Social Theory: Yassin Al Haj Saleh

20th Oct 2022 by Simon Mabon

By Fadi Nicholas Nassar, Director of the Institute for Social Justice and Conflict Resolution and Assistant Professor in Political Science and International Affairs at the Lebanese American University. 

Much of social and political theory is borne out of the struggle to not only bear witness to the presence of injustice in our world, but to subvert its varied and often compounded grip on our lives and futures.  Whether it is to make life more free, bearable, inclusive, equitable, or just, social theory is centered in answering existential issues that tear at the human condition. In the end, it is its people-centric roots that have allowed for its transformative applications across time and space. One still has much to learn reading Hannah Arendt, Angela Davis, Aimé Césaire…in the Middle East today. Of course, the applications of this knowledge extend beyond the particular area of focus of these intellectuals—there are methods, ways of looking at the world and our place in it, approaches to identifying oppression and working towards freedom from it, that matter.  

The Middle East is certainly a region where such social discourses resonate so profoundly, but it is also one that has much to teach the world. Momentous phenomena, such as protracted authoritarianism, revolutions in spite of them, inflexible counter-revolutionary movements, or the consequences of impunity and selective justice, not only have such critical impacts on those living through them, they also draw attention to larger social and political axioms that govern our world. Not since Edward Said has an intellectual from the Middle East helped the world see itself by looking at the region as the Syrian intellectual and dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh. Al-Haj Saleh’s rebuking of neo-orientalists, on the right and left, that seek to represent others they believe cannot represent themselves, speaks to the urgency of returning to the heart of social and political theory—the pursuit of truth, not as an academic exercise, but as a struggle for freedom—and the need to center the voices working towards that liberation. Indeed, it is the ‘dialectics of struggle’, Said reminds us, that distinguishes “The Wretched of the Earth” from “Madness and Civilization”, and Frantz Fanon’s active commitment to an ongoing, collective struggle as opposed to Michel Foucault’s scholastic tradition of ‘acquiring a reputation for learning, brilliance…’ that makes the work the more significant of the two.[1] In a similar vein, Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s work and life, cannot be separated into distinct theoretical and practical domains, and his disruption of what has become a disciplinary norm, presses us to question whether the field of Middle Eastern studies, so inspired by Said, has followed the tradition of the early Foucault or that of Fanon.  

Main Argument: The Dialectics of Struggle 

Almost every profile of Yassin al-Haj Saleh, starts off with a brief allusion to the 16 years in which he was imprisoned in Syria for his political convictions. The theft of a man’s youth in a sentence. But it is the Syrian prison—the suppression of freedom; the normalization of torture and violence; the manufacturing of fear and weaponizing of trauma to suffocate trust and pit those trapped in its grasp against one another—that defines the authoritarianism of Assad’s rule. And it is the extraordinary defiance of victims and survivors of such monstrosities and the ongoing struggle for freedom and justice that is the conscience of the Syrian Revolution.[2]

The Revolution Made Impossible 

As brave Iranians put their bodies and lives on the line resisting the Islamic Republic, it is a cruel mockery that the Syrian Revolution and al-Haj Saleh’s nuanced account of the challenges it endured, is misconstrued to portray the Iranian regime as inevitable and a people’s revolution for freedom, impossible. The Syrian Revolution did not fail; the world continues to fail Syria. In turn, the absence of any meaningful effort to remedy that failure and effectively respond to authoritarian violence, impunity, and the false politics of inevitability, threatens us all. Al-Haj Saleh’s “The Impossible Revolution” is a testimony against that nihilism, offering a detailed portrayal of how decisions, actions, and inactions by the various stakeholders involved in the Syrian tragedy exacerbated structural vulnerabilities and spawned new ones to work against a people’s freedom movement. But al-Haj Saleh’s book, written in Syria, is not a history of the revolution—it is a living contribution to the revolution. In his review of the book, Sune Haugbolle really captures that underlying spirit of how al-Haj Saleh is not ‘thinking about the revolution’, but ‘thinking with it.’ [3] It’s a point that speaks to the growing disconnect in academia and brings us back to that distinction between Fanon and Foucault.We cannot write about injustice and oppression and the struggle to subvert them without ensuring our words aim to work towards that freedom. That is the responsibility of intellectuals. Not only to speak truth to power. But to fight for the triumph of truth.  

