Egypt‘s Culture Wars Lead to Crackdown on Labor Party

Egypt has long been one of the centers of modern Arabic literature, its many publishing houses producing works by Egyptian and other Arab authors. Over the course of the 20th century, publications from time to time raised the hackles of another venerable Egyptian institution, the ancient Islamic University of al-Azhar. Clashes over works by ‘Ali ‘Abd al-Razzaq on the Caliphate and by Taha Hussein on pre-Islamic literature and  were major intellectual causes celebres during the 1920s. In more recent years, with the rise of political Islam, Islamists have frequently denounced certain works and barred others from universities. The Nobel Laureate Naguib Mahfouz’ work Awlad Haratina (literally, “Children of Our Quarter”, but published abroad as “Children of Gebelawi”) was published serially in al-Ahram but then not published in book form in Egypt for decades because of controversy over its contents. At one point Mahfouz was the victim of a knife attack by an Islamist, though he survived.

The latest book quarrel is both curious in its origins — the author is not Egyptian, the book is not new, and it has long been available in Egypt — but also in its results to date. It has divided government institutions, with the Ministry of Culture and the state prosecutors on opposite sides of the debate, and with al-Azhar weighing in heavily. More importantly, perhaps, it has split one of the country’s most vocal opposition political movements, giving the government an excuse to freeze its activities and suspend its muckraking newspaper, al-Sha‘b.

Those political results in a highly political year — Egypt conducts parliamentary elections later this year, and the government has pledged they will be more honest than the controversial last vote in 1995 — have given a whole new dimension to what was already a vocal (actually quite noisy) debate in the ongoing culture wars between Egypt’s secularist intelligentsia and its Islamist movement (including the “official” Islamic leadership at al-Azhar). Now the Labor Party — the Muslim Brotherhood’s ally and publisher of al-Sha‘b — is in disarray, al-Azhar and the Culture Ministry are at cross-purposes, and Islamists and intellectuals are denouncing each other.

Sheikh al-Azhar Tantawi

The government’s move against al-Sha‘b and the Labor Party may prove the most important aspect of this crisis, at least in an election year, but the whole debate directly involves some of the crucial cultural disputes troubling  not only Egypt (where the size of the Westernized intelligentsia makes it particularly visible) but also other Arab and Muslim countries as political Islamists challenge literary productions. This Dossier looks at both the political and cultural aspects of the battle.

The book that started it all is not even new. As many Egyptian intellectuals have noted, it has been available in Egyptian bookshops since its publication in Cyprus in 1984, and later editions have been published in Beirut and Damascus which were also available. It is called Walima li A‘shab al-Bahr (A Banquet for Seaweed), a novella by the Syrian novelist and poet Haydar Haydar. What provoked the latest round of fury was the decision to republish it in a series of modern Arabic literary classics called Afaq al-Kitaba (Horizons of Literature), the Editor-in-Chief of which is novelist Ibrahim Aslan. The series had already published dozens of titles of modern classics, and apparently little real debate occurred among those in charge over publishing another modern work.

The Estimate has not read the book and, unlike many of its critics, will not offer an opinion without reading it. Its defenders say that while there are characters who express pessimistic, or even blasphemous doubts, they are balanced by others who express conventionally pious positions. The book’s defenders note that even the Holy Qur’an itself quotes the words of unbelievers.

Culture Minister Husni

Enter the Labor Party’s newspaper, al-Sha‘b. It has a reputation as a muckraking thorn in the government’s side, and an influence which goes beyond its limited circulation (which is mostly in Cairo). Really a mouthpiece for the Muslim Brotherhood, which is a major ally of the Labor Party, al-Sha‘b has sometimes claimed to be the only newspaper which can bring down Cabinet officials, though it has rarely if ever succeeded in actually bringing one down. Its campaign against a former Interior Minister did not bring about his resignation: that came because of the massacre of tourists at Luxor. Al-Sha‘b Editor Magdy Hussein and a couple of his reporters have been in and out of jail (currently they are appealing another conviction) for libeling Agriculture Minister Yusuf Wali. And lately, it has been attacking the Minister of Culture, Faruq ‘Abd al-‘Aziz Husni.

Al-Sha‘b began a series of articles attacking the publication (or re-publication) of A Banquet for Seaweed, which it claimed attacked the Prophet Muhammad and otherwise demeaned Islam. It also called for students at al-Azhar, the thousand-year-old religious university, to demonstrate against the Culture Ministry’s allowing the book to be published.

The Islamist movement, in recent years, has frequently managed to ban books through condemning them as anti-Islamic; in a number of cases it has also forced some books published abroad to be removed from curricula and reading lists not merely in  the state universities but also in private ones such as the American University in Cairo.

