by Nadia Wassef
While I could see my mother only as a mother, I failed to see myself as anything but myself. My mother always said that parenthood humbled her. It broke her and it built her. My father said it held him hostage. And finally, I knew what they both meant. Suddenly, there were two more people on this earth I’d happily give my life for. If I’d known the intensity of this commitment, I wonder if I’d have still chosen to take the risk of parenthood, to expose myself and others to the potential of so much pain.
Parenting, like marriage, is a power struggle. That ultimate managerial tug-of-war between mother and father. My parents succeeded in carving out domains, and they never trespassed onto each other’s territory. After my father died, my mother conquered new terrain, filling the space that he left with herself. Her love for her grandchildren overtook her love for Hind and me, and she grandparented accordingly. She’d always snap at me when she sensed I was treating my daughters differently. I’d argue that they were different ages and had different privileges, and she’d inevitably tell me that her approach—to treat Hind and me as similarly as possible—was superior. I listen to my mother, but I don’t always take her advice. In the same vein, Number One and I make the big decisions together, but we don’t haggle over the minutiae. Our divorce, and the relationship it facilitated, freed us from the power struggle of daily shared parenting.
* * *
Control is the one addiction I have spent a lifetime trying to quit. I’ve been deluded into thinking that I can control anything, including my desire to control everything. The truth: most things that we care about are outside of our control. Deal with it. I have. I am. I remember lying on the cold steel table during Layla’s birth. I knew relief was within reach. A hospital worker brought her to me for a kiss, then took her to a nearby table. I watched as they cut her cord and suctioned her lungs, and then I addressed the doctor.
“Tie my tubes,” I said with all the authority I could muster.
“Have you discussed this?” The doctor looked at Number One.
“They’re mine, not his. Tie them!” I demanded. I wasn’t sure exactly why, I just knew I wanted it done, and soon. Maybe my command was a feminist battle cry. Or maybe a rejection of the cultural belief that women should have as many children as possible. My tubes were just a liability. Or maybe I was tired of the pain endemic to being a woman in a body. What I do know is this: I couldn’t control what happened to my body while I was pregnant, and I can’t control how my kids turn out. The one thing I can control is never doing this again.
6
THE CLASSICS
While our customers had finally learned that Diwan wasn’t a library, they still seemed to want us to be more than a bookstore. I recall an interaction with Dr. Medhat, one of our most abrasive, and endearing, regulars. You may remember him from Egypt Essentials, where his search for an ancient Egyptian title unleashed a tirade about Diwan’s insufficient reverence for pharaonic times.
Today’s outburst began with: “How can there be no ancient Egyptian titles in your Classics section?” Medhat’s capacity for indignation never failed to impress me. Still, I admired his passion. “Where is The Story of Sinuhe?”
“Out of print,” I replied.
“As Diwan, it’s your duty to publish it. Instead of filling the section with surrogates!”
“Diwan is not a publishing house,” I responded apologetically.
“And why not?” he prodded. “You should do for publishing what you’ve done for bookselling.”
“Maybe you’re right.” I’d given up. With some people, it’s wiser to agree rather than to continue a doomed conversation. His suggestion was something Hind, Nihal, and I had considered over the years. Hind was the one who finally put her foot down, citing an Egyptian popular saying: leave the bread to the baker. Diwan is a bookstore; we sell books. And in the last seven years, we’d opened four stores—Zamalek in 2002, Heliopolis in 2007, then Maadi in 2008, and now Cairo University in 2009.
Despite seven years of similar interactions with Dr. Medhat, I was always caught slightly off guard by his onslaughts. He had a righteous devotion to ancient Egypt, so of course our Classics section was a target of particular criticism.
“Dr. Medhat, I’ve tried to stock this section with timeless literature worthy of rereading.”
“My dear, I’m sure you’re familiar with Calvino’s article about the virtues of revisiting the classics in one’s mature years. He reminds us that great books incite rereading not because they root us in the past but because they speak to our present.”
“Isn’t that subjective?”
