postcolonial “national” state. Al-Sham by contrast should be understood in its “prophetic” meaning: that of a religious territory which is not fragmented along clearly demarcated borderlines, and which comes “next” to the holy Ḥijāz area. Isis is known as “Dāʿish” in Arabic, for the acronym of al-Dawla al-Islāmiyya fi-l-ʿIrāq wa-l-Shām, but if an unfortunate would utter such a word in public in an Isis-controlled area, he could be punished with 80 whips.

[3] Of the so-called “corrective movement,” ḥaraka taṣḥīḥiyya, which “corrected” and acted upon the early Baath of the 1960s.

truth claims, avowal, and evidence

Truth claims, avowal, auto-biography, and madness in the construction of criminality in contemporary Syria

Zouhair Ghazzal

Loyola University Chicago

zghazza@luc.edu

In the Syrian penal system, which closely follows the French model of evidence, a judge constructs evidence based on forensic reports, interviews of and statements delivered by suspects and witnesses, and memos drafted by judges, lawyers, doctors, and other professionals appointed by the court in the course of the investigation; all of which constitute truth claims, as constructed by the judge from the vintage viewpoint of his or her own narrative. In other words, statements taken individually would be problematic in terms of receiving their validity through factual evidence alone. If they do not stand on their own, it is because their validity would only be established through the judge’s narrative.

There is, however, another twist to the matter, as judges would be unable—or at the very least, feel embarrassed—to deliver their verdict without the accused openly making an avowal: I did what you have suspected me of doing, and that is the truth of the matter. That kind of avowal (confession?), in its religious Christian underpinnings, becomes normative in the secular European penal systems of the nineteenth century. The avowal opens that unavoidable gap in our understanding of the act and the subject behind the act, an attitude that led to the outsourcing of juridical opinions in the direction of doctors and psychiatrists. Tell me who you are, and why you did it, became the motto of judges towards their suspects and accused. Because such calls to truth could not be answered once and for all, judges had to give up some of their authority in favor of opinions delivered by doctors and psychiatrists. A declaration of insanity was good enough to halt the verdict, as required by law (again, following precepts adopted by the French Code pénal since 1832), whereby the accused would be sent to a psychiatric institution rather than be incarcerated in a prison cell.

One could argue, by tracing the discursive archeology and genealogy of the penitentiary to its European nineteenth-century roots, that the transformation of the avowal as the sine qua non of evidence prior to verdict was probably related to the association of penance to the prison system. It was not enough to incarcerate people for wrongdoing, as the prison experience must carry with it the weight of rehabilitation: We have to know the subject, who he is, for the rehabilitation process to be successful. Penance, in its Christian medieval underpinnings, assumes a process of voluntary self-punishment inflicted as an outward expression of repentance for having done wrong: the prison would then become that public penance for having done wrong. But it was not enough, however, for “society,” as represented by the judge, to know who did commit the hideous act: the avowal of the culprit became normative across the penal system.

What is striking here is the parallelism to be drawn between the juridical and the medical. “I am mad”: The avowal becomes the key component in the psychiatric process, without which there would be no contract between the patient and medical authorities. Hence the patient must himself seal the conditions of his incarceration in a medical institution. In similar vein, a suspect, prior to becoming an accused, must declare that “I did commit the crime that I was accused of.” In both instances, the act creates the contract, while in civil law the contract establishes an obligation that is consensual.

Behind such exigencies, from both the juridical and medical instances, lies a long history of avowal, one that is associated with “telling the truth” (dire vrai) in general, and, more specifically, “telling the truth of oneself” (dire vrai sur soi-même), both of which could be traced back to their Greek, Roman, and Christian origins. With all the exigencies towards “objectivism” to be found in both the juridical and medical science, what brings them together is that strange requirement of the discourse of the culprit/patient on him(her)self. Hence between the judge and the culprit lies the discourse of the culprit, the knowledge that the latter has on him(her)self. Similarly, between doctor and patient lies the truth that the patient would reveal on him(her)self. The declaration itself could be understood as speech act, but it exceeds it in the sense that, at least in penal proceedings, it could constitute the tragic climax of court hearings. Avowal is by definition associated with “telling the truth,” as it does not make much sense to declare that what I’m telling you is not the truth. The question then becomes to understand the implications behind such practice of telling the truth, and how it paves the way towards the penitentiary, as opposed to the mere experience of the prison. The broader implication is that of governmentality, that is, the political control of society as a whole.

