The Website ALL4SYRIA reported (in Arabic) on July 17, 2010 that private Islamist elementary schools have been proliferating in Syria. The title of the article: Secrets and Background Behind the Decision to Ban the Wearing of the Niqab in Syria’s Schools and Universities Taken by the Office of National Security.
A Summary of the ALL4SYRIA article
Islamist groups in Syria have succeeded in controlling most private elementary schools (up to sixth grade), estimated to be around 200 schools (presumably in Damascus) with approximately 25% to 30% of all elementary schools enrolment. The article revealed that teachers are all women, don the Niqab (black covering of face and body), and belong to Islamist proselytizing groups, typically led and controlled by women. ALL4SYRIA added that classroom teaching material contravenes Ministry of Education curriculum and textbooks, that young children are instructed to insist that their mothers must wear the Niqab so that they avoid burning in hell’s fire, that large amounts of money have been paid by Islamist organizers to purchase secular private schools from their owners; for example, Dar Al-Faraj, Dar Al-Na’eem, Omar bin Al-Khattab, The Arab Islamic College, Ummat Al-Majd, Al-Yaqzah…).
Significance of the article
Such a development is disconcerting. Syria must be vigilant. At the core of Islamist teaching, just like Wahhabi teaching, is indoctrination and brainwashing in fanaticism. Sunni Islamists, Syria’s included, embrace Wahhabi extremism with all their being. Their speech and actions are akin to being members of a religious cult.
It should be noted that the word "Islamist" refers only to the tiny minority among individual Muslims who are extremists in their religious fervor and beliefs; specifically, the Hanbalite Wahhabis. The word "Islamist" does not apply to the 95% of Sunnis who follow the other three schools of jurisprudence (Hanafites, Maliktes, and Shafiates). This great majority is moderate, enlightened, and tolerant. On a macro level, the word "Islamist" refers to extremist Islamic states, not to moderate Islamic countries. While Egypt, Indonesia, Malaysia, Syria, and Turkey, for example, are Islamic countries, Saudi Arabia is an Islamist country.
Source: Daring Opinion, Stop Wahhabi Indoctrination of Syrian Youth
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Syria. Show all posts
Sunday, 1 August 2010
Monday, 19 July 2010
Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself
Far from the heated debates of Europe, Syria has banned the niqab in classrooms, adding another layer to this complex story
Quietly, away from the fanfare that accompanied the French vote on banning the niqab in public, and calls by Philip Hollobone to impose a ban in Britain, the Syrian government has instituted its own, more limited, ban, removing teachers who wear the full face veil from teaching in public schools.
At first glance, such a move might seem puzzling: Syria, with dozens of religious sects and a nominally secular government, has managed for decades to use a light touch, at least when it comes to personal faith.
But the rise of religion among the population has shaken the leadership: with overt displays of faith on the rise and a rare terrorist attack in Damascus two years ago attributed to Islamists, the government appears to be moving against hardline religious ideas.
The niqab ban in public schools is a fairly blunt instrument but, on such a small scale, it may be intended to send a message. Egypt, too, has instigated a similarly limited ban (for university exams), a move opposed by Islamists but upheld by the courts.
Continue reading Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself
Source: The Guardian
Quietly, away from the fanfare that accompanied the French vote on banning the niqab in public, and calls by Philip Hollobone to impose a ban in Britain, the Syrian government has instituted its own, more limited, ban, removing teachers who wear the full face veil from teaching in public schools.
At first glance, such a move might seem puzzling: Syria, with dozens of religious sects and a nominally secular government, has managed for decades to use a light touch, at least when it comes to personal faith.
But the rise of religion among the population has shaken the leadership: with overt displays of faith on the rise and a rare terrorist attack in Damascus two years ago attributed to Islamists, the government appears to be moving against hardline religious ideas.
The niqab ban in public schools is a fairly blunt instrument but, on such a small scale, it may be intended to send a message. Egypt, too, has instigated a similarly limited ban (for university exams), a move opposed by Islamists but upheld by the courts.
Continue reading Syria's niqab ban is part of a clash within Islam itself
Source: The Guardian
Sunday, 23 May 2010
T E Lawrence: hero or mirage?
The legacy of T E Lawrence, the British intelligence officer who fought alongside Arab irregulars and was immortalised in David Lean’s film, varies markedly between the West and the Middle East. Alasdair Soussi looks at the man and myth, 75 years after his death.
The arrival of the British-led Imperial Camel Corps into the Arab camp at Aqaba was always likely to cause friction. Despite fighting as allies against the might of the Ottoman Empire in the 1916-18 Arab campaign to drive the Turks out of the Middle East, the British troopers and the Arab irregulars never made comfortable bedfellows. This particular summer’s day in 1918, at the closing stages of the Great War, was to be no different.
The army encampment, in what is today Jordan’s southernmost city, reverberated to the sound of excited cries and musket fire as the 314-strong imperial troops galloped into town. Such was the greeting afforded them by the Arabs that many in the Camel Corps thought Aqaba itself was under attack.
By nightfall, tensions had reached breaking point. Unfamiliar with the ways of the Arab camp and convinced they had been shot at while bathing in the sea earlier that day, several troopers were about to take matters into their own hands with the aid of a few grenades when a figure in white appeared.
“He stood in the middle of the square, flung back his aba, showing his white undergarment, and illuminated by the countless fires, raised his hand,” one soldier recalled. “Immediately the firing ceased, the hubbub died down and we had a peaceful night.”
That figure was Thomas Edward Lawrence. T E Lawrence, who died 75 years ago this week, and who was pivotal in the success of the Arab revolt against the Turks, was the man the world would come to know as Lawrence of Arabia, and that anecdote – almost mythical in tone, yet a documented fact – is one of hundreds that have surrounded a life that continues to provoke the debate.
David Lean’s 1962 epic, starring Peter O’Toole, was based on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s memoir of the two-year campaign. The film was a global sensation, but it was not the first time that the Lawrence myth had captured the popular imagination.
Forty-three years earlier, Lowell Thomas, a US journalist, toured the world with a highly romanticised film about Lawrence shot in the desert towards the end of the war. With Allenby In Palestine And Lawrence In Arabia was an immediate hit, not least in Great Britain where Lawrence was born in 1888. Consequently, Lawrence’s role in the Arab uprising, his pursuit of victory against the Ottomans, and his complete immersion in the Arab way of life as a British intelligence officer, all contrived to create a man more otherworldly than simply flesh and bone. Michael Asher, the English-born explorer and Arabist, and author of Lawrence: The Uncrowned King Of Arabia, is one of many who readily subscribes to this view.
“When I went to Lawrence’s cottage – now a museum – at Clouds Hill in Dorset [south-west England], it felt like a church. I realised that he was seen in Britain as a secular saint. If you think about it, Lawrence was really the only ‘hero’ to emerge from the First World War, a war in which millions died – he was the man who seemed to resurrect in his person the lost dead boys of a whole generation.”
Here, in the Middle East, the arena in which Lawrence gained his reputation, there are no such memorials.
So what is his legacy in this part of the world? Like many things concerning Lawrence, the answer is far from simple.
At only 1.65m tall and with a head that looked too big for his body, this shy Welsh-born son of an Anglo-Irish father and a Scottish mother was an unremarkable-looking man. Yet, he possessed a mind that was quite brilliant. After gaining a first-class degree in modern history from Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence became an archaeologist, and travelled across the Middle East honing his knowledge of its geography and language, both of which he would come to master.
At the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the British intelligence service in Cairo and soon became involved in negotiations to orchestrate an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which was sealed when Britain all but promised the Arabs a single unified nation should they triumph. But, while the revolt would be a major success, the European powers went back on their word. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret pact cooked up by Britain and France in 1916, carved up the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence in a post-Ottoman world, a betrayal that put paid to any Arab hopes of freedom.
Continue reading T E Lawrence: hero or mirage? Source: The National, Abu Dhabi
The arrival of the British-led Imperial Camel Corps into the Arab camp at Aqaba was always likely to cause friction. Despite fighting as allies against the might of the Ottoman Empire in the 1916-18 Arab campaign to drive the Turks out of the Middle East, the British troopers and the Arab irregulars never made comfortable bedfellows. This particular summer’s day in 1918, at the closing stages of the Great War, was to be no different.
The army encampment, in what is today Jordan’s southernmost city, reverberated to the sound of excited cries and musket fire as the 314-strong imperial troops galloped into town. Such was the greeting afforded them by the Arabs that many in the Camel Corps thought Aqaba itself was under attack.
By nightfall, tensions had reached breaking point. Unfamiliar with the ways of the Arab camp and convinced they had been shot at while bathing in the sea earlier that day, several troopers were about to take matters into their own hands with the aid of a few grenades when a figure in white appeared.
“He stood in the middle of the square, flung back his aba, showing his white undergarment, and illuminated by the countless fires, raised his hand,” one soldier recalled. “Immediately the firing ceased, the hubbub died down and we had a peaceful night.”
That figure was Thomas Edward Lawrence. T E Lawrence, who died 75 years ago this week, and who was pivotal in the success of the Arab revolt against the Turks, was the man the world would come to know as Lawrence of Arabia, and that anecdote – almost mythical in tone, yet a documented fact – is one of hundreds that have surrounded a life that continues to provoke the debate.
David Lean’s 1962 epic, starring Peter O’Toole, was based on Seven Pillars of Wisdom, Lawrence’s memoir of the two-year campaign. The film was a global sensation, but it was not the first time that the Lawrence myth had captured the popular imagination.
Forty-three years earlier, Lowell Thomas, a US journalist, toured the world with a highly romanticised film about Lawrence shot in the desert towards the end of the war. With Allenby In Palestine And Lawrence In Arabia was an immediate hit, not least in Great Britain where Lawrence was born in 1888. Consequently, Lawrence’s role in the Arab uprising, his pursuit of victory against the Ottomans, and his complete immersion in the Arab way of life as a British intelligence officer, all contrived to create a man more otherworldly than simply flesh and bone. Michael Asher, the English-born explorer and Arabist, and author of Lawrence: The Uncrowned King Of Arabia, is one of many who readily subscribes to this view.
“When I went to Lawrence’s cottage – now a museum – at Clouds Hill in Dorset [south-west England], it felt like a church. I realised that he was seen in Britain as a secular saint. If you think about it, Lawrence was really the only ‘hero’ to emerge from the First World War, a war in which millions died – he was the man who seemed to resurrect in his person the lost dead boys of a whole generation.”
Here, in the Middle East, the arena in which Lawrence gained his reputation, there are no such memorials.
So what is his legacy in this part of the world? Like many things concerning Lawrence, the answer is far from simple.
At only 1.65m tall and with a head that looked too big for his body, this shy Welsh-born son of an Anglo-Irish father and a Scottish mother was an unremarkable-looking man. Yet, he possessed a mind that was quite brilliant. After gaining a first-class degree in modern history from Jesus College, Oxford, Lawrence became an archaeologist, and travelled across the Middle East honing his knowledge of its geography and language, both of which he would come to master.
At the outbreak of the First World War, he joined the British intelligence service in Cairo and soon became involved in negotiations to orchestrate an Arab revolt against the Ottoman Empire, which was sealed when Britain all but promised the Arabs a single unified nation should they triumph. But, while the revolt would be a major success, the European powers went back on their word. The Sykes-Picot Agreement, a secret pact cooked up by Britain and France in 1916, carved up the Middle East into colonial spheres of influence in a post-Ottoman world, a betrayal that put paid to any Arab hopes of freedom.
Continue reading T E Lawrence: hero or mirage? Source: The National, Abu Dhabi
Tuesday, 16 March 2010
An appetite for Aleppo
At an indeterminate point in Aleppo’s main market street, the Souq al-Attarine, but most likely somewhere between observing a pair of goat testicles dangling off a skinned carcass, and running into a bloody, matted camel head hanging on a large metal hook, I lose my appetite. This is a shame, because we are due to lunch at Bazar al-Charq, a restaurant known for its myriad preparations of the ground-meat dish kibbeh, itself an Aleppan speciality.
I’m trailing Anissa Helou, the London-based, Syrian-Lebanese cookbook author and docent of delicacies, on a culinary tour through Syria.
A tall, elegant woman with an attention-grabbing puff of silvery hair (small children compare her, sotto voce, to Cruella de Vil), Helou gives regular cooking classes in London and, once or twice a year, steers small groups of hungry travellers to the region’s gastronomic epicentres – Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, Istanbul and Gaziantep in Turkey – where they eat themselves to a standstill.
On this trip, the occasional cultural interludes, such as excursions to the Roman ruins of Palmyra and the Crusader castle of Krak de Chevaliers, feel like flickering film static interrupting a week-long highlight reel of Syrian cookery.
Syria has become a relatively popular tourist destination in the past five years, and not only for backpackers bouncing around the region on falafel-fuelled gap years.
A mandatory pit stop on both the Silk and the Spice Roads for hundreds of years, Aleppo’s residents (both welcome and unwelcome) have included Turkomen, French, Greeks, Indians, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Ottomans, Armenians and Kurds, all of whom bequeathed at least a trace of their cookery to the city.
Damascus, the capital, has many lovely courtyard restaurants, but it is best known for its spectacular variety of street food.
Aleppo, on the other hand, has evolved a tradition of more elegant, elaborate dining. Pierre Antaki, the co-founder and vice president of the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy, attributes this to economic factors: most Aleppans still go home for lunch, snooze a bit, then work again until evening, whereas Damascenes often work far from their homes and eat a quick bite in or near their shops or offices before finishing the day’s work.
“In Damascus, hardly anybody goes home for lunch,” says Pierre. “They work one shift, and live far outside of the city. Here, if the big fat boss doesn’t go home and eat and have his siesta, it’s not a day.”
Aleppo in particular is known for the quality of its raw ingredients; despite a brutal drought in the north-east of the country (and in neighbouring Jordan), the land surrounding the city is, and always has been, rich and green. The famous Aleppan pistachio, fistik halabi, for example, wears many hats in the local cuisine, appearing in both sweets and savouries.
We arrived just as the season kicked off, early October, and it’s difficult to turn a corner without encountering a mountain of fresh, unpeeled nuts, looking rather majestic for something the size of a nut, in their matte magenta robes.
The lush environs also nourish those higher up on the food chain; lambs are usually fed on an all-grass diet, resulting in top-quality meat that, know-how aside, sets Aleppo’s kibbeh apart. Florence Ollivry, the author of Les Secrets d’Alep: Une grande ville arabe révelée par sa cuisine, counts 58 different preparations, sculpted into various shapes, raw, baked, or fried, and served with everything from a simple drizzle of olive oil, a few mint leaves and a green onion to savoury yoghurt or tomato sauces.
At Bazar al-Charq, just outside of the old city in a 300-year-old building, we taste at least half-a-dozen of these. While two travellers recline on cushions at an empty table, recuperating from the various stomach plagues that Syria visits upon foreigners, I try to banish the testicles and hanging camel head from my mind and focus on the kibbeh carnival unfolding before me.
Bazar al-Charq has been around since 2003 and, according to Anissa, is one of Aleppo’s most underrated restaurants.
The setting – a large, basement room with vaulted stone ceilings – is slightly heavy on the Orientalist kitsch, but the kibbeh are no joke. Among those we tried were a well-seasoned kibbeh sajiyyeh (cooked on the saj, or concave grill), which was relatively light (kibbeh is more frequently encountered fried), kibbeh bi-laban (fried balls swimming in yogurt sauce, with tender bits of lamb floating alongside), kibbeh with sumac and aubergine (in a sour, dark sauce whose colour contrasted with the light, lemoniness of the sumac) and the formidable kibbeh maajouqa, a kind of quesadilla that substitutes discs of greasy meat for tortillas, with a filling of cheese and red and green peppers.
If we put all the ground meat on our table together, we could probably have assembled a small lamb.
Several of the diners are avid home cooks. What makes a perfect kibbeh?, they want to know.
“The proportion of meat to bulgur is very important,” Anissa begins. “Heavier on the meat. It should be well-seasoned and fatty without being greasy. And it should be grilled or fried until it’s crispy.”
On our first evening, we ate at Yasmeen d’Alep, which opened in 1995 in the Christian-Armenian neighbourhood of Jdeideh. We sit down, a bit ragged after what seemed like endless hours on the bus from Damascus. And the mezze parade begins: eggplants stuffed with bulgur salad, nuts and potatoes, rice kibbeh, sausage casing stuffed with rice, ground meat and chickpeas, and several salads.
If you go
The flight Return flights to Damascus from Dubai on Emirates (www.emirates.com) cost from $325 (Dh1,195) including taxes
For more information on the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy and Pistache d’Alep, see www.gastrosyr.com and www.pistachedalep.com
Along with excellent grilled meats, Yasmine d’Alep serves a superb rendition of kebab kerez, or cherry kebab, lovely little balls of spiced, minced meat swimming merrily in a sauce of sour cherries, topped with toasted flatbread. According to Antaki, the sweet-and-sour combination (arguably a Persian influence) is in fact a Chinese contribution to Aleppan cuisine, although the dish is considered Armenian. In lesser hands, it can taste as though someone opened a can of cherry pie filling onto a plate of meatballs; here the chef shows admirable restraint in tempering the tartness of the cherries.
The newest and perhaps most successful restaurant in Aleppo is Zmorod. It opened around a year ago, and the owner, Dalal Touma, was dining at a table by the door when we walk in, and the large courtyard, warmed by golden-rose light, is filled with mostly Syrian patrons.
Anissa orders what sounded like two of everything on the menu, despite the fact that most of us were still wobbling from lunch. The service is excellent – Anissa barely glances at the menu, and instead embarks on a swift back-and-forth with the waiter in Arabic, who has a number of suggestions for what’s freshest and most interesting. The highlights include a cold dish of chicken morsels covered with the thickest, richest tahini sauce imaginable, tender fish with spicy tarator (a tahini sauce spiked with red pepper), and a grilled red pepper salad.
Through her cookbooks, such as Modern Mezze (Quadrille Publishing, 2007), her occasional columns in The Financial Times, and her blog (www.anissas.com) Helou does her bit to champion Syrian cuisine, which despite its similarity to Lebanese food, is considerably less well known. This is most likely, she thinks, because Syrians never experienced the famine and political turbulence that, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, drove so many Lebanese into the diaspora, where they had to eat, of course.
“You can eat the same dishes in Syria and in Lebanon but they’ll taste totally different,” Helou says. “Kebab in Syria is actually kafteh (ground meat balls) whereas kebabs in Lebanon really means lahmeh meshoui (grilled chunks of marinated meat.)
The Syrian fattouche is different in that the bread is fried and it often has cheese in it, and it is dressed with pomegranate syrup whereas in the Lebanese fattouche, the bread is normally toasted and the dressing is mostly sumac.”
