Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature In a world with no meaning, meaning is an act . . . This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt’s dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights. Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring novelist and construction laborer of the lowest order, leads us down a fractured path of reminiscence in his quest for purpose and identity in a world where the old orders and traditions are powerless to help. Bawdy and wistful, tragicomic and bitter, his stories loop and repeat, crackling with the frictive energy of colliding worlds and linguistic registers. These are the tales of Cairo’s new Bedouin, men not settled by the state but permanently uprooted by it. Like their lives, their stories are dislocated and unplotted, mapping out their quest for meaning in the very act of placing brick on brick and word on word.
How the Quranic Story of Dhul-Qarnain Has Revealed the Most Mysterious Secrets of the Ancient Pharaonic and Chinese Civilizations? : and how the History of These Two Civilizations Have Revealed the Secretes [sic] of the Quranic Story of Dhul-Qarnain and Other Quranic Stories and Facts?
How the Quranic Story of Dhul-Qarnain Has Revealed the Most Mysterious Secrets of the Ancient Pharaonic and Chinese Civilizations? : and how the History of These Two Civilizations Have Revealed the Secretes [sic] of the Quranic Story of Dhul-Qarnain and Other Quranic Stories and Facts?
What are the fundamental differences between Alexander the Great and Dhul-Qarnayn? Is Dhul-Qarnayn (Akhenaten) the believing man from the family of Pharaoh mentioned in the Qur’an? What was the path of Dhul-Qarnayn’s historical journey? Where is the setting sun located? Where is the sunrise located? Where is the country between the two dams located...the site of the reclamation built by Dhul-Qarnayn? Who are Gog and Magog? In this book, ""Unveiling the Secrets of Dhul-Qarnayn: Akhenaten and Gog and Magog"" by Hamdi bin Hamza Al-Suraiseri Al-Jahani, a former member of the Saudi Shura Council, the author was able to decipher the identity of Dhul-Qarnayn by building his facts on historical documents and evidence, and a careful and meticulous reading of ancient history. The author surprises readers by revealing that Dhul-Qarnayn was none other than Akhenaten, the monotheistic pharaoh of Egypt, and he also reveals the secrets of the people of Gog and Magog, their origin, time, and homeland.
Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature In a world with no meaning, meaning is an act . . . This is a story about building things up and knocking them down. Here are the campfire tales of Egypt’s dispossessed and disillusioned, the anti-Arabian Nights. Our narrator, a rural immigrant from the Bedouin villages of the Fayoum, an aspiring novelist and construction laborer of the lowest order, leads us down a fractured path of reminiscence in his quest for purpose and identity in a world where the old orders and traditions are powerless to help. Bawdy and wistful, tragicomic and bitter, his stories loop and repeat, crackling with the frictive energy of colliding worlds and linguistic registers. These are the tales of Cairo’s new Bedouin, men not settled by the state but permanently uprooted by it. Like their lives, their stories are dislocated and unplotted, mapping out their quest for meaning in the very act of placing brick on brick and word on word.
All national identities are somewhat fluid, held together by collective beliefs and practices as much as official territory and borders. In the context of the Palestinians, whose national status in so many instances remains unresolved, the articulation and 'imagination' of national identity is particularly urgent. This book explores the ways that Palestinian intellectuals, artists, activists and ordinary citizens 'imagine' their homeland, examining the works of key Palestinian thinkers and writers such as Edward Said, Mahmoud Darwish, Mourid Barghouti, Ghassan Kanafani and Naji Al Ali. Deploying Benedict Anderson's notion of 'Imagined Communities' and Edward Soja's theory of 'Third Space', Tahrir Hamdi argues that the imaginative construction of Palestine is a key element in the Palestinians' ongoing struggle. An interdisciplinary work drawing upon critical theory, postcolonial studies and literary analysis, this book will be of interest to students and scholars of Palestine and Middle East studies and Arabic literature
From the author of Small Change comes this engaging guide to placemaking, packed with practical skills and tools that architects, planners, urban designers and other built environment specialists need in order to engage effectively with development work in any context. Drawing on four decades of practical and teaching experience, the author offers fresh insight into the complexities faced by practitioners when working to improve the communities, lives and livelihoods of people the world over. The book shows how these complexities are a context for, rather than a barrier to, creative work. The book also critiques the single vision top down approach to design and planning. Using examples of successful professional practice across Europe, the US, Africa, Latin America and post-tsunami Asia, the author demonstrates how good policy can derive from good practices when reasoned backwards, as well as how plans can emerge in practice without a preponderance of planning. Reasoning backwards is shown to be a more effective and inclusive way of planning forwards with significant improvements to the quality of process and place. The book also offers a variety of methods and tools for analyzing the issues, engaging with communities and other stakeholders for design and settlement planning and for improving the skills of all involved in placemaking. Ultimately the book serves as an inspiring guide, and a distillation of decades of practical wisdom and experience. The resulting practical handbook is for all those involved in doing, learning and teaching placemaking and urban development world-wide. (publisher)
This book gives definition to participatory practice as a necessary form of activism in development planning for cities. It gives guidance on how practice can make space for big and lasting change and for new opportunities to be discovered. It points to ways of building synergy and negotiating our way in the social and political spaces ‘in between’ conventional and often competing ideals – public and private interests, top down and bottom up, formal and informal, the global agendas which outsiders promote and the local needs of insiders, for example. It offers guidance on process, designed to close gaps and converge worlds which we know have become divisive and discriminatory, working from the detail of everyday life in search of beginnings that count, building out and making meaningful locally, the abstractions of the global causes we champion – poverty alleviation, environmental sustainability, resilience. Practice – the collective process by which decisions are negotiated, plans designed and actions taken in response to needs and aspirations, locally and globally – we will see, is not just about being practical, but more. Its purpose is to give structure to our understanding of the order and disorder in our cities today, then to disturb that order when it has become inefficient or inequitable, even change it. It is to add moral value to morally questionable planning practice and so build "a social economy for the satisfaction of human need." Practice in these spaces ‘in-between’ redraws the boundaries of expectation of disciplinary work and offers a new high ground of moral purpose from which to be more creative, more integrated, more relevant, more resourceful – more strategic.
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