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The Impossible Revolution: Making Sense of the Syrian Tragedy Paperback – 27 July 2017

by Yassin al-Haj Saleh (Author)
4.6 out of 5 stars 35 ratings
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Yassin al-Haj Saleh is a leftist dissident who spent sixteen years as a political prisoner and now lives in exile. He describes with precision and fervour the events that led to Syria's 2011 uprising, the metamorphosis of the popular revolution into a regional war, and the 'three monsters' Saleh sees 'treading on Syria's corpse': the Assad regime and its allies, ISIS and other jihadists, and Russia and the US. Where conventional wisdom has it that Assad's army is now battling religious fanatics for control of the country, Saleh argues that the emancipatory, democratic mass movement that ignited the revolution still exists, though it is beset on all sides. 'The Impossible Revolution' is a powerful, compelling critique of Syria's catastrophic war, which has profoundly reshaped the lives of millions of Syrians.
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  1. ISBN-10
    1849048665
  2. ISBN-13
    978-1849048668
  3. Publisher
    C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
  4. Publication date
    27 July 2017
  5. Language
    English
  6. Dimensions
    19.8 x 2.7 x 13 cm
  7. Print length
    256 pages
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Yassin al-Haj Saleh is widely regarded as Syria’s foremost thinker and the intellectual guru of the Syrian uprising. Born in Raqqa, he spent sixteen years as a political prisoner in Syria (1980-1996) and has been living in exile in Turkey since 2013, still struggling for Syria and Samira, his abducted wife. Along with a group of Syrian and Turkish intellectuals and activists, he established the Syrian Cultural House in Istanbul called Hamish ('margin' or 'fringe'), which has become a major hub of activity and helped change the debate about Syria within Turkey. He has written and edited five books in Arabic, but this is his first in English.

Product details

  • Publisher ‏ : ‎ C Hurst & Co Publishers Ltd
  • Publication date ‏ : ‎ 27 July 2017
  • Language ‏ : ‎ English
  • Print length ‏ : ‎ 256 pages
  • ISBN-10 ‏ : ‎ 1849048665
  • ISBN-13 ‏ : ‎ 978-1849048668
  • Item weight ‏ : ‎ 360 g
  • Dimensions ‏ : ‎ 19.8 x 2.7 x 13 cm
  • Customer reviews:
    4.6 out of 5 stars 35 ratings

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Yassin Al Haj Saleh

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Top reviews from United Kingdom

  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars The Syrian people are not a monolith
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 21 November 2023
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    It was really great to get an insight into the differing ideologies which exist among the people of Syria. And despite their differences, they were unified in their goal of toppling the regime. Unfortunately the regime was able to exploit their inability to properly organise. It was also tragic to see the optimism of the author in the beginning and how this gradually waned as the years went on.
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  • Joey
    5.0 out of 5 stars A must read. Full stop.
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 7 August 2017
    Format: Paperback
    This collection of essays by the Syrian dissident and intellectual Yassin Al-Haj Saleh is his first in English. How one of Syria's most well-known intellectuals had to wait until 2017 to see one of his books in English is a revealing fact in itself, but that's for another time. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh wrote while hiding from both the Assad regime (in Damascus) and ISIS (in Raqqa, his city of origin) as well as in rebel-held Ghouta. His brother Firas was kidnapped by ISIS in Raqqa for organizing an anti-ISIS protest. His wife, the great activist Samira Al Khalil was kidnapped by the rebel group Jaysh Al Islam in December of 2013, along with Razan Zeitouneh, Wael Hamada, and Nazem Hamadi - in Ghouta. All remain missing to this day. In addition, both he and Samira were imprisoned by the Assad regime, for sixteen and four years respectively, for belonging to communist parties (different ones).

    I mention this because there are many today, including those on the left, who have abandoned any sober analysis of a betrayed and abandoned country. There are too many who rely on their usual 'western' voices, 'specialists' whose authority endures fact-checking and Syrian condemnations. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh's writings are one of the antidotes to that poison of indifference, racism, islamophobia, xenophobia and cynicism. He's not the only one as Syrians have been writing on the revolution for six years and counting. Their voices are not absent, their agency not lacking. It is the world's cynicism that wants them silent.

    This book attempts to analyze the implications of the 2011 Syrian Revolution and its subsequent violent conflict(s). It is humane and understanding, but also sober and piercing. It tries to understand the phenomenon of 'militant nihilism' - more popularly known as jihadism, or islamic extremism - as well as the fascistic and neo-sultanic nature of the Assad regime. It speaks of the symbolism of the 'four Syria' as he sees it: Assad's Syria, symbolized by Assad's own image (as well as his father's); the 'Syrian Arab Republic'; 'Insurgent Syria'; and the 'Salafist, Sunni, Islamist Syria', symbolized by the black banner. We can also add 'Kurdish Syria', whose story is part of the 'Kurdish question', a people denied statehood now facing incredible difficulties once again.

