Alawites (Arabic: العلويون, romanized: al-ʿAlawiyyūn) are an ethnoreligious group, many of whom identify as Arabs, who live primarily in Syria and elsewhere in the Levant. They follow Alawism, an offshoot of Shia Islam as a ghulat branch during the ninth century. Alawites venerate Ali ibn Abi Talib, the "first Imam" in the Twelver school, as a manifestation of the divine essence. It is the only ghulat sect still in existence today. The group was founded during the ninth century by Ibn Nusayr, who was a disciple of the tenth Twelver Imam, Ali al-Hadi, and of the eleventh Twelver Imam, Hasan al-Askari. For this reason, Alawites are also called Nusayris, although this term can be considered derogatory in the present day.
Surveys suggest Alawites represent an important portion of the Syrian population and are a significant minority in the Hatay Province of Turkey and northern Lebanon. There is also a population living in the village of Ghajar in the Golan Heights, where there had been two other Alawite villages (Ayn Fit and Za'ura) before the Six-Day War. The Alawites form the dominant religious group on the Syrian coast and towns near the coast, which are also inhabited by Sunnis, Christians, and Ismailis. They are often confused with the Alevis, a religious group in Turkey that shares certain similarities with the Alawites but has key differences.
The Quran is one of their holy books, but its interpretation differs significantly from Shia Muslim interpretations and aligns with early Batiniyya and other ghulat sects. Alawite theology and rituals differ sharply from Shia Islam in several important ways. For instance, various Alawite rituals involve the drinking of wine and the sect does not prohibit the consumption of alcohol for its adherents. As a creed that teaches the symbolic/esoteric reading of Qur'anic verses, Alawite theology is based on the belief in reincarnation and views Ali as a divine incarnation of God. Moreover, Alawite clergy and scholarships insist that their religion is theologically distinct from Shi'ism. Alawites have historically kept their beliefs secret from outsiders and non-initiated Alawites, so rumours about them have arisen. Arabic accounts of their beliefs tend to be partisan (either positively or negatively). However, since the early 2000s, Western scholarship on the Alawite religion has made significant advances. At the core of the Alawite creed is the belief in a divine Trinity, comprising three aspects of the one God. The aspects of the Trinity are Mana (meaning), Ism (Name) and Bab (Door). Alawite beliefs hold that these emanations underwent re-incarnation cyclically seven times in human form throughout history. According to Alawites, the seventh incarnation of the trinity consists of Ali ibn Abi Talib (Muhammad's cousin and son-in-law), Muhammad himself, and Salman al-Farisi, a Persian companion of Muhammad.
An important component of Alawism is the belief in the transfer of souls, rejected by orthodox Islamic scholars of both the Twelver Shia and Sunni conviction, leading to the Alawites being considered heretics by classical theologians of Sunni and Shia Islam. A lone 1932 fatwa by Hajj Amin al-Husseini recognising them as Muslims has been seen as based on immediate political, anticolonial considerations. Alawites have faced periods of subjugation or persecution under various Muslim empires such as the Ottomans, Abbasids, Mamluks, and others. The establishment of the French Mandate of Syria in 1920 marked a turning point in Alawite history. Until then, the community had commonly self-identified as "Nusayris", emphasizing their connections to Ibn Nusayr. The French administration prescribed the label "Alawite" to categorise the sect alongside Shiism in official documents. The French recruited a large number of minorities into their armed forces and created exclusive areas for minorities, including the Alawite State. The Alawite State was later dismantled, but the Alawites continued to play a significant role in the Syrian military and later in the Ba'ath Party. After Hafez al-Assad's seizure of power during the 1970 coup, the Ba'athist state enforced Assadist ideology amongst Alawites to supplant their traditional identity. During the Syrian revolution, communal tensions were further exacerbated as the country destabilized into a full-scale sectarian civil war.
