“Word behind bars,” written by Mounir Adib, is a unique book that allows readers to see the underside of a subculture of people that differ from the general public perspective.
For years we have studied the leaders of the Jama’a al-Islamiya from the viewpoint of their puritanical ideas, condescension of others on the pretext of being closer to God and bloody actions seeking power to establish their own regime.
In his book, however, Adib attempts to shed light on a dark side of those leaders that is yet unknown to researchers and aims to answer questions such as, “Do these people sometimes act like us?”
Adib collected what those political prisoners wrote in the 30 years they spent behind bars. The first chapter includes the poems they inscribed on the prison walls and the second includes their short stories.
The book, which comes in 319 pages, presents the first poems written by the al-Qaeda leader Ayman al-Zawahiri and Abdel Basset Galah Gawab, which tells a true story. The book also presents an ode in which they praised the mother of President Anwar al-Sadat’s assassin, Khaled al-Islambouli. The ode was sung in the training camps of Afghanistan. It also includes the poem, “Carry Your Weapon and Kill Anwar,” a poem that urged the members of the Jama’a al-Islamiya and the Islamic Jihad Organization to jointly kill Sadat.
Among the short stories are “A Divorce Proxy,” “Stuffed Food in Paradise,” “Samah,” “The Cursed Palace” and “The Return of an Immigrant.”
Prison literature was, to an extent, tackled by certain leftist writers in the 1960s. Today, Adib is documenting the literature of the Islamists who do not really care as they are occupied with other things.
Edited translation from Al-Masry Al-Youm
