Jonathan Smolin, The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser (Stanford University Press, 2025).
Jadaliyya (J): What made you write this book?
Jonathan Smolin (JS): I wrote The Politics of Melodrama after realizing that Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s wildly popular romantic serials operated on two levels. At first glance, they were cliff‑hangers that boosted the circulation of Rose El Youssef, the seminal weekly magazine that Abdel Kouddous edited. Beneath the swoons and plot twists, however, Abdel Kouddous was also staging the painful political break‑up with his one‑time ally Gamal Abdel Nasser. Each installment traces, in allegorical form, the nation’s passionate love for the manly officer‑hero of the 1952 Revolution and the bitter sense of betrayal as Nasser abandoned constitutional promises for military dictatorship. I realized that melodrama, dismissed for decades as “lowbrow,” was in fact the emotional ledger of the revolution. Writing this book therefore allowed me to rescue a body of work adored by millions yet ignored by scholars, and to restore affect—heartbreak, longing, despair—to the political history of modern Egypt.
J: What particular topics, issues, and literatures does the book address?
JS: Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s serialized melodramas worked as “double speech.” By hiding pointed political allegory inside gripping love stories, he drew huge audiences while slipping sharp criticism of Nasser past the censors. Because a new installment appeared every week, the fiction captured events almost in real time; its open-ended form lets us see meanings shift from issue to issue on pages still bearing the marks of copy editors, advertisers, and state monitors. Circulation became a kind of mutual therapy: Nasser read the chapters avidly, confronting a mirror that was sometimes flattering but often accusatory, and readers measured their own hopes and disappointments against the unfolding plot. Popular culture thus emerges not as a decorative backdrop but as the volatile arena where ruler and ruled negotiated their relationship. These insights invite scholars of Middle Eastern politics and literature to treat mass culture as both evidence and event—an archive still wet with fresh ink.
J: How does this book connect to and/or depart from your previous work?
JS: Both The Politics of Melodrama and my first book, Moroccan Noir, ask how “cheap” print genres mediate high politics, but they approach the question from opposite angles. Moroccan Noir traces how a monarchy worked to rebrand itself through glossy images of heroic policemen; state power sought to set the terms of the narrative. The Politics of Melodrama flips the lens: here a celebrity novelist turns the mechanics of pulp—serialization, cliff‑hangers, moral polarities—against an increasingly autocratic regime. Methodologically I again rely on ephemera (magazines, newspapers, radio, and television), yet the Egyptian case foregrounds immediate emotional reaction rather than long‑term institutional marketing. The shift from detective fiction to melodrama moves the analytic focus from forensic reason to wounded feeling, showing that popular culture can serve as public square and confessional booth at the same time.
J: Who do you hope will read this book, and what sort of impact would you like it to have?
JS: Specialists in Middle Eastern history and Arabic literature will find a fresh archive and a reframing of Nasserism through sentiment rather than ideology. Media scholars and theorists of melodrama gain a non‑Western case that complicates Euro‑centric genre timelines. Journalists and general readers interested in authoritarianism may recognize contemporary echoes in the dance between a strongman and his best‑selling critic. Above all, I hope Egyptian and Arab readers see their cultural memory taken seriously and discover in Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s fiction a vocabulary for thinking about betrayal, love, and political desire.
J: What other projects are you working on now?
JS: I am currently drafting a new book, tentatively entitled Father Is Dead: An Uncensored Cultural History of the June 1967 Defeat. In it, I offer a new perspective on the aftermath of what is known as the Six Day War or the Naksa. While the history of this shattering Arab loss to Israel has centered on the rise of subsequent Palestinian resistance movements, this project shifts the focus to a starkly different and widely unknown cultural response: the emergence of uncensored, sexually explicit pulp novels and magazines in Lebanon immediately after the war. I explore how these forgotten works tell a new cultural history of the defeat, offering new spaces and representational forms for exploring how the trauma of the shattering loss was processed on the national level.
J: What role did translating the fiction of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous play in developing The Politics of Melodrama?
