Despite the longevity and the relative simplicity of the concept of a ceasefire, there has been little agreement, and much confusion, around their nomenclature. This chapter is primarily devoted to better understanding and interrogating these definitions. It moves away from the conventional view of ceasefires that focusses primarily on their success at reducing violence and battle related deaths or their ability to lead to a peace agreement, and instead traces the genealogy of the literature on conflict resolution and the state to the scholarship on the construction of order beyond the state to argue that ceasefires should not only be considered military tools but types of wartime order that have statebuilding implications.

This chapter offers context to the primary case study of this book – the Syrian civil war. It does this by elaborating more fully on two broader topics – on the one hand, a historical overview of the Syrian regime and the onset of the revolution; and on the other hand, a summary of the major ceasefires used during the civil war. These two subjects are of course inexorably interconnected. By providing an overview of some of the important aspects of Syria’s recent political and social history, we gain a better understanding and appreciation of two themes of relevance for this book: firstly, the nature of the Syrian state, in particular the structure and essence of the Assad regime; and secondly, the ramifications of this for how ceasefires have played out during the Syrian civil war.

In this chapter I recreate the earliest memories of the birth of a child into a faith that defines their character and culture. With the birth of every child, the world is recreated and repeated anew, and the myth of origin is reenacted. God of every Holy Book comes to revisit humanity. I am drawn to the story of the first creation of our humanity in the Qur’an and its sublime rendition by Najam Najm al-Din Razi in his Mirsad al-Ibad, for in it I imagine my own birth, the birth of my brothers, cousins, our parents, and grandparents, all the way back to the birth of every child on this earth; all the way back to Adam and Eve as we imagine them in our Qur’an. We were all born with that breath of God breathing life into the body of Adam. To be born into Shi’ism is one such birth; thus, to be born into a passion, an epic, a moral imperative, a deeply inflicted wound, a martyrdom, a guilt. I was born to Shi’ism, long before a gang of revolutionary reactionaries kidnapped my love and passion and happy, healthy, and robust Shi’i childhood to build a gaudy and reactionary Islamic republic with it. I detail this birthing of a humanity anew in this chapter.

In this chapter I describe in some detail the earliest signs of puberty and emerging adulthood. But perhaps more pointedly, I describe how toward the end of my high school years at Dr. Hesabi, a certain degree of impatience and vague anxiety was settling in me, for which I had no explanation, or even full consciousness. I always thought I needed to be somewhere else than where I was. The more books I read and the more movies I watched, the farther I moved away from our neighborhood and my family and friends. I was with them and continued to be what I was. But a sudden distance had started to settle in me between where and what I was and where and what I thought I should be. The age of puberty was creeping up on me, and the distance between where and what I was and where and what I thought I should be had by now become palpable. I was always a stellar student and continued to do my assignments like a robot. But my agitations came from somewhere else. I was reading like termites eating through books and buildings, drawn to both Russian and American literature as much as to Persian. I had no taste or patience for European literature – French, English, or German. Russian literature was a major staple of the Iranian literary scene since the early twentieth century, but after World War II, American literature had become as compelling. Mark Twain, William Faulkner, Ernest Hemingway, and John Steinbeck were being actively translated into Persian. These recollections become the premise of how I marked the last few years of my childhood and my sudden entry into adulthood.

This chapter is a detailed recollection of aspects of my birth and upbringing as a platform to think through the theoretical issues of memory and history and amnesia and loss. The dialectic between memory and forgetfulness here becomes the plane of authorial subjection. I explore a detailed exposure of how polyphonic voices become definitive to such recollections. As I recall such flashes of my early childhood, I realize in recounting the memories of our childhood that we are drafting entirely different, imperceptible, otherwise forgetful accounts of history – a history that has in fact not left its traces, as Gramsci had surmised, in us in cognitive and transcendental terms but in entirely fleeting and emotive terms on a plane of immanence that is in need of detection and discovery. Every shared memory, a memory I share and one that, in turn, triggers my readers’ similar memories, initially provokes a social, political, or cultural event beyond the reach of such memories, and as such it becomes a microcosm of something larger, something other than itself. But that is not all that there is to such memories. In fact, such allusions might be an impediment to a much more precious discovery. This triggering may first suggest itself as the social history of childhood, which we eventually lose in our adulthood, but every single such memory is also the microcosm of something other than itself, something other than history, something larger, more immanent, and thus, soon we realize what appears as social history is in fact an emotive history, a worldly history pointing to an ethereality other than itself, marking the moment when the world was being born anew, piece by piece, when we as a child for the first time realized there is a larger world, of which we had little to no awareness, over which we had no control.

What does it mean to be a person, a persona, a knowing subject? When a philosopher of bygone age like Suhrawardi puts his own knowing subject at the epicenter of his unknowing world, I find in that moment a moral and philosophical momentum in which I too can locate my own knowing subject at the epicenter of my own unknowing world. I therefore begin this book with a reading of Suhrawardi’s allegorical prose, where we see him telling us when the Former of Truth (Musavver-e beh Haghighat) wanted to create him; let us just say God wanted to create him. Suhrawardi is an Illuminationist philosopher and he speaks his own peculiar language. He created Suhrawardi as a falcon. Have you ever heard anything stranger, more astonishing, more beautiful, more miraculous? Who is talking here? By what authority, what audacity, does he talk this way? A falcon? Really? What happened to that authorial voice, that agential power with which philosophers like Suhrawardi talked? How did we get from there to here, when we are afraid of our own shadow, as my late mother used to say – may she rest in peace? I write as a product of a colonial world, with a postcolonial claim to my subjectivity, reclaiming the moment when I was de-subjected to re-subject myself, at the receiving end of a brutal history of domestic tyranny and foreign domination, who has still managed to stand up and say “I” and place a meaningful sentence in front of that authorial “I.” I wish to find out how did that happen. The fact that Suhrawardi said “I” long before I did has something to do with my “I” too – even or particularly when I write “I” in English in the shadow of his Persian “Man/I.” This book is about “Man/I.”