Revolutionary Culture

Most Syrians, of course, did not adopt the religion of Assadism, though its icons decorated their streets, shops and cars. Syria scholar Lisa Wedeen’s book Ambiguities of Domination asks why the regime invested so much money and effort in a propaganda structure which was so obviously ineffective, and finds that the intention was not to convince the public but to undermine the public space, to destroy the integrity of those forced into hypocrisy, and to debase the meaning of language itself. Syrians behaved ‘as if’ they loved the regime, even praising the president in front of their children out of fear the children might repeat the wrong thing in public. A culture of hypocrisy and opportunism spread, and nobody expected honesty. In this way, and by brute demonstrations of power (most notably the 1982 Hama massacre), Assad Senior achieved his kingdom of silence.

When Bashaar inherited the state at the turn of the century, neo-liberal economic reforms combined with nepotism to destroy the old quasi-socialist safety net for the rural and suburban proletariat and the lower middle class. Crony capitalism became part of the culture (making Bashaar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf by far the richest man in the country), increasing poverty and social division, and undercutting the old contract whereby (some) previously marginalised classes and regions were brought closer to the economic centre. This ill-named ‘infitah’ or ‘opening’ meant that coffee at (Saudi prince) Waleed bin Talal’s Four Seasons (built on demolished Ottoman town houses) cost half a week’s working class wage. At the same time, the Old City of Damascus was revived by boutique hotels, fine restaurants, bars and art galleries. The old Damascus families couldn’t afford the property prices, and moved to the suburbs, the fringes of which were increasingly inhabited by the poor unemployed or underpaid, many of them climate-change refugees from the ignored and desertifying east.

For about six months after Bashaar’s ascension it looked as if a gradual ‘Damascus Spring’ would breathe new life into the stagnant political and cultural spheres. Some long-term political prisoners were released. Some of the ubiquitous pro-regime grafitti was painted over. There were notably fewer posters of the president on the walls. Cartoonist Ali Farzat’s ‘al-Domari’ (The Lamplighter), with its weekly diet of satire and investigative journalism, was the most provocative of the newly licensed publications. Political discussion groups set up in private homes, and dissenting intellectuals issued declarations calling for greater political freedom. But almost immediately the spring faded back to winter. Those intellectuals who had been encouraged to engage in constructive criticism were arrested and imprisoned on spurious charges. Private but regime-affiliated media (usually owned by the president’s relatives and friends) aimed to smother, and provide a simulacrum of, a genuine free press. ‘Al-Domari’ was closed. 

Yet state censorship was inevitably less efficacious than in earlier decades. Access to al-Jazeera and other satellite channels was widespread, and internet use steadily spread. Though the internet was carefully monitored, young Syrians soon became experts in cheating the authorities via proxy servers. The new technology meant that despite the best efforts of the supposedly Arabist regime, Syrians in the years before the revolution had never been in closer touch with the Arabs in their various countries, especially the young and politically restless.

And so it was in the remaining fields of culture, a process of push and pull between state repression and a society hungering for new horizons. The people resisted passively with dark humour and a gruff irony, and made their own evening entertainments with oud and song. The more elitist and politically neutral visual arts flourished in the Bashaar years, as did historical and fantasy television drama. More provocative arts lived either underground or on the edges of the visible. Books either permitted or smuggled from elsewhere were discussed in private conversations. Poetry remained a popular and often subversive commentary on social realities and – because orality and memorisation are still important elements of Syrian culture – poems were as difficult to censor as the internet.

Two of the late twentieth Century greats were Nizar Qabbani and Muhammad al-Maghut. The former spent much of the Ba‘athist period in exile, in Lebanon and London, but his anti-traditional love poems and his devastating political poetry (against social backwardness and dictatorship, and on nationalist themes) were equally well-known in Syria and throughout the Arab world. Al-Maghout’s poetry was far less romantic and perhaps more in keeping with the times than Qabbani’s (his narrative personas are more likely to be leering lechers than self-annihilating lovers), and his prose satires, though they named no names, were savage. Nevertheless, Maghut was tolerated and perhaps even grudgingly admired by Hafez al-Assad.

Playwright Sa‘adullah Wannous was another who somehow got away with it. His proto-revolutionary ‘The Elephant, O Lord of Ages’ was even performed (in both Arabic and English – translated by Peter Clark, who writes the introduction to this issue) in central Damascus. Other favourites who danced on the boundaries include comedians Yasser al-Azmeh, whose ‘Maraya’ dared to poke fun at the secret police, and Durayd Lahham, who starred in biting satirical films (scripted by Muhammad al-Maghut) on the failures of Arab nationalism, perhaps the best of which is ‘al-Hudood’ (The Borders). By approving such work, the regime gave the impression that not it but other regimes were guilty of corruption and self-interest, that were it not for them it would have solved pan-Arab challenges.

