For many people, a country is a source of identity: a constant, a flag, a constitution. But what happens when you live through a revolution? What happens when your life cracks open at history’s fault line?
Since the fall of Assad six months ago, Syrians have been engaged in deep, wide-ranging conversations about the future of their country. At its core, this conversation is about two fundamental questions: Who are Syrians? And what is Syria? These aren’t just political or academic debates. They are personal, existential, and even spiritual, and they are being asked by a society that is looking inward, perhaps for the first time in its modern history, with vulnerability and openness. Syrians are asking these questions not because they finally are free to do so, but because they are not free to avoid them — the construction of a national identity is a vital necessity. This is a formative moment. It is also an historic opportunity.
For millions of Syrians, the fall of Assad was a monumental moment, but it also brought new challenges. Defiance of Assad was a goal that brought many Syrians together. His fall posed a set of new questions. I asked myself at one point if it is Syria that I love or Syrians – the people, the nation, my nation. What is Syria anyway? Is it a piece of land? A map? A name? But Syrians, those are people I’ve known, lost, and found again.
One debate that captures the depth of questioning in Syria over the last few months was the name of the country itself. Is it Syria, or the Syrian Republic? The Syrian Arab Republic? In Arabic, is it Souria or Souriyya — سوريا أو سوريّة? The spelling is not just a question of linguistics; it is a political question, and different answers represent different political visions. Syrians want to remake the country down to its syllables. Like the flag, like the anthem, like the state itself.
Souriyya, which historically referred to different parts of the Levant, was adopted by the Assad regime with its pan-Arabism ideology. In defiance, many want to call it Souria, a pronunciation that echoes the Arabic names of countries with non-Arabic linguistic origins. Before the twentieth century, Arabs used to refer to country names using the letter ta marbuta (ة), then moved to the letter alef (ا). Some argue that Syria’s name should follow this linguistic evolution, acknowledging Syria’s ethnic and cultural diversity. While “Syria” is a Greek-derived name, the land’s deep Aramaic cultural roots remain relevant to many Syrians’ vision of national identity today.
For some, this subtle change is a way of reclaiming the word from the regime and its ideology. It is an assertion of difference, of agency, even of ownership. (Americans will remember an analogous shift in Ukrainian identity: the move from Kiev — the Russian rendering — toward Kyiv, the Ukrainian name.)
We are not just repeating what we inherited. We are rewriting it.
Syrians are re-spelling Syria.
For a long time, Syria was not meant to be a country. Its people, like many other groups in the region, never drew their borders. Chunks of territory that they considered their own — that felt like theirs, that their families or friends or neighbors or fellow Syrians lived upon — were incorporated into other newly formed modern states, like Iraq, Turkey, Lebanon, Israel, Palestine, and Jordan. There has never been a popular, organic Syrian ideology. Instead, Syria’s modern identity was long dominated by transnational ideologies. Arabism, Islamism, Communism: so many isms saw the Syrian state as a transitional political unit in pursuit of a larger entity. Creating the United Arab Republic between Syria and Egypt was a clear manifestation of this ambition, which failed.
Today, Syrians are searching for an identity and a national project that is uniquely Syrian, neither inherited nor imported — something made here, made now, and made by us. That search is messy. There is no frictionless way to discover a nationhood, and this region is rife with… complications. The cleavages are deep: Kurds and Arabs, Islamists and secularists, tribal conservatives and progressive urbanites. But there is one thing they now seem to agree on: Syria is a destiny. And Syrians are stuck together, willingly or unwillingly.
We are building something we’ve never had before: a republic that is truly Syrian.
All this explains why it mattered so much to us when the regime’s flag stopped flying in our name. And it explains why another flag, the flag of the Syrian Republic that gained independence from France, emerged from the protests. Some claimed that this repurposed flag represents capitulation to colonialism. They are wrong. For those who carry it, the flag flies for liberation from Assad as a second independence. It reassures us that we have some identity that we can resuscitate: even if it is painful, we do have a selfhood which predates a great tormentor.
We fought over colors and symbols because we had so little else that was ours.
The symbols a nation uses to represent itself are always of immense import. These are reflections of deep structural constants and the arguments over them are symptomatic of profound ruptures — the kind that rattle a society when it is rebuilding itself from the ground up. Syrians are not just navigating a post-Assad reality. They are navigating a post-certainty world, where the definitions of home, nation, and self have all been unsettled. We know they must exist because we experience their facticity — I know I am Syrian, I know my country is Syria, and that my people are the Syrian people. But I don’t know what that means.
This precarity is not merely political, it is personal, it is tender. We are raw. We are influx — our language, memory, belief, betrayal, and hope.
But what we are reckoning with and fighting for through all this tumult is our legacy. This is a fight for what survives, and what we choose to keep alive.
This reckoning has forced many of us to confront difficult truths. The revolution unearthed our divisions, but also our capacity to ask new questions. It summoned us to turn our face away from our rulers, and look at one another and at ourselves. We have to ask ourselves what kind of society we want, and what kind of people we are.
Some of us are only just realizing how little we knew about each other. Provincial and other sub-national identities now rile uncomfortable up against deeper, unresolved tensions. And yet, in this void left by Assad, we find room to talk, to disagree, and to imagine, despite all the erupting cycles of violence.
What’s being born is not a ready-made ideology. It’s not Arabism or Islamism in a new coat. We are birthing something messier and more intimate: a self-invention. Syrians are mixing what we’ve inherited with what we’ve endured, and what we now hope to become. This is not the end of history, it’s the beginning of a new era.
And so, the question of how to spell Syria is more than philological. It is a question of authorship. Of ownership. Of agency. The debates over our country’s name and identity are only the beginning. Far more difficult will be the task of shaping a Syria that belongs to its people, one that we can finally call our own.
We are no longer living in someone else’s story. We are beginning to write our story ourselves. Perhaps it will not be peaceful or prosperous, but like so many Syrians, I will fight to make it so.