Many admirers described Gamal El-Ghitani as the architect of the Arab novel.  His death on 18 October left a marked gap in the world of Egyptian literature.

 “I came to the world as a novelist,” El-Ghitani wrote in his last article published by Akhbar Al-Adab newspaper. “From the beginning, I asked myself big questions, which I tried, and still try, to answer through literature. My main question is about time: where from? And where to?”

Many admirers described Gamal El-Ghitani as the architect of the Arab novel.  His death on 18 October left a marked gap in the world of Egyptian literature.

 “I came to the world as a novelist,” El-Ghitani wrote in his last article published by Akhbar Al-Adab newspaper. “From the beginning, I asked myself big questions, which I tried, and still try, to answer through literature. My main question is about time: where from? And where to?”

El-Ghitani rarely smiled. He always seemed engrossed in thinking, asking questions, as he said, with tightened lips and serious eyes. “At first glance, El-Ghitani seemed sullen and arrogant, which may be due to his apparent charisma,” says young writer and journalist Ahmed Nagai. “But those who approached him knew he was simple and humane.”

“I knew El-Ghitani spontaneously,” says Egyptian writer and novelist Abdo Gaebair. “The first time we met, we felt we had known each other for a long time. This may be due to the fact that we both come from Upper Egypt and because we had more things in common than writing, our love of history, especially the history of the Mamluk and Islamic monuments.”

Early life

El-Ghitani was born on 9 May 1945, in the city of Guhayna, Sohag Governorate in Upper Egypt and moved with his family to Cairo when he was a child. He received his primary education in Abdurrahman Katkhuda School in Al-Azhar District and middle education in Muhammad Ali School. He then joined the School of Arts and Crafts in Abbassia. After his graduation, he trained for three years to be a carpet designer, which later qualified him to work as secretary of the Egyptian Cooperative Association for Khan el-Khalili Artificers and Artists.

In those ancient Cairene atmospheres, the seed of El-Ghitani’s passion for Arab and Islamic heritage formed over the first thirty years of his life. “This man was born and lived among Islamic antiquities and history,” says Gaebair. “I remember when my friend playwright Ismail Adly and I decided to visit Islamic monuments in Egypt. We collected enough money and set off with our wives. We used to read about a monument before visiting it, and our most comprehensive source we resorted to from time to time was El-Ghitani. He advised some references and books and contacted us to know where we got on our journey.”

In his novelist project, El-Ghitani was inspired by the Fatimid and Mamluk heritage in medieval Egypt. His encyclopedic knowledge of ancient literature helped create a wondrous novelist whose language was very similar to the texts of the ancient Arab historians. A prominent example is his masterpiece ‘Zayni Barakat’ in 1974.

A Marxist

“When I was seven years old, I read the stories of Arsène Lupin and dreamed of taking from the rich and giving to the poor,” said El-Ghitani in a TV interview. “I dreamt of becoming an honest thief. The honest thief however has become a Marxist socialist concerned about social justice. I used to cry whenever I saw a beggar. Crying is a form of protest.”

El-Ghitani embraced Marxism in his youth and was detained for six months on charges of belonging to a communist organization. “In 1966, I was arrested under Gamal Abdel Nasser,” said El-Ghitani in a press interview. “It was a traumatic experience. Nobody knew our whereabouts. We slept on the floor. In winter, the jailers used to throw iced water  on us when interrogating us. They also practiced torture using electricity. Then, I made sure I would not stop writing against the regime.”

El-Ghitani belonged to the 1960s generation of Egyptian novelists, writers and poets who emerged after the defeat of the Six-Day War in 1967, including Ibrahim Aslan, Sonallah Ibrahim, Abdel Hakim Qasem, Yahya Taher Abdullah, Amal Donqol and Abdel Rahman el-Abnudi. It opened the door to a new current of prose and poetry, looking for an alternative route and a new identity.

In 1969, El-Ghitani published his first book, a collection of short stories entitled ‘Papers of a Young Man Who Lived a Thousand Years ago.’ The collection included five stories inspired by the Egyptian Islamic history – all were a spiritual response to the defeat of the Six-Day War.

“When he published his first collection and pro-socialist realism critics began applauding him, I asked him to be careful and not to be swayed too much by them lest he should repeat himself,” Gaebair said.

A journalist

Also in 1969, El-Ghitani worked as a war correspondent for Akhbar el-Yom Institution during the War of Attrition between Egypt and Israel (1967-1973). “I was surprised why he did it,” says Gaebair. “This man loves history and literature. What on earth does he have to do with war?”

In 1974, El-Ghitani worked in the Press Report Department and then he traveled to Iraq, Iran and Lebanon during times of war. In 1985, he became head of the Literary Department of Akhbar el-Yom. In 1993, he founded Akhbar Al-Adab newspaper which became the most important cultural newspapers in the Arab world and he was its editor-in-chief.

“The atmosphere that he created in the newspaper was an exceptional case,” says Nagai who worked as a journalist in the same newspaper. “He was a humble editor at a time when editors in news institutions refused to take elevators with reporters. For him, everybody was a colleague, starting with junior journalists and ending with cleaners.

Once, I entered his office to comment on a statement someone (had made in a meeting). ‘He is crazy,’ I said. ‘Yes, indeed,’ he replied. He kept silent for a moment and then added: ‘But you know what; I also used to say crazy things because we writers no matter how idealists and prudent we are, we have this teeny-weeny bit of craziness. I have it too.’”

Obsession with novelty

“When I issued my ‘Knight in a Wood Horse’ collection, I was surprised that he came to my office to interview me about it,” says Gaebair. “An established writer who was greater than me came to interview me, while I was still at the beginning of my literary career. We shared a healthy and pure friendship. When he found Akhbar Al-Adab newspaper, he invited me to write with him.”

“Despite his many preoccupations, he was a great reader,” says Nagai. “He used to skim through all the books received by his office. I learned from him the term ‘book sniffling’ – to get introduced to the book and its language from initial glancing. When I published my first novel, ‘Rogers,’ I gave him a copy as a courtesy. I did not imagine he would read it. Three days later, he called me into his office and we talked about the novel. He even hosted me in his TV show without a critic or guests to talk about the novel, my style of writing, the city of Mansoura where I grew up, my grandfather and my father. I am a good reader of El-Ghitani. I read his works before I work in journalism. I was excited to work with him even before my work in Akhbar Al-Adab. I like his long stories. They are great. You feel that some of his works were initiated as a story, but then stretched to become a novel.”

“El-Ghitani is a problematic novelist,” says Gaebair. “He wrote usual non-historical stories, including a story of a young man who left the city to work in a remote village. His boss was a strong man imposing his authority on everyone around him and he even tried to physically assault the young man. El-Ghitani’s talent in this story was brilliant and his beautiful language moved smoothly.”

“Since its start, the novelist project of El-Ghitani was based on highly complex engineering, which you find evident in his ‘Events of Zaafarani Quarter,’ ‘Zayni Barakat’ and ‘Messages of Insights in Destinies’,” says Nagai. “His drifts of narration and overlapped novel architecture were praised by readers and critics and El-Ghitani loved composition diversity. His ‘Book of Illustrations’ and ‘Recording Notebooks’ have no novel architecture and he used open narration in them. He once told me: ‘I write unconditionally with a free hand.’ However, El-Ghitani’s readers, who liked his first novels, did not absorb or enjoy this style. Thus, his most famous work in Egypt and the Arab world is ‘Zayni Barakat,’ but he is best known in France and Europe for his ‘Book of Illustrations’.”

“I believe that after several historical novels, El-Ghitani began to abandon this style and he wrote ‘Book of Illustrations’ and ‘Recording Notebooks’ in a different way,” says Gaebair. “These writings are more like trips in space and time, free from novelist form.”

“El-Ghitani’s insistence to use the language of Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti and Muhammad ibn Iyas – both were men of religion and language before being historians – as well as other historians of that period was not motivated by excellence or the revival of the language as some critics argued, but by, in my opinion, El-Ghitani’s passion of the language,” says Nagai. “That language was able to accommodate vernacular and classical Arabic and Arabized French, which is what attracted El-Ghitani to this language. El-Ghitani was not read well because he was the editor in chief of Akhbar Al-Adab newspaper, which then grew famous to the point of becoming a literature authority in the cultural milieu. This made any position of Akhbar Al-Adab a position of El-Ghitani, which caused many of those who had specific attitudes against the newspaper to settle their scores with it through El-Ghitani’s works.”

His battles were known for all, in particular with Minister of Culture Farouk Hosny under Hosni Mubarak in addition to head of Akhbar el-Yom Institution columnist Ibrahim Saada. In addition, alimbaratur.com accused him of being the real writer of Saddam Hussein’s novel ‘Zabibah and the King’ which he strongly denied. El-Ghitani stirred much controversy when he demanded the abolition of Al-Azhar University and its annexation to Ain Shams University because its students protested against the ousting of Mohamed Morsi, which was considered as an offense by the university.

“I know I will never know,” said El-Ghitani in his last article. “I know that the answers I do not know now may be found by others who would come after me. Abū Hayyān al-Tawhīdī taught me that questions are more denotative than answers.”