NON-FICTION Tazwir dawlah: shahadat al-istibdad wa tazwir al-intikhabat (Forging a State: Testimonies of Tyranny and the Rigging of Elections), Mahmoud Qatari, ed. Said Shoeib, Cairo: Markaz al-mustaqbal al-misri, 2005. pp158 This book consists of two parts. The first of these contains damning testimony from a high-ranking retired police officer, the author, Mahmoud Qatari, on the coercive means used by the police during elections, and how the police are used by the country's ruling party to ensure the success of its candidates. This section includes detailed documentation of the persecution of police officers who refuse to follow the dictats of the powers that be. "The police apparatus is the decisive factor in rigging elections. The police control the electoral roll, and it is the authority supervising the voting process and polling stations... The mission of police officers, as this is understood within the force, is to defend the government and not the people or even the state. An officer who refuses to obey will be punished one way or the other, and if he does so he could be framed, put on trial or even imprisoned," Qatari writes. The book's second section comprises important documents relevant to the recent elections in Egypt, including the famous report by the Association of Judges on the referendum to amend Article 76 of the Constitution, as well as a compilation of related material by jurists and political activists on democracy and democratic reform. Qadiat al-ajial: tahdi al-shabab al-masri 'abr qarnin (The Generations Question: the Challenges for Young Egyptians over Two Centuries), Ahmed Abdallah Rozah, Cairo: Dar Misr al-mahroussa, 2005. pp194 Ahmed Abdallah Rozah is a political scientist who obtained his doctorate from King's College, Cambridge, in the 1980s, the topic of his thesis being the role of students in the Egyptian national movement. More importantly, perhaps, Rozah was also himself the leader of the Egyptian student movement of 1971-1972, and as such he is well-placed by experience, as well as by qualification, to deal with the theme of the present book. In it, Rozah provides a searing analysis of the different characteristics distinguishing one generation of Egyptian youth from the next, placing special emphasis on four important junctures: the youth during the anti-imperialist struggle prior to the 1952 revolution; the youth of the early years of the 1952 revolution; the youth of the years following the 1967 Arab defeat, and, finally, the youth at the turn of the 21st century. Rozah's analysis of these four generations of young people during four historical moments in the country's development leads him to the conclusion that today's Egyptian youth suffers from disenfranchisement and alienation greater than at any time in the past. Moreover, he believes that unless radical reform takes place, and unless the avenues of political change are widened, violence could spread such that misguided young people could resort to "bullets instead of ballots," in the author's words. To avoid such a catastrophic scenario, Rozah calls for real and not just cosmetic reform, which is the only "historical compromise for those who want to avoid the flames and evils of revolution," he says. Dkakirat al-horoub: min daftr morasil sahafi (The Memory of Wars: From a Correspondent's Notebook), Salah Nassrawi, Baghdad: Dar al-Nahreen for Publication, 2005. pp236 Salah Nassrawi, a senior Iraqi journalist with the Associated Press, was a young man studying in England when Saddam Hussein embarked on his ill-fated adventure of waging war on the newly instated Islamic Republic of Iran in 1980. This war dragged on for eight long years, ruining the resources of both countries and causing the death of countless numbers of people on both sides. Nassrawi returned to his country in 1982 to work as a journalist for a number of national and international newspapers and news agencies. From Baghdad, he covered the continuing Iraq-Iran war, as well as the Iraqi invasion of Kuwait and the bombardment of Iraq in the winter of 1991 by US-led coalition forces. During all these events, Nassrawi tried hard to keep his professional integrity as a journalist, keeping his distance from the fascist regime until his personal safety became at risk. In May 1991, he fled Iraq and has not returned since. The book documents in great detail the tragedy of Iraq through the eyes of an Iraqi national who spent a decade covering from up close the machinations of a regime bent on the destruction of one of the richest Arab countries, both in terms of material and intellectual wealth, and then spent a further decade watching from exile the sliding of his country into subjugation. The book ends with the US-led occupation of Iraq, the country now being, Nassrawi concludes, "in a much worse situation and one that cannot be remedied by an American military machine dominated by Neo-Cons who see in what they have done in Iraq only a possible model for the [rest of the] region." Bush al-saghir fi dou' al-tahlil al-nafsi (Bush Junior in a Psychoanalytic Light), Hussein Abdel-Qadir, Amman: Azminah for Publication, 2005. pp167 The author of this