A Woman from Syria

By X. Lady

It is an autobiography of a Syrian womans unusual life and eighty years of experience. Some years were happy, and others were sad. The Syrian society is not widely known, and reading her book, one can get an idea about that country and its society, traditions, and the different religions and sects. I am introducing Syria and my life to the reader.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Xlibris US
• Release date: May 19, 2014
• ISBN: 9781493188291

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Copyright © 2014 by Lady X.

Library of Congress Control Number:     2014905427

ISBN:                  Hardcover                        978-1-4931-8830-7

                            Softcover                          978-1-4931-8831-4

                            eBook                               978-1-4931-8829-1

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the copyright owner.

Rev. date: 05/14/2014

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Contents

Introduction

Rebecca’s Prediction

My Childhood

My Father

Syria and the French Mandate

The Syrian Revolution

Father and the Revolution

Father in Egypt

Father’s Wives

My Parents’ Marriage

My Mother’s Family

My Mother

Aunt’s Family

After My Birth

Father’s Jobs

My Family House

The Alley

Two Cafes

Salhiah Quarter

Syria Products

My Early Childhood

My Grand Mother

Sexual Assault

Father and the Movies

Lute Lessons

My Cousin Haiam

Traditions

Bram Sacrifice

Ramadan, the Fasting Month

Islam Five Pillars

Muslim’s Duties

Al-Nouba and Piersing

Pilgrim Reception

Prophet Muhammad’s Birthday

Boys’ Circumcision

Feasts

The Snowman

The Bear and the Monkey

The Peep Show Box

The Photographer

The Wedding Ceremony

The Bride Bath

After-Delivery Bath

The Storyteller (Hakawati)

My Schools

Israel and Palestine

Preparatory School

Hijab

Reading Hobby

Arts

Primary Stage Teacher

Dancing Lessons

Marriage (1952-1963)

Love

My Engagement

The Wedding

Qara Town and First Pregnancy

The Leechs

Qara Again

Back to Damascus

Pregnant Again

Sport Teatcher

My Second Child

Secondary Certificate

Third Pregnancy

Scout Leader

The Car

Teaching Diploma

Scouts Camp in Alexandria

Gliding

The Five Gliders in Egypt

Celebrating Gifted Gliders

The President and the Gliding Club Celebration

Selling the Car

Military Teacher

TV Program

The University

Divorce

Maher

My Beloved Ones

My Ex-Husband Marriage

To Europe

My Ex-Husband and the Children

After Divorce

Syrian Film Organization

Secondary-Stage Teacher

Buying a New House

Dar’a City

Teaching in Damascus

Father’s Death

Retirement

Tourist Guide

Elder Daughter Marriage

Business and Trade

English Company Dealer

My Son Marriage

Cyprus Apartment

In The Travel Agencies

To Abu Dhabi

Back Home and Mother’s Death

The Farm

Hasan

World Women Conference

Nairobi Conference

Younger Daughter Marriage

Spirituality

The Roamers

Acting

My Books

The Tank

Retirement

Immigration

Syrian Crisis

My Life Lessons

My Weird Events

Rome (1964)

Brno-Czechoslovakia (1964)

The Rein River Cruse (1964)

Munich (1964)

The Pakistani Man (1964)

Solo Guide (1965)

Robbery in Beirut (1969)

Spain and Rosita (1969)

Monica (1972)

Drug Dealing

Copenhagen Restaurant

From Paris to Damascus (1972)

Sleep In (1972)

Hamburg (1972)

Robbery in London (1973)

Israeli Raid on Damascus (1973)

Sweden (1974)

Kenya (1980)

Chichen Itza (1981)

Bangkok (1983)

Hong Kong (1983)

Christa (1983)

Fuji Mountain (1983)

My Drowning Story (1983)

Colombia and Brazil (1984)

To New Delhi (1984)

Cremation (1984)

Nepal (1984)

From Cairo to Luxor (1985)

Nairobi (1985)

The Hookers’ Street (2001)

Bangkok (2008)

Introduction

I am eighty years old. I lived a life full of ups and downs and would like to share it with you. I was once asked, If I had the chance to change my life, what life would I choose? The answer was, I wouldn’t change anything except for some faults that left a bitter taste in my mouth, which I would rather avoid them.

