Books read and films seen this year of grace 2012

The High Window*, Raymond Chandler
The Long Goodbye*, Raymond Chandler
Muhammad, Karen Armstrong
Stalingrad, Anthony Beevor 
Defying Hitler, Sebastian Hafner
Berlin at War: Life and Death in Hitler’s Capital 1939-45, Roger Moorehouse
This Business of Living: Diaries 1925-50*, Cesare Pavese
Relapse into Bondage, Alexandru Cretianu
Friends and Heroes*, Olivia Manning
Waugh in Abyssinia, Evelyn Waugh - I reviewed it here

As You Like It*, William Shakespeare
History of the Roumanians*, R.W.Seton-Watson 
A History of Romania, Kurt Treptow

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire, Victor Sebestyen

Jeff in Venice, Death in Varanasi - Geoff Dyer
In Ethiopia with a Mule, Dervla Murphy - I reviewed it here
Tippu Tip: The Story of His Career in Zanzibar and Central Africa, Heinrich Brode
First Footsteps in East Africa, Richard Burton
The Emperor: Downfall of an Autocrat, Ryszard Kapuscinski - I reviewed it here
Here is New York, E. B. White
The Psychopath's Bible*, Christopher Hyatt
Remote People, Evelyn Waugh 

The Diary of Terror: Ethiopia 1974-1991, Dawit Shifaw 
Solitude*, Anthony Storr
Pagans and Christians Robin Lane Fox - I reviewed it here
The Shadow of the Sword. Tom Holland - I reviewed it here.
The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, Edward Gibbon.
The Early Church*, Henry Chadwick

Bold means I loved it. An asterisk means I have read it before. 

What a masculine, middle-aged list. I am even reading military history, which is the last refuge of the middle-aged male. In fact I tried Beevor's Stalingrad on a recommendation from an aesthete friend but it bored and repelled me. Gibbon though is great.

I read Chandler for the prose style not for the plot, though he is a good storyteller. I thought when 14 that The Long Goodbye was too long and too much trying to be a proper novel. Now I absolutely loved it except the ending with the silly twist which I merely skimmed without attempting to understand it.

Karen Armstrong on Muhammad is not worth reading as she does not mention that the evidence for her subject's life is extremely late indeed (two centuries after the event).

Hafner's book, to my great surprise, an account of his uneventful life in Berlin in 1933, found among his papers and published ten years ago, is absolutely wonderful. It is beautifully written and deeply horrifying because of the sheer normality of his life as he describes it in Berlin in 1933 and the ease and rapidity with which Germans accepted Nazism and Nazi indoctrination. I hope it becomes a classic and is read in a hundred years' time as it deserves to be. People follow like sheep. I saw a somewhat faint parallel with another totalitarian ideology with a whiff of sulphur, political correctness, which has made cowards of us all in recent years. 



The Moorehouse book is not particularly well written or strikingly insightful, but it efficiently covers the ground. The story of Stella Kübler, the beautiful blonde Jewess who was used by the Nazis as bait to uncover Jews hiding in Berlin, chilled my blood. She was told that, by her collaborating, her parents would be saved, but unsurprisingly they were sent to the gas chambers anyway. She herself lived to an old age before she committed suicide. One solitary Jew was permitted to survive in the Jewish cemetery burying Jews according to Jewish practice. He was still alive when the Russians came. 

This is what a friend of mine calls Hitler porn but my excuse is that I know very little about German domestic history during the Nazi period, the subject is important and I am interested in biographies of cities, writing as I am one a book on Bucharest. 

Olivia Manning's third volume in the Balkan trilogy, set in Greece, which I reread while spending the weekend in Athens and Hydra, inclines me to think that the reason I like the first two so much is because of my love of and interest in Romania not Manning's writing. She does not create characters. Her characters are clearly drawn from life in many cases and therefore do not come alive. It is the invented ones like Yaki who live. 

Seton-Watson is magisterial and should be read by all foreigners who speak English in Romania. I am ashamed that I had only skimmed it before. I had never opened Treptow, which the author gave me in 1999, before he went inside, and had assumed it would be a facile popularisation but, despite the numerous mistakes and misspellings, it was a more vivid, condensed account than Seton-Watson and taught me rather a lot. Dennis Deletant tells me it was written by a  group of Romanian historians not by Treptow and completed very hurriedly - hence the mistakes and typos - so that Adrian Nastase, when he was Foreign Minister,  had copies to give away when he visited the USA.

Revolution 1989: The Fall of the Soviet Empire by Victor Sebestyen is journalism rather than history, but very interesting.

I read Here is New York, by E. B. White, because Johann Hari tweeted that it was the best essay of all time. It is not but it is very well written and might inspire me to write about Bucharest if I am lucky. But reading Remote People by Evelyn Waugh immediately after Here is New York makes Waugh's prose seem even more dazzling than usual. White is a very good stylist whom Waugh effortlessly outdoes. Although perhaps I am biassed as I 'get' English writers so much better than American ones. Americans speak our language but do not think like we do. And they write in English but not in the setting of the English class system, which always makes reading them seem eerie.

The Psychopath's Bible is a reminder that psychopaths, though amoral or rather immoral, have values they believe in, which they cannot be argued out of - might is right, survival of the fittest, victims want to be victims, selfishness is good, the ideas of Ayn Rand. A reminder that morality, like art, is inspired by love not logic.

'Tom' Holland went to my college years after me and took a Double First in Classics and History and has many books to his credit. I try not to be jealous, but he cannot write.

I haven't decided whether I love Gibbon yet - reading a book on a kindle makes love more difficult, for some reason - but I am enjoying him, though his paganism and contempt for the early church disgust me. He is a very good historian indeed. Cardinal Newman said, "It is melancholy to say it, but the chief, perhaps the only English writer who has any claim to be considered an ecclesiastical historian, is the unbeliever Gibbon."  

Four novels, which is much better than my usual score, although I am not sure the two Raymond Chandler thrillers really count.

Films seen

Six films is also much better than my normal score, which is none. None were any good, except In A Better World. Albert Nobbs was dull, pleasant but in the end a waste of time - please read George Moore's wonderful short story instead. George Moore is an unjustly neglected genius (like me).

The Blue Dahlia (1947)*
The Brasher Doubloon (1947)
Albert Nobbs (2011)
In a Better World (2011)
Thank you for Smoking (2005)
Goodbye, Lenin (2003)

Battle in Gaza, 634

Less than five years after the (Byzantine) Roman Empire had won back Palestine from the Iranians, on 4 February 634, Muslim Arabs defeated the Byzantine army, commanded by the candidatus, Sergius, at the Battle of Dathin, a village near Gaza. Sergius himself was killed. The Muslim victory was celebrated by the local Jews. 

This is the moment when Islam enters history. 

