How Hafiz Asad Tamed the Muslim Brothers

Hassan al Banna (1906-1949, assassinated) was the Egyptian Islamist who in 1928 founded a vast popular movement called the Société des Frères Musulmans” or Muslim Brotherhood (a.k.a. the Muslim Brothers, the Brothers), which was dedicated to ending British rule and replacing it with his Golden Age vision of a purged Islamic state. The Muslim Brothers remain active today. For example, Egyptian D r. Ayman al-Zawahiri, al Qaeda’s number two man, is a Muslim Brother. Between 1928 and the time of this writing, the Muslim Brothers have had a blood-colored run, which has included years of fighting against the Ba’th secular party founded by the Greek Orthodox Christian Michel ‘Aflaq (and others) and later led by the late Syrian President Hafiz al-Asad (1930-2000) (see “Who Are the ‘Alawis?” at: http://www.semp.us/biots/biot_232.html).

Hassan al Banna (1906-1949), founder of the Muslim Brothers.Source: http://mujib1.tripod.com/sitebuildercontent/ sitebuilderpictures/imamhasanalbana.jpg.

Egyptian D r. Ayman al-Zawahiri, a Muslim Brother and al Qaeda’s number two man. Source: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ayman_al-Zawahiri

Philosophical Differences between the Ba’thists and Muslim Brothers

‘Aflaq, on the anniversary of the Prophet’s birth in 1943, advocated the primacy of Arab state revival, which “came up against the classic problem of how to reconcile the goals of Arab nationalism with the universal values of Islam so central to Arab life,” according to writer Patrick Seale (1, p. 31). “What sense did it make to speak of the ‘eternal message’ of a distinct Arab nation when the Prophet’s revelation was for all mankind? ‘Aflaq’s solution was to assert that Islam was the most sublime expression of Arabism: the one had grown out of the other and there could be no contradiction between them. Islam, he argued, was from its very beginning an Arab religion, revealed in an Arabic Qur’an, meeting Arab needs, embodying Arab values, and launching the Arabs on their conquest of the known world.” As could be anticipated, the Muslim Brothers were deeply offended by ‘Aflaq’s suggestion that “Islam was a flowering of Arab genius rather than a revelation of God.”

Michel ‘Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian and one of the founders of the Ba’th party.
Source: http://www.joric.com/Saddam/Aflaq.gif

A current of organized Muslim activism had existed in Syrian public life since the 1930s. The French in 1938 inadvertently furthered the Muslim cause by uniting isolated pockets of Islamic resistance to French rule into a single nation-wide organization charged with Islamic teaching in schools. Hence was born the Shabab Muhammad (Young Men of Muhammad). (Seale, p. 322) In a related point, Seale notes that by recruiting a large number of Ba’th schoolteachers into government service after the 1963 Ba’th revolution, a vacuum was created into which the Muslim Brotherhood implanted itself in the schools where it influenced the young. (Seale, p. 323)

The Asads Move to Latakia

In 1949, the Asad family moved from their humble abode in the Alawi mountains along the Mediterranean coast between Lebanon and Turkey, to the city of Latakia on the coast where two of the sons, Hafiz and Rif’at were attending French-run schools. The founding conference of the Ba’th in Latakia, wrote Seale, “had outstripped its principal competitors, the Communists and the Syrian National Party, and was brought up hard against the fundamentalist Muslim Brothers, religious conservatives in alliance with the city elites, with whom it was thereafter to wage a war without quarter.” (p. 36) In fact, the Muslim Brothers in Latakia singled out Hafiz who was already a student Ba’th leader, and repeatedly tried to beat him up. Once in 1948, some Muslim Brothers stabbed Hafiz in the back, an injury from which he recovered within several weeks. Dr. Ghanim, the medical doctor who helped bring the Ba’th party to Latakia, shooed the young ‘Alawi boys off the streets, thinking it better that their Sunni Ba’th comrades fight off the Muslim Brothers raging through the streets.

