Held in conjunction with the 11th International Egyptian Modern Dance Festival, a current photographic exhibition captures the art of modern dance, writes Ingrid Wassmann

Ati Metwaly dances along to the rhythms of Kazantzakis

Best known for his novels on Parisian themes, the nineteenth-century French author Victor Hugo also wrote on the orient, as a recent exhibition explains. David Tresilian caught the final days

Robert McNamara, The Hashemites: The Dream of Arabia, 2009, the American University in Cairo Press, Cairo, New York

The death of Nasr Abu-Zayd in a Cairo hospital this week has deprived Arab-Islamic culture of a leading voice of rationalism. His pioneering studies in Quranic exegesis caused him great trouble 15 years ago, when religious zealots accused him of being an apostate and succeeded in obtaining a court ruling to that effect, something that endangered his personal safety. For the past 15 years Abu-Zayd had been living in exile. As he was preparing to leave the country then, he spoke to Mona Anis and Amira Howeidy about the reasons behind his ordeal and how he conceived of the affair which rocked Egypt in 1995. Below is the text of the interview published in this newspaper on 22 June 1995