Vertical Divider

We have already been modern
On Utopia, by Ahmed Khaled Towfik

It's Utopia, where looking for a way to pass every minute of your life consumes you. This is not how we usually imagine Egypt. Although actually I have never been there; I only got the picture that is in the header when I was crossing the Red Sea on my way from an airport on Synai on my way to Aqaba. But at the same time, I feel Egypt is a very familiar reality. I have Egyptian friends, colleagues here in Leiden, and plenty of Egyptian books in my possession of course. They seem to exist in excess, just as this one of Ahmed Khaled Towfik, that I found, in an English translation by Chip Rossetti, on the shelf with free books to take away from the University library. It's an elegant hard cover edition enveloped in glossy paper, presented as a best seller. The original Arabic publication dates back to 2009, a prehistory, if referred to the pace of Middle Eastern history these days. It seems pre-revolutionary, but in fact it is as much post- as it is pre-, since there have been other revolutions in Egypt. For example, there was one in 1981, when someone shouted "I have killed the Pharaoh!" over the body of Anwar Sadat. This is why it always seems that any revolution in Egypt we hear about has been heavily overdue.
Ten-year old Towfik's novel makes me think about one equally remote, a 2002 Polish novel by Dorota Masłowska, Wojna polsko-ruska pod flagą biało-czerwoną (Snow White and Russian Red in English translation). There are many similar points: teenage emptiness, drugs, promiscuity, radicalization. The same kind of recent affluence that does not exactly mean that people are rich to enjoy a comfortable life, and certainly not that their country is rich. They are hidden behind a fence, as if in a concentration camp.
It makes me think about yet another remote book, In the Bluebeard's Castle, by George Steiner, collecting a series of lectures given as early as 1971. Even more remote than the Egyptian-Israeli war in 1973 that is nearly completely obliterated from the teenage hero's memory. At the same time, war and killing, abstract, movie-like, reduced to quintessential pathos and excitement in Towfik, just like the hate of the Russians in Masłowska's book, are the sole remedy against boredom. In those old times, Steiner read about similar problems in Stendhal's Le Rouge et le Noir. It is still the same boredom that comes after the close of the modern revolution; the boredom that makes the circle of repeated revolutions. It already did in the 19th century, and more, even before Napoleon came to Egypt with his men for the first time. Before the Egyptians were brought into this circle of repetition.
The Egypt that exists in my mental horizon is quintessentially modern, even more than Stendhal. It has its Nahda, its writers, its intellectuals, even its modernist architecture, its Cairo and its Alexandria, that of the Alexandrian Quartet. Even Umm Khulthum and belly dancers taste like modern, and perhaps they are. All the Egyptian literature I have read is modern, and living the bitterness of being modern. For such is the modernity of Hamida from the Midaqq Alley (Zaqaq al-Midaqq, 1947), who finds her better life as Fifi (that was at least her professional nickname, if I still remember it after so many years, in the Polish translation of Naguib Mahfouz's early novel). Such is the modernity that comes to the village of the child in the figures of a teacher, a doctor and a military officer charged with the requisition of arms that the inhabitants did not even possess (Tifl min al-qarya, a book of memories written by Sayyid Qutb when he was not an Islamist yet, first published in 1946). The proper modern ending of Qutb's memories of childhood is not his journey to the city, but a poignant chapter on the sorrow of women, a middle-class bitterness on lost property lived in gloomy houses lit by kerosene lamps. Sort of Egyptian Bovary, only more conscious of her lot than her French counterpart. In a way, is it thus not so very surprising to anticipate the sequel of Egyptian modernity, as well as Egypt's post-revolutionary boredom, that Towfik situates not so very far from now, in 2023. 


Ahmed Khaled Towfik, Utopia, trans. Chip Rossetti, Doha, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation Publishing, 2011.

Leiden, 15.03.2019

Vertical Divider

Pre-modern vs modern fear
A Child from the Village by Sayyid Qutb

It is a simple. sentimental book, first published in 1946, when the name Sayyid Qutb did not mean what it means today; his Islamist writings and activism were to appear only some years later. He was actually born in Musha in Upper Egypt, the village from the book, in 1906, and there is no reason to believe that the things described differ substantially from the reality of an Egyptian child at the time. There is no sophisticated pacte de lecture implied in whatever he writes; at least not more sophisticated than what would be typical for a South European neorealist writer of the same epoch. These memories require no competent reader, and apparently have nothing to satisfy such a reader. Nonetheless I found something to speak about before I return this little book to the library. Fear.
Under the appearence of unpretentious, sentimental delving in personal memories, the universe described has a common denominator that ends up by splitting things apart; and it is by no means the contrast between the pre-modern and the new, modernized reality. On the both sides of such divide there is fear, a fear that risks to remain with us when the childhood is over.
The boy who is perhaps not yet nine or ten years old at the beginning of the narration fights in vain against the fears that emerge around him. The first one is a "magzub", or non-conformist saint, living in the margin of the local community; other appear on stage with the progressive advent of the modern institutions: the gym master at school, the doctor, the local administrator. Finally, the enormity of the state machine makes itself present as a new instance of oppression against which Qutb the Islamist will fight and that will utterly kill him in 1966. Wandering Sufi saints and ifrits are tiny and harmless compared with it.


Sayyid Qutb, A Child from the Village, trans. John Calvert and Willian Shepard, Cairo, The American University in Cairo Press, 2005.

Leiden, 26.03.2019