The holy month of Ramadan and the months preceding it have always been a time when droves of Muslim worshippers, particularly Sufis, flock to seek the spiritual fulfilment and blessings of well-known members of the prophet's family (ahl al-beit) and (...)
“And do not worry that life is turning upside down. How do you know that the side you are used to is better than the one to come?”
Persian poet Jalaleddin Mohamed Al-Rumi
(1207-1273 CE)
It was the hour before a curfew was imposed in Cairo on the (...)
Proclaim to men the pilgrimage: they will come to thee on foot and on every lean camel, coming from every remote path —Quran, Surat Al-Hajj
This time of the year has a particular spiritual significance in the hearts of millions of Muslims around the (...)
It was early afternoon in the Upper Egyptian village of Abu Djoud in Luxor. Children were cheering and playing traditional games in unpaved alleyways in front of their homes. Then they headed for a felucca ride on the Nile that their village (...)
“The president of the assembly, Al-Sayeda Zeinab, listens attentively to the lamentations of all the creatures, even the lament of trees lashed by the wind.”
From The Book of Illuminations by Egyptian novelist and writer Gamal Al-Ghitani (...)
“The president of the assembly, Al-Sayeda Zeinab, listens attentively to the lamentations of all the creatures, even the lament of trees lashed by the wind.”
From The Book of Illuminations by Egyptian novelist and writer Gamal Al-Ghitani (...)
The whole problem with the world is that fools and fanatics are always so certain of themselves, and wiser people are so full of doubts — philosopher Bertrand Russell, winner of the Nobel Prize in 1950
The Christchurch massacre
It did not occur to (...)
Um Ismail, an uneducated widowed mother of three living in an impoverished village in Sohag in Upper Egypt, often has a hard time coping with looking after her elderly bed-ridden mother in her hometown and keeping her job in Cairo to provide food (...)
Um Ismail, an uneducated widowed mother of three living in an impoverished village in Sohag in Upper Egypt, often has a hard time coping with looking after her elderly bed-ridden mother in her hometown and keeping her job in Cairo to provide food (...)
“Know your own happiness. Want for nothing but patience —or give it a more fascinating name: call it hope.” Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.
When “life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings,” as English novelist Jane Austen put it (...)
“Know your own happiness. Want for nothing but patience —or give it a more fascinating name: call it hope.” Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility.
When “life seems but a quick succession of busy nothings,” as English novelist Jane Austen put it (...)
“I never wanted to have four children. I had planned for only two,” said 39-year-old Shaimaa in a frustrated tone. Not that Shaimaa did not like children, but she explained that the financial burden of having to raise four children had itself been (...)
It was 18 April, World Heritage Day, and the newly-refurbished Al-Sherifeen Street in Downtown Cairo was bedecked with 19th-century-style lights. Painters were drawing sketches and seeking inspiration from the area's history, while musicians were (...)
“When you step into the zone of love, language as we know it becomes obsolete. That which cannot be put into words can only be grasped through silence.”
— The Forty Rules of Love by Elif Shafak
Silence, indeed, seemed to be the language of many (...)
And for all this, nature is never spent;
There lives the dearest freshness deep down things
From God's Grandeur by Gerard Manley Hopkins
(1844-1889)
There is, perhaps, no better testimony of how nature's “dearest freshness” still lives “deep down (...)
It was on a cold winter afternoon that we started our one-hour stroll down what is perhaps Cairo's most fascinating memory lane. We had hardly stepped out of the offices of the magazine Mantiqti on Elwi Street in the Al-Borsa district when Tarek (...)
The fresh paint on dozens of newly refurbished historic buildings in Downtown Cairo not only gives a new lease of life to the city's 19th-century centre, known as Khedival Cairo, but also allows the buildings themselves to gaze out in defiance of (...)
It was on a cold winter afternoon that we started our one-hour stroll down Cairo's perhaps most fascinating memory lane. We had hardly stepped out of the offices of the magazine Mantiqti on Elwi Street in the Al-Borsa district when Tarek Atia, my (...)
The fresh paint on dozens of newly refurbished historic buildings in Downtown Cairo not only gives a new lease of life to the city's 19th-century centre, known as Khedival Cairo, but also allows the buildings themselves to gaze out in defiance of (...)
Many veiled women living in the West may have found great comfort in the heartening call of President of Austria Alexander Van der Bellen for all women to wear headscarves in solidarity with Muslims and fight what he described as “rampant (...)
The cool morning breeze of the back-to-school season and the sound of school buses bring memories of anxiety rather than happiness to Ahmed's mother. It is not just that Ahmed used to cry every morning as he took the bus to school.
“He was a (...)
It is 9am in a branch of one of Egypt's most famous private eye hospitals in the working class district of Al-Sayeda Aisha. The clinic is teeming with patients from different social classes and backgrounds, but the majority seem to have come from (...)
Age has left its mark on the art deco apartment building in the Cairo district of Heliopolis where high-school student Maha lives, perhaps in the same way that life has dealt blows to her middle-class family. It was not smooth sailing for Maha's (...)
A first-time visitor to Egypt's northern port city of Rosetta in the Al-Beheira governorate may be struck by the impending sense of doom that seems to lurk everywhere since a boat carrying hundreds of illegal migrants capsised in one of the most (...)
“Social media in the Arab world is a critical part of everyday life — as much a necessity as food, water and shelter because it is impossible to imagine life without it.”
The Arab Social Media Report, 2013
It was 9am, Nahla's time for morning (...)