I am in Doha, Qatar for two days. I just came back from a visit to the brand new “old suq” of Suq Waqif. It’s an anthropological experience of the first order, in how a country can and did re-imagine and reinvent its past, or rather bits and pieces of the past of many neighboring countries, re-package it, and present it to the world as its own — with success. I could not distinguish what was specifically Qatari, if anything, but then again the Arabian Gulf culture is a largely supra-national culture. The architecture is a mix of Oman’s and Bahrain’s, the Bedouin-pattern textiles are Syrian imports, the metal lamps are Egyptian, the glass patterns in the walls are Yemeni. The tricks works, up to a point, even for the trained eye. Just imagine the effect on the random tourist.
This was taken in a Damascus interior by French photographer Gervais Courtellemont in 1908, and gleaned off the internet. The Facebook website I got it from notes that the oldest color photo ever was taken by the Lumiere brothers in Lyon in 1907 using the same autochrome technology. What epitomes of refinement old Damascus and old Aleppo were.. and old Bagdad, and old Mosul, and old Sanaa, old Mecca, old Medina, and old Jerusalem… now all gone.