Egypt's Culture Wars

Politics and Practice

Samia Mehrez

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2008
• Print ISBN:
  9780415666879
• eBook ISBN:
  9781134109517
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Islamic Studies
• Index: Social Sciences

This ground-breaking work presents original research on cultural politics and battles in Egypt at the turn of the twenty first century. It deconstructs the boundaries between 'high' and 'low' culture drawing on conceptual tools in cultural studies, translation studies and gender studies to analyze debates in the fields of literature, cinema, mass media and the plastic arts.

Anchored in the Egyptian historical and social contexts and inspired by the influential work of Pierre Bourdieu, it rigorously places these debates and battles within the larger framework of a set of questions about the relationship between the cultural and political fields in Egypt.

Part I
Inside the literary establishment

Power struggles and dreams of autonomy

1 Dr Ramzi and Mr Sharaf

Sonallah Ibrahim and the duplicity of the literary field

January 1997 marked the end of the expected intervals between Sonallah Ibrahim’s past and most recent novels.¹ Dhat had appeared in May 1992 and, with the advent of 1997, Ibrahim’s Egyptian and Arab audiences greeted the new year with the publication of the opening chapters of his new novel Sharaf, serialized, for the first time ever in Ibrahim’s 30-year career as a writer, on the pages of Cairo’s weekly literary paper, Akhbar al-Adab.² An eventful new year indeed, for it marked a crucial change in Ibrahim’s politics and strategies of publication; a change which this chapter will read attentively as a revelatory moment in recent developments of the literary field in Egypt today, and as an instructive episode where the field’s internal structure, positions and battles are concerned.

Those among us who have followed Ibrahim’s publishing history know that this development had been unthinkable. It was unthinkable that Ibrahim’s work would appear on the pages of a state-run paper, given what he writes and the history of its reception (or lack thereof) by the state apparatus.³ Whereas his first novel Tilka

(1966; English translation The Smell of It, 1971) was published with a small publisher, requiring his financial collaboration, and was subsequently banned, his last novel, Dhat (English translation, Zaat, 2001) appeared through Dar al-Mustaqbal al-Arabi, an established leftist, Nasserist, private Egyptian publisher, with acknowledgements by the author to three lawyers “who graciously provided advice and guidance”⁴ concerning the lethally critical manuscript. All the first editions of his other works have been published outside Egypt, by Arab publishers, with the exception of Bayrut Bayrut (1984), which marked the beginning of his collaboration with Dar al-Mustaqbal. With the publication of Sharaf, first in serialized form (a few opening chapters in Akhbar al-Adab) and subsequently the publication of the complete manuscript (March 1997) by Egypt’s reputedly liberal, state-run Dar al-Hilal, an establishment of considerable history and intellectual weight, the impossible marriage indeed occurred. It is important to note that Ibrahim was courted by both Akhbar al-Adab and Dar al-Hilal and that he was initially wary of their commitment. But, they both took the risk and delivered. How is it then that this new alliance is made possible? Why is it so important that we attend to it? How does it bespeak the cultural politics that govern the cultural field in Egypt today? And how does it impact on Ibrahim’s position within it?

The literary field: an economic world in reverse

In an earlier article entitled “Sonallah Ibrahim’s Dhat: The Ultimate Objectification of the Self” I argued that the history of the publication and reception of Dhat attested to the emergence of a relative autonomy within the literary field in its relationship with that of power. More importantly, the very existence of the text within Egypt pointed to the fact that such autonomy was being recognized by the field of power itself, since the novel that vehemently attacked the workings of the state, its apparatus and institutions was published without any attempts at banning or censorship. Moreover, I also argued that the nomination of Dhat for a national book award (The Cairo International Book Fair Award), and the prompt withdrawal of this nomination on the eve of the award ceremony, seemed to reconfirm what the French sociologist Pierre Bourdieu has called “the social miracle” in which, as he puts it, “he who loses wins”. I had relied on Bourdieu as a conceptual and methodological aid, especially in his work Les règles de l’art (English translation, Rules of Art, 1996) in which he looks at the emergence of an autonomous literary field (le champ littéraire) in nineteenth-century France, focusing predominantly on the work of Gustave Flaubert as a high point in this autonomy. I had noted that the nature of the developments which had taken place within the literary field in Egypt were substantially different from those which surrounded its emergence in nineteenth-century France. However, I did suggest that Bourdieu’s theoretical framework provided an inspiring model that can be rethought and used to serve as an analytical tool for the study of the changes within the social space in modern Egypt, focusing on developments in the cultural field, in particular.⁵

