The Alawites: Between Syncretism and State Power

Their Beliefs

The Alawites (also called Nusayris) are a group concentrated primarily in Syria and southern Turkey whose beliefs include:

The deification of Ali ibn Abi Talib: Mainstream Alawite theology holds that Ali is a divine figure, an incarnation or manifestation of God. This is shirk by any definition of the term. Ali himself, when followers began attributing divine status to him, burned those who made the claim.

Transmigration of souls: Alawites believe in reincarnation: that souls transmigrate through multiple bodies after death. This contradicts the Quranic account of death, resurrection, and judgment.

Secret doctrine: Alawite theology is divided into exoteric (public) and esoteric (secret) levels. The full doctrine is revealed only to initiates (khassa). This two-tier structure (with religious truth available only to insiders) has no basis in Islam and is a marker of esoteric deviation.

Syncretism: Alawite practice incorporates elements from Christianity (the celebration of Christmas and Epiphany) and pre-Islamic Syrian religion. This reflects an origin as a syncretic movement rather than an Islamic one.

Ibn Taymiyyah's Ruling

Ibn Taymiyyah issued a fatwa on the Nusayriyya that is explicit: they are more dangerous to Islam than the Christians and the Mongols, because they present as Muslims while holding beliefs that are outside Islam entirely. He ruled that they are not Muslims and that the rules of Islam do not apply to them as to Muslims.

This ruling was issued in the context of the Crusades and Mongol invasions, when Alawite communities in the coastal mountains of Syria were observed to be supportive of Crusader presence and hostile to Muslim governance.

The Assad Family and Ba'athist Power

Hafez al-Assad came to power in Syria in 1970 through a military coup. He was Alawite, a member of a minority community that constituted approximately 12% of Syria's population in a country that was over 70% Sunni Muslim.

To legitimise his rule to a Sunni majority, Hafez al-Assad needed a fatwa declaring Alawites to be Muslims. In 1973, during the constitutional crisis when Syrians objected to the absence of an Islamic identity requirement for the president, the Lebanese Shia cleric Musa al-Sadr issued a fatwa declaring Alawites to be a branch of Shia Islam. This was a political fatwa with no scholarly basis, issued to serve the interests of Ba'athist power, not Islamic theology.

On the question of whether Alawites are Muslim: most mainstream Shia scholars and institutions do not accept Alawites as properly Shia, which matters because the claim to Shia identity was itself contested. The Assad regime sought a fatwa from the Lebanese Shia scholar Musa al-Sadr in 1973 declaring Alawites to be Shia Muslims; this fatwa is widely understood among scholars as politically motivated (issued in exchange for political considerations from the Syrian government) and was not followed by mainstream Shia scholarly bodies. The Sunni scholarly position on Alawite theology, based on classical analysis of their doctrines (divinity of Ali, transmigration of souls, absence of Islamic pillars), is that these doctrines place them outside the fold of Islam.

The Ba'athist project in Syria was explicitly secular and Arab nationalist: hostile to political Islam, to Islamic education, and to the independence of Islamic institutions. The Assad regime's relationship with Islam was instrumental: using Islamic legitimacy when convenient, suppressing it when threatening.

The Assad regime's Ba'athist project was not merely non-Islamic; it was actively hostile to Islam. This is documented in the systematic suppression of Islamic education, the imprisonment and torture of Islamic scholars and activists, and the alliance with Iran (itself a Shia theocracy) against the Sunni populations of Syria, Iraq, and Lebanon.

The massacres at Ghouta, Madaya, and Aleppo (documented in the contemporary issues entry on Iran and Israel) were committed by a regime whose ruling family belongs to a group that the major scholars of Islamic history ruled to be outside Islam.