What does everyone expect from the new Syria and its leader?

The enthusiastic participation of the people in the ceremonies held on the first anniversary of liberation from the bloody and criminal Assad regime is undoubtedly an event unseen even in Syria's century-long history. In many provinces of the country, millions of people took part in the Freedom Day celebrations without any coercion, as an expression of a joy they felt within themselves.

We had witnessed similar scenes of participation since 2011. Back then too, the people took part in massive numbers in protest demonstrations against the regime that required great courage, and demanded that the regime change. That is, the Syrian people is a people that did not shrink from expressing its feelings back then either.

Truly, those protests, which took place after a long empire of fear and despotism, after the inhuman practices of the mukhabarat, showed an explosion in which the wall of fear was overcome. With its mukhabarat tactics the regime had established over the Syrian people, for 50 years, a regime of fear in which brother suspected and feared brother. A gloom in which the slightest accusation could drag a person into uncertain fates in Sednaya and similar dungeons, leaving people unable to breathe. Despite this, in 2011 the people launched an uprising that spread rapidly to all cities, and demanded the reform of the regime, and when the regime insisted on not being reformed, its overthrow (iskat).

The regime's terrible response to these demands is well known. The Syrian people did not flinch, were not content with demonstrations; everyone who could hold and find a weapon took up the resistance. The people who took part voluntarily in the protests that day today, again voluntarily, embrace with great enthusiasm this revolution made by their own sons. There is for now no other place in the Arab geography where the people and the state are this integrated. What it means to have a state that represents oneself, Türkiye too had fully experienced on 15 July.

THE SYRIAN PEOPLE MORE THAN DESERVE THE FREEDOM FESTIVAL

They are joining this festival they deserve with great joy and enthusiasm, without hesitation. Freedom is a great value whose worth is very well understood when great prices have been paid for it. Those who place their hopes on freedoms given by others surrender like sacrificial sheep when those freedoms are taken back. But the Syrian people know very well the meaning of the victory that came after the days they lived under Assad's tyranny for 60 years. They know very well that this is the result of patience shown in the way of God, a patience girded with determined resistance, of trust and reliance upon God.

The Syrian Revolution is, in fact, an example, like a verse (ayah), of the determining power of free will against regimes that have been fortified by international balances and issued a certificate of indestructibility. Their fortresses thought indestructible are leveled to the ground, their armies thought invincible taste the heaviest of defeats, their reputations thought lofty are toppled and they are disgraced, and the oppressors see with their own eyes by what kind of upheaval they have been overthrown. Russia, Iran, Israel, China, the US and the Gulf countries… Some directly, some through balancing games, were continuing to support the Assad regime. The victory came just at the moment when they had all reaffirmed their support, renewed their contracts with the Assad regime, and when it was thought that this bloody regime had left no door of hope for the oppressed. And just as the oppressors saw with their own eyes by what kind of upheaval they were overthrown, those next in line must have taken a message from this overthrow too. That message had in fact reached Assad very early on, in an inscription written by children on the walls of the streets of Daraa: "Doctor, it's your turn!" said the free children of Daraa. The Dr., instead of receiving this message, imagined, like the Pharaohs, that by killing all the children and cutting off the lineage of the children who could overthrow him, he could escape this upheaval. But the only place he could escape to was this inevitable end. He has now become a message of admonition dispatched to his likes.

On the 1st year of the Syrian revolution, on Freedom Day, the embrace and dialogue between Ahmed al-Sharaa and his people hold all the glad tidings of a very bright future for Syria. We keep listening to the sick commentaries of those who attribute different and, by their own lights, absurd meanings to the international contacts he undertook after making the revolution in order to put his country on an even keel. Truly, from these analyses we can understand only this for certain: they would have done so themselves.

If it were they, they could really owe such a victory only to the US, to Israel, or to other imperialists to whom they would make their countries a bargaining matter. Cowards and collaborators who cannot achieve any success without making those bargains, without selling their countries, cannot otherwise understand or interpret Sharaa's victory that has risen like a sun. They try to interpret Sharaa's international contacts after the revolution with this mentality of salesmanship and cowardice.

Yet Sharaa bases his success in the revolution on no one but God. Because of the revolution, which he and his comrades feel was accomplished through their faith in God and by acting in line with God's commands, they are far from a mindset that would humble itself before a creature. In Doha, in his answers to Amanpour's questions, in his answers to the accusation of terrorism, or in his remarks about the expectations placed on them, he displayed not the slightest defensive/apologetic attitude. He is not obliged to compromise either on his principles or on the program he will implement for Syria in order to have the terrorist label removed. He simply lays out the objective facts: those who call him a terrorist are the real terrorists, because of the civilians they killed en masse in Afghanistan, Iraq and Gaza...

SHARAA SURPRISES

Sharaa surprises also regarding the "radical Islamist performance" that Amanpour and others expect of him. What they expect is perhaps the performance ISIS displayed as a deadly spectacle, one entirely incompatible with the wisdom, principles and politics of Islam. There are even those who accuse him of deviating from the cause he has struggled for until now because Sharaa did not display this performance. Yet Sharaa has neither abandoned his claims nor deviated from his path. According to him, and in fact according to the generally accepted understanding of Islamism, this is precisely what Islam is.

That was exactly what he said in the conversation during the visit I made to him in the very first days of the revolution, on the first day he sat in his office. True, we had given it a label like "the Islam of Damascus," but this is something that anyone who knows the history of the spread of Islam will see at once.

There is no need and no meaning in attributing a great metaphorical story of "transformation" or "change" to his switching immediately from military uniform to a tie. Sharaa has a very strong notion of fiqh regarding how Islam and its realities can meet.

Those who are ready to see only violence, blood, intolerance and impatience from Islamists should question the clichés in their own minds and immediately confront this very simple, plain question: where did they ever see, in the states and societies Muslims founded and ruled for centuries, the examples they expect from Islamists today?

Looking at who planted these expectations in their own brains today would be a very good start for experiencing an enlightenment.