I was asked a while back to contribute a guest post to Washington Post reporter Jack Fairweather’s blog “Islam’s Advance” (about “Islam influencing and adapting to the modern world”).
I ended up writing on a phenomenon that has interested me for a while, every since I read Patrick Haenni’s great book “L’Islam de Marché” [...]

I was sent this image in an email forward.
The text says: “You can’t stop them, but you can protect yourself.”

Two obvious (and rhetorical) questions: Can we really not stop harassment? And does veiling really “protect” you?

We are launching a new blog under the Arabist umbrella. This is something we’ve been thinking of for some time and let’s just say that it’s going to be my summer project. Please check out The Arabist Review, which will be dedicated to covering arts and culture in Cairo and (hopefully) the Arab region. We [...]

Search around Project Guttenberg, the excellent repository of free ebooks, and you’re bound to find dozens of books that in some way have to do with Egypt. One thing most of these have in common — particularly those from the 19th and early 20th century, when the Victorian fad was to write travel diaries — [...]

The Guardian writes on the occasion of the London Palestine Film Festival:
Perhaps Palestinian cinema cannot help but be ironic, when the most widely known cinematic images of Palestine are those that close Otto Preminger’s 1960 film Exodus and Steven Spielberg’s Schindler’s List. In Exodus, youthful Israeli forces win a decisive battle against the old-world savagery [...]

The London Book Fair, which this year shines a spotlight on Arab literature, ends tomorrow. Here are selected links to related stories:
✯ PUBLISH AND BE DAMNED - On religion and censorship for Egypt’s independent publishing houses.
✯ Pigs raid Sharqawi’s publishing house; confiscate books خنازير الداخلية تداهم دار ملامح للنشر وتصادر كتب at 3arabawy - Hossam [...]

Egyptian novelist Bahaa Taher has won the “Arabic Booker” . Here’s a 2002 profile of Taher, from the late lamented Cairo Times, after the jump.

The Winter 2008 issue of Bidoun, the Middle Eastern arts and culture magazine, has been out for a few weeks now. For some weird reason I can never access it directly from Egypt, it only works through a proxy like proxyfellow.com or hidemyass.com, but it’s worth the trouble to check out the striking cover (below) [...]

Does anyone know how to get hold of this?

[Thanks, M]

Words Without Borders is running a series of excerpts from graphic novels from around the world this month, including two from Egypt and Lebanon. The fantastic Mazen Kerbaj, whose use of collage first surfaced during the Lebanon war of 2006, has an account of growing up during the Lebanese civil war:

For Egypt, I also like [...]

 I just saw the movie that everyone is talking about in Cairo these days: Heyya Fauda (It’s Chaos). It’s the latest by Youssef Chahine, but unlike a lot of his work lately, it’s eminently entertaining. It’s also very political. The film opens with actual footage of the many street protests and altercations between demonstrators and riot police [...]

From Scott Horton’s very erudite blog at Harpers:

Rembrandt Harmensz. van Rijn, Ibn Khaldūn Meets Sultan al-Narir, ink drawing (ca. 1650)
“Politics is the ordering of the household or the city as they ought to be according to the requirements of ethics and wisdom so that the multitude could be made [...]

Beyond the Veil:
When the French government invaded Algeria, in 1830, it started a vast campaign of military “pacification,” which was quickly followed by the imposition of French laws deemed necessary for the civilizing mission to succeed. Women were crucial to that enterprise. In articles, stories and novels of the day, Algerian women were universally depicted [...]

Our friend and former Cairo mag contributor G. Willow Wilson has released her graphic novel, Cairo, and NPR interviewed her about it. Here’s the blurb from the book:
Journalist G. Willow Wilson brings an extraordinary fable to Vertigo in October with CAIRO, an original graphic novel illustrated by Turkish artist M.K. Perker, himself a contributor to [...]

[Thanks, Francesca.]

Readers may be interested in reading this profile of Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswani from last week’s Le Mondes des Livres, accompanied by a review of the recently launched French edition of his last novel, Chicago.
We had mentioned Chicago when it came out earlier this year, while Baheyya had reviewed it.
Click on the image below to [...]

The US Embassy recently produced a CD of old interviews from the Voice of America Arabic service archives. (VOA Arabic was canceled a while ago, to be replaced by the much-criticized, pop-heavy Radio Sawa). The interviews — of major Egyptian writers, artists, singers such as Naguib Mahfouz, Mohamed Abdel Wahab and Tahia Carioca — are [...]

When Andrew Hammond writes about Arab media, I read attentively — from Arab Media & Society:
Powered by vast petrodollar resources, thus began a concerted Saudi attempt to dominate the world of cable and satellite television media in the Arab world and steal the thunder of Egypt, once the leader of Arab media in the 1950s [...]

The LAT has a great piece by Ashraf Khalil on Arab actors in Hollywood dealing with prejudice and typecasting — More work, one role for Arab actors:
“What kind of a name is that?” the voice coach asked at the end of the lesson. The name on the check he’d been handed by his student didn’t [...]

Science and the Islamic world, an essay by a Pakistani scientist on the decline of science in the Islamic world in my favorite magazine (not really), Physics Today:
In the Islamic world, opposition to science in the public arena takes additional forms. Antiscience materials have an immense presence on the internet, with thousands of elaborately designed [...]