Asad

"That’s what people say, but I don’t think it’s correct. Patrick Seale was my great inspiration for studying Syria. I started with one of his earlier books, which I used at university, both when I was studying and when I was teaching. He is one of the few people who can write in such a way that it is both high quality in terms of content and also attracts a lot of readers. He’s both a very high calibre academic and a high calibre journalist. You can read this book from page one to the end, not only as an academic book but also as a thriller. The book is part of a trilogy which also includes The Struggle for Arab Independence and The Struggle for Syria . Seale has this way of interweaving personal things with the wider context of history. So the book alternates. It’s not just a theoretical history, but also highly personal about the [former] president. Patrick Seale is I think the only writer, or one of very few writers, who had personal access to Hafez al-Assad. When the book was just published, I saw the criticism that he was a little bit biased – but I didn’t see that at all in the book. Having spoken with the president on various occasions just means he had better information, it doesn’t mean he was less critical. Usually it’s called Assad’s biography, but it interweaves the wider historical context. It’s a history textbook on quite an important episode of Syrian political history, in which Hafez al-Assad was president, and also the time before he became president. It looks at things that happened in very critical periods, for example during the October [Arab-Israeli] War in 1973 and how the views of [former] President Assad conflicted with those of [the then Egyptian president] Anwar Sadat. Sadat made a separate peace treaty – and the word separate is very important – with Israel. President Assad’s line was that only by having a united front towards Israel would there be a solution. Patrick Seale, also in a more recent article, referred to the disaster of Camp David. And we’ve seen that. There has been peace between Egypt and Israel, but it didn’t lead to any other real peace, even though it was in 1979, already more than 30 years ago. Exactly. This is what you see in all of Seale’s books. There are a lot of eye-openers in them. On several occasions, in his latest book [ The Struggle for Arab Independence ], I came across things which were a real surprise. It’s not at all a dull history but a real eye-opener, not only for people who know very little but also for people who have dealt with the Middle East, including Syria, for a long time. It’s less the case than it was, but it is a framework that exists in people’s minds. The area was divided up by the French and the British, who created artificial boundaries and artificial units. Under the Ottomans in that area, there were no boundaries. People could cross easily from Damascus to Haifa, or to Beirut, or they could go from Aleppo to what now is southern Turkey. There were no such borders, and the communication between Aleppo in northern Syria and Mosul in northern Iraq was, for instance, more intense than between Aleppo and Damascus. And these people still have a lot in common – their Arabic is very similar. With Lebanon and Jordan, there are borders now, and the military may wear different uniforms. But the people are very close to each other. They don’t see it that way. Lebanon is also a very specific case. These two countries are very much bound together through history, and the Maronite Christians in Lebanon play a role in this. Patrick Seale calls Syria a truncated body. It used to be much bigger, but its limbs have been cut off – Lebanon and the former Palestine, Jordan or even southern Turkey. It has a new shape. That’s also the reason why there was no strong Syrian identity, in the sense of an identity linked to the territory of today’s Syria. It was either a broader Arab identity, or much smaller than Syria – a provincial or tribal identity."