This quote from a character in the 1974 novel Al-Karnak (Karnak CaféFootnote ²) by Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz (1911–2006) sums up the reaction of millions of people in Egypt and the Arab world to the June 1967 Arab–Israeli war.Footnote ³ Why did this war shatter their worldviews? A military defeat may occur for purely military reasons, in this case the better preparation of Israeli troops.Footnote ⁴ Why should it cast doubt on a whole way of life? The answer to this question lies in the social and cognitive structure of nationalism, which I examine in a moment of crisis, after the 1967 war, when it became necessary for nationalist intellectuals to debate issues that had previously been taken for granted. Al-Karnak, which was made into a highly profitable and controversial film, provides a good starting point for studying these debates. However, it is important to understand them as products of the nationalist project of which Mahfouz was a part. I first analyze the history of that project, explaining its raison d'être and its success by the 1960s.

STRATEGIES OF SYMBOLIC POWER IN RELIGION AND NATIONALISM

Many scholars have noted similarities between nationalism and religion, but these observations have remained suggestive rather than theoretical.Footnote ⁵ Like religion, nationalism has its prayers,Footnote ⁶ its temples, hymns, and catechisms,Footnote ⁷ its saints and martyrs,Footnote ⁸ its prophets,Footnote ⁹ and its priests.Footnote ¹⁰ Some have attempted to explain these similarities on purely psychological grounds, in terms of a need for a sense of purpose in life.Footnote ¹¹ Attempts to explain the relationship between the cognitive and social characteristics that religion and nationalism share have produced few results.Footnote ¹²

Nationalism can be seen as an example of what Pierre Bourdieu calls a “field”: an arena of conflict in which players who have interests at stake in a given type of social practice compete to attain dominant positions.Footnote ¹³ Players seek some form of “capital,” something with value recognized in the field. I treat nationalism, religion, literature, and cinema as subfields within the field of cultural production and focus on cultural capital (knowledge, know-how) and symbolic capital (prestige, reputation, authoritativeness).Footnote ¹⁴ It can be argued that what is at stake in the nationalist field is a kind of symbolic capital, specifically, being perceived as an authority on the nation.

Different forms of capital can be converted into others, but there is always a struggle over the exchange rates.Footnote ¹⁵ In Egypt a struggle has taken place over whether nationalist capital is more valuable than religious capital (i.e., religious authority). Moreover, I contend that both sides in this conflict have used similar strategies—and that an analysis of these strategies offers a way to understand the similarities between religion and nationalism.

Drawing on Bourdieu's analysis of the religious field, I focus on two strategies: the strategy of the prophets, which is based on charisma, and the strategy of the priesthood, which is based on cultural capital. Both aim to satisfy the laity's demands, specifically the dominant class's demand for legitimation and the dominated class's demand for salvation.Footnote ¹⁶ A prophet “embodies in exemplary conduct, or gives discursive expression to, representations, feelings and aspirations that existed before his arrival”; he is seen as having direct access to truth via inspiration or revelation.Footnote ¹⁷ In contrast, priests can claim special insight (and thus gain religious capital) only by virtue of their cultural capital; typically, like the Muslim ʿulamaʾ, they reproduce, systematize, and adapt a prophetic message. These strategies enable prophets and priests to exercise symbolic domination over believers, a domination that can function only because it is seen as natural and legitimate. The interests it serves are “euphemized” or “misrecognized,” even by those who exercise it.Footnote ¹⁸

In the early 20th century, Egyptian nationalist writers came disproportionately from the minority that possessed secular cultural capital,Footnote ¹⁹ but this observation remains unexplained. I call this category of cultural producers “secular intellectuals.” Their desire to end British imperial rule cannot, by itself, explain their commitment to nationalism because religious arguments were also used against British rule,Footnote ²⁰ antinationalist Communism made an appearance,Footnote ²¹ and peasants’ movements rejected the state altogether, demanding local autonomy.Footnote ²² I suggest that it was in secular intellectuals’ interest to promote nationalism as a way of converting their cultural capital into symbolic capital, thus forming a nationalist priesthood that could compete for influence with the ʿulamaʾ.Footnote ²³

Nations “have about them a halo of disinterestedness,”Footnote ²⁴ and intellectuals have an “interest in disinterestedness.”Footnote ²⁵ The discourse of nationalist intellectuals implies that they alone understand the nation's heritage and can act as the “conscience of the nation”Footnote ²⁶ or—as Tawfiq al-Hakim puts it in his 1933 novel, ʿAwdat al-Ruh (The Return of the Spirit)—“the nation's voice” (lisān al-umma al-nāṭiq).Footnote ²⁷ Thus, although they may sincerely believe that they are disinterested,Footnote ²⁸ their discourse encourages the belief that the nation's salvation depends on them, just as the discourses of religious priesthoods encourage the belief that the salvation of souls requires some kind of priestly guidance.Footnote ²⁹

Bourdieu's concept of “habitus” suggests how this strategy may have taken shape. A habitus is a coherent, durable set of concepts and embodied dispositions that shapes perception and guides action.Footnote ³⁰ Secular intellectuals possessed a religious habitus as members of the religious laity and had evidence all around them of religion's success as a system of symbolic power. Thus, when they found their aspirations to symbolic power blocked by the dominance of the ʿulamaʾ in the early 20th century, they were predisposed to try to overcome that obstacle by imagining a nationalism that was similar to religion (without necessarily being consciously aware of the similarity) and that would place them in the priesthood role.

