Bookseller Mohamed Aziz
- A viral social post celebrated Mohamed Aziz as Morocco's most photographed bookseller, a self-taught reader with reportedly over 4,000 books read. (x.com) - The post described Aziz as in his late 70s, multilingual, and trusting that customers won't steal from his stall. (x.com) - The story generated thousands of likes and reposts today amid World Book Day conversations online. (x.com)
A bookseller in Rabat’s old medina became a World Book Day fixture online on Thursday, April 23, after a widely shared post revived interest in Mohamed Aziz and his decades-long reading habit. (news18.com) Aziz is described in recent and archival profiles as one of Rabat’s oldest booksellers, still working from the same medina area after starting with a handful of books in the 1960s and opening a permanent shop by 1967. (news18.com) (1000libraries.com) Multiple profiles say he was orphaned young, left school at about 15 because he could not afford textbooks, and turned to selling and reading books instead. (news18.com) (welcomeafrica.org) The details that travel furthest online are the hardest to verify exactly: reports put Aziz in his late 70s, say he reads six to eight hours a day, and credit him with thousands of books read in Arabic, French, English and sometimes Spanish. (news18.com) (1000libraries.com) That timing is part of the story. UNESCO’s World Book and Copyright Day falls every year on April 23, a date the organization has marked since 1995 to promote reading, publishing and copyright. (unesco.org) (press.un.org) Aziz’s image also fits a larger social-media pattern in Morocco, where creators and publishers increasingly use short videos and photo posts to spotlight local culture, heritage and everyday figures from cities like Rabat. (telquel.ma) Profiles of Aziz often place his stall against Morocco’s literacy record. World Bank data, drawing on United Nations Educational, Scientific and Cultural Organization statistics, shows Morocco’s adult literacy rate at 85.62% in 2022, the latest year listed in that series. (data.worldbank.org) Writers who have visited or profiled him describe a routine built around used books: morning searches through streets and markets for volumes to resell, then long hours reading between customers, prayers and the occasional cigarette. (welcomeafrica.org) (1000libraries.com) One line attached to Aziz appears in several recent retellings: “Those who can’t read won’t steal books. And those who can, aren’t thieves,” News18 reported from the viral post summarizing his shop’s open display. (news18.com) So the viral post did not introduce Mohamed Aziz as much as recirculate him: an old-medina bookseller, photographed for years, whose life story gets rediscovered whenever the internet starts talking seriously about books. (welcomeafrica.org) (news18.com)
