Sisi, Nasser, & the Great Egyptian Novel

Decades between Nasser and Sisi, a generation of Egyptian intellectuals seems to yearn in old age for Nasserite optimism, which somewhere took a wrong turn into security police dungeons.

by Ahmed El Shamsy

Journalists and intellectuals riding the bandwagon of military rule in Egypt are a dime a dozen these days, but Gamal al-Ghitany is a special case.

His 1974 novel Zayni Barakat is considered a seminal study of postcolonial disappointment, a vivid account of how the hopes placed in a charismatic leader were suffocated by a net of state surveillance and torture.

Al-Ghitany, who was jailed for half a year during the regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, has firsthand experience of the horrors of totalitarianism.

It may come as a surprise, then, that in post-Mubarak Egypt, al-Ghitany has emerged as one of the most outspoken proponents of military rule and the draconian suppression of dissent.

What can this tell us about postcolonial literature and the Arab Spring’s authoritarian turn?