Before We Became a Minority: From Ugarit to the Armed Checkpoint

When does a person born upon their own land become part of a minority compelled to justify its very existence? This book begins in Ugarit, the city that preserved writing and music in clay. It traces the history of the Syrian coast from the ancient civilisations and the Byzantine world, through the invasion of the Arab-Islamic armies, to the emergence of the Alawite faith, its retreat into the mountains, and the fatwas that crossed the centuries only to return in our own time through the language of religious excommunication, killing, and displacement. Dr.-Ing. Bassam Issa combines historical research with personal testimony. He does not write from a distance, but from the memory of a man whose life unfolded within Syrian state institutions, who witnessed the rise of sectarian discourse, left his country in 2014 out of concern for his family, and then followed from exile what happened on the coast, in as-Suwaida, and throughout the rest of Syria. The book defends no political system and holds no entire religious community responsible for the actions of individual members. Instead, it dismantles the narrative that reduced the Syrian state to a single sect, turned the individual Alawite into someone accused by birth, and simultaneously provided extremist groups with a religious language through which collective punishment could be justified. The question extends into the host country itself: What happens when an extremist carries with him the very fatwa from which he fled, and uses the freedom of the society that received him against that society itself? From Ugarit to the armed checkpoint, from the clay that preserved the first melody to the bullet that asks a human being which sect he belongs to, this book seeks to reclaim a principle older than all religions and states: A human being needs no fatwa in order to be born, and should need no creed in order to be allowed to remain alive. This is a book about Syria. At the same time, it is a book about identity, memory, and religion when it becomes a form of rule, as well as the necessary journey from the rule of creeds towards a state in which the human being stands above the fatwa.