As-Suwayda: From Neighboring Wars to Pasha's Siege (2)

Author: علي حبيب الله

SadaNews - Ibrahim Pasha, the leader of the well-known Egyptian campaign (1831–1840), seized all of Greater Syria, to the point where he nearly toppled the capital of the Ottoman Empire, Istanbul, had it not been for the intervention of European armies that prevented him. Meanwhile, in Syria, a revolution broke out against him and his rule in all its mountains since 1834, when the Egyptian pasha burdened the farmers of Syria with taxes they rejected, then imposed conscription into his army, igniting the flames of revolution... Meanwhile, in Jabal Hauran (the Druze Mountain), the story of their revolution against the Egyptian rule goes as follows:

Sheikh Yahya al-Hamdan, the chief of the mountain, headed a delegation from the mountain, at the request of the "Hamkadār of Syria" Sherif Pasha, to meet with him and negotiate the exemption of the Druze from military conscription after Ibrahim Pasha instructed his Hamkadār in Syria of the necessity of conscripting them. When Sheikh al-Hamdan tried to convince Hamkadār Sherif Pasha to exempt the Druze from military service, the latter became adamant, insisting that al-Hamdan carry out Ibrahim Pasha’s orders, and it is said that he struck the Sheikh of the mountain on his face, giving him ten days to present his conscripts (1). This slap insulted the Sheikh of the mountain and ignited all of him, leading the Druze of Hauran to engage in the largest confrontation they had known against the authority of Damascus in the nineteenth century.

While Ibrahim Pasha decided to wage war on the Druze of the mountain, he found that the best way to suppress their rebellion was to incite their neighbors against them: the Bedouins of Hauran. This was not the last time the Damascus authority sought help from the Bedouin tribes of Hauran to confront the Druze of the mountain. The reason for Damascus' appeal to the Bedouins, in the face of the Druze mountain, was historically known in the mountain as the "Wars of Neighboring". These initial wars, which were waged between the tribes of the Bedouins of Hauran and the Druze since the latter settled in the mountain in the late seventeenth century, arose from a social grievance among the Bedouins, who perceived the arrival of the Druze and their settlement in the hill as a disaster and a depletion of their resources. The account recounts the first time the Bedouins of Hauran noticed the first group of migrating Druze who pitched their tents in 1685 on the land of the "Mother" plateau south of the village of Brika: "The Bedouins were pleased with this strange group, as they were delighted with their strange attire made of white and yellow cashmere, then the Druze retreated to Najran...(2).

In Najran, the arriving Druze clashed with the Bedouins of "Al-Fahili" and expelled them from there. In 1692, the Druze of the mountain clashed with the Bedouins of "Walad Ali" and defeated them, expanding their settlement area at their expense up to the borders of the "Dama" area in the mountain. A series of disputes and conflicts persisted between the Bedouins of the mountain and the Druze throughout the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, and until the mid-nineteenth century, when Sheikh "Shaqqa" the Druze Abbas al-Qalaani, between 1858–1865, seized seven villages from the Bedouins in the northeastern part of the mountain. The French historian Brigitte Chebler, in her book "The Uprisings of the Druze Mountain - Joran," detailed the disputes over the seizure of villages and lands that the Druze exercised in their efforts to drive the Bedouins from the villages of the mountain to the plain, pushing them toward the peripheries of the steppe (3), which generated a historical Bedouin grievance about their "usurped rights" in the mountain.

The historical grievance of the Bedouins of Hauran remains a framework that explains not only the narrative of the Druze-Bedouin conflict over the identity of Jabal Hauran, where any minor conflict between a Druze farmer and a Bedouin shepherd could evolve into a confrontation resembling a civil war among the people of Hauran throughout the Ottoman history of the mountain, but also explains the efforts of the ruling authorities in Damascus, both Ottoman and thereafter, in their conflicts with Jabal al-Suwayda, to seek assistance from the neighbors – usually referring to the Bedouins – to incite them against the Druze. This was part of the policy of awakening or activating communal prejudice to serve the agendas of power, at various stages of the history of southern Syria even to this day.

Even Bashar al-Assad, upon inheriting the seat of power from his father Hafez, faced his regime's first test in Syria connected to As-Suwayda, when bloody events erupted there in 2000, between the Druze residents and the Bedouins of the city, following an incident where a Bedouin's livestock attacked a Druze farmer's crops in the village of Al-Raha, leading to the killing of a Druze villager by the Bedouins, resulting in a conflict that extended to As-Suwayda city, causing dozens of deaths, most of them Druze, many of whom were killed by the forces of Assad the son. At that time, the Druze of As-Suwayda took down the Syrian state flag from the governorate building, replacing it with the five-Druze border flag (4). The Druze of As-Suwayda were the first among Syrians to experience the violence of Assad the son and his repressive mentality, which later other Syrians would also endure.

This historical narrative does not mean that the relationship between the Druze of Jabal Hauran and the Bedouins remained governed by prejudice and civil strife; rather, rules developed between them governing civil peace and coexistence, and social ties intertwined between them at the level of traditions and customs, in food, music, and rituals of joy and mourning. The authentic Bedouin customs and traditions of Hauran left a significant impact on the arriving Druze since the early eighteenth century.

It is war and geography - to be precise: war on geography - that primarily shaped the collective identity of the Druze of the mountain, more than the Druze religious faith - Tawhid played a role in shaping it, certainly. From here, most foreign travelers who visited Jabal Hauran in the nineteenth century considered the Druze there as a "warrior race" (5). All songs of Hauran the mountain represent a lexicon of the Druze wars and their relationship with their place and geographical status. And although they were farmers who relied on agriculture for their livelihoods primarily, whenever some of them wanted to take up crafts, they only practiced the craft of saltpeter coming from the mountain (6).

Moreover, the wars of the Druze in the mountain did not mean they were a cohesive and tightly-knit social unit, neither socially nor politically, for the tribal conflicts among them over influential chiefdom in the mountain never faded at any stage of their history there. These conflicts made them a tribal - clan-based society, and they were united only by confrontations with forces from outside the mountain, particularly with the successive ruling authorities in Damascus, which turned them into a religious community, meaning into "the Druze" with the definite article, as a religious group.

The first confrontation the Druze of Hauran faced against forces from outside the mountain and Hauran was in 1810 when Wahhabis coming from the Hijaz attempted to plunder the Druze crops in the Hauran plain, but they managed to drive them back.

However, what drew the attention of the Ottoman state and its governors in Damascus to them was their war against the forces of Ibrahim Pasha (1831–1840), mentioned earlier, which the Druze waged under the leadership of the Al-Hamdan family in the mountain, in rejection of the taxes, disarmament, and conscription, followed by the insult to their leader Yahya al-Hamdan. At the beginning of 1838, the Druze of the mountain besieged themselves in the Al-Lajat area, and their war against the Egyptians became known by this name: "The War of Al-Lajat" (7). This was after Ibrahim Pasha attempted to incite their neighbors against them and mobilize the Syrian scholars against them, calling them a religious group that was outside the faith, and indeed some scholars in Damascus fatwaed the legitimacy of fighting them and violating their sanctity. Hence, the saying of the Druze mountain poet, Abu Ali al-Hanawi, in one of his poems:

"There is no nation but reached the fire of its evil
Upon us and claims that we are infidels... (8)

No confrontation occurred between the Druze of As-Suwayda and the Damascus authority on political grounds without being cloaked in sectarian - confessional agendas. The confrontation of the Druze of As-Suwayda with the forces of Ibrahim Pasha in Al-Lajat lasted nine months, during which the pasha's army did not hesitate to destroy and poison the famous water springs there. The Druze of Wadi Al-Taim and Rashaya in Lebanon, led by Shibli Agha Al-Arban, rallied to support the Druze of the mountain, which eventually compelled Ibrahim Pasha to lift the siege on Al-Lajat and withdraw. In fact, the Druze of As-Suwayda ultimately managed to impose their demands on the Egyptian authorities in Damascus, including their exemption from conscription unless they desired it voluntarily, their right to keep their weapons, rejecting the employment of their men and animals for forced labor, paying taxes in cash rather than kind, and not building forts for the Egyptians in Jabal Hauran (9), among other demands. Even until the late last century, "ma’amil" (gold-plated coffee pots) were displayed in one of the houses of the Halabi family in As-Suwayda, said to have been seized by Izz al-Din al-Halabi from the tent of the Egyptian campaign leader Ibrahim Pasha (10).

The Egyptian rule in Greater Syria ended after the Egyptians withdrew in 1840, and Damascus returned to the Ottoman embrace. Its governors became aware of the Druze of As-Suwayda for the first time, just as the Ottomans became aware of the Alawites on the Syrian coast after the Egyptian campaign, as the mountain dwellers participated in the revolution against the Egyptian rule, just like the other mountain areas in Greater Syria. The experience of Egyptian rule and the revolution against it by the components of the mountain regions of Greater Syria formed a political and social awareness in itself, just as it opened the eyes of the Ottomans to these components and their role during the fourth decade of the nineteenth century, including the Druze of Jabal Hauran.

This paved the way for the first confrontation on the ground of Jabal Hauran between its Druze and the authorities of the Ottoman state in Damascus, after the Sublime Porte imposed conscription on all Muslim men in 1852, including the Druze, which led to a bloody clash then between the Ottoman forces and the Druze who were refusing military service, and the mountain became a refuge for every Druze rejecting conscription in Mount Lebanon, the Golan, and Galilee. Following this confrontation, since 1853, Jabal Hauran has officially been referred to by the Ottoman authorities as "Jabal al-Druze," thus officially defining the mountain's identity as connected to its "rebellious and unruly" Druze, thus forming the Druze of As-Suwayda in the imagination of both the Ottomans and the people of Damascus together (11).

The perspective of the people of Damascus, both Muslims and Christians, toward the Druze of the mountain as "unruly" did not change until late in the nineteenth century and early twentieth century. Between the 1850s and the late 1850s, Jabal al-Druze - Hauran - witnessed several social and political transformations, the most significant of which was the "Popular Movement," as another chapter in the rebellion and confrontation and protest in As-Suwayda.