Syria-2

(From Damascus. Written Tuesday evening.) As I started writing this, the plaintive quarter
tones of the evening call to prayer were reverberating from the minaret very
near to us. Now, that one’s stopped and I can hear other ones coming
thinly from other minarets around town. On Saturday, when we had dinner
at a restaurant up on Jebel Kassioun looking down on the city, we could see
many of its minarets picked out with green neon lighting: little green spears
sticking up from a broad, spreading carpet of orange street lights and lit-up
homes.

From ground-level I’ve seen some of the churches that have blue lighting
for the crosses topping them. Sunday evening we wandered around the shadowed
streets of the Old City’s Christian Quarter and heard the broad tones of
heavy church bells. Church bells on a cold and rainy Sunday evening…
that reminds me of so many poignant things about my childhood.

Last night, we went out to dinner with Mahat Farah Khoury, an older woman
with a long career as a writer and journalist who for many years s also directed
the local office of the Middle East Council of Churches. The weather
had been whipping up for a storm throughout most of the day and by the time
we left her house for the restaurant at 9:15 p.m. it was snowing in town.

This morning, it was still very cold. I looked from the hotel-room
window up to Kassioun, which was wearing a cape of white snow on its craggy,
sandy-colored outcroppings. The Palestinian professor who’d been planning
to come into town to meet us this morning called to say that her home, over
toward the Lebanon border, was quite snowed in. Bill and I decided that–since
it wasn’t actually snowing or raining–we should get out and do some good
walking around town. First, we went to an oud (lute) maker whose
location in Souq as-Surouja we found in the Lonely Planet, to do a little
business. We made a few wrong turns along the way. But eventually
we made a single turn north from the modern-day bustle of Shukri Kuwatly
Street, and descended three steps from there back almost straight into the
middle of the 19th century. That little street had square cobbles;
it was lined with two-story wattle-and-daub houses and shops, many with second-floor
balconies or wood-latticed windows canted out over the street on thick wooden
beams. Over the street, too, hung the limp vestiges of what, in the
summer, must have been shady grape arbours.

We found the oud maker’s place easily there. It was a tiny storefront
with an oud hanging outside it. Inside, the craftsman (Nabil)
sat filing away at the neck of an insturment. His entire stock was
hung in the store above him, and there was barely enough floor space for
Nabil, his apprentice, Bill, me, and Nabil’s electric lathe, so whenever
anyone wanted to move everyone else had to make adjustments in three dimensions.
We did not buy an oud then and there…

After we left we took a cab to the Bab al-Saghir (“Little Gate”), at the
far side of the walled Old City. Foolishly, we exited the cab quite
some way away from the Bab al-Saghir, and had to walk back to it between
large walled cemeteries. Our destination was two once-private houses
within the Old City that the LP had identified as gems of mid-18th century
architecture: the Sibai House and the Nizam House. The LP was, as so often,
completely right. These two houses were more run-down and slightly
smaller versions of the Azem Palace, which we’d revisited on Sunday. All
three grand homes were built in the distinctive Damascene style of banded
layers of contrasting dark and light stone: lovely, complex structures built
around internal courtyards graced by fountains and big old citrus trees;
all of them sport beautifully airy, high-arched diwans— reception
rooms that have gorgeous painted-woode ceilings and one side completely open
onto the fountains of the main (male-only) courtyard.

We poked around a little in each house. Private homes are the hidden
treaures of the walled cities of the old Middle East. As you pass down
the twisty, mean alleys that snake through the cities, their thousands of
private homes carefully hide their charms from the prying eyes of outsiders
(and from the heat of the summer sun.) But once you go into thehomes,
including many even of the smallest ones, you find these stunning courtyards
and living spaces designed for privacy and relaxation. My ex-husband
had cousins who lived in just such a place near the Bab al-Sharqi (Eastern
Gate) here. Now, though, that one has been turned into some kind of
a tourist magnet and has neon all over its front…

