Faced with extreme rural poverty, waves of government-backed oppression, and the heavy tax burdens imposed by the Alawite sheiks themselves, Alawite society was, in the words of the missionary Samuel Lyde - who lived amongst them in the 1850s - ‘a perfect hell on earth.’ One should keep in mind that the hatred harboured against these people by the Sunni majority was not based purely on religious prejudice. Pouring down the mountains under the cover of night, cattle-raids by the Alawites against the nearby farmers were frequent, and as Lyde notes with horror, ‘nothing is thought of killing a Mussulman as a natural enemy.’ The Handbook for Travellers in Syria and Palestine, written at roughly the same time, warns the reader of ‘a wild and somewhat savage race, given to plunder, and even bloodshed, when their passions are excited or suspicion roused … their country must therefore be traversed with caution.’
After a series of swiftly-quelled rebellions in the 1860s and 70s, it was Midhat Pasha, appointed Governor of Syria in 1878, who first attempted to deal with this unruly minority by persuasion rather than by force, promising to end their harassment by the local authorities, build schools in the region, and best of all, grant them a degree of formal autonomy under the millet system. Though Midhat’s would last only until 1881, he nonetheless set a more peaceable tone for future negotiations with the Alawites. Among his more conservative successors, Diya Bey, local governor of Latakia, was rather more keen to see the Alawites brought into the fold, and though he was happy to keep some of the promises made by his predecessor, would do so only on the condition that the Alawites become orthodox Muslims. The Alawite chiefs were all too glad to concede, and signed a joint agreement allowing the construction of 40 new schools, at which their children would be raised in the precepts of Sunni Islam. Within a few years of Diya Bey’s death, all of those schools were closed, and quietly converted into cattle barns.
The last, and fiercest, Alawite insurrection came in 1918 - not against the Ottomans but the French, who had been given the Mandate of Syria in the aftermath of the First World War, and by this time already occupied the Syrian coast. This prompted a prominent Alawite Sheik, Saleh Al-Ali, to call a meeting of his co-religionists, warning of their new overlords’ plans to separate them from the rest of Syria, and urging them to resist. Catching wind, French authorities sent for his arrest, but found themselves repelled by Al-Ali’s militiamen; so began the revolt. An early string of victories - mostly inflicted against France’s native allies - forced the Mandate to accept his terms. But no sooner than the deal was made, the French betrayed the truce and resumed bombarding the rebel positions, chasing them deep into the remote north. Al-Ali’s men had been put down, but their leader was still in hiding, with a 1000-franc bounty on his head. It was not until his enemies, having abandoned all hope of tracking him down, formally issued a pardon that he would finally give up.
When General Billote asked why he surrendered, the Sheik replied, ‘By God, if I had even ten armed men left to fight I would not have quit.’ Who can say whether he knew how clearly his words echoed those of the unnamed leader of the Rebellion of 1318 who, precisely 600 years prior, is reported by the chronicler Al-Birzali to have told his men, had his soul been shared among ‘ten selves with only a stick, with neither sword nor lance, with this alone he would have defeated the Sunnis?’ I borrow a line here sometimes attributed to Mark Twain: History doesn’t repeat itself, but it often rhymes. Saleh Al-Ali died in his home, on 13th April 1950. His tomb, a pilgrimage site for nationalists under the Assad regime, is marked by as large and as tasteless a bronze statue as one might expect - it lies on the outskirts the city of Tartus, which at time of writing remains under curfew, following the massacre of some 1,540 (mostly Alawite) men, women, and children, at the hands of pro-government security forces.
Al-Ali’s rebellion is somewhat of a red herring - a rare and early exception to the rule that the Alawites found French rule far preferable to that of the Sunnis, and represented the colonial project’s most devoted loyalists. Boycotting the outbreaks of Arab nationalist resistance (most notably, the Great Syrian Revolt of 1925) that pockmarked the period, and contributing a sizable portion of the counter-revolutionary forces that put them down, the Alawites earned a solid reputation amongst their countrymen as collaborators. The fatwa issued against them in the 14th Century, accusing the sect, amongst other things, of siding with the Crusaders against the Muslims, seemed to have been posthumously vindicated.
