Looking back at Al Saqi, London's finest Arabic-language bookshop

This week, Al Saqi, London’s premier centre for Arabic books, sparked an enormous response across social media when it announced it would be closing at the end of the year.

“We imagined that there would be reaction but never anticipated the extent to which people feel that sadness,” says Lynn Gaspard, the publisher and managing director of Saqi Books.

Ms Gaspard says the response was "heartbreaking … it’s been really overwhelming. It means everything to us.”

For more than 40 years Al Saqi Bookshop was the centre of the Arab community and played a role far beyond being a simple retailer of books.

“There were few places to feel at home for Arabs and Muslims,” Ms Gaspard says. “Since 9/11 it has not been the easiest of times.

"We were a home for people who were emigres, and especially for the expat Arab community.

"We would play music — world music, Arab music — and the atmosphere in the shop offered a safe space where you wouldn’t have to explain yourself.”

The bookshop built up a loyal following, offering books not available anywhere else.

Ms Gaspard describes Gulf Arabs arriving with suitcases at the end of the summer, stocking up on books for the year ahead.

“During the time I lived in London, Al Saqi Books was our meeting point with other members of the Arab diaspora,” says Maryam Al Dabbagh, an Iraqi who now runs the cultural consultancy Rouya in Dubai.

“It was because of Saqi that we read the wonderful works of Fatema Mernissi and Amin Maalouf.

"I used to recommend brilliant English translations of Arabic literary masterpieces to my friends around the world, which Saqi made possible.”

The bookshop also helped to spread Arabic literature to the Arab communities who could not afford it. They donated books to schools and charities, and to refugee camps across Europe and the UK.

Ms Gaspard’s father, Andre Gaspard, opened Al Saqi Books with his childhood friend Mai Ghoussoub in 1978. They had fled Beirut because of the civil war.

The final straw came, Ms Gaspard says, when Ms Ghoussoub was driving a wounded Palestinian soldier to hospital. Her car came under shelling and she lost an eye.

Soon after that, they both left — Ms Ghoussoub to London and Mr Gaspard first to Paris. He soon moved to London and his wife, Salwa, followed later.

Ms Gaspard says her father did not speak English but he was determined to maintain the life of the kind he had led in Beirut, where he was a lawyer and journalist.

In Beirut, Ms Ghoussoub and the Gaspards had been part of the Trotskyist socialist movement and they endowed Al Saqi with the same ideals.

“They were all young socialists,” Ms Gaspard says. “They had a dream of a better society.”

The Gaspards and Ms Ghoussoub quickly moved into publishing as well as selling.

Al Saqi Books started publishing English-language works in 1983, and then it opened an Arabic-language division, Dar al Saqi, in 1988. Both presses are still continuing even though the bookshop will close.

The 1990s was the heyday of the bookshop: it was making so much money, says Ms Gaspard, that it financed the two presses.

The Iraqi architect Mohamed Makiya, who had been part of the blooming of the country’s art scene in the 1950s and '60s, opened the Kufa Gallery next door.

The gallery hosted important and first-time exhibitions of Arab modern and contemporary art, and held events for the bookshops — loud parties full of fascinating people, says Ms Gaspard, that were a melting pot of Arab and British cultural life.

It was a key stop for Arab cultural figures as well as literary luminaries beyond the regional community, such as Harold Pinter and Wole Soyinka, both now Nobel Prize winners.

Ms Gaspard and her sister grew up at the bookshop. Their school bus dropped them off in front of its doors, and they spent the afternoons playing in the maze-like arrangement of books in its basement.

Nights were filled with political discussion, she recalls — the topics went over her head, but she understood the passion with which they were debated.

Deciding to close

Independent bookshops worldwide have notoriously suffered over the past 20 years, in large part caused by online retailers such as Amazon, which began as purely a bookselling operation.

But as they have become endangered, their value has become more visible.

New schemes are being put in place to enable online ordering from independent booksellers, such as bookshop.org, which was launched in the US and UK in 2020, and has so far generated more than £2 million ($2.4 million) for bookshops in the UK.

According to the Booksellers' Association, after a 20-year decline in the number of bookshops, the figure has been rising for five consecutive years.

Ms Gaspard says that although they struggled through the typical ups and downs of an independent press, their resilience and its proximity to the effects of the region’s conflicts was part of the bookshop’s charm.

It was not immune to the difficulties and indignities suffered by Arab expatriates.

They contended with censorship, hate mail, and death threats — particularly during the fatwa against Salman Rushdie, whose books they continued to stock.

Ms Gaspard describes Gulf Arabs arriving with suitcases aghot the end of the summer, stocking up on books for the year ahead.d..ey were pushing the boundaries t

Conflict seeped in from afar. In 2006, during the July War between Lebanon and Israel, their warehouse in Beirut was bombed by the Israelis, while the naval blockade made it impossible to bring out more stock.

And in London, the closing of Kufa Gallery in 2007 marked the end of an era. Ms Ghoussoub died that year, and although the Saqi Bookshop continued to serve an important important function in the Arab community, its heyday was over.

Over the past five years, the crises continued to add up: first Brexit, then the pandemic and then the rise in cost of living.

Al Saqi Books had the added difficulty of having to weather Lebanon’s all-consuming crisis, as its stock came from its warehouses in the country.

The cost of shipping has trebled, Ms Gaspard says, and contacts in Lebanon want to be paid in cash. Currency fluctuations — for the Lebanese pound and UK sterling — battered the bookshop’s already slim margins.

Last year, flash flooding in their London area of Westbourne Grove inundated their basement, where Ms Gaspard and her sister used to play as children.

“There were too many challenges,” she says. “I’m not sure who would have been able to meet them. After 44 years of trading, it’s time to move on.”

The bookshop closes in a different context to its opening 44 years ago. At the time, there were few other Arab cultural sites where the expatriate community could meet.

But now organisations such as the Arab-British Centre, the Mosaic Rooms, Arts Canteen and Marsm are displaying Arab art and culture, and providing a space for the home away from home that Al Saqi Books was first to offer.

The efforts of prominent Arab patrons and supporters, such as the Menaac acquisition committee for Tate, and of Arab specialists such as Venetia Porter, formerly of the British Museum, have also helped Arab art to enter British institutions.

Ms Gaspard says this changed landscape will continue to serve the Arab community. She says she is determined to use the moment not to mourn, but to celebrate the bookshop’s impact.

“Every book you sell has a positive impact,” she says. “You just open their world just slightly larger. It’s an achievement and a privilege.”