Alawites

• 1. A Faith Kept Secret

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  The Alawites are an ethnoreligious group, many of whom identify as Arabs, who live mainly in Syria and elsewhere in the Levant. Their faith has been guarded so closely that the first authentic account for outsiders came from a broken oath. Soleyman of Adana, a 19th-century Alawi who converted to Christianity, wrote down what he had sworn never to reveal. According to him, the Alawi deified Ali and venerated Christ, Muhammad, Plato, Socrates, and Aristotle. He added that they held themselves apart from Muslims and Christians alike, regarding both as heretics. Rumours filled the silence around them. Arabic accounts tended to be either flattering or hostile, and Western scholarship has made serious advances only since the early 2000s. The community follows Alawism, which took shape in the ninth century as a branch of Shia Islam. It began as one of many early mystical movements known as ghulat, and it is the only one still in existence. This documentary asks how such a faith arose, what its followers believe, and why other Muslims have so often doubted it. It also asks how a community of poor peasants came to stand at the centre of Syrian power, and what happened when that power collapsed.

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• 2. Names and Homelands

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  In the middle of the 19th century, the English missionary Samuel Lyde lived among the Alawites and reported that they called themselves "Ansari". Other sources say that word is only a Western misspelling of "Nusayri". Nusayri was the older name, taken from the founder Ibn Nusayr al-Numayri. By the 1920s it had fallen out of use. Intellectuals inside the community, working under the French Mandate, campaigned to replace it with "Alawi". They called the old name an "invention of the sect's enemies" because it implied "a separate ethnic and religious identity". The new name stressed a link with mainstream Islam, and especially with its Shia branch. Today "Nusayri" is treated as a slur. Sunni fundamentalists fighting Bashar al-Assad's government used it often, because its stress on Ibn Nusayr hints that Alawi beliefs are man-made rather than divinely inspired.

  The scholar Necati Alkan argues that the new name is older than the French. Most studies credit Muhammad Amin Ghalib al-Tawil, an Ottoman official whose book appeared in 1924, with coining it. Alkan points instead to an 11th-century Nusayri tract that already lists Alawi among the names of a believer. In 1903 the Jesuit Henri Lammens visited a sheikh named Abdullah in a village near Antakya, and the sheikh preferred that name for his people. Petitions from 1892 and 1909 even called the community the "Arab Alawi people".

  Surveys suggest the Alawites make up about 11 percent of Syria's population. Their traditional home is the Coastal Mountain Range along the Mediterranean, where Latakia and Tartus are the main cities. Many also live on the plains around Hama and Homs. Four confederations organise the community: the Kalbiyya, Khaiyatin, Haddadin, and Matawirah. Each is divided into tribes named for a place of origin or a leading religious figure. Until 1953, Alawites held reserved seats in the Syrian Parliament. The 1960 census then recorded only general Muslim and Christian categories, in order to reduce sectarianism. Their Arabic dialect is famous for how it treats the letter qaf, a trait shared with neighbouring villages such as Idlib. It also borrows heavily from Turkish and French, as in the word ascenseur for an elevator.

  In Turkey, the Alawites are often confused with the Alevis, who share the name's origin and pronunciation but differ in key ways. To avoid the mix-up, Turkish Alawites call themselves Arap Alevileri, or "Arab Alevis". During the 1930s the authorities used the label Eti Turkleri, meaning "Hittite Turks", to hide their Arabic origins. Some older people still use it as a euphemism. Their exact number is unknown because they are not recorded separately from Sunnis, but there were 185,000 in 1970. In Lebanon an estimated 150,000 Alawites lived in 2011, mostly in the Jabal Mohsen neighbourhood of Tripoli and ten villages in the Akkar District. Their leader Ali Eid won them two reserved parliamentary seats in the Taif Agreement of 1989. Farther south, the village of Ghajar on the Golan border is home to about 3,900 Alawites. Before the Six-Day War it stood alongside two other Alawite villages, Ayn Fit and Za'ura.

