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WORK TITLE: The Merchant of Syria
WORK NOTES:
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 3/6/1956
WEBSITE: https://dianadarke.com/
CITY:
STATE:
COUNTRY: United Kingdom
NATIONALITY: British
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
Born March 6, 1956.
ADDRESS
CAREER
Author, travel writer, translator, and cultural specialist. Also works as BBC correspondent.
WRITINGS
Also author of many other travel guides for different publishers.
SIDELIGHTS
BBC Middle East correspondent and journalist Diana Darke has loved travel since she was very young. “My earliest travel memories are of long car journeys from Wales to southern Germany each year to stay with my grandparents at their farm in a tiny village in the Pfalz (Rheinland Palatinate),” she stated in an interview found on the Bradt Travel Guides website. “My brother and I loved those journeys. In the days before seat-belts, electronic devices or even tape cassettes, we developed an eye for detail in the towns and landscapes we passed through. We learnt to watch the ever-changing view from the car window and were never bored.”
My House in Damascus
Darke began to specialize in the Middle East (and Syria in particular) after her first trip to the region in 1978 in order to learn Arabic. “Darke is a journalist and travel writer,” explained a contributor to the Economist, “and much of her early time in Syria was spent walking its hills and exploring its mosques, churches, monasteries and fortresses. But in 2005 she took the bold decision to use her life’s savings to buy an 18th-century Ottoman house in [Damascus’s] Old City.”
That house was called Bait Baroudi, and her experience in buying the dwelling and living in Damascus is the subject of her work My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution. “She bought the house – and paid for it in cash, which meant a trip to the bank, where the manager told her the transfer from England had not yet arrived but she could have the cash anyway,” stated Mary Russell in the Irish Times. “Carried away in plastic bags, it took the Baroudi brothers six hours to count it. And don’t even mention insurance, which in Islam is akin to setting yourself up against the fate Allah has in store for you.” She “tells much of her Damascus story,” said the New Republic reviewer, “through a deep knowledge of Arabic,” explaining how the language reveals the culture of the ancient state.
Using her house as a lens to examine modern Syria, My House in Damascus becomes a kind of complementary text to Darke’s travel writing. “By exploring the history and architecture of Bait Baroudi, as well as the background of its neighbors and neighborhood (including a maddening, opaque, and often informal city bureaucracy),” wrote Frederick Deknatel in the New Republic, “Darke details the charms and lives of one of the world’s oldest cities and perhaps the Middle East’s best-preserved urban center. The house is the setting of a unique account of Syria in the six years before the crackdown on peaceful protests led to the current, devastating civil war. She writes about how the Old City’s restoration in the mid- to late-2000s marked a conspicuous boom time in Assad’s Syria.”
The heart of the book, reviewers agree, lies in Darke’s depiction of the culture—warm and welcoming, for the most part—of her neighborhood in Damascus. “It is Darke’s everyday stories of Syria,” declared Kevin A. Davis in the Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, “that demand the attention of readers– from a short trip to Homs, to a cafe encounter to discuss a potential marriage, to seemingly endless meetings with lawyers.” Unfortunately, Darke was not able to enjoy her house for long. “After the start of the war,” wrote a contributor to Public Radio International’s the World in the introduction to an interview with the writer and journalist, “Darke gave a group of her friends … permission to take refuge in the house. ‘I was happy about that arrangement, and this lasted for a couple of years,’ she says.” She was unable to return to Damascus because the civil war had shut down the diplomatic channels that could have given her access to her home.
The Merchant of Syria
In The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival, Darke outlines the culture of modern Syria by examining the life of successful textile merchant and businessman Abu Chaker. “Darke describes Abu Chaker as the ‘archetypal Syrian merchant’: Crafty, wily, smart and endlessly adaptable. She says he embodied a noble Syrian tradition stretching back centuries. In a diverse religious and linguistic landscape,” stated William Armstrong in the Hürriyet Daily News, “… trade glued the mosaic together. The high esteem that merchants have historically been held in the region is clear from the commercial architecture dating back centuries ” Abu Chaker was born into relative affluence, but when his father died in the early 1930s he had to go to work to support his mother and the rest of his family. “Alongside this story of personal survival, Darke recounts Syria’s economic history,” declared Robin Yassin-Kassab in the National. “Her intriguing argument is that commerce has always acted as the social glue joining different communities. Instead of the rural-urban divide, she focuses on the ‘grain-trade alliance,’ which her ‘archetypal Syrian merchant’ embodied through his co-operative social network.” The Merchant of Syria, said a Publishers Weekly reviewer, “culminates with an account of the ghastly civil war that erupted in Syria not long before Chaker’s death.”
Critics praised The Merchant of Syria. “Darke has lived in and written about Syria before,” asserted Jeff Fleischer on the Foreword Reviews website, “and does a nice job describing the various factors that, for better or worse, led to the modern Syrian state.” “If you want to grasp what Syria was, what it could have been, and how instead it has become this hell,” concluded Church Times website reviewer Stephen Griffith, himself a Syrian specialist with long familiarity with Syrian history, “reading this book will be informative, and offer a deeply human view of a world destroyed by the Assad thugs and their associates.”
