What do you think?
Rate this book
Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy
Syria's dictator Bashar al-Assad and his junta regime have slaughtered hundreds of thousands of Syrians in the name of fighting terrorism. Former political prisoner, and current refugee, Yassin al-Haj Saleh exposes the lies that enable Assad to continue on his reign of terror as well as the complicity of both Russia and the US in atrocities endured by Syrians.
332 pages, Kindle Edition
First published August 28, 2017
67 people are currently reading
1602 people want to read
Ratings & Reviews
Friends & Following
Create a free account to discover what your friends think of this book!
Community Reviews
Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews
September 21, 2017
Yassin Hajj Saleh is one of the few truly heroic public intellectuals still living and working today. He spent 18 years in the jails of Ba'athist Syria for his left-wing political activism before taking part in the 2011 revolution, where he was one of its most able and informed underground chroniclers. In 2013, his wife was kidnapped by militia groups in the Damascus suburbs and Yassin was forced to join the exodus of millions of Syrians who have become refugees in Turkey, where he lives today.
This book is a set of essays written by Yassin over the course of the revolution. Although they deal with a range of themes, they are arranged in a way that provides a rough chronology of the rise and fall of Syrian society over the past six years. I was familiar with his writing over much of this time and had also interviewed him at length for a major news publication a few months ago, so a lot of what is in this book was not necessarily new to me.
One argument from the book stood out to me though: Yassin's articulation of the process of Salafi-Jihadist radicalization as a form of "nihilism" similar to other forms of world-denying nihilisms that have arisen over the past century. Within Islam there is a concept of the "dunya," or material world, that most Muslims reconcile themselves with. Those who reconcile often tend naturally to be the ones for whom the material world itself is more comfortable, reasonable and bearable. But the propensity to deny the value of the dunya can have a negative side, leading to the extreme where the physical world itself is seen as lacking merit or value and thus any type of insane act can be justified against it and its inhabitants. It is generally seen as a positive thing among practicing Muslims to negate material possessions in favor about spiritualism, but in the wrong hands this denigration of materialism can become dangerous.
For Muslims who embrace the nihilistic viewpoint that the world is meaningless (as the 19th and 20th century European nihilists did before them for altogether different reasons) the earth simply becomes a debased realm for acting out their internal lives, holding no value as a place to negotiate with or cherish. In this we can see the type of mentality that led Islamic State to blow up the historic al-Nouri Mosque in Mosul, technically cherished to Sunni Muslims like them, but a place that holds no sentimental meaning for those who have completely divorced themselves from the corrupted earth long ago. Coupled with a maniacal focus on tawheed, a lionization of an early Golden Era to the exclusion of all other history and a general spiritual and educational impoverishment, it is clear how this could become a potent and dangerous ideology. This explanation of what animates"radical Islam" is both novel and intellectually satisfying for those of us who know something about how Islam is actually practiced and conceptualized within the world.
As usual Yassin is principled and insightful on everything he discusses. The vast majority of his ire is directed at the "neo-Sultanic" state of the Assad family which he blames for the destruction of Syrian society, whereas the jihadists and foreign interventionists function as epiphenomena of the Assad's gruesome misrule. He also eloquently excoriates the crimes and excesses of the Western powers, including the function of their loathsome "terrorism discourse" that has now been appropriated by the fascistic Assad regime.
I recommend anything Yassin writes, and would say that this book is a must-read for students of revolutions and the modern Middle East in particular. His online essays are also a great education on the subject of Syria and can help demystify what, at least on its surface, has become one of the most complex conflicts in recent history.
(There is also my interview with him which I think is an education in itself: https://theintercept.com/2016/10/26/s...)
This book is a set of essays written by Yassin over the course of the revolution. Although they deal with a range of themes, they are arranged in a way that provides a rough chronology of the rise and fall of Syrian society over the past six years. I was familiar with his writing over much of this time and had also interviewed him at length for a major news publication a few months ago, so a lot of what is in this book was not necessarily new to me.
One argument from the book stood out to me though: Yassin's articulation of the process of Salafi-Jihadist radicalization as a form of "nihilism" similar to other forms of world-denying nihilisms that have arisen over the past century. Within Islam there is a concept of the "dunya," or material world, that most Muslims reconcile themselves with. Those who reconcile often tend naturally to be the ones for whom the material world itself is more comfortable, reasonable and bearable. But the propensity to deny the value of the dunya can have a negative side, leading to the extreme where the physical world itself is seen as lacking merit or value and thus any type of insane act can be justified against it and its inhabitants. It is generally seen as a positive thing among practicing Muslims to negate material possessions in favor about spiritualism, but in the wrong hands this denigration of materialism can become dangerous.
For Muslims who embrace the nihilistic viewpoint that the world is meaningless (as the 19th and 20th century European nihilists did before them for altogether different reasons) the earth simply becomes a debased realm for acting out their internal lives, holding no value as a place to negotiate with or cherish. In this we can see the type of mentality that led Islamic State to blow up the historic al-Nouri Mosque in Mosul, technically cherished to Sunni Muslims like them, but a place that holds no sentimental meaning for those who have completely divorced themselves from the corrupted earth long ago. Coupled with a maniacal focus on tawheed, a lionization of an early Golden Era to the exclusion of all other history and a general spiritual and educational impoverishment, it is clear how this could become a potent and dangerous ideology. This explanation of what animates"radical Islam" is both novel and intellectually satisfying for those of us who know something about how Islam is actually practiced and conceptualized within the world.
As usual Yassin is principled and insightful on everything he discusses. The vast majority of his ire is directed at the "neo-Sultanic" state of the Assad family which he blames for the destruction of Syrian society, whereas the jihadists and foreign interventionists function as epiphenomena of the Assad's gruesome misrule. He also eloquently excoriates the crimes and excesses of the Western powers, including the function of their loathsome "terrorism discourse" that has now been appropriated by the fascistic Assad regime.
I recommend anything Yassin writes, and would say that this book is a must-read for students of revolutions and the modern Middle East in particular. His online essays are also a great education on the subject of Syria and can help demystify what, at least on its surface, has become one of the most complex conflicts in recent history.
(There is also my interview with him which I think is an education in itself: https://theintercept.com/2016/10/26/s...)
February 26, 2018
'The Impossible Revolution. Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy' (2017) consists of
10 or so essays written between spring 2011 and February 2015. The author is not some Western (-educated) pundit on the payroll of a transatlantic think tank but a Syrian journalist and former member of the Syrian Communist Party (and who was already a poltical prisoner from 1980 to 1996). Given the ideological battle over the Syria narrative (security discourse, blind anti-imperialism, regime change R2P crap etc), I don't need to explain why that matters SO MUCH.
I was looking for exactly this kind of book which provides an analysis of ideology, class and power in Syria. Obviously, there's no point in making sense of the uprising (any uprising) without understanding the constellation of social forces in contemporary Syrian society and the (past and present) material and ideological base of the Assad oligarchy and various oppositional forces. The essay on 'the roots of Syrian fascism' was fairly enlightening in this sense.
While it's always convenient to lump these uprisings together under the Arab spring narrative - oppressed people rising up against brutal dictator - this 'framework' (or lack thereof) cant account for the internal dynamics and very unique trajectories of the uprisings within each country. Obviously, geopolitics is key to these revolutions and whether or not a dictator stays or goes depends on whether or not the P5 want him (ugh. Still no female Middle Eastern dictator in the 21st century!) stay or gone.
I guess it's part of the Western arrogance (and lack of Arabic language skills) to disregard the complexities of internal ideological and political struggles and to reduce these revolutions to what's comfortable to the Western mind: the good ones who want (our kind of liberal) democracy and free market capitalism, the brown people, especially women we need to save with the pen (thanks, Malala) and a little bit of NATO weaponry, and the bad ones, radical Islamists and brutal dictators who kill civilians (NATO doesnt). The outcome of this good versus evil struggle ultimately depends on whether we, the good ones (West, NATO, UN), get the upper hand or the global dictator backing axis of evil (Russia, Iran, North Korea etc). There's very little room for Syrian agency and potential post-Assad political formations that do not include a Western chosen government (formed in London or Geneva).
So yeah, essays like these are helpful to making a little more sense of the 'Syrian tragedy' but also point to the fact that a) the very last thing this conflict needs is (more) foreign military intervention and b) that the post-war road to peace of whatever will then be part of Syria will be very long and difficult. Duh.
10 or so essays written between spring 2011 and February 2015. The author is not some Western (-educated) pundit on the payroll of a transatlantic think tank but a Syrian journalist and former member of the Syrian Communist Party (and who was already a poltical prisoner from 1980 to 1996). Given the ideological battle over the Syria narrative (security discourse, blind anti-imperialism, regime change R2P crap etc), I don't need to explain why that matters SO MUCH.
I was looking for exactly this kind of book which provides an analysis of ideology, class and power in Syria. Obviously, there's no point in making sense of the uprising (any uprising) without understanding the constellation of social forces in contemporary Syrian society and the (past and present) material and ideological base of the Assad oligarchy and various oppositional forces. The essay on 'the roots of Syrian fascism' was fairly enlightening in this sense.
While it's always convenient to lump these uprisings together under the Arab spring narrative - oppressed people rising up against brutal dictator - this 'framework' (or lack thereof) cant account for the internal dynamics and very unique trajectories of the uprisings within each country. Obviously, geopolitics is key to these revolutions and whether or not a dictator stays or goes depends on whether or not the P5 want him (ugh. Still no female Middle Eastern dictator in the 21st century!) stay or gone.
I guess it's part of the Western arrogance (and lack of Arabic language skills) to disregard the complexities of internal ideological and political struggles and to reduce these revolutions to what's comfortable to the Western mind: the good ones who want (our kind of liberal) democracy and free market capitalism, the brown people, especially women we need to save with the pen (thanks, Malala) and a little bit of NATO weaponry, and the bad ones, radical Islamists and brutal dictators who kill civilians (NATO doesnt). The outcome of this good versus evil struggle ultimately depends on whether we, the good ones (West, NATO, UN), get the upper hand or the global dictator backing axis of evil (Russia, Iran, North Korea etc). There's very little room for Syrian agency and potential post-Assad political formations that do not include a Western chosen government (formed in London or Geneva).
