On Tuesday, 29 April, at 7pm in its Zamalek branch, Diwan is hosting its next Book Club with two titles offered for discussion, one in Arabic and one in English: Naguib Mahfouz’s classic Khan Al-Khalili and Diwan cofounder Nadia Wassef’s own Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller.
Named after the famous Islamic Cairo bazaar, Khan Al-Khalili was first published in 1945; many reprints have followed since, including the Diwan edition which came out two years ago. The events of the novel unfold against the backdrop of World War II, at a time where Cairo’s educated middle class were posing serious questions about modernity, religion and the past versus the present and the future. Like the rest of the Nobel laureate’s work, this novel was translated into numerous languages.
For its part, Chronicles of a Cairo Bookseller — an account of how three women, Nadia, her sister Hind and her chosen sister Nihal, re-worked the concept of bookselling in Egypt at the early years of the 21st century — was published in the original English in both the US and the UK in 2021, practically two decades after the launch of Diwan’s flagship branch, precisely the one overlooking 26 July Street in Zamalek. The book describes how the initiative envisaged the bookshop as something more than simply a place where one frequents to browse the shelves and pick up some titles, endearing as this exercise is for dedicated book-lovers.
Just a few weeks ago, on 8 March, Wassef, together with Hind and Nihal, celebrated the “23 years and counting of Diwan” that had expanded from what Wassef calls in her book “the firstborn” of 26 July to another nine stores; indeed, just after the January 2011 Revolution, there were 16.
The story of Diwan, as told in the Chronicles is also a story of the past versus the present and the future. As Wassef puts it, the idea came up at a moment when Cairo, despite its numerous and established bookshops, lacked a modern version of the bookshop that existed elsewhere in the world, a space where clients could have access to a wide range of old and new titles in several languages and where be seated with a coffee to read.
“We do not claim that we invented it; it was there and we brought it to our city,” Wassef told Al-Ahram Weekly in an interview on the 23rd anniversary of Diwan. In this sense, she argues, the real contribution of the Diwan goes beyond making a wider and more diverse range of old and new titles available. It was rather taking the bookshop culture to its core: dialogue.
The reality of the matter, she says, was that when Diwan started back in 2002, there were good books being printed in Egypt and there were books receiving attention but the issue was the lack of a space for people to have a conversation about these books — not just through the discussions, readings and launch events that Diwan established as a matter-of-fact aspect of the Cairo book scene but also through providing a space where readers could spend some time in a welcoming, friendly environment with a cup of coffee to share their views on their titles of choice. Actually, in her Chronicles, Wassef recalls the confusion of bureaucrats when asked to issue a licence for a business with such a Gemini profile.
It was much easier to conceive the idea than to see it delivered, nourished and sustained. The novelty of the concept behind the store had some people confused about whether Diwan was a library or a bookshop — or even just an air-conditioned venue at the heart of the busy city.
It also had some sellers at some of the branches confused because it was hard for them to reconcile to the level of openness and diversity that Diwan was committed to in its titles both in the Arabic and English sections and the less voluminous sections in French and German. Inevitably, as Wassef tells it, complicated business and finance challenges prompted closures and cuts.
However, in a balance sheet she shared with the Weekly four years after her book came out, Wassef sounded more conscious of the imprint that Diwan had on bookselling and book consumption in Cairo and elsewhere in Egypt. She agreed that in the first quarter of the 21st century Diwan took part in making room for industry practices like promoting best-sellers, providing access to a wider range of titles, making it possible to order them from abroad by request, and endorsing the “immortality” of the book in the face of a firm digital revolution.
“Actually, I think it has been working the other way round for booksellers and book publishers all over the world: social media has been contributing positively somehow to book sales; when a book gets attention on TikTok the book goes viral,” Wassef said. However, for this particular bookseller, making money does not take precedence over sharing ideas.
According to Brigitte Boulad, Diwan’s current events and cultural developer, an essential founding concept of this business endeavor is to be a book hub: “We think it is important to go really in depth with the readers into ‘the very depth of the subject matter’.” This implies the many book clubs that are both of Diwan’s and of readers of Diwan’s books and writers in its recent publishing business. It also includes discussions enabling insights into different topics that Dwian’s bookshelves are sharing with the readers irrespective of specific titles and in a cross-disciplinary way.
Last month, Boulad talked about a scheme to start a discussion on fashion, not from the glamour point of view but rather as a niche subject. “Fashion is about culture, climate, finance and much more,” she said.
Climate Connect and What Is Narration are two exercises that Boulad is proud of for “giving voice to the cultural community” and “furthering the Diwan audience-community to make it more inclusive with individuals who might not afford the increasing prices of books but who could certainly benefit from the discussions that Diwan holds — with some being uploaded for YouTube viewing.”
While expanding on the established fronts its founders chose to pursue, Diwan finally and “after much ado” decided to venture into publishing. According to Ahmed Qarmalawi of the publishing business, it was not an easy decision to go into publishing but the experience was worthwhile because it achieved its prime target of “filling certain gaps” in the market, from producing coffee table books and more non-fiction titles at a moment when fiction dominated to re-offering classics in conventional and non-conventional ways.
Over the past few years since the start of the publishing venture, Qarmalawi said that Diwan Publishing especially takes pride in two things: introducing new writers with new writing techniques, and recruiting the younger generations to reading the classics. “With new titles it was about risk, with classics it was about re-branding,” he said. “And it was not always easy — although it was inevitably successful.”
A big row occurred upon Diwan’s re-publishing and re-branding of Naguib Mahfouz over two years ago with revolutionary, experimental covers that steered clear of anything previously seen. “Our eyes were on the younger generation; we wanted to get them interested and it worked well,” he said. Moving beyond the “first shock and the subsequent acquired taste of the new style of covers for Mahfouz,” Diwan pushed the envelope even further in a joint venture with Al-Mahroussa Publishing to put out Mahfouz in the comics format. Judging by the reaction of this year’s Cairo International Book Fair, where some of these comics were available, Qarmalawi is convinced that this was yet another achievement in re-branding Mahfouz.
After working on Mahfouz, Diwan has started re-publishing Taha Hussein, with eight classics already out in very neat black and white hard covers. Youssef Al-Sebai’s work came out this year with some very colourful covers which, according to Qarmalawi, generated new interest in his work.
According to Wassef, Boulad and Qarmalawi, for the next two years new projects will unfold at Diwan, building up to the 25th anniversary celebration. These projects will be faithful to the founding concept of the business, they will seek greater accessibility and broader intellectual capacity and enable Diwan to be “the third place” it has always aspired to embodying — an independent cultural hub that is more than either a library or a bookshop.
In 2002, when Wassef sat down with her sister Hind and her chosen sister Nihal to plan the launch of Diwan’s first store, she would never have thought that, 23 years down the line, she would be sitting at that first venue for a discussion of her own book alongside one of Mahfouz’s. But that’s exactly what she will be doing towards the end of this month.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 10 April, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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