Youssef Rakha – författare

A transgressive novel by an acclaimed writer that spans seventy years of Egyptian historyCertain as I’ve never been of anything in the world that you have a right or a duty to know, that you absolutely must know, I sail through the mouth of that river into the sea of her life.Amna, Nimo, Mouna—these are all names for a single Egyptian woman whose life has mirrored that of her country. After her death in 2015, her son, Nour, ascends to the attic of their house where he glimpses her in a series of ever more immersive visions: Amna as a young woman forced into an arranged marriage in the 1950s, a coquettish student of French known to her confidants as Nimo, a self-made divorcee and a lover, a “pious mama” donning her hijab, and, finally, a feminist activist during the Arab Spring. Charged and renewed by these visions of a woman he has always known as Mouna, Nour begins a series of fevered letters to his sister—who has been estranged from Mouna and from Egypt for many years—in an attempt to reconcile what both siblings know about this mercurial woman, their country, and the possibility for true revolution after so much has failed.Hallucinatory, erotic, and stylish, The Dissenters is a transcendent portrait of a woman and an era that explodes our ideas of faith, gender roles, freedom, and political agency.

An ambitious and timely essay collection exploring what it means to be Arab-Muslim in the twenty-first centuryPostmuslim, Youssef Rakha's debut essay collection, tells the story of Islam's clash with the West in the last thirty years from a perspective rarely available to the Western reader. Impassioned, intimate, erudite, and playful, these essays trace Rakha's intellectual and spiritual transformations across multiple decades alongside significant moments in recent history. He recounts "losing his religion" as a teenager in Cairo after the fall of the Berlin Wall, resentful of the conservatism and rigid conformism of his middle-class Egyptian milieu. But what he sees and comes to understand about the West eventually disenchants him as well. Along the way, Rakha explores rich subjects such as boxing and democracy, addiction and the "hungry ghost" of the great ninth-century poet Al-Mutanabbi, recent Egyptian history rewritten in the form of horror film tropes, and a bold proposal to revitalize Arab-Muslim culture via the surprisingly multicultural lifeways of the Ottoman Empire."Postmuslim" is a term of Rakha's invention that embraces the fullness of Muslim identity rather than its essentialized and distorted versions. This is a vital book for anyone negotiating their own relationship to alienation, faith, intersecting identities, and the hypocrisy of those in power.