Two illuminating Syrian novels of late twentieth Century dictatorship, both available in English (and both banned but clandestinely available in Syria), are screenwriter and novelist Nihad Sirees’s ‘The Silence and the Roar’, a tragi-comic dystopia to match Orwell or Huxley’s, and Khaled Khalifa’s masterful ‘In Praise of Hatred’, which dramatises rival ideologies in 1980s Aleppo, torn between the Muslim Brothers and the regime.

The totalitarian period also produced a notable prison literature, most recently ‘The Shell’ (not yet published in English) by Mustafa Khalifa, who was imprisoned without charge or trial between 1982 and 1994. For so many intellectuals and writers, prison (and the inevitable mistreatment that goes with prison) was a formative experience. Others include the political thinker Yassin al-Haj Saleh and the poet Faraj Bayrakdar.

Precisely because of the savage degree of repression, it seemed to many (including me) that the Arab revolution which erupted in Tunisia in the last days of 2010 wouldn’t reach as far as Syria. The first Facebook calls for protest mobilised almost nobody. Traumatic memories of Hama, fear of sectarian breakdown, the near complete absence of political networks and civil movements, the presumed nationalism of the regime (its ‘resistance’ image still impressed some at home) – these factors in combination seemed to ensure the regime’s stability. When Mubarak fell, Syrian TV showed al-Jazeera’s live feed of the celebrations in Tahrir Square. This was a message to the people that the regime had nothing to fear, that its self-confidence and sense of legitimacy were unshaken.

On February 17th 2011, police beat up the son of a merchant in the Hareeqa area of central Damascus. (Hareeqa means ‘Fire’, and is so named because it was burnt by French bombs during the 1925-1927 anti-colonial uprising.) Such brutality would usually pass with only a little muttering; this time the merchants and labourers of the neighbourhood apprehended the guilty policemen, then gathered in their hundreds and chanted ‘The Syrian People Won’t be Humiliated’. The regime sent the Interior Minister to the scene. He asked the crowd if this was a demonstration. No, they responded; but it clearly was – not only a protest against repression, but a sign of an entirely new mood.

Next, the torture of the boys in Dara‘a who had scrawled revolutionary slogans on the walls. Then the murder of the boys’ protesting relatives. Then an expanding circle of protests, murders, and larger protests, spreading over the entire country, involving every class, ethnicity and sect.

Bashaar personally was popular until his first, belated speech of the crisis. People expected an apology and an announcement of serious reform; instead they heard giggles and wild conspiracy theories. And every day the killings, beatings and humiliations accumulated. When thirteen-year-old Hamza al-Khateeb’s horribly tortured corpse was returned to his parents, Syrians responded with a visceral outrage which startled even themselves. One face on the screen defined the moment: ‘I am not an animal!’ proclaimed this man with wide-open eyes, as if it was a new discovery.

Syrians stopped acting ‘as if’, and shocked themselves in the process. Participants often describe their first protest as an almost mystical experience of liberation through honest self-expression, of breaching the limits imposed by fear, and of finding true solidarity with the community. Those who entered the revolution had a sense of being reborn as citizens rather than as subjects, as agents of Syrian destiny rather than mere extras in the Assad epic.

Revolutionary Syrians discovered the country anew. At protests they learnt the Kurdish word for freedom (‘Azadi’) and recited the names of towns and villages of which they’d never previously heard, but which were suddenly centres of the revolutionary culture: Kafranbel, Amouda, Da’el, al-Bayda, and so on.

Regime supporters, meanwhile, emphasised a Syrian identity which excluded the majority of Syrians. These barbarians, they explained, were protesting in Hama because the city had always been a centre of Islamist reaction; in Dara‘a and Deir ez-Zor the people were shoeless Beduin; in Idlib they were ignorant peasants; in the Damascus suburbs they were poverty-stricken fanatics; and the Homsis (the butt of a million Syrian jokes) had always been stupid.

Even as the death count rose, many figures of the established official culture declared loyalty to the regime and its narrative of foreign infiltration. These included the ‘nationalist’ comedian Durayd Lahham and pop star George Wassouf, seen on video singing to, and kissing the hand of, Bashaar’s cousin Rami Makhlouf. Others, such as the Paris-based modernist poet Adonis, who for decades had been a critic of dictatorship and cultural stagnation but now strangely referred to Bashaar as ‘the elected president’, appeared more scared of Islamism, perhaps of Islam, than of the regime’s terror and its sectarian propaganda (this was long before Salafist groups became prominent in the armed opposition). But many more took pro-revolutionary positions. Some examples: actress Mai Skaf was arrested for protesting; cartoonist Ali Farzat had his hands broken by regime thugs for caricaturing Bashaar; novelists Khaled Khalifa, Samar Yazbek and Fadi Azzam wrote for the revolution and against the repression, as did poets Golan Hajji and Rasha Omran; and musician Sameeh Shuqair wrote and sang ‘Ya Haif’ (‘For shame, brother, for shame! Shooting the defenceless – for shame! How can you arrest young children? You are a son of this country but you kill its children. You turn your back to the enemy but you assault us with a sword.’) It’s significant that several figures on this very limited list are from minority communities, including Assad’s own Alawi community. Their presence in the revolution therefore contradicted the regime’s sectarian narrative.

But the real cultural change was the explosion of ‘low-brow’ art and commentary in the revolution, from the increasingly creative protest chants through street poetry and dancing to revolutionary songs.

In Da’el, for instance, the romantic song ‘Ya Sari Sar al-Lail’ was transformed into an anti-regime march. In Hama, Ibrahim Qashoush led the crowd in ‘Irhal, ya Bashaar!’ (Leave, Bashaar!), a song which rapidy became an anthem of the revolution. (The regime’s artistic response was to rip out Qashoush’s vocal chords before throwing his corpse in the Orontes.) On the internet, Syria’s hip hop and metal groups added their noise. A host of short video projects expressed revolutionary hopes and criticism, the ‘Top Goon’ puppet shows one of the most accomplished. Alongside the engaged art of established painters abroad like Ibrahim Jalal, younger artists like Tammam Azzam and Wissam al-Jazairy designed shocking and inspiring internet images. The ‘Stamps of the Syrian Revolution’ project sought to symbolically reclaim sovereignty and national identity from the tyrannous state by defining its own set of national heroes, including figures of the anti-colonial struggle alongside contemporary activists, intellectuals, artists and martyrs. Syrians, supposedly cut off by tyranny from the flow of global culture, proved themselves adept students of international media and its popular culture references. Kafranbel, for instance, a small town in Idlib province, became nationally and then internationally known for the witty and media-savvy slogans and cartoons (in Arabic and English) displayed at the Friday demonstration.

Many foreign commentators read the uprising through their habitual journalistic or Area Studies prisms, ones often tinged with Orientalism. They saw the sectarian breakdown as fated and inevitable even before the regime and its allies managed to engineer it, and therefore they missed one of the most remarkable features of the revolution – the miracle of a non-sectarian freedom movement in a country which, despite the cheery official talk of a happy mosaic, was certainly riven beneath the surface by sectarian, ethnic and class cleavages (the Alawi-dominated regime, as the French had done, had sustained these divisions in order to rule). One of the most prominent early protest chants was ‘Wahed, Wahed, Wahed, ash-Sha‘ab as-Suri Wahed’ (One, One, One, the Syrian People are One); in besieged Sunni areas of Homs, the Alawi actress Fadwa Suleiman led the chant ‘La Ikhwan Wala Salafiya: Kulna Bidna al-Hurriyyeh’ (No Muslim Brotherhood and No Salafism: We All Want Freedom). Nabd (Pulse), formed in 2011, is an organisation specifically targetting the threat of sectarianism. It organises protests which include people of all backgrounds, particularly in secular strongholds and mixed communities such as Homs, Yabroud, Selemiyyeh and Zabadani; its Alawi and Ismaili members smuggle aid and supplies into (largely Sunni) areas under siege; and it reaches out to pro-regime communities.

What this anti-sectarian activism demonstrated was not so much an absence of sectarian identification amongst the younger generation as a strikingly intelligent analysis of the challenge ahead. Their political elites abroad failed them, but Syrians on the ground had learnt the lessons of the clash between Islamists and the regime in the 1980s, and of the sectarian civil wars in Lebanon and Iraq. They knew the regime would play on sect to retain power; they knew the fear of sectarian breakdown would keep many on the sidelines of the revolution. And it’s notable that this movement was by no means restricted to islands of bourgeois cosmopolitanism in Damascus and Aleppo – all-Sunni farming communities and the poor inner cities understood and promoted the unity imperative as much as anyone else. 

