Nothing has harmed our conception of the Levant’s affairs, and the affairs of those of us who live in it, more than a succession of theories that sprung from divergent intellectual traditions but came to the same practical conclusion. Sectarianism (along with ethnic loyalties) was the primary victim of these theories, and given the central role that it plays in our lives and relationships, its obfuscation has made addressing it more difficult and the problems associated with it more dangerous and threatening.
A theory propagated by rulers, mostly military men with Arab nationalist backgrounds, that sectarianism was an evil colonialist invention had prevailed decades ago. As for us, we are the children of "a single nation" awaiting the dawn of our national consciousness. Nationalist intellectuals were no kinder to ethnic identities. Michel Aflaq, the founder of the Baath party, considered the Berbers of North Africa to be Arabs, and whenever the Kurds spoke of their Kurdishness, Arab nationalists would remind them of the "Arabness" of their ancestor Salaheddine, almost leading the Kurds to wrap his remains in colorful packaging and hand them to the Arab nationalists.
Later on, the failure to understand reality, within leftists circles, surpassed the failure to change it. Discussing sectarianism was belittled, as it is merely a "manifestation" of class conflict, the result of our societies' entry into the global market, or a bourgeois ruse to fragment the working masses. Through the collaborative efforts of nationalists, Islamists, and leftists another myth was popularized: that Orientalists devoted themselves to inventing sectarianism to vilify us.
For their part, "modernists" have always naively seen linear progress as an inevitability, believing that education and evolution would do away with this "repugnant" scourge and place us at the forefront of a "civilized" world awaiting our arrival.
Here we are today, seeing something more substantial and bigger in sectarianism than everything this nonsense has put forward, not because we are sectarian "by nature," but because successive waves of the old collaborating with the new have made us that way. Regimes that confiscated public space made up the latest of these waves. Their blend of factionalism and extreme repression led to the entrenchment of loyalties, the calcification of social thoughts and religious conceptions, and, at the same time, something like the institutionalization of those loyalties.
This approach, which made everything bad worse, drew from an already-available sea of communal divisions that did not pave the way for any kind of political society. Nonetheless, we prefer to forget that our history books almost exclusively present us as Arabs and non-Arabs, Mawla (Muslim subjects) and Dhimmis (non-Muslim subjects), our neighborhoods as Jewish and Christian quarters, and our mountains as Alawite and Druze.
While these kinship loyalties did not confront anything that broke them apart as they had in the West, the military regimes broadened and reinforced divisions that had already been there instead of narrowing them as part of a project to build national communities.
In other words, sectarianism is not destiny, but it has been turned into something of the sort, as has been reflected most recently by the developments in Syria. The regime responsible for strengthening sectarianism has been leveled to the ground, but the sectarianism it left in its wake has the capacity to produce systems and realities because of the numerous relationships it had established, but also the many resentments and grudges it fueled.
Indeed, driven by their lofty and just ethical patriotism, the sons and daughters of the Syrian revolution are now criticizing the country’s new state of affairs and authorities. They have very clearly shed their sectarian or ethnic loyalties, aligning with values that states are supposed to be built on.
However, whether the reality of sectarian schisms can be effectively confronted remains an open question; indeed, the fallen regime had desertified political life, while the nuclei of modern and progressive politics now find themselves poorly organized and in a weak negotiating position vis a vis sectarian forces. There is reason to fear that we could end up with a clash between two unjust and high-strung sensibilities that will be difficult to dislodge and whose aggressive inclinations will be difficult to contain:
A majoritarian sensibility that "reassures" minorities and seeks a "just" sultan. It also seizes power for itself under the pretext that it is the majority who had overthrown the regime, and then proceeds to build a "new" political system founded on despotism and dominance. It is doing so on the premise of governance references that others do not see as legitimate, with power thereby confined to loyalists who believe in those references, and who, driven by their strong convictions, torture and humiliate those who differ, to say nothing about their opponents.
The other sensibility is minoritarian. It is selfish and unconcerned by the fact that the genocide of the fallen regime targeted the majority alone and that it thus has a duty to do what it had avoided before: showing solidarity with the victims of the genocide, advocating for justice without vengeance, fostering a healthier and cleaner national climate, and elevating the genocide to one of the pillars underpinning the new Syria.
While it is true that the plans and projects of Türkiye, Iran, and other countries conflict with the emergence of a stable alternative in Syria, focusing on the sectarian and ethnic question is the gateway to addressing the challenges, including those plans and projects. It might be sensible, out of concern for national unity and to ensure that Syria’s pluralism is managed and regulated through peaceful channels, to look to the federal framework established by the French Mandate (between 1922 and 1924) for inspiration. Here too, the Mandate was not very mistaken, or at the very least, it was less mistaken than those who had resisted it.
