The sociologist and intellectual Shkëlzen Gashi, author of “Massacres in Kosovo 1998–1999”, has long been aware of the price to be paid for challenging the dominant narrative of those in power. 

According to the Special Prosecutor’s Office of Kosovo, his offence is “distorting the truth about the Kosovo War of Liberation”. Gashi, however, believes that the reason for the persecution is that he has written “the first book on this subject that avoids hate speech and addresses all victims on all sides, regardless of their ethnicity, religion or political ideology”. 

Gashi’s book lists names, numbers and locations, totalling 10,333 bodies across 83 massacres, arranged in chronological order. “In total I counted 105, but there are 22 about which nothing is known,” he says as he turns the pages featuring photographs of piles of bodies, funerals and mass graves, “and the most significant thing is that, for the majority of these killings, no one has been convicted. 90% of the massacres I recount in the book end with this sentence: to date, no one has been tried or convicted for these crimes.” 

Regarding the identity of the victims, he explains that “90% are Albanians killed by Serbian police, military or paramilitaries. Crimes committed by Albanians account for only 10%; they took place after the war, as acts of unorganised revenge, and were not carried out by Albanian military or police.”

Gashi dared to break the taboo surrounding the war crimes committed by Kosovo Albanians against Serbian communities; at the same time, he honours the memory of other ethnic and religious groups—Roma, Ashkali or Catholics—who have been marginalised from the official narrative and are difficult for both Serbian and Albanian nationalism to come to terms with.

The Albanian writer and dissident Fatos Lubonja has written a scathing article in which he argues that “this lynching speaks volumes about the kind of state that is in danger of being built in Kosovo (…) History teaches us that tragedy, in the form of war or dictatorship, begins when the parties identify with the truth and seek to impose it on everyone by any means”. 

For their part, representatives of the veterans’ associations of the Kosovo Liberation Army (UCK), the guerrilla group that fought the Serbs, are calling for “a law to be enacted to protect the history of the UCK, and for anyone wishing to write on the subject to obtain evidence from the relevant authorities”. Or, in other words, from those who do not question their version of events. 

“Peacebuilding also involves establishing the truth and creating shared narratives about what happened, as well as reconciliation and letting go. In Kosovo, we haven’t had that, and it’s a serious problem. The Albanian and Serbian communities continue to live within their own constructions of reality, so there are competing narratives about the past,” laments Ramadan Ilazi, head of research at the Kosovar Centre for Security Studies.

Whilst this was happening in Pristina, thousands of kilometres away, in a cell at The Hague prison, Hasim Thaci, the former leader of the UCK and the West’s main ally in NATO’s bombing campaign against Serbia, awaits sentencing following the trial that concluded last February. 

The Prosecution at the Special Court for Kosovo is seeking 45 years’ imprisonment for Thaci and three other guerrilla commanders for war crimes, crimes against humanity, kidnapping, torture, cruel treatment of prisoners and murder in 102 cases. 

Whatever the jury’s verdict, which is expected by the end of July 2026 it will have a major impact on Kosovo’s politics: “If he is convicted, it will have consequences for the UCK and would give Serbia a weapon to use against Kosovo and oppose its independence. If they are found not guilty, I believe it would have a major impact on domestic politics, because they would return as heroes,” explains analyst Emir Abrashi. 

Disinformation and Hybrid Warfare

On 24 April, a court in Pristina found three Kosovo Serbs guilty of terrorism and “serious acts against the constitutional order and security of Kosovo” for their involvement in an attack carried out by a Serbian-backed group of armed men in the Kosovo village of Banjska in September 2023, which resulted in the death of a Kosovo police officer.

According to the judge’s verdict, this was a “well-trained” group that “in an organised manner, entered the Republic of Kosovo illegally from the Republic of Serbia with dozens of vehicles, some armoured”. “The aim was to destabilise and destroy the basic political, constitutional, economic, and social structures of the Republic of Kosovo, through a well-organised plan. They attempted to secede parts of the territory in northern Kosovo, which have a majority Serbian population, and join them with Serbia”, the judge argued. 

Furthermore, it claims that the attackers were trained at a military camp in Serbia, and that Serbia provided all the military and logistical infrastructure needed to carry out the attack, in which up to 44 people are implicated. According to a journalistic investigation by BIRN, the grenade launchers seized by the Kosovar police had passed through Serbian state maintenance centres; and the ammunition used by the attackers matches that manufactured in 2022 by a Serbian state arms producer. 

“Serbia continues to harbour hegemonic ambitions over Kosovo,” says Arben Fetoshi, a professor at the University of Pristina and director of the Octopus Institute for Hybrid Warfare Studies, “but it is waiting for a favourable geopolitical context to reclaim Kosovo. Right now they cannot invade Kosovo, which is why they are resorting to hybrid warfare: disinformation, propaganda and acts of aggression to destabilise Kosovo as an independent country.”

“In the months leading up to the attack in September 2023, we detected a large amount of disinformation originating from Serbia and focused on northern Kosovo,” confirms Fitim Gashi, executive director of SBunker, a media organisation dedicated to monitoring and combating disinformation in Kosovo, “and the main argument behind all that disinformation is that the Kosovo government wants to expel the Serbs. The message conveyed by these campaigns, many orchestrated by the Serbian government, is that Serbs are not safe in Kosovo and must take action to defend themselves.” 

According to Ilazi, this is a misguided view of the nature of Kosovo’s political system. “Kosovo wasn’t designed to be a state of a single ethnic group,” he argues, “but I think social media is amplifying these kinds of messages that seek to perpetuate this sense of permanent conflict because certain politicians stand to gain from it. You can win elections by selling dreams or selling nightmares, and I think politics has a lot to do with maintaining this atmosphere of fear and hatred.”

To Question the Narrative is to Question the Elites 

Jeton Neziraj has devoted much of his literary work and his role as a public intellectual to the very opposite: to breaking down taboos, bringing people of different backgrounds together, and telling stories that overcome fear and hatred. This playwright knows well the feeling of being the one who challenges the prejudices of the majority and the demands of the powerful. 

He was one of the promoters of POLIP, the first literary festival to bring together Serbian and Albanian authors. Furthermore, his plays explore the most uncomfortable aspects and blind spots of his country’s culture, politics and society: corruption, the LGBT community, the role of guerrilla veterans, relations with Europe and post-war reconciliation. 

For his plays, he has been branded ‘unpatriotic’, ‘Yugonostalgic’ and a ‘traitor to national interests’. His latest play is “Under the Shade of a Tree I Sat and Wept”, a co-production with a South African theatre company exploring forgiveness between communities.

“I don’t know if I’ve been very stupid or very brave,” says Neziraj as he looks back on all the times his words have proved controversial or divisive. “But I believe that is the role of an artist, to be critical. And I think it’s been useful. I believe there is now more freedom of expression in Kosovo than there was fifteen years ago. There are still problems, of course, but I think that now we wouldn’t have to call the police at a theatre premiere because there are people protesting outside, as happened to us on one occasion, or because veterans wanted to boycott the play which, allegedly, defamed the UCK.” 

It is precisely this problem with veterans that has placed Gashi at the centre of the storm in recent weeks. Gashi, like Neziraj, knew that questioning the heroic narrative of the war was ultimately tantamount to questioning the system of power that has governed the country ever since. 

The former guerrilla leaders and affiliated organisations, explains the sociologist, took control of all spheres of public life: “The university, the judiciary, television, the administration, the political parties and the media are under the control of this so-called elite that has ruled Kosovo for two decades.” In these circumstances, “the UCK has manipulated the war and its memory to stay in power. Since they supposedly liberated the country, they claim the right to rule it and justify their corruption through terror”.

In 2020, Gashi received threats and lost his job as an adviser to President Kurti for stating on television that “some senior officials in the UCK committed war crimes and should be punished for them”. The focus of his historiographical work centres on civilian victims and on the peaceful resistance against Serbian oppression, which, in his view, has been overlooked by official historians intent on highlighting the role of the guerrillas. 

“My aim with this book was to clarify what had happened in each of the massacres. A book like this should be written about every single violation of humanitarian law that took place during the war. First we must know exactly what happened, then there must be reparations, and it is very important that the history textbooks used in schools are revised.” 

The Views of Veterans

Gazmend Syla joined the UCK at the age of 16 and today, at 45, he is the vice-president of the National Veterans’ Association, an organisation with branches in virtually every municipality in the country. Syla speaks with pride of the sacrifices made by his comrades, which, in his view, have not been sufficiently recognised by his compatriots.

We are at the organisation’s headquarters in Peja, one of the main guerrilla strongholds during the conflict, and the walls are covered with flags, emblems and photographs of the martyrs. “Nobody likes war. But you have to go if someone wants to kill you,” he explains after recounting the exploits of some of the “3,000 martyrs” recognised by the organisation.

Syla explains that the organisation’s mission is, at its core, like that of an NGO: “We help veterans when they have a need and mediate with the government to convey their demands.” And what about its influence in politics? “We don’t have a party of our own, but we do have relations with many different parties,” he replies. 

Asked about the trial in The Hague against Thaci and other guerrilla leaders, Syla replies indignantly: it is a set-up against innocent men, the witnesses have been bribed to testify against the UCK and it all boils down, in essence, to “a political issue”. 

The veterans’ association has organised mass demonstrations in Pristina, Tirana and The Hague to demand the acquittal of the accused. He does not wish to conclude the matter without pointing the finger at Western nations: “We fought alongside the United States, the United Kingdom and Germany. They helped create the UCK, fought with us and supplied us with weapons. If we are guilty, then NATO is too.”

Syla is unwavering in his defence of the UCK’s political and military role in Kosovo’s independence, and regards the guerrilla movement as one of the pillars of national life. “We are free now and my children go to school,” he explains, “before, in Yugoslavia, we had nothing and the police and the military would beat us for speaking our own language. We had to fight to be free, and now we are doing well. Perhaps we’re not like Switzerland or Spain, but this is our country and we’re happy here.” 

However, his view on relations with Serbia and the Serbs of Kosovo is not what one might expect from a former guerrilla fighter. “The Serbs are citizens of Kosovo just like anyone else. They’re not to blame. They are my neighbours and I get on with them just fine. Their freedoms and political rights are recognised by the Constitution, and that is how it should be.” 

Syla is highly critical of Prime Minister Albin Kurti’s attempts to exclude Lista Sprska, the main Serbian political party in Kosovo, from the elections or to outlaw it: “They should be left in peace.” 

“The things I think and am telling you now, I can’t say them at meetings with the veterans,” Syla laments, sadly, “there, they only want strong, more aggressive rhetoric. And it’s a shame.”

The post To Question Memory is to Question Power: The Narrative of Violence is Shaking up Political Life in Kosovo appeared first on Untold.

The building does not just display history; it selects which histories can remain visible, and which must be softened, abstracted, or forgotten.

This is where the stakes emerge. The museum’s beauty carries political work: it naturalizes a version of the country in which conflict, inequality, and rupture are treated as noise rather than memory. By monumentalizing continuity, the institution implies consensus. By designing awe, it designs obedience. The danger is not that the museum tells a story—every museum does—but that it presents its story as the only one with the right to fill space.

The Grand Egyptian Museum is both architecture and argument. Its material language, spatial choreography, and territorial placement operate like a voice: articulating what the state wants to be believed about the past, and what it hopes the public will no longer remember about the present.

Architecture and the Performance of Sovereignty

The Grand Egyptian Museum acknowledges that architecture is a performance of authority, a stage on which the state rehearses its preferred version of Egypt. Its size, symmetry, and alignment with the desert plateau are not only aesthetic performances; they are choices that speak in the state’s voice. Through these gestures, the structure suggests that the nation is continuous, cohesive, and immune to rupture. What appears to be a museum of the past is, in practice, a projection of the present—a carefully built argument about who owns history and who is permitted to stand inside it.

Official discourse reinforces this message. The museum is presented as a “national gift to the world” and a testament to an eternal civilizational identity, as though a single architectural form could gather every fragment of Egypt into one unbroken narrative. The effect is deliberate: to make political discontinuity feel like historical continuity; to transform instability into destiny. In this framework, the museum does not claim legitimacy; it manufactures it. The visitor is invited to marvel not only at antiquity, but at the modern state’s ability to summon antiquity as proof of its right to rule.

Inside, form becomes instruction. The procession from forecourt to atrium to monumental staircase guides visitors through a spatial lesson in belonging. Awe is not incidental—it is engineered. By directing the gaze upward, outward, and forward, the museum implies that the state is both heir to the ancient past and guarantor of the national future. The body learns by moving. The eye learns by being guided. Authority is absorbed not as argument but as atmosphere.

This is where the strings attached become visible. The question is not whether the museum is beautiful; it is what this beauty is doing. Architecture performs sovereignty not by describing power, but by making it feel natural, inevitable—like the only possible order. In the Grand Egyptian Museum, design becomes a form of speech. The building does not say the state is permanent; it teaches permanence. And in that lesson, certain histories—revolutionary, contested, or inconvenient—must be quiet enough to fade beneath the alabaster light.

Site, Form, and Design

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not sit neutrally on the edge of Cairo; it occupies the city like a statement. Its site, drawn between the density of the urban plain and the rising desert plateau, stages a threshold where the state can curate what Egypt looks like before one even enters the building. The approach—highways, forecourts, controlled access points—prepares the visitor to see the museum not as a public institution but as a destination that has already decided how it should be seen.

The building’s triangulated geometry, derived from the visual lines to the Giza pyramids, is more than an architectural concept; it is a strategy of affiliation. By joining itself to the horizon of antiquity, the museum anchors the present regime to the authority of the ancient past. Material choices reinforce the logic: alabaster, historically used in temples and tombs, glows at dawn and dusk in a way that suggests reverence, authenticity, and inevitability. It is a calculated softness—an aesthetic of welcome that conceals the precision of control behind it.

Inside, the museum’s interior volumes are organized as if they were a landscape of ascent. Wide halls, controlled perspectives, and the long pull of the monumental staircase train the body to read space as progress. The building is not merely walked; it is climbed, ascended, and internalized. Architecture becomes choreography, and choreography becomes instruction. Even the generous sightlines toward the pyramids are not simply vistas; they are confirmations: this is where the story comes from, and this is where the state claims the right to continue it.

At this scale, design produces a political effect. The museum does not demand belief; it designs the conditions under which belief becomes the easiest response. It organizes the city’s edge into a controlled frontier, turning territory into narrative and access into agreement. The message embedded in the site is clear: Egypt can be seen from here—but only in the way the state prefers it to be seen.

Materiality, Light, and the Aesthetic of the Sublime State

Light does a particular kind of political work in the Grand Egyptian Museum. The alabaster façade, glowing at dawn and radiant from within at night, softens the building’s edges just enough to make authority feel gentle. It produces an atmosphere of invitation, but one in which the terms of entry are already decided. Transparency is suggested, not granted; openness is performed, not lived. What looks like light is also a kind of veil.

Inside, illumination becomes a form of direction. Daylight enters through triangulated skylights and alabaster fins that scatter brightness across statues and vitrines, creating a visual field where artifacts appear suspended in reverence. The visitor is not simply observing objects; they are being positioned in relation to them. Light gathers the eye, concentrates it, tutors it. The museum does not tell the visitor what to think—its spatial glow teaches them how to see.

This aesthetic is not accidental. By producing awe, the museum produces agreement. The softness of the alabaster, the slow bloom of light across stone surfaces, the calibrated passage from shadow to radiance—they are emotional cues that smooth over rupture. The technique is subtle: instead of commanding, it persuades; instead of asserting power, it normalizes it. Authority arrives not as an order, but as ambience.

What emerges is a choreography of perception. Light does not simply reveal the architecture; it completes its argument. It ensures that the emotional register of the museum—wonder, pride, belonging—leans toward acceptance rather than interruption. And in that emotional current, alternative narratives lose volume. Under the alabaster glow, disagreement dims, critique quiets, and the idea of a single, unbroken national story becomes easier to believe.

Spatial Choreography and State Pedagogy

The Grand Egyptian Museum is not only a sequence of rooms; it is a sequence of lessons. The spatial journey—from the forecourt to the atrium, to the monumental staircase, to the galleries, and finally to the terrace facing the pyramids—produces a controlled progression in which movement becomes meaning. Each transition feels natural, but it is choreographed with intent. The visitor is ushered from anticipation to reverence to confirmation, as if the architecture were guiding thought through the body rather than through language.

