A House in Damascus - Before the Fall Read online

  On re-entering the hotel we were treated to an extraordinary sight. Across the lobby sashayed two tall, beautiful women wearing high heels—and bikinis! It stopped the hotel that afternoon , even in this beach environment. This was in Syria. It would not have occurred in, say, a Jordanian hotel on the Dead Sea or most anywhere else in the Arab world, but it was happening in Lattakia. It was clearly unusual, perhaps even unique, but the point was that it happened in Bashar al-Assad's Syria before the rise of all the bloodshed and mayhem. (There is an interesting point here—some of an earlier generation suggest that the more conservative dress styles came with the rise of the Assad regime, and that life was simpler and less rigid before that rise). It would be a stretch way too far to interpret this beach incident as a sign fundamental change was already occurring in Bashar al-Assad's Syria but, still, it indicated some of the options and choices some Syrians were making already. However, can only imagine what Salah ah-Din might have thought.

  Imagining his thoughts was far simpler back along and off the main road between Lattakia and Homs. About sixty kilometres from Homs towards the other port city of Tartous and its Russian naval presence, a notable shape appears on the top of a hillside. As you leave the main road and drive closer in towards it, the shape sharpens into a castle that becomes ever more massive the closer it looms. The road follows a valley and its slopes, along which the now standard modern apartment blocks, shops and houses appear. One of these profusions is the whacky Al Wadi hotel, built progressively in what is vaguely described as "Crusader style". Balconies on its western side rooms provide an uninterrupted view up the hill to what by now is a hulking presence that belittles everything else—Krak Des Chevaliers or, locally, Qalaat el Hosn (stronghold castle).

  Krak Des Chevaliers is the best example of a Crusader castle, and has survived for over a thousand years. It began life as a Kurdish castle commanding the important valley trade route from the interior to the Mediterranean coast, and it still overlooks vast plains away towards the coast, now covered in buildings but back then a significant and fertile food bowl. The Crusaders recognised its strategic significance as they moved slowly south towards Jerusalem, their ultimate goal. Over many years Krak was added to, strengthened, fortified, made more sophisticated, and in all the Crusading years it was never taken by force, such was its impregnability. The castle finally fell to the Mamluk Sultan Baybars in 1271, when he fabricated a letter from the Crusader commander in Tripoli, advising defenders to surrender because no more European reinforcements were available.

  At its high point, Krak Des Chevaliers hosted a population of over two thousand inside its walls, and perhaps only two hundred of those were knights—this potent attacking force was highly expensive to run, so commanders controlled the numbers. This defensive stronghold was turned over to the Knights Hospitaller in 1144, the body that began supporting Christian pilgrims to the Holy Land, then eventually emerged as a military body aiding the Crusader cause.

  The castle symbolises the seriousness and complexity of this cultural and religious clash of wills that haunts us still. Even now it is a very steep climb by car up the hill to the entrance, and the sheer size of the place is best judged by how puny the huge tour buses parked at its base appear. The convoy of camper vans driven by a party of Europeans looked even smaller. The main entrance thoroughfare was built to accommodate two fully equipped knights mounted on warhorses, riding side by side up the winding incline to the interior. The architecture, design and engineering are still breathtaking. Massive, soaring walls up to fifty metres high enclose a labyrinth of accommodation and service areas, complete with well-thought out sanitation. Given that it developed over a long period, several architectural and cultural styles are now evident, notably the elegant Norman-style hall in the main courtyard at the top of the entrance way. Elsewhere there are enormous bathing and baking complexes, and the layout shows what a bustling place it was.

  It remained that way for a very long time, too. When that intrepid traveller Gertrude Bell visited Krak in the very early twentieth century she, too, rode up the long keep to the courtyard. The horses in her party "stumbled and clanked" their way over the cobblestones, as a thin light filtered in through the "few loopholes" in the walls. The villagers were then still living in the castle—they would be shifted out very much later—and a butcher was still plying his trade at the gate.57

  The ideological heartbeat for all this development and campaigning now looks paradoxically puny. The chapel is away in the northeast corner of the complex, a narrow but high-vaulted space which would barely have held all the knights at their most numerous. When Baybars took the castle, he had a mihrab added to the space to make it a prayer hall, as it is still now labelled.

  It is hard here to avoid the thought that, as symbolised by the relative sizes of fort and chapel, this huge undertaking was based flimsily on a small amount of understanding and appreciation. From that time onwards, relations between the Christian and Muslim worlds have never really recovered, those initial frosty relations reinforced by crass, early twentieth century political stupidities that saw outside forces carve up Arabia and the Holy Land with no input from the inhabitants. More latterly, the same strain of misunderstanding and self-interest has ensured that division, decay and destruction continue.

  Being at Krak, though, helps convey the complexity of all this. It could not have been built and defended without substantial interaction between invader and resident. Local populations supplied it with food and services. Local industry provided the huge stone masonry, and local labour fashioned that into the fort. Local skills and knowledge informed the design and construction engineering. There were, then, long periods where invader and resident came to know each other well, to understand the other perspective, and to gain more detailed knowledge. There was rapprochement, and throughout the Crusades there were times when a Christian outpost at Krak was surrounded and ignored by the forces of Islam.

