When scholars point out that modern terms like algebra and algorithm, or inventions such as the camera, originate from Muslim scholars who lived in Baghdad, Samarkand, and Córdoba centuries ago, they are not claiming that those scholars invented the modern world as we know it. Instead, they should be making a more important point: knowledge accumulates. It travels. It is translated, absorbed, challenged, refined, and transformed. Civilizations inherit, adapt, and extend knowledge, continuously discovering the world.

The great intellectual achievements of the medieval Muslim world were themselves made possible by this cross-pollination. Much of the intellectual flowering associated with Islamic civilization was triggered by the translation and study of Greek, Indian, Syriac, and Persian works. Muslim scholars did not merely copy these traditions; they built upon them. This was not theft, but inheritance turned into innovation.

Yet in the imagination of many Muslims today, this connection with medieval Muslim scholars often produces a fantastical belief that “we” somehow invented everything modern, and that the West simply stole it from us.

This sentiment did not emerge from nowhere. Serious scholars have long challenged Eurocentric histories of modernity. George Saliba, for example, has shown how European Renaissance science, including Copernican astronomy, cannot be understood apart from earlier Arabic-Islamic scientific traditions. Jack Goody, from a different angle, wrote of “the theft of history,” criticizing the way Western historiography claimed as uniquely European many developments that were in fact more widely human. These are serious arguments, and they deserve to be taken seriously, especially when they challenge lazy myths of Western self-creation. But in popular discourse, and under the influence of populist appropriation of postcolonial narratives, they are often flattened into a much cruder accusation: they stole our knowledge.

The young Berlin-based Syrian rapper Siba Alkhiami captures this sentiment in her by now-infamous song, Dounana (“without us”):

“Eradicate our roots. Demolish our homes. Criminalize our existence. Falsify our origins. Separate our loved ones. And slaughter our children. Take our blood for granted. And demonize our revolutionaries. Steal our knowledge… But who would you be without us?”

I have addressed the main claims in this song in my previous essay “The Fiction of Collective Innocence,” but the embrace of the notion that the West “stole our knowledge” raises an obvious question that merits separate treatment.

If the West “stole” Muslim knowledge by studying, translating, and building upon it, did Muslims “steal” Greek, Indian, Syriac, and Persian knowledge before that? Are we stealing Western knowledge today when we study at Western universities, or at Western-style universities at home? Are we stealing when we import Western technology, medical systems, legal concepts, musical instruments, industrial processes, and even the machines that manufacture the clothes we wear?

The problem is not pride in one’s ancestors' achievements, as that pride can be healthy. The problem begins when pride becomes myth, and myth becomes grievance, and grievance becomes a moral worldview.

The idea that knowledge belongs permanently to one civilization, and that its use by others constitutes theft, is historically false and morally corrosive. It teaches us to see history not as a shared human process but as a ledger of stolen property. It encourages us to believe that progress is something others possess only because they robbed it from others. And this, in turn, becomes an impediment to progress—not merely in the technological sense, but in the moral sense.

When certain acts are not condemned because they are wrong in themselves, but because we were their victims, then we have not rejected injustice; we have resented being on the wrong side of it. The danger begins when injustice is condemned only from the victim’s seat. In that case, the object of resentment is not the structure of domination itself, but one’s exclusion from the dominant position. The moral imagination remains trapped inside the very hierarchy it claims to oppose. Justice becomes a matter of reversal rather than transformation: the oppressed dream not of ending oppression but of occupying the oppressor's place. Grievance may still speak the language of liberation, but it quietly preserves the architecture of domination.

This is where grievance politics becomes dangerous. If the West’s progress is explained primarily as the result of pillaging other peoples’ knowledge, resources, and labor—rather than also as the outcome of internal struggles for rights, representation, transparency, and accountable institutions—then the lesson drawn is not that pillaging is wrong. The lesson becomes that pillaging breeds success. If pillaging works, why condemn it when practiced by Russia, China, Iran, or anyone else? Why not aspire to become the pillager?

This does not mean denying that Western powers did pillage, colonize, enslave, and exploit. They did. These crimes contributed to material advantages that served as the foundation of Western societal development. In some cases, imperial wealth and global dominance may have helped cushion domestic tensions, finance state capacity, and make liberal compromises easier at home, even as coercion and domination were practiced abroad. The paradox is not that liberal ideas were fake, but that societies capable of developing rights-based institutions internally were often willing to deny those same rights externally. This paradox must be faced honestly, but if we reduce Western development entirely to theft, we blind ourselves to the institutional, intellectual, and moral struggles that also shaped it. We end up learning the wrong lesson from history.

The deeper human paradox is this: when a civilization develops concepts such as liberty, equality, and fraternity, then treats those concepts as proof of its superiority and as justification for dominating others, it violates its own principles. It confuses the responsibility to share knowledge with the impulse to rule. But, the opposite error is just as destructive: when the victims of domination define justice as trading places with their former oppressors rather than ending the structures of oppression themselves, they perpetuate the same cycle under a different banner.

In both cases, claims of moral superiority become hollow. External actors may cloak their interventions in the language of justice, solidarity, liberation, or resistance, but beneath the rhetoric, they are no different. Each side tells itself a flattering story that edits history to preserve its innocence. Each side shrinks time, produces a self-serving narrative, dismisses inconvenient facts, and turns memory into a weapon.

Knowledge was never the possession of one people; rather, it has always belonged to the human journey. Civilizations rise when they participate in that journey with confidence, discipline, and openness, but decline when they turn to entitlement, grievances, and revenge.

The question, then, is not “Who are you without us?” Nor is it “Who are we without you?” The better question is: how can we build upon the knowledge we have inherited from history for centuries to come?

Every Syrian community in exile carries its own idea of Syria, frozen largely as it was when they left. It’s as if there’s an innate inability, or unwillingness, to allow the place you left to keep living without you, to keep accumulating complexity, contradiction, and culpability that your absence exempts you from sharing.

The nostalgia that sustains diaspora communities is epistemological and carries a claim about what Syria was and, therefore, what it must become again. And it is built on a foundational distortion. Ask the generation that left Syria in the 1960s, 1970s, and 1980s about sectarianism, and many will tell you: we never asked about religious background. It was impolite to do so. In our time, it did not matter.

The leap from “we did not discuss it” to “it did not matter” is enormous, and it is unfounded. Syria’s communities did not discuss their differences publicly because the political and social culture of the time treated such discussion as a provocation, a vulgarity, and a threat to the national myth of unity. But the silence was evidence of avoidance, not harmony. The sectarian, tribal, regional, and ethnic dynamics were always there, shaping political behavior from the first days of Syria’s independence: in the coups, the factional alignments, the unspoken calculus of who got which ministry, which military appointment, or which business license.

The fact that Syrians resisted the French attempt to divide the country into sectarian statelets was a genuine national achievement, but it was not evidence that communities truly understood each other as equals, had developed mechanisms to manage their differences, or grasped what citizenship actually requires. It meant, at most, that the nationalist sentiment was stronger than the sectarian one at that particular moment. The two were never mutually exclusive, and history proved it.

What the diaspora inherited from that era was the habit of treating silence as harmony, and harmony as a sufficient substitute for justice. In exile, deprived of the lived friction that might have challenged the myth, that evasion calcified into identity. The Syria that did not discuss its divisions became, in memory, a Syria that had none at all. And that Syria—serene, cosmopolitan, tolerant, wronged—became the icon that the diaspora now defends, demands, and insists upon as the template for what must be rebuilt.

It is a beautiful Syria. But it never quite existed. And not only because the tolerance was shallower than memory allows. It never existed because no single Syria ever did. Each community, each sect, each ethnic group conceived of the country in a way that corresponded to its own particular concerns, fears, and sense of what it was owed and what it could afford to concede.

The Sunni Arab majority imagined a Syria that was theirs, with room for others, but contingent on perceived loyalty and good behavior. The minorities imagined a Syria that protected them, guaranteed their place, and did not require them to dissolve into a majority culture they did not fully trust. The Kurds imagined a Syria that acknowledged what had been denied them—rights, culture, identity—while many also dreamt of Kurdistan, the imagined homeland that cuts across Syria, Turkey, Iraq, and Iran, and to which any Syrian solution was always merely a way station.

None of these Syrias made serious room for what the others wanted or needed or required their holders to reckon honestly with the fears and grievances of communities other than their own. They coexisted through the mutual suppression of the conversation that might have forced it, not mutual understanding.