Well, we didn’t go there this morning. After the two houses that we
did see we headed north for a possible stop at one of the coffee-houses to
the east of the Omayyad Mosque. But on one tiny lane we were walking
along there, my eye was suddenly riveted by a storefront displaying some
superb Palestinian-style embroideries. (Anyone who knows me knows what
a sucker I am for these.) So we had to go in. The work was beautiful:
intricate, well designed, and well finished. It was made by women in
the Yarmouk refugee camp, the salesman told us. They used traditional
Palestinian designs (as we could see), but the work was made up into sales
goods according to ideas and patterns provided a German women of whose work
in this field we had already heard. How lucky that we’d found this
little cluster of stores! We hurried out half an hour later with several
Christmas presents tucked under our arms…

In the early evening, we went back to the oud maker. Our order
wasn’t ready yet. So we walked along to the Old City, which we approached
this time from the northwest corner, walking along the cobbled road that
runs between the northen edge of the massive Ottoman citadel and the tumbling
gray waters of the Barada River. At the point where the Citadel ended we
turned south into the Old City and walked along a narrow but still busy street
(Housewares-ville, you could call this area of the souk, I think) until we
hit the Souk al-Hamidiyeh (Embroidered Brassieres, truly louche Belly-dance
Outfits, and Tableclothes-ville– nearly all of it).

We turned east along the barrel-vaulted space of the Hamidiyeh, dodging the
importunings of several tablecloth salesmen, came to the Omayyad Mosque,
and walked around to arrive at the point Bill had identified earlier in the
day as the location of a couple of interesting coffee-houses. Indeed,
the one we went into had truly–as the Lonely Planet told us– been installed
inside the lovely, banded-stone building of a former Arab-style hammam
(bath-house). We mounted very steep steps to go in, then wandered through
a number of the hammam‘s different chambers, each one now furnished
with simple tables and chairs for coffee-drinkers and narghileh-smokers.
The domed ceilings had glass sunlight catchers studded into them. Once
painted white, the domes were now slicked with the tawny residues of hundreds
of narghilehs. On the banded-stone walls hung some ancient grainy photographs
of the city.

I’m always a little wary of Middle Eastern coffee-houses as being (predominantly)
male spaces. But this one had several women clients and people did
not make me feel out-of-place at all. We had mint tea while admiring the
surroundings and listening to the “click-clack” of two men playing backgammon
in the next room. The other clients in our room were three young-ish
people speaking Persian. Everything was very relaxed.

I guess I haven’t mentioned anything about the large numbers of Iranian tourists
here in the city. There are a number of Shi-ite holy places in and
around Damascus. So despite the fact that the city was predominantly
the headquarters of the contested Caliph Omayya, scourge of the Shi-ites,
many Shi-ites like to come here on religious pilgrimages, and given the fairly
close political links between the Syrian and Iranian governments, the Iranians
facilitate or perhaps even help support the visits here of scores of thousands
of Iranian pilgrims each year. You can see them in the main souqs during
shopping hours: mainly women… flocks of figures swathed in chadors in a
range of plain black or flowered fabrics, all clustered together around a
tour guide. When Bill was in the Omayyad Mosque the other day he saw
several groups of them there, though the main item there of religious significance
to Shi-ites is apparently the alleged head of Hussein Ibn Ali, brought there
as a trophy by Omayya’s followers after they had vanquished him in battle.
Memorialization is an interesting thing.

* * *

So which interesting people have we been seeing here? One was Sheikh
Salah Kuftaro, President of the Abu Nour Foundation, a Sunni Muslim institute
of higher learning founded by the late Grand Mufti of Syria, Sheikh Ahmed
Kuftaro. Sheikh Ahmed passed away some three months ago at a very advanced
age.

We had a very warm welcome from Sheikh Salah, whom I had met two years ago
when I was in Syria with two other members of our Quaker delegation. This
time, I gave him a copy of the book that resulted from that whole, region-wide
fact-finding mission. Then, he talked with Bill and me more about the
current situation. He said that people in Syria feel very angry about
what the Americans have been doing in Falloujah, and disaapointed in the
lack of any effective response to that from many Arab governments. (No real
surprise there, perhaps.)

