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

The diversity of our society is an asset, not a problem. Today, all its components aspire to live in friendliness. The brutality of the regime, contrary to what some official Sunnis claim, is exercised against all Syrians, not only against the Sunnis. The authorities wanted to scare the minorities by presenting themselves as their protector. We are living important times. We can feel that fundamentalism in its most radical form is losing ground. Getting to democracy is the hope of all Arabs. This will put an end to sectarian violence.

With this novel, I wanted to exorcise the leaden blanket of silence that hangs over this bloody period of Syrian history.

If the regime falls, there is inevitably a difficult period of transition. During that period, the freedom for all political parties must be restored, there must be a free press, and an active political debate that will allow free and transparent elections within half or a full year. We will go through many obstacles in order to build a democracy, that’s for sure. And maybe, we will take some steps back. But we must go on. We must fight the impression that Syria will fall into a civil or religious war. It is very important that the Syrian people show that they are now united. That we fight together for our democracy.

The reasons for censoring this book were the ways in which the writer gave a human face to the religious extremists, the harshness with which he described the oppression and, above all, the way in which he has explained violence against the Alauliti, religious group to which the family of al- Assad belongs.

In praise of hatred is a must read for several reasons. First of all, the books introduces us to a new author in the world of Arabic literature, who has great literary depth, comparable to Faulkner and Garcia Marquez, which Khalifa cites as his preferred authors, but who do not have a profound influence on his writing. Another name seems to linger between the lines of this novel, and that is perhaps the name of Gibran, especially for the longing moral sense of freedom, that the complex story seems to suggest.