the language of ma'alula

I know that I'm easily susceptible to the pathos of dying languages. (It's possibly why I spent a year learning one when I was eighteen, though I've since forgotten almost all of what I learned.) So I was drawn in immediately the other day when I saw a short piece in the New York Times on the dwindling Aramaic-speaking communities of Syria, with a dateline of Ma'alula. The reporter introduces us to the town via an elderly resident named Elias Khoury (not to be mistaken with the Lebanese novelist of the same name!) and details the familiar villains of language loss: urbanization and migration, education practices and "Arabization" policy, television, the generation gap. Not much new here (indeed, some familiar clichés, including the obligatory reference to the "language of Jesus"), but it left me sinking into Syrian memories anyway.

I have warm memories of a short time spent in Ma'alula, and I did hear Aramaic spoken there, although it sounded close enough to Arabic to have little resonance for my ignorant ear. More vivid is the memory of wandering into a church in Bab Touma--the Christian quarter of the Old City of Damascus--where a deacon offered to show me an Aramaic bible, and read the verses aloud to me, tracing the lines of Syriac script.

One line from the article that made me shake my head, in reference to a young man called John Francis--"Western-sounding names are common among Christians in Syria and Lebanon." Not quite--they're Christian names, not "Western" ones, and would be no less common in, say, Kerala. But one can't assume too much from a name, common or otherwise: not long after my visit to Ma'alula, I spent several days in a desert monastery called Deir Mar Musa in the nearby mountains. One of the resident monks, a young Christian man from a Maronite village in a neighboring valley, was named Jihad. All the careless uses and careful parsings of that word I've seen in text after text these last several years, and still I find myself thinking first of bearded Brother Jihad, who made me my first cup of maté and taught me to milk the goats.