Khan Al-Harir (the Silk Market) was a Ramadan television serial broadcast over two seasons, in 1996 and 1998. Focusing on domestic Syrian politics leading up to the unity of Syria and Egypt to become the United Arab Republic between 1958-1961 and the subsequent dissolution of the union.
Yearly, during Ramadan, month-long serials are broadcast around the Arabic-speaking world. Many Syrian producers and writers have created some of the best serials. Khan al-Harir is one such show.
First broadcast in 1996, it ran for 23 episodes. Two years later, in 1998 it ran for 25 episodes. The story revolves around shopkeepers, merchants, and traders in a neighborhood, Khan al-Harir (the Silk Bazaar). However, as with many of the popular Ramadan serials, it focuses on a specific point in history. In this case, the focus is on the months preceding the formation of the United Arab Republic, the union between Syria and Egypt and its subsequent dissolution.
The show gives an accurate representation of neighborhood life in Aleppo in the 1950s during the United Arab Republic and an insightful glimpse into the political debates of the time. It also gives a look at the socio-economic differences in this Alepppan neighborhood and how their politics differed, and how they interacted with one another.
Furthermore, it also parses masculinity and representations of manhood in contemporary Syrian understanding. Rebecca Joubin, writes about this extensively in her 2013 book, 'The Politics of Love: Sexuality, Gender, and Marriage in Syria Television Drama.' She writes about two of the characters, at opposition to each other political in the show, and also in how they understand their masculinity and how its viewed by society.
Nihad Sirees and the other writers of the show used the debates present in 1950s Syria, between camps who supported the Baghdad Pact powers and those who were in favor of the USSR as allegory for the political debates present in the 1990s, which featured state socialism versus capitalism partisans. In this way, the past was used to critique the present and Gamal Abdel Nassar’s increased authoritarianism in Syria is a metaphor for Hafez al-Assad’s Ba’ath party dictatorship. The story-line follows the families, and their drama, and eventually forces friendships and families apart and creates unlikely alliances; the last episode of the serial features two groups, one marching for the union and one marching for independence, showing how the UAR and the political suppression that had been carried out had caused the ideologies to polarize the community until they could no longer debate and could only march.
Watch the first episode in the video above and the rest of the serial on YouTube.