Gaza opens first English library

on

Despite political obstacles, Gaza sees the opening of its first English library.

library_chomsky_inkline.jpeg

A Facebook page called Library & Bookshop for Gaza launched in July has gathered 200 books and $2,000 in donation from international sponsors to build Gaza’s first English library.

Mossab Abu Toha, a 24-year-old Gazan who graduated from the Islamic University of Gaza, started the crowdfunding campaign as he saw political hindrances had made it difficult for Gazans to access books from across the world.

According to BarakaBits, Toha pushed through with the initiative despite obstacles in the Israeli postal service. In an interview with Al Jazeera, he said, “Freedom is a state of mind. [With books], you’re liberating yourself by living in an imaginary world where there are no boundaries … If I choose to be free, I can be free through my writing, through speaking.”

The Islamic University of Gaza’s library director, Mamdouh Firwana, also said, “For 10 years, we were going to Cairo to purchase books, but for the past five years, we can’t go because of the security situation and because of the bad relations between Hamas and the Egyptian regime.”

The initiative was widely received by authors and academics alike, so much so that American philosopher Noam Chomsky himself donated books to the library.

To read the original story, click here.

Leave a Reply

Fill in your details below or click an icon to log in:

WordPress.com Logo

You are commenting using your WordPress.com account. Log Out / Change )

Twitter picture

You are commenting using your Twitter account. Log Out / Change )

Facebook photo

You are commenting using your Facebook account. Log Out / Change )

Google+ photo

You are commenting using your Google+ account. Log Out / Change )

Connecting to %s
https://the-inkline.com/2017/04/11/gaza-opens-first-english-library/
the-inkline.com
crawl=CC-MAIN-2017-22
70160
application/http; msgtype=response
sha1:AIPHIMYKE3W7JHTMVN2HQW2IZMFFRZTT
<urn:uuid:9a5baf01-519f-494e-b748-fc2bd2d73a99>
2017-05-24T04:10:41Z
192.0.78.24
text/html
sha1:XBZYIRFHM4GAT4ZXDN7N3S63EHQZQY5E
<urn:uuid:4283883a-a5fc-4d08-821b-bec26f89983c>
https://the-inkline.com/2017/04/11/gaza-opens-first-english-library/
length
response
<urn:uuid:8c482a4f-70a3-4c44-a35d-1dba94b83d00>
robots: classic
hostname: ip-10-185-224-210.ec2.internal
software: Nutch 1.6 (CC)/CC WarcExport 1.0
isPartOf: CC-MAIN-2017-22
operator: Common Crawl Admin
description: Wide crawl of the web for May 2017
publisher: Common Crawl
format: WARC File Format 1.0
conformsTo: http://bibnum.bnf.fr/WARC/WARC_ISO_28500_version1_latestdraft.pdf