Modern Egypt

With almost every news broadcast, we are reminded of the continuing instability of the Middle East, where state collapse, civil wars, and terrorism have combined to produce a region in turmoil. If the Middle East is to achieve a more stable and prosperous future, Egypt-which possesses the region's largest population, a formidable military, and considerable soft power-must play a central role. Modern Egypt: What Everyone Needs to Know® by Bruce Rutherford and Jeannie Sowers introduces readers to this influential country. The book begins with the 2011-2012 uprising that captured the world's attention before turning to an overview of modern Egyptian history. The book then focuses on present-day Egyptian politics, society, demography, culture, and religion. It analyzes Egypt's core problems, including deepening authoritarianism, high unemployment, widespread poverty, rapid population growth, and pollution. The book then concentrates on Egypt's relations with the United States, Israel, Arab states, and other world powers. Modern Egypt concludes by assessing the country's ongoing challenges and suggesting strategies for addressing them. Concise yet sweeping in coverage, the book provides the essential background for understanding this fascinating country and its potential to shape the future of the Middle East.

A history of Egypt from the Arab conquest to the present day.

For many Egyptians in the early twentieth century, the biggest national problem was not British domination or the Great Depression but a "marriage crisis" heralded in the press as a devastating rise in the number of middle-class men refraining from marriage. Voicing anxieties over a presumed increase in bachelorhood, Egyptians also used the failings of Egyptian marriage to criticize British rule, unemployment, the disintegration of female seclusion, the influx of women into schools, middle-class materialism, and Islamic laws they deemed incompatible with modernity. For Better, For Worse explores how marriage became the lens through which Egyptians critiqued larger socioeconomic and political concerns. Delving into the vastly different portrayals and practices of marriage in both the press and the Islamic court records, this innovative look at how Egyptians understood marital and civil rights and duties during the early twentieth century offers fresh insights into ongoing debates about nationalism, colonialism, gender, and the family.

Reprinted in 1967, this 1931 book is an historical and administrative study of the reign of Muhammad 'Ali (1769-1849). The author strives 'to escape from the traditional hero of French and villain of English writers, and to ascertain by a study of original materials what Muhammad 'Ali really did'.

This desk reference provides biodata, biographical sketches, and source material for approximately 500 men and women who have played a major role in Egypt's national life.

The Yacoubian Building holds all that Egypt was and has become over the 75 years since its namesake was built on one of downtown Cairo's main boulevards. From the pious son of the building's doorkeeper and the raucous, impoverished squatters on its roof, via the tattered aristocrat and the gay intellectual in its apartments, to the ruthless businessman whose stores occupy its ground floor, each sharply etched character embodies a facet of modern Egypt -- where political corruption, ill-gotten wealth, and religious hypocrisy are natural allies, where the arrogance and defensiveness of the powerful find expression in the exploitation of the weak, where youthful idealism can turn quickly to extremism, and where an older, less violent vision of society may yet prevail. Alaa Al Aswany's novel caused an unprecedented stir when it was first published in 2002 and has remained the world's best selling novel in the Arabic language since.

In this pioneering history of transportation and communication in the modern Middle East, On Barak argues that contrary to accepted wisdom technological modernity in Egypt did not drive a sense of time focused on standardization only. Surprisingly, the introduction of the steamer, railway, telegraph, tramway, and telephone in colonial Egypt actually triggered the development of unique timekeeping practices that resignified and subverted the typical modernist infatuation with expediency and promptness. These countertempos, predicated on uneasiness over “dehumanizing” European standards of efficiency, sprang from and contributed to non-linear modes of arranging time. Barak shows how these countertempos formed and developed with each new technological innovation during the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, contributing to a particularly Egyptian sense of time that extends into the present day, exerting influence over contemporary political language in the Arab world. The universal notion of a modern mechanical standard time and the deviations supposedly characterizing non-Western settings “from time immemorial,” On Time provocatively argues, were in fact mutually constitutive and mutually reinforcing.