Apparently the Al-Sha‘b articles were copied and widely distributed at al-Azhar, and on May 8, the demonstrations at al-Azhar turned into rioting. Egypt’s government will frequently allow certain types of debate to reach a fairly high pitch, with considerable leeway given both sides, but anything which suggests the use of violence tends to make it react, or overreact, promptly.

Al-Azhar is not a hotbed of political Islamist opposition: it is rather the government’s own sanctioned Islamic (and often Islamist) citadel. The student riots prompted a classically Middle Eastern wave of committees.

The Culture Ministry, not surprisingly, defended the publication of the book and in fact praised it as both a classic and “harmless”. Labor Party figure and al-Sha‘b columnist ‘Adel Hussein and his allies in the Party and at the paper launched new attacks on the book and the fact that it was being published with taxpayer funds. The pro-government and staunchly anti-Islamist weekly Rose al-Yusuf launched a major defense of the Culture Ministry and an attack on al-Sha‘b.

But the government was quickly revealed to be anything but unanimous in its defense of Culture Minister Husni. On May 10, the state prosecutor called Editor Aslan to its office and held him for several hours of questioning, along with three others involved in the decision to publish. It decided to begin possible proceedings against Aslan and one of the other three, Hamdi Abu Gulayyil. The prosecutor’s office moved after a complaint was filed by a maverick lawyer.

The Ministry of Culture issued its own committee report May 10, indicating that it found the book made extensive use of symbolism and literary narrative but in no way insulted Islam or the Prophet. But the Religious Committee of the People’s Assembly (Parliament) issued its own statement, saying that the issuance of the book in Egypt was a “mistake” and that future books should be submitted to al-Azhar before publication. (In fact, the committee even literally recommended burning the book.) As it happens, the head of the Religious Committee is Ahmad ‘Umar Hashim, who is also the Dean of al-Azhar. (He holds his parliamentary seat by appointment from the President rather than through election.)

Parliament Speaker Fathi Surur promptly removed the issue from the Religious Committee and referred it to the Culture Committee where the Ministry of Culture’s influence is direct.

This left many Egyptians awaiting the report of al-Azhar’s own committee on the issue, headed not by Hashim but by Egypt’s senior religious figure, the Sheikh al-Azhar, Sheikh Muhammad Sayyid al-Tantawi, the Grand Imam of al-Azhar.

Sheikh Tantawi (who was the subject of a Profile in The Estimate of April 12, 1996, just after his appointment) has generally been favorable to government positions; unlike his predecessor, Sheikh Gad al-Haqq ‘Ali Gad al-Haqq, he has opposed female circumcision and other questions on which Gad al-Haqq had taken positions opposite the government’s.

But this time Tantawi and al-Azhar generally sided with the critics of the book and insisted that al-Azhar has a duty to vet books published by the Egyptian government. That added to the sense that the Culture Ministry was at odds with official Islam, not just with oppositionist political Islam. Culture Minister Husni insisted that al-Azhar should really have no role in the decision.

The “culture war” aspect took on another facet when some 350 Egyptian authors, artists, intellectuals and others submitted a request to the Prosecutor-General asking that they be included as defendants, along with Aslan and Abu Gulayyil, in any prosecution for publishing the novel.

The Attack on Labor

As noted earlier, this controversy differs from earlier ones in that it has led to the (temporary at least) suspension of a major opposition party in an election year.

Egypt’s Socialist Labor Party, to give it its full name, is today neither very socialist nor particularly affiliated with labor: in effect it is the legal political organization through which the nominally illegal Muslim Brotherhood makes its opinions known. Its history is in some ways even more curious than this summary suggests. Its official Chairman, still today, is Ibrahim Shukri, who was born in 1916 and will turn 84 in September. In 1935 Shukri joined the Misr al-Fatat or “Young Egypt” movement, usually seen as a right-wing nationalist movement modeling itself in part on European fascist groups. Shukri remained active in Misr al-Fatat and its successors until he was arrested just before the 1952 Revolution, for opposing King Faruq.

He was released at the time of the Revolution, joined the single legal party of the Nasser years, and held a number of provincial and other posts.

In the mid-1970s, President Anwar Sadat announced the creation of three “forums” (manabir: it can also be translated “pulpits”), which were quasi-parties: one on the left, one on the right, and one (Sadat’s) in the center. Disappointed when his created “leftist” party became the quasi-Marxist Progressive National Unionist Rally, in 1978 Sadat ordered the creation of a new “leftist” opposition, meant to be more tame: the Socialist Labor Party. Shukri, who had been in Sadat’s Cabinet at one point, became its head.

