Umayyads and Byzantines: How Victimhood Manufactures Its Myths in Syria

In contemporary Syria, the erosion is not confined to the political sphere. It has penetrated the social fabric itself. The crisis has moved beyond the failures of an authority that suppresses representative pluralism or imposes institutional control from above. What now unfolds is a deeper and more corrosive transformation: a steady push that encourages Syrians to relinquish the idea of “a people” as a shared political community and to seek refuge instead in narrow, defensive identities shaped by fear, grievance, and selective invocations of history. This is the essential insight that emerges when one links the paralysis of politics to the rise of isolationist self-definitions.

When politics disappears, the public sphere no longer serves as a space for peaceful competition, negotiation, or the pursuit of common interests. The vacuum is filled by older, more instinctive forms of belonging. Groups begin to imagine themselves not as components of a single nation, but as self-contained entities with their own redemptive narratives, their own idealized pasts, and their own designated adversaries. Difference ceases to function as diversity and becomes a line of fracture. Pluralism loses its creative potential and turns into a source of mutual suspicion. It is within this atmosphere that identities such as “Umayyads” and “Byzantine Romans” reappear, not as historical continuities but as symptoms of a profound socio-political malaise.

The danger lies in the fact that these labels are not used as passing metaphors or cultural references. They operate as tools of social reordering. The discourse of the “Umayyads” does more than evoke a historical dynasty; it attempts to construct an imagined community within the Syrian Muslim heartland, one that claims symbolic precedence and sets the terms of legitimacy and belonging. In this framework, “Umayyad” and “Sunni” are recast as exclusionary markers, valued not for their theological or historical meaning but for their usefulness in policing the boundaries of loyalty, even against Sunnis who reject this alignment. The past is not opened for reflection; the present is barricaded.

The invocation of “Byzantine Romans” mirrors this logic. When segments of the Christian population perceive the public sphere as inhospitable to equal citizenship and interpret rising social forces through the lens of exclusion, they retreat into symbolic fortresses. Theological distinctiveness becomes insufficient; it is expanded and recast in a quasi-national mold to provide imagined historical depth. The attempt to define the self as neither Arab nor Syrian but as “Rûm” or “Byzantine” seeks a sovereign past and an imperial alternative. The psychological impulse is understandable, yet the result is a withdrawal from the shared national space into a closed identity that deepens the stalemate.

The strength of this analysis lies in its exposure of historical fragility. “Umayyad” was never a national identity, and “Sunni” was originally a jurisprudential and theological category rather than an ethnic or existential one. “Roman” once denoted citizenship within a multi-ethnic empire, not a modern nationalist identity. Even the term “Byzantine” is a later historiographical invention unknown to the empire’s own inhabitants. What emerges today is not a revival of authentic history but a reinvention of it, shaped by contemporary anxieties. These are modern myths draped in the garments of antiquity.

The decisive element is the fusion of these inventions with narratives of victimhood. Groups that experience fear, exclusion, or humiliation do not always seek justice alone. They often pursue symbolic compensation to restore a sense of agency and worth. At this intersection, identitarian mythology takes shape. Pain becomes narrative, narrative becomes memory, and memory becomes a claim to exceptionalism or divine favor. A community that once saw itself as marginalized begins to imagine itself as the heir to a lost grandeur. Without political and ethical remedies, victimhood becomes the raw material for psychological secession.

This is the emerging Syrian tragedy. Victimhood no longer inspires a more equitable social contract; it inspires the construction of higher walls. As political horizons contract, the allure of an identity that promises salvation, even at the expense of truth, grows stronger. The homeland ceases to function as a shared framework and becomes a landscape of wary groups living side by side, each searching for its own symbols, its own banners, and a grievance to justify its retreat. What disappears is not only the unity of the state but the very possibility of a society.

The central premise remains clear. An authority that obstructs politics does not create a neutral void. It accelerates the sectarianization of groups, the nationalization of grievances, and the crystallization of fear into rigid identities. Fragmentation becomes less a risk than a method. A country may remain geographically intact while being symbolically and socially partitioned, a fracture far more enduring than any border.

One may question the occasional overreach in attributing this entire process to long-term external engineering or colonial legacies, a claim that remains the least substantiated. Yet the core insight stands. When politics collapses, myth returns. When people are driven to inhabit only their wounds, they invent selves that cannot coexist with others, defined solely by their opposition to the “other.”

Syria today requires fewer identities nourished by humiliation and fewer voices speaking in the idiom of historical destiny. It requires the restoration of politics as the only arena capable of transforming pain into rights, difference into a contract, and memory into a shared responsibility rather than a weapon. To surrender to victimhood in the absence of a functioning public sphere is to produce nothing more than a collection of survivors on paper, living within a society that has ceased to exist.

This article was translated and edited by The Syrian Observer. The Syrian Observer has not verified the content of this story. Responsibility for the information and views set out in this article lies entirely with the author.

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