The fascinating Doctrina Jacobi nuper baptizati, a Christian polemic against the Jews and one of the very few historical sources, records voices from an otherwise eerily silent period of Middle Eastern history:

When the candidatus was killed by the Saracens, I was at Caesarea and I set off by boat to Sykamina. People were saying "the candidatus has been killed," and we Jews were overjoyed. And they were saying that the prophet had appeared, coming with the Saracens, and that he was proclaiming the advent of the anointed one, the Christ who was to come. I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist. Indeed, Isaiah said that the Jews would retain a perverted and hardened heart until all the earth should be devastated. But you go, master Abraham, and find out about the prophet who has appeared." So I, Abraham, inquired and heard from those who had met him that there was no truth to be found in the so-called prophet, only the shedding of men's blood. He says also that he has the keys of paradise, which is incredible.

This seems to be the first of the very few near-contemporary references to Mohammed, leaving aside the four references to him in the Koran, though he is not named and it has been unconvincingly suggested that the reference is to some other prophet. In fact, we know very little about Mohammed. Almost everything that is thought to be known about him is myth.

Two years later, the Battle of Yarmouk marked the final defeat in Syria of the Roman Empire, which was in fact, by this time, Greek. The Middle East has remained mostly in Muslim hands ever since. 

The Christian Middle East still exists and still feels Greek, though Christians, who made up 20% of the population of the Middle East in 1900, now make up 2% and are now leaving in large numbers. The traditional Jewish Middle East existed up until 1948, when the Jews were expelled from many Arab countries. Little remains of it now.

Do we know anything about Muhammad or the origins of Islam?

I am reading Tom Holland's book In the Shadow of the Sword which I should probably not have bought had I taken the time to look through the pages and see that it is a popular history, written to make the paperback bestseller lists. But this would, on the whole, have been my loss. Some of the book's themes are important and should be widely discussed.

The book is exasperating and quite exceptionally badly and vulgarly written.  I cannot remember ever reading anything that insults the reader quite so much and yet Mr Holland has won several literary prizes, which I find completely incredible. The book contains many hundreds of sentences as bad as this one:

'He [Muhammad] had experienced history's most epochal mid-life crisis.'  

Historians are discombobulated. A sultan with halitosis can 'slay flies with a single breath'. Holland sounds like a history teacher trying to amuse his fifth form class and the whole book seems to be written for serialisation in the Daily Mail. The stories about the Empress Theodora's prepubescent sexual life, which are completely off the subject, are repeated with unnecessary detail and given undue credence. The book is, as Gerald Manley Hopkins described Locksley Hall, an ungentlemanly row, but the subject matter is fascinating.

Holland convinces me that we know virtually nothing about Muhammad, including whether or not he had a religious conversion at the age of forty. This is largely because of a lack of a written culture in the Arabia of the period. Compare what we know about fifth century Britain: we know much more simply due to Gildas and the Venerable Bede. The Koran tells us almost nothing about Muhammad. There are no more than four references to him in the Koran and two fleeting references to him by name in near-contemporary Christian writers. The Teaching of Jacob, a Greek Christian apocalyptic text written between 632 and 640, which Holland does not specifically mention, might be the oldest reference to Muhammad in existence. It does not name Muhammad, but puts the Christian case against him poignantly and pithily: 

I, having arrived at Sykamina, stopped by a certain old man well-versed in scriptures, and I said to him: "What can you tell me about the prophet who has appeared with the Saracens?" He replied, groaning deeply: "He is false, for the prophets do not come armed with a sword. Truly they are works of anarchy being committed today and I fear that the first Christ to come, whom the Christians worship, was the one sent by God and we instead are preparing to receive the Antichrist."

The hadiths, sayings attributed to Muhammad, and the biographies of him probably have no value at all as historical evidence, being written far too late. This lack of evidence should always have been obvious (Gibbon pointed it out in a footnote to the Decline and Fall) but only became reasonably widely accepted in the last thirty-odd years, though it is still fiercely disputed. We do not know, for sure, if Muhammad visited Mecca. The battles he is thought to have won, over which historians have spilt much ink, are probably as factual as the Battle of Camlann at which Mordred defeated King Arthur.

Thomas Carlyle's famous essay praising Muhammad and Sir William Muir's Life suggesting he may have been a psychopath possessed by Satan seem equally houses based on sand. The most important fact that we know for sure about the early history of Islam is that Muslims conquered half the known world in the seventh century, including the Middle East, North Africa and Spain, before being defeated at the Battle of Tours in 732. We do not know for sure if Islam enabled the Arabs to conquer so much of the world or whether Islam was a by-product of this remarkable explosion. The late Bishop Kenneth Cragg said: 

Muhammad, in expanding his empire, managed to start a religion.

However, we do not know for sure if Muhammad himself led the Muslims to victory. Some have even argued that Mohammad did not exist, as others have done about Jesus of Nazareth, of whom much more is reliably known. 

Holland is certain (perhaps too certain) that the Koran originates in the early seventh century, basing his argument on one verse, which he thinks refers to the Persian conquest of Palestine in 614. He rejects, in a couple of sentences, the idea that the Koran was composed using material from various sources, including Christian hymns, as others have asserted. This is a question that deserved much more space in a long book that includes many long and irrelevant digressions. I suspect that it is elided for fear of the reaction from Muslims.

Two scholars were allowed to examine parchment fragments of the oldest known Koranic manuscript which were found forty years ago in a mosque in Sana’a, in Yemen. One, Gerd- Rudiger Puin, decided that the Koran had evolved over time using material from various sources. The Yemeni authorities were understandably angry and no further research has been published. This is also the theory of other scholars, including Patricia Crone and 'Christoph Luxenberg' (the latter writes under a pseudonym for fear of violent reprisals).  Holland, however, agreeing with the scholarly consensus, is convinced that the variations in texts are not of great importance and their similarities point to an early origin. These scholarly disputes require a good working knowledge of Arabic and classical Syriac or Middle Aramaic. Holland, so I have read, does not have these languages.

Of course, for Christians the idea that the Koran we know today does have an early origin is rather disappointing, although they hate it when biblical scholars undermine the historicity of the Gospels. Still, there is very much that is very mysterious about the Koran. It is fascinating to learn that many hadiths insist that the punishment for adultery should be death by stoning, but the Koran stipulates 'a hundred lashes'. How does this square with the Koran being much older than the hadiths? It tells us that the scribes who copied out the Koran did not adjust the text to accord with the hadiths but also that those who wrote down the hadiths did not know the Koran in the version we have it.

The Koran is almost the only evidence that we have for the origins of Islam, yet the Koran tells us virtually nothing about history. According to Holland, we do not even know if it originates in the Arabian peninsular (Arabia) or elsewhere in the Arab world - Iraq has been suggested by Patricia Crone as an alternative site.

