Nation as neighborhood: how Bab al-Hara dramatized Syrian identity

Drama series and modernity

Literature about television drama series in postcolonial contexts has focused on how they relate to states’ modernization projects and people’s experiences of modernity. Within the context of Latin America, Martín-Barbero (1993) argues that popular culture and television drama play an important role as a vehicle to find a national path to modernity by acting as an archive of native art, national icons, and cultural forms such as storytelling and songs. Similarly, in her research on Egypt, Abu-Lughod contends that television drama series are considered by state officials and cultural producers as “particularly effective instruments of social development, national consolidation and modernization” (2005: 112). She argues that television is a key institution for the production of national culture and modern progress and, as Singh contends, nations are the “quintessential artifacts of modernity – social creations engineered and lived primarily through the techniques of narration and representation” (2005: 19). At the level of the viewer, Abu-Lughod adds, drama series act as a technology for the construction of new kinds of selves, in which “emotionalization of the quotidian world” feeds into the ways the viewer understands his or her identity and experiences of modernity and nationhood (2005: 124). Within this framework, I understand the Bab al-Hara as a project for imagining a new trajectory to modernity by celebrating “the old” and constructing a national self-identity around it.

The case of Syria

Before delving into the case of Bab al-Hara, it is important to explain the political and socioeconomic background that makes drama series a particularly important site for the construction and contestation of national identity in Syria. These factors have many dimensions, both internal, from “within” the industry itself, and external, with the Syrian government’s interest in the political impact of these series. From an industry perspective, several factors have contributed to the rise of Syrian drama, including the introduction of a 1991 law that allows private investments in television productions, and the professional shift made by Soviet-educated Syrian cinema directors and cultural producers in the fields of theatre and radio. In the 1990s, these professionals left their respective fields and began to work in the production of television series, due to its being a more popular and profitable cultural form. Furthermore, many writers and journalists became television script writers because of the lack of employment opportunities in an environment of exceedingly low book sales and readership (Nusair, 2010).

With the decline of the popularity of other cultural forms, and the absence of freedoms of expression and public political life in Syria, there was a pressing need for some form of cultural expression; this was fulfilled by television series and the debates they generated. In the words of a Syrian television critic:

There is a [cultural] void that has to be filled somehow; and the pressure from the [television] consumers at home who are fixed in front of their television screens was strong because they do not go to the theatre or the movies or to political party meetings.… Syrian society has made Syrian drama an alternative to the absent intellectual elite. (Al-Jabin, 2010)

Realizing the importance of television series in compensating for a cultural and political gap, the Syrian regime invested in the growing industry in the 1990s through the Cham TV production company, which was owned by the vice-president of the republic at the time, Abdelhalim Khaddam. This political and financial support for drama series “as the alternative political and cultural authority” fueled their success (Al-Jabin, 2010). These reasons, in addition to the ground-breaking rise of the pan-Arab satellite television industry, have contributed to what has come to be known as the Syrian “drama outpouring” in reference to the increase in the number of Syrian drama series that amounted in 2008 to 35 productions, airing on various Arab satellite channels (Salamandra, 2008).

At the political level, in the year 2000, President Bashar al-Asad took over power from his late father, Hafez, who had ruled the country for 29 years. The beginning of Bashar’s rule witnessed what was called the “Damascus Spring,” a period of vibrancy within Syrian civil society. However, the “spring” was short-lived, as the regime quickly crushed the potential opposition and imprisoned or exiled many civil society figures (George, 2003). Alongside the coercive measures taken by the state, the new president needed a “make-over” of the state’s strategy to communicate with its population. Under his father, this was based on a particular system of rhetoric and symbolism referred to by Wedeen (1999) as “Asad’s cult.” The “cult” focused on the symbolism of the president’s person as the powerful eternal charismatic leader and on the Ba’athist slogans about Arab unity, socialism, and anti-Zionism. Under the new president, this rhetorical and symbolic system became more of a burden than an asset to Bashar’s power. The previous total focus on the person of Hafez in regime propaganda made it more difficult for his son to adopt the same tactics. The other aspect of regime propaganda, its pan-Arab Ba’athist ideology, was conceived in the late 1940s. It considered Syria as simply a territory (Arabic: Qutr) in the Arab nation rather than a political entity with its own identity. When Bashar took over power, ideological Arab nationalism had lost much of its relevance in the Arab world and, consequently, it had become more difficult to consolidate a national sense of identity in Syria with the tired old Ba’ath Party slogans about socialism and Arab nationalism.

