Syria: the time of the Desert

I have read

Usamah ibn Munkidh, ​Kitab al-i'tibar (12th c.)
Salwa Al Neimi, Burhān al-ʿasal | The Proof of the Honey (2007)

Vertical Divider

I have written

... nothing ...

my Syrian travel before the war

I visited Syria in February 2010, just months, if not weeks, before the beginning of the unrest that utterly led to the civil war. This is why the memory of this travel weighed heavily in me, by the idea that most travels are just squeezed between one conflict and another. And even at that moment, Bosra made a particularly grim impression on me. Not just by the basaltic aspect of the city; also by a particular poverty of its inhabitants. There are different kinds of poverty, characterised by different types of absence. In Bosra, as I saw it, the absence was beyond the material things. It was a deeper, more essential lack of reason to exist, a sort of suspension in the history. 
I also visited other places, those musts of a European grand tour: Krak des Chevaliers, Palmyra, Damascus with its Omayyad mosque and the old city. How much do I regret not having seen more!... And also, not having been kinder, more generous to the country's inhabitants, children of ten selling postcards on the sites, green-eyed adolescents attempting to establish any sort of contact, in view of who knows what future.

Bosra

Palmyra

Coming to my old photos of Palmyra, the sensation of loss intensifies; some of the old stones I saw there are no more. What about the juvenile sellers of postcards, boys and girls in traditional dress? Where are they?

Damascus

In a hammam.

The interior of the Omayyad mosque.

Mausoleum of Ruqaya, the so called Crystal Mosque.

reading Syrian literature

knights and falcons

Usamah ibn Munqidh in his autobiography, Kitab al-I’tibar (Book of learning by example) studied and translated by Philip K. Hitti, gives an image of the Holy Land dominated by Christian invasion. This Muslim warrior and courtier living in the times of the Crusades (1095-1188) was the son of the educated emir of Shaizar, a miniature state in the vicinity of Aleppo. His life was filled by wars, travels and hunting. As a member of the social elite of that time, he used to maintain close relationships with important figures among both, Muslims and Christians. He was a friend of the great Salah ad-Din and of the king of Jerusalem, Fulk. If we believe Usamah’s own words, he was bound by mutual ties of amity with numerous European knights. In his autobiographical book, falconry furnish a constant background for those social relationships, crossing over an ideological gap that could seem impossible to transverse.
One of striking moments of this quite singular autobiography is the burial of a beloved she-falcon, complete with Qur'an recitations and a lot of weeping, organized by Usamah's friend; to such a degree that he believed it was the burial of the friend's own daughter. Reading the narration concerning the relationship with the falcon one can detect rather curious traces of the “culturalization” of the natural behaviour of the bird, as observed by its human partner. Just to give an example, the Syrian falconer interpreted the fact that the falcon didn't attack the fowl in the courtyard as the proof that the bird understood and shared the basic cultural distinctions and concepts, such as “home” and “domestic” versus “alien”, “outsider”, “wild” or “stranger”. 


​
Usamah Ibn Munkidh, Kitab al-I'tibar (Book of Learning by Example), ed. Philip K. Hitti, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1930.