There’s no real objection to escapism, in the right places… We all want to escape occasionally. But science fiction is often very far from escapism; in fact, you might say that science fiction is escape into reality
— Arthur C. Clarke
The Past, the Future, O dear, is from you; you should regard both these as one.
— Rumi
This is not the place to write about time-travel in Arabic science fiction. I haven’t read the classics of the genre, let alone the latest installments to give you a comprehensive survey of Arabic time-travel literature.[1] Instead I’m going to focus on a number of newer works that give us interesting insights into how Arabic authors, men and women, deal with the related subjects of time, fate and agency. It must be understood from early on that whereas Western science fiction tends to see the passage of time as denoting progress, particularly technological advance, Arab science fiction authors often take the opposite view.
Time means moving away from inherited values and with that inevitable decline, leading to another cycle of civilizational rise and fall – Ibn Khaldun’s famous reading of history. We’re generally pessimistic and don’t trust institutions and written codes to do the job for us.[2] In Dr. Hosam Elzembely’s novel America 2030, the country becomes a covert dictatorship as a mafia-like organization penetrates the political system, putting its man in the White House. In his novel The Half-Humans, you have the super-advanced Land of the Seven Hills, a planet that cuts itself off after it ceases to progress scientifically, with corruption and arrogance taking root. And this despite the planet’s democratic system. I confirmed this suspicion while interviewing my friend Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, contrasting his prequel novels The Black Winter and Children of the Apocalypse. In the first novel of the Malaz series, the Metro stations become a site of resistance against oppression, but in the sequel novel, they become oppressors themselves. As he clearly put it:
The transformation of the Metro is my way of showing how fragile human sanctuaries are. Communities often begin with solidarity, but over time, fear, suspicion, and greed corrode them. Nothing remains pure forever. I wanted readers to feel that even hope can turn into horror if it isn’t carefully protected. The same thing happened in Malaz: City of Resurrection, where a haven eventually decayed into a city ruled by tyrannical hunters. Humanity has a way of corrupting everything it touches.[3]
Author Mahmoud Fikry goes even farther in his darkly supernatural cyberpunk novel Metaverse (2023), with the theological concept of ‘eternal return’ (العود الأبدي). It’s a quasi-time travel story of its own, but with the hero foiling the plans of an ancient demon only to be trapped into an alternate past of his own.
Thank heavens things seem to be changing. At this year’s Cairo International Book Fair I chanced on a whole swathe of new novels, and even newer authors, that altered my original set of conclusions. Something ‘interesting’ is going on in the collective unconscious of the Egyptian authorial psyche, and possibly on a larger scale in society as the generational makeup of the country changes. And this may be true of the Arab world in general.
Reinventing the Wheel
Hanadi Abed, cited before in these pages, began her sci-fi career with a 150-page long time-travel novel – The Hour of Time (ساعة الزمن , 2019). A teenage girl named Rosy has a happy life, with a loving father and a comfy upbringing. Nonetheless, she lost her mother at an early age to a terminal disease and still hasn’t gotten over it. Her father tries to compensate, but she feels a gap in her life. As luck would have it her best friend, Ihab, is a science wizard. They found a fallen meteorite and he uses it to create a wormhole that lets her go back to her mother’s childhood, meeting her at a school she enlists in. Rosy also meets her grandfather, the head principal, and a young version of her father. Sadly, she can’t stay long. Ihab gave her a communicator device and he tells her time is faster back where he is, with two months going by since she left and her poor father becoming a broken man. He also cautions her against staying too long because it could change the future.
While in the past she befriends a girl, Sarah, who helps cover for her at school and whose own family takes Rosy in. When she makes the decision to go back to her time, for her father’s sake, she tells Sarah and they organize a going-away party. While getting ready to return, she wonders what will happen in the future. Will anybody remember her from these people? Will she have new memories herself and forget her old self prior to the journey? Those questions are never ultimately answered, mind you, and the character is concerned with respecting God’s will. Her mother still is going to die, but the important thing is that, by meeting her and seeing how her mom made the right decisions for marriage and love, Rosy gets the confidence to make the right decisions herself. (The scene where she meets her future mother is ‘creepy’, since they are near identical down to the mole above her lip).
There’s a subplot involving another youngster sent back in time but that’s peripheral. Something more noteworthy is the plethora of ‘foreign’ names such as Rosy and Sarah’s uncle Jimmy. (Sarah is perceived as an Arabic name, the name of the wife of the Prophet Abraham). Religion is never touched on in the novel, apart from the debate about fate and changing the past. Rosy’s father, moreover, is named Adam. Adam was the father of us all, regardless of our religious differences. The author is a Palestinian and Palestinians are just as concerned with national unity as Egyptians. And her father’s blonde to boot.
