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Syria Eases Pressure on Islamists
DAMASCUS, July 3 (IslamOnline & News Agencies) - Islamists received an official go-ahead from the secular Baath-dominated government to hold open social and cultural debates, a Syrian Islamist said Tuesday.
Mohammad Habash, the director of the Center of Islamic Studies, said he received the approval from the interior ministry after applying two months ago.
The debates will be organized with the goal of "spreading moderate Islamic thought," Habash said.
He added that he is politically neutral, with no affiliation to the Baath party or the banned Muslim Brotherhood, which tried to overthrow the secular regime in the late 1970s and early 1980s. They have since been brutally repressed by force and labeled an illegal organization.
The Islamic forum would be the second forum sanctioned by the government since it imposed restrictions on such political meetings in February.
The government also granted permission to a Baathist MP in the northwestern seaport of Lattakia to hold political debates.
Meanwhile, the authorities have refused to grant permission to a Nasserist political forum, said Jade al-Karim Jibai, the forum's organiser.
However, Jibai said he is appealing the government's decision. While awaiting a final answer, he continues to host his discussion group.
Political forums sprouted up in Syria after Bashar al-Assad succeeded his father, late Syrian strongman Hafez al-Assad, as president upon his father's death in June 2000.
But since February, the authorities have demanded that all such political forums obtain assembly permission from the government and have required that the forums submit the names of all those taking part before the meetings.
Some groups have called this demand impossible.
Meanwhile, in a conciliatory gesture to Islamists, the government approved the publication of works by late Muslim Brotherhood leader, Sheikh Mustapha Sibai, said his son Mohammed Sibai.
Sibai, who owns a Damascus publishing house and has no affiliation with the Muslim Brotherhood, said the government would allow 13 of his father's 25 books to be imported to Syria. He added that the books are not of a political nature.
Sheikh Sibai died in 1962, before the Baath party assumed power.
The Baath government has been characterized by authoritarian rule at home and a strong anti-Israeli occupation policy abroad, particularly under former President al-Assad.
In 1967, Syria lost the Golan Heights to Israel, while civil war in neighboring Lebanon allowed it to extend its influence in the region.
The government has dealt harshly with any opposition, with thousands presumed dead since the crackdown on the 1982 uprising of the Muslim Brotherhood in Hama.
The young Assad's modernizing credentials have been bolstered by his role in a domestic anti-corruption drive. He studied to become an eye doctor in Damascus and London but joined the military after his brother's death, and was promoted to colonel in 1999. He is the head of the Baath party and Syria's army.
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