Word: damascus
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: during 1960-1969
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...Duke might just as well write another piece called the Damascus Reel, for Syria, too, underwent a shakeup, quieter but no less significant. Behind the sudden shuffle of Middle Eastern leaders was a power struggle inside a strange new political force, the Baath (Renaissance) Party, which in little less than a year has turned from a shadowy, clandestine movement without popular support into a dynamic power challenging Gamal Abdel Nasser for leadership of the Arab world...
Founder Aflak, 53, whose scholarly manner has won him the nickname "The Professor," defines Baath through his career as much as through his words. Born in Damascus to the Greek Orthodox faith in an overwhelmingly Moslem environment (Aflak's father was a moderately successful grain merchant, and his mother, now 75, is still illiterate), Aflak got honors in history at the Sorbonne. In Paris he argued politics with other Afro-Asian students, read Marx, Nietzsche and Jefferson. He says, "I quickly found Marxism inadequate, based on materialism without human and spiritual values, without national consciousness. Nations are only large...
Returning to Damascus as a teacher, Aflak was soon indoctrinating students in his revolutionary ideals, drawing support from those who were overeducated, unemployed sons of the poor. In 1942, after leading a strike against French history texts being used in Syrian schools, he quit teaching and became a fulltime agitator, drawing support from those who, like himself, were overeducated, underemployed sons of peasants and workers. The luminous classical Arabic of his political tracts fills Baathists with ecstasy, but in translation, his ideas seem rather murky: "Nationalism is love before everything else"; "Revolution is the opposition of truth to the existing...
...terrific roar, and the line vanished from sight behind a spouting column of black dust and smoke." So wrote T. E. Lawrence, in Seven Pillars of Wisdom, of his World War I dynamiting raids on the Hejaz Railway, the 782-mile "pilgrim express" whose single track linked Damascus with the Islamic holy city of Medina. Lawrence of Arabia reduced most of the line to a snarl of sprung steel and splintered ties. Nearly half a century of desert winds and systematic depredation have done the rest. Bedouins ransacked the abandoned stations, pried loose wooden ties for cooking fires. In Medina...
...five Cahaly brothers grow up in Damascus, Syria, "the oldest city in the world," Ralph boasts. Their parents worked in a silk mill. Mike, "10 or 12 years older" than 60-year-old Ralph, came to America in time to fight in World War I. Ralph arrived in 1920, at the age of 17, and found his first job in a Liggetts drug store. The brothers opened a small grocery store in 1922 on Oxford St. in Cambridge, but after six years made a fateful move. All of their four succeeding stores were on Mount Auburn St. Old graduates...