'Tarik Sabry is the perfect 'modern Sinbad' navigating back and forth between different countries, cultures and languages, enriching them and himself. In the 1001 Nights there are two Sinbads: a sedentary one (al-bari) who is rather boring and not so successful. The other is a sea-navigator (al-bahri) who has an exciting life precisely because he masters the art of communicating ... Read morewith the Other. Tarik's book reflects this art.' - Fatema Mernissi; 'In this ambitious, wide-ranging first work Tarik Sabry examines contemporary Arab culture from a double perspective. He seeks to rescue contemporary Arabic intellectual thought from a preoccupation with its heritage and tradition and to refocus it on the profane culture of everyday life. He has written an absorbing account of the encounters with modernity for young Arabs of North Africa in market places and cafes, in queues for visas outside Western embassies, on a bridge in Cairo where lovers meet, and in the responses of young Berber tribesmen to 'Baywatch' and Pamela Anderson. It is a beautifully written, passionately engaged account of the many-sided, contradictory meanings of The West as object of desire and distrust in the Maghreb today.' - Paddy Scannell Show Less