The first thing that strikes you as you walk into Dar Merit is the poverty of the place; next comes the chaotic sprawl of its books. Still, two titles stand out on bookshelves immediately next to the entrance of the Downtown apartment-turned-office building: National Ghosts and Freedom and Fallacy.

They’re just two of the works that have seen Dar Merit publisher Mohamed Hashem named the recipient of the fourth Jeri Laber International Freedom to Publish Award, which is handed out each year by the Association of American Publishers’ International Freedom to Publish Committee (IFTPC).

The annual award, created in 2002, is named after Jeri Laber, a founding member of IFTPC as well as of Human Rights Watch, the high-profile international NGO.

“The [IFTPC] is delighted to recognize Mohamed Hashem of Dar Merit for his unwavering commitment to freedom of expression,” said committee chairman Hal Fessenden in a statement announcing the award. “We applaud his bravery and determination.”

The committee monitors the status of freedom of expression by sending fact-finding missions to countries where they believe it is comparatively limited. Past recipients include publishers in Iran, Indonesia and Kurdistan.

The Association of American Publishers (www.publishers.org) is a US industry association and lobby group with more than 300 members. The group, whose members include powerhouses of American publishing, has as its mandate to “expand the market for American books and other published works in all media, as well as to promote the status of publishing in the United States and throughout the world,” among other goals that include clamping down on piracy and promoting freedom of expression.

Yosrey Aql Hashem with controversial poet / activist Ahmed Fouad Negm

“A commitment to the truth equals the dissemination of all ideas without restriction. Freedom is supposed to know no bounds,” says Hashem, whose publications draw on the same spirited political discourse that informs the activist Kifaya movement, of which Hashem is an active member.

“Those people [Kifaya members] broke the taboo of criticizing the head of the regime This change was reflected only by us and not by any other publishing house,” he contends.

Hashem publishes books for some of the most prominent members of Kifaya, including Mohamed El-Sayed Said, a Kifaya co-founder and the deputy director of Al-Ahram Center for Political and Strategic Studies (ACPSS). His other choice of writers — many of whom are among the most controversial writing in Arabic today — established the house in just one short year as being one of the most outspoken critics of the current government.

Among Dar Merit’s best sellers, Hashem says, are the novels of Ibrahim Eissa. The editor-in-chief of the muckraking weeklies Sawt El-Ummah and El-Dostour by day, Eissa is also known for his biting novels, which challenge authority in works of political satire told through allegory.

After years of working for a private publishing house, Hashem decided to establish his own firm in 1998.

“The idea was to publish what I love,” he says, adding that while he was happy with his former employer, he always felt something was missing. “I was not doing what I wanted. The owner is the manager and he holds the right to publish what he likes. I could interfere [with the publishing policy] sometimes; however, I was not doing all what I liked.”

Hashem maintains that his mission statement from day one was to cross all the red lines, and he credits the role played by Kifaya in forcing better opportunities for freedom of expression. The movement, he says, encouraged him to break further taboos.

In the past, many booksellers were hesitant to display Dar Merit’s titles, many of which would never have been published just two years ago. But that’s changing, Hashem says: “After the political mobility that we witnessed, few booksellers feel afraid to distribute our books.”

Hashem was born in the Delta town of Tanta in 1958. After growing up poor, he couldn’t afford to pursue a university degree and instead earned a trade-school diploma in textile manufacturing. Still, he says he developed an interest in literature and political activism at an early age, which allowed him later to work as a reporter for a number of Arab newspapers.

He is the author of almost 30 short stories and one novel, Open Playgrounds, which he published in 2004.

Hashem’s first brush with controversy came in 2001, when he sent to market Khalil Abdel Karim’s The Formative Years of the Life of the Prophet Muhammad (PBUH), which touched off a firestorm in religious circles and was eventually banned by the Al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy on the grounds that it demonized the faith.

It wasn’t until last year that his politically controversial books began flying off shelves. In the intervening years, Hashem deserves credit for being the first to print Alaa El-Aswany’s Omaret Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building).

“Omaret Yacoubian was a great move. We were the first publishers, but due to financial constraints couldn’t print the second edition,” says Hashem, adding that the 7,000 copies of Yacoubian he sold made the book his best-selling title to date.

On average, Merit prints just 1,000 to 2,000 copies of each book. “This is a very slim number especially since our population is more than 70-million strong. At least 100,000 among them must be interested in culture and politics,” Hashem complains. “It takes us a lot of time to sell those 2,000 copies no matter how much we try to hold exhibitions or distribute copies in other bookstores or governorates.”

According to a government study released last fall, the average Egyptian reads a mere 1.5 pages per month, and book publishing is on the wane throughout the Arab world. According to the UNDP Arab Human Development Report released in 2003, Arab publishers accounted for just 1.1 percent of global production; Arabs constitute 5 percent of the world’s population.

“We produce a lot of books, but sales are low, so we’re always in deficit,” Hashem says, explaining that he’s currently LE 300,000 in debt. “It is sad. If we had readers, I would have been the richest person in Egypt because we really publish important books.”

Despite his mounting debts, Hashem remains positive about the future of Dar Merit: “I am optimistic and hopeful that we will witness a boom and that we will have attractive books that will sell well,” he says. “The solution to the debts is to keep looking for more attractive books without giving up our line of thought. I want respectable books that sell well; I do not want purely commercial books.” et