Ibrahim Hamidi - the man in Sham - just published an article in al-Hayat explaining that Syrian authorities have set aside the recent decision of the Director of Awqaf in Damascus خالد المعتم Khalid al-Ma`tim, which forbid teaching religion lessons in the mosques and required them to close in between prayer times. The law had also restricted Qu'ran classes to two times a week and cancelled the early morning and evening calls to prayer. This was all highly provocative and caused a backlash. ("Syria Comment" reported on this decision before the international press thanks to a guest writer from Syria.)

As a result the military academy invited the religious authorities of Syria, including Muhammad Habash and the Grand Mufti Hassoun, to a conference on religion. According to Ibrahim, this was the first time that the military establishment in Syria has invited religious figures to common dialogue in the academy since the Baath came to power in 1963.

Habash and others used the occasion to call for establishing religious instruction in the military academy, claiming there was no contradiction between Islam and Arab nationalism and that the two sprung from the same values and reinforced each other. Habash criticized the new party law indirectly by stating that there is no reason to forbid the establishment of religiously based parties. He pointed to the success of Hamas and the resistance in Lebanon as well as religiously based parties in Iraq and Egypt. He suggested that Syria should embrace this new religious awakening within Syria as it does in its foreign policy to strengthen Arabism.

This is a very smart line of argumentation on his part. It traps President Bashar in his own contradictory policy of supporting Islamic parties in neighboring countries while suppressing them at home. This is the same thing that Bayanouni and Khaddam are doing in the external opposition and that the Damascus Declaration folks called for within Syria. The religious establishment in Syria will be able to use the growing strength of the religious opposition to fight for more latitude for its activities at home.

Bashar will have to respond positively to Habash if he wants to neutralize, or at least attenuate, the opposition's call for greater religious freedoms in the political arena. This is what we have seen happen in Egypt, Jordan and elsewhere in the Middle East. The state has been steadily dragging the edges of the imperial tent outward in the direction of religious authorities to keep them working within the system rather than joining the opposition. It places the Syrian state in a very awkward position. The military authorities in Syria have always had an inimical relationship to political Islam, as the attempt to ban Islamic instruction demonstrated. Syria can no longer fight Islamism through suppression alone. It must find a way to tame it and bring it over to the state's side. This will be very difficult. The only real way to do this is to inculcate "liberalism" and change the fundamentalist underpinnings of much of the Islamic revival. Liberalism is something that the Baath Party doesn't know much about for it contradicts the very nature of a one party state. If the Baathists adopt real liberalism it will undermine their own raison d'etre.