by Jared Cohen
As was usually the case, I had to wake up from my nap when we arrived at the Lebanese-Syrian border. At the border, I saw the usual scene of trucks lined up for miles, probably waiting for days, before crossing. When Syria had been pressured into withdrawing its troops from Lebanon in March 2005, it did so with great reluctance and at great cost to Syria’s economy and prestige. The Syrian withdrawal from Lebanon coincided with American government pressure for Syria to do a better job securing its borders. While the United States wanted the Assad regime to secure its border with Iraq, the Bashar al-Assad regime in Syria used the opportunity to shut down its borders with Lebanon to economic traffic. While some traffic was let through, commercial trucks were left sitting at the border, sometimes for weeks on end. Border crossings have become like gigantic parking lots, with literally miles and miles of trucks not moving an inch. With Lebanon’s economy already in shambles, the commercial lockdown of the border has come at great cost to the Lebanese, yet another source of widespread Lebanese hatred for Syria.
Fortunately only commercial vehicles were being held up. It was actually rather easy for me to get to the Lebanese-Syrian border. In fact, this was my third time going to Syria in the past two months and I had never run into any trouble at the border, but this time was different. My passport resembles a small book. It is thick and well-worn and often raises the eyebrows of officers, guards, and stuffy bureaucrats. I was even once asked upon arrival in Stockholm if Burundi was a real country. The immigration officer at the Syrian entry point was focused on one page of my passport and asked me, with a cocky and stern look, why I had gone to Israel.
I was puzzled. I had been to Israel in 1990, but this passport was issued in 2001. There were no Israeli stamps in my passport, the presence of which would immediately result in my being denied entry to Syria. I had deliberately avoided taking a trip to Israel before I traveled to Lebanon and Syria, precisely to avoid this predicament. “Maruuhit Israel,” I told him (I hadn’t gone to Israel).
He didn’t seem to believe me. I shrugged and put my hands to my sides; I had no clue what he was talking about. He pointed to a stamp in my passport and I leaned over to look. He was pointing to my multiple-entry visa for Ethiopia. He had mistaken the five-sided star on the Ethiopian stamp for a Star of David.
“This is for Ethiopia, not for Israel.” I said. He still looked confused, so I drew a picture of a Star of David alongside the five-sided Ethiopian star to demonstrate the difference. He was finally convinced and he allowed me to proceed.
Syria, like most Middle Eastern nations, does not recognize the State of Israel. They do not take kindly to even the smallest reminder—like a stamp in a passport—that Israel does in fact exist. Such willful ignorance is not limited to border crossings. I was once at the Virgin Megastore in Beirut, browsing DVD box sets of The West Wing. They had the first and third seasons of the popular show, but the second season was conspicuously absent. The saleswoman told me that the store was forbidden from selling the second season: The word Israel had been uttered too many times in those episodes.
Such restrictions are government posturing and Middle Eastern youth know it. Even the most vehemently anti-Zionist youth I met would express frustration at living next to a country in which they had never been allowed to set foot. As one Hezbollah student told me, “I don’t want to go to Israel to fight or destroy it. I just want to see what it is like. I grew up only twenty kilometers from the border, and still I have no idea what it is like there.” In fact, when you ask a lot of young Lebanese what language they would like to learn besides English, many of them suggest Hebrew. This is even more so the case among the Shi’a from the south, the area bordering Israel.
The charade at the border had been a colossal waste of time and I actually got the impression that the other people in the taxi were irritated with me for holding up their journey. Too tired to address the awkwardness with my traveling companions, I just went back to sleep.
I had probably dozed off for about an hour when I woke up to the sound of singing. It was my taxi driver; in his voice, each word that he sang grew louder and was dragged out longer. It sort of sounded like “Hava Nagila.” Then I heard the words:
Hafez!
Basil!!
Bashar al-Assad!!!
