A literary struggle between liberals and conservatives
May 13th 2010 | CAIRO
WHEN Richard Burton, a 19th-century British adventurer and linguist, published his translation of “The Thousand and One Nights” in 1885, many complained about the salacious scenes that previous bowdlerised editions had omitted. “We must remember that grossness and indecency…are matters of time and place,” wrote Mr Burton in his introduction, a year before he was knighted. “What is offensive in England is not so in Egypt.”
Some of today’s Egyptians are acting as yesterday’s British Victorians. A group of Islamist lawyers calling itself “Lawyers Without Shackles” is taking Egypt’s ministry of culture to court for issuing a new edition of the Nights that is more faithful to the 1835 Cairene manuscripts that form the cornerstone of the canonical version of this famously fluid text. As in the West, various versions are available in Egypt, with the most popular ones aimed at children. A new distinctly adult-oriented one quickly sold out its first print-run, and the activist lawyers are trying to ensure there is no second printing. They are appealing to Article 178 of Egypt’s penal code, which punishes “with imprisonment for a period of two years anyone who publishes literature or pictures offensive to public decency”.
Islamist Egyptians, going back to 1985, have tried to ban the bawdier editions of the Nights. Samia Mehrez, a professor at the American University of Cairo who recently wrote a book called “Egypt’s Culture Wars”, says the lawsuits serve a political rather than cultural purpose. “Cultural icons have been used as pawns in the political game between the state and the Islamists,” she says. “It is the Islamists’ way of getting back at the state, by embarrassing it, for the violence it inflicts on them.”
But it is not only Muslims who are twitchy. Yusef Zeidan, who won the Arabic Booker prize last year for his novel “Azazil”, is under attack from Christian activist lawyers emulating their Islamist peers also by citing Article 178. “Azazil”, meaning a devil, was an unlikely bestseller. Its theme is the fifth-century debate between Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, over various arcane ecclesiastical and theological issues. Mr Zeidan, a Muslim scholar of religion, backs the Nestorians, depicting Cyril as fanatical and intolerant. This has upset some Coptic Christians, for whom Cyril is a revered founding father.
Gamal al-Ghitani, a leading novelist who edited the latest version of the Nights, has rallied fellow intellectuals in a defence of the tales in the literary magazine he runs, Akhbar al-Adab. Some think it preposterous to ban a work of literature that many in the rest of world admire as a shining symbol of Arab culture.
The authorities, including the minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, have remained silent in both cases, thereby irking liberal campaigners. But last time he spoke out, against an attempt in 2000 to ban a novel, “Banquet for Seaweed”, by a Syrian, Haydar Haydar, some Egyptian students rioted in protest against the book, which contains irreverent allusions to the Koran by jocular atheists. Still, the publishers stopped printing the novel, and even classical authors such as Abu Nuwas, a medieval poet known for his homoerotic verse who fled to Egypt from Baghdad because of censorship, were no longer published. This time, Mr Hosni has kept mum but the second print run of “The Thousand and One Nights” is going ahead, pending a court verdict. Judging by recent trends, the Islamist lawyers’ case may be rejected.
These controversies have arisen just as publishing in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world has perked up, partly thanks to enterprising independent publishers and to a growing Western interest in Arab literature. A spate of new books, many of them tackling taboos, have appeared. Some conservatives have grumbled, especially about a trend towards the sexually explicit, but nothing akin to the agitation against “Banquet for Seaweed” has occurred. Despite efforts by the Islamists to invoke the law, the tide in Egypt’s culture wars may slowly be turning against them
May 13th 2010 | CAIRO
WHEN Richard Burton, a 19th-century British adventurer and linguist, published his translation of “The Thousand and One Nights” in 1885, many complained about the salacious scenes that previous bowdlerised editions had omitted. “We must remember that grossness and indecency…are matters of time and place,” wrote Mr Burton in his introduction, a year before he was knighted. “What is offensive in England is not so in Egypt.”
Some of today’s Egyptians are acting as yesterday’s British Victorians. A group of Islamist lawyers calling itself “Lawyers Without Shackles” is taking Egypt’s ministry of culture to court for issuing a new edition of the Nights that is more faithful to the 1835 Cairene manuscripts that form the cornerstone of the canonical version of this famously fluid text. As in the West, various versions are available in Egypt, with the most popular ones aimed at children. A new distinctly adult-oriented one quickly sold out its first print-run, and the activist lawyers are trying to ensure there is no second printing. They are appealing to Article 178 of Egypt’s penal code, which punishes “with imprisonment for a period of two years anyone who publishes literature or pictures offensive to public decency”.
Islamist Egyptians, going back to 1985, have tried to ban the bawdier editions of the Nights. Samia Mehrez, a professor at the American University of Cairo who recently wrote a book called “Egypt’s Culture Wars”, says the lawsuits serve a political rather than cultural purpose. “Cultural icons have been used as pawns in the political game between the state and the Islamists,” she says. “It is the Islamists’ way of getting back at the state, by embarrassing it, for the violence it inflicts on them.”
But it is not only Muslims who are twitchy. Yusef Zeidan, who won the Arabic Booker prize last year for his novel “Azazil”, is under attack from Christian activist lawyers emulating their Islamist peers also by citing Article 178. “Azazil”, meaning a devil, was an unlikely bestseller. Its theme is the fifth-century debate between Nestorius, Patriarch of Constantinople, and Cyril, Patriarch of Alexandria, over various arcane ecclesiastical and theological issues. Mr Zeidan, a Muslim scholar of religion, backs the Nestorians, depicting Cyril as fanatical and intolerant. This has upset some Coptic Christians, for whom Cyril is a revered founding father.
Gamal al-Ghitani, a leading novelist who edited the latest version of the Nights, has rallied fellow intellectuals in a defence of the tales in the literary magazine he runs, Akhbar al-Adab. Some think it preposterous to ban a work of literature that many in the rest of world admire as a shining symbol of Arab culture.
The authorities, including the minister of culture, Farouk Hosni, have remained silent in both cases, thereby irking liberal campaigners. But last time he spoke out, against an attempt in 2000 to ban a novel, “Banquet for Seaweed”, by a Syrian, Haydar Haydar, some Egyptian students rioted in protest against the book, which contains irreverent allusions to the Koran by jocular atheists. Still, the publishers stopped printing the novel, and even classical authors such as Abu Nuwas, a medieval poet known for his homoerotic verse who fled to Egypt from Baghdad because of censorship, were no longer published. This time, Mr Hosni has kept mum but the second print run of “The Thousand and One Nights” is going ahead, pending a court verdict. Judging by recent trends, the Islamist lawyers’ case may be rejected.
These controversies have arisen just as publishing in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world has perked up, partly thanks to enterprising independent publishers and to a growing Western interest in Arab literature. A spate of new books, many of them tackling taboos, have appeared. Some conservatives have grumbled, especially about a trend towards the sexually explicit, but nothing akin to the agitation against “Banquet for Seaweed” has occurred. Despite efforts by the Islamists to invoke the law, the tide in Egypt’s culture wars may slowly be turning against them
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