Love and death and the passage between entry into the world and exit from it are the focus of this collection of short stories. Buthaina Al Nasiri is an Iraqi author who has lived in Cairo since 1979. Despite this physical and temporal distance from her homeland, much of her material derives from it and many of the stories in this collection reflect her deeply felt nostalgia for Iraq. In contrast to many contemporary female writers, she confesses to being less interested in the position of women in society than in that of people in general and the sufferings they experience between birth and the end of life. Nonetheless, some of her best stories depict the many-colored relationships that exist between the sexes.Buthaina Al Nasiri's work has been widely translated into European languages, but this is the first volume of her stories to appear in English, for which renowned translator Denys Johnson-Davies has selected work from a career of short-story writing spanning some thirty years.To view a short video created by the author, go to www.youtube.com/watch?v=RDOedA9hQ8M.

Together with such figures as the scholar Taha Hussein, the playwright Tawfik al-Hakim, the short story writer Mahmoud Teymour and - of course - Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Hakki belongs to that distinguished band of early writers who, midway through the last century, under the influence of Western literature, began to practice genres of creative writing that were new to the traditions of classical Arabic. In the first story in this volume, the very short 'Story in the Form of a Petition, ' Yahya Hakki demonstrates his ease with gentle humor, a form rare in Arabic writing. In the following two stories, 'Mother of the Destitute' and 'A Story from Prison, ' he describes with typical sympathy individuals who, less privileged than others, somehow manage to scrape through life's hardships. The latter story deals with the people of Upper Egypt, for whom the writer had a special understanding and affection. It is, however, for the title story (in fact, more of a novella) of this collection that the writer is best known. Recounting the difficulties faced by a young man who is sent to England to study medicine and who then returns to Egypt to pit his new ideals against tradition, 'The Lamp of Umm Hashim' was the first of several works in Arabic to deal with the way in which an individual tries to come to terms with two divergent cultures.

Translated by Denys Johnson-Davies
With a new introduction by Tayeb Salih

‘An Arabian Nights in reverse … Powerfully and poetically written’ 
Observer

When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger – the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven to take brutal revenge on the decadent West and was, in turn, destroyed by it. Now the terrible legacy of his actions has come to haunt the small village at the bend of the Nile.

The story of a man undone by a culture that in part created him, Season of Migration to the North is a powerful and evocative examination of colonization in two vastly different worlds.

As with his earlier works, Mohamed El-Bisatie's novel is set in the Egyptian countryside, about which he writes with such understanding. Episodic in form, it deals with a family Zaghloul the layabout father, Sakeena the long-suffering wife, and two young boys. The central theme of the book is hunger: the hunger of not knowing where one's next meal is coming from, and the universal hunger for sex and love. Sakeena's life revolves round trying to provide her family with the necessary daily loaves of bread that will stave off starvation. Labor-shy Zaghloul works on and off at one of the village's cafes, but prefers to spend his time listening in on conversations about subjects such as politics, which he would have liked to know more about, if only he had been an educated man. He is also intrigued by the stories told by young university students about their sexual exploits. Eventually chance presents him with a new job: to keep company with an elderly and over-fat man and help him on and off the mule he has to use for getting about. After looking in turn at the lives of the husband and the wife, the novel finally focuses on their elder son, who, although lacking the advantages of any sort of education, nonetheless shows more initiative than his father, and discovers his own way of contributing to the family bread larder. Despite its bleak title, Hunger is told with a lightness of touch and the writer's trademark wry humor.

Short story writing in Egypt was still in its infancy when Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," arrived in Cairo as a young man in the 1940s. Nevertheless, he was immediately impressed by such writing talents of the time as Mahmoud Teymour, Yahya Hakki, Yusuf Gohar, and the future Nobel literature laureate Naguib Mahfouz, and he set about translating their works for local English-language periodicals of the time.
He continued to translate over the decades, and sixty years later he brings together this remarkable overview of the work of several generations of Egypt's leading short story writers. This selection of some fifty stories represents not only a cross-section through time but also a spectrum of styles, and includes works by Teymour, Hakki, Gohar, and Mahfouz and later writers such as Mohamed El-Bisatie, Said el-Kafrawi, Bahaa Taher, and Radwa Ashour, as well as new young writers of today like Hamdy El-Gazzar, Mansoura Ez Eldin, and Youssef Rakha.

After years of study in Europe, the young narrator of "Season of Migration to the North" returns to his village along the Nile in the Sudan. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to make a contribution to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood--the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his own years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land.
But what is the meaning of Mustafa's shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man--whom he has asked to look after his wife--in an unsettled and violent no-man's-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.
"Season of Migration to the North" is a rich and sensual work of deep honesty and incandescent lyricism. In 2001 it was selected by a panel of Arab writers and critics as the most important Arab novel of the twentieth century.

