Issue No. 598
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8 - 14 August 2002 Issue No. 598 Living |
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| Published in Cairo by AL-AHRAM established in 1875 | Recommend this page | ||
Mood Swings
Scenes of censorship
Sex and religion. Or, religion and sex. Regardless of the order, those are the two subjects that animate the Public Censor's Office, perk up their employees' ears, give them a sense of purpose, direction, and all the rest of it. I used to think politics was another favourite subject at the censor's office. But not any more, it seems. Politics -- dangerous-subversive-red-leftist politics -- are no longer of concern to anyone -- least of all the censors.
I've always known that the censor's office existed somewhere within the belly of my country's monolithic bureaucratic beast. I know it comprises employees whose job is to decide for the Egyptian public which printed materials they should not be reading. One occasionally becomes aware of the censor's physical existence, like when you leaf through the pages of the foreign magazine you've just bought only to realise that several pages have been torn out. Ah, those were the censor's hands at work! I'd always imagined the censors in Kafkaesque terms: hunched over dusty desks at the end of long corridors, frowning and bespectacled, the sound of tearing paper filling the air about them as they slash, tear and shred, page after page after page, cutting out indecent cleavages and the like from fresh copies of Vogue, Health and Fitness, or even, at times, The Economist.
Aside from this mental image, I had never met a censor in person, until my shipment of 12 boxes of books arrived by express mail from the occupied territories last week. The letter was benign enough: "Your shipment has arrived from Tel Aviv. The censor's office has sequestrated four books. Please come to the main post office at Ataba Square to pick up your boxes. Kind regards." A benign and polite letter, which is exactly what the censors turned out to be in person. There was no Kafkaesque figure waiting for me at Ataba Square. Instead, the censors occupied a small dingy one-room office, attached to the main post office next door. I drove there with two conflicting reactions: first reaction, relief. From a shipment of 12 cartons of books, the censor had sequestrated only four. That's good! Second reaction: anxiety. Which books did they sequestrate? And, of course, the inevitably futile cry of "why?".
To the "which" and "why" questions the censors dished out the muddled response of sex and religion. Two books were taken away because Al-Azhar objects to them on religious grounds. The first book was on Shari'ati, a progressive scholar whose writings are characteristic of the creative and liberal spirit of modern Shi'a jurisprudence. I worried and worried -- the book was a gift from the lovely Tamara Chalabi, how will I ever find another copy again? "All Shi'a books are suspect. We have orders from Al-Azhar to sequestrate them all." "But how will I explain this to Tamara?" was all I could think. The second book was Mohammed and the Origins of Islam. I had leafed through it once, decided it wasn't that interesting and set it aside. But now that the censors had it, my interest in the book had definitely been rekindled.
Two other books remained. Both Arabic novels, both published in Beirut and bought in Ramallah. "And why did you sequestrate those two?" I asked, my patience wearing thin. We had now moved on to the sex bit, and the censor seemed to have lost his entire Arabic vocabulary. Being the decent (read repressed) people that we are, he found the same difficulty many of those in the Egyptian middle class have in articulating his issues with sex. He stalled and stalled, searching for words: "Well, you see..., they..., what we would call..., cover topics..., that..., well..., are..., well..., very..., well..., not good". "Huh?" I asked in feigned deafness, "What do you mean 'not good'?" His stuttered search for words ensued: "Well..., you see..., they have..., well..., like..., not-very-good-images." "But there are no pictures in the two novels, just words!" "Yes!" the censor replied, "the words depict scenes that are, well, you know..." I couldn't bear it anymore, and hollered back the unutterable: "What scenes? What? gins[sex]?" "Yes!" came his relieved reply, followed by the favourite line of the Egyptian middle classes when it comes to sexual propriety: "You wouldn't want your mother/sister/wife/daughter to leaf through something like this, now would you?" He posed the question with the secure smile of having won the debate and ended our conversation.
But I persisted: "Yes, I wouldn't mind if my mother/sister/wife/daughter read these novels. They're all married, or going to get married eventually. So what's wrong with reading about sex?" I tried to argue that censorship was the refuge of the weak and insecure. Ideas need to battle with ideas in the open. Sex needs to be discussed -- in the open. Otherwise, the more you repress issues -- keeping them in the dark -- the more they will stay with you and come back to haunt you in mutated and far more dangerous forms. "Besides," I asked in exhaustion, "which public are you trying to protect? Who reads books in Egypt anyway?"
But I decided against further debate, determining instead to take a constructive tack. I wrote up an objection, and gave it to the censor. His reply was a predictably benign "God willing, you will get them back." As I stepped out to leave, I eyed the censor's office one last time. There were large metal cabinets all over the place. I had always wondered what happens to all of those saucy images, torn out day after day from Vogue/Health and Fitness/The Economist. Are they with my four books in the hallowed confines of the metal cabinets, or pinned up somewhere on some bathroom wall?
This week's contributor is a lecturer of law at Harvard Law School, formerly at Bir Zeit University, Ramallah.
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