In religion, one of the priesthood's main tasks is to disseminate practices that maintain the religious habitus of the laity.Footnote ³¹ Because people engage in religious practices, they believe God exists.Footnote ³² In a similar vein, nationalist intellectuals promote a habitus that makes nationalism part of the “banal” background of everyday life.Footnote ³³ Because people's everyday practices presume the existence of the nation, they believe the nation exists; they are therefore predisposed to have strong feelings about it and even to die for it.Footnote ³⁴

Egypt's nationalist prophets have included leaders such as Mustafa Kamil, Saʿd Zaghlul, and Gamal Abdel Nasser. Bourdieu suggests that the relationship between priests and prophets is characterized by interdependence as well as by competition for lay followers.Footnote ³⁵ Nasser's nationalism was influenced by Tawfiq al-Hakim's ʿAwdat al-Ruh, which argues that Egyptians needed to worship a great leader, as they had worshiped the pharaoh, in order to regain their former glory.Footnote ³⁶ Thus nationalist intellectuals like al-Hakim legitimized Nasser in advance. Nasser also relied on intellectuals to systematize his doctrinesFootnote ³⁷; for example, Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal, editor of the state-run newspaper Al-Ahram, ghost wrote Nasser's book Philosophy of the Revolution. Footnote ³⁸ In return, Nasser consecrated these writers,Footnote ³⁹ converting their cultural capital into symbolic and material profits by awarding them prestigious positions in the state's cultural institutions.Footnote ⁴⁰

Nationalist capital became highly valuable in the fields of literature, journalism, and cinema. As a result, the autonomy of these fields was severely limited. The autonomy of any field depends on the exclusion of external sources of legitimation,Footnote ⁴¹ but nationalism made intellectuals’ credibility dependent on their acceptance of the public's symbolic demands, including their demands for particular leaders, such as Nasser.Footnote ⁴² Egyptian nationalist intellectuals such as al-Hakim became aware of the consequences of their heteronomy after the 1967 war. In a 1974 essay, ʿAwdat al-Waʿy (The Return of Consciousness), al-Hakim acknowledges that Nasser was “worshiped by the people.” Struggling to explain why he himself had smiled complacently at this worship, he speculates that it was “because of the ideal of a leader for whom I had waited thirty years.”Footnote ⁴³ He argues that Nasser had acquired “such sanctity as to make him infallible [maʿṣūm] in the people's eyes,”Footnote ⁴⁴ just as mainstream ʿulamaʾ have considered the Prophet Muhammad infallible.Footnote ⁴⁵ In a similar vein, Yunan Labib Rizq argues that nationalism made Egyptians feel that criticism of Nasser was forbidden—not by law but by an “overwhelming popular desire.”Footnote ⁴⁶

A habitus shapes and justifies a way of life,Footnote ⁴⁷ and belief in Nasser's infallibility was a key element of the nationalist habitus of millions of people. The 1967 war cast doubt on its validity by showing that Nasser was fallible and therefore might be a false prophet: this is why it shattered worldviews, called ways of life into question, and caused a “crisis of hegemony.”Footnote ⁴⁸ Although the pro-Nasser demonstrations following his resignation in the wake of the defeat and the crowds that joined his funeral procession in 1970 might suggest that Egyptians’ faith in him was unshaken,Footnote ⁴⁹ it must be remembered that habitus is a set of durable dispositions that cannot change overnight.Footnote ⁵⁰

To illustrate nationalism's effects on the autonomy of cultural producers such as Mahfouz, I turn now to Al-Karnak and the film that was based on it, as well as critical responses to both works in Egypt. The novel's main subject is the injustices of Nasser's police state. To support the claim that nationalism limited intellectuals’ autonomy, I focus on how all these texts deal with Nasser's responsibility for those injustices.

MAHFOUZ AND AL-KARNAK

The son of a middle-class civil servant, Mahfouz studied philosophy at Cairo University before embarking on a literary career, which he supplemented until his retirement with civil-service jobs, initially in the Ministry of Religious Endowments.Footnote ⁵¹ He notes that when he was growing up, Saʿd Zaghlul's name was “sacred” for him and his family;Footnote ⁵² anyone who did not support Zaghlul's Wafd party was an “infidel” (kafir) in their eyes.Footnote ⁵³ (This is an example of how a nationalist habitus was modeled on a religious one.)

