View From The Other Side of the Mirror
14 April 2011 | Share:
It is there, right in the thick of it, and it always has been. It is desert and citadel, ruins and trade route, marketplace and sacred space. Its cities are the oldest in the inhabited world, its ruins the most intoxicating, its people the most welcoming. For the half of us human beings who identify as Christian, Muslim, or Jewish, its history is our identity, its civilization the emergence and syncretic evolution of our creed.
This garden is Syria: ally of Iran, underwriter of Hamas and Hezbollah, police state par excellence, where this week the government of Bashar Al-Assad is trying to smother nascent offshoots of the Arab Spring.
In The Other Side of the Mirror, due out this week from Paul Dry Books, noted author Brooke Allen unleashes this powerfully exhilarating place from its political shackles and places it in the center of our imagination. Allen deftly handles this travel writer’s sleight of hand with extraordinary historical and literary range—from the Aramaic-writing satirist Lucien to Luis Buñuel to Lady Hester Stanhope, who reinvented herself as Queen of the Desert—and a seemingly infinitely iterative sense of place. Syria, she shows us, always with a keen eye for details that matter to the traveler, is human synthesis:
First there were the ancient Babylonian gods; then the Semitic Arab gods; the Phoenician gods; the Anatolian gods penetrating Syria from the north; the Parthian gods from the east. In the wonderful museum at Suweida in southern Syria (practically empty, like all provincial Syrian museums), we found a Roman-era door lintel of local manufacture with Aphrodite and Eros on one side, Athena on the other, and in the middle none other than the Semitic deity Baal Shamin!
What makes Syria special, however, is the manner in which all these layers have gathered. Particularly in comparison to the Americas, she says, “Syria is totally different. There seems to have been no particular impetus for new settlers, or conquerors, to obliterate the traces of the vanquished. The custom the invading Muslim armies had of building a mosque next to a Christian church rather than destroying the church is symptomatic of what appears to be a widespread local tendency to leave older architecture alone, even if it seems worthless and defunct.”
This provides a wonderful landscape for the informed explorer. And indeed, Allen obliges by taking us to the birthplace of the alphabet—“the one and only alphabet, from which all the world’s alphabets derive” (Ugarit), the only place in the world where Aramaic is still spoken (Maaloula), the stronghold of the Assassins, who were the first terrorists (Masyaf), the spot in which Cain killed Abel (in the Cave of Forty Men, above Damascus). The cave, she writes:
remained a holy place, perhaps the oldest known holy place in this very old land….Abraham is said to have prayed in the cave. So have Jacob, Moses, Jesus, and even St. George, lest any Christians feel excluded. ..Catherine and I, though not believers, were nevertheless impressed by the place’s aura of ancient sanctity, and by its smiling Imam. We sat there in the falling afternoon shadows, savoring the utter silence broken only by the cawing of a circling bird…This, we thought, might be the very birthplace of monotheism. Considering all the trouble it has caused in the world, it seems a peaceful spot.
One way the broadly visionary travel writer disarms the ideologically-minded reader is to place contemporary power struggles in the context of history. One can’t really single out Bashar al-Assad, or even his father, the far-more brutal Hafiz, and the repression they have wrought for forty years, in the light of the crusaders, the French colonialist “protectorate,” or the ruthless reign of Nur al-Din, the so-called prince of Aleppo, who was the first to put into practice the idea of jihad.
Among the most memorable of these figures in Allen’s narrative is the best known ruler of Palmyra (of whose ruins there is “nothing comparable in Europe, in all the world”), Queen Zenobia, whose ambition and lusty aggression is seemingly comparable—in the retelling, anyway—to Cleopatra. Zenobia was born in the third century, married the Roman governor of Palmyra Septimus Odenathus. When the heroic Septimus was murdered, Zenobia “attacked Palestine, then Anatolia, then, most boldly of all, Egypt.” This, and placing her face on local coins, was a direct threat to the Emperor Aurelian, who retook Anatolia and Antioch, and then reportedly placed Zenobia in chains, draped her in jewels, and marched her through the streets of Rome.
Much of Allen’s point in writing The Other Side of the Mirror is to pull back the curtain on a society little understood in America. Syria is one of the safest nations in the world (at least it was until March 15, when residents of the town of Deraa initiated the long-coming protests against the Assad regime); by standards of the region it is broadly diverse—10% of Syrians are Christian—officially secular, and immensely social. She fell quickly in love with the intimate, energetic, colorful life of the Damascus and Aleppo medinas (old cities) and the souqs (tradesmen’s quarters), which are far better preserved as centers of daily commercial life than those in other cities in the region, and with the sense—often felt by travelers in similar places—that life there is more immediate, intense, fulfilling.
