It was a surprise to find such large numbers of people in public libraries in Cairo recently, as it might have been thought that such scenes were long gone and were never coming back, now that digital materials have largely replaced physical books.
Nevertheless, more and more young people today, members of the digital generation, are aiming to connect more with physical books and the history behind them.
Lamia Magdi, a senior student at the Faculty of Arts, Ain Shams University, said that “a philosophy professor introduced me to reading in my freshman year. Up until then, I had barely read 10 books in my life.”
“Today, I am obsessed about reading books. I can’t give them away or even lend them out. I read some novels more than once, such as Miramar by Naguib Mahfouz and Al-Tantouriah by Radwa Ashour,” she added.
Ayman Ali, 17, said that “I read five or six novels every month. I like reading because it takes me to another time and place. I am a regular visitor to Egypt’s Public Library in Cairo. I have a book on me at all times: during vacation and in public transportation, and whenever I have the time I go on reading.”
Alaa Maghawri, the holder of a PhD in libraries and archive science from the University of Alexandria, said that long before libraries and the need for silence that books require, “the earlier oral culture, marked by repetition and formulas, was essential for human civilisation to grow and survive. This oral culture originated from the spoken language, which Plato described as being made up of ‘spoken words having something winged and sacred’ to them,” he said.
“Generation after generation passed down a society’s cultural heritage by listening, speaking, and memorising. It contained stories, poetry, fairy tales, proverbs, spells, wishes and curses, myths, humorous narratives, legends, and riddles all mixed together,” he added.
“Homer’s poetry is a prime example of this oral culture. The Iliad and the Odyssey are built up out of formulas, repeated phrases like ‘grey-eyed Athena’, ‘wine-dark sea’, ‘swift-footed Achilles’, and ‘resourceful Odysseus’, for example. Speeches were used for the transmission of ideas along with literature and could be used for communication between members of society that was hardly understood by people outside it.”
The origin of writing can be traced back to ancient Mesopotamia around 3500-3100 BCE, when limestone and clay tablets were used as a support for written words. The famous Kish Tablet found in what is now southern Iraq is considered to be one of the world’s oldest written texts. Later, the earliest paper-like material was made from the pith of the papyrus plant made into a scroll. The ancient Egyptians used papyrus as a support for books like the Book of the Dead.
Parchment, often used for Hebrew scriptures, was another writing medium, this time made from animal skin. Scrolls remained the most popular form of writing material until the codex, later made of wood paper, was introduced during the Roman period.
“Even after the invention of writing, oral culture continued to last. One of its most eloquent defenders was Socrates, according to Plato an opponent of writing. Socrates thought that writing would lead to the decline of a culture based on memorisation and that young people who were taught to read would lose their ability to memorise and think freely,” Maghawri said.
Many literary masterpieces began as oral traditions before they were recorded in writing, including the story of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Arabic story of Kalila and Dimna, the One Thousand and One Nights, the Arab epic the Sirat Bani Hilal, and the early Islamic poems the Muallaqat.
“When civilisations expanded and small communities grew into vast empires, oral culture was no longer enough. There was a need to record laws, tax records, and administrative decrees without alteration or distortion. At the same time, there was a fear of losing knowledge due to the threats facing those charged with passing on oral forms. If the guardians of knowledge die, society loses an important part of its identity,” Maghawri said.
Documentation faced a massive material obstacle, however, as the materials available were either heavy, difficult to craft, or expensive. But the ancient Chinese then invented wood-based paper, which became the foundation for book development worldwide.
“Chinese paper was made from bark fibres taken from mulberry trees. They kept the process a secret for a long time until in 751 CE the Arab armies defeated the Chinese Tang Dynasty at the Battle of Talas. Two Chinese papermakers were taken captive, and it was from them that the Islamic world learnt how to make paper. In the 13th century, paper was introduced to mediaeval Europe from the city of Baghdad,” Maghawri said.
At first, books were copied by hand, and only elite scholars could afford them. But, in the 15th century, German goldsmith Johannes Gutenberg invented the printing press using movable type. His invention allowed books to be available to ordinary people.