As the decade progressed, regional events such as the unpopular influx of Iraqi refugees into Syria after the Anglo-American invasion (Iraqi refugees …, 2007) and the international and Arab media campaign against Syria following accusations of regime involvement in the assassination of the Lebanese leader Rafiq al-Hariri in 2005, encouraged expressions of Syrian national pride and a sense of belonging to the Syrian nation-state. Symbols of Syria, such as the flag and map, began to be used more often in regime propaganda. In contrast to most images and statues of the late president Hafez, which glorified him as an Arab leader, those of Bashar were most of the time juxtaposed to maps and flags of Syria in an apparent attempt to encourage nationalism toward the country and the consideration of Bashar’s rule as an intrinsic part of Syrian identity.

The rise of expressions of nationalism toward Syria was also reflected in popular culture, whether reality television shows (see Kraidy, 2010) or the equally popular drama series, particularly the Damascene milieu genre with its depiction of national authenticity, which I will discuss later in the article. The genre reflected a new appetite in the country for celebrating “Syrianness” and was also affected by the regime’s economic and political influence on the television industry. In the words of Syrian television critic Al-Jabin (2010):

The [regime] authority understood the influence of Syrian drama series and knew that it could benefit from them to promote its projects.… Subsequently, the Syrian presidency became interested in the Syrian drama industry with its producers, directors, and stars.

The government’s interest in drama series was made clear starting 2005. With the backdrop of the Arab campaign against Syria after the assassination of Lebanese leader al-Hariri, Syrian television drama series faced a boycott from the rich Gulf television stations. The Syrian government stepped in and rescued the Syrian drama industry by purchasing a large number of series with allocated money from the state budget to compensate producers’ losses. The head of Syrian Television justified the purchase by saying that the goal was to promote Syrian art in Arab countries (Ibrahim, 2007).

The role of Syrian censors also reveals the influence of political authorities over the production of television series. For example, a script-writer of Bab al-Hara, Marwan Qawuq, has admitted in an interview that he had to change the script of one of the seasons of the series after being told to “play down the anticolonial struggle in the plot” (in Al-Sharq al-Awsat, 2007). He explained that the series was to be broadcast at a time when Syria’s relations with France were improving because of its opposition to the invasion of Iraq and the regime did not want to play up colonial history at a time of Franco-Syrian rapprochement.

With this background of state financial support and influence over the production of television series, the depiction of the past in the Damascene milieu genre developed from the 1990s, when it offered a nostalgic imagination of life in a past locale, to the late 2000s (particularly in Bab al-Hara), when it more directly constructed an image of a Syrian political identity. In the next section, I elaborate on the ways that the series reflected this new nationalist mood in the country and how the portrayal of national identity was based on specific nostalgic temporal and spatial representations in the television series.

Nostalgia and authenticity

In Syria, I argue, the popularity of series such as Bab al-Hara is based on their powerful construction of an essential national identity that is based on a nostalgic imagination of the past at the local level, which is the hara or the neighborhood. Boym (2001) has defined nostalgia as a longing for a home that no longer exists or has never existed, and as a reaction to experiences of modernity because it acts as a defense mechanism in times of accelerated rhythms of life. Boym also argues that nostalgia tends to rely on the interaction between the temporal and spatial as it “charts space on time and time on space” (2001: xviii). This framework of temporality and spatiality is important to understand the Damascene milieu television series and the example of Bab al-Hara. I will begin my analysis with the spatial element.

