Selected articles
Review of “A Line in the Sand: Britain, France and the Struggle that Shaped The Middle East”, by James Barr
Baalbek, in Lebanon’s Bekaa Valley, is the most magnificent temple in the entire Middle East, one of the seven wonders of the ancient world.
“Syria - A Historical and Architectural Guide” by Warwick Ball
... though he has sunk his own share of shard-hunting trenches through the alluvial mud of Afghanistan and Mesopotamia, he has studied Syria with the broad-ranging lens of an art historian.
“Damascus: Hidden Treasures of the Old City” by Brigid Keenan
Her subject is not public architecture, the five M's of a Muslim city - mosques, mausolea, markets, medrasa and military-monuments - but the closely guarded domestic space.
“The Pashas: traders and travellers in the Islamic World” by James Mather
There was much patriotic talk of exporting English broad-clothe to the Levant, but in reality the trade was also underwritten by breaking the arms embargo of Christendom with the Turks
Busra and Bostra, Syria
Bahira took Abu Talib aside and told him to keep a special watch over Muhammad, “for if others see and get to know about him what I know, they will do him evil for a great future lies before this nephew of yours.”
The Lure of the Silk Road
I knelt by the emperor’s grave-slab and touched it. Beneath, wrapped in linen embalmed in camphor and musk, his shrunken body had been laid in an ebony coffin. I could not imagine it. The living man was too vivid in my mind.
Colin Thubron’s The Lost Heart of Asia
Medieval Damascus
In the cosmopolitan court of Ommayad Damascus, scholar officials drawn from the old ruling classes of Byzantium and Sassanid Persia, from Yemen and Egypt mingled with singing girls, desert bards and nomad huntsmen drawn from out of the old tribal courts of Arabia.
Review - “Syrian Episodes: Sons, Fathers, and an Anthropologist in Aleppo”, by John Borneman
For the respect so freely given to fathers and grandfathers is part of a pattern of obedience which extends to other patriarchal authority figures - to the rulers of the house, be they socialist Presidents, hereditary Kings, scholarly Sheikhs or coup-leading Colonels.
Review - “Cleopatra’s Wedding Present; Travels through Syria” by Robert Tewdwr Moss
These various transformations and ambitions are so honestly drawn, so fiercely fought-for and imagined that the reader is at once drawn entranced in his wake.
Ruins of the shrine to Saint Simeon
… the intensity of his discipline alarmed the community – which was constantly on its guard lest madness, exhibitionism or self-serving masochism undermined a hermit in his spiritual search.