Etymology
In older sources, Alawis are often called "Ansaris". According to Samuel Lyde, who lived among the Alawites during the mid-19th century, this was a term they used among themselves. Other sources indicate that "Ansari" is simply a Western error in the transliteration of "Nusayri". Alawites historically self-identified as Nusayrites, after their religious founder Ibn Nusayr al-Numayri. However, the term "Nusayri" had fallen out of currency by the 1920s, as a movement led by intellectuals within the community during the French Mandate sought to replace it with the modern term "Alawi". They characterised the older name (which implied "a separate ethnic and religious identity") as an "invention of the sect's enemies", ostensibly favouring an emphasis on "connection with mainstream Islam"—particularly the Shia branch. The term "Nusayrites" is now used as a slur and was frequently used as by Sunni fundamentalists fighting against Bashar al-Assad's government in the Syrian civil war, who use its emphasis on Ibn Nusayr to insinuate that Alawi beliefs are "man-made" and not divinely inspired.
Necati Alkan argued in an article that the "Alawi" appellation was used in an 11th-century Nusayri book and was not a 20th-century invention. The following quote from the same article illustrates his point: As to the change from "Nuṣayrī" to "ʿAlawī": most studies agree that the term "ʿAlawī" was not used until after WWI and probably coined and circulated by Muḥammad Amīn Ghālib al-Ṭawīl, an Ottoman official and writer of the famous Taʾrīkh al-ʿAlawiyyīn (1924). However, the name 'Alawī' appears in an 11th century Nuṣayrī tract as one of the names of the believer (...). Moreover, the term 'Alawī' was already used at the beginning of the 20th century. In 1903 the Belgian-born Jesuit and Orientalist Henri Lammens (d. 1937) visited a certain Ḥaydarī-Nuṣayrī sheikh Abdullah in a village near Antakya and mentions that the latter preferred the name 'Alawī' for his people. Lastly, it is interesting to note that in the above-mentioned petitions of 1892 and 1909 the Nuṣayrīs called themselves the 'Arab Alawī people' (ʿArab ʿAlevī ṭāʾifesi) 'our ʿAlawī Nuṣayrī people' (ṭāʾifatunā al-Nuṣayriyya al-ʿAlawiyya) or 'signed with Alawī people' (ʿAlevī ṭāʾifesi imżāsıyla). This early self-designation is, in my opinion, of triple importance. Firstly, it shows that the word 'Alawī' was always used by these people, as ʿAlawī authors emphasize; secondly, it hints at the reformation of the Nuṣayrīs, launched by some of their sheikhs in the 19th century and their attempt to be accepted as part of Islam; and thirdly, it challenges the claims that the change of the identity and name from 'Nuṣayrī' to 'ʿAlawī' took place around 1920, in the beginning of the French mandate in Syria (1919–1938).
The Alawites are distinct from the Alevi religious sect in Turkey, although the terms share a common etymology and pronunciation.
Genealogical origin theories
The origin of the genetics of Alawites is disputed. Local folklore suggests that they are descendants of the followers of the eleventh Imam, Hasan al-Askari (d. 873), and his pupil, Ibn Nusayr (d. 868). During the 19th and 20th centuries some Western scholars believed that Alawites were descended from ancient Middle Eastern peoples such as the Arameans, Canaanites, Hittites, and Mardaites. Many prominent Alawite tribes are also descended from 13th century settlers from Sinjar.
In his Natural History, Book V, Pliny the Elder said:
We must now speak of the interior of Syria. Coele Syria has the town of Apamea, divided by the river Marsyas from the Tetrarchy of the Nazerini.
The "Tetrarchy of the Nazerini" refers to the western region, between the Orontes and the sea, which consists of a small mountain range called Alawi Mountains bordered by a valley running from southeast to northwest known as Al-Ghab Plain; the region was populated by a portion of Syrians, who were called Nazerini. However scholars are reluctant to link Nazerini and Nazarenes. Yet the term "Nazerini" can be possibly connected to words which include the Arabic triliteral root n-ṣ-r such as the subject naṣer in Eastern Aramaic, which means "keeper of wellness".