It’s good to see a family and teen drama facilitated by the kind of philosophical retrospection characteristic of time-travel. Much the same can be said of Algaa: Satan’s Great Plan (ألاجا “خطة إبليس الكُبرى”, 2023) by youthful Egyptian author Abdel Rahman Al-Radad.
The opening passage of the novella is a three-way explanation of déjà vu: that man, when he’s born, sees the whole reel of his life; that there is a third eye that picks up vibrations of events before they happen; that you did in fact do these things, but have travelled back in time and are re-encountering the same situation again. The third option is the one used in the story. It begins with a young man named Yaqeen, living with his family, typically forced to do some daily chores such as buying breakfast for them. He’s also racing off to a job interview and accidentally knocks over a girl, Yaqteen, who turns out to be an employee at the same company. He got the job and they’re forced to endure each other, and both have an uneasy sense that they’ve met each other before. Both of them, moreover, encounter mysterious people telling them the same things and warning them that more is to come.
Yaqeen bears the brunt of these encounters and finds himself repeating that first early morning all over again or imagining himself to be dead, screaming to his family that he’s not a ghost to no avail. Then he understands what’s going on and refuses to accept the so-called reality in front of him and a devil makes his appearance and tells him that he chose this fate, wanting to save his sweetheart Yaqteen. (Even the young duo notes the similar-sounding names they have). He snaps back into his old original self, a grown man investigating a weird crime, with Yaqteen as his assistant and future bride. (She’s also his cousin, typically). He’s up against some masonic or satanic cult that wants to cause the end of the world, and they target his whole family and kill Yaqteen too. That’s when he makes the devil’s bargain, pardon the pun, with the antagonist demon, who tells him about ‘holes’ in time that their scientists have been able to discover that allow for time-travel. (Demon scientists with wormhole technology of their own; this is both sci-fi and dark fantasy).
Yaqeen goes back but fails to save Yaqteen, and she tells him he should have never made the bargain and to accept God’s will since the good lord would never do anything without a reason. That’s when he wises up and finds a way to foil the cult’s plan for global domination, interestingly by using a close friend in the media who also fell afoul of this plot. Their counter plot involves computer hacking smartphones, social media and satellite television, using the tools of the evil doers against them.
Behind all this, of course, you feel this is a dialogue about globalization and Westernization, with the family unit and human bonds as a microcosm of the nation. The demons and cults are really stand-ins for these foreign threats to the national character, an all too common concern in Egyptian science fiction and horror.[4] The religious ethos of the story is self-evident, underlined by Yaqteen’s dying words, as well as the similarity in their names. They’re fated together. Finally, you have the name of the hero, Yaqeen (يقين), which means absolute faith and conviction in Arabic. You will also note that the younger version of Yaqeen loves the winter, making him less lazy; as if he likes the cold winds of the West. (The opposite of family warmth, الدفء الأسري, in Egyptspeak). Talk about time-travel as an allegory for cultural nationalism. Only in Egypt!
Not that this is the end of the story, as far as this article is concerned, since these novels were written before the Gaza war.
The Andalusian Alternative
Needless to say the merciless Israeli war on Gaza circa 2023 has had an effect on Egyptian writing, not least fantastical literature. I had the good fortune of reading one of the first genre novels produced in Egypt on the topic, Tarek El-Shenawi’s Al-Andalus-Gaza (2024); a 68 page novella to be precise. It begins in no uncertain terms in Cordoba, the last bastion of Islam in Iberia in 1492 as it capitulates to the invading Spaniards. The great knight Mousa bin Abi Al-Ghassan refuses to give up, the man originally entrusted with organizing the popular resistance against the invading armies. He fights and fights till there is no escape but the sea, with a giant tidal wave engulfing him – never to be seen again. Then we are catapulted to the present day world, in July 2023, in Alexandria with clear skies above. Dr. Sabri, a retired and lonely medical doctor is in his chalet, making it a policy to ignore the passersby and read the same newspaper over and over again. Then the skies turn dark as a massive tidal wave emerges out of nowhere, depositing the great hero on the seashore.
Needless to say comedic episodes follow as the man is a state of culture shock at how people speak and how scantily clad women are, and all the machinery on display. The good doctor takes him in and claims he’s a long lost relative – his own son is in the USA – and then the Gaza war breaks out and Mousa sees history repeating itself. He won’t stay idle and insists on crossing the border to help the Gazans organize and fight back. Galvanized by his example, Dr. Sabri decides to follow suit, providing medical aid to the wounded and homeless, finally finding his calling in life.
