Download or read book A New Old Damascus written by Christa Salamandra and published by Indiana University Press. This book was released on 2004-12-10 with total page 222 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: "[F]illed with rare encounters with Syria's oldest, most elite families. Critics of anthropology's taste for exoticism and marginality will savor this study of upper-class Damascus, a world that is urbane and cosmopolitan, yet in many ways as remote as the settings in which the best ethnography has traditionally been done.... [Written] with a nuanced appreciation of the cultural forms in question and how Damascenes themselves think, talk about, and create them." -- Andrew Shryock In contemporary urban Syria, debates about the representation, preservation, and restoration of the Old City of Damascus have become part of status competition and identity construction among the city's elite. In theme restaurants and nightclubs that play on images of Syrian tradition, in television programs, nostalgic literature, and visual art, and in the rhetoric of historic preservation groups, the idea of the Old City has become a commodity for the consumption of tourists and, most important, of new and old segments of the Syrian upper class. In this lively ethnographic study, Christa Salamandra argues that in deploying and debating such representations, Syrians dispute the past and criticize the present. Indiana Series in Middle East Studies -- Mark Tessler, general editor

Download or read book Damascus written by Brigid Keenan and published by . This book was released on 2001 with total page 224 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Damascus, reputed to be the worldʹs oldest continually inhabited city, has enjoyed a history of immense grandeur, enormous political and mercantile power, and great cultural and artistic achievement. In addition to some of Islamʹs most magnificent architecture, such as the Umayyad Mosque, the city boasts a heritage of fairy-tale palaces and sumptuous private houses. Sadly, many of them are in urgent need of restoration. Brigid Keenan and Tim Beddow were given unprecedented access to the inner, "hidden" city, which has resulted in a book that is of immense importance to all concerned with the heritage of architecture in the Islamic world. The superb photographs include façades, courtyards, alleyways and fountains, and the breathtaking interiors that often lie behind the unassuming walls of the old town, with exquisite details in stone, wood, paint, marble, plaster, glass and mother-of-pearl. The whole, published with the generous support of Wafic Rida Said, forms a convincing and elegiac plea for the preservation of the heart of this historic ancient capital. -- Jacket.

Download or read book My House in Damascus written by Diana Darke and published by Haus Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-15 with total page 307 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The ongoing conflict in Syria has made clear just how limited the general knowledge of Syrian society and history is in the West. For those watching the headlines and wondering what led the nation to this point, and what might come next, this book is a perfect place to start developing a deeper understanding. Based on decades of living and working in Syria, My House in Damascus offers an inside view of Syria’s cultural and complex religious and ethnic communities. Diana Darke, a fluent Arabic speaker who moved to Damascus in 2004 after decades of regular visits, details the ways that the Assad regime, and its relationship to the people, differs from the regimes in Egypt, Tunisia, and Libya—and why it was thus always less likely to collapse quickly, even in the face of widespread unrest and violence. Through the author’s firsthand experiences of buying and restoring a house in the old city of Damascus, which she later offered as a sanctuary to friends, Darke presents a clear picture of the realities of life on the ground and what hope there is for Syria’s future.

Download or read book Preserving the Old City of Damascus written by Faedah M. Totah and published by Syracuse University Press. This book was released on 2014-05-28 with total page 328 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In Preserving the Old City of Damascus, Totah examines the recent gentrification of the historic urban core of the Syrian capital and the ways in which urban space becomes the site for negotiating new economic and social realities. The book illustrates how long-term inhabitants of the historic quarter, developers, and government officials offer at times competing interpretations of urban space and its use as they vie for control over the representation of the historic neighborhoods. Based on over two years of ethnographic and archival research, this book expands our understanding of neoliberal urbanism in non-western cities.

Download or read book Damascus written by Ross Burns and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2007-06-11 with total page 409 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Lavishly illustrated with beautiful photographs and original plans, traces the story of this colourful, significant and complex place through its physical development and provides, for the first time in English, a compelling and unique exploration of a.

Download or read book Damascus Station A Novel written by David McCloskey and published by W. W. Norton & Company. This book was released on 2021-10-05 with total page 347 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Finalist for the 2022 ITW Thriller Award for Best First Novel "Damascus Station is simply marvelous storytelling.…[A] stand-out thriller and essential reading for fans of the genre." —Financial Times A CIA officer and his recruit arrive in war-ravaged Damascus to hunt for a killer in this page-turner that offers the "most authentic depiction of modern-day tradecraft in print." (Navy SEAL sniper and New York Times bestselling author Jack Carr). CIA case officer Sam Joseph is dispatched to Paris to recruit Syrian Palace official Mariam Haddad. The two fall into a forbidden relationship, which supercharges Haddad’s recruitment and creates unspeakable danger when they enter Damascus to find the man responsible for the disappearance of an American spy. But the cat and mouse chase for the killer soon leads to a trail of high-profile assassinations and the discovery of a dark secret at the heart of the Syrian regime, bringing the pair under the all-seeing eyes of Assad’s spy catcher, Ali Hassan, and his brother Rustum, the head of the feared Republican Guard. Set against the backdrop of a Syria pulsing with fear and rebellion, Damascus Station is a gripping thriller that offers a textured portrayal of espionage, love, loyalty, and betrayal in one of the most difficult CIA assignments on the planet.