The purpose of this chapter is to examine some of the values and dynamics within the literary field in Egypt as they become evident through a close reading of one text and one episode in the recent history of the field: Gamal al-Ghitani’s laudatory editorial that accompanied the appearance of the first chapters of Sharaf on the pages of Akhbar al-Adab. I will argue that this document is of crucial importance for it is written by one of the most influential pens in Egypt today and is published on the pages of the most widely distributed and read literary journal in the Arab region. It is of paramount importance to note that, like Ibrahim, Gamal al-Ghitani made his debut in the mid-1960s and, like him again, al-Ghitani has risen to a different but equally prominent position within the literary field today.⁶ However, the 30 years or so that mark the professional development of the two men, as artistic producers, and subsequently the space which each has come to inhabit within the literary field sets them apart: as Ibrahim continues to work in the margins, refusing to take up any public occupation other than writing, al-Ghitani consolidates his public career as journalist, becoming editor-in-chief of a widely influential literary weekly within the field. These elements, in addition to the circumstances surrounding the publication of Sharaf, give occasion to explore more fully the Bourdieu model that I had suggested would be instrumental in understanding some of the developments in cultural life in Egypt today.

According to Bourdieu, the division of labour within the social space during the modernization process has led to the emergence of subfields of production (sous-champ de production) within the social space itself, each with its own history, its own values, its own internal relationships of production and its relative autonomy in face of the field of power (le champ du pouvoir). Among these subfields of production Bourdieu identifies the political field, the economic field, the cultural field which, in turn, is constituted of subfields: the scientific field, the artistic field, the philosophical field and the literary field. Each and every one of these subfields is a heterogeneous structure characterized by a set of constitutive objective relations that orient the battles or conflicts that seek to conserve or transform the field.⁷ Moreover, the relations of production within each of these subfields can be understood only with reference to the field of power (le champ du pouvoir) which, Bourdieu warns, is not to be confounded with the political field (le champ politique). The field of power is defined as the space where relationships of power between agents or institutions that own the necessary capital (political, economic, religious) get played out. This dynamism, within the field of power, allows the various owners of capital to occupy dominant positions in the different subfields of production thereby contaminating their values and the relationships of production within them. Hence, all subfields of production are in a dominated or subordinate position to the field of power that for ever controls their degree of autonomy. Autonomy for Bourdieu is not independence: given the existence of the field of power and its dominant position, the autonomy of the subfields is always menaced by its interventions and contamination.

As for the literary field in particular, the focus of our attention here, it acquires relative autonomy with the accumulation, over time, of symbolic capital by several successive generations. This accumulation allows the cultural producers, indeed forces them, to ignore the demands of temporal power for the sake of principles and norms internal to the literary field itself. In other words, those who enter the literary field have every interest to be disinterested.⁸ This disinterest is what allows Bourdieu to define the literary field as an economic world in reverse where the fundamental law is internal independence vis-à-vis any external demand outside the field. The economy of praxis in the literary field is based on the inversion of the fundamental principles of the economic world. This inverted economic logic creates the social miracle of “he who loses wins”.⁹ However, the various positions of the agents within the literary field are always traversed by the values of the field of power, i.e. economic or political profit. Hence there will always be internal conflict, within the field, between two principles: the heteronymous principle (agents that dominate the literary field economically or politically) and the autonomous principle (agents that distance themselves from economic or political profit).¹⁰

Sharaf Sonallah Ibrahim: he who loses wins

If Bourdieu’s model remains somewhat too theoretical, I trust that Gamal al-Ghitani’s editorial, significantly entitled “Sharaf

” (Sonallah’s Sharaf/Honour), will, to a great extent, provide an exemplary elucidation of the model.¹¹ Through its discourse on Ibrahim and its representation of other players in the field, the editorial maps out the relationships of production within the literary field in Egypt, the conflicting and contradictory positions within it, its contamination by various agents from the field of power (both political and economic) while developing, through its very representation of Ibrahim himself, a vision of the ideal literary field, the ideal internal norms and values that should govern it, and its ideal relationship with the field of power.

