Ma bitar, Rabba Mansour:
The Ba’ath initially came through the military, which mutated and mutated until it finally entered the fold of the immortal leader. Muhammadanism came to our country—let’s put it mildly—through the immortal Sword of god Ibn al-Walid! In other words, in both cases, there was “violence” and war, and control over the region and its people was achieved by sword and rifle. The Baath quickly degenerated into a privileged class that monopolized theft, corruption, and looting, similar to the spoils of war, which were the main motivation for the invasions. Both dwarfed human rights to the point of abolition or minimalism, and established the class system to the maximum extent, thus widening the gap between the privileged Baathists and the rest of the people. The Caliphate discriminated between the people, as stated in the Covenant of Umar, which had an essence similar to the essence of Article 8, and to perpetuity, deification, and the essence of religious doctrine. From the beginning, the Baath was an occupying power that waged war on the country, colonized it, and exhausted its capabilities. The Caliphate was nothing but that. After half a century of Baathist occupation and fourteen centuries of Arab-Ottoman occupation, those who look at Syria and Iraq see nothing but ruins. The Baath implemented, with regard to corruption, the Ottoman governor system. The Syrian thinker Muhammad Saad Atlas said in his book (History of the Arab Nation) about the deteriorating political conditions in the Levant, which led to the revolution against the Ottomans (Mount Lebanon): “When the tenth century AH/seventeenth century AD entered, the calamities of the people of the Levant increased, and the succession of governors increased over them, and each one of them stole and plundered and then left the country after being removed from it. The number of governors of Damascus during those centuries reached eighty-one governors, and the number of governors of Aleppo reached forty-nine. Unrest increased in the country and the rank of governorship became bought and sold like goods. The governor became nothing more than a tax collector, and the best governor in the eyes of the Ottoman Sultan and the Ottoman Grand Vizier – that is, the Prime Minister – was the most active in collecting money compared to his predecessor, as was the case with Amr ibn al-As, Uqba ibn Nafi and those who followed them. The affliction on the people increased when the campaign of the Ottoman soldiers known as the “Janissaries” intensified, and they spread throughout the country, corrupting it. This reminded us of a person named Iyad Ghazal (the Baathist governor of Homs). All the remaining Baath governors were like Iyad Ghazal and the Ottoman governors and the Arabs of the Peninsula, such as Musa bin Nusayr and others. To understand the Muhammadan-Ba’athist approach, it is necessary to briefly note the concept of the revival of the Arab nation as it appears in the Ba’ath literature and the concept of the Muhammadan revival as it appears in Sayyid Qutb’s thought “Milestones.” It is also necessary to note that it is not permissible to deal with the nationalist revival as an intellectual and political movement, but rather as a religion, and it is not permissible to consider Muhammadanism as a religion, but rather as politics. The nationalist revival is Islam in its majority, even if some of the nationalist group and some of the Muhammadan group reject the supposed identification between the revival of Islam and the Islam of the Ba’ath. However, this rejection does not stand up to the fact that the nationalist revival considers itself the leader of the state and society forever, and the Islamic revival considers itself the leader of society and state forever. There are basic common denominators between the revival of Islam and the Islam of the Ba’ath, as both are “monotheistic” and both are “superior” to society. Qutb said this explicitly, that the first step is to rise above this ignorant society on the path to the believers assuming leadership of humanity. The immortal leader Hafez wanted to lead the Arab nation, but his son who inherited it was, according to the opinion of one of the esteemed members of the People’s Assembly, qualified to lead the world, i.e. to lead humanity, as Sayyid Qutb had predicted regarding the muslim Brotherhood!