Perhaps one of the hardest questions anyone can be asked is, “Who are you?”
If you ask some people about me, they may tell you good things; if you ask others, they may tell you bad things.
If I try to answer you myself, I may conceal certain things because I am unaware of them, or simply because I do not want to tell you about them.
So all I can do is share a few facts about myself that I know for certain.
- My name is Hussein Ghrer.
- I am a software engineer, software developer, programmer, and so on—choose whichever term you are used to.
- I am married and have two sons.
- I was born in Syria and now live in Germany.
Why Do I Write?
Writing is my preferred tool for thinking. When I write, I think about a subject deeply and coherently, because I can see the contradictions, shortcomings, and mistakes I make standing before me, pleading to be corrected. When I write, I can see which idea needs stronger foundations before it can be justified, which term needs clarification, and which concept I need to understand more fully.
Through writing, I also communicate with others. I engage in discussion with them, or simply share my intellectual wonder.
Why This Blog?
At the beginning of the Syrian revolution, in 2011, I happened to strike up a conversation with a grocery-store owner who was complaining that his teenage son had recently begun disobeying him. I jokingly told him that the revolution was not only against the Assad regime, but against every form of patriarchal authority, and that he should begin adapting. He did not quite understand what I meant, but we laughed.
Three years later, in 2014, the officer in charge of eighth section at Damascus Central Prison entered Room 804 during his rounds. He saw me reading and found several books in my possession. When he left the section, he told his representative there—a prisoner like the rest of us—to keep an eye on me, because I was a dangerous man: I read.
Then, on 8 December 2024, Bashar al-Assad’s regime fell. Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham took power in Damascus. It is a Salafi-jihadist group founded by Abu Muhammad al-Jolani—now known as Ahmed al-Sharaa—after he broke away from ISIS and later announced his separation from al-Qaeda. The first thing the group did was remove every mention of the theory of evolution from the curriculum, even though it had appeared only timidly in school textbooks and many teachers had skipped over it under the Assad family.
It is no coincidence that religion and authoritarian rule share a fear of science and knowledge. Nor is it a coincidence that religion and authoritarianism so often form an alliance, or even merge, as in the case of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, which governs Syria today. Science and knowledge necessarily require free and critical thinking, which undermines the authority of both over people’s lives. Religion and authoritarian rule each claim authority over truth, legitimacy, legislation, and morality (the body). Critical thinking refutes that claim and strips them of it.
Nor is it a coincidence that women in Iran have increasingly removed the hijab, and that Iranian women in Europe have appeared in clothing considered immodest in Islamic countries, alongside demonstrations against the Iranian regime and in support of those protests. They are reclaiming their bodies for themselves. This movement is a symbol of reclaiming authority over truth, legitimacy, legislation, and morality from religion and authoritarianism.
In his book A Message to the Arab Mind, Fouad Zakaria writes: “It is a cause for profound sorrow that, in the late twentieth century, the Arab intellectual finds himself compelled to wage a battle that Arab thinkers at the end of the nineteenth century had almost decisively settled in favour of reason and progress.” I therefore believe that criticism must be radical toward every religious or non-religious authority that claims to be the source of truth, legitimacy, and morality.
I do not write to offer final answers, but to test ideas, expose their contradictions, and defend every person’s right to knowledge, questioning, and ownership of their body and life. In this blog, you will find my attempts to understand religion, politics, science, and society through a form of criticism that recognises no authority above questioning and reasoned argument.
Translated by AI and reviewed and corrected by me