Egypt government announces relocation of Ras al-Hekma residents to Shams al-Hekma
During a phone interview with Al-Hayat TV channel, Homsany indicated that many services have already been completed, explaining that the relevant authorities have facilitated the relocation of citizens.
Citizens residing in the first phase have been relocated to the Shams al-Hekma area, near Ras al-Hekma city, he stated.
The Cabinet spokesperson noted that some facilities have reached 100 percent completion, while other work is nearly 98 percent complete.
He noted to the construction of a new experimental school in the Shams al-Hekma area, comprising 28 classrooms, indicating that it will officially enter service during the next academic year.
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Al-Ahram Weekly
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- Al-Ahram Weekly
Translating logic and hunting poems - Culture - Al-Ahram Weekly
The Library of Arabic Literature published by New York University Press in Abu Dhabi celebrated its tenth anniversary two years ago with events designed to reflect on the past successes and future directions of this remarkable series of translations from mostly classical Arabic literature into modern English. Speaking to the Al-Ahram Weekly in a 2018 interview, the editors said that 'the series is aimed at the general reader who may not know anything at all about Arabic literature or Arab-Islamic civilisation… [and is] intended to reach out directly to this readership, requiring of readers as little effort and occasioning them as little cultural and intellectual anxiety as possible in order to enjoy our books.' It has produced dozens of works of classical Arabic literature in hardback editions featuring newly edited Arabic texts and facing English translations. Many of these have been republished in English-only paperback versions aimed at readers not requiring the original Arabic texts and the scholarly annotations, the intention being eventually to produce English-only paperbacks of all the books. 'Our editions of the Arabic texts are aimed to reach out to readers of Arabic. These editions are authoritative, but they are not burdened with excessive annotation. All our translations will in due course appear in English-only paperback versions. We also produce PDF files of our Arabic texts and make them available on the Library's Arabic Website,' the editors told the Weekly, adding that the series aims to meet the requirements of multiple constituencies, from scholars to classroom use to interested general readers. It has established itself as including go-to English versions of sometimes hard-to-find classical Arabic texts in the same way that the well-known Loeb series has done for classical Greek and Latin texts with their facing English translations. Many readers of the Weekly will have followed the Library of Arabic Literature since its inception a dozen or so years ago. Even more will have been grateful for the opportunities it has provided to read intriguing works of early modern Egyptian literature in English translation. Roger Allen's translation of What Isa ibn Hisham Told Us by the early 20th-century Egyptian journalist Muhammad al-Muwaylihi appeared in the series in 2018, for example, allowing contemporary readers access to this satirical account of Cairo. Humphrey Davies's translation of the 17th-century writer Yusuf al-Shirbini's Brains Confounded by the Ode of Abu Shaduf Expounded appeared in the series in 2019, with this satirical work pitting Egypt's rural population against its urban residents and including a scholarly commentary on a poem supposedly written by a peasant named Abu Shaduf. The Library has since returned to the mediaeval period, including by publishing new translations of works like the 13th-century scholar Najm al-Din al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic, a textbook for use in schools, and the 'hunting poems,' published as A Demon Spirit, of the 8th-century Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas. Both books contain introductions setting the works in the context of their time and containing useful hints about how modern English-speaking readers might approach them. While the poems of Abu Nuwas make significant demands on the reader – and of course also the translator – owing to their employment of elaborate and highly metaphorical language, curiously the demands of al-Katibi's textbook are in some ways more straightforward. His discussion of what is essentially post-Aristotleian logic will be intelligible to anyone familiar with the basics of the traditional subject, even if for modern readers his formulations are challenging. Hunting poems: The 8th-century Abbasid poet Abu Nuwas ('the one with the curly hair') has quite a reputation in Arabic letters, and James Montgomery, Professor of Arabic Literature at Cambridge University in the UK and the