Satiric Literature and Other ”Popular” Literary Genres in Egypt Today

This article starts by describing some characteristics of current Egyptian popular literature, based on field observation at the Cairo 2016 book fair and a survey of the Egyptian authors available on the social network Goodreads, and puts the stress on the spectacular rejuvenation this market experienced in the last ten years. It focuses then on one of this market’s main genres, namely, satiric literature, and suggests through the analysis of various authors’ trajectories and works that it reveals a tension between reformism and subversion, a tension similar to the one that characterises the predicament of the Egyptian intelligentsia in the post-2011 context.

Since my Ph.D. research on the Egyptian literary field, conducted in the 1990s, I have been fascinated with the question of the limits of the field, in other words, the question of the definition of legitimate literature. Who defines it? How? What gets into the canon and what does not? Egyptian writers often complain that they have a limited audience: "Egyptians don't read literature, they use to lament, implicitly equating between their own, restrictive, definition of literature, and their fellow citizens." However, there is a much broader readership for literature in Egypt than the few thousand readers of the latest novel by Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī, Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm or Ibrāhīm Aṣlān. People did read, but they did not read the books these legitimate writers wanted them to read. 1 Then came the Yacoubian Building phenomenon. 2 A novel by a previously unknown writer became in a few years a real bestseller, locally and then internationally, something unheard of in modern Arabic literature. This prompted heated debates within the Egyptian literary field, between those arguing that the novel added nothing to the Egyptian or Arab novel, and those (among them of course its author) who argued that the readers' acclaim was the best proof of its literary value. Yet, more interesting than this controversy, that was but a repetition of countless debates about the definition of legitimate literature, the success story of The Yacoubian Building revealed a general evolution of the Egyptian book market that took place during the last decade of Mubarak's rule, whose most visible characteristic was the emergence of the bestseller. Following the Yacoubian Building success, several books, all by newcomers, reached unprecedented levels of sales and audiences. This was made possible by several transformations: growing audiences (made possible by the general raise of enrolment in secondary and higher education, especially among girls-and girls in Egypt as elsewhere are more prone to reading than boys); the rapid growth of Internet access, which generated new reading practices but also new ways of promoting books (online book clubs, blogs, forums, illegal downloading) and a new form of relation between writers and their readers (through social networks); and finally a spectacular modernization of the retail market (notably the emergence of several actors who introduced new marketing techniques and developed a whole network of bookshops within a few years such as Dīwān, Shurūq, and more recently Alef Bookstores). 3 The revolutionary turmoil of 2011-2013 badly affected this emerging market. The reading audience turned to newspapers and TV and computer screens at the expense of books and the publishing sector witnessed a general shrink. Things started to get better, if not on the political level, starting from 2014. I had the opportunity to assess this recovery while spending two weeks in Cairo during the 2016 book fair (27 January-10 February). I had not visited the book fair for five years and I was stunned by the sheer quantity of new publishers, new authors and new books. To start with a rough measure: Egyptian books must carry a legal deposit number, which consists of the year of publication followed by a serial number given by the National library according to the date of deposit. This means that one can assess how many books have been published during a given year by looking at the legal deposit number of the books published at the end of the year. This is also the period where the largest amount of books is published, in order to be available at the Book Fair by the end of January. This year, the highest 2015 serial numbers I found were over 25,000, a clearly unprecedented figure (by end of the 1990s the legal deposit number just reached 10,000).
The transformation of the book market was very visible in the way books are marketed. Publishers have developed new strategies to attract readers, the most visible one being to put in front what is presented as bestsellers. 4 Book covers enlarged in poster size, high piles of the same title, mention of the (always high) number of prints on the cover, etc. In my previous research, 5 I noted that while authors and retailers had done a lot to boost the book market, publishers were lagging behind. Now it seems that they are catching up with the movement. Looking at all these so-called bestsellers (of course, not all books presented 3 JACQUEMOND 2013. See also ROOKE 2011 Here and in the following, terms emphasized in bold indicate artifacts, roles and activities that with all probability will be of particular relevance for the In 2016 project's search for Gumbrecht'ian arrays, codes, and codes collapsed (cf. S. GUTH's Introduction to the present Living 2016 dossier). The emphasis is the editor's.] as such actually are), I was amazed to find that most of their authors were young newcomers, just as were the crowds of readers (predominantly female) attracted by them. This bestseller market is definitely a "young" market in every meaning of the word. It is also a market dominated by three genres: horror, satire, and romance, each one having its own codes (cover illustration and title), which make it easily identifiable by the consumer. 6 However, the Egyptian book market has not changed a lot during the last decades in one aspect: its opacity. Publishers never make public sales figures, and would they, it would not help a lot because of the massive amount of book diffusion that is taking place out of their control, either in the form of illegal prints or illegal downloading on the Internet. In my previous research on bestsellers, I built up a tentative chart of the most popular Egyptian authors by tracking the number of pdf versions of their books downloaded on <4share.com>. Back in 2010-2011, it was the downloading platform most widely used by Arab readers, and with every book available for download it indicated the number of previous downloads. While such a survey is no longer possible (<4share> no longer states the number of downloads, and it competes now with countless other downloading platforms), I have made an attempt at updating it through another means, which has proved very useful: the specialized social network Goodreads. Launched in the US in 2007, it has developed in a way so attractive for the book market that it has been bought in 2013 by Amazon, and it is used by many authors in the Anglo-Saxon world as a promotion tool for their books. It has become also quite popular in the Arab world. The network boasts some 50 million members worldwide, among them at least several hundreds of thousands Arab readers, if one judges by the number of ratings of the most popular Arab authors (close to 330,000 for Aḥmad Khālid Tawfīq).

