Search results for ""American University in Cairo Press""

Located some one hundred kilometers southwest of Cairo, the Fayum region has long been regarded as unique, often described in terms that conjure up images of an idealized Garden of Eden. In The Fayum Landscape Claire Malleson takes a novel approach to the study of the region by exploring the ways in which people have, through millennia, perceived and engaged with the Fayum landscape. Distinguishing between the experienced landscape of state and bureaucratic record and the imagined landscape of myth, meaning, and observers’ personal influences and expectations, Malleson questions in detail where those perceptions come from. She traces religious practices, follows the tracks of myths and traditions, and investigates the roots of stories found in texts from the pharaonic, classical, and Medieval Islamic periods. She also reviews many, more recent travel writings on the region from the seventeenth to the nineteenth centuries. The work of each author is presented in its historical and cultural context, and Malleson integrates what is known about ancient activities in the Fayum, based on the archaeological evidence from the many monuments and ancient settlements that exist in the region. Scholars and students of archaeology and landscape studies as well as general readers interested in Egypt’s history and archaeology will find this book highly engaging and enlightening.

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November 1979. Violence has broken out in the holiest site of Islam after a charismatic rebel and his devoted followers have announced the coming of the Mahdi and seized the Grand Mosque in Mecca. Among the insurgents is a young woman, Sarab, disguised as a man. As the horror and chaos of the siege reach their peak, she escapes and encounters a French officer from the opposing side. They form an unexpected bond, as hostility turns to attraction, but the violence of both of their pasts will return to haunt them. Award-winning writer Raja Alem’s extraordinary narrative stretches from Saudi Arabia’s Najd desert to the heart of Paris. In her typical bold and captivating style, this most unusual of love stories unpicks faith and fanaticism, alienation and redemption, and ultimately what it means to be human.

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The city of a thousand minarets is also the city of eclectic modern constructions, turn-of-the-century revivalism and romanticism, concrete expressionism, and modernist design. Yet while much has been published on Cairo’s ancient, medieval, and early-modern architectural heritage, the city’s modern architecture has to date not received the attention it deserves. Cairo since 1900: An Architectural Guide is the first comprehensive architectural guide to the constructions that have shaped and continue to shape the Egyptian capital since the early twentieth century. From the sleek apartment tower for Inji Zada in Ghamra designed by Antoine Selim Nahas in 1937, to the city’s many examples of experimental church architecture, and visible landmarks such as the Mugamma and Arab League buildings, Cairo is home to a rich store of modernist building styles. Arranged by geographical area, the guide includes entries for 150 buildings of note, each entry consisting of concise, explanatory text describing the building and its significance accompanied by photographs, drawings, and maps. This pocket-sized volume is an ideal companion for the city’s visitors and residents as well as an invaluable resource for scholars and students of Cairo’s architecture and urban history.

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The map of a city is a palimpsest of its history. In Cairo, people, places, events, and even dates have lent their names to streets, squares, and bridges, only for those names often to be replaced, and then replaced again, and even again, as the city and the country imagine and reimagine their past. The resident, wandering boulevards and cul-de-sacs, finds signs; the reader, perusing novels and histories, finds references. Who were ?Abd el-Khaleq Sarwat Basha or Yusef el-Gindi that they should have streets named after them? Who was Nubar Basha and why did his street move from the north of the city to its center in 1933? Why do older maps show two squares called Bab el-Luq, while modern maps show none? Focusing on the part of the city created in the wake of Khedive Ismail’s command, given in 1867, to create a “Paris on the Nile” on the muddy lands between medieval Cairo and the river, A Field Guide to the Street Names of Cairo lists more than five hundred current and three hundred former appellations. Current street names are listed in alphabetical order, with an explanation of what each commemorates and when it was first recorded, followed by the same for its predecessors. An index allows the reader to trace streets whose names have disappeared or that have never achieved more than popular status. This is a book that will satisfy the curiosity of all, be they citizens, long-term residents, or visitors, who are fascinated by this most multi-layered of cities and wish to understand it better.

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Morocco is a country that has been much invaded, much traveled though, and much written about in many languages. Positioned at the entrance to Africa—or the entrance to Europe—it has seen deep cultural cross-fertilization and the emergence of a very distinct culture at the threshold of two worlds. Its history is exciting and colorful; its ancient cities extraordinary in their preservation; and its people magnetic. It has drawn travelers and writers for many centuries, and continues to do so today, with the result that there exists a rich seam of description and sometimes quizzical (but generally very fond) appreciation, which Martin Rose, a long-time resident of the country, has been able to mine for this fascinating anthology.

