Alabaster sarcophagus of Hafez being stroked in reverence
Far from being a homogenous grouping of devout Muslims, as the last 47 years of rule by the Islamic Republic would have us believe, Iran’s population of 93 million is a diverse multi-ethnic people. ‘We never did Islam the way they wanted us to,’ was the clear refrain I met from Iranians during my last tour of Iran. The empty mosques bore witness, serving largely as places for men to take a nap on the carpet during their lunch break. This was in September 2014, shortly after the UK and Iran announced their intention to resume diplomatic relations, broken off in 2011 following the storming of the British Embassy in Tehran by protesters chanting ‘Death to England.’ Decades of colonial interference in Iranian affairs, including the 1953 coup to install the Shah as absolute ruler (codenamed Operation Boot) to protect Britain’s oil interests, have left little love lost between the UK and Iran.
Today’s Iranian government officially registers all citizens born to Muslim parents as Muslim, an act which effectively masks the true personal beliefs of the younger generation. It does not, however, officially collect detailed ethnic data in its census, so figures are of necessity estimates, but the World Population Review 2026 gives a 51-61% core of Persians, 16-24% Azerbaijanis, 7-10% Kurds, 8% Gilaks and Mazandaranis, 2-6% Lurs, 2-3% Arabs, 2% Baluch and 2% Turkmen and other Turkic groups.
What these diverse multi-ethnic groups do, however, share, is a strong cultural identity. The joke runs that in every Iranian home there are two books, Hafez and the Qur’an. One is read and the other unread.
Hafez, the fourteenth century national poet, represents the rich complexities of Iran’s identity. His tomb in Shiraz, Iran’s most liberal city, is a place of pilgrimage day and night, with crowds of devotees stroking his alabaster sarcophagus. His poetry, besides lauding the joys of love and wine, also targets religious hypocrisy. “Preachers who display their piety in prayers and pulpit”, he wrote 600 years ago, “behave differently when they are alone. Why do those who decree repentance do so little of it?”
While the West remains obsessed with Iran’s nuclear enrichment, it is an open secret that well-connected clerics and businessmen enrich themselves through sanction busting. When I lacked the cash in Isfahan to buy a rug, the dealer simply rang a friend in Dubai and processed the supposedly banned credit card transaction. It duly appeared on my statement as a purchase made in Dubai.
Despite the mullahs’ best endeavours – or maybe because of them – there have been fundamental changes in Iranian society since the revolution in 1979. More women than men now graduate from university, leading to a well-educated female population that is refusing to breed, despite government incentives: ironically, a consequence of the mullahs’ own policy of spreading education.
Though the minorities are usually blended in the cities, many are concentrated in the border regions: the Kurds in the northwest, the Beluch in the southeast, the Turkmen in the northeast and the Arabs in the oil-rich southwest. If the central authority of the IRGC were to collapse, it could trigger a significant splintering in peripheral regions where historical grievances and armed movements are most deeply embedded. The Kurds in particular are the most potent ethnic opposition, and have a history of revolution against the Iranian regime, but also of disunity, frequently descending into infighting. The best organized are the PKK, Turkey’s nemesis, whom President Erdogan would be furious to see armed by the US, as Trump has hinted.
Given the lack of unified opposition to the IRGC, a power vacuum could see chaos, civil war and a resurgence of movements seeking independence. Deep divisions exist between the Persia-centric opposition royalists who would welcome the return of the Shah’s son, Reza Pahlavi, and the ethnic minorities.
Recent independent surveys have found that Iranians are increasingly embracing their pre-Islamic heritage as another way of expressing anti-regime sentiment. There is immense pride in the unique Persian identity of their ancient Zoroastrian religion, almost as a kind of cultural nationalism. With origins to much earlier than 600BC, when Cyrus the Great adopted it as the state faith, it is one of the world’s first monotheistic religions, introducing the idea of a single supreme deity, Ahura Mazda, often represented as an eagle- winged disc with a human figure emerging from the centre. Scholars believe Zoroastrianism profoundly shaped the foundations of Judaism, Christianity and Islam, specifically its belief in the dualism of the eternal struggle between good and evil, the Final Judgement, angels and demons, the resurrection of the dead, and heaven and hell.
In 1979 the mullahs did a deal, allowing Zoroastrians one seat in Parliament if they did not oppose the regime. The fire temple in Yazd, spiritual heart of Zoroastrianism, has burned for over 1500 years, and the faith today is said to be experiencing a resurgence especially among young Iranians, among whom there is a marked trend away from traditional religious practice.
[Some elements of this article first appeared in a feature entitled ‘The ghosts of Iran’ published in The Tablet magazine, 12 March 2026, co-authored with John McHugo.]
Tonight Donald Trump announced he will order the lifting of sanctions on Syria ‘to give them a chance at greatness’. It is a momentous declaration of confidence in the new man at the top, a man widely dismissed in the West as a religious militant, a jihadi extremist.
I am writing this post tonight because I profoundly disagree with the profiles put forward in recent months of Ahmad al-Sharaa, formerly Abu Muhammad al-Jolani, by The Economist, the Financial Times and The New York Times. They are all obsessed with his past, with his changes of direction and allegiance, with what they call his ‘chameleon’ nature. They are also convinced that he is driven by a lust for power, calling him ‘the great pretender.’
In my view, they are wrong. They misjudge and misunderstand the man, basing their analyses on the factual details they have been able to glean from various sources about al-Sharaa’s previous history and his background. They do not understand how his brain works, with some even confessing that they are puzzled by how he has managed to persuade other people to follow his directives and gain a following.
Here, I should reveal that I have an extra tool at my disposal – namely, a professional qualification in graphology earned over twenty years ago which enables me to analyse his handwriting and to see into his mind, to understand his motivations and his priorities. Handwriting is brainwriting and cannot lie. Through its subconscious elements like spacing, flow, direction, continuity, pressure and speed, it reveals the secrets of a person’s makeup, their character, their drive, their moral integrity, their strengths and weaknesses. These are elements that apply irrespective of the language or the script. I was trained on English and French handwriting, a two-year course of study with French external examiners in written and oral papers, but the same principles apply in Arabic, or indeed in any other language. Obviously when talking about a script direction being progressive, in English progressive is left to right, while in Arabic it is right to left. For regressive it is the other way round – in Arabic left to right, in English right to left.
Let us look at the case of Ahmad al-Sharaa. I first saw his handwriting when it appeared online at the end of the 10 March 2025 agreement signed between him and Mazloum Abdi, commander of the SDF, the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces. The contrast between the two men’s handwriting and above all their signatures was striking.
Looking at Mazloum Abdi, his signature is not progressive, but doubles back over itself, unsure of its direction, hesitant, and ends in an unnecessary and cautious dot. Bashar al-Assad, incidentally, had a cautious, self-cancelling signature that tried to big itself up in energy-wasting flourishes that lacked direction. Some years ago I wrote a comparative analysis of Assad father and son, concluding that while Bashar might have been the face of the Assad regime, he was certainly not its backbone.
Ahmad al-Sharaa on the other hand has the most remarkable signature I have ever seen, in English or in Arabic. The sheer ingenuity and agility in the way it is formed is astonishing. It begins in the top right corner with the four Arabic letters of Ahmad – alif, Ha, mim and dal, before moving back towards the right and seamlessly becoming the letters of Ahmad in English – A, h, m, a, d. The free-flowing movement at the end of the Arabic ‘dal’ cleverly doubles as the ‘A’ of the English Ahmad. The signature then reverts to the Arabic ‘al-‘ of the start of his family name, before ending in a final progressive flourish where the letters of Sharaa are not legible. There are four changes of direction, and the pen never leaves the paper. It is all one smooth stroke, carried out at speed. The movements throughout are highly progressive, never regressive. This is a man who only moves forwards, never backwards, and who is always open to all manner of solutions, approached from a variety of angles. He thinks outside the box and shows great adaptability and flexibility, whilst remaining true to his own vision. He is not driven by greed for power or money, but rather by a genuine belief that he has the ability to bring Syria forward into a new and progressive future. He is not dogmatic, stubborn or difficult.
His writing illustrates clearly the complex journey he has been on in his life to arrive at where he is now. His many changes of direction have been integral and necessary parts of his life. A signature of this complexity has taken many years to evolve, and certainly did not suddenly appear on 8 December 2024 with the fall of Assad. It is not just pragmatism, as western analysts like to describe it. It is far more than that. It is his ability to adapt quickly to changing situations and to move progressively with the flow of events as they unfold. This is a skill that requires deep intelligence, thoughtfulness and good judgement combined, all exercised simultaneously and at pace. On top of that there is also an element of playfulness and humour, making him likeable and popular. The New Syria would be hard pushed to find a better man to navigate the challenging road that lies ahead.
Anyone familiar with Islamic art will long have known how heavily William Morris drew his inspiration from the Islamic world. One glance at his patterns is enough – the repetition to infinity, the twisting foliage, the richly entangled fruit and birdlife, the stylised designs that are often botanically impossible yet speak to us at some deep primordial level – all are hallmarks of Islamic art. Curiously, ever since his patterns were popularised, appearing in every imaginable accessory in our kitchens and living rooms, from curtains to coasters, from tablecloths to mousemats, those same iconic Morris designs have been subsumed as ‘quintessentially English’, somehow deemed to be an intrinsic part of our British cultural identity. It is the same blind spot that exists with Gothic cathedrals like Notre-Dame, proclaimed to be ‘quintessentially French’, synonymous with the French national identity, by those oblivious to the Islamic origins of such rich architectural styles and ornamentation.
