Revolutionary Melodrama explores intersections between cinema and politics during the Nasser era, a period in which a military regime embarked upon the construction of a new civic identity for an independent Egypt.With the blessing of a "revolutionary" regime, filmmakers began to explore issues of social inequity, colonial and feudal exploitation, changing gender roles, religious and cultural traditions and, finally, the disappointments of the revolutionary project itself. (more...)

Commemorating the Nation
Collective Memory, Public Commemoration, and National Identity in Twentieth-Century Egypt
By Israel Gershoni & James Jankowski

Commemorating the Nation is a study of the relationship between public commemoration and national identity in Egypt over the course of the twentieth century. Appropriating insights from recent theoretical discussions of collective memory and public commemoration, it examines the modes by which different communities of memory—the state under successive regimes; rival political forces; elite and non-elite groups in civil society—remembered and commemorated the Egyptian national struggle. (more...)

The Wine of Love and Life
Ibn al-Farid's al-Khamriyah and al-Qaysari's Quest for Meaning
Edited, Translated and Introduced by Th. Emil Homerin

Ibn al-Farid (d. 632/1235) has long been venerated as a Sufi saint and poet whose verse stands as a high point in Arabic poetry. Several of his poems became religious and literary classics, among them the al-Khamriyah or “Wine Ode.” Perhaps the first and certainly the most influential commentary on this poem was the Sharh Khamriyat Ibn al-Farid by Dawud al-Qaysari, a direct spiritual descendent of the great Sufi master Ibn al-`Arabi. (more...)