Even in war-torn Syria, animals have brave protectors. Have you heard the story of the “Cat Man of Aleppo”?

His name is Mohammad Alaa Aljaleel. In a life now long gone, he was an electrician. Today, he’s the guardian angel to more than 150 stray and abandoned cats.

Read more here.

A sad story with some hopeful outcomes - from the New Yorker blog post by ELIAS MUHANNA:

". . . Maktabat al-Sa’eh (“The Pilgrim’s Bookshop”) is a Tripoli landmark, occupying a five-thousand-square-foot space in a grand, crumbling building that once served as an Ottoman police barracks. Before the fire, the labyrinthine warren of books had flaking paint on its walls and a leaky ceiling, but Father Sarrouj pays a pittance in rent and his landlords have neglected him. Crammed into the space are mountains of books, perhaps as many as a hundred thousand. The exact number is unknown, although the priest has used a computer to try to keep track of his inventory and, since 2005, to maintain a creaky Web site. Bearded and spectacled, he bears a passing resemblance to a more nebbishy Umberto Eco, but his appearance is belied by a rhetorical spryness typical of Levantine men of the cloth. Since Father Sarrouj began appearing on the nightly news, he has handled interviews with aplomb, fielding questions and citing Biblical and Koranic verses without skipping a beat.

Who started the fire? The circumstances are mysterious. Did the bookshop contain polemical writings insulting to Islam? Had Father Sarrouj authored an incendiary pamphlet about the Prophet Muhammad? Or were the arsonists somehow connected with the building’s owners, who had been trying to muscle the recalcitrant priest out for years? Rumors swirled as politicians, bishops, and muftis raced to denounce the crime and join the photo ops in front of the bookshop’s charred entryway. Even Salem al-Rafei, a Salafist sheikh who has preached jihad against the infidels in Syria, came to Father Sarrouj’s defense. For a few hours, every press conference and television interview conjured up fusty commonplaces about Lebanon’s importance as a symbol of coexistence, a mosaic of religious communities, the cradle of civilization, and the home of, yes, the people of the book. . .

Astonishingly, the Maktabat al-Sa’eh fire prompted something that two years of suicide bombings and assassination attempts had not: a public outcry. The Lebanese have absorbed the blows of the Syrian proxy war by desensitizing themselves, an old habit born from years of muddling forward through violence, decaying infrastructure, and communal strife. When Father Sarrouj’s books went up in flames, though, a nerve was apparently struck. Within hours, civil-society groups set up a barn-raising effort to secure and catalogue the undamaged books, clean up the shop, and build new shelving. Someone launched a fundraising initiative. Book drives were organized around the country.An international courier announced that it would ship books from anywhere in the world to Lebanon to replenish Father Sarrouj’s collection. "

Link

The Calligrapher’s Secret by Rafik Schami

Abridged version of my review posted on Edith’s Miscellany on 20 September 2013

Rafik Schami (رفيق شامي) is a friend of Damascus and also a friend from the Syrian capital as his Arabic penname proves when translated into English. He loves telling stories and taking his readers to the Damascus of his childhood and before. Consequently his novel The Calligrapher’s Secret is set there.

The Calligrapher’s Secret begins in April 1957 when rumour spreads in Damascus that Noura, the beautiful wife of the famous and rich calligrapher Hamid Farsi, has run away. In an Arabic, more precisely a Muslim environment this is a life-threatening crime for a woman to commit, even more so in the novel’s time period. People say that Noura felt insulted by the ardent love letters from Nasri Abbani which the womanizer known all over town and almost illiterate had ordered from her unknowing husband to seduce her, but there’s much more behind it. Her fairly modern education and a strong will to take life into her own hands play an important role just like her encounter with her husband’s Christian apprentice and errand-boy Salman. And then there’s Hamid Farsi’s passion for Arabic calligraphy and his attempt to reform the script which leads to his disgrace and subsequent fall.

It’s a complex and interlocked story which Rafik Schami unfolds in The Calligrapher’s Secret. The book is a little different from what we are used to today, since its author isn’t just a novelist, but a story-teller who combines the best of Arabic oral tradition and western literary skill. Language and style are modern and accessible. The setting gives the novel the touch of a fairy-tale from the Arabian Nights. At the same time Rafik Schami isn’t sparing of criticism.

I passed a good time reading The Calligrapher’s Secret. For me it has been a very enjoyable read which helped me to understand the Arabic mind a little better. Highly recommended.

For the full review please click here to go to my blog Edith’s Miscellany.