Syria brief, Part II
Women's rights, Islamic jurisprudence, and the question of virtue
Happy New Year new readers! I am gleefully back at my desk after a few weeks of work and family travel, basking in the thrill of routine. This week’s installment will, as promised, round out the discussion of Syria and Hayat Tahrir al-Sham (HTS) that I began in my last post. But, coming on the heels of a horrific ISIS-inspired attack in New Orleans that killed 15 people and injured many more, I first want to say a few words about this particular kind of modern jihad.
In many ways, the New Orleans attack was a textbook example of the individualistic, spectacular (in the literal sense), and nihilist violence I described in my last book. The assailant, Shamsud-Din Jabbar, grew up mostly secular in Texas with a father who converted to Islam, joined the army after a failed stint in college due to heavy partying, eventually earned a business administration bachelor’s degree in computer information systems, worked for Deloitte, got disillusioned with the world, and was radicalized online. Family report that he also seemed to be unraveling on account of financial pressures and three failed marriages.
Following a very common pattern, Jabbar never received a traditional Islamic education and was reportedly alienated from his local Muslim community. He swore allegiance to ISIS in a video message, but at this point it seems that the impetus was his alone; ISIS was an inspiration, not a command structure. Like so many who have turned to this form of violence, he regarded jihad as an individual duty that could be undertaken without all the things that were traditionally required to make a jihad legitimate: a recognized ruler to declare it, an army to wage it, and a set of parameters concerning who could be targeted (non-combatants are typically off limits). These were the legal strictures that separated jihad as warfare from mere vigilantism.
In contrast, ISIS believes that anyone anywhere can participate in the global jihad using whatever means he had access to, including vehicles. The following is taken from one of my old issues of the ISIS magazine, Rumiyah, which included an entire section on “just terror” tactics and identified “large outdoor conventions and celebrations” and “Pedestrian-congested streets” as applicable targets.
The individualization of jihad is inherently destabilizing, but in mixed ways. On the the one hand, you have a figure like Jabbar—or before him, the assailants in San Bernardino and Orlando, among others—for whom the idea of a personalized jihad renders horrific attacks on civilian targets in the West permissible. Like those of al-Qaeda, such attacks are designed to create a sense of universal vulnerability and perpetual insecurity: it could happen to anyone, at anytime. On the other hand, the idea that jihad is no longer the exclusive right of recognized rulers is a potentially emancipatory message — exactly that which powered HTS and other rebel groups in Syria over many long and grueling years of civil war. But in that case, the aim is local and revolutionary, not global and symbolic. And as I wrote last time, “HTS eschews this globalized logic [of ISIS] and rather framed its jihad squarely in terms of ousting the Syrian regime. They seem fundamentally uninterested in attacking Western targets, including Americans in Syria.” The attack in New Orleans serves to underscore the significance of that distinction.
Finally, it’s worth noting that HTS has labored to reinscribe the use of violence within an alternative political structure such that individual soldiers cannot act in the manner of Jabbar - in other words, to curb the revolutionary potential of individualized jihad. All this points to a concerted attempt to govern - including the pragmatic need to monopolize the use of force.
So much for this latest attack (shameless plug: if you want to dive deeper, you should read my book on ISIS). Today I planned to return to HTS’s approach to women’s rights, Islamic jurisprudence, and democracy. Each of these is a massive topic in its own right, so I’m making the executive decision to whittle this list down to the first two (those of you pining for #3 should stay tuned for a bonus translation of and commentary on a very interesting fatwa about parliamentary rule). With no further ado:
Women’s rights: The issue of women’s rights in Muslim societies has long been a contentious one in the West, with scholars like Giyatri Spivak and Lila Abu-Lughod criticizing the imperial posture that Western observers have assumed toward Muslim women (“white men saving brown women from brown men” in Spivak’s memorable phrasing). Such sentiments have often provided a pretext for imperial conquest, from 18th century India to 21st century Afghanistan. It’s worth keeping this context in mind and trying to center the voices of Syrian women in the conversation, starting with what we know about those who lived for the last several years under HTS rule in Idlib.
The general picture is not great, but also not the sort of dystopian world of ISIS or Taliban rule. Women reportedly make up over 60% of university students in Idlib province—a far from cry the near total ban of education for girls one finds in Afghanistan today—but controversy emerged after they were prevented from studying media and political science. According to the feminist activist Ghalia Rahhal, HTS officials in the past harassed her and feminist colleagues and attempted to curb their work in women’s empowerment centres.
Still, Rahhal describes a world of give and take that is more hopeful terrain for women’s organizing. Per The Guardian’s reporting:
A few handpicked to serve in the transitional government have already drawn anger for their comments about women. Obaida Arnout, a spokesperson for the new authority, said women’s “biological and physiological nature” made them unfit for some government jobs.
And Aisha al-Dibs, the new minister for women, said she would not “give room” to any civil society organisations that disagree with her view, citing one “catastrophic” programme eight years ago that she claimed led to a rise in divorce rates.
Both statements sparked a fierce backlash, all of which appeared to chasten the new government. Days later, Maysaa Sabrine, a former deputy at the Syrian central bank, was appointed to head the institution, the first woman to do so in its history. Rahhal views this as part of a push-pull of draconian measures she said she was familiar with under HTS rule, with their repeal labelled as responsiveness to criticism.
