‘Romeo and Juliet,’ by Fawwaz Haddad

At the recent Doha launch of ArabLit Quarterly’s Spring 2026 The Fall of Eternity, co-editors Ghada Alatrash and Fadi Azzam spoke with Georgetown University-Qatar professor Youssef Haddad about literature, Syria, and the work of imagining a path forward. Today, we share a short fiction from the issue that attempts part of that re-imagination.

 

“Romeo and Juliet” (from Republic of Darkness)

By Fawwaz Haddad 

Translated by Alaa Alqaisi

2023

 

He didn’t go to the Commissioner on that storm-lashed night just because he missed a friend. Something had struck his life and shaken him to the core, setting his feelings ablaze until he couldn’t master himself, stumbling from thought to thought. In just a few days, he’d shed several kilos.

The Commissioner felt sorry for him, this Lieutenant Colonel, thin as a reed and soaked through, rain running from his hair all the way down to his heels. He chalked the starved appearance up to poor eating; the man’s appetite had turned against food. Loneliness weighed on him. One look at the man’s miserable state and there was no doubt: he badly needed a friend. The Commissioner had done him a kind of harm—unwittingly—by helping loosen his stiff, moralizing view of life and people, only to leave him stranded in a crisis he hadn’t been ready for, off-balance, stripped of his borrowed certainties.

Part of why the Commissioner’s mind ran wild was the Lieutenant Colonel’s theatrics—he laid on the misery thick—and guilt crept in. But his suspicions soon fell apart. The Lieutenant Colonel admitted his story was, at heart, strictly personal and purely romantic, untouched by any moral stain. If he was suffering, it was from happiness itself. He came only because he trusted the Commissioner; there was no one else to whom he could pour out his heart.

What did this happy Lieutenant Colonel want of him?

Plainly, he wanted a guide in matters of the heart. In the past, he’d had his share of love affairs, yes. But they belonged more to the other side than to him. He had not loved; he’d been loved. This time was different. This marvelous, impossibly tangled affair had made him both blissful and wretched, unsettled yet reassured, and also a little unhinged. He was in love.

The Lieutenant Colonel, so happy he was trembling, was rattled by the uproar inside him, the surging feelings he couldn’t contain. They flooded him, and never had he known such heat. He was happy because he loved a gentle girl, wretched because he feared losing her, at a loss about what to do, and yet at peace, because she loved him back.

Arif saw no problem with love. It was a step in the right direction. The moment favored romance, now that the grand idea of national suicide had folded up and become part of the Lieutenant Colonel’s past. His work at the Branch wouldn’t keep him from the beloved; he was on duty even when he wasn’t. And it wouldn’t be hard to arrange a happy ending: marriage, and to hell with war and ruin and blood and culture and politics and denunciations and informers.

The Commissioner advised them not to delay the leap, to let their story end in the golden cage of matrimonial bliss.

Unfortunately, the Lieutenant Colonel was nowhere near his happy ending. Marriage was out of the question until a whole chain of brutal obstacles could be eased. All of these boiled down to one, the largest of them all: the lovesick Lieutenant Colonel was Alawite, while the beloved young woman was Sunni. Before the war, such a sectarian difference rarely blocked a match. People married anyway. If families balked, you talked them around—from both sides—while the lovers held their line with sulks and bozameh—pouting, silent wars—even a hunger strike. If it came to it, they went ahead in spite of threats, colluding in a staged “kidnapping,” where the lover abducted the beloved with her consent. A month or two later, mediators from both families would step in to mend things. Faced with the accomplished fact—she’s pregnant, the child will need grandparents, uncles, aunts—everybody made peace with everybody.

Now, though, her blood might be spilled. Or his. Or both.

They both knew what stood between them. For Alawites, to wed a Sunni girl was a betrayal of the nation at a time when, as they claimed, the terrorist Sunni sect was waging war on them. And to marry an Alawite boy was likewise a betrayal of the nation, since “the Alawite shabbiha left no Sunni untouched by killing.”

More precisely: marriage would be treason to the revolution, just as it would be treason to the regime, two coy formulas often used to dress up sectarian treachery. Blood was up to the knees. Old hatreds raced at a gallop. The regime and the opposition could both deny sectarianism; rancor and spite called them liars.

Had they known where this love would lead, perhaps they would have swerved away from it. But fate had its own plans.

What fate did—despite them and beyond their choice—was to set the stage for this extraordinary story. The first act began when the Lieutenant Colonel was driving back from the Branch he rarely ever left. That day, for no clear reason, he felt like lingering in the streets.

He spotted a knot of shabbiha around a microbus. They had chased it in a four-wheel-drive, forced it to a stop, and were pawing through the passengers. Their leader—a swaggering tough, a real mule—yanked a veiled girl off the minibus and tried to haul her to their car while she screamed in terror. The Lieutenant Colonel pulled over, even though he normally never stopped near a shabbiha crowd. Her plea for help goaded him; he got out and hurried toward them. He was in uniform. Even after they had clocked the eagle-and-star on his shoulders, they told him to move along. He showed his security ID. One look and they snapped to attention. He was a Branch chief, not some ordinary officer. He asked why they were detaining the girl. The mule—their boss—said she was a suspect and that he had orders from al-muʿallim, “the Boss,” to arrest her.

The moment he turned toward her, fate set to work, weaving its threads with a shameless lyric flourish, although nothing about the scene was lyrical. His eyes locked on her fresh, luminous face. Tears were running down her cheeks, and they lent her features a radiant sheen and a fragile clarity, so that she looked—for all the world—like the most beautiful girl alive. What rushed through his head defies tidy telling, but only one image held: the shabbiha, those brutes, were about to devour an innocent, lovely girl. He had a choice: be the rescuing knight or the quaking coward. Fate didn’t waste the moment. The brave Lieutenant Colonel fell in love at first sight, and every look after that, keeping time with his pounding heart, his quickened breath, the flush in his cheeks, the knocking of his knees, was just prologue to tearing her from their hands, even if it cost him his life. She was already his beloved.

Then he saw the mule of a thug catch her off guard, clamp her by the forearm, and drag her toward the car. Fate hurried the rest along, urging the Lieutenant Colonel—against his usual caution—to act with pure speed and force. He surged forward and slapped the man across the face with both hands, then seized him by the neck and nearly choked him, until the others jumped in, pleading for mercy. He only let go after he warned them: try this again and he’d haul them to the Branch.

He soothed her, ushered her to his car, and, as politely as he could, asked to drive her home, afraid one of those louts might tail her. Fate brushed her too with its spell. As she would later say, she too loved him at first sight; the moment she turned and saw him through her tears, he was the most handsome young man she had ever set eyes on. And the Lieutenant Colonel really was a handsome man.

Fate then left them to the consequences of their lovely story. Having woven the threads—prickly as they were—it would no longer meddle. Perhaps even fate couldn’t keep up. Sometimes it tangles people together and then leaves them to work out their own knots; it has no wish to run their lives. It invents the story and the problem in one breath, then moves on.

She assumed her rescuer was a Sunni officer. She couldn’t picture an Alawite officer saving a veiled Sunni girl. And yet it should have been obvious: a chief of a security branch simply could not be Sunni. Love had blinded her. He, for his part, didn’t care whether she was Alawite or Sunni, even though she was veiled. Love had blinded him, too.

What followed was little more than the routine mechanics of romance. The flame held even after they realized their sects hated each other, even fought each other, while both claimed they neither hated nor fought, in the fashion of a regime that had stoked a war of sects.

Love claimed the prime seat in their hearts; reality demanded enmity. They needed to narrow the contradictions and opt for understanding. She suggested a mutual exam in religion. Even as they trusted in love’s miracle, they both knew passing it would mean a risk for each of them. For her, the test was terrifying: what if her beloved Lieutenant Colonel turned out to be an unbeliever?

Amazingly, the “hard” test was easy, and no miracle was required. The questions were purely religious, touchy in the extreme. She believed her doctrine was the true one; she put the questions, and he used his head, even while smitten. On God, he answered that he believed in the One, the Unique, the Self-Sufficient Refuge. He believed in His books, His messengers, and the Day of Judgment, and he bore witness: there is no god but God, and Muhammad is the Messenger of God. He wasn’t lying; that was honestly his faith. As for her—though he didn’t test her—she loved Ali, may God be pleased with him, and her mother often made votive vows at the shrine of Sayyida Zaynab. In the end they agreed: there is no good reason for Muslims to be split into sects.

