Egypt's best-selling author says government trying to silence him
Egypt’s best-selling author, Alaa al-Aswany, said on Sunday that authorities have pressured a cultural centre to cancel an event where he was scheduled to talk about how the government manipulates the public with theories that the world is conspiring against Egypt.
Aswany said the cancellation of his gathering last Thursday in Alexandria followed other measures in the past year that have prevented him from appearing on TV channels or getting published in Egyptian newspapers.
He told the Associated Press that “freedom of expression is at its lowest point, worse than in the days of Hosni Mubarak”, Egypt’s longtime president who was overthrown in a popular uprising in 2011.
Calls and a text message sent to the Interior Ministry weren’t answered, and the cultural centre could not immediately be reached for comment.
The cancellation follows the referral to trial by public prosecutors of the author Ahmed Naji for publishing in a literary magazine an excerpt from his novel The Use of Life that prosecutors said violated public morals.
Aswany rose to international fame after the publication of his 2002 novel The Yacoubian Building, which describes social and political changes in Egyptian society since the 1952 military coup by the Free Officers, who included former resident Gamal Abdel-Nasser. In 2006 the novel was made into one of Egypt’s biggest movie productions, featuring some of the country’s top movie stars.
Aswany broke social taboos by including an openly gay character, and described the radicalisation of a young man after being rejected from the police academy because his father was a doorman.
Aswany supported the Egyptian military’s ouster of Islamist president Mohammed Morsi in July 2013 but has grown critical of resident Abdel-Fattah al-Sissi, who as military chief ousted Morsi. Aswany says near-daily invitations for TV and newspaper interviews have ceased since Sissi’s inauguration in June last year.
Some of the newspaper managers “told me directly that they’re under pressure and that they’re unable to have a contract with me”, he said. As for television appearances, “a friend of mine, a very famous anchor, told me they don’t want me to appear on TV”.