The two cuisines share many similarities – a mezze tradition, kibbeh worship, an emphasis on the fresh and the seasonal – but Syrian food has its particular charms. It also comes with an edge of danger. Judging from the number of travellers who fell ill on the tour (five out of seven, or everyone except Anissa and me), Syrians’ enthusiasm for hygiene is nowhere near as rigorous as their devotion to flavour.
One place where we are assured a higher degree of protection was at the home of Maria Gaspard Smara, a successful caterer known for her sure hand with Aleppan specialities (she also contributed many recipes to Ollivry’s book). She welcomes us with bowls of rosy, fresh pistachios and proceeds to demonstrate a series of classic Aleppan dishes, including muhammara, a dip made of red pepper paste, walnuts and pomegranate syrup, and a delicious snack of deep-fried aubergine slices dipped in egg batter and deep-fried again.
“There are four seasons in Aleppo, and each has its own cuisine,” explains Smara. Late summer, for example, is stuffed vegetable season. “Also, Aleppan cooks don’t waste anything,” she says, illustrating her point by using the insides of hollowed-out courgettes (to be stuffed with a rice mixture) to make a garlicky dip.
The main dish, frikeh, or toasted green wheat and lamb, she cooks in a meat broth flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and pepper, topped with pistachios, almonds and pine nuts fried in semneh, or clarified butter, and served with a thick, plain yogurt. For dessert, it’s all we could do to find room for a couple of large, juicy figs.
On our last morning in Aleppo, Anissa took a few of us to Hajj Abdo, the city’s authority on beans. His beans – foul, or fava beans– simmer overnight in large copper vessels that appear to be as old as he is (66), and their hearty, faintly bitter smell hangs in the air around the corner shop he has been working in since he was 21. Having lived for a year in Egypt, I was traumatised by foul. Egyptians tend to turn it into something resembling mud, which, although I have not yet found an archaeologist to back me up on this, I believe it was used to bind the bricks of the Great Pyramids. But Anissa assured me this was something utterly different.
Eating under the scrutiny of a dozen pairs of eyes can be faintly uncomfortable for women travellers, but these beans demand to be savoured. There is one major choice to be made: shall it be with tahini or lemon? After this hurdle, everything else – chilli paste, garlic, salt, cumin, olive oil – is a matter of degree. Anissa and I prefer the tahini version, which has a certain unctuousness amplified by a ladleful (yes) of oil on top, and she goes for extra chilli, while I enjoy a spoonful of cumin.
The Aleppan leg of the tour wound down at an old favourite, Wanes, a modern-looking, rather characterless, and staunchly local eatery that has been open since 1977.
“My mother and I used to come here in the 1980s for their grills,” Anissa tells us as we sit down. After a morning of foul, we were too full for grilled meat, but Anissa orders an abundant spread nonetheless. (It is customary – and Anissa never strays from this custom – to order enough mezze so as to eliminate any negative space on the tablecloth).
The standouts are the jibneh kurdiyyeh (Kurdish cheese), a salty white cheese between two pieces of flat bread, with small but potent minced hot green chillies and slices of tomato, all pan-fried like a quesadilla, and the basterma, an Armenian speciality of spiced, pressed dried meat often served with thin slices of raw garlic and eaten drizzled with olive oil and freshly cured green olives on the side. For dessert, I hand out some plump, sweet figs I had picked up in the giant market outside the old city, and the group piles back into the bus to head to Palmyra.
If there was anything fabulous left to eat in Aleppo, it would have to wait until the next trip.
travel@thenational.ae
Source: The National: An appetite for Aleppo
I’m trailing Anissa Helou, the London-based, Syrian-Lebanese cookbook author and docent of delicacies, on a culinary tour through Syria.
A tall, elegant woman with an attention-grabbing puff of silvery hair (small children compare her, sotto voce, to Cruella de Vil), Helou gives regular cooking classes in London and, once or twice a year, steers small groups of hungry travellers to the region’s gastronomic epicentres – Damascus and Aleppo in Syria, Istanbul and Gaziantep in Turkey – where they eat themselves to a standstill.
On this trip, the occasional cultural interludes, such as excursions to the Roman ruins of Palmyra and the Crusader castle of Krak de Chevaliers, feel like flickering film static interrupting a week-long highlight reel of Syrian cookery.
Syria has become a relatively popular tourist destination in the past five years, and not only for backpackers bouncing around the region on falafel-fuelled gap years.
A mandatory pit stop on both the Silk and the Spice Roads for hundreds of years, Aleppo’s residents (both welcome and unwelcome) have included Turkomen, French, Greeks, Indians, Italians, Chinese, Jews, Ottomans, Armenians and Kurds, all of whom bequeathed at least a trace of their cookery to the city.
Damascus, the capital, has many lovely courtyard restaurants, but it is best known for its spectacular variety of street food.
Aleppo, on the other hand, has evolved a tradition of more elegant, elaborate dining. Pierre Antaki, the co-founder and vice president of the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy, attributes this to economic factors: most Aleppans still go home for lunch, snooze a bit, then work again until evening, whereas Damascenes often work far from their homes and eat a quick bite in or near their shops or offices before finishing the day’s work.
“In Damascus, hardly anybody goes home for lunch,” says Pierre. “They work one shift, and live far outside of the city. Here, if the big fat boss doesn’t go home and eat and have his siesta, it’s not a day.”
Aleppo in particular is known for the quality of its raw ingredients; despite a brutal drought in the north-east of the country (and in neighbouring Jordan), the land surrounding the city is, and always has been, rich and green. The famous Aleppan pistachio, fistik halabi, for example, wears many hats in the local cuisine, appearing in both sweets and savouries.
We arrived just as the season kicked off, early October, and it’s difficult to turn a corner without encountering a mountain of fresh, unpeeled nuts, looking rather majestic for something the size of a nut, in their matte magenta robes.
The lush environs also nourish those higher up on the food chain; lambs are usually fed on an all-grass diet, resulting in top-quality meat that, know-how aside, sets Aleppo’s kibbeh apart. Florence Ollivry, the author of Les Secrets d’Alep: Une grande ville arabe révelée par sa cuisine, counts 58 different preparations, sculpted into various shapes, raw, baked, or fried, and served with everything from a simple drizzle of olive oil, a few mint leaves and a green onion to savoury yoghurt or tomato sauces.
At Bazar al-Charq, just outside of the old city in a 300-year-old building, we taste at least half-a-dozen of these. While two travellers recline on cushions at an empty table, recuperating from the various stomach plagues that Syria visits upon foreigners, I try to banish the testicles and hanging camel head from my mind and focus on the kibbeh carnival unfolding before me.
Bazar al-Charq has been around since 2003 and, according to Anissa, is one of Aleppo’s most underrated restaurants.
The setting – a large, basement room with vaulted stone ceilings – is slightly heavy on the Orientalist kitsch, but the kibbeh are no joke. Among those we tried were a well-seasoned kibbeh sajiyyeh (cooked on the saj, or concave grill), which was relatively light (kibbeh is more frequently encountered fried), kibbeh bi-laban (fried balls swimming in yogurt sauce, with tender bits of lamb floating alongside), kibbeh with sumac and aubergine (in a sour, dark sauce whose colour contrasted with the light, lemoniness of the sumac) and the formidable kibbeh maajouqa, a kind of quesadilla that substitutes discs of greasy meat for tortillas, with a filling of cheese and red and green peppers.
If we put all the ground meat on our table together, we could probably have assembled a small lamb.
Several of the diners are avid home cooks. What makes a perfect kibbeh?, they want to know.
“The proportion of meat to bulgur is very important,” Anissa begins. “Heavier on the meat. It should be well-seasoned and fatty without being greasy. And it should be grilled or fried until it’s crispy.”
On our first evening, we ate at Yasmeen d’Alep, which opened in 1995 in the Christian-Armenian neighbourhood of Jdeideh. We sit down, a bit ragged after what seemed like endless hours on the bus from Damascus. And the mezze parade begins: eggplants stuffed with bulgur salad, nuts and potatoes, rice kibbeh, sausage casing stuffed with rice, ground meat and chickpeas, and several salads.
If you go
The flight Return flights to Damascus from Dubai on Emirates (www.emirates.com) cost from $325 (Dh1,195) including taxes
For more information on the Syrian Academy of Gastronomy and Pistache d’Alep, see www.gastrosyr.com and www.pistachedalep.com
Along with excellent grilled meats, Yasmine d’Alep serves a superb rendition of kebab kerez, or cherry kebab, lovely little balls of spiced, minced meat swimming merrily in a sauce of sour cherries, topped with toasted flatbread. According to Antaki, the sweet-and-sour combination (arguably a Persian influence) is in fact a Chinese contribution to Aleppan cuisine, although the dish is considered Armenian. In lesser hands, it can taste as though someone opened a can of cherry pie filling onto a plate of meatballs; here the chef shows admirable restraint in tempering the tartness of the cherries.
The newest and perhaps most successful restaurant in Aleppo is Zmorod. It opened around a year ago, and the owner, Dalal Touma, was dining at a table by the door when we walk in, and the large courtyard, warmed by golden-rose light, is filled with mostly Syrian patrons.
Anissa orders what sounded like two of everything on the menu, despite the fact that most of us were still wobbling from lunch. The service is excellent – Anissa barely glances at the menu, and instead embarks on a swift back-and-forth with the waiter in Arabic, who has a number of suggestions for what’s freshest and most interesting. The highlights include a cold dish of chicken morsels covered with the thickest, richest tahini sauce imaginable, tender fish with spicy tarator (a tahini sauce spiked with red pepper), and a grilled red pepper salad.
Through her cookbooks, such as Modern Mezze (Quadrille Publishing, 2007), her occasional columns in The Financial Times, and her blog (www.anissas.com) Helou does her bit to champion Syrian cuisine, which despite its similarity to Lebanese food, is considerably less well known. This is most likely, she thinks, because Syrians never experienced the famine and political turbulence that, throughout the 19th and 20th centuries, drove so many Lebanese into the diaspora, where they had to eat, of course.
“You can eat the same dishes in Syria and in Lebanon but they’ll taste totally different,” Helou says. “Kebab in Syria is actually kafteh (ground meat balls) whereas kebabs in Lebanon really means lahmeh meshoui (grilled chunks of marinated meat.)
The Syrian fattouche is different in that the bread is fried and it often has cheese in it, and it is dressed with pomegranate syrup whereas in the Lebanese fattouche, the bread is normally toasted and the dressing is mostly sumac.”
The two cuisines share many similarities – a mezze tradition, kibbeh worship, an emphasis on the fresh and the seasonal – but Syrian food has its particular charms. It also comes with an edge of danger. Judging from the number of travellers who fell ill on the tour (five out of seven, or everyone except Anissa and me), Syrians’ enthusiasm for hygiene is nowhere near as rigorous as their devotion to flavour.
One place where we are assured a higher degree of protection was at the home of Maria Gaspard Smara, a successful caterer known for her sure hand with Aleppan specialities (she also contributed many recipes to Ollivry’s book). She welcomes us with bowls of rosy, fresh pistachios and proceeds to demonstrate a series of classic Aleppan dishes, including muhammara, a dip made of red pepper paste, walnuts and pomegranate syrup, and a delicious snack of deep-fried aubergine slices dipped in egg batter and deep-fried again.
“There are four seasons in Aleppo, and each has its own cuisine,” explains Smara. Late summer, for example, is stuffed vegetable season. “Also, Aleppan cooks don’t waste anything,” she says, illustrating her point by using the insides of hollowed-out courgettes (to be stuffed with a rice mixture) to make a garlicky dip.
The main dish, frikeh, or toasted green wheat and lamb, she cooks in a meat broth flavoured with cardamom, cinnamon and pepper, topped with pistachios, almonds and pine nuts fried in semneh, or clarified butter, and served with a thick, plain yogurt. For dessert, it’s all we could do to find room for a couple of large, juicy figs.
On our last morning in Aleppo, Anissa took a few of us to Hajj Abdo, the city’s authority on beans. His beans – foul, or fava beans– simmer overnight in large copper vessels that appear to be as old as he is (66), and their hearty, faintly bitter smell hangs in the air around the corner shop he has been working in since he was 21. Having lived for a year in Egypt, I was traumatised by foul. Egyptians tend to turn it into something resembling mud, which, although I have not yet found an archaeologist to back me up on this, I believe it was used to bind the bricks of the Great Pyramids. But Anissa assured me this was something utterly different.
Eating under the scrutiny of a dozen pairs of eyes can be faintly uncomfortable for women travellers, but these beans demand to be savoured. There is one major choice to be made: shall it be with tahini or lemon? After this hurdle, everything else – chilli paste, garlic, salt, cumin, olive oil – is a matter of degree. Anissa and I prefer the tahini version, which has a certain unctuousness amplified by a ladleful (yes) of oil on top, and she goes for extra chilli, while I enjoy a spoonful of cumin.
The Aleppan leg of the tour wound down at an old favourite, Wanes, a modern-looking, rather characterless, and staunchly local eatery that has been open since 1977.
“My mother and I used to come here in the 1980s for their grills,” Anissa tells us as we sit down. After a morning of foul, we were too full for grilled meat, but Anissa orders an abundant spread nonetheless. (It is customary – and Anissa never strays from this custom – to order enough mezze so as to eliminate any negative space on the tablecloth).
The standouts are the jibneh kurdiyyeh (Kurdish cheese), a salty white cheese between two pieces of flat bread, with small but potent minced hot green chillies and slices of tomato, all pan-fried like a quesadilla, and the basterma, an Armenian speciality of spiced, pressed dried meat often served with thin slices of raw garlic and eaten drizzled with olive oil and freshly cured green olives on the side. For dessert, I hand out some plump, sweet figs I had picked up in the giant market outside the old city, and the group piles back into the bus to head to Palmyra.
If there was anything fabulous left to eat in Aleppo, it would have to wait until the next trip.
travel@thenational.ae
Source: The National: An appetite for Aleppo
Sunday, 24 January 2010
Is Syria ready to engage with NGOs?
By Lina Sinjab
BBC News, Damascus
A fruit juice seller reads a newspaper in Damascus. File photo
The concept of civil society is relatively new to Syria
Syria has sent a strong signal that it is ready to engage with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development organisations in order to promote a more active civil society in the country.
At this weekend's pioneering conference in Damascus which drew many international delegates, Syria's First Lady, Asma al-Assad, called on Syrian citizens to become more engaged in addressing the country's social and economic challenges.
"The government is partnering with these organisations [NGOs] … to try and develop the best development strategy for the country. It is part of a broader approach to development, clearly based on the idea that one party cannot do it alone," she told the BBC.
The concept of civil society is relatively new to Syria, where the government has long exerted tight controls over the involvement of NGOs in Syrian life.
The country has a small number of functioning NGOs in comparison to neighbouring nations: around 1,500 compared with 5,000 in Lebanon.
But their number is increasing, according to the Syrian government.
"This represents a political will. They wouldn't have increased, otherwise. They wouldn't have been involved or encouraged to be involved in sectors previously not encouraged," Mrs Assad says.
'Crucial role'
The keynote speaker at the conference, Lord Mark Malloch Brown, who is a senior advisor to the World Economic Forum, says that the region as a whole faces a "gathering storm" of societal problems, with poor economic growth, high unemployment, and low levels of education.
Asma al-Assad
"Civil society should be a partner to the state and indispensible part of the development process," he says.
In 2007 under the chairmanship of Mrs Assad, the Syria Trust for Development was established to work on rural development, female empowerment, and the promotion of Syrian culture.
The first lady believes that such organisations are playing a crucial role in areas that were previously perceived as the role of the government alone.
"Most importantly is the role these organisations are playing and the change they are influencing on the ground," Mrs Assad says.
'Real change'
Some are sceptical that the Syrian government will genuinely allow independent organisations to develop within the country.
Rami Khouri, director of Isam Fares Institute for Pulic Policy in Beirut and a delegate at the conference, said that that though the event was an important signal, only time would tell whether real change would happen.
"This is a moment where civil society and private sector have to challenge [the government] in a positive way to see how far the government is willing to open up the space."
And some local organisations still find it hard to operate in Syria.
Mayya Rahabi, co-founder of a committee to defend women's issues, says she doesn't believe there is real civil society in Syria.
"We applied for the registration three years ago and we haven't heard an answer," Mrs Rahabi says.
The Syrian government is working on new legislation that - it claims - will make it easier for people like Mrs Rahabi to operate.
"I am hoping that this conference and this new law will allow us to operate freely - that real change will come, not just words," Mrs Rahabi says.
Source BBC: Is Syria ready to engage with NGOs?
BBC News, Damascus
A fruit juice seller reads a newspaper in Damascus. File photo
The concept of civil society is relatively new to Syria
Syria has sent a strong signal that it is ready to engage with non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and development organisations in order to promote a more active civil society in the country.
At this weekend's pioneering conference in Damascus which drew many international delegates, Syria's First Lady, Asma al-Assad, called on Syrian citizens to become more engaged in addressing the country's social and economic challenges.
"The government is partnering with these organisations [NGOs] … to try and develop the best development strategy for the country. It is part of a broader approach to development, clearly based on the idea that one party cannot do it alone," she told the BBC.
The concept of civil society is relatively new to Syria, where the government has long exerted tight controls over the involvement of NGOs in Syrian life.
The country has a small number of functioning NGOs in comparison to neighbouring nations: around 1,500 compared with 5,000 in Lebanon.
But their number is increasing, according to the Syrian government.
"This represents a political will. They wouldn't have increased, otherwise. They wouldn't have been involved or encouraged to be involved in sectors previously not encouraged," Mrs Assad says.
'Crucial role'
The keynote speaker at the conference, Lord Mark Malloch Brown, who is a senior advisor to the World Economic Forum, says that the region as a whole faces a "gathering storm" of societal problems, with poor economic growth, high unemployment, and low levels of education.
Asma al-Assad
"Civil society should be a partner to the state and indispensible part of the development process," he says.
In 2007 under the chairmanship of Mrs Assad, the Syria Trust for Development was established to work on rural development, female empowerment, and the promotion of Syrian culture.
The first lady believes that such organisations are playing a crucial role in areas that were previously perceived as the role of the government alone.
"Most importantly is the role these organisations are playing and the change they are influencing on the ground," Mrs Assad says.
'Real change'
Some are sceptical that the Syrian government will genuinely allow independent organisations to develop within the country.
Rami Khouri, director of Isam Fares Institute for Pulic Policy in Beirut and a delegate at the conference, said that that though the event was an important signal, only time would tell whether real change would happen.
"This is a moment where civil society and private sector have to challenge [the government] in a positive way to see how far the government is willing to open up the space."