Until, that is, it is pointed out in exhibitions like ‘William Morris and Art From the Islamic World’, still running till 9 March 2025, where the eye can become trained. All credit is due to the William Morris Gallery, the fine Georgian family home in Walthamstow where Morris grew up, for staging this exhibition, and for highlighting to a British audience what has been hiding in plain sight all along. The gallery’s guiding mission has been to bring the communities of Walthamstow, where one in five of the population is Muslim, closer together, an outreach project to show how different cultures have intertwined and inspired creativity since time immemorial. Maybe a future exhibition at the V&A could do the same for Islamic architecture and European medieval styles like Romanesque and Gothic?
The starting point of the exhibition is a smallish room which brings together items from the Islamic world all of which, crucially, once belonged to Morris and his family. Though Morris himself never travelled further east than Italy, he acquired a range of carpets, textiles, metalwork and ceramics mainly from Iran, Syria and Turkey, which clearly served as his prototypes, using them to decorate his homes. This geographic range is very important to the curators’ careful and deliberate choice of phrasing in the title ‘Art from the Islamic world’, a much more accurate description than was common in Victorian times when all Islamic art was labelled ‘Persian’, considered the ultimate in Orientalist chic. Even today, museums like the Jackfield Tile Museum in the Ironbridge Gorge perpetuate such misnomers in their labelling, describing English tiles that are clearly copying Ottoman Turkish tile designs as ‘Iranian-influenced’.
Fritware/Stonepaste Tile. Unknown. Fritware, mould made, painted in blue, green, turquoise and black under a colourless glaze, height 26.6 cm, width 27 cm, depth 2.8 cm, weight 2627 g, circa 1574-1599. Ottoman Period. Syria, Damascus. Forms part of a panel comprising twenty three tiles, C.4-1928. This tile probably formed the edge of the original panel.
When Morris, who often railed against the privileged society into which he was born, first launched his business in 1861, opening an interior design shop in Oxford Street, he was trying to bring his styles to the middle classes, well aware that most of his commissions were for wealthy clients with more money than aesthetic sense. ‘I spend my life ministering to the swinish luxury of the rich,’ he lamented. Some mocked his hand-made approach to design and craftsmanship as ‘thoroughly medieval’ and ‘useless’. At the time, his style of artist-led designs, using quality materials and hand-craftmanship was pushing against the tide of the Industrial Revolution. ‘I have never been in any rich man’s house,’ he declared, ‘which would not have been the better for having a bonfire made of nine-tenths of all that it held.’ It was part of his ‘Crusade against the age’, and in the end his persistence prevailed, for by the turn of the century, Morris & Co had become a by-word for good taste. He sold to important clients in Europe, America, Australia and Canada, exhibiting at international trade fairs in Paris, Boston and Philadelphia to raise the company’s profile. He learned to be a businessman, buying out his partners, and extending his product range to more affordable off-the-shelf items like wallpapers, fabrics and tiles. The Arts and Crafts movement, spearheaded by Morris, began in England and flourished in Europe and America between 1880 and 1920. On his death aged 62 in 1896 his coffin was draped in a magnificent 17th century Ottoman brocaded velvet from his own collection, made from silk and metal thread in Bursa, the first Ottoman capital.
Regret that his products were beyond the reach of the ordinary working class contributed to Morris’s growing political activism. Acutely conscious of his own privileged status in high society, he denounced the increasing industrialisation of the time, and became a socialist aged 50. He criticised the British government’s attempts to drag the country into a Russian-Turkish war in 1877, warning against ‘false patriotism’ and the dubious motives of the ruling classes who were led only by desire for profit.
Becoming a fervent environmentalist, he descried the despoliation of the landscape, and fought to stop pollution of the Thames and the destruction of Epping Forest. Although a nervous public speaker, his belief in his cause led him to give up to a hundred lectures a year, sometimes three a week, determined to make a difference. Driven by idealism, he wanted to imagine a world in which communities were equal, with no concept of private property, where craftsmanship and creativity could flourish. In 1877 he founded SPAB, the Society for the Protection of Ancient Buildings, and led the campaign to save the west front of St Mark’s in Venice. He was also outraged by the appalling restoration of St Albans, where the new pseudo-Gothic west front damaged much of the original fabric.
In south London at Merton Abbey, the Gothic ruins of which he restored, along with its water mill (another innovation introduced to Europe from Syria via Islamic Spain) on the River Wandle, he recreated an environment of medieval craftsmanship and techniques. He used natural dyes like indigo, disliking intensely the synthetic dyes of the times, even though it took him ten years of experimentation to achieve good results. So smitten was he with the beauty of Persian and Turkish carpets, hanging them on his walls or draping them over his tables as far too precious to walk on, that he decided to pioneer the production of hand-made rugs in Britain, recruiting experienced weavers from the declining Spitalfields silk industry, and using specially-built hand looms, hoping that eventually their skills would pass down to the next generation so that Britain might build its own hand-woven carpet tradition. One such example, called ‘Peacock and Bird’ is on display in the exhibition, so strikingly inferior in workmanship to the real thing that it serves as a clear marker that, even with the best will in the world, and the money, such traditions take centuries to accumulate and evolve.
All Islamic art ultimately seeks to recreate Paradise in the form of gardens and rivers, flowers and trees, where hierarchy is absent and where all live peacefully in mutual cooperation. The material and the spiritual world are connected through geometry, the unifying intermediary. This is precisely what Morris the idealist clearly felt drawn to in Islamic art, with its egalitarian traditions and deep respect for nature. As a child he had loved observing birds, flowers and plants in the Essex countryside. One of his most sophisticated patterns, which he named ‘Rivers’, after tributaries of the Thames, is based on meandering diagonal stems and natural growth, so that, as he put it, ‘even where a line ends, it should look as if it had plenty of capacity for more growth.’ This, together with his use of stylised birds and animals in pairs, to give underlying geometric structure to his patterns, are further borrowings from Islamic art. Other motifs he used, like flowers in vases, are also common in Islamic art.
Fritware/Stonepaste Tile Panel. Fritware, mould-made, painted in blue green and black under a clear glaze and framed in ebonised wood decorated with gilding, height, whole, 122 cm, width, whole, 92 cm, depth, whole, 8 cm, height, single tile, 26 cm, width, single tile, 27 cm, circa 1550-1650. Ottoman Period. Production Place: Damascus, Syria.
Granada, the most technically complicated textile Morris ever produced, so complex it never reached commercial production, was woven in 1884 at Merton Abbey. Featuring pomegranates and almond-shaped buds, connected by pointed arches and branches, the name tells us that his inspiration came from the patterns of the Alhambra Palace of the Nasrid kings. Though Morris himself never visited the Alhambra, he knew it through the lens of designer-architect Owen Jones (1809-74), who spent six months at the end of his Grand Tour, aged twenty-five, drawing detailed sketches of the stucco wall patterns of the palace, and acquiring a fascination with geometry, colour theory and the use of abstraction in decorative ornament. The result was his seminal work The Grammar of Ornament (1856), still used as a sourcebook in design schools internationally.
As the Gothic Revival got underway, the wealth generated from industry and trade, together with religious reform, resulted in a frenzy of churchbuilding, leading Morris to enter the market for church furnishings, like stained glass, embroidery, furniture and metalwork. Many of Morris’s contemporaries shared his interests and beliefs, like stained glass designer and tile-maker William de Morgan who also joined the Arts & Crafts movement. De Morgan moved his business to Merton Abbey, where he reproduced the fourteenth century ‘lustreware’ techniques of Muslim craftsmen, inspired by Islamic and medieval patterns. His tiles also decorate the walls of Leighton House in London’s Holland Park with its famous Arab Hall, a showcase of original sixteenth-century Damascus tiles procured on behalf of the painter Lord Frederic Leighton (1830-96).
A separate room in the exhibition is devoted to Morris’s daughter, May Morris, who travelled to the Islamic world after her father’s death. It displays the various items, especially textiles, she brought back and clearly valued highly, becoming a collector herself, as well as a donor.
A beautifully illustrated book, titled Tulips and Peacocks in a nod to the most prized flower of the Ottoman Turks, and the most loved bird of the Persians, has been published by Yale University Press specially for this exhibition, featuring a collection of ten essays by different specialists, including excellent contributions from the exhibition’s curators, Rowan Bain and Qaisra M. Khan, each exploring aspects of Morris’s connections to Islamic art. The front cover shows the distinctive 17th century Damascus tiles that Morris had acquired, in a pattern he called ‘Vine trellis’, purchased by Cambridge’s Fitzwilliam Museum after his death, and now reloaned by the Fitzwilliam for display at this exhibition. The book is on sale in the gallery’s shop, along with an impressive array of Morris-themed memorabilia for gifts or souvenirs.
Morris believed that through his work he could act as a bridge allowing craftspeople of the past to pass on their knowledge to contemporary artisans. The enduring popularity of his patterns suggests this may have been no idle dream, as people continue to respond to the same quasi-mystical, other-worldly qualities in his designs which echo those of Islamic art. Just below the surface, there is always the sense that something divine, something bigger than us mere mortals, unites us in our humanity. In this, perhaps, lies Morris’s universal appeal.
