2 June 2011

Another Syria is Possible?

The regime’s base continues to crumble. We hear about more and more Alawis even sidling away from the regime; Party members too (“BINOs” anyone?) are less and less enthusiastic about the regime. We always knew that; support for Assad was always a mile wide and an inch deep. We mouthed the words but we didn’t mean them deeply; we looked at Bashar as the worst option save for all the others.

And we hoped and wished and fervently prayed that our gambles were right. Whatever else one said about him, he was better than his poppa, better than his uncle, better than his brothers, better than Saddam … right? Maybe next year, we’d have some serious reforms, maybe next year things would be better. He did keep us from being Iraq: Part II; the economy did improve, he was nowhere near as embarrassing as the rest of the league (King Playstation? The Laughing Cow? The King of Africa? The Twink Lover of the Pirate Coast? The Cuckoo’s Egg? Any prince of the Saudis? In that League, the Lion’s Cub was really the father of Ali!)

But … no longer … we stopped believing in what seems already a long time ago. I can even recall the moment: the afternoon of March 30, 2011.

Our protests began in January but they were small and nothing more but the protests of a handful of us, over-educated, idealistic ‘elitists’ if you will … and then they got larger in mid March and became national. The government overreacted. We had martyrs for our cause; they had blood on their hands. It was a national crisis. And they began talking about reform. Assad was to address the parliament and the nation, we were told; and all of us, whether we were with the regime or against thought ‘now is the hour when the Lion’s Cub shows that he deserves his job’. We talked of what he might offer, what path ahead and of reform …

And then he spoke … and as he spoke the whole nation sorrowed. There’d be no real reform, at best window dressing … and even that would e unlikely …

And the protest movement changed that afternoon; from then on, it was clear. We had no choice but to push ahead, no choice but to call for a revolution, no choice but freedom.

And the regime … pushed back and stuttered and floundered and killed. Everyday brought names of new martyrs and towns that were almost forgotten even here suddenly were spoken of around the world: Dera’a and Banyas and Tel Khalikh and Douma and Maarat and now Rastan … Rastan home of the world’s oldest working dam, Rastan by the Orontes, Rastan where secrets best unspoken might be found, Rastan is shelled now and joins the list of hero cities and towns that now stretch from the Tigris to the Sea …

The regime acts now almost as though it wants to lose. They are now going after sheikhs and qadis, the leaders of the religion, here, and making sure no Sunni does not want them gone, not one day but today. Farouk and Najah hang on but how long before they leave their offices? That “business class’ of Sunnis sides with the state no longer.

In Turkey, the opposition in exile gathered this week (the real opposition, one should note; the fake factions that exist only to line pockets or pump up egos denounced it); no unity statements full of surging pronouncements were made to sway the busloads of protesters the regime had had shipped in … but the shape of things to come emerges.

The New Syria will be a better place for Kurds. It will be a better place for Muslims. It will even be a better place for Communists. And one thing is becoming clear; we’re done with dictators and rule by strong men. No more generals, no more dictators, no more fake royal clans. We’ve learned to respect one another even when we disagree. Kurds and Arabs, Communists and Islamists working side by side … and Syrian Salafis? They are as likely to take power here as they are to do so in Tennessee …
The only thing keeping us from freedom is fear; not ours, we are not afraid, but the pathetic fears that impel the soldiers in Maher’s brigades, the fears that we will come for them in vengeance. And they act only as though they dream of that day and want us to. If they stand down, we will ALL be free.

Another Syria is possible and we can see it from here.

I was a teen-aged idiot

When I was 18, I was an idiot in many ways. I was, or so my teachers told me, more than smart enough. I did well in school, had wonderful test scores. Everyone told me that I should apply to any university I desired. My parents told me that, wherever I was accepted, they would make sure that my tuition was paid and everything taken care of. I applied to a fair number of schools, including prestigious ones, and got into every single one of those, even the ivy league ones. My parents were pleased. If nothing else, I knew that when my father sat with his peers, the other old Arab guys, he’d be able to brag about ‘my daughter at Yale’ or at Princeton or wherever I ended up going. They’d have to settle with saying “my daughter is at Georgetown” or “my son is at Emory” (ours was the competitive world of immigrant families; I’m told the same sort of competitive bragging goes on in other little worlds).

But I didn’t go to any of them. Instead, I opted for not even the best school I’d gotten into in Georgia. I was an idiot.

Back then, I felt myself to be devout. I spent at least as much time learning Quran as I did on school work and poured my energies into what we called ‘dawah’, trying to spread the light of Islam to the unbelievers, trying to make myself into a paragon of Muslim virtue. Headscarf knotted proudly below my chin, I turned unplucked brows to the world and decided everything by what I thought would aid that.

