You Don't Know Jack

The other night, I was out for dinner with a friend who was recently evacuated from Damascus. She’d been there more than a year, and missed it terribly. “It’s so amazing,” she said wistfully as we sat in a beautiful restaurant on Rainbow Street, Amman’s most happening area. I asked her how it compared to Amman, and was surprised by her answer. Not the part about it being gorgeous and culturally rich – Damascus is famous for that. But she told me that Syria, and Damascus in particular, is much less conservative than Jordan. That’s saying a lot. Jordan is one of the most moderate countries in the Middle East. Syria’s reputation, at least in the West, is one of an Islamist, anti-Western hotbed of terror, the epicentre of Angry Arabs and the kind of place you’d expect to find Claire Danes darting furtively through the dusty streets on a covert op for the CIA. Au contraire, says my friend. She likens Damascus to Beirut, a city famous for restaurants, night clubs, and cute open-air cafes. Women go sleeveless in the summer, she tells me. In Jordan, or Pakistan, or even Chad, that would get you dirty looks at best. Damascus has great shopping too, even now. Not only is Syria a cultural jewel, she says, “it’s one of the coolest places I’ve ever been.”

Huh.

Being the instinctively critical type, it’s not often I get caught out believing in a political myth. It’s a sobering reminder of how subtly we’re coached by television and newspapers and movies to believe in an image that may be very far removed from reality. It also adds yet another layer of tragedy to the conflict.

Mark Twain once wrote, “No recorded event has occurred in the world but Damascus was in existence to receive news of it. Go back as far as you will into the vague past, there was always a Damascus… She has looked upon the dry bones of a thousand empires and will see the tombs of a thousand more before she dies.”

I really, really hope he’s right.