The Book Collectors

by Delphine Minoui

  But the government began to worry about this popular momentum, which, in its eyes, was growing too large. One month later, twenty-four activists involved in planning the demonstration were arrested and then imprisoned for “attempts to overthrow the system.” They included Muhammad Shihadeh, who paid a stiff price: three months of brutal interrogations, before being sentenced to three years of incarceration in the infamous Sednaya Prison. The ordeal was painful but highly edifying. Behind bars, Ustez encountered members of the Muslim Brotherhood and Salafists, and also jihadists back from Iraq and Afghanistan. The same jihadists whom Assad later deliberately liberated from prison during the 2011 revolution, at the same time that pacifist demonstrators were being arrested. In confinement at Sednaya, Ustez met major opposition figures, like the communist leader Abdul Aziz al-Khair. And inside Sednaya, he learned to take refuge in books—an experience that would later inspire his young friends, even if he didn’t directly participate in the creation of the Daraya library.

  In 2005, Muhammad Shihadeh was released six months earlier than expected. The former prime minister of Lebanon Rafic Hariri had just been assassinated in Beirut. Blamed for the act, the Syrian regime found itself under international pressure. Assad pardoned a few prisoners to improve his image. The pressure nonetheless stayed on. Every two months, Ustez was summoned by the intelligence services. He was forbidden to leave the country. The university wanted nothing more to do with him. But he was undaunted. Carrying a diploma in English literature, he became a translator. He fell in love, married, and started a family. “More than a model,” says Ahmad, “a source of inspiration.”

  In Daraya, several years went by in relative calm. Then, in March 2011, at the beginning of the Arab Spring, a new event rattled its inhabitants. In Daraa, another Syrian city, some teenagers had scrawled “Your turn will come, Doctor” on their school’s wall. The message was aimed directly at Bashar al-Assad, inspired by the fall of Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt. The bold youths were arrested and tortured, plunging their parents into profound distress. Anger quickly poured into the streets throughout Syria. Fed by the contagious fervor spreading through the Arab-Muslim world, other cities joined the movement. True to its trailblazing past, Daraya was one of the first to rise. On Friday, March 25, Daraya Shebab, the movement formed in the nineties, regrouped for a new struggle. Ustez hurriedly wrote one of the first slogans. “From Daraya to Daraa, a dignified people,” the protesters repeated in chorus. The crowd swelled visibly. In the space of one hour, thousands braved the ban on demonstrating. A success.

  The young generation quickly followed suit. Against his father’s will, Ahmad joined the second protest. He remembers everything about his “first time.” His heart afire. Losing his voice from too much shouting. And quite simply the joy of being there. Myriad images flood his memory. Women throwing rice at the crowd, like at a wedding. Children astride shoulders, eyes turned to the future. Members of the Druze and Christian minorities, there to support a revolution that the Alawite Assad immediately labeled “Sunni” to divide Syrians. And the cri de coeur chanted in unison: “Jenna! Jenna!” Paradise! Paradise! The resistance of the nineties had passed the baton.

  “People were yelling with all their might. An incredible feeling. We were one against the dictatorship. At first, we weren’t demanding the end of the regime; we wanted more justice, equality, answers to our needs. And then everything suddenly shifted toward an unknown future.”

  When the first bullets whistled, the young protesters got creative: they offered the soldiers roses and bottles of water with a short note around the neck—“We are your brothers. Don’t kill us. The nation is large enough for all of us.” The idea came from Ghiyath Mattar, a twenty-six-year-old tailor. His message irritated the regime. It contradicted the official propaganda that saw hate-filled religious fanatics, armed to the teeth, scattered in these hordes of dissenters. On September 6, 2011, Ghiyath Mattar was arrested. Three days later, his tortured body was returned to his family. The young man had been castrated, his throat slashed. The death by torture of “Little Gandhi,” as he was nicknamed by Ahmad and his friends, was merely a sample of the regime’s unspeakable brutality.

