Egypt hurt by banned books

2001-02-01 09:41

Cairo, Egypt - As he pores over a map of booths at the Cairo International Book Fair, 18-year-old Ahmed Mohammed explains he has definite ideas about literature. Some books, he says, can be dangerous.

"Some of them promote vice," says the student of religion at Cairo's Al-Azhar University, mainstream Islam's most prestigious seat of learning. "If you read explicit sexual material, you'll be tempted."

Mohammed - looking like a young cleric-to-be in turban and galabiya, a traditional ankle-length gown - agrees with the Egyptian government's recent decision to ban three novels. But pulling the books off shelves has raised a furore among writers that's spilled over to the book fair, the Arab world's biggest literary event.

President Hosni Mubarak defended the move before the fair opened last week - saying books published in Egypt must be in line with the country's "religious and cultural values" - and criticised protests by writers and intellectuals as unwarranted.

"There was no need for such a fuss," Mubarak said.

Articles in the press and literary journals have lambasted the decision by Culture Minister Farouk Hosni as a knuckling under to Muslim fundamentalists.

Although Egypt's population of 65 million is predominantly Muslim, the fundamentalists have been sidelined from any major role in government under Mubarak's rule. But Egyptian intellectuals have frequently argued that the government is too quick to ban books, movies and TV shows to boost its own Islamic image before the conservative public.

MubarakÆs move appeared designed to avoid a repeat of bloody clashes last May between protesting students and police over "Banquet for Seaweed", a novel by Syrian writer Haider Haider. The novel, considered a 20th century classic and reissued by the Culture Ministry last year, was deemed blasphemous.

After the latest book banning, a number of Culture Ministry officials resigned in protest. A group of writers signed a petition saying they would boycott panel discussions and readings at the two-week book fair. Some writers scoffed that the bureaucrats would next be declaring war on the classic "Thousand and One Nights", which includes some decidedly bawdy tales.

The three novels that were banned - "Before And After" by Tawfiq Abdel-Khaliq, "Forbidden Dreams" by Mahmoud Hamed and "Children of the Romantic Error" by Yasser Shaaban - had been published by the Culture Ministry, which is Egypt's largest book publisher. When he banned the works earlier this month, Hosni also fired the head of the department that published them.

Of the three works, "Before and After" received the lion's share of attention in the debate.

Its main character is a retired civil servant who recounts social and political changes in Egypt over the past 50 years through childhood experiences in a Nile Delta village and later in the capital, Cairo. His recount is peppered with references to early sexual experiences and includes a scene in which a woman takes off her clothes and has sex with the main character in his hospital bed.

The novel sold 1 700 copies before it was banned. Abdel-Khaliq, the author, insists the hospital scene "is part and parcel of the literary buildup of the novel".

Others came to the defence of "Before and After" and the two other novels.

Writing in the latest edition of Cairo's English-language Al-Ahram Weekly, Ferial Ghazoul, a literature professor at the American University in Cairo, said the banning diminished Egypt's standing as a leading Arab nation.

"These three works are experimental and succeed in varying degrees.... The accusation of pornography is completely inapplicable to these works," she wrote.

The independent weekly newspaper Sawt al-Umma (Voice of the Nation) published a photo montage of Culture Minister Hosni - a painter trained in France and Italy - wearing the traditional turban and long beard of a Muslim cleric, an allusion to charges that the banning pandered to Muslim fundamentalists.

Writing in a literary weekly last week, leading novelist Gamal Al-Ghitani said: "The minister has caused grievous damage not only to Egyptian culture, but to Egyptian politics too."

- SAPA