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Rosa Yassin Hassan, Translated by Max Weiss
Rosa Yassin Hassan was born in Damascus in 1974, and studied architecture at Damascus University. She published her first collection of short stories in 2000, and has published several novels, including Abnus (Ebony), which won the Hanna Mina literature prize, Nighatif (Negative), Hurras al-hawaʾ (Guardians of Air), Brufa (Rough Draft), and, most recently, Al-Ladhina massahum al-sihr: min shazaya al-hikayat (Those Touched by Magic: Fragments of Stories). Ḥasan has been a critical voice within the nonviolent Syrian uprising from the early days of the revolt in 2011 while she still lived in Damascus until remains so since fleeing to Germany in 2012. This essay was originally published as “Ayna al-muthaqqafun al-suriyyun min al-thawra?” Jadaliyya, March 2, 2012.
One question that has been asked regularly during these early months of the Syrian revolution concerns the role of the intellectuals. The question is sometimes posed as a demand for explanation, especially insofar as the consequences of the revolution seem to have made the role of the intellectuals even more limited than it had been at the start, for various reasons that can be discussed. The voices spinning in this orbit might accuse intellectuals of a lack of courage and having a bias towards or even being indistinguishable from the dictatorship, of hiving themselves off from the people in order to live in ivory towers. But placing all intellectuals in the same basket like this would be a mistake, just as we cannot view any stratum of society in terms of such a collective logic.
But Things Are Even Worse Than That!
It is instructive to recall that ever since the spread of global liberation movements and related ideological affiliations, in particular those of the leftist and nationalist sort, political intellectuals have hewed as closely as possible to a unified front. During the 1950s and 1960s it was difficult to find a politicized or political intellectual who was not also interested in the question of culture. Furthermore, culture and politics constituted something like an agonistic unity in which the two were held together by a subtle yet unmistakable bond. Politics, in general, would therefore have to be injected with thought, simultaneously making the cultural producer adhere to both general concerns of the homeland and the politics of the age.
After the Baʿth Party came to power in Syria there was a meticulous determination to fracture that unified front. The events of the 1980s bolstered the brutal military strategy pursued by the regime, which revealed one of its faces in the war against Hama and Jisr al-Shughur as well as the widespread arrest campaigns that led to the destruction of the opposition, beginning with the Communists, extending across their multiple doctrinal party lines, all the way to nationalist parties and religious currents. This ferocious violence was directed against all those in the opposition, eviscerating political and civil activism of any meaning and efficacy, and contributing to the fragmentation of that longstanding unified front: intellectuals and political activists. Perhaps it seemed that the union of intellectuals was now complete, but in fact it had been divided into two camps. One that had been mobilized to work in tandem with the levers of power, to become transformed into a part of it, falling into line with its political parties as well as its active cultural and non-cultural institutions, more kingly than the king, graced with the spoils of power, making a mockery of their pens by writing in the service of the regime and stabbing in the back those intellectuals who refused to be co-opted. The second, those who constituted the other camp, clung to their oppositional orientation, their stance against dictatorship, albeit in silence or on the sly, because speaking out would have led to a fate like those of their comrades who wound up in exile or in prison or buried six feet under. It might be said that the first mobilization of this camp of intellectuals came in the early 1990s, when some of them issued “The Statement of the Ninety-Nine,” arguing against the participation of the Syrian regime in America’s war against Iraq. And perhaps what explains the ferocity as well as the surprise of the authorities at the time, in their response to that declaration, was how long that silence had gone on.
Over the course of several decades those foundations continued to pile up deep down inside dissident intellectuals, some of whom made their peace with the status quo and remained oppositional in silence, even as a number of them paid with their lives for their inability to come to terms with keeping silent. Still others found means for survival on the inside through their conviction that there were benefits to co-existing with the regime without ever fully falling into line. Among these (purported) benefits was an ideological dimension that attracted many intellectuals to the defense of the regime, convinced that it was a secular modern regime of resistance, justifications that neatly overlapped with regime discourse itself. We might also recall that many Syrian intellectuals in the opposition camp fiercely defended the coming to power of Bashar al-Assad in 2000, despite the fact that some of them had never stood on the side of power before, not because their ideological beliefs had been quashed by the regime but for the simple fact that it provided them with material and moral gains, as part of a new partnership with intellectuals who joined their camp.
“The tricks of upgrading dictatorships!”
Throughout the past decade or so these tricks have transformed intellectuals and politicians into a social stratum that is almost entirely cut off from the other sectors of society, both in terms of their influence and in terms of their everyday activity. Therefore, in any adequate critical appraisal we cannot simply consider those intellectuals who are far removed from the street as biased. After the eclipse of progressive ideologies that could articulate the connections between the intellectual and the people, between the intellectual’s identification with her social class and her relationship to the street, the intellectual began to search for her own space and individuality, which resulted (in its darkest form) in her total alienation from the masses, her confinement to a theoretical cage. This coincided with a global wave of postmodernism that fetishized pure detachment. To a large extent the very existence of the intellectual was now merely dependent upon his or her own creativity and cultural knowledge.
For all these reasons I believe that Syrian intellectuals were as blindsided as everyone else by the revolution. It has been surprising and sudden, especially after decades in which the people seemed submissive and resigned. But here the fruits of history ripened, and the revolution that the cultural and political elite played no role in setting off – even if we cannot ignore the fact that they had some gradual, invisible effect – seems like one that has no connection to them whatsoever. It’s certainly possible that the elite was trying to attach itself to the revolution, out of a belief that total acquiescence to the will of the street was their obligation, a duty to abdicate their timeworn roles as critics and iconoclasts. If we set aside certain times and places when and where they played an important part – in a social role, first and foremost – the activity of the intellectuals was close to nonexistent in most aspects of the revolution, which is what may have caused it to sometimes veer off course or lean towards revenge and fanaticism in some of its flashpoints.
Only a very small number of Syrian intellectuals have fully taken a stand with the revolution, or even written about it (whether to articulate its point of view or point out its mistakes), while some are deeply moved by the revolution but afraid of a civil war or sectarian troubles (especially those among sectarian and ethnic minority communities), and still others, secularists for the most part, are truly on the side of the will of the people but they are scared of the shadow of obscurantism cast by the (so-called) Islamist wave, from one city to another and one social class to another. There are those who might ask, “Why don’t we see intellectuals in the street, then?” I believe that even the slightest security lapse would bring many of them out into the streets; some would remain steadfast in their position, while others would have their stances upended into bias towards the regime. Protests today are like maps for martyrdom, which not everyone has the courage to face. We could name a lot of people who have been arrested, at the protests organized by intellectuals as well as other events, especially young people who are trying to disrupt the condition of subservience to creative expression alone, a matter to which many graybeard intellectuals have grown quite accustomed.
In the final analysis I believe that the comparison of Syrian intellectuals to the intellectuals of the Egyptian revolution is a false one. The youthfulness of the Egyptian revolution and the existence of a dedicated place for the demonstrators to go – Tahrir Square – the fact that the army stood with the people, and the presence of diverse forms of media all make the comparison with the Syrian situation extremely difficult and unfair.