Bahaa Taher: Cairo's greatest literary secret

The latest Booker prizewinner is tucking into seafood risotto beside the calm waters of the Arabian Gulf, weighing up a sometimes turbulent career. Bahaa Taher was sacked as a radio journalist in Egypt in the 1970s and driven into exile. Yet he says now, "I was freed, not fired."

As the Man Booker prize turns 40 this year, the foundation behind it has backed a new award, for the best novel of the year written in Arabic. Taher picked up the first $60,000 International Prize for Arabic Fiction last month in Abu Dhabi. The award was announced during the international book fair there, now a joint venture with Frankfurt, aimed at stimulating publishing in the region, with zero tolerance of rampant book piracy. Few Arabic novelists can earn a living from their books.

The Arabic Booker prize was launched to some swingeing attacks in the Arab press, with complaints about aping western models, and alleged geographical bias (there were two Egyptians and no Gulf writers on the shortlist of six). Yet to preclude interference, even the identity of the six judges, chaired by the London-based Iraqi author Samuel Shimon, was kept secret until the shortlist was announced in January. Taher's Sunset Oasis, published in Cairo last November, was chosen out of 131 novels from 18 countries. For the author, the award has a credibility that others lack. He says, "Many prizes in the Arab world give priority not to literary value, but to politics or fashion."

Taher, aged 73, spent 14 years in Geneva as a UN translator before returning to Cairo in 1995, and is fluent in English. He lives in Zamalek, on an island in the Nile, with his wife of 17 years, Stefka, a Russian interpreter of Greek and Slovenian descent. He has two daughters from an earlier marriage, and two grandsons. When I met him in Cairo in January, he was a heavy smoker. Now he pats his pockets in vain for the cigarettes he "gave up four days ago", while his frequent laughter gives way to a nasty cough.

One of the most respected living writers in the Arab world, he has written six novels (three translated into English), four short-story collections, plays and non-fiction - though none has been published in Britain. The prize will change that. Funds for an English translation of Sunset Oasis have been pledged by the Tetra Pak heiress and Granta owner Sigrid Rausing, while UK publishers are already competing for the book.

Taher was spurred by the 2003 invasion of Iraq, which he vehemently opposed, to explore earlier occupations, of Egypt by Britain, and of Berber lands by Egyptian Arabs. Set in the late 19th century, Sunset Oasis begins with a caravan journey from Cairo to Siwa, an oasis town on Egypt's Libyan border, peopled by fiercely independent Berbers. "The desert is a space in which people discover themselves," Taher says. "For some it's positive; for others it's catastrophic." He based his protagonist, Mahmoud, on a military ruler of Siwa whose banishment to the rebellious outpost by the British authorities was surely "a punishment not a promotion". In 1897, this Egyptian police chief dynamited part of the ancient Ammon-Ra temple complex whose oracle Alexander the Great consulted. The novel probes the possible motivations behind this bizarre act of vandalism.

"I imagined he destroyed the temple," says Taher, "because he had taken part in the Orabi revolution against British occupation." This was a failed nationalist uprising in 1881that led to the Anglo-Egyptian war and colonial rule. For Mahmoud, who shatters the glorious past to open people's eyes to the present, it is a bitter irony that "our ancestors were great men, but their grandchildren are fit only for occupation".

Hinting that his police chief embodies the despair of Arab intellectuals over two centuries, Taher says there are parallels between the Orabi revolution and the Egyptian revolution of 1952, which overthrew the monarchy and brought Gamal Abdel Nasser to power. Taher came of age in the confusing aftermath, with its political purges, as part of the left-leaning "generation of the 60s", writing experimental fiction. A stubborn believer in Arab unity, who sees himself as "one of the last surviving Nasserists", Taher says, "I didn't at all like the revolution when I was young. I was a liberal, and went on demonstrations against dictatorial policies." But after Anwar Sadat came to power in 1970, "I saw the positive things Nasser did destroyed. Despite grave mistakes, the thrust was for social justice and the right of the poor to be liberated after centuries of subjugation. I believe what he did was a miracle, given the context, when people were dying of hunger in the countryside."

