{"id":6157,"date":"2021-11-29T00:00:57","date_gmt":"2021-11-28T22:00:57","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/?p=6157"},"modified":"2025-05-15T23:17:06","modified_gmt":"2025-05-15T21:17:06","slug":"syria-through-british-eyes","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/themarkaz.org\/oldmarkaz\/syria-through-british-eyes\/","title":{"rendered":"Syria Through British Eyes"},"content":{"rendered":"
Novelist Rana Haddad spent the first fifteen years of her life in Syria before moving with her family to England. The difference between what she saw and experienced in Syria and what she heard about Syria in England thereafter was like night and day. This is part one of a two-part essay. The second instalment is entitledObjective Brits, Subjective Syrians<\/a>.<\/em><\/h5>\n

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Rana Haddad<\/h4>\n

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Imagine if a stranger were to tell your story in their words. Moreover, imagine that this stranger believed their own fantasies about you more than what you told them about yourself, and that this stranger\u2019s voice was loud enough for all the world to hear \u2014 but yours was not. This is what it\u2019s like to be a Syrian living in the West.<\/p>\n

I was born in Syria\u2019s harbor city of Latakia in 1970, the year General Hafez Al-Assad became president of the Syrian Arab Republic, or rather its de facto king. <\/em>For since his dramatic arrival on the scene, all dressed up with his signature moustache and military uniform, Assad ruled Syria as if it were his kingdom. And to prove this, he later bequeathed it to his shy ophthalmologist son, who for many years didn\u2019t know he was a prince or an heir apparent.<\/p>\n

Syria at the time I was growing up there was a country where the humblest person read and wrote poetry and ate the most meticulously-prepared dishes, because both good food and poetry were considered a basic necessity of life.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

Think of what it might have been like living in England during the Tudor or Elizabethan eras, but add in all sorts of period props such as 1970s fashions, gadgets and music from both East and West, black and white TV, radios, telephones, cameras, cars, buses, traffic lights, ketchup, mayonnaise and fountain pens. Add to that scene a Mediterranean lifestyle no different from those enjoyed in Italy, Greece or Spain but significantly more ancient, a fabulously refined food culture, along with music and poetry enjoyed by both rich and poor.<\/p>\n

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Rana Haddad’s novel is published by Hoopoe\/AUC Press<\/a>.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Syria at the time I was growing up there was a country where the humblest person read and wrote poetry and ate the most meticulously-prepared dishes, because both good food and poetry were considered a basic necessity of life. Syria, which spanned both a large part of the Levant and a portion of the Fertile Crescent and Mesopotamia, had been a multicultural, multiethnic and multireligious society for millennia. Dotted along its coast and hinterland were monuments such as Ugarit where the first world alphabet was created, and numerous Phoenician, Aramean, Assyrian, Babylonian, Roman, Greek and Byzantine, and crusader ruins and castles. There were early versions of Aphrodite and Venus here; the goddesses Ishtar and Inanna were worshipped with similarly dramatic myths that predated the Greek myths, myths peopled with gods and goddesses; with poetry and art to match as well as ancient innovations in science, music, astronomy, math and even law. Syria, which was also influenced by the Ottomans and the French, was once the sweetheart of British orientalists such as T.E. Lawrence, Agatha Christie and Gertrude Bell, who saw in its land and culture and people the tremendous magic and beauty that very few ordinary British people of today know about.<\/p>\n

Another mostly-forgotten truth about Syria is that it is the mother of the Christian west, or perhaps its grandmother; some of the world\u2019s first churches continue to be active there today, with services conducted in Aramaic, the language of Christ, a close cousin language of both Arabic and Hebrew (Biblical or greater Syria encompassed today\u2019s Syria as well as current day Anatolia, Antioch, Lebanon, Palestine and Israel \u2013 before it was divided up like a piece of cake by the French and the British a century ago).<\/p>\n

