Asala versus al-Dhahabi: a battle for the soul of Syria

The singer Asala caused a stir with her “Syrian Album”: 14 songs, one for each province. The announcement of two Damascus concerts prompted a backlash led by activists and preachers, including an Egyptian sheikh calling himself “al-Dhahabi” (Lit: the golden one) under the slogan “Musical instruments are forbidden”. A rival campaign, led by prominent public figures, won considerable popular backing.

The episode exposed a struggle over public life. Conservatives framed the issues in terms of religious permission and prohibition: instrumental music, mixing between the sexes, a woman’s voice and public concerts. The state took sides. The Ministry of Culture sponsored the concert; the presidency endorsed it through Ahmed al-Sharaa’s media adviser, Ahmed Mowaffak Zaidan. Asala embodied Syrian art “at one with its people”, he declared, and her songs would become a “building block” of the new Syria.

Asala’s name supplies an irony: it means “authenticity” in Arabic, and both camps defend precisely that. Her first husband, moreover, belonged to the al-Dhahabi family. The other “al-Dhahabi”, Egyptian preacher Hani Dahab, became known for his “Sharia-compliant hijab” initiative. He regards Syria’s liberation by Islamist factions as an opportunity to remake society according to a Salafist fundamentalist standard.

Asala offers another account of authenticity: dialects, women singing, instruments, dabke dancing, traditional qudud songs, rural heritage. Sea and mountain. Hauran, Deir Ezzor, Latakia, Qamishli and Sweida. Against a prescribed identity, she sets one rooted in culture, history and geography: Syrians as they are, with differences no single cultural mould can contain.

The novelist Taysir Khalaf recalls remarks from 1905 by Jamal al-Din al-Qasimi, a leading Levantine Salafist. Al-Qasimi remembered old religious chants and qudud fondly, complaining that contemporary singing gave him no pleasure. “Authentic Syrian religious life” was evidently more complex than modern Salafist rhetoric allows.

Yet assigning each province a song revealed another difficulty: culture ignores administrative boundaries. Hauran extends beyond Daraa; the Euphrates region beyond Raqqa. The Badia connects eastern Homs, Deir Ezzor and Jazira. Hasakah’s Arab, Kurdish, Syriac, Assyrian and Bedouin diversity defies this scheme. As Ninar Omran observes, “Syrian heritage was not created within the administrative boundaries of the provinces".

The state sees Syria as an administrative map. Beneath lies a country of coasts, steppes, rivers, mountains, trading towns and caravan routes, whose interactions produced dialects, rhythms, food and human networks indifferent to administrative lines. 

Syria’s cultural boundaries are not arbitrary. The Euphrates is a corridor of human movement; the steppe, a space of connection. Hauran’s culture crosses the Jordanian border. The coast reflects the relationship between mountain and sea. Hence a song from eastern Homs can sound closer to Deir Ezzor.

Culture follows physical geography and human movement, exposing the limits of modern political maps. Some critics called this an “internal Sykes-Picot”: bureaucratic divisions encouraging the illusion that each province forms a distinct cultural tribe. Music grows from ways of life. Pastoralists and farmers sing differently. Mountains preserve rhythms unlike those of open plains; Silk Road cities absorb instruments and melodies unfamiliar to isolated settlements. Asala’s songs give voice to a long history between people and land.

This explains why human rights activist Hiba Ezzedine wept at “Idlib, apple of my eye”. Her province had escaped the vocabulary of bombardment, displacement, camps, terrorism and war, entering another: love, joy, song.

Ziad al-Soufi made a similar observation about Latakia. Politics and war reduced it to sectarian images; Asala restored its sea, lemons, memories and beauty. War commandeers the meanings of places. Raqqa becomes “ISIS”; Idlib, “the liberated territories”; Latakia, “the regime’s support base”; Sweida, “the Druze”; Deir Ezzor, “the tribes”. Music returns them from ideology to everyday life.

My friend, the engineer Adnan Hatoum, offered a necessary corrective. A song released in Sweida, “We Are Part of You”, became painful to hear after violence engulfed the province. Can a song create a homeland? Perhaps it can reveal the distance between the homeland imagined and the one that exists. Music does not necessarily unite Syria. It reveals the Syria that so many Syrians want.

The clash between Asala and al-Dhahabi pits two understandings of identity against each other: a mould into which Syrians must fit, or the product of centuries of mixing, difference, migration, geography and memory. One seeks to determine what Syrians ought to become. The other recognises what they already are: a people whose contradictions and traditions cannot be contained within a single definition imposed from above.

There are things the “liberators” do not get to decide: how people sing, what they eat, what they wear, the dialect in which they express their love, and what they remember when they hear their city’s name.

Culture moves more slowly than revolutions. And it is older than governments.