The most consistent and basic unit of the dramatization of the past in this genre is the series’ setting, which is the idea of the hara. The hara is depicted as the realm that defines the identity of its inhabitants. It is this rooted sense of identity – enacted in the series – that is a central object of nostalgia in Syria, where the fabric of the hara is under threat in a growing and developing city such as Damascus. While houses in old Damascus, for example, were spacious even for the poorer classes, today families are crammed into tiny apartments in a city where real-estate prices are among the most expensive in the world (see Clerc and Hurault, 2010).

As for the temporal element in the Damascene milieu genre, the setting is either the late 19th century or at the “cusp of living memory” (Salamandra, 2008: 187) in the early 20th century. This is what Boym (2001: 11) has dubbed “the dinosaur effect” that is typical of the nostalgia industry in its romanticization of objects and ideas that nobody actually remembers. Within this framework, time itself is the dinosaur or the object of nostalgia because it is depicted, contrary to modern life where it is measurable and has capital value, as that of daily life. In other words, we are nostalgic for a “repetitive time of fragments rather than [the] measurable units” of modern economic production (Martín-Barbero, 1993: 218).

In the Damascene milieu series, time is mostly depicted as defined by the lives of the characters. It is divided into the time before or after someone dies, gives birth, marries or becomes leader of the hara. For example, in one episode of Bab al-Hara (season III, 2007), we see a midwife estimating the date of delivery of a baby by calculating how many days it had been since the death of the leader of the hara. Furthermore, the way the television drama series is directed, shot, and edited reflects the shared communal nature of time; for example, usually all the characters are shown doing the same thing at the same time. If it is dinner-time, the camera takes the viewer from one household to another as characters are shown simultaneously sitting and eating in the different houses. When a character is shown doing something different from everyone else, this indicates an important part of the plot that builds suspense and entertainment value.

Thus, the basis of the nostalgic atmosphere of the series is the nostalgia for a bygone time and a disappearing space. It is the juxtaposition of fluid time over a defined space of locality that generates nostalgia for everything else imagined to have taken place there and then. In the series, such imagined objects of nostalgia include solidarity between the characters and communal chivalry as performed in the struggle against occupation. This sense of solidarity is shown to trump all other cards in the hara. For example, as one Bab al-Hara character says about an unpopular and troublemaking widow, in the first episode of season III (2007): “She remains from our hara and if something happens to her, God forbid, we would all feel sad and compelled to help her out.” Other examples show that when the hara is attacked by outsiders, solidarity is not breached, not even between rival protagonists. In this way, Bab al-Hara draws an image of a Syrian community whose solidarity is its source of power in the face of insurmountable challenges, whether internal, such as social problems, or external, like occupation.

As mentioned, the historic time setting for this genre of drama is either in a context where Damascenes were shown resisting Ottoman rule or French colonialism and the hara is portrayed as the site where mobilization for national causes begins. Nostalgia for the moral clarity of anticolonial struggle is a common theme in postcolonial societies (Bonnett, 2010). In the words of Wenzel, anticolonial nostalgia “acknowledges the past’s vision of the future, while recognizing the distance and the difference between that vision and the realities of the present” (2006: 7). Anticolonial nostalgia is projected toward the unfulfilled dreams of the nation, the failed futuristic dreams that independence from colonialism would bring development, prosperity, and dignity. However, in the eyes of many Syrians, postcolonial reality has brought accumulated crushed dreams, since liberation from the Ottomans brought the French mandate and independence from the French brought political instability, dictatorship, economic hardship, Western hegemony, and defeat in regional wars against Israel. These themes have been articulated both by the makers of the Bab al-Hara series and by other media figures in discussions in the Syrian and pan-Arab news media. In describing the reasons for the success of the series, the director, Bassam al-Malla (in Al-Quds al-Arabi, 2007) says:

The series comes at a moment when the Arab society feels threatened and besieged whether because of occupation or foreign intervention or internal fighting. [The viewer] seems to consider the values presented in Bab al-Hara as a positive response to the reality in crisis.

