JULY 2000, pages 32, 84

Cairo Communiqué

Dispute Over Controversial Book A Banquet for Seaweed Becomes Increasingly Politicized in Egypt

By Andrew Hammond

It’s hard to know whether or not to interpret the recent storm in Egypt over a novel denounced by the highest authority in Sunni Islam as an affront to Islam, and which caused a riot between police and several thousand religious students on May 8, as an example of Egypt and the Arab world’s kulturkampf between secularism and Islamism.

On one level it was clearly political. Al-Shaab newspaper is just about the only major outlet left for political Islam in Egypt. It gives editorial space to the banned but moderate mainstream Islamist Muslim Brotherhood. Indeed, if the banned group had card-carrying members, Al-Shaab editor-in-chief Magdy Hussein would probably fit the description. But with the country’s jails still packed full of religiously conservative youth detained indefinitely during the failed insurrection by radical Islamist groups in the 1990s, and the government promoting in public a more and more Western-friendly secular agenda, “political Islam” has felt that it is on the run of late.

Al-Shaab’s temptation has been to go hell for leather in long-drawn-out and vicious press campaigns against ministers associated in some way with the Western secular agenda and the squashing of political Islam. They have included ex-Interior Minister Hassan Al Alfi, who championed a crackdown on the Muslim Brotherhood that started in 1995; Agriculture Minister Yousef Wali, the only minister to have actively and openly cooperated with Israel since the 1981 peace treaty; and Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, the happy bachelor minister who prints books like Syrian writer Haider Haider’s A Banquet for Seaweed ,that provoked May’s riots.

“The political trend they represent feels weak,” says Gamal Ghitani, novelist and editor-in-chief of Egypt’s main literary weekly Akhbar Al Adab (Literary News). “It was very strong for years but the government succeeded in knocking them out. Now they [Islamists] have turned on culture.”

Refai Ahmed Taha, a senior member-in-exile of the Gamaa Islamiya—the group that spearheaded the anti-state violence of the 1990s—issued a statement saying the closure of the paper “shows the repressive, dictatorial and illogical practices of the regime.”

But the campaign against Wali landed editor Magdy Hussein and two other Shaab journalists in jail earlier this year. It wasn’t the first time. They were jailed during the Alfi campaign in 1998, but released by an appeals court months later.

Freedom of expression needs defending, in the current climate.

This time, though, it looks like they will have to serve a full two years. Commentators are convinced the paper and the Labor Party that produces it launched a campaign against the Haider novel—with headlines such as “God is great! Who will give me his allegiance that he is prepared to die?” that came close to calling for blood—to pressure the government to release them. Raising the heat a little over religious issues might also stand the Islamists in good stead for parliamentary elections expected to take place in November, though it’s almost a dead certainty they were going to be excluded by the authorities anyway.

Magdy Hussein and his uncle, Adel Hussein, a prominent Marxist intellectual who turned to Islamic politics in the 1980s, have used the party and paper as a means to mobilize the masses. It’s a view of politics they derive from the quasi-fascist Young Egypt party of turbulent 1930s Egypt, founded by Ahmed Hussein, Adel’s brother and Magdy’s father. Adel Hussein is largely viewed as someone who turned Islamist when he saw the way the wind was blowing in the region after the 1979 Revolution in Iran.

The government got its revenge. Al-Shaab has been closed down after an internal dispute within the Labor Party conveniently came to a head, allowing an official committee that regulates political parties to suspend its activities on May 20 pending a resolution of the leadership fracas in the party. So as far as the state is concerned, it’s case solved.

But is it? The political and intellectual community is bitterly divided about an old issue—a national consensus on immutable religious principles and the state’s power to make sure individual citizens do not violate them. Writer Mohammed Abbas, who launched Al-Shaab’s campaign against the book, thinks Egypt has betrayed its believing masses by allowing a minority of atheist Western secularists to dominate cultural life.

Religion Under Siege

“Secularists are less than two percent of the Egyptian population, but they take at least 99 percent of the positions in broadcasting, television and the papers,” he says. “The religious trend is completely under siege in Egypt. It’s a form of betrayal of the people.”

Islamists who try to address the middle ground of public opinion have tried to argue that the book is of such bad standard and irrelevance that it isn’t worth the angst—a mantra similar to the one mouthed by Islamists after a court forcibly divorced Cairo University professor Nasr Abu Zeid from his wife in 1995, claiming his research proved he was an apostate from Islam and so could not be married to a Muslim woman.

“Al-Shaab went too far in criticizing. It is not worth the demonstrations,” prominent columnist Fahmy Howeidy says. “But the writers [defending Haider] violated certain things which should be respected in this society. Society is against the things they are defending.” Egypt is, after all an Islamic state, Howeidy says—which, following the words of the constitution, is true, despite the contrary image of modern secular nationalism the regime likes to portray to the outside world.

Even commentators not viewed as sympathetic to political Islam have said liberal writers have gone too far. “What is the wisdom of publishing deviant literary works by sick people suffering from psychological and sexual diseases?” poet Farouk Goweida raged in the state-owned Al Ahram of May 7. “The fashion of writing about the body, the painting of the body, the theater of the body, the cinema of the body, novels of the body—all of these have nothing to do with real art.”

The liberal intellectuals have little faith that the government is going to do anything to stem the tide of religious conservatism and defend freedom of expression. But it needs defending, in the current climate.

A press campaign two years ago against the inclusion of Muhammad, Frenchman Maxime Rodinson’s biography of the Prophet of Islam, on a history course reading list at the American University in Cairo (AUC) has led to the banning of over 100 titles at the AUC Press and bookstores on the orders of Ministry of Information censors.

Thirteen titles have been removed from the AUC library and 19 have been restricted to library use only, making Egypt’s self-declared font of higher education look increasingly similar to the tertiary education centers in the rest of the country. And one writer, Salaheddin Mohsen, is currently in jail awaiting a state security court trial on charges of trying to spread atheist beliefs via his writings. The charge sheet says he admitted during questioning that he “denies the existence of God and does not recognize the Islamic religion.”

Also indicted is prominent novelist Ibrahim Aslan, interrogated one night by state security prosecutors from 10 p.m. to 6 a.m. because he had recommended that A Banquet for Seaweed should be published in last November’s reprint. It was the reissue of this 17-year-old book that caused all the fuss—ironically, as part of a series meant to showcase highpoints in modern Arabic literature.

Aslan says the whole furor shows an acute schizophrenia in the political, religious and social discourse in the country—between Islamism and secularism, one might say. The Islamists do not understand modern literature, he argues. “They deal with novels as they deal with books on geography, history or aviation. They stop at sentences and take them as a sign of the whole work,” he asserts.

The novel, which looks at the failure of Arab revolutionary movements in Iraq and Algeria in the aftermath of the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, contains phrases describing God as a “failed artist” and Prophet Muhammad as a womanizer. Ironically, however, Aslan says the comments are spoken by an obviously atheist character in a novel whose overall message is the triumph of religious faith.

Abbas isn’t having any of it. “When the imaginary person in a novel talks about a real person it is very serious. This is libel and slander of God, the Prophets and the Qur’an, because they are real,” he says. It’s up to the “believers whose feelings are insulted” to litigate on their behalf.

For Abbas, art isn’t really meant to reflect life. “With a novel you have got to raise the [moral] level of the population,” he says. For the most part, art does not in fact completely mirror reality—fiction in film and state-dominated television never uses swear words or deals directly with domestic politics.

But this book goes beyond even that, Abbas says. In one section, the Prophet Moses imagines that God descends to occupy the body of a prostitute with whom Moses is having sexual intercourse, Abbas says, but whether it’s the novel’s atheist anti-hero, Moses, or the author speaking is not clear. Swearing is one thing, but “you’ll never find anyone who imagines sexual intercourse with God.”

They might be politically cornered, but with Al-Azhar on their side, Abbas and his supporters have the upper hand in the literary debate. A statement by Sheikh Mohammed Sayed Tantawy of Al Azhar University came close to denouncing Haider as an apostate. The book “goes beyond what is universally accepted about religion,” the Tantawy statement said. “The novel is full of phrases and expressions which scorn and insult all sacred tenets.”

Tantawy, like everyone else who has taken part in the debate, has almost certainly not read the work in question. That’s not a surprise since it was taken off the streets after only some 1,200 copies from last November’s print run were sold, though bootleg copies continue to be sold for up to 200 Egyptian pounds ($57). The last irony is that the novel has been around in Egypt, Jordan, Lebanon and Haider’s native Syria since 1983, the year he penned a tome aimed then at intellectuals which now is in the eye of a particularly vicious storm.

Meanwhile, other writers are drawing attention to the significance of the dispute to public discourse in Egypt. Egypt’s leading leftist intellectual, Mohammed Sid Ahmed, wrote that progress is based on the assumption that “sacred tenets” essentially do not exist.

“Take the field of mathematics, which is no longer an ever-growing consistent structure whose component elements are irrefutable, but has undecidability at its very core,” he wrote in Al Ahram of May 25. “This is a challenge to the very logic we are accustomed to.” Given the current mass revival of that logic, a state of schizophrenia seems destined to last for a long time to come.

Andrew Hammond is a free-lance journalist based in Cairo.