The Compact Minorities and the Syrian State, 1918-45

Historians of the modern Arab world tend to emphasize the elements of novelty and discontinuity that were introduced during the period of the first world war and the ensuing Peace Settlement. This perspective stresses such aspects as the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire, the formation of the Arab states, the establishment of a direct and indirect European rule and the replacement of traditional loyalties by the supremacy of Arab nationalism. A different perspective underlines the importance of patterns and processes which were transmitted often in a modified form from the late Ottoman period to the Empire's Arab successor states. One such facet of the transition from Ottoman to Arab rule concerns the dominant role played in the government of the new states by members of the notable families, which had played a salient role in Ottoman administration and politics particularly in the nineteenth century.' This element of continuity also had an important impact on the relations between the communities which formed the heterogeneous population of the new states of the Fertile Crescent. Thus, the Arab governments installed in Damascus and Baghdad represented a perpetuation of the Sunni predominance and hegemony of the Ottoman period for the sizeable Shiite communities of Syria and Iraq.2 In this context the relationship which developed between the embryonic Syrian state and the Alawi and Druze communities is of particular interest to the study of both the Ottoman legacy and the issue of inter-communal relations in the Arab successor states of the Ottoman Empire. The two 'compact minorities'3 shared a