NF (1995) The Pillars of Hercules (67 page)

This glass and steel monstrosity, like a massive airline terminal, on a high bluff overlooking Damascus was almost the first thing I saw the next day when I reached the city. It can be seen from every part of the city; that is obviously one of its important features. The structure was as truculent and unreadable and unsmiling, as forbidding, as remote as the man himself. Vast and featureless, it could be a prison or a fortress, and in a sense it is. Assad has almost no contact with the people, and is seldom seen in public. He is all secrets, a solitary king-emperor. There are rumors that he is sick, that his son’s death was a shock, that he is in seclusion. Some days he is shown on the front page of the
Syria Times
sitting rather uncomfortably in a large chair, apparently nodding at a visiting dignitary.

Beneath Assad’s palace, Damascus lay, biscuit-colored, the chill of
morning still upon it, the new suburbs, the ancient city, the souk, the mosques and churches, the snarled traffic, the perambulating Damascenes. For reasons of religion and commerce—its shrines, its mosques, its churches—Damascus is heavily visited. It is an ancient city, so old it is mentioned in the Book of Genesis (14:15–16)—Jerusalem is not mentioned until the Book of Joshua (10:1–2). Unlike Jerusalem, which as an old walled city and bazaar it somewhat resembles, Damascus is the destination of few Western tourists; but it is dense with its neighbors from the desert and the shore. It is the souk and the shrine for the entire region. “Damascus is our souk,” a man in distant Latakia told me. It is everyone’s souk. And the great Omayyad Mosque, built thirteen hundred years ago to a grandiose design, is the destination of many pilgrims. Beirut is only a short drive—two hours at most—and so there were Lebanese here too; and Iraqis, stifled by sanctions, shopping their hearts out; Nawar people, Gypsies from the desert, and the distinctly visible women with tattooed chins and velveteen gowns from the Jordanian border; gnomes in shawls, scowling Bedouins, and students, and mullahs with long beards, and young girls in blue jeans and hectoring touts in baseball hats.

In one corner of the walled city was the house of Ananias, who in Acts 9: 1–20 had a vision which commanded him to go to the house of Judas to receive Paul.

“Original house,” said a caretaker.

Perhaps it was. Perhaps this was Straight Street. But I was dubious. It was true that this was the oldest continuously inhabited city in the world, but it had also been besieged and wrecked and pillaged and burned at various times. The shops in the souk, which was larger than Aleppo’s, and better lighted and airier, sold brassware and tiles, inlaid boxes and furniture, rugs, beads, huge swords, bad carvings, knickknacks, and Roman glassware.

“Original glass,” the hawkers said.

They were small mud-encrusted perfume bottles which had recently—so these stories went—been excavated. There were small terra-cotta figures, too, and pint-sized amphorae. For just a few dollars I could be the owner of a priceless collection of Roman artifacts.

The head of John the Baptist is said to have been interred at the Omayyad Mosque. Anyway, there is a shrine to it in the interior of the
mosque, which lies at one end of the covered bazaar. I walked there and saw a group of Iranian pilgrims squatting on the carpeted floor, all of them sobbing, as they were harangued by a blubbing mullah doing a good imitation of an American TV evangelist in a mea culpa mode, yelling, preaching, weeping, blowing his nose, wiping his eyes, while his flock honked like geese in their grief.

Looking on were incredulous Syrians, secretly mocking, smiling at the exhibitionism and looking generally unsympathetic.

“Are you religious?” I asked an Arab in the mosque.

“Not at all,” he said. He had come to look at the renovation of the mosaics and pillars in the courtyard of the mosque. It was a horrible job the workmen were doing, he said—an act of vandalism, they were defacing it.

“What is that man saying?” I asked, indicating the howling sobbing mullah. He was standing, stuttering and speechifying, and at his feet, the sixty or more people sat with tearstained faces, their shoulders shaking.

“He is telling the story of Hussein.”

Hussein, Ali’s son, was the grandson of Mohammed, and was beheaded in the year 680 by an army of the Omayyad caliphate at the Battle of Karbala in Iraq. It was a violent and dramatic story which involved Hussein witnessing the slaughter of his wife and children, surrounded by a hostile army, besieged, urging his horse onward, and at last apologizing to his horse as—helpless—Hussein is decapitated.

