The following anecdote was related to me during my field work
in Syria a few days after the event allegedly took place:
One day a high-ranking officer visiting the regiment ordered the
soldiers to recount their dreams of the night before. A soldier
stepped forward and announced: “I saw the image of the leader
in the sky, and we mounted ladders of fire to kiss it.” A second
soldier followed suit: “I saw the leader holding the sun in his
hands, and he squeezed it, crushing it until it crumbled. Darkness
blanketed the face of the earth. And then his face illuminated the
sky, spreading light and warmth in all directions.” Soldier
followed soldier, each extolling the leader's greatness. When
M's turn came, he stepped forward, saluted the visiting officer,
and said: “I saw that my mother is a prostitute in your
bedroom.” The beating and discharge followed. Commenting
retrospectively on his act, M explained that he had “meant that
his country is a whore.”M's
story was told to me by a close friend of M's, one of my most
reliable sources for information about Syrian politics, during the
course of what would become two and one-half years of field
research in Syria. In 1985, while studying Arabic, I lived with a
Lebanese family in Abu Rummaneh, an affluent neighborhood of
Damascus. In 1988–89, under the auspices of an IIE-Fulbright
grant, I lived in the women's dormitories at the University of
Damascus, in the Palestinian refugee camps, and in a rented apartment
in Salahiyya, a middle-class neighborhood near the center of town.
In 1992, I rented an apartment on the border of the middle-class,
conservative neighborhood of Muhajirin during a year-long stay
supported by a Fulbright-Hays doctoral dissertation fellowship. And
in 1996, funded by a grant from Wesleyan University, I returned
for the summer and lived in the Institut Français
d'Études Arabes de Damas. During the course of
my research, I conducted open-ended interviews with over
100 people from diverse generational, religious, sectarian,
and class backgrounds. Interview subjects included prominent
government officials, leaders and rank-and-file members of the
“popular” organizations, peasants, sports coaches,
school teachers, principals, entrepreneurs, artists, poets, film
directors, economists, historians, and political
dissidents.