Introduction for The Politics of Melodrama

INTRODUCTION

ANALYZING IHSAN ABDEL KOUDDOUS

On the morning of 31 July 1954, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, perhaps the most popular and prolific writer of fiction in the Arab world in the twentieth century, woke up in Cell 19 in Cairo’s military prison. He had been arrested three months earlier by the secret police and spent the first forty-five days in solitary confinement, followed by several weeks of harsh interrogation. For Abdel Kouddous, it was a harrowing experience, a kind of psychological torture, full of insults and abuse. As he wrote soon after his release, “The initial weeks passed violently, every minute pricking my nerves. My entire body was torn apart and burned with fire.”¹ When Abdel Kouddous woke up that morning, he had spent ninety-five days in prison. He had no idea when—or if—his ordeal would end.

As the guard opened the cell gate that morning, he greeted Abdel Kouddous with uncharacteristic respect after weeks of insults. “Congratulations, sir,” the guard told him with a smile. “The director wants to see you in his office. We’ll really miss you.”² Abdel Kouddous was escorted to meet the prison director, who informed him that he was being released. The director gave no explanation for the decision, just as Abdel Kouddous had not been told why he was being arrested three months earlier. He only later learned that he had been charged with plotting to overturn the 23 July 1952 Revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers to power in Egypt. Abdel Kouddous quickly returned to his cell to take the tin inmate cup that he had used during his imprisonment as a memento of the traumatic experience. The cup, which he later had engraved with the prison name as well as his cell number and dates of imprisonment, still sits on display in the Abdel Kouddous family home.

As soon as Abdel Kouddous arrived at his apartment in the Garden City neighborhood in Cairo, the phone rang. He assumed that it was his mother calling to welcome him home. He picked up the receiver and heard the voice of Gamal Abdel Nasser. “Hi,” said Nasser laughing. “Have you learned your lesson yet, Ihsan? Come have lunch with me and don’t be late. I’m waiting for you.”³ Abdel Kouddous could not believe his ears. Even though he had not seen his wife and two young children for more than three months, he immediately set out for Nasser’s residence. “I found myself forced to accept the invitation for a reason that I still don’t fully understand,” Abdel Kouddous recalled in 1975, some two decades later, when he spoke publicly about this episode for the first time.⁴

Abdel Kouddous ate lunch with Nasser, and afterwards the two watched a movie together. They chatted about the movie and other light topics but not the jailing or Abdel Kouddous’s release. Nasser continued to insist that Abdel Kouddous come to his home nearly every day for a meal and a movie. During the visits, the two talked about a variety of things, but they awkwardly avoided discussing the arrest. After about a month of these forced invitations, Abdel Kouddous could no longer suppress his confusion and discomfort. He finally asked Nasser why he kept insisting on these visits. The president then looked him in the eye and said, “I’m giving you psychoanalytic treatment, Ihsan!”⁵ The comment made Abdel Kouddous’s blood run cold. What led up to this ominous moment? What did Nasser mean by this? Why did Nasser set himself up as analyst and Abdel Kouddous as his patient? What was Abdel Kouddous’s “illness”? And how would Nasser’s “treatment” impact Abdel Kouddous personally and shape his exceptionally prolific and bestselling writing, both at the time and in the years following this encounter? What was once a tight personal bond between them—one that had formed during Abdel Kouddous’s surprisingly close engagement with the Free Officers in the months leading up to the 23 July 1952 coup as well as his pivotal involvement in inadvertently embedding military rule in the months afterwards—now became something more complex and troubling.

Despite the massive secondary literature on Nasser, few inside or outside Egypt knew then—or know today—of Nasser’s highly fraught and deeply consequential relationship with Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, the giant of Arabic fiction and popular culture. When the two met in 1950, they must have quickly recognized the uncanny parallels between them. They were born less than a year apart. Each studied law at university and got married at the same age. Each eloped because of family opposition. They both had two young children at the time. Each was reserved and shy in person, but they were both intensely driven by political convictions. It was the Anglo-Egyptian Treaty of 1936—which gave Britain the right to station ten thousand troops in the Suez Canal, among other privileges—that made both Abdel Kouddous and Nasser vehemently anticolonial, shaping their political consciousness and pushing them to participate in street protests at the time. Each was disgusted not only at the control of the British but also at the Egyptian monarchy and the collaborating elite. Each had been haunted and further radicalized by the humiliation of the Abdeen Palace incident of 4 February 1942, when British authorities surrounded King Farouk’s palace with tanks and demanded the installation of a new prime minister, which the young monarch quickly and subserviently accepted. Each flirted with numerous political groups during the 1940s, including the Muslim Brotherhood, but eventually became disillusioned with them all. The loss of Palestine in 1948 dramatically escalated their political activities as each began collaborating with anyone they could find, regardless of political affiliation, to spark revolution in Egypt, end the monarchy, and eliminate British colonialism. As Mohamed Hassanein Heikal, the foremost articulator of Nasserist ideology, would later recall, “Palestine defined Nasser.”⁸ The same could no doubt have been said of Abdel Kouddous when the two met in 1950.

These striking parallels formed the basis of their relationship, which started sometime in 1950 when Nasser and other members of the clandestine Free Officers first visited Abdel Kouddous at the offices of the weekly Rose El Youssef. Abdel Kouddous served as editor in chief of the magazine, which was perhaps the most important political and cultural publication in Egypt at the time. By 1950, Abdel Kouddous was well known as a muckraking journalist and editor who was desperately searching for scandals that he could print to inflame the public and incite them to revolution. It was thanks to these meetings that Abdel Kouddous was able to break the notorious Rotten Weapons scandal in 1950. As the public would soon discover on the front pages of Rose El Youssef, the palace armed the Egyptian military for the disastrous 1948 Palestine War with defective rifles that shot in reverse and grenades that exploded when touched. In his fiery editorials at the time, Abdel Kouddous used secret documents leaked to him by Nasser and the Free Officers to show that the palace had purchased these “rotten” weapons at highly inflated prices, pocketing enormous kickbacks in exchange for sending unsuspecting Egyptian soldiers to their suicide on the battlefields and the loss of Palestine. Thanks to Abdel Kouddous and his secret collaborators, the shocking scandal quickly crystalized widespread disgust at the corruption and immorality of the monarchy and collaborating elite, ultimately preparing public opinion to embrace the Free Officers Coup once it arrived.

