The Arab Republic of Syria is an Arab state located in the Middle East bordering the Republic of Turkey to the north and northwest, to the east and southeast with the Republic of Iraq, to the south with the Hashemite Kingdom of Jordan, to the west with the Lebanese Republic and to the south-west with the State of Israel. The country also has an outlet to the Mediterranean Sea in the north-western area. Although much of Syria's borders have been traced and recognized internationally, tensions remain with Israel due to the occupation of the Golan region for more than fifty years (conquered by the Israelis following the "Six Day War") and with Turkey for possession of the Sangiaccato di Alessandretta (known in Turkey as the "province of Hatay"), Syrian territory ceded in 1939 by the French mandate authorities to Kemalist Turkey and subsequently annexed to the Turkish state through a fraudulent referendum.
In 2011, at the outbreak of the conflict, the population of Syria was estimated to be 24 million inhabitants, in addition to a large refugee population comprising 1,5 million Iraqis and 600.000 Palestinians. In this case it is necessary to speak of estimates because the last Syrian census dates back to 2004 (therefore the official statistics are remarkably obsolete); Furthermore, it is good to remember that in Arab countries statistical surveys often and willingly suffer from problems related to approximation and political problems that generate wide fluctuations, when not real distortions. As for the ethno-religious composition, most analysts attributed the following percentiles to the population:
-75% Sunni Muslims (Arabs, Kurds, Turkmen, Circassians and Chechens);
-15% Shiite Muslims (Alauiti, Druze, Ismailiti and Duodecimani Shiites);
-10% Christians (Arabs, Armenians and Assyrians of all denominations).
However, it is already necessary to get our hands on and say that such data may not represent reality at all. In fact, the only "certain" data relating to the sectarian composition of the country date back to the 1943, 1953 and 1960 censuses. Starting from the 1970 census, statistics of a religious nature were eliminated as well as, from an ethnic point of view, sets a generalized "Arab" membership despite the presence on the territory of the country of other non-Arab ethnic groups such as the Kurds, the Assyrians, the Armenians, the Turcomans, the Circassians, the Chechens and others. It is easy to see how difficult it is to faithfully represent the sectarian composition of a complex country like Syria using data almost 60 years old! By way of example, it would be enough to remember that, according to estimates, the Alauite population of Syria was estimated in a range between 1,5 and 4,5 million individuals, with most of the research proposing an average value of 2,5- 3 million people. For reasons of prudence, we will accept an average estimate for all communities.
ALPHABETIZATION, DEMOGRAPHIC TRANSITION AND "POLITICAL-IDEOLOGICAL" MOBILIZATION
Although a large part of the popular vulgar has been dominated, over the past five decades, by the "Clash of Civilizations" theory touted by Samuel P. Huntington and by a persistent vision of Middle Eastern affairs held hostage by the Islamic tradition and colonialist past, observing carefully the information relating to social transformations concerning the Middle East, it can be well understood how, on the contrary, it is well routed in the broader movement of History (*).
Paraphrasing the old Hegelian adage, it is possible to find, even empirically, how the progressive increase in literacy rates on the planet as a whole gives the intuition of an irresistible upward movement of the human spirit. All countries, one after the other, are progressively marching towards a state of universal literacy. This general movement is not reconciled with a representation of humanity as a universe segmented into irreducible, if not antagonistic cultures and civilizations, as Huntington would like. Obviously there are discards, which in some cases can also be significant, but not exceptions. And, of course, there is no "Arab exception" or even worse "an Islamic exception".
The states of the Middle East (and Syria with them) present considerable criticalities in the literacy sector due both to the scarcity of resources and to archaic social structures which discouraged both education and female employment in the workforce. These objective conditions are obviously different from country to country; however, by looking at the data relating to the age classes for each of the companies examined, it is possible to identify the moment when half of the men and women between the ages of 20 and 24 are able to read and write. This moment is decisive because it crystallizes the beginning of the next phase in which the first generation with a literate majority reaches adulthood. From this point, rates begin to accelerate rapidly, as demonstrated globally during the twentieth century. And, from a historical point of view, literacy rates have increased exponentially in the Arab world as in no other area of the world. Thus we thus have the first piece of modernity. However, it often involves the imitation of foreign models and this inevitably leads to a clash with the traditional local world.
We are therefore faced with a further element hitherto only hinted at: the "political-ideological" mobilization of populations subject to a surge in the level of literacy rates. As long as the bad plant of illiteracy continues to afflict a certain territory or a certain population, social peace is essentially guaranteed by the permanence of the archaic structures of management of power and society. In the context of the Middle East, these structures refer to tribal alliances and clan-like clientele which in turn originate in the traditional community-extended family organization (the "endogamous community family" mentioned in "Part 1"). Literacy affects all of this, inevitably leading to new balances. On the one hand, it allows individuals to work better and, on the other, makes them more aware of their rights, prompting them to question the pre-established order. This is particularly important in women because it involves a significant drop in birth rates.
"Total fertility rate" (TFR) is defined as the total number of children a woman brings into the world over the course of her life. The minimum threshold for a society to reach a condition of equilibrium from the demographic point of view is 2,11 children per woman. In societies characterized by the phenomenon of illiteracy, women are essentially entrusted with the task of nurses and, therefore, they bring to the world a tendentially numerous offspring. But when literacy makes its way to all levels of society, things also change for the female universe. First of all, the need to complete the study path entails that women delay marriage. Secondly, the skills acquired in the field of study are then often put into practice even in the workplace; thus the woman becomes an active element of wealth production within society.
A further element concerns the size of the family, in fact educated women will bring fewer children into the world and will tend to prefer a nuclear-inspired family organization of western inspiration. This is a change that should not be underestimated. If in fact, with the passage of time, the TFR falls below 3 children per woman, this means that a quarter of all couples implicitly accept not to have a male descent, which is equivalent to a waiver of the patrilinear principle by the company . In a territory such as the Middle East, where patrilineal, patriarchal and patrilocal family structures are the masters and where the "phallus cult" reaches heights not found anywhere else in the world, the end of this system is equivalent to the merger of a nuclear core; society begins to "ideologically activate" and becomes more unstable. And this is what happened in Syria and in the Arab world in general on the eve of the so-called "Arab Springs".
There is no certain mathematical formula to say exactly when a society in the process of literacy and in demographic transition begins to show signs of instability. Nor is it said that the level of literacy must be total over the whole territory of the country or completely affect one of the two sexes. Finally, it is possible that the waves of destabilization are more than one and distributed over time with no apparent solution of continuity. When the French Revolution broke out in 1789, much of France plunged into illiteracy. Yet the modernizing reforms initiated by Cardinal Richelieu, Cardinal Mazarin, Louis XIV and Louis XV, in addition to the cultural explosion favored by the Enlightenment, had meant that the area of the Seine basin orbiting around Paris had been reached a literacy percentage of the male component of society close to 50%. This transformed Paris, notoriously the beating heart of France, into a laboratory of political activity that found its outlet in revolutionary ferments.
A similar path has affected Russia, when the working classes of the large industrial centers of Moscow and Petrograd were literate on the eve of the First World War, or Iran when, in 1979, the literacy rate for both men and women had exceeded the 50% threshold, in this case at national level.
The same phenomenon is at work in the Arab countries, which passed the literacy threshold between the 80s and the 90s and then slipped into the vortex of the so-called "Arab Springs". In general, we can confidently say that, human societies enter a phase of "political-ideological activation" in a period of 50 years straddling the achievement of the literacy threshold of 50% of the population throughout the national territory or in certain areas which, for a myriad of reasons, represent the beating heart of a society (Paris 1789, Milan 1848).
This phenomenon of "ideological activation", to tell the truth, can make us understand how Syria before the outbreak of the war was an ideal place for the "nesting" of the jihadist germ. Land of commercial exchanges and meeting of civilizations par excellence since ancient times, Syria replicates the traditional family dynamics at a macro-social and political-ideological level that have characterized its population since time immemorial. The organization of Syrian society is fundamentally patrilineal and patrilocal, in fact in the early 90s of the twentieth century, over 35% of married women aged between 15 and 49 had kinship relationships with their spouse.
The "ideal" Arab marriage is that between carnal cousins; when this solution is not feasible, another relative of any degree is chosen and, only later, "halogen" suitors are taken into consideration. The social implications of this choice mean that the bond between the male members of the same family is very deep, that the right to succession is strongly unbalanced in favor of "strong sex", that the clanic and tribal bonds are paramount to all levels of society and that these characteristics contribute to keeping the archaic culture of the people alive. The Syrian census of 1981 presents an analysis of cohabitations according to kinship ties, revealing that, in total proportion of genders and daughter-in-law, the former represent only 2,9%. This proportion is an indicator of "matrilocality".
There is a slight increase in matrilocality, which however remains absolutely minority, when moving from the countryside to the city: 1,6% in the rural environment (against 98,4% of patrilocality), 5,2% in the urban environment (against the 94,8% patrilocality). The general data, however, are likely to be misleading given that the country presents a striking differentiation between the so-called "peripheral" areas and the central part of the country connected with the heart of the Arabian Peninsula. The provinces with an Alauite population (which profess an Islam officially linked to Shiism, whose authentically Muslim character is sometimes questioned) are distinguished by a matrilocality which, although absolutely minority, is still very significant: 6,6% of matrilocality rural for the province of Tartus, 12,5% for Latakia. These data present interesting analogies with neighboring Lebanon, which has matrilocality indexes of the order of 10%. On the other hand, in the internal provinces such as Aleppo, Raqqa, Dera'a, Hasakah and Deir ez-Zor, the matrilocality rate falls below 1%, a sure sign of a true patrilineal obsession. This difference has a further implication in the field of the right to succession where in the alauite areas the inflection in favor of women is very important while in the central areas of the country all the family assets are inherited from the male descent or, in the absence of it, from the so-called "asaba", the enlarged male relationship. However, this approach is rejected by Shiite Islam and in particular by the Alauiti. If a family does not have a male descent, the daughters will inherit all the ancestral assets while the cousins will only have "dust in their teeth", as the adage of Shiite family law says.
(*) "Literacy and Development in the West" (1969), CM Cipolla
(teacher)
Photo: Giorgio Bianchi