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• 3. Founders and Scholars

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  The founder of Alawism, Muhammad ibn Nusayr, was a disciple of two Twelver Imams, Ali al-Hadi and Hasan al-Askari. When al-Askari died, a dispute over his succession split the Shia community. Ibn Nusayr then claimed to be the Bab and Ism of the dead Imam and to hold his secret teachings. He went further, declaring himself the "Bab of the Imams", claiming prophethood, and attributing divinity to al-Askari. Al-Askari denounced him. Islamic authorities expelled his disciples, and most of them moved to the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range, where they built a distinct community. Scholars such as Yaron Friedman believe Ibn Nusayr did not see himself as a rebel. In their view he thought he held the true Shia doctrine.

  Around the middle of the tenth century, a follower named al-Khasibi organised the movement during Hamdanid rule in northern Syria, which lasted from 947 to 1008. He died in Aleppo about 969, after a rivalry with the Ishaqiyya sect, which also claimed Ibn Nusayr's teaching. From Aleppo, Alawism spread to Sarmin, Salamiyah, Homs, and Hama. It then took root in low-lying villages west of Hama, including Baarin, Deir Shamil, and Deir Mama. Further settlements grew around the Wadi al-Uyun valley and the mountains near Tartus and Safita.

  In 1032, al-Khasibi's grandson and pupil Abu Sa'id Maymun al-Tabarani moved to Latakia, which was then under Byzantine control. He died in 1034. The historian Stefan Winter calls him "the last definitive scholar of Alawism", because he founded its calendar and gave its teachings their final form. Through his writings and his work among the rural population, he influenced the faith deeply. Winter still urges caution. It is unclear whether Alawite teachings reached the mountains behind Latakia in the eleventh century, where Muslims generally leaned toward Shia Islam. The local chieftain Nasr ibn Mushraf al-Rudafi, who swung between alliance and conflict with Byzantium, is nowhere recorded as a patron.

  Farther south, a 13th-century Alawite treatise credits three local families with sponsoring the sect in the Jabal Bahra. They were the Banu'l-Ahmar, the Banu'l-Arid, and the Banu Muhriz, and they held fortresses there in the 11th and 12th centuries. In 1097, as the Crusaders entered Syria, the chronicler Bar Hebraeus says many Alawites were killed. The Crusaders then decided the sect was not truly Islamic, tolerated it, and even took its members into their ranks alongside Maronites and Turcopoles. Two shaykhs from Mount Sinjar in modern Iraq, al-Makzun, who died in 1240, and al-Tubani, who died in 1300, are credited with uplifting the group.

  The question of where ordinary Alawites came from is still disputed. Local folklore says they descend from followers of al-Askari, who died in 873, and of his pupil Ibn Nusayr, who died in 868. Some 19th- and 20th-century Western scholars proposed ancient ancestors such as the Arameans, Canaanites, Hittites, and Mardaites. Many prominent tribes, by contrast, descend from settlers who came from Sinjar in the 13th century. Pliny the Elder, in Book V of his Natural History, mentions a "Tetrarchy of the Nazerini" in the region between the Orontes and the sea. Scholars hesitate to link those Nazerini to the Nazarenes. They note instead that the name may connect to an Eastern Aramaic word, naser, meaning "keeper of wellness".

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• 4. Trinity and Reincarnation

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  Seven times, Alawite teaching holds, the one God has appeared in human form. The Alawite Trinity has three aspects: Ma'na, meaning "meaning", Ism, the "Name", and Bab, the "Door" or Gate. Ma'na is the source and meaning of all things. It generated the Ism, which in turn built the Bab. Together they form an "indivisible Trinity". Alawite theologians divided history into seven eras, each marked by a new incarnation of this triad. In the first era the three appear as Abel, Adam, and Gabriel. In the fourth they are Joshua, Moses, and Dan ibn Usbaut. The seventh and last era brings Ali ibn Abi Talib, Muhammad, and Salman al-Farisi, a Persian companion of Muhammad. Alawites picture these three as the sky, the sun, and the moon. They teach that Ali created Muhammad and gave him the mission of spreading the Qur'anic teachings on earth.

  Ali stands at the centre of the faith. Alawites call him the last and supreme manifestation of God, and their testimony of faith is translated as "There is no God but Ali". The Qur'an is one of their holy books, but they read it symbolically, in a way that matches early Batiniyya and other ghulat sects. Another text, the Kitab al-Majmu, is said to be a central source of doctrine. Daily Muslim prayers play no part in Alawite practice.

