Mohammed Bin Khulayf

I wonder how many of you had to meet strangers in parking lot to buy books.

Otherwise, you probably never lived in a third-world country where censorship impacts your buying purchases.

In Saudi Arabia, where I grew up, the government censored books, where there are certain books you're allowed to buy and there are certain books that they're just not allowed.

Any books that explicitly argues with evolution or against the governments or against religion, they will be straight-up banned.

So, I don't know if you all remember message boards and internet forum.

That's when I would go and know about what books are banned and what like hot so I could go and chase down for those books because I'm not buying available books.

I'm buying all the banned ones that the government told me I should not read.

But the problem is there's a lot of books that are not available that we assume they're banned.

So when we want to buy banned books, we would hear of a friend of a friend or a cousin or someone off the online or going to a neighboring country.

So we would send them a list.

We would be like, this is the books that we're looking for.

Michael Jackson cassettes, the Titanic.

And we would meet in a parking lot.

And we either give them money or we exchange with other banned books and other...

cassettes.

If you travel to a neighboring country in Saudi Arabia, bookstores would have literally a section of banned books in Saudi Arabia because they know we would spend any money to get a banned book.

There is a trick or a loophole in the system where we could get our hands on banned books.

That's Riyadh International Book Fair, and I recommend you check out their Wikipedia page because there is a lot of scandals throughout the years.

because there's a lot of books that come to Saudi at one time and a lot of them are new that Saudi government did not have chance to review, there would be a chance of getting banned books.

The agency that enforces banned books are religious police and they will walk into the book fair chasing down people buying books and they will take them off of their hand and they will be at the gates looking at what you bought and they will check out the books and they will read it and they'll be like, oh, there are animals talking in these books.