Finding Common Ground in an Uncommon Nation

By: Ed O'Connell and Cheryl Bernard | March 19, 2008 | Travel

Meanwhile, her broad range of listeners — from truck drivers to farmers, from college kids to housewives — have all been initiated into the world of Feng Shui, learned the principles of “the laws of attraction” and “The Secret,” and are finding new age spirituality more appealing and planning for a happy future more interesting than extremist politics.

Our second night in Damascus finds us atop Qassioun Mountain, a popular destination for Syrians of all economic stripes. For the ordinary folk, roadside picnics and mobile kebab stands do the job. With Anzour, however, we travel to the very pinnacle, where the staff of a luxury restaurant falls all over itself to welcome us — actually him. Once seated at the best table with the most panoramic view, however, Anzour waxes pensive.

“Look down,” he tells us, with a dismissive gesture. “Do we see all those countless little triangles lit up in neon green? Those are all the minarets of the mosques, more mosques than any city could possibly need. And how many cinemas do we suppose the city has, by contrast? One! Change that balance and you can change the Middle East! Entertain people! Make them think! Give them hope and a wider horizon, and the radicals will soon be on the run. Sometimes I feel like, as an artist, I can’t breathe here,” he says, adding quietly, “I would just like to take my wife to the cinema once in awhile, that’s all.”

Yes, Anzour is a star here in Syria: respected, revered and listened to. But the world is bigger and so is his talent, so he has accepted a new project and a new patron: Muammar Qadaffi, Libya’s eccentric leader, and onetime U.S. enemy. Qadaffi has written a script and commissioned Anzour to film it. The screenplay concerns the Italian invasion and occupation of Libya at the start of the last century. The budget is no problem, not when “The Leader” has decreed that this film shall be made. As for Anzour, he dreams of getting a Golden Globe for this film, dreams of enticing Omar Sharif, Anthony Hopkins and Sean Connery to play the lead roles. Below us, thousands of lights twinkle in the city below . . .

The following morning, we make our way to the United Nations High Commission for Refugees office on the outskirts of Damascus to learn more about the large number of Iraqis who have fled to safety in Syria. A line of applicants, all hoping to register for rations and residence permits or better still, for visas to the West, snakes across the vacant lot behind the office. Spotting us as Westerners who perhaps work for an embassy and can help them, they quickly surround us, pushing tattered files and fistfuls of documents under our noses and pleading frantically for help. Two women, shaking from nervous exhaustion, beg us to intercede. They come here every day, but no one receives them, no one tells them anything.

Inside, country director Dietrun Gunther is almost as nervous as the refugees. Understaffed, the German-born official’s office is no match for the estimated 1.4 million Iraqi refugees who have made their way to this country. They have to wait months and months for an appointment, let alone an answer, and she feels for them, but the day has only so many hours and what can she do? The Syrians – government and population – have been surprisingly hospitable, but the strain is significant, overloading everything from housing to the electricity and sewer systems. Her agency just can’t keep up, and it bothers her to think of the consequences such as daughters sold into prostitution by their destitute Iraqi families. She worries about the many who may lose hope and go back to war-torn Iraq, back to unsafe areas.

Returning to the city center, our visual impressions confuse us more than they explain anything. The city seems so secular, so relaxed, with the usual urban Middle Eastern paradox of girls poured into skin-tight jeans, but wearing the Islamic headscarf – the “sport hijab look” as the young boys in Jordan call it. We also notice clusters of other women in full abaya — a traditional over-garment.  Anzour explains that these are indeed members of a clandestine sect, the so-called Qubaisiate. Commanded by an elderly female preacher, this sect-like movement first recruits women into religious discussion circles, then advances them through a series of secret initiations into ever more clandestine cells. A woman’s “rank” in the sect is reflected by the color of her hijab, but beyond that, little is known of the actual agenda of the movement, and no one has seen its secretive leader recently.

Anzour had explored the dynamics and psychology of the group in his 2006 miniseries The Renegades.  By now we expect the unexpected out of Anzour — and Syria — so we are not surprised to learn that his proactive series implied that the cult is run by manipulative, predatory lesbians who use religion to seduce innocent Muslim girls. Concerned about the rising influence of Islamists in Syria, many apparently took to Anzour’s insinuations with gleeful irreverence.

We next decide to visit Palmyra, the site of expansive Roman ruins and just a short drive from Damascus.  At some point in the past, someone apparently thought it would be a good idea to route the highway directly through the middle of the ruins instead of diverting half a mile to preserve them. Consequently, cars race past, spitting gritty exhaust onto the antiquities, while scruffy children play football and hawk postcards among the ancient arches. Elderly tour guides sit disconsolate on fallen columns, wishing for business.

“American?” we are asked by the guide who has been assigned to us. “Go back to America,” he adds, and for a moment we think that we have finally met with the aggressive anti-American sentiment everyone warned us about. But it’s not what he means. “Go back to America and tell your friends to come here,” he continues, launching into a sad tale of declining business, empty hotels and no income ever since the U.S. government declared Syria a no-go pariah state. All that’s left now, he complains, is the occasional Italian, Korean and Japanese tourist – not enough to sustain an economy. 

Palmyra is ready, should the Americans return. Squeezed between grocery shops selling giant bunches of dates and souvenir shops offering “genuine” antique weapons, we find The Pancake House, and sit down to one of the greatest breakfasts of our lives. Enjoying her meal at a neighboring table is the third American in Syria, Marla Mossman, an artist and photographer from New York. This is a way station on her trek across the Silk Road for a documentary she is preparing on the role of women and religion on that historic trail. We give her a lift back to Damascus, where she and Cheryl impulsively decide to wash off the dust of the road in a traditional hammam, or Syrian bathhouse, in the old market district. For those who have not visited such an establishment before, here are the essential basics: For a pittance, you will be handed a threadbare towel and a pair of much-used slippers. Your very existence and your cluelessness will be the occasion of great universal merriment among the other female bathers. Expect to discover that this is a popular teenage hangout and anticipate clusters of giggling young girls throwing handfuls of water at each other as the elderly matron rebukes them and threatens to throw them out onto the street.

