The Minimalistic Words of Sonallah Ibrahim:

 

One of the Arab world’s most unyielding literary dissidents, Sonallah Ibrahim (1937-2025) devoted his life’s work to social justice and national liberation. Known for his stubborn integrity, Ibrahim refused to “enter the pen,” a phrase he used in reference to submission to the cultural establishment, and equally refused prizes, honors, and official recognition. He paved the way as the pioneer of the Arab documentary novel, his writing both a witness and a staunch refusal to submit to corruption and tyranny. Arrested in 1959 for his involvement with a leftist organization, he spent five years in prison, where the stench of decay — both literal and political — seeped into his consciousness, ultimately becoming the opening note to his iconic first novel, “That Smell” (1966).

 

Rich with political and social messages, “That Smell” became the first of a new narrative genre, the documentary novel. In the words of The New Arab, Ibrahim transformed the novel into a “space for documentation and the unveiling of historical and political truths.” Exploring the topics of bureaucratic absurdity, political disillusionment, and the alienation of life under state control, his works drew from his critical intellectual background and political experience from his involvement in political activism as a young man. Ibrahim developed a “novelistic architecture crafted with skill and patience, not to entertain or amuse, but to leave a deep scar in the reader,” writes Khalil Suwaileh in his article, “Sonallah Ibrahim: The Vanguard Dissident Who Stared into the Abyss,” published in Al Majalla.* His frequent use of the first-person voice blurred the line between autobiography and fiction, inviting the reader to see the narrator’s defeats as both individual and collective.

 

“It was not merely the raw realism, intimacy, or anxious gaze at a defeated, broken, and flawed reality that set his novel apart in the Arabic library, but its unique narrative sensibility,” states Suwaileh. Ibrahim dismantled the traditional structures and molds of the novel at the “furthest edge of experimentation, linguistic economy, density, and telegraphic sentences that cut straight to the point.”

 

One of Ibrahim’s distinctions as an Arab novelist lies in his commitment to rebellion, his narratives an embodiment of his anger and protests against a world “dying in broad daylight,” in the words of Suwaileh, who describes Ibrahim as a novelist whose specialty was “crafting nightmares, not rosy dreams.” He discarded the ‘imagined tale’ in favor of documentation, drawing from his experience and journeys. 

 

Ibrahim’s work was guided by Arabic historiography and journalism, the latter of which came from his passion for journalism as a young man. He followed in the footsteps of medieval Egyptian historians Taqi al-Din al-Maqrizi and Abd al-Rahman al-Jabarti, recording events with a moral purpose. Echoing Maqrizi’s work “Relief of the Nation by Unveiling the Affliction,” a record of the famines that struck Mamluk Egypt (mid-13th to early 16th century), Ibrahim similarly documented famines while exposing the underlying rot of society that was hidden to the unassuming eye. 

 

He invoked Jabarti’s “The Marvelous Compositions in Biographies and Events” from an unexpected angle, rewriting the history of Napoleon Bonaparte’s campaign in Egypt and its false historical claims about enlightenment from the perspective of the marginalized. Rather than merely presenting facts, Ibrahim rearranged and reformulated them to “construct a discourse that exposes what is hidden and restores public memory to visibility in the face of marginalization,” as one journalist writes in “Pioneer of the Arab Documentary Novel,” published in The New Arab.** His writing carries archival value in and of itself, preserving a chronological record of pivotal periods in Egyptian and Arab history and opening a space for reinterpretation of the past in light of the Egyptian and Arab present.

 

Archival research and first-hand observation were crucial to Ibrahim’s writing. He compared ‘true history’ with ‘fabricated history’ in efforts to “debunk the lies,” using a free-flowing narrative that allowed him to “lift the veil from confessions, revelations, and defeats long hidden or erased from the Arab novel’s body,” states Suwaileh. Archival material bolstered the flow of the narrative, but he also used a counter-archive to “correct” and “strip away the blurriness and falsehood.”

 

Ibrahim seamlessly wove news reports, official statements, and press excerpts with fictional invention, striking a balance between documentary material and imaginative depth. In doing so, he depicted reality without embellishment. As stated in The New Arab, “The reader thus finds themselves in front of a narrative that traces the smallest details of individual existence without separating them from the broader historical context, but rather binding them to major political transformations.”

 

Stylistically, Ibrahim was celebrated for his uniquely minimalist prose, which combined the succinct, staccato-like style of Ernest Hemingway with his intent to document and draw from Arabic historiography and journalism. Hemingway and Ibrahim both relied on their journalistic backgrounds in their work. Hemingway’s experience as a war correspondent “sharpened his eye for detail and fact,” while Ibrahim’s work in journalism and his meticulous historical research lent his writing an archival precision, according to Suwaileh, who explains, “For Hemingway, facts anchor a universal human drama; for Ibrahim, they expose the concrete realities of authoritarianism and corruption.”

 

Classical and early modern Arabic prose bear a profound legacy of rhetorical flourish, ornament, and linguistic display that is still present in 20th-century writings. Rather than follow the path of this legacy, Ibrahim adopted Hemingway’s “iceberg technique,” which omits the superfluous and focuses on the more profound meaning beneath the surface, leaving only the visible tip, much like an iceberg. He broke away from the mold of Arab literary traditions and instead turned to “white language” — an economical, clear, and blunt style, very much like literary minimalism and plain prose — that prioritized documentation and information as the core of the novel, free of “cosmetic mediations that soften their impact,” in the words of The New Arab. His use of white language was “less about omission and more about precision: journalistic clarity, the refusal of embellishment, and the raw exposure of facts.”

