Roads to Freedom
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by Wendell Steavenson August 29, 2011
I arrived in Damascus on a Friday at the end of July, a few days before the start of Ramadan, and five months into a grimly repetitive series of protests and crackdowns in towns and cities across Syria. When I checked into my hotel, I discovered that I was the only guest. I also found that I could not connect to the Internet. “Friday, Saturday—Internet very bad,” the desk manager explained. I learned later that the government steps up its restriction of Internet service on the Islamic weekend, because that is when most of the protests occur.
I walked through the Old City—the Christian quarter and the Shia quarter, the Sufi mosques and the souks of Sunni merchants, the labyrinthine passages and hidden courtyards. It was quiet without the usual throng of browsing tourists. In cafés, I was often the only customer. The Old City is, in some ways, a microcosm of modern Syria, a secular state that comprises an array of ethnic and religious groups. At the heart of the Old City is the magnificent Umayyad Mosque, a part of which was built originally as a Byzantine church. Sunni worshippers mingle with Shia pilgrims visiting the shrine of the martyr Hussein, the Prophet’s grandson, and with Christians visiting the tomb of John the Baptist.
Syria came under the secular, socialist rule of the Baath Party in 1963. For the past four decades, it has been controlled by the Assad family—first by Hafez al-Assad, who took power in a coup, and, since his death, in 2000, by his son, the current President, Bashar al-Assad. The Assads belong to one of Syria’s most distinctive minority groups, the Alawites, who are followers of a secretive dissident offshoot of Shiism, and historically come from villages in the country’s mountainous west. The Assad regime has kept minorities it favors protected within a majority Sunni population by maintaining a rigidly authoritarian state. Syrians are mindful of sectarian strife in neighboring Lebanon and Iraq—more than a million Iraqi refugees have taken shelter in Syria since 2003—and, for many of them, lack of freedom has been offset by the consolations of stability and security, in a region without much of either.
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