Assad’s ghost still haunts Syria’s parliament

The story of Syria is, in a sense, the story of an overcoat.

Let us begin, then, with a brief account of The Overcoat, Nikolai Gogol’s famous short story – the one that supposedly prompted Dostoevsky to remark: “We all came out of Gogol’s overcoat”. We shall return to it at the end.

Its hero is Akaky Akakievich, a lowly but conscientious civil servant living in St Petersburg, then the Russian capital. His name has something of the flavour, to Arab ears, of calling a man Mabrouk Mabrouk or Khalaf Khalaf. He deprives himself of even food so that he can afford a new overcoat. Yet on the very first occasion he wears it, the coat is stolen. Akaky dies of grief – only to return as a ghost, roaming the city and stealing other people’s overcoats.

Pictures of Syria’s new People’s Assembly, whose membership was chosen during the transitional period through a mixture of popular and official endorsements, have circulated alongside photographs of the same chamber under the Assads – in “the age of applause”, when clapping was practically part of the political liturgy. The rule was simple: clap and you’ll avoid trouble.

In 1974, Hafiz al-Assad borrowed the Ba’ath Vanguards youth organisation from the Soviet-style pioneer movements of socialist states, adapting the idea to the ideology of the Ba’ath Party and Arab nationalism. In primary schools, the organisation became notorious for what was known as the “Vanguard clap”. The ritual then migrated into mass organisations, municipal councils and eventually the People’s Assembly itself. Under the two Assads, applause had become political prayer: a daily rite by which loyalty and submission were publicly professed. 

Footage still circulating on social media shows Bashar al-Assad, heir to his father, entering the People’s Assembly to interminable applause, as though returning in triumph from some magnificent bit of war fighting. By contrast, President Ahmed al-Sharaa entered the same chamber to no applause at all – another kind of imitation, perhaps, or simply the photographic negative of a sordid political spectacle.

Applause itself is an imported custom, inherited from theatres, Roman arenas and the modern Western stage. The Arabs traditionally had other ways of displaying delight. Old accounts even describe a man overcome with pleasure as “scraping the earth with his feet in joy”. 

Yet the Assad regime, for all its Ba’athist nationalist posturing, turned applause into a patriotic duty. Politicians and ordinary citizens alike were compelled to clap as proof of loyalty and submission. The man who kept his hands still risked finding himself under suspicion of treachery.

The Quran describes the worship of the pagans at the Kaaba thus: “Their prayer at the House was nothing but whistling and clapping.” Whistling, in modern times, has largely become a sign of protest in theatres and public meetings; applause, meanwhile, is the first symbolic reward bestowed upon the performer or political orator – even when what he has just uttered is drivel.

In modern parlance, a politician is a “representative” of the people, and applause has consequently become praise for the best representative expressed through the hands: a bodily language of approval, satisfaction and delight.

It is also contagious, rather like ringworm. People often clap because they are members of a crowd, rather than because they have formed an opinion – particularly in regimes where politics itself is forbidden.

And applause (Ar: tasfeek) has its own thunder. It is bell and drum fashioned from flesh. Even in Arabic, the etymology is suggestively close to safka: a bargain or compact, an agreement struck by the joining of hands. An old saying runs: “May God bless the bargain struck by your right hand. ”And in the tradition concerning allegiance: “Whoever pledges allegiance to an Imam, giving him the clasp of his hand and the fruit of his heart…”

The ghost of the Assad era, it seems, has not yet departed. Most politicians – and even some Friday preachers – continue to employ the vocabulary and rhetorical habits of that age in their statements and sermons. Consider, for example, this post from the Syrian Ministry of Information: “The qualitative leap achieved by Syria in the World Press Freedom Index came as an implementation and result of the vision of His Excellency President Ahmed al-Sharaa”.

The clapping-free opening of the new People’s Assembly was nevertheless different. It seemed to recover something of the fine traditions of Syria’s post-independence parliamentary heyday – or perhaps to edge closer to those of the British House of Commons, where parliamentary convention traditionally frowns upon applause.

MPs voice approval with cries of “Hear, hear”, and opposition by other means. The point is to preserve the chamber as a place of argument rather than allow proceedings to degenerate into a clapping competition. 

President Ahmed al-Sharaa enjoys considerable popularity and acceptance following the fall of the Assad regime; many of his opponents concede as much. Others attribute the regime's collapse to international and regional understandings, as well as to the decrepit state of the regime itself. “Such days We alternate among mankind”, as the Quran eloquently puts it. 

Assad, after all, left behind a “heavy legacy” – the phrase much used at the beginning of his son’s rule in the early 2000s, and one capable then of being understood as either praise or condemnation.

Some of al-Sharaa’s supporters now seem eager to manufacture slogans to rival those once chanted for Assad: “Ahmed for ever”, perhaps. Others itch to revive the rituals of applause, if only to spite Assad’s remaining supporters. There are even those who claim that al-Sharaa wants to be king, or at least to a presidency as permanent as the Assad family’s supposedly eternal rule.

Be that as it may, a political directive to dispense with applause in parliament is a major leap forward: the abolition of an absurd ritual of loyalty and submission.

And so we return to Gogol’s Overcoat, and to our poor Mabrouk of St Petersburg.

‘The Prophet’s mantle’ became one of the symbols of the caliphate and sovereignty. Prophet Muhammad is reported to have told Uthman, the future third Caliph of Islam: “O Uthman, God will clothe you in a garment; if the hypocrites demand that you remove it, do not remove it.” Scholars interpreted the garment as the Caliphate. Historian Ibn al-Athir called it “one of the finest metaphors.”

Assad’s ghost, stripped now of his iron mantle, still wanders through the heart of Syria, much like the ghost of Gogol’s unfortunate hero. Assad’s coat was woven from the suffering of Syrians, from the very skins flayed from their bodies under torture.

And yes, many people kept warm beneath it.

There is an Arabic saying that captures the attitude towards Assad’s iron overcoat rather neatly:

I want it for myself – and I spit on it.