It arrived for me in Beirut under plain cover, a brown envelope containing a small, glossy paperback in Arabic, accompanied by a note from an Egyptian friend. "Robert!" it began. "Did you really write this?"
The front cover bore a photograph of Saddam Hussein in the dock in Baghdad, the left side of his head in colour, the right side bleached out, wearing a black sports jacket but with no tie, holding a Koran in his right hand. "Saddam Hussein," the cover said in huge letters. "From Birth to Martyrdom." And then there was the author's name – in beautiful, calligraphic typeface and in gold in the top, right-hand corner. "By Robert Fisk."
So there it was, 272 paperback pages on the life and times of the Hitler of Baghdad and selling very well in the Egyptian capital. "We all suspect a well-known man here," she added. "His name is Magdi Chukri."
Needless to say, I noticed one or two problems with this book. It took a very lenient view of the brutality of Saddam, it didn't seem to care much about the gassed civilians of Halabja – and it was full of the kind of purple passages which I loathe. "After the American rejection of the Iraqi weapons report to the UN," 'Robert Fisk' wrote, "the beating of war drums turned into a cacophony..."
Dare I suggest to readers that this kind of cliche doesn't sound like Robert Fisk? The only war drums I could hear were those of my own astonishment. For I never wrote this book. It wasn't plagiarism – a common practice in Cairo, which is why I ensure that all my real books are legally published in Arabic in Lebanon. No, this wasn't plagiarism. This was forgery.
And it was clearly the moment for Detective Inspector Fisk to hunt down "The Mystery of the Cairo Forger". Elementary, my dear reader, which is why I boarded Middle East Airlines flight ME304 from Beirut to my least favourite Arab capital, the bureaucratic, traffic-snarled, bankrupt, wonderful, lawless, irredeemable, spectacular Cairo.
I had called an Egyptian journalist friend, Saef Nasrawi, to be my Dr Watson and – a few metres from the front door of the Marriott Gezira Hotel – we found our faithful driver, Yasser Hassan. "Make sure you put my family name in your newspaper," he announced. I have now done so.
It's always been my theory that a taxi driver – especially in Cairo – will be more helpful, more friendly and altogether more enthusiastic if he knows why you're in the back of his cab. So, when I showed him the slim paperback, he raced off at once to what we all hoped was the office of the publisher, clearly printed on page two. "Ibda" the company was supposedly called and the Egyptian telephone operator had traced the name to an address in Old Cairo, No 953 Corniche el-Nil.
Through the downtown morning traffic, we ground, canyons of black and white taxis like our own; vast, single-storey buses packed with Galabiya-clad and bearded men; 4x4s carrying Cairo's demimonde of jewelled ladies and young men with shaving problems – the bewhiskered chin-for machismo is as much a problem in the Middle East as it is in London.
No 953 was a tall tenement block into which Saef and I could not penetrate without the permission of a black-cowled lady whose child was playing in the dust of the roadway. She listened as we called upstairs. Yes, a woman's voice said. We could take the elevator. On the wall beside the lift was a sign: "Ibda – the house of creativity for journalism, publication and distribution". I could believe in the "creativity" bit.
But the veiled and polite lady on the 11th floor was all ignorance. "We never published such a book," she said, and called her female boss, who was at the Cairo Book Fair. She called us back on our mobile and insisted – quite truthfully – that Saddam Hussein was not her work. Not only did she deny all knowledge of the forgery – her assistant weighed us down with her own genuinely produced books of literary endeavour.
Saef and Yasser debated our problem. The publishing details in the front of the book were clearly wrong. But the frontispiece announced that the book had been registered for circulation with the Egyptian government – in other words, it has been cleared for sale by the official censor. So, Detective Inspector Fisk decided that a visit to the Dar al-Kutb – the official "House of Books" attached to the Ministry of Culture – was our next destination. Had the forger, the so-called Magdi Chukri, been smooth enough to legalise his illegally produced book with the oh-so-law-abiding Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak?
