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The Other Side of the Mirror (A Travel Narrative of an American in Syria)– Brooke Allen [Excerpts]
p. 4 The Destination
It was literally impossible for us to walk down a street without a passersby trying to strike up a
conversation. On my very first evening in Damascus, wandering half-?stunned and jet-?lagged through the
ancient spice market in the gathering darkness, I was ushered by one young vendor into the little room
at the rear of his stall. Here he poured me some tea and summoned his brother to translate. The two of
them showed metheir photograph album, a great treasure. There was a picture of my host with
President Bashar al-?Asad, which he pointed outwith some pride, but he was even more eager to point
outa shot of himself with John Kerry, to whom he had had the privilege of serving coffee during a
diplomatic visit the senator had made to Damascus.
Visitors are not required to register with any agency (indeed there doesn’t appear to be such an agency)
or to employ a guide or to join a group. You can travel and stay wherever you like without ever
encountering officialdom in any form. Far from shying away from being seen with Americans, the locals
sought out our company.
Everyone, it seemed, wanted to know who and what we were. “Are you English? German?” At first we
were a little nervous about admitting to being Americans – after all, if their political rhetoric is anything
like ours they must hate us, right? But we needn’t have worried: once we admitted our nationality
there was a bit of surprise, but then the interest became even more intense: “We have so few
Americans coming to our country. How are you enjoying your trip? You are very welcome.” Almost
without exception, they spoke of their admiration for Jimmy Carter and his peacekeeping efforts. Barack
Obama had recently been sworn into office; hopes were very high.
Occasionally we voiced a regret that our countries were not better friends, and when we did so the reply
was invariably the same: “Everyone knows that’s just politics, not people.” Well – do they? Not on our
side of the pond. I reflected, and tried to envision the kind of reception a family of Syrian tourists might
find in New York. First, an endless grilling at immigration and security, where they would be approached
as potential criminals and enemies rather than as guests, which is how Syrian officialdom treated us.
Then, assuming they were lucky enough to get in the country at all, they would encounter reactions
ranging from indifference to outright hostility. It would be most unlikely for anyone to bid them
welcome, much less invite them into their homes for tea, coffee, or a meal, as so many strangers invited
us into their homes in Syria. So far from sensing danger in the air, we felt far safer in Damascus than we
usually do in New York, and even gave up locking our hotel rooms after the first couple of days. The
many European tourists we encountered (Syria is a popular destination among Europeans) seemed to
have no particular fears.
As for the dreaded red tape – difficulties changing money and reserving hotels, passport and visa hassles
– there simply wasn’t any. I was able to renew my visa in less than five minutes, literally, at Aleppo’s
passport office. Hotel managers reserve your room the old-?fashioned way, not through a credit card
deposit but simply by writing your name in a book, then erasing it again if you cancel. Changing money
can be done at any bank or Bureau de Change without even filling out forms or keeping receipts, though
because there is no reciprocity between American and Syrian bans you can’t use an ATM machine or
travelers’ checks – you simply have to bring a wad of American cash and change it bit by bit. This might
seem to be a problem, for everyone is nervous about carrying large sums of currency. But there is
practically no petty crime in Syria and you are most unlikely to have your pocket picked.
Syria is classified by human rights organizations as a police state, and its citizens have to watch what
they say and write. In 1968 – even before the first Asad’s time – a special court, the Supreme State
Security Court, was set up to try those accused of dissent or offences against state security. Under the
control of the executive branch of the government, the SSSC still exists, and Amnesty International has
deemed its proceedings “grossly unfair.” Syria’s prisons contain quite a few people found guilty of vague
crimes like “spreading false news,” “weakening national morale,” and “inciting sectarian sentiments.”
The cult of the Asad family is immediately noticeable, with posters and statues of the current president
and his father littering the urban landscape. It is very unusual to hear any criticism of the president or
his regime: the general belief seems to be that the walls have ears, and people we chatted with would
frequently throw in some positive comment about Bashar al-?Asad, apparently as a sort of propitiatory
magic. We came across a couple of openly disaffected people, but such encounters were rare. What we
were most surprised by was the fact that there is obviously a significant measure of genuine enthusiasm
for the president mixed with all the pro forma compliments. The attitude of Syrian citizens toward the
Asad regime turns out to be exceedingly complex and there is a real appreciation of the benefits Asad
and his father have brought on the country – mixed, of course, with resentment over one-?party rule and
a government-?controlled press.
