Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics

"This is the next best book, after Seale’s, which is why I’ve put it at number two. It gives you a very rich multi-dimensional picture of what Syria really is. The peasantry and the descendants of lesser rural notables are the people who are now in power. Both the former president and the present president are descendants of peasants, people from the countryside. The book gives a very varied picture. Not all peasants are the same – you have peasants with land, without land, belonging to a certain clan or tribe, living in the lowlands or in the highlands. But they are very much represented in the regime and that’s why Hanna Batatu wrote this study. I should mention that he also wrote what I consider to be the best book on Iraq. His Syria book is shorter, it is about a third of the size of the one on Iraq, but it is almost like an encyclopaedia of the complexities of Syria, of the countryside, of people within the Ba’ath Party, the background of the Alawite officers et cetera. No, it’s much wider, it’s about all the peasantry, and about the whole of Syria. It’s about certain politicians, like Akram al-Hawrani, who was the first to bring in the poorer people, the lower middle class from the countryside, into politics and recruited people for the military who happened to have that background. It’s a tougher book than Seale’s, but for people who are really interested in Syria it’s a highly interesting book. It hasn’t been given the place among Syria books which I think it deserves. He was a Palestinian from Jerusalem. He died in 2000. He proudly showed me, at the time, in Beirut, his manuscript of the book on Iraq, which was published later. This sequel book about Syria, is really for the fine tasters. It’s not just about the Ba’athist period, after 1963, but also a long time before – he gives a deep perspective on the time of the French Mandate, and of the Ottoman Empire. Also if you want to get to know something about the earlier history of Syria, it’s a very good book to read."