الممكنات
جود الطعمة
This text was first published in 2025 in GROUNDS research publication by SLARG research group of Sint Lucas Antwerp. The original text published in the publication entitled ‘The Mumkinat of Remembrance’ was written early 2024 in relation to my current artistic research on the Euphrates river in Syria and its drying state, focussing on the river as a living body and a witness. It explores Al-Mumkinat, the realm of the possible. It draws from the Barzakh, the liminal, intermediary space of all potential existence, to imagine futurisms beyond the fallen Assad regime in Syria. It brings together dreams, personal stories and political struggle through displacement, dictatorship and the possibility of a (no)return to the Euphrates river.
I had to revisit the text after the collapse of the Assad dictatorship on 8 December 2024. In a continuous attempt to reconfigure voice, language and imagination, I rewrote the text to write with the voices I have always wanted to wrtie with, to unlearning self-censorship and fear.
This version, which you are reading below, follows three chapters weaving personal dreams through three of activist, artist and engineer Bassel Khartabil Safadi’s paintings and poems, smuggled out during his imprisonment in Damascus central prison or Adra prison. I wish this reading to be a tribute to Bassel’s resistance, in memory of forcefully disappeared detainees in the Assad prisons, and everyone who dreamt and evoked the mumkinat, that something else is possible.
Chapter 1: Uncertain-Dream.
June 15, 2015, Damascus Central Jail.
What is this dream I see every night?
A web?
Black lines? A tunnel?
Or some memories from my childhood?
Deir ez-Zor, 1995. She woke up to a sight she perceived as a nightmare. Shock in that moment, she was screaming, hitting away a bat she noticed in the last hours of the night biting on her newborn’s little hand. We were sleeping under the sky’s vast carpet in the courtyard. I watched her from under the covers, even though the bat flew away, she was still in panic. Quickly, my habbaba — Allah yerhamha and bless her soul — rushed with a bowl of water, which I later knew by the name of طاسة†الرعبة†, the fear-soothing bowl, and offered it: ‘Say Bismillah and drink, may Allah protect you all and ease your hearts.’
Years later, the courtyard would cease to exist, the sky’s vast carpet was covered by the bombs’ smoke towers, the bat lost its way through it and the bowl was nowhere to be found. The house in which we gathered in Deir ez-Zor was found in ruins after decades of tyrannical regime rule, its shelling and besiege of the city and their militias’ violences. the Shabiha, the regimes thugs, has stolen everything.
I confronted one of those Shabiha in my dreams. I was almost able to retrieve what was lost, burnt and stolen but those ghosts vanished down a street in Antwerp, in the crevasse of my subconscious mind. I played this dream many times in my head. Every time I recall it, I confront them and I retrieve my family’s albums, my grandmother’s old bracelets, my grandfather’s praying beads, textiles, objects and the bowl from the old house.
I think about the dreams and the imaginations of the many lives confiscated in Palestine, Syria, Sudan and many nations fighting for liberation and better living conditions. In my dreams and imagination, images of justice are already taking place. I see such possibilities with the eyes of my imagination, I act with them as a collective destination, as a reality I know exists and desire to bring forth. The invocation of Al-Haqq, the just, has for generations been the focus of our gaze, shaping our collective imagining of a dignified life rooted in justice.
Chapter 2 Deformity.
June 17, 2015, Damascus Central Jail.
An attempt to draw a stereotype. This is the stereotype I have in mind for the deformed souls, I have to deal with every day at jail. There are a lot of them.
Even outside the jail cell, these deformed souls operated under different names—Shabiha, regime loyalists, state operatives, Assad family. And still, there were those like Bassel, who confronted them, code by code, image by image.
All Bassel Khartabil Safadi ever tried to do was to remain two steps ahead of the Assad regime.
Two-steps ahead, already in the future. Bassel Khartabil Safadi—Syrian-Palestinian open software developer, coder, thinker, and founder of the Damascus Hackerspace—was a fearless advocate for the free flow of information and an open internet. He was arrested by the Assad regime in 2012, detained without trial. in 2015 regime authority secretly executed him after transferring him to an undisclosed location.
In 2011, he documented the earliest demonstrations that broke out in Harasta, and attended the first few hours of a sit-in held in the city of Duma, along with a large group of students from Damascus University; then returning to his office to upload the footage and send it to various media outlets, news agencies, and human rights organizations.
Bassel did his utmost to adapt technology for the sake of the revolution, putting his expertise at the disposal of the movement’s youth. In this he wasn’t alone; there were hundreds of anonymous activists who were entrenched behind their screens and pseudonyms, fighting for the revolution on this particular front. Dozens of pages were created, and hundreds of networks were formed, all to enable Syrian revolutionaries to safely transfer and exchange information. There was no one place to gather them, and no leader to direct their action. While the regime had long been able to penetrate society at all levels, these were finally able to penetrate it and detect its weaknesses. They devised several systems to convey the glaring picture of a revolution facing a bloodthirsty regime.