  The human soul has its own story. Alawites hold that they were originally stars or divine lights that were cast out of heaven for disobedience. They must pass through repeated reincarnation before they can return. According to their beliefs, females are excluded from this cycle. Orthodox scholars of both Twelver Shia and Sunni Islam reject the transfer of souls. That rejection is a main reason classical theologians branded Alawites heretics.

  The rituals look strikingly unlike those of other Muslim communities. Alawites do not forbid alcohol, and wine is drunk in various rites. Males alone perform a secret form of Mass in which wine is consecrated. Many Alawites carry Christian names. They observe Epiphany, Christmas, and the feast days of John Chrysostom and Mary Magdalene. Other celebrations include Old New Year, Akitu, Eid al-Ghadir, Mid-Sha'ban, and Eid il-Burbara. They also honour legendary saints, among them Khidr, identified with Saint George, and Simeon Stylites. Their only sacred structures are the shrines of tombs.

  Scholars describe this mixture as syncretic. It draws on Phoenician mythology, Gnosticism, neo-Platonism, and Christian ideas, blended with Muslim symbolism. Matti Moosa finds the Christian elements unmistakable, from the Trinity to a lengthy prayer called the Quddas. Friedman and others disagree about the cause. In their view the resemblance to Christianity was largely coincidence. They argue that the movement began as an allegorical, mystical Quranic current and only later absorbed outside practices, because its followers believed every religion shared the same hidden core.

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• 5. Secrecy and Belonging

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  Friedman once noted that every piece of Alawi religious material he cited came from public libraries and printed books. The sacred writings themselves remain hidden. Some parts of the faith are kept from all but a select group of Alawites, which is why the sect has been called mystical. Their priests tend to conceal core doctrines, and modern religious authorities have never confirmed what the beliefs are. Alawites have also adopted the practice of taqiya, a form of concealment meant to avoid victimization. Because the doctrines are esoteric and strictly guarded, conversion into the community is forbidden.

  Whether the faith counts as Islam has been argued for centuries. The Syrian historian Ibn Kathir classed Alawites as non-Muslims and polytheists. His mentor Ibn Taymiyya was even harsher, listing them among the worst polytheist sects. Through many fatwas he called them "the worst enemies of the Muslims", more dangerous than Crusaders and Mongols. He also accused them of aiding both invasions. Al-Ghazali likewise rejected them, and the Twelver scholar Shaykh Tusi condemned their beliefs. Even the British novelist Benjamin Disraeli, in Tancred, treated them as not Shia.

  The twentieth century brought political rulings. In 1932, Haj Amin al-Husseini, the Sunni Grand Mufti of Jerusalem, issued a lone fatwa recognising them as Muslims. It has been read as a response to immediate anticolonial politics. In 1974, the Lebanese Twelver leader Musa as-Sadr, founder of the Amal Movement, declared them a community of Twelver Shiite Muslims. The timing mattered because of a constitutional requirement that Syria's president be a Muslim. The journalist Robert F. Worth argues that such rulings came from Shia clerics eager for Syrian patronage. He also sees the claim of belonging to Islam as a rewriting of history. Tom Heneghan makes a sharper comparison. Calling Alawism an offshoot of Shi'ism, he says, resembles calling Christianity an offshoot of Judaism.

  Under Hafez al-Assad, the faith itself was reshaped. Peter Theo Curtis describes a "Sunnification" in which Alawites became effectively Sunni rather than Shia. Public manifestations of Alawite religion were banned, along with any unified religious council. Sunni-style mosques were built in every Alawite village, and Alawis were encouraged to perform Hajj. The grand mosque in Qardaha, the Assad family's hometown, is dedicated to Abu Bakr al-Siddiq, whom Sunnis revere and Shia do not. Joshua Landis notes that Syrian textbooks made no mention of Alawites, Druze, Ismailis, or Shia Islam. Meanwhile an early-1970s booklet signed by Alawi men of religion declared the Alawites followers of the household of the Prophet. In 2016, unnamed community leaders went further, releasing a "Declaration of an Alawite Identity Reform". It presented Alawism as a current within Islam and rejected absorption into Twelver Shiism. Ali Sulayman al-Ahmad, chief judge of the Ba'athist state, put the official line plainly: "We are Alawi Muslims. Our book is the Qur'an. Our prophet is Muhammad. The Ka`ba is our qibla, and our Din (religion) is Islam."