History
Ibn Nusayr and his followers are considered the founders of the religion. After the death of the Eleventh Imam, al-Askari, problems emerged in the Shia Community concerning his succession, and then Ibn Nusayr claimed to be the Bab and Ism of the deceased Imam and that he received his secret teachings. Ibn Nusayr and his followers' development seems to be one of many other early ghulat mystical Islamic sects, and were apparently excommunicated by the Shia representatives of the 12th Hidden Imam.
The Alawites were later organised during Hamdanid rule in northern Syria (947–1008) by a follower of Muhammad ibn Nusayr known as al-Khaṣībī, who died in Aleppo about 969, after a rivalry with the Ishaqiyya sect, which claimed also to have the doctrine of Ibn Nusayr. The embrace of Alawism by the majority of the population in the Syrian coastal mountains was likely a protracted process occurring over several centuries. Modern research indicates that after its initial establishment in Aleppo, Alawism spread to Sarmin, Salamiyah, Homs and Hama before becoming concentrated in low-lying villages west of Hama, including Baarin, Deir Shamil, and Deir Mama, the Wadi al-Uyun valley, and in the mountains around Tartus and Safita.
In 1032, al-Khaṣībī's grandson and pupil, Abu Sa'id Maymun al-Tabarani (d. 1034), moved to Latakia (then controlled by the Byzantine Empire). Al-Tabarani succeeded his mentor al-Jilli of Aleppo as head missionary in Syria and became "the last definitive scholar of Alawism", founding its calendar and giving Alawite teachings their final form, according to the historian Stefan Winter. Al-Tabarani influenced the Alawite faith through his writings and by converting the rural population of the Syrian Coastal Mountain Range.
Winter argues that while it is likely the Alawite presence in Latakia dates to Tabarani's lifetime, it is unclear if Alawite teachings spread to the city's mountainous hinterland, where the Muslim population generally leaned toward Shia Islam, in the eleventh century. In the early part of the century, the Jabal al-Rawadif (part of the Syrian Coastal Mountains around Latakia) were controlled by the local Arab chieftain Nasr ibn Mushraf al-Rudafi, who vacillated between alliance and conflict with Byzantium. There is nothing in the literary sources indicating al-Rudafi patronized the Alawites.
To the south of Jabal al-Rawadif, in the Jabal Bahra, a 13th-century Alawite treatise mentions the sect was sponsored by the Banu'l-Ahmar, Banu'l-Arid, and Banu Muhriz, three local families who controlled fortresses in the region in the 11th and 12th centuries. From this southern part of the Syrian coastal mountain range, a significant Alawite presence developed in the mountains east of Latakia and Jableh during the Mamluk period (1260s–1516).
According to Bar Hebraeus, many Alawites were killed when the Crusaders initially entered Syria in 1097; however, they tolerated them when they concluded they were not a truly Islamic sect. They even incorporated them within their ranks, along with the Maronites and Turcopoles. Two prominent Alawite leaders in the following centuries, credited with uplifting the group, were Shaykhs al-Makzun (d. 1240) and al-Tubani (d. 1300), both originally from Mount Sinjar in modern Iraq.
In the 14th century, the Alawites were forced by Mamluk Sultan Baibars to build mosques in their settlements, to which they responded with token gestures described by the Muslim traveller Ibn Battuta.
Ottoman Empire
During the reign of Sultan Selim I, of the Ottoman Empire, the Alawites would again experience significant persecution; especially in Aleppo when a massacre occurred in the Great Mosque of Aleppo on 24 April 1517. The massacre was known as the "Massacre of the Telal" (Arabic: مجزرة التلل) in which the corpses of thousands of victims accumulated as a tell located west of the castle. The horrors of the massacre which caused the immigration of the survivors to the coastal region are documented at the National and University Library in Strasbourg.
The Ottoman Empire took aggressive actions against Alawites, due to their alleged "treacherous activities" as "they had a long history of betraying the Muslim governments due to their mistrust towards Sunnis." The Alawis rose up against the Ottomans on several occasions, and maintained their autonomy in their mountains.
