How did a hated Alawite get to be president of a Muslim Syria?

If some Syrian Alawites think they are Muslims, I can be forgiven for having thought that too. Isn’t that curious? That many Alawites born after 1971 in Syria make that mistake? How did that happen? And how did a member of a non-Muslim minority get to be president of a Muslim country?

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Just as a point of interest, al-Assad is Arabic for “the lion” and that is not the family’s original name. Hafiz’s paternal grandfather’s last name was al-Wahhish and that is Arabic for “the beast.” The family adopted the name al-Assad in 1927.

A large part of this misunderstanding is actually political. Until 1971, when Hafiz al-Assad became president, the Alawites were the most oppressed group of people in Syria. They were widely reviled and hated as infidels.

Al-Assad was an evil man, and he was a very politically gifted man. He reached out to Al Azhar Mosque in Egypt a few years after Syria and Egypt formed the United Arab Republic requesting that the Alawites be considered a Muslim sect. They ignored his request.

He did this for two reasons: Firstly, the Syrian constitution states that the president must be a Muslim. So for him to be an Alawite and president would have violated the constitution. And secondly, supposedly to protect the Alawites.

I interrupted him with a question. This is interesting, I said. But how did he get that far? How did someone at the bottom of the social ladder ever get to the position where he could challenge that law?

It has to do with the Ba’ath Party. The Ba’ath was founded in Syria and became fairly popular in Syria and Iraq, primarily among the minorities. There were some Muslims in it, but initially, it was founded by a Christian by the name of Michel Aflaq, an Alawite, Zaki al-Asuzi, and a Sunni.

Ba’athism is based on secularism and a pan-Arab identity. The minorities were so terrified, you know, Syrian minorities, as well as Iraqi minorities, were terrified. I’m not talking about the Kurds or the Assyrians, which are ethnic minorities. Religious minorities, like the Christians and the Alawites, were treated as second-class citizens and they were so terrified of Islamist mentality that they considered championing an Arab identity and pan-Arabism as an alternative to pan-Islam. And a lot of Alawites believed that if they would enlist in the Syrian military, this was back during the 1950s and 1960s, before Assad took control, if they enlisted in the army, thus confirming their sense of national identity as Syrians, as Arabs, then the Muslims wouldn’t come after them.

We’re Arabs, we’re Syrians, they proclaimed; who cares if we’re not Muslims! That kind of idea. The elder Assad made a name for himself in the Ba’ath party leadership. He was also a military officer, an air force officer.

The Syrian government didn’t care that the Alawites were enlisting in the military. They were good fighters. They’re fierce. So if they want to join the military, let them. But it got to the point where Assad had advanced both within the Ba’ath leadership and the military leadership that he managed to launch a coup in 1970 and become president in 1971. The Sunni Muslim class in Syria was entirely against him being president, purely because he was an Alawite.

He quickly did two things to lower their resistance to him. First, he lobbied the Muslim authorities to have the Alawites recognized as a Muslim sect and, when that did not work, he launched a war against Israel in 1973, to basically tell the world: Look at me; maybe I’m not a Muslim, but I’m doing something that you Muslims care about, which is fighting Israel.

That was the Yom Kippur War, I believe you guys call it; we call it the October War.

So part of the reason why he waged that war was to earn the validation of the Sunni Muslim community in Syria. And that was when the Al AzharMosque made the politically controversial decision to recognize the Alawites as Muslims, driven by pressure from Egyptian Nasserist and liberal scholars and politicians who liked Assad because he was a military commander under Nasser, fought Israel, and seemingly never surrendered – in contrast to Sadat, who was weak and signed a peace deal with Israel.

Even radical Sunnis thought he was strong and manly. That’s the classic Arab mindset — respect for strongmen.

He applied a lot of Taqiyyah [deceit sanctioned by Sharia Law]; he lied about Alawism so he could convince the religious authorities to consider us almost Muslims. He got Musa al-Sadr, a Shia Iranian-Lebanese, to consider both the Alawites and the Druze as members of the Shia sect in exchange for military support during the Lebanese Civil War. Al-Sadr convinced Khomeini and other Shia scholars in Iran and Iraq to view the Alawites as Shia.

Alawites are secretive about our faith but Assad told our community to tell people we are Muslims and to deny all the unsavory allegations that would make Alawites appear non-Muslim. But from living alongside Alawites, or visiting Alawite areas, the Syrian Muslims saw that our lifestyles were entirely different than theirs: our women don’t wear the hijab and we drink wine whenever we want to. We have a very liberal mindset and a liberal set of rules.