And when they went into exile, they took those partial, self-serving maps with them, and promptly stopped updating them. More tellingly, most continued to insist on the myth of a unified Syrian identity as the proper framework for the country they had left, even as they organized their lives abroad along the very communal lines they claimed did not define Syria. The Christian Syrian gravitated toward the Christian Syrian community. The Alawite toward the Alawite. The Druze toward the Druze. The Kurd toward the Kurd. The unity they demanded of Syria at home was a demand they made of others, not a practice they maintained themselves. It was, in this sense, the purest expression of the pathology: a standard applied outward, never inward.

Then the revolution came, and what remained of the myth imploded. Each community experienced the uprising, the civil war, and its aftermath through its own communal prism, and what it saw there confirmed what it had always privately believed. The barriers that politeness and nationalism had kept formally invisible became explicit, load-bearing, and in many cases insurmountable. Old suspicions hardened into convictions, and old grievances acquired new, bloodier evidence. The revolution did not create the divisions, but it gave every community permission to stop pretending they did not exist, and fresh reasons to dig deeper into them.

In exile, the effect was amplified: each community’s diaspora closed ranks around its own narrative of the war, its own account of who had suffered most and who bore the most responsibility. The partial maps became battle maps. And the distance from Syria, rather than providing perspective, provided impunity and the freedom to hold the most extreme version of your community’s position without having to live alongside the people it was directed against.

This is where the pathology acquires its most damaging political dimension. The positions formed in exile, hardened by distance and untempered by the friction of actual coexistence, flow back into Syria through money, media, and the emotional authority that the homeland instinctively grants to those who left and kept faith. Local leaders who might be inclined toward accommodation find themselves outflanked by diaspora voices that have no stake in the consequences. Communities that might be edging toward pragmatic negotiation are pulled back by the weight of their exiled members’ expectations. The diaspora sets temperatures it will never have to live in.

And the homeland, still dependent on the diaspora’s resources and validation, too often defers to them. What began as a failure of imagination becomes a feedback loop: exile distorts, distortion transmits, transmission hardens what was already rigid, and the cycle repeats.

There were dissidents within each community who refused the communal narrative, tried to maintain cross-communal solidarities, and criticized their own camp as readily as they criticized others. They existed, and they matter as evidence that the pathology was neither inevitable nor universal, nor the only possible response to the circumstances. But they were too few, and the revolutionary moment—rather than vindicating them—isolated them further. The closing of communal ranks left little room for those who refused to close ranks, and the emotional and social cost of dissent within one’s own community proved, for most, too high to sustain.

I call this compound condition Syriosis. It is not a single condition but a cluster, and its components reinforce each other in ways that make the whole more resistant to treatment than any individual symptom:

• The first component is the frozen clock: the inability to allow the country you left to keep changing without you, combined with the insistence that your frozen image of it is the authoritative one.

• The second is the distortion that accompanies the freezing: the selective memory that smooths over contradictions, elevates the tolerable moments into golden ages, and suppresses the evidence that complicates the myth.

• The third is the conversion of that distorted memory into a moral claim—not merely “this is how Syria was” but “this is how Syria should be,” and by extension, “those who disagree with my vision of it are betraying it.”

• The fourth, and perhaps most corrosive, is the substitution of litany for introspection: the endless rehearsal of contributions made and wrongs suffered, presented as self-knowledge, when it is in fact its precise opposite.

What makes Syriosis particularly hard to treat is that its symptoms present as virtues. Fidelity to the homeland looks like loyalty. Refusal to compromise looks like a principle. The rehearsal of grievance looks like bearing witness. Amplifying one’s own community’s position looks like advocacy. From the inside, the pathology is indistinguishable from commitment and devotion. That is why it persists across generations, and why the dissenters within each community—those who question the myth, insist on complexity, and refuse the communal narrative—are experienced not as honest voices but as traitors.

Syriosis is self-sealing. It has built-in antibodies against the only things that could cure it.

When the fall of Assad came, unexpectedly swift and disorienting, it brought a moment of hope. But hope for what, precisely? For each community, it was a hope for the effortless realization of the Syria it had been carrying in its fantasies. The Sunni Arab majority hoped for the Syria that was, finally and legitimately, theirs. The religious minorities hoped for a Syria that would protect them, restore them, and treat them as equal victims of the Assad regime, irrespective of their actual sympathies at the time or now. When clashes and massacres struck the coastal mountains and Sweida province, those hopes curdled and were followed by calls for an autonomous or independent Alawite enclave along the coast, and for a Druze homeland in Sweida.

The Alawite and Druze diaspora, previously more subdued, galvanized rapidly, forming active lobbies in Western capitals alongside the Christian diaspora organizations that had long been calling for international protection against what they described as Islamist Arab Sunni rule.

The Kurds, for their part, hoped that the fall of Assad would finally open the door to formal autonomy in the areas they called Rojava—or Western Kurdistan. That project, however, encompassed not only Kurdish-majority areas but also territories home to Assyrian and Chaldean communities, as well as Arab towns and cities that had come under Kurdish control during the fight against the Islamic State. Those populations had tolerated Kurdish governance reluctantly while Assad remained a threat; with his removal, their reasons for acquiescence disappeared. The Kurdish political investment in Syria was, as always, conditional—a tactical position within a larger dream that Syria’s borders alone could never satisfy.

What all these projects shared was a foundational misreading of what had been lost. They were hopes for the reconstruction of something that, in the form imagined, had never actually existed.

And that is the deepest problem. When you believe the task is to reconstruct a lost reality, you can at least argue about how faithfully to reproduce it. But when the reality you are trying to reconstruct was always an illusion, the reconstruction project is doomed before it begins. It is not nostalgia for a place. It is nostalgia for a fantasy. And fantasies, however sincerely held, cannot serve as blueprints.

The actual challenge Syria faces—the one almost no community in the country or the diaspora has been willing to name—is not reconstruction but construction: the building of a shared reality among communities that have never truly negotiated what living together actually requires. That is a harder task, a longer one, and one for which the diaspora, as currently constituted, is almost entirely unequipped to undertake. Though in fairness, the country they left behind appears no more ready to undertake it.

Before anyone pushes for a particular project, whether it be autonomy, separatism, federalism, democracy, or Islamism, what is needed first is a different kind of conversation: an honest reckoning with who we are, how we came to be, and the geopolitical realities within which we all have to live. Only from that foundation can Syrians develop a clearer sense of the limits of the possible—and begin, at last, to work within them.

A peace deal between Lebanon and Israel is, unfortunately, not happening in the near future. Not because peace is irrational, but because the political conditions for peace do not exist. Israel is entering an election year. Lebanon’s political system is so divided between rival religious factions that the government struggles to function effectively. Hezbollah is still armed, and the Lebanese state is unwilling and unable to confront the central question of sovereignty. And without Hezbollah’s disarmament, there can be no real peace.

This is the hard truth Lebanon keeps avoiding: negotiations are the only path forward, but Lebanon is not yet capable of negotiating as a state.

On the Israeli side, Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu has little room to make concessions. Israel is heading toward elections in October 2026, and the northern front will be politically explosive. Any agreement that does not neutralize Hezbollah will be denounced by Netanyahu’s right-wing and far-right partners as surrender. For those constituencies, security is measured solely by the removal of Hezbollah’s military threat. In an election year, Netanyahu has no incentive to disappoint the camp that keeps him afloat politically.

However, Lebanon’s problem runs deeper. This is not a normal state debating an ordinary foreign policy question. Lebanon’s political system is divided along sectarian lines, with rival religious factions able to block major national decisions and prevent the state from acting cohesively. Hezbollah is not merely an armed group operating outside the state; it is the dominant force within much of Lebanon’s Shia political insiders.

Polling cited by Al-Monitor before Operation Epic Fury suggested Hezbollah enjoyed support from roughly 85 percent of Shia respondents, even as support among the broader Lebanese population remained below 10 percent. That does not amount to a national mandate. It points to something more dangerous: a major political constituency in Lebanon is tied to an armed organization whose strategic priorities are ultimately aligned with Iran rather than the Lebanese state itself.

No Lebanese government can sign a peace agreement with Israel while Hezbollah keeps its arsenal. Israel will not accept it. The United States will not underwrite it. And no serious treaty can coexist with an armed party able to start a war whenever Tehran’s regional calculations require it. U.S. Secretary of State Marco Rubio recently put the issue bluntly: a Lebanon-Israel peace deal may be achievable, but Hezbollah is the problem.