His early novels were literary “pharaonism,” that is, nationalist evocation of ancient Egypt. Echoing al-Hakim's Return of the Spirit, Mahfouz's first novel, ʿAbath al-ʾAqdar (Khufu's Wisdom, 1939), promoted a political system in which the nation worships its leader. Pharaoh worship is described as “divine patriotism,” and the pharaoh claims to derive his legitimacy from the Egyptian nation.Footnote ⁵⁴ Yet this advocacy of nationalist worship went hand in hand with Mahfouz's opposition to organized religion,Footnote ⁵⁵ to the value of the ʿulamaʾ's cultural capital. Indeed, pharaonism “attracted secular modernists precisely because it provided a source for inventing a modern tradition evacuated of most religious content.”Footnote ⁵⁶

By 1952, Mahfouz had published a number of realist novels and stories. After the Free Officers’ coup of that year, he wrote no literature until 1959. At first he claimed this was because the new regime had remedied many of the social problems that had been the focus of his writing, but after Nasser's death, he asserted that he had simply been afraid of antagonizing the regime.Footnote ⁵⁷ Richard Jacquemond suggests another explanation:Footnote ⁵⁸ Mahfouz had gained little revenue or recognition as a writer by 1952 and may have felt discouraged. He continued writing film scripts, which were far more profitable than novels. Within a few years, however, the state's cultural policies had moved social realism from the avant-garde to the mainstream, and in 1955, Mahfouz was transferred to the state cultural apparatus, where he occupied several important posts connected with the cinema, such as director of censorship.Footnote ⁵⁹ His trilogy of novels—completed before the coup and exploring the middle class's relationship with the nationalist movementFootnote ⁶⁰—was finally published in 1956–57 and received a state literary prize. Mahfouz's nationalism was a successful long-term investment that brought him symbolic and economic profits.

Although his novel ʾAwlad Haratina (Children of Gebelawi, 1959) may well reflect disappointment with the Nasser regime,Footnote ⁶¹ it also uses Mahfouz's authority as a consecrated writer to launch an attack on the credibility of the ʿulamaʾ and to reiterate his call for a Messiah-like national hero.Footnote ⁶² The ʿulamaʾ's successful campaign against the novel's publication in EgyptFootnote ⁶³ shows the limits of the dominant position that the nationalist priesthood had achieved in its struggle with the religious priesthood, a position that has only deteriorated since then. In Tharthara fawq al-Nil (Chatter on the Nile, 1966), an “ancient Egyptian sage” asserts that the pharaoh is “wise, perceptive, and just” but that his commands are not being obeyed, hence the land is corrupt.Footnote ⁶⁴ Thus the cult of the nation legitimizes Nasser's rule along pharaonist lines and preserves his aura of innocence.Footnote ⁶⁵

Critics have tended to see Al-Karnak more as a political document than a literary work.Footnote ⁶⁶ My aim here is not to evaluate the novel's literary merit but to situate it among different stances regarding the significance of the 1967 defeat. In the immediate aftermath of the war, Mahfouz wrote short stories, collected in Taht al-Mizalla (Under the Bus Shelter, 1969), in which each character seems trapped in a kind of solipsism,Footnote ⁶⁷ as if a sudden loss of faith in the nation has undermined all justification for social bonds. In Al-Karnak, the characters once again seem to belong to a national community, but it is an unstable and indeterminate one. This is partly because of the first-person narrative, in which a middle-aged writer, much like Mahfouz, repeatedly struggles to elucidate unexplained events. This is a far cry from the omniscient third-person narrative of Mahfouz's trilogy, which reflects the author's confidence in his priestly insight into the state of the nation.Footnote ⁶⁸

Mahfouz's novels of the early 1960s maintain an omniscient third-person narrative but confine it to characters’ subjective viewpoints.Footnote ⁶⁹ In Al-Karnak, as in Miramar (1967), we are told the same story repeatedly from different viewpoints, none more reliable than the others. The narrator has abandoned any claim to possess privileged insight because his belief in the very concept of the nation, which had justified that claim, has been called into question. He is reduced to the more modest role of an investigator who lays bare the source of his raw material: stories of imprisonment told to him in cafés.Footnote ⁷⁰

The narrator becomes a regular customer of a Cairo café, Karnak, which is frequented by Egyptians of different ages and classes, including a group of students: Zaynab and Ismaʿil, who are in love, and their Communist friend Hilmi. All are enthusiastic about “the revolution”—the official term for the 1952 military coup and for Nasser's regime—especially the young people, for whom “history began with the 1952 revolution. Everything before then was some obscure and inexplicable ‘period of pagan ignorance’ [jāhiliyya].”Footnote ⁷¹