[A version of this article first appeared in The Times Literary Supplement (The TLS) on 17 January 2025]
With its future in the balance, a cultural historian looks past the corruption, violence and trauma of recent decades to the almost lost history of collaboration and shared traditions between Muslims in Syria and Christians in Europe. By DIANA DARKE [as first published 10 January 2025 in The Tablet]
Buildings have stories to tell, in Syria none more perhaps than the magnificent Umayyad Mosque in the heart of the walled Old City of Damascus. It embodies the very soul of Syria, a sacred site where for over two millennia multiple civilisations and religions – Aramean, Greek, Roman, Byzantine and Islamic – have coalesced yet also survived in their own unique form. No surprise, therefore, that the new de facto ruler of Syria, Ahmad al-Shar’a, leader of Hay’at Tahrir al-Sham, the Organisation for the Liberation of Syria (HTS), chose to head straight there to pray after entering the city on 8 December.
Syria has long been overwhelmingly Muslim but the Umayyad Mosque claims the heads of John the Baptist as well as Hussein, the Prophet Muhammad’s grandson. While still a cathedral, following the Muslim conquest of Damascus in 634, the building was shared by Christians and Muslims for close to a hundred years, as were the cathedrals of Homs and Hama. They were only converted to mosques once the Muslim population, small at first, gradually expanded. Top Byzantine Christian mosaicists then followed the brief of new Umayyad masters to cover the walls of the courtyard with breathtaking visions of the Islamic Paradise, timeless landscapes of fantasised trees, gardens, rivers and palaces in shimmering green and gold.
When rulers change, life for those uninvolved in the fighting tends to continue as before. The best architects and craftsmen are summoned to work on new prestige projects, irrespective of their religion, just as the most entrepreneurial businessmen find new opportunities. It was the same in Umayyad Spain when elite Muslim craftsmen were summoned by new Christian rulers during the Reconquista, to transfer their innovative engineering technologies like pointed arches and ribbed vaulting, as well as their decorative repertoires, to prestige abbeys and cathedrals. As late as 1492 the Catholic monarchs Ferdinand and Isabella appointed a Muslim master builder to look after all royal buildings in Aragon, a position that then passed to his son.
I bought a semi-derelict Ottoman courtyard house in Old Damascus in 2005. Full of wonder that I, as a foreigner, was able to buy a chunk of a UNESCO World Heritage site, I embarked on a three-year restoration project, guided by a Syrian architect and a team of fifteen craftsmen, experiencing first-hand the labyrinthine corruption of government and legal systems. To learn more about the house itself, I re-entered the academic world to study Islamic art and architecture. Deciphering the decorative styles of the house gave me the essential foundation for my subsequent work, connecting the almost lost history of collaboration and shared traditions between Muslims in Syria and Christians in Europe, traditions that formed the springboard for the architectural styles we know in Europe as “Romanesque” and “Gothic”.
In the new Syria of 2025 a Christian wheeler-dealer who made a fortune during the war in the transportation business is now raking it in as a high-end hotelier. Among Aleppo’s traditional soap-making family businesses, trade is up by 80%. My lawyer, who throughout the war bemoaned the fact that most of his caseload was divorce work, is now kept busy by clients asking questions he cannot answer. Many, like me, had their houses stolen during the war by profiteers writing fabricated intelligence reports against them. By a miracle, despite being labelled a British terrorist with links to armed groups, I went back in 2014 and retook possession, evicting my previous lawyer, his mistress and baby, along with a fake general on a forged lease.
The interim government faces huge challenges. Disentangling the different currencies, legal and education systems that operate in the different regions of Syria will take a long time. Add to that the complication of how to monitor the movements of returning refugees, as well as compiling a new electoral roll, and the three-year period Al-Shar’a suggested last week will be needed to draft a new constitution – four years for proper elections – in a unified Syria, becomes an ambitious target.
Al-Shar’a has promised to make Syria inclusive for all, including women. The country’s central bank has just appointed its first-ever female governor. Many commentators outside the country gnash their teeth, convinced that HTS, a Sunni Islamist group once aligned with Islamic State and al-Qaeda, remains a jihadi extremist outfit similar to the Taliban. Yet at least so far, its leaders appear ready, as are the majority of Syrians inside the country, to take Syria on a new trajectory, and seem prepared to engage pragmatically with the “international community” that failed it so badly, some elements of which even went so far as to rehabilitate Assad as if he were a fact of life, never understanding how hollowed-out his regime was, how unrepresentative of the overwhelming majority of Syrian people.
Syrian friends forced into exile during the war (along with nearly a third of the Syrian population) are scattered across Lebanon, Jordan, Turkey, Germany, Norway and Canada. From a range of professions – architect, lawyer, hotelier, tour guide, environmentalist – not one of them was able to continue their former work in their host countries. All struggled to make new lives for themselves and they feel they have lost thirteen years of their life. Even harder to bear is how in recent years refugees from Syria have been made to feel increasingly unwelcome, the mood turning against them in their host countries as right-wing populism has risen to heights where it is destabilising Europe as well as Syria’s neighbours. Most now plan to return, to rebuild their lives and their country, bringing with them new expertise and knowledge. After Germany’s 6000-plus Syrian doctors have left, they will be missed by its aging population, their worth only recognised once it is too late. Friends who stayed also feel the last thirteen years have been wasted, their country devastated by aerial bombardment from the Assad regime and Russia, sanctioned and isolated from the outside world.
Nothing screams “CHANGE” to me more loudly than the sudden arrival since 8 December of the world’s media, banned since 2011. During the 54 years of the Assad dynasty’s rule – 30 years under Hafez from 1970 till his death from leukemia in 2000 and 24 years under his second son Bashar – it was never easy for journalists to get visas into Syria. Control of the narrative was always an essential part of the Assad grip on power.
“Come in and report without restriction” was the message from al-Shar’a. In a country with so many secrets to uncover it is a journalist’s dream come true. Heartwarming scenes like a man exiled for 50 years reuniting with his 100-year-old mother have competed on our screens with tales of torture and abuse from the prisoners streaming out of the “slaughterhouse” in Seydnaya. Thank God the Assads’ filthy linen has been exposed for all to see.
Blacklisted for years, I was able to slip into Syria seven times since the uprising began in March 2011, most recently as part of the Crazy Club, hiding under the cassocks of the clergy. Now I can return openly. The situation inside Syria is complicated and varies considerably from region to region but prices for most things have got cheaper and the Syrian pound’s exchange rate has stabilised. Embassies are re-opening, schools and universities have reopened and civil servants are back at work. In Damascus the hotels and restaurants are brimming, not just with journalists but also with foreign delegations – even from the US – queuing to offer support and investment. But water and electricity remain in short supply. As the architect living in my house explains: “They told us, ‘You were silently patient for 54 years, be patient for a few more days and you will have bright times to come.’ But it turns out we have no infrastructure. We still have electricity for only one hour in the day and one hour in the night.”
Even so, he is happy, along with my other Syrian friends, that they are starting the New Year without Assad. Turkey has taken on responsibility for repairing the airports, roads and trains while Qatar will get priority in the energy sector. The White Helmets, trained to dig bodies out from under the rubble of Russian and regime air strikes, are now redeployed to clear that same rubble left untouched by Assad for years.
Much of Syria’s cultural heritage, damaged across the centuries by fires, earthquakes and wars, has later been rebuilt, each time more beautiful than before. The Umayyad Mosque’s Jesus Minaret, added in the eleventh century, resembles a campanile, and is named for the spot where, according to local folklore, Christ will descend on the Day of Final Judgement, a blending of Christian and Muslim beliefs typical of Syria. Mary receives more mentions in the Qu’ran than in the New Testament, and Old Testament stories like Abraham and the sacrifice of his son form key festivals in Islam. Syrian Muslims have historically attended church services at Christmas and Easter with Christian friends, while mosques have welcomed those of all faiths and none.
The pressures are great and the future is precarious, but the Syrian people have the skills, the ingenuity, the innovative mindset and instinct for survival, despite the obvious deep trauma and hurt, to create a new Syria, one that may ultimately serve as a model for the wider Middle East.
In a surreal twist of timing, President-elect Donald Trump was the guest of honour at Notre-Dame’s special reopening service on 7 December, at the very same time that the rebel offensive in Syria was reaching its whirlwind climax. Hours later, on Sunday 8 December, the world woke up to find that the Assad regime had vanished, following Bashar al-Assad’s night-time escape to Moscow, and that Notre-Dame was fully open to the public, following its intensive five-year restoration after the 19 April 2019 fire.
Syria too has been burning for the last 13 years. ‘Assad or we burn the country,’ was the message scrawled on walls across the country by his much-feared shabiha (secret police), along with slogans like ‘There is no god but Bashar’ and ‘Do not kneel for God, kneel for Bashar’.
Syria and Notre-Dame now both face a new future simultaneously. Restoring a fire-damaged medieval cathedral to a tight deadline was a huge challenge, one that many people thought impossible. Rebuilding an entire country, restoring its social fabric, regenerating its decimated economy after so many years of war is, of course, a challenge of an entirely different order, one that is almost beyond conceiving, a challenge that will involve many difficult steps and take many decades to achieve. But it is doable, with the right backing.
