القاموس السياسي العربي

النظام الملكي:- عند وفاة الملك ينتقل الحكم لأبنه ليصبح هو الملك الجديد .

النظام الجمهوري:- عند وفاة الرئيس ينتقل الحكم لأبنه ليصبح هو الرئيس الجديد


السياسي المحنك:- رجل يتسم بسعة الصدر عند المناقشة وسعة الكرش فيما عدا ذلك .

الدستور:- كلمة تقال للحماية من الأسياد لما الواحد يدخل بيت مسكون دستور يا أسيادي .......... العفو والسماح .

الديمقراطية:- نوع من الفنون الزخرفية يستخدم لتزويق صورة الحكومة.

العولمة:- عملية تحول اجتماعي وثقافي وفني تتزعمه سفيرة الثقافة هيفاء وهبي .

الشفافية:- سمة ضرورية للملابس المستخدمة في العولمة.

النظام العالمي الجديد:- ويندوز إكس بي.

الجات:- مصيبة وجان علي دماغنا.

التنوير:- عملية تتم في الشوارع عندما يسكنها وزير.

صندوق النقد:- ما يفرقش كتير عن صندوق الزبالة.

المبايعة:- ورقة بتكتبها لما تبيع عربية قديمة.

القانون:- آلة تصدر أصوات جميلة لما تلعب فيها بصوابعك .

حرية النشر:- تمارسها النساء علي السطوح في المناطق الشعبية.

الدبلوماسية:- أحسن هدية تصالح بيها مراتك بس بشرط الماس يكون حر.

العمل السياسي:- يمارسه كل من يعمل سايس في جراج.

الصراع الطبقي:- خناقة كل بيت علي مين اللي حيغسل الأطباق النهاردة.

الحرب الأهلية:- حرب البنت مع أهلها عشان تتجوز الواد اللي هي عايزاه.

حرب الشوارع:- قيادة سيارة في شوارع دمشق.

حرب التحرير:- معركة شهيرة يخوضها كل من يريد استخراج جواز سفر من مركز الهجرة و الجوازات في البرامكة.

عملية السلام:- زي عملية اللوز بالضبط، تنتهي برمي اللوز في الزبالة.

الشريط الحدودي:- الشريط الجاي لعمرو دياب.

الوحدة العربية:- أن تعاني كل دولة عربية الشعور بالوحدة.

Q and A

Even though I look at the day in which the regime of Saddam Hussien was toppled as one of the greaetest days in the life of Iraqis, I found this Q and A a delight to read...


Q Daddy, why did we have to attack Iraq ?
> A Because they had weapons of mass destruction.
>
> Q But the inspectors didn't find any weapons of mass destruction.
> A That's because the Iraqis were hiding them.
>
> Q And that's why we invaded Iraq ?
> A Yep. Invasions always work better than inspections.
>
> Q But after we invaded them, we STILL didn't find any weapons of
> mass destruction, did we?
> A That's because the weapons are so well hidden. Don't worry,
> we'll find something, probably right before the 2008 election.
>
> Q Why did Iraq want all those weapons of mass destruction?
> A To use them in a war, silly.
>
> Q I'm confused. If they had all those weapons that they planned
> to use in a war, then why didn't they use any of those weapons
> when we went to war with them?
> A Well, obviously they didn't want anyone to know they had those
> weapons, so they chose to die by the thousands rather than defend
> themselves.
>
> Q That doesn't make sense. Why would they choose to die if they
> had all those big weapons with which they could have fought
> back?
> A It's a different culture. It's not supposed to make sense.
>
> Q I don't know about you, but I don't think they had any of those
> weapons our government said they did.
> A Well, you know, it doesn't matter whether or not they had those
> weapons. We had another good reason to invade them anyway.
>
> Q And what was that?
> A Even if Iraq didn't have weapons of mass destruction, Saddam
> Hussein was a cruel dictator, which is another good reason to
> invade another country.
>
> Q Why? What does a cruel dictator do that makes it OK to invade
> his country?
> A Well, for one thing, he tortured his own people.
>
> Q Kind of like what they do in China ?
> A Don't go comparing China to Iraq . China is a good economic
> competitor, where millions of people work for slave wages in
> sweatshops and help make US corporations richer.
>
> Q So if a country lets its people are exploited for American
> corporate gain, it's a good country, even if that country
> tortures people?
> A Right.
>
> Q Why were people in Iraq being tortured?
> A For political crimes, mostly, like criticizing the government.
> People who criticized the government in Iraq were sent to prison
> and tortured.
>
> Q Isn't that exactly what happens in China ?
> A I told you, China is different.
>
> Q What's the difference between China and Iraq ?
> A Well, for one thing, Iraq was ruled by the Ba'ath party, while
> China is Communist.
>
> Q Didn't you once tell me Communists were bad?
> A No, just Cuban Communists are bad.
>
> Q How are the Cuban Communists bad?
> A Well, for one thing, people who criticize the government in
> Cuba are sent to prison and tortured.
>
> Q Like in Iraq ?
> A Exactly.
>
> Q And like in China , too?
> A I told you, China 's a good economic competitor. Cuba , on the
> other hand, is not.
>
> Q How come Cuba isn't a good economic competitor?
> A Well, you see, back in the early 1960s, the US government
> passed some laws that made it illegal for Americans to trade or
> do any business with Cuba until they stopped being Communists and
> started being capitalists like us.
>
> Q But if we got rid of those laws, opened up trade with Cuba ,
> and started doing business with them, wouldn't that help the
> Cubans become capitalists?
> A Don't be smart.
>
> Q I didn't think I was being one.
> A Well, anyway, they also don't have freedom of religion in Cuba.
>
> Q Kind of like China and the Falun Gong movement?
> A I told you, stop saying bad things about China . Anyway, Saddam
> Hussein came to power through a military coup, so he's not really
> a legitimate leader anyway.
>
> Q What's a military coup?
> A That's when a military general takes over the government of a
> country by force, instead of holding free elections like we do in
> the United States.
>
> Q Didn't the ruler of Pakistan come to power by a military coup?
> A You mean General Pervez Musharraf? Uh, yeah, he did, but
> Pakistan is our friend.
>
> Q Why is Pakistan our friend if their leader is illegitimate?
> A I never said Pervez Musharraf was illegitimate.
>
> Q Didn't you just say a military general who comes to power by
> forcibly overthrowing the legitimate government of a nation is an
> illegitimate leader?
> A Only Saddam Hussein. Pervez Musharraf is our friend, because he
> helped us invade Afghanistan .
>
> Q Why did we invade Afghanistan ?
> A Because of what they did to us on September 11th.
>
> Q What did Afghanistan do to us on September 11th?
> A Well, on September 11th, nineteen men - fifteen of them Saudi
> Arabians - hijacked four airplanes and flew three of them into
> buildings, killing over 3,000 Americans.
>
> Q So how did Afghanistan figure into all that?
> A Afghanistan was where those bad men trained, under the
> oppressive rule of the Taliban.
>
> Q Aren't the Taliban those bad radical Islamics who chopped off
> people's heads and hands?
> A Yes, that's exactly who they were. Not only did they chop off
> people's heads and hands, but they oppressed women, too.
>
> Q Didn't the Bush administration give the Taliban 43 million
> dollars back in May of 2001?
> A Yes, but that money was a reward because they did such a good
> job fighting drugs.
>
> Q Fighting drugs?
> A Yes, the Taliban were very helpful in stopping people from
> growing opium poppies.
>
> Q How did they do such a good job?
> A Simple. If people were caught growing opium poppies, the
> Taliban would have their hands and heads cut off.
>
> Q So, when the Taliban cut off people's heads and hands for
> growing flowers, that was OK, but not if they cut people's heads
> and hands off for other reasons?
> A Yes. It's OK with us if radical Islamic fundamentalists cut off
> people's hands for growing flowers, but it's cruel if they cut
> off people's hands for stealing bread.
>
> Q Don't they also cut off people's hands and heads in Saudi
> Arabia ?
> A That's different. Afghanistan was ruled by a tyrannical
> patriarchy that oppressed women and forced them to wear burqas
> whenever they were in public, with death by stoning as the
> penalty for women who did not comply.
>
> Q Don't Saudi women have to wear burqas in public, too?
> A No, Saudi women merely wear a traditional Islamic body
> covering.
>
> Q What's the difference?
> A The traditional Islamic covering worn by Saudi women is a
> modest yet fashionable garment that covers all of a woman's body
> except for her eyes and fingers. The burqa, on the other hand, is
> an evil tool of patriarchal oppression that covers all of a
> woman's body except for her eyes and fingers.
>
> Q It sounds like the same thing with a different name.
> A Now, don't go comparing Afghanistan and Saudi Arabia. The
> Saudis are our friends.
>
> Q But I thought you said 15 of the 19 hijackers on September 11th
> were from Saudi Arabia .
> A Yes, but they trained in Afghanistan.
>
> Q Who trained them?
> A A very bad man named Osama bin Laden.
>
> Q Was he from Afghanistan ?
> A Uh, no, he was from Saudi Arabia too. But he was a bad man, a
> very bad man.
>
> Q I seem to recall he was our friend once.
> A Only when we helped him and the mujahadeen repel the Soviet
> invasion of Afghanistan back in the 1980s.
>
> Q Who are the Soviets? Was that the Evil Communist Empire Ronald
> Reagan talked about?
> A There are no more Soviets. The Soviet Union broke up in 1990 or
> thereabouts, and now they have elections and capitalism like us.
> We call them Russians now.
>
> Q So the Soviets - I mean, the Russians - are now our friends?
> A Well, not really. You see, they were our friends for many years
> after they stopped being Soviets, but then they decided not to
> support our invasion of Iraq , so we're mad at them now. We're
> also mad at the French and the Germans because they didn't help
> us invade Iraq either.
>
> Q So the French and Germans are evil, too?
> A Not exactly evil, but just bad enough that we had to rename
> French fries and French toast to Freedom Fries and Freedom Toast.
>
> Q Do we always rename foods whenever another country doesn't do
> what we want them to do?
> A No, we just do that to our friends. Our enemies, we invade.
>
> Q But wasn't Iraq one of our friends back in the 1980s?
> A Well, yeah. For a while.
>
> Q Was Saddam Hussein ruler of Iraq back then?
> A Yes, but at the time he was fighting against Iran , which made
> him our friend, temporarily.
>
> Q Why did that make him our friend?
> A Because at that time, Iran was our enemy.
>
> Q Isn't that when he gassed the Kurds?
> A Yeah, but since he was fighting against Iran at the time, we
> looked the other way, to show him we were his friend.
>
> Q So anyone who fights against one of our enemies automatically
> becomes our friend?
> A Most of the time, yes.
>
> Q And anyone who fights against one of our friends is
> automatically an enemy?
> A Sometimes that's true, too. However, if American corporations
> can profit by selling weapons to both sides at the same time, all
> the better.
>
> Q Why?
> A Because war is good for the economy, which means war is good
> for America Also, since God is on America's side, anyone who
> opposes war is a godless un-American Communist. Do you
> understand now why we attacked Iraq?
>
> Q I think so. We attacked them because God wanted us to, right?
> A Yes.
>
> Q But how did we know God wanted us to attack Iraq ?
> A Well, you see, God personally speaks to George W. Bush and
> tells him what to do.
>
> Q So basically, what you're saying is that we attacked Iraq
> because George W. Bush hears voices in his head?
> A Yes! You finally understand how the world works. Now close your
> eyes, make yourself comfortable, and go to sleep. Good night.
>
>
> Good night, dad....!

