The single most frequently asked book-related question in the past two decades has been: Why do Egyptians no longer read as before? We could print volumes exploring the answers, whether they’re economic, social, cultural or political, but veteran Ezbekeya bookseller Amm Amin summed it up for us when he spoke his mind to Egypt Today last September (“Endangered Species?” by Editor Noha Mohammed, page 38).

“The toughest thing I’ve had to deal with is seeing how people’s relationships with books have changed,” Amm Amin said. “Before, books were priceless possessions treated with respect and never easily forsaken. A few days ago, I saw a group of kids stuffing their schoolbooks into a garbage can. It broke my heart.”

Ibrahim El-Moallem, the head of the Arab Publisher’s Union, couldn’t agree more. He said once in an interview that the popular aversion to books begins in the school system.

“Textbooks in most of the Arab countries are a means of torture for students. They are very badly written, very badly illustrated, poorly printed, too long and tedious.”

Hence the modern-day book-burning rituals Amin describes.

In a more dramatic commentary on the state of the Arab reader, Lebanese publisher Lokman Selim stunned the Arab intelligentsia at an international book fair in Beirut with a life-size grave and tombstone that read “The Arab reader is dead.” It’s quite a statement, especially coming from Lebanon, which is renowned for its publishing industry (the old saw was always “Egypt writes, Lebanon publishes and Iraq reads”) and which has a literacy rate of 85 percent, the highest in the Arab world. It’s nothing short of shocking that with a population of 275 million Arabic speakers in 22 countries, print runs of 10,000 are considered gargantuan.

Egypt Today Archives Naguib Mahfouz

Publishing was introduced in the region in 1850, some 400 years after it started in Europe, so according to El-Moallem, it’s still comparatively a budding industry. Today, Egypt’s 300 publishers release about 15,000 new books a year despite the many challenges, the foremost being a high illiteracy rate of 44 percent (a figure that has been repeatedly contested by CAPMAS, which claims the correct number is 29.8 percent, down 10 percent in the past six years “thanks to the earnest efforts exerted by the Egyptian government”). First Lady Suzanne Mubarak spearheaded the annual Reading For All festival in 1990, part of a bigger Family Library Project (in association with UNESCO) to foster a healthier reading culture by making books more available to people of all ages and income brackets.

The Cairo International Children’s Book Fair, which kicked off 21 years ago, is a major venue for these releases. The former appeal of its wide selection of imported volumes has dimmed following sharp price hikes triggered by the float of the pound in January 2003.

Then again, the phenomenon isn’t limited strictly to Egypt: Hardly a month goes by that one international or national newspaper somewhere in the world doesn’t decry the death of printed books and a culture of reading at the hands of the internet, video games and television.

Although the numbers suggest that the General Egyptian Book Organization’s Cairo International Book Fair is still going strong (150 publishers from 32 countries exhibited 450,000 books in 1979, while in 2003 the number of publishers shot up to 3,125 from 97 countries showing 5 million books), pundits have ceaselessly criticized the fair for having become an annual carnival of sorts where families go to enjoy a day outdoors with some ice cream and cotton candy.

In an Egypt Today feature by Senior Writer Azza Khattab (“To Be Published,” February 2002, page 70-75) one private publisher preferred to call the Exhibition el-souq (book market), noting the dearth of new books and the unpredictability of sales in a climate increasingly dominated by psuedo-religious books. Another remarked that in Egypt best sellers are often 50-plus-year-old titles (again, mostly religious classics), bound talismans that wind up untouched on dusty bookshelves.

Al Ahram Archives Mohammed Hassanein Heikal

Translation and censorship have been the subjects of much debate in the past quarter century. The need to translate books defining the contribution of Arab and Islamic cultures to human heritage became more pressing following the events of September 11. Shattering Western stereotypes had a twofold objective: on the one hand, to help reintegrate the Arab world with the “global village”; and on the other, to reassert Arab and Islamic identities.

In that sense, at least, the American University Press, which has dominated the field of translation publishing for some 20 years, has given many observers hope. In 1988, when Naguib Mahfouz was awarded the Nobel Prize, AUC already had the rights to eight of his novels, but international demand for his work paved the way for more translations. The establishment of the university’s Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature in 1996 opened new vistas for contemporary Arab writers.

The work of prize-winning authors (both Egyptian and Arab) was translated and thus made available to an international readership.

When the organizers of the upcoming Frankfurt International Book Fair, the largest publishing trade fair in the world, decided to spotlight the Arab world in its upcoming session next month, the Arab League found itself in a corner. Rumor had it that some of the members refused to pay their share of the $4.5 million budget, claims League officials denied. (Egypt Today’s Senior Writer Manal el-Jesri covered the issue in “Fair’s Fare”, May 2004, page 44-45.) The translation factor cropped up again, and El-Moallem reiterated his call for setting up a fund to bankroll the translation of Arabic books. The question is, “Will it happen this century?” Don’t expect to see Arabic books in other languages at Frankfurt; instead the Union has decided to promote books awaiting translation through catalogues in various languages with titles and authors’ bios for potential foreign publishers to pick and choose.

Issues of censorship and the extent of the powers given to Al-Azhar and the Coptic Church over what is or is not fit for public consumption have been thorny. Only last month, el-Jesri had a heart-to-heart with Al-Azhar’s director of El-Mogmaa El-Bohouth Al-Islamiya (Islamic Research Council IRC) over its renewed judicial power to seize and confiscate books that “tamper with divine material” (“The Last Say”, page 40.)

Associated Press Saddam Hussein

And like most subjects dealing with culture, morality, identity and religion, the issue of censorship boils down to the eternal chicken-or-the-egg dilemma: Is the state coercing religious authorities? Or are the centuries-old arbiters of virtue flexing their muscles in a bid to regain a vestige of their long-lost glory?

I once read somewhere that the only sure weapons against bad ideas are better ideas. Banning books is probably the most counterproductive form of intellectual terrorism that ever existed. As the bearers of ideas, books are weapons that have changed the course of history and the most powerful ones have been the most forbidden.

World’s oldest book?

In November 1984, 136 kilometers south of Cairo, a young Egyptian archaeologist discovered what may well be the oldest book in the world.

Linda Curran/Egypt Today

Dating back to the second half of the 4th century, it was found in the tomb of an 11-year-old girl, placed underneath her head. Hailed as the earliest complete book of Psalms ever found, it was hand-written in a dialect once used by Egypt’s first Christians Coptic Oxyrhynchus in Greek letters.

It took six months to separate the 252 papyrus leaves of the book, which were bound between two polished wooden covers with a leather spine, and years to restore. It was finally put on display at Cairo’s Coptic Museum in 1992.

An Acquired Taste

In February 2002, when Al-Shaab newspaper (the now suspended mouthpiece for the Islamist-oriented Labor Party) triggered a campaign against an allegedly blasphemous novel by Syrian writer Haydar Haydar titled A Banquet for Seaweed, outraged Al-Azhar students took to the streets in protest against the book.

Stephen Timpe/Egypt Today

To contain the confrontation between the students and the Central Security forces, then Dean of Al-Azhar Ahmed Omar Hashem, who was also head of Parliament’s Religion Committee, issued a statement that the novel should be burnt, shocking the intellectual community and moving the war on the streets to a war of words with the Ministry of Culture.

In the finger-pointing that followed, secularists accused Al-Azhar of devoting more attention to banning books than to fighting extremist religious thinking. In the end, an ad hoc committee of literary critics convened by Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni the real target of Al-Shaab’s campaign concluded that the book was not defamatory of God or religion.

Most intellectuals, Islamist or not, agreed that the mob mentality behind the students’ hysterical outbursts (most of whom read neither the novel nor the article) reflects, if anything, the suffocation of political life in Egypt and the pressing need for reform.

