On the night of September 17, Damascus witnessed something it had not seen in fifteen years. Assala Nasri, the Syrian-born superstar who had lived in exile since she bravely threw her support behind the 2011 uprising against Bashar al-Assad, walked onto the stage of the Al-Fayhaa Sports Hall. “Thank God,” she told a sold-out crowd, “I’m back in Damascus!”
What followed was more than an ordinary concert. Syrian flags rippled through the huge audience, who sang every lyric back to her, many in tears. “I never thought this day would come. It’s like a beautiful dream,” one 56-year-old woman told reporters. Assala herself seemed to struggle to hold back emotion as she opened with “Syria Janna” (“Syria Is Heaven”), a song she released the week Assad’s regime finally collapsed in Dec 2024. Culture Minister Mohammed Yassine Saleh, who joined Assala on stage, praised her return as a symbol of “freedom over oppression.”
What was most remarkable was the diversity of the crowd, which included many women who wore a hijab, many who did not, and men from all walks of life. As Asya Hesham, a Syrian TV presenter, put it on X:
The veiled women sing… and the secularists sing. The conservatives sing… and the liberals sing. The people of Suwayda sing, and the people of the coast sing, Daraa and Aleppo and Damascus and Raqqa and Deir ez-Zor and Hasakah and Homs sing… The message is clear: The monkey [Assad] has fallen… So, Syria expands to include everyone.
This was indeed a beautiful message of inclusion that Syria desperately needs after more than half a century of brutal tyranny and over a dozen years of devastating civil war. The country has a large Sunni Arab majority, with varying degrees of religiosity, along with Alawites, Christians, Kurds, the Druze, and others. What will hold them together, in peace and prosperity, is a pluralist sense of nationhood, where everyone’s faith, identity, and way of life is respected. And that will be enhanced by moments where they can all come together – like an Assala concert – to share common inspiration, joy, and hope.
Puritan Backlash
This pluralist vision is not easy to accomplish, though – just as it isn’t in the West these days – since there are always those who would like to make their own tribe or creed dominant. In the weeks before the concert, a group of conservative clerics led a campaign to cancel the event. The loudest voice was Hani Dahab, an Egyptian preacher known as Sheikh al-Dhahabi, who denounced “sinful concerts,” and who even claimed – falsely, as it turned out – that the show had already been called off.
The controversy in Syria reminds us, once again, the Muslim world has many forces willing to reshape society according to their own notions of right and wrong. Against such puritan ambitions, we need not just political decisions to keep them at bay, but also religious thought that can criticize them from within.
Meanwhile, on Sept. 6, a formal statement signed by 62 public figures, including two members of parliament and a reinstated Syrian diplomat, called on the government to review the rules governing public events and to withdraw official support from anything deemed incompatible with “Syrian society’s identity and values.” The statement did not name Assala, but its timing left little doubt about what it was about.
To its credit, the government did not fold. The Ministry of Culture even announced that it would help sponsor Assala’s next album. This was yet another sign of recent efforts by the government of President Ahmed al-Sharaa to embrace Syria’s broader society – alongside reaching an agreement with Kurdish-led forces, reopening Christian schools shuttered for decades under the Assad regime, and taking steps to return confiscated properties to Syria’s long-displaced Jewish community. (These hopeful moves have, unfortunately, co-existed with less inspiring campaigns, including incidents of persecution of Alawites and Druze.)
The controversy in Syria reminds us, once again, the Muslim world has many forces willing to reshape society according to their own notions of right and wrong. Against such puritan ambitions, we need not just political decisions to keep them at bay, but also religious thought that can criticize them from within.
“Commanding the Right and Forbidding the Wrong”
The first step in such pluralist religious thought is to ask a simple but crucial question: Do Muslims have the right – let alone the duty – to impose the obligations of Islam, as they understand them, on other Muslims?
For puritans like al-Dhahabi, the answer may be obvious. They believe “instrumental music, mixing between the sexes, a woman’s voice and public concerts” are simply haram, or religiously prohibited. Then they easily take the next step of calling on the government to ban these things, thinking they are fulfilling a Quranic duty: “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong.” The Taliban regime does the same thing, systematically, through its “Ministry of Commanding Right and Forbidding Wrong” – a government institution aimed at monitoring the behavior of citizens according to Taliban standards.