It got louder and more celebratory:
Hafez!…
Basil!!…
Bashar al-Assad!!!…
Now the taxi driver wasn’t the only one singing. The older lady who had been smoking in the back also joined in. They were clapping and smiling. I didn’t know what else to do, so I joined in. My Syrian traveling companions were literally singing the praises of the brutal al-Assad dictators, and it was chilling to see their pictures on every street corner, their decals on every taxi windshield, and billboards glorifying their mythical achievements and disgusting brutality.
The taxi dropped me off in Homs again, the same predominantly Sunni city that had been my first introduction to Syria several months earlier. This time I didn’t stay long. I hailed another taxi and asked to be taken to Palmyra, or Tadmor, as it is known in both Arabic and its original language of Aramaic. Three hours from Homs and 250 kilometers northeast of Damascus, the ancient city of Palmyra stands in the center of Syria. The site being adjacent to perhaps the largest oasis in the Middle East, it is not hard to imagine why the ancient Romans chose it to construct the eastern flank of their empire.
They built Palmyra as a center for tax collection, a stopping point for trade, and a protection fortress for the eastern front of the Roman Empire, and two thousand years later much of what once stood here remains. I spent two full days walking through the ancient columns, exploring the amphitheater, and wandering around the rock tombs. It was a massive desert, except instead of cacti growing out of the sand, there were gigantic columns of limestone whose blocks fitted tightly together in a perfectly symmetrical pattern to form archways. In every direction I could see a different feature of the city and it became fun to decipher the varying historical functions of what I saw. Even when the city seemed to end, as indicated by smaller columns and fewer ruins, I could still see the large rectangular rock tombs erected out of the sand. It never ended.
When I stood before those magnificent ruins in Palmyra, it became easy to see how Syrian young people, looking at their history, are overtaken with a sense of pride. There are thousands of ruins scattered throughout Syria. Even granted an entire lifetime for the purpose, one could not see them all. Considered by some to be the most spectacular ruins in the entire world, Palmyra is filled with intact columns, arches, coliseums, temples, churches, and a variety of other structures. To young people, the ancient ruins in the Middle East are more than just tourist attractions. In Syria and Iran, young people would always refer to my desire to see these sights as admirable; my young friends praised what they saw as my interest in understanding their cultural pride. In Iran, it was about seeing Persepolis; in Syria, Palmyra; in Iraq, the ancient citadels; and in Lebanon, Baalbak.
While I was in Palmyra, a young man approached me on a camel. He couldn’t have been older than seventeen, but he told me that he spoke nine languages. When I asked him where he had learned them, he explained, “from the tourists.” But the place was empty. He explained to me the frustration of being Syrian: knowing what treasures the country possesses and wanting to share them with the world, but having no visitors.
The city of Palmyra was filled with interesting shops. Some of the stores were designed for tourists, with Syrian artifacts at hiked-up prices. These were not the blanket shops of Al-Marrad. There was a whole row of stores, much like a main street in any busy and developed town. While some of the stores offered artifacts and clothing, there was also no shortage of tea shops, places to smoke flavored tobacco, and restaurants. As I walked into one of the shops, my eyes immediately zeroed in on a small but ornate Quran, protected by an intricately designed metal case. It stood with its majestic allure on a fancy silver stand. After bargaining on the price
, I was told by the young shopkeeper, “Be very careful with this, it is very special. Make sure you take care of it and show it respect.” He then picked it up, kissed it, and said a prayer. I asked him if he would mind showing me some of his favorite passages. And so began an afternoon-long lesson on the Quran. We went through dozens of passages, as I listened to him explain what they meant and the various ways that they could be interpreted.