In his book Seven Pillars of Wisdom T. E. Lawrence wrote:
The sect, vital in itself, was clannish in feeling and politics. One Nosairi would not betray another, and would hardly not betray an unbeliever. Their villages lay in patches down the main hills to the Tripoli gap. They spoke Arabic, but had lived there since the beginning of Greek letters in Syria. Usually they stood aside from affairs, and left the Turkish Government alone in hope of reciprocity.
During the 18th century, the Ottomans employed a number of Alawite leaders as tax collectors under the iltizam system. Between 1809 and 1813, Mustafa Agha Barbar, the governor of Tripoli, attacked the Kalbiyya Alawites with "marked savagery." Some Alawites supported Ottoman involvement in the Egyptian-Ottoman Wars of 1831–1833 and 1839–1841, and had careers in the Ottoman army or as Ottoman governors. Moreover, they even initiated the Alawite revolt (1834–35) against the Egyptian rule of the region, which was later suppressed by the Governor of Homs.
By the mid-19th century, the Alawite people, customs and way of life were described by Samuel Lyde, an English missionary among them, as suffering from nothing except a gloomy plight. Early in the 20th century, the mainly-Sunni Ottoman leaders were bankrupt and losing political power; the Alawites were poor peasants.
French Mandate period
After the end of World War I and the fall of the Ottoman Empire, Syria and Lebanon were placed by the League of Nations under the French Mandate for Syria and Lebanon. On 15 December 1918, Alawite leader Saleh al-Ali called for a meeting of Alawite leaders in the town of Al-Shaykh Badr, urging them to revolt and expel the French from Syria.
When French authorities heard about the meeting, they sent a force to arrest Saleh al-Ali. He and his men ambushed and defeated the French forces at Al-Shaykh Badr, inflicting more than 35 casualties. After this victory, al-Ali began organizing his Alawite rebels into a disciplined force, with its general command and military ranks.
The Al-Shaykh Badr skirmish began the Syrian Revolt of 1919. Al-Ali responded to French attacks by laying siege to (and occupying) al-Qadmus, from which the French had conducted their military operations against him. In November, General Henri Gouraud mounted a campaign against Saleh al-Ali's forces in the Alawi Mountains. His forces entered al-Ali's village of Al-Shaykh Badr, arresting many Alawi leaders; however, al-Ali fled to the north. When a large French force overran his position, he went underground.
Despite these instances of opposition, the Alawites mostly favored French rule and sought its continuation beyond the mandate period.
Alawite State
When the French began to occupy Syria in 1920, an Alawite State was created in the coastal and mountain country comprising most Alawite villages. The division was intended to protect the Alawite people from more powerful majorities, such as the Sunnis.
The French also created microstates, such as Greater Lebanon for the Maronite Christians and Jabal al-Druze for the Druze. Aleppo and Damascus were also separate states. Under the Mandate, many Alawite chieftains supported a separate Alawite nation, and tried to convert their autonomy into independence.
The French Mandate Administration encouraged Alawites to join their military forces, in part to provide a counterweight to the Sunni majority, which was more hostile to their rule. According to a 1935 letter by the French minister of war, the French considered the Alawites and the Druze the only "warlike races" in the Mandate territories. Between 1926 and 1939, the Alawites and other minority groups provided the majority of the locally recruited component of the Army of the Levant—the designation given to the French military forces garrisoning Syria and the Lebanon.
The region was home to a mostly-rural, heterogeneous population. The landowning families and 80 percent of the population of the port city of Latakia were Sunni Muslims; however, in rural areas 62 percent of the population were Alawite. According to some researchers, there was considerable Alawite separatist sentiment in the region, their evidence is a 1936 letter signed by 80 Alawi leaders addressed to the French Prime Minister which said that the "Alawite people rejected attachment to Syria and wished to stay under French protection." Among the signatories was Sulayman Ali al-Assad, father of Hafez al-Assad. However, according to Associate Professor Stefan Winter, this letter is a forgery. Even during this time of increased Alawite rights, the situation was still so bad for the group that many women had to leave their homes to work for urban Sunnis.
