MICHAEL KIMMELMAN /ESSAY


DAMASCUS, Syria - Globalization and the Web have not eroded the power of Syria’s authoritarian regime, nor fostered new cultural riches, say local artists and intellectuals.

Aside from a proliferation of the usual chain stores, boutique hotels and restaurants that are today’s fashionable excuse for “worldly” culture, they have produced among Syrians only greater unease. Liberties have been only further curtailed by a regime still trying to grasp the challenges of the Web.

Every book, art catalog, film script and television program, big or small, still runs a gantlet of government censors. “There’s a false image of openness now,” said Youssef Abdelke, 59, a painter who moved back a few years ago, after living 28 years in a kind of self-imposed exile in Paris.

“The authorities are still controlling everything, and you can’t even hire a cleaning woman without the security services’ permission.” When Bashar al-Assad took over as Syria’s president in 2000, he ushered in a brief period of openness that came to be called the Damascus Spring.

But those gains are long gone, despite the influx of first-run Hollywood movies and the token appearance by a pioneering Western dancer or musician for the odd arts festival. Under Mr. Assad’s father, President Hafez al-Assad, there were clear red lines of intolerance.

Now those lines are no longer clear, increasing a tendency toward selfcensorship. Rosa Yassin Hassan, a novelist, put it this way: “Two people write about the same thing, and one is imprisoned today, the other not.

That sends a message, I believe. It is done on purpose to increase fear and apprehension.” Even as the United States and Western Europe have been making quiet overtures toward Syria, hoping among other things to drive a wedge between it and Iran, this nation has been pursuing its usual wily, paradoxical policies: cracking down on political Islamists at home, for instance, but supporting movements like Hamas and Hezbollah abroad. Officials allow a few poetry readings, but they have also drafted a law that would now force bloggers and other journalists to submit all writings for review before publication.

Ms. Hassan, the young novelist, said censors originally agreed to the publication of “Ebony,” her first novel, but then excised passages they deemed sexually offensive. She decided to publish abroad. Her next book chronicled the lives of former female political prisoners. The book after that landed her on the shortlist for an Arabic version of the Booker Prize.

Today Ms. Hassan isn’t allowed to travel abroad. “It’s complicated,” she said, “because nowadays, with the Internet and satellite TV and translations from and to Arabic, writers in Syria are not isolated from the world. It is not like it was 30 years ago. We can publish elsewhere.

There can be a public fuss. But in a sense this only makes the situation feel worse for younger writers because we can dream.” The Syrian reading public, she said, “has always been tiny, and intellectuals are isolated from the rest of society.” At the same time a young literary scene has developed, she insisted, publishing abroad if necessary.

Syrian artists, meanwhile, also “now feel pressure” to cater to nouveau riche Arabs, said Mr. Abdelke, and they’re less concerned about thorny issues of Syrian identity or Syrian politics. Mouna Atassi, a veteran dealer whose gallery is one of the finest in Damascus, said the last few years have witnessed “tremendous new interest from collectors in the Gulf and in the West and the arrival of big money shaping what people here make and sell. But it’s all about money and the market now, about tourist consumption and a few rich Syrians.”

Ousama Ghanam, a playwright in his 30s who teaches and directs theater here, said that most performing arts events are still sponsored by the state, which favors populist fare. Private benefactors, such as they are, prefer to back events that make money and are big on soap operas, perhaps the country’s major artistic export. His students graduate only to find that the jobs available as actors, directors and playwrights are all on the soaps. “This is the new reality,” Mr. Ghanam said. “So the soap operas and historical melodramas are creating taste.” At 48, Hatem Ali is one of Syria’s top television and film directors. He has directed several of the country’s soap operas, and he recently shot a feature film, “The Long Night,” about political prisoners.

The soaps bought him, as he put it, “immunity” to make “The Long Night.” He was able to muster $250,000 in private money, a meager budget. The film was then tacitly banned by Syrian authorities . “We got permission on paper from one committee to go ahead with the film, but then another government committee saw the film, and my own long night with the Syrian authorities started,” he said .

So why did he make it? “It’s our job to raise our voices, a little bit,” Mr. Ali said . “Movies don’t move people to revolution. But they’re part of a discourse, pebbles in a still lake.” “I am not desperate yet,” he added. “But I am less hopeful.”