El Shooq is the story of the inhabitants of a marginalized street in Alexandria who live ordinary lives but who all have longings for love, escape, wealth, power or respect. The central character is Umm Shooq, and her particular story affects the lives of everyone on the street.

Umm Shooq earns money roasting, grinding and selling packets of coffee to her neighbours and reading their future in the grounds. It is widely acknowledged that her acquaintance with demons and spirits helps in her fortune telling. It is also understood that people are wary of upsetting her because of the demons. Her two daughters, Awatef and Shooq must regularly restrain her when the demons take hold of her and she starts beating her head against the wall.

To pay for a life-saving medical operation for her son, Umm Shooq boards a train to Tanta to beg help from her family with whom she broke many years ago when she ran away to get married. Arriving at the Tanta station, she is overcome by the hopelessness of getting any money from her family and, determined not to return empty-handed, she continues on to Cairo with no thought or plan, save that of helping her son.

In Cairo, as she utters aloud a prayer for her son, someone puts money into her hand and so begins a week of begging on the streets. She returns to Alexandria with the money to find that her son has died. In the midst of grieving, she takes the decision to return to Cairo every other week for the sake of her daughters’ future, letting everyone assume that she has made up with her family in Tanta.

It is a pivotal decision: she must counter the demeaning shame of her secret with the advantage of power and status. It is no longer enough for her to read the coffee grounds; she begins to read them to find out all about her neighbours’ lives and secrets. For example, she discovers the secret of Ragaa’ who betrays her husband (a kerosene seller) with a young neighbour, the secret of Umm Salem who, when her husband transforms his son’s room into a bar, lusts after the men who frequent it. Dispensing advice and money, she is, thus, both their salvation and the millstone around their necks. Her eyes that were once beautiful become something to be feared by all the inhabitants of the street.

As time passes, Umm Shooq’s daughters continue to dream of love and of completing the promise of Shooq and Hussein’s relationship with marriage. With gainful employment, Hussein asks Shooq to marry him, but she persuades him to wait to approach her parents until the year of mourning is up. When, approached, Umm Shooq, with the authority of her secret and accumulating fortune hidden in a box under the bed, high-handedly refuses the match and sends the young man packing and, even, has him beaten up. Broken-hearted, Shooq tries to kill herself by setting fire to herself. Only the appearance of her mother’s demons and the intervention of the neighbours, who get the matches off of Shooq, save her. The beating given Hussein, Umm Shooq’s demands, the poverty that people ascribe to the family, the demons, the fights and their father’s drunkenness — all these keep potential suitors away. The years pass and, as their mother’s power increases, so does their hatred of her. Their life becomes a routine of chores, looking at the television and watching life pass them by. Their closeness and love for one another grow. One day, deeply affected by the romantic kiss they see on the television, by their memories of love, they curse their mother for keeping them away from anything beautiful in life and make an unspoken decision to look for pleasure, if not for love and marriage.

People start noticing how young men hang around on the corner of the street, especially when Umm Shooq is absent. They have their suspicions but their mother’s power over all of them prevents them from looking her in the face and telling her the facts.

Umm Shooq’s last day in Cairo comes when someone recognizes her on the street. She prepares herself to challenge anyone back home who would dare confront her with the scandal. But no one does, and she enters her house with the feeling of coming to a safe place only to find the questions and mockery, as well as the anger, hatred, and rancour she expected to find on the street in the eyes of her daughters.

Still trying to prove she is the strongest, Umm Shooq tells them she did this for their future. They respond that their future died when she chased off any potential suitor, that they died from her fights and her demons and that they were buried alive in this room. Umm Shooq drags the box of money from out under the bed to prove her words, but this only enrages them further, and Shooq explodes, telling her mother that they have sold their honour for this money and that her begging has only further compromised any future they might have had. She grabs them, screaming, and they push her off, as if casting off all the fear and despair that have built up over the years.

The demons take hold of Umm Shooq and she starts slapping herself and banging her head against the wall, cursing them all the while. Shooq and Awatif move closer to their mother and, in sudden, unspoken agreement, do not move forward to help her, but keep saying : «Enough, Ma, enough!».

The people in the street stop what they’re doing to listen to what’s going on inside the flat. Abu Shooq stumbles into the street, sees the crowd in front of his flat and goes inside, followed by some of the neighbours. They come in as Umm Shooq collapses, a smear of blood on the wall behind her.

Umm Shooq is buried on the strength of the neighbours’ testimony that she had banged her head against the wall until she died. The street and its inhabitants take up their normal lives again. A week later, in the early dawn, the two ghostly figures of Shooq and Awatif emerge from the house unseen, going in the direction of the street with the tram, carrying between them a box wrapped in a shawl.