Through one woman's life, Youssef Rakha tells the story of post-revolution Cairo in The Dissenters

The Dissenters (Peninsula Press, 2025) is Youssef Rakha’s fifth novel and his first written in the English language.

Youssef Rakha is one of Egypt’s most influential literary voices, and this novel was born out of his desire to create a work of fiction about the meaning of a historical moment, as significant and transformative as that of a revolution, and its consequences.

“What the January Revolution of 2011 did for me — more than live up to the promise of actually changing the world, or even showing that such an aim was possible or desirable — was to change my view of the world as it was: Egypt at this point in history, why it is the way it is politically and socially and culturally, and what kind of genuine, collective, and consensual transformation we might look forward to outside idealistic rhetoric and 'democracy' propaganda,” explains Youssef in an interview to The New Arab.

“The experience deepened and fine-tuned my understanding of modern Arab history and the present-day global power structure,” he adds.

A British-educated Cairo dweller, Youssef is the only child of the late lawyer Elsaid Rakha, a Marxist, and the now-retired English-to-Arabic translator Labiba Saad.

He was born and grew up in Dokki, a neighbourhood in Cairo. And Cairo, and its history, is at the heart of much of his work.

His daring debut novel originally written in Arabic and published in 2011, The Book of the Sultan's Seal: Strange Incidents from History in the City of Mars (Interlink Books, translation edition 2015), is studied for its reimagining of the city of Cairo and its possible significance in the canon of Arabic literature.

Youssef, who has worked for Al Ahram Weekly since 1999, is also known as the editor of a bilingual literature and photography website named after his first novel, The Sultan's Seal: Cairo's Coolest Cosmopolitan Hotel, last updated in 2023.

Youssef centres The Dissenters, a novel he wrote in the epistolary form, around the figures of Mouna and her son, Nour, who is the narrating voice for most of the book.

Nour’s younger sister, Shimo, had left Egypt to study in America, without saying goodbye. When their mother dies in 2015, Nour starts writing her long, intimate letters from the loneliness of a disused attic of his family home.

In his letters, Nour, a middle-aged Egyptian journalist, recalls the life of his mother Amna Hanim Abu Zahram, whom her children affectionately call Mouna, and the other women who helped form him and have now departed.

In a complex narrative of memories and occurrences told in a non-linear way, Youssef unfolds the portrait of a woman, Mouna, and a family which is also that of his country, Egypt, and its ongoing love story with revolutions, and their implications of violence.

Mouna is represented as the pious Egyptian mother, the Sadat’s model citizen who can’t stand political Islam and is not suddenly politicised by the events of the January Revolution of 2011 that toppled Hosni Mubarak.

Rather, she appears to be yet another victim of patriarchy and its social systems, subjected to FGM as a young girl.

From love and passion to obsession, Mouna confronts herself with the myth of the “Holy Jumpers,” a mysterious and ambiguous metaphor Youssef created for the women of his book.

Furthermore, Youssef explains: “The only conventional dissident in the book," actively challenging a political system, “is the Marxist father, Amin,” who was arrested in the ‘50s and served a prison sentence for his activism.

“But everyone else is in their own way a dissenter. Shimo, Mouna’s daughter, is a dissenter from Egyptian society and primarily from her mother. Nour is a dissenter in more than one way. You could say that Nour is dissenting from his maleness, from his masculine identity […] At one point, Nour seems to give up his own existence: he says, ‘I'm just a vessel transporting one woman's life into another's’,” Youssef adds. 

“Even the younger son, who is a psychopathic officer with the secret police, dissents from his left-wing family. I think the idea of dissent in The Dissenters is that it is in opposition to the political and social forces that be: everyone is dissenting from how they're supposed to live and what they're supposed to believe about themselves, and of course that is only really meaningful because it is responding to the world,” Youssef thinks.

The Dissenters is a novel that you will like if you want to glimpse a world that is perhaps rarely portrayed in English and is concerned with the shifting circumstances of a more recent Egyptian history.

The stories that Youssef recounts, and the compelling way he tells them, make up for some of the stereotypes of the characters presented in the book.

Out of Youssef’s pen, Nour writes letters in a language suffused with idioms and single words in his mother tongue, Egyptian Arabic, such as fellahin or alf baraka and khawaga. Infusing the English language with local meanings, idioms, and cultural references comes to the aid of asserting identity.

“I wanted to find a register or an idiom of the English language that would reflect living in Cairo and the ways its people speak. Including some Egyptian Arabic terms," without translation, "is one thing. There are also literal translations of some expressions, in both Egyptian and classical Arabic. And then there is Mouna's French as well,” says the author.

“For me the process is holistic, subjective, and mostly intuitive: to give a convincing sense of what the speech-scape of Cairo feels like while using an English prose that is still legible, and one that is literary in the ways that matter to me too: layered and lyrical, with depth and range, but essentially conversational as well,” Youssef continues. 

“Whether in Nour's narration or in what people do and say, the humour in the book reflects a very Egyptian mode of existence too.” 

Utilised as a literary device, humour “makes certain things more bearable in the book, and that is consistent with the ways Egyptians always deploy it: to help them bear a difficult or impossible situation, to make the best of their own limitations in the face of overwhelming realities.”

Hopefully, “there is also a bit of a critique: what are we laughing at, exactly? On the one hand, it is great that we're not taking ourselves too seriously, but how much do we betray our values when we laugh?”

An award-winning writer of fiction and non-fiction both in Arabic and English, Youssef Rakha is currently working on a book of essays, Postmuslim (2026), in which he explores from his personal perspective what it means to be an Arab Muslim in a Western-dominated world.

Elisa Pierandrei is an Italian journalist and author based in Milan. She writes and researches stories across art, literature, and the visual media. Elisa holds a master's degree in Journalism and Mass Communication from the American University in Cairo (2002), after graduating in Arabic Language and Literature at Ca' Foscari University in Venice (1998)

Follow her on X: @ShotOfWhisky