of taking pleasure in reading without deluding ourselves, fleetingly, that what we are reading is not made up but has actually happened. (It is because of this make-believe that the lights are turned off in theaters, whether of stage or screen.) It follows that the confusion that occurs in the minds of some between imagination and reality is an indicator of the artist’s excellence in the execution of his work, since he has succeeded in making the reader’s make-believe seem true, though, in this case, the make-believe is exaggerated and causes him to cease to distinguish between form and reality.
The second reason lies in the fact that literature is an art of life. The novel is a life on paper that resembles our daily lives, but which is more profound, significant, and beautiful. It follows that literature is not an isolated art. On the contrary, its matter is life itself and it intersects with the human sciences such as history, sociology, and ethnology. This intersection is a double-edged sword. On the one hand, it provides the novelist with inexhaustible ammunition for his writing while on the other, negative, side, it drives some to read works of fiction as though they were studies in sociology, which is fundamentally mistaken. The writer of fiction is not a scholar but an artist impacted emotionally by characters from life, who then strives to present these in his works. These characters present us with human truth but do not necessarily represent social truth.
A work of fiction may be of benefit in that it gives us certain indications concerning a given society but it is incapable of presenting its essence, in the scientific meaning of the term. Sociology, with its field-based and theoretical studies, its statistics and its graphs, is capable of presenting the scientific essence of a given society but this is not the role of the novel or the poem. The character of a young, Egyptian, headscarf-wearing woman in a novel may give us an idea about the feelings and problems of some women who wear headscarves but certainly does not represent all the women who wear headscarves in Egypt. Anyone who wants to know the ‘truth’ about the phenomenon of the headscarf must consult the studies on the topic conducted by sociologists.
Why am I writing this?
Because this confusion between imagination and truth, between the work of fiction and the sociological study, was applied to my novella The Isam Abd el-Ati Papers, much in the manner of a curse, and led to its being banned for many long years. How did this come about?
2
On my return from my studies in the United States at the end of the 1980s, I decided to dedicate all my efforts to becoming a writer, while at the same time I was obliged to work as a dentist to earn my living. As a result, my life came to be divided into two completely separate parts—the dignified, well-managed life of a respected dentist, and the life of a free man of letters, devoid of all social shackles and pre-existing rules. Each day, after finishing my medical work, I would throw myself into the discovery of life in its most authentic and exciting forms. I would roam strange places and get to know unusual characters, driven by an insatiable curiosity about and genuine need to understand people and learn from them. How many nights I spent in odd, raucous partying with characters who piqued my interest, following which I would be obliged to go by the house to take a shower and drink a quick cup of coffee before taking off again to start, without having slept, my work at the hospital. Day after day, I worked at forming my own group of amazing characters. I made friends with poor people and rich, retired politicians and bankrupt former princes, alcoholics, ex-convicts, fallen women, religious fanatics, con men, thugs, and gang leaders, all the time maintaining a precise and rigorous distance between the worlds of night and day. Sometimes, despite myself, problems would occur: at the end of one night when I had been drinking at a cheap bar downtown, a fierce quarrel erupted between two drunks, one of whom dragged the other out of the bar and began beating him in the street. With some other well-meaning customers, I rushed to break up the fight and bring about the required reconciliation. The whole scene was accompanied, needless to say, by a huge uproar, loud shouting, and slanderous insults. In no time we heard the sound of a window being opened in the building opposite, and a man, obviously aroused from sleep, appeared and started shouting angrily, threatening to call the police if we did not desist immediately from making such a drunken row. When I raised my head to look at him, I recognized him: it was one of my patients at the clinic. Certain he had seen me, I quietly stole away. A few days later I had an appointment to measure him for a set of false teeth. I received him normally. While I was working, he kept peering at me suspiciously. Finally, no longer able to contain himself, he said to me, “Excuse me, doctor. Do you sometimes spend the evenings in places downtown?” I was expecting the question, so I gave him an innocent smile and said in the accents of a professional liar, “I can’t go out in the evenings during the week as I have to wake up early to do my surgical procedures, as you know.”
The patient gave a sigh of relief and said, “That’s what I thought too. Not long ago, I saw someone who looked like you in the street at four in the morning, but I told myself it couldn’t possibly be you.”
Fortunately, however, such incidents didn’t occur often. One night, when on my fascinating nocturnal wanderings, I ran into Triple Mahmoud. A friend had introduced me to him and I had been captivated from the first moment by his extraordinary intelligence and the originality of his ideas. He was different from anybody else I had known. Even his name was unique, his father and grandfather for some reason favoring Mahmoud over any other name, which made his name Mahmoud Mahmoud Mahmoud. This had excited the mockery of his colleagues at school, where they named him Mahmoud Times Three, or Triple Mahmoud, and this name had stuck with him until even he came to use it. When I met him, Mahmoud was a little over forty and his life could be summed up as a series of determined but unsuccessful attempts to succeed in a variety of fields. At university he had studied—one after the other—engineering, fine arts, and cinema, only to abandon them all. When I asked him the reason, he replied, “I realized that the educational system in Egypt leads to the stifling of creativity in the student, and, in addition, to his being tortured psychologically.” When I looked dubious, he added by way of clarification that “the great artists and pioneers of cinema in Egypt created the cinema first, and only established the Institute of Cinema later, proving that they didn’t need the institute’s classes in order to create the cinema.”
This strange and eccentric logic, which was not without its validity, was an example of Mahmoud’s take on life, and most of his actions and thoughts were characterized by the same equal mix of eccentricity and original thinking. He was incapable of getting along with stupidity, bureaucracy, and social hypocrisy and was straightforward, frank, and sensitive to the highest degree to any slighting of his opinions or personal dignity—all characteristics designed to bring failure in their wake in the corrupt situation in which we live in Egypt. All the same, despite his rejection of the educational system, he was far from lazy. Once persuaded by an idea, he would exert honest and exceptional efforts to see it put into practice. He was also one of the most diligent readers I have met in my life, having educated himself so well that he had attained an encyclopedic knowledge of art, history, and literature. He was a gifted painter but his first exhibition, in Egypt, failed to attract the interest he had expected so decided to take his paintings to France and exhibit them there, telling his friends, “I shall take my art to those who understand art.” Someone asked him, “How can you go to France when you don’t know a word of French?” Staring at him with contempt, as though calling down curses on his stupidity, he said, “Am I going to France to talk?”
Needless to say, he failed in France, where, as he sat on a sidewalk on the banks of the Seine, he described his situation with a mixture of sarcasm and bitterness as that of “a hungry bankrupt, on whom and on whose paintings the heavy rain descends.”
I stayed friends with Mahmoud for a good while, and he had an impact on me. I was fond of him and felt very sad at the way in which his fate had become so circumscribed. A few years later, Mahmoud suffered a nervous breakdown; he was treated in clinics more than once. Then he fell into the slough of narcotics and this led to his early and sudden death at an age of less than fifty. My sorrow over Mahmoud was both personal and general. On the one hand, I sympathized with the trials of one blessed with authentic talent who harbors great hopes only to see them all dashed. On the other, I felt that in all fields Egypt was losing major talents and forces, such as Mahmoud, through tyranny and corruption. Had Mahmoud been born in a democracy, whose citizens had access to justice