FEMALE FOUNDER

EVERY DREAM HAS ITS PRICE

Diwan Bookstores. The successful entrepreneur Nadia Wassef has been listed several times on the Forbes list of the 200 most influential women in the Middle East. In her book, she talks about Cairo’s first modern bookstore which she founded.

T E X T

URS U LA S CHEIDL

It’s a sunny late summer day in London. Nadia Wassef is very happy because “the weather is usually terrible here. I took Egypt’s perfect weather for granted and I miss it,” she tells us in this Zoom interview. “It was wonderful growing up in Egypt. I was perfectly happy without fast food and Netflix. I loved ABBA. The world was a friendlier place before social media,” laughs the Cairo native, born in 1974. As a little girl, she wanted to be a ballet dancer because “the women in Arab films moved with so much strength and beauty.” However, as she got to know the world around her, she became aware of the exploitation and less pleasant aspects of this profession. She attended public schools, studied English and French, studied social anthropology, comparative literature and creative writing in Cairo and London. “I know I’m privileged, I stand by that, but you have to make the best of it,” she is convinced, “that’s what I also tell my two daughters.” Before becoming a bookseller, she campaigned against female genital mutilation

and published articles and books on women’s rights and wrote about violence against women. Completely unplanned. At the beginning of the 2000s, Egypt was caught up in a mood of political awakening. There was much interest in culture, international exchange and consumerism.“ It was a difficult time in our lives privately, our father had just died after a long illness. We felt empty and disillusioned inside. At a dinner with friends, my sister Hind and I spontaneously decided to open a bookshop.” Together with their friend and business partner Nihal Schawky, they wanted to create a space that bridged East and West. Without a concrete business plan and only their own savings to start with, they founded a modern bookshop in Cairo in 2002. “It shouldn’t be just any bookshop. We wanted to reflect culture not as opposites or boundaries, but as parts of a bigger whole. And when you start thinking about books, especially with Egypt’s rich cultural tradition, there’s music, films and documentaries that can easily be integrated with a Western context. It was very exciting. Everything we offer has to mean something, not just financially. It has to add something to the conversation you have with your readers as we discuss society and how we can move forward together,” Wassef still enthuses euphorically about the beginnings of Diwan Bookstores. In just under 20 years, Diwan Bookstores has developed into a successful franchise concept. There were plenty of challenges, the path was not always easy, as Wassef reveals in her debut book “Every Day Destiny Turns a Page”, an adventurous and impressive story of the founding of Diwan, its staff and visitors, the Debut. With her book “Jeden Tag blättert hurdles of business life, censorship, Egypt’s das Schicksal eine Seite um” Nadia Wassef has written a declaration of love for books and bookshops. The German first edition history and female self-empowerment in the cultural circles of Cairo. “The most difwas published by Goldmann in September. ficult thing, not only in Egypt but every320 pages, 20 Euros. where in the world, is bureaucracy. It’s very

frustrating, especially when you’re young and impatient,” Wassef recalls. She doesn’t think it was more difficult just because there were three women involved in the project. “If you decide to make your gender an issue, it will become one.” To this day, Wassef stays in touch with her clients, who ask her for book recommendations. “These relationships with people that Diwan has created keep us all together. They help us find community, even when times are difficult.” Meanwhile, Nadia Wassef has retired from operations and is starting her new adventure as an author in London. “At a certain point, I thought of Diwan as a person with her own personality and she wouldn’t like the expansion we wanted. Sometimes people have to divorce in order to have a good relationship. And that’s what Diwan and I needed. My mistake was that I tried to impose what I wanted to happen. And that just didn’t work.” She still distributes and ships books she loves. “I will always be an advocate for books and bookshops. In every challenge in my life, a book has helped me and I want to share that with others.” Emotional entanglements. In her book, she wanted to tell the story of Diwan, not without first getting the consent of her sister Hind. She threw away the first version, and took a whole year to craft the second. She first had to come to understand her relationship with Cairo, with Diwan and with the people involved, in order to be able to formulate something in peace. “The secret is to keep going,” she notes. The book also tells about the need to know oneself, to be and do what one wants. “I am very happy that my book is now being published in German and translated into other languages, because I want to present other characters and personalities from Egypt beyond the usual stereotypes. There are so many Egyptian women who won’t wear a veil and who live their lives with increasing self-determination. I hope this book clears up some misconceptions,” she muses. As an entrepreneur, she has not been discouraged and has won several awards for her efforts. Rankings mean nothing to her, but “a lot to other people. My daughters are proud of me and have hung the poster in the kitchen. I wasn’t that happy to be on the Forbes list. It’s also kind of a curse because there’s strength associated with it. But when they see me with my daughters, you immediately realize that I hold no authority over them,” she laughs. For Nadia Wassef, impatience is one of the biggest problems of our time. We look at the last five years, 20 years - it’s nothing. Whatever it is, we want it now. That’s not how political change works, it happens very slowly. In the case of Egypt, we are looking back at 7,000 years of history. Change comes when the time is ripe, not according to a schedule, you can’t force it. Everywhere in the world it’s always about process; if we want to influence how things happen then we only need to study history. She could definitely imagine living back in her home country of Egypt. She never says never to anything. She advises young people to have a dream, but “be aware that it also has a price, and that you probably won’t get it right the first or second times around.” At the end of our interview, Nadia Wassef waxes philosophical: “You should listen to what the world wants to tell you. I never did that in my younger days. Today I listen to the world and it has changed a lot for me. It whispers, and sometimes you don’t hear it, especially if you are too noisy yourself. And I used to make a lot of noise!”

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