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Economist, February 20, 2016, “Love Story: Damascus,” p. 75.
Irish Times, June 8, 2014, Mary Russell, review of My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution.
New Republic, August 15, 2014, Frederick Deknatel, “How One Woman’s Luxury Damascus Villa Became a Refugee Camp.”
Publishers Weekly, February 19, 2018, review of The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival, p. 65.
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June-July, 2015, Kevin A. Davis, review of My House in Damascus, p. 62.
ONLINE
Bradt Travel Guides, https://www.bradtguides.com/ (May 28, 2014), “Interview with Diana Darke.”
Church Times, https://www.churchtimes.co.uk/ (May 4, 2018), Stephen Griffith, review of The Merchant of Syria.
Diana Darke website, https://dianadarke.com (June 20, 2018), author profile.
Foreword Reviews, https://www.forewordreviews.com/ (March/April, 2018), Jeff Fleischer, review of The Merchant of Syria.
Hürriyet Daily News Online, http://www.hurriyetdailynews.com/ (April 12, 2018), William Armstrong, review of The Merchant of Syria.
National, https://www.thenational.ae/ (April 5, 2018), Robin Yassin-Kassab, review of The Merchant of Syria.
World, https://www.pri.org/ (December 22, 2014), “A British Author Fights to Hang onto Her Home in Damascus.”
Diana Darke is an Arabic translator and cultural specialist who has lived and worked in the Middle East for over thirty years. She is the author of My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis (Haus, 2016). Her links to Syria are deep and ongoing.
A British author fights to hang onto her home in Damascus
PRI's The World
December 22, 2014 · 5:15 PM EST
Producer Shirin Jaafari
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Damascus trip 17 Nov - 3 Dec 2014 022.JPG
Diana Darke stands in the courtyard of her house in Damascus, Syria. Credit: Courtesy of Diana Darke
Author Diana Darke has been traveling to Syria for years, and she had always admired the history and architecture of Damascus. So when she had the opportunity to become a homeowner in Syria's capital city, she instantly took it.
Bait Baroudi courtyard with fountain working, view towards the northern 19th century facade.jpg
Bait Baroudi courtyard with fountain working, view towards the northern 19th century facade. Credit: Courtesy of Fiona Dunlop
She bought a house in the city back in 2005, when Syria was quiet and peaceful. But even now that a civil war rages around Damacus and across the country, Darke is still fighting to hang onto the house she fell in love with.
It's located in the Muslim Quarter of Old City of Damascus, with painted ceilings and inlaid stones. Darke describes it as historic and beautiful. It took three years of shuttling back and forth between Damascus and London to complete its restoration.
After the start of the war, Darke gave a group of her friends, who were displaced, permission to take refuge in the house. "I was happy about that arrangement, and this lasted for a couple of years," she says.
That is, until recently. Darke heard that her lawyer had moved into the house and was taking it over. "He was busy kicking all my friends out," she says. She rushed to Damascus and began the lengthy process of getting her house back.
There are still a few court cases pending, but she says the house is once again hers. She has written a book about her travails called "My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution."
Darke says that while the front lines haven't reached into central Damascus, the city has been severely affected. "Residents in Damascus get less than four hours of electricity a day," she says. "There's a massive shortage of bottled gas, which is what everybody uses to cook." Some suburbs have simply been shelled practically out of existence
But while the war has made it extremely difficult for Darke to keep her house, she says she can't fathom selling it: "To give up on it would be giving up on Syria."
Diana Darke
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Diana Darke
Author and Middle East expert Diana Darke at a talk at King's College School, Wimbledon
Born
6 March 1956 (age 62)
London, England, UK
Occupation
Author, Middle East expert, Arabist, Broadcaster
Spouse(s)
John McHugo
Children
Chloe and Max
Parent(s)
Alma Hauck and Ronald Taylor
Website
dianadarke.com
Diana Darke (born 6 March 1956) is an author, Middle East cultural expert, Arabist, BBC broadcaster[1][2][3] and journalist. Her work has appeared in the Guardian,[4][5][6] the Financial Times,[7][8] the Sunday Times,[9] the Daily Telegraph[10][11] and Al Araby.[12] She graduated from Wadham College, Oxford, in 1977, where she studied German and Philosophy/Arabic,[13] then went on to work for the British Government Communications Headquarters (GCHQ) and Racal Electronics Plc as an Arabic consultant. In 2005, Diana purchased a 17th-century courtyard house in the Old City of Damascus,[14] which enabled her to become deeply embedded in Syrian society and culture. Diana has returned six times since the Rebellion began in March 2011 and her links inside the country are deep and ongoing. The house is currently lived in by Syrian refugee friends displaced from their own homes by shelling in the suburbs.
