Hunting for books in the ruins: How Syria's rebel librarians found hope

March 26, 2021

English teacher Muhammad Shihadeh salvages books from the rubble in Darayya

 

HOW REBELS BUILT A LIBRARY FROM BOOKS RESCUED FROM THE RUBBLE

[Note by Tom Gross]

The dreadful Syrian conflict, now over 10 years old, one of the worst in the world in recent decades, continues on. There been many dispatches over the years on this list about the human toll. Here is an interesting piece concerning books. (It is an edited extract from The Book Collectors of Darayya published by Picador.)

 

BOOK EXTRACT

Hunting for books in the ruins: how Syria's rebel librarians found hope

In a town under siege from Assad?s regime, a small group of revolutionaries found a new mission: to build a library from books rescued from the rubble. For those stranded in the city, books offered an imaginative escape from the horrors of war

By Delphine Minoui
The Guardian
March 16, 2021

https://www.theguardian.com/news/2021/mar/16/words-have-the-power-to-heal-syrias-rebel-librarians

At first, Ahmad Muaddamani was a distant voice coming through my computer speakers: a fragile whisper from a hidden basement. When I made contact with him on Skype, on 15 October 2015, he hadn?t left Darayya in nearly three years. Located less than five miles from Damascus, his town was a sarcophagus, surrounded and starved by the regime. He was one of 12,000 survivors.

They had been under fire from Bashar al-Assad?s rockets, barrel bombs and even a chemical weapon attack for many months. Syria?s president had besieged the town since November 2012. Like many others, Muaddamani?s family had packed their suitcases and escaped to a neighbouring town. They begged him to follow. He refused ? this was his revolution, his generation?s revolution.

He had joined one of the first demonstrations in Darayya calling for change, in 2011. He remembered everything about his ?first time?: his heart on fire. Losing his voice from shouting slogans. The joy of being there. It was his first sensation of freedom.

Muaddamani and other young rebels had stayed, not to defend their city, but to keep something in it alive. In the city under siege, he got hold of a video camera and finally realised his childhood dream: he would expose the truth. He joined the media centre run by the new local council. In the daytime, he roamed the devastated streets of Darayya. He filmed houses ripped apart, hospitals overflowing with the injured, burials for the victims, traces of a war invisible and inaccessible to foreign media. At night, he uploaded his videos to the internet.

One day in late 2013, Muaddamani?s friends called him ? they needed some help. They had found books that they wanted to rescue in the ruins of an obliterated house.

?Books?? he repeated in surprise.

The idea struck him as ludicrous. It was the middle of a war. What?s the point of saving books when you can?t even save lives? He?d never been a big reader. For him, books smacked of lies and propaganda. After a moment of hesitation, he followed his friends through a gouged-out wall. An explosion had ripped off the house?s front door. The disfigured building belonged to a school director who had fled the city and left everything behind.

Muaddamani cautiously felt his way to the living room, illuminated by a single sliver of sunlight. The wood floor was carpeted with books, scattered amid the debris. With one slow movement, he knelt on the ground and picked one at random. His nails flicked against the dust-blackened cover, as if against the strings of a musical instrument. The title was in English, something about self-awareness, a psychology book. He turned to the first page, deciphered the few words he recognised. It turned out the subject didn?t matter. He was trembling. His insides turned to jelly. An unsettling sensation that comes with opening the door to knowledge. With escaping, for a second, the routine of war. With saving a little piece, however tiny, of the town?s archives. Slipping through these pages as if fleeing into the unknown.

Muaddamani took his time standing up, the book against his chest. His entire body was shaking. ?The same sensation of freedom I felt at my first protest,? he remembered.

A detonation interrupted the internet connection. I stared at the screen. After a moment, he continued his story, giving an inventory of the other books found in the rubble that day: Arabic and international literature, philosophy, theology, science. A sea of information.

?But we had to hurry,? he continued. ?Planes were rumbling outside. We moved fast, dug up the books, and filled the bed of a pickup to the brim.?