Download or read book The Emerging Asian City written by Vinayak Bharne and published by Routledge. This book was released on 2012-11-12 with total page 296 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: The Asian urban landscape contains nearly half of the planet’s inhabitants and more than half of its slum population living in some of its oldest and densest cities. It encompasses some of the world’s oldest civilizations and colonizations, and today contains some of the world’s fastest growing cities and economies. As such Asian cities create concomitant imagery – polarizations of poverty and wealth, blurred lines between formality and informality, and stark juxtapositions of ancient historic places with shimmering new skylines. This book embraces the complexity and ambiguity of the Asian urban landscape, and surveys its bewildering array of multifarious urbanities and urbanisms. Twenty-four essays offer scholarly reflections and positions on the complex forces and issues shaping Asian cities today, looking at why Asian cities are different from the West and whether they are treading a different path to their futures. Their combined narrative – spanning from Turkey to Japan and Mongolia to Indonesia - is framed around three sections: Traditions reflects on indigenous urbanisms and historic places, Tensions reflects on the legacies of Asia’s East–West dialectic through both colonialism and modernism and Transformations examines Asia’s new emerging utopias and urban aspirations. The book claims that the histories and destinies of cities across various parts of Asia are far too enmeshed to unpack or oversimplify. Avoiding the categorization of Asian cities exclusively by geographic location (south-east, Middle East), or the convenient tagging of the term Asian on selective regional parts of the continent, it takes a broad intellectual view of the Asian urban landscape as a 'both...and' phenomenon; as a series of diverse confluences – geographic, historic and political – extending from the deserts of the Persian Gulf region to the Pearl River Delta. Arguing for Asian cities to be taken seriously on their own terms, this book represents Asia – as a fount of extraordinary knowledge that can challenge our fundamental preconceptions of what cities are and ought to be.

Download or read book The Road from Damascus written by Robin Yassin-Kassab and published by Penguin UK. This book was released on 2008-06-05 with total page 374 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: It is summer 2001 and Sami Traifi has escaped his fraying marriage and minimal job prospects to visit Damascus. In search of his roots and himself, he instead finds a forgotten uncle in a gloomy back room, and an ugly secret about his beloved father... Returning to London, Sami finds even more to test him as his young wife Muntaha reveals that she is taking up the hijab. Sami embarks on a wilfully ragged journey in the opposite direction, away from religion – but towards what? As Sami struggles to understand Muntaha’s newly-deepened faith, her brother Ammar’s hip hop Islamism and his father-in-law’s need to see grandchildren, so his emotional and spiritual unraveling begins to accelerate. And the more he rebels, the closer he comes to betraying those he loves, edging ever-nearer to the brink of losing everything... Set against a powerfully-evoked backdrop of multi-ethnic, multi-faith London, The Road from Damascus explores themes as big as love, faith and hope, and as fundamental as our need to believe in something bigger than ourselves, whatever that might be.

Download or read book Damascus Nights written by Rafik Schami and published by Interlink Publishing. This book was released on 2014-08-08 with total page 268 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Rafik Schami's award-winning novel. In the classical Arab tradition of tale-telling, here is a magical book that celebrates the power of storytelling, delightfully transformed for modern sensibilities by an award-winning author. The time is present-day Damascus, and Salim the coachman, the city's most famous storyteller, is mysteriously struck dumb. To break the spell, seven friends gather for seven nights to present Salim with seven wondrous "gifts"—seven stories of their own design. Upon this enchanting frame of tales told in the fragrant Arabian night, the words of the past grow fainter, as ancient customs are yielding to modern turmoil. While the hairdresser, the teacher, the wife of the locksmith sip their tea and pass the water pipe, they swap stories about the magical and the mundane: about djinnis and princesses, about contemporary politics and the difficulties of bargaining in a New York department store. And as one tale leads to another... and another... all of Damascus appears before your eyes, along with a vision of storytelling—and talk—as the essence of friendship, of community, of life. A sly and graceful work, a delight to readers young and old, Damascus Nights is, according to Publishers Weekly, "a highly atmospheric, pungent narrative."

Download or read book Dancing in Damascus written by Nancy Lindisfarne and published by SUNY Press. This book was released on 2000-08-10 with total page 188 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: These nine short stories explore love and loss in contemporary Damascus, as well as the possibilities of writing ethnography as fiction.

