Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and, broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past fifty years. Subscribe to receive details of new books, articles and upcoming events.
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LATEST ARTICLE Liberation DazeHope, fear, and uncertainty in postwar Syria. When I first visited Syria, on Easter Sunday 1973, Christian families were attending Mass and calling on one another with presents of sugar-coated almonds. To this twenty-two-year-old graduate student hitchhiking to Aqaba from Beirut, Syria was a mix of delightful chaos and state-imposed monotony. Christians, Druze, Alawis, and Jews were free to practice their faiths. Unlike in Saudi Arabia, alcohol was legal. Women not only drove cars, they worked in offices, shops, and restaurants. Some chose to wear headscarves, but many chose not to. At the same time, billboards reminded citizens of their duty to the Baath Party’s founding motto: unity, freedom, socialism. Children wore military-style uniforms at school, and informants spied on their neighbors. The image of Hafez al-Assad, who had been president for just over two years, was ubiquitous. When I visited Damascus some months later, protesters threw eggs at a foreign dignitary. I asked my philosophy tutor at the American University back in Beirut whether he thought the Syrian government approved. “If the Baath Party doesn’t want people to throw eggs,” he said, “the chickens don’t lay eggs.” That was the Syria I came to know over fifty years, through wars, attempted coups, the death of Hafez, and the accession of his son Bashar. It seemed unchanging, unchangeable, even throughout fourteen years of civil war. And then, on December 8 last year, it all changed. Assad was gone… |
Charles Glass
Charles Glass is a writer, journalist and, broadcaster, who has written on conflict in the Middle East, Africa and Europe for the past fifty years. Subscribe to receive details of new books, articles and upcoming events.
LATEST ARTICLE Letter from Beirut: A Stubborn Indifference to War This city keeps you on your toes, as long as you hang on to them. When you walk across a one-way street, look both ways. No driver—on a motorcycle or in an SUV—hesitates to charge the wrong way up a road clearly signed for traffic to go in the opposite direction. When two cars meet head-on, the driver going the wrong way shouts abuse at the innocent one obeying the rules. Welcome to Beirut. This insouciant behavior reflects the...
OUT NOW Over nearly a half century, David Hirst was The Guardian newspaper’s indispensable voice from the Middle East A landmark collection of David Hirst's finest reporting THE PEN AND THE OLIVE BRANCH Reporting the Middle East DAVID HIRSTEdited by JANICK GOLD and CHARLES GLASSIntroduction by JONATHAN DIMBLEBY read more > PRE-ORDER YOUR COPY NEW TO WATCH In a series of interviews with leading historians on the History of Resistance, Charles Glass and his history students at the American...
LATEST ARTICLE 1970s Postcard showing the two bays of Zaytouni and Saint Georges Beirut, Now and Then On Wednesday , 8 April, Israel expanded its kill zone beyond what had been known as the ‘safe’ areas north of Beirut’s suburban south. I talked to a doctor at the American University Hospital who told me his emergency room was treating four hundred patients wounded in the bombing. Four had died. I passed the hospital, where families outside were waiting for the medical staff’s reports. By the...