Being a Q grader is something akin to what a sommelier is to wine, a grand master is to chess. Like so much of third-wave concentration on quality and expertise, the Q-grading program was very new, established in 2004. Ten years later, there were still only two thousand Q graders in the world. And Willem was correct: among those two thousand, not one was an Arab. This seemed like the kind of obvious challenge that Mokhtar was meant to overcome. A vision gripped him, of returning to Yemen, arriving in Sana’a and striding through the country as the world’s first Arab Q grader. An important man.