Forbidden Dreams

Less than a year after the Haydar Haydar episode, three young Egyptian novelists whose works were published by state-run institutions found themselves on the battleground. But this time Minister of Culture Farouk Hosni didn’t come to the rescue.

Not only were Tawfiq Abdel Rahman, Yasser Shaaban and Mahmoud Hamed (authors of Before and After, Children of a Romantic Error and Forbidden Dreams, respectively) hung out to dry, but Ali Abu Shady, then head of Cultural Palaces, was relieved of his post by Hosni himself, who announced on National TV that the books were immoral and obscene.

Writers and intellectuals decrying the blow to freedom of expression subsequently organized a boycott of the 2003 Cairo International Book Fair.

The “A” in AUC

The American University in Cairo came under the microscope in May 1998, when a group of alumni forced the university to stop teaching the controversial book Mohammed by French Orientalist Maxime Rodinson.

The Censorship Authority had earlier demanded the revision of some 450 books, and banned four outright for violating religious, cultural and traditional beliefs: Islamic Political Thought by Montgomery Watt, Political Islam by Joel Beinen, Muslim Extremism by Gilles Kepel and Alifa Rifaat’s short story collection Distant View of a Minaret.

The controversy came as the university itself was under attack for being “American” and “conspiring” to “corrupt the minds” of its impressionable young students.

Less than a year later, in January 1999, Samia Mehrez, an AUC professor of modern Arabic literature, came under fire for assigning her class the fictional autobiography of Moroccan writer Mohammed Choukri Al-Khubz El Hafi (For Bread Alone). Students complained to their parents about the book’s “pornographic content,” and a public campaign ensued against both Mehrez and the university.

The curriculum committee was forced to consider removing Sudanese novelist El-Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North from the following year’s reading list.

Egypt Today Archives Bibliotheca Alexandrina

Off with his head

In a February 1990 interview, British-Indian author Salman Rushdie claimed, “Books choose their authors; the act of creation is not entirely a rational and conscious one.”

His statement came exactly one year after Iran’s Ayatollah Khomeini issued a fatwa sentencing Rushdie a Muslim by birth to death for blaspheming the Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) and the Islamic faith in The Satanic Verses.

The declaration sent shockwaves across the globe. Overnight, what many literary critics considered to be a mediocre book became one of the most sought-after novels of the year, and Rushdie who had a $5 million bounty placed on his head became the most sought-after novelist of the year.

The book was banned in Egypt, Pakistan, Saudi Arabia, Somalia, Sudan, Malaysia, Qatar, Indonesia, South Africa, India and, of course, Iran. In Pakistan, five people died in riots against the book; in England, it was temporarily withdrawn from two bookstores on the advice of the police.

Ijtihad or heresy?

What began in 1993 as a routine request for promotion from Cairo University professor of Islamic studies Nasr Hamid Abu Zaid ended up as a legal battle against apostasy.

Abu Zaid was refused a professorship when Abdel Sabour Shahin, a senior colleague, rejected his academic publications in a vehement report accusing Abu Zaid of being anti-Islamic.

The issue escalated further when Cairo University President Mamoun Salama adopted Shahin’s view, helping the case snowball all the way to court when a case was filed demanding that Abu Zaid be forcibly divorced from his wife, Cairo University professor Ibtihal Younis, on the grounds that he was an apostate (and hence not a Muslim and, thus, not allowed to be married to a Muslim woman).

Although he won the first case, the Court of Cassation ruled against him and he was forced to flee with his wife to the Netherlands, where he now teaches at the University of Utrecht.

The bone of contention was his controversial reading of the Qur’an in a book titled The Concept of the Text: A Study of the Quranic Sciences, in which he argued that the Qur’an was not an absolute that transcends reality and that all interpretations of the holy text have been influenced by the historical, political and social situation of their time. His books criticized contemporary Islamic discourse for being self-serving.

