In 2002 I spent a few days in Damascus – the latest capital which the crazy Israelis have decided to bomb (the others being Beirut, Tehran and Sana'a).
I went to check whether I would be happy spending some years there on an EU funded project but decided it was not my thing on the basis of being pissed off by the obvious antipathy to women displayed by Arab men – particularly on the plane out. But I do remember being bowled over by the quality of the glassware I found in the small workshops in the city – and by the amazing mosque.
https://alastaircampbell.org/2025/07/429-question-time-gaza-genocide-and-global-hypocrisy/
This post puts it very appropriately – indicating that a
new country is bombing a 5000 year old country.
Tim Mackintosh-Smith is the only Arabist known to me who
From 1982 to 2019, lived in an ancient tower house off the "Market of the Cows" in the old city of San'a, Yemen. As a consequence of the civil war in Yemen, he had to leave this home and temporarily relocate to Malaysia.[4] He is the author of the travel books Yemen: Travels in Dictionaryland (1997) and Yemen: The Unknown Arabia (2000). Further, he is one of the foremost scholars of the Moroccan medieval scholar Ibn Battuta. Mackintosh-Smith has published a trilogy recounting Ibn Battuta's journeys as published in his Muqaddimah (The Prologue): Travels with a Tangerine (2001), The Hall of a Thousand Columns (2005) and Landfalls (2010).
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