Iyer could not have known this when he finished his book but Mohammed Atta, the leader of the September 11 hijackers, had also written his thesis on the Syrian suq while in university at Hamburg. For Atta, the suq was under siege, choked by the westernstyle development all around it—the maze-like underground architecture of shops and tunnels overwhelmed by the glitter of highrise hotels.
However, in Iyer’s case, it is not so much the conflict between cultures but the romance between them that is the more enduring attraction. So it is that when Macmillan emerges from the suq, he finds himself led into a mosque where people are weeping tears of...
