A House in Damascus
Before the Fall
by
Brian Stoddart
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Thank You.
For My Friends In Damascus—May You Prevail
Table of Contents
Preface
Prelude
Boutique Days
Not A Palace
The Jesus Minaret
A Manager From Melbourne
A Taxi to Work
Houses Around the Corner
The Souk Life
Souk Sarouja
The Carriers
Buying a Shirt
Man of La Kemba
An Antique Seller
Another Home at Brokar
Eating Out
Give Us This Day Our Daily Bread
Coffee
Sweets Are Us, and We Are Nuts
Hubble Bubble
Backgammon and Cards
The Animal Kingdom
A Fighter Pilot at the Bakery
Father, Son and Holy Ghost
Al Midan
Qanawat and Other Heritage
Salah ah-Din's Shadow
Car Cultures
The Moving Image
Books and Music
A Problem of Perception
Trysting
Tony Blair Should Live in The House
An Arabian Horse Journey
Straight Street Weaver
Careers
A Genuine Kilim
Living With/out Language
Hammam Bakri Spectacle
A Road From Damascus
Last Day
Lacuna
Bibliography
Preface
While there were some issues along the way and later, I am extremely grateful to the companies that commissioned me to work in Damascus and Syria, and so finally gave me the excuse to be somewhere I had always wanted to be. The European Union's aid and development arm provided the funding for the project that, sadly, was suspended at the onset of the 2011 troubles. Those organisations, then, very kindly made it possible for me to live in Damascus which, as always, is significantly different from visiting.
My project colleagues, local and international, may or may not recognise some of this. I learned much from them directly and indirectly and, unknowingly, they were wonderful sounding boards as I went about Damascus in search of understanding, ideas, inspiration and insight. Given what has transpired in the past year or so I am not naming them here, most especially not those Syrian colleagues who were all fabulous to work for, and whose loyalty to Syria deserves far more than they have received recently. They will all know who they are, and I hope they will know also just how much I am in their debt.
I am very grateful, too, to Joshua Landis and Matthew Gray, wonderful Syrian specialists who supported and indulged the enthusiasm of a curious newcomer to their field. Joshua generously posted to his excellent Syria Comment website anything I wrote on Syria through my blogsite, or through other website outlets like The Conversation. It has been enriching to exchange thoughts and ideas with people like Joshua and Matthew. Their on-going work reaffirms just how important it is that we continue to support and fund adequately all those universities around the world whose staff, at crucial moments, provide us with the deeper insight we so desperately need.
This venture into the new world of e-publishing has been facilitated by Nina Paules and her great team at ebookprep.com. Their production and design skills have turned an idea into an attractive reality for which I am extremely grateful. Numerous friends and acquaintances helped keep me going when it all seemed too hard, so thanks to them as well. Lynne McDonald, a friend from schooldays, kindly proofread an earlier version, as did an again unnamed friend in Damascus—any mistakes that remain are mine alone.
As always I owe the greatest thanks to my family who forever put up with me going off to do exotic things, and who have to rely on a usually unreliable Skype connection, text or email to keep up with what I am doing. Sandi was able to spend time with me in the House in Damascus, and came very quickly to love the place and the city as much as I did and still do. For the most part, though, she held everything together back home while I lived this latest dream. I can never thank her enough for allowing me all my adventures while she sacrifices many of her own interests. Our daughters Kirsten and Laura, film producer/writer and international relations specialist respectively, themselves global citizens and travellers, were also great supporters of what became one of the best experiences I have had anywhere in the world.
For that very reason and memory, it has been both difficult and sad to complete this book against the backdrop of the unfolding Syrian horrors of 2011 into 2012. Those events themselves have been bad enough, but made all the worse because of the personal connections I have back in Damascus and Syria. My colleagues, friends and acquaintances have gone through hell, and it has been hard to sit by and just watch, think and write. May they all survive, and know that at least one foreigner come to Damascus had them in his thoughts throughout.
Brian Stoddart
Prelude
~
Even before the present troubles began in Syria early in 2011, Damascus was regarded generally as a fabled city now tainted by allegations of links to terrorism. Despite that, it remained and still remains one of the world's great destinations. Perhaps the longest inhabited capital anywhere, and still strategically significant if now for political as opposed to the commercial reasons of earlier times, "Old Damascus" still retains a romantic ring. Following Edward Said's most famous work, some might say much of the attraction for outsiders is "Orientalist" in sway and, therefore, irrelevant.1 There might be something to that, but it would be wrong to accept such a reading as the whole version. Damascus has welcomed and accepted people now for two millennia and, during that time, some have come to conquer and be tolerated rather than welcomed.