THREE FOR THOUGHT WHAT YOU NEED TO READ ABOUT . . . SUICIDE TERRORISM

Death wishes
A look at historical and literary precedents helps put today's death-obsessed bombers into perspective, ROBERT PAPE says
ROBERT PAPE

On Monday, a suicide bomber walked into a restaurant in Tel Aviv and blew up -- killing himself and nine Israeli civilians. We know the horror. We know not to be surprised, even though this attack came after months of relative calm. But do we understand what drives seemingly ordinary people to strap explosives to their bodies and deliberately kill themselves while on a mission to kill others?

Recently, we have made strides in understanding suicide terrorism. Just a few years ago, one could listen to a seemingly endless stream of journalists asking, "Why do only Muslims carry out suicide attacks?" The media's approach dovetailed with the popular notion that suicide terrorism is a product of religious extremism -- where a poor, desperate (Muslim) soul seeks to escape the troubles of this world for a quick trip to paradise. Today, we know a great deal more. Much challenges the conventional wisdom. Some is a bit disconcerting.

In my own work, I studied every suicide terrorist bombing and attack around the world from 1980 to early 2004, analyzing a total of 462 suicide terrorists who killed themselves to complete their missions. Of these, more than half were secular. The world leader in suicide terrorism is a group many in the West have not heard much about: the Tamil Tigers, in Sri Lanka. This group -- secular, Marxist, Hindu -- carried out more suicide terrorist attacks than Hamas or Islamic Jihad. Further, at least 30 per cent of all Muslim suicide terrorist attacks are committed by purely secular groups, such as the Kurdish terrorist group in Turkey called the PKK.

Instead of religion, what more than 95 per cent of all suicide terrorist attacks around the world have in common is a specific political goal: to compel a democratic state to withdraw heavy combat forces from territory the terrorists consider to be their homeland or that they prize greatly. This has been the central goal of every campaign of suicide terrorism since 1980: from Lebanon, Sri Lanka, Chechnya, Kashmir, the West Bank, al-Qaeda and Iraq.

To put today's suicide terrorism into perspective, it is helpful to look at historical precedents. The three best known of these early suicide campaigns were those of the ancient Jewish Zealots; the 11th- and 12th-century Assassins; and the Japanese kamikazes from the Second World War.

Yigael Yadin's Masada: Herod's Fortress and the Zealot's Last Stand (Random House, 1966) offers a fine history of the last days of what were probably the first suicide attackers in history.

Determined to liberate Judea from Roman occupation, two militant Jewish revolutionary groups, the Zealots and the Sicarii, used suicidal violence to provoke popular uprisings from about 4 BC to 70 AD. Typically, they attacked their victims in broad daylight in the heart of Jerusalem and other centres, using small, sickle-like daggers (sicae in Latin) concealed under their cloaks. Many of these attacks were suicide missions, since the killers were often immediately captured and put to death.

The Zealots remain controversial even to this day, in part because historians credit their attacks with precipitating the "Jewish War" of 66 AD, which led to the destruction of the Temple and the fateful events at Masada, in which more than 900 Jews committed suicide rather than accept a return to Roman rule.

The new edition of Bernard Lewis's 1967 The Assassins: A Radical Sect in Islam (Basic Books, 2002) also sheds considerable light on the powerful role resistance to the threat of foreign occupation has long played in the history of suicide terrorism.

The Ismaili Assassins -- a Shia Muslim sect based in northwestern Iran in the 11th and 12th centuries -- created an effective organization for the planned, systematic and long-term use of political murder which relied on suicide missions for success. For two centuries, the Assassins' daggers demoralized the mainly Sunni rulers of the region as well as leaders of Christian Crusader states, chalking up more than 50 dramatic murders and inspiring a new word: "assassination."

Most of the Assassins' victims were political and military leaders who were so heavily guarded that even successful attackers would almost surely pay for that success with their lives. What made the Assassins so lethal was that they were willing to die to accomplish their missions and often, rather than attempting to escape, revelled in their impending death.

Territorial control was a key element of the Assassins' program. Living in the remote Elburz mountains of northern Iran, an area with many castles and a sympathetic population, the Assassins succeeded, as Lewis writes, "in creating what was virtually a territorial state." Numerous sultans in Persia and Iraq sought to uproot the Ismaili menace by military force, only to find themselves accepting negotiated settlements. The pattern of suicide assassinations continued until the Mongols invaded Iran and exterminated virtually the entire Ismaili population in 1258.

The Japanese kamikazes during the Second World War were regular military forces, and so are not normally considered terrorists, although they also used suicide attack in an attempt to ward off a foreign occupation. Their history and motives are superbly recounted by Emiko Ohnuki-Tierney's Kamikaze, Cherry Blossoms, and Nationalisms (University of Chicago, 2002).

Starting in October, 1944, the Japanese high command organized a variety of "special attack" units called kamikazes, whose pilots agreed to crash their airplanes, gliders and even manned torpedoes into U.S. naval vessels. Their purpose was to impose such a high cost on the attacking fleet that the United States would settle for a negotiated outcome rather than invade the Japanese home islands. The name "kamikaze" derives from the "divine wind" that was said to have turned back a Mongol invasion fleet in the 13th century.

More than 3,800 pilots gave their lives on these missions, which continued through August, 1945. Through detailed examination of numerous diaries and other narratives written by the kamikazes themselves, Ohnuki-Tierney provides compelling testimony that these suicide attackers were not driven by loyalty to the Japanese Emperor or "peer group pressure." Instead, "their sense of loyalty was channelled into their sense of patriotism . . . unconditional dedication to a cause greater than their own lives."

Of course, understanding the real motives of most suicide terrorists does not mean we should exonerate them. Suicide terrorism is the murder of innocents and so remains an unacceptable tactic of war. However, knowing more about the logic and circumstances of suicide terrorism can provide a strong foundation for new policies that can achieve vital foreign-policy interests without provoking a new generation of suicide attackers.

Robert Pape is professor of political science at the University of Chicago. His most recent book is Dying to Win: The Strategic Logic of Suicide Terrorism.

http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/LAC.20060422.BKREAD22/TPStory/Entertainment

Iraqi marriages defy civil war spectre
by Ahmed Janabi
Thursday 23 March 2006 5:44 AM GMT

Many Iraqis dismiss the possibility of civil war in their country saying the Iraqi tribal, ethnic, religious and sectarian mosaic is interconnected through blood and marriage.

Despite widespread speculation at home and abroad that Iraq is on the verge of civil war, couples from different backgrounds have been defying the theory by marriage.

Young men and women – as was the case before the US-led invasion three years ago - from different ethnic, religious and sectarian backgrounds still flock to the civil courts every morning for marriage contracts.

Sahira Abd al-Karim, a civil lawyer in Baghdad, confirmed to Aljazeera.net that Iraqis from different backgrounds are still marrying each other.

"Sectarianism is something shameful among Iraqis, especially the middle class," she said. "As a lawyer in the civil courts in Baghdad I have seen Sunni marrying Shia, Arab marrying a Kurd.

"I myself am a Sunni Arab but my brother has been married to his Shia Arab wife for more than 40 years, and their eldest son married a Turkmen girl. I really cannot see how these people [Iraqis factions] would fight each other."

A civil judge in Baghdad who preferred not to reveal his identity told Aljazeera.net that the rate of mixed background marriages has declined slightly, as has marriage in general.

Slight decline

"Definitely the number of mixed marriages has declined recently, but we have to take into consideration that marriage cases in general have fallen due to deteriorated security situation and immigration. People are leaving Iraq looking for safety," he said.

The judge agreed with Sahira that urban Iraqis regard sectarianism as shameful.

"Families of young couples usually get embarrassed when I ask them do they want the marriage to be finalised according to Sunni or Shia Islamic Sharia? They do not want to be labelled as sectarians, and you see each family encourages the other to tell the judge to finalise the marriage according to its sect."

Marwan Muhammad, 26, and Zainab Hussein, 25, were declared husband and wife by the civil judge in al-Karkh Civil Court in Baghdad this month.

Marwan, a Sunni Arab, and Zainab, a Shia Arab, fell in love shortly after they started their university studies four years ago.

Security fears

"Due to the current situation in Iraq, I and Zainab agreed to live in a room at my parents' house. My family promised Zainab's family to treat her like a dear daughter," Marwan said.

Despite their happiness, the couple were disappointed not to have been able to had celebrate their wedding properly because of the security situation.

"Curfew starts at eight in the evening, and that would not allow us to hold a proper wedding party," Marwan said.

