by Mike Thomson
Abdul Basit and his wife had different tastes in their reading. Zohour, he told me, was especially keen on books on human development, while he was more drawn to literature. In his wife’s view, he continued, Syria would need more educated women focusing on this area for the country’s future development. Although not actually opposed to that thought, Abdul Basit doubted that the study of human development had answers for everything. Instead, he believed it was down to us all to decide our own paths in life. But after a sideways look at his strong-willed wife, a now grinning Abdul Basit seemed to accept that he wasn’t winning this battle of beliefs. ‘Thanks to the books Zohour is reading, our life is now guided by plans and schedules. She has plans for everything, including one for today. It began at 05.30 this morning and involved breakfast, a coffee break, followed by some exercises!’
Abdul Basit went on to tell me that Zohour was also very fond of reading cookery books and that having been a mathematics student she liked to further her studies by reading more on that subject too. He told me that they both loved reading the copy of This is What Life Taught Me that his father had given him. ‘Unfortunately,’ he said, ‘because Zohour was living outside besieged Daraya, I wasn’t able to show her this book before, though I longed to do so. But as soon as she arrived in Idlib one of the very first things I did was give it to her.’ Abdul Basit reiterated what others from Daraya had told me about there being no libraries in Idlib town, and that although you could buy books there, they were very expensive. But as he and Zohour couldn’t bear life without reading, they had both been saving up. So far, Abdul Basit told me, they had been able to buy two books: one on the basic principles of economy, by the Kuwaiti writer Sultan el Jassem, and one on ideas and research, by the former Syrian teacher and veteran broadcaster Ali al-Tantawi. And, as ever, Abdul Basit was certainly not leaving it there. ‘We are trying our best to get more. It’s not easy though, because books cost so much here, but at least it’s a start. We’re also continuing to work on plans to start a library here in Idlib town. We believe libraries are as important as food and water, so we’re determined to start one, even if it’s only very small.’
Abdul Basit was also hoping to get his hands on a copy of his favourite play, so that he could share it with his wife. ‘Shakespeare’s Hamlet is such a wonderful book. I remember reading it whenever I could back in Daraya, often during quiet moments when I was working in the hospital. Its imagery is so rich and the dialogue so captivating. But unfortunately I can’t find a copy of that anywhere here in Idlib, so my wife hasn’t had the chance to read it yet.’ Hearing Abdul Basit voice his love of Hamlet took me back several years to one of our earliest conversations in the secret library, when he had told me how he loved the book so much that he kept sneaking glimpses of it in between helping patients at the hospital. ‘Abdul Basit,’ he had told himself, ‘this must stop!’ So much had happened since then for both of us, particularly him. Here he was today, married and a father, living far away from Daraya and the secret library he so cherished. He seemed much older and our conversations, once rather formal, were those of friends, even though we had yet to actually meet. The war had gone from bad to worse, but Abdul Basit’s enthusiasm for life and books remained undiminished.
Now that he had started a family, I was interested to see how he saw his future. As I asked him my mind returned to the chilling answer twelve-year-old Islam had given me when I had put the same question to her a couple of years before. She had told me then that she saw no sense in making plans for the future because she didn’t think she would get out of besieged Daraya alive. Her answer still haunts me, though I had just had some very good news from Malik. He told me that Islam, her mother and siblings had managed to leave Daraya without suffering any further injuries, and were living in the neighbouring town of al-Moadamyeh. I was delighted to know that despite her darkest fears, young Islam did have a future after all. I hope from the bottom of my heart that it’s a very happy one.
Then there was Amjad, another child whose life has been scarred by the war. While older people may feel defeated by such terrible times you expect the younger generation, imbued with the optimism and self-certainty of youth, to look forward to the future with confidence and hope. Yet even Amjad, who had once bustled around the secret library with such relentless joy and enthusiasm, now seemed lost in the past. The same, happily, could not be said of Abdul Basit.
