Africa & Middle East > Syrian Arab Republic > The Northeastern Desert > Aleppo > Articles > Elusive Aleppo

I’m lying on a rooftop in Aleppo, one of the oldest cities in the world. Pigeons gust over the ramparts of the ancient citadel, as the call to prayer goes up from first one mosque, then another - the long wavering notes overlapping, filling the darkening sky with their conference of yearning and wonder.

Situated amid the rocky plateaux of northern Syria, at the hub of ancient trade and pilgrim routes, Aleppo is a place where everything, no matter how old, is built on top of something older: mosques atop Byzantine basilicas, atop Greek and Roman temples, synagogues, Zoroastrian fire temples. Millenniums of wars, fires and earthquakes mean that most of what you see is merely medieval. But you’re profoundly aware of the layers of ancient culture, not only beneath your feet, but in the very air of the place. It’s as though you’re inhaling the dust of monuments along with aromas of cinnamon and cloves, drains and traffic fumes.

But laying here, bathing in sounds of otherness in the heart of the oldest quarter of the city, I feel I’m far from getting to grips with the place. Aleppo doesn’t rush to reveal itself. In fact, everything about it is maddeningly enigmatic.

In the narrow streets of the old city, the studded doors of the mansions are set deep, the walls high and windowless, while the women come sheathed in black: buttoned-up in coats of strangely Edwardian cut, their faces draped in shawls - with no gaps for lustrous kohl-rimmed pools, just an utter ghost-like blankness.

In the immediate vicinity of where I’m staying are the meeting places of no less than 20 Sufi orders - mystical Muslim brotherhoods, for whom music, song and dance are a means towards union with the divine. But how, if your don’t speak Arabic, are you supposed to contact them? I feel that around every corner I may step into some mysterious adventure, or that I may be disgorged by the place in a week’s time, its essence having eluded my completely.

It was music that brought me here - a recording of Syrian Sufi music heard at a friend’s house in London: a rasping, breathy flute, a slow, ominous drumbeat and a low voice, magnificently rounded as though resonating through some dark and cavernous chamber. I had a sense of music that has absorbed something from all the civilizations that have existed in that part of the world; music that, far from being purely Islamic, embodied knowledge too deep and too ancient to be contained by any one tradition.

The man behind this recording was a Frenchman, a student of Arab music for more than 20 years, who had converted to Islam and now lived in a 14th-century palace in Aleppo. He has given himself the name of the medieval Sufi poet Rumi, founder of the whirling dervishes - Jalal Eddine, the “Splendour of Faith”. I pictured him rattling around in his palace - as orientalist beatnik with a touch of the T E Lawrence. Then one day, discovering we had a friend in common, I phoned him.

When someone tells you that where they live is like Marrakesh without tourists, that they have many rooms and you are welcome to stay, you don’t think twice.

Syria was effectively closed to westerners for decades. It still sees few tourists. Visas are complicated, flights expensive or tortuously indirect. But six months later I flew into Aleppo at four in the morning, a pick-up driven by Jalal Eddine’s servant taking me through the deserted streets, along boulevards lined with burning rubbish, through a narrow gateway into the old city. We carried my luggage along narrow passages into a tree-lined courtyard, where my host appeared on a staircase - tall, silver-haired, in his mid-forties, but with a glow of elfin youthfulness.

I was shown to a cell-like chamber off the domed atrium, where I lay as the dawn call to prayer rang our over the city.

The house was designed to keep out the heat. The walls of the central living space soar, their elegant arabesques interlocking beneath the light-filled dome. But a certain dimness lingers in the well of the room. The floors and fountain are of polished orange marble. The walls glow with richly coloured kilims, with embroidered hangings, and brass salvers, 6ft in diameter and fabulously engraves. A huge beaded chandelier from a Cairo mosque dangles from the dome.

For several hours a day, Jalal Eddine sits on the banquette of Bedouin cushions, intent over his instrument, the qanun - the plucked zither that gives that archetypal ring of “eastern promise” to oriental music. The rippling phrases answer, repeat, overlay each other in dazzlingly complex patterns - all imbued with the same ominously dramatic inflection as the call to prayer, that sense of yearning, of reaching out towards something vast and unknowable.

Aleppo is famous for music throughout the Arab world. Many great singers live here, though traditionally they perform not in cafes or at concerts but at soirees in private houses, which in the past would have been carefully sealed (how typical of this place!) so that not one note would be audible to passers-by. Fortunately, Jalal Eddine has just announced that he is holding one in a few days’ time.

Aleppo’s reticence vanishes the moment you hit the souks: 22km of vaulted, dimly lit thoroughfares, one of the largest covered markets in the world. A central corridor runs dead straight through it all - and you’re in the way! Shoulders, elbows and hands shove at you from every direction. I see Jalal Eddine’s giraffe-like frame plunging off into the throng as barrows ram straight for my shins. Donkeys, thrashed by bareback boys, come bucking out of nowhere, while a spluttering three-wheeler van with a lambada-playing horn, piled high with boys and dirty laundry, lurches backwards out of a side alley.

But even more than energy and ceaseless movement, the souk exudes a sense of fatalism and indifference. The traders sprawled behind their glass cases of cumin and cloves, their sacks of hibiscus petals; the men and boys bellowing, tearing open great sacks of trainers, stacking bars of laurel soap in ziggurat formations; all have the air of being locked into another rhythm, another ethos that will keep this place going whatever the competition from the forces of globalisation. And that ethos, according to Jalal Eddine, is Sufism.

A current of mysticism within Islam, Sufism contains elements of much older belief systems - of ancient Persian fire worship, of the dualistic philosophies of the Gnostics, which fed into the medieval Christian heresies, the teachings of the desert hermits and ascetics. From the perspective of the West, it all seems risibly abstruse. Like shamanism and transcendental meditation, Sufism has been absorbed into the pantheon of new-age esoterica; like Zen, it seems less comprehensible the more you learn about it.

But here in Syria, it becomes suddenly matter of fact. It’s what goes on. The market traders have been closing their stalls on a Friday afternoon, going to the mosque and then on to the Zikr - the ecstatic ceremonies of the Sufi orders - every week for a thousand years. Nonetheless, finding someone who can not only explain Sufism, but impart that sense of knowledge linking back into the ancient world, is not going to be easy.

“What you have here is popular Sufism,” says Jalal Eddine. “For them the Zikr is a rave. It’s gestalt therapy! To find someone with the higher knowledge if nowadays very difficult.”

I must try to meet Sheikh Hilali, the head of the Q’adri brotherhood in Aleppo, possessor of a library of ancient books. It is said that he was once a doctor in Germany, and still has a German wife hidden away in his house.

Our taxi pulls out into a Brands Hatch tide of rusting Buicks, horse drawn carts and murderous three-wheeler vans. A lone cyclist comes meandering from the other direction, apparently indifferent to his imminent oblivion.

The imposing buildings of the new city are a legacy of the period 1918-45, when Syria was under French mandate and Aleppo was the final terminus of the Orient Express. They look like the blackened hulks of a forgotten civilisations, yet French is still the language of the cultured elite. The churches of the city’s large and influential Christian community loom over the traffic - Maronite, Chaldean, Gregorian, Armenian Orthodox, Syrian Orthodox, Byzantine Catholic, Syrian Catholic … the list goes on.

The pavements are packed with glossy youth, sprawled over cars, packing out the ice cream parlours and juice bars, veils and black gloves having given way to skin-tight flares and platform boots. But even here there’s the sense of a society that’s developed far from the capitalist mainstream. There’s no Coca-Cola, no MTV, or Hollywood films. There’s a wide variety of mostly dated western music on sale, but the music you actually hear is all Arab. And whether it’s digitalized pop, the dronings of Egyptian nightclub orchestras or completely traditional, it’s all imbued with the same yearning inflection and fatalistic dying fall as the Muslim call to prayer.

If I had to sum up the essence of Aleppo, it is that sound: the magnificent conversations of the muezzins - which here are live, not recorded - booming out of loudspeakers in the passageways of the old quarter, animating the shimmering hear over the city five times a day, for up to half an hour at a time. For we westerners, if represents something archetypal - the essence of the oriental other. I’d always taken it for the sound of the desert - the soul crying out amid the great solitude of sand and stars. But as our taxi weaves through the rush-hour traffic, Jalal Eddine explains that its melodic structure is derived from the rites of the Syrian Orthodox church, which are conducted in Syriac, language close to the Aramaic spoken by Jesus.

“The philosophy of Arab music is completely Hellenistic,” he expounds. The makams, the melodic archetypes of oriental music, correspond to the modes of ancient Greek music defined by Pythagoras and Aristotle. “And,” he concludes triumphantly, “they got it all from Babylon!”

Ancient knowledge, indeed. But how am I going to find that embodied in contemporary Aleppo? “It is around you everywhere,” he says. “You just have to be patient.”

Outside a juice bar opposite the huge walls of the Umayyad Mosque, I found Sabri Moudallal. Eighty-two years of age, keeper of a tradition of sung poetry dating back to Moorish Andalusia, composer of some of Aleppo’s most famous Sufi songs, he was listlessly flicking through his rosary, his gaunt and stubbled features as grey as his old double-breasted suit. He accepted my handshake with a weary nod, hardly bothering to fully open his eyes. The bar owner handed me a frothing mugful of carrot and banana, so dense and meaty I could manage barely half. I stood there sipping at it, wondering what to say to this old man who seemed hardly bothered to go on living.

That night, as the guests arrived for Jalal Eddine’s musical soiree, there was Moudallal, now sporting a red fez, his eyes aglitter, waving animatedly at someone in the audience. Turning and seeing nobody responding, I waved back.

Le tout Aleppo was there - all the city’s greatest musical connoisseurs: a customs man in dark glasses, a millionaire collector of Byzantine are; the Syriac bishop, portly in his tight white cassock - French expats, market traders, neighbours. The room glowed like some sumptuous Persian miniature.

Then, suddenly, the musicians and the choristers - middle-aged men in white gowns - had seated themselves around the Bedouin banquette and the music had begun. Dressed in black, Jalal Eddine - looking half-priest, half-rock star manqué - led, the jangling ornamented phrases picked out over the undulating rhythm of lute and tambourine. Moudallal smiled broadly, nodding in time and the whole audience, packed around the galleries of the atrium, did likewise.

After a lute improvisation of severe, mathematical brilliance, Moudallal leant forward, letting out a long note - wavering, but surprisingly powerful. As Jalal Eddine’s plucked responses built up an air of jangling suspense, Moudallal explored the phrase, gesturing towards those round the banquette as he teased out the nuance of the words in exclamations, each longer, keener and more ornate than the last - the audience rocking with delight, expostulating on the greatness of God, till Moudallal conducted them suddenly into a surging anthemic chorus.

The suite of songs, chants and exquisite instrumental interludes unfolded before us like a labyrinthine chain of rooms. Jalal Eddine’s house, witness to centuries, seemed suddenly fully alive, and felt I was experiencing the real life of Aleppo that had eluded me over the past days.

The following afternoon, two of the choristers returned, and as they got up to leave, Jalal Eddine gestured me to follow.

The Zawiya al-Hilali, the meeting place of the Q’adri order, was square, wood-paneled, the glow from the windows in the dome the only light, and the whole room breathed with a deep rhythmic phrase - a heavy exhaling, like a locomotive shunting slowly towards speed. The sheikh, a tall, bearded figure, mythically austere in turquoise turban and long flared coat, stood in an alcove, nodding with an empathic ritualistic movement. White-clad figures were packed along the walls, all swaying, leaning forward in a circular undulating motion, till soon it seemed as though the very building were moving. And all the time a voice from among the people sitting crowded on the floor kept up an insistent wailing counterpoint.

“They are just saying that there is no god but God,” whispered Jalal Eddine, as we seated ourselves at the back of the crowd.

As a nod form the sheikh - the doctor from Dortmund, or wherever it was - the rhythm picked up speed, breaking suddenly into an anthem of such ringing, exultant volume it seemed the walls would give way in a great blaze of light and noise. Then, just as suddenly, the deep chanting began again.

Out in the yard, the sheikh’s disciples gathered round us - bright-eyed men in their thirties with the full beards denoting religiosity - all very welcoming, but curious. What exactly did we want?

In a long room with mock rococo furniture (or perhaps it was real), the sheikh sat, looking quite as dumbfounded as we were. All around the disciples crowded, watching us expectantly.

“Ask your questions now,” said Jalal Eddine, aware that we were already encroaching. Questions? My mind had gone completely blank. Was it true, I found myself blurting out - feeling, even as I was saying it, that I was violating him and everyone else there - that the sheikh had once practiced western medicine?

The sheikh raised his finger, and to my astonishment spoke in English - tortuously articulate, but grammatically correct.

“I never practiced it!” His eyes grew wide. “I only studied it! A sheikh of the Q’adri order must be familiar with all the arts and sciences of his time. I studied medicine in Berlin for six years.” But just before he was due to qualify, his father had dies, and he had returned to assume the mantle that had been passed on down the centuries.

And, I asked, was there a problem in trying to reconcile the ancient Sufi knowledge with modern scientific knowledge?

He smiled broadly, raising his hands. “Why should there be a problem? Knowledge is only knowledge! Learning is only learning!”

“Damn,” I said, as we made our way up the street. “I didn’t ask about his wife.”

“Be glad that you didn’t,” said Jalal Eddine.

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