The Lebanese state knows this. It simply refuses to behave as if it does.

For decades, Lebanese officials have hidden behind sweeping statements void of any actual meaning: “national dialogue,” “defense strategy,” “consensus,” “resistance,” “Lebanon’s weakness,” “regional complexity.” These phrases don’t translate into viable policies. They are anesthetics meant to quell a suffering population. They have allowed the state to postpone the question of sovereignty indefinitely.

The government is indeed incapable of disarming Hezbollah by force. But incapacity doesn’t erase responsibility. The state’s failure is not only military but also moral and political. It has normalized the presence of an armed group backed by Iran operating above the authority of the state, while treating full state control over weapons and military force as an unrealistic goal rather than a basic requirement of sovereignty. Time and again, Lebanon’s leaders have allowed Hezbollah to pull the country into conflict, only to later praise the group for managing the crises it helped create.

The Lebanese Armed Forces still retain respect among many, but that trust has steadily eroded over time. Take May 7, 2008, when Hezbollah and its allies seized parts of Beirut by force and turned their weapons against fellow Lebanese citizens while the army stood by without intervening. The message was unmistakable. When challenged, Hezbollah, not the Lebanese state, held the real power over the use of force in the country.

That memory still governs Lebanon today. Every discussion of disarmament contains the ghost of another May 7th. This is why talk of state authority rings hollow. The Lebanese ultimately fear both Israel and Hezbollah.

This brings us to Nabih Berri, the speaker of the parliament and a popular Shia politician. Anyone counting on Berri to break with Hezbollah is delusional. Berri’s role is not to rescue the state from Hezbollah; it is to manage the interface between Hezbollah, the state, and the outside world. The recent dispute with President Joseph Aoun was revealing. Aoun said steps regarding negotiations had been coordinated with Berri and Prime Minister Nawaf Salam. Berri immediately contradicted him, saying the president’s remarks were inaccurate “to say the least,” particularly regarding the November 2024 arrangement and negotiations.

The sequence of events matters here. His contradiction occurred only after Berri received a call from Iran’s parliamentary speaker, Mohammad Bagher Qalibaf, with both sides stressing that ceasefire efforts must prioritize halting hostilities over other issues. When the Lebanese state inches toward a position Hezbollah dislikes, Berri becomes the barrier. He is not an alternative to Hezbollah; rather, he is an integral part of the same obstructionist architecture.

This is why the fantasy of Lebanese diplomacy without Hezbollah’s disarmament is dangerous. It assumes that Lebanon can negotiate peace while one faction retains the right to wage war. Far from diplomacy, that is fraud perpetrated at the national level.

And yet, despite all of this, negotiations remain the only path Lebanon can take. Not because Israel is benevolent or the United States is impartial. Not because peace would erase decades of violence, distrust, and political failure. It is the only path left because every alternative Lebanon has pursued has ended in destruction, paralysis, or collapse.

This is a broad, bitter lesson of the entire Arab-Israeli conflict. Every major Arab nation that confronted Israel eventually had to face the same fact: war could not by itself recover land, secure rights, or build a durable political future.

Even Gamal Abdel Nasser, a great icon known for his confrontational stance toward Israel, came to understand the limits of confrontation. This is precisely what Nasserist propagandists prefer to bury. After 1967, Nasser knew that talk alone could not reverse a military disaster. Recent debate around leaked recordings attributed to conversations between Nasser and Muammar Gaddafi revived this uncomfortable point: Nasser was not blind to the need for a political settlement if it could recover occupied Arab land and prevent further catastrophe. His rhetoric remained maximalist; his strategic mind was less romantic. Even Nasser understood that endless war was not a winning strategy.

Anwar Sadat of Egypt understood this even more clearly. War with Israel is not only war with Israel. It is, strategically, war with the United States. In 1973, Sadat learned that Israel’s military endurance was inseparable from American power. A critical Egyptian account of Sadat’s evolution quotes him saying that America had entered the war with its full weight and that he found himself facing America itself. Even more revealingly, the U.S. State Department’s historical record quotes Sadat telling Kissinger after the October War: “I am making this agreement with the United States, not with Israel.”

Sadat’s 1973 war was not a war of total liberation, but rather a war to move stagnant waters—Sadat himself said it. He knew Sinai could not be recovered by force. War created leverage; negotiations and only negotiations recovered the land. Egypt regained Sinai through a treaty, not through permanent confrontation. Jordan, too, secured its interests through negotiation.

The Arab-Israeli conflict offers no example of war restoring rights in a durable way. But it does offer many examples of war destroying societies, empowering security machines, radicalizing publics, and making external patrons more powerful. Lebanon should know this better than anyone.

The conclusion is bleak but unavoidable. No peace is possible while Hezbollah keeps its weapons. No state can exist while an externally controlled party can declare war without the permission of the Lebanese government. No negotiation can succeed while Nabih Berri and others function as custodians of Hezbollah’s veto. And no Lebanese recovery is possible while the state keeps pretending that sovereignty can be indefinitely postponed.

Lebanon needs a cold, hard reckoning. The country must move toward negotiations because the alternative is not dignity, but permanent decay: a border of ashes, a state without authority, a people without protection, and a future mortgaged to decisions made in Tehran.

Hold your horses, then. Peace is not near. But the path is straightforward. Lebanon must either become a state capable of negotiating—which means confronting Hezbollah’s arsenal—or remain an arena where others perpetually negotiate over its ruins.

In the last week of April 2026, two performances unfolded on opposite ends of the Mediterranean. In the Ghab Plain of rural Hama, Syrian security forces arrested Amjad Yusuf, the warrant officer who personally executed bound civilians at the edge of a pit in the Tadamon district of Damascus in April 2013, and who was filmed doing it. His sisters appeared on camera shortly afterward, defending him. He was poor, they said. He was of low rank. The real criminal was Assad. The videos—forty-one murders by his hand, recorded in his own voice, time-stamped—did not enter the frame.

Across Syria and its diaspora, different audiences are repeating a familiar, flawed framework in response—a collective “we” stripped of responsibility and an absent “other” made to carry the blame.

In the same week, a song called Dounana, or “Without Us”, released in early 2024 by the Berlin-based Syrian artist Siba Alkhiami, returned to virality across German social media. Its closing line, addressed to an unnamed “you,” declares: “Who would you be without us? You would not be without us.” The song catalogs injuries—uprooted, demolished, criminalized, falsified, slaughtered, demonized, colonized—without ever specifying their author. The “you” is structurally absent. So is any “we” that ever did anything but suffer.

Two stages, one week, bound together into a single ritual aimed at manufacturing innocence.

Read the lyrics of Dounana carefully, and a strange vocabulary surfaces. Every verb of agency is conjugated to “you”: you uprooted, demolished, criminalized, falsified, separated, slaughtered. Every “we” is a moral object: our roots, homes, existence, origins, loved ones, children. There is no “we” that acted. No “we” that aligned with Soviet patrons, embraced Ba’athist or jihadist ideologies, sustained sectarian violence, applauded autocrats, or exiled its own dissenters. The “we” of Dounana is innocent by construction.

The addressee is also a construction. Siba has described the song in interviews as indicting “white supremacists” and the West, and calling for “Global South” unity. But within the lyrics themselves, the “you” is never named. The song requires this absence. An interlocutor who could answer back would dissolve the ritual at the first verse. The Russians who bombed Aleppo, the Iranians who organized the militias, the Syrian officers who staffed the prisons—all are unavailable to the song’s grammar, because naming them would force the “we” to admit the proximity of the hands that did most of the killing. The “you” must remain abstract. The geography must remain global. Otherwise, the room gets too small.

Note also what produced the song. Dounana was co-written with Felix Spitta of Germany. Felix Spitta, often known as Monkyman, is a German musician, producer, and filmmaker based in Berlin. He is known for his work in downtempo/electronic music, his collaborations with Amselcom, and his work as part of the production duo Spittbrothers. The song was produced in Berlin, distributed through European indie infrastructure, and amplified by a public sphere that tolerates Arabic-language indictment of Western power.

Siba herself lives in Berlin because Damascus would not have her. The song is, in every material sense, a product of the entanglement it forecloses. It exists because the “you” it addresses shelters the “we” it performs.

The televised performance by Amjad’s sisters in Hama runs the same playbook in a tighter radius. They do not deny the videos exactly; they redirect them. He was a low-rank conscript. He was poor. The real criminal was Bashar Al-Assad and his top lieutenants. Each clause is a transfer of moral mass—out of Amjad, into an abstract, absent other. Assad is in Moscow. Moscow is indifferent to what is claimed in Hama. The transfer is therefore meaningless. Whatever guilt the family carries can be poured into the unanswerable void, and what remains in the room is a poor village boy, a victim of forces beyond his control.

The video evidence does not interrupt this. It cannot. The ritual does not run on evidence, the way the song, Dounana, does not run on history. Both run on the construction of an unanswerable other into whom guilt can be displaced, leaving behind a “we” purified by the displacement. In Berlin, the “you” is white supremacy; in Hama, it is the deposed dictator. In both cases, the addressee is chosen specifically because of its unavailability. Presence would dissolve the ritual.

What the sisters performed on camera is what the song performs on the stereo. Siba’s ritual extends across continents because her audience cannot puncture it. The sisters’ ritual contracts to a brother because their audience—Sunni neighbors with lists, journalists with footage, a transitional government building case files—would puncture anything wider.

The flat “we” travels in only one direction. It assembles at a distance and dissolves on contact with its claimed constituents. Siba can sing on behalf of a “we” that stretches from Damascus to Caracas because her Berlin audience will not produce a Yazidi woman to ask where her solidarity was when an Arab Islamist Sunni movement enslaved her grandmother and sister in Sinjar. No Palestinian from Tadamon will remind her of the fate of his brother, killed by Amjad Yusuf. No Kurd from Afrin will rise to ask about the Arab nationalist project that displaced him. No Druze from Suweida will interrupt to ask about the massacres of recent months.

The sisters in Hama cannot escape what their brother did because their audience is right there—neighbors, officials, journalists, all within reach. Any “we” they invoke has to survive that proximity, so they shrink it to something defensible: one brother, one village, one uniform. The closer the audience, the smaller the “we.”

That’s why the broad, innocent “we” only works at a distance. It depends on audiences far removed from the events in places where no one can challenge it. Back home, where people remember who did what, it falls apart.

Both cases are less about truth than positioning. Each is trying to secure standing within a system that rewards blame and excuses. Neither asks what comes after, nor how anything gets built.

Despite their radical tone, both gestures are ultimately conservative in that they aim to preserve a broken system. Real change would mean rejecting the framework that trades suffering for moral exemption—and refusing the idea that any community must defend its worst members as “ours.” Instead, both work within that system, asking for a better position inside it. Siba seeks recognition as a witness; the sisters seek leniency for their brother. Neither asks what it would take to build something different.

Grievance stops at the demand. It can expose, accuse, even disrupt—but it cannot build. Building requires admitting that what you inherit, and who you inherit it from, implicates you.

Durayd ibn al-Simma, the pre-Islamic poet, wrote a line about his tribe, Ghaziyyah, that has become proverbial: “I can only belong to Ghaziyyah, if she errs, I err with her, if she finds the right path, I will walk it with her.”

The line is usually read today as a confession of moral cowardice—I follow my tribe whether right or wrong. That reading misses what Durayd actually says. He does not say he will defend Ghaziyya when it errs. He says he will err with it. The grammar is fate-sharing, not justification. He cannot purchase private rectitude while his people are in error; his moral condition is not separable from theirs. He refuses the exit that says I am personally enlightened, my people are backward, therefore I am clean. He stays inside the implicated “we” because leaving it would be a lie about what he actually is.

The sisters in Hama want Durayd’s belonging without his implication—the warmth of the plural without its weight. What is missing in both performances, and what the modern Arab public sphere has largely lost the capacity to acknowledge, is the move that would complete Durayd: stay inside the “we,” and then atone for what the “we” did. The Yom Kippur liturgy and the Anglican confession both perform this move in the plural—we have sinned, we have betrayed, said by the entire congregation, including those who personally did none of these things. Membership in a community implicates one in the community’s sins, and the public acknowledgment of this implication is the precondition of any community that intends to outlast its worst chapters.

A line I have been mulling over for some time names the alternative with brutal economy: man yubarrir yukarrir, or, he who justifies, repeats. Justification paves the road to repetition, because every justification establishes that this kind of act, under conditions like these, is permissible, which means the next time conditions are even loosely like these, the act is pre-authorized. The Alawite defense of Amjad is not only about Amjad. It licenses every future Amjad. Siba’s indictment of an unanswerable West is not only about Gaza. It licenses every future displacement of Arab guilt onto a foreign address. Atonement breaks the cycle.

The representative this moment requires is not a speaker for grievance but a speaker for accountability. Someone willing to atone. The cleanest modern instance is Willy Brandt kneeling at the memorial of the Warsaw Ghetto Uprising in 1970—a German chancellor personally innocent of Nazi crimes, an actual anti-Nazi who had fled to Norway during the war, on his knees atoning on behalf of a people he belonged to. He demanded nothing of his addressee. It accomplished what no negotiation could.

Such figures are largely absent from Arab and Muslim public life. The available religious vocabularies emphasize private istighfar, the Islamic practice of seeking individual forgiveness, over communal confession. Authoritarian legacies trained generations to read concession as defeat. A young woman in Berlin blames “white supremacists” because the script for the harder address—to her own community, on behalf of her own community—barely exists in living Arab memory. She is improvising in the only register her culture left her.

This essay is not an attack on Siba or on Amjad’s sisters. It is aimed at the absent figures who could model a different approach and have not. It is a caution from within the implicated “we.”

Grievance politics did not protect the Alawite community; it made it usable, first by Assad, and likely by whoever comes next. And Berlin did not take Siba from Damascus; it gave her refuge from a regime that would have silenced her. Her platform exists because of institutions that do not exist in the region.

In a country that witnessed a long civil war, no community—Sunni, Alawite, Christian, Druze, Kurdish, Ismaili, none—can claim innocence, and all need to accept their role in history. In a country where identity is still defined by sectarian and ethnic belonging, we all become complicit in actions committed in the name of our communities, even if we did not participate, even if we reject the narrow belonging itself. This is the burden we carry. This is the true nature of our inheritance. There is no clean slate in the moral sphere.

The same week that saw Amjad Yusuf arrested in the Ghab Plain and Dounana return to virality across German social media saw something else, in Damascus: the opening of the first public trial of Assad-era officials. Atef Najib—the former head of Political Security in Daraa, the man under whose watch the teenage graffiti-writers were tortured into becoming the catalyst for the 2011 uprising—sat in the defendants’ cage at the Palace of Justice while families of victims filled the hall. This is what legal accountability looks like, and it is necessary. But trials punish individuals; they do not heal communities. A verdict against Najib will not produce a single Alawite voice speaking publicly on behalf of an Alawite community implicated in what Najib did. A conviction of Amjad will not produce a single Syrian artist with Siba’s platform turning her microphone toward the regime that drove her into exile, on behalf of those still inside. The institutions are beginning to do their part. The atoners must do theirs.

The window for this work is narrow. Late April 2026 is a hinge. Syria is still malleable, still re-forming, still capable of being shaped by the approach its public figures choose. Six months from now, the patterns will be set. The atoners who do not appear by autumn may not appear at all. This essay is a summons—not to the women on the cameras, who are speaking the only languages they were given, but to the figures not yet on screen and who could be: religious leaders, intellectuals, artists with standing, judges, journalists, the few across all communities who could break the hostage cycle by stepping into the role no one has rewarded them for stepping into. The market for manufactured innocence is enormous. The market for atonement does not yet exist.

Someone must make it. Someone must be first.

From the massacres of Alawites in the coastal mountains in March 2025, to the suicide bombing of Mar Elias Church in Damascus in June, to the massacres of Druze civilians in Sweida in mid-July, Syria has experienced one communal shock after another. In the northeast, clashes between the Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) and the central authorities helped push large-scale Kurdish autonomy toward its end, before American mediation yielded a January 30, 2026, integration deal. Then, in March 2026, the Christian town of Suqaylabiyah came under sectarian attack after what began as a local dispute. And in the months between those two Marches, Syrians also witnessed sporadic efforts to curb personal freedoms through administrative measures, including the recent restrictions on alcohol sales in Damascus. Small wonder, then, that so many observers now speak as though Syria is simply repeating the cycle of sectarian strife once again. But the plotline is far more complex this time.

