Religious Leaders Must Prevent Another War in Syria
Saving the country should matter more than winning the argument. Religious authorities can help stop history from repeating itself.
Syria’s tragedy was not born of its inter-communal diversity. What proved catastrophic—during the civil strife and the long, corrupt authoritarian rule that paved the way to it—was the moment this diversity was weaponized and wielded as an instrument of domination, mobilization, and mutual annihilation. Once communal identities and belief systems became instruments of power, violence acquired a moral vocabulary, and restraint was recast as betrayal.
Over the past fifteen years, Syria has demonstrated how easily communal identities can be activated by malevolent actors, whether from within the country or beyond its borders. Sectarian rhetoric lowered the cost of killing, justified collective punishment, and invited foreign actors to insert themselves as protectors, patrons, or avengers. The result was not the defense of community or faith, but the erosion of trust, sovereignty, and social cohesion—costs borne disproportionately by ordinary Syrians and passed on to future generations.
The challenge Syria currently faces is not how to erase communal differences, but how to prevent them from being continually mobilized against the country and its people. This is especially difficult in an environment where all communities—regardless of size or political position—can point to genuine experiences of victimhood, and where clinging to communal identity has become one of the only options to keep yourself and your loved ones safe.
Communal identity in Syria isn’t necessarily destructive. For long stretches of the country’s modern history, religious and sectarian belonging functioned primarily as markers of social continuity, cultural inheritance, and local solidarity. What changed was the way it was activated, framed, and instrumentalized during the rule of the Assad dynasty—from father to son—both by the regime and by segments of its Islamist opposition, from the Muslim Brotherhood to Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its affiliates. Over time, communal affiliation was deliberately distorted from a lived social reality into a political resource, invoked to secure loyalty, suppress dissent, and legitimize violence.
As state authority eroded and violence became commonplace, this manifestation closed off alternatives for ordinary Syrians. In the absence of reliable institutions, impartial justice, or credible protection, individuals and families sought safety where it still seemed available—within their immediate communal networks. What began as a defensive cemented into a defensive consensus. Having cross-communal ties or claiming neutrality became dangerous. Many Syrians did not align along sectarian lines out of conviction, but out of necessity.
This dynamic helps explain the near absence of inter-communal sympathy during much of the conflict. Many refused to acknowledge even the evidence of their own eyes when members of their community were implicated as perpetrators. Facts were reinterpreted, justifications manufactured, and responsibility deflected through whataboutism. Some went further, using both traditional and social media to mock victims or incite further harm. In this regard, there is ample guilt to go around—and little innocence to claim.
Recognizing this reality does not mean accepting it as permanent, nor does it require moral amnesia or the abandonment of pursuing future accountability. It means recognizing that a society recovering from long, violent internal conflict can’t start by judging who was right or wrong, or by comparing whose suffering was worse, until it first dismantles the systems that allowed the violence to happen in the first place. Where fear, collective guilt, and communal defensiveness still dominate, attempts at moral arbitration are more likely to reproduce division than to heal it. Before a society can reconcile, it must first show restraint—and before passing judgment, it must agree that differences should never again be used as a justification for violence.
Political arrangements alone will not achieve this. Religious language—invoked by state and non-state actors alike—provided justifications, absolutions, and red lines that politics alone could not supply. This is why representatives of religious authority have a role to play in dismantling what was built in their name.
This is not a call for clerical rule, nor an appeal to install religion over the state, but a recognition of social reality. In a society where religious affiliation continues to shape moral intuitions and communal boundaries, silence from those regarded as moral authorities leaves a vacuum easily filled by extremists and opportunists. When violence has been sanctified, its repudiation must also be articulated in a moral register that communities recognize as legitimate.
At the same time, this role must have clear limits. Religious leaders aren’t being asked to settle theological debates, assign blame for the past, or get involved in politics. What’s needed is something simpler but essential: a shared statement that doctrinal differences must never again be used to justify violence.
The proposal is straightforward. Religious leaders from Syria’s various communities, speaking for themselves, would issue a short joint statement committing to three key principles: leaving doctrinal judgment to God and the Day of Judgment; rejecting all forms of inter-communal violence and formally revoking any religious rulings that support it; and affirming equal citizenship, legal protection, and the right of every community to worship, teach, and manage its internal affairs freely and without fear. The aim isn’t to erase disagreement, but to promote peaceful coexistence.
Such a declaration would not heal Syria overnight, erase past wrongdoing, or absolve responsibility. Its purpose is more modest—and more urgent.It would make violence in the name of religion morally unacceptable, close the ethical loopholes that have allowed identity to be weaponized, and strip future extremists of the religious language they rely on to justify fear and bloodshed.
For this to work, the declaration must be deliberately narrow and resist becoming a forum for historical reckoning or collective confession. Syria’s wounds are too deep, and trust too tenuous, for any document at this stage to bear the weight of assigning blame or litigating the past. Its purpose would be solely to prevent renewed violence before settling accounts.
Within the moral language familiar to many Syrians, the preservation of life ranks highest. The Qur’anic—and earlier Talmudic—principle that saving a single life is akin to saving all of humanity establishes a clear ethical ceiling no doctrine can override. Any religious ruling that justifies violence between communities should not be seen as a betrayal of faith.
The same logic applies to diversity itself. Human difference is not presented as a failure to be corrected, but as part of divine wisdom: “O mankind, We have created you from a male and a female and made you into nations and tribes so that you may know one another.” (The Quran 49:13).
From this perspective, internal strife in the name of faith is a transgression against divine authority. It substitutes human certainty for divine judgment. Deferring judgment to God while committing to protect life and coexistence honors both the limits of human authority and the priority of mercy over domination.
Recent efforts, such as the Marrakesh Declaration (a landmark, scholar-led declaration issued in Morocco by over 250 Muslim leaders, scholars, and officials, advocating for the protection of religious minorities in Muslim-majority nations), have shown that religious authorities can draw meaningful moral boundaries against violence. But Syria’s experience exposes the limits of approaches that address pluralism outwardly (non-Muslim communities) while leaving intra-communal violence unresolved. A Syrian initiative, shaped by Syrian realities and voiced by those directly concerned, would not replace such efforts, but extend their logic to the fault lines that proved most lethal.
Syria’s problem isn’t that there’s too much diversity—it’s that there have been repeated failures to set limits on how identity and difference are used. When identity becomes a constant tool for political or social mobilization, violence is never far behind. Ending this cycle doesn’t require religious agreement or forgetting the past. It requires restraint—clearly defined, publicly affirmed, and grounded in shared moral principles.
This isn’t a call to forget the past or to give up on justice. It’s a call to focus on the right steps, in the right order: protect life before settling scores, practice restraint before seeking reconciliation, and show humility before making judgments. In a country worn down by the cost of moral certainty, choosing to leave ultimate judgment to God may be the most responsible way to begin living together again—and to spare future generations from repeating inherited conflict.
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