As one journalist has argued, the lure of Bab al-Hara is in its reaction to the present “dearth of chivalry and nobleness and to the inauthentic values of the market” (Yihya, 2007).

It is these nostalgic tropes of imagining how a Damascene community lived in the past that conjure an image of what can best be described as “authenticity.” Within the dialectics of the quests for both modernity and heritage, authenticity becomes a useful concept that captures the construct of a true past culture (see Sabry, 2010). As Shannon argues in his study of Syrian music, the question of authenticity has arisen “in the context of the question of modernity … beginning in the late eighteenth century with the onset of European colonization of the region and continuing through the current struggles” (2006: 54). Postcolonial writers such as Said have contended that postcolonial nationalism is fixated on “the search for authenticity, for a more congenial national origin than that provided by colonial history, for a new pantheon of heroes, myths and religions” (1979: 79). The whole genre of the Damascene milieu series is then a representation of this quest for authentic national origins and renewed national myths. In fact, the director of Bab al-Hara, Bassam al-Malla, claims that the series is an “honest portrayal of authenticity” and attacks its critics as ignorant of the heritage and ways of life in old Damascus (in Al-Quds al-Arabi, 2007).

However, such representations of authenticity have developed over the course of 20 years of production of the Damascene milieu series. In her book about authenticity in Damascus, building on Anderson’s (1991) notion of imagined communities, Salamandra argues that, “unlike the novel that engenders feelings of connectedness,” the Damascene milieu series of the early 1990s, exacerbated “regional and sectarian tensions, provoking resentment and hostility rather than kinship” particularly along regional affiliation (Damascus versus other Syrian cities and regions) and sectarian identity (2004: 105). This article argues that the genre has developed since the 1990s in a manner that has strategically sought to move beyond local representations of Damascene identity and to dramatize a Syrian national identity. In other words, later productions such as Bab al-Hara have merged modern national symbols with the representation of an old Damascene hara in an apparent attempt to construct an image of authentic “Syrianness” that feeds into the project of consolidating national identity.

A shifting genre

The genre of the Damascene milieu series has developed in a way that acquired direct political overtones, which occurred through specific tropes of portraying the old Damascene hara as a microcosm of a nation-state with its own sovereignty, authoritarian rule, and citizens. In Bab al-Hara, the portrayal of sovereignty was achieved by introducing the concept of the bab or the gate of the hara. As television critic, Mansour (2010), has noted, “it was never the case that Damascus neighborhoods had gates. Damascus has seven main gates and they are known to this day.” However, in Bab al-Hara, neighborhoods are depicted as having borders, a gatekeeper, and a gate that opens and closes according to the decisions of either the local authority or the French occupiers. For example, the plot of season IV (2009) of the series revolves around how the French impose a siege on the hara by closing its gate and the ways that people resist it with the help of other haras. The image of a besieged national space strikes a chord in Syria, which has been relatively isolated regionally and internationally because of its foreign policy that supports Hezbollah in Lebanon and Hamas in the occupied Palestinian territories. In this manner, the hara is presented as a nation-state with a bounded territory and relations with foreign entities.

The hara is also shown to have a homogeneous population with ties to people from different religious backgrounds. In the last two seasons of the show, a Christian woman character is introduced. According to the story, she seeks refuge in the hara because the French were pursuing her for involvement in the anticolonial rebel movement. This represents another symbol of modern nationhood emphasized in the old Damascene hara, which is the idea of an encompassing Syrian national identity that includes citizens of different religious sects. In Bab al-Hara there are many references to a common Muslim-Christian resistance against French colonialism. For example, when the rebels of the Damascene hara need arms, they are shown to get them from a Christian rebel leader from Aleppo. Such depictions are consistent with the secular outlook of the Syrian regime, whose rhetorical and communication strategy focuses on ideas of national unity that encompass sectarian and ethnic loyalties.

