Mick Hartley

From the Daily Star:

At the Cairo Book Fair, the largest and most important event of its kind in the Arab world, religious works dominate, while literature and scientific texts are often pushed to the margins. Millions of Cairenes thronged to the fair, giving it an air of carnival on the vast exhibition grounds covering 80,000 square meters in northern Cairo and featuring some 1,400 stands of books and CDs. By Sunday, when the 39th annual fair came to a close, organizers estimated that some 2 million people had visited, dwarfing similar events in Beirut, Casablanca and Abu Dhabi – though many complain that the crowds are just there to picnic and buy religious books….

Korans of all styles, from the simple to the leather-bound, share shelf space with collections of religious sayings and fatwas as well as their more modern incarnations on cassettes and compact disks. The collected works of late venerable preachers like Egypt’s Sheikh Mohammed Shaarawi and Saudi Arabia’s Abdel Aziz bin Baz were present as well, though there was stiff competition from the young “new look” television preachers like Amr Khaled….

The fair also has its darker sides, with anti-Christian polemics advocating conversion to Islam as the only solution to a flawed religion and, of course, plenty of editions of Adolf Hitler’s “Mein Kampf” for sale.

“It makes up a big part of our success, especially among the 18-25 crowd,” says Mahmoud Abdallah of the Syrian-Egyptian Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi publishing house.