The Egyptian authors hit list according to Goodreads
Every book listed in Goodreads is presented with a complete bibliographical record, its average rating (on a scale from 1 to 5), number of ratings and number of reviews, all of which can be read below on the same thread. Goodreads is also a social network whose members can befriend each other, send messages, comment reviews, etc. One can make a research by book title or by author. Authors' page usually include a short bio (often filled by the author her/himself) and aggregate the statistics of all his books (average rating, number of ratings, number of reviews, number of distinct works), plus a link to "similar authors" who are determined, one can suppose, by some algorithm.

Ratings Type of writing
Author Rank compared to previous chart ↓ .

Ratings Type of writing
Maḥmūd al-Saʿdanī  8,647 satiric writer Yūsuf al-Qaraḍāwī (1926) 8,575 Islamic preacher Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī  7,625 novelist Muḥ. M. al-Shaʿrāwī (1911-1998    33,581 poet (Palestine) Nizār Qabbānī  28,195 poet (Syria) Goodreads seems to be especially popular among Egyptian readers, if one judges by the relatively lower number of ratings of the most popular non-Egyptian Arab authors compared to their Egyptian peers (the second larger audience of this social network being seemingly located in the Arabian peninsula, if one judges by the strong presence of authors coming from this area in the above list of non-Egyptian writers). Both charts have the same bias, namely, they measure the popularity of Egyptian authors not among Egyptian readers, but among the wider audience of Arab readers and Arabic-language users worldwide. If we make the plausible hypothesis that middlebrow authors tend to have a more local reputation than highbrow, canonical authors, who are prone to have a larger Arab audience, it means that both charts probably overstate the weight of the canonized, legitimate authors and understate that of the middlebrow authors within the Egyptian national market. Another bias is that both charts assess books, not authors: in other words, the more a given author has published books, the more downloads or ratings he will get, which explains the high ranking of such prolific authors as Aḥmad Khālid Tawfīq, Muṣṭafà Maḥmūd or Nagīb Maḥfūẓ. Conversely, the high ranking of Aḥmad Murād (n° 3) and Muḥammad Ṣādiq (n° 7) in the Goodreads chart (having respectively only five and four books published to date) is quite telling of their resounding success. Aḥmad Murād's al-Fīl al-azraq (The Blue Elephant, 2013) and Muḥammad Ṣādiq's Hībtā (Hepta, 2014) may have outreached Yacoubian, if not in terms of sales, surely in number of readers. Both have also, like Yacoubian, been quickly turned into movies as successful as the books (Hībtā: al-Muḥāḍara al-akhīra [Hepta: The Last Conference], released on April 20, 2016, has been one of the biggest hits of the year 2016 8 ). While their writings are quite different (Murād made his debut with two detective novels before moving to the psychological thriller à la Stephen King, then to the historical novel; Ṣādiq's Hepta is a romance of sorts on the seven stages of love-hence its title), they market themselves in very similar ways. Other newcomers ranking high in this chart include Ḥasan al-Gindī, the most popular specialist of the Egyptian version of horror fiction (adab al-ruʿb), who has published some ten books since 2009 (and further down in the chart, his colleague Tāmir Ibrāhīm), and Khawla Ḥamdī (n° 17), a young Tunisian author of three romance novels published in Egypt and therefore having a mainly Egyptian audience, the reason why I included her in this chart.
Overall, the most interesting finding of this chart is the strong showing made by the new kings of the Egyptian bestseller. First come the elder ones, Aḥmad Khālid Tawfīq (n° 1) and Nabīl Fārūq (n° 5), who gained fame in the 1990s with their immensely popular series for teenagers (they are by far the most prolific writers-almost 1,000 different titles between the two of them). While Fārūq remained stuck in those genres, Tawfīq has been able to conquer other age brackets, especially since Yūtūbiyā (Utopia, 2007), his biggest hit to date and a political thriller set in the near future, that can be seen as the pioneer of the wave of dystopian novels that appeared in the aftermath of the 2011 revolution. Among the bestselling authors who emerged in the first decade of the 2000s, Yūsuf Zaydān (n° 6), ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī (n° 11) and ʿUmar Ṭāhir (n° 13) appear to have also gained popularity in the last years, while sticking to the genres that made their initial success: historical novel (Zaydān), realistic, politically committed fiction (al-Aswānī), and satiric writing (Ṭāhir).
Among other interesting findings is the high ranking of elder writers belonging to the consecrated literary avant-garde of the generation of the sixties (Bahāʾ Ṭāhir, n° 14) or seventies (Raḍwà ʿĀshūr, n° 9; Muḥammad al-Mansī Qandīl, n° 19), while other equally or more consecrated writers of these generations are much less popular than they looked in the previous chart (Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī, Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm). This might be explained by the fact that, unlike Ghīṭānī and Ibrāhīm, the former have moved towards forms of writing more appealing to a larger audience, especially through the historical novel, a genre that connects middlebrow and highbrow literature and readers, in Egypt as elsewhere. It also indicates that the elder generations of writers benefit from the general improvement of the Egyptian book market. Among the eldest generations, that of the "pioneers" (al-ʿAqqād, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn) seem to have lost much of its appeal, while Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm (n° 10) and especially Nagīb Maḥfūẓ (n° 4) remain quite popular. 9 As regards the latter, it is noteworthy that his most rated novel on Goodreads is the controversial Awlād ḥārit-nā, which was not published in Egypt before 2006, a few months after his death. 10 One of the most striking differences between the two charts is the sharp drop in interest for Islamic authors, whether the more conventional, religious figures (Ghazālī, Qaraḍāwī, Shaʿrāwī) or the more militant (Sayyid Quṭb). Only Muṣṭafà Maḥmūd maintains a strong presence, but although he is commonly dubbed as an "Islamic writer" (kātib islāmī), he deals with religion rather from an existential or spiritual point of view, being thus read, especially by the youth, as a Muslim Paolo Coelho of sorts rather than as a shaykh or a dāʿiya (preacher). In this sense, it his noteworthy that his most popular books are Ḥiwār maʿa ṣadīqī al-mulḥid (Dialogue with My Atheist Friend) and Riḥlatī min alshakk ilà 'l-īmān (My Journey from Doubt to Faith). Also, we remark that the second most popular book by Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm on Goodreads, after his classic Yawmiyyāt nāʾib fī 'laryāf (Diary of a Country Prosecutor), is Ari-nī 'llāh (Show me God), an essay on faith neglected by canonical literary history. In other words, it seems that the social groups active in Goodreads, predominantly young and female, remain strongly interested by religious matters, but in a way rather disconnected with Islamic dogma or with the quest for immediate, worldly guidance often associated with contemporary popular Muslim preachers. Should this shunning be linked with the fading popularity of the Muslim Brotherhood (and other political forces using Islam as a rallying symbol) in post-2013 Egypt? This is a tempting interpretation, but it is safer to leave the question open.
On the whole, this chart is a clear illustration of my starting point. Among the twenty top Egyptian writers of this chart, only five can be dubbed as consecrated by the literary establishment (N. Maḥfūẓ, R. ʿĀshūr, T. al-Ḥakīm, B. Ṭāhir, ʿA. al-ʿAqqād), another five as being less consecrated but yet widely recognized as "proper" writers (Zaydān, al-Aswānī, al-Sibāʿī, ʿAbd al-Quddūs, M. al-M. Qandīl), while the other ten rather represent various forms of middlebrow literature. The Egyptian reading audience exists, but it does not read necessarily what the literary establishment wants it to read-which is, after all, a very trivial observation that can be made in many modern contexts.
Finally, and since we are going to deal more specifically now with satiric literature, this genre does not seem to be as popular as one could have expected given the abundant production it gives rise to in nowadays Egypt. True, its two major exponents, ʿUmar Ṭāhir and Bilāl Faḍl, are present in the chart (n° 13 and n° 24), but at a relatively low level. Among the three major genres of "popular" literature I identified at the beginning of this paper as the most thriving in 2016 Egypt-romance, horror, satire-, the latter seems to be the less successful, at least with the Goodreads Arab audience.

The case of satiric literature (adab sākhir)
Satire has a deep tradition in Egyptian culture that goes back to ancient times, and its prevalence throughout history has certainly to do with the national political culture, with its characteristic mix of deference and derision towards patriarchal authoritarianism, a mix that seems to have permeated for centuries the social fabric, from the nuclear family to the political system. Fī 'l-badʾ kānat al-nukta, "In the beginning was the Joke", writes Yūsuf Idrīs at the incipit of his famous short story A-kāna lā budda yā Lī-Lī an tuḍīʾī 'l-nūr (Did You Have to Turn on the Light, Lili?), pastiching the opening verse of the Gospel of John. 11 The oral nukta, satiric poetry, comedy as a main genre in both Egyptian cinematic and theatrical output, press caricature, are, along with adab sākhir, the main forms of ex-pression of this culture of derision the Egyptian people usually associate with the need for tanfīs, that is, to vent one's anger or frustration. To this list, the revolutionary moment added a new genre: the satiric talk show invented by Bassem Youssef (Bāsim Yūsuf, b. 1974) with the success we know, which made of him the king of Egyptian satirists without contest for the short period during which he was allowed to exert his talents. 12 During the second half of the 20 th century, several authors specialized in adab sākhir, and some of them such as Maḥmūd al-Saʿdanī (see charts above), Muḥammad ʿAfīfī , Aḥmad Ragab (1928Ragab ( -2014 13 or Galāl ʿĀmir (1952Galāl ʿĀmir ( -2012, were very popular among readers. However, the decade before the 2011 revolution witnessed a renewal of the genre at the hands of a new generation of writers: Bilāl Faḍl (b. 1974), ʿUmar Ṭāhir (b. 1973), Ghāda ʿAbd al-ʿĀl (b. 1978, Aḥmad al-ʿUsaylī (b. 1976), Usāma Gharīb, etc. The wave of successful books by these and other authors on the eve of the 2011 revolution became so visible that it was commented both in the local and foreign press, 14 before becoming a topic of interest for a number of researchers in modern Arabic literature. Before dwelling further on the subject, a preliminary reflexion on the category of adab sākhir seems necessary.
In Western literary criticism, satire refers both to a specific literary genre, born in Latin poetry (satura, a versified medley) and revamped in European Renaissance and Enlightenment literatures, and to a discursive mode (mode discursif) that permeates all literary genres, from poetry to fiction, drama, and further. 15 While the latter sense seems more adapted to modern Western literatures, it is noteworthy that it is commonly described as a specific literary genre in modern Arabic culture, especially in Egypt. However, the ambiguity of satire, between a specific meaning and a broader one, is also palpable in the current Egyptian context: precisely because adab sākhir is recognised here as a specific genre, the limit between the written production characterised as such and other written works dwelling more or less on satire as a "discursive mode" is all but clear. 13 In July 2011, Aḥmad RAGAB was awarded the highest state prize in literature, the Nile Prize (formerly the Mubarak Prize). Several commentators criticized this choice on the ground that it rewarded a satirist who practiced his art without ever being too harsh on the Mubarak regime (and, moreover, only a few months after the latter's fall, hence the change in the name's prize). But significantly, these same commentators stressed that this award was also a long overdue recognition, by the literary establishment, of satiric literature. mention the term in the front cover or in the blurb of the book, such as ʿUmar Ṭāhir's bestseller Shaklă-hā bāẓit (Looks Like it Messed up, 2006), subtitled Albūm ijtimāʿī sākhir (Satiric social album). Several writers also present themselves or are presented as kātib sākhir (satiric writer) in the press or in the Internet pages (Wikipedia, Goodreads, etc.) dedicated to them. In other instances, a book is not explicitly qualified as adab sākhir but readers will connect it with the genre through paratextual elements: title, subtitle, cover illustration, blurb. Unlike highbrow literature where originality is an essential criterion, middlebrow forms of writing imply serialisation, that is, the reproduction of a variety of codes that allow the reader/consumer to identify the book/product as belonging to a given line of products. As regards adab sākhir, the reader's attention will be caught by a humorous title and/or subtitle, a cover illustration using the codes of press caricature, a well-chosen excerpt of the book as blurb, etc. 16 The author and/or publisher often put more care into these paratextual elements than in the text itself and the reader is disappointed by the actual content of the book, just as the filmgoer abused by a trailer that gathers in two of three minutes the best jokes and punch lines of a poor comedy. 17 However, the success of adab sākhir in the pre-2011 years seems to have led to an extension of the genre in ways unknown before. Books labelled as adab sākhir either by authors and publishers, or by reviewers and readers, only share a common structure that can be characterized as serial. That is, they consist in a series of chapters usually based on the same structure and ending with a punch line of sorts. This serial form is visible whether these books are originally written as such or whether they consist of collections of pieces previously published as press articles or columns (satirists are often journalists) or blogs. 