by Nadia Wassef
“Hag, you are a master!” Usually, I carefully measured my reactions around Mustafa, since I knew he studied the expressions of his clients to get them to shell out higher sums. But he was a seasoned dealer, and not even my most convincing performances muddled his instincts. And this time, I was too thrilled to compose myself.
“Just put it in the freezer. It will kill any remaining bookworms,” said Mustafa. “Now, we negotiate. But be gentle.” He was playing the prey, knowing full well he was the predator.
* * *
Mustafa’s Matba’at Bulaq edition begins with the juxtaposition of faith and sex, one potential cause for conservative animosity. The opening verses invoke Allah, as the Western poets might invoke God. Allah’s name sits squarely beside the impressive catalog of sexuality, eros, and adultery. The collection transgresses boundaries of race, class, and decorum. Still, many of the underlying ideas are normative and conventional, such as the cliché of female sexuality as a threat. Throughout the text, female desire must be controlled, harnessed, used as a tool for male pleasure. Pious men, virtuous women, brave warriors, virgins, demons, and harlots all meet ends suited to their deeds. Some modern versions rely upon stilted euphemisms, attempting to evade the censorship that the more debauched earlier texts faced. In these editions, the language of sex is cleansed of anything carnal. Physical encounters are rendered impersonally. Postcoitus, lovers resume their dealings as though they had exchanged polite salutations rather than bodily fluids. Nothing is real: it is metaphor, allegory, fantasy. Still, even these purified editions incite pushback from conservative commentators. They are guilty by association.
My next stop after Hag Mustafa was Hag Madbuli, newspaper seller turned bookseller turned publisher. The illustrious entrepreneur managed his relationship with government censorship masterfully. He’d been around forever. My mother recalled seeing him on the beaches of Alexandria’s Montaza each summer in the 1960s, wearing a white galabeya and beige overcoat. Clutching a bundle of books held together by a leather strap, he’d shout, “Livres nouveaux!” Later, he’d abandoned his father’s wooden newspaper kiosk and opened a shop on Talaat Harb Square, in Cairo, with his brother. Even though he was illiterate, he was one of the shrewdest men in the business. He began his publishing activities in the late 1970s by enlisting the help of students who studied foreign languages. In exchange for store credit, they translated texts for him, which he’d then publish and sell at bargain prices. When I was a college student in the 1990s, he was my point of entry into forbidden literature. In between classes, I’d leave campus, cross Tahrir Square, and walk down Talaat Harb Street to his shop. Everyone knew that if you couldn’t find a book, Hag Madbuli had it. From him, I bought the works of Egyptian feminists like Nawal El Saadawi, along with most other banned titles of the moment. It was rumored that even during the notorious 1985 court case, Hag Madbuli sold copies of Alf Layla w Layla. Later, he supplied Diwan with books he published. He was accustomed to Amir’s witty banter and large orders. This time, my visit, and my singular quest, surprised him. Still, he delivered. I emerged from his shop triumphant, with an unexpurgated Arabic version wrapped in a black plastic bag, like someone hiding sanitary products while leaving the pharmacy.
That edition contained another key to the controversy: it mixed Fus’ha, classical Arabic, and ‘Amiyya, colloquial Arabic. “Proper” classics could only be in Fus’ha, the language of the Koran. And yet here, the sexual passages in vernacular speech intermingled with didactic utterances in Fus’ha. Even though the alignment of “higher” language to noble actions and “lower” language to earthly acts was clearly demarcated, they shared a space, which was too close for comfort for some.
* * *
Other readers, especially young readers, knew the stories from more commercial adaptations, like the Disneyfied version of Aladdin. Alf Layla w Layla, in its modern iterations, had followed two parallel trajectories: children’s literature and adult with a capital A literature. This polarization further entrenched people’s assumptions. It was either suitable for children or unsuitable for mass consumption.
