"September 24, 2001.
Psychosis has spread in the West for two small weeks. Fear of the Middle East has become such that for many I'm throwing myself in the lion's jaws. Nevertheless I'm landing in Damascus.
And the real-life situation is actually very different. Indeed relationships with Israel are stormy and the regime is far to match our ideals of democracy and of freedom of expression, but nowhere do I feel hostility. It is even hospitality and kindness that I feel, like I will a few years later in Pakistan.
Syria, like a fair part of the Middle East, has been from time immemorial a land of exchange and civilisation. Didn't it witness, long before it became a Roman province, the birth of writing? Wasn't Damascus, one of the oldest cities in the world, the refined centre of the mighty Umayyad caliphate, which ruled from Spain to Central Asia?"
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