The second collection of this year’s standout books offers narratives that explore personal experiences, pain and success, and history and culture.

1 Al-Khawgaiya

(The Foreign Woman)
Femony Okasha
Al-Shorouk, 2024
PP 263

This is an open personal account of a joint mother-and-daughter story that goes through love, pain, and loss. It offers insight into a wide range of estrangements – some by choice and some not. It is the story of a woman who left Europe behind to come live under the sun in Egypt, a daughter who was put at unease by her mother’s foreign nationality (but not necessarily her identity), a woman who walks the lanes of dementia, and finally, a daughter who has to come to terms with the loss of a mother as she reads through her mother’s dairy in a journey of admiration, admiration, empathy, and healing.

Femony Okasha, the author of Al-Khawgaiya (The Foreign Woman), was born in the 1970s to an Egyptian father and a mother from the Netherlands. Her book is a tribute to her mother, who was born in the early decades of the 20th century in post-World War I in Europe and whose adolescence was heavily marked by World War II and the Nazi occupation of her country before embarking on a life of adventure that takes her first to England and then to Egypt where she falls in love with a Muslim Egyptian man, moving into a mixed marriage and a joyful life there.

The book is a mélange of recollections and dairy notes that present the stories of two women of two generations and different cultural affiliations who each go through life in that long and often difficult search for love, compassion, and belonging. In this way, Al-Khawgaiya offers much more than what its title offers.

There is the moving part that is dedicated to reflecting on the early signs of dementia that hit Gerda Okasha in her 80s and the hard time that Femony had to go through before she accepted that her strong, vivid, active, and unyielding mother was forced to bow to the agony of memory loss, confusion, and anxiety.

However, there is a lot more in the book about the norms of a middle-class family in early 20th-century Europe: the challenge of a couple in a mixed marriage in Egypt in the 1950s, the life of a Jewish mother (Femony’s paternal grandmother, Victoria) in Egypt after the establishment of Israel and the subsequent departure of the Jews of Egypt, including the cousins of Anwar (Femony’s father) to Europe and North America, the lifestyle of the upper-middle-class in Egypt under the subsequent tenures of Gamal Abdel-Nasser and Anwar El-Sadat, key political events in Europe in the first part of the 20th century and Egypt in the second part of the century, and ultimately the experience of a working woman who is going simultaneously through divorce and the realization of her mother’s cognitive decline.

In his introduction to the book, novelist Mohamed El-Mekhzangui qualifies Al-Khawgaiya as one of the most sensitive and emotional texts on heartache and cognitive illness. He even writes that he found the book more moving than Annie Ernaux’s I Did Not Get Out of My Night.

2 Garah Khaerg El-Serb – Mozkerat Magdi Yacoub

(A surgeon apart – Magdi Yacoub, biography)
Authors: Fiona Gorman and Simon Pearson
Translated from the original English: A Surgeon and a Maverick
Translator: Ahmed Shafa’ai
Al Masryiah Al Lebenaniyah, 2024
PP 298

This book is more about a journey of success than anything else. It is the story of a man who was born to a conservative Egyptian Coptic Orthodox family in the early 1930s and whose dedication, discipline, and ability to excel led him to become one of the world’s top-ranking heart surgeons in the second half of the 20th century.

While the title suggests that this volume is a biography of Magdi Yacoub, the actual text shows that it is more of a recollection of medical advancements and breakthroughs in heart surgery that made it possible to save lives and also to allow those who die to help save the lives of others through organ donation.

There is very little in close to 300-page volume, which comes in a very smooth translation by poet/translator Ahmed Shafa’ai from the original English, about Yacoub as a man and father or about an Egyptian-British citizen. The facts are put down: where he was born and educated, the background of his family, the saddening death of a paternal aunt that inspired him to pursue a medical career, his marriage and his children and his love of classical music, especially of Bach and Chopin.

However, the text does not get personal – almost at all – except in very brief moments where Yacoub shares some sense of slight unease upon the operation of his first heart transplant. That said, Yacoub is clear that worries are always under control in the operation room, where he is always “focused and in control” and knows that “if something goes wrong, I can fix it.”

Yacoub does not share much about his family relations or his friendships. He talks about a family where respect and affection were the norm in a very fact-of-matter sense. He speaks of professors who inspired him and co-workers who crossed paths with him with much admiration but not much more.

He shares no sentiments that he might have had at instrumental moments in the history of the two countries he subscribes to, Egypt and England. He states that he took no interest in politics and focused only on medicine, research, and saving lives.

Even when it comes to his resentment of forced retirement at the age of 65 due to the working norms for surgeons in England, Yacoub is just talking about a decision to keep up the work elsewhere, especially in Africa through the charity that he committed to, and through the Aswan Heart Centre – Magdi Yacoub Heart Foundation that he established in the Upper Egypt city that he loved during his childhood/adolescent years where his family lived in Aswan upon the assignment of his father, a physician too, in the city.

