This is How the Assad and the Sisi Regimes Agreed on a Unified "Religious Discourse"?

The Syrian regime has been seeking to break the isolation imposed on it by the Arab world for years by heading toward its counterpart in Egypt, but this time through the gate of the religious establishment of the Abdel Fattah al-Sisi regime, which in Cairo follows the same approach as in Damascus.

Syria's Assad Religious Foundation undoubtedly works to serve power, leading to justifying the governor's actions toward the people, and floating a single-character religious discourse because it comes out of a single security apparatus, observers say.

The Syrian regime's reliance on the Ministry of Endowments is not new;

Mohammed Abdul Sattar al-Sayed, minister of endowments in Bashar al-Assad's regime, visited Egypt on July 4, 2021, accompanied by a religious delegation that included Damascus Countryside Endowments Director Khader Shahrour and Mr. Ahmed Qabbani's advisor, emphasizing the ministry's role in stabilizing the Assad regime internally and polishing it externally.

The Minister of Assad's Endowments held several meetings in Cairo, most notably the meeting with the Mufti of Egypt of the Sisi regime Shawki Allam, and the chairman of the religious affairs and endowments committee in parliament Ali Juma, in the presence of the Assad regime's ambassador to Egypt Bassam Darwish.

The minister's talks with Allam and Jama focused on "the role of religious institutions in Syria and Egypt in confronting extremism and intensifying efforts to protect young people from the influence of deviant ideas."

According to the Page of the Ministry of Assad's Endowments: "Upgrading contemporary religious discourse to be appropriate to the requirements of reality and to touch on the problems of society and its purity from the flaws of the Brotherhood and destructive atonement."

But al-Sayed's speech from Cairo on July 9, 2021, revealed one of the dimensions of the visit, especially when he said, "Syria over the past 10 years has fought terrorism, confronted extremism, resisted the blockade and won."

"Syria was the first to discover the reality of the Brotherhood's criminality and fight them in the 1980s, and it is confronting them today and facing all extremist groups," he said.

"Egypt has also suffered from them for a long time, and today the Syrian and Egyptian armies are in danger of this organization and will win it as they previously won in the War of Liberation, October 1973." 

 

Promoting the Governor's Narrative

In a preliminary reading of the message of the Meeting of the Assad Foundation and Sisi, it became clear that the focus of the debate on the common mosque between the two regimes in the permanent media promotion of the people's status as "extremist terrorists" was evident.

In particular, he is known in Syrian circles for using the Assad regime to the Ministry of Endowments to promote the media and political narrative he espouses in his war against the Syrian people.

No, but more than that, in July 2018, Assad's own minister of endowments, who has been in office since 2007, called in a video recording for the Qur'an to be interpreted contemporarily as "Bashar al-Assad's intellectual foundations in religious reform."

This proposal was met with great ridicule in the Syrian street, which considered that the approach of stopping Assad aims to exploit religion in favor of Bashar's stay in power and his character to the point of making it more like a "national education" approach.

Observers believe that calling on Sisi and Assad's religious institutions to renew religious discourse is only to limit it to serving the survival of these regimes, and to stigmatize any group, even if it is religious, that criticizes the ruler and his policies as extremist and terrorist.

Since Sisi's takeover of Egypt, he has focused on changing religious discourse and personally, despite the fact that the Ministry of Endowments has been assigned the task and held many seminars and meetings, where the coup d'état of clerics such as Ali Juma and Shawki Allam.

 

Unified Religious Discourse

Mohammed Nour Hamdan, a Syrian researcher with a Ph.D. in Islamic jurisprudence and director of the Center for Advice, said Assad's visit to Egypt is "part of the Assad regime's attempt to gain any appropriate opportunity to break isolation."

"Especially since it takes the formality of opening up prospects for cooperation with the Sisi regime, which supports the anti-Arab revolutions," he adds.

"The figures he met with the Minister of Assad's Endowments played a role in supporting the coup against the late Mohamed Morsi," Hamdan said.

"They all agree on the sanctity of going out against the ruler, whether he is defeated or through a military coup, to justify injustice and tyranny," he said.

"The first is the convergence of ideas between the Egyptian religious establishment of fatwas and their counterpart in Assad's Syria," Hamdan explains.

"Especially since Egyptians like Ali Juma to Mufti Al-Assad Ahmed Hassoun and how Juma has distorted many religious texts to support the coup, as Hassoun did," he said.

"That is why these people are now seen as sultan scholars and politicized," he says.

