"There is a table at the cafe which has the same customers every single day. They start with coffee and end up in the evening drinking locally-made arak and smoking the affordable Al Hamra cigarettes made in the coastal city of Latakia.

The four men at this table are almost the only ones left of the old customers in this cafe, which once bustled with Syrians from all walks of life. Music nights, poetry readings, exhibitions, gossip and cultural debate all took place over wine and dinner."

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When the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany took the stage in October at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris to promote the French translation of his latest novel, he was presumably not expecting to be heckled and chased from the venue by a crowd of his own countrymen. But minutes into his talk, the author’s voice was drowned out by the shouts of Egyptian emigrés who had come out for the chance to tear him to bits.

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