Once the cultural and political beacon of the Arab world, Cairo is now close to becoming the region’s social sump. The population of this megalopolis has swollen to an estimated 17 million, more than half of whom live in the sprawling self-built neighbourhoods and shantytowns that ring the ancient heart of the city and its colonial-era quarters. Since the late 1970s, the regime’s liberalization policy—infitah, or ‘open door’—combined with the collapse of the developmentalist model, a deepening agrarian crisis and accelerated rural–urban migration, have produced vast new zones of what the French call ‘mushroom city’. The Arabic term for them al-madun al-‘ashwa’iyyah might be rendered ‘haphazard city’; the root means ‘chance’. These zones developed after the state had abandoned its role as provider of affordable social housing, leaving the field to the private sector, which concentrated on building middle and upper-middle-class accommodation, yielding higher returns. The poor took the matter into their own hands and, as the saying goes, they did it poorly.

Sixty per cent of Egypt’s urban expansion over the last thirty years has consisted of ‘haphazard dwellings’. These districts can lack the most basic services, including running water and sewage. Their streets are not wide enough for ambulances or fire engines to enter; in places they are even narrower than the alleyways of the ancient medina. The random juxtaposition of buildings has produced a proliferation of cul-de-sacs, while the lack of planning and shortage of land have ensured a complete absence of green spaces or squares. The population density in these areas is extreme, even by slum standards. The over-crowding—seven people per room in some neighbourhoods—has resulted in the collapse of normal social boundaries. With whole families sharing a single room, incest has become widespread. Previously eradicated diseases such as tuberculosis and smallpox are now epidemic.footnote¹

The generation that has come of age since 1990 has faced a triple crisis: socio-economic, cultural and political. Egypt’s population has nearly doubled since 1980, reaching 81 million in 2008, yet there has been no commensurate increase in social spending. Illiteracy rates have risen, with schools starved of funds. In the overcrowded universities, underpaid teaching staff augment their income by extorting funds from students for better marks. Other public services—health, social security, infrastructure and transportation—have fared no better. The plundering of the public sector by the kleptocratic political establishment and its cronies has produced a distorted, dinosaur-shaped social structure: a tiny head—the super-rich—presiding over an ever-growing body of poverty and discontent. At the same time, youth unemployment has been running at over 75 per cent.

The cultural realm, meanwhile, has become an arena for bigoted grandstanding, prey to both official censors—the long-serving Minister of Culture, Farouk Husni, showing the way—and self-appointed ones, in parliament and the broadsheet press.footnote² In the political sphere, the Emergency Law, in place since 1981, has been punctiliously renewed by an almost comically corrupt National Assembly. The notorious Egyptian prison system has been made available to us, British and other European nationals subject to ‘extraordinary rendition’. Since Sadat’s unilateral agreement with Israel in 1979 a widening gulf has grown between popular sentiment and the collusion of the political establishment with the worst us–Israeli atrocities in the region, and its de facto support for their successive wars: invasions of Lebanon, Desert Storm, occupations of Afghanistan and Iraq. Egypt’s marginalization as a regional power has only increased the younger generation’s sense of despondency and humiliation.

It is within this unpropitious context that a striking new wave of young Egyptian writers has appeared. Their work constitutes a radical departure from established norms and offers a series of sharp insights into Arab culture and society. Formally, the texts are marked by an intense self-questioning, and by a narrative and linguistic fragmentation that serves to reflect an irrational, duplicitous reality, in which everything has been debased. The works are short, rarely more than 150 pages, and tend to focus on isolated individuals, in place of the generation-spanning sagas that characterized the realist Egyptian novel. Their narratives are imbued with a sense of crisis, though the world they depict is often treated with derision. The protagonists are trapped in the present, powerless to effect any change. Principal exponents of the new wave would include Samir Gharib ‘Ali, Mahmud Hamid, Wa’il Rajab, Ahmad Gharib, Muntasir al-Qaffash, Atif Sulayman, May al-Tilmisani, Yasser Shaaban, Mustafa Zikri and Nura Amin; but well over a hundred novels of this type have been published to date. From their first appearance around 1995, these writers have been dubbed ‘the 1990s generation’.

The Egyptian literary establishment has been virtually unanimous in condemning these works. Led by the influential Cairo newspaper Al-Akhbar and its weekly book supplement Akhbar al-Adab, its leading lights conducted a sustained campaign against the new writers for a number of years. Ibda’, the major literary monthly, initially refused to publish their work. The young writers were accused of poor education, nihilism, loss of direction, lack of interest in public issues and obsessive concentration on the body; of stylistic poverty, weak grammar, inadequate narrative skills and sheer incomprehensibility. Yet there has been little detailed critical scrutiny of this body of work and the new directions it suggests for contemporary Arabic literature; nor sustained attempts to relate it to the broader social and political context from which it has emerged.footnote³

In what follows I will attempt to illustrate both the range and the commonalities of the new Egyptian novel. It has been argued that this work should be understood outside the limits of genre classification, in terms of a free-floating trans-generic textual space.footnote⁴ Instead, I will suggest that these new novels do indeed share a set of distinct narrative characteristics; these involve both a rupture with earlier realist and modernist forms, and a transformation of the rules of reference by which the text relates to the extrinsic world. I will suggest that, whatever their actual settings, these works share demonstrable formal homologies with the sprawling slums of Cairo itself.footnote⁵