Lawrence Durrell, The Alexandria Quartet. These are four beautiful, devastating books about the cosmopolitan Egypt before WWII, when all ethnicities and religions mixed there -- Greeks, English, French, Italian, Jewish, Muslim, everyone. It's also a deep, yearning love story.
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Alaa Al-Aswany, The Yacoubian Building. It's abt one upscale building in Cairo and the various lives within it -- a louche expat, rich bureaucrats, young Egyptian strivers. It traces the change in Egypt in the 90s from its famously secular, loose society into a more Islamic one.
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Naguib Mahfouz, literally anything but especially the Cairo trilogy. He won the Nobel Prize, so this is self explanatory.
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Movie: Youssef Chahine, Heya Fowda. The title means something like "Total Chaos" and it's a movie about the rise of the Egyptian police state under Mubarak. Also told through a love story! Egyptians love dramatic love stories.
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And of course for music, Umm Khultum (spellings vary, Om Khalthoum is another, so is Oum Kalthoum) who is considered one of the pillars of Egyptian music. Here's a random song I found by googlinghttps://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-T-IOEhuukk …
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It's important, in times of upheaval, not to exoticize or Orientalize Egypt especially and to understand the country's history. I also keep an Egypt twitter list, a holdover from the Arab Spring, but which remains, incredibly, pretty updated. https://Twitter.com/moorehn/lists/Egypt …
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