Many people reading the first volume of Egyptian Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy may have wondered about the late-night absences of family patriarch al-Sayyid Ahmad Abdel-Gawad who spends a lot of time at musical entertainments while (...)
As Afghanistan enters a new period of uncertainty following the withdrawal of US forces from the country this year, many people's thoughts may be turning to events 20 years ago before the US invasion of the country after the attacks on New York and (...)
The late Palestinian-American writer and academic Edward Said will be familiar to all readers of the Weekly, not least because of the regular columns he wrote for the paper between 1993 and 2003. These were later collected in books such as Peace and (...)
Browsing through the heaps of books for sale on the open-air bookstalls of the Ezbekiyya Book Market in Cairo, Egyptian writer Iman Mersal came across a novel by an unknown author. Entitled Al-hubb wa-al-samt (Love and Silence) and published in 1967 (...)
While Paris in the spring has perhaps inevitably lacked something of the characteristic atmosphere that makes this season in the French capital justly famous this year, the lifting of most of the restrictions associated with the Covid-19 coronavirus (...)
Postponed owing to measures intended to halt the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, but finally and triumphantly opening to enthusiastic audiences with the partial lifting of French restrictions last week, the Arab Divas exhibition at the Institut (...)
While the ancient Greek historian Herodotus is probably the best-known visitor to ancient Egypt, some other ancient visitors left less extensive accounts behind that contain observations of almost equal value.
Herodotus visited Egypt in the mid-5th (...)
It was the ancient Greek historian Herodotus who said that Egypt is "the gift of the Nile," an observation that is as true today as it was when he visited the country some 2,500 years ago.
One of the things that struck Herodotus most when he visited (...)
Probably the most important of all memoirs of British colonial rule in Egypt is Modern Egypt by Evelyn Baring, Lord Cromer, who after 25 years as British consul-general in Cairo returned to the UK in 1907 to spend his retirement. According to the (...)
The western Sudanese region of Darfur is perhaps best known today among international audiences for the tragic conflict that tore the region apart after 2003, only finding some lasting resolution after the revolution in Sudan that removed former (...)
There have been many books about the British archaeologist-turned-intelligence-officer T E Lawrence, better known as "Lawrence of Arabia" owing to his activities in the region during the First World War, but perhaps there has never been one quite (...)
The growth of tourism in 19th-century Europe opened up new possibilities for travel, with first railways and then steamships placing even previously largely inaccessible destinations such as Egypt well within the reach of Europe's middle (...)
Rather like proverbial London buses that make passengers wait for one to come along, and then three arrive at once, English-language publishers abroad have finally been waking up to the rich back catalogue of works of modern Arabic literature (...)
The surviving sites and monuments of ancient Egypt have always been a source of fascination for European and other visitors to Egypt. They are physically more impressive than the remains of most of the other cultures that once flourished in the (...)
Not many French orientalists have attracted as much attention as Louis Massignon. A long-time professor at the Collège de France in Paris and a member of the Arabic Language Academy in Cairo and sometime lecturer at Cairo University, among many (...)
Since its inception a decade or so ago, the Library of Arabic Literature of mostly classical Arabic literary works in English translation has been going from strength to strength. Published by New York University Press in Abu Dhabi, it now produces (...)
While literary prizes have been proliferating both inside and outside the Arab world over recent years, there are still few that recognise specifically translation, at least of contemporary works of literature.
It is here that the UK Saif Ghobash (...)
Already hit by further restrictions as a result of a second wave of the Covid-19 coronavirus after many months of relative freedom, the French Mediterranean port city of Marseilles, like the rest of France, was once again put under lockdown at the (...)
Born in Alexandria in 1921, after attending Alexandria University Safouan went to Paris after World War II in order to continue his studies, soon becoming interested in psychoanalysis and in the work of French psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan. The latter (...)
Taking place against a background of renewed restrictions against the spread of the Covid-19 coronavirus, this year's History Days at the Institut du Monde Arabe in Paris were necessarily on a smaller scale than has been the norm for this annual (...)
News last week that three worshippers in a church in the southern French city of Nice had been stabbed to death by a suspected Islamist terrorist added to fears in France of a rise of religious violence after the decapitation of French schoolteacher (...)
Biographical details about Michael Pearce, author of the 19 titles that have thus far appeared in the popular Mamur Zapt series of detective stories, can be hard to find apart from the few sentences that appear on the covers of the novels (...)
English crime writer Agatha Christie was an occasional and always appreciative visitor to Egypt. Her first visit took place before the First World War when as the daughter of a wealthy upper-middle class family she spent three months attending balls (...)
The long history of relations between Europe and the Middle East is a marvelous topic for the historian. Not only is the Arab world and broader Middle East Europe's nearest neighbour, but the two regions also have much history in common.
Both the (...)
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 (...)