“And those sweet lips, that the Prophet himself kissed—peace and blessings be upon him!—were then brutally kicked by the soldiers—”

A great shout went up from the passionate pilgrims, and a tiny Smurf-like woman shrouded in black handed a wodge of tissues to the mullah. He blew his nose and continued.

“They kicked Hussein’s head like a football—!”

“Waaaa!”

What startled me was the immediacy and power of the grief. It was more than pious people having a good cathartic cry. It was like a rehearsal for something more—great anger and bitterness and resentment, as though they had been harmed and were nerving themselves to exact revenge. The howls of their grieving Muslims had the snarl of a war cry.

Assad was a dismal individual but, impartially intolerant, at least he could claim credit for keeping religious fanaticism in check. He had persecuted
the religious extremists with the same grim brutality he had used in suppressing political dissent. It was perhaps his only real achievement, but he was characteristically ruthless, which was why the massacre at Hamah claimed so many lives. That was the trouble with dictators: they never knew when to stop.

This subject came up at lunch the next day with some Syrians I had been introduced to. It was one of those midday meals of ten dishes—stuffed vegetables, salad, kebabs, hummus, filled bread, olives, nuts and dumplings—that lasted from one until four and broke the Syrian day in half. But one of the pleasures of Syria was its cuisine, and the simplest was among the best. Each morning in Damascus I left my hotel, walked three blocks and bought a large glass of freshly made carrot juice—twenty carrots, fifty cents.

“Oh, yes, this is definitely a totalitarian state,” one man said. “But also people here are civilized. We are able to live our lives.”

How was this so?

“I cannot explain why,” another said. “There is no logic in it that you as a Westerner can see. But in the Arab world such contradictions are able to exist.”

“We allow for them,” the first man said. “It is very strange. Perhaps you would not be happy here.”

“Are you ever afraid?” I asked.

“There are many police, many secret police. People are very afraid of them.”

“Do people discuss Assad?”

“No one talks about him. They do not say his name.”

I said, “So what we’re doing now—this conversation—it’s not good, is it?”

They all smiled and agreed. No, it was not a good idea. And, really, in a totalitarian state there is nothing to talk about except the obvious political impasse.

“Do you think I should go to Beirut?” I asked.

“You know the Israelis are shelling the south?”

“How would that affect me?”

“Many of the fundamentalists have retreated to Beirut. They associate
Israel with America—after all, America allows this to happen. They might accuse you of being a spy. It is not a good time.”

“What would they do to me?”

“Kidnap or—” The man hesitated.

“Shoot me?”

Out of delicacy, they were not explicit, but I had the distinct feeling they were saying, “Don’t go.” They lived in Syria. They visited Beirut all the time—it was such a short distance to travel, no more than sixty miles, and of course the border formalities.

“The last time I was in Beirut—just a few days ago,” one of them said, “Israeli jet planes were flying over the city, buzzing the rooftops, intimidating people, breaking the sound barrier—and windows.”

I was losing my resolve. That made me linger in Damascus. One of the happiest experiences I had in Damascus was at the house of a man named Omer, the friend of a friend. Omer was a Sudanese cement expert who worked for the Arab Development Corporation. He lived with his attractive Sudanese wife and three children in an apartment block about a mile from the center of Damascus.

We were drinking tea and eating sticky buns when he summoned his eight-year-old son, Ibrahim, to meet me. The boy did not speak English. He was tall for his age, wearing rumpled blue buttoned-up pajamas. He looked solemn, he said nothing, he stood and bowed slightly to show respect.

Then, without a word, he went to a piano in the corner, and sat, and played “Theme With Variations” by Mozart. It was plangent and complex, and sitting upright on the stool, the boy played on, without a duff note. In that small cluttered apartment I experienced a distinct epiphany, feeling—with Nietzsche—that “without music life would be an error.”

The fighting in southern Lebanon and the strafing of Beirut made me reconsider my jaunt along the Lebanese coast. I called the American Embassy in Damascus and asked for information. By way of response I received an invitation to a recital at the ambassador’s residence. On this particular Arabian
night, the performance was given by a visiting American band, Mingo Saldivar and His Three Tremendous Swords. Saldivar, “The Dancing Cowboy,” played an accordion, Cajun and Zydeco music, jolly syncopated country-and-western polkas. At first the invited guests—about a hundred Syrians—were startled. Then they were amused. Finally they were clapping.

