Ibtihal Salem's writing provides an excellent forum for studying both everyday life in Egypt and current literary experimentation in the Middle East. Her poignant pieces hover between the structure of story-telling, the visuality of vignettes, and the compression of poetry. They both record and evoke a literary ferment going on in Egypt today.
Salem's writing of the last thirty years is lauded for its social messages also. Finding the expression of sexuality necessary to explicate problems of Egyptian identity, Salem often links poverty to gender marginality. Her heroines, however,...
Ibtihal Salem's writing provides an excellent forum for studying both everyday life in Egypt and current literary experimentation in the Middle Eas...
Often likened to Rigoberta Menchu and Nadine Gordimer, Nawal El Saadawi is one of the world's leading feminist authors. Director of Health and Education in Cairo, she was summarily dismissed from her post in 1972 for her political writing and activities. In 1981 she was imprisoned by Anwar Sadat for alleged "crimes against the State" and was not released until after his assassination. Memoirs from the Women's Prison offers both firsthand witness to women's resistance to state violence and fascinating insights into the formation of women's community. Saadawi describes how political...
Often likened to Rigoberta Menchu and Nadine Gordimer, Nawal El Saadawi is one of the world's leading feminist authors. Director of Health and Educati...
Marilyn Booth's elegantly conceived study reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male-authored, in the late nineteenth century short sketches by and about women began to appear in biographical dictionaries and women's journals. By 1940, hundreds of such biographies had been published, featuring Arabs, Turks, Indians, Europeans, North Americans, and ancient Greeks and Persians. Booth uses over five hundred "famous women" biographies--which include subjects as diverse as Joan of Arc, Jane Austen, Aisha bt. Abi Bakr, Sarojini Naidu,...
Marilyn Booth's elegantly conceived study reveals the Arabic tradition of life-writing in an entirely new light. Though biography had long been male-a...
Hamdi Abu Golayyel offers a striking portrait of a marginalized Egyptian community, bringing to life the absurd and tragic characters who occupy the margins of society while paying tribute to a historical Cairene neighborhood. By turns comic, reverential, beautiful, and tawdry, the novel reveals a social climate where ruthlessness and goodness seem almost indistinguishable and humanity is on display in all its rich variety.
The novelist s distinctive vision of Egypt s various postmonarchy political regimes and ideologies shapes this dark comedy of human relations and underground...
Hamdi Abu Golayyel offers a striking portrait of a marginalized Egyptian community, bringing to life the absurd and tragic characters who occupy th...
When Rajaa Alsanea boldly chose to open up the hidden world of Saudi women--their private lives and their conflicts with the traditions of their culture--she caused a sensation across the Arab world. Now in English, Alsanea's tale of the personal struggles of four young upper-class women offers Westerners an unprecedented glimpse into a society often veiled from view. Living in restrictive Riyadh but traveling all over the globe, these modern Saudi women literally and figuratively shed traditional garb as they search for love, fulfillment, and their place somewhere in between Western society...
When Rajaa Alsanea boldly chose to open up the hidden world of Saudi women--their private lives and their conflicts with the traditions of their cultu...
Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and by visitors to those societies. One theme that threads through the collection is the intimate interrelatedness of West and East evident in encounters within and around the harem, whether in the elite socializing of precolonial Tunis or the popular historical novels published in Istanbul and Cairo from the late nineteenth century onward. Several of the contributors focus on European culture as a repository of...
Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eas...
Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eastern and North African societies, and by visitors to those societies. One theme that threads through the collection is the intimate interrelatedness of West and East evident in encounters within and around the harem, whether in the elite socializing of precolonial Tunis or the popular historical novels published in Istanbul and Cairo from the late nineteenth century onward. Several of the contributors focus on European culture as a repository of...
Harem Histories is an interdisciplinary collection of essays exploring the harem as it was imagined, represented, and experienced in Middle Eas...
Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 1860-1914) was a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 women's lives, al-Durr al-manthur fi tabaqat rabbat al-khudur (Pearls scattered in times and places: classes of ladies of cloistered spaces), was published between 1893 and 1896 and features Boudicca, Catherine the Great and Victoria Woodhull, among many others. Booth presents Fawwaz's dictionary as a 'feminist history' and a key text in the debates on gender and national efficacy in 1890s Egypt and Ottoman Syria.
Zaynab Fawwaz (c. 1860-1914) was a forceful voice in support of women's rights to education and work choices in colonial-era Egypt. Her volume of 453 ...
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...
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 Egypti...
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...
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 deci...