So yeah, essays like these are helpful to making a little more sense of the 'Syrian tragedy' but also point to the fact that a) the very last thing this conflict needs is (more) foreign military intervention and b) that the post-war road to peace of whatever will then be part of Syria will be very long and difficult. Duh.
June 16, 2018
الكتاب ممتاز , عبارة عن 12 مقالة تأريخية لما حدث في سوريا بين 2011 و 2016 .
أكثر المقالات التي أعجبتني هي العاشرة بعنوان من الثورة الى الحرب : الأرياف السورية تحمل السلاح , يليها مقالة الشبيحة و التشبيح و صعود العدمية المقاتلة .
جميل دوما أن تقرأ عما كنت تعيشه يوميا من وجهة نظر مراقب يرى الصورة بشكل أوسع .
أكثر المقالات التي أعجبتني هي العاشرة بعنوان من الثورة الى الحرب : الأرياف السورية تحمل السلاح , يليها مقالة الشبيحة و التشبيح و صعود العدمية المقاتلة .
جميل دوما أن تقرأ عما كنت تعيشه يوميا من وجهة نظر مراقب يرى الصورة بشكل أوسع .
June 18, 2019
Equal parts historical analysis, political commentary, moral interrogation of the uses of violence and the nature of sectarianism and fascism, and above else a prescient plea to the world, Yassin's series of essays provides a very personal account of Ba'athist Syria and the roots of the civil war.
By the end one of his ten essays, one is left with a sense of sorrow and anger. As he puts it, the world has come to adopt the shabiha's logic 'Assad, or the country burns' (the rhetoric of regime change a mere red herring) in addition to that of the global 'war on terror' which amounts to barbarism dressed as secular modernism.
As the author says in his introduction (following a great foreword by Robin Yassin-Kassab, co-author with Leila al-Shami of Burning Country): '...the Syrian Question indicates that we are currently facing an international crisis within a world that is being run by the powerful...[that] is losing direction and at the same time concealing possibilities for emancipation and democracy. The crisis is no longer a Syrian one. It is a crisis of the world.' Syria has become the world inasmuch as global powers on all sides fight to outdo one another in brutality against Syrians on all sides of the conflict; but at the same time, the world has become Syria, the jockeying of criminal regimes and enterprises (the state and it's corresponding shabiha) who sow sectarian seeds in order to maintain their own personal fiefdoms.
Given the lack of many Syrian voices in discussions in the West concerning the conflict and ensuing refugee crisis, the work of dissident Syrians like Yassin al-Haj Saleh would be a great place to start for anyone looking for more than the exclusively geopolitical commentary you typically find in the public discourse or down right obfuscation and conspiracism in fringe outlets on the left and right alike.
By the end one of his ten essays, one is left with a sense of sorrow and anger. As he puts it, the world has come to adopt the shabiha's logic 'Assad, or the country burns' (the rhetoric of regime change a mere red herring) in addition to that of the global 'war on terror' which amounts to barbarism dressed as secular modernism.
As the author says in his introduction (following a great foreword by Robin Yassin-Kassab, co-author with Leila al-Shami of Burning Country): '...the Syrian Question indicates that we are currently facing an international crisis within a world that is being run by the powerful...[that] is losing direction and at the same time concealing possibilities for emancipation and democracy. The crisis is no longer a Syrian one. It is a crisis of the world.' Syria has become the world inasmuch as global powers on all sides fight to outdo one another in brutality against Syrians on all sides of the conflict; but at the same time, the world has become Syria, the jockeying of criminal regimes and enterprises (the state and it's corresponding shabiha) who sow sectarian seeds in order to maintain their own personal fiefdoms.
Given the lack of many Syrian voices in discussions in the West concerning the conflict and ensuing refugee crisis, the work of dissident Syrians like Yassin al-Haj Saleh would be a great place to start for anyone looking for more than the exclusively geopolitical commentary you typically find in the public discourse or down right obfuscation and conspiracism in fringe outlets on the left and right alike.
September 16, 2019
ياسين المثقف الراقي كما هو دوماً, الصامد رغم غياب سميرة، المؤرّخ السرّي للثورة السورية.
يستحق جائزة على هذا الانجاز الفكري الجبّار، ليس فقط على المعلومات و طريقته في توصيلها بل يستحقها أكثر على الجهد المبذول لمشاركة القرّاء هذا الإرث الثقافي التاريخي عن طريق مجموعة من المقالات المكتوبة ما بين عام ٢٠١١ و ٢٠١٦، مع المراجع و الروابط و الاثباتات التي تنحت في عقولنا و قلوبنا أسباب استحالة ثورتنا المنحولة.
المقولة التاريخية: "الأسد، أو نحرق البلد"، لكن فعلياً الأسد حرق البلد و أخذها و أصبحنا نحن منفيين لا منتمين لها و لا لمكان سكننا الجديد. حرق كل تطلعات الثورة و أهدافها و أخمدها بفضل استخدامه لمنطق الطائفية بالتعاون مع الشبيحة "الأوادم".
استمتعت جداً بالقراءة عن الأكراد السوريين، تاريخهم السياسي في سورية و علاقته العكسية بهويتهم.
من حسن حظنا ياسين مازال موجود و مثابر على الكتابة.
يستحق جائزة على هذا الانجاز الفكري الجبّار، ليس فقط على المعلومات و طريقته في توصيلها بل يستحقها أكثر على الجهد المبذول لمشاركة القرّاء هذا الإرث الثقافي التاريخي عن طريق مجموعة من المقالات المكتوبة ما بين عام ٢٠١١ و ٢٠١٦، مع المراجع و الروابط و الاثباتات التي تنحت في عقولنا و قلوبنا أسباب استحالة ثورتنا المنحولة.
المقولة التاريخية: "الأسد، أو نحرق البلد"، لكن فعلياً الأسد حرق البلد و أخذها و أصبحنا نحن منفيين لا منتمين لها و لا لمكان سكننا الجديد. حرق كل تطلعات الثورة و أهدافها و أخمدها بفضل استخدامه لمنطق الطائفية بالتعاون مع الشبيحة "الأوادم".
استمتعت جداً بالقراءة عن الأكراد السوريين، تاريخهم السياسي في سورية و علاقته العكسية بهويتهم.
من حسن حظنا ياسين مازال موجود و مثابر على الكتابة.
September 21, 2024
"دخلت بعضها" بهذه العبارة العامية التي تفيد أن الفوضى قد عمَت كنت أجيب نفسي قبل غيري عما وقع في سوريا بعد 2013. مفاد ذلك دخول حزب الله في الحرب و الذي رفضت تصديق ما يقوم به (بالنسبة لي لا يوجد سبب يحول دون وقوف قوة مقاومة في صف الثورات العربية) ناهيك عن الطابع الطائفي المرعب لفيديوهات مقاتليه الذي كنت أحاول إقناع نفسي بأنها لا يمكن إلا أن تكون مفبركة. ثم جاءت داعش و أذناب القاعدة و جاء أن تصدر الكرد المشهد كأبطال محررين بالتوازي مع التدخل الإيراني الروسي، و هذا التدخل الأخير هو الذي لم أجد له أي ذريعة بتاتا حينها. و عن الولايات المتحدة التي سبق و تدخلت في ليبيا و هددت بالتدخل في حال استعمال "الكيماوي" و لم تفعل رغم استعماله، فحدث و لا حرج ... موقفها كان غريبا مرة ظهرت و كأنها تدعم الثورة ثم قامت بدعم الأكراد و بعدها بان بالكاشف أنها لا تمانع بقاء الأسد. و وسط كل تلك الفوضى تتالت الفضاعات التي كانت تغطي على كل شيء آخر و دفع الثمن ألوف مؤلفة و كنت أعزو كل ذلك لكونها "دخلت بعضها". بلغة أخرى عجزت عن فهم ديناميكية التحولات التي شهدتها الثورة و خاصة مصلحة المتدخلين فيها و تقاطع مصالحهم و تنافرها و كذلك دور الكيان و موقفه.
يجيب هذا الكتاب إذن بفكر وازن و نظرة ثاقبة عن كل تلك الأسئلة و يقدم كاتبه ياسين الحاج صالح تأريخا و تحليلا لتحولات الثورة السورية منذ انطلاقها حتى 2016، معتمدا 13 مقالات تم اختيارها من عشرات المقالات التي كتبها خلال تلك الفترة.
و لكن لماذا الثورة السورية ؟ لماذا القراءة عنها الآن؟
يسير منذ عام حدثان متوازيان زمنيا... حرب الإبادة في غزة و اكتمال أفول تجربة الديموقراطية في تونس. و إن كانت الثورة السورية أثرت على عدة بلدان فلا أظنها أثرت عربيا على أكثر من لبنان ثم تونس بصفة مباشرة.
لمزيد تفسير الفكرة أعود لمعطيين: العدد الرهيب جدا من التونسيين الذين التحقوا بداعش و العمليات الإرهابية التي شهدتها تونس. عن المعطى الأول فهو لا يزال إلى اليوم محل جدل...جدل قضائي و ربما أهم منه جدل سياسي استعملته القوى الغير إسلامية لضرب الإسلاميين متهمة إياهم بتكوين شبكات تسفير للدواعش انطلاقا من بوابة الحدود التركية (وجب التنويه فيما يتعلق بالإسلاميين غالبية النخبة السياسية و الأكاديمية و جزء هام من المجتمع يضعهم جميعا في نفس السلة و يطالب صراحة بإقصائهم من المشهد..هؤلاء الإقصائيون يرون أن ما وقع في سوريا مؤامرة و أن الأسد انتصر على الإرهابيين و تضم هذه الفئة يساريين و تجمعيين و قوميين و نقابيين)...غني عن القول أن حزب الله مثلا خسر مكانته عند الإسلاميين و جزء واسع من غير المأدلجين بسبب جرائمه في سوريا غالبا و النزعة الطائفية بدرجة أقل. غني عن القول كذلك أن حرب غزة الحالية ساهمت في تلميع صورة الحزب و تناسي شيء مما وقع عند من انفضوا من حوله ذات يوم، بحجج من قبيل وحدة المقاومة، ضرورة تجاوز الخلاف السياسي، كل بندقية موجهة للعدو تستحق الإشادة ... هؤلاء نفسهم باتوا و الأولين ينعتوننا (نحن الذين لم ننسى) بالطائفية تماما كما ينعت الصهاينة منتقديهم بمعاداة السامية. و كملخص لكل ما سبق يمكن القول أنه و بإستثناء الإيديولوجيا، لم يُحدث أي شيء استقطابا ثنائيا كذلك الذي أحدثته الثورة السورية. و عن علاقة ذلك بنهاية التجربة الديموقراطية في تونس يكفي القول بأنه بعد جحافل الدواعش و الهجمات الإرهابية و اتهام الإسلاميين (النهضة) بالوقوف خلف التسفير و الإغتيالات السياسية، أن تشويه الثورتين جاء بالتوازي و بطريقة متداخلة ساهمت في دفع الإستقطاب الثنائي إلى أقصاه، و أنه ما أن استتاب الأمر للإقصائين حتى عادت العلاقات مع النظام السوري و عومل الأسد كمحرر لشعبه!
