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  Over time, I noticed a strange discrepancy. People bought business hardcovers. In our other sections, hardcover sales were confined to the likes of J. K. Rowling and Dan Brown. Unlike Americans, Egyptians seldom bought hardcovers—ours was, and is, a price-sensitive market. Most of the population could barely afford to buy paperbacks. Most Egyptians struggled to afford food, clothing, housing, education, and health care. If there was anything left over, it wouldn’t be spent on books. And the economy was still recovering from 2003, when the central bank “floated” the Egyptian pound, releasing it from the established exchange rate with the dollar and allowing it to fall in value. A popular saying summed up the situation: the eye desires what the hand cannot grasp. So even fewer people were buying pricey hardcovers, except for business books. I wondered why. Were these tomes essential office décor? Did businessmen display them like framed college degrees, imbuing their enterprises with an aura of success and scholarship? Was there an underlying assumption that businessmen could afford to spend money on books?

  I walked to Hind’s side of the Heliopolis store for answers. Her Arabic business section was stacked with translations of my English-language bestsellers. Arab authors writing about business were curiously absent.

  “Can I help you with something?” Amir, Hind’s Arabic-book buyer, asked with a smile. Once a darbuka drummer in a traveling band, Amir was handsome, with a towering build, ripe-date complexion, slicked-back hair, and wire-rimmed glasses. Still, his most striking attribute was his quick wit. He seemed to charm everyone he encountered.

  “Yes. Where are the Arab authors who write about business?”

  “There aren’t any. Come on, Ustazah, lead the way!” he quipped. “Jokes aside, there’s Ibrahim Elfiky, but he writes more about personal development, less about business.”

  “Don’t customers ask for local authors?”

  “No. They want the foreigners.” Amir’s gaze narrowed as he mused, “I don’t think they would trust the advice of a local. They want the Americans who made it big.” The customers’ skepticism was well-founded. Nasser’s reforms had sequestered businesses, promising collective ownership with the people. Once-thriving enterprises became inefficient bureaucracies saddled with people who felt little agency, or ownership, over them. After his election in 1970, Sadat, attempting to salvage the failing economy, instituted Infitah, literally “openness,” an open-door policy that appealed to private (mostly foreign) investors. Mubarak, the next president, began a privatization program further aimed at divesting state ownership from the many businesses that had diminished in value due to poor management and corruption.

  Amir continued. “Hard work won’t get you anywhere, but bribery will. We’ve learned to be suspicious of businessmen, because we see them as fat cats who amassed their wealth through dishonesty. Success is not something we celebrate. We envy it, but we know it was gained unethically.” He paused, as if answering a question. “Pray that Diwan coasts along. Don’t wish for it to become too successful.” His words echoed my father’s repeated warning: “In this life, keep your head down and hope nobody notices you.”

  * * *

  I thought of Amir and my father as I attempted to stock new business titles. At the same time, the project grew more personal. Once a compulsive reader of fiction, within the first five years of Diwan, I had begun to capitulate to the pressures and demands of my new persona as a businessperson, a label that became more adhesive as the bookstore grew—with our new office, new staff, new sections, and now, new location. I tried, and failed, to see myself as a businessperson. As usual, I read in search of answers. Surprising everyone, but most of all myself, I became one of Diwan’s dedicated consumers of business and management books, hoping that their pages would offer guidance. (My experience with nonfiction had previously been limited to gender studies in college.) The books failed to capture my imagination, but I kept reading, fueled by insecurity, in the hope of self-improvement. I was never good with numbers. I preferred words. I knew nothing of business plans, bottom lines, top lines, and management lines. I knew that lines were things I crossed.