Iraqi wedding parties usually kick off early in the evening, with a band singing until dinner time. Singing and dancing continues after dinner until late at night and sometimes until dawn, but due to ongoing partial curfew people tend to end their weddings early evening.

Ban Haddad, 35, a neighbour, said: "We missed the scene of dozens of nicely decorated cars touring the streets of Baghdad after midnight to celebrate a newly married couple."

Haddad, a Shia Arab, graduated from Baghdad University in 1991 and in 1995 she married a Sunni Arab man.

"Believe it or not the Sunni and Shia thing is mentioned in our house for sake of humour, you know like I joke with my husband and tell him that Sunni are not good husbands or they are stingy … Things like that just to laugh, I do not know how they introduced sectarianism to all aspects of life, the situation is awful now," she said.

Tribal factors

Some Iraqis say the tribal factor is crucial in pushing away the danger of civil. All Arab countries are tribal societies which value the blood bond more than sect.

Tribal leaders dismiss the possibility of civil war between ordinary Iraqis, saying they all belong to tribes that contain Sunni and Shia clans.

Shaikh Muhammad Ahmed al-Mislit, a senior tribal leader, ruled out the possibility of Iraqi clans fighting each other because of different sectarian belief. Al-Mislit belongs to the Arab tribe of al-Jobur which numbers about three million Iraqis and contains Sunni and Shia clans.

"Every member in my tribe sees other members as cousins; I cannot see myself or any one of my tribe fighting his own people and family for political or sectarian beliefs," al-Mislit said.

"My evidence for that is both Shia and Sunni Jubor tribesmen go to the same tribal authority to judge between them, they do not go to Sunni or Shia clerics."


Low-level civil war?

But some prominent Iraqis believe that the country has already slipped into a low-intensity civil war.

Iyad Allawi, the former prime minister, recently told the BBC: "We are losing each day an average 50 to 60 people throughout the country, if not more. If this is not civil war, then God knows what civil war is."

Jalal Talabani, Iraq's Kurdish president also said after the Samarra bombing last month that civil war was a threat, but he has since played this down.

"The Iraqi people cannot accept a civil war,"he said on Sunday. "We are passing through a difficult period right now, but the attachment of Iraqis to their country will prevent such a war."

General George Casey, commander of US military forces in Iraq, also rejected the notion that a civil war was "imminent" or "inevitable" in an interview with Fox News, arguing that a new government would help ease sectarian tensions.


Aljazeera + Agencies
By Ahmed Janabi
You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/3A99E30A-9A99-4DF7-98FF-0BECF6093E6C.htm

Faith and freedom

Faith and freedom

With a tradition of justice and secularism, there is no reason to fear Iraq's Shia resurgence

Karen Armstrong
Thursday May 8, 2003
The Guardian

The sight of millions of Iraqi pilgrims flocking to the holy Shia city of Kerbala has caused disquiet in Washington. Since Shias comprise about 60% of the population of Iraq, it is not inconceivable that the ousting of Saddam Hussein could result in a democratically elected Shia government - a nightmare scenario to many in the west, where Shi'ism has been regarded as the epitome of fanaticism since the Iranian revolution of 1978-79. Among many the mention of Shi'ism immediately evokes thoughts of sinister ayatollahs, processions of flagellants, and an implacable hostility to progress and democracy. But how accurate is our perception of the Shia, and would a Shia Iraq necessarily be a disaster?

Unlike the governments of Europe and America, Iraqi Shias have consistently and heroically opposed Saddam. During the 70s and 80s, while we in the west seemed to find the Ba'ath regime quite acceptable, the Shias of Iraq regularly risked their lives in the arba'in pilgrimage, a three-day march from Najaf to Kerbala, braving police bullets, waving the bloodstained shirts of those who had fallen, and shouting: "Oh Saddam, take your hands off the army! The people do not want you!" It was not Saddam's secularist policies, his initial courting of the west, nor his neglect of Islamic law that principally offended them. Their resistance to Baghdad was fuelled by a visceral and religiously inspired rejection of tyranny.
The shrine cities of Najaf and Kerbala take us to the heart of Shi'ism. Najaf contains the tomb of the Prophet Mohammed's cousin and son-in-law, Ali bin Abi Talib, the fourth caliph of Islam, who was murdered in 661. After his death, Islam was never the same. Ali had been a devout Muslim and had an outstanding reputation for justice, but the Umayyad dynasty that followed him was increasingly worldly, inegalitarian and autocratic. To many this seemed a betrayal of the Koran, which insisted that the first duty of Muslims was to create a just and equal society. Malcontents who called themselves the Shia i-Ali (Ali's partisans) developed a piety of protest, refused to accept the Umayyad caliphs, and regarded Ali's descendants as the true leaders of the Muslim community.

In 680, the Shias of Kufa in Iraq called for the rule of Ali's son, Husain. Even though the caliph, Yazid, quashed this uprising, Husain set out for Iraq with a small band of relatives, convinced that the spectacle of the Prophet's family, marching to confront the caliph, would remind the regime of its social responsibility. But Yazid dispatched his army, which slaughtered Husain and his followers on the plain of Kerbala. Husain was the last to die, holding his infant son in his arms.

For Shias the tragedy is a symbol of the chronic injustice that pervades human life. To this day, Shias can feel as spiritually violated by cruel or despotic rule as a Christian who hears the Bible insulted or sees the Eucharistic host profaned. This passion informed the Iranian revolution, which many experienced as a re-enactment of Kerbala - with the shah cast as a latter-day Yazid - as well as the Iraqi arba'in to Kerbala.

Shi'ism has always had revolutionary potential, but the Kerbala paradigm also inspired what one might call a religiously motivated secularism. Long before western philosophers called for the separation of church and state, Shias had privatised faith, convinced that it was impossible to integrate the religious imperative with the grim world of politics that seemed murderously antagonistic to it. This insight was borne out by the tragic fate of all the Shia imams, the descendants of Ali: every single one was imprisoned, exiled or executed by the caliphs, who could not tolerate this principled challenge to their rule. By the eighth century, most Shias held aloof from politics, concentrated on the mystical interpretation of scripture, and regarded any government - even one that was avowedly Islamic - as illegitimate.

The separation of religion and politics remains deeply embedded in the Shia psyche. It springs not simply from malaise, but from a divine discontent with the state of the Muslim community. Even in Iran, which became a Shia country in the early 16th century, the ulama (the religious scholars) refused public office, adopted an oppositional stance to the state, and formed an alternative establishment that - implicitly or explicitly - challenged the shahs on behalf of the people.

I n his opposition to Shah Reza Pahlavi's brutal dictatorship, Ayatollah Khomeini was thus a typical figure, though in declaring that a mullah should be head of state he was breaking with centuries of sacred Shia tradition. Yet at the end of his life, even Khomeini insisted that government must be emancipated from the constraining laws of traditional religion. The experience of running a modern state had convinced him of the wisdom of Shia "secularism".

It would be a mistake to imagine that Shias are reflexively opposed to modern, western ideals. In 1906, leading mullahs in Iran campaigned alongside secularist intellectuals for a modern constitution on European lines, and parliamentary rule. Because representative government would limit the tyranny of the shahs, it was a project worthy of the Shia. Today, 25 years after the revolution, Iran has moved beyond Khomeini. It has a freer press than any of its Arab neighbours. The conservative clerics whose ideas were forged in the 1950s seem increasingly irrelevant to the young, who want Iran to remain a religious country, and are proud to be Shia, but support President Khatami in his demand for greater democracy. Abdolkarim Sorush, the chief intellectual of Iran, argues that every Iranian has three identities: Shia, Persian and western.

The US administration has recently spoken darkly of Iranian "agents" infiltrating Iraq to spread revolutionary Islam. One of the Shia movements in Iraq, the Supreme Assembly for the Islamic Revolution, was indeed founded in Tehran in 1982 as an umbrella organisation for all Iraqi Shia opposition groups. But it never fulfilled this function, since Iraqi Shias resist Iranian control. Today Iraqi clerics, who were in exile in Iran, are now returning home. They have had enough of Iranian-style theocracy, and are reverting to traditional Shia "secularism".

Hizb al-Da'wa al-Islamiyya, the other main Iraqi Shia movement, has always operated independently of Iran, has a modern organisation and a strong lay membership. In the past, Da'wa has asserted that if it is elected, it will not impose Islamic law against the will of the people, and that it wants a liberal democracy, a multiparty system, modern education, free elections and a free press. Like any religious tradition, Shi'ism has had its share of belligerent, narrow-minded hardliners, but from the very beginning, leading Shia thinkers promoted ideals that are familiar to us in the west, not least that criticism of their own society is the basis of the democratic ethos. After decades of Saddam, western-style secularism may not appeal to many Iraqis, and Shia leaders, who have so bravely opposed the Ba'ath regime, are likely to be more respected than an Iraqi exile parachuted in by the Americans. If Iraqis choose a Shia government in free and fair elections, we should at least give it the benefit of the doubt.

Karen Armstrong is the author of Islam: A Short History (Weidenfeld) and The Battle for God: A History of Fundamentalism (HarperCollins)

comment@guardian.co.uk

Zealots

"No drug, not even alcohol, causes the fundamental ills of society. If we're looking for the source of our troubles, we shouldn't test people for drugs, we should test them for stupidity, ignorance, greed and love of power." (Patrick Jake O'Rourke)


I will comment on these two articles later on.

The Destruction Of Mecca
Saudi Hardliners Wiping Out Their Own Heritage
By Daniel Howden
The Independent - UK
Published: 06 August 2005

Historic Mecca, the cradle of Islam, is being buried in an unprecedented onslaught by religious zealots.

Almost all of the rich and multi-layered history of the holy city is gone. The Washington-based Gulf Institute estimates that 95 per cent of millennium-old buildings have been demolished in the past two decades.

Now the actual birthplace of the Prophet Mohamed is facing the bulldozers, with the connivance of Saudi religious authorities whose hardline interpretation of Islam is compelling them to wipe out their own heritage.

It is the same oil-rich orthodoxy that pumped money into the Taliban as they prepared to detonate the Bamiyan buddhas in 2000. And the same doctrine - violently opposed to all forms of idolatry - that this week decreed that the Saudis' own king be buried in an unmarked desert grave.