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• 6. Under Sultans

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  In the 14th century, the Mamluk Sultan Baibars forced the Alawites to build mosques in their settlements. They answered with token gestures, which the Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta described. A far deadlier episode came under the Ottoman Sultan Selim I. On the 24th of April 1517, a massacre took place in the Great Mosque of Aleppo. It became known as the Massacre of the Telal, because the corpses of thousands of victims piled up into a mound west of the castle. Survivors fled to the coastal region. Documents recording the horrors are kept at the National and University Library in Strasbourg.

  Ottoman officials justified their harsh actions by pointing to alleged treachery, claiming the Alawites had a long record of betraying Muslim governments out of distrust of Sunnis. The Alawites rose against the Ottomans on several occasions and held on to their autonomy in the mountains. T. E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, gave a blunt portrait. He wrote that the sect was clannish, and that "One Nosairi would not betray another". Usually, he said, they stood aside from affairs and left the Turkish government alone, hoping for the same in return.

  Relations were not only hostile. In the 18th century, the Ottomans employed several Alawite leaders as tax collectors under the iltizam system. Yet between 1809 and 1813, Mustafa Agha Barbar, the governor of Tripoli, attacked the Kalbiyya Alawites with what the record calls marked savagery. Some Alawites backed Ottoman involvement in the Egyptian-Ottoman Wars of 1831-1833 and 1839-1841, and built careers in the Ottoman army or as governors. They also started the Alawite revolt of 1834-35 against Egyptian rule, which the governor of Homs later suppressed.

  By the middle of the 19th century, Samuel Lyde described their situation as nothing but a gloomy plight. Early in the 20th century, the mainly Sunni Ottoman leaders were bankrupt and losing political power, and the Alawites were poor peasants. In 1918, with the empire's collapse close at hand, an Alawite leader named Saleh al-Ali summoned his peers to a meeting in the town of Al-Shaykh Badr.

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• 7. Mandate to Power

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  On the 15th of December 1918, Saleh al-Ali urged the Alawite leaders gathered at Al-Shaykh Badr to revolt and expel the French from Syria. When French authorities heard about the meeting, they sent a force to arrest him. Al-Ali and his men ambushed and defeated it, inflicting more than 35 casualties. This skirmish began the Syrian Revolt of 1919. Al-Ali besieged and occupied al-Qadmus, the base for French operations against him. In November, General Henri Gouraud launched a campaign in the Alawi Mountains. His forces entered Al-Shaykh Badr and arrested many Alawi leaders, and al-Ali fled north. When a large French force overran his position, he went underground.

  Despite such resistance, most Alawites favoured French rule and hoped it would continue after the mandate ended. When the French occupied Syria in 1920, they created an Alawite State covering most Alawite villages, meant to protect the community from larger majorities such as the Sunnis. They also made microstates for Maronite Christians and Druze, and separate states for Aleppo and Damascus. The French prescribed the label "Alawite" in official documents so as to classify the sect alongside Shiism. They recruited minorities heavily. A 1935 letter from the French minister of war called the Alawites and the Druze the only "warlike races" in the Mandate territories. Between 1926 and 1939, minorities supplied the majority of the Army of the Levant, the French force garrisoning Syria and Lebanon.

  The region was mixed. About 80 percent of the port city of Latakia was Sunni, but 62 percent of rural residents were Alawite. A 1936 letter signed by 80 Alawi leaders told the French Prime Minister that the Alawite people rejected attachment to Syria. One signatory was Sulayman Ali al-Assad, the father of Hafez al-Assad. Stefan Winter argues the letter is a forgery. In May 1930 the Alawite State was renamed the Government of Latakia, and on the 3rd of December 1936 it was re-incorporated into Syria. The law took effect in 1937. In 1939 the Sanjak of Alexandretta, now Hatay, was given to Turkey after a League of Nations plebiscite. Zaki al-Arsuzi, an Alawite leader who resisted the annexation, later co-founded the Ba'ath Party with Michel Aflaq and Salah ad-Din al-Bitar. After World War II, Sulayman al-Murshid helped unite the Alawite province with Syria. He was executed in Damascus on the 12th of December 1946, three days after a political trial.

