Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria Book Review

 

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria

A must-read book by a Syrian heroine

Defiance: A Memoir of Awakening, Rebellion, and Survival in Syria was published by Viking on February 24, 2026. It is 432 pages long.

Syrian photojournalist Loubna Mrie was born in 1991. Mrie's father was an assassin for the Assad regime. Mrie describes a relatively privileged childhood followed by more straitened circumstances after her parents' divorce. She witnessed, and then participated in, the Syrian civil war (2011 - 2024). Her participation alienated her father. Eventually Mrie moved to the United States where she remains.

Defiance is one of the most remarkable books I have ever read. The writing is exquisite. Sensuous vignettes engage the reader's sight, hearing, scent, taste, and touch. Descriptions initially evoke a privileged girl's Syria: the smell of the bills in cash gifts from daddy, and the smell of hairspray on date night as girls stroll along a seaside corniche. The book progresses, and we enter a courageous journalist's Syria at war. We visit an apartment that Loubna has never bothered to clean, until a date with a sexy American aid worker inspires her to tidy up before his arrival. We witness protesters, shot by government thugs, bleed to death on Syria's streets. We cringe as ulcers pock the faces of victims of leishmaniasis, caused by sand-fly bites.

Defiance is intimate, written with an unflinching courage and profound insight found only in the highest literature. Too many other authors, recounting their adventures in danger zones, depict themselves as purely heroic. Mrie is humble enough, and values truth enough, to expose the good, the bad, and the ugly in her own character. I suspect that she is far more admirable than she herself realizes. In her writing, she reveals her own admiration for others who gave the ultimate sacrifice for their ideals. I hope she overcomes whatever survivor guilt that may haunt her.

Carl Rogers' dictum "the more personal, the more universal," applies to Mrie's writing. As Mrie explores her own motivations, reactions, and perceptions, she increases our own insight into ourselves. Yes, if we had been raised as she was raised, we, too, would find it hard to voice a protest against even a monster like Hafez al-Assad. Yes, if we had lived through what she had lived through, we, too, might succumb to alcoholism, one-night stands, and blackouts.

I wish I were still teaching. I had many Muslim and/or Middle Eastern students, and often assigned works by and about Muslim women. These included Nawal el Saadawi's account of her own female genital mutilation from her book The Hidden Face of Eve, Leila Ahmed's "Women and the Advent of Islam" from Signs, Malala Yousafzai's I Am Malala, Kate McCord's In the Land of the Blue Burqas, works by Yasmine Mohammed and Ayaan Hirsi Ali, and the folklore collection Speak Bird Speak Again. Defiance is an instant classic that belongs on the same shelf with all of these.

As with many highly detailed personal memoirs written in the midst of historic events, Defiance teaches the reader much about sweeping, geopolitical history, here, specifically, about Syria and the wider Middle East, but also much about the reader's own country and her own heart. I encountered this crossroads of history and the human heart in the words and teary eyes of my Middle Eastern students during the Syrian civil war. My students were heartsick. They wanted the world to recognize the agony in their ancestral homeland. They were confused. Why could America, the West, or someone not rescue their loved ones back at home? No one was rescuing them, and they became angry and cynical.

Not just my students, but the wider world, shuddered. Syria's civil war produced about 6.8 million refugees, refugees that caused political crises in Europe. No doubt the West would have preferred a safe, stable, democratic Syria. Given insurmountable realities, that Syria was, and perhaps still is, impossible to realize. Syria is made up of many sects, many of whom feel it is their duty to revile, fight, and even kill members of what they see as infidel sects. There are not just Christians, Jews, Druze, and Muslims in Syria, but splinter sects from orthodox Islam.

Dictator Hafez al-Assad exploited Syria's sectarian differences when he staged a coup decades ago, and to retain power for his family for roughly fifty years. His minority, the Alawite Muslims, are condemned by Sunni Muslims as mushrikeen or polytheists. According to Al Monitor, "The Alawites were persecuted by the Umayyad, Abbasid, Mamluk and Ottoman states, which carried out massacres against the Alawites after occupying the Levant in 1516 . . . The Mamluk and Ottoman authorities used fatwas as religious justifications to kill Alawites." Assad exploited Alawite fear and wider fear of civil war to retain power. He maintained power through brutal torture, usually carried out by his fellow Alawites.

Perhaps the Assad regime's most notorious crime was the 1982 Hama Massacre. Assad's government killed civilians; death toll estimates run between five and forty thousand. Assad's governmental forces were largely Alawite Muslims; victims were largely Sunni Muslims, some affiliated with the Muslim Brotherhood. For their part, Alawites cite their history of massacres of Alawites by Sunni Muslims during the Ottoman era as justification for their fear of non-Alawites.