Abdel Kouddous was such an enthusiastic partner in the buildup to the coup that Nasser telephoned him during the early hours of the operation to invite him to participate in it along with the other Free Officers, making Abdel Kouddous the only civilian to do so. Abdel Kouddous felt so closely linked with Nasser and the Officers that he was terrified during the coup that he would be hanged if it failed. Moreover, in the weeks following 23 July 1952, Abdel Kouddous was so zealous in his public support for the coup that members of the old guard thought that he was the civilian official of the Free Officers. During this time, he gave radio addresses urging the public to have full trust in the Officers and called repeatedly in the pages of Rose El Youssef for suspending the constitution and dissolving the political parties. Abdel Kouddous took these steps because he believed that the Officers were simply acting as a pliable tool to carry out his long-standing goal of uprooting what he saw as an impossibly corrupt political system and sowing the necessary seeds for a new era of rule of law and democracy. Military dictatorship, despite the obvious warning signs, was not a concern for him, at least not publicly. As Abdel Kouddous declared in total confidence in his editorials at the time, the Officers would withdraw once they completed the necessary “cleansing” of what he saw as the corrupt political terrain.

In summer and fall 1952, Abdel Kouddous seemed certain that he would continue to guide Nasser, his handsome yet shy co-conspirator, to achieve his own political goals, just as he had in the two years leading up to the coup while inflaming the Rotten Weapons scandal in the press. Nonetheless, in the weeks after the coup, Abdel Kouddous discovered that Nasser was no longer the man he had thought he was. The quiet and seemingly servile Nasser whom Abdel Kouddous believed he had dominated before the coup now stridently pushed Abdel Kouddous aside, taking increasing steps to install military dictatorship in the country. By the time Abdel Kouddous started to rebel against Nasser and the Free Officers, both behind closed doors and in public in his editorials in Rose El Youssef, it was too late. By spring 1954, Nasser had not only systematically erased his recalcitrant former co-conspirator Abdel Kouddous from the official accounts of the revolution but had also imprisoned him in brutal conditions for three months to make sure that he understood who was in charge. Abdel Kouddous would not reveal his chilling “analysis” at Nasser’s hands—or other critical details about their relationship—for another twenty years, well after Nasser’s death.

While the story of the strikingly close personal and political ties between Abdel Kouddous and Nasser is largely unknown, the contours of their relationship might be familiar. Abdel Kouddous was far from the only intellectual or political figure before the coup to project his desires and fantasies of a new Egypt onto the masculine yet seemingly obedient Nasser, only to be disappointed by his inability to control Nasser afterwards. He was also not the only figure to feel a deep sense of ownership for a new Egypt in the wake of the coup and then be shocked and appalled at the subsequent imposition of military dictatorship. Ahmed Abul-Fath, editor in chief of the influential daily newspaper al-Misri (The Egyptian), served as a close confidant of Nasser in the years before the coup. Like Abdel Kouddous, Abul-Fath published articles in the buildup to the coup attacking colonialism and calling for revolution. In the weeks after 23 July 1952, Abul-Fath also went on the radio and published articles urging the public to support the Officers on the assumption that they were installing democracy in Egypt. Nonetheless, Abul-Fath quickly discovered that Nasser was no longer the manly yet subservient figure he had known before the coup. Unlike Abdel Kouddous, Abdul-Fath would spare himself years of humiliation (and, certainly, jail) by fleeing Egypt to Paris, where he would write the first tell-all insider book about Nasser, confessing his deep regret at his role in bringing him to power. As Abul-Fath wrote with tremendous guilt, “I did everything I could to push him to abandon the idea of dictatorship for democracy.”⁹

Hassan Hudaybi, the Supreme Guide—or leader—of the Muslim Brotherhood from 1951 until 1973, and Sayyid Qutb, the organization’s foremost intellectual during the Nasser era, believed that Nasser had sworn allegiance to the Brotherhood in the buildup to the coup. Both therefore publicly supported Nasser and the revolution through fall 1952, confident—like Abdel Kouddous—that they could direct him to install their vision of a new Egypt based on the ideology of the Brotherhood.¹⁰ Qutb in particular surprisingly wrote a number of editorials in Rose El Youssef vehemently calling on the public to support the coup and the Officers. Their faith in Nasser and their confidence in their ability to push him to implement their political program once he reached power would prove to be deeply mistaken. Not only would Nasser decimate the Muslim Brotherhood after a member of the party tried to assassinate him in October 1954, but Qutb would eventually become one of the few political opponents whom Nasser executed.

Tawfiq al-Hakim, pioneer of modern Arab theater and prominent public intellectual both before and after the coup, believed that his 1933 novel Return of the Spirit had formed Nasser’s self-image as a hero bringing liberty and freedom to Egypt through revolution. Al-Hakim saw Nasser after the coup as the embodiment not only of his protagonist in the novel, Muhsin, but also of his own vision of a new democratic Egypt.¹¹ For this reason, al-Hakim would later claim, “I am the prophet and the advocate of ‘the blessed revolution.’”¹² And al-Hakim had no doubt that Nasser gave him appropriate credit. According to al-Hakim, Nasser admitted that “the revolution is really his revolution.”¹³ Unlike Abdel Kouddous, al-Hakim remained almost entirely silent about the installation of dictatorship during the Nasser era. Nonetheless, some four years after Nasser’s death, al-Hakim would publish a sensational book declaring his guilt, regret, and complicity at the subsequent imposition of authoritarianism and Nasser’s cult of personality.¹⁴

Even Jefferson Caffery, United States Ambassador to Egypt from 1949 to 1955, had a similar relationship with Nasser. Caffery met with Nasser and the Free Officers before the coup as part of the U.S. plan of a “peaceful revolution project in Egypt.”¹⁵ On the morning of the coup, Nasser even sent a note to Caffrey informing him of the move in an attempt to avoid U.S. or British intervention. While the details of the Officers’ relationship with Caffrey remain murky, we know that they had dinner together on 20 August 1952 as part of ongoing consultations about foreign affairs.¹⁶ It was in the weeks after the coup that Caffery boasted to British and French diplomats of the influence he had over the Officers, proudly calling them “my boys.”¹⁷ As with Abdel Kouddous, Abul-Fath, Hudaybi, Qutb, and al-Hakim—among others—Caffrey’s naïve confidence would quickly be dashed. His romance with Nasser would end soon after the coup.

