Islam Issa

speaker

96 appearances 1 recordings 1 series first heard Jul 2026 last heard 13 Jul

Islam Issa’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.

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recordings per month · last 12 months

Recordings per month over the last 12 months — 1 in all, peaking in Jul 2026 with 1.

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A Good Read · Joanne Harris and Islam Issa · 13 Jul 2026 podcast

I mean, we often forget how old Egypt is.

We think Shakespeare's 400 years old or Beowulf is a millennium ago.

This story, the actual occurrence is three and a half millennia ago.

I often say Cleopatra's closer in time to the invention of the iPhone than to the building of the pyramids.

That's how old the Egyptian civilization is.

And so it's still resonant thematically, despite being set so long ago.

And maybe that's because of the structure.

Yeah, and structurally that's fascinating because it shows that everything in life has multiple perspectives.

I think it's just saying that truth is kind of a paradoxical or impossible concept.

And the narrator's father tells him at the beginning to be impartial and open to every witness.

And then he says, when you find the truth...

tell it to people who wish to contemplate it and I love that start because it's not that everyone is going to accept truth and also it's not enough to accept so-called truth but you have to actually contemplate that fact.

And then there's the relation to Tutankhamun as well.

I think it's fair to say there was some repetition in the book as a result of these convoluted events.

And the narrator often says things like, he spoke to me about so-and-so, so I'll skip over that because I've already heard about it.

But I think there are some really key themes that do transpire as it goes along.

For example, this kind of emphasis on love, this idea that love can solve things and the question of whether it can.

This idea of what it, this question of what it means to lead.

There's a moment where one of the characters says, you know, he should have been a poet or a singer.

Instead, he was the king.

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