As the Assad family's grip on power lessened, democracy did not come rushing in like a long awaited guest of honor. The Assad regime fell on December 3, 2024, but fighting and killing have not stopped. In March, 2025, Sunnis committed mass killings of Alawites. In November, 2025, the BBC reported on the drive-by assassinations of Christians and also of Alawites. "As they chatted with a friend over coffee and cigarettes, they were hit by a hail of bullets. The killings happened in the village of Anaz in Wadi al-Nasara, or the Valley of the Christians." The BBC found that "Having survived the war, some Alawites now wonder if they will survive the peace." A 14-year-old Alawite was assassinated as she celebrated success at school exams. Ghina was "'the best of daughters' her mother says, 'so smart, so good at school, addicted to studying, with so many plans.' The teenager loved basketball, and wanted to travel and to study law." In December, 2025, Steptoe reported that

"Armed clashes persist nationwide as government forces confront insurgent groups, pro-Assad militia remnants, and minority armed factions, particularly in the Druze communities in the south, resisting integration. Extremist violence has resurged, with a revived Islamic State conducting attacks in government-held areas, including a deadly Damascus church bombing, the first such strike in the capital since regime change … so far in 2025, at least 590 people, including children, have died from landmines, potentially making Syria's casualty rate the world's highest for a single year."

In short, though my students, millions of refugees, and author Mrie reported a devastating picture of human suffering in war-torn Syria, the West could not and cannot save Syria.

No one can save a country where individuals feel their identity first to be, not as human beings most significantly like other human beings, but as members of a tribe, where tribalism trumps basic humanity and any concept of human rights, and where tribal identity informs morality and behavior. Membership in tribe X demands that members foreground hostility, expressed as anything from exploitation to murder, against members of tribe Y.

Tribe also trumps individuality, and this emphasis on tribe to the exclusion of individuality negates time. If one is, not primarily "Ali," a unique individual who has never existed before and will never exist again, but primarily "An Alawite who happens to be named Ali," then one does not exist, primarily, in 2026. If tribal identity trumps individual identity, one could be any Alawite from any time period. One may as well be an Alawite who is massacred by Sunnis in 1517. And any given Sunni is not, primarily, a unique individual named Omar. He is, primarily, a Sunni named Omar. Though it is 2026, he may as well be one of the Sunnis who massacred Alawites in 1517. In this tribal worldview, there is no passage of time, and progress, and moving past atrocity, are both impossible.

This tribal worldview could help the reader to understand Loubna Mrie's father's hideous behavior toward her. Jawdat Mrie did not see his daughter, Loubna, as a unique individual who has never existed before and would never exist again. He saw her as "Alawite," as "daughter." Loubna existed to fill those roles, not to grow into her own identity. When Loubna asserted her identity, she violated tribal dictates. Not only her father, but almost her entire family, and her Alawite friends and neighbors as well, were ready to do violence to her to punish her for placing her individual integrity above tribal identity.

My Syrian students, Muslim and Christian, would rhapsodize about the homeland they missed so badly, the homeland that, they were sure, was better than the USA where they found themselves. Like Mrie, they praised the deliciousness of Syrian food and the intensity of interpersonal relations. And yet there they were in America, the country they thought in many ways to be inferior to home. They lambasted the West for not "saving" war-torn Syria.

One does not have to be a Nobel Peace Prize Laureate to perform a cost-benefit analysis of the new Syrian custom of strapping on a gun, mounting a moped, and shooting a 14-year-old girl just because she is a member of tribe X. As long as there is a critical mass of Syrians who decline to confront the results of that analysis, Syria will be unsafe, brutal, and poor. In this sense, Mrie's book has no real happy ending, at least not for the Syria she describes. The martyrs to democracy she meets and mourns in this book's pages are yet to be redeemed. Mrie, in spite of all the risks she took to serve her country is, one hopes, safe and at peace. Her country's fate is still yet to be determined.

Mrie depicts Syria's hornet's nest of competing sects and their irreconcilable desires for Syria's future through her encounters as a young, naive, privileged daughter of a corrupt Alawite assassin, and later, as an uprooted journalist covering the revolution, and, subsequently, the rise of ISIS. As I was reading this book, and Mrie always seemed to be perfectly positioned to have encounters with history in the making, I said to myself, "This woman's life is so cinematic it hardly seems real." Mrie says the same thing herself at one point. "It feels like fiction; it can't be real." I'll say this, though. Even if Defiance were discovered to be a novel, not a memoir, it would still make for excellent reading. My review, below, will contain many "spoilers." I advise the interested party to stop reading this review now, avoid the spoilers below, read the book, and then come back and compare notes with me by reading the rest of this review.