Abdel Kouddous’s fiction was also disseminated on a much wider scale than that of any other Arab writer. All of his work was first serialized in the country’s most popular weeklies before it was collected in book form and subsequently reprinted in dozens of editions by multiple publishing houses over several decades. Moreover, Abdel Kouddous’s novels and short stories were adapted into some of the most important and popular films in the history of Arab cinema, such as I Do Not Sleep, There’s a Man in My House, and My Father’s Up a Tree, among many others. In his seminal study of cinematic melodrama in Nasser’s Egypt, Joel Gordon notes that “Ihsan’s stories are lushly romantic tales of broken hearts and shattered love affairs.”¹⁸ In total, forty-nine Egyptian films were based on his work, all featuring at least one superstar of Egyptian cinema, such as Faten Hamama, Omar Sharif, or Abdel Halim Hafez. Dozens of radio plays and television series were adapted from his fiction, many broadcast over months and aired repeatedly over the years. Numerous individual works were adapted and disseminated in Egypt and the Arab world in all three media. Even though Abdel Kouddous died in 1990, his work is even still being revitalized for new audiences.¹⁹ Considering its popularity, quantity, and reach, the fiction of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, more than any other writer, should be considered foundational texts of Arab popular culture and the public imaginary during the Nasser era.

Despite this, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous has been almost entirely ignored by critics and academics, both in Egypt and abroad. To date, there is not a single book in any language focusing on Abdel Kouddous’s fiction or his critical role in the production and dissemination of Arabic popular culture in the twentieth century, let alone the politics of his highly contentious yet little-known relationship with Gamal Abdel Nasser. And despite his unparalleled sales and popularity, it was not until late 2021, when my translation of Abdel Kouddous’s classic I Do Not Sleep was published, that readers of English could finally discover this legend of Arabic literature for themselves.²⁰

There are many reasons for this neglect. Just as Abdel Kouddous gained popularity for his scandalous fiction in the late 1940s and early 1950s, the well-known critic and writer Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad labeled him the “writer of the bed,” dismissing Abdel Kouddous as a lowbrow writer who focused on sexual titillation instead of serious literary matters. This title stuck with Abdel Kouddous throughout his career. Although it certainly helped his sales as well as the adaptation of his work in other media, it turned “respectable society” against him. Highlighting sexual desire—especially that of young female protagonists—was not only alluring but also disturbing for many segments of Egyptian society in the 1950s and 1960s. Rose El Youssef magazine, where most of his fiction was serialized, would regularly print letters of outrage about immorality in his fiction. Despite his immense popularity, Abdel Kouddous later recalled that, during this period, people would frequently not admit to reading his work for fear of being associated with questionable morality.²¹ Young people—and women in particular—did not want to be caught by their parents or husbands reading his fiction. Of course, these same parents or husbands might have had their own copies of Abdel Kouddous’s fiction, which they read when no one was looking.²²

Besides at least some of the public’s discomfort over the depiction of sexuality in his writing, critics dismissed Abdel Kouddous because he typically set his work in a bourgeois milieu. This is ironic because Abdel Kouddous wrote fiery editorials, especially before 1954, attacking the wealthy and their political backers in Egypt as agents of colonialism and regressivism. His fiction before the coup, which commonly depicted the excesses of the ruling class, served as a vehicle to drum up anger at the elite. As he explained in a series of retrospective interviews in 1980, “My only motivation before the revolution was to lay this class bare so that the wheel of popular revolt would turn until it arrived at what we strove for—their overthrow.”²³ After the 1952 coup, popular anger at inequality helped guide the policies of the Free Officers, including the land reform program and abolition of civil titles, which sought to uproot the power and privilege of the old elite. Throughout the Nasser era, and especially after the late 1950s, the “socialist revolution” was launched, further targeting the wealthy of the previous era, including the nationalization of private companies and seizure of land and assets. In helping to build this new society, fiction—like the media—was expected to follow suit and serve a political and social role not simply by supporting the revolution but also by helping to manufacture its message. Nonetheless, almost all of Abdel Kouddous’s major works during the 1950s and 1960s are set in a bourgeois context and focus on the emotional anxieties of the wealthy, almost entirely refusing to play any role in “educating” the public about Nasserist ideology. Although it is clear that Abdel Kouddous was not celebrating the wealthy in his fiction—and not all of his characters are bourgeois—critics still dismissed him partly because of the perception that he consistently focused on the lives of the wealthy of the previous era and not the aspirations and achievements of the new Egypt.

Perhaps a more important reason for the near-total critical dismissal of Abdel Kouddous as a fiction writer is his style. Unlike Nobel laureate for Literature Naguib Mahfouz, Abdel Kouddous employed simple vocabulary and sentence structure in a way that appealed to the widest possible readership—and especially to the young—but not to literary critics. As early as 1943, Abdel Kouddous was calling for the simplification of Arabic so that it could be used as a vehicle not only to build large audiences for the press but also to touch the emotions of ordinary Egyptians.²⁴ He developed his style under the influence of Mohamed El-Tabii, the first Rose El Youssef editor who popularized the magazine by employing simple, sensational language. Throughout his career, both in his journalism and fiction, Abdel Kouddous strove to democratize Arabic, moving it from the language of the elite to that of the masses, occasionally making fun of the complex vocabulary and syntax of writers like the “Dean of Arabic Literature,” Taha Hussein, and Naguib Mahfouz, even though both were close friends. Seen from the perspective of the nahda—the nineteenth-century Arab renaissance that was forged through the simplification of classical Arabic for the newly emergent press—fiction for Abdel Kouddous was partly a tool to lure readers, who might otherwise not be interested in politics, to the next issue of his magazine, where they might come across the latest political debate of the day as they flipped through the pages to find the next racy installment of his fiction.²⁵