Despite the Alawites’ best efforts, by 1936 the French were forced to leave, and no-one was less happy to see them go. In a memorandum dated to 11th June of the same year, a number of Alawite gentry begged Prime Minister Léon Blum not to let them be annexed to the newly independent Syria, citing ‘the spirit of hatred and fanaticism embedded in the hearts of the Arab Muslims,’ claiming their integration with the Sunni majority would ‘mean only their enslavement and annihilation.’ The letter concludes with a request for ‘independence within their small territory, placed under the hands of the French Socialist leaders.’ Ironically, among the undersigned was one Suleiman Al-Assad; his grandson, until very recently, served as the 19th President of the Syrian Arab Republic.
Their initial protestations notwithstanding, incorporation into the fledgling Syrian state would ultimately serve the Alawites very well. Between 1949 and 1954, the nation endured no less than four successive military coups. Each of these were led by Sunni military men, and each new leader began his tenure with a purge of the previous regime’s loyalists from the army - in each case, also largely Sunnis. Having kept their heads down, the Alawites (around 10% of the country’s population) came to make up 65% of non-commissioned officers in the armed forces, and an even larger portion of the lower ranks, by 1955. In the meantime, the left-wing nationalist Ba’ath Party had been active in recruiting Alawite members since its formation in the 1930s, and by this point had secured the loyalty of a good number of the high ranking officers. All this culminated in the birth of a clandestine Alawite military committee, a party-within-the-party, unbeknownst to the Ba’athist leaders. Their first recorded meeting (allegedly) occurred in 1960, at the Assads’ hometown of Qarhada, formulating a programme to assist Alawites in the military in ascending the ranks of the Ba’ath Party. At an (alleged) subsequent meeting in 1963, the group plotted the replacement of the remaining Druze and Ismaili military personnel, the relocation of rural Alawites to the cities, and ultimately, the establishment of an independent Alawite State - one attendant, a young Hafez Al-Assad, was (allegedly) initiated into the religious rank of ‘Najid.’ Though the following years would prove especially turbulent, with various factions in the Ba’ath Party struggling for dominance after the collapse of Syria’s short-lived union with Egypt, by 1970 all was a fait accompli - a once despised heretical minority, hiding in the remote hinterlands, had come to dominate the army and the state; the periphery had become the centre, and General Al-Assad had ascended to the presidency.
As one might have guessed, the Ba’athists were rather good at looking after their own - widesweeping agrarian reforms, the forced reallocation of lands belonging to the Sunni aristocracy, and a healthy degree of sectarian prejudice in hiring for government jobs, saw the Alawites flooding down the valleys into Syria’s urban centres. A common joke from the 1980s asks, ‘Why is the back of an Alawite boy’s head so flat?’ - Answer: ‘That’s where their mothers slap them each morning and say, ‘’Go to Damascus, my son!’’’ By the time of the census of 2004 (four years into Bashar Al-Assad’s tenure), 80% of the Alawite population was employed in the military, government, or state-owned industry.
But all this came at the cost of a fundamental shift in Alawite identity. Hafez’s attempts to normalise the group in the eyes of the rest of Syria - he prayed at Sunni mosques, made the pilgrimage to Mecca, had the Alawites declared a legitimate branch of the Shia faith - meant that increasingly, the sect came understand themselves as the partisans of a secular, pluralist Syrian nationalism, rather than a group centred around an all-male initiatory secret society, whose founding doctrines, we might tentatively suggest, were largely abandoned, forgotten, or altered. The situation is well summed up in the following anecdote - in 1988, the tomb of the Alawite sage Al-Tabarani was dismantled, to make room for the expansion of Latakia’s industrial seaport.