The forecourt acts like a threshold of discipline. It separates the turbulence of Cairo from the curated calm of the museum, signaling that one is crossing from the city’s contested present into a state-managed version of the past. The atrium, dominated by monumental figures, shifts the scale of the body: the visitor becomes smaller, and the state—architecturally speaking—becomes larger. The monumental staircase then performs the emotional climax. Ascending it feels like rising into the national narrative itself, as if the visitor were being placed inside the timeline the state prefers.

Pedagogy happens through design. The galleries are arranged to unfold history as an inevitability: a straight line from antiquity to modern authority, uninterrupted, unbroken, unquestioned. Rooms do not simply display objects; they display a worldview. The architecture directs pacing, determines sightlines, and maintains focus, allowing little room for hesitation or doubt. Even when the visitor pauses, the building continues narrating around them, as if the story could not be stopped.

This choreography carries a political charge. The museum does not instruct through argument or didactic panels; it teaches by shaping how the visitor moves, sees, and remembers. It performs the state’s preferred logic: that belonging is simple, that continuity is self-evident, that the nation has always been whole. The effect is persuasive not because it demands consent, but because it makes consent feel like the most intuitive response. In this sense, the museum behaves less like a cultural institution and more like a training ground for a particular way of imagining Egypt—one where disagreement has no spatial equivalent and where dissent finds no place to stand.

Urbanism, Mobility, and Territorial Control

The Grand Egyptian Museum does not stand alone; it is the anchor of a redesigned territory. The highways, landscaped approaches, security perimeters, and dedicated access routes are not supporting infrastructure—they are part of the project’s architecture. Before the visitor reaches the building, the city has already been edited. Mobility is directed, visibility is managed, and arrival is staged as proof that the museum exists at the center of an orderly national landscape. The edge of Cairo becomes a frontier where the state can choreograph what the capital looks like, and who gets to approach it.

This territorial framing reimagines the western periphery of the city as a controlled zone of presentation. The new roads bypass neighborhoods that once surrounded the plateau, replacing the improvisation of informal life with a curated route that leads directly to the museum’s entrance. What appears as efficiency is also isolation; what appears as access is also filtration. The surrounding communities, markets, and everyday noise of the area are quieted by distance. The museum reads as if it rises out of empty land, even though it does not. The silence is engineered.

Tourism infrastructure intensifies this effect. Airports, arterials, and hotel corridors link into the museum like arteries feeding an image. The state gains not only visitors but vantage points. The approach offers views that feel cinematic—framed horizons, measured distances, controlled skylines that hide the city’s contradictions. This is not about hiding Cairo; it is about selecting which Cairo will be seen. The result is a geography where the museum becomes both destination and filter: a place that promises access to the nation while deciding what the nation looks like on the way in.

In this configuration, territory becomes narrative. Space is made to speak. The controlled approach routes tell the visitor that the city is coherent, the nation is continuous, and the state is the author of both. And because this coherence is experienced physically—driven, walked, entered—it becomes easier to believe. The choreography of arrival, movement, and containment performs a political claim long before architecture comes into view: that modern Egypt can be understood from here, and that the legitimacy of the present depends on the disappearance of what surrounds it.

Authoritarian Monumentality in Historical Perspective

The Grand Egyptian Museum joins a longer tradition in which states build at scales that exceed function in order to exceed doubt. Monumentality here is not an architectural genre, but a political method: a way for governments to materialize certainty where consensus is fragile, and to project continuity where history has been fractured. Across different contexts and eras, monumental projects have served the same purpose—to turn authority into something that looks like geology, something too large to argue with.

Seen in this light, the museum inherits more than its alignment with the pyramids; it inherits the logic of monuments that stabilize regimes by stabilizing narrative. Just as earlier authoritarian and developmentalist states built to outlast the criticism of the present, the museum builds to outlast the memory of rupture. The gesture is familiar: when politics is unsettled, architecture is asked to appear immovable; when identity is contested, stone is asked to speak more loudly than people. The building functions as reassurance, not evidence.

But unlike older monumental projects, the Grand Egyptian Museum operates under conditions shaped by global capital and transnational cultural networks. Loans, consultants, partnerships, and international museological standards do not weaken the national message; they amplify it. They allow the state to present its narrative as globally verified, technically endorsed, and culturally neutral—when it is, in fact, a deeply situated political argument. The museum becomes not just a monument to heritage, but a monument to the credibility of the state itself.

This continuity with past monumentalism is less about imitation than adaptation. Ancient complexes sacralized divine rule; twentieth-century megaprojects dramatized ideological futures; the museum sacralizes heritage as proof of modern authority. In each case, scale stands in for consensus, and spectacle stands in for negotiation. The architectural language changes, but the political instinct does not. The building does not ask the public to believe; it asks them to stand in front of something that makes belief feel unnecessary.

The result is a paradox: a project that appears inclusive by virtue of cultural pride, yet exclusive by virtue of the narrative it enforces. It remembers too much of one history and too little of another. It claims to gather the nation, but it gathers only the version of the nation that can fit inside its myth. What is absent is not forgotten by accident; it is forgotten by design.

The Authoritarian Sublime and the State Machine

The Grand Egyptian Museum presents itself as a place of preservation, yet its power lies in what it constructs rather than what it protects. It uses alignment, scale, and the softness of light to turn architecture into a statement of endurance. The building does not argue for the state’s permanence; it rehearses it. It makes authority feel architectural—quiet, inevitable, already decided.

This is what gives the project its force. By organizing sightlines, controlling approach routes, and scripting movement, the museum draws a boundary around which futures are imaginable and which histories are permitted to matter. The narrative it offers is coherent and compelling, but it is a coherence built on selection. What exceeds the story is allowed to fall away. What disrupts continuity remains outside the frame of alabaster and glass.

None of this negates the museum’s achievements as a work of design. It is visually extraordinary, technically sophisticated, and unmistakably ambitious. But ambition is not neutral, and beauty is not without consequence. If the museum succeeds, it is because it persuades—not because it proves. It gathers visitors into a vision of Egypt that feels seamless enough to stand, and silent enough to hold.

The question that remains is not whether the museum will endure, but what it will ask the public to forget in order to endure. In this sense, the building’s most powerful exhibition is not its collection, but the story it makes possible—and the stories it leaves in the dark.

The post Building Belief: The Grand Egyptian Museum and the Architecture of State Power appeared first on Untold.

***

Sometime in the 1960s, the famous zajjal (Lebanese folk poet) Zein Shu’ayb (1922 – 2005) from south Lebanon performed with his troupe Zaghloul al-Damour, a poetic duel that was filmed and broadcast on Lebanese television. 

The recording survived and decades later, like many of Zein’s performances, it resurfaced on YouTube and was remixed on hip-hop and rap beats, circulating again in new videos. Listening to it today, the rhythm feels familiar to us, almost like a rap song, with its fast delivery, verbal challenge and repeated lines. Yet Zein Shu’ayb’s words echo a much older poetic tradition, which was performed in village gatherings before large mass audiences. 

In these various remixes, vernacular poetry that existed for centuries circulate easily on digital media, showing how public storytelling changes form without disappearing. Before hashtags and social media, history in the Arab world was already performed, debated and shared in public through voices like these.

History does not live in archives or behind campus walls. It is a public good — accessible, open and shared. It is an active and living force involving personal and communal practices that extend beyond researchers and university professors. This is the essence of “public history,” which brings the past into our streets and digital spaces.

Today, the accessibility and circulation of information define our age. It lives in coffee shops and museums, on theatre stages and YouTube channels, in family albums and neighbourhood archives. A growing popular interest in the past has given rise to thousands of podcasts and social media channels each year. As digital technologies make it easier to share interpretations of history, it becomes increasingly important to reflect on how historical knowledge is produced and communicated to wider audiences.

In the Arabic speaking world, these practices long predate the term “public history.” Moving between contemporary examples and older traditions, from the Hakawati to Zajal and Qawl, communities have transmitted memory, identity and political commentary through public performance for centuries. What is today described as “public history” is, in many ways, a continuation of these older traditions — now unfolding in digital and institutional spaces as well revealing how deeply rooted these practices are in the region.

Making History (More) Public 

The term “public history” emerged in the United States in the 1970s, when Robert (Bob) Kelley, a historian at the University of California at Santa Barbara, used it to describe a new training programme aimed at expanding career opportunities beyond formal education. Over time, the term came to refer more broadly to historical activities conducted outside universities, including curated exhibitions, walking tours and other forms of engagement.

Although initially connected to Western networks in the US, Canada, Australia and Europe, public history has become increasingly international and diverse. The popularisation of the term in the Western world does not mean that the practice originated there. Communities across the Global South have long engaged in forms of public history. More recently, these practices have been formalised through national associations such as the Rede Brasileira de História Pública (2012), the Italian Association for Public History (2017) and the Japanese Association of Public History (2018).

Defining public history is not straightforward. It can take different meanings in different contexts. At its core, however, it seeks to make historical narratives and heritage more accessible while encouraging communities to participate in shaping them through family archives, local initiatives and collective practices.

History in the Public Space 

Initially understood as history produced outside academia, public history often takes place in cultural institutions such as libraries and museums. When these institutions focus on historical topics, their outreach and engagement activities become forms of public history.

History museums have long been part of the cultural fabric of the Arab world. The Egyptian Museum (founded in 1858) and the National Museum in Lebanon (founded in 1942) can be seen as early institutional examples of public history through their public programming.

More recent initiatives are also accessible online, including the Women and Memory Forum in Egypt (since 1995) and the Palestinian Museum (since 2018). Public history can also be displayed and performed in theatres, on walls and in streets through guided tours and festivals. In its diverse forms, it creates spaces that connect society with material culture and heritage.

Communicating with the Public 

Making history public means communicating it beyond specialist audiences, reaching those who may not engage with academic books or research.

Public history employs a wide range of media, including exhibitions, documentary films, guided tours, board games, comics, graphic novels, websites and newspapers. With the rise of digital technologies, it has expanded into social media, podcasts and online collections.

In the Arab world, examples include the Qatar National Library’s podcast series and the community archiving initiative Keys to Palestine. Individual initiatives also contribute to this landscape, such as Charles Al Hayek’s Heritage and Roots channel and his LBCI television programme “بقصة لبنان” (“Lebanon in a Story”), now in its fifth season with co-presenter Yazbek Wehbe.

YouTube channels and podcasts have become particularly prominent platforms. The Al Jazeera+ series Al Jahbaz features content creator Bisher Najjar re-enacting moments from the history of the Greater Syria region through performance and satire, with references listed in each video description.

As with cultural and media institutions more broadly, political agendas can influence which historical narratives are curated and how they are presented to the public.

Public Participation 

Public history is by definition a collective process. Exhibitions, digital platforms and archives require time, skills and collaboration among curators, designers, educators and media professionals.

Some initiatives extend participation further through “co-creation,” involving members of the public in collecting and preserving objects, photographs and oral testimonies. Citizen committees may design and lead projects about their neighbourhoods or specific events.

In this way, public history can help restore agency and power to people. Rather than relying solely on national discourses constructed by states and authorities — which often marginalise certain communities — it may begin with smaller stories that complicate larger narratives.

One recent initiative in the Arab world is Shubra’s archive, developed in Cairo’s Shubra neighbourhood to document and share local history with its residents.

Many participatory initiatives rely on oral history. The American University of Beirut’s Ras Beirut project documents the history of a neighbourhood through residents’ voices. Other initiatives have recorded the social history of Palestine, including the Al Rowat storytelling platform, Nakba through oral history, and accounts of leading female figures, persecuted queer figures and political exiles. Some participatory projects operate “under the radar” to avoid external scrutiny or surveillance.

Oral history is often seen as a means of empowering marginalised and under-represented communities to influence and enrich official narratives. It also fosters critical engagement with contemporary social and political issues rooted in the past. The early Arab Nationalist Movement used the term tathqif to describe engagement with the public that combined education with political awareness.

An Ancient Practice 

Public history practices in Lebanon and the Levant can be traced back centuries, including mediaeval traditions and earlier Jahiliyya poetry that recorded and performed history within communities and at larger gatherings.

Three examples are particularly illustrative: the Hakawati, al-Zajal and al-Qawl.

The Hakawati is a storyteller who recounts tales from Arab heritage in coffee shops or open-air settings using vernacular Arabic. While traditionally male, women such as Shalabieh al Hakawatieh (Sally Shalabi) now also practise this art.

Similar traditions exist across the Arab world under different names, including Nabaṭī poetry in the Arabian Peninsula, Humayni poetry in Yemen, Malhūn in Morocco and Dubeit in Sudan. These traditions share features such as vernacular language, collective participation, historical transmission and public performance.

Al-Zajal, a Lebanese vernacular poetry tradition inscribed on UNESCO Intangible Cultural Heritage List, is another example. One early documented case is attributed to Sulayman al-Ashluhi, a Christian monk from Akkar, who composed verses after the fall of Tripoli in 1289, recording the capture of the County of Tripoli (1102-1289), one of the Crusader states, by the Mamluks. In doing so, it recorded historical events in a form accessible to local audiences.

While al-Zajal refers specifically to the Lebanese folk poetry tradition, al-Qawl encompasses spoken word practices more broadly across the Arab world. Both traditions share several defining principles.

First is the use of vernacular language. Qawl is rarely written in classical, standardised Arabic, as its aim is to reach broad audiences, particularly in rural areas. It expresses local traditions and dialects, in contrast to the formal literacy often associated with urban centres. This gives Qawl a popular dimension and facilitates the transmission of knowledge in forms that resonate culturally and socially.

Second is the use of rhythmic stanzas and rhyme. All documented examples of Qawl employ this technique. As a means of publicly delivering knowledge, Qawl adopts strategies attentive to emotion and collective experience. Its musicality enhances memorability and echoes earlier literary traditions such as the Iliad, the Odyssey, Homeric poetry and Ugaritic texts, where rhythm supported oral transmission.

Closely connected to this is the central role of historical knowledge. History is a defining component of Qawl. Even when idealised, evocations of the past express identity, pride, community cohesion and socio-political satire. By embedding history in vernacular poetry, communities create local methods of transmitting memory from one generation to the next through public performance. Qawl has been used to record events, mark turbulent periods and commemorate political celebrations.

Finally, Qawl is defined by its public manifestation. Individuals or collectives perform as a troupe before large audiences, often in the form of poetic challenges accompanied by musical instruments. The practice promotes dialogue and acknowledges differences. Its verses may evoke tolerance and shared identity, but can also recount coercion and violence. Spontaneous, informal and emotionally charged, Qawl enables historical knowledge to be experienced collectively and retained across generations.

Through these vernacular traditions, history remains a shared and embodied practice — performed, contested and transmitted in public long before it was named as such.

Public History in Arabic 

Translating “public history” into Arabic is not straightforward. The term may be rendered as Tarikh Aam, but alternatives such as Mahali (local), Ahli (people’s) or Mujtama’i (community) capture different nuances.

The English expression combines both making history accessible and engaging in history with the public. Arabic allows more subtle distinctions between these dimensions. The verb تأريخ (to historicise) differs from the noun تاريخ (history) only by the addition of a hamza, reflecting the tension between history as inheritance and history as an active process.

If one wants to play with the Arabic language when translating the expression “public history” to reflect both its active and passive dimensions, one can simply add parentheses to the hamza, to show the possibility of both active historicization and the sharing of history in one word: 

تا)ء(ريخ 

As for the term “public” in Arabic, in the linguistic heritage of colloquial Levantine and broader Arabic-speaking lands, the term Ya ‘Ammi (literally “Oh kinsman”) is used to denote a sense of community. This also has common roots with the West Semitic “M” or “Am” (Canaanite, Hebrew, Phoenician), which denotes the idea of a group or people. As such, this mirrors some meanings associated with the term “public” in English. 

For other Arabic-speaking practitioners, the terms Ahli/Mahali (people’s/local) or Mujtama’i (community) feel more grounded in people’s everyday lives, in contrast with Āmm, which can also mean “general” and is not as commonly used in the Egyptian dialect and context, for instance. Ultimately, whether one opts for the more formal translation Tarikh Aam or decides to be more playful with the Arabic language, this article hopes to inspire more public conversations and discussions across Arabic-speaking communities. 

Why Public History? 

Many practices in the Arab world correspond to what is now termed “public history,” some dating back centuries. Using the term can help support and empower those engaged in these practices.