Publications[edit]
Syria, Bradt Travel Guides, 2010, ISBN 978-1-841-62314-6.
Oman, Bradt Travel Guides, 2010, ISBN 978-1-841-62332-0.
North Cyprus, Bradt Travel Guides, 2012, ISBN 978-1-841-62372-6.
Eastern Turkey, Bradt Travel Guides, 2014, ISBN 978-1-841-62490-7
My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis, Haus Publishing, 2016, ISBN 978-1-908-32399-6.
No bio
The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival
Publishers Weekly. 265.8 (Feb. 19, 2018): p65.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2018 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival
Diana Darke. Oxford Univ., $27.95 (224p)
ISBN 978-0-190874-85-8
Darke (My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis) presents a richly detailed work that contextualizes Syria's long history as a "melting pot of civilizations" while giving an intimate view of one Syrian's extraordinary life. In chronicling the rise of Abu Chaker (1921-2013) from local textile salesman to multinational fabric magnate, Darke strikes a celebratory and even reverential tone. She paints her subject as a deeply humble man who leaned on faith, sought consumer trust above all else, and shunned debt, yet was always willing to "pay more to get something better." Interwoven with Chaker's biography are chapters on the social structures that shaped his world, such as how "the strict routine of prayer drummed in the importance of punctuality" for the diligent merchant. The book culminates with an account of the ghastly civil war that erupted in Syria not long before Chaker's death, allowing Darke to contrast the oppressive al-Assad regime with the merchant's peaceful and productive life. Darke does a magnificent job of taking what could otherwise be a dispiriting tale of national crisis, and reframing it as an inspirational story of personal survival and triumph. (May)
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival." Publishers Weekly, 19 Feb. 2018, p. 65. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A529357553/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=385e4e92. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A529357553
My House in Damascus: An Inside View Of the Syrian Revolution
Kevin A. Davis
Washington Report on Middle East Affairs. 34.4 (June-July 2015): p62.
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2015 American Educational Trust
http://www.washington-report.org
Full Text:
My House in Damascus: An Inside View Of the Syrian Revolution
By Diana Darke, Haus Publishing, 2014, paperback, 254 pp. List: $24.95; MEB: $18.
[ILLUSTRATION OMITTED]
My House In Damascus is an account of a British woman in Syria and the product of the author's decades of experience as a professional researcher in Syria. It is at once a story of her own time there as well as the stories of the many close friends she made.
In the mid-2000s, Darke decided to look into buying property in the old city of Damascus, a decision rarely made by non-Syrians due to the formidable bureaucratic obstacles facing foreigners. But the seemingly mundane details of this process can provide great insight into Syrian life, and Darke's account is a fascinating and gripping tale about a foreign woman in Syria who decides to create a home there.
It is Darke's everyday stories of Syria that demand the attention of readers-- from a short trip to Homs, to a cafe encounter to discuss a potential marriage, to seemingly endless meetings with lawyers and bankers. These colorful anecdotes provide a fascinating picture of contemporary Syrian society at a time when news from Syria rarely goes beyond the war.
It is not until past the book's halfway mark that Darke begins to discuss the Syrian revolution in any real detail-- and even then, the story is still heavily focused on her house. Readers wanting an in-depth examination of the politics of the civil war should look elsewhere.
As the protests of 2011 slowly transform into what we now describe as the Syrian civil war, Darke's story grows increasingly dark. Eventually she is unable to return to Syria, as the embassy in London is now closed. The friends we have become so familiar with throughout her book gradually come to live in her house with their families as their villages are destroyed, her house becoming something of a sanctuary for her displaced friends.
A final bonus of the book is that a portion of the proceeds go to benefit a Higher Education Fund for Syrians--further evidence of Darke's commitment to and love for Syria and its people, who have given her so much over the years.
Kevin A. Davis is director of AET's Middle East Books and More.
Davis, Kevin A.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
Davis, Kevin A. "My House in Damascus: An Inside View Of the Syrian Revolution." Washington Report on Middle East Affairs, June-July 2015, p. 62. General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A417186372/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=8e0e84bb. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A417186372
Love story; Damascus
The Economist. 418.8977 (Feb. 20, 2016): p75(US).
Copyright: COPYRIGHT 2016 Economist Intelligence Unit N.A. Incorporated
http://store.eiu.com/
Full Text:
Two memoirs of falling in love with Syria
WHAT is being lost as Syria bleeds? Not just lives, but a tradition of pluralism and tolerance, all too rare in the Middle East, and a rich cultural treasure-house. That is the message of these two very personal books by Britons who have lived in Syria and fallen in love with it.
Peter Clark ran the British Council in Damascus for five years in the 1990s. His diaries--quirky, digressive, indiscreet--chronicle his attempts to build cultural relations in a police state filled with fear, corruption and red tape. Even friendly officials are wary of the ruling Baath party.