Born in Cairo in 1935, Taher spent summers in Karnak, his parents' village near Luxor. His father was an Arabic school teacher who died when Taher, the youngest of eight, was 17. His illiterate mother spun mesmerising tales about families and vendettas in Luxor, "her paradise lost". In his best known novel, Aunt Safiyya and the Monastery (1991), translated intoEnglish in 1996, a young Muslim man caught in a blood feud with a vengeful aunt is given sanctuary in a Coptic (Christian) monastery. It was written as violent clashes between Muslims and Copts were erupting in Upper Egypt, and its vision of harmony angered parts of both communities.

Women are also casualties in his fiction. Taher, who believes "women in our country are still not free because men are not free", was very close to an elder sister, a social worker who died in 2001. "Though my father was very conservative, Solma insisted on going to work and marrying the man she loved. But society was not ready. The emancipated women of the 1950s were not rewarded at all. That's why a younger generation is not as brave."

After attending Cairo University, he helped found Cairo Radio's cultural programme in 1957, meeting Naguib Mahfouz (the 1988 Nobel laureate) among other writers, and producing radio drama, from Greek tragedy to Samuel Beckett. He was sacked in 1975. "We were accused of being a 'red' cell in Cairo Radio, though we were presenting both sides. Sadat said, 'Those not with me are against me.' I was left penniless. I couldn't write for newspapers or translate."

In Switzerland, he found time to write. In Love in Exile (1995, translated in 2002), a divorced journalist and unrepentant Nasserist has an affair with a younger Austrian woman in an unnamed European city. Though Taher's fiction often reveals catastrophic misconceptions between Europe and the Arab world, he says, "I never thought a character could reflect a whole culture, or a 'clash of civilisations'. We're not that different." His interest, he says, is in how people subjugate others. Love in Exile includes testimony of the massacre of Palestinians in the Sabra-Shatila refugee camps in Beirut in 1982. "It took me 10 years, writing and discarding, to try to calm down," Taher says.

Sunset Oasis reflects his frustration at Egypt's stagnation under Hosni Mubarak, president since Sadat's assassination in 1981 and now poised to hand power to his son Gamal. "I've lived through King Farouk, Nasser, Sadat, Mubarak," says Taher. "Now even democracy for a minority doesn't exist. Mubarak divided and conquered. I can't see a society, just individuals." Taher was given Egypt's top state literary award in 1998, but he quit the ineffectual writers' union in 2000. A founder of Writers and Artists for Change, part of the opposition movement Kifaya (Enough), he says, "I went to all the demonstrations, but I no longer participate because it isn't in touch with the people."

While some contemporaries have withdrawn from politics, others have become Islamists, "astonishingly, since so many were Marxists in our youth". In Love in Exile, the journalist is dismayed to see his son embrace political Islam. In Taher's view, the outlawed Muslim Brotherhood - the strongest opposition, with a fifth of seats in the assembly - thrives "because all other ideologies have collapsed, and people can't live without hope. They think, if we can't change the world with Marxism or nationalism, we can change it with religious ideas." He says Britain and France supported the Brotherhood during the 1956 Suez war, when its members were "cruelly tortured in prison. But when Sadat made a coalition with them to crush the left, they infiltrated education. While the state withdrew from social activities, they built clinics and distributed food." After 30 years, "there was a generation ready to accept their ideology. That's how they won 88 seats. If it was a free election, they'd have won 288. It's a sad and tragic situation."

He petitions for the release of political detainees, including members of the Muslim Brotherhood, which boycotted Tuesday's municipal elections after hundreds were arrested in a pre-election crackdown. "You can't defeat an ideology by putting people in prison - it adds to their popularity," he says. "Even if I'm against their thinking, I'll defend them - though I'm sure they wouldn't defend me."

Taher's humane vision may chime with an implicit aim of the prize. On a trip to Luxor last month, he was gratified to find it had been spared Muslim-Copt tensions, a benefit, he believes, of its constant stream of visitors. "It's the wisdom of ages," he says. "When you know the other, you're tolerant. It's when you don't know the other that you're afraid."