18 Within this serial form, the content of each unit of the series can be very diverse, from short essays pondering religious, moral or social matters 19 to fictional anecdotes very similar to short stories, and sometimes presented as such (for instance, several books by Bilāl Faḍl are presented as collections of qiṣaṣ qaṣīra 20 ). Another characteristic of adab sākhir is its tendency to use ʿāmmiyya rather than fuṣḥà Arabic, or a mix of both, 21 which is one of the major reasons of its appeal, but this is not a development specific to this genrewriting in colloquial Egyptian or mixing it with standard written Arabic, a growing trend 16  since the 1990s at least, seems to have gained momentum in the post-2011 context. For all these reasons, trying to assess the amount of books published since 2011 that one can file under the category of adab sākhir appears to be an impossible task, and it would be presumptuous, in the limited scope of this paper, to give an overall appreciation of their content, tendencies or social function. While the phenomenon has attracted the attention of researchers, 22 very few academic literature, if any, has been published to date on the subject of Egyptian current satiric literature. The one piece I have been acquainted with is the one Stephan Guth kindly extended to me before publication, 23 and I will use it as a starting point to my own take on the subject. In this article where he deals with a cluster of young (shabāb) authors of adab sākhir, Guth suggests that "the most adequate rendering of [this term] is perhaps 'carnivalesque literature' or 'subversive literature'", 24 implicitly discarding its more common translation, that is, "satiric (or satirical) literature". He contrasts their writings with those of their earlier (in the 1920s) counterparts of al-madrasa al-ḥadītha, ʿĪsà ʿUbayd and Maḥmūd Taymūr, who "still write in the modus of (social) criticism, driven by the wish to promote moral improvement (tahdhīb), which are the main modus and goal of an optimistic Enlightenment with its 'yes, we can!' social reformism". 25 In the following pages, I would like to suggest a more nuanced reading of the current output of Egyptian adab sākhir, as oscillating between reformism and subversion. Actually, this ambivalence is embedded in the very notion of satire. In the Dictionnaire du littéraire, Claire Cazanave defines satire as "a genre that aims at denouncing the vices and insanities of men with a moral and didactic purpose". 26 This definition applies perfectly to the first masterpiece of modern Egyptian satire (although it has never been classified as adab sākhir), Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī's Ḥadīth ʿĪsà ibn Hishām, a reformist manifesto par excellence. At the other extreme of the spectrum, Yūsuf Idrīs's short story A-kāna lā budda yā Lī-Lī an tuḍīʾī 'l-nūr, whose opening line I used as an epigraph for this piece, can be read as an epitome of the Egyptian carnivalesque where, as in Bakhtin's reading of Rabelais, things are turned upside down for the sake of nothing but mocking and ridiculing. In this short story written as a long nukta of sorts, the imam is not mocked in the way "men of religion" (rijāl al-dīn) usually are in modern Arabic literature, that is, as venal hypocrites who do not act accordingly to their preaches. Rather, he is portrayed as a victim of Lī-Lī's awakening of his desire, which leads him to overstep his religious duty at the most crucial moment, that is, in the midst of the prayer he leads from the minbar. Far from advocating for moral values (sincerity vs hypocrisy, restraint vs greed, etc.), A-kāna lā budda… reveals and magnifies the locus where moral values cease to exist, namely, the realm of the flesh. Between reformism and subversion I will argue that analysing the current Egyptian output of adab sākhir through this lens, that is, as a genre in tension between reformism and subversion, or between taʾdīb (disciplining) and qillat adab (impoliteness), to use Tarek El-Ariss' suggestive formulation, 27 provides us with a heuristic approach not only to this specific output but perhaps more broadly to the predicament of the Egyptian intelligentsia in the post-revolutionary context. I will test this tension first through a comparison between the contrasted post-2011 trajectories of the two most famous names in the generation of satirists who emerged in the years 2000, namely, Bilāl Faḍl and ʿUmar Ṭāhir. The same age (Faḍl is born in 1974, Ṭāhir in 1973), they both started their careers as journalists in the late 1990s (Ṭāhir in Niṣf al-dunyā, a weekly magazine published by al-Ahrām state-owned group, Faḍl in al-Dustūr, an independent newspaper that breathed new life in the Egyptian press as soon as it was launched in 1995). By 2011, they were well established enough as writers to become op-ed writers in the independent press that flourished at that time, notably in al-Taḥrīr, a private daily launched in June 2011 by Ibrāhīm ʿĪsà (with whom Faḍl had worked in al-Dustūr). They also continued to publish books at an amazing pace (ten new titles by Bilāl Faḍl between 2011 and now-they probably include most of his press articles-, six by ʿUmar Ṭāhir). Besides this, Faḍl was carrying on a successful career as a scriptwriter, and Ṭāhir as well as a ʿāmmiyya poet, songwriter and scriptwriter.
