How many feasts have passed since the Tadamon massacres?

Having left behind yet another Ramazan, which we experience as a month of mercy, abundance, contemplation and return to the self, we have reached the Bayram. We have reached the Bayram, that is, the 'iyd, the return to the starting point: the starting point where we remove the distances that make us distant from one another, and set aside the things, the preoccupations and the cares that estrange us from God and from being itself, so that we may know and recognize one another.

For that reason the Bayram fulfils its function of 'iyd, of giving back to us what we have lost and making our existence flourish again, through a feast of gathering.

We notice who takes part in this feast, who is able to take part, and who is not. Bayrams begin with a visit to the graves, but condolences for those we lost during the year are also repeated, once more, on the first day of the Bayram. In this way life and death meet, as they should. And thus we also come to know that a life lived in forgetfulness of the fact that we are mortal, and that life is a trust entrusted to us, is a state of heedlessness.

Bayrams are times when time cannot be turned into cash. They realize themselves in their own routine, in their own time. All that falls to us is to submit to them and to grasp their meaning. A Bayram is being's way of explaining itself, and it summons us to this sermon of its own once or twice a year.

A Bayram is not to be experienced with a notion of entertainment in which one is beside oneself, has lost one's senses and has surrendered oneself to the flow of pleasures. It suspends all the titles, offices, goods and property that cling to a person in this world and tear people apart and away from one another; thus it makes the Bayram a Bayram for everyone, and returns us, if only for a while, to our essence.

That is why a Bayram is a restitution: the restitution of the point from which we began, of what we have lost, of our authenticity, our sincerity, our genuineness, our purest state.

Moreover, even in an age in which time, like everything else, is seen entirely as a possession (a commodity, cash), Ramazan comes and goes again every year to remind and teach us that neither property nor time lies within our own control.

The existence of Bayrams is a mercy and an abundance that flows into being and points the way to human beings, who are always prone to losing their way. May this mercy and abundance never be lacking upon you.

THE DEPTHS OF HUMAN DEGRADATION IN SYRIA

Yet where we feel this mercy, it is also part of what the Bayram requires that we remember those who are deprived of this gathering and cannot take part in this feast, and that we grieve with their griefs. In Syria, right next door to us, the greatest evils that human beings can do to one another, and the people exposed to those evils day after day, came before our eyes again, right on the eve of the Bayram.

The innumerable images of the torture, the cruelty and the massacres that those tyrants inflicted on people with the most criminal feelings, devaluing human life to such a degree, were recalled and put back on the agenda. These images do not leave my eyes.

The scenes in which the Shabiha beasts kill innocent civilians, hands bound behind their backs, until they are dead, with great lust and appetite, mocking and amusing themselves, are among the most routine business of the Syrian regime. This is a treatment that no animal inflicts on its enemy or its prey. It is something that no beast has ever done. Indeed, this points to the capacity of the human being, created as "the noblest of creatures," to sink to the level of "asfal-i safilin" (the lowest of the low).

If a human being at the level of asfal-i safilin only harmed himself, that would be his own choice; but that he commits such a merciless wrong against other people is a terrible thing. There are in fact countless records; you have probably watched the footage of the Daramon massacre. In another video, soldiers of the Baath regime beat a man lying on the ground with his hands tied behind his back, one after another, with all their strength, striking his whole body with sticks until they are exhausted. A fire that someone lit nearby suddenly sets the detainee's head alight. The burning man tries to put out his head with his kicks, and they try to smother it by pressing a car tire on him. It is clear from their conversation, and from the fact that they later kill the man in a horrific way, that they did this not to save the detainee from the flames but so as not to let him die before he had suffered enough torture.

All of these were in fact known events and scenes. But people forget very quickly. The great majority of the people who were subjected to these tortures and killed had not taken up arms; most were people who had been arrested on the grounds that they had taken part in anti-regime demonstrations.

These images of savagery explain sufficiently from where, why and how people have fled. Nothing else would drive millions of people to leave their homes, their homeland and their nests and seek adventure in other countries. And even those who could not leave Syria do not live in camps, inside Syria, in conditions far worse than their former way of life, for any other reason.

For eleven years, however many Bayrams have come and gone, the ordeal of these people has not ended and is not ending. The plight of these people is of course first of all the shame of the Assad regime and its plain crime against humanity, but it is at the same time the shame of all humanity, and naturally, first of all, the shame of those who count themselves as being of the same stock and the same religion as they are.

May this Bayram, God willing, be an opportunity to face these shames and to be rid of them. May it keep us far from the insolence, the lack of conscience and the ignorance of remembering what these people have suffered and saying "what are they doing here, let them go back to their country."

Now that we have entered a season of renewed relations with some Arab countries, may this renewal be an 'iyd: may it be a means for their eyes to be opened, their consciences awakened, their honor remembered and their brotherhood revived in the face of their own kin and co-religionists wallowing in such conditions.

A blessed Bayram to you all.