Bassel was held in a small cell, from which he could view a small patch of sky for a small part of the day. Nine months he spent in a cell with no light at all. Before he was imprisoned, detained, executed, he mad epaingints of which some we see now. he also made three-dimensional CGI renderings of Palmyra’s ancient city. In his old life he created these virtual spaces to help us remember what the world once looked like. Perhaps those powers of imagination helped him envision a world beyond his cell. He was a futurist, already two steps ahead.
During his incarceration, and during the extended period when his death was presumed but not yet confirmed, his story became a rallying point around the world. His plight drove essays, and conference sessions, and political statements. And it inspired music. The tracks you are listening to are part of a collection sourced from different projects undertaken by members of the Disquiet music community to keep Bassel's story alive.
Chapter 3 Resurrection
July 10, 2015, Damascus Central Jail.
From time to time I resurrect old black and white dreams from my childhood memories.
Dreams and imagination have agency. Imagination, or Khayal, is generally thought of as the process of conjuring that which does not exist, presently or subjectively. It has representational, fictional and creative functions. To imagine is to conjure an idea, a feeling, a thought, a sensory or affective response that was not present before the act of conjuring it began.
To understand the power of dreams and imagination, I turn to Islamic cosmology.
In Cosmology and Architecture in Premodern Islam, Samer Akkach wrote that Muslim philosophers and mystics have articulated a concept of imagination with two distinct functions: dreaming and imagining. Dreaming is involuntary and forms the focus of mystical and rational sciences concerned with visionary experiences, dream interpretation and divine inspiration. They are messengers to us from the unknown, voices from our collective subconscious, warners of deep disturbances, bearers of glad tidings, carrying long hidden memories and prophetic voices of the future.
Imagining is voluntary and multifaceted. With regard to creativity, the act of imagining has been viewed historically as involving the retaining by memory of images perceived through the senses (al-quwwa al-hafiza القوة الحَافظة), the recalling of images when they are no longer in contact with the senses, and the composing of new images by the form-giving faculty (al-quwwa al-musawwira القوة المص ّّورة
The dream world and the world of imagination are at once real and unreal, wherein things feel touchable yet remain unreachable. We can’t get our hands on them, but they still live among us, and even if we don’t notice them, they’re still there. Imagination, like dreams, have an apparitional or phantasmal quality: they are perceivable, meaningful forms yet without physical presence.
Ibn Arabi was a Muslim scholar, poet, philosopher and thinker. He viewed imagination as the creative cause of our existence and the powerful agency that enables us to remain connected to the infinite and the Absolute. He differentiates three entities at the highest universal level: al-Wujud al-Mutlaq الوجود المطلق, ‘Absolute being, العدم المطلقAbsolute Non-Being’, and a Barzakh Mediator’, that bridges the other two. The first is the unrestricted existence of the Divine, the necessary Self-Existent; the second is the Non-Self-Existent; and the third, the barzakh, is the intermediary domain of archetypes of all possible existence or الممكنات.
The intermediary world, the Barzakh, derives from the Qur’an, which makes more than one mentioning to its nature: ‘He has loosed the two seas to meet, yet between them stands a Barzakh which they cannot overrun’ (55:19–20); ‘It was he who brought forth the two seas; the one sweet and fresh, the other salt and bitter, and set between them a Barzakh and an insurmountable barrier’(25:53).
The barzakh is the line between the two seas that meet but don’t merge.
the barzakh through its unitive-separative nature, brings together the two neighbouring realms into a meaningful relationship. The Barzakh is where the transition of the world from potentiality to actuality takes place.
I lean on these concepts within an Islamic framework to help me understand the imaginal as a position , a space conjuring a future beyond dominating power structures, as a value system and a source of knowledge beyond the Euro-American, Western values that dominate the world, which have proved time and time again their selectiveness, rooted in imeprialism, colonialism and systematic oppression.
It is within this framework, in this realm of all possible existence (al-mumkinat the bordering and meeting of two seas, the liminal, centre periphery, the seen and unseen الممكنات, dream realm, alam al-khayal 6,عالم الخيال the Barzakh — where I position myself and where the conjuring of possibilities emerges.
To think of the possible—الممكنات، الممكن، المكان، الكون، كن، ن—is to acknowledge a deep debt and commitment to those who showed us a possible liberated state of becoming, who helped us concieve a future that is beyond contnious apocalypse. We carry these futures, these possibles, these dreams that accelerate transformation; beyond the logic of the state. Re-examining and interrogating narratives that surround oceans of historical fiction. It submerges cultural nostalgias that prop up a dubious political paralysis and works to solidify a generative force, towards being subjects and not objects of history.
.الممكنات، الممكن، المكان، الكون، كن، ن
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