After the Rābiʿa massacre (August 2013), Bilāl Faḍl's voice was one of the rare, within the liberal camp, to condemn unambiguously the repression. 28 In the following months, he kept voicing his criticism at the new powers-to-be in the daily al-Shurūq, until the newspaper censored one of his columns. 29 A few months later, the producers of Ahl Iskandariyya, a TV series written by him, stopped the filming. This was clearly another act of indirect, unofficial censorship. 30 This led him to leave the country for the United States, with a grant to study drama in New York. He joined then Al-ʿArabī al-Jadīd, a Londonbased Arab newspaper launched by the Qatari private company Fadaat Media in 2014 "as a counterweight to Al-Jazeera and its pro-Muslim Brotherhood influence", 31 which soon sheltered a number of dissident Egyptian voices. Since October 2015, he hosts a cultural program, ʿAṣīr al-kutub (Book's essence) on Al Araby TV, the channel launched the same year by Fadaat Media. Although he maintains a strong presence on the book market, most of his books being published by Dār al-Shurūq, the biggest private publisher in Egypt, his self-imposed exile and his absence from the Egyptian media have clearly affected his audience.
Conversely, ʿUmar Ṭāhir kept a lower profile, continuing to contribute to al-Ahrām and al-Akhbār, the main public, pro-government newspapers, as well as to al-Taḥrīr, which followed a pro-government line after the July 2013 coup, and, more recently (since May 2016) to al-Maqāl, the new opinion daily founded by Ibrāhīm ʿĪsà in February 2015. Maybe as a result of the current limits of his freedom of speech within the written press, Ṭāhir became much more active on the social media in the latest months, especially in Facebook where the number of his followers doubled (from 200,000 to 400,000) between May and October 2016.
In spite of their different political stances in the aftermath of 2013, Faḍl and Ṭāhir have followed a somewhat similar path, moving away from satiric writing and acting more and more, each one in his one way, as cultural mediators in a way typical of Egyptian intellectuals, that is, digging on the country's modern political or cultural history and offering their readers more or less original insights on events and personalities that marked the history of modern Egypt, often with a "lesson" to draw for the present day. This is the explicit program of Bilāl Faḍl's latest book, Vītāmīnāt lil-dhākira (Vitamins for Memory), published in January 2016. As for ʿUmar Ṭāhir, he has moved even further away from adab sākhir: his two latest books, Athar al-nabī (The Prophet's trace, 2015) and Idhāʿat alaghānī (Radio Hits, 2015), consist respectively of a series of pieces reflecting on various episodes in the life of Muḥammad, and a collection of accounts of the author's intimate relationship with some popular Arabic songs.
The hypothesis of a tension between taʾdīb and qillat adab, or reformism and subversion, should be tested through a family problems are caused by "poverty and ignorance", and in the second, because "these people have to sow religion and restraint in their inner selves". Which leaves us with "the middle class, which represents 70% of our society" 34 -a very broad definition, indeed, of the Egyptian middle class, but coherent with the authors' purpose, which is to "know their [that is, those 70% of the society] problems and try to help them in solving these problems". 35 Most chapters of the book follow the same pattern: a sketch, usually in dialogue form, presenting a dispute between husband and wife, followed by a "commentary" where the narrator stresses each side's rights and wrongs and provides advice in order to enhance harmony within the couple. The whole book is written in Cairene dialect and the dialogues often sound like those of an Egyptian musalsal (TV series). 36 The characters and situations are quite stereotypical: the husband does not care about being attractive, forgets the wedding anniversary, neglects the household and his children, has an affair, wants to take a second wife; the wife gets jealous for no reason, cannot stand her mother-in-law, refuses to have sex with her husband, etc. Each conflicting situation is presented as if it always happened in the same direction: the stereotypical Egyptian wife cannot be neglectful of herself or of her household and children, she cannot have an affair (and obviously, she cannot dream of taking a second husband), whereas the stereotypical husband cannot be jealous, refuse to have sex with his wife or have problems with her mother, etc. The comments and advices provided by the narrator/author aim at preserving the matrimonial bond, and in order to do so, both parties must refrain from falling into the natural tendencies, so to speak, of their respective sex. Here is a typical example: [As regards sexual needs], man is totally different from woman, because he is "positive" 37 and much less able than her to control his instincts. Of course, this does not mean that the woman is more virtuous or has a stronger will power: it is simply a gift our Lord bestowed on her so that she can protect herself in all situations. The clearest proof of this is that widows and divorced women can sometimes live without men, whereas it is very difficult for a widower or a divorced man to spend the rest of his life without a woman.