Some light on this mysterious period in Arabian history is also shed by this book about the Jewish kingdom of Himyar (very roughly what is now Yemen), where Jews oppressed Christians. The suppression of Himyar by the Ethiopians provides Holland with the opening chapter of his book, though it is not very relevant to the origins of the Muslim religion. My visit to Ethiopia and to the Yazidi holy place, Lalish, in Iraq have whetted my appetite to know more about this period and part of the world. I look forward to going to Sana'a, though possibly when it is a little less dangerous.



Here is a very good article in Standpoint by Nick Cohen, about Tom Holland's book.

Ion Mihai Pacepa on the killing of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi

Ion Mihai Pacepa talks about the killing of the U.S. Ambassador in Benghazi, which we know, despite what Mrs. Clinton said, was not a spontaneous response to a film about Muslims: 

"My past experience at the top of the Soviet bloc intelligence community gives me solid ground to state that the Muslim attacks on U.S. embassies and the assassination of our ambassador to Libya, carried out with Soviet-made rocket-propelled grenades, Kalashnikovs and Molotov cocktails, were just as “spontaneous” as the May Day parades in Moscow – and that they have the same organisers".

He is certainly not very trustworthy but since he was working for the KGB (not the CIA)  this is probably true. 

Gang rape in Paris shocks France

A terrible story of gang rape of a young white girl has shocked France and shocked me, who generally never read crime stories. The light sentences meted out to the four youths who were convicted were almost equally shocking.  I scoured the net to find out whether they were indigenous French youths or whether 'youths' was code for Arabs or Muslims. 

Only the NYT mentions that one of the men convicted has a Muslim name. I presumed the others were also Muslims and a French journalist has confirmed this to me Why is this not mentioned in the press that disingenuously talks about 'French gang culture'? This should be not only mentioned but widely discussed surely, not least by Muslims in France.

‎Islam in Romania

Sheik Omar Bakri, who has claimed responsibility for the suicide bombing of a busload of Israeli tourists in Burgas, in Bulgaria, in July, said in an interview published in the Bulgarian press that both Romania and Bulgaria are legitimate targets for attacks, because they are ‘Islamic land’ and because troops from those countries are fighting in Afghanistan. 

"Once Islam enters a land, that land becomes Islamic and the Muslim have the duty to liberate it some day. Spain, for example, is Islamic land, and so is Eastern Europe: Romania, Albania, Macedonia, Serbia, Kosovo and Bosnia."

The head of Romania’s Intelligence Service (SRI), George Maior commented on this on television:

“We are not exempt from terrorist threats. It is increasing and we are on the map of terrorism organizations as a potential target because of our presence in Afghanistan and because of the anti-missile shield. And we are very careful. Omar Bakri was under analysis by the Service in the past, he tried to come to Romania, he has connections in Romania, he’s a man we are looking at carefully.”

Actually, the Sheik's history is not accurate, at least not about most of Romania, though he could have dragged in the Ukraine, Hungary, Greece and Southern Italy where Islam did enter (even Rome was sacked, but not occupied, by the Muslims). All of what is now Romania was, it is true, once in some sense part of the Ottoman Empire and shown as such on the maps, but Islam never 'entered' Romania, except for the Dobrudgea, the Bucovina and for 150 years the Banat. The great achievement of the Wallachians, Moldavians and Transylvanians was, when they could no longer resist the Turk by force of arms, to make terms and preserve their autonomy and the property of their landowners. Serbia, Albania, Bulgaria and Greece failed to preserve their system of landownership and government. The three principalities which made up most of what is now Romania simply paid tribute to the Sublime Porte and were untouched by Islam. They were always ruled by Christian princes, owned by Christian landlords and governed by their own laws. In fact, Wallachia and Moldavia were never territories of the Ottoman Empire but protectorates.The only other semi-detached part of the Ottoman Empire which had this form of self-government was the Lebanon. Romanian landlords and nobles were very lucky to escape the fate of their counterparts elsewhere in South-Eastern Europe.

Mosque at Constanza

Muslims were forbidden to settle in Wallachia and Moldavia to prevent them from appealing to the Sultan for protection against the Christian authorities. Ethnicity in the era before nationalism was less important than religion and every Christian who owned land was a citizen. Greeks, Serbs, Armenians and Albanians were magistrates and bishops. Jews could settle, but could not be citizens unless they converted.

It is not clear how we should describe the status of the Regat in English, but protectorate or suzerainty are inaccurate approximations. Home rule is not quite right for the Phanariot era in the 18th Century, when the principalities were ruled by Greeks, who bought their throne from the Sultan and did not last long, but would apply to the periods of native princes in the seventeenth century and after the Wallachian uprising of 1821. At any rate the Sultan played no part in ruling the Regat whose rulers had far more freedom from Constantinople than Romania now has from Brussels. Only in 1876 did the new Ottoman constitution for the first time enact that Wallachia and Moldavia were full parts of the empire. The War of Independence followed in 1877, a war, though, that was not really fought for de jure independence, but under compulsion from the Czar who would have marched his army across the principalities in any case.

Romanians tell me that Romania resembles other Balkan countries, especially Serbia and Greece, and they should know much better than me, but I always fancy that the Balkan feeling, which you get in other Balkan countries, Albania most of all, and which is really a Turkish feeling, is sensibly less in evidence here. This may be simply due to the fact that Romanian is, despite all attempts to deny it, a Latin language. But if I am right and it goes deeper than this, this would be the explanation. At any rate, there are no mosques here, except in the Dobrudgea.

Ali Ghazi Mosque in Babadag, built in the 16th century, is the oldest mosque in Romania. 

I first came to the Balkans in 1990 by train, hoping to see Europe morph into Asia. Strada Lipscani felt utterly sui generis and un-Western, with gypsy or Arab music playing from transistor radios, but, apart from the old town in Bucharest, Romania was Europe and so was Bulgaria, despite her statues of Lenin, mosques and the gypsy quarter in Plovdiv. In 1990, after Romania, Istanbul was almost a bore - it was back to capitalism and Mars bars and foreign newspapers - but it was Muslim and the East. It felt like Asia. Now that I have lived in the Balkans for fourteen years, Bulgaria, Greece and Turkey feel as if they have very much in common. At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium. 

When I went to Constanza for the first time in 1999 and saw the mosque there, overlooking the Black Sea, I felt that I was in an odd, hybrid place. My generation was the last that could forget that there were large numbers of Muslims in Western Europe. That was in 1999 and we cannot forget them now. The roughly 20,000 Romanian Muslims, inaccurately labelled Turks, are a tiny number compared with the millions in England, France, Germany and Spain. The town where I was born, like Constanza, now has two mosques.

