WP: Religious Surge Alarms Secular Syrians

[DeepModem Mom]

Religious Surge Alarms Secular Syrians
Islam's Clout Among Frustrated Youth Challenging Governments Across Mideast

By Scott Wilson
Washington Post Foreign Service
Sunday, January 23, 2005; Page A21


NASIRIYAH, Syria -- A religious revival is sweeping Syria, challenging the secular, ruling Baath Party to allow more Muslim influence in government and frightening many Syrians schooled for decades to fear political Islam.

Growing religious feeling can be seen across the landscape, from the proliferation of head scarves worn by young women in Damascus to an enormous privately funded mosque nearing completion in downtown Aleppo, Syria's second city. Muslim clerics, meanwhile, are growing increasingly bold in asking for democratic political reforms that could give them a larger role in government.

Alarmed by the trend, some within Syria's secular intelligentsia and middle class have begun writing and organizing against it. From his airy home in Nasiriyah, a town 35 miles northeast of Damascus, Nabil Fayyad, a secular writer, accused the government in print last September of softening its stand against the increasingly popular Islamic movement, its chief rival for power, amid pressure from the United States to reform....

***

Islam's growing political clout is challenging governments across the Middle East, even those built on Islamic principles, as religious sentiment intensifies among young, frustrated populations. Syria's ruling Baath Party, an Arab nationalist movement, has been at odds with Islamists for more than 35 years....


http://www.washingtonpost.com/wp-dyn/articles/A29401-2005Jan22.html

[necso]

1. Invading Iraq

stirred up fundamentalism in Iraq, in the neighborhood and more widely. As the war there burns on, more and more fundamentalism (or violence masquerading in its name) has been (and will be) stirred up.

And the same things will happen if we invade Syria or Iran, fanning the flames of fundamentalism to new intensity... and spreading them further and further.

It is a lot easier to stir up a hornet's nest, than it is to put all those hornets back in the nest.

[CHIMO]

2. Must Be The Bogiman

Well how does one end a crusade?