هذا التقرير متاح أيضًا بـ العربية
The liberation of Damascus was an extraordinary moment, both personally and for the rapid transformations it set in motion across the region. To understand its significance, however, we must place the event in its broader historical context. That is why I turned to historian Dr. Bashir Nafi, whose work offers a lens for examining how Damascus has shaped the political history of the Middle East — and how that history continues to inform the region’s present.
Nafi has spent decades studying the history of the Levant and the formation of its modern states, while living through the successive Arab defeats that shaped his generation’s experience. Born in Rafah refugee camp to a Palestinian family displaced from al-Faluja, he later taught Islamic and Middle Eastern history at Birkbeck, University of London. He served as a senior researcher at the Al Jazeera Center for Studies. His research has focused on the modern history of the Levant, Arab nationalism, the Palestinian cause and Islamic movements — questions that remain central to understanding the region’s conflicts and political transformations. He has written several influential works on these subjects.
In this interview, we examine the historical roots of the divergent paths Turkey and the Arab East took in forming their modern states, and ask whether the regional order established after the First World War can now be reshaped.
I want to begin with Syria’s liberation, Dr. Nafi. After decades of studying the history of Bilad al-Sham and following the pivotal events that have shaped the Mashriq, what thoughts and reflections come to mind as you see Damascus today? How might this moment influence regional stability and prospects, both positively and negatively? What does this moment mean to you, both as a historian and as someone who has witnessed the region’s successive turning points? This moment can inspire hope and a sense of possibility for the region’s future.
Damascus has haunted me for a very long time. As a historian, whenever I set out to research or write about Damascus, or Bilad al-Sham more broadly, I struggle internally to preserve my objectivity—to approach events, personalities, and questions with the neutrality the historian’s craft demands.
But let me try, with as little detail as possible, to explain how I understand what has happened in Syria over the past two years.
The overthrow of the Assad regime was, first and foremost, a victory for the Syrian people. It also confirmed something I have long believed: that the outbreak of the Arab revolutionary movement in 2011 marked the beginning of the end of an entire era in the history of the Mashriq and the opening of a transition towards another. Given these historical shifts, what plausible future scenarios exist for the region’s political landscape? How might the lessons from Turkey’s and Syria’s trajectories inform regional prospects for stability, reform, and potential conflict? Exploring these connections can deepen understanding of regional dynamics.
At another level, Syria’s liberation from the former regime can be understood as an extraordinary step towards restoring the country to its historical trajectory. This can motivate the audience to see Syria’s future as a collective opportunity for renewal and stability.
This was a great victory for the Syrian people and for a will forged through nearly a decade and a half of bitter struggle. It also corrected an extraordinarily costly deviation in Syria’s history — one that had subjected the country, for decades, to the rule of a minority regime that was profoundly hostile to the heritage and values of the Syrian people.
A question has often occupied my mind after years of exile in Turkey: What factors made the trajectory of the Turkish Republic differ so greatly from the trajectories and directions of the Arab states, which were also part of the Ottoman Empire, especially regarding the nature of their systems of government? Turkey went through a period of coups and did not emerge in its current form except after long years of suffering, yet the state — even in its harshest and most overbearing moments — was never a fascist police state like most of our Arab states. Turkey’s transition to democracy also did not require bloody revolutions and civil wars, offering a hopeful example for regional development.
Like you, this paradox has long intrigued me, and perhaps the failed coup attempt in Turkey in 2016 prompted me to try to answer this particularly complex question.
I believe modern Turkey did not experience a decisive rupture between the Ottoman order and the republican state. The Arab states of the Mashriq, by contrast, were almost all subjected to foreign colonial rule, and their state institutions were, to a significant extent, products of the colonial order. This helps explain why the Turkish civil and military bureaucracy developed a relatively more rational character than its Arab counterpart.
Historians of modern Turkey have often overlooked that Mustafa Kemal and the leadership of the Republican People’s Party had already decided to move from one-party rule toward political pluralism in 1938, just months before his death.
Mustafa Kemal toured several Turkish provinces and returned deeply troubled by what he had witnessed: the living conditions of ordinary citizens and the republican state’s failure to improve the country’s circumstances and advance its society.
At a meeting of the ruling party’s leadership, party and state officials concluded that Turkey’s economic and social backwardness was partly the result of the heavy burden the state imposed, which had constrained society’s capacity for initiative and creativity. They therefore saw the solution in dismantling the one-party system and introducing political pluralism.
Mustafa Kemal’s death, followed by the outbreak of the Second World War, postponed that transition until the war’s end. Turkey nevertheless experienced a series of military coups between 1960 and the mid-1990s — overt or indirect, most of them during the Cold War. Yet these interventions were generally followed relatively quickly by a return to civilian government and political pluralism.