Neo-orientalism and the Pitfalls of Anti-imperialism

How unfortunate it is, that the intellectual who insisted upon the sanctity of that responsibility continues to be no friend of the Syrian Revolution. In his blistering critique of Noam Chomsky’s engagement on Syria, al-Haj Saleh evidences the failure of Chomsky to “speak the truth and to expose lies” [4] and draws attention to the discontents of ‘anti-imperialistic’ frameworks that orbit exclusively around imperial power and render invisible all outside it. As al-Haj Saleh writes, Chomsky “…views the Syrian struggle — as with every other struggle — solely through the frame of American imperialism. He is thus blind to the specificities of Syria’s politics, society, economy and history.” 

Al-Haj Saleh’s critique presses Chomsky to explain—which he has yet to— his tepid condemnation of Assad, invisiblizing of Syrians, endorsement of conspiracy theorists that have denied mass atrocities, and rigid framework based off an epistemology that has no interest in truth or evidence, and instead relies on ideology rather than methods that involve the participation of those affected by the phenomena he seeks to explain. Not only does al-Haj Saleh call out how Chomsky’s fixed gaze on U.S. interventions in the region deprioritizes the Assad regime and relativizes its crimes, he makes clear that “[t]he monstrous character of the regime is the central fact of this conflict, indeed of Syria’s history since 1970. It is the key to understanding the country’s continuing catastrophe and the root of everything else.”

What’s more, his critique does not let Chomsky or his narrow anti-imperialism off the hook in offering no solutions for the survivors of such monstrosity and for failing to acknowledge their agency, autonomy, and legitimate struggle for dignity and freedom. [5] Chomsky, he argues, “…is instead guided by a dead system that is unresponsive to people’s legitimate desire not to live under violent tyranny or to the scale of human suffering and pain inflicted upon them when they act upon that desire.” In a time of monsters, it is al-Haj Saleh who insists upon the responsibility of intellectuals to speak the truth and expose lies. 

In Application: ‘Syria is the World’ 

Yassin al-Haj Saleh bears witness to the dysfunctions of our world, the cruelty of its exclusions, and the unravelling of solidarities [6] in the face of such existential doom. Syrians’ ‘struggle for life’, al-Haj Saleh explains, was ‘impossibly destroyed’ by a collective dehumanization of Syrians. It is not just that local, regional, global, and intellectual hegemons refused to see the value in Syrians’ right to freedom and dignity, let alone to life; the universal implications of the deprivation of these rights and the normalization of such injustice continue to be ignored. Like a germ, the intention to either silence the voices of the oppressed or remain silent to their collective suffering has infected our international system. For if concepts of justice are the cornerstones of our societies, the fate of our connected futures are inevitably tied to the moral compromises allowed in any system. With a prophetic vision reminiscent of Yeat’s “Second Coming”, al-Haj Saleh warns us all: “Syria is a worldless microcosm, and I think we are now seeing a Syrianized world failing itself the way Syrians were failed, left to be massacred, dehumanized, and rendered superfluous, to use Arendt’s terminology.”

Yassin al-Haj Saleh does more than draw attention to Syria, he introduces a way to think about Syria that can transform social and political theory and the broader dialectics of struggle by bridging the existing gap between ‘the political’ and ‘the ethical.’ [7] Notably, his critique of Chomsky and his dead system of thought would resurface following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. Once again, similar elements about this dehumanizing approach to anti-imperialism would come to light: the refusal to acknowledge the legitimate freedom struggle of Ukrainians and the injustice they are confronting, the arrogance to dictate to Ukrainians what a just struggle is or is not, the minimizing of imperialisms and violence not caused by the United States or its allies, and the dearth of engagement with local sources or voices. [8] It is for these reasons, that in his own analysis on Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, al-Haj Saleh upholds that “Ukraine is a Syrian cause. So is the world.” The question, he leaves us ashamed to answer, when will Syria be our cause? [9]   

An Issue to be Aware of: More than a Witness

Yassin al-Haj Saleh asks us to look at Syria, its pain, its struggle, its trauma, its people, and their fundamental right to dignity and freedom. He forces us to grapple with the failure of our global solidarities and intellectual institutions to ensure those freedoms, protect those rights, and prevent the horrors that have come to define our world. And it is his words and his defiant life that give hope in a world of such monstrous despair. A hope grounded, not in romanticized ideologies or empty slogans, but in a genuine appreciation for the extraordinary power of ordinary people and their fight for nothing short of their collective freedom.But, as I hope I have tried to make clear, he also presents a theory of liberation that is rooted in people, not ideology. It is a theory that demands we center the oppressed in our methods and our focus as we position them as the primary audience of our work.

