As the 56th Cairo International Book Fair approaches, Egypt’s publishing industry faces a familiar contradiction: a major celebration of books is also a place from which some publishers are excluded without a public explanation.
The 2025 fair is scheduled to open officially on 23 January, with public access from 24 January until 5 February. Announced participation comprises 1,345 publishing houses and institutions. Yet the General Egyptian Book Organization (GEBO), which runs the fair, faces criticism from cultural and rights circles over repeated refusals to admit particular publishers. Publishers and rights researchers interviewed for this report believe some exclusions are connected to editorial positions that do not align with the authorities or security agencies.
ElMaraya: exclusion after years of pressure
On 31 December 2024, ElMaraya for Culture and Arts announced that it had been barred from the upcoming fair. The publisher said it had participated regularly from 2017 through 2023, winning the fair’s awards twice during that period. It said it consistently paid its financial obligations on time and held valid, updated administrative and legal documents, copies of which were deposited with the Publishers Union and GEBO.
According to its statement, ElMaraya registered within the prescribed period but never received the payment authorisation needed to rent its stand. Its account on the fair’s website was then closed. Attempts by the Publishers Union and the publisher’s supporters to establish the reason or find a solution were unsuccessful, it said.
Yahya Fikri, ElMaraya’s executive director, tells Zawia3 that the publishing house has faced repeated pressure from the artistic works police over the past eight years. He describes two raids involving the seizure of books and equipment and the filing of police reports. The first, in 2022, led to his detention at Abdeen police station for more than 24 hours. Following the second raid, in July 2024, an administrative trainee was held for around 72 hours.
Fikri disputes the alleged violations recorded against the publisher. These included issuing books without legal deposit numbers or author contracts, selling other publishers’ books because a single complimentary copy was found in his personal library, and using unlicensed computer software. He says these allegations are unfounded.
Pressure has also been exerted inside the fair. On 30 June 2021, a security delegation including artistic works police, National Security personnel and fair security visited ElMaraya’s stand and requested a copy of Curly, the poetry collection by then-imprisoned activist Ahmed Douma. According to the publisher’s account at the time, staff were verbally instructed not to display or sell it pending a decision.
In a statement on 26 September 2022, ElMaraya described a raid the previous evening. Officers spent about seven hours inspecting licences, author contracts and computers. At around 7pm, they seized copies of books and contracts and took Fikri to Abdeen police station.
The police report alleged discrepancies between published titles and the titles in author contracts, publication of Maraya magazine without the required authorisation, and possession on a laptop of PDF books issued by other publishers. Lawyers Negad al-Borai, Khaled Ali and Anas Sayed submitted evidence disputing the allegations, according to the publisher. Prosecutors ordered Fikri’s release on the guarantee of his residence; after returning to the police station that afternoon, he finally left at about 10pm.
On 29 July 2024, rights lawyer and former presidential candidate Khaled Ali reported another raid, following an event at ElMaraya two days earlier. He said officers arrived after attendees had left and detained Ibrahim Mostafa, an administrative assistant studying commerce at Ain Shams University. Prosecutors subsequently ordered his release pending investigation in Abdeen misdemeanour case 5142 of 2024.
Ali said personnel from Abdeen police, artistic works police and tax evasion police searched the premises for around five hours, seizing approximately 217 books, two computers and financial files.
Fikri believes GEBO disapproves of ElMaraya’s editorial direction. He says the Publishers Union relayed the organisation’s position that it could exclude any publisher without giving reasons. Apart from one refusal to issue a legal deposit number, ElMaraya had generally been able to publish its books, he says. But verbal instructions subsequently prevented the display and distribution of certain literary or historical titles, without a written administrative order or explanation.
He sees these interventions as reflecting official hostility towards publishers producing progressive and democratic cultural work.
Fikri says 75% of ElMaraya’s titles are released shortly before the fair. Exclusion therefore cuts the publisher off from its principal annual sales season while its obligations to authors and book-production staff remain.
The pressure comes as the depreciation of the pound against the dollar has driven up paper and printing costs, raised book prices and reduced sales. Fikri believes lighter reading has become more commercially successful amid mounting pressures on everyday life and a weakening sense of identity.
