August 23, 2014
I saw Syria last before most of those causing the turmoil there were probably even born. Considering what the country has come to today, 31 years was a lifetime ago. Going there as a schoolgirl — albeit a highschooler — inured me to some of the undercurrents that were already eddying and promising later chaos. But even so, it was hard to think of unpleasant things like minority rule and majoritarian angst when the riches of an ancient civilisation beckoned.
Damascus, in particular, was such a genteel city. Of course, the security police were hated. But there was not much visible discontent about the authoritarianism of President Hafez al-Assad. The stirrings of rebellion had already begun when we were there in the early 1980s. But it would have been hard to foretell today’s situation then. In fact, though Damascus was not as European as Beirut in its heyday, its grandeur made it seem above quotidian squabbles, at least to an Indian teen.
After all, this was a city that was traditionally so close-knit that streets did not have names but were known by the prominent families that lived on them. I was told that addresses would read like “fourth house from the residence of the XXX family” and postmen would have no problem identifying the area. The Indian ambassador’s residence at that time, incidentally, would therefore have been traditionally marked as, “Down the road from Assad’s palace”.
Everything in Syria seemed to stretch effortlessly back to antiquity. Aleppo was a great trading city even before Mesopotamia arose and Alexander captured it en route to India. And then there was Crac de Chevalier complete with a round stone table, the 4,000-year-old Aramaic city of Palmyra in the desert and the magnificent Omayyad mosque in Damascus that some say contains the remains of John the Baptist and was also the site of Greek-era temple.…
It was apparent that great civilisational strands that go back to earliest recorded history and then some, met and intertwined right there in the Syrian region. Even the relatively recent Indian connection was unmistakable, with more adherents of the various Syrian Christian doctrines — with further localised offshoots — living in this country than there: many ornate churches are full of desi mementos left behind by Indian pilgrims.
Though they were officially supposed to be ‘Syrian Arab’, very little except the tenets of Islam seemed to connect the Syrians I met — or their immediate neighbours in Lebanon, Jordan, Israel-Palestine and, at a stretch, Eqypt — culturally to other Arabs in the Gulf or North Africa. Their food was different (more Mediterranean) and their manners far more sophisticated. Even the language they spoke, though nominally also Arabic, was more mellifluous rather than Gulf-guttural.
But Syria’s melting-pot nature was most emphatically visible in its people, who are clearly drawn from many races. Our drivers, for instance, were uncle-and-nephew. But one was olive-skinned and black-eyed, the other red-haired and blue-eyed. There were traces of many other ethnicities too, right in our tiny embassy staff. But one thing was very apparent: Syrians were also acutely conscious of — and proud of — their very old and very rich pre-Islamic, cosmopolitan heritage.
That is why it is so hard to imagine that a brutal and medieval force that calls itself the Islamic State of Iraq and Syria (ISIS) — and now simply the Islamic State (IS) — would coalesce and grow in that region. Would the great monuments that people marvelled at for centuries go the way of the Bamiyan Buddhas and remnants of Nineveh? Beheadings of infidels, forced conversions —all these would have been abhorrent to the Syrians I met and interacted with.
Could so much have changed in three decades in a civilisation that had matured over millennia?
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