Middle East - Anthony Ham [14]
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Deir al-Qamar seems to have changed little in the last century or so. For a strong evocation of 19th-century Lebanon, delve into The Rock of Tanios by journalist Amin Maalouf, which tells a compelling tale of murder and mystery in a Lebanese village.
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SYRIA
Damascus Nights
It was almost 10 years to the night since I had first walked down the steps behind the Umayyad Mosque in Damascus and through the doors of Al-Nawfara Coffee Shop. It was like coming home. For three months back in 1998, I had spent almost every evening here, arriving a couple of hours before the sunset call to prayer to find a quiet corner to write and chat with the locals before Abu Shady, the resident hakawati (storyteller), took his throne. Occasionally, in the manner of all live acts, his performance fell flat. But when it worked there was magic in the air as he wove fabulous tales, berated his audience and slammed down his sword for dramatic effect. In the time that I had been away from the Al-Nawfara Coffee Shop I had been drawn to the art of storytelling around the world. One time in particular, in the southern Spanish city of Granada, I had entered a tea room in the old Albaicín quarter and been assailed with apple-scented tobacco and the memories of stories told in Damascus.
But this time was different. The popularity of storytelling, that most noble of Middle Eastern art forms, is waning, displaced by gyrating pop divas beamed live from Beirut. Abu Shady had been one of my heroes. He was not a young man when I saw him last. That he was now the last heir to the Sheherezade throne had me worried – would I find him still telling tall tales?
I pulled up a chair in the corner of the shop, inhaled deeply and looked around. There in the corner, in the same seat that he has occupied for the past 10 years and probably longer, Mohammed was drawing long and hard on his nargileh. When I introduced myself and asked if he remembered me (he clearly didn’t), he exhaled and said without hesitation, ‘Yes, and you still owe me money.’ I looked around at the other faces, most of which were lined with the passing years but unmistakeably the same. And there in the corner sat Abu Shady, chain-smoking and reminiscing about old times with his friends. When he donned his waistcoat and planted his tarboosh atop his head and climbed his throne, I felt a frisson of excitement. And then, with the manner of a kindly grandfather, with all the passion of an angry imam, he began to tell the story of the star-crossed lovers of Anta and Abla. The years melted away. When he was finished Abu Shady shuffled off into the night, leaving me to draw long draughts of reassurance from my nargileh.
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In Damascus Nights, Rafik Schami, the exiled Damascene writer, tells the marvellous story of Salim the coachman, a storyteller in Damascus who loses his voice and only the seven stories of seven friends can bring it back. In its sense of magic, rambling digressions and larger-than-life characters, it’s just like a night spent at Al-Nawfara Coffee Shop.
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By interviewing Abu Shady for this book, I came to know a man with a passion for stories, a greengrocer by day who devours the classic works of world literature in his spare time, a man who believes that although he is one of the world’s last storytellers, the tradition will never die. The world will, he assured me, always need stories, then he introduced me to his son, Shady, who promised that he stands ready to continue the tradition when his father retires.
Anthony Ham
Hospitality’s Generation Next
As I picked my way through the ruins of Palmyra, I became accustomed to men with camels, men with portable eskies and men with ‘old Roman coins, very cheap’. But Hamid, a local Bedouin boy, was different – he asked for nothing more than a coin to add to his collection. Finally, he settled on a 50¢ coin, forsaking the more-valuable €1 and €2 coins on offer because he already had them. He handed me a set of dusty postcards. Keep the postcards and the coin, I told