Humphrey Davies

Ahmad Fāris Al-Shidyāq

Leg over Leg

Elias Khoury

As Though She Were Sleeping

Alaa Al Aswany

'Friendly Fire' is a novella and collection of short stories from Alaa Al Aswany, author of 'The Yacoubian Building'. As in that novel, Al Aswany dissects modern Egyptian society and reveals with skill and detachment the hypocrisy, violence and abuse of power characteristic of a world in moral crisis.

Friendly Fire

Muhammad ibn Mahfuz al-Sanhuri

Written in mid-17th century Egypt, Risible Rhymes is a short, comic disquisition on “rural” verse, mocking the pretensions and absurdities of uneducated poets from Egypt’s countryside. Like al-Shirbini’s Brains Confounded, written some forty years later, it combines a biting satire on Egyptian rural society with a hilarious parody of the verse-and-commentary genre so beloved by scholars of the day. The two texts also share six overlapping short poems, which suggests that they emanate from a common corpus of pseudo-rural verse that circulated in Ottoman Egypt. Nothing is known about the author, al-Sanhuri, who likely hailed from Egypt’s Fayyum region, although he describes his text as having been written at the behest of an unnamed friend. Alongside the later Brains Confounded, al-Sanhuri’s Risible Rhymes provides further evidence of a hitherto unrecognized genre of Arabic literature during this period, namely, mock-scholarly commentary on verse of supposedly rural provenance. Preoccupation with the countryside as a cultural, social, economic, and religious locus in its own right is unique in pre-twentieth-century Arabic literature. Using clever literary analysis and wordplay, this mordant commentary offers readers a rare window on rural life in Ottoman-era Egypt.

Risible Rhymes

Lesley Lababidi

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.

A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo

The author describes how he became drawn to a radical Islamic group as a teenager, his committment to the group's beliefs and activities, his arrest and time in prison, and his eventual rejection of radical Islam.

Humphrey Davies

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