It is now time to draw together some of the main threads of this study, and to attempt a brief, overall summary and evaluation of Sonallah Ibrahim's novels to date. (I use the words ‘to date’ advisedly, as Sonallah Ibrahim is still writing and undoubtedly still has it in his power to surprise us – even though, realistically speaking, it may be doubted whether any future novels would be likely to radically change our overall evaluation of his work.)

We may first observe, by way of background to the forthcoming discussion, that if there is one single value that he himself regards as having dominated the whole of his literary activities, it is the devotion to ‘truth’ (‚idq), as exemplified in the quotation from Yawmiyyat al-Wahat at the head of this chapter. As Samia Mehrez observes, it was the question of ‘truth’ in relation to the writer that formed the central underlying theme of the George Antonius Lecture that he delivered in Oxford in April 2005;1 and it also figures prominently in the acceptance speech that he gave on receiving the Ibn Rushd Prize for Freedom of Thought for the year 2004 in Berlin2 – a speech that stands in marked contrast to the words with which he had rejected the Egyptian State novel prize the previous year. This devotion to ‘truth’ as the artist's prime motivation has also been clearly linked in the case of Sonallah Ibrahim himself with a strong and explicit political commitment, carried through into his writing career from his early years as a member of the Egyptian Communist Party – a motivation that forms a mirror image, as it were, to the ‘negative characteristics’ that he applied in Yawmiyyat al-Wahat to his definition of the role of the writer in contemporary Egypt as follows: