Obituary: Khairi the Symbol has Fallen "Cairo's cannabis-smoking literati relied during the 1990s on an African bango supplier named Soliman. When Soliman was finally arrested, confusion reigned, frustrated 'owners of the high humour' (as the Arabic expression has it) scoured the lengths and breadths of the city for a suitable alternative. The terminology of the politically committed 1960s -- during which hashish was both widely available and affordable -- was used to describe the predicament of cannabis deprivation in the apolitical 1990s. It was said, in the most tragic of tones, that 'Soliman the symbol has fallen,' the implication being that with his disappearance an entire way of life had vanished, inducing a sense of loss comparable to that felt upon the collapse of the Soviet Union. Soliman had been one of the few remaining expressions of Sixties consciousness, and now he too was gone." Thus this writer, on the publication of one of many books by (31 January 1938-9 September 2011) in July 2000: The Prince of the Vagabond Novelists as he was recently called in the Egyptian press and perhaps the most prolific �ê" and profuse �ê" of an intimate, grassroots history-oriented wing of the Generation of the Sixties, was born in the village of Shabas Amir in Kafr Al-Sheikh. He ranged far and wide as a struggling young man, notably as a street peddler in Alexandria, before he settled down to the literary life in Cairo in the Seventies. He was the recipient of numerous prizes including the State Merit Award in 2005 and the AUC's Naguib Mahfouz Medal in 2003, and he worked as a radio critic and a theatre professor besides being a columnist and literary portrait writer. His brand of historical narrative has been described variously as magic realism and contemporary folk epic, and his works (Al Watad and Sariq Al-Farah, for example) were popularised as films and television serials. Shalabi wrote over 70 books, but it is for his novels �ê" many of which are published by Dar El Sherouk and a number of which are available in English �ê" that he is widely celebrated. Youssef Rakha
