A dictionary of idiomatic expressions in written arabic

How would you ever know that “to lose a baby ostrich” means to rush into something without thinking? Or that “what can the wind take from the pavement?” is said when someone has nothing left to lose?This comprehensive guide to idiomatic expressions in literary Arabic, the first of its kind, will ...

Alif: journal of comparative poetics, no. 32

This issue of Alif: Journal of Comparative Poetics is devoted to the intersection of the imaginary and the documentary, the fictional and the cultural in the three genres of literature (poetry, fiction, and drama), in history, in film (feature and documentary), in photography, in plastic arts, an...

Honey hunger

WINNER OF THE 2025 SAIF GHOBASH BANIPAL PRIZE FOR ARABIC LITERARY TRANSLATION "An evocative, unpredictable novel."—Words Without BordersA breathtaking novel of longing, uncertainty, and ultimately of hopeAzzan is a beekeeper in a rural community in Oman. Devoted to tending his bees and searching...

The house of the coptic woman

A Notable African Book of 2023 (Brittle Paper)Tightly plotted and taboo-breaking, this explosive story takes readers to the roots of religious strife where the smallest of sparks can start a bonfire Nader, an idealistic public prosecutor at the outset of his career, leaves Cairo to start a new p...

Ancient egyptian art

Four thousand years of art in full colorFrom the earliest clay figures and ivory combs of Predynastic times, through the masterful statuary of the Old Kingdom and the exquisite tomb paintings of the New Kingdom, to the astonishingly modern painted portraits of the Greco-Roman era, the artistic ac...

On friendship between the no longer and the not yet: an ethnographic account

An ethnographic study of the contemporary meanings, forms, and purposes of friendship among young EgyptiansThere is a great deal to be said about ideas and imaginations of the “future” when one does not have the luxury of maintaining a slot in the present. In the midst of acute conditions of prec...

Understanding cairo

This book moves beyond superficial generalizations about Cairo as a chaotic metropolis in the developing world into an analysis of the ways the city’s eighteen million inhabitants have, in the face of a largely neglectful government, built and shaped their own city. A new post-revolution Afterwor...

Christians in egypt

Drawing on more than four decades of experience studying Christian communities in Egypt, Otto Meinardus offers here a sweeping overview of the principal Christian churches and organizations in Egypt today. For the first time, this wealth of information has been gathered into one volume, making it...

Quseir

This volume presents the results of recent archaeological and historical studies of the Ottoman fort of Quseir, which was Upper Egypt’s only direct outlet to the Red Sea at that time. Illustrated with over 100 maps, drawings, and photographs, this groundbreaking study examines a key example of Ot...

The cotton plantation remembered

Cotton made the fortune of the Fuuda family, Egyptian landed gentry with peasant origins, during the second part of the nineteenth century. This story, narrated and photographed by a family member who has researched and documented various aspects of her own history, goes well beyond the family ph...

The jinn daughter

FINALIST FOR THE NEXT GENERATION INDIE BOOK AWARD BEST SCIENCE FICTION & FANTASY: AN AMAZON EDITORS' PICK A stunning debut novel and an impressive feat of storytelling that pulls together mythology, magic, and ancient legend in the gripping story of a mother's struggle to save her only daugh...

Palmyra (arabic edition)

In this important and timely publication, top international scholars present current research and developments about the art, archaeology, and history of the ancient city of Palmyra, a UNESCO World Heritage site located in Syria. Palmyra became tragic headline news in 2015, when it was overtaken ...

Abusir

At the center of the world-famous pyramid field of the Memphite necropolis lies a group of pyramids, temples, and tombs named after the nearby village of Abusir. Long overshadowed by the more familiar pyramids at Giza and Saqqara, this area has nonetheless been the site, for the last fifty years,...

Cairo modern

The novelist’s camera pans from the dome of King Fuad University (now Cairo University) to students streaming out of the campus, focusing on four students in their twenties, each representing a different trend in Egypt in the 1930s. Finally the camera comes to rest on Mahgub Abd al-Da’im. A scamp...

Embrace on brooklyn bridge

On the eve of Salma’s twenty-first birthday, scattered friends and family converge on New York for a celebration organized by Darwish, her obstinate grandfather. Each guest’s journey to this fated gathering takes on an unexpected significance, as they find themselves revisiting the choices they h...