Another historical fallacy in Bab al-Hara is the character of the ‘Aqid, which means the leader of the hara. The ‘Aqid represents the bravest, wisest, and most masculine man in the hara. A man becomes the leader through consensus of the hara’s elite, who are the wealthy characters such as the barber, the owner of the local coffee shop, and tradesmen. In Bab al-Hara, the characters’ consensus on choosing the ‘Aqid is shown to be achieved quite effortlessly as the character clearly exhibits the most impressive leadership qualities. The leader is shown to have a room, which resembles a present-day office, where he heads meetings of the hara’s elite. He is shown as a conscientious and strong leader who solves the hara’s problems by listening to different opinions before making his final binding decision. In this way, the ruling structure of the hara is presented as a vibrant public sphere that is compatible with authoritarian rule. In other words, the imagination of a deliberative public sphere in the context of a Syrian hara incorporates Habermasian notions of the public sphere as a realm of social life in which “critical public discussion of matters of general interest” takes place (Habermas, 1989: xi).

However, it is also a public sphere that follows a clear hierarchy and is presided over by a popular ruling figure. It is depicted as embodying a condition of natural harmony between the local authority figure, the elite, and even the poorer classes, who are all united in the face of external occupation. For example, in one episode in season I (2006), this political arrangement is spatially demonstrated. One character is accused of stealing gold from his neighbor and, as a result, is summoned to the ‘Aqid’s office, into the presence of the hara’s elite. Because the whole hara was interested in the case, the men from poorer backgrounds stand outside the room, looking through the window and reacting to what the members of the elite are saying. Everyone is involved in the deliberation process about how to deal with the character’s theft; after the leader’s ruling, the characters are shown to be satisfied with the conflict’s conclusion.

The ending of the fifth and final season of the series (2010) is a more dramatic example of how the hara came to represent a nation-state and how its inhabitants were portrayed as displaying nationalist feelings towards it. The last episode revolves around the discovery that one of the hara’s elite figures was a spy for the French. The other notables and the ‘Aqid take a unanimous decision to execute him. The hara’s residents gather in its main square to witness the execution. The elite and the younger and more masculine characters stand in the front line of the crowd and tell the spy why he is to be executed. “If you know the nature of the hara’s men and you are playing such a game, then you are playing with your blood,” says one character. Another adds “The status and wealth that you run after should be sought amongst your countrymen, and not with the occupier who bought you with money.” For his part, the ‘Aqid vows “as God is my witness, I shall make of you an example to all who would think of emulating your actions.” After these words, everyone begins to shoot the spy. As he lies lifeless on the ground, the men of the hara stand hand in hand screaming with triumphant joy “Allahu Akbar” (God is great), as the women ululate. Before the show ends, a voiceover by the Christian woman character, who was shown to be involved in fighting the French, says “with the help of God and the care of their loved ones, horsemen depart.… They remain united hand in hand until judgment day.” The last season of the series (2010) ends with an image of the hara’s men, rich and poor, leaving on horses presumably to continue their struggle against the colonizer. This demonstrates the dramatization of harmony between Syrians, whether it is the leader, the elite, or the poor in their performance of anticolonial nationalism and Syrian authenticity.

