No more chit chat on the Nile

No one provides a better example of the vexed relationship of the state vis-à-vis cultural production, writes Samia Mehrez*
As an Egyptian writer, Naguib Mahfouz has always been acutely aware of the relationship between literature and politics and of its constraining, perhaps even compromising effect on cultural production in general and on the creative writer in particular. He has always been a strong believer in the power of the written word. For Mahfouz, writers are soothsayers; their role is to tell the "truth." In order for writers to perform this role they need their autonomy. Mahfouz argues that the state can only stand to gain if it provides and ensures freedom of expression. For it is through the written word of the creative writer that authorities can accede to the "consciousness of the nation," its dreams and its disillusionment. On one level, writers may be seen as informers: their words record the unspoken, silenced underground history of a nation at its various moments of historical, political and social transformation. If they are critical, it is to be constructive; if they are controversial it is to provoke debate; if they are outspoken, it is for the collective good. Such is the idealistic vision of the father of Egyptian realism.
However, given the interdependence between the cultural and political fields in Egypt writers have ironically sought the patronage and protection of the state in their attempts to acquire such autonomy. The continued frustrating unpredictability of the state's position vis-à-vis cultural production has always rendered this relationship, to say the least, problematic. No one provides a better example of this vexed relationship than Naguib Mahfouz himself. Mahfouz's entire literary history is not only an actual enactment of his beliefs but a relentless and dangerous strategic exercise in their fulfillment as well. Indeed, the Nobel laureate's literary biography provides an instructive reading in the problematic relationship between power and knowledge in general and the state and its liberal, secular intellectuals, in particular, over close to a century in Egypt's modern history. The various potentially explosive moments in Mahfouz's career confirm that even though he learned early on that the role of writer/ soothsayer is paved with thorns the Nobel laureate never abandoned his attempts to expand the limits of freedom of expression despite repeated episodes of intimidation and censorship.
One early example that may be sited in this regard is Mahfouz's Al-Qahira Al-Jadida (New Cairo) published in 1943. In this novel Mahfouz critically depicted Egyptian society during the Thirties. He exposed political and moral corruption in a country submerged in poverty, hypocrisy, and opportunism through the story of a government employee who became a pimp, in order to advance in the bureaucracy. This particular story happened to coincide with a real scandal among the Egyptian ministers at the time. This "coincidence" earned Mahfouz an interrogation by the Mufti of the Ministry of Waqf, Sheikh Ahmed Hussein (Taha Hussein's brother) who also volunteered advice to the young Mahfouz: "Why don't you write about love, and stay away from these dangerous things." Similarly, when Zuqaq Al- Midaqq (Midaq Alley) was published in 1947, Mahfouz was advised, by Ibrahim El-Mazni (the well-known writer who was also responsible for the decision to grant Mahfouz the Arabic Language Symposium prize in 1946 for his novel Khan Al-Khalili) to stay away from realism: "All the calamities in Zuqaq Al-Midaqq will be dumped on you. So be careful."
Such advice by powerful symbols in the political and intellectual fields did not go unheeded by the rising novelist and may actually partly explain the shift that occurs in Mahfouz's literary output, during the late fifties, from realism to symbolism. Perhaps the example that best narrates Mahfouz's shifting strategies in his confrontation with, and manipulation of the authorities is that of his banned novel Awlad Haratina (Children of Our Alley, translated into English as Children of Gebelawi), published in 1959. Three months after the 1952 revolution Mahfouz had already completed his chef d'oeuvre: The Trilogy, a monument in social realism. This was followed by seven watchful, silent years during which Mahfouz did not write. His publication of Awlad Haratina, a work that defies unilateral interpretation, invites a careful analysis of the relationship between Mahfouz's seven-year silence with the advent of a new political regime and his shift from the social realism of The Trilogy to the symbolic mode of Awlad Haratina. If The Trilogy can be read as a social history of Egypt between the two world wars, then one possible reading of Awlad Haratina suggested by Mahfouz himself is that it provides a symbolic history of Egypt after the revolution. The disquieting conditions of the timeless symbolic hara (alley) and the imposing godlike figure, Gebelawi were, according to Mahfouz, his way of critiquing the shortcomings of the new regime while avoiding possible censorship.
Awlad Haratina first appeared in serialized form on the pages of Al-Ahram, whose editor-in- chief at the time was Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the man responsible for transforming Egypt's leading daily newspaper into an intellectual fortress by inviting the country's leading writers and intellectuals to join its editorial staff. Even though Mahfouz himself offers us a political reading of Awlad Haratina, the prevailing reading at the time was overwhelmingly religious. The successive characters in the novel were read as representations of the successive prophets of monotheism and the political parody was lost to the dominant religious one. Al-Azhar condemned the work as blasphemous and demanded that it be banned. However, the state, seeking to preserve its own power in this controversial situation between the cultural and the religious fields, stepped in to broker a deal: the novel would be banned in Egypt but Mahfouz would have the freedom to publish it elsewhere.
Another equally instructive moment in the relationship between the cultural and the political fields in Egypt is the story behind the publication in 1966 of Tharthara fawqa Al-Nil (Chit Chat on the Nile, translated into English as Adrift on the Nile). This is the novel that shocked the Egyptian audience with its daring representation of defeatism and escapism in Egyptian society just before the 1967 war with Israel and came to acquire a "prophetic" nature in the aftermath of the defeat. Tharthara fawqa Al-NiI brought Mahfouz into direct confrontation with President Nasser himself. The novel is set in a houseboat on the Nile, where a group of men and women, representing various walks of life (a civil servant, a lawyer, a young woman student, a house-wife, an actor, and a journalist), intent on escaping a bleak outside reality, convene to indulge in drugs, sexual promiscuity, and politically satiric hallucinations. The element of political parody did not escape the authorities of the sixties and Mahfouz was seen as having gone beyond the red lines. However, threats of censorship subsided thanks to the intervention of the minister of culture, Tharwat Okasha who, when ushered by the president to voice his opinion, promptly defended the novel and successfully convinced Nasser that: "if art is not allowed this kind of freedom, it will not be art."
It is precisely because such autonomy for the literary field was never realised that the story of Awlad Haratina came back to haunt Mahfouz 30 years later, in the aftermath of the Nobel Prize. The Swedish Academy had listed Awlad Haratina as one of the milestones in Mahfouz's career that had earned him international recognition. The special attention paid to the banned novel brought the fate of its publication in Egypt again into question. A campaign was launched by some of Egypt's leading critics to obtain a green light from Al-Azhar for publication, reiterating that there had been no legal action against the book. In fact, the Egyptian evening paper Al-Masa' began to serialize the novel once more. The moment was indisputably a permissive one, but Mahfouz, sensitive to the political climate of the late eighties, declined, asking that Al-Masa' stop publication.
Despite this compromise, or perhaps because of it, the entire episode continued to gain momentum with the appearance on stage of the Salman Rushdie Affair which almost coincided with the Nobel Prize. Islamic fundamentalist groups in Egypt made associations between Awlad Haratina and The Satanic Verses that culminated in a fatwa by Omar Abdel-Rahman, the Mufti of Al-Jihad- now serving a life sentence in the United States, in which he essentially decreed that had Naguib Mahfouz been punished for his blasphemy 30 years ago Salman Rushdie would not have emerged.
On 14 October, 1994, as the Nobel Laureate walked out of his apartment building he was stabbed in the neck by a young Islamist who was acting on the fatwa pronounced by Omar Abdel- Rahman six years earlier. The brutality of the attack shocked the entire world but its impact and signification were even greater for the Egyptian intelligentsia. Suddenly, the Nobel Laureate's literary biography became symbolic of the end of the unrealised dream not just for him as an individual writer, but for an entire cultural field that continues to be stabbed in its pursuit of autonomy.
* The writer teaches Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo
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