How One Author Used Melodrama to Express Dissent in Mid-Century Egypt

Back in graduate school, Jonathan Smolin learned Arabic by reading the short stories of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, one of Egypt's most popular and prolific writers of the 20th century. Widely known by the public by his first name, Ihsan wrote melodramatic fiction, characterized by emotional stories of love, passion, and betrayal.

"It was so much fun to read; I couldn't wait to get to the end of the story to find out what happened," says Smolin, an associate professor in the Middle Eastern Studies Program.

Despite Ihsan's popularity, none of his fiction had been translated into English and no one had published about him or his work, Smolin says, because "critics assumed that it's just lowbrow melodrama and not worth studying."

Smolin has set out to change that. In addition to translating two of Ihsan's classics—I Do Not Sleep (2021) and A Nose and Three Eyes (2024)—Smolin recently authored the first-ever book about Ihsan and his work, The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser. In it, Smolin shows how Ihsan's impact went much deeper than scholars think, revealing the author's surprisingly close relationship with Egypt's second president, Nasser, and his role in Egyptian politics and culture.

"Melodrama actually served as a kind of vehicle for dissent and protest against the installation of military dictatorship," Smolin says.

In a Q&A, Smolin talks about Ihsan's fiction, the intersection of politics and culture in the Arab world, and how he is rewriting the conversation about one of the most tumultuous and crucial periods in Egypt's history.

You've mentioned that the idea for this book stemmed from observations you made years ago, when you were in graduate school. How did this come about?

It's hard to characterize how important a writer Ihsan was. He wrote hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of short stories. He wrote 20 to 25 novels; 50 of the classics of Egyptian cinema were based on his fiction. All of the stars of Egyptian cinema became stars by acting in the films based on his fiction.

My professor in the 1990s, when I was learning Arabic, was telling our class that this author is the most important writer in the Arab world but no one's written about him because the critics don't consider melodrama valuable. Yet his fiction is the most important lens through which to understand the 20th century, and Egypt and Arab nationalism, and so on. And my professor said, 'Someone has to write this book.'

I focused all of my academic work on Morocco until 2017, including writing a book and translating three Moroccan novels from Arabic to English. At that time I thought, you know what? I'm sure someone's written that book on that really popular writer of melodrama that my professor was talking about in the 90s. And I went and looked, and no one had! I just thought, this is impossible. It's 2017. How has no one written a book on such an important author?

You discovered that not only did Ihsan write fiction, but he also served as the editor-in-chief of the most important political and cultural magazine of the 1940s through the 1960s. What was the impact of this magazine role on his fiction writing?

He published all of his fiction in the magazines. He serialized them, and he serialized all his novels. But he didn't write whole novels and then chop them up and serialize them; he went into the office on Friday night, wrote the chapter of the fiction, and sent it to the printer the next morning. So it turned out that he's writing political editorials and the fiction perhaps on the same day.

So once I stopped reading his fiction as published books on a bookshelf, and I started reading them in their original magazine format, I began comparing each chapter of a famous novel with the political editorial that he was writing in the same issue. This gave me a completely different way of reading him and tracing the impact of his politics and engagement with the politics of the 50s and 60s.

Those decades marked a turning point in Egyptian history, as the Egyptian Revolution of 1952 overthrew King Farouk and marked the end of British colonial rule. How politically involved was Ihsan during this time?

He had a very close relationship with Gamal Abdel Nasser, who was the driving force of the 1952 Revolution and became the first dictator in the Arab world. Ihsan was very involved in bringing Nasser to power in his position as the editor-in-chief of this magazine, and accidentally solidifying a dictatorship in Egypt by trying to compel the public to support Nasser without realizing what he was doing.

You've said Ihsan was a proponent of democracy and felt betrayed by Nasser's authoritarian rule.

The relationship between the two was very, very close. Ihsan was the one who broke this incredible scandal that showed the public how corrupt the monarchy was, and he did this with materials that were leaked to him by Nasser. And so when the coup happened, that morning, Nasser actually called Ihsan and brought him down to the barracks; Ihsan saw himself as a civilian participant with the officers in this coup. And in the immediate aftermath, he thought that he was going to direct them and cleanse the politics in the country, and that these officers were going to withdraw and go back to the barracks once democracy flourished. And he quickly found out that that was not the case: Nasser installed a dictatorship and then jailed Ihsan for dissent.

Ihsan's fiction again and again is about a female narrator who falls madly in love and doesn't pay attention to all of the warning signs of the terrible betrayal that's going to come. And then once the betrayal happens, the female character is unable to articulate to the world the way that she betrayed her family or brought a traitor into the household or whatever it may be. He's using this as a veil, so to speak, for confessing and expressing his own anxieties about the way that he, like the Egyptian public, fell in love with Nasser as a democrat, not suspecting the betrayal of democracy to come. Ihsan thought that Nasser was faithful, that Nasser was this object of not just love, but passion and devotion. And he felt that Nasser betrayed him and the nation by turning away from democracy and installing military dictatorship instead.

As you point out in the book, it wasn't just Ihsan who was enamored with Nasser in the beginning. He had almost cult-like public adoration.

He was such a sharp contrast to the king that they overthrew. He was manly and had Hollywood-actor good looks, and the public broadly fell in love with him with a kind of crazy love that had not existed in the Arab world before. If you go back and look at the images, he's like a messianic, redeeming, savior figure that the public is just throwing themselves on and trying to kiss and touch. The public has just fallen completely head-over-heels in love without seeing and understanding the betrayal that's happening in real time: the installation of a military dictatorship, the end of the rule of law, restriction of freedom of expression, the abuse of civil rights and human rights, and so on and so forth.

Ihsan's fiction becomes this vehicle for him to push the public to see this betrayal—without getting himself arrested again.

Was there anything surprising that came up in your research for this book?

This really is a rewriting of what we know about popular culture during the Nasser period, which is the most important political and cultural period of the 20th century. Scholars had assumed that there was little to no dissent against Nasser until the mid-1960s. It's a rewriting of the intersections of politics and popular culture. It's a new history, a new understanding of this crucial period that really explains the making of the modern Middle East. I think it is going to be a surprise to many people in the field. I don't think they're expecting this at all.
 
But the other part of this, too, is that the materiality matters. There's no way to write this story without going back to the original magazines, which were very hard to access. There's no complete collection of them in the United States, so I had to go back and forth to Cairo and buy hundreds of issues of these magazines and dig them out of used magazine markets and go through big long checklists, hoping so-and-so could find these issues. If the archive doesn't exist, you have to build it.

What's next for you?

I don't want other researchers to have the same problems that I had. And so I've begun collaborating with Dartmouth Libraries and Dartmouth Digital Humanities Network to digitize and provide open access to paper copies of this magazine from 1925 to 1975. It'll be their first Arabic digital collection. I am invested in making this kind of material accessible to scholars in ways that it wasn't for me.