Cairo IllustrateD

With too much text to be called a pictorial guide, too much history to be a guide book and too much of the modern to be an illustrated history, Michael Haag’s Cairo Illustrated is in a category of its own.

The book begins with an outline of the events and people that have shaped Cairo since around 3000 BC. By the end of the book, just over 90 pages later, the reader has been whisked through more than 5,000 years of the city’s history. The author leapfrogs around the city and its history, starting his first chapter in Coptic Cairo and winding a circuitous route to the Great Pyramids of Giza. Each chapter is filled with the history of a specific area of Cairo and its place in the modern megopolis. Haag also wanders off the tourist track and offers a glimpse of life in Fustat, as well as that of the squatters in the City of the Dead. The photographic illustrations are beautifully shot and richly complement Haag’s prose.

He describes the chaos and the allure of the city: “ as the sun sets over the Nile, the present slips away into timelessness. The call of the muezzins floating across the darkening city and the Pyramids of Giza, magnificently silhouetted against the shimmering horizon, are reminders that the monuments of the pharaohs and sultans lie within the compass of the city Egyptians call ‘Mother of the World.’”

Writing about the heart of medieval Cairo, along the western edge of Khan El-Khalili, Haag muses, “There is still enough mystery and beauty to remind you that this was the original city of A Thousand and One Nights.”

Cairo Illustrated serves as an excellent first-time tour of Cairo, but the author’s reasonably fresh point of view will also show longtime residents a new way to look at the old city. (CS)

Following the September 11, 2001, terrorist attacks, there was an explosion in both Western academic and popular interest in Islam. The place of women in Islamic societies has drawn more than its fair share of attention, and analysis has largely fallen into two camps: One claims Muslim women are passive and subjugated in Islamic societies (an argument that has been taken up by many to support Euro-American interventionism in the Muslim world). The second attempts to ‘redeem’ Islam by focusing on the positive and active roles women have taken in the history of the Islamic world.

Beyond the Exotic: Women’s Histories in Islamic Societies is a dry but useful academic text from the second of these categories. Its focus lies, interestingly, not on the women themselves, but on the potential of various sources for research. In her critique of the continuing pervasiveness of orientalism and exoticism in Western academic scholarship, Georgetown Professor Amira El-Azhary Sonbol argues that “dependence on one single source for historical research can be at best limiting, and this issue has been a serious problem for Muslim women’s studies in which the over-dependence on one source — be it scripture, literature, court records, and so on — has given a limited and often stilted picture of women’s lives.”

As a response to this academic single-mindedness, Sonbol divides her book into eight sections ranging from church, awqaf and legal records to popular culture and oral tradition.

The result is mixed. Beyond the Exotic provides an excellent overview of the potential and the shortcomings of textual sources in the Islamic world, many of which are often overlooked. Sonbol compiles a cohesive and relevant collection of essays to relate these sources to women’s histories; however, for the general-interest reader, or even for the more tangentially related academic, it is neither compelling nor grounded enough to beg a full read.

The collection features a pair of Cairo-based scholars: Nelly Hanna, a professor at the American University in Cairo, and Ramadan al-Khowli, a PhD candidate at Cairo University. Hanna’s contribution surveys historical sources shedding light on concubines and females slaves in Ottoman Egypt, while al-Khowli presents “Observations on the Use of Shari’a Court Records as a Source of Social History.”

Other Egypt-related articles cover topics including “The History of the Discourses on Gender and Islamism in Contemporary Egypt (1980-1990)” by Howard University Professor Mervat F. Hatem and “The Use of Textbooks as a Source of History for Women: the Case of Turn-of-the-Century Egypt,” by Mona Russell. (CM)

Set in the pretentious, corruptible world of East Coast academia, On Beauty revolves around the lives of Howard and Kiki Belsey, their three college-age children and the family of Howard’s academic nemesis.

Howard Belsey, an art history professor at an Ivy League school, is an insecure academic whose life work is to disprove Rembrandt’s genius — and whose book on the topic will, in all likelihood, never be published. Prone to professional embarrassment and jealousy, Howard makes an enemy out of Monty Kipps, a Caribbean-born, right-wing professor in Howard’s field. His middle-aged life becomes punctuated by a series of magnificent mistakes, the most destructive being an affair with a colleague that he tries, unsuccessfully, to cover up.

As Howard’s transgressions become apparent, his wife Kiki, a large black woman with a strong Southern upbringing, is beginning to see her life in a different light. She starts to question Howard’s beliefs, which she has taken as her own, and begins to wonder whether she could ever truly belong to the white, upper-class community in which she has made her life.

As their parents’ marriage begins to deteriorate, the three children each face a set of challenges in their own newly adult lives. Levi, embarrassed by his family’s affluence, befriends a group of Haitian refugees and takes a job with them selling bootleg DVDs on the street. Zora becomes preoccupied with climbing her university’s social latter, while the eldest son, Jerome, converts to Christianity and becomes enamored with the daughter of Howard’s rival.

Howard’s feud with Professor Kipps takes on an entirely new dimension when Jerome’s heart is broken by Kipps’ daughter, and Kipps’ sickly wife becomes Kiki’s closest friend.

The book was shortlisted for the prestigious Man Booker Prize in 2005 and pays homage to E.M. Forrester’s social comedy Howard’s End.

On Beauty manages to be heartbreaking, unsentimental and hilarious. While dealing with identity, social class and race, Smith’s book confronts some of our deepest, most human fears of losing those we love — and losing ourselves along the way. Smith observes, “The greatest lie ever told about love is that it sets you free.”

Filled with realistic dialogue and poignant insights, On Beauty is the best work yet by Smith, an author who has been highly acclaimed for her past three novels, despite having just turned thirty. (JO) et

–Reviews by Callie Maidhof, Jessica Olien and Cache Seel