“No. Most books are like people. They live and they die. But the classics are immortal. I can see you’ve included the obvious titles of the Western canon,” he said as he surveyed the shelves. His fingers ran across the spines of Gilgamesh, the Iliad, the Odyssey, the Aeneid, The Canterbury Tales. “And a few of our Eastern epics.” He paused, studying one book. “The Arabian Nights! Seriously? Your shelves have power. Use it wisely.”
“I am, Dr. Medhat, I am.”
* * *
I’d never considered the Arabian Nights’ place on Diwan’s shelves controversial. I’d never imagined that it wasn’t a classic. Its contents clashed with the prevailing winds of conservatism blowing through Egypt. But all of us—customers, booksellers, readers, and used-book dealers—had our own personal associations with the book. These associations gave it a life well beyond itself, illustrating Calvino’s assertions perfectly.
What makes a book a classic? Gossipy, lowbrow literature in its time might become essential literature in the next, like Dickens. Spy thrillers, like Ian Fleming’s, are published today as “classics.” Who decides what literature is timeless? Some great works are forgotten or destroyed, and then later rediscovered in eras more amenable to their ideas and aesthetics. Some books speak to their moment but not to any future—successful and quickly forgotten. Who remembers Sully Prudhomme, the first winner of the Nobel Prize for literature?
As a child, I cherished the Arabian Nights. Most readers will be familiar with the book: a collection of Middle Eastern folktales, compiled during the golden age of Islam, Alf Layla w Layla in Arabic, meaning One Thousand and One Nights. The tales, held together by a frame story, originate in medieval Persian, Arabic, Indian, and Greek folklore and literature dating as far back as the tenth century. In the frame story, two kings, Shahrayar and Shahzaman, discover the infidelities of their queens and vow to exact revenge on womankind. In order to never be cuckolded again, Shahrayar marries a different virgin every night, deflowers her, and then beheads her the following morning. As you’ll recall, one woman, Scheherazade, the vizier’s daughter, puts an end to this bloodbath, outsmarting the king by telling stories that end each night in a cliffhanger, keeping the king from killing her, at least until the following evening. One thousand and one nights later, the king pardons Scheherazade, and they live happily ever after.
Fatma, my childhood nanny turned family cook, was a skilled storyteller. Though she couldn’t read, she had memorized many of Scheherazade’s tales. As a child, I could fall asleep only after an installment of the adventures of Sinbad the Sailor, Ali Baba, or Aladdin. In those years, every night of the holy month, a program called Fawazeer Ramadan aired on television. In 1985, the theme of the series was One Thousand and One Nights, and of course, I was hooked. The star, Sherihan, would perform Western and belly dance routines before presenting a nightly riddle. Her soundtrack was Rimsky-Korsakov’s symphonic suite Scheherazade, intermingled with Egyptian folk tunes. I’ve written this book with that suite and Umm Kulthum’s hour-long love song Alf Layla w Layla playing on repeat.
In short, I was obsessed. Scheherazade was my heroine. I promised myself that if I had a daughter, I would name her Scheherazade. I admired the character’s authority and cunning. When I was pregnant with my first daughter, everyone—Number One, Faiza, Hind—tried to dissuade me from giving her such an esoteric name. I settled instead for Zein. A year later, I was
pregnant again. I called my second child Layla.
But selling the book at Diwan was no simple task. We’d just opened our newest branch, a large shop inside Cairo University, when a student requested it. I listened as Mahmoud, a new hire, said we were out of stock. I knew this wasn’t true, because I knew every shelf intimately. I looked on from one of the café tables that dotted the store. Each time we’d opened a new branch, Hind, Nihal, and I would spend our days there keeping tabs on our staff, and, just as important, getting to know the habits and needs of our new customers. And Cairo University wasn’t just another store. Its setting was a utopian symbol of accessible education. Founded in 1908, the school was the result of Egyptian intellectuals lobbying and fundraising for a secular, modern, independent institution, the first of its kind. With the help of an endowment from Princess Fatma Ismail, the daughter of the ruler Khedive Ismail, the university opened, at first, to men, and later, to women.
