Different paths sought to Assad’s ouster

KILIS, TURKEY - In a different Syria one might imagine Yahya Abdur Rahman and Raschid Mohammad as good friends — serious, ambitious young men who have invested their hope in their country and their faith in God.

But neither of them are in Syria. Twenty-two-year-old Abdur Rahman had his medical school studies interrupted by the war and now lives as a refugee in Gaziantep, southern Turkey. Twenty-five-year-old Mohammad has been living in Gaziantep the last five years. He came to Turkey to study Turkish and English and then eventually enrol in a food science program at university — useful training for a role in his father’s business.

Abdur Rahman and Mohammad have never met. Despite similarities, their fates are vastly different. Abdur Rahman has been in Turkey over a year trying to find work — an under-the-table job since Syrian refugees can’t obtain work permits in Turkey. He’s also trying to get into a university, but says, “There is no (Turkish) university that says hello to Syrians.”

Rather than finding himself shut out of the Turkish job market and education system, Mohammad has found a network of friends and mentors among the Turks. When he’s not studying at university in Gaziantep, Mohammad volunteers with Kimse Yok Mu, a Turkish, Muslim charity established by the Hizmet movement. He delivers aid to refugees and occasionally runs missions across the border, in one case taking wheelchairs to Antakya, a town near the Turkish border which the biblically minded will know as Antioch.

The two young Syrians see the war in their country differently. Both think the war is a disaster and President Bashar al-Assad is a war criminal, a dictator and unqualified to rule. But Abdur Rahman wants to fight. Mohammad wants peace now, and can’t see more fighting as a path to peace.

With his three years of medical school, Abdur Rahman has had some experience helping the Free Syrian Army battle the Assad regime. He worked for a short time in a mobile clinic that patched up wounded soldiers. He sees no contradiction between going to war against a dictator and the doctor’s oath he hopes he will one day take to protect life.

“Wasn’t George Washington a freedom fighter? Didn’t he fight for democracy?” he asks.

Sometimes you just have to fight. Not fighting means allowing a brutal, criminal regime to run the country and that would be wrong, he said. He wouldn’t fight for power. He will fight for peace and democracy.

“I think sometimes soldiers can make peace,” he said.

Abdur Rahman concedes more fighting might end in stalemate and an effectively divided country with zones of Kurdish, Sunni and Alawite control. But he hopes not.

“I hope and think it will be one country for all Syrians,” he said.

But a unified Syria isn’t enough. To truly transcend the country’s colonial past, and stave off American and British interest in oil, relatively small and weak Arab nations need to be part of a bigger entity — some sort of federation or union, he said.

“I hope it (Syria) will unite with other Arab countries,” he said. “To make us more force, more power. We think Western countries control us with Bashar al-Assad. We want our own country.”

He doesn’t say so, but it’s a vision that lies at the bottom of a lot of jihadist rhetoric. Al Qaeda has often evoked romantic political and religious visions of caliphates — religiously founded, sharia-based local governments — bound together in the ummah, the community of Islam which transcends nations.

Life in Turkey and contact with the Hizmet movement of modern Sufi Imam Fetullah Gulen has given Mohammad a very different view of the war. As a volunteer with the Kimse Yok Mu relief and development agency, he has come to believe in a secular state that makes room for Islam rather than an Islamic state.

“We don’t want an Islamic system,” he said. “In Turkey I have my freedom. I don’t have to do Islamic things because they (state officials) want. I do Islamic things as I want.”

Mohammad’s time in Turkey and his Hizmet friends have taught him the importance of the Quranic verse on free will and religion.

“Let there be no compulsion in religion,” reads chapter two verse 256 of the Quran. “Truth stands out clear from error. Whoever rejects evil and believes in Allah has grasped the most trustworthy hand-hold that never breaks. And Allah hears and knows all things.”

Mohammad sees parallels between the sectarian meltdown in Iraq and what may happen in Syria if the fighting doesn’t stop. Rather than the Iraqi pattern, Mohammad sees Turkey as a model.

“The Turkish government, they’re teaching people to love each other. They are looking to people as people,” he said.

Turkey has learned the value of a positive secularism that gives individuals and communities opportunity to contribute to society without the state favouring or enforcing any system of belief. The Turkish model of democracy is also making way for a version of Islam that is engaged in building up society without tying the religion to a political structure or ideology, said Imam Merhat, another Kimse Yok Mu volunteer.

“One of the principles of Islam is to look on people as humans, not on their religion,” said the Muslim cleric. “We’re teaching people to look on people as humans and people are accepting that. We are not judging people by their religions. God has made these people.”

In the end the refugee medical student and the student-volunteer have a lot of common ground. They both suffer with their country and want to help people caught in the fighting. They both want a democratic, free Syria. One would fight for it, the other wants the fighting to stop.

As I shook his hand Yahya Abdur Rahman pointed out that his name means “slave of God.” Raschid means “rightly guided.”