And some local organisations still find it hard to operate in Syria.
Mayya Rahabi, co-founder of a committee to defend women's issues, says she doesn't believe there is real civil society in Syria.
"We applied for the registration three years ago and we haven't heard an answer," Mrs Rahabi says.
The Syrian government is working on new legislation that - it claims - will make it easier for people like Mrs Rahabi to operate.
"I am hoping that this conference and this new law will allow us to operate freely - that real change will come, not just words," Mrs Rahabi says.
Source BBC: Is Syria ready to engage with NGOs?
Thursday, 15 October 2009
Syria: Islam’s Most Important Library to Reopen in Aleppo
After decades of neglect, one of Islam’s most important libraries is about to reopen in Aleppo, offering scholars access to some 70,000 books and rare works of art, and shining a light on a centuries-old tradition of learning.
Aleppo, Syria’s second city, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, outdone only by Damascus. It has also been a centre of scholarship for millennia, especially for the three Abrahamic faiths.
Islamic scholarship, in particular, thrived there during the Middle Ages.
Aleppo survived the Crusades under the protection of the Muslim armies of the Turkish Zengid dynasty, prompting scholars to flock there, seeking refuge and contributing to the intellectual life of the city.
Among the most renowned scholars was the Iraqi-born 10th-century poet Abu Tayyib al Mutanabi, arguably the most profound poet in the Arabic language.
Another was the polymath philosopher Abu Nasr Mohammed al Farabi, known in Latin as Alpharabius, whose work was known to the philosophers of the Italian Renaissance.
It was not until the Mongols sacked Aleppo in the mid-13th century that it started losing its allure as a centre of learning. For the remaining centuries, scholarship would ebb and flow depending on the state of the Islamic world. Perhaps this may have created the environment in which, 80 years ago, one of Islam’s most important libraries withered away almost unnoticed, closing its doors when its last keeper died.
Ignored but not forgotten, the Waqf Library of Aleppo will reopen on November 22 thanks to a renewed commitment by the religious authorities to preserve Islamic heritage. Aleppo was voted the Arab Capital of Islamic Culture for 2006 by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
Covering 1,500 square metres, the library will house more than 70,000 books, many of them rare and hard to find, along with an electronic database that “has all the PDF documents of ancient Islamic books and manuscripts available today”, says Dr Mahmoud al Masri, who was chosen by the religious authorities to head the library restoration project in 2006. “We’re offering something that is not available elsewhere.”
Dr al Masri is a paediatrician, but also holds a doctorate in the history of science and medicine, as well as a masters degree in Sharia science.
“The library may not be that large,” he says, “but most of the books we have here cannot be found at any of the public libraries or the university libraries.”
The project is funded by Islamic endowments, or Waqf in Arabic. The collection includes ancient manuscripts and originals of rare books. Dr al Masri explains that because the library is so specialised, it will not be open to the public, only to students and researchers, though anyone who can show a link to research will be given access.
The Waqf Library is located under the Grand Mosque, in a space that operated as a car wash until the mid-Nineties, when a 10-year restoration project began on the mosque and its slightly leaning minaret. Crossing the outer courtyard of the mosque, visitors arrive at a small, elegant glasshouse. This is the part of the library that is open to the public, who can inspect the 100 or so books about Aleppo on display.
A staircase in the middle of the room leads down to the library proper. For the interior, Dr al Masri commissioned artisans to make furniture and archways. The chairs are made of carved wood with inlaid mother of pearl. The ceilings and doorways are decorated with carvings featuring Persian or Arabic designs, a specialty of Aleppo.
Continue reading-Source: Arab Detroit News: Syria: Islam’s Most Important Library to Reopen in Aleppo
Aleppo, Syria’s second city, is one of the oldest continuously inhabited cities in the world, outdone only by Damascus. It has also been a centre of scholarship for millennia, especially for the three Abrahamic faiths.
Islamic scholarship, in particular, thrived there during the Middle Ages.
Aleppo survived the Crusades under the protection of the Muslim armies of the Turkish Zengid dynasty, prompting scholars to flock there, seeking refuge and contributing to the intellectual life of the city.
Among the most renowned scholars was the Iraqi-born 10th-century poet Abu Tayyib al Mutanabi, arguably the most profound poet in the Arabic language.
Another was the polymath philosopher Abu Nasr Mohammed al Farabi, known in Latin as Alpharabius, whose work was known to the philosophers of the Italian Renaissance.
It was not until the Mongols sacked Aleppo in the mid-13th century that it started losing its allure as a centre of learning. For the remaining centuries, scholarship would ebb and flow depending on the state of the Islamic world. Perhaps this may have created the environment in which, 80 years ago, one of Islam’s most important libraries withered away almost unnoticed, closing its doors when its last keeper died.
Ignored but not forgotten, the Waqf Library of Aleppo will reopen on November 22 thanks to a renewed commitment by the religious authorities to preserve Islamic heritage. Aleppo was voted the Arab Capital of Islamic Culture for 2006 by the Organisation of the Islamic Conference.
Covering 1,500 square metres, the library will house more than 70,000 books, many of them rare and hard to find, along with an electronic database that “has all the PDF documents of ancient Islamic books and manuscripts available today”, says Dr Mahmoud al Masri, who was chosen by the religious authorities to head the library restoration project in 2006. “We’re offering something that is not available elsewhere.”
Dr al Masri is a paediatrician, but also holds a doctorate in the history of science and medicine, as well as a masters degree in Sharia science.
“The library may not be that large,” he says, “but most of the books we have here cannot be found at any of the public libraries or the university libraries.”
The project is funded by Islamic endowments, or Waqf in Arabic. The collection includes ancient manuscripts and originals of rare books. Dr al Masri explains that because the library is so specialised, it will not be open to the public, only to students and researchers, though anyone who can show a link to research will be given access.
The Waqf Library is located under the Grand Mosque, in a space that operated as a car wash until the mid-Nineties, when a 10-year restoration project began on the mosque and its slightly leaning minaret. Crossing the outer courtyard of the mosque, visitors arrive at a small, elegant glasshouse. This is the part of the library that is open to the public, who can inspect the 100 or so books about Aleppo on display.
A staircase in the middle of the room leads down to the library proper. For the interior, Dr al Masri commissioned artisans to make furniture and archways. The chairs are made of carved wood with inlaid mother of pearl. The ceilings and doorways are decorated with carvings featuring Persian or Arabic designs, a specialty of Aleppo.
Continue reading-Source: Arab Detroit News: Syria: Islam’s Most Important Library to Reopen in Aleppo
Friday, 25 September 2009
How Creativity Blossoms in a Rigid Regime
In Syria, the secret police is as omnipresent as traffic wardens are in the West. Every movement and every word are registered. Yet some writers see this as a creative challenge rather than a nuisance. They use their wit, humour and imagination to offer the world an insight into a society that at first glance seems closed off. Susanne Schanda reports
It is one of those days. The narrator Fathi Schin doesn't even want to get out of bed. The heat in his room is oppressive and he can hear the obtrusive noise of a major organised demonstration with chanting demonstrators and marching music through his closed window.
Nihad Siris's novel, which was published last year in Germany with the title Ali Hassans Intrige (Ali Hassan's Intrigue), is a dark, bitter satire about the leadership cult in an Arab dictatorship. It tells of a day in the life of Fathi Schin, a melancholy author who has been forbidden to write. The day in question is the twentieth anniversary of the day the "Great Leader" came to power.
The streets of the city are blocked by a sweating, slow-moving river of people; every second person holds aloft a placard bearing the image of the leader; people with megaphones bellow out cues that are answered by idiotic rhyming declarations of love and devotion to the leader chanted by a chorus of voices: "Two, four, six, eight … leader, you are truly great!"
Source: Qantara, How Creativity Blossoms in a Rigid Regime
It is one of those days. The narrator Fathi Schin doesn't even want to get out of bed. The heat in his room is oppressive and he can hear the obtrusive noise of a major organised demonstration with chanting demonstrators and marching music through his closed window.
Nihad Siris's novel, which was published last year in Germany with the title Ali Hassans Intrige (Ali Hassan's Intrigue), is a dark, bitter satire about the leadership cult in an Arab dictatorship. It tells of a day in the life of Fathi Schin, a melancholy author who has been forbidden to write. The day in question is the twentieth anniversary of the day the "Great Leader" came to power.
The streets of the city are blocked by a sweating, slow-moving river of people; every second person holds aloft a placard bearing the image of the leader; people with megaphones bellow out cues that are answered by idiotic rhyming declarations of love and devotion to the leader chanted by a chorus of voices: "Two, four, six, eight … leader, you are truly great!"
Source: Qantara, How Creativity Blossoms in a Rigid Regime
Monday, 21 September 2009
Border not a barrier into Iraq
NINEWAH PROVINCE // Efforts to control Iraq’s border with Syria are being undermined by a shortage of manpower and money as well as police collaboration with insurgents, according to officers in the Iraqi security forces.
A critical 400km section of the desert frontier in Ninewah province, northern Iraq, near Mosul, is currently being guarded by a 3,600-man detachment of the Iraqi Border Patrol (IBP). Despite long-running concerns about Islamic militants crossing into Iraq and an ongoing diplomatic crisis between Baghdad and Damascus over claims of Syrian support for insurgents, Iraqi commanders in the area say they remain significantly under resourced.
“We have a shortage of soldiers in the border patrol. We need an extra 700 to 1,000 to be able to do our job properly and they probably need better pay. At the moment a basic border patrol officer earns about US$420 [Dh1,500] a month. It’s not enough,” said Lt Col Rashid Hassan al Raskani, a battalion commander in the IBP in Ninewah.
Corruption is rife in Iraq, with security officials complaining that insurgents routinely bribe their way through checkpoints or out of police custody. Low salaries are partly to blame and reduced Iraqi government budgets, a result of oil prices that have tumbled from just over US$145 (Dh533) a barrel last July to just under $70 now, have done nothing to help the situation.
Lt Col al Raskani, who has served on the Iraq-Syria frontier since 2004, said while the security situation had improved in recent years, foreign Islamic militants were still entering Iraq and carrying out high-casualty attacks.
“No border in the world is totally secure and Iraq’s border with Syria is no different,” he said in an interview. “Every day we conduct patrols and operations and we catch smugglers and terrorists.”
Source: The National, Border not a barrier into Iraq
A critical 400km section of the desert frontier in Ninewah province, northern Iraq, near Mosul, is currently being guarded by a 3,600-man detachment of the Iraqi Border Patrol (IBP). Despite long-running concerns about Islamic militants crossing into Iraq and an ongoing diplomatic crisis between Baghdad and Damascus over claims of Syrian support for insurgents, Iraqi commanders in the area say they remain significantly under resourced.
“We have a shortage of soldiers in the border patrol. We need an extra 700 to 1,000 to be able to do our job properly and they probably need better pay. At the moment a basic border patrol officer earns about US$420 [Dh1,500] a month. It’s not enough,” said Lt Col Rashid Hassan al Raskani, a battalion commander in the IBP in Ninewah.
Corruption is rife in Iraq, with security officials complaining that insurgents routinely bribe their way through checkpoints or out of police custody. Low salaries are partly to blame and reduced Iraqi government budgets, a result of oil prices that have tumbled from just over US$145 (Dh533) a barrel last July to just under $70 now, have done nothing to help the situation.
Lt Col al Raskani, who has served on the Iraq-Syria frontier since 2004, said while the security situation had improved in recent years, foreign Islamic militants were still entering Iraq and carrying out high-casualty attacks.
“No border in the world is totally secure and Iraq’s border with Syria is no different,” he said in an interview. “Every day we conduct patrols and operations and we catch smugglers and terrorists.”
Source: The National, Border not a barrier into Iraq
Sunday, 23 August 2009
Arabic and friendship studies in Syria
The Syrian capital, Damascus, is becoming a popular destination for foreigners who want to learn Arabic. The BBC's Paul Moss, who spent time there earlier this year, was inspired to study hard by his encounters with the city's people.
Alex sent a text message to say he had been bitten by a snake. Perhaps I was unfair, but I reckoned he was making it up.
Among the great pantheon of excuses people have made for missing an exam, "attack by snake" must rate as one of the more implausible.
But Alex had sent the text message to several of my classmates, asking them to inform the authorities at Damascus University.
He would be absent, he said, from the final test for "Arabic level one" as he was still recovering from the venomous injury.
I doubt whether Alex's story will put many people off coming here.
Studying Arabic in Damascus is increasingly popular.
For anyone wanting to learn the language the city has become a Mecca, if you will pardon a somewhat inappropriate metaphor.
Continue reading: BBC-Arabic and friendship studies in Syria
Alex sent a text message to say he had been bitten by a snake. Perhaps I was unfair, but I reckoned he was making it up.
Among the great pantheon of excuses people have made for missing an exam, "attack by snake" must rate as one of the more implausible.
But Alex had sent the text message to several of my classmates, asking them to inform the authorities at Damascus University.
He would be absent, he said, from the final test for "Arabic level one" as he was still recovering from the venomous injury.
I doubt whether Alex's story will put many people off coming here.
Studying Arabic in Damascus is increasingly popular.
For anyone wanting to learn the language the city has become a Mecca, if you will pardon a somewhat inappropriate metaphor.
Continue reading: BBC-Arabic and friendship studies in Syria
Monday, 13 July 2009
Were Syria’s conservatives just testing the water?
Most Syrians may never know that a controversial draft law, dubbed by its opponents the “Taliban initiative”, was rejected last week by the country’s parliament. Nor may they believe the level of controversy it created during the one month period after it was leaked to activists and a circle of Syrian intellectuals.
Though the chance of the draft ever becoming law may have been slim, the discussion it created provided a revealing look at the dance between ultra-conservative Islamists and their nemeses in Syria, which include secularists, the renewal movement known as Tajdeed – Islamists who aim to renew Sharia by going back to the essence of Islam – and a long list of minority groups who feel their rights would be jeopardised by an Islamic state. Whether the ultra conservatives were just testing the waters or whether they believed that their efforts would succeed is difficult to determine. What is certain is that the contents of their draft law would have sent Syria back centuries in time, and would have probably shocked most Syrians, especially women and minorities, if only they had known about it.
The draft law managed to circumvent all the usual channels that the public relies upon to remain informed of the latest legislation proposed in the government. Draft laws usually show up in the local press, generating reaction from readers, but in this case the press was banned from covering it. The Syrian parliament also posts draft laws on a website so affected parties have a chance to comment, but again, not in this case.
The reasons behind these cloak and dagger tactics were unclear. If it hadn’t been for a leak in early June, not even the activists would have learnt of it.
Even more mysterious, the law was the product of a secret committee commissioned by the head of parliament, the Syrian prime minister Naji al Otri. The committee worked on the draft for two years, and until now the names of the committee members could only be guessed at, except for one man, Hassan Awad, a professor at the Sharia law school in Damascus who came forward on public radio. Mr Awad is now in Sudan doing research, and he did not respond to repeated queries asking him to comment.
The draft law would have required women to travel only if accompanied by a mahram, a close male relative. A loophole in the draft law would have allowed a Christian man to take on a second wife and Christians would have discovered their right to divorce, despite any objections from their own church. As Father Antone Musleh, a patriarch of the Orthodox Church, put it: “The draft law dares to infringe on marriage within Christianity, which to the Church is a sacrament. It’s a Divine hand that plays into the life of humans, and the Church is the first and last party responsible for interpreting this for its flock.”
The draft law provided that a girl as young as 13 could take her parents to court and make the judge pressure them to allow her to marry.
A complete stranger could sue the couple next door if he thought one of them had become an apostate, which is enough reason to annul their marriage before a Sharia court.
“This is the most dangerous part of the draft law, the introduction of apostasy legal code,” said Dr Mohammed Habash, a parliamentarian and Islamic scholar and one of the leading figures of the renewal movement in Syria.
Apostasy laws were used for decades during Islam’s beginnings, usually with the purpose of punishing men who defected from a Muslim army to join the enemy’s lines at a time of war. But used in the context of the draft law’s proposal, Dr Habash explained, apostasy laws “undermine the family, which is the essence of society’s fabric”.
This law, known also as hasba, was used infamously in Egypt in 2001 by Islamists who tried to annul the marriage of Nawal al Saadawi, a feminist author, after deeming her an apostate for her writings. An Egyptian emergency court overturned the verdict after an international outcry.
Perhaps most absurdly, the “Taliban initiative” would have technically prohibited the legal marriage of any apostate, even to another non-believer.
The Syrian foreign minister Walid al Muallem told me during an outing with his family: “The president has already said he will not sanction it. It’s already dead in the water.”
But in the meantime, in true Syrian form, there were conflicting statements from the people’s assembly, who said that the draft law was thrown out, and the parliament, which insisted it was “still under review”.
Opponents breathed a sigh of relief when one week later parliament issued a statement saying it “rejected the contents of the draft law”, sending it back to the Ministry of Justice “to take a fresh look at the issue”.
But at least one activist thinks this development is a small victory for real reform in Syria. He has already pledged to keep “a very close eye on extremist views, and to publish them for everyone to know”. He is also launching an aggressive campaign to push for progressive reforms, such as ensuring better rights for divorced women, allowing all mothers to pass on to their children Syrian citizenship and to better address domestic violence and child abuse.
“Starting today, we will knock on the doors of official and non-official organisations, political and religious, everyone, and hold them responsible for all the issues that affect women and children in Syria,” he said.
“No more usual excuses like ‘this is because of cultural norms and traditions or class warfare’. And no more procrastinations like ‘it is not the right time or we have other, more pressing issues’.”
Though the chance of the draft ever becoming law may have been slim, the discussion it created provided a revealing look at the dance between ultra-conservative Islamists and their nemeses in Syria, which include secularists, the renewal movement known as Tajdeed – Islamists who aim to renew Sharia by going back to the essence of Islam – and a long list of minority groups who feel their rights would be jeopardised by an Islamic state. Whether the ultra conservatives were just testing the waters or whether they believed that their efforts would succeed is difficult to determine. What is certain is that the contents of their draft law would have sent Syria back centuries in time, and would have probably shocked most Syrians, especially women and minorities, if only they had known about it.
The draft law managed to circumvent all the usual channels that the public relies upon to remain informed of the latest legislation proposed in the government. Draft laws usually show up in the local press, generating reaction from readers, but in this case the press was banned from covering it. The Syrian parliament also posts draft laws on a website so affected parties have a chance to comment, but again, not in this case.
The reasons behind these cloak and dagger tactics were unclear. If it hadn’t been for a leak in early June, not even the activists would have learnt of it.