I am a secretive character, and to expose my private life was very far from my thoughts, although my younger daughter Mona was always encouraging me to write about my experience in life, but I didn’t respond. Then I found myself writing it to my grandchildren to let them know me since they were always far from me. Then a courageous thought occurred to me to publish details on my life and the country I was living in to introduce both to people who have no idea about both and still do not know the real psychological reason for that courageous deed.

My elder daughter was against writing this book in English because I would never cope with the English style of writing, while my younger daughter’s idea was writing the book with the English I learned in Damascus University, English department, which is actually a translation of my Arabic thoughts, and she won.

To write this book, I only have to remember the events that my memory provides me with. Normally, seniors live in their past; I do that only in songs and movies, and writing my life details made me relive them, some with pleasure, others with regret. Those made me follow my personality changes and enabled me to know much about my character and others’ behavior and treatment toward me.

Rebecca’s Prediction

Rebecca was an Italian tourist; she came with her father to Damascus around forty years ago, and I was their tourist guide. The moment she saw me, she asked if my zodiac sign was a scorpion, and that was right. She predicted a few events that would happen to me during my life. Luckily, I found the paper on which her predictions were written; all became true during my lifetime. Here are the most important ones:

Somebody will die in a car accident.

I shall work in the education or art field.

I shall live long abroad.

I must be aware of water.

The last prediction, I don’t know yet—it may be my sudden death.

My Childhood

It was a great privilege to be born in Damascus, the oldest capital in the world continuously inhabited. Its known history dates back to at least nine thousand years ago. Syria was my homeland. I am very proud of its history, and the thirty-three civilizations were at its land, leaving thousands of archeological sites.

I was gifted with three important privileges; the first was my very open-minded dad. He gave me freedom and had complete trust in me. He didn’t let religion and social customs to derange improving myself. The second was visiting forty-five countries in the world; mingling with different cultures enhanced my knowledge and education. The third was my inborn persistence and ability to develop and improve myself. Other Syrian women were living under their family’s conservative male wings and society’s traditional trends. They were locked in their daily duties, breeding their kids and looking after their houses and husbands. But I had to struggle against many customs and habits to free myself and fly.

My Father

My father was born in 1897. He was a handsome man with strong and kind features. I was looking at two photos when he was in his youth. In the first one, he appeared elegant among his friends, wearing a white European suit with a tie, white socks, and shoes. He was smiling, giving a content life expression.

In the second photo, he was holding his tambourine, and the others each had a musical instrument in hand. They were a musical group spending their free time together playing or singing; that was my father’s hobby and his job in his early youth.

Father had a very pleasant, simple, tender, generous, peaceful, and pleasant character. He was loved by everybody, especially children.

My grandpa came from Egypt to Syria with Ibrahim Pasha’s troops in 1831, sent by his father Muhammad Ali Pasha to Grand Syria to take it from the Ottomans’ rule and join it to Egypt. But Ibrahim Pasha left Syria and went back to Egypt due to the pressure of the European powers in 1840. Some of the troops were held back, and my grandfather was one of them. He lived in Damascus and was in charge of a public bath near his house in the Salhiah area, at the foot of Qasioun Mountain, located outside the ancient wall surrounding Damascus.

Grandfather married a woman from the near village. The first my family status registration at the government was in 1850 when my grandfather registered his firstborn. They gave birth to five boys and one girl. Two boys and the girl died before my birth, and I know very little about them. One of the brothers was a merchant. The other went to Sudan and was a literary man; he appears in a photo sitting on a chair, wearing a long Syrian garment, and simple shelves with books are behind him. My only aunt was a teacher. She married a judge and died in a pilgrimage to Mecca and was buried there.

The youngest of the living brothers was an olive oil merchant in his early youth, and then he became a Sufi following the Al-Rifaeia method, living in a room connected to a nearby mosque, doing his religious rituals and duties.

I remember him standing in the street, holding the head of a very long and thick snake he caught in a house using special Rifaeia method prayers. He appeared as a small man dressed in old-fashioned garments, with a beard and a small turban on his head. People were in a circle surrounding him, admiring his deed and the prayers he used to catch that snake. He never married and, of course, had no children.

The elder brother was a government employee. It was the most secure job at that time. He had a better living and education than his brothers. He also had children, four sons and three daughters. His wife was from the high society of the city Hama. She was snobbish and considered herself and her kids much better than those of the other brothers, who weren’t government employees and had no children, except for my father who had only me, a girl. Their house was in a better area and far from ours. The relationship between my uncle’s family and mine was weak and not friendly, which influenced the children of both in the past till the near future.

