In Syria, Converting For Sake of Politics

DAMASCUS, Syria -- Last Sunday, Munir al-Sayed, a middle-aged Sunni Arab from the northern city of Aleppo, quietly did something he had done only once before in his life, without telling his wife or his friends.

Slipping into a Shiite shrine on a business trip to Damascus, Sayed removed his shoes in respect, padded across the tiled floor in his stocking feet and bowed his head in prayer -- not as a Sunni, but as a Shiite. Surrounded by Shiites, the 42-year-old Sunni lawyer prayed with hands pressed to his sides as Shiites do, rather than with hands crossed in front of him, as Sayed's family and other Sunnis have done for generations.

Sayed's new step across the dividing line between the two main sects of Islam had nothing to do with religion and everything to do with the polarizing state of political affairs in the Middle East and the world, he said: The white-collar worker from Aleppo was seized with a heartfelt desire to pay homage to Hezbollah leader Hasan Nasrallah, whose Shiite militia has been seen by many Muslims around the world as having humiliated both the Israeli military and its U.S. ally in Lebanon this summer.

"I'm Sunni, but I belong to Hasan Nasrallah," the gray-haired Sayed, smiling slightly, said that evening over tea as he and older Sunni and Shiite men, wearing a mix of Western clothes and Arab robes and headdresses, lounged on cushions in a Damascus meeting hall. Damascus, like the rest of the Islamic world, was in the second week of Ramadan, the Muslim holy month. The city's people were gripped in the insomniac rhythm of fasting by day and gathering by night for languid hours of meals, water pipes and conversation.

"I've converted politically," explained Sayed, who said he first prayed as a Shiite during this summer's fighting between Hezbollah guerrillas and the Israeli military. "I'm belonging to the politics of Hasan Nasrallah."

Sayed is far from alone, Shiite clerics here say. Emotions in the Middle East after the war in Lebanon, and at a time of unrelenting carnage in the U.S.-led war in Iraq, illustrate a number of crucial trends in the Islamic world.

Not least, Sunnis and Shiites say, pride in what is perceived as Hezbollah's triumph has fostered respect and a small but escalating number of politically sensitive conversions for the Shiite faith in Syria. Syria is about 70 percent Sunni, and many in the majority have long regarded the tiny Shiite minority as little more than heretics who strayed from the larger, Sunni branch of Islam.

The burgeoning of Shiism is worrisome to some Sunnis. Sunni leaders of Saudi Arabia, Jordan and Egypt all have warned of the increasingly influential "Shiite crescent." The crescent stretches from Afghanistan through Shiite-ruled Iran to Iraq, where a newly empowered Shiite majority holds power, across Syria to Lebanon, where Hezbollah makes its base and Shiites are estimated to be the largest religious group.

On a broader scale, however, some Shiites and Sunnis say the Israel-Hezbollah war brought Shiites and Sunnis closer. Many Shiites and Sunnis outside Lebanon share a common pride in Nasrallah even as they share a common worry over the sectarian bloodshed in Iraq, clerics and political analysts in Damascus said.

"George Bush has done us a favor. He has united the Arabs," joked Mustafa al-Sada, a cheerful, broad-nosed young Shiite cleric who works with many of the Sunnis who come to Shiite religious institutions here with questions about conversion.

Sada said he knows of about 75 Sunnis in Damascus who have converted since fighting in Lebanon started in mid-July. The war escalated what he said was a growing trend toward conversion to the Shiite faith in recent years.

"We can touch it, sense it," he said. "We get contacts from other countries, asking us to open mosques, send clerics."