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Angry protests met the announcement that the Sanjak would be detached from Syria, despite French mandatory officials’ efforts to present the agreement as a guarantee of the security of the soon-to-be-independent Syrian state. In preparation for the upcoming elections to the Assembly of the newly independent Sanjak, Arab and Turkish activists tried to recruit potential voters. Ankara redefined the Arabic-speaking Alawis as Turks, creating violent fissures in one of the Sanjak’s poorest but most populous communities. The Arab nationalist League of National Action led opposition to the Sanjak’s new status, opposing French and Turkish efforts to enforce the League of Nations decisions and continuing its attacks on the collaborationist Syrian government. In Geneva, a Committee of Experts drew up a new Statute and Fundamental Law to govern the independent Sanjak.

A good example of the porosity of sectarian boundaries is provided in this chapter on Turkish migrants in Germany of Shi’a backgrounds. While the Shi’a religious field in Germany is fairly small and has only recently grown, Alevis from Turkey have had a long presence in Germany. The chapter discusses lines of cooperation between different Shi’a groups – a cooperation based on pragmatic considerations given their limited numbers and few resources in the small diasporic space of Germany. At the same time, Alevis, Twelver Shi’ites and Nusayri-Alawis from Turkey cooperate and hold events together based on the shared orientation towards and veneration of the ahl al-bayt that transcends the historical, cultural and doctrinal differences between these movements. At the same time, the chapter observes how certain Alevi movements undertake a rapprochement towards Twelver Shi’ism adopting some of its legal and ritual practices and following its clerical authorities.

In this chapter there are two primary categories to emerge with regard to the classification of minorities in the Middle East. The first comprises religious minorities, both early religious groups and more contemporary groups established during or after the nineteenth century. The second category comprises Muslim ethnic groups spread over two or more territories with a distinct cultural identity and language. This chapter details religious minority identities. Within the first section of this chapter, we examine non-Muslim religious communities including Jews, and a rather broad number of Christian communities, while accepting that some groups cross-cut this category. Section two examines Islamic minority communities including the ‘Alawis, Druze, Babism and the Baha’i Faith, and Ismaili communities.

This chapter seeks to examine and analyse the history and legislative provisions to protect ‘minorities’ in Syria. It offers an explanation of how these can be identified in a state that has been effectively ruled by a minority community, seeking to provide explanations and a context for this rule. A significant focus of the chapter lies on what we view as sectarian entrepreneurialism which plays a significant role in the events that played out in Syria in 2012. The identity politics that took root under Bashar Al-Asad provided a ready-made framework within which religious, social, and political divisions are articulated. Alawis, Druze, Palestinians (a majority of whom are Sunni) and Christians in Syria, whilst comprising a demographic minority, have either forged an uneasy alliance under Asad or have endeavoured to remain ‘neutral’.

This introductory chapter begins with a brief description of the ʻAlawis, considered one of the most conspicuous, talked-about confessional groups in the Middle East today. The ʻAlawis represent perhaps 11 percent of the population in Syria, with important regional concentrations in the province of Antioch (Hatay) as well as in Adana and Mersin in southern Turkey, and in the ʻAkkar district and the city of Tripoli in northern Lebanon. The discussion then turns to classical perceptions of ʻAlawism, nomenclaturism, and dissimulation. Almost all previous studies of the ʻAlawi past either have been too concerned with theology or have provided only histoiré événementielle, emplotting a handful of references to seemingly ubiquitous, but in fact very rare, instances of sectarian strife, discrimination, and violence of the sort favored in the narrative chronicles, to produce a story of apparently unremitting conflict. In contrast, this book focuses on the less conspicuous—but ultimately more typical—historical evidence of mundane, uneventful, everyday interaction between the ʻAlawis, their neighbors, and the state authorities. An overview of the subsequent chapters is also presented.

This chapter re-examines the early development of the ʻAlawi community and its situation in western Syria in the medieval period in the wider context of what might be termed Islamic provincial history. It starts from the premise that the conventional image of the “Nusayris” has largely been fashioned by elite historical sources whose discourse on nonorthodox groups is a priori negative but which, when read against the grain and compared with other sources, can yield a less essentializing, less conflicting account of the community's development. In particular, the chapter aims to show that the ʻAlawi faith was not the deviant, marginal phenomenon it has retrospectively been made out to be but, on the contrary, constituted, and was treated by the contemporary authorities as, a normal mode of rural religiosity in Syria.

This chapter addresses what can in effect be described as the consolidation of the ʻAlawi community in a newfound “compact” form. It argues that the receding tide of Shiʻism did not expose the ʻAlawis to a Sunni or Mamluk backlash, but rather permitted the community to cement both its religious leadership and identity and its position vis-à-vis the state. On the local level, the thirteenth century was witness to an intense debate over the limits of ʻAlawi orthodoxy, a debate that helped give the doctrine its final form and established the ʻulama as the community's uncontested religious authority, but in doing so also removed religion from the sphere of everyday life. Drawing on the Khayr al-Saniʻa as well as a wide range of medieval literature, the subsequent sections explore the relationship between the ʻAlawi community and the Mamluk state beyond the trope of enmity and persecution.

This chapter examines the Ottoman cadastres in detail, both to demonstrate the extent of the Ottoman state's control over the region in the sixteenth century and to show that the Ottomans did not attempt to annihilate the ʻAlawi population (as is claimed in local folklore) but rather to maximize their tax revenues, maintaining ʻAlawi-specific dues but also emending or even forgiving taxes in areas in need of economic revival. The second part of the chapter draws mainly on Ottoman executive orders to show that the imperial government perceived of brigandage in the coastal mountains committed by ʻAlawis as a social and not a religious problem, repeatedly casting “uneducated” ʻAlawi subjects as the victims of manipulation by more powerful figures, and not discriminating against them on the basis of their religion.