Abdel Kouddous’s focus on simplified sensational Arabic and increasing mass participation for the press was not simply a product of ideology. While it is easy to overlook now that his massive library exists in book form published in many editions over the years, all of his writing—both political and fictional—was first published in the highest-circulation magazines in Egypt. Abdel Kouddous’s novels were all serialized on a weekly basis over long periods of time, sometimes for over a year. The pressures and demands of press serialization—selling magazines, keeping readers coming back week after week for the next installment—played a critical role in shaping Abdel Kouddous’s content and style. Each weekly installment, which was later published as a chapter in book form, typically features some kind of sensational element and ends in a cliffhanger. Abdel Kouddous was highly attuned to the importance of sales since his magazines, at least before the nationalization of the press in 1960, depended almost exclusively on circulation, not advertising revenue, for their survival. While his clear, crisp, simple prose and sensational content were tied directly to ideological and pressing commercial concerns, these only reinforced the perception of critics that his work was popular but lowbrow, certainly not texts worthy of serious literary consideration.

Another key reason why Abdel Kouddous has not been taken seriously as a fiction writer is that he was one of the most important and influential political journalists in the Arab world, especially during the 1940s and 1950s. He called for revolution repeatedly in the press before the coup in increasingly vitriolic terms. He was particularly prolific after the coup, much more so than his peer Ahmed Abul-Fath, typically publishing a weekly political or cultural article, frequently two or three, in a wide variety of magazines and newspapers until his retirement in the 1980s. He was also editor in chief or chairman of some of the most important publications in Egypt, such as Rose El Youssef, Sabah al-Khayr (Good Morning), Akhbar al-Yawm (News of the Day), and al-Ahram (The Pyramids), the country’s daily newspaper of record. Despite the obvious potential for crossover, his fiction has never been read as political. No doubt, his sexual sensationalism, romantic melodrama, simple cinematic language, and massive sales contributed to that perception, as did his total dismissal by critics.

Yet there is another important reason for why the public never understood the political aspect of his fiction. As I trace in chapter 2, Nasser and the Free Officers fully embraced their co-conspirator Abdel Kouddous during the coup and in the weeks after, but by the late fall of 1952 they had begun to distance themselves from him. The more Abdel Kouddous protested against his waning influence over Nasser and the trajectory of the revolution, both in the pages of Rose El Youssef and behind closed doors, the faster he fell out of favor. By summer 1953, when the Free Officers turned to producing and disseminating official histories of the first anniversary of the revolution, there was a deliberate decision to erase the insubordinate Abdel Kouddous from the narrative. No longer was the Rotten Weapons scandal cited as the prime motivation for the coup. And no longer was Abdel Kouddous even acknowledged as a co-revolutionary, participant in the coup, or friend of Nasser. Abdel Kouddous quickly went from being widely seen as the civilian official of the Free Officers—someone who had risked his life to participate in the coup and then worked tirelessly to embed the Officers in rule—to just a journalist and bestselling writer of romantic melodrama with no particular ties to Nasser. By summer 1954, after his release from jail, Abdel Kouddous stopped writing confrontational editorials entirely or claiming direct involvement to the revolution and instead turned his attention to fiction, giving the impression that he was retreating from politics to escape to popular diversion through salacious tales. Starting in fall 1954, he began publishing at least one novel as well as dozens of short stories a year for the next decade, establishing himself as the giant of popular fiction that he is known as today. His early erasure from the history of the revolution therefore helped cement for both the public and critics that his fiction is apolitical, a view that has persisted to this day.

This assumption about his work is as widespread as it is misleading. It presumes that there was no overlap between his career as a dissident political journalist and as a fiction writer. It assumes that Abdel Kouddous simply stopped being political when he wrote fiction. It assumes that his fiction was nothing more than an entertaining, prurient diversion for him and the public, a perception reinforced by his unparalleled commercial and popular success. While Abdel Kouddous typically did not address this in interviews—mostly because he was almost never asked about it—he did drop a few clues later in his career that his work was indeed highly political. In one retrospective interview in 1968, Abdel Kouddous explained, “There’s something about me that you shouldn’t forget. I always lived fighting in a hot political atmosphere, and I played a role in it. Fiction is one of my weapons. How could I avoid politics in it?”²⁶ In another series of interviews published in 1982, he said, “All romance fiction revolves around political society since a writer can’t get rid of his political ideas.”²⁷ Despite what I will show are the inseparable connections between politics and fiction in his writing, neither the public nor critics have linked these two spheres in his work. This is a deep misreading of Abdel Kouddous and his fiction, one that I will show throughout this book has led to a misunderstanding of not only his writing but also the politics of fiction, mass media, and popular culture during the Nasser era.

Much as I did in Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture, I have written the narrative of each chapter of this book by weaving together details excavated from a large archive of diverse sources.²⁹ This Abdel Kouddous archive, which took me years to compile and was the product of the help of many kind people and generous funding sources, is made up of thousands of magazines and dozens of audiovisual sources published over a span of some four decades. It includes all of his fiction; thousands of editorials and cultural commentaries; dozens of adaptations of his work in film, television, and radio formats; and many author interviews. I was also able to access Abdel Kouddous’s surviving personal letters, notes, and other documents, thanks to the generous help of his family. His family also helped confirmed a number of critical details about his life. Hanan al-Shaykh, the famed author of The Story of Zahra who had a romantic relationship with Abdel Kouddous from 1963 to 1965, generously spoke with me at length, providing me with crucial background information that I would not otherwise have been able to unearth.