The republican Turkish state, like its Arab counterparts, sought to dominate and control society. But the balance between state authority and social forces remained comparatively more moderate than in most Arab states. Particularly after independence from direct colonial rule, many Arab governments pursued an aggressive effort to weaken and control social forces, both traditional and modern.
Turkey offers a telling example. The republican state could not abolish the waqf system for more than two or three years in the late 1920s before social pressure compelled it to reverse course. In contrast, most Arab states sought to bring the waqf sector under state control, either directly or indirectly.
I believe a second important factor was that the republican Turkish state was born with deep self-confidence. This stemmed not only from Turkey’s size, geographical position and demographic weight, but also from the fact that it had escaped direct foreign domination. The consciousness of being the heir to a six-century-old empire also became deeply embedded in the country’s collective identity.
Arab states, by contrast, emerged from independence with weaker self-confidence. Foreign powers had largely drawn their borders, and their ruling elites faced, from the outset—for geopolitical, economic, and demographic reasons—a persistent sense of vulnerability and threat.
The third factor, undoubtedly, was the establishment of Israel in the heart of the Arab Mashriq and the prolonged climate of insecurity created by Israeli expansionism.
You have previously argued that Aleppo was marginalized after the collapse of its historical economic hinterland, cut off from its markets in Anatolia and Iraq and reduced from a major regional center to a city within a relatively small republic, losing much of its industrial and commercial weight.
Today, however, Turkish-Syrian cooperation appears to be opening new possibilities. Plans include establishing industrial zones on both sides of the border, while Ankara and Damascus have agreed to revive the Hejaz railway. Could these developments mark a broader regional transformation and help restore some of the historical economic links that once connected the region’s cities? Or do modern political borders and other contemporary constraints still limit the possibility of such a revival?
I have always believed, and I would like to repeat today, that the post-World War I regional order was the greatest catastrophe to befall the peoples and countries of the Mashriq since the Islamic conquests. There is a long history of tribal migrations and population shifts, of intermarriage, connection, and alliance, of trade and the movement of crafts and industries, of the travels of scholars, schools of thought, Sufis, and pilgrims — all of which together made this Mashriq stretching from the Black Sea to the Gulf of Aden and from Isfahan to Cairo.
Behind all of that, we are all heirs to layers of Islamic imperial legacies, one accumulated upon another, for more than 1,400 years. With the fall of the Ottoman order, the creation of modern nation-states, and the drawing of arbitrary borders that separated those states, we were forced to abandon the imperial inheritances that had shaped our history, our economy, our social patterns, and our vision of ourselves and the world.
After more than a century of life under the weight of the post-World War I regional order, there is growing awareness among Arabs, Turks, Kurds, and perhaps even among Iranians, that there is no way out of the condition of instability, constant internal regional friction, and the inability to achieve economic and social advancement without trying to overcome the heavy consequences of the post-World War I order.
That, in my view, is what is driving the return today of trade-route projects from the Gulf coast to the Syrian coast, railway lines from Istanbul to Jeddah and from Basra to Turkey’s Mediterranean coast, efforts to revive oil pipelines between Iraq and Turkey and between Iraq and Syria, and perhaps even thinking about a gas pipeline between Qatar and Syria.
All of this is taking place amid a state of continuous war for the past three years, affecting all the countries of the Mashriq in one way or another. In other words, we are living through an intense struggle between forces working to preserve the order of fragmentation and internal regional rivalry, and forces seeking to overcome the catastrophe of the past hundred years. And I am certain the latter forces will ultimately impose their will.
Do you see the change in Damascus today as truly an advanced step toward the flourishing of Syrian society, or will it merely be another phase in a recurring pattern of changing the form of power? What makes this transformation different this time from the situation after independence, for example?
Yes, I believe the major turning point in December 2024 has opened a new phase of freedom, prosperity, and renewal across Syria—politically, culturally, economically, and socially.
The political system that may emerge in the new Syria is still unclear. So far, there are no clear indications that serious dialogue on the constitution and the future political system has begun. But I do not believe such a dialogue will be delayed for long. Ultimately, Syrians will reach an appropriate understanding of the state and its system of government, along with the economic, judicial, legal, and educational frameworks that follow from it, as well as the country’s foreign relations.
What you point to — Syria’s prolonged experience, since independence, of instability, uncertainty and successive, often forced, transitions — is certainly true. But the new Syria also understands the lessons of that history.
The Syrian elite has expanded in ways that were previously unimaginable. Through years of revolution, displacement, migration and exile, Syrians have accumulated a wealth of political, cultural and economic experience and developed new capacities that will shape the country’s path of renewal.
All of this will contribute to Syria’s future. One thing is clear: Syria can no longer return to what it once was.