Defiance opens with young Loubna's visit, with her maternal grandmother, to the tomb of an Alawaite sheikh. The tomb is covered by a green cloth. The cloth has been kissed and fondled by countless pilgrims. It is filthy and malodorous. Grandmother encourages little Loubna to kiss this cloth. Loubna doesn't want to. Loubna has been told, "Shorten your tongue," that is, to "shut up." "A good Alawite must obey. No questions." Loubna doesn't obey. And so begins a lifetime of defiance.

Alawite women don't have to cover their hair, but women are still subordinate to men. Mrie depicts this subordination through accounts of her family life. After his effusive courtship of her mother, Jawdat, her father, becomes "intolerably abusive." When Loubna is born, her father wants to name her after one of his mistresses. Her mother disagrees. "The burden of girls is with you until death," Mrie quotes an Arab proverb. The couple eventually divorce. In Arab societies, Mrie reports, divorce is understood to be the woman's fault. Mrie's mother sometimes strikes little Loubna so hard her skin bruises, and she makes Loubna and her sister Alia phone their father to beg for support payments, but she also makes it clear that she loves her daughters.

As a school girl, Mrie is forced, with other children, to chant slogans in support of Hafez al-Assad. They call him "father." As a child, Mrie tears up when she sees him on TV. In school, underperforming children are abused by the teacher. Some are beaten in public with a thick stick. As the child of a powerful member of the Assad regime, Mrie receives preferential treatment.

Students are taught that the Holocaust never happened; it was made up to facilitate Jews getting their own state. Students are also taught to revere a suicide bomber as a hero. Elections are manipulated to guarantee 100% support for Assad. Daughters must kiss their father's hands and feet to ensure that they will inherit from him. An aunt prescribes a magic spell to improve Jawdat's behavior. Jawdat's abuse continues in spite of the magic spell. He rages at his daughter that she is a "whore." He also calls his wife a "whore" for, in his opinion, not treating his laundry respectfully enough. Even so, Mrie's mother constantly attempts to manipulate her daughters into charming their father. When he behaves hatefully towards his daughters, his ex-wife blames the daughters, not him. When, in 2000, Hafez al-Assad dies and his son, Bashar, takes over, Mrie's aunt fantasizes that Bashar will marry her daughter, famous for her beauty; this daughter is all of ten years old.

Though Mrie's father Jawdat and his extended family are imperfect, at times Mrie and her sister enjoy privileges; for example, they can visit an amusement park, even though it is officially closed. Even such innocent pleasure come at a price. The spoiled cousin who gets them into the park torments his female relatives. When one resists, he steps on her and beats her, as a female servant watches and does not intervene. When Mrie's paternal grandmother dies, Mrie's aunt, who had managed the grandmother's rental properties for years does not inherit her property; rather, Mrie's uncles, who did nothing to manage those properties, inherit them. Everyone, including the aunt who was cheated out of an inheritance, accepts this as normal.

Mrie, along with her classmates, cheats at school. The teachers cheat, too, telling students what bribes to provide and slipping exam questions to students from powerful families. Even so, Mrie fails important exams. Her father is thrilled. He does not want an educated daughter; he wants a compliant one who will quickly marry an Alawite.

One day Mrie realizes that her father is sleeping, not only with another mistress, but with the mistress' 12-year-old daughter. Younger is better in Arab culture, Mrie reports. The mistress also forces her daughter to sleep with other customers. After Mrie discovers her father's vile behavior, Jawdat bribes his daughter by handing her money. Mrie hated her father, but, in her society, she had no recourse. Reporting his rape of a child would not result in justice, and would probably get her, and possibly the child victim, killed. As it was, Mrie wouldn't take money from her father for a nose job, the same nose job everyone in her family got, so that they would look less Middle Eastern.

In December, 2010, Mohamed Bouazizi, a young Tunisian vegetable seller, abused by his corrupt regime, sets himself on fire. This event is cited as the beginning of the Arab Spring. Protests begin in Syria. The government-run television station insists that the protesters are chanting "Death to Alawites." In fact the government is lying; the protesters chant for a Syria free for all sects. Rumors circulate. "Women in burqas" – that is, orthodox Muslims, not like the Alawites, who do not cover their hair – are poisoning Alawites. Qatari pills cause Syrians to curse Assad. The protests are staged in Qatari studios. US-paid Iraqis are poisoning ketchup bottles. The US is making phone calls that trigger seizures. And, of course, it is rumored that Israelis are causing trouble. The Alawites decide that the Syrian uprising will result in their mass death. The Assad family is their only protection against being slaughtered by Sunnis.