Travel, he told me enthusiastically, was high on his and Zohour’s agenda. They were hoping to go to Europe, though as tourists, not refugees. Their planned first stop was to be Andalusia in southern Spain, which was more genealogical quest than beach holiday. Abdul Basit told me he was drawn to the region because it was once ruled by the al-Ahmar family, which was his last name too. Their main aim was to get to know more about the great civilisation that had once lived in the region. After that it would be on to Saudi Arabia to go on an Islamic pilgrimage to Mecca and, that done, they wanted to finish their adventure with a trip to Malaysia. Though, again, this last leg looked set to be more of a fact-finding trip than a holiday. ‘This is a nation that only thirty years ago was considered an undeveloped country. But back then its people made a plan to become part of the developed world and they are about to achieve that goal. We think that Syria could learn a lot from Malaysia’s experiences and perhaps make similar progress once the war is over.’ Even at this late stage, Abdul Basit seemed to believe that the revolution against President Bashar al-Assad’s regime would eventually succeed. But the almost total defeat of rebel forces had made that prospect very unlikely, for the moment at least. And with the regime’s army massed on Idlib’s borders, I feared that avowed opponents like Abdul Basit would struggle to stay in the country, never mind play any role in rebuilding it. Yet at the same time I had a gut feeling that someday, somehow, he would indeed find a way to do that.
Abdul Basit and Zohour also hoped to spend time travelling around Idlib too. When I asked him whether he thought this might be dangerous, given the number of armed extremist groups roaming the province, he waved my concerns away. So far, he told me, he had managed to avoid any trouble with them. His confidence on this issue derived from recent brief encounters with the al-Nusra Islamist group. As soon as he mentioned where he was from, they were quite helpful. Daraya was considered a birthplace of the revolution and was lauded in most opposition circles. In fact, Abdul Basitt continued, this link with Daraya acted like a kind of passport, letting him travel through most rebel-held areas without trouble. The problem, however, was that such areas were becoming fewer and farther between as the war continued to turn in Assad’s favour.
By 10 January 2018, the Syrian government’s long-predicted offensive against Idlib province was well underway. In the far south of this last rebel-held province, 100,000 civilians had been forced to flee their homes as pro-regime forces advanced. Most were heading north towards Idlib city, struggling along swollen, dangerous roads, carrying, pushing or pulling all they could manage. The regime’s immediate objective was the strategically important Abu al-Duhur airbase, which rebels had seized on taking control of Idlib in 2015. Soon it would fall. Meanwhile pro-Assad planes and guns continued to pound the rebel-held area of Eastern Ghouta, just outside of Damascus, home to 400,000 half-starved people. Like Daraya before its evacuation, the enclave’s population has lived under siege for four long years. They too were slowly being starved into submission. Both areas had, somewhat ironically, been officially declared ‘de-escalation zones’.
All through the war, those Syrians opposed to Assad had hoped that the US and its allies would intervene against the regime in as robust a way as Russia and Iran had done in support of it. That had never happened under President Obama so I was interested in whether Abdul Basit thought it might under Donald Trump. ‘The previous president didn’t give us much hope for the future,’ he said. ‘He always talked about how red lines must not be crossed by the regime, but then did nothing when they were. At least Trump did punish Assad after the chemical
weapons attack here in Idlib province. But we’re going to have to wait and see what else he does and whether he might offer us any further hope to cling to.’ Sitting forward in his chair, as if about to impart a secret, Abdul Basit told me that he at least felt less worried on one front. He thought it was now unlikely that Assad’s regime would try to retake Idlib province soon. He had thought that was coming after the evacuation of formerly rebel-held Daraya was followed by another from eastern Aleppo. But he now believed that the regime’s attack on the south of the province would probably stop once they had got the Abu al-Duhur airbase back. He had become convinced, he said, that Assad’s forces were simply not strong enough to march north from there and retake the whole region. Even if they did try to do this, he added, the people of Idlib would not give up easily.