Despite the provocations, the new discourse of shared dignity in citizenship remained dominant for the first year and a half, and still survives today. It is perhaps the revolution’s greatest victory; the fact that after 2012 it was overshadowed by an increasingly virulent identity politics is perhaps the greatest tragedy brought about by the counter-revolution. The regime engineered this, first by a propaganda effort, then by sending irregular shabeeha militias (in the Homs, Hama and Lattakia areas, these were almost entirely manned by Alawis) into Sunni areas to slaughter, rape, torture and burn. And when Iran and its client militias (including Lebanon’s Hizbullah, once wildly popular amongst Syrians) reorganised Assad’s failing front-line, the ethnically cleansed and the dispossessed came more and more to see themselves as victims of an Alawi-Shia front. Now this too is part of the culture, alongside the discourse of common citizenship: a mutual demonisation enacted through video clips, sectarian anthems, and physical assaults on the other side’s religious heritage.

One very positive feature of revolutionary Syria is the plethora of exercises in self-government that emerged in response to the repression and the collapse of state services. Hundreds of local councils throughout the country – many chosen in free elections, the first in Syria in over four decades – document deaths and arrests, organise protests and civil disobedience campaigns, and provide aid and humanitarian supplies to areas under regime siege. In liberated areas, the councils organise health, education, sanitation, and power as best they can under desperate conditions. This is the grassroots framework of Syria’s most hopeful future, and if anti-aircraft defences ever protect these territories from Assad’s scorched-earth-from-the-air, the base would have opportunity to grow, the refugees could return home, an alternative could be proven. But the bombs continue to fall... Umbrella groups which link up the councils on regional and national levels include the Local Coordination Committees (LCCs), the National Action Committees (NACs), the Federation of the Coordination Committees of the Syrian Revolution (FCCs), and the Syrian Revolution General Commission (SRGC).

In parts of the country, sharee‘a courts sprang up where the civil courts collapsed, and these varied greatly. In some areas they were imposed by one brand or other of Islamist militia, and focussed on restricting individual freedoms, particularly those of women, and suppressing political dissent; in other areas they were worthwhile grassroots community initiatives to redress grievances and ensure basic security after the collapse of the state.

And Syrians took control of their media. They uploaded phonescreen videos to YouTube, hundreds of thousands of them, making the Syrian revolution and the various counter-revolutions the most documented of any events in history.  Beyond Syria, meanwhile, a new media subset emerged – bloggers and analysts, the weapons expert Elliot Higgins is perhaps the most influential, who cross-reference and examine the YouTube raw material to build a picture of the war, the forces and arms in play. If the world is confused as to what is happening in Syria, no blame can be assigned to the revolutionary people. Thousands of citizen journalists and photographers risk their lives to get the story out; very many have died. 

In this country where ten years ago one satirical paper (‘al-Domari’) seemed an enormous leap forward, there are today at least 59 independent newspapers and magazines, including the collectively-managed ‘Oxygen’, from Zabadani, and ‘‘Aneb Baladi’ (Local Grapes), established by women in the besieged, starved and bombarded suburb of Darraya, near Damascus.

The revolution has brought dramatic change to the culture where it’s most immediately significant, in people’s personal lives. Conservative women have come out of seclusion to do social work; others have defied their fathers to put on the hijab in solidarity with their neighbours, or to take the hijab off, or even to take up arms and fight. Soldiers have disobeyed their officers; men who once acted only for profit are now motivated by principle. At every level Syrians are questioning authority – that of the regime and of those attempting to replace the regime, of Islamists and secularists, of traditional leaders and of the new ones who fail. Civil society is protesting against the regime, against the PYD (the organisation currently dominating Syrian Kurdistan), against the corruption or intolerance of local Free Army militias, and against the mainly foreign-manned al-Qa’ida offshoot the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS).

The culture of resistance is based on a culture of criticism. Short of large-scale genocide or a permanent ethnic cleansing (neither possibility can be discounted), this cultural vivacity can’t be returned to the box. The revolution has changed Syrian social dynamics irrevocably.

Yet so many have been killed, detained, or exiled. So many have been raped or otherwise humiliated. What was once a ‘middle-income’ country is an economic wasteland. A generation of children enters the twenty-first Century without schooling. For that matter, without vaccination, and with polio, typhoid, tuberculosis. A generation of orphans, of children who have known terror, who have seen the roof cave in, their uncle stabbed to death, their father in abject panic. What will this bring?

For most Syrians today, survival comes first and last. Their culture is one of war, displacement, rupture, trauma. Over the past three years some have stooped to astounding depths of savagery; others have engaged with the turmoil in unexpectedly inspiring  and beautiful ways. No-one can say which impulse, or what combination of impulses, will win the future. This uncertainty too is revolution.