OVER THE PAST TWO DECADES, Egypt has seen a massive outpouring of works dealing with a variety of historical and political subjects. It would seem as though all the pent-up ideas censored by the Nasser regime poured out during subsequent years to quench the country's intellectual thirst. While this article will concentrate on historical works, we must perforce also examine works that pertain to disciplines necessary to the writing of history, such as religious discourse. fundamentalist current that has swept the Muslim world has roused an interest in religious interpretations of history, economics, and gender relations. According to Albert Hourani, the foremost historian today on the Arabs, The writing of history was a feature of all urban Muslim societies ... Works of history and cognate subjects provide the largest body of writing in the main languages of Islam, apart from religious literature.' That may be the reason for the large market in Egypt for works of history, for they recount a past that had been proscribed under Nasser. Historical works dealing with the century-and-a-halflong monarchy were simply not written. There is also a large market for works dealing with the more recent past that lay bare, or purport to lay bare, the inner workings of the Nasser and Sadat regimes. As proof of this intellectual ferment, one has only to look at the list of books published by what in America would be described as a small private press, that of the renowned Madbuli, who brings out over a thousand titles each year. Although Madbuli is certainly literate and well read, rumors circulate that he is illiterate, perhaps because he prefers wearing a native jellaba to Western clothing and so projects an image of someone who is not westernized. Possibly, the rumor is a calumny spread by jealous competitors.2 Madbuli started out as a bookseller of leftist works in a bouquiniste stall by the Ezbekieh gardens, then moved to a small shop, which grew, as did the demand for books, until his bookstore, now in Midan Talaat Harb, a centrally located square in the heart of modern Cairo, became the focus of anyone interested in acquiring important books on Egypt, and he became
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