Did Trump give a single thought to Syria as he sat through the cathedral service? Probably not. Arriving in Paris that morning, he had dismissed the country, posting on his Truth Social network: “Syria is a mess, but is not our friend,” then adding “THE UNITED STATES SHOULD HAVE NOTHING TO DO WITH IT. THIS IS NOT OUR FIGHT. LET IT PLAY OUT. DO NOT GET INVOLVED!”
The very next day, however, the dynamics on the ground inside Syria had suddenly changed in a way no one had thought possible. In less than a fortnight the Islamist rebels from Idlib had swept out from the north, taking charge of Aleppo, Hama and Homs, while Druze rebels from Suweida in the south surged up to take the capital Damascus just in advance of them.
Despite his determination not to get involved, Trump may yet find himself, once in office on 23 January 2025, wrestling with decisions about the new Syria that will affect America directly – what to do about the US troops still stationed there, whether or not to support the Kurdish-led SDF (Syrian Democratic Forces) in Syria’s oil-rich northeast, whether to use them to clamp down on a resurgent ISIS and above all, whether to lift the sanctions and the rebels’ terrorist designation in order to allow the country to rebuild. Speed is of the essence, as with Notre-Dame’s rebuilding, so that everyone believes in the project and its feasibility.
Notre-Dame’sConnections to ‘Stealing from the Saracens’ and ‘Islamesque’
‘Islamesque’ is a revolutionary piece of research, challenging the European art history world and its use of the architectural term ‘Romanesque’. The book has garnered a starred review in Publishers Weekly, an honour awarded to books ‘of exceptional quality and distinction’. Yet while my attention would ordinarily have been focused on ‘Islamesque’, I have found myself instead consumed by the new developments inside Syria, following every twist and turn, even asked to give media interviews by outlets like the BBC. My Syrian friends, both inside and outside the country, are ecstatic about the demise of the Assad regime. The ones inside said it felt unreal, as if they were watching a movie, with events all around them unfolding so quickly. After 54 years of milking the country like their own private farm, the old regime, its posters of Bashar so omnipresent, just melted away overnight. Their illusion of strength and invincibility was, in my view, always hollow, held in place by little more than fear and by the terrible tentacles of the Assad security and intelligence branches, all seventeen of them, modelled on East Germany’s monstrous STASI, a network that reached into all corners of society, leading people to believe that even the walls had ears. Such fear does not breed loyalty – it used to annoy me when commentators said that Assad still had a lot of support among Syrians inside the country.
Syria and Notre-Dame also share many connections. For example – and you will find no mention of this in any of the overwhelmingly Europe-focused documentaries, books and articles written about the cathedral’s restoration – the structure’s sturdiness can be traced back to early fifth, sixth and seventh century archetypes of the twin tower model still extant in Syria’s northwest, where stonemasonry skills are literally as old as the hills. The three limestone massifs of Jebel Zawiya, Jebel Barisha and Jebel Ala formed the local building material for all Syria’s early churches. Close to two thousand such structures remain scattered among the ruins of some eight hundred settlements in the rebel-held Idlib Province, despite the Assad regime’s and Russia’s aerial bombardment of the last decade and despite the heavy earthquakes that have afflicted this region of northwest Syria since time immemorial, . These Byzantine settlements, known as the Forgotten Cities, were designated a UNESCO World Heritage Site in June 2011, just three months after the start of the Syrian war.
Trump is almost certainly unaware of these and the many other cultural connections between Notre-Dame and Syria, let alone how the Gothic or ‘Saracen’ elements in Notre-Dame cathedral then found their way across the Atlantic, into cathedrals like Washington DC’s National Cathedral, the spiritual home of America, into Gothic campuses like Yale University and even into the heart of American democracy, Washington DC’s Capitol Dome, with its ‘Saracen’ Islamic double dome.
Whether or not he knows or cares about this architectural backstory of so many American monuments, Trump has the power to transform the new Syria. He could, in an act of faith and leadership similar to that which enabled Notre-Dame to be rebuilt in five years, have the vision to do a deal with Turkey’s President Erdogan on the Kurdish PKK elements within the Kurdish-led Syrian Democratic Forces (SDF) that also allowed the 2000 US troops to go home to America, and to then lift the US sanctions that were imposed against the old Syria in recognition that the new Syria deserves a chance to rebuild itself from the inside. In my dreams, this would enable the country to rise from the ashes and shine like a beacon in the region surprisingly speedily. It could even be a vital part of Trump’s legacy – to help create a new Syria – and as a by-product, even to eradicate Islamic terrorism from the globe forever. Once peace and stability are restored in the Middle East, extremist outfits like ISIS would find no more drivers for recruitment. Their base support gone, they would simply melt away, as surely as the Assad regime melted away once its ideological hollowness was apparent to all.
The colourful royal invitation to King Charles III’s coronation is rich with images of the natural world. It is a fitting reflection of the new king’s profound interest in nature and the environment. Prominently featured in the centre is what the BBC website calls ‘the folklore figure of the “green man” [https://www.bbc.co.uk/news/uk-65175984], described by Buckingham Palace as ‘a symbol of spring and rebirth which celebrates a new reign’.
But what do people, including those at Buckingham Palace, really know about the mysterious Green Man? Seen peeping out from the carved foliage of so many Norman churches, he did not appear in England till the 12th century. His origins are shrouded in mystery and his meaning was lost by the end of the Middle Ages.
As part of research into the Islamic influences on Norman architecture, I have been studying the Green Man for some while now. The more I saw him, in all his moods, from menacing to humorous, from welcoming to ferocious, the more I saw his uncanny parallels with al-Khidr, a popular and well-known Islamic saint with many mystical associations. Al-Khidr means ‘The Green One’ in Arabic, and the Arabic root kh, d, r, conveys everything to do with greenery, green pastures, verdure and vegetation. The colour green was the Prophet Muhammad’s favourite colour, and al-Khudeira, one form of the Arabic root, means Paradise.
The timing of his appearance in our foliage and in this country, coupled with the fact that he was not known before, but appeared suddenly, suggests he was very likely brought back to England by returning Norman Crusaders. They would have first encountered him in the Holy Land, where he is deeply embedded in local folklore and Sufi mysticism as an omnipresent figure, a force for both good and evil. Given the powers with which al-Khidr is associated, his appeal to Christian Crusaders would have been considerable – it is not for nothing that he is conflated with St George, patron saint of England and, who, incidentally, is also the patron saint of the Lebanese Christians, the Palestinian Christians and the Syrian Christians.
There is however one big difference between al-Khidr and St George. Al-Khidr is still alive, whereas St George was martyred by pagan Roman soldiers and is well and truly dead. That said, like al-Khidr, he had the power to appear to people at moments of crisis and give them strength, as can be seen in the legend of his timely appearance at the 1098 Battle of Antioch, part of the First Crusade, riding on a white horse and carrying his famous lance, just in time to save the day and turn the battle in the Crusaders’ favour. It is a scene recreated in medieval church murals, as in the 12th century St Botolph’s Church at Hardham in West Sussex, painted by the monks of the powerful Cluniac Priory of Lewes. These monks, so associated with returning Crusaders, would have been entirely familiar with the legendary appearance of St George at Antioch, and his presence in the mural means it can safely be dated to the early 12th century, after news of the victory at the battle would have reached England. St George was especially venerated as a warrior saint from the Crusades onwards.
Church of St George, dating to 515, Ezraa, southern Syria
Al-Khidr’s immortality is a vital characteristic that he shares with the Green Man, whose various forms and facial expressions depict him as very much alive, like some kind of primeval spirit living among the foliage. Part deity, part prophet, part pagan, part saint, part human, his appeal has proved to be universal, a unifying figure among the three great monotheistic religions. In the Holy Land he is revered by Muslims, Jews and Christians alike, conflated not just as al-Khidr and St George, but also as the Prophet Elijah.
Of his many tombs, the most likely one to contain an actual body is thought to be in Lod, Israel, where the Crusader church of Saint George was built on top of an earlier Byzantine one alongside the Mosque of al-Khidr.
At Bait Jala near Bethlehem a shrine is believed by Christians to be the birthplace of St George, and by Hebrews to be the burial place of Elijah. William Dalrymple, in his book From the Holy Mountain, also came across this kind of syncretism and fluidity between religions in the Holy Land, writing of Bait Jala:
‘With all the greatest shrines in the Christian world to choose from, it seemed that when the local Arab Christians had a problem – an illness, or something more complicated – they preferred to seek the intercession of George in his grubby little shrine at Beit Jala rather than praying at the Church of the Holy Sepulchre or the Church of the Nativity in Bethlehem.’ He asked the priest at the shrine whether many Muslims came too, and the priest replied, “We get hundreds! Almost as many as the Christian pilgrims. Often, when I come in here, I find Muslims all over the floor, in the aisles, up and down.”
The shrine’s reputation as a place of healing was nothing new, but stretched back as far as anyone could remember, a continuous tradition. Such places carry a very special power and atmosphere.
My own first encounter with al-Khidr was in Aleppo, at a visit to the citadel in 1978, when I noticed his cenotaph to the right of the zigzag path that leads up through the succession of defensive gates into the citadel itself. Its location there was as if well-placed to give thanks, chosen for its survival of the dangers represented in the archway above the entrance by a pair of intertwined serpent dragons. Having navigated the fifth and final zigzag, with smiling lions and sad lions carved into the stone walls, seen as having magical powers and protecting against evil, you emerge into the sunlight of the open citadel summit.
