Syria's Peasantry, the Descendants of Its Lesser Rural Notables, and Their Politics Hardcover – 1 Jul 1999

In this book on political developments in Syria, Hanna Batatu follows up his work on Iraq in `Old Social Classes' with the same forensic attention to detail that he demonstrated there. If you valued that work, you will also value this one.Be warned, however, that in this case, the focus is much narrower. You've really got to be interested in the growth of the Ba'th Party in Syria to appreciate this book. Batatu is not concerned with a broad view of Syrian social classes and the political movements associated with them, but solely with the peasantry in all it's forms and with the political and religious movements which spring from that class and further the social, political and economic fortunes of that class. How have peasants in Syria struggled against other social classes, what form has this struggle taken historically and what political formations have arisen from this struggle? Principally, this means the Syrian Ba'th Party. And that, in a nutshell, is what this book is about - the social and political origins of the Ba'th , how the Ba'th developed and how it relates to other political currents in Syria and the Middle East.In that respect I found the book quite narrow. I wanted to know the background and growth of other social classes and political movements in Syria. In other words, I wanted a Syrian version of Batatu's work on Iraq and didn't get it.So, it's a specialist work for a small audience. Except Syria is increasingly in the eye of the media and in the cross-hairs of the hawks in Washington and Tel-Aviv. These people and their spokespeople in the media will try to present the Syrian Ba'th regime as a sectarian regime based on the `Alawi sect and as some sort of fascist regime.What 'Syria's Peasantry' represents in this debate, therefore, is the defeat of the notion that the Syrian Ba'th is a sectarian, or even apartheid, regime. Armed with Batatu's analysis, such simplistic and misleading propaganda can be dismissed.

Despite Batatu's penchant for academic flourish and the lack of chapter-to-chapter temporal flow, "Syria's Peasantry..." is an authoritative analysis of the origins and nature of the Syrian Ba'ath Party. Batatu expertly weaves demographical data, anecdotal accounts, and academic hypotheses into a compelling historical construct. Even more, Batatu's incisive insights into the life of Hafez Al-Asad, without drawing prejudicial or unqualified conclusions, breathes vibrancy as well as scholarly vigor into Syria's most enigmatic president. Indeed, some would say Asad's life was as veiled and mysterious as it was Machiavellian, so I found Batatu's conservative "let the reader decide" approach to be personally illuminating.

Batatu, emeritus professor at Georgetown University, has now published two similarly large tomes dealing with a Middle Eastern state laboring under a radical regime. Both have long, obscure, and pedantic titles, a vaguely Marxist outlook, and a content that manages to be simultaneously fascinating and infuriating. Fascinating because Batatu has spent decades unearthing, compiling, and comparing data. Here is the place to find a discussion of the electrification of the Syrian countryside, Asad's personality, the evolution of the Ba'th Party, or the various portrayals of peasants by Muslim and Western authors. Infuriating because, as Batutu acknowledges, his study "does not seek to prove or disprove any particular thesis or draw from the accumulated evidence any general theory." Instead, the author is quite content to ferret out the information and leave at the reader's doorstep, for him to make of it what he will.Infuriating too because the book meanders without disciplined from subject to subject, without logic or structure. It does so on the macro level, with two sections devoted to the Syrian peasantry and two to the regime of Hafiz al-Asad - and no explicit connection between them other than the fact that Asad is "Syria's first ruler of peasant extraction." It also does this on the micro level, with one subject tumbling on top of another (Sufism as a source of political quietism among peasants; why mountaineers resort to force more than plains-dwellers; the appeal of communism to peasants).Despite Batatu's disavowal of "any general theory," his choice of subject matter does point to his arguing on one side in the great debate of modern Syrian history: Does the character of the Asad regime derive from its rural or its 'Alawi religious background? Batatu's opus represents a major, if diffuse, effort to prop up the increasingly unsupportable rural thesis.Middle East Quarterly, December 1999