A House in Damascus - Before the Fall Read online

  From the oddly out of character Bab Kissan, the view over the road is further reminder of what Damascus has been and how it has evolved. There is a church within the same camera viewer frame as a mosque, and around the church there is a cemetery.

  The wall then immediately changes, a remnant rather than a presence. It encloses what is oddly open space in a city where that commodity is at a premium. For a few hundred metres there is an amalgam of styles and periods, but some excavation shows much of the original wall now lying some way below the present levels. Base and superstructure: Damascus invented that before it was discovered by the cultural Marxists.

  The line peters out on the way through to the bottom of Al Amin Street and its residential area. In fact, the wall cuts in through residential areas so that tantalising glimpses appear through fences, over other walls, through open gates and even incorporated into buildings. Bab Saghir is almost hidden amidst this, off to the right of the road that feeds through the bottom of the souk from the main road. It is a fabulous gate, still used every day by people who pass beneath the beautiful ancient Arabic calligraphy and never give it a thought. This gate is especially important in the history of Damascus, because it is the main portal to the Saghir cemetery where lie some of the most significant people in Syrian history and, indeed, in the history of Islam. They include the husband of Halimah, the Prophet's wet nurse.

  From there the wall winds through and around to Bab Jabiye that is now so incorporated in the souk that it is almost impossible to find. It is low, squat and impressive, even if festooned by clothes from the nearby traders who have adapted it into their lives. The massive iron doors are still there, as they are at Saghir, but they have not been shut for a very long time and probably never will be—the succeeding levels of asphalt layers are now well above the base of the doors.

  Bab Al Jabiye really turned up of its own accord in that, such is Damascus, I had walked within a few metres of it almost every time I returned through Souk Medhat Pasha. All I had to do, by accident one day, was go just one more alley coming from Hamidiyeh, turn left, quickly right then further still left, and there it was. It is the classic gate, solid but low in height with a squared-off arch, thickly-stoned and graced by fantastically heavy iron, decorated gates that have now not closed for many years. The trading stalls are now built all around those gates, that lead to yet another maze of commercial activity behind Medhat Pasha.

  Every day, then, produced yet more heritage treasures, often in the most unexpected ways and places, a central part of the allure and mystery of Damascus.

  Salah ah-Din's Shadow

  ~

  An impressive statue sits in front of the Citadel, just along from the entrance to the souk Hamidiyeh. A distinguished-looking, bearded and helmeted soldier is seated on a horse, guarded by two watchful soldiers. Huddled immediately under the horse's backside, literally ready to be shat upon, cower two vanquished foes. The rider is Salah ah-Din (known more straightforwardly in the West as Saladin), the great scourge of the Crusaders and whose memory is still revered, demonstrated daily by the stream of visitors paying homage at his nearby tomb beside the Umayyad Mosque. The two vanquished Crusaders are Guy de Lusignan, who was the King of Jerusalem, and the unlovable Renault de Chatillon who commanded the mighty Karak Castle, further south of what is now Amman in Jordan. Renault de Chatillon is said to be the only Crusader prince killed by the otherwise saintly Salah ah-Din: the Frenchman had hassled Salah ah-Din's sister, and was also said to have tried to steal the Prophet's remains from Medina.

  A couple of years earlier, during a break while on assignment in Jordan, I spent an afternoon wandering the impressive Karak remains, probably now the second-best Crusader castle to visit. It is south of Amman on the King's Highway, a switchback ribbon that threads through the towering hills and swooping valleys of the chain that falls precipitately to the Dead Sea and so, by definition, gives a clear line of site over the West Bank and into Israel. This is the fulcrum of world history both ancient and modern. The first approach to Karak is through the town itself, and the stroll into the castle from that side is anti-climactic to say the least. A little wooden footbridge leads over a modest moat to a ticket box, tucked under an equally modest wall and in an undistinguished staging area.