I have met three or four Romanian so-called Turks, who were all very nice people. The one I liked most was a very sympathetic young woman (she might have had gypsy blood) in Constanza who told me she had converted to Christianity and in her spare time went around Muslim villages, trying to convert other Muslims. She wanted, she said, to set them free. How different from the Anglican way of doing things. Something about her simplicity moved me a great deal.

Emil Perhinschi, to whom I am indebted for teaching me much about Romanian history, comments as follows (Ion Bratianu was Liberal Prime Minister during the War of independence and Mihail Kogalniceanu was a highly regarded former Prime Minister):

"At moments they almost feel like the same country, which historically they were - Greater Greece, Byzantium." 
that country was calling itself (herself ?) Romania, too ;) not Greater Greece, nor Byzantium, and the Romaioi and Rumanians North of the Danube were the last to abandon the original Megali Ideea, which was to restore the Eastern Roman Empire ... the former 48ers were still talking about a Greek-Rumanian confederation until close to 1860. At least they were accused by their enemies of having such plans ... Barbu Catargiu mentions this in his speeches.
"I suspect there were not very many Romanians in the Dobrudgea in 1878 and think it was poor substitute for Bessarabia which Alexander II and Disraeli ensured the Romanians lost." 
Very likely Bratianu traded Bessarabia for Dobrudgea when he made the secret deal with the Russians, but had to pretend he does not agree since his deal was not extremely popular. ... in 1877 there were hot debates against whom should Rumania go to war, and while the wives were entertaining Russian officers at court receptions the husbands were drilling the army in Oltenia and would have gone against the Russians but for the article 7 in the 1876 Ottoman constitution.
Rumania needed a useable sea port. Galatz and Ibrail were accessible to sea-going vessels, but only to small ships, and the Delta route was long, dangerous and infested with malaria ... around 1840s it was said that 1/10 of the sailors that crossed the Delta got infected. The Sulina channel was dredged since at least 1820, but the depth varied and at the mouth it was very low, ships had to be unloaded before crossing the bar then loaded back. Chilia was deeper, but lengthened very much the time needed to get to the Bosphorus.
Before 1878 Kustendge was a village of fishermen with very small docks, and the railway from Cernavoda was almost bankrupt because the docs in Kustendge were very poor and not protected, so very little traffic went that way. The port was built after 1878. 
During winter Dobrudgea was a popular destination for Rumanian shepherds, so there was a sizable Rumanian population, but no Rumanian majority, not even during the winter :). Dobrudgea was not very populated anyway: invasions and pitched battles fought in your backyard every 20 years took care of that. Some Circassian refugees were settled there after 1840, too. Taxes were much lower in the Ottoman Empire so when Dobrudgea became part of Rumania a lot of the natives sold their land and left before the government realized what is going on and lowered the land tax (Kogalniceanu took advantage of the sales then lobbied for a lower tax rate when he realized he sunk money in semi-desert). 

Edward Gibbon on the Ethiopians

From Chapter 42 of the Decline and Fall:

Justinian had been reproached for his alliance with the  Æthiopians, as if he attempted to introduce a people of savage negroes into the system of civilized society. But the friends of the Roman empire, the Axumites, or Abyssinians, may be always distinguished from the original natives of Africa. The hand of nature has flattened the noses of the negroes, covered their heads with shaggy wool, and tinged their skin with inherent and indelible blackness. But the olive complexion of the Abyssinians, their hair, shape, and features, distinctly mark them as a colony of Arabs; and this descent is confirmed by the resemblance of language and manners, the report of an ancient emigration, and the narrow interval between the shores of the Red Sea. Christianity had raised that nation above the level of African barbarism: their intercourse with Egypt, and the successors of Constantine, had communicated the rudiments of the arts and sciences; their vessels traded to the ifle of Ceylon, and seven kingdoms obeyed the Negus or supreme prince of Abyssinia, The independence of the Homerites, who reigned in the rich and happy Arabia, was first violated by an Æthiopian conqueror: he drew his hereditary claim from the queen of Sheba, and his ambition was sanctified by religious zeal. The Jews, powerful and active in exile, had seduced the mind of Dunaan, prince of the Homerites. They urged him to retaliate the persecution inflicted by the Imperial laws on their unfortunate brethren: some Roman merchants were injuriously treated; and several Christians of Negrawere honoured with the crown of martyrdom. The churches of Arabia implored the protection of the Abyssinian monarch. The Negus passed the Red Sea with a fleet and army, deprived the Jewish proselyte of his- kingdom and life, and extinguished a race of princes, who had ruled above two thousand years the sequestered region of myrrh and frankincense. The conqueror immediately announced the victory of the gospel, requested an orthodox patriarch, and so warmly professed his friendship to the Roman empire, that Justinian was flattered by the hope of diverting the silk-trade through the channel of Abyssinia, and of exciting the forces of Arabia against the Persian king. Their ally, Nonnosus, descended from a family of ambassadors, was named by the emperor to execute this important commission. He wisely declined the shorter, but more dangerous, road through the sandy deserts of Nubia; ascended the Nile, embarked on the Red Sea, and safely landed at the African port of Adulis. From Adulis to the royal city of Axume is no more than fifty leagues, in a direct line but the winding passes of the mountains detained the ambassador fifteen days; and as be traversed the forests, he saw, and vaguely computed, about five thousand wild elephants. The capital, according to his report, was large and populous; and the village of Axume is still conspicuous by the regal coronations, by the ruins of a Christian temple, and by sixteen or seventeen obelisks inscribed with Grecian characters. But the Negus gave audience in the open field, seated on a lofty chariot, which was drawn by four elephants superbly caparisoned, and surrounded by his nobles and musicians. He was clad in a linen garment and cap, holding in his hand two javelins and a light shield; and, although his nakedness was imperfectly covered, he displayed the Barbaric pomp of gold chains, collars, and bracelets, richly adorned with pearls and precious stones. The ambassador of Justinian knelt; the Negus raised him from the ground, embraced Nonnosus, kissed the seal, perused the letter, accepted the Roman alliance, and, brandishing his weapons, denounced implacable war against the worshippers of fire. But the proposal of the silk-trade was eluded; and notwithstanding the assurances, and perhaps the wishes, of the Abyssinians, these hostile menaces evaporated without effect. The Homerites were unwilling to abandon their aromatic groves, to explore a sandy desert, and to encounter, after all their fatigues, a formidable nation from whom they had never received any personal injuries. Instead of enlarging his conquests, the king of Æthiopia was incapable of defending his possessions. Abrahah, the slave of a Roman merchant of Adulis, assumed the sceptre of the Homerites; the troops of Africa were seduced by the luxury of the climate; and Justinian solicited the friendship of the usurper, who honoured, with a slight tribute, the supremacy of his prince. After a long series of prosperity, the power of Abrahah was overthrown before the gates of Mecca; his children were despoiled by the Persian conqueror; and the Æthiopians were finally expelled from the continent of Asia. This narrative of obscure and remote events is not foreign to the decline and fall of the Roman empire. If a Christian power had been maintained in Arabia, Mahomet must have been crushed in his cradle, and Abyssinia would have prevented a revolution which has changed the civil and religious state of the world.

Harar is the real thing

"Before either had spoken the General sized William up; in any other department he would have been recognized as a sucker; here, amid the trappings of high adventure, he was, more gallantly, a greenhorn. "Your first visit to Ishmaelia, eh? Then perhaps I can be of some help to you. As no doubt you know, I was there in '97 with poor `Sprat' Larkin." "I want some cleft sticks, please," said William firmly. Miss Barton was easier to deal with. "We can have some cloven for you," she said brightly."

Evelyn Waugh, Scoop

I fly - after Ethiopean Airline's invariable long delay - to Dire Dawa which by contrast to Lalibela is hot, tropical and feels Caribbean. I only drive through it on my way from and to the airport but the buzz Is very palpable. Then a crowded minibus through wonderful scenery and gathering dusk to Harar. 

As in Dervla Murphy's day, there is always a schoolmaster to speak to you in English though now very many other people also speak English. Damn the English language, that dissolvent of parochialism. I sat next to a P.E teacher who told me, 'Every Ethiopian hates Ethiopia.' I understood this unpatriotic sentiment perfectly. Every Ethiopian is now aware that he is poor when within living memory Ethiopians felt superior to the rest of mankind. 

The schoolmaster was interesting at first but he ran out of themes and I wanted to watch the villages and the landscape (beautiful, dark green). I suggested this, I hope politely. He replied, 'What are the staple foods of Britain?'  'Oh, please.' He later got off the bus without a word to me.

I chose Harar on instinct, without any research, but it is the perfect choice, though no longer a mostly Muslim city. It is full of people drinking beer and easy girls, unlike in Evelyn Waugh's time, but the old city promises to be different. The Tana Hotel where I alight seems a series of very noisy bars and possibly a bordello but I later hear it is the best hotel in town. I move on to an Italian built hotel, the Ras Hotel, which had been recommended to me by a Mexican Jew in Addis, as cheap and pleasant. It feels like a gaol and costs $10. I saw a cockroach in the bathroom but the bed was clean. It does have a good restaurant and an internet cafe and there I befriend a nice guide called Hailu. I ate a very good Yemeni dish called Monday or something similar. I stayed the next night too from force of inertia but upgraded to the wonderful suite which runs along the front of the building and costs $20. One can imagine a young Fascist colonel holding parties in it.

August 6

Harar is the real thing. The Ethiopian highlands and its churches and castles I vaguely knew about but waking here in this Stalinist prison (Mussolini era actually) for which they charge you $10 (with excellent breakfast) I feel transfigured.

The strangest, but delicious, breakfast today with a completely unpronounceable name containing spicy meat. The only element I recognised was injera.

Harar is said to be the fourth holiest city in Islam but I do not know why nor who decides these things. When I was in Kairouan in Tunisia it claimed to be the fourth holiest city in Islam, after Mecca, Medina and Jerusalem.

Dervla Murphy is my companion after Steve left and I am unable to resist internet cafes and broadcasting to my 1,056 Facebook friends who are my other companions. In the internet cafe in the hotel I read this by Dervla and feel I did not score highly. I only obeyed rules 1, 3 and 4 - am ashamed I neglected 2.

I am enjoying Dervla's account of her journey across Ethiopia by mule - she deplores the very outset of tourism and I am with her but it has not got very far - certainly not here in Harar. But travel with Facebook and email is wrong. I wonder if Hararis have heard of Paris Hilton.

I asked. They had not. 

Nor Madonna. 

No point in going to Zanzibar after Harar but I have to honour the ticket.

Hailu took me round.

This man makes shoes from worn out car tyres. Customers call them 'thousand-milers'. 

19th century house in the walled Muslim city where I shall stay if I go back next year en route to Somaliland.

The old mosque to which kaffirs are forbidden access - the exterior is modern and uninteresting alas.

The Egyptian Mosque - late 19th Century, pretty but closed. 

A shrine to a Muslim holy man.

The exquisitely lovely mosques of Constantinople make Islam seem very beautiful. Muslim piety is attractive and moving but here, though it is exotic to white travellers, Islam struck me as a utilitarian and man made creed. It is spiritual yet seems to lack a dimension. For some reason, on this journey Islam reminded me of Communism.

Sir Richard Burton was the first white man to enter Harar, where an ancient tradition said that the city would decline should a Christian ever set foot there. He and his companions risked death or a ghastly imprisonment by doing so. He described Harar as 

'the ancient metropolis of a once mighty race, the only permanent settlement in Eastern Africa, the reported seat of Muslim learning, a walled city of stone houses ... the emporium of the coffee trade, the head-quarters of slavery.'

Burton stayed with the Emir for ten days, officially as a guest but really his prisoner, and was soon bored. After leaving Harar, things became much less dull and he came close to dying of thirst. Englishmen are better and worse, but much smaller, than in his day. (I am also struck that people wrote better about Africa then than now, because they knew there was such a thing as the psychology of nations).


Burton gives an account of chewing quat - the mildly narcotic herb favoured by Muslims because their religion forbids drinking alcohol though Hailu told me the Muslims of Harar mostly disregard this rule and that forbidding sex before marriage. A beauty salon ('Beutiy salon) I partook in the coffee ceremony and rank the best coffee I ever tasted. A young man gave me much quat and i chewed manfully without any discernible effect. It tastes ghastly and gives some a stomach ache but did nothing to or for me.

In Burton's day and in mine, Harar had over eighty mosques but I only saw two and and wonder where the rest were.

It was only when I got to Harar that people told me that here Arthur Rimbaud spent his last years, as an arms dealer and respected pillar of the community. I didn't go to see the museum in his supposed house, since the books told me he never lived there and in fact it was built years after his death. General Gordon, when he was still Colonel Gordon, was also in Harar. Sylvia Pankurst's account of Gordon's time in Harar is here. 

Later, when Harar was a couple of hours by car from the nearest station, someone who means more to me than these great men, Evelyn Waugh, visited twice. In his day, before the Italians came, the old town built from mud was still the whole of Harar. Waugh's friend, Patrick Balfour, who was also there in 1935, wrote:

Here, for the first time in Abyssinia was a town, not a mere conglomeration of native hovels and European shacks. Here were streets: a bewildering network of them, high and narrow, but well-built and on a coherent plan.

