CAIROLIVE.COM'S EXCLUSIVE PLOT SUMMARIES AND UPDATES ON THE GOINGS-ON OF YOUR FAVORITE RAMADAN SHOWS...

Money matters more as week 3 begins

Youssra continues to exemplify the ideal single mother, while Sobhi's horseman gallops faster...

Al Attar Wal Saba' Banat
(The spice dealer and the seven girls)
8.20pm on Channel 2

Haj Saleh's (Nour El-Sherif) wife Sayyeda (Somaya El-Alfi) has convinced her husband to marry a poor girl, Hania (Magda Zaki), secretly aiming to convince him that he is not able to conceive children. To Sayyeda's shock, Hania becomes pregnant a few months later. Overwhelmed by jealousy, Sayyeda now believes that she has a problem that does not allow her to conceive. She starts treating Hania badly, to the extent that she starves her for a few days, hoping that the unborn child might die. She also forbids the Haj from seeing Hania for days.
Then, to everyone's surprise, a few episodes later, Sayyeda becomes pregnant. Hania gives birth first, to a boy named Abdel-Rahman (who, when he grows older, is also played by Nour El-Sherif).
Eventually, Sayyeda gives birth to a boy Seif, (Emad Rashad) and a girl (Hala Fakher). At the same time, Sayyeda's jealousy towards Hania increases -- she kicks her and her child out of the house and bans the Haj from visiting them in their new house. 
Hania, meanwhile, personifies the role of the kind and loving wife, refusing to take any money from Haj Saleh, and working to provide a living for her child.
Matters get complicated as the years go by, with Sayyeda's boy, Seif, becoming a jealous type who hates anyone who is better than him. So when Hania's boy Abdel-Rahman does well at university while Seif doesn't, Sayyeda asks the Haj to force Abdel-Rahman to drop out of college. The Haj obeys her orders blindly and convinces Abdel-Rahman that he needs him to help him in his spice store (Note: a lot of people are disappointed that Nour El-Sherif's character in this series has a weak personality).
Seif's jealousy extends into Abdel-Rahman's love life as well -- when Abdel-Rahman and Thoraya (Bothaina Rashwan) fall in love, Seif tells his mother that he loves her too. Accordingly, Sayyeda goes and asks for her hand in marriage behind the Haj's back and they do get married, thus breaking Abdel-Rahman's heart.
Haj Saleh then gets a vision telling him that he should take care of a widow (Sawsan Badr) and so he decides to convince Abdel-Rahman to marry her. Abdel-Rahman agrees, although he is not in love with her.

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Ayna Qalby
(Where is my heart?)
At 10.15pm on Channel 2, at 11.20 on the Egyptian Satellite Channel and at 7.00pm on Nile Drama, 8.20 on Dream TV

Faten (Youssra) has a lot of problems. First of all, her late husband's cousin Morshidy convinces her to meet him in his office, then brazenly asks her to marry him. She refuses, telling him that all she wants is the money( LE100,000) he stole from her late husband.
Morshidy, meanwhile, is worried that Faten will tell his wife (Khokha) about his proposal, so instead he decides to tell his wife that Faten wanted to marry him, but he refused. An enraged Khokha goes to Faten's house to teach her a lesson about trying to steal another woman's husband. Although Faten was not at home, Khokha ends up slapping Faten's daughter, and causing a scandal in the whole building.
When Faten comes back, she finds her son and daughter close to a nervous breakdown. Trying to restore her dignity, she goes to Morshidy's house and tells his wife the truth, but Morshidy convinces his wife that Faten is lying. The next day, Morshidy's daughter, Touha, embarrasses Faten's daughter Farah in school, in front of everyone.
This inspires Farah to go to Morshidy's office where she manages to covertly tape him saying that he loves her mother, that he wanted to marry her and that Faten's late husband had given Morshidy LE100,000 to become a partner in his company before his sudden death. She then takes the tape to Morshidy's family, exposing his lies. Khokha kicks Morshidy out of the house and he goes to live with the woman he is married to 'orfi (in secret).
Faten's other problems have to do with her job, where she is always trying to prevent corrupt contractors from building shoddy houses. There is one contractor who is very well connected -- and they can not nail him. Faten (like mother, like daughter) decides to play a scam on him by convincing him that she will accept his bribes. Meanwhile, she manages to tape him confessing that he has built houses that do not meet building regulations. He is subsequently arrested and Faten is honored for her courage with a LE20,000 reward. 
Meanwhile, making things ever more complicated on the personal track, Morshidy's son, Salama (Ibrahim El-Shakankeery), who is hopefully in love with Faten's daughter Farah, gives the girl a total of LE100,000 (the money that her late father had given his father), but Farah is not able to tell her mother about it, afraid she will find out about the tape scam. Salama is also in big trouble at home with his mother Khokha and sister Touha, who hate Faten's family with all their might.