The whole Abu Nour Foundation is a very interesting project. The Syrian
regime, which has always prided itself on its “modern”, secular nature, had
its own, very violent encounter with Sunni extremism back in the early 1980s.
At that time, Sunni militants made many attacks against regime-related
targets and along the way killed scores or perhaps hundreds of Syrian
civilians. The government cracked down very hard. In February
1982 it counter-attacked, launchinga military-scale assault against
the militants’ main stronghold in the northern city of Hama that leveled
a number of city blocks in the center of the city– including its historic
Grand Mosque. Perhaps as many as 1,200 or so civilians were killed there…
That assault, and a few years of maintaining tight police measures
against suspected militants, beat back the “threat” that the militants had
posed to the country. In a parallel measure, the regime encouraged
the development by people connected with the Grand Mufti of a more “modern”,
liberal strand of Sunni Islam to which believers could adhere… So
that’s where we were: the Abu Nour Foundation.

Sheikh Salah said he could agree with the American project of putting an
end to Saddam Hussein’s regime. But he also said he strongly opposed
many of the things the Americans had done in Iraq ever since then– especially,
the massive use of force against Fallujah and other places. And he
speculated that many in the Bush administration seemed to be driven by a
brand of fundamentalism that seemed almost exactly to mirror that of Osama
Bin Laden. Arguing from his reading of the Muslim holy texts he spoke
strongly against the use of violence in all circumstances except in cases
of immediate self-defense. And he decried any use of aggressive violence
that claimed to be motivated by “religion”. He criticized Bin Laden
very harshly on this score– as he also criticized people who kidnap and
kill civilians in a place like Iraq.

On church and state issues, he argued that religious institutions should
not seek to take over the powers of governments. Indeed, he said, “religion
should return to the mosques.”

Many people in the west love to whine and complain and say “Where are the
Muslim voices that speak out against Bin Laden?” Perhaps they should
look in a place like Syria– and also listen carefully to everything else
a very moderate Muslim thinker like Sheikh Salah Kuftaro says, as well…

We also had a good meeting (in Gemini, one of Damascus’s absolutely hippest restaurants)
with my friend and colleague Ibrahim Hamidi, the bureau chief for Al-Hayat
here in Damascus. I was so happy to see him! The last time I
saw him, when I was here in December 2002, we had a couple of really interesting
discussions– and then, just four days later he was thrown into jail on what
looked very much like a trumped-up accusation of “disclosing state secrets.”
Some time later he was sentenced to, I believe, six years imprisonment.
He spent five months (“five months and two days,” he told us,
to be precise) in jail, all or nearly all of it in solitary confinement.
And then, in late May 2003, he was released..

As we sat down to lunch I started asking him about the whole experience
he had gone through in prison. He said he was never tortured in any
direct way, either physically or mentally. But he found the solitary
confinement hard to bear. He said he could not speak at all for a couple
of days after he was released. In addition, that winter was bitterly
cold, and he came out with problems in his knees that required lengthy physiotherapy.
He said he realized pretty early on during his imprisonment that he
needed to take good care of himself, both physically and mentally, on the
supposition it was possible he’d be in jail for the rest of his life. “I
made a systematic attempt to get to know myself,” he said at one point. He
also said he walked up and down his cell for around seven hours per day.

Right now he’s free– and working again– under some kind of parole-like
arrangement, though he still has to go back to the police for periodic hearings.
The next one is on December 23rd. I asked him if it was okay
for me to write about what he’d told me of his prison experiences. He
thought a moment, then said “Yes.”

We talked a bunch about many other things… Including that just last February,
he got married. His wife, Dima Wannous, is a translator and has recently
completed a translation from French to Arabic of The Pianist. For
which, he said, she already has a publisher here… (Longtime JWN readers
might remember that I really loved– if that’s the right word– the movie
of The Pianist. Actually, I found the book even more
striking than the movie, for a number of reasons.) But how great if the translation
will be published here… I know, when I was in Ramallah in February,
that several of Palestinian friends there had been to a screening of the
movie held in an art cinema there, and had found it very moving.

… Well, it’s Wednesday morning now. I need to go find out what’s
up with the world. Later today, we’re hoping to see Sadeq al-Azem,
the great Syrian intellectual who’s this year’s winner of Europe’s ultra-prestigious
Erasmus Prize, and then drive back to Beirut. Let’s hope Sadeq has
the time to see us and that the passes over the mountains to Beirut are open
in the late afternoon….