Bestselling Egyptian novelist Alaa al-Aswany was forced this week to shut down one of his public seminars. The event – ironically enough titled Conspiracy Theory: Between Reality and Illusion – had been scheduled for Thursday at Alexandria’s Jesuit Cultural Centre, but on Monday, Aswany announced that Egyptian state security had informed him the seminar could not be held.
Aswany, also a practising dentist, exploded on to the Arabic literary scene in 2002 with his second novel, The Yacoubian Building. The book became a bestseller in Arabic, was made into a big-budget film, and became a hit in its English translation. Aswany has maintained a high-profile output since as a newspaper columnist, novelist and public speaker. He has been holding public seminars in Cairo and Alexandria for the last several years, stirring debate and propounding his views on post-2011 Egypt.
He was initially supportive of the current president Abdel-Fattah al-Sisi, even after a mass killing of Muslim Brotherhood supporters in August 2013, but has also criticised parts of Sisi’s governance. By last summer, the novelist was banned from publishing his weekly column in the Egyptian daily Al Masry Al Youm and from appearing on state-run media.
“While I publish everywhere in the world,” Aswany said last month in an interview with the French newspaper Humanité, “I cannot do so in my own country”. He said that under Sisi’s government “freedom of expression does not exist, the situation is worse than under Mubarak”. He told the newspaper that he still supports the “fight against terrorism”, but that it doesn’t justify dictatorship.
Kept off the airwaves, Aswany uses social media to communicate with an Egyptian audience. On Thursday, he used Twitter to condemn what he said was an attempt by security services to smear social media, which he called “the only space left for free expression”.
The cancellation comes as the space for speech that doesn’t fit Sisi’s narrative has narrowed. This year, dozens of journalists and activists have been jailed, from prominent investigative journalists like Hossam Bahgat to young stringers. In a campaign launched earlier this month, the country’s Journalists’ Syndicate demanded the release of at least 32 reporters it said are currently in detention.
The hostility to controversial speech has also affected novelists. There is no pre-publication censorship in Egypt, but the young novelist and journalist Ahmed Naji went to trial last month because a chapter of his most recent novel, which appeared in a literary journal, was found to have “offended public morals”. Although Naji’s novel The Use of Life remains on sale, he could face up to two years in prison for the excerpted chapter.
In May this year, a book documenting Egypt’s political graffiti, Walls of Freedom, was held up at customs and subsequently refused entry. In August, Egypt’s National Centre for Translation (NCT) pulled its own translation of Egypte de Tahrir: L’anatomie d’une révolution from shelves. This came, according to Ahram Online, after a TV presenter accused the NCT of publishing books that “attack the army”.
This crackdown applies to other arts as well: The country’s groundbreaking Al-Fann Midan (Art is a Public Square) festival was harried out of existence by state security last year. The event, which launched in 2011, was a cherished space for music, poetry, and theatre events, but it underwent increasing problems with security permits in 2014.
The Cairo-based Arabic Network for Human Rights Information (ANHRI) was swift in condemning the cancellation of Aswany’s seminar, saying in it “completes the crackdown on the great writer”. In addition to his media ban, ANHRI noted that the author “is being subjected to smear campaigns on account of defending his right as well as his fans’ right to freedom of expression, and the right to criticise the absence of freedoms”.
“The state has dozens of newspapers and satellite channels that speak on its behalf and defend its stances,” the ANHRI statement quoted Aswany as saying, “so why [does] it waste the citizen’s right to hold a seminar that is attended by scores or hundreds?”
This year, two books by Aswany were released in English translation: Democracy Is the Answer and his most recent novel, The Automobile Club.