“Syria is not condemned to confrontation between Muslims and Christians”

What will happen to the Christians of Syria? If we must first rejoice at the fall of Bashar Al Assad, an inhuman and bloodthirsty tyrant, who ruined the country, filled the prisons and pushed millions of exiles onto the roads, there are also reasons to ‘worry. We should not innocently imagine that with the fall of Assad, Syria will miraculously become a pluralist, peaceful and prosperous country.

Nevertheless, the question posed about the future of Christians in the new Syria generally implies, among those who ask it, the conviction that the fall of the bloody Assad dictatorship inevitably means the coming to power of Islamists, and therefore a new episode of the global confrontation between Muslims and Christians.

A diversity of Islam and Christianity

Let us first remember that Syrian Islam itself is not homogeneous. Alongside the vast majority of Sunni citizens, the country also has Druze, Shiites, Alawites and Ismailis. On the other hand, Syria is also not homogeneous from an ethnic point of view and is also characterized by great contrasts from the point of view of its economic and social development.

Furthermore, it is difficult to speak of Christians as a homogeneous group. We must first distinguish those who are attached to Rome, and receive directives from the Vatican, from those who are not. Furthermore, the Churches which have their decision-making center outside Syria (such as the Maronites) are not in a situation comparable to those whose patriarchal seat is in Damascus, such as the Greek Orthodox and the Syriac Orthodox.

Finally, we generally tend to assimilate Christians to their clergy. However, Christians have also distinguished themselves by their adherence to forms of secularism, like Georges Sabra and Michel Kilo, both of Orthodox origin, trained in the Communist Party, and propelled to the head of the opposition to the regime at the start of the revolution, in 2011-2012.

The low weight of Christians

Due to this institutional division and this political plurality, Christians do not carry much political weight, especially since they have been considerably weakened demographically over the past ten years. Among the different groups that make up the Syrian mosaic, we must distinguish those who, like the Sunnis, the Alawites, the Kurds or the Druze, have a territorial base and armed militias, and those who, like the Christians, cannot create a balance of power with weapons in hand, because they have never been the bearers of a specific national and territorial project. On the contrary, they have always been the promoters of a Syrian and Arab national state.

This is what naturally brought them closer to the Baath Party. When Hafez Al Assad took power in 1970, “rectifying” the Baath line, they felt rather reassured. The new strongman represented a stabilization compared to previous regimes. However, Syria had not become a secular country, as some propaganda had led people to believe. A confessional balance based on an alliance of minorities and based on the exercise of terror was established.

Power, monopolized by a clique rather than by a particular confession, governed not by the easing of tensions and pacification between communities, but on the contrary by confessionalist, communitarian and geographical engineering which took full advantage of the competition between groups and the fear of each other. The Muslim Brotherhood’s 1979 uprising and subsequent crackdown lent credence to the idea that minorities were in danger and that Assad was their last line of defense.

This argument was reused against the Syrian revolution (2011-2018). The intervention of the Islamists and then of Daesh, in the Syrian civil war, served to once again legitimize Bashar against terrorism, and to ensure that the minorities regrouped, at least officially, behind him.

The cost of supporting the Assads

Before this war, Assad offered Christians access to schools and universities and the possibility of reaching high levels of responsibility, unthinkable in other Muslim-majority countries, such as Egypt. However, this Assad support for Christian religious freedom had a cost: the clergy could not be independent of the government, but had to adhere to official rhetoric and collaborate with the intelligence services. When the civil war broke out, he sided very firmly with Bashar before the Vatican invited Catholics to be more circumspect.

Today, while individuals and organizations try to support on the Internet the idea that the new masters are oppressing Christians, it seems on the contrary that they have no reason to complain about the militiamen of Hayat Tahrir Al- Cham and its leader Ahmed Hussein Al Charaa alias Abou Mohammed Al Joulani. Forms of cooperation between the latter and priests had already developed in the Idlib enclave in recent years.

An issue for international opinion

If Christians do not carry great political and military weight in current Syria, they can nevertheless benefit from the stake they represent in international opinion. The attitude of the new authorities towards them will in fact be considered as a test of respect for minorities and pluralism, and will serve as a criterion for the development of international cooperation and foreign support for the reconstruction of the country. On the other hand, in the event of the restoration of order and peace, it is imaginable that exiled Christians would return, or at least reinvest in the tourist economy and in industrial production in Syria, which would be beneficial to the all of its inhabitants.

However, we should not wait for the establishment of a European-style democracy. There “religious freedom”, of which the Melkite patriarch spoke, is that which Islamic law has recognized to Christians since the origins of Islam: that of exercising worship and following their own confessional law in personal and family matters. But this is not the freedom of conscience that the Universal Declaration of Human Rights speaks of. This is challenged by Islamic states, because it implies individual freedom in religious matters, therefore the right to change religion, to apostatize from Islam.

In the Constitution put in place by Assad, Muslim law was only one of the sources of law, not the only one. Civil law was not unified, with each community following its own personal law, with its own courts. In the event of a conflict of jurisdiction, it was nevertheless Muslim personal law which applied to all parties.

The new regime is expected above all to establish peace and the rule of law. But it is very likely that, if he keeps his promises to “moderation”it will align itself in terms of “religious freedom”on these Islamic-inspired provisions.