MAKATI CITY (MindaNews / 05 July) – Somewhere between the ruins of Homs and the olive groves of Quneitra, the sand no longer remembers the footsteps of resistance. It only remembers the boots.
And perhaps in a five-star New York hotel suite this coming UN Summit, the final shroud will be lifted.
According to Israeli media, Ahmad al-Sharrā‘a—more popularly known by his war-name, Abu Mohammad al-Julani—The Zionist entity’s unofficial governor of Damascus and once the poster child of black-flagged jihad, will meet Prime Minister Benjamin Netanyahu for “diplomatic discussions.” (Shafaq News, “Syria-Israel Meeting Under Consideration During Upcoming UN Summit,” Shafaq News, June 30, 2025, https://shafaq.com/en/Middle-East/Syria-Israel-meeting-under-consideration-during-upcoming-UN-summit. See also The Cradle, “Sharaa–Netanyahu Meeting in the Works for Upcoming UN Session,” July 1, 2025, https://thecradle.co/articles-id/31656.)
This isn’t merely a shift in policy—it is a reengineering of identity. Julani is no longer constructed as an enemy of the West, but as a potential ally, a pragmatic actor in the unfolding narrative of “regional stability.” This metamorphosis reveals how political legitimacy is not just seized through force, but narrated through shifting discourse.
Yes, you read that right: the former al-Qaeda affiliate, the dustman of Syria’s dead cities, now being prepared for statesmanship by Tel Aviv’s think tanks.
Nowhere to be seen now is the euphoria of “from Damascus to Jerusalem” chants during the so-called “liberation day.” What was once projected as a march of dignity is now exposed as a calculated drift toward disgrace.
It turns out that narratives—more than weapons—determine who becomes hero or heretic. The banner of resistance is not only about who fights, but about who gets to tell the story.
So, this is where revolutions go to die: in air-conditioned rooms with fruit trays and handshakes. And Karbala weeps again.
Once upon a battlefield, a man named Ḥusayn stood against a throne whose only legitimacy was its appetite. He was outnumbered, outarmed, outmaneuvered—and he knew it. Yet he refused compromise. Refused allegiance. Refused the invitation to a pragmatic political solution. Because truth, he believed, was not a matter of numbers, and resistance was not measured by the odds of success.
Fast-forward thirteen centuries: A man like Julani, draped in the vocabulary of jihad but trained in the logic of capitulation, has been recast from terrorist to transitional technocrat. His former beard of takfīr is trimmed into a PR-friendly trimmed version. The blood-soaked rhetoric of Wahhabism now sanitized into TED Talk tropes of “stability,” “governance,” and “moving forward.”
But one must ask: Forward to where? To Tel Aviv?
It must be a hard time for the likes of Sami Hamdi to justify Julani’s gesture toward Tel Aviv. The very figures who once romanticized “Islamist revolution” as a redemptive arc for the region now find themselves spinning Julani’s diplomacy as “pragmatism”—a word far too comfortable with betrayal.
The Times of Israel—never short of irony—recently confirmed:
“Syria does not demand the Golan Heights for the agreement with Israel.” (“Report: Syria Not Demanding Golan Heights as Part of Deal with Israel,” The Times of Israel, June 29, 2025, https://www.timesofisrael.com/liveblog_entry/report-syria-not-demanding-golan-heights-as-part-of-deal-with-israel.)
Let that sink in.
The Golan Heights—once etched into the soul of every Syrian textbook, once defended with Soviet SAMs and Arab blood—now apparently too much of an inconvenience to bring up at the bargaining table. Not even for show.
Julani, the man whose followers once declared all borders artificial and all governments apostate, now prepares to ink a borderless deal with the very entity that shattered Syrian sovereignty with impunity for decades.
Once branded globally as a terrorist, Julani is now recoded in Western media discourse as a “reformed” actor. This semantic shift exemplifies how, in constructivist terms, threat perceptions and political identities are socially constructed and reconstructed.
And what do the neo-Umayyads say?
Some are silent, their tongues paralyzed by career calculations. Others offer the new creed: “Iran is the bigger threat.” As if the Zionist bootprint on Syria’s neck could be photoshopped out of history.
This new framing does not arise from empirical threat analysis but from a constructed regional narrative—where strategic alliances, not moral clarity, define the ‘enemy’.