There is very little in the book actually that reveals any ideas that Yacoub might have. There are just a few references here and there, including his assessment that the quality of teaching at the Cairo University medical school fared better before the introduction of free university education under Gamal Abdel-Nasser and the subsequent significant increase in the number of students per class and his dismay over the unsatisfactory and even unavailability of adequate health care for children with heart problems in the poorer countries – compared to the level of medical care that is offered to children in developed countries.

The book is a very interesting read for two reasons. First, it shows the journey of hard work and accomplishment of one of the most admired figures in Egypt today — even if only from a bird’s-eye view. Second, it shows the path and pace of medical advancement and the ability of committed medical doctors to change the lives of patients who might have otherwise had to endure much suffering or fail to recover from life-threatening ailments.

In this book, Yacoub shares one secret of success: a good and accomplished doctor needs to be tuned to the details of the living conditions of his patients “because medicine is not just about science and books but also about societies” as a professor of biochemistry once told his students at the school of medicine of Cairo University. “This phrase was forever engraved in my mind,” he said.

“Modesty” is the other secret of success and excellence shared in the book's introduction, written by prominent Egyptian nephrologist Mohamed Ghoneim, who is also associated with significant advancements and medical charities. Yacoub’s “astounding success never undermined his utter modesty,” Ghoneim wrote.

The book has a very interesting collection of photos – including very few family photos and some featuring Yacoub with figures such as Princess Diana, who was committed to supporting charities.

3 Modon Cinema’iya – Tarikh Lel Hadarah Al-Gharibyah mn Al-Shashah ila Al-Waqa’

Cinematic cities - Historizing Western modernity from ‘reel’ to ‘real’
Nezar Al-Sayyad
Translated from the original English: Cinematic Urbanism – A History of the Modern Cities from Reel to Real
Translated by Hala Hussein and Nezar Al-Sayyad
Al-Ain, 2024
PP 389

Some reasons could make the translation of this book, which talks about American and European films and cities, originally published by Routledge in 2006, relevant to Egyptian – and Arab – readers today. The most obvious reason is the ongoing debate about urban “development” and what it means regarding the quality of life to the majority, or for that matter a minority, of people. Another reason relates to the criteria of “urban criticism” that this book offers and could be easily applied to any city that has been there for long enough to go through significant phases of urban evolution – and for this evolution to be caught through the lens of cinema production.

Ultimately, Nezar Al-Sayyad, a professor and an urban historian with many publications on the subjects, states that looking at the cities through the movies that featured them could make one re-think his take on these particular cities and wonder if the “reel” has been more dominating in the intellectual image that one develops of a particular city than the “real.” El-Sayyad argues that, in some cases, the iconic images of certain cities were the making of the movies rather than anything else – with New York being a very obvious example.

However, this book is not at all about buildings and films. It is more about people who live in the cities – workers who are coerced by this or that city, minorities who see none of the grace of this or that city or those nouveaux riches who conquer the cities and force new norms.

This book approaches cities in and out of war, cities of migrants, and cities of revolt through the lens of specific movies that reflect on the path of modernity and its impact on urbanism.

By revisiting the cities through movies produced at different times, this book of Nezar Al-Sayyad prompts the reader to see the blurring line that separates the reality of the city from its image portrayed in the cinema production — and by doing so, the reader might come to realize that one person’s utopic city is another’s uttermost dystopic setting.

4 Azmena Masriya

“Egyptian Times”
Baher Souliman
Eshraka, 2024
PP 193

This book falls strictly within an increasingly popular genre of revisiting Egypt’s 19th and 20th centuries history, particularly with an eye on the times of the French Invasion/Expedition (1798-1801) and of Mohammed Ali (1805-1848).

The essential argument that Baher Souliman is putting through his slightly over 190-page volume is that modernity in Egypt was not at all a byproduct of the French invasion/ expedition, as some like to argue. Nor, Souliman argues, were the times of the Ottoman rule of Egypt's (from the early 16th century to the early 20th century) centuries of decline and misery.

Azmena Masriya argues that it is important to consider whether the modernity introduced with the French invasion/expedition was disassociated from colonial purposes.

According to Souliman, the issue is about the concepts of modernity and whether these concepts have to be strictly defined by Western criteria. Essentially, the author argues that there is no reason to assume that the West, as a colonial power at the end of the day, has a monopoly over modernity. “Some like to talk much about the Ottoman decline compared to the modernity that Napoleon introduced. But this is not a founded argument,” Souliman wrote.

Moreover, Souliman is contesting the argument that Mohammed Ali is “the creator” of modern Egypt. Mohammed Ali, he argues, “created Egyptian bureaucracy… but this is different from introducing modernity,” he wrote.

There is no reason, Souliman wrote, to assume that there is an inevitable clash between religion, or specifically Islam, and modernity or to assume that modernity is, by definition, only attained through the elimination of religion.