لأجل كل ذلك و حتى لا ننسى و نحيط بشيء من مأساة سوريا المركبة، كان أن اخترت القراءة عن الثورة السورية الآن...وعن أول ما اخترته من عناوين فهو بلا ريب محطة ضرورية جدا لمن أراد الفهم و تقليب الرأي.
تمت
20/09/2024
July 22, 2023
One of those books they’ll find in 500 years and study as a seminal book about our times. Social, political, historical take on Syria through the lens of one of the greatest Middle Eastern thinkers ever. Tbh, If Malala got a Nobel, Yassin should get 5.
Incredibly analytical, perceptive, and nuanced writing - almost to a degree I cant humanely comprehend knowing the author’s tragedy. Two novel concepts for me were a) the deep link between nihilism and salafi jihadism - I never thought about these two (in my mind polar opposite) ideologies merging together and had such a lightbulb moment. b) The essay on baathism, sectarianism and neoliberalism coming together through the ages to create this “perfect storm”, this perversive natural state of being that’s def not exclusive to Syria. Lots to unpack.
Overall, really happy i picked up this book, my knowledge of Syria deepend in magnitudes.
Incredibly analytical, perceptive, and nuanced writing - almost to a degree I cant humanely comprehend knowing the author’s tragedy. Two novel concepts for me were a) the deep link between nihilism and salafi jihadism - I never thought about these two (in my mind polar opposite) ideologies merging together and had such a lightbulb moment. b) The essay on baathism, sectarianism and neoliberalism coming together through the ages to create this “perfect storm”, this perversive natural state of being that’s def not exclusive to Syria. Lots to unpack.
Overall, really happy i picked up this book, my knowledge of Syria deepend in magnitudes.
June 7, 2018
A remarkable account of the evolution of the Syrian revolution and ensuing conflict. This collection of essays really helped me understand the nuances behind the political situation in the country, such as the use of sectarianism as a tool to divide or the fact that there is a wide range of solutions for the international community that lie between military intervention and doing nothing. While I hoped for a bit more tying together of the ideas introduced in the various essays, I would highly recommend for someone looking for more insight into the Syrian conflict.
November 19, 2019
Very interesting, though some things went over my head; I’m still learning.
August 23, 2018
In its lucidity, erudition, range and percipience, the book is worthy of a Gramsci. In its method, rigour and predictions, it is an intellectual achievement of extraordinary significance. The book honours the revolution by describing with precision its causes and aspirations and recording with complexity its challenges and achievements. It is the living chronicle of a revolution, a sustained diagnosis, a prophecy and a 'J'accuse'.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh, one of Syria's most celebrated intellectuals, wrote these essays over a period of five years, from underground in Damascus, Douma and Raqqa, and from exile in Istanbul. Saleh's compelling biography and his colossal sacrifices lend his writings unusual moral authority.
While still in college, Saleh was arrested by the regime and spent 16 years in its notorious prisons; and, since the start of the revolution, his wife and brother have both been disappeared by jihadis (the latter by IS). Yet, in spite of the personal tragedy, Saleh writes with remarkable dispassion and objectivity.
The discussions range from the causes of the revolution, the regime's violent repression, the revolution's turn to arms, the rise of the Islamists, the threat of militant nihilism to the question of sectarianism. They are rooted in history but they aren't the usual apologetic narratives of colonial depredation and native passivity. Saleh's interest is in postcolonial Syria, in its initial promise, halting progress, and eventual betrayal under Baathist rule.
The Baath Party however was merely a cover for what Saleh calls Hafez al-Assad's "neo-sultanic" rule under which the social functions of the state declined, the population became dependent on a new elite through networks of patronage from below, while the security state maintained order through surveillance and terror from above.
The regime used the logic of sectarianism to keep the population split vertically, so that people at the bottom could only access state resources and services through intermediaries from their own sect. Sectarianism in the regime's hands became a political means of control. It had nothing to do with doctrinal differences; its guiding principle was power.
In this system kinship become a key principle, money guaranteed access, and together they created the supreme value: power. People at the top of the pyramid were free to expropriate state resources and a legal system was instituted to protect the gains.
The state functioned on two levels: a "non-sectarian yet powerless visible state" and an invisible "private and sectarian" one. It is the latter that enjoyed "sovereignty over people's fates, internal domestic affairs, public resources, and regional international relations".
Under Bashar al-Assad the state also replaced its "obsolete, inhumane political apparatus with a glamorous material façade". A regressive and exploitative system was given cover by a purely culturalist notion of modernity with the left-behind blamed for their own immiseration because of their attachment to "tradition".
Tellingly, when revolution came, virtually all the defections happened in the visible state while the invisible, sectarian state remained cohesive and resilient.
Beyond resilience, however, the privatised state also tried to neutralise the revolution's political advantage by forcing upon it a military contest for which it was decidedly unprepared.
As early as June 2011, Saleh warned against the dangers of this "state of nature": Violence could replace the revolution's positive aspirations with the logic of necessity and desperation. Saleh charges the regime as the primary instigator of violence. But while wary of military confrontations, Saleh does not blame the armed uprising for undermining the revolution.
Abandoned by the world and faced with the regime's lethal provocations, revolutionary conscience could only hold out so long. Saleh recognises the necessity of armed resistance when the alternative is total annihilation. He also notes that contrary to pacifist dogma, "those who took up arms did not replace the peaceful revolution but rather contributed to its expansion and resilience".
By July 2011, three months into the uprising, Human Rights Watch had recorded 887 unarmed protesters killed by regime snipers. The Free Syria Army was formed shortly after that. It was partly through the protection of rebel arms that street protests continued to grow (reaching their peak during the summer of 2012). Citizen journalists provided additional protection by filming violations and beaming them out to the world.
But if Saleh recognises the legitimacy of armed resistance, he is withering in his condemnation of what he calls "militant nihilism" (a term he prefers to "terrorism" which has been diluted of meaning through misuse by repressive states).
It is neither morally defensible nor practically justifiable because it "necessarily hurts the innocent, owing to its arbitrariness". Even when motivated by real injustice "the 'goal' of terrorism collapses into the very act of rebellion against this condition and into the elimination of enemies without ever achieving anything greater, such as… national independence, or ending poverty, or even punishing criminals among the rulers and their collaborators".
Saleh was predicting the rise of such nihilism already in May 2012. Without support for the revolutionary forces, he warned, the nihilists will strengthen. "Were a nihilist organisation to somehow come to power", Saleh writes in a prophetic passage, "the result could only be brutal despotism. Not only are nihilist organisations accustomed to indiscriminate violence: their radical withdrawal from the world encourages the cultural and psychological conditions necessary for prohibiting dissent and uprooting any alternative."
In a section on media activists, Saleh describes them as creating an "objective memory of the uprising". In these ten essays, he has achieved something similar.
For all its resilience, the revolution in Syria appears headed toward a grim denouement. But in the face of cynical efforts by counter-revolutionary ideologues to rewrite history, Saleh's work will stand as an imperishable reminder of the circumstances through which this impossible revolution endured.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh, one of Syria's most celebrated intellectuals, wrote these essays over a period of five years, from underground in Damascus, Douma and Raqqa, and from exile in Istanbul. Saleh's compelling biography and his colossal sacrifices lend his writings unusual moral authority.
While still in college, Saleh was arrested by the regime and spent 16 years in its notorious prisons; and, since the start of the revolution, his wife and brother have both been disappeared by jihadis (the latter by IS). Yet, in spite of the personal tragedy, Saleh writes with remarkable dispassion and objectivity.
The discussions range from the causes of the revolution, the regime's violent repression, the revolution's turn to arms, the rise of the Islamists, the threat of militant nihilism to the question of sectarianism. They are rooted in history but they aren't the usual apologetic narratives of colonial depredation and native passivity. Saleh's interest is in postcolonial Syria, in its initial promise, halting progress, and eventual betrayal under Baathist rule.
The Baath Party however was merely a cover for what Saleh calls Hafez al-Assad's "neo-sultanic" rule under which the social functions of the state declined, the population became dependent on a new elite through networks of patronage from below, while the security state maintained order through surveillance and terror from above.
The regime used the logic of sectarianism to keep the population split vertically, so that people at the bottom could only access state resources and services through intermediaries from their own sect. Sectarianism in the regime's hands became a political means of control. It had nothing to do with doctrinal differences; its guiding principle was power.
In this system kinship become a key principle, money guaranteed access, and together they created the supreme value: power. People at the top of the pyramid were free to expropriate state resources and a legal system was instituted to protect the gains.
The state functioned on two levels: a "non-sectarian yet powerless visible state" and an invisible "private and sectarian" one. It is the latter that enjoyed "sovereignty over people's fates, internal domestic affairs, public resources, and regional international relations".
Under Bashar al-Assad the state also replaced its "obsolete, inhumane political apparatus with a glamorous material façade". A regressive and exploitative system was given cover by a purely culturalist notion of modernity with the left-behind blamed for their own immiseration because of their attachment to "tradition".
Tellingly, when revolution came, virtually all the defections happened in the visible state while the invisible, sectarian state remained cohesive and resilient.
Beyond resilience, however, the privatised state also tried to neutralise the revolution's political advantage by forcing upon it a military contest for which it was decidedly unprepared.