  Syria became independent on the 17th of April 1946. Military coups followed, and in 1958 Syria joined Egypt in the United Arab Republic, which broke apart in 1961. In 1963 a secretive military committee that included the Alawite officers Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid helped the Ba'ath Party seize power. In 1966 Alawite-affiliated officers expelled the party's old guard. In 1970, Air Force General Hafez al-Assad took power in a "Corrective Movement" that overthrew Jadid. Until then the Alawites were among Syria's poorest and most marginalised groups. Robert D. Kaplan compared Assad's rise to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia".

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• 8. Rule, War and Fall

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  In 1971, Hafez al-Assad declared himself president, a post that the constitution of the time reserved for Sunni Muslims. The 1973 constitution replaced Islam as state religion with a requirement that the president be Muslim, and protests erupted. A significant majority of Sunni Syrians accepted his rule, but the Muslim Brotherhood did not. In the 1970s and 1980s it spread anti-Alawite propaganda and waged a violent campaign against the Ba'athists. In June 1979, thirty-two cadets, mostly Alawites, were killed in the Aleppo Artillery School massacre. After the Brotherhood tried to assassinate Hafez al-Assad in 1980, the regime cracked down violently. His brother Rifaat al-Assad ordered the slaughter of hundreds of Brotherhood members at Tadmor Prison in Palmyra.

  The confrontation peaked in February 1982, when the Brotherhood tried to seize the city of Hama. The regime deployed between 6,000 and 8,000 troops. In the Hama massacre, up to 25,000 people were killed over 27 days. To ensure that troops would not turn on the government, the regime stacked the units with Alawites. Rifaat al-Assad's Defense Companies were reportedly 90 percent Alawite, and in other units up to 70 percent of officers were Alawites. Syria stayed relatively stable until 2011, but Hama left lasting sectarian resentment. Under Hafez and his son Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded him in June 2000, Alawites filled the military and political elite, including intelligence services and the shabiha, the loyalist paramilitaries. The community's situation improved but it stayed relatively poor next to other Syrians.

  When the civil war began in 2011, the state conscripted young men. Fearing defections, the regime preferred to send Alawite recruits to the front lines, and conscription disproportionately targeted Alawite regions. In May 2013, the pro-opposition SOHR stated that at least 41,000 of 94,000 regime soldiers killed were Alawites. Reports estimated that by 2015 up to a third of 250,000 young Alawite men of fighting age had died. A pro-opposition source claimed 150,000 deaths in April 2017, while another report suggested around 100,000 by 2020. Many Alawites first backed Assad out of fear that a rebel victory would mean slaughter. Islamist rebel attacks did strike Alawite villages and neighbourhoods, among them the Aqrab, Maan, and Adra massacres and the February 2016 Homs bombings. Younger Alawites grew angry and called for reconciliation with the opposition. They also feared Iranian conversion campaigns on the coast, which they saw as a plot to absorb their identity into Twelver Shia. By 2023, some Alawites openly criticised the regime for corruption, economic mismanagement, and disregard for civil liberties.

  In November and December 2024, as opposition forces advanced, thousands of Alawites fled Homs toward Tartus Governorate. Damascus fell days later. The SOHR claimed that Assad had considered a fallback Alawite state on the coast, and that Russia rejected the idea as an attempt to divide Syria. On the 25th of December 2024, thousands protested in Latakia, Tartus, Jableh, Homs, and Qardaha after a video showed an attack on the Al-Khasibi shrine in Aleppo. At least five people were killed there and the shrine was set ablaze. Demonstrators chanted "Alawite, Sunni, we want peace". Transitional authorities led by Hay'at Tahrir al-Sham said the attack dated from earlier in December and blamed unknown groups. The SOHR confirmed at least 16 deaths in a massacre of Alawites at the village of Fahil near Homs.

  In March 2025, the SOHR reported that Syrian security forces and pro-government fighters had killed more than 1,500 Alawite civilians in western Syria. President Ahmed al-Sharaa said the Alawite sect had made an "unforgivable mistake" and urged its members to lay down their weapons. Later that month, nearly 13,000 Alawites crossed the Nahr al-Kabir into Lebanon to escape the violence.

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