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The Open Door is a landmark of women's writing in Arabic. Published in 1960, it was very bold for its time in exploring a middle-class Egyptian girl's coming of sexual and political age, in the context of the Egyptian nationalist movement preceding the 1952 revolution. The novel traces the pressures on young women and young men of that time and class as they seek to free themselves of family control and social expectations. Young Layla and her brother become involved in the student activism of the 1940s and early 1950s and in the popular resistance to continued imperialist rule; the story culminates in the 1956 Suez Crisis, when Gamal Abd al-Nasser's nationalization of the Canal led to a British, French, and Israeli invasion. Not only daring in her themes, Latifa al-Zayyat was also bold in her use of colloquial Arabic, and the novel contains some of the liveliest dialogue in modern Arabic literature."Not only a great novel, but a literary landmark that shaped our consciousness."--Abdel Moneim Tallima "A great anticolonialist work in a feminist key."--Ferial Ghazoul "Latifa al-Zayyat greatly helped all of us Egyptian writers in our early writing careers."--Naguib Mahfouz

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On the eve of Salma's twenty-first birthday, friends and family travel to New York for a celebration reluctantly organized by her grandfather Darwish. As the guests make their way to the party, each journey takes on a greater significance than a simple trip to the city, as they find themselves examining their pasts, their relationships to one another, and to the country in which they live. Between Cairo and New York, Embrace on Brooklyn Bridge paints a vivid portrait of a fragmented Arab-American family, one struggling to become whole again and to let go of the past.

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Marcus Pasha Simaika (1864-1944) was born to a prominent Coptic family on the eve of the inauguration of the Suez Canal and the British occupation of Egypt. From a young age, he developed a passion for Coptic heritage and devoted his life to shedding light on centuries of Christian Egyptian history that had been neglected by ignorance or otherwise belittled and despised. He was not a professional archaeologist, an excavator, or a specialist scholar of Coptic language and literature. Rather, his achievement lies in his role as a visionary administrator who used his status to pursue relentlessly his dream of founding a Coptic Museum and preserving endangered monuments. During his lengthy career, first as a civil servant, then as a legislator and member of the Coptic community council, he maneuvered endlessly between the patriarch and the church hierarchy, the Coptic community council, the British authorities, and the government to bring them together in his fight to save Coptic heritage. This fascinating biography draws upon Simaika's unpublished memoirs as well as on other documents and photographs from the Simaika family archive to deepen our understanding of several important themes of modern Egyptian history: the development of Coptic archaeology and heritage studies, Egyptian-British interactions during the colonial and semi-colonial eras, shifting balances in the interaction of clergymen and the lay Coptic community, and the ever-sensitive evolution of relations between Copts and their Muslim countrymen.

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When the imam of a small town in Southern Lebanon is diagnosed with cancer, the illness he fears and has expected for years, he takes the radical decision to abandon the life he inherited from his father. He was persuaded to wear the robe and turban in his youth to preserve the family tradition and entered into an arranged marriage. While his grandfather and father were once powerful imams, he displays no interest in the mosque. The wife, for whom he feels no affection, attends to her chores and nurses his father, now sick and bedridden, in his house. Though he worries about his two sons, who were born deaf and mute, he takes no measures to secure a special education for them.

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Ibn Shalaby, like many Egyptians, is looking for a job. Yet, unlike most of his fellow citizens, he is prone to sudden dislocations in time. Armed with his trusty briefcase and his Islamic-calendar wristwatch, he bounces uncontrollably through Egypt’s rich and varied past, with occasional return visits to the 1990s. Through his wild and whimsical adventures, he meets, befriends, and falls out with sultans, poets, and an assortment of celebrities - from Naguib Mahfouz to the founder of the city of Cairo. Khairy Shalaby’s nimble storytelling brings this witty odyssey to life.

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When young and handsome Othman married Sofia-sophisticated, French, rich, and forty years his senior-he found his ticket out of a life of desperate poverty in the slums of Casablanca. But when Sofia is brutally murdered, the police quickly zero in on Othman as the prime suspect. With his mistress, the love of his life, waiting in the wings he certainly has motive. But is he guilty? Or has he been framed by an overzealous, corrupt police force?

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Just to the south of modern Cairo stands the historic enclave known as Old Cairo, which grew up in and around the Roman fortress of Babylon, and which today hosts a unique collection of monuments that attest to the shared cultural heritage of ancient Egyptians, Christians, Jews, and Muslims. In this lavishly illustrated celebration of a very special place, renowned photographer Sherif Sonbol's remarkable images of the fortress, churches, synagogue, and mosque illuminate the living fabric of the ancient and medieval stones, while the text describes the history of Old Cairo from the time of the ancient Egyptians and the Romans to the founding of the first Muslim city of al-Fustat, focusing on the Jewish history of the area (exploring the famous Genizah documents found in the Ben Ezra Synagogue that tell so much about everyday life in medieval Egypt), the early Coptic Christian churches, some of the oldest in the world, and the arrival of the Muslims in the seventh century, their establishment of al-Fustat on the edge of Old Cairo, and the building of the oldest mosque in Africa.