As early as June 2011, Saleh warned against the dangers of this "state of nature": Violence could replace the revolution's positive aspirations with the logic of necessity and desperation. Saleh charges the regime as the primary instigator of violence. But while wary of military confrontations, Saleh does not blame the armed uprising for undermining the revolution.
Abandoned by the world and faced with the regime's lethal provocations, revolutionary conscience could only hold out so long. Saleh recognises the necessity of armed resistance when the alternative is total annihilation. He also notes that contrary to pacifist dogma, "those who took up arms did not replace the peaceful revolution but rather contributed to its expansion and resilience".
By July 2011, three months into the uprising, Human Rights Watch had recorded 887 unarmed protesters killed by regime snipers. The Free Syria Army was formed shortly after that. It was partly through the protection of rebel arms that street protests continued to grow (reaching their peak during the summer of 2012). Citizen journalists provided additional protection by filming violations and beaming them out to the world.
But if Saleh recognises the legitimacy of armed resistance, he is withering in his condemnation of what he calls "militant nihilism" (a term he prefers to "terrorism" which has been diluted of meaning through misuse by repressive states).
It is neither morally defensible nor practically justifiable because it "necessarily hurts the innocent, owing to its arbitrariness". Even when motivated by real injustice "the 'goal' of terrorism collapses into the very act of rebellion against this condition and into the elimination of enemies without ever achieving anything greater, such as… national independence, or ending poverty, or even punishing criminals among the rulers and their collaborators".
Saleh was predicting the rise of such nihilism already in May 2012. Without support for the revolutionary forces, he warned, the nihilists will strengthen. "Were a nihilist organisation to somehow come to power", Saleh writes in a prophetic passage, "the result could only be brutal despotism. Not only are nihilist organisations accustomed to indiscriminate violence: their radical withdrawal from the world encourages the cultural and psychological conditions necessary for prohibiting dissent and uprooting any alternative."
In a section on media activists, Saleh describes them as creating an "objective memory of the uprising". In these ten essays, he has achieved something similar.
For all its resilience, the revolution in Syria appears headed toward a grim denouement. But in the face of cynical efforts by counter-revolutionary ideologues to rewrite history, Saleh's work will stand as an imperishable reminder of the circumstances through which this impossible revolution endured.
April 16, 2019
This was an amazing book about examining why the Syrian Revolution and the fascism that exists in the country. I truly loved it and would recommend it to anyone who wants to know more on the topic.
August 13, 2022
This book delivers on its title.
My knowledge of Syria was deepened considerably by this excellent collection of essays, each a chapter. In the first chapters the author reports on the status of the revolution starting in 2011. Thus are the facts established. Then in the final essay comes a comprehensive analysis of the Syrian situation as it has developed from the time of Hafez al-Assad's ascent to power by way of no less than three coups in 1963, 1966 and 1971. This final chapter explains why the revolution failed. The author could not have come up with a better plan to educate us.
The revolution of 2011 began peacefully and proceeded to make considerable gains until Bashar al-Assad decided to make all out war and the revolution collapsed simply from the need to make defense a priority. Then the Islamic extremist forces of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and ISIS rampaged across the country. For a time it looked like Assad was finished, but then Russia came to his rescue militarily and he remains supreme today.
Starting out filled with the hope of the early days in 2011, this book takes the reader into the despair for change that came with the descent into chaos. For this reader, to whom Syria seemed like a stable place for many years, the reality of the means by which that stability was achieved came as a shock.
Hafez al-Assad established a personality cult in many ways like that of North Korea. All the signs and parades, the arranged public demonstrations, the grandiose titles of Leader of the Nation were the face of a regime that behind the scenes maintained an army that was primarily an intelligence and torture service in the service of one man who it was claimed had possession of Syria as one might own a plantation.
Unsurprisingly the country was/is commonly called "Assad's Syria." Several times the author compares Assad's rule of Syria with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In both cases the people are left powerless, have their land appropriated at will and have no say in their future. In short, Syria is a colony.
At the top, the country is secular. The Alawites, a Shi'a sect of which the Assads are members, make up a large segment of the powerful. Islamic themes are employed only to produce popular appeal. Crony capitalism allows vast wealth to be accumulated with the help of a bourgeoisie sitting in board rooms and composing the technocracy that makes the machinery of technology work while the vast Sunni population (70%) sits in near destitution. If there are any objections, brute force by way of organized thuggery know as the shabiha is ready to act.
The author notes that in the old days of French occupation of Syria, the Alawites were looked down upon and did not hesitate to join the French army in maintaining colonial control. Not feeling themselves accepted as part of Syria then, they have turned the tables and now rule with Shi'a Iran providing powerful backing. But the author is careful to note that Assad has ultimate authority. Though the Alawites enjoy the benefits it is not the case that Assad rules because he is Alawite. Power flows from one person.
Despite secularism at the top sectarianism is vital to the system, exploited to divide the population through isolation and suspicion that pits one group against another. The author explains that when someone is called in for interrogation, the likely first question will be "you are a member of the X sect. Why would you want to help the Y sect?" This is a successful recipe for national disunity providing the needed division to prevent change at the top.
The final chapter of the book is a penetrating examination of the system that so effectively maintains itself in power. One group of the wealthy exploits the country at the national level and another even wealthier group runs Syria's international trade and finance, all under a single supreme leader. As an American, I see an uncomfortable similarity in the last four years in the United States.
This book will not leave the reader feeling good. Russia, experienced in the use of raw military power to reduce Chechnya to ashes, is determined that Syria will not be a place where Islamic extremism can find refuge. Russia now has both a land and a naval base in Syria that are equipped to act as needed.
President Obama was mocked for failing to intervene in Syria and though there has been US military action there in support of the Kurds and against ISIS, it is difficult to see anything the US can do that would help to the common people of the country.
This is a powerful, readable work by a well informed author. If only there were similar works for the many other areas of conflict, where an ignorant US public can be too easily convinced of the desirability of whatever power plays Washington has in mind. The movers and shakers in DC would undoubtedly be educated by this book. They as a group are too inclined to simplify the world to a chessboard devoid of real, suffering people. Needless to say the US invasion of Iraq did nothing but strengthen Iran's position in Syria while burdening Syria with a flood of refugees, very few of which were allowed into the homeland of the invader.
To aid your reading, I highly recommend the ethnic map of Syria provided by Wikipedia and also an animated map of the situation in Syria from 2011 through 2019, also from Wikipedia. Note in particular the bright green area representing the success of the revolution early on, only for it to evaporate in warfare.
My knowledge of Syria was deepened considerably by this excellent collection of essays, each a chapter. In the first chapters the author reports on the status of the revolution starting in 2011. Thus are the facts established. Then in the final essay comes a comprehensive analysis of the Syrian situation as it has developed from the time of Hafez al-Assad's ascent to power by way of no less than three coups in 1963, 1966 and 1971. This final chapter explains why the revolution failed. The author could not have come up with a better plan to educate us.
The revolution of 2011 began peacefully and proceeded to make considerable gains until Bashar al-Assad decided to make all out war and the revolution collapsed simply from the need to make defense a priority. Then the Islamic extremist forces of al-Qaeda, al-Nusra and ISIS rampaged across the country. For a time it looked like Assad was finished, but then Russia came to his rescue militarily and he remains supreme today.
Starting out filled with the hope of the early days in 2011, this book takes the reader into the despair for change that came with the descent into chaos. For this reader, to whom Syria seemed like a stable place for many years, the reality of the means by which that stability was achieved came as a shock.
Hafez al-Assad established a personality cult in many ways like that of North Korea. All the signs and parades, the arranged public demonstrations, the grandiose titles of Leader of the Nation were the face of a regime that behind the scenes maintained an army that was primarily an intelligence and torture service in the service of one man who it was claimed had possession of Syria as one might own a plantation.
Unsurprisingly the country was/is commonly called "Assad's Syria." Several times the author compares Assad's rule of Syria with the Israeli occupation of Palestine. In both cases the people are left powerless, have their land appropriated at will and have no say in their future. In short, Syria is a colony.
At the top, the country is secular. The Alawites, a Shi'a sect of which the Assads are members, make up a large segment of the powerful. Islamic themes are employed only to produce popular appeal. Crony capitalism allows vast wealth to be accumulated with the help of a bourgeoisie sitting in board rooms and composing the technocracy that makes the machinery of technology work while the vast Sunni population (70%) sits in near destitution. If there are any objections, brute force by way of organized thuggery know as the shabiha is ready to act.
The author notes that in the old days of French occupation of Syria, the Alawites were looked down upon and did not hesitate to join the French army in maintaining colonial control. Not feeling themselves accepted as part of Syria then, they have turned the tables and now rule with Shi'a Iran providing powerful backing. But the author is careful to note that Assad has ultimate authority. Though the Alawites enjoy the benefits it is not the case that Assad rules because he is Alawite. Power flows from one person.
Despite secularism at the top sectarianism is vital to the system, exploited to divide the population through isolation and suspicion that pits one group against another. The author explains that when someone is called in for interrogation, the likely first question will be "you are a member of the X sect. Why would you want to help the Y sect?" This is a successful recipe for national disunity providing the needed division to prevent change at the top.
The final chapter of the book is a penetrating examination of the system that so effectively maintains itself in power. One group of the wealthy exploits the country at the national level and another even wealthier group runs Syria's international trade and finance, all under a single supreme leader. As an American, I see an uncomfortable similarity in the last four years in the United States.
This book will not leave the reader feeling good. Russia, experienced in the use of raw military power to reduce Chechnya to ashes, is determined that Syria will not be a place where Islamic extremism can find refuge. Russia now has both a land and a naval base in Syria that are equipped to act as needed.
President Obama was mocked for failing to intervene in Syria and though there has been US military action there in support of the Kurds and against ISIS, it is difficult to see anything the US can do that would help to the common people of the country.
This is a powerful, readable work by a well informed author. If only there were similar works for the many other areas of conflict, where an ignorant US public can be too easily convinced of the desirability of whatever power plays Washington has in mind. The movers and shakers in DC would undoubtedly be educated by this book. They as a group are too inclined to simplify the world to a chessboard devoid of real, suffering people. Needless to say the US invasion of Iraq did nothing but strengthen Iran's position in Syria while burdening Syria with a flood of refugees, very few of which were allowed into the homeland of the invader.