Download or read book From Damascus to Beirut written by Hazem Fadel and published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing. This book was released on 2016-02-08 with total page 140 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Notably, studies on the Arabic novel tend to focus on canonical writers, like the Egyptian novelist and Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006), and leave out or just mention en passant the work of others. This book is not concerned with the ways in which the Arabic novel breaks away from or reproduces Mahfouz’s approach and techniques, but focuses instead on the way in which the authors in question engage with the phenomena of nationalism, feminism, post- and neo-colonialism, civil war, and social change in the Arab world using an urban scenario as their privileged point of observation. The Arabic city is privileged as a focal point because it is the space where the struggles over issues of nation-building, gender, religion, and class, as well as the patriarchal, colonialist, Zionist, and sectarian violence linked to these issues, manifest themselves most evidently. To this end, From Damascus to Beirut: Contested Cities in Arab Writing brings together four novels published between 1969 and 1989, which have never been approached from this perspective nor put in this kind of dialogue before. Ulfat Idilbi’s Damascus, Ghassan Kanafani’s Haifa, Ahlam Mosteghanemi’s Constantine, and Elias Khoury’s Beirut are social and historical products, and, as such, as Henri Lefebvre maintains, are deeply rooted in politics and affected by ideology. The cities discussed here, in fact, display the ebbs and flows of political and social life in their respective countries and in the Arab world in general. Each city stands at a crucial point in the history of the Arab world, and the way in which they are represented by their respective authors sets the stage for, and sometimes even foreshadows, an upcoming defeat or disappointment. Albeit for different reasons, Damascus, Haifa, Constantine and Beirut are all expressions of failures either on national, political, social, or economic levels. Paradoxically, however, they are also the repositories of their people’s hopes and aspirations, as well as of their disappointments. Analysing these novels as such, this book will be of particular interest to postcolonial readers and, more importantly, to English-speaking readers who are interested in the study of modern Arabic literature. Its close textual analysis offers the reader new tools not only for understanding themes and narrative techniques pertaining to the Arabic novel, but also the contemporary political, cultural and social issues that produced them.

Download or read book Ebla to Damascus written by Harvey Weiss and published by . This book was released on 1985 with total page 0 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Old Damascus the Unknown written by Zakariyā Muḥammad Kibrīt and published by . This book was released on 2002 with total page 29 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt:

Download or read book Damascus Gate written by Robert Stone and published by Simon and Schuster. This book was released on 1999-05-04 with total page 534 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: American journalist Christopher Lucas is investigating religious fanatics when he discovers a plot to bomb the sacred Temple Mount.

Download or read book Transforming Damascus written by Leila Hudson and published by Bloomsbury Publishing. This book was released on 2008-07-30 with total page 201 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: In 1860, Damascus was a sleepy provincial capital of the weakening Ottoman Empire, a city defined in terms of its relationship to the holy places of Islam in the Arabian Hijaz and its legacy of Islamic knowledge. Yet by 1918 Damascus had become a seat of Arab nationalism and a would-be modern state capital. How can this metamorphosis be explained? Here Leila Hudson describes the transformation of Damascus. Within a couple of generations the city changed from little more than a way-station on the Islamic pilgrimage routes that had defined the city's place for over a millennium. Its citizens and notables now seized the opportunities made available through transport technology on the eastern Mediterranean coast and in the European economy. Shifts in marriage patterns, class, education and power ensued. But just when the city's destiny seemed irrevocably linked to the Mediterranean world and economy, World War I literally starved the urban centre of Damascus and empowered its Bedouin hinterland. The consequences shaped Syria for the rest of the twentieth century and beyond.

Download or read book A Disappearance in Damascus written by Deborah Campbell and published by Picador. This book was released on 2017-09-05 with total page 352 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: Winner of the Hilary Weston Writers’ Trust Prize for Nonfiction Winner of the Freedom to Read Award Winner of the Hubert Evans Prize In the midst of an unfolding international crisis, renowned journalist Deborah Campbell finds herself swept up in the mysterious disappearance of Ahlam, her guide and friend. Campbell’s frank, personal account of a journey through fear and the triumph of friendship and courage is as riveting as it is illuminating. The story begins in 2007, when Deborah Campbell travels undercover to Damascus to report on the exodus of Iraqis into Syria, following the overthrow of Saddam Hussein. There she meets and hires Ahlam, a refugee working as a “fixer”—providing Western media with trustworthy information and contacts to help get the news out. Ahlam has fled her home in Iraq after being kidnapped while running a humanitarian center. She supports her husband and two children while working to set up a makeshift school for displaced girls. Strong and charismatic, she has become an unofficial leader of the refugee community. Campbell is inspired by Ahlam’s determination to create something good amid so much suffering, and the two women become close friends. But one morning, Ahlam is seized from her home in front of Campbell’s eyes. Haunted by the prospect that their work together has led to her friend’s arrest, Campbell spends the months that follow desperately trying to find Ahlam—all the while fearing she could be next. The compelling story of two women caught up in the shadowy politics behind today’s most searing conflict, A Disappearance in Damascus reminds us of the courage of those who risk their lives to bring us the world’s news.

Download or read book The Sacred Books of the Old and New Testaments written by and published by . This book was released on 1904 with total page 256 pages. Available in PDF, EPUB and Kindle. Book excerpt: