Al-Sharaa Is Shooting … Hoops! Syria’s Leader Uses Basketball To Help Us Forget His Radical Moves

-Analysis-

BEIRUT — Syrian President Ahmed al-Sharaa, it turns out, is a basketball player. This news is just the latest update in the biography of the man we once called: Abu Mohammed al-Julani.

This latest “image reset” came by way of a home video shared online, showing al-Sharaa shooting baskets with compatriots — falling within the context of trying to make us forget that he was leader of the “Nusra Front” (where he was known by the al-Julani nom de guerre) before taking over ruling Syria and vowing tolerance for all.

The basketball-playing al-Sharaa offers a vision full of intelligence, as he practiced his hobby with some modest skill. His is a form of intelligence that is meant to stimulate our own intelligence — and it did.

An artificial modernity

Our intelligence requires us to realize that al-Sharaa’s “modern” activities are necessarily addressed to those outside Syria, to the many “lands of basketball,” and to the West more broadly. It is an artificial modernity whose manifestations dissolve completely before the Syrian blood spilled along sectarian lines, by the man’s command — or by his silence — which suggests we are still facing a hybrid rule, necessarily a product of the hybridized factions of the al-Nusra militants.

An Eastern man, then, with all the historical and sectarian wretchedness that his Eastern identity endures, chooses an entertaining and popular Western style, imitating the full specifications of today’s NBA coaches: formal suit, tie and basketball in hand.

This image of the basketball-playing moderate could wind up deceiving the Western mind.

At the same time, none of those features negate the presence of a beard, inherited from a past he still carries into his present. Generally speaking, a groomed beard is not in itself a sign of an extremist past, or even of a reformed moderate who refuses to exit that past. We are again faced with a pattern prevalent in the United States and Europe, and any resemblance to this pattern stems from Ahmed al-Sharaa himself when we became familiar with his features.

Before his first public appearance, he was still referred to only as Abu Muhammad Al-Julani, a man known by his “jihadist” biography with physical features remaining mostly elusive to the public, with the likely exception of Bashar al-Assad’s intelligence and the CIA. And here lies the paradox. Apart from those two intel agencies, Al-Julani could have shed his jihadist robe — and also played basketball without evoking in us any reaction connected to his old and new positions in Syria.

Bloody spectacle

This image of the basketball-playing moderate could wind up deceiving the Western mind — not because the latter is necessarily easily deceived — but because such deception aligns with the Western mind’s interests. In al-Sharaa, there is that thing which enriches a Western, particularly American, mind that practices the game of interests with a skill far superior to the al-Sharaa’s basketball skills.

And because Ahmed al-Sharaa is the current president of Syria, our intelligence — and first and foremost that of the Syrians, which he stimulated in us through his basketball spectacle — requires that the man be dissected outside the game of nations. The current bloody realities of Syria require such dissection.

Everything about Ahmed al-Sharaa indicates that he is still haunted by Abu Muhammad al-Julani.

Everything about Ahmed al-Sharaa and his factions indicates that he is still haunted by Abu Muhammad al-Julani, and that playing a modern Western sport or opening the doors of the presidential palace might, at best, be part of a performance through which he begs for legitimacy to rule Syria. And it is a performance, and begging, aimed mostly at the West.

Yet we must not forget that this basketball spectacle of Ahmed al-Sharaa meant for Western audiences coincides with a bloody spectacle carried out by the factions of “Al-Julani” against Syria’s Alawite and Druze minorities.