Even more mysterious, the law was the product of a secret committee commissioned by the head of parliament, the Syrian prime minister Naji al Otri. The committee worked on the draft for two years, and until now the names of the committee members could only be guessed at, except for one man, Hassan Awad, a professor at the Sharia law school in Damascus who came forward on public radio. Mr Awad is now in Sudan doing research, and he did not respond to repeated queries asking him to comment.
The draft law would have required women to travel only if accompanied by a mahram, a close male relative. A loophole in the draft law would have allowed a Christian man to take on a second wife and Christians would have discovered their right to divorce, despite any objections from their own church. As Father Antone Musleh, a patriarch of the Orthodox Church, put it: “The draft law dares to infringe on marriage within Christianity, which to the Church is a sacrament. It’s a Divine hand that plays into the life of humans, and the Church is the first and last party responsible for interpreting this for its flock.”
The draft law provided that a girl as young as 13 could take her parents to court and make the judge pressure them to allow her to marry.
A complete stranger could sue the couple next door if he thought one of them had become an apostate, which is enough reason to annul their marriage before a Sharia court.
“This is the most dangerous part of the draft law, the introduction of apostasy legal code,” said Dr Mohammed Habash, a parliamentarian and Islamic scholar and one of the leading figures of the renewal movement in Syria.
Apostasy laws were used for decades during Islam’s beginnings, usually with the purpose of punishing men who defected from a Muslim army to join the enemy’s lines at a time of war. But used in the context of the draft law’s proposal, Dr Habash explained, apostasy laws “undermine the family, which is the essence of society’s fabric”.
This law, known also as hasba, was used infamously in Egypt in 2001 by Islamists who tried to annul the marriage of Nawal al Saadawi, a feminist author, after deeming her an apostate for her writings. An Egyptian emergency court overturned the verdict after an international outcry.
Perhaps most absurdly, the “Taliban initiative” would have technically prohibited the legal marriage of any apostate, even to another non-believer.
The Syrian foreign minister Walid al Muallem told me during an outing with his family: “The president has already said he will not sanction it. It’s already dead in the water.”
But in the meantime, in true Syrian form, there were conflicting statements from the people’s assembly, who said that the draft law was thrown out, and the parliament, which insisted it was “still under review”.
Opponents breathed a sigh of relief when one week later parliament issued a statement saying it “rejected the contents of the draft law”, sending it back to the Ministry of Justice “to take a fresh look at the issue”.
But at least one activist thinks this development is a small victory for real reform in Syria. He has already pledged to keep “a very close eye on extremist views, and to publish them for everyone to know”. He is also launching an aggressive campaign to push for progressive reforms, such as ensuring better rights for divorced women, allowing all mothers to pass on to their children Syrian citizenship and to better address domestic violence and child abuse.
“Starting today, we will knock on the doors of official and non-official organisations, political and religious, everyone, and hold them responsible for all the issues that affect women and children in Syria,” he said.
“No more usual excuses like ‘this is because of cultural norms and traditions or class warfare’. And no more procrastinations like ‘it is not the right time or we have other, more pressing issues’.”
Sunday, 12 July 2009
Syria renaissance excludes human rights
In a quiet neighbourhood in the centre of Damascus Michel Kilo sits in his small flat sipping coffee as his wife shells beans for lunch.
Syrian sits in a cafe as US President Barack Obama speaks in cairo 04.06.09
Syrians talk openly about global and regional but not domestic politics
His TV is tuned to an Arabic news channel, his reading glasses sitting on his nose as he catches the latest developments from Tehran.
Weeks after finishing a three-year prison sentence, Mr Kilo dedicates his time to family life, while the enthusiasm that characterised his writing before his arrest is now directed solely at articles focusing on pan-Arab and regional issues, rather than local ones.
In 2006, Mr Kilo and 10 other activists were arrested after signing the Damascus-Beirut declaration.
The statement, backed by Lebanese and Syrian intellectuals, called for normalising bilateral relations after decades of Syrian domination of its smaller neighbour Lebanon.
International thaw
At the time, with Syria under severe international pressure, the authorities' tolerance of the move was very limited.
Damascus faced accusations of supporting insurgency in Iraq, and involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Dissident Syrian writer Michel Kilo
Mr Kilo was in prison for three years after signing the declaration
But today, the situation has changed. The country is no longer isolated by the West and key Western leaders have approached Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to help stabilise the region.
The country has attracted both foreign investment as well as tourism - signs it is beginning to come in from the cold.
But the authorities show no sign of relinquishing the tight control which the Baath Party has exerted since it took power in a 1963 coup and banned all opposition.
"The priority is not to have any opposition or independent voices and it is successful in oppressing this scene," says Yassin Haj Saleh, a writer and human rights activist.
Clampdown
A campaign of arrests has left an estimated 6,000 people in jail as political prisoners.
Meanwhile, about 400-450 people are subject to official travel bans, although the real number could be in the thousands, human rights groups say.
The measures are extended to young bloggers and some internet users, as well as civil society activists and some artists.
Civil society needs to be revived and reactivated and this is only in the hands of the authorities"
Mohannad al-Hassani
Lawyer and human rights activist
"There is a continuous deterioration in the human rights situation in Syria," says lawyer and head of Syrian Human Rights Organization Mohannad al-Hassani.
But the worst situation is suffered by the Islamists, according to Yassin Haj Saleh.
"There are many young people who are arrested for their Islamic affiliation, but they are not organised. They are mostly villagers and their families are being harassed and pressured," he says.
The crackdown has attracted little media attention, especially in suburbs and rural areas.
Last year, riots erupted in Sadnaya prison. A number of prisoners were reported killed. The government said then the prisoners were Islamists.
Human Rights Watch recently called on the Syrian government to provide information on the incident.
"The Syrian government should end the anguish of the prisoners' families, disclose the names of those injured or killed, and immediately grant them access to their loved ones," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
'Lack of vision'
There is no organised opposition in Syria, just individuals who oppose government policies.
And even these figures are fragmented and lack vision says Omar Amirallai, an intellectual and filmmaker.
"The opposition in Syria is in need of self-criticism, reform and reconciliation," he says.
But others believe that even with more vision and organisation, their efforts will come to nothing under current government restrictions.
The streets of Damascus have the feel of a relaxed and bustling city.
Around cafe and restaurant tables, discussions are heated about global and regional politics - but no one talks about the political situation in Syria.
Mohannad al-Hassani believes the country should embrace international and regional changes with its own progress on the level of civil and human rights.
"Civil society needs to be revived and reactivated and this is only in the hands of the authorities.
"They should look into these needs seriously as it is difficult for Syria to continue in isolation from what the whole world is moving towards."
Syrian sits in a cafe as US President Barack Obama speaks in cairo 04.06.09
Syrians talk openly about global and regional but not domestic politics
His TV is tuned to an Arabic news channel, his reading glasses sitting on his nose as he catches the latest developments from Tehran.
Weeks after finishing a three-year prison sentence, Mr Kilo dedicates his time to family life, while the enthusiasm that characterised his writing before his arrest is now directed solely at articles focusing on pan-Arab and regional issues, rather than local ones.
In 2006, Mr Kilo and 10 other activists were arrested after signing the Damascus-Beirut declaration.
The statement, backed by Lebanese and Syrian intellectuals, called for normalising bilateral relations after decades of Syrian domination of its smaller neighbour Lebanon.
International thaw
At the time, with Syria under severe international pressure, the authorities' tolerance of the move was very limited.
Damascus faced accusations of supporting insurgency in Iraq, and involvement in the assassination of former Lebanese Prime Minister Rafik Hariri.
Dissident Syrian writer Michel Kilo
Mr Kilo was in prison for three years after signing the declaration
But today, the situation has changed. The country is no longer isolated by the West and key Western leaders have approached Syrian President Bashar al-Assad to help stabilise the region.
The country has attracted both foreign investment as well as tourism - signs it is beginning to come in from the cold.
But the authorities show no sign of relinquishing the tight control which the Baath Party has exerted since it took power in a 1963 coup and banned all opposition.
"The priority is not to have any opposition or independent voices and it is successful in oppressing this scene," says Yassin Haj Saleh, a writer and human rights activist.
Clampdown
A campaign of arrests has left an estimated 6,000 people in jail as political prisoners.
Meanwhile, about 400-450 people are subject to official travel bans, although the real number could be in the thousands, human rights groups say.
The measures are extended to young bloggers and some internet users, as well as civil society activists and some artists.
Civil society needs to be revived and reactivated and this is only in the hands of the authorities"
Mohannad al-Hassani
Lawyer and human rights activist
"There is a continuous deterioration in the human rights situation in Syria," says lawyer and head of Syrian Human Rights Organization Mohannad al-Hassani.
But the worst situation is suffered by the Islamists, according to Yassin Haj Saleh.
"There are many young people who are arrested for their Islamic affiliation, but they are not organised. They are mostly villagers and their families are being harassed and pressured," he says.
The crackdown has attracted little media attention, especially in suburbs and rural areas.
Last year, riots erupted in Sadnaya prison. A number of prisoners were reported killed. The government said then the prisoners were Islamists.
Human Rights Watch recently called on the Syrian government to provide information on the incident.
"The Syrian government should end the anguish of the prisoners' families, disclose the names of those injured or killed, and immediately grant them access to their loved ones," said Sarah Leah Whitson, Middle East and North Africa director at Human Rights Watch.
'Lack of vision'
There is no organised opposition in Syria, just individuals who oppose government policies.
And even these figures are fragmented and lack vision says Omar Amirallai, an intellectual and filmmaker.
"The opposition in Syria is in need of self-criticism, reform and reconciliation," he says.
But others believe that even with more vision and organisation, their efforts will come to nothing under current government restrictions.
The streets of Damascus have the feel of a relaxed and bustling city.
Around cafe and restaurant tables, discussions are heated about global and regional politics - but no one talks about the political situation in Syria.
Mohannad al-Hassani believes the country should embrace international and regional changes with its own progress on the level of civil and human rights.
"Civil society needs to be revived and reactivated and this is only in the hands of the authorities.
"They should look into these needs seriously as it is difficult for Syria to continue in isolation from what the whole world is moving towards."
Thursday, 11 June 2009
Darkness and light
Syria, more than most, is a land of stories and storytellers. The farmers and shopkeepers describe early Islamic battles or episodes from the Crusades as if they'd attended them in person. A gathering of friends is quickly elevated into a group performance of jokes, laments, myths and conspiracies. Even Syrian surnames suggest stories: there are families called The-Milk's-Boiled, Sip-The-Yoghurt and Undone-Belt. "The deeper you swim into our stories," a village rhetorician once told me, "the more you understand that they have no floor."
Yet Syria is better known for its poets, and its TV dramas, than for its novelists. Egypt, with its unending metropolis, is the home of the Arabic novel, and Egypt produced the Arabs' master of fiction, Naguib Mahfouz. But a flame equally bright now burns from Damascus, via Germany, as shown by what may turn out to be the first Great Syrian Novel.
In The Dark Side of Love, Rafik Schami exploits all the resources of the classic realist novel and then goes a little further, forging a new form out of Syrian orality. His basic unit is not chapter or paragraph, but story; a thousand bejewelled anecdotes and tales are buried here, ready to spring, but each is melded with such dazzling surety into the whole that reading the book is always compulsive. In its final, self-exposing passage, Schami compares his method to mosaic work, in which every shiny object is a beauty in itself, yet which in combination, at a distance, reveals a still greater beauty. The novel is even Tolstoyan in its marrying of the personal, social and political spheres, of private with national life.
It starts with an unsolved murder. "Knowledge is a lock," says a policeman, "and the key to it is a question, but we're not allowed to ask questions in this country ... which is why there isn't a single good crime novel in Syria. Crime novels feed on questions."
Commissioner Barudi dares to ask. The answer is an epic of violent enmity between families, and between clashing ideas of love. The first idea is easily stated: "Love in Arabia depends more on what your identity card says than the feelings of your heart."
"Identity card" means religion and sect and, more fundamentally, the all-powerful clan - that haven of solidarity and comfort which "saved the Arabs from the desert, and at the same time enslaved them". In the mountain village of Mala, the Catholic Mushtaks and the Orthodox Shahins feud and kill for honour and revenge. In nearby Damascus, Farid Mushtak and Rana Shahin prefer the approach of Syria's greatest Sufi saint, Ibn Arabi, who cried: "Love is my religion!" As with Romeo and Juliet, or Layla and Majnun, Farid and Rana's romance shines secretly, ill-fatedly. It is a compelling and complete love story.
Schami's Mala is on a par with Márquez's Macondo for colour and resonance, although nothing more magical than real life happens here - only seductions and insanities, a visit by a dangerously drunk president, a peasant uprising, a bandit siege.
Damascus, "a lost luggage office" refined and trampled by 40 civilisations over 8,000 years, is experienced through its cafés, hammams and homes, its puppet shows, Eid festivals and hunger riots, via the underground press, a boxing match and a brothel. The canvas is vast and closely painted. It feels encyclopedic, in psychological observation as well as social breadth.
There are no faux-magical pyrotechnics in the telling, but richly detailed characters working through real situations, characters whose inherited wounds the reader comes to care deeply about. Each is vividly drawn, with quiet and acute intelligence. The patriarch George Mushtak is an elemental force; so, too, is his philandering, repenting son, Elias. Farid, who we know best of all, grows by enduring a tyrannical father, Israeli bombs and a "political" prison camp.
The Dark Side of Love is a fiction that accurately (if selectively) documents Syrian social history. Its sweep reaches from 1907 to 1970, through the French occupation, the chaotic coup years, the rise of the Ba'ath and the disastrous June war. Farid and Rana swim on the great currents of 20th-century Syrian thought - communism, feminism, nationalism, Islamism - and witness the poisoning of the waters. Farid's torture scenes are painfully, brilliantly narrated. Relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims, between the countryside and the city, between men and women, and between political factions, are explored with subtlety and honesty.
It is translated very well from the German, although annoying Germanic orthography remains - so that Yusuf is written "Jusuf" and the Damascus quarter Muhajireen becomes "Muhayirin". And perhaps a glossary of dictators' names would have been useful. Schami disguises the actual characters with names whose comic impact will be lost on those who don't speak Arabic: Abdul Nasser, for instance, is called Satlan, which means "stoned".
The weakest part of the book is its title. The Dark Side of Love illumines almost every side of love, as well as fear, longing, cruelty and lust. Darkness and light alternate like the basalt and marble stripes on Damascene walls, and the novel's structure is just as strong. A book like this requires a less limiting title. I suggest something as expansive, as comprehensive, as War and Peace.
• Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus is published by Penguin
Yet Syria is better known for its poets, and its TV dramas, than for its novelists. Egypt, with its unending metropolis, is the home of the Arabic novel, and Egypt produced the Arabs' master of fiction, Naguib Mahfouz. But a flame equally bright now burns from Damascus, via Germany, as shown by what may turn out to be the first Great Syrian Novel.
In The Dark Side of Love, Rafik Schami exploits all the resources of the classic realist novel and then goes a little further, forging a new form out of Syrian orality. His basic unit is not chapter or paragraph, but story; a thousand bejewelled anecdotes and tales are buried here, ready to spring, but each is melded with such dazzling surety into the whole that reading the book is always compulsive. In its final, self-exposing passage, Schami compares his method to mosaic work, in which every shiny object is a beauty in itself, yet which in combination, at a distance, reveals a still greater beauty. The novel is even Tolstoyan in its marrying of the personal, social and political spheres, of private with national life.
It starts with an unsolved murder. "Knowledge is a lock," says a policeman, "and the key to it is a question, but we're not allowed to ask questions in this country ... which is why there isn't a single good crime novel in Syria. Crime novels feed on questions."
Commissioner Barudi dares to ask. The answer is an epic of violent enmity between families, and between clashing ideas of love. The first idea is easily stated: "Love in Arabia depends more on what your identity card says than the feelings of your heart."
"Identity card" means religion and sect and, more fundamentally, the all-powerful clan - that haven of solidarity and comfort which "saved the Arabs from the desert, and at the same time enslaved them". In the mountain village of Mala, the Catholic Mushtaks and the Orthodox Shahins feud and kill for honour and revenge. In nearby Damascus, Farid Mushtak and Rana Shahin prefer the approach of Syria's greatest Sufi saint, Ibn Arabi, who cried: "Love is my religion!" As with Romeo and Juliet, or Layla and Majnun, Farid and Rana's romance shines secretly, ill-fatedly. It is a compelling and complete love story.
Schami's Mala is on a par with Márquez's Macondo for colour and resonance, although nothing more magical than real life happens here - only seductions and insanities, a visit by a dangerously drunk president, a peasant uprising, a bandit siege.
Damascus, "a lost luggage office" refined and trampled by 40 civilisations over 8,000 years, is experienced through its cafés, hammams and homes, its puppet shows, Eid festivals and hunger riots, via the underground press, a boxing match and a brothel. The canvas is vast and closely painted. It feels encyclopedic, in psychological observation as well as social breadth.
There are no faux-magical pyrotechnics in the telling, but richly detailed characters working through real situations, characters whose inherited wounds the reader comes to care deeply about. Each is vividly drawn, with quiet and acute intelligence. The patriarch George Mushtak is an elemental force; so, too, is his philandering, repenting son, Elias. Farid, who we know best of all, grows by enduring a tyrannical father, Israeli bombs and a "political" prison camp.
The Dark Side of Love is a fiction that accurately (if selectively) documents Syrian social history. Its sweep reaches from 1907 to 1970, through the French occupation, the chaotic coup years, the rise of the Ba'ath and the disastrous June war. Farid and Rana swim on the great currents of 20th-century Syrian thought - communism, feminism, nationalism, Islamism - and witness the poisoning of the waters. Farid's torture scenes are painfully, brilliantly narrated. Relations between Christians, Jews and Muslims, between the countryside and the city, between men and women, and between political factions, are explored with subtlety and honesty.
It is translated very well from the German, although annoying Germanic orthography remains - so that Yusuf is written "Jusuf" and the Damascus quarter Muhajireen becomes "Muhayirin". And perhaps a glossary of dictators' names would have been useful. Schami disguises the actual characters with names whose comic impact will be lost on those who don't speak Arabic: Abdul Nasser, for instance, is called Satlan, which means "stoned".
The weakest part of the book is its title. The Dark Side of Love illumines almost every side of love, as well as fear, longing, cruelty and lust. Darkness and light alternate like the basalt and marble stripes on Damascene walls, and the novel's structure is just as strong. A book like this requires a less limiting title. I suggest something as expansive, as comprehensive, as War and Peace.
• Robin Yassin-Kassab's The Road from Damascus is published by Penguin
Tuesday, 21 April 2009
Syrian opposition group collapses
DAMASCUS // The birth of the National Salvation Front (NSF) in the spring of 2006 prompted intense speculation that the Syrian opposition, for so long weak and divided, had unified and would launch a serious challenge to the leadership of Bashar Assad, the president.
Syria had just been forced to withdraw its army from Lebanon, a major setback for the regime, and was under intense pressure from the international community for reform. Abdelhalim Khaddam, the former vice president, had defected to Brussels and vowed to reveal many regime secrets and a political storm was brewing over Damascus.
In this turbulent atmosphere came the unlikely union between Mr Khaddam, a one-time regime stalwart, and Ali Sadreddin Bayanouni, the leader of the banned Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who lives in London, and a flurry of media reports on the newly formed government-in-exile that for the first time could really vie for power with the regime.
But when the NSF alliance collapsed this month, it caused hardly a murmur in Syrian circles.
According to opposition figures inside Syria, the NSF had long been irrelevant and was from the very start a fragile alliance.
Up until his resignation, Mr Khaddam was a senior figure in Mr Assad’s administration and had been a loyalist of the former president, Hafez al Assad, the same man who led a bloody operation against the Brotherhood during the 1980s. “It was always about opportunism and the National Salvation Front was always an illusion,” said Hassan Abdul Azeem, the head of the Democratic Arab Socialist Union and one of the founding members of the Damascus Declaration, a domestic opposition alliance from which it has now split.
The NSF and the Damascus Declaration never saw eye to eye because of Mr Khaddam’s involvement in the former. No domestic political opposition group could afford to associate with him for fear of censure, but more than that there was little interest among the opposition in aligning with a character they felt had no credibility.
“Khaddam believed the Syrian regime would be finished after pulling out of Lebanon and he thought that the NSF would form the new government. He and the Muslim Brotherhood were betting that foreign pressure and foreign forces were going to be about regime change in Syria as they had done in Iraq. They were wrong.”
One of the major criticisms of the NSF was that its main leaders were living overseas – Mr Bayanouni in London and Mr Khaddam in Brussels.
“We were always concerned that any Syrian opposition groups should be built from inside the country,” Mr Azeem said. “They need to be legitimate and close to the real situation, they need to understand conditions on the ground and they need to be independent of foreign interference.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Syria and membership is technically punishable by death. Nevertheless, it is thought to have some grassroots popularity and a natural constituency among Syria’s Sunni Arab majority. In teaming up with the former regime insider, the Brotherhood hoped to widen its appeal, both to Baath Party members inside Syria and foreign powers wary of Islamist politics but keen to see a new regime in Damascus.
In reality the alliance appears only to have stained the Muslim Brotherhood’s reputation; Mr Khaddam, long viewed inside Syria as a highly corrupt member of the old guard, is now widely regarded as a traitor after fleeing abroad and trying to overthrow the president.
Already cool relations between Mr Khaddam and Mr Bayanouni deteriorated rapidly after the January war in Gaza, during which the Brotherhood suspended its activities against the Syrian regime, which was supporting Hamas, effectively its arm in Palestine.
By that stage, the cracks had become impossible to avoid. There was already speculation the Brotherhood had entered into mediated talks with the Syrian authorities about lifting capital punishment for membership in the group and allowing exiles to return, though neither step has been taken.
“There is always speculation around such talks,” said Ammar Qurabi, the head of the National Organisation for Human Rights in Syria. “In reality the NSF was always weak and it has done nothing. The Muslim Brotherhood thought Khaddam would bring international contacts and regimists but that amounted to nothing.”
The dissolving of the NSF alliance, in which at least some opponents to the Syrian regime had placed their faith, has, however, given others a slim reason for hope. “This opens the door,” said Mr Azeem of the Arab Socialist Party.
“In the past some people were gambling on the Americans to come here and change the regime. The collapse of the NSF will encourage the domestic opposition to focus and to unify their efforts on bringing about change from the inside.”
He also said that the withdrawal of the Muslim Brotherhood from the NSF made it possible for the Islamic group to improve its ties with the domestic opposition. Although the Muslim Brotherhood endorsed the Damascus Declaration, a number of other signatories regarded its membership in the NSF as a de facto resignation.
“The Muslim Brotherhood had a history in the opposition and they have given their blood for that,” Mr Azeem said. “If Bayanouni asked to co-operate with my party I would welcome that, I would welcome co-ordination and dialogue.”
Herven Oce of the Kurdish Future Movement – which is outside of the Damascus Declaration – also saw possibilities in the NSF’s failure. “Maybe in [the] future this will help with the restructuring of the opposition,” she said. “There will be more clarity in the coming period.”
With the advent of the Obama administration and re-engagement between the United States, Europe and Syria, there are hopes that the tough stand on pro-democracy campaigners would be eased and political prisoners released. So far there have been no concrete steps in that direction, according to Mr Qurabi, who said the opposition’s weakness remained its principal characteristic.
“We can talk of the NSF split, but the Damascus Declaration is the same,” he said. “Some groups have split from it, the other leaders are in prison.
“At the moment, none of the opposition groups has any real influence … both inside and outside of Syria. At the moment the strongest thing [is] the security [services], the strongest thing is the regime.”
Syria had just been forced to withdraw its army from Lebanon, a major setback for the regime, and was under intense pressure from the international community for reform. Abdelhalim Khaddam, the former vice president, had defected to Brussels and vowed to reveal many regime secrets and a political storm was brewing over Damascus.
In this turbulent atmosphere came the unlikely union between Mr Khaddam, a one-time regime stalwart, and Ali Sadreddin Bayanouni, the leader of the banned Syrian Muslim Brotherhood who lives in London, and a flurry of media reports on the newly formed government-in-exile that for the first time could really vie for power with the regime.
But when the NSF alliance collapsed this month, it caused hardly a murmur in Syrian circles.
According to opposition figures inside Syria, the NSF had long been irrelevant and was from the very start a fragile alliance.
Up until his resignation, Mr Khaddam was a senior figure in Mr Assad’s administration and had been a loyalist of the former president, Hafez al Assad, the same man who led a bloody operation against the Brotherhood during the 1980s. “It was always about opportunism and the National Salvation Front was always an illusion,” said Hassan Abdul Azeem, the head of the Democratic Arab Socialist Union and one of the founding members of the Damascus Declaration, a domestic opposition alliance from which it has now split.
The NSF and the Damascus Declaration never saw eye to eye because of Mr Khaddam’s involvement in the former. No domestic political opposition group could afford to associate with him for fear of censure, but more than that there was little interest among the opposition in aligning with a character they felt had no credibility.
“Khaddam believed the Syrian regime would be finished after pulling out of Lebanon and he thought that the NSF would form the new government. He and the Muslim Brotherhood were betting that foreign pressure and foreign forces were going to be about regime change in Syria as they had done in Iraq. They were wrong.”
One of the major criticisms of the NSF was that its main leaders were living overseas – Mr Bayanouni in London and Mr Khaddam in Brussels.
“We were always concerned that any Syrian opposition groups should be built from inside the country,” Mr Azeem said. “They need to be legitimate and close to the real situation, they need to understand conditions on the ground and they need to be independent of foreign interference.”
The Muslim Brotherhood is banned in Syria and membership is technically punishable by death. Nevertheless, it is thought to have some grassroots popularity and a natural constituency among Syria’s Sunni Arab majority. In teaming up with the former regime insider, the Brotherhood hoped to widen its appeal, both to Baath Party members inside Syria and foreign powers wary of Islamist politics but keen to see a new regime in Damascus.
In reality the alliance appears only to have stained the Muslim Brotherhood’s reputation; Mr Khaddam, long viewed inside Syria as a highly corrupt member of the old guard, is now widely regarded as a traitor after fleeing abroad and trying to overthrow the president.
Already cool relations between Mr Khaddam and Mr Bayanouni deteriorated rapidly after the January war in Gaza, during which the Brotherhood suspended its activities against the Syrian regime, which was supporting Hamas, effectively its arm in Palestine.
By that stage, the cracks had become impossible to avoid. There was already speculation the Brotherhood had entered into mediated talks with the Syrian authorities about lifting capital punishment for membership in the group and allowing exiles to return, though neither step has been taken.
“There is always speculation around such talks,” said Ammar Qurabi, the head of the National Organisation for Human Rights in Syria. “In reality the NSF was always weak and it has done nothing. The Muslim Brotherhood thought Khaddam would bring international contacts and regimists but that amounted to nothing.”
The dissolving of the NSF alliance, in which at least some opponents to the Syrian regime had placed their faith, has, however, given others a slim reason for hope. “This opens the door,” said Mr Azeem of the Arab Socialist Party.
“In the past some people were gambling on the Americans to come here and change the regime. The collapse of the NSF will encourage the domestic opposition to focus and to unify their efforts on bringing about change from the inside.”
He also said that the withdrawal of the Muslim Brotherhood from the NSF made it possible for the Islamic group to improve its ties with the domestic opposition. Although the Muslim Brotherhood endorsed the Damascus Declaration, a number of other signatories regarded its membership in the NSF as a de facto resignation.
“The Muslim Brotherhood had a history in the opposition and they have given their blood for that,” Mr Azeem said. “If Bayanouni asked to co-operate with my party I would welcome that, I would welcome co-ordination and dialogue.”
Herven Oce of the Kurdish Future Movement – which is outside of the Damascus Declaration – also saw possibilities in the NSF’s failure. “Maybe in [the] future this will help with the restructuring of the opposition,” she said. “There will be more clarity in the coming period.”
With the advent of the Obama administration and re-engagement between the United States, Europe and Syria, there are hopes that the tough stand on pro-democracy campaigners would be eased and political prisoners released. So far there have been no concrete steps in that direction, according to Mr Qurabi, who said the opposition’s weakness remained its principal characteristic.
“We can talk of the NSF split, but the Damascus Declaration is the same,” he said. “Some groups have split from it, the other leaders are in prison.
“At the moment, none of the opposition groups has any real influence … both inside and outside of Syria. At the moment the strongest thing [is] the security [services], the strongest thing is the regime.”
Tuesday, 7 April 2009
Restoring faith in religious schools
When a car bomb went off in Damascus last September, killing mainly civilians, antiterrorism officers found a network of private Islamic institutes had spiralled out of control. Now these religious academies are under strict new rules.
DAMASCUS // It was an unremarkable Saturday morning in Damascus, right up until 8.45am when the bomb exploded on the main airport road, killing 17 people and wounding more than a dozen others.
There had been previous bombs in Syria; there have been assassinations and political disappearances. But the assault of Sept 27 2008 was different. It was the deadliest of its kind for decades and, although apparently targeting a security service office, the victims were overwhelmingly civilian.
Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Turkey – Syria’s neighbours – had all become more or less intimate with this type of attack and the repercussions; the immediate panic and confusion, struggling with mass casualties, the gruesome work of sifting through body parts to identify the dead, trying to hunt down the perpetrators.
Syria, however, was caught off guard. And if the numerous security agencies were blindsided by the bombing itself, they were also shocked by the results of their inquiry into how it happened.
Antiterrorism officers discovered that a network of influential private Islamic schools had spiralled dangerously out of control.
Religious schooling in Syria has expanded rapidly since 2005, when there were just 30 state-run religious education institutes with 7,000 students. According to official figures, by 2008 that number had risen to 127 Islamic academies with about 21,000 students.
However, it was the 32 private schools in Damascus that set alarm bells ringing. Although opened with government permission, they had for years been running largely unconstrained by rules or regulations. No firm system had ever been put in place to monitor their teachings or ideologies, or to prevent the spread of radicalism among their thousands of students.
Less than two months after the 200kg car bomb was detonated, Syrian state television aired the confessions of nine men and one woman, who said they had orchestrated and carried out the attack. All admitted to being members of Fatah al Islam, a Lebanon-based Sunni extremist group.
Fatah al Islam fought a bloody war against the Lebanese army in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in 2007, a conflict that killed more than 300 people.
Among the Syria bombing suspects was Abdul Baqi Hussein, who claimed to be Fatah al Islam’s security leader and to have carried out guerrilla attacks against the Americans in Iraq. He also said he had studied for two years at the Fatah institute in Damascus, one of the city’s major private Islamic schools.
In his televised remarks, Hussein portrayed the institute as a magnet that “attracts many Arab and foreign students” who shared a “hard-line” Islamic ideology. It was at the school that his own militancy had been incubated, he said, and the place where he had met like-minded colleagues.
The mosque and teaching rooms of the Fatah institute are a short distance from the Christian quarter of the Old City and separated from Bab Sharqi, a major historical site and tourist landmark, by a congested road.
The institute was established in 1965 by Mohammed Salih Farfor and initially had 200 students. Today, it is administered by his son, Hussam Eddin Farfor, and has 5,500 students from around the world, including Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, although most are Syrians from conservative Sunni families.
In the aftermath of the bombing it came under close scrutiny. Government investigators realised they had little information about key aspects of the school’s operations.
It was teaching from a syllabus that had never been approved by either the ministry of education or the ministry of religious affairs.
Foreign students were not properly vetted by the security services, and little was known about teaching staff and their beliefs. Crucially, the sources of the institute’s funding were unclear.
A senior figure within Syria’s religious schools community, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Fatah institute had an annual budget of some US$3.3 million (Dh12m), and that the authorities had only been able to accurately trace a fraction of it back to its sources.
The rest came from unknown private donors.
When the televised confessions implicated the institute in the bomber’s ideological development, there were public demands from secular elements of Syrian society that it be forcibly closed to prevent a spread of Islamic militancy.
Moderates inside the ruling elite reportedly harboured similar fears: that Syria’s Sunni majority population – significant numbers of whom probably quietly advocate Syria being run as an Islamic state, rather than as a secular-leaning republic – may have passed the point where it could be controlled.
In an interview at the Fatah institute, Mr Farfor said the school taught a modern and moderate curriculum – including western philosophy and languages – and placed a heavy emphasis on tolerance. The bomber was an anomaly, he said, and had not learned violence there.
“We have a good history, one man cannot deform us,” he said. “In the days of the Prophet Mohammed there were liars and hypocrites, do we blame Mohammed for that? This man does not represent our academy, we have good professors and students who become key figures in society, why does anyone want to delete our history?”
Mr Farfor pointedly warned against closing private Islamic schools, saying it would only serve to exacerbate problems of extremism, driving young Muslim scholars perilously out of sight.
“Let’s teach the youth in the light, not let them go underground where they will get a fanatical or extremist interpretation of Islam,” he said.
The Fatah institute was not the only Islamic establishment affected by the lax, confused government regulations. All of the private institutes were in a similar situation. The largest, oldest and most illustrious of the schools, the Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Institute – also known as Abu Noor – has as many as 8,000 students enrolled at any one time, some 300 of whom are non-Arabs, from Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Algeria and Morocco.
Its annual budget is about $4.8m, much of which comes from a registered Islamic charitable foundation, al Ansar, which has declared annual finances of $2.8m. The remaining funding for the Kuftaro institute, $2m, comes from private donors whose identities are unknown to the authorities.
Such opaque financial arrangements opened the possibility that money was coming from ultraconservative Islamic groups that may have deliberately wanted to stir up militancy in Syria to undermine the regime. Sunni extremists have made it clear they consider Syria’s largely secular authorities to be un-Islamic, a tension heightened because the ruling Syrian elite are Alawite, a sub-sect of Shia Islam considered heretical by Sunni hardliners. Damascus’s close relationship with Shiite Iran has also angered Arab regimes and Sunni hardliners, all fearful that Shiism is spreading in the region and growing in power.
The large number of foreign students and private teaching staff exacerbated potential for trouble in the Islamic institutes. The combination of factors raised difficult questions for the Syrian authorities. “Where were they getting the money from?” asked one government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There were 1,000 private teachers, all paid much more than normal teachers, and they got their salaries from private sources, and we didn’t evaluate them. There are about 500 foreign students who had visas without thorough checks of their backgrounds.”
Private academies maintain that the overwhelming majority of students are peaceful and moderate. But one of the most well-respected schools admitted that foreign students are proving difficult to track. Again, speaking on condition of anonymity, a leading institute administrator said he had concerns before the bombing.
“The Syrian students are not so much of a worry, and most of the foreign students live on campus so we know what is happening with them. But one third of students live off campus and they are much harder to monitor. We don’t know where they go, who they meet, what ideas they are getting. We’d rather they all lived inside the academy.”
Of most immediate concern to the authorities, however, was the unregulated curriculum, which enabled some of the institutes to teach nakedly sectarian agendas. A member of a religious schools review committee, established in the wake of the bombing, said sectarian intolerance had been taught in classrooms.
“They did not have to have their books approved, or their curriculum,” the committee member said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject. “In some Sunni schools they were using books that said it was against God for Muslims to visit the tombs and holy shrines, which are Shiite cultural practices.
“And some of the Hawza [Shiite religious schools] taught negatively about the caliphs who followed the Prophet, a criticism aimed at Sunnis.”
The impact of these teachings was to emphasise differences between Sunnis and Shiites, a dangerous subject, particularly following the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq between 2005 and 2007, and the perpetually simmering torment in Lebanon. Syria, with a mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a sizeable Christian minority and various other communities, has been at pains to avoid igniting any sectarian fires on home soil.
Most of the problems arose because no single government ministry was ultimately responsible for the private religious schools. They were licensed by the ministry of religious affairs, funded by charities overseen by the ministry of labour and social affairs, and had broad curriculum directions mapped out by the ministry of education.
As the Islamic institutions quickly developed in size and number, the absence of clear regulations and co-ordinated oversight swamped the ability of Syria’s often-dysfunctional bureaucracy to keep track of what was going on. Laws governing religious schools were still based on a decree issued in the late 1950s, when Syria and Egypt were joined as the United Arab Republic, under the leadership of Gamal Abdul Nasser.
The Sept 27 bombing came as a wake-up call to the authorities, underlining the need for quick and effective reforms. It also apparently galvanised normally obstinate ministries into actually taking action. Rather than closing any of the private schools, by the end of last year – a few months after the bombing – they were all brought under the direct control of the ministry of religious affairs.
A unified, government-approved curriculum was established in consultation with the institutes’ heads, removing all books that spread sectarian discord. Texts making disparaging remarks about either Sunnis or Shiites were prohibited from classes.
New financial regulations were introduced. Since the end of 2008 it has been a requirement that comprehensive, detailed accounts be submitted to a government finances committee for audit. Donations from charities no longer pass directly into the hands of the institutions, instead needing prior approval from government observers.
In an effort to draw a clear line between the funding charities and the schools, anyone working in a religious capacity within a private Islamic teaching institute is no longer allowed to hold an official position within a charity providing finance to that school.
Two other key changes are being implemented, concerning teachers and foreign students. Whereas overseas students used to be able to register for study at any school prepared to accommodate them, new regulations mean all foreign students will be compelled to register at a single centre, the Badr al Deen al Hasseni school in Damascus’s Old City.
