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The
Chronicle of Higher Education
In Syria, Building a Civil Society
Book by Book
BYLINE: KATHERINE ZOEPF
January 14, 2005, Friday
SECTION: INTERNATIONAL; Pg.
33
Damascus, Syria
Leave it to others to devise grand programs for bringing democracy to
the Middle East: Ammar Abdulhamid wants to lay
the intellectual foundations of citizenship one book at a time.
Two years ago, with a small group of Syrian writers
and academics here, Mr. Abdulhamid, a 38-year-old
American-educated historian and novelist, founded DarEmar, a
nonprofit publishing house dedicated to making canonical works of
Western philosophy, social science, and
literature available in Arabic. His goal, he says, is to print books
that will foster "debate on a broad range of
issues pertaining to civil society and
democratization."
In most of the world, it has been a couple of centuries since publishing
a new edition of John Locke could be
considered risky or incendiary. But this is Syria, a Baathist
dictatorship with tightly controlled news
media and a stagnant publishing industry. Mr. Abdulhamid knows he must
be careful. His tiny publishing venture, which is seeking support from
foundations and other Western donors, just released its first
books this fall. It is being watched hopefully
by intellectuals within Syria, although some observers wonder whether
ordinary Syrians will be interested in the sometimes esoteric writings
of long-dead Western philosophers.
Mr. Abdulhamid is an independent social analyst and
the author of Menstruation (Al Saqi Books, 2001), a
novel that deals with issues of sexuality and repression in his
country. He recently spent six months at the
Brookings Institution, an independent think tank in Washington, where he
wrote about the challenges faced by the newest generation of Arab
intellectuals.
He intends to begin his new business by translating and publishing great
works of Western philosophy. Eventually he
hopes to translate a range of classical and
contemporary titles from the humanities and social
sciences, as well as a series of books that will
explain the U.S. government and legal system to the Arabic
reader.
It was while earning a bachelor's degree in history at the University of
Wisconsin at Stevens Point in the early 1990s,
Mr. Abdulhamid says, that he began to wonder why so few of the books
that are considered cornerstones of the
European enlightenment are available in Arabic.
"Take the Federalist Papers, the works of Descartes, Hume, Kant, Locke,"
he says. "As far as I know, only some of
Kant's work has been translated into Arabic, and many of these other
philosophers and writers haven't been
translated at all. It's really ridiculous."
To students of the publishing industry in the Arab world, that state of
affairs does not come as a surprise. Across
the region, a combination of low literacy rates and repressive
censorship laws keeps the number of foreign
books that find their way into Arabic translation very low.
Even for Arabic-language books, print runs are small by international
standards; academics and novelists in the
region sometimes elect to publish in English or French, rather than
Arabic, to reach larger audiences abroad.
The "Arab Human Development Report," published in 2003 by the United
Nations Development Program, found that the
number of books translated per year in the
entire Arab world -- 22 countries -- is roughly one-fifth of the number
translated each year into Greek alone. The
report also lamented the lack of scholarship within the Arab world about
other societies and ways of life.
"A form of Arab self-containment hobbles cooperation with international
partners in the humanities and social
sciences," it argues. "There is no accumulated tradition of Arab
scholarship on the 'Other.'"
Addressing the practical problems -- those of translation and
distribution -- that inhibit the spread of
ideas between the West and the Middle East is a crucial first step in
any plan for encouraging a more robust civil
society in the region, Mr. Abdulhamid says.
When it comes to the U.S. government's goal of turning Iraq into a
beacon of freedom in the Middle East, he adds,
"You're talking about democracy and modernity and bringing all these
good things to the Arab world. But we just
don't have the basic intellectual
foundations."
Hunger for
Discussion
By commissioning fresh, accessible translations of Western
philosophers into Arabic, and by making the
books available cheaply, accompanied by critical and interpretive
essays, Mr. Abdulhamid hopes to attack those
problems at their source and improve the quality
of political discussion in Syria at the grass-roots level.
He and his colleagues are soliciting start-up financing for DarEmar's
publishing business from nongovernmental
organizations and from publishers in the United States and Europe. About
$25,500 has been raised so far, he says. He
and his partners have contributed another $12,700.
Thanks to money from the Foundation for the Production and Translation
of Dutch Literature, in the Netherlands,
Arabic translations of Erasmus and Spinoza are under way, and Mr.
Abdulhamid expects to be able to begin a Locke
translation soon.
The Tharwa Project, an online subsidiary of DarEmar that publishes
essays and runs a discussion forum on minority
rights and democratization, a somewhat edgy proposition in a country
given a lot of black marks by human-rights
groups, is thriving (http://www.tharwaproject.com).
Tharwa means "wealth," and the Web site, which is in both English and
Arabic, is designed to encourage Syrians to
see their country's ethnic and religious diversity as a positive
endowment rather than a source of
fragmentation and potential problems. Syrians were
allowed limited Internet access only as of 2000, but now many
Syrians go online at home or in Internet
cafes.
DarEmar's first books, paperbacks that were available in October for $2
to $2.50 at Damascus's annual book fair, are a
series of Dutch novels about the Arab world. They were selected after
the Dutch foundation offered DarEmar
substantial assistance. Although it is too
early to gauge public response to the books -- which must be ordered
online until Mr. Abdulhamid finds a Syrian
distributor -- his organization is already attracting attention for its
ambitious, aggressive plan for translating
important works of Western philosophy. Those
titles are due out this summer, he says.
