In Homs, Syria, Mustafa Khaled Alwan, 72, recently recovered several hundred books he had hidden at the end of 2011, when the government intensified its crackdown on the uprising. According to his account shared with AFP, more than 90% of the collection survived despite the war, bombings, and years of absence. The house where the books were hidden suffered significant damage, but the shelves remained intact behind the masonry. Alwan returned to Homs after the fall of Bashar al-Assad in December 2024 and found the building seriously damaged and the interior burned. Behind the masonry, however, the books had endured. The collection includes hundreds of titles covering Islamic teachings, poetry, scientific works, and texts on social issues. Among the authors are Hassan al-Banna, founder of the Muslim Brotherhood, and Sayyid Qutb. Some of these authors could have put their owner at risk, as the Muslim Brotherhood was severely repressed under Hafez al-Assad. Syrian law No. 49, enacted in 1980, made membership in the Muslim Brotherhood punishable by death, according to Amnesty International. Under Bashar al-Assad, control over printed material expanded further, with Decree No. 50 in 2001 imposing strict regulations on newspapers, books, and other printed materials, as noted by Human Rights Watch. When protests against the regime grew stronger in 2011, Alwan feared that his support for the uprising would also endanger his books. Homs became a major center of dissent and faced particularly harsh repression. By the end of the year, he moved his books to a house recently purchased for his son. "No one knew that I owned this house," he told AFP. "Supporters of the revolution came to help me, and we built a wall" to hide the volumes, he added. Shortly after, Alwan left Homs due to the siege. The city was then heavily bombed. The books remained behind the wall, inaccessible and especially hidden. When he finally began to demolish it, the septuagenarian described a "mixture of fear and hope." On the other side, the shelves were still there: "more than 90%" of what was hidden had been found intact, according to his estimate. The books were then brought back to his home. The story began circulating in Arabic-language media a few days earlier. As early as September 17, Al Jazeera shared a video (via X) showing Mustafa Alwan knocking down the wall. The media reported the books as belonging to his son Bilal, a detail that differs from the later AFP report, which describes them as Mustafa Khaled Alwan's collection. However, both accounts agree on the location—Homs—and the concealment of the books in 2011, as well as their remarkable preservation. This emergence from the shadows occurs in a deeply transformed Syrian book landscape since December 2024. AFP notes that books previously banned are now openly available in bookstores, including accounts about torture in Syrian prisons and Islamic theology texts once prohibited. ActuaLitté had already observed this change in February 2026 during the return of the Damascus International Book Fair. Religious, political, and historical texts previously censored or risky to possess have returned to the shelves. However, the relaxation of restrictions has been accompanied by a certain caution among book professionals. The story of Homs also finds an echo in Daraya, near Damascus. During the siege of the city, residents recovered thousands of volumes from destroyed buildings to create an underground clandestine library. In Homs, the gesture was the opposite: instead of extracting books from ruins to preserve them, Alwan made them disappear behind a wall before the war reached them. For Mustafa Khaled Alwan, finding them "in excellent condition" was, he told AFP, "the most beautiful moment" of his life.