    This book isn't light, but the many interviews of Yassin Haj Saleh available online would give the reader additional context to Yassin Haj Saleh thinking, as well as those who inspire them. I recommend them. And I also recommend watching the documentary 'our terrible country' which follows the author and the young photographer Ziad Homsi (including scenes showing the great Samira Al Khalil).

    Don't be shy. Put aside the 'leftists' who ended up whitewashing or downright supporting a fascist regime in their unwillingness to see beyond geo-politics and grand narratives. Try and understand Syria for what it is, and for who its people are, not as a ‘problem’ to solve but as a crisis that mirrors our own, and not as a people to pity but one to learn from - for all our sakes.
    13 people found this helpful
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  • M.I.Ahmad
    5.0 out of 5 stars A book on Syria worthy of a Gramsci
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 11 August 2017
    Format: Paperback
    This is a truly remarkable book. In its lucidity, erudition, range and percipience, it is worthy of a Gramsci. In its method, rigour and predictions, it is an intellectual achievement of extraordinary significance. The book describes with precision the revolution's causes and aspirations and recording with complexity its challenges and achievements. It is the living chronicle of a revolution, a sustained diagnosis, a prophecy and a j’accuse.

    Yassin al Haj Saleh, one of Syria’s most celebrated intellectuals, wrote these essays over a period of five years, from underground in Damascus, Douma and Raqqa, and from exile in Istanbul. Saleh’s compelling biography and his colossal sacrifices lend his writings unusual moral authority. While still in college, Saleh was arrested by the regime and spent 16 years in its notorious prisons; and, since the start of the revolution, his wife and brother have both been disappeared by jihadis (the latter by ISIS). Yet, in spite of the personal tragedy, Saleh’s writes with remarkable dispassion and objectivity.

    The essays in this book tackle questions that most confound audiences in the west. The discussions range from the causes of the revolution, the regime’s violent repression, the revolution’s turn to arms, the rise of the Islamists, the threat of militant nihilism to the question of sectarianism. They are rooted in history but they aren’t the usual apologetic narratives of colonial depredation and native passivity. Saleh’s interest is in post-colonial Syria, in its initial promise, halting progress, and eventual betrayal under Baathist rule.

    Saleh describes how the regime tried to neutralize the revolution’s political advantage by forcing upon it a military contest for which it was decidedly unprepared. As early as June 2011, Saleh warned against the dangers of this ‘state of nature’: violence could replace the revolution’s positive aspirations with the logic of necessity and desperation. Saleh charges the regime as the primary instigator of violence. But while wary of military confrontations, Saleh does not blame the armed uprising for undermining the revolution. Abandoned by the world and faced with the regime’s lethal provocations, revolutionary conscience could only hold out so long. Saleh recognizes the necessity of armed resistance when the alternative is total annihilation. He also notes that contrary to pacifist dogma, “those who took up arms did not replace the peaceful revolution but rather contributed to its expansion and resilience.”

    By July 2011, three months into the uprising, Human Rights Watch had recorded 887 unarmed protesters killed by regime snipers. The Free Syria Army was formed shortly after that. It was partly through the protection of rebel arms that street protests continued to grow (reaching their peak during the summer of 2012). Citizen journalists provided additional protection by filming violations and beaming them out to the world.

    But if Saleh recognizes the legitimacy of armed resistance, he is withering in his condemnation of what he calls “militant nihilism” (a term he prefers to “terrorism” which has been diluted of meaning through misuse by repressive states). It is neither morally defensible nor practically justifiable because it “necessarily hurts the innocent, owing to its arbitrariness”. Even when motivated by real injustice “the ‘goal’ of terrorism collapses into the very act of rebellion against this condition and into the elimination of enemies without ever achieving anything greater, such as…national independence, or ending poverty, or even punishing criminals among the rulers and their collaborators”.

    Saleh was predicting the rise of such nihilism already in May 2012. Without support for the revolutionary forces, he warned, the nihilists will strengthen. “Were a nihilist organisation to somehow come to power”, Saleh writes in a prophetic passage, “the result could only be brutal despotism. Not only are nihilist organisations accustomed to indiscriminate violence: their radical withdrawal from the world encourages the cultural and psychological conditions necessary for prohibiting dissent and uprooting any alternative”.