On three occasions, the young people disappear—arrested and interrogated by the intelligence agency. Rumors of arbitrary imprisonment and bloodcurdling torture circulate. The narrator tries to justify these events to himself on the grounds that ordinary people must have endured great hardships in former times to bring about the achievements of Egypt's great rulers as well as those of the Prophet Muhammad; thus he places national heroes in the same category as a religious prophet, implicitly including Nasser in that category. During the students’ third imprisonment, the June 1967 war occurs. Zaynab and Ismaʿil return, but Hilmi does not, having died under torture. In the aftermath of the war, the narrator realizes that discourses of national unity had blinded him to conflicts of interest among Egyptians as well as among Arab states.Footnote ⁷²

He then interviews Ismaʿil and Zaynab in turn. Born in 1949, Ismaʿil is one of the “sons of the revolution,” that is, one of those who reached adulthood during the Nasser years. He and Zaynab grew up together in a poor neighborhood and were able to go to university thanks to the regime's policy of free education, although she did so against the wishes of her parents, who wanted her to marry a local chicken vendor.

Ismaʿil and Zaynab recount their interrogations at the hands of Khalid Safwan, the head of the intelligence agency, who falsely accused Ismaʿil first of belonging to the Muslim Brotherhood, then of being a Communist. Safwan had the three young people tortured; Zaynab was raped. She and Ismaʿil were forced to become informants, each without the other's knowledge, and Zaynab informed on Hilmi, who was then killed under torture. Zaynab became a prostitute, selling herself to the chicken vendor, among others. Ismaʿil's worldview was shattered by the June 1967 war, but he sees the Palestinian resistance as a ray of hope. Zaynab, in contrast, feels only self-hatred and despair, and her “faith” (īmān) in the revolution has vanished. She says, “I've come to believe it's a castle made of sand.”Footnote ⁷³

The novel's title indirectly retracts the concept of the nation that Mahfouz promotes in his early novels. Karnak, the name of an ancient Egyptian temple, may be interpreted as an allusion to his early pharaonism. The reader is thus prompted to construct a “conceptual blend”Footnote ⁷⁴ in which the modern Egyptians worshiping the nation in the café are matched with ancient Egyptians worshiping pagan gods in the temple. Readers may infer that nationalism is a false religion, like that of the ancient Egyptians, and that Mahfouz's call for a modern form of pharaoh worship was a tragic error.

At the end of the novel, a reformed Khalid Safwan appears in the café after serving a prison sentence. He blames the Nasser regime's atrocities on all Egyptians, condemns dictatorship, and advocates political freedoms. Expressing what, for Rasheed El-Enany, is the core of Mahfouz's intellectual commitment,Footnote ⁷⁵ Safwan calls on Egyptians “to accept from Western civilization the value of science and the scientific method, and without any argument”Footnote ⁷⁶—in effect, a commitment to the value of secular cultural capital, which nationalism had justified. In Al-Karnak, it is no longer clear how to justify this belief or how to apply it in practice. The novel seems to imply the need for a practical sociology while acknowledging that none of the novel's characters, including the narrator, knows how to construct it.

Al-Karnak was completed in December 1971 but not published until 1974. In May 1971, Nasser's successor, Anwar al-Sadat, announced a “corrective revolution,” in effect a purge of his opponents, who were dubbed “centers of power” and blamed for the 1967 defeat as well as for the injustices committed by the previous regime.Footnote ⁷⁷ Safwan represents a “center of power”; such individuals held dominant positions in subfields of the political field, for example, police and intelligence services. This dominance was based on “political capital,”Footnote ⁷⁸ a type of social capital whose source was ultimately Nasser himself. In the upper echelons of the state, place in the hierarchy depended mainly on perceived loyalty to Nasser. According to P. J. Vatikiotis, Nasser maintained complete personal control over the various security services, which competed with one another in displays of loyalty to him; to this end, they invented conspiracies from which they could claim to be protecting him.Footnote ⁷⁹ As a side effect of this competition, thousands (perhaps tens of thousands) of Egyptians were imprisoned during crackdowns on political opposition, and torture was commonplace.Footnote ⁸⁰

Why was the novel not published until 1974? It is unclear whether Mahfouz initially kept the manuscript to himself because he judged that it was not safe to publish it or whether the authorities blocked its publication. Because Sadat had been one of the organizers of the 1952 coup and had served as Nasser's vice president, he may have wished to protect himself from critiques of the previous regime in the early years of his presidency. After the October 1973 Egypt–Israel war, which he successfully represented as a victory although Egypt's military defeat was averted only by the intervention of the superpowers,Footnote ⁸¹ Sadat could claim to have succeeded where Nasser had failed and could therefore use the publication of critiques of Nasser's regime as part of a self-legitimizing discourse.Footnote ⁸²

It is striking that the novel does not mention Nasser. A clue to why lies in how Egyptian critics handled the question of Nasser's responsibility for the atrocities Mahfouz depicted. Some of these critics are not well known, but their views are nevertheless valuable indicators of the range of competing stances that emerged among secular nationalist intellectuals in response to the 1967 and 1973 wars.