At the heart of any such people-centric approach to the dialectics of struggle is a respect for voices closer to the ground as ‘partners’ in theorizing about our shared world and more than sources of information to better understand particular struggles. De-colonizing social theory, in other words, requires meaningful commitments to learn from, rather than just study, the Middle East and other regions marginalized from global knowledge production. As Yassin al-Haj puts it: “We, as Syrians, are allowed to be “witnesses”: we can give testimony, we can tell our own stories, but it is always at a low level of knowledge, below the level of theorizing or conceptualizing about phenomena. In my work, I try to challenge that.” In doing so, he offers us the only future possible. 

References

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “A Critique of Solidarity.” Al-Jumhuriya, May 13, 2022. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2018/05/18/a-critique-of-solidarity/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. Bil-Khalas Ya Shabab! 16 ‘Aman Fi Al-Sujun Al-Suriyya [Salvation, Oh Youths! 16 Years in Syria’s Prisons]. Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2012. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “Chomsky Is No Friend of the Syrian Revolution.” New Lines Magazine, March 18, 2022. https://newlinesmag.com/review/chomsky-is-no-friend-of-the-syrian-revolution/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “Selective Solidarity,” Medico International, May 18, 2022. https://www.medico.de/en/selective-solidarity-18594.

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “Surviving monstrosities: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh.” Al-Jumhuriya, June 25, 2020. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2020/06/25/surviving-monstrosities-interview-yassin-al-haj-saleh/.

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy. London: C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd, 2017.

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “The struggle for life: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh.” Al-Jumhuriya, May 16,2021. https://www.yassinhs.com/2021/03/16/the-struggle-for-life-an-interview-with-yassin-al-haj-saleh/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. "‘We, As Syrians, Are Allowed to be ‘Witnesses.’", ArabLit Quarterly, September 30, 2020. https://arablit.org/2020/09/30/yassin-al-haj-saleh-we-as-syrians-are-allowed-to-be-witnesses/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “Why Ukraine is a Syrian Cause.” Democracy for the Arab World Now (DAWN). March 5, 2022. https://dawnmena.org/why-ukraine-is-a-syrian-cause/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “Worldless Syria: Depopulated discourses and denied agency.”Al-Jumhuriya, July 10, 2021. https://www.yassinhs.com/2021/07/10/worldless-syria-depopulated-discourses-and-denied-agency/.

Bohdan Kukharskyy et al., “Open Letter to Noam Chomsky (and Other like-Minded Intellectuals) on the Russia-Ukraine War,” e-flux, May 23, 2022. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-other-like-minded-intellectuals-on-the-russia-ukraine-war.

Chomsky, Noam. "A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals." The New York Review of Books, (February 23, 1967). 

Haugbolle, Sune. "The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy." Race & Class 60, no. 1 (2018): 93–96. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818771274. 

Jonny Diamond, “A Ukrainian Translator of Noam Chomsky Responds to His Recent Comments on the Russian Invasion.,” Literary Hub, March 3, 2022. https://lithub.com/a-ukrainian-translator-of-noam-chomsky-responds-to-his-recent-comments-on-the-russian-invasion.   

Recommended Readings

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “A Letter to the Progressive International.” Al-Jumhuriya, April 24, 2022. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2020/09/21/letter-progressive-international/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. Al-sir ʿala qadam wahida [Walking on one foot]. Beirut: Dar al-Adab li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawziʾa, 2012.

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. "Anatomy of Tadamon Massacre, Damascus, 2013." Journal of Genocide Research, (2022): 1–12. https://doi.org/10.1080/14623528.2022.2114665.  

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “An Interview with Yassin Al-Haj Saleh on The Role of Culture in Syria’s Struggle.” The New Inquiry, November 25, 2015. https://thenewinquiry.com/three-monsters/.  

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. Asatir al-akharin: Naqd al-islam al-muʾasir wa-naqd naqdihi [Legend of the others: Critique of contemporary Islam and critique of its critique]. Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2011.

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. "From Genocide to Permanent Security and from Identity to Politics." International Politics Reviews, (2022): 1-6. https://doi.org/10.1057/s41312-022-00132-6. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “Letters to Samira (8): Four Years, Four Words.” Al-Jumhuriya, February 5, 2022. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2018/12/05/letters-to-samira-8-four-years-four-words/.  

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. "L’Univers des Anciens Prisonniers Politiques en Syrie." Revue des mondes musulmans et de la Méditerranée, no. 115-116 (2006): 249–65. https://doi.org/10.4000/remmm.3037.   

