Kabul book-seller wants to spur reading habit
Shah Muhammad Rais is the biggest book-seller in Afghanistan, but
while business is good, he still has another mission in mind: to get his
countrymen interested in reading again.
Having failed to reach all the far-flung corners of war-torn
Afghanistan with a mobile book shop on a bus, the 54-year-old Rais has
now launched a Web site (www.shahmbookco.com) to reach those who have
access to the Internet and order books on-line.
He claims to have the world's largest collection of books on
Afghanistan in key international languages.
"I would say they are unique," Rais said in his store in the heart of
Kabul as his staff dusted off a pile of books, part of the nearly 1
million he owns.
"With regret and unfortunately, I have to say that I am the main
book-seller in Afghanistan. There will be a crisis of books if something
happens to us or if we collapse. So, it is very important that we have
others involved in this too," he said.
Rais, who has an engineering degree, has been involved in the book
trade for 35 years and is well known to many expatriates in Kabul as
well as Afghan book lovers.
A visiting Norwegian journalist wrote a book about Rais months after
the Taliban's fall in 2001.
"The Bookseller of Kabul", portraying Rais as tough and brutal with
his family, became a worldwide hit with sales of more than a million
copies.
Rais, who hosted the author, Asne Seierstad, rejects the book and at
one stage was planning to take legal action against her.
His worst experience as a book-seller during the past three decades
of war was being thrown behind bars for two years by the communist
government of the 1980s for selling "imperialistic books" and copies of
the newspapers of Western-backed Afghan factions opposing the regime.
In 2002, he began to work on a project to sell books from a bus to
remote parts of Afghanistan.
After failing to get support from foreign NGOs involved in
educational or cultural projects, he bought a bus himself.
The bus took some 20,000 books to a number of northern provinces in
2006, but violence and insecurity in the south and east blocked his
efforts to reach the rest of the country.
"That way, a student would have saved money and time by not
travelling all the way from Kunduz or Takhar to Kabul to buy a book," he
said referring to two northern provinces.
"There was a big rush and enthusiasm, but I had to drop the project
for I did not receive support from the government and the NGOs.
Of course, business was and is part of my agenda, but people would
have benefitted more from it," he said. The cost of a book on the bus
tour would not have been higher that what Rais sells in his store in
Kabul now, he says.
Now, the broad-shouldered and neatly bearded Rais has created a
website containing the books he has for sale and their prices. But
buyers have to pay and arrange for their own private transport to
receive the books.
The spirit of book reading has suffered in Afghan culture due to
three decades of war which hurt education and literacy rates in
Afghanistan, once the birth place of many important and Asian scholars,
scientists and poets.
"Through books, our children would know about their culture, history
and understand the world. Books are like seas. You have to dive into the
sea to get the pearl. You have to read books to know how to solve your
country's problems," Rais said.
"Unless, we reintroduce the habit of book reading, we will have more
illiterates and more trouble," he said.
Rais is working on a personal memoir of the last three decades and
also wants to expand his current business by building a "massive book
shop, library and a publishing house to have direct contacts with the
world's libraries," he said.
REUTERS
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