Syria’s new strongman, Ahmed Hussein al-Charaa, who abandoned his nom de guerre, al-Joulani, and now wears a tie, received the heads of French and German diplomacy on January 3. One is a man, the other a woman. One, Jean-Noël Barrot, was able to be greeted according to custom, the other, Annalena Baerbock, was kept at a physical distance. You don’t touch – not even your hand – a woman who is neither your mother, nor your wife, nor your sister. In the name of pragmatism, the European delegations preferred to kick in: they would have preferred a formal handshake, but that was not the “purpose” of the visit, says Barrot (we do not make an official trip just to shake the hands of sinners!) and Baerbock simply says that she does not agree. And boom in your trimmed beard!
Two days later, we learned that the new Minister of Justice, Shadi al-Waisi, was in the Idlib region during the time of the al-Nostra brigade led by al-Joulani, responsible for the shooting death of at minus two women for “corruption and prostitution”, chilling images in support. It was the time before, other jurisdictions, other customs – minimal commentary on Syrian Islamist governance but still acceptable, tie-dye tactics required. No big deal, don’t shy away from your pleasure, no one has yet massacred Christians, Kurds or locked women in shrouds of obliteration, a burning fir tree, a few abuses, it’s nothing, just think, that Bashar al-Assad is gone and Joulani-Charaa promises: okay, elections in four years; OK, a Constitution to rewrite, a thousand things promised and nothing is due yet, but still. You have to grit your teeth and accept other customs, other cultures, other ways of doing things. But what to do with school textbooks quickly rewritten by Islamists with trimmed beards? What to do with the “defense of the nation” replaced by the “defense of God”, with the disappearance of pre-Islamic history? What to do with the end of the theory of evolution? What to do about this poor education of Syrian children?
It is true that demonstrations have broken out here and there to express the refusal of the Islamist-style rewriting, but for how long will these demonstrations be authorized? Time to lift sanctions, bring back capital, fully relaunch diplomacy? And after? Will it be enough to bite our fingers to see the scam? The worst is perhaps the delusional desire of too many geopolitical commentators to defend the “transitional Islamist government” as if not doing so was a sign of intolerance, an acceptance of hated Western domination. We must show progressive white credentials, distinguish the conservatism of the entire region, Christians, Druzes, Kurds included, from the big bad jihadism, repeat that many veiled women from the conservative Sunni bourgeoisie work, that Syrian women are not the same, they are not like “the others”. This is exactly what was said about Iranian women in 1979, who had actively participated in the Islamic revolution and who protested en masse and in huge demonstrations against the imposition of the veil and Sharia law and, strong women or not, politicized women or not, they were swallowed up by the Islamism in power.
I do not agree with all these beautiful people who flock to who is the most tolerant, the most confident in the Islamized future by imagining that it is possible, despite the Islamic Republic of Iran, despite Erdogan, despite all the miserably failed attempts of Islamist governments, Mohamed Morsi in Egypt, Rached Ghannouchi in Tunisia, that Islamism and democracy, that Islamism and living better, studying better, working better, breathing better, hoping better have the shred of a chance of being compatible. In the name of cultural relativism which is an assignment at birth, in the name of everyone doing as their culture commands them, we reduce a woman to being a taboo on legs, we criminalize the body, we confuse ideology and religion, faith and dogma , law and prohibition, pragmatism and blindness. Syria is condemned to darkness with the flower in the corner of ignorance.
Abnousse Shalmani, committed against the obsession with identity, is a writer and journalist
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