ABSTRACT
Cooperation between Islamist and secular opposition forces in Syria started well before the 2011 uprising and the subsequent creation of the oppositional Syrian National Council. Whereas elsewhere in the Arab world such cooperation was generally observed from the 1990s on, in Syria it dates back to the early post-colonial period. Under Ba’thist rule, the first formal Islamist–secular alliance was set up as early as 1982 and several similar initiatives were launched during the last decade. Reasons for this exceptionality include the country’s unique democratic experience before 1963, the subsequent exclusion of most political forces by the Ba’thist regime, the destruction of the opposition parties’ popular base through state repression, the latter’s moderating effect on the Islamists’ ideological stance and, more recently, the relative mitigation of ideological divides in a context of rising liberal hegemony. Moreover, transverse fault lines such as tensions between longstanding and recent exiles have divided both Islamist and secular opponents, thus leading them to form rival cross-ideological coalitions. Tensions over the status of Islam in the institutions of the state will very probably be revived by the fall of the Ba’thist regime, but modern Syrian history shows that political actors are likely to make genuine ideological compromises when they are engaged in parliamentary life.
