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CAIRO / Al-Ahram Weekly / Interview / April 2-8, 2009 edition
Of the thousands of passers-by who walk past an old building on Al-Geish Street, near Bab Al-Sheariya Square in Downtown Cairo, very few can realise that on the fifth floor there is a huge flat that acts both as a library and a home.
It contains 15,000 books in Arabic and 3,000 others in English, among them hundreds of rare books and reference works. The flat is also home to
Gamal El-Banna, who has read the majority of the books his library contains.
El-Banna is almost 90 years old now, and he tells
Al-Ahram Weekly that ever since he was 15 he has made a habit of reading two books in Arabic a day and one book in English every two days. He started collecting the treasured contents of his library in 1940, adding to the books his father and his brother had already gathered.
The library is impressive indeed. Every wall in El-Banna's flat is covered top to floor with shelves, and even the bedroom is filled with books, except for a gap in the shelves on one of the walls, which contains a photograph of his beloved younger sister Fawzia.
Interview by Sahar El-Bahr
"I am a writer. It's the only job I've ever had. It's even written on my ID card. The only thing I wanted to do in my life is read and write," El-Banna says. "It is problematic, because I am a writer in a country where few people read. I was a weak child and was never fit enough to play with the other children in the streets or to ride a bicycle. I was fit for nothing but to sit and read and write. I spent most of my childhood in my father's huge library."
Though he is best known today as a prominent Islamic scholar, El-Banna in fact has written over 50 books that deal not only with Islam, but also with politics, economics and the trade union movement. If certain concerns characterise all his books, they are with freedom, religious revival, and the use of the mind to find new solutions to old problems.
Click to continue reading
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly
CAIRO / Al-Ahram Weekly / Interview / April 2-8, 2009 edition
Of the thousands of passers-by who walk past an old building on Al-Geish Street, near Bab Al-Sheariya Square in Downtown Cairo, very few can realise that on the fifth floor there is a huge flat that acts both as a library and a home.
It contains 15,000 books in Arabic and 3,000 others in English, among them hundreds of rare books and reference works. The flat is also home to Gamal El-Banna, who has read the majority of the books his library contains.
El-Banna is almost 90 years old now, and he tells Al-Ahram Weekly that ever since he was 15 he has made a habit of reading two books in Arabic a day and one book in English every two days. He started collecting the treasured contents of his library in 1940, adding to the books his father and his brother had already gathered.
The library is impressive indeed. Every wall in El-Banna's flat is covered top to floor with shelves, and even the bedroom is filled with books, except for a gap in the shelves on one of the walls, which contains a photograph of his beloved younger sister Fawzia.
Interview by Sahar El-Bahr
"I am a writer. It's the only job I've ever had. It's even written on my ID card. The only thing I wanted to do in my life is read and write," El-Banna says. "It is problematic, because I am a writer in a country where few people read. I was a weak child and was never fit enough to play with the other children in the streets or to ride a bicycle. I was fit for nothing but to sit and read and write. I spent most of my childhood in my father's huge library."
Though he is best known today as a prominent Islamic scholar, El-Banna in fact has written over 50 books that deal not only with Islam, but also with politics, economics and the trade union movement. If certain concerns characterise all his books, they are with freedom, religious revival, and the use of the mind to find new solutions to old problems.
Click to continue reading
© Copyright Al-Ahram Weekly
