[Editor’s note: This article is the third in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.] In the experience of Syrians’ dispersal and our diaspora—and before it, during the revolution, with its territorial shifts from one region to another in Syria—we were offered a paradox and rare opportunity. This was for Syrian groups…

[Editor’s note: This article is the second in a series published in collaboration with Mada Masr to mark the tenth anniversary of the Egyptian revolution. It is also available in Arabic.] The embodied insight I gained the evening of Mubarak’s abdication in February 2011 is that absolute freedom corresponds to the feeling of being trapped in a crowd. This doubled-edged sentiment has allowed me to…

As the French President Emmanuel Macron strolled down a Beirut street named after the first French High Commissioner in Syria and Lebanon, Gen. Henri Gouraud, two months ago—one century almost to the day since the same Gouraud decreed the very creation of French-occupied “Greater Lebanon”—a petition calling for the return of French colonial rule in Lebanon gathered over 60,000 signatures. So rife did talk of…

They told me I had cancer in my tongue. Just like that. I don’t know how. Neither did they. I toured Aleppo’s hospitals one after another: al-Razi; Salloum; al-Jamia; al-Salam. After various high-tech tests were conducted with laryngoscopes, X-rays, and other equipment, they also found a second lump in my throat. “He who seeks the Lord will find him”: this seems to be the oncologist’s…

The mourning over the loss of Abd al-Basit Sarout, the larger-than-life Syrian opposition figure killed fighting Assad regime forces earlier this month, has encompassed at least three distinct forms of grief, in isolation or combined. First, there is the straightforward sorrow for the death of a 27-year-old killed fending off the advance of the regime in the countryside north of Hama, after eight years of…

When discussing the fable known as the “October War of Liberation,” the Syrian regime, in its rhetoric and propaganda, invariably leaves out a matter of utmost importance; namely that its “valiant army” (as it calls it) failed to liberate most of the Syrian territory occupied by Israel during the June 1967 War. After the October 1973 war, six villages inhabited by Syrians, located in the far…

In Aleppo in early 2012, at a discussion between opposition activists, the banners used in demonstrations in a small town called Kafranbel were the topic of conversation. Most of those present spoke of the “originality” of these banners, and their extraordinarily acerbic sarcasm and ridicule. One person joked their authors must be traffic police, referring to the profession long associated with the people of the…

[Editor’s note: The below article was produced as part of Al-Jumhuriya’s 2017 Fellowship for Young Writers. It was originally published in Arabic on 11 May, 2018.] Along the coast of a calm Syrian city, Tartous, lay several cafés; a handful I can recall from my childhood; and one of them was “Espero Café”. This single-story lot was not always a café; some elders said it…

[Editor’s note: The below article was produced as part of Al-Jumhuriya’s 2017 Fellowship for Young Writers. It was written by Wa’el Abd al-Hamid based on the testimony of a man named Shams al-Din. It was originally published in Arabic on 19 April, 2018.] (1) My name is Shams. I’m fifteen years old, and I really hate my name. I don’t know why my parents decided…

[Editor’s note: The below is an edited version of a talk given by the author at Berlin’s Thinking Together conference on 25 March 2018 (video available here). An Arabic version of the text was published by Al-Jumhuriya on 29 March 2018.] The day I left Syria in the fall of 2013, I published a short essay titled, ‘On Bidding Syria Farwell… Temporarily.’ I could not…