On nationalism and national identity

The previously discussed depictions of modern national attributes such as sovereignty, citizenship, and nationalism represent the tropes in the dramatization of a Syrian national identity. In other words, through the aesthetic of nostalgia, the television series attempts to conflate imaginations of sovereignty, nationalism, and national leadership within the rubric of Syrian identity. There is a temporal ordering that is strategically deployed to bridge the distance between the nation and the state. In the words of Appadurai:

the relationship between states and nations is everywhere an embattled one … while nations (or more properly groups with ideas about nationhood) seek to capture or co-opt states and state power, states simultaneously seek to capture and monopolize ideas about nationhood. (2007: 289)

My argument is that in Syria the genre of the Damascene milieu is an important stage in this “battle of imagination” especially because – as I will demonstrate later – symbols from the series have been used by both the Syrian regime and its opposition. For its part, the regime has influenced in direct and indirect ways the production of television series to the advantage of its nation-building project in a manner that has represented national identity within the binary of “authentic” and “nationalist” versus “foreign occupier” and “spy.” Basically, the series has depicted a particular way of being Syrian, which entails loyalty toward the leader and resistance against the colonial power.

Spatial sovereignty, then, has been at the heart of the plot of the series and its treatment cannot be understood without an analysis of how the politics of temporality play out in the series. As Hardt and Negri (2001: 102) have contended:

Just as the concept of nation completes the notion of sovereignty by claiming to precede it, so too the concept of the people completes that of nation through another feigned logical regression. Each logical step back functions to solidify the power of sovereignty by mystifying its basis, that is, by resting on the naturalness of the concept. The identity of the nation and even more so the identity of the people must appear natural and originary.

What Hardt and Negri call “natural and originary,” I am referring to as authentic. In this way, the Bab al-Hara series can be understood in terms of a quest for national authenticity. By making symbols of national sovereignty the cornerstones of the nostalgic narrative, the series depicts the Syrian nation as preceding sovereignty and portrays “the people” as preceding the nation. In the treatment of the anticolonial struggle, sovereignty is also shown as an intrinsic part of the identity of the nation and people. Within this framework, series such as Bab al-Hara have contributed to the construction of a national identity that promotes the unity of the different communities within the current form of the Syrian nation-state. They portray Syrians as “a people” whose acceptance of the current national political arrangement is “authentic.”

Stated differently, the phenomenon of the popularity of these series, in addition to the regime’s support of and interest in their production, can be understood within the context of the alleviation of collective anxieties about modernity and, specifically, Syrian nationhood and statehood. The roots of these anxieties relate to the “incongruity between felt membership and state authority” and between national identification and political organization in Syria (Wedeen, 1999: 16). Syrian national identity has been continuously challenged by allegiances of sect, ethnicity, and local belonging, or wider affiliations to pan-Arab unity, the unity of “greater Syria” or Islamic identity (see Wedeen, 1999). Like many others in postcolonial contexts, Syrians have been struggling to construct a national identity within the nation-state they found themselves in after colonialism. Engrained in their collective memory is a deep resentment over the way that the British and the French colonial authorities divided the Levant region under the Sykes-Picot agreement of 1916 into the modern national entities of the Levant. Many Syrians believe that much of this area was historically ruled centrally from Damascus. Another aspect of the anxiety is over the legitimacy of the authoritarian rule of the Syrian Ba’athist regime. While under Hafez al-Asad such anxiety over national identity was glossed over by focusing state communication on the glorification of the president’s person and on Arab nationalism, under Bashar the focus shifted to bolstering a sense of belonging to the Syrian nation-state. The genre of the Damascene milieu and particularly Bab al-Hara falls within this context of an attempt at “softening the clashes” between different conceptions of identity and imaginations of a sense of belonging.

Bab al-Hara and the Syrian uprising

I have so far argued that the development of the genre of the Damascene milieu series is characterized by its amalgam of symbols of national sovereignty and its nostalgic portrayal of life in the past at the local level, which produce a representation of national authenticity. As the political circumstances in Syria took a dramatic turn with the anti-regime uprising that began in March 2011, the representations of authenticity of the Damascene milieu series, and particularly Bab al-Hara, became a site of contestation between government and opposition supporters. To return to Appadurai’s (2007) notion of the battle of imagination between state and nation, the appropriation of Bab al-Hara symbolism in opposition discourse is an example of a counter-offensive, through the imagination of agents with different ideas about nationhood, against the state.