To wit, an avowal is a “total” contractual obligation between speaker and hearer, in the sense that it is the entire “culture” of a society that is at stake. How people speak to one another, how they make a confession, how they deny a previous statement, are not simply a product of a “situated encounter,” but transcend it to what the archeology of knowledge in a certain culture has produced over its long history.

In Arabic, avowal usually stands for iʿtirāf, whose root is the verb iʿtarafa, to avow, to confess (which tends to be the former in a secular setting like a court hearing). The other parallel term is that of iqrār, from the root verb of aqarra, to acknowledge, to declare. However, even though the two terms of iʿtirāf and iqrār seem to be (wrongly) used interchangeably in the court literature, even by judges themselves, they should not be confused. In effect, the iʿtirāf carries that strong sense of “telling the truth” in an exercise of self-revelation; iqrār by contrast is an act of acknowledging which could be “read” or “interpreted” as such by a judge from a series of statements delivered by a suspect or witness. It hence lacks that direct self-avowal.

It is beyond our purposes to trace back the genealogical connotations of such concepts throughout the history of Arab and Islamicate societies and civilizations. What we can do for our purposes here is to see how such notions operate in the context of the contemporary Syrian courts, that is to say, how they have been transplanted, adopted, and assimilated in order to understand their juridical and political connotations in a developing state like Syria. (One could indeed argue that practices of self-examination, whereby an internalized belief must be externalized in relation to an authority that would provide its “approval,” is indeed absent in Islam; or for that matter a “hermeneutics of the self” is absent altogether.

A judge in the city of Idlib (north of Syria) made the following remarks in a memo he drafted regarding a woman who was accused of killing her husband (allegedly helped by her brother) in the late 1980s, problematizing “avowal” into six broad categories.

1.     A judicial avowal must be descriptive, personal, frank, and emanating from a free will, while at the same time in accordance with reality.

2.     When there is a denial to the original avowal, as was the case here with both prime suspects, having denied in the presence of a military prosecutor most of what they had stated earlier, the earlier avowal could still stand as valid, in particular if the denial would create an implausible reality, that is, a “view contrary to the accepted reality (khilāf li-l-ḥaqīqa al-rāsikha).” In our case here, it would have been implausible that the victim would have died either in an act of suicide or targeted by assassins other than the two suspects.

3.     An avowal must be devoid of confusions, ambiguities, contradictions, and in no need of manipulated interpretations to become intelligible down to its finest particulars (juzʾiyyāt).

4.     An avowal could also be implicit (iʿtirāf ḍimnī) in the sense that the suspect avoided any direct acknowledgment of a truth, but nevertheless her statements, when interpreted in conjunction with other statements, either by the same suspect or by another witness, could bear the light of a hidden acknowledgment.

5.     In all the above instances, it would be therefore up to the judge to decipher a genuine confession from a faked one, or perceive an acknowledgment in the process of an interview or a police report, and contrary to what the defense attorney in our case here had repeatedly stated, denying an avowal (rujūʿ ʿan iʿtirāf) is not enough for the judge to drop the confession in question, as the denial itself could be devoid of any truth.

6.     Finally, the aim of all this tedious but essential work in sorting out avowals and acknowledgments would be to determine for each homicidal case “the cause of the killing (al-bāʿith fi-l-qatl),” considering that “each criminal act is in need of a motive (dāfiʿ).”

Even though taken out of context from the factualities of the crime in question, such assertions are nonetheless normative enough to reveal the discourse that stands in Syrian courts when it comes to avowal, and more broadly, evidence.

What does it mean that an avowal must be frank and emanating from a free will? One obvious interpretation is that an avowal must not be delivered under duress, otherwise “telling the truth” would become meaningless. But, a more deeper explanation would look in relation to the revelation of the self, the fact that what is revealed in an avowal is that inner self, or as the judge stated in item 6 above, the fact that every crime has a “motive” or “cause”: identifying the killer is not enough, if the motive is not there yet. What else would provide us with the motive but the avowal from the one who presumably committed the act of killing? We therefore need to understand why the discourse of the accused must, in the last resource, come at the rescue of the objectivity of the juridical discourse; and why, at times, when the defendant is unable to fill that gap, psychiatric and medical discourse is there to fill that silence. Moreover, defendants, at times, in the solitary confinement of their prison cell, draft “letters” on their own, addressed to family members, friends, confidants, or even counsels and judges, which on their own pose additional problems at identifying the meaning of avowals as speech acts. Where do auto-biographical statements fit? What role should we accord to them?