* * *
The new store represented a huge ambition of mine, a dream achieved. We’d created our flagship shop to address a cultural deficit, but it catered to the literary elite. Our next two branches, Heliopolis and Maadi, were both located in wealthy urban areas where the upper and middle classes lived and shopped. We targeted adults with disposable incomes like ourselves. And in doing so, we’d neglected a huge subset of the Egyptian population: young people across different social strata. Diwan needed to be affordable, accessible, and well curated in order to succeed with younger generations. We needed to start a relationship where there hadn’t been one.
That new relationship was riddled with contradictions. In honor of the store opening, Minou had designed a bag with an image of the school’s iconic dome, surrounded by inspirational words in Arabic and English calligraphies. The irony was that the cost of producing one of those bags was greater than the margin on the average transaction at the campus branch, where students mainly bought café items and low-cost stationery. When they bought books, they were the cheapest paperbacks available. With every transaction, with every bag, we were losing money. Hind and Nihal suggested we stop giving out the bags, except with larger purchases. I refused. Behind my refusal was the fear that Diwan would have to change, to become a watered-down version of herself to survive in this new setting. If the thought was unsavory—upper-class neighborhoods got the real deal, while lower-class ones got the knockoff—its logical extension was even more so: Diwan, and the culture of reading it stood for, was a class-based pursuit that flourished only among those who could afford it. I recalled the conversation with the journalist early on, who’d predicted the failure of our venture before we’d even begun: “People in Egypt don’t read anymore.” If our profitable stores had to compensate for their less successful counterparts, Diwan would become a philanthropy, not a business. Minou warned me that we were expanding too fast. I told her to shut the fuck up. What was done was done.
The student who’d requested the Nights turned to leave. As she made her way to the door, I intercepted her, introduced myself, wrote down her details, and promised that Diwan would be in touch. I watched as she left the store to rejoin her friends in the large courtyard, where we’d hung two huge murals by Minou. I was proud of the outdoor space, which Nihal had designed: bright yellow tables crowded by black chairs seemed invitingly haphazard. Unlike the flagship café chairs, which Hind insisted had to discourage lingering, these were actually comfortable.
* * *
I turned back to confront Mahmoud.
“Alf Layla w Layla is in stock. It’s right there.”
“I’m sorry for the oversight. I must not have noticed it.”
“You’re observant as a hawk.”
“I’m a good Muslim.”
“And I’m a good bookseller.”
“You shouldn’t sell it.”
“You shouldn’t lie.”
“You know they want to ban it. I agree with them. It has things in it that are not part of our faith. Godless things.”
I’d been closely following the case he referred to: A group of conservative lawyers, calling themselves Lawyers without Restrictions, had gone to court to remove a popular edition of the Nights published by a government entity and edited by the iconic author Gamal al-Ghitani. They wanted to replace it with a more sanitized edition. Like Mahmoud, they were outraged by the sexual language and the exaltation of wine, which they saw as a danger to Egyptian youth, a prelude to sin. He sympathized with them. I did not. Until the court’s official ruling, I was committed to keeping that edition on my shelves.
“These stories were written down at a time when Islamic civilization was at its mightiest. It was the height of learning, conquest, and cultural output. Why can’t you celebrate that?”
“How do you not see the pornography in it?” chastised Mahmoud.
“How do you only see pornography? And isn’t there a difference between pornography and art?” I answered. “What you believe is your own business; your actions cost my business the sale of a book. So here’s what you’re going to do. Wait a day. Call the customer. Tell her you found it. You know I will check the system to make sure this transaction went through. If it hasn’t, you know what happens next.”
Mahmoud’s attitude wasn’t unique. Historically, the Nights engendered intense reactions from its conservative critics. Some thought moderate censorship was enough to conceal its lascivious subtext. Others banned it outright. Antoine Galland, the French orientalist, performed his own exorcism of the Nights when translating it into French for the first time in the early eighteenth century. The U.S. government banned it under the Comstock Law of 1873, which aimed to legislate public morality. It’s still banned in Saudi Arabia.