They discovered they agreed where it mattered, perhaps because what they knew of religion was precisely what mattered. She prayed, but never asked him to; her brothers didn’t pray at all. She fasted, and he promised to fast Ramadan with her; how could he eat while she abstained? They both knew that quarrels live in the details—where the devil makes his den—so they steered clear. Such minutiae felt small beside God, the Prophet Muhammad, his cousin Ali, prayer, and fasting.

None of that would count with their families if the two of them announced their love. No one would share their convictions. Takfir went both ways, and now killing—sectarian murder—had joined it. They kept quiet, since speaking would bring the sky down on their heads. If they wanted their love to last, they had to keep it secret.

The Lieutenant Colonel was superstitious and skittish. On their evening drives, he refused to cross the bounds of Damascus. They circled al-Muhajirin, al-Salihiyyah, and Abu Rummanah, and they went no farther than Dummar and al-Rabwah. They might hit a sectarian checkpoint, or a shabbiha one, or a Daesh unit. Then what? She could be killed before his eyes, or he before hers. There was no guarantee they would die together; checkpoints took sides.

Their sad love yielded sad meetings, charged with chaste longing. Fingers interlaced, tears brimmed. She leaned her head against his shoulder; his bent to hers. The sight of them was tender, like Eve slipping out from Adam, as if they were a living emblem of the woman made from man’s rib. But leave aside those primal images of man and woman, and you still had this: a principled man had found a love that suited him, mirrored in a kindred, feminine spirit. In truth, all that had happened was that a romantic man found his match in a romantic beloved.

To the Commissioner, there was nothing rare in it. It was the same old plot spun by Romeo and Juliet, except now it wore a Syrian, sectarian cut: a Romeo who was Alawite, a Juliet who was Sunni. Arabize the names and you would get Jamil the Alawite and Rafif the Sunni.

But the problem was huge. No golden cage would bring them together. This wasn’t two feuding families but liberated and loyalist zones, an army, militias, fighting factions… Marriage slid into the realm of the impossible.

And still, neither sect nor weapon could snap the bonds of this love. It outmuscled regime, army, terror, and intelligence. That reckless romantic streak fit their bold, beautiful affair.

The Commissioner counseled the Lieutenant Colonel to be wise and patient—that is, not to be naïve—lest their love story end in tragedy, for romance was enamored of death. For now, the road to a home together was blocked. He mustn’t try to steamroll Rafif’s family and run off to the village. It wasn’t safe. The villagers would shun her; some crazed shabbih might kill her and desecrate the body. And if he married her in Damascus, it wouldn’t take much for some puffed-up pseudo-sheikh to stab him, split his belly, spill his guts, and vanish in a blink. The Commissioner did not pretty the picture. If they met the lunatics of either camp—Sunni or Alawite—the end could be that brutal.

To keep their love intact, they would have to outwit Sunnism and Alawism both, as well as keep the affair off the intelligence radar, lest she be branded a plant set against a Branch chief. If they took those precautions, their love could outlast the weather of days and the blows of time—and the sectarian crazies—and endure past the war. Then, perhaps, everyone would take stock of how ruined the country had become and admit the war was a great crime. Enmity would lose its fuel; quarrels would shrink back to “normal” bickering; and—God willing—people would make peace. Better to say: we’ll cross that bridge when we come to it. But for the record: there was no fixing any of this unless the Syrian catastrophe itself was undone; Syria was the root, and their story a branch.

Fawwaz Haddad is a Syrian novelist. He earned a law degree from the University of Damascus in 1970 and published his first novel in 1991. He has written seventeen novels, a short-story collection, and a book reflecting on his novelistic practice. Since 1998 he has devoted himself fully to fiction, and in recent years he has also published essays on literature and on Syrian affairs. His novel The Unfaithful Translator was shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction in 2008. His novel God’s Soldiers was longlisted for the same prize in 2010, and was translated into German by Günter Orth. His novel Solo Piano Music (2009) was translated into English by Max Weiss and published by Dar Arab in 2023.

Alaa Alqaisi is a Palestinian translator, writer, and researcher from Gaza, deeply passionate about literature, language, and the power of storytelling to bridge cultures and bear witness to lived realities.