What is it about?
After more than seventy years, when Kahlil Gibran’s 1923 masterpiece The Prophet had circulated freely in Egypt, censorship authorities banned the book in 1999 and 2011. The Prophet, a book of 26 prose poems written in English by the Lebanese-American poet Gibran Kahlil Gibran, has sold more than one hundred million copies, making him one of the most widely read poets in history, behind only Shakespeare and Lao Tzu. The book contains the universal ingredients sought after by publishers, but it also presents sensibilities, such as nude figure drawings, that would not easily pass the scrutiny of censors in the Arab world. This article explores the social and political context surrounding the censorship of The Prophet and its Arabic translations in Egypt, with a particular focus on the power play between censors and different agents and the strategies employed by the latter to revoke the ban on the book. The extent and intensity of power intervention speak to the significance of this case study. Qualitative analysis of English and Arabic press material is utilized to gain insights into the censors’ reports and the responses of different social and political agents. This is paired with compiling and analyzing a dataset of bibliographical information on the editions of The Prophet’s Arabic translations published in Egypt between 1999 and 2022.
Why is it important?
The significance of this study lies in extending knowledge on the dynamics of censorship in Egypt by considering the confiscation of The Prophet within its broader international and local context and revealing a range of censorship practices shaped by different sources of power. The study highlights how different forms of power came into play in the censorship of The Prophet, the most notable being the Ministry of Information, the Ministry of Higher Education, the Ministry of Culture-backed Writers Union, and Al-Azhar’s Islamic Research Academy. It was noted that censorship in Egypt seems to be a decentralized process, with several ministries and the Writers Union taking opposing stances on whether or not The Prophet should be banned. The decentralized system of censorship is double-edged, in that it allows the state to frame its censorship decisions as responding to demands from religious institutions and the public. At the same time, the fragmentation of censorship powers has caused the system to be unstable and susceptible to pressure from external agents at the national and international levels.