Many will no doubt fixate on issues of women’s dress, which is a wholly inadequate measure of women’s freedom in a context in which feminist activists wear hijabs while Assad apologists invoke the bikini to defend his murderous regime (I jest, but only barely). As with minority relations, we are in too-early-to-tell territory when it comes to how HTS will manage its own internal factions while navigating a broader social context that includes a large secular population — not to mention many women activists who are already demanding equality.
What we do know is that, As HTS swept across Syria, its command issued a statement on social media indicating, “It is strictly forbidden to interfere with women’s dress or impose any request related to their clothing or appearance, including requests for modesty.” Perhaps they have seen other revolutionary Islamists crash and burn on the shores of women’s rights, and are trying to steer away from controversy. The problem is that such issues cannot be avoided forever, as any new constitution and governing structure will have to hash out contentious issues concerning women’s political rights and roles, divorce and custody issues, domestic violence, and education.
My hunch is that HTS leader Ahmad al-Sharaa knows very well that pushing for a hardline Islamist stance on any of these will undermine his leadership of a unified Syria and potentially kindle an inter-factional struggle with the US-backed Syrian Democratic Forces. But he also knows that perceived shortcoming on shari‘a adherence will compromise his ability to lead HTS and keep its more conservative players in line. How he plans to square this circle is anyone’s guess, but he arguably has some flexibility afforded by HTS’s approach to Islamic jurisprudence, which leads us to:
Law: This whole topic is a bit inside baseball, but I find it both significant and promising that HTS does not pretend to be above the traditional schools of Sunni Islamic legal interpretation (forgive me: every once in a while I need to nerd out about the things I studied in grad school). The very long story short is that legal pluralism is an integral part of Sunni jurisprudence, with four recognized schools (mathhab/mathahib), each with their scholars, texts, institutions, interpretive rules, and analytic criteria. They don’t all agree with each other, but there is a strong convention for adherents of other schools to recognize the rulings of any of the four as valid.
I find all this super fascinating from a legal and philosophical perspective, but what’s important for our purposes is that many modern jihadi groups—ISIS perhaps most notoriously—have claimed a form of legal authority that supersedes that of the traditional schools. In lieu of admitting that interpretation is an inherent part of jurisprudence, ISIS followed in the wake of ideologues who claimed it was possible to implement the divine law directly without any human muddling or mediation by returning to the example set by the prophet and early generations of Muslims (the salaf, from which the term Salafi is derived). If this sounds a bit Protestant, you’re on the right track, as I first argued ten years ago when ISIS surged onto the global scene. As the scholar Roxanne Euben has said, “the denial that an interpretation is an interpretation is a crucial characteristic of what it means to be a ‘fundamentalist’.”
While HTS is officially Salafi in orientation, the group recognizes the other schools of legal interpretation and has pursued a policy of rapprochement over the past several years. Writing in 2021, Jerome Drevon and Patrick Haenni found that HTS “developed a more inclusive religious approach over time” that was particularly noteworthy for its restrictive position on excommunication, or takfir, an ISIS hallmark that facilitated extensive attacks on other Muslims. As they continue:
At the Shari‘a Faculty of Idlib, the salafi religious creed (‘aqida) is taught but schools of jurisprudence are also emphasised, with a specific role of the Shafa‘i maddhab [school] as it is the most common in Idlib. The deputy dean of the Faculty of Shari‘a recognises that “we are searching for common ground that allows a teaching for all and for that, among us, we reject the use of the concept of takfir. No one can tell that the other is outside of Islam.”
So too, the group has embraced the Shafa‘i school (which has historically been dominant in Syria) in key religious institutions not because it is doctrinally the closest to the HTS’s own Salafi proclivities, but because it is the school of the majority. Drevon and Haenni further recount the creation in 2019 of a High Council on Fatwa “intended to undermine the authority of the global salafi jihadi thinkers and dilute the influence of the remaining hardliners inside.” As one HTS-affiliated scholar told the researchers:
We made sure we invited everyone: Sufis, Ash‘ari, shaykhs linked to other factions. Our objective was not to monopolise the fatwa but to set up a body with a legitimacy able to impose itself as an indisputable reference. The opinions of the High Council are rare but strong; they also aim to prevent people from following fatwas that come from abroad.
At a substantive theological level, all this points to a years-long attempt by HTS to transition away from its Salafi jihadi roots and toward the path followed by more conventional Islamist parties in the region. Critics may still find much lacking in the latter, but they are on the whole not interested in the sort of bloody purity politics of ISIS (who, it’s worth remembering, brutally persecuted Sufis among others).
Finally, the attempt to re-root the group in the local Syrian context has also required recognizing the legitimacy of people’s existing practices rather than trying to impose new ones on a top-down basis. The great caveat is that this accord might work fine when dealing with a conservative religious society, wherein some variance is allowed within horizons that are still relatively constrained. But how does it work when dealing with a truly pluralistic society that includes many who are secular or non-Muslims?
There are many Islamists who argue that one cannot impose religious virtue from the top down using state institutions, and rather focus their efforts on outreach and education. I don’t have any fundamental problem with such an approach, which is common across religions and particularly prevalent within contemporary Jewish communities. The problem comes when conservative figures use state power to implement religious rulings that are at odds with the wishes of most people — you know, like stripping women of the right to an abortion. Someday I’ll write much more about this question of virtue and the state across cultures.