Liberation Daze
Harper's Magazine | 2nd June 2025
Hope, fear, and uncertainty in postwar Syria. When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from Beirut, Syria was a mix of delightful chaos and state-imposed monotony. Christians, Druze, Alawis, and Jews were free to practice their faiths. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, alcohol was legal. Women not only drove cars, they worked in offices, shops, and restaurants. Some chose to wear headscarves, but many chose not to. At the same time, billboards reminded citizens of their duty to the Baath Party’s founding motto: unity, freedom, socialism. Children wore military-style uniforms at school, and informants spied on their neighbors. The image of Hafez al-Assad, who had been president for just over two years, was ubiquitous. When I visited Damascus some months later, protesters threw eggs at a…
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The Nation
The country’s new leader, Ahmed al-Shara, has donned a suit, trimmed his beard, and dropped his nom de guerre. But Syrians are still afraid. The messages started appearing on my phone as soon as I left Syria in mid-January. At…
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The Nation
If history is any guide, the latest Lebanese ceasefire may well have broken down by the time you read this. Whenever I hear the word “ceasefire” about Lebanon, I reach for my stopwatch. During the first phase of the civil…
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The New York Review of Books
After the Hezbollah leader Sheikh Hassan Nasrallah decided to draw Lebanon into the Israeli-Palestinian conflict, tit-for-tat bombings along the border with Israel overshadowed the country’s political and economic plight. Italo Calvino’s Invisible Cities describes the imaginary Maurilia, whose inhabitants invite…