Public history reconnects scholars, archivists, curators, designers, podcasters, tour guides, heritage specialists and community groups who may otherwise remain separated by geography, discipline or institution. Rather than distinguishing between academic and non-academic, professional and amateur, it encourages collaboration to produce richer and more inclusive histories.

Finally, instead of distinguishing between academic and non-academic, professional and amateur, public history encourages universities, scholars and researchers to connect with local groups, communities and practitioners to produce a richer and more inclusive history.

It reminds us that history is not confined to the archive. It is shaped, performed and shared in public.

The post From Hakawati to Hashtags: Making History Public in the Arab World appeared first on Untold.

For the better part of the past two years, we have read study over study detailing the manifold forms of violence inflicted on the population of this tiny strip of land – maybe to compensate for the screaming silence on or relativization of these horrors by so many colleagues and institutions. 

Yet most of these readings only reiterate to what we already know. We know the casualty counts, the satellite images, the story of Hind Rajab. We all know them and what they are symptoms of. At least, those of us who want to know. 

There is an exhaustion that is not only emotional but epistemic: the sense that Gaza’s archive of horrors has become so heavy, so routinised, that it no longer clarifies anything. It merely accumulates. And in that accumulation, the place and its people risk dissolving into function – into a screen for moral and political performances and a symbol for the erosion of rights-based global order that, let’s be honest, never truly served those now paying its highest price.

Abdalhadi Alijla’s Fearful in Gaza does not accept this economy. It does not offer Gaza as piecemeal material for a political lesson. It refuses the familiar rhetorical contract in which the reader is permitted to feel only if the text supplies the requisite volume of shock, and in which the writer is expected to translate lived reality into the idiom of an international audience. 

I finished Fearful in Gaza with the distinct feeling one sometimes has after reading a work that is neither “extraordinary” nor “representative”, and yet more unsettling than either category. In fact, the book stays with me to date precisely because it does not contain something shocking in the way the world expects writing on Gaza to shock. Instead, it trusts in being taken seriously in its own, very quiet way. 

Alijla insists, with remarkable discipline, in the irreducible seriousness of the ordinary. He writes about growing up in Gaza with an honesty that is strikingly frank and unsparing. “Ungeschönt” (unvarnished?) we say in Germany, where we seem to have a precise word for everything but for the brutal Israel occupation and the genocidal violence deployed in Gaza. 

Contrasting with the semantic acrobatics of German officials or media in trying to avoid certain terminologies, Fearful in Gaza comes with a sobering clarity. In fact, its language is almost plain and precisely for that reason it is deeply affecting. Everyday routines, small pleasures, and moments of intimacy and care are described with the same clarity and in the same breath as moments of shame, humiliation, and the slow sedimentation of fear into the biographies of every protagonist of the book. 

But most importantly they are presented without moral staging for a specific audience. Unlike so many recent publications, Gaza appears here not as a metaphor or a case study, but as a real place of home, with all the contradictions that implies.

Two Voices, One Childhood, No Setting

Formally, the book is written in two voices: “The Son” and “The Mother.” While the son, Ayk, carries the main line, his mother interrupts, mirrors, adds weight, and often presses down on the same memory from another angle. What results from this structure is a family memoir that does not seek harmony but remains fragmentary dissonant. 

The son’s narrative registers the world through the eyes of a child and without full comprehension, the mother’s narrative registers the same world as a horizon of responsibility and vigilance. However, the mother’s interventions do not function as explanatory commentary. Alijla does a great job portraying the mother as an authority in her own right, with her exhaustion, anger, tenderness, and practical intelligence. Through her testimony, he makes visible the labor of keeping a child alive in Gaza, without ever romanticizing or lionizing this task.

Violence enters into this relationship of mother and son not as a spectacular event that can be easily morally consumed, but as a persistent atmospheric condition that reorganizes the child’s and the mother’s cognitive and emotional architectures. 

As a pressure that seeps into the logic of childhood and quietly deforms it. There is the children’s fascination with military jeeps, and their instinct to domesticate them by giving them animal names, as if naming could tame the terror. The gesture is, on the surface, playful, a small act of imagination. But it is also a way how a child makes fear manageable by giving it a known shape. 

Effectively it is also a technique of survival in a context of constant uncertainty: In one moment, school is school. In the next, it is no longer just school – when the teacher distributes pieces of onion because its smell helps against tear gas or when children are marched across the schoolyard at gunpoint and with their hands up. 

This scene that illustrates the carceral nature of a child’s life under occupation is described without theatrical punctuation, which is precisely why it becomes difficult to forget. One feels, reading it, the thinness of the wall that is supposed to separate childhood from coercion and harm, and how quickly that wall is pierced. In another passage, the mother describes waking her son at the first sound of military engines, because she is afraid his heart could stop during a nightly raid. 

There are passages that are even more difficult because they do not offer interpretive scaffolding. A scene of sexual violence against children is observed through the eyes of a six-year-old who cannot yet name what he sees but carries the fear from this incident for years, as if the body understood something that language could not yet organize. The description does not force emotion, though. Alijla refrains from converting the scene into a moral exhibit. He merely describes, and the description itself is what unsettles.

Home, Not Symbol

The comparison to other recent books produced under conditions of war and siege is unavoidable, not because they are the same, but because they share an ethic of focusing on the ordinary. That is what makes Fearful in Gaza feel closer, in spirit, to books like Tijan Sila’s Radio Sarajevo or Tony Doherty’s This Man’s Wee Boy than to much of what is marketed as “Middle East” conflict literature. 

This kinship that has less to do with geography than with scale. Sila’s Sarajevo is not presented as a grand theatre for questions of belonging amid ethnic conflict. It is a toilet where the family sleeps, crude jokes, and the brittle bonds of boyhood. Likewise, Doherty’s Derry at the onset of civil war in Northern Ireland is made intelligible by being rendered small and specific through the joys and tribulations of childhood and a son’s fragmentary recollections of his father, shot dead on Bloody Sunday. 

Alijla does something similar, but with his own temperature. Through his recollections of everyday kitchen situations, quarrels over schoolwork, neighbourhood routes, and the stubborn persistence of habits even when these habits become risky, he gives the domestic and the routine a dignity that public talk about Gaza rarely allows. That matters because so much writing and commentary in Europe and North America treats Gaza as a symbol first and as a lived world second. 

Since 7 October 2023, this symbolic reflex has only intensified. Gaza is increasingly made to carry debates that are, in practice, not about Gaza at all, and more about the moral self-positioning of distant audiences: about legitimacy, about the right vocabulary, about whose grief is permissible and what forms of violence are justifiable. 

In Germany, where public debate has largely concentrated on a self-referential struggle over the country’s historic responsibility, this dynamic has been particularly stark, with the effect that Palestinians appear, at best, as a footnote to someone else’s ethical drama. In this climate, Gaza functions like a floating signifier, a symbolic container filled with meaning ascriptions that harden moral frontiers, prevent empathy, and criminalise solidarity, policing what can be said and who is cast as decent or dangerous. 

Alijla’s refusal to write Gaza as allegory matters here. By returning again and again to the small things, to the mother’s vigilance, to the child’s strategies of coping, to routines disrupted and reassembled, Fearful in Gaza withdraws Gaza from the role of rhetorical object and gives it back its status as a place where people live, remember, disagree, and endure. 

Gaza is presented as home in the literal sense, that is, a place where your life happens, where you learn tenderness and cruelty in the same day, where you absorb contradictions because you have no choice. In the end, this is how the book becomes political: It trusts the reader to feel the humanness of its protagonists without being pushed to do so. 

This is, for me, the central reminder the book carries: Sometimes the most powerful political writing is precisely that which simply tells what it is like, without the implicit bargain that the reader will only pay attention if suffering is presented at maximum volume.

Exile as Aftersound

The frame of the book is also a story of later, of what comes after the spectacle. Towards the end of the book, Alijla describes his cumbersome relocation Sweden, where he lives and writes today. From this exile, he was forced to witness from afar Israel’s destruction of the very home he remembers so affectionately and the death of the people who populate his memories: Of the Shuja’iyya neighbourhood, located East of the so-called “Yellow Line” drawn by Israel straight across the Gaza Strip, where nothing but rubble remains. Abdalhadi’s mother, whose voice structures the book and anchors many of its most intimate passages, was killed in an Israeli drone strike in May 2025. 

Against this backdrop, Fearful in Gaza has become something it never meant to be: A record of places and voices that have been violently disappeared. The book’s closing movement thus performs a subtle shift. What started as memory becomes preservation. In this sense, the memoir holds a powerful truth. Namely that neither geographical nor temporal distance, neither occupation nor physical destruction can erase what we hold dear. They only alter the modalities. 

Sleeplessness, sensory echoes, the sea as an unexpected trigger may puncture the author’s everyday life in exile. But these punctuations are not just reverberations of trauma. They testify to the continued presence of a world that did not end simply because the narrator left it. In Fearful in Gaza, the mother’s voice offers the vocabulary of Ghourba, longing and estrangement, and with that the sense that “after” is not a clean temporal category but a different kind of living with the same thing.

When I closed the book, I did not feel better informed. Nor did I feel morally validated in my political position. Instead, there was a quieter recognition, bordering on embarrassment, of how often we mistake information for understanding. And so the introductory question returns, but changed slightly in tone: Why do I still read books like this?

Because every now and then a book refuses the roles assigned to it and, by doing so, leaves an even deeper mark.

The post Gaza, Not a Metaphor: Childhood, Memory, and the Refusal of Spectacle appeared first on Untold.

The gathering is small, perhaps no more than a dozen people, but they scream out loud, which in Japan is quite unusual. They chant mostly in Japanese, sometimes in English. The slogans are familiar: “stop the genocide”, free Palestine “from the river to the sea”, and “end the Israeli apartheid now”. 

In front of them, a line of candles and small lanterns laid down. Behind them, well illuminated, the Hiroshima Peace Memorial, more commonly known as the Atomic bomb dome. 

The building was originally designed by Czech architect Jan Letzel and was realised in 1915, to host art exhibitions in what was at the time the city business district. 

On 6 August 1945, at 8:15 am, the atomic bomb dropped by the United States razed the entire city to the ground. No buildings remained standing close to the hypocenter. With the exception of the Dome, thanks to its structure of steel and stone, despite being almost right below where the bomb exploded. In the 1950s, the park was established around the building as a space to host different memorials. In 1966, the city council took the official decision to preserve the dome. The restoration was minimal, and the dome itself shows clear signs of the impact. Its purpose, and that of the entire park and the institution running it, is one: to convince humanity never to use that weapon again. 

Aoe Tanami sensei (the Japanese term for “teacher”), as the others used to call her, was among the first ones to organise the vigils. She is an associate professor at the Faculty of International Studies at Hiroshima University and specialised in Palestinian culture. On 26 October, she was there, playing a tambourine and leading the chants. After the event, she invites all the participants to have dinner at her office. The group is quite diverse: most are Japanese, including some involved directly with local anti-nuclear movements, but also some foreigners. 

Two Palestinians are also there. Lara lives in Hiroshima, where she moved in October 2024, and she works as a counselor at the Hiroshima International School. Her mother came to visit from Canada. For the occasion, at the specific request of her daughter,  she cooked ful (fava beans), while others brought Japanese dishes. 

In the conversation, an aspect emerged that many people around the world during the last two years can relate to: Palestine is not only a cause to fight for, but rather an entry point to better understand the society they live in, create a community, find a sense of humanity in a world where violence and human rights violations are often met with silence and avoidance. 

The Palestine-Hiroshima Vigil Community

The first gathering, around 30 people, took place spontaneously on October 13, 2023, to mourn the Palestinian and Jewish lives lost, and protest the ongoing massacres in Gaza. Some of the participants insisted on continuing. The vigil took place every day, for 500 consecutive days. At least one person was always there, with a banner and candle. Later, the group became known as the “Hiroshima-Palestine vigil community”. Before summer 2025, it was decided to limit the gatherings to weekends only.

In early 2024, the community delivered letters to mayor Katsumi Matsui and the city council questioning their silence over the Gaza massacres. For them, Hiroshima has a specific responsibility. The city built up its post-war identity as an example of turning its status of victim into resilience, recovery, and promotion of nuclear disarmament through advocacy, education, and documentation of survivors’ experiences. In fact, the city evolved into a relevant actor on the international diplomatic scene when it comes to peace and disarmament. 

The term hibakusha, to design the victims of the bomb, including those suffering from the effects of radiation, acquired a global dimension. In 1957, the Japanese government recognised the issue and provided the victims with specific forms of support. 

However, this role, according to members of the community, soon became frozen into memorialised rituals, limited only to nuclear weapons, and often disconnected from other contexts. In front of the genocide unfolding in Gaza, despite its previous generous contributions to humanitarian aid in the region, Japan took a very timid stance, very close to US policies. It didn’t put any diplomatic pressure on Israel, didn’t impose any sanctions, and rather continued business as usual. 

When UNRWA was defunded by the US and their allies, Japan followed. The country has consolidated trade relations with Israel. Not only through weapon companies, but also large investments in the Tech sector. The Japanese pension fund, the largest in the world, invests billions in Israeli companies, including those directly involved in the genocide. 

Holding gatherings in front of the dome has a strong symbolic value. It gives the “never again” slogan a wider breath, to embrace weapons of mass destruction and the endless cycles of violence that characterize our world. Shouting in this place also assumes a specific meaning, as it disrupts the silence of the memorial and the calm of the city. If Japan in general tends to be quiet and avoid social nuisances, in Hiroshima the act appears even more dissonant. When demonstrators approach people passing by to hand over leaflets to them, most of them turn and walk away. 

Japanese people passing by the vigils tend to ignore them. Very few decide to stop by, and even less decide to join the community. This is why the group decided to keep doing it in front of the dome, instead of more crowded places like the Hondori street, one of the city’s most important shopping hubs. Not only because of the symbolic value, but also because in that place they are more visible to tourists. 

“Hiroshima is a conservative city. It is not chaotic and loud like Tokyo, and people here tend to respect the rules. For this reason, with small numbers, the vigils have to create some noise in order to attract attention: drums, music, shouting. It has to be disruptive and inappropriate”, says Lara. 

Takuya Kirihara, a painter/musician originally from Saitama, agrees. In Hiroshima people tend to follow the rules, he says, and judge harshly those who don’t, even more than in other places in Japan. Despite its prominent anti-nuclear stance, in the last elections many voted for the far right party Sanseito, which promotes the idea of returning to atomic weapons.

Born in a communist family, Takuya was pushed by his parents to make his own experience abroad. He left Tokyo for Berlin, where he remained for 16 years. He came back in 2023, this time to Hiroshima. He says:

What I can do is to bring a perspective from Europe to the country. A friend of mine introduced me to the people of the vigil, and they invited me to join the gatherings. The noise music scene in Japan is very small, almost absent in Hiroshima. So the music serves the purpose of instilling curiosity. It tells people that something different is happening. But in general most of the Japanese are not interested in these issues. And we are a country where concepts like ‘human rights’ or ‘nation state’ have been imported and have a quite recent history.  

Sailor Kannako is another member of the community.  She is a DJ and singer who started her career in Tokyo. Her name recalls the manga character Sailor Moon. She is very involved in activities of solidarity with Palestine, including performances in which she mixes noise music and political slogans. About the vigils, she says: “When we stand at the Atomic Bomb Dome, many passersby avoid photographing us. They take a photo of the Dome, then quickly move on. This scene, which plays out almost every day, feels like a symbol of Hiroshima today”. 

Most of the members, says Tanami sensei, didn’t have any activism experience before the vigil. 

At the same time, today the community is visited by different groups: representatives of the postal workers’ union, women’s groups, and many of the old guard anti-war and anti-nuclear activist groups, members of Kakuwaka, and at a certain point even the Nihon Hidankyou, the hibakusha movement that won the Nobel Peace Prize last year. 

Connecting Gaza genocide and the bombing of Hiroshima is important but also problematic, Tanami sensei explains. Of course there are similarities: the level of destruction, the civilian victims. But the people in Gaza are without a homeland, they are refugees. The bombing of Hiroshima was a war crime, but it happened in the context of a war, against a state. Moreover “Japan committed crimes against people in Korea, or before in Okinawa. In many ways we can say it was the Israel of Asia. So I am generally against drawing a comparison between Hiroshima and Gaza beyond a certain line”. 

But being in Hiroshima has also advantages, she adds: “Here at the university they stop me and they congratulate me for my ‘peace activism’. Even if this is not what I do, framing it like this facilitates my acceptance. When I go to Tokyo, I am perceived only as a radical”. 

