Syrians a people more than worthy of a generous welcome from Canada
Warm smiles and instant invitations to coffee and tea with every welcoming breath: that’s the limitless kindness Syrians offered to strangers a decade ago. The same was true a century earlier. And a good thousand years before that.
I saw it once with my own eyes. It was so amazing that I kept going back for more, burning through six visas to Syria in the nether years after the fall of Saddam Hussein and before the rise of the Islamic State group.
I learned to despise the Assad regime, as most Syrians do.
And I came to love Syrians, who are without a doubt the most welcoming people I’ve ever known.
That Canada is answering in kind today, as the first wave of war-ravaged Syrian souls spend their first night among us, is no less astonishing given the uproar to our south.
One of my D.C. contacts, Georgetown University security studies professor Paul Sullivan, emailed Thursday, both stunned and heartened by the “amazing contrast on the treatment of refugees in your country — and in your paper.”
Sullivan is down there, after all, deafened as the Donald Trumpet of fear reaches a crescendo, awaking the likes of the Ku Klux Klan.
As Pierre Trudeau once observed, living alongside America is like “sleeping with an elephant.”
No matter how friendly or temperate the beast, one is affected by every twitch and every grunt.”
Few of us are old enough to remember a time when the elephant twitched with such raw nativism. Yet Canadians, in some cases neighbourhood by neighbourhood, are somehow managing to answer with a Trudeauesque shrug in offering direct sponsorships to the refugees. Whatever. Welcome, strangers.
I’ve spent enough time in Syria to fill this paper with anecdotes of the extreme hospitality I encountered. But my all-time best memories involve one particular road trip in 2005, when the first rental cars become available in Damascus.
I booked a tiny KIA — 1100 cc’s of pregnant roller skate — and set out on a journey through desert and mountains where Westerners seldom tread. Canadians were scarce in those parts. But even scarcer were people like my good friend and travelling companion, radio reporter Aaron Schachter, who happens to be 1) American and 2) Jewish and, with a U.S.-led war raging in neighbouring Iraq, just slightly nervous about the welcome we would find.
Our rattled nerves settled quickly as door after door opened before us. We drove straight into a welcoming wall of adab, one of those Arabic words that makes translators crazy. It can mean courtesy, good manners, breeding, or even the literary arts. But, in this context, adab describes the time-honoured custom of elevating hospitality to an almost sacred act.
We were feted at every turn. At one village, a tribal sheikh apologized profusely for not having a feast ready, telling us, “If I knew you were coming I would have slaughtered a goat.”
We had the ancient city of Palmyra — the remarkably intact Greco-Roman ruins that today are in the despoiling hands of Islamic State — all to ourselves. Our guide for that afternoon, Abu Hassan, walked us through the ancient colonnade, pointing to the temple of Baal, the agora, the amphitheatre and granite pillars hauled triumphantly from Egypt, lamenting that there was so much to see, yet so few to see it. “You see how peaceful Syria is? We want you to know we love peace. We want you to feel you are at home.”
We got lost again and again. But Syrian passersby routinely jumped into the car with us, happily interrupting their day to offer direct guidance. One thing that became abundantly clear: Syrians are especially good at distinguishing between citizens and those that rule over them. As one Syrian youth told us in surprisingly good English as we rolled through the electrifying spring-green mountains that separate Syria from Lebanon, “Welcome to our paradise. America? I hate your government, but I love your people. You are welcome.”
A few minutes later, we drew our collective breath at the first glimpse of the unbreachable Crusader for- tress of Krak des Chevaliers, the fabled Castle of the Knights. T.E. Lawrence once described it as “perhaps the most wholly admirable castle in the world.”
And, like Palmyra, it was empty, bereft of a single traveller. And worse, we pulled up at closing time, with a lone custodian padlocking the daunting front gate. The Krak is lined with medieval masonry 25 metres thick at its base. And we weren’t going to see it. Damn.
But this being Syria, the attendant shrugged and promptly reopened the fortress, just for us — and walked us through to its astonishing ramparts, carefully pointing out the ancient stables, the foundry, the olive press, the mounds of basketball-sized boulders, still waiting to be loaded into the catapults of war, seven centuries later.
That, Canada, is who just got here: the sort of people who would rather bend the rules of a Smithsonian or the Royal Ontario Museum than disappoint a wayward traveller. A people more than worthy of the generous welcome at hand.