book, Hussein Abdel-Qadir, is a psychoanalyst who writes in his introduction that the idea for the book came to him when he was asked by a journalist in March 2003 about the reasons for Arab impotence while he was preparing to go to Paris for a scientific conference. The question stayed with the author, who attended a huge anti-war demonstration on 20 March 2003 in Paris, the day the US-led war on Iraq began, and he says that he felt ashamed that such a demonstration could not take place in any Arab country. This feeling set him on the path of analysing the psychological motivations behind the war on Iraq and the Arabs' inability to do much about it. The result is an interesting book that employs analytical tools drawn from the work of Jacques Lacan and Freud himself, especially from the latter's essays "The Future of an Illusion" and "Thoughts for the Times on War and Death," as well as from recent political works by Noam Chomsky and Bob Woodward. Al-moujtama' al-arabi al-islami: al-hayat al-iqtisadiya wa al-ijtimaiya (The Arab-Islamic Society: Economic and Social Life), Al-Habib al-Janahani, Kuwait: Alam al-Maarifah, Sept. 2005. pp396 This book by the Tunisian scholar Al-Habib al-Janahani argues that one cannot understand the fierce political struggle witnessed in the early days of Islam without examining the socio-economic transformations experienced at the time. Drawing on a wealth of Arabic and foreign material -- historical, empirical and theoretical -- al-Janahani has divided his book into three section, each comprising a number of detailed chapters. The first section deals with social and economic transformation during the early days of Islam, the second on the growth and development of the Arab and Islamic cities during the third and fourth centuries after the Hijra, while the last comprises a number of in-depth studies on the socio-economic history of the Islamic regimes that existed in North Africa at the time of the zenith of Islam, analysing their forms of landownership, finance, trade and urbanisation, naturally making much use of Ibn Khaldun. Al-turath wa qadaiya al-'asr (Heritage and Contemporary Questions), Mahmoud Ismail, Cairo: Roa'iah for Publication, 2005. pp281 In his latest book, Egyptian historian Mahmoud Ismail, who has spent a lifetime researching Islamic history and dissenting movements in this history, claims that more often than not heritage studies and historical studies are still separated from each other. In an attempt to bridge this gap, Mahmoud argues for the rejuvenation of religious discourse, arguing that for this to happen the Islamic heritage and its religious sciences, such as jurisprudence, interpretation and hadith, should be re-examined in the light of modern scientific methods, thus encouraging humanistic and rational trends while discarding retrograde or narrowly xenophobic ones. In arguing for this method, Mahmoud analyses different Renaissance projects in Islamic thought, especially those put forward by thinkers such as al-Farabi, Avicenna, Akhwan al-Safa and Averroes. Other chapters of the book deal with Sufism and with the relationship between the religious establishment and dissent in Islam, and there is a final chapter on the possible reconciliation of the different Islamic sects, a very pertinent question today in the light of the current clashes taking place in Iraq between Sunni and Shia Muslims. Manhaj al-islah al-islami fi-al-mujtam' (The Method of Islamic Reform in Society), Abdel-Halim Mahmoud, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation (GEBO), 2005. pp175 This classic work by Sheikh Abdel-Halim Mahmoud, late Grand Sheikh of Al-Azhar, has been reissued in GEBO's affordable "Reading for All" series, the publishers noting in the foreword that there is today more than ever a need to counter incorrect conceptions of Islam among Muslims, especially following "the fierce attacks on Islam and Muslims that have taken place since 9/11 and the events that have followed that date." In the book, Mahmoud deals with the challenges confronting Islam in the modern age, preaching moderation and embracing modern science as a religious duty. For Mahmoud, "any reform -- whether on the personal level or on the level of society -- begins with science, be that science religious or material..... Whether we begin the path of reform from the vantage point of theoretical science or from that of material or empirical science, our endeavours must be imbued with a purpose. This purpose is an Islamic obligation, as science must be the basis for the path towards God. Indeed, knowledge is a form of worship and a form of jihad." Poetry Complete Collected Poems (Authorised Version), Ahmed Fouad Negm, Cairo: Dar Merit, 2005. pp661 To see all of vernacular poet Ahmed Fouad Negm's poems in a single tome, organised and authorised by the author in person, is a deeply heartening experience. Though popular for some four decades now -- in 1967 the artistic duo Sheikh Imam Issa and Negm took the Arab world by storm when they sang their bitter disappointment with the Egyptian army's performance in the Arab-Israeli war, and later went on to satirise the Sadat regime -- until