SABRY HAFEZ: THE NOVEL, POLITICS AND ISLAM - Haydar Haydar's Banquet for Seaweed
The astonishing story
of the uproar in Egypt over the publication of a Syrian novel set in Algeria—a
work of literature as trigger for political crisis and polemical turmoil, two
decades after it was written, in a landscape completely transformed. Haydar Haydar’s
fiction as tuning-fork of stark dissonances of time and outlook in the Arab
world.
SABRY HAFEZ: THE NOVEL, POLITICS AND ISLAM
On April 28th of this
year an impassioned appeal appeared in Cairo, blazoned across the pages of the
newspaper al-Sha‘b. Entitled ‘Who Pledges to Die with Me?’, it was
a ferocious attack on a novel published in Egypt some months earlier, Walimah
li-A‘shab al-Bahr (Banquet for Seaweed), calling it a blasphemous work by
an apostate who merited assassination. Uproar ensued. Mosques thundered at the
discovery of this infamy. The novel was withdrawn. Judges and police
interrogated intellectuals and officials in the Ministry of Culture. Students
demonstrated, and armoured cars rolled into the streets. Debate raged in the
National Assembly, and the activities of a political party were suspended. Two
different government committees were set up to investigate the affair. A
torrent of articles and declarations, for and against the book at issue, poured
off the presses. In Yemen, in Saudi Arabia and Kuwait analogous campaigns were
triggered. Though the Arab world has seen not a few cultural or political
clashes over literary works, the scale and intensity of the hubbub in Egypt
this year is unprecedented.
Yet what is the text
that has provoked it? A novel that is now nearly twenty years old, and has run
through at least six editions, by a Syrian writer whose fiction has never so
much as touched on the country where he is now reviled. Perhaps the most
astonishing, and ominous, feature of the whole episode is the disjuncture
between the controversy and its object. Not that Banquet for Seaweed is
an irrelevant or inconsiderable novel—just the contrary: it is a very powerful
and remarkable one. But no less revealing of the present condition of culture
and politics in Egypt than the rage of its enemies is their blindness to its
themes and significance. To understand this deadly discrepancy, a look at the
historical context of the battlefield of ideas in the Middle East today is
necessary.
Power and learning
The Arabic novel is a
purely twentieth-century phenomenon, whose rise was intricately linked to a
cultural transition—involving a major shift in what Pierre Bourdieu has called
‘symbolic domination’—in the passage to modernity. [1] In
pre-modern times, cultural leadership in the Arab world was virtually
inseparable from religious authority, itself highly dependent on the currently
governing political power. In these conditions, education was firmly in the
hands of the religious establishment. The basic function of the leading centres
of learning—the Azhar in Cairo, the Najaf in Iraq, the Umayyad in Syria, the
Zaytuna in Tunisia or the Qarawiyyin in Morocco [2]—was
to teach the Quran and transmit the concepts and rules of Muslim tradition.
Most cultural production was grounded in religious concerns, and works of
literature were deeply rooted in intellectual and stylistic competences
acquired from the study of sacred texts. Endowments by the faithful
strengthened the material basis of traditional Islamic institutions, but did
not—with the exception of the Shi’i centre in Najaf—enhance their independence
from political rulers.
Islam granted those
equipped with learning a prominent role in society, so cultural elites,
nurtured by the religious establishment, often acted as spiritual arbiters
between the rulers and the ruled. More accessible to the people, their good
offices could mediate complaints from below to those above, or ameliorate
unjust rulings by the powerful—while, vice-versa, rulers often used them to
pacify or control the masses. Over time, the more stagnant and autocratic the
political establishment became, the more subservient the traditional
intellectual elite was forced to be. Such was the trend pronounced during the
three centuries of Ottoman rule in the Middle East, when local religious offices
were manipulated from Istanbul to stoke individual ambitions, set groups
against each other and coopt potential discontent. For the smooth running of
each region, an effective alliance had to be set in place between the appointed wali—administrative
official—and the local religious leadership, capable of suppressing or
discrediting any opposition to the status quo.
Modernity on the
Nile
In Egypt, however, the
symbolic capital of the traditional elites started to erode in the early
nineteenth century, when Muhammad Ali (fl 1805–48) [3] —often
called the founder of modern Egypt—introduced, on the heels of the short-lived
Napoleonic expedition to the Nile, a new, European-based educational system.
For centuries, the religious establishment had sustained a system of Qur’anic
schools throughout the Middle East that gave it a monopoly of education. Thus
Muhammad Ali’s reforms, which broke this monopoly, amounted to little less than
a cultural revolution. The new educational system supplied the modernizing
state with much needed technocrats and civil servants. Schools, hospitals,
newspapers, magazines, printing presses, learned societies and charitable
organizations were founded in large numbers. The spread of journalism, and
translations of European literature, created new reading publics and fostered
nationalist awakening. Even the position of women was not left unchanged. [4] From
all these institutions, the traditionally educated were alienated and
effectively excluded. The new order preferred advisors trained in Europe, who
often returned to occupy high positions in its administration. By the time
Muhammad Ali’s grandson, Khedive Isma’il—educated in Paris, and determined to
‘make Egypt a part of Europe’—was deposed by British intervention in 1879, the
modern educational system had established complete ascendancy over its
religious rival, its products outnumbering their counterparts from the
traditional schools by ten to one. The latter, however, were marginalized
rather than uprooted—an error for which Egypt would later pay dearly.
Under the British
protectorate radical nationalism was repressed, but the semi-colonial order
could not halt rapid urbanization and, with it, further changes in customary
modes of life and systems of values. An educated reading-public started to
support new types of literature and art—forms hitherto unknown in Arabic
culture: the short story, the novel, drama, painting and, eventually, the
cinema.
Meanwhile, religious education was coming to be seen—even in the
countryside, its traditional hinterland—as barren and unhelpful to the young.
The graduates of the Azhar had serious problems finding work in the
institutions of the modern state. Politically, too, since the struggle for
independence from Britain needed to speak the language of the occupiers, its
leaders came without exception from the modern educational system. By the first
decades of the twentieth century, the new cultural elite was ready to challenge
the traditional intellectuals on their own ground. Pioneering works of
narrative included acerbic attacks on pillars of local religion—typically
depicted as villains using religious robes to hide treachery, opportunism and
debauchery.
After discrediting the traditional elite in the first two decades
of the century, the new intellectuals started to rationalize the sacred in the
1930s, [5] and
to accommodate it into the secular by the 1940s, arriving at an almost complete
secularization of religious topics in their treatment of the character of the
Prophet and his early companions by the 1950s. [6] In
1960 the first Marxist biography of Muhammad appeared. [7] The
development of this intellectual offensive coincided with the country’s
progress from colonial rule to limited independence, and finally complete
liberation from imperialist control at the end of the 1950s.
However eroded their
power base, traditionalist leaders never ceased to resist the advance of
secularization; and the dual educational system continued to generate an
underlying dichotomy in Egyptian culture that gave them resources for
counterattack. Bigots used every opportunity to depict their adversaries as
catspaws of a Western plot against Islam—not an easy task, at a time when they
were leading the national movement against colonial rule and mobilizing the masses
behind them. Yet traditionalists never tired of assailing their foes as enemies
of the faith.
The history of modern Egyptian culture is punctuated by the
battles fought between the two forces. In 1925, the traditionalists won the
contest over Ali Abd al-Raziq’s book, Islam and the System of
Government, which had called for the separation of religion and the state,
and secured the dismissal of the author from his post at the Azhar. But in 1926
they lost the campaign to convict Taha Husain—the leading Egyptian intellectual
of the time—of blasphemy, for advocating in his book, On Pre-Islamic
Poetry, a Cartesian approach to the study of Arabic culture. In 1927
the Muslim Brothers association was formed, to press home the counterattack on
the modernists. But the 1930s and 1940s proved to be a period of frustration
for the traditionalists; in a time of liberal experiment, they failed to make
any gains over the next two decades. It was not until 1959 that they again won
a significant victory, when the Azhar proscribed Naguib Mahfouz’s novel, The
Children of Gebelawi. [8] A
decade later, two plays by Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, Al-Husain: The
Revolutionary, and Al-Husain: The Martyr, were banned from the
stage.
Under Nasser, however,
these remained relatively isolated episodes. In the main, the 1950s and 1960s
was a period of social polarization, increasing activity by the left, and a
sharp crackdown on the Muslim Brothers and kindred groups. Many fundamentalist
leaders went into exile, where a number joined forces with Nasser’s two major
enemies, the feudal dynasties of the Arabian Peninsula and their patron in the
United States. Association with the Saudi dynasty de-radicalized the Islamic
movement, giving it a built-in phobia of the left. When Egypt was trounced by
Israel in the Six Day War of 1967, these traditionalists seized on the defeat
to blame the whole modernist project for this national disaster. This was the
beginning of a determined counter-offensive to re-legitimize discredited forms
of religious-political discourse, which modernist intellectuals made the
mistake of not taking very seriously at first...
