The Language I Met on the Shelves

The Arabic section at Kinokuniya was a place I approached cautiously.

I wish I could say that I walked in with confidence, eager to reconnect with a language that had always been mine. The truth was much less romantic.

I felt foreign there.

Not because I could not read Arabic, but because I had never learned how to inhabit it as a reader. The language of everyday life, school assignments, examinations, and occasional poetry was familiar enough. Literature, however, felt like a distant relative I had somehow failed to know.

People around me often spoke of Arabic literature with a confidence I could not relate to. Some quoted Al-Mutanabbi effortlessly. Others recited lines by Al-Shafi'i as though they had always belonged to them. Meanwhile, my own understanding felt painfully limited. I often found myself wondering whether I had somehow missed a conversation everyone else had been invited to.

Every time I wandered into that section, I carried an uncomfortable feeling of trespassing. That someone would eventually notice I did not belong among those shelves and ask what exactly I thought I was doing there.

An irrational fear, perhaps. But not an unfamiliar one.

I worried about overlooking something obvious. I worried about revealing how little I knew. More than anything, I dreaded discovering that the distance I felt from Arabic literature was entirely my own doing—that the fault lay not with the language, but with me. Beneath all of that lingered a quieter suspicion: perhaps Arabic literature had been speaking all along, and I simply had not learned how to listen.

After all, I had spent most of my life in an Arab country while feeling surprisingly detached from Arabic literature. To many people, that alone would seem like a contradiction.

To me, it felt like reality.

Still, I kept returning.

Fifteen minutes at a time.

Sometimes thirty.

Just enough to walk the shelves and see what was there.

My expectations were remarkably small.

Everything I knew about Arabic literature had come from classrooms, textbooks, and school anthologies. Arabic, in my mind, belonged to poetry, classical texts, formal speeches, and the occasional passage students were expected to memorize and promptly forget.

I did not expect to find my preferred genres.

I certainly did not expect to discover books that felt written for readers like me.

If anything, I expected confirmation of what I already believed: that Arabic literature and I simply occupied different worlds.

Instead, I found abundance.

Rows and rows of books I had never heard of.

What surprised me most was not the number of books, but the realization that Arabic publishing existed as a living ecosystem entirely separate from my assumptions about it.

I had expected familiarity. Instead, I was confronted by the uncomfortable realization that I knew almost nothing.

There were entire sections devoted to genres I had never associated with Arabic literature. Contemporary fiction sat beside historical novels. Shelves of translated works introduced names I recognized from elsewhere but had never imagined encountering in Arabic. Books on philosophy, psychology, and religion occupied their own corners, each demanding far more attention than I could give them during my short visits.

The experience was strangely humbling.

For years, Arabic literature existed in my imagination as a relatively narrow tradition. Not because anyone explicitly told me so, but because my exposure to it was equally narrow. School offered excerpts. Anthologies offered selections.

Examinations offered answers.

None of them prepared me for the overwhelming abundance of choice.

For the first time, Arabic literature stopped feeling finite.

Until then, Arabic literature had been something prescribed.

Here, it was something chosen.

The difference was profound.

For the first time, I found myself browsing instead of studying. Curious instead of obligated.

And somewhere in that curiosity, a quiet excitement began to emerge.

Perhaps there was something here after all.

The difficulty, of course, was knowing where to begin.

Looking back, I had no strategy whatsoever.

I wandered largely by instinct.

Today, recommendations are everywhere. A few minutes online can generate endless lists of books worth reading.

Back then, things were different.

There were no literary circles around me. No trusted readers whose tastes mirrored my own. No carefully curated lists guiding me toward essential works.

I would pick up a book because the title sounded intriguing. Another because the cover caught my eye. Occasionally, I would open a novel at random and read a few pages while standing between the shelves, hoping some sentence would convince me to take it home.

Most failed.

Some felt distant from the very first page. Others felt oddly artificial, as though they were trying too hard to sound literary. A few simply left no impression at all.

Yet every now and then, a book would refuse to be returned to the shelf.

Some books held my attention while others left me cold. I could sense a pattern emerging long before I could explain it. Certain books seemed to echo conversations I was already having elsewhere—in English, in translated literature, and in the private corners of my own curiosity. I recognized the feeling before I understood its source.

The irony was that I often found myself reaching for English to describe what I was searching for in Arabic. I recognized depth when I encountered it. I recognized ambiguity, symbolism, atmosphere, and intellectual curiosity. Yet translating those instincts into a coherent explanation proved surprisingly difficult.

It was on a random Tuesday. I had left work early and, as had become routine by then, found myself wandering through the bookstore once again. One of the booksellers was arranging a newly arrived stack of novels when a familiar name caught my attention: Elif Shafak.

I hesitated.

I previously read The Bastard of Istanbul in English and, to my surprise, did not enjoy it very much. While the novel received widespread praise, it simply did not resonate with me. Finding another book by the same author was hardly a moment of excitement.

If anything, I was skeptical.

Yet curiosity got the better of me.

I picked up The Forty Rules of Love and opened it to a random page.

"لا تحاول أن تقاوم التغييرات التي تعترض سبيلك، بل دع الحياة تعيش فيك. ولا تقلق إذا قلبت حياتك رأساً على عقب. فكيف يمكنك أن تعرف أن الجانب الذي اعتدت عليه أفضل من الجانب الذي سيأتي؟"

"Do not resist the changes that come your way. Instead, let life live through you. And do not worry that your life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?"

I remember pausing.

This was not what I expected.

I thought I was holding a love story. Instead, I found references to Rumi, Sufism, philosophy, and ideas I recognized only vaguely. I knew of Rumi. I had encountered references to Sufism before. Yet these ideas remained at the edges of my understanding—familiar enough to recognize, distant enough to remain unexplored. 

The more I read, the more intrigued I became.

For the first time, I wondered whether I had been looking in the wrong places all along. Even if the novel was translated, it still mattered. I was encountering these ideas through Arabic, and that alone felt significant.

Hope.

Not certainty. Not conviction. Certainly not the feeling of having finally found what I was looking for.

Only hope.

The kind that makes you close the book carefully, tuck it under your arm, and head for the nearest café before the spell has a chance to break. I remember settling into my usual armchair by the window, wrapping my hands around a cup of coffee, and opening the book again. I wanted to know whether the feeling would survive beyond that single page.

The book did not answer every question I carried into that café.

If anything, it left me with more.

But it revealed something far more important: the possibility that my assumptions had been wrong. Somewhere among those shelves existed the kinds of conversations I had been searching for all along. I simply had not known where to find them.

Slowly, the shelves dismantled a belief I carried for years. 

The problem was not absence.

It was exposure.

The more shelves I explored, the larger the landscape became. Every answer seemed to generate three new questions. Just when I thought I had found my bearings, I realized I was even more lost than when I had begun.

Yet this time, the feeling no longer frightened me.

Because being lost implied there was something worth searching for.

The more shelves I explored, the more I began noticing that my struggle was not with Arabic itself.

It was with the kind of Arabic I had been taught to expect.