Youssef Rakha – författare

Set in Cairo between 1997 and 2011, The Crocodiles is narrated in numbered, prose poem-like paragraphs, set against the backdrop of a burning Tahrir Square, by a man looking back on the magical and explosive period of his life when he and two friends started a secret poetry club amid a time of drugs, messy love affairs, violent sex, clumsy but determined intellectual bravado, and retranslations of the Beat poets. Youssef Rakha’s provocative, brutally intelligent novel of growth and change begins with a suicide and ends with a doomed revolution, forcefully capturing thirty years in the life of a living, breathing, daring, burning, and culturally incestuous Cairo. From the Trade Paperback edition.

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 "e;losing his religion"e; 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 "e;hungry ghost"e; 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."e;Postmuslim"e; 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.

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, climbs 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; as 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, as 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, stylish, and erotic, 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 intimate and expansive book exploring what it means to be Arab-Muslim in the twenty-first century'Postmuslim' is Youssef Rakha's term to describe an attitude that embraces the fullness of Muslim identity rather than its essentialized, idealized, or distorted versions. Impassioned, erudite, and playful, this book traces Rakha's intellectual and spiritual transformations across three decades alongside significant moments in history.Rakha describes 'losing his religion' as a teenager in Cairo before moving to Britain as a young student, yearning for freedoms denied to him in his middle-class Egyptian milieu. But what he sees and comes to understand about Britain and the West eventually disenchants him as well. This book is a record of Rakha's attempts to create an identity for himself from out of the resources of two cultures about which he feels ambivalent. Along the way, he explores subjects such as boxing and democracy, addiction and 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 tells the story of Islam's relationship with the West in the last thirty years from a perspective rarely available to the Western reader. This is a vital book for anyone negotiating their own relationship to alienation, inheritance, intersecting identities, and the hypocrisy of those in power.

Brilliantly introduced by Nezar Andary, this book is a work of creative nonfiction that approaches writing on film in a fresh and provocative way. It draws on academic, literary, and personal material to start a dialogue with the Egyptian filmmaker Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (1969), tracing the many meanings of Egypt’s postcolonial modernity and touching on Arab, Muslim, and ancient Egyptian identities through watching the film.

Brilliantly introduced by Nezar Andary, this book is a work of creative nonfiction that approaches writing on film in a fresh and provocative way. It draws on academic, literary, and personal material to start a dialogue with the Egyptian filmmaker Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (1969), tracing the many meanings of Egypt’s postcolonial modernity and touching on Arab, Muslim, and ancient Egyptian identities through watching the film.           

Brilliantly introduced by Nezar Andary, this book is a work of creative nonfiction that approaches writing on film in a fresh and provocative way. It draws on academic, literary, and personal material to start a dialogue with the Egyptian filmmaker Shadi Abdel Salam’s The Mummy (1969), tracing the many meanings of Egypt’s postcolonial modernity and touching on Arab, Muslim, and ancient Egyptian identities through watching the film.

Was unterscheidet den arabischen Porno von seinem westlichen Pendant? Die Motive? Die Einstellungen, Perspektiven? Die Techniken? Mit Begeisterung untersucht der ägyptische Schriftsteller und Journalist Youssef Rakha in diesem aufregenden englischsprachigen Essay, den er auf Arabisch so nicht hätte schreiben dürfen, das ebenso verfemte wie verbreitete Genre der östlichen und der westlichen Popkultur. Beschreibung wechselt sich ab mit Analyse, Kultur und Politik verschmelzen in den Bildern der Lust. Der Porno ist Spiegel der Gesellschaft, seine Bildsprache ist so formalisiert wie kulturell bedingt, gleichzeitig wirkt er zurück in die Gesellschaft. Gelingt am Ende dem arabischen Porno, was der arabischen Rebellion misslang?