These are exactly the properties with which the Green Man is credited today, in his many revivals in garden furniture and ornaments of the 21st century, the same powers with which he was credited in England from the Middle Ages onwards.
It is no accident that the oldest forms of him in England are to be found on early Norman churches, where his religious imagery shows itself in full flourish. The fact that he appears on doorways and entrances on the outside of churches, and again on the interiors, on chancel arches, capitals and columns, marking the transition into the holiest parts of the church, is not just coincidence. His role is to ward off evil spirits, to protect against harm, but also to celebrate the fertility of Nature and to welcome worshippers into the presence of God. He could be carved in wood or in stone, but was rarely to be found in illuminated manuscripts, stained glass or in jewellery. In the forms where his mouth, nostrils and sometimes even his ears and eyes, appear to be sprouting the foliage and vegetation, he also symbolises rebirth, the endless cycle of Nature of which he is an integral part. Often his face was the only sculpture to survive the obsessive destruction of the Reformation, presumably because he was not seen as idolatrous, but rather as a harmless representation of Nature that offended no one. This interpretation confirms that his origins as a saint were already lost to Christians by the 16th century.
The first Green Men to appear in England during the 1100s were the work of masons brought over from France after the Norman conquest in 1066. Their faces were not classical by any stretch of the imagination. The Green Men on the capitals of the main portal of Kilpeck Church in Herefordshire, for example, have protruding eyes with carved holes for pupils as found in early oriental statues of kings and pagan gods.
The Kilpeck foliage carvings also show Coptic/Fatimid style in the way the stems are bound together with ties and how the leaves have deeply incised v-shaped grooves.
At Barfrestone Church in Kent, sometimes called ‘the Kilpeck of the South’, a pair of Green Men on the north door likewise show no classical influence and are evidently protecting the church from evil spirits and may thus have given comfort and reassurance to a highly superstitious medieval population who would have wholeheartedly believed in evil spirits and their power. Sometimes, when smiling, he serves to welcome worshippers into the church.
The Gothic Revival brought the Green Man back into public consciousness and 20th century writers like JRR Tolkien in the Lord of the Rings introduced characters called Ents who were half tree half man, leading lives of quiet wisdom deep in the forest. Morris dancers are more versions of the Green Man, re-enacting old traditions that have been largely forgotten. He has well and truly entered the public imagination as an immediately recognisable figure, usually benign these days, but with occasional overtones of a wild spirit in league with nature. In this dual function and almost schizophrenic personality the Green Man again echoes the characteristics of al-Khidr. King Charles himself, I’d like to think, with his own freely acknowledged appreciation of Islam, would be happy to learn of such deep cross-cultural connections.
A version of this article was first published on Middle East Eye:
The sheer scale of the disastrous series of earthquakes in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria is hard to absorb, especially in a region already blighted by a decade of war, displacement, drought and disease. As if that were not sufficient punishment, the cruel weather has added another layer of suffering with its comfortless blanket of snow, making rescue efforts even tougher, whilst leaving thousands of shell-shocked souls to freeze in the open, homeless.
For many outside the region, it may seem a faraway tragedy that has no direct bearing on their own lives. But as someone who has visited the area repeatedly over several decades, I feel that, beyond the humanitarian crisis unfolding day by day, there is a bigger picture that needs to be explained, to help grasp how connected we all are by oft-forgotten historical and cultural ties.
Historical and Cultural Context
The discovery in the 1990s of the world’s oldest temples, a series of mysterious circular structures on the summit of Göbekli Tepe (‘Pot-bellied Hill’ in Turkish), turned all previous perceptions of man’s early history on their head. Overlooking the once lush grasslands of the Fertile Crescent, northeast of Urfa, they were built by nomadic hunter-gatherers some 12,000 years ago, pre-dating Stonehenge by 6,000 years, and the world’s earliest city at Çatalhöyük, also in eastern Turkey, by a full 3,000 years.
Gobekli Tepe
Similar groupings of circular temples have been identified in northern Syria, collectively proving that man’s first construction efforts, were devoted, not to building settlements, but to the worship of deities connected with the sun, the moon and the circular seasonal cycles on which he depended. The temples were first unearthed in 1994 by German archaeologist Klaus Schmidt, who tragically died before seeing UNESCO inscribe them on its World Heritage List in 2018.
World heritage sites
As recently as 2021, UNESCO added the late Hittite site of Aslantepe (‘Lion Hill’) near Malatya and the Euphrates, in recognition of its significance in illustrating how a State society first emerged in the Near East, along with a sophisticated bureaucratic system that predated writing. Among the finds were the world’s earliest known swords, evidence of the first forms of organised combat used by the new elite to maintain their political power.
Aslantepe, two lion men in combat
Towering above the Tigris, UNESCO’s other World Heritage Site (2015) that lies within the earthquake zone is the brooding city of Diyarbakir, whose mood seems reflected in its massive black basalt walls. It too is part of the ancient Fertile Crescent, an important regional centre commanding the surrounding fertile plains throughout Hellenistic, Roman, Sassanid Persian, Byzantine, Islamic and Ottoman times. Its elegant ‘Ten-Eyed’ bridge, built by the Seljuks in 1065, still spans the river below.
Further testimony to the onetime prosperity of the region is the site of Zeugma on the Euphrates, famous for its collection of superb mosaics, among the finest in the world. Once a thriving frontier town on the eastern edges of the Roman Empire, where 5,000 troops were garrisoned to defend against the Persians in the 2nd and 3rd centuries CE, it was also known as Belkıs, a reference to the Queen of Sheba and her legendary wealth. Rescued, along with many other ancient sites, from the flooding caused by the modern Birecik Dam on the Euphrates, the spectacular mosaics graced the floors of rich villas, but today are housed a new purpose-built museum in nearby Gaziantep, epicentre of the first 7.8 magnitude earthquake that struck overnight on 5 February.
Zeugma mosaic, the so-called ‘Gypsy Girl’
Those who know Aleppo will find in Gaziantep many echoes of that more famous Syrian city. Not for nothing did so many Syrian refugees fleeing war in their own country take refuge in Gaziantep as their city of choice. In the days before the artificial borders imposed by Britain and France after World War One, the two cities were closely linked. Easily the most sophisticated city in southeast Turkey, Gaziantep, long hailed as the pistachio capital of the world, boasts around its prominent Seljuk citadel an old quarter, much of which was built by the Ottoman Governor of Aleppo. Like Aleppo, it has a mixed Muslim/Christian population, with its Christian population in Ottoman times likewise much larger than today. Their churches and mansions are still scattered about the old Christian quarter, often now converted to musical venues or boutique hotels. The citadel itself has suffered damage in the earthquake, so the historic quarter of which it forms the heart must also have been affected. Like Aleppo’s historic centre, it was the subject of extensive restoration projects, and experienced boom-level growth in recent times, its citizens deeply proud of their shared heritage and identity.
Gaziantep Citadel
Border ironies
Earthquakes do not recognise political boundaries, and just as Gaziantep was part of the Ottoman Province of Syria till 1922, so Aleppo too, less than 200km to the south, has suffered damage, both to its iconic citadel mound and to its surrounding historic areas. Friends have told me of their homes, newly restored from the war, damaged once again, by force majeure, as if accursed. Aleppo’s Great Umayyad Mosque, located at the foot of the citadel, has been undergoing restoration funded by Putin’s ally, the Russian politician Ramzan Kadyrov, President of Chechnya. The mosque’s unique 1,000 year-old Seljuk minaret miraculously survived many earlier earthquakes, only to collapse in cross-fire in 2013. Its rebuilding is a dauntingly complex jigsaw that is in progress, 60% complete, which has somehow survived this quake.
In more border ironies, the Province of Hatay in southeast Turkey belonged to Syria till 1939. Known before then as the Sanjak of Alexandretta, it was incorporated into Syria under the French Mandate in 1918 at the Ottoman Empire’s demise, but the French then gave it to Turkey in anticipation of a new war against Germany, a bribe to buy Turkish neutrality. Syrians have never accepted the transfer and most Syrian maps still show it as part of Syria.
Now eclipsed by the mosaics at Zeugma, Hatay boasts its own, much older mosaic museum in its capital city of Antakya, ancient Antioch, also hit by the earthquake. Built by the French, it was considered in its day second in the world only to the Bardo Museum in Tunis, displaying, in scenes like Narcissus and Echo and the Drunken Dionysus, the licentious lifestyle of banqueting and dancing against which the early Christians here preached. St Peter’s Rock Church cut into the cliffs behind the city was founded in 47CE by Peter, Paul and Barnabas as the first church after Jerusalem. Matthew is said to have written his Gospel in Antioch. Even before the arrival of Christianity, the city was very mixed, with Greek, Hebrew, Persian and Latin all spoken in its streets. ‘If your aim in travelling is to get acquainted with different cultures and lifestyles, it is enough to visit Antioch’, wrote Roman historian Libanius. ‘There is no other place in the world that has so many cultures in one place.’
St Peter’s Rock Church, Antakya (ancient Antioch)
Cycles of history
Today the population remains very mixed, with large communities – both Muslim and Christian – blended together. Among the early churches in Antioch was the octagonal Domus Aurea (Golden House), a magnificent structure thought to have been Constantine the Great’s palace chapel, built in 327CE. Destroyed by fires and earthquakes in 588, its exact location is lost to us today, but it is known through the description of contemporaries to have served as the prototype for the octagonal Basilica of San Vitale in Ravenna, Italy, from where the Emperor Charlemagne took his inspiration for his own palace chapel at Aachen, Germany.