While Abdul Basit and I were talking I could hear bursts of laughter and good-natured shouts and exclamations, as if some people had come into the room. Sure enough, they had and I could hear a very familiar voice calling out my name. It was Anas. Delighted, I shouted back a loud and heartfelt hello, though for a few seconds I wasn’t sure if he had heard me. But he had, and a big surprise was in store for me.
‘Hi, Mike,’ he said, ‘I would like to introduce you to my newly arrived daughter, Batoul. I am a father now!’ Anas put the video-linked phone in front of a tiny little girl sitting happily in her mother’s arms. Dressed in a pink Babygro with a teddy bear on the front, she stared back, her small head framed in a matching pink and white hood. This star of the show was clearly loving the limelight. Adoring words came from every corner of the room. Staring besottedly at his little daughter, who had been born just a few days before, Anas could not have looked any prouder or happier.
With great enthusiasm he told me how marriage and fatherhood had changed his life. Looking across adoringly at his wife, Asmaa, he told me what a wonderful woman she was. Just like in Abdul Basit’s case, married life seemed to have done wonders for him. Anas, once described to me by Abdul Basit as a young man in clothes an older man would wear, looked younger now. Filled with new-found optimism and energy, he explained that he and Abdul Basit had been talking about returning to Daraya as soon as possible. ‘The first thing we’ll do when we get back,’ he told me, ‘is rebuild the secret library, as well as the school nearby. We want to set up educational institutions and help our country start again. But we’ll be aiming at rebuilding minds rather than buildings. When people think of building a town, they normally think only of homes, shops and offices, but we want to build a nation.’ Anas then added, ‘If we fail to rebuild people’s minds it will make no difference what buildings we put up. Without a proper foundation,’ he continued, ‘society will eventually collapse.’ This, he insisted, had happened before, and it was why the civil war had started. After forty years of despotic rule by the Assad family, the country had fallen apart.
Much as I hated to dampen Anas’s high-spirited optimism, I felt the need to point out that President Bashar al-Assad was now in the strongest position he had been in for years, largely thanks to military backing from Russia, Iran and Lebanon’s Hezbollah. But he was undaunted. ‘We will still continue doing our work and planning for the future. We won’t give up. Even though our land is occupied and our people continue to suffer, the fight is not over. As Abdul Basit may have told you, we are hoping to set up a small library here in Idlib. Whether we succeed in this or not, I’m going to keep on reading. As I remember saying to you back in Daraya, just like the body needs food the soul needs books.’
This talk of Daraya and its treasured secret library seemed to have generated a wave of nostalgia. It washed over Anas, leaving him staring into space for a while. Then, slowly gathering his thoughts, he said: ‘We had a place of sanctuary, an oasis of calm and harmony in what seemed like a world gone mad. It’s not only the books I miss, it’s the place I read them in. I also miss the environment of the library, the people there, I miss everything about that special place. It wasn’t just a repository of books. It was another world, a world we shared together. And while outside was destruction and pain, inside was creation and hope. Despite all that was happening, I felt inspired inside those walls.’
Anas’s words brought me back to those of the deeply missed Omar Abu Anas. A few days before he died, he had told me how he and his friends saw reading as the bedrock for a better future, that it would help them all rebuild their nation once the guns stopped firing. ‘Brains rather than bullets are going to be needed to put this devastated country back together again.’ Books, he had insisted, whether on the subject of literature, history, politics, religion, poetry or anything else, can help show the way forward and provide the building blocks for the years to come. Abdul Basit agreed: ‘It is not only Anas and me,’ he told me, ‘many young people are just as passionate about books as we are. One day we will go back to Daraya. We will work together to build an immense library there, one that will be the heart of the town. It was our refuge, it was where we had fun, it was where we came to enjoy the magic of books. The secret library was a glimmer of hope in a very dark world. It was our spiritual sanctuary.’
