Syria: Islam, Solidarity, & the Europhone Left (2016)

Reproduced below is an excerpt from “The Start of Solidarity,” a chapter in Leila Shami & Robin Yassin-Qassab's book Burning Country: Syrians in Revolution and War. Hyperlinks have been added to contextualize some references.

‘Zooming out’ is one of the worst habits of an oversimplifying media. We see presidents, kings and warlords on our screens, alongside maps and flags, but seldom the people in all their diversity. In the Syrian case many commentators slipped into a generalising Islamophobia, one of ‘al-Qaida’ terrorists explaining all, and of all Sunni Islamists representing a monolithic enemy. Against the grain of reality, the phrase ‘jihadists armed and funded by the West’ came very easily to columnists’ pens. Little distinction was made between moderate Islamists and extreme jihadists, between those willing to accommodate democratic forms and those not, and ISIS was casually and routinely conflated with ‘the Syrian opposition’ – even when they were at war with each other. Instead of examining how deliberate political decisions by key actors brought sectarian identity to the fore, Orientalist opinion-formers portrayed sectarian conflict as fated and inevitable. In this way they became unwitting carriers of Assadist propaganda, and contributed to the manufacture of popular assumptions in the West concerning Syria – that a secular regime stands on one side and fanatical Islamist extremists on the other, with nothing in between.

Some commentators have been so fixated on the evils of Sunni Islamism that they reverse cause and effect as well as chronology to understand Assad’s repression as a defensive response to Islamist violence.¹ And journalists of the left and right frequently agonise over the potential fate of Alawis and Christians in a future Syria while ignoring the actual fate of the Sunni majority today. Syrian philosopher Sadik Jalal al-Azm bemoaned this narrow focus:

The Sunni majority of the country is getting a savage beating from the storm troops, militias, and scud missiles of a small militarized minority that monopolizes the power and wealth of the country. The cities that have been destroyed are Sunni cities, while minority communities have remained relatively safe and calm. The large majority of the more than 200,000 killed so far, of the wounded, of the permanently impaired, of the disappeared and vanished, of the imprisoned and tortured are Sunni. Most of the millions who have been exiled and internally displaced are Sunni.²

ISIS’s theatre of atrocity demonstrates an accurate understanding of Western media prejudices. The beheading of one American is headline news; the tens or hundreds killed daily by Assad’s war go unreported. The immolation of the Jordanian pilot Muaz al-Kasasbeh creates global outrage; the routine incineration of women and children by Assad’s barrel bombs doesn’t.

The Muslim world did show some solidarity, sometimes in useful ways. As individuals or in groups, Muslims donated a great deal to refugees and those suffering inside. Muslims came from around the world to deliver aid, to provide medical care and to fight in moderate, Syrian-led brigades.

The transnational jihadists who joined ISIS, on the other hand, those who impose their ideology on the Syrians under their sway, are of course taking advantage of Syrian suffering rather than showing solidarity. And the ever-ready angry crowds so easily mobilised and manipulated by the beneficiaries of a politics of offence have been resoundingly silent. Syrians reacted with tired cynicism to the manufactured furore over the Innocence of Muslims YouTube film. Protests over the obscure insult led to at least 50 deaths around the world. No such upheaval followed the destruction of countless Syrian mosques or the rape of countless Syrian Muslim women. A banner unfurled at one Friday protest read: ‘Is This the Same Prophet Who is Insulted Every Day in Syria?’

Still the fact remains. Syrians know that Muslims sent them money and weapons, and sometimes came to die for them. Much of the international left, on the other hand, slandered them as fools, barbarian jihadists or agents of the West.

The Kurds were a partial exception; they did enjoy a good deal of popular support in the West, particularly during the battle for Kobani in late 2014. Some anarchists and leftists even went to fight for the PYD against ISIS. Syrians – Kurds as well as Arabs – were bemused by this selective solidarity. Why, they asked, did the West (its warplanes more than its activists) care about the small town of Kobani but not the enormous city of Aleppo, where the liberated area was hard pressed by both ISIS and Assad? Some of the answer must lie in the poor media coverage of the revolution discussed here. All Western readers knew of Arab Aleppo was that it was ruled by ‘Islamists’ of some stripe or another; they knew nothing of the grassroots activists, the committees and councils or the extraordinary ‘ordinary’ men fighting to defend their communities. Even more important than the misreporting was the hard work done by well-established Kurdish communities in Europe, often linked up to trades unions and leftist parties. Turkish Kurds in particular have been very enthusiastic about PYD rule in Syria – understandably, given the scale of the national accomplishment – and have worked hard to relay the PYD’s leftist and egalitarian rhetoric to the West. Syrian Kurds, who have witnessed the gap between rhetoric and reality, tend to be much less enthusiastic. But most still welcome the attention and support.

Here it’s worth quoting the Syrian-Kurdish journalist and activist Shiar Nayo:

It was heartening to see all that international solidarity with the Syrian Kurds’ struggle in the wake of Daesh’s attacks on Kobani in 2014. But it was disappointing that this solidarity remained largely confined to that one particular battle, and that it was often expressed in uncritical, naïve ways. Many Syrian revolutionaries and rebels in other parts of the country had also been fighting Daesh and had also been experimenting with self-administration initiatives for four years. But their incredible efforts have gone largely ignored internationally, both by governments and by supposed leftists.

Even when the momentum was high around Kobani, international expressions of solidarity with Syria, especially in the West, did not grow more mature. Culturally, they often fell for simplistic Orientalist stereotypes spread by mainstream media about beautiful women fighters, barbaric Islamists and so on. Politically, they often failed to distinguish between the aspirations and rights of a group of people and a specific model that claims to embody these aspirations. Then there was all that hype around the PKK’s and PYD’s claims that they were changing into an ‘anarchist’ movement. The PKK is a highly ideological, nationalist party based on a strict military regime and blind loyalty. It still thrives on the apotheosis of the leader and the notion of one party leading state and society. It is not very different to so many leftist parties that have been riddled with these Stalinist-Leninist plagues. I would like to believe that the party is changing and is rethinking its ideology and practices. But until it really changes, I cannot understand how anyone can call it an anarchist movement, or even a legitimate representative of people’s struggle for freedom and justice.

So, while more solidarity is needed, it should be a critical solidarity – which should be distinguished from conditional solidarity. Critical solidarity means you support a struggle as a matter of principle (with real material support) but maintain an active, critical stance toward a particular version or force that claims to represent people’s aspirations and capitalises on them for political ends. Without such solidarity, it is likely that the promising self-administration experiment in the Kurdish areas of Syria will end with the strengthening of the PYD’s dominance and an increase in its oppressive practices against other Kurdish forces and activists in the name of protecting what has been achieved so far, along with a gradual squandering of these achievements in exchange for narrow political interests.³