''The Open Door'' (El bab el maftuh) is a 1960 novel by Egyptian writer
Latifa al-Zayyat
Latifa al-Zayyat ( ar, لطيفة الزيات) (8 August 1923 – 10 September 1996) was an Egyptian activist and writer, most famous for her novel ''The Open Door'', which won the inaugural Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature.
Biography
Al Zay ...
. It won the inaugural
Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature The Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature is a literary award for Arabic literature. The novel, written in colloquial
Egyptian Arabic
Egyptian Arabic, locally known as Colloquial Egyptian ( ar, العامية المصرية, ), or simply Masri (also Masry) (), is the most widely spoken vernacular Arabic dialect in Egypt. It is part of the Afro-Asiatic language family, and ...
explores a middle-class Egyptian girl's coming of age, against the background of the growing Egyptian nationalist movement before the 1952 Egypt revolution. The book was made into a 1963 Egyptian film directed by
Henry Barakat
Henry Antoun Barakat ( ar, هنري أنطون بركات, 11 June 1914, Cairo – 27 May 1997, Cairo) was a well known Egyptian film director. He was born in Shubra to a Melkite Greek Catholic father of Syro-Lebanese descent, and a Syro-Le ...
with
Faten Hamama
Faten Ahmed Hamama ( ar, فاتن حمامه ; 27 May 1931 – 17 January 2015) was an Egyptian film and television actress and film producer. She was the first wife of Ezz El-Dine Zulficar. She made her screen debut in 1939, when she was ...
Saleh Selim
Saleh Selim ( ar, صالح سليم) (11 September 1930 - 6 May 2002) was the 10th president of the Egyptian Al Ahly Sporting Club. He also was a famous Egyptian football player and actor. He was nicknamed El Maestro because of his way of lead ...
. Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in ...
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Laura Bier - 2011
CONCLUSION The Legacies of State Feminism in an interview conducted a few years before her death in 1996, Latifa al-Zayyat told her interviewer that her landmark novel, The Open Door, hailed by critics as a poignant expression of the hopes and aspirations of a revolutionary generation, is now “an impossibility.”1 Over the last three decades, Nasserist narratives of modernity have been challenged by the failures of state socialism, the policy of infitah (open door policy) that began ...