MINISTER of Culture Farouk Hosni will inaugurate the third round of the Arab Novel Conference, organised by the ministry's Supreme Council of Culture under the title "The novel and history" this Saturday. A high-profile event featuring some 200 novelists and critics from across the Arab world as well as several high-ranking Arabists besides, the "novel conference" -- as it tends to be referred to -- has come to represent the clash point of oppositional intellectuals and the cultural establishment since novelist Sonalla Ibrahim made a spectacle of refusing to accept the second round's award -- deemed one of the most prestigious honours in Arabic literature -- in October 2003. Of the four senior novelists rumoured to be the nominees for the award this year -- Egyptian novelists Edwar El- Kharrat and Khairi Shalabi, Libyan novelist Ibrahim Al- Kawni and Lebanese novelist Elias Khouri -- the latter is a somewhat surprising choice given his stance on Ibrahim's elaborately orchestrated refusal to accept the award. An oppositional figure since the time of Nasser, Ibrahim had kept quiet about his intention on being informed of the council's decision, delivering a harshly critical statement -- being an arm of the regime, the establishment, he said, "does not have the credibility with which to grant such an award" -- from the podium during the award-giving ceremony in the presence of Hosni, critic Gaber Asfour, the chairman of the council, and the jury. Khouri was among those who hailed the speech and the manner in which it was delivered as the first truly engaged act to be undertaken by an Arab intellectual for decades, backing not only Ibrahim's views but his independence of spirit and cunning approach. In response to Ibrahim's spectacle Asfour and Hosni had claimed that in thus refusing the award, Ibrahim was in effect humiliating jury members -- respected Arab writers, all, many of them oppositional figures -- and pointed to previous occasions on which he had accepted the patronage of the establishment -- a line of thinking that finds support in the fact that many intellectuals continue to occupy government posts even as they criticise the regime. Such complex relations between intellectuals and the establishment are not always thought to imply the cooption of the figures in question, since the cultural institution, while never clashing with government figures or edicts, is thought to enjoy a greater degree of freedom than other arms of the regime, being a forum for self expression and serious-minded research. It is largely in such a framework of thought that the third novel conference will operate, aiming to establish the independence of the cultural institution, or rather its loyalty to the intellectual sphere. In making statements about the present round, Asfour announced that it has been dedicated to the late novelist Abdel-Rahman Mounif, an oppositional figure if ever there was one, who received the first round's award in 1998. More pertinent to the debates surrounding this round's award is the widely accepted belief that the Council is eager to give the award to an Egyptian, as if to make up for the embarrassment of Ibrahim -- a conjecture that automatically excludes Khouri and Al-Kawni. Of the two remaining nominees, since Shalabi will be receiving the state merit prize for his lifetime's achievement later this year, it is El-Kharrat who will likely receive the award. (It has also been said that Ibrahim Aslan, another towering talent, was not nominated because he had already received the state merit prize.) The event provides for some 35 seminars and 60 testimonies, with highlights including Fouad Al-Takarli on "the Iraqi intellectual under fire", Mohsen Al-Mousawi on the novel as history, Ibrahim Fathi on the death of grand narratives in the Egyptian novel, Ahdaf Soueif on her experience of the historical novel, Bensalem Hemeish on "the novel as a search for lost history" and Marilyn Booth on female novelists' diaries in the 1920s.
