Syria, the Desert & the Sown

by Gertrude Lowthian Bell

THE TEKYAH KILLĀNIYYEH, ḤAMĀH

Nor, said Kbēs, have such summary methods of injustice ceased. Quite recently a quantity of onions were stolen from a shop belonging to 'Abd ul Ḳādir el 'Aẓam in the quarter immediately below my camp. The servants of 'Abd ul Ḳādir came to the house of the sheikh of the quarter and demanded from him their master's property, and since he knew nothing of the matter and could not indicate who the thief might have been, they seized him and his son, wounding the son in the hand with a bullet, dragged them to the river bank, stripped them, beat them almost to death, and left them to get home as best they might. The incident was known all over Hamāh, but the government took no steps to punish 'Abd ul Ḳādir. I went to the house of Khālid Beg 'Aẓam, which is the most beautiful in the city, as beautiful as the famous 'Aẓam house in Damascus. Khālid took me into rooms every inch of which was covered with an endless variety of Persian patterns in gesso duro and woodwork and mosaic. They opened upon a courtyard set round with an arcade of the best Arab workmanship, with a fountain in the centre and pots of flowering ranunculus and narcissus in the corners. The women of the house of 'Aẓam have even a greater reputation than the sumptuous walls that hold them; they are said to be the loveliest women in all Ḥamāh.

The Killāni I visited also in their charming house by the Orontes, the Tekyah Killāniyyeh. It contains a mausoleum, where three of their ancestors are buried, and rooms looking over the river, filled with the pleasant grumbling of a Persian wheel. From thence I went to the Muteserrif, who is an old man bent almost double, and acquainted with no tongue but Turkish. I was considerably relieved to find that he bore no malice for my unruly conduct in the matter of the guard. As we walked home to lunch we met an aged Afghan clad in white. Dervish Effendi was his name. He stopped the station-master to inquire who I was, and having learnt that I was English he approached me with a grin and a salute and said in Persian, "The English and the Afghans are close friends." He was in fact as well-informed as the British public—possibly better informed—of the interchange of visits and civilities between Kabul and Calcutta; and the moral of the episode (which developed into a long and tiresome, but most cordial, visit from Dervish Effendi) is that the report of what happens in the remotest corner of Asia is known almost immediately to the furthest end, and that it is scarcely an exaggeration to say that if an English regiment is cut up on the borders of Afghanistan the English tourist will be mocked at in the streets of Damascus. Islām is the bond that unites the western and central parts of the continent, as it is the electric current by which the transmission of sentiment is effected, and its potency is increased by the fact that there is little or no sense of territorial nationality to counterbalance it. A Turk or a Persian does not think or speak of "my country" in the way that an Englishman or a Frenchman thinks and speaks; his patriotism is confined to the town of which he is a native, or at most to the district in which that town lies. If you ask him to what nationality he belongs he will reply: "I am a man of Isfahān," or "I am a man of Konia," as the case may be, just as the Syrian will reply that he is a native of Damascus or Aleppo—I have already indicated that Syria is merely a geographical term corresponding to no national sentiment in the breasts of the inhabitants. Thus to one listening to the talk of the bazaars, to the shopkeepers whose trade is intimately connected with local conditions in districts very far removed from their own counters, to the muleteers who carry so much more than their loads from city to city, all Asia seems to be linked together by fine chains of relationship, and every detail of the foreign policies of Europe, from China to where you please, to be weighed more or less accurately in the balance of public opinion. It is not the part of wanderers and hearers of gossip to draw conclusions. We can do no more than report, for any that may care to listen, what falls from the lips of those who sit round our camp fires, and who ride with us across deserts and mountains, for their words are like straws on the flood of Asiatic politics, showing which way the stream is running. Personal experience has acquainted them with the stock in trade and the vocabulary of statecraft. They are familiar with war and negotiation and compromise, and with long nurtured and carefully concealed revenge. Whether they are discussing the results of a blood feud or the consequences of an international jealousy their appreciations are often just and their guesses near the mark.

CAPITAL IN THE MOSQUE, ḤAMĀH

For the moment, so far as my experience goes, the name of the English carries more weight than it has done for some time past. I noticed a very distinct difference between the general attitude towards us from that which I had observed with pain five years before, during the worst moments of the Boer War. The change of feeling is due, so far as I can judge from the conversations to which I listened, not so much to our victory in South Africa as to Lord Cromer's brilliant administration in Egypt, Lord Curzon's policy on the Persian Gulf, and the alliance with the conquering Japanese.