The Sickle Does Not Own the Harvest

Samir Taqi

The harvest does not own the fields, just as the rifle cannot claim the meaning of revolution. Tools are borrowed; land, crops, blood, and pain belong solely to their rightful owners.

The Syrian struggle for freedom, democracy, and civic life began when the heroes of May 6 ascended the Ottoman gallows in Damascus and Beirut; when Syrian men and women joined together to forge a pluralistic national pact in the face of French occupation; and when the Syrian people stood, time and again, against Israeli aggression. Through this lens, the history of Arab republics since the fall of the defunct Ottoman Empire can be understood.

When warlords cloaked in the garb of revolution and ideology rose to power—ruling in the name of “socialism,” “nationalism,” or “revolutionary Islam”—they ushered their countries into a full era of bloody authoritarianism and militia domination. Since then, power has circulated among ideological “revolutionaries,” from nationalists to Marxists to political Islamists, crossing bridges of ruin and seas of blood, deriving legitimacy from mythical national or religious narratives, and governing through repression and the destruction of society and civic life.

As a result, numerous Arab states—from Syria to Lebanon, Iraq, Yemen, Sudan, Libya, and others—have become models of militia republics, severed from modernization, incubating chronic failure, rentier parasitic economies, and bureaucratic bourgeoisies that live off corruption and monopoly rather than production and labor. In this sense, lived experience confirms that every closed ideological system is corrupt by definition, authoritarian by necessity, and a failure in practice.

When ideology is raised above humanity, society becomes raw material in the hands of power; the homeland is reduced to a barracks, the city to a camp, and the citizen to a number in security and intelligence files.

When the Syrian revolution erupted, it did not merely confront Ba‘athist rule as a governing party; it revolted against the entire model—against ideological “revolutionaries,” warlords, and every authority claiming monopoly over truth while confronting freedom of thought and democracy with violence, denunciation, and prisons. At its core, the revolution declared the end of the legitimacy of the sickle and the rifle in determining the fate of the Syrian harvest.

The Syrian revolution did not begin in mid-November 2024, nor did it end on December 8 of that year, as some would like to claim—as though history could be reduced to negotiation dates or coups conducted behind closed doors. Nor did it even begin on March 15, 2011, when the first protests erupted in Daraa, Damascus, and Homs. It is far older than that.

It manifested itself when the strikes of Damascus and Aleppo merchants paralyzed the country in the 1960s in defense of free markets and individual initiative, and when activists of the “Damascus Declaration” confronted authority bare-chested—an eye facing an awl—pointing toward a different Syrian path: that of a democratic civil state reconciled with itself.

For all these reasons, this revolution is not, and will never be, the property of warlords. It belongs to Nizar Qabbani, Muhammad al-Maghout, Riyad al-Turk, Mishaal Tammo, Abdulaziz al-Khair, Raja Nasser, and countless other activists. It belongs to every Syrian struggler who disappeared into the alleys of Damascus, Aleppo, Homs, Jableh, and beyond; who traversed rugged nights in rural Hama, Idlib, Afrin, Jabal al-Arab, the Alawite Mountains, and the Syrian Jazira.

It belongs to those who perished in the basements of Ba‘athist–Assadist torture and extermination; to families whose homes were destroyed because they dared to say “no” to the intelligence state; and to ordinary people who protected their neighbors from brutality and sectarian revenge, refusing to become informants or pawns in the machinery of repression.

It also belongs to enlightened religious figures—from the late Sheikh Jawdat Said to Dr. Muhammad Shahrour—and to a long line of Islamic reformers who sought and found in faith a path to freedom and dignity. It belongs to every modest Syrian public servant who tried to shield people from the abuses of power, and to every statesman who believed public office to be a service rather than a spoil, quietly dismantling the foundations of tyranny from within institutions until authority became hollow and rootless.

When Syrians were slaughtered by the guillotine of ISIS terror and other forms of savage jihadism, Syrian patriots did not hesitate to condemn this terror through action rather than slogans, making enormous sacrifices in fighting the so-called “Caliphate State” and its derivatives. Many fought on two fronts simultaneously—against authoritarianism and against religious barbarism—so that Syrian identity would not dissolve into bloodthirsty imported doctrines.

Since the March 2011 uprising, the Assad regime, together with both East and West, colluded to empty the revolution of its substance and turn it into a massacre that went beyond killing and destruction to sever the roots of Syrian national cohesion and reengineer it according to warring powers. The bleeding continued until Syria became a haven for warlords from across the globe and a laboratory for weapons, ideologies, and alliances.

Major international shifts—from the war in Ukraine to escalating regional confrontation after October 7, to the erosion of understandings with Russia and rising tensions between Iran and the West—accelerated the reordering of the “Syrian file” on regional and international tables.

At that point, new high commissioners from Western and regional capitals lined up to draw maps of “transition” in Syria, much as Lawrence of Arabia once did. Envoys and mediators poured in—from Western politicians to Turkish and regional generals and diplomats—to manage the collapse in the final weeks of the ruling family and oversee the distribution of zones of influence and tutelage over a war-weary country.

Thus, Syria gradually came under intertwined regional and international guardianship, an open arena for future great-power conflict. Iran was neutralized, the military chain of command paralyzed—and this was hailed as the “great victory.” Yet today, after Assad’s thunderous fall, Syria faces an even deeper and graver existential challenge, amid a new cycle of tutelage, arms, and fragmentation.

The Syrian revolution did not begin in mid-November 2024, nor did it end on December 8 of that year. The sickle does not own the harvest. The true harvest is a democratic civil state where citizens are equal before the law, where the economy is rebuilt on productive rather than rentier foundations, and where politics is reclaimed from militias and security apparatuses and returned to a free society.

Absent this, the revolution’s cause remains open. So who owns the field? And who owns the harvest?