While I was wandering in the corridors of the Doha International Book Fair, the Arab Esture House wing stopped me, I stopped a little browsing some titles, until Mrs. Ban Al -Ani, Director of the House, told me: “You are from Bahrain? London, I smiled, not surprising, but because this name knocks on my door whenever I exchange quick conversations with various types of people and nationalities.
That name that some may think is a repetition in the fabric market, in fact a fabric of the memory of Manama, a voice that did not leave his shop, and a situation that did not swire between the gain and the departure, Nabil Abdul Rahman Ajour, whom some think that he is just a merchant who inherited a shop in the Al -Tawwish market, but they do not know that it is one of the few who refused to abandon the old market, lease their stores, and did not surrender The market is for strangers, but rather, and is still, watering the old Zaraneik with a live memory, and wipes the dust from the details of Manama with an indisputable hadith, whenever he sat in his shop or wrote a line in his papers, or sent a post in his account on social networks.
On Saturday morning, there is a “Nabil Ajour” Sabta, whose name suggests that it is a family session only, but it is in fact an informal diplomatic forum, the ambassadors and some of the leading visitors are distracted by the Bahraini breakfast in its humble shop, where the Balal is mixed with politics, tea with diplomacy and international relations, and the cloth attests to this and is written in memory.
There, there is no place for official compliments, tales starting from the taste of Manama, and ending with the future of the market, and some of them only pass through the pamper of coffee that narrates the jokes of the Bahrainis as if they were in their first council, they are Sabbath that resembles its owner: authentic, simple, and deep, beating the love of Manama.
Nabil inherited the trade on his grandfather Muhammad, and from his father after him Abdul Rahman, and his uncle Ali, then he worked in the store alongside his brothers since childhood, schools did not know him alone, because school education has limits, but he learned in the bills of suppliers, the books of the account, and in a market that does not distinguish between the son of the merchant and the worker.
In a detailed moment of his childhood, he chose to stay in Bahrain to study psychology instead of alienation, and excelled until he was the first to graduate with a bachelor’s degree in this specialization from the University of Bahrain, but when his father chose him between completing a master in Britain or returning to the store, he chose the path that smells of the smell I lived it.
What distinguishes Nabil Ajour from other market traders is not only to preserve the trade of his family and her heritage in fabrics, but his insistence on documentation is distinguished, as he is one of the few who realize that the market is not only a place for sale, for supply and demand, and crowds of seasons, as he realizes that the market is further, the market is a living memory, which witnesses transformations, which is the place that was the lifeline in the past.
Therefore, you see it today writes, documents, and is considered a book entitled “Memory of Ben Ajour”, in which he recounts the details of the Gulf, its markets and vocabulary, just as it was narrated on the baskets of the fabric in his childhood, and when the professor told me that Al -Ani told that his books were very popular in her London House, and I talked about his kindness and his fragrant biography, I realized that the voice that was launched from the railway from the railway He thinks who does not know Nabil.
This man, who collected in his place between hospitality and diplomacy, between trade and writing, and between originality and openness, was distinguished from others and became walking in attempts to return a beautiful market for this market, and when you ask him about his philosophy, he may answer you with the verse of his father’s line on a silver box: “Whoever fears God makes him a way out and provides him with a where he does not count. The shirts wither, it remains a smell in the place, and echoed in the souls.
Since his grandfather Muhammad wages this story in 1932, ninety -three years have passed, in which the doors were not closed on dust, and the keys were not suspended on the walls of forgetfulness, ninety -three years, in which the faces of the market changed, the complexes rose, the merchants immigrated, and the shops turned into foreign facades, except that he and few others … remained.
His voice remained in the market, it remains because the story is not only a trade.
In a noble shop, the fabrics are sold, and the biography of a homeland is narrated … in the words of a man who did not leave the shop, and you, the reader, may not read his biography in the curricula books, but the market preserves them, and the place testifies, there are men, they do not leave the shop, because they only sell the fabric … but they sew a piece of the homeland.
