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Sisi’s Egypt

Anatomy of a counter-revolution and its epigonic figurehead. Shifting relations of military, state security and business networks, in the ad-hoc construction of a regime more repressive than its predecessor. Hazem Kandil discusses the merciless crackdown on the Bedouin in Sinai, and consoling myths of the Muslim Brothers.

Whose Golden Age?

Hazem Kandil on Alaa Al Aswany, On the State of Egypt. The author of The Yacoubian Building yearns for a lost golden age of liberalism.

Revolt in Egypt

An Egyptian sociologist gives an in-depth account of Mubarak’s overthrow, from the social tensions of the dictatorship’s final years to the present ferment of transition. The old regime’s structures of rule, and the prospects for the new dispensation emerging from its shadow.

The New Egyptian Novel

The slums of Cairo find their homology in a new genre of narrative fiction, argues Sabry Hafez. Striking formal innovations of a generation raised under the asphyxiating rule of the Mubarak dictatorship.

The Novel, Politics and Islam

The astonishing story of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria—a work of literature as trigger for political crisis and polemical turmoil, two decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar’s fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time and outlook in the Arab world.

In Search of Sadat

“‘I, Anwar el-Sadat, a peasant born and brought up on the banks of the Nile—where man first witnessed the dawn of time—present this book to readers everywhere.’ The tone of voice is lofty. The gaze that seems, in the cover photograph, to be both inward to some hidden . . .” read more

Sadat’s Egypt

“The evolution of the crisis in Lebanon during the past eighteen months has provided striking evidence of a major change in the Middle East since Nasser’s death. As that country plunges ever deeper into its morass of manipulated violence, Egypt, for two decades the central actor in Arab . . .” read more

Rethinking the Middle East

“For Marxists, using a theory that began as an analysis of capitalist society, precapitalist and colonial societies have presented a dual, dialectically interrelated problematic: problems of the theoretical analysis of such societies, and problems of revolutionary strategy in the colonial societies—where Marxists have too often been guided by . . .” read more

The Crisis in Nasser’s Egypt

“During September 1966, there was a significant governmental shift in Egypt. Zakariyya Mohieddin, for long the régime’s strong man, was replaced by a Colonel of Engineers, Sidky Soliman, who had for several years been Minister responsible for the Aswan High Dam. Interpretations of this shift differed; but in . . .” read more