Editorial

Sami Moubayed

Last night I had a long conversation with a friend about being free (hurr) and being liberal (mutaharrer). The difference in Damascus, particularly among the so-called ‘elite,’ is very blurred. That elite is not the true elite of Damascus. It is an imported elite—an imposter elite—that achieved this status not by good manners and good education, but rather, through an abundance of wealth. Freedom is the prerequisite for liberty. Back in the early 1940s, Nizar Qabbani was criticized on the campus of Damascus University for writing about women at a time when the nation was ablaze with anti-French riots. He asked, “Why have we been spilling blood against the French since 1920?” A friend replied: “For independence.” “Wrong” said Nizar, “we did it for freedom!” Syria might become in-dependent, he added, but it needed to be free in order to be a healthy country. “Nations, just like human beings, need two legs to function properly. One leg is independence. The other is freedom.” If the Syrians are not free, they can never enjoy independence. They will remain like a one-legged human, crippled and permanently disabled. Freedom means the right to live and the right to love. This applies to women as much as men, he added. A woman has the right to be born, to get educated, to love, to be loved, to be a sister, a friend, a mother. She has the right to succeed and be independent from any man. Finally she has a right to grow old and to die satisfied with dignity. Freedom, he added, means the freedom to chose one’s own social, political, and religious beliefs. One can be free—and conservative. Freedom comes from reading good books, learning new things in life, and watching different societies, if not in person then through television or the Internet. Accumulating new ideas is to educate, however, rather than duplicate. The human mind is well-suited to digest, challenge, adopt, or discard different views. Freedom comes from proper education, at home, school, university, and life. Many of those in Damascus who claim to be ‘liberal’ in fact lack ‘freedom.’ They actually ad-opted liberty minus freedom, taking on its accessories without going through the prerequisite process of education. They adopted ‘liberty’ from short trips to Europe, and through watching Lebanese satellite television. ‘Liberty’ does not mean wearing short skirts, drinking alcohol, or speaking a few words of English. It does not mean hanging out at the new posh restaurants of Damascus. There is nothing wrong with that for sure, but adopting these values without being educated into them produces very shallow, materialistic, and one-dimensional people who judge each other by how they look, where they socialize, and what kind of car they are driving. These people read nothing but paparazzi entertainment magazines, watch nothing but sitcoms and MTV style Arabic music channels. Again there is nothing wrong with that because life without entertainment is unbearable. Entertainment without life, however, is equally destructive. These people gather—on a daily basis—not to talk about life, work, interests and ideas but rather—other people. They measure success by how many parties one gets invited to and how many compliments one receives at any given venue.