For this bookseller of Kabul, the pandemic was a blip in a country afflicted by long-term war
Shah Muhammed Rais of Shah M Book Company fame was inadvertently prepared for the pandemic. Inside Shah M Book Company, Kabul
“…But all this world is like a tale we hear
Men’s evil, and their glory, disappear.”
This is one of the 50,000 couplets that make up 10th century poet Abul Qasem Firdausi’s
Shah Nameh: The Book of Kings, a masterpiece in Persian that offers philosophical insight into almost every human dilemma. That, at least is the feeling of Afghanistan’s legendary bookseller Shah Muhammed Rais, a man whose own tumultuous biography is perhaps no less epic than Firdausi’s magnum opus.