Feeding hyenas at the edge of town at sunset is supposedly an old tradition to bring good luck to the city but this daily event dates back about fifty years. It felt thoroughly touristy, even though Harar has few tourists - there were six the evening I went, five of us in Hailu's party. I was very disdainful at the time (we tourists are the biggest snobs) but I was too superior. I realise now that it is the way two local eccentrics make a little money and keep a sort of tradition alive. Read more here.

Dinner with Hailu. He is a Christian who, oddly enough, was born in the Old Town. He has as many Muslim friends as Christian. There are no problems between the two communities in Harar he says. He takes his religion seriously, I presume, or at least is about to embark on one of the Ethiopian Church's severe fasts the next day. He tells me ten years ago Muslim girls were supposed to be chaste before marriage but no longer. 'Now we are living in the modern world.' Sir Richard Burton would have approved.

Dervla says the Ethiopians drink a lot and I saw a girl drunk in the street at ten in the morning in predominantly Muslim Harar. The place is full of bars where people are drinking beer and Ramadan seems ignored.

Hailu seems to like Mengistu, who was born in Harar. This is no excuse as so was Haile Selassie.

. 
I am horrified to see across the road a billboard proclaiming a hotel called ' 5 Star Hotel.' I hoped this was a wooden lie but Hailu tells me it is true. Who will stay there? 'UN people.' 

August  7

Country and Western playing  in the internet cafe at my hotel. Globalisation is bloody.

Walk with Hailu round the old town and we see the Egyptian mosque and buy some coffee in the market and fail to buy me a  t shirt – I am fatter than the fattest people in Harar perhaps I should have bought an I Love Ethiopia one but I couldn’t bring myself to.

From Harar to Addis – heavenly ride seated thanks to Hailu in the front of the minibus and as comfortable as if I had my own driver – heavenly scenery- villages – life. I am seeing life but I never take part. The best part of my holiday so far. Cost, 100 birr = EUR 4.

At the airport I am told the plane to Addis has been cancelled and I must wait till tomorrow but after some discussion it appears that the departure of my plane has been brought forward two hours and is on the point of leaving. 'You were not informed?' 'No!' I am given a seat in business class and arrive in Addis early where it is cool and raining and I am safe in the hotel. 

I consider luxury hotels immoral and deeply corrupt and usually avoid them but I seem to need things done for me much more than most people and I think I need good hotels more than most people. I am getting far more than my money's worth from the Hotel Jupiter Cazanchis in Addis. It has become a surrogate mother to whose teat I cling.

My bedroom is on the first floor and overlooks the front of the hotel. Slightly to the left is scrubland, in which stand tiny houses made of corrugated iron, beside a large heap of broken tiles. Two boys in front of one of the shacks are cleaning a pair of jeans with a bar of soap.

A diary of a journey to Syria and Beirut in April 2007

Friday, March 30, 2007


I am off to Istanbul this afternoon by night train en route to Damascus which according to the BBC is 'on the tourist map.' Damn. My life's mission is to separate myself from tourists and other normal people.  

The train left Bucharest's Gara de Nord at 12.30 in the afternoon, took over an hour to reach the Bulgarian border and more than two to cross it. The Turkish border involved waiting in several queues in the station at 2 am in the rain. A nice self-possessed girl going to Jerusalem overland and going up to Oxford to read Arabic. A literal and draining French-Canadian boy who kept asking for information of a lowering kind about the countries we were passing through. How despicable travellers are.



Saturday, March 31


Awoke to grey uneventful Turkish countryside. 16½ years after my last visit by train. The Golden Horn was hidden by a stationary train when we arrived at the station and it was gently drizzling.




Paulius’s flat with a splendid view but a cold grey day. A vulgar-looking 8-storey cruise ship in the centre of his view, The Free Carnival.



Walking. Market. Touristy hamam, its hot room not hot enough, too many people like a field hospital after a disastrous battle.



Dinner. Diet forgotten. A carouse


Tuesday 3 April


Antioch.


The cave where St. Peter preached as written in Acts. Pope Paul VI was there and I have a plenary indulgence for going there. Met Chuck and his girl, Americans living in Damascus, studying at the American University there which flourishes despite the State Departments long-standing advice to US citizens that Syria is dangerous. (It is not at all.)


A very hurried look at some marvellous mosaics in the town museum and then I missed my bus again.


I was put on a Damascus bus and after an hour standing in a queue on the Turkish frontier post and a melee on the Syrian side I was deposited at the side of the road. A few moments later some big dusky men in suits appeared from nowhere. ‘Damascus?’ I asked and they agreed this was the place. In a short while a dolmuş arrived and we all got in. I gave my 50 pound note = $1 and was given change. Such fun squeezed in.


Aleppo indescribable, ancient, down-at-heel, Ottoman, filled with women in veils and men wearing skirts and tea-towels on their heads, the real thing, the Orient at last. What I had hoped Turkey would be but what it is not. The life that was once in Greece and in Bucharest. Dusty, noisy, much traffic (old cheap cars). Asking the way to the Hotel Baron which I knew was full and finally I made it to the most charming old hotel and there I found a room from the manager (he had one of those beautiful fruity Syrian-British voices like Farouk’s). No $40 rooms left and he gave me the presidential suite for $70 where I later learnt President Assad snr had stayed in 1970. Laurence or even Agatha Christie would have impressed me more.





Heavenly dirty decrepit traffic-choked. The Ottoman Empire which at Safronbolu is a museum here exists as it really was. The life that once spread beyond Bucharest to the Carpathians and Belgrade. Here travel is an adventure. The old town genuine and not touristy where the town does its shopping sans supermarket. There are still wonderful adventures left.




Wonderful meal at wonderful restaurant. Arab ladies sitting next to me. I prevented myself disliking the lower-middle class English couple who then sat at the other table.



Wednesday 4 April


Mr Walid who has been leading tours for 40 years. The manager who is charming and warns me to knock him down by at least 30%.


The hotel is so shabby my suite rather wonderful but very down-at-heel and this is a renovated room.


Very basic breakfast in dingy room where I am very happy. So 1930s and colonial.


My guide M. takes me on a very interesting tour of caravanserais and mosques. He is an archaeologist and learned. Lunch in a good restaurant. An afternoon alone wandering.


M. who married at 18 and has 3 children brought his 44 year-old German girlfriend with him tonight and one year younger than me she looked like a grandmother which she is old enough to be.


Whirling dervishes in the evening. A guide book I borrowed said these performances were very rare but now they are very frequent and only for tourists. As well as the religious whirling we saw some other dances and I felt this had lost its innocence. An audience of Germans in their 50s watched, dressed as people in their 50s dress nowadays, i.e. like overgrown children.




Dinner. M. says the young Assad is much more liberal than his father and is respected although his appointment was not fair. ‘We are a republic not a monarchy.’ Other people in the party have their power-bases and ‘There is a red line he may not cross.’ M said ‘we killed’ his elder and nastier brother.




