Damascus has fallen. As soon as once more. One of many oldest cities on the earth has fallen. To rise once more from its rubble, heralding a brand new order. In its rise and fall, Damascus has classes for all civilisations, all rebels, and all regimes.

It was in July 2012 that rebels penetrated Damascus, hitherto thought-about inviolable. Each the regime and the rebels understood its significance—army and symbolic. The rebels superior to the closely militarised capital of Syria however didn’t make any actual features. A yr later, in August 2013, the Syrian regime launched Operation Capital Defend. The capital needed to be shielded, and any quantity of power was acceptable to thwart any insurgent assault. Town was safeguarded by way of using disproportionate power towards rebels working from round Damascus. Solely quickly so. Eleven years later, the regime has fallen. For the sixth time, not less than, because the 1st century AD Roman conquest of Damascus’s Seleucid empire.

The Cycle Of Energy

Not solely has Damascus seen violent regime adjustments, it has additionally skilled ethnic and non secular clashes, together with the Crusades. However in virtually each important conflict—civilisational or political—one factor has stayed frequent: recapturing of the misplaced floor. The cyclical nature of energy. The centuries-old unabated contestation on the socio-political turf of Damascus has outlined its character. The present developments in Syria, due to this fact, should be examined by way of a extra expansive glass of historical past and tradition.

Peter Frankopan’s The Silk Roads underscores the significance of Damascus as an emporium adjoining to one of the crucial thriving commerce routes of the world. Regardless of no quick access to the Mediterranean Sea, it was within the league of nice cosmopolitan cities such because the Byzantine Constantinople (Istanbul), the Greco-Roman Antioch, and the previous Chinese language capital metropolis of Chang’an. Its early embrace of agricultural practices owing to the pure inland water techniques of the Barada River and investments in irrigation infrastructure made Damascus a land of a lot. 

Even on the peak of Christian-Muslim spiritual clashes across the tenth century AD, merchants had a breezy time in Damascus. Muslim merchants from Spain, for instance, have been protected by the Christians of Damascus. For one of many oldest inhabited cities of the world, with no spiritual underpinnings originating from any spiritual textual content, commerce was very important. Merchants, the outsiders, have been due to this fact resistant to the native political and non secular strife. Damascene society relied on the “outsiders” to retain its regional energy as a seat of sociocultural dominance. Damascus, as perceived immediately, is actually a results of 4 centuries of Ottoman rule that got here to an finish with the First World Struggle. Town was the seat of the Turkish Wali. 

Lands Of ‘Outsiders’

Damascus, curiously, wasn’t dominated by a neighborhood dynasty ever because the overthrow of the Aram-Damascus kingdom within the eighth century BC. This characteristic makes Damascus nearer to Delhi than its Phoenician, Judean, and Arab neighbours. The “outsiders” quickly began changing into the insiders, and the town developed. Delhi has this in frequent with Damascus and classes from the latter are, due to this fact, pertinent to us.

The Assad regime’s rise and fall alerts us to the constraints of liberalism when it stays throughout the elite confines. It’s all the time susceptible to crumbling underneath the burden of in style mobilisation. The mainstay of Syria’s multicultural nature was consociational engagements between totally different ethno-religious teams at totally different occasions in historical past. The Assad regime’s politicisation of the Syrian society’s multiculturalism was self-serving. After the army coup of 1970 that put in Hafez al-Assad as a totalitarian ruler, all types of dissent started to be crushed, satirically, by the ruling Ba’ath Get together, the regional champion of dissenters within the Arab world.

When liberalism will get weaponised thus, it spells doom for not simply the conservatives but additionally the quintessential liberal values. Bashar al-Assad carried ahead this legacy of his father with extra zeal and ruthlessness. The riot towards him, due to this fact, must be seen as not solely political but additionally socio-religious. The Sunni Muslims of Syria, the bulk group, clearly had had sufficient of the marginalisation heaped on them by the Alawite (Shia) Assad household and their acolytes. 

Liberalism And Liberals

This could seem acquainted to us. The undermining of liberal values by liberals themselves, the ascent of conservative forces, the politics of exclusion, and the numerous fires of violent ethno-religious clashes, we have now seen all of it. Politics of exclusion, even when probably the most inclusionary gamers bask in it, by no means ends nicely. The civil battle in Syria must be seen as one other component within the continuum that has the return of the Taliban in Afghanistan, the Islamic Revolution of Iran of 1979, the reactionary overthrow of the Kemalist order in Turkey by Erdogan, and the autumn of Sheikh Hasina in Dhaka as landmark occasions.

Instantly after the autumn of Damascus, scenes of celebrations (and looting) began flooding the information and social media. Impervious to them, Israel moved to plant its flag past the sooner buffer zone. And that is the lesson Delhi’s regime and rebels should pay heed to.

(Nishtha Gautam is a Delhi-based creator and educational.) 

Disclaimer: These are the private opinions of the creator