As I stated before, Syria is one of the few countries in the area that are officially secular. Many religious people complain about the secularism of the state. Some even blame secularism for all the failures in our economies and politics.
Let’s look closely for a second before we blame anyone for our failures. Is the state indeed secular?

First let’s start with defining Secularism? According todictionary.com
Secularism is “The view that religious considerations should be excluded from civil affairs or public education”.

Now let’s see how Secularism applies in our dear country.

1. Our civil affairs and laws are hugely influenced by the Islamic law, “Shari a”, and the Syrian Judicial law takes the model of the Hanafite Sunni laws as a good example to follow. The influence mostly appears in personal affairs such as marriage, divorce, paternity, custody of children, and inheritance.

2. Our public and private school oblige students to receive religious education as a part of their curriculum from the 1st grade to the 12th.
-Sunni, Alawaite, Ismilite, Druz, Izidi, Sufi, and Shiite students (and all the non-religious and Atheist students whose families or ancestors belong to the sects just mentioned)are gathered under one category. They study a book that basically teaches some picked information from the Sunni faith.

-Orthodox, Catholic, and Protestant students (plus the Atheists and Non-religious ones) are gathered under one category. They also study one book which follows a faith that I assume follows the Orthodox faith, because they represent the majority of Christian. But it is known that the first lessons always deal with and glorifies “martyrdom”. These lessons also happen to have some not-very-spiritual quotes from famous Syrian politicians too.

For further and more specific information about religious education in Syrian schools, you could read the essay: Islamic Education in Syria: Undoing Secularism by Professor Joshua M. Landis


3. All missionaries, except a few Sunni and Christian ones, are prohibited from entering the country or promoting their faith, at least legally.

4. By law, Inter-faith marriages are permissible. However, the offspring of the marriage will always belong to the Islamic faith, whether the mother or the father is Muslim. So if an Atheist, Buddhist, or a Christian married a Muslim man or a woman in Syria, all their children will be considered officially as Muslims.

5. All conversions to any religion, except to Islam, are prohibited. I don’t know if it is a written or unwritten law, but I have a tragic story to tell you. It’s about a Damascene guy who used to live in our neighborhood.

He is the son of a prominent Syrian Actor. He and his friend were interested in learning about other faiths. Secretly, they converted to Christianity, but for some reason the secret wasn’t kept hidden very well. They started having hard time from the people around them including their friends and families that disowned them. That part of the story is not remarkably stranger than other conversion stories worldwide. However, things got even worse. When it was time for them to join the military service, they were badly treated and one of them got shot twice by some militant who wanted to convert them back. They served jail time for months. Many attempts of conversions went in vain, until the two headstrong guys were released and told to go free in condition they don’t tell anybody about their conversion.
The small details of that story might not be 100% accurate, but the story was told by the guy’s mother. She’s the only person in his family that is still in contact with him.

On the other hand, I heard about many people who openly talk about their Atheism, religious-bashing, conversions, or religious freedom. An example for that would be Nabil Fayad who is becoming a political and religious celeberity in Syria.

Having said all of the above, I would like to mention that I am not Anti or Pro Secular or Religious states in Syria. I just wanted to point that our versions of Religious and Secular states look so much alike and function in the same way. Furthermore, neither option worked well to secure our freedom of belief (whatever we believe or NOT believe in). Of course, provided that people who care about freedom of belief exist in this country.