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 six Arab countries. With "Marco Polo Egypt" and "Marco Polo Red Sea & Sinai" he has written two travel guide books.

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".