Saturday
Aug072010
Books on Egypt
By 
Issandr El Amrani | Books Egypt
Issandr El Amrani | Books Egypt Max Robenbeck, in an interview with the excellent new Economist literary blog Prospero, notes the relative dearth of books on contemporary Egypt — especially non-academic ones. (There are quite a good range of highly focused academic books, however.
I'd like to mention my friend Sanna Negus newly released Hold on to your veil, Fatima! as a quite good general introduction to many issues, particularly on women. Sanna lived in Cairo for years, and her books was quite successful in her native Finland. This is an updated translation. If you don't know much about Egypt and want a broad look at some of the most salient political and social issues the country has to face, it seems like a good bet. More on the book when I finish it...
Reader Comments (2)
Care to list some of those academic books on Egypt? I don't recall coming across a good read about Egypt, academic or not, since Galal Amin's "Whatever Happened to the Egyptians?".
This book by Sanna Negus seems nice, however, neither el-Shrouq nor Diwan have it in stock. Would you happen to know where we could find it?
There are no generalist academic books on Egypt in the mold of Roger Owen's or John Waterbury's 1980s works, or Eberhard Kienle's book on the 1990s deliberalization, but there are a few more specialized volumes. Two I've come across lately are Yoav DiCapua's "Gatekeepers of the Arab Past: Historians and History Writing in Twentieth-Century Egypt" which is about how Egyptian history was conceived in the 20th century, and the other is Tamir Mustafa's "The Struggle for Constitutional Power: Law, Politics, and Economic Development in Egypt" which focuses on constitutionalism and the judicial system (a bit like Rotherford but more in depth). I know there are a couple of books coming out late this year or next about Egypt generally or the Muslim Brothers (I've read part of a forthcoming one, which provides a lot of statistical data and analysis about the MB in elections). And there are a few comparative books worth looking at for the Egypt chapters, like Jason Brownlee's book on authoritarianism and Steven Cook's book on militaries.