Freedom of Religion in Syria - Understanding Syrian Ideals

Understanding Syrian Ideals

To the Swiss scholar Marcel Stüssi the inherent difficulty with regard to Syrian religious freedom lies in the circumstance that the Western reader is required to reset some, but not all, knowledge on Western values unless she or he wants to be trapped by specific modes of thinking. While in the West, fairness means that the state protects a more or less autonomous society in which individuals are free to form a variety of allegiances and bonds of solidarity along any lines they choose (leisure, political, religious, cultural, racial, sexual etc.), in the Near East the justice system requires the state to assure that the individual is related to the religious community as part of a larger organism.
In other words, in Syrian culture the religious community is highly valuable as a positive human good, and as such, fully responsible for promoting the good of its members. Those members perpetually recognize a reciprocal obligation to act for the welfare of the community and their fellow adherents. In contrast, individuals in Western society find their place through the exercise of their individual freedom in competition or association with others. Thereby the law facilitates individual self-fulfilment first and foremost. The apparent conflict between Western and Near Eastern value and identity systems cannot easily be reconciled. Syria’s system includes structures and governmental functions that are not comparable with legal standards of Western systems.