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This collection of scholarly essays on Egyptian culture, history, society, archeology, literature, art, and conservation is published in memory of Werner Mark Linz, who spent much of the latter part of his professional life as the Director of the American University in Cairo Press. East-West Divan is the first volume of the Gingko Library, a publishing project that embraces scholarship from both East and West, conceived by Werner Mark Linz to foster greater cross-cultural understanding. Among the contributors to this collection are the Egyptian novelist Alaa Al Aswany, author of The Yacoubian Building; Egyptian archaeologist Zahi Hawass; the renowned Swiss theologian, Hans Küng; the author of the acclaimed A Fort of Nine Towers, Qais Akbar Omar; and Prince El Hassan bin Talal of Jordan.

The Middle East and North Africa region is well-known for its abundant natural resources and important geostrategic position. This position is often overshadowed by continued sectarian violence and trans-boundary conflicts that threaten the stability of the entire region with serious global implications. This preoccupation with conflict has come at the expense of addressing the region’s other challenges.
 
Although the region’s fragile environmental state has increasingly preoccupied policymakers in individual countries, there is currently insufficient attention paid to coordinating collaborative action to recognise and address problems relating to its environmental sustainability and climatic change. In the absence of a positive agenda for tackling these issues, recurrent environmental setbacks and rapid depletion of the region’s natural resources continue to pose a major threat to the long-term economic, political, and social stability of the region.
 
Despite the urgency of these challenges, there is little research dedicated to studying MENA’s environmental sustainability. Environmental Challenges in the MENA Region: The Long Road from Conflict to Cooperation draws from the proceedings of a seminal international conference on the subject at SOAS in October 2016, which was held as a celebration of the SOAS Centenary. This led to a collective contribution by experts and policy-makers concerned with the state of the MENA region’s environmental predicament with the aim of addressing these problems in a constructive and forward-looking approach.
 
The chapters in this book are predicated upon two critical premises. First, expertise and awareness from a wide range of disciplines is required to understand and address environmental challenges. And, second, to have a real chance of success, MENA countries need to confront these problems as their common threats and to see them as an opportunity for regional cooperation and policy coordination. This book provides the results of an interdisciplinary effort to address the various dimensions of the region’s environmental challenges from across the region and disciplines.
 

This volume of articles written by Naguib Mahfouz between 1971 and 1981 serves as a portrait of a volatile period in Egypt’s history, which began with the Corrective Revolution and the Yom Kippur War with Israel and ended with the assassination of President Anwar El-Sadat.

In these essays of the Sadat era, published in the state-owned Al-Ahram newspaper, Mahfouz seems an unreliable narrator. The tension between an author who rails against censorship, yet is bound within its confines, runs through this fascinating body of nonfiction writing. Nonetheless, Mahfouz’s own thoughts are unmistakably present. We gain his insight into diverse political topics, such as socioeconomic class, democracy and dictatorship, and Islam and extremism, topics which still seem highly pertinent to the situation in Egypt today.

A vital accompaniment to his literature, this collected work is contemporaneous with Mahfouz’s fictional works such as Karnak Café, The Harafish, and Arabian Nights and Days. Essays of the Sadat Era is the second of four volumes in which Mahfouz’s nonfiction work is translated into English for the first time.

The nonfiction writing of Naguib Mahfouz, presented in English for the first time.

The first Arabic language writer to win the Nobel Prize for Literature, Naguib Mahfouz, helped bring Arabic writing to an international readership. This collection of his early writing, from his time as a philosophy student, reveals the intellectual ferment of the young author, grappling with two millennia of philosophers and writers and establishing his own voice among them.

Available in English for the first time, these essays tackle a vast array of subjects, from Presocratic Philosophy to love and the sexual impulse. The intellectual development demonstrated here forms the foundation of Mahfouz’s literary work, granting insight into the mind behind such famed works as the Cairo Trilogy and Children of The Alley.