“Islamism can have many faces: it can be liberation theology, bourgeois democracy, dictatorship, or apocalyptic nihilism. It should not be assumed that democracy in the Middle East will resemble liberal Western democracy, which – following the full backing many Western states have given to Israel’s genocide in Gaza – has lost what little credibility it still had.”
Understandably, a transitional destroyed Syria, people’s concerns will be daily bread and butter issues.
“Seriously, whether Syria is Muslim or secular, I just want a country with electricity, food, reasonable prices, no corruption, unity, safety; a country I can actually be proud of and call home.”
Yet Leila Shami limits her argument to political arrangements and the political will of the different actors of the Syrian society; she does not conditions the unity and stability in Syria and the success of secularism or Islamism or their failure to the Syrian political economy: will the new regime and its backers provide a decent living conditions, employment, electricity, dignity …without huge inequality, corruption and rampant capitalism — some of the fundamental sources of social conflicts? The signs are there.
Let’s not forget how the Assad regime survived. It did not rely merely on the technology of violence; a political economy of bread, infrastructure and aliances were fundamental cores. Yet subsidised bread and other means of bying consent worn out at the end. Soon or later, the fate of the Egyptian regime will be decided because of similar factors.
As well as class the regional perspective is totally absent in Shami’s view. Syria is not even Iraq with its oil wealth, let alone the UAE or Qatar. Like in 2011 a few regional regimes will not tolerate a ‘democratic’ model of any shape, for it threatens their survival. Syria cannot be Singapore. Without a regional revolution there will not be a long term solution of emancipation and the new-and-old crap will weigh on the brains of people.
“Men make their own history, but they do not make it as they please; they do not make it under self-selected circumstances, but under circumstances existing already, given and transmitted from the past. The tradition of all dead generations weighs like a nightmare on the brains of the living. And just as they seem to be occupied with revolutionizing themselves and things, creating something that did not exist before, precisely in such epochs of revolutionary crisis they anxiously conjure up the spirits of the past to their service, borrowing from them names, battle slogans, and costumes in order to present this new scene in world history in time-honored disguise and borrowed language.”
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