SOURCE: THE NEW YORK TIMES

BY: DUNYA MIKHAIL

In a region that sways “on the palm of a genie,” as the Arabic saying goes, where bullets and explosions are more familiar than bread, you would not expect people to read, let alone to risk their lives for the sake of books. Yet in 2013 a group of enthusiastic readers in Daraya, five miles southwest of Damascus, salvaged thousands of books from ruined homes, wrapping them in blankets just as they would victims of the war raging around them. They brought the books into the basement of a building whose upper floors had been wrecked by bombs and set up a library. As Mike Thomson recounts this unlikely story in “Syria’s Secret Library,” this underground book collection surrounded by sandbags functioned, as one user put it, as an “oasis of normality in this sea of destruction.”

There, the self-appointed chief librarian, a 14-year-old named Amjad, would write down in a large file the names of people who borrowed the books, and then return to his seat to continue reading. He had all the books he could ever want, apart from ones on high shelves that he couldn’t reach. He told his friends: “You don’t have TV now anyway, so why not come here and educate yourself? It’s fun.” The library hosted a weekly book club, as well as classes on English, math and world history, and debates over literature and religion.

Advertising the library’s activities without compromising its security was a dilemma; patrons relied on word of mouth for fear that it would be targeted by the Syrian Army. By the time the library was founded, Daraya, a site of anti-government uprising and calls for reforms, had been under siege by the army for more than a year. Its 8,000 remaining residents — from a prewar population of about 80,000 — faced near-constant bombardment and shortages of food, water and power. The situation worsened in 2014 when the Islamic State made Raqqa its de facto capital and went on to invade vast areas of Syria and Iraq. The jihadists were paying people to join them, and many parents had no idea what jobs their sons were taking until it was too late. “Ignorance is always the enemy of humanity,” Homam, a volunteer at the library, tells Thomson. The siege was lifted in 2016 after numerous protests on social media, including an open letter signed by 47 women in Daraya underscoring their desperation, along with the fact that the town was full of civilians, not terrorists, as the government was claiming.

Thomson, a radio and television reporter who covered the war in Syria for the BBC, dedicated months to interviewing the library’s founders and their friends via Skype and social media. When the internet went down in Daraya, his sources recorded comments on their phones as audio diaries they could send on to Thomson when the connection was restored. His book is a compassionate and inspiring portrait of a town where, one of the founders tells him, “fuel for our souls” was an essential need. The books “help us understand the outside world better,” another founder, a local dental student, said. Likewise, Thomson’s book may help the outside world better understand Syrians. The country’s rich literary history has been overshadowed by the turmoil of civil war, and Daraya’s secret library is a testament to the Syrian people’s long pursuit of knowledge in both good and bad times. Like many other populations in conflict zones, Syrians, Thomson writes, dream of “a place to plan a future without bullets and bombs.”

In the same spirit of piling books under Daraya’s shattered streets, local artists painted graffiti art on the walls of ruined buildings. In a moving image drawn by Abu Malik, a local artist nicknamed Banksy, a little girl stands on a pile of skulls writing the word “hope” high above her head.