  Behind closed doors, some inhabitants started to arm themselves, discreetly. There were whispers of defection within the military establishment, and even insurrection. Ahmad and the majority of Daraya’s revolutionaries refused to fall into the trap of violence. At every new gathering, the marching order was unerring: “Silmiya, Silmiya [peaceful, peaceful], even if they kill us by the hundreds.” Faithful to the civic spirit of Ustez and the older rebels, they held the course of their peaceful mobilization: Ahmad’s tireless group took turns protecting public buildings, participated in discussion forums, and even started an underground journal called Enab Baladi (The Grapes of My Land) to provide residents with important facts about their wartime situation. They became experts in “flying protests,” when a group of demonstrators swiftly forms and dissipates just as quickly. They began to march at night when the daytime became too dangerous. Funeral services for “martyrs” even provided new opportunities to assemble. But the regime has as little respect for the dead as it does for the living. In February 2012, tanks from the neighboring Mezzeh air force base turned up in the middle of a funeral. Some thirty people were killed. “The incident is etched in our memories. We still call it ‘Black Saturday,’” says Ahmad.

  And then, the unthinkable happened. On August 25, 2012, the tanks returned to town. “It was in the middle of Ramadan,” remembers Ahmad. After three days of intense bombing, regime soldiers attacked Daraya. Street by street. House by house. The inhabitants who resisted were lined up in front of a wall and shot, one by one. Men, women, children, indiscriminately. A collective punishment for the demonstrators. For the flowers and bottles of water. For the grains of rice at processions. For this peace odyssey that stretches back to the nineties, far before the revolution. Shut up in a makeshift shelter, Ahmad didn’t discover the scale of the massacre until the troops left three days later. The bodies of dozens of victims had been gathered in the courtyard of a mosque. A cemetery was hastily created for some five hundred martyrs. “In reality, the dead probably numbered seven hundred, if you take into account all the others, buried when and where they were executed,” clarifies Ahmad.

  The death toll also doesn’t include the countless activists arrested during the roundup whose tortured bodies turned up, three years later, in a file labeled “Caesar,” the code name of a former military police photographer who took pictures of thousands of corpses.

  “I was beside myself. I no longer recognized my town. My neighborhood,” says Ahmad.

  As he watched, distraught, columns of families began an exodus after the carnage. But the core of the resistance chose to stay and get organized. In October, a local council was created. By joint agreement, the two brigades newly created to defend the town, as part of the Free Syrian Army, the embryo of the armed opposition, were placed under the council’s control. Another detail that set civic action in Daraya apart from that in other towns.

  Bashar al-Assad doesn’t like being resisted. On November 8, 2012, he retaliated again, this time imposing a blockade on Daraya. As soon as this sanction was announced, a new wave of departures began. It included Ahmad’s parents. They begged him to follow them. Though he had no idea what lay ahead, the young activist made the choice to stay.

  “You don’t abandon a revolution halfway through,” he insists.

  He couldn’t have imagined what would come next. A year later, as Daraya’s remaining inhabitants were struggling to survive, two missiles pierced the sky in the middle of the night of August 21, 2013. Strangely, no detonations sounded. But in the span of a few minutes the community clinic found itself flooded with patients presenting the same symptoms: convulsions, pupillary contractions, feelings of suffocation. Like other rebel towns bordering Damascus, Daraya was the victim of a chemical weapon attack. In Daraya, as in Zamalka, Douma, and
Moadamiya, the missiles had unleashed a horrifically noxious gas that would be quickly identified by French intelligence services as sarin.

  Discussions among Paris, London, and Washington commenced. They decided to bypass the United Nations Security Council, subject to Russian and Chinese vetoes, and sanction the Syrian regime, even if it meant proceeding to strikes. Initially enthusiastic, U.S. president Barack Obama walked back his decision and left it up to Congress, after the British Parliament voted against action in Syria. Ultimately, Obama yielded to opposition to a military intervention. Following a proposal made by Moscow, Syria’s chemical arsenal was then placed under international monitoring, in anticipation of its destruction. A default retaliatory measure for which the inhabitants of Daraya paid a heavy price. After the infamous attack, the rebel town became the site of new atrocities. Unpunished for his crimes, Bashar al-Assad intensified his tactics of repression, tightening the noose around Ahmad and the remaining dissidents’ throats.