For Lara, political activism in Japan as a Palestinian was quite a transformative experience:  

Before coming here, I searched on google Palestine related things in Japan, and the vigil community came out first. The first weekend I went to the Dome, just to observe, and I started getting to know the group, and soon they invited me to speak at the events. It was a very interesting experience for me, as a Palestinian, because in Japan they focus a lot on education and awareness. Despite their limited numbers they have a very balanced and diversified approach: they can be disruptive, but also set up events for raising awareness, boycott campaigns, and academic work. 

Since 7th October, it has been devastating. I was in Jordan at the time, which enabled me to grieve collectively with Palestinians there. I could watch the news, mourn, and share with others as a Palestinian, without the need of explaining or teaching anything. So when I came to Japan I was very worried. I was extremely glad when I discovered the vigil community. I am really proud of the work they do to inform and educate. In a context where they are quite isolated, they realise they have a greater responsibility, and they do a lot of effort in order to achieve the same outcomes as in other contexts. 

In this sense, Japan has taught me the value of community. Living here was a transformative experience: here you really learn that you, as a single individual, are not important. Elsewhere, people are always struggling to get their place. Here is different, they value the collective more than individuals. 

A Decolonial Café in Tokyo

Sawa Sawa is a community café established in July 2025 in the calm Arakawa neighborhood, in Tokyo. The name is composed of two words with the same sound but different meanings. In Japanese ‘sawa’ (さわ) means ‘a chat over tea’, and in Arabic (سوا) it means ‘together’. 

It was founded by a group of Japanese and Palestinians who felt the need to have a safe space in which they could meet and discuss issues that, they realised, are interconnected. Many of them met before, as they were engaged in educational events, running different campaigns, including BDS, over the last two years. But they lacked a physical place to talk comfortably and meet people sharing similar values and interests. While there are other venues engaged with political issues, like the Friends of Palestine in Kobe, or the anarchist queer Namnam community in Kanagawa, or small punk communities scattered here and there, Sawa Sawa is the first one focusing on a comprehensive decolonial approach. 

Since its birth, the place has hosted film screenings about Palestine and the Ryukyu Islands (the modern day Okinawa), but also fundraising events, workshops, and discussions. 

Hanin is one of the founders. Born in Gaza, she moved to Japan when she was eight, and she returned in 2023, after 10 years in the Gulf. After the 7th of October, the political atmosphere in countries like the United Arab Emirates was suffocating, and she decided to move back to Tokyo. In Japan, Palestinian residents are only a few dozen (in 2023 they were 95). As the country doesn’t grant refugee status, almost all of them are there to work, or to study. And yet, she says, here you can speak freely, and she found a community of engaged and like-minded people. 

Sawa Sawa is the evolution of that community. “It is a place to decolonize minds”, she says, “where you can have conversations about different oppressions all over the world. Not only Palestine but also Sudan, Congo, and, of course, Japan”. 

Because of the context, the approach is quite different from the vigil community in Hiroshima, says Hanin: 

We want to attract people in a calm, subtle way. That’s also why we didn’t choose a name that was too clearly political. Sawa Sawa wants to be a space where you can slow down in order to unlearn and relearn while taking a pause from a hyper capitalistic metropolis like Tokyo, where everyone is always on the go. 

As someone coming from Gaza, it is not always easy for me. I feel so much rage, I want to be disruptive. But there is a thin line between being disruptive and damaging the cause. In other places in the world it would be completely fine, but in Japan you can become alienated very quickly. Or we would be banned. Here it is like this: when you make a mistake, they immediately take strong measures. There is a big debate among us, and sometimes we go in smaller groups to protest at events. Other times we need to change strategy in order to attract people and raise awareness.  

Some of the campaigns they launched were quite successful. Itochu, a massive trading company that signed an MoU with Israeli Elbit systems, canceled it after a boycott call that started in Japan, and then became global and particularly effective in countries such as Malaysia and Canada, where the company has also a strong presence. 

Palestine Solidarity as a Mirror and a Community 

For Hanin, Palestine is not only a topic, but rather a way to start a discussion. 

For a lot of Japanese people, Palestine is like a mirror. It is a way to look into their own country’s history. In a way, people woke up because of Palestine. It is an entry point, and they look at different parts of the world and realise there is oppression and exploited people everywhere. 

Imperial Japan is not much discussed in Japanese society, especially if we consider the education system. After the Second World War, there was a lot of ‘peace washing’. Peace education is great, but it cannot remain in theory. So Palestine often becomes part of a larger conversation that involves the anti-nuclear and anti-war movement. But it should be louder and bigger than it is at the moment. More difficult is to connect this to Japan’s colonial past. Not only what they did in southeast Asia, but also to the Ainu people in the north, and in the Ryukyu islands.

In this context, Palestine becomes an entry point to also reflect about the Japanese imperial and colonial past. Not only the occupation of Korea and China and the war crimes committed there, but also the older issues, such as those concerning the Ainu, an indigenous people located in Hokkaido, in the North, and gradually forced into assimilation, or the more recent annexation of the Ryukyu islands (Okinawa) during the Meiji period, at the end of the XIX century. 

The case of Okinawa is the easiest one to bring into the debate: after the Second World War, the island was forced to host more than 70% of the US military bases in Japan, and it was for a long period administered directly by the US. The decision to impose this burden disproportionately on Okinawa has been read by many of its inhabitants as another proof of the colonialist and racist attitude of the mainland towards them (the island has its own specific  identity, language, and ethnicity). The continuous US military presence is also often perceived as a humiliating subordination to US imperialism and its political agenda in the region.  

“When I was a University student, I was an anti-imperialist activist”, says Aoe Tanami, “I think the topic is very important of course. But it is not always connected with Palestine. Bringing up the issue of Japanese colonialism when we speak about Gaza could be counter-productive. And when it comes to talk about imperialism, it is even more delicate, as it is related to the figure of the emperor, and even some of our members in the vigil community don’t want to talk about it”. 

In Japan, some aspects of the past have been washed through the pacifist stance the country adopted after the Second World War, which rejected armed conflict, as stated by article 9 of the constitution adopted in 1947. And yet, revisionist narratives are becoming stronger, and the rightwing populist Sanseito party, which glorifies the imperial period and aims at removing article 9 from the constitution, is on the rise. 

In this context, Palestinian solidarity movements in the country, as in many others, acquire a larger meaning and scope. As Hanin concludes: “It’s not so much how much we can do for Palestine sometimes, but how much Palestine is doing for us, right?”

The post Between Hiroshima and Tokyo: Palestine is a Mirror appeared first on Untold.

“We have fasted from joy for ages,

and now we break our fast upon the plate of dignity.

Record, O time of victory, record,

Damascus is ours until the Day of Resurrection.”

He quickly added a clarification, as if aware of the exclusion already implied:

“When we say ours, we mean everyone of every race, faith, and from every origin to every horizon.”

Yet the contradiction is already inscribed in the moment itself. Even in its gesture toward inclusivity, the speech evoked a purified, exalted Damascus, a vision of triumph rooted in a timeless Arab-Sunni imaginary rather than in the fractured present.

Capital of the Umayyads

Within hours, the clip circulated widely across social media. The verses became a digital anthem for the “new Syria”, often paired with a single, gleaming phrase that seemed to hold the promise of rebirth: “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads.”

The Umayyad Caliphate or Umayyad Empire (661–750 CE) was the second caliphate in Islamic history and, at its height, one of the largest states of the medieval world. Its territories stretched from the western frontiers of China to southern France, encompassing North Africa, the Maghreb, al-Andalus, the Sind, and Transoxiana. 

Centered in Damascus and marked by the Arabization of state administration under ʿAbd al-Malik, the Umayyads left a lasting political and cultural legacy that continues to be invoked and romanticized in contemporary Syrian and Arab imaginaries.

The expression itself was not new. Bashar al-Assad had used the same words years earlier to court the nostalgic imagination, portraying the city as “the beacon of the Umayyads and the cradle of Arab civilization.” Yet in the post-Assad imaginary, the phrase acquired a different resonance. It became both nostalgic and redemptive, a dream of authenticity after decades of humiliation and dictatorship.

In this evolving rhetoric, “Damascus, capital of the Umayyads” is more than a slogan. It is an affective myth: a promise of purity and resurrection projected by an Arab-Sunni imaginary trying to restore coherence amid collapse.

The Umayyad dream no longer belongs to power or opposition alone; it is deeply embedded in the moral and spiritual imagination through which many Syrians – particularly from the Arab-Sunni community – envision their place in history. Far from being a passing rhetoric tied to the fall of Assad or argumentatively the ascent of ”the majority” again’, it has become a framework for self-recognition, a way of reconstituting “the nation” as a moral community destined for restoration.

Orientalism from within

In this imagination, victory and virtue are inseparable. The nation’s rebirth is conceived not only as a political project but as an act of moral purification, a return to an untainted origin where faith, masculinity, and honour align. 

This is the same grammar that once structured cultural myths like Bab al-Hara  (the gate of the neighbourhood), a hugely popular Syrian TV drama series, first aired in 2006, that nostalgically imagines a 1930s Damascus neighbourhood as a tightly knit, patriarchal community of “honourable” men defending “tradition” and the homeland, and has been broadcast across the Arabic speaking region for 13 seasons. The yearning for an immaculate past, the masculine guardianship of a virtuous community, and the exclusion of difference as the condition of purity.

Here, Orientalism no longer arrives from the West. It emerges from within, through the desire to idealize the self by imagining it as both sacred and victimized, timeless and threatened. The Umayyad dream, in this sense, is a form of self-Orientalism: an internalized gaze that seeks redemption not through transformation, but through resemblance to an imagined essence of the Orient itself.

If the Umayyad dream shaped the ideological vocabulary of the new political order, it also found powerful expression in the media and digital public sphere. Figures in pro-government media and among online influencers began invoking “Banu Umayya” (Umayyad people) not merely as a historical dynasty but as a moral lineage, a metaphor for honor, continuity, and faith.

One striking example came from Qutaiba Yaseen, a widely followed influencer aligned with regime narratives, who shared a video titled “Men of Dignity from Sweida stand alongside the sons of Banu Umayya in Damascus.” The clip showed a group of Druze men celebrating what he called “the liberation of the land of the Umayyads.” While his caption emphasized unity and brotherhood, the very choice of imagery – where belonging is validated through the Umayyad idiom – reveals how deeply this moral geography structures the imagination of “the new Syria.”

Visual grammar

Across social media, dozens of Facebook groups and pages now carry names such as “Syria al-Umayyah” or “Banu Umayya.” Their posts blend patriotic iconography with religious overtones, producing a digital landscape where history is both sanctified and aestheticized.

Even episodes of misunderstanding highlight how emotionally charged this symbolism has become. During the July 2025 sectarian violence in Sweida, a predominantly Druze city, in which hundreds of people were killed and members of Syria’s defence and interior ministries were later detained on suspicion of abuses against civilians, a banner reading “Sweida without ummiyyah” (illiteracy) was mistaken for “Sweida without Umayyads,” triggering outrage among armed groups and their supporters. 

The intensity of the reaction spoke not to confusion alone, but to the extent to which Umayyah now functions as a sacred signifier, an emblem that fuses history, faith, and national legitimacy.

The romanticization of the Umayyad dream unfolds through gendered imagery that fuses purity, heroism, and faith into a single visual grammar. Viral videos set to the song “Banu Umayya, their origins are gold” portray men as guardians of a sacred lineage. 

One shows Ahmed al-Sharaa, the head of the transitional government, riding a horse in a slow, cinematic sequence, a tableau of masculine virtue and divine favor. Another, filmed in Damascus’ Umayyad Square, features a masked horseman carrying the tawheed flag, a black flag bearing the Islamic declaration of faith (the shahada) in white, echoing the same melody of glory and moral renewal.

While variants of such flags have existed historically as religious symbols, in contemporary Syria and the wider region this specific black shahada flag has become strongly associated with jihadist and Salafi-jihadi groups, and therefore carries militant and sectarian connotations rather than being a neutral religious emblem.

These scenes are not merely political symbols; they reveal how moral imagination is gendered, sanctified, and aestheticized. The horse, the flag, the disciplined body, all perform a yearning for order through the image of the righteous man. This visual culture does not imitate anyone’s gaze; rather, it springs from within, from a longing to see the self as pure, elevated, and whole.

Such imagery invites a question rather than an accusation:

What does it mean when a society envisions its rebirth through these codes of purity and virility?

Perhaps the “Umayyad dream” is less about reclaiming power than about reimagining the self, a collective effort to restore coherence through an idealized reflection of what it believes it once was.

The fiction of the moral past

In this expanding media ecosystem, the Umayyad dream operates less as nostalgia for empire than as a mode of moral self-fashioning. It provides an affective grammar through which the Arab-Sunni imaginary reclaims virtue and coherence amid collapse, a language of sanctified belonging that transforms loss into purity.

But the Umayyad dream is not the only vessel of nostalgia or self-Orientalism.

Years before the revolution – and still today – the TV series Bab al-Hara built another dream: one that turned “Old Damascus” into a mythical homeland for an entire Arab imaginary. 

As noted once in The Guardian, the series “has been an extraordinary phenomenon from the moment it was launched,” watched “from Morocco to Kuwait” and becoming a shared ritual of Ramadan evenings. Beyond entertainment, it crystallized a collective fantasy of what “authentic Arab life” once looked like, a Damascus of honour, piety, and masculine solidarity.

What distinguishes Bab al-Hara from other television dramas is not only its popularity but its power to shape collective memory. It became a reference point for how millions imagined Syrian – and by extension, Arab- identity. Danny Makki observed once that the series “misconstrues the history of what Syria was during the mandate era,” yet paradoxically defines how that history feels. 

For viewers across the Arab world, the Hara (the neighbourhood) became shorthand for virtue, resistance, and rootedness, an imagined moral homeland that transcended geography and class.

In this sense, Bab al-Hara did not just represent nostalgia; it manufactured it. It offered Arabs from Rabat to Riyadh a mirror in which to see a purified version of themselves, turning Damascus – remote, complex, and plural – into a moral epicenter of the Arab world.

In Bab al-Hara, purity is not only spiritual but domestic. The home becomes a miniature nation, ruled by paternal wisdom and feminine modesty. The neighborhood is a moral microcosm where every deviation – a woman’s defiance, a man’s betrayal – threatens the order of the whole. Through its melodrama of virtue and shame, the series transforms social hierarchy into moral truth.

A ritual of belonging

This is not merely nostalgia for a simpler past; it is an aesthetic theology of purity.

The men of Bab al-Hara embody the same disciplined masculinity seen later in the post-2011 Umayyad revival, vigilant, protective, and righteous. The show taught generations to feel authenticity as something lost and endangered, and to imagine moral restoration through obedience and gendered order.

Bab al-Hara does not simply reproduce Orientalist clichés of the “Arab patriarchal society.” It performs them from within, as a cultural desire. The Damascus it imagines – pure, communal, and morally intact – is a mirror of how the self wishes to see itself: uncorrupted by modernity, yet triumphant in its own virtue.

The Umayyad dream and Bab al-Hara reveal two distinct yet converging temporal imaginations through which the Arab-Sunni self performs its own “purity.” Both rely on what Ghassan Moussawi calls fractal Orientalism, a process through which societies reproduce the same binaries of progress and backwardness, purity and corruption, not between East and West but within themselves. 

Rather than a Western gaze imposed from outside, this is a local hierarchy of virtue: a self-sustaining taxonomy that distinguishes the “authentic” from the “deviant,” the “moral” from the “fallen.” It is constantly rehearsed through media, memory, and ritual performance, allowing communities to define themselves by continually reasserting who belongs and who does not.

In the Umayyad imaginary, history is compressed into a single, sanctified century. The Umayyad Caliphate – just one among many civilizations that flourished in the region – becomes reimagined as the timeless essence of Syria’s identity. What came before and after – Aramaic, Byzantine, Abbasid, Ottoman, and modern plural histories – fades from collective memory. 

The brevity of the Umayyad period paradoxically strengthens its symbolic power: its scarcity becomes proof of purity. This moralized temporality underpins contemporary political and religious discourse, where the call to restore “the Damascus of the Umayyads” becomes not an historical project but a ritual of belonging.

Historical fabrication

Bab al-Hara performs a similar manipulation of time, but within the domestic and social sphere. The series constructs a Damascus that never existed, erasing the city’s real modernity during the early 20th century. The show’s central motif of “gated neighborhoods” is a historical fabrication: “It was never the case that Damascus neighborhoods had gates. 

