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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 5 - 11 August 1999 Issue No. 441
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Profile Focus Interview Features Travel Living Sports Time Out Chronicles People Cartoons Letters The Prophet is back
By Nadia Abou El-Magd
In response to a spate of articles in the British media alleging that censorship has banned more than 90 books in Egypt, Minister of Information Safwat El-Sherif has dismissed such reports as "sheer fabrication with no basis of truth."
It was the British daily The Independent that launched the attack last week with an article entitled "The Prophet falls foul of Egyptian thought police." The article charged that among the books that were banned is The Prophet by Gibran Khalil Gibran, which it described as "one of the most inspirational works to come from any modern poet in the Arab world." The article was picked up later by the BBC.
The Prophet, published in the early 1920s, is a visionary text that fuses notions quarried from both Christianity and Sufi Islam, producing a personal mythology that has proved a perennial bestseller. The author of The Prophet, Gibran, is a Lebanese poet and writer who emigrated to the United States where he died in 1931.
The Independent and news agencies reported that an association called Friends of Khalil Gibran held sit-ins outside the Lebanese Ministry of Culture last month demanding the banning of all Egyptian books and films in Lebanon.
Last April, Mustafa Taye', chief censor's deputy, was quoted in the Egyptian press as saying that "the Censorship Department has decided to refer The Prophet to the Islamic Research Centre [of Al-Azhar] because the book contains illustrations that could be perceived as representing the Prophet Mohamed."
For his part, critic Abdel-Qader El-Qott favours a less literal interpretation of the illustrations, adding, however, that although "the illustrations in The Prophet were drawn by Gibran himself" they "are not fine works of art. The book will not lose much if it's reprinted without them," as he wrote in Al-Ahram last May.
The news of the banned books -- and The Prophet is not the only one -- is not new. In March, officials at both the bookstore and the library of the American University in Cairo (AUC) complained that the censorship department had banned more than 70 titles. Among the titles mentioned by Mark Linz, director of AUC Press, are: Children of Gabalawi by Naguib Mahfouz, Woman at Point Zero by Nawal El-Saadawi, Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, Cities of Salt by Abdel-Rahman Mounif and The Prophet by Gibran. This had followed on the withdrawal from circulation in the AUC library and lifting from syllabi of Moroccan novelist Mohamed Shukri's autobiographical novel Al-Khubz Al-Hafi (For Bread Alone) which contained scenes deemed indecent.
Egyptian intellectuals responded to this onslaught on freedom of thought with vehemence. Salama Ahmed Salama, Al-Ahram columnist and editor-in-chief the monthly Al-Kutub: Wighat Nazar (Books: Viewpoints), warned in his column in the magazine's April issue that banning controversial books, including Al-Khubz Al-Hafi, would eventually result in "generations suffering from intellectual and spiritual impoverishment." Indeed, the very title of his article, "Al-Fikr Al-Hafi", punned on Shukri's title. Novelist Youssef El-Qa'id described the issue as an "unholy war" and the weekly Rose El-Youssef described the banning of the books, especially Gibran's, as scandalous.
Although the Press and Publications Department, which is in charge of censoring books, initially declined to comment on the issue, the Censorship Department, for its part, began to issue statements when the matter was raised in the American media last June. The Egyptian media thus published the censorship department's denial of banning the alleged 70 titles, and explaining that it banned only three or four books "for containing indecent material and explicit sexual scenes that run counter to the religious and ethical beliefs of Egyptians."
Linz explained that the four books that were banned were textbooks that were to be taught as part of the curricula. They are: Islamic Political Thought by Montgomery Watt, Political Islam by Joel Beinin, Muslim Extremism in Egypt by Gilles Kepel and Distant View of a Minaret by Alifa Rifaat. Recently, however, AUC issued a statement saying, "The office of censorship has informed us that The Prophet is now permitted to be available for public use."
Lutfi Abdel-Qader, director of censorship, denies that his department had banned the book. "We didn't lift the ban for the simple reason that we didn't impose it in the first place. This is a totally unnecessary misunderstanding," Abdel-Kader told Al-Ahram Weekly. When asked about the 70 or so other titles that are reported to be banned, Abdel-Qader retorted, "They are liars. This is a conspiracy against the apparatus [Censorship]; I don't know what their aim is by distorting facts. We didn't censor those books."
Citing the censorship taboos as religion, sex and national unity, Abdel-Qader nevertheless added that "we don't have to give them [AUC] details on the rules we go by."
The relationship between AUC and the Censorship Department soured last year when the university had to drop another controversial book, Mohammed by French Orientalist Maxime Rodinson. Since then, according to AUC officials, the Censorship Department has put books taught at, and published or imported by AUC under scrutiny.
