Islam and the Culture of Modern Egypt

Mohammad Salama is Professor and Director of the Arabic Program at San Francisco State University. He has published numerous articles on comparative literature and Arabic literature and film and is author of The Qur'an and Modern Arabic Literary Criticism (forthcoming), Islam, Orientalism, and Intellectual History (2011), and co-editor of German Colonialism: Race, the Holocaust, and Post-War Germany (2011). He is the recipient of two Fulbright Scholar Awards.

Preface; A note on transliteration and translation; Introduction: prelude, considerations, and definitions; 1. History matters; 2. Nahḍa-t Miṣr: Zaynab and the cultural Renaissance of modern Egypt; 3. Blindness and insight: challenging the sacred/secular divide in Ṭāhā Ḥusayn's The Days; 4. An Egyptian Sophocles: Qurʾānic inspiration in Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm's People of the Cave; 5. Writing the mad text: freedom, modernity and God in Naguib Mahfouz's 'The Whisper of Madness'; 6. Islamism writes back: Alī Aḥmad Bākāthīr's Red Revolutionary and the dismantling of the secular; 7. Realism and utopian irony in Yūsuf Idrīs's Faraḥāt's Republic; 8. Islam and secular nationalism in a film age: unveiling Youssef Chahine's Gamīla al-Gazā'iriyya; Appendix 1: 'The Whisper of Madness'; Appendix 2: an interview with Youssef Chahine; Appendix 3: feature films produced in Egypt from 1927–62; Bibliography; Index.