And, in reality, many Alawites suspected this move was more to satisfy his political ambitions than to protect the Alawites from Muslim hatred.

But did having an Alawite president give the Alawites privileges over the majority Sunni population of the country?

There are four different Alawite tribes, the largest of which is the Kulebia tribe, the tribe that Assad’s family belongs to, and three of the tribes fell in line with Assad’s family’s tribe, because they were promised protection. The fourth tribe, however, was very much against the Assads the whole time. For one thing, they thought that having an Alawite who’s so much a public figure would mean people would be talking about us and that that would cause problems.

They didn’t like Assad for various other reasons, such as launching a war for Palestine. We all knew that it was a strategic political move and not because he cared about the Palestinians; at least we believed he did not care about the Palestinians.

Some Alawites were also very uncomfortable with the fact that the faith itself was being, not only Islamized, we were becoming more and more culturally Muslim, but also Sunnified. The elder Assad would pray the Sunni way, even though Alawites don’t pray at all. There is a Shia way to pray and a Sunni way to pray. He’d go to the mosque and pray the Sunni way, with his hands.

Assad crushed the tribe that opposed him. There were over 180,000 Alawites in Assad’s prisons because they dared to challenge his authority.

The other three tribes pretty much just fell in behind the elder Assad, and in exchange, Assad promised them certain things, like good military positions in his army. But the only people in the Alawite community that benefited from Assad directly were people in his tribe, specifically people that he knew personally, and their friends and their friends’ friends. So the regime became very nepotistic. The other two tribes that supported him remained extremely poor.

So that we would never be in danger or under threat, there was a kind of general rule that the eldest son in every family enlists in the army. For this reason, we were always an active and vibrant part of the Syrian military. Yet, all of these families remained extremely poor, remained completely without means, but they still sent their kids to enlist.

In contrast, Assad’s tribe got many financial advantages and political benefits from his rule.

Aside from the oppositional tribe, did the two tribes that supported Assad but weren’t among his own tribe fail to benefit from his rule because of a lack of resources available to be handed out?

When you look at his close social circle, they were mostly Sunni. He gave a lot of advantages to the Sunnis, at the expense of the Christians and the Druze and the other Alawites — all because he wanted to maintain control. The Sunnis formed a very powerful element of his regime. About 80% of the older Assad’s government were Sunnis while his army was split 50-50.

Did everything stay the same when Hafiz al-Assad died and Bashir took over in the year 2000?

When the old Assad died, there was a huge problem with the fourth tribe, whatever remained of them, who didn’t want his son to be president. Bashar was seen as kind of an idiot. The Alawite community is very homogenous and we gossip a lot.

Bashar went to study abroad in the West at a young age; he liked music like Nirvana and Genesis and he apparently liked Phil Collins. There were news articles about him during his time in London and he was generally considered quiet and not fit for leadership; he didn’t have any ties to the community either. That was true for all of the Assads, actually, because they were mostly born or grew up while their father was president; they were privileged, spoiled, and raised in the Sunni and not Alawite way.

So most Alawites didn’t trust the younger Assad and, after his father’s death, a huge group of them completely revolted. In the year 2000, Bashar’s brother, Maher, threatened all the Alawites. He drove tanks to the Syrian coast. To be fair, he also threatened Sunnis; many Sunnis were also against Bashar. The Assads threatened everyone, They silenced everyone. They arrested thousands of the opposition.

And now comes the revenge?

If you had asked the Alawites 50 years ago, they would most likely have told you that we want independence. We couldn’t achieve independence during the time of the Arab-Israeli war, that is 1948, and into the 1950s because we were weak. No other country knew anything about us; nobody supported us. So the one thing the Alawites wanted while Assad was in power, the older one, was for him to give us our independence.

The one surefire way to ensure our survival would have been independence. Forcing us to be a part of Syria where 90% of the population is Sunni and 90% of the population already hated us — as a sect, as a community – was a recipe for disaster.

So what is happening to the Alawites right now, unfortunately, was predicted decades ago. But those voices were silenced.

Thank you so much for writing about us, for showing an interest in us. No Arab media outlets are even talking about what is happening to us and most of those that do, justify it!

Originally published on 21 April 2025 here, on my Substack newsletter.