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Life in the Arab World as a White Lesbian Feminist
As an American-born feminist and a lesbian, Chivvis Moore is the last person that many people would expect to be an advocate for Arab culture, which is so often thought of as anti-American,...
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Is Hillary Clinton a Modern-Day Cleopatra?
From her first appearance in national politics, Hillary Clinton was pilloried by mainstream and fringe sources alike. By the time she was running for president, accusations of corruption had flowered...
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What a Woman Must Do to Become King
There are times in human history no one wants to live through. The Bronze Age Collapse of the 13th-century B.C. The Assyrian sack of Thebes in 663 B.C. The fall of the Roman Empire in the fifth...
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On Discovering the Lost Manuscripts of Naguib Mahfouz
Naguib Mahfouz is the familiar face of Egyptian literature. If Egyptians haven’t read the Nobel laureate’s many novels, they’ve probably seen one of his films. What’s more, the master was always...
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Waiting for the Day That Characters Don’t Default to White
When I started working on my novel in 2015, I knew it needed to be be about Egyptians. I wanted the book to follow Egyptians like me, who were raised in America, their family’s culture often clashing...
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In Cairo, the Garbage Collector Knows Everything
Some of the following material appeared previously, in different form, in The New Yorker. * In the first fall of the Arab Spring, I moved with my family to Cairo. We came in October 2011, during the...
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The world’s oldest surviving letter by an actual Christian contains a request...
Sometimes the greatest secrets are right under our noses, in shuttered backrooms or buried beneath layers of decades-old junk. One researcher at the University of Basel, in Switzerland, has discovered...
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The Writer and the Dictator: A Love/Hate Story
If you want to understand Egypt, you have to read Return of the Spirit. Tawfiq al‐Hakim wrote it in 1927 when he was studying in Paris, and the moment it was published in Cairo in 1933 it took its...
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What If We Called It the ‘Flax Age’ Instead of the ‘Iron Age’?
Archaeology has traditionally had a fundamental bias against fabric. Fabrics are after all highly perishable, withering away within months or years, and only rarely leaving traces behind for those...
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Deported at the Dawn of the Syrian War
Lawand Kiki was born in 1979, the fourth and final child of a dissident couple in Damascus. His mother told him that, in her native Kurdish language, his name meant “he who is loved.” When Lawand was...
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André Aciman: On Yearning for the Not-Yet and What Could Have Been
Four sentences that I wrote years ago keep coming back to me. I am still not certain that I understand these sentences. Part of me wants to nail them down, while another fears that by doing so I will...
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Ahmed Naji on Nights in Prison: ‘You Started to Believe That You Could Design...
Ahmed Naji is the guest. “Reading and Writing in an Egyptian Prison,” an excerpt from his memoir (which is looking for an American publisher), is in this month’s Believer magazine. From the episode:...
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How Cairo Became a Cosmopolitan Destination in the 1920s
“Egypt is a country where the Egyptians reign, English rule, and everybody does as he pleases.” So two African American residents of Ezbekiyya wrote in a letter of December 1923, published in the...
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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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