Egyptians Tangled Up in ‘Seaweed’

Three days after a controversial novel ignited a violent student protest, the conflict continued to roil Egypt on Thursday as various officials defended or condemned the 1983 work that some claim defames Islam.

Egypt’s own mini-Salman Rushdie affair centers on “A Banquet for Seaweed” by Syrian author Haider Haider. The title refers to a despairing religious skeptic who commits suicide by drowning himself in the sea.

Embarrassed by the sudden arousal of anti-government Islamic sentiments, officials of President Hosni Mubarak’s ruling National Democratic Party seemed to blow both ways on the book.

The parliament leadership said all copies of the book should be burned, and prosecutors interrogated several cultural officials through the night about their decision to allow the book’s republication in Egypt last year.

At the same time, a committee of literary experts appointed by the government’s Culture Ministry issued a finding that there was nothing blasphemous about the book.

“A great deal of injustice has been done to this novel,” the committee reported. “Its themes have been falsified and its great artistic values have been ignored.”

Responsibility for the publication ultimately rests on Culture Minister Farouk Hosni, who has been the main target of the Islamists’ criticism.

The novel, which is well known in Arab literary circles, sold fewer than 1,100 copies after it was republished here in November, officials said. It is no longer being sold in Egypt.

Criticism published in an anti-government Islamic newspaper, Al Shaab, which has been leading a media campaign against the novel, triggered a violent demonstration at Al Azhar University here Monday. Police used tear gas and rubber bullets to subdue protesters and arrested dozens of students.

On Thursday, the campus remained off limits to journalists and was blocked by police vehicles, amid unofficial reports that some of the students had continued a sit-in.

On the streets outside the Al Azhar Mosque, where the university began about 1,000 years ago as a center of Koranic teaching, veiled female students handed out copies of the Al Shaab criticism.

One of the students, 20-year-old Fatma Hassan, said she had not read the novel, only the published passages in the newspaper “that insult God.”

“I think Christians and Jews should be just as angry as us because this book insults the entity of God,” she said. “We cannot remain silent when someone attacks our prophet.”

She called on Hosni to resign as culture minister. “How can we have an official in the government who cannot protect our religion?” she asked.

The Egyptian Organization for Human Rights, however, issued a statement Thursday expressing alarm at the campaign against the book and the officials. It warned that the campaign “has reached the extent of direct and clear incitement to assault artists and officials by publishing their addresses.”

Egypt’s Nobel Prize-winning author Naguib Mahfouz was stabbed in the neck in 1994 after a similar campaign accusing him of blasphemy and apostasy.

He survived, but another leading secular intellectual, Farag Foda, was slain in 1992 by Islamic extremists.

In addition to Haider’s novel, Egyptian writer Edwar Kharrat’s “The Poetry of Modernity in Egypt” has come under fire in the media for alleged blasphemy.

Haider, interviewed Thursday by Reuters in his native Syria, lashed out at his attackers.

“Those people are twisting the truth to serve their immoral and cheap purposes,” he said. “They are real terrorists whose main aim is to gain popular support for their parliamentary election campaign later this year.”

Haider, 63, acknowledged that some of the characters in the novel uttered words against God, but he said these views did not reflect his own.