"This is not good enough!" our driver, Yasser, roared at me. "Mr Robert, the people of Egypt will think you wrote this book. You must go to the British embassy, you must go to the Egyptian government, you must go to the police, you must go to our intelligence services." I had been through this kind of trust curtain before. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Egyptians still evince a blind confidence in Ottoman authority.
The Brits wouldn't care a damn about this forgery and the Egyptians even less – always supposing "Magdi Chukri" hadn't slipped the civil servants a few piastas for registering a book by "Robert Fisk".
We arrived at the Ministry of Culture, a bleak Stalinist office block next door to which we found "House of Books". On the first floor was an emporium – I hesitate to call it an office – of books, a vast atrium of volumes and manuscripts. They lay feet high on desks, metre high on shelves and – so it seemed – miles high from the floor. Hundreds, nay thousands, of books were stacked in Dickensian rows, floor to ceiling, bodice-rippers and Arabic fiction and treatises on Islamic jurisprudence and physics textbooks. Two veiled ladies and two bearded men sat at a desk amid this forest of literature, one of them – there is always a miracle in Cairo – in front of a grimy, faded-yellow desktop computer.
I asked if my favourite volume had been approved by the Egyptian government for sale. "By Robert Fisk?" the man asked.
.. snip ..
The front cover bore a photograph of Saddam Hussein in the dock in Baghdad, the left side of his head in colour, the right side bleached out, wearing a black sports jacket but with no tie, holding a Koran in his right hand. "Saddam Hussein," the cover said in huge letters. "From Birth to Martyrdom." And then there was the author's name – in beautiful, calligraphic typeface and in gold in the top, right-hand corner. "By Robert Fisk."
So there it was, 272 paperback pages on the life and times of the Hitler of Baghdad and selling very well in the Egyptian capital. "We all suspect a well-known man here," she added. "His name is Magdi Chukri."
Needless to say, I noticed one or two problems with this book. It took a very lenient view of the brutality of Saddam, it didn't seem to care much about the gassed civilians of Halabja – and it was full of the kind of purple passages which I loathe. "After the American rejection of the Iraqi weapons report to the UN," 'Robert Fisk' wrote, "the beating of war drums turned into a cacophony..."
Dare I suggest to readers that this kind of cliche doesn't sound like Robert Fisk? The only war drums I could hear were those of my own astonishment. For I never wrote this book. It wasn't plagiarism – a common practice in Cairo, which is why I ensure that all my real books are legally published in Arabic in Lebanon. No, this wasn't plagiarism. This was forgery.
And it was clearly the moment for Detective Inspector Fisk to hunt down "The Mystery of the Cairo Forger". Elementary, my dear reader, which is why I boarded Middle East Airlines flight ME304 from Beirut to my least favourite Arab capital, the bureaucratic, traffic-snarled, bankrupt, wonderful, lawless, irredeemable, spectacular Cairo.
I had called an Egyptian journalist friend, Saef Nasrawi, to be my Dr Watson and – a few metres from the front door of the Marriott Gezira Hotel – we found our faithful driver, Yasser Hassan. "Make sure you put my family name in your newspaper," he announced. I have now done so.
It's always been my theory that a taxi driver – especially in Cairo – will be more helpful, more friendly and altogether more enthusiastic if he knows why you're in the back of his cab. So, when I showed him the slim paperback, he raced off at once to what we all hoped was the office of the publisher, clearly printed on page two. "Ibda" the company was supposedly called and the Egyptian telephone operator had traced the name to an address in Old Cairo, No 953 Corniche el-Nil.
Through the downtown morning traffic, we ground, canyons of black and white taxis like our own; vast, single-storey buses packed with Galabiya-clad and bearded men; 4x4s carrying Cairo's demimonde of jewelled ladies and young men with shaving problems – the bewhiskered chin-for machismo is as much a problem in the Middle East as it is in London.
No 953 was a tall tenement block into which Saef and I could not penetrate without the permission of a black-cowled lady whose child was playing in the dust of the roadway. She listened as we called upstairs. Yes, a woman's voice said. We could take the elevator. On the wall beside the lