The Princeton Encyclopedia of Islamic Political Thought

Ba‘th Party

Hizb al-Ba‘th al-‘Arabi al-Ishtiraki (Party of Arab Socialist Resurrection) is a Pan-Arab nationalist party founded in the 1940s that exerted far-reaching political and cultural influence on the Arab world, particularly in Syria and Iraq. Though conceived as a secular nationalist movement, its ideology considered Islam a vital part of Arab heritage but not the basis for politics. In practice, Ba‘thists have been antagonistic to members of the traditional Muslim elite as well as violent opponents of Salafism and Shi‘i religious movements.

Party Origins

Upon their return to Damascus, Syria, from university studies in Europe, Michel ‘Aflaq and Salah al-Din al-Bitar (1912–80) began a discussion circle among the city’s educated young men that would form the nucleus of the Ba‘th Party (1942). Both ‘Aflaq, a Greek Orthodox Christian, and Bitar, a Sunni Muslim, were of solid middle-class origins and brought to the party their distrust of the elite and bourgeois nationalists of a previous generation who had failed to rid Syria of colonial rule. The party’s ranks were swelled by the addition of the followers of an embittered ‘Alawi refugee intellectual from the Sanjak of Alexandretta, Zaki al-Arsuzi (1901–68), who also brought to the party an emphasis on social justice, the cult of personality, and Arab chauvinism. The party’s socialism and secularism held little appeal for Syria’s Sunni elite or its middle class. Nevertheless, the party proved particularly attractive to non-Sunni landowners and rural smallholders, Arab Christians, and junior officers.

The Ba‘th Party in Syria and Iraq

The party held its first congress in 1947. Branches of the party were founded in Iraq, Jordan, and Lebanon in the early 1950s. Gamal Abdel Nasser’s rise to power and his advocacy of Arab unity gave a considerable boost to the party’s program. In 1958, Syrian Ba‘thists engineered the short-lived period of unity with Egypt (1958–61), creating the United Arab Republic (UAR). After the failure of the UAR, the center of gravity in the Syrian wing of the party shifted to military cadres dominated by ‘Alawis and Sunnis of rural and peasant origin. This faction, led by Minister of Defense Hafiz al-Asad (1930–2000), took control of Syria (1970) following a bloodless coup. Asad rejected many of the more radical dimensions of Ba‘thism and Pan-Arabism in favor of regionalism. An ‘Alawi from the area of Latakia in northwestern Syria, Asad placed ‘Alawis and Christians in positions of leadership in the state and party apparatus, further supplanting members of the Sunni middle class and elite in the process.

The Ba‘th Party had a similar trajectory in Iraq. As in Syria, Ba‘thism proved initially attractive to non-Sunni-Arab educated young men, in this case Shi‘is. Shi‘i leadership gave way in the years before the 1968 coup, which brought the Ba‘thists to power, as ‘Aflaq, then still party leader, appointed men from Iraq’s Sunni minority, including a young Saddam Hussein (1937–2006), to key regional leadership positions. Throughout the 1970s, Hussein and his kinsmen from the city of Takrit methodically took control of the state and the party. The régime that emerged was authoritarian in nature and sought to control all aspects of culture, religion, and thought through a vast secret police network and the party’s ideological domination of education, the arts, and media. Though weakened in the period following the Gulf War (1991), the Iraqi Ba‘thists under Hussein remained in tight control of the majority of Iraq until 2003 when the U.S.-led occupation of Iraq and the systematic program of de-Ba‘thification eliminated the party as a viable entity.

Ba‘thism and Islam

Ba‘thism is an amalgamation of leftist and ultranationalist ideas from 1930s and 1940s Europe. The basic tenets of the party are embodied in its slogan, “Freedom, Unity, and Socialism.” The party is secular in its view of citizenship and political participation, seeing religious distinction as antimodern and an impediment to Arab unity. However, Ba‘thism does reserve a special role for Islam in the formation of the “Arab spirit” and character and considers it, with language, as the essential element of Arab heritage (turāth). As the party’s chief ideologue, ‘Aflaq developed this idea first in his essay “Valediction for the Arab Prophet” (1943), in which he identifies Muhammad as the ideal prototype of the fully realized Arab (“Muhammad was all the Arabs. May all the Arabs today be Muhammad”) and sees Islam as the basis for a particular Arab humanism. Later essays explicitly identify Islam as the genius of the Arabs and argue that the manner in which Ba‘thism incorporates Islam into its ideology prevents Arab nationalism from becoming a sterile copy of European nationalism and precludes the need to use Islam as the basis of a reactionary political movement. While ‘Aflaq represents the dominant trend in Ba‘thist thought, others in the party, including Arsuzi, were more reluctant to valorize Islam in such a way, preferring atheism. Nevertheless, mainstream Ba‘thism secularized Islam, making it exterior to politics but seeking to capture it as a feature of Arab history and culture.

Throughout the 1980s and 1990s, both Ba‘thist régimes suffered crises of legitimacy in part based on their lack of credible Muslim credentials. In response, the Syrian Ba‘thist leadership sought greater accommodation with Islam by making changes to the constitution to guarantee that the head of state would be a Muslim, more closely identifying heterodox ‘Alawism with Twelver Shi‘ism, and assuring the president’s attendance at Friday prayers at Damascus’s Umayyad Mosque. In Iraq, the crisis emerged during the war with Iran (1980–88) and worsened with the Gulf War and its aftermath. Saddam Hussein responded with largely symbolic measures, including renouncing Ba‘thist secularism, adding the takbīr (“God is great”) in his own handwriting to the Iraqi flag, banning the sale of alcohol, rescinding some women’s rights, encouraging veiling, and embarking on massive mosque-building programs.

To many mainstream Muslims, Ba‘thism is inherently un-Islamic. This is, in part, based on the leading role Christians and heterodox Muslims have played—and continue to play—in the formulation of party ideology and leadership. It also derives from episodes like the massacre of members of the Muslim Brotherhood (an organization that was outlawed in Syria) and its supporters during an abortive uprising in Syria in 1983, the most violent moment of which occurred in the central Syrian city of Hama when Syrian forces killed an estimated 20,000 people and destroyed several of the city’s important mosques and shrines. Systematic Ba‘thist persecution of religious Shi‘is took place in Iraq, the most noteworthy examples being the murder of Ayatollah Muhammad Baqir al-Sadr (1935–80) and members of his family and the mass killings and desecration of holy sites during the Shi‘i uprising following the Gulf War.