Systems.

Why they're kinda fascist.

Here in the Old City of Nablus, we are starting a library. Actually, it’s a literary hub as well as a cultural center, a place of radical fabulousness. But the core of it is a library in an 600 years old Mamluk cave building which includes Arabic and foreign language books (such as English) rubbing shoulders with a book published in 1896, liberated in recent days from the National Library of Iz, having been held captive there for many a moon before finally being held by Arab hands again, here in Nablus, after a quick trip via bus and servees, the jailbreak made possible with a quick nip and tuck of the RFID security tag stuck inside the cover. It’s happier here. Freedom, of sorts.

The National Library of Iz is a behemoth of a purpose-built organized reading shed in concrete and glass. The shelves are arranged in a Fibonacci spiral, the dictionaries in lines of contented smugness, everything labeled to perfection. Minds focus on pages, noses in books filled with Latin script, Arabic script, and a weird mish-mash of blocky Latin mixed with ancient Hebrew that passes as the official language of the colonizer, despite being constructed from this and that back in the 19th Century, when Wagner was espousing his racial purity ideas through the medium of opera, and Eliezer Ben Yehuda was ‘modernizing’ the ancient book’s linguistics into a vehicle to discuss stuff of modern times, such as opera, or library systems. Adopted in 1924, at the Technion as a core offering of statehood, before the fact, but after Balfour said what he said.

Our little library in the Old City of Nablus is called Al-Mubtada, which means ‘The Beginning’, except it’s actually a grammatical term that’s closer to ‘the subject’, with another word, 'Al-Mishwar’ meaning ‘the object’. It’s all impossible to translate, with Arabic having at least six times the amount of words as English, because it’s a more advanced, more ancient, more poetic, and probably more sacred language. If you’re wondering what all those extra words mean, you’re looking at Al-Mubtada in the face, and know more than the average native English speaker what the other Arabic words mean. The lexicon of nuance and variety, the quality of nouns embedded with time or place, with adjectives and their subjects.

I know two words for rain in English - rain and drizzle - okay three if you count stupid shit like ‘precipitation,’ but I know four in Arabic. They describe the quality of rain in different ways. There’s rain, just rain, and then there’s rain you don’t like. There’s also a light spring rain that’s pleasant, and a heavy summer rain. That’s just me, as a non-native Arabic speaker. No doubt, there are plenty more, endless rain words for a place that has so little actual rain that no, it’s not remotely like the Inuit words for snow. It’s like desert-dwellers who have a superior language, and named every single thing with a depth of information and poetic beauty that often leaves my jaw lower.

The culture here is also better than the West. Sorry, but it is more advanced, older, a deeper, better culture than the one I was immersed in for five decades, and made my own, as a professional cultural worker at the top of my game. Palestinian culture is better than yours. Sorry, not sorry. It just is.

But it’s the intangible culture in the West Bank that’s the reason why my body is on the line. Until my last breath, I will resist, like Winston Smith, the forces of control that wish to extinguish the intangible culture of the West Bank. You can quote me on that if I’m snuffed out. This is perhaps my last testimony, and I’m okay with that, if it’s how things roll and you understand the importance of the intangible culture that I’m immersed in here in the ancient streets of Nablus, at Al-Mubtada, with folks who have manners alongside dark humor and lives full of meaning. Alhamdulillah.

One of the emeralds of this precious ancient delicate ecosystem of intangible culture is the honor system. Because everyone believes in Allah, nobody is a thief. If you’re a thief, you clearly desperately need that piece of bread you stole, so it does not count, because you are me, and I am you, and we are indivisible, one fragment of Oneness as I am another. Eat the bread! صحة

But generally speaking, the honor system reaps rewards for the baker, because you do come back soon with the money that was owed, and there’s no anxiety that you won’t.

The idea that was originally mooted was to make a Modern Library in the Old City of Nablus, with QR codes for the books and custodial and non-custodial collections, and an online lending system that can be browsed to pick your picks before arrival. My job was to research and identify the best tech solutions for this problem. I was advised it needs to be layered - first with a classification system, later a cataloguing system, and finally, a cloud-based digital repository where the library elements will all live.

