By Namit Arora

With Syria in the news, I’ve dusted off an account I wrote a few months after my visit there in Feb 2001. I’ve also created an 8-min video from my archives, using music by Fairuz for soundtrack. While I look at contemporary Syrian society and politics, the bulk of my narrative is on Ugarit, a nearly 4,000-year-old city held to be the birthplace of the alphabet. We know a fair bit about it from its surviving clay tablets, written in this first alphabet. One tablet even has this timeless reminder to men: ‘Do not tell your wife where you hide your money.’

The road to Lattakia goes over the Anti-Lebanon Range. I had left Aleppo under a blue sky at noon; now a thick fog rolls in, tall conifers appear in the valleys, visibility drops. The pop Arabic music in the bus gets louder but does not deter my fellow passengers from dozing. Handsome villages with brick houses, clean streets, and small domed mosques appear now and again. The bus stops at a rest area with gift shops and restaurants and arrives in Lattakia by early evening. I take a cab to the city center and find a hotel. It is my tenth day in Syria.

Lattakia lies on the Mediterranean coast of Syria and is one of its most modern towns. I see well-groomed women flaunting their feminine charms in tight jeans, sleek coats, flowing dark hair, makeup, décolletage. It feels like Eastern Europe. The evening prayer from a mosque comes wafting down rooftops just in time to remind me: I am in an Islamic country. Its socialistic aims clearly run counter to those of radical Islam, virtually absent in Syria. Just days ago, curiosity led me to ask a few urban young men: which Arab country has the hottest women? The winner: Lebanon, Syria next, and tied for third spot: Tunisia, Jordan, Kuwait. I imagine local young women waging a million mutinies daily—in dress, movement, occupation, choice of mates. Each new threshold crossed a potential source of angst and family drama. An intricate web of connections, customs, certitudes, all subject to modernizing change.

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