While Abdul Basit and I were talking, Anas was staring at his phone. He said he was looking at a short video of the destruction in Southern Idlib and besieged rebel-held Eastern Ghouta. He passed the device to Abdul Basit, pointing to a particularly distressing scene, before later sending the video to me. A father was holding his badly injured young daughter in his arms, screaming at the camera, while white-helmeted civil defence workers struggled to dig people out of the rubble behind him. Anas became increasingly emotional as he watched the video again with his friend. ‘I keep thinking that could have been my child. What if I had come back to my house to discover this? It is just so terrible. I can’t imagine what the families of these children must be feeling.’ Anas told me that the scene he was watching reminded him of the horrors unleashed on Daraya for so long. He had carried on as best he could in those days, refusing to be intimidated by the regime’s bombs, but only now that he was a father did he understand what those with families must have gone through each day. ‘If I’d had a family to look after then,’ he said, ‘I would have worried about them all the time. I would have been too frightened to do almost anything, I’d have been constantly fearing for their lives. I think it would have made me incapable of living my life in other ways. I can only be thankful that when I did become a father, it was here, in a safer place.’
Before Anas finished speaking, Abdul Basit had clicked on another harrowing report showing thousands of bedraggled civilians swarming along a blackened and desolate highway, heading north towards Idlib town. It made me wonder how much longer their new home-in-exile would remain safe, and whether, sooner or later, the regime would come for Idlib. Already, Anas told me, people had left Idlib town and set off for the Turkish border, hoping to escape the fighting before it came to them. I asked him if he was considering doing the same, now that he had a wife and baby to take care of.
‘Some of my family and friends are trying to convince me to go to Turkey and leave Syria,’ he replied, ‘but I am refusing to do that. I’m determined to stay until the end. I don’t want to leave my country. If every person who is against the regime does that, the regime will be free to do whatever they want with our country. So I simply have to stay here whatever happens.’
His brave and defiant words reminded me of those of Muhammad back in Daraya, when the shells were falling all around him. It is one thing to have beliefs and ideals, and quite another to stand by them in this way, risking your life and all you hold dear. These men weren’t warriors in the conventional sense, they fought with words rather than weapons. To me, their quiet courage, resilience and determination was all the more remarkable for that.
When I had first tried to find people from Daraya after the evacuation, I wondered whether the secret library would still be important to them. After all, many had lost relatives and close friends, seen their homes bombed to rubble and then been uproo
ted to a new place far away. There they faced having to start life all over again. To find a roof over their heads, food, clothing and work to somehow pay for it all and still they weren’t safe. Bombs might fall at any time and they could be besieged all over again by pro-Assad forces. Given all this, I reasoned, would the secret library now be little more than a fond but redundant memory? Inside, I knew the answer. Its books had been looted and its readers all gone, yet the extraordinary spirit of this literary sanctuary was undiminished. I cannot think of anyone who can illustrate this fact better than Abdul Basit:
The library gave birth to a movement of knowledge and learning, and enabled us to explore new things. It was also our sanctuary, and our minaret. It guided us through all the horrors, lit the path we should take and inspired us to carry on. It taught us that a fighter without knowledge is not a hero, but a gangster. The library’s many books were fuel for our souls. They gave us back our lives. While bombs rained down from the skies, we discussed new ideas, learned from the past and planned for the future. The library united us all. It was an essential part of Daraya, and what it stood for. Looking back, the secret library was not only our saviour, it was our biggest weapon against the regime.
At this point Abdul Basit went quiet. For the next few moments I heard nothing but the faint murmur of traffic and the occasional shouts of distant children. Had he no more to say? As if in answer, a deep sigh filled the void before Abdul Basit continued:
The secret library was filled with the wonderful aroma of old books and paper. It smelt of history, literature, philosophy and culture. It was a deep, rich, comforting smell. It was like when you walk in the door of your home and are guided to the kitchen by the smell of fine food. That special dish, and all its delicious ingredients, are waiting there for you. To me, the library was like that. It gave us a precious space where we could breathe hope instead of despair. It liberated us from suffering and savagery. Inside its walls the love of science, literature and ideas filled the air. This symphony of books soothed our hearts. As we entered, its aura revived us, like fresh air to a suffocating man. It was the oxygen for our souls. It was a place where angels met. Each time I stepped inside, I flew with them.