On 14 August 2013, a month after the toppling of President Mu ḥammad Mūrsī, the Egyptian military and police killed in the region of 1,000 people during the dispersal of pro-Muslim Brotherhood sit-ins in Cairo. Ten days later, the novelist Sonallah Ibrahim (b. 1937) was interviewed by the sensationalist daily al-Yawm al-Sābiʿ to assess the country's state of affairs. Long celebrated in Egypt and around the world as a pioneering voice in modern Arabic literature, Ibrahim is best known for his starkly minimalist and documentary style in prose, his ascetic personal life, and, above all, his fierce and sustained political committedness. His early career paralleled in certain ways that of Naguib Surur: the same years the latter spent in exile (1959–64), the former spent in prison; both were, during this period, members of a communist group; like many of Surur's own works, Ibrahim's debut novel, Tilka al-Rāʾiḥa (1966) (The Smell of It, trans. 1971) was rejected by the censor for its alleged obscenities. In 2003, having established himself as a consistent opponent of the Sadat and Mubarak regimes, he famously rejected an award from the Ministry of Culture in a stirring speech delivered in front of the minister himself. It therefore came as a shock to many of his readers, particularly those in the West, when in this latest interview he not only expressed admiration for ʿAbd al-Fattāḥ al-Sīsī, Egypt's new military leader, but seemed to give his endorsement to the regime's repressive techniques, including its self-declared ‘war on terrorism’, the reinstatement of the notorious Mubarak-era Emergency Laws, and the massacre that had occurred just days earlier.

At this moment in recent history, Ibrahim was not alone among Egypt's ‘liberal’ or ‘leftist’ writers and intellectuals, many of whom offered statements in support of al-Sīsī's government that scandalously contrasted with their own histories of dissent. Novelists like Gamal al-Ghitani, Bahaa Taher (Bahāʾ Ṭāhir) (b. 1935), Alaa Al Aswany (ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī) (b. 1957), and Ibrahim Eissa (Ibrāhīm ʿĪsā) (b. 1965) – all known for having been targets of past authoritarian regimes, and all but Eissa having spent time in prison – seemed to have changed overnight from radical defenders of freedom and social justice to apologists for the military and police state. Critics are still attempting to make sense of what has been called the ‘authoritarian turn’ of some Egyptian littérateurs.