Diwan is, arguably, Cairo's first Western-style bookshop. Youssef Rakha talks to two of its owners Click to view caption Occupying a propitious corner of 26th July Street Diwan seems to be publisher Ibrahim El- Mu'alim's answer to the "corporate revolution" envisaged for the future of Arab culture. In the words of Nadia Wassef, one of its five owners -- along with Hind Wassef, Ali Dessouki, Ziyad Bahaaeddin and Nihal Shawqi -- the venue aims to be "much more than a bookstore." The cafeteria, stationery section and chairs notwithstanding, Diwan certainly has atmosphere. "What makes this place different is that it wants to have a life," Nadia says; and a life it certainly does have. Like the Townhouse Gallery or the Cairo Workshop it provides the culturally inclined with a place to go. Here they can sit and read, sip coffee or stroll peacefully around sampling a broad variety of items. Diwan is probably the only venue in Cairo that dispenses beautifully hand-bound Al-Azhar notebooks and Cultural Development Fund videos in the same space. Besides sections on contemporary literature, history and politics, a good selection of software is available, as are self-help books and travel guides. The children's section is well-stocked and, as Amir El-Nagui, the executive manager, points out, the bookshop's activities include a "children's story time," during which the bookshop's smaller visitors are entertained. "A broad cross section of people come," El- Nagui points out: "students, writers and artists, elderly people, families, people from all kinds of class background. Expats form only a small percentage of our visitors." "We can't claim this is an original idea," Nadia begins. "The only original thing about it is that we did it in Cairo, whereas Barnes and Noble and Waterstones had thought of it years ago. I have no intellectual pretensions," and this is something Nadia consistently stresses, "so I can't tell you with a straight face that we are doing something for culture or revitalising culture, though as you can see in so far as this is a bookshop, and one that's different, we undoubtedly are. But saying it would be too presumptuous, and we didn't think of it that way. What we can say," -- at this point we are joined by Hind, of the owners the Wassef sisters are the ones assigned the responsibility of looking after the day-to-day running of the bookshop -- "is that we like books, we like reading. That's true of all the founders. We come from very different backgrounds but we are friends and we were all at a juncture in our lives when we were ready to take on a truly absorbing project. And opening a bookshop seemed like the right thing for us. Doing it well is the greatest challenge." Has Diwan made a profit since its inauguration on 8 March? "This we couldn't possibly tell you," Nadia and Hind reply almost in unison. "It is far, far too early to judge. Ask me in a year. At the moment, you understand, there is the novelty factor; people enjoy the coffee and they like our bags, so they come. Whether it will sustain itself economically we really can't say. What I can say," Nadia adds, "is that people who tell you Egypt is not a country where people read are wrong. All kinds of people read. The problem is just that we are very sceptical about investing in a bookshop." Diwan seems to be modelled on bookshops like Waterstones or Dillons, nonetheless; and in the light of its place in the framework of a nascent corporate culture, it is not unreasonable to expect that there are plans to branch out. "When you say corporate," Hind counters, "it makes me think of McDonald's. Culture is one of the few things that have to be unique, and I'd like to think that this is what we're doing. At the moment we are very unwilling to consider new branches. In order to do this sensibly we'd really have to wait and see, you have to know the shop's financial cycle, the way it works over time. We were really very sceptical and very scared at the beginning, because what we were doing, in effect, was starting a business during a recession. And even now I think the uniqueness of this place is what's keeping it alive. If there were other branches, maybe not so many people would come. What we are toying with right now is the idea of the Internet. Because if people can order books from home and reliably receive them, that's like having another branch but without all the hassle. You have to understand we're experimenting and learning; and in so far as we're thinking about expansion at all, it is the Internet that we're interested in, the great potential that it has. But at the moment we still don't have a site." Despite the variety of the items on offer -- the Encyclopedia Britannica on CD Rom and Bernard Lewis's What Went Wrong, for example -- some visitors have criticised the selection of books on offer, while others have complained of an alleged marking up of the prices of inexpensive books like those published by the General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO) and the private-sector Misr Library. How are the books chosen and where do they come from? Does Diwan import directly from abroad? And if so, how has the bookshop fared with red tape and censorship? "What most people believe, you see," Hind goes on, "is that books don't sell while shoes do; it's not true. As for our business partners, we deal with over 85 distributors, all the local publishers of Arabic books -- Dar Al-Shurouq, Madbouli, Al-Hilal, Miret -- you name it. When it comes to items from abroad," Nadia takes over, "in some cases there are established companies that do their jobs really well and save us the trouble. Master Group, for example, does beautiful work with popular fiction. All the CDs and DVDs, the coffee table books and art books are not directly imported. Because the red tape can be a nightmare, especially when it comes to videos and music. We get them from official distributors. Distributors with a lot of experience like Dar Al-Shurouq have been extremely helpful to us with books. We deal with distributors in London, because in the West you don't go straight to the publisher, you go to distributors. And we avoid books that are banned because it's too much hassle, it is not worth it. I can't give you the profile of our customers yet, but any study on bookshops will tell you that even somebody who only reads comics still prefers to go to a place where many other things are on offer. And it's not true that we don't have the latest books, we do have very many new things. Even hardback fiction that hasn't come out in paperback..." "We try to get the whole spread of available material. I can't stress this enough," Hind continues, "but the culture of censorship is a problem in itself. With DVDs particularly, people seem to think that either you have magic powers over someone really high up in customs or you are dealing in pirated material. The truth is that, instead of concentrating on all those banned items and insisting on having them you have to work with what is legally available; and it is this that will eventually, hopefully open things up a bit. And in truth there is so much that's available, if you look for it, absolute gems. I didn't know that Shadi Abdel-Salam's The Night of Counting the Years existed with English and French subtitles. So we are importing, yes. We do orders as well. One of the main issues, actually, is importing Arabic books. Demand is erratic and the channels aren't very clear. In some cases I underestimated how much people actually keep up: just because a book is coming out doesn't mean it's going to be a bestseller. But we are learning how to experiment. One problem is that because the place is upmarket, with GEBO publications for example, people automatically assume that we're ripping them off. It's not true. Because of the costs of the place many of these books we are actually making a loss on. But we can't not have them. We can't not have Naguib Mahfouz. It has to do with this idea of having something for everyone. If a book is contributing to the comprehensiveness of the place, it is worth having even if it is not paying its rent on the shelf, so to speak." How does managing the place feel? "The trade aspect is not as easy as it might be." We are back with Nadia. "Anyone in retail will tell you that the market could be doing better. Then there is the problem of foreign currency availability. I had to collect �194.18 in change from friends who had recently been to England to deposit the good will down payment on an order from London. The bank said to me, 'Forget it!' And when currency rates fluctuate so much and you pay more for foreign currency, within a month you can end up having two copies of the same book on the shelf with an LE8 or LE9 price difference. What would you do about that? It seems repetitive to say that what people need to work on in Egypt is their attitude, their work ethic. But the point is when you throw yourself into something like this you have to be there to make sure people are doing their work. Rather than being a productive job, it ends up being re-productive, even counterproductive from the personal perspective. Because every day you have to run around saying the same things to the same people, stressing and nagging over and over. And if you've put your heart in it, if you've committed yourself to it, you end up feeling imprisoned. Earlier I was far more into activism than I am now, I'm no longer so interested in changing the world as such. And like Voltaire's Candide I've found myself a garden that nobody can take away from me. It may be humdrum work, to cultivate your garden. But this is what I intend to be doing."
