From The Holy Mountain (28 page)

The period of uncertainty for Syria's Christians came to an end with Asad's
coup d'etat
in 1970. Asad was an Alawite, a member of a Muslim minority regarded by orthodox Sunni Muslims as heretical and disparagingly referred to as Nusayris (or Little Christians). Asad kept himself in power by forming what was in effect a coalition of Syria's many religious minorities - Shias, Druze, Yezidis, Christians and Alawites - through which he was able to counterbalance the weight of the Sunni majority. In Asad's Syria Christians have always done well: at the moment, apparently, five of Asad's seven closest advisers are Christians, including his principal speechwriter, as are two of the sixteen cabinet ministers. Christians and Alawites together hold all the key positions in the armed forces and the
mukhabarat.
While the official population figures are distrusted by everyone I spoke to, the Christians themselves estimated that they now formed slightly less than 20 per cent of Syria's total population, and between 20 and 30 per cent of the population of Aleppo, giving that city one of the largest Christian populations anywhere in the Middle East.

The confidence of the Christians in Syria is something you can't help noticing the minute you arrive in the country. This is particularly so if, like myself, you cross the border at Nisibis: Qamishli, the town on the Syrian side of the frontier (and the place where Metropolitan Gregorios Yohanna Ibrahim was brought up) is 75 per cent Christian, and icons of Christ and images of his mother fill almost every shop and decorate every other car window - an extraordinary display after the furtive secrecy of Christianity in Turkey. Moreover Turoyo, the modern Aramaic of the Tur Abdin, is the first language of Qamishli. This makes it one of a handful of towns in the world where Jesus could expect to be understood if he came back tomorrow.

The only problem with all of this, as far as the Christians are concerned, is the creeping realisation that they are likely to expect another, perhaps far more savage, backlash when Asad dies or when his regime eventually crumbles. The Christians of Syria have watched with concern the Islamic movements which are gaining strength all over the Middle East, and the richer Christians have all invested in two passports (or so the gossip goes), just in case Syria turns nasty at some stage in the future.

'Fundamentalism is building up among the Muslims,' said a pessimistic Armenian businessman I met while wandering in the Aleppo bazaars. 'Just look at the girls: now they all wear the
hijab:
only five years ago they were all uncovered. After Asad's death or resignation no one knows what will happen. As long as the bottle is closed with a firm cork all is well. But eventually the cork will come out. And then no one knows what will happen to us.'

In the meantime, while the Christians nervously sing Asad's praises, most of the Sunni majority continue to grumble about his repressive Ba'athist government and the ruthlessness of his secret police, although several Muslims I talked to did admit to a grudging admiration for their dictator's sheer shrewdness and tenacity. In the absence of any legal opposition, disaffected Syrians have taken refuge in a series of jokes at the expense of the Alawite ruling clique. The taxi driver who took me back from the Syrian Orthodox cathedral told me this Asad story as we crawled through the bazaars behind an ambling train of pack-mules:

'My cousin is a taxi driver in Damascus. One day he was waiting by some traffic lights when a limousine with clouded glass windows smashed into his rear. The back of the taxi was completely wrecked. My cousin is a hot-blooded man - we all are in my family - so he jumped out and began to harangue the occupants, calling them sons of unmarried mothers, brothers of incontinent camels, fathers of she-goats and so on. After two minutes of this, the rear window of the limousine lowered half an inch, and a visiting card was thrust through the crack. On it was written a single telephone number. My cousin started shouting, "What is the meaning of this?" but the window was wound up again and the limousine swerved around him and his concertina-ed taxi, leaving him shouting into space.

'My cousin was determined to get some compensation from the rich man who owned the car, so the following day he went to a phone box and rang the number that had been written on the card. He started by softening the man up with a few pleasantries, then went on to demand a new taxi, saying that fifteen people depended on the money he brought home, that his wife was sick and that his daughter was getting married the following year.

'There was no response to this, so my cousin began to get angry again, comparing the man to the vomit of an Israeli dog and the worms which wriggle in the belly of a wild pig. He had been speaking like this for five minutes when suddenly a quiet voice on the end of the line said: "Do you have any idea who you are talking to?"

'"No," replied my cousin.

'"You are speaking to Hafez al-Asad," said a sinister voice. "As you may be aware, I am the President of the Syrian Arab Republic."

'"I know who you are," said my cousin without hesitation, "but do you have any idea who
you
are talking to?" '

"No," said the voice, surprised.

"Thank God for that," said my cousin, slamming down the phone and running back to his car as fast as he could, before the
mukhabarat
could trace the call and treat him to an extended stay at President Asad's pleasure.'

Aleppo,
4
September

I sat up last night reading the book lent to me by the Metropolitan,
The History of the Monks of Syria
by Theodoret, Bishop of Cyrrhus. Theodoret turns out to be a near contemporary of John Moschos, and if this book is anything to go by, even more eccentric in his tastes.

If Theodoret is to be believed, the greatest celebrities of his day were not singers or dancers or even charioteers, but saints and ascetics. St Symeon Stylites the Elder, whose pillar lay a few miles west of Aleppo, was a case in point.

