Robyn Creswell: on culture in Egypt

I linked to the informative article by Robyn Creswell in the New York Times's Book section.  I challenged Robyn on the reference to the era of Nasser and the phrase that talked about the monopoly of culture (not to deny the attempt at monopoly but to maintain that the literary and artistic production under Nasser was far more rich than under Sadat or Mubarak).  Well, Robyn took up the challenge and replied with a most informative response (I cite with his permission):  "As a long-time admirer of your blog, I was very happy to see that you linked to my NYT article about Tahrir's culture of revolution. You also posed a challenge, with regards to my remark about the Nasserist regime's "virtual state monopoly on culture" (incidentally, that phrase is taken from Anwar Abdel-Malek's "Egypt: Military Society," a book that I think we both rate quite highly). The challenge was to name "one important literary book written during the Sadat era." That's easy. "Zayni Barakat" was published in 1974, and whatever you think about where Ghitani has gone from there--or whether it was opportunist of him to write an anti-Nasserist allegory during the early days of the Corrective Revolution--it's clearly an important novel. I would say the same of Sonallah Ibrahim's "Najmat Augustus" and "al-Lajna," as well as Yusuf al-Qa'id's "Yahduth fi Misr al-An" and Edward Kharrat's "Rama wa-l-Tinnin." But in fact I was not making any claims about how the state's level of involvement in culture relates to aesthetic merit. I don't think that's a question that has easy answers--in the Middle East or anywhere else. Instead, I was trying to provide some historical context for the aggressively anti-official culture that we have seen in Tahrir over the past three weeks. From afar, the scene reminded me of a moulid--another popular festival that the regime, as well as the Ikhwan, have done their best to get rid of, the one because it fears crowds of all sorts, and the latter because they find it unorthodox. I suppose you thought I was being anti-Nasserist in my remarks about nationalizations, but that wasn't my intent. We may even have a similar reading of the role Nasserism plays in this uprising--as I did my best to explain, very briefly, in this piece (which I wrote the day after the protests began):".