Controlled by the ministry of religious affairs – which will also be responsible for obtaining entry visas and screening students – it will make it easier to identify any Islamic extremists. The days of the Abu Noor institute attracting hundreds of foreign students are effectively over.
Control over school staff will also be passed fully into government hands, with all teachers to be brought on to government payrolls, in effect nationalising staff at private religious schools.
“Each school will get its donations and money through a committee headed by an employee who works for the ministry,” Mohammad Bukheet, director of the religious education department at the ministry of religious affairs, said in an interview with Syria Today magazine.
“We [the government] want to know where all monies are coming from and where and when they are being spent.”
Mr Bukheet, who is in charge of day-to-day oversight of the religious schools, made it clear that private institutes would have far less freedom from now on. “We will be the decision-makers,” he said. “We can now hire and fire any teacher and we will pay their salaries.”
The religious schools have had little option but to embrace the changes ordered by Syria’s authoritarian administration.
In November leaders of all the major private Islamic institutes were invited to meet with Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, to talk about the new regulations. According to one institute official, the president made it clear the schools were not under threat but that they had to be brought under a coherent legal framework. The president also reportedly said the raft of new controls would be tested for a year and then reviewed.
“The political leadership wants to lead by consensus on this,” said the official. “It doesn’t want a crackdown and the measures it has introduced are moderate, they respect our rights.”
At the Kuftaro institute, Salah al Deen Kuftaro, the school director, said he supported the new rules.
“We are happy with the new measures. We work in a transparent way so we are not angry.
“I don’t see these things as negative points. For example, with a unified curriculum approved by the government, it means our qualifications will be officially recognised. In the past we had graduates with certificates that were not accepted for government jobs.” Mr Kuftaro also said the decision not to shut all private Islamic schools had been a moderate and sensible solution.
“We have to accept there has been a rise in Islamic sentiments in the region. We have to recognise that phenomena, not try to ignore it.
“To have our young people studying in our schools is better than them going to other countries where they may learn strange ideas or end up with teachers who tell them the real Islam is violent.
“We don’t need people going abroad to return with radical and wrong ideas. The best solution is to have them studying in the open here in Syria.”
psands@thenational.ae
DAMASCUS // It was an unremarkable Saturday morning in Damascus, right up until 8.45am when the bomb exploded on the main airport road, killing 17 people and wounding more than a dozen others.
There had been previous bombs in Syria; there have been assassinations and political disappearances. But the assault of Sept 27 2008 was different. It was the deadliest of its kind for decades and, although apparently targeting a security service office, the victims were overwhelmingly civilian.
Iraq, Lebanon, Jordan, Israel and Turkey – Syria’s neighbours – had all become more or less intimate with this type of attack and the repercussions; the immediate panic and confusion, struggling with mass casualties, the gruesome work of sifting through body parts to identify the dead, trying to hunt down the perpetrators.
Syria, however, was caught off guard. And if the numerous security agencies were blindsided by the bombing itself, they were also shocked by the results of their inquiry into how it happened.
Antiterrorism officers discovered that a network of influential private Islamic schools had spiralled dangerously out of control.
Religious schooling in Syria has expanded rapidly since 2005, when there were just 30 state-run religious education institutes with 7,000 students. According to official figures, by 2008 that number had risen to 127 Islamic academies with about 21,000 students.
However, it was the 32 private schools in Damascus that set alarm bells ringing. Although opened with government permission, they had for years been running largely unconstrained by rules or regulations. No firm system had ever been put in place to monitor their teachings or ideologies, or to prevent the spread of radicalism among their thousands of students.
Less than two months after the 200kg car bomb was detonated, Syrian state television aired the confessions of nine men and one woman, who said they had orchestrated and carried out the attack. All admitted to being members of Fatah al Islam, a Lebanon-based Sunni extremist group.
Fatah al Islam fought a bloody war against the Lebanese army in the Nahr al Bared refugee camp near Tripoli in 2007, a conflict that killed more than 300 people.
Among the Syria bombing suspects was Abdul Baqi Hussein, who claimed to be Fatah al Islam’s security leader and to have carried out guerrilla attacks against the Americans in Iraq. He also said he had studied for two years at the Fatah institute in Damascus, one of the city’s major private Islamic schools.
In his televised remarks, Hussein portrayed the institute as a magnet that “attracts many Arab and foreign students” who shared a “hard-line” Islamic ideology. It was at the school that his own militancy had been incubated, he said, and the place where he had met like-minded colleagues.
The mosque and teaching rooms of the Fatah institute are a short distance from the Christian quarter of the Old City and separated from Bab Sharqi, a major historical site and tourist landmark, by a congested road.
The institute was established in 1965 by Mohammed Salih Farfor and initially had 200 students. Today, it is administered by his son, Hussam Eddin Farfor, and has 5,500 students from around the world, including Africa, Eastern Europe and Asia, although most are Syrians from conservative Sunni families.
In the aftermath of the bombing it came under close scrutiny. Government investigators realised they had little information about key aspects of the school’s operations.
It was teaching from a syllabus that had never been approved by either the ministry of education or the ministry of religious affairs.
Foreign students were not properly vetted by the security services, and little was known about teaching staff and their beliefs. Crucially, the sources of the institute’s funding were unclear.
A senior figure within Syria’s religious schools community, who spoke on condition of anonymity, said the Fatah institute had an annual budget of some US$3.3 million (Dh12m), and that the authorities had only been able to accurately trace a fraction of it back to its sources.
The rest came from unknown private donors.
When the televised confessions implicated the institute in the bomber’s ideological development, there were public demands from secular elements of Syrian society that it be forcibly closed to prevent a spread of Islamic militancy.
Moderates inside the ruling elite reportedly harboured similar fears: that Syria’s Sunni majority population – significant numbers of whom probably quietly advocate Syria being run as an Islamic state, rather than as a secular-leaning republic – may have passed the point where it could be controlled.
In an interview at the Fatah institute, Mr Farfor said the school taught a modern and moderate curriculum – including western philosophy and languages – and placed a heavy emphasis on tolerance. The bomber was an anomaly, he said, and had not learned violence there.
“We have a good history, one man cannot deform us,” he said. “In the days of the Prophet Mohammed there were liars and hypocrites, do we blame Mohammed for that? This man does not represent our academy, we have good professors and students who become key figures in society, why does anyone want to delete our history?”
Mr Farfor pointedly warned against closing private Islamic schools, saying it would only serve to exacerbate problems of extremism, driving young Muslim scholars perilously out of sight.
“Let’s teach the youth in the light, not let them go underground where they will get a fanatical or extremist interpretation of Islam,” he said.
The Fatah institute was not the only Islamic establishment affected by the lax, confused government regulations. All of the private institutes were in a similar situation. The largest, oldest and most illustrious of the schools, the Sheikh Ahmad Kuftaro Institute – also known as Abu Noor – has as many as 8,000 students enrolled at any one time, some 300 of whom are non-Arabs, from Indonesia, Malaysia, Russia and the former Soviet Union, Pakistan, Algeria and Morocco.
Its annual budget is about $4.8m, much of which comes from a registered Islamic charitable foundation, al Ansar, which has declared annual finances of $2.8m. The remaining funding for the Kuftaro institute, $2m, comes from private donors whose identities are unknown to the authorities.
Such opaque financial arrangements opened the possibility that money was coming from ultraconservative Islamic groups that may have deliberately wanted to stir up militancy in Syria to undermine the regime. Sunni extremists have made it clear they consider Syria’s largely secular authorities to be un-Islamic, a tension heightened because the ruling Syrian elite are Alawite, a sub-sect of Shia Islam considered heretical by Sunni hardliners. Damascus’s close relationship with Shiite Iran has also angered Arab regimes and Sunni hardliners, all fearful that Shiism is spreading in the region and growing in power.
The large number of foreign students and private teaching staff exacerbated potential for trouble in the Islamic institutes. The combination of factors raised difficult questions for the Syrian authorities. “Where were they getting the money from?” asked one government official, speaking on condition of anonymity. “There were 1,000 private teachers, all paid much more than normal teachers, and they got their salaries from private sources, and we didn’t evaluate them. There are about 500 foreign students who had visas without thorough checks of their backgrounds.”
Private academies maintain that the overwhelming majority of students are peaceful and moderate. But one of the most well-respected schools admitted that foreign students are proving difficult to track. Again, speaking on condition of anonymity, a leading institute administrator said he had concerns before the bombing.
“The Syrian students are not so much of a worry, and most of the foreign students live on campus so we know what is happening with them. But one third of students live off campus and they are much harder to monitor. We don’t know where they go, who they meet, what ideas they are getting. We’d rather they all lived inside the academy.”
Of most immediate concern to the authorities, however, was the unregulated curriculum, which enabled some of the institutes to teach nakedly sectarian agendas. A member of a religious schools review committee, established in the wake of the bombing, said sectarian intolerance had been taught in classrooms.
“They did not have to have their books approved, or their curriculum,” the committee member said, on condition of anonymity because of the sensitive nature of the subject. “In some Sunni schools they were using books that said it was against God for Muslims to visit the tombs and holy shrines, which are Shiite cultural practices.
“And some of the Hawza [Shiite religious schools] taught negatively about the caliphs who followed the Prophet, a criticism aimed at Sunnis.”
The impact of these teachings was to emphasise differences between Sunnis and Shiites, a dangerous subject, particularly following the sectarian bloodletting in Iraq between 2005 and 2007, and the perpetually simmering torment in Lebanon. Syria, with a mix of Sunni and Shiite Muslims, a sizeable Christian minority and various other communities, has been at pains to avoid igniting any sectarian fires on home soil.
Most of the problems arose because no single government ministry was ultimately responsible for the private religious schools. They were licensed by the ministry of religious affairs, funded by charities overseen by the ministry of labour and social affairs, and had broad curriculum directions mapped out by the ministry of education.
As the Islamic institutions quickly developed in size and number, the absence of clear regulations and co-ordinated oversight swamped the ability of Syria’s often-dysfunctional bureaucracy to keep track of what was going on. Laws governing religious schools were still based on a decree issued in the late 1950s, when Syria and Egypt were joined as the United Arab Republic, under the leadership of Gamal Abdul Nasser.
The Sept 27 bombing came as a wake-up call to the authorities, underlining the need for quick and effective reforms. It also apparently galvanised normally obstinate ministries into actually taking action. Rather than closing any of the private schools, by the end of last year – a few months after the bombing – they were all brought under the direct control of the ministry of religious affairs.
A unified, government-approved curriculum was established in consultation with the institutes’ heads, removing all books that spread sectarian discord. Texts making disparaging remarks about either Sunnis or Shiites were prohibited from classes.
New financial regulations were introduced. Since the end of 2008 it has been a requirement that comprehensive, detailed accounts be submitted to a government finances committee for audit. Donations from charities no longer pass directly into the hands of the institutions, instead needing prior approval from government observers.
In an effort to draw a clear line between the funding charities and the schools, anyone working in a religious capacity within a private Islamic teaching institute is no longer allowed to hold an official position within a charity providing finance to that school.
Two other key changes are being implemented, concerning teachers and foreign students. Whereas overseas students used to be able to register for study at any school prepared to accommodate them, new regulations mean all foreign students will be compelled to register at a single centre, the Badr al Deen al Hasseni school in Damascus’s Old City.
Controlled by the ministry of religious affairs – which will also be responsible for obtaining entry visas and screening students – it will make it easier to identify any Islamic extremists. The days of the Abu Noor institute attracting hundreds of foreign students are effectively over.
Control over school staff will also be passed fully into government hands, with all teachers to be brought on to government payrolls, in effect nationalising staff at private religious schools.
“Each school will get its donations and money through a committee headed by an employee who works for the ministry,” Mohammad Bukheet, director of the religious education department at the ministry of religious affairs, said in an interview with Syria Today magazine.
“We [the government] want to know where all monies are coming from and where and when they are being spent.”
Mr Bukheet, who is in charge of day-to-day oversight of the religious schools, made it clear that private institutes would have far less freedom from now on. “We will be the decision-makers,” he said. “We can now hire and fire any teacher and we will pay their salaries.”
The religious schools have had little option but to embrace the changes ordered by Syria’s authoritarian administration.
In November leaders of all the major private Islamic institutes were invited to meet with Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, to talk about the new regulations. According to one institute official, the president made it clear the schools were not under threat but that they had to be brought under a coherent legal framework. The president also reportedly said the raft of new controls would be tested for a year and then reviewed.
“The political leadership wants to lead by consensus on this,” said the official. “It doesn’t want a crackdown and the measures it has introduced are moderate, they respect our rights.”
At the Kuftaro institute, Salah al Deen Kuftaro, the school director, said he supported the new rules.
“We are happy with the new measures. We work in a transparent way so we are not angry.
“I don’t see these things as negative points. For example, with a unified curriculum approved by the government, it means our qualifications will be officially recognised. In the past we had graduates with certificates that were not accepted for government jobs.” Mr Kuftaro also said the decision not to shut all private Islamic schools had been a moderate and sensible solution.
“We have to accept there has been a rise in Islamic sentiments in the region. We have to recognise that phenomena, not try to ignore it.
“To have our young people studying in our schools is better than them going to other countries where they may learn strange ideas or end up with teachers who tell them the real Islam is violent.
“We don’t need people going abroad to return with radical and wrong ideas. The best solution is to have them studying in the open here in Syria.”
psands@thenational.ae
Thursday, 2 April 2009
Second city putting itself first
ALEPPO, SYRIA // For centuries Damascus and Aleppo have been rival cities, competing for the limelight, each regarding the other as something of an impetuous upstart. Both claim to be the more historically important, the most cultured, the most sophisticated, the most economically powerful.
In recent years, the Syrian capital has clearly overshadowed its northern competitor. As the national administrative centre, where decisions are made, Damascus has simply been more relevant. And as the country has opened up economically, the capital has been the focus for the private banks and investment; the Syrian stock exchange that began trading last month is in Damascus, 375km south of Aleppo.
While this situation is unlikely to change, the severe economic difficulties facing Syria have prompted the authorities to place greater emphasis on tourism. And as that happens, Aleppo is likely to become increasingly important.
“The government and ministry of tourism are paying attention to the development here,” said Fouad Hilal, president of the Aleppo Travel Agents Association. “Aleppo has excellent tourist sites, especially areas of interest for Christians, and it is still a place where you can stay cheaply if you want. If you have $1,000 (Dh3,673) a night to spend you can, or if you have $6 a night to spend, you can do that too.
“I’d say the level of service and quality given to tourists is acceptable, it’s something I’d like to see improve and it will, the investment is coming.”
A series of large four- and five-star hotel complexes are under construction that, when completed, will double the number of guest beds in the city from its current level of 2,600. Work is already underway to restore Aleppo citadel and other parts of the city centre, in an effort to make it more accessible and marketable.
“Tourism is increasing and our long term strategy is that if the hotels are there, they will be full,” Mr Hilal said. “Annual occupancy rates are high, and most of the tourists are staying in the more expensive sort of hotels.”
As an indicator of rising demand, in 1994 there were 1,161 recorded visitors to the citadel of Saint Simeon, 60km north-west of Aleppo, one of the area’s key historical sites. In 2004 there were 230,000 visitors.
Another major attraction – and potential money supplier for Syria – is the village of Brad, 30km from Aleppo. It is a sacred sight for Maronite Christians, and Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, recently pledged local land to the community, which plans to build a new shrine. Thousands of pilgrims from the eight million-strong Maronite community across the world are expected to visit each year.
While it is renowned as a conservative Islamic city, Aleppo has a sizeable population of Christians, and with 12 different sects, it boasts the most diverse Christian community in the Middle East. Beirut has a larger number of Christians but cannot match the mosaic found in Syria’s second largest city: six Catholic sects, three Orthodox, two Protestant and one Nestorian.
Mohammed Kujjah, who administered Aleppo’s year as Islamic capital of culture in 2006, said the city would benefit from a renewed influx of tourists, shrugging off suggestions it might do damage to the city’s character.
“Aleppo has always been closely connected to the wider world,” he said. “The first consulate opened in Damascus in 1833 by which time there had been one in Aleppo for 700 years. When Damascus was just a point on the pilgrim route, Aleppo was an important trading centre. In that way, Aleppo has always been a place for tourism and visitors.”
There are, however, obstacles to be overcome before anything approaching a revival can be achieved. Some city industry leaders are frustrated with the slow pace of change; others complain that the city is still not considered a high priority by the authorities in Damascus.
“In the national five-year spending plans Aleppo has only been allocated 10 per cent of the national tourism budget,” one said on condition of anonymity. “Given the importance and potential of the city that’s just not enough.”
“We do need more resources,” Mr Kujjah said. “We need more investment. But the future looks good. We have the sites, we have hospitable people, and tourism is going to be important for Syria’s economy.”
Beyond the matter of money, constant regional instability also hangs as a heavy cloud over hopes for Aleppo’s revival. During the recent Gaza war, 20 per cent of tourist bookings were lost, with travellers worried that the fighting could spread.
“For tourism to really become big we will need a peace in the Middle East,” said Mf Hilal, the travel agent. “Whenever there are problems, tourists cancel their bookings.”
In recent years, the Syrian capital has clearly overshadowed its northern competitor. As the national administrative centre, where decisions are made, Damascus has simply been more relevant. And as the country has opened up economically, the capital has been the focus for the private banks and investment; the Syrian stock exchange that began trading last month is in Damascus, 375km south of Aleppo.
While this situation is unlikely to change, the severe economic difficulties facing Syria have prompted the authorities to place greater emphasis on tourism. And as that happens, Aleppo is likely to become increasingly important.
“The government and ministry of tourism are paying attention to the development here,” said Fouad Hilal, president of the Aleppo Travel Agents Association. “Aleppo has excellent tourist sites, especially areas of interest for Christians, and it is still a place where you can stay cheaply if you want. If you have $1,000 (Dh3,673) a night to spend you can, or if you have $6 a night to spend, you can do that too.
“I’d say the level of service and quality given to tourists is acceptable, it’s something I’d like to see improve and it will, the investment is coming.”
A series of large four- and five-star hotel complexes are under construction that, when completed, will double the number of guest beds in the city from its current level of 2,600. Work is already underway to restore Aleppo citadel and other parts of the city centre, in an effort to make it more accessible and marketable.
“Tourism is increasing and our long term strategy is that if the hotels are there, they will be full,” Mr Hilal said. “Annual occupancy rates are high, and most of the tourists are staying in the more expensive sort of hotels.”
As an indicator of rising demand, in 1994 there were 1,161 recorded visitors to the citadel of Saint Simeon, 60km north-west of Aleppo, one of the area’s key historical sites. In 2004 there were 230,000 visitors.
Another major attraction – and potential money supplier for Syria – is the village of Brad, 30km from Aleppo. It is a sacred sight for Maronite Christians, and Bashar Assad, the Syrian president, recently pledged local land to the community, which plans to build a new shrine. Thousands of pilgrims from the eight million-strong Maronite community across the world are expected to visit each year.
While it is renowned as a conservative Islamic city, Aleppo has a sizeable population of Christians, and with 12 different sects, it boasts the most diverse Christian community in the Middle East. Beirut has a larger number of Christians but cannot match the mosaic found in Syria’s second largest city: six Catholic sects, three Orthodox, two Protestant and one Nestorian.
Mohammed Kujjah, who administered Aleppo’s year as Islamic capital of culture in 2006, said the city would benefit from a renewed influx of tourists, shrugging off suggestions it might do damage to the city’s character.
“Aleppo has always been closely connected to the wider world,” he said. “The first consulate opened in Damascus in 1833 by which time there had been one in Aleppo for 700 years. When Damascus was just a point on the pilgrim route, Aleppo was an important trading centre. In that way, Aleppo has always been a place for tourism and visitors.”
There are, however, obstacles to be overcome before anything approaching a revival can be achieved. Some city industry leaders are frustrated with the slow pace of change; others complain that the city is still not considered a high priority by the authorities in Damascus.
“In the national five-year spending plans Aleppo has only been allocated 10 per cent of the national tourism budget,” one said on condition of anonymity. “Given the importance and potential of the city that’s just not enough.”
“We do need more resources,” Mr Kujjah said. “We need more investment. But the future looks good. We have the sites, we have hospitable people, and tourism is going to be important for Syria’s economy.”
Beyond the matter of money, constant regional instability also hangs as a heavy cloud over hopes for Aleppo’s revival. During the recent Gaza war, 20 per cent of tourist bookings were lost, with travellers worried that the fighting could spread.
“For tourism to really become big we will need a peace in the Middle East,” said Mf Hilal, the travel agent. “Whenever there are problems, tourists cancel their bookings.”
Monday, 30 March 2009
A Lebanese diva shines at the Palace
“You couldn’t say she’s less than a diva. She’s very special to everyone,” explained Bilal, one of the hordes of concertgoers who poured into the lobby of the Emirates Palace auditorium a clear hour ahead of this charity engagement. “As soon as you’re saying Magida el Roumi... it’s like you’re saying Andrea Bocelli or Pavarotti.” And yet, in the West, she’s scarcely known at all.
Here’s a primer. El Roumi came to prominence in the early Seventies when she won a Lebanese TV talent show. From the start of her professional singing career, she offered a potent blend of classical and pop styles, delivered with a stirring side order of nationalism. Poets wrote for her, most notably the Syrian love-lyricist Nizar Qabbani; the greatest Arabic songwriters and arrangers shaped her sinuous, disco-inflected sound. And to match that dramatic music was a stormy life story: divorce, bereavement, a turn to the consolations of faith, a comeback. Such careers seem drawn from some mystic well of universal archetypes – the chanteuse with a thousand faces.
Yet, the capacity audience at the Emirates Palace had come to see just one. And at first sight, it isn’t clear why el Roumi should command such adoration. She’s shy, oddly reticent. As she slipped out in front of her 30-piece band, she seemed almost apologetic. The crowd stood and applauded and she floated her way through the thunderous Ya Bladna, demurely acknowledging the pounding handclaps, at times offering the ghost of a shimmy, her arms hanging limp by her sides. Her voice was unforced, conversational.
During her next number, something of the strange mutability of her sound became apparent: slinky bossa nova rhythms and a wonderfully twangy pop-orchestra electric guitar gave way to rattling, skeletal percussion. Strings swooped and darted like something from an Isaac Hayes soul epic. And el Roumi’s voice began to lift in shuddering melismas, falling away with infinite world-weariness.
During Ghanni Lel Hob, her Seventies roots were revealed in further detail. The band locked into what was unmistakably a disco beat. A wah-wah guitar percolated away beneath bongos, and el Roumi’s voice climbed to a racking intensity. Though still almost motionless, her onstage persona had shifted slightly: chorus followed crashing, tear-stained chorus, and she hovered between Dancing Queen excess and the stalking grandeur of fado.
Throughout the show, her sharp band negotiated the swerves and tempo-changes of her material with aplomb. A sextet of sad-eyed, tuxedoed backing singers provided a funereal backdrop for the increasingly animated star – funereal, that is, until three of them locked arms and began a synchronised jig across the stage, tumbling to and fro like sailors on a pitching deck.
At one point, a fez was delivered to the star. She put it on for a number which exhibited as well as anything the strange breadth of her style. A sparkling jazz melody laid over a near-dubbish rhythm section gave way to one of the singer’s Olympian choruses, surging like something out of the Elvis comeback special. Then – a great and inexplicable touch – an African woodblock melody floated in.
More startling still was her sudden blast of operatic singing in Amb Bihlamak, a piercing, imploring aria. She rolled it out for the encore, too, draped in the Lebanese flag, laden with flowers, the audience standing and clapping along. It was madly incongruous, moving, in short, fabulous and all that connotes. No, you couldn’t say she’s less than a diva.
Here’s a primer. El Roumi came to prominence in the early Seventies when she won a Lebanese TV talent show. From the start of her professional singing career, she offered a potent blend of classical and pop styles, delivered with a stirring side order of nationalism. Poets wrote for her, most notably the Syrian love-lyricist Nizar Qabbani; the greatest Arabic songwriters and arrangers shaped her sinuous, disco-inflected sound. And to match that dramatic music was a stormy life story: divorce, bereavement, a turn to the consolations of faith, a comeback. Such careers seem drawn from some mystic well of universal archetypes – the chanteuse with a thousand faces.
Yet, the capacity audience at the Emirates Palace had come to see just one. And at first sight, it isn’t clear why el Roumi should command such adoration. She’s shy, oddly reticent. As she slipped out in front of her 30-piece band, she seemed almost apologetic. The crowd stood and applauded and she floated her way through the thunderous Ya Bladna, demurely acknowledging the pounding handclaps, at times offering the ghost of a shimmy, her arms hanging limp by her sides. Her voice was unforced, conversational.
During her next number, something of the strange mutability of her sound became apparent: slinky bossa nova rhythms and a wonderfully twangy pop-orchestra electric guitar gave way to rattling, skeletal percussion. Strings swooped and darted like something from an Isaac Hayes soul epic. And el Roumi’s voice began to lift in shuddering melismas, falling away with infinite world-weariness.
During Ghanni Lel Hob, her Seventies roots were revealed in further detail. The band locked into what was unmistakably a disco beat. A wah-wah guitar percolated away beneath bongos, and el Roumi’s voice climbed to a racking intensity. Though still almost motionless, her onstage persona had shifted slightly: chorus followed crashing, tear-stained chorus, and she hovered between Dancing Queen excess and the stalking grandeur of fado.
Throughout the show, her sharp band negotiated the swerves and tempo-changes of her material with aplomb. A sextet of sad-eyed, tuxedoed backing singers provided a funereal backdrop for the increasingly animated star – funereal, that is, until three of them locked arms and began a synchronised jig across the stage, tumbling to and fro like sailors on a pitching deck.
At one point, a fez was delivered to the star. She put it on for a number which exhibited as well as anything the strange breadth of her style. A sparkling jazz melody laid over a near-dubbish rhythm section gave way to one of the singer’s Olympian choruses, surging like something out of the Elvis comeback special. Then – a great and inexplicable touch – an African woodblock melody floated in.
More startling still was her sudden blast of operatic singing in Amb Bihlamak, a piercing, imploring aria. She rolled it out for the encore, too, draped in the Lebanese flag, laden with flowers, the audience standing and clapping along. It was madly incongruous, moving, in short, fabulous and all that connotes. No, you couldn’t say she’s less than a diva.
Friday, 20 March 2009
The road from Damascus
Do you like adventures?” asked the receptionist at the Zenobia Hotel in Palmyra. My husband and I looked at each hesitantly knowing that there could only really be one answer. We unfolded our road map and replied: “Of course.”
We were feeling foolish but lucky. After all, we’d decided to embark upon a self-guided, 10-day driving holiday around Syria, against the advice of every guidebook we’d consulted, the Damascenes we’d met – who looked aghast at the suggestion – and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office website. Not, mind you, because of masked men lurking in the hills but the very real danger of road accidents.
Escaping Damascus the previous day had been an adventure in itself. The traffic, which fizzes around the old walled city and up into the wider streets of the modern-day capital, had repeatedly foiled our feeble attempts at navigation before spitting us out onto the main road heading north towards Aleppo. Somehow we’d managed to survive the improbable one-way system, avoid pedestrians, pot-holes and U-turning taxis, and obeyed the many soldiers-cum-traffic police who orchestrate the chaos at every junction with the blast of a whistle and the flick of a white baton. Neither of us really understood how we’d made it out alive, but the car horn was working just fine.
With nerves and our marriage barely intact, we had cause to celebrate as we turned off the main highway and onto the long straight desert road to Palmyra.
Before us lay 220 stress-free kilometres, and it was finally time to take in the view. As the traffic dwindled to the occasional lorry, heavily-laden, and headed to the Iraqi border, a few Bedouin tents stood out on wind swept ridges in the yellow distance, as did the family of five that we passed, speeding along on a single, underpowered motorbike.
After three hours, and many a sign to Baghdad, we rounded a bend and drove down the cobbled street that takes coach loads of tourists right through the centre of the famous ruins. As we checked into the Zenobia Hotel, which overlooks the archaeological site, we marvelled at the fact that there were only two or three other sight seers wandering over the remains, next to an oasis planted with date, palm and pomegranate orchards.
Still known locally by the ancient Semitic name of Tadmor, Palmyra dates from the second millennium BC and is mentioned in the Bible. The city became a prosperous staging post for merchants and travellers on the trading route between the Mediterranean and India and China.
Standing beside a small cemetery, one of Cyrrhus’ most striking landmarks is a second or third-century hexagonal-shaped Roman tomb, rather oddly crowned with a Corinthian capital. Alamy / Photolibrary
Its markets sold spices, fabrics, precious stones and metals, and it reached the height of its prosperity under Queen Zenobia, who invaded Egypt and famously defeated the Roman army, before the city was razed to the ground by Emperor Aurelian in 272. What remains today is a curious hotchpotch of Hellenistic, Roman and Parthian architectural styles.
Apart from a young man offering camel rides, and a few other touts, zipping up and down on motorbikes flashing postcards and trinkets, the ruins felt remarkably undisturbed by the present day. There are very few signs to help tourists unscramble the history and it’s possible to ignore the construction of a number of new hotels that will soon ring the site.
Without hordes of tourists snapping away, walking the length of the colonnade towards the fortress-like Temple of Bel felt like stepping back to the time of curious gentleman travellers who romanticised Palmyra and longed to stand in its shadows. Of course, this daydream turned out to be pure fantasy: when I later looked up drawings of Palmyra made when it was first “discovered” by Robert Wood and James Dawkins in 1750, it’s clear that many of its carvings are now either eroded beyond recognition or simply missing.
Today, parts of the site have been reconstructed, and the jumble of masonry sitting in the sand has been neatly numbered by generations of archaeologists. The famous crime novelist Agatha Christie accompanied her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who dug at Palmyra from 1934 to 1939. Staff at the Zenobia were only too pleased to show me the Contessa suite where Christie stayed: decorated with traditional wooden furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the rooms are not grand by five-star standards, but it does have uninterrupted views of the ruins – albeit through barred windows.
The next day we bolted our breakfast, keen to hit the road – this time for the less-visited remains of Rasafa. However, the state of that road was cause for some concern. Close study of the map revealed that we had two choices: head back along the route marked in red towards Homs, then double back to Rasafa; or take what appeared to be a cross-country track marked only with a pale dotted line. “It is a short distance but the road is unlevel,” the hotel receptionist explained.
A few questions later, we discovered that he was an English teacher at the local school, but we were still none the wiser as to what unlevel really meant – neither steep nor, apparently, potholed. He assured us that our scarred saloon car would survive the trip, and so with only a large bottle of water for supplies, we turned left out of the hotel driveway.
Second century Roman bridge on the road to Cyrrhus, northern Syria. Nick Leech
On the map, the turning to Rasafa forks north from a dot called Al Sikhneh. This turned out to be a town small enough that if you drive up and down the main street a few times, you will be seen by everyone who lives there. After a final humiliating manoeuvre in the main square, before a curious all-male audience, my husband jumped out to ask for directions. In my roles as driver and dutiful and modest wife, I waited in the car with the engine running. It was to become an oft-repeated ritual. Outside the main towns, few people spoke English but it was always enough to smile, say “Salaam alaykum” and point to the destination in Arabic in our guidebook while looking helplessly lost. In this way over the next week, my husband flagged down dozens of shepherds, construction workers, lorry drivers, motorcyclists, mechanics and farmhands. Whoever he hailed, the response would always be the same: a broad smile, and gestures that we understood to mean “just keep going”.
Finally, thanks to the advice of a small crowd of men decked in bushy moustaches and jellabiya, it seemed we were on the right road. A small sign to Rasafa appeared as we reached the very edge of town, just as we were about to lose hope and turn back to the refuge of the main road. A small coach appeared in my rear-view mirror, surely a sign that this must be the way to a tourist attraction. It disappeared again just as quickly and suddenly we understood what unlevel road meant as our car sprayed up enough grit to sandpaper the car and we peered through clouds of dust. Two hours later at a top speed of 15km an hour we reached a tarmac road just as panic had begun to set in. Even though we were in a car, and not trekking on foot across the desert, the sense of isolation and unchanging scenery was enough to bring on despair. In the nick of time, Rasafa had appeared.
The walled city of Rasafa became a well-known place of pilgrimage for followers of St Sergius, a Roman soldier martyred in 305 for refusing to make sacrifices to almighty Jupiter. Today, it is still possible to see delicate carvings on the dome of the basilica and the enormous size of the buried cisterns, the largest of which would have held 15,000 cubic metres of water, and sense some of the site’s former grandeur. Considered an important example of Byzantine architecture, it – like so many sites in Syria – has not yet been fully excavated and feels almost forgotten.
There is no entrance fee, no ugly signs to divert your attention, and certainly no cafe selling coffee and flapjacks. Like invaders, we climbed over the fortress’ walls and wandered uninterrupted. We found the large clay handle of an amphora lying discarded underfoot, but most amazing of all was the way that the walls, almost two kilometres long and made of local gypsum stone, shone in the strong, spring sunlight.
Heading north-west towards the refuge of Aleppo, the road shadows the great Euphrates, and the landscape changes: sand, grit and rock are replaced with greener, irrigated land, boy shepherds grazing their animals in the central reservation and rubbish as far as the eye can see. At one spot, industrial chimney stacks belted out enough smoke to make the sky almost appear on fire as the sun set behind. We craned our necks disappointed not to be able to see Lake Al Assad on our right, and had to make do with spotting fellow travellers instead. On the back of almost every flatbed lorry, there were people bobbing about; some sat on plastic chairs, smoking, others perched precariously on bales of cotton or boxes of oranges. A boy stood spread-eagled on the bumper of one, like a GI Joe action figure,clinging on to stacks of boxes for dear life.
The next day, after a night in Aleppo, with its twisting souq and hugely impressive citadel, we continued our odyssey north to the Turkish border, intrigued by the guidebook’s lyrical description of the Kurdish farmers’ lands, complete with olive groves and yet more shepherds. Not to mention some of the most pockmarked roads that we’d yet tried to navigate. It was slow going with many false turns: the narrow road undulated, sometimes tarmac, more often gravel, and, in the many small villages made of breeze block houses, a muddy mess of gaping, watery holes, thanks no doubt to heavy farm machinery. Our intended destination was to be the remains of Cyrrhus, the little that’s left of the city founded on a hill in 300BC. A peculiar second or third-century hexagonal-shaped Roman tower tomb in the field below, crowned with a Corinthian capital, marked our destination.
The real highlight of our meandering six-hour journey, however, proved to be the two second-century Roman bridges that we bumped over on the way to the tomb. Only five metres wide, and made of massive stones but without kerbstones to keep vehicles from slipping over the side, each spans a noisy river. When we left the car to listen to the birdsong and the sound of water rushing past; the air was clean and fresh – a valuable commodity in such a polluted country – and this part of Syria felt distinctly wintry and unmistakably European. My mobile phone beeped with a text message that read: welcome to Turkey.
When we finally arrived at Cyrrhus, exhausted by the effort, we couldn’t face schlepping up the hill to see yet more ruins and contented ourselves with a brief sprint to the tomb, where tractors were parked outside. The journey had proved more worthwhile than the goal but, strangely, it was no less rewarding for that.
Our thoughts turned to the journey back to Aleppo. Reluctant to retrace our path, we drove on, finally rewarded by a signpost and a main road, but then, with the light fading, we came to a halt: the way ahead was blocked by a huge mound of gravel. It was the end of the road. Ready to give up, we finally understood the value of hiring a local driver who would have known the quickest route from A to B without swearing and wasting time via C.
Then, our saving grace appeared. Dressed in fatigues, jellabiya and a kaffiyeh, Mostafa was a charming old man, well into his seventies, who pointed us towards Aleppo before jumping into the back seat and presenting me with a strongly scented narcissus flower. Unable to speak a word of English, we managed to introduce ourselves in pigeon Arabic before our hitchhiker directed us, left, right, and off-road around the side of a church when a funeral procession blocked our route again.
Without Mostafa’s assistance we would have spent the night in the car; instead we found ourselves speeding towards Aleppo, accompanied by the sound of his prayer beads clicking. The sighs from the back of the car gradually became louder until Mostafa slapped his chest and said something to my husband. Busy dodging other cars like bullets, I asked: “What did he say?”. My husband maintained a diplomatic silence while I quickly figured out that Mostafa had asked to drive so that we’d get to Aleppo more quickly.
Eventually we reached a busy roundabout on the outskirts of the city where he asked me to stop the car. We watched as he disappeared into a crowd of people buying and selling goods at makeshift stalls, but not before he planted an enthusiastic kiss of thanks on my husband’s cheek. The meeting, full of warmth, a few misunderstandings and good humour, was like our stay in Syria and felt all too brief.
We were feeling foolish but lucky. After all, we’d decided to embark upon a self-guided, 10-day driving holiday around Syria, against the advice of every guidebook we’d consulted, the Damascenes we’d met – who looked aghast at the suggestion – and the UK Foreign and Commonwealth Office website. Not, mind you, because of masked men lurking in the hills but the very real danger of road accidents.