In the modern world Damascus maintains an allure, especially for those in the West. By definition, much of that comes from its place in the Christian history that preceded its significance as a major intellectual influence on the Muslim world. After all, it was on the way here that Saul is said to have had his personal epiphany to become Paul and eventually St Paul. Once in the city, he had to escape pursuers wanting to rid th
emselves of a Christian nuisance, and there is still a symbolic basket at Bab Kissan where he was allegedly lowered over the wall. Almost two thousand years later, a generation in the British world saw either themselves or their family or friends in and around Damascus and Arabia as soldiers in two world wars, first against the Turks then, later, against the Germans but with the complication of the Vichy French. In between those odd polarities the world interacted with Damascus, Syria and its region in trade, diplomacy, politics and religious war.
Yet nowadays Syria remains an enigma, especially so after the events of 2011 that still continue. Under-reported and poorly reported, the country's reputation rather than its reality shaped perceptions everywhere. The complexities of its place in the Arab and Islamic world, its nuanced relationships with Iran and Lebanon, its intransigence on Israel, and the nature of its government under the al-Assad father and son succession at the head of the Baath Party, all combined to blur the picture of what Syria was really like.
For that reason, anyone venturing to Damascus and Syria on the eve of the troubles encountered a host of questions and expressions of concern. "Will you be safe?" was a too-common query from those whose knowledge came from a media fixated by anything that might be or potentially labelled or carry potential to as terrorism. In the general mind, there was little if any distinction between either the different segments of the Arab world or of the broader Islamic one. The great tragedy of the past twenty years is the approximation of Islam with what has too easily and readily been identified as "fundamentalism". The easy elision, consequently, is to see the whole of the former Arabia as a hotbed of pernicious paranoia leading to unprincipled attacks on a non-offensive West. Samuel Huntington's Clash of Civilizations will come to be seen as having had a very large hand in that, but he was not alone.2
Granted, a first time visitor to Damascus or elsewhere in the region could find it affronting when young boys run about neighbourhoods armed with replica pistols and AK-47s, reflecting in some ways the media images that led to all the disillusions in the first place. Granted, Syria plays an obvious and aggressive role against Israel within the Arab coalition. Granted, Syria's opposition to the allied invasion of Iraq and subsequent siding with Ahmajinedad's Shia-dominated Iran did not help improve its reputation.
Despite all that, anyone with a sense of history should welcome an opportunity to spend time in and learn about Damascus and Syria, especially if living there and working with a major government department as well as the university sector, trying to build future capacity. For a trained historian, that chance was also daunting, because the trade builds respect for accumulating detailed knowledge of a place and people over a long period. It doubts, even derides observations not based on masses of factual evidence, dismissing the idea that an intelligent observer might have useful and interesting things to say about such an experience.
Perhaps, then, it was an historian who reckoned that anyone visiting a new place and culture should write a book about it either within twenty four hours or after twenty four years, because everything in between lacked value. This book ignores that dictum and draws on the historical training, but ignores many of its rules in order to produce a sense of a place that deserves to be far better understood and, indeed, needs to be far better understood. It proceeds from a love of Damascus and its people, and of Syria, and is written from a perspective of sadness over what has happened in such a very short time.
Perhaps in some ways it is a memoir of a Damascus that may well take some time to reappear if, indeed, it ever does. If so, it will also be a memoir for what might have been.
Boutique Days
~
A couple of weeks let alone months or even years later, the first days in a new place, especially a "foreign" one, seem far off. The elapse of time can eradicate memories of three days survived without bags in the middle of a major Muslim festival because no-one was looking for them. More significantly, what initially seems a remote and bewildering maze later takes on ordered familiarity. It is important all the more, then, to remember those early points, because they mark the beginning of growth and learning.
During the thirty minute drive into Damascus from its airport, it is hard to imagine what the city might look like. It will not reflect those mid-nineteenth century W.H. Bartlett prints, obviously, and there is not a camel in sight. Yet all the guidebooks still refer to Damascus essentially as a magical place. To reach that magic now, you must cross flat, dry, whitish plains with little greenery or sign of life apart from people on building sites. This is not the view marvelled at by all the old time travellers, the one from the passes coming through from Beirut. Plastic bags bowl across the landscape, driven by the strong, hot winds of the dry season. The freeway eventually reaches the outskirts of the city and Mount Qassioun rears up in the background, suburbs now half way up its slopes.
At this point Damascus resembles many other cities in the region, strewn over now subjugated hills that host cement blocked apartment buildings sprouting forests of television and radio antennae. The outskirts are dusty, rubbishy, undistinguished. Sporadic stalls and markets appear in spaces and along streets, carrying everything from vegetables to toys. The elaborate freeway system funnels towards the centre, and tailored parks appear along with more substantial buildings and grander houses. Mosques stand out, but so do churches. Traffic thickens and the usual global brands appear: Toyota, Mazda, Citroen, BMW, Mercedes. Motor cycles are rare, a shock for anyone used to being in Asia. Bicycles are an endangered species. There are pedestrians, but not in that sense: they are more like free range people who just happen to be crossing roads. In short, there is little about Damascus that is different from most other places in the world, apart from the expectation.