In May 1930, the Alawite State was renamed the Government of Latakia in one of the few concessions by the French to Arab nationalists before 1936. Nevertheless, on 3 December 1936, the Alawite State was re-incorporated into Syria as a concession by the French to the National Bloc (the party in power in the semi-autonomous Syrian government). The law went into effect in 1937.
In 1939, the Sanjak of Alexandretta (now Hatay) contained a large number of Alawites. The Hatayan land was given to Turkey by the French after a League of Nations plebiscite in the province. This development greatly angered most Syrians; to add to Alawi contempt, in 1938, the Turkish military went into İskenderun and expelled most of the Arab and Armenian population. Before this, the Alawite Arabs and Armenians comprised most of the province's population. Zaki al-Arsuzi, a young Alawite leader from Iskandarun province in the Sanjak of Alexandretta who led the resistance to the province's annexation by the Turks, later became a co-founder of the Ba'ath Party with Eastern Orthodox Christian schoolteacher Michel Aflaq and Sunni politician Salah ad-Din al-Bitar.
After World War II, Sulayman al-Murshid played a major role in uniting the Alawite province with Syria. He was executed by the Syrian government in Damascus on 12 December 1946, only three days after a political trial.
After Syrian independence
Syria became independent on 17 April 1946. In 1949, after the 1948 Arab–Israeli War, Syria experienced a number of military coups and the rise of the Ba'ath Party.
In 1958, Syria and Egypt were united by a political agreement into the United Arab Republic. The UAR lasted for three years, breaking apart in 1961, when a group of army officers seized power and declared Syria independent.
A succession of coups ensued until, in 1963, a secretive military committee (including Alawite officers Hafez al-Assad and Salah Jadid) helped the Ba'ath Party seize power. In 1966, Alawite-affiliated military officers successfully rebelled and expelled the Ba'ath Party old guard followers of Greek Orthodox Christian Michel Aflaq and Sunni Muslim Salah ad-Din al-Bitar, calling Zaki al-Arsuzi the "Socrates" of the reconstituted Ba'ath Party.
In 1970, Air Force General Hafez al-Assad, an Alawite, took power and instigated a "Corrective Movement" in the Ba'ath Party, overthrowing Salah Jadid (another Alawite). The coup ended the political instability which had existed since independence. Alawites were among Syria's poorest and most marginalized groups until Hafez al-Assad's seizure of power. Robert D. Kaplan compared his rise to "an untouchable becoming maharajah in India or a Jew becoming tsar in Russia—an unprecedented development shocking to the Sunni majority population which had monopolized power for so many centuries."
Under Hafez al-Assad and his son Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father upon his death in June 2000, Alawites made up the majority of Syria's military and political elites, including in the intelligence services and the shabiha (loyalist paramilitaries). The economic and social situation of Alawites improved, but the community remained relatively poor compared to other Syrians, and the Sunni-Alawite divisions persisted.
In 1971, al-Assad declared himself president of Syria, a position the constitution at the time permitted only for Sunni Muslims. In 1973, a new constitution was adopted, replacing Islam as the state religion with a mandate that the president's religion be Islam, and protests erupted. In 1974, to satisfy this constitutional requirement, Musa as-Sadr (a leader of the Twelvers of Lebanon and founder of the Amal Movement, who had unsuccessfully sought to unite Lebanese Alawites and Shiites under the Supreme Islamic Shiite Council) issued a fatwa that Alawites were a community of Twelver Shiite Muslims.
A significant majority of Sunni Syrians accepted Hafez al-Assad's rule, but the Muslim Brotherhood in Syria, an Islamist group, did not. In the 1970s and 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood pushed anti-Alawite propaganda and a violent anti-Ba'athist campaign in Syria. Thirty-two cadets, mostly Alawites, were killed in the June 1979 Aleppo Artillery School massacre. In response to the Brotherhood's attempted assassination of Hafez al-Assad in 1980, the regime ordered a violent crackdown; Hafez's brother Rifaat al-Assad ordered the slaughter of hundreds of Brotherhood members at the Tadmor Prison in Palmyra.