In Egypt, Alf Layla w Layla was one of several battlefields where wars over identity and culture politics were fought. Throughout the last century, Egyptian governments have shuffled between secularism and conservatism with no clear or consistent ideology, deepening societal divisions. Debates and debacles ensued between incensed readers, governments, intellectuals, and the judiciary, unfurling over many decades. In 1985, a case was brought by another group of conservative lawyers against a publisher and two booksellers for producing and selling a racy version of Alf Layla w Layla. The judge ruled in favor of confiscating the print run and fining the three culprits five hundred Egyptian pounds each. Their crime: violating Egypt’s anti-pornography laws and threatening the country’s moral fabric. The judge pointed out that he wasn’t banning all versions, just those that contained more than a hundred stories detailing sexual acts. Egypt’s intellectuals expressed their outrage at the creation of a new dichotomy: Islamic versus pornographic. At the time, my father regularly read the work of the progressive journalist Anis Mansour, who protested the wave of Islamization sweeping through Egypt. My father understood that this wave was inevitable and unstoppable. The head of the Morals Department in the Ministry of the Interior proclaimed that the book posed a threat to Egypt’s youth. He denied that the stories were part of our heritage, claiming instead that the book should be kept in museums. My mother, the eternal champion of all museums, found his myopia infuriating.
Other censorship dramas ensued and the courts moved on. The provocations of the Nights—namely, its metaphors, symbols, and abstractions of sex—were forgotten for a while. Still, these images lurked in our minds, barely repressed. Books were always battlegrounds, even when the fights changed. Early objections had been on political and religious grounds. Then, sex itself became a target. No matter the named justification—sex, politics, religion—the conservative view tended to win. But in 2010, months after the exchange with the student, literature won. The ruling didn’t mean that the book’s placement in Diwan’s Classics section went uncontested. Dr. Medhat’s views had more supporters than I imagined.
Some of them, including certain Cairo University students, thought it wasn’t literary enough to qualify as a classic. I would remind these customers that the tales had inspired troves of canonical literature shelved in
the same section. Boccaccio’s Decameron. Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales. Marguerite de Navarre’s Heptameron. In Candide, Voltaire refers back to Sindbad. Who can forget Tennyson’s poem “Recollections of the Arabian Nights”? Or Edgar Allan Poe’s “The Thousand-and-Second Tale of Scheherazade”? It’s hard to read Borges without hearing echoes. John Barth’s novella Dunyazadiad. Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children. Even Stephen King’s Misery, in which the protagonist is forced to write a novel under threat of death, recalls Scheherazade’s plight.
This impressive roster wasn’t enough to persuade doubting customers of the book’s merit. I began to research different editions of the Nights, tracking how it shifted, transformed, and found new permutations. I knew that I wasn’t going to find these editions easily. The stories had been passed orally, with a fluidity that both ensured, and threatened, their survival across generations. I knew exactly where to start: with my favorite book dealer, Hag Mustafa Sadek. When I visited him at his market stall at Suur El-Ezbekiya, he suggested I come by his brick-and-mortar shop some Friday after midday prayers. I waited for a suitable number of Fridays to pass after our conversation, to give him time to source the books. Hag Mustafa had inherited his family business, which included the bookshop and warehouse, and his stall, from his great-grandfather. Mustafa and his fellow book dealers, who all sold at Suur El-Ezbekiya, worked in the alternative market, the antithesis to the government-owned publishers and failing bookshops of the time. They had an informal, diffuse network that evaded regulation and oversight and was far more efficient than the broken system upheld by government bureaucracies. Mustafa and his colleagues could source anything for a price.
Hag Mustafa had honey-colored eyes and milk-white teeth. He was a jovial man, invariably dressed in a 1980s safari suit. He gave me the honorary title of doktora. I descended the steep staircase into his shop, a cavern piled with books. A few were placed on shelves, but most were piled on the ground, in wobbly columns labeled with stray slips of paper. As usual, he offered me a cup of dense Turkish coffee. His delight was apparent as he sifted through the stacks on his desk for my prize. Finally, he seized a stained and weathered cardboard book perforated with holes. I knew what it was immediately: a rare 1892 edition of Alf Layla w Layla, published by Matba’at Bulaq, Egypt’s first printing press, which was established by Muhammad Ali in 1820. Hag Mustafa knew treasure when he saw it. “This is a piece of history. The holes don’t change that.”