'As his fame circulated everywhere,' wrote Theodoret, 'everyone hastened to him, so that with everyone arriving from every side and every road resembling a river, one can behold a sea of men standing together in that place. Not only inhabitants of our part of the world, but also Ismaelites, Persians, Armenians and men even more distant than these: inhabitants of the extreme west, Spaniards and Britons and the Gauls who live between them. Of Italy it is superfluous to speak. It is said that the man became so celebrated in the great city of Rome that at the entrance of all the workshops men have set up small representations of him, to provide thereby some protection and safety for themselves . . .'

Theodoret, as the principal chronicler of the great Byzantine ascetics, was effectively the leading celebrity biographer of his day, and his works were read as far away as Anglo-Saxon Canterbury. But his subjects - suspended in cages, walled up in hermitages, buried in cisterns - presented a rather different set of difficulties to the figures whose peccadilloes and appetites are so minutely examined by hack biographers today. For if Symeon was the most famous of Theodoret's celebrity subjects, he was by no means the most eccentric. There was, for example, Baradatus, who Theodoret congratulates for having devised 'new tests of endurance'. On a ridge above his hermitage he constructed out of wood 'a small chest that did not even match his body and in this he dwelt, obliged to stoop the whole time. It was not even fitted together with planks, but had openings like a lattice; and because of this he was neither safe from the assault of the rains nor free from the flames of the sun, but endured both.'

Eventually Baradatus's bishop persuaded him to come out of his latticed coffin, but far from going into ascetic retirement the hermit merely devised an even more unusual way to follow his calling. Baradatus decided that his new ploy was going to involve standing up all the time. But as this was a fairly common form of asceticism at the time (no less a figure than the youthful St John Chrysostom once pursued this method of self-punishment for two years without a break), Baradatus seems to have come to the conclusion that standing up for the rest of his life was, on its own, not going to be enough. He therefore decided to make things more difficult for himself. He covered his entire body 'with a tunic of skins - only around the nose and mouth did he leave a small opening for breath', so that in addition to having to stand all day he would also be baked alive in the sweltering Syrian midsummer heat: a sort of Byzantine boil-in-the-bag monk.

This was, however, tame stuff compared to one of Theodoret's heroes, Thalelaeus, who constructed a cage, then hung the contraption in the air. 'Sitting or rather suspended in this, he has spent ten years up till now. Since he has a very big body, not even sitting can he straighten his neck, but he always sits bent double with his forehead tightly pressed against his knees.'

When Theodoret went to visit this strange figure, he found him 'reaping the benefit of the divine gospels, gathering benefit therefrom with extreme concentration'. Only at this point does it seem to have occurred to Theodoret that this sort of behaviour was, perhaps, just a little strange. 'I questioned him out of desire to learn the reason for this novel mode of life,' wrote the Bishop. Thalelaeus had his answer ready: life, he said, was to be lived as uncomfortably as possible as an insurance policy against worse discomforts in the life to come: 'Burdened with many sins, and believing in the penalties that are threatened, I have devised this form of life, contriving moderate punishments for the body in order to reduce the mass of those awaited. For the latter are more grievous not only in quantity but also in quality, so if by these slight afflictions I lessen those awaited, great is the profit I shall derive therefrom.'

In most other societies, ascetics like this might perhaps be regarded with a certain amount of suspicion; but in Byzantium it seemed that every village wanted some self-torturing hermit to live among them, to bring them good luck, to cure them of diseases and demons, and to intercede for them both at the wordly palace of Constantinople and the more distant court of Heaven. Hermits were considered especially lucky to have around when they were dying: that way the village could claim the corpse, and add to its stock of sacred relics. If Theodoret is to be believed, hundreds of eager Byzantine peasants seem to have hung around dying saints, waiting to slice up the old men as soon as they dropped off their perches - quite literally in the case of stylites.

Theodoret records one such case, when word got out that a famous hermit named James of Cyrrhestica was reported to be dying. On a previous occasion when James had been seriously ill, Theodoret had had to exert all his episcopal authority to disperse a crowd of sickle-wielding relic-seekers. But a little while later, when James's condition suddenly worsened, Theodoret was away on business to Aleppo, and the people of Cyrrhus were forced to take the law into their own hands.

'As many [peasants] were coming from all sides to seize his body,' wrote Theodoret, 'when they heard what was happening, all the men of the town, both soldiers and civilians, hastened together [to where James lived, on a hilltop four miles to the west], some taking up military equipment, others using whatever weapons lay to hand. Forming up in close order, they fought by shooting arrows and slinging stones - not to wound, but simply to instil fear [in their rustic rivals]. Having thus driven off the local inhabitants, they placed the hermit on a litter while he was quite unconscious of what was happening - he was not even conscious of his hair being plucked out by the peasants [as a relic] - and set off [with the comatose hermit] to the city.'

As a result of a series of such pre-emptive swoops on dying ascetics, Cyrrhus became so clogged with relics that Theodoret lobbied to have it renamed Hagiopolis, the city of saints. On my map, the town's ruins lie forty-five miles to the north of Aleppo. Tomorrow I plan to drive out there, taking the Metropolitan's book with me, and see what is left of Theodoret's bishopric.

Aleppo,
5
September