At the Sharjah International Book Fair, deep within the labyrinthine displays of shrink-wrapped titles with unbroken spines, lies a booth that is distinct and outwardly anachronistic.
The newspapers displayed on its walls feature pictures of Abdel Halim Hafez and a young Yasser Arafat. They report on the death of Umm Kulthum and the formation of the United Arab Emirates. Illustrations of stars such as Faten Hamama peer from magazine covers.
The booth takes up multiple stalls, but it feels cramped. Visitors cautiously manoeuvre and thumb through the stacks of books and periodicals, careful not to send the precarious pillars of paper cascading to the floor. One collapses every so often.
The Arab Archive for Heritage Foundation is a sliver of Soor Al-Azbakeya, Cairo's famous used-books market. It is a trove of history amid the fair’s glossy displays. Its story stretches back 125 years, a lineage that Mohammed Sadeq can trace to his great-grandfather.
“He began the business around 1900, near Al Azhar Mosque, in an area called Al Khaleej Al Masri – extending from Sayyida Zainab District to Bab Al Khalq and Al Azbakeya – that’s where the book market began,” Sadeq says.
“My profession has been passed down from generation to generation. It used to be called Al Warraqeen (the paper collectors). It referred to those who gathered everything printed, from books and magazines to photographs and old newspapers.”
Though the title has fallen out of use, Sadeq steadfastly continues to uphold the tenets of his inherited vocation. Now 54, he was only a toddler when he began going to work with his father. “He’d tie me to a lamp post so I wouldn’t go running into the street and its cars,” he says. “I watched him work and I fell in love with the job.”
By the time he was seven years old, Sadeq was working at the family stall. Within the next decade, he began to think of ways to expand the business. The shop once dealt almost exclusively in books on religion, history and classical literature. “We were in Al-Azhar,” he says. “And that was the kind of knowledge people wanted back then. Novels didn’t really sell.”
The shop’s catalogue widened as the shop moved through various locations before joining the other book stalls in the Al Azbakeya area around a decade ago.
“We began to work with more titles,” Sadeq says. “Novels, literary works, books on management, books on accounting – everything that was historical. When I took over, I began focusing more on the archival. I developed myself to archive everything – newspapers, magazines, journals, photographs, books. I organised them in an archival way, like the big government institutions.”
The stall at the Sharjah International Book Fair lays bare Sadeq’s efforts. Each magazine cover, book or photograph is a window to history.
A 1969 edition of Al-Musawar tells of the arson attack on Al Aqsa Mosque, where an Australian citizen, Denis Michael Rohan, set fire to the pulpit. Beside it is a 1970 issue depicting a young Arafat as the “leader of the Palestinian Revolution”. There are newspaper articles with headlines reporting the death of Egyptian president Gamal Abdel Nasser with calligraphic text that reads “the leader and the hero has died”. There are magazine covers depicting Sheikh Mohammed bin Rashid – now UAE Vice President and Ruler of Dubai – taking part in the Al Ahram Endurance Race in Egypt in 2001.
In fact, there is an entire section dedicated to the history of the UAE. There are multiple publications announcing it joining the Arab League. Others highlight the first proclamations of the country's leaders. Several on display feature Sheikh Dr Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi, Ruler of Sharjah.
“I found that everything Sheikh Sultan said in the early 1970s, about strengthening education, building mosques and developing Sharjah, all of it came true,” Sadeq says. “Everything he said in those early papers are now reality. Sharjah is one of the most cultural places in the world today. When I first visited five years ago and saw the elegance, the organisation and the respect for books, I felt joy. I knew my profession would not die.”
Sadeq’s confidence has not waned. Even as new technologies such as artificial intelligence emerge, and online archives become the norm, he says there will always be a place for printed books.
“No matter how technology develops, no matter how artificial intelligence advances, all that doesn’t matter to me, not one bit,” he says. “I love paper. If one day they make every scholar, every researcher, every academic depend only on the internet for their sources, I’ll quit the job. But I know that won’t happen.”
Sadeq says he has often been encouraged by family and friends to go into another, more lucrative line of work but for him, continuing the legacy of his family and Al Warraqeen is not a job.
“It’s a mission,” he says. “The early traders were pillars of culture. When I see that spirit fading, I feel it is my duty to keep it alive.
This work preserves memory. When you sit among these newspapers – some 50, 60, 70 years old – you see the stories of nations passing before your eyes,” he adds. “You see colonialism, you see independence. You see cinema from its beginnings – the silent films of the 1920s to the talkies of the 1940s. You see how Egyptian television appeared in the 1960s and how people gathered around the radio before that. You see how the Arab world changed socially. You see how Egypt used to be all about athletics and wrestling, then it became more interested in football. All of that history is right here, in front of you.
“I have gone through them all and lived a thousand years in one lifetime.”
Sharjah International Book Fair is running until November 17
