Abdul Ghani Ballout - Essaouira

Moroccan educator El Houssine Boukebir rushes to meet a customer's call, ordering "special" coffee and an old philosophical book.

The cup is squeezed with vigor and activity in its café in the coastal city of Essaouira. It guides the book’s place with apparent ease, as it moves between the canteen and light-moving bookshelves. "There is no way to resist ignorance except with science and culture, and whoever is afraid of darkness should light the light," Bookbear told Al Jazeera Net, while receiving new pioneers with his usual smile.

Take initiative or become extinct
Bookbir chose the fiftieth progressive man in a unique initiative to turn a café located in a popular neighborhood of the Moroccan city into a cultural shrine intended for the general public as well as intellectuals to read books, learn foreign languages ​​and listen to beautiful music.

There is no place here for smoke, or head-cracking noise. Only serious and sometimes smiling features often fill space with vitality and humanity.

Bockbear adds, some of his looks are regrettable. "It saddens me that the culture of banality prevails in a bitter reality," before he continues in a sharp voice, "whoever does not initiate becomes extinct, just as peoples die when their culture is defeated."

Al-Hussein Bookbair Zain Cultural Café with books, music instruments, judgment and proverbs (Al-Jazeera)

The beginning of the story
Bookbear tells that he is a graduate of philosophy and sociology from the Rabat College, not lending his luck for not having a job, but rather helped his family to create the café that turned from a "skimmer" (a small restaurant specializing in milk and its derivatives) to a place more famous than a knowledgeable fire in the city.

Bookbear began enriching its café with college textbooks that it inherited from years of college achievement, before his friends joined to add their fingerprints each in his field of specialization by bringing in other books.

"The café gives young people the opportunity to self-create and expand their creative imagination, and in my turn the first thing that I saw on the world stage was above these simple chairs, the simplicity of the place," young theater artist Rashid Lahjari told Al Jazeera Net.

Volunteer and have fun
Every work here in this cafe is based on volunteering, you put your hand at the beginning in work and others rush to put their hands in your hand to form a driving force towards good and beauty, as explains the Moroccan poet Noufal Al-Saidi to Al Jazeera Net.

Contemplating the endless movements of passers-by, he adds, "Whoever follows the chapters and scenes of daily life in the cafe, fascinates him when the words on an enjoyable evening turn into rhythmic poetry, or later conversations into theatrical, novel, or story screening projects."

As for the young Hassan Bouzroud, a fan of the café who is eager to read books there, he tells Al-Jazeera Net, "We need every time to breathe thin words with human meanings, our need for water and air."

A cultural paragraph inside the Cultural Café (Al-Jazeera)

Pioneers and sayings
In the simple café, you walk around your eyes in every corner, and you find nothing but simplicity the title of a place where you feel that the mind is close to culture, and calm and beautiful music gives a feeling of safety and comfort.

She joins carefully arranged books over and over again, and pictures of Charlie Chaplin, Molière and Che Guevara, hanging banners adorned with wisdom and sayings of thinkers and wise men or the daughters of Booker himself, those that talk about love of the country, and others about freedom and dignity and a third about the keys to love and so forth.

The young man sips the two cups of tea before he opens a "window in a book" and writes with his right hand a valuable note on the margin, which is engaging in deep reflection, and adds, "There is no room for creativity without seeing many experiences in all countries."

Plastic artist Said Haji, one of the pioneers of the cultural cafe (right), accompanied by Hussein Boukabeer, owner of the cultural cafe (Al-Jazeera)

Cultural nostalgia
In a corner not far from young people, some of whom are playing cards and others studying a new book, the plastic artist Said Haji sits busy reading a novel that is dear to his heart.

Nostalgia and Said go back to the time of the seventies of the last century, when cultural cafes were spread all over the Moroccan cities.

Saeed Hajji says to Al-Jazeera Net, in his well-known calm voice, "The Booker Initiative deserves to be mentioned, it is the enjoyment of the pioneers and allows" the people "to regain the initiative."

Foreigner (second from right) gives English lessons inside the Cultural Café (Al-Jazeera)

A never ending dream
The night relaxes its shadows in the city, while the cafe receives more visitors, some of whom turn into a teacher, and others into Najaba students to learn the English language, as happens today - the day of the completion of the report - one night in December.

Young Hassan Bouzroud says that young people currently go to the café to learn languages, today Shakespeare's language and before that there were lessons for other foreign languages.

"Work is the answer to the question of what to do," Bookbear says. He dreams that his idea will evolve and grow more mature and brilliant, and that his cafe becomes a platform for literacy, an open theater, or an art gallery.