Damascus has seven main gates, known to this day. The character of the Aqid – the paternal leader who rules the neighborhood – is likewise an invented tradition, unknown to actual Damascene social structures. Historian Sami Moubayed noted that Bab al-Hara’s Damascus erases the city’s modernity: its tramways, newspapers, intellectual clubs, theaters, and publishing houses vanish, replaced by the simplified archetypes of the “Shamian setting” established in earlier dramas: barber, baker, vegetable seller, policeman.

In both imaginaries, the past is not remembered but rebuilt; time is aestheticized and moralized. The Umayyad past is purified into faith and conquest, while the Bab al-Hara past is purified into patriarchal virtue and social order. Each constructs a closed moral chronology that excludes historical complexity: one through divine authority, the other through domestic hierarchy. 

Together, they illustrate how some Syrians and Arabs perform self-Orientalism not by imitating the West, but by staging its own ideal self, the pure, disciplined, and timeless Orient it longs to inhabit.

If temporality in both Bab al-Hara and the Umayyad dream collapses history into a purified origin, their social and political dimensions translate that origin into hierarchy. Both imaginaries depend on the repeated performativity of authority – patriarchal in one case, and theocratic in the other – as the guarantor of purity.

In Bab al-Hara, patriarchy is not only a narrative structure but the moral axis of the world itself. As mentioned earlier, the Aqid as well as the Abadayat (strong men), stand as embodiments of collective virtue: decisive, self-sacrificing, and untainted by doubt. The stability of the neighbourhood depends on their ability to preserve honor through control, to punish deviation through violence, and to restore moral equilibrium through obedience. 

Female characters, in turn, serve as moral signifiers, either preserving communal dignity through modesty or threatening it through disobedience. Violence, far from being chaotic, is ritualized; it performs justice as purification. The show’s moral universe thus reduces social complexity to a binary between discipline and decay, mirroring “a theater of virtue.”

The Umayyad imaginary scales this logic upward. The masculine ethos of the neighbourhood – the man who protects his neighborhood and restores its honor- becomes the figure of the righteous man of the nation. What Bab al-Hara staged as domestic virtue now returns as public theology: a call for moral guardianship at the scale of the state.

This transformation is not merely rhetorical; it is enacted. Across social media and public gatherings, performances of faith and virility merge into a shared script of revival. The “pure man” of the neighborhood becomes the “defender of the Ummah,” the guardian of a faith imagined as both wounded and sovereign. Within this discourse, reclaiming moral order also implies reclaiming political legitimacy for the idea that the nation’s rightful rule, historically associated with Arab Sunnis, was “lost” under ”the non-Sunni Assad authority” and must be restored.

These notions have taken performative and embodied forms. Ahead of the coastal clashes in March 2025, Damascus authority-aligned preachers and local figures called for al-nafir (mobilisation) – a term rooted in jihadist lexicon – framing mobilization as a sacred duty of protection and purification. Ending up with massacres against the Alawite community there. 

With the July assault on the Druze in Sweida, tribal networks in Syria invoked al-faz‘a – traditionally a communal call for mutual aid – but here transformed into a performative act of aggression. In both cases, the vocabulary of purity and defense migrated from the household to the battlefield; the moral economy of the Hara became the national grammar of mobilization.

Performing the past: From the Baath to the Ummah

It is important to note, however, that the Baathist regime itself was an early architect of this self-Orientalizing grammar. As researcher Husam Itani observes, “the Umayyad revival draws from the same well as Baathist ideology, which turned the past- too- into a dream meant to guide the future.” The continuity is not merely symbolic: both frameworks reimagined moral order through the disciplined masculine body and the myth of civilizational resurrection.

Rahaf Doghli also demonstrates in her book Romanticizing Masculinity in Baathist Syria, Baathist rhetoric recentered the figure of the man as soldier-citizen, the disciplined, sacrificial masculine body whose loyalty, obedience, and willingness to wield ‘legitimate violence’ constitute the very essence of belonging. 

This legacy of moralized masculinity survives today in both the rhetoric of Islamist governance and the popular culture that preceded it. The Umayyad imaginary does not replace the Baathist one; it inherits and re-performs it, translating the soldier-citizen into the believer-warrior, and loyalty to the leader into devotion to God.

In this sense, social and political self-Orientalism in Syria is not a passive inheritance but an active practice. It is sustained through gendered performance and emotional investment, through rituals of loyalty and moral speech. Authority here is not imposed from above, it is lived, rehearsed, and believed in.

Across this imagined spectrum – from the Hara to the “Umayyad capital” – the yearning for origin reveals itself not as a national sentiment shared by all Syrians, but as a project rooted in the Arab-Sunni imaginary of moral restoration. It envisions not a plural Syria but a purified ummah, a spiritual polity redeemed through discipline and faith. 

Today, this imaginary finds its most visible expression in the rhetoric and performance of Islamist factions such as Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, whose call to moral and territorial “liberation” extends the same logic that once governed the Hara: the defense of community purity through masculine virtue and divine order.

In this vision, the past is not recovered, it is rehearsed. The Umayyad century, brief and distant, becomes the horizon of eternity; the Damascus of Bab al-Hara, fictional and domesticated, becomes its emotional blueprint. Both transform history into a theater of redemption where belonging depends on the exclusion of difference.

Too often, Orientalism has become a convenient scapegoat, a totalizing explanation that attributes all the region’s distortions to Western power, leaving little room to interrogate the failures within. By locating domination exclusively outside the self, this reading absolves the internal hierarchies, mythologies, and desires that sustain oppression from within. 

Here, the notion of internal/self Orientalism becomes more revealing: it exposes how communities construct their own “Others,” reenacting the same logics of exclusion and moral superiority once ascribed to the West. In this sense, what is performed today is not merely resistance to Orientalism, but its domestication, the reproduction of its gaze in the mirror of the self.

The post From Bab al-Hara to the Umayyad Dream: How Nostalgia Shapes Syria’s New Moral Order appeared first on Untold.

For much of teta’s life, she covered her hair with a headscarf, mostly white in color, beige, but also black after the death of her husband and then son. She preserved it underneath the colorful soft fabric because hair is sacred and needs to be protected.

When I was little, my grandmother’s hair had already begun its transformation—streaked with white, though sometimes, she coaxed it back to brown with henna before she moved to modern dyes, leaving the roots pale and the ends burning copper in the sun. 

Like many Palestinian women before her, she washed it with olive oil soap, worked warm oil through it with her fingers. And despite the wildness of her hair, it was always soft, almost as soft as the creases in her palms. She braided it back before heading to the land, her hands busy with watering the soil beneath her, planting another pomegranate tree, or plunging them into soapy water, scrubbing clothes clean. 

She smelled of home, of earth, of olive trees and time.

Inherited Threads

My mother, aunts, and older cousins inherited traces of her stubborn hair, echoes of its texture, but never quite the same. There was always something missing, something altered—until me. I believe I was her 18th grandchild, the first she wanted named after her. But it didn’t happen. Her name, Sadika, was deemed too heavy, too old-fashioned, and was set aside by my sister. 

Yet she lived on in me—in my despise of tomatoes, in my grumpiness, and indeed, in my curls. In the way I carried them, untamed and bold. A crown I had to learn to control, but never to diminish.

The knowledge of tending to hair was passed down, from my grandmother to my mother, and from my mother to me—an act of love, nourishment, and quiet resilience. My mother carried the ritual forward—scrubbing my scalp with steady hands, cultivating strength and growth. After washing, she worked olive oil into my scalp with tenderness and patience. As she braided my hair each morning before school, I felt the comfort and power of womanhood flowing through her touch. 

When my grandma was diagnosed with breast cancer in 2018, her hair began to change. When I was diagnosed with a desmoid tumor in 2020, mine did too. Her curls loosened; mine abandoned me altogether. At one point, we found ourselves on the same hormonal drug—tamoxifen. 

I was a fraction of her age, yet walking a path that mirrored hers. She recovered, though her hair thinned and turned completely white. I would look at her and think: At least one of us is still holding onto the curls. That, of course, until mine slowly grew back in 2021.

We were bound by more than blood. By loss. By renewal. 

Living Memory

On 8 April 2024, as a great total solar eclipse darkened the sky and Ramadan neared its end, Teta, who had been bedbound for some time, took her final breath. When she passed, my father’s voice on the phone was heavy, my mother’s cries trailing behind him. I ran my fingers through my curls, tracing their shape, feeling her there in every strand.

There are a thousand ways to remember her, a thousand stories I could tell, but my hair will always be ours alone. A thread spun through generations, a gift from the women before me. It is wild, fearless, unapologetic—stubborn and beautiful, just like her.

Palestinian women have always braided their hair in devotion and defiance. They have combed olive oil through the strands, just as they have tended their trees—both symbols of resilience, of roots that refuse to be displaced. Hair loss comes with autumn, like leaves surrendering to the wind. Even as a child, I noticed how much more hair I shed in the fall, a quiet reminder that I am part of nature, that the weak strands must fall away to make room for stronger ones. 

In the spring, cutting the ends is essential, like pruning branches so they may bloom again. Every February, we would trim our hair, trusting that it would grow back healthier, fuller—another lesson in patience and renewal.

Resistance, Return

However, right now, as I write this piece, I am once again losing my hair from chemotherapy. This time, my Teta is not here to witness it. She is not here to brush her hands over my head, to whisper prayers, to remind me that what falls will grow again. She has passed, and with her, the stories she carried, her braid falling down her head, her wrinkly hands and face, and the quiet strength of a woman who lived, endured, and gave.

I refuse to believe she’s completely gone. I carry her story now. Every curl that grows back is a verse, every strand a memory woven into my being. I carry her with me, in my hair, in my roots, in the land that shaped us both, and in the soil in which her body currently inhabits. But my grandmother’s loss was not just personal—it was woven into a greater history of displacement.

Like countless Palestinian women, my grandmother carried both personal and collective grief. She was fourteen when her family was forced to flee their home in the village of El-Mzer’a during the Nakba of 1948. They walked for days, searching for refuge after their land was taken and their village destroyed. She witnessed a world she once knew crumble before her eyes–the orange orchards, the narrow pathways of her village, and the old structures. Today, only one remains: a Roman mausoleum, later converted to a mosque dedicated to Al-Nabi Yahya (John the Baptist).

But even after all that devastation, teta held onto traditions—farming, embroidery, and careful rituals of hair and skin care. These were not just acts of survival but acts of defiance, of persistence, of love.

Occupation, like cancer, has robbed us of our identity, land, and parts of ourselves. But we persevere. We persist, filled with resilience, finding other parts of ourselves connecting us to our land, heritage, bodies, and ancestors.

My hair will return, stronger than ever—a promise to my grandmother, to the women before her, and those yet to come.

Allah yerhamik ya Teta.

The post Teta’s Hair: A Story of Palestinian Women’s Resilience, Resistance, and Renewal appeared first on Untold.

Davide Oberto: Kamal, can you tell us how you encountered cinema and how you started to make films?

Kamal Aljafari: When I was a Palestinian student in Jerusalem, I wasn’t really interested in art and cinema – in the sense that it wasn’t something that I aspired to pursue. 

At that time, I was mostly an activist at the university, a member of a left-wing student group.

Within that context, I began working with the (editorial) team of a magazine, where I learned how to investigate the different issues I wanted to write about.

At that point, almost by chance, I started going to the cinemathéque in Jerusalem – mainly  because everybody seemed to be going there. You could get a membership and then watch films. And I really enjoyed watching films!

But the idea of studying and making films only came later, when I started thinking about creating something to express things that I couldn’t articulate in other ways.

This desire coincided with my growing urge to leave the country. I was involved in a kind of Marxist group – it was almost like a sect – and it was really difficult to break away. So for me, making art and wanting to express myself differently and artistically became a way to escape that situation and eventually to leave the country.

I ended up going to Germany because someone told me about the school in Cologne and offered to let me stay at their place.

I was 26 when I left. That was already many years ago – my God!

I think things often happen by coincidence. In the end, I could have ended up doing something completely different, not necessarily filmmaking. 

D.: What about your first films?

K.: Well, the first film I made was at film school – the one I did in Geneva- Visit Iraq (2003, 25’). I’m not sure if I’ve already told you this: recently I wanted to digitize some old miniDV tapes of my earlier films like The Roof (2006, 61’) and others. While going through the tapes, I found three labeled “Gaza”. I had no idea what they were, I didn’t even remember ever filming in Gaza. Really, I had no recollection.

I watched the tapes, and they turned out to be footage from a visit that I made to Gaza when I was 28. At that time, I was already living in Germany. I had taken a camera from my school, returned to Palestine, and filmed for three days. And incredibly, I never watched the material.  I never digitized those tapes, so I never saw them until now. I am even in the footage myself because I had asked someone to film me while I was talking to people.

This might be  the first thing I ever filmed. You know, it just happened after my first year at film school. I had learned a bit how to use the camera, and then I went to film that. My idea back then was to make a film about my experience in prison. I was looking for someone in Gaza who was imprisoned with me. I didn’t find him, but I filmed that search, and then never watched the material. I’ve carried it with me for almost 25 years. Now that I’ve discovered it, I’m making a film from it called With Hasan in Gaza.

D.: When were you in prison?

K.: When I was 17. I talked a bit about that experience in The Roof.

D.: Have you already finished With Hasan in Gaza?

K.: (laughing) Not yet, not that fast! 

What is interesting is that there’s a lot of great material in the footage, especially the people. I filmed many people, their faces…But what is also fascinating is that I had completely forgotten all of it.

D.: In fact I’m wondering how you will work with this material, with this footage… Since you forgot you even shot it, it could function for you almost like an archive.

K.: Exactly-like an archive!!

I could only remember because I watched the footage. Otherwise, the fact that I had gone there, that I had slept at that person’s place, was completely erased from my memory. It was around the year 2000. There were bombings around the house. And Hasan, the person who hosted me, said “Yeah…don’t worry, let’s watch TV. There is a basketball game”. So he turned on the TV and he started watching the basketball game, and I filmed that. Sometimes I would look and film out of the window, checking what was happening outside. But he kept saying: “Don’t worry, don’t worry. Just come and sit next to me”.

This time I want to approach the filmmaking process differently, because this footage brought back so many memories – about Gaza, about my time in prison. I’ve written the narration, and I’ll start working on it when I’m in Paris (Kamal received a one-year fellowship at The Institute for Ideas and Imagination, Columbia University in Paris).

With Hasan in Gaza is actually the first thing I ever shot, and it’s become a kind of archival footage. It’s crazy, because it has only now come to light. I carried it with me all these years, never watched it – and it’s really strange how things happen. That’s why I say: it’s not always about what we decide to do. It’s about what life brings us, how life carries us to places.

I could have ended up being a writer, instead of making films. I don’t want to say that I was born to make films. Sometimes, we start something, we enjoy it, we stay with it. We live, and life leads us.

 D: Maybe cinema turned out to be the perfect language for expressing a necessity…

 K.: In a way, yes.

I started by writing for the political magazine, doing reportages, but not only. I also expressed more poetic feelings, and I started taking photos for the magazine, too.

I think that filmmaking, in a way, was an accident – a good accident, but still an accident.

It could have completely failed. I went to study in Cologne, and it could have happened that I didn’t enjoy it. But in the end, I stayed, and I’m still making films. It might sound really crazy, but most of the people I studied with don’t make films anymore. No one! At some point, you start a family…I don’t know…You have to work…It becomes too hard to be a filmmaker…

It’s strange, because I didn’t plan it this way. I didn’t intend to make films with archival footage, and now even though there is a fiction film I want to make I find myself working in an archive again.

This time, it’s my own archive, but it really is an archive. I can watch myself at 28 years old. I still had a lot of hair, and I was very attentive and curious.

D: I think cinema, in your case – especially considering your early films like The Roof, Balconies (2007, 7’), Port of Memory (2009, 62’) – is a remarkable opportunity , or perhaps a serendipitous accident, to combine space and time. You went to this film school in Cologne, then returned to Ramleh (Kamal Aljafari’s hometown, Editor’s note) where you began  intertwining  the space around you with the personal (hi)story and the time of your family…

K.: For me, it was something natural and instinctive – to fill the environment I came from with meaning.

 I grew up in a house where the second floor was left unfinished. So, for me, the sense of belonging to a certain sense of history was always there.

When I returned,  I made my first feature-length film, The Roof, in 2004.

I was immediately attracted by this landscape, which was part of my story, part of what I wanted to express. I couldn’t do what I wanted to do without relating to that.

D.: Maybe you can tell us where your family lives.

K.: On my mother’s side, the family came from Jaffa; on my father’s side, from Ramleh. Both families were internally displaced, meaning they lost their homes, and were resettled to houses that belonged to other Palestinians. They couldn’t return to their original houses, because their neighborhoods were destroyed. After 1948, the Israeli army created ghettos for the Palestinians who remained in Israel. 

In Jaffa, out of 120,000, only a tiny minority, about 2000, stayed. The same happened in Ramleh, only 100 remained out of around 30,000. The house where I was born had previously belonged to another Palestinian family. It was “given” to my family because this area had been designated as the area where all the Palestinians who stayed after 1948 were gathered. The house was unfinished – the second floor was never completed – and they lived there. It has remained the same ever since, because the municipality doesn’t give permission to build further. It’s been frozen in time for 76 years.

So, naturally, this space became part of my films. And this space is, of course, also intertwined with time. Generation after generation, you inherit a special sense of time. I think I tried to explain this spacetime idea in The Roof, where I said that my parents live on the ground floor, and the past lives above them, on the second floor.

D.: And then you move on to using archival material or, rather, creating your own archive.

K.: I wanted to tell the story of where my mother came from and of the neighborhood where  her family came from. It was a fisherman’s neighborhood, now part of Tel Aviv. By chance, I discovered that some Israeli films from the 60s had captured this place before it was completely destroyed. And that’s how I came up with the idea of making a film. Initially, I just wanted to collect images of the backgrounds from those Israeli films. But then, I found that there are many films shot in Jaffa in the ‘60s, ‘70s and ‘80s. I began a photographic project, taking snapshots of these backgrounds. I would project the films and focus on the details appearing in the background: houses, people and fragments of everyday life. At first, I didn’t intend to make a film, it was just mostly about collecting images. I was so thrilled to see and discover these places in the background of Israeli films.

That led to my decision to make Recollection (2015, 70’), a film about memory and the act of recollecting or remembering. I made it precisely because those places no longer exist physically: they survive only virtually, in images. And, as I mentioned earlier, one project leads to another.

D.: in Recollection and in An Unusual Summer (2020, 80’) you are no longer working with the footage you shot yourself. Especially in Recollection, you did something incredibly powerful politically too. You used these Israeli films shot in Jaffa and you deliberately erased  the actors…

K.: I’ve always reworked the images to make them my own. I didn’t just take the archival footage as it is. I reworked these images and, by doing so, I created a different ownership. Altering these images is both an artistic and political act. In a way, by changing them, you liberate them and they become your own images.

D.: This might be the difference between a document and a documentary.

K.: I never think in terms of  style or genre, like “Now I’m making a documentary…” . I just try to find the right way to express myself. I don’t set boundaries. I use whatever tools I think are necessary.

For example, in A Fidai film (2024, 78’) I also used some Israeli fiction films scenes, because they helped me express myself and show something. What I’m doing is, in a way, free-form art.

D.: In fact we can say that in A Fidai Film, your most recent work, you express your freedom to the fullest. Can you tell us about the genesis of the film? How did you discover the material?

K.: I’ve been collecting images for a long time, from many different places. During the  COVID pandemic, the Israeli Cinema Archives began uploading a large amount of material online, and I’ve been watching these videos from the very beginning. I was particularly interested in what they had  on Jaffa and Ramleh, and I started recording images that I found interesting. 

Then, by chance, a friend sent me an article about what happened in 1982 during the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, when the Israeli army looted and destroyed the Palestinian Research Center in Beirut. That  article sparked the idea of making a film – one where I would sabotage the material coming from Israeli archives. I came up with the title, A Fidai Film, because “Fidayin” refers to the Palestinian fighters who, in the early years, crossed the border and made actions not to harm people but to sabotage the Zionist project, such as planting a bomb in a factory. 

In Hebrew, they were called “saboteurs”, a term still used today to describe Palestinian fighters. There is actually a very funny interview with Edward Said where he talks about this word. He recounts an incident from 1982, when the Israeli Army had captured a Palestinian fighter in Beirut. During the interrogation, they asked if he was a saboteur. Thinking to save his own life, he answered: “Yes, I’m a saboteur”. Then the interview took a surreal and absurd turn. They asked him what exactly he did as a saboteur and he answered: “I wake up in the morning and I think about sabotaging things”. 

In some way, when I came up with this title, everything fell into place. I began downloading and capturing video materials online with the intention of ‘sabotaging’ the images.

In many of the Israeli films that I captured, both documentary and fiction, Palestinian places and landscapes are used as visual backdrops during the opening and end credits. That was always deeply disturbing to me, and I felt the need to sabotage it, to literally scratch over the names of the titles. That’s how I started. Then I discovered footage taken by the Israeli army from the Palestinian Research Center, and I did the same to what they had written over the images at the beginning of each clip. So, sabotage by sabotage, the film came to life. The process itself became the film and that’s what makes the Fidai project so unusual and interesting.

The starting point is what happened in 1982, but the material comes from many different sources. I sabotage, I intervene, I disrupt, I remove people, I erase texts, I create a new meaning.

D.: I love the fiction scene with the two lovers on the beach. It feels like a French film from the ‘60s. You can almost imagine a Serge Gainsbourg song playing in the background. You can recognize the style, the period, and yet the effect you create feels so uncomfortable, so unheimlich, so unpleasant.

 K.: That film actually screened in Cannes, as a short, sometime around 1965.

When I watched it, I couldn’t believe my eyes. The dialog, in all its banality, reflects  exactly what they are doing to Palestine.

The man says: “I’m gonna go on and on like this. I can’t stop it”, and the woman replies: “It’s terrible, but we can’t stop it”. The scene, to me, captures the essence of the Zionist project: the recognition of the harm and yet an unwillingness or refusal to stop.

By covering their faces and sabotaging the image, you create this new meaning. Otherwise, it’s just a couple on the beach. Once you put on this mask, they become someone else. The scene becomes something else. It’s no longer about them. It becomes a metaphor for  something much larger.

D.: How did you decide to include the text (Letter from Gaza, 1956) by Ghassan Kanafani? (Ghassan Kanafani was a Palestinian journalist, politician, and author. He developed the notion of “resistance literature”. Born in 1936 in Acre, he was assassinated by the Mossad along with his niece on 8th July 1972. A/N)

K.: I felt it was necessary to find references that convey  a sense of history through personal stories. Kanafani always wrote about the stories of individuals.

When I was a teenager, my history teacher asked us to record some oral history. I interviewed an elderly neighbour who told me a story that, years later, I found  again in Letter from Gaza. He spoke about the possibility of going to California and about a boy who had lost his leg.

It’s very likely that  Kanafani had heard a similar story from someone in a refugee camp in Lebanon or in Jordan. I don’t know exactly where. In Letter from Gaza, he recounts a story from 1956, during the first major Israeli military attack on Gaza. He writes about the 13-year-old Nadia who has lost her leg during the attack.

Reading that text today,  it becomes clear just how long this suffering has been going on. Including Letter from Gaza in the film could be seen as a response to what’s happening today, but it isn’t. I’m talking about 1956. And yet, it is about today,  just on a different scale.

People watching the film now often think it’s a reaction to what happened in October. In reality, the film was finished between July and August 2023 – the final edit even earlier. 

But it’s true that the film reveals the background of what is happening today.

D.: That’s probably why those in  power always try to destroy archives.

The footage of the destruction of the Palestinian Research Center in 1983 is incredibly powerful and scary.

K.: Yes, those in  power always try to erase evidence.

The story of the Center is both symbolic and, frankly, quite surreal. First, they tried to assassinate Anis Sayigh, the director of the Center. They sent him an envelope bomb, which exploded in his face. He nearly died, and lived the rest of his life with severe hearing damage and a constant, painful noise in his ears. 

But he survived, and continued his work directing the Center. Later, the Israeli army looted the place. After the army withdrew from Beirut to South Lebanon, some of the Center’s staff came back to rebuild the library. But the army had planted a powerful bomb. Many people were killed, the street was completely destroyed, cars were incinerated. 

The goal was clear: to put an end, once and for all, to the efforts of documenting Palestine. To permanently erase the archive. To destroy any attempt at building a historical record, a collective memory.   

D.: What are your projects after With Hasan in Gaza? You mentioned working on a fiction film…

K.: Yes. I’ve written the script, but I don’t think I will shoot it in Palestine as I originally planned. I want to find a different way of doing it, to continue this tradition of working with something more virtual.

I’m still figuring it out. There are so many possibilities today with 3D technology: you can create anything. Of course, filming remains important to me, but I think I want to use the material differently. I want to create something that isn’t realistic, even in terms of place or setting. That’s the direction I want to pursue, but first, I want to finish the Gaza film.

D.: What you are saying about the impossibility of shooting in Palestine and the necessity to imagine and to build a virtual reality reminds me of a scene from Film Socialisme by Jean-Luc Godard. When the cruise ship arrives in front of Palestine, we don’t see the land itself. 

Instead, we just see a Palestinian postcard with the words “défense d’entrer” (forbidden entry) written across it.

K.: Working with archives is directly tied to this feeling of inaccessibility. In theory, I could go there, but the place is inaccessible because it was destroyed. So I turned to archival films- images captured by others – because these destroyed places continue to exist only through these images.

But the inaccessibility is also deeply psychological. Today, I find it very difficult to imagine myself going back. I can’t picture myself landing there. It’s become such a psychological barrier, and that in itself forces me to rethink how I can make films.

I can’t just make a normal film now. The idea of simply going there and shooting, I can’t imagine myself doing that.

Avoiding that direct return has become a way to protect myself. I know it would be emotionally challenging. So I try to work differently, with distance and with layers. For this fiction film, I’ll probably return to archives again. Over the years, I have collected so much material, thousands of hours, stored in many hard-drives. Some of it I shot myself. I want to find a way to use all this material.

I have to work with limitations. Limitations force you to create something unexpected, which sometimes results in a much more powerful film.

Imagine this: I want to make a fiction film, but I can’t shoot it in the place where the story is set. Maybe, I’ll shoot it in a similar location, not pretending that it is Palestine. Perhaps in Palermo or in Lisbon.  There is something of Jaffa in Palermo for sure. I might insert some shots from there and it will be clear that it is Palermo and not Jaffa, but it doesn’t matter to me. Palermo is also part of my history. 

Ultimately, I’m speaking about a country that we have lost, a homeland that we have lost and I’m not trying to escape from that loss. Every film I’ve made -and every film I will make-, starts  from that condition, from trying to find a way to relate to it.

D.: One last question about the beginning of A Fidai Film. The film opens with a giant red sun: a striking image. It reminds me of the postnuclear films from the 80s…Why did you choose to start the film with such a symbolic image?

K.: This idea came from the feeling that colonialism and the Zionist project want to block out  the sun, and of course this image gives the sensation that a disaster is looming. But you can’t cover the sun forever, you can try, as I did in the film, but it won’t work. The sun always  comes back, even after a disaster. 

The post Accidents, Archives, and Acts of Sabotage: A Conversation with Palestinian Film Director Kamal Aljafari appeared first on Untold.

In such times, family memories and people’s histories become an important means for resistance, as they challenge the dehumanizing global rhetoric which reduces our regions to zones of conflict. Passed down through generations, they fill the gaps left by national and dominant narratives and reveal how “ordinary people” have shaped history in ways often forgotten.

As a historian, I have always been captivated by the ability of family memories to create counter-narratives. A few years ago, I published an essay about my family’s history in Arabic, where I reflected on their experiences between Beirut and Jabal Amel (southern Lebanon), and their connection to Lebanon’s collective identity. To revisit these memories today and translate them into English is like an act of witnessing—to stitch and preserve fragments of a fading past. It is also a way to counter discourses that reduce people in Lebanon, Palestine, and other places to political labels, collateral damage, or statistics. By restoring our humanity and the complexity of our histories, these stories transform the personal into the political and offer a more intimate and human perspective.

Today, I return to my family’s memories from Jabal Amel, which is a name I prefer over “southern Lebanon,” as it reflects the region’s deeper history and identity. Jabal Amel has long been a frontline of resistance and a site of struggles over power and identity, but it now faces a profound sense of defeat and isolation, both locally and globally.

Through narrating my grandfather’s biography and my father’s recollections, I follow the intimate connections between Beirut and its rural peripheries. I explore the forced migration of people from rural areas to the city, the exploitation they endured, and the illusions upon which the city was built—legacies that continue to haunt Beirut. The history of Shia migration from the south of Lebanon and the Beqaa to Beirut, often framed around “belts of misery” and marginalization, overlooks the lived experiences of individuals whose stories transcend sect and class, representing the most exploited sectors of society.

Recovering these forgotten narratives challenges colonial erasure, dominant histories, and the local political manipulation of these narratives. It allows us to bear witness to their lives and suffering, while reclaiming the histories of religious communities who have long been (and still are) instrumentalized or dismissed as backward, terrorist, or vulgar.

Reflecting on the lives of my grandfather, grandmother, and father, my aim is to see how the stories of ordinary people have shaped Lebanon’s past and continue to shape its present. By resisting dehumanization and erasure, these memories honor lives that the world too often tends to forget. Through the act of remembering and retelling, we keep these histories alive and reimagine our collective identity from below.

Between the End of the Ottoman Empire and the Birth of Greater Lebanon

My grandfather, Sheikh Ali, was born in the early 20th century, in 1907 according to his identification papers, in Jabal Amel, which was part of the Ottoman Empire at the time. He was born in a small village called “al-Yehudiyeh” (meaning “the Jewish” or “the Jews”), which the locals renamed “as-Sultaniyeh” in the 1960s, after the main village road, known as “Al-Sultani.”

My grandfather wasn’t born blind; he lost his sight in 1914 during World War I, when a trachoma epidemic swept through the region, affecting many people’s eyes. Many of those infected lost their vision due to a lack of treatment, and my grandfather was among them. His father, Sheikh Khalil Abbani, was a farmer and one of the sheikhs of al-Yehudiyeh.

When my grandfather lost his sight at the age of seven, he could no longer participate in the family’s agricultural work. His family sent him to Beirut with others who went to the city to beg, hoping that due to his blindness, people might offer him charity. At that time, many villagers were escaping poverty in rural areas. Seeking better job opportunities, they were forced to go to Beirut, especially after the Ottoman state integrated tobacco farming into the global capitalist network at the end of the 19th century. The state granted a French company, the Regie, the monopoly to purchase and control tobacco production, as the Ottoman government lacked the capital to develop tobacco fields. This affected farmers in Jabal Amel, who were forced to sell their crops to Regie at low prices. Due to their lack of literacy and skilled trades, many rural newcomers ended up doing menial jobs in Beirut, such as shining shoes, carrying loads, selling kaak (sesame bread), or begging on the streets of a city that didn’t always know how to welcome its many newcomers.

My grandfather likely arrived in Beirut after World War I, though my father doesn’t know the details of those early years. My grandfather never spoke of it, and my father never asked. I can only imagine what my grandfather must have felt being sent to the city to beg after losing his sight and being abandoned by his family. How did a blind child from a rural village cope in a city undergoing profound changes in urbanization, architecture, politics, and culture? A city gradually abandoning its local knowledge and skills under the pressures of colonial expansion and global openness. Was he captivated by the sounds of the modern city and its rhythmic speed, or did he long for the quiet and familiarity of village life? Did he cry over his fate, exhausted from begging in the streets, and yearn to return home, knowing it was impossible?

Years later, my grandfather met a Christian association for the blind, with whom he stayed involved for several years. Through this association, he was enrolled in the British Syrian Mission Blind School, known at the time as the “English School,” located in Beirut’s Zuqaq al-Blat neighborhood (now the site of the old French Lycée Abdel Kader building). Founded in 1868, the school offered free education to blind students, teaching them various skills and trades. It provided elementary classes where students learned Arabic and English Braille, along with subjects such as arithmetic, history, geography, and religion. Older students, those over the age of twelve, attended afternoon workshops where they were taught trades like chair caning and basket weaving. Younger students participated in workshops once a week, with the rest of their time spent in the recreation room, which featured puzzles, dominoes, a radio, and instruments like the piano and violin for music training.