He was very knowledgeable and clearly well-read in the Quran. He didn’t boast about his religious commitments, nor did he emphasize how deeply pious he was. I have found in my experiences in the Middle East that those who feel the need to brag about their religious commitments are often those who are either new to their faith or not well-versed in its teachings. I met so many young people throughout Lebanon, Iran, Syria, and Iraq who claimed to be deeply pious, well-read in the Quran, and scholarly about Islam. When I would ask them to show me the location of a passage in the Quran, however, many of them didn’t know where to turn. Despite an oft-stated commitment to Islam, most youth in the Middle East have never read the Quran cover-to-cover. Instead, they rely on others to tell them what it says. Such reliance on oral education highlights the importance of the mosque and the cleric they choose to follow. Religious extremists employ this method to find new recruits. While this structure of religious education is not exclusive to the Middle East, this reliance on intermediaries to interpret all religious doctrine has provided an opening for dangerous extremists to hijack Islam. I was amazed at how many youth believed—often incorrectly—that the words of the extremist marja (clerical leader) they followed were verbatim from the Quran.
After a few hours going over passages in the Quran, he asked me why I was so curious to learn about Islam. It was as if he hadn’t expected me to care, let alone sit with him for hours going over the text of the Quran. I explained to him that for a student of the Middle East, understanding Islam is essential. He looked at me perplexed and then said with astonishment, “I didn’t think anyone in America would ever want to learn about Islam.” He shouldn’t have been surprised by this. I actually found it refreshing to see someone sitting with a Quran and pointing out passages, rather than regurgitating rhetoric that had been distorted by individual interpretation. It wasn’t quite critical thinking, but it was a step in that direction. I asked him where he got the impression that an American would never want to learn about Islam, and without hesitation he proclaimed that America hates Islam, and wants to destroy the religion.
I hated hearing this because I knew it wasn’t true. Yet he seemed so firm in his conviction. I didn’t try to argue with the young shopkeeper; but I reminded him what the American government had done for Muslim victims after the tsunami and the assistance the United States provided to Iranians after the earthquake in Bam. I told him about Bosnia and about how important our own Muslim population is in America. Like the other young people with whom I’d shared these examples in Lebanon and Syria, he had a difficult time responding. He stuttered a bit. “Well, maybe in those events the United States did something, but…” He trailed off.
Before we parted ways, I decided to buy a kaffiyeh from him. It was the typical Syrian head wrap, designed with red and white checkers. He placed it on my head and rested two black woven rings on top so as to hold it in place. After carefully adjusting it, he pulled back to admire his handiwork. He then shook my hand and said, “Now you look like you are from Syria.”
As was my usual tactic, I found some random guy on the street willing to drive me farther west. He had been lingering around Palmyra, perhaps looking for work. He made it easy to find him because he actually approached me with the offer of a cheap excursion to one of the rock tombs that I had been too lazy to walk to earlier that day. In the blistering summer heat, I always looked for an excuse to cut my walking time and he had a big pickup truck that made it all seem like an adventure. His name was Raja and he was tall, with a full beard and dark skin. He wore long pants and a collared shirt every day we were together, but his head was always adorned with a scarf. Raja was originally from Deir-e Zur, but had passed through Palmyra for business, or rather hopes of business. Like so many other young adults, he was simply looking for a way to make a living in Syria. He had tried handicrafts, rugs, and even tea; now he was hoping to make some money by leveraging his pickup truck as a taxi service.
We were heading in the same direction, so he offered me a good deal. I told him I wanted to visit several nomadic communities that were off the beaten track and then continue on to Deir-e Zur. Other than that, he knew very little of my plans. As I ventured farther into the eastern Syrian province of Deir-e Zur, where the influence of insurgent Iraq had supposedly meshed in a dangerous manner with an already fundamentalist political environment, I was looking for anything that might evoke a friendly response. He kept telling me, “Don’t worry, my friend. I will take you to do and see all that you want and when we get to Deir-e Zur, you will meet my family and see my friends. You will see the real Syria.” So we headed out together. I had now made it halfway across Syria. I was a third of the way to Iraq and more than a little anxious about the rest of my trip.