Despite the considerable size of this archive, it is important to stress from the outset that there are still gaps. Unfortunately, almost all of Abdel Kouddous’s close friends and colleagues have passed away, leaving important holes in a researcher’s ability to reconstruct what happened behind the scenes in key moments in his life. As for the written record, Abdel Kouddous wrote thousands of articles, short stories, and installments of novels, but these were almost all published under the shadow of state censorship that severely restricted his ability to write openly and directly. Moreover, nothing particularly sensitive survives in his personal papers, including information about the most difficult episodes of his career, almost as if Abdel Kouddous had been careful not to leave behind any potentially incriminating material. There is also no surviving written record of official demands for censoring his fiction or editorials, even though we know that many were made. We know that Nasser expressed his anger at Abdel Kouddous and intervened in his work many times, though, as far as we know, he never did so in writing.³⁰ At first, Nasser met with Abdel Kouddous in person to demand changes. Once their personal relationship deteriorated, Nasser sent intermediaries such as Anwar Sadat, a fellow founding member of the Free Officers and the future president of Egypt, and journalist Mohamed Hassanein Heikal to relay his displeasure. Time and again, the archive hints at tantalizing moments of intervention and conflict behind the scenes without clearly articulating it, echoes of which I explore throughout this book. Despite obvious gaps, the archive is without question complete enough to allow me to show the impact of the political on the fiction of Abdel Kouddous for the first time. The implications for this new reading are substantial.

For example, in I Do Not Sleep, serialized in 1955–56, Abdel Kouddous retells the story of the coup by veiling himself as a young female narrator who plots to convince her father, symbolizing the Egyptian people, to divorce and expel her prim and proper stepmother (British colonialism), only to embed in her place a sexy, cunning, and devious traitor (Nasser), with the effect of destroying the household, or nation, in the process.³³ In Girls in Summer, serialized in 1958, Abdel Kouddous again writes himself into the fictional text, this time as a woman too weak and anxious to reveal the sexual abuse that she is suffering in secret at the hands of her husband’s manly and authoritarian best friend, another thinly veiled symbol of Nasser as both a traitor and dictator.³⁴ In A Nose and Three Eyes, serialized in 1963–64, Abdel Kouddous this time writes himself as a young woman having an affair with a doctor, a not-so-subtle reference to Nasser as his “psychoanalyst,” who proceeds to degrade and corrupt her, eventually turning her into a prostitute, a metaphorical reading of what Abdel Kouddous felt Nasser had done to him and the nation.³⁵ As I show throughout this book, romantic melodrama and sexual sensationalism repeatedly gave Abdel Kouddous the cover to transform what could not be articulated openly—regret for his failed “romance” with Nasser and the revolution—into a narrative form that was acceptable to authorities, at least most of the time. Of course, his work was not simply acceptable to the public; thanks to its mass dissemination, circulation, and consumption in multiple media throughout the Nasser years and beyond, it formed the basic backdrop—a collectively shared experience—of Egyptian popular imagination during the era.

What is this kind of romantic melodrama telling us about the relationship between the intellectual and power? What is it telling us about the advent of a new political order under Nasser? How does this fiction stage the birth of the new era of Arab dictatorship and a new role of the intellectual as dissident? By excavating this voluminous archive of material and embedding the original serialization of Abdel Kouddous’s fiction in the context of its immediate publication in the press as well as its contemporaneous political and biographical backdrop, I reframe Abdel Kouddous’s writing as something new. In addition to romantic melodrama helping to shape the imaginations and desires of generations of readers, I show how Abdel Kouddous’s work offers a new model for understanding fiction as dissent during the Nasser era. His fiction is categorically not iltizam, that is, literary commitment as conveyed through high literary art, which has been the dominant model for reading the political in Arabic literary texts during this era.³⁶ Instead, it is one that employs the basic strategies of the nahda—simplified Arabic disseminated through the press to foster mass readership—to write romantic melodrama as a metaphorical vehicle to contest the fate of the 1952 revolution, condemn Nasser’s betrayal of democracy, and reveal the depths of Abdel Kouddous’s regret and guilt at what Egypt had become. Crucially, this new reading of Abdel Kouddous stresses the importance and inclusion of non-elite culture into the history of Nasserism.

We know that Nasser’s early political imagination was formed by literature, and in particular by Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Return of the Spirit. Nasser was so inspired by al-Hakim’s novel that he began writing a novel himself, For Freedom, sometime in the mid-1930s, naming his protagonist Muhsin, the same name that al-Hakim used for his own hero who would rise up to bring liberation to Egypt.³⁷ As numerous scholars have noted, the young Nasser saw himself as playing a dramatic role, embodying the hero that Egypt had been searching for in order to lead it to freedom. My excavation of Abdel Kouddous’s archive significantly complicates this depiction of Nasser’s relationship to literature. I show in chapter 1 how Abdel Kouddous seemed to be well aware of Nasser’s fantasy of playing the role of the liberating hero for Egypt in the two years before the coup, using this framework to construct a script for Nasser in the pages of Rose El Youssef, all but sending out casting calls for him to take on the role. I then read Abdel Kouddous’s romantic melodrama after the coup partly as framing Nasser’s affair with the nation. As Margaret Litvin has argued, Nasser had a “romance with the Egyptian people.”³⁸ In Abdel Kouddous’s metaphorical fiction, it is the Egyptian people—doubled as a young woman—who, like him, have fallen madly in love with the handsome and seemingly pliable Nasser, only to be abused, betrayed, degraded, and humiliated once he takes control of the relationship. In this, I show how Nasser went off the script of the romance that Abdel Kouddous had written. Now jilted, Abdel Kouddous’s focus on sex and romance in his fiction becomes something new. It stages Egypt’s relationship with Nasser and the nation’s pathological obsession with his messianic qualities as a melodramatic romance and desire for his masculinity and virility.