There’s more to the novella of course than this, with an equally comedic interlude of court plots and counterplots in the besieged kingdom of Grenada, with princes and ministers overthrowing each other, with help of the Spanish invaders to the north. Not to forget that the Spaniards likewise call on the Arabs to help them with their own petty power struggles. You can tell that this is all a very explicit allusion to the situation of the Arab world of today, not least the power struggles between the Palestinians themselves since Yasser Arafat vacated the scene. And Sabri comes from sabir and sabr or ‘patience’.
It’s a fun novel and Dr. Shenawi is an author chum but, to be honest, my favourite time-travel novel by far is Wiaam Adel’s Legends from the Land of Al-Andalus
(أساطير من أرض الأندلس , 2025). It’s a short read, only 92 pages long, and almost a non-novel novel. There’s no plot as such, just a series of episodes and observations made by a number of female characters. And yet it packs in more history and passion than any of the works cited here. The prose alone, picturesque, lyrical and romantic, wins you over and leaves you transformed by the end.
It begins with an Egyptian journalist, Wiaam, that books a ticket to Madrid to acquaint herself with the long lost world of Al-Andalus. She’s very impressed by the beauty of the modern European city of Madrid and how colourful and chummy the Spaniard are. But, beneath all that, Wiaam feels that the ages old Muslim presence and lost civilization is still there, if only in spirit. Then we are catapulted, without explanation, into the Islamic past of Iberia through a series of very diverse female perspectives. The first such person, Lili, is the daughter of a prominent jurist surrounded by the plush urbanity and gardens of Al-Andalus. Nonetheless she is aware that there was a hidden ugliness behind the scenes, with court plots, greed and betrayals. She leaves this world and becomes an outcast but nonetheless perseveres, spreading rebellious ideas and becoming the ‘conscience of Al-Andalus’.
The story additionally clarifies that by doing this she is living up to the example of her jurist father, a man who tried his best to uphold justice in this rancid environment. This is doubly significant in the Arabic context because boys are usually seen as the ones who have to maintain the family name. A second great woman is described as the mother who helped make history. Her husband is killed in battle, through a treacherous arrow, and she raises their only son to be bravery and courageous to take up the mantle of his dad. And she succeeds, the son becoming a hero. Likewise there’s more to this than meets the eye, for the sake of the non-Egyptian reader. This is modeled, in my opinion, on Isis, the wife of Osiris and dutiful mother who marshaled her son to take vengeance for his slain father. A very Egyptian interpretation of Andalusian history and contribution to fantastical literature.
One of these female spokespersons is a Christian, a ferocious blonde northerner captured in battle but nonetheless treated with respect in the royal palace. She’s eventually given her freedom and allowed to return to her lands. Wives are portrayed as well educated and good and trusty advisers to their husbands, and the voice of the people, even when slave girls. The final heroine is an Egyptian journalist named Yasmin (or Jasmine), not Wiaam, who lives by herself in a ‘cold’ apartment who decides to search through the family inheritance; boxes left by her grandmother. She finds a manuscript, reads it, and finds herself traveling backwards in time to Al-Andalus, during a key turning point when a great Islamic city is under siege by the northeners. People are shocked to see her in the streets, speaking a strange dialect, with her hair uncovered. She is apprehended and brought to the police, to see if she is a foreign spy. The knight in charge however buys her outlandish story and feels drawn to her by bonds of trust and affection. When betrayals take place he gives her the mission of preserving the books of science (and magic) in the library, lest they fall into the wrong hands. She’s a stranger, so no one will suspect her.
They both make a break for it in the end and Yasmin is forced to make a devil’s bargain, yet again. The manuscripts they’ve saved can take her back to her present-day world but she prefers to stay here, where’s she loved and has a purpose in life. The last time we see her is in a chapter entitled the ‘Heart of Al-Andalus’, happy to give up the modern world where she lived as a body without a soul. Her heart belongs here, armed both with love and knowledge – the knight she loves and the manuscripts. A new beginning for her, and obviously for us and the heritage of Al-Andalus. The closing chapter is set in a modern Cordoba with a girl named Salma becoming acquainted with legends from the past, in the form of a flock of magical butterflies that bless the city. Their huge wings are covered in Arabic inscriptions, carrying names and lessons from the distant past of the country. People celebrate, chanting that ‘it has returned’, referring to Al-Andalus. They stay up all night quoting epic poems and playing music. All are united, children of the same city – no difference between rich or poor. (And one suspects also no difference between old/young, Muslim/Christian, man/woman). Now the Cordobans live out the rest of their lives in expectation, searching for butterflies. Salma then says that this mystical occurrence is no legend but a promise, that beauty will return as long as there is room in the heart for dreams. The novel closes without tears or wounds but happiness, that the memory of Al-Andalus will live on forever as a paradise on the wings of the most delicate thing imaginable – a butterfly.
