FOUR
WHAT DID A YOUNG SYRIAN like me know about the outside world? My generation paced like turtles after technologies, finally adopting them years after they had been used and discarded by people outside our corner of the globe. We were fascinated by the little we knew and ashamed at the relative backwardness of our country. We knew we lagged decades—in some villages, centuries—behind other nations and that we needed desperately to catch up. Nael and I blamed our people for their—our—state. We loathed that cousin who had once posed next to a BMW and then bragged about it for years afterward, or the sister who, after a visit to the Gulf, described the mediocre wares at shopping malls as “the wonders of the world,” objects of her eternal longing. Or the endless family visits—the days whiled away over too-sweet tea and pointless, useless prattle, when no one would ever admit that anything was wrong. A friend once joked: “The West invents, while we say ‘Praise God’s greatness.’ ” Our people used religiosity as a tranquilizer. Some viewed technology as devilish, while others saw it only as a testament to the wonder of God’s creation, rather than the product of questing human minds. We retreated into irrelevant pride for our Islamic Arab culture—a culture that, a thousand years ago, had led the scientific world. Nael sometimes sighed, “People have reached as far as the moon and we Syrians are still—”
“—debating the correct color for women’s hijabs and the loss of the late Al-Andalus,” I might have finished.
Yes, Syria’s succession of corrupt dictatorships was one reason we remained a third-world country, but my generation knew another cause: our religious self-deceptions. We heard from people around us that the best person is the one most loved by God, not the one who accomplishes anything in the world—that the follower/prescriber Shafaie, with his countless rules, was far superior to the questioning philosopher Ibn Rushd. Worship meant more to our people than earthly achievement, and conformity became an instrument to numb our brains. To us, life here on earth was a trivial, ephemeral pleasure. Only the next world mattered. We must work for everlasting paradise.
In these ways, we hibernated from our pitiful present and gloried in satisfying glimpses of our past, until, in the last days of 2010, our regularly scheduled programming underwent a spectacular disruption. A guy set himself on fire in Tunisia. He had been insulted by a policewoman. Would he have reacted differently were she a man? No matter. The Spring had arrived.
ON ONE ARAB SPRING EVENING, Nael and I sat in his house watching the human whirlpool roiling Egypt’s Tahrir Square on TV. We were stunned, watching the largest of the Arab dinosaurs go through the painful and costly process of extinction, which is a rare thing to happen in our meadows, and when it does, the dinosaur still doesn’t actually leave you in peace. He makes sure he leaves behind a substitute, one who mirrors him, in all his tyranny, as identically as he once mirrored the tyranny in us. Even so, some of us would be glad to see a new face once in a lifetime.
I turned to Nael. “If only this could happen in Syria,” I said. He gave me a skeptical smirk.
LADIES AND GENTLEMEN, please lend me your ears, and a minute of your time, to judge me fairly. I grew up angry at the filthy buildings and the unpaved streets. I grew up resentful at the religious poor and the liberal rich. I grew up hateful of the empty words and the overfilled bellies. Ladies and gentlemen, it was forbidden to chase a stray beam of light. It was forbidden to aspire. My father, his father, their father, same father, was watching me, was watching us all. I hated that I had no voice. I hated that I was unseen. I wanted to shout in the face of every corrupt motherfucker who thought he was better than me because his father was richer than mine and better connected. My generation had to do what was done. And so I joined a ruthless stream.
Maybe I don’t regret it. Maybe I don’t care. Like me. Hate me. I only wanted a sniff of fresh air. I was hungry for it. Each time I marched, each time my eyes burned from tear gas, each time I shouted curses at the snitch-filled Baathist Student Union, each time I heard the crack of bullets, I killed the fear and the stagnation that my jailers had imposed on me.
Ladies and gentlemen, in the name of “Fuck it,” I was unleashed.