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Islamic Tourism. Syrian Culture Week in London provided a window into the spirit of a nation that for thousands of years has been at the heart of human civilisation and at the cross roads of the great cultural currents of history.
By holding this event in association with the London Middle East Institute, the British Syrian Society highlighted the importance of cultural and educational ties between the Syrian and British people. The week introduced British audiences to contemporary Syrian art, music and culture.
In her speech at the launch of the week held in mid-September at the Brunei Gallery at London University's School of Oriental and African Studies, Baroness Symonds, a Labour Minister in the Foreign and Commonwealth Office, emphasised that this cultural event tied another knot in the chain of knots we have to tie in understanding Syria, a country steeped in culture and history. "This event gives us the opportunity to update our view of Syria".
According to Dr Bouthaina Shabban, the Syrian Minister of Expatriates, the headlines in the Western media give a misleading impression of Syrian culture and society. "Thanks to Mel Gibson many people know that Aramaic was spoken in the ancient Middle East. Few know that Aramaic has not only been spoken for three millennia but is still part of the complex cultural mix that makes up modern Syria. The Syrian Ministry of Expatriates was established in 2002 to serve the interests of Syrian expatriates - nearly as large as the country's domestic population. There are 10,000 Syrians in the UK. In the first six months of 2004, the number of Western tourists to Syria nearly doubled to 141,000 from 85,000 in the same period last least. This trend, together with events like Syrian Cultural Week will help generate a better understanding between our nations", said Dr Shaaban".
The exhibition of contemporary Syrian art was the focal point of the culture week. Works which represented three different generations of artists living in Syria were chosen. Every one of these artists has a unique character that absorbs the geography of the country its features and different aspects of it landscape.
"For a variety of historical reasons, the European artistic and cultural community is only now beginning to be aware of contemporary art in the Arab world", the exhibition's curator Ghayas Akhras said. "But for decades artists working in cultures outside Western Europe have been expressing themselves in terms which are culturally distinctive but recognizable as part of the European idiom.
"Syria has long been a crossroads between Western European, Mediterranean and Arab cultures. It is now time for a re-evaluation of a cultural community that has often been put into an Orientalist box and regarded as exotic rather than as part of the mainstream of European culture.
"A small but representative group of internationally recognised and influential artists exhibited works in oils, collage and wood and bronze sculpture. Some, like the painter Nazir Nabaa and the sculptor Abdullah Murad, are among the most influential and highly respected artists in the Arab world. Many have exhibited internationally - including in Eastern Europe, France and Italy - but many showed their works in the UK for the first time.
"The principal aim of the art exhibition was to introduce visitors to contemporary Syrian art in the context of the country's artistic heritage and traditions. The 21st century Syrian artist has a wealth of knowledge and inspiration to draw upon from both the country's Occidental and Oriental traditions: this has produced works that are powerful in their use of colour, figurative abstract and often with a hint of dramatic narrative".
Abdullah Chhadeh and Kinan Azmeh provided a penetrating flash of insight into Syrian music. Chhadeh is a refugee born in the Golan Heights and trained in both Arab and Western classical music traditions. He first became known for 'Arabised' Vivaldi played on the qanun, a Middle Eastern zither. With his band Nara, he now plays original compositions influenced by Arabic music as well as Western classical music and jazz.
Kinan Azmeh is the only Syrian and the first Arab to win the first prize at the Nicolay Rubinstein international youth competition in Moscow. A classical clarinet soloist, he also enjoys jazz improvisation on both the clarinet and the tenor sax. Currently he plays and tours with the Syrian bank hewar (dialogue), which fuses classical Arabic and jazz musical forms. He is credited as one of the composers in the film score for Control Room about Al Jazeera's coverage of the Iraqi invasion.
Two academic lectures were also delivered during the cultural week. Professor Nasser Rabbat, Aga Khan Professor of Islamic Architecture Massachusetts Institute of Technology spoke about historical architecture in Syria - a beautiful index of intercultural dialogue. Professor Sebastian Brock, Reader in Syriac Studies at the Faculty of Oriental Studies (Eastern Christianity) at Oxford University gave a lecture Syria: the home of many cultures.
Professor Rabbat said that the focus of architectural history has recently shifted from the cultural to the intercultural. Culture, that potpourri of historical, religious or imagined markers of identity, is no longer easily accepted as a disciplinary framework. Novel research is now conducted in the overlapping intercultural spaces where peoples have always met and exchanged ideas, views and practices, and, in the process, created art and architecture.
Syria is an ideal intercultural site. Through successive transmutations from Aram to Seleukia, to Roman Syria, to Bilad al-Sham and to Syria again, it has accumulated many interrelated architectural traditions. Some of these traditions flourished for a long time and radiated their influences near and far. Others shined brightly for a brief moment. Still others inhabited small niches in the land and evolved quietly.
All, however, left remarkable traces in Syria, traces that bespeak their heterogeneous inspiration and hybrid Quality. Guided by an intellectual and aesthetic dialogue with past and contemporary traditions, their builders seem to have adopted, borrowed, resurrected, synthesized and invented at every stage of their creative process. Among the interlocutors they consciously engaged were Ancient Egypt, Mesopotamia, Anatolia, Classical Antiquity, Rome and Byzantium, Persia, South Arabia and the full gamut of styles that we came to call Islamic.
In his lecture Professor Sebastian Brock said that Syria – in the wider sense of Bilad ash-Sham, the local name for a region that also includes parts of Jordan and Saudi Arabia – has a wonderfully rich history of literacy that goes back nearly four and half millennia. In the course of some forty-four centuries this literacy has been expressed in an impressive number of different languages and scripts. Moreover, within this period Bilad ash-Sham has witnessed the invention of alphabetic writing- one of the great achievements of human civilization – and the birth of two world religions.
The earliest literacy cultures of Syria were brought to light by archaeologists in the twentieth century. The earliest known language of the regions, Eblaitic, dating back to 2400BC, was only discovered a few decades ago. In the second millennium BC Eblaitic was followed by two other early Semitic languages, Akkadian and Ugaritic, the latter with its splendid epic literature. The opening of the first millennium BC witnessed the earliest alphabetic texts in Phoenician, Hebrew and Aramaic. Of these three languages it was the last, Aramaic, which was to become, by about 700BC, the main language of international diplomacy over a remarkably wide area, covering from modern western Turkey and Egypt to Afghanistan. And Aramaic, with its various dialects, was to remain the language of the vast majority of the population of Bilad ash-Sham (and further East) for the next 1400 or more years. In the later part of this period, from the time of Alexander the Great onwards, Aramaic came to be joined increasingly by Greek, above all in the cities and towns. | 
