M. NASR AL-GIBALI Candidate of Philological Sciences King Saud University, KSA Ain Shams University, Egypt Keywords: contemporary Egyptian fiction, Yusuf Zeidan, The Nabataean novel, Islam Modern Egyptian writer and philosopher Yusuf Zeidan was born on June 30, 1956. In 1980, he graduated from the Faculty of Philosophy of the University of Alexandria. In 1989, he defended his dissertation on philosophical sciences, and ten years later received the title of professor. Since 1994, he has been leading the study of cultural heritage in the Department of Rare Manuscripts at the Library of Alexandria. He has published more than 600 scientific articles on the problems of the Arab spiritual heritage, Christian symbolism in poetry, and the problems of covering philosophical issues in literary works. In 2009, Y. Zeidan became the winner of the prestigious Arab Booker Prize for Arabic Fiction in the Middle East1. His novel "Azazel" has been widely published worldwide and has been published in 20 languages. Translation into Russian was carried out for the first time by the author of this article together with P. G. Gulkin, an orientalist, Arabist, executive editor of the expert information platform Arafnews.ru. In 2013, the novel had a circulation of 2.5 thousand copies. ex. it was published by the Russian book publishing house "Astrel". By popularity of Yu. Today, Zeidan is compared to the modern American writer Dan Brown, the author of the intellectual detective stories "The Da Vinci Code", "Angels and Demons" and others. As for his other novel, The Nabataean, it is very popular in Arab countries and has been reprinted several times. The interest in this work is primarily due to the relevance of the problems raised in it and, of course, the high artistic skill of the author. The Nabataean is a novel in three parts. It takes place at a critical time for the Middle East and the entire world, at the beginning of the seventh century, when a new world religion, Islam, is emerging ... Read more