The Weekend. No, not just any weekend. The Weekend. :)

Over this weekend, I was able to accomplish much, elhamdulillah.

On Friday, I dressed up nicely in order to be respectful and went in search of the Sayyida Ruqayya mosque. It’s a relatively big place which seems really small from the outside when you first approach it. There are two doors through which to enter, one is for men and the other for women. Once I entered through the door for women, on the left there was a bin where they had bags for shoes. On the right there was a stand with abayas (black) on it, although the abaya didn’t come into play until I was pretty much into the mosque and about to go into the place where Sayyida Ruqayya herself is buried. Right when I was about to enter, the guy at the door stopped me and told me to go back and get an abaya, which I did. Afterwards, I walked in. I visited Sayyida Ruqayya elhamdulillah, and couldn’t help but cry when I got really close to her resting place. There were many Iranians around, and I could also see inside the tomb itself that there was a lot of Iranian money placed into the shrine, as blessings or luck. You could see some Syrian pounds as well, but mostly it was Iranian money. I apologize; I don’t know the unit of money for Iran so I’m not going to say anything but Iranian money.

A side note here about Sayyida Ruqayya herself—if I read the sign correctly in the mosque, she is the daughter of Hz. Husayn, who was martyred in Karbala. Mostly this is a Shi’a place if I understood correctly, and as I was walking towards the shrine I could see a lot of them had stones. I also prayed, and while I was praying someone placed a stone on top of my bag. It’s usual that a Shi’a have a stone from the earth of Karbala while praying, but I don’t know if this stone was actually from there since there’s a box of stones that is at the entrance to the shrine proper. Either way, I was quite happy to have been there. I couldn’t leave there for a while though, so I sat for some time in the courtyard and just prayed. It was wonderful and peaceful. When I had first walked into the mosque there was a group of Iranians reciting an ode or a prayer, I’m not exactly sure what they were reading, meaning obviously I have to get started on Persian soon. When I walked out and sat in the courtyard there wasn’t anyone doing anything in a group setting, it was just a couple of people spread out through the courtyard sitting together and talking and such, so I was able to just sit there for a while. It was quite a hot day but the courtyard itself was really nice and cool and windy.

After visiting the Sayyida Ruqayya mosque, I then went to the Umayyad Mosque. The Sayyida Ruqayya mosque is quite close to the Umayyad Mosque actually, it’s not even five minutes away by walking. Anyways, I got to the Umayyad Mosque, but they told me that I couldn’t get in without an abaya, so I went to the “Putting on Special Clothing Room” (no joke, that’s the real name of the room) and got an abaya for five Syrian pounds (which is also lira. Have I talked about the money unit here before? If I haven’t, a quick overview now: foreigners usually refer to the Syrian money as Syrian pounds, and Syrians refer to it as lira, and I’ve heard my grandmother refer to it as Suri, to distinguish it from the Turkish lira. So there we are :) ) because I’m Turkish. The guy asked me where I was from because the price changes according to where you’re from. Turks get a lower price apparently.

Having borrowed the abaya from here, which happened to be an interesting gray-brown color, I walked in and just did a walk around the mosque first. Afterwards I started to take pictures, and I will hopefully be able to upload them on a Picasa web album or something and link it to here so that people will be able to see. Words are nice of course but since one picture’s worth a thousand words, one needs to put pictures up as well, and hopefully I will be able to do this.

If you all remember, all of this is happening on Friday, so I happened to be at the Umayyad Mosque right around the Friday prayer time, so I stuck around and listened to the hutba and prayed the Friday prayer. Only after the Friday prayer had been finished do they let women visit the actual prayer site within the Umayyad Mosque, and within this prayer hall is the shrine of Hz. Yahya, or Zacharias as I believe he is called in English. I visited him, elhamdulillah, and then towards the back of the complex you can find one of the shrines for Hz. Husayn, and in the same place they also have a small shrine for Zeynel Abidin. I visited both of these places, and then being really hungry, went home to prepare lunch. When I got home, I found that one of my house mates’ friend was here and she knew the way both to Sayyida Zainab and also to Mohi al-din Ibn Arabi. Originally I had planned on going to Sayyida Zainab after finishing with lunch and whatnot, but I ended up going to Mohi al-din Ibn Arabi’s tomb and mosque with the friend. She is truly a wonderful person.

After visiting and paying respects to Mohi al-din Ibn Arabi, we stuck around for a while because the men were actually doing a zikr. They were in a small room though off to the side, and the people working at the mosque wouldn’t allow us women to sit downstairs close to the room so we had to go upstairs, but once we sort of pasted our faces and ears to the window, we were able to hear much of the zikr elhamdulillah.

After the zikr, we decided on meeting at 6:30 am on Saturday morning to go to Sayyida Zainab.

The morning of Saturday, I woke up, got ready, but I was running sort of late so I didn’t have time to eat breakfast (bad idea not eating breakfast. Always eat breakfast). Anyways, I booked it to the bridge where we were going to meet, and we met up and then went to the top of the bridge to catch a microbus to go to a certain point on the way to Sayyida Zainab. From that certain point, we caught another microbus to go to Sayyida Zainab. It took quite some time to get there, but elhamdulillah, we were able to reach Sayyida Zainab and visit her. They gave me an abaya there as well. By the way, I say “they gave me an abaya” but what I really mean is I borrowed the abaya, I didn’t actually get to keep it. Having taken the abaya, we entered the complex, which is absolutely amazing. The outside is full of blue and green and yellow tiles that are arranged in the most beautiful and intricate flower designs courtesy of Iranians who really know what they’re doing when it comes to pretty designs.

The inside was actually much like the Sayyida Ruqayya mosque, just Sayyida Zainab was much larger and honestly I felt like although the inside was quite well taken care of, the outside areas could definitely use more looking after. And I don’t fully know why, maybe it was because I was with someone but I didn’t have the same feeling in Sayyida Zainab as I did in Sayyida Ruqayya. I will have to go to visit her again insha’allah, and we’ll see how things are when I go back. Maybe it’ll be different being alone. We’ll see.

After visiting Sayyida Zainab, we walked around the area a little bit more and visited other important sites. We walked into a cemetery and I found the tomb of Ali Sheriati, which I was completely surprised to come across, it was a pretty small affair and not well taken care of but it was there. I finally bought an abaya—Moroccon style abaya, in Syria, yes, thank you very much. The social unacceptability continues full-blast. I also got my first taste of true hospitality when we were doing the walking around. My friend wanted to find the mosque for one of the first martyrs from the Sahaba, which happened to be in the Palestinian refugee neighborhood of the city, so while we found the mosque we also found that it was locked, and a nice Palestinian man helped us get in touch with the imam so we were able to go inside and see the maqam of the martyr and also walk through the mosque. Side note again—the mosques here are amazing and they sort of disguise themselves. You think they’re going to be pretty small due to their door size, but then you walk inside and it’s an amazing, light-filled place, quite large, too. This was exactly the case with this mosque we visited.

We went back home for lunch, and I decided on eating pizza this time, so I went and got pizza. The guy is amazing but the pizza crust is interesting, the dough isn’t like the dough in America. Then again, not even the ketchup is similar so can’t exactly expect the pizza dough and whatnot to be similar. Still delicious, but the pizza dough is more like pastry dough. Anyways.

I ate lunch, and then afterwards I walked up to Mohi al-Din Ibn Arabi for asr prayer. We had asked yesterday and the people at the mosque said that they held zikr sessions after asr prayer, and we both wanted to go see how that would be. My friend couldn’t come because she had things to do but either way, I walked up there and prayed asr and then sat and listened to the zikr. It was quite wonderful to hear; I’d listened to other zikrs before so I had an idea of what it would be like but that had always been in a pretty private setting with a set number of people. This time was different though because it was just a community full of people I’d never seen before and whom I also assumed didn’t see each other on a regular basis. They were all quite comfortable with simply sitting next to each other and praying and doing zikr. I admire their ability to be Muslim and be completely okay with it, no problems, and no assumptions attached.

All in all, quite the productive weekend. I was quite happy with what I was able to accomplish, elhamdulillah. School starts again on Sunday, so we’ll see how this week goes. See you all at the next post! :D

School Starts!! First week of classes!

