Teaching Arabs, Writing Self by Evelyn Shakir

Author:Evelyn Shakir [Shakir, Evelyn]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781566569248
Publisher: Interlink Publishing

Evelyn with her students in Damascus

A Fullbright in Damascus

NEIGHBORHOOD

I loved the sound of it, loved to give it out as my address. Shari’ Nuri Basha, the street (shari’) on which I lived for four months. Long enough to feel at home. A plaque at one end identified the honorable Basha as the Turkish governor of Damascus in the last years of the Ottoman era. Even when the empire fell and the French moved in, the street name held.

Except that there is more to the story. Sometime in the 1940s, Syrian officials re-named the narrow lane in honor of the British emissary Sir Edward Spears, a latter-day Lawrence of Arabia, who had argued strenuously for Syrian independence. The tribute was short lived. Within a decade, maybe two, Shari’ Spears was no more, Nuri Basha had reclaimed his ancient place. My guess is there came a moment, after Suez or leading up to it, when Damascenes were in no mood to think kindly of any Englishman.

It was not a long street, my Nuri Basha. I could walk it in under 10 minutes, from the busy commercial intersection, known as Jisr el-Abyad (the White Bridge), up to the far end that stopped just short of the American Language school and, below that “the Tent of the Nation,” a popular site of rallies against America’s Middle East policies. At either end of the street, not on Nuri Basha itself but set close to it, was a mosque. The one at Jisr el-Abyad was the landmark I looked for when watching from the microbus for my stop, the taller, prettier one I called “my” mosque because I passed it so often as I went about my day and was caught up more than once in the stream of worshippers converging on it at noon or before dusk.

Summoned by the muezzin, they hurried from every direction, sober-faced men and boys. One faith, one purpose. Though a woman and a non-believer, I was comforted by their company as they caught up with me and passed me, but I was also wistful. No comparable community to embrace me, I mused; no comparable rituals to sustain me. During Ramadan, when the mosque could not hold all the worshippers, the last to arrive lined up in the yard: tiers of men, now standing erect, now bowing toward Mecca, now kneeling with foreheads and palms to the ground. I slowed my pace as I passed, but I knew enough not to pull out my camera. On the sidewalk, an old man sat cross-legged on a kitchen chair he’d set under a tree. He was polishing shoes the men had slipped off at the gate, lining them up neatly on a stone wall when he was done. It had the feel of piety. Though it was business, of course, and location was everything.

From mosque to mosque, the shari’, lined with apartment buildings, ran through a middle-class neighborhood, which was ­respectable certainly but not chic as it had been in General Spears’s day.

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