The Brotherhood responded with increased violence, culminating in an attempt to seize control of the city of Hama in February 1982. The regime deployed between 6,000 and 8,000 troops to suppress the insurgency, and in the Hama massacre, up to 25,000 people were killed over 27 days. Seeking to ensure that troops would not turn against the government, the Assad regime was careful to ensure the dominance of Alawites in the units deployed to Hama: Rifaat al-Assad's Defense Companies were reported to be 90% Alawite, and in other units, up to 70% of officers corps were Alawites. After 1982, Syria remained relatively stable until the outbreak of the Syrian civil war in 2011, but the events in Hama left enduring Sunni-Alawite sectarian resentments.
Syrian civil war
After the Syrian civil war broke out in 2011, the Ba'athist state conscripted able-bodied men, mostly youth, into the regime's military. Fearing mass defections in military ranks, the Assad regime preferred to send Alawite recruits for active combat on the frontlines, and conscriptions disproportionately targeted Alawite regions. This has resulted in a large number of Alawite casualties and immense suffering to Alawite villages along the Syrian coast.
Many younger Alawites were greatly angered by the Assad government, held the government responsible for the crisis, and increasingly called for an end to the conflict via reconciliation with the Syrian opposition and preventing their community from being perceived as being associated with the Assad government.
In the early days of the Syrian civil war, many Alawites felt compelled to back Assad, fearing that a rebel victory would lead to a slaughter of the Alawite community, especially as the conflict took on an increasingly sectarian cast. In May 2013, pro-opposition SOHR stated that out of 94,000 Syrian regime soldiers killed during the war, at least 41,000 were Alawites. Reports estimate that up to a third of 250,000 young Alawite men of fighting age has been killed in the war by 2015, due to being disproportionately sent to fight in the frontlines by the Assad government. In April 2017, a pro-opposition source claimed 150,000 young Alawites had died. Another report estimates that around 100,000 Alawite youths were killed in combat by 2020.
Many Alawites feared significant danger during the Syrian civil war, particularly from Islamic groups who were a part of the opposition, though denied by secular opposition factions. Alawites have also been wary of the increased Iranian influence in Syria since the Syrian civil war, viewing it as a threat to their long-term survival due to Khomeinist conversion campaigns focused in Alawite coastal regions. Many Alawites, including Assad loyalists, criticize such activities as a plot to absorb their ethno-religious identity into Iran's Twelver Shia umbrella and spread religious extremism in Syria.
Alawite villages and neighborhoods were targeted by Islamist rebel attacks during the war. These include the Aqrab, Maan and Adra massacres, the 2013 Latakia offensive, the Homs school bombing, the Zara'a attack, and the February 2016 Homs bombings.
While many Alawites were Assad loyalists throughout the civil war, the Baathist regime faced increasing discontent in the war's later years from Alawite-dominated areas. By 2023, some Alawites had criticized the regime for its corruption, economic mismanagement, and disregard for civil liberties. During a rapid offense in November and December 2024 by opposition forces fighting the Assad regime, thousands of Alawites fled the city of Homs ahead of the capture of the city; those who left headed to coastal Tartus Governorate. Upon the fall of Damascus and collapse of the Assad regime days later, Alawite communities continued to express uncertainty about their future, although fears receded somewhat because the opposition forces did not target Alawites after capturing Homs.
Alleged attempt to establish an Alawite state
According to the UK-based war monitor Syrian Observatory for Human Rights (SOHR), former Syrian President Bashar al-Assad sought to establish an Alawite state on the Syrian coast as a fallback plan. This proposed coastal statelet was reportedly intended to serve as a stronghold for his regime in the event of losing control over the rest of the country.
Russia, a key ally of Assad, allegedly rejected this plan, viewing it as an attempt to divide Syria. The SOHR claimed that Assad subsequently fled to Russia on his plane after facing opposition to the proposal and refused to deliver a speech about stepping down from power. There were also reports claiming that Assad had been relying heavily on Iran's support to maintain his position.