    In a section on media activists, Saleh describes them as creating an “objective memory of the uprising”. In these ten essays, he has achieved something similar. For all its resilience, the revolution in Syria appears headed toward a grim denouement. But in the face cynical efforts by counter-revolutionary ideologues to rewrite history, Saleh’s work will stand as an imperishable reminder of the circumstances through which this impossible revolution endured.
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  • Mimi Saad
    1.0 out of 5 stars Very poorly written and largely fabricated
    Reviewed in the United Kingdom on 23 June 2019
    Format: Paperback
    Glorifies some very questionable terror linked forces
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Top reviews from other countries

  • Theodore M. Horesh
    5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant Insights from Leading Voice of the Syrian Revolution
    Reviewed in the United States on 19 December 2017
    Verified Purchase
    Numerous books have now been written on the Syrian Revolution, but this is probably the most insightful. Yassin Al-Haj Saleh is often referred to as "the conscience of the Syrian Revolution," and for good reason. In a series of essays, written over the course of the revolution, Saleh explains the pressures that first peaceful protesters and then violent revolutionaries experienced. He explains the totalitarianism of the Assad state, the way it suppressed free thinking, the gangsterism that lay at its heart, and what this did to the people living under it. He explains that the revolution was about a human freedom that could not be experienced when Syrians were being forced to live a lie and that the Revolution itself was about coming to live in the real world. It was about overcome a dissociation that had been manufactured by the state in order to sustain its power, a power which crippled its victims by destroying their inner lives. And he explains how the revolution was ultimately broken through the brutality of the regime's response, which traumatized demonstrators, forced them to live in fear, and ultimately destroyed them by inducing in them a nihilistic response.

    A prisoner of Assad's brutal prison system for 16 years, Saleh knows the regime better than the vast majority of commentators. But he also happens to be an unusually humane commentator and an astonishingly insightful intellectual. Saleh is known as the conscience of the Syrian Revolution because he is tending to the inner well-being of Syrians. And with each essay the reader can see him anticipating and trying to stave off the worst turns of the revolution: the turn to Islamism, the shift into nihilism, the the ultimate brutalization of all sides.

    This is an extraordinary book not only for Syria, though. There are few top-notch intellectuals in collapsed states. In this sense, Saleh might provide insights into what it is like to live in North Korea or Burma that would otherwise be closed off to readers in the west. But he also provides insights into the Syrian experience that Syrians themselves lack. Perhaps most of all, he should be read by Syrians themselves, who in so doing might free themselves from the inside. The revolution will continue long after it has been put down in the hearts and minds of Syrians. I can think of no more powerful book through which it might be kept alive.
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  • Ann Burke
    5.0 out of 5 stars A Popular Revolution Stalled and Betrayed
    Reviewed in the United States on 27 August 2017
    Format: PaperbackVerified Purchase
    With the revolutionary transition of Syria from a brutal dynasty to political democracy now stalled by the massive military intervention of outside forces with their own agendas, the appearance of Syrian dissident Yassin al-Haj Saleh’s erudite analysis of the history of that process could not be more timely.
    With the question of how and when that transition might be reignited now pressing in the minds of both its supporters and detractors, “The Impossible Revolution” provides a solid basis on which to begin the formulation of an answer.
    Of great relevance to the Western left, including an American audience, Saleh at times speaks directly to those who haven’t lived up to their proclaimed commitment to peace and justice. While progressives in the US undeniably made a major contribution to ending the US government’s war in Vietnam, arguably prevented a US invasion of Nicaragua, and contributed to the freeing of South Africa from the tyranny of apartheid, the largest part of the US “peace and justice” movement has utterly failed the Syrian people. Indeed, in the minds of many Syrians, it has been a betrayal.
    Saleh has previously written about the willful blindness of the western left’s phony “anti-imperialism” and its chauvinist betrayal of Syria:
    “What I always found astonishing is that mainstream Western leftists know almost nothing about Syria, its society, its regime, its people, its political economy, its contemporary history... My impression about this curious situation is that they simply do not see us; it is not about us at all. Syria is only an additional occasion for their old anti-imperialist tirades, never the living subject of the debate. So they do not really need to know about us.”
    Further expounding on the chauvinism of US and European pro-Assad groups that define themselves as “anti-imperialist”, Saleh wrote:
    “The central element in the definition of the anti-imperial left is imperialism and, of course, combating it. Imperialist power is thought of as something that exists in large amounts in America and Europe. Elsewhere it is either nonexistent or present only in small amounts. In internationalist struggles, the most important cause is fighting against western imperialism. Secondary conflicts, negligible cause and vague local struggles should not be a source of distraction. This depopulated discourse, which has nothing to do with people’s lived experiences, and which demonstrates no need for knowledge about Syrians, has considered it unimportant to know more about the history of their local struggles.”

    The absurdity of organizations with the honorable words “PEACE” and “ANTIWAR” in their names giving overt or tacit support to the Assad government, a regime guilty of well-documented crimes of historic proportion, is strikingly ludicrous. Particularly when their tacit support for fascism is mere silence, the shame of these groups and individuals is acute.