Despite the limited career opportunities this school offered blind students, preparing them only for low-paying jobs, it shaped my grandfather’s character and nurtured his talents. It provided him with an opportunity to build a life that he couldn’t have found within his family or community. He learned Braille, though he didn’t practice it much, and became skilled in chair caning, a craft he continued throughout his life. Perhaps the most significant influence from his time at the school was his exposure to Evangelical Christian teachings, which had such a profound impact on him that he converted to Christianity. He was around nineteen or twenty years old at the time. His family and the villagers were outraged—how could Sheikh Khalil’s Shia son become a Protestant Christian?

They pressured him to “return” to his original faith. My family would joke half a century later about how different our lives in the southern suburbs of Beirut might have been if my grandfather had remained Protestant. However, what interests me most today is understanding what drew him to Protestantism in the first place, why he chose to embrace a different religion, and why he ultimately decided to return to his original faith. Did he find what he was looking for there? What attracted him to that faith that he didn’t find in his own environment? And when he returned to being Shia, did he truly believe in it, or was it simply a matter of social pressure? Did he practice either religion at all?

As for his official identity, my grandfather was recorded as a Muslim Sunni. During the 1932 census, a key part of the establishment of the modern Lebanese state and the process of registering citizens under the French Mandate, the census committee visited my grandfather’s house in Beirut and asked, “What is your confession?” He simply replied, “I’m a Muslim,” and they registered him as Muslim, which at that time meant Sunni, not Shia. My grandfather wasn’t aware of this distinction, and apparently the census officials didn’t bother to clarify this or verify the information—especially given the many bureaucratic errors and the highly politicized nature of the census results.

My father discovered this during an election year, possibly in 1968. He couldn’t find their names on the Shia electoral roll and searched until he found them listed among the Sunnis. At the time, my father didn’t care much, as he considered himself a “leftist who didn’t care about sects”! However, when he wanted to marry my mother years later, her parents objected when they discovered that he was Sunni on paper, even though they were from the same village. They insisted that he change his sect. My father complied and went to the Jaafari Court to correct the error.

But the sheikh there refused, accusing my father, a civil servant employee, of wanting to take a Shia position to increase the number of Sunni employees. My father insisted that he was Shia by blood, so the sheikh asked him to bring his Shia father, who had at the time already passed away. My father then suggested bringing his mother and uncle, and the sheikh accepted. My father’s Shia identity was officially restored, though to this day, our family’s official record remains among Sunni records! My grandfather’s decisions and slips continue to amuse me, lingering more than half a century after his death in this surreal city and society. It also strikes me how modern states can shape your identity with a piece of paper, not just through lived experience.

The Day My Grandfather Became an Urban Man

My grandfather was in his forties when my father was born a few years after independence in 1947, the youngest of three siblings with two older sisters. Despite his poverty, my grandfather insisted on educating my father and his sisters, both of whom earned the certificate of primary education, which was considered quite an accomplishment for people of their social standing. At that time, my grandfather worked as a chair caner. During this period, the Shia feudal lord Ahmad Abdel Latif Al-Assad likely helped arrange for him to get a job at the Regie Company in Beirut. Regie employed blind workers to sort tobacco leaves, alongside many rural farmers whom the company had originally impoverished and driven to the city. My grandfather worked there for the remainder of his life.

I don’t know much about his working conditions, but it’s clear that work at Regie wasn’t easy. Workers faced exploitation and vulnerability in the industrial sector, along with poor working conditions, lacking basic services and equipment. My father tells me that one day my grandfather resigned, though he doesn’t recall the exact reason, and took his severance pay, which wouldn’t last more than a month. The family was upset and appealed to Ahmad Al-Assad to have him reinstated. My grandfather returned to work, and he gave back the severance pay.

Though my grandfather abandoned his Evangelical faith, he maintained his involvement with the Christian Association for the Blind, which was based in a church near Saint Joseph University in Ashrafieh, on Monot Street, where they held regular meetings. During the association’s presidential elections, they would elect my grandfather as president for two or three hours, just until the elections were over, as he was the only Muslim member. Then, he would return to being Sheikh Ali.

My father sometimes accompanied him to these meetings, but in reality, it was my grandfather who led the way. From the Msaytbeh neighborhood in West Beirut to the Jesuit University in East Beirut, he directed my father: “Go through here, turn there,” he would say. My grandfather “saw” the streets of the city with perfect clarity, confidently navigating them with his wooden cane. When he went to the Regie factory in Mar Mikhael, he would take the tram from Basta to Dora, and my father would sometimes wait for him at the tram stop if he wasn’t in school. But my grandfather didn’t really need him—he was sharp and had a strong sense of direction, fully aware of how to move through Beirut, which had by then become his city.

The city had pulled him from his rural roots and was harsh on him, but like all cities, it opened doors to new worlds. It was in this environment that his political ideas began to take shape. He befriended Khalil Naous (1935–1986), a journalist and leader in the Lebanese Communist Party, who lived nearby and greatly influenced him. My grandfather was a natural revolutionary, having suffered from the combined hardships of his blindness and his difficult social conditions—first at his family’s home, then in Beirut, and later at Regie. Although he never officially joined the Communist Party, his views were shaped by the city’s social and labor movements. He witnessed these firsthand, as much of the political activity at that time occurred in the Regie and Ghandour confectioneries’ factories, where workers often gathered.

According to my father, my grandfather held leftist and socialist views that were “quite advanced” for someone of his background and circumstances. While he never openly discussed his ideas with my father, he accepted and supported my father’s leftist leanings. When my father became politically active as he grew older, my grandfather didn’t object. My father would talk to him about the state, socialism, and Lenin, and my grandfather would listen and accept these ideas. He also got to know most of my father’s friends, as he enjoyed sitting with them and involving himself in their conversations.

I never met my grandfather. He passed away many years before I was born, while he was still working at the Regie. All the men in the family—my uncles and my grandfather—died of heart disease, and my grandfather suffered for some time before he passed. In 1964, when my father was in his Brevet (Intermediate) year, my grandfather had his first heart attack and was taken to Makassed Hospital, where he was treated and released. He became a heart patient after that. He often worried about his health and would frequently tell my grandmother, “My heart hurts; make me a cup of mint tea.”

In 1971, on a Friday, my father had just been appointed as a secondary school teacher while still attending the Faculty of Pedagogy. On his way back from the university cafeteria, he found my grandfather at home, feeling tired. My grandfather asked to take him to the hospital. As soon as they arrived, he was taken into the emergency room. Minutes later, the doctor came out and told my father, “I’m sorry, it was a severe heart attack.” To this day, my father blames himself for not calling an ambulance. He didn’t have a car, so they had to take a taxi to the hospital, where they walked inside. My father didn’t have the experience or knowledge of how to handle the situation, nor did he know whom to contact. My grandfather was 63 years old when he died, one year before his retirement.

My Grandfather, Music, and the Radio

One of the things that fascinates me most is my grandfather’s cultural interaction with the city and how it influenced his musical tastes and choices. He became a true urban man, moving to the city’s rhythm and engaging with its culture. My grandfather adored the famous Egyptian singer Mohammed Abdel Wahab—he was one of his “devoted fans,” constantly playing his music at home, while disliking the famous Egyptian singer Umm Kulthum. His favorite songs included “Ana wal-Azab wa Hawah” (“Me, the Torment, and His Love”) and “Ya Wabour, Quli Rayih Ala Fein” (“O Ship, Tell Me Where You’re Heading”), as well as many songs by the Egyptian singer Asmahan. However, like many of his generation, he was particularly fond of popular Lebanese baladi music, especially songs by Elia Baida and Odette Kaddo. “He would wait for the baladi songs program at around 4 or 5 PM,” my father once told me.

Curious, I rushed to the radio archive I work on to search for the program, and I ended up correcting my father’s information—it turns out that the baladi songs were likely broadcast between 6 and 7 PM. This connection between my work and my grandfather brings me closer to him, making my work feel more personal. I asked my father more about the radio and music, and I was pleased to learn that my grandfather not only listened to music but also played and was deeply moved by it, which explained a lot about his personality. He had always seemed distant in my memory, mostly connected to a single black-and-white photograph of an elderly man with dimmed eyes.

My father told me that my grandfather learned to play the violin through the Blind Association and had even bought one to play at home. But one day, in a moment of anger after an argument with my grandmother, he smashed the violin on the table. My father doesn’t recall what the argument was about—perhaps it was over a meal or something else. After breaking the violin, my grandfather never bought another or played music again.

My father remembers their home from when he was a child, and despite their modest means, they had a radio. My grandfather would listen to BBC Arabic or Sawt al-Arab (Voice of the Arabs) radio. He greatly admired the Egyptian leader Gamal Abdel Nasser and always had the radio close to his head on the nightstand. He would listen to music and smoke; he was a heavy smoker. He would sit on the bed with his head resting against the wall, or he would cane chairs while listening to the radio. He taught my grandmother how to cane chairs as well, while my father only learned how to attach the back and seat of the chair when it was done.

That same old radio eventually found its way to my father’s house, where I came to know it. My mother, however, despised it. She disliked anything that “cluttered the house” and never missed a chance to complain about it or attempt to get rid of it. For years, she managed to hide it in the attic, until it was “lost along with many things” after the destruction of our house in Beirut’s southern suburbs during the Israeli war against Lebanon in July 2006.

I used to mourn the loss of that radio, along with the many personal items, books, and photographs we lost during that time. But now, as I move from city to city, from one home to another, I realize I no longer cling to those feelings. The loss continues, but with it comes a strange relief—an ease that comes from letting go. Letting go has made it easier to move on. I don’t carry photos or personal belongings with me; only a few essentials and my daughters, who stay with me wherever I go. I move from one house to the next, always closing the door behind me, although today, I feel the accumulation of estrangement and alienation from this constant movement.

Unlike my parents, who—despite being displaced many times during the civil war and various Israeli aggressions in Lebanon, or perhaps because of it—found it impossible to abandon the idea of a permanent home. For them, having a fixed home was an essential part of life.

My grandfather didn’t move much after leaving his village either. He never lived in the south again. He didn’t inherit any land from his family in as-Sultaniyeh, so my father’s family became more connected to my grandmother’s village until 1964. That year, one of my grandfather’s cousins, out of pity, gave him a small piece of land in as-Sultaniyeh that wasn’t good for much, telling him, “If you can build a house on it, go ahead.” My grandfather built a small room there, which allowed him to return to his village for brief visits during holidays and enabled my father to become a regular visitor, thus restoring the family’s connection to the village.

My father later inherited that house and added a floor to it, turning it into the family home where we spent all our holidays and summer vacations. We grew tired of its small size, its strange shape, and its inconvenient location in the middle of the road, yet every time war broke out in the south, the fear of losing that small, cherished connection to our village would haunt us all.

As for Beirut, like many Shia who migrated to the city in the 1920s, my grandfather settled in the Msaytbeh area, on the outskirts of the old city, while later generations moved to the farther suburbs. He first lived in a house in Hayy al-Munassafa in Msaytbeh, before moving to a house in Hayy al-Lija neighborhood, near my father’s aunts, who helped raise him and his two sisters, as my grandmother (sitti) was also blind.

Sitti Maria Shuayb and the Silence of Women in Family Memory

Sitti Maria was also from Jabal Amel, from the village of Charqiyeh. Like my grandfather, she wasn’t born blind, but at the age of ten, while working in the fields behind an ox, she was kicked in the eyes by the animal and lost her sight. Since both my grandparents had been blind from a young age, it was difficult for them to marry in the traditional way, so their families sought to find blind partners for them, and they were married. Back then, no one questioned how they would manage their affairs or raise children.

Despite her blindness—or perhaps because of it—sitti took full charge of running the household and caring for the family. She would climb up to the exposed, unprotected roof using a wooden ladder to reach the attic, and then another to reach the roof, where she would hang laundry on the clotheslines without anyone’s help. She was a skilled cook, showering her children with love and care. She moved freely around the neighborhood, visiting her two half-sisters, the local shop, and some relatives, though she never ventured far.

That’s how my father described her to me. Unlike my grandfather, there aren’t many stories about her, just recollections of her kindness, simplicity, and strong faith. She spent much of her time praying, yet she was accepting of my father’s departure from religious practices. It saddens me that there are so few memories of her, with no specific details lodged in my father’s mind. Like many women, the details of her daily life and her personal struggles in a city that was new to her are missing. A city she didn’t know and couldn’t see, but perhaps she could feel the pulse of the neighborhoods she roamed and hear some of the noise around her. Kindness, cooking, and faith—these three words sum up my grandmother. Even when I asked my mother about her, she simply said, “She was a traditional southern woman, hard-working and humble.”

I never knew my grandmother either; she passed away in 1976. At the time, she was with my father in as-Sultaniyeh, having fled Beirut after the civil war broke out in 1975. She suffered from severe pain but, like most women, endured it in silence until my father finally took her to a nearby hospital in Tebnin village. There, the doctor informed him that she had cirrhosis of the liver. My father didn’t know what cirrhosis meant and recalls how the doctor explained it as liver cancer. There was no medication for her condition at the time, only painkillers to ease her suffering.

As the pain became unbearable, my father took her to her village, Charqiyeh, to be examined by a doctor trained in France, but by then, she was already dying. She knew it, and she tried to hide it from my father. She didn’t last long and passed away quietly. Her family wanted her buried in Charqiyeh, but my father insisted on burying her next to my grandfather in as-Sultaniyeh. To this day, he regrets that decision, of burying her far from her family and the village she belonged to.

I try to dig deep into my father’s memory, searching for more stories about her, or details of what she looked like, but very little of her memory remains. All the stories are either about my grandfather or my father. My father tells me how once my grandfather had a fight with her and sulked, bringing home a bottle of wine, which he drank along with some of his favorite foods. My grandmother remained silent, saying nothing to him. Or he tells me how she generously gave him her small share of my grandfather’s inheritance, out of sheer kindness and compassion.

Sitti, too, came from a poor ‘Amili family. Her father was taken by the Ottomans for safar barlik (forced conscription) and never returned, leaving her mother alone to raise her and her brother. Her mother eventually remarried and moved to Beirut with her new family, while my father’s uncle remained in Charqiyeh. Like my grandfather, her extended family treated them unfairly in matters of inheritance. I don’t know much about her family, only faint memories of the times my father took us to Charqiyeh to visit his uncle and cousins. My father’s uncle was a farmer who ensured all his children were educated, and they worked together in tobacco farming. My father even helped during school vacations, spending long periods with them.

My father’s uncle is the third link in my father’s memory of sitti. Whenever he mentioned her, he would also talk about her family in Charqiyeh, especially his uncle’s house, where he was raised. My father’s uncle was the father of Ali Shuaib, a martyr who led the 1973 operation to seize the Bank of America located in Downtown Beirut, in protest against American banks funding Israel’s war on Syria and Egypt.

Ali and three other militants occupied the building before he was killed by Lebanese Internal Security Forces at the Americans’ request. My father always spoke with pride and a sense of romanticism about his cousin, Ali Shuaib. As the poet Abbas Beydoun wrote in his poem “Ya Ali,” which he dedicated to Ali after his death and was sung by Marcel Khalife, my father continued to “recount the story” of his cousin the poet, who was educated in the village and later attended the Faculty of Pedagogy at the Lebanese University in Beirut.

My father tells me how he would meet with Ali and two other friends in the village of Charqiyeh to discuss politics. To my father, Ali’s views grew more radical over time, surpassing the Communist Action Organization and Socialist Lebanon, as he co-founded the Lebanese Socialist Revolutionary Movement with two other young men, aiming to fight against capitalism and religious and political feudalism. My father recalls how Ali gradually distanced himself ideologically from him and his friends, coming to believe that revolutionary violence was the only solution—and practicing it. He became, for the family, the martyr of the labor movement and the martyr of the Palestinian revolution.

It saddens me how every conversation about sitti ends with a discussion of the men in the family. How I wish I could have known her and spoken with her. I would have asked her about her life back then, hoping she could share her own stories, about the challenges she faced in the village and in Beirut, about the difficulty of living in such harsh environments, and about the stories only women recount about their lives and the men in the family. But all I have are my father’s memories, my only link to her and to my grandfather. He recounts them to me over Zoom, with my mother sitting beside him, listening quietly. Occasionally, she adds a few stories of her own, while I sit in another city, trying to grasp whatever small moments I can from their fading memories.