Parts of the Crusader castle of Marqab, built from black basalt to dominate the Mediterranean coastal plain, are also damaged from the earthquake, with collapsed towers. Second in power only to the mighty Krak des Chevaliers, its cellars were stocked with enough provisions to last a thousand men for a five-year siege. Originally an Arab stronghold fortified in 1062, it was captured by the Byzantines in 1104, then sold to the Knights Hospitaller. It fell following a brief siege to the Mamluk army of Sultan Qalaoun in 1285, who whitewashed and thus preserved the frescoes in the chapel. One depicts a striking vision of Hell in which a huge bishop is sitting naked in a fire, with two devils tending the flames, along with two monster-headed figures flying overhead.
Marqab Castle, near Baniyas, Syria
Such cycles of history, filled with so many seismic twists and turns like earthquakes, wars and invasions, have all played their part in the ever-shifting balances of power in this region of great strategic significance. When looking at the horrors that are unfolding in southeast Turkey and northwest Syria today, it is impossible to predict how the current disaster will shape the future of this most volatile of regions.
The complex political landscape at play in both countries is likely, without huge international support, to hamper progress towards the imperative delivery of aid, while fledgling efforts that were underway for restoration of cultural heritage sites, especially in the blighted and fractured territory of Syria, will inevitably be pushed even further down the agenda.
Past parallels show us that rival powers are likely to continue to vie for control of this once Fertile Crescent, where the tectonic plates of so many past civilisations have struggled for survival, in ways that have shaped us all.
This piece first appeared in Middle East Eye on 9 February 2023:
When Russia entered the Syrian war in September 2015, I started to watch RT, Russia’s state-controlled TV network. That’s a six-year dose of studying how Russia projects its worldview to a global audience, a master class in alternative reality and information manipulation. These same techniques are now being reprised in Russia’s reporting of its “special military operation to liberate Ukraine from neo-Nazis.” All independent media outlets in Russia have been forced to close, ensuring that only President Vladimir Putin’s version of events reaches Russian ears and eyes.
The Arab proverb, “He who speaks the truth must not pitch his tent near ours,” might have been written for Putin. With skills honed through decades of working for the KGB, including time spent as a liaison officer to the Stasi in East Berlin, President Putin is a true aficionado of the art of disinformation. He knows how important it is to seize the narrative from the outset and never to deviate from the script. Syria provided him the perfect training ground for Ukraine. RT journalists were allowed free rein inside the country to report the Russian government’s version of events, while Western journalists were denied visas. Russian media repeatedly discredited the work of the White Helmets, whose first-hand film footage of Russian and Syrian regime airstrikes on schools, hospitals, and markets across the country flatly contradicted Russian propaganda. The BBC extensively researched and exposed this tactic in their Intrigue: Mayday podcast series.
To counter Western outrage in Ukraine, Putin uses tactics familiar from Syria, claiming Russian attacks were faked or that Ukrainians themselves conducted them as part of an anti-Russian smear campaign. In Syria Russia claimed to conciliate, while simultaneously denying humanitarian aid to rebel-held areas under siege, in the same way that humanitarian corridors for the evacuation of civilians are routinely thwarted in Ukraine. Residents under siege in Syria were given the choice — starve or surrender. When they eventually surrendered, the Russians brokered “reconciliation deals,” which were then reneged on. Russia used “de-escalation zones” as temporary strategic measures, allowing it to buy time to refocus on military efforts in other areas, exactly as it is doing in Ukraine now. In Syria it then broke the de-escalation agreements, blaming the “terrorists” for violations. To this day, the false narrative persists in many Western quarters that the Syrian war was all about fighting “terrorists” like ISIS. But research has established that more than three-quarters of the deaths in the Syrian war were perpetrated, not by ISIS terrorists and other extremists, but by the Assad regime and its supporters — Russia, Iran, and Hezbollah. ISIS and its ilk killed just 6%. Rarely did Bashar al-Assad and his Russian bosses target ISIS. Instead they went after the moderate opposition — as did ISIS — well aware that they were the real threat. Of the half million Syrians killed, the overwhelming majority were innocent civilians, women and children, not “terrorists.”
Putin and Bashar merchandise on sale in an Aleppo hotel, in April 2018, author’s photo.
As reports mount of chemical weapon use by Russian forces in Ukraine, expect more lessons learned in Syria. Russian media claimed the numerous horrific photos of dead gassed Syrians, uploaded by witnesses at the scene, were fakes, using “actors.” When teams from the Organization for the Prohibition of Chemical Weapons (OPCW) tried to reach sites to collect evidence, they were barred for “security reasons” and told that soldiers were making the area “safe.”
While Russian-sponsored trolls and bots were active on social media in support of Syria’s President Assad, just as they are today in support of Putin’s actions in Ukraine, Assad apologists, including respectable British academics and Members of Parliament, were seduced into parroting these Russian memes, causing untold damage to public perceptions of the Syrian war. The Times newspaper conducted its own investigation into such people. In April 2018 I myself travelled with a delegation dubbed “the Crazy Club” to undermine its message from within. Invited to visit and tour Syria by the Syriac Orthodox Church, we were treated like royalty, and it was easy to see how Christians throughout the 11-year war chose to align themselves with Assad to ensure their own survival. The same thing is happening today with the Russian Orthodox Church, where Patriarch Kirill in Moscow is standing by Putin, giving the Ukraine invasion his blessing and branding it “a Holy War.” By contrast, a multi-faith mission of Christians, Muslims, Jews, Hindus, and Buddhists led by Rowan Williams, former archbishop of Canterbury, has travelled, at some risk to themselves, to Ukraine to meet refugees, hoping to persuade President Putin and the Russian Orthodox Church of the error of their ways. Williams is even supporting calls for the Russian Orthodox Church to be excluded from the World Council of Churches.
If only a similar high-level multi-faith group had spoken out years ago against the way both President Assad and President Putin have used their relationships with the Orthodox Church to project themselves as guardians of the minorities, the war might have taken a different course and much bloodshed might have been avoided.
Instead, tragically, despite initially appearing to support anti-Assad protesters, Western governments, weary of Middle Eastern conflicts, and with no appetite for involvement, kept their distance, leaving a vacuum that first ISIS in 2013 and then Russia in 2015 stepped in to fill. Their inaction was a gift to Russia, emboldening Putin to pursue his goals in Ukraine.
Bashar and Putin together in their ‘virility’ poster: the caption reads ‘The Age of Virility and Men’ in Arabic and in Russian.
Putin understood from the outset how to ensure Russia benefitted from the conflict. He enlarged the Russian naval base at Tartous and developed an air base at Hmeimeem near Latakia, extending the Russian state’s lease to operate them by 49 years. A Russian import-export village was established in Latakia port after 2015 and Russia’s military hardware was showcased. Putin boasted of testing over 320 weapons systems in Syria, while 85% of Russian army commanders gained combat experience in Syria. The cruelest and most efficient of them, Gen. Alexander Dvornikov, has now been appointed to take charge of operations in the Donbas region of eastern Ukraine.
Neither nation-building nor reconstruction were ever on the Russian agenda in Syria. On the contrary, the Kremlin was content to have a client state that was just stable enough to safeguard Russia’s interests, but not so strong that it no longer needed Moscow’s protection. The same is likely to be true in Ukraine, with Russia spending just enough money in areas it considers strategic, but avoiding large-scale investment that would bog it down, as happened in Afghanistan. Unlike Western governments that require clean endings and to bring their troops home, Russia has shown in Syria that it is comfortable with protracted low-level conflict, often using mercenaries as cannon fodder. In Ukraine battle-hardened Syrian soldiers are said to be recruited at 25 times their Syrian salary to fight for Russia. The Russian TV network Zvezda News, owned by the Russian Ministry of Defense, posted a recent video showing Brig. Gen. Suhail al-Hassan, “The Tiger,” commander of the Russian-backed elite 25th Special Mission Forces Division, involved in air landing operation drills in northern Syria. The Russians are clearly in charge, while the Syrian soldiers are interviewed afterwards, raving about the experience and praising their Russian trainers. Russian media likewise show upbeat interviews with Syrian soldiers purportedly queuing up to fight for Russia in Ukraine, while Western media report coercion among Syrian recruits, who acknowledge that 90% of them die.
Putin and Bashar watching over a Syrian regime checkpoint, January 2019.
Today Syria is a puppet state, with Russia controlling security and defense, while Iran has taken charge of the religious and cultural files. An Aleppo businessman summed up the situation well, describing Bashar as “a man with two false legs, one Russian, one Iranian, hopping from one leg to another as the ground he is standing on is very hot.”
As for the Russian propaganda climax, that came in Palmyra on 5 May, 2016. Knowing the world was fascinated by the fate of Syria’s most iconic ancient site, a magical trading city in a desert oasis first seized by ISIS in 2015, Putin flew in a Russian orchestra from Moscow, led by his favorite conductor, to stage a victory concert in the Roman theatre after Russian forces helped recapture it from ISIS. To crown it all, with the eyes of the world watching, Putin popped up by videolink on the Palmyra stage to project himself as “the Saviour of Syria,” the only international leader truly fighting terrorism. Pocketing massive credit, it was the moment he moved from the Palmyra stage to the world stage, his dream come true, a global player at last.
