The triumphant return to Damascus of Assala Nasri, the most prominent Syrian female singer of her generation, after 15 years of exile has captivated Syrians and drawn in Arabs, Kurds and Turks across the region.
Thursday’s three-hour concert was sponsored by the Ministry of Culture, and reports focused on the opposition it aroused in Syria’s Salafist circles and on the government’s insistence on holding it regardless. To many observers, that alone belied the claim, dominant in partisan Iraqi and Lebanese media and, tellingly, Israeli outlets, that Syria is now ruled by jihadists. The Lebanese film writer Bechir Soueidy caught the mood in a viral tweet referring to the Islamic State group, accompanied by a clip of the concert’s female dancers: “Are those the Daesh members Hezbollah went to fight in Syria?”
Among Syrian thinkers, online and off, the conversation ran deeper, centering on Assala’s deliberate effort to model an inclusive Syrian nationalism. Two weeks earlier she had released a “Syrian Album” of 14 folk songs, one for each governorate, each in its local dialect. On stage she professed her love for Sweida and sang in Kurdish, to roaring cheers. That celebration of diversity lands at a moment of deep division, between Arabs and Kurds and between Sunnis and other sects, that Syria’s new rulers have both stoked and tried to paper over. As the Syrian-American philanthropist Shuaib Rifai quipped on X, “You have one singer doing more national reconciliation than the entire government.”
The obstacles are great. Assala contends with an array of sectarian and ethnic identity entrepreneurs, from Syria’s new rulers to Alawites, Kurds and Druze, the last two courting autonomy or statehood. The deeper problem is that inclusive nationalism never took root in Syria to begin with. Thinkers like Burhan Ghalioun, Yassin al-Haj Saleh, Rahaf Aldoughli, Sami Kayyali, Sarah Hunaidi and Huda Zein have all pointed to the role the Assad regime played in co-opting and securitizing sectarian identity as a core instrument of authoritarian survival, deliberately fracturing Syria’s social fabric rather than forging a genuinely shared civic belonging.
What it left behind was a country where communal identity became the primary vehicle for security, and where narratives of collective guilt could be shifted from one group to the next. The new authorities, these intellectuals contend, have not repaired the damage; some patterns of exclusion have simply been reproduced, with loyalty to the centralized state and membership in the Sunni Arab majority marking who belongs to the nation.
This critique cuts two ways. It contradicts the new government, which presents Syrians as broadly unified and firmly nationalist. But it also punctures the rose-tinted discourse of coexistence that Syrians of all sects embraced before 2011, discarded during the uprising amid Assad’s sectarian massacres and the country’s fragmentation, and have revived since his fall. Under Assad, difference was papered over and honest debate about national identity was impossible.
The warmth of Assala’s welcome, from Syrians of every creed and ethnicity, points to something real beneath both the official story and the intellectuals’ pessimism: a popular desire for a nationalism that celebrates difference rather than denying it. For the first time in decades, Syrians can openly argue over who they are, even as the state advances a nationalism stamped with a Sunni Arab “neo-Umayyad” identity, and figures like Druze Sheikh Hikmat al-Hajari and the Alawite Sheikh Ghazal Ghazal work to keep communities apart and afraid of one another.