Volume 47, Number 18 · November 16, 2000
Witch Hunt in Egypt
By Max Rodenbeck
Arabic is a uniquely concise language, so much so that it regularly dispenses with the verb 'to be.' There is no need to say 'The sky is blue.' It's quite enough to say 'The sky blue' and your meaning is clear. This is not just a bit of linguistic arcana. If it weren't for this grammatical convention, the recent stormy controversy over a book banning in Egypt may never have taken place. The center of the controversy is a single blank typespace on the back page of the April 28 issue of a Cairo tabloid called al-Shaab. The name means 'The People,' al-Shaab being the biweekly newspaper of Egypt's Socialist Labor Party, a noisy but feeble opposition grouping that has drifted with prevailing fashions from vague leftism toward a particularly shrill, xenophobic brand of Islamism. The blank space is to be found in an article that purports to be a review of Syrian writer Haidar Haidar's novel A Banquet for Seaweed.
Feature, 3503 words
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