The second and third determinants are that "fatwas and religious discourse in Egypt are no different from what they are in Syria today," Hamdan said.

"Especially in supporting military force against the people, as well as accusing opponents of terrorism and working to demonize the Muslim Brotherhood and consider them to be tyrants," he said.

"As well as the neck of the texts for the military, Assad's religious establishment accused the opponents that their foreheads did not know prostration and that they were agents and received money from abroad."

 

Employing Religious Figures

In the face of these new data, religious institutions in Syria and Egypt are currently on the same path and raising the same slogan, in terms of attracting religious figures and employing speeches and fatwas in accordance with the ideology of political power.

This is what has been the case in Syria since the time of Assad Sr., who was interested in adapting religious discourse and making the intelligence services a watchdog through instructions sent to the Ministry of Endowments.

Egypt's attitude toward the Syrian revolution was turned upside down as Sisi came to power in June 2014, following the coup against the late President Mohamed Morsi on July 3, 2013, Egypt's first elected civilian president after the January 2011 revolution.

This was after Morsi openly declared his support and stand with the Syrian people in their revolution against the Assad family, and officially severed his country's relations with the Syrian regime.

Many argue that the Assad regime is entering narrow gaps, with the aim of achieving any new breakthrough in the level of the return of the relationship with its Arab surroundings or the contribution of some of them to its refloating.

Therefore, in the Egyptian case, Sisi's foreign minister Sameh Shukri has long hinted that Egypt looks forward to "Syria's return to its Arab surroundings," meaning the Assad regime and "returning again to take its place that we all cherish."

 

Security and Military Support

But the observer of the Syrian regime's relationship over the past seven years believes that it has taken on the character of progressive support for Assad.

Bashar did not hide the existence of security and military cooperation with the Sisi regime, he said in an interview with Lebanon's Hezbollah-affiliated Al-Manar tv channel in August 2015.

"Syria and Egypt are in the same ditch to fight the terrorists," he said.

This was reflected in the meeting of the head of national security of the Assad regime Ali Mamluk, to invite the director of the department of the general intelligence service General Khaled Fawzi to visit Egypt, where it was agreed to "coordinate political positions between Syria and Egypt and strengthen coordination in the fight against terrorism."

Their cooperation escalated dramatically when general intelligence chief Abbas Kamel, appointed by Sisi to succeed Fawzi, was invited to visit Egypt on December 22, 2018.

Owned by Bashar al-Assad's first intelligence hand, he holds the security file of Syria, and always appears with him during his meeting with Western and Russian officials.

Abbas Kamel, a man close to Sisi, his former office manager and his right arm, was not long behind meeting Assad regime officials, visiting Damascus on March 2, 2020.

During an interview with Portuguese television in November 2016, Sisi called for support for "national armies" in Syria, Iraq and Libya, prompting the interlocutor to ask, "Do you mean the national army in Syria, the Syrian army?" Sisi replied, "Yes."

Sisi's speech at the time was seen as a resolution of Egypt's "stated" position on supporting Bashar al-Assad's regime, after which he reported on sending Egyptian military forces to Syria to coordinate with Assad regime forces in the "fight against terrorism."

On December 7, 2016, the Lebanese newspaper Al-Akhbar confirmed the transfer of a group of Egyptian security and military officers to Syria since the beginning of November 2016.

The newspaper, which is close to Hezbollah, said this comes "in the context of a military-security cooperation program between the two countries aimed at combating terrorism and exchanging experiences under direct Russian auspices."

 

Why Egypt?

Current events indicate that there are factors pushing for the Assad regime's current increased activities towards Egypt specifically, identified by the director of the Center for Three Continents of Studies, Syrian researcher Ahmed al-Hassan.

Al-Hassan told Al-Estiklal that the Assad regime is currently working on "multiple projects to penetrate international isolation and build new post-militarization alliances, and Egypt is a key part of this project with the Gulf states."

The researcher attributed the regime's goal to "carry out partial reconstruction operations in Syria, improve the regime's political papers, and obtain Egypt's support for interpretations that correspond to the regime's orientations regarding international resolutions, especially Resolution 2254."

"Assad is working to convince Egypt of an Arab role parallel to turkey's regional role, because the regime is aware of the dangers of a unilateral alliance with Iran without parallel alliances in the Arab axis, especially with high Qatari-Egyptian coordination to attract Egypt and Saudi Arabia to the Turkish regional axis against Iran," Hassan said.