But then all those truth-claims need to be detected by someone, hence the importance of the judge’s discretionary powers; or, as item 5 above states, it is “up to the judge” to make distinctions, to decipher a genuine confession from a faked one, or an implicit avowal from one that seems more straightforward, or whether a denial should be accepted as such. More importantly, it is up to the judge to construct the “motive” of the crime, as without this dāfiʿ the judicial process would be devoid of its substance. In all this, therefore, the judge acts as a “hearer” in the face of a suspect-speaker of sorts, a suspect who at the end of a hearing may have said very little, or nothing at all. To relieve himself from such deadlock, the judge may at the end seek psychiatric help for his suspect, but, whatever the outcome, all discretionary powers are in his hands.

At times avowals could be frank and startling, as if there is too much into them in a very little space:

I confess of having committed the crime of killing my mother. The reason was that my mother kept interfering with my marital life, forbidding me from filing for a divorce from my husband. I was also aware that my mother and sisters were having sex with my husband. I reiterate all previous statements [to the police and public prosecution].

This was a woman speaking to an investigating judge in his office at Aleppo’s Palace of Justice in 1996. She will also inform him that prior to killing her mother she had burned her own home, then went to her mother’s house to spend the night, woke up early in the morning, took a hammer from the kitchen and killed her mother in her sleep by smashing her skull.

Notwithstanding the horror of such scenes, the young woman, Fatima, a mother of a teenage boy, drafted a letter to a family member while serving in her prison cell.

To my paternal cousin Muhammad ‘Ali Shawwa Abu ‘Abdo,[1] hoping that when you’ll receive this missive you’ll be in good health, as God wishes. In case you’d care to ask, I’m doing well, and the only thing that I miss is seeing my dear son Sami Shawwa.[2] I also want you to talk to my brothers so that they would drop their lawsuit against me, and to get me out of my prison. I can’t take it anymore, as I’m on the verge of committing another crime in prison. I’m unable to live here far away from my son Sami, as I’m unable to adapt to this situation in such circumstances. Tell them that if they don’t drop their lawsuit against me so that I get out of here, I’ll arrange for them seas of blood—not a single sea only—and I can do that from my prison, and not only in talk.

Besides the fact that such gruesome passages look startling, if not embarrassing, it is not clear what judges do with them. The above passage is taken from a long letter that the accused had drafted to her cousin while in prison, a copy of which was in the dossier that was used by the judge for his verdict. The discretionary powers of the judge were here, as they always are, enormous. The judge could have, for instance, asked for psychiatric evaluation, but he did not, probably because neither prosecution nor defense pushed for such request. More importantly, however, was what he precisely did with such written “testimony,” as there was no indication that he effectively used it in his verdict; but then it could have had impacted him without openly addressing the issue. The point here is that such “testimonies” which play the role of “avowals” even more strongly than “normal avowals” would do, may, in the final analysis, not receive even a casual mention in the verdict. Even by law, the question of their inclusion remains indeed problematic, as these are statements delivered in writing but only in the privacy of the culprit, hence nothing was uttered in public, within the format of the usual line of questioning. Which begs the question, why are they then included in the dossier? What difference would that make?

What such question reveal is the fundamental problematic that we have posed at the beginning of this survey, namely, that the avowal has become in nineteenth-century Europe the centerpiece of the criminal dossier, in that “telling the truth,” the discourse of the culprit, must come from the subject him(her)self. In sum, the discourse of judges and doctors, though necessary, is not enough. What we need to question, therefore, is, through an analysis of dossiers, how the avowal has become the centerpiece of evidence, what role does it serve, and the deadlocks that the system has placed upon itself with such requirement.