A different Egyptian epic, al-Seera al-Hilaliya, had a more prestigious place in our cultural imagination, even though its origins aren’t much different than those of Alf Layla w Layla. This sweeping poem of love, war, and heroism was only recently published, despite having entertained Egyptians for the last six centuries. Its stories have traditionally been passed on orally by bardic figures, who meandered through the villages of Upper and Lower Egypt accompanying their tales with the rababa, a two-stringed lyre made of wood. Sometimes the Seera took up to seven months to narrate in its entirety. These storytellers, who learned their craft from their fathers and grandfathers, adjusted their tales to their audiences. Each lyric ended very differently depending on whether it was narrated east or west of the Nile. Al-Seera al-Hilaliya survives in part because of its accessibility and inclusivity—the entire community can listen to it. In all the versions I’ve encountered, there are no sex scenes.
In some ways, the Seera is understood as the Egyptian counterpart to the Iliad and the Odyssey. Perhaps this is due to subject matter. Homer, like the anonymous storytellers of the Seera, tells great chronicles of war and power. Of course, anyone who’s read the Iliad knows that private griefs and marriage plots also abound. And the Odyssey has its own allegiance to the heart, as in Penelope’s steadfast loyalty in her husband’s absence, or Odysseus’s affair with the glorious nymph Calypso. In contrast, the Arabian Nights is perceived as a seductive, if lowbrow, collection of fantastic tales. I think the two are not so different after all. Penelope’s cunning, as she weaves a burial shroud for her husband’s father and then secretly unravels it nightly, resembles Scheherazade’s, both women delaying the manic pursuit of hungry men by spinning yarns.
* * *
The Nights’ salacious reputation overshadows all its other qualities. For conservative critics, its erotic subject matter betrays the lowest human impulses. Others oversexualize it for different ends. I learned this one evening, when I stopped by Zamalek on my way home from visiting Heliopolis and Maadi. I wandered through the shelves, remembering the simple happiness of stacking and sorting in our early days. It was a form of meditation, another thing I no longer had time for. With each new branch, Hind, Nihal, and I faced the predicament of a parent with a newborn: how to divide our time and attention equitably among our growing family. We noticed a pattern. New stores lessened the sales of existing stores, without ever surpassing them. Older stores, left unattended, began to act out: displays, staff performance, and overall management slid into disorder. Even though we made a concerted effort to divide ourselves between Zamalek, Heliopolis, Maadi, Cairo University, and the stalls in the Carrefour City Centre Malls in Maadi and now Alexandria, to support and monitor our staff, striking a balance was impossible. Staff in older stores began to complain that new releases were being diverted to new stores. New stores complained that their sales were low because of insufficient stock. Everyone believed that they were victims in an unfair system that favored their rivals. No one took responsibility, or considered the surrounding economic landscape.
Still, the overall trajectory of sales was on an incline. The system functioned because we poured ourselves into it. The moment we stopped, or neglected one location even briefly, things yielded to the downward pull of gravity with shocking speed. Of course, being shit with numbers, it took me a long time to figure out that the problem was in the very nature of how we ran Diwan. A labor-intensive, high-quality operation that cut no corners demanded exorbitant overheads. Those overheads increased at a rate that would never match sales.
As I stood on Zamalek’s shop floor surveying the stacks of books on the display tables, a distinguished-looking older gentleman approached me to ask for my assistance. He was dressed in a white taub, the long garment worn by Gulf Arabs, and a red-and-white head scarf, his dignified affect concealing his coarse attempt at youthfulness. He asked me for new releases in Ara
bic. I made a few recommendations, then enlisted the help of Ahmed, my favorite and most knowledgeable customer-service staff member, who now shuffled between the stores to train new hires. I retreated to my stacking, and after a while, the gentleman returned to ask me what my favorite Arabic classic was. Without thinking, I answered, “Alf Layla w Layla.” He asked Ahmed to add it to his pile.
“You Egyptian women are a force to be reckoned with. Ahmed tells me you’re one of the owners of Diwan.”
“I am.”
“A venture like this can’t be easy.”
“It has its moments.”
“One day the women of my country will be like the women of yours.”
“I’m sure. Enjoy the rest of your visit. And please let me know if Ahmed or I can be of any assistance.” I returned to my task. After the gentleman left with his books, Ahmed walked over to me carrying a piece of paper.
“He asked me to give you this.” He handed me the paper with some hesitation. I thanked him. He waited for me to read it. Was it a complaint? I opened the slip. It had four digits with a word scribbled above them in Arabic. Ahmed, who was quite tall, had a view of the note from above. I stared at the erratic handwriting, trying to decipher it.
“It’s his hotel and room number,” mumbled Ahmed. I felt a prickling in my scalp. Ahmed put both palms up in a calming gesture.
“Ibn el kalb el wisikh el wati,” I hissed. I tore the paper to shreds. “If your colleagues on the shift ask, he was sending his compliments.”
“Of course,” said Ahmed, eyes on the ground.
That evening, I sat in the car on the way home in a daze, staring into the chaos of the traffic. Samir, undeterred by my unresponsiveness, chattered away, happily summarizing events and observations from his day. I replayed my dialogue with the gentleman in my head. Something in my manner must have encouraged him. Citing Alf Layla w Layla as one of my favorite books was a mistake. It probably had some double meaning. It was easier to blame myself than to try to understand such a presumptuous gesture. He must do this regularly: walk into a shop and leave his room number, believing himself irresistible. His entitlement infuriated me. I especially hated that he hadn’t given me a chance to respond, except in my own head.
* * *
Around this time, I’d begun to suspect that Diwan had developed an independent personality outside of Hind’s, Nihal’s, and my plans for her. I know it sounds crazy, but I really believed that she had a mind of her own, one that could decide to accept or reject our ideas. She had trouble with our digital innovations. We built a website for her, and that worked well enough. But then we tried to design apps, and sell e-books, and we failed miserably. We weren’t being true to the project, or to our (very technologically challenged) selves: we were brick-and-mortar, paper-and-ink, analog people. Ten years ago, industry experts predicted the death of bound physical books. Today, the same experts celebrate the comeback of independent booksellers. Even though everything except for the book itself, from production to retail, has become electronic, paper and ink remain.
These shelves have power. Use it wisely. Dr. Medhat’s command from our last interaction propelled me to look at Hind’s Classics section. While mine was dominated by epics spanning the ages, hers mostly featured poetry. Her collection ranged across centuries, from pre-Islamic Jahiliyya, to the early Islamic period, through to the golden age of Islam (the eighth to the fourteenth centuries), a period that overlapped with Europe’s Dark Ages. I asked her why she included hardly any classics written in prose.
“This isn’t an exhaustive catalog of the Islamic civilization’s greatest hits. There was prose, sure, in the form of treatises and tracts. But those were mainly scientific, rather than literary, works.” She continued to the next shelf. “Then you had the Egyptian literary renaissance of the 1800s, when translation to and from Arabic was rampant. And by the end of the nineteenth century, Arabic printing presses were taking off, catering to wider audiences and tastes. Indigenous traditions mixed with new Western forms, like drama and the novel.” Her hands moved along the shelf. “There’s another surge of poetry in the late nineteenth century, led by Ahmed Shawki, Prince of Poets, who epitomized the neoclassical age…”
“Poetry’s not my thing.” I gestured to Hind to move along.
“It is. You get turned off by Fus’ha.” Hind continued before I had the chance to protest. “You love Umm Kulthum’s songs. The most brilliant poets of the twentieth century vied to write her lyrics. That’s why people still remember the words, even though her songs are seventy-plus years old. It’s poetry set to music.”
* * *
During customer-service training, there was little need to review Hind’s Classics section. Most of Diwan’s staff had studied the Arab poets in school. The public school curriculum, from my father’s time in the 1930s through the present, contains a great deal of Arabic poetry. Its strictness, its forms, and its measures illustrate the rules of grammar and syntax. Students have to memorize and quote hundreds of verses and contextualize them in textbook fashion. Independent opinions and personal interpretation are unwelcome. Poetry isn’t an art, but an exercise and an education. In theory, this program promises to build appreciation for the language. In practice, it produces hostile students who, like Marianne Moore, dislike poetry.
In the latter half of the twentieth century, as conservative religious movements became more mainstream, subtle changes occurred in the school curriculum. Nonreligious courses integrated more Koranic phrases as exemplars of Arabic language. Arabic literature, endowed with more flexibility in expression and form, received less attention.
Fus’ha is the language of the Koran, and a dead language seldom spoken in day-to-day conversation. It’s guarded, frozen in time, by Al-Azhar, one of the oldest Islamic universities in the world, founded in AD 970, the center of learning for Sunni Muslims. During the early twentieth century, Salama Musa, a journalist and an advocate of secularism and socialism, lobbied to change the official national language from Fus’ha (classical) to ‘Amiyya (colloquial) Arabic. He wanted to make written language more accessible to the masses. His initiative even garnered support from members of the Arabic Language Institute, which was established in 1932 by royal decree in service of preserving and studying the language. Al-Azhar, eager to preserve the sanctity of language, and the source of its power, fought this initiative to the death.
Not all of Hind’s classics were poetry. Her section also showcased the masters of twentieth-century Egyptian prose: Ihsan Abdelkoddous, Tawfik al-Hakim, Yahya Haqqi, Taha Hussein, Youssef Idris, Soheir al-Qalamawi, Naguib Mahfouz, Youssef al-Sebai, and Latifa al-Zayyat. As a university student, I’d read their novels and short stories, which were written in a looser version of classical Arabic. While the language was by no means vernacular, it was far less rigid—their departure from convention paved the way for future experimentation.
Some of these writers had come up in the very university where we were standing, like Taha Hussein (1889–1973). Born into a lower-middle-class family in 1889, he was the seventh of thirteen children. At a young age, he contracted an eye infection and was left blinded due to improper medical treatment. He was sent to a kuttab, a school where children learned reading, writing, and the Koran. He then went to Al-Azhar University, the theological institution, where he clashed with the conservative school administration. Despite being blind and poor, he was accepted into the recently opened Cairo University, where he received his first PhD and eventually became a teacher. Like Dr. Medhat, Hussein was a proponent of pharaonism, an ideology that extricated Egyptian from Arabic history, whose supporters believed that Egypt’s true renaissance could only occur through reclaiming the country’s pre-Islamic heritage. While he authored numerous novels, short stories, and essays, he was best known for his 1926 work of literary criticism, On Pre-Islamic Poetry, which subverted the prevailing ideas about poetry at the time and raised subtle questions about the Koran as historical text. Al-Azhar, his former school, lobbied for leg
al action. The public prosecutor, in deference to the cultural climate of tolerance, declined to do so. Hussein’s book was temporarily banned until a modified version was published the following year, entitled On Pre-Islamic Literature. Hussein lost his post at Cairo University in 1931, but in 1950, he was appointed minister of education, where he advocated for free and accessible education for all. He was nominated for the Nobel Prize in literature from 1949 to 1965, fourteen different times.
History repeats itself with different consequences. Sixty-nine years later, in 1995, Nasr Hamid Abu Zayd, a Cairo University professor, published Critique of Islamic Discourse, angering some of his more conservative Islamic colleagues, one of whom denounced him in a sermon at ‘Amr ibn Al-‘As Mosque. Lawsuits accusing Abu Zayd of apostasy followed. After years of legal turmoil, he and his wife left Egypt and went into exile in Leiden. I met him in 1999 at an Oxford University conference appropriately called “Rethinking Islam.” He asked if I was returning to Cairo after the visit. I nodded. “Tell her I miss her,” he said. After enough time had elapsed and the case against him had been largely forgotten, he returned to his homeland, where he died in 2010. In a case of poetic injustice, he died the same year Alf Layla w Layla faced the possibility of a new legal ban.