Traveling in Europe in the 2010s, the Syrian architect Marwa al-Sabouni was baffled by the questions she would receive. How do you feel, people would ask earnestly, visiting places of such wealth and ease, when your own country has been shattered by war? “I’m always perplexed by this question,” al-Sabouni once wrote, “because I see neither prosperity nor grandeur in Europe.” On the contrary, the cities of the West struck her more as a hideous warning of what a rebuilt Syria might look like.
Al-Sabouni’s work is full of surprises. Feted by The Guardian and The New York Times, she writes about tradition and social cohesion like a dyed-in-the-wool conservative. On the other hand, she writes about colonialism and financialization like an ardent leftist. Her work is a sort of extended love letter to her home city of Homs, about which she can be spectacularly rude. (“I’m critical because I do have eyes,” she laughs. “It needs so much work on every level.”) She is best known as a voice of the Syrian civil war who has borne witness to the inconceivable suffering of her people. “The Syrian people have been facing 14 years of annihilation,” she says. “They had to live in rubble, they had to live without power, they had to live in starvation, they had to live under sanctions, they had to live without medication.”
In her 2016 book The Battle for Home, al-Sabouni wrote: “Putting Syria back together is what I am trying, in imagination, to do.” But the book struck a chord with readers elsewhere, because Syria is not the only place in the world which seems to have lost the thread of its identity—not the only place whose residents wonder if that thread can ever be rediscovered.
Still, when I called al-Sabouni last week we started by talking about Syria. It’s a strange atmosphere, she says: The celebrations of Assad’s fall, in the aftermath of so much carnage, feel—in her daughter’s words—“like a wedding in a graveyard.” The weather this month is relentlessly hot and dry. Like everybody, she is following the news and trying to figure out what comes next. In a recent article, al-Sabouni remarked that the country is “up for grabs”: “Powers such as Israel, Russia, Iran, Turkey and the United States may still be gathering around maps, deciding the fate of us Syrians so that we might fall into fragmentation and further conflict.” Egypt and Libya, she added, are not encouraging precedents for what follows a revolution.
But there are, she tells me, “very hopeful signs from the people in the administration.” Syria has a new “sense of sobriety,” she believes: The war, which changed the life of every Syrian, has been “like a cleansing period”—a time of learning and a preparation for change. “I hope that the current administration will have the confidence not to betray the patience of the Syrian people.”
“If her writing has a central theme, it is that people need to belong.”
What would count as a betrayal? “The central question here is rebuilding,” she says—meaning not just housing and infrastructure, but the sense of Syria as a home. If her writing has a central theme, it is that people need to belong: to live somewhere with a genuinely common life, which maintains their connection with the land, upholds their values and respects their history. She hopes that the reconstruction will give a place to smaller firms, to local builders and artisans who know the people they are building for and who will respect the character of the places where they build. “We have this temptation to follow the Gulf model,” she says: big loans, big corporations and imported foreign labor. The main thing she is praying for is that the new government will not “succumb to the enormous pressures that are coming from the Gulf region as well as from the West.”
Independence means a lot to al-Sabouni—in her own life as well as for Syria. “I don’t say this with much pride, but I have this sense of rebelliousness,” she says. “I am not a person who can tolerate…” a pause, then she dissolves into laughter. “I can’t be employed, I guess.” As a student, she observed with alarm the older architects: “the blatant despair on their features,” she writes, “their sloping defeated shoulders, their low-pitched voices, and their eyes dried of hope.” When she got a government job at a university, she realized why. Architecture projects were entirely in the hands of powerful politicians and firms, and were dictated by profit alone: “a mob collaborating to make business from the streets, infrastructure and buildings of the city.” She knew people who left the country, hoping to get rich elsewhere and then return. Al-Sabouni stayed.
The job was easy money, but it became intolerable. Al-Sabouni has described her colleagues’ astonishment when, given a commission to design some furniture, she actually began turning up to the office and doing sketches. “My employers—whose daily routine was to check in, have a ‘divine’ cup of coffee that no one would dare to interrupt, chat for an hour or so, do some of the accumulated paperwork and then go home early—started to circle around my desk with unconcealed amazement on their faces, asking me curiously what I was doing so early in the morning.” When al-Sabouni submitted her designs, she never heard back. She quit, hoping to find answers to the questions burning in her mind about the purpose of architecture.
Help arrived in the form of The Aesthetics of Architecture, a rather technical early work by the English philosopher Roger Scruton. Scruton put into words what al-Sabouni had intuited: “It was like a validation of views that I already had,” she says. Scruton wrote, for instance, that architecture should evoke in us “the inward resonance of an idea or a way of life.” That experience was just what al-Sabouni’s teachers had ignored. She wrote to him, and they became friends: She paid tribute to his “great mind and heart,” while he called her “a beautiful soul” and “one of the most remarkable people I have ever met.” They had their differences—over Islam, over Western power, over economics—but they shared a sense that the human heart needs, in the end, somewhere to come home to.
That was the subject of The Battle for Home, which contrasted in great detail the older architecture of Syrian life with the disasters that had followed. In the old town of Homs, al-Sabouni wrote,
As in all old Syrian cities, alleys embraced houses, and mosques opened their front doors to the facing doors of churches, and minarets and church towers raised their praying hands in unity above the rooftops. This way of life promoted cultivation and harmony.
These cities were generous cities. They offered, for free, drinking water fountains in the streets, benches to sit on, and the cool shade of trees that gave joy throughout the year with their fragrances and fruits. Their generosity was a model for residents to follow; it was the womb in which a shared morality gestated. The buildings, streets and trees … were the very soul of the community.
