SYRIA: LIFT THE VEIL AND DISCOVER AN ENIGMA
Mary Wakefield

The Daily Telegraph (LONDON)
June 18, 2006 Sunday

As the midday call to prayer spread out into Damascus last week,
I felt a burst of anxiety. There were bullet holes in the roof of
the El Hamidiyeh souq – a legacy of the troubled French mandate –
and the floor was dotted with circles of sunlight. Women in black
burqas drifted past, the tiny spotlights sliding over the folds of
their nylon skirts, then men in white dresses, looking too young for
their serious beards.

Day one in Syria and I felt jumpy, and judged. By the north gate
of the Great Umayyad mosque, I put on a vast, grey, polyester burqa
(mandatory for girl tourists), took off my shoes and stepped inside.

What was I expecting? Obvious fanatics? Wall-eyed mullahs and cowed
women? Instead, Syria’s most sacred Islamic space looked like a
crèche. The vast courtyard was wriggling with children; boys knelt
over remote-control cars, girls held hands, skipped, dragged toddlers
backwards across the slippery marble. Beneath the 8th-century mosaics
of Islamic paradise – trees and citadels in green and gold – young
mothers and their husbands gossiped, glanced at me and laughed.

With each new day in Syria, the idea I had arrived with – of an
aggressive country, repressive, hungry for jihad – diverged more
sharply from the Syria in front of me: young, peaceful, hungry mostly
just for kebabs. Not that one refuted the other exactly, more that
both pictures, though contradictory, seemed to be equally true.

It is a fact, for instance, that Syria is only a mock democracy.

Bashar al-Assad, like his father before him, is in effect a dictator
who owes his authority to the army and the dreaded Mukhabarat, the
secret police. Last Sunday, Abdel Halim Khaddam, the exiled leader
of the opposition, claimed that Assad had ordered his assassination;
in a week or so, the UN will probably conclude that Syria’s military
intelligence (headed by Bashar’s brother-in-law) was behind the
assassination of the liberal Lebanese Prime Minister Rafiq Hariri.

Many "dissidents" – a lawyer, a writer, a human rights activist –
have been arrested by the regime.

Even so, Assad’s Ba’ath party is a long way from Saddam’s. It has
lifted the ban on internet access and mobile phones, and ordinary
Syrians seem free not just from fear, but from regular Western
misanthropy as well. Throughout Syria, passers-by paused to say
"welcome" and invite me in for mint tea – no furtive looks, no
soviet-style reluctance to be singled out.

For most of us, Syria is the sugar daddy of Islamic terror, riddled
with al-Qaeda training camps, funding Hamas and the Hezbollah, goading
deranged Iraqi insurgents into battle with the Christian West. But
within its borders, there’s the sort of mutual respect between the
different faiths that Bradford can only dream of. Syria is a refuge
for Armenian Christians driven out of Turkey and for Nestorians who
have fled Iraq.

In the Christian town of Maaloula, some of the last remaining speakers
of Aramaic dedicate themselves to keeping the language of Christ
alive. At the heart of the Umayyad mosque in old Damascus, octogenarian
Muslim men whisper prayers at the tomb of John the Baptist’s head. "I
love Christians," said a Sunni man as the crusader castle, Krak des
Chevaliers, appeared through the windows of our bus. He kissed the
tips of his fingers and closed his eyes.

"Christians are people of the Book. We are all sons of God."

On my last day in Aleppo, half-lost somewhere in the 18 miles of
covered souq, I stopped beside a juice bar to wonder whether a glass
of squashed strawberries would be nice. "What nationality are you?"
said the juice-man. "English," I said. "Tony Blair? George Bush?"
he asked. "Yes," I said firmly, though a curious crowd had begun to
gather and to my right, a fat, blind man selling piles of crushed
cumin was ignoring customers so as to listen in.

Then the juice-man put his hands in the air and began to smile.

"Crazy!" he said. "They’re crazy!" Then in Arabic: "Majnoon!" Soon
everybody was shouting, "Tony Blair! George Bush! Majnoon!" and
laughing, and patting me sympathetically on the back.

Mary Wakefield is assistant editor of The Spectator.

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