This chapter follows the rise to power of the Shamsins, the Bayt al-Shillif, and associated ʻAlawi families as Ottoman tax concessionaries. It shows that their position of local autonomy, rather than having evolved out of some domestic or “tribal” leadership structure, resulted from a paradigm shift in Ottoman provincial administration as well as from a very favorable economic context, in particular the development of commercial tobacco farming in the northern highlands around Latakia. If the eighteenth century witnessed the emergence of a veritable Ottoman–ʻAlawi landed gentry, it also saw increasing social disparities lead to large-scale emigration away from the highlands toward the coastal and inland plains as well as toward the Hatay district of what is today southern Turkey.

This chapter highlights major trends in Ottoman and Syrian history affecting the ʻAlawi community in the nineteenth century. It begins by showing that the ʻAlawi notability increasingly came into conflict with semiautonomous local officials during the breakdown of Ottoman imperial authority at the start of the century, causing the community as a whole to be cast as heretics and outcasts from Ottoman society for the first time. Faced with increasing discrimination and abuse by provincial officials, ʻAlawi feudal leaders nonetheless continued to support the diffuse authority of the Ottoman Empire over the intrusive statism of the Egyptian regime between 1832 and 1840. The ʻAlawi community was then increasingly subjected to repressive social engineering measures under the Tanzimat and the reign of Abdülhamid II, including military conscription and conversion. At the same time, however, while resisting efforts at assimilation, the ʻAlawis also began to avail themselves of the benefits of modern public schooling and proportional representation on newly instituted municipal councils, thereby finding their voice as a political community for perhaps the first time.

This chapter documents the ʻAlawis' ambivalent relationship with the Syrian Arab, Ottoman/Turkish, and French colonial projects at the threshold of the contemporary era. The first section considers the educational policies of the Abdülhamid regime toward the ʻAlawis, which generated what was probably the most extensive documentation ever in their regard. The second and third sections analyze ongoing control and development measures in the region under both Abdülhamid and the CUP government (1908–14), and show how the ʻAlawis capitalized on the opportunities provided by modern schooling and increasing contact with the outside world to promote a distinctly local, ʻAlawi “reformism.” The final section discusses the contrast between France's separatist, confessionalist policies and Turkey's resolve to incorporate and assimilate the ʻAlawis of Cilicia and the Alexandretta (Hatay) district.

This concluding chapter summarizes key themes and presents some final thoughts. The book has shown that the multiplicity of lived ʻAlawi experiences cannot be reduced to the sole question of religion or framed within a monolithic narrative of persecution; that the very attempt to outline a single coherent history of “the ʻAlawis” may indeed be misguided. The sources on which this study has drawn are considerably more accessible, and the social and administrative realities they reflect consistently more mundane and disjointed, than the discourse of the ʻAlawis' supposed exceptionalism would lead one to believe. Therefore, the challenge for historians of ʻAlawi society in Syria and elsewhere is not to use the specific events and structures these sources detail to merely add to the already existing metanarratives of religious oppression, Ottoman misrule, and national resistance but rather to come to a newer and more intricate understanding of that community, and its place in wider Middle Eastern society, by investigating the lives of individual ʻAlawi (and other) actors within the rich diversity of local contexts these sources reveal.

This chapter presents a complex multifaceted reading of the history of the Alawi community in Syria. It provides an opportunity to interrogate the way in which the religious and the political intertwine and shed light upon the current impasse in the country and the wider region. It examines how the Alawi community came into being, what its beliefs are and to what extent the sect's genesis and dogma have had an impact upon its evolution as a political community. In religious terms, the Alawi community has made major strides by re-integrating into the broader socio-religious fabric of Syrian society through asserting its mainstream Shi’a affiliation. Those within the community who are disinclined towards any religious affiliation have found a place in the secular spaces of society. Politically, however, the Alawi community as a whole has been hamstrung by its association with the ruling Asad clan, which has exploited religious identity to entrench autocratic rule.

This chapter explores the embattled existence and contested identities of Lebanon's Alawi community in Tripoli. It focuses on the entrenched hilltop enclave of Jabal Mohsen, perched above its historic Sunni rival, Bab al-Tabbaneh, in the valley below. Economically marginalised and religiously mistrusted, the social and urban fractures of Jabal Mohsen have been exacerbated by reliance and support on Syria's Alawi-led Asad dynasty. Political and military complicity with Syrian forces during the Lebanese civil war (1975-90) and more recent support for Bashar al-Asad in Syria's ongoing civil war continues to enflame historic grievances and contemporary animosities. For almost four decades, Tripoli has witnessed intermittent violence between Salafist militias and Alawi fighters from these rival neighbourhoods. Open conflict has transformed and distorted daily lives and everyday urban structures. This territorial conflict reflects and is fuelled by a number of broader struggles: the battle for Lebanese sovereignty and army control; the role and influence of Tripoli's political elites and intensifying geo-political rivalries — Syria-Iran-Hizbullah and Saudi-Qatar-Sunni ‘Future party’. This chapter, based on interviews and ethnographic observations within Jabal Mohsen, examines the ongoing and complex negotiation of identity, social memory and everyday survival. It seeks to analyse Jabal Mohsen as a both a physical site of urban conflict and an imagined space of communal solidarities (national, religious, political, victimhood) and geo-political rivalries.