Great expectations

Youssef Rakha wraps up the debates surrounding the Arab world's guest-of-honour contribution to the Frankfurt Book Fair opening this week

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Concerns over Arab performance at the 2004 International Frankfurt Book Fair (6-10 October) have centred on the official guest-of-honour presentation, organised by a committee representing Arab ministries of culture under the auspices of the Arab League. At the 11th hour, many parties are still questioning the capabilities of a political organisation that has demonstrated but a limited capacity for effective teamwork and only the most cursory interest in culture. Not only Arab but German commentators point to the league's repeated failure to assume a unified stance, its dependence on undemocratic regimes and its administrators' bureaucratic (as opposed to "intellectual") orientation.

Even Ibrahim El-Muallim, chairman of the Arab Publishers' Union and one of the presentation's principal champions, had embarked on the project with trepidation. "I feared the selection of books and participants would not follow objective criteria," he told Al-Ahram Weekly, "that they would be too regime- oriented, too official, the way they often are in this part of the world." But while the ultramodern pavilion in which books will be exhibited and readings held is not lined with overblown posters of Arab heads of state, the presentation programme and the list of official invitees has generated not a little contention in literary circles.

Most recently, novelist Bahaa Taher published an article explaining his reasons for rejecting the league's official invitation: Arab intellectuals were excluded from the preparation process and the organisers failed to invite important literary figures. Both the choice and quality of translations of Arabic books to be presented at the fair have been called into question, with novelist Gamal El- Ghitani, editor of the literary journal Akhbar Al-Adab and the Egyptian Ministry of Culture's most outspoken antagonist, pointing out that they were produced within an impossibly short period of time -- three months -- and under the supervision of state employees rather than men of letters. The message, diametrically opposed to the reassuring statements of Amr Moussa, secretary- general of the Arab League, is that the presentation has the makings of a great fiasco.

Like Taher, El-Ghitani decided against taking part in the end: he would have accepted an invitation issued directly from the Arab League, not from the Ministry of Culture, but this requirement proved procedurally impossible. Yet even he conceded that the presentation's official participants "are more or less representative of their respective countries". Some critiques of the programme reflect ideological concerns: the organisers' decision not to invite Nasr Hamed Abu- Zeid, an innovative Islamic scholar who has been living in exile since Islamists declared him a heretic, for example. Others, like comparative literature professor Magdi Youssef's, stress scholarly issues: the programme's failure to take account of Arab achievements in the natural sciences, an omission that confirms the notion that Arabs have made no contribution to material knowledge for centuries.

Many points of contention concern relatively trivial organisational shortcomings and personal disputes, however, and the fact that both Volker Neumann, president of the fair, and Mark Linz, director of the American University in Cairo Press, agree that the league will provide "the most impressive presentation possible" suggests that things are perhaps not as bad as they seem. Similar criticisms, Neumann argued, were directed at previous guests of honour, every year. "Last year," he told the Weekly, "it was the same with our Russian friends." Like El-Muallem, Linz was rather more concerned with the business aspect of the fair, pointing out that Arab publishers have little experience of dealing in international copyrights -- a crucial point seldom broached in the Arabic press.

More pertinent to the discussion was El-Muallim's claim that it is the multifaceted achievement of Arab civilisation through the ages, to a far greater extent than contemporary cultural life, that will give substance to the presentation. While undoubtedly justified at some level, such a line of thinking was thought to undermine the credibility of the project as a whole.

The reason behind the Arabs' presence as guest of honour at Frankfurt lies at the centre of yet another significant debate: whether the purpose of the Arab presentation is to counter post-11 September prejudice or to endorse awareness of a vital contemporary literature. Many official figures -- Moussa included -- have stressed the importance of "rectifying misconceptions" and "improving Western images of the Arab". Yet not a few intellectuals believe that to participate with this purpose would amount to a humiliation. The Arab world sustains a diverse, living culture, they argue, and suffers the brunt of terrorism to an even greater degree than the West. It has much to offer Frankfurt other than the knowledge, already current in Germany, that Arabs are an ordinary people, as normal as any other.

Yet it is arguably the Arabs' own self- doubt, the feeling that Frankfurt presents them with a test they must endeavour to pass, that informs many parties' concerns about the event. Many argue that contemporary Arabic writing could occupy as much space as Latin American literature on Western bookshelves. Together with the yearlong programme of cultural events to take place in several German cities, the Frankfurt presentation will no doubt help dispel the illusion that Arabs are isolationist fanatics with terrorist agendas targeting their former colonisers. Whether Frankfurt will contribute to expanding the scope of Arabic literature in the West remains to be seen.