This is a kind of compromise solution where you don’t change the past as such, creating an alternate timeline for the present day world. But nonetheless you do alter something that happened in the past that always it to live on onto in the present – if only as an example. Now to make sense of it all under the sci-fi microscope.
A (Very Personal) Conclusion
It is clear here that Arab authors, who are invariably Muslims, are pensive about changing the past – going against God’s will in effect.[5] If something bad happens to you, it’s a test and Allah wants you to learn something from it and go on with your life without any sense of regret of the ‘if only’ variety. I’ve felt this pensiveness myself while writing my own time-travel stories. My first published story in this subgenre, “Demigods in Time”, also steadfastly refuses to change the past. I have a Bedouin boy and his father being zapped backwards in time by a time displacement bomb only to find themselves in the presence of greatness itself – the hero of heroes, Gilgamesh. The future world they come from is an Iraq falling under the purview of Persian might, forcing people to join the ranks of nomads once again, so naturally the Bedouin boy calls on Gilgamesh to take a primitive strike against the Farsi’s. But, honorouable man that he is, he won’t. Instead he and the future duo depart for the seas in an armada that dedicates itself to not changing the past, but collecting the wisdom of lost civilizations as a gift to the present-day world and so change the future.
This was in 2019, but prior to that I had written my first-time travel story in 2016, “A Table Set for Two.” finally published in Thyme Travellers (2024). The inspiration for the story actually came from a Friday prayer sermon, how the phrase ‘if only’ opens the door to Satan. While the hapless hero is Palestinian, he resides in Cairo and is secretly in love with a Spanish girl, his assistant and a very devout convert to Islam. He goes backwards in time to save Al-Andalus and messes everything up for everybody, including his sweetheart. In clichéd fashion he has to go back a second time and set things straight.
Naturally, Palestinians are always concerned with historical comparisons to the Crusades. But they also are instinctively drawn to Andalusian history, fearing the same fate will befall them. There are families in Morocco that have their house keys from when their ancestors were in Ghernata, just like Palestinian refugees in Lebanon. What’s less well known is that Egyptians are also instinctively drawn to Al-Andalus. Egyptian period dramas have had a long love affair with that bastion of tolerance and diversity, a form of mirror imaging on the part of Egyptians who see in their country the same kind of cultural and religious ‘melting pot’ that Al-Andalus was. (Some of the best period dramas on Andalusian history were made in Egypt. TV series I grew up with and that influence me in my fictional work). Egyptians particularly pine for the kind of cosmopolitanism that they once enjoyed in the old days of the monarchy, and specifically in the city of Alexandria. Again, this comes out in their period drama. Hence, Youssef Chahine’s aptly titled movie Al-Maseer (1997) or Destiny, about the great Andalusian jurist philosopher Ibn Rushd (Averroes). His beloved land is being torn apart by fanatics as the crusaders to the north plot and scheme, with the help of coconspirators on the inside. Chahine was a native of Alexandria, from a mixed Christian and Muslim Lebanese family, and he used Alexandria as the centerpiece of so many of his movies. This brings us back to the person of Dr. Sabir, ignoring all the foreign nationals he sees on the coastline and the streets of Alexandria, only to meet the ultimate foreigner who is an Arab Muslim from the equally cosmopolitan Andalus. And critically, it is only his chance encounter with Mousa bin Abi Al-Ghassan that jolts him out of stasis.
The past is there to be learned from, not changed. It’s the future that is an open book. That being said, there’s no reason why we can’t dream about changing the past. There’s a difference between ‘if only’ and what if. You have to imagine alternate scenarios to what actually happened (counter-factuals) if you are to think constructively about the future. It’s a healthy exercise, both in the very reality-bound world of social science and the boundless worlds of science fiction, fantasy and horror.[6]
I’ve gone up this conceptual ladder myself, over the years, even winning an Arab literary contest once through an alternate history story where the Israelis fail to take the Negev in 1948.[7] They become a fortress nation and engage in terror acts as a consequence, including plane hijacks. The English, by contrast, end up becoming the allies of the Arabs in the face of this besieged juggernaut. There are lots of jibes at the current situation of the world in the story but I did base the storyline on a very real what-if situation that almost took place during the Nakba. Ben-Gurion wanted the Negev to pitch the country better to the Americans, while his military were afraid of getting pinned down by Arab forces on both sides.[8] The lesson again being, nothing is inevitable unless you make it so. It seems the same process is happening in our genre literature, with people willing to take the risk of at least ‘imagining’ a better future resulting from a deliberately altered past.