A Saudi architect, Sami Angawi, who is an acknowledged specialist on the region's Islamic architecture, told The Independent that the final farewell to Mecca is imminent: "What we are witnessing are the last days of Mecca and Medina."

According to Dr Angawi - who has dedicated his life to preserving Islam's two holiest cities - as few as 20 structures are left that date back to the lifetime of the Prophet 1,400 years ago and those that remain could be bulldozed at any time. "This is the end of history in Mecca and Medina and the end of their future," said Dr Angawi.

Mecca is the most visited pilgrimage site in the world. It is home to the Grand Mosque and, along with the nearby city of Medina which houses the Prophet's tomb, receives four million people annually as they undertake the Islamic duty of the Haj and Umra pilgrimages.

The driving force behind the demolition campaign that has transformed these cities is Wahhabism. This, the austere state faith of Saudi Arabia, was imported by the al-Saud tribal chieftains when they conquered the region in the 1920s.

The motive behind the destruction is the Wahhabists' fanatical fear that places of historical and religious interest could give rise to idolatry or polytheism, the worship of multiple and potentially equal gods.

The practice of idolatry in Saudi Arabia remains, in principle at least, punishable by beheading. This same literalism mandates that advertising posters can and need to be altered. The walls of Jeddah are adorned with ads featuring people deliberately missing an eye or with a foot painted over. These contrived imperfections are the most glaring sign of an orthodoxy that tolerates nothing which fosters adulation of the graven image. Nothing can, or can be seen to, interfere with a person's devotion to Allah.

"At the root of the problem is Wahhabism," says Dr Angawi. "They have a big complex about idolatry and anything that relates to the Prophet."

The Wahhabists now have the birthplace of the Prophet in their sights. The site survived redevelopment early in the reign of King Abdul al-Aziz ibn Saud 50 years ago when the architect for a library there persuaded the absolute ruler to allow him to keep the remains under the new structure. That concession is under threat after Saudi authorities approved plans to "update" the library with a new structure that would concrete over the existing foundations and their priceless remains.

Dr Angawi is the descendant of a respected merchant family in Jeddah and a leading figure in the Hijaz - a swath of the kingdom that includes the holy cities and runs from the mountains bordering Yemen in the south to the northern shores of the Red Sea and the frontier with Jordan. He established the Haj Research Centre two decades ago to preserve the rich history of Mecca and Medina. Yet it has largely been a doomed effort. He says that the bulldozers could come "at any time" and the Prophet's birthplace would be gone in a single night.

He is not alone in his concerns. The Gulf Institute, an independent news-gathering group, has publicised what it says is a fatwa, issued by the senior Saudi council of religious scholars in 1994, stating that preserving historical sites "could lead to polytheism and idolatry".

Ali al-Ahmed, the head of the organisation, formerly known as the Saudi Institute, said: "The destruction of Islamic landmarks in Hijaz is the largest in history, and worse than the desecration of the Koran."

Most of the buildings have suffered the same fate as the house of Ali-Oraid, the grandson of the Prophet, which was identified and excavated by Dr Angawi. After its discovery, King Fahd ordered that it be bulldozed before it could become a pilgrimage site.

"The bulldozer is there and they take only two hours to destroy everything. It has no sensitivity to history. It digs down to the bedrock and then the concrete is poured in," he said.

Similarly, finds by a Lebanese professor, Kamal Salibi, which indicated that once-Jewish villages in what is now Saudi Arabia might have been the location of scenes from the Bible, prompted the bulldozers to be sent in. All traces were destroyed.

This depressing pattern of excavation and demolition has led Dr Angawi and his colleagues to keep secret a number of locations in the holy cities that could date back as far as the time of Abraham.

The ruling House of Saud has been bound to Wahhabism since the religious reformer Mohamed Ibn abdul-Wahab signed a pact with Mohammed bin Saud in 1744. The combination of the al-Saud clan and Wahhab's warrior zealots became the foundation of the modern state. The House of Saud received its wealth and power and the hardline clerics got the state backing that would enable them in the decades to come to promote their Wahhabist ideology across the globe.

On the tailcoats of the religious zealots have come commercial developers keen to fill the historic void left by demolitions with lucrative high-rises.

"The man-made history of Mecca has gone and now the Mecca that God made is going as well." Says Dr Angawi. "The projects that are coming up are going to finish them historically, architecturally and environmentally," he said.

With the annual pilgrimage expected to increase five-fold to 20 million in the coming years as Saudi authorities relax entry controls, estate agencies are seeing a chance to cash in on huge demand for accommodation.

"The infrastructure at the moment cannot cope. New hotels, apartments and services are badly needed," the director of a leading Saudi estate agency told Reuters.

Despite an estimated $13bn in development cash currently washing around Mecca, Saudi sceptics dismiss the developers' argument. "The service of pilgrims is not the goal really," says Mr Ahmed. "If they were concerned for the pilgrims, they would have built a railroad between Mecca and Jeddah, and Mecca and Medina. They are removing any historical landmark that is not Saudi-Wahhabi, and using the prime location to make money," he says.

Dominating these new developments is the Jabal Omar scheme which will feature two 50-storey hotel towers and seven 35-storey apartment blocks - all within a stone's throw of the Grand Mosque.

Dr Angawi said: "Mecca should be the reflection of the multicultural Muslim world, not a concrete parking lot."

Whereas proposals for high-rise developments in Jerusalem have prompted a worldwide outcry and the Taliban's demolition of the Bamiyan buddhas was condemned by Unicef, Mecca's busy bulldozers have barely raised a whisper of protest.

"The house where the Prophet received the word of God is gone and nobody cares," says Dr Angawi. "I don't want trouble. I just want this to stop."

© 2005 Independent News & Media (UK) Ltd.

http://news.independent.co.uk/world/middle_east/article304029.ece
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Statue fatwa riles artists by Ali Gomaa says that sculpting is sinful
Monday 03 April 2006 5:18 AM GMT

A fatwa issued by Egypt's religious authority forbidding the display of statues has raised fears that it could be used as an excuse to destroy the country's historical heritage.



Shaikh Ali Gomaa, the Grand Mufti of Egypt and the country's most senior Islamic jurist, issued the religious edict last week.

He ruled that the exhibition of statues in homes is prohibited and based his opinion on the hadith (the sayings of Prophet Muhammad).

Intellectuals and artists argue that the decree represents a setback for art - a mainstay of the multi-billion-dollar tourist industry - and would damage the country's fledgling sculpture industry.

Gomaa did not mention statues in museums or public places, but he condemned sculptors and their work.

Still, some fear that the edict could encourage people to attack the thousands of ancient and pharaonic statues at tourist sites across Egypt.

Gamal al-Ghitani, editor of the literary magazine Akhbar al-Adab, said: "We don't rule out that someone will enter the Karnak temple in Luxor or any other pharaonic temple and blow it up on the basis of the fatwa."

Counter views

Gomaa had pointed to a passage from the hadith that stated: "Sculptors would be tormented most on Judgment Day." He said the text left no doubt that sculpting the living form was sinful and using statues for decorating homes forbidden.


Gomaa's ruling ran counter to the opinion cited more than 100 years ago by Mohammed Abdu, a respected figure and Egypt's grand mufti at the time, permitting the private display of statues after the practice had been condemned as pagan.

Ghitani said Abdu's ruling had ended the issue, as it said statues and pictures were not forbidden in Islam, except idols used for worship.

Art world

Ezzat al-Qamhawi, a novelist, said Gomaa's ruling would "return Muslims to the dark ages".

Daud Abdul Sayed, a film director, said the ruling "simply ignored the spiritual evolvement of Muslims since the arrival of Islam ... Clearly, it was natural that they forbid statues under early Islam because people worshipped them.
"But are there Muslims worshipping statues nearly 15 centuries later?"
Yussef Zidan, director of the manuscript museum at the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, said: "Why would anyone even bring up the issue in a country where there are more than 10 state-owned institutions that teach sculpting and more than 20 others that teach the history of art?"

Ghitani said: "It's time for those placing impediments between Islam and innovation to get out of our lives."

Opinions

The criticisms of the legal opinion have put religious scholars at odds with artists, who say that such edicts only reinforce claims, particularly in the West, that Islam is against progress.

Some, including Abdul Sayed, compared Gomaa's edict with a similar one issued by the former rulers of Afghanistan, the Taliban, that led to the destruction of statues of the Buddha despite widespread opposition.


Mainstream Muslim scholars, including Egypt's then mufti, Nasr Farid Wasel, and Shaikh Yusuf al-Qaradawi, the leading Qatar-based scholar, all condemned the Taliban's actions in March 2001.

However, Shaikh al-Qaradawi joined Gomaa in ruling that statues used for decoration are prohibited.

"Islam proscribed statues, as long as they symbolise living entities such as human beings and animals," al-Qaradawi says on a website.

The only exception, he said, are children's toys.

Government role

Gomaa was appointed as grand mufti by Hosni Mubarak, the Egyptian president. The mufti's legal opinions carry much weight and generally represent the official line.

His legitimacy is often challenged by other Muslims over his affiliation to the government and his edicts are not always followed.

The government can choose to enforce or ignore the ruling and its reaction in the past often depended on public opinion.

Muslim Brotherhood

The Muslim Brotherhood, Egypt's main political opposition force, dismissed the fatwa.

Issam al-Aryan, a spokesman for the movement, said: "The people are more concerned with corruption. What they would like to see is a fatwa banning the presence of the same people at the helm of the country for 25 years and not against statues."


Previous decrees include a ruling in 2001 by Wasel against the Arab version of Who Wants to be a Millionaire? that was airing on Egyptian television, saying it was forbidden by Islam because it was a form of gambling.

The show was eventually cancelled, although it was not clear whether that was because of the ruling.

In another edict in May 2001, Wasel ruled that beauty pageants in which women appear scantily clad in front of panels of male judges are prohibited. The authorities played deaf and Egypt continues to host them.

