Re-Narrating the Past, Producing the Present and Unlocking the Future: Haris al-Quds, a TV-Dramatization of ‘Post-war’ Syria

Abstract

Regaining control of Aleppo was an important symbolic victory for the Syrian state army, which has opened the way for state-sanctioned narrations of ‘post-war’ Syria. To elucidate the workings of this narration, I explore the TV drama Haris al-Quds (2020) as a fascinating window into Syrian state ideology in Bashar al-Assad’s ‘post-war’ Syria. I argue that the Syrian state holds on to future visions of the past while re-narrating history to fine-tune its ideological heritage in a state-endorsed and state-endorsing TV drama. The serial’s interweaving of selected historical times allows for the experience of alternative narrative times, constructing what I refer to as resistance time, Manichaean time, and restoration time. In this play with temporality, each time serves in different ways as a promotion of a particular ideological understanding of Syria.

Key Words:

• Aleppo
• Ba’athism
• Haris al-Quds
• Ideology
• Narrative Temporality
• Syria
• TV-drama

Acknowledgements

The author wants to thank Nina Grønlykke Mollerup and Andreas Bandak for their productive and thoughtful input for this article, as well as for inspiring conversations within the frame of the research project Archiving the Future: re-collections of Syria in War and Peace. The article was presented at a research seminar at Centre for Comparative Culture Studies (at UCPH), receiving valuable feedback, especially from Pelle Valentin Olsen and Petek Onur. An earlier version also benefited from constructive criticism by Anders Hastrup and students affiliated with Archiving the Future.

Disclaimer Statement

This article was made as a part of the collaborative project Archiving the future: re-collections of Syria in War and Peace (ref. 9062-00014B). The project is led by PI Andreas Bandak

Disclosure Statement

This work was funded by the Independent Research Fund Denmark.

Notes

1 Nour Halabi & Christa Salamandra (2019) Guest Editors’ Introduction: The Politics in and of Middle Eastern Television Drama, Middle East Critique, 28 (2), pp. 97–100.

2 Christa Salamandra (2019) Past Continuous: The Chronopolitics of Representation in Syrian Television Drama, Middle East Critique, 28(2), pp. 121–141.

3 Gary R. Edgerton (2001) Television as History: A Different Kind of History Altogether, in: Gary R. Edgerton & Peter Rollins (eds) Television History: Shaping Collective Memory in the Media Age, p. 4 (Kentucky: The University Press of Kentucky).

4 For more about ideology as a lived evolving practise rather than a static theoretical manifest see e.g. Michael Freeden (2003) Ideology: A Very Short Introduction (Oxford: Oxford University Press). Within Middle Eastern studies, Sune Haugbolle works with a similar ideological concept when he states that ‘we must abandon the idea that ideologies are finite and cohesive, and instead study the processes of boundary making between them and the re-reading and re-writing of history that contributes to the formulation of new ideological positions’. Sune Haugbolle (2012) Reflections on Ideology After the Arab Uprisings, Jadaliyya. Available at: https://www.jadaliyya.com/Details/25424, accessed April 21, 2023. For a study of the production of ideology within media, see Christine Crone (2020) Pan-Arab News TV Station al-Mayadeen (Peter Lang).

5 These three ideological concepts are also represented in the motto of the party: ‘Unity, liberty, socialism’. Where unity refers to Arab unity; and liberty to freedom from colonialism.

6 Each episode lasts approximate 45 minutes. All quotes from the serials as well as the news coverage are translated by the author from Arabic to English.

7 Clifford Geertz (1973) The Interpretation of Cultures: Selected Essays (New York: Basic Books).

8 Nina G. Mollerup & Christine Crone (forthcoming) From Uncanny to Sensible Pasts: Temporal Reorderings in Syrian documentaries, History & Anthropology, unpublished manuscript.

9 Christa Salamandra (2015) Syria’s Drama Outpouring: Between Complicity and Critique, in Leif Stenberg & Christa Salamandra (eds) Syria from Reform to Revolt: Volume 2: Culture, Society, and Religion (Syracuse University Press); Donatella Della Ratta (2018) Shooting a Revolution: Visual Media and Warfare in Syria (London: Pluto Press).

10 Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution; Christa Salamandra (2008) Creative Compromise: Syrian Television Makers between Secularism and Islamism, Contemporary Islam, 2(3), pp. 177–189.

11 See, for example, Miriam Cooke (2007) Dissident Syria: Making Oppositional Arts Official (Duke University Press) for a discussion of Syrian artists’ role as oppositional voices contra a role as ‘court jesters’.