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Hassan makes a living in his native Marrakesh as a comic writer and performer, through his satirical sketches critical of Morocco's rulers. Yet when he is suddenly conscripted into a losing war in the Sahara, and drafted to a far-flung desert outpost, it seems that all is lost. Could his estranged father, close to power as the king's private jester, have something to do with his sudden removal from the city? And will he ever see his beloved wife Zinab again? With flowing prose and black humor, Youssef Fadel subtly tells the story of 1980s Morocco.

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Friendship, though esteemed, has not been central in critical studies. It has been overshadowed by other bonding relationships. However, it figures as a privileged theme in classical, medieval, renaissance, and modern philosophy. More recently, sociological, anthropological, and psychological studies have explored the varied dimensions of friendship. Different cultures view friendship in various perspectives that intersect, contrast, and echo each other. In Middle Eastern, East Asian, European, and American thought, philosophers, jurists, and creative writers have explored the idea of friendship and their input is analyzed in this issue. Alif 36 foregrounds different ways of presenting friendship in diverse cultures and historical periods.

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Can a writer help to bring about a more just society? This question was at the heart of the movement of al-adab al-multazim, or committed literature, which claimed to dominate Arab writing in the mid-twentieth century. By the 1960s, however, leading Egyptian writers had retreated into disillusionment, producing agonized works that challenged the key assumptions of socially engaged writing. Rather than a rejection of the idea, however, these works offered reinterpretation of committed writing that helped set the stage for activist writers of the present.David DiMeo focuses on the work of three leading writers whose socially committed fiction was adapted to the disenchantment and discontent of the late twentieth century: Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris, and Sonallah Ibrahim. Despite their disappointments with the direction of Egyptian society in the decades following the 1952 revolution, they kept the spirit of committed literature alive through a deeply introspective examination of the relationship between the writer, the public, and political power.Reaching back to the roots of this literary movement, DiMeo examines the development of committed literature from its European antecedents to its peak of influence in the 1950s, and contrasts the committed works with those of disillusionment that followed. Committed to Disillusion is vital reading for scholars and students of Arabic literature and the modern history and politics of the Middle East.

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Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated is a fascinating and highly experimental story based loosely around the author’s own experiences in Egypt as a Moroccan student and visiting intellectual. In Cairo the narrator, Hammad, takes us on a deeply personal journey of discovery from the heady days of the 1950s and 1960s, with all the optimism and excitement surrounding Moroccan independence, Suez, and Abdel Nasser, up to the 1990s and the time of writing, revealing an individual intensely concerned with Arab life and culture. Meanwhile, his regular visits to Cairo allow us to watch a culture in transition over four decades. Exploring themes of change, the role of culture in society, memory, and writing, in a text that combines narrative fiction with literary criticism, philosophical musings, and quotation, Like a Summer Never to Be Repeated is among the most innovative works of modern Arabic literature and a testimony to Mohammed Berrada’s position as a leading pioneer.

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This book presents a concise account of the lives and times of some of the more significant occupants of the Egyptian throne, from the unification of the country around 3000 BC down to the extinction of native rule just under three millennia later. Some, such as Thutmose III, had a major impact on their time, and were remembered by their own people until the very civilization collapsed. Others, such as Tutankhamun, were soon forgotten by the Egyptians themselves, only to burst into popular culture thousands of years after their deaths, as a result of the labors of modern archaeologists. Still more remain unknown outside the small circle of professional archaeologists, but led lives that call out for wider dissemination. This book sets out to provide a mix of all three categories, in an attempt to present a balanced view of Egyptian kings and their range of achievements.First published in 1995, Monarchs of the Nile has now been extensively revised and rewritten to take into account two further decades of research and excavation.

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One of the best ways to learn a language is by studying the media that native speakers themselves listen to and read, and popular songs can also reveal much about the culture and traditions of a country where the language is spoken. Egypt, as one of the great cultural production centers of the Arab world, enjoys a particularly rich musical scene, with songs in many styles in both Modern Standard Arabic and Egyptian Colloquial Arabic.Here, Cairo-based Arabic teacher, Bahaa Ed-Din Ossama, presents twenty songs in Egyptian Arabic performed by popular singers from Umm Kulthoum to Mohamed Mounir and builds a variety of language lessons around them, with notes on vocabulary, grammar, and usage, and communicative exercises in listening, writing, and speaking. The songs are graded from easiest to most difficult, and each lesson includes a link to a performance of the song on YouTube, the lyrics of the song, and notes on the songwriter, the composer, and the singer. An illustration by cartoonist, Okacha, accompanies each song, adding not just a touch of humor but an additional departure point for classroom discussions.Students using this unique book will not only improve their Colloquial Arabic skills but will also gain an insight into the cultural landscape of Egypt. The book can be used in the classroom or for self-study.Includes songs by: Ali al-Haggar, Dalida, Farid al-Atrash, Laila Murad, Latifa, Medhat Saleh, Mohamed Abd al-Wahab, Mohamed Fawzi, Mohamed Mounir, Nagat, Riham Abd al-Hakim, Sabah, Samira Said, Shadia, Suad Hosni, and Umm Kulthum.

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Beirut has seen many armies and empires come and go, but the legacy of this long history is not so much in surviving monuments as in the quintessential Levantine spirit of the people. A commercial hub since the days of the Phoenicians, it was a centre of learning under the Romans, its law school preeminent in the Empire. Beirut was the point of entry to the Levant for many Europeans and Americans undertaking a Grand Tour or a pilgrimage to the Holy Land, and visitors (whether their focus was piously Biblical or more prosaic) recorded their impressions of this effervescent port city where East rubs against West. A Beirut Anthology gathers the choicest of these, from writers as diverse as Alphonse de Lamartine and Mark Twain, providing a surprising and vivid glimpse behind the veil of this elusive and alluring city.

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Since it was first published in 1998, Viola Shafik's Arab Cinema: History and Cultural Identity has become an indispensable work for scholars of film and the contemporary Middle East. Combining detailed narrative history-economic, ideological, and aesthetic-with thought-provoking analysis, Arab Cinema provides a comprehensive overview of cinema in the Arab world, tracing the industry's development from colonial times to the present. It analyzes the ambiguous relationship with commercial western cinema, and the effect of Egyptian market dominance in the region. Tracing the influence on the medium of local and regional art forms and modes of thought, both classical and popular, Shafik shows how indigenous and external factors combine in a dynamic process of "cultural repackaging."Now updated to reflect cultural shifts in the last two decades, this revised edition contains a new afterword highlighting the latest developments in popular and in art-house filmmaking, with a special focus on Iraq, Lebanon, Palestine, and the Gulf States. While exploring problematic issues such as European co-production for Arab art films, including their relation to cultural identity and their reception in the region and abroad, this new edition introduces readers to some of the most compelling cinematic works of the last decades.

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An acclaimed economist and lifelong Palestinian nationalist Yusif Sayigh (1916-2004) came of age at a time of immense political change in the Middle East. Born in al-Bassa, near Acre in northern Palestine, he was witness to the events that led to the loss of Palestine and his memoir therefore constitutes a vivid social history of the region, as well as a revealing firsthand account of the Palestinian national movement almost from its earliest inception. Family and everyday life, co-villagers, landscapes, pleasures, outings, schooling, and political figures recreate the vanished world of Sayigh's formative years in the Levant. An activist in Palestine, he was taken prisoner of war by the Israelis in 1948. Later, as an economist, he wrote extensively on Arab oil, economic development, and manpower, teaching for many years at the American University of Beirut and taking early retirement in 1974 to work as a consultant for a number of pan-Arab and international organizations. A single chapter on Palestinian politics provides insights into his later activist work and experiences of working as a consultant with the Palestine Liberation Organization to produce an economic plan for an eventual Palestinian state.This fascinating memoir by a pioneer and major figure of the Palestinian national movement is a welcome addition to the growing literature on Palestinian life during the first half of the twentieth century as well as an account of some of the most pressing political and economic issues to have faced the Arab world for the better part of the twentieth century.

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Sinai's allure is legendary. Its spectacular landscapes, thriving flora and fauna, and unique history, the store of centuries, have long held sway in the imagination of millions. The high mountains and wadis of the peninsula's south provide the fertile soil that feeds some of Egypt's highest diversity of plants, while foxes, vipers, lizards, and tortoises are just some of the animals that make their home in the north, which is characterized by lagoons and vast dunes of soft sand. Sinai: Landscape and Nature in Egypt's Wilderness transports us to the haunting grandeur of this peninsula with 150 breathtaking full-color photographs. Omar Attum's discerning eye shows us blood-red mountains, animals in natural repose and habitat, solitary trees and flowers, and fugitive strips of water, conveying stark beauty and enormous vulnerability, an abundance of life yet utter, devastating peace. The photographs are accompanied by an evocative introduction by Attum to Sinai's wildlife and landscape.

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Egypt's Copts make up one of the oldest and largest Christian communities in the Middle East. Yet despite the availability of a large number of books on aspects of Coptic culture, including art and architecture, monasticism, theology, and music, there is to date no single volume that provides a comprehensive cultural history of the Copts and their achievements. Coptic Civilization aims to fill this gap, by introducing the general reader, the interested non-specialist, to Coptic culture in all its variety and multi-faceted richness. With contributions by twenty scholars, Coptic Civilization includes chapters on monasticism, the Coptic language, Coptic literature, Christian Arabic literature, the objects and documents of daily life, magic, art and architecture, and textiles, as well as the history of Coptic Church, its liturgy, theology, and music.

