In early 2008, the replacement of the Kaftari Minister of Awqaf, Ziyad al-Ayyubi, with the Mufti of Tartus, Muhammad al-Sayyid (b. 1958), whose father ‘Abd al-Sattar had taken on the same portfolio in the 1970s, was followed by renewed attempts at seducing the ulama. Al-Buti was appointed as the preacher and director of the Umayyad Mosque, and he reorganised the teachings to replace Kaftari lecturers with sheikhs from Zayd and the Midan.

From July 2008, however, following orders from the Ba‘th’s National Security Bureau, al-Sayyid implemented a sudden change, promising the ‘end of anarchy’. One recalls that in previous years the regime’s rapprochement with the clergy had been encouraged by the foreign policy crisis; this time it was the dramatic improvement of Syria’s international position (the takeover of West Beirut by pro-Syrian militias in May 2008, Bashar al-Asad’s invitation to attend the 14 July ceremonies in Paris that same year) that allowed the regime to enact this reversal.

THE END OF ‘INDIRECT RULE’

In September 2008, the death of seventeen civilians in a car bombing near a mukhabarat facility in Damascus gave the authorities an opportunity to expand the scope of the measures announced a few weeks earlier. The televised confessions (doubtful, of course) of the alleged perpetrators, who were presented as members of the formerly Tripoli-based jihadi group Fath al-Islam , did indeed highlight the role of two kinds of religious institutions that had already been singled out in al-Sayyid ’s summer statements: sharia institutes, with one of the detainees claiming to have been influenced by the ‘many radical Arab students’ he had met during his studies at al-Fath; and charities, some of which had served as a ‘cover’ for raising funds in aid of the terrorist cell.