References

Abi Samra, Muḥammad, Mawt al-abad al-sūrī. Shahādāt jīl al-ṣamt wa-l-thawra [The Death of Syria’s Eternity. Testimonies of the Silence and Revolution Generation], Beirut: Riad el-Rayyes Books, 2012.

ʿAwwā, Muḥammad Salim al-, Fi uṣūl al-niẓām al-jinā’i al-Islāmi, 2nd. ed., Cairo: Dar al-Maʿārif, 1983 [1979].

Dulong, Renaud, ed., L’aveu. Histoire, sociologie, philosophie, Paris: Presses Universitaires de France, 2001.

Fahmy, Khaled, "The Anatomy of Justice: Forensic medicine and criminal law in nineteenth-century Egypt," Islamic Law and Society 6, no. 2 (1999): 224-71.

Foucault, Michel, Mal faire, dire vrai. Fonction de l’aveu en justice, Presses Universitaires de Louvain, 2012.

Foucault, Michel, La société punitive. Cours au Collège de France, 1972–1973, Paris: EHESS–Gallimard–Seuil, 2013.

Garapon, Antoine, Bien juger. Essai sur le rituel judiciaire, Paris: Éditions Odile Jacob, 1997.

Ghazzal, Zouhair, The Grammars of Adjudication, Beirut: Ifpo, 2007.

Ghazzal, Zouhair, The Crime of Writing, Beirut: Ifpo, 2015, forthcoming.

ʿUṭrī, Mamdūḥ, Qānūn al-ʿuqūbāt, Damascus: Muʾassasat al-Nuri, 1993.

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[1] Muhammad ‘Ali was the brother of Fatima’s husband, hence her brother-in-law. If, as she claims, he was her “paternal cousin,” then Fatima and husband must have also been paternal cousins. There is a possibility, however, that they were “cousins” only in the figurative sense of the term, that is, not as a real blood relationship.

[2] Referring to both son and cousin by their full names has something impersonal about it, diminishing its intimacy, as if the letter was meant to be read not by the recipient himself, but by some anonymous judicial authority.

the syrian civil war

Is the current violence in Syria a revolt of “society” against an oppressive state, or should it be read more meaningfully as a full fledged civil war? If we assume the perspective of civil war, then the “state” and its various apparatuses would stand as just one “civil party” among others, protective of its own social and political interests, while revealing the multi-layered relations of power in Syrian society which cannot be solely attributed to a dysfunctional state–society relation. That is to say, even though the violence was originally meant to displace the apparatuses of the state, it has since then sprawled in different directions, not to be restricted to the problems of legitimacy that an authoritarian state has engulfed itself into since the Baathist revolution in the 1960s. It is such hypothesis that we want to explore, first, by contextualizing the antinomies of the Syrian nation-state in historical perspective, since its inception from the remnants of the Ottoman Empire and the French colonial state. Second, through a combination of sociological and anthropological approaches, we want to analyze the contradictions that the Baathist state has set itself into once it has opted for a hegemonic takeover of civil society, in particular in the 1970s, with Asad’s “corrective movement” and its aftermath, which led to a massive expansion of the state apparatuses.

The collapse of the old Ottoman order, both in its political and cultural connotations, established, amid the Sykes–Picot agreements in 1916, a British–French colonial order, which implied moving, quite abruptly, from Empire to nation-state. New states with colonial “borders” (“lines in the sand”) were thus formed, such as Lebanon, Syria, Iraq, Jordan, Palestine and Kuwait, whose territories were previously set within the “frontiers” of a multi-ethnic empire. The post-Ottoman colonial order was therefore the first attempt to create a modern nation-state with that awkward combination of a sovereign state, supported by a national bourgeoisie of rentiers, manufacturers and financiers (the ex-Ottoman urban notables), which inevitably dominated politics and government. This colonial liberal order, which coopted the nascent national bourgeoisie into its ranks, persevered until the Second World War. The first indication of the displacement of such political and economic order was, indeed, the free officers revolution in Egypt in 1952, which other countries have replicated. With that single event the social roots of a would-be second political and economic order, which still dominates the region until now, and which apparently the current revolts are attempting to displace, was already there.