Mrie, a woman who has been taught "to memorize, follow, and obey instructions … essential to being a good woman, daughter, and Syrian … never to raise my voice or disagree" joins a protest march. Gunshots. People run. She falls. A man lifts her, carries her to safety. Mrie makes it to her grandmother's house. Grandmother says, "May God curse your soul." Mrie's family does not support any protest against Assad.

But Mrie returns to protest some more. In civilian apartments, she aids in the medical treatment of protesters. This medical treatment includes amputation of limbs. It is too unsafe to go to hospitals. Jawdat is furious. He cuts Mrie off financially. Mrie must get a job, but she has been trained to be helpless, to be dependent on men. She feels worthless. Her family won't help. They tell her that she should be grateful that her father cut off her allowance and not her tongue. Mrie suddenly understands, "Our oppressors will never be our protectors."

Mrie moves out of her Alawite stronghold and to Damascus. Her messiness angers her roommate. She has never learned to pick up after herself. She has to learn how to overthrow Assad, patriarchy, and her own slovenliness. She falls in with a yeasty group of young, idealistic, risk-taking revolutionaries. They are from various groups, Christian, Alawite, Sunni, but vow that in the new Syria there will be equal rights for all. Wealthy Syrians, domestically and overseas, donate to the revolutionaries. These wealthy people are too cautious to take public stands themselves.

A man named Naji teaches Mrie how to use a camera successfully to record the revolution for foreign media sources. The world should know what is transpiring. Naji is Isma'ili, another minority Muslim sect. Mrie cooks a traditional Alawite bulgur dish for her friends. It is inedible. She did not first pick the stones out of the bulgur. She has never been taught to be independent.

Mrie earns money from her photojournalism. She knows what she stands for: "We are against the killing and detention of people; pondering the finer points of politics seems like a luxury." Mrie must acknowledge her own bigotry, in one case, against Kurds. She has been taught to regard them as inferior, to call them "boyaji," "shoeshine boy." "Tailors risk jail for sewing traditional Kurdish clothes. Even speaking Kurdish is considered a crime."

Mrie becomes a courier. At one point she delivers bundles of cash. The cash tempts her. She succumbs, and eats out at a fancy restaurant. She realizes she can't be trusted with cash, and refuses assignments to transport cash. On a visit home, Mrie notices an absence. "Alawite villages were emptied of their young men. More than forty thousand were killed fighting for the regime."

Syrians, Mrie says, are "fascinated" by the US. "If you worked hard, your work paid you back. Unlike Syria, where it was common knowledge that only one's connections … can bring success and stability." Tribalism sabotages economies.

In the midst of death and mayhem, Mrie still sees beauty. "I watch the sun spill its yolk into the clouds, staining them dark pink and orange."

Mrie starts to drink. Alawites do drink alcohol, which is forbidden in orthodox Islam. But Mrie is becoming an alcoholic. This is a problem for a revolutionary. She says intemperate things that put herself and others at risk. She has blackouts. The revolutionaries she first connected with are starting to scatter to other countries. Amer, a colleague, insults her. She insults him back. He strikes her so hard she develops a black eye. So much for the ideals of the revolution. "Under pressure, under the fear of death by execution, by torture, by bombing, people can release the monster they've spent their lives repressing." Mrie quotes Lorca. "What is a human without freedom, Mariana? Tell me. How can I love you if I'm not free? Can I give you my heart if it is not mine?"

She visits a bombed out site. "It dawns on me that many oppose the uprising not out of love for the government but because the pain of having to dig through the rubble of your house in search of the bodies of your family members is more real than abstract ideals like democracy or freedom." The trusted revolutionary who transported Mrie to the bombed site attempts to execute her because she is an Alawite. A man she knows only from the internet rescues her (remember that the next time someone tells you there is no benefit  to social media). Mrie asks, "What good is 'liberation' if the liberator is going to assume I am a traitor simply because I am an Alawite? … and, without trial at this sole discretion, execute me?" But Mrie makes clear that she herself is not free from her formation. "I wonder if I will ever truly escape the patterns of submission ingrained in me since childhood."

