Michael Totten points to this piece in The New Republic which sheds some light on the cult of personality around the Assad family which has developed amongst the Alawites. Based on the piece Totten declares that the Alawites are definitively not Muslims. This is problematic on two levels. First, Totten is an atheist last I checked. Who is he to declare takfir? For the unbelievers all organized superstitions are equally fallacious, and distinctions between kinds of fantasy should never be made into a precise science. Second, the argument that the Alawites are not Muslims is not as clear as Totten and his source make them out to be. I actually lean toward the proposition that the Alawite alignment with orthodox Shia Islam is a political calculation, and that the sect does come out of the esoteric and syncretistic religious milieu which has long been submerged amongst the alpine fringes of the Near East. Some groups, such as the Druze and the Yezidis, have become definitely non-Muslim (the Druze in particular are post-Muslim, in that their Muslim origins are clear). Others, such as the Alawites, have shifted toward a more Muslim identity.
But that’s neither here nor there. The New Republic piece is littered with error or misleading assertions. You have to know something about the facts to catch those errors though, and most people simply don’t know facts, whether through laziness or stupidity. The author of the piece observes that “Yemen is a stronghold of the Sunnis.” This isn’t really true. Yemen has one of the highest fractions of Shia in the Muslim world, probably higher than Lebanon, and certainly higher than Syria. The current president of Yemen, Ali Abdullah Saleh, is by origin a Shia. Granted, the Shia of Yemen are peculiar in that their beliefs and practices verge closer to Sunni Islam than most Shia. They are the flip side of the quasi-Shia Alawites, being quasi-Sunni. But this subtly is totally elided. Then the author states that “It’s very un-Islamic to read esoteric meanings into the Koran.” This is just not true! From Wikipedia:
An esoteric interpretation of the Qur’an is an interpretation of the Qur’an which includes attribution of esoteric or mystic meanings to the text by the interpreter. In this respect, its method is different from the conventional exegesis of the Qur’an, called tafsir. Esoteric interpretations do not usually contradict the conventional (in this context called exoteric) interpretations; instead, they discuss the inner levels of meaning of the Qur’an. A hadith from Prophet Muhammad which states that the Qur’an has an inner meaning, and that this inner meaning conceals a yet deeper inner meaning, and so on (up to seven levels of meaning), has sometimes been used in support of this view….
Esoteric interpretations are found in Sufism and in the sayings (hadiths) of both Twelver and Ismaili Shi’a Imams. In Arabic, batin refers to the inner or esoteric meaning of a sacred text, and zahir to the apparent or exoteric meaning.
Many of the generalizations people make about Islam qua Islam are actually about the non-mystical strands in Sunni Islam. One can argue that this is the majority of the world’s Muslims (though the diffuse influence of Sufi strands softens this assertion), but very few deny that the Shia of Iran are Muslims. Esoteric readings of the Koran go back to the beginning of Islam, and as it happens the mainstream orthodox tradition turned away from it. But the tendency is preserved in marginal and minority Islam traditions…such as among the Alawites!
The piece above attempts to give the reader a deeper and more textured window into Syria. I don’t have much issue here or there with their characterization of the Assad cult of personality. But a lot of the stuff I can double check, and which would be beyond the ability of the typical reader to notice, is shady.
Thanks very much, Razib, this post is quite helpful.
Anything Michael Totten writes should be taken with a supertanker load of salt. His pieces from the Russian-Georgian conflict read like they were all lifted directly from the Georgian government’s press releases.
re: totten. he has spent much of the past 10 years writing about the mid-east, and a lot of time there. i don’t get why he’s still so thin on medium-level difficulty facts. i’ve seen him make first approximation errors many times. that’s fine if it isn’t your bread & butter, but he’s supposed to add value?
Why let facts get in the way of a great conclusion?
Even for a neocon Michael Totten’s reporting on the Middle East is awful. He just doesn’t know what he’s talking about. In 1973, the Shia theologian Musa Al-Sadr – “the Vanished Imam” – formally recognised the Alawis as Shia coreligionists. As for the origins of the Alawites, I read somewhere they’re descendents of the Bahrain-based Qarmatians an Ismaili sect whose state was destroyed by the Seljuk Turks in the eleventh century.
I’ve seen bigger boners from equally exalted experts. Christopher Hitchens, who wrote in 2003:
“I have no respect for the hereditary principle and neither does Shiite Islam, which considers earthly kingship to be profane.”
Hunh? The Shia split off precisely because of their support for hereditary succession. I guess Hitchens could used the phrase “earthly kingship” as a weasely out, but it obscures almost everything important about Shia origins.
