By: Dr. Adnan Bozan

“First of all, I apologize to some intellectuals and those who speak freely, who may have found themselves, unfairly, included in the description of ‘the company of donkeys.’ I do not mean people of thought and free expression; rather, I mean those who have chosen ignorance and triviality as their way of life.”

Sometimes I ask myself, after all these years of struggle and resisting ignorance through my writings: What have I gained from knowledge? What has culture given me? What have the books among which I have lived done for me—the laws I studied, the philosophy that exhausted my mind, the history whose layers I searched through, and the literature to which I gave more of my life than I gave to myself?

I was a lawyer, a founder of a political party, and a political prisoner under the criminal Assad father-and-son regime. I lived politics from within, and I paid the price for my positions with imprisonment, pain, torture, threats, persecution, and exile from my homeland. I was leftist in thought and deeply rooted in nationalism. I was born into a family in which culture and politics had a strong presence, as though I had entered this world with a book in my hands, a question in my mind, and a cause in my heart.

And then what?

I am the author of more than one hundred works, ranging from law to philosophy, history, literature, poetry, short stories, and novels. I am also the author of hundreds of studies and research papers, and thousands of articles and texts. I have spent an entire lifetime reading, writing, researching, and thinking—not to collect titles, money, or wealth, nor to fill shelves with books, but because I believed that knowledge could raise a human being above ignorance; that a book could be more valuable than money; and that an idea could outlive its creator.

But today, as I look around me, I find myself confronted with a question harsher than all the questions I have written about:

What is the value of all this knowledge if the society in which I live cannot distinguish between a book and triviality, between thought and ignorance, or between a person of knowledge and a person who merely shouts? What am I to do with a hundred books in an environment that does not read a single book? And what am I to do with hundreds of studies in a society that may spend hundreds of hours talking about women’s bodies, yet cannot spare a single minute for an idea, a piece of knowledge, or a question?

What kind of curse is this, that makes a human being spend an entire lifetime searching for meaning, only to find himself surrounded by people who see nothing of life but its surface?

I studied law, only to encounter those who do not understand the meaning of justice. I studied politics, only to encounter those who do not know the difference between principle and self-interest. I read philosophy, only to encounter those who are afraid of questions. I wrote history, only to encounter those who do not understand that nations that forget their history repeat their mistakes. I wrote literature and poetry, only to find people measuring a person’s worth by what they possess rather than by what they know, and by the noise they create rather than by the ideas they produce.

So, was knowledge a mistake?

Were books a mistake?

Was this entire lifetime I spent in pursuit of knowledge merely a long illusion?

Perhaps the problem is not with knowledge, but with the place in which knowledge has been placed. Knowledge cannot do anything inside a mind that has shut its doors. A book cannot awaken someone who has chosen to live asleep. An idea cannot find its way into a mind that has made ignorance a creed and triviality a culture.

That is why, yes, in moments of anger I feel that I want to curse all this knowledge, all these books, and all these years I have spent reading, researching, and writing. I feel like saying: Damn knowledge if the price of possessing it is to know more than one should in a world that does not want to know anything.

But deep down, I know that I do not truly curse knowledge. Rather, I curse an age that does not know the value of knowledge.

I curse an environment that gives the ignorant more presence than the knowledgeable, the loud more fame than the writer, and the trivial more influence than the person with an idea. And I curse those who have made ignorance a standard, triviality a virtue, and reason an accusation.

As for knowledge, I will leave it where it has always been: as a witness against me, and as a witness to this age.

Perhaps, in the end, the question is not: What did I gain from all this knowledge?

Rather: What will remain of all those who failed to understand knowledge when all the noise is gone and the book alone remains?

Only then may some people realize that donkeys can live without books, but books are what bear witness, after everyone is gone, to who was human—and who chose to live as a donkey.