Friday Finds: Cairokee Issues a Song in Memory of Egyptian Author Ahmed Khaled Towfik

Last week, the Egyptian rock group Cairokee released a new song and music video honoring Egyptian genre author Ahmed Khaled Towfik:

The song is written around Towfik’s poem “No Longer Young.” The music was composed by Cairokee guitarist Sherif Al-Hawari, it was produced by Sari Hani, and filmwork was done by Motaaz Ibrahim.

The poem is posted beneath the video on YouTube, which has already garnered more than 330,000 views, a testament to the popularity of Egypt’s don of genre.

The popular and prolific author, who died earlier this month in the northern city of Gharbia, was just 55. According to the BBC, the author suffered a sudden health crisis.

Commonly called “the Godfather,” the popular blogger Zeinobia called Towfik the “Pop Culture godfather of a whole generation of Egyptians,” adding on Twitter that he was one of the few “intellectual figures and public figures in Egypt that believed we should mourn the Egyptians who died in and was not afraid of expressing this in public.”

Towfik’s books were particularly concerned with widening class divides, as evidenced in Utopia and other near-future dystopias. Utopia, tr. Chip Rossetti, was a finalist for the 2012 Science Fiction and Fantasy Translation Awards. However, it came out from Bloomsbury Qatar, which has since dissolved, and is now out of print in English.