In the Arab world, schools, museums, and national archives celebrate the state’s history and “great men”, while the people’s history is erased and forgotten. Based on his research in the Egyptian National Archives, the Egyptian historian and academic Khaled Fahmy will reflect in his lecture on his own attempt to break this silence by telling the story of the average Egyptian.
Khaled Fahmy is the Edward Keller Professor of North Africa and the Middle East at Tufts University. He is a historian of the modern Middle East with special emphasis on nineteenth-century Egypt. His books and articles deal with the history of the Egyptian army in the first half of the nineteenth century, and the history of medicine, law, and urban planning in 19th- and 20th-century Egypt. Fahmy is educated at the American University in Cairo and the University of Oxford, and has earlier taught at Princeton, NYU, Columbia, Harvard and Cambridge Universities. In addition to his academic publications which have appeared in both English and Arabic, he is also active on regular and social media as well as his own bi-lingual blog.
This lecture is part of an evening event taking place at Deichman Bjørvika, as part of Masahat festival 2023. Prior to the lecture, there will be a film screening “SALATA BALADI”(EGYPTIAN SALAD) by Nadia Kamel (2008, 105 minutes). And after the lecture, Khaled Fahmy will be in conversation with Michelle A. Tisdel (Researcher, National Library in Oslo), moderated by Rana Issa (Artistic Director of Masahat). More information about the event can be found here.
FILM SCREENING: “SALATA BALADI” (EGYPTIAN SALAD), (2008, 105 minutes)
This documentary explores the complex cultural and religious heritage of the Egyptian filmmaker Nadia Kamel’s own family. Her mother has Jewish and Christian Italian origins, and converted to Islam when she married Kamel’s Turkish-Ukrainian father. Accompanied by her 80-year-old mother and her 10-year-old Palestinian nephew, Kamel embarks on a journey to Italy and Israel in an attempt to tell the story of an Egypt that no longer exists.