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Notes From a Cairo Bookseller
To the uninitiated pedestrian, Diwan was just one of several shops behind the Baehler mansions’ ornate exterior. The traditional royal-blue street sign read Shari’ 26 Yulyu, 26th of July Street. We’d...
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How Did the Arab Spring Change Fiction?
A wealthy Cairo suburb is experiencing a plague. Enormous corpse plants, installed to secure the perimeter of a luxurious villa, are being uprooted by the wind, flying through the air and crushing...
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What Can a Dead Egyptian Pharaoh Teach Us About the Modern World?
Nefertiti, Akhenaten, Tutankhamun. Firm facts about these ancient individuals are as dry as an Ohio canal, compared to the soap opera psychodramas that have been woven around them. Tutankhamun was part...
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Naomi Klein on How Egypt’s Extinguished Revolution Continues to Inspire...
You Have Not Yet Been Defeated, a collection from Alaa Abd el-Fattah published this year by Seven Stories Press, is living history. Many of its words were first written with pencil and paper in a cell...
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Reading Mahfouz: Egyptian Literature Between Old and New, Freedom and Censorship
September 21, 1959 A sudden drop in temperature. The weather is almost cold. Autumn clouds cover Cairo’s skies. The communists are sitting in prison at al-Mahariq but the campaigns against them...
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Today’s hero: the 82-year-old Egyptian man who has collected 15,000 books for...
Amid all the terrible book (banning) news, it’s nice to find a small bright spot. Today, that brightness takes the form of 82-year-old Hamdallah Abdel Hafez, who has been collecting books for his...
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How the Nation of Islam Sent Shockwaves Across 1950s America
In January 1958, Elijah Muhammad sent a cablegram to Gamal Abdel Nasser, the president of the United Arab Republic, on the occasion of the Afro-Asian Peoples’ Solidarity Conference hosted by the...
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Access For Whom? On Gaining Permission to Narrate Egypt’s Past
In the beginning was the permit, and the permit was not with me. Only with it in hand could one map and inhabit the space of the archive. The process of gaining permission to enter and use the archive...
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Remembering the Egyptian Childhood I Never Had Through Its Culinary Traditions
Every grape leaf has a smooth side. My mother explains this as we sit at her round breakfast table. She dips her hand into the bowl of washed grape leaves, gently peeling one away from the stack. She...
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On the Hip-Hop That Powers Egypt’s Ongoing Revolution
The modern history of Egypt is told, by insiders and outsiders alike, largely through the narrative of authoritarian leaders and their so-called “iron-fisted” rule. Gamal Abdel Nasser (1956–1970) was...
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