First published in 1971, this novel is set in the early 16th century in the Egypt of the Mamluk dynasty, the warrior caste dominant for over 700 years. The author was a war reporter in the Middle East, and has written six collections of short stories in Arabic.

Zayni Barakat

Literature & Fiction

Al-Ghitani, Gamal

Contemporary

Penguin??Books

This historical novel, first published in Arabic in 1974, is set in early 17th century Mamluke Cairo. It traces the career of Zayni Barakat ibn Mousa as Cairo's puritanically moral and severe wali or governor, who employs several corps of spies and informers to rule the city. The author has used various narrative devices including diary extracts, police reports, legal decrees, first-person narratives and religious discourses which together with oblique references to the Cairo of Nasser, serve to give the novel the dimensions of a political and historical fable.

Genre Fiction

VIKING

An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the cafe owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband - all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher's reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humour prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.

The Zafarani Files

Arabia Books Ltd

With its Sufistic parables of the human condition, rendered in a style redolent of both the austere meditations of Borges and the dark engorged ruminations of Arthur C. Clark, Pyramid Texts engages the mind and beguiles the imagination. In a series of chapters each shorter than the last―so that, like their subjects, they taper ultimately into nothingness―the author evokes the obsessions that have drawn men over the centuries to the brooding presence of mankind’s most ancient and mysterious monuments. Among others in a procession of exotic characters, a Moroccan seeker after knowledge spends years contemplating the pyramids in the hope that one day he will understand the mysterious writing that fitfully appears on their sides. Another waits patiently for the moment when the shadow of one will diverge from its accustomed path and bestow immortality, and the Sphinx performs a celestial dance. Pyramid Texts leads us into a world of endless passages and mysterious sighing winds, a world whose claustrophobic and shadowy spaces may be illuminated by flashes of ecstasy leading to scintillating transfigurations and dizzying annihilations.

Pyramid Texts: A Modern Arabic Novel

Literary

The American University in Cairo Press

The Mahfouz Dialogs records the memories, views, and jokes of Naguib Mahfouz on subjects ranging from politics to the relationship between his novels and his life, as delivered to intimate friends at a series of informal meetings stretching out over almost half a century. Mahfouz was a pivotal figure not only in world literature (through being awarded the Nobel prize for literature in 1988 he became the first writer in Arabic to win a mass audience), but also in his own society, where he vastly enhanced the image of the writer in the eyes of the public and encapsulated as the victim of a savage attack on his life by an Islamist in 1994 the struggle between pluralism, tolerance, and secularism on the one hand and extremist Islam. Moderated by Gamal al-Ghitani, a writer of a younger generation who shared a common background with Mahfouz (al-Ghitani also grew up in medieval Cairo) and felt a vast personal empathy for the writer despite their sometimes different views, these exchanges throw new light on Mahfouz's life, the creation of his novels, and literary Egypt in the second half of the twentieth century.

The Mahfouz Dialogs

Biographies & Memoirs

Arts & Literature

The Zafarani Files: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature (Hardcover))

An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo’s old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the café owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband―all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher’s reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humor prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.

An unknown observer is watching the residents of a small, closely-knit neighborhood in Cairo's old city, making notes. The college graduate, the street vendors, the political prisoner, the café owner, the taxi driver, the beautiful green-eyed young wife with the troll of a husband all are subjects of surveillance. The watcher's reports flow seamlessly into a narrative about Zafarani Alley, a village tucked into a corner of the city, where intrigue is the main entertainment, and everyone has a secret. Suspicion, superstition, and a wicked humor prevail in this darkly comedic novel. Drawing upon the experience of his own childhood growing up in al-Hussein, where the fictional Zafarani Alley is located, Gamal al-Ghitani has created a world richly populated with characters and situations that possess authenticity behind their veils of satire.

One of Egypt's greatest contemporary writers reflects on life and love This haunting memoir, written ten years before al-Ghitani's death, weaves together a series of vignettes in a style that mimics the uneven, discontinuous nature of memory itself. These fragments are summoned from across the span of a singular lifetime. We read of his childhood adventures, his erotic awakenings, his time as a political prisoner, and his reports from the battlefront in Iraq and the corridors of power in Syria. Vivid passages capture fleeting glances of strangers through car windows, flavors and scents of delicacies savored, dreams and sorrows of neighbors in the apartment blocks of Cairo before Nasser, as well as chance conversations at points of transit, in cafés, on elegant streets, and with unnamed paramours. These memories, and al-Ghitani's musings on memory's own finitude and mutability, make Traces both a memoir and a meditation on memory itself, in all its inscrutable workings and inevitable betrayals.

Traces: A Memoir (Composition Books)

For Naguib Mahfouz, Cairo has always been a place of special resonance, a city he loves passionately and has revisited in his writings. Photographer Britta Le Va, a longtime admirer of the novels of Mahfouz, guides us through his pages and treads his streets to produce a collection of visual images of the city. Each complements a verbal image selected from Mahfouzs writings. In his introduction, novelist Gamal al-Ghitani describes a walking tour with the novelist through the streets of Gamaliya, the heart of the old city where both of themmore than thirty years apartwere born and raised. Mahfouz reminisces and remarks on what has changed and what has not in eight decades

The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz

Arts & Photography

Ghīṭānī, Jamāl

Le Va, Britta

Photography & Video

Amer Univ in Cairo Pr

“In the course of my long travels I have never seen a city so devastated. After a long time I ventured out into the streets. Death, cold and heavy, hung in the air. Walls have no value here, doors have been eliminated. No one is certain that they will see another day.” The Egypt of the Mamluk dynasty witnessed a period of artistic ostentation and social and political upheaval, at the heart of which lay the unsolved question of the ruler’s legitimacy. Now, in 1516, the Mamluk reign is coming to an end with the advance of the invading Ottomans. The numerous narrators, among them a Venetian traveler and several native Muslims, tell the story of the rise to power of the ruthless, enigmatic, and puritanical governor of Cairo, Zayni Barakat ibn Musa, whose control of the corrupt city is effected only through a complicated network of spies and informers.

British & Irish

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Al-Ghitani, Gamal. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Books by Al-Ghitani, Gamal

See the best price to sell, buy, or rent books by Al-Ghitani, Gamal. BookScouter helps to compare book prices from 25+ online bookstores and 30+ buyback vendors with a single search.

Zayni Barakat

Zayni Barakat

The Zafarani Files

Pyramid Texts: A Modern Arabic Novel

The Mahfouz Dialogs

The Zafarani Files: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature (Hardcover))

The Zafarani Files: An Egyptian Novel (Modern Arabic Literature (Hardcover))

Traces: A Memoir (Composition Books)

The Cairo of Naguib Mahfouz

Zayni Barakat