Innocence and War

by Ian Strathcarron

  Among the casualties in those four days and nights of horror was the American consul, Abdu Costi. We do not know if the Excursionists met his successor, Mikhayil Mishaqa, who later wrote extensively about the massacres and as consul reported to Jeremiah Augustus Johnson, whom Mark Twain at least had met in Beirut. But if the Excursionists had it might explain why they seemed to rush out of Damascus without seeing the timeless souk and the Omayyad Mosque, then as now two of the best reasons for visiting the Old City.

  In a letter to Johnson, Mishaqa wrote that the Jews had also been spared because the Christians did the Jew-hating for the Muslims. Later he wrote: “It is hard to dissociate the divine from the material and the daily in a region largely considered as the birthplace of the three major monotheistic religions15, and where [people’s exclusive claim to] ‘God’ himself is the problem.”

  No problem today though. All is sweetness and light, religious tolerance compulsory between the faiths and even among each faith’s sects. I am keen to visit this Presbyterian church started in 1866, and arrange to meet the vicar, the Reverend Butros Zaour. A big, hearty man with a generous smile and open gestures makes me comfortable, then makes himself comfortable too.

  “First,” he announces in perfect mid-West accented American English, “I have to set you right about your terminology. I am not the vicar, I am the pastor. And we are not Presbyterian - although we are, you know - but here we’re Evangelical.”

  “Points taken,” I reply, “but how so?”

  “Awhile back, when President Bashar’s father was in charge, the government insisted on religious tolerance and equality, Christians and Muslims - the Jews had gone by then. But they said to the Christians: hey, you guys got too many sects. Not just us Protestants, but all the Greek sects, the RCs and Maronites, the Armenians, local Syrians, everybody. Gotta get yourselves organized. We’re gonna recognize four patriarchies here. That’s it. Go sort.

  Greek Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Latin Catholic and Evangelicals.”

  “So,” I suggest, trying to be helpful, “in Western terms the Evangelicals here are the non-Catholic, non-Orthodox refuseniks.”

  “Kinda style. We are under the Protestant umbrella. Right here we started off as Presbyterian, still are, but now in Damascus we have Anglicans, Alliance missionaries, Nazarenes, and Baptists, some Lutherans and Armenian Protestants. The latter are Congregational, a little awkward as they don’t do hierarchies.”

  “Like the Plymouth Church of the Pilgrims, the ones along with Mark Twain, they were Congregationalists.”

  “Well, we have to say to the Congregationalists, you have to fit in. If the Maronites can fit in, anybody can fit in! It’s OK, they come along after our Sunday service and have a quiet service themselves.”

  “I love the way everybody just rubs along together here,” I say. “There’ll be an electric wail of the muezzin one minute, then the ding-dong of church bells the next. Same in the streets and cafés, everyone is Damascene first and then their faith after that. But I want to ask you: after the terrible massacres of 1860, dreadful affair, all the churches sacked too, how come five years later a completely new mission arrived, a Presbyterian16 mission that built this church - presumably on the very spot where other Christians had been slaughtered?”

  “It’s the way of the Lord,” he replies. I must look blank. “You look blank. Our life in the church is not logical like maybe yours. The Lord calls and we follow. The Lord moves in mysterious ways with few straight lines. And don’t forget the early missionaries came to convert the Jews, not the Muslims. Many thought that Islam was just a heretical branch of Christianity, another splinter group if you will - to add to all the others. After all, a Martian would find Christians and Muslims almost identical - why, we all used to pray together not so long ago. It was the Jews who needed their souls saving; the Jews more than the Muslims. The Muslim theology is not at its root a million miles away from ours, and the Jews, come to that, it’s the societies that are so different.” “I don’t mean to be rude, but wasn’t it just one lot of nomadic and illiterate tribesmen needing explanations for the inexplicable versus another, just with different superstitions?”

  “That’s too simple, and too cynical. Old Testament maybe, up to a point. You can read it anyway you like, and that’s the Judean way. For sure there was mass illiteracy and superstition, but our side, if I can put it like that, were largely settled and not nomadic, and by the time of the New Testament with a large body of work to draw from.” the pastor replies.