Faruq Munib, writing in the state-run newspaper Al-Jumhuriyya in 1974,Footnote ⁸³ avoids mentioning Nasser's name by resorting to vague expressions such as “the past” to refer to the previous regime. He praises the novel for acknowledging the atrocities of a past “historical phase” but insists that he does not wish to “slander the past.” Indeed, he blames the atrocities on “terrorists” who sought to “blacken the white page of the revolution,” stressing that nobody can deny the revolution's great accomplishments. He also echoes the state's official rhetoric about the “great October war.” Writing in the same vein in the same newspaper, Ahmad ʿAbbas Salih argues that “socialism” should not be blamed for “all the filth of the past” and commends the novel as “an objective report” that holds “the dehumanization of Egyptians” responsible for the 1967 defeat.Footnote ⁸⁴ Publishing in the same pages a few days later, ʿAbbas al-Aswani lauds Mahfouz for showing that “criminals,” who had “nothing to do with the revolution,” had tortured the “sons of the revolution.” He notes that far from being “feudal landowners,” these victims were the children of the poor and the working class.Footnote ⁸⁵ A review by ʿAbd al-Fattah Muhammad ʿUthman,Footnote ⁸⁶ published in 1982, uses the same rhetorical formulas: the revolution ate its own children, who came from the working class that it was supposed to rescue. In a similar vein, when Mahfouz was asked about Al-Karnak in connection with Nasser in a 1988 interview, he replied that the novel was directed not against Nasser but rather “against those whom Nasser was against” (ḍidd man kāna ʿAbd al-Nāṣir ḍiddahum). He hastened to add that he was not against Nasserist policies such as land reform and free education.Footnote ⁸⁷

Why was it difficult for Mahfouz and his defenders to hold Nasser responsible for atrocities, even after his death? Why were they at pains to show reverence for accomplishments of the revolution when mentioning those atrocities? They presumably aimed to stave off the sort of attack that ʿAbd al-Rahman abu ʿAwf directed against the novel and its author in 1986.Footnote ⁸⁸ Mahfouz, he said, writes from the position of a “petit-bourgeois” (i.e., an opponent of Nasser's socialism), depicting individual choices as springing from a void and ignoring the role of class struggle in shaping human action; therefore Al-Karnak unjustly portrays Nasser as a dictator who ruled by terror and portrays Sadat, who retreated from “the path of the 1952 revolution,” as a hero. (In fact, neither ruler is mentioned in the novel.) The analysis proposed here can account for this reasoning: by suggesting that class struggle necessitated atrocities, Abu ʿAwf defends the prophet's infallibility. Mahfouz and his supporters must have been well aware that they risked being accused, in effect, of blaspheming the revolution. In these debates, “the revolution” can be read as a euphemism for Nasser. If, as Yunan Labib Rizq argues, Egyptians tended to see Nasser's relation to them as one of “fatherhood,”Footnote ⁸⁹ the phrase “sons of the revolution” can likewise be taken to refer to those who, having grown up with Nasser, had come to feel that they, more than anyone, were his sons.

In an interview, Mahfouz contends that most of the errors of the revolution were due to autocracy, in which the ruler's will resembled the decree of God (al-qaḍāʾ wa-l-qadar), yet he avoids mentioning Nasser's name in this context. He then observes that he could not have been against the revolution because he had benefited greatly from it, “writing in Al-Ahram and enjoying all the opportunities that were given to me.”Footnote ⁹⁰ However, there is no logical contradiction in rejecting something from which one has benefited, after realizing one's mistake. The analysis of nationalism proposed here makes Mahfouz's statement understandable: having consecrated Nasser in advance and been consecrated by him, he cannot question Nasser's legitimacy as a prophet without undermining his own legitimacy as a priest. We may interpret in this light the judgment pronounced on Nasser's rule in Mahfouz's novel Amam al-ʿArsh (Before the Throne, 1983): “You were the destruction of the intellectuals—the vanguard of the nation.”Footnote ⁹¹ What had been destroyed—not by Nasser alone but by nationalism as a whole—was precisely intellectuals’ ability to question Nasser's legitimacy.

A premise of nationalism is that the nation's demands are necessarily legitimate. According to the model proposed here, this is because both prophets and priests must treat the laity's demands as legitimate in order to win support. Because the nation seemed to have chosen Nasser,Footnote ⁹² it was difficult for the nationalist priesthood to consider him a tyrant or to persuade the laity of such an idea, just as it would be difficult for a religious believer to accept that God might subject the faithful to the rule of a tyrannical prophet. Hence the villain of Al-Karnak could not be Nasser; it had to be someone like Khalid Safwan.

AL-KARNAK, THE FILM

I now turn to the film based on Al-Karnak in order to take into account a wider range of responses to the issue of Nasser's responsibility. I also consider how the film adaptation reinforced the effects of nationalism on the autonomy of an author such as Mahfouz.