Wasel issued a ruling against watching solar eclipses and another against bullfights, but refused to support rights activists in their campaign to outlaw female circumcision.


AFP
By

You can find this article at:
http://english.aljazeera.net/NR/exeres/48AA33FF-8E95-44A0-A89A-528BC4A6A34F.htm

Re:Jonathan Steele of the Guardian

Re:Jonathan Steele "US allies are behind the death squads and ethnic cleansing "
http://www.guardian.co.uk/comment/story/0,,1753653,00.html

"I have come to believe that objectivity means giving all sides a fair hearing, but not treating all sides equally....Objectivity must go hand in hand with morality"
Christine Amanpour

What captured my attention when I read this flawed article was the way its writer repressed the news that he didn’t favour For instance he writes that “The rampaging by Shia militias and the rise of defensive Sunni vigilantes have launched a low-intensity ethnic cleansing”. Strange as it may be, but this dishearteningly ignorant thesis attempts to dismiss a simple fact that is in the aftermath of the American invasion, it was this “defensive” Sunni vigilantes” which first declared a war on Shiite. The bombing of Ali’s Shrine in Najaf in August 2003 that resulted in the death of tens of Shiite, among whom was Bakr Hakim, the late head of the Supreme Council for the Islamic Revolution in Iraq was just the beginning of an endless series of sectarian attacks against the Shiite who compose the majority of Iraqis. Since then, there has been literally thousands of attacks against the Shiite, many of which was directed against them during their holy days and at their scared shrines

To illuminate this point, here is some figures from the BBC:

2004
Total attacks: 26,496
Improvised bombs: 5,607
Car bombings: 420
Suicide car bombings: 133
Suicide bombers wearing explosive vests: 7

2005
Total attacks: 34,131
Improvised bombs: 10,593
Car bombings: 873
Suicide car bombings: 411
Suicide bombers wearing explosive vests: 67

Commenting on the horrors of these attacks, a certain Brian Anthony remarks in readingeagle “Imagine a single one of these events happening in downtown Poughkeepsie, let alone a thousand. How many times would you turn the other cheek?”

But it's really worse than that, is Steele’s crude simplification when he writes about the Americans battle against the Jihads(it would better read Wahabis) and the “nationalist Sunni-led insurgency”. What stroke in his latter notion was the total absent of any in-depth understanding of the underlying motives of such “nationalist” insurgency. I mean it is more reasonable to say the reason why the insurgents strongholds lies mainly in the Sunni areas where they enjoy supports from the locals is power per se. For the Sunni were holding the grips of power for decades and when a someone comes in and take what they considered to be their “divinely given right” to a group which happens to be the majority, then it is not surprising that they will fight with tooth and nails to regain their lost power? So it is realpolitik, rather an abstract notion of nationalism that drives them to fight.

That is why most of the Arab Sunnis in Iraq have never acknowledged that Shiite are the majority. Ironically enough, they claim that they are the majority?

Probably the best solution to this dead block is a recognition from the part of Sunnis that they are a minority and act accordingly. At the same time, their leaders should stopped embracing Saddam’s unrevealed rubbish argument that the most of the Iraqi Shiites are Iranians. And a milder approach from the Shiite politicians and surely heeding the advice of Sistani who has been advocating a bigger saying for the Sunnis in the future of Iraq will be the answer to this problem.

If both also abandoned their self-victimhood and had a better faith in each other which must be complimented by disarment of the militias AND of those Sunnis zealots. Only then, they will be able to eliminate the dangers of a disastrous full-scale civil war. After all, about a quarter of the Iraqi populations, have already made that choose through the mixed Shiite-Sunni marriages. I wish that the rest of the Iraqis will learn from the human experiences of their compatriots.

The Construction of Social Identity in Damascus

The thing that has captured my attention in Damascus over the past few years was the way Damascenes have been taking pride in being “real Damascenes” and looking back nostalgically to the “good old days”. Even though this “Golden Age” that people tend to refer to here is an imagined one still this newly constructed social identity can be interpeted in the light of the uncertainty and increasing changes that society is going through.

That is why I found this essay truly engrossing even though I should not been taken to agree with all the notions and arguments being put forward.


8. Consuming Damascus
Public Culture and the Construction of Social Identity
Christa Salamandra

If you enter the Old City of Damascus at the Eastern Gate, walk a few yards along A Street Called Straight, and turn down the first narrow alley on your right, you will find, jutting out from among the inward-looking Arab-style houses of this quiet residential quarter, a sign advertising “Le Piano Bar.” Enter through the carved wood door, walk along the tile-covered foyer, under the songbird’s cage, past a display case strung with chunky silver necklaces, and step up a stone platform to the raised dining room. Here well-heeled Syrians sit at closely spaced tables, drinking ‘araq and Black Label whiskey, and eating grilled chicken or spaghetti. Each of the walls around them is decorated in a different style. One features a collection of Dutch porcelain plates set into plaster. On another, strips of colored marble hold a series of mosaic-lined, glass-covered cases displaying wind instruments. Another features two floral wrought iron–gated windows draped in a locally produced striped fabric. Wrought iron musical notes dance on another wall. At the front of the long, arch-divided room is a huge mother-of-pearl–framed mirror. Set into the top of the mirror is a digital billboard across which the Piano Bar’s menu and opening hours float repeatedly. The proprietor sings “My Way” and other Frank Sinatra favorites to a karaoke backup tape. When he finishes, video screens tucked into corners feature Elton John sing-alongs. On some nights a pianist and clarinetist play Russian songs as patrons clank wooden castanets.

