Publish and Perish?

A row over who can publish Naguib Mahfouz’s banned Children of the Alley in Egypt and under what circumstances has reignited debate over Al-Azhar’s role in the publishing industry

I AM AFRAID THE novel is not available,” was the response I received when I asked about the Arabic-language version of Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’s Awlad Haretna, or Children of the Alley, at one popular downtown bookstore.

The crestfallen look on my face must have been enough for the salesman to recant his initial statement. “Come back in an hour and I can give you a copy,” he murmured to me

“How much will it cost?” I asked.

“I can give it to you for LE 50,” was the reply.

An hour was all it took to discover that the novel, deemed blasphemous by religious scholars when it was first published in the 1950s and promptly banned, is readily available on the black market. Although most newspaper sellers surveyed said they could provide me with a copy within a few days, prices were all over the map, topping out at LE 70.

Omar Sayed, a Downtown newspaper seller, offered the lowest price: LE 25. Sayed says he has sold about eight copies of the novel in the past couple of months, claiming the copies he sells were of the Lebanese edition, then smuggled into Egypt by Arab tourists. “I keep those copies for my favorite clients. If an ordinary customer comes to me and asks about it, I tell him that I do not have it that’s because we heard it was banned,” says Sayed.

It was soon time to go back and see if my copy was ready for me. The salesman had left it with one of his colleagues. At the cash register, the cashier flipped the book on its face. When I tried to turn it around to have a look at the cover, he snatched it out of my hands, murmuring angrily: “No! This book is banned.” Once out of the bookstore, I discovered I was one of the lucky clients: mine was a Lebanese edition published in Beirut in 1986 — with no price tag.

Children of the Alley, which was among the four works that qualified Mahfouz for the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988, has never been published in book form in Egypt. With the work having been banned several times by Al-Azhar, Mahfouz still insists he will not print it without the official endorsement of the seat of Sunni religious learning.

But a recent announcement that a state-owned publishing house would print the novel here for the first time has reignited a debate in intellectual circles on the role of the oldest Sunni institution in regulating literature. Read more...