There is an exaggerated fear of democracy, but democracy is in fact the ultimate and ideal solution for protecting all minorities. During the last three months the Syrians have proved that they are not going to embark on the path of sectarian violence despite attempts to incite it. This is a truth that everyone must understand, and Syrian history bears eloquent witness to this fact.

Sindbad editions (Actes Sud), specializing in the translation of modern Arabic literature, has just published a book that is very relevant in the challenging times through which Syria is going at this very moment.

“The regime is still the ’80s, the Cold War, and treats us like a herd of sheep who do not deserve to make demands of freedom. The president, whom all called ‘young’, has chosen to refer to that past, and lost credit. ”

he president is not the young man who was said to have modern and reformist tendencies, but a dictator like the others, unable to understand what was happening in front his eyes, ready to kill half of his people to remain in power, thinking he is the only one to have the right to decide what reforms the country needs and when to grant them to his subjects as a reward.

A prose so powerful, it competes with the events of history, and yet, full of nuances, it makes the reader share the most intimate and contradictory feelings of the protagonists. There is this, and even more, in the revelation novel by Khaled Khalifa (‘In praise of hatred’, Bompiani, translation by Francesca Prevedello). The author, a 47 year old Syrian, is a writer as well as a poet and a screenwriter. Some of his works have been censored. This novel took him 13 years of work.

A girl who feeds on resentment in the city of Aleppo littered with corpses: In praise of hatred, by the Syrian novelist Khaled Khalifa, focuses on the path of a young fundamentalist in the Islamist uprising (1976-1982) against the Baathist regime and its bloody repression (25 000 dead). At the time where Khalifa’s novel is translated in Europe, the ongoing democratic revolt in Syria strangely echoes this traumatic episode. Khalifa described the process of fanaticism that takes over a lonely heart in a gloomy, conservative mansion deserted by its men