Fatima Rushdi News Today

Netflix’s 'Perfect Strangers' caused a scandal in Egypt due to sexual content. But the persistent and systematic censorship of Egyptian films goes back to the early 1960s

Skip the pyramids, hit the nightclubs: Badia Masabni with her cabaret troupe Credit: © Collection of Lucie Ryzova After the Revolution of 1919, when Egypt gained her sovereignty, the new kingdom bristled with possibility. Egypt was now, as one American jazz musician put it, “a country where the Egyptians reign, the English rule, and everybody does as he pleases”. By 1922, when Tutankhamun’s tomb was being uncovered in the Valley of the Kings, Cairo had become, says Raphael Cormack, “on...

The dancehall divas who set the pace in Egypt’s roaring 20s Midnight in Cairo tells how the city’s vibrant nightlife was driven by female cabaret entertainers and club entrepreneurs Cairo entertainer and nightclub owner Badia Masabni, centre, with her troupe. Photograph: Courtesy of Lucie Ryzova Cairo entertainer and nightclub owner Badia Masabni, centre, with her troupe. Photograph: Courtesy of Lucie Ryzova Sun 2 May 2021 07.00 EDT The birth of the women’s movement in Egypt is ...

The dancehall divas who set the pace in Egypt’s roaring 20s Donna Ferguson The birth of the women’s movement in Egypt is not usually associated with music hall singers, dancers and actresses. But it was on the stages of theatres and nightclubs in Cairo, in the roaring 20s, that early feminists first asserted themselves, a new book will argue. The capital’s biggest stars were independent, transgressive Arabic-speaking women who, in the 1920s, were seeking to redefine their ...

-Aziz Street has become a cinema, while its shell is now used as storage for many of the shops around. Dubai of the 1920s: during the second half of the 19th century, Mohammed Ali’s grandson Ismail the Magnificent turned Azbakeya into Egypt’s modern nightlife and entertainment district, opening Egypt’s first opera house there in 1869, as well as other theatres and a circus. By the 1920s, Cairo was a boom town, full of new investment and new development – one of the most cosmopolitan pla...