The Forgotten Novelist Who Remade Egyptian Cinema

The scene takes place in a disco. Girls are wearing miniskirts, bikini tops, and layers of glitter. 20-somethings are dancing to psychedelic music and guzzling liquor straight from the bottle. A few couples are kissing, ensconced in corners of the club. It could have been a scene from . But this isn’t grungy, 1970s New York City—we’re not even in America. The scene is from a 1972 Egyptian film , adapted from the novel of the same name, about a high society doctor and his romantic adventures in Cairo’s uber-cosmopolitan social circles. The author, (known as Ihsan), is one of the most popular and prolific Egyptian writers of the twentieth century. He wrote 60 books, a third of them novels, and 600 short stories. Dozens of his works have been adapted to film and serialized on Egyptian television, his characters played by the mega moviehas been translated into English, published for Anglophone readers just last year. In his foreword, the book’s translator, , declares, “It is shocking that Ihsan Abdel Kouddous is still largely unknown outside the Arab world.”