Depending on the approach, coming into the Old City may or not be a surprise. The driver pulled up at the bottom of a one-way street that later revealed itself as Al Amin, which separates the Southern Muslim and Jewish Quarters and retains a strong Shia character. There was no gate or wall, and the area was surrounded by multi-storied apartment blocks fronted by fruit and vegetable stalls. But we were in the Old City, the driver said. A young man arrived with a two wheeled trolley in vain expectation of bags to carry, unaware of the non-services rendered by the airline that day. He took what there was, and led off up Al Amin.
The area was closed for the holidays, but kids were playing with toy guns, people were talking and surveying new passersby. After one hundred and fifty metres, the trolley boy swung left into what looked like a laneway to nowhere crammed with broken stuff. He swung right then left again, into an apparently dead-end alleyway. On one side, an open area hosted the remains of a collapsed house. Next to it stood another, looking like it would soon follow suit. At the end of the lane, the upper levels of buildings leaned in towards each other, almost touching. We were almost in a tunnel without windows. He stopped, reached up a wall, rang an unnoticed bell. What was this?
The brown wooden door in a lime washed lemon-coloured wall opened—into a serene, picturesque, elegant space with a fountain in the middle surrounded by wooden tables bearing plates of fruit and a breakfast out of Gourmet Traveller: olives, flat bread, hommus, yoghurt, several different cheeses that obviously included haloumi, pastries, and several other things yet to be identified. And there was the smell of coffee.
For once, the booking engine-identified boutique hotel outmatched its online promise. As it would turn out, most such establishments did in Damascus. This one had a small number of mostly small rooms apart from the one to which I was directed, up in the top corner looking out onto a little patio. Its interior was entirely Damascene with painted poles supporting the roof, with the cupboards and furniture done in similarly distinctive style. The stairs were steep, the absent bags an unexpected blessing.
Then the only hotel like it in the immediate area, but with several others planned, this gem was fashioned out of a house at least four hundred years old. The essential bones of its Arab design were maintained,
giving the place a character not found in homogenised Hyatts and subjugated Sheratons. Among the guests were some Australian refugees in from Dubai looking for holiday freedom, a family from France, a small group of Scandinavians, and a Kuwaiti couple, all drawn to Damascus for different reasons. This hotel also had an interesting precedent, too.
In the first edition of Murray's Handbook to the region, published in 1858, travellers were advised of two hotels now available to them. The Hotel de Palmyre was on Straight Street, but reportedly "neither clean nor comfortable", and an owner with a reputation for "Arab tricks." The other was the Locanda Malluk. Originally one of the first fine houses in Damascus, it was now refurbished in the best Damascene architectural style. The Melluk family were also among the leading silk merchants in the city. It was clear where the author thought travellers should stay.3
Three days now stretched out ahead before the office opened, and this present hotel in the Melluk tradition had no map. Directions were simple. Out the door, turn left, and immediately hit a T junction. Turn right, and pass a lovely little local mosque with a delicate turret before hitting another T. You are in the southern section. Turn left—and come to another left, a right incline up a sloping alley, or a hard right, and there will be Straight Street. These lanes were tight, the walls anonymous, shafts of bright early autumn sun warming sections of the street and throwing shadows from the tiny Damascene "balconies" that appeared in all the books. There was almost nothing open, apart from a tiny hole in the wall that dispensed nothing but bags of chips, and there were few people about.
Thus began three days of wanderings that led all over the Old City, blurring direction as well as time and sense. Al Hamidiyeh was as towering a souk as promised and some of its outlets were open to catch the tourists, especially those in search of towels or stuffed eagles. The outside walls of the Umayyad Mosque were as impressive as promised. The alleyways went in all directions. "Lost in the Jewish Quarter" sounds more like the title of an oil painting by a minor later-nineteenth century British painter than a state of being. A coffee shop had men outside nursing the smallest cups imaginable, and negotiating the overwhelming nargileh from which emanated massive clouds of sweet smoke. Promising streets narrowed to blank walls. Inconspicuous alleys led to major walkways. Here and there an open door revealed a massive interior courtyard. Rows and rows of shuttered doors hinted at the size and scope of interconnected souks. A profusion of black-garbed women (in 1883 an acerbic Mrs Mackintosh described them as "very substantial ghosts") were entering a modern mosque that looked Iranian from its markings, so must the Sayyida Ruqayya in the Shia Quarter.4 The mosque is named after the daughter of Hussein, son of the first Shia imam and one of the great Shia martyrs. (In mid-May 2012 came reports that the mosque's imam had been assassinated as the Syrian unrest took on distinctly sectarian tones). An inadvertent venture outside the wall led eventually back into the Old City, at Bab Touma in the Christian Quarter with its profusion of churches. That led down to the bottom of Straight Street at Bab Sharqi, from where a walk back up Straight Street led to the covered Souk Medhat Pasha (Pasha is the Turkish rather than Arabic spelling, but is used commonly to identify the souk).
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