A Catch-22 Situation: Caught between Censorship and a Weak Book Market

​​A few years ago I met the Turkish author Orhan Pamuk at a literary event in Cologne at which he had been introduced by the late Orientalist Annemarie Schimmel on the occasion of the publication of the German translation of his novel My Name is Red. This novel has already been translated into Arabic twice in Syria, as have other books by Pamuk, which have been translated and published either in Syria or other Arab countries.

These publications were illegal and Pamuk bemoaned the fact that not a single publisher had bought the rights. And it didn’t end there. He had not yet seen a single copy of the translations of his works. He asked me if I owned any copies of his book.

After the event we agreed that I would publish the Arabic translation of his novel Snow. We then went to my home where I gave him an Arabic copy of his book as a gift.

Even authors like Milan Kundera are affected by such illegal publications. When I contacted Vera Kundera a few years ago, she was delighted that someone was at last interested in translating Kundera’s work into Arabic. I was astonished because all of his books had long since been translated into Arabic; some of them even several times. The same can be said of the works of authors like Paul Auster, Amin Maalouf, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, Heinrich Böll, Günter Grass, Jürgen Habermas, and Patrick Süskind.

The Arabic book market

But what motivates Arab publishers and cultural institutes to do this? First of all, it must be said that they have nothing to fear because even though many Arab states have agreed on paper to respect copyright, infringements of copyright are not prosecuted.

Egypt is a perfect example of this situation. The publishing company Madbouli published Fred Halliday’s Islam and the Myth of Confrontation in Arabic even though the Lebanese publisher Al-Saqi had bought the rights to the book. It was exactly the same situation with the renowned Egyptian publishers Al-Halal. They published an unauthorised Arabic translation of Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose, albeit with the title Sexuality in the Church.

In order to understand how Arab publishers handle the concept of copyright and all the laws that go with it, it is important to take a closer look at the status of the Arabic book itself. The Arabic book market is, in general, controlled by dozens of censorship authorities and can not really develop as a result of a plethora of bans.

Let us assume that an average publishing company publishes 2,000 copies of a novel written by an Arab author. Over 50 of these copies must be made available by the publisher to the censorship authorities for examination. This situation is aggravated by the fact that the standards required by the censors change. It is not unusual, therefore, for a novel that has been published and sold to be banned in the following year.

If we consider that 2,000 copies is a typical run for a novel, it is easy to see the problems faced by a publisher whose sole aim is to safeguard the survival of his publishing company. This is why many publishers would simply not be able to buy the rights to books and then to have them translated. In short, literature of a certain level is a luxury for them on which they earn nothing, regardless of how low the cost of buying the rights to the books is.

Positive development

Some books that I have published have been plagiarised by publishers in Syria and Egypt. The same applies to Lebanon and Iran where, it must be said, the greatest number of illegal Arabic and international books are published. Even daily and weekly newspapers in Kuwait, Qatar, and Egypt have no qualms about book piracy.

Other Arab countries do not even recognise copyright. The same can be said of translations published by official institutes like the Syrian Ministry of Culture, the Iraqi Ministry of Culture under Saddam Hussein, or even respected institutes like the Culture Academy in Abu Dhabi or the National Council for Culture in Kuwait.

That being said, there have been positive changes to the benefit of copyright over the past few years. The High Cultural Council in Cairo, the National Council for Culture in Kuwait, and other institutes in Morocco and Tunisia have set about tackling the problem. This is a step in the right direction. It overlaps with the increased interest of the Arab Publishing Association and the Arabic Book Fair in uncovering and prosecuting plagiarism and those who perpetrate it.

Khaled Al-Maaly

© Qantara.de 2005

Translation from German: Aingeal Flanagan

Khaled Al-Maaly is an author and founder of the Al-Kamel-Verlag in Cologne.

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