The Modern School and Global Modernity: The Example of an Egyptian Ghost Story of the mid-1920s (Mamūd āhir Lāshīn, Qi at‘ ifrīt)

A close reading of an Egyptian short story of the mid-1920s and a comparison of the result of this reading with H. U. Gumbrechtʹs study In 1926: Living at the Edge of Time, ‘an essay on historical simultaneity’, reveal that worldwide categories of perception and ordering everyday-worlds speak out also from representations of Egyptian life written by M. . Lāshīn, a member of the Modern School (al-Madrasah al- adīthah), even in one of his most ‘local’ and ‘banal’ stories. These congruencies enable us, for the first time, to read the Modernistsʹ texts not only as products of a local Egyptian adab qawmī, lagging behind developments in ‘world literature’, but also as indigenous representations of life-worlds that, while wearing a local garment, testify to a sharing of more universal ways of perception and feeling and thus of participating in global discourses.