To aid your reading, I highly recommend the ethnic map of Syria provided by Wikipedia and also an animated map of the situation in Syria from 2011 through 2019, also from Wikipedia. Note in particular the bright green area representing the success of the revolution early on, only for it to evaporate in warfare.
October 26, 2017
I’ve paused this one for the time being. Very academic and well-written, and the story of the Syrian revolution and the consequent calamity deserves to be heard - it seems to be a subject that in the West we’ve both hardened our hearts to and resolutely refused to even to try to understand properly.
However, I know very little about the complexities of the crisis and I mistakenly picked this up thinking it was a history of it. It’s not, it’s a selection of academic political science essays which I reckon you need to have good knowledge of the crisis to properly appreciate - without one I felt they were pretty hard going. So, one I’ll revisit!
However, I know very little about the complexities of the crisis and I mistakenly picked this up thinking it was a history of it. It’s not, it’s a selection of academic political science essays which I reckon you need to have good knowledge of the crisis to properly appreciate - without one I felt they were pretty hard going. So, one I’ll revisit!
October 16, 2018
My review of The Impossible Revolution, written Nov. 2017, is posted here: https://isreview.org/issue/108/roots-...
Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s Impossible Revolution appears in print at the very same time Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its backers seem closer than ever to defeating the last vestiges of the Syrian Revolution. From 2011 to 2013, revolutionary forces had scored big victories, liberating cities and territory from the regime. But over the last four years, Assad’s counterrevolutionary alliance reversed these successes, culminating in the expulsion of the residents of Eastern Aleppo last winter.
Assad’s regime has been the main force of counterrevolution in this alliance. He took up a scorched-earth policy just months into the uprising, barrel bombing and destroying entire neighborhoods—mostly working-class and poor neighborhoods—that had dared to revolt. Meanwhile it released jihadists from its prisons who came to lead the Islamic fundamentalist organizations, including the al-Nusra Front and Jaysh al-Islam. This second pole of the counterrevolution tore at the revolution from within.
Still, the regime could not have retained control of the country without the third force of counterrevolution, the numerous regional and international imperialist powers, all of whom intervened in different ways against the uprising. Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United States all share culpability for the defeat of the Syrian Revolution.
The essays in Saleh’s new book were written during the first four years of this process, while he was in hiding. They celebrate the successes of the revolution given all the odds against it, while grappling with the mounting challenges to its survival. Saleh, who was imprisoned by Hafez al-Assad from 1980 to 1996 for his involvement in the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau), made the decision to go into hiding at the start of the Syrian revolution in order to write freely, while continuing to participate in the uprising. He traveled and wrote first in Damascus, then in rebellious Douma in the Eastern Ghouta, in Raqqa under ISIS control, and finally in exile in Turkey, where he now lives.
Saleh brings a framework informed by Marxism to the discussion of Syria, its revolution, and Assad’s counterrevolution. He aims to repoliticize key questions concerning the path the uprising has taken, rooting them in the region’s history, its patterns of economic development, and state formation. He thereby provides a refreshing alternative viewpoint to the all-too-common Islamophobic and pro-regime dismissal of the uprising as the work of jihadists.
Throughout the book, he examines four ways that political discourse has been suppressed in Syria. First, the Assad family’s patrimonial dictatorship regime repressed organizing spaces, first under Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. Saleh shows how he allowed “no political parties, no public political discussions, no political debates in the parliament or newspapers or universities, no free opinions, no independent or voluntary meetings, no public protests. . . . All Syrians, save only their free master, are slaves, or politically dead.”
This worsened under Bashar as he imposed neoliberal reforms. After a brief Damascus Spring in 2000 when he relaxed some of the regime’s worst restrictions, he quickly reversed course and further curtailed political freedoms. “Syrian society continued to be excessively impoverished politically,” Saleh writes, “because it was prevented both from expressing itself and its needs within public space, and from independent gathering and organization.”
Second, the Syrian regime employed a key tool, sectarianism, to divide the population and prevent working-class solidarity, and further clamp down on political debate. Sectarianism became both omnipresent and yet a taboo topic. Saleh says that “sectarianism has distorted politics and rationality in ways that have precluded any possibility of public discussion of societal affairs.”
Though the “transformation of sectarianism into an essential tool of governance” is entirely the work of the regime, Saleh calls out Syrian intellectuals, whom he argues have refused to face the issue. This is disastrous, he contends, because “public debate,” would allow “for sectarianism to be defined, examined, and critically assessed, and would [make] it possible for society to overcome and free itself from it.”
Third, the regime uses a traditional “culture of poverty” discourse to deflect blame from its neoliberal economic policies and onto Syria’s masses. In Saleh’s words, “The new bourgeoisie see the people as backward, illiterate, ignorant fanatics who are responsible for their own living conditions, who are a function of attributes rooted in their beliefs.” This ruling-class ideology posits that “the conditions in which people live have nothing to do with social or political factors.”
Fourth, the chaos and violence of the counterrevolution have prevented debate and discussion on strategy for the uprising. Saleh laments that, with mass arrests and torture, sieges and bombing campaigns, political assessments have become a “luxury.” But he insists these discussions must be revived to chart any coherent path forward.
One of the most important contributions Saleh makes in rebuilding left political discourse in and on Syria is his challenge to the Islamophobic depictions of the country’s provincial workers and poor who revolted. Smeared as “traditional,” religious, and backwards by regime supporters from the first day of the uprising, these cities and towns had suffered the brunt of the Assad family’s neoliberal project. Saleh writes:
There is nothing traditional about this so-called “traditionalism”: it is incomprehensible outside of very particular political and economic circumstances that, in their outcomes, resemble the effects of colonialism.
These social environments were in a process of dissolution until the 1970s. However, the prolonged deterioration of economic conditions, the collapse of the public education system, and an imposed political quarantine all played a role in their isolation and were active engines for “traditionalizing” them.
Saleh thus shows the real problem is not the people, but the regime. Its neoliberal policies created the worst rates of poverty and inequality across the Middle East with 30 percent below the extreme poverty line and another 30 percent just above it.
The chasm between wealth and extreme poverty in Syria is even more pronounced today. Aerial photographs show neighboring towns in Syria, with pro-regime towns fully intact and boasting modern infrastructure, directly beside utterly destroyed rebellious towns whose decaying infrastructure is still visible.
Assad used this Islamophobic discourse against these provincial masses to justify and excuse his barbaric destruction of the country. He took advantage of the rise of Islamic fundamentalist organizations, which he helped create by releasing jihadists from his jails, to accomplish two aims: first, win a base of support among Alawites, Christians, and other religious minorities within the country; and second, gain the support of imperial powers like Russia and regional ones like Iran in the name of fighting Sunni jihadist terrorism.
Saleh also explains the emergence of the Islamic fundamentalist forces. “The issue is not with a self-identified eternal Islam,” he writes, “but with a newly manufactured Islam that has been molded in response to contemporary conditions and demands, in the same fashion as the major modern political ideologies.”
He roots their emergence not in the supposed traditionalism of provincial people, but in historical and material conditions. Those include the defeat of the secular left, neoliberalism, the destruction of the welfare state, its replacement by charities run by fundamentalist forces, and the increasing conflict between fundamentalist regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran that sponsor proxies throughout the region.
The essays in the book move from historical materialist accounts of the roots and politics of the revolution to its development, high points, and defeat. The essays, written over the course of this process, shift from the early optimism of 2011 to steely recognition of the setbacks over the last four years.
His first essay, “Revolution of the Common People,” written June 2011, is politically optimistic. He describes, in a manner similar to that of C. L. R. James describing the Haitian Revolution, the revolutionary hope of that moment: “For hundreds of thousands of Syrians, the Syrian popular uprising has been an extraordinary experience, ethically and politically: an experience of self-renewal and social change, an uprising to change ourselves and a revolution to change reality.”
Noting its transformative power and depth, Saleh says, “It will be very difficult to defeat the uprising.” He calls the uprising an “intifada,” likening the struggle of the Syrian masses to that of the Palestinians, a colonized population facing occupation and apartheid.
“The regime may be able to overcome the intifada by force,” he says, “but such a victory will only mark the first round in a longer struggle, one in which Syrians will already have recourse to a sophisticated memory of exceptional experiences, a source of support for them in any future rounds of their liberation struggle.”
But after this we see Saleh’s political horizons narrow in essays written later as the counterrevolution comes to dominate and the promise for democratic change across Syria wanes. Writing in September 2011, Saleh describes the start of the second stage of the uprising as characterized by “self-defense, desperation, and the survival instinct, rather than by considered estimation of the means through which issues of the general interest—and demands for democracy—might be introduced into the process of revolution.”
Saleh staunchly defends the right to take up arms and establish an armed wing as a means to protect the revolution. But he notes how the desperate nature of this battle began to make discussion and debate about strategy and tactics seem to be a luxury. The turn to desperate self-defense against the regime’s total war on the Syrian people sidelined the democratic organization, debate, and popular struggle that had been the hallmarks of the earlier stage of the revolution.
He shows how clarity about the revolution’s goals begins to fracture as Assad rains terror upon the population. The early confidence of self-emancipation gets transformed into desperate calls for international intervention. This transformation, he argues, set people on “a collision course with the [original] conscience of the Syrian uprising, which can be formulated in terms of three ‘No’s: no to violence, no to sectarianism, and no to outside military intervention.”
He places the blame for this primarily on the regime. The young leaders of the revolution who had assessed and coordinated demands and strategy at its start were already detained, shot, or killed under torture.
The later essays in the book, written amidst the impending victory of the counterrevolution, reflect the narrowed horizons of defeat. For example, he tends to exceptionalize the Syrian state as somehow more aberrant than others in the region, and calls for a return to a “healthy” nationalism as a solution to Syria’s crises.
Saleh writes: “For my part, I vote for the Syrian nation-state. I vote against the hypothetical erasure of the Sykes-Picot borders, and against the creeping feudal fragmentation as well.” He hopes for a “new form of Syrian nationalism” to counteract the counterrevolution’s fragmentation.
