OMINOUSLY?:

Voice of the Middle East?: Alaa Al Aswany's controversial novel The Yacoubian Building has taken the Arab world by storm. He talks to Rachel Aspden. (Rachel Aspden, 26 February 2007, New Statesman)

"You hate Egypt?" a disbelieving aristocratic roué demands of his impoverished secretary in Alaa Al Aswany's novel The Yacoubian Building.

"Of course," she replies, shocked that he had to ask.

In Cairo, this is a dangerous sentiment - and Al Aswany's portrayal of homosexuality, Islam ism, poverty, exploitation and corruption is doubly so. Writers in Egypt are caught in a tug-of-war between an autocratic government intolerant of criticism and dissent, and an increasingly powerful Islamist movement vioently opposed to any "affront to public morality".

The space between them is narrow. In the past few years, writers have been imprisoned, beaten, fined and had their books pulped by government agencies - and suffered harassment, attacks and even murder at the hands of Islamists. But The Yacoubian Building slipped through, selling hundreds of thousands of copies since its first publication in 2002, and becoming the bestselling Arabic novel in recent history. In 2006, when a lavish film adaptation was released, 112 MPs demanded that the film be censored for "spreading obscenity and debauchery".

Controversy, especially involving sex and Islamists, sells. The Yacoubian Building, in an excellent translation by Humphrey Davies, has been picked up by HarperCollins for a rare publication in the west. Like The Bookseller of Kabul and last year's Booker-shortlisted In the Country of Men, it will become famous for offering, as the New York Review of Books put it, "an amazing glimpse" into Middle Eastern society and culture. Ominously, President Bush's adviser Karen Hughes has it on her bedside table. [...]

Religious extremism, he says, has been nurtured by the government. "In Egypt, we have always had a tolerant reading of Islam. But since the 1970s, the Saudis have spent billions of dollars on exporting [the radical tradition of] Wahhabism. And Wahhabism is a Christmas present for the Arab dictators - they both deny political rights to the individual." The west's fear of Islamists (in the shape of the Muslim Brotherhood, a banned organisation whose members are allowed to run for parliament as "independent" candidates) coming to power in a democratic election "has been whipped up by the government in order to secure its own position".

"Let's use a medical analogy," continues Al Aswany. "When you analyse Egypt's problems, you have to separate the disease from its symptoms and complications. Our disease is dictatorship, and the symptoms are poverty, injustice, corruption and fanaticism. If you treat the symptoms as though they were the disease, you will kill the patient. And this is what the west and the government are trying to do. Terrorism is not the disease. These people asking 'What shall we do about terrorism?' are missing the point."

The Yacoubian Building is full of vignettes illustrating the corruption that trickles down from the top layers of Egyptian society.

Lawrence Wright's Looming Tower is excellent on the nexus between the Egyptian origins of Islamic terror and the Saudi funding of extremist Islam.

Posted by Orrin Judd at February 22, 2007 7:25 AM