I stand in the vestibule of the Army Club pool in the mongrel second-hand bikini I bought just for this occasion and watch Nouran in her ruffled black one-piece press Um Ibrahim for answers. Set off from us by the reception counter stacked with chips and candy, her wan face swathed in flowing black, Um Ibrahim affects the reserve of a wounded dignitary.
“The people sacrificed for freedom. We paid the price of freedom with our blood. Where is freedom?” Nouran demands. “This isn’t your house. I will come to your house any way you want, but this doesn’t belong to you. It belongs to the people”.
“No, it belongs to the Ministry of Defense”, Um Ibrahim says.
“No, the Ministry of Defense is responsible for it, but it doesn’t belong to the ministry. You handed it back to the people. When you go into a place for the people, you have to accept everything about them”.
I came late to this battle. It’s my first, and now becoming my last, time at the women-only Army Club pool; Nouran, my Arabic teacher and a regular there, decided swimming would be good for my lower back pain. I didn’t know when I handed my cash, clothes and backpack to Um Ibrahim that she had just appeared here, along with a laminated sign on the bulletin board informing visitors they must comply with sharia’ law. So when Um Ibrahim sent a young employee to deliver her veto, it didn’t occur to me to fight. She found me at the edge of the large pool eyeing its clear blue water with anticipation.
“Your maillot is forbidden in the pool”, she said. Giving me a brisk once-over, she added, “The top part is ok. But the bottom part is really short. You need something like this”, she gestured to her own thighs covered in black bike shorts.
Maybe I had no reaction because I was trying to follow what she meant. The word maillot is French for one-piece, and probably arrived in Syria with the French occupation, but in Syrian Arabic can mean any Western-style bathing suit. My bikini top was a periwinkle blue jog bra; my bikini bottom was printed with lemons; I’d spent the better part of an hour digging through a deep thrift store bin of divorced bikinis to compose a somewhat-matching pair. The lemons were my favorite of the lot. But short? What did she mean? It’s a bikini bottom; how else could it be?
Another employee told Nouran her one-piece with its skirty ruffle was also forbidden. Nouran turned and stalked out of the pool room, disappearing into the reception area. I looked again at the water where two dozen or so women and children were paddling and splashing. Only now did I notice that all the women were wearing some version of bike shorts. This fact did not connect to any logic or explanation in my head. I was not in a logical frame of mind. I was covered in sweat from the baking July afternoon and standing between a luscious blue pool and a lush garden dotted with palm trees, and now I would get to experience neither. I waited resignedly for Nouran to fetch me so we could leave. After five minutes I started to wonder if she was ok.
I find her mid-argument, facing off against Um Ibrahim and the employee. I missed the beginning, when Um Ibrahim told her, ‘It wounds my eyes to look at you’. Does Nouran feel bullied? Does she need back-up?
“We paid 14 years, in blood, for freedom. It was a huge price. And the least freedom I could achieve is to wear whatever I want. And respect. First of all, respect for women. Respect for my existence. And for the existence of any person. Her tone was not respectful”, Nouran says, staring at the employee. Nouran is fine, I conclude. And we may be here a while. I open the Twix bar Um Ibrahim sold me and take small melty bites.
“She is Christian”, Nouran says, gesturing to me. “Her religion is fine with bikinis. So you are wronging her religion. Or is this place only for Sunnis?”
Nouran lobs reason after reason. Um Ibrahim and Rawan don’t budge. So Nouran takes her claim to the male officers’ room next door. They are surprised to hear of the new rules but say it’s out of their hands. Next we hike sweating back to the Army Club’s main gatehouse. As we walked, I explained that when I arrived there by taxi, the officers tried to send me to Al-Fayha’ Pool, a different, private pool on the same vast parkland, instead. I insisted on going to the Army Pool because my friend was there, and they finally, reluctantly let me through.
“It’s because you are not wearing a hijab”, Nouran exclaims. “They want to ban women in sporty outfits from the Army Pool”. Um Ibrahim is not a regular employee; she’s the wife of the officer responsible for the whole Army Club. “They don’t respect women in sporty clothes. But it’s not their right to ban anyone”.
When we reach the gatehouse, Nouran identifies the younger officer as being from Idlib, where she’s from, too. He receives us affably, and gives us back the entry fee we paid, but he and his colleague throw up their hands at our complaint. They withdrew entirely from the Army Pool, they say, so we women could enjoy it in peace. In any case, it’s not in his hand. It’s up to Abu Ibrahim, the man responsible for the whole Army Club complex.
It seems we have no choice, if we want to swim, but to make our way to the other pool. It’s far away, it turns out, with its own entrance closer to the middle of the vast green blob of land that houses both pools within an elaborate sports complex. As we traipse along the sidewalk running along its perimeter, I feel overheated and confused. Where are we even? Why are there two pools with different rules?
Al-Fayha Pool, Nouran explains, belongs to the Sports Ministry, and was always open to the public. The Army Club, which includes basketball, football, and tennis courts, as well as two pools, belongs to the Ministry of Defense. Under the Assad regime it was strictly off-limits to ordinary Syrians.
“I never in my life entered the Army Pool”, Nouran says. “We were banned from entering the Army Club. It was only for the officers of the regime”. Maher al-Assad, the younger brother of Syria’s dictator, had fancy bathrooms done up for himself in one wing of the Army Pool building. When the regime fell at the end of 2024, the Ministry of Defense announced it was giving the Army Pool back to the people, and Nouran, delighted she could access a new and modern facility that included a sauna, became a regular.
The grounds are indeed beautiful: lush delicate grass interspersed with trees and flowers. I stop to smell a cream-colored rosebush; the sweetness is delicious. Then I wonder, am I secretly a little cowed as well as awed by the grandness of the beauty? I want to know where Nouran gets her fight and frank persistence against oppressive rules from.
“Were you ever in prison?” I ask.
“No. Just one time I fractured my ankle at an anti-regime protest”, Nouran says. In 2012. Swimming strengthens this weak ankle. She has plenty of experience being targeted for her bathing attire, though. Once in Lattakia, where she moved from Idlib to study Arabic literature, she was swimming in the sea in her hijab, which marked her as visibly Sunni. A group of swimmers surrounded her and said, “Why are you here? This is our sea”. A few years later at a five-star resort in Tartous, the staff took her money but refused to let her swim in the mixed-sex pool in a burkini. She could swim in the sea in that get-up, they told her, but not in the fancy pool with the tourists.
Under the Assad regime, tourists and foreigners in general, including me, were wildly privileged and far safer than Syrians, before the revolution started and after. I lived in Damascus through September of 2012, and when checkpoints sprang up across the capital and the armed men running them began to detain Syrians whose ID cards identified them as being from opposition neighborhoods, I was almost always waved through without any checking of my passport. My face was enough to get me a free pass. In the calculus of the Assad regime, my presence, as a beneficiary of this double standard, served to affirm that the regime was a benevolent, secular force liberating and protecting Syrians from the backwards hordes of terrorists - the regime considered anyone who protested against it a terrorist - trying to overthrow it.
I say this to stop anyone who’s read this far from seeing me, my lemons and Nouran’s outspokenness as some neo-colonial meme about the superiority of Western culture, or as a eulogy for the neoliberal facade of the Assad regime. The Assad regime was a ruthless kleptocracy that protected no one but itself and the assets it looted from the Syrian people. The Assad regime paid enough lip service to Western values that US policymakers did nothing to effectively stop it from killing hundreds of thousands of Syrians in the most brutal ways.
Meanwhile, America’s forever wars of the last quarter century and counting projected a virulent imperialist feminism from Afghanistan to Iran. Domestically, Trump has made crude sexism and racism a winning personal brand, flaunting his octogenarian bad-boy behavior as proof of his anti-establishment credentials while raking in over two billion dollars in profits last year alone. A sliver of that - $125 million - comes from foreign golf and real estate deals, and Syrian power brokers seeking to curry favor with the Trump administration floated the prospect of a Trump golf course somewhere on the Syrian coast.
The Syrian Coast After the Fall of the Syrian Regime
10 January 2025
And there’s the rub. For folks who can afford it, Syria may well become a brand-new paradise; for super-rich investors, it’s a chance to become even richer creating upscale beauty out of rock-bottom ruin. Al-Fayha Pool, for instance - the new Fayha Pool, read the signs leading to it - belongs to the Ministry of Sports, but was recently renovated in partnership with a private investor. The price of entry is double that of the Army Club Pool: a hundred thousand lira, in the old Syrian currency, versus fifty thousand, or about $7.70 USD versus $3.85. By comparison, a standard bag of Syrian’s daily flatbread costs about 31 cents, and over half of Syrians remain food insecure. This gap between haves and have-nots creates two Syrias: one rule-free for the few who can afford its privatized freedoms, and another a maze of rules imposed from who knows where on the many who can barely afford bread, rent or bus fare.
When we finally make it through al-Fayha’s doors, at first I balk at the doubled price. But then the sight of the pool, clear and deep and almost empty, changes my mind. Al-Fayha actually houses two pools, one indoor and one outdoor, and it is the indoor one we find open for business, just reopened after renovations. Sunlight streams through a skylight, making a bright warm square in the deep end. I dive and surface, dive and surface. Nouran swims laps and tries, in the moments I pause on the diving block, to tell me the word for “dive” in Arabic. A mini-lesson.
I stare at her, maybe scowling. Nouran laughs.
“Leave me alone”, she says, translating my expression.
I nod and grin. I don’t want words right now. I am luxuriating in water, light and air. In bodily freedom, and the trust that comes from confirmed respect, from knowing someone will stand up for your right to exist as is.
“Respect - that’s the whole story”, Nouran says after. Mutual respect for and from everyone. “What would be really sweet is if everyone could exist in the same place, together”.
