At a glance
A shorthand guide to the month compiled by Mahmoud El-Wardani
Magazines and periodicals
Sotour, monthly magazine, issue no. 52, Cairo: Sotour Publications
 In the March issue of Sotour, the main pivot concerns "the search for freedom," a theme that is tackled from a number of perspectives by, among others, I'tidal Othman, Mona Tolba, Ahmed Shaaban, Mohamed Nour Farahat and Karim Abdel-Salam. Politically slanted contributions include Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil on "the decease of the course of Oslo" and Mohamed Said Idris on "the Republican nightmare." In the arts section, Abdel-Hadi El-Gazzar and Hamid Abdallah occupy centre stage. In the science section, Ahmed Shawqi writes on "development and excessive development," and Sotour publishes Mohamed Eliewa's "The Death of Him who Loved Life," the article which won Sotour's scientific writing competition. The magazine hosts, in addition, its usual retinue of columnists and critics, covering the winding month's cultural events.
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Al-Arabi, monthly magazine, issue no.210, Kuwait: Ministry of Information
 The prestigious monthly resumes a by now long-standing process of regeneration, expanding its pages and improving its format. Under the title of "The Debating Ring," among others, Mahmoud Abdel-Fadil writes on social and political aspects of the liquidity crisis in Egypt, Abdel-Rahman Shakir on the 1952 Revolution and Mahdi El-Husseini on French images of Egypt in the 18th century. The issue devotes an entire folio to what is cautiously referred to as 'literature uncovered', touching conservatively on the censorship crisis that erupted following the publication of three sexually explicit novels by the General Organisation for Cultural Palaces, to which Maher Shafiq Farid, Ramsis Awad and Mohamed Selim El-Awwa contributed articles on a range of topics from "sex in the works of Abbas Mahmoud El-Aqqad, Yehia Haqqi and Latifa El-Zayyat" to "the legal limits of creativity." The issue includes articles on the performance arts and recent literary publications.
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Al-Hilal, monthly magazine, March 2001 , Cairo: Al-Hilal Publishing House
 In common with many Arab magazines, Al-Hilal continues to suffer from the lack of any integrated editorial principle to guide the choice of topics and issues discussed, despite the prominence and intellectual prowess of the magazine's contributors. This issue's bundle is typical: Mohamed Berrada on Jean-Paul Sartre, Ahmed Abu Zeid on Franz Fanon, Abdel-Azim Anis on algebra, Sami Khashaba on "the total plan" for Arab culture. Literary articles deal with a wide range of issues from poetry and heritage to narrative aspects of contemporary film and the art of the mashrabiya. Highlights include a poll on Arab expatriates in Canada and writings by Mohamed El-Makhzangi and Hanna Mina.
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Ahwal Misriya (Egyptian Chronicles), quarterly magazine, winter 2000, Cairo: Al-Ahram Centre for Political and Strategic Studies
 This issue's folio is on "Egypt's monuments: interaction between human beings and rocks," an excellent work of scholarship providing comprehensive information on Egypt's monuments, the antique smuggling industry and geological aspects of ancient Egyptian life. Coverage of current issues includes Hoda Mekkawi on Muslims and Copts in the framework of national unity, Mohamed Ezzelarab on shanty towns in Cairo and analysis of the last People's Assembly elections. In addition, the issue contains retrospective pieces on the Cairo International Film Festival and reproductions of drawings by the veteran cartoonist Hegazi.
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Books
Sufun Qadima (Old Ships), Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid, Cairo: Miret Publications, 2001. pp121
 Ibrahim Abdel-Meguid's latest collection of short stories comprises 12 pieces written between 1992 and 2000. It opens with Abdel-Meguid's version of Naguib Mahfouz's post-1967 story, Taht Al-Mazalla (Under the Bus Shelter), Taht Al-Mazalla 2000, and communicates, first and foremost, Abdel-Meguid's startlingly prosaic vision of Alexandria and his understanding of a peculiar kind of working-class, existentially tormented character. In Abdel-Meguid's descriptions, nature and the human mind are frequently interconnected: "He turned and saw the horizon, so he decided to swim all the way to it. Will he become one of the tribe? There is no horizon in existence. The distance between the earth over which he might swim and the sky is the same as the distance between sky and the horizon... he must live on, deluded."