The Hama Riots of 1964

In the early spring of 1964, prayer-leaders in Syrian cities began to preach inflammatory sermons against the secular, socialist Ba’th, whipped up street riots and closed the souks (Arab markets), according to Seale. (p. 92). The economy was stagnant and some people were wondering whether the Ba’th party was providing Syrians with good government. The center of the insurrection was Hama (350,000 people), a stronghold of the Muslim Brothers in Syria. In April 1964, the Muslim Brothers used firearms for the first time, and set up roadblocks, stockpiled food and weapons, ransacked wine shops to spill the offending liquor into the utters, and beat up any Ba’th party man they could find. The Syrian National Guard called in troops and tanks, which opened fire on the insurgents who fled for cover in the densely-populated mud-and-wattle warrens of the city.

Photo of Hama in 1940, showing a minaret. Source: http://almashriq.hiof.no/general/700/ 770/779/contemporary/fareeds-picts/Hama.html.

Citadel in Hama, Syria.Source: http://www.geo.ya.com/travelimages/syria22.jpg

“After two days of street fighting, the insurgents took cover in the Sultan mosque which they had made their principal weapons store whereupon the Prime Minister gave the order to shell the mosque.” (Seale, p. 93) The minaret from which the rebels had been firing collapsed and killed many of them. In all 70 Muslim Brothers died. Among the prisoners taken was a “tall-red-bearded fanatic called Marwan Hadid,” who had become a religious fundamentalist in Cairo, Egypt in the early 1960s, and reveled in the fusion of religion and politics. He, like his Muslim Brothers, believed that “the secular Ba’th was an offence against God and nature; Ba’thists were infidels spurning the holy law who had to be exterminated for the health of society.” (p. 93)

The Muslim Opposition 1977-1982

The Syrian economy in the 1976 was again sagging in relation to the oil price escalation in Saudi Arabia and the other Gulf states, and the “have-nots began to stir,” wrote Seale (p. 321) “In response Asad announced in August 1977 the formation of a ‘Committee for the Investigation of Illegal Profits’, which began vigorously enough by arresting a score of top businessmen and government servants but then backed away when it found itself tangling with personalities close to the regime.” (p. 321) For example, Asad’s own younger brother, Rif’at, was rich, but could not be reigned in for two reasons: he was at the top of the pinnacle of power, and he ran his Defence Companies (“the praetorian guards of Asad’s presidency”), which increasingly were needed in the battle against the Muslim Brothers. (Seale, p. 321) The phrase “Muslim Brothers” was used throughout the five-year crisis (1977-1982) to describe the Muslim or Muslim-spearheaded opposition which manifested itself in a variety of guerrilla groups with different leaders and histories and operating in different parts of Syria, according to Seale.

“Mosque study circles where boys went in the holidays to study Arabic and the Qur’an become places of recruitment for the terrorists.” Seale writes, “A potential recruit would be asked to hide a weapon, then to return it, then to take it again and learn to strip and assemble it. The next state might be to involve him in the surveillance of a Ba’th party official or the reconnoitering of a government building. ‘Now you are one of us’, his Islamic mentor would say. ‘Your neck is on the block like ours.’ A brutal method used to harden young men was to get them to gun down unprotected workers like street-sweepers who because of their job had to be out early. Several were killed in this way.” (p. 323.)

Some Muslim activity was out in the open. For example, one Muslim Brother named ‘Isam al-‘Attar, when refused reentry into Syria following his pilgrimage to Mecca in 1964, set up headquarters in Aachen, West Germany where, from 1968 onward, he waged a war of words against Damascus with printed materials, and channeled money and supplies to fellow Muslim Brothers in Syria and other countries.

Asad was in great danger of being assassinated or overthrown during these years. Indeed, Islamists were emboldened by the 1979 Iranian revolution. “From their safe haven deep in the ancient warrens of northern cities like Aleppo and Hama where cars could not enter, the guerrillas emerged to bomb and kill. They set fire to buildings, closed shops, whipped up anti-government demonstrations and strove to control the streets. When cornered, they often blew themselves up with grenades strapped round their waists. They sent hit teams to kill party members in their beds.” (p. 324) They killed not only Ba’thists and ‘Alawis but a dozen Islamic clergy who had denounced the killings, according to Seale. In one instance, an agent of the Islamic underground who worked for Syrian Air Force intelligence leaked to the Muslim Brothers the car registration numbers of most of the state’s top intelligence officers. (p. 327)