“Suddenly, everyone in Europe was reading, men, women, children, the rich, and the poor. Reading began to be described as a ‘fever’, a ‘craze’, and a ‘madness’. It was a habit that knew no social boundaries.”
COLLECTING BOOKS: During the 18th century in Europe, wealth and prestige were not measured by land or gold but by owning paintings, attending the opera, and collecting fine books.
Books were used to convey a person’s intellectual identity. For example, in the 16th-century Italian painter Agnolo Bronzino’s “Allegorical Portrait of Dante”, Dante is shown holding a copy of his poem the “Paradiso”.
“This painting tells us that this man is culturally accomplished. But despite that, he’s not even reading the book in the painting. It’s one of the most obvious examples of using a book as a signal to say something larger about a person,” Maghawri said.
Libraries could protect books from nature and human error, but they could not always protect them from power. Halim Atef, a human-rights lawyer, said that “the ideological impulse behind the burning of books came from the simple belief that books were the main source of societal schism and sedition.”
“There have always been groups that rejected specific books because they contradicted their beliefs or interests; thus, in their view, the solution was to burn them and to wipe them out of existence,” he said.
“This was common in conflicts where the intention of the warring parties was to erase each other. As a result, books and libraries, along with museums, have become primary targets in wartime since they are seen as symbols of memory, heritage, and identity.”
The destruction of books became tied to the concept of cultural genocide. “Ordinarily, genocide means denying a group of people their right to exist, whereas cultural genocide means destroying their shared memory and culture, even without killing the people themselves. Erasing a culture often leads to, or happens alongside, the erasing of people,” Atef said.
Works of philosophy, politics, the humanities, and some novels were among the books that have been the most destroyed. Historians note that the first systematic book burning in history was ordered by the Chinese Emperor Qin Shi Huang in 213 BCE, when books of history, philosophy, and poetry were destroyed.
Religious books faced burning in mediaeval Europe. In Andalusia in southern Spain in 1499 CE, more than 500,000 Islamic and Arabic manuscripts were burnt to erase the Muslim identity from the peninsula.
Of course, libraries do not only belong geographically to the country they are located in, as they constitute a shared intellectual resource that belongs to all of humanity. Yet throughout the ages, libraries have been burnt, and countless books and manuscripts lost, leaving us knowing little or nothing about them today.
From the Library of Baghdad to the Library of Alexandria, all the way to the records of the Maya civilisation in South America and German books in the 1930s, vast numbers of books have been lost as a result of war and conflict. “Stripping human beings of their language, culture, and written history leaves them without a real existence,” Atef said.
“Following the burning of books by authors such as Sigmund Freud, Karl Marx, Franz Kafka, and others in Germany in the 1930s, the burning of books and the destruction of a group’s written cultural heritage have been classified as a form of persecution and a crime against humanity,” he added.
The 1954 Hague Convention for the Protection of Cultural Property in the Event of Armed Conflict, together with its subsequent protocols, stipulates that damage to the cultural property of any people constitutes an injury to the cultural heritage of all humankind. Furthermore, it narrows down the military necessity of defence and, for the first time, established individual criminal responsibility, treating such acts as war crimes.
Under its 1970 and 1972 conventions, the UN cultural agency UNESCO also prohibits the illicit import, export, and transfer of ownership of cultural property. Losing any unique book or manuscript, anywhere across the world, amounts to a loss for the collective memory of humanity. In 1992, UNESCO launched its Memory of the World Programme, with the goal of shielding documentary heritage, manuscripts, and rare library collections from ideological censorship via physical safeguarding and digital archiving.
“Reading has always been different from writing. Writing prioritises sound, as the spoken word must be transformed into representative signs. Reading, however, prioritises meaning. From the era of the ancient Egyptian scribe until now, Egypt has always taken care of reading due to the belief that it soothes the mind,” said Wafaa Nassar, a scholar from the University of Alexandria.
“The first public library in Egypt was created by Ali Pasha Mubarak in 1874 and was called the Khedival Library, now the National Library of Egypt, or Dar Al-Kutub. It began with about 30,000 Arabic, Turkish, and Persian books, along with manuscripts,” she said.