Assassination: The worst form of censorship

Egypt’s Naguib Mahfouz, born in 1911, was catapaulted into international headlines when he became the first Arab to receive the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988. Six years later, he grabbed international attention once again when he was the victim of a nearly fatal stabbing by an Islamist fundamentalist.

His novel Awlad Haritna (Children of the Alley), a semi-biblical allegory with characters symbolizing Prophet Mohammed (PBUH) and Jesus, was banned when it first came out in 1959 both for its critique of the politics of the time and because it was considered blasphemous. The book remains highly contraversial, and some claim that it was the reason for the assasination attempt. Others belive that the cause lay in Mahfouz’s outspoken advocacy of peace between Egypt and Israel.

Online Morality Police

In one of the first incidents of its kind, Cairo’s vice squad arrested Al-Ahram Weekly webmaster Shohdi Naguib in an early morning raid at his home on November 22, 2001.

Naguib was charged by the internet monitoring unit affiliated with the police of “disseminating information harmful to the reputation of the country” and the “intent to corrupt public morals.”

The offense: allegedly posting a 30-year-old poem titled Kuss Ummiyat, penned by his father, the renowned poet, critic and playwright Naguib Sorour (1932-1978), on a website called wadada.net. The poem was about Egypt’s defeat in the 1967 war. Naguib’s ownership of the website was never established, but after the ordeal he decided to leave the country altogether and moved to Russia.

The untamed shrew

With her characteristic unruly mass of white bobbed hair, Nawal El Saadawy has made headlines more than any other Egyptian woman in the past two decades.

Known as the darling of the West (largely because she confirms stereotypes of the Arab world, especially concerning the treatment of women), several of her books were banned. Her book The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (1980) was banned in many Arab countries and was burned in Iran.

Her campaigns against female genital mutilation, as well as her views on veiling, polygamy and inheritance laws under shariah, led to numerous death threats after which she left Egypt for the US in 1993, where she remained for five years.

This June, she once more raised the ire of Al-Azhar, which called for a ban on her The Fall of the Imam, a book criticizing late president Sadat that was first published 20 years ago.

SilENCED FOREVER

Farag Foda dared to think out of the box, but unlike many who took this path, he didn’t make it.

In June 1992, the secularist intellectual, journalist and human rights activist was assassinated by religious extremists for advocating beefing up laws against religious terrorism and for his views in favor of normalizing relations with Israel.

His book To Be or Not To Be was banned in 1990 on the grounds that it offended religion; two weeks before he was killed, he was branded an apostate by Al-Azhar. Some intellectuals blamed his death on Foda’s brand of inflammatory rhetoric, saying it was insensitive to revered institutions and traditions.

The sound and the fury

In 1983, controversial political analyst and Nasser confidant Mohammed Hassanein Heikal published a bombshell titled Khareef El-Ghadab (Autumn of Fury), in which he analyzed the reasons behind Sadat’s assassination and the rise of political Islam.

His critique of the shifting role of the Grand Imam of Al-Azhar, who, he claimed, was increasingly being used by the regime as a tool to further its political ends, infuriated the Azhar community.

Once again, students demonstrated to have the book banned.

The other side of Saddam

The first time I heard about a literary genre called “dic-lit” (aka dictator literature reminiscent of Hitler et al. I’m sure the pun was intended) it was in relation to a novel supposedly written by Saddam Hussein in 1999 titled Zabiba Wal Malik (Zabiba and the King).

Where he found the time to author this medieval romance about a valiant Arab who saves a damsel in distress from evil conquerors was beyond me, until a malicious rumor began to circulate a year ago that the novel was actually penned by none other than our very own Gamal El-Ghitani.

In Iraq, the bookwas hailed as a great work of art and even adapted to the stage by the Iraqi National Theater. As with his other novels, The Fortified Castle and Men and a City, Saddam credited it as “a novel by its author.” The manuscript of his fourth novel Get Out, You Damned was found in the Iraqi Ministry of Culture after the US invasion. Excerpts of it appeared in Asharq Al-Awsat newspaper.

