Autorentext

Dr. Heba Arafa Abdelfattah graduated from Georgetown University in the Department of Arabic and Islamic Studies in 2017. Her research interests fall within the interdisciplinary area of humanities focusing on the philosophy of religion and the philosophy of art as articulated in Arabic and Islamic thought in all its expressions(from the 7th to the 21st centuries). She works with sacred scripture, literary texts, archival documents, films, and other forms of artistic and cultural production to understand creative experiences at the intersection of discourses of modernity and religious mores. Her articles appeared in such peer-reviewed journals as Religions, Review of Middle East Studies, International Journal of Communication, and the Journal of Islamic and Muslim Studies (JIMS). Dr. Abdelfattah served as visiting assistant professor at the Georgia Institute of Technology. She was also a postdoctoral fellow at the Institute of Sacred Music and a lecturer in the Department of Religious Studies at Yale University. She has been an assistant professor in the Division of Humanities at Grinnell College since 2022.

Klappentext

This book studies the rise of cinema in colonial Egypt as a supplemental secular public sphere that is not anti-religion. To this end, it investigates the reception of film by three centres of power: the colonial authorities, the Muslim clergy, and the Cairene bourgeoisie. It inquires about the representations of modernity in films produced during the time and the place filmmakers assigned to Islam in these representations. The result is a story of survival and coexistence told through the lens of cinema as modern art and popular culture negotiating its overt and covert censorship in the public sphere, despite colonization and war.

Zusammenfassung
Explores over 30 feature films from the formative years of Egyptian cinema (191952) to contest the contradiction between Islam and innovation.