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Set in the ancient Upper Egyptian village of Karnak against the backdrop of the British campaigns in Sudan, the Second World War, and the war in Palestine, The Collar and the Bracelet is the stunning saga of the Bishari family-a family ripped apart by the violence of history, the dark conduits of human desire, and the rigid social conventions of village life. In a series of masterful narrative circles and repetitions, the novella traces the grim intrigues of Hazina al-Bishari and the inexorable destinies of her son, the exile and notorious bandit Mustafa, her daughter Fahima, tortured by guilt and secret passion, and the tragic doom of her beautiful granddaughter Nabawiya. Yahya Taher Abdullah's haunting prose distills the rhythmic lyricism of the folk story and weaves it into a uniquely modernist narrative tapestry of love and revenge that beautifully captures the timeless pharaonic landscapes of Upper Egypt and the blind struggles of its inhabitants against poverty, exploitation, and time-themes that are echoed and amplified in the short stories included in this volume, which span the breadth of Abdullah's tragically short career as one of Egypt's most brilliant writers of modern fiction.

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This novel is set in an idyllic Egyptian village from the time it was discovered by Muhammad Ali's mission in the early nineteenth century to the 2003 US invasion of Iraq, movingly intertwining events on the world scene with the life dramas of its protagonists. The story opens with the pivotal character, Mubarka al-Fuli, now a grandmother and matriarch, wanting to dictate a letter to God for her grandson to send to the Almighty by email. We are then ushered back in time to Mubarka's fiery adolescence and her painfully aborted romance with Muntasir, son of the village's deceased but legendary strongman. The shifting fortunes of the al-Deeb clan affect every aspect of its members' lives, from their sexual vulnerabilities to the grief of loss, the uncertainties of a changing world, and the heartaches born of betrayal, and love unfulfilled.

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"How could a good Muslim boy like you be born into a Jewish family!" For Galal, forced to leave Egypt in the 1960s Jewish exodus with his family, the Diaspora has none of the beauty of a rich tapestry of history; it is a day-to-day struggle to fit into his new life in Paris, reconcile the conflicting demands of family and friends, and come to terms with who he is. The quest for belonging and identity is at the heart of this sensitive and tender narrative. Earthy, rambunctious supporting characters burst from the page, spontaneous, emotional, yet, for all their fa ade of confidence, no less adrift than Galal himself. Ruhayyim's Paris of the 1960s is startlingly relevant: then, as now, religion offers an illusory source of community and identity for migrants to the west, not fitting in, yet cut off from their roots. Deeply personal, this unusual, uplifting coming-of-age novel takes us into the heart of an ordinary young man in the grip of an unforgiving historical moment.

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This pioneering collection of analyses focuses on the ideologies and activities of formal women's organizations and informal women's groups across a range of Arab countries. With contributions on Syria, Jordan, Lebanon, Palestine, Iraq, Egypt, Kuwait, the United Arab Emirates, Yemen, and the Arab diaspora in the United States, Mapping Arab Women's Movements contributes to delineating similarities and differences between historical and contemporary efforts toward greater gender justice. The authors explore the origins of women's movements, trace their development during the past century, and address the impact of counter-movements, alliances, and international collaborations within the region and beyond, providing accessible accounts for scholars and others interested in the Middle East and in women's movements in other settings.

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In the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly migrated northward to Egypt and other eastern Mediterranean destinations, yet relatively little is known about them. Studies have focused mainly on the mamluk and harem slaves of elite households, who were mostly white, and on abolitionist efforts to end the slave trade, and most have relied heavily on western language sources. In the past forty years new sources have become available, ranging from Egyptian religious and civil court and police records to rediscovered archives and accounts in western archives and libraries. Along with new developments in the study of African slavery these sources provide a perspective on the lives of non-elite trans-Saharan Africans in nineteenth century Egypt and beyond. The nine essays in this volume examine the lives of slaves and freed men and women in Egypt and the region. Contributors: Kenneth M. Cuno, Y. Hakan Erdem, Michael Ferguson, Emad Ahmad Helal Shams al-Din, Liat Kozma, George Michael La Rue, Ahmad A. Sikainga, Eve M. Troutt Powell, and Terence Walz.

