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Examines the influence of Islam, as a religion, a practice, and a tradition, on Egypt's visual and literary modernity.
List of contents
Preface; A note on transliteration and translation; Introduction: prelude, considerations, and definitions; 1. History matters; 2. Nah¿a-t Mi¿r: Zaynab and the cultural Renaissance of modern Egypt; 3. Blindness and insight: challenging the sacred/secular divide in ¿¿h¿ ¿usayn's The Days; 4. An Egyptian Sophocles: Qur¿¿nic inspiration in Tawf¿q al-¿ak¿m's People of the Cave; 5. Writing the mad text: freedom, modernity and God in Naguib Mahfouz's 'The Whisper of Madness'; 6. Islamism writes back: Al¿ A¿mad B¿k¿th¿r's Red Revolutionary and the dismantling of the secular; 7. Realism and utopian irony in Y¿suf Idr¿s's Farä¿t's Republic; 8. Islam and secular nationalism in a film age: unveiling Youssef Chahine's Gam¿la al-Gaz¿'iriyya; Appendix 1: 'The Whisper of Madness'; Appendix 2: an interview with Youssef Chahine; Appendix 3: feature films produced in Egypt from 1927-62; Bibliography; Index.
About the author
Mohammad Salama is Professor and Director of the Arabic Program at San Francisco State University. He has published numerous articles on comparative literature and Arabic literature and film and is author of The Qur'an and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism (forthcoming), Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History (2011), and co-editor of German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Post-War Germany (2011). He is the recipient of two Fulbright Scholar Awards.
Summary
Boasting an in-depth analyses of individual texts over half a century, this intriguing history of the dynamics of Islam and culture in modern Egypt presents the conflict between tradition and secular values in a challenging new light. Including literature and film as crucial sources, this book is accessible to general readers and scholars alike.
