From Postcolonialism to Post-Arab Spring Cosmopolitanism and the Crisis of Syrian Identity

Hamid Dabashi (2012) saw the Arab spring revolutions as a collective act of overcoming the colonial condition and retrieving a repressed cosmopolitan worldliness that has been overshadowed by the contradictions of postcolonial politics. Dabashi posits that the pluralist and egalitarian slogans of protesters were an expression of this worldliness. In this research I assess this claim in the context of Syria. I examine the question: Has this cosmopolitan orientation resurfaced in Syria? I argue that the 2011 Syrian uprising was a retrieval of what Dabashi describes as repressed cosmopolitan worldliness. It was a grassroots attempt to bring an inclusive meaning to Syrianism, consistent with the country's boundaries and reflective of its ethnic and religious cosmopolitanism. The transformation of the crisis into a global proxy war has resulted in the rise of hundreds of armed groups driven by competing projects that have vacated the revolutionary attempt to redefine Syrianism.