Yet one more element that made Abdel Kouddous unique was the way that he sought to self-analyze in fiction through metaphors of revelation and confession. His audience was not only the broad public but also Nasser himself, who was a devoted reader of Abdel Kouddous’s fiction.⁴⁰ Nasser did not read books, but he monitored the press closely, including following installments of Abdel Kouddous’s fiction, even offering comments and feedback at times. Once it was no longer possible to express dissent about Nasser through editorials because of censorship or directly in person, Abdel Kouddous inserted his critiques into his fiction, which he filled with details of their relationship, known only by the two of them at the time, to protest the fate of the revolution and challenge Nasser himself. Abdel Kouddous therefore both exhibits and complicates the way that numerous writers, such as Ahmed Abul-Fath and Lutfi al-Khuli, used the press to guide Nasser’s thinking.⁴¹ In this, Abdel Kouddous followed in the long line of authors in authoritarian environments trying to influence the ruler, seemingly writing for an audience of one.⁴² I also show how Abdel Kouddous at times abandoned this strategy to rebel against Nasser in his fiction, oscillating between appeasement and condemnation. In these pendulum swings, Abdel Kouddous sometimes became a defiant, jilted patient in therapy with Nasser as his detested psychoanalyst. I show how, with each weekly installment of dissent, Abdel Kouddous tried to reveal the secrets and guilt that he had been harboring yet repeatedly failed to achieve the curative effect that he so clearly sought. While this component of Abdel Kouddous’s fiction might have been opaque to the public, which could not know the details of Abdel Kouddous’s personal relationship with Nasser, it was certainly clear enough to Nasser, his self-appointed therapist.

As I argue in this book, Abdel Kouddous, through his mass-consumed fiction, expressed his repressed guilt and regret through the form of romantic melodrama. Unsurprisingly, these melodramas, which were typically centered in the family, were anchored in Abdel Kouddous’s relationship not only with Nasser—the self-appointed surrogate therapist—but also his mother, Fatima Youssef. Better known by her stage and publishing name, Rose El Youssef, she is one of the trailblazing divas discussed by Raphael Cormack in Midnight in Cairo. Youssef transitioned from stage acting to journalism when she published the first issue of her eponymous magazine, Rose El Youssef, in October 1925. After focusing mostly on art and theater news for the first year, the magazine shifted to political and cultural coverage mixed with a groundbreaking use of caricatures and biting political humor, establishing itself as the most important weekly periodical in Egypt by the 1930s. Abdel Kouddous had a particularly complex relationship with his mother. For him, she was not simply a stern figure of discipline and disapproval whose love he tried to gain throughout his life. She also symbolized the liberal era in Egypt, the period from the 1920s up to the Free Officers Coup, that Abdel Kouddous fought against in the pages of the same magazine. By plunging into his “affair” with Nasser and calling for revolution in the years leading up to 23 July 1952, Abdel Kouddous was also rejecting his mother and symbolically trying to kill her (and her era) off, a threat/insult she no doubt took quite personally. In a series of episodes that I cover in this book, I show how Youssef ridiculed and humiliated her son for his calls for revolution, mocking him for what she saw as his naïve support for Nasser as a democrat, his reckless involvement with the Officers, and even his fiction. As I argue, this complex triad between Abdel Kouddous, his mother, and Nasser evokes the framework developed by Lynn Hunt in The Family Romance of the French Revolution.⁴³ Hunt’s basic argument, drawing on Freud, is that the individual psyche is linked to social order through collective family imagery in which the parents are eliminated and replaced by a new revolutionary figure, typically a young male. Through his writing, Abdel Kouddous provided the framework and imagery for replacing the cold, distant, and passé mother with the young, virile, and masculine Nasser, not just for himself but also for the nation. Of course, this replacement would ultimately lead to military dictatorship, much to Abdel Kouddous’s regret, guilt, and horror.

We know that Nasser was particularly prickly when it came to criticism, especially criticism expressed in public fora. As he read each weekly installment of Abdel Kouddous’s fiction, he saw the potential for it to serve as a vehicle to disseminate his political ideology to the broader public, but he also no doubt detected the dissent aimed directly at him. As I show, Nasser took a hands-off approach to Abdel Kouddous’s dissent at times, presumably viewing it as a private affair known only by the two of them, and intervened angrily at other times. Reading Abdel Kouddous’s fiction in the context of its original publication in the press illuminates Nasser’s repeated attempts to control Abdel Kouddous, to harness and coopt his popularity, engineer his fiction, and turn him into a mouthpiece for his political ideology and agenda. Moreover, in at least three incidents—and there were almost certainly more—I show the ways in which Nasser punished Abdel Kouddous for his dissent. The archive, read on a weekly basis in the context of its publication in the press and linked to events in Abdel Kouddous’s life, offers a surprisingly detailed record not only of fiction as staging a new political order but also of the production of Nasserism, not as a top-down linear process but of the way Nasser himself repeatedly attempted to micromanage one of the most important Arab intellectuals of the twentieth century through the press. As I show throughout this book, this relationship functioned like a pendulum, with Abdel Kouddous oscillating between rebellion and appeasement. We know that Nasser punished and then resuscitated writers and members of the regime many times. Thanks to Abdel Kouddous’s unparalleled production as both a journalist and fiction writer—publishing these different forms on a weekly basis, often in dialogue with each other, on deadline—his archive offers by far the most detailed record of the way Nasser attempted to manage intellectuals and shape their writing.

As is well known, Nasser left behind no diaries or any other written material that would offer an uncensored image of his views. As P. J. Vatikiotis stresses, “We can only sketch the outline of his personality by reporting what his colleagues and associates thought of him.”⁴⁵ We therefore only know Nasser as a person through the composite image created by the accounts of others, such as later memoirs by other Free Officers and other figures who claimed to have particularly important influence on him, including Ahmed Abul-Fath. Moreover, as one of Nasser’s biographers notes, Nasser, unlike other military dictators, did not eliminate his old comrades and co-conspirators. Instead, as detailed in later memoirs by members of the Free Officers, he kept them around, repeatedly humiliating them to render them fearful and to keep them seeking his approval. In his 1962 tell-all memoir, Ahmed Abul-Fath describes in great detail how Nasser savored humiliating the other Free Officers, especially Sadat, and then bringing them back into his inner circle.⁴⁶ When Nasser told Abdel Kouddous that he was giving him “psychoanalytic treatment,” it was not the first time that Nasser sought to humiliate him, and it would be far from the last. The archive shows how each new humiliation deeply impacted Abdel Kouddous in both his personal life and his fiction, pushing him at first to try to appease and please Nasser, inevitably followed by angry acts of rebellion. Because of its scope and detail, Abdel Kouddous’s archive also offers the most detailed account of the extent and impact of Nasser’s micromanagement of his former co-revolutionaries, a critically important element of how Nasser managed the “friends of the past,” a central part of his rule that has evaded systematic analysis to date. Through my reading of Abdel Kouddous’s archive, a new picture of Nasser emerges, one that shows not only the pendulum swing of his relationship with intellectuals and members of the regime. It also highlights Nasser’s unyielding obsession to engineer popular culture, to subdue and humiliate former co-conspirators, and to intervene in their personal lives in ways that have not been explored fully before.