When he starts English classes, they are infiltrated by the secret police. He persists, organising an exhibition of photographs of Syria by Freya Stark, a travel writer, in the 1920s and 1930s--and then, more ambitiously, an Anglo-Syrian production of Purcell's opera "Dido and Aeneas", which, against all odds, is a great success. In the midst of all this, he somehow finds time to translate a novel by Ulfat Idilbi, a spry old Syrian feminist in her 80s.
There are political insights into the persecution complex of the Alawites, the heterodox religious minority, historically poor and marginalised, which has come to dominate the ruling civil and military elite. There is a chilling encounter with the president, Hafez al-Assad, whose "cold grey eyes" seemed to "look into your soul". But the principal characters are the author's Syrian friends--the writers, lawyers, bank managers and university professors with whom he eats, drinks, dances and gossips. He relishes the odd details of Syrian life: the old khan (or caravanserai) that used to be a lunatic asylum, the tea Syrian migrants have brought back from Argentina, the delightful word gommaji (an amalgam of Italian and Turkish), meaning a man who repairs punctures.
Diana Darke's book is set in the Syria of Bashar al-Assad, who succeeded his father in 2000. Ms Darke is a journalist and travel writer, and much of her early time in Syria was spent walking its hills and exploring its mosques, churches, monasteries and fortresses. But in 2005 she took the bold decision to use her life's savings to buy an 18th-century Ottoman house in the Old City of Damascus. Her book, now in an enlarged third edition, tells the remarkable story of how she did so, despite a succession of legal and bureaucratic obstacles, and the onset of civil war.
As with Mr Clark and his opera production, Ms Darke's British and Syrian friends thought she was mad. Like him, she persevered. Interwoven with the story of how she renovated the house are asides on an array of issues--education, women's rights, Islamic art--and on the Assads, whose regime she clearly detests. When the war forced her to leave, she turned the house into a refuge for Syrian friends escaping the violence.
Both authors cling to the hope that Syria with its mosaic of communities and traditions, and its unique history and archaeology, will somehow rebuild itself. In the meantime their books serve as moving tributes to the Syria that has been lost.
Damascus Diaries: Life Under the Assads.
By Peter Clark.
My House in Damascus: An Inside View of the Syrian Crisis.
By Diana Darke.
Source Citation (MLA 8th Edition)
"Love story; Damascus." The Economist, 20 Feb. 2016, p. 75(US). General OneFile, http://link.galegroup.com/apps/doc/A450846092/ITOF?u=schlager&sid=ITOF&xid=1777acf3. Accessed 27 May 2018.
Gale Document Number: GALE|A450846092
Darke tells much of her Damascus story through a deep knowledge of Arabic, especially the phrases that carry special weight and meaning for such mundane things as insurance. No one in Syria insures his or her house, she notes, because insurance is a mixed-up issue in Islam. “How can you take out insurance against the will of God?” Instead, things are left to fate, in a way, or qadar wa qada, “God’s decree and judgment.” It is a phrase she repeats throughout the book; each time it seems more consequential. She never built a hammam or Turkish bath under the courtyard of Bait Baroudi, as many recommended she do, though Bassim, the architect, drew up plans. “Today,” she notes, “it would have made a good bomb shelter.”
Author Diana Darke tells a story of hope from Homs amid dark times and repeating history
“I was a 22-year-old blonde woman travelling alone, and I was completely safe. Everybody was courteous and welcoming,” the author recalls of how she fell in love with Syria
Robin Yassin-Kassab
April 5, 2018
Updated: April 10, 2018 04:31 PM
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Author Diana Darke. Stuart Clarke
The Middle East “held a fascination for me since childhood. I mean, it’s where civilisation began”, engaging conversationalist, British writer and historian Diana Darke says of her lifelong entanglement with the Arab world. Her second book, The Merchant of Syria, is published this month.
After studying Arabic in the 1970s, she spent six months in Beirut. This is when – through a series of cross-border visits – she first fell in love with Syria. “I was a 22-year-old blonde woman travelling alone, and I was completely safe. Everybody was courteous and welcoming,” she recalls.
Damascus in particular captured her heart – “You breathe the history as you walk the streets” – so much so that she wrote a Bradt guidebook to the city. Years later, she struggled through Syria’s notorious bureaucratic hurdles to buy and restore a 17th-century Old City home. Her first book – My House in Damascus (2016) – is an affecting account of this process.
The house was initially inhabited by friends displaced from the besieged area of Ghouta. Then, after a corrupt lawyer wrote a security report describing Darke as “a British terrorist”, the house was seized by profiteers. Undaunted, she returned in 2014 to reclaim it.
Her books interweave contemporary and historical events, providing a long-range perspective that she deems “more important than ever. Because today, everybody has short memories. The media works on immediacy – blood and gore. It distorts people’s view of the area, which across the centuries has been this incredibly open, tolerant, embracing place – and largely because of trade”.
