Cleric's Slaying a Rallying Cry for Kurds in Syria

*

Long before he vanished from the streets of Damascus, the capital, Khaznawi was considered a dangerous man.

Just 47 when he died, he'd already gained a reputation as one of the country's most respected, and subversive, religious minds.

Khaznawi, a sober-faced father of 16 who wore flowing tunics, a tidy turban and unruly beard, was from the small Kurdish village of Khazna, an outpost in the deprived eastern desert where Syria fades into Iraq.

In a country of pervasive want, these borderlands are one of the bleakest corners. It is a landscape of almost unbroken brown, a deadly stretch of desert animated by dust devils and listless, bleating flocks, where farmers in mud huts struggle to scrape a living from the inhospitable earth.

Khaznawi grew up here against a backdrop of rising tensions between Arabs and Kurds. He'd clashed with the Syrian regime for decades. His book on Islamism was banned. He was forbidden to travel for most of the 1990s and barred from delivering sermons at Friday prayers.

"Security agents used to say that a traditional religious man keeps the people ignorant, and one security agent is enough to control everyone," said Morshed, Khaznawi's son. But he "enlightened people, so they needed a lot of agents to keep an eye on everyone."

Khaznawi was hungry for change, both religious and political. He advocated passionately for women's rights, scorning Islamic tradition that valued a man's testimony on par with that of two women.

"He crossed a lot of red lines which the others couldn't cross," Morshed said.

Khaznawi made weekly trips to Damascus, working as deputy to Mohammed Habash, a moderate Islamist member of parliament and director of the Islamic Studies Center. Both men preached an Islam so tolerant that they were branded \o7kafir\f7, or nonbeliever, by fundamentalist preachers.

"My friend, my brother," Habash said of Khaznawi in a recent interview. "We were in the same struggle against the darkness and corruption of religion."

Both received death threats, Habash said. On a single day this year, Habash got seven menacing calls on his cellphone.

But relations between Habash and the Khaznawi clan have soured badly since the body was found. Habash didn't go to Khaznawi's funeral, and he did not send condolences, Khaznawi's family said.