Yet there is a big gap in the puritans’ reasoning. Not every Muslim – let alone every citizen – agrees on what is “right” and what is “wrong.” Not every Muslim, for example, thinks music is haram, or sees a problem with “mixing between the sexes,” as long as it stops short of debauchery. (In Turkey, my home country, none of this is a public issue.)
Therefore, when the puritans try to enforce “Islam” on society, all they really do is dictate their own narrow understanding of Islam to everyone else. They don’t advance genuine piety based on sincere conviction – they only advance the tyranny of their own beliefs.
This problem was spotted by another Damascus-based Islamic scholar – a much older and wiser one – back in the 17th century. This was Abd al-Ghani al-Nabulsi, a Hanafi scholar who taught at the Umayyad Mosque, and who had opposed the puritans of his own time: the Kadizadelis, who caused much havoc in the Ottoman Empire with their zeal for “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” through violence and coercion. Like today’s puritans, the Kadizadelis believed music was haram, which led them to attack the Sufi orders that sang and danced. They also viewed two novelties in Ottoman society (coffee and tobacco) as haram, and their campaign helped push Sultan Murad IV (r. 1623–40) to ban both across the empire on pain of death. For a while, people, seriously, were executed in the streets of Istanbul simply for drinking coffee.
Against this zealotry, al-Nabulsi raised a crucial argument in his work Al-Hadiqah al-Nadiyyah, or “The Dew-Moistened Garden.” The Quranic duty of “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong,” he wrote, is a “matter of the tongue” – meaning it should be carried out only through preaching. Moreover, people had the right to dismiss that preaching, al-Nabulsi added, by citing Qur’anic verses:
In summary, “commanding the right and forbidding the wrong” refers to the tongue, and it is the truthful opinion. As God Almighty said: “And say, ‘Truth is from your Lord. Whoever wants, let him believe and whoever wants, let him disbelieve’ [18:29].” The meaning of this verse is not to force people to obey the command and avoid the prohibition. That is why God Almighty said to His Prophet, whom He sent to deliver the command and prohibition: “Do you want to coerce people until they become believers?” [10:99]. And God Almighty said: “There is no compulsion in religion” [2:256].
In other words, al-Nabulsi, an Islamic scholar from 17th-century Damascus, opposed religious coercion and defended what we would today call “religious freedom” – all with Quranic references. It is a wisdom that can still help the Damascus of the twenty-first century, and elsewhere in the Islamic world, where some preachers can’t distinguish between their own conceptions of piety and the government policy concerning all citizens.
Preach and Let Live
In practical terms, al-Nabulsi’s vision means that Syria’s ultra-conservative clerics, who don’t approve concerts like Assala’s, are free to preach their views, and those who agree with them can act accordingly. But they shouldn’t demonize, threaten, or try to discipline those who disagree.
The Syrian Revolution has triumphed in toppling a monstrous tyranny, ending its unspeakable murders and tortures, and liberating its victims. It will continue to do so by extending freedom to all Syrians, regardless of religion, sect, ethnicity, or way of life.
Meanwhile, those who think that concerts in Damascus somehow betray the spirit of the Syrian revolution – as some clerics have claimed passionately from pulpits — should hear what Hassan Daghim, an Islamic scholar and a member of the Syrian People’s Assembly, said on X amid the controversy:
I never knew that we launched the revolution to ban singing or to celebrate it, nor to impose the hijab or forbid it, nor to promote mixing or enforce separation. What I do know is that we launched the revolution to deter aggressors, fight oppressors, free the free men and women, destroy torture chambers, and avenge the martyrs of long decades.
Indeed, the Syrian Revolution has triumphed in toppling a monstrous tyranny, ending its unspeakable murders and tortures, and liberating its victims. It will continue to do so by extending freedom to all Syrians, regardless of religion, sect, ethnicity, or way of life.
Many Syrians are hoping for this bright future – as do many others, including myself. For Syria is the silver lining of our dark times, and its achievement excites us all. And that is why Assala’s return to Damascus resonated so broadly, not just with the daughters and sons of Syria, but also with millions of others around the world.
The views expressed in this article are the author’s own and do not necessarily reflect MBN’s editorial stance.