The Merchant of Syria is in part the biography of Abu Chaker Chamsi-Pasha, who began his career at 10, after his father’s death, running the family textiles shop in Homs. He went on to run one of Britain’s biggest textile companies.
The book’s subtitle is A History of Survival. Dodging the United Arab Republic’s nationalisations, Chamsi-Pasha shifted to Lebanon in 1959. At the outbreak of Lebanon’s war, his warehouses were looted, but banks extended him credit simply on the basis of trust. He used it to buy stock directly from the United Kingdom to supply the souqs of the Gulf.
In 1981, he moved into Yorkshire’s struggling textiles industry, buying the giant Hield and saving its Bradford mills.
Alongside this story of personal survival, Darke recounts Syria’s economic history. Her intriguing argument is that commerce has always acted as the social glue joining different communities. Instead of the rural-urban divide, she focuses on the “grain-trade alliance”, which her “archetypal Syrian merchant” embodied through his co-operative social network.
She admiringly describes the waqf system integrating religion, trade and public welfare, and sees Islam’s traditional “moral economy” as a more humane variant of capitalism. “The surplus is put back into the community,” she tells me. “Mutual support is built into the system. Nobody talks about giving to charity. It’s just the way things are done. It’s the opposite of our contemporary corporate cut-throat culture.”
In Chamsi-Pasha’s Homs, Christian traders were as supported as Muslims. Peaceful interchange between the country’s various groups has been the rule, Darke says, “precisely because of political turbulence, because the state – from at least the French period on – was rapacious, it meant communities had to work together to solve problems. And they usually did”. At its best, this produced a form of multiculturalism proving “that the strength of society lies in everybody, from every background, bringing something to the table”.
________________________
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________________________
Chamsi-Pasha resettled in Homs in 1999. He left for the last time in 2011, at the age of 89, and died two years later, having watched the destruction from afar.
The war seems to have undone the strong social bonds that Darke praises. Today, she warns that extremism will continue “as long as a government remains that the majority of the population cannot respect, trust or depend on”, and hopes for a future in which “the motivation for wealth creation is shared benefit, not personal enrichment”. The long historical perspective sometimes makes it seem that Syria is fated to eternal repetition. Evidence is presented of repeated destruction (Emessa – ancient Homs – was also “thoroughly destroyed”), resistance (in 1925, “broad coalitions of Syrians” fought the French), and repression (assisted by foreign mercenaries, the French then burnt Ghouta). I ask Darke if this focus on continuity also contained a message of hope.
“It’s the worst it’s ever been,” she says. “Syrians will have to fight incredibly hard to overcome it. But society will survive. It’s not going to be permanently pushed under by this current phase. My grandfathers – one German, one English – fought in opposite trenches in the First World War. Some years later their children married. There’s a lesson here.”
Living in the eye of Syria’s storm: My House in Damascus
Diana Dark’s account of her life in the ancient city glows with an understanding of and affection for its people
Market: Souk Al-Khayyateen, in the old city of Damascus. Photograph: Tim Gerard Barker/Lonely Planet/Getty
Mary Russell
Sat, Jun 28, 2014, 01:00
First published:
Sat, Jun 28, 2014, 01:00
1
Book Title:
My House in Damascus An Inside View of the Syrian Revolution
ISBN-13:
978-1908323644
Author:
Diana Darke
Publisher:
Haus Publishing
Guideline Price:
Sterling14.99
The advice she got was clear and unambiguous: “Don’t do it.” Further, it was given by a lawyer who knew his stuff. But what was the advice she sought? Marriage? Divorce? Changing horses midstream? None of these. What Diana Darke wanted to know was should she buy a house in Damascus. Reader, she bought it, and when you get to the end of My House in Damascus you’ll understand why.
The old walled city of Damascus is one of the most evocative places in the Middle East. After 300 years of Ottoman rule its architecture, from hovels to ramshackle palaces, speaks, even in decay, of private wealth and public grandeur. Bands of white limestone and black basalt define not only the magnificent Azem Palace but also Beit Baroudi, the gracious dwelling Darke bought after viewing 30 other houses. Its name means “house of the gunpowder seller”.
At a crossroads in her life following the end of her marriage to a diplomat, and being fluent in Arabic, she took on the job of writing the Bradt Guide to Syria. She had first visited the Middle East in 1978 to study Arabic, but it wasn’t until 2005, while researching the Bradt guide, that she got the idea of buying Bait Baroudi.
It was a challenging process. Take the dead-aunt clause. This stipulated that the sellers, the four Baroudi brothers, had to guarantee that they and only they had a claim on the house – at which point enter their dead aunt, whose beneficiaries could be classed as claimants. A problem? No, no. Easily resolved by writing in another clause, she was assured.
Then there was the price. Whatever it was – she doesn’t tell us – the sum shrinks somewhat when it appears in the contract. “This is for the tax,” the lawyer tells her, “so we don’t have to pay the real amount.”