I listened to no one else’s counsel. Even Hind, my mentor whom I called my sheikha, told me that I was making a mistake. But she was also, in my dreams, my heart’s desire and that was enough to make me refuse to listen to her.

After I’d sent out most of my applications and the first acceptance letters had trickled in, I went to see one of those first ones to reply. Agnes Scott College, the World for Women, was initially one of my ‘fall back’ schools. Twenty minutes from home by car and one with a steady stream of nice Arab Muslim girls attending. A cousin had already graduated from there after high school in Kuwait and there were a fair number of girls I knew who’d gone there.

I made arrangements with Dina, one of the sweetest Arab Atlantans of my generation, to spend a night in her dorm and see how I liked it. I arrived with my little bag and she showed me her room. Her roommate, she explained, would be gone so I could use her bed.

Where’s she? I asked.

The roommate usually stayed with her boyfriend. In his house? No, no, in his dorm room at another school.

I put my trust in God alone, I swear and am scandalized. So why do you live with someone like that?
Like what?

Someone wicked.

Dena shrugs, she doesn’t see it that way. Their way is different than ours and leaves it at that.

We have dinner in the cafeteria and she introduces me to her friends. We go with some other girls to a lecture where a poet reads. I love it. Afterwards, we walk into town and have ice cream. I notice two women in the ice cream shop, holding hands, lesbians. Dena notices me noticing, tells me that it’s rude to stare (in Arabic) and that I shouldn’t judge them and not be so close-minded; it’s normal here. I don’t have the heart to tell her that I know that we’re in ‘Dyke-atur’ and all that that implies.

We go back to the dorm and I take off my hijab. Dena and I sit and talk with her dorm-mates and she and I teach them debke steps. We’re laughing and having fun. And I notice that two of the girls are holding hands and look at each other with love. And those two were the two I had been most ‘clicking; with. Kristin’s a French major and we’d talked about Flaubert (she’s actually read Salammbo, not just Bovary) and her girlfriend studies history.

When we retire and we’re laying in bed, I ask Dena about them. She tells me it’s no big deal, I shouldn’t be homophobic and let them be happy together.

And I start to imagine myself next year, here or somewhere else, living in a dorm, no family anywhere about. No one knows me; I make new friends. And sooner or later, I imagine, I’ll be looking at one of them and our eyes will lock and we will kiss and end up in bed. And then everything follows; somebody sees us and tells my parents who, if I’m lucky, simply disown me. Or maybe just ships me off to be married to some ninety year old monster or maybe they kill me and bury my body in the river … and even if not, the family has nothing to do with me, Hind and the Sisterhood expel me … and cut off from home and family, I end up on the streets, a broken wreck of a woman, begging for money to buy drugs or drink, and die in a gutter of some sort of awful disease, then comes Qiyamat and I find myself engulfed in the Fire, for ever and ever …

And it is all to clear and everything is obvious. In the morning, I realize, I can’t go away to college. I cannot live in a dorm. If I do, it’s obvious that I’ll destroy my life and condemn myself to the Fire. There’s no other way, I think.

“The young man and the young woman, alone in a room,” I recall someone telling me, “and the shaitan makes three.”

For me, though, I know, that, if I am not careful, the Shaitan will tempt me and me and a woman who isn’t so driven, we’ll make three with the Shaitan.

So, I make my decision that morning, before my mother comes to get me. I won’t go to Agnes Scott or Emory or UGA or Tech; I won’t go to Yale or to Princeton or Vassar or Smith. I don’t even bother finishing the application for Georgetown or for Harvard. I will go a school where I can live at home, commute from my parents’ house and not deal with Shaitan.

Of course, I don’t tell anyone why. I justify to myself and explain it in other terms. Here, we are building a sisterhood, of young women who will follow the Miss. If I go somewhere new, all my work will be over here and I’ll have to start from scratch. The family needs me, so does the Miss. I convince myself that it makes sense to go to a school full of headscarfed Muslimas who commute from their fathers’ houses. I tell Rania and she is enthusiastic about it. My sheikha and my family think what I’m saying makes sense – or at least that’s what they tell me.

And years go by and I realize that I was an idiot governed by fear. Yes, there were consequences when I stopped being scared of my own shadow and life was never simple, but becoming true to myself set me free … and all my imagined horrors never happened (we’ll see later about the Fire, I suppose) and instead I found unguessed depths of loving-kindness.

And if I could go back in time seventeen or eighteen years, I would tell my younger self to be herself and not try to be who it is that she thinks everyone wants her to be. I'd tell her 'you know that girl you like, tell her about it ... worst thing, she'll reject you and you'll move on. You’ll get over it and you’ll fall in love with someone else and she’ll be a better choice. Take the opportunities you actually have; you have ones that 99% of your peers would envy and you reject them. Make the best of what you have instead of running from shadows ... oh, and, Amina, eat more, please!”