[…] As for the woman who refuses [to have sex with] her husband, ignores him or sleeps while knowing that he needs her [sexually], despite the fact that he treats her respectfully and tenderly, and justifies it by saying "It' 37 The author uses the adjective mūgab, which refers to the positive electric polarity, the woman being implicitly characterized as the negative (salbī) polarity.
afraid for my hairstyle", she is being unfair to her husband and she must understand that by doing so, she becomes accomplice in any fault he might fall into […]. 38 Like most satirists, Muʿawwaḍ is thus a moralist. He makes his reader laugh at his characters in order to reaffirm the matrimonial bond as a social norm. The last sentence of the book reads as follows: This is the history of Hind and Hindāwī, the history of every household in our country, and how many histories there are inside the houses, but only the smart one understands that it is always the same old story, that he is not the only one to live it and enjoy it as it is, and that there is no harm in him trying to make it better. The only harm is to become desperate or run away and leave behind him a story he walked into by his own will and people who agreed to walk into it with him. 39 In this respect, it is very much similar to Ghāda ʿAbd al-ʿĀl's introduction of ʿĀyza atgawwiz, where she expresses her scepticism towards young women who pretend not to care about marriage or having other priorities: It might be true that many girls have high ambitions in their studies or in their careers, but I challenge any one of them to tell me that her first and foremost ambition in life is not to become a wife, if only because it is the only way for her to become a mother. 40 Here is another bestseller of adab sākhir where satirising marriage is a means not to mock the institution in itself, but to criticize its debasement in the current conditions prevailing in Egyptian society (or, as Īhāb Muʿawwaḍ would say, in the Egyptian middle class). Like Muʿawwaḍ, ʿAbd al-ʿĀl is clearly on the reformist pole of adab sākhir. Let us turn now to the other pole, the subversive one. Muṣṭafà Shuhayb (b. 1988) is a young writer and journalist with already five books published between 2010 and 2016. According to his Wikipedia Arabic page, 41 the most successful (14 prints) is Riḥlatī min ilshakk lil-shakk barḍuh 42 (My Journey from Doubt to Doubt Again)-a pastiche of Muṣṭafà Maḥmūd's bestseller Riḥlatī min al-shakk ilà 'l-īmān (My Journey from Doubt to Faith, 1970). The content is faithful to the title: unlike Īhāb Muʿawwaḍ, Muṣṭafà Shuhayb does not seek to provide advice or guidance through humour. His book is a candid and funny account of a young man's quest for himself within a family and a society who provide him with unsatisfactory answers: the theme and style remind of ʿUmar Ṭāhir's in Shaklă-hā bāẓit, 43 his first hit. The blurb, in pure ʿāmmiyya, is a faithful rendition of the book's content, also written mostly in dialect: This book is for you if: You never were top of the class. You can't take a decision. Dogs frighten you and you like to bully cats. You hate the smell of hospitals. You killed a cockroach and you waited until you watched the ants gathering around it. You used to put a slash on the RIGHT sign to make it look WRONG too. You got an electric shock when a child. You pilfered the private lessons money and you cheated on the price of the schoolbooks. You don't know your ID number, you can't memorize your father's phone number, your mother's or your sisters'. You are afraid of carrying babies. You lose all your receipts. You use traffic as an excuse even when the streets are empty. You're the best when it comes to give advice but you are as helpless as a babe! 44 Riḥlatī is a succession of chapters where a first-person narrator who resembles the author, a young man in his twenties, makes fun of himself confiding to his reader stories about his family, his friends and more or less every kind of problem young men and women are confronted with in Egypt-except those having to do with sexuality. This silence about such a crucial matter for most Egyptian youth reveals the limits of the acceptable subversiveness in this kind of literature. As much striking is the absence of politics (no mention of what happened between 2011 and 2013 in the country in this book published in 2015) and religion: in other words, Muṣṭafà Shuhayb stays on the safe side from the famous "trinity of taboos" (al-thālūth al-muḥarram) 45 . In spite of these concessions to the unwritten rules imposed by both state and society, Riḥlatī still deserves to be read as a form of subversive satire in the sense that it is faithful to its title: it takes us "from doubt to doubt again", opening a Pandora's box of questions and leaving the reader with no answers to them. It ends with a chapter where the narrator finds himself dead, witnesses his own funeral and seems to finally come to terms with his depression and insignificance. A very pessimistic ending, quite anticlimactic for a supposedly humorous book, but also much telling of, or in tune with, the mood of the Egyptian youth in the post-2013 context. This trend is taken to an extreme of sorts in Ḥikāyāt sīkūbātiyya 46 (Psychopathic Stories), the first book of Wagīh Ṣabrī, a young author who presents himself as follows on the blurb: Wagīh Ṣabrī is a young man in his twenties who has grown up in Egypt and has been educated in its schools. This is why he has learnt zilch in the field in which he specialised and he has decided to do what he enjoys doing. 