ʿAli Badrakhan, son of director Ahmad Badrakhan, was born in 1946 and graduated from Egypt's Film Institute in 1967Footnote ⁹³; he thus belonged to the generation of “the children of the revolution.” His first feature film, Al-Hubb Alladhi Kan (The Love That Was, 1973), deals with women's rights and won the Association of Egyptian Critics’ award for the best Egyptian film of the year.Footnote ⁹⁴Al-Karnak (1975) was his second film. The cast includes several major stars: Suʿad Husni is cast as Zaynab, in keeping with her history of playing “sullied Cinderellas”; Farid Shawqi, known for playing thugs, takes the role of Zaynab's father; and Kamal al-Shinnawi, by then associated with amoral, upper-class characters, plays Khalid Safwan.Footnote ⁹⁵

Badrakhan and his stars were thus well positioned to make a film that intellectuals would take seriously and that would also earn a high short-term return on the producer's investment. Moreover, in late 1975 and early 1976, “everyone in Egypt was talking about” the unsuccessful lawsuit that Salah Nasr, the former head of the intelligence agency, had brought against Mahfouz and the film's producer alleging that the character of Khalid Safwan was based on him.Footnote ⁹⁶ The court case undoubtedly boosted the film's box-office receipts.Footnote ⁹⁷ In an interview with Mahfouz a few months after the film's release, a critic noted that tens of thousands of people had seen the film and that, in all likelihood, no other film had ever made as much money in Egypt.Footnote ⁹⁸ This phenomenal success triggered a wave of similar films (dubbed al-karnaka) on the misdeeds of the “centers of power.”Footnote ⁹⁹

The film follows the plot of the novel but includes a great deal of additional material. The chief difference is that the film begins and ends with triumphant footage of the October 1973 war, which rescues Ismaʿil and Zaynab from despondency and gives them a new sense of purpose in life. Newspaper headlines trumpet the slogans of Sadat's “corrective revolution,” promising an end to censorship and surveillance. In reality, the Egyptian film industry experienced harsher censorship than ever under Sadat, and from 1971 to 1973 it was prohibited from making films about the 1967 defeat.Footnote ¹⁰⁰ It is doubtful that ʿAli Badrakhan could have made the film had it not glorified the “corrective revolution” and the October 1973 war.Footnote ¹⁰¹

Although in the novel Zaynab's parents want her to marry the chicken vendor Hasaballah, in the film Zaynab's father, Diyab, scorns Hasaballah's marriage proposal. Zaynab is going to be a doctor and thus of a higher class. Hasaballah retaliates by publicly accusing Zaynab of sexual impropriety, which leads to a huge fight scene involving the whole neighborhood. Critic Halim Zaki Malika dismisses this scene as “basically intended for the third-class audience,”Footnote ¹⁰² but the conflict between Diyab and Hasaballah may also have a political significance. Even by 1970, Nasser-era socialism had benefited only a small minority of “the masses of poorer Egyptians.”Footnote ¹⁰³ The regime's need to legitimize both existing economic inequalities and the new opportunities for class distinction introduced by Sadat's “open door” economic policy of 1974Footnote ¹⁰⁴ may explain why Zaynab's parents reject Hasaballah's marriage proposal in the film. Sadat had convinced his chiefs of staff of the need for the October 1973 war by warning that the student movement might spark mass uprisings of the poor.Footnote ¹⁰⁵ The fight scene can be read as a surrogate for the uprising that Sadat wished to prevent, a way of allowing audiences to blow off steam vicariously while sending the message that big fights cause senseless damage. Moreover, Diyab and Hasaballah are reconciled in the end: the latter accepts Zaynab's upward mobility, which puts her out of his reach.

At the same time, a nationalist metaphor may be detected in Diyab's effort to defend his daughter's honor. Hasan Shah contends that no one who watches the scene of Zaynab's rape can avoid seeing her as a symbol of Egypt, whose honor was violated “during the time of oppression that ended in 1967”; Viola Shafik also sees Zaynab as a symbol of the nation.Footnote ¹⁰⁶ The melodramatic struggle between Zaynab and Safwan, whose moral characteristics contrast more sharply than in the novel, facilitates this reading. In the novel, Zaynab prostitutes herself for money; in the film, she has sex with an acquaintance who has just kept her from committing suicide, and no money changes hands.Footnote ¹⁰⁷ In the novel, she informs on Hilmi; in the film, she tries to exonerate him in her report to Safwan.Footnote ¹⁰⁸ The novel ends with a reformed Safwan joining the café circle; the film leaves him in prison and disgraced.

The highly polarized confrontation between Safwan and Zaynab makes it easier to see them as representing opposing forces. Beth Baron has shown that raped and prostituted women have often been used as symbols of Egypt, its honor besmirched by an oppressive (colonial) state.Footnote ¹⁰⁹ For viewers watching a film with a nationalist theme, the familiar frame of struggle between an oppressive state and an oppressed nation and the conventional conceptual blend of nation as woman point to Safwan as the state and Zaynab as the nation.Footnote ¹¹⁰ In Bur Saʿid (Port Said, 1957), Farid Shawqi stars as a hero who defends the honor of the nation, represented as a woman.Footnote ¹¹¹ This time, in his role as Diyab, his fight scene implies that he cannot restore the nation's honor by attacking other Egyptians. Only the October 1973 war can restore it, and if Egyptians are to be punished, only the state should do so. All this suggests that the film, like the war, was part of a last-ditch effort to restore faith in national unity in order to prevent class conflict.

