The Republic of False Truths

February 1, 2021
A reimagining of Egypt's 2011 Tahrir Square protests and the hypocrisies underlying the state's response. Al Aswany, Egypt's best-known living novelist, loves cross sections of his home country: Chicago (2008) and The Automobile Club of Egypt (2015) both feature sizable casts of characters who symbolize elements of Egyptian society. His strategy is the same in this ambitious and hard-hitting, if sometimes stiff, novel. As protests of Hosni Mubarak's decadeslong dictatorial regime intensify, multiple characters support or resist the revolution. Danya, a protester and medical student, openly defies her father, a prominent general, Ahmad. Ashraf, a hash-smoking failed actor conducting an affair with his maid, is stoked out of his passivity by the nearby crowds. Asmaa, a teacher at a corrupt school, falls for Mazen, a labor organizer at a cement factory. Nourhan, the wife of the factory's manager, becomes a prominent TV host, spouting falsehoods that the protesters are paid-off agents of the United States and Israel. Al Aswany means to skewer the hypocrisy that infuses much of the national psyche, how Islamic prohibitions are casually sidestepped to rationalize everything from infidelity to state-sanctioned rape and murder. (As one character puts it: "We're in Egypt. Injustice is the rule.") Because Al Aswany is trying to deliver a political portrait as much as a social novel, many of the characters hew to simplistic archetypes: Mazen is a clenched-fist pro-revolution sloganeer, Ahmad a coldblooded torturer. But the characters the author clearly has more affection for, like Ashraf and Asmaa, are richer and more flawed, and their experiences reveal how their acts of protest have social and personal consequences. And as a whole, the novel shows how the early promise of the protests fizzled, leading the country to lapse back into authoritarianism. Any successful revolution, Al Aswany suggests, will demand a wholesale cultural reckoning and tolerance for violent push back. A flawed but valuable fictional reckoning with a failed revolution.

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Starred review from February 15, 2021
The Arab Spring, a pro-democracy movement that fueled the optimism of many in the Middle East, reached Egypt in 2011. Internationally best-selling Al Aswany (The Automobile Club of Egypt, 2015) explores the lead-up to and the immediate aftermath of the revolution through a gripping chorus of voices. Among the many colorful characters are General Ahmad Alwany, part of the national security apparatus; his daughter Danya, who becomes a part of the revolution; Asmaa, a teacher who refuses to let her gender dictate her life; and Ashraf, an unemployed actor who finds love with his maid. Beginning slowly as the various characters take their place on the stage, the story gathers increasing momentum as the revolution gets squarely under way. Al Aswany insightfully explores how the power-hungry elite systematically quash dissent not just through force but also by manipulating minds. "The Egyptians live in the Republic of False Truths. They live in a mass of lies that they treat as if they were true," Asmaa writes as she reflects on the failed revolution. In today's splintered and partisan political and media landscape, this is a stark lesson for democracies everywhere: Whoever controls the narrative, controls the outcomes. Brave, sobering, provocative, and thoroughly absorbing.

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