Suwayda: A Nation's Memory: From the Assad State to the July 2025 Massacres The Druze, the Syrian State, and the Making of Modern Syria (Religious and War Studies in the Middle East)

In July 2025, in the space of five days, more than 1,700 people were killed on a mountain in southern Syria. Most of them were Druze civilians. Some of the killers wore government uniforms. Suwayda: A Nation’s Memory is the first comprehensive scholarly history to explain how this happened — not as a sudden eruption of ancient hatred, but as the violent end-point of a century and a half of promises made and broken between a small, closed religious community and every government that has ever claimed to rule over it. This is a big book, and it needed to be. Spanning 1860 to the present day across three parts, thirty-six chapters, and nine appendices, it traces the Druze community of Jabal al-Arab — the “Arab Mountain” of southern Syria — from the faith’s eleventh-century origins in Fatimid Egypt, through the Ottoman period and the French Mandate, through seventy years of rule by the Assad family, through the Syrian civil war and the extraordinary eighteen-month Dignity Movement of 2023–2024, and into the catastrophe of July 2025 and its still-unfolding aftermath. Along the way it introduces readers with no prior knowledge of Syria or the Druze faith to everything they need: who the Druze are, why their religion has accepted no converts for a thousand years, what Jabal al-Arab and Jabal al-Druze mean, and why a mountain most Western readers have never heard of has spent a hundred and fifty years quietly negotiating the terms of its own survival. A community that kept trusting — and kept being failed. The book’s central argument is stated plainly in its opening pages, offered as a thesis for the reader to test against the evidence rather than a conclusion to be taken on faith: that Suwayda’s relationship with the Syrian state has followed a recognizable, repeating pattern of negotiated autonomy — granted, tested, broken, and renegotiated — that held through every previous crisis this book documents, and that finally broke rather than bent in July 2025. What makes that month so devastating is not only its scale, though 1,700 documented deaths is a catastrophic toll for a community numbering perhaps 700,000 worldwide. It is that the massacres were the third documented failure of a government’s promise to protect the Druze within five months of that government taking power — following mass killings of Alawite civilians on Syria’s coast in March 2025, and a wave of sectarian violence in the Damascus suburbs of Jaramana and Sahnaya in April and May. Twice already that year, Syria’s new transitional government had shown what it would do when tested. Suwayda’s leadership extended trust anyway — and on 1 May 2025, in a unanimous public statement, explicitly rejected “any form of partition, separation, or secession.” Ten weeks later, government forces entered Suwayda under the banner of restoring order, and some of them began executing Druze civilians in the streets. This book does not let that irony pass unremarked. It is, in the end, a book about what happens to a people’s patience — and what a state forfeits when it exhausts it. Suwayda: A Nation’s Memory is written by Dr. Hisham Al-Saghbini, whose own family history is rooted in the Druze community this book documents, and who brings to the project both a professional grounding in rigorous research and a personal, inherited stake in seeing this history told accurately. It is presented as a living scholarly document — its author’s stated intention is to revise and extend it as trial records, further investigation, and direct field testimony become available in the years ahead. For readers and researchers: this edition includes full chapter-level citations and endnotes, a consolidated bibliography, a complete chronology from 1860 to the present, statistical tables, and a formal research-ethics protocol governing the treatment of victims and survivors throughout.