Hörfunk & Print; Analysen, Reportagen, Interviews aus einer Region im Umbruch
Jürgen Stryjak
Cairo, Egypt
Jürgen Stryjak, born in 1962, is a Cairo-based correspondent for German-language media in Germany, Austria and Switzerland. His work has been published in a number of well-known magazines and newspapers, among them Cicero, abenteuer und reisen, Das Magazin, Der Tagesspiegel as well as Merian, Capital, Berliner Zeitung and many others. He reports for the German public radio ARD on political, social and cultural affaires in 15 mostly Arab countries. With »Marco Polo Egypt« and »Marco Polo Red Sea & Sinai« he has written two travel guide books.
The renowned non-fiction publishing house Ch. Links published his book »Egypt. A Country Portrait«, in which Stryjak describes in detail the socio-political and economic conditions in the country, the power of the military, the influence of the religion, as well as the events in the country during the Tahrir Revolution of 2011 and the period of upheaval afterwards. The Federal Agency for Civic Education (Bundeszentrale für politische Bildung/bpb) published a special edition of the book.
Jürgen Stryjak has finished the Henri Nannen School for journalism in Hamburg and studied the Arabic language in Cairo. During his years in Egypt's capital, he has lived in wealthy quarters of the westernized upperclass as well as among more common Cairenes in working-class and popular neighbourhoods.
In his features and reports, columns and portraits, Jürgen Stryjak has written about belly dancers, suburban Muslim preachers and the bedouins of the Sinai peninsula. He has portrayed entrepreneurs, environmental activists and feminist Islamists. He is especially interested in the effects of globalization, the mix of Western lifestyle, international pop culture and pious traditions, all of which are forcing today’s Egyptian society into a breath-taking transformation.
Jürgen Stryjak has travelled through many countries in the Middle East. The late Naguib Mahfouz, the Egyptian winner of the 1988 Nobel Prize for Literature, dedicated one of his newspaper columns to Stryjak's thorough knowledge of Egyptian society, titled »A German in Bab Al-Futouh«. – Naguib Mahfouz on Jürgen Stryjak :
»What pleased me most of all was this unique German's capacity for engaging with every detail of life in the popular residential quarters -- unlike many of his colleagues and fellow expatriates.«
