DAMASCUS—Books recounting torture in Syrian prisons or texts on radical Islamic theology now sit openly in Damascus bookstores, no longer traded in secret after iron-fisted ruler Bashar al-Assad’s ouster.
“If I had asked about a (certain) book just two months ago, I could have disappeared or ended up in prison,” said student Amr al-Laham, 25, who was perusing stores near Damascus University.
He has finally found a copy of “Al-Maabar” (The Passage) by Syrian author Hanan Asad, which recounts the conflict in Aleppo from a crossing point linking the city’s rebel-held east with the government-held west, before Assad’s forces retook complete control in 2016.
Last month, Islamist-led rebels captured the northern city in a lightning offensive, going on to take Damascus and toppling Assad, ending more than half a century of his family’s oppressive rule.
“Before, we were afraid of being marked by the intelligence services” for buying works including those considered leftist or from the ultra-conservative Salafi Muslim movement, Laham said.
While many say the future is uncertain after Assad’s fall, Syrians for now can breathe more easily, free from the omnipresent security apparatus in a country battered by war since 2011 after Assad brutally repressed peaceful anti-government protests.
Syria’s myriad security agencies terrorized the population, torturing and killing opponents and denying basic rights such as freedom of expression.
Assad brutally repressed any hint of dissent and his father Hafez before him did the same, notoriously crushing a Muslim Brotherhood-led rebellion in the 1980s.
Several books that were previously banned and only available to Syrians if they were pirated online now frequently pop up on footpath displays or inside bookshops.
They include “The Shell”, by Syrian author Mustafa Khalifa, a devastating tale of an atheist who is mistaken for a radical Islamist and detained for years inside Syria’s infamous Tadmur prison.
Another is “My Aunt’s House” — an expression used by Syrians to refer to prison — by Iraqi author Ahmed Khairi Alomari.
Prison literature “was totally forbidden”, said a bookshop owner in his fifties, identifying himself as Abu Yamen.
“Before, people didn’t even dare to ask — they knew what awaited them,” he told AFP.
