Stranger to History (8 page)

Syria International:
Notes from the Translation Room

I
left Istanbul the morning after the Love club. My wish to see the city in snow was unfulfilled, but compensated in part by seeing Anatolia in deep winter. I was on the Taurus Express to Damascus, travelling on what had been the old Hejaz railway. It was built by the Ottomans in their last years, with the intention to connect Istanbul to Mecca, and was famous for being blown up routinely by T. E. Lawrence.

The sleeper was blue and white, the only carriage with Arabic letters on it, sharp-edged sickles and dots, which spelt out the equivalent of ‘CFS, Chemins de fer Syriens’. It was to fall away from the rest of the train when we reached the south-east. We drifted past a few coastal towns with red-tiled roofs before I fell asleep, making up for the late night. When I awoke it was just after one o’clock and the winter sun was almost hot. Outside, a brown stream was bubbling past rocks in a shallow chasm. The low branches that hung over it would have brought shade in another season, but were now bare and cast a long, thorny shadow over the water. A single white heron gazed indefinitely over at the muddied winter scene. All around, large, round rocks were heaped on top of one another as if in preparation for a child’s game, with snow and shrubs competing for the spaces between them. Gradually, the land became flatter and the winter scene more complete. By late afternoon, the train was racing past snow-covered towns, and only the occasional glimpse of a wall or collapsed house of honey-coloured stone spoke of a warm country. A pale, orb-like sun hung overhead and minarets poked out of the thick snow, forging new associations in my mind, unused to linking Islam with winter.

The next morning, after a night in the train, I was in southern Anatolia and the snow was gone. It was replaced by a landscape of grey boulders and gentle hills, with a sparse cover of thin, emerald grass. The rocks stayed, but the earth became red and the grass more lush as we continued south. There were few trees and the land’s mild, grassy contours met the sky further than the eye could see. Mid-afternoon. We were unhitched and waited for many hours for a new engine. After a small collision, movement one way and then the other, we set off again.

I stepped out of my cabin to ask our large Syrian attendant, with mascaraed eyes, for some tea when I caught a powerful whiff of marijuana smoke coming from the direction of the engine. I put my head out of the window and it was stronger. I followed the smell, walking the length of the sleeper, until I came to a door with two sealed windows. On the other side, two fine-featured Turkish soldiers with watery red eyes and berets were standing outside their carriage, choking and laughing over a blunt-sized joint.

When they saw me, they bent double with laughter and, arm outstretched, offered it to me. I made a gesture of helplessness: the sleeper doors were locked with a nut and a bolt and seemed not to have been opened in years. More out of courtesy to them than from any conviction that it would open, I tried unscrewing the nut. It slid straight off and the bolt fell into my hands. I pulled at the doors; they divided, but no more than six inches, just enough for the soldiers, now in hysterics, to pass me the joint.

In Turkey, military service is compulsory and they were completing theirs in the nearby town of Iskenderun. They spoke little English so we smoked and laughed, and I, more than them, kept looking behind me in fear of the Syrian attendant catching me. He didn’t come so we smoked the fat joint to its filter. At one point, we went through a tunnel and the soldiers took great pleasure in passing the burning end in the darkness. Soon after, the train slowed down and the soldiers shuffled off to duty. A few minutes later I saw them disembark. They waved, then pointed ahead, grinning and glassy-eyed. I put my head out and saw two sentry posts, with small Turkish flags, standing alone on a gently sloping grassy stretch. There was no sign of a town, just the changing gradient of the land. We were at the Syrian border.

The Turkish exit stamp came quickly and the train, passing a barbed-wire fence, rolled in the direction of a complex consisting of a grey building with a green roof, an ochre minaret and a water-tank. The sky was a mixture of rain and evening, and beams of religious light broke through the cloudy kaleidoscope on to the lower country ahead. More trains with Arab script appeared, then a portrait of the Syrian leader, Bashar al-Assad, a boyish, fleshy face and chinless; nothing like the tight-mouthed stare of his late father, Hafez.

They kept us at the border for hours. First, a Swiss consultant was questioned for many minutes about his profession. He appealed to me, but the words that might have worked in Turkish didn’t in Arabic. The immigration officer was young and casually dressed. He asked whether I spoke Arabic, if I was Muslim, then offered me a cigarette, and moved on to Leon, a Chinese-American software engineer. He was taken away for several minutes and returned shaken. ‘I’ll tell you about the little bit of theatre that occurred once we get moving,’ he said, with a weak smile. He never did.

The rain that began in Aleppo continued through the day and into the evening, following me to Damascus. An Egyptian film played on the Kadmus bus I had boarded. It was a black comedy of sorts in which the main character, a young man, was afflicted with a skin disease that only he could see; its portrayal was vile. I could barely bring myself to look at the green-black slime that spread over his otherwise pleasant face. The film’s garish colours and noise were hard to get away from. A soldier sitting next to me with a crew-cut and severe lacedup boots laughed uproariously at the blighted man’s fate.

The countryside beyond Aleppo turned to desert, not soft, sandy desert but flat, hard, gravelly desert. The yellowish-brown hills in the distance were bare and gritty. Every now and then we would pass a large mural of Assad
père
or
fils
. The older man’s murals were in 1970s socialist style: the grim-faced leader managing a smile as agriculture and industry, combine harvesters and mills, worked in the background. The colours were faded, and in some the paint had flaked off, leaving powdery white patches. The younger Assad had launched a campaign of his own, consisting of a young Syrian man and woman staring patriotically into the distance, with the red, black and white of the Syrian tricolour behind them. This, I was sure, was a response to the wave of international pressure Syria, after so many years in Arab nationalist sleep, was suddenly facing. As it became dark, the bus passed through the towns of Hama and Homs, both ancient, with rich classical histories. In the early 1980s, Hama had been the scene of a crackdown in which the dictator had levelled a good part of the old city and overnight solved the country’s Muslim Brotherhood problem, the Islamist movement that thrived in neighbouring Egypt. People spoke of the crackdown with awe; rumours circulated that the government had chased the Brotherhood into Hama’s sewers and electrocuted them.

The Kadmus bus dropped us off at a depot some way out of town. It was a bleak spot, open, unprotected and badly lit. There was little of the comfort or wonder of arriving in a new place, just rain, cement block houses and naked bulbs. The city’s skyline was low and indiscernible, green tube-lit minarets and white city lights dotting the gloom. The presence of the minarets in this small, makeshift way, at once shabby and ubiquitous, gave the darkness an unexpected, neon edge. It was Christmas Eve.

I had first heard of the primacy of Syria as a destination for international Islam from Hassan Butt.

‘I do believe I’ve got a bigger role to play,’ Butt said, in the curry house in Manchester, ‘and when that time comes, I will make my preparations to play that role.’

He’d been hinting at it so I asked, ‘It’s martyrdom, isn’t it?’

‘Absolutely,’ he replied. ‘It’s something that makes me really depressed, being stuck in this country, because I know I’m so far away from it. I know that if I was to pass away in my sleep, I would not have the mercy of Allah upon me because I have been such a bad person. And I don’t see myself getting into heaven that easily, except through martyrdom.’

‘Where would you go if you got your passport back?’ I asked.

‘Probably Yemen and Syria initially, because at the moment I’m wanted in Pakistan for supposed involvement in an assassination plot against Musharraf.’

‘And after Yemen and Syria, the enemy you would finally confront is the US, right?’

‘Yes, but maybe America will be destroyed in my time, maybe I’ll have something completely different to do.’ Then his face expressed new urgency. ‘But I need to learn Arabic! As an English and Urdu-speaking person, I can see the beauty of Islam from the outside, but I really can’t access it without Arabic. It’s like having a beautiful house and only being able to see through the windows how beautiful it is inside. That is how I view Arabic. I believe the Arabic language will give me the key to the things I don’t have access to at the moment. Once I learn Arabic,
inshallah
, I will get myself militarily trained. It’s like the Jews in Israel: conscription is incumbent upon every male and female.’

The presence of international politics and of the traditional enemies of international
jihad
were visible in Syria within hours of my arrival. On Christmas Day in Damascus, as I explored the city’s bazaars and baths, I saw a series of red banners, hung in a giant sweep across the breadth of the souk. Their yellow, orange and white painted letters read:

From Syria the country of peace and loving to the Aggressive Israel and its allied America . . . We are in Syria the country of self-esteem and homebred we refuse your democracy after what we had seen happen in Iraq and Palestine and how your democracy build on people’s bodies which you bombed on civilians innocents and when the matter reached the council of security in the United Nations and how you used the rejection right (the Vito) to save Israel for only a suspicious matter, and how America pursued the council of security to issue a decision against Syria followed by new decision even Syria executed first one, but the Syrian people not afraid and whatever the difficulties could be and they are resistant by leadership of dearest the President B. Al Assad.

On Valentine’s Day the year before, a bomb killed the Lebanese prime minister, Rafik Hariri, in downtown Beirut. Hariri had played an important role in rebuilding Beirut after its destruction during the Lebanese civil war and was known for his opposition to the Syrian military presence in his country. The Syrians were rumoured to have been behind the bomb, and after an outcry in Lebanon, they withdrew their army from the country. A UN inquiry into Syria’s role in the assassination of Hariri had implicated the Syrian high command, and the Americans, perhaps pursuing ends of their own, were putting pressure on Syria for its meddling in Lebanon and for supporting terrorism in Iraq. The air in Syria that winter was filled with rumour.

The country had been closed for decades. The regime, for most of its existence, had been socialist, intolerant of religious politics, and the people had only received propaganda. With their role in the world suddenly internationalised, the city was plastered with these cryptic, high-pitched messages. It was the government’s response to trouble in the world beyond. President Bashar al-Assad and the Syrian people were not kneeling before anyone but God. And so, in the absence of a free press, an intellectual life and a political culture, and under the watch of a fierce secret police, the mosque became the only place for people to congregate and discuss politics.

What struck me on that first day, as I read the banner, was how unusual and desperate a message it was, unfurled over the souk, the most public of public places, in the guise of a private citizen’s initiative. In Syria, where an email with sensitive content could get you pulled up by the secret service, the banners could only have dominated the great bazaar with the blessing of the regime. In another society, where it might really have been possible for an independent party to rent space and make a political statement, it would be difficult to imagine a message of its kind: a public shriek directed at international enemies, hanging over the equivalent of Times Square or Oxford Street. In India, I couldn’t imagine an international issue with enough following to warrant hysteria of this kind.

The shoppers in their polyesters, eating stringy ice-cream and walking down the covered souk, more reminiscent of a Paris passage than a traditional Arab souk, seemed oblivious to the banners. They were mostly young men with light beards, wide trousers and baggy jackets. They wandered about in twos and threes, often arm in arm, here stopping for something to eat, there for a soft drink, seemingly aimless, smoking at will. The main commerce occurred between women, in dark, heavy coats and headscarves, some fully veiled, and moustached shopkeepers with hard, round stomachs. Only foreigners, the odd group of Italian tourists, still visiting Syria despite darkening clouds, on their way to the magnificent Umayyad Mosque at the end of the covered market, stopped to read it. Indeed, the message, translated badly into both French and English, must have been intended, in some measure, for them too.