Category Archives: Blog

These spiritual window-shoppers, who idly ask,
How much is that? Oh, I’m just looking.
They handle a hundred items and put them down–
shadows with no capital.

What is spent is love and two eyes wet with weeping.
But these walk into a shop,
and their whole lives pass suddenly in that moment,
in that shop.

Innocent games…resembling checkers, hopscotch, and chess, are played there. In addition, mullahs, dervishes, and poets take turns telling stories in verse or in prose. The narrations by the mullahs and the dervishes are moral lessons, like our sermons, but it is not considered scandalous not to pay attention to them…A mullah will stand up in the middle, or at one end of the coffeehouse, and begin to preach in a loud voice, or a dervish enters all of a sudden, and chastises the assembled on the vanity of the world and its material goods. It often happens that two or three people talk at the same time, one on one side, the other on the opposite, and sometimes one will be a preacher and the other a storyteller. — Jean Chardin (d. 1713)

In the souq of the Old City of Damascus, there are a number of small tables set up in front of the cafes and shops for shoppers and pilgrims to stop for a quick–or luxurious–cup of coffee. Most people don’t realize that coffee’s origins go back directly to Sufi history in Africa and the Middle East. Since it’s too late for me to explain it in a blog post, you can read more about the mystic origins of coffee in this BBC article as well as in this post, which focuses more on the adjudication of coffee in Islamic law under the Ottomans…

How could I forget that I have photographs of the elaborate woodwork and ablaq interior of my absolute favorite restaurant in Damascus? Surprisingly, when I had dinner there, there weren’t any other foreigners–which means I must have been in the right place. The beauty of the restaurant speaks for itself. It was hard to get up and leave after enjoying my luscious lentil soup, since I knew I may never be able to return…

While many of you may look at this graffiti and say, “Humph, look at that–Occupy Beirut,” I look at this wall and see: JELLYFISH! My eyes are primed to see jellyfish, since they started invading our beach this week. Today, when I got to the beach, four people had already been stung–so I had to sit today out and workout in the gym instead. Now, on top of worrying about car bombs and foreign military intervention next door, I guess we have to add jellyfish to the list. Maybe that’s why they’re appearing not only in the water, but also now on land too–in graffiti. So look out! The jellyfish are coming, the jellyfish are coming!

In my piece “Sharing the Sufis of Syria,” I mention the time that I stumbled upon statues of semazens (whirling dervishes) in Azm Palace in Damascus. Next to these statues, I spotted a few Sufi scrolls from several centuries ago–like the one above. Since these fragile writings are kept under glass, it’s difficult to take a clear photograph of them–but you can still see the style of the calligraphy, and the two different colors of ink…