Egypt

Cairo from a café

The Hindu (Savtej Sarna)

A brief experience of Mahfouz country, though the café he used to frequent is no more, having given way to change…

The night throws its canopy gently over the Great Pyramids at Giza, as if it were reluctant to smudge their sharp silhouettes. And as the first stars force their presence into a dusky sky, timelessness takes over the vision: there is an assurance that the pyramids are safe for another night as they have been for centuries. There is nothing more to be done there except to drive back into the heart of bustling Cairo and begin the search for the café where Naguib Mahfouz, the man who has alternatively been called Egypt’s Balzac or Zola or Galsworthy, breakfasted and wrote for four decades.

It is not an easy journey. Even as the hour turns late, the streets are choked with cars, taxis and donkey carts piled high with large melons. We crawl past palaces and minarets, restaurants and shopping malls; clearly, there are no closing hours. And the night seems to be throwing a picnic for the entire city under the gently swaying date palms.

- Urbanization Threatens Pyramids
jacksonville.com (Brian Norman) There have been several features about this subject over the years, but it never hurts to be reminded. The Pyramids and the Sphinx of Giza are the most recognized objects in Egypt and attract millions of tourists each...

- Travel: Blending With The Locals In Cairo
Guardian Unlimited (Will Hobson) "Are you an Egyptologist?" Fady, the young Copt sitting at the nextdoor table in El Bostan café in Cairo's downtown, wondered. He had seen the introductory paperback I was reading, and immediately wanted to chat....

- Fiction Review: Morning And Evening Talk
The Financial Times (Review by Maureen Freely) Morning and Evening Talk: A Modern Arabic Novel By Naguib Mahfouz Translated by Christina Phillips American University in Cairo Press If the universal is the local without walls, the late writer Naguib Mahfouz...

- Travel: Discovering Cairo Through The Eyes Of Naguib Mahfouz
The Hindu - Magazine (Sadhana Rao) An article that describes a trip to Cairo, looking at it through the eyes of the novelist Naguib Mahfouz: Through his prose, Naguib Mahfouz (a confirmed Cairo loyalist) has given us a myriorama of his homeland. He opened...

- Obituaries: Naguib Mahfouz
http://washingtontimes.com/commentary/20060909-101228-8126r.htm"Naguib Mahfouz wrote about his Cairo not as an abstraction but as one long street of shopkeepers, government employees, pensioners, quiet decent people and the other kind, the small-time...

Egypt