Grandpa’s family was pious and conservative except for my father; he was more open-minded than his society. My father was the middle one and had a different attitude toward life; he was a free soul and was adventurous, fond of music and singing with a nice and strong voice. He spent his life as he had wished, and I inherited some of these traits.

Nothing was mentioned to me about how his three wives, whom he had married one after the other before my mother, were living in one house with the rest of his family, and how many times he was with either of them. Probably he was so busy indulging himself in his hobby that he didn’t care about his marriage duties, especially because he had no children then. He was a womanizer and a heavy drinker; both were unacceptable in the Syrian society at that time and were considered religiously great sins. His only goal was life enjoyment, and he was irresponsible about everything. I sometimes wonder how my religious grandparents bore that kind of behavior.

Syria and the French Mandate

The following political history had an important role in both our lives—mine and my father’s. At that time, Ottoman sultans were ruling Grand Syria for about four hundred years, from 1516 to 1919. Grand Syria consisted of recent Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and the occupied Palestine; this whole area was called Bilad al-Sham.

During World War I, the Ottomans and the Germans were against the Allies who asked the Arabs to help them in exchange for their independence. The Arabs believed them and started their revolution from Mecca in 1920 against the Ottomans’ rule. Then the rebels arrived at Bilad al-Sham or Grand Syria and reached Damascus with the Allied troops on October 10, 1918, accompanied by the English general Allenby. World War I was over, and the Allies were the winners. That pledge of freedom and independence was completely neglected because of the Sykes-Picot Agreement. It was achieved in 1916 between exterior the minister of England Sir Mark Sykes and France’s Mr. Georges-Picot, dividing Grand Syria into four countries: Syria, Lebanon, Jordan, and Palestine, then putting them under their mandates. French mandate was forced upon Syria and Lebanon, and the British mandate upon Jordan and Palestine. In Syria, the mandate lasted from 1920 to 1946.

The Syrian Revolution

When the French mandate was forced upon the angry Syrians, the minister of defense, Yusuf al-Azmah, took his small Syrian army with the little ammunition which was left from the Ottoman’s after their rule had ended in Syria, and thousands of patriot civilians, holding whatever tools they could get to fight with him. They all went on July 24, 1920, toward Lebanon Road, from where French soldiers should come. After a few miles from Damascus, they faced the well-equipped French army, who had tanks, cannons, and planes. Yusuf al-Azmah fought the French desperately; he knew his deed wouldn’t be successful, but a great shame would stain all the Syrians if they didn’t defend their homeland.

Of course the battle was a great success for the French, and Yusuf al-Azmah was martyred with most of the defenders. His grave now is on Maysalon Hill, where the soil was soaked with the patriots’ blood.

In 1925, the patriotic Syrians revolted against the French mandate in many Syrian parts, and the colonized troops had a great loss. Not only was the mandate forced upon the Syrians but also the loss of İskenderun, which was given to Turkey by France. The French government couldn’t give part of its land to Germany because of all the citizens’ refusal, and then the French government would not be able to do it and must resign. But the same government gave Syrian İskenderun Province—Hatay of today—to Turkey on November 29, 1939, and forbade the Syrians to protest under the threat of imprisonment or hanging by the French mandate laws. The reason of that generosity was to bribe the Turks, preventing a new alliance between Turkey and Germany in World War II. Hatay contains Antakya, the ancient Antioch, which was once the capital of Grand Syria. France and the French didn’t lose anything, but the Syrian lost 4,800 square kilometers of a very fertile land at their Mediterranean shore, with three rivers and many small lakes. That cession the Syrians had never accepted.

I had some awful memories concerning the French mandate. I was a child, walking with one of my parents near the parliament. There was a black soldier holding a rifle headed by a sharp weapon, wearing a red fez and short trousers, the unusual garment in those days. That image scared me, and I was pulling my parent’s hand to go far away. Black-colored people were unusual in Syria, and those black soldiers were from African countries occupied by France. The French were using colonized nations’ soldiers to control their other colonies and sparing their French soldiers for their safety.

The French mandate offered the Syrian minorities their greatest care, teaching them French and sending their students to learn in France. Also the breaching centers offered generous services and were doing the same. That was the best way to get the minority’s approval and assistance in case the majority was refusing the mandate.

