Rebuilding culture

On May 18 last year, during its 11-day bombing campaign on Gaza, Israel demolished the five-storey building housing Samir Mansour’s bookstore, the largest in the strip, reducing 100,000 books to shredded card and paper. 

Warned that the building would be targeted, Mansour rushed to the scene minutes before Israel unleashed its bombs but he dared not enter to rescue computers and documents. Mansour said, “At that moment, I knew the meaning of pain, what it means to lose everything you loved.” Financial losses, estimated at $700,000 were particularly heavy for poverty-stricken Gaza.

Since Mansour has no ties to any political party or armed faction, he called Israel’s strikes “an attack on culture.”

Opened in 2000 on busy Salaheddin Street near Gaza’s three universities, the bookshop was popular with students and the reading public. It served as a community centre, obtained books from libraries and other shops on behalf of customers and published local writers. It had the largest collection of English literature in Gaza.  

Dubbed Al-Amal, the hope, the bookstore provided course material for secondary and university students, books to open the horizons of children trapped in Gaza, and books to give hope to

Gazans who have lost hope since Israel imposed its unrelenting siege and blockade in 2006-07 after Hamas won the Palestinian legislative election and took power in Gaza.

Other bookshops along al-Thalatiny Street, also known as al Maktabat street, or “the bookstores street,” were destroyed or damaged during Israel’s offensive against knowledge as well as Palestinian civilians and their power and sewage plants, hospitals, schools, apartment blocks, manufacturing facilities, farms and public buildings.

During Israel’s bitz, six high-rise iconic buildings were targeted and flattened and 184 residential and commercial properties were destroyed. Israel attracted a great deal of bad publicity for attempting to silence the foreign press by striking al-Jalaa tower which housed the offices of al-Jazeera and the Associated Press. However, little attention was given to bookshops which boost the morale of some of Gaza’s endlessly embattled two million people.

On Feb.17, Al-Amal, reconstructed and restocked, was reconsecrated thanks to donations from the world over. Mansour declared, “I was devastated when the shop was destroyed although my friends and loved ones boosted my morale. But I was born again, today is a new birthday for me.”

British supporters launched a global GoFundMe campaign and assembled a collection of 150,000 books. Among them are children’s books, novels by local, Arab and foreign authors, and business and computer programming manuals totalling 400,000 books when combined with other acquisitions.

Mansour’s story reminded of the Oxford and Cambridge bookstore which was opened in wartime Homs in Syria by husband and wife architects, Ghassan Jansiz and Marwa al-Sabouni. They, too, were motivated to provide Syrian children, students and adults with books that would offer learning and distraction during hard and dangerous times. Whenever I went to Homs (before covid) I used to visit the bookshop where there was a constant stream of customers. Gassan and Marwa have a double mission: to provide largely English books to enable Syrians to learn the global lingua franca and rebuild Homs damaged and destroyed heritage.

Two days after Al-Amal reopened in Gaza, Mosul University’s library, ransacked by Daesh and bombarded during its occupation of the city, welcomed students once again. Books were also donated by firms and people from around the world while reconstruction was carried out by the UN Development Programme with financial support from Germany.

“This is an extraordinary moment in the history of our city,” the university’s director of libraries, Sayf Al Ashqar, told the Guardian. “The library’s reopening is not just important to the students – but to all of us who lived through that terrible time. It is a symbol of new beginning and we would like to thank everyone who made it possible.”

Publishers donated some 20,000 higher education books through the UK Book Aid International after professor Alaa Hamdon approached the charity. “I’ve always believed that libraries are lighthouses of knowledge - providing a beacon for those who value learning. [Daesh] extinguished that light for a time, but now our lighthouse is once again burning bright. Libraries can only thrive when they are full of inspiring wonderful books.”

Mosul University’s Library, Iraq’s second largest, founded in 1921, was reputed to be among the richest in the country. During Daesh’s rule, an estimated 8,000-10,000 books and irreplaceable ancient manuscripts were burned or damaged. Daesh torched books and texts which did not conform to its ideology. Unesco said this was “one of the most devastating acts of destruction of library collections in human history.” The library now has shelving to accommodate 100,000 books.

During the two-and-a-half years Daesh occupied Mosul, its fighters not only set fire to the main library but also used buildings where students had once studied as an arsenal to store weapons and ammunition and a laboratory were Daesh had made crude chemical weapons. The lighthouse was transformed into a house of death.

War did not spare one of my favourite places in Baghdad, al-Mutannabi Street in the heart of the old city. Last year, between August and December, the street, inaugurated by King Faisal in 1932, was upgraded and spruced up in an effort to launch a cultural renaissance in Iraq’s capital, famous for its poets, painters, and novelists until the US war plunged Iraq into 19 years of bloodletting and instability.

While bookshops line both sides of the narrow streets, every Friday booksellers with and without shops have for decades displayed sale books on grubby sheets laid on the pavement. In 2003, a month after the US occupied Baghdad, I went with a friend to al-Mutannabi street and found my first book, “The United States and the Palestinian People,” published in Beirut in the 1970s, among those for sale along with other titles issued by the same house. I had seen my book in February 2002 before the US attack: Clearly Baghdadis were not interested in the wars in Palestine while they were expecting George W. Bush’s onslaught on Iraq. I bought the book as a memento of al-Mutannabi street, named after the Abassid era poet Tayeb al-Mutannabi whose statue has been erected as part of the restoration project.

Although there have been no reports of Russian air strikes on bookshops and libraries during the ongoing Ukrainian conflict, the slogan civilised people the world over should adopt is “Books not bombs!”

Photo: TNS