The digital repository was the easy part for us, as one of our extended network builds them for a living in the States and offered to do this on an open-source cloud that’s secure and free from BDS issues or censorship, which cannot be said for Amazon’s AWS, Google’s GCP, or the blood soaked purple waters of Microsoft’s Azure. Safe in the knowledge we have a solution for the most tricky layer, I set to work exploring the first two pieces of the puzzle.

Regarding classification systems, the existing options are musty, dusty leftovers from the peak colonial age. Racist, in fact, for example, the best of the bunch is the Dewey Decimal System, which designates all books in the 200’s to ‘Religion,’ but of that, 200- 289 are set aside for Christianity, with 290-299 allocated to ‘Other Religions’, i.e. all other religions, including Islam, Buddhism, Shamanism, and everything else.

Despite this, we opted to use Dewey, as it’s still the best of the bunch. We’ll customize the 200’s to fix the problem as best we can. So, classification system identified. Next, cataloguing.

For that, we identified an open-source behemoth called Koha, first recommended by a colleague in The Cultural Salon’s extended network at the Bodleian Library in Oxford, which is recognised as one of the world’s great libraries. It’s the one in Harry Potter.

We started digging. The hole got bigger. Koha is a massive pile of spaghetti, a deep well of never-ending options. Someone offered the cash for an interpreter, so we sent her YouTube links for tutorials that curdle milk into yogurt, such is their blandness. She watched, took notes, yawned, prepared to share their insights with our 25 year old local Palestinian woman who has been signed up for the job on the basis of her charm, natural abilities in hospitality, and her smarts, as a student of Electrical Engineering.

She’s intelligent, local, and the finest choice to be a librarian at this specific library, which I remind you is small, grassroots, and in the Old City of Nablus in a 600 years old Mamluk cave building, established with the intention to be a space for intellectual life for this community. A place for poetry recitals, reading and writing, for the new generation and also, the older one. Workshops, and an independent publishing house, a place also for arts and crafts, and for community cohesiveness.

A place for excellence - but excellence defined within the parameters of here and now, which means, radical excellence. Anti-colonial excellence. Punk.

And that is why it’s all bullshit, the tech solutions we have identified. I think it’s all a load of bollocks compared to our 25 year old librarian’s grassroots solution, which has no need to evaluate and unpack the intangible cultural reality that we are immersed in here in this ancient streets. She’s an indivisible part of the whole. A living breathing fragment of honor, in a prehistoric system of freedom that’s beyond the imagination of the poor fellows stuck in cubicles and bedroom laptops, hammering away at their keyboards like me, in our Western civilization whatnot reality while everyone here is down on their mats, abandoning their fragmentation with every bow.

I am urging our partners to go with her system. It’s a spreadsheet with a few columns, for example, the name of the book, its author, fiction or fact, the publisher, a summary of the dealio. We can add a column for if it’s been lent out, another for the name of the person who borrowed it, and for the date. Any notes, such as if they aim to return it in a week or a month, as a rough ballpark. A phone number, and that’s it - no QR code, no online browsing. Just a young woman who has held every single tome in her hands to create the synopsis and log the details. Someone who can recommend a good novel, and knows where the history of Nablus books were put on these rounded, handmade shelves in a cave established for human bonds.

The romance is increased, the culture honored, the warmth of human breath cooled in summer by her eyes, as readers are beckoned by the tea and poems.

I think it’s better because, our honor system illuminates the fascist tendencies of our faraway friends. Our community knows Allah, like for real. If somebody doesn’t bring back their book, it would be because they need it more. They are us, and we are them, and all of us benefit from the transaction, which usually will mean it comes back.

Khallas, that’s good enough for me, and anyway with Koha or any of the other systems, what exactly is the guarantee beyond this? Where’s the utility in an ultra-streamlined system, when the main aim is building beauty?

I can see the utility further down the line, once our community has been built, and we have new problems to tackle, such as keeping track of our extensive collection of rare and fabulous radical books, but in this stage, it’s all about the flow of quiet excitement and the curation of discovery, and that’s best served by our human. A humble, excited, curious, local mind with personal warmth and humor, welcoming local readers as she personally selects literature for each in-person guest.

Ahlan wa Sahlan b’ Al-Mubtada!