At the risk of quote Wiki:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Shi%27a%E2%80%93Sunni_relations
“Sunnis follow the Rashidun “rightly guided Caliphs”, who were the first four caliphs who ruled after the death of Muhammad: Abu Bakr (632-634), Umar ibn al-Khattab (634-644), Uthman ibn Affan(644-656), and Ali Ibn Abi Talib(656-661).
Shia theology discounts the legitimacy of the first three caliphs and believe that Ali is the second-most divinely inspired man (after Muhammad) and that he and his descendants by Muhammad’s daughter Fatimah daughter of Muhammad’s first wife Khadījah bint Khuwaylid, the Imams, are the sole legitimate Islamic leaders.”
The full Hitchens article is here:
http://newsgroups.derkeiler.com/Archive/Soc/soc.culture.indian/2006-06/msg00298.html
He generally blows off the threat poised at the time by Moqtada al-Sadr and puff up Khomeni’s grandson, of whom we’ve heard nothing about ever since.
And, this, mind you, was one of the leading voices that got us mired in Iraq.
Interesting sidenote: Hitchens nearly got himself and Totten killed in Beirut when defaced some kooky party’s signage.
Much like the question of whether Mormons are Christians, the question of whether Alawites are Muslims is one for which there is no ascertainable fact of the matter. Sufficiently expert observers can point out historical facts about the origins of different sects, and matters of doctrine and ritual on which one sect differs from other sects generally considered to be members of X religion. One can also ascertain how widespread the belief is among self-identified adherents of X religion is that a particular sect is or isn’t part of X religion. And all of that may be true and useful information. But it doesn’t answer the question people seem to want answered. Maybe people should stop asking it and ask the questions that can be answered.
@CJColucci: I’m not so sure the question is binarily unanswerable. For granularity within related groups it may not be meaningful to set up an arbitrary list of rigid criteria as a yes/no “litmus” test.
I think the analogy to ethnicity is an apt one – and Razib’s expertise with population genetics should be able to generate some insights. Think of someone living on the Swedish / Norwegian border. Does it “make sense” to ask whether that person, if you were to examine their genes, was “either Swedish or Norwegian?” Probably not. But if you tested lots of Swedes and lots of Norwegians you would find those semi-distinct clusters one see on those 2d allele frequency charts.
In fact, there would be no official “ideal Swedish archetype” – all you would have a series of bell curves and correlations. You would know what the two populations tend to statistically share and how they differ, and then you could “place” a particular individual in your graph and see *to what degree and with what probability or level of confidence* you could characterize his “genetic identity” or even admixture.
Now, we can continue this analogy to examinations of any question of multivariate terminological qualification, especially ones that have certain “genetic”-like attributes like branching from common origins, heritability, and hybridization. Religion is one of those phenomena. Here’s a close-enough example to what I’m talking about.
If you gave every member of the Near East a kind of religious GSS, especially one with a high level of specificity as to the major distinctions in Muslim theological diversity, you would end up with “confessional clusters” that would look awfully similar to those genetics graphs. Placing any particular individual, or even the official positions of a sect as a kind of “archetypal Alawite”, would permit to visualize the distance to the major Muslim clusters. You could do the same thing for the Mormons and Christianity of course. Maybe you could map everybody and every religion on a sufficiently comprehensive and radically simplified graph.
And you would look to what degree any particular sect seemed distinct and unrelated to the dominant clusters. Distance from X, being an “islands” of idiosyncrasy, or a closer proximity and affinity to a clearly distinct alternative categorization Y, would tend to indicate that any particular sect is “not really X”.
Now, it is true that to complicate matters these things, of course, change over time, and furthermore, even a Sect that is “not really X” may choose to identify with the mainstream of X both for concrete political and social advantages (preventing discrimination and bias, not being seen as strange, outsider cult-followers by the dominant group, etc.) and the psychological benefit of not *feeling* like an distinct outsider oneself.
For example, if you were to do this analysis for the Mormons and measure the Mormons to be “not really like other Christians”, and to find that all the other Christian groups are tolerant of each other but in near-unanimous agreement that the Mormons aren’t really like the rest of them, it would still be true that many Mormons would identity themselves as mainstream Christians both to shape attitudes amongst the other Christians and to bolster their own feelings of fitting-in and normalcy.
Finally, while I don’t think Totten is sufficiently knowledge to “declare takfir”, the tone of that line seemed to suggest that either such a declaration is impossible or meaningless, and/or that it could only be appropriately undertaken by a Muslim or a scholar of Islam. Apologies if I’m misinterpreting that, of course, but I think that anyone doing the data-analysis exercise I’ve outlined above can and should be perfectly qualified to call ’em as they measure ’em. It should be possible for anyone conducting this exercise, regardless of personal beliefs or experience, to objectively demonstrate and illustrate their assessment of truth value of an assertion like “The Alawites are not really Muslim, but pretend to be for reasons of political convenience”.