On Finding Community Through Adabiyat
On Finding Community Through Adabiyat
By Houcine Chraïbi
In July 2020, I messaged Adabiyat on Twitter. Reading had become something I used to do—a habit from an earlier version of myself, having only read about five books in the previous decade. Hesitantly, I asked if I could join and whether it was open to men. The name itself—Adabiyat, the feminine plural form of Adab, meaning literary works—made me assume it was a women’s book club. It was not. I gave my email, joined the listserv, and showed up to my first session. Now, forty sessions later, I have not missed a single meeting.
Adabiyat is a virtual book club devoted to fiction by authors from both the Arab world and its vast diaspora. We meet roughly once a month, sometimes every five or six weeks. We read novels in English—some originally written in English, others translated from Arabic or French. The selections include graphic narratives, romances, political allegories, quiet domestic stories, speculative fiction, and sprawling contemporary satires. In recent years alone, we have explored out-of-print classics like Year of the Elephant by Leila Aboulela, and innovative voices in books like Shubeik Lubeik by Deena Mohamed, selections that took me to places I never expected.
However, some books took me even further. In 2022, when we read the prize-winning Gate of the Sun by Elias Khoury, the moderators suggested reading partners to tackle its 600 pages. They paired me with Stephanie, a stranger in another time zone. We exchanged emails and scheduled video calls to discuss our progress, trading observations about the interwoven stories of Palestinian refugees and Galilean villages. A Paris Review interview with Khoury had circulated among the group beforehand, describing how he spent years in refugee camps collecting oral histories that would become the foundation of his novel. Then Khoury himself joined our Adabiyat Zoom call. I believe that session was our highest turnout ever. This is what Adabiyat has given me: social and political situations I never knew about, cultures I had ignored, and the chance to ask authors directly about their work. It feels like I am catching up on a life I didn’t know I was missing.
Adabiyat began in Washington, D.C., more than a decade ago. In 2020, it went virtual, and suddenly the room could span the globe. Participants dial in from Malawi, Greece, Saudi Arabia, India, and across the United States—regulars alongside newcomers reconnecting with roots they miss. I hear someone recognize familiar expressions in a novel set in a country not their own, and another push back against perceived stereotypes. This diversity fosters a remarkably rich exchange of perspectives, language experiences (some having read books in Arabic versus English), and personal histories.
Our discussions are always deeply nuanced conversations. These are voices I would never have encountered otherwise. Now, I recognize them before their faces even appear on screen. Not just the voices themselves, but what they carry—I know who will defend a book to the death and who will cheerfully tear it apart. I know who speaks rarely but always with precision, and who jumps in first with an opinion still forming. I know who will catch the political undercurrents and who will zero in on the prose. After five years, recognizing the voice is just the start, I have learned the habits of mind that come with it.
Through Adabiyat my reading has been transformed. I used to read alone, now it is something that I do in preparation for a conversation with people that will notice what I have missed, and challenge what I have assumed. By reading these books, I have developed my own way of inhabiting them. I linger on recipes and local dishes in kitchen scenes—what people eat reveals who they are. I try to decipher the background music, the songs a character hums or the radio playing in a café. In The King’s Fool, the mention of al-Munfarija, the famous poem by Ibn Nahwi—a favorite of mine—brought a strange pleasure: encountering a beloved text within one I was just discovering. These details anchor the stories in lived cultures, turning pages into portals.
The discussions reveal layers that reading alone cannot. Take our conversation on Shubeik Lubeik, a graphic novel written entirely in Egyptian dialect. It led to a debate erupting over whether colloquial Arabic signals artistic boldness or fading classical fluency. One participant, nostalgic from her years in Cairo, felt transported back; another recalled childhood pleas for her mother to translate Egyptian TV into their family’s Iraqi dialect. I sat there realizing how much I did not know about regional Arabic—and how hungry I was to learn more.
When I hosted the session on The Ardent Swarm by Yamen Manai, I feared I had little to offer. My credentials are spreadsheets and budgets, not literary analysis. What could I possibly offer this group? And as arguments flared over the novel’s portrayal of external influences—legitimate critique or lazy trope?—a first-timer from Egypt and participants from Senegal joined the fray. No consensus emerged, and I realized my job was never to settle the debate. It was to make room for it.
I live in a small Texas town now infamous for library book bans—infamous enough to inspire a documentary, The Librarians. The irony stings that amid efforts to restrict what people can read, I have found a community devouring stories others might never encounter. Every session becomes a quiet act of resistance against isolation and against the notion that certain narratives belong only to certain people in certain places. In my corner of the public school district, where policy and procurement occupy my days, these gatherings reclaim something that public battles seek to limit.
Adabiyat has given me forty books I would never have found alone. It resurrected my dormant reading habit and sharpened my thinking on literary translation. I read in English, but these stories were not all born in English. Someone labored to bring them across, and Adabiyat has taught me to pay attention to that labor, to notice the translator’s name and wonder what was gained, what was lost, what choices were made. It has taught me to sit with discomfort when a book challenges me and to listen when others see something I missed. But mostly it has given me this: the experience of belonging to something larger than myself.
At the end of each session, someone takes a screenshot. There we are, a grid of faces spanning time zones, some with morning coffee, others in dimly lit rooms where it’s long past bedtime. I look at that image sometimes and marvel at how unlikely it is—that a hesitant Twitter message could lead here, to this room of readers scattered across the world. Forty sessions in, I am no longer the person who read five books in a decade. I show up. I read for meaning. I listen deeply. I speak when I have something to say. That is what Adabiyat has made me.
Houcine Chraïbi has been a member of Adabiyat, an international book club dedicated to Arabic literature in translation, since July 2020. He works in education finance and lives in Texas.