John Borneman, a professor of anthropology at Princeton University who
is in Aleppo, Syria, on a Fulbright research
fellowship, says he is intrigued by the idea of using cheap printing and
explanatory glosses to make books of
philosophy appeal to a wide, Arabic-speaking audience.
"This is the hadith tradition, the tradition of reading the Koran
together with its interpretive essays," he
says. "It's true that here there is this tradition of looking outside
the text for understanding. Their chief
trouble will be finding people talented enough to write these kinds of
essays for a general audience."
Developing a readership for the books will also be difficult, Mr.
Borneman says: "There's a real hunger for
political discussion here, since it's not allowed. But political theory
is something else entirely. Finding people who
will do this kind of deep reading is difficult anywhere in the world.
Here in Syria, I've met one or perhaps two people who would be
capable of it, and curious enough to buy the books."
'Damascus Spring'
Nafez A. Shammas, head of the English department at the University of
Damascus, says the project is long overdue.
"We have been exposed to some Western literature, but what we really
need now is politics, philosophy, sociology,
and psychology in translation," he says. The
few translated texts in these fields are often significantly out of
date, he notes, and important new works are
unavailable in Arabic.
Despite the U.N. agency's bleak assessment of publishing in the region,
Mr. Shammas believes that there is a market
for such books: "The real problem has always been that we can't afford"
to translate foreign works.
Mr. Shammas praises DarEmar's plan for translating books on American
culture and government: "I'd like to see
information about life in America presented in an educated, civilized
way. You do us injustice through your lack of knowledge about us, but we
also do you injustice through our lack of
knowledge about America. You are not all cowboys, and we are not all
terrorists."
When Syria's president, Bashar al-Assad, took office in 2000, following
the death of his father, Hafez al-Assad, a
brief period of openness followed. For a few months, Syrians enjoyed
unprecedented freedom of speech and assembly.
That period, which became known as the
Damascus Spring, was followed by crackdowns in which pro-democracy
organizers were arrested.
Most Syrians say they feel freer than they did under
the previous regime. But the fear of broaching one of
the so-called "red lines" -- taboos that include criticizing the
president and discussing atheism in this
largely Muslim country -- remains very real for
ordinary citizens.
Syrian newspapers and magazines are monitored by the state, and all
books must be vetted by a government panel
before publication. Although literacy rates, at nearly 90 percent for
men and 64 percent for women, are rising,
books remain a luxury item in a country where
average annual income hovers around $1,000.
Bookstores tend to be small, their offerings heavily weighted toward
Koranic interpretations and other religious
texts. At the popular annual book fair, which drew publishers from all
over the Arab world to Damascus, about 50
percent of the exhibiting companies
specialized in Islamic texts. Another 25 percent specialized in
children's books.
The fair's offerings are broadly reflective of Syrian reading habits,
says the owner of a bookstore here that
specializes in novels, poetry, and academic texts. Syrians are growing
steadily more religious, he says, and books on
secular topics don't sell nearly as well as
they did a generation ago. He gestures at the wooden shelves lining his
shop, a space too cramped for more than three
or four customers at a time, then proudly indicates a glass case holding
an array of poetry.
Delighted to have an interested audience, he suddenly winks, goes behind
the counter, and produces an Arabic
translation of 1984. The man, who at that point asks not to be
identified, also shows off his shop's tiny
stock of philosophy texts in Arabic -- seven books in
all, including several volumes of Rousseau, which were translated
as part of a Unesco project in the early
1970s. Interest in those books, he says, is limited mainly to students.
Relevance Among
Arabs
Sadik Jalal al-Azm, who chaired the philosophy department at
the University of Damascus for many years and
is one of the Middle East's foremost public intellectuals, says the new
Arabic translations of philosophy books will
be valuable additions to public discourse in
Syria. Some philosophical debates that are of primarily historical
interest to Western scholars, he notes, have
much more immediacy in the Arab world, where they are still open to
question.
"For example," he says, citing writings on the concept of secularism in
public life, "some of these writings on the
relationship between philosophy and theology are of no interest in the
West anymore but remain very relevant here."
From Mr. Abdulhamid's perspective, that is exactly the point. "These
philosophers have lost a bit of their
relevance to the West because their ideas have already been incorporated
in the intellectual, social, economic, and
political life of the West," he wrote in an
e-mail message. "This is not so in a place like Syria or many other
parts of the Arab world, where these ideas are still foreign and can
still pose a serious challenge to the traditional value system."
So even though Mr. Abdulhamid and his partners have obtained a license
from the government to run a publishing
company, the dangers of discussing civil society and minority affairs --
two of the apparent "red lines" in Syria --
are never far from their minds.
Although DarEmar's first philosophy books have yet to be examined by the
Department of Censorship (the Dutch novels
passed review), Haretha Yousuf, one of the
company's founding partners, says he has been pleasantly surprised so
far with how smoothly things have gone.
"We were so nervous at first," he says. "We kept thinking, 'Oh, my God,
we're going to go to jail.' But every time we
cross a red line, we find out that nothing happens, that it wasn't a red
line at all."
Slowly but surely, he says, Syria is becoming more
open. But testing the limits of that new freedom
requires courage, commitment, and careful planning, he says.
"If you want to establish something, you have to do it slowly," Mr.
Yousuf says. "Civil society is a difficult
term. But through all our activities, we're simply trying to create an
open discussion. We believe that it's possible
to prevent conflict if people can learn to talk about themselves and
their differences in a free way. We're
teaching people about what it means to be an
active citizen."
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