    But Saleh’s new book “Impossible Revolution” is not primarily focused on the international betrayal of Syria. Rather it is a collection of ten essays written over the past few years of the intense Syrian conflict. Together they trace the history from the perspective of developments intrinsic to the Syrian nation. It views the conflict both in Syrian national terms as well as with an international perspective.
    Yassin al-Haj Saleh comes from eastern Syria near Raqqa, currently held by ISIS, his enemy no less than the Assad regime. During the time he was a medical student in Aleppo he joined a Marxist political organization openly critical of Hafez Assad, father of the current Syrian dictator. For this slight against the brutal dynasty, he spent 16 years of hell in a Syrian prison.
    After the 2011 popular uprising against Bashar Assad, Saleh worked with underground civil organizations in areas largely outside the dictator’s control. His wife Samara, a leading civil society organizer, was kidnapped. Her fate remains unknown. Intensely sought by both Assad and anti-democratic Islamic forces, Saleh escaped to Turkey in 2013. There he currently works as a writer and historian of the Syrian Revolution.
    Reflecting the immense joy and optimism of the enormous and largely non-violent uprising in 2011, the book’s opening essay “Revolution of the Common People” beams with the confidence and creativity of those early days. It was then the common belief that the Syrian people had forever lost their fear, and that they would never again succumb to the oppressor. Victory seemed inevitable and it seemed near, given the contemporaneous fall of dictators in Tunisia and Egypt.
    Saleh writes in this early essay: “Today there are two powers in Syria: the regime and the popular uprising.” Indeed that was the common perception in 2011. But, alas, it ain’t no more!
    In time a sobering reality replaced those early convictions. That change is indeed reflected in the subsequent essays of this book, as the conflict hardened for the democratic movement. The massive military intervention of Russia and Iran to salvage the Assad regime, coupled with the machinations of Turkey, Saudi, the US, Hezbollah and the Gulf states for their own political aims, led to a battlefield impasse and the rise of ISIS in Syria, and more currently, to territorial gains by the Assad/Russian/Iranian forces. The failure of the opposition to form a lasting united and coherent political organization (or a military one) can be perhaps explained by the impact of this external intervention. That organizational letdown certainly has been a key factor leading to the current sobering situation.
    In a recent interview with journalist Amy Goodman on “Democracy Now”, Saleh defines four stages of the Syrian uprising and these are very much reflected in this book “Impossible Revolution”:
    1) The period of peaceful demonstrations and the formation of the Free Syrian Army
    2) The intervention of Hezbollah, Daesh, and Salafist forces which put a Sunni-Shia conflict character on the struggle
    3) The massive increase of military force from Russia and Iran, coupled with US intervention against ISIS lead to what can be called the Imperialist stage
    4) The stage where we are now. Saleh says that this stage remains in large part undefined. Saleh calls for “dynamic new thinking, reconciliation and moderation “ within the opposition, but he reiterates his conviction that there can be no peace with justice under Assad.
    In these indecorous days for Syria it is hard to see a clear path ahead to a democratic Syria in peace. Yet in spite of the sobering reality on the Syrian ground today, the spirit of justice that has motivated the hearts and minds of millions of Syrians remains. It will undoubtedly flower again.
    For readers and peace-loving people seriously interested in hearing a cogent, honorable and extraordinarily knowledgeable Syrian voice tracing the conflict in Syria, “Impossible Revolution” is at the top of the must-read list. It is an historic achievement.
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  • Park Hyun Joo
    4.0 out of 5 stars Well worth reading
    Reviewed in the United States on 28 November 2021
    Verified Purchase
    There is much to learn from this book. The author provides many useful and unique insights into Syria's modern history, and also goes a step further to make many specific recommendations about the possible course of the Revolution and the country. I found at times the style of writing strayed too far into academic philosophy, making it difficult to engage with in a real-world, pragmatic sense. Also, the author's bias towards Israel is apparent on many occasions, which I found distracting but otherwise did not take away from the overall material because the author's positions generally do not rely on his opinions on Israel being accurate. These minor quibbles do not detract from the fact that this book deals in great depth with the multivarious, ever-changing relationships between the different parts Syria's society.
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  • Amazon Customer
    5.0 out of 5 stars Brilliant analytical tour de force of the Syrian People’s Revolution
    Reviewed in the United States on 21 June 2018
    Verified Purchase
    Brilliant analytical tour de force of the Syrian People’s Revolution. This book is indispensable reading for anyone who seriously wants a thorough understanding not only of what motivated the Syrian people, but as well of what the Arab Spring’s impact was across the globe and how it’s reperc are still being felt today as Syrians valiantly struggle against the dictator and mass murderer Assad and all the world’s imperialist powers.
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