Egypt’s novel social critic
Gamal al-Ghitani, a one-time carpet designer who would become one of Egypt’s most acclaimed novelists, died Sunday at the age of 70.
Al-Ghitani, whose work was frequently published in English translations, was best known for his1974 novel Zayni Barakat, a scorching allegorical critique of totalitarianism in which a ruthless Egyptian leader’s legitimacy is challenged.
While the novel was set in the 16thcentury Mamluk era, there was little doubt that it was a critique of the authoritarian regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in 1966 had al-Ghitani jailed for five months for his public dissent.
Because he opposed Islamic fundamentalists, including the banned Muslim Brotherhood, al- Ghitani sometimes found himself endorsing alternatives that might not otherwise have been palatable. He firmly supported the army after the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and defended its ouster of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist president, in 2013, despite repressive measures that followed.
As a writer and editor he was a fervent defender of artistic freedom.
In 2006, when Egypt’s leading Islamic jurist declared that exhibiting statues at home was forbidden, al-Ghitani declared, “It’s time for those placing impediments between Islam and innovation to get out of our lives.”
Gamal al-Ghitani was born to a poor family in the town of Guhayna in the upper Egypt governate of Sohag on May 9, 1945. He grew up in Cairo, was apprenticed to a carpet maker and studied Oriental carpet design at the College of Arts and Crafts.
Writing was in his heart, though. His first short story was published when he was 14. In 1969, he joined the staff of the newspaper Akhbar al-Youm and was a correspondent during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
He founded Akhbar al-Adab, a leading literary magazine, in 1993 and was its editor until 2011. He wrote more than a dozen novels, including The Zafarani Files, Pyramid Texts, The Book of Epiphanies and The Book of Revelations, as well as short story collections.
He also published The Mahfouz Dialogs, a collection of recorded conversations that the novelist Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel laureate, had with friends over a halfcentury.
In 2013, al-Ghitani was a visiting professor at the Mellon Islamic Studies Initiative at the University of Chicago.
This year al-Ghitani received the Nile Award, Egypt’s top literary state honour, after having won the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Egyptian National Prize for Literature and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his novel Ren.
“A writer of great stature and originality hardly paralleled in modern Arabic,” Salma Khadra Jayyusi wrote in Modern Arab Fiction: An Anthology, “his style is rooted in the Arabic literary tradition, and he has successfully attempted to reintroduce the old Arabic ‘tale’ form, in contradiction to other writers who model their fiction on Western styles.”