Al-Manhal is a social enterprise that will open in the heart of the Old City of Damascus in 2025. It will serve at once as a cultural space, an artisanal bakery and a carefully curated bookshop. Al-Manhal will occupy a 75m² space on the historic Straight Street in Old Damascus, close to the entrance to Souk Midhat Pasha.
At a time when Syria is emerging from over 50 years of brutal totalitarianism and 14 years of devastating conflict, Al-Manhal will offer something deeply needed: a place where Syrians can access knowledge through affordable books, savour their local delicacies, and gather around their common ideals to heal and imagine a different future.
We will make carefully curated selection of books affordable to Syrians, make artisanal baked goods made from local grains and agricultural products, and organize meaningful cultural events that promote unity and social cohesion, celebrate diversity, and contribute to post-conflict healing and reconciliation.
Asser Khattab is a French-Syrian writer and journalist who lived between his two ancestral cities of Aleppo and Damascus for the first 22 years of his life. He began working as a journalist with international media at a young age during the war. He worked in areas controlled by the Assad regime, where working in journalism can easily lead to arrest, torture, or execution. After reporting on the conflict for various international outlets, including as the Spanish News Agency’s covert Syria Correspondent, he had to flee from Syria to Sudan then to Lebanon. For three years, he lived illegally in Beirut, all the while continuing to cover Syria and the region, first for the Financial Times then for The Washington Post. Finally, in early 2020, he managed to arrive in France with an asylum visa. Since moving to France, despite a decision to take a professional break from reporting on Syria, he has contributed numerous essays to publications such as FT Weekend and New Lines Magazine, until he finally wrote the essay he thought was impossible: “Assad’s Fall Brings Joy and the Call of Home,” in December 2024. In January 2025, he went back to Syria for the first time in eight years, where he was joined by Brant Stewart, and the two began planning to open Al-Manhal. Asser has always been an avid reader, finishing about one book per week, according to his exaggerated estimates, with a predilection for what he describes as ‘old books or new books about old things.’
Brant Stewart is a baker and social entrepreneur from the United States who has worked with Syrians in Lebanon for 10 years, designing and implementing activities focused on social cohesion and healing through education, theater, and baking. Over the years, Brant’s small organization had a variety of programs from teaching Arabic literacy, to a summer school focused on teaching children about the social and emotional aspects of learning. It had a larger program for girls focused on the prevention of gender-based violence and early childhood marriage, along with a playback theater program, a form of improv theater that facilitated active listening and dialogue between the girls and their families and wider community. All of the programs were offered to a very deliberate mix of children - from Syrian to Lebanese, Sunni to Alawite. In 2017, Brant started a sourdough bakery, where women from vulnerable mixed backgrounds created delicious bread made from local Lebanese wheat. Mavia Bakery continues to employ Syrian and Lebanese women to this day, and it continues to grow different varieties of local wheat, as well as operating a stone mill in the Bekaa Valley near the border with Syria. Over the span of these many years living and being engaged in meaningful work with Syrians in Lebanon, Brant not only learned about building relationships and community, but also came to care for Syria in a way that he never thought possible, especially for someone who, prior to January 2025, never had the chance to actually go there.
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