Ahdaf Soueif, the acclaimed Egyptian writer, and possibly the best-known internationally after the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, has been in India at least a couple of times recently. I met her briefly at the Jaipur Litfest last fortnight but, in May 2010, shortly after she won the first Mahmoud Darwish award, named in memory of the Palestinian poet, I recorded a long interview with her. Our conversation was both literary and political because Soueif, like Nadine Gordimer, Mahasweta Devi and Arundhati Roy, is both novelist and activist; it is worth recounting some of what she said to understand what has gone so horribly wrong in that ancient and troubled land.
A few words about Ahdaf Soueif: she has been a professor of English literature at both Cairo university and colleges in Britain and writes in both Arabic and English; she is a passionate crusader for Palestinian rights, starting the Palestine Literature Festival and publishing her collected essays in Mezzaterra: Fragments from the Common Ground (2004). But much of her fame rests on her bestselling novel The Map of Love (2000), a romantic story, with two timelines set in 19th century and contemporary Egypt. The two stories are interlinked; in the first, a young Victorian widow travels to Egypt and marries an Egyptian nationalist who is murdered by a conservative political faction; in the 1970s narrative an American researcher comes to Egypt to excavate her past and that of her Palestinian lover. Will the past again tragically revisit the present? Among the many unsettling questions the novel raises is how much or, in fact, how little Egypt has changed in the past century, especially in its volatile relationship with the West. Here is the writer on the subject: “I was struck by parallel ideas of the world becoming a smaller place. The other thing I was struck by were the demands of the Egyptian people as expressed in popular feeling. In 1882 there was an uprising in Egypt against the rulers; today there are similar resentments.”
Nineteenth century Egypt, a satellite of the Ottoman empire, became a British protectorate in 1882 at the instigation of Muhammad Tawfiq Pasha, until the army revolution of 1952 led by “free officers”, of whom the charismatic but autocratic Gamal Abdel Nasser became leader and introduced Arab socialism. But the repressive hand of the “free officers” became heavier: first under Anwar Sadat and, since 1981, under the increasingly authoritarian former air force commander Hosni Mubarak. In Ahdaf Soueif’s words, “Today many of the demands are actually the same — an end to foreign influence, paying off of Egypt’s debts, running the economy to benefit its own people, a free press and so on. These continue to be the same demands of 110 years ago.” Asked about political freedom, she bluntly replied: “Everybody knows that elections in Egypt are not free and fair. For example, the mechanism by which a candidate is selected for the presidency is not really conducive to democratic choice. Also a large section of the population is uneducated. So there is no way that we can describe Egypt today as democratic.”
Indians can feel comfortable in Egypt because of a certain familiarity, from the chaos of modern Cairo to the line of ancient monuments to words and phrases in spoken Arabic; but travel deeper, away from the Nile delta, into the western desert or across Sinai as I have done over several trips in the last 20 years, and it remains a parched and backward place, blighted by ancient poverty. There is a robust middle class but joblessness, rampant corruption and other frustrations have turned them into sympathisers of the banned Muslim Brotherhood, many of whose votaries languish in jails. In the cities the battle of the hejab has won, turning a liberal, cosmopolitan society into ultra-conservative, Arab-influenced milieu. Prescient though her writings are, even Ahdaf Soueif could not have predicted the mammoth scale of protestors demanding change in Egypt.
