I was sitting with some friends at the Nofara café, just outside the back gate of the marvellous Ommayad mosque in Damascus. It's a historical place standing in the vicinity of an old fountain, which explains the origin of its name. Its walls are hung with old pictures, traditional calligraphies and beautiful designs. The story-teller's raised stand was still empty, but he would come soon to rejoice the evening for patrons and first-time visitors alike, attracted by the fame of this institution.

The so-called hakawati, wearing a red fez on his head, comes to recite stories while people chatter and sip pitch black cardamom-flavoured coffee. For more serious tales, he enhances the performance by wearing an elegant white robe and even brandishing a sword to highlight outstanding passages in the narration.

 

That night we were smoking hubble-bubble, mellow puffs of scented smoke coming out of our mouths after each draw, while the gentle sound of water stirred by the aspiration burbled in the glass bowl that made the base of the pipe. After finishing my turn, I passed on the mouth-piece to the next person in the circle, and to do so I stretched out the wooden stick that ends the soft pipe.

"I'm going to teach you how you should hand it!", my friend said. "The way we do it, is fold the tip backwards so that the extremity touches the pipe; then you can pass it on".

"And the person who takes it, will pat on your hand twice to thank you", another one added.

I had learned something new and I was left wondering for a while how many times cultural differences get into the way to hinder even the most basic form of communication. You can't believe yourself to be safe even when a non verbal exchange is going on. Gestures are highly at risk, the most striking example being the thumb-up sign for all right, that in Iran is the equivalent of raising one's middle finger. Never do it in that country if you feel like expressing your happiness, approval, agreement, or you may be seriously misunderstood! But even without talking about such extremes, how many times my ordinary behaviour may have been interpreted as rude or even offensive in a foreign country.

There are nonetheless lots of common points. Conventions across cultures are established to regulate social relationships and they satisfy successive levels of need, ordered in a scale. In the first place, they make an individual's social behaviour just acceptable, by especially putting the strictest ban on performing basic bodily functions in public. Getting over one's spontaneous selfishness is also a cardinal principle. Peaceful living in a group is therefore assured by respecting the basics that a child is taught from an early age and come to form part of his culture.

On a second level, we find the rules that express a person's refinement. Good manners are not shared by everybody, but allow a person behaving according to them to be distinguished, but also accepted in his social group. There are conventions for every aspect of social living, but maybe not so many as for eating a meal. How a table is dressed, how a person handles cutlery and eats food, are all codified into sets of rules, the first attempt of the kind being Della Casa's Galateo written by the Italian clergyman as early as 1558.

These rules vary from one generation to the next, from one social agglomerate to another; they change as a function of the situation, but most notably from culture to culture. How you stick your peas on the throngs of your fork turned downwards may well be a basic of upper-class manners in Britain, but isn't, to my knowledge, a principle taught to children in my country. I also clearly remember the heavy veil of silence that fell over the table when a Chinese guest ended her meal by gently, still audibly burping in appreciation of the food eaten.

Funnily enough, one is particularly intolerant of others breaking the rules he knows, and were it not for old good manners, he would probably give in to an almost irresistible desire to point it out to the offender just to show how well he knows the ropes. At the same time a person is more or less insensible to the rules he ignores.

A good example of this is when I look down on people avidly licking the teaspoon after stirring their coffee as if this invisible layer sticking to it were the tastiest of all or the last drop of liquid left on earth. But conversely, when a relative once said in horror that he'd witness a fellow teacher enter a university classroom and imperturbably walk up to the first row in front of other professors with his hat on, I agreed on condemning the breach, only to find myself a few days later talking to that same relative inside the house with my hat on!

Thirdly, civilities offer an easy way out of potentially embarrassing situations because they provide a universally recognised behaviour not only in dire straits, but also in ordinary circumstances. We don't realise how much plain conversation and even jokes go along fixed lines, and when you start observing it, it's sometimes frustrating to see patterns take over even what at first sight looks like the most lively spontaneity. It's particularly easy to observe them when you're relatively alien to the culture. For instance, Arabic polite conversation is particularly formulaic, but that doesn't mean that Westerners do not follow equally stringent rules in their intercourses.

When refinement rules are pushed to the extreme they serve the ultimate purpose of defining who belongs to a certain group and who doesn't. The higher social classes, not to speak of closed circles or even secret sects, have they own code of conduct or private rituals that guarantee affiliation and exclude outsiders. However, these mechanisms are not necessarily restricted to the higher echelons of society, for even suburban gangs have their own jargons and codes of conduct to achieve the same goal.

Rules, like them or not, are a pillar of social life. It's good coming to terms with them, not feeling oppressed by their weight. For a change, I like observing them and learning them across space, to try and transcend my national and cultural barriers.

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