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Amira min Abdeen
(Amira from Abdein)
11.05pm on Channel 1, 7.10 on the Egyptian Satellite Channel 1 and 3.00pm on Nile Drama. 10.00pm on Dream TV

Lacking funds, Amira (Samira Ahmed) decides to take her daughter Ghada (Hanan Turk) and her grandaughter Shahd to live in her old house in Abdein. Of course at first they find it very different from the villa they used to live in, but soon they realize that the people who live there are unlike anyone they have ever met. Doctor Shalaby, for example, offers his services to patients free of charge. Their other  neighbors are all friendly types who try to become close to them, as well. Plus, Amira reunites with her sister (whom she had stopped talking to when she first left Abdin).
Meanwhile, Amira's husband Abdel-Monsef (Youssef Shaaban) and Ghada's husband Tarek (Ahmed Shaker) leave Amira's son Gamal (Mohamed Riad) in Athens and flee with all the money they stole to another country. Gamal finds that there is no use staying in Athens alone (especially since he is left penniless) and decides to make a deal with the Egyptian authorities -- if he turns himself in and confesses that Abdel-Monsef and Tarek stole the money and fled, he could be treated as a witness instead of a partner in crime. Gamal had also  promised the authorities that he would give them valuable information about other businessmen who had worked with Abdel-Monsef and had also stolen money from banks.
Accordingly, after Gamal turns himself in, he is allowed to leave jail on  LE5000 bail, until the trial date, when he will appear in court to say what he's agreed to say. Complicating matters, however, is the fact that he has been threatened by the "Very Dangerous People" (VDP -- it is actually said this way -- in English -- contrasted with VIP) that he is now messing around with, and he is advised by his step-father's lawyer (Abdel-Rahman Abou Zahra) to be quiet or else there could be terrible consequences. 
The businessmen do in fact kidnap Gamal and tell him that if he testifies he will either lose someone dear to him or they will kill him. They make a deal with him that if he does not testify against them, they will give him one million dollars and tickets to anywhere in the world, and he is given 48 hours to decide. 

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Fares Bela Gawad
(Horseman without a Horse)
11.50pm on Channel 2 and 5.30 on Nile Drama. 6.45pm on Dream

Sunday's episode finally introduced the Protocols of the Elders of Zion book that has caused so much grief for the makers of this series.
Hafez (Mohamed Sobhi) is known as the Ta'lab (fox) -- who is a Zorro-like person dressed in black -- Egypt's greatest freedom fighter against the English occupation.
Hafez is a master of disguise. When his mother Malak died, his father Naguib kidnapped Hafez from the Turkish mansion where he was living to take him to live with him and his father (Ashraf Abdel-Ghafour). There Hafez learns how to disguise himself, in order to avoid being caught by his Turkish grandmother, who wants to take him to Turkey with her. As a child, he would pretend to be either black or Indian. But when he grew up, he went to France and studied the "art of disguise" professionally in an institute.
One of his aliases is as a journalist named Farahat, who works in the Mo'ayed newspaper. He benefits from this position because he is allowed to attend all the press conferences that are held by the British, and is thus able to ask all the questions he finds necessary.
Gamil Rateb plays an English officer who vows to find the "fox" and kill him. The soap opera takes us to the Denshway massacre in which many Egyptian citizens were killed, arguing that this incident witnessed the birth of children defending themselves with stones.
At one point, Hafez's grandfather dies, and in a tragic and touching scene, Hafez tells him that he is the "fox".
Meanwhile, Hafez finds the Protocols of Zion in the house of Princess Margaret (Maha Abou Ouf), one of his friends, but he does not yet  understand the importance of the book. Princess Margaret was threatened by the country's Jewish leaders into giving back the book, since they feared it would be found by someone who would use it against them. Margaret refused, however, and kicked them out of her house.
Hafez is then sent by the Jewish community to steal the "Protocols of Zion" from Margaret's house. After stealing it, however, he is curious about the book and does not give it to them. He was told by the Jewish community that it is a book that explains a secret formula for making soap and that they want to exploit it -- better them than the English. But Hafez doesn't believe them and intends to translate the book, which is written in Russian. 

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