At night, the mosques of Damascus are lit up so that the domes
and minarets glow green against the black sky, and you feel like
you have entered another world entirely. This is not an inaccurate
perception.
Pictures of Syria’s dictator, Bashar al-Assad, dot the shops and
street corners of Syria. If you happen not to think too much about
it, the effect is fairly comic. Despite the poses he strikes,
Bashar is less than imposing. In 1994 had been studying to become
an ophthalmologist when his brother Basil died in a car crash.
Overnight, Bashar became the heir apparent to his father, Hafez, in
the world’s most explosive region. With his weak chin and beady
eyes, he has always looked more like an eye doctor than a
despot.
I had come to Damascus from Cairo with two friends, unsure of
what to expect. In Cairo, the universal language is a complex
combination of screaming and hand-waving. Syria could not be more
different. On our first day, the woman traveling with us asked a
shop-owner where she could buy a scarf so that she could enter the
stunning Umayyad Mosque. Instead of selling her one, he directed
her to where she could borrow a scarf at the entrance to the
mosque. Not only would an Egyptian shop-owner have sold her a
scarf, he would have appeared on the verge of an aneurysm during
the bargaining process.
The Syrians we met tried to sidestep our political differences.
My male friend told one man that we were Americans, and his eyes
immediately lit up. “America! George W. Bush! I love your
President!” he said. When my friend asked him if that was what he
really believed, he looked dejected. Disappointed that he could not
in good faith stick to the compliment, he admitted, “No, not
really.”
We found there were often considerations that transcended, for
most Syrians, their opinions on global politics. In Palmyra, a
little town on the way to Aleppo, we ran into five Syrian girls who
happened to be studying English. These girls wanted to practice
their English, they wanted to talk about their favorite American
movies — but mostly, I think, they simply wanted to talk to boys.
I had just made the mistake of hiking up a castle instead of taking
a bus, and then made the greater mistake of taking a “shortcut” up
a dusty ridge, where I scraped my shin against a rock. So I was
dirty, sweaty, and a little bloody when I met the girls.
Nevertheless, one of the them, Busaina, pointed to my scraggly
week-old beard. “I think this,” she ran her fingers against her
jaw, “is very beautiful.” Smiling, she said, “I think you are very
beautiful.” She thrust pieces of paper into our hands for us to
write notes to them, and we had our pictures taken with all of them
individually.
These girls could not flirt with Syrian boys in this way without
being branded as disreputable, some sort of “loose women.” In many
Islamic societies, where women are supposed to be neither seen nor
heard, their behavior would have been scandalous.
Beneath the friendly surface, Syrians cling to fiercely
anti-Western beliefs. “I think Americans hate Arabs,” Busaina
confided to me. We tried to convince her otherwise, but it was no
use. The father of the girls, who stood by quietly most of the
time, eventually told us in halting English that he thought the
American government was very bad and the Syrian government was very
good.
And how could they believe anything else? Most Syrians have
lived their entire life under the rule of the Assad family. The
pictures of Bashar may seem ridiculous to an outsider, but they do
not seem ridiculous to a Syrian who sees hundreds of them each day.
Much of Syrians’ information comes from the government newspaper,
Tishrin. Its reporting about the United States seems to
always mention how America is colonizing the Middle East to rob
Arabs of their natural resources, or how it is complicit in
Israel’s “atrocities.” A recent article in the English-language
version of Tishrin asserts in one breath that whenever
Ariel Sharon goes to the U.S. he “[comes] back more determined to
blow away the last remaining pieces of the peace process” and that
America’s reasons for going to war in Iraq “were evident later on
when the pieces of the Iraqi oil cake began to be distributed
amongst the shareholders of the three companies who helped launch
the war.”
It doesn’t help matters that Palestinian flags fly beside Syrian
flags, and bazaar shops in Damascus and Aleppo hawk heroic pictures
of Palestinian militant leaders.
It has become a common trope, in liberal circles, to blame
America’s poor reputation in the Middle East on its own actions.
One gets the sense that these people believe that Syrians pick up a
copy of the New York Times and, contemplating the
situation judiciously, reach their opinions on international
affairs. But in Syria, as well as other countries in the region,
the governments intentionally make it impossible for America to be
seen positively. Preventing America from achieving popularity among
his population is a matter of life and death for Bashar al-Assad.
Should Syrians ever want the rights Americans enjoy every day, the
overthrow of al-Assad’s government would inevitably follow.
A very different world, of course. But one that perhaps could be
more like ours.