Afterwards, I found the ambassador talking animatedly in Arabic to a tall patrician-looking Syrian. I introduced myself and asked my question.

“Don’t go to Beirut,” the ambassador replied. “Not now. Not with your face. Not with your passport.”

The American Ambassador to Syria, Christopher Ross, a fluent Arabic speaker, is a highly regarded career diplomat, and an amiable and witty man. He is also a subtle negotiator in the delicate peace talks involving Israel and Syria. The sticking point was the Golan Heights. This large section of eastern Syria was captured by the Israelis in 1967 and has been occupied by them ever since—and partly settled—something that quite rightly maddens the Syrians. In this connection, Ambassador Ross saw a great deal of President Assad, had been to Assad’s bunker and would have been a fund of information for me, except that he skillfully deflected all my intrusive questions.

“I think the ambassador is right—stay away from Lebanon at the moment,” the tall man said. He was Sadik Al-Azm, from an ancient Damascene family. His professorial appearance—tweed jacket, horn-rimmed glasses—was justified, for he was a professor at Damascus University. He was noted as the author of an outspoken defense of Salman Rushdie.

“That seems rather a risky thing to have done in a Muslim country,” I said.

“What do I care?” he said, and laughed out loud. “This is a republic, anyway. Even our president defended Rushdie!”

“It doesn’t worry you that Syria is crawling with Iranian fundamentalists?”

“What do they know?”

“They know there’s a
fatwa
, they idolize Khomeini,” I said. “It seems to me they’d like to stick a knife in your guts.”

“The Iranians you see here haven’t read anything,” Professor Al-Azm said. “They haven’t read what I wrote about Rushdie, and they certainly
haven’t read
The Satanic Verses.
I’m not worried. In fact, I am updating my book at the moment for a new edition.”

“Fearless, you see?” Ambassador Ross said.

“What do I care?” the professor said.

“I think this phrase ‘Islamic fundamentalism’ is misleading,” the ambassador said. “I call it ‘political Islam.’ ”

He went on to say that he felt it was related to many other movements that in my opinion were now actively obnoxious in the world—the Christian Coalition, the Moral Majority, the Pro-Life assassins, and so forth. The militant moralizers in the United States who represented a new Puritanism were ideologically similar to the Muslim Brotherhood and the Party of God. Ambassador Ross did not say so, but it was logical to conclude from this that the Reverend Pat Robertson and the Ayatollah had a great deal in common.

In Syria and elsewhere, unexpectedly, political Islam was growing. More people—many of them young—wore veils, fasted at Ramadan.

This severely orthodox reaction had something to do with the waywardness of governments and the crookedness of politicians. Instead of working within the system, people were adopting a religious scourge, which was a simpler remedy involving denunciation and murder. It was perhaps understandable, but I found it depressing.

I wandered away while the ambassador was challenging Professor Al-Azm on another recondite matter, and I fell into conversation with a Syrian, Mr. Hamidullah. After a while I asked him about the cult of Basil.

“Father-President groomed him for leadership,” Mr. Hamidullah said.

“Isn’t an election usually a more reliable way to pick a leader?” I asked.

“In your country, maybe. But Syria is much different. Here it is necessary to have a golden formula to govern.”

“I see,” I said.
Golden formula?
I said, “And President Assad has the golden formula.”

“I call it the Secret Key,” Mr. Hamidullah said. “Without it, Syria cannot be governed. Father-President was passing this on to his son. He knew that when he died the next leader would need to have the Secret Key.”

“And this Secret Key is necessary because—”

“Because this country is so difficult!” he said. “We have Druses, Alawites, Christians, Jews, Shiites, Assyrians. We have Kurds, we have Maronites. More! We have Yazidis—they are devil worshipers, their God of Bad is a peacock. We have—what?—Chaldeans! How to govern all of them? Secret Key!”

He grinned at me, having demonstrated to his satisfaction that the Hafez Assad dictatorship was necessary and that, in the absence of Basil, his second son, Bashar, would be the possessor of the golden formula, the Secret Police—sorry, Mr. Hamidullah! I meant to say the Secret Key.