Inspired by the “Arab Spring” uprisings in Tunisia and Egypt in early 2011, hundreds of thousands of Syrians took to the streets to demand their political freedom. However, the Syrian regime brutally attempted to crush the uprising, killing tens of thousands of Syrians since March 2011 as the country is caught in armed struggle between the regime and opposition forces. Within the context of this article, it is notable how common expressions and symbols reminiscent of Bab al-Hara have proved relevant in the new political crisis. In his first speech to discuss the crisis on 31 March 2011, Bashar al-Asad addressed the people of the southern Syrian city of Dara’a, where the mass protests first took place, by stating “the community of true nationalism and authentic Arabism; the people of Dara’a are the community of pride, bravery, and dignity; the community that will take control over the few who sought to spread chaos and undermine national unity” (Al-Asad, 2011). The words echo the nationalist themes of Bab al-Hara, whose opening jingle starts with the words “O community of pride, dignity and bravery” and goes on to say “the bastard sows sedition but glory returns to those with wisdom and authenticity.” Furthermore, the protesters also used the same words – “O community of pride, dignity, and bravery” – on the official Facebook page of “The Syrian Revolution 2011” to call on Syrians to protest. This is not to imply that tropes of imagining the national community around such general qualities are an invention of Bab al-Hara. Rather, it is an indication of the direct political overtones of these notions that were both reflected and popularized anew by the television series. The importance of the Bab al-Hara series within this context is that it enables Syrians to imagine the same dramatized images and performances of nationalist authenticity when such words are used in political rhetoric.

Both government and opposition supporters also used the tune of the jingle as background music to several amateur video clips uploaded on the video-sharing website YouTube that show footage of either anti- or pro-regime demonstrations. The videos typically show images of politicians deemed traitors contrasted with the masses, shown as the true nationalist Syrians. One popular video includes a voiceover from the Bab al-Hara character, who became the ‘Aqid of the hara in season V (2010). As the amateur video shows footage of an activist bleeding to death after being shot during a protest, the voiceover says “I swear by the God that created the earth in six days, your blood will not go in vain” (naser2016, 2011). In the series, the character was referring to avenging the killing of his father by the French. In the amateur video, the content was adapted to the Syrian uprising.

Another remarkable example is a video made by opposition activists in Talbiseh, a town north of the central city of Homs. To the music of the series, the video shows a Bab al-Hara-style confrontation between men acting as pro-government thugs, known in Syria as shabiha, depicted as heavily armed and dressed in typical civilian clothes, and, on the other side, peaceful protesters of different ages holding olive branches and the opposition’s new Syrian flag (Talbiseh …, 2012). The person acting as the leader of the shabiha group says “Today we come either to kill or be killed.” The ‘Aqid of the opposition group – dressed as a character in the series – responds: “In Talbiseh, we are all rebels and we are not scared of death.” The confrontation cynically ends up with the pro-regime thugs asking for money, specifically US dollars, and then conceding and leaving the battle scene – symbolism that regime supporters lack patriotism and are only after money and power. Perhaps the most striking aspect of the amateur video is how seriously armed opposition men have taken the acting of the sketch in their impersonation of Bab al-Hara characters.

In fact, Syrian and Arab journalists and publics have given a great deal of attention to the political positions of Bab al-Hara’s actors, who themselves became national symbols. Although a few of the actors expressed sympathy with the anti-regime protesters, the majority appeared on national television to voice support for the regime. A report on the pan-Arab satellite news channel, Al-Jazeera, discussed this political division of the actors by conflating them with the series’ characters. It stated that the hara’s residents are “no longer united”:

Their long television drama series with its five seasons, which was the talk of the town for so long, has come to an end. However, they have recently found themselves facing a real struggle in their country. Each of them has been expected to state a clear position that has no relation to art. Is this then the sixth season of Bab al-Hara? (Abdelhadi, 2011)

