Geography Reference
In-Depth Information
logy and an attendant personality cult. Photos of President Hafez al-Assad on every shop
window and car windshield defaced the landscape. Geography did not determine Syria's
destiny—or Turkey's—but it was a starting point.
Geography and history tell us that Syria, with a population of twenty million, will con-
tinue to be the epicenter of turbulence in the Arab world. Aleppo in northern Syria is a
bazaar city with greater historical links to Mosul and Baghdad in Iraq than to Damascus,
Syria's capital. Whenever Damascus's fortunes declined, Aleppo recovered its greatness.
Wandering through the souks of Aleppo, it is striking how distant and irrelevant Damascus
seems. Aleppo's souks are dominated by Kurds, Turks, Circassians, Arab Christians, Ar-
menians, and others, unlike the Damascus souk, which is more a world of Sunni Arabs. As
in Pakistan and the former Yugoslavia, in Syria each sect and religion is associated with a
specific geographical region. Between Aleppo and Damascus is the increasingly Islamist
Sunni heartland of Homs and Hama. Between Damascus and the Jordanian border are the
Druze, and in the mountain stronghold contiguous to Lebanon are the Alawites, both rem-
nants of a wave of Shiism from Persia and Mesopotamia that a thousand years ago swept
over Syria. Free and fair elections in 1947, 1949, and 1954 exacerbated these divisions
by dividing the vote along regional, sectarian, and ethnic lines. The late Hafez al-Assad
came to power in 1970 after twenty-one changes of government in the previous twenty-
four years. For three decades he was the Leonid Brezhnev of the Arab world, staving off
the future by failing to build a civil society at home. Whereas Yugoslavia still had an intel-
lectual class at the time of its breakup, Syria did not, so stultifying was the elder Assad's
regime.
During the Cold War and early Post Cold War years, Syria's fervent pan-Arabism was a
substitute for its weak identity as a state. Greater Syria was an Ottoman-era geographical
term that included present-day Lebanon, Jordan, and Israel-Palestine, to which the trun-
cated borders of the current Syrian state do great violence. This historic Greater Syria was
called by Princeton scholar Philip K. Hitti “the largest small country on the map, micro-
scopic in size but cosmic in influence,” encompassing in its geography, at the confluence
furnished the Greco-Roman world with some of its most brilliant thinkers, Stoics and Neo-
platonists among them. Syria was the seat of the Umayyad Empire, the first Arab dynasty
after Muhammad, which was larger than Rome at its zenith. And it was the scene of argu-
ably the greatest drama in history between Islam and the West: the Crusades.
But the Syria of recent decades has been a ghost of this great geographical and historical
legacy. And the Syrians are poignantly aware of it; for, as they know, the loss of Lebanon
cut off much of Syria's outlet to the Mediterranean, from which its rich cultural depositories
had breathed life. Ever since France sundered Lebanon from Syria in 1920, the Syrians
have been desperate to get it back. That is why the total Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon
