The Siege of Yarmouk and Iran's 'house churches'

The History Hour

BBC

History, Society & Culture, Personal Journals

4.4 • 879 Ratings

🗓️ 23 November 2024

⏱️ 51 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Max Pearson presents a collection of the week's Witness History episodes.

We hear the story of the pianist who played on when Damascus was bombed and the Christians who met in secret.

Plus how William Golding wrote Lord of the Flies, the handover of Macau to China in 1999 and the start of the Ultimate Fighting Championship.

This episode contains descriptions of violence, which some listeners may find distressing.

Contributors: Aeham Ahmad - the Pianist of Yarmouk. Dr Gillian Howell - Senior Research Fellow at the University of Melbourne. Naghmeh Panahi - founder of a network of secret 'house churches' in Iran. Miguel Senna Fernandes - former member of the Macau Legislative Council. Judy Carver - William Golding's daughter. Campbell McLaren - co-creator of UFC.

(Photo: Aeham Ahmad, the Pianist of Yarmouk and other Palestinian musician refugees in Damascus, in Syria, in 2014. Credit: Rame Alsayed/Anadolu Agency/Getty Images)

Transcript

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0:00.0	Hello and welcome to the History Hour podcast from the BBC World Service with me, Max Pearson,
0:10.0	the past brought to life by those who were there. This week, the Christians who struggled to keep
0:15.5	their faith after the Islamic revolution in Iran. The head interrogator looked at me and he said, you know, if you say you're Muslim,
0:23.7	you get to go right now, you get to leave.
0:26.2	If you say you're a Christian, you're going to be tortured, you're going to be killed.
0:29.1	From 1999, the handback of Macau from Portugal to China.
0:33.7	I bought a flat in Lisbon just in case, my friends. They all did the same thing. It was
0:40.7	fashionable to buy something for security reasons in Portugal. And what inspired William Golding's
0:47.1	Lord of the Flies. And I said to her, wouldn't it be a good idea to write a book about what
0:52.8	actually would happen to children if they find
0:55.7	themselves alone on an island? That's all coming up later in the podcast. But first, we're going
1:00.7	back to 2014 and the early years of Syria's brutal civil war when a district called Yarmouk,
1:07.9	just eight kilometres from the centre of Damascus, was under siege by the
1:12.2	Syrian army. Some 18,000 people, mainly Palestinian refugees, were effectively cut off from the outside
1:19.4	world. Mike Lanchin has been speaking to a former resident, a Palestinian musician who became known
1:25.7	as the pianist of Yarmouk, and listeners may find parts of his
1:29.6	account distressing.
1:40.6	It's January 2014.
1:43.6	Crowds of gaunt and desperate people have emerged from the wasteland of Yarmouk's bomb-shattered buildings.
1:51.7	It could be the scene of a natural disaster, but this is man-made.
1:57.3	Not much is left in Yarmouk.
2:00.4	But this tide of people.
	...

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