1. The name of the neighborhood is pronounced “iz-Zawiya el-Hamra.” It is written in different ways in the literature. To avoid confusion, I use the classical transliteration throughout this book. People usually drop “el-Hamra” and refer to the area as iz-Zawiya. [BACK]

2. See Singerman (1995) for a detailed analysis of informal networks in Cairo's old quarters and the political significance of these networks. [BACK]

3. The literature also often refers to al-Zawiya only in the context of these clashes (Ansari 1984; Kepel 1993; Hanna 1997). [BACK]

4. See, for example, Cairo's map in Seton-Williams and Stocks (1988). [BACK]

5. Baladi, which is discussed further in chapter 3, is a complex concept that signifies a sense of authenticity and originality. It is derived from the word balad, which refers to different units such as a village, a city, or a country. Baladi in this context refers to the areas and residents of old popular quarters in Cairo. [BACK]

6. These neighborhoods have also attracted the attention of writers such as Naguib Mahfouz, whose wonderful novels document various aspects of life in old Cairo. [BACK]

7. At that time, an Egyptian pound was equivalent to around thirty-four American cents. [BACK]

8. The published data from the 1996 census do not disaggregate the population by religion. [BACK]

9. Relationships became familylike with some informants. So when members of my family visited from Jordan, it was necessary to exchange visits with close informants. [BACK]

10. Huda and Ahmed have enacted the marriage contract, which means that legally they are married. Socially, however, they are not married (i.e., they are not

12. Because Zidane was Algerian and Muslim, people assumed that he was also Arab. No one in the neighborhood mentioned his Berber origin. [BACK]

13. Until recently, social theories tended to treat space as “the dead, the fixed, the undialectical, the immobile,” while time was seen “richness, fecundity, life, dialectic” (Foucault 1980b: 70). This approach has been criticized by several authors who emphasize that space is not a mere container for social activities: “space is socially constructed” and “the social is spatially constructed” (Massey 1994: 70). [BACK]

14. In this work, Foucault shows how prisoners who are distributed in space so that they can be observed without being able to see their observers internalize the feeling that they are under the gaze of power and become reproducers of their own subjugation. [BACK]