There’s a lot of that in a country where bribery is a recognised means of earning a living. The mukhabarat, or military intelligence, would pop in to see how things were going and next day her precious secateurs would be missing.
She bought the house – and paid for it in cash, which meant a trip to the bank, where the manager told her the transfer from England had not yet arrived but she could have the cash anyway. Carried away in plastic bags, it took the Baroudi brothers six hours to count it. And don’t even mention insurance, which in Islam is akin to setting yourself up against the fate Allah has in store for you.
The Syrians took her to their collective heart, inviting her to tea, to visit, to family birthday parties. She was especially lucky in her team of helpers – Ramzi the guide, Marwan the architect, Rashid the lawyer, Abu Ashraf her gofer: “Leaving him to get the suitcases out of the boot,” Darke writes, “I opened both sets of locks . . . and stepped into the courtyard with its riot of colour – the wisteria, the bougainvillea, the myrtle, the lemon tree, the vine ascending to the roof terrace.”
And then, as you will have guessed, war clouds darkened the sky. Marwan fled to Turkey; Ramzi was driven out of his village home, his beloved olive trees destroyed. The British embassy closed. “Conveniently, the BBC’s Middle East correspondent,” Darke notes, “had been granted a regime-sponsored visa and was on hand to interview distressed residents fleeing (from al Nusra) as they arrived in Damascus.” How puny these embedded journalists must have seemed to someone living in the old city right up to 2012.
Bait Baroudi is now home to a number of families – all Syrian friends – who have sought refuge in the old city, replicating the fate of the house of another English woman who made Damascus her home: the unstoppable Lady Jane Digby, whose glorious love affair with a desert sheikh in the 1800s shocked upper-class England. Jane’s house, when I visited it a few years ago, was home to numerous families who, in an unkind world, would be called squatters – but not in Syria, where the people are famed for their kindness and hospitality.
Now Darke sometimes gets phone calls from the current residents of Bait Baroudi, asking her to mediate in a dispute. She frets that the two water tanks on the roof may not be enough for the increased number of people there. Is the house warm enough? The price of fuel has gone from eight to 100 Syrian pounds per litre. Like the rest of us, she has no answers to Syria’s problems, noting that Lebanon’s civil war continued for 15 years.
If you’ve been to Syria you’ll revisit here some of your favourite places.
Darke’s book comes with a helpful glossary and list of characters, but what it glows with most is an understanding of and affection for the peoples of Syria. That and a hope that one day she’ll return.
The Merchant of Syria
A History of Survival
Diana Darke
Oxford University Press (May 1, 2018)
Hardcover $27.95 (224pp)
978-0-19-087485-8
In The Merchant of Syria, Diana Darke uses the true story of Abu Chaker, a cloth merchant who began his career in Syria before expanding into Lebanon and later the United Kingdom, as an entry point to discuss Syria and how it developed as a country.
Abu Chaker was born in 1921, as the Ottoman Empire was on its way out. He died in 2013, during the Syrian civil war, after he left his home city of Homs. Darke tracks the major events of Chaker’s life, from his marriages to the start of his textile career, and from some precarious career moves to his success expanding the UK-based Hield Brothers brand. Interviews with his children and acquaintances provide background, though their contributions steer toward general impressions and his overarching views on life and business, without a lot of additional detail.
Though The Merchant of Syria is ostensibly about Abu Chaker, it’s really a big-picture story about Syria from ancient times through to the present, with trade highlighted throughout. Darke notes what was happening in Chaker’s life at important touch points in Syrian history, using him to help place those events in context.
The book provides a solid, quick overview of Syrian history, both as part of larger empires and as a singular entity. This includes explaining how gender roles in the country developed, the importance of commodities like textiles as a form of hard currency in the area, and how the transfers of power between the Ottomans, the French, the Ba’ath Party, and the Assad family affected life for the Syrian people.
Darke has lived in and written about Syria before, and does a nice job describing the various factors that, for better or worse, led to the modern Syrian state. Abu Chaker lived through key parts of that history, and his story proves to be an effective vehicle for greater understanding.
Reviewed by Jeff Fleischer
March/April 2018
The Merchant of Syria: A history of survival by Diana Darke
04 May 2018
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Stephen Griffith reads about the Syria that has been destroyed
WHEN you have lived in Syria, and known and loved its people, how do you make sense of its past seven bloody and destructive years? Diana Darke deals with this sorrow by telling stories.
Her follow-up to the seductive My House in Damascus is the story of Mohammad Shaker Shamsi-Pasha (known by all as Abu Chaker), a Syrian “merchant” from Homs; how he ended up an international businessman of some importance, based in Bradford and London. His life spanned decades of political and economic change, and she interleaves the chapters of his story with the history of Syria.
Encouraged by an act of trust and extraordinary generosity by another merchant, Abu Chaker cleverly developed bonds of mercantile confidence to become the main supplier of Hield Brothers’ Bradford broadcloth across the Middle East, in time buying and expanding the Yorkshire business.