While Abdel Kouddous attacked Nasser directly in a number of editorials published between January 1953 and March 1954, this was the exception rather than the rule. Instead, as I argue in this book, Abdel Kouddous repeatedly used allegory and metaphor to express his despair over the trajectory of the revolution. It is also essential to state that I am not claiming that Abdel Kouddous was fully aware of what I read as repeated acts of dissent against Nasser in his fiction or that he always carefully constructed fictional allegory intentionally in this way. Regardless, I show throughout this book how Abdel Kouddous returned repeatedly to similar acts of rebellion against Nasser in his fiction for a period of nearly fifteen years. It is clear during this time that Abdel Kouddous was trying to process his anxiety and despair, expressing it both to the public and to his most important reader, Nasser, on a weekly basis in his serialized fiction. Perhaps the fact that he wrote installments of his fiction so quickly and under strict deadline encouraged him to express what he was feeling in a given week without the filter of time and distance. Just as the public seemed to ignore his attempts to reveal his anger, regret, and revolt—repeatedly overlooking the political critique embedded in these mass-consumed serialized texts—it is entirely possible, even likely, that Abdel Kouddous was himself not fully aware of his own repression and acting out against Nasser. His fiction therefore can be read not only as a new kind of staging for the birth of Arab dictatorship and the oscillating, contingent relationship between intellectual and power during the Nasser era but also, paradoxically, as a slippage of repressed despair and a compulsion of revolt, not necessarily intentional heroic resistance. Nonetheless, following Fredric Jameson, I argue throughout this book that it is the political unconscious that fundamentally shaped Abdel Kouddous’s work.⁴⁹

Abdel Kouddous might be remembered today even more for the classic film adaptations of his fiction than for his written novels and short stories. For many, the endings of the films, many of which present a stark moralistic solution to complicated gender and sexual relations, are synonymous with his fiction. While many of the films faithfully followed the fiction until the climax, almost all of the endings, especially in the films during the Nasser era, were altered, sharply sanitizing the dissent that Abdel Kouddous had expressed in the original written work. Sometimes these changes were made to please the censor. Other times, they appear to be the product of the director, producers, and studio looking to maximize ticket sales. It is essential to clarify that Abdel Kouddous lost all control of these film adaptations once he signed away the rights to them. In fact, the films were a source of deep ambivalence for him. He no doubt enjoyed the notoriety and fame that followed each box-office success. Nonetheless, he was repeatedly outraged at how the films altered the endings of his fiction, sometimes even to the point of publishing complaints about them in the press. Since Abdel Kouddous had so little control over almost all of the film adaptations, I will only discuss these films when they are directly relevant to my argument.

This book offers a new history of the 1952 revolution as well as the politics and popular culture of Nasser’s Egypt through the life and work of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous. In the detailed history reconstructed in each chapter, Abdel Kouddous emerges as the neglected legend of Arabic romantic melodrama, the pivotal yet erased player in the Free Officers Coup, and a tragic figure who unintentionally worked to embed military dictatorship in Egypt. He also becomes the haunted conscience of the revolution and the nation, a unique figure who lived the repeated oscillation between resisting and accommodating the dictator. He looms as a highly nuanced and paradoxical figure who struggled deeply with the contradictions, shame, and self-loathing of pleasing Nasser while being unable to repress his dissent for long, whether he was aware of it or not. Through the social-political biography that I offer in this book, I show how Abdel Kouddous comes to represent a national allegory for his beloved Egypt during the Nasser era, in its dreams and fantasies, grief and disappointment, repression and denial, and, ultimately, its degradation, submission, and defeat. By excavating the little-known yet deeply consequential relationship between Abdel Kouddous and Nasser on the level of the weekly archive and in dialogue with episodes in his personal life, this book ultimately shows how rereading Abdel Kouddous—in his anxieties, repressions, and paradoxical acceptance of and resistance to Nasser’s psychoanalytic “treatment”—offers a new history of the politics of dissent, popular culture, and fiction during perhaps the most consequential period of modern Middle Eastern history: the birth and spread of Arab dictatorship.

Notes

1. Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus, “95 Yawman fi al-Sijn,” Ruz al-Yusuf, 6 September 1954.

2. Muhammad al-Shinnawi, Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus bayna al-Adab wa-l-Siyasa (Cairo: Manshurat Battana, 2019), 552.

3. Ibid., 554.

4. Ibid.

5. Ibid., 555.

6. On Nasser’s messianism, see Yoav Di-Capua, “Revolutionary Decolonization and the Formation of the Sacred: The Case of Egypt,” Past and Present 256, no. 1 (2022).

7. Nasser has been the subject of a massive secondary literature. On his rise to power, see Joel Gordon, Nasser’s Blessed Movement: Egypt’s Free Officers and the July Revolution, new paperback edition (Cairo and New York: The American University in Cairo Press, 2016). Recent important books include Laura Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood: Feminisms, Modernity, and the State in Nasser’s Egypt (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2011); Sharif Yunis, Nida’ al-Sha‘ab: Tarikh Naqdi li-l-Idiyulujiyya al-Nasiriyya (Cairo: Dar al-Shuruq, 2012); Omar Khalifah, Nasser in the Egyptian Imaginary (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2017); Fawaz A. Gerges, Making the Arab World: Nasser, Qutb, and the Clash That Shaped the Middle East (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2018); Alex Rowell, We Are Your Soldiers: How Gamal Abdel Nasser Remade the Arab World (New York: W.W. Norton & Company, 2024).

