Things could go very wrong in Syria – they could also go very right. Let’s gift its people optimism | Nesrine Malik

Last week, time collapsed. Bashar al-Assad’s fall recalled scenes across the region from the start of the Arab spring almost 14 years ago. Suddenly history felt vivid, its memories sharpened. In fact it no longer felt like history. Scenes that it seemed we would never see again – of crowds thronging the squares; the obscene riches of despots exposed, their fortresses stormed, their iconography desecrated – unlocked a familiar, almost sickening sense of possibility. Of giddiness, of horror at what fleeing dictators had left in their wake, and of hope. Syria’s long revolution – the death, torture, imprisonment and exile that Assad’s crushing of it unleashed – makes its successful end bittersweet. The price was so high, which makes its spoils even more dear.

The moment is also different in another way. In those 14 years, other revolutions across the region either unravelled or resulted in the retrenchment of dictatorial regimes under new management. And so that sense of untrammelled optimism that followed the fall of that first crop of dictators is tempered by some wariness of what comes next. But it can and should be a productive wariness rather than a reason for despair. Because what Syria benefits from now is an understanding of the fragility of this period. To those of us who experienced it before in other countries, it felt like a time when the momentum of revolution was unstoppable and cleansing. It had a kinetic energy that swept away the old systems to be replaced by new administrations, armed with good intentions and popular support, that would simply figure it out.

But in places such as Egypt and Sudan, ancien regimes lurked too deeply to simply be uprooted by removing their figureheads. In others such as Yemen, power vacuums and armed groups made their own bids for power and then drew in proxies that fuelled civil war. One could choose to look back over this record and conclude that it was always inevitable – or that they arm a new Syria with knowledge of what were then unknown risks and curveballs.

The latter may sound like a naive reading, I realise. The world in general, and the Arab world in particular, have changed so much in the past decade. The region has become a proxy playground. The UAE is heavily involved in Sudan’s war – as it was, along with Saudi Arabia, in Yemen’s. And in that war, Iran backed its own partners in the Houthis. The Syrian revolution became a theatre for the ambitions of different parties, with Russia moving in to support the regime and launch itself as a regional power as the US focused on fighting Islamic State, with Iran backing Assad and Turkey maintaining a presence to prevent the emergence of a viable Kurdish autonomy movement. It’s a lot to unravel. And that’s without the vexing presence of an Israel exploiting this tenuous moment to steal even more land in Syria. Hours after Assad had fled, three foreign armies were striking targets in the country. On day one, any new government in Damascus inherits the challenges not only of administering a fractured country ravaged for years but also of managing the competing interests of external cynics and rogues, and the arsenal of fighters and weapons they have established.

But there is the logic of abstract foreign policy analysis, and then there are the concrete facts of one of the world’s most brutal regimes falling, the release of a staggering number of prisoners, popular celebration and reunion, and potentially the return of millions of refugees who for years have been discriminated against in exile or perished in perilous crossings. There is the concern that Assad’s fall might trigger imperialist US agendas in the country, and there is the fact that the desire to topple a tyrant is an indigenous and not external one. There is the worry that Hayat Tahrir al-Sham and its leader, Abu Mohammed al-Jolani, have extremist and sectarian roots and inclinations, and there is the reality that the methods of their politics are far more complicated than the straight terrorist narrative.

The truth is that, among all the prognostications, nobody has a monopoly on the means of establishing peace and stability after the removal of deeply embedded authoritarian regimes. Not the west, which beat a retreat from vast calamitous interventions during the “war on terror”. Not Gulf powers, whose main concern is strengthening their own economic and political positions, and to that end have extended the life of regional conflicts. And not the governments of other Arab countries for which the protests of the Arab spring are not the distant past but an ever-present threat that must constantly be forestalled through oppression and co-option.

Over the years, the Syrian people themselves seem to have disappeared, as the country became merely a domino that could fall the wrong way, disrupting regional and global settlements, and escalating security concerns. Yasser Munif, a Syrian scholar who specialises in the country’s grassroots movements, cautioned against beholding Syria mainly through the place it occupies in all these discourses. “It’s important,” he said in a 2017 interview, “to push for the revolutionary grassroots narrative that has been completely isolated, silenced, marginalised, and, for many, unthinkable.” The role of religion in opposition, he said, doesn’t necessarily mean such forces have “a totalitarian kind of ideology. We need to transcend the orientalist discourses in order to understand the depth and the geography of the opposition in Syria.”

History and the number of actors in the region bear down on Syria, producing back-seat drivers who feel as if they’ve been down this road before and know the terrain better – where the right and wrong turns are. But when things seem complex, a broadly reliable indicator of the right path is the people themselves, not those who feel they know better. The compass now should be with Syrians, whose joy and relief should not be immediately suffocated over concerns about what comes next.

What dramatic change, in the Arab world or elsewhere, ever came with a neat blueprint? Syrians’ future should not be held hostage to previous disappointments, their unique extended revolution not flattened into a reading of what it augurs. The past few days have already demonstrated what intense bondage and anguish they have been released from. If anything, it is now they who have the potential to show the way for the rest who have gone astray. We owe them our trust, our support, and, yes, some naivety.