22 - 28 February 2001
Issue No.522
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Al-Ahram Weekly On-line 22 - 28 February 2001 Issue No.522 |
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The Children of Gabalawi
In the course of a meeting with the respected Islamic writer Ahmed Kamal Abul-Magd, the latter likened Mahfouz's fiction to a "great loom" that brings together "all the different coloured threads of Egyptian life," even though, as Abul-Magd pointed out, it treats of politics but briefly. Awlad Haretna (The Children of Gabalawi), Mahfouz's religiously controversial novel, the copyright of which he has not given to any publisher, then came to the foreground of the discussion.
I have always thought that if Dr Kamal Abul-Magd and Sheikh Mohamed El-Ghazali [another renowned, religiously oriented writer] wrote an introduction to it, I would approve of its publication. The latter sadly passed away before he had a chance to do so, and the former had promised to bring the issue to the attention of a religious writer whose scholarship is as well respected as El-Ghazali's. The first to make a bid for it was publisher Ibrahim El-Mu'allem.
The novel has been published elsewhere in the Arab world, and that does not concern me to the same extent. If it is to be published here (but, since it has caused so much trouble in the past, I don't see why it is necessary to publish it), then it would require the sanction and the blessing of our intellectual and religious authorities. This consent is very important to me, and is written into my literary project.
Based on an interview by Mohamed Salmawy.
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