Escaping Damascus the previous day had been an adventure in itself. The traffic, which fizzes around the old walled city and up into the wider streets of the modern-day capital, had repeatedly foiled our feeble attempts at navigation before spitting us out onto the main road heading north towards Aleppo. Somehow we’d managed to survive the improbable one-way system, avoid pedestrians, pot-holes and U-turning taxis, and obeyed the many soldiers-cum-traffic police who orchestrate the chaos at every junction with the blast of a whistle and the flick of a white baton. Neither of us really understood how we’d made it out alive, but the car horn was working just fine.
With nerves and our marriage barely intact, we had cause to celebrate as we turned off the main highway and onto the long straight desert road to Palmyra.
Before us lay 220 stress-free kilometres, and it was finally time to take in the view. As the traffic dwindled to the occasional lorry, heavily-laden, and headed to the Iraqi border, a few Bedouin tents stood out on wind swept ridges in the yellow distance, as did the family of five that we passed, speeding along on a single, underpowered motorbike.
After three hours, and many a sign to Baghdad, we rounded a bend and drove down the cobbled street that takes coach loads of tourists right through the centre of the famous ruins. As we checked into the Zenobia Hotel, which overlooks the archaeological site, we marvelled at the fact that there were only two or three other sight seers wandering over the remains, next to an oasis planted with date, palm and pomegranate orchards.
Still known locally by the ancient Semitic name of Tadmor, Palmyra dates from the second millennium BC and is mentioned in the Bible. The city became a prosperous staging post for merchants and travellers on the trading route between the Mediterranean and India and China.
Standing beside a small cemetery, one of Cyrrhus’ most striking landmarks is a second or third-century hexagonal-shaped Roman tomb, rather oddly crowned with a Corinthian capital. Alamy / Photolibrary
Its markets sold spices, fabrics, precious stones and metals, and it reached the height of its prosperity under Queen Zenobia, who invaded Egypt and famously defeated the Roman army, before the city was razed to the ground by Emperor Aurelian in 272. What remains today is a curious hotchpotch of Hellenistic, Roman and Parthian architectural styles.
Apart from a young man offering camel rides, and a few other touts, zipping up and down on motorbikes flashing postcards and trinkets, the ruins felt remarkably undisturbed by the present day. There are very few signs to help tourists unscramble the history and it’s possible to ignore the construction of a number of new hotels that will soon ring the site.
Without hordes of tourists snapping away, walking the length of the colonnade towards the fortress-like Temple of Bel felt like stepping back to the time of curious gentleman travellers who romanticised Palmyra and longed to stand in its shadows. Of course, this daydream turned out to be pure fantasy: when I later looked up drawings of Palmyra made when it was first “discovered” by Robert Wood and James Dawkins in 1750, it’s clear that many of its carvings are now either eroded beyond recognition or simply missing.
Today, parts of the site have been reconstructed, and the jumble of masonry sitting in the sand has been neatly numbered by generations of archaeologists. The famous crime novelist Agatha Christie accompanied her husband, the archaeologist Max Mallowan, who dug at Palmyra from 1934 to 1939. Staff at the Zenobia were only too pleased to show me the Contessa suite where Christie stayed: decorated with traditional wooden furniture inlaid with mother-of-pearl, the rooms are not grand by five-star standards, but it does have uninterrupted views of the ruins – albeit through barred windows.
The next day we bolted our breakfast, keen to hit the road – this time for the less-visited remains of Rasafa. However, the state of that road was cause for some concern. Close study of the map revealed that we had two choices: head back along the route marked in red towards Homs, then double back to Rasafa; or take what appeared to be a cross-country track marked only with a pale dotted line. “It is a short distance but the road is unlevel,” the hotel receptionist explained.
A few questions later, we discovered that he was an English teacher at the local school, but we were still none the wiser as to what unlevel really meant – neither steep nor, apparently, potholed. He assured us that our scarred saloon car would survive the trip, and so with only a large bottle of water for supplies, we turned left out of the hotel driveway.
Second century Roman bridge on the road to Cyrrhus, northern Syria. Nick Leech
On the map, the turning to Rasafa forks north from a dot called Al Sikhneh. This turned out to be a town small enough that if you drive up and down the main street a few times, you will be seen by everyone who lives there. After a final humiliating manoeuvre in the main square, before a curious all-male audience, my husband jumped out to ask for directions. In my roles as driver and dutiful and modest wife, I waited in the car with the engine running. It was to become an oft-repeated ritual. Outside the main towns, few people spoke English but it was always enough to smile, say “Salaam alaykum” and point to the destination in Arabic in our guidebook while looking helplessly lost. In this way over the next week, my husband flagged down dozens of shepherds, construction workers, lorry drivers, motorcyclists, mechanics and farmhands. Whoever he hailed, the response would always be the same: a broad smile, and gestures that we understood to mean “just keep going”.
Finally, thanks to the advice of a small crowd of men decked in bushy moustaches and jellabiya, it seemed we were on the right road. A small sign to Rasafa appeared as we reached the very edge of town, just as we were about to lose hope and turn back to the refuge of the main road. A small coach appeared in my rear-view mirror, surely a sign that this must be the way to a tourist attraction. It disappeared again just as quickly and suddenly we understood what unlevel road meant as our car sprayed up enough grit to sandpaper the car and we peered through clouds of dust. Two hours later at a top speed of 15km an hour we reached a tarmac road just as panic had begun to set in. Even though we were in a car, and not trekking on foot across the desert, the sense of isolation and unchanging scenery was enough to bring on despair. In the nick of time, Rasafa had appeared.
The walled city of Rasafa became a well-known place of pilgrimage for followers of St Sergius, a Roman soldier martyred in 305 for refusing to make sacrifices to almighty Jupiter. Today, it is still possible to see delicate carvings on the dome of the basilica and the enormous size of the buried cisterns, the largest of which would have held 15,000 cubic metres of water, and sense some of the site’s former grandeur. Considered an important example of Byzantine architecture, it – like so many sites in Syria – has not yet been fully excavated and feels almost forgotten.
There is no entrance fee, no ugly signs to divert your attention, and certainly no cafe selling coffee and flapjacks. Like invaders, we climbed over the fortress’ walls and wandered uninterrupted. We found the large clay handle of an amphora lying discarded underfoot, but most amazing of all was the way that the walls, almost two kilometres long and made of local gypsum stone, shone in the strong, spring sunlight.
Heading north-west towards the refuge of Aleppo, the road shadows the great Euphrates, and the landscape changes: sand, grit and rock are replaced with greener, irrigated land, boy shepherds grazing their animals in the central reservation and rubbish as far as the eye can see. At one spot, industrial chimney stacks belted out enough smoke to make the sky almost appear on fire as the sun set behind. We craned our necks disappointed not to be able to see Lake Al Assad on our right, and had to make do with spotting fellow travellers instead. On the back of almost every flatbed lorry, there were people bobbing about; some sat on plastic chairs, smoking, others perched precariously on bales of cotton or boxes of oranges. A boy stood spread-eagled on the bumper of one, like a GI Joe action figure,clinging on to stacks of boxes for dear life.
The next day, after a night in Aleppo, with its twisting souq and hugely impressive citadel, we continued our odyssey north to the Turkish border, intrigued by the guidebook’s lyrical description of the Kurdish farmers’ lands, complete with olive groves and yet more shepherds. Not to mention some of the most pockmarked roads that we’d yet tried to navigate. It was slow going with many false turns: the narrow road undulated, sometimes tarmac, more often gravel, and, in the many small villages made of breeze block houses, a muddy mess of gaping, watery holes, thanks no doubt to heavy farm machinery. Our intended destination was to be the remains of Cyrrhus, the little that’s left of the city founded on a hill in 300BC. A peculiar second or third-century hexagonal-shaped Roman tower tomb in the field below, crowned with a Corinthian capital, marked our destination.
The real highlight of our meandering six-hour journey, however, proved to be the two second-century Roman bridges that we bumped over on the way to the tomb. Only five metres wide, and made of massive stones but without kerbstones to keep vehicles from slipping over the side, each spans a noisy river. When we left the car to listen to the birdsong and the sound of water rushing past; the air was clean and fresh – a valuable commodity in such a polluted country – and this part of Syria felt distinctly wintry and unmistakably European. My mobile phone beeped with a text message that read: welcome to Turkey.
When we finally arrived at Cyrrhus, exhausted by the effort, we couldn’t face schlepping up the hill to see yet more ruins and contented ourselves with a brief sprint to the tomb, where tractors were parked outside. The journey had proved more worthwhile than the goal but, strangely, it was no less rewarding for that.
Our thoughts turned to the journey back to Aleppo. Reluctant to retrace our path, we drove on, finally rewarded by a signpost and a main road, but then, with the light fading, we came to a halt: the way ahead was blocked by a huge mound of gravel. It was the end of the road. Ready to give up, we finally understood the value of hiring a local driver who would have known the quickest route from A to B without swearing and wasting time via C.
Then, our saving grace appeared. Dressed in fatigues, jellabiya and a kaffiyeh, Mostafa was a charming old man, well into his seventies, who pointed us towards Aleppo before jumping into the back seat and presenting me with a strongly scented narcissus flower. Unable to speak a word of English, we managed to introduce ourselves in pigeon Arabic before our hitchhiker directed us, left, right, and off-road around the side of a church when a funeral procession blocked our route again.
Without Mostafa’s assistance we would have spent the night in the car; instead we found ourselves speeding towards Aleppo, accompanied by the sound of his prayer beads clicking. The sighs from the back of the car gradually became louder until Mostafa slapped his chest and said something to my husband. Busy dodging other cars like bullets, I asked: “What did he say?”. My husband maintained a diplomatic silence while I quickly figured out that Mostafa had asked to drive so that we’d get to Aleppo more quickly.
Eventually we reached a busy roundabout on the outskirts of the city where he asked me to stop the car. We watched as he disappeared into a crowd of people buying and selling goods at makeshift stalls, but not before he planted an enthusiastic kiss of thanks on my husband’s cheek. The meeting, full of warmth, a few misunderstandings and good humour, was like our stay in Syria and felt all too brief.
Sunday, 1 February 2009
The road to a new Old Damascus
DAMASCUS -- Scenes from the old, walled city of Damascus: A carpet dealer skilled at multilingual bargaining is cajoling a tourist into his showroom. A rhythmic tap-tap-tap resonates from a doorway as an artisan hammers silver strips into a richly decorated brass tray. A Syrian woman does the day's shopping, visiting one stall for meat, another for olives, a third for flatbread.
The charm of the ancient part of the Syrian capital has always been the easygoing harmony with which tourists and Damascenes share the narrow alleys and covered markets. But now this crowded district - at the centre of what's believed to be the world's oldest continuously inhabited city - is in danger of losing this endearing character.
Aggressive investors flush with cash have pushed property prices so high that homeowners increasingly are selling long-time family properties and moving away. Others are fleeing the pollution and congestion generated by dozens of new trendy restaurants and boutique hotels catering to wealthy visitors and Damascus' expanding hip and rich crowd.
Now, the debate on how much latitude to give private enterprise is gathering steam as authorities try to balance the revitalization of the 128-hectare old city with preservationist goals. Already, about 50 hotels and 120 restaurants and cafés have been licensed, and among the many up and running are some shoddy imitations of traditional Arab architecture.
"This city is being turned into an amusement park," complained Hikmat Shatta, a French-educated architect, describing the changes overtaking the neighbourhood where he grew up and still lives.
"In some parts, I walk with my eyes fixed on the ground," Shatta said. "I am ashamed to look up and see what is happening. We are moving from the authentic to the bizarre and ridiculous."
In the maze of alleys, cobblestone streets, Turkish baths, coffee houses and historical sites that form the old city, the prospect of most residents disappearing is especially troubling because the area once exemplified Syria's religious and ethnic harmony. Most of the Jewish inhabitants are gone, but the Muslims and Christians who remain live in peace, their places of worship sometimes just steps apart.
The human diversity is reflected in the historic sites. The Omayyad Mosque, built in the eighth century, is on a site that earlier held a temple dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter and a Christian church. Today, the mosque has shrines housing what are said to be the heads of both John the Baptist and Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed.
Nearby is the tomb of Saladin, the 12th-century Muslim warrior who fought the Christian crusaders. The old city also is home to storied Straight Street, where, as the Bible recounts, St. Paul regained his sight and was baptized.
The old city was long shielded from development because Syria's radical politics isolated the country, but now it is attracting European tourists, and this poses complex changes, says Nazir Awad of the state's Antiquities Authority. He says authorities must simultaneously try to curb pollution, protect existing homes, attract new residents and revitalize the area without changing its character.
Not everyone opposes the developers' invasion. Some long-time residents say the area was slowly dying, with many inhabitants leaving for modern neighbourhoods to escape the high cost of maintaining old homes built of mud bricks and plaster.
As a result, poor migrants from rural Syria moved in, lured by spacious homes and low rents, and the area went downhill.
Some old-timers say that until the old city attracted investors' attention in the mid-1990s, many of its streets were deserted once stores closed shortly after nightfall.
"What we have now is the better of two evils," said Samer Antoine Kozah, an art dealer who lives in an eight-room house that has been in his family for about 150 years.
"Yes, the old city is threatened, but let us be realistic - it was dying. The restaurants and hotels have changed my life and disturbed me, but I thank their owners for doing business here," said the 51-year-old Kozah, sitting in his gallery before a large photograph he took of the old city at sunset.
OMAYYAD MOSQUE One of the world's oldest and largest mosques, it sits on a spot considered sacred for at least 3,000 years, with Arameans, Greeks, Romans and Arabs in turn building places of worship there. The mosque overlooks a broad square entered through columns surviving from the Roman era.
TOMB OF SALADIN The tomb of the legendary Muslim general, who fought the armies of the Third Christian Crusade, is in a small garden next to the Omayyad Mosque. Saladin died of a fever in Damascus in 1193. His name in Arabic, Salah a-Din, means "righteousness of the faith."
STRAIGHT STREET The street dates to Roman times. It runs east to west and, according to the Bible, is where St. Paul's eyesight was restored by St. Ananias. Part of the street is the covered Medhat Pasha market; the street is entered through Bab al-Sharki, one of the old city's main gates.
HOUSE OF ST. ANANIAS This is where St. Paul is believed to have been baptized. St. Ananias became the first bishop of Damascus and later was stoned to death by order of the city's Roman governor.
AL-HAMIDIYAH SOUK This market is next to the Damascus citadel. It's the city's largest covered market and contains shops dealing in Syrian crafts and antiques as well as everyday goods.
MORE INFORMATION
MINISTRY OF TOURISM
http://www.syriatourism.org.
The charm of the ancient part of the Syrian capital has always been the easygoing harmony with which tourists and Damascenes share the narrow alleys and covered markets. But now this crowded district - at the centre of what's believed to be the world's oldest continuously inhabited city - is in danger of losing this endearing character.
Aggressive investors flush with cash have pushed property prices so high that homeowners increasingly are selling long-time family properties and moving away. Others are fleeing the pollution and congestion generated by dozens of new trendy restaurants and boutique hotels catering to wealthy visitors and Damascus' expanding hip and rich crowd.
Now, the debate on how much latitude to give private enterprise is gathering steam as authorities try to balance the revitalization of the 128-hectare old city with preservationist goals. Already, about 50 hotels and 120 restaurants and cafés have been licensed, and among the many up and running are some shoddy imitations of traditional Arab architecture.
"This city is being turned into an amusement park," complained Hikmat Shatta, a French-educated architect, describing the changes overtaking the neighbourhood where he grew up and still lives.
"In some parts, I walk with my eyes fixed on the ground," Shatta said. "I am ashamed to look up and see what is happening. We are moving from the authentic to the bizarre and ridiculous."
In the maze of alleys, cobblestone streets, Turkish baths, coffee houses and historical sites that form the old city, the prospect of most residents disappearing is especially troubling because the area once exemplified Syria's religious and ethnic harmony. Most of the Jewish inhabitants are gone, but the Muslims and Christians who remain live in peace, their places of worship sometimes just steps apart.
The human diversity is reflected in the historic sites. The Omayyad Mosque, built in the eighth century, is on a site that earlier held a temple dedicated to the Roman god Jupiter and a Christian church. Today, the mosque has shrines housing what are said to be the heads of both John the Baptist and Hussein, the grandson of the Prophet Mohammed.
Nearby is the tomb of Saladin, the 12th-century Muslim warrior who fought the Christian crusaders. The old city also is home to storied Straight Street, where, as the Bible recounts, St. Paul regained his sight and was baptized.
The old city was long shielded from development because Syria's radical politics isolated the country, but now it is attracting European tourists, and this poses complex changes, says Nazir Awad of the state's Antiquities Authority. He says authorities must simultaneously try to curb pollution, protect existing homes, attract new residents and revitalize the area without changing its character.
Not everyone opposes the developers' invasion. Some long-time residents say the area was slowly dying, with many inhabitants leaving for modern neighbourhoods to escape the high cost of maintaining old homes built of mud bricks and plaster.
As a result, poor migrants from rural Syria moved in, lured by spacious homes and low rents, and the area went downhill.
Some old-timers say that until the old city attracted investors' attention in the mid-1990s, many of its streets were deserted once stores closed shortly after nightfall.
"What we have now is the better of two evils," said Samer Antoine Kozah, an art dealer who lives in an eight-room house that has been in his family for about 150 years.
"Yes, the old city is threatened, but let us be realistic - it was dying. The restaurants and hotels have changed my life and disturbed me, but I thank their owners for doing business here," said the 51-year-old Kozah, sitting in his gallery before a large photograph he took of the old city at sunset.
OMAYYAD MOSQUE One of the world's oldest and largest mosques, it sits on a spot considered sacred for at least 3,000 years, with Arameans, Greeks, Romans and Arabs in turn building places of worship there. The mosque overlooks a broad square entered through columns surviving from the Roman era.
TOMB OF SALADIN The tomb of the legendary Muslim general, who fought the armies of the Third Christian Crusade, is in a small garden next to the Omayyad Mosque. Saladin died of a fever in Damascus in 1193. His name in Arabic, Salah a-Din, means "righteousness of the faith."
STRAIGHT STREET The street dates to Roman times. It runs east to west and, according to the Bible, is where St. Paul's eyesight was restored by St. Ananias. Part of the street is the covered Medhat Pasha market; the street is entered through Bab al-Sharki, one of the old city's main gates.
HOUSE OF ST. ANANIAS This is where St. Paul is believed to have been baptized. St. Ananias became the first bishop of Damascus and later was stoned to death by order of the city's Roman governor.
AL-HAMIDIYAH SOUK This market is next to the Damascus citadel. It's the city's largest covered market and contains shops dealing in Syrian crafts and antiques as well as everyday goods.
MORE INFORMATION
MINISTRY OF TOURISM
http://www.syriatourism.org.
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