Today this façade is crumbling, and the Assads’ model is being shaken. Sunni Syria, Kurdish Syria, Christian Syria, and Druze Syria, which had been blunted, marginalized, and despoiled by forty years of brutal Alawite Baathism, are being reawakened. This may not necessarily entail a precipitous Balkanization of Syria—the majority of Syrians seem to be still steadfast in face of the regime’s assaults, just as they seem immune to the regime’s attempts at playing the sectarian card. Conversely, the emancipation and political reawakening of Syria’s various ethnic groups may not lead to representative forms of government either, nor might they spawn a pluralist, federal system—the prospects of yet another kind of dictatorship rising are actually not that far-fetched. Still, the dynamics of change seem to have smitten the Syrians and shaken them out of their traditional inertia and resignation.

Unitary monolithic Syria of the Arab nationalist may very well be breathing its last. Whatever emerges out of its charred remains might be well served casting a glance at pre-Baathist Syrian history; at a “Syrian nation” as an entity distinct and separate from the “Arab nation,” composed of Arabs to be sure, but swarming with Levantine ethnic and cultural groups with histories and memories predating Muslims, Christians, and Jews. Antun Saadé, founder of the Syrian Social Nationalist Party (ca. 1932), advanced a unique conception of this Syrian nation as a crucible and synthesis of many cultures, civilizations, ethnic, and linguistic communities; a rich composite of Levantine Phoenicians, Canaanites, Hebrews, Aramaeans, Assyrians, and their modern progeny. Saadé claimed:

We, the Syrians, have completely done away with the myth that we are easterners [read, “Arabs”] and that our destiny is linked to that of the eastern [or Arab] peoples. We, the Syrians, are not easterners. On the contrary, we are the fountainhead of Mediterranean culture and the custodians of the civilization of that sea which we transformed into a Syrian sea, whose roads were traversed by our ships and to whose distant shores we carried our culture, our inventions, and our discoveries.[8]

Syria’s current calls for change, the tenuous realities of the Assad dynasty, and Adonis’s lifelong exhortation that his countrymen begin once more relating to their checkered ancient heritage, might be the charter of a new resurrected nation. “Bring your axes along” wrote Adonis, “pack up <Allah> like a dying [Arab] Sheikh, open a pathway to the sun away from minarets, open a book to a child besides the books of musty pieties, [and] cast the dreamer’s eye away from Medina and Kufa. I am not the only one…”[9] This is Syria’s salvation. This is the Syria that many of its decent children—and their neighbors—are yearning for.

 

[1] Adonis, Waqt bayna r-ramad wal ward [A Lull Between the Ashes and the Roses] (Beirut: Dar al-‘Awda, 1972), p. 11

[2] Ibid., pp. 12 and 33.

[3] Adonis, Indentité Inachevée, (Paris: Editions du Rocher, 2004), pp. 22-23.

[4] Ibid.

[5] Matti Moosa, Extremist Shiites, (New York: Syracuse University Press, 1988), pp. 287-88.

[6] Fouad Ajami, “The Autumn of the Autocrats,” Foreign Affairs, May-June, 2005.

[7] Archives of the French Ministry of Foreign Affairs (MAE, Paris, Quai d’Orsay: Série E-Levant, Sous-Série Syrie-Liban, Carton 413, Dossier 2, Volume 266.)

[8] Labib Zuwiya Yamak, The Syrian Social Nationalist Party (Cambridge, MA; The Center for Middle Eastern Studies, Harvard University, 1966), p. 89.

[9] Adonis, A Lull Between the Ashes and the Roses, p. 34. (Emphasis in the original.)