recently Negm had exercised very little control over his work in print. Both Negm and Imam had spent the greater part of the late 1960s and 1970s in prison, while their work spread like fire -- encouraging copying and distribution without copyright. Following their stint outside Egypt, where their work appeared in numerous records and publications produced by Arabs living abroad, they still received few if any financial reward. Yet with the present book the issue is not whether it will bring Negm sufficient compensation (books generally don't in Egypt); what is cheering, rather, is that it makes his work available. One can now read the full corrected text of many poems one has known by heart for years, through Imam songs, without the benefit of an authorative reference to be kept on one's book shelves. There are some 180 poems in this volume, the only snag being the lack of an index or table of contents, making it difficult to find poems without considerable browsing. Nor is there much order to their arrangement; it would have helped to see them arranged chronologically. Maqam Iraq, Tamim Al-Barghouti, Cairo: Atlas for Publication, 2005. pp79 This is the fourth book of poetry by the extremely gifted Egyptian-Palestinian poet Tamim Al-Barghouti. A political scientist by training, he has recently obtained his PhD from Boston University, but his most remarkable achievement is the versatility he has shown in composing verse in both classical Arabic and different Arab vernacular dialects, producing a collection of poems in each of classical Arabic, Palestinian colloquial and Egyptian colloquial. In this, a single long poem written in response to the invasion of Iraq, he employs Iraqi colloquial as well, alternating it with classical Arabic and drawing on an Iraqi ballad form known as Abou Dhaiah as well as canonical poems. In the words of al-Barghouti in the introduction to this book, "I spent more than two years writing this text, which is a collection of testimonies by living species and objects -- the crescent, the palm tree... Bashar ibn Bord, al-Mutanabi, Zeinab the daughter of Imam Ali and al-Hallaj -- all speaking in classical Arabic and in Iraqi colloquial, as if I had taken a snapshot of them all to keep it in memory before a teenager from Texas hoods and wires them with electric barbs." FICTION Kharif al-General (The General's Autumn), Hamdi al-Batran, Cairo: Hilal Novels, 2005. pp346 A public uproar preceeded the apperance of this novel, when its sccheduled date of publication in the Hilal Novel series was delayed from July to August following the appointment of a new editor of the series. Speaking to the press, Hamdi al-Batran did not deny that a section of the book was edited out on the request of the new editor, while the editor himself said no changes were made without the author's approval. Be that as it may, this semi-autobiographical novel deals with the life of a senior police officer asked to retire while in his early 50s, and details pertinent to that life. But the author uses the metamphor of impotence as an allegory for the the protagonist's life after retirement, when all those who knew him when he was a senior officer no longer wanted to associate with him. There is also plenty of gory detail about what takes place in Egypt's police stations and how the police apparatus works in the service of the regime. Istiqalat malik al-mout (The Resigning of Death Angel), Safaa al-Nagar, Cairo: Dar Sharqiat, 2005. pp170 The author of this novel published her first collection of short stories last year; nevertheless she has a very distinct style which becomes more pronounced in this book. As a novel it departs in so many ways from the common characteristics of most young fiction writers now working in Egypt, who seem to be more interested, by and large, in adopting Western innovations and experimenting with new techniques than in producing content of substance. Al-Nagar, by contrast, tells a conventional story set in a typical Nile Delta village where three generations of characters exchange views about the changes that have beset the countryside as exemplified in that village of theirs -- which becomes, in time, a sort of microcosm of the entire nation. Seamlessly and without pretence, the author manages to weave the workings of history into the fabric of human tale, exposing not only outward transformations but their effect on inner lives. A page of a 13th-century Quran, French National Library in Paris Tarikh al-kitaba (History of Writing), Alexendria: Bibliotheca Alexandrina, introduction by Ismail Serageldin, ed. Khaled Azab, translated by a group of scholars, 2005. pp397 Originally published in French and English by the prestigious Paris house Flammarion in 2001, this invaluable history of the art of writing, Histoire de l'écriture: de l'idéogramme au multimedia, is now available in Arabic. Offering the original's stupendous reproductions of manuscripts in various media and from across the world's geographical and historical spectrum, the book, in an excellent translation accomplished by a team of scholars, details the development of what remains perhaps humanity's greatest invention.
