 |
Fallen Angel by Alexandre Cabanel, 1868
Sameh Fawzi, Ma’a Tahiyat Iblis (With Regards from Satan), Cairo: Dar Al-Maarif, 2020. pp150 |
In his new novel, With Regards from Satan, the journalist and writer Sameh Fawzi explores pragmatism in religion. His hero, Ihab Al-Mansouri, who hails from Mansoura, is a picaro who supports himself through relationships with older women and maintains a path of upward mobility, graduating from Cairo University and studying journalism in Leeds, UK, on a British Council scholarship.
Ma’a Tahiyat Iblis |
As he embarks on a career in the local press, however, Al-Mansouri clashes with bureaucracy and corruption and the decline of the profession. Using Facebook to do what he is prevented from doing by his editor, Al-Mansouri meets Bushra, a similarly dissolute man who happens to be a Christian. Bushra makes his confession to Al-Mansouri, but they differ over the need to abide by religion and how. Yet within a short while Al-Mansouri, who has declared himself an atheist and a rationalist, starts working with Islamist extremists. They give him the protection and power he needs, since he is a vulnerable individual, while he helps them to win their fights with secularists. Marrying an Islamist women, he begins to lead a double life, pretending to be religious among his fellows and in public while drinking and philandering in secret. The contradiction devastates him. At the end of the book, Al-Mansouri visits the old book seller in his hometown who confronts him with his reality: “You are an opportunist.” But he is unable to change his duplicitous ways.
Like It Happened in Brighton, Fawzi’s previous novel, this is an eminently realistic and engaging read, and it deals with some of the most pressing issues in an appealing way.
* A version of this article appears in print in the 13 August, 2020 edition of Al-Ahram Weekly
