The Bookseller of Southall

I met Shah Muhammad Rais in Southall on a Friday afternoon in early August. It was the season of heat waves, the ‘season for remembering Afghanistan’, as Rais wryly put it, referring to the transient glut of news coverage of the country four years after the Taliban’s takeover. I had last seen Rais in Kabul over a decade ago, at his famous bookshop. He left Afghanistan in September 2021, arriving in the UK as an asylum seeker, living first at a Home Office hotel before being moved to his council flat in Southall.

In his living-room, Rais offered me a cup of masala tea and a tray of dried fruit. His wife was in Norway, he said, and his many children and grandchildren were scattered across the world. The bookshelves were full: a few English titles of the kind he’d stocked in Kabul, from translations of Sufi poetry to accounts of Nato’s long war in Afghanistan. Most of the books, however, were published by his new company, Indo Aryana Book Co.

Rais abandoned a career as an engineer to set up his bookshop in Kabul in 1974. It stayed open through decades of regime change and civil war. Until 2010, he also ran a branch in the lobby of the Intercontinental Hotel in Kabul. In 2003, Rais was the subject of an unflattering portrait by the Norwegian journalist Åsne Seierstad. Her account of her time in his home, The Bookseller of Kabul, became an international bestseller. Rais sued her in a Norwegian court for invasion of privacy. (She was later cleared on appeal, and has since written another book on Afghanistan.) He wrote and self-published a rebuttal, Once Upon a Time There Was a Bookseller in Kabul.

In 2023, the Taliban attacked the bookshop and threatened the manager. But Rais told me he was still getting books to readers. ‘We supply them to students, especially to the hidden schools that are functioning for girls. Sometimes they get donations, or people order for them from abroad from us online. We send the books with a bike to their address.’ He also sends books to other cities across the country through bus drivers. ‘Usually they themselves are illiterate, but they want to help. Ninety per cent don’t even take payment for doing this work.’

Rais showed me some of the books he’s published. There was a series of illustrated stories from the Quran, told in simple language for children, in Dari and Pashto (‘The Taliban have a problem because of the pictures’), a series of illustrated Russian stories, also for children, and an Afghan-Jewish folk tale called The Wooden Sword, which ‘makes the Taliban very angry’. He also publishes flash cards and wall charts for learning Dari and Pashto. Among his bestselling titles is a Dari translation of reflections on statecraft by Lee Kuan Yew, the former prime minister of Singapore. Other steady favourites are collections of classical Persian poetry by Abdul Qadir Bedil and Mirza Ghalib, as well as translations of Dostoevsky and Balzac.

‘Things are really bad in Kabul,’ Rais told me. ‘There is a lot of poverty, and no work. The schools are closed, and even if they are open most of the classes are for Islamic studies. Even that is not the right Islam, it is the Taliban’s ideology.’ And yet, he said, ‘people are still reading, despite all the problems.’

In his Kabul shop, Rais used to charge international customers more to subsidise local readers. ‘I told every foreigner who came to my shop openly: “If it costs twenty euros in Europe, I sell the same book for forty euros here, and I put the money for students.”’

For his new business, he says he has stuck to the same idea. His company prints the books at relatively low cost in Iran and India. ‘Then we sell them at more expensive rates globally – for example, the same book costs ten pounds here and 26 pence in Afghanistan. If they buy one book, we can sell a hundred books to Afghans.’

The first book published by Indo Aryana Book Co, he told me, was a Balochi translation of The Little Prince. ‘I sent the story to my friend who is a Baloch writer and poet to translate it. Then I sent it to another friend, an Iranian Baloch, for proofreading. Then I got it edited by an Afghan Baloch. The result was a bestselling book.’ Many of his readers are in the diaspora, ordering the books online. ‘Mostly people buy the language primers and the kids’ books, especially Afghan schools and parents who want their kids to learn the language.’

I asked him what he missed about Kabul. He pointed to the three phones beside him. ‘I’ve switched two of these off today so we can talk, or they are ringing all the time,’ he said. ‘I am lucky. I see Kabul everyday. I talk to poets and writers and politicians. They are not silent, they are still working. The people who are silent are the reactionary people, the diplomats who are living in ease abroad. They don't say a word – not good or bad.’

In London, he said, he is happy because he is busy. He has plans to open a bookshop among the wedding halls of Southall. ‘Do you know, these halls are empty for at least fifteen days a month? And because most weddings are at night, they are free during the day also,’ he said. His plan is to rent a hall and transform it into a ‘multipurpose cultural venue, that will have a bookshop, host events and also sell other things connected to Afghan culture like clothes and dry fruits’. He described the design of the bookshelves he had in mind, that would fold out during the day and not take up any space during the night. ‘I am very hopeful it will happen soon,’ he said.

I asked what had become of the archive he had painstakingly built in Kabul, an attempt to preserve his country’s literary heritage, including pamphlets and official publications from Afghanistan’s recent past. ‘I have kept it safe, it is mostly abroad, spread out over a hundred places,’ he said. ‘The Taliban destroyed some books, but it’s as if they robbed a millionaire of a few rupees.’ Rais has built and rebuilt his collection several times. ‘My children tell me to stop doing this work, but why should I? I am still alive. I will keep going.’

‘When I began my bookshop, people told my father: “Your son has gone mad.” But we have a Farsi saying, “Deewana kaar e khud hoshiyar ast”: “The madman is good at his own work.”’