Thursday 5 April


Sick badly from eating that damnable raw lamb M. ordered. It tasted horrible too.


Recovered enough in the afternoon to walk slowly around the Christian quarter in the drizzling rain. The Syrian Orthodox church. The Armenians. The Marionites. Lots of boy scouts and girl guides and many people at Mass on Maundy Thursday afternoon. Christians after Mass seemed very European.


Beautiful veiled girls taking off their veils to look at clothes in a shop window. So feminine these Moslem girls and very pretty.


M’s woman is also sick. No dinner. I stumbled to a hamam in the medina.


A little mosque where a mother fully veiled bounced up and down in prayer and her son beside her. I wish England were as religious but I do not want this in England.






Friday 6 April 

Serjilla Crak le Chevalier. Palmyra.


Serjilla with M. , a ‘dead’ Byzantine city. Hama with its water-wheels which lift the water from one level to another and are very old. Artesian wells with donkeys which we learnt about in geography no longer exist anywhere in the world, M. told me but I later discovered that Syria still has them. He told me up to 60, 000 Muslim Brothers were killed there in 1982. I expect the real figure is much smaller and I am glad they were suppressed though not like that. The city was ruined by the fighting.






He sleeps with his clients but not with ‘dirty girls.’ But Russian dirty girls are available. What if his wife had a boyfriend?’ ‘She wouldn’t she comes from a conservative family.’ But men in those situations kill their wives and get off with 1 month. ‘Because the judge is a man and the police are men.’ Anyway it was different. If she found out she would cry for two weeks. He added ‘This isn’t from Muhammad.’


Crack de Chevalier is the most thrilling castle and vast. Perhaps the most romantic and exciting building I ever saw. Later I learnt Laurence paid over 40 visits. Our driver had been in Bucharest in the 80s and remembered the ‘madams’ with great fondness. He was very shocked as were all the Arabs I met that that I didn’t have one nor children. Luckily he couldn’t speak English.


The ruins. Wonderful. I managed one hour without thinking of myself as a test.




Some Irish boys of 40 who remembered how expensive long-haul travel was in 1989 and who stayed at the Sham Palace. Where do ‘ordinary people’ get so much money? I mourned the Ottoman Empire and national self-determination. ‘’That’s because you always had national self-determination.’ Indeed. A good point. Then we agreed that both countries were losing this in the face of immigration.


They said Petra in 2003 was without any tourists and were disappointed that they had returned.


My hotel was worth $4 not the €20 M had bargained for. My bed had fleas, a first for me, so I went elsewhere for a bed which I bargained down to $10 but was worth less. But clean. Felt proud of myself for making a scene.


Saturday 7 April Palmyra Damascus


I woke at 6 to see Palmyra but dawn had already come and it was raining so I returned to bed.


The French engineer who had brought his wife and children there from Beirut told me there was no hope in Beirut. 30 days of war with Israel destroyed hope more than 15 years of civil war.


I remember a postponed train, an Englishwoman woman waiting on the railway platform complaining about Cairo to Mum and Dad in 1972 and their horror at the discomforts she described and my wanting to go there. From here comes my dislike of Thatcherism. Now I am becoming right-wing but still dislike conventionality.


By 10 when I got there so had the coach parties. Always get a guide in future. My guide didn’t show me the underground tombs which I later was told were essential. Marvellous and beautiful and I tried to tell myself that other tourists didn’t matter. And they weren’t so very many really but it was Easter and Syria had a holiday for Easter. I am a lazy tourist perhaps because I am alone.


A bus to Damascus cost 120. Not bad. An Indian film in the coach then a British thriller with police with machine guns and black gangsters and shootouts in inner-city dereliction. No doubt somewhere behind it all and the four-letter words that I could just hear there was a Richard Hannay plot but this is London? And this is globalisation and will destroy traditional Muslim culture for which I am sorry. My sympathies go out to the fundamentalists.


Damascus, city of the world’s desire. No, that’s Constantinople. Dinner in the garden at the dingy Journalists’ Club where we could get a drink with Chuck and Kirsten and a leftish Yale graduate who told me global warning would lead to mosquitoes spreading disease around the world something of which I had heard nothing. He and I almost quarrelled about the British Empire. I said ‘we’ abolished suttee. ‘ “We”?’ he said with contempt. A dreary place but nice food and no tourists. They had to go off. I went to look for Mass in the Christian quarter and then back to bed in my horrible cold room.


Easter Sunday 8 April


Woke early and found a Catholic Mass and regretted the absence of Latin as I always do. Nineteenth-century church airy and white. Christian girls in tight trousers. But two or three in mantillas. Expensive-cheap look, lots of lipstick. Graham Greene.


Got better room with much haggling. Mediocre lunch in Christian quarter. The Old Town. S Ananaias’s house. Mutually schismatic churches.


Art deco grimy houses a bit like Bucharest. Far far fewer veils than in Aleppo.


The taxi-driver told me I was ‘gentil’ and meant it and I was flattered. I want to be liked.


Buffet alone and very good indeed in the Cham (pronounced sham) Palace although the Irish boys were not happy staying there. 'The Cham is a sham.'


Easter Monday, April 9 2007


i admire the Muslim world and am also appalled by it. The strange thing is that I find myself saddened that they are bound to lose their struggle against Paris Hilton consumerist inanity. But I don’t want this world of theirs transplanted into Yorkshire. But I am 50 years too late on that one. I was disappointed that the Christians here seem very Western and to have embraced modernity but am having dinner tonight with one and shall learn more. The girls beautiful but in Aleppo mostly veiled often fully.

Muslims are consumerist but they manage to do without our relentlessly triviality..

I could live happily in Syria had I not settled in Romania. Not much market for headhunters though.

Why do American voices in the internet cafe so grate?


Do they represent the modern world made banal flesh?


It is for Christians to confront modernity, not to succumb to it. Pop culture and MTV are threats to us as to Muslims. Is this true? Anyway, this is Senex talking.



Walid. I can now read character and liked him better than my other two guides. But we did Damascus very quickly between 11 and 3.30 including time in the museum. Usually his guides linger longer in the palace he shows them. He was shocked my man in Palmyra didn't shows me the underground tombs. He showed me a magnificent one in the museum. And a marvellous synagogue from the 2nd century with wonderful murals of Moses






The mosque. A religious edifice first for Baal. Like the one in Palmyra






The street called straight which I already knew.






I said some prayers to St. Paul.






A sudden realisation. Islamic militancy will not provoke a Christian backlash but strengthen secularism. Just as AIDS didn't create a backlash.