As if Karbala’s cry—“Hal min nāṣirin yansurunā?” (“Is there anyone to help us?”)—could be reinterpreted as a call to submit to Tel Aviv for the sake of “regional realignment.”
While bowing down to Tel Aviv, men identified with the regime in Damascus would unabatedly bomb churches, kill Syrians whom they labeled as “deviants,” and close the Shrine of Sayyida Zaynab—especially this sacred month of Muḥarram. They would even desecrate it in Google Maps, erasing not only heritage, but memory. (“Sectarianism and Minorities in the Syrian Civil War,” Wikipedia, last modified June 25, 2025, https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Sectarianism_and_minorities_in_the_Syrian_civil_war; “Syrian Authorities Deny Restrictions at Sayyida Zainab Shrine,” Shafaq News, June 29, 2025, https://shafaq.com/en/Middle-East/Syria-denies-restrictions-at-Sayyida-Zainab-shrine; “Iraqi Pilgrims Reroute as Rituals Suspended at Sayyida Zainab Shrine in Syria,” Shafaq News, June 30, 2025, https://shafaq.com/en/society/Iraqi-pilgrims-reroute-as-Sayyida-Zainab-shrine-rituals-suspended-in-Syria. On digital map desecration, see circulating images and posts on X (formerly Twitter), accessed July 6, 2025.)
They are not just mistaken. They are declaring whom they serve.
Let us return, then, to ‘Āshūrā’. Not as a ritual, not as a sectarian event, but as a compass. In a world where political realities are shaped by symbols and memory, ‘Āshūrā’ is not merely an event—it is a counter-narrative to submission. A construct that continues to unsettle every regime that thrives on fear and forgetfulness.
Ḥusayn did not simply die for truth; he refused to let falsehood wear its clothes. He knew that some defeats are victories, and some victories—when achieved through silence or compromise—are the most devastating defeats of all.
Julani may soon walk the halls of the UN, may receive handshakes and development funds. But to the eye of Karbala, he remains what he always was: not a liberator, but a dustman of dignity.
He did not liberate Syria. He merely swept its honor into bags and stacked them at Tel Aviv’s gate.
But Karbala does not end at Ḥusayn’s final breath. It continues in Zaynab’s voice.
In the aftermath of massacre and humiliation, Sayyida Zaynab stood unbroken in the very palace that engineered the bloodbath. In the court of Yazīd—drunk with victory, surrounded by jesters and generals—she did not cower. She did not negotiate. She declared:
“I see nothing but beauty. These are people whom Allah has destined for martyrdom… Scheme as much as you wish, for by Allah, you shall never be able to erase our memory.” (Ibn Ṭāwūs, Al-Luhūf ʿalā Qatlā al-Ṭufūf, 105; Al-Majlisī, Biḥār al-Anwār, vol. 45, 116–117.)
Today, we need that voice more than ever.
To Julani, the Zionist entity’s de facto governor of Damascus, and his cheerleaders in expensive suits and hollow media campaigns, Zaynab’s voice still reverberates:
You may be embraced by those who once cheered your destruction. You may be rebranded as “moderate” and praised as “the future of Syria.” But you will never erase the memory of betrayal.
You will never erase the smell of bodies under Aleppo’s rubble, nor the shame of surrendering the Golan with a grin.
You will never erase the eternal contrast: between Karbala’s defiant dignity and your polite disgrace.
Because Zaynab still speaks. And this time, her sermon is not in Damascus or Kufa—but in every heart that remembers what ‘Āshūrā’ really means.
#Politics #MiddleEast #Syria #InternationalRelations #SocialConstructivism #Ashura #Zaynab
[MindaViews is the opinion section of MindaNews. Mansoor L. Limba, PhD in International Relations and Shari‘ah Counselor-at-Law (SCL), is a publisher-writer, university professor, vlogger, chess trainer, and translator (from Persian into English and Filipino) with tens of written and translation works to his credit on such subjects as international politics, history, political philosophy, intra-faith and interfaith relations, cultural heritage, Islamic finance, jurisprudence (fiqh), theology (‘ilm al-kalam), Qur’anic sciences and exegesis (tafsir), hadith, ethics, and mysticism. He can be reached at mlimba@diplomats.com and www.youtube.com/@WayfaringWithMansoor, and his books can be purchased at www.elzistyle.com and www.amazon.com/author/mansoorlimba.]