Gamal al-Ghitani, a former carpet designer who switched careers to become one of Egypt’s most acclaimed novelists, died on Sunday in Cairo. He was 70.
He had been in a coma at a hospital since being admitted in mid-August with heart and respiratory problems, the state news agency said.
Mr. Ghitani, whose work was frequently published in English translations, was most famous for his 1974 novel “Zayni Barakat,” a scorching allegorical critique of totalitarianism in which a ruthless Egyptian leader’s legitimacy is challenged.
While it was set in the 16th-century Mamluk era, there was little doubt that the novel was a critique of the authoritarian regime of President Gamal Abdel Nasser, who in 1966 had Mr. Ghitani jailed for five months for his public dissent.
Because he opposed Islamic fundamentalists, including the banned Muslim Brotherhood, Mr. Ghitani sometimes found himself endorsing alternatives that might not otherwise have been palatable. He firmly supported the army since the fall of Hosni Mubarak in 2011 and defended its ouster of Mohammed Morsi, the Islamist president, in 2013, despite repressive measures that followed.
After a series of terrorist attacks in Cairo in 1993, he explained: “In the battle between a religious extremism and terrorism seeking to bring down a corrupt and basically repressive government, the choice for many of us, lamentable though it may be, is to side with army and regime.”
But as a writer and editor he was also a fervent defender of artistic freedom.
When an Egyptian court found a novel by Alla Hamed blasphemous to Islam in 1992 and sentenced the authorto prison, provoking international protests, Mr. Ghitani dismissed the book, “The Distance in a Man’s Mind,” as mediocre, but said: “We cannot allow religious authorities to censor our creative and intellectual work. I am not defending Mr. Hamed now; I am defending myself.”
And in 1994, when a member of Parliament criticized the reproduction of a Gustav Klimt painting of Adam and Eve in a publication that Mr. Ghitani edited, he responded: “Unless every owner of a pen or a brush and every innovator stands up to such attacks, no one will be able to write a word, compose a tune or paint a color.”
In 2006, when Egypt’s leading Islamic jurist declared that exhibiting statues at home was forbidden, Mr. Ghitani declared, “It’s time for those placing impediments between Islam and innovation to get out of our lives.”
Gamal al-Ghitani was born to a poor family in the town of Guhayna in the upper Egypt governate of Sohag on May 9, 1945. He grew up in Cairo, was apprenticed to a carpet maker and studied Oriental carpet design at the College of Arts and Crafts.
Writing was in his heart, though. His first short story was published when he was 14. In 1969, he joined the staff of the newspaper Akhbar al-Youm and was a correspondent during the 1973 Arab-Israeli war.
He founded Akhbar al-Adab, a leading literary magazine, in 1993 and was its editor until 2011. He wrote more than a dozen novels, including “The Zafarani Files,” “Pyramid Texts,” “The Book of Epiphanies” and “The Book of Revelations,” as well as short story collections.
He also published “The Mahfouz Dialogs,” a collection of recorded conversations that the novelist Naguib Mahfouz, a Nobel laureate, had with friends over a half-century.
In 2013, Mr. Ghitani was a visiting professor at the Mellon Islamic Studies Initiativ eat the University of Chicago.
Prime Minister Sherif Ismail praised him this week for “enriching literature with his unique style, intelligence and broad vision.”
This year, Mr. Ghitani received the Nile Award, Egypt’s top literary state honor, after having won the French Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et des Lettres, the Egyptian National Prize for Literature and the Sheikh Zayed Book Award for his novel “Ren.”
“A writer of great stature and originality hardly paralleled in modern Arabic,” Salma Khadra Jayyusi wrote in “Modern Arab Fiction: An Anthology,” “his style is rooted in the Arabic literary tradition, and he has successfully attempted to reintroduce the old Arabic ‘tale’ form, in contradiction to other writers who model their fiction on Western styles.”
Humphrey Davies, who translated several of Mr. Ghitani’s books into English, once described Mr. Ghitani’s writing as rooted in “the history of Arabic literature but also areas such as Sufism and magic.”
Survivors include his wife, Magda El Guindy, editor of a children’s magazine; and two children, Magda and Mohammad.
In “Zayni Barakat,” his parable about Egypt under President Nasser, Mr. Ghitani, though describing his country in the 16th century, clearly despaired of what had become of it in the 20th.
“These days the whole of Egypt is in an uproar,” the narrator says. “This is a Cairo I don’t recognize.” The city, he goes on, “looks like an invalid on the point of bursting into tears.”
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http://www.nytimes.com/2015/10/21/books/gamal-al-ghitani-egyptian-novelist-dies-at-70.html?_r=0
Photo: Gamal al-Ghitani in an undated photograph.Credit Poklekowski/ullstein bild, via Getty Images