The general principle seems to be that if you want to be a left alone, don’t get involved in politics. With
the exception of traffic cops, there is no visible police presence, and no armed guards in front of hotels
and public buildings as there are in countries like Egypt. Big Brother might be lurking, but his presence is
not immediately obvious. And so far from being dangerous for foreigners, as the State Department
would have had us believe, Syria (as I discovered later) has been deemed the third safest country in the
world, after Malaysia and Singapore.
Why should this be so? The police presence in Syria is nothing at all like ultra-?repressive Singapore,
where theft is punished with lashes of a cane and narcotics offenses will get you the death penalty. On
the contrary, Syria possesses a certain Mediterranean casualness, and its citizens openly flout laws
pertaining to minor offenses like littering or smoking. Perhaps, as some Syrians suggested to us, it’s
because the country has a “shame culture”: someone caught stealing brings great shame on their family.
I struggled to make sense of all these seeming contradictions, ultimately deciding that a fortnight was
not nearly long enough. I started to plan a second, more leisurely trip, with the idea of writing a book or
article. My friend Catherine, a Washington lawyer with a lifelong interest in classical history and culture,
agreed to come along with me; another friend, Arthur agreed to join us for a week as we swung through
Crusader country. And so I arrived back in Syria at the beginning of November.
p. 26 The Destination
The guard, who had introduced himself as Saeed, rolled his eyes. “Here is my telephone number, “ he
said, pressing a piece of paper into my hand. “My mother and I would be happy to take you to dinner
before you leave and show you around Damascus at night.”
When the evening came the mother couldn’t join us, but Saeed took me to his favorite restaurant and
all around the Bag Touma district, chattering away with puppy-?like friendliness. He was only a senior in
high school, as it turned out, and was working at the Sham Village as a part-?time job. His father had left
the family when he was a small child, his mother suffered from back trouble, and he and his brother had
to contribute to the family budget. Saed longed to be a fashion designer – he had every episode of
Project Runway practically memorized – but he figured that with all his responsibilities, training for a
career in fashion was nothing but a pipe dream. He was planning instead to study Japanese at the
university and go into business.
“I wish I could have got dressed before meeting you so I could show you my style,” he said, “but I had to
come straight from work.” Saeed is an avid consumer of international pop culture, a passionate devotee
of Britney Spears, Beyonce, and 50 Cent. His fifteen-?year-?old brother helps support the family by doing
web design and Photoshop after school, and also performs and records techno-?rap with his girlfriend: he
aspires to be the Arab Eminem. Their mother, Saeed said, is completely addicted to Oprah and quotes
Dr. Phil whenever an occasion arises.
As we walked, Saeed reached up and plucked branches of jasmine for me, crushing the blossoms in his
fingers so I could get a richer waft of their fragrance. He spoke without bitterness about his dreams for
a career and how unlikely it was that they would come true. “We are all the family we have, so we must
take care of each other,” he said. “My mother has done everything for us. We must care for her.”
These encounters led me to some profound rethinking, both about the country I was visiting and my
own. “What went wrong?” historian Bernard Lewis asked about the Islamic world, in his recent book by
that title, and the phrase has caught on. Some things have gone wrong there, unquestionably; but
others seem, at least to my foreign eyes, to have gone right. Whether because of Islam’s call on the
faithful to practice charity and hospitality or because of some other cultural conditioning in that
direction, Syrians seem to have developed a far more civil and polite public arena than our own.
One might profitably transpose Lewis’s question and ask what went wrong with us – with America. For
my trips East have made it clearer to me than ever before that something has gone very wrong: a
cultural hardening that set in, I have come to believe, in the Reagan 80s when greed suddenly became
good. In the intervening quarter-?century our country succumbed to a grim Social Darwinist philosophy
according to which our neighbor is defined not as a fellow-?creature but, if not exactly an enemy, then at
least a potential competitor. One might have expected the resurgence of American Christianity over the
same period to have mitigated this dog-?eat-?dog attitude, but too many of our Christian churches seem
to have incorporated the philosophy of competition directly into their creeds.
