Sonallah Ibrahim: the maverick novelist who never betrayed his convictions

A certain intellectual kinship can be discerned between Sonallah Ibrahim and the medieval historian Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi. In Ighāthat al-Ummah bi-Kashf al-Ghummah, al-Maqrizi focused on the famines that struck Mamluk Egypt and their causes. Ibrahim, in turn, chronicled a different kind of famine: that caused by decay and rot.

Sexual hunger perhaps lies at the core of the author of Sharaf, symbolising a broader expression of societal constraints enforced by rigid norms that burden his characters' movements. His use of the autobiographical to document events lent a voyeuristic quality to his fictional landscapes. This disrupted the linear progression of historiography, steering instead towards a sociological reading defined by piercing transitions that laid bare the abscesses of the times.

The differences between That Smell and his later works were stark, marking a novelist less concerned with entertaining than with leaving a lasting impression. His distinctive method of narrative construction relied primarily on archival materials, which supported and fed the flow of his storytelling, as demonstrated in Zaat. Yet ultimately, his work was an effort to clarify, correct, and strip away distortion. Here, his trajectory intersected with that of al-Maqrizi. Both aimed to lift the veil on neglected margins.

Sealed-off spaces

Sonallah Ibrahim displaced the imagined tale in favour of the document. He drew upon his journeys across maps as lived spaces, memories and revelations. The result was a lens acutely attuned to detail, however minor—the same method through which he documented the "aesthetics of narrow spaces". Prison became a recurring theme, examining the suffering of the confined body, its needs and longings. The defeat of the body reflected a broader defeat: an existential collapse in suffocating spaces.

His novels existed within what might be called a 'deep reservoir of loss'. Later, Ibrahim invoked another historian: Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, author of Aja'ib al-Athar fi al-Tarajim wal-Akhbar, yet he approached him from a position of opposition, seeking to re-narrate Napoleon Bonaparte's invasion of Egypt by stripping away historical illusions surrounding the Enlightenment. In doing so, he confronted the violent collision between the cultures of the turban and the hat, offering a view from the margins.

Ibrahim's unique contribution to the Arabic literary canon lay in his allegiance to the language of rebellion, with abrasive narrative forms designed to hold his anger, fury and protest against a world in decay. At some point, one questions the effectiveness of the pared-down prose he adopted in later works like The Ice and the sort of challenge it presents for today's reader.

Still, he remained faithful to a style shaped early in his career by Ernest Hemingway's "iceberg technique", which strips away excess to reveal deeper meaning beneath the surface. This reliance on the reader to uncover what lies hidden became central to his narrative style.

To devour oneself, as depicted in The Committee, becomes a bleak distillation of subjugation, abuse, and annihilation, a searing satire aimed at tyrannical authority and an unflinching exposure of repression, humiliation, and systemic degradation. This theme echoed through time in the writing of the author of 67, published 47 years after it was written, as he dismantled the myths of defeat, the Nasserist era, the rise of Coca-Cola, and consumerist culture.

Beaten in prison

His voice of refusal grew steadily stronger in parallel with a broader social castration. He drew upon newspaper archives, commercial advertisements, journalistic reports and news bulletins to build a hybrid collage, charting invisible geographies that mapped an alternative discourse beyond the official line. By using the first-person voice in most of his novels, Ibrahim blurred the lines with autobiography. His characters hovered between collective concerns and private fissures, all under the long shadow of Egypt's political transformations.

Prison served as the backdrop for much of Sonallah Ibrahim's fiction, an experience that scarred him both physically and psychologically. In Sharaf, he explored the theme of incarceration and the very meaning of honour through the story of an attempted sexual assault on the narrator by a foreign tourist.

In The Oasis Diaries, he wrote: "They struck my head with open palms, and I was powerless to evade them… the beating continued relentlessly. My glasses shattered before the investigator landed a heavy kick that hurled me into the wall." That violent collision with the wall reappears in different guises across his work, reflected in the slow disintegration of his characters as they watch themselves sink, a fall that symbolises the demise of Egypt's middle class, to which he belonged, as it endured repeated blows from authoritarian repression and the crumbling realities of public life in Egypt.

Of Bach and dreams

This is the plight of a novelist who begins his day to the sounds of Bach, only to be overwhelmed by the din of the street, interrogating social history as though writing a manifesto of protest, yet never abandoning the aesthetic elegance of his documentary form, carefully piecing together the ruins with literary precision.

Syrian filmmaker Mohammad Malas recalls their time together in Moscow, saying that while Sonallah liked to listen to Bach, he preferred Haydn. "We would sit together, each of us having made peace with the other's choice. In that Muscovite room, we seemed like a stage composition, our fourth wall being the forest outside. The forest was our only audience for these daily performances. Bach and Haydn played in the background, alongside Dos Passos or Graham Greene, Freud, Dostoyevsky, prison, love and women. At the end of each performance, we would each recount the dream we had the night before."

After nearly half a century of turbulence, defined by defeats and transformations, Ibrahim—a revolutionary intellectual who never compromised his principles or betrayed his leftist convictions—left the world with his moral clarity intact. He remained indifferent to the accolades that came his way—and that his peers sought. He sang out of tune with the chorus, refused entry into the pen, and declared a decisive break from anything that betrayed his avant-garde vision and narrative integrity. Then he withdrew from the stage; pure, untainted, like a burial shroud.