The Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim visited the United States in the 1990s. Ibrahim had viewed America as an overweening and destructive empire, but according to the scholar Mara Naaman, when he arrived at the source of world power, he was struck by the poverty and suffering he saw. Perhaps he had imagined a place of frivolous, wealthy people enjoying the fruits of their reign over the rest of the world. Surely, he could not hold all of these poor, marginalized people responsible for the suffering of his own Egyptian people. In his novel Amrikanli, he attempts to resolve the fact that this
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