Why do the political and cultural elites seem incapable of taking responsibility for public affairs? Sami al-Kayyal meets with Dr. Salah Nayouf to discuss the prevailing concepts of political work in Syria today and their relationship to Syrian history. How was society stripped of any ability to generate genuine and effective political movement? And how did we arrive at the pervasive conceptual distortion from which we now suffer? The discussion touches on the question of “Syrian patriotism” and the “Syrian individual,” and asks whether our older national and popular ideas are still viable, and whether there are alternatives to them. In conclusion, Dr. Nayouf explains the reasons for his withdrawal from what is known as the “Political Council for Central and Western Syria,” one of the recent experiments in political work to emerge in the country. Watch the first episode of the sixth season of the program “Public Space.”