  The relationship between Salah ah-Din and the Lionheart might well have been idealised but, within it, there were moments of peace and understanding that showed how things might be in a better world led by people committed to understanding and negotiation.

  Car Cultures

  ~

  There were no cars in the immediate neighbourhood of the house because the lanes were too narrow, permitting only the small rubbish truck whose driver amazingly navigated the maze a couple of times a day, and the similarly small delivery vehicles that pitched up to the restaurants throughout the day. Qasr Ath-Thaqafeh, however, streamed traffic in from Straight Street then directed it back out again via the street along from the bakery, where yet another stream entered having wended its way down from Bab Touma Street or up from Quemariye. This was a bottleneck created by history, and social practice.

  Imperial regimes might leave, but the cultures attached to them take longer to do so. For a place that loathed French rule, the loathing doubled by the knowledge that French sovereignty stemmed from a doublecross schemed up with the English, the persistence of things French is fascinating. To see the "Musee National", for example, seems odd and so, too, do many of the signs in French on houses and monuments, on madrasa, public buildings and streets. Strangely, that persistence came in handy, however, because the French—perhaps trying to recapture earlier glory days amidst these now economically depressing ones—provided a good proportion of the tourists who were appearing immediately before the upheaval.

  Among the things that the French left were Peugeot, Renault and Citroen, new models now mixing along a surprising number of old ones. Over in a Christian Quarter back alley, a perfectly maintained example of the old frog-eyed, long and slung-back Citroen from the 40s and 50s with the distinctively box-shaped boot sat proudly, tight into the wall on the alley. Modern Peugeot 206s squeezed past it, in a stream of the latest models from several marques.

  The most spectacular vehicles were the old tanks and spaceships made by the Americans in the fifties and sixties, the Dodge, Studebaker
and Chevrolet behemoths that look huge on any roads let alone those in the Old City. Under the Hafez al-Assad motorway, just off Al Midan Street and parked near a cleared lot, there was a magnificent Cadillac—how did it get there? Or what about the marvellous, faded Studebaker parked up a laneway near all the sweetshops nearby? It takes a good many three point turns to navigate the Old City narrows in these beasts, as well as the affectionate sympathy and support of fellow road users and pedestrians. It is almost as if the old cars have somehow become the modern symbols of the city's history, because in some quarters these cars are revered.

  One day, a new face appeared in the antique shop for tea. His occupation was arranging car rallies, and he reported a big and enthusiastic following. He had just returned from a rally in Turkey where there were also active discussions to create a Turkey-Lebanon-Syria-Jordan run, a parallel to all attempts at gaining strategic unity in the Arab world. Every year now, he said, there was a "Welcome to Syria" car rally run for charity, and it included celebrities from the worlds of Arab public life, films, music and popular culture. It arose, he reckoned, from a combined love for culture and cars.

  On Thursday through to Saturday nights, areas like Straight Street and the stretch through the Old City emerging out along Hammam Al Bakri Street onto Bab Touma Street, became an open air car display room. On one memorable night, the Jesuit Church in Hammam Bakri was the scene of a wedding that required a fleet of eight white Audi A6s to come the wrong way up the street. Traffic was backed up in all directions, there were elaborate parking and exit manoeuvres, and considerable organisational intervention from both guests and passing observers. Most people simply admired the cars, as they do when there are other weddings throughout the Quarter where vehicles turn up festooned in flowers, the brides decked out in fashionable dresses made in small shops like the one around from the house in the lane up to the sweet souk.

  On weekend nights, particularly, the boy racers were everywhere. Windows down, both in summer and winter, stereos at full throttle with the latest Arab techno or rap damaging their own eardrums and those of all within a few hundred meters, the racers sat, usually at a standstill. One authority reckons this to be part of "feeling" the music, and part of the evolutionary clash between old and new.58 Like counterparts around the world their mufflers were modified, if not always the engines, attracting the same disapproving looks dispensed by elders everywhere. Their cars were festooned with the local variations on cultural icons that appear around the world: crosses, crescents, scimitars, medallions, prayer beads, and an explosion of soft toys.

  Like their global counterparts, too, these guys chatted to all the young ladies who sometimes responded, but mostly looked baffled at encountering a carload of young guys seemingly able to tolerate huge amounts of noise. On the open road, these same poseurs sometimes attempted to recreate every car chase ever set in film on the hilly streets of San Francisco, but settled mostly for weaving in and out of traffic on the semi-freeways, or for the occasional speed limit violation out on the highways.

  Kia, Hyundai, GM, Chevrolet and Mazda dominated the market with Mitsubishi, Ford and a gaggle of others making up the numbers. Around the city and out in the country, along the main roads, long stretches of car sales yards full of vehicles awaited the-then ever increasing numbers of buyers. Some of those buyers had exotic tastes. Seeing a Hummer in Straight Street was a challenge to the senses, especially given its military connection that had been so prominent in the desert conflicts. The same applied, in lesser degree, to the Land Rover Defenders that appeared all over the city, many used by military personnel but others by people obviously from rural areas. The "4WD/SUV in the city" syndrome was as apparent here as anywhere in the west, with desert-capable vehicles patrolling Old City streets but clearly never having been off the tarseal.

