A Soul Without a Body

Al-Darb al-Ahmar, old Cairo, October 2024. Radi Fahmy is a retired press photographer, 63 years old, with a film camera on his chest for 40 years. He develops his prints in a small room under a red light, and the pictures appear in the tray one by one. Then he stops. Every picture is cut off on the left: half a face, half a door, and the girl who was standing there is not in the frame. Then he smells burnt metal, and in an instant he is up above, 20 or 30 meters high, in total silence. He sees the roof of his house, the washing line, the pigeon tower, and through a small opening he sees a man lying on the tiles. He was looking at himself. Then Nour knocks on the door: we heard something fall. Are you all right?

This is a science fiction thriller set on the rooftops of old Cairo, between Bab Zuweila and the Street of the Tentmakers. The doctor says the problem is not in his eyes but behind them, and the surgeon says the operation will stop the loss of sight and end the episodes at the same time. But Radi wants to know first: does he really see, or does he imagine it? With Nour he designs a test of sealed envelopes and white boards on the rooftops, without knowing what is on them. In his way stand Abdel Aal the pigeon keeper, who does not want strangers on the roofs, Abdel Moneim the carpenter, who fears for his daughter, Fawzia, who lives alone in a room on a roof, and Dalia, his daughter far away in Toronto. Time is running out, and every episode has a price.

The phenomenon in the novel is real: the out-of-body experience. In the 1940s the surgeon Wilder Penfield in Canada heard a patient say he felt he was leaving his body. In 2002 Olaf Blanke in Geneva stimulated an area on the right side of a woman's brain, and she saw herself from above. In 2007 Henrik Ehrsson created the same feeling with goggles and a camera. Hidden-target tests, from Tart in 1968 to the AWARE study in 2014, taught scientists that a test must be "blind". And the tumor that takes away half of the field of vision is real too. All of this is explained with simple pictures from daily life, with no equations. A final section, "What is real and what is imagined", tells you clearly where science ends and imagination begins.

The book is written in Arabic.