The present book is meant to be a first reader in Egyptian-Arabic drama for European students. The preface contains a short introduction to the genre with bibliographical hints for further study. The existence of a rich collection of such plays is well known and so are the numerous difficulties of interpretation which they present to the European student because of the dialect in which they are written and the many stamps typical of the place and period of creation which they bear.
For the purpose, the authors chose five short one act plays, each with its own peculiarities, which they have transcribed in Roman characters and provided with fotnotes explaining the passages which cannot be readily looked up in the existing dictionaries
The editor, Karl-G. Prasse, is emeritus senior lecturer of Berber, Carsten Niebuhr Institute, University of Copenhagen. He has formerly published a.o. Lexique Touareg-Francais (Museum Tusculanum Press, 1998)