When Syria entered the Nations League, France, in 1945, was ordered to evacuate Syria for good. But the French refused to leave, and the Syrians went on strike. A French plane raided and bombed a large business area, and then they killed all the twenty-nine Syrian regiments defending the parliament. Finally, and under the national pressure, France was obliged to evacuate Syria on April 17, 1946, and that became Syria’s Evacuation and Independence Day. As a reaction to the Syrians’ anger and to avenge against the mandate, French language in schools was omitted.

Father and the Revolution

Father was with the fighting rebels during the 1925 revolution, all centered in Damascus Gouta; it was full of farms and greenery and was their hiding place. Father did not fight but entertained the rebels with his music and singing, when they weren’t ambushing or attacking.

Father in Egypt

Father’s music and passion for singing drove him to Egypt, the arts and music center. He lived there for about a year. His voice and tambourine music were good, and he met many famous musicians and singers and started to perform on the stage. He used to tell me about the Egyptians’ personality, mainly their merriment and humor. The Egyptian society was open and not as conservative as the Syrians’, and he preferred that society more.

He had to leave Egypt and travel from Cairo to Palestine, spending about thirty days riding horseback. His thighs were torn from the friction between the flesh and the saddle. He told me a lot about his suffering and the incidents that happened to him during that tour. That is one of many stories I still remember. He didn’t tell the reason of that adventure, and I didn’t ask; could be because children can’t analyze what they hear.

Those tales were seeds planted in my subconscious, which appeared later in my traveling and writing. Or could be due to genetic heritage, since one of my uncles was a literary man and my father was an adventurous one.

Father’s Wives

Father married three women before my mother, one after the other. One of them passed away, another was divorced, and the third—I have no idea about her. He desperately wanted a son from any of them, but it was not granted. My mother was the fourth and the last. None gave him a child except her.

He loved living in Egypt but had a great urge to have a son. For that, he returned to Damascus and to his family to settle and then to marry my mother.

He married her because she was young and nice-looking. But the most important thing was that she had given birth to a girl from another marriage, and that baby died, but it proved her fertility and granted him a good and hopeful marriage. Father, like most Arabic husbands in that time, believed the cause of childlessness was their barren wives, not because of them since they were stallions.

In the Arab culture, the sons would be the supporters and the parents would depend on them. I never believed in that because the kids would be looking to support their children; they are more important for them than their parents. They turn their backs to the past and look forward to the future, unless they can balance their feelings between the parents and children.

My Parents’ Marriage

I can’t describe my parents’ wedding party because I wasn’t born yet. During the marriage, my father returned to the strict Muslim religion to repent his sins. He started to pray five times a day and to fast on Ramadan month. He stopped drinking and singing and used his nice voice only for calling to the dawn prayer, as a repentance to God and a donation to people. No matter the weather situation, every day in the early morning, he would ascend tens of stairs to the minaret balcony to call for the dawn prayer. Nowadays a microphone inside the mosque is used. After calling, he would humbly beg God to forgive his sins and to grant him a son. God praised his name granted him a half wish, a girl instead of a boy. I was the only child he could have; none was either before or after me, and it was the half wish to reward his piety, although my father tried his best to please Him.

Father asked the sheikh to choose the best name for me, either that of my mother’s mom or father’s. Luckily, the sheikh suggested my mother’s mum’s name. And on the next day of my birth, victoriously, Father registered me at the government. At that time he was thirty-six years old, and mother, twenty-eight. I am maternally Kurdish and paternally Arabic.

My Mother’s Family

The period of Turkish Ottomans’ rule for about four hundred years was the Arab dark ages. Everything was changed—the language, the food, the manners, the habits, and the culture in general. Marriage among the two nations was normal. The Turks got not only the Arabs’ wealthy countries but also their young men to fight with Germany in World War I.

During that war, my maternal grandfather died, leaving behind him my grandma with a boy and two girls. They were unsupported and needy. My grandma used to send those children to the field to pick up what was left after the harvesting. Then she had the chance to work in a female students’ dormitory of a teachers’ academy for girls. The boy died, and later on, her elder girl, my mother, joined her in the same work. The second girl married a Turkish chef.

My grandmother job salary supported her family with a decent living; even she could save some money for the rainy days. After grandma’s retirement, her savings enabled her to build a house on land that belonged to the government