God in Times of Uncertainty
By Khadija Mohamed Embaby and Amira Mittermaier. In times of profound uncertainty, what does God offer to believers? And how does uncertainty affect believers’ ideas about, and relations to, God?
By Khadija Mohamed Embaby and Amira Mittermaier. In times of profound uncertainty, what does God offer to believers? And how does uncertainty affect believers’ ideas about, and relations to, God?
By Carl Rommel. One does not have to spend a long time in Egypt to apprehend that football is a serious matter that stirs powerful emotions across the male population. Match shirts of Cairo’s two giant clubs, al-Ahly and al-Zamalek, are omnipresent in streets and squares throughout the country; club rivalries are a source of passionate controversies and banter in cafés, workplaces, and social media.
By Christian Junge. What are the social functions of reading literature? While many studies approach Arabic literature primarily through the lens of authors, the literary field, or sociopolitical discourses, my interdisciplinary postdoctoral research project, “Affective Readings”, shifts the focus to the readers. I ask: What do readers read, and how and why?
By Adam Mestyan. Some years ago I came across a fragmented, nineteenth-century Arabic manuscript in Cairo. The work, The Garden of Ismail’s Praise, caught my eye as one of a number of compositions written in praise of Ismail Pasha (r. 1863–1879), the “khedive”, or Ottoman governor, of Egypt.
By Sari Hanafi. By academic freedoms, I mean the freedom of thought and of creating new ideas and the freedom of expression through teaching, conferences, research, and publications.
By Malak Labib. In January 2021, the Egyptian government decided on the liquidation of the Egyptian Iron and Steel Company, one of the country’s oldest public-sector enterprises. While officials pointed to the company’s accumulated losses and its deteriorating production capacity, the decision was met with wide opposition.
عمرو علي (الفلسفة/ علم الاجتماع، الجامعة الأميركية في القاهرة، مصر). عمرو علي. خرج شاب مصري متحمس من محاضرة في أواخر تشرين الثاني/ نوفمبر 2017 وهرع إلى مقهى بالقرب من ميدان التحرير للقاء أصدقائه. وأخبرهم عن تلك المفكّرة التي تُدعى “حنة أرندت” التي عرف للتوّ أشياء عنها وعن فكرتها الخاصة بـ”البدايات الجديدة”.
By Amro Ali (Philosophy/Sociology, The American University in Cairo, Egypt). An enthusiastic Egyptian youth exited the closing of a lecture event in late November 2017 and rushed to a coffeehouse near Tahrir Square to meet up with his friends. He told them about this woman thinker called ‘Hannah Arendt’ who he just learned about and her peculiar idea of ‘new beginnings.’
By Amr Hamzawy. On September 28, 2020, a half-century had passed since the death of President Gamal Abdel Nasser. The legacy of the “July 1952 Republic”, whose legal and political pillars he built between 1952 and 1954 and that he ruled until his death in 1970, is still omnipresent in today’s Egypt.
By Shehab Ismail. The city of Cairo was surrounded by human-made mounds composed of rubbish and debris that had been piling up on the same spots for centuries. This blog post narrates how the author encountered the rubbish mounds during his research on the history of sanitation in Cairo. It explores two materials that were commonly found in the city’s dumpsters: archeological finds and organic fertilizers.