Max Pearson
speaker
1,342 appearances
10 recordings
1 series
first heard Dec 2025
last heard 11 Apr
Max Pearson’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsRecordings per month over the last 12 months — 10 in all, peaking in Jan 2026 with 3.
Appearances
Surya Alango has been speaking to Malak Al-Rafai, a young volunteer who helped run the library.
It's the 27th of August 2016, and we're in Darayya, a town on the western fringe of Damascus.
An evacuation agreement has been brokered between the Syrian government and rebel forces, ending one of the longest standoffs in the Syrian civil war.
23-year-old Malik is one of the rebels being escorted out of the town.
The front lines started to collapse and the regime started to advance in the city.
The fight was so intense, the clashes were so intense, and immediately they told us, you have to flee the city, you have to leave the city.
As the Syrian government forces advanced, so too did the world's media, including Al Jazeera English.
After some days, we watched footage, and by accident, they filmed soldiers collecting books from the basement of the library.
Daraya had once had a cultural centre with a small library, but this had been damaged during the war.
But there was another place Malik knew about.
It was secret, like no one knew the place, but for us it was the library.
Since 2013, this secret library has been tucked deep underneath the rubble of a bombed out building.
In the regular world, everyone can go borrow a book and read a book.
But the norm back then was that you are under siege, you are not allowed to study, you are not allowed to live your life as you want, you are not allowed to go out of the siege, you are not allowed to travel, you are not allowed to do anything that you want.
So it was giving us the sense of normalcy.
We were treated as animals, but then we started the library.
We felt like, yeah, we are human again.
We have some freedom under siege.
We have the ability to go to a place that we love, to discuss things that we love without any restrictions.
Let's rewind four years to 2012, the beginning of this siege.
Showing 821–840 of 1,342 · page 42 of 68
← Previous
Next →