I came to the United States in 1986. I went to the University of Wisconsin, to a small campus called Stevens Point, not the main campus in Madison. And I loved it over there. I mean it, to me, it was my coming-of-age experience was really in the United States and in Wisconsin in particular.
After a period of two years however, I was still young, a bit confused. I had Islamist tendencies at the time even though my family is pretty liberal and artistic. So I dropped out of college after a couple of years and went to Madison, went to a mosque there, became more invested in Islamic group. And I´ve read a lot about the history of Islam, the jurisprudence.
I went through that period for about– a couple of years, but by the end of it I became disillusioned really, I mean for a variety of reasons. The more I read about the history of Islam, the more I realized that there are a lot of conflict within the community and that we really need to look at it more objectively rather than be a partisan of this group or that group and that we needed somehow a new interpretation of the faith.
And I embarked on that and I felt that one thing that could help is if I understood more about the country that I was in. So I began reading about the history of the United States, the writings of the founding fathers, the Federalist Papers.
Basically, well I don´t know how many people can say the Federalist Papers actually inspired them to quit their fanatical sort of outlook on life, but to me the pragmatic spirit in the writings of the Federalist Papers and how people actually discussed how a nation can be established, how tyranny can be prevented through a structure of governments by separating the powers, by putting all these checks and balances within the system, I was fascinated by that.
By the time I graduated, I became more of a secular humanist in terms of my outlook on life and very much inspired, as I said, by the Americana, by the spirit, the experiment– that´s called the United States, how America came to be, the values of the founding fathers and how they did not impose them on the future generation. They sort of in a sense wrote a Constitution and a Bill of Rights that was meant to correct their failings and their own mistakes.
They empowered the future generations and they empowered posterity to be free and itself and to build something on a solid basis, but without being enslaved by an ideology. That was really empowering. And in Islam, especially today, a lot of people think about going back to the golden age of Islam for instance, and think a lot about the salaf, the people who came before, the ancestors.
When you read the founding fathers, they thought a lot about posterity and what posterity will think. A term in Arabic is Halaf –the posterity. And I wanted that sort of switch in our mind. To me, you know, stop thinking about the past, think about the future. It´s not how if the prophet was alive, for instance, will look and think about us, but how my kids will think about me in ten, 20, or 30 years time, how the future will think about us in the present.
So I became more really future oriented because of that. And I realized that this is the key to it all, that future orientation, that preoccupation with posterity and building something that can outlast you, that can you know, survive your own failings, basically.
Ammar Abdulhamid is a Syrian human rights activist who in 2003 founded the Tharwa Foundation, a grassroots organization that enlists local activists and citizen journalists to document conditions in Syria. In response to his activities, the Syrian government subjected Abdulhamid to repeat interrogation and threats. In September 2005, he and his family were forced into exile in the United States. From his home in Maryland, Abdulhamid remains one of the leading bloggers and commentators on events in Syria through the Syrian Revolution Digest.
Follow Ammar Ahbdulhamid on Twitter @Tharwacolamus and on his blog, Syrian Revolution Digest.
The Syrian Arab Republic originated as a secular, socialist state dominated by the Ba’ath party, an Arab nationalist movement. The state has since evolved into an autocracy headed by a single family and dominated by members of the minority Alawite sect, a branch of Shia Islam.
The Ba’ath Party took power in Syria in a series of coups d’état in the 1960s and 1970s. One of the leaders of those coups, Hafez al-Assad, became president in 1971 and led the country until his death in 2000. Under Assad, Alawites assumed control over the state security forces. In 1982, Assad’s forces stormed the city of Hama to brutally suppress a Sunni rebellion, killing thousands of civilians.
Following the death of Hafez al-Assad, his son, Bashar al-Assad, was elected president by a referendum in which he ran unopposed, officially garnering 97 percent of the vote. He was reelected in 2007, again with 97 percent of the vote.
The Syrian government is one of the world’s most brutal and restrictive. From 1963 to 2011, the government operated under an “Emergency Law,” which suspended many constitutional protections of civil liberties. The government continues to use arbitrary detention and torture against political opponents, and operates through an extensive internal security apparatus, including secret police. The government controls most of the country’s media outlets, and access to the Internet is permitted only through state-operated servers. The minority Kurdish population has been continually discriminated against and repressed.
Influenced by movements in Egypt and Tunisia, large opposition protests took place across Syria in 2011. The government responded with a harsh crackdown. Security forces fired on protestors, killing thousands. The crackdown led the Arab League to suspend Syria’s membership. The Assad regime attempted to appease dissenters through a series of low-level and largely inconsequential reforms in 2011 and 2012. However, the conflict has escalated into full-fledged civil war with both liberal and Islamic militias being formed to fight against the Assad regime. The Assad regime has continued to attempt to defeat the opposition using air strikes and heavy artillery to attack rebel-held neighborhoods. Freedoms of association, assembly, and the press were restricted even further as the government attempted to quell the uprising. Over a million people have been either internally displaced or fled the country as refugees.
In the summer of 2013, it was confirmed that the Syrian government had used chemical weapons to attack civilians. Over 600 people were killed in one such attack in the Ghouta suburb of Damascus using a nerve agent confirmed to be sarin. The Assad regime’s use of chemical weapons drew international attention and resulted in a renewed international focus on the nation and its civil conflict.
Freedom House rates Syria as “not free” noting that conditions even prior to the 2011 uprising and subsequent civil war were, at best, abysmal. It earned the worst possible ratings of seven in both the political rights and civil liberties categories. Conditions since the 2011 uprising have only deteriorated, and civil freedoms are restricted under the fear of violence. Freedom House has also expressed concern over rising sectarian tensions and massive displacement.