Indeed. You are once again not reading the title of this blog post wrong. I’m once again in school, during the summer. It seems I just cannot do without school, and I’ve even managed to find a school in the oldest city of the world, Damascus. :) Just kidding. The point of my coming here was to speak Arabic and take classes, so elhamdulillah, the point is being accomplished insha’allah.

I walked to school this morning and arrived in about 35-40 minutes. After looking on the board for my name (Fatima Zulfikar—have I mentioned already that my name has become Fatima here? People have a hard time saying my name here as well, so I just went with Fatima. In Arabic: فاطمة ذوالفقار) and finding that I will be in room B-10, I walked over to my classroom. Classes here start at 9 and end at 1, meaning I have four hours of Arabic class through the day, with 10 minute breaks in between each hour. Quite fun. I calculated with my dad later in the week (I’m writing this post over the weekend of my second week here)that due to the 4 hours a day, 5 days a week, I’m actually doing the same amount of Arabic that I’ve done over the past three years at UNC, in one month. For a lot cheaper, by the way.

There are now 14 people in my class, 3 boys and 11 girls, plus the teacher, whose name is Ahmad Muhammad Muhammad, or, as he said, “in English, Ahmad Muhammad Double.” You have to hear him say the word “double” though, it’s not the same as it is in America. Or if anything you just have to wait until you see me or talk to me again to hear me saying it. :)

On the first day of class we did some really basic grammar, sort of like a re-cap of the basics of Arabic grammar where we went over the concepts of noun, verb, and what can be termed prepositions (خروف جر). Actually before that we introduced ourselves and things like that, and then we did the introduction to grammar.

Throughout the two weeks of school up to now, we went over numbers (عدادmore complicated than you would think actually—there are different rules for different numbers, as in the thing that is being counted changes according to the number, and the gender of the number also changes depending on the gender of the noun. It’s quite wonderful.) and repetition for emphasis (توكيد) and then also the part of a sentence that answers the questions of “how?” (الحال) and, most awesomely, we also went over the meanings of verb forms in Arabic. You see, in Arabic, you have this system where out of three letters, or the root, you can make a million different kinds of words depending on what form you put it in—this goes for verbs, which have 10 forms, called وزن plural اوزان, as well as nouns and adjectives and adverbs. The connections within the language are amazing, and you can pretty much make out the meaning of any word if you can find the three-letter root of that word.

So school is from Sunday to Thursday, and the weekend hits you kind of unexpectedly, especially since I’m still getting used to the fact that the week is indeed from Sunday to Thursday, and the weekend is Friday and Saturday. The feeling of happiness that washes over a person when they realize that the next day, Friday, is the start of the weekend, is exactly the same.

My weekend was pretty awesome so that deserves a post of its own, so the adventures of my second weekend here coming up!

The weekend: Friday and Saturday

So you think I’ve written the days of the weekend wrong, do you? Nope. Not at all. The weekend here consists of Friday and Saturday instead of Saturday and Sunday, which I think is quite wonderful, and yet I’ve no idea why. Either way, I’ve had two extremely relaxed days where I really haven’t done much other than sitting and reading and eating and drinking liters and liters of water. I literally cannot stop drinking water. Anyways, as I haven’t done much of value for these two days, I’ve decided to dedicate this post to a description of Damascus and my house and things like that.

Thus, first of all, the house: it’s a classic house that consists of a courtyard with rooms all around, and it has two floors. The first floor consists of the courtyard, three rooms, the kitchen, and the bathroom. The second floor has two rooms (I’m on the second floor in one of these rooms) and there are also five little steps up to the roof of the house. You come in from the front door and walk through a small corridor that opens to the courtyard of the house. The courtyard is half covered by a grapevine and the other half is by some kind of cement covering but I don’t really know what it is made up of. Anyways, the first floor of the house is arranged around the courtyard. Immediately once you come out of the corridor, the first door to your right is a room. Right next to this room is the kitchen. There’s a bit of emptiness where there a bunch of plants and whatnot, and you can see the stairs going up to the second floor. On the left wall of the first floor, there’s space for the TV (which one of my housemates just recently bought because the old one didn’t work and had obviously not been used for quite some time. It’s actually sort of hard to tell for how long the old TV hadn’t been used since there’s a lot of dust and sand floating around here, but either way, it just hadn’t been used.) So after the TV, you just keep going and you have these random cement blocks that are covered by a rug and I haven’t yet become curious enough to lift up the rug to check and see if there’s anything substantial underneath the rug, so I’ll update you guys about that once I do check.

So, once you pass the cement blocks, there’s another room right in front of you, and then right next to this room is the bathroom. The bathroom has a toilet that you sit on, it’s not squatty. There’s a bathtub in there as well, and it’s quite clean except because we go in there with our shoes it gets muddy after a while since there’s just so much dust on our shoes and the bathroom floor tends to be wet. Either way though, it’s quite nice. Turn your back to the bathroom, and right in front of you are the stairs to the second floor, and to the left there are actually two other rooms-—one is a classroom that the landlady’s son uses to teach Arabic when he’s around, and there are some stairs going up which lead to another room.

Now, once you go up the stairs (the ones in front of you, not the ones leading to the room), the only things you’re going to find are the two rooms and there’s also a laundry line which I’m pretty sure I’ll be using that one because it puts the clothes right out in the sun so they’ll dry quicker. The two rooms are right next to each other, and the room in front of you when you get up the stairs is that of a housemate, and the room right next to it is mine! It’s quite nice, large, and has high ceilings so I feel like I have a lot of space. In my room there’s a bed, a closet, a desk with a mirror on it which I don’t use except to put my water and cell phone on when I go to bed, and then another table which I use more often. I also have a window that I tend to keep open while I’m in the house so that the room gets air. Despite being on the second floor the room doesn’t get very hot, especially when I keep the window open, but I do have an air conditioner. I used it the first night I spent in the house, but after that I just didn’t need to use it because the weather’s been so nice and cool and windy. The wind is a wee bit dangerous for the clothes, but hey, you win some, you lose some.

The way the room is arranged is as such: you come in through the door, and the window is to your left, and the little desk is right in front of the window. There’s a small sofa right after the table, and then there’s the bed. To your right is the closet, and after the closet you have the other desk thing, which, like I said, I just don’t feel the need to use. It’s a really nice room, but most of my time I spend downstairs in the courtyard area.

The house is nice in general, it’s not hugely taken care of or maintained, but there’s a person who comes in every week to do the cleaning and stuff so that’s nice. And they’re really helpful when it comes to installing and moving things about so it’s okay.

That's it in general for the house. As for Damascus, let me just get straight to the point and state it very succinctly: it is exactly like Istanbul, maybe less well-arranged, and Arabic instead of Turkish is heard on the streets. Otherwise, I swear I'm simply walking around a big city in Turkey unable to understand all of the conversations going on around me since my colloquial Arabic is pretty much next to non-existent. Damascus is also obviously older than any other city on earth so you kind of have to multiply the Istanbul effect of walking on history by 10 I think which should get you to the correct ratio of the history level of the city.

Anyways, Damascus a little bit more in general. Its actually quite small. I don't know why but it seemed absolutely huge when I was looking at the map and then I realized I could walk most places in less than half an hour, 45 minutes if I was being slow.

I can't help but be comparative right now though, so some comparisons and similarities between here and Turkey. Traffic: completely the same. Horns honk the entire time, cars/buses/minibuses/microbuses/taxis don't care about pedestrians, or bugs, as I've decided to refer to us humans who walk. Its really interesting as well but taxis and microbuses honk at whatever they see moving essentially. Whether they're empty or not, they see someone walking, they honk. Its amazing. People: friendly and helpful, elhamdulillah. The men are also the same as in Turkey where they pretty much stare at you for being a woman. White people might blend in a little bit more in Turkey so I get more attention here for the white color of my skin, but its not that bad. Nobody acts on the looks they give so really, everything is good. Damascus is quite the safe place elhamdulillah.

That's all the similarities I can come up with right now, but I'll be sure to update the similarities soon as I remember them. For now, look out for the next post about the start of school! :) Indeed. Even in Damascus, I have managed a summer school. And, for all intents and purposes, its been good. :)