The latest buzz from Saddam’s prison cell is that he has embarked on his fifth novel, provisionally entitled The Great Awakening. Saddam’s literary career was probably inspired by fellow dictator, Libyan leader Muammar Qadafi, who published his first short story collection The Village, the Village, The Earth, the Earth and the Suicide of the Astronaut in 1998. It was followed by an international edition expediently retitled Escape to Hell and Other Stories.

Between cultures

When In the Eye of the Sun first came out in 1992, Egyptian-British novelist Ahdaf Soueif was virtually unknown. Her mammoth, largely autobiographical novel about the coming-of-age of a young girl in Cairo and England was the first book to be written in English by an Egyptian woman, a fact that became a pretext for denouncing her as not part of Arab literature at all.

Yet, despite sharp criticism and accusations that the book defamed the image of Egyptian women, Soueif was hailed by most as Egypt’s George Eliot and applauded by many readers, including Edward Said, for placing gender politics on the Arab literary map.

Love thy neighbor or else

Ithink that at some point, even my bawab was accused of anti-Semitism. Apparently, Egypt tops the list of nations espousing hostile propaganda, directed not only against the state of Israel, but against the Jewish people as a whole.

The release of a new edition of the notorious Protocols of the Elders of Zion in 2002 by Dar Akhbar El-Youm added fuel to the fire started by veteran actor Mohammed Sobhi, who based his Ramadan series Knight Without a Horse on the same book. (The series caused a sort of diplomatic crisis with the US.)

What the scholars say is a centuries-old hate screed fabricated by Czarist Russia is considered by most people in the Arab world as fact.

In November 2003, The Protocols were once more in the news when the 1976 Arabic version of the book the first translation by Mohammed Khalifa El-Tunisi was put on display next to holy Muslim and Christian books in the Manuscript Museum of the Bibliotheca Alexandrina. It was swiftly removed following vehement protests in the Western and Israeli media.

Dare to deny

Former communist and French convert to Islam Roger Garaudy was one of the most popular figures in Egypt in the 1990s. His book, The Founding Myths of Modern Israel, saw him taken to court in his homeland, where he was accused of Holocaust denial, a crime in France, Germany and some other European countries. He was convicted and fined $50,000.

First released in 1995, the book enraged Israel for challenging five Zionist “myths”: The Promised Land for Jews in Palestine; Jews as God’s Chosen People; the idea of A Land Without People for a People Without a Land; the Nazi holocaust; and the distinction between the Jewish faith and political Zionism.

Us against them

First published in the summer 1993 issue of Foreign Affairs, a quarterly released by the US Council on Foreign Relations, Samuel P. Huntington’s essay “The Clash of Civilizations” was instrumental in drawing up the (pre-emptive) US checklist for the world.

To this day, this 20th century version of The Prince, made famous in a book-length version by the same name in 1998, continues to be controversial. In it, Huntington theorized that in the post-Cold War era, world politics was entering a new phase where the overriding source of international conflict would be culture.

He posited that the differences between civilizations (religion, history, language and tradition) would be the battle lines of the future and posed the economic and military expansion of Asia and the demographic explosion of Islam as the two main threats to Western civilization.

His recommendation: that the US forge alliances with similar cultures and spread its values. And as for its relationship with “alien” cultures, it must be accommodating where possible, and confrontational if necessary.

When she started putting together the first pieces of the first of her seven-book series in the mid-1990s, J.K. Rowling, a single mother in her late twenties, couldn’t even afford a typewriter. She was divorced and living on welfare.

Today, the creator of Harry Potter tops the list as one of Britain’s wealthiest women. That first volume, Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone, was an instant hit when it was released in 1998. The subsequent five parts (three of which have been adapted to film) were successful among children and adults alike.

The magic caught on in Egypt. In Cairo, the fifth installment, Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix, sold out in four days. Although the books are perceived as having spearheaded a crusade for reading and literacy, they were challenged by some parents, who complained of the series’ dark themes and said that it promoted witchcraft and encouraged children to defy authority.

PALESTINIAN-AMERICAN Edward Said’s Orientalism, first published exactly 25 years ago, should be required reading not only for those interested in post-colonial studies, but for anyone who lives in this era.

Said, who died on September 25, 2003 at age 67, was known as one of America’s great contemporary intellectuals and a prominent speaker for the Palestinian cause. In his groundbreaking book he defined what he saw as the Western conception of the Orient: eccentric, backward, sensual, passive, a biologically and culturally inferior “Other.”

His book called into question these underlying assumptions, rejecting the racial and religious prejudices which continue to dominate the Western intellect, despite the passing of the colonial age, because the notions developed by the Orientalists had come to be institutionalized.

IN 1969, NOVELIST Sonallah Ibrahim caught the attention of the literary world when his debut novella Tilk Al Raa’iha (The Smell of It) was banned because of its political undertones and sexually explicit content.

Imprisoned under Nasser, the left-wing activist continued on his anti-establishment path while at the same time carving a niche for himself in the contemporary literary scene with books like Sharaf (Honor), Zaat, Al-Lagna (The Committee) and his latest, Amricanly.

In October 2003, Ibrahim raised havoc when, standing at the podium of the second Annual Arab Novel Festival, he refused to accept the Ministry of Culture’s prestigious Novelist of the Year award, a prize worth LE 100,000, to voice his discontent with the Ebeid government’s domestic and foreign policies. He also criticized Arab intellectuals for allowing themselves to be co-opted by Arab governments.

It wasn’t the first time Ibrahim raised a stir: In 1997, he feigned illness to avoid having to appear in person to receive a Sharaf. In 2000, he quietly turned down AUC’s Naguib Mahfouz Literary Award (even though AUC has translated and published two of his novels), and in September 2003, he boycotted the Arab Novel Festival in Morocco to protest the Israeli foreign minister’s visit to Casablanca.

PRESIDENT HOSNI MUBARAK issued a decree in 1990 to rebuild the ancient Library of Alexandria, which burned to the ground some 1,600 years ago.

In the years following Mubarak’s decree, which became known as the “Aswan Declaration,” a group of organizers raised funds and broke ground on the Bibliotheca Alexandrina, which celebrated its soft opening in 2001 with an inaugural ceremony presided over by First Lady Susanne Mubarak and library director Ismail Serageldin, a former World Bank vice-president.

Designed by four Norwegian architects, the 11-story circular structure with an inclined, sun-lit roof was built with gray granite etched with hieroglyphics. Only a stone’s throw away from the site of the original library, the 40,000 square meter facility cost about $230 million to complete and is now home to a planetarium, state-of-the-art IT facilities, a lab for the restoration of ancient manuscripts, museums, theaters and conference halls.

Today, it’s backers are touting the Bibliotheca as a “fulcrum for cross-cultural dialogue” and a “bridge between East and West.”

With a capacity to house up to 8 million books, manuscripts and rare volumes, it may well become Egypt’s equivalent of the Library of Congress. Many valuable collections have already been donated by the governments of France, Italy, Spain and Russia, among others, as gestures of support.

Since its official opening in October 2002 (postponed from April in a show of solidarity with the Palestinian people after the rise in Israeli violence in the occupied territories) the Bibliotheca has lived up to the hype, hosting conferences, workshops and art exhibits and attracting high-profile figures from the fields of politics, arts, and humanities.

In March 2003, a fire broke out in a fourth-floor administrative office. Authorities say a short-circuit caused the accident, which saw 29 people taken to hospital for treatment for smoke inhalation. Sixteen fire engines put out the blaze in 45 minutes. The mysterious fire didn’t look good, but optimists thought it might have a silver lining: to fend off the evil eye, perhaps?

The most recent highlight at the Bibliotheca: The national conference on reform, which resulted in the Alexandria Declaration. et