Newspapers and Novels

February 18, 2008

On Sunday the New York Times ran a front page article on Egypt. The title was evocative: "Stifled, Egypt's Young Turn to Islamic Fervor." Reading through the article I was struck by how the situation paralleled the representation of Egyptian society in the 2002 novel The Yacoubian Building. Here is the case of a twenty-two year old woman:

She was engaged to Mustafa... for more than two years. The plan was for Mustafa and his family to take a year or two to construct and furnish an apartment. But Mustafa’s father had no money left after setting up two older sons, and the young man was unable to raise enough money to finish the construction. Ms. Ashour wanted to help, secretly, but she has been unable to find a paying job. When her mother told her to end the engagement, something snapped, and she sought solace in increasingly strict religious practice.

So the progression is: 1) social engagement and optimism, 2) modest social goals blocked, and then 3) joining in with a radical Islamic group. Alaa al-Aswany in the Yacoubian Building details this same process. I have elsewhere called this a theory of Islam.

This ties in with my musings about the importance of popularity. If the Yacoubian Building had simply been a novel written by an outsider for an outside audience, then we would have no idea if this book had captured something important. Since the Yacoubian Building was an immense hit, we can surmise that something about this novel is true. When this is backed up with an investigative journalistic piece, we can conclude that this depiction of corruption and the attraction of radical Islam is an element that appealed to a wide range of people. Every person that reads a novel or goes to see a film can be thought of as a voice saying: this work is important to me. Part of the job of interpretation is to figure out not just what is objectively excellent about a work, but to ask: why did all these people find this an important work?