“What happened next ... was the destruction of a way of life.”
What happened next—via French and British misrule and then under the socialism of the Ba’ath party—was the destruction of a way of life. Old street plans were replaced with grids, old acacia trees uprooted to make way for unlovely imports, old buildings demolished. “Palaces, baths, and other buildings with historic and aesthetic meaning,” she wrote, “were repeatedly replaced with dead blocks of concrete, which were of no decorative or even functional or economic merit.” The rich failed to invest in the city, but treated it as a hotel. The “real estate mafia” threw up huge, unsightly blocks of flats. Most dangerously, the integration and social harmony of the old cities, with their busy souks, open courtyards and shared markers—Muslims and Christians collaborated to build Homs’s famous mosque—was abandoned. Now different communities, segregated into zones, sheltered behind concrete barriers living parallel lives. The architect’s task, for al-Sabouni, is to create boundaries without creating divisions. But in Syria, the partitions of the built environment became the battle lines of a deadly conflict. It wasn’t that urban planning was to blame for the war, but the war revealed how divided Syria had already become.
Al-Sabouni’s account was persuasive; it earned her much acclaim as well as invitations from the United Nations and the World Economic Forum. More shocking, and less noticed by the international media, was that she extended a similar critique to the West. Syria might have had its war, but the United States had its “deaths of despair”—and both were expressions of the same kind of crisis. “Our world is blighted by many sick cities, the cries of which are no less urgent than the cries of those devastated by war.” Social breakdown, she wrote in her second book, Building for Hope (2021), is the modern disease, and it should be expected wherever “cities are built to divide people rather than to bring us together.”
In Building for Hope, al-Sabouni coined a term for the urban model that disturbed her when she visited cities abroad: the Factory. The Factory is not just literal factories, though they play a part, but the system which has replaced cities of face-to-face trading and shared customs. In the 21st-century metropolis, which serves an insatiable international market, people have no need to talk to each other, or trade among familiar faces; they just need somewhere to sleep, close enough to where they work. The rich get richer and less numerous, “eliminating each other in the game of competition,” while the proletariat gets bigger and bigger, as the Factory expands its pool of workers. “What I see in Europe is growing numbers of people rejected by their cities, deprived of their rights—living on the crumbs of the Factory.”
“She saw ancient town centers turned into Disneylands.”
When al-Sabouni visited Western cities, she saw ancient town centers turned into Disneylands, and the surrounding areas blighted by homelessness and the brutal real-estate market. When she did events in bookshops, Al-Sabouni tells me, “I would listen to owners and workers in those shops, and often they were on the verge of closing, on the verge of bankruptcy.” And she grew increasingly baffled by the condescension of the locals.
When people from the West say to me, “We must help, because we have too much and you have too little,” I’m perplexed, because the truth is that none of us truly has anything; everything belongs to the Factory … All the prosperity that was generated from colonization or was generated in its wake, and that built the European centers in their heydays, is being sold today to global businessmen who have become the actual owners of the cities … Students cannot live near colleges, employees cannot live near workplaces, traders cannot afford to open shops in the city, farmers cannot afford to farm their lands.
It is an unashamedly moral critique; indeed, an implicitly religious one. “Definitely faith is central in my thinking,” al-Sabouni says. Her next book, out in 2026, is about “the essence of the mosque,” and she enthuses about the “huge freedom” and broad horizons of Islamic belief. It’s clear from her writing, as well, that she regards religion as uniquely powerful in restraining the greed that can destroy societies.
Building for Hope contains a wistful passage about the waqf, an economic institution not dissimilar to a trust, and influenced by Islamic teachings on the duty of charity. Through a waqf, you could establish in perpetuity a library, a school, an orchard, protected from external interference. It made a little oasis of generosity in the middle of cities—until, as al-Sabouni tells it, the French and the British destructively reformed the waqf system. There was a meadow in Damascus which was reserved for sick and aging animals. It has since been confiscated and turned into a location for an international business fair.
For al-Sabouni, that exemplifies how colonial powers have run Syria—which has, she suggests, often produced an “inferiority complex” towards the West. Now, she believes, the Gaza war has “unmasked” Western pretensions to stand for human rights and free expression. That in turn encourages Syrians to think they can run their own affairs.
Does al-Sabouni hope for a significant role in the rebuilding? “If you’re asking me if I’m waiting for big commissions to fall into my lap, definitely not,” she says. “I’m one of those millions of people who are just hopeful to see Syria being rebuilt for Syrians. And this long patience with so much hardship and heartbreak to be lifted.”
Her chief project, a collaboration with her husband, is a summer school “for architects and also for horses.” The idea is to teach the craft while spending time with “the silence and beauty” of the animals—who are, she says, a source of healing. The school will be built in collaboration with local masons, using the black basalt for which Homs’s old city was once famous; some of the materials have come from the rubble left after the war. It signifies, as al-Sabouni believes architecture at its best can signify, the values and the accomplishments of the local people.
All the same, I can’t resist asking how al-Sabouni maintains her affection for a city which she has described as “lacking a single memorable architectural sight” and whose residents she says recently descended “from a state of intellectual richness and spiritual connectivity … into an immoral world of triviality and disorder.” How does it still feel like her only imaginable home?
“Affection is related to familiarity,” she says. “And also there is this sense of responsibility that has grown over time since the war started. This vacuum that was created invited you to fill it with some sort of action. And for me, it was writing and thinking and sometimes also building.
“It’s the place where you have your attachment, you know? The values that you hold, the faces that you see, the tongue that you speak, even the creatures that you see. There are two owls, for example, that stand on the rubble of a ruined home near here. And I … I say good morning to them.”