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the yacoubian building
The Yacoubian Building holds all that Egypt was and has become over the 75 years since its namesake was built on one of downtown Cairo's main boulevards. From the pious son of the building's doorkeeper and the raucous, impoverished squatters on its roof, via the tattered aristocrat and the gay intellectual in its apartments, to the ruthless businessman whose stores occupy its ground floor, each sharply etched character embodies a facet of modern Egypt -- where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies, where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism, and where an older, less violent vision of society may yet prevail. Alaa Al Aswany's novel caused an unprecedented stir when it was first published in 2002 and has remained the world's best selling novel in the Arabic language since.
Life is More Beautiful Than Paradise
In 1986, when this autobiography opens, the author is a typical fourteen-year-old boy in Asyut in Upper Egypt. Attracted at first by the image of a radical Islamist group as "strong Muslims," his involvement develops until he finds himself deeply committed to its beliefs and implicated in its activities. This ends when, as he leaves the university following a demonstration, he is arrested. Prison, a return to life on the outside, and attending Cairo University all lead to Khaled al-Berry's eventual alienation from radical Islam. This book opens a window onto the mind of an extremist who turns out to be disarmingly like many other clever adolescents, and bears witness to a history with whose reverberations we continue to live. It also serves as an intelligent and critical guide for the reader to the movement's unfamiliar debates and preoccupations, motives and intentions. Fluently written, intellectually gripping, exciting, and often funny, Life Is More Beautiful than Paradise provides a vital key to the understanding of a world that is both a source of fear and a magnet of curiosity for the west.
The Book of Charlatans
Uncovering the professional secrets of con artists and swindlers in the medieval Middle East The Book of Charlatans is a comprehensive guide to trickery and scams as practiced in the thirteenth century in the cities of the Middle East, especially in Syria and Egypt. The author, al-Jawbarī, was well versed in the practices he describes and may well have been a reformed charlatan himself. Divided into thirty chapters, his book reveals the secrets of everyone from “Those Who Claim to be Prophets” to “Those Who Claim to Have Leprosy” and “Those Who Dye Horses.” The material is informed in part by the author’s own experience with alchemy, astrology, and geomancy, and in part by his extensive research. The work is unique in its systematic, detailed, and inclusive approach to a subject that is by nature arcane and that has relevance not only for social history but also for the history of science. Covering everything from invisible writing to doctoring gemstones and quack medicine, The Book of Charlatans opens a fascinating window into a subculture of beggars’ guilds and professional con artists in the medieval Arab world. A bilingual Arabic-English edition.
Tales from Dayrut
This collection of fourteen connected stories and a novella, From the Secret History of Numan Abdel Hafez, takes us deep into Upper Egypt and the village of Dayrut al-Sharif, in which Mohamed Mustagab was born. To depict a world renowned for its poverty, ignorance, vendettas, and implacable code of honor, Mustagab deploys the black humor and Swiftian sarcasm of the insider who knows his society only too well. When the stillness of a day's end is shattered by a single gunshot, poignant beauty merges seamlessly into horror, and when a police officer seeking to unravel a murder finds himself with more body parts than he knows what to do with, violence tips as easily into farce. In counterpoint, the author's often surrealist imagination explores the mysteries of a landscape where seductive women haunt dusty paths and a man may find himself crushed like a worm beneath another's foot. Elsewhere, the horizons of 'my village' expand to include other countries (the author worked in the Arabian Peninsula for a number of years), where equally disastrous consequences follow on folly and self-delusion. Previously almost unknown in English, Mustagab's voice is both original and disturbing.
In Darfur
A merchant’s remarkable travel account of an African kingdom Muḥammad al-Tūnisī (d. 1274/1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants trading with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Al-Tūnisī was raised in Cairo and a graduate of al-Azhar. In 1803, at the age of fourteen, al-Tūnisī set off for the Sultanate of Darfur, where his father had decamped ten years earlier. He followed the Forty Days Road, was reunited with his father, and eventually took over the management of the considerable estates granted to his father by the sultan of Darfur. In Darfur is al-Tūnisī’s remarkable account of his ten-year sojourn in this independent state, featuring descriptions of the geography of the...
Friendly Fire
In Friendly Fire, Al Aswany paints the minute ties that hold together a family, a school classroom or the relationship between a man and a woman. But he also dissects modern Egyptian society and reveals the hypocrisy, violence and abuse of power characteristic of a world in crisis. In Friendly Fire, readers will find again the vivid, passionate characters of today's Cairo, clamouring to be heard
The Critical Case of a Man Called K
A deeply moving and perceptive debut novel of diagnosis and life with cancer, shortlisted for the International Prize for Arabic Fiction K is an introverted man in his mid-twenties, working for a big, faceless petrochemical company. After reading Kafka, K decides to write his own diary, but he is constantly frustrated by his lack of experiences, his concerns about his privacy, and the demands of his dull job and family. When he receives the news that he has leukemia, he finds himself torn between a sense of devastation and a revelation that he has finally found a way out of his writing predicament, as he begins to rebel against the social and economic constrains that threaten to overwhelm him. Through Mohammed Aziz's measured but forceful writing, this is an absorbing, sensitive, and at times darkly humorous telling of K's experience of illness, his contemplation of death, and his determination to maintain his independence of decision through it all.
Gate of the Sun
In a makeshift hospital on the outskirts of Beirut, Yunis, an ageing Palestinian freedom fighter, lies in a coma. His spiritual son Dr Khaleel - who has no real medical qualifications - nurses the older man, refusing to admit that his hero may never regain consciousness.
Sunset Oasis
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A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo
Who were ʿAbd 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? A Field Guide to the Street Names of Cairo lists more than 450 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.
