‘We were raided regularly': with Assad gone, banned books return to Syria's shelves

The Guardian

27-01-2025

To print a book in the days of the Bashar al-Assad regime, one first had to think of the censors. Was the book political in nature? Off to the ministry of information. Religious? To the ministry of religious affairs (awqaf). Literature? To the Union of Arab Books. All were a front for the Syrian security services, who would pore over the suggested titles, and in the best-case scenario, approve the book with exhaustive line-by-line corrections, or in the worst-case scenario, reject the book in its entirety.
Even with approval, a book's shelf life could be short. Syria's relations with Iraq had worsened: security services would visit stores and order them to remove any books that spoke highly of the Iraqi government. An author had declared his opposition to the Assad regime: a knock on the door – get rid of this one too.
'We were raided regularly, so we couldn't publish anything without approval, as both us and the author would be punished,' said Wahid Taja, an employee of Dar al-Fikr, one of Damascus's most prominent publishing houses, established in 1957.
Over the course of his 25-year career at Dar al-Fikr, the number of banned books in his warehouse grew. The Assad regime was fickle, so his employees were constantly pulling books from the store and packing them away in storage.
When the former Syrian president was toppled in a lightning 11-day offensive in early December, Taja immediately thought of those books gathering dust, unread for years. One by one, he opened boxes of books whose contents were supposedly dangerous and placed them back on Dar al-Fikr's shelves.
Adham Sharqawi, whose writings on Islam were considered controversial; Burhan Ghalioun, a Syrian-French intellectual and longtime critic of the Assad regime; Patrick Seale, a prominent British journalist who wrote – not disapprovingly – of the Assad family; their books can once again be found in the aisles of Damascene bookshops.
Those books that existed in the grey zone, that were neither banned nor approved and had to be requested by name from behind the counter, were also brought forward. Among them were the novels of Khaled Khalifa, an author who lived in Damascus until his death in 2023, whose stories – printed in Beirut and brought to Damascus – were unusually bold in their thinly veiled criticism of the Assad regime.
One book that was never banned was George Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four, despite the glaring parallels with the Assad regime's totalitarian security apparatus. Taja's own theory as to why the novel was allowed to be sold was simple: 'They wanted us to imagine that they had the same capabilities, to watch us wherever we went.'
With the Assad regime gone, Orwell's book seemed less like a threat and now merely a reminder of what once was. 'There is freedom now, we don't have fear any more. It's completely different, everyone is more comfortable,' Taja said.
It is not only banned books that have returned to Damascus. Taxi drivers now complain of the capital's worsening traffic, as cars sporting Idlib license plates clog the streets of the city from which they had been exiled for well over a decade. Friends chart out the future of the country over cups of coffee in elevated voices in the historic home of Damascus's intelligentsia, al-Rawda cafe, free of the watchful eyes of Syria's omniscient informants.
In ExLibris, a 23-year old English-language bookshop located in an upscale neighbourhood of Damascus, the shop's extensive collection still bore the marks of the Assad regime's controls. The prices of the imported books were all scratched out – to avoid suspicion of dealing in foreign currencies, a potential jail sentence a little over a month ago.
The bookshop had not received any new books since 2019, sustained by a massive shipment brought in by its owner, Rima Semmakie Hadaya, during the country's last international book fair. Syrian authorities were more lenient with allowing in books during its international books fairs, to accommodate foreign publishing houses.
All of the titles on ExLibris's shelves – ranging from Harry Potter to Noam Chomsky – were approved by the previous administration. Hadaya did not want to expose herself or her employees to danger.
'Now that we feel that we can breathe, we're not worried that they will come in and notice maybe one book with a pound or dollar sign we forgot to erase,' she said.
The shop owner is still waiting for guidance from the new authorities before importing more books. The now ruling Syrian rebels, who have said their once extremist version of Islam has moderated, have issued no instructions to publishing houses or bookshops. Western sanctions are also an obstacle for book importers, still active on Syria despite the fall of the Assad regime they purported to punish.
Damascus's bookshops and printing presses hope that this period of freedom lasts, and is not just a repeat of the Damascus Spring in 2001, when newly installed Assad allowed his people a brief taste of freedom before shutting the door once again.
'I'm still watching from the sidelines. I have hope, but I need to see what they do next,' Hadaya said.