Beards and bosses

General Suheil al-Hassan, better known as “the Tiger”, recently stirred old ghosts when a leaked recording – snippets thoughtfully broadcast by Al Jazeera – had him declare: “He is military, security, and political, but above all he is a man of religion before politics, security, and militarisation”.

This, of course, touches a raw nerve. Back in the 1980s the conflict between the Baath Party and the Muslim Brotherhood was carefully disguised on the Alawite Baathist side so as not to inflame Sunni sentiment against the Alawites. The struggle was packaged instead as one between “progressives” and “reactionaries”, “socialists” and “feudalists”. Hence the immortal slogan: “There is no life in this country except for progress and socialism”.

The Tiger’s remark is hardly unique. He is, after all, the founder of the Taramih unit, its name borrowed from the Shiite poet al-Tirmah. Legend has it that Ali ibn Abi Talib [the fourth Caliph) once sent a reply to Muawiya ibn Abi Sufyan carried by al-Tirmah. When the messenger entered Muawiya’s court, he greeted him with: “Peace be upon you, O King”. Muawiya asked why he had not said “Commander of the Faithful”. Al-Tirmah replied: “We are the faithful – who appointed you over us?” A celebrated debate followed.

General Suheil al-Hassan grew his beard early, and it is said he has three different versions of himself, each one hardly resembling the other. One recalls that during the rise of Baathist rule, a beard was practically an accusation: an Islamic symbol, a Prophetic practice, even an obligation in most schools of Islamic law. That changed when Hafiz’s eldest son Bassel permitted himself a short beard. Soon young men followed suit out of piety or vanity, but claiming imitation as their excuse.

The Tiger has long been fond of rummaging through history, hence the creation of the Taramih unit, whose name he pronounces incorrectly as usual. He once described Hafiz al-Assad as “sacred”. There is, in contemporary Syria, a noticeable tendency among leaders to lean into religion, to fuse faith and worldly power into a single, infallible package. In wartime especially, religion comes in handy for mobilisation: death is near, and the afterlife suddenly feels relevant.

The public was recently startled by Rami Makhlouf, the fallen regime’s CFO, resurfacing to instruct the people – claiming transmitted wisdom from Ali ibn Abi Talib – to avoid revolution for now and to stay put if the fitna appears. He was quoting from books of jafr attributed to Ali. Makhlouf appears to believe that Sheikh Ghazal Wahib Ghazal has privileged access to the unseen, and perhaps felt a twinge of jealousy. According to these mystical portents, the time for revolution has not yet come. He urged Alawites to refrain from any activity, peaceful or armed, during the first three months of 2026, promising deliverance thereafter contingent on obeying the otherworldly instructions delivered to him through dreams and glad tidings.

As for Sheikh Ghazal Wahib Ghazal himself – the de facto leader of the Alawites – his star has risen with remarkable speed. He has seated himself on the throne of spiritual leadership. Protesters even burned images of Bashar al-Assad, denouncing him as a traitor who abandoned the sect and fled with his life and fortune, and transferring their allegiance to the new spiritual authority. The Sheikh cuts an imposing figure: white-bearded, formally trained in Islamic law, holder of degrees from Damascus and London, scion of a family of scholars, former mufti in Latakia and nationally. He calls, interestingly enough, for a secular, decentralised government in Syria.

Among the Druze, the name that has risen since the victory of the revolution is Sheikh Hikmat al-Hijri, successor to his brother Ahmad al-Hijri, who died in a car accident widely suspected to have been an assassination by the Assad regime. With his ascent, the prominence of Sheikhs Hamoud al-Hannawi and Youssef al-Jarbou has faded. Some might see this as a reaction to Sunni Salafi rule – often branded “Wahhabi” – embodied by Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham (HTS), the Islamist faction that led the charge to victory and toppled half a century of repressive rule.

Not a single faction among the victorious forces is secular. The secularist wants comfort and peace; their appetite for self-sacrifice dwindles. In the moment of battle, when death draws close, one tends to think of one’s place in the hereafter. The old regime, for all its secular rhetoric, was a thinly veiled sectarian enterprise. Ahmad al-Sharaa, leader of HTS, by contrast, has toned down overt religiosity in his public appearances. He prefers to pose instead as a sporty presidential type, shooting hoops, even playing billiards, or appearing alongside female presenters without handshakes.

This leaves the third fundamentalist movement: the Kurdish Autonomous Administration led by the Syrian Democratic Forces. Its fundamentalism is rigidly Marxist. Its leader, clean-shaven with a boyish face, venerates Abdullah Öcalan in school curricula to a degree bordering on deification. His portraits are raised in the Baathist and North Korean styles. Schoolbooks teach Darwin’s theory of evolution and the feminist cult of Ishtar. The SDF leader himself avoids mosques and religion altogether, for praise or blame alike. Unlike his rank-and-file who openly mock religion, he has never appeared in a mosque to congratulate Arabs or Kurds on their festivals, as a leader paying polite homage might. Not a single religious phrase is attributed to him. To compensate, a cleric from the Sufi Khaznawi dynasty – Murshid Mashouq al-Khaznawi – has volunteered to provide the Autonomous Administration with a religious beard, offering it fierce loyalty and defending it across media platforms and social media networks.

Between these three movements there exists an open alliance. The Washington Post even leaked a report claiming that Israel channelled millions of dollars to the SDF to be passed on to al-Hijri’s fighters in Suwayda. How, one wonders, can such doctrinal opposites form a pact?

The truth is that the squabbling is cosmetic. What unites the three parties is, first, hostility to the ruling Islamist factions, and second, a shared commitment to “social freedom”: women’s dress, and the permissibility of much that Islamist factions classify as grave sins and forbidden acts.