In May 1966, a janitor at the Arab Bank named Adnan Sultani assassinated the owner of Al-Hayat newspaper, Kamel Marwa, in his office. Marwa was one of the pioneers of modern journalism, and before that he had worked in Berlin for the Palestinian cause.
Newspapers and nationalist groups celebrated the killer and the crime, and gave Soltani the status of a fighter, while he went to prison and spent his years in prison. When the civil war broke out, the first national duty undertaken by the fighters was to open the prison doors and release all categories of convicts, at the forefront of which was the fighter Adnan Soltani. Speech festivals began to be held in which the first preacher was the struggling brother…
One of Soltani’s characteristics is that he admitted at his trial that he did not read Kamel Marwa or Al-Hayat newspaper. We will get to know this type of activist when a garage worker in Egypt tries to slaughter the prince of the Arabic novel, Naguib Mahfouz, because of “the boys of our neighborhood.” When he is arrested, he confesses that he did not read the novel or anything else because his job repairing car tires does not allow him to do so.
In his famous and only novel, “Beer in the Billiard Club,” Wagih Ghaly says, “Do you know how many young men, including doctors, engineers, and lawyers, are in concentration camps, or do you not know that there are concentration camps at all?” When Sanallah Ibrahim arrives at Abu Zaabal prison, and the guards push him inside, he discovers that none of them know how to read, so what about the meanings of the novel? Muhammad Al-Maghout, the beloved poet of the simple, says, “In prison, all beautiful things collapsed in front of me. Instead of seeing the sky, I saw his boots, Abdul Hamid Al-Sarraj’s boots, which left their mark on me throughout my life.”
Then the status of a fighter is given to the late Soltani, who spent the last years of his life working in the field of culture and literature, as an employee in one of the houses of the “Great Jamahiriya,” as a reward for his great contribution to supporting and strengthening national work. Did the intellectuals make a mistake?
Is their struggle and courage worth a night in a prison cell? Does the entire Arab culture deserve the scene of the mechanic trying to slaughter the Arab Noble, because he was incited to do so by the owner of the garage or the blacksmith teacher there? The lucky intellectuals are the ones whom the enemies of culture contented themselves with throwing in prisons where they spend a period of their lives. Some of them were unlucky, such as Naguib Mahfouz, Kamel Marwa, and Riad Taha. When the force finds no means to confront the culture other than bullets and knives, it is because the fear of the weak is undefeated.
