Les Vertueux

Abstract

heresy in the 1990s, to cite only two famous examples – the question of the making of an Egyptian cultural scandal does get something of an answer. Indeed, The Story of the Banned Book revisits all the contentious signposts that made the book and its author so scandalous: the fraught relationship between intellectuals and the state; the contested right to administer morality to the public; the role of religion within the moral public sphere; the struggle over who speaks for religion and by what right; competitiveness between intellectuals; the role of public media within and outside of Egypt; and the force of public opinion. As he blends these many different facets of the story together, Shoair takes the reader on a captivating investigative journey. Indeed, The Story of the Banned Book is not only a literary and intellectual achievement, but also a methodological triumph, which is where its true value lies for scholars. Search the history of almost any Nobel laureate and you will be directed to an organized archive. That is no more the case here than it is for almost any Arab intellectual of equal, let alone lesser, stature. Thus, to know Arab intellectuals fully and intimately, one has to devise a research method that circumvents the absence of the archive as it constructs its own record of the person and event in question. To do so is to follow Shoair’s method of combining critical oral history, investigative journalism skills into forgotten records, as well as more conventional explorations of the intellectual and cultural record of the era, and the books and debates that made it. Beyond the sheer pleasure of reading this investigation, there is the lesson of what it means to represent and bring to life a writer, a text and a community that, for a variety of reasons, left no organized record of their history.