Although the novel does not mention Nasser, the film alludes to him repeatedly while maintaining the greatest possible ambiguity about his responsibility for events. Alone in his office, Safwan calls someone, undoubtedly Nasser, to decline a promotion to a ministerial post; it would be “a death sentence,” for he has many enemies. He adds that despite “what happened,” the regime must not let down its guard. This could mean either that Nasser is well aware of what Safwan is doing or that Safwan conceals the true nature of his activities from Nasser. (In his review of the film, Halim Zaki Malika contends that Safwan represents a “clique” that committed atrocities even though these “were not asked of it.”Footnote ¹¹²) Nasser's framed portrait hangs in Zaynab's room over her desk; in a shot/reverse-shot sequence, she stares up at it in panic, as if it were an actor, before writing a report to Safwan about Hilmi. Again there are two possible readings. One, realizing that she can hide nothing from Nasser, she writes the report for fear of being caught for failing to write it. Two, she is horrified at how low she, like Safwan, has fallen from the ideals that Nasser embodies but forces herself to write the report anyway.Footnote ¹¹³

After the 1967 defeat, some café patrons debate who is responsible, using vague phrases such as “the political leadership” without mentioning Nasser's name. Crowds chant, “Gamal, the people are behind you!” and “Nasser! We will fight!” On hearing them, one of the least likable characters remarks sardonically that Egyptians are a naïve people (“wi-l-nabi iḥna shaʿb ṭayyib”). He could mean either that they are naïve for supporting Nasser or naïve for wanting to continue fighting. Moreover, the speaker could be seen either as perceptive or unpatriotic. These ambiguities, which promote “those reinterpretive perceptions that invest the message with the expectations of the hearers,”Footnote ¹¹⁴ enable audiences who have kept faith in Nasser's prophethood, as well as those who have lost faith, to find confirmation in the film.

Critics’ reactions to these ambiguities reveal a range of understandings of Nasser, but these stances are more striking for their similarities. Some critics continued avoiding the issue of Nasser's responsibility altogether. Writing in the state-run newspaper Al-Akhbar in 1976, Hasan ʿAbd al-Rasul commends the film for “opening the file” of “black years that have ended for good”Footnote ¹¹⁵ (probably an allusion to Tawfiq al-Hakim's call for “the file,” i.e., the state archives, of the previous regime to be opened,Footnote ¹¹⁶ something that still has not happened); like a surgeon, the film reveals the tumors that “the revolution of 15 May 1971” (the “corrective revolution”) removed. In a similar vein, writing in the same newspaper, Hasan Shah hails the film's treatment of “the period in which the influence of the centers of power became excessive.” These reviews, which do not mention Nasser at all, indicate that the Sadat regime hoped to use the film as propaganda, reviving the nationalist discourse that the 1967 war had thrown into doubt. Although the novel presents skepticism about nationalist discourse as a positive step toward acknowledging other sorts of conflict and formulating a new, scientific understanding of society, the film construes such skepticism as a malady that can be cured only by a national victory such as the October 1973 war and by a reformed nationalism that includes a pretense of political liberalism. The film omits the idea, forcefully expressed in the novel, that the revolution was a “castle made of sand.”

Another response to these ambiguities ventures a mild criticism of Nasser while displaying loyalty to him and to his official doctrine. Muhammad Zuhdi praises the film for illustrating “the contradiction between the revolution and its generation” during “a profound political and social transformation in the Arab nation.” Conceding the difficulty of passing judgment on a “historical period,” especially in “transitional phases,” he nonetheless suggests that one of the causes of the film's tragedy is that “the leader,” not content with his people's wholehearted support, tries to reinforce his power through security services that are “inimical to the aims for which he struggled.”Footnote ¹¹⁷ This leaves Nasser's intentions above reproach and skirts the issue of his direct responsibility.