  “Fair enough. It’s easy to be glib if you haven’t been called. But the massacres here must have been ghastly. Let me read you this from Mark Twain, visiting here five years after the massacre, and only a year after your church opened. He wrote, ‘In Damascus they so hate the very sight of a foreign Christian that they want no intercourse whatever with him. It is the most fanatical Mohammedan purgatory out of Arabia. Where you see one green turban of a Hadji elsewhere (the honored sign that my lord has made the pilgrimage to Mecca) I think you will see a dozen in Damascus... The Damascenes are the ugliest, wickedest looking villains we have seen. All the veiled women we had seen yet, nearly, left their eyes exposed, but numbers of these in Damascus completely hid the face under a close-drawn black veil that made the woman look like a mummy. If ever we caught an eye exposed it was quickly hidden from our contaminating Christian vision; the beggars actually passed us by without demanding bucksheesh; the merchants in the bazaars did not hold up their goods and cry out eagerly, “Hey, John!” or “Look this, Howajji!” On the contrary, they only scowled at us and said never a word.’” “Sounds about right,” the pastor replies. “Only hundred and fifty years ago, wasn’t it? Everything here changed here with the 1970 coup. The al-Assads are Alawites, a minority Muslim sect that even the Muslims think are a bit wacky. In Pakistan they are still persecuted, mosque-bombed and suchlike. In Saudi, forget it - it’s lamppost time. That’s an unhappy place, Pakistan, by the way. The al-Assads knew that the only way to protect a minority is to declare majorities illegal - and unwholesome. It’s worked. They’ve done wonder- fully for all minorities. When the Muslim crazies got uppity in the ‘seventies al-Assad Senior whacked them, good and hard. If he hadn’t Syria would not be the great place it is today. Now I’ll tell you, when your Mark Twain was here, in our early missionary17 days, the Presbyterians were wary of the Alawites.”

  “The British Foreign Secretary of the time said that Druze and Alawites were Pagans, capital P,” I say.

  “Well, the Alawites thought that all women were created from the sins of the Devil and had no souls. That’s all gone. Today just look at Syria’s First Lady, an Alawite by marriage. She stands for everything that is gracious and right about modern Syria. Classy. She is the future.” He pours our second coffee, Turkish, and out of the blue says: “I hate to say this about a fellow Christian, but George W. Bush was an idiot - a complete idiot18.”

  “Well, as Mark Twain said, politician and idiot are synonymous terms.You mean all the Axis of Evil guff?”

  “He’s an embarrassment. The Catholics here say ignoramus.” “And Obama?”

  “The Syrians like him. But it’s all about Israel. Is-rae-el as they say here. Bush junior just let them run riot. We’ll see.”

  The pastor isn’t the first person to have spoken well of the al-Assad dynasty’s current dictator, Dr. Bashar al-Assad. What is slightly unnerving about the dynastic dictatorship’s scion is that the poor boy just doesn’t really look the part. Even when he’s trying to look mean on the ubiquitous full size posters, with his aquamarine eyes and skimpy moustache President Bashar al-Assad looks like a friendly 45-year-old optician working for Lens Crafters in a suburban shopping mall - which is exactly what he would have been if dynastic politics had not brought him up short. His father, Hafez al-Assad, a proper old-fashioned Ba’ath Party henchman, seized power in a coup d’état in 1970 (the tenth coup since in
dependence from France in 1946) and ran Syria as a Soviet bloc fiefdom, and a particularly unpleasant one at that. His eldest son, Basil, ran the secret police and was shaping up to be a proper Baby Doc while his youngest son Bashar was playing the young Michael Corleone in London, quietly studying ophthalmics and even marrying his Kay, a very bright London-born financier called Emma.

  Then young Bashar’s dreams of suburban anonymity were shattered in 1994 when the airbags in 31-year-old Basil’s Mercedes 500SL failed to explode as he was rushing to the airport. Bashar was called home and sent to the military academy and fast-tracked to the top. When his father died in 2001, the 34-year-old Bashar was voted president by 97.62 per cent of the population - his father’s old secret police are still looking for the 2.38 per cent of troublemakers. The word most commonly associated with Bashar is “disappointing”, in the sense that westernized Syrians and others in the wider non-Arab world had hoped that with his European education, vocational calling and British wife there might be a Damascus Spring. They are still waiting. Also waiting are the youthful Syrians, stuck in a rut by the ruling classes, denying them the opportunity to improve themselves and their country.