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The complete series of innovative new coursebooks in Egyptian colloquial ArabicAimed at the growing number of students studying Arabic worldwide, the Kallimni ‘Arabi series takes an innovative, functional approach to the study of Egyptian colloquial Arabic—the spoken dialect most frequently studied and most widely understood in the Arab world. Kallimni ‘Arabi Mazboot, the fourth book in the series, is designed for adult students at the early advanced stage of learning the language.Drawing on her years of experience as an Arabic instructor, author Samia Louis has developed a course rich in everyday cultural content and real-life functional language as well as comprehensive grammar. Written in accordance with the ACTFL guidelines for teaching Arabic as a foreign language, this highly structured course trains students in the crucial skills, with emphasis on listening and speaking.Each chapter includes a conversation unit that enables students to improve their communication skills and allows for progressive acquisition of vocabulary and grammar through interactive classroom tasks and everyday situations, from expressing personal likes and dislikes to initiating conversations and describing events and experiences. The associated audio files have recordings of each chapter’s dialogues and exercises, made by native Egyptian speakers to enrich the student’s exposure to the spoken language in its natural context and speed. The associated audiovisual files , both available online and as a CD, comprise a series of video programs entitled “People’s Opinions,” which further help the students to place colloquial Egyptian within context. “The books in the [Kallimni ‘Arabi] series altogether present the best Arabic textbooks available . . . miles ahead of most others.”—David Wilmsen, American University of Beirut

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This book is an invaluable new reference source and critical review of Arab women writers from the nineteenth century to the end of the twentieth.Arab women's writing in the modern age began with A'isha al-Taymuriya, Warda al-Yaziji, Zaynab Fawwaz, and other nineteenth-century pioneers in Egypt and the Levant. This unique study - first published in Arabic in 2004 - looks at the work of those pioneers and then traces the development of Arab women's literature through the end of the twentieth century, and also includes a meticulously researched, comprehensive bibliography of writing by Arab women. In the first section, in nine essays that cover the Arab Middle East from Morocco to Iraq and Syria to Yemen, critics and writers from the Arab world examine the origin and evolution of women's writing in each country in the region, addressing fiction, poetry, drama, and autobiographical writing.The second part of the volume contains bibliographical entries for over 1,200 Arab women writers from the last third of the nineteenth century through 1999. Each entry contains a short biography and a bibliography of each author's published works. This section also includes Arab women's writing in French and English, as well as a bibliography of works translated into English.With its broad scope and extensive research, this book is an indispensable resource for anyone interested in Arabic literature, women's studies, or comparative literature.

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In 1872, Ismail Pasha, the khedive of Egypt, was the first to adopt the European custom of positioning heroic statues on public display as a symbolic message of the continuing authority of the ruling Muhammad Ali dynasty to which he belonged, but it was not until the early twentieth century and the determination of sculptor Mahmoud Mukhtar that such public art gained general acceptance, and today statues stand, ride, or sit in the streets, squares, and gardens of Cairo. Each sculpture adds a piece to the jigsaw of history spanning personalities and events that shaped the city and wider Egypt from 1805 to 1970, and here Cairo-based author Lesley Lababidi provides a unique perspective on Egyptian history through looking at more than thirty statues and monumental sculptures and the stories behind them. Between statues, she explores Cairo’s growth and its multidimensional identity, as manifested in the development and changing use of city space over the centuries, and examines the relationship of Cairo’s modern denizens with the landscapes, districts, palaces, archaeological sites, cafés, bridges, and gardens of their great and maddening city, the Mother of the World. Illustrated throughout with color photographs and archival pictures, Cairo’s Street Stories presents a unique and lively view of the history that fashioned the city’s streets and open spaces, and of the many and often unexpected uses to which its inventive inhabitants put them.

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This volume presents the results of recent archaeological and historical studies of the Ottoman fort of Quseir, which was Upper Egypt's only direct outlet to the Red Sea at that time. Illustrated with over 100 maps, drawings, and photographs, this groundbreaking study examines a key example of Ottoman-era material culture in Egypt. With contributions from seven historians and archaeologists, "Quseir" traces the development and history of an important Ottoman fortress, built near an abandoned medieval port. Its establishment was part of a constant struggle by the Ottoman state to maintain control of the desert and the routes across it. Studies of the archaeological remains from the fort reveal the presence of reused stones from a Greco-Roman temple and emphasize its key role as a regional grain entrepot and port of embarkation for Muslim pilgrims on the way to Mecca. "Quseir" is a portrait of a place at the boundary of two powerful cultural and economic systems. While serving as an outlet for the pilgrims and produce of Upper Egypt, Quseir also played a role in the distinctive maritime culture of the Red Sea. This study also reveals in detail for the first time the story of the struggle between the British and French for control of Quseir during the Napoleonic occupation of 1798-1801.

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This enchanted tour of Egyptian art by one of its early explorers is one of the most beautiful modern works on ancient Egyptian art. Prisse d’Avennes’ monumental work, first published in Paris over a ten-year period between 1868 and 1878, includes the only surviving record of many lost artifacts.‘‘None of Prisse’s contemporaries had the skill or endurance to bring such an endeavor to such a brilliant end. He was far ahead of his time in his awareness of the vulnerability of the monuments and the need to protect them and to record them. His were the first reliable drawings of Egyptian architecture and ornaments and the first plans and sections of constructions newly excavated. He returned to Paris [in 1860] with a rich harvest of 300 drawings, 400 meters of squeezes, and 150 photographs.’’ — Maarten J. Raven, Curator of the Egyptian Department, the Rijksmuseum van Oudheden, Leiden.Now reissued in a handy new hardbound reference format.

