Cairo contested : governance, urban space, and global modernity /

This study is the companion to Singerman and Paul Amar's edited collection, Cairo Cosmopolitan: Politics, Culture, and Urban Space in the New Globalized Middle East (2006). As the cover jacket puts it, "This cross-disciplinary, ethnographic, contextualized, and empirical volume explores the meaning and significance of urban space, and maps the spatial inscription of power in the mega city of Cairo." Some 18 scholars representing different countries, disciplines, and national academic traditions have cooperated to examine this challenging and complex subject with impressively solid and objective research. The editor explains that the book "takes seriously the conflicting forces of globalization that are playing themselves out on the space, bodies, and lived experience of Cairo population ... and [yet] makes sense of these forces not by caricaturing them and labeling them in terms of good versus bad, hegemonic versus counter-hegemonic, global versus local, or other dichotomous binaries."(p.29) An excellent pioneering endeavor whose impressive openness is exemplified by the authors' examination of such forces as the Islamist ulama and the al-Azhar establishment as well as the government's security apparatus. This is the fresh air of academic freedom! For any student of the Middle East this is, indeed, a very valuable addition. Summing Up: Essential. Upper-division undergraduates and above. N. Rassekh emeritus, Lewis and Clark College