Ihsan abdel quddous biography of martin
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British film at Cannes on how Islam helped a London gangster find peace
"I was sick and tired of watching films in which people convert to Islam, buy a rucksack and blow themselves up," says Martin Askew, 42, who stars in Snow in Paradise, which screened in the Un Certain Regard selection in Cannes.
Askew, who has co-written the script with the first-time director Andrew Hulme, reveals that the film is based on his life: he grew up among gangsters in the East End of London before he converted to Islam in , just before 9/
The film details how an East End gangster has his life turned upside down when his best friend Tariq (the British actor Aymen Hamdouchi) is killed. This leads to a period of self-reflection and he begins to look at Islam as a way to find peace.
But Askew does not play himself in the film; the character has been renamed Dave and is portrayed by the British newcomer Frederick Schmidt.
“I was walking down the street when I was tapped on the shoulder and asked if
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Introduction for The Politics of Melodrama
INTRODUCTION
ANALYZING IHSAN ABDEL KOUDDOUS
On the morning of 31 July , Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, perhaps the most popular and prolific writer of fiction in the Arab world in the twentieth century, woke up in fängelse 19 in Cairo’s military prison. He had been arrested three months earlier by the secret police and spent the first forty-five days in solitary confinement, followed by several weeks of harsh interrogation. For Abdel Kouddous, it was a harrowing experience, a kind of psychological torture, full of insults and abuse. As he wrote soon after his release, “The initial weeks passed violently, every minute pricking my nerves. My entire body was en hög byggnad eller struktur apart and burned with fire.”1 When Abdel Kouddous woke up that morning, he had spent ninety-five days in prison. He had no idea when—or if—his ordeal would end.
As the guard opened the cell gate that morning, he greeted Abdel Kouddous with uncharacteristic respect after weeks of insults. “
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Breaking Bourgeois Taboos in Cairo: Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s A Nose and Three Eyes, by Gretchen McCullough
Breaking Bourgeois Taboos in Cairo: Ihsan Abdel Quddous’s A Nose and Three Eyes, by Gretchen McCullough Book Reviews [email&#;protected] Mon, 10/14/ - Five or six years ago, I was reading Ihsan Abdel Quddous (–) with my Arabic teacher and thought of writing an article about him in English, but I found only one translation on Amazon. I was puzzled. Why had one of the best-known Egyptian novelists gone untranslated? Had leftist Egyptian intellectuals steered Arabists away from him, dubbing him an aristocratic right-winger? Had he been unfairly stereotyped as a novelist who wrote only for teenage girls? Or had he simply been unlucky in the quixotic business of English publication? It was unclear. Because so many of Abdel Quddous’s novels have been made into movies, Egyptians know him by heart. (His film scripts sold like hot cakes in Egyptian cinema.) Abdel Quddous—a prominent jou