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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 August 2000 Issue No. 493 
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Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Al-Ahram Weekly 3 - 9 August 2000 Issue No. 493
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 |
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Egypt Region International Economy Opinion Culture Features Travel Living Sports Profile People Time Out Chronicles Cartoons Writing it out
By Youssef RakhaBetween Tai'zz and Sana'a, the journalists and the muhtasibin (inspectors) have been having it out. The occasion? The trial of Samir Rashad Al-Youssufi, editor of the state-sponsored Tai'zz weekly, Al-Thaqafiya -- for serialising the late Yemeni author Mohamed Abdel-Wali's novel, Sana'a Madina Maftouha (Sana'a: An Open City, which has been published six times, in both Yemen and beyond, over the last three decades) -- starting on 13 April, in the magazine.
An echo of the Egyptian Banquet, the event has given rise to an impressive sense of secular solidarity in Yemen, yet it counts as another incongruous example of the increasingly widespread Arab tendency to politicise censorship, throwing religious, literary and political questions into the same, hopeless bundle.
On the thirteenth -- forever a star-crossed date -- the Yemeni intellectual apparatus thus unwittingly planted the seeds of a disputation that would remain latent for another two months. But on 8 June, once the last instalment of the novel hit the newsstands, what appeared to be sectarian discontent erupted, with mosque preachers and everyday people backing up the Yemeni Islah Party, the first political institution to champion the anti-Thaqafiya campaign. It has since transpired that the campaign followed Al-Youssufi's defection from the Islah Party (a few years ago), and his joining the Jumhuriya institution (a substratum of the Ministry of Information). And it was in this context that the Yemeni writers' union, in solidarity with the press and lawyers' syndicates, insisted that the campaign constitutes "an affront to Yemen before the world, which exchanged Mohamed Abdel-Wali's novels and taught them at universities." (Al-Wasat, 3 July)
The (Cairo-based) Union of Arab Journalists' position notwithstanding, it was the Yemeni Minister of Information who took a hard-line stand and even spoke of resignation, intervening in the trial to free Al-Youssufi (the ministry, he told the court, would guarantee the journalist's good conduct) when, following the second session at court, Al-Youssufi was detained without sufficient legal justification. In Egypt, neither the Press Syndicate nor the Ministry of Information had reacted against the Banquet campaign, yet its repercussions continue to resonate, hollow, in the public sphere, the latest manifestation being the belated publication, in Akhbar Al-Adab (30 July), of Lebanese scholar Ali Harb's analysis of the controversy, following Heikal's.
Meanwhile -- the recent buoyancy of Arab culture in France makes Paris a predictable candidate for literary hype -- authors have been scribbling away with a marked degree of competence, and exacting (deserved?) positive responses on an impressively large scale. In the same issue of Akhbar Al-Adab , an interview with Farouq Mardam Bey -- the Francophone Syrian publisher, author and consultant responsible for making Acte Sud the biggest publisher of contemporary Arabic literature in French (and possibly in any European language) -- celebrated the more recent shift towards perceiving Arabic literature as an art, rather than a documentary aid to understanding Arab society.
There are, Mardam Bay explained, two sides to the attention paid to Arabic literature, "one of which is negative, demonstrating an obsessive interest in Islamist movements... But there is, too, a positive side, embodied in an interest in Islamic culture in general and its place in the cultural history of humanity in particular." Pointing up the specifically French drive towards incorporating Islam (its culture and history) into a wider (secular) social-intellectual framework, Mardam Bey seemed to suggest that the rise or fall of Arabic literature in the West largely depends on how Islam is perceived -- a fact that gives Al-Youssufi's trial a profoundly disappointing edge. Mardam Bey expressed an affirmative conviction in "accumulation", the long-term effects of publishing more and more translations of Arabic books.
And in this context, Mardam Bey's mention of Warda, the latest novel-sensation by author Sona'alla Ibrahim (whose year-old Sharaf was phenomenally successful in France) -- "What helped was the presence of Ustaz Sona'alla in Paris, his meetings with journalists and his sincere, frank responses to the questions posed to him, in which he did not in the least compromise the basic principles in which he has believed... which is totally contrary to the norms of European journalism" -- is in harmony with the editor, novelist Gamal El-Ghitani's assertion in his last column that Khairi Shalabi's Saleh Haisa, Mohamed El-Bisati's Layalin Okhra (Other Nights) and Warda constitute a literary renaissance. Novelist Bahaa Taher, further confirming the hypothesis, was awarded the prestigious Italian Guiseppe Cerbi prize for his widely acclaimed novel Khalti Safiya wal Dier (My Aunt Safiya and the Monastery), and is to travel to Rome early next October to receive it.
With such vitality and success gracing the horizon, the bubbling of extremist discontent, it is sincerely hoped, will vaporise into nothing, and the freedom to think (Tafkir) will finally triumph over the tendency to declare intellectuals apostates (Takfir).
