Making Do in Damascus: Navigating a Generation of Change in Family and Work

2. The Arab Republic of Syria

25 2 The Arab Republic of Syria Unity, Freedom, Brotherhood. —Ba‘th Party slogan Historical Syria Syria is an ancient land. Its history goes back to the Sumerians who lived in the region more than five thousand years ago. Located in the eastern Mediterranean between Turkey, Lebanon, Jordan, and Iraq, it has been a center of trade and commerce for millennia. Damascus itself claims to be the oldest continually inhabited city in the world. Variously occupied and incorporated into ancient empires by the Babylonians, Egyptians, Hittites, Persians, Macedonians, Greeks, Romans, Byzantines, Arabs, and Turks, Syria is a mosaic of ethnic, religious, and cultural groups. From these groups, an array of political alliances has formed and reformed within and across social class throughout its long history. Many of the religious and cultural groups in Syria trace their beginnings back to the Roman Empire. Jews and Christians as well as Greeks, Romans, and other religious and ethnic groups lived in Damascus from the first century CE. When the Roman Empire divided in 395, Syria became incorporated into the Eastern Byzantine Empire. For two and a half centuries, the churches and communities of the East were ruled from Constantinople (Istanbul). Yet as the church debated and clarified the key points of its theology—Did Christ have two natures, God and man, and two minds or one? Did the Holy Spirit proceed from the Father and the Son or just from the Father?—geographic distance as well as political and theological disagreements increasingly marginalized the eastern empire 26 | Making Do in Damascus from the western. As a result, when Muslim armies invaded in 636, they met little resistance from the majority Monophysite Christians, and Syria was absorbed into an expanding Islamic Empire. In 661, the Umayyads made Damascus the capital of the Islamic world, divided the region into four large districts (Damascus, Homs, Urdin, and Palestine), and made Arabic the empire’s official language. Although Damascus lost some of its political prestige when the Abbasids moved their capital to Iraq in 750, the city remained an important center of culture, commerce, religion, and trade for the next five hundred years. Beginning in the tenth century, however, a series of conquests and reconquests by Byzantines, Turks, Crusaders, Ayyubids, and Mongols as well as periodic famine and plague weakened the region and destroyed much of the city’s wealth, architecture, and culture. In 1516, Syria was again conquered— this time by Ottoman Turks. For the next four hundred years, the Ottomans would control the entire region—collecting tribute and exercising political influence from the larger cities of Beirut, Damascus, and Aleppo. For the most part, outlying areas were left to do as they pleased so that local, clan-based loyalties and political power remained strong.1 Syria’s modern history is rooted in the economic and political transformations of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For a long while, rural areas had been governed by a traditional system of patronage among feudal landowners, peasants, and herdsmen. During the second half of the nineteenth century, this system of patronage began to give way to larger-scale commercial agriculture dominated by an absentee-landlord class. With increases in mechanization, farming was less prone to the vicissitudes of pests and drought and became a more secure source of investment and wealth. This change, coupled with greater involvement of rural elites in local politics and Ottoman interest in increasing revenues through land taxes, led to the privatization and consolidation of land holdings under the control of urban, absentee landlords. Within a relatively short period of time, the older tribal sheikhs were transformed 1. This brief overview of Syria’s early history draws on Barakat 1993; Hitti 1959, 2002; and Hourani 2003. The Arab Republic of Syria | 27 into “cotton sheikhs” (Hinnebusch 1991; Khalaf 1991), whose economic and political interests were linked to the markets of the West and who were alienated from the interests of traditional peasants and herdsmen.2 The interests of these elite absentee landlords quickly merged with those of older merchant urban and religious elites as religious leaders began to drop their opposition to marriage across broad family lines. By the beginning of the twentieth century, Syria’s political economy consisted of a “politics of notables” (Hourani 1968), in which an alliance among absentee landlords, merchant elites in the old city of Damascus (old “Shami” families), and a newer military class of influential families...