Paying the price

Loyalty’s fatal cost

Cycle of Fear: Syria’s Alawites in War and Peace. By Leon Goldsmith. Oxford University Press; 306 pages; $37.50. C. Hurst & Co; £25.

THE Alawites, an esoteric Muslim sect living mainly in Syria’s coastal hinterland, number only a few million, but they make up a disproportionate part of the state apparatus. Bashar Assad and his father before him, themselves Alawites, used this to shore up their rule; indeed Mr Assad would not still be in power had his co-religionists not stuck by him.

In “Cycle of Fear” Leon Goldsmith, a political scientist at Sultan Qaboos University in Oman, does not see the sect’s loyalty as a given. He sets out to explain it by examining their history. He challenges the notion that the Alawites, once so poor they sold their daughters to urban Sunni households as servants, have prospered since one of their own, Hafez Assad, became president in 1971.

Only the Assads and a handful of families (Alawite and others) became rich and powerful. Most Alawite villages are still muddy outposts. The bureaucrats and security men often...

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