Unlike Mustafa Kemal in Turkey and Abdel Nasser in Egypt, the Syrian Ba‘thists did not seek to integrate the ulama into the state apparatus: on the contrary, they deliberately excluded them from it. As a result, the clergy has enjoyed relative economic and institutional autonomy in spite of the suffocating surveillance by the mukhabarat (intelligence service).

INSTITUTIONAL DEVELOPMENT AND KEMALIST-LIKE MODERNISATION (1946–1963)

While a modern centralised state emerged in Egypt in the early nineteenth century, state regulation of religious activities is relatively new in Syria. The Arab provinces of the Ottoman Empire were hardly affected by the attempts of the Sublime Porte to establish a formal religious hierarchy (ilmiyye), while the Awqaf administration that was established in the 1840s was only concerned with economic issues. Therefore, by the outbreak of the First World War, there were only a handful of state-appointed clerics in Syrian cities (mufti, judges, and preachers at the Great Mosque).

Faced with the need to build the structures of the young Republic of Syria, the i rst post-independence regimes chose to manage Islam by establishing formal institutions and regulations. 4 At the request of the Congress of Ulama that was held in Damascus in 1938, President Taj al-Din al-Hasani (1941–3), the son of an eminent scholar and a turbaned ‘alim himself, instituted a status of ‘grand ‘alim’: this involved the payment of a monthly salary that aimed to help beneiciaries ‘not to be in need and have to accept zakat and donations’.