1920s Cairo: a counterculture was on the rise. A passionate group of artists captivated Egyptian society in the city's bars, hash dens and music halls - and the most dazzling and assertive were women. Midnight in Cairo tells the thrilling story of Egypt's interwar nightlife, through the lives of these pioneering women, including dancehall impresario Badia Masabni, innovator of Egyptian cinema Aziza Amir and legendary singer Oum Kalthoum. They exploited the opportunities offered by this new...

The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind-readers and Jinn summoners all set out to assure the masses that, just as newly discovered invisible forces of electricity and magnetism determined the world of science, so unseen powers commanded an unknown realm of human potential. This was an international movement of eccentrics, gurus and prophets, with East and West interacting in unexpected ways.Drawing on untapped sou...

What was popular entertainment like for everyday Arab societies in Middle Eastern cities during the long nineteenth century? In what ways did café culture, theatre, illustrated periodicals, cinema, cabarets, and festivals serve as key forms of popular entertainment for Arabic-speaking audiences, many of whom were uneducated and striving to contend with modernity's anxiety-inducing realities? Studies on the 19th to mid-20th century's transformative cultural movement known as the Arab na...

An international history of the uncanny in the 1920s and 1930s.The interwar period was a golden age for the occult. Spiritualists, clairvoyants, fakirs, Theosophists, mind readers, and Jinn summoners all set out to assure the masses that just as newly discovered invisible forces of electricity and magnetism determined the world of science, unseen powers commanded an unknown realm of human potential.Drawing on untapped sources in Arabic in addition to Europe...

Modern Arabic literature remains little known and poorly understood despite growing curiosity among European readers. This brief introduction offers a unique overview, focusing on developments over the last fifty years. It provides a guide to the literary landscape, indicating the major landmarks in the shape of authors, ideas and debates. The picture that emerges shows that the literature of the modern Arab world, Europe's closest neighbour, is not so far from us as we are sometimes encou...

Few westerners will ever be able to understand Muslim or Afghan society unless they are part of a Muslim family. Twenty years old and in love, Phyllis Chesler, a Jewish-American girl from Brooklyn, embarked on an adventure that has lasted for more than a half-century. In 1961, when she arrived in Kabul with her Afghan bridegroom, authorities took away her American passport. Chesler was now the property of her husband's family and had no rights of citizenship. Back in Afghanistan, her husba...

Exposes the many cycles of monument destruction and cultural suppression in Egypt from antiquity to the present day• Details the vandalism of Egyptian antiquities and suppression of ancient knowledge under foreign rulers who sought to cleanse Egypt of its “pagan” past• Reveals the real reason behind Napoleon’s invasion of Egypt: Freemasonry• Shows how the censorship of nonofficial Egyptology as well as new archaeological discoveries continued under Antiquities Minis...

Throughout my childhood, my grandmother Yasmina, who was illiterate and grew up in a harem, repeated that to travel is the best way to learn and to empower yourself. "When a woman decides to use her wings, she takes big risks," she would tell me, but she was convinced that if you didn't use them, it hurt....So recalls Fatema Mernissi at the outset of her mesmerizing new book. Of all the lessons she learned from her grandmother -- whose home was, after all, a type of prison ...

The films of Andrei Tarkovsky have been revered as ranking on a par with the masterpieces of Russia's novelists and composers. His work, from films such as Ivan's Childhood, Andrei Rublev, Solaris, Mirror, Nostalgia and Sacrifice, has had an enormous influence on the style of contemporary European film, with its open narrative structures and slow, pensive mood; yet Tarkovsky has remained an elusive subject for reflection and analysis. T...

'Moving and beautifully written . . . a paean to tolerance between diverse faiths and different communities' FINANCIAL TIMESIn Lives Between the Lines, Michael Vatikiotis traces the journey of his Greek and Italian forebears from Tuscany, Crete, Hydra and Rhodes, as they made their way to Egypt and the coast of Palestine in search of opportunity. In the process, he reveals a period where the Middle East was a place of ethnic and cultural harmony - where Ar...

When Iman Mersal stumbles upon a great – yet forgotten – novel written by Enayat al-Zayyat, a young woman who killed herself in 1963, four years before her book was published, Mersal begins to research the writer. She tracks down Enayat's best friend, who had been Egypt's biggest movie star at the time; she is given access to Enayat's diaries. Mersal can't accept, as has been widely speculated since Enayat's death, that a publisher's rejection was the main reason for Enayat's suicide. From...

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...