Aleppo 5 a.m.: 'we awoke to dozens of large explosions... the Syrian army had sealed all roads'

Then came silence. He'd be back, I knew. I gave up on the cartoon images of the grammar's polite get-to-know you conversations. "Arabic Without Pain" was its title, but the promise was false. I sat staring at the wall, anxiously waiting for Jean-Pierre. I was a second year student of Persian and Arabic at Oxford University, and felt as if I was getting nowhere. Back at home, it humiliated me that friends in other faculties were climbing the foothills of scientific achievement or testing the boundaries of philosophical debate, while I spent most of my first year copying the ever-changing curves and dots of the Arabic alphabet chalked up on a blackboard as if I was in primary school. The droning tone of the lecturers, bored numb by our hours of simplistic drudgery, often left me fighting with sleep. None of it seemed relevant to real life. The narrow historical scope of my Oriental Studies course seemed so disconnected from everything I read in the newspapers about the dramas of the modern Middle East.

Still, those same news stories had made me anxious about traveling to the region alone. Over our houseboat lunch, Jean-Pierre, then visiting Oxford for his research into the administration of Middle Eastern cities in the 19th century Ottoman Empire, had gaily insisted that I should fly out on my next vacation to join him in the field. When I eventually tracked him down to the cardamom-coffee scented corridors of a French institute in the Syrian capital of Damascus, he swept me off to Aleppo, 200 miles to the north. Guidebook in hand, I begged to stay in the colonial-era Baron Hotel, with its creaky, cavernous iron beds, its skyward-ho airline posters from another age and its threadbare memories of guests like Agatha Christie. After one night, however, Jean-Pierre declared the atmosphere of genteel decay claustrophobic and demanded that we decamp into a rough-and-ready hotel round the corner. It took me a while to realize that the reason the floor below us was populated by fleshy, middle-aged ladies was because this was a whorehouse known locally as Madame Olga's.

We spent three weeks in Aleppo. Sometimes Jean-Pierre would take me to help with his research, notably in an ancient Aleppo merchant's khan, or trading house in the bazaar. Here we dug out everything from 19th century photographs to hand-written Korans to Chinese porcelain, buried deep in a cluttered storeroom behind the colonnaded courtyard, where years earlier camel caravans unloaded their wares. I jostled with donkeys and black-swathed housewives through the narrow suqs of the bazaar, drinking in the smell of spices and the elixir of being utterly distant from England. Nearly everyone still wore ankle-length gowns, not western dress. The mediaeval-looking arched alleys still had shops on aged wooden platforms, with a knotted rope suspended above to help the shopkeeper heave himself in. At other times I stayed at home and struggled on with my Arabic catechism, sitting upright on one of the two beds in our bare room of whitewashed cement. My ritual of study kept the chaotic rush of new experiences at bay and offered the distant promise that one day I might be able to comprehend them.

My stumbling academic efforts, however, were rapidly being overtaken by a crash course in Middle East reality. At 5 a.m. on our first morning in Madame Olga's, we awoke to dozens of large explosions shaking the city. Later that morning we discovered that the Syrian army had ringed and sealed all roads into the city. The shopkeepers had declared a general strike, locking down their metal shutters in what I was to learn was the time-honored but often futile fashion of Middle East urban protest. Now a few keystrokes on a computer can dig out reports on the Aleppo troubles of March-April 1980 as part of the Syrian government's unending quest to crush its domestic opponents. Some commentaries say power-hungry Islamic extremists were fighting to overturn the secular order. Others note that moderate Islamists were finding sympathy among businessmen frustrated with impoverishment and corrupt economic mismanagement. Apparently, conservative Sunni Muslims were chafing at domination by the schismatic Alawite Muslim minority who monopolized the country through their strongman, President Hafez al-Assad. Or perhaps all of the above. Back then, I couldn't have told these concepts apart, and nobody was framing events in these easy sound bites anyway. News agencies and radio stations in Beirut eventually carried a few confused reports from Aleppo, but they were short, appeared days later and vaguely quoted "travelers from the city." We did not even hear about these. Not even Jean-Pierre's vivacious cross-questioning of everyone we met could explain what was going on.

The populace lived in a swirl of conflicting rumors. The bazaar was nearly empty except for the soldiers. A few tradesmen watched in silence as army platoons smashed the padlocked shopfronts open with sledgehammers, making the stone vaults ring with metal clangs and explosions of glass. The army conducted searches for Islamist dissidents, district by district, house by house. I spent most of the first evening on our tiled balcony, hypnotized by the lines of tracer bullets lacing through the night sky. Armored vehicles clanked along the nearby main road, occasionally passed by columns of open trucks filled with frightened civilian captives in pyjamas or flowing nightgowns. I could read stress on the faces of everyone, but the population was not necessarily cowed. One of our ladies at Madame Olga's did her share, emptying a bucket of water over the heads of two soldiers as they left the establishment. That image of a prostitute servicing the oppressors but at the same time supporting supposedly "Islamist" rebels implanted in me a long-lasting suspicion of all ideological interpretations of the Middle East.

The soldiers arrested Jean-Pierre and me several times. They were unpredictable, either extraordinarily friendly or so nervous that they would arm their guns and rocket-propelled grenade launchers and ram them into our bellies. Once, when Jean-Pierre's loose-leaf photocopies of Ottoman texts were mistaken for the flyers calling for shopkeepers to strike, we spent an uncomfortable hour in one of the impromptu torture and interrogation centers set up in construction sites on the edge of the city. Jean-Pierre charmed the officer in charge, teaching me that an ability to make people laugh was an essential survival skills. Protected by Jean-Pierre, the edginess was exhilarating. I soon gave up trying to read the few history textbooks I had taken with me.

Hugh be discussing his widely anticipated book in Washington DC from 31st March to 4th April First at Foreign Policy, Politics and Prose, Brookings, Transatlantic Academy, the Newseum and the Middle East Institute.