Alif: journal of comparative poetics, no. 26

This issue of Alif is devoted to travel and travel-writing in the broadest cross-cultural sense and focuses on what Mahmoud Manzalauoui has termed indigenes, visitants, sojourners, and habitants or metics, particularly in Egypt and the Middle East. It is a tribute to Middle East scholar and accla...

Egypt unexpected

This book of extraordinary photographs of the ‘other side’ of Egypt is the result of the more than three years that Italian photojournalist Silvia Dogliani spent in the country, traveling, meeting people, and looking out for the unexpected. Through her pictures she presents a remarkable—and diffe...

Kallimni ‘arabi aktar

The complete series of innovative new coursebooks in Egyptian colloquial ArabicAimed at the growing number of students studying Arabic worldwide, Kallimni ‘Arabi Aktar takes an innovative, functional approach to the study of Egyptian colloquial Arabic—the spoken dialect most frequently studied an...

Femininity and dance in egypt: embodiment and meaning in al-raqs al-baladi

Considering the paradoxical position of al-raqs al-baladi or “belly dance” in Egyptian social life, as both a vibrant and a contested cultural form, this issue of Cairo Papers in Social Science considers the impact of wider socio-cultural and political forces on the marginalization of professiona...

Alif: journal of comparative poetics, no. 24

In the time of love

Love—who can count its varieties, measure its force, uncover the masks it wears, or predict how it binds and divides? In this spare novel, master storyteller Naguib Mahfouz gives us some of his most memorable characters, widely familiar to Egyptians from the film version of the book: Sitt Ain, wi...

The mosques of egypt

In this fully color-illustrated, large-format volume, a leading historian of Islamic art and culture celebrates the great variety of Egypt’s mosques and related religious buildings, from the early congregational mosques, through the medieval mausoleum–madrasas, to the neighborhood mosques of the ...

Egypt pocket guide

This compact, full-color guide is an ideal introduction to the cultural, religious, artistic, and architectural heritage of Egypt’s Coptic Christian community. Covering the ancient monasteries of Wadi Natrun and the streets and churches of Old Cairo, and ranging from Deir Mar Antonius on the Red ...

Thutmose iii and hatshepsut, pharaohs of egypt

"A veritable roadmap, not only to the complex issues surrounding their reigns, but also to the tale of their modern rediscovery. "—Stephen P. Harvey, Ahmose and Tetisheri Project, AbydosAn innovative account of the lives and times of the ‘warrior king’ Thutmose III, and the female pharaoh Hatshep...

Coptic saints and pilgrimages

Here in Coptic Saints and Pilgrims, Otto Meinardus examines the popular traditions and beliefs of the Copts. While the Coptic Orthodox church is strongly influenced by Hellenistic modes of thinking, many of the folk attitudes and practices by contrast have their roots in the religious heritage of...

The illustrated guide to the coptic museum and churches of old cairo

Taking readers through the various exhibits, this useful guidebook explains and illuminates the aesthetic and religious importance of each of the museum’s works on display, such as icons, stelae, sculptures, wall paintings, wooden altar screens, liturgical implements, and vestments and bible cask...

Alif: journal of comparative poetics, no. 35

Vernacular poetry and folktales, standardized Arabic, Persian, and Turkish, as well as literary works by Middle Easterners in different European languages offer a complex regional literary field. While comparative work among the “classical” traditions of these literatures is undertaken without co...

The golden chariot

From her cell in a women’s prison, Aziza decides to create a golden chariot to take her to heaven, where her wishes and dreams can be fulfilled. As she muses on who to take with her, she tells the life stories of her fellow prisoners and decides in her heart which ones deserve a free ride to para...

A history of arab graphic design

PROSE Award Winner, Art History & Criticism “Easily the best introduction to the history of modern Arab visual culture on the market today.”—The Brooklyn Rail The first-ever book-length history of Arab graphic design, now available in ArabicArab graphic design emerged in the early twentieth c...

The greeks and the making of modern egypt

The Greeks and the Making of Modern Egypt is the first account of the modern Greek presence in Egypt from its beginnings during the era of Muhammad Ali to its final days under Nasser. It casts a critical eye on the reality and myths surrounding the complex and ubiquitous Greek community in Egypt ...

A jerusalem anthology

A Jerusalem Anthology takes us on a journey through a city, not just of illusion and powerful accumulated religious emotion, but of colors, lights, smells, and sounds, an inhabited city as it was directly experienced and lived in through the ages. Memoirs of visitors such as as sixth-century AD p...

