By Mohammad Baali
Albawaba.com – Cairo
A new crisis erupted this week at the “Culture Palaces,” the name given to the body supervising arts and literature production in Egypt, when an editor at the state-run agency resigned over what he called “secret censorship.”
According to sources, Abdel Nasser Hanafi, the editing secretary of the publication Aswat Adabeyya, resigned after he discovered that a senior co-worker had excised verses from a Sufist poetry book before it went to print.
Albawaba.com has learned that Aswat Adabeyya’s top editor, Abdel Memem Teleima, will also quit over the controversial decision.
The sources said that when Hanafi complained to the head of the publications unit at the agency, he learned that the director himself had authorized three copy editors to make a final edit, however they saw fit, of all publications before printing.
In a letter Hanafi sent to his boss, a copy of which was obtained by Albawaba.com, the secretary told Teleima that “what is going in the agency confirms rumors that the department intends to secretly censor its publications.”
The Culture Palaces have already sparked two crises in Egypt. The first was when they authorized a reprint of a controversial novel by a Syrian writer. The decision triggered mass protests among university students last year, who saw the literary work, A Banquet of Seaweed, as insulting to Islam.
Earlier this year, in a second crisis, Islamist MPs protested that the government agency, which functions under the ministry of culture, had published three other novels they considered “immoral.”