Mrie travels to Turkey. She calls her mom. Mom doesn't answer. What happens next is so awful I will leave it to you to buy and read this very worthy book to discover the full horror that Mrie has survived. In the wake of her mother's fate, Mrie is savaged by her community. Her fellow Alawites in Syria hate her; they want to torture her to death. Mrie is innocent. This does not matter. What matters is that she is a woman, and she is an Alawite who has aligned herself with non-Alawites and their ways. She is reminded of a hideous video of a Yazidi girl who is stoned to death by her nearest and dearest in Iraq because she dared to love a man who was not of her tribe. Mrie may be referring to the video of the murder of 17-year-old Du'a Khalil Aswad.

Mrie begins a long stretch of working for various Western NGOs. It is difficult for her to reconcile what she has lived through in Syria and the civilized, carpeted conference rooms complete with refreshments. Her NGO work is remunerative and appreciated.

Mrie begins to have one-night stands. One day, she wakes up covered in bruises. She can't remember what happened. She is in a lot of pain, and alcohol and casual sex are the only "therapy" she will allow herself. She returns to Syria, in spite of the danger. She discovers that some liberators are in fact looting. One must not report that, she is advised. Naji, who is now also in Turkey, disagrees. "Replacing evil with another form of evil is not liberation. It is a failure."

Mrie barely escapes death another time; later, she enjoys a meal of "grilled meat, pink cabbage, cucumbers, and baba ghanouj."

Mrie meets Peter, a handsome young American war veteran and aid worker who falls head over heels in love with her. "In his presence, I came to believe that the tulips and cherry trees of April in Istanbul had bloomed thanks to him, and not the rotation of the earth." Again, I will refrain from telling you what happens to Peter. Please read the book. Remember to bring tissues.

Mrie returns to Syria. She encounters ISIS. They are "foreign fighters" – not native born Syrians. She interacts with a terrorist who had been born to a Christian family in France.

Mrie receives a scholarship that takes her to New York City. She spends her time frequenting Syrian hangouts. She learns that "Naji has been shot in the head in Antep." ISIS claims credit for the assassination. "Nowhere is safe." Mrie comes to realize that writing helps. "Pain and trauma are like vampires walking the earth in the dark. Exposing them to light can diminish their power over us."

I said, above, that this book is so cinematic it reads like a novel, but even if it were one, it would still be true. Mrie writes powerfully of moments that most of us have shared. She describes goodbyes to loved ones, goodbyes that she relives and wishes she could change. Many of us have had similar goodbyes that haunt us. Mrie, though suffering from PTSD, rejects offers of compassion. Many of us have been equally proud and have refused to be defined by others as needing help.

Mrie also writes about less common experiences that resonate for me personally. I wasn't there in Syria in 2011, but I was there in Poland in 1989. Mrie was lifted up by a stranger after protesters, running for their lives, knocked her down. With thousands of others, I faced off with the ZOMO, paramilitary police. With others, I ran, and was almost crushed, and was protected by Poles I barely knew. When not protesting, we spent our time, as did Mrie and her fellows, in dingy apartments debating the finer points of overthrowing evil power.

Before that, I had been a Peace Corps Volunteer in two of the poorest countries on earth, one in Africa, one in Asia. The Central African Republic was a failed state and we were under constant threat. Both the CAR and Nepal had been oppressed and exploited by foreign powers. Expulsion of foreign powers and an end to the colonial era did not usher in a golden age of democracy, not in Syria, nor in CAR or Nepal. CAR and Nepal are very different countries, thousands of miles apart. But both are burdened by tribalism.

When I returned from these countries to the US, it was difficult to explain to Americans why they remained so poor. Usually people would not allot me much time to speak, so I'd try brief anecdotes. I would mention that I knew a poor peasant in Nepal, for example, who had thirteen children. One of the children was a boy. He was, of course, the last child. Every other child, a girl, was a mistake. Some of those girls would die from hunger and parental neglect. Some would join thousands of other unwanted Nepali daughters and be sold into sex slavery. For any of us to speak of the worth of female life would be to defy the sacred Vedas that required a male child to offer the prayers for the dead once the parents died. Or I would mention a lovely man I met in Africa, an old peasant. He had listened when foreign aid workers came to his village and taught about advanced methods that would improve his yields. These foreigners gave him better seeds. His farm did improve, until his neighbors showed up and burned his farm down. A primitive concept, "limited good," informed their arson of their neighbor's livelihood.

CAR and Nepal are not Syria. They are, though, both places where ideas, more than any physical reality, keep people down. The US could not save CAR or Nepal any more than it could save Syria. Those who introduce new ideas, ideas based on human equality – even of women – and human individuality incur the same hate Mrie experienced from her own flesh and blood after she exercised her own individual integrity. "Where there is no vision, the people perish." We must pick our visions carefully.

Danusha V. Goska is the author of God through Binoculars: A Hitchhiker at a Monastery