Akhenaten

Akhenaten: A Historian’s View examines what scholars have said over the years regarding key aspects of Akhenaten and his times (‘the Amarna Period’), to produce a ‘history of histories,’ exploring exactly how various chains of arguments were arrived at—and how houses of cards thus erected have su...

The tent

A journey inside the wounded hearts and minds of a group of Egyptian Bedouin womenThe Tent is a beautifully written, powerful, and disturbing novel, featuring a host of women characters whose lives are subject to the will of a single, often absent, patriarch and his brutal, foul-mouthed mother. T...

Sports and society in the middle east

A set of studies looking at the history, politics, and sociology of sports in the Arab worldThe sociology of sports in the Middle East has been neglected compared to other world regions. This volume aspires to encourage a greater focus on this topic. Here are assembled papers that discuss various...

Before the throne

In this extraordinary drama-in-dialogue, Naguib Mahfouz reveals his love for all of Egypt’s extensive history—and his deep knowledge of it. In Before the Throne, he summons nearly sixty of Egypt’s rulers to the afterlife Court of Osiris, from a king who unified Egypt for the first time, around 30...

Abu simbel

An indispensable companion and guide to one of the world’s great archaeological sites The three-thousand-year-old rock-cut temples at Abu Simbel and the story of their rescue from the rising waters of Lake Nasser in the 1960s are almost as familiar worldwide as the tale of the gold funerary mask ...

The pyramids portfolio

These handsome portfolios in a special new gift edition format contain ten fine art prints each of David Roberts’s superb nineteenth-century lithographs of Egypt, ancient and modern. Between 1842 and 1849, on the basis of sketches made on the spot and aided by his excellent memory, David Roberts ...

The lamp of umm hashim

The first of several works in Arabic to deal with the way in which an individual tries to come to terms with two divergent culturesTogether with such figures as the scholar Taha Hussein, the playwright Tawfik al-Hakim, the short story writer Mahmoud Teymour and—of course—Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Hak...

Oral history in times of change: gender, documentation, and the making of archives

Challenges, opportunities, and methodological issues in the creation of oral history archives in the Arab worldOral history archives have always been at the forefront of liberatory social movements in general, and of feminist movement in particular. Until the end of the twentieth century in the A...

The traveler and the innkeeper

This timely, elegant novel’s hero is an Iraqi secret police inspector who routinely uses enhanced interrogation techniques, which even he considers torture. Convinced that he is protecting society from anarchy, he is at peace with the world until ordered to interrogate a childhood friend, a journ...

The lost manuscript of frédéric cailliaud

The travel accounts of Frédéric Cailliaud were an important early contribution to the birth of Egyptology in the first half of the nineteenth century. But one of his major works was never published. For the first time here, his exquisite color plates are presented alongside a translation of his o...

From reading to writing, volume 1

A new comprehensive approach to teaching Arabic reading and writing skills to heritage students at the intermediate and advanced levelsFrom Reading to Writing, Volume 1 is a content- and task-based textbook for students of Arabic as a heritage language at the intermediate and advanced levels, aim...

In the spider's room

A sensitive and courageous account of life as a gay man in Egypt and Winner of the 2019 Prix de la Littérature Arabe Hani was out for an evening stroll near Cairo’s Tahrir Square when a heavy hand landed on his shoulder. An informant had identified him, and he was thrown into the back of a police...

Race and slavery in the middle east

In the nineteenth century hundreds of thousands of Africans were forcibly migrated northward to Egypt and other eastern Mediterranean destinations, yet relatively little is known about them. Studies have focused mainly on the mamluk and harem slaves of elite households, who were mostly white, and...

Poisoned legacy

After the death of Rameses II, the Nineteenth Dynasty soon fell into decline and familial conflict, culminating in a final civil war that ended with the accession of a new dynasty. Sethy I and Rameses II’s promotion of a concept of a wider ‘royal family’ may have sown the seeds for the conflicts ...

Wonders of the pyramids

A visit to the magnificent Pyramids of Giza, the one remaining Wonder of the ancient world, is incomplete without enjoying the performance of the spectacular Sound & Light Show of music, historical narration, and lights and images played out on the ancient stones themselves and on the eternal...

Gaza graffiti

Graffiti began in Gaza in 1987, during the first Intifada, when there was no Palestinian television or radio in the Gaza Strip, and no newspapers: the messages that spread along the walls became an important means of communication. Over the years, all political groups have had their own graffiti ...