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Khaled, the spoiled idle son of a pasha, meets Malim, carpenter’s apprentice and son of a scoundrel, when he comes to fix a broken window. In the course of his work, Malim stumbles across a stash of money and dutifully hands it in. Khaled cooks up an overly elaborate plot to see that his dastardly father pays Malim his due, but the plot backfires and Malim is thrown in jail. Khaled’s guilt over Malim’s misfortune, made worse by his ridiculous attempts to defend him, result in a decisive moment: he breaks ties with his cruel and tyrannical father, seeking to leave behind the upper-class lifestyle he finds so suffocating. They meet again years later, when Malim has been released from prison and given up on earning an honest living. Khaled gets caught up in Malim’s latest scam and is drawn into joining his commune of eccentrics and failed artists living in a derelict Mamluk citadel.

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A new history of Ottoman TunisThe first Ottoman conquest of Tunis took place in 1534 under the command of Kheireddine Barbarossa. However, it was not until 1574 that the Ottomans finally wrested control of the former Hafsid Ifriqiya (modern-day Tunisia), retaining it until the French occupation of Tunisia in 1881. The Regency of Tunis was thus born as an imperial province, and individuals originating from throughout the vast territory of the Ottoman Empire settled there, rapidly creating a new elite via marriage with women from local notable families. This book studies the former Hafsid territory’s position within the Ottoman world and the social developments that accompanied the genesis of the united Regency of Tunis until the death of Hamouda Pasha.On the social plane, who were these Turko-Ottomans who were able to drive the Hafsid kings from their throne? Were they noble officers, as is so often remembered? The sources paint a different picture: one of rogues from distant Anatolia, and captives of corsairs from across the Mediterranean. These men expanded privateering for their own profit, seizing the country’s riches for themselves and monopolizing exports to Europe.Leïla Blili revisits the conventional historiography of Ottoman Tunisia, widely considered by historians to be an autonomous province ruled by a dominant class of Turko-Ottomans cut off from local society. She shows that the Regency of Tunis was much less autonomous than secondary scholarship has alleged and, through her analysis of the marriages of these Turko-Ottomans, that they were in fact well-integrated into the local population. In doing so, she also illuminates the place of kinship ties in the establishing of inheritances, access to spheres of power, and the very acquisition of titles of nobility.

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Self-presentation is the oldest and most common component of ancient Egyptian high culture. It arose in the context of private tomb records, where the character and role of an individual—invariably a well-to-do non-royal elite official or administrator—were presented purposefully: published by inscription and image, to a contemporary audience and to posterity. Living Forever: Self-presentation in Ancient Egypt looks at how and why non-royal elites in ancient Egypt represented themselves, through language and art, on monuments, tombs, stelae, and statues, and in literary texts, from the Early Dynastic Period to the Thirtieth Dynasty. Bringing together essays by international Egyptologists and archaeologists from a range of backgrounds, the chapters in this volume offer fresh insight into the form, content, and purpose of ancient Egyptian presentations of the self. Applying different approaches and disciplines, they explore how these self-representations, which encapsulated a discourse with gods and men alike, yield rich historical and sociological information, provide examples of ancient rhetorical devices and repertoire, and shed light on notions of the self and collective memory in ancient Egypt.

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Across the globe, American-style and liberal arts universities are being established. From the first, the American University of Beirut, established in 1866, to the liberal arts institutions being established in Saudi Arabia, Ghana, and elsewhere in the twenty-first century, there is a clear sense of the global desire for the American approach to higher education as a way of counteracting traditional, more narrowly defined university educations. However, these universities operate in a distinctive dynamic that must learn to bridge one culture with another, and leadership of such institutions must by its nature focus on such complexities and tensions. Throughout the chapters of this book, this unique element of these universities will be better understood through the stories and experiences as presented by their presidents, provosts, and other academic leaders.

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Little is known about Egypt’s Gypsies, called Dom by scholars, but variously referred to by Egyptians as Ghagar, Nawar, Halebi, or Hanagra, depending on their location. Moreover, most Egyptians are oblivious to the fact that there are today large numbers of Gypsies dispersed from the outskirts of villages in Upper Egypt to impoverished neighborhoods in Cairo and Alexandria. In Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt sociologist Alexandra Parrs draws on two years of fieldwork to explore how Dom identities are constructed, negotiated, and contested in the specifically Egyptian national context. With an eye to the pitfalls and evolution of scholarly work on the vastly more studied European Roma, she traces the scattered representations of Egyptian Dom, from accounts of them by nineteenth-century European Orientalists to their portrayal in Egyptian cinema as belly-dancers in the 1950s and beggars and thieves more recently. She explores the boundaries—religious, cultural, racial, linguistic—between Dom and non-Dom Egyptians and examines the ways in which the Dom position themselves within the limitations of media discourses about them and in turn differentiate themselves from the dominant population. This interplay of attitudes, argues Parrs, sheds light on the values and markers of belonging of the majority population and the paradigms of nation-state formation at the governmental level. Based on extensive interviews with government workers and ordinary individuals in routine contact with the Dom, as well with Dom engaged in a variety of trades in Cairo and Alexandria, Gypsies in Contemporary Egypt is about the search for the fragments of identity of the Egyptian Dom.