8. Saïd K. Aburish, Nasser: The Last Arab (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 2004), 28.

9. Ahmed Abul-Fath, L’Affaire Nasser (Paris: Plon, 1962), 92.

10. Gerges, Making the Arab World, 89ff.

11. Israel Gershoni, “An Intellectual Source for the Revolution: Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Influence on Nasser and His Generation,” in Egypt from Monarchy to Republic: A Reassment of Revolution and Change, ed. Shimon Shamir (Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1995).

12. Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Return of Consciousness, trans. Bayly Winder (New York and London: New York University Press, 1985), 61.

13. Ibid., 19.

14. Ibid.

15. Miles Copeland, The Game of Nations: The Amorality of Power Politics (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1969), 62.

16. Laura M. James, Nasser at War: Arab Images of the Enemy (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2006), 3.

17. Khaled Mohi El Din, Memories of a Revolution: Egypt 1952, trans. TRIACC Translation Services (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1995), 127.

18. Joel Gordon, Revolutionary Melodrama: Popular Film and Civic Identity in Nasser’s Egypt, Chicago Studies on the Middle East (Chicago: Middle East Documentation Center, 2002), 137.

19. Abdel Kouddous’s magnum opus, The Sun Never Sets, was adapted into a thirty-part television series for Ramadan in 2017. His classic 1963–64 novel A Nose and Three Eyes was also adapted into a new film in 2023.

20. Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, I Do Not Sleep, trans. Jonathan Smolin (Cairo and New York: Hoopoe, 2021). An English translation of Abdel Kouddous’s I’m Free appeared in Egypt in 1978 and has been long out of print. See Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus, I Am Free, and Other Stories, trans. Trevor Le Gassick (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organization, 1978).

21. Ihsan Abd al-Quddus and Mahmud Murad, I‘tirafat Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus: al-Hurriya, al-Jins (Cairo: al-‘Arabi li-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzi‘, 1980), 91.

22. Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus, Ayyam Shababi (Cairo: al-Maktab al-Misri al-Hadith, 1980), 10.

23. Amira Abu al-Futuh, “Mishwar Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus: 1,” al-Siyasa, 19 July 1980.

24. Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus, “Lughat Bini Hamir,” Akhir Sa‘a, 26 September 1943.

25. On the nahda, see Tarek El-Ariss, ed., The Arab Renaissance: A Bilingual Anthology of the Nahda (New York: Modern Language Association of America, 2018).

26. Ahmad ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti Hijazi, “Ba‘d Sab‘at Shuhur min al-Samt Ihsan Yatakallam (1),” Ruz al-Yusuf, 28 October 1968. This is one of the few interviews that take Abdel Kouddous’s fiction seriously as works of literature.

27. Amira Abu al-Futuh, Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus Yatadhakkar (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-Misriyya al-‘Amma li-l-Kitab, 1982).

28. Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus, “Katib al-Qissa,” Ruz al-Yusuf, 20 December 1954. This was confirmed by Abdel Kouddous’s wife and son as well. See Muhammad ‘Abd al-Quddus, Hikayat Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Amma li-l-Kitab, 2011), 44–49; Ni‘am al-Baz, “Awraq Khassa wa-Hamma min Sanawat Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus: al-Majmu‘ al-Thalith,” Akhir Sa‘a, 2 March 1983.

29. Jonathan Smolin, Moroccan Noir: Police, Crime, and Politics in Popular Culture (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2013).

30. This should not come as a surprise. According to P. J. Vatikiotis, “Nasser conducted his state business face to face and largely by word of mouth.” See Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1978), 315.

31. Al-Hakim, Return of Consciousness, 27.

32. Anwar El-Sadat, In Search of Identity: An Autobiography (New York: Harper Colophon Books, 1977), 210.

33. Abdel Kouddous, I Do Not Sleep.

34. Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, “‘Girl Three,’ Translated by Raphael Cohen,” Banipal, no. 71 (2021).

35. Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, A Nose and Three Eyes, trans. Jonathan Smolin, foreword by Hanan al-Shaykh (Cairo and New York: Hoopoe, 2024).

36. The model of iltizam has also come under reconsideration recently in the work of Benjamin Koerber. See Koerber, Conspiracy in Modern Egyptian Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018).

37. Huda Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir, ed. Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir Taliban wa-Zabitan, vol. 1, Jamal ‘Abd al-Nasir: al-Awraq al-Khassa (Cairo: al-Hay’a al-‘Misriyya al-‘Amma li-l-Kitab, 2015), 53ff.

38. Margaret Litvin, Hamlet’s Arab Journey (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2011), 40.

39. Omnia El Shakry, The Arabic Freud: Psychoanalysis and Islam in Modern Egypt (Princeton and Oxford: Princeton University Press, 2017).

40. Abdel Kouddous discussed this many times in interviews. See, for example, al-Shinnawi, Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus bayna al-Adab wa-l-Siyasa, 602.

41. Rami Ghinat, Egypt’s Incomplete Revolution: Lutfi al-Khuli and Nasser’s Socialism in the 1960s (Portland, OR: Frank Cass, 1997).

42. For other examples, see Mark Lilla, The Reckless Mind: Intellectuals in Politics (New York: New York Review of Books, 2001).

43. Lynn Hunt, The Family Romance of the French Revolution (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992).

44. See Bier, Revolutionary Womanhood.

45. Vatikiotis, Nasser and His Generation, 306.

46. Abul-Fath, L’Affaire Nasser, 222ff.

47. John Waterbury, Egypt: Burdens of the Past/Options for the Future (Bloomington: Indiana University Press in Association with the American Universities Field Staff, 1978), 235ff.

48. Gershoni, “Intellectual Source for the Revolution,” 233.

49. Fredric Jameson, The Political Unconscious: Narrative as a Socially Symbolic Act (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981).