Art & Culture

A Guide to the Coolest Arab Bookstores for the Chronically Online

BYKhaoula Ghanem

September 17, 2026

There is something almost painfully ironic about the fact that one of the first words revealed to the Prophet Muhammad was Iqra: read. More than 1,400 years later, it feels like people are doing everything but that. Our attention spans have been cooked by TikTok, so much so that even Apple has decided that what we apparently need next is an iPhone with dual screens that folds. Which feels like a good time to point out that humans perfected the foldable device centuries ago. It is called a book.

Thankfully, the Arab world has never been short on places devoted to them. Across the region, bookstores have doubled as neighborhood institutions, intellectual meeting points, and, occasionally, places where controversial ideas could still find their way into readers’ hands. Some have been around for generations, like Cairo’s Madbouly and Beirut’s Halabi, while others are reimagining what a bookshop can look like today, complete with coffee, cocktails, art, and carefully curated shelves. From century-old Emirati homes to overflowing Amman stacks, these are the Arab bookstores worth closing a few tabs for.

Zerzura Books and Prints, Dubai

If your idea of a good bookstore involves digging for something you probably will not find anywhere else, Zerzura deserves a few hours of your time. Founded by rare-book dealer Alex Warren and based in Dubai’s Alserkal Avenue, Zerzura is considered the city’s first specialist rare-book seller, with shelves spanning first editions, signed copies, vintage children’s books, maps, prints, magazines, and titles documenting the Middle East.

The name itself comes from Zerzura, the mythical “lost oasis” that European explorers once searched for in the desert west of the Nile, which feels appropriate for a shop built around the thrill of finding something unexpected. Its stock changes constantly, and previous finds have ranged from first editions of The Alchemist and The God of Small Things to a rare signed 1998 edition of Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets. Beyond books, there are vintage Middle Eastern travel prints, regional photography, old magazines, maps, and Arabic film posters, including Egyptian and Lebanese cinema memorabilia.

Bait Elowal, Al Kutubkhana, Sharjah

Leave it to Sharjah to put a bookstore inside a century-old Emirati home. Al Kutubkhana, which translates simply to “House of Books,” sits inside Bait Elowal, the cultural and dining concept envisioned by Sheikha Bodour Al Qasimi and opened in the Heart of Sharjah in February 2025. The building itself was formerly known as Bait Al Mazrou and dates back more than 100 years, overlooking Sharjah Creek from Al Mareija Square. Renovated in 2024, much of its original architecture was retained, including its thick walls, wooden doors and traditional courtyard.

The bookstore is small and deliberately curated, with Arabic and English titles spanning regional history, art, literature and culture, including books documenting the UAE and Gulf alongside English translations of works by Sharjah ruler and author Sheikh Dr. Sultan bin Muhammad Al Qasimi. Its selection also fits neatly into Bait Elowal’s wider premise, which looks back at Sharjah’s history as a trading port and the movement of people, knowledge and objects along old trade routes. The name “Elowal” itself refers to the traveller returning home carrying stories and discoveries from elsewhere.

Halabi Book Shop, Beirut

The Kaskas institution began life in 1958, when Hussein Halabi, known as Abou Nazmi, opened a neighborhood grocery store that also sold newspapers, magazines and periodicals. His son Abdallah eventually took over in the early 1990s and began adding books, initially as a hobby, until the collection grew so enormous that by the early 2000s, books and assorted collectibles were quite literally stacked on top of one another.

The shop entered its next chapter when Abdallah’s daughter, Lana Halabi, joined the family business in 2014, eventually overseeing a renovation that began in 2016 while preserving much of its old-school character. Today, Halabi sells new, used, rare, vintage, and out-of-print titles across Arabic, English, and French, with particularly good sections dedicated to Lebanese writers, the country’s history and Civil War, Palestine, politics, art, and literature. There are also magazines, comics, children’s books, and enough wonderfully specific Lebanese ephemera to make “I’m only going in for one book” a fairly unrealistic proposition.

Azbakeyeh, Amman

Before Azbakeyeh had shelves, it had a pavement. Founder Hussein Yassin began selling secondhand books from a street stall in Amman before turning the idea into a permanent bookstore in the early 2010s, driven by a fairly simple problem: books were becoming too expensive for many young Jordanians to buy. The shop took its name and inspiration from Cairo’s famous Souq El Azbakeya, the historic secondhand book market known for affordable, rare, and out-of-print titles.

Yassin built the collection with an initial purchase of around 100,000 books and kept prices deliberately low, while Azbakeyeh expanded beyond its walls through hundreds of pop-up book fairs held at universities and across Jordan. Its shelves have become a particularly good place to lose an afternoon, with secondhand books spanning Arabic literature, history, politics, philosophy, translated fiction, and children’s titles alongside the occasional rare or out-of-print discovery. Over the years, Yassin has estimated that the project has sold or given away well over a million books.

Madbouly Bookstore, Cairo

Few bookstores can claim to have helped shape the intellectual life of a city, but Madbouly earned that reputation one newspaper at a time. Long before Mohamed Madbouly became one of Egypt’s most influential booksellers and publishers, he was a six-year-old selling newspapers alongside his father in downtown Cairo in the 1940s. By 1951, the family had secured a kiosk in Talaat Harb Square, where Madbouly and his brother Ahmed sold newspapers and imported publications to the neighborhood’s cosmopolitan crowd. Books gradually followed, and the operation eventually grew into the landmark bookstore on Talaat Harb Square that became a fixture of downtown Cairo.

What made Madbouly legendary, however, was what you could find once you walked through the door. Mohamed developed a reputation for tracking down books that were difficult, controversial, or outright impossible to find elsewhere, while his publishing business brought out works across politics, philosophy, literature, and social thought. The store became a regular haunt for generations of Egyptian and Arab intellectuals, with Naguib Mahfouz among its famous visitors. Madbouly died in 2008, but his name remains inseparable from Cairo’s bookselling history.

Lulu & The Beanstalk, Dubai

Part bookshop, part café, part bar, Lulu & The Beanstalk is what happens when two filmmakers decide storytelling does not necessarily need a screen. Sisters Wafa and Amirah Tajdin opened the independent concept inside DIFC’s ICD Brookfield Place in 2022, creating a space where books sit alongside coffee, cocktails, food, and a very good soundtrack.

The name belongs to their grandmother, Mama Lulu, whose love of storytelling shaped the sisters growing up. There is a particularly lovely detail to that story: Lulu herself could neither read nor write, but was, according to Wafa, a brilliant storyteller. The sisters translated memories of her home, where food, conversation, and stories were always circulating, into a deliberately whimsical space designed with Stockholm-based designer Jenny Askenfors of BOFINK.

Books are consequently more than decorative props here. They are part of the world the sisters built, with a curated bookshop tucked among mismatched furniture, patterned walls and shelves of objects that make the whole place feel closer to an eccentric living room than anything you would expect to find beneath the glass towers of DIFC. By day, you can disappear into a book over coffee; by night, cocktails and music take over. It might be one of the few places in Dubai where ordering another chapter and ordering another drink are equally reasonable ways to spend the evening.

A Guide to the Coolest Arab Bookstores for the Chronically Online

Madbouly Bookstore, Cairo

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