  It is only when you start wandering through the levels and along the walls that the true power of the place emerges. Karak sits right on the edge of a sheer drop of perhaps two thousand metres but looks a lot more. The castle was first built atop this, then over the years its inhabitants created a catacomb of levels, rooms and hidden spaces underneath at the same time as they started building up. Originally, of course, the castle was out on its own,, but over the ages the town built towards the giant, so now it is actually in an urban setting that helps underplay its initial impressiveness. One guide book hinted that for a fee an attendant might just show off the magnificent hall that lies underneath the main courtyard. Sure enough, for a small fee, he showed me to some stairs that led to wooden doors opening into a cavernous but impressive space once used for major occasions. Along its outside walls, a series of windows both let in light and gave a breathtaking sense of the drop into the valley. This was why Karak was so important, and so substantial.

  While exploring the chains of rooms that were once Crusader residences, the grander halls assigned to the greater nobles, the kitchens where lesser folk toiled, and the servants' quarters that made up the bulk of the castle, I thought not once about Renault de Chatillon, but frequently of Salah ah-Din. Exploring the site and standing on the ramparts looking miles off into the distance, it was almost as if his spirit was there on my shoulder.

  There was an historiographical journey at play here. G.M. Trevelyan,the pioneering English social historian, once said that his craft required its practitioners to own a stout pair of boots (these days the reference would be to sturdy Keens or Eccos, no doubt). My addiction to social history was fired by reading Sir Steven Runciman's three volume History of the Crusades while an undergraduate student at the University of Canterbury in far-off New Zealand.53 While no apologist for the Western invaders, Runciman did not necessarily provide the story of the "Other", as we would now term it—many years later, Amin Maalouf's The Crusades Through Arab Eyes provided that insight magnificently.54 Rather, Runciman provided a clear sense of what it had been like and, by definition, raised questions concerning how it all worked and how people ran their lives. The iconic T.E. Lawrence's work on the Crusader castles did something similar, but the combined effect was more of an idealised view about those days.55 That was especially so for a young, country town New Zealander for whom the seventy five kilometre shift to Christchurch was in itself an adventure. My subsequent intellectual journey has been about trying to locate the "historical view" from the other side: India, sport, Asia generally, the Caribbean and, now, the Levant.

  At the outset I had one great advantage, the extraordinary J.J. Saunders of Canterbury's History Department and who, although I did not then realise it, began developing that view of the "Other" both in his writing and through his teaching. John Joseph Saunders (identified behind his back as "JJ" but addressed always as "Mr. Saunders") came to New Zealand from England after World War II.56 He had begun his academic career in what was then the lowly centre of Exeter between the wars, and developed a sense of the grand sweep overview of history, especially of the medieval period in what is now known as Central Asia. He spent some of World War II in military intelligence in India but, soon after that conflict concluded, decided a better future lay in New Zealand at the Canterbury University College of the University of New Zealand, which would become the University of Canterbury in its own right before I arrived there.

  In truth, JJ was a daunting figure, intellectually rather than physically. He was short, broad and a little portly when I first encountered him but he carried himself well, his eyes through thick glasses pitched at a level well above his nose as he rolled into lectures, the aura strengthened by the strong, well-artic
ulated and distinctive Devonian voice. The first lectures I took from him were in the big first year introductory course, where he discussed medieval Europe and included a taste of the Crusader story. He made an impression, no mean feat because those lectures were on Monday evenings through winter in the old university site in Christchurch. It was cold and miserable, both getting to and even inside the hall, but he had something, the ability to spark an interest in events a long way off in time and space. Up close, as in the Tudor-Stuart course he ran by tutorial only in second year, he was demanding, especially if you had not done the reading. However, his specialist courses at senior levels on the Crusades and, wildly different, the intellectual origins of the Russian Revolution, were eye-poppingly wonderful, enriching demonstrations of why history was interesting and important. JJ was a gifted teacher. He had eschewed the PhD which is now de rigueur for any historian envisaging an academic career but his knowledge, insight and analysis was formidable. That allowed him to produce some outstanding works from far off New Zealand, including a history of the Mongols that must be reckoned as one of the original insights into the "Other".

