By Youssef Rakha Novelist Gamal El-Ghitani, founding editor of the weekly Akhbar Al-Adab -- for many, the Arab world's most active literary-cultural resource -- was a war reporter and a left-wing activist before embarking on a career in cultural journalism. He has written newspaper columns for many years, commenting not only on cultural policy but equally on social phenomena and regional events. His perspective, while inevitably politicised, is vastly inclusive; and he has maintained interests not only in subjects on which he is an expert -- Islamic Cairo, but equally in subjects he considers of particular relevance or weight -- ancient Egyptian literature. Born in Juhaina, Sohag, El-Ghitani grew up mostly in Cairo, and in drawing on the Arab canon, notably of the 17th-19th centuries, his fiction reflects not so much the distant authority of literary tradition as the continuity of a grassroots urban discourse, vernacular in essence, to which both he and his readers have felt an intimate affinity. Perhaps best embodied in the daily chronicles of the 19th-century historian Abdel-Rahman Al-Jabarti, this mode of writing, in El-Ghitani's hands, made an effortless transition into the modern novel. El-Ghitani has been a central part of the city's café culture and was for many years the friend and confidante of the late Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz, until the latter's death last year. His best known novel in English is Zaini Barakat , published with Penguin in London. Like much of his work, the novel mimics the cadences and rhythms of canonical Arabic; and in retelling the story of the Ottoman takeover of Egypt with a focus on the spy-turned-intelligence chief who was to make the country a police state, it speaks with openness about the country's power dynamics since 1952, and in so doing manages to be entertaining in the same breath. Widely published, translated and honoured, he has finally received the State Merit Award this year. "As far as I'm concerned, internally, I've long gone beyond the [Street Merit] Award. I took the State Incentive Award out of President Sadat's hand in 1980; and at the time the head of the fiction committee at the Supreme Council of Culture was Tawfiq El-Hakim; members included Naguib Mahfouz and Ihsan Abdel-Quddous; the youngest member was Youssef El-Sharouni." These are the names of Egypt's best known and most firmly established authors, and El-Ghitani's implication is that, in 1980, he was already lionised. "So, if you think from 80 to 07, 27 years have passed; does it make sense to have waited quite that long? This is on the one hand. On the other hand, if you look at the achievement of the Sixties Generation, you will find there are two principal currents or trends. One is represented by Sonallah Ibrahim," the hyper-realist who spectacularly rejected the council's Novel Conference Award; "the other, which returns to an older mode of storytelling, is my own. If I try to look objectively, these are the two most important achievements of the Sixties. So the logical thing would have been for this award [to come] to me at the end of the 1980s or the beginning of the 1990s. Of course it was delayed due to the cultural establishment's position on me, and to circumstances relating to cultural policy, etc., all of which you will know about only too well. There is a backdoor into the establishment which only lets in those the minister [Farouk Hosni] approves of, and that's the Arts Academy. It puts forward candidates for the award. Of course it would have been impossible for me to make it through that door." El-Ghitani refers to his long- standing feud with Hosni, which he insists on pointing out has never been personal. "But some three years ago, an important poet and dear friend, a professor in Sohag University, Nassar Abdallah, noticed that the state awards had ignored me for such a long time. And he suggested me by way of mischief. Or rather, he thought, 'Let's see if we put your name in, what's going to happen.' So he put me forward, together with a professor of Islamic monuments, now vice-president of the university, Abdel-Sattar Osman -- for the two of them, I am a son of Sohag, because I was born there and everything, and this made them want to redress the situation -- but look what happened. The letter somehow found its way to the Science Academy, and by the time it reached the Arts Academy, it was past the deadline, 17 December, and my name was not on the list of candidates that year. The following year Dr Nassar insisted, and deciding to pit himself against Egyptian bureaucracy, he sent the letter by express mail -- there was no way out, and that's how my name came up. It was put forward by university professors in no way affiliated with the ministry; and out of 50 votes I got 43, the first time. For this reason I don't think there could have been very blatant intervention this year. It has changed nothing at all." El-Ghitani explains that he had chosen "the more difficult route" -- that of public endeavour, which would inevitably involve him being cast in the role of dissident -- "and when you are oppositional, you are subject to revenge in completely unrelated areas, you never know what to expect". He quotes the title of a humorous article by the Syrian writer Nouri Al-Jarrah, which captures the spirit in which cultural scores are settled: "Wait till his novel comes out, then I'll slam him." El-Ghitani says he has never held a secret opinion; "three times a week", in his Al-Akhbar and Akhbar Al-Adab columns and in his published journals, he says what he feels, and this has frequently given him trouble. Until he began to make critical observations about cultural policy in the early 1990s, he says, his personal relations with Farouk Hosni were "very friendly". He does not deny that he has since used Akhbar Al-Adab as a forum for critiquing the ministry, but he insists this was never personally motivated: "My opinion, in very brief, is that the Ministry of Culture or this particular minister has implemented a policy that harmed Egyptian culture. Do you think my getting the state award will change that opinion? I believe that one of the consequences of that policy was that the state award ignored several important names that should have received it long ago, while others, not worthy of it, received the award. No doubt some important names have received it too, but look how long it took Youssef Edris to receive