This book is more than that story. By adding alternate chapters on Syria’s history, it tackles questions about the causes of the catastrophe of the past seven years, and seeks to challenge both those who think that the Syrian War is about supposed ancient sectarian hatreds, and those who, in their ignorance, despise Islam.
She has an excellent knowledge of both Syria and its Islam, and an affection for the multi-faceted, non-sectarian world that existed before the rise of the current House of Assad, with its outrageous corruption, greed, and violence. This is all thoroughly narrated in the historical chapters.
She is occasionally wrong when she discusses Eastern Christianity, accepting as history what is clearly legend, and she may well paint an overly rosy picture of the life of minorities under the Ottomans; but she is right in showing Syria’s urban life as integrated and not sectarian until the 1970s.
Her affection for Abu Chaker is clear. He is a paragon of Muslim business values, in which absolute trust, and care for the customer and the wider community, is paramount. In his world, no one would seek to bankrupt anyone, see a cheque bounce, or impoverish those in debt. And, as a pious Muslim, he works with Christian partners by whom he was trusted, as by the whole community. There is a sense of generosity, integral to Muslim piety, which is very close to the values of Jesus which Western capitalism has forgotten.
If you want to grasp what Syria was, what it could have been, and how instead it has become this hell, reading this book will be informative, and offer a deeply human view of a world destroyed by the Assad thugs and their associates.
The Revd Stephen Griffith is a retired priest. He specialises in Syria and the Syriac community in Turabdin.
The Merchant of Syria: A history of survival
Diana Darke
Hurst £20
(978-1-84904940-5)
Church Times Bookshop £18
Free UK delivery from the Church Times Bookshop this month: enter code CTPOST at the checkout. (Until 31 May 2018, Church Times price books only.)
April 12 2018
By WILLIAM ARMSTRONG william.armstrong@hdn.com.tr
The merchant of Syria
‘The Merchant of Syria: A History of Survival’ by Diana Darke (Hurst, 364 pages, £20)
Until Syria returned to the headlines two weeks ago, fatigue and cynicism had been growing and focus was drifting. New approaches seemed necessary to recapture interest in the tragedy. In “The Merchant of Syria,” author Diana Darke uses the life of textile merchant Abu Chaker as a window through which to examine the modern history of Syria, from the late Ottoman era to the cataclysmic present. The book skillfully weaves an engaging personal story with rich scholarship based on oral history, archival research and ethnography.
Abu Chaker was born into relatively comfortable circumstances in Homs in 1921. But after his father died he had to abandon his studies at the age of 10 to support his mother and seven sisters. Despite this, through shrewd determination Abu Chaker managed to develop his local business into a multinational empire, riding the waves of political turbulence until his death in 2013 aged 92.
Darke describes Abu Chaker as the “archetypal Syrian merchant”: Crafty, wily, smart and endlessly adaptable. She says he embodied a noble Syrian tradition stretching back centuries. In a diverse religious and linguistic landscape - Sunni and Shia Muslims, Alawis, Druze, Orthodox and Catholic Christians, Syriacs, Armenians, Kurds, Turkmens, Circassians, Ismailis and Jews – trade glued the mosaic together. The high esteem that merchants have historically been held in the region is clear from the commercial architecture dating back centuries - the souks, bedestans and hans that Darke describes as “veritable cathedrals of commerce.” Commerce and religion, she writes, are “forever side by side.” Indeed, mosques have long been built at the center of social and commercial complexes, funded by foundations or wealthy merchants.
Abu Chaker was a Sunni Muslim with professional origins in the Homs souk. From there he built his cloth trade into a national, regional, and international network. He moved operations to Beirut in 1960, where the freer, more liberal atmosphere provided the right climate to expand beyond the shores of the Middle East. After the Lebanese civil war broke out in 1975, Abu Chaker turned to the U.K., buying and saving a mill run by the textile company Hield in the Yorkshire town of Bradford. Bradford had been an important economic center during Britain’s industrial heyday, but by the end of the 20th century many factories had closed down. Abu Chaker managed to save the Hield business at a time when all the other working mills in Bradford had fallen silent, turning it into a global brand with a showcase store in London’s Knightsbridge. The mill in Bradford still serves as the company’s headquarters today.
Darke’s previous book was “My House in Damascus,” describing her experiences buying and renovating a 17th century courtyard house in Damascus’ old town, which ended up stolen and occupied by war profiteers. Her deep personal knowledge of Syria and its people is worn lightly throughout “The Merchant of Syria.” Darke personally knew Abu Chaker and his family before his death, and portrays him in an almost reverential light: A tough but scrupulously honest businessman, a pious but tolerant Muslim, a modest and humble man. One senses a certain idealization in the portrait, but the book’s weaving of Abu Chaker’s life story with broader contextual details is richly rewarding.
