“Once, shame prevented my tears. Now, it’s my tears that prevent shame.” (Al-Mutanabbi)
Sitting at a café during a Damascus evening in early January, surrounded by friends I had met during different chapters of my life in Beirut, Damascus, and Berlin, I wanted to tell them a story—something that had happened to me during the siege of Ghouta in 2013. But the tears came first. I couldn’t continue; I choked up before the words could leave me.
Two days earlier, when I first arrived in Damascus after more than a decade away, I cried at the city’s gates. But I hid my tears, ashamed, from the taxi driver who had brought me from the Jordanian border back to my city.
In the first five days in Damascus, the tears never stopped. Every street I passed, every memory I recounted, every visit to my brother’s grave, every glimpse of our abandoned house—the tears would surge to my eyes, and I found myself constantly on the edge of crying. Sometimes I would collapse and weep without control; at other times, I’d manage to hold the tears back, leaving them hovering just outside the gates of my heart.
At first, I was ashamed of my tears. I wasn’t someone who cried in front of people. But in Damascus, after a day or two, you realize that everyone cries all the time. Those who stayed behind and survived Assad’s brutality cry for their lost lives and for the dream of a better future. Those who returned after fleeing cry for memories and the lost years. Those who speak of missing prisoners cry for the disappeared. Those who witnessed massacres cry for the atrocities etched into their minds forever. Those who were displaced, who lost their homes, cry for images that will never leave them.
Everyone cries. And so you cry too, because you are one of them.
What is crying?
“I see that crying is foolish / Yet those who mourn cannot help but cry.”
(Abu Dhu’ayb Al-Hudhali)
Wikipedia defines crying as: “a type of emotional response to a particular feeling, usually sadness or pain, and often in reaction to specific circumstances, though it can also result from joy or positive events.”
I like this definition. It’s short, compact, and captures different types of crying. But it is abstract, neutral. It doesn’t cover the full scope of what crying is.
What about the way the heart trembles as the tears fall?
What about the sobs that wrack the body?
What about the hands that reach out to touch your shoulder when you cry in public? The words of comfort?
What about crying alone, far away, and feeling like you’re the only person left on Earth? Shouldn’t the definition of crying also include all these emotions?
And what about those who cry for religious reasons—those who weep in prayer, or near a place they hold sacred? Or poets, who cry for no reason—or for every reason?
And what about the tears we shed without understanding why—like when we hear a melancholic Iraqi song, even if we can barely understand the words?
Crying for the Dead
“It is not from longing for a lost embrace, / Nor for a statue I have broken, / Nor for sorrow over a buried child— / I cry!”
(Mahmoud Darwish)
It seems that the death of my little brother affected me far more than I ever realized. It was the first close death I had ever experienced. I was a teenager then, concerned only with playing basketball, reading, and hanging out with friends. Then death descended, covering my family and me in a wave of sorrow we could not shake for many years—and even then, only because other waves of sorrow came and drowned us anew.
On that day—November 9, 2005, which coincided with the sixth day of Ramadan—Nawar died. I remember standing in the hospital courtyard, crying when I heard the news. I remember crying as my father embraced me. Crying on the way home. Crying in my parents’ room. Crying until sleep overtook me.
After that day, I did not cry for Nawar again—until early 2025, when I returned to Damascus, visited our old home, and stood by my brother’s grave after nearly 14 years.
I planted a tree for Nawar in a forest in Britain. I lit candles for him in different corners of the world. I told myself the world had given our family a gift, fleeting but precious—and that gift was Nawar. I convinced myself I would never again see our home, or Nawar’s grave.
But Assad fell.
I returned to the house of my childhood.
And I visited my small friend, who remains forever young—warm and beautiful, like a cup of tea on a cold night.
Crying from Powerlessness
“Before Azza, I knew not what it was to cry / Nor what it meant for the heart to be crushed by grief.”
(Kuthayyir Azza)
This is the hardest kind of crying. The crying that comes when you witness the displacement of Aleppo, the siege of Ghouta. The crying that accompanies images from the Tadamon Massacre, from Daraya, Bayda, and the coastal atrocities. The crying that rises from watching suffering unfold on a screen—knowing you cannot stop it. Crying out of helplessness.
What can a person do when confronted with horror and is powerless to intervene? What can one do if beaten by a regime’s thug? What can we do when the world turns its eyes away from the thousands slaughtered in Gaza?
We cry.
We cry out of helpless rage.
