Literature is not officially censored in Egypt; the scholars of al-Azhar are entitled to scour books on religion for objectionable material, but not other genres. Yet books are often the victims of insidious “street censorship,” which occurs when the media and religious groups rouse public indignation to the point that the authorities must intervene. This is what happened in the case of the Syrian novelist Haydar Haydar’s Banquet for Seaweed, which was published by an Egyptian government-run press in 2000. (Government-published books are crucial to Egyptian letters, as low levels of readership and weak copyright laws have stunted the growth of a commercial publishing industry.) Based on a few provocative passages cited out of context, religious scholars and their mouthpieces in the press labeled the book “blasphemous.” It’s a good guess that none of the riot police or hundreds of students at Cairo’s main Islamic university that fought pitched battles over the book had ever read a page of it.
More recently, the literary magazine Ibdaa (“Creativity”) had its license revoked over the publication, in 2007, of a poem by the renowned poet Helmy Salem, deemed blasphemous because it personified God with lines such as: “The Lord isn’t a policeman/who catches criminals by the scruff of their necks/the Lord is a villager who feeds the ducks/who probes cows’ udders with his fingers, calling out:/Plenty of milk…” Before Ibdaa was shut down, Salem had already been forced to return a State Award for Achievement in the Arts, honoring his entire body of work. The court that rescinded the award found that “The sin that he committed … against God and against society, challenging its traditions and religious beliefs should fail the sum total of his work, rendering him ineligible for any state honor or prize.”