Books flourished, but so did journalism with the establishment of the Al-Ahram newspaper in 1875 and other magazines and periodicals. According to the Central Agency for Public Mobilisation and Statistics (CAPMAS), Egypt had about 343 public libraries in 2022. Among them the Greater Cairo Library stands out, among other things because it is housed in a palace that once belonged to Princess Samiha Kamel, a granddaughter of the Khedive Ismail.
She had an eye for the arts, and she turned her residence into a kind of literary salon, with the third floor given over to the fine arts. She stayed there until her death in 1984, and in her will she asked that the palace be handed to the state for cultural purposes. Today, it is the second-largest library in Egypt, with more than 200,000 books and rare manuscripts.
“Egypt’s modern writers and thinkers were responsible for a new wave of literature, among them Taha Hussein, Abbas Mahmoud Al-Aqqad, and Naguib Mahfouz, alongside Mustafa Sadeq Al-Rafei, who composed the national anthem of the monarchical period, Islami ya Misr,” Nassar commented.
This was also a time of cultural salons, among them those of the Egyptian-Lebanese writer May Ziadeh, held each Tuesday, and those of Al-Aqqad, held on Fridays. Traditional coffee shops evolved into informal spaces where individuals could exchange ideas, among them the Riche café in the Downtown area and the Fishawi café in Historic Cairo.
Book clubs and reading circles also originally dated to this period.
BOOK CLUBS: Today, literary salons and book clubs have been turning into digital spaces powered by the Internet.
Many members of Generation Z and Generation Alpha using hashtags such as BookTok and Bookstagram are sharing book reviews, annotated pages, and even literary memes.
Nadia Diaa, a psychologist, said that “many young people are choosing printed books instead of digital texts because they offer a sense of something real and offer a break from excessive screen time and online content.”
“Books are no longer viewed only as objects for leisure but as symbols of taste and identity,” she said.
“One shift is that today’s readers don’t feel stuck reading the school literary canon, like novels by Russian novelist Fyodor Dostoevsky or UK novelist Jane Austen, so that they can seem smart. Instead, they are wandering into genres they actually like, without seeking to be labelled as bookworms,” she added.
“No book makes someone more intellectual just because it sits on a shelf. What matters is reading, even just a few pages a day. Reading routines are linked to verbal recall, which makes it easier to pull words out during a conversation. They similarly expand the vocabulary and fix brain rot. Echoing the Roman philosopher Seneca’s criticism of wealthy Romans who collected libraries for display rather than learning, I remind people not to use books as luxury decoration.”
According to former minister of culture Ahmed Fouad Hano, the Cairo International Book Fair saw the historic number of 6,200,849 visitors in 2026. Data published by the World Population Review on global reading rates for 2025 showed that Egypt ranked first among the Arab countries for reading. Egyptians read an average of 5.41 books per year, about 121 hours of reading over the course of a year.
Nora Tamim, a writer and translator known on social media as “Al-Set Baheya”, said that “Arabic poetry, Egyptian folklore, and the image of the Egyptian woman possess a particular kind of cultural magic that evokes a deep sense of our homeland.”
“Baheya has become one of the most enduring symbols in Egypt’s collective memory and a personification of the country. The character was popularised by the poet Ahmed Fouad Negm, who blended colloquial poetry with Egyptian folk literature, before she was immortalised in his collaboration with the musician Sheikh Imam in the iconic song Masr Ya Umma Ya Bahya (Egypt, O Mother, O Radiant One).”
“This is the image I seek to present through my social media platforms,” she said, where she shares reflections on everyday life, women’s rights, and Egyptian folklore.
“National identity begins by keeping it alive in daily conversations and contemporary storytelling. I see social media as an essential tool for introducing culture to the younger generations,” she added.
However, she cautioned that if we really want to reach young people, there is a need to craft content that feels visually striking and fresher, especially short-form videos, because people’s attention spans have shifted. The key is to renew Egyptian identity in an authentic way and in a way that is sustainable, Tamim said.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 30 July, 2026 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
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