Similarly, an Arab journalist speculated whether the series was in fact a reason behind the Syrian uprising. “Five seasons of stories full of implicit messages about dignity and bravery were enough to change the mood of Syrians and mobilize them with nostalgia for their past and as a result they rebelled against their oppressors” (Al-Nassir, 2011). Other journalists linked the resistance against the regime’s army in certain neighborhoods in the embattled city of Homs to the portrayals of bravery and dignity at the level of haras as dramatized in the series (Shabakshi, 2011). Another example is the discourse generated by an armed opposition group’s killing of an actor in Bab al-Hara in November 2012 after accusing him of working for the regime. The slain actor’s character in the series was shown to have been killed in a battle against the French army. The symbolism of his role in Bab al-Hara was highlighted by regime supporters, who set up several Facebook groups and uploaded YouTube videos mourning the actor-turned-hero. Clearly, the series has provided ample symbolism and rhetoric for Syrians, both regime opponents and supporters, to voice their nationalist sentiments.

Conclusion

This article has discussed how popular culture, specifically television drama series, can act as an important site for the imagination of self and nation. I have suggested that in an authoritarian and postcolonial country like Syria there is a deep crisis over how to find a path toward accepted forms of modernity and national identity. This quest often uses imaginations of the past as a basis for conceptualizing and contesting present political identities. Since the early 1990s, dozens of television series have dramatized an imaginary Damascene and Syrian past within a nationalist backdrop of anti-imperial struggles. Throughout 20 years, these television series have contributed to shaping the public memory of Syria, that is the “body of beliefs and ideas about the past that help a public or society understand its past, present and by implication, its future” (Bodnar, 1993: 15). The Bab al-Hara television series, as the most popular of the Damascene milieu genre, has dramatized national identity through its portrayal of an amalgam of symbols of the past and present.

This study has several key implications. It underscores the importance of popular culture in understanding not only a country’s cultural and social complexities, but also in exposing its core political identity crises. This project is particularly relevant to the study of authoritarian political contexts in the way it sheds light on how popular culture and entertainment television gain symbolic significance in such communication environments. Similarly, it emphasizes their role at the contemporary moment in bolstering a sense of nationalism. Television dramas of this kind celebrate the relation between the individual and the nation by presenting patriotic characters as heroes, while shunning characters who exhibit lowly acts of treason. They celebrate community and local traditions from costumes to songs to foods in the way they portray the daily lives of people at the time. Television series play a role in mediating the tensions in the imagination of state and nation by bringing them closer through bolstering a sense of belonging to the nation-state.

In the case of Syria, symbols from the television series have been used as political tools to claim nationalist authenticity during the struggle between the regime and its opponents within the context of the Arab uprisings. These protests that have changed the political landscape of the Arab world have been described as “a revolution of the imagination” because they have “put individual Arabs at the center of their own narratives” (Elseewi, 2011: 1198) and have inspired individual and collective performances of nationalism. In societies with low book sales and a previously absent political public life, popular culture thus plays a central role in understanding political and cultural developments, and drama series are one part of the popular culture mosaic.

The importance of the specific case of the Damascene milieu is also to do with how it places notions of nostalgia, authenticity, and memory at the center of political and cultural debates about identity. Syria is an example of a postcolonial society searching for a home-grown system of governance and for politically orienting collective identities. Political discourse is often framed through ascribing and contesting meanings of the symbols of the past. This study is an example of how collective cultural memory is constructed and used for political purposes (Zelizer, 1995), whether it is religious revivalism or nationalist essentialism. Locating and analyzing such sites of memory (Nora, 1997) is of particular importance in the Arab world of the post-2011 uprisings, as anxiety over the political future is expressed through reconsideration of previous narratives about the past. In conclusion, what I have attempted to emphasize throughout this article is that Arab television and popular culture are at the heart of debates about understandings of modernity, nationhood, sovereignty, and postcolonialism, and are therefore a necessary element and site of analysis within these discussions.