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Sonallah Ibrahim, The Egyptian Novelist Who Captured History
The great Egyptian writer Sonallah Ibrahim passed away earlier this month, on August 13, 2025. Several years ago, BULAQ discussed his novel Warda – the story of a female fighter in the 1960s and 70s Dhofar rebellion in Oman, and of the Egyptian intellectual who, decades later, tries to solve the mystery of what happened to her. We discuss the vibrant and mysterious female character at the heart…
— Sonallah Ibrahim
“I do not write to comfort the reader, but to disturb them and push them to think.”
Covering Sonallah
For years I had been searching for it: the first edition of That Smell, Sonallah Ibrahim’s revolutionary novella. When it came out in 1966, authorities had censored it and critics panned it. Today it is considered an unsentimental classic that catapulted Arabic literature into a new phase. And, like a cherry on top, the cover of the original edition had been drawn by the late Egyptian caricaturist Mustafa Hussein. But where do you find a novel that was banned five decades ago?
Go straight to the source.
For the spring issue of the Cairo Review of Global Affairs, I interviewed Sonallah Ibrahim. Before we started talking, Ibrahim pulled out of a copy of that fateful first edition from one of his towering bookshelves. The cover was much simpler than I had imagined. None of the ornate flourishes typical of Hussein’s illustrations: just a naked man, head cocked to the right, looking more amphibian than human. The title is scrawled out in tortuous calligraphy—every bit as darkly beautiful as the prose inside.
Over the next two hours, Ibrahim sounded off about the rule of President Abdel-Fattah El-Sisi, the imprisonment of author Ahmed Naji, and much more.
Here is an extract from our conversation:
JONATHAN GUYER: Why do you write novels?
SONALLAH IBRAHIM: When I was a teenager I would buy every newspaper available. If I didn’t have money, I would agree with the seller that I would read it and bring it back for half price. Really my passion was the press. All my attempts to join a newspaper or magazine failed. Right after coming out of prison I went to Rose El-Youssef, and they said no. I went to other papers. Someone I knew was in charge of Al-Gomhouriya, a daily paper. I started doing stories and submitting them. I did an interview with the Soviet poet [Yevgeny] Yevtushenko, who had come on a visit. I noticed that he was wearing a watch in the shape of a triangle, and I wrote that in the interview. The man at the paper said to me, “Really, what kind of watch? Are you making it up?” At that time, when I had started writing That Smell, I started to feel that that form of expression was more comfortable for me, completely free, that I could say or do anything.
***
After the interview, I began to notice that many of Egypt’s great cartoonists had contributed covers to Ibrahim's paperbacks. Nabil Tag drew Beirut, Beirut. Hegazi (or someone pastiching Hegazi’s style) penned Sharaf. Mohi El-Din El-Labad composed a collage cover for Zaat.
Who better than a cartoonist to capture the humor and minimalism of Ibrahim’s singular approach to writing?
Zaat, 1992, by Labbad
***
From Left to Right: Beirut Beirut, 1988, by Nabil Tag; The Committee, 1982, by Salah Enani; Sharaf, c.1998, perhaps by Hegazi.
***
Read “Plight of an Arab Intellectual,” my extended interview with Sonallah Ibrahim, in the new issue of the Cairo Review.
Remembering Sonallah Ibrahim: His ‘Arsène Lupin’
Sonallah Ibrahim died this week at the age of 88. His “Arsène Lupin,” originally written in the al-Wahat Prison Camp, Western Desert, Egypt, in 1963, appeared in translation in the Summer 2020 CRIME issue of ArabLit Quarterly. Arsène Lupin By Sonallah Ibrahim Translated by Emily Drumsta I approached the store with some hesitation. Once in front of the door, I peeked in and found what I’d been…
Towering Egyptian Novelist Sonallah Ibrahim Dies at 88
AUGUST 13, 2025 — Egyptian novelist Sonallah Ibrahim — one of the great literary innovators of the twentieth and early twenty-first centuries — died today, the Egyptian Ministry of Culture announced. He was eighty-eight. Born in Cairo in 1937, Ibrahim chronicled the Cairo of his youth — and a family seemingly much like his — in his tender, heart-bending 2007 novel Stealth, translated to English…
Lit & Found: Hosam Aboul-Ela, Mona Kareem, and 'Exportability & Context: Reading Arabic Literature in the West'
For those who missed the event last month, the Crown Center for Middle East Studies has put the discussion between Mona Kareem and Hosam Aboul-Ela on Sonallah Ibrahim’s work, as seen through the lens of “exportability,” on YouTube: The “exportability” in question references French critic and translator Richard Jacquemond on translating Sonallah Ibrahim’s Zaat, from which some fifty pages were…
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On the Sonallah Ibrahim Renaissance
By Tugrul Mende The Turban and the Hat is the most recent of Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels to reach English, translated by Bruce Fudge and published by Seagull earlier this year. The novel imagines its way into the lives of Egyptians during the French occupation. In this interview, Bruce Fudge about through the complexity of the novel, the challenges of translating it, and why Sonallah Ibrahim’s…
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Coming in June: Historical Fiction & Animal Stories
Coming in June: Historical Fiction & Animal Stories
Book publication dates shift, and thus we are supplementing the annual list of forthcoming literature in translation with monthly lists, which we hope are more accurate. If you know of other works forthcoming this month, please add them in the comments or email us at [email protected]. * The Turban and the Hat, by Sonallah Ibrahim, tr. Bruce Fudge (Seagull Books) From the publisher: “The…
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