Public cultural forms such as the Piano Bar play a part in the construction of social identities in Damascus. In one sense the Piano Bar is merely in the Old City; in another sense, no matter how unlikely, it is of Old Damascus. The localization of transnational cultural forms such as restaurants and television programs involves an imagined idea of the city and its past. Some cultural forms, like television programs, are easily available to all. Others, like the Piano Bar, are accessible to a far more limited set of people. Selective consumption of this commoditized past has become a primary mode of class and social distinction.
Links to and representations of Old Damascus become increasingly significant in a context of rapid and profound social and demographic change. Like many Middle Eastern cities, Damascus has experienced a steady and significant population increase throughout the twentieth century. During the post–World War II, postindependence period the city’s population multiplied fourfold, rising to 1,347,000 in the early 1980s.[1] Unofficial estimates now place the number at three million to four million. To house large numbers of mostly rural migrants, dormitory suburbs were rapidly and cheaply built or expanded and older two-story buildings replaced with high-rise apartment blocks. Some sections of the Old City have been cleared, and those remaining are threatened. Damascenes now find their city transformed, and themselves outnumbered by those distinct from them in social class, regional background, and religious sect.
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Consuming the Old City
In Syrian usage the term “Old Damascus” refers to a number of closely related phenomena. Most concretely, it connotes the physical space of the Old City itself, past and present. Parts of Old Damascus have been torn down to make way for concrete high-rises and modern boulevards, but many quarters remain standing, including those inside the Old City walls. Old Damascus also refers to a lifestyle associated with the city as it was—or supposedly was—before the major social, political, and economic transformations that began in the early 1960s. Last, Old Damascus is an imagined idea of the past commodified in the form of restaurants, cafés, books, television programs, advertisements, social events, art and photography exhibits, and boutiques.
Old Damascus now features in state-sponsored art and photography exhibits, lectures, and folklore festivals designed more for Syrians than for foreign tourists. There appears to be a link between the tourist industry and the resurgence of interest in Old Damascus. During the 1980s the Ministry of Tourism’s primary interest shifted from ancient ruins to the more recent past, and the minister of tourism from 1981 to 1988, Nawris al-Daqar, prioritized the preservation and reconstruction of the Old City. Al-Daqar, from an Old Damascene family and proud of this affiliation, encouraged events that celebrate the city. In addition, the majority of Ministry of Tourism employees are said to be of Damascene origin. The minister of culture, Najah al-Attar, who has been in office since the late 1970s, is also from an Old Damascene family. Tourism links the local and the global in unmediated ways, presenting a commoditized and depthless Old Damascus, but those representations most resonant for Old Damascus advocates are found elsewhere, in the mediated forms of expressive culture, such as books.
A primary medium for the promotion of a sense of Damasceneness is a series of memoirs written by Damascenes, mostly from notable families, about social life in the Old Damascus of their youth. The first, Siham Turjuman’s Ya mal al-Sham (O Wealth of Damascus), was published in 1969. Others date from the middle 1980s onward. Part autobiography, part social history, these works represent a type not found in classical Arabic literature. Unlike the traditional biographical and autobiographical form, the tarjama, these books do not merely recount the details and events of an individual’s—usually a religious scholar’s—life and the connections that constitute learned tradition (Eickelman 1991). Rather, they construct fragmentary, imagistic, and highly emotive accounts of the past more broadly. These books of personal reminiscence, whether knowingly or otherwise, evoke shared experience. Most memoir authors are prominent professionals—doctors, lawyers, and journalists—who know each other well and form an amateur literary circle. For instance, the introduction to the third edition of Najat Qassab Hasan’s Hadith Dimashqi (Damascene Talk) includes acknowledgments to and letters of praise from many of the other memoir authors. Old Damascus reminiscences contain vivid, seemingly timeless descriptions of the Damascene-style house, methods of preparing and eating traditional foods, and customs and traditions related to holidays, weddings, births, and funerals. All lament the passing of what is seen as a wholesome, integrated way of life. In O Wealth of Damascus Turjuman recounts lovingly the sounds, smells, and tastes of her youth spent in various quarters of the Old City. Weddings, funerals, trips to the public bath, songs, tales, and proverbs are described in a glow of nostalgic yearning:
When I go back to the old quarters where our ancient house sleeps or to the suqs with their smell of old age, I find that my attachment to things that are old is stronger than to modern ones. I discover that the only pure reality in my soul is the reality of childhood, as if childhood is a being, aware of what goes on around it, clinging to what is most genuine in order to keep it from changing. This reverence for the past reassures me that my knowing, attentive, pure childhood will reject anything false that tomorrow has to offer. (1994, 9)
What distinguishes these recent publications from earlier literary expressions of pride in and love for Damascus, notably Ibn Kannan’s eighteenth-century Yawmiyyat Shamiyya (Levantine Diary) and Muhammad Kurd ‘Ali’s 1944 Dimashq: Madinat al-sihr wa-al-Shi‘r (Damascus: City of Enchantment and Poetry), is precisely this sense of loss.[2] A particularly poignant example is Nadiya Khust’s al-Hijra min al-janna (Exodus from Paradise), a eulogy for an Old City quarter torn in half with the construction of Revolution Street:
Much of what I feel today is sorrow because my daughter does not know what it is like to wake up in an Arab house, opening her eyes to its decorations. She does not know the joy of looking out from the ornaments of the parapet and jasmine down to the courtyard, and she does not know the alternations of light on the Kabad tree. Generations of lovers of civilization will not know what fell under the rubble in Damascus. (1989, 10) In his Dimashq al-asrar (Damascus of Secrets) the Damascene journalist and former People’s Assembly member Nasr al-Din al-Bahra also bemoans this loss of authentic culture, as the concrete high-rises of the New City grow to engulf the Old:
Your Damascus is becoming two. The first, the authentic, is shrinking and declining. The second, having come into being like a small child, has come to grow like cancer, a blind growth, base and without identity. (1992, 14)
Memoirs, as representations of national memory, are among the cultural forms most readily accessible to the world beyond Syria. They fit neatly into the glowing global interest in other worlds, past worlds, to which Khust alludes. Books recounting life in Old Damascus have begun to attract translators. In 1994 the University of Texas Press published an English translation of Turjuman’s Ya mal al-Sham, under the title Daughter of Damascus. Authors like Turjuman sell well in a burgeoning global market for Third World and women’s literature. Yet within Syria Turjuman is a highly controversial figure; large segments of Syrian society are hostile to what they perceive as the elitism and exclusivity of the experience she recounts. Taken out of context, Ya mal al-Sham loses its political force. Daughter of Damascus is far removed from the complex cultural conflicts within which Ya mal al-Sham was conceived, and which render it richly illustrative of its milieu. Western media market such elite representations of local culture as uncontested authenticity.
Old Damascenes like Turjuman, Khust, and al-Bahra now find themselves a minority in “their” own city. As David Lowenthal notes, minorities often “deploy heritage not to opt out of nation-states but to achieve gains within them” (1996, 81). These authors present Damascus and Damasceneness as a metonym for Syrian national culture. Once this was easier, as the more emotive term for Damascus, Sham, stood for both the city and the Ottoman province of Syria, in the way that Misr signified both Cairo and all of Egypt. As Richard Handler (1985, 207–8) argues, the construction of national identity involves the appropriation of detached cultural objects, which are then made to stand for national culture. In this case, Damascus itself and memories of it have become objects of Syrian nationhood. Turjuman writes, “Damascus is the Syrian people and my people” (1994, 6). Likewise, Khust maintains that the city’s unique architectural style is “not just the attraction of visitors, not just the earth which brings together generations, or the house which wants next to it the rest…rather, it is national memory” (1989, 11). Because the Old City represents generations of civilization, Khust argues, its preservation is “a matter of major cultural and national significance” (1993, 5). Addressing a second-person Syrian reader, she links her concern for Old Damascus to the loss of other authenticities:
The modernity around you leads you to believe the past is a disgrace, and that the historical Old City is an insult to you. Until you distinguish between the white and black thread in life, and the dryness and cement spreads around you.[3] You see others in the world, having left their paradises for illusion and cold; they too gather fragments of memory and broken pieces of their abandoned gardens of the past. Before you, they understood the value of what was demolished, of what they left behind. (1989, 26)
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The Context
The Old Damascus phenomenon is linked to transformations in Syrian society over the past thirty years. Until the Baath party takeover in the early 1960s, a number of elite “notable” families with long ties to the city dominated social, economic, and political life in Damascus (Hourani 1946, 1968; Khoury 1983, 1987; Hinnebusch 1991). The first blow to this monopoly came with the attempted unification with Egypt (1958–61). With the consolidation of the Baath party government in 1963, political power shifted to a largely non-Damascene and nonurban military elite that became even more powerful after the perceived successes of the 1973 war. Dominating this military elite are members of the ‘Alawi religious sect, Syria’s largest religious minority, considered heretical by the orthodox Sunni of Damascus. The nationalizations of the middle 1960s further undermined the dominance of the notables. Also, those non-Damascenes—often peasants—who made fortunes in the Gulf during the oil boom of the 1970s often returned not to their villages but to Damascus, forming a class of nouveaux riches whose fortunes often exceeded those of the old notable families. The Damascenes were forced to do business with and even obey the newly rich and powerful whom they considered social inferiors.
But which group actually dominates which sphere of life is far from clear. For certain Old Damascus supporters, it is the barbarians from the countryside, who destroyed the older, Damascene-controlled forms of commerce by applying socialist policies, yet have themselves made fortunes by licensing legal trade and controlling smuggling. They argue that the most high-ranking government positions are reserved for ‘Alawis. They see the twenty-eight-year-old Asad regime as having succeeded in obliterating Sunni economic, social, and religious life. “There used to be a lot more ceremonies like this one,” said a Damascene television director, after a Sufi ceremony held in an Old City house on the Night of Power,[4] “but the government did away with them. They try to destroy everything Sunni.” I asked why people have become so interested in Old Damascus recently.
Not all the people, only the true Damascenes. Why, because they feel they are in a minority. Damascus is a town invaded by its own countryside. People are here because the social life in the countryside is awful. They run to Damascus to have a better way of life. More, as they think, civilized than in their own lands.…If you go to Beirut, you find New Jersey. Damascus resembles the first face of the Orient in front of Western civilization. You are in a town which turns its back on all aspects of Western civilization. [Then] suddenly events happen which break everything. He proceeded to describe what he saw as a conspiracy on the part of the Baath party to destroy the Muslim sections of the Old City, pointing out that the quarters that have been spared are predominantly Christian and Jewish.
Yet for non-Damascenes, it is the “merchant princes of Damascus,” as an ‘Alawi professor put it, who still control commercial enterprise. According to an ‘Alawi writer from Latakia, members of his sect are not automatically preferred for government and other positions:
The most important jobs are for Damascenes and Christians. The high-salary positions in the international hotels go to Christians. Diplomats are mostly Damascene and Christian; the Christians are sent to the West, the Damascenes to Arab countries. Grants to study in the West go to Christians; the head of the office in charge of sending students abroad is a Christian. They say that this regime is ‘Alawi, but I don’t think so. Or, you can say that there is a coalition of ‘Alawis who are benefiting, but not the rest. There are ‘Alawi villages that still don’t have electricity. If you ask a Damascene, he will answer in a way that reflects his prejudices. He will say that they [the ‘Alawis] have come and dominated everything, stolen everything, and so on. But those who came in from other areas live in the suburbs, in illegal, substandard housing, while those in the center are Damascene and Christian.
The university too used to be a Damascene preserve; the ‘Alawi professor remembered a Damascene colleague complaining that all the outsiders had ruined the university. “Do you mean me?” the professor asked. “No, not you, but all the others,” the colleague replied. The professor’s wife asked me, “What do the Damascenes say when you talk to them, do they hate us?” I replied that there was some resentment. The ‘Alawi writer told a similar story:
I asked one [a Damascene], “Why are you so interested in restoring an old city, rather than building a city of the future?” I felt that there was something ideological in his answer. He said that before the many projects that changed the architectural character of Damascus, people lived calmer and more balanced lives. They think that what happened to people in Damascus is that they became dehumanized, lost openness, communication, and trust. Yet Damascenes are very closed, they don’t visit non-Damascenes, they don’t invite non-Damascenes to their houses. You can’t make friendships with the women, and with the men you can only make friendships that are not friendships at the same time. There is something sectarian that motivates those who show interest in Old Damascus. They isolate themselves as a special group from Damascene bourgeois families, and they consider people who come to Damascus invaders who corrupted or changed the majesty of the Old City.
But just what is a Damascene, and more specifically, who are the old elite families? How long a family’s roots in the city must be and how prominent a family must have been to be considered notable are unclear. The concept of notable, bint or ibn ‘ila (literally, daughter or son of a family), is difficult to pin down. Certainly, a series of well-known names are always included in this category, but it is sometimes more loosely applied. Even more problematic is the matter of where the old elite families are now, and what their relationship is to what I call the Old Damascus movement. Many old elites have married into the new moneyed classes. Many others left Syria decades ago with the advent of Baath party rule. Michael Herzfeld (1991, 66) points to a similar situation in Crete, where virtually all of the families who formed the commercial elite of Rethemnos at the turn of the century have since left the town. Those who remain bemoan the loss of “aristocratic values” even though they themselves can rarely claim aristocratic status.
Although the question of who can legitimately claim Old Damascene status seems an obvious one, it is ultimately unhelpful. What is sociologically significant is not so much the validity of status claims but how these claims are used in urban identity contests. Ties to an elite Old Damascus, genuine or spurious, have become cultural capital, in Pierre Bourdieu’s (1984) sense, in a context of rapid social transformation and an increasing emphasis on public image and display. The Old City itself, twenty years ago a nether region associated with the backwardness of the past, is now a source of rich authenticity for Damascenes at home and abroad. In a global context that places an increasingly high premium on local cultures, Old Damascus is once again a status marker. Damascenes boast of the Old City’s glory to foreigners and other Syrians alike. For instance, Rana Kabbani, a Damascene author and media figure now living in London, promotes Old Damascus’s wealth of traditional natural beauty products to the readers of British Vogue (1998, 134–35).
Many Old Damascus supporters are not among the city’s wealthiest citizens and do not represent marriages of new money and old status. Many are intellectually oriented middle-class professionals—lawyers, doctors, and journalists—with comfortable but in no way extravagant lifestyles. Their families usually have deep roots in the city; their names are well known and often associated with Damascene exclusivity. Yet they are not always awlad ‘ila, members of old notable families. Many feel no sense of identification with the businessmen—some of whom are of old notable origin—whom they blame for working along with the government to destroy the Old City. For them, Damasceneness is a form of resistance to dominant values that they see as materialistic and superficial. Interestingly, some of the most prominent are former leftists who once believed in the nationalist project, and have since become disillusioned. According to a young translator:
I’ve noticed over the past five years that I have become proud of being Damascene. I see this also with my father, who was one of the founders of the Baath party. The Baathists used to think Syrians were all simply Syrian. Now many of them regret this. Now they feel that they are distinct from all the villagers, but especially from the ‘Alawis. They think: the ‘Alawis may have the money, they may have the power, but we have the tradition.
The prestige of this tradition sometimes attracts non-Damascenes with aristocratic pretensions. Non-Damascene, but nonetheless Sunni, Defense Minister Mustafa Talas is a well-known Old Damascus enthusiast whose publishing house, Dar Talas, has produced one of the most widely read Old Damascene memoirs. At the same time, it may be that wealthy Old Damascenes who have married their fortunes to new money do not need to promote their Old Damascus status. Whatever the reason, the very wealthy tend not to be at the forefront of the movement. Some serious aficionados are disenchanted former leftists, and their switch of political affiliation is often pointed to, by critics of the Old Damascus trend, as evidence of typically Damascene weakness of character. Supporters see heritage as an alternative to materialism.
The interest in Old Damascus is occurring as material wealth is becoming an increasingly important measure of status in Syria. Areas of the city are heavily marked in this way. The most incisive question to a potential bride or groom is no longer “Who is your father?” or “What do you do?” but “Where do you live?” People speak wistfully of a time when education and family background mattered. According to a young writer from Aleppo, “It used to matter, who you were and what you did, but now all that matters is consumption.”
This privileging of economic capital above all else is, ironically, in part a result of the Baath party’s socialist policies. The authority of the old elite families was linked to a combination of political and economic dominance, access to the West in the form of travel, education, and consumer goods, and an urbane, cultivated lifestyle of high education, refined manners, and attention to matters of taste. It was sometimes connected to religious learning. The demise of the old families’ dominance over social, political, and economic life in Damascus marked a shift in the understanding of what is considered elite.
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Friends and Interlopers
Many Old City activists belong to an organization called the Society of Friends of Damascus (Jam‘iyat Asdiqa’ Dimashq). Established in 1977 by “people who were very keen to have the city as it should be,” as President Burhan Qassab Hasan—brother of Najat—put it, the organization founded the Museum of the City of Damascus and sponsors lectures and exhibits. Here too the purpose appears to be the promotion of a distinctively Damascene identity. Qassab Hasan estimates that 30 percent of Friends of Damascus’s members are Damascene. “We don’t place restrictions [against non-Damascenes], but we prefer to have Damascenes because they like Damascus more.” Yet in practice membership is restricted; a candidate must be nominated by two current members. Qassab Hasan argues that such regulations exist because “we need people who work, not who have fun.” He boasts of the organization’s preservation efforts: “We stopped the tearing down of houses.…We are doing our best. All the government officials cooperate with us. Many would like to see Damascus as it was before. Whether they like it or not, when we say this or that, they have to agree.”
Yet Friends of Damascus is often associated with lavish dinner parties that used to be held in Old City houses but now tend to take place at posh New City hotels. Much like the Daughters of the American Revolution in the United States, the organization’s primary goal seems to many to be not the preservation and restoration of the Old City but the maintenance and promotion of the old social elite. Ardent Old Damascus activists often express irritation and frustration at the organization’s lack of success in getting laws passed to protect large areas of the Old City. Themselves Friends of Damascus members, they point to a tendency to prefer socializing to activism. “It should be called the Society of Friends rather than the Society of Friends of Damascus,” said one. According to another member, an architectural historian:
They do nothing, just waste time delivering lectures. Delivering lectures means nothing; we need to move!…In Ramadan they will break fast at the Cham Palace [Hotel] with a piano. This is ridiculous! They should act in a very different way, they should educate people about Damascus, about conserving and preserving. They should publish articles, they should change their ideas and the way they work, in order to be much better. And another, an architect, said, “What do they want, these Friends of Damascus members? They want what you could call prestige. They want to form and maintain relations among themselves, and with ministers and other prominent people.” A former member, a professional woman in her mid-thirties, takes this criticism further, “I don’t know why you are interested in Friends of Damascus. It’s becoming more of a matchmaking company than a society. Most of the women there are old maids looking for husbands.”
Many Syrians of non-Damascene origin living in Damascus see Friends of Damascus as a sinister organization whose bigoted and xenophobic members aim to rid the city of all “outsiders.” According to an ‘Alawi writer originally from the coastal region:[5] “Their idea, which is not directly expressed, is that Damascus was invaded by many migrants who deformed its old or inherited identity. They consider those who have come to Damascus to have corrupted the majesty of the Old City. They would like us to leave.”
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Constructing the Local
All the connotations of Old Damascus converge in the current transformation of the Old City into a recreation center. Most old notable families left their Old City houses decades ago, in favor of modern-style apartments in the elite districts of New Damascus. Their children and grandchildren are returning to the Old City now not to live as their ancestors had, or to shop during the day, like the peasants and tourists, but to spend leisure hours in the evening, either at the Piano Bar or at one of several newly opened restaurants. Set in old merchant houses, these establishments abandon the Western restaurant model that had inspired the previous generation of Damascus restaurants. Instead, they aim to provide a restaurant experience that is deliberately “Eastern” and, beyond this, distinctively Damascene. The most elaborate of these is the Omayyad Palace Restaurant, in the vaulted basement of what is believed to be the long-destroyed Umayyad Palace. “Damascus generosity and hospitality invite you to the Omayyad Palace,” reads the restaurant’s glossy brochure, in Arabic and English. The diner is ushered down a carpet-lined staircase into a cavernous room lavishly decorated with numerous carpets, a bubbling fountain, plants hanging from skylights, patterned marble floor, mother-of-pearl–inlaid and brocade-upholstered chairs, low brass tables, locally blown glass, copper urns, and glass cases filled with pottery and old photographs. Waiters in baggy black sharwal, black- and silver-striped shirts made from local cloth, fezzes, and imitation Docksider shoes serve drinks. The floor show begins with a “folklore” troupe, in shiny polyester black-and-green outfits, dancing to taped music. The dancing continues for half an hour, after which guests are asked to help themselves to an almost exclusively “Oriental” buffet. Tea, coffee, and water pipes are offered after the meal, as a “traditional” band, dressed in jalabiyas and fezzes, plays old songs. Whirling dervishes and Sufi music round off the evening.