But, as Saleh himself recognizes, the Middle East is an interlocked prison house of peoples, and it is hard to see that any revolution could succeed within national boundaries without spreading to the rest of the region. Indeed, that was the hope of the Arab Spring in 2011. The uprisings showed the power of the Arab working classes to challenge tyrants in each nation state and inspire others to do the same, calling into question all the inherited colonial divisions with the hope of an entirely new democratic and egalitarian order in the Middle East and North Africa.
To stop this internationalist threat, the region’s ruling classes and tyrants used the existing state structures and national divisions to carry through their counterrevolutions. In such circumstances, the Left in Syria and regionally might be better served by the Arab Spring’s early internationalist aspirations, rather than hoping for a nationalist solution in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East. The struggle may begin in this or that nation-state but the end goal must be regional and indeed global.
Nevertheless, Saleh’s book is essential reading for those who stand in solidarity with the original aims of the Syrian Revolution. It has no pretensions to be the final word on the political questions it raises and the answers it provides. Instead, it opens up space for genuine discussion of history, the material roots of the uprising, the nature of the regime, its counterrevolutionary strategy, the reactionary nature of Islamic fundamentalist formations, and lessons and debates about those for the Left in organizing the next phase of the struggle in Syria and the Middle East.
Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s Impossible Revolution appears in print at the very same time Bashar al-Assad’s regime and its backers seem closer than ever to defeating the last vestiges of the Syrian Revolution. From 2011 to 2013, revolutionary forces had scored big victories, liberating cities and territory from the regime. But over the last four years, Assad’s counterrevolutionary alliance reversed these successes, culminating in the expulsion of the residents of Eastern Aleppo last winter.
Assad’s regime has been the main force of counterrevolution in this alliance. He took up a scorched-earth policy just months into the uprising, barrel bombing and destroying entire neighborhoods—mostly working-class and poor neighborhoods—that had dared to revolt. Meanwhile it released jihadists from its prisons who came to lead the Islamic fundamentalist organizations, including the al-Nusra Front and Jaysh al-Islam. This second pole of the counterrevolution tore at the revolution from within.
Still, the regime could not have retained control of the country without the third force of counterrevolution, the numerous regional and international imperialist powers, all of whom intervened in different ways against the uprising. Hezbollah, Iran, Russia, Turkey, Qatar, Saudi Arabia, and the United States all share culpability for the defeat of the Syrian Revolution.
The essays in Saleh’s new book were written during the first four years of this process, while he was in hiding. They celebrate the successes of the revolution given all the odds against it, while grappling with the mounting challenges to its survival. Saleh, who was imprisoned by Hafez al-Assad from 1980 to 1996 for his involvement in the Syrian Communist Party (Political Bureau), made the decision to go into hiding at the start of the Syrian revolution in order to write freely, while continuing to participate in the uprising. He traveled and wrote first in Damascus, then in rebellious Douma in the Eastern Ghouta, in Raqqa under ISIS control, and finally in exile in Turkey, where he now lives.
Saleh brings a framework informed by Marxism to the discussion of Syria, its revolution, and Assad’s counterrevolution. He aims to repoliticize key questions concerning the path the uprising has taken, rooting them in the region’s history, its patterns of economic development, and state formation. He thereby provides a refreshing alternative viewpoint to the all-too-common Islamophobic and pro-regime dismissal of the uprising as the work of jihadists.
Throughout the book, he examines four ways that political discourse has been suppressed in Syria. First, the Assad family’s patrimonial dictatorship regime repressed organizing spaces, first under Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad. Saleh shows how he allowed “no political parties, no public political discussions, no political debates in the parliament or newspapers or universities, no free opinions, no independent or voluntary meetings, no public protests. . . . All Syrians, save only their free master, are slaves, or politically dead.”
This worsened under Bashar as he imposed neoliberal reforms. After a brief Damascus Spring in 2000 when he relaxed some of the regime’s worst restrictions, he quickly reversed course and further curtailed political freedoms. “Syrian society continued to be excessively impoverished politically,” Saleh writes, “because it was prevented both from expressing itself and its needs within public space, and from independent gathering and organization.”
Second, the Syrian regime employed a key tool, sectarianism, to divide the population and prevent working-class solidarity, and further clamp down on political debate. Sectarianism became both omnipresent and yet a taboo topic. Saleh says that “sectarianism has distorted politics and rationality in ways that have precluded any possibility of public discussion of societal affairs.”
Though the “transformation of sectarianism into an essential tool of governance” is entirely the work of the regime, Saleh calls out Syrian intellectuals, whom he argues have refused to face the issue. This is disastrous, he contends, because “public debate,” would allow “for sectarianism to be defined, examined, and critically assessed, and would [make] it possible for society to overcome and free itself from it.”
Third, the regime uses a traditional “culture of poverty” discourse to deflect blame from its neoliberal economic policies and onto Syria’s masses. In Saleh’s words, “The new bourgeoisie see the people as backward, illiterate, ignorant fanatics who are responsible for their own living conditions, who are a function of attributes rooted in their beliefs.” This ruling-class ideology posits that “the conditions in which people live have nothing to do with social or political factors.”
Fourth, the chaos and violence of the counterrevolution have prevented debate and discussion on strategy for the uprising. Saleh laments that, with mass arrests and torture, sieges and bombing campaigns, political assessments have become a “luxury.” But he insists these discussions must be revived to chart any coherent path forward.
One of the most important contributions Saleh makes in rebuilding left political discourse in and on Syria is his challenge to the Islamophobic depictions of the country’s provincial workers and poor who revolted. Smeared as “traditional,” religious, and backwards by regime supporters from the first day of the uprising, these cities and towns had suffered the brunt of the Assad family’s neoliberal project. Saleh writes:
There is nothing traditional about this so-called “traditionalism”: it is incomprehensible outside of very particular political and economic circumstances that, in their outcomes, resemble the effects of colonialism.
These social environments were in a process of dissolution until the 1970s. However, the prolonged deterioration of economic conditions, the collapse of the public education system, and an imposed political quarantine all played a role in their isolation and were active engines for “traditionalizing” them.
Saleh thus shows the real problem is not the people, but the regime. Its neoliberal policies created the worst rates of poverty and inequality across the Middle East with 30 percent below the extreme poverty line and another 30 percent just above it.
The chasm between wealth and extreme poverty in Syria is even more pronounced today. Aerial photographs show neighboring towns in Syria, with pro-regime towns fully intact and boasting modern infrastructure, directly beside utterly destroyed rebellious towns whose decaying infrastructure is still visible.
Assad used this Islamophobic discourse against these provincial masses to justify and excuse his barbaric destruction of the country. He took advantage of the rise of Islamic fundamentalist organizations, which he helped create by releasing jihadists from his jails, to accomplish two aims: first, win a base of support among Alawites, Christians, and other religious minorities within the country; and second, gain the support of imperial powers like Russia and regional ones like Iran in the name of fighting Sunni jihadist terrorism.
Saleh also explains the emergence of the Islamic fundamentalist forces. “The issue is not with a self-identified eternal Islam,” he writes, “but with a newly manufactured Islam that has been molded in response to contemporary conditions and demands, in the same fashion as the major modern political ideologies.”
He roots their emergence not in the supposed traditionalism of provincial people, but in historical and material conditions. Those include the defeat of the secular left, neoliberalism, the destruction of the welfare state, its replacement by charities run by fundamentalist forces, and the increasing conflict between fundamentalist regimes like Saudi Arabia and Iran that sponsor proxies throughout the region.
The essays in the book move from historical materialist accounts of the roots and politics of the revolution to its development, high points, and defeat. The essays, written over the course of this process, shift from the early optimism of 2011 to steely recognition of the setbacks over the last four years.
His first essay, “Revolution of the Common People,” written June 2011, is politically optimistic. He describes, in a manner similar to that of C. L. R. James describing the Haitian Revolution, the revolutionary hope of that moment: “For hundreds of thousands of Syrians, the Syrian popular uprising has been an extraordinary experience, ethically and politically: an experience of self-renewal and social change, an uprising to change ourselves and a revolution to change reality.”
Noting its transformative power and depth, Saleh says, “It will be very difficult to defeat the uprising.” He calls the uprising an “intifada,” likening the struggle of the Syrian masses to that of the Palestinians, a colonized population facing occupation and apartheid.
“The regime may be able to overcome the intifada by force,” he says, “but such a victory will only mark the first round in a longer struggle, one in which Syrians will already have recourse to a sophisticated memory of exceptional experiences, a source of support for them in any future rounds of their liberation struggle.”
But after this we see Saleh’s political horizons narrow in essays written later as the counterrevolution comes to dominate and the promise for democratic change across Syria wanes. Writing in September 2011, Saleh describes the start of the second stage of the uprising as characterized by “self-defense, desperation, and the survival instinct, rather than by considered estimation of the means through which issues of the general interest—and demands for democracy—might be introduced into the process of revolution.”
Saleh staunchly defends the right to take up arms and establish an armed wing as a means to protect the revolution. But he notes how the desperate nature of this battle began to make discussion and debate about strategy and tactics seem to be a luxury. The turn to desperate self-defense against the regime’s total war on the Syrian people sidelined the democratic organization, debate, and popular struggle that had been the hallmarks of the earlier stage of the revolution.
He shows how clarity about the revolution’s goals begins to fracture as Assad rains terror upon the population. The early confidence of self-emancipation gets transformed into desperate calls for international intervention. This transformation, he argues, set people on “a collision course with the [original] conscience of the Syrian uprising, which can be formulated in terms of three ‘No’s: no to violence, no to sectarianism, and no to outside military intervention.”
He places the blame for this primarily on the regime. The young leaders of the revolution who had assessed and coordinated demands and strategy at its start were already detained, shot, or killed under torture.
The later essays in the book, written amidst the impending victory of the counterrevolution, reflect the narrowed horizons of defeat. For example, he tends to exceptionalize the Syrian state as somehow more aberrant than others in the region, and calls for a return to a “healthy” nationalism as a solution to Syria’s crises.
Saleh writes: “For my part, I vote for the Syrian nation-state. I vote against the hypothetical erasure of the Sykes-Picot borders, and against the creeping feudal fragmentation as well.” He hopes for a “new form of Syrian nationalism” to counteract the counterrevolution’s fragmentation.
