By LINA SERGIE ATTAR
November 18, 2014
Tucked outside the walls of the old city of Aleppo, there is a hidden 800-year-old Ayyubid stone building called Madraset al-Firdaws, or the School of Paradise. The small architectural gem was the vision of Dayfa Khatoun, the Kurdish-Syrian niece of Saladin, who ruled Aleppo for seven years in the 13th century. She envisioned a modern complex dedicated to the study of Sufi Islam. Every element in the complex followed the ancient and strict “golden proportion,” from the overall floor plan to the smallest details on the ornamental columns with muqarnas capitals. The building with its 11 domes was designed—from concept to execution—to stand apart from the dozens of other religious monuments in Aleppo. It was built to be perfect.
I visited Madrasat al-Firdows in June 2011 during my last visit to Aleppo. At that time, the people of the city were still safe, far from the turmoil erupting across Syria. Protests raged outside Aleppo’s borders, but absolute stillness occupied the courtyard as it had for centuries.
It is no longer so. The cobblestoned streets of old Aleppo have been torn into piles of rubble. War has lodged itself in the heart of the city for over two years now, splitting it literally in half between rebel and regime forces. Now ISIL fighters encircle what remains of Free Syrian Army territory as the city’s fate hangs in the balance. Many of Aleppo’s ancient artifacts have been destroyed—burned, bombed, looted. The city that was once home to over four million people, is now ravaged by over two years of indiscriminate shelling and constant barrel bombs launched by the Assad regime that killed, injured, and displaced thousands of innocents along with their precious cultural heritage. Rebels on the front line retaliate with haphazard shells of their own that strike both army forces and civilian bystanders.
Miraculously, Madraset al-Firdows still stands intact although devastating loss surrounds it.
Loss permeates every Syrian family. Three and a half bloody years of conflict has taken over 200,000 lives and displaced millions. Loss is a word that defines Syria today.
In September, I watched Secretary of State John Kerry discuss “Heritage in Peril: Iraq and Syria” at the opening of the Assyria to Iberia at the Dawn of the Classical Age exhibition at the Metropolitan Museum of Art in New York City. The Egyptian Temple of Dendur was a grand background for Kerry as he lamented the recent loss of cultural heritage in Iraq and Syria. During his short speech, he mentioned ISIL seven times. He mentioned the Assad regime once, in passing. At times he seemed almost sincere in his sentiments, “And I must say, in the last 29 years that I served in the United States Senate, I went to Damascus a number of times and to Syria, and I cringe at what is happening now, and particularly to an extraordinary place like Aleppo.” I wondered if cringes from people in high places had the power to save my city.
After the diplomatic speeches, as the guests dispersed into the museum halls, three men began to play traditional Syrian songs on the stone platform. They faced the rows of now empty seats surrounded by a shallow moat, literally stranded on a stone island of displaced cultural heritage, playing to a nonexistent crowd, singing to no one. Like the forsaken people of Syria.
Inside Madraset al-Firdaws in Aleppo, Syria. | Courtesy of Lina Sergie Attar
That evening, while I listened from the sidelines, while the trio played their melancholy songs, while the special guests browsed ancient artifacts perfectly lit and displayed in pristine glass vitrines, the U.S.-led coalition against ISIL began to bomb my country.
Cynicism is the new fundamentalism of our age. The hypocrisy of the last three years has silenced many of my Syrian friends. We no longer ask why all Syrians don’t deserve to be protected—not just their cultural heritage and not only the minorities? Why are the international “right to protect” laws not used to protect people but rather political interests? Why do places like Kobani and Kassab capture the world’s outrage, measured in trending hashtags, while places like Homs and Aleppo are ignored? Why has the world ignored massacres in Daraa and Daraya; and Hama in 1982; and Qamishli in 2004 when the Assad regime killed over 30 Kurds and displaced thousands to refugee camps in the Kurdistan region of Iraq?