  * * *

  As I read, I encountered my nonexistence. The books were oblivious to my cultural context; people like me had gotten lost in translation. None of these authors provided strategies for navigating Egyptian bureaucracy. Standardized guidance, like budget advice, failed to accommodate the idiosyncratic nightmare of creating systems from scratch (like ISBNs and sales figures), surrounded by chaos. What piece of advice could help me deal with the fact that every shipment that entered Cairo Airport took anywhere from one week to three months to clear, depending on the tangle of regulations, missing paperwork, capacity, and staff? How could I ensure stability when everything that should have been a fixed cost was a floating variable? How could I handle a workforce that would rather be employed by the government, a boss that would pay less but also demand less? Or customers who expected Diwan to be a library, and tried to return books after reading them? Practical tools were useless in an impractical landscape that seemed to follow only one rule: insha’allah, bokra, maalesh. The words play on bureaucratic responses to requests: if God wills it, tomorrow, never mind. And then there was the added dimension of gender. These male authors, businessmen, and entrepreneurs came into this world never questioning that it belonged to them, whereas even in my own shop, I sometimes felt out of place.

  I wondered if the books worked for my customers. What lessons did they learn? Many Egyptian companies were one-man shows, driven by a strong male leader. Ours was a culture accustomed to pharaoh figures. Delegation was seen as a sign of weakness, putting you at risk of getting ripped off. Maybe elsewhere, people understand that collaboration enhances efficiency and gives workers autonomy. In theory, I agree, but I struggle to delegate. I can’t blame this on my being a control freak. I became controlling for a reason: I couldn’t trust others to do my job to my standards. Perhaps the level of excellence that I sought was impossible to achieve. Only Hind and Nihal understood why I still insisted on stacking books myself when I had so many other responsibilities: most of my staff would avoid alphabetizing titles. For them, it was enough to dust the shelves and walk away. Since I was unable to rely on others, all tasks took on equal importance: both the mammoth and the minuscule kept me up at night.

  I faced my own success and recognition with ambivalence. I shared Amir’s distrust of the former, and I recalled my father’s warning against the latter. But I was actively grappling with both. The Zamalek shop had a growing international reputation, with more tourists shopping daily alongside our regulars. Heliopolis was a larger store, a physical manifestation of our success. Suddenly I, as Mrs. Diwan, was seen as successful, too. And the visibility that came with being Mrs. Diwan was a little oppressive. Maybe it was a language problem: new words, titles, and identities failed to convey reality. On the one hand, I felt validated—noticed, witnessed. Can success exist if no one else sees it? And on the other hand, I felt terror at having my greatest ambition wrested out of my head and into the world. The incredible vulnerability of making a private thought public plagued me, and was compounded by the new shop. I couldn’t be in two places at once. I had to let go. I asked my friend Yasmin for advice. She told me to stop thinking. “Thought belittles. Thought is a distraction. Understand that a thought is just a thought. You’ve always made a lot of noise. Accept quietness. Let go of old narratives that no longer serve you. I promise that new ones will appear.” As I immediately wrote her words down on my to-do list, she snapped, “Oh, for fuck’s sake! Maybe if you stop doing, you might start being.”

  * * *

  I remember an ill-fated meeting one summer morning in 2008 with a man who wanted to franchise Diwan. It was exceptionally hot. Samir had parked far away. As I entered the grounds of the Heliopolis shop, I felt that my appearance reflected the sun’s fury: pink cheeks, damp hair. I’m an aggressively punctual person, and I loathe people who are habitually late. I checked my watch to ensure that I w
as a few minutes early for the meeting. I stood at the steps leading up to the villa. I decided to take a tour of the back garden to check the cleanliness of the outdoor café, knowing that only desperate smokers would be occupying its tables on a day like this. Satisfied, I made my way up the stairs of the villa, passed through the arched doorway, and stood in the hallway, savoring the air-conditioning. Surveying the display opposite the cashier terminal, I saw books in disarray. I registered the disorder with disapproval, then began climbing the winding staircase to the second floor, circling Minou’s suspended chandelier. On the surrounding walls hung portraits of thinkers and doers across disciplines, times, and places, also designed by Minou: Sheikh Muhammad ‘Abduh (Egypt’s liberal Islamic reformer), Simone de Beauvoir, Marie Curie, Mahatma Gandhi, Pablo Picasso, Malcolm X, Mayy Ziyadeh, and many more. As I entered the café, I saw Nihal at a center table, deeply absorbed in The Power of Now. My eyes were always drawn to hers, which were patient and green. She inserted her bookmark into the well-thumbed pages and laid the book to rest on the table.