Naguib Mahfouz, the first and only writer of Arabic to be awarded the Nobel prize for literature, wrote prolifically from the 1930s until shortly before his death in 2006, in a variety of genres: novels, short stories, plays, screenplays, a regular weekly newspaper column, and in later life his intensely brief and evocative Dreams. His Cairo Trilogy achieved the status of a world classic, and the Swedish Academy of Letters in awarding him the 1988 Nobel prize for literature noted that Mahfouz "through works rich in nuance-now clear-sightedly realistic, now evocatively ambiguous-has formed an Arabic narrative art that applies to all mankind."Here Denys Johnson-Davies, described by Edward Said as "the leading Arabic-English translator of our time," makes an essential selection of short stories and extracts from novels and other writings, to present a cross-section through time of the very best of the work of Egypt's Nobel literature laureate.

Here, for the first time, is a volume of short stories from this commercially and culturally vital and vibrant center of the Arab world-a selective sampling of a burgeoning literary output since the 1970s by the leading Arabic-English translator. Life before oil in this region was harsh, and many of the stories in this collection-by both men and women from all corners of the country-tell of those times and the almost unbelievable changes that have come about in the space of two generations. Some tell of the struggles faced in the early days, while others bring the immediate past and the present together, revealing that the past, with all its difficulties and dangers, nonetheless possesses a certain nostalgia. The volume includes stories by Abdul Hamid Ahmed, Roda al-Baluchi, Hareb al-Dhaheri, Nasser Al-Dhaheri, Maryam Jumaa Faraj, Jumaa al-Fairuz, Nasser Jubran, Saleh Karama, Lamees Faris al-Marzuqi, Mohamed al-Mazroui, Ebtisam Abdullah Al-Mu'alla, Ibrahim Mubarak, Mohamed al-Murr, Sheikha al-Nakhy, Mariam Al Saedi, Omniyat Salem, Salma Matar Seif, Ali Abdul Aziz al-Sharhan, Muhsin Soleiman, and 'A'ishaa al-Za'aby.

The importance of Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898 to 1989) to the emergence of a modern Arabic literature is second only to that of Naguib Mahfouz. If the latter put the novel among the genres of writing that are now an accepted part of literary production in the Arab world today, Tawfiq al-Hakim is recognized as the undisputed creator of a literature of the theater. In this volume, Tawfiq al-Hakim's fame as a playwright is given prominence. Of the more than seventy plays he wrote, The Sultan's Dilemma, dealing with a historical subject in an appealingly light-hearted manner, is perhaps the best known; it appears in the extended edition of Norton's World Masterpieces and was broadcast on the old Home Service of the BBC. The other full-length play included here, The Tree Climber, is one that reveals al-Hakim's openness to outside influences in this case, the absurdist mode of writing. Of the two one-act plays in this collection, The Donkey Market shows his deftness at turning a traditional folk tale into a hilarious stage comedy. Tawfiq al-Hakim produced several of the earliest examples of the novel in Arabic; included in this volume is an extract from his best known work in that genre, the delightful Diary of a Country Prosecutor, in which he draws on his own experience as a public prosecutor in the Egyptian countryside. Three of the many short stories he published are also included, as well as an extract from The Prison of Life, an autobiography in which Tawfiq al-Hakim writes with commendable frankness about himself. Contents: Introduction by Denys Johnson-Davies, The Sultan's Dilemma (full-length play), The Tree Climber (full-length play), The Donkey Market (one-act play), The Song of Death (one-act play), Diary of a Country Prosecutor (extract from the novel), Miracles for Sale (short story), The Prison of Life (extract from the autobiography), Azrael the Barber (short story), Satan Triumphs (short story).

Drawing on an intimate knowledge of modern Arabic writing, Denys Johnson-Davies brings together a colourful mosaic of life as lived and portrayed by Arabs from Morocco to Iraq. From a diverse area of the world with the common factor of a written language, these thirty stories tell of an old Moroccan peasant woman who kills snakes; an Iraqi soldier who returns home as a stranger after years as a prisoner-of-war; a repairer of lost virginities in a Tunisian village; a typically Mahfouzian start to a train journey; the steamy meeting of two women and a catat the height of an Iraqi summer; the ill-fated attraction of a boy to a magical bird in the Tuareg deserts of Libya; and a novel way of hunting ducks in the Nile Delta. The purveyors of this strange and delightful cornucopia of fictions include Naguib Mahfouz, Yusuf Idris and others.