12 Donatella D. Ratta (2014) Making Real-Time Drama: The Political Economy of Cultural Production in Syria’s Uprising, CARGC paper, 6, p. 8.

13 Nour Halabi & Noha Mellor (2020) The "Soft" Power of Syrian Broadcasting, in Noureddine Miladi & Noha Mellor (eds) Routledge Handbook on Arab Media (Abingdon: Routledge).

14 Della Ratta, Shooting a Revolution.

15 Salamandra, “Past Continuous”.

16 Ibid.

17 The serial was directed by Syrian-Palestinian film director, Basil al-Khatib, based on a manuscript by Syrian Hassan M. Youssef. All episodes are available at: https://watanflix.com/en/series/%D8%AD%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B3-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%AF%D8%B3, accessed April 21, 2023.

18 See for example the interview with Basil al-Khatib and Hassan M. Youssef broadcast on al-Mayadeen, April 24, 2020. Available at: https://www.almayadeen.net/episodes/1393663/%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B4%D9%87%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9_%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%85%D8%B4%D9%87%D8%AF%D9%8A%D8%A9-%D8%AE%D8%A7%D8%B5–-%D8%AD%D8%A7%D8%B1%D8%B3-%D8%A7%D9%84%D9%82%D8%AF%D8%B3, accessed April 21, 2023.

19 Almashhad YouTube Channel. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMewDOH-51E, accessed April 21, 2023.

20 Gh. A. Hassoun (2020) “The Guard of al-Quds” series…a model of the resistant drama. Available at: https://www.sana.sy/en/?p=192320, accessed April 21, 2023.

21 See Basil al-Khatib’s Facebook post from April 25, 2020. Available at: https://www.facebook.com/basil.alkhatib.98/posts/3405184392844437, accessed April 21, 2023.

22 Myriam Sweidan (2020) Syrian TV Dramas: The Collapse of Freedom. Available at: https://daraj.com/en/46825/, accessed April 21, 2023.

23 Hassoun, “‘The Guard of al-Quds’ series”.

24 For further analysis of al-Mayadeen see Crone, Pan-Arab News TV Station al-Mayadeen. A discussion of the funding of the station can be found on pp. 63–65.

25 Relievable statistic in the Arab world is often difficult to find, including audience rating, however numbers indicate that in 2015 al-Mayadeen outnumbered both al-Jazeera and al-Arabiya in Syria and Lebanon, see: Crone, Pan-Arab News TV Station al-Mayadeen, pp. 68–69.

26 On al-Maydeen’s or WatanFlix’ YouTube channels the number of viewers for each episode ranged between 25,000 and 120,000 by the end of 2021.

27 Ep.1, min. 12:10; in 1974, Capucci was sentenced to 12 years in prison for his collaboration with the Palestine Liberation Organization (PLO). However, he only served three years of the sentence as the Vatican reached a deal with Israel to release Capucci under condition that he no longer would engage in the Palestinian resistance nor live in any Arab country. He moved to Latin America initially, but later settled in Rome where he lived until he passed away in 2017.

28 Edgerton, “Television as History”, p. 4.

29 Jakob Skovgaard-Petersen (2018) The Umayyads in Contemporary Arab TV Drama:ʿUmar ibn ʿAbd al-ʿAzīz and al-ḥajjāj ibn Yūsuf in Musalsalāt, in Alain George & Andrew Marsham (eds) Power, Patronage, and Memory in Early Islam: Perspectives on Umayyad Elites (Oxford University Press), p. 10.

30 Michael Carrithers (1994) ‘Stories in the Social and Mental Life of People’, in Esther N. Goody (ed) Social Intelligence and Interaction: Expressions and Implications of the Social Bias in Human Intelligence, pp. 261–276 (Cambridge University Press), p. 261.

31 Edgerton, “Television as History.”

32 Ibid, p. 3.

33 For more about history as media events see Tobias Ebbrecht (2007), History, Public Memory and Media Event, Media History, 13(2-3), pp. 221–234.

34 Ebbrecht, “History, Public Memory and Media Event”, p. 227.

35 Lila Abu-Lughod (2005) Dramas of Nationhood: The Politics of Television in Egypt (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

36 For more about the importance of the ‘key’ as a Palestinian symbol of return, see e.g. Laleh Khalili (2007) Heroes and Martyrs of Palestine: The Politics of National Commemoration (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press).

