At the 12-day annual fair, New Azbakya recreates Cairo’s iconic book market in a time capsule with over 3,000 vintage newspapers, magazines, and books including rare UAE titles and Arab cultural gems from the last century
Sharjah, November 11, 2025
In a fairground of glossy new book releases, LED-lit banners and digital storytelling workshops, one stall at the ongoing 44th Sharjah International Book Fair (SIBF) seems to hum to a different rhythm, literally.
As you walk past exhibit U14, what will get to you first is the soft crackle of an old photo floating through the air, playing an Egyptian classic by the timeless Abdel Halim Hafez. The scent of aging paper lingers as visitors step closer, drawn not by bright displays but by the sepia-tinted quiet nostalgia of a time gone by.
Stacked in neat but timeworn piles, New Azbakya is less a stall and more a portal, or perhaps a museum, that serves as a carefully assembled time capsule of the Arab world’s cultural memory. Its shelves are heavy with timewarped magazines, black-and-white photographs and framed yellowed newspapers from another century. On one side, cassette tapes and postcards from Cairo’s golden age of cinema spill out of wooden crates. On another, English, French, and Italian paperbacks peek at you from a tranche of Arabic bestsellers from the mid-20th century.
“I wanted people to feel what it was like to live in the Arab world in the 70s and 80s, before screens, before everything became digital,” says Ehab Elrifai, owner of New Azbakya. “Every piece here has a story. All of it is from my personal collection.”
Elrifai’s stall takes its name from Cairo’s legendary Azbakeya market, once the beating heart of Egypt’s literary scene, where readers, poets, and collectors scoured narrow alleys for rare books and forgotten treasures. “It was where Egyptian intellectual life lived,” Elrifai said. “I wanted to recreate a piece of that here in Sharjah.”
UAE gems from another era
But the collection also reaches closer to home to the UAE’s own story. On display are issues of Al Ittihad from the 1990s and a September 4, 1985 issue of Majid, the much-loved Emirati children’s magazine. A particularly prized find is Customs and Traditions in the UAE, authored by Sheikh Mohammed bin Ahmed bin Sheikh Hassan and commissioned by the late Sheikh Zayed bin Sultan Al Nahyan, the founding father of the UAE.
Visitors often pause longer here than other booths nearby. Some run their fingers gently across old covers, others hum along with the Egyptian song playing softly from the phonograph. “These papers and magazines are not just history,” says Elrifai. “They show how people thought, dressed, laughed and just how they dreamed back in the day.”
One of Elrifai’s proudest pieces is a collection of magazines Rose al-Yousef, named eponymously after Arab world’s first female journalist and first published in October exactly 100 years ago and Akhir Sa’a (The Last Hour), launched in 1924 and among Egypt’s oldest publications – both once vibrant forums culture in Cairo. “Rose al-Youssef stopped publishing around six or seven years ago,” he said, picking up a copy whose edges are feathered with age. “I sometimes buy a magazine for $1,000, then reprint it – just so the new generation can know their history, their culture.”
Tucked between Arabic classics and pulp serials are unexpected finds in English too – a Co-operative News issue from Manchester dated 1949 (Dh50), a French travelogue on North Africa, and English-language books about life in the UAE in the 1980s, selling for Dh300.
The juxtaposition feels deliberate – global yet intimate, like flipping through the collective scrapbook of a region still negotiating its past and future while at the crossroads of a wondrous present. “These papers and magazines are not just history,” Elrifai said. “They show how people thought, dressed, laughed – how they dreamt back in the day.”
Visitors linger longer here than in most stalls, eyes skimming past modern hardcovers to trace the fading headlines of a world that once was. Children point curiously at cassette tapes; older visitors smile wistfully at covers they once knew.
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