Yusuf Idris (1927-91), who belonged to the same generation of pioneering Egyptian writers as Naguib Mahfouz and Tawfiq al-Hakim, is widely celebrated as the father of the Arabic short story, just as Mahfouz is considered the father of the Arabic novel. Idris studied medicine and practiced as a doctor, but even as a student his interests were in politics and the support of the nationalist struggle, and in writing-and his writing, whether in his regular newspaper columns or in his fiction, often reflected his political convictions. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize for literature more than once, and when the prize went to Naguib Mahfouz in 1988, Idris felt that he had been passed over because of his outspoken views on Israel. In all, Yusuf Idris wrote some twelve collections of superbly crafted short stories, mainly about ordinary, poor people, many of which have been translated into English and are included in this collection of the best of his work. But although he is best known for his short stories, he also wrote nine plays and a number of novels and novellas, the best of which are also sampled here.

"The Goodly Word: Al-Kalim al-Tayyib"-written by the renowned fourteenth century jurist, Ahmad Ibn Taymiyya-is one of the most referred to works on prayer and the merits of prayer. Exclusively based on what the Prophet Muhammad himself said and did, "The Goodly Word" includes prayers for every moment of the Muslim's life. It is presented in a bi-lingual edition so that the exact prayers of the Prophet can be read in the original Arabic. "The Goodly Word" has been translated into English by the late Ezzeddin Ibrahim and Denys Johnson-Davies, two distinguished scholars who have also translated "An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith" and "Forty Hadith Qudsi", both published by the Islamic Texts Society.

"The Wedding of Zein "takes place in the same village on the upper Nile where Tayeb Salih's "Season of Migration to the North "is largely set, but here the story that emerges through the overlapping, sometimes contradictory voices of the villagers is comic and redemptive rather than tragic. Everyone in the village is dumbfounded when the news goes around that Zein is getting married--Zein the freak, Zein who no sooner than he was born burst into laughter and has kept women and children laughing ever since, Zein who lost all his teeth at six and whose face is completely hairless, Zein who never wears shoes and does not trim his nails. Zein married at last? Zein's role in the village is not to get married himself but to fall in love with girls who then marry someone else. The story of how this miracle came to be is a story that engages the tensions that exist in the village, or indeed in any community--tensions between the devout and the profane, the poor and the propertied, the modern and the traditional--and as it plays out in Salih's agile hands it reveals a prospect, absurd and yet wonderful and certainly wonderfully entertaining, of their ultimate reconciliation--a mythical, utopian vision from the deep past or the ideal future of the world made whole.
Salih's classic novella appears with two of his finest short stories, "The Doum Tree of Wad Hamid" and "A Handful of Dates."

An alleyway of Tangier as seen through the eyes of a prostitute, the price paid by a sophisticated Cairene philanderer for his infatuation with a young bedouin girl, the callous treatment a young wife receives from the man to whom she has been married. These are some of the themes of the twenty-four stories in this volume, each by a different author and rendered into English by one of the finest translators of Arabic fiction. Among the authors represented are Edward El-Kharrat, Bahaa Taher, Alifa Rifaat, and Ghassan Kanafani. Through the eyes of insiders, these stories show us the intimate texture of life throughout the diverse countries and cultures of the Arabic world.

The 'hadith qudsi' are the sayings of the Prophet divinely communicated to him. The present collection has been compiled from all the available books of 'hadith'. The forty chosen here are all well authenticated and present many of the doctrinal, devotional and ethical elements of Islam. A scholarly introduction deals fully with the subject and shows the way in which the 'hadith qudsi' differs from the Qur'an and from the Prophetic 'hadith'. This selection and translation has been made by the translators of 'An-Nawawi's Forty Hadith'. 'Forty Hadith Qudsi' is regarded as a companion volume and has been printed in similar format with the original Arabic text given alongside the English translation.

"Al-Ghazali on the Manners Relating to Eating" is the eleventh chapter of the "Revival of the Religious Sciences" (Ihya Ulum al-Din), which is widely regarded as the greatest work of Muslim spirituality. In "Al-Ghazali on the Manners Relating to Eating", Abu Hamid al-Ghazali helps to bring to light the religious and spiritual dimensions of one of the most basic of human needs: eating and the conduct connected with it.---First, Ghazali discusses what a person must uphold when eating by himself: that the food is lawful, that both the person and the surroundings should be clean, that one must be content with what is available, and how the person should conduct himself while eating and after eating. Ghazali then proceeds to discuss eating in company and says that to all the above should be added the necessity of courtesy, conversation and the proper presentation of food. Finally, Ghazali expounds the virtues of hospitality and generosity and the conduct of the host as well as that of the guest. Other topics that are discussed are: abstention from food, fasting and general health. Whilst the focus of this chapter of the "Revival" is upon the question of eating, Ghazali also presents the importance of aligning every aspect of one's life with religion and spirituality. Referring extensively to the example of the Prophet and to that of the early Sufis, Ghazali illustrates how the simple activity of eating can encourage numerous virtues that are themselves necessary for the remainder of the spiritual life.---In this new edition, the Islamic Texts Society has included the translation of Abu Hamid al-Ghazali's own Introduction to the "Revival of the Religious Sciences" which gives the reasons that caused him to write the work, the structure of the whole of the "Revival" and places each of the chapters in the context of the others.