JS: Until recently, almost none of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous’s novels were in print in English; the only existing version dated to the 1970s and had long disappeared from bookstores. By translating I Do Not Sleep (Hoopoe, 2022) and A Nose and Three Eyes (Hoopoe 2024), I sought to reopen a crucial chapter of Arabic popular fiction for students, scholars, and general readers who know Nasser-era Egypt largely through political histories or high-literary icons like Naguib Mahfouz. I Do Not Sleep lays bare the gendered power games of Cairo’s bourgeoisie, while A Nose and Three Eyes interrogates sexual desire and the detritus of failed romance. My approach to translating both works seeks to highlight the emotional cadence and cinematic quality of Abdel Kouddous’s Arabic prose. The process was also deeply archival and collaborative; while working on A Nose and Three Eyes I conducted a series of conversations with famed Lebanese novelist Hanan al-Shaykh, whose secret 1960s relationship with Abdel Kouddous informed one of the novel’s central characters. Her insights—and the revelatory foreword she penned for the translation—enabled me to calibrate tone and subtext that might otherwise have slipped through the cracks.
Excerpt from the book (from pages 1 to 3)
Excerpted from The Politics of Melodrama: The Cultural and Political Lives of Ihsan Abdel Kouddous and Gamal Abdel Nasser by Jonathan Smolin, published by Stanford University Press, ©2025 by Jonathan Smolin. All Rights Reserved.
On the morning of 31 July 1954, Ihsan Abdel Kouddous, perhaps the most popular and prolific writer of fiction in the Arab world in the twentieth century, woke up in Cell 19 in Cairo’s military prison. He had been arrested three months earlier by the secret police and spent the first forty-five days in solitary confinement, followed by several weeks of harsh interrogation. For Abdel Kouddous, it was a harrowing experience, a kind of psychological torture, full of insults and abuse. As he wrote soon after his release, “The initial weeks passed violently, every minute pricking my nerves. My entire body was torn apart and burned with fire.” When Abdel Kouddous woke up that morning, he had spent ninety-five days in prison. He had no idea when—or if—his ordeal would end.
As the guard opened the cell gate that morning, he greeted Abdel Kouddous with uncharacteristic respect after weeks of insults. “Congratulations, sir,” the guard told him with a smile. “The director wants to see you in his office. We’ll really miss you.” Abdel Kouddous was escorted to meet the prison director, who informed him that he was being released. The director gave no explanation for the decision, just as Abdel Kouddous had not been told why he was being arrested three months earlier. He only later learned that he had been charged with plotting to overturn the 23 July 1952 Revolution that brought Gamal Abdel Nasser and the Free Officers to power in Egypt. Abdel Kouddous quickly returned to his cell to take the tin inmate cup that he had used during his imprisonment as a memento of the traumatic experience. The cup, which he later had engraved with the prison name as well as his cell number and dates of imprisonment, still sits on display in the Abdel Kouddous family home.
As soon as Abdel Kouddous arrived at his apartment in the Garden City neighborhood in Cairo, the phone rang. He assumed that it was his mother calling to welcome him home. He picked up the receiver and heard the voice of Gamal Abdel Nasser. “Hi,” said Nasser laughing. “Have you learned your lesson yet, Ihsan? Come have lunch with me and don’t be late. I’m waiting for you.” Abdel Kouddous could not believe his ears. Even though he had not seen his wife and two young children for more than three months, he immediately set out for Nasser’s residence. “I found myself forced to accept the invitation for a reason that I still don’t fully understand,” Abdel Kouddous recalled in 1975, some two decades later, when he spoke publicly about this episode for the first time.
Abdel Kouddous ate lunch with Nasser, and afterwards the two watched a movie together. They chatted about the movie and other light topics but not the jailing or Abdel Kouddous’s release. Nasser continued to insist that Abdel Kouddous come to his home nearly every day for a meal and a movie. During the visits, the two talked about a variety of things, but they awkwardly avoided discussing the arrest. After about a month of these forced invitations, Abdel Kouddous could no longer suppress his confusion and discomfort. He finally asked Nasser why he kept insisting on these visits. The president then looked him in the eye and said, “I’m giving you psychoanalytic treatment, Ihsan!” The comment made Abdel Kouddous’s blood run cold. What led up to this ominous moment? What did Nasser mean by this? Why did Nasser set himself up as analyst and Abdel Kouddous as his patient? What was Abdel Kouddous’s “illness”? And how would Nasser’s “treatment” impact Abdel Kouddous personally and shape his exceptionally prolific and bestselling writing, both at the time and in the years following this encounter? What was once a tight personal bond between them—one that had formed during Abdel Kouddous’s surprisingly close engagement with the Free Officers in the months leading up to the 23 July 1952 coup as well as his pivotal involvement in inadvertently embedding military rule in the months afterwards—now became something more complex and troubling.