A Dream of Secular Utopia in ISIS’ Backyard - NYT

[flamingdem]

http://www.nytimes.com/2015/11/29/magazine/a-dream-of-utopia-in-hell.html

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But to sympathetic Western visitors, Rojava was something else entirely: a place where the seeds of the Arab Spring promised to blossom into utopia. ‘‘What you are doing,’’ said Raymond Joliffe, a member of Britain’s House of Lords, during a trip in May 2015, ‘‘is a unique experiment that deserves to succeed.’’ A Dutch professor named Jan Best de Vries arrived in December 2014 and donated $10,000 to help buy books for Kurdish university students. David Graeber, a founder of Occupy Wall Street, visited that same month and wrote before his trip that ‘‘the autonomous region of Rojava, as it exists today, is one of few bright spots — albeit a very bright one — to emerge from the tragedy of the Syrian revolution.’’

In May, I saw an announcement on Facebook for the Mesopotamian Social Sciences Academy, a new, coed university in Rojava’s de facto capital, Qamishli. This in itself was revolutionary. For years, Bashar al-Assad and his father, Hafez, forbade many Syrian Kurds to study. In ISIS territory just 15 miles away, Kurdish girls were routinely tortured for being Westernized heretics — sometimes tied by their ponytails to car bumpers and dragged to their deaths. In Rojava, they were being educated.

When I sent a message to the academy’s Facebook page, requesting more information, I received a reply from Yasin Duman, a Kurdish graduate student living in Turkey. He had taught several courses there, he said, and when he found out I was a writer and professor in New York, we discussed a journalism class. Duman explained that Rojava’s youth had little experience with the idea of free speech. Perhaps I could teach them: ‘‘A free people has to have freedom of speech,’’ he said. It would be a cultural exchange. I would teach writing, and my students would show me what life was like in Rojava. We decided that I would spend a week in July giving a crash course in journalism basics: how to report, how to interview and how to document the war raging around them.

Now, after three months and at least as many logistical hiccups, I was about to see this strange political experiment for myself. The official led us out of the office and onto a ramshackle skiff. We were technically entering a failed state. Yet when we came ashore on the other side of the river and passed a brick guard tower staffed with armed men, I saw a red, green and yellow tricolor banner — the flag of Rojava.