August 29, 2009 • 3:08 pm
DURA-EUROPOS, SYRIA – Syria is Damascus to the growing number of Western tourists here. A short trip to the Greek desert city of Palmyra, about halfway to the Euphrates from the capital, is often as far east as visitors go.
Down the highway, however, where the Euphrates greens a strip of the rocky landscape, is a corner of the country less known for historical sights than for its proximity to war-torn Iraq. It is from here that militants have entered Iraq since the American invasion in 2003. The conflict has left Dura-Europos largely unseen by tourists.
But on a cliff overlooking the Euphrates less than 30 miles from Iraq, where Roman soldiers once watched for invading Persians, it’s possible to imagine life in the fortified desert city of Dura-Europos 2,000 years ago. Founded in 300 BC by Seleucus, one of Alexander the Great’s generals, it was a cosmopolitan outpost; first Hellenistic, then Roman – home to Greeks, Syrians, Christians, and Jews.
Read the rest of my most recent story for the Christian Science Monitor.
Filed under: Syria, Writing , Christian Science Monitor, Dura Europos, Euphrates, Mari
August 25, 2009 • 9:08 pm
Last week friend and old Cairo confidante Adam Makary filed this story for Al Jazeera English, on all that was expected from Mubarak’s recent entourage-heavy visit to Washington. Or rather, about how little was expected. He asked for my two cents, so somehow I was one of a half dozen Egyptian and American youth pooh-poohing the sick man of the Middle East’s overdue visit to America. It’s a little late, but I thought to post it anyway.
“Little expected from Mubarak visit,” Al Jazzera English.
Filed under: Uncategorized , Al Jazeera English, Mubarak, visit, Washington
August 24, 2009 • 4:19 pm
The writer takes on fear-mongers and hysteria, as always, in an excellent books article in the Guardian:
Is Europe about to be overrun by Muslims? A number of prominent European and American politicians and journalists seem to think so. The historian Niall Ferguson has predicted that “a youthful Muslim society to the south and east of the Mediterranean is poised to colonise – the term is not too strong – a senescent Europe”. And according to Christopher Caldwell, an American columnist with the Financial Times, whom the Observer recently described as a “bracing, clear-eyed analyst of European pieties”, Muslims are already “conquering Europe’s cities, street by street”. So what if Muslims account for only 3% to 4% of the EU’s total population of 493 million? In his book Reflections on the Revolution in Europe: Can Europe Be the Same With Different People in It? – which was featured on Start the Week, excerpted in Prospect, commended as “morally serious” by the New York Times and has beguiled some liberal opinion-makers as well as rightwing blowhards – Caldwell writes: “Of course minorities can shape countries. They can conquer countries. There were probably fewer Bolsheviks in Russia in 1917 than there are Islamists in Europe today.”
More.
Filed under: Literature, Media , Eurabia, Guardian, Islam, Islamophobia, Pankaj Mishra
My recent piece on the problems of architectural preservation and development in Damascus for GlobalPost.com:
DAMASCUS, Syria — Like Cairo’s Pyramids and Shiraz’s roses, to paraphrase travel writer Colin Thubron, the oasis of Damascus conjures running water. But that was 40 years ago.
These days the Barada River runs dry through one of the world’s oldest cities. Meanwhile tourists, long a rarity in the socialist Syria of Hafez al-Assad, are now flocking to the historic center of Damascus.
But a boon for the country’s economy and image is also a threat to the capital’s heritage, as a spate of often-hasty building restorations and conversions in the UNESCO-protected Old City has turned the area into a kind of historicist fantasyland of nostalgic architecture driven less by preservation than development.
Along with Aleppo, Damascus boasts the highest concentration of preserved, traditional Arab residential architecture in the Middle East. For decades the Ottoman-era courtyard houses and merchant palaces in the half-square-mile Old City crumbled as wealthier residents left for Western-style apartments in garden suburbs outside the city center. The flight began under the French Mandate in the 1930s and continued after Syrian independence in 1946 and throughout the end of the 20th century as the city’s suburbs expanded along the dry hills that edge the city.
Read the rest here.
Filed under: Syria, Writing , Damascus, old city, architecture, development, tourism, Global Post