Commoditized representations of Old Damascus are not limited to the Old City itself. Old Damascus theme restaurants and cafés have sprung up in the wealthier districts of the New City over the past decade. Noteworthy among these are recent additions to the Damascus Sheraton, the city’s most elegant hotel and favorite haunt of the city’s elites. Al-Narabayn, built on the hotel’s back grounds, is an upscale version of al-Nawfara, the popular café behind the Umayyad Mosque in the Old City. This establishment serves families and groups of teenagers coffee and tea and simple foods long associated with the poor, such as ful (fava beans) and fatta (a chickpea, bread, and yogurt dish), all at exorbitant prices. During the summer al-Narabayn moves outdoors, becoming al-Nawafir (a name again reminiscent of the popular Café al-Nawfara). The Meridien Hotel followed suit with Café Tric Trac, a two-tiered patio eatery decorated in mosaics and greenery, popular for water-pipe smoking and backgammon and card playing on summer evenings. Patrons pass away long hours, buffed, coiffed, and glittering in gold, talking and playing backgammon, seeing and being seen. Restaurants are uniquely intense people-watching sites. Unlike other leisure activities, such as cinema or theater, in which participants are afforded passing glimpses of fellow audience members, restaurantgoing provides a prolonged gaze of the other (Finkelstein 1989, 17). Tables are filled with al-mas’ulun—“the responsible,” the powerful and well connected.
The Sheraton has also replaced its elegant French restaurant with the “Oriental” Ishbilia (Seville). Here too the atmosphere is consciously “Eastern” right down to the waiters’ long waxed mustaches. On the night I visited, most tables were filled with Syrian men, many entertaining what appeared to be business associates. One table was composed of Syrian media figures. In 1986 the Sheraton invented a local tradition with its weekly Layalina, an outdoor, summertime, “Oriental” food and entertainment extravaganza that replaced the smaller and more expensive events at which French or continental food was served. This new event takes place around the hotel’s swimming pool, which, because of its long, grand staircase designed for bridal processions, is the most sought-after location for summer weddings.[6] Layalina is held on Monday nights because hairdressers in Damascus are closed on this day, thus limiting the likelihood that the Sheraton would lose wedding bookings.[7] In addition to a lavish “open buffet” of local specialties, a server in old-fashioned costume doles out falafel—a street food not habitually eaten in restaurants, let alone one of the Sheraton’s caliber—from a carriage like those once used in the Old City. Another serves sweets like those that used to be sold outside schools. All of these innovations were sound business decisions, according to the assistant food and beverage manager and service manager, Sami Farah. “People are fed up with classical European food,” he explains, “they want mezza, grills, and ‘araq.”
Yet the popularity of Old Damascus theme restaurants should not be seen as a rejection of the non-Damascene, the foreign and the Western. Instead, local culture is taking its place, self-consciously, among global cultures, with Café Tric Trac literally next to the Meridien’s Mexican restaurant and al-Narabayn next to the Sheraton’s pizzeria. Although the contrast between the eclecticism of the Piano Bar and the image of the Old City appears ironic, one of the markers of social differentiation in Syria is the ability to command both cosmopolitan and local idioms.
The increasing prevalence of Old Damascus simulacra also reflects the development of modernity through the growth of new leisure practices. Once an integral part of communal life, leisure activities are now separated from work, privatized, and commodified (Rojek 1995, 191). Restaurants are a case in point. Dining out has become the most popular pastime among the Damascene elite. Just two decades ago restaurantgoing was largely restricted to foreigners, travelers, and students.[8] Damascenes used to denigrate the quality and cleanliness of their eateries. Dining was a home-bound, family-centered activity. Now restaurants are central to the experience of past and present, near and far, seeing and being seen, being and becoming. They are the locus of a new local culture.
Restaurants and other cultural forms relatively new to the Middle East are sites at which tradition is reinvented. Here the concept of “public culture,” as developed by the pioneering journal of the same name, provides a useful framework. Studies of public culture are concerned with the local production and reception of transnational cultural forms, often in urban non-Western contexts. As Carol Breckenridge and Arjun Appadurai note, “Much of the non-Western world has now adopted forms of technological representation, consumption and commodification which are harnessed to the idiosyncrasies of their own traditions, and to the ways in which indigenous elites reconstruct these traditions” (1988, 1). I would add that what is occurring in Damascus is not mere synthesis of local tradition to Western form but the very construction of the local. While identity construction involves consumption of cosmopolitan cultural forms, these are locally produced and locally transformed.
Television is the most easily available of these forms. During the first half of the fasting month of Ramadan in 1993, Syrian television aired a fifteen-episode serial drama entitled Ayyam Shamiyya (Damascene Days), directed by Bassam al-Mallah. This series, said to be inspired by Egypt’s successful Layali al-Hilmiyya (Hilmiyya Nights), was the first to depict social life in Damascus in the late Ottoman period (1910).[9] It is also said to be the first such program without a strong plot, and with politics as a backdrop rather than the central focus. Damascene Days attempted to portray daily life in an unnamed Old City quarter, concentrating on family relations, problems between neighbors, and local administration. Customs and traditions associated with rites of passage were carefully depicted.
Damascene Days was clearly the media event of the year. It is difficult to overestimate the extent to which the series was watched and discussed. Most Damascus homes receive only two television channels: Channel 1, which aired the series, and Channel 2, which broadcasts foreign-language programs.[10] Syria produces many low-budget serial television dramas each year, but showpiece productions are aired during Ramadan.[11]Damascene Days was shown during what might be called Ramadan prime time, one hour after the beginning of iftar, the fast-breaking meal. It is a time when most people relax at home with their families, digesting the first food of the day. Television sets were tuned to the series even in the presence of large numbers of guests. Damascene Days sparked lively debate in the media and in conversation. Syrian Television also aired a two-hour discussion, filmed in an Old Damascene house, with all those involved in the production.
Assessments of the series were generally split along predictable lines: people with Damascene origins themselves were enthusiastic, whereas non-Damascenes’ reactions ranged from mild disinterest to fervent opposition. Most debates centered on the issue of authenticity. Critics argued that the series sanitized and romanticized life in the Old City, glossing over or collapsing social and economic differences. In Damascene Days both merchant and hummos seller have mother-of-pearl–inlaid furniture, and all characters are positively drawn, save the brutal but buffoonish Turkish soldiers. It was even argued that the Turks, who appear only briefly to hunt down a fugitive and to rape the sandwich seller’s daughter, should have been portrayed more harshly. Supporters stressed the authenticity of the dialogue, which was rich in archaic idiom; of the decor, which showcased inlaid furniture and other local products; and of social customs, such as those connected to marriage. As for the supposed neglect of class distinction, fans of the series argued that social differences at this time were in fact less accentuated than they are now.
Old Damascus once again occupied Syrian Television’s post-iftar slot during Ramadan 1994, in ‘Ala’ al-Din Kawkash’s thirty-episode series, Abu Kamil, Part Two. Set in an Old City quarter during the last days of the French Mandate, this unsuccessful sequel to the popular Abu Kamil was heavily criticized in many circles, but particularly among Damascenes. Most thought it drawn out, outlandish, and dull. Unlike Damascene Days, which presented an Old City quarter galvanized against the Turks, Abu Kamil, Part Two depicted Damascenes as traitors who collaborated with the French and fought among themselves. Another series broadcast in a later slot, Najdat Isma‘il Anzur’s Nihayat rajul shuja‘ (The End of a Brave Man), showed the people of Baniyas, a coastal city, struggling together against French forces. Based on a novel by the acclaimed Syrian author Hanna Mina, The End of a Brave Man won high praise in many circles for its tight plot and high production value but also for its depiction of a valiant and noble past, in which everyone was unified.
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Distinctions
Many of the older modes of social distinction are fading, having been replaced by mere consumption. Higher education is no longer seen as an important mark of social distinction for the elite, or as a reliable means to upward mobility for the humble. The democratization of Syrian universities has spread meager resources very thin. The majority of students graduate virtually unskilled. At the same time, low tuition fees and less-than-rigorous entrance standards have increased access to higher education, undercutting the prestige once associated with a university degree. The same is becoming true for degrees from Western universities, as the children of the expanding new-money classes are able to attain these with ease. Some upper-middle-class families encourage their sons to eschew university altogether and to go directly into family businesses. The title “duktur” no longer has the same deep resonance.
The trappings of Western elite culture—familiarity with current movements in the performing and visual arts; theater, opera, and moviegoing; museum and gallery visiting, highbrow fiction reading—do not constitute cultural capital in the upper reaches of Damascene society, as they do in Bourdieu’s (1984) France. Foreigners—diplomats and oil company employees—are virtually the only visual arts patrons. Often the more impoverished part of the artistic community itself makes up the audience and readership for local high-cultural production. The same faces can be seen at all highbrow art events: concerts, plays, films, and exhibit openings. Paradoxically, mass media such as television link the most general of audiences to a few producers, whose success elevates them to honorary membership in the social elite.
Wealth is displayed in elite hotels and expensive restaurants and at engagement parties, weddings, funerals, and other rite-of-passage events. Elite consumption practices often privilege representations of Old Damascus, or at least allusions to older forms of social life—Old Damascus theme cafés, old-fashioned horse-drawn wedding carriages, iftars and suhurs (Ramadan meals) in posh restaurants. The most talked about wedding of the 1995 season, staged by Najdat Isma‘il Anzur—director of The End of a Brave Man—featured the bride entering the Sheraton Hotel on camelback. Reconstructions of Old Damascus, as status markers or as metonyms of national culture, have become central to the experience of modernity in Syria. As Daniel Miller (1995a, 4) points out in more general terms, many social groups around the world are now constituted not through traditional value systems but through appropriation or rejection of global forms. Production, consumption, and rejection of Old Damascus simulacra are for Syrians the basic materials of identity construction.
The authentic Old Damascus of Damascene Days represents true mass consumption, available to all, rejected by some. But those who produce authenticity for the masses may themselves frequent exclusive venues like the Piano Bar, where drinks cost $5 each and the decor is an ironic hodgepodge of past and present, local and foreign.[12] Discussions of local appropriations of global cultural forms often gloss over such distinctions. At the level of imagery, however, it is true that the search for the return of Old Damascene authenticity is a journey into the urban, Middle Eastern experience of modernity: from the Old City itself (whose mostly lower-middle-class inhabitants would leave it if they could), to intellectuals and media figures who claim to represent local tradition and complain of apathy and frustration, to exhibits and dinner parties, bookshops and television shows, to that favorite haunt of the Old Damascenes, the Sheraton Hotel; and finally to the ultimate decenteredness of the Piano Bar, which, in the words of a librarian, “has absolutely no identity.”
The one who did the decor has assimilated too many cultures. We have a saying that fits: “From every orchard one flower.” Those dishes on the wall are Dutch, but they are not arranged in a Dutch way. It’s for younger people. You can never place it anywhere. They offer a very limited menu—shish tawuk, which is Turkish, and spaghetti, which is Italian. They have an old piece behind the bar that was part of the Umayyad Palace. Such a combination is unbelievable. And the curtains! I have never seen this fabric, which used to be used for cushions, used for drapes. Yes, it is Damascene, but it is used in a totally different way. Next I’m afraid I’ll find part of my mother’s underwear hanging as a curtain! They are arranging old things in a rather modern art way. We have this desire to live in a modern way, because at least in furniture we can do it. In our thoughts we are often tied to old ideas.
The final paradox is that “old ideas” is itself an image distinctive of modernity, and the pursuit of Old Damascus is a contemporary phenomenon.