Looking through the bookshelves of the 2026 Cairo International Book Fair you found a plethora of novels masquerading as science fiction or fantasy that were all about escapism. Young people withdrawing into themselves psychologically from the miserable world around them. The same holds of the time-travel stories cited above, just in a more proactive and healthy fashion, given the horrors of the Gaza war and the entire region teetering on the edge of total anarchy.
Surely anything would be better than this. We’re slowly but surely becoming aware of our own agency, as represented in brave attempts to imagine a better past that help guide us in the present towards an even better future. Having a series of women as the agents and drivers of history, past, present and future in Wiaam’s novel is probably the most poignant example of this in the whole bunch – my sarcastic stories included. If one good thing has come from the Gaza war, it’s this. And I found quite a few novels about Al-Andalus at the book fair as well. We’re reevaluating our past instead of living in it, and transcending our present instead of being stuck in it, and seeing the future as the ultimate refuge.
Time as progress, on condition that it’s guided by the lessons of the past. Fate that is not subservient to God but, at the same time, is in service of God. The ultimate reconciliation of science and religion, morals guided by the romantically pure of heart.
The path from wormholes to being whole!
Special thanks to Hanadi Abed and Tarek Al-Shenawi.
By Emad El-Din Aysha, PhD
March 2026
[1] For the genre in Arabic literature, please see: Michael Cooperson, “Remembering the Future: Arabic Time-Travel Literature”, Edebiyât, Vol. 8, No. 2, 1998, pp. 171-89. For a contemporary alternate history example, focused on Al-Andalus interestingly (see below), see Yasser Bahjat’s Yaqteenya: The Old World (يقطينيا: العالم القديم, 2015).
[2] For an extended debate on this in Islamic history, progress vs. regress, please see my pre-SF academic writings: “Foucault’s Iran and Islamic Identity Politics: Beyond Civilizational Clashes, External and Internal”, International Studies Perspectives, (2006), Vol. 7, pp. 377–394.
[3] Quoted in this interview “Sci-Fi Interlopers – Exploring the ‘punk’ inside Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi”, The Liberum, 24 October 2025, https://theliberum.com/sci-fi-interlopers-exploring-the-punk-inside-ahmed-salah-al-mahdi/.
[4] Please see my review of Abd Al-Aal Bikhyt’s novella Ikhtiraq (‘The Hack’ or ‘Penetration’, 2022), “Space Enough to Feel – Hacking away at Egyptian dreams of the Metaversal revolution”, The Liberum, 13 September 2023, https://theliberum.com/space-enough-to-feel-hacking-away-at-egyptian-dreams-of-the-metaversal-revolution/.
[5] This pensiveness extends to Muslims characters even, in Chinese time-travel science fiction, as evidenced in Ted Chiang’s “The Merchant and the Alchemist’s Gate” (2007). Accessible here: https://images.shulcloud.com/1202/uploads/Documents/TheMerchantandtheAlchemistsGate.pdf.
[6] This is the science of futurology, which actually traces itself back to H.G. Wells, as I’ve documented elsewhere: Aysha, “Exiled to the Future: Mental Hurdles on the Road Towards Palestinian Science Fiction”, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays, (McFarland, 2022), pp. 114.
[7] (يعرّج على حقولها – القصة القصيرة التي فازت مشاركة بالمرز الأول في مسابقة مجلة “شجون عربية” للقصة القصيرة) , 24 August 2019.
[8] Thank this book by Abd Al-Azim Ramadan (المواجهة المصرية الإسرائيلية في البحر الأحمر, 1996).
Emad El-Din Aysha is an academic researcher, sci-fi author and freelance translator and journalist currently residing in Cairo, Egypt. He was born in the UK in 1974 to a Palestinian father and Egyptian mother, completed his PhD in International Studies in 2001 at the University of Sheffield and has taught at universities as diverse as the American University in Cairo and Heliopolis University for Sustainable Development. He has a regular SFF review column in The Liberum online newspaper and formerly wrote for Egypt Oil & Gas and The Egyptian Gazette. He has two books to his name, the nonfiction ‘Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays‘ (McFarland, 2022), and an anthology in Arabic that has recently been republished – ‘The Digital Hydra’ (2026) – see below. He also had the honour of publishing a story with the first ever anthology of Palestinian SF (Palestine+100) and the award winning Thyme Travellers, and is a member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction regularly represents Arab literature at forums like Balticon and WorldCon.
