Raqqa Subject to Imposed Islamisation

(Raqqa, Syria) – New Islamist regulations in Raqqa are felt by students every day on a bus that transports them from Raqqa city to the private Ittihad University in the city’s suburbs.

The male students sit in the front of the bus, while the girls sit in the back, because the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) has prohibited the male and female students from sitting together.  ISIS runs a checkpoint between the suburbs and the city, and before the bus reaches it, the driver, Abu Muhammad, asks the women to “cover up” so they can pass without problems.

The fighters at the checkpoint forbid the passage of any car in which the women are uncovered, including the Ittihad University students, who are twice daily forced to put on a niqab before the ISIS checkpoint, both while entering and exiting the city.  They take off the niqab after they pass the checkpoint.

ISIS currently controls Raqqa, after a battle that ousted the Ahrar ash-Sham and Al-Nusra Front from the city at the beginning of January, while the Hudhayfa bin al-Yaman battalion participates in the siege of the headquarters of the Syrian government’s Army Division 17, located at a base three kilometres  north of the city.

And yet even before establishing its full authority over Raqqa, ISIS had begun dictating certain behavioural codes to Raqqa’s residents.  Some have to do with appearance as well as other aspects of daily life, in accordance with “Islamic tenets,” since the opposition took over the city on March 4, 2013.

In addition to imposing the wearing of the veil and niqab by force, as is the case with the female university students, ISIS also encourages the garment by selling it at reduced prices at an outlet called “Al-Durra al-Massuna,” or “The Protected Gem,” which replaced a mainstream clothing shop there.

Enforcing the wearing of the niqab on all women at the security checkpoints was just the first step, since the men were also about to encounter their own share of ISIS scrutiny, according to one Raqqa resident, 25-year-old Muhammad al-Huweidi, who is a student at Ittihad University.

“They stopped us at one of the checkpoints once, and after ensuring that all the women were wearing the niqab, they turned to some of the men who were deemed to be wearing clothing that was ‘too tight’ or wearing their hair in unconventional ways,” Mohammad said. “They were warned that this clothing was ‘haram’ and that they should be wearing looser clothing.”.

Under Baath rule, even a light beard might cause problems, since the regime feared any manifestation of the Muslim Brotherhood. Now the presence of any beard, particularly a long one, conveys the fact that the wearer is a devout Muslim – and thus the Islamist militiamen are more likely not to hassle him.

 This has lead many young men to grow beards, not necessarily out of religious motivation, but to better blend into the new social order and to facilitate their passage through the many security checkpoints scattered throughout the city and its outskirts, a fact that rules the lives of the women as well.

“Most of the female university students don’t wear veils,” says al-Huweidi. “But before they arrive to the checkpoint they put on a veil that covers their bodies and faces. Fifty meters after the checkpoint, they take it off.”

But this little trick can’t last for very long, as it has now also become impossible for the women to be on the university campus without covering their heads, at the very least.

Al-Huweidi recounts how ISIS representatives visited the campus on December 29, 2013, and, after seeing many unveiled women, forbid them all—students, faculty and administrators—from coming back to campus. The teachers refused to hold lessons until the women were allowed back to the university, which prompted a delegation of students to seek an audience with the head of the ISIS advocacy office, a man by the name of Abu Hamza al-Masri, who told them that the women could return to the university as of Sunday, January 5, provided they wear the veil.

ISIS forces female students to wear the full veil, covering both face and body, as a condition of their being able to continue their studies. They also conducted several lectures within educational institutions on the importance of Islamic dress.

“After a lecture conducted by some of the women from the ISIS advocacy office, they handed out some CDs,” says Suad, 22 (not her real name), a student at the Faculty of Mathematics. Suad never looked at the CD, but says she knows the content very well. Damascus Bureau obtained a copy of the CD: directed especially at women, it includes e-books about women and the fatwas concerning them, as well as warnings about the practice of witchcraft and sorcery, in addition to Islamic anthems and recitations from the Quran.

What is described in religious terms as an “unlawful meeting” between a man and woman alone in public spaces, such as cafes or parks, has also become a source of problems, as it is prohibited for any man to meet with a women deemed “forbidden,” to him, which means,  any woman not related to him by blood or marriage.

“I was walking with my cousin on the periphery of the Rashid Gardens when we were stopped by a patrol,” said an 18-year-old resident of Raqqa, named Ahmad. “ They ordered my cousin to leave on her own and then took me to one of their headquarters where they beat me before they let me go.”

Several similar cases have been publicized on Facebook, including one that included allegations of an assault by members of the Ahrar al-Sham on a group of male students at the Faculty of Literature after they were caught standing and talking to some of their female colleagues on the university campus.

Until this winter, the interference by the ISIS, and before that, the Sharia Committee, which comprised several of the Islamic factions that maintained control, had been limited to issues concerning appearance and dress, since shops were not forced to close during prayer time, nor was there a punishment for those caught wandering the streets during prayer time.

But this week ISIS issued new regulations. They include a ban on playing music and selling tobacco, and forcing shops to close 10 minutes prior to the start of each of the five daily prayers.

Cars have also had to change their bumper stickers and emblems, swapping out any expressions of love or tenderness for jihadist or revolutionary slogans, just as the songs that once spilled out of shop and car speakers are now dominated by Islamic or revolutionary anthems, though they remain as loud as ever.

According to an imam at a mosque in Raqqa, who refused to give his name, the authoritarian imposition of Islamic appearance on the society has created a backlash. “Some of the women now paint on their cosmetics much more thickly after they were forced to wear the veil,” he said.

He says the solution must come through advocacy and awareness-raising for girls and women and parents, for without that, the society, as he puts it, “if forced into everything Islamic, will come to reject it.”