To what constitutional abyss and cultural degradation do some members of the Syrian People’s Assembly wish to drag the country? MPs who have emerged from the caves of the Dark Ages to stand at the forefront of legislative authority, bringing with them a distorted jurisprudence, a petrified consciousness, and a vision that yields no law—instead, it drafts ignorance into constitutional articles and endows backwardness with the immunity of the state and the prestige of the institution.
What was put forward by two members inside the Assembly—who perhaps were speaking on behalf of a broad segment of its membership—during the discussion of the report presented by the Minister of Education regarding his ministry’s work and proposals to address the deteriorating educational reality, was not an innocent difference of opinion. Rather, it was a explicit aggression against reason, women, children, and the future of society. For when an MP claims that women have “dominated” the teaching profession and that instruction requires “the strength of a man,” he not only insults the female teacher, but exposes the shallow nature of his own upbringing and his inability to grasp that education is knowledge, competence, and a mission—not muscles, virility, and a display of power. Most wretched of all is that this ignorance is cloaked in the mantle of jurisprudence through feeble interpretations that offend religion before they offend women, turning texts into instruments for her exclusion and the execution of her civilizational role.
Today they demand her exclusion from education; tomorrow they will expel her from state departments, then erase her presence from society until she ends up a captive within four walls—a being stripped of will, voice, and rights. This is how the assassination of a woman begins: a proposed article in parliament, ending with the imprisonment of half of society inside homes.
Then, from the very same depths, comes someone demanding the reinstatement of corporal punishment in schools, as if a child can only be raised with a stick and cannot learn except through humiliation. Legitimizing violence in classrooms is not education; it is the early establishment of a culture of servitude through which the child’s dignity is broken, trained in submission, and ingrained with obedience to power and fear of authority. One group seeks to assassinate the role of women, and another seeks to crush the personality of the child—yet both share in manufacturing a tamed, ignorant, and terrified society that is easily subjugated in the name of religion, tradition, and upbringing.
What kind of manhood is this that asserts itself only by excluding women? And what kind of education requires a man to beat children and teach them humiliation? Manhood is not found in breaking the female teacher, nor is education found in flogging the pupil, nor is legislation found in codifying ignorance. This is not a state being built, but a new structure of tyranny replacing the intelligence service’s whip with the cleric’s stick, and political repression with guardianship over minds.
If Syria is not rescued from the clutches of this intellectual darkness—after it expanded from the executive branch to the legislative, and prepared to swallow the judiciary—it will not head toward building a homeland, but toward a deeper, longer-lasting ruin. The country has moved from the grip of a criminal junta to the danger of an authority harboring within its bowels a takfiri, jihadi tendency that wants to reshape society according to its closed jurisprudential illusions. Physical destruction can be restored and a tyrant can be overthrown; but when extremism turns into law, ignorance into a curriculum, and humiliation into education, ruin settles in minds and is inherited by children.
So where are the female MPs of this parliament, and where are their voices against legislation that begins with excluding women from education and may end with their imprisonment within four walls? Their silence today will not be neutrality, but a prelude to their own exclusion tomorrow.
Today, Syria needs a revolution against intellectual degradation just as much as it needs a revolution against political tyranny. The fall of the criminal regime was no victory as long as the country has fallen into an even darker swamp. Therefore, the revolution must be revived: a revolution that liberates the human being from both the tyrant and the domineering cleric together, preserves the dignity of women and children, restores to education its mission, to reason its sovereignty, and to Syria its civilizational face.
United States of America
September 15, 2026
Note: This text is translated from the original Arabic version… Read the Arabic version:Click here
