Mu?ammad al-T?nis? (Author)
Mu?ammad al-T?nis? (d. 1274/1857) belonged to a family of Tunisian merchants who traded with Egypt and what is now Sudan. Raised in Cairo, al-T?nis? spent ten years traveling through the Darfur Sultanate. On his return to Egypt, he played an important part in Mu?ammad ?Al??s modernization project, supervising the translation of veterinary and medical texts and editing the first printed editions of classical Arabic texts.

Kwame Anthony Appiah (Foreword by)
Kwame Anthony Appiah, who has been president of the PEN American Center, is the author of The Ethics of Identity, Thinking It Through: An Introduction to Contemporary Philosophy, The Honor Code, and the prize-winning Cosmopolitanism. Raised in Ghana and educated in England, he has taught philosophy on three continents and is currently Professor of Philosophy and Law at New York University. Professor Appiah writes the ?Ethicist? column in the New York Times Magazine.

Humphrey Davies (Translator)
Humphrey Davies is an award-winning translator of some twenty-five works of modern Arabic literature, among them Alaa Al-Aswany?s The Yacoubian Building, five novels by Elias Khoury, including Gate of the Sun, and A?mad F?ris al-Shidy?q?s Leg over Leg. He has also made a critical edition, translation, and lexicon of the Ottoman-period Brains Confounded by the Ode of Ab? Sh?d?f Expounded by Y?suf al-Shirb?n?, as well as editions and translations of al-T?nis??s In Darfur and al-Sanh?r??s Risible Rhymes from the same era. In addition, he has compiled with Madiha Doss an anthology in Arabic entitled Al-??mmiyyah al-mi?riyyah al-makt?bah: mukht?r?t min 1400 il? 2009 (Egyptian Colloquial Writing: selections from 1400 to 2009) and co-authored, with Lesley Lababidi, A Field Guide to the Street Names of Central Cairo. He read Arabic at the University of Cambridge, received his Ph.D. from the University of California at Berkeley, and previous to undertaking his first translation in 2003, worked for social development and research organizations in Egypt, Tunisia, Palestine, and Sudan. He is affiliated with the American University in Cairo.