  “But we had to hold strong. Not let ourselves be beaten. Continue to carve the path laid out by Ustez,” he continues.

  And so one day in late 2013, the idea of saving books from the rubble emerged. Hesitant at first, Ahmad eventually let himself be convinced. What better way to defy Syria’s leader than to contradict his narrative of a terrorist opposition? Bashar al-Assad had gambled that he could bury them all alive. Bury the town itself, and its remaining inhabitants. Its houses. Its trees. Its grapes. Its books.

  From the ruins, a fortress of paper would arise.

  The secret library of Daraya.

  At the end of October 2015, I open my inbox to find a message from Ahmad, with the subject line “Library rules.” I read:

  1.No book can be borrowed without the librarians’ permission.

  2.Do not forget to return your books on the indicated date.

  3.Any reader who returns a book overdue will be barred from borrowing others.

  4.Respect the peace and quiet of others and abstain from making noise.

  5.Be mindful of keeping the library clean.

  6.Please return books to their original place after reading them.

  In a postscript, Ahmad explains that these instructions were printed on an A4 piece of paper and prominently placed at the basement entrance, glued to a pole, so everyone can see them.

  He and his friends have created something extraordinary in the midst of a war zone, their library a land without borders. A string of connected continents. A secret hideaway where books circulate with no need for a safe-conduct pass or bulletproof vest. In this protected place, they’ve managed to establish an atmosphere of collective intimacy, as well as a sense of ethics, discipline, and, oddly enough, normality. There is no doubt that this is what helps them hang on. Even the fighters of the Free Syrian Army are regulars at the library.

  “Our most faithful reader is an armed rebel. He can’t get enough. He reads everything he finds. He spends so much time plunged in books by the Tunisian historian Ibn Khaldun that my friends and I call him by that name now,” jokes Ahmad.

  The next day, Ahmad introduces me to Omar Abu Anas, aka Ibn Khaldun. Same setup as usual. A computer. Two chairs facing each other. The crackling of war as background music.

  “Ahlan wa sahlan,” says Omar.

  He talks in a highly polished Syrian dialect, close to literary Arabic, as if reading great scholars has rubbed off on his vocabulary. Between two pixelated clouds, I make out his face, covered by a thin beard. I listen closely, relying on the precious aid of a translator friend of mine named Sarah.

  Omar had also planned on an engineering career. Before the revolution. Before the conflict turned his life upside down.

  “When the regime forces started to shoot at us, we had no choice but to protect the demonstrators. So I gave up my studies and volunteered to fight. It was the first time that I took up arms.”

  Twenty-four years old, Omar belongs to the Liwa Shuhada al-Islam rebels. Along with Ajnad al-Sham, it is one of two brigades of the Free Syrian Army’s southern front. This young accidental fighter is one of the countless children of Daraya, aged eighteen to twenty-eight, who were propelled overnight to the front lines of the war. Unlike their leaders, deserters from the official army, they have no combat experience. Former college classmates and next-door neighbors, they sometimes find themselves fighting the bombs and tanks with one weapon shared among three people.

  Liwa Shuhada al-Islam translates to “The Martyrs of Islam Brigade.”

  “Do you consider yourself a jihadist?”

  I provoke him on purpose, as much out of curiosity as a desire for objectivity. And also from a need to clarify labels in the face of repeated accusations from Damascus. My question prompts a long silence. His face darkens. I imagine he’s offended. Omar takes a deep breath before calmly explaining:

  “If I chose to fight against the regime, it was to defend my land. My country. My right to freedom. Fighting wasn’t a choice. It was a necessity. When your friends fall before your eyes for having brandished a piece of cardboard calling for change, what’s left, except the desire to protect other protesters? Sadly, that’s how it all started. And then, with the regime’s bombs, the vicious spiral of violence began.”

