To browse Academia. The paper focuses via empirical fieldwork in Berlin and Damascus on the notion of 'Damascus' and how it transforms as images, media and bodies are on the move.
Before I left my country of residence, Germany, to visit Syria, I discussed my plans with many different people: close friends, colleagues as well as acquaintances. In all of these discussions there was a polarity between the positive connotations that the city of 'Damascus' evoked and the negative connotations fortified by the US government's definition of Syria as a "rogue state" in their war against terrorism.
Asking my counterparts' opinions about my field trip, their remarks were regularly two-edged: images of coffeehouses where you could smoke an arghila, a water pipe, and drink Turkish coffee, play chess or backgammon were mixed with notions of the deceptive Muslim who would take you on a trip into the hinterland and hold you there until one of the many countries involved in the occupation of Iraq called their young soldiers back to their respective homelands.
Wonderful spices, seducing the traveller into otherworldly states of mind, become a gateway to militant sectarian offshoots of Islam. Fear and desire, the antipodes that structure the greater part of European attitudes towards something considered a real 'other,' generated a strange array of pleas, beginning with several requests to receive written letters from this otherworldly place of yesteryear, and ending in insecurities that resulted in tears, as if I were going to a war zone and might never come back.
Much of what European's 'know' about Syria is drawn from The Tales of Nights, which portray, among others, the fifth Abbasid caliph Harun al-Rashid, who reigned in Baghdad, Sindbad and Aladdin, along with Scheherazade as the story-teller, or Rafik Schami's tales of Salim the coachman, the poems by the Persian Omar Khayyam, stories of fictitious Persian characters like Hajji Baba, or romanticised figures like Salahuddin.