In subsequent days, the collection effort continued in the ruins of abandoned houses, destroyed offices, and disintegrating mosques. Muaddamani developed a taste for it. With each new hunt for books, he savoured the immense pleasure of unearthing abandoned pages, bringing back to the world life buried in wreckage. They excavated with their bare hands, sometimes with shovels. In all, they were 40 or so volunteers ? activists, students, rebels ? always at the ready, waiting for the planes to go silent so they could dig in the rubble. They salvaged 6,000 books in one week. One month later, the collection reached 15,000. The books were short, long, dented, dog-eared, damaged; some were rare and highly sought-after.

They had to find somewhere to store them. Protect them. Preserve this small crumb of knowledge before it all went up in smoke. By general agreement, a plan for a public library took shape. Darayya never had one under Assad, so this would be the first. ?The symbol of a city that won?t bow down ? a place where we?re constructing something even as everything else collapses around us,? added Muaddamani. He stopped, pensive, before uttering a sentence I will never forget: ?Our revolution was meant to build, not destroy.?

Fearing reprisals from the regime, the organisers decided this library would be kept in the greatest of secrecy. It would have neither name nor sign. It would be an underground space, protected from radar and shells, where avid and novice readers alike could gather. Reading as refuge. A page opening to the world when every door is locked. After scouring the city, Muaddamani and his friends uncovered the basement of an abandoned building at the border of the frontline, not far from the snipers, but largely spared rocket fire. Its inhabitants were gone. The volunteers hurriedly constructed wooden shelves. They found paint to freshen the dusty walls. They reassembled two or three couches. Outside, they piled a few sandbags in front of the windows, and they brought a generator to provide electricity. For days, the book collectors busily dusted, glued, sorted, indexed and organised all these volumes. Now arranged by theme and in alphabetical order on overstuffed shelves, the books found a new, harmonious order.

These young Syrians cohabited with death night and day. Most of them had already lost everything ? their homes, their friends, their parents. Amid the chaos, they clung to books as if to life, hoping for a better tomorrow, for a better political system. Driven by their thirst for culture, they were quietly developing an idea of what democracy should be. An idea that challenged the regime?s tyranny and Islamic State?s book burners. Muaddamani and his friends were true soldiers for peace.

Before the revolution, Muaddamani studied civil engineering at Damascus University. When Syria rose up against the Assad regime in March 2011, he was 19. His father, who had spent 12 months in prison in 2003 for a simple comment he had whispered to a friend, forbade him to go into the streets. Muaddamani missed the first protest held in Darayya. During the second one, he sneaked out and joined the crowd, chanting at the top of his lungs: ?One, one, one, the Syrian people are one.?

Weeks, then months went by, and the protests continued. Assad?s voice shouted menacingly from transistor radios. ?We will win. We will not yield. We will eliminate the dissenters.? Regime forces fired into the crowd. Muaddamani and his friends chanted even louder ? ?Freedom! Freedom!? ? as other resisters took up weapons to protect themselves.

SALVAGING BOOKS IN DARAYYA

?Ustez? (?Professor?) Muhammad Shihadeh, a teacher of English and nonviolent resistance techniques, salvaging books in Darayya. Photograph: Mohammad al-Eman
He explained why the regime was so focused on Darayya. ?Darayya is not like other cities. Its civic resistance stretches way back before the revolution.?

Darayya?s resistance had begun in the late 90s, in one of the mosques, where activists would study the Qur?an and read banned works by religious dissidents. In particular, they spent hours dissecting the writings of Jawdat Said, one of the first Muslim thinkers to engage with the notion of nonviolence. Contrary to the ?terrorist? label they would inherit much later, these men were advocating a form of Sunnism favouring dialogue and tolerance. Their only weapons were a few secretly gathered books. That tradition of nonviolent rebellion through knowledge was picked up almost by accident, in the creation of the underground library.

By 2002, the Darayya group had begun to translate its new knowledge into activism, with environmental and civic initiatives. After the US invasion of Iraq, it demonstrated against the occupation. The Assad government was also opposed to the US operation, so the dissenters of Darayya felt safe in their protest. But the government began to worry about this popular momentum, which was growing too large. A month later, 24 activists involved in planning the demonstration were arrested and imprisoned.

