Sonallah Ibrahim's most recent full-length novel, al-Jalid (Ice), was published towards the end of January 2011, at the precise moment of the mass protests centred on Cairo's Tahrir Square that forced the resignation of the then Egyptian President Hosni Mubarak on 11 February 2011 – a move that prompted the transfer of power to the Supreme Council of the Armed Forces, and everything that has followed since. According to the author's note at the end of the work, the novel had been completed in Heliopolis (Sonallah Ibrahim's home) in December 2010.

Publication and Translations

Al-Jalid was published in Cairo by Dar al-Thaqafa al-Jadida and in Beirut by Dar al-Adab in January 2011. To my knowledge, there have so far been no foreign-language translations of the work.

Background

The work, which contains an opening page reading simply ‘Moscow 1973’, clearly derives from Sonallah Ibrahim's own stay in Moscow during that same period, the circumstances of which were described in Chapter 2 above. As is the case with many of Sonallah Ibrahim's novels, few specific dates are given in the text, but there are discussions about, and occasional references to, a number of significant (mainly external) political events, enabling the reader to establish an at least approximate chronology in his or her mind; the novel closes with a New Year party, which provides a firm closing date for the work. The external events referred to include significant developments in a number of different parts of the world, including US involvement in Vietnam, and the overthrow of the Marxist Chilean President Salvador Allende on 11 September 1973; but from the viewpoint of an Egyptian spending the period in question abroad, the most significant is unsurprisingly the October 1973 Arab–Israeli War (also known as the Ramadan, or Yom Kippur, War), which began on 6 October 1973 when Egyptian and Syrian forces launched surprise attacks on Israeli positions in the occupied Sinai Peninsula and Golan Heights.