This is a tale of two Syrian cities. One worships the late president Hafez al-Assad, who died a week ago today. The other loathes him.

In Qordaha, Assad's home town, they love the late president to distraction, as they would a God or a prophet. For Assad brought pride, wealth and power to the Alawi mountains. He was the native son, Ali Suleiman's boy who learned to read and write, joined the air force, helped lead the 1963 Ba'athist revolution and seized the president's office seven years later.

The walls of Qordaha are painted black and houses are shrouded in sackcloth. In Hama, a Sunni Muslim city two hours drive inland from Qordaha, the only black flags fly on public buildings. There are no noisy processions of chanting mourners. No one sits under Assad memorial canopies erected by local officials, and there are few takers for the piles of Assad posters distributed at news stands.

"Welcome to Qordaha, the Lion's lair", says the archway over the triumphal road into Assad's home village. As Patrick Seale recounts in his biography, Assad, the Struggle for the Middle East, the late president's grandfather was called "Wahhash" - "savage", or "monster" - because of his prowess at wrestling. Assad's father moved up in the world, from peasant to minor notable, and changed the family's name from Wahhash to Assad - from monster to lion.

Now Syrians make the pilgrimage to Qordaha in tens of thousands, to pay tribute to the Lion. It is a pretty town, with purple bougainvilia flowers, glimpses of the Mediterranean, filigree lamposts and red-roofed, Spanish-style apartments paid for by the government in Damascus.

More than 5,000 people have visited the cream and honey-coloured stone mausoleum in the last two hours, 23-year-old Maher Salman, a distant cousin of the Assads and a permanent guide here, tells me. Salman has the fair hair and blue eyes for which the Alawis are known - allegedly a vestige of the crusaders' passage through these mountains. Dr Bashar, Assad's son who is almost certain to succeed him as president, has the same sky-blue eyes.

A thick fog of incense rises from brass bowls placed around Assad's tomb, at the centre of the octagonal dome. He is buried in the earth, beneath the floor, and his grave is blanketed with green branches, a pillow of white flowers and an open Koran at the head. A circle of white flowers surrounds him. "These flowers are a symbol of how the people rallied behind President Assad," 40 year-old Ma'an Ibrahim, the chief of protocol for the shrine, explains.

A silent crowd of men and women, army generals, Syrian Air crews, bedouins and civil servants, swirls constantly through the incense that rises from the tomb. Suddenly an almost animal shriek breaks out, and we see a young man in a tracksuit fall to the floor. "He has lost his senses," Mr Ibrahim explains. "It happens several times a day. "People cannot believe what has happened. The only thing that alleviates this ordeal is their love for Dr Bashar." A few minutes later, an attractive young woman in black collapses sobbing among the bowls of incense and her family help her to the door.

The shrine was built for Assad's eldest son Bassel, his favourite, who was killed in a car crash in 1994. Today, no one is visiting the ante-room where Bassel lies under a green satin draped catafalque - like Salahedin's tomb in the Ommayed Mosque in Damascus.

"The president used to come here every year on the anniversary of Bassel's death, and sometimes on feast days," Mr Ibrahim recalls. "He prayed and read the opening chapter of the Koran - I have proof that he was a strong believer in God. He used to say, `God gave me this son and God took him away from me.' When he went out, sometimes he was smiling. There would be a crowd waiting and he would give instructions that food and drink be provided for the people."

Assad the Holy, Assad the Good. Mr Ibrahim tells us that the Great Leader's lesson to his people was one of love - for their neighbours, for their countrymen, for the world. "He loved all religions and sects and all the religions loved him," he continues, as if pre-empting the accusation of Alawi sectarianism invariably levelled by Assad's enemies. Mr Ibrahim's eulogy contradicts dozens of human rights reports on torture and the detention of thousands of political prisoners. It is hard to square with the Syrian secret services' past penchant for assassination and bombing.

As I leave the shrine, a Lebanese Shia, an adviser to the speaker of parliament Nabih Berri, tells me that the Alawis are Shias like him, that he thanks God for the life of Hafez al-Assad, without whose support the Lebanese resistance would never have driven the Israelis from southern Lebanon. Suddenly, it all makes sense - the black headbands and wailing processions, Assad's friendship with Iran and the Lebanese Shias. Ba'athist ideology is always portrayed as socialist, Arab nationalist and secular. The death of Hafez al-Assad drove home that Alawis are Shia Muslims, not the mysterious, isolated sect whose existence was for so long a taboo subject.

The 1963 Ba'athis revolution overthrew the urban, gentrified Sunni Muslim establishment that for centuries treated the Alawis - now 11 per cent of Syria's population - as servants. For nearly 40 years, the once-poor country people, the Shia sects - Alawis, Druse and Ismailis - and their minority Christian cohorts, have lorded it over their former Sunni masters. With Sunnis comprising 75 per cent of Syria's 15 million population, Assad could not have held power without Sunni allies - Mustafa Tlass, his defence minister for 30 years and Abdel Halim Khaddam, the vice-president who has acted as president since his death, are both Sunnis.

But Alawis hold the positions of real power in the ruling Ba'ath party and army. Nowhere did this rankle as it did in Hama, a centre of Sunni orthodoxy. In 1982, Assad's younger brother Rifa'at wiped out the Sunni Muslim Brotherhood in a month-long siege in which a reputed 10,000 people were slaughtered.

To the fundamentalist Sunni sheikhs of Hama, the Alawis are heretics. Syria's 1976 intervention in Lebanon - on behalf of Maronite Catholics and against Sunni Muslim Lebanese and Palestinians - ignited a six-year war of car-bombs and assassinations, run from the mosques of Hama. In February 1982, Assad's army surrounded the city with thousands of tanks, then shelled it into submission.

Today, a luxury hotel sits on the bank of the Orontes River, on the spot from which Rifa'at al-Assad's tanks bombarded the old city. Hama's famous water wheels, which have irrigated local gardens since four centuries before Christ, still groan and creak for the benefit of the city's few tourists. Myth says their groans are the voices of the dead.

Eighteen years after one of the worst atrocities in the modern Middle East took place here, Hama is a sad, lifeless city. Its ancient stone walls are still scarred by bullets and shrapnel, still stained black by fire. The roofs of derelict buildings are caved in. Plants grow from their walls. The women who move silently through the streets all wear long robes and headscarves - evidence that the population's fundamentalist leanings have not altered.

Several painters live in an artists' colony around the courtyard of an Ottoman building. One has painted a triptych of the old town in flames. Tormented, ghostly figures appear in windows. Buildings bleed into the river. An adult flees, clutching a child to its chest. The painting is just abstract enough to be a safe political statement - its violent colours and fissured homes and faces could have other interpretations, should the secret police come calling.

In 1982, the painter hid in his basement and ate nuts for a month to survive. "What happened, happened," he says sadly, sitting in his artist's studio. He is more forthcoming than the other half-dozen people I spoke to. A man on a motor scooter, two shopkeepers, two students of Islamic law in long robes, a restaurant owner - all looked over their shoulders to see who might be listening, replied elliptically, then changed the subject.

"1982 is gone, the painter says. "I don't think of it anymore. It is finished in my mind." Did he lose anyone he loved? "I don't want to talk about it anymore," he answers. "Let me just say that every household lost at least one."

The artist began an oil portrait of Dr Bashar al-Assad on the day of the President's funeral. He intends to give it to the provincial governor as a gift. As a sign of loyalty and submission. As an insurance policy, should the secret police come calling.