The very title of the editorial already bespeaks one of the most important attributes of the ideal cultural producer. The word Sharaf (honour) in the title of the editorial obviously performs a double role. First, Sharaf is a reference to the title of the new novel (also the name of the protagonist, who, like the female protagonist of Ibrahim’s previous novel, Dhat (self), is gradually emptied of that initial identity). On a second level the word sharaf (honour) is an attribute of the author himself: the honour of Sonallah Ibrahim. Those familiar with Ibrahim’s démarche will take this attribute very seriously and will indeed agree that, as a cultural producer, he is Bourdieu’s disinterested ideal, occupying a position of the writer most antagonistic to the field of power, and bearing a hefty badge of honour, a crucial symbolic capital that he diligently accumulated over at least thirty years within the literary field through both his independence from and out-spokenness against the field of power. By constructing this attribute as a positive value, however, al-Ghitani, author of the editorial, produces another interesting and crucial effect: recognizing and upholding honour as a value, even when attributed to Ibrahim alone, makes of that value a shared symbolic capital among those who inhabit a similar position within the field. Hence it becomes not only a value bestowed on Ibrahim but one that is upheld by the author of the article himself. Even if the two men are not close friends, even if they meet but on rare occasions, even if their respective writing careers develop in different directions (details which the editorial is keen on noting), their relationship is cemented through this positive and shared value of sharaf/honour.

Al-Ghitani’s article opens with a return to the mid-1960s, a return to the first moment that earned Ibrahim his badge of honour. The flashback is to Tilka l-

and its eventful publication and immediate banning. The opening of the editorial positions itself at a transformative moment within the autonomy of the literary field in Egypt: “It was clear then that the writer [Ibrahim] was challenging both unwritten and uncharted prohibitions that had settled within the writers themselves in what may be referred to as conventions.”¹² In this opening paragraph al-Ghitani reconstructs the internal battles of the field during the mid-1960s. Sonallah Ibrahim and other new agents, among them al-Ghitani himself, were engaged in a battle or conflict not simply with the political authorities, as we have all grown accustomed to represent it, but with other participants within the field itself, other writers who had settled into certain “conventions”. It is by reading these lines as a description of a transformative moment that we can reread many of the lashing comments that the writers of the 1960s received at that moment in time. It is only natural therefore for earlier agents within the field, who have acceded to various dominant positions, guardians and propagators of certain symbolic values, to combat the new arrivals, in the following terms:

This young generation that does not read (Taha Hussein), that does not study (Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal), that does not seek depth (Ahmad Baha al-Din), this generation of bureaucrats that does not know its own classics, nor the classics of others, what will it write?¹³

The dominant symbolic values of the mid-1960s are more than clear as enumerated above: heritage, education, world classics, high culture, etc. The new agents, like Ibrahim, represent the absence/lack or even inverse of those symbolic values. More seriously these new agents seem to bring into the field values that are alien to it: “they” do not know the classics, do not ready, do not study, do not seek depth! The relationship between these two positions was, and had to be, antagonistic, for the literary field is a battle field of forces acting on the participants, in various ways, depending on the position they occupy within it.

When Tilka

first appears it is banned by the political ...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• List of plates
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• Prologue: Take them out of the ball game – Egypt’s cultural players in crisis
• PART I Inside the literary establishment: power struggles and dreams of autonomy
• PART II Remaking culture: emerging institutions, discourses, icons and metaphors
• PART III The bounds of change: state, street and self-censorship
• Epilogue
• Appendices
• Notes
• Bibliography