  “Why can’t our staff understand that well-arranged displays are pleasing to the eye? They enable customers to see, and maybe, hopefully, fucking buy a book, so we can pay their fucking salaries!” I complained. “I thought the books at the entrance were bad, but the ones near the stairs are stacked like a fruit seller’s pyramid of oranges. We just went over this last month.”

  “Talk to Marketing and stop micromanaging.” Nihal’s expression stayed placid. She poured water into the empty glass before me. “I love Eckhart Tolle. You should read him.”

  “My bedtime reading is How to Write a Successful Business Plan and The Seven Habits of Highly Effective People. I’ve just finished Who Moved My Cheese? An A-Mazing Way to Deal with Change in Your Work and in Your Life. And guess what? I still don’t like change. And I like self-help books even less.”

  “Don’t allow your passion for Diwan to kill your passion for reading,” she said, tapping a small brown glass bottle into the palm of her hand. She unscrewed the lid and administered five drops into my water. “We are successful as we are. One can only plan so much.”

  “You know I don’t believe in this homeopathy crap.” I picked up my glass, watching the drops dissipate.

  “No matter. It works regardless.”

  “I’m not sure these business books help. They don’t speak to me or my circumstances.”

  “Then go back to reading fiction. Maybe for you there’s more truth in it.”

  “Where’s the franchise guy?”

  “The traffic is terrible.”

  “Unless he’s a tourist, he fucking knows that as well as we do.”

  “Hind isn’t here yet. You can fuss about that,” Nihal teased.

  “Hind has trained me, and all of us, well over the years. We know what to expect from her,” I said, resigned. In her lifelong rebellion against our father, who saw punctuality as a prerequisite to personhood, Hind has never been early, let alone on time, to a single event in her life. Growing up, I always returned home five minutes prior to any curfew our father issued; for Hind, a schedule was a random assortment of numbers designed to be disregarded. To this day, we travel separately to the same meetings. I insist on being five minutes early and she doesn’t mind being five minutes late. We fight.

  As the minutes passed, I caught one of the customer-service staff’s eye and directed his gaze to the offending displays. Shahira, our longest-serving Zamalek manager and the one who’d investigated my ballerina, kept reminding me to take it easy on our new hires. Heeding her advice, I tried to breathe out, then I channeled all of my frustration toward this staff member, glaring blatantly at the book displays and back at him. Finally, I marched over to make my distaste known. When I returned, Nihal was chatting to a young man dressed in a comically ill-fitting business suit with broad shoulder pads and cropped pants. He had an uncannily white face, brown eyes, and a substantial beard without the accompanying mustache. There was something insincere about him. Even the looseness of his clothes felt affected.

  “The traffic must be terrible this morning,” I opened, with a salvo rather than salve. He smiled but didn’t apologize. We offered him tea, coffee, or Turkish coffee. He declined, and then began to speak.

  “Diwan has become a household name in no time. I never imagined that Egyptians read so much, or were willing to spend their money on books.”

  “The saying goes, ‘Egyptians write books, Lebanese publish them, and Iraqis read them,’” I countered. “We’ve created an experience, and that’s why we are a success.”

  “Sorry I’m late,” said Hind, casually breezing into the last vacant chair. She stared intently at our guest, urging the meeting to continue uninterrupted.

  “Yes, and you set high standards. One of my favorite business gurus says, ‘Good is the enemy of great.’” He leaned back, as if pleased with his own cleverness.

  “Mediocrity is our enemy,” I said.

  The man cut to the chase. He asked us to imagine a world overtaken by Diwans: mini Diwan caravans in rural areas; kiosks in malls; smaller outlets in universities and middle-income neighborhoods; and even stand-alone Diwan cafés. I reminded him how small we still were, with only two shops and a five-year age gap between them. Still, there was something so alluring about imagining a regional Diwan takeover.

  “The scale you are suggesting is a little…” I trailed off, allowing my silence to speak the rest.