translator of the 'hunting poems' (tardiyyat), begins by reviewing it for contemporary readers. Abu Nuwas, he says, 'heretic, countercultural icon, brigand, court jester… ritual clown [and] justified sinner,' was 'arguably the greatest poet of the Arabic language' and at the very least was a virtuoso in the Abbasid poetic genres of 'panegyrics (madih), reunciant poems (zuhdiyyat), lampoons (hija), hunting poems, wine poems (khamriyyat), love poems (ghazaliyyat), and transgressive verse (mujun).' Produced for the entertainment of the Abbasid elite – Abu Nuwas was a kind of court companion of the Caliphs Haroun al-Rashid and Al-Amin – his poetry 'never fails to delight, surprise, and excite,' Montgomery says, adding that 'what is most striking is its apparent effortlessness and the naturalness of its Arabic, despite the deployment of the full panoply of the new rhetorical style known as badi,' meaning 'modern' or even 'modernist.' Abu Nuwas's poetry is occasional, he adds, in the sense that it must be imagined as having been written for specific occasions to entertain the poet's aristocratic audience. Perhaps for those coming to the poetry from an Anglophone background, a comparison might be made to the work of the early 17th-century English poet John Donne, also a master of transgression and a writer of self-consciously 'modern' poems for a coterie audience. Montgomery has translated some 120 of Abu Nuwas's hunting poems including some of uncertain attribution. Most of them are short, perhaps a couple of stanzas long, and they are written in a highly charged poetic language. For those opening the book for the first time and wondering what makes a 'hunting' poem, Montgomery provides a useful explanation. The hunting poems are not descriptions of the act of hunting itself but instead are occasioned by it. Hunting of various kinds, always with animals such as dogs or hawks, was a favourite activity of the Abbasid elite for whom Abu Nuwas wrote his poems. He specialised in elaborate verbal pictures of the animals employed in the hunt, and one can imagine some of his poems being dedicated to prize specimens. Hunting was an occasion for ritualised display, Montgomery says, and at least for its human participants it does not seem to have involved much physical effort. For those whose idea of hunting, particularly hunting with dogs, is drawn from English foxhunting, Abbasid hunting seems to have been a rather sedentary affair, though not for the hunted animals. It mostly took place in the grounds of monasteries, where the human hunters would walk or ride about until prey broke ground, after which they would unleash hawks, dogs, or even cheetahs to bring it down. Abu Nuwas's hunting dogs are described as straining at the leash, their bodies tensed with expectation and nerves and muscles working together to leap upon their prey. 'The eye exults in his beauty,' Abu Nuwas writes of one hunting dog. 'The bright blaze / on his head, his white forelegs, fire-stick / thin, his long cheek, his scissor bite.' Of another, he writes of it 'pulling on the leash / like a lunatic terrified of needles / bolting from a doctor.' There is a rather jokey poem about a spider, also engaged in a form of hunting – 'this thing, this mean and despicable trifle / the colour of dark, muddy water, with its tiny back and chest … faster than a wink / or waking with a jolt, this thing scurries about / like a heady wine sprouting from an amphora / when broached.' Rules of logic: Najm al-Din al-Katibi's The Rules of Logic (Al-Risala Al-Shamsiyya), translated by Cambridge Arabist Tony Street, takes readers out of the entertainments of the Abbasid court and into the more earnest environment of the madrassas, the mediaeval Arab schools whose curriculum of philosophy and religion was in some ways similar to their equivalents in Europe. Aristotle was the philosopher most studied in the mediaeval European schools, and he was also the basis for the philosophical parts of the mediaeval madrassa curriculum in the Arab world, though as Street suggests this was Aristotle filtered through the work of the Islamic commentators. If one man can be described as having invented logic, broadly speaking the study of argument, it was Aristotle, and Aristotle's description of the field, inspiring the mediaeval logicians in both the Islamic and the European world, survived more or less unchanged until the last century when logic was developed for modern needs and almost completely rewritten by 20th-century logicians. Al-Katibi's Rules of Logic refers to the logic established by Aristotle, modified, in the Islamic case, by Ibn Sina (Avicenna), and he begins with subjects and predicates of various types that provide the traditional groundwork for logical analysis. From there, following Aristotle, he moves onto the syllogism, attempting some classification of its different types with a view to establishing valid and invalid arguments. The treatise is divided into three parts, the first on terms and expressions, the second on propositions or sentence types, and the third on syllogisms and the rules of argument. Only if the premises are true can the conclusion of a syllogism be true, and al-Katibi sets out six forms of true proposition including those true by definition and those true by experience. He adds propositions true by 'intuition' and by 'widespread agreement,' while noting that experience, intuition, and consensus cannot yield certain knowledge. Only a syllogism taking propositions of these types as its premises can come close to yielding a true conclusion, he says, adding a list of uncertain propositions that people may nevertheless use in argument. These include 'endoxic' propositions –statements taken as true because it is convenient to do so – received propositions – arguments from authority – and suppositional propositions –jumping to conclusions. A syllogism 'built on these kinds of premises is called rhetoric,' he says, whose aim is to 'exhort the hearer' and does not have truth as its goal. As for propositions whose truth value is indeterminate – he gives the example of 'wine is liquid ruby' – their only value is in poetry. Propositions that claim to be true neither by definition nor by experience – his example is 'beyond the world is a limitless void' – are either false or meaningless. An argument built on such premises 'is called sophistry, and its goal is to silence or deceive an opponent.' Street says that while it can never be known why logic became a core subject of the mediaeval madrassas, 'there can be no doubt that [its] utility for analysing and justifying legal reasoning was a major consideration.' Even if some religious scholars 'regarded the broader logical tradition with suspicion,' owing to its non-religious origin, 'they were prepared to include the Rules among texts unobjectionable to pious concerns.' 'Few of the Rules's readers went on to formulate knowledge-claims in the propositional forms listed in the Rules,' he says, 'and still fewer went on to deduce new knowledge-claims using the inference-schemata' provided by al-Katibi. 'But all would have come away… with an appreciation of the many pitfalls of building an argument in natural language.' Abu Nuwas, A Demon Spirit: Arabic Hunting Poems, trans. James Montgomery, pp 432, Najim al-Din al-Katibi, The Rules of Logic, trans. Tony Street, pp179, both New York: New York University Press, 2024 * A version of this article appears in print in the 6 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
Al-Ahram Weekly
an hour ago
- Al-Ahram Weekly
Kindergarten classes in mosques - Egypt - Al-Ahram Weekly
A cooperation protocol was signed last week between Minister of Endowments Osama Al-Azhari and Minister of Education and Technical Education Mohamed Abdel-Latif to open kindergartens in mosques. The service targets children before the age of compulsory education, according to a statement issued by the two ministries. Osama Raslan, the spokesperson for the Ministry of Endowments, told Al-Ahram Weekly that the protocol is scheduled to be implemented immediately on a pilot basis in Qena governorate in preparation for a nationwide rollout after an evaluation by the end of this summer. He noted that daily evaluations will take place, emphasising that all those involved in the educational process are education graduates who have studied educational psychology and are committed to a curriculum implemented by the Ministry of Education, incorporating ethics and behaviours. Raslan added that Ministry of Education teachers will be assigned to receive children in morning shifts at mosques, which run from 8am to 1pm. They are also responsible for equipping mosque annexes with appropriate educational tools and enhancing mosque courtyards with games, ensuring a blend of education and recreation for children. Raslan emphasised that only one mosque in each village will receive children aged four to six, and that it must have an annex, where mourning events and wedding ceremonies are held and which are commonly known as event halls. This is to make clear that children will not attend classes within the mosque area designated for prayer. According to Raslan, this protocol aims to make good use of the two ministries' capabilities to achieve the goals of building an authentic Egyptian character, fostering a love of reading and learning, and connecting generations to their cultural and civilisational heritage. 