  At Karak, then, I remembered JJ and his role in getting me there—and I was not the only one. Geoffrey Rice was in my year and eventually served the history department at Canterbury long and honourably. Under JJ's tutelage he wrote an honours thesis on the role of the Assassins during the Crusader period, before going on to British and then New Zealand history. While doing that work he, too, visited the Levant and some of the Crusader sites. At the same time now, though, I thought about Salah ah-Din and those medieval conflicts that still resonate.

  Arriving in Damascus later, I recalled those thoughts at Karak further to the south. Being so firmly located near the Umayyad Mosque, the house site never saw a Crusader because none ever got inside the city walls. That was not for the want of trying. In 1113 a force led by Baldwin I was so confident of victory that, in advance, it allocated who would get which of the city's houses and contents as booty. The city held out. That provoked a sequence of attacks, the last major one being in 1148 when Louis VII of France and Conrad of Hohenstaufen led the whole of the Crusader army against just this single city. They suffered terrible losses, marauding forces from inside the city picking them off at will. Damascus was never threatened again.

  However, the city did figure in later Crusader manoeuvres, in curious fashion. Later that century, Salah ah-Din faced his equally idealised counterpart, Richard I "The Lionheart" of England, in what was long regarded as a "civilised" struggle for Arabia. El Adil, both Salah ah-Din's brother and one of his generals, happened to befriend The Lionheart who lit upon an ingenious plan. He would marry his own sister off to Al Adil, give the couple Jerusalem and Acre as a separate kingdom, and so end the Holy War. It did not work because, after Salah ah-Din's death, Al Adil turned on the Crusaders and drove them out. It is interesting to imagine what his wife might have thought. El Adil is entombed in the Madrasa El A Deliya, a few hundred metres from the house, a memorial to the man who, besides marrying Richard I's sister, also built the nearby Citadel and strengthened the walls of the old Roman city of Bosra (near the Jordanian border) to protect them against attack.

  That curious marital alliance is a reminder of just how important this period was in determining the shape of the world as we know it now. Right across Europe large armies, along with their baggage trains and retinues, were encouraged to give up several years and quite possibly all of their lives to ride towards the Holy Land, part of a "liberation" movement against the Muslims who allegedly threatened civilised religious and social life. This was fewer than five hundred years after the Prophet established what now ranks as one of the world's three great belief systems. In just five hundred years, then, the great clash of ideas and ideals created what would be another three hundred years of intermittent bloodshed, bigotry, hatred and misunderstanding whose ideological reverberations, in turn, still influence our present lives.

  There is a further turn to this history and the study of the "Other" in my own life. As a New Zealander I am an avid rugby union fan, and as a Canterbury man I support the Christchurch-based franchise in the Super 15 competition. That causes me discomfort. The team is phenomenally successful but, for me, its name is abrasive—the Crusaders. Before each of its games a group of horses and riders parade the ground, decked out in faux Crusader uniforms with the riders brandishing swords. Attending fans wear replica Crusader helmets and also wave the souvenir swords. At a time of so much conflict in the Middle East, and given the history of the Crusades, it might be time for a re-think.

  My Karak experience of Salah ah-Din was repeated in Syria. It was simple to achieve in Damascus, simply by standing in front of the statue and remembering that the great man was entombed nearby. A two and a half hour drive to Homs produced something very different. Like Damascus, Homs never fell to the Crusaders. Instead, it was the centrepiece for a three-way struggle through that entire period involving the Crusaders, the Turks, and JJ's Mongols. The city was younger than Damascus, dating from about the 1st century BC, and serving a dual purpose as regional centre for a rich farming area, and strategic site on the trade routes that criss-crossed the region. From its earliest days, Homs (or Hims) has been a centre of resistance, including throughout the Crusader period. Over nine hundred years later, as the French were on their way out of Syria, Homs became a major support base for the rising Baath Party that would twenty years later produce the Assad dynasty. Not too long after that Homs and nearby Hama became Baath opponents, and then in 2011 re-emerged as major centres of resistance against the Bashar al-Assad regime.

