This book is a comparative study of the sociological field in two different Muslim societies: Malaysia and Egypt. It analyses the process of the production of 'knowledge' through the example of the modern 'Islamization of knowledge debate' and local empirical variations.

Cairo is a city of collective exhaustion. From the 2011 revolution to Sisi's seizure of power in 2013, like millions of others, Mona Abaza was swallowed by a draining and exhausting daily life of a city caught up in the aftermath of revolt - a daily life that transformed countless people into all-embracing apolitical subjects. Cairo collages narrates four parallel tales about Cairo's urban transformations in the twenty-first century, examining everyday life and resilience after 2013. Weaving personal narrative with incisive theoretical discussions of the quotidian and the everyday, Abaza raises essential sociological questions regarding global orientations pertaining to emerging military urbanism. With reflections on the long hours of commuting to the gated communities in the desert east of Cairo and the daily material lives and social interactions of residents in decaying middle-class buildings, Abaza's collage of landscapes weaves together the transmutations underway in the various Cairene geographies. -- .

Cotton made the fortune of the Fuda family, Egyptian landed gentry with peasant origins, during the second part of the nineteenth century. This story, narrated and photographed by a family member who has researched and documented various aspects of her own history, goes well beyond the family photo album to become an attempt to convey how cotton, as the main catalyst and creator of wealth, produced by the beginning of the twentieth century two entirely separate worlds: one privileged and free, the other surviving at a level of bare subsistence, and indentured.
The construction of lavish mansions in the Nile Delta countryside and the landowners' adoption of European lifestyles are juxtaposed visually with the former laborers' camp of the permanent workers, which became a village ('Izba), and then an urbanized settlement. The story is retold from the perspective of both the landowners and the former workers who were tied to the 'Izba. The book includes family photo albums, photographs of political campaigns and of banquets in the countryside, documents and accounting books, modern portraits of the peasants, and pictures of daily life in the village today.
This is a story that fuses the personal and emotional with the scholar's detached ethnographic reporting-a truly fascinating, informative, and colorful view of life on both sides of a uniquely Egyptian socio-economic institution, and a vanished world: the cotton estate.