Taken separately, each episode can be made to fit a familiar narrative: minorities under siege, Islamists ascendant, the state either complicit or absent, and Syria slipping toward a new sectarian order. That narrative contains elements of truth. But it also misses something essential. What is happening in Syria today is the violent and deeply unstable renegotiation of boundaries and relations between communities, regions, classes, and local power centers after the demise of an old order and in the absence of a credible new one.

This is what many observers, especially on social media and in sensationalist media coverage, continue to misunderstand. They seize on each atrocity or controversy as proof of a fixed communal or ideological logic. But Syria’s reality is more dangerous and more complicated than that. The country is going through a moment in which old fears, accumulated grievances, wartime dislocations, economic decline, shattered institutions, local vendettas, and external meddling are all interacting at once. In that environment, even minor disputes can rapidly acquire sectarian dimensions. The recent attack on Suqaylabiyah is a case in point: what began as an altercation between young men from different communities spiraled into mob violence targeting Christian homes, shops, and property, reigniting broader communal fears—even though its causes were local rather than ideological.

Any government would struggle under such conditions. Syria’s transitional authorities, however, carry additional burdens of their own making. They came into power with an Islamist pedigree, a thin technocratic capacity, and a persistent reluctance to incorporate too many outsiders into decision-making circles. That reluctance is understandable at one level: movements forged through war and underground discipline tend to fear dilution, infiltration, and loss of internal cohesion. But it is also politically costly. It narrows the regime’s social imagination, limits its competence, and leaves too many decisions in the hands of provincial officials, security actors, or ideological zealots operating with little effective oversight.

Transitional President Ahmed al-Sharaa’s recent visits to Berlin and London are genuine foreign policy achievements, and should be regarded as such. But international normalization is not ideological endorsement. Western governments are engaging a transitional authority they hope will stabilize Syria, not ratifying an Islamist project. More to the point, the hardest constraint on any such project is not diplomatic but strategic. Israel has already declared Syria’s new leadership a security threat, seized additional Syrian territory as a buffer zone, is demanding demilitarization south of Damascus, and is actively supporting Druze calls for autonomy—and potentially independence. Any Syrian leadership that imagines it can pursue an Islamist agenda along Israel’s border, after Israel’s experiences with Hezbollah and Hamas, is not reading the room. It is courting the kind of military and territorial consequences that would accelerate Syria’s fragmentation rather than consolidate its recovery.

This produces a familiar Syrian pattern. Formal authority is centralized enough to avoid accountability but decentralized enough to allow local excesses, improvisations, and ideological freelancing. Governors and local officials act on their own instincts, biases, or calculations. The center then tries, quietly and belatedly, to contain the fallout. That may look new to outside observers. It is not. It is deeply Syrian in the modern authoritarian sense. It is how factional rule reproduces itself.

That is why I argued from the early weeks after the fall of the Assad regime that al-Sharaa would end up borrowing more from the Assad playbook than many observers expected. Not because the two projects are identical, but because the governing dilemmas are similar and because factional leaderships in Syria tend to converge in method even when they differ in rhetoric. As I wrote earlier in The Hill, Syria’s history has a way of punishing those who think they can manipulate its social balances without being consumed by them.

Under Assad, the regime’s informal justification gradually hardened into a doctrine: the state, and more specifically the security state, existed to protect minorities from a Sunni threat. The Alawites were pushed to the forefront of the military and intelligence apparatus not simply because of communal solidarity, but because the regime required a loyal social base bound to its survival by fear. That arrangement also distorted Alawite communal life itself, upsetting internal balances among clans and local networks and turning the specter of Sunni revenge into a permanent instrument of regime consolidation.

Something structurally similar is now emerging from the other side.

Yes, Syria’s new rulers are Sunni Arabs, and Sunni Arabs are the country’s demographic majority. Yes, after decades of repression under Assad, many Sunnis have developed a heightened sense of shared grievance and identity, and deadly fear of the possibility of the return of minority rule. But that does not mean the current leadership represents “the Sunnis” in any straightforward sense. It does not. The men now governing Syria emerge from a hardline Islamist milieu that remains ideologically distinct from the much broader Sunni mainstream in the country.

Most Syrian Sunnis do not share the Salafi-Wahhabi worldview that shaped Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the movement that toppled the Assad regime and was long designated a terrorist organization before al-Sharaa recast it as a ruling political force. Their religiosity is more traditional, socially embedded, and often influenced by Sufi sensibilities. Others are socially liberal, politically pragmatic, or simply exhausted by ideology altogether. So the return of “majority rule” is, in fact, being mediated by a faction that represents a minority current within that majority. That is one of the central facts of the present moment, and it is one of the new authorities still seem reluctant to confront honestly.

The recent alcohol controversy in Damascus made that painfully clear. Authorities moved to limit alcohol sales in restaurants and bars, triggering protests from Syrians who saw the measure not merely as a lifestyle issue but as a test of public freedom and equal citizenship. This sparked a demonstration in the neighborhood of Bab Touma, attended by a diverse group of secular activists from all communal backgrounds, as well as extensive commentary on social media and an unexpected, focused international response given other developments in the region. The Governor of Damascus ended up walking back some of the more controversial elements.

What followed mattered even more. Islamists attempted to seize on this opportunity to demonstrate strength by calling for major protests throughout the country on March 27, demanding a total ban on alcohol sales. The turnout was meager: instead of the tens or hundreds of thousands expected, only a few hundred hardline protesters appeared across different locations. It was one of the clearest signs yet that a radical Islamist social agenda does not enjoy broad spontaneous support in Syria today—not among the country’s minorities, and not among the Sunni majority either.

The violence in Suqaylabiyah, unfolding in the same period, belongs to a different story—though it has been wrongly conscripted into the same narrative. What happened there was not an extension of the national discourse around alcohol and Islamist mobilization. It began as a local brawl between men from two neighboring towns with decades of accumulated tension, a fight that escalated through false rumors spread on WhatsApp claiming a man had been killed. What followed was a mob of two to three hundred, not an ideologically organized assault. Crucially, it was contained not by the state alone but by a robust local civil network whose leaders cleared the streets before the mob arrived, almost certainly preventing deaths. Government security forces responded with reasonable speed, given their resource constraints.

None of that fits the narrative of sectarian implosion that spread immediately on social media, where the town’s wartime history was weaponized to frame the entire event as proof of Sunni aggression against Christians. That framing was opportunistic and inaccurate. But it was also predictable—and the government must reckon with why it remains so easy to manufacture. The near-universal amnesty extended to regime-era figures, without explanation or a credible transitional justice framework, leaves a vacuum that bad-faith actors will continue to fill. Demanding that affected communities simply stay patient is not a policy. It is an invitation to the next provocation.

Taken together, these episodes—the failed Islamist mobilization, the local riot misread as sectarian design, and the governor’s retreat under public pressure—tell a more honest story than the dominant narrative allows. The country is not naturally aligning behind a project of moral authoritarianism. To be sure, if the government wanted to manufacture the appearance of mass support, it could likely put far larger crowds in the streets. But that would mean embracing the Assad model more openly: choreographed demonstrations, coercive legitimacy, and the state speaking through managed public theater. And that road leads to the destruction of whatever domestic, regional, and international credibility this transitional leadership still retains.

The current leaders of Syria enjoy wide support among the Sunni Arab majority, but that support is not an endorsement of their Islamist worldview. It never was, neither among Sunnis nor among the country’s other communities. What Syrians and the international and regional powers that recognized this transition actually conferred was something more demanding: a mandate to find common ground between Syria’s diverse communities, around which something resembling a shared modern identity might be built.

But that obligation does not rest solely on the leadership. Every community must understand it. Syria did not arrive at this point because a single sect failed. Every community carries its own unresolved crisis: habits of denial, dependence on patrons, authoritarian reflexes, fantasies of innocence, and a deep reluctance to examine how fear has shaped political behavior. To turn this moment into a morality play about Sunni excess is to continue the escapism that flourished under Assad—to evade responsibility, to treat factionalism as the permanent grammar of Syrian political life, and to hand extremists an influence far exceeding their actual numbers.

The real significance of this moment is larger and harsher. Syria is confronting itself—not as a slogan, or an imposed national mythology, but as a fractured human reality. Syrians are being forced to ask, perhaps for the first time without a regime scripting the answer, who they are as a people: a collection of communities bound by history, geography, and catastrophe into a state that has never quite decided what it wants to be.

