Let me say right at the onset that the only reason I’m writing this is to help the Egyptian Tourism industry, and also to show my gratitude to the Organisers of the quite incredible Cairo International Book Exhibition. It’s not to make other students of knowledge and scholars feel jealous as they realise what they missed out on (although of course you did miss out) and it’s not to make others feel bad (although of course you should feel slightly bad and gutted on missing the greatest show around).

So no nazr on me folks. :-)

Anyway, this معرض القاهرة الدولى للكتاب yearly get together is world-famous and rightly so. It is quite simply mind-boggling. Effectively all of the world’s Arabic book publishers come down for a couple of weeks with all their key stock and all their latest releases, prints, authenticated versions etc.

It’s nothing but books, books, and then more wonderful, amazing, gratifying, delightful…books. Seriously, it’s the playground of the scholars (and there are plenty of them walking round, it’s like spotting the celebrity!) and when you enter and walk around, you start to really feel like a kid again in a sweet shop. It’s ‘ajeeb ya’ni.

I think I visited over two hundred separate book shops/stalls over 18 hours and I probably had to leave 80% of the rest of the stalls because my body simply couldn’t handle it, despite wheelchairs, brothers and all the other help you can imagine. Okay, I’ve got to admit that we decided to use the wheelchair to carry the books, but hey.

I could wax lyrical to be honest, but instead why don’t I show you some of the pics that were taken from our group.

Books, books, glorious books!

-

-

Amongst all this fitnah (yeah, believe me!), we came across some wonderful old prints of the Hashiya of Ibn ‘Abidin (r), as well as a lovely copy of Tafsir’l-Manar…

-

-

The other wonderful aspect to the fair is the amount of people. Thousands! And most of them very “practising” masha’Allah which really adds a great feel to the place as a whole…

-

-

We came across some very interesting people as well. One of them was the Shaykh behind Dar’l-Minhaj based in Jeddah who are behind Shaykh Muhammad al-’Awwamah’s and Shaykh Bin Bayyah’s books. They were promoting their excellent un-tampered versions of Riyadh’l-Salihin and the 40 Hadith Nawawi, based upon quality manuscripts from the riwayah of Ibn al-Attar. Most exciting masha’Allah and nice to see some quality work still being put in to the well-known and often thus neglected classics.

Interestingly they’re also about to release a new version of the Musnad of Imam Ahmed in 12 volumes with approximate 200 extra hadith found from the latest checking of international manuscripts which is fascinating to say the least. Perhaps caution might be better until we get the book in our hands, but judging by Sh Awwamah’s discoveries on the Musannaf of Ibn Abi Shaybah, we might be in for a big surprise. Or not. Let’s see.

Then we came across one of my favourite book shops (al-Azhariyyah li’l-Turath) run by probably the most knowledgeable owners out there. Normally, owners know everything about bottom lines, how much discount they can give, how good or rubbish a buyer you are i.e. British (think Omid and that moneysupermarket ad!) and that’s about it. But this man (on the left) is quite unbelievable when it comes to his knowledge and his love for his books, stock and madhab. Even more amazing than him is his wife who was even more knowledgeable but I haven’t seen her in a long time…

-

-

There were loads of the ‘Ulema walking about but we only got a picture of Sh Ali Hasheesh on the left with Sh Ali Hasan al-Halabi from Jordan on the right…

-

-

Anyway, it was simply incredible. I came out cream-crackered, bamboozled, but very satisfied. And so I just wanted to say that this is the greatest show I’ve ever seen where you can just pick up any book you’ve dreamt of, for excellent prices, in one place at the one time.

I loved it. Now say Masha’Allah. No nazr remember?

:-)