From Mass Mediations :New Approaches to Popular Culture in the Middle East and Beyond, ed Armbrust, W. UNIVERSITY OF CALIFORNIA PRESS 2000
http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=ft8k4008kx&chunk.id=ch8&toc.depth=1&toc.id=ch8&brand=ucpress&query=damascus#

Notes
Funding for fieldwork in Damascus, 1992–94 and February-March 1996, was provided by a Social Science Research Council International Doctoral Dissertation Fellowship and a Linacre House Trust Research Grant.
1. These are the most recently released figures. The results of the 1996 census were not yet available at the time of writing. [BACK]
2. For a discussion of Ibn Kannan and other eighteenth-century literary celebrants of Damascus, see Tamari 1998. [BACK]
3. A reference to a saying (hadith) of the Prophet Muhammad regarding the appropriate time to break fast during Ramadan, when it is so dark that a black thread can no longer be distinguished from a white thread, and, more generally, when to say the dawn prayer. [BACK]
4. Laylat al-Qadr, the twenty-seventh of Ramadan, the night the Qur’an descended. [BACK]
5. The ‘Alawi, Syria’s largest minority group, are a religious sect considered heretical by the Sunni Muslims of Damascus. Originating from the villages of coastal Syria, they are strongly associated with the peasantry. [BACK]
6. The Sheraton was eclipsed in 1995 with the opening of the lavish Nobles’ Palace. [BACK]
7. Visiting a hairdresser on the day of a wedding party is crucial for Damascene elite women, as weddings are among the most important occasions for social display. For more on Damascene weddings, see Tapper 1988–89. [BACK]
8. Historically most Middle Eastern cities lack strong restaurant traditions (Hattox 1985, 89). [BACK]
9. For a discussion of Hilmiyya Nights, see Abu-Lughod 1995b. [BACK]
10. This was very true in 1993, but by the end of the following year middle-class households were gaining access to satellite dishes. [BACK]
11. For more on Syrian Ramadan television serials, see Salamandra 1997. [BACK]
12. A university-educated government employee earns $80 to $100 per month. [BACK]