Conversations of longing

Author's name: Hamed Mohamed Hamed

Let's agree that you have never seen any of the places mentioned in this book before, and unfortunately, you probably never will!

This book speaks of a class of Cairo that no longer actually exists today, a class that perished like a rose whose leaves dried up and fell, leaving only a remnant of its old fragrance scattered in the pages of books and on the tongues of storytellers here and there.

Ibrahim Naji asks, through the voice of Umm Kulthum in the song "Al-Atlal":

How did that love become just a story, a tale of longing?

In this book, we stand upon the ruins of Cairo not to weep for them, but to reassure ourselves that even if its monuments have vanished and its features have disappeared, stories are always capable of reviving them, so that we may see them with our own eyes, even if it is with the eye of imagination!