Soviet ties to Syria go back to the 1970s when the USSR was Syria’s main economic partner and one of its strongest political and military allies. Hafez al-Assad’s long-term vice-president from 1984-2005, Abdel Halim Khaddam, said in an interview from exile in Paris: “You have to understand that, at some point, practically half the Syrian population worked for the Secret Police. Remember that we were formed by the Soviets. That’s why they were so powerful. The intelligence services soon became the main factor in maintaining the regime. The model was the KGB or Stasi. They were everywhere. Thousands of Syrians went to Russia to train and study, learnt Russian, and married Russians.”
Putin has learned much from his Syria playlist, tactics perfected over the years in which he had a free hand in the country. After the fighting in Ukraine is over, with many cities reduced to empty shelled buildings, expect the same tactics employed in Syria, where the regime confiscated all property from people it deemed “terrorists,” using new laws on land it had taken to prop up regime agendas and create facts on the ground, a sly way of gaining revenue while avoiding sanctions.
Today, ironically, I can no longer watch RT on Freeview, Sky, or other Western media channels because, just days after Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, it was taken off the air across Europe and the U.K., deemed “unfit to hold a license.” If only such a concerted Western consensus had been garnered against Russian disinformation in Syria, providing a challenge to the Russian and Syrian regime’s narrative that it was always “fighting the terrorists,” the Syrian war might, in my view, have ended by now, instead of dragging on into its twelfth year. May the Ukraine war at least not share that fate.
Look at the imagery in this poster plastered on a wall in bombed-out Homs. I photographed it on a visit in April 2018. Bashar al-Assad, president of Syria, sporting dark glasses and military fatigues, looking resolute and determined, appears in the heavens opposite the Virgin Mary, floating above the head of a martyred soldier. Bashar, on a par with the Virgin Mary, is presented as the guardian angel of Syria’s Christians. The message is spelled out even more clearly in war slogans liberally scrawled by regime militias on the walls of buildings everywhere, even on mosques — “There is no god but Bashar” and “Do not kneel for god, kneel for Bashar.”
Since the start of the current war, Bashar al-Assad, in power since 2000, has consistently sought to promote himself as the protector of Syria’s minorities — be they Christian, Alawi, Shi’i or Druze — from Islamist extremists. Many Western audiences have been seduced by his smart casual look and by his increasingly prominent, beautifully turned-out British wife, Asma. What has happened to minorities over the last 10 years of war and how does that compare to their treatment historically inside Syria?
Syria’s constitution is secular, but states that the president must be Muslim. When Bashar’s father, Hafez al-Assad, seized power in 1970, he was the first Alawite to become head of state. Alawites were considered by mainstream orthodox Sunni Muslims, who make up around 75% of Syria’s population, to be an heretical offshoot of Shi’a Islam, so Hafez engineered a convenient fatwa from Musa al-Sadr, a respected Shi’a cleric, declaring Alawites to be “within the fold of Islam.” Before the current war, Alawites accounted for about 10% of the population. Precise figures today are notoriously difficult to assess but most experts think the proportion may now have risen to something closer to 15%, partly because the majority of the many millions who have left Syria as refugees have been Sunni Muslims. Christians account for around 10% of the population, while Druze and Ismailis (further offshoots of Shi’a Islam) together represent about 5%.
Sectarianism and internal divisions
It is a common misperception in the West that sectarianism in the region is some ancient phenomenon rooted in age-old feuds. The Assads know this and understand only too well how to play on Western fears of Christian persecution by Muslim extremists, especially after the rise of ISIS and its public beheadings of Western Christians. But such divisions as existed between people were as likely to be found within the plethora of Christian and Muslim sects historically represented, and still present, in Syria as between the different religious communities themselves. One colorful story told to me by a Syrian dentist who grew up in a majority Orthodox Christian village in Syria’s Wadi Nasara (Valley of the Christians) described how his church felt so upstaged by a fancy new Evangelical church built with money brought in via the Allied army after World War II that the rival church was blown up! Syria’s Christians are not one homogenous group — there are many internal divisions, just as there are within Muslim and indeed Jewish groupings. The root of the problem is often economic inequality, rather than religious difference.
A striking historic example is the 1860 Damascus massacre of thousands of Christians. Covered in the European press at the time as a sectarian event, it triggered outrage and public sympathy, followed by the dispatch of French troops in what was labelled the first humanitarian intervention in defense of minorities. Yet the problem was never sectarian — it originated within the silk industry of Mount Lebanon. The Maronite Catholics were commercially closest to the French and many lived in socially-isolated grandeur, rich from the privileges awarded them by Western powers seeking to gain new markets at a time of European recession. As the Ottoman grip on its empire weakened, a feeding frenzy began in its provinces, with foreign interests competing for the spoils. The result was not only the ensuing inter-confessional violence among communities that had lived together largely peacefully up to that point, but also the complete undermining of the regional silk industry. It was gradually bought out by foreigners, mainly French Catholics, leading more and more locals to lose their livelihoods.
In Damascus the predominantly Catholic wealthy quarter in the Old City was burnt and looted by a mix of impoverished Druze and Bedouin, while many indigenous Orthodox Christians who lived in poverty-stricken Midan outside the walls to the south were spared and protected by their Muslim neighbors. The same resentments based on privilege and inequalities are building in today’s Syria, as churches in Homs and Aleppo are rebuilt and refurbished while the vast Sunni suburbs and their local mosques remain flattened. Only the flagship Aleppo Umayyad mosque and the Homs Khaled ibn al-Waleed mosque are being rebuilt for show, as empty shells.
Newly made church pews in Homs about to be varnished. Photo by the author.Aleppo’s Umayyad Mosque under restoration, funded by Chechnya’s Ramzan Kadyrov, a key ally of Russia’s Vladimir Putin. Photo by the author.Khalid ibn al-Waleed Mosque in Homs, restored to a very rudimentary standard by the regime’s Al-Iskan al-Askeri, the Military Housing outfit. Photo by the author.
The 1860 war, like the war that rages today in Syria, was often mislabeled a civil war. Episodes of persecution were frequently misread by Europeans as sectarian, rather than economic, in nature.
But as with the current war, it only exacerbated the root cause of the grievances, deepening foreign interference. In the wake of French troops educational and philanthropic agencies began to arrive, often run by Catholic missionaries, founding orphanages, boarding schools, and dispensaries in which their own religion was privileged.
Engineering demographic change
Once the French took over Syria after World War I under their mandate, they continued their “divide and rule” methods by creating separate statelets, including for the Alawis and the Druze. But their attempts were resisted in the Great Revolt of 1925, which began in the southern Druze region. The Syrian people showed their innate pluralism by refusing to identify themselves by sect. Not until after the Ba’athist coup in 1963 did sectarian sentiment in Syria begin in earnest, when the sense of exclusion felt by many Sunnis led to the first real appearance of Sunni Islamist militancy in the 1980s, the trigger for the Muslim Brotherhood Hama massacre led by Bashar’s uncle, Rifaat al-Assad.
From 2012 onward “starve or surrender/reconciliation” deals were imposed on populations perceived to be disloyal. The first such deal was in Homs, where opponents of the Assad government were transported out in the famous “green buses” to the rebellious Idlib Province, whose population has now swelled to bursting with more and more displaced rebels, overwhelmingly Sunni Muslims. By late 2016, after half the Syrian population had been displaced and Syrian citizenship had been granted to tens of thousands of Iranian mercenaries who had fought to keep him in power, Bashar boasted to an American interviewer that “the social fabric is much better than before.”
Demographic change continues to be engineered or precipitated in today’s war, as it has been throughout Syria’s history. Centuries ago Sayf al-Dawla, founder of the Hamdanid dynasty, relocated the entire Shi’a population of Harran (in today’s Turkey) to repopulate his capital Aleppo after it had been ravaged by a Byzantine attack. After the end of the Crimean War, the Russians, needing to create a Christian majority, brought in Christians and by 1865 had pushed over half a million Muslims out into the Ottoman heartlands. In 1939 the French separated the Sanjak of Alexandretta from Syria and ceded it to Turkey, triggering the exodus of thousands of Armenians and Arabic-speaking Alawi, Sunni, and Christian refugees into northern Syria. In 1967 after capturing the Golan Heights in the Six Day War, Israel began almost immediately to settle Israeli Jews there, before illegally annexing the territory in 1981. Israeli maps show it as Israeli territory, not as Syrian territory occupied by Israel. Official Syrian maps continue to show both the Golan and the Sanjak of Alexandretta (renamed Hatay by Turkey) as part of Syria. Future maps of Syria will no doubt vary depending on who publishes them.
The ultimate irony is that within so-called secular Syria as represented by the nominally secular Ba’ath Party, in power under the Assads for the last 50 years, sectarianism has been consistently on the rise. The mentality has been you have either been a Ba’athist or not. You are either with us or against us. Loyal Ba’athists have been protected, be they Sunni, Alawi, Christian or whatever. Those perceived as disloyal to the Ba’athist Party have been punished, either through imprisonment, detention or torture.