it, he was even in a coma when it happened. As for the Generation of the Sixties, you've got Ibrahim Aslan and Khairi Shalabi -- and they both deserve it, no doubt -- but Sonallah Ibrahim was never a candidate. The prize they offered him, which he rejected, was a special, one-off thing and in effect a humiliation. Things were not impartial, in short." El-Ghitani feels the most rewarding fact about the award is that "everyone, from the least significant person to the best-known writer" have had the same comment: "Congratulations, even though it came so late." It is, he says, a statement of the truth. To see the award as a step in the direction of reconciliation with the establishment is to misread the whole situation. El-Ghitani says no one ever contacted him except for Nassar, "a truly respectable man: an impartial poet, closer to the opposition than the government and officially representing an independent university"; the day he found out about his candidacy, El-Ghitani was in a conference with the Italian ambassador: "Believe me, had it been a friend of mine whose name was added to the list, I might have paid more attention or even felt more excitement." El-Ghitani has since caught wind of the minister declaring that he had personally voted for him, describing him as an important writer and "a value". Compare to his previous declarations, he says: "Who is this Gamal El-Ghitani?" And the writer and humourist Mahmoud El-Saadani wrote replying to the effect that, if he really didn't know who El-Ghitani was, Hosni should resign immediately. "If you ask me my opinion of him as a person," El-Ghitani says, "I would say he is much better than many other cultural officials. But what I talk about is his policy. And in this regard my position has in no way been affected." As the minister of culture's most outspoken critic -- "objective" is a term next to impossible to apply with any degree of accuracy, but it can safely be said that in opposing cultural policy El-Ghitani stood to lose rather more than he stood to gain, and indeed as he points out repeatedly he did suffer as a result -- the novelist has, whether inadvertently or not, cast himself in the role of shadow minister of culture within a regime that allows for no such pluralism in practise. This line of thinking finds support both in the fact that he has worked largely from within Akhbar Al-Yom -- like Al-Ahram a "national", for which read pro-government and to a very great extent government-funded, press institution -- and that both he and his newspaper have frequently played host to those ideas, figures and currents without access to the establishment, discovering young new voices in literature and the arts, raising awareness of major cultural and regional issues, supporting progressive causes. (The present writer suspected El-Ghitani might find the notion of being shadow minister offensive or unpleasant, and consequently avoided spelling it out in so many words, but for this writer as for many of his generation, easy access to El-Ghitani and generous support from him have provided what the ministry purports to exist for, namely a milieu, recognition and dialogue. Regarding issues of national importance or events requiring national representation, it is more frequently in the direction of El-Ghitani than that of the ministry's many mediocre cronies -- Hosni himself is of course by and large beyond reach -- that one's mind tends to wander. This, it must be added, is not a political position, rather a reflection of direct experience of the culture scene, on the ground). "No doubt playing a public role has negatively impacted my career as an author," he says. El-Ghitani goes through his early years of activism, his arrest, his dismissal from work, the sense of belonging to a community that has always characterised his generation; he speaks of "fresh emotions" and "committed dreams", the beginning of the end with the 1967 War, the eventual collapse of the Soviet Union, and the fact that for the Sixties, by and large, politics went into the very formation of being. A public role was more or less unavoidable. It was in 1985, under Said Sonbol, that he started performing his current public role, after several years of retirement from the front, a voluntary act undertaken in response to Sadat's policies of, among other things, peace with Israel. He took charge of the literary page in Al-Akhbar, the earliest basis of Akhbar Al-Adab. "This is when the problems started. Because once you're in charge of a page, you become a party in the cultural arena." It was a hard battle against censorship, largely in favour of the Generation of the Sixties, which Sonbol more or less condoned. By 1993, he was editor of Akhbar Al-Adab ; and given "the power of the minister, and his press militias, the mafia warfare he can and does declare by phoning people at their homes", its orientation of approaching culture as a perspective on every aspect of life, remaining true to the Arab intellectual's views, was bound to turn into an all-out battle not only with the ministry but with the minister himself. After his return from the US, where he undertook heart surgery at the end of the 1980s, El-Ghitani says, he felt it was a battle worth waging. "What remains to Egyptians apart from Egyptian culture?" The impartiality and commitment of Akhbar Al-Adab has had resonance throughout the Arab world and beyond, and El-Ghitani, whether as novelist or some kind of shadow minister, represents Egypt widely in Europe. He is oversensitive in dealing with the ministry, he says: he will never accept any form of money from them, even if it is to attend the Frankfurt Book Fair. "But my view of the state award is different. First of all, my name was put forward not by the ministry but by an independent party. Secondly, I believe things had come to such a point where, if my name was there and I was still excluded, things would not look so good. The minister is intelligent enough not to have intervened." El-Ghitani is looking forward to retirement at 65 in two years' time, when he will have the chance to concentrate on his novels. And he trusts the team with which he works in Akhbar Al-Adab. "When I go," he says, "I will leave behind not one but 10 capable editors-in-chief." Tired he may be, and relatively frustrated as a novelist -- retirement will help him get over that frustration -- but as he says repeatedly and very convincingly, his conscience is clear.
