Both Maha and Yusif are not real people. They are characters in Ya Maryam, the novel I started writing after the attack against Sayyidat al-Najat in 2010 and published in Arabic in 2012. But there are hundreds of thousands of real Mahas and Yusifs.

“With a grimy towel, another troll is making a show of wiping your windscreen so you’d have to hand over some coins while the traffic stalls. You blow your horn preemptively to tell him you’re not interested. And, as he spits on the tyre, shuffling menacingly before he moves on, you suddenly see how little ‘revolution’ has affected the ugliness that while not necessarily brought about, was definitely uncovered by Sadat.

You see it in the pollution and the garbage, the pointless and hopeless rush, the hawk- and leech-like behaviour of peddlers, the impossibly inconsiderate attitude of drivers to one another, the chaos, the deafening microphones playing bad shaabi and Quran, the ultimate paralysis of motion.

It’s ugliness that Mubarak – busy managing terrorists, then hogging the yield of slow privatisation à la crony capitalism – made no effort to control. But had he done, would it have made much difference?”

Of the hundreds of news items that cite your name, Mohammed Hamdan (Abu Hajar) al-Sawarka, none gives your age or personal details. It’s hard to believe you are older than 17. “Abu Hajar” suggests you already have a daughter, named after the wife of the prophet Ibrahim according to Muslim custom. But if that is the case she can’t be more than a few years old; it wouldn’t surprise me if you married right after puberty. Under the circumstances, of course, those who condemn you do not bother to account for your good looks, the mildness of your manner, or the child’s warmth in your smile—an earnestness that makes sincerity irrelevant, so ingenuous is your willingness to die.

Mental writing is a technique developed by the Islamists. One of them would memorize more than ten thousand names, names of prisoners who had entered the desert prison, names of their families, the cities and villages they came from, dates they were arrested, their sentences, their fates…

When I decided to keep these diaries, I tried to train my mind. I transformed it into a cassette tape, on which I recorded everything I saw, and some of what I heard. Now, I am playing back some of what that tape contains.

Khaled always entered first and greeted the customers sitting at tables near the door. He bent down, kissed the men, flirted with the women, and strutted to where Nabil, Qasabji’s owner, had cleaned a spot for us. He ordered either a glass of arak or the local Damascene beer, Barada, pulled a cigarette from his pack, lit it, and added to the purplish haze of smoke.

I first thought of this project in a random conversation with Nadim Tarazi, a friend who owned my favorite bookshop in Beirut in the 1990s, and now runs “La Maison du livre”, association for book professionals. He was visiting Paris where I then lived. It was the winter of 2006. I had been a literary agent specialized in Arabic literature for two years, and was struggling to find independent information on books. This is where the realization of a need for more information on Arab books, as well as for quality standards, stemmed from.