• Choose a category
• All
• Classic-Fiction

Leila arrived at my house half an hour later. As I told her that the first lady didn’t want to help us import the magazine, Leila’s tears poured down her face. I put a finger to my lips and pointed at the ceiling, not knowing where a listening device might have been planted in my apartment. We ran out of my apartment and onto the street to talk privately.

Leila kept looking over her shoulder into the darkness and ahead of us into the areas illuminated by streetlights. “Do you see someone there?” she asked me. When I said no, she still insisted someone was watching us. “It’s mukhabarat [intelligence agents], don’t you see them,” she said in complete panic, tears streaking her face. Not knowing what to do, I held her hand and told her not to worry. “I will talk with the first lady personally,” I said. “Don’t worry, we haven’t done anything wrong.”

The next morning I sent a letter in the company mailbag up to the palace requesting a meeting with the first lady. As I knew she wasn’t helping us with the magazine’s import procedures, Leila called the Ministry of Information and made an appointment with deputy minister Taleb Kadi Amin. A rotund man with a thick grayish-brown mustache and sporting a 1970s-style comb-over haircut, Taleb was known to be among the ministry’s “reformers”—officials who, supposedly, were not closely aligned with the country’s intelligence services.

Taleb greeted us with a firm handshake and asked us to sit down. After a few minutes of introductions, Taleb looked at Leila and me and said, “Where is Ms. Rola Bayda?”

Surprised he knew Rola and that we worked with her, we told him she was out of the country recovering from an illness.

“What about the money from the UNFPA [United Nations Population Fund]?” he asked.

Leila just stared at me, not knowing what to say. We were there to talk about importing the magazine, and he was asking us about money from a UN agency.

After we made it clear that we didn’t know what he was talking about, Leila presented him with our sample edition for submission to the ministry’s censorship bureau. Syrian law stated that no printed material could enter the country without approval from the Ministry of Information, so we needed permission in order to clear the magazine’s shipment from Lebanon through Syrian customs. He shook our hands as we left and asked us to call him the next day for the verdict.

In the ministry’s rickety elevator, whose stainless-steel sides scraped the sides of the elevator shaft as we descended, I remembered that the UNFPA was listed among the bodies supporting MAWRED. I also remembered that the agency’s Syrian director, Dalia Hajjar, was a good friend of Rola’s. Dalia was smart and well educated; she was also from the ruling Alawite elite. It was widely rumored that the first lady would soon promote Dalia to be the head of Syria’s “Family Council”—an umbrella institution that the first lady was creating to deal with the myriad problems facing Syrian families.

Thoroughly confused and not knowing what to do, I initiated a process of damage control. After Leila received the censor’s approval the following day, I also requested that she obtain all permissions to distribute the magazine as well. Next, we imported the sample edition’s five thousand copies into the country and stored them at my apartment, well out of the way of anyone snooping around Syria Today‘s offices at the MAWRED incubator. I then drafted a letter with Leila introducing the magazine. Finally, we sent introductory copies to all the embassies, the EU and UN agencies, and all the ministries.

Letters of support started to fill our e-mail in-boxes. One impassioned e-mail from the chief of the UN Development Program’s office in Damascus urged us to push forward “no matter what obstacles we faced.” It made us feel good to hear that people enjoyed the publication’s writing, editing, and layout—but underlying every message was something else: what we were doing was unprecedented and needed to continue at all costs.

Two weeks later, Rola