April 8, 2002	Monday	Muharram 24, 1423

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PESHAWAR, April 7: In this raucous border town, long a centre of men and materiel for wars in next-door Afghanistan, Osama bin Laden has fallen out of favour and, at least, one industry is thriving on the change.

“My business is flourishing,” said Naveed Akhtar, a book publisher, amid a jumble of machines and papers in what serves as the office of NTR Printers.

Six weeks ago Akhtar, the owner of what had been a very small business, received an order for 250,000 primary school textbooks for Afghanistan.

He has doubled the number of his employees to 12, set up 12-hour shifts and expects his profit to increase to Rs150,000 a month from Rs30,000 a month. He has also been contacted by some businessmen in Afghanistan who want him to open a printing operation there.

According to a New York Times report, the books about the “chief architect of the Sept 11 attacks” used to sell well before his movement was crushed militarily.

During the Taliban era, the only orders from Afghanistan were for Islamic books, and the moustachioed but otherwise cleanshaven Akhtar did not get any of those because of the Taliban’s intolerance for men without beards — and they opposed a liberal education.

With American and European development money pouring in to revive education in Afghanistan, Akhtar’s good fortune resonates throughout what might be considered the publishing district of Quissi Khawani, the cacophonous bazaar in Peshawar’s old city. But not everyone in the old part of the city shares Akhtar’s enthusiasm for the end of the Taliban regime.

“Business is very bad,” groaned Mohammad Saeed Ahmad, the owner of Maktabiadal Mohallah bookshop. He sells only Islamic books, written in Persian and Arabic, and with the fall of the Taliban his buyers have disappeared.

Ahmad, who has a long, unkempt beard and was wearing a white skull cap, pointed across the street to a bookshop, whose blue doors were closed with a chain and padlock. The owner was selling the shop and moving to Quetta, he said. To survive, bookshops will have to switch from selling mainly Persian and Arabic books to books in Urdu, the principal language of Pakistan.

In another sign that readers follow politics, most of the stores, which were heavily stocked with books about Osma bin Laden, have seen their sales lag. “They sold like hot cakes,” said Azizullah Khan, sitting cross-legged on the carpet in Saeed’s shop. The buyers didn’t even bargain for Osama tomes, he recalled.

“If we asked Rs100 for these,” he said, “they bargained for 50 rupees. For books about Osama bin Laden, if we asked 100, they paid 100.” But Saeed interjected: “People are not asking for those books now.”—NNI