I remember myself as a young boy, maybe ten years old, walking hand in hand with my father near Marjeh Square in Damascus. We heard shouting from a side street. We looked and saw a regime officer slapping an elderly man across the face. People surrounded them, but no one moved. Paralyzed by fear.
I remembered this scene years later, when the revolution was at its strongest in Syria. As I was writing about humiliation under Assad’s regime, this memory resurfaced, among many others—and I cried.
Cried out of rage and helplessness.
I felt that same helplessness years later, when I was struck by a tram.
Lying there on the street, unable to move, strangers trying to help, I realized how powerless I was. A woman held my hand, preventing me from moving, fearing internal bleeding. When she saw the tears welling up in my eyes, she said, “It’s okay to cry. It’s the shock.” I didn’t want to cry in front of the hundreds of people gathered around me, watching me die.
So I didn’t.
For a brief moment, I thought I was ready to die.
It was the purest moment of freedom I had ever known.
I spent months confined to bed after that accident, unable to do anything but lie down, write, and watch films. Every time I tried to go to the bathroom, supported by my partner, I cried out of frustration. I couldn’t walk. I leaned on her, sobbing—and she would cry with me.
Crying for the Fall of the Regime
“Do not belittle the value of tears / For they release the burdens that overwhelm the heart.”
(Mohammed Mahdi Al-Jawahiri)
Like all Syrians, I was glued to the screens for days leading up to the fall of the regime. My computer screen split into four windows, streaming four different news channels, while another station played on the TV and my phone buzzing nonstop with updates.
I couldn’t believe it when Aleppo was liberated. Then Hama.
And now they were advancing toward Homs. I barely slept during those December nights of 2024. Tears and emotions overwhelmed me.
On the seventh night of the month, news broke that the U.S. government expected the regime to fall within five to ten days. I told my German partner, “Let’s sleep. It won’t happen tonight.” Our daughter was sleeping at her cousin’s house next door.
We woke up early to a phone call from a friend saying: “Assad has fled. The regime has fallen.”
I jumped out of bed and turned on the TV. As soon as I saw the news, I cried. My partner asked why I was crying, and I told her: “I don’t know. I’m crying for everything. For freedom. For the years of my life lost. For those who died for this moment. This is not crying from sadness. It’s not even from happiness. This is another kind of crying—crying for the fall of the regime.”
She cried with me. Our seven-year-old daughter came running in, saw us crying, and asked why. We told her, “Assad is gone.” She jumped up, shouting in German: “Assad is gone! Assad is gone!”
Then she asked for her backpack.
We asked why, and she said: “To go back to Syria.”
I cried even harder.
We had never spoken to her about returning.
She’s German, born to a German mother, her first language is German.
But she understood, instinctively, that what binds our family to Syria runs deeper than language or geography.
Crying at My Daughter’s Birth
“I stood weeping / As she walked away, weeping too / Turning back again and again.”
(Al-Baha’ Zuhayr)
I was among the lucky few who witnessed the miracle of birth. I stayed by my partner’s side the entire time. Never left her for a second. I tried to be as helpful and present as possible. I held my daughter in my arms the moment she was born. She was the softest, most beautiful thing my eyes had ever seen. I cannot truly describe the emotions parents feel when they first see their child.
I believe fathers are born at the moment of birth, while mothers are born with the beginning of pregnancy. I wanted to be fully present from the first moment. When we first saw the early ultrasound, the doctor pointed to a small dot and said: “Do you see this flickering point in the middle?
That’s your baby.”
The world changed. Tears welled up in my eyes—and in my partner’s.
At her birth, when I held my daughter for the first time, I cried again.
And in the seven years since, I have cried countless times—with and for my daughter.
Crying as a Form of Resistance to Gender Roles
“Men weep over life / And my longing for my death has exhausted my tears.”
(Al-Abbas ibn al-Ahnaf)
Do men cry? Yes. And often.
I saw my father cry when my brother died. I saw him cry when we reunited in Paris after five years of separation. I saw him cry when he met his granddaughter in the hospital, sick at the age of two.
I have heard friends speak of their fathers’ tears. I have seen men cry over the ruins of their destroyed homes. I have seen men cry for their lost loved ones. I have seen men cry in movie theaters at a tender scene. I have seen men cry listening to emotional songs.
Men cry just as women cry. Everyone cries. Crying is normal. It is a human response.
Maybe it’s time we let go of outdated phrases like:
“When men cry, know that grief has surpassed the peaks of mountains.”