But, as Saleh himself recognizes, the Middle East is an interlocked prison house of peoples, and it is hard to see that any revolution could succeed within national boundaries without spreading to the rest of the region. Indeed, that was the hope of the Arab Spring in 2011. The uprisings showed the power of the Arab working classes to challenge tyrants in each nation state and inspire others to do the same, calling into question all the inherited colonial divisions with the hope of an entirely new democratic and egalitarian order in the Middle East and North Africa.
To stop this internationalist threat, the region’s ruling classes and tyrants used the existing state structures and national divisions to carry through their counterrevolutions. In such circumstances, the Left in Syria and regionally might be better served by the Arab Spring’s early internationalist aspirations, rather than hoping for a nationalist solution in Syria or elsewhere in the Middle East. The struggle may begin in this or that nation-state but the end goal must be regional and indeed global.
Nevertheless, Saleh’s book is essential reading for those who stand in solidarity with the original aims of the Syrian Revolution. It has no pretensions to be the final word on the political questions it raises and the answers it provides. Instead, it opens up space for genuine discussion of history, the material roots of the uprising, the nature of the regime, its counterrevolutionary strategy, the reactionary nature of Islamic fundamentalist formations, and lessons and debates about those for the Left in organizing the next phase of the struggle in Syria and the Middle East.
April 29, 2019
This book was actually hard for me to read, mostly in terms of the writing style. There were a lot of places that needed an editor (spelling, duplicated words, weird spacing, inconsistent spellings, flow of language), but that didn't detract from the message or the interest.
It also repeats quite frequently, but I think that's largely because this is a chronological compilation of translated articles; it felt like I was being reminded of the same few things (meanings of words, structures of power, who people were) multiple times. In a lot of these instances, I started skimming because otherwise I felt like the information was too repetitive. A better use of space would be to have footnotes and a glossary for words like 'shabiha' instead of constant parenthetical notes about it that break engagement and forces the audience to stop, reread the sentence without the parenthetical note, and then continue. It was really frustrating.
Overwhelmingly, I think I would've liked these articles more as... articles rather than as a compilation because of how similar they could be. The information is something that we need to know more about because this story isn't really breaking into the world headlines from the perspectives of people who live in Syria. We get a lot of talking heads who are "Middle East experts" or "Middle East scholars" with no lived experience or "foreign relations experts" or "diplomatic experts" who haven't really interacted with Syria. In that way, this book is pretty refreshing.
It also repeats quite frequently, but I think that's largely because this is a chronological compilation of translated articles; it felt like I was being reminded of the same few things (meanings of words, structures of power, who people were) multiple times. In a lot of these instances, I started skimming because otherwise I felt like the information was too repetitive. A better use of space would be to have footnotes and a glossary for words like 'shabiha' instead of constant parenthetical notes about it that break engagement and forces the audience to stop, reread the sentence without the parenthetical note, and then continue. It was really frustrating.
Overwhelmingly, I think I would've liked these articles more as... articles rather than as a compilation because of how similar they could be. The information is something that we need to know more about because this story isn't really breaking into the world headlines from the perspectives of people who live in Syria. We get a lot of talking heads who are "Middle East experts" or "Middle East scholars" with no lived experience or "foreign relations experts" or "diplomatic experts" who haven't really interacted with Syria. In that way, this book is pretty refreshing.
Read
May 17, 2025No se me ha hecho fácil leer, pero es más alentador que Dawla, que leo a la vez y que es directamente devastador. Me alegraba todo el rato leyéndolo pensando que ya ha caído Asad, que en paz no descanse.
Tiene el autor un pensamiento claro y humanista, casi heroico en su generosidad y temple por escribir en medio de la revolución/guerra civil/matanza de los civiles por el estado. Por su análisis del uso político del (la idea del) sectarismo, una forma de dividir y conquistar, de sembrar el caos y aplicar el control, no una expresión innata y legítima de la “identidad” (la palabra misma me da arcadas a estas alturas), me parece más que razón para leerlo. Aborda lo de “proteger a las minorías” (cuando en Siria suelen ser pequeñas poblaciones que habían captado el poder y la riqueza, haciendo muy mal uso de los dos, marginalizando al 70% del país que es suní), que tanto gusta a Europa, con contundencia y mano izquierda, pero cortándolo en seco. Poco a poco acabaremos con ese liberalismo discursivo tan blando y empalagoso, que aparte de no esclarecer, entorpece y esconde.
También vale la pena leerlo porque ya va siendo hora de leer a más sirios y escuchar a más sirios y prestar más atención a los sirios sobre todo antes de emitir opiniones sobre los sirios y qué deben y tienen que hacer los sirios. Algo sabrán los sirios de Siria, digo yo. Sobre todo este sirio, uno cuya opinión escucharé con atención.
Tiene el autor un pensamiento claro y humanista, casi heroico en su generosidad y temple por escribir en medio de la revolución/guerra civil/matanza de los civiles por el estado. Por su análisis del uso político del (la idea del) sectarismo, una forma de dividir y conquistar, de sembrar el caos y aplicar el control, no una expresión innata y legítima de la “identidad” (la palabra misma me da arcadas a estas alturas), me parece más que razón para leerlo. Aborda lo de “proteger a las minorías” (cuando en Siria suelen ser pequeñas poblaciones que habían captado el poder y la riqueza, haciendo muy mal uso de los dos, marginalizando al 70% del país que es suní), que tanto gusta a Europa, con contundencia y mano izquierda, pero cortándolo en seco. Poco a poco acabaremos con ese liberalismo discursivo tan blando y empalagoso, que aparte de no esclarecer, entorpece y esconde.
También vale la pena leerlo porque ya va siendo hora de leer a más sirios y escuchar a más sirios y prestar más atención a los sirios sobre todo antes de emitir opiniones sobre los sirios y qué deben y tienen que hacer los sirios. Algo sabrán los sirios de Siria, digo yo. Sobre todo este sirio, uno cuya opinión escucharé con atención.
February 7, 2018
Phenomenal writing and deep, rare insights into Syrian politics and pain. Indispensable eye-witness testimony and analysis of remarkable clarity, both of which counter the grimy geopolitical conspiracy narratives popular across the political spectrum in the West. This book is an enormous contribution to a defiant cultural and historical legacy, one that is still being written -- that of the Syrian people.
August 13, 2022
A great example of 'practical Gramscianism', in particular the last essay on "Neo-Sultanism" which is a model of Marxist political analysis of a concrete conjuncture.
January 5, 2025
a must-read, this was a very thorough introduction for me to this topic
January 7, 2025
3.5⭐️ rounded up
October 10, 2018
يناقش الكاتب في مجموعة مقالاته الثورة السورية وتطوراتها وتحولها إلى حرب أهلية سنية شيعيه.
اهم المقالات في رأيي الشخصي هي الحادية والثانية عشرة.
اهم المقالات في رأيي الشخصي هي الحادية والثانية عشرة.
August 23, 2018
Reading this tremendous, expansive, and lyrical selection of essays about the Syrian Revolution I was struck by two things. The first is how so dead-on some of Saleh’s predictions and warnings cams to pass. As the essays are written over the years of the revolution, from 2011 to 2016 you can read his thinking through concretely the challenges the revolution faced, from the militarization of the struggle, sectarianism, and the rise of Islamic fundamentalism.
Secondly I was struck by in his description of the features of the Assad state—which refers to as Syrian fascism—and how the many political traits that the Western so-called left Assad apologists use to defend Assad are the exact features of the ideological mold of what Saleh calls ‘Absolute Arabism” that serves as the root of Syrian fascism. From the veneer of faux anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, to an obsession with foreign conspiracies, accusations (taballi) against traitors, the myth of ‘civilization’ and Islamaphobic modernization are all elements of an internal regime that terrorizes ordinary Syrians. Each of these are the pillars through which Assad father and son built, justify and maintain a totalitarian state that Saleh describes adroitly as Neo-Sultanic. To hold those very things externally as positive aspects of the Assad regime—as this so-called left does—reflects a severe Orientalism and complete lack of understanding of Syrian society. Saleh’s excellent work casts this —tragically—in sharp contrast.
The book is excellent, especially the middle chapters. Saleh presents a political voice that is both incredibly thorough and sharp in analysis but from the framework or the normal Syrian people struggling in an impossible situation.
Secondly I was struck by in his description of the features of the Assad state—which refers to as Syrian fascism—and how the many political traits that the Western so-called left Assad apologists use to defend Assad are the exact features of the ideological mold of what Saleh calls ‘Absolute Arabism” that serves as the root of Syrian fascism. From the veneer of faux anti-imperialism and anti-Zionism, to an obsession with foreign conspiracies, accusations (taballi) against traitors, the myth of ‘civilization’ and Islamaphobic modernization are all elements of an internal regime that terrorizes ordinary Syrians. Each of these are the pillars through which Assad father and son built, justify and maintain a totalitarian state that Saleh describes adroitly as Neo-Sultanic. To hold those very things externally as positive aspects of the Assad regime—as this so-called left does—reflects a severe Orientalism and complete lack of understanding of Syrian society. Saleh’s excellent work casts this —tragically—in sharp contrast.
The book is excellent, especially the middle chapters. Saleh presents a political voice that is both incredibly thorough and sharp in analysis but from the framework or the normal Syrian people struggling in an impossible situation.
June 24, 2018
Colección de artículos sobre el tema que da título al libro. Muy interesante para quien quiera un análisis en profundidad y con conocimiento de causa, no sólo del conflicto sirio y de su evolución desde marzo de 2011 hasta el año 2017 (fecha en que está datado el último de los artículos), sino también de los mecanismos que han permitido al régimen actual mantenerse en el poder y de las consecuencias que éstos han tenido y tienen sobre la sociedad siria actual. También, por supuesto, analiza el papel de otros agentes internacionales en este conflicto y critica las limitaciones de las visiones occidentales del mismo.
Muy pero que muy recomendable.
Muy pero que muy recomendable.
December 20, 2024
Riddled with gaps, doesn’t address many many elephants in the room, and ultimately its projections did not hold at all. Theoretically “unstable” account. But is an interesting account nonetheless. If you are liberal-left aligned this could be your Syria bible, but will know you have been long abandoned
September 1, 2019
كتاب تحليلي عميق ينحو نحو علم الاجتماع في تحليل الظواهر و التفاعلات التي اختلطت في مرجل الثورة السورية
November 16, 2021
Really a 3.5/5
This is a difficult book to review.