The Syrian system seems to have installed some respect for the humanity of the dispossessed, while our
own Social Darwinism seems only to have engendered contempt for them as pathetic losers. I was
struck by the Syrians’ shocked reaction to the healthcare debate going on back at home at the time of
my visit: they simply could not conceive of a system that let poor people fall through the cracks, that
allowed someone to die unnecessarily if they couldn’t pay for care. The whole thing made me think it
quite probable that Islam is philosophically incompatible with the doctrinaire capitalism we have been
trying to spread around the world. But then again, so is Christianity – real Christianity, that is-? as I see it.
American media coverage of the Middle East for the last forty years or so – probably since the 1967 war
– has engendered a knee-?jerk prejudice that will be almost impossible to cure. To visit Syria is to
confront the unhappy truth about our media, which is that much of the international news we read or
see, from whatever portion of the political spectrum, serves not as a window looking out at the world
but as a mirror: a mirror that reflects our own fears and obsessions and shines them right back at us.
p. 30 Time
Aleppo is a living amalgam of historic periods. Trophy girlfriends strut alongside their men in what might
here be considered the height of fashion: clinging little scarlet miniskirts worn with tights, along with
perilously teetering high heels. On cobblestones these shoes become treacherous, making the girls cling
tightly to their companions’ arms to keep from falling – and maybe that is the whole point of the
exercise, after all. One young woman wore a hijab that modestly covered her body but happened to be
gleaming gold and coated with glitter. Fashion in footwear is particularly striking. Aleppo’s young spivs
tend to sport leather shoes, unremarkable perhaps, of curly-?toed Ottoman slippers. Women, even
those completely concealed by burqas, favor highly-?polished boots of a rather S & M aspect, sharply
high-?heeled with glittering silver panels at the side – boots not made for walking.
p. 31 Time
The Western view of the “Arab world” as a homogenous, purely Muslim place full of anonymous black-?
clad crowds is blown to pieces as soon as you arrive in this complex civilization. On the level of sheer
human spectacle, Syria’s cities are astounding. It is an easy cliché to call the country of crossroad of
civilization, but here, in the streets of Aleppo or Damascus, the cliché comes true. Where the
Mediterranean meets the Arab world, the desert meets the metropolis. Syria was for many centuries a
key stop on the Silk Road, its markets a depot for the goods of all the world. The result is that the
country has been a melting pot and a multi-?cultural society for a very, very long time.
Damascus and Aleppo both lay claim to being the oldest continually inhabited city on earth, with life-?
spans somewhere in the neighborhood of eight millennia. No scholar has been able to determine which
is older, for dense habitation on both sites has kept archaeologists from being able to dig down to the
earliest signs of civilized life, but there can be no doubt that other cities are very ancient. One of the
most extraordinary aspects of the country, and the most compelling reason to make the trip there, is the
spectacle it offers of life being lived, totally unselfconsciously, just as it has been for thousands of years.
In America we often turn what is left of our old architecture into Disneyfied theme parks: think of what
has happened to Colonial Williamsburg – or even old Santa Fe or Nantucket, now populated not by
ranchers and whalers but by CEOs. The well-?preserved centers of European cities like Paris or
Amsterdam have essentially become open-?air museums. This is not at all the case in Damascus or
Aleppo, whose souqs, khans (caravansarais), and houses of prayer are still being used for their original
purposes. Here, history is not over; it lives on. In the 1860s Mark Twain, stunned by his first sight of
Damascus, marveled that the city “measures time not by days and months and years, but by the empires
she has seen rise and prosper and crumble to ruin. . . Damascus has seen all that has ever occurred on
earth, and still she lives. She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires, and will see the
tombs of a thousand more before she dies.”
p. 116 Faith
The country is roughly seventy-?five percent Sunni Muslim, ten percent Shi’a Muslim, ten percent
Christian, and five percent other minorities. (Jews now comprise only a tiny handful.) Religion here is
supposed to be a private matter, and so is one’s style of dress; whether or not to wear the headscarf, for
instance, is officially considered a personal decision, though of course most people conform to the
expectations of their families and communities, as people do everywhere. Sharia law has a limited role
in the Syrian &nb
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