  He was undeterred. “Now is Diwan’s moment. Remember what Jack Welch said: ‘Control your own destiny or someone else will.’” I hated the idea that anything coming out of this guy’s mouth could be insightful.

  As our sycophantic visitor detailed the art of franchising, the modest fee his company would take, and the service to God and country we would be doing, Nihal listened earnestly. She was probably practicing the mindful acceptance of her then guru, Eckhart Tolle. Unwilling to forgive the man’s tardiness, I kept glancing at my watch. At the forty-minute mark, I closed my notebook. I dropped it into the open mouth of my bag, curled up beside me like a lapdog. He paused. “I see that I have taken up too much of your time. Here’s my card. Think about my proposal, and I’ll be in touch.” On cue, Hind, Nihal, and I stood up; I extended my hand to shake. He looked at my hand, looked back up at me blankly. I kept my hand outstretched. He offered me his elbow. My head tilted quizzically.

  “I don’t shake hands with women.” One, two, three, four, five seconds passed. Then I forced a broad smile.

  “Hug, then?” I suggested. He turned, flustered, and exited in a huff. None of us considered walking him out. Our laughter resounded through Diwan’s café. I wondered if it followed him down the stairs. I didn’t care.

  “And to think you were offended that he didn’t apologize for being late!” Nihal slapped one palm against the other in disbelief, her eyes glinting with mirth.

  “Personally, I’m disappointed you didn’t just hug him,” said Hind.

  “Or elbow him in the face! Maybe homeopathy does work?” I suggested gleefully.

  As we collected our belongings, Nihal spoke what I was thinking: “How does a man attempt to franchise a business founded and managed by women, and yet think women are unworthy of a simple handshake?”

  “Because he can,” said Hind, zipping up her bag with a finality that put an end to both laughter and further discussion.

  In hindsight, I realize that we should have read the signs: the large beard without a mustache, the trouser legs cropped to avoid touching the dirt of the ground. Both were in accordance with what Salafists believed to be the Prophet’s sunna. Salafism, a revivalist movement within Sunni Islam, developed in Egypt at the end of the nineteenth century in reaction to Western imperialism. It advocated for a return to the early years of Islam, during which “purer” forms of worship were commonplace. But this was three years before the revolution, and we hadn’t met our fellow Egyptians yet, so signs of religious allegiance went unnoticed.

  The Muba
rak regime was hegemonic in its support of mainstream Islam. Members of other religious factions practiced blending in, revealing membership through subtle signals only their brethren could read. They existed quietly, spreading their regimented religious practices, waiting for their day to come. And it did: with the fall of the Mubarak regime, groups whose relation to Islam was tenuous at best revealed themselves and the extent of their power. In the thirty years of Mubarak’s reign, I didn’t know anyone who had voted for him, or voted in general. Yet at the end of every election, he was returned to power with a 97 percent victory. In 2011, when he was ousted from power and unrigged elections and referendums began to be held, we all realized how little about our countrymen we really knew. But it would be some time before we’d be forced to face the full meaning of that rejected handshake.

  * * *

  Hind, Nihal, and I were three very different managers. I am not good at people. If Diwan’s success had been dependent on my ability to win friends and influence others, we would have failed miserably. To be clear, I was a bitch to work with. I know, I know, it’s a bad word. But I reclaim it with pride. I am a difficult person. I am not easy or simple. I missed the memo that suggested I should be. I was—and it’s gotten worse with age—an impatient, exacting, and dictatorial leader. I was tactical, exerting pressure on those who worked with me and driving them to do better. I apologized for none of it, since whatever I asked of others, I demanded of myself first. Hind and Nihal understood that and let me be. Nothing provoked my fury like a half-assed job. Those who worked as hard as I did won my unwavering respect and loyalty. With those who didn’t, I became notorious for my vitriol. I never grasped the extent of it until years later, when I discovered that I had earned the code name of “Terminator.” Hind and Nihal dispatched me as their envoy to meetings with those they didn’t care to see again; I was utterly unable to negotiate or mediate.