'We need to exploit under-utilised assets,' said Raslan. In response to some objections that this should not be done in mosques and that it is better to do it in schools, Raslan clarified that school buildings are busy throughout the year and when there are no classes, school grounds need to be maintained for the next academic year. He asserted that according to the protocol, kindergarten classes are free for all segments of the Egyptian population, and that accepting Christian children into the nurseries is not prohibited. This is to reassure citizens that the protocol serves all Egyptians without exception. He adds that limiting it to Muslims is a violation of the Egyptian constitution and heritage. Mona Ahmed, a kindergarten teacher for more than 25 years, told the Weekly that the idea is excellent because it prevents children from sitting in front of TV and mobile screens all day. It will also provide a useful educational and moral dose for a large part of the day. Based on her long experience, Ahmed said private nurseries are currently very expensive, which prevents many parents from enrolling their children. She adds that the kindergarten curriculum focuses on teaching the basics of reading and writing in the Arabic language and teaching linguistics such as demonstrative pronouns, singular and plural, in addition to the principles of arithmetic and exploration. 'The idea is excellent,' Ahmed said. 'It will help them to prepare well for the primary stage.' * A version of this article appears in print in the 6 August, 2025 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
Al-Ahram Weekly
3 hours ago
- Al-Ahram Weekly
5th Egyptian aid convoy heads to Gaza with 1,200 tons of supplies - Foreign Affairs
Egypt's fifth humanitarian aid convoy, comprising over 100 trucks with 1,200 tons of essential supplies, lined up on the Egyptian border on Thursday and is on its way to Gaza via the Karm Abu Salem crossing. The supplies in the convoy include approximately 840 tons of flour and 450 tons of assorted food baskets, according to a statement by the Egyptian Red Crescent (ERC). The fifth Egyptian convoy comes as Egypt intensifies efforts to send urgent humanitarian aid to Gaza as Israel continues a five-month deadly blockade on the strip that plunged the 2.3 million population into famine and starvation. On Sunday, the ERC, the national coordination body for aid delivery to the Gaza Strip, launched Egypt's first aid convoy to Gaza, named 'Zad Al-Ezza: From Egypt to Gaza,' after five months of total blockade by Israel. During the first three days of Egypt's humanitarian initiative, Egypt has delivered over 4,000 tons of humanitarian supplies to Gaza, despite bureaucratic and logistical obstacles on the Israeli side. The statement highlighted that the ERC has been present at the border since the beginning of the crisis and that the Rafah crossing has never been closed from the Egyptian side. The organization has remained on high alert, mobilizing 35,000 volunteers to ensure the delivery of aid. "Since the onset of the crisis, more than 35,000 aid trucks carrying over 130,000 tons of humanitarian assistance have entered Gaza," the ERC reported. These included food, water, medical supplies, medicines, shelter items, personal hygiene products, infant formula, diapers, ambulances, and fuel trucks. Al-Azhar's Zakat and Charity House also announced the dispatch of its 11th humanitarian convoy as part of its international campaign 'Aid Gaza.' The convoy carried thousands of tons of food and relief aid, as well as 1,000 fully equipped tents to provide shelter for Palestinian families who lost their homes due to Israel's genocidal war. The organization stated that the aid includes essential medications, medical supplies, infant formula, healthcare products, clothing, blankets, canned food, and drinking water. Simultaneously, 25 trucks from the UAE entered Gaza via the Rafah crossing, carrying equipment for potable water pipelines, intended to establish a new clean water line in southern Gaza. Meanwhile, Jordan dispatched a 60-truck humanitarian aid convoy loaded with food to support the people of Gaza amid the ongoing humanitarian crisis. According to Jordan's official news agency Petra, the convoy was organized in coordination with the Jordanian Armed Forces, the World Food Programme, and the World Central Kitchen. In tandem, on Wednesday, four Egyptian military transport aircraft, carrying tons of food aid, conducted an airdrop on Wednesday over areas in the Gaza Strip that are difficult to access by land. In exclusive statements to Al Arabiya and Al Hadath news channels on Wednesday, Egypt's Foreign Minister Badr Abdelatty described the US/Israeli Gaza Humanitarian Foundation (GHF) as 'a mechanism of death' for starving Palestinians who line up every day to receive food from its four designated distribution sites. Since May, Israeli troops have killed an wounded hundreds of aid-seekers at so-called 'aid centres', triggering an international wave of condemnation of the GHF and Israel for its months-long deadly blockade on the strip. FM Abdelatty also accused Israel of using starvation as a weapon of war, describing the famine in Gaza as "beyond imagination." Follow us on: Facebook Instagram Whatsapp Short link:
