I’m in Syria for the next few months to work on a film focusing on inter-faith dialogue and in some ways it feels like this is the perfect time to do it. Syria is a country in the midst of ‘change’, however hackneyed that may sound. What that change is exactly and what it holds in store for the country is difficult to assess, only that the change is occuring is evident, with more international visitors on the streets and businesses opening daily. I’ve been coming to Syria for the past few years with my wife, who has good insight into the place, and both of us agree that right now things are happening on an exponential scale.
We’re living in the Souk Al Jouma area to the north of the city. It’s a beautiful area, full of 12th and 13th century buildings alongside the clutter of day to day life. There’s a busy fruit and vegetable market just down our street and every evening the milk man comes with a van full of containers of fresh from the cow milk. Men traipse out to fill their own containrs and then go home to make yoghurt. So that’s nice. The area’s hosted plenty of illustrious guests prior to us. It was originally built by people retreating from the coast during the crusades and is also known as ‘Salhiyye’ – the friendly ones. The sufi sheikh and scholar Ibn Al Arabi is buried here and every Thurday night there’s a thikr at his shrine. It’s an interesting place as it’s also the only place in Damascus where Ive seen adults with down syndrome or other learning disabilities just hanging out and interacting with the community. A while after Ibn Al Arabi Richard Burton and his wife Ishbel lived here as the British consul, until they got chased out during some intrigue. They talked of living with a ‘hammam on one side and a mosque on the other’ and not much has changed on that respect, we’re surrounded by mosques with varying qualities of voice and there’s hammam down one of the alleys. I’ve still to try it, I’ll keep you posted on that one.
Music wise there’s some amazing stuff happening here, the trouble is there’s very few places to perform other than poorly disguised brothels. We did hear some excellent Iraqi Maqam a couple of nights ago in a bar in Geremneh though, I’ll try and bring my sound recorder along next time.