Despite the losses, he says ElMaraya will continue publishing serious literature and in-depth research. He calls on the authorities to support a publishing industry capable of accommodating Egypt’s many talented writers and researchers.
A recurring pattern at the book fair
ElMaraya is not the first publisher to face exclusion. Tanmia Bookshop and Publishing House was refused participation for three years following the 2018 arrest of its founder, Khaled Lotfy, over an Egyptian edition of The Angel: The Egyptian Spy Who Saved Israel, about Ashraf Marwan, the son-in-law of former president Gamal Abdel Nasser.
The case followed a September 2017 raid by artistic works police in which an employee was detained. Tanmia destroyed its entire print run of 2,000 copies. The case was then transferred into the military justice system. Lotfy received a five-year sentence, upheld through military appeals in 2019. He was released on 20 November 2022 after serving his sentence.
During the 2017 fair, an employee of a Lebanese publisher was detained over a book discussing Shia Islam. The stands of Dar al-Quds and Al Yasser were closed after police reports concerning Shia publications. Ashraf Mamoun, then head of the publications crime unit within the artistic works police, said five titles had been confiscated.
In 2018, then-GEBO head Haitham al-Hag Ali announced restrictions on books expressing Muslim Brotherhood ideas, referring to the organisation’s designation as terrorist in Egypt. He said an inspection area had been allocated in the Azbakeya section to prevent counterfeit books and works deemed to incite violence or terrorism.
Palestinian writer and publisher Bisan Adwan, co-founder of Ibn Rushd Publishing House, has been unable to take part since her deportation from Egypt in March 2020 and placement on an entry ban list. Her account linked the action to accusations of atheism and political hostility towards her.
Aseer al-Kotb was excluded from the 2022 fair amid public allegations that it was aligned with the Muslim Brotherhood and controversy over its publication of Iraqi writer Ahmed Khairy al-Omari. These were accusations levelled at the publisher, rather than a substantiated explanation establishing an organisational affiliation.
In 2023, journalist Anwar al-Hawary reported the confiscation of his books Taming Tyranny and The New Dictatorship from the fair. Physician Khaled Abdel Rahman also accused unnamed security bodies of preventing Rawafed Publishing from printing 42 Qasr al-Nil Street, his history of the Doctors Syndicate. The manuscript included the syndicate’s mobilisation in 2016 following the police assault at Matariya hospital.
Sayed Saber, publishing director at Dar al-Montada, subsequently said security bodies had requested the removal of Mohamed Medhat Mostafa’s History of the Zionist Movement and Its Organisations from the publisher’s 2023 stand, without explanation. The book examined Zionist associations in Egypt before July 1952. Its author described the action as confiscation.
The Tripoli Scientific International Library also reported that a book on the poetics of Libyan history had been seized at the 54th fair. It accused the deputy fair director of taking the displayed copy and threatening to close the Libyan Publishers Union’s stand if another copy appeared.
On 23 January 2024, Karam Youssef, founder of the independent publisher Al Kotob Khan, announced its exclusion hours before staff were due to take possession of their stand. She said all fees had been paid and documents supplied, yet the allocated space was given to another publisher without a clear explanation or prior official notice. Months of work by authors and staff had been wasted, she said.
The announcement followed a similar statement from Tanweer for Publishing and Media the previous day. Tanweer said it was notified just one day before taking possession of a stand that had remained reserved in its name that morning. Contacts with the Publishers Union and GEBO had failed to produce an explanation or solution.
Books withdrawn from circulation
Restrictions extend beyond fair admission. Around a year before this report, GEBO withdrew Egyptian poet Yonan Saad’s collection In a Red Crowd from its bookshops and stopped selling it. The book had passed a reading committee, been published and remained on sale for roughly a year and a half. No court ruling banning it had been issued, according to Saad.
He tells Zawia3 that he initially laughed when an employee interpreted the title’s “red crowd” as a communist crowd. He reread the poems without finding a basis for that reading. To him, red suggested vitality, blood, desire, madness and love. What first seemed absurd nevertheless led to the book’s withdrawal.
