Ismail - The Rule of Violence : Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria

Cambridge Middle East Studies has been established to publish books on the nineteenth- to twenty-first-century Middle East and North Africa. The series offers new and original interpretations of aspects of Middle Eastern societies and their histories. To achieve disciplinary diversity, books are solicited from authors writing in a wide range of fields including history, sociology, anthropology, political science and political economy. The emphasis is on producing books affording an original approach along theoretical and empirical lines. The series is intended for students and academics, but the more accessible and wide-ranging studies will also appeal to the interested general reader.

The Rule of Violence

Subjectivity, Memory and Government in Syria

Salwa Ismail

University of London

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Salwa Ismail 2018

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This book undertakes a quest to understand how Syrians experiences of political violence, both spectacular and routine, became formative of the Syrian polity over the decades of al-Asad rule (1970 onward). My interest in pursuing this quest formed during a period of fieldwork in Syria in 2005. The immediate political context, then, was marked by the suppression of the civil society movement that had emerged in 2000 and took organised expression in a number of discussion forums, in publications such as semi-independent cultural magazines and in artistic works. Although, at the time, the security services were arresting regime critics and silencing opponents, activists maintained hope and showed much personal courage in pressing for political change.

As an observer and participant in public cultural activities that took place in carefully circumscribed spaces of discussion and debate such as the al-Attasi Forum (closed in June 2005), the Journalists Syndicate Club and the Institut Franais du Proche Orient (IFPO), I both witnessed and experienced practices of silencing and of self-censorship. These practices drew the boundaries of what could and could not be said, establishing thresholds of the permissible in speech that were not to be crossed. Paradoxically, however, they gave rise to debate and disagreements among cultural activists and other engaged Syrians precisely about the contours of borders of public discourse and whether they should be observed. Yet many debates and discussions that inevitably veered towards the past, and proffered diagnostics of authoritarian rule to explain the countrys political impasse, closed off pathways of memory and of reading the present in light of past experiences of violence, especially extreme violence.

In the course of interviews and conversations, a puzzle arose as much from my interlocutors silences and ellipses as from their statements and declarations. In personal discussions with a number of politically engaged Syrians activists in the civil society movement, dissident writers and former political prisoners the authoritarian past and the dominance of the security services were commonly invoked themes. These themes prefaced the cultural and civil activists analysis of the constraints on their action and the challenges they faced in their struggle for political opening and accountability. The name of Hafez al-Asad was uttered to invoke, in an almost mythical sense, a figure of dictatorship that pervaded all aspects of political, social and cultural life and stunted political growth. The silence about the Hama violence in my interlocutors narratives of the not-too-distant political past was expressed in interrupted speech. In private or more intimate accounts of al-Asads dictatorship, the atrocities committed by the regime in Hama remained largely unspoken a seemingly absent sign and referent.