Despite the official secularity of the Syrian state, religion has always been a viable instrument used by the Baˈathist regime to consolidate its authority and legitimacy. Taking different historical trajectories ranging from confrontation to co-optation, the boundaries between state and religion have shifted to conflation in the post-2011 uprising. The official political rhetoric has become explicitly religious and anti-secular, ending an era of official secularity since the 1970s. This newly employed religious rhetoric is evident in the presidential discourse, which is heavily and explicitly infused with religious language. Analysis of Bashar al-Assad's speech to high-ranking ulama in 2011 and his other public statements on the website of the Ministry of Awqaf provides evidence not only of how such religious language marks the move from secularity, which was used to strategically co-opt religious institutions up to 2010, but also how the deployment of religion has become a source of security, legitimacy and survival for the Baˈathist regime since 2011.

This paper investigates how women are perceived in the symbolic construction of the nation. It examines national songs as integral parts of identity-making in this stage of state consolidation in Syria. Moreover, in investigating the relationship between the construction of masculinist national identity and the perpetuation of nationalist songs after the ascendance of the Baˈath regime, this paper will use nationalist songs as an arena that reflects the marginalisation of Syrian women in public culture. Hence, this paper is concerned with the conceptualisation of the nation as an "imagined listening community" (Anderson, 2006) harnessed through aural production of nationalist songs as a means of political domination, while at the same time perpetuating symbols of hierarchy and masculinism.

This is a revisionist study of Syrian Ba'athism. At its heart is an examination of ingrained masculinist bias. I argue that there is a reciprocal relationship between militarism and masculinity, achieved through gratifying protection for both the nation and women. While most feminist scholarship dealing with states formation in the Arab context attribute its gendered nature to dictatorship, patriarchy and religion there is no debate about the development of states, and their relation to militarism and masculinism. This construction of militarized masculinity in Ba'ath ideology ensures the preservation of gendered laws that perceive women as less equal. While teasing out this aspect, I seek to explore the status of women in the Syrian Constitution (1973) and laws by investigating the role of the state as a male protector in which women's rights become challenged by the state's paternalistic perceptions.

This article addresses the evolution of Syrian nationalism, showing how the early pan‐Arabist ideals of the Baathist founders morphed into a cult of personality focused narrowly on emotional attachments to the regime. Current Syrian state nationalism is a “constructed primordialism” consisting of vague and sentimental concepts of the Syrian people and their history, despite the fact that the Syrian state in its current territorial identity has only existed for a few decades and incorporates a diverse mosaic of ethnic, cultural, religious and national backgrounds. In the absence of a cohesive pre‐existing community to form the basis of Syrian national identity, the regime tempered its nominal commitment to Arabism with heavily Romanticized rhetoric emphasizing familial bonds of love and devotion between the people and the leader. This primordialist construct has thwarted the emergence of a civic‐oriented national identity in Syria and contributed to tensions underlying the current civil war.

Spanning the era of the two Assads (father and son) up to 2007 (the referendum year confirming Bashar al-Assad’s continuation as president) and songs produced during the war, this study will explore the role of ‘love’ (hub) and its relation to ‘blood’ (dam) in the continuity and persistence of heroism in the national narrative. As a form of politics, love and blood have served the Baathist state in obtaining and using power and domination. This article investigates the various ways love as a political tool has been instrumentalized to legitimize the regime and construct national ties and unity. As such, this study interrogates the connection between the sacralization of the nation and the construction of love as a political and cultural tool to subject loyalty and subordination in political culture. Understanding discursive appropriations of love in this way offers a fresh perspective into the meaning—and most importantly, the politics—of love in modern Syria and its relation to Baathism, the Syrian uprising, and popular culture. In this context, the use of the term ‘love’ (hub) by the opposition has become a confirmatory tool of the regime’s illegitimacy. While ‘love’ as a political tool has been instrumentalized by the Syrian Baath regime to consolidate authority, the citizenry now faces many challenges. One of these is not only reversing this imposed ‘love’ with hate or anger towards the regime, but more importantly, rationalizing nationhood and national membership by focusing on establishing civic engagement and representation.