In Damascus, books flood bookstores: “No more books are banned”

Post-revolutionary Syria is fast becoming a book lover's paradise. Long banned by the old regime, dozens of highly sought-after books are flooding Syrian bookstores and spilling out onto the streets.

The epicenter of this newly found literary freedom is the famous “bookstore alley” in the Halbouni neighborhood of Damascus, a leafy street with no fewer than twenty bookstores and printing shops of all sizes.

This is where Radwan Sharqawi runs the Fardous bookstore, a small neighborhood shop opened by his family in 1920. Between the Syria of today and that of the Assad family's long reign, it's like night and day, he says.

“Before, we were interrogated daily by the security services,” says Radwan. “Now, everything is allowed, and no book is banned: it’s a golden age for books!”

For decades, any book written by an intellectual or artist that expressed opposition to the Assad regime (or that deviated even slightly from the official line) was simply banned.

The same was true for books that addressed Syrian history without strictly following the ruling Baath Party's revisionist narrative. Writings on the history of the Arab-Israeli conflict or the 2011 Arab Spring uprisings were considered contraband.

Last December, as soon as Bashar al-Assad's fall was announced, Radwan Sharqawi, like many booksellers, re-released the banned books he had previously set aside and secretly sold to a few trusted individuals. Many readers flocked to the shop to buy these works.

“The world is a village; we cannot control the information that circulates or outlaw knowledge, ” he argues. “Banning books is backward. People will eventually find a way to express themselves and read.”

From father to son, the Assad family “saw books as a drug: a source of knowledge, thought, and culture that could spread and threaten their rule,” he explains. “The regime produced and sold narcotics but treated books like the worst drug of all.” Banned books were secretly imported from Lebanon and hand-delivered to select readers.

Among the books banned by the Assad regime were publications on Islam and on Islamist thinkers with theological or practical links to the Muslim Brotherhood, an Islamist movement seen as a political rival to the (officially secular) Assad regime.

The writings of Islamist thinkers such as Ibn Taymiyya, an influential medieval Sunni jurist and thinker, were also banned. Books by theorists aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood, such as Hassan El-Banna [founder of the Muslim Brotherhood in the late 1920s], Sayyid Qutb [an Egyptian Islamist ideologue hanged in 1966], and Youssef Al-Qaradawi, suffered the same fate.

Even books as innocuous as a tafsir, an annotated Quran with explanations and context, were banned for fear that they would conflict with the Islamic authorities tightly controlled by the Assad government.

“These are texts about religion and God, not politics,” retorts Abdulkader Al-Sarooji, owner of the Ibn Al-Qayem bookstore, as a customer browses the shelves of Islamic books, their titles engraved in gold calligraphy on the leather covers. “The word of God does not harm anyone.”

As soon as the regime fell, Abdulkader began importing books from Turkey and northern Syria into his Damascus bookstore. Syrians are snapping up previously banned titles, from the works of Ibn Taymiyya to the writings of French-speaking Syrian thinker Burhan Ghalioun, an opponent of the [Assad] regime.

“There is a strong demand for banned books because people feel they need to fill gaps, including in their religious education,” he says.

Under the Assad regime, the most dangerous texts – and therefore the most sought-after today – were works of fiction and books inspired by the true stories of Syrians who had endured abuse in prison.

The most strictly banned book was Ahmed Al-Amri's Bayt Khalti , which details the excruciating suffering endured by women incarcerated in the notorious Saidnaya Prison.

Today, Bayt Khalti proudly sits in the windows of bookstores and on the stalls of street vendors throughout Damascus, whether it is the official edition or poor-quality counterfeits that meet the high demand.

“That book was the most dangerous of all,” confirms Hussein Mohammed, who sells books on the street, brandishing a copy of Bayt Khalti . “If you were caught with it, you were finished.”

Another popular work that was banned was Al Qoqaa, or “The Cochlea,” which recounts the detention of a Syrian Christian in the regime’s prisons.

Eyad, a young man from Damascus, bought a fiction book for Hussein after spending a good hour browsing in the bookstore aisle. “There are many books I've been wanting to read all this time,” he confided. “My reading list is long, even though I can't afford to buy them all. But now, at least, we have the freedom and time to read.”