  Like all dictatorships, the Syrian one is at heart brutal and stupid, and Canute-like shuts down the newspapers and magazines that it can while being unable to stem the ever-flowing tide of information from cyberspace. When it tries to get cute with new technology, it finds itself locking up teenage girls who blog about Mahatma Gandhi. Another teenager was “questioned” - for six months - because he was moderating an online youth forum. Meanwhile serious journalists have fled and operate openly available - and highly critical - blogs and sites from beyond the borders. This regime can only lock up its techlit teenagers instead of fast-tracking them to greater know-how and success.

  The writer has been in a few dictatorships: the Shah’s Iran, Zia’s Pakistan, Saddam’s Iraq - and al-Assad Junior’s regime is hardly Saddamesque, more lesser spotted inconvenience if politics or journalism are not your bent. In Syria one is reminded of another semi-dictatorship, that of King Mohammed VI of Morocco. another hard father to soft son act. As a legal front for the repression it hides behind a fifty-year-old State of Emergency which even al-Assad’s civilian supporters are urging him to revoke; as an economic fact the government through its own efforts and its nationalized industries employs well over half of the workforce, giving itself an inbuilt quelling of dissent.

  The area’s biggest millstone, religious fundamentalism, has been neutralized by an intolerance of it of which the mullahs themselves would be proud. Arab societies, from Bedouin tribesmen to the pillars of academe, are traditional societies, and don’t respond well to quick change. We might preach to the Arabs about the joys of democracy, and say it’s done us well for over two thousand years. But it’s a disingenuous argument: the Greek democracy was only for the propertied few, and universal suffrage in Western Europe is much less than a hundred years old - in France’s case it didn’t happen until after the Second World War. What the Greeks really gave us was dialectics, which in turn led to our whole system of reasoning by questioning and re-questioning - and from that came democracy and much more besides.

  Far less impressive is al Assad’s record on terrorism. Finding himself out of the Arab loop as Egypt then Jordan recognized Israel, the PLO fell apart into splinter groups and the Palestinians held elections, he has taken to keeping a toe in the Palestinian water by second-hand terrorism. Allowing his country to be used as a conduit for Iranian arms for Hezbollah to fire at Israel from southern Lebanon while keeping his own troops well away from Israeli wrath is cowardly and proves nothing.

  Bashar can look around him and draw his own conclusions. To the north he sees Turkey, a democracy slipping backwards towards Islamism as fast breeding Anatolian peasants outvote secular Istanbul liberals. To the west he sees Lebanon, a democracy whose constitution is based entirely around confessional voting, whose own logic has brought it into the hands of Hezbollah and the longing for another vengeful war. To the south he sees Israel, another democracy, where multiparty proportional representation means political stagnation under the religious-right fundamentalists’ veto. To the east he sees Jordan, not a democracy, but a reasonably liberal Arab monarchy of recent provenance where society progresses as it does in the Arabic way at an Arabic speed. One can see Bashar looking east, seeing what works, sprucing up his ten-year-old son Hafez and timing the changes conservatively. (Hafez was named after his grandfather; let’s hope that’s all they have in common.)

  Meanwhile he can only hope that his subjects, high in youth and unemployment, low on opportunity and expectation and now with access to news of the Arab Spring changes elsewhere in the Middle East, don’t push for that change in Syria faster than his regime is prepared to give it. Perhaps only then will we find out who really is in charge, the old guard who would have no compunction about maintaining their stranglehold on privilege and opportunity by spraying the rioters with live rounds or the more liberal Bashar circle who - it is popularly believed - would blanch at the prospect.

