Description

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As the Egyptian revolution unfolded throughout 2011 and the ensuing years, no one was better positioned to comment on it—and try to push it in productive directions—than best-selling novelist and political commentator Alaa Al-Aswany. For years a leading critic of the Mubarak regime, Al-Aswany used his weekly newspaper column for Al-Masry Al-Youm to propound the revolution’s ideals and to confront the increasingly troubled politics of its aftermath.

This book presents, for the first time in English, all of Al-Aswany’s columns from the period, a comprehensive account of the turmoil of the post-revolutionary years, and a portrait of a country and a people in flux. Each column is presented along with a context-setting introduction, as well as notes and a glossary, all designed to give non-Egyptian readers the background they need to understand the events and figures that Al-Aswany chronicles. The result is a definitive portrait of Egypt today—how it got here, and where it might be headed.

About the Author

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Alaa Al-Aswany is the author of The Yacoubian Building and many other novels.

Paul Naylor studied Arabic at SOAS, University of London. He has since worked as a researcher and translator for media clients such as Al Arabiya and PBS. He is currently in the PhD program on Islamic culture in West Africa at the University of Birmingham.

Praise For…

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 “A testament to Aswany's talents as a writer, as he transitions seamlessly from dry intellectual commentary to vicious political satire and elegant social metaphors rendered through fictional representation. . . . For a figure such as Aswany, whose thought and opinion had proved so controversial in recent years, it is in the transition between different points of view, not the steadfast commitment to one particular ideology, that the true message lies. Or rather, it is in the transitioning between different polarised positions in relation to Aswany's continued and vocal assertion that “Democracy is the answer.’”

— Middle East Monitor

“Al Aswany is a world writer, making Egyptian concerns into human ones and beautifully illuminating our always extraordinary and sometimes sad and baffling world.”
— Times

“A peerless teller of personal stories that reveal a general truth, and one incapable—as admirers of The Yacoubian Building, Chicago, and Friendly Fire will know—of a dull or timid paragraph.” 

— Independent