Post-revolution Syria is becoming a page-turner’s paradise.
After years of being banned by the former regime, dozens of long sought-after books are flooding stores across Syria, literally spilling onto the streets.
An epicenter of this new literary freedom is the so-called “bookshop alley” in the Halbouni neighborhood of Damascus, a leafy street lined by two dozen bookshops and printers, big and small.
Why We Wrote This
For decades, Syrians could not readily buy books banned by the Assad family dictatorship. The dynasty’s fall means no more banned books.
It is here that Radwan Sharqawi runs the Fardous Bookstore, a small corner shop that his family has owned since 1920. The contrast between today’s Syria and the long period of Assad family rule is like night and day, he says.
“Before we had daily interrogations by the security services,” Mr. Sharqawi says. “Now everything is permitted, nothing is banned. Now is a golden era for books!”
For decades, any book written by an intellectual or an artist who had expressed opposition to the Assad regime – or who simply did not vocally toe the official line – was banned.
So, too, were books that touched on Syrian history from any perspective other than the ruling Baath Party’s revisionist version. Titles on the history of the Israeli-Arab conflict, or anything on the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings, were contraband.
Out from the shadows
As soon as news broke of Bashar al-Assad’s fall last December, Mr. Sharqawi, like many booksellers, brought out banned books that he had previously stashed away and sold only to trusted customers in secret. Customers began lining up to buy formerly forbidden tomes.
“The world is a village; you can’t control information or ban knowledge,” says Mr. Sharqawi. “Banning books is backwards. People are going to express themselves and read.”
The Assad regime, father and son, “viewed books as a drug: awareness, thought, and culture that could spread and threaten them,” he says. “The regime produced and traded in narcotics and treated books worse than drugs.” Banned titles were secretly smuggled into Syria from Lebanon, destined for select customers.
Books banned in the Assad era included publications about Islam, and Islamist thinkers with any theological or real-world ties with the Muslim Brotherhood, the Islamist movement seen as a political rival to the nominally secular Assad regime.
Islamic thinkers such as Ibn Taymiyya, the influential medieval Sunni jurist and scholar, were banned. So, too, were books by Brotherhood-aligned clerics such as Hassan al-Banna, Sayyid Qutb, and Yusuf al-Qaradawi.
Even a book as basic as a tafsīr, an annotated Quran with explanations and context, was banned, for fear it might contradict the Assad government’s tightly controlled Islamic authorities.
“These are texts about religion and God, not politics,” says Abdulkader al-Sarooji, owner of the Ibn Al Qayem bookshop, as a customer browses shelves of leather-bound Islamic books, their titles engraved in decorative golden calligraphy. “The word of God harms no one.”
No limits now
As soon as the regime fell, Mr. Sarooji began importing books from Turkey and northern Syria to Damascus. Syrians are rushing to snatch up banned titles, from Ibn Taymiyya’s works to the writings of Syrian French opposition thinker Burhan Ghalioun.
“There is demand for banned books because people feel there is a gap in their knowledge, even in their religious knowledge,” says Mr. Sarooji.
The most dangerous texts during the Assad era – and the books in highest demand now – are works of literary fiction, titles that draw on the real experiences of Syrians who spent time in jail and suffered abuse at the hands of the regime.
The most fiercely banned book was “Bayt Khalti,” by Ahmed al-Amri, which details the horrors faced by women in the notorious Sednaya prison.
Now “Bayt Khalti” is prominently displayed on bookshelves and vendors’ roadside stands across Damascus – in both legitimate editions and blurry knockoffs that feed the high demand.
“This book was the most dangerous one,” street-side book vendor Hussein Mohammed says as he waves a copy of “Bayt Khalti.” “If they caught you with this, you were a goner.”
Another popular banned text, “Al Qoqaa,” or “The Cochlea,” details a Christian Syrian’s time in Mr. Assad’s prisons.
Eyad, a young Damascene, purchased a book of fiction from Mr. Mohammed after spending an hour browsing in the bookshop alley.
“There are a lot of books that I have wanted to read for years,” he says, rattling off the titles of several Islamic and political books. “My reading list is long, and my ability to buy them is limited.”
“But now we have freedom and the time to read.”