But Labor did not become the malleable party Sadat had in mind, either. At first it sought to be a critic from the left, though many of its leaders were, like Shukri, old Misr al-Fatat figures. By the early 1980s, the Muslim Brotherhood, still illegal but by far the second strongest political force in the country, had forged a highly improbable alliance with the New Wafd Party, heir of the secularist, nationalist party of the pre-Revolutionary period. That alliance faltered, and the Brotherhood began to ally itself with, and gradually take over, the Socialist Labor Party. The Party’s newspaper al-Sha‘b (“The People”) soon became an Islamist voice, especially as the Brotherhood’s legal publications were closed.

Ibrahim Shukri remains the Party’s Chairman (or at least he did until the current dispute over leadership), but the Party’s real leadership is Islamist, with Secretary-General ‘Adel Hussein its primary spokesman.

Partly because of this genealogy, and partly because the Muslim Brotherhood itself has factions within it, the Labor Party has frequently been beset with internal quarrels, almost invariably encouraged by the government. Meanwhile its newspaper, al-Sha‘b, and its Editor, Magdy Hussein, have been regular thorns in the government’s side.

The opposition press in Egypt is unique in the Arab world. Unlike the opposition press in, say, Morocco, it genuinely attacks the government (though rarely President Mubarak himself) on a regular basis. But its readership is almost entirely limited to Cairo, its print run is small and its audience mostly confined to intellectual elites. The Wafd Party paper al-Wafd tends towards sensationalism; The Nasserist paper al-‘Arabi and the leftist paper al-Ahali attack the government from the left, other small opposition papers have their own niches, and al-Sha‘b takes both an Islamist and a fiercely anti-corruption muckraking tack. The latter has landed Editor Magdy Hussein in jail, the paper has been banned on occasion, and the government press regularly denounces it.

The al-Sha‘b campaign in this case also needs to be seen, not primarily as an attack on the book, but as an attack on Minister of Culture Husni for having permitted its reprinting. (Attacks on books alone are often quietly met by the book’s discreet disappearance from the market.) The use of the Haydar book as a means of attacking a government Minister (who was also being denounced for various aspects of his personal life and résumé: Husni is an artist by background) may well have been intended as a means of gaining Islamist votes for the Labor Party in the Parliamentary elections. The fact that Magdy Hussein and two other journalists were just re-sentenced to prison probably was a motive as well. But the government has weapons in its arsenal, too.

Suddenly, two separate “Party Congresses” of the Labor Party met on May 16, apparently after rebel opponents of the party’s Islamist tendencies seized two separate party offices. One, meeting at the Party offices in the Qubba Gardens area of Cairo and claiming 1,400 party members were present, withdrew confidence from Chairman Shukri and Secretary-General Hussein and named a retired film actor, Hamdi Ahmad, a founder of the Labor Party in its original incarnation, as the new Party Chairman. Yet another “Congress”, with 1,200 attendees, met in the party’s Nasser City offices and elected Ahmad Idris (a genuine socialist, not an Islamist), also calling for a ban on al-Sha‘b and an investigation of the Party’s role in fomenting the Azhar rioting. Both of the two “Party Congresses” denounced Shukri and ‘Adel Hussein for turning the Labor Party into a religious movement.

Shukri and ‘Adel Hussein denounced the two congresses as illegal; they insisted the move was backed by the government in an attempt to silence the party. Sayf al-Islam Hasan al-Banna’, son of the founder of the Muslim Brotherhood and its main liaison with Labor, also joined the criticism.

On May 20, that argument gained some support when the Political Parties Committee of the Maglis al-Shura or Upper House of Parliament, which is in charge of regulating parties, froze the party’s activities until its real leadership could be determined, and also suspended publication of al-Sha‘b.

Virtually all the opposition parties — except for the leftist, staunchly anti-Islamist Tagammu‘, or Progressive Unionist Rally — opposed the decision to freeze the Labor Party’s activities; so did human rights groups. The government press praised it, generally taking the stance that it was about time, in the wake of the Azhar rioting.

What happens next is far from clear. The Political Parties Committee has referred the Labor Party’s file to the Prosecutor General for possible action. Even if none is taken, the effective freezing of the party’s activities while the “three competing claimants for its leadership” work out their problems amounts to a ban, since two of the three are totally rejected by the official leadership, Shukri and ‘Adel Hussein, who see the whole question of “competing leaderships” as a government-inspired set-up. But on the other side of the ledger, many early, left-leaning founders of the Labor Party have been unhappy with the takeover of the Party by the Brotherhood, and now that the Party may have overplayed its hand (the Azhar riots being a case of using violence), they have sought to take the opportunity (and the government’s backing) to try to take back the party. This issue may not be resolved before the parliamentary elections.

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