The 57th Damascus International Book Fair: a threshold where "we write history… we read history"

Since its liberation, Syria has been the scene of very heavy visiting traffic. It has already come a long way on the road to opening up to the world again and integrating with it, but that the first major event realized as a Damascus initiative, with the dimension of sending a message to the world through this integration, is a book fair is probably both very meaningful and very functional.

Functional, because throughout history Damascus has been a center of culture and civilization that spoke to the world through books. Even the ancient Greek works that would later inspire Western civilization were translated here, giving Islamic civilization a new color and making them ready for the interest of the West.

The tombs of Ibn Taymiyyah and Ibn Arabi, the two symbolic names of one of the deepest divergences in the history of Islamic thought and sects, are both here. In every street there are traces of very important, famous names from the noble Companions or the generations immediately after them. Saladin (Salahaddin Ayyubi) and Nureddin Zengi are neighbors here, and, with their wisdom in governance as much as with their heroism, they continue to inspire books of political philosophy.

Under the oppression and tyranny of the 60-year Baath regime, not only the people of today but, as it were, a potential of civilization lay buried, and now we are witnessing its revival. That this revival begins with a book fair is very important in this respect. Of course, the fair takes place not merely as a publishing gathering but as one of the most visible reflections, in the cultural field, of the great political and social rupture Syria is going through in these times.

At the 57th Damascus International Book Fair, attended by 500 publishers from 35 different countries, the number 57 is of course intriguing. This number also points to the existence, for better or worse, of a tradition of book fairs: a fair that had been held 56 times until 2011. Although the Assad administration suspended the fair entirely when the revolution process began in 2011, the fairs of past years also have nothing to do, near or far, with the logic of the fair being held now. It is a fair held under great pressures, in which an extremely meticulous selectiveness operated on the books to be sold, and even the books, or certain titled books, of some very important Islamic greats were caught up in censorship.

In fact, this was perhaps the harshest form of the fair style in many Arab countries. On entering the fairground, the walls on the right and left feature a striking illustration of the official practices toward books in this period. It represents a process that extends from the reading of banned books in hidden corners for fear of being caught, to experiences of books being buried in the ground to be hidden, then to those who, having been caught up in the Mukhabarat's surveillance for reading books, ended up in Sednaya, Tadmur and other dungeons, and now to the book's re-emergence from beneath the ground as a light of enlightenment.

To this fair, coming 15 years after precisely these pressures, there was an influx of about 250 thousand visitors on the first day. This density points, on the one hand, to the desire of the cultural sphere, which has been shrinking for years through economic and social attrition, to "breathe again"; and on the other, to the fact that the relationship established with the book is a vein that keeps collective memory alive even in times of crisis.

In fact, even if we speak of a 15-year gap, in the last 5-6 years before the revolution a book fair was held in Idlib, regarded as the cradle of the revolution. I took part online in the events of two of those fairs. This too is among the most striking signs that the present Sharaa administration's interest in the Book is not a temporary and showy interest.

Now the most ambitious aspect of the Damascus Fair is that there is no ban whatsoever on books. At the fair, where about 100 thousand kinds of books are offered for display and sale, there is no restriction at all. However, while foregrounding this absence of restrictions, the Reuters report interestingly presents it solely through the fact that "the works of the radical Islamist Sayyid Qutb, whose sale was formerly banned, can now be sold and are being printed in large runs." As if his were the only work set free and that were the only feature of the fair. Yet freedom is the slogan of this fair; where there is a ban there is no book. From books that can exist where there is a ban, no liberating and heart-soothing idea comes out.

This fair has a strong "symbolic language." The slogan put forward, "We write history… we read history," implies both a reckoning with the past and an effort to build a new shared narrative. As emphasized also in Euronews's Arabic analysis, the poster design makes references to the Ugarit alphabet; this shows the fair's search to reposition Syria not only through current political debates but also through ancient cultural heritage.

In the speeches at the opening, President Ahmed al-Sharaa stressed "that humanity has long been searching for truth, that as knowledge increases awareness grows, and that this deepens the need for learning." Mentioning Damascus historically as one of the centers of "knowledge and gnosis (ilm and marifa)," he presented the fair as "not a simple cultural event but the recall of a kind of civilizational claim." The President put forward the classical political/ethical discourse that "ignorance is associated with weakness, and a society that knows and acts on what it knows with strength," that "power without knowledge is destructive, and a sword without insight strikes its own owner." At the center of the speech was the idea of Damascus as "a wellspring that has drawn seekers of knowledge from East and West"; afterwards he said the fair is "a blessed return and a precious beginning after Syria's complete liberation."

Minister of Culture Muhammad Yasin al-Salih built his opening message on "the book" in the language of a "refounding." The Minister stressed that he regards the book and knowledge as "one of the pillars of Syrian identity throughout history," and that Damascus, as "the city that gave birth to the first alphabet," must register its cultural presence anew through this gate. The Minister also described the new cultural climate by linking the fair to "the expansion of the space for free thought and expression," with allusions to "the hegemony of a single thought."

A manifestation of the fair's prominence in this new climate in terms of the absence of bans was the existence of a section devoted to the previously suppressed Kurdish language and culture. On this occasion we learn that a Directorate of Kurdish Language and Culture has also been established in the Ministry of Culture. The Kurdish staff who welcomed visitors at the stand and explained their works to them seemed to be enjoying an atmosphere of complete freedom and trust, and they embraced us with great sincerity.

Second, we are faced here with a much larger-scale counterpart of the Arabic Book Fair in Istanbul, which has been held for 10 years and which likewise stands out, compared with fairs in the Arab world, for its "absence of bans." Walking around the fairground, the rate at which we meet and chat with familiar people is much higher than in Türkiye. Almost everyone speaks Turkish, more or less, and tries as a gesture to address us in Turkish.

In the Syrian revolution, we see the strongest reflection of the liberation of the human being in the liberation of the Book. With this fair, Syria is, in the fullest sense of the words, "writing history, reading history and having it read."