When Shihab runs afoul of a loan shark, all avenues of salvation in Mubarak’s corrupt, oppressive Egypt are closed to him but one: robbing a bank. Things go wrong: In their blow against their crumbling society, Shihab and his friend Mustafa happen on evidence of vice that points to the upper reaches of the regime. […]
Short story writing in Egypt was still in its infancy when Denys Johnson- Davies, described by Edward Said as “the leading Arabic–English translator of our time” arrived in Cairo as a young man in the 1940s. Nevertheless, he was immediately impressed by such writing talents of the time as Mahmoud Teymour, Yahya Hakki, Yusuf Gohar, […]
Two old friends find themselves side by side on the flight from Algiers to Constantine. There is a lot of history between them, as well as bad blood. They have lived very different lives, even though they are bound by shared experiences from their youth, chief among them the Algerian War of Independence. The flight […]
With The Silence and the Roar, Nihad Sirees writes a powerful, life-affirming and Kafkaesque novel about a censored writer trying to live a normal life under a Middle Eastern dictatorship, Syria. Fathi, a writer no longer permitted to write, makes his way through a city churned by parades for an unnamed dictator. It is a […]
Is a literary project echoing The Odyssey. It reflects years of research into Arab seafaring, mathematics, marine archaeology, alchemy, the Pearl Route, the Mughal Court, the Persian Gulf, and the Omani-Portuguese sea wars for control of the Indian Ocean. Its memorable characters follow their natures rather than the rules of society. Their nobility of soul […]
Why was the corpse of Khalil Ahmad Jaber found in a mound of rubbish? Why did he disappear weeks before his horrific death? And who was he? A journalist begins to piece the truth together by speaking with his widow, a local engineer, a nightwatchman, the garbage man who discovered him, the doctor who performed […]
It is 809 AD in Baghdad, the capital of the ‘Abbasid Empire. The famed Caliph Harun al-Rashid has died. His successor, al-Amin, son of his Hashemite Arab wife, had promised the Caliph that he would appoint his half-brother al-Ma’mun, born to a slave mother, as his heir apparent. But al-Amin appoints his own son instead. […]