  His statements are lucid, stripped of the usual provocative and ideological jargon we’ve heard all too often from jihadists. At no moment does Omar reference the “grandeur of Allah,” “revenge in the name of Islam,” or the “crusaders’ plot,” expressions used frequently by Islamist fanatics in their speeches and interviews. In fact, his words reflect the same candor as the revolutionary slogans of 2011—the thirst for freedom, and recourse to weapons as the sole means to protect oneself. On the other side of the screen, Omar continues:

  “As for jihad … To those who seek to tarnish our image by painting us as religious fanatics, my response is simple: we are Muslims. That’s how it is. It’s our culture. But we refuse any usurpation of our religion. Whether it be by the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaeda; or by Daesh … Those people don’t represent our ideas. They warp them! Don’t forget that the revolt began with calls for justice and respect for human rights, not for Islam.”

  I’m curious to know at what exact moment books began to have a critical importance in his life. Was it when the library opened? When he read a particular passage?

  “It was when I understood that the war could go on for years. When I realized that we could only count on ourselves.”

  From that point onward, books would replace the university he no longer attended. He would have to educate himself. Fill the void that could be taken over by fanatics imposing their backward ideas.

  “Books had a crucial impact very quickly—they helped me not to lose myself.”

  And so Omar began to devour anything he could get his hands on.

  “I love Ibn Khaldun. I’ve read lots of political and theological books. But I’m also interested in Western works about international law and the social sciences. It’s only by studying other schools of thought that we can prepare ourselves to establish a new political system.”

  He’s been leading a double life ever since, between war and literature. A Kalashnikov in one hand, a text always in reach of the other. He even created a mini library on the front line: a dozen works perfectly organized and protected behind the sandbags. The concept inspired other combatants. When the bombs quiet down, they exchange books and share reading recommendations.

  “War is destructive. It transforms men, kills emotions and fears. When you’re at war, you see the world differently. Reading is a diversion, it keeps us alive. Reading reminds us that we’re human.”

  For Omar, reading is a survival instinct, a basic need. On every leave, he rushes to the library to borrow new texts. Books take hold of him and they don’t let go. Alone in the night, his weapon his sole companion, he reads. He believes in the magic of the written word, a Band-Aid for the soul, a mysterious alchemy that allows him to escape into unmoving, suspended ti
me. Like Hansel’s pebbles, one book leads to another. We stumble; we advance; we stop; we begin again. We learn. Every book, he says, contains a story, a life, a secret.

  “And among all these, do you have a favorite?”

  “Al-Qawaqa’a,” he answers immediately.

  Al-Qawaqa’a! The Shell. I know this book. I read it before the revolution. It’s chilling. Terrifying, in fact. The Syrian writer Mustafa Khalifa wrote it after twelve years of detention in Palmyra, the terrible “desert prison.” This semiautobiographical account is full of atrocious descriptions inspired by his jailers’ barbarism, torture, and the nightmare of his incarceration under the reign of Hafez al-Assad. I’m shocked that Omar had the courage to read this chronicle of horror. As if he didn’t see enough of it in his daily life …

  “Under Assad, the father and then the son, the book was banned. There was so much censorship that we had very little information about the extent of the regime’s brutality. Most of us really became aware of it at the beginning of the revolution, when pro-Assad forces began to brutally crack down on us. Today, it’s important to open people’s eyes to our past, which, in moments of doubt and despair, can remind us why we are resisting.”

  Despite the cruelty laid out in The Shell, Omar developed a special connection to the book. It opened a door to his country’s buried history. Reading versus the memory-erasers, the chieftains of single-minded thought. I would later learn that this once banned book is one of the most read in Daraya. It is all the more precious because it was found in the home of the dissident Yahya Shurbaji, a friend of Ustez and a member of the nineties group. In 2011, he was arrested at the same time as Ghiyath Mattar, the “Little Gandhi” of Daraya. His family has had no news of him since. But his name has stayed on everyone’s lips. And in keeping with the tradition established at the library, that name figures prominently on the first page of the book.