On the one hand, it's deeply valuable and important to get insight from a leading intellectual of the Syrian revolution. His writings convey his deep consideration and analysis of the factors leading up the the revolution from the very founding of the Syrian state.
His insights into the Assad dynasty, deconstruction of the notion of "sectarianism" and the dynamics of the revolution provide perspective into the movement, and how and why it fell apart to the extent it has.
On the other hand, this book is very dense, and really does need an editor. There are points that are repeated ad nauseum in various forms. That doesn't mean that they aren't valid and insightful points, but just that an editor was needed to help tidy up the writing. To clarify, this is not a criticism of the translator, who has done a brilliant job - it's a structure thing.
The other point is that every now and then, the author makes a few assumptions or contentions that are more ideological than analytical; on the rare occasion there is a "we're victim to a conspiracy" aspect, which was jarring. It's important to caveat that this doesn't take away from the majority of his analysis, but it is there at some points.
Another point I felt was a bit unfair was criticism of humanitarian actors, and Syrians who work for international humanitarian organisations - who have done a lot of good work to help their people. I understand the ideological perspective that can lead to this conclusion, but I disagree with it.
I would also note that this book is not an introduction the Syria conflict - its greatest value (for an outsider) would be to a reader who is familiar with the conflict, its drivers, actors and trends. Otherwise, the reader could be easily lost and the insight from the analysis would go over their head.
It's a result of these factors that I cannot give it a 4/5, but I do recommend this book.
This is a difficult book to review.
On the one hand, it's deeply valuable and important to get insight from a leading intellectual of the Syrian revolution. His writings convey his deep consideration and analysis of the factors leading up the the revolution from the very founding of the Syrian state.
His insights into the Assad dynasty, deconstruction of the notion of "sectarianism" and the dynamics of the revolution provide perspective into the movement, and how and why it fell apart to the extent it has.
On the other hand, this book is very dense, and really does need an editor. There are points that are repeated ad nauseum in various forms. That doesn't mean that they aren't valid and insightful points, but just that an editor was needed to help tidy up the writing. To clarify, this is not a criticism of the translator, who has done a brilliant job - it's a structure thing.
The other point is that every now and then, the author makes a few assumptions or contentions that are more ideological than analytical; on the rare occasion there is a "we're victim to a conspiracy" aspect, which was jarring. It's important to caveat that this doesn't take away from the majority of his analysis, but it is there at some points.
Another point I felt was a bit unfair was criticism of humanitarian actors, and Syrians who work for international humanitarian organisations - who have done a lot of good work to help their people. I understand the ideological perspective that can lead to this conclusion, but I disagree with it.
I would also note that this book is not an introduction the Syria conflict - its greatest value (for an outsider) would be to a reader who is familiar with the conflict, its drivers, actors and trends. Otherwise, the reader could be easily lost and the insight from the analysis would go over their head.
It's a result of these factors that I cannot give it a 4/5, but I do recommend this book.
August 21, 2020
This is a 2017 collection of essays by a Syrian intellectual and activist, characterizing the regime of Bashar al-Assad and reflecting on the revolution and its possible future. If you're an academic, then yes, read this whole book. If you're looking for a treatment of this topic more for the general reader, you might look at No Turning Back: Life, Loss, and Hope in Wartime Syria.
The Assad regime claims "a monopoly on power, wealth, and patriotism." Under Assad, the Syrian people have suffered “political persecution, cultural alienation, and economic exploitation," to say nothing of detainment, torture, and murder. I was struck by the familiarity of his description of authoritarianism. For example, he writes, "Government by raw force without democratic representation, capturing the language and rhetoric, illegitimate accumulation of wealth through the state--all these are based on separation. Separation of gain from effort, of words from their meanings, of positions from qualifications and competencies." In discussing the causes of Syrian fascism, he identifies absolute Arabism (prohibition of internal dissent along with the isolation of Syrians from an aggressive and conspiring "outer world"), sectarianism (playing groups against one another and demonizing some groups, resulting in dehumanization), and the new bourgeoisie (who view the people as “backward, illiterate, ignorant fanatics who are responsible for their own living conditions”).
Lots to think about. Heartbreaking that Syrians are still suffering.
The Assad regime claims "a monopoly on power, wealth, and patriotism." Under Assad, the Syrian people have suffered “political persecution, cultural alienation, and economic exploitation," to say nothing of detainment, torture, and murder. I was struck by the familiarity of his description of authoritarianism. For example, he writes, "Government by raw force without democratic representation, capturing the language and rhetoric, illegitimate accumulation of wealth through the state--all these are based on separation. Separation of gain from effort, of words from their meanings, of positions from qualifications and competencies." In discussing the causes of Syrian fascism, he identifies absolute Arabism (prohibition of internal dissent along with the isolation of Syrians from an aggressive and conspiring "outer world"), sectarianism (playing groups against one another and demonizing some groups, resulting in dehumanization), and the new bourgeoisie (who view the people as “backward, illiterate, ignorant fanatics who are responsible for their own living conditions”).
Lots to think about. Heartbreaking that Syrians are still suffering.
January 16, 2021
This is an incredibly refreshing and welcome exploration of the Syrian civil war. Through critical thought and political engagement Yassin Al-Haj Saleh provides insight into the conflict while contributing to the much needed resurgence of Arab intellectualism and contemporary Arab political thought. Saleh provides an excellent on the ground perspective of the conflict, in addition, the linear evolution and changes of his thoughts throughout the evolution or devolution of the conflict itself is particularly interesting. We see Saleh's hopeful optimism begin to waiver as the revolution itself begins to fragment into many complex and at times self-destructive pieces. This will resonate with Syrian readers themselves who, like myself, may have found ourselves waning in optimism as the conflict persists and ambitions of revolution become far harder to visualize. While this text is obviously anti-regime, Saleh does not take a sectarian stance in his perspectives on the conflict, rather he illuminates how sectarianism operates as a the modus operandi of the Assad regime and explains thoughtfully how a liberated Syria, is one liberated from the shackles of sectarian thinking.
If you are interested in a deeper understanding of the Syrian conflict, or are a Syrian looking for a more intellectual and critical perspective on our current state of affairs, from the perspective of a fellow Syrian, I would highly recommend this book. I look forward to the day when more of Saleh's texts are translated and available for english readers.
If you are interested in a deeper understanding of the Syrian conflict, or are a Syrian looking for a more intellectual and critical perspective on our current state of affairs, from the perspective of a fellow Syrian, I would highly recommend this book. I look forward to the day when more of Saleh's texts are translated and available for english readers.
September 18, 2025
With the Assad regime finally gone once and for all, I thought to take a look at this book made by a Syrian intellectual. Containing several essays from 2011 to 2015, it tackles the very different questions on how Syria got to where it is and addresses the various problems Syria faces and how they could be resolved. They tackle everything from sectarianism to authoritarianism and how Syria could be able to overcome its worst ills and form a better society and government out of the mess. The earlier essays were very prophetic about how the rise of far-right Islamist movements would become an enemy to the Revolution as much as Assad, with ISIL being one of them. And the author especially makes time to warn people about how sectarianism can destroy whole countries and turn people against each other in horrifying ways.
Though Assad may be gone, Syria faces a seriously uncertain future as the current government is repeating many of the same problems as the last one: sectarian violence, nepotism, and authoritarianism. I pray that this country can end this cycle of violence once and for all and that it can finally move past this decades-long nightmare for good.
Though Assad may be gone, Syria faces a seriously uncertain future as the current government is repeating many of the same problems as the last one: sectarian violence, nepotism, and authoritarianism. I pray that this country can end this cycle of violence once and for all and that it can finally move past this decades-long nightmare for good.
February 21, 2023
تطلعت إلى قراءة هذا الكتاب بعد انتهائي من الكتاب الرائع "بالخلاص يا شباب" لنفس المؤلف. الكتاب مجموعة مقالات أفادتني كثيراً في فهم أسباب الثورة السورية ودوافع المشاركين فيها ومساراتها التي أفضت إلى حالة سوريا المروعة حالياً. تكالبت عوامل عديدة على فشل الثورة السورية؛ أهمها هو القمع الشامل الذي قام به نظام الأسد وحليفه الإيراني والعدمية الإسلامية التي سيطرت على أكثر طوائف المعارضة وأقواها. أتى ذلك كله في إطار دولي رأي أن بقاء الدولة الأسدية أكثر عملية من زوالها، اتفق على هذا الإطار الأمريكيون والروس والصينيون والأوروبيون قبل أن تلحق بهم دول مجلس التعاون الخليجي وأخيراً تركيا.
قضت هذه الاعتبارات العملية على أحلام السوريين في حياة عادلة لا تخضع لرعب الأجهزة الأمنية في مملكة آل الأسد وهو ما كان نذيراً بالاتجاه نحو عالم أقل ديمقراطية واندماجاً تنغلق فيه القوميات وينتشر فيه الخوف والتحريض على اللاجئين والأقليات بينما يستمر فرض اللامساواة والتمييز والإفقار بقوة السلاح.
أكثر فصول الكتاب إفادة بالنسبة لي هي التي وفرت إضاءات على المسألة الكردية وطبيعة تفاعل النظام الأسدي مع الكرد السوريين في إطار صراعاته السياسية مع العراق وتركيا وهو ما لم تكن لي به سابق معرفة.
قضت هذه الاعتبارات العملية على أحلام السوريين في حياة عادلة لا تخضع لرعب الأجهزة الأمنية في مملكة آل الأسد وهو ما كان نذيراً بالاتجاه نحو عالم أقل ديمقراطية واندماجاً تنغلق فيه القوميات وينتشر فيه الخوف والتحريض على اللاجئين والأقليات بينما يستمر فرض اللامساواة والتمييز والإفقار بقوة السلاح.
أكثر فصول الكتاب إفادة بالنسبة لي هي التي وفرت إضاءات على المسألة الكردية وطبيعة تفاعل النظام الأسدي مع الكرد السوريين في إطار صراعاته السياسية مع العراق وتركيا وهو ما لم تكن لي به سابق معرفة.
Displaying 1 - 30 of 47 reviews