Saad questioned whether a line placing a kind communist and a greedy trader at a chessboard was enough to make a poem communist. In a public post, he argued that poetry should not be reduced to political, religious or nationalist affiliation. An artist may hold an ideology, he wrote, without the artwork becoming an ideological tract. He hoped to see the collection return to the shelves for the coming fair.
Ahmed Douma’s Curly faced a different intervention. In October 2024, Public Prosecutor Mohamed Shawki ordered an investigation following complaints alleging contempt of religion. The prosecution said it had examined the collection online, requested police inquiries and tasked specialists from Al-Azhar with reviewing the disputed passages.
The collection, written during Douma’s imprisonment, had already faced restrictions upon its first edition in 2021. Security officers instructed ElMaraya not to display or distribute it. After Douma’s release from prison, further restrictions and the cancellation of a signing event accompanied a campaign accusing him of religious disbelief. The investigation was still a matter of allegations, not a conviction.
Literary critic Sabry Mamdouh reported in November 2023 that the Egyptian National Library had refused a legal deposit number for Ashraf al-Khamaisi’s abridgement and critical edition of Ibn Hisham’s biography of the Prophet, intended for publication by Al Moharrer. When the publisher subsequently applied for a number for a new novel by the same author, that request was also refused, he said.
In March 2022, novelist Alaa Farghali announced that his novel Behler Passage, published by Diwan that January, had been barred from circulation. He said it was initially held at the printer after an unnamed authority deemed it obscene, offensive to religion and a threat to social peace. Lawyers secured its release to appear briefly at the 2022 fair, but the author reported that it remained banned. He said he had not seen the assessment or been told which body issued the ban.
Alaa al-Aswany’s The Republic of False Truths, published in Arabic by Lebanon’s Dar al-Adab, was also prevented from circulating in Egypt. In 2019, al-Aswany said he had been summoned before military prosecutors in connection with the novel. It follows characters who joined the January 2011 revolution, opposed it, feared it or shifted their positions as its fortunes changed.
In October 2018, economist Abdel Khalek Farouk said National Security had seized his book Is Egypt Really a Poor Country? from a printer in Dar al-Salam and detained the printer, Ibrahim al-Khatib, despite the book having official permissions. Prosecutors subsequently ordered both men held for four days pending investigation on allegations of publishing false news.
Novelist Ahmed Naji was imprisoned in 2016 on a charge of violating public modesty after the state-owned literary newspaper Akhbar al-Adab published an excerpt from Using Life. Following a broad solidarity campaign, his sentence was suspended and he was released in December 2016, after approximately ten months in prison. The Court of Cassation subsequently overturned the prison ruling in 2017.
Rights advocates argued that his imprisonment violated Article 67 of Egypt’s Constitution. The article protects artistic and literary creativity and prohibits custodial sentences for offences arising from the public dissemination of artistic, literary or intellectual work, while leaving penalties for incitement to violence, discrimination between citizens and attacks on individuals’ honour to legislation.
The dispute over legal deposit numbers
Farid Zahran, president of the Egyptian Publishers Union, former presidential candidate and head of the Egyptian Social Democratic Party, tells Zawia3 that roughly 120 publishers were excluded from the previous fair.
He says GEBO, as organiser, has rules allowing it to refuse participation without giving a reason, a practice he compares with other book fairs. The organisation nevertheless cited alleged violations by some publishers: unpaid fees, selling legal deposit numbers, failing to supply copies of books for which numbers had been issued, or displaying other publishers’ books without the required authorisation and payment. Other exclusions were believed to have security motives.
About 100 of those publishers have been permitted to return for the 2025 fair, while approximately 20 remain excluded, Zahran says. GEBO told the union that the exclusions related to the reasons announced the previous year and other reasons it would disclose later.
He notes that media attention has focused on ElMaraya’s first exclusion, although other publishers had been barred for years. Tanmia, for example, has been permitted to return this year. He also acknowledges that some artistic works police actions are arbitrary or unlawful, citing his own Al-Balad bookshop, which he says was closed for two years without a court judgment.
According to Zahran, delays or refusals in issuing new legal deposit numbers arise partly from stricter enforcement of the requirement to supply copies to the National Library and Archives. Some publishers had obtained numbers over the preceding 15 years but failed to deposit copies, and later exhausted their stocks. Others obtained numbers for books they never published.