47 The first "psychopathic story" is also reproduced in the blurb. It is a short, hilarious dialogue between a psychiatrist and a patient who complains from a weird addiction: he 44 SHUHAYB 2015: back cover. 45 More precisely, "[t]he real taboos could instead be labelled obscenity, blasphemy and political opposition, the classical reasons for suppression of the freedom of expression since Antiquity" (STAGH 1993: 127 loves to rape doctors, male and female as well. It ends with the so-called patient starting to undo his shirt's buttons in preparation of his raping. This, added to the author's selfpresentation, leads us to categorize Ḥikāyāt sīkūbātiyya as adab sākhir, even if the book title and front cover do not conform to the codes of the genre. The other stories are very much in line with that of the doctors' rapist. Most of them consist of short (2-3 pages) dialogues taking place in daily social intercourses (job interviews, a woman buying sanitary towels in a pharmacy, an oral exam at the university, etc.). Yet dialogue becomes absurd when one of the parties, or both of them, is obviously mad, in a way that is nothing but an exaggeration of what is taking place in ordinary life. 48 Other stories aim at Egypt as a whole: a group of jihadists consider conquering Egypt, but when one of them describes it as a total mess, they renounce; aliens roam around Earth kidnapping people to enslave them in their planet, but when they discover that they have put aboard an Egyptian, they decide to send him back despite his supplications, because they "take everybody except Egyptians", the "worst slackers on earth". 49 The spaceship takes off and a few seconds later, "a creased fifty pounds note falls down". The Egyptian "takes it, unfolds it, kisses it and puts it in his pocket". 50 One finds here neither moral aim guiding the social critique, nor post-adolescent revolted confessions. All we have is black humour, absurd and a derision that spares no one, or rather, seems to target all Egyptians. Wagīh Ṣabrī's look at Egyptian society is hopeless. It reminds me of Aḥmad al-ʿĀʾidī (Alaidy)'s cult novel An takūn ʿAbbās al-ʿAbd (Being Abbas el Abd), 51 with the humour in addition. This subversive tone is also very much present in Ṣabrī's very popular posts on Facebook, 52 where he engages sometimes in direct political commentary. For instance, at the beginning of the Tiran and Sanafir affair 53 he published a hilarious imaginary dialogue between King Salmān and marshal-president al-Sīsī, a dialogue that could have been written for a Bassem Youssef program. 54 A few days later, he had this one: -Sorry about that, hagga, your son has hope.
-Oh my! Why? How did he catch it? As if we didn't have enough on our hands! -He might be born with it. Or he's one of those upright youth who took part in the revolution and painted the sidewalks. Let him take this suppository until he is cured and gets useless, characterless and unconcerned with life, with God's help.
-Let's pray to Him,Doctor! 55 This is as close as one can get to the famous French aphorism: L'humour est la politesse du désespoir (Humour is the polite form of despair). It is tempting to make a parallel between this kind of black humour, which seems to be rather unheard of in the field of Egyptian satiric literature, and the several dystopian novels that appeared recently in Egypt. 56 Each one in its own way, they appear as the literary expression of the state of mind of large sections of the Egyptian youth in the current context. The brutal repression of political dissent that has followed the army's takeover in July 2013 and targeted the "revolutionary youth" as much as, if not more than the partisans of the "deposed president" Muḥammad Mursī, has led to a shrinkage of public space as spectacular as was its expansion between January 2011 and June 2013. It has also reached several of those writers, cartoonists and other artists such as Aḥmad Nāgī, Islām Gāwīsh, the Aṭfāl al-Shawāriʿ music band, 57 etc., who unknowingly transgressed the shrinking limits of what is deemed acceptable within artistic or literary expression by the powers-to-be. But as sweeping as the counterrevolution may be, it cannot erase the experience lived during those two years, an experience that has been especially decisive for the young generation whose political socialisation took place in this context. Whether in the conventional book form, as we examined here mostly, or through social networks, whether in written form, in caricature or in the current Youtube videos that prolong the Bassem Youssef talk-show, satire remains a privileged form of expression of the Egyptian youth's discontent with the current state of affairs as well as a way to cultivate the spirit of freedom they experienced during the years 2011-2013.