That confrontation has not been and will not be comfortable. It will produce more crises, more distortions, and more temptations to retreat into communal myths. But the meager turnout at the Islamist protests, the cross-communal character of the Bab Touma demonstrations, and the speed with which the Damascus governor walked back his overreach—these are not nothing. They are signs that ordinary Syrians, across communities, are already pushing back against the scripts being written for them. Whether citizens rather than clients, communities rather than camps, a republic rather than an arrangement among frightened factions—that possibility is still alive.

Whether it survives will depend less on the current leadership’s intentions than on its willingness to be constrained: by law, public pressure, and the evidence of what Syrians actually want. Syria has squandered opportunities such as this before, usually by allowing the loudest and most ruthless voices to fill the vacuums that the exhausted and moderate leave behind.

After everything, the question is whether enough Syrians—across all communities—have been burned badly enough in the past to stop it from happening again.

Gaza has been a canvas for competing metaphors for decades. Depending on the observer, it is described as a beautiful Mediterranean enclave, an “open-air prison,” or—most controversially—the “world’s largest concentration camp.” This phrase has been used by sociologists, historians, and political activists to describe the Strip’s long-standing isolation. It was first applied to Gaza by Israeli historian Baruch Kimmerling in 2003, and the rhetoric intensified following the 2007 blockade.

But does Gaza actually meet the technical criteria of a concentration camp, or is the term being deployed as a rhetorical weapon rather than a descriptive fact?

To answer this, one must begin with the standard definition of the term. A concentration camp is “a place where large numbers of people are deliberately imprisoned or confined in a relatively small area, usually without a trial or individual indictment, under the authority of an executive or military order rather than a judicial process.” Central to this definition is the concept of total physical custody. In a camp, the relationship is binary: there is the “guard,” and there is the “inmate.”

The primary reason Gaza fails to meet this definition lies in its internal governance. In a concentration camp, the guard exercises direct, continuous physical control over every aspect of the inmate’s life. Gaza, however, had its own internal de facto government under Hamas. It maintained its own police force, civil service, and judicial system. Gaza’s residents were not “inmates” under the direct physical custody of the Israeli state; they were citizens of a territory governed by a local administration that exercised sovereign functions—collecting taxes, enforcing laws, and managing infrastructure—entirely independent of the blockading power.

Critics often point to the theory of “effective control” to bridge this gap. They argue that because Israel controlled Gaza’s airspace, maritime borders, and tax clearances, it remained an occupying power with total responsibility. This interpretation stretches the legal definition of occupation beyond its intended bounds. Under the Hague Conventions, occupation requires a state to exercise “actual authority” over a territory. Since the 2005 disengagement, Israel did not have the power to enforce municipal laws or manage the daily civil lives of Gazans. One cannot logically be a “camp guard” if one does not stand inside the camp, and one cannot be an “inmate” if one is governed and policed by one’s own national authorities.

A second, more common metaphor is that of the “open-air prison.” The logic here is that a prison does not require a guard in every cell; it only needs a warden who controls the exit. Yet this analogy collapses when one looks at a map. Gaza shares a border not only with Israel, but also with Egypt via the Rafah crossing.

Following Hamas’s takeover in 2007, Egypt also strictly regulated movement for its own national security reasons. If a “prison” has two different wardens from two different countries who do not coordinate their management, it ceases to be a prison and becomes a territory under a dual security blockade. To call Gaza a prison is to ignore Egyptian sovereignty and the fact that travel was, in fact, possible. While difficult, the process of registering for travel via Egypt for education or tourism reflected border bureaucracy, not penal incarceration. In an actual prison, one does not apply for a permit to take a summer vacation or pursue a degree abroad.

The “prison” and “camp” labels also ignore the existence of a functioning private sector and civil infrastructure. In a detention facility, the state provides rations, and inmates own no property. Yet according to the Palestine Monetary Authority’s 2018 report, Gaza had 96 bank branches serving roughly 850,000 accounts. It even had a stock exchange—the Palestine Exchange—where Gazan companies such as Paltel Telecommunications were traded. The Palestinian Central Bureau of Statistics documented that, despite severe constraints, Gaza’s private sector in 2019 included more than 70,000 registered businesses across manufacturing, services, and agriculture.

This economic activity coexisted with severe hardship. United Nations data from 2020 showed Gaza’s unemployment rate had reached 45 percent—among the highest in the world—with youth unemployment exceeding 60 percent. The World Bank reported that 65 percent of the population lived below the poverty line, and approximately 70 percent relied on humanitarian assistance from UNRWA for basic services. The WHO reported regular stockouts of essential medicines, and fishing zones were restricted to between three and six nautical miles rather than the 20 stipulated in the Oslo Accords. But while the blockade severely restricted the flow of goods, the internal distribution and management of resources remained in the hands of Gazan authorities and private actors. A warden provides for inmates; a state blockades an enemy territory. The latter is a tragic reality of war, but it is not a system of imprisonment. The existence of a market-based economy and independent social institutions—however constrained—is incompatible with the definition of a camp.

After October 7, many videos circulated on social media showing parts of Gaza that resembled a Mediterranean resort: pristine beaches, the sparkling restaurants along Al-Rasheed Street, and the upscale malls of the Rimal district. These images confused many observers, juxtaposing claims of a “concentration camp” or “open-air prison” with scenes that appeared almost Beverly Hills–like.

The explanation lies in Gaza’s internal class divide. The existence of luxury does not negate the blockade, but it does undermine the camp or prison metaphor. In real prisons or concentration camps, suffering is flattened and equalized; no one dines at a seaside bistro while others survive on rations.

In Gaza, however, these villas and high-end restaurants catered largely to the Hamas elite and their inner circle. According to multiple investigations, senior Hamas officials were collectively estimated to be worth between $1 and $5 billion, with wealth derived from taxes on tunnel smuggling, control of fuel and construction materials, and skimming from international aid. In 2014, it was widely documented that Hamas imposed a 25 percent tax on all goods entering through tunnels and controlled the distribution of building materials, creating vast opportunities for enrichment.

This internal stratification further undermines the prison narrative. The fact that a ruling class could live in luxury while simultaneously constructing a multi-billion-dollar underground tunnel network—estimated by Israeli military sources in 2021 to have cost roughly $1 billion and to have used 6,000 tons of concrete that could have built 86 schools or 19 hospitals, according to COGAT calculations—demonstrates that Hamas functioned as a sovereign actor making political and financial choices. If the supposed “inmates” are building the tunnels, running the police, and dining in luxury villas, then the prison metaphor ceases to describe reality and instead becomes a rhetorical mask. It obscures a complex, stratified society in which an internal government controlled resources and chose to prioritize military objectives over civilian welfare.

The question of whether Gaza was a “concentration camp” or an “open-air prison” carries profound implications for how responsibility, agency, and potential solutions to the Israeli-Palestinian conflict are understood.

When a problem is misdiagnosed, the proposed solutions are inevitably misguided. If Gaza were truly a concentration camp, the solution would be simple: open the gates, and the crisis would disappear. This framing ignores the reality that Gaza’s humanitarian catastrophe emerged from a complex interaction of external blockade, internal governance failures, resource allocation choices by Hamas, Egyptian security policy, and the broader regional conflict.

Accurate language also matters for accountability. The prison metaphor places all responsibility on Israel as the “warden,” overlooking Egyptian policy decisions and—more significantly—absolving Hamas of responsibility for governance, resource allocation, and the prioritization of military infrastructure over civilian needs. From 2010 to 2020, Hamas systematically diverted concrete, fuel, and other dual-use materials toward military tunnels rather than civilian reconstruction, even as housing, water systems, and the power grid deteriorated.

Precision is equally important for international law and humanitarian intervention. The Fourth Geneva Convention imposes specific obligations on occupying powers—obligations Israel has argued it did not bear after 2005 precisely because it no longer exercised the level of control that constitutes occupation. Whether one accepts this legal interpretation or not, conflating blockade with concentration camp obscures the actual legal frameworks governing state behavior and undermines efforts to alleviate civilian suffering.

Finally, rhetorical precision matters for the possibility of political solutions. Metaphors that strip away Palestinian agency—portraying Gazans solely as passive victims rather than a population living under a de facto government that made consequential choices—paradoxically disempower the very people they aim to defend. Any sustainable solution must account for internal Palestinian governance, not only external restrictions.