Four decades of a ruthless tyrannical dynasty is Syria’s real problem from hell: endless genocide with no end in sight. After fighting for freedom and dignity for over three and a half years, many Syrians have simply given up on hope for the future from sheer exhaustion and frustration. But not all of them. Some Syrians continue to fight for justice despite the crushing madness of Assad and ISIL.
Despite the utter despair, loss is only part of the story of Syria. Brave voices of truth and glimmers of hope continue to emerge from the darkest and most unlikely of places.
Attorney, human rights activist, and founder of the Syrian Centre for Media and Freedom of Expression, Mazen Darwish, penned an acceptance speech for the 2014 PEN Pinter award for International Writer of Courage from inside Adra prison in Damascus, where he has been detained since 2012 by the Assad regime. Salman Rushdie shared this year’s PEN Pinter Prize with Darwish because of his lifelong dedication to freedom of expression “in one of the most dangerous places in the world.” Darwish’s powerful letter says more about Syria, Islam, patriotism, and cultural heritage than any ISIL-crazed expert on cable news.
He begins with an apology to Rushdie, a bold and courageous confession. “Indeed, we were silently complicit because we dismissed the matter as if it was none of our concern. Today, we are paying dearly for this in our own blood. . . . Unfortunately, it has required all of this bloodshed to convince us that we are the ones who will pay the price for preventing those whose opinions differ from ours from expressing themselves, and for us to finally realize that we are digging our own graves when we respond to thought by apostatizing, and meeting opinions with violence.”
He expresses his vision for Syria’s future: “Morality, freedom and justice form the true essence and purpose of Islam, as they do for all other religions and human value systems. And so it is on this basis that we must reassess our heritage and redesign our culture, to ensure that religion is compatible with human rights, and that they work in partnership. In this way, a system of moral sanctuary can be established, one capable of protecting the Syrian people, keeping them stable and secure, ensuring their unity and diversity, and guaranteeing justice and equality among them.”
Finally he addresses Syrians who still hide behind their silence: “Some Syrians still think that only iron and fire can ensure their survival, and others fear democracy more than they hate dictatorship. I tell them to stop what they are doing, because unlike people, ideas cannot be killed.”
Darwish represents the forgotten Syrian voices who want nothing but liberty and dignity, even now, after loss, after despair. Darwish’s voice emerges from his dark prison cell to remind Syrians and the world, that hope lives on.
A wall covered with ideas and memories that cannot be killed faces my desk as I write. A map and photographs of old Aleppo. A card from Anthony Shadid’s memorial in 2012. A small collage by a Syrian refugee in America. A row of hand-painted, wooden pinhole cameras made for Syrian refugee children by students in Hong Kong. And many photographs of displaced Syrian kids and the drawings they made during the creative therapy workshops our organization, Karam Foundation, runs twice a year on the Syrian/Turkish border.
Syrian Americans who are dedicated to the humanitarian crisis in Syria tend to function as if it’s a post-conflict zone. We focus on projects that create hope instead of handouts. At Karam Foundation, our team supports projects that empower families rather than promote a refugee culture dependent on aid that comes and goes at the whim of international agencies. We would rather send seeds than food baskets, support small businesses, rebuild schools, hospitals, and infrastructure. As UNHCR Head of Communications Director, Melissa Fleming eloquently expressed in her recent TED talk: “We must help refugees thrive not just survive.”
Syrian organizations are constantly looking ahead, past the conflict and destruction, to salvage whatever has been left of our country while violence continues to tear away at Syrian flesh every day.
When we travel to the edge of Syria, the negative noise that buzzes around us in America disappears. The news, analysis, and chatter stops when we work in the refugee school. Somehow, loss is more bearable when you are close. Our work opens a sliver of a world of possibilities to children who have just a gleam of hope left.
This week we embarked on our fourth mission in 18 months. It is an innovative leadership program focused on technology and entrepreneurial workshops for Syrian refugee teens. The Karam Leadership Program was inspired last summer by a group of Syrian high school girls who demanded we help them build a future for themselves. They don’t expect to be forsaken forever; they plan to seize opportunities wherever they can find them. These kids who have lost everything will be the next leaders of Syria whether the world is prepared for their engagement or not.
We no longer ask why all Syrians don’t deserve to be protected—not just their cultural heritage and not only the minorities?
People jaded by despair often ask us: “What can you change by working with Syrian refugee kids? Your work is just a drop in the bucket. It won’t make a difference.” Maybe it will change nothing at all for Syria’s present. Nothing for Syria’s past. But the future? Our eyes are on it. And so are the kids’.
Syrians are tired of pundits and politicians telling us who we are and how we are destined to kill each other because of our diverse sects and “violent” religion. We are tired of being told what is happening to our country, and why. We are tired that ISIL dominates the international media while Assad’s planes drops barrel bombs every day with impunity.
History is long. No people in the world knows this fact better than the Syrians. Our memories, however, are short. We forget and we forgive. Even after being forsaken by the world, we still try to relate to you. To tell you the the truth about Syria: in a book of names of the dead; in the hundreds of YouTube videos that are uploaded every single day by moderate Syrians you claim don’t exist; in Kafranbel’s unrelenting banners and cartoons raised every Friday without fear of Assad’s bombs, ISIL’s beheadings, or the U.S.-led coalition’s drones.
Syrians are no longer a people of the past or the present. They are a people in limbo, waiting to emerge from of their country’s blood and ashes, from of the world’s hypocrisy, from barbaric extremism and ruthless tyranny.
Artist and journalist Molly Crabapple recently described this past summer as one full of monsters, “The world is connected now. Where it breaks, we all break. But it is our world, to love as it burns around us.” Syrians seem destined to face many seasons of monsters: monsters we created, monsters we tolerated, monsters we fed to kill other monsters, and monsters hiding in the shadows yet unknown. All of us face the greatest monster that lives in our collective minds: fear.
People decide to combat this fear in different ways. The Pentagon has named the war against ISIL, apparently the greatest international fear (other than Ebola, of course): Operation Inherent Resolve. It’s a laughable name that deserved its sarcastic reception on social media. If only people knew what those two words really meant.
Inherent resolve does not look like a drone or a barrel bomb or a beheading. It does not look like a bloodied sword or a black flag raised against the will of the people. Inherent resolve is in the words of a man trapped in prison because of his unwavering belief in human rights for all Syrians. Inherent resolve is in the proud yet heartbreaking words of refugee teenager Sabah from Aleppo, who insisted on speaking to us in English while we spoke Arabic. She articulated her thoughts clearly, though tears streamed down her round cheeks, “I left my city like a white angel. It was covered in snow. I want to go back. I want to be something.”
There is no inherent resolve but the Syrian people’s will to live.
Culture is not gazing at antiquities and feeling a constructed nostalgia with a distant past. This is the lesson that Syrians, the people of history and heritage, have learned in the most violent way. During turbulent times in history, when everything we know is falling apart and our collective past is being erased in front of our eyes, culture transcends its definition. It calls for creating something that was never there before. To imagine a place so perfect it was called paradise. Then build it.
Syrians face a world far from perfection or paradise — a world with no respect for the past and no consideration for the present. We must become like our ancestor Dayfa Khatoun: visionaries for the future. That is where the next evolution of our culture awaits — in ideas and in people. It’s the people’s music, art, architecture, and innovation that continues to thrive under the bombs.
This culture flows through the people wherever they are—through their history and memory—to live, build, create, sing, and tell their own stories and truth. It’s our world to love even as it burns and our inherent resolve to live. Because as Mazen Darwish said, “Ideas can’t be killed.”
Lina Sergie Attar is a Syrian American architect and writer. She is president of Karam Foundation. Follow her on twitter @amalhanano.
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