Toward the end of 2017 some hoped that an end to the war in Syria was in sight. But in recent months the country seems to have careened once again into a violent spiral. Darke is sympathetic to the idea that “only shared commercial interests can bind the region together, not politics.” She finds in Abu Chaker a hopeful model for this: “A good merchant’s role will be the same as his – to find partners who can be trusted, irrespective of their religion or ethnicity, to establish links between different communities, based on mutual benefit.” This is moving and certainly true, but amid intense geopolitical jostling in Syria it also feels sadly unrealistic.
Interview with Diana Darke
28/05/2014 09:04
Written by Diana Darke
Diana Darke, author of our new Eastern Turkey guide, discusses travel memories and offers tips for aspiring travel writers.
What is your earliest travel memory?
My earliest travel memories are of long car journeys from Wales to southern Germany each year to stay with my grandparents at their farm in a tiny village in the Pfalz (Rheinland Palatinate). My brother and I loved those journeys. In the days before seat-belts, electronic devices or even tape cassettes, we developed an eye for detail in the towns and landscapes we passed through. We learnt to watch the ever-changing view from the car window and were never bored.
What is your most bizarre?
The most bizarre travel memory I can recall was my first arrival on Syrian soil in August 1978. It was in the port of Tartous, where I was edging my ancient 2CV Citroen cautiously down a very rickety ramp from a cargo vessel that had made passage from Volos in Greece. Sandwiched between heavy good vehicles, mainly lorries carrying Mercedes Benz cars out to Iran, it was one of those incongruous moments I will never forget, as the wheels touched down and I descended into the cheerful chaos of the docks.
Which travel destination has taken you most by surprise and why?
The travel destination that has taken me most by surprise is Lake Van in Eastern Turkey. The sheer size of it, seven times bigger than Lake Geneva, and the colour and exceptional light from the mountains encircling it lend an ethereal quality. Swimming in it is a magical experience, the alkaline water feeling silky and soft. Local people drag clothes behind their boats to wash them and they emerge as if they have been soaked in Comfort.
Lake Van © Diana Darke
Describe the most memorable hotel you've stayed in.
My most memorable hotel is the Shmayaa in Midyat (www.shmayaa.com) Eastern Turkey. I’ve just spent eight days based there, and it’s the most unlikely oasis of serenity and beauty I’ve ever come across. It was originally the 16th-century residence of a Syriac bishop, now converted to a 15-room hotel with exceptional taste and flair. It has a magnificent courtyard with fountain and a spectacular roof terrace overlooking the town with its mix of church towers and minarets. I feel completely at peace there and the food and wine is wonderful.
Midyat Hotel © Diana Darke
Everyone gets it wrong sometimes, so what's the biggest travel blunder you've ever made?
My biggest travel blunder was to try to climb Mt Ararat without the right kit. I had no idea what I was doing or how hard it would be, so did not have enough layers of clothing for the high altitude, head torch or crampons. The Kurdish guides were great though, and lent me their long johns, adjusted their crampons with cellotape to fit me and walked ahead of me in such a way that their head torch gave me something to follow. Looking back, it’s a miracle how I ever made it to the summit. I was 53 and not very fit.
Diana hiking in the mountains of eastern Turkey
If you could travel to any moment in history which would you choose?
I would travel to Midyat in 1915 so I could see for myself what actually happened at the time of the so-called Sayfo, the massacres of Syriac Christians supposedly at the hand of Kurdish tribesmen under instructions from the Young Turks. The historical sources remain very unclear.
How did you first get involved in travel writing?
I first got involved in travel writing after enjoying my best ever holiday in Turkey in the 1980s. There was not a single guidebook to the country in those days, so I thought I might have a go at writing one myself. With no idea about publishing and no contacts, I went to Stanford’s travel bookshop in London’s Longacre to look at the shelves and take down the names and addresses of the publishers who had done books on Egypt and Greece but not on Turkey. Out of the seven publishers I contacted, enclosing a two-page proposal, two wrote back saying they were interested – the timing was just right, so I was very lucky.
If you had one tip to share with other travel writers what would it be?
One travel tip to share with other travel writers, what would it be – always think ahead to anticipate potential problems when travelling somewhere new and unknown and make sure you are as well prepared as possible with supplies of vital medicines, water and food. At Hasankeyf in Eastern Turkey just a few days ago my husband had a nasty fall to the head as we were clambering down the banks of the Tigris. I had tissues on me for the blood and antiseptic wipes. Local people were incredibly kind and gave us a lift to the clinic where he was given a local anaesthetic and stitches. I had Paracetemol on me for the pain. Then we drove to the nearest proper hospital where he was given a CT scan to the head to check for brain haemorrhage as he had been unconscious and was suffering memory loss. All was fine, thank goodness. The whole thing cost nothing at all, as all Emergency treatment in Turkey is free, and was all sorted within two hours – far far better than the NHS! The Ibuprufen I had helped the swelling go down, and after 5 days we were able to take out the stitches in the hotel using my nail scissors and tweezers.