Perhaps Egypt's late eminent man of letters Louis Awad was the first to break the taboo when he decided to publish his autobiography in the mid-1980s. Awad, who was a great professor of English literature and a prolific literary critic and writer, deliberately -" and violently -" dismantled all the conservative traditions and societal rules which hampered his predecessors' bids to let go of their bitter rivalries. In his autobiography, Awad vented his spleen on society, his university colleagues and many of his ungrateful students. He also scandalised his family, especially his brother Ramses (also a notable professor of English). Worse, Awad claimed that his religion (Christianity) and his leftist ideologies were a stumbling block to academic promotion and State awards for his eminent achievements. Although Awad's autobiography rippled the stagnant waters of Egypt's intellectual community, his successors have appeared to think twice and have revised their autobiographies several times before sending them to the print house. There seems to be a tendency among many writers of autobiographies to sing their own praises, boasting of their talents, while stressing their childhood determination to live up to the expectations of their families and teachers. Admittedly, they also sing the praises of the people who have helped for example ministers and undersecretaries, if they worked for official institutions. Perhaps, Awad's radical understanding of the role of this kind of literary genre (autobiography) was the product of his immense knowledge of Western culture and literature. As he prepared to jot down his memoirs, he must have decided to walk in the footsteps of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Oscar Wilde, whose autobiographies, lewd in some respect, sent a shiver down the spines of Western societies and prompted large-scale reactions from sociologists, politicians and educational strategists. In a bid to find reasons for the reluctance of Arab men of letters to reveal their bad and good sides in their autobiographies, Saeed el-Kafrawi, a noted literary figure, refuses to ignore the restrictive norms and rules in conservative Arab communities. He also thinks that Arab societies remain unable to come to terms with the radical disclosure of truth, irrespective of an author's motive for revealing the truth. "Some men have managed to overcome this obstacle by seeking refuge in novels or drama," el-Kafrawi says. "The case in hand is the novel Sara by the late Mahmoud Abbas el-Aqqad [a notable thinker and philosopher]." Egypt's Nobel-laureate novelist Naguib Mahfouz was also suspected of ‘autobiographing' when he published his famous Solasiyya (Cairo Trilogy). "Gifted writers use novels to reveal facts and realities about their lives and societies," el-Kafrawi comments. Autobiographies remained absent from the libraries in Arab countries until 1855, the year when a Muslim clergyman named Sheikh Ahmed Fares el-Shediak published his memoirs ��" in Paris of all places. In 1916, the eminent man-of-letters Abdel-Rahman Shokri came up with a confession about his life, describing the hurdles he'd surmounted in order to carve out a niche for himself in Egypt's literary community.