The Second Generation and “Arab Leftist” Ideas

My father never felt different because his parents were blind, thanks to my grandfather’s strong personality and my grandmother’s resourcefulness. What bothered him most were the comments from people who would say, “Look at this smart boy, even though his parents are blind,” or ask whether he could see. My father had deep respect for his father and appreciated his awareness. For him, his father was part of the “generation of hardship,” as he called it, who worked hard to build a family and refused to let my father drop out of school. Many from my father’s generation sold bread, as people from as-Sultaniyeh were known for selling bread in Beirut, but my father never did that—my grandfather insisted on sending him to a private school.

My father began his education at the school of Sheikh Ali Humani. There were no public schools nearby in the Shia neighborhoods, and the nearest one, the Military School, wasn’t great. Sheikh Ali Humani’s school wasn’t much better, and he charged them one franc a day. In 1957, when my father was ten years old, he found out that a new public school had opened in Msaytbeh, called al-Ghoul School. He went on his own, enrolled in the fifth grade, and only then told his father. That same year, the 1958 war broke out, suspending classes for three months and forcing them to take their Certificat exams late, in December.

Later, my father attended the newly opened Raml al-Zarif Public School, but it was terrible—there were no chairs, desks, or even chalk. Each student had to bring their own chair! My father barely learned anything that year and spent his time playing outside. My grandfather then turned to a relative who worked for the Baydoun family, who had founded the Amlieh School (named after Jabal Amel) in Ras al-Nabeh, the first school aimed at educating the Shia in Beirut, and asked him to enroll my father there.

In 1960, my father joined al-Amlieh School, and his life completely changed. From being a disinterested student, he became a serious one. Like many Shia who studied at Amlieh, his political awareness began to grow there. He and his classmates met the Marxist intellectual Waddah Sharara, their French teacher, who introduced them to the Marxist group Socialist Lebanon, where they got to know Ahmad Beydoun, Fawwaz Traboulsi, and Hassan Kobeissi—key thinkers of Socialist Lebanon and later, the Communist Action Organization.

It wasn’t unusual for my father to be part of these circles. The rapid industrial growth and rise of Beirut’s urban working class, especially after the closure of the Suez Canal in 1967, fueled demands for reforms. Many Shia, like my father, were drawn to socialist and left-wing ideologies, particularly as rural Shia regions faced neglect and Israeli hostilities triggered waves of migration to the capital between 1943 and the mid-1970s. In Beirut, most Shia found themselves living in poverty belts and working low-wage jobs, but their urban exposure further exposed them to left-wing and Palestinian movements. This period was pivotal in shaping Shia political identity, with many joining secular parties, such as the Lebanese Communist Party and Palestinian groups. The Israeli invasions of southern Lebanon in the 1970s intensified their political consciousness. As Israeli forces threatened their villages and homes, their commitment to liberation deepened—not only from internal inequalities but also from external aggression.

After school graduation, my father enrolled in the Faculty of Pedagogy at the Lebanese University in 1967, specializing in mathematics. The faculty had been established just a year earlier. It was during his time there that my father’s political involvement deepened. The faculties of law, sciences, and pedagogy became strongholds of leftist political activity among students, particularly the Faculty of Pedagogy, which attracted many poor students like my father, who had scholarships (of 200 lira, close to my grandfather’s laborer salary of 300 lira). My father fondly recalls what he calls the “golden era” of the Faculty of Pedagogy, where, during its first ten years, it “produced the most important secondary school teachers.” He smiles sadly, adding, “Most of them are retired or gone today.”

Like many leftists of that time, my father embraced slogans like freedom, equality, class struggle, resistance, and Arab nationalism. However, these ideas often remained political rhetoric rather than practices in their daily or personal lives. My father participated in labor cells aimed at organizing the growing labor force and educating workers, like his father, about their rights and methods of organizing. This was part of their broader revolutionary project for a radical transformation of Lebanese society.

But despite their search for new intellectual and organizational frameworks and their influence by Marxist thought, they never fully broke away from the values of traditional nationalist parties, which glorified leaders, the military, and the family, while upholding stereotypical roles for each individual. They prioritized political reforms over social and economic ones and never seriously addressed women’s political, economic, or social liberation. They clashed with the entrenched patriarchal political structure, which was built on the organic relationship between the state, employers, capital, and traditional unions. This led to repressive campaigns against labor, student, and teacher protests and strikes in the early 1970s.

In any case, my father’s political involvement didn’t last long. He left the organization soon after the war began in 1975, as the party took on sectarian tendencies, and as his family responsibilities grew. Not much remains of that past today. The city has changed once again, and many of its residents have become preoccupied with the daily struggles of war and, later, the illusion of rebuilding it. Yet, the weight of their experiences remains a heavy burden on them and on us.

Searching for Meaning

My father spent his life teaching in public and private schools, retiring just a few years ago. He lived and built a family in Bir al-Abd, in Dahieh (Beirut’s southern suburbs), distancing himself from the gradual changes there as Hezbollah rose, with its resistance and the social changes it engendered, paralleling the broader neoliberal shift in the city and its society. We, the grandchildren of my grandparents, grew up there, caught between different worlds: between Beirut and Dahieh, between Jabal Amel and Beirut, between the remnants of the left and tradition, between the resistance and the rejection of Hezbollah’s growing dominance, between the middle class and the obscenely wealthy. Here and there… but never truly here or there.

My father always believed that education and employment were the keys that enabled him and my grandfather to achieve upward mobility and escape poverty. However, as the years passed, we were swept up by neoliberalism, nationalist rhetoric, the fading aura of the resistance, and its current defeat. My father’s public job and its promise of social mobility no longer held any meaning since the financial collapse. The narratives that once shaped the city, nationalist or sectarian, also lost their resonance.

Many places, like Hayy al-Lija, Dahieh, and Jabal Amel, remain largely stereotyped in dominant discourses, from the “belts of misery” in the past to “Hezbollah’s stronghold” today, dehumanizing, over and over, the people inhabiting these places and flattening their complex and rich histories.

I’m not sure if my father fully grasps this. But here I am, today, like so many others, I find myself dreaming of a place that breaks the ghosts of the past and reconciles with their history. A place untouched by the dominance of capital, its various political and sectarian parties, and their long history of accumulated looting. Yet here we are, crushed again, and fleeing to different refuges and exiles. We inherited the dust of their past and failed to create a better world—a world that was never truly ours, nor theirs. Yet, despite—or perhaps because of—the weight of this legacy, we have found ways to free ourselves from it. But even as we try to break away, the destruction of the places we once called home threatens to erase our narratives. We are left searching for meaning in a shattered present and a past that might restore our collective memory and shared humanity. In the face of dehumanization, global silence, and media indifference, we hold onto our histories to preserve, rehumanize, and assert our existence and dignity.

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جنة جنة جنة يا وطنا [Paradise, Paradise, Our Country is Paradise] 

Words and the relentless music penetrate my body, inebriated and exhausted as it rests on a sofa of a semi-stranger, with the only bond we share being Syria. Night eventually descends in summery Berlin, while I am listening countless times to the song Janna Janna remixed by the Syrian-German band Shkoon.

Its beginning and end dissolve into a flow of sounds, words and beats. Darkness reaches the palm frond framing the window, its slow motion devouring every single object of that unfamiliar living room. The night is untamed, almost ruthless, in its carnivorous mission, ingesting my own body and mind, too, until now occupied by the crescendo of the synths and the pounding of the beat. The entire space and myself, the past and the present, dissipate profanely and profoundly.  

***

May 2021, Berlin, a desk

It was not the first time I listened to this song, even to this specific remixed version. As happened to a lot of the traditional musical repertoire, the piece was reinvented with new meanings in March 2011 and became the soundtrack of this historical period, the revolution, after protests sparked in Syria. The song, also, became tied to one of its uncontested icons, Abdul Baset al-Sarout, a young prominent football goalkeeper who had embraced the revolution and led the protests in Homs with his words and presence. He later turned into a Free Syrian Army fighter in the wake of the brutal repression and siege laid down by the al-Assad regime in his hometown, a transformation captured by the documentary Return to Homs by filmmaker Talal Derki. The song and its infinite re-interpretations also became the sonic landmark of my nightlife in the German capital, since my arrival in May 2018. I witnessed its innumerable metamorphosis–that did not scratch its sacred power–in the many Arab parties populating pre-pandemic Berlin. 

***

February 2019, Berlin, a nightclub

An unremarkable winter night. An electro dabke version of the song instigates a powerful energy reverberating on the dancefloor. Squeezed next to each other, partygoers are greeting each other, some others dancing and drinking, others simply chatting. The moment this song starts, this heterogeneous group becomes a single entity. My friend Azad, standing next to me, is also infected by the song and the atmosphere. He starts to shout, singing along. Holding my hand, he initiates a spontaneous dabke line where I follow his voice and body. We ignore the heat, the lack of space and oxygen; we dance, sneaking around single dancers, trying to find an empty spot for our next steps amongst the other chains of people whose hands clasp together. The song is replayed immediately, the energy still inhabiting the room with force as sweating bodies and loud voices continue to move and sing in unison. 

I did not reflect much in that moment about what was happening –as similar to other such moments punctuating my nocturnal life. I just danced, I let myself be carried away by the sound and the vibe. There was no time, space and, even, willingness to dissect the power of the song as it was all about living in the moment, savouring its addictive and hedonistic flavour like an animal starving in the middle of a dying forest. Maybe those moments on the dancefloor were just so cathartic because they were about holding onto something beautiful that was about to end or it had already ended but we were not ready to let go. 

Revolutions never last for an eternity, nor should they. Yet, those moments of pure magic can survive, or we want (we need) them to survive, not to fall down, collapse forever–and us–with them. They always remind me of Eugenio Montale’s poem, I Limoni [The Lemon Trees], his wandering in a noisy city made of cement punctuated by a moment of pure beauty as he suddenly glimpses a lemon tree hidden in the courtyard of a building. Maybe the revolution had the smell of the lemons Montale was desperately seeking, that ultimate treasure that life, the world, and nature can offer to ordinary people. Maybe the paradise–Janna Janna–was Montale’s lemon trees. 

***

October 2022, Berlin, an old kneipe

For Azad, –the friend who held my hand in captivity dancing dabke that night– the song is an allegory of his revolutionary past. Three years after that night; a lifetime after the revolution, we talk about my ideas behind this text. He smiles at me and his partner, with a hint of bitterness, saying that he forgot about that night, but he remembers the song as part of his young self reaching the square to protest, dance, listen to Janna Janna and to fulfill the promise of a different future for Syria. His enduring attempts always failed as the regime’s snipers and their bullets were always faster in dropping the curtains at these rebellious gatherings and claiming some people’s lives in the process. 

***

August 2015, Lebanon, a school courtyard

For me, that dabke reminds me of those evenings spent in the courtyard of the school in the midst of agricultural fields. Created by the Syrian community displaced from rural Homs, the school and its courtyard–situated not far from its informal settlement – became the stage for any sort of event that required a sahra [party]: celebration of an engagement, a wedding or just ordinary life. The singer with his voice and the musician with his electric piano animate those dark nights and their summer breeze amusing the usual crowd while guests arrive from far and not so far away. 

Sometimes, we just listen to his singing, making up impromptu celebratory or ironic lyrics about one of us. Other times, the electro dabke pushes us in the middle of the courtyard/dancefloor as circles of men and women, sometimes mixed, dance not far from children playing around. The atmosphere is not always joyful, nostalgia and melancholia arise amongst a tensed silent audience as his voice recalls the past and what has been lost. 

There was no revolutionary fervor in those summer evenings. Janna Janna and all the other revolutionary songs never made it to the courtyard –to be honest, the revolution seemed to have become a chimera by the time of my arrival in August 2014. Sarout was never mentioned there either. Yet, those moments also were revolutionary in their own essence: they were celebrating the ‘minor struggles’ to be alive and continue to live despite displacement and the devastation of the war. 

***

Berlin, October 2024, a bed

The dancefloor was neither the street nor the courtyard. Yet, Berlin 2019 managed to bring Syria 2011 and Lebanon 2015 back as if we were inside a half-broken TV from the nineties, in which, from time to time, one channel blended with another one –as if time and space collapse making it impossible to distinguish what we were doing, with whom, where and when. The dancefloor, after all, was just a vacuum that helped everyone postpone a sense of an ending and a future repeating an eternal past. After all, this was Berlin, it was not Sarout singing, it was only a remix. Like my friend, I also danced the night away. But that waning dusk on the sofa was different. It was not a time of reckoning the end, but a time of remembering its beginning.  

***

August 2012, London, a crowd, the Syrian embassy

Another Saturday afternoon in front of the Syrian embassy in the most imperial looking parts of Central London. ‘Janna Janna’ is filling the air of those revolutionary protests: we are not Syria, but Syria and the revolution are here. For the young and older generations of Syrians protesting from a distance, this is a moment of hope, euphoria, togetherness until then unimaginable, as fear and silence brought from Syria were carefully cultivated and generationally transmitted even in the diaspora.

I was happy to touch again those moments that were, so far, buried by the passing of time. Yet, they felt more distant than ever, belonging to a parallel universe that crashed in front of the violent reality. 

***

June 2019, Berlin, a computer screen

A week after me lying on that sofa,Sarout died after being wounded in battle between Hama and Idlib. My Facebook newsfeed becomes a reel of mourning for this man and his legacy: the video of him singing during the protests, his interviews and pictures of the funeral attended by thousands of people in Idlib. In Lebanon, members of the Syrian community I lived with commemorated his death, abandoning their usual carefulness in posting anything political and revolutionary at their own very real risk. In Berlin too, the news feels devastating––he was a symbol of the revolution, but almost an embodiment of the Syrian predicament and its contradictions. His death feels like a kitchen knife cutting deeply through the skin and flesh of a finger.

***

November 2024, Berlin

We are no longer on a dancefloor, its darkness and the darkness of the night did not protect us from the reckoning of this bitter end; there weren’t any lemon trees to uncover in any hidden corner. Like the TV of my childhood where white, black and grey lines dominated the screen, eating up one channel and the intrusive other, the feelings, people, years and places belonging to the revolution became mixed up with neither beginning nor end. A dream I did not live but watched in front of a broken TV showcasing fragments of my diaries, fieldnotes and memories. Maybe I can only archive these fragments, making some order and clarity in between these monochromatic lines as a final act of mourning, or as a way to deal with the lingering melancholia. I put a date, a place, I unpack and deconstruct the secret beauty of a lemon tree, the captivating lyrics of Janna Janna, reminding myself that even revolutionary icons like Sarout are human.

***

 7th December 2024, Berlin, Sonneallee/Arab Street,

I am walking towards Sonneallee to catch the bus to go home and watch the speech of Bashar al-Assad that never happened. My friend Nawal and I are stopped by a young boy standing in front of one of the many Syrian patisseries that found their homes in this long avenue. Wearing the Syrian revolutionary flag like the mantle of a superhero, he stands next to an old stereo singing Janna Janna, offering sweets to people passing by to celebrate the imminent fall of Bashar al-Assad. The revolutionary flag reappears in a blink of an eye, worn like an accessory by men walking in the street or attached to the Keffiyeh and the Palestinian flag at the entrance of many shops. 

The day after, even Sarout reappears in flags and posters brought by the jubilant crowd celebrating the collapse of the regime and its eternal aura. I smell again the lemon tree as Janna Janna is blasted in the middle of Kreuzberg, almost symbolizing this surreal moment of touching paradise with the point of that finger, effortlessly, at least for the here and now.

I do not know what to do with this text now that it tells a different ending written only in November from the one we witnessed more recently. I want to delete that part, but I can’t. I am tempted to rewind the tape, letting the interferences in the screen just be what they have been, without any order or logic, to preserve that revolutionary momentum as it was, as it is now, and with it, those who are not here with us, celebrating the many ways in which they also contributed to make the unimaginable and unforeseeable become history. 

This text was written prior to February 2025 and is part of the dossier “Eternity Unwoven,” curated by Veronica Ferreri and Inana Othman.

The dossier is a collaboration of Archivwar with Untoldmag and Arabpop. Its Italian version is available in Arabpop Vol. 8 “Cose” (Arabpop logo)

Graphic project: Greg Olla

The publisher remains available to rights holders regarding any images for which it was not possible to identify or contact the owners.

This project has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon Europe Resarch and Innovation Programme under the Marie Sklodowska-Curie grant agreement No. 101064513 “ARCHIVWAR – Archives in Times of War: Scattered Families and Vanishing Past in Contemporary Syria.” 

Funded by the European Union. Views and options expressed are however those of the author(s) only and do not necessarily reflect those of the European Union or the European Execute Agency. Neither the European Union nor the granting authority can be held responsible for them.

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