DAMASCUS - Books recounting torture in Syrian prisons or texts on radical Islamic theology now sit openly in Damascus bookstores, no longer traded in secret after iron-fisted ruler Bashar al-Assad's ouster.
"If I had asked about a (certain) book just two months ago, I could have disappeared or ended up in prison," said student Amr al-Laham, 25, who was perusing stores near Damascus University.
He has finally found a copy of "Al-Maabar" (The Passage) by Syrian author Hanan Asad, which recounts the conflict in Aleppo from a crossing point linking the city's rebel-held east with the government-held west, before Assad's forces retook complete control in 2016.
Several books that were previously banned and only available to Syrians if they were pirated online now frequently pop up on footpath displays or inside bookshops.
They include "The Shell", by Syrian author Mustafa Khalifa, a devastating tale of an atheist who is mistaken for a radical Islamist and detained for years inside Syria's infamous Tadmur prison.
Another is "My Aunt's House" -- an expression used by Syrians to refer to prison -- by Iraqi author Ahmed Khairi Alomari.
Prison literature "was totally forbidden", said a bookshop owner in his fifties, identifying himself as Abu Yamen.
"Before, people didn't even dare to ask -- they knew what awaited them," he told AFP.
Elsewhere, the owner of a high-profile publishing house said that since the 1980s, he had stopped printing all political works except some "very general (essays) on political thinking that did not deal with a particular region or country".
Even so, Assad's "security services used to call us in to ask about our work and our sales -- who came to see us, what they bought, what people were asking for", he told AFP, requesting anonymity.
He said security services were often "uncultured" when it came to literature, recalling an investigator who insisted he wanted to question Ibn Taymiyya, a Sunni Muslim theologian who died in the 14th century.
In shelves at the entrance of his Damascus bookshop, Abdel Rahman Suruji displays leather-bound works emblazoned with golden calligraphy of Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya, a medieval Muslim theologian and important Salafi ideologue.
Also on display are tomes by Sayyed Qotb, a theoretician behind the Muslim Brotherhood who inspired its radicalisation.
"All these books were prohibited. We sold them in secret, just to those who we could trust -- students we knew or researchers," said Suruji.
Now, they are in "high demand", he said, adding that his new customers include Damascus residents and Syrians who have returned from abroad or visiting from former rebel bastions in the country's north.