He says these failures expose publishers to legal penalties. Once the Culture Ministry began enforcing the requirements, publishers complained that they could not obtain numbers for new releases ahead of the fair. The union secured a temporary solution: the ministry agreed to defer the outstanding deposits until after the fair and extend the deadline for a year, with publishers undertaking to supply the missing copies.
A further difficulty is the volume of applications handled by National Library staff immediately before the fair. Zahran expects a digitisation system, trialled for about two months, to help relieve that bottleneck.
He insists that the National Library and Archives is not a censorship authority and should not refuse a deposit number because of a book’s content. It routinely states that it does not require security approvals and that refusals concern regulatory violations. He does not rule out a gap between the stated policy and actual practice.
Zahran distinguishes the absence of a general pre-publication book censor from controls on imported books and specialised review, including Al-Azhar’s role concerning Qur’an texts. This does not mean that publishers are free of other interventions, as the cases described in this report demonstrate.
For him, another central problem is that publishers are treated legally as traders rather than as an industry. They consequently miss benefits available to industrial activities, including certain import and export arrangements, unlike cinema, which has recognised industrial representation.
He also criticises the union’s governing law, dating from the 1960s, when political and trade-union pluralism was restricted. He says the annual membership subscription remains fixed at EGP 20 under that law, forcing the union to charge other fees instead.
Zahran argues that linking access to legal deposit numbers with union membership has brought in organisations whose purposes differ from those of commercial publishers. He cites religious and government institutions, including Al-Azhar, the cathedral, the Education Ministry and GEBO. Their representatives, he says, may have priorities different from those of businesses with commercial registrations, tax cards and profit-seeking publishing operations, creating tensions within the union.
Pressure beyond the fair
Book fair exclusions and confiscations sit within a broader history of closures. In December 2016, security forces sealed branches of Al-Karama libraries, established by rights lawyer Gamal Eid. In September 2017, Zahran, then speaking as chairman of Al-Mahrousa Publishing and owner of Al-Balad Cultural Centre, said officers raided and closed the downtown Cairo bookshop and seized chairs, other furnishings and books.
In 2019, a judicial asset-freezing decision targeted the Arab International Company for Commercial Agencies, owner of the Alef bookshop chain, which had 37 Egyptian branches. Tanmia also experienced raids, seizures and temporary closure during the period surrounding the Angel case.
In January 2022, the Arab Network for Research and Publishing announced the closure of its Cairo and Alexandria bookshops, citing security pressure and incitement against it. Fair officials also closed its stand, alleging that it had used deceptive means to participate.
Sara Ramadan, a researcher at the Association for Freedom of Thought and Expression, tells Zawia3 that the Cairo fair presents a particular problem because its regulations let the organiser exclude publishers without explanation. She says this has enabled refusals, cancellations and exclusions even after fees were paid.
Tanmia has been among the worst affected, she says. She connects ElMaraya’s exclusion to the security pressure surrounding Curly. Such decisions deprive disfavoured publishers of both sales and the opportunity to build relationships with readers and other publishers. She also points to cases in which legal deposit numbers were refused or books removed from the market.
Exclusion costs publishers more than a stand: it removes a major opportunity to earn revenue, meet readers and establish professional relationships, Ramadan says.
Ramadan describes Egyptian publishing as subject mainly to censorship after publication. But the restrictive climate also prompts some printers and publishers to submit manuscripts to security bodies voluntarily, seeking advance reassurance against trouble. Writers internalise those pressures and censor themselves before a work even reaches a publisher.
She argues that custodial penalties for publishing offences in Egyptian law conflict with constitutional protections. Publishers considered undesirable also face pressure from artistic works police and the tax authorities, she says, at a time when economic losses are already undermining the industry.
As roughly 100 previously excluded publishers prepare to return to the 2025 fair, around 20, including ElMaraya, remain outside it, according to Zahran’s figures. Some authors are preparing to meet readers, while others—among them Yonan Saad—remain unable to place their books on the shelves despite the absence of a confiscation ruling. Their experience adds urgency to calls for a more open public sphere and greater freedom of expression.