This collection of forty 'hadith' by one of the most famous compilers of 'hadith' is generally regarded as the most popular anthology and the best introduction to the study of the Prophet's sayings which, together with the Qur'an, contain the essential teachings of Islam. The Arabic original has been printed alongside the English translation for the benefit of those with a knowledge of Arabic. The translation, by two scholars working in close collaboration, combines accuracy with readability.

This dazzling anthology features the work of seventy-nine outstanding writers from all over the Arab-speaking world, from Morocco in the west to Iraq in the east, Syria in the north to Sudan in the south.
Edited by Denys Johnson-Davies, called by Edward Said "the leading Arabic-to-English translator of our time," this treasury of Arab voices is diverse in styles and concerns, but united by a common language. It spans the full history of modern Arabic literature, from its roots in western cultural influence at the end of the nineteenth century to the present-day flowering of Naguib Mahfouz's literary sons and daughters. Among the Egyptian writers who laid the foundation for the Arabic literary renaissance are the great Tawfik al-Hakim; the short story pioneer Mahmoud Teymour; and Yusuf Idris, who embraced Egypt's vibrant spoken vernacular. An excerpt from the Sudanese writer Tayeb Salih's novel "Season of Migration to the North, " one of the Arab world's finest, appears alongside the Libyan writer Ibrahim al-Koni's tales of the Tuaregs of North Africa, the Iraqi writer Mohamed Khudayir's masterly story "Clocks Like Horses," and the work of such women writers as Lebanon's Hanan al-Shaykh and Morocco's Leila Abouzeid.

Set in a small village in the Egyptian Delta, El-Bisatie's finely tuned novella illustrates the social and sexual tensions in a community in which nothing is secret and where people's pasts haunt their present.

When Mussad catches the butcher's son Amer with his wife, the whole village knows and waits with bated breath for Mussad to exact his revenge. But something goes wrong. Mussad's ill-planned schemes are choked by an opaque veil of history--his wife's sexual past, the war-torn lives of their families, and the personal allegiances of his friends and enemies. The village women relive private desires and inner fears as the men take sides in the struggle, either to protect Amer from Mussad's wrath or to help Mussad track down and confront his nemesis.

In the words of Denys Johnson-Davies, "El-Bisatie is a writer's writer, which is to say a writer who makes no concession to the lazy reader. El-Bisatie stands back from his canvas and sketches his characters and events with a studied detachment. While there is drama in his stories it is never highlighted. The menace lurks almost unseen between the lines."

Drawing on the characters and the spirit of the classic A Thousand and One Nights, Arabian Nights and Days is a significant departure for Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz. Though he is best known for chronicling his own times, in this novel, first published in Arabic in 1982, Mahfouz injects new life into an Arabic masterpiece. Though it is set in an Islamic city in medieval times, the modern reader will find much in this novel that is surprisingly familiar. It depicts a city plagued by widespread corruption among its most powerful citizens, and a pervasive sense of social unrest and insecurity. The chief of police is kept particularly busy dealing with the underground activities of various religious sects that are intent on changing the unscrupulous regime. Amid all of this, as in the Thousand and One Nights, genies appear out of bottles accidentally opened by innocent individuals, affecting their lives in exciting, sometimes detrimental ways. Famed for his skill as a storyteller, Naguib Mahfouz has here produced a novel that is as colorful and entertaining as the book that inspired it.

An alleyway of Tangier as seen through the eyes of a prostitute, the price paid by a sophisticated Cairene philanderer for his infatuation with a young bedouin girl, the callous treatment a young wife receives from the man to whom she has been married. These are some of the themes of the twenty-four stories in this volume, each by a different author and rendered into English by one of the finest translators of Arabic fiction. Among the authors represented are Edward El-Kharrat, Bahaa Taher, Alifa Rifaat, and Ghassan Kanafani. Through the eyes of insiders, these stories show us the intimate texture of life throughout the diverse countries and cultures of the Arabic world.