37 Andreas Bandak & Simon Coleman (2019) Different repetitions: Anthropological Engagements with Figures of Return, Recurrence and Redundancy, History and Anthropology, 30:2, pp. 119–132, p. 126.

38 Bilad al-Sham is an ancient phrase referring to the geographic area of what today constitutes Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, Palestine and parts of Iraq.

39 See for example, Ep. 15, min 34:39.

40 In modern Syrian politics, The Syrian Social National Party (SSNP) famously has promoted the idea. Despite SSNP being illegal until 2005, it has gained a growing political influence during the years of war – not least due to the success of its pro-al-Assad militias on the battlefield. See: Adel Beshara (2011) Antun Sa’adeh: Architect of Syrian Nationalism, in Adel Beshera (ed) The Origins of Syrian Nationhood, Histories, Pioneers and Identity (Oxon & New York: Routledge); Nour Samaha (2016) The Eagles of the Whirlwind, Foreign Policy, March 28; Crone, Pan-Arab News TV Station al-Mayadeen.

41 Kamal Salibi (2003) A House of Many Mansions: The History of Lebanon Reconsidered (California & London: I.B.Tauris).

42 Christopher Phillips (2013) Everyday Arab Identity: The Daily Reproduction of the Arab World (Oxon & New York: Routledge).

43 Raymond Hinnebusch (2002) The Foreign Policy of Syria, in Raymond Hinnebusch & Anoushiravan Ehteshami (eds) The Foreign Policies of Middle East States. The Middle East in the International System. (Colorado & London: Lynne Rienner Publishers); Yassin al-Haj Saleh (2017) Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy (London: Hurst).

44 National borders, on the other hand, appear as the result of foreign imperialism, most obviously in the shape of Israel. When Capucci travels between Beirut and Jerusalem and repeatedly meets the Israeli guarded border in the late 1960s, it stands in stark contrast to the movements of young Capucci pre-1948 and thus highlights the seemingly artificiality of Israel. One of the Israeli border checks eventually leads to the arrest of Capucci and his later imprisonment—symbolizing the ultimate restriction of freedom of movement.

45 When I refer to the Syrian Army’s gain of military control over East Aleppo on December 22, 2016, as a ‘liberation’, it corresponds to the wording in Haris al-Quds and does not refer to my personal understanding of events nor my personal political positioning regarding the conflict.

46 Ep. 3, min 30:49–31:12.

47 Andreas Bandak (2015) Reckoning with the Inevitable: Death and Dying among Syrian Christians during the Uprising, Ethnos, 80(5), pp. 671–691.

48 Lisa P. Galal (2009) Minoriteter, Medier og Kampen om den Koptiske Identit [Media and the Battle over the Coptic Identity], in Mette Thunø & Ehab Galal (eds) Globale medier i verdens brændpunkter: religion, politik og kultur [Global Media in the World's Focal Points: Religion, Politics and Culture] (Copenhagen: Museum Tusculanum); Viola Shafik (2007) Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press).

49 See Almashhad YouTube Channel. Available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=uMewDOH-51E, accessed April 21, 2023. And Fushia YouTube Channel, available at: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=Vg0BNu_jbTA, accessed April 21, 2023.

50 Hassoun, “‘The Guard of al-Quds’ series”

51 Annika Rabo (2011) Conviviality and Conflict in Contemporary Aleppo, in Anne Sofie Roald & Anh Nga Longva (eds) Religious Minorities in the Middle East: Domination, Self-Empowerment, Accommodation, (Brill), p. 131.

52 Lina Khatib (2011). Islamic Revivalism in Syria. The Rise and Fall of Ba'thist Secularism (Oxforshire & New York: Routledge).

53 Ep. 1, min. 11:35.

54 See, for example, Salwa Ismail (2018) The Rule of Violence (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press) for an elaboration on the tabooing of the violence in Hama in 1982 that later often merely was referred to as ‘the events of Hama.’

55 See, for example, ep. 21, 26, and 29.

56 Volker Perthes (2004) Syria under Bashar al-Asad: Modernisation and the Limits of Change. (London & New York: Taylor and Francis).

57 Lisa Wedeen (2019) Authoritarian Apprehensions: Ideology, Judgment, and Mourning in Syria (Chicago: University of Chicago Press).

58 Ibid., p. 20.

59 François Hartog (2003) Regimes of Historicity (New York: Columbia University Press), p. 3.

60 Chad Elias (2018) Posthumous Images (Durham: Duke University Press), p. 10.