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A Bookstore Grows in Damascus - Publishing Perspectives

https://publishingperspectives.com/2026/05/a-bookstore-grows-in-damascus/

> Al Manhal bakery and books hopes to be a space where Syrians can come together to learn about their own history and discuss deep issues following 54 years of dictatorship and censorship.

After decades of a brutal dictatorship, a revolution and then civil war, the sudden fall of the Assad regime in Syria in December 2024 gave Syrians their long-dreamed-for freedom of expression despite continuing financial hardship. Thousands of Syrians in exile flocked back to the country to visit, such as Actes Sud/Sindbad’s publisher Farouk Mardam-Bey, who returned to Damascus at age 80, having left the city 50 years ago.

Writer and journalist Asser Khattab was one of these visitors who had left Syria in 2017 as a young political refugee, returning after eight years as a French citizen, with the dream of opening a bookshop. Unlike Mardam-Bey, who grew up in Damascus in the 1950s and 60s during a period of cultural effervescence prior to the dictatorship, Khattab’s experience was one of frustration.

Like Mardam-Bey, Khattab grew up in a household where books were all-important. Everyone in his family read, and his grandfather was a writer. He read Arabic classics in his grandfather’s library and western 19th and 20th century classics in English at his missionary school. But what he really wanted to read—contemporary books he read about on the internet—were impossible to find in the numerous yet censored bookshops in Aleppo or Damascus, including ones that carried books in English.

“One day I want to have a curated bookshop,” he thought.

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