 

Ibrahim adapted the principle of omission towards a very different literary and political horizon. As Suwaileh writes, “Like Hemingway, he [Ibrahim] writes in clipped sentences, often with the matter-of-fact tone of an official memo or news bulletin. Yet in Ibrahim’s hands, this restraint becomes a political tool.” The absences in his fiction are not only emotional but historical; silences are not merely aesthetic but political, indicators of censorship, repression, surveillance, and failed revolutions. Hemingway’s “iceberg” becomes, in Ibrahim’s work, “a submerged archive — a body of suppressed history and political critique that the reader must dive into to grasp fully,” states Suwaileh.

 

Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels were committed to exposing the raw, ugly truths. His first novel, “The Smell” (initially titled “The Foul Smell in My Nose”), was first published by Shi’r Magazine in 1966, but was immediately banned in Cairo and underwent numerous revisions until a final uncensored version was published in the 1980s. The novel delves into Ibrahim’s observations about the Nasser regime’s hollow slogans and a permeating stench of decay that wafts from every direction, a literal and figurative symbol of the corruption, rot, and decay of Nasser’s Egypt. A semi-autobiographical story, Ibrahim wrote the novel after serving five years in prison. The story follows a recently released political prisoner as he wanders through Cairo and attempts to write about his torturous experience in vain. The novel has been described as “terse” and “unsettling,” known for its fragmented, telegraphic style and blend of literary narration with documentary materials that deviates from the traditional structures and embellished rhetorical language of the Arabic novel.

 

Just as Ibrahim’s works were known for their rhetoric-free language, his novels were also characterized by their depiction of key historical, social, and political moments from the perspectives of the marginalized. In “The Star of August” (1974), he presents the construction of the Aswan High Dam from the perspective of someone who has experienced political imprisonment. “The Committee” (1981) features a narrator who navigates complex bureaucratic procedures while confronting Egypt’s economic and political realities on a nationwide and global scale. This novel “stripped the mystery from the police state” and illustrated “how the alienated being is trapped in endless nightmares, exposing the layers of authoritarian oppression toward both individuals and masses until identity itself is lost,” explains Suwaileh.

 

His novels expressed a critical stance toward authority, the political system, and mechanisms of economic and cultural domination. “Zaat” (1992) presented the life of a single woman through clippings from Egyptian newspapers. A portrait of modern Egyptian history, this work constructs a parallel history of political and social events, revealing how official policies shape the life of the heroine and her surroundings, according to The New Arab. Meanwhile, in “Amrikanli” (2003), the narrator turns into a critic of globalization, corporate domination, and American control over the world order. In “67,” a manuscript originally written in 1968 and published 50 years later in 2017, Ibrahim captures the events that followed the 1967 war.

 

The politics of power and the erosion of ideals were central to his novels, regardless of setting. His works were not limited to Egypt, but in fact delved far beyond its borders to Berlin (in “Berlin 69,” 2014), San Francisco (in “Amrikanli”), and Moscow (in “Ice,” 2011), among other cities and countries. In the words of Suwaileh, “The spaces he described were often claustrophobic: prison cells, bureaucratic offices, interrogation rooms. These ‘opaque spaces,’ as one critic called them, symbolized the constriction of public life under authoritarianism.”

 

Prison appeared as a recurring theme in most of Ibrahim’s works, “not only from the angle of political accusation but also in his care for the body’s shackled pain, needs, and desires,” writes Suwaileh. The body’s defeat signified more than a physical, biological downfall, but represented defeat on an overarching scale, ranging from existential disappointments to complete collapse. Serving as the backdrop to most of Ibrahim’s novels, the prison setting is especially poignant in “The Oasis Diaries” (2005), a reflection on his own experience as a political prisoner during the 1960s.

 

The human body, sexual deprivation, and physical degradation also appeared as recurring themes in his writing. Sexual hunger served as a model of “closed traditions and strict constraints weighing down his characters,” states Suwaileh. “Sharaf” (1997) delves into the themes of both prison and the meaning of honor through the attempted sexual assault of the narrator by a foreign tourist, an allegory for Egypt’s exploitation. In many of his works, the human body serves as a political battleground, wherein imprisonment, sexual deprivation, and physical degradation occur not for shock value but as a metaphor for collective defeat. In “The Committee,” the narrator is forced into an act of self-cannibalism — “a grotesque act Ibrahim used to distill the experience of oppression into its most brutal, absurd form,” as Suwaileh states.

 

Sonallah Ibrahim’s novels allowed the historical and political to intersect with the “imaginary,” paving the way for a unique form of political and ideological critique from within literature itself. A writer unwilling to ornament reality, Ibrahim used his craft on behalf of the marginalized, opening the door to a new generation of writers with his documentary and political approach to fiction. Although this stance — both political and artistic — cost him visibility in official channels, it earned him a devoted readership across generations. In the words of Suwaileh, “Sonallah Ibrahim’s refusal to accept state prizes became as much a part of his public identity as his novels. He remained, to the end, ‘spotless as the white of a shroud’ — a metaphor as much for moral integrity as for finality.”