The Bin Shabibs
In a preview from our forthcoming book, The Kinfolk Entrepreneur, Pip Usher meets Rashid and Ahmed Bin Shabib.
Rashid Bin Shabib is seated behind his desk at the offices of Brownbook, the bimonthly Dubai-based periodical he launched with his twin brother, Ahmed. Wearing a kandoura, tousled dark curls bidding an escape from his white thobe, Rashid cuts a dashing figure. He’s internationally educated and erudite, as comfortable in Emirati national dress as he is in slim-cut trousers and owl-shaped glasses. He looks around him and sees the Middle East and North Africa as a region rich in tradition and beauty. And yet, whenever he flicks
on the news, it’s the same old story. Death. Destruction. Dark, heavy stuff. It’s hard not to let it wear him down.
“You read it, and then see it reinforced and reappropriated. It becomes an echo chamber to some extent,” he says of the mainstream media’s...