But for all the decades before the terrible war that erupted in Syria after the 2011 revolution, to all intents and purposes Syria did not exist, or if it did then it was as a land of Bedouins and terrorists and nothing much in-between. But this was not the Syria that I lived in for the first fifteen and a half years of my life.<\/p>\n

During the 1970s and 1980s, my father first had a black Citro\u00ebn, and later a white Peugeot; we had hardly ever been confronted with a camel except on TV. As children and teenagers, we knew all about the West, which did not know anything about us. We watched Casper the friendly Ghost and Tom and Jerry on our television screens as well as Russian fairy tale cartoons; we watched Charlie\u2019s Angels<\/em> and Dynasty<\/em> and Dallas<\/em> as well as Syrian and Egyptian soap operas. We were not familiar with tents either, nor with deserts (except on school trips to Palmyra which was in the part of Syria where, yes, we had a desert). Syria had the Mediterranean, mountains, plains, major rivers such as the Orontes and Euphrates as well as a desert. It had an urban professional class, a rural class as well as Bedouins, it had liberal people as well as conservative, rich as well as poor. Everything existed there, like it does in many other nations. But unlike in the West, which had lost touch with its own ancient roots, in Syria modernity and the past co-existed in a way that many of us found deeply enriching and it filled our world with meaning.<\/p>\n

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The coastline along Latakia today.<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n
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We went to a girls\u2019 school that was formerly a French convent school, a stone\u2019s throw from the Corniche which was full of cafes and fish and Arabic mezze restaurants, where people played backgammon, drank Syrian-made Arak, beer and wines and watched live concerts of both Arabic and western singers and bands. Our school courtyard was full of centuries-old trees and fragrant blossoms, and our school with teachers with French names such as Mademoiselle Laudie and Madeleine, Gladys, Georgette, or a Turkish Ottoman name such as Madam Irfan, and our Arabic literature teachers had names like Jawhara (Jewel), or Ramez (the Symbolic one) or Usama (the one who has a name). All of history was encompassed in our teachers\u2019 names. Our dentist had a Greek name, our supermarket owner was Armenian, the woman who helped my mother every day at home was Alawite \u2014 she was illiterate but her daughters eventually went to study at university and became teachers. As a small child I learnt my first words in Arabic with an Alawite village accent as I spent so much time with her and also her children, giving me a sense of both rural Syria where she came from as well as the urban and coastal Syria where I grew up. In our Christian convent school, we had plenty of Muslim children. Sitting side by side together we grew to love one another and developed friendships that lasted a lifetime; many of our parents were friends and business associates and former schoolmates too, and the links between the families and their off-spring had lasted for many generations.<\/p>\n

And as for war and terrorism, yes, I had a short experience of them. Three years after I was born, a 19-day war erupted with our 25-year-old neighboring state of Israel. Every morning we would see petrol silos burning on the coast, and a soldier by the name of Jawdat was stationed in our garden to protect our house, which faced the city corniche. Every morning and afternoon, I would bring him a tray of coffee and biscuits, and I remember how when he left I cried the way only a little girl can cry at losing a young man in uniform who treated her as if she were his daughter or his sister. As soon as the war stopped life returned to normal, and it was as if nothing had happened.<\/p>\n

The Syrian love of life continued unabated, and became even more intense with the knowledge that none of what we had could be taken for granted. One day military airplanes could be flying over our coast and houses, while we were playing card games in bunkers, and then a few weeks later we could find our parents sitting in a fish restaurant, while we children played hide and seek, or with rackets on the beach. But apart from these drastic one-off 19 days of danger, daily life in Latakia was extraordinarily safe and secure. As a young girl of eight or nine, it was not unheard of for me to take a taxi on my own or with my friends to go here and there, or to go and visit my friends on foot without supervision. From morning till night, our lives as children and teenagers were free, we did as we pleased and the city was our playground. The number of people who knew us, our parents and even our grandparents was in the high hundreds, so wherever we went we were surrounded by acquaintances, who kept an eye on us.<\/p>\n