Media coverage Al Bait Al Duwaliy September 2024

Why Dubai's Kutubna Cultural Centre is more than a bookshop For Shatha Almutawa, launching Kutubna Cultural Centre has been akin to receiving “a second PhD and a more important one”, writes Razmig Bedirian. It has familiarised her with the Gulf’s literary and artistic scene in a way that she could never have had while living abroad.

The Emirati-Kuwaiti historian returned to the UAE from the US in 2022, shortly after the birth of her daughter. Almutawa had been teaching Islamic intellectual history at the American University in Washington, DC. She had spent more than two decades studying and working in the US but wanted to move back to the region so that her daughter would grow up with her family.

Yet Almutawa wanted to sustain her academic practice but in a less institutional format. She sought to open a bookshop, one dedicated to books from the Gulf. It was her way of reading works from the region she had not been exposed to in the US.

Shatha Almutawa is the founder and director of Kutubna Cultural Centre. Antonie Robertson / The National Shatha Almutawa is the founder and director of Kutubna Cultural Centre. Antonie Robertson / The National Kutubna Cultural Centre is very much a bookshop at its core but since marking a soft opening last year, it has blossomed into something larger. The centre will now hold its official launch through One Hundred Years of Painting: Arab Art from 1916 to 2017, an exhibition that opened on Saturday and runs until October 13.

Almutawa says she never expected the cultural centre to encompass all it does today. When she came up with the idea, she had thought about a space reminiscent of Cairo’s street-side bookshops. However, as she managed to secure a sprawling space in Nadd Al Hamar and began applying for a licence, her initial idea soon became a more ambitious project.

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