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “The Greater Jail: The Politics of Prison in Syria.” Al-Jumhuriya, April 24, 2022. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2021/02/19/greater-jail-politics-prison-syria/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. The Syrian Shabiha and Their State—Statehood and Participation. In Heinrich Böll Stiftung Perspectives. Berlin: HBS. March 3, 2014.  http://lb.boell.org/en/2014/03/03/syrian-shabiha-and-their-state-statehood-participation. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. “The Ukrainian-Syrian-Russian Triangle and the World.” Al-Jumhuriya, April 21, 2022. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2022/03/25/the-ukrainian-syrian-russian-triangle-and-the-world/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. "Towards an Appropriate Politics of Engagement with Nusra Front." Al-Jumhuriya, January 22, 2013. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2013/01/22/towards-an-appropriate-politics-of-engagement-with-nusra-front/. 

Al-Haj Saleh, Yassin. "The Syrian Cause and Anti-Imperialism." Translated by Yaaser Azzayyaat. Al-Jumhuriya, May 13, 2022. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2017/02/24/the-syrian-cause-and-anti-imperialism/.  

[1] For more on Edward Said’s reflections, refer to: Edward W. Said, “The Shadow of the West,” in Power, Politics and Culture: Interviews with Edward W. Said, edited by Gauri Viswanathan (New York: Vintage Books, 2002).

[2]  After fifteen years of imprisonment, Al-Haj Saleh was asked by the Syrian authorities to spy on the opposition. He refused. As punishment, he was jailed in the notorious Tadmor Prison forced to endure what he describes as hell. For more on Al-Saleh’s, reflections on his imprisonment and the carceral state in Syria, refer to Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, Bil-Khalas Ya Shabab! 16 ‘Aman Fi Al-Sujun Al-Suriyya. [Salvation, Oh Youths! 16 Years in Syria’s Prisons]. (Beirut: Dar al-Saqi, 2012).

[3]  “Thinking with the revolution involves an attempt to give voice to the desires and hopes of revolutionaries, and to relay the contradictions and challenges that developed in the clash with the Syrian regime, the militarisation of the revolution, the growing Islamist dominance, and the imperialist interventions in the conflict by regional and global powers. It is both an intellectual and personal journey through its frenzy and ultimate tragedy, as it developed from a broad popular ‘revolution of the common people’, as Saleh describes it in the opening essay of June 2011, to become an orgy of ‘militant nihilism’, the title of an essay written just one year later.”  Sune Haugbolle, "The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy." Race & Class 60, no. 1 (2018): 93. https://doi.org/10.1177/0306396818771274. 

[4] Noam Chomsky, "A Special Supplement: The Responsibility of Intellectuals." The New York Review of Books, (February 23, 1967).

[5] “The ossification of Chomsky’s system of thought explains the paradox of labeling the regime brutal and monstrous without being able to say one positive sentence about any of those who have been struggling against it.” Yassin Al-Haj Saleh. “Chomsky Is No Friend of the Syrian Revolution.” New Lines Magazine, March 18, 2022. https://newlinesmag.com/review/chomsky-is-no-friend-of-the-syrian-revolution/.

[6] For more on al-Haj Saleh’s critique of solidarity, see: “What was valuable in the concept of solidarity was the framework of worldwide responsibility, breaking down the segregation of human pains from one another. What could retain this value is transcending solidarity to partnership in a world that today progressively forms a single framework of responsibility, but still provides levels of freedom and capability of utmost disparity.” Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, “A Critique of Solidarity.” Al-Jumhuriya, May 13, 2022. https://aljumhuriya.net/en/2018/05/18/a-critique-of-solidarity/. 

[7] For more on al-Haj Saleh’s analysis of bridging the political and the ethical, refer to: Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, “The struggle for life: An interview with Yassin al-Haj Saleh.” Al-Jumhuriya, May 16,2021. https://www.yassinhs.com/2021/03/16/the-struggle-for-life-an-interview-with-yassin-al-haj-saleh/. 

[8]  See for example, Bohdan Kukharskyy et al., “Open Letter to Noam Chomsky (and Other Like-Minded Intellectuals) on the Russia-Ukraine War,” e-flux, May 23, 2022. https://www.e-flux.com/notes/470005/open-letter-to-noam-chomsky-and-other-like-minded-intellectuals-on-the-russia-ukraine-war and Jonny Diamond, “A Ukrainian Translator of Noam Chomsky Responds to His Recent Comments on the Russian Invasion.,” Literary Hub, March 3, 2022. https://lithub.com/a-ukrainian-translator-of-noam-chomsky-responds-to-his-recent-comments-on-the-russian-invasion.   

[9] For more on his critique of the selective solidarity following Russian’s invasion of Ukraine, consult: Yassin Al-Haj Saleh, “Selective Solidarity,” Medico International, May 18, 2022. https://www.medico.de/en/selective-solidarity-18594.