Nowruz and Mother’s Day: a tale of two symbols

“Newroz pîroz be” — Happy Nowruz. The words are spoken plainly, without embellishment or hesitation, as spring arrives on 21 March. Fires are lit across the hills, and songs rise from Kobani (Ayn al-Arab) and Serê Kaniyê (Ras al-Ayn) marking the celebration of Nowruz. In the Kurdish imagination, the festival is bound to the legend of Kawa the blacksmith, who lit a fire to herald the end of tyranny. Since then, fire has become a reminder of an enduring idea: that oppression can, and does, end.

Over the course of the twentieth century, as nation-states took shape across the region, it evolved into a vital cultural marker through which Kurdish communities preserved their identity. In Turkey, Syria, Iraq and Iran — where Kurds have long faced denial or restriction of their cultural expression — Nowruz came to embody both social and political meaning.

To celebrate Nowruz is to assert Kurdish identity in the public sphere. When thousands gather around a single fire, clad in traditional dress and singing Kurdish songs, the celebration itself becomes an assertion of a people with a shared history and culture.

But 21 March in Syria is also Mother’s Day. Though not a Syrian invention, the Assad regime proved adept at harnessing occasions and symbols to entrench its rule. In such systems, everything can be repurposed into the architecture of power. This is a hallmark of authoritarianism: the re-engineering of events to serve a desired narrative, even when those events are, at their core, tragic.

Hafez al-Assad’s military coup of 1970 became the celebrated “Corrective Movement”. The war of 1973 — in which Syria lost land, men and material — was rebranded as the “October Liberation War”.

Mother’s Day was folded into the same symbolic order. The regime did not rely solely on repression to curtail Nowruz celebrations; instead, the state pursued a subtler tactic: it crowded the day with an alternative symbol. Motherhood — warm, moral, universally resonant — proved ideal. It posed no awkward questions of national identity, nor did it disturb the official narrative.

A glance at Hafez al-Assad’s speeches reveals how carefully the image of the mother was politicised. In addresses marking both Mother’s Day and military occasions, he fused mother and al-watan, the Nation. The mother was cast as a figure of patience and sacrifice, one who endures the loss of her son because she has offered him to the Nation, raising dutiful citizens loyal to the State.

Here, the regime’s notion of the “good citizen” becomes clear. It was not an autonomous individual navigating a diverse society, but one wholly subsumed within the official nationalist cult-narrative. In schools, children recited each morning: “One Arab nation with an immortal mission.” Arabism was presented as the sole legitimate framework for national identity. Implicitly, this excluded all others — foremost among them Kurdish identity, which remained unrecognised in public life for decades.

Today, the picture is changing. Following the fall of the regime, Kurds have begun reclaiming space to express their cultural identity openly. A stroll through Umayyad Square reveals large banners, hung early, announcing Nowruz celebrations. By contrast, one must look more closely to find even a single sign marking Mother’s Day.

This prominence of Nowruz at the heart of the capital carries its own political message. By elevating this symbol in the public space, the new authorities present themselves as something different: more open, more willing to acknowledge the cultural plurality long denied to Syrians.

What emerges is a duality of symbols: the public and the private. Nowruz, by its nature, is a collective cultural and political expression. Mother’s Day, by contrast, remains largely confined to the intimate sphere, to the bond between mother and child, expressed within the home.

Yet regimes, past and present, appear equally wary of the moment when a private symbol spills into the public realm beyond their control. For that transformation is always possible. The mother once cast as an emblem of patience and sacrifice can, with disarming ease, become something else entirely: a woman searching for her son’s grave, demanding justice. 

In Syria, the concerns of ordinary people resemble the keys of a piano: one rises as another falls, depending on how the instrument is played. Today, cultural identity takes centre stage; tomorrow, calls for justice may return with renewed force. But societies cannot remain forever as keys pressed by others.

Perhaps the longed-for transformation lies elsewhere: that these scattered notes might one day form a complete instrument, no longer played by others, capable of bringing all its tones into harmony — a music in which no cause is muted for another to be heard, and where every identity, every grief, contributes to a fuller, shared composition.