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Kharitat Al-Hubb (The Map of Love), Ahdaf Soueif, translated by Fatma Mousa, Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 2001. pp461
 Set in the 1990s, Ahdaf Soueif's latest novel juxtaposes a contemporary East-West encounter with the story of a love affair between a colonial Englishwoman and an Egyptian nobleman following the failure of Ahmed Orabi's Revolution and the start of the British occupation. The latter story appears in the form of an old box containing the love letters of the two 19th-century protagonists, which lands in the hands of the present-day protagonist. Aptly translated by literary scholar, critic and translator Fatma Mousa (the author's mother), this is the perfect introduction to Soueif's work, and the only one of her novels that has been published in Arabic. A work of historical, postcolonial awareness and postmodern literary finesse, Soueif's novel betrays an Egyptian sensibility and a profound understanding of the female psyche.
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Haya Adiya (An Ordinary Life), Mohamed Saleh, Cairo: General Organisation for Cultural Palaces (Literary Voices Series), 2000. pp83
 The first book to appear in the Literary Voices Series following the censorship crisis centring on the series' latest three novels (Before and After, Sons of the Romantic Fault and Forbidden Dreams), Mohamed Saleh's collection of poems includes arguably the poet's most important work to date. Comprising poems written over the last five years, following the publication of Saleh's Sayd Al-Farashat (Catching Butterflies, 1996), the book bears testimony to Saleh's dogged search for a rhetoric that forgoes well-known and overused devices. Saleh writes, "He thinks he is bound/ By an ordinary life/ He says a life like this/ Makes the spirit ascetic/ And that he must/ Swerve off his path... Walking on the streets, there/ Below/ Better/ Than staying suspended, thus/ With no hope of descending..."
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Fatrat Al-Takwin fi Hayat Al-Sadiq Al-Amin (The Formative Period of Prophet Mohamed's Life), Sheikh Khalil Abdel-Kerim, Cairo: Miret Publications, 2001. pp419
 The Prophet's formative years, as the author of this book points out, is the least known period of his life. The purpose of the book, in fact, is to redress this biographical gap, documenting the period starting with the Prophet's marriage to Al-Sayeda Khadija and ending with the descent of the message at Ghar Hiraa. The author has solicited the help of dozens of biographies and histories of that time, concluding that the Arabian Peninsula was indeed ready for the advent of a prophet, so much so that both Christians and Jews impatiently awaited the event. The book deals amply with Al-Sayeda Khadija's status as a Christian and the role of her cousin, Waraqa Ibn Noufal in bringing Islam to the world.
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Ayqounat Al-Fann (The Icon of Art), George Bahgory, Cairo: Sharqiyat, 2001. pp190
 Veteran painter and cartoonist George Bahgory resumes his literary project in this "fictional autobiography," as the artist himself describes his new book, a literary exercise of rare innocence and stunning sincerity, betraying a pure love of art and people. Bahgory's alterego, Faltas, reappears here in slightly different form. The book relates Faltas's enrollment in the College of Art, how he lived through the defeat of 1967 and how he ended up as an expatriate painter in Paris, offering a panoramic view of an entire era and a whole generation of characters. In a whisper, almost, Bahgory has produced a rare record of the 1950s and 1960s.
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Tifl Al-Mamha (Eraser Boy), Ibrahim Nasrallah, Beirut: The Arab Foundation for Studies and Publication, 2000. pp351
 The Palestinian writer Ibrahim Nasrallah has tackled almost every literary genre in existence. Since 1980 he has published 13 collections of poetry, seven novels and a book on the cinema. This, his eighth novel is subtitled "a Palestinian farce". It tells the story of a Palestinian school child learning about the history of his people since 1948. Each chapter is not only a development in the life of the child but an episode in the Palestinian struggle; accordingly chapters are offered as "lessons" characterised by a good deal of black comedy and philosophical reflection.
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