But are we ready for a third order? With Gamal Abdul Nasser coming to power in 1952, Egypt would opt for a series of statist measures that would ultimately establish themselves as a blueprint for the Arab world at large: the undermining of the power of the colonial bourgeoisie through methods of confiscation or nationalization of rural, urban, manufacturing, financial and educational assets. Which led to a state-controlled economy, where the state’s security is monopolized by an ever growing army, paramilitary groups, and intelligence services.

The dismantlement of the colonial liberal order was therefore quick to happen, and in Egypt that order was already fully reversed by the mid-1950s: by then Egypt, the most populous Arab country, was running under a massive civil and military bureaucracy where the role of the military (as epitomized by Nasser himself) and intelligence services had become paramount; where education and the economy were fully dominated by the statist bureaucracy; and where the peasantry, looked upon as suspicious for its conservatism and subjection to old landlord families, was subject to constant political mobilization. Such drastic processes, irreversibly anti-liberal, would serve as blueprint for the rest of the Arab world, and by the late 1950s other Arab countries would follow suit. In 1958 the coup of Abdul-Karim Qasim, another disgruntled officer, has put a sudden and bloody end to the rule of the Hashimite monarchy which had been ruling Iraq since the 1920s. In 1963 the Baath Party came to power in both Iraq and Syria, whose rule has been further brutally consolidated in the 1970s with Hafiz al-Asad in Syria and Saddam Hussein in Iraq. In 1969, a coup led by an unknown and young officer under the name of Mu‘ammar al-Gadhafi, damaged the long and stable rule of the Idrissi monarchy in Libya. By 1978–79 this “second political and economic order” was locked and further consolidated thanks to the Iranian revolution, which undermined the Pahlavi dynasty, and a tradition of Shi‘i monarchism since the early sixteenth century, instituting an Islamic Republic for the first time in the Middle East and West Asia.

This brief recapitulation of events should remind us of the frailty of the colonial bourgeois order that was established in the wake of the dismantlement of the Ottoman Empire: if that order has been reversed all too easily, in a series of coups d’états across the region, and through blunt statist measures intended to weaken the private economies, it was only because of the puniness of that order, which could be attributed to Ottoman times, and to the way the old élites, appended with new professional groups, were integrated into the colonial economy. To begin with, the Ottoman political patrimonial order implied maintaining a close hand on the prebendal urban élite (the a‘yān) through stipends in the form of land rents. But even though the ownership was formally to the sultan and the state, the notables enjoyed de facto full possession, giving them that special status of a group (Stände) of rentiers without, however, much competition from any local or regional economic group. Even though some of the a‘yān invested in other activities than land, such as trade and manufacturing, land was their prime resource. More importantly, the a‘yān as the prime status group in society was neither an “aristocracy” per se nor assigned any political role within their community, beginning with the city which they were supposed to “represent.” Indeed, Ottoman absolutism precluded the formation of local aristocracies, leaving all “political representation” to the center.

With the colonial nation-state now a reality, that old order was not completely dislodged, but was rather beefed up with all kinds of new forces and realities. To begin with, land rent now intermixed with manufacturing, trade and finance, as the old rentiers have learned how not to make land their sole asset. Secondly, new middle class professional groups, not to mention the nouveaux riches, all of which benefited from the openings of colonialism, and the special attention that the latter accorded to “minorities” (Christians, Armenians, Jews, Kurds and Alawis), were now sharing the benefits of the commercial and manufacturing wealth of the mandate period. Thirdly, the old élites, in conjunction with new entrepreneurial groups, formed political parties, participating in all governmental activities, from the presidency, parliament, and cabinet positions. As a newly formed nation-state, Syria now thought of itself as a territory with internationally acknowledged borders, rather than as a “province” appended to a multi-ethnic empire. But this also implied seeking for a certain degree of homogeneity, which was not there in the world of Empire. The heterogeneous nature of Syrian society was marked by a couple of incongruities. Firstly, the mandate inherited the Ottoman millet system, whereby “communities” lived on their own, in specific neighborhoods of the city, with their own schools, businesses, and “representatives” protecting their rights. Secondly, the nation-state implied the formation of a single political territory, which de facto entailed a minimum degree of cohesiveness among regions. In the Ottoman system, the central axis of the four major predominantly Sunni cities of Damascus, Hims, Hama, and Aleppo, was the one that consolidated the core of the traditional rentier class, the manufacturing of the craft guilds, linking the trade routes and their merchant classes from Jerusalem to Baghdad. With the newly formed nation-state that core economic axis was shared with two additional ones: the western Mediterranean one of Banyas, Jableh, Tartus and Latakia (the predominantly Alawi mountainous and coastal regions), and the northern-eastern one of Hasakeh, Qamishli and Dayr al-Zor. It is safe to say that Syria’s modern history hinges, on the one hand, on the relations between the operational economic hegemony of Sunni and Christian manufacturing and business families, and, on the other, on the imbalance between the central axis of the four major cities and the two regional axes subserved to them.

