It has been almost nine months since I posted an essay on my website (Basemalzahabi.com).

For someone who has developed the habit of writing regularly about education, human cognition, artificial intelligence, self-awareness, and the many contradictions of our rapidly changing world, nine months is a long silence.

But it was not an empty silence.

In retrospect, I think I stopped writing publicly because I became too busy living through the questions I had been writing about.

The past nine months have taken me through two worlds that have defined much of my life.

Early in the year, I returned to the classroom and spent time doing what I have always loved and perhaps know best, that is teaching. 

Then toward the end of June, I traveled back to my beloved, free Syria, the country where my story began but from which I have lived far away for most of my adult life.

Somewhere between the classroom in Michigan and the streets of Damascus, the questions occupying my mind began to change.

I had spent years thinking about how individuals think, how students learn, how artificial intelligence might change human cognition, and what happens when technology begins performing intellectual tasks we once assumed belonged exclusively to us.

But Syria confronted me with a much larger question: How does a nation think about its future? And, perhaps more importantly: Can a nation learn to think differently about itself?

Those questions have occupied much of my intellectual and emotional life during these months of silence.

Returning to the Classroom

After decades in higher education, including years of administration, university leadership, international programs, research, and institutional responsibilities, I continue to find something uniquely satisfying about teaching.

There is a refreshing simplicity to the classroom. Titles matter very little there.

Students are not particularly interested in what administrative positions their professor once held or what appears on his résumé. They want to know whether he can help them understand the problem sitting in front of them. Can you explain something complicated clearly? Can you make them curious? Can you challenge them without discouraging them? Can you make them think?

And perhaps most importantly, can you help them develop enough intellectual confidence that eventually they no longer need you?

That last question has become particularly interesting in the age of artificial intelligence.

Teaching engineering while AI tools are rapidly becoming part of students' intellectual environment has given me an unusual opportunity to observe something deeper than technological adoption.

And what should education become when access to information is no longer the primary intellectual limitation? These questions initially concerned individual cognition. But gradually I began asking them on a different scale. If individuals can become more reflective about how they think, can institutions? Can universities? Can governments? Can societies? Can a nation possess something analogous to metacognition, the ability not merely to make decisions, but to examine how it makes decisions, what assumptions it relies upon, where its information comes from, how it learns from failure, and whether its institutional habits still serve the future it hopes to create? Then I went to Syria.

Returning to Where the Story Began

There are places we visit, and there are places to which we return. The distinction is profound.

Syria is not simply a country on a map for me. It is the place where my earliest understanding of the world was formed. Damascus gave me my first streets, my first language, my first memories, my first sense of belonging.

I have spent more than four decades of my life away from Syria. America became home. It gave me extraordinary opportunities to study, teach, build a career, raise a family, and participate in institutions that profoundly shaped the person I became.

Yet geography does not completely determine belonging. Some places remain inside us regardless of distance. And so, returning to Syria was not simply travel. It was an encounter between memory and reality.

There is something extraordinary about walking again through Damascus after years away. The city seems to exist simultaneously in several periods of your life. You see the street as it is. You remember it as it was. And somewhere between the two, you remember yourself as you once were.

A corner awakens a memory you did not know you still possessed. A familiar expression spoken in the Damascene dialect collapses decades of distance. 

A smell from a bakery, the sound of a market, an old stone wall, a courtyard, a minaret appearing above rooftops, small things suddenly carry enormous emotional weight.

But something unexpected happened during this visit. After the first emotions of return began to settle, I found myself looking at Damascus differently. I stopped seeing only the Damascus I remembered. I began seeing the Damascus that might someday exist. I began imagining the Syria that has not yet been built.

And a question began following me everywhere: What could Syria become by 2050?

Not simply what could be repaired. Not what could be restored. Not how quickly Syria could reconstruct what had been destroyed. But something more ambitious:

If Syrians were given the opportunity to think seriously about the next twenty-five years, what kind of country would they choose to build?

The Syria I Can Imagine

When I think about Syria now, I carry several countries in my mind simultaneously. There is the Syria of my childhood. There is the Syria that endured years of terrible suffering. There is the Syria I recently visited. And increasingly, there is another Syria. One that does not yet exist.

If history has forced Syria to rebuild so much, why should we limit our ambition to rebuilding what existed before? Why not ask for something larger? What could Syria become?

The road to Syria 2050 has already begun.