You Georgetown Kids May Have Just Had Your Midterms, But It’s Finals Time In Damascus

Thursday morning, bright and early, our exam began at 9 am. 1 ½ hours of writing/reading/grammar with a 30 minute break of a listening exam thrown in the middle. The exam wasn’t that bad—it included an article about obesity in America, another about addiction to smoking that was read aloud for the listening section and an essay question on whether the Internet would/already has replaced the need for books—though you wouldn’t know it as every time the professor left the room half the class would turn to their neighbor, their notes or their textbooks for the answers. The attitude of the other students in my class throughout the month had surprised me and it was probably the only downside of my experience thus far at the language institute.

Before I came other students that I talked to who had studied at the institute warned me it was the professor who was the determining factor in how successful your class was, but in this case the students definitely brought it down. Some of them genuinely wanted to learn and had many valid questions, but overall we probably did about 1 ½ hours of actual work every day with the other hours tied up in answering endless repeated questions for each of the 16 other students in the class and addressing their repeated complaints about the exam and how difficult everything was and blah blah blah. So although it would be nice to go on to the next level in a week or so and have some familiar faces in my class, perhaps its not such a bad thing that I will be taking the next month off and getting a little off track.

After the written exam we waited around for the conversation section. Students went in two at a time and had to pick a random topic, then debate it between the two of them. The topics were based on our class discussions with Hassan and included: What is the most important relationship between men and women and why (mine)? Is the Internet good or bad and why? Is the study and preservation of ancient sites good or bad and why (maybe the worst question of them all)? I was towards the end of the list, so by the time it reached my and Wan-Jin’s turn to be tested, Hassan was completely bored and let us go after about five minutes of discussing why its important for men and women to have friendships.

With the exam and level 5 behind us, I went with Katherine and Jack (20 year-old taking a semester off from university in Australia) to find a book for Katherine in a particular neighborhood based on a handdrawn map. One of her Syrian friends had recommended the book to her, it is a collection of stories aimed towards children written in fus’ha and about the lives of the 16 prophets (of which Muhammad is the last). The map led us to a back-roads street with two Islamic bookshops on it. It seemed a little random that her friend would direct us to this exact spot, especially once Katherine asked for the book at both shops and neither one had it, though one told her to wait for 10 minutes and someone would bring it. While we waited we walked a little in the area to see if we had missed another more obvious street of bookshops but there was none. When we returned the book still wasn’t there so we sat on the steps and ate from a bag of mixed nuts and decided that someone was probably frantically biking around the city trying to buy this book for her for a third of the price she will be charged.

Book in hand, we walked in the general direction of Katherine’s gym, where she gladly pays $100 a month to work out 2-3 hours a day, including shower (the house that she lives in doesn’t have a shower, only bucket baths), and she said it’s the only gym that she visited where the men didn’t stop working out to stare at her when she walked inside. On the way we got into a discussion about Islam, about various aspects of the religion and particularly how it is expressed here. Katherine met a student in her level 4 class who is British and lives here with his Pakistani-British wife, and who converted to Islam for their marriage. Somehow she feigned enough interest in being converted herself to get invited to their daily Qu’ran lessons and so she sits and listens (not exactly a discussion-based lesson) to the lectures geared towards Western converts. Pretty sweet deal if you ask me and definitely great insight into the basic teachings of Islam.

Still, I don’t know if it is best to study Islam from the perspective of your average local Muslim, considering the fact that there seem to be infinite ways (probably as many as there are in other religions) to interpret and internalize the religion—from perspectives on heaven and hell, relationships with nonbelievers, family life, wearing the headscarf, gender roles, perspectives on other religions, ideas about the origins of Islam and its current form, etc. Maybe it is better to study it from an outsider-academic-historic-comparative religion-perspective, trying to make sense of all these seemingly contradictory interpretations and what they have to do with the rest of the world. Obviously a combination of both is best, but these personal Qu’ran lessons seem to be pretty exclusive and besides, listening to one teacher doesn’t tell you anything about all the other ways people understand their religion. And perhaps, neither does sitting in a class at Georgetown on Islamic Studies, 1000s of miles away from the Muslim world, listening to a professor who would probably be condemned if s/he taught this way here. Or what about the g’town counterpart to Katherine’s lessons in the Ummayad Mosque, studying the Qu’ran with the Muslim Students Association?

Anyway, of course none of us really know anything about the topic in reality, but we stood for about 20 minutes talking on a street corner between her gym and the direction of where Jack and I live, before we decided to just sit in a restaurant and get some lunch instead. We walked to a nearby restaurant (the first actual restaurant I’ve been to in Damascus!) on the upper floor of a building at a table that overlooked a busy central square in the city and ordered a few small dishes, sitting for a while longer and enjoying the end of our class and the beginning of our weekend.