At the beginning of the Arab spring, in March 2011, a new event stirred up the inhabitants of Darayya. Inspired by the fall of Zine al-Abidine Ben Ali in Tunisia and Hosni Mubarak in Egypt, some teenagers in Deraa, another Syrian city, more than 50 miles from Damascus, had scrawled ?Your turn will come, Doctor? on their school?s wall. The message was aimed at Assad. The youths were arrested and tortured. Anger quickly poured into the streets throughout Syria. Fed by the fervour spreading through the Arab world, other cities joined the movement.

Darayya was one of the first to rise. On Friday 25 March, Darayya Shebab, the movement formed in the 90s, regrouped for a new struggle. ?From Darayya to Deraa, a dignified people,? the protesters repeated in chorus. The crowd swelled. In the space of an hour, thousands braved the ban on demonstrating. When the first bullets were fired, the young protesters got creative: they offered the soldiers roses and bottles of water with notes attached: ?We are your brothers, don?t kill us.?

The message irritated the regime. It contradicted the official propaganda that there were hate-filled religious fanatics among the demonstrators. In September 2011, the leader of those peaceful protests was arrested and tortured. His mutilated body was returned to his family. After that, pockets of armed resistance began to form, but the peaceful movement persisted.

On 25 August 2012, Assad sent in the tanks. After three days of intense bombing, regime soldiers attacked Darayya. 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. A collective punishment for the demonstrators. For the flowers and bottles of water. For this peace odyssey that stretches back to the 90s, far before the revolution.

Shut up in a makeshift shelter, Muaddamani 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 approximately 500 dead, but he believed there were at least 200 more, hastily buried where they were executed.

On 8 November 2012, the government imposed a blockade on Darayya. As soon as this sanction was announced, a new wave of departures began. It included Muaddamani?s parents. The young activist made the choice to stay. ?You don?t abandon a revolution halfway through,? he said. He had no way of knowing what would come next.

The library very quickly became one of the cornerstones of this isolated town. Open from 9am to 5pm, except on Friday, the day of rest, it welcomed an average of 25 readers a day, mainly men. In Darayya, Muaddamani said, women and children were not very visible and rarely ventured outside. In general, they made do with reading the books their fathers or husbands brought home, rather than risk the barrel bombs raining from the sky.

?Last month, around 600 fell on the town,? said Muaddamani. His friend Abu el-Ezz, co-director of the library, was a near fatality. In September 2015, he was on his way to the book cellar when one of the many barrel bombs being tossed from regime helicopters landed in front of him.

These containers full of explosives and scrap metal fell randomly and were particularly destructive. Abu el-Ezz was hit in the neck by pieces of shrapnel that affected his nervous system; after that, he suffered from cramps that stabbed down to the small of his back.

After weeks of convalescence, Abu el-Ezz was able to leave his hospital bed and joined Muaddamani at the media centre run by the local council, which spoke for the opposition to the regime. ?Books are our way to make up for lost time, to wipe out ignorance,? he said.

Abu el-Ezz was 23 years old, just like Muaddamani. And his engineering studies also had been interrupted. Like Muaddamani, he?d never been a bookworm. At college, he said, the required reading verged on caricature. Countless sheets of paper wasted to honour the memory of the former Syrian president Hafez al-Assad, who died in 2000.

?Before the revolution,? he continued, ?we were fed lies. There was no room for debate. We were living in a coffin. Censorship was the glue of our daily lives. Assad was the master of the country, of time, of thought.?

Abu el-Ezz was still in terrible pain from his wounds, but he wanted to talk about his new passion, books. He dared to believe in the good they can do. Words have the power to soothe mental wounds. The simple act of reading had become a huge comfort to him. He liked to wander through pages. Lose himself in words. His reading choices were eclectic, varying from analyses of political Islam to Arabic poetry to psychology.

?Books don?t set limits; they set us free. They don?t mutilate; they restore. Reading helps me think positively, chase away negative ideas. And that?s what we need most right now.?