This set the stage for the fate of the Alawites during the Syrian Civil War; the recipients of decades worth of government patrimony, hugely overrepresented in the army, as well as in the plain clothed militias (known as ‘Shabiha’) sent to harangue anti-Assad protestors, the sect won a name for themselves amongst many of their compatriots as regime lackeys. Among the slogans chanted in the early demonstrations around 2011 was supposedly included: ‘Send the Alawites to the grave and the Christians to Beirut!’ Assad’s supporters were largely drawn from Syria’s minority groups, who saw him as a bulwark against the threat of majority rule; ultimately, the conflict is not to be understood purely as a backlash against an autocratic government, but a clash between an Alawite-lead Syrian national project, and the supra-national ambitions of Sunni Islamist groups like the Muslim Brotherhood and Al-Nusra - Jolani’s old outfit.
The last decade and a half has seen the Alawites retreat en masse from Syria’s major cities, back to their traditional homeland in the mountainous northwest: early this Spring, the site of their renewed persecution by fighters tied to Jolani’s interim government, following an ambush carried out against the local security forces by a band of recusant Assad loyalists. To Jolani’s credit, this appears to be a case of an ascendant government, hot off the heels of a military coup, failing to bring its more radical discontents in line, rather than outright state violence - curiously, the bloodshed (which Jolani himself has condemned) seems to have been carried out not by native Syrians, but (per a witness quoted in a BBC report linked here) by Islamist volunteers from Chechnya and Central Asia, who supported the opposition’s rise to power. We might venture therefore that this was motivated less by grievances the Alawites’ Sunni neighbours may still hold against them, but rather on more strictly theological grounds.
Who can say whether or not Al-Tabarani’s heresies, for which the Alawites have historically - even presently - been so reviled, are still practiced, still believed in? If the answer were a yes, we can be sure they would not let it slip. I suspect modern day Alawites might find my description of their theology - which is, admittedly, based purely on literature and not personal experience - unfamiliar and a little unflattering. Nonetheless, readers who, like myself, were over-curious teenage boys at the time of the Civil War, might remember a handful of blurry videos on Liveleak, in which Assad’s men would hold a captured enemy at gunpoint, and - like the rebels of 1318 - and force him to recite the words, ‘There is no god but Ali.’ I remember one of these very clearly, in which (we should remember here, the Alawite faith has not always been so conservative as to limit God’s incarnations to a measly seven) the name Ali was swapped for that of Assad - for obvious reasons, I have not included the links to these videos, nor have I sought to find them. In a recent post on X, an account claiming to represent the ‘Alawite Muslim Defence League’ declares with perfect bluntness:
>‘Bashar Assad is the eternal litmus test for all world species, anyone who hates him is a devilseed in human form with no soul and no rights on earth or in [the] heavens.’
One some evening unrecorded, the last person, before the triumph of the Cross, to have witnessed sacrifices to Woden on English soil, to have seen the face of Napoleon in the flesh, to have heard the Sermon on the Mount with his own ears, quietly passed away. It is not impossible, in light of recent events, that this century will see, in some hospice in Dearborn, Michigan or in Munich, the no-less-quiet passing of the last believing Alawite; their name, like that of the Donmeh or the Qarmatians, might someday join the list of those faiths known only to academics and uncredentialed enthusiasts like myself. What would be worse is that, at least in the West, they are likely to spend their last decades as objects of pity - perhaps they will find themselves the subject of a handful more PhD theses than is usual, perhaps the diaspora will organise a march down Whitehall, at which a small crowd of White students butcher the chants - and be remembered only as such. Pity threatens to dilute the memory of what I have found to be among the most unique, most profound, most beautifully cunning movements in modern religious history.
It is that history of theirs I had wanted to draw attention to - the history of a hidden community of cattle-raiders and mountain-dwelling hermits who came skipping down the valleys to conquer all of Syria, and how they came to lose it - and to do no more than that, to draw attention. I am by no means the best qualified to undertake the task, and if any of those better qualified should read this article, I would ask them to please be patient with me. I am only and very much an amateur - but here an amateur in the fullest sense, from the Latin, ‘amare’; what I have written I wrote for the sake of love.