This a place that amazes me.
Few are the people who follow their passion no matter what, even over their own comfort. He was one of those people. —
His Story:
I was always a person who looked at societies differently than others. It is magical how when you see the outcomes of events, but yet, they make sense when you study society. I was fond of the social outcome of societies. In my opinion, to write literature is making history and writing it literally. The writer goes into imagination and this imagination, in my opinion, has two specifications. The first is analytical, where he sees the world and society from his perspective and writes about these the way he sees it, and then as an observer.
So, When you read the literature you go through two processes. You first need to understand the mind of the writer, which is my passion, the second is to see how people look at their societies, which is another passion of mine.
I was born in Damascus suburb, Giroud. It is 50 km away from Damascus. I finished my high school in the city I was born in, and then I moved to Damascus to study English literature. “Why English literature?” you may ask. The reason I chose English literature not Arabic is to satisfy this passion I have in my life. Arabic is my mother tongue, and with English, I can read in two languages. I felt I was open to more cultures and able to understand more about societies. After university, I started to prepare myself to do MA in comparative literature. My idea was to go through history and see how women were gods to how they were closed up in the homes. I believe there were some critical points in history where things changed. Women were thought to be holy creatures. When you want to see your fortune in coffee-cup, a woman does it for you all the times. Women are somehow considered as the tongue of god or the unknown. How many times your mother told you about her feeling about something and turns she’s always right. That is why we see women are the ones in position when we try to predict the future. Comparative literature will show me how poems, novels, and theaters have dealt with women throughout history and how the patriarchal revolution when Torah was brought down, changed the whole history and started to look from above to women. It was the first time women treated as a minor position in society. This is my idea and the way I designed my research.
Unfortunately, the revolution started when I was still at the beginning of research. I had no choice but to be in the streets with all the people of Syria to reclaim out the right to live. We wanted to make our own decisions. I could neither apply for the MA, nor to stay in Syria. I went to Lebanon. Somehow my study is related to journalism so I started working as a journalist. My primary objective and motivation to be a journalist were to compare and criticize constructively. To see where our politicians fail and where they do good for the seek of the future of Syrians. I wrote for a news platform concerned about Syrian civilians. I wrote the stories about the besieged areas. Also, about armed people who gave up war and went to civil societies. Then I moved to France24 as an assistant manager in 2013. I was responsible for five files, Sudan, Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and the Gulf. I was responsible for coordinating with the reporters and editing scripts until producing the final report before sending it to Paris. In 2014, I decided to come here for two reasons. First, the girl whom I loved lived in Turkey. The other reason was that I felt that my experience in Beirut was over. It is a small city that you can know its people in only six months, but also you can become an analyzer. I had always gone to Lebanon before moving there. We are similar people. So, I wanted to discover a new place, history.
Some Arabs look at Turkey as an ex-colonizer. We were taught in schools that the Ottoman empire was a colonizer. I wanted to come to here to see this country how it went from an empire to a free state. I wanted to see a country in the Middle East that had the determination to be free and to be the best democratic country in the middle east. I look at the elections here, and I am amazed how transparent they are. I have never seen that in my country. I was sure that I would be another person and learn so much when I moved to turkey. It is different than Europe and any other country. In Europe, the new generation hasn’t been through the process of revolution and change. They were raised in a democratic environment. But in Turkey, you live in the core of evolution. So inspiring, even though my life in Lebanon was doing well I couldn’t resist my eager to move. I stayed in Istanbul for 15 days then moved to Gaziantep because I had a contract with a company for three months. I then stayed there for another seven months and came back to Istanbul. The funny thing was I always worked in startups. I learned how to create something from nothing. How to make things succeed. I worked for many websites and went to politics in Syria not to write what was happening but to analyze and show pros and cons of events.
I am pleased here. I once told my wife that we are in a place where history is being created and this will teach us a lot for the future. Here you can see history being created. You see people with and against something, and some who don’t even care, all would sit at the end of the day around the same table. We have never seen this in the Arab world. The mentality there is about who is with me and who is against me, and those who agree with me can sit with me. This is the primary factor for me staying here. When you see a secular person and a religious one together. A woman with hijab with her daughter without hijab or the other way around. This place that amazes me. Sometimes I feel like just grabbing a camera and taking pictures of people in streets. Contradictions exist, but still, the life is going on. I am not claiming that Syria is so different, where you can find this but in a smaller range, not in the suburbs. I am very interested in this and still trying to encode this way in life. I look, think and analyze why this is happening. You see different mindsets and political orientations with minimal violence. To me Turks are Middle Eastern, not Europeans. Another thing that I have realized is that people are not afraid to hide their identities. For example, if you ask about someone’s religion in the Arab world, most of us would back off a little bit and wonder how they would respond. When you see a Muslim drinking here, then it is his own choice, and it is not thought that Islam is like this. People don’t judge each other’s faiths. In Syria, all the alcohol shops are owned by Christians because they are permitted socially to drink because it is not prohibited by their religion. If a Muslim does that people would look at him in an awful way. This touched me a lot, and I believe that this is how people should live. I hope that the Turkish experience inspires me to write something to the next generation of Syrians.
My wife, the woman my life. She is the reason why I came to Turkey. She is the daughter of a well-known journalist in Syria. He was the chief editor in a newspaper, responsible for local affairs. I met her in Damascus at a small party. She was a friend of my friend. The first time I shook her hand, I felt something was strange. I told my friend that this girl would be my wife for the rest of my life even though I knew she was in a serious relationship. My friend said me it was impossible. I saw her on another occasion, and we worked together in a revolution related thing. After it, every one of us took different paths. I went to Lebanon, and she went to Turkey where both of us got engaged to different people. It had been a year and a half we hadn’t talked. When I came to Istanbul for a conference, a friend of mine told me she was here too. I told him to call her maybe also her fiancée would join us. Honestly, I didn’t want to see her because I was engaged and there was a moral commitment. In between, there were emotions that I couldn’t bear to hide. I met her with friends she hated me because I was ignoring her. I didn’t want to show any feelings, though I was burning from inside. Then I went to Lebanon, where my engagement after a while didn’t go well, and we broke up. Six months later a friend of mine told me that my friend, the girl I loved in Turkey, broke up with her fiancée, so I decided to try my chance. We started to talk again about her life and mine. Our relationship grew up, and I decided to move to Istanbul. We were together for a year, and then we got engaged. We have been married since the end of 2014. It is incredible when you have a journalist in the house who see things from a different perspective than me. We say our opinions without trying to convince each other. When we feel that the argument goes intense, we stop it. Even when it comes to friends, we don’t agree or like the same people. I have friends that she doesn’t want and vice versa, but we still sit all together. My wife worked in many organizations, and now we are living here, and when we got married, we married on the Turkish way.
In Istanbul, I feel like I travel in time. The mixture of civilizations is amazing. I once told a friend that I will stay in a place as long as the place surprises me.