Before the Assads, religious identities were pluralistic, and were only relevant at the social level. They were not politicized or institutionalized. The Assad legacy is to have turned Syria into a sectarian society for its own ends, following the French mandate model, setting community against community. But once Assad and his dynasty are gone, the Muslim-majority Syrian society will, in time, revert to its natural state of tolerance and co-existence with religious minorities, given the chance. It is the default position of every Syrian I know. All of them mourn the current triumph of Assad’s mock-secular sectarianism and pray collectively for its speedy passing.
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This article first appeared on 12 April 2021 as part of a series written for MEI, the Middle East Institute based in Washington DC, where I am a non-resident scholar on their Syria Program:
Cross-section of the Washington DC Capitol Dome, showing the Islamic double dome vaulting technique
England’s greatest architect, Sir Christopher Wren, wrote that what we call “the Gothic style should more rightly be called the Saracen style.” Americans, it seems, are especially fond of Gothic. Across the continent are spectacular Gothic Revival structures, many modelled on the medieval cathedrals of England and France, such as St. John the Divine and St. Patrick’s in New York City, Washington National Cathedral, and the Cathedral of St. John the Baptist in Savannah, GA. On top of that, America boasts the world’s biggest collection of neo-Gothic architecture in its universities, colleges, and schools. What accounts for that popularity?
America’s leading neo-Gothic architect, Ralph Adams Cram, wrote in his book Gothic Quest about the power of architecture “to bend men and sway them.” Like the fervent European Gothic Revival architects before him, such as Augustus Pugin, designer of the clock tower commonly known as Big Ben for the Houses of Parliament in London, Cram believed that Gothic was the “purest” form.
While studying classical architecture in Rome, he had an epiphany during a Christmas Eve mass, thereafter becoming an Anglo-Catholic. Like his fellow neo-Gothic enthusiasts in Europe, and indeed like many Europeans today, for him Gothic architecture epitomized the Catholic faith. The commonly held view of Gothic’s provenance was that it represented Europe’s shared heritage. Although such Eurocentrism remains deeply rooted, serious scholarship has questioned just how “European” the Greek, Roman, and Byzantine civilizations that preceded the era of Gothic actually were, since all three empires were multicultural and multiethnic. Few of the later Roman emperors were ethnically Italian and even fewer Byzantine rulers were ethnically Greek.
The Islamic roots of Gothic architecture
The time has come to examine Gothic in the same way, since Cram never realized, along with Americans and Europeans in general, that key elements of Gothic architecture — the pointed arch, the trefoil arch, ribbed vaulting, and many other features — were born, not in Europe, but further east, often evolving from styles that were associated with a completely different religion.
Even Eurocentric architects cannot deny that the pointed arch had its origins in Islamic architecture. It appeared in the 7th century Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem, built as the first Muslim shrine by the Umayyad caliph Abd al-Malik, and was then further developed under the Abbasids in Baghdad.
The Dome of the Rock in Jerusalem was built as a Muslim shrine in the late 7th century. Its design features were widely copied by the medieval Crusaders and brought back to Europe in the 12th century. (Andrew Shiva / Wikipedia / CC BY-SA 4.0)
It went on to become the defining feature of Islamic religious buildings. The trefoil arch, so enthusiastically adopted by Gothic architecture as a symbol of the Holy Trinity, first appeared as a carved decorative feature in Umayyad shrines and desert palaces. Byzantine church architecture, which the Umayyad caliphate inherited, had round Roman arches and single domes, like Constantinople’s Hagia Sophia. There was not a pointed or trefoil arch in sight, let alone ribbed vaulting.
Trefoil arches above the mihrab in the Cordoba Mezquita, predating their use in Gothic cathedrals by over a hundred years. (Ingo Mehling, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
From Syria and their capital Damascus, the Umayyads brought these elements to Spain in the 8th century, re-using them in their main mosque of Cordoba, still known today as the Mezquita, Spanish for “mosque,” even though it was converted to a Catholic cathedral at the Reconquista. The 10th century ribbed vaulting of the Mezquita’s main dome was analyzed in 2017 by Spanish architectural engineers and pronounced the most perfect example of geometry, never once needing structural repair in its thousand-year existence.
The masons’ marks displayed on the rear wall show the names to be overwhelmingly Muslim, unsurprisingly, since their grasp of geometry and their stonemasonry was recognized as far superior to that of their European counterparts. It was no coincidence that Spanish Christian kings like Alfonso XI and Pedro the Cruel insisted on Mudéjar (Muslim) craftsmen for their building projects.
From Spain, these skills and styles passed into southern France where they were gradually incorporated into Benedictine abbeys and Cluniac shrines on the pilgrim route to Santiago de Compostela. The same styles also found their way into Europe from vibrant Islamic cities like Cairo, Damascus, and Aleppo, passing first via Italian trading ports like Amalfi, then via the Norman, Arab-influenced architecture of Sicily.
Amalfi cathedral, showing the pointed arches first copied from the Ibn Tulun Mosque in Cairo. The cathedral was financed by Amalfi merchants trading with Cairo. (Berthold Werner, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
The returning Crusaders, ironically, set up new kingdoms in the 12th century, mimicking the styles of their conquered enemies, whom they called the Saracens, meaning “people who steal.” The Norman French brought the styles back to Normandy, where they synthesized them into what was originally just called “French work” in cathedrals like Notre-Dame and Chartres, before importing the style into England, under Norman rule at the time, in buildings like Canterbury Cathedral and Westminster Abbey.
Fan vaulting of the crossing inside Canterbury Cathedral. (Tobiasvonderhaar, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)Pointed arches, trefoil arches and ribbed vaulting in the Chapter House, Westminster Abbey. (ChrisVTG Photography, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Only centuries later was it misleadingly dubbed “Gothic” by an Italian art historian, the same person who coined the term “Renaissance.” In Spain, it was called the “Gothic of the Catholic Kings.” Eurocentrism at work again.
From Spain to North America
In North America, it is easy to forget that when the Spanish arrived in Mexico in 1492, they came from a world in which Christians and Muslims had shared rule for nearly 800 years. The Spanish colonizers did not build in the style of the native Americans whose lands they took, but imported the styles of their homeland, just as the Umayyads had recreated the Syrian styles of their homeland in Spain, modelling the Cordoba Mezquita on the Damascus Umayyad Mosque. The influence of “the Moors,” as the Muslims were known, can be found in practically every style of Spain from the 8th century onwards, with its unmistakable tinge of Orientalism.
The Spanish missions in California and Arizona, founded by Catholic priests of the Franciscan order in the 18th and 19th centuries, also imported the styles of their homeland, and Moorish designs are evident in San Xavier del Bac and San Luis Rey de Francia.
Mission San Xavier del Bac, near Tucson, Arizona, with its Moorish-inspired exterior. (Keyany, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
Taking inspiration from English Oxford and Cambridge colleges, “Collegiate Gothic,” as it is known, began in 19th century America with church-like libraries at prestigious universities such as Harvard’s Gore Hall.
Harvard’s Gore Hall. (G.G. Smith, engraver, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons)
The popularity of Collegiate Gothic endures into the 21st century, with prominent “new” buildings still seen as representing the pinnacle of sophistication, such as Yale’s Benjamin Franklin College and Princeton’s Whitman College. Much of Yale’s campus can be considered “Gothic,” including Yale Law School.
Yale’s Sterling Law Building, home to the Yale Law School. (Shmitra, CC BY-SA 3.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
In Europe too there is still one famous neo-Gothic church under construction. Its Spanish architect, Antoni Gaudí, another devout Catholic, openly acknowledged the influence of Islamic architecture in his masterpiece, the Sagrada Família in Barcelona. It is a style we might call Hispano-Saracenic-Gothic, representing the ultimate fusion of nature, geometry, and religion. A multinational team is collaborating to complete it in time for the 2026 centenary of Gaudí’s death, using materials from all over the world.
The still unfinished Hispano-Saracenic-Gothic cathedral of La Sagrada Família, Barcelona. (C messier, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
On top of all the “Saracen,” “Moorish” elements we have identified in so-called “Gothic” buildings, there is still one more surprising thing to take in: The Capitol building in Washington, DC owes a debt to Islamic architecture, through its double dome.
The United States Capitol, with its double dome, a “Saracen” technique where the interior and exterior have different profiles, leaving a hollow in between. (Sdkb, CC BY-SA 4.0, via Wikimedia Commons)
This is the technique, first used in Seljuk tombs and later Ottoman mosques by the great court architect Sinan, where the exterior profile is taller, in order to make a bold silhouette on the skyline, than the interior dome, which is lower, with a hollow space in between. The clever device was copied across Europe, notably by Wren in his iconic dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral in London where he openly admitted use of what he called “Saracen vaulting.” That is why the cover my new book, Stealing from the Saracens: How Islamic Architecture Shaped Europe shows the interior dome of St. Paul’s Cathedral.
Surely if there is a lesson in all of this, it is that no one “owns” architecture, just as no one “owns” science. Everything builds on everything else.
How wonderful it would be, in this current age of Islamophobia and nationalism, if we could acknowledge the ties that bind us, often in mysterious and unseen ways, rather than seeking to airbrush them out of our history. My hope is that an enhanced understanding of the shared elements of Christian and Islamic architecture might encourage us toward a broader inter-religious dialogue, even with those we may sometimes have seen as “the enemy.”
A version of this article first appeared on the website of the Washington-based thinktank The Middle East Institute:
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