What about the other library regulars? What did they read? What subjects captured their interest? At first, said Abu el-Ezz, everyone was getting their bearings, dipping their toes in. A book is like a precious relic that you?re examining for the first time ? it can overwhelm. The most curious ones picked a text at random without much hesitation. The shyest visitors, those unused to reading, were nervous, intimidated by the idea of even touching a book cover. But certain books started to gain popularity by word of mouth. ?That?s how most of our borrowers ended up reading The Alchemist,? he said.

?By Paulo Coelho??

?Yeah, it?s one of our most popular books. People pass it around. Some have read it a couple of times.?

Maybe this international bestseller appealed to the library?s patrons because it describes a notion familiar to them: self-discovery. A Spanish shepherd?s journey from Andaluc?a to the Egyptian pyramids spoke to them. Darayya?s young revolutionaries heard in this book an echo of their own perilous odyssey. It contained a treasure particularly precious in their eyes: the idea of limitless freedom.

Among Abu el-Ezz?s generation, which has only ever known the rigid dictatorship of the Ba?ath party (in power since the early 60s), the thirst for change is striking. ?Most of the readers are like me. They never liked books before the war. Today, the young people of Darayya have everything to learn. It?s like all of us are starting over at zero. At the library, people ask me for books about ?democracy? all the time.?

Another book, placed prominently on the shelf, has proved particularly popular: Kitab al-Ibar (The Book of Lessons), by Ibn Khaldun. ?Our readers have all skimmed this massive book at one point or another. In it, a 14th-century Tunisian historian uses his own experiences to try to determine the causes for the rise and decline of the Arab dynasties.? In the midst of revolutionary uncertainty, this forerunner of modern sociology offered, if not solutions, at least ways to think about issues as fundamental as governance, power struggles and economic development ?essential fodder at a time when the shape of the future Syria was endlessly questioned.

Books were helping transport these young Syrians somewhere else. The residents of Darayya were inspired by these narratives. They were a source of intellectual sustenance too long withheld.

Abu el-Ezz was impatient to get well enough to return to the library. For him, it was not only a place of healing but also somewhere he could breathe ? a hopeful page in Syria?s dark history.

At the end of October 2015, I opened my inbox to find a message from Muaddamani, 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, he explained that these instructions were printed on an A4 piece of paper and prominently placed at the basement entrance, glued to a pole, so everyone could see them.

He and his friends had created something extraordinary in the midst of a war zone, their library a land without borders. A secret hideaway where books circulated with no need for a safe-conduct pass or bulletproof vest. In this protected place, they had managed to establish an atmosphere of collective intimacy, as well as a sense of ethics, discipline and, oddly enough, normality. There was no doubt that this helped them hang on. Even the fighters of the Free Syrian Army were 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 Ibn Khaldun that my friends and I call him by that name now,? said Muaddamani.

The next day, he introduced me to Omar Abu Anas, AKA Ibn Khaldun. He talked in a highly polished Syrian dialect, close to literary Arabic, as if reading great scholars had rubbed off on his vocabulary.

Like Muaddamani, Abu Anas had 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 I took up arms.?

Twenty-four years old, Abu Anas belonged to the Liwa Shuhada al-Islam rebels. Along with Ajnad al-Sham, it was one of two brigades of the Free Syrian Army?s southern front. This young accidental fighter was one of the countless young men of Darayya, aged 18 to 28, who were propelled overnight to the frontlines of the war. Unlike their leaders, deserters from the official army, they had no combat experience. Former college classmates and nextdoor neighbours, they sometimes found themselves fighting the bombs and tanks with one weapon shared among three people.

OMAR ABU ANAS READING ON THE FRONTLINE

I asked if he considered himself a jihadist. He paused for a long time before replying. ?If I chose to fight against the regime, it was to defend my land,? he said. ?My country. My right to freedom,? he said. ?Fighting wasn?t a choice. It was a necessity. When your friends are shot before your eyes for brandishing 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.?