Rif’at, Hafiz’s younger brother, wanted to wage all-out war against the terrorists. “The government was losing control, he argued; the bureaucracy was corrupt and the party torn by useless ideological debate; citizens [who remained neutral] showed no sense of responsibility. What was demanded was absolute loyalty; those who were not with the regime must now be considered against it. The Ba’thist state had to be defended, in blood if necessary…He asked for a free hand. Seeing that the Islamic terrorists had sworn to kill every infidel, he pledged his readiness to fight ‘a hundred wars, demolish a million strongholds, and sacrifice a million martyrs.’” (p. 327)

Rif’at Asad, President Hafiz Asad’s younger brother.
Source: http://www.meib.org/articles/0006_sd.htm

So it began. Rif’at, with the go-ahead from Hafiz, armed citizen militias who were asked to fight for the government, which most did as they were sick of the disruptions in their lives, including the constant fear of death from Islamist terrorist bombs and murders. On October 6, 1981, Islamic terrorists in Egypt assassinated Anwar al-Sadat, and leaflets in Damascus threatened Hafiz Asad with the same fate.

Hama II: The Hama Massacre

At 2 a.m. on the night of February 2-3, 1982 a Syrian army unit surveying the old city of Hama fell into an ambush when they inadvertently discovered the hideout of the notorious terrorist Abu Bakr, who commanded a network of cells by radio from his post deep in the warren. Abu Bakr gave the order for a general uprising. “Lights were switched on in the city’s mosques and the chilling cry of jihad against the Ba’th rang out over the loudspeakers used for the call to prayer. At his signal, hundreds of insurgents attempted to seize power in the city. (p. 332) The battle for Hama raged for three weeks. After regaining control of the town in the first week, government forces spent the next two hunting down insurgents. The guerillas moved back underground, but were hunted there. In nearly a month of fighting about a third of the historic inner city was demolished with artillery shells and bulldozers. Thousands of civilians were killed in the battle.

What did the Hama fight accomplish? The “pounding of the town in 1982 was designed to banish [Muslim] puritanism once and for all…[a] great deal of public money was spent” to rebuild Hama. For example, “roads were cut through where once no car could pass, squares and gardens were laid out, and the whole of Hama was reshaped on a grand scale, with ring roads and roundabouts serving entirely new quarters furnished with schools, clinics, playgrounds and shopping malls. Among major public buildings put up after the rising were a 230-bed hospital, a cultural center, a girls’ sports institute and teacher training college, a central market of oriental design, headquarter buildings for the Peasants’ Union and federations of teachers and engineers, and a sports center of outrageously ambitious proportions complete with Olympic-sized swimming pool. On Asad’s orders, the state funded the construction of two large mosques to make up for those destroyed in the fighting as well as a Catholic church as large as a cathedral. Among the revolutionary changes was the introduction of mixed bathing in 1983 and the first college dormitory block in the whole of Syria to house both male and female students. ..But all this could not erase the name of Hama as byword for a massacre.” (p. 334)

The Aftermath of Hama II

The Hama battle was successful in its goals and the rebellious activities of the Muslim Brothers in Syria ceased after this point. According to one source, the battle was not widely publicized at the time as the Syrian government made a determined effort to keep information from getting out. (2) Following the Hama incident, Asad changed, viewing himself as the victim of a terrible alliance of external and internal enemies. After his struggle with the Muslim Brothers, he threw his support behind Ayatollah Khomeini’s Islamic revolution because he believed that the Shi’ism of the Ayatollah was a very different sort of militant Islam from the Sunni fundamentalism of the Syrian guerrillas, and, like Nasser’s Arab nationalism, was an indigenous movement determined to affirm itself against outsiders.

Editor’s Note: Patrick Seale published his book on the little known Asad in 1988. Yet it still reads fresh because the Islamist pressure experienced by Asad continues today in other countries. Asad’s way of taming the Islamists was to annihilate them. Yet, after Hama, he increasingly “lost it” in terms of using terrorism as a methodology to bring about changes he desired. Seale obtained the input of Asad and his family and friends in the writing for the book, which, it must be acknowledged, paints a sympathetic picture of this “misunderstood” man.

Sources:

1. Patrick Seale: “Asad: The Struggle for the Middle East.” University of California Press. 1988.

2. “Hama Massacre,” Wikipedia: at http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Hama_Massacre; accessed July 5, 2005.