The second novel by the Egyptian writer Alaa El Aswany broke sales records this year, preceded by the reputation of L’immeuble Yacoubian (The Yacoubian Building), recently adapted for the screen. Written in the manner of a serial that one reads in a single sitting, or nearly so, it is also and above all a courageous and successful indictment of the political oppression weighing on Egyptian society and of the Islamic puritanism that triumphs within it. In that sense, it is no accident that its author set it in Chicago: the richness of the committed, anti-puritan strain of the American novel is well known.
The first reason to recommend reading this novel is… the pleasure one takes in reading it. This story of several members of the small community of Egyptian doctors and researchers settled in Chicago is written like a good old serial, in the manner of Dumas or Sue… Each chapter is devoted to one of the characters and, in keeping with the serial technique, breaks off at a crucial moment; then we rejoin the character two or three chapters later, exactly where we had left him, in suspense always skillfully maintained.
The novel as a whole forms a succession of engaging narratives, in which the characters follow one another and meet again from one chapter to the next, in an ever-tighter weave, each having to confront one of the most significant episodes of his life — in the private, social, or political sphere: exile and arrival in Chicago, the beginning or end of a love, the discovery or refusal of sexuality, separation from a child grown adult or from a spouse grown estranged, allegiance to the representatives of a system or refusal of all submission: the element to be confronted is sometimes external, sometimes internal.
Alaa El Aswany’s freedom of tone is total, both in the description of the numerous love scenes (never violent or unbearable) and in the political dialogues, centered on the analysis of what drives beings and governments to betray, or to betray themselves.
And this is no doubt the second good reason to read this novel: it offers a courageous and damning vision of Egyptian society today, between revolt and resignation, in a context that is stagnant, corrupt, archaic, and massively won over by Islamism.
The characters are, in this regard, emblematic: the Egyptian police system is remarkably embodied in the figure of the sinister and cruel Safwat Shaker, who rules over the Union of Egyptian Students (who live only on their grants) and around whom a ballet of compliance or refusal is organized.
Very different, the character of Doctor Saleh is likewise representative of an exile that is synonymous with a despairing loss of and to oneself.
Each character represents a possible stance in life, in society, in exile; among these stances, the novel’s hero, the young Nagui, chooses refusal. And he also belongs to the long tradition of libertine heroes, his political freedom going hand in hand with the choice of love outside marriage and freedom of morals; he thus refuses both the chastity imposed by the mullahs and the system of compromises put in place by the agents of State Security within the Union of Egyptian Students in America. This student association gradually becomes a metaphor for Egyptian society, crushed by the security agents who organize submission and servility.
A novel of denunciation and commitment, Chicago takes up most of the many problems from which Egyptian society suffers, such as Egypt’s scientific and technological backwardness, a backwardness that explains its brain drain:
“— All the Egyptians who have worked with me (in the U.S.) are gifted and have a great capacity for work. Despite this, Egypt, as a country, is still scientifically backward. Do you have an explanation?
— Egypt is underdeveloped because of the absence of democracy, no more and no less. Egyptians achieve excellent results when they emigrate to the West, whereas in Egypt they are oppressed and pushed aside by the regime.”
— p. 206
A novel of exile, Chicago intelligently poses the question of the emigration of elites away from poor countries and their fate in Western societies. Each of the exiles must answer for his choice in the face of an inhuman dilemma: stay in the country and be crushed; flee and abandon it. The descriptions and analyses of an Egyptian woman who stayed behind are terrible:
“— Egypt is at its lowest, as if everything my comrades and I fought for were a mirage. Democracy never came into being, we never rid ourselves of underdevelopment, ignorance, and corruption. Everything has changed for the worse. Reactionary ideas are spreading like an epidemic. Just imagine: out of fifty women employees, I am the only Muslim in the administration who does not wear the hijab. How could Egypt have evolved this way?
— Repression, misery, oppression, the loss of hope in the future, the absence of any national objective […] What is spreading now in Egypt is not real religiosity, but a collective nervous depression, accompanied by religious exhibitionism. What made things worse is that the millions of Egyptians who worked in Saudi Arabia came back with Wahhabi ideas, and that the government supported the spread of these ideas, which reinforced it. The Wahhabi rite forbids rising up against a Muslim ruler, even if he oppresses the people. The only thing that concerns the Wahhabis is covering up the woman’s body.”
— p. 387
This Egypt is as much the work of the politicians since Nasser (“I continue to believe that he was one of the best leaders Egypt ever had, but his enormous fault was not to have established democracy and to have left us a military power inherited by people less honest and less competent than he”) as it is the consequence of individual choices judged very harshly: this Egyptian woman who stayed behind thus concludes her conversation with her former sweetheart, who left to live in the United States, with a few cruel words: “At least I didn’t run away.”
Their reunion will end there, for resolution seems impossible under Alaa El Aswany’s pen — and one may regret it: to present the exile of intellectuals and professionals from poor countries in terms of flight or betrayal is a surprisingly moralizing simplification that frames in terms of cowardice (submit or resign) what is also a matter of survival.
Another disappointment, and a major one: the representation of Israel, far removed from what one might expect from a novelist so clear-sighted about his own country. The analyses Alaa El Aswany offers of relations between Israel and its Arab neighbors are hardly encouraging. Under this author’s pen, the Hebrew State appears only in sweeping representations, with little nuance, even little accuracy, since it is almost always associated with “massacres”:
“Don’t most Jews throughout the world help Israel with all their strength? Is it not as a Jewish State that Israel perpetuates its massacres against the Arabs?”
— p. 411
And further on:
“The Arabs hate Israel not because it is a Jewish State but because it usurped power in Palestine and perpetrated dozens of massacres against the Palestinians. If the Israelis were Buddhists or Hindus, it would change nothing for us. Our struggle against Israel is political, not religious.”
Finally, one finds in Alaa El Aswany’s novel a soothing and well-known reading of relations between Jews and Arabs, a reading that is quite disappointing:
“Read history. The Jews lived for centuries in the Arab world without problems and without oppression. On the contrary, they enjoyed the trust of the Arabs. So much so that for a thousand years the private physicians of the sultans were generally Jews.”
— p. 286
This vision of the Jews and of other minorities living for so long “in the Arab world without problems and without oppression” frankly leaves one wondering.
Along these lines, one regrets that El Aswany was among the writers calling for a boycott of the 2008 Salon du livre (Paris Book Fair), whose guest of honor was Israel: at bottom, he refused to meet writers who, like him, not far from him, separated by a secure border that is proof that peace agreements in the region can be signed and respected, act as he does and denounce what seems to them intolerable in their own country.
This is yet another of the reasons why it is impossible to follow the author in all his conclusions: when he hurls his anathema indiscriminately upon all of Israeli society, or when he presents the choice of exile by Arab-Muslim professionals and intellectuals, at worst as a form of betrayal, at best as an indecent flight.
What one will take away from Chicago are the questions that run through any reflection on the evolution of Arab-Muslim societies today. Exile, become a novelistic space, makes it possible to pose — three hundred years after the Lettres persanes (Persian Letters), and with courageous but, alas, similar answers — the question that imposes itself in the face of the Islamist rise in Egypt as elsewhere: “How to be a Muslim today?”