But of course Syrian life is changing. Assad came to power with the promise to open the economy (though certainly not the political system), with the predictable effects on daily life. “These souqs,” says Allen, “have lasted for a couple thousand years, evolving somewhat but still recognizably what they must have been in early Arab and even perhaps in Roman times. How will they fare in the age of the shopping mall? Will they go the way of America’s mom-and-pop stores?”
Allen is right to wonder. As all of the best writers of place, she is alive to the inherent tensions between the traditional and the modern; the title “The Other Side of the Mirror” is meant to reflect that tension. But for all of Allen’s tremendous range in so much of this work, on this she comes up flat. She substitutes an honest discussion on what’s gained and lost through modernization (even sometimes for the traveler) with a declension narrative full of digs at contemporary American life. And indeed, America, with its canned sense of the past, plays foil to Syria, where history it is simply and unselfconsciously lived. Thus all new buildings are rot and all elements of modernization signs of a society in decline. When Allen visits the evocative ruins of the fortifications of the city of Zenobia (once controlled by and named for the Queen of Palmyra), she is “horrified” to learn that it is threatened by a proposed dam. Unfortunately, she carries this tension no further.
In the wonderfully lyric novel Return to Dar al-Basha, on the Tunis medina, the novelist Hassan Nasr treads these same themes. The protagonist, Murtada, grew up in the medina, but fled in the wake of religious repression and domestic abuse. Some forty years later he returns, only to find that the city has changed drastically. The family house with its thick walls and generous courtyard is crumbling (Allen spends a great deal of time in just these sorts of homes in Damascus and Aleppo). Murtada, seeking meaning in the old urban fabric, wants to restore it. But having no money he seeks out his cousins, the last of the family to have been born in the house. He visits one of them, the interestingly named Nur al-Din, “a man of substance, with many responsibilities and enterprises,” in his modern office.
Like his namesake, this Nur al-Din is a bit of a fundamentalist. When Murtada says he wants all the cousins to chip in to restore the house, al-Din responds, “The world has changed. People have stopped looking backward. That old house no longer has a role to play. It played its part, but that’s over. It’s not good for anything now—no way. People’s lifestyles have changed…Their manner of thinking is different. That old house and all those old neighborhoods need to be torn down, so they can be rebuilt with structures that have the amenities that correspond to the requirements of modern life.” Like Murtada, Allen would be appalled by this theory. It’s just what has produced so much muck. The Syrians who haven’t quite come this far in their thinking, she says, don’t know how lucky they are.
Certainly, the traveler to Syria is the most fortunate. But the average Syrian? Nur al-Din wonders about Murtada’s attachment to the old ways. “What past?” he asks. “The past befouled by dishonor and catastrophes, the one based on exploitation and tyranny, on slavery and the oppression of women, on the expropriation of workers’ rights, and on the denial of liberties? These old neighborhoods, which you have come to defend, Mr. Murtada, were built on injustice.”
Surely, Allen would say and so is the Saudi-built shopping mall and the jerrybuilt slums spreading out from Damascus and Aleppo…and she would be right, of course. But she has done this otherwise extraordinary book—so filled as it is with so many engaging voices and landscapes—a bit of a discredit by not grappling honestly with the attraction of the new.
Oh, but of course intellectually she gets it spot on (and therefore so do we, the lucky reader). Standing on a Damascus street, she senses the way that city has responded to its succession of people, ideas, and innovations. “The architectural synchronism of this great Levantine city,” she writes,
in which each age and faith has left visible relics of the previous ones to make up part of the ensemble, is unlike anything to be seen even in that most synchronistic city of Western Europe, Rome. The sight in Damascus of the enormous propylaeum of the Roman Temple, with its Corinthian capitals and its entablature half smashed away, rearing forty feet into the air over the great walls of the mosque, the old souq spread beyond it covered with its gracious nineteenth-century arched roof, is an unforgettable image, especially considering the casual street life going on all around it: stalls selling books, a wagon piled high with pomengranates and blackberries, peanut-sellers, shwarma stands, the bustling crowds, the gawping tourists, whether Japanese with cameras or burqa-clad Iranians in town to visit the spot where the martyr Husayn’s head is said to have touched ground (on the site of the mosque, of course, the timeless holy site) after the Batttle of Karbala.
Envisioning this wondrous accumulation I was reminded of one of Italo Calvino’s “Invisible Cities”, the aptly named Zenobia. (Calvino, too, was worried about the coming malls and the dehumanizing sprawl.) Evaluating Zenobia, Calvino wonders if it is the kind of city which continues, across the centuries, “to give form to desires.” Allen’s Damascus, her Aleppo, her Syria, now so carefully revealed for us: can we name another place that has so profoundly and consistently given form to human desires? And yet, it seems, never erasing what came before.
The Other Side of the Mirror: An American Travels Through Syria
by Brooke Allen
Paul Dry Books, 2011