The suffering of Gaza’s civilian population is real and extensively documented. But understanding that suffering accurately—as the result of a blockade imposed by two states on a territory governed by a third political entity that made its own resource allocation decisions—is essential for crafting policies that might actually improve lives rather than merely score rhetorical points.

The goal should not be to win a war of metaphors, but to describe reality with enough precision to change it.

In much of the popular telling, modern Iranian history follows a simple arc. Iran had a democracy. In 1953, the CIA and British intelligence overthrew it by removing Prime Minister Mohammad Mosaddeq. The Shah returned, ruled as a Western-backed autocrat, and a quarter-century later the Islamic Republic emerged as the delayed consequence of that original sin.

This story is compelling. It offers moral clarity, a clear villain, and a straight line from foreign intervention to theocratic rule. But it is also incomplete. The habit of compressing this history into a morality tale—foreign intervention destroys democracy, which later returns as religious extremism—is emotionally satisfying but analytically false. Iran’s modern tragedy is not that its politics were hijacked once. It is that they never stabilized at all.

Iran did not move from democracy to theocracy because of a single covert operation. What unfolded between Mosaddeq’s rise in the early 1950s and Ayatollah Khomeini’s return in 1979 was a far longer process marked by weak institutions, unresolved political tensions, and repeated failures by Iran’s own elites—liberal, royalist, leftist, and clerical alike—to build a system resilient enough to endure crisis.

Understanding that history requires first understanding why Mosaddeq occupies such a central place in Iran’s political memory.

Mosaddeq came to office in 1951 through constitutional means, backed by a broad nationalist coalition demanding Iranian control over its oil. For many Iranians, he embodied dignity, legality, and independence. The Anglo-Iranian Oil Company was a represented foreign domination to many, and nationalization united liberals, professionals, parts of the clergy, and the urban middle class behind a shared cause. After his removal, Mosaddeq became something more than a politician: a symbol of a democratic path not taken, invoked by later generations across the political spectrum.

Mosaddeq governed a political system that was weak long before foreign intelligence services intervened. Parties were shallow, parliament was feckless, the monarchy retained significant constitutional power, and street mobilization often substituted for durable institutions. Britain’s response to oil nationalization—legal challenges, tanker interdictions, and diplomatic isolation—severely damaged Iran’s economy. Oil revenues collapsed, inflation rose, and the state struggled to pay its employees. Political crisis followed economic strain.

Under mounting pressure, Mosaddeq narrowed rather than broadened his coalition. He sought emergency powers, attempted to bring the armed forces under his direct authority, and dissolved parliament through a referendum marred by boycotts, intimidation, and implausible margins. By mid-1953, Iran no longer had a functioning legislature. A leader committed to constitutionalism was governing largely by decree.

Support fractured. Sections of the middle class drifted away. Senior military officers grew hostile. Clerical allies recoiled, worried about disorder and the growing influence of the communist Tudeh Party. Ayatollah Abul-Qasim Kashani, once a key partner in the nationalist movement, openly broke with Mosaddeq. These developments were not the product of foreign manipulation alone—they reflected a domestic political breakdown.

Foreign intelligence services did intervene. Britain and the United States authorized a covert effort to remove Mosaddeq, and that fact is not in dispute. What is often overstated is how decisive that intervention proved to be. The initial attempt failed. Mosaddeq rejected the Shah’s dismissal decree, arrested its couriers, and the Shah fled the country. Both Washington and London believed the operation had unraveled.

What followed succeeded not because foreigners controlled events, but because Iranians took charge. Large crowds filled the streets. Clerics mobilized openly. Military units switched sides. State authority shifted rapidly. Mosaddeq surrendered. Contemporary U.S. embassy and CIA cables describe the speed and scale of these developments as unexpected, driven less by foreign direction than by loyalty to the monarchy, fear of instability, and exhaustion with political deadlock.

Mosaddeq was a tragic figure, but not a mythic one. He devoted his life to constitutional politics, yet under strain, he weakened the very institutions meant to sustain it. His removal was shaped by foreign interference, yes, but it was accelerated by domestic divisions that had already hollowed out the system.

The return of Mohammad Reza Shah in 1953 did not immediately produce the authoritarian state later associated with the 1970s. The Shah came back cautious and constrained. For several years, Iran retained political parties, parliamentary life, and a degree of pluralism unusual in the region. This period contained genuine possibilities.

Those possibilities were gradually squandered.

Rather than restoring constitutional balance, the monarchy steadily centralized power, first in the name of stability and later out of ambition. Liberal forces failed to reconstruct durable organizations. The left fragmented and radicalized. Clerical networks, increasingly excluded from formal politics, expanded their influence through mosques, charities, and informal authority structures.

The system hardened without maturing.

The Shah’s White Revolution reshaped Iranian society. Literacy increased, infrastructure expanded, and women entered education and the workforce in unprecedented numbers. These changes were real and significant. But they were not matched by meaningful political representation. Parliament lost credibility, courts lacked independence, and dissent was managed by security services rather than processed through politics.

Modernization without representation breeds expectations it cannot satisfy. A younger, educated society encountered progress without voice and order without legitimacy. By the late 1970s, Iran had no trusted mechanism to negotiate conflict. When crisis came, it could only be resolved in the streets.

The Islamic Revolution did not overthrow a functioning democracy; it replaced a system that had lost the confidence of nearly every constituency. Liberals lacked organization, the left lacked trust, nationalists lacked unity, and the monarchy lacked credibility. Only the clergy possessed nationwide networks, disciplined leadership, and a moral language that resonated across classes.

They did not seize a stable order. They stepped into a vacuum.

From Mosaddeq to Khomeini, Iran’s trajectory was not a straight descent from democracy into dictatorship triggered by a single foreign plot. It was a prolonged failure to institutionalize governance, manage compromise, and ground legitimacy beyond personalities. Foreign interference mattered, and it left lasting damage. But it did not determine everything that followed. Domestic actors mattered more—and none succeeded in building a political system strong enough to endure repeated crises.

Reducing this history to the CIA or foreign interference may be emotionally satisfying, but it badly distorts and oversimplifies reality. External interference mattered, yet it did not erase Iranian agency or determine the outcome. What failed, again and again, were domestic institutions and political actors unable—or unwilling—to build a system capable of surviving pressure, defeat, and compromise. The Islamic Republic was not imposed from abroad; it emerged from a vacuum created at home. Treating foreign powers as the sole authors of Iran’s fate turns structural failure into conspiracy, and prevents any serious reckoning with how revolutions are actually born.

The Arab world remains one of the few regions where democracy has yet to take root. Latin America experienced its democratic wave, Eastern Europe dismantled its walls, and even Africa now counts more democracies than dictatorships. But from Casablanca to Basra, genuine political pluralism is still elusive.

The numbers are brutal. According to the Arab Barometer’s Wave VIII survey, faith in democracy has collapsed. In Iraq, support has dropped thirty-four points since 2012. In Tunisia, the so-called Arab Spring “success story,” it has fallen twenty-eight points. In Lebanon, twenty-six. Across the region, overwhelming majorities now agree their countries need “a leader who can bend the rules if necessary to get things done.” Eighty-eight percent of Iraqis say so. More than seventy percent of Tunisians and Lebanese agree.

This is not a cultural rejection of freedom. But it is a rejection of what passes for democracy in the Arab world. Citizens wanted dignity. What they got instead were hollow parliaments stuffed with cronies, ministries auctioned off to sectarian bosses, and economies so sclerotic that young people dream not of building startups but of landing government desk jobs that may never come.

As Ibrahim Elbadawi and Samir Makdisi demonstrated in their econometric study, there is something deeper here than modernization theory can explain. Even after controlling for education and income, a “negative and highly significant Arab dummy effect remains,” evidence of a stubborn democracy deficit. Wars that might spark transitions elsewhere only entrench tyrannies here. And rents, whether from oil, aid, or monopolies, rot institutions and buy silence. To paraphrase Larry Diamond: easy money corrodes governance, distorts accountability, and makes authoritarianism easier to sustain.

But the real betrayal is economic. For decades, Arab economies have been strangled by crony capitalism. Well-connected firms hoard credit and licenses while genuine entrepreneurs are locked out. Across the region, small and medium-sized enterprises—the backbone of any healthy economy—receive barely eight percent of bank loans. In wealthy countries, that figure is three times higher. The result is suffocation: a young man with an idea in Cairo or Baghdad must beg family for capital while the state lavishes subsidies on bloated monopolies.