In the steam room proper, do not be surprised if clusters of naked women suddenly clap their hands and leap to their feet for a spontaneous bout of Oriental dancing and ululating that may or may not (their English was too shaky to tell) be related to an upcoming wedding.  And if you are a man, do not despair. Your turn begins at 5 p.m. when the hammam switches from women-only to men-only, though we cannot attest to any comparable levels of celebration.

Anzour and Honey have warned us that they want nothing to do with politics, that art and culture are all they are concerned about. So on the next evening, we leave them behind and venture out on or own to visit a dissident from the short-lived, but impressive Damascus Spring movement. We travel to Berze, a neighborhood high up in the hills outside Damascus. We climb a few flights of a darkened stairway to a utilitarian apartment building until finally a smallish, soft-spoken man answers the door and invites us in. 

His impeccable English, we learn, came to him at a high price – he taught it to himself during his almost 20 years in Syrian prisons. Jailed without a trial at the age of 18 for being a Communist activist, he has only recently been released from prison. There is still something of the socialist intellectual about him, and the same is true of his wife, who walks in briefly and wordlessly to plunk down a tray of tea and biscuits. Nonchalantly, he nods in her direction and relates that she spent seven years in prison. 

His story, as it unfolds in a serene manner, is nothing short of horrible: years in prison without even being informed of the charges against him; the loss of his youth; at last, a trial and then a sentence. And yet with light at the end of the tunnel, on the day when he should have been released, he was sent to yet another prison, the one all dissidents fear: the one in Palmyra.

“This is the one where they torture you,” he says, stoically. “Not because they want to get information out of you, or even a promise that you will henceforth refrain from political activism — no, just to destroy you.”

In any event, the plan failed: despite the torture, he was not broken. Thoughtfully, he offers his assessment of Syria today. “It is much better under the son Bashar than it was under the father Assad.” He himself, for example, is able to publish political articles and editorials. He is not allowed to have a passport or to travel, but a publishing house in Lebanon is printing his prison memoirs, and of his friends who joined the Damascus Spring movement, most experienced no sanctions at all, while a few were imprisoned temporarily.

On our last day, we head for the Shia neighborhood of Zeinab. The gigantic Umayyad mosque in the heart of Damascus is a major tourist attraction – or would be if there were tourists. Honey has taken us to this beautiful and unique ancient overlay of Roman temple plus Christian church plus mosque. But perhaps the more interesting religious destination is a different mosque, Sayyida Zeinab, in the bustling, commercial, working-class and refugee neighborhood of Zeynat Zeinab. Zeinab was the Prophet Mohammed’s granddaughter and this is a major Shia shrine and place of pilgrimage. 

Approaching on foot, we look up this time at the mosque’s minaret lit in green, and the golden domes and flocks of birds vivid against the gradually darkening nighttime sky. We are not sure what to expect – to be turned back at the entrance seems a distinct possibility since it is quite obvious that we are not Shia pilgrims. The bigger question is: How politely will that be done?

The mosque is surrounded by a night market: Rows of tables are lit only dimly with gas lamps and piled with all conceivable wares from amulets to linen sheets (which the seller tells us are for wrapping up the bodies of the dead) to cheap plastic children’s toys and little red capsules containing decorative black kohl with which to rim your eyes. But after browsing for a few minutes, we approach the entrance, which is guarded by several soldiers, some elderly men, and a large and formidable lady wrapped entirely in black. In the end, the men just gesture to a pile of shoes where we are to leave ours, while Cheryl finds herself heartily embraced by the large lady, who bellows, “America … Welcome!” as she wraps the foreign guest in a loaner chador (an all-encompassing black veil worn by ultra-conservative women). In an instant, we are inside this very exotic scene, instantly part of the moving bedlam. This is an important shrine, and Shias from all over the world make the pilgrimage. They find themselves emotionally overwhelmed to have finally made it to the site of their long-held devotion. Old men kiss the gate and the entryway; groups of pilgrims beat their chests in unison while chanting “Zeinab, Zeinab” — the name of the prophet’s daughter who is buried there. In one corner, a storyteller relates the tale of Ali, causing his audience to wail. Inside the shrine, a crush of excited people fight to touch the gold-enclosed tomb, or to hold a piece of cloth to it, which will then become sanctified. In hopes of a miracle, the sickly and the handicapped, as well as babies, are pushed forward through the mob. In between these scenes of havoc, children scamper and play, sandwiches are unwrapped, amulets are purchased and pictures are taken. For these people, it is a very special and sacred place and we feel grateful for their generosity in letting us be witness to it.  Unlike the Saudis who threaten to kill any “unbeliever” who tries to visit Mecca, here we are not just tolerated; we are actively welcomed as guests. In one of the arched corridors, Ed admires a poster. It is immediately taken down, with many eager fingers prying loose the Scotch tape, and given to him as a gift. Those who speak some English stop to see if we need any assistance or have any questions. Some regard us curiously, but no one is hostile. The mosque’s beautiful lighting, the blue-and-aqua-tile mosaic throughout capped off by the mosque’s golden dome against the clear starry sky, make it a near otherworldly experience.

As we fly above the Damascus sky the next morning, we feel content that we have observed the kaleidoscope below from as many perspectives as possible. We found common ground in perhaps the most uncommon of all nations we had visited – common concerns, common worries, common hopes, common dreams and yes even common hairstyles. Next stop for us?  Stay tuned.

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