Rabbi Sohn has written an exceptional family portrait of the experience of living in Egypt with her husband and children. Advised not to share the fact that they are Jewish, they discover what it means to hide and then increasingly share their identity.

After being denied permission to join her husband in America, an Iraqi refugee is trapped in Cairo during the aftermath of the 2011 revolution and must rely on a foolhardy attorney with feelings for her and a not entirely legal plan to get her out.

An Egyptian woman's reflections on her changing homeland—updated with an afterword on the Arab Spring In language that vividly evokes the lush summers of Cairo and the stark beauty of the Arabian desert, Leila Ahmed movingly recounts her Egyptian childhood growing up in a rich tradition of Islamic women and describes how she eventually came to terms with her identity as a feminist living in America. As a young woman in Cairo in the forties and fifties, Ahmed witnessed some of the major transformations of this century—the end of British colonialism, the rise of Arab nationalism, and the breakdown of Egypt's once multireligious society. As today's Egypt continues to undergo revolutionary change, Ahmed's inspirational story remains as poignant and relevant as ever.

Bringing together a distinguished interdisciplinary group of scholars, this volume explores what happens when new forms of privatization meet collectivist pasts, public space is sold off to satisfy investor needs and tourist gazes, and the state plans for Egypt's future in desert cities while stigmatizing and neglecting Cairo's popular neighborhoods. These dynamics produce surprising contradictions and juxtapositions that are coming to define today's Middle East. The original publication of this volume launched the Cairo School of Urban Studies, committed to fusing political-economy and ethnographic methods and sensitive to ambivalence and contingency, to reveal the new contours and patterns of modern power emerging in the urban frame. Contributors: Mona Abaza, Nezar AlSayyad, Paul Amar, Walter Armbrust, Vincent Battesti, Fanny Colonna, Eric Denis, Dalila ElKerdany, Yasser Elsheshtawy, Farha Ghannam, Galila El Kadi, Anouk de Koning, Petra Kuppinger, Anna Madoeuf, Catherine Miller, Nicolas Puig, Said Sadek, Omnia El Shakry, Diane Singerman, Elizabeth A. Smith, Leïla Vignal, Caroline Williams.

CAIRO TO DAMASCUS by JOHN ROY CARLSON. PREFACE: IT seems to me there are two ways, generally speaking, to pre pare a book, take a trip, or, for that matter, to live a life. One may go at it dilettante fashion, as a tourist nibbling at ex perience, titillating the emotions yet emotionally starved, stimulating oneself with ambition yet forever tortured by frustration. Circumstances and temperament, however, may conspire together so that, with the freedom of a nomad, one can escape the straightjacket of everyday boredom, hurdle fences of space and time, and consume life at its sources. Prop erly directed, such an earthly life may give wing to one's imagination, clarity to one's thinking, strength to one's convic tions, and even bring one nearer to the simple, eternal truths of God and spirit This book, I feel, belongs in the second category the cate gory of the primitive. I left my country quite as uninformed, I am afraid, as are most Americans with respect to other peoples and other shores. But everywhere I went I sought to touch reality always honestly, and always at first hand. Everywhere I clung close to the smells, the flora and fauna of native existence. In that spirit I have written of the Arabs among whom I lived. I found much good and much evil evil acquired through a feudal order that, in rny opinion, remains the Arab's greatest enemy and his greatest barrier to emergence from the dark ages. I am grateful for Arab hospitality and the kindness I was shown, but a reporter, like a physician, must not remain blind to the ills plaguing his subject. With no desire to attribute to myself or my writings any viii Preface exaggerated importance, it is my fervent hope that the manyArmenians living in the Arab Middle East will not suffer at the hands of fanatics because an American of Armenian descent happened to write this book. To them I can only say that I have told the story honestly, as I saw it. And to my Arab friends who asked only that I tell the truth/' I can say in all conscience that I have told the truth. Let me assure them that I speak in this book as an American, and purely in an individual capacity, with no ties to or membership in any Armenian-American body save the church into which I was born. Any retribution against the Armenians a minority island in a Moslem sea would be an unwarranted and senseless cruelty. I have written this book with the hope that it will bring both Arabs and Jews into truer focus for the reader; that it will help reveal what they are and what they are not, what may be ex pected of them and what is impossible. I pray that these ancient Semitic peoples will reconcile their differences, that Palestine refugees who, in the main, left their homes because Arab leaders urged them to do so expecting a short war and a quick victory will be resettled. The only alternative to peace is disaster for Arab, Jew, and Christian, for none may hope to prosper alone. Together they may ultimately build a prosperous and democratic Middle East. To remain apart, at dagger's point, means only that Communism and anarchy can be the ultimate victors.