Abu Anas?s words reflected the same candour as the revolutionary slogans of 2011 ? the thirst for freedom, and recourse to weapons as the sole means to protect oneself. ?As for jihad ? To those who seek to tarnish our image by painting us as religious fanatics, my response is simple: we are Muslims. We refuse any usurpation of our religion. Whether it be by the al-Nusra Front, the Syrian branch of al-Qaida; or by Islamic State ? 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 was 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 realised 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.?

He had been leading a double life, between war and literature. He even created a mini-library on the frontline: a dozen works organised and protected behind the sandbags. When the bombs quietened down, the combatants exchanged books and shared 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.?

I asked if he had a favourite. ?Al-Qawqa?a,? he answered immediately. Al-Qawqa?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 13 years of detention in Palmyra, the terrible ?desert prison?. This semi-autobiographical account is full of atrocious descriptions inspired by his jailers? barbarism, torture and the nightmare of his incarceration under the rule of Hafez al-Assad.

?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, Abu Anas developed a special connection to the book. It opened a door to his country?s buried history. Reading versus the memory-erasers, the chiefs of single-minded thought. I would later learn that this once-banned book was one of the most read in Darayya. Abu Anas was particularly attached to The Shell because it reminded him of his own situation. How to survive behind bars? How to endure forced confinement?

?The Shell is a mirror in which I can project myself,? Abu Anas said. ?A protective bubble I create to be able to endure the worst.?

His unwavering faith in books brought to mind all the letters and accounts left behind by the soldiers of the first world war. Like Marcel ?t?v?, a graduate of France?s prestigious ?cole Normale Sup?rieure, who devoured 80 books in two years on the frontline. Or Robert Dubarle, the captain of France?s legendary mountain infantry, whose wife constantly sent him reading material for the trenches. Then there?s the famous Soci?t? Franklin, which bankrolled the creation of 350 barrack libraries. Reading to escape. Reading to find oneself. Reading to feel alive. Among the young people of Darayya, reading had even more meaning than that. Here, reading was an act of transgression. It was an affirmation of the freedom they had been deprived of for too long.

In August 2016, news spread that an envoy from the Fourth Division had issued an ultimatum to the city?s inhabitants: leave Darayya immediately or end up buried alive there. The situation in Darayya had become desperate. ?There was nothing left to eat, nothing to protect ourselves with. The regime had burned all our farmland. It was leave or die,? Muaddamani wrote in a series of texts. The young rebels who had survived the horror of war by losing themselves in books had to leave their treasures under the rubble.

He was evacuated to Idlib. A few weeks later, he sent me a photo of what remains of the secret library. The shot was taken by one of the rare reporters granted access to Darayya, under the regime?s close surveillance. I recognised the enclosed space with its perfectly lined-up aisles and wooden shelves along the walls. They were half-empty. The remaining books were thrown on the floor, abandoned to dust and darkness. Ripped-out drawers littered the ground, mixed with scattered volumes. In the background, a soldier wearing fatigues trampled the paper wreckage. The books didn?t end up in a bonfire, as Muaddamani had feared. After unearthing the secret library, regime soldiers had pillaged it to sell the books for cheap on the sidewalk of a flea market in Damascus.

A year later, some of the librarians had left Syria for Turkey. Muaddamani stayed in Idlib, where, even after the ceasefire declared in May 2017, life was difficult. Anxiety over an uncertain future settled over the relief brought by the semblance of a truce. Initially welcomed as heroes, Darayya?s activists grew disenchanted. ?We wanted to embody a third path, to show that an alternative to the regime and Islamic State was possible,? he said.

It felt to him as if there was no longer a precise goal in the resistance, a defined objective. Dozens of factions and local councils were competing for control. There was also the fear that the regime would make this the site of its final sweep. That the sole remaining bastion of the rebellion would be the theatre for the last battle against the insurgents.

Yet Muaddamani wanted to remain hopeful. He wanted to believe that the long night of the Syrian people would be followed by a rebirth. In what form? He didn?t know. In the meantime, he had launched a mobile library for the children of Idlib.

 

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