In a predominantly agrarian society there is that lingering problem of mostly landless peasants, of big “absentee” landlords who invest the bulk of their rents in the city, of lack of adequate infrastructural resources (roads, schools, water and electricity), of peasants being “represented” by their abusive landlords. To elaborate, the power relations are always in favor of the urban areas, but even further, there is that persistent imbalance between the urban axes—the core one of the four major cities, and the ones attached to it by the mandate—which doubles the urban–rural imbalance into one with underdeveloped urban axes.

To proceed a bit rapidly, it is no secret that the structure of the paramilitary factions that downsized the traditional political and economic groups since the 1963 Baath coup, were small to middle class landowners from rural areas. Indeed, the Baath was supposed to bridge that gap between landlord and peasant, city and countryside, the core Sunni axis of the four major cities with the western coastal and mountainous areas, and the north-east. The agrarian reforms of 1963–69 did some of that, by dispossessing big landlords, and transforming peasants into small landlords, with various laws making it harder for the landlord to evict tenant-farmers and laborers. At the same time, the economic assets of what became in the liberal period the “bourgeois middle class” were nationalized in an apparent attempt to consolidate the state monopoly over the economy and its national resources. Quite rapidly, therefore, the early pre-Asad Baath managed to rip off landowning, manufacturing, and financial middle class groups from their core resources, which in itself was a blunt attempt to downgrade them politically in favor of the one-party system that was yet to come. The Syrian paradox—or exception—would consist precisely in the return of the power groups that were weakened in the 1960s. This would take place in the coming couple decades in two different stages. When Hafiz al-Asad assumed power in 1970 in the wake of a coup d’état against his early Baathist companions, he inaugurated what was then dubbed as the “rectification movement,” which in essence meant “correcting” the “extremes” of the early Baath. More concretely, this aimed at a re-opening towards old Sunni and Christian professional groups that always dominated the national economy; but even though they were openly courted to reinvest in core economic sectors (such as textiles, food and chemicals), they did so only reluctantly, leading the whole “rectification movement” into a downward spiral from which it never recovered. The 1979–82 years in particular witnessed a number of urban riots, led by the since then outlawed Muslim Brothers, which culminated in the Hama massacre in 1982, a symptomatic failure of a state-run economy.

The fall of the Berlin Wall and the communist bloc left Syria without the “socialist” protective umbrella that it relied upon since the 1960s. An attempt was made to “liberalize” the economy, this time more realistic than the defunct “reforms” of the 1970s, with “investment law n° 10” in 1991. Herein lies the paradoxical dialectic of contemporary Syrian history: firstly, the return en force since the 1990s of the economic Sunni and Christian middle classes; secondly, the failure of the one-party “socialist” state to reduce imbalances among confessional groups, cities and regions; or to incorporate new emerging groups into its entrepreneurial activities (including the Alawis which are supposedly in control of political power via the Asad clan, but which as a whole are an underclass rather than a privileged group); or to drastically improve the status of the peasantry and the redundant surplus in rural labor. In sum, there is a blatant “return” to the Ottoman and colonial eras, with their dominant professional Sunni and Christian urban groups, which look down at peasants, tribes, and rural areas. In one of those iconic historical twists, which may be at the root of the current uprisings, political power is presently in the hands of groups which originally were small to middle class rural landowners, and whose rural origins seem all too forgotten amid four decades in power; while “real” economic power is back to the groups that were displaced in the 1960s by those who are now holding power. It is such an awkward “sharing” of power between well experienced entrepreneurial ancien régime factions that cannot rule, and the political nouveaux riches, who do not have the required entrepreneurial habitus to be fully integrated into the ranks of the traditional economic class, which now delineates Syria in its civil war.