I rode in the back of Raja’s white pickup truck with my head wrap blowing in the wind. It was so refreshing and I cherished every minute that the wind relieved me from the living sauna of Syria in July. I still had every intention of continuing northeast to Turkey and then down into Iraq, but at this point, there was no need to explain that to Raja. While I was planning to enter Iraq through the north, I figured it might also be interesting to cross the Abu Kamal border and try to get to the ancient southern city of Babylon.
Not aware where he was ultimately taking me, Raja took me deep into the Palmyra Desert so that I could meet some Bedouins. Having spent three months living with the Maasai in southwestern Kenya, I had my own impression of what the nomadic lifestyle was like. I expected a simple lifestyle: no running water, no electricity, no technology. I expected apathy about politics and a visible rift between the Bedouin nomads and the rest of Syrian society.
I was right about one thing: The Bedouins did live in the middle of nowhere.
Raja and I drove to a point where roads ceased to exist. Consequently, we didn’t seem to be going anywhere. All I saw in every direction was desert. Every once and a while, I would see a small shrub as I sat up from the back of the pickup truck, but the sight was certainly not worth the sand blowing in my face. It was never clear to me how Raja navigated. It should have been lonely, as there was literally nothing anywhere in sight. But it wasn’t. I felt peaceful and without a worry in the world. For the first time in Syria, I didn’t feel as though I was in a police state. For once, I could focus more on being overheated than of being followed. There was no Big Brother watching me, no images of Syria’s dictators past and present; it was just me, Raja, and a bunch of sand. This must be why the Bedouins prefer the desert lifestyle.
As we continued on through the desert, I thought back to a trip to Africa. In March of 2003, I had driven through the desert of Mali on my way to Timbuktu. In the smoldering heat and without any water, my car sank in the desert. Nearly passed out from heat exhaustion and scared about how I would get out of the situation, I was rescued by Tuareg nomads. They took me into their tents and sent the children out in the middle of the night to dig the sand away from the car so that I could leave in the morning. But this felt different. Getting stuck in an African desert was no picnic, but being lost less than two hours away from Iraq’s war-torn Sunni Triangle was nothing I wanted to experience.
But the car didn’t sink, we didn’t have to be rescued, and the driver found the Bedouins that I had been looking forward to meeting. The nomadic Bedouins may be a small portion of the population and exercise little influence over politics, but they cover a vast region of Syria and are one of the most important symbols of Syrian culture. Traditionally associated with nomadic migrations that took place between the fourteenth and eighteenth centuries from the Arabian Peninsula, many Bedouin
s settled in the Levant, bringing their traditional pastoral ways with them to the vast deserts of Sinai and Palmyra.
There are roughly one hundred thousand Bedouins living in Syria, but the vast majority of them have settled into the town and city lifestyles; the predominantly Sunni Bedouins are one of the great symbols of the Middle East, yet only a small percentage continue to live as nomads. These days, it is more common to see Bedouins driving pickup trucks and running small businesses than herding sheep. Most of the Bedouins who choose to maintain a nomadic existence can be found scattered throughout the Palmyra Desert, where we were.
When we arrived, the Bedouin encampment was almost as I had pictured it. There were three white cloth tents that stood alongside one another: Each was held up by ropes that were staked down in various directions, and the tent itself was held down by a collection of sandbags. It was windy in the desert, so much so that those wearing veils seemed to use them more for protecting their faces from the sand than for religious purposes. Not far from the tents, the Bedouins had erected fences to shelter their livestock. I saw water storage containers and there was a separate tent for the kitchen.
I wondered how anyone could possibly enjoy a life out here in the desert. It was so secluded from everything. The youth who live in these nomadic communities seemed to have no form of recreation and no way of getting an education. The setting would have looked simple and stereotypically nomadic, if it hadn’t been for one small thing. The Bedouin nomads might have chosen to live in the middle of nowhere, but they were connected to events not only in Syria, but around the world. No, it wasn’t through telepathy; it was through satellite television.