  Project work took us to Al Baath University in Homs, on the southern edges of the city and very close to the area known as Bab Amr that would flash to global attention in late 2011. Regime forces shelled the area, and foreign correspondent Marie Colvin lost her life. All that had been unimaginable not too long before. As I sat in a restaurant one evening on my first visit to the city, the streets were suddenly devoid of traffic as huge crowds of young men took to the streets. They were celebrating an important victory by one of the local professional football teams at a nearby stadium. The flag and scarf waving, chants and songs, and sharing of joy with anyone who showed an interest were the displays of victory common around the world. They were no different from anyone else.

  The University's warm-spirited Vice-President, who also pointedly flouted the University's "no smoking on the premises" rule, saw an opportunistic gap in our program, and laid on transport for us to visit the old city. There were all the usual reminders of Syria's complex past and present. The main mosque was a splendid example of an earlier style, clean lines and a lovely interior. Not far away, though, stands the Um al-Zennar Church, a Syriac Orthodox centre going back hundreds of years, and famed because it holds what is said to be the belt worn by Mary, the Mother of Jesus. Homs, like elsewhere in Syria, has a heterodox population that, for the most part, has been harmonious.

  It is also highly hospitable, despite forever having been the butt of the sort of jokes the Irish tell about the Kerryman:

  Homsi: "Do you sell colour TVs?"

  Salesman: "Yes."

  Homsi: "Great. I want a green one."

  These Homsi jokes are legion, but the Homsis themselves are warm and friendly. While there on one occasion my local mobile phone managed to switch it off and, of course, I did not have the access code. We drove to a phone centre and the next thing I knew, four assistants were dealing with the phone that was taken away while I and my colleagues were plied with tea and sweets. In a few minutes the phone arrived back, in full working order. I went to pay but that was refused, politely but definitively:

  "Thank you for coming to Homs and we hope you have a nice stay."

  Who knows now what has happened to those marvellous people?

  About three hours away, out on the coast, Lattakia presented a different but as instructive story. Almost closer to Cyprus than Damascus, the city has been a port from somewh
ere around the fourth century BC, and in 333 BC was taken by Alexander the Great to later became an important Roman centre. When Islam arrived, one especially important development for Syria was that Lattakia and its region became the main centre for the Alawite community, an offshoot of the Shia but largely disowned by most of the major Islamic groups. The Assad family came from the Alawite, and Lattakia was the major centre.

  Lattakia did fall to the Crusaders, in 1097 at the start of the long period of conflict, and for almost a century was traded as part of alliance-building among the major crusading partners. In 1188, however, that man Salah ah-Din retook the city for Islam. As at Karak, his presence is evident in Lattakia, and even more so a little further down the road where the huge Crusader castle known as Marqab still towers over passersby. Lattakia, though, now has a different feel, particularly in its conflicting roles as a military centre and a tourist one. While I had heard whispered expressions of support for more "democracy" in Damascus, sitting one night at dinner in the naval officers club in Lattakia overlooking the western end of the Mediterranean, the talk was of the need for more "control" to better manage the rising youth movements and lifestyles considered a challenge to the normal order. People needed to be given direction and certainty.

  There was a radically different picture at the beachside hotel nearby. One afternoon, we decamped across the road to a bakery where tasty mini-pizzas and meat-filled pastries streamed out of a traditional oven, all to be washed down with good local coffee. We had come from a session where policy issues became tinged by political correctness, so the conversation now was about the political condition and its likely scenario, all against the growing actions in places like Tunisia and, especially, Libya. The consensus was that Syria would not take the same path, because although the regime had tight control it was also interested in returning Syria to the global political mainstream, freeing up the economy and loosening control. Those last two words were key, because they appeared often: there was a widespread view Syria should not speed towards full democracy because it had done well under Bashar, steady development would be much better than chaos. A few months later, that discussion would be recalled, especially because of what happened immediately after.