Looking at the structure of Syrian society over the past 15 years, we see two contradictory pictures, and focusing on either one points to a different path toward the future: The first concerns the fragmentation, dispersal, and divisions of society, while the second concerns the thousands of Syrians who have gone through new experiences, learned, and acquired expertise. Which of the two, in your view, will be more influential in the country’s future?
The second, certainly. Fragmentation and division are phenomena, or perhaps transitional phases. To a large extent, they were products of the exclusionary, one-dimensional state and the systems of repression and control that shaped Syria, particularly from the early 1960s onwards.
With the fall of the former regime, Syria’s efforts to address questions surrounding its diverse communities, open public space to different voices, and redefine the relationship between the state and the groups that make up Syrian society can begin to restore the country’s social bonds and cohesion.
But this will not happen overnight. Much will depend on whether Syrians can reach a broad consensus on the country’s political future, make meaningful progress towards rebuilding civil peace, revive economic growth, and stabilize Syria’s relations with its Arab and Islamic neighbors.
Can we say that Syria has successfully passed through the most difficult phase in rebuilding civil peace? And how do you assess the way the forces that emerged victorious have dealt with the legacy of violence, violations, and sectarian tensions? To what extent have they been able to approach these challenges through the institutions and logic of the state, while addressing the concerns of Syria’s different communities and political forces?
Yes, Syria has passed through the most dangerous phase in the process of rebuilding civil peace. The events that unfolded during the first six months of last year in the Alawite coastal region and in Sweida were undoubtedly painful — profoundly so. But when viewed within the longer arc of Syrian history, they may perhaps be understood as an expression of a form of social score-settling, however painful, that had accumulated over decades of repression, persecution and the destruction of the country’s social fabric.
The considerable restraint and pragmatism with which the self-administration in al-Jazira and northeastern Syria was handled may likewise signal the new governing order’s rapid maturation.
Yet no one can predict with certainty what choices Syria will ultimately make in rebuilding the state or what form its system of government will take. State-building is a long journey, and it must begin with a broad national dialogue — one that brings together the Syrian majority alongside the country’s various communities and political forces.
You once said that Israel lost Syria after liberation, while we see that since the events of Oct. 7, Israel has been using its surplus of power to shape a different reality in the region; there is also speculation that Syria’s current leadership knows war is inevitably coming. How do you see this? Could a viable security agreement exist between the new Syria and Israel?
When I said that Israel had lost Syria, I did not mean to accuse the former regime of being an Israeli agent. That was not the case. But the former regime, like other Arab authoritarian regimes — particularly regimes dominated by a sectarian, political or social minority — approached Israel primarily through the interests of the regime itself and the demands of its survival and continuity.
When power and decision-making are returned to the people, whether in Syria or elsewhere in the Arab world, Israel inevitably loses some of the strategic advantages it derived from the existing order.
As for the future of relations between Syria and Israel, we should try to understand what lies ahead first through the lessons of history, and then through the consequences of the war that has continued since October 2023 — the longest war the Mashriq has witnessed since the First World War.
Historically, Israel has been a state that is external to the Arab-Islamic Mashriq, with a political project that conflicts with much of the region’s historical heritage and has pursued territorial expansion. It is clear that, at this stage, a war with Israel would not serve Syria’s interests, for reasons that are not difficult to understand. A security agreement between the two countries may therefore be possible, perhaps lasting a year or several years. Yet Israel’s continued pursuit of expansion could eventually undermine such an agreement, opening a new phase of rivalry and conflict.
What is certain, in any case, is that despite its considerable military superiority, Israel has not achieved its principal objectives in the war that began in October 2023 — namely, the broader transformation of its Arab and Islamic surroundings that it has sought. Instead, a new regional balance of power appears to be taking shape, slowly, cautiously and with considerable hesitation, and not necessarily to Israel’s advantage. Syria is likely to be an important component of that emerging balance.
Arab observers believe that the future of the Mashriq must rest on an Arab-Turkish-Persian alliance. Do you think the Iranian regime can truly transcend its sectarian nature and move toward an alliance with Arabs and Turks based on shared strategic goals and balanced partnerships?
I hope the Iranian regime can move beyond its sectarian character and the prolonged estrangement from its Arab-Islamic neighborhood that has marked its history since the early Safavid period. Lasting, comprehensive stability in the Arab-Islamic Mashriq will be difficult to achieve without establishing a regional security order that includes Iran—with “security” understood in its broadest sense.
But is such an order possible, or even likely, in the foreseeable future?
The truth is, I do not know. What I do know is that Arab and Turkish elites need to take the initiative to build ties with their Iranian counterparts and encourage Iran to recognize that its interests cannot be separated from those of the region’s other peoples and states, and that its future cannot be detached from theirs.
Even that, however, may not be enough. Iran may first need to be convinced, one way or another, that its project of regional expansion has failed — and failed decisively.