Many, perhaps most, societies have tended to hold medical practitioners in awe, sometimes hoping against hope, given their historically often-limited scientific knowledge, that the right doctor called at the right time can restore health to a (...)
The Franco-Tunisian writer Albert Memmi, who died in Paris on 22 May at the age of 99, was possibly the last surviving member of the generation of French and North African writers who contributed to debates about the end of French colonialism in the (...)
More and more museums and other institutions worldwide have been putting resources online for people to access during the Covid-19 coronavirus pandemic.
At a time when it is advisable to leave the house as little as possible and then only for (...)
So, you want to learn Arabic? But what sort of Arabic should you learn and for what purposes should you learn it?
Many people beginning what can turn out to be the long-term project of learning the Arabic language will have asked themselves such (...)
Writing in Al-Ahram Weekly a few weeks ago, Aziza Sami welcomed the appearance in English translation of the Treasure Trove of Benefits and Variety at the Table (Kanz al-fawa'id fi tanwi' al-mawa'id), a mediaeval Egyptian cookbook.
But rather like (...)
Recent years have seen more and more national and international awards emerging for literary works in Arabic, including the annual International Prize for Arabic Fiction (the “Arabic Booker Prize”), the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature awarded by (...)
Many readers of Al-Ahram Weekly will remember that the origins of Al-Ahram go back to the arrival on Egypt's shores of two Lebanese brothers, Beshara and Selim Takla, towards the end of the 19th century and their foundation of a new newspaper of (...)
Cairo is not the only city to have had problems protecting and preserving its modern architecture. Other cities have had too, with common problems being not only the cost of renovating modern buildings that may not conform to contemporary building (...)
For many years, the only modern novel translated from Arabic published in the prestigious Penguin Classics series of international literary works in English translation was Season of Migration to the North by the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih.
Today, (...)
Speaking to Al-Ahram Weekly in a 2018 interview, the editors of New York University's Library of Arabic Literature, an ambitious series of mostly classical works of Arabic literature in new English translations, explained that “the series is aimed (...)
For many people in France, the crisis over the Covid-19 outbreak in China was something mostly watched from afar.
There had already been the SARS crisis in 2003 followed by the crises over MERS, H1N1 and avian flu. Even with the alarming news coming (...)
The Belgian cartoonist Georges Remi, better known by his penname Hergé, was not a great traveler. He preferred to leave the task of exploring the rest of the world to the boy-detective Tintin, his best-known creation, while he remained little more (...)
Continuing a tradition going back some quarter of a century, the Maghreb des Livres book fair took place in Paris last weekend, with organisers Coup de Soleil and IReMMO, the Institut de Recherche et d'Études Méditerranée Moyen-Orient, once again (...)
Entering the darkened spaces of “Inspired by the East”, an exhibition at the British Museum in London on ways in which the Islamic world has influenced European art and design, many visitors may feel that they are entering a kind of Oriental (...)
As part of Saudi Arabia's plans to develop tourism in parts of the Arabian Peninsula, the archaeological sites of the AlUla region in the country's north-west are currently the subject of a new exhibition at the Institut du Monde Arabe in (...)
In the wake of the publication of Orientalism by the late Palestinian-American intellectual Edward Said, some works of European scholarship on the Arab world received a bad name. They had been complicit in European colonialism, Said wrote, or they (...)
With the world's capital cities now almost overflowing with encyclopaedia, thematic, and generic museums, more and more attention is being paid to museums in the provinces, sometimes in areas traditionally not always seen as visitor (...)
Continuing in a tradition established in 2015 with the first of the Arab History Days at the Institut du monde arabe in Paris on the theme of the city in the Arab world, this year's edition of this successful series of debates and lectures brought (...)
Egypt has one of the world's oldest postal systems, possibly the oldest if one counts the methods used to transport letters and other items during the ancient Egyptian period. It also has one of the world's oldest dedicated postal museums presenting (...)
Best known for its outstanding collection of 19th-century French painting that includes the world's largest collection of work by the Impressionist painter Claude Monet, the Musée Marmottan in the French capital's 16th arrondissement is a familiar (...)
Egypt has one of the world's oldest postal systems, possibly the oldest if one counts the methods used to transport letters and other items during the ancient Egyptian period. It also has one of the world's oldest dedicated postal museums presenting (...)
As Nevine El-Aref wrote in Al-Ahram Weekly last week, there can be few residents or visitors to the French capital who are not aware that the “Tutankhamun: Treasures of the Pharaoh” exhibition has stopped off in Paris on the latest leg of a world (...)
Only half a century or so ago, it might have seemed that railways were just another legacy industry. Railway networks were being slimmed down or rationalised throughout the developed world, road haulage was replacing rail freight, and individuals (...)
There must be many residents and visitors to Cairo who have often stopped to wonder about the origin of the capital's street names. Some of them are not difficult to work out, such as Ramses Street, named after the ancient Egyptian Pharaoh Ramses (...)
British historian James Barr published a book in 2011 about the rivalry between Britain and France for control of the Middle East after World War I, entitling it A Line in the Sand.
He has now followed this up with another book, Lords of the Desert, (...)