The shops in the souk. This town is very different from Aleppo and much more western. I read that since they were allowed to use the internet a few years ago after Assad snr died a new world opened for young people. But in Aleppo the internet runs very slowly in the very few internet cafes which are poorly patronised.






Monday night. Daoud in Elissar a charming man who turns out to be Nawaf’s brother-in-law. Agrees that Syrian Christians resemble Greeks. His best friend is a Muslim who doesn't drink. Syrian girls much better characters than Romanians who are false and materialistic. Syria is like Romania 10 years ago.






Tuesday Beirut






Woke at 7 and was tired all day. Decided to move hotels. Wanted a bed with springs and a bath with a plug.






A driver greeted me as I entered the station with 'Beirut?' and I was sitting in the front seat of a big taxi between the driver and a Lebanese Christian lady who'd been visiting her dead sister's children and was glad to be returning home. An imam in flowing robes his wife and children beside me.






The mountains. Mt. Lebanon. 2 and half hours for $5. The lady said it should have been $4.






The Beirut Central District, sealed off by soldiers, rebuilt, eerie, devoted to tourists but there were almost none. Sad.






A club sandwich en plein air. The orthodox cathedral and a mosque. All felt brand new although the marvellous iconostasis wasn't.






A non-place.






Soldiers bearing guns everywhere. And tent cities, I suppose with refugees from the south.






The National Museum is simply marvellous. Extraordinary roman funerary monuments. Mosaics.




The pigeon rocks. The Mediterranean. A man with blood streaming from his face standing on the edge talking to police. I wondered if it was blood or ink. It looked very bright. Of course it was blood. People stood around on the esplanade and one awful man was laughing, thinking that was the appropriate response.






A Starbucks overlooking the Med, an awful cup of ‘coffee of the week’ handed to me with several requests to enjoy it and the day






For some reason I was reminded of the dullness of an English seaside resort from my 70s childhood. But very much bigger and completely western. The girls pretty and very chic and North London. The whole place felt like North London by the sea. St John’s Wood perhaps, mixed with Bournemouth.






At last a lively street full of shops. A woman in a bookshop told me Beirutis were ‘fed up.’ She looked fed up. I tactlessly said the downtown seemed like a tomb. ‘Poor downtown.’






I felt at 6 a desire to be 'home' and found another shared taxi again without trouble in the sinister bus stn/taxi rank. A charming newly married girl in a veil with a sweet smile and a speech impediment.




Wednesday






The old town. Following 'Monuments of Syria’ by Ross Burns whose scholarly prose belied the fact that the author is an Australian although I tried to imagine the burr. A very good lunch at Elissar, a famous old restaurant in the Christian quarter. I put myself in mind of Jerome's father in A Shocking Accident though I wasn't wearing an unsuitable dark suit but my olive jacket with a crème handkerchief in the pocket






Dinner in the evening was in a back street near my hotel which I found was a little bit of old Damascus not demolished, $1 for something tasty and far too large made of chick peas and sauce. Trees, dusty little street.






Thursday April 12










This morning I felt a sudden whim to stay a bit longer though I had been regretting being here too long. Like a parent letting go of a child I told myself to follow my instinct and my instinct said stay another day or two and for a second time I changed my ticket for free.






Wandered. A Turkish bath. My 3rd and all very different. The 1st in Istanbul touristy hurried and not very hot. the one in Aleppo where the old man took 15 minutes to get the steam to come out of the pipe. This one excellent but the hot room was scalding hot and most of us couldn't bear to enter. A massage which I was glad was brief.






A wonderful khan nearby, black and white tiles.






Cow’s head with lemon between the teeth






Food handled with bare hands everywhere like in 50s England.






This is how the Balkans was.





Everyone is shocked here that I have no wife no girlfriend and no children. Ahead of me stretches my path to the grave alone I suppose.






I felt very foolish to live without a woman as I waited for Rami. He and his lovely girlfriend took me to the pub at the Sheraton which R perceives as an oasis of Westernness. I'd have preferred anywhere else but there we are. Mostly Arabs. The movers and shakers I suppose come here. Syria is infinitely more corrupt than Romania. Emails and letters get opened. They reckon Tunisia and Syria are the two important markets that Europe wants. I doubt this. Places of immense poverty in the old town. ‘You’d be surprised’ The girl was so charming and talkative and totally western it seemed. She comes from Aleppo where everyone knows everything about everyone but here in Damascus she is free.



Friday April 13


Hassan Tom's guide took me to a modern Orthodox monastery and to Maalula one of the 4 villages in the world where they speak sometimes Aramaic. I heard a sweet young Catholic girl called Mary (thus, NOT Miriam) recite the Pater Noster in Aramaic and felt very happy to be among my own people and my own sweet religion. I want to read Lane Fox. At last I find the Syrians, mentioned in the Pears Cyclopedia section on heresies. Nestorians, Jacobites etc






A book title I know well from my adolescence in second-hand bookshops nagged at me: A Journey to the Monasteries of the Levant. Wonderful, inviting title. (My anti-Catholic cousin Geraldine to whom I mentiojned this, to my astonishment, obviously thought the title repellent.)






Hussein makes a good case for the anti-Israeli a position. I suspect this is becoming the right-on cause like South Africa was in the 80s and once Tsarist Russia. Syrians respect suicide bombers. Assad snr was never as bad as Saddam. 'Please don’t misunderstand what I am going to say. Saddam was a very, very bad man. But, I don’t like to say this,the Iraqis need a leader like Saddam.' This could well be right to a degree. Alas. alas.






Hussein has children and quoted Mahomet: marriage is half of religion. ‘I agree with him on that’ I said and then wondered if this remark would offend him. Why don’t I believe in the Christian view of marriage, that marriage is about children and that a family should be perhaps as Joanna said ‘a church’?






There are 4 million Iraqi refugees here and many more come each day. Did he say 3,000 a day? Driving up prices which hits the poor who can't afford meat at the best of times






I think that the orthodox in not resisting dictators like Ceausescu have more in common with early Christians than the Catholic Church with its political pronouncements. I think that a religion that commands stoning is vile and the old idea of an eye for an eye. But why does the Old Testament do so if it is indeed inspired? And Our Lord said he came to fulfil the law. Can someone please explain?



I feel my limbs stiffen. Every Syrian assumes there is ‘a she’ in my life. Admittedly they just want to sell me jewellery but they have a point.



I saw something in one of the churches. Wish I could remember it. In English. Do not care for praise. Do not judge other people. 


Judging and stigmatising is sometimes necessary but it is exactly about substituting political ideas which are about violence for the power of love.


Saturday, 14 April 2007

In a bookshop in Istanbul airport I found two books for foreigners living in Turkey. The introduction to one said the writer had been one of few foreigners in 1998 when she came but after 2002 very large numbers came. Thus will it be in Romania. The world has changed forever.