  This provided unique visual opportunities. One was the modern black VW Beetle parked at the top of Al Amin street in front of the poster suggesting Mahatma Gandhi "Learned From Husayn." That was on the occasion of the Shia Martyr's anniversary at nearby mosques, which produced a host of such inventive placards, and somehow the incongruity seemed to work.

  The ultimate incongruity, of course, is that the streets and alleyways of the Old City were designed for pedestrian traffic but were now dominated by these modern vehicles. Over in the Midan, those streets developed to service the camel caravans that headed in and out on trade missions or on the Haj. The city has adapted as it has done to all else, but these cars still seemed alien. No doubt, the in-flow would have ceased once sanctions imposed in wake of the 2011 disturbances set in, so perhaps all the new models will become the surviving Cadillacs and Studebakers of the future.

  The Moving Image

  ~

  There was something surreal about watching Jarhead in a house in Damascus.

  That film, of course, has Jake Gyllenhaal in a brilliant portrayal of Anthony Swofford who wrote the book of the same name, and this is a rare occasion when the film might just be better than the book. The story has Swofford joining the US Marine Corps prior to Desert Shield and Desert Storm, withstanding the bastardisation to become a sniper. His outfit is shipped to Kuwait, its days filled with mindless trivia before entering Iraq. He fires not a shot in anger, the war ends, but by then he has seen the carnage inflicted on Iraqis, and the irrational behaviour of a military intent on killing. The film evokes sympathy for the innocent victims of war but little for the alleged Arab perpetrators, with one maddened American grunt ranting gleefully about dozens of dead "ragheads", one of the many contemporary variations on the epithet: towelheads, mad mullahs, camel jockeys, sand niggers, hajis and all the rest of the demeaning and derogatory terms.

  It seemed ideologically odd to be able to buy the DVD for the equivalent of one dollar, along with just about every other Iraqi war movie made by the Americans, most of which depict an American honour or righteousness even when evoking sympathy for victims and what happens to individual American soldiers. Series like The Unit and Over There that play up the same values were not readily available, but almost all the films were. Similarly available was Spielberg's deeply flawed Munich, with Eric Bana as the Israeli avenging angel against the Munich Olympics massacre masterminds in Black September and the PLO. In that film, the Arabs appear singularly one dimensional, unreasonable and inflexible as well as vengeful. Again, the only sympathy is for a potential Arab child victim, and for the Bana figure who goes through post-traumatic stress, brought on by non-support from his own side as much as by his experience of killing Arabs.

  The odd presence of these films in the cheap DVD shops along Quemariye and throughout the city was offset occasionally by the appearance of one from "this" side of the fence, like Paradise Now. Here, two lifelong but young Nablus friends commit to a suicide bombing raid in Israel. One finally goes off, having managed to get his friend returned home, and the film ends with the volunteer sitting in a bus full of Israeli soldiers and civilians. Allegedly the best insight into what drives this behaviour the film, successful at the Oscars, looked an amateurish, almost shallow attempt at understanding the driving forces, despite its setting in the ravaged West bank where people eke out a miserable living in bleak conditions.

  The central question was this—if Syria was as closed a society as generally described, how come these films were available for viewing in the old Arabic house? That house was not far from the spot in the main thoroughfare where a metal Israeli flag was fastened to the ground, so that thousands of people could trample on it daily. This was also a reminder of how closely the Americans had aligned with Israel and so complicated regional politics for generations. The Americans and the Israelis were the popular villains, yet their fictionalised versions and interpretations of events were freely available for viewing.

  This seemed remarkably tolerant, especially when the general depiction of Syria was so negative in all these films and series. In the 2011-12 American TV series hit, Homeland, the main character returns to the United States eight year
s after having been captured in Iraq, but with most of his terrible incarceration spent in Syria. In both The Unit and Over There, Syria is the motif for all that is the worst in terrorism and "fundamentalism". In Body of Lies, the CIA operative played by Leonardo de Caprio is taken out of Jordan and into Syria, so he can be "processed" properly by Jordanian intelligence agents released from their own rules. That is, Syria is portrayed generally as a lawless, "anything goes" zone. In the earlier The Sum Of All Fears, the action proceeds from a missile-carrying plane being shot down while flying over Syria. This bleak, narrow and stylised American view of Syria, then, was freely and surprisingly available inside Syria.

  A superficial reading might put that down to the enterprise of local small business people who see a chance to sell American movies, with no consideration of ideology. After all, President Bashar himself was a leader in the rise of IT and the internet in Syria, considering it an essential piece of modernisation. Some things were suspiciously unavailable on the web locally, like Amazon—but there was inconsistency, because ABE books could be accessed. Then, the availability of those films might have arisen from the difficulty of policing the internet and its attendant DVD proliferation. However, it might also have been perceptible recognition that the spread of information was inevitable.