The human toll of this failure is immense. Youth unemployment in the Arab world stands at nearly twenty-eight percent, the highest in the world. Female participation in the workforce is lower than anywhere else, under twenty percent. And sixty to eighty percent of formal jobs are still in the public sector, where citizens wait years for secure jobs that governments can no longer afford to provide. A pyramid scheme that cannot sustain itself forever.

So when Westerners ask, “Why don’t Arabs believe in democracy?” the answer is not that Arabs hate freedom. It is that freedom has never fed them. Democracy, as practiced here, has been an empty theater where elites squabble over scraps while the lights go out and air conditioning fails in 100-degree heat. If ballots only lead to bankruptcy, why would anyone choose them?

The Arab Barometer captures the result with painful clarity: citizens are turning back to alternatives they once tried to overthrow. Support for strongmen has surged. Many now prefer benevolent dictatorships that promise services without rights. In Jordan and Mauritania, majorities say they would accept Islamic law as the basis of governance even if it excluded elections. In Tunisia, youth who grew up after the Jasmine Revolution are now less supportive of democracy than their parents, who lived under dictatorship.

This is the cruel inversion of the Arab Spring. Freedom was demanded. Chaos followed. Now order is king.

Yet here lies the paradox: the same Arab world that has failed to democratize is bursting with young people who could power it forward. Half the region is under twenty-five. It is the youngest, most educated generation in Arab history. It is a generation that has scrolled TikTok, coded apps, and built small businesses against all odds. It is a generation that has heard the slogans of freedom and experienced the bitterness of betrayal.

If democracy is ever to mean more than a slogan, it must be tied to prosperity. And prosperity will not come from bloated states or generals in sunglasses. Unleashing entrepreneurs, dismantling monopolies, opening access to credit, and integrating markets is the only path forward that leads to success. The entrepreneurship policy brief puts it simply: entrepreneurship is a “pathway to inclusive prosperity,” the only viable approach to sustainable growth, innovation, and jobs. For every one percent rise in self-employment, unemployment falls by more than one percent over time.

But entrepreneurs today face a stacked deck. Starting a business in the Arab world can cost nearly a third of the average income per capita. In OECD countries, it costs just three percent. Crony capitalists with political ties monopolize contracts, cheap credit, and licenses. Banks prefer lending to governments and giant conglomerates. The financing gap for small and medium enterprises is estimated at $180 billion. A system that denies young people the ability to create and work is a system that teaches them despair.

The protests of 2011 were as much about jobs as about freedoms. So were the uprisings of 2018 that rocked Sudan, Algeria, and Lebanon. In both waves, young people demanded an end to corruption and unemployment. They were promised reforms, only to be swiftly betrayed.

RAND warned a decade ago that elections without institutions would collapse. It was right. Institutions cannot be built without citizens who can think freely and work freely. That is where civil society and entrepreneurship meet. That is also where the seeds of real democracy must be planted.

And this is where Ideas Beyond Borders has carved out a rare space of hope. RAND’s prescription was to invest in civil society and education. The entrepreneurship report called for freeing entrepreneurs to build inclusive prosperity. IBB is doing both. By translating books banned by censors, building media platforms that challenge dogma, and supporting young entrepreneurs, IBB is doing what authoritarian regimes fear most: creating citizens who are independent in both thought and livelihood.

Democracy will not arrive in the Arab world by parachute, by foreign lecture, or by the next military coup in the name of reform. It will come when citizens no longer need to beg for support, when their minds are free, their stomachs are full, and their hands can build, when dignity is not a promise on a poster but a paycheck earned honestly.

That is why many Arabs no longer believe in democracy as they have known it. And that is why the real task is not to mourn that disbelief, but to show through ideas, jobs, and opportunity that democracy can still deliver.

Until then, elections will remain largely performative. Yet beneath the surface, momentum for change continues to build—it only needs the right conditions to take root.

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This article was written by Muhi Al Ansari.

Ask the average Westerner about Iraq and you’ll get some version of the same image: ruined cities, armed militias, citizens cowering in fear. The implication is clear—Iraq is a failed state. Dangerous. Unlivable. Headlines, foreign policy briefings, and media narratives rarely reflect the reality on the ground and paint an outdated, flattened picture. And while Iraq still faces serious challenges, the country is also full of movement, creativity, and ambition. Yet these realities rarely make it past our borders, much less into the headlines. Iraq is far more complex—and far more hopeful—than the one the world thinks it knows. So why is our country’s image abroad so warped and disconnected from the lives we actually live?

Because we’ve been spoken for, or over, for more than two decades. The media has trapped an entire nation in a time capsule of war and chaos.

In 2024 alone, Iraq imported over $700 million worth of Japanese cars. Life here is full of motion. Full of color. People crowd Al-Mutanabbi Street until midnight, flipping through books, drinking tea, talking politics. Children go to school. Tourists visit ancient ruins in Ur and Nineveh. Our hospitals are functioning, our universities are publishing, and our cities are alive with art, music, and debate.

But those stories don’t fit the narrative.

Iraq’s post-2003 generation—the young people born after the fall of Saddam Hussein—have only known a country in transition. But they haven’t inherited defeatism. They’ve inherited ambition. And they’re reshaping the future in ways the world isn’t paying attention to.

Young Iraqis aren’t waiting for the government to save them. They’re launching startups, building creative agencies, opening cafés, forming film production companies, and staking out new careers in graphic design, copywriting, public relations, and business development. Nearly everyone I know in their twenties or thirties has a LinkedIn profile and is actively seeking opportunities to thrive, not just survive.

At the same time, civil society is growing. NGOs and grassroots organizations are more active than ever. Women are stepping into new public roles. Conversations around health, human rights, and law are entering mainstream discourse. Iraqi youth are also participating in a fragile but real democratic system—something rare in this region.

This new generation isn’t looking westward for identity. They’re looking inward and forward. They’re preserving Iraq’s architectural heritage—resisting the bland high-rises of global sameness in favor of domes and arches that reflect our cultural depth. They’re embracing digital currencies, building fintech platforms, and slowly moving Iraq into a cashless future.

They’re making room for big ideas—creative spaces, cultural hubs, coworking lofts—places where critical thinking and innovation can thrive. The private sector has given them the freedom to act. And they’re using it.

None of this erases the challenges we face. But it complicates the story. Western media has a moral responsibility here. Its coverage shapes international aid, investment, and foreign policy. It influences how Iraqis are treated abroad. It even affects how we see ourselves.

The dominant image of Iraq as a broken place, defined by violence and dysfunction, is not just inaccurate—it’s harmful. It erases the dignity and determination of millions of people building something better under difficult conditions.

Iraq today defies the narrative that has long defined it in the global imagination. It is not a war zone frozen in time, but a country undergoing uneven but undeniable change—driven by a generation that has only known life after dictatorship. The challenges are real, but so is the progress. If international media continues to rely on outdated tropes, it will miss the most important story unfolding here: Iraqis themselves are shaping their future. It’s time the coverage caught up.

In his thought-provoking talk, Faisal Saeed Al Mutar dives deep into a question that has troubled the world for decades: Why hasn’t traditional aid worked in the Middle East? After trillions spent and billions allocated to development, why are we still seeing brain drain, instability, and limited economic opportunity?

Faisal takes us behind the scenes of a radical new approach—one that reimagines aid as an investment rather than charity. Instead of bloated bureaucracies and ineffective middlemen, this model bets on the people themselves. By directly funding local entrepreneurs with market-driven ideas, the results have been nothing short of extraordinary.

Consider this: under the conventional system, a million dollars might create 50 jobs. With this new approach? 35,000 jobs—at a fraction of the cost. And it’s already changing lives. IBB’s Innovation Hub program models the success of this approach.

He shares the stories of people like Hakam Hesham, who launched a female-staffed taxi service in post-ISIS Mosul. Or Hani Hamade, a Syrian refugee in Turkey, who built a thriving language academy that no longer relies on aid—with just $3,000, he now employs 57 people.

The message is clear: trust people, reduce barriers, and real change happens.

Faisal’s vision isn’t just theory—it’s happening now, proving that with a bit of risk and a lot less red tape, we can turn small investments into something transformative.

Watch the Full Talk Here