Still another approach attacks Nasserism without mentioning Nasser. Thus Sami al-Salamuni extols the film, emphasizing that it focuses on his own generation, the one that grew up with the revolution and said “yes” to it; the revolution, he adds, rejected this “yes” because it was a thoughtful “yes” rather than the unthinking “yes” demanded.Footnote ¹¹⁸ In sentences echoing my argument, he maintains that the film reveals a truth that some would prefer to ignore because it offends their “sacred notions”; some intellectuals rejected the film “for the sake of the gods or pagan idols that they themselves created in order to worship them, and that they are still worshiping, even after eating them and being eaten by them” (an allusion to accounts of pre-Islamic Arabs who made idols out of dates and worshipped them, then ate them).Footnote ¹¹⁹

Finally, another strategy suggests that if Nasser were responsible for atrocities, they must have been justified. Mustafa Khurshid contends that the film unrealistically shows Safwan and his cohorts acting on their own; either Safwan was in league with “foreign powers” or there were “circumstances” that justified his actions.Footnote ¹²⁰ (Khurshid does not suggest what these circumstances might have been.) The film's goal, he writes, is to mislead the public; it transforms the filmmakers into “repugnant instruments of the counterrevolution” (i.e., Sadat's “corrective revolution”), which was “wickedly spreading defeatism” and allowing the “great achievements of the revolution” to be obliterated. Khurshid's association of the film with “defeatism,” despite its jubilant depiction of the October 1973 war as a great national victory, suggests that something important is left unsaid. ʿAli abu Shadi, making a similar argument, very nearly says it. “Abdel Nasser is gone,” he writes, “and Sadat has put on Nasser's shirt, and gone to worship, treacherously, deceptively, in Nasser's prayer niches [maḥārib].”Footnote ¹²¹ After arguing that the Nasser regime's atrocities were “revolutionary behavior, which many of the world's revolutions had been through,” he explains that, because of (once again unnamed) “objective political circumstances,” the regime had to commit these injustices in order to champion the interests of the poor. Abu Shadi describes the film as the “first salvo” in a vicious, unpatriotic campaign of cinematic attacks on Nasser and his regime intended to vilify the achievements of the revolution. He calls these “the films of apostasy” (aflām al-ridda), an allusion to the “wars of apostasy” that followed the death of Muhammad.Footnote ¹²²

Faced with an exact parallel in nationalism for the problem of evil in religion, Khurshid and Abu Shadi opt for theodicy. What seems to have bothered them is not that the film might make people think Nasser was responsible for imprisoning and torturing innocent citizens but that it fails to teach them that this brutality was justified. Therefore the film is “apostasy” with regard to faith in Nasser's prophethood and “defeatism” with regard to the preservation of that faith.

Such accusations of disloyalty to the nation can be taken as attempts to “excommunicate” opponents from the field by tracing boundaries in a way that favors one's own position.Footnote ¹²³ At the same time, the areas of tacit agreement among all these critics are striking. Both an impassioned defender of the film, such as al-Salamuni, and a vociferous opponent, such as Abu Shadi, uses religious metaphors (“sacred,” “worship,” “pagan idols,” “prayer niches,” “apostasy”) when describing attitudes toward Nasser. Moreover, Mahfouz, Badrakhan, and the critics all seem reluctant either to applaud or to directly incriminate Nasser. They cannot repair the damage to his credibility nor can they repudiate him; therefore, when expressing adulation or censure, they tend to use “the revolution” as a euphemism for his name.

Why did Badrakhan choose to adapt Mahfouz's novel by adding a great deal of new material rather than make an original film on the same topic? André Lefevere argues that “[t]he non-professional reader increasingly does not read literature as it is written by its writers, but as rewritten by its rewriters,” including authors of film and television adaptations.Footnote ¹²⁴ One way that a film adaptation can attract an audience is by promising viewers some of the cultural capital represented by the original text. This cultural capital will be particularly valuable if the novel was written by a consecrated author.Footnote ¹²⁵ Badrakhan capitalized on Mahfouz's name—which appears prominently in the film's opening titles (“written by the great author Naguib Mahfouz”)—partly because Mahfouz was a consecrated “conscience of the nation.” This “signature” implies that the author vouched for the position represented by the film.Footnote ¹²⁶

However, because cinema's high production costs make it less autonomous overall than literature,Footnote ¹²⁷ film adaptation may implicate the author in a stance less autonomous than the original work. Although Mahfouz's novel suggests that nationalism has not lived up to its promise, implying that it may be time to search for alternatives, the film omits this idea and instead wholeheartedly embraces Sadat's nationalist discourse, thus aligning Mahfouz with a much less autonomous position. Mahfouz appears not to have minded; in an interview, he asserts that the film is largely “faithful to the story's vision,” adding that Sadat's “corrective revolution” was a continuation of the July 1952 revolution and that the filmmakers were right to glorify it.Footnote ¹²⁸ Thus a novelist's “signature” on a film adaptation can change the meaning of the novel, restricting the autonomy of the author's position in the field of cultural production.

Badrakhan claims that the effect of a political film surpasses that of speeches, articles, and television put together.Footnote ¹²⁹ Yet the film's immense popularity should not lead us to conclude that audiences found its message persuasive, whatever they took that message to be. Hani Shukrallah argues that the October war succeeded in defusing the student movement, which had essentially been focused on the “national question,” but that strikes and uprisings of the urban poor intensified after 1973. The 1967 “crisis of hegemony” had delegitimized nationalist discourse in the eyes of the dominated classes, who were turning instead to new religious discourses.Footnote ¹³⁰