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At one interrogation, he encounters Mustafa Ismail: a university professor turned master thief, who breaks into the homes of the great and the good and then blackmails them into silence.Mustafa has dedicated his existence to the perfection of his trade and authored a book titled The Book of Safety, the ultimate guide to successful thievery, containing everything from philosophical principles to the best way to open a door.Yasser Abdel Hafiz's beautiful and deceptively effortless novel tracks Khaled's descent into obsession with this mysterious book and its author, in a narrative that holds us spellbound.

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Robert Armour's classic text, long cherished by a generation of readers, is now complemented with more than 50 new photographs and line drawings that show the gods and goddesses in their characteristic forms. Armour maintains a strong narrative thread with illuminating commentary in his lively, vigorous retelling of stories from Egyptian mythology, including those of the sun god Ra, the tragic death and rebirth of Osiris with the help of Isis, the near-burlesque of Horus' battle with the evil Seth, and the "gods of the intellect" Thoth and Maat. Now with an updated bibliography and glossary as well as new charts showing the gods at a glance and ancient Egyptian chronology in brief, this book is sure to inform and enchant a new generation of readers.

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In light of the rapidly growing number of people studying Arabic--in academia, governments, NGOs, and business--Media Arabic is a unique and timely learning tool for anyone looking to access news information from this important global region firsthand. Media Arabic introduces the language of the newspapers, magazines, and internet news sites to intermediate and advanced level students of Modern Standard Arabic. Using this textbook, students will be able to master core vocabulary and structures typical of front-page news, recognize various modes of coverage, distinguish fact from opinion, detect bias, and read critically in Arabic. Drawing on their long experience as Arabic instructors, Alaa Elgibali and Nevenka Korica have organized the book into six chapters, each covering a dominant news topic: Talks and Conferences, Demonstrations and Protests, Conflicts and Terrorism, Elections, Rule of Law, and Business. In addition, the book offers three self-assessment units and a glossary organized by theme. The book enables students to read extended texts with greater accuracy and speed by focusing on the relationships among meaning, language form, and markers of cohesive discourse. The activities include pre-reading discussions as well as extensive practice on vocabulary in context, organizing information, skimming, scanning, critical reading, and analyzing content.

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Modern Standard Arabic (MSA) is the literary language of today's books, media, and formal communication throughout the Arab World, the region's principal shared language of written and official discourse. The third book in this new series for the classroom is designed for adult learners of the language at the intermediate stage.Drawing on her years of experience as an Arabic instructor, author Samia Louis has developed a course rich in everyday contexts and real-life, practical language, along with a wide range of grammar-learning strategies to allow students to deploy the language with confidence. Written in accordance with the ACTFL guidelines for teaching Arabic as a foreign language, the course is conceived in such a way to make the study of Arabic language and grammar easier for the student.Book Four addresses the middle to high intermediate Arabic learner. The aim of this book is to help students to read and write articles, essays and texts, using a range of tenses, in correct Arabic grammar. Students will also learn how to communicate orally in a number of different situations, discussing current events, leisure activities, and practical matters.The students' facility with sentence structure and vocabulary is increased by reading newspapers and listening to news broadcasts, and by writing about real-life interests such as environmental conditions, political issues, sports, and cultural pursuits. The chapters guide students through the gradual acquisition of vocabulary and grammar. Exercises at the end of each chapter cover all essential skills and translation, with emphasis on reading and writing. The accompanying DVD includes audio material for all listening activities, dialogs, and reading exercises. The book is further supported by online interactive reading, writing, and grammar drills.

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This volume is the first joint publication of the members of the American - Egyptian mission South Asasif Conservation Project, working under the auspices of the State Ministry for Antiquities and Supreme Council of Antiquities, and directed by the editor. The Project is dedicated to the clearing, restoration, and reconstruction of the tombs of Karabasken (TT 391) and Karakhamun (TT 223) of the Twenty-fifth Dynasty, and the tomb of Irtieru (TT 390) of the Twenty-sixth Dynasty, on the West Bank of Luxor. Essays by the experts involved in the excavations and analysis cover the history of the Kushite ruling dynasties in Egypt and the hierarchy of Kushite society, the history of the South Asasif Necropolis and its discovery, the architecture and textual and decorative programs of the tombs, and the finds of burial equipment, pottery, and animal bones.

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