  ***

  Having hoisted the New Pilgrims by their own petard and taken Sunday as a day off, Twain re-joined the Holy Land tour on the Monday. They found themselves a Ferguson and went to Via Recta, the “street which is called Straight”, mentioned by Luke in Acts 9:10-19: “And there was a certain disciple at Damascus, named Ananias; and to him said the Lord in a vision, Ananias. And he said, Behold, I am here, Lord. And the Lord said unto him, Arise, and go into the street which is called Straight, and enquire in the house of Judas for one called Saul, of Tarsus: for, behold, he prayeth, And hath seen in a vision a man named Ananias coming in, and putting his hand on him, that he might receive his sight.”

  I must say there is a certain tingle to be walking down “the street which is called Straight”, as though the Bible has connected the then and the now. There clearly was such a street here two thousand years ago, and for two thousand years before that. Biblical scholars accept Acts 1-12 as being broadly factual, St. Paul’s obviously metaphorical blinding aside. Twain noted that, “The street called Straight is straighter than a corkscrew, but not as straight as a rainbow.” Sure enough halfway along there is a chicane as the street kinks around a Roman arch.

  They headed east along the street called Straight until turning left into Sharia Hanania just before the reconstructed Romanesque Bab Sharqi. “We called at the reputed house of Ananias. There is small question that a part of the original house is there still; it is an old room twelve or fifteen feet under-ground, and its masonry is evidently ancient. If Ananias did not live there in St. Paul’s time, somebody else did.”

  Nowadays, of all the Biblical sites of Damascus the St. Ananias Church is the most interesting. Its provenance is unprovable, but probable, and to some extent irrelevant. A plaque tells us that “Oriental tradition, according the Greek [Orthodox] menology, confirmed by the [Jesuit] Bollandists, tells us that Ananias was one the 72 disciples chosen by Jesus and that following the stoning to death of the deacon St. Stephan, Ananias returned to his home city, Damascus, where later he became the city’s first bishop. The governor Licinius later had him stoned to death outside the Damascus city walls for being the head of the local Christians.”

  Archaeologists see the sequence of events thus: Ananias’ house being used as a place of veneration by the early Christians, and the Christians then being ousted by the Romans who in 200 AD built a temple on the site; sometime during the Byzantine period and before the Muslim invasion, so sometime around 400 AD, the house was made into a church, the Church of the Holy Cross; and when the Muslims converted the Byzantine St. John’s Basilica into the magnificent Omayyad Mosque, they rebuilt the damaged Church of the Holy Cross in compensation.

  It wasn’t at all uncommon for Christians and Muslims to pray together up to two hundred years ago. Eastern Orthodox Christians, and therefore the earliest Christians, prayed by pr
ostrating themselves as Muslims do, albeit while crossing themselves as they did so; the kneeling while praying posture is a later invention of the Western Catholic Christian tradition. The site had well documented dual use as a church and mosque until 1820 when the Ottomans allowed the Franciscans to rebuild the now crumbling structure and restore it as a dedicated church. After it was desecrated in the 1860 massacre it was rebuilt again as it is now, and just in time for Mark Twain’s visit in 1867.

  I’m not sure to what other sites their Ferguson took them, or how he explained them, but today they have either vanished like “the place where the disciples let Paul down over the Damascus wall at dead of night - for he preached Christ so fearlessly in Damascus that the people sought to kill him, just as they would to-day” or are a kitsch sham such as “a tomb which purported to be that of St. George who killed the dragon” or a plain tall story such as “the honored old tradition that the immense garden which Damascus stands in was the Garden of Eden, and that the rivers Pharpar and Abana are the ‘two rivers’ that watered Adam’s Paradise.” Twain was having none of it: “It may be so, but it is not paradise now. It is so crooked and cramped and dirty that one cannot realize that he is in the splendid city he saw from the hill-top. The gardens are hidden by high mud-walls, and the paradise is become a very sink of pollution and uncomeliness... Damascus has plenty of clear, pure water in it, though, and this is enough, of itself, to make an Arab think it beautiful and blessed. Water is scarce in blistered Syria. We run railways by our large cities in America; in Syria they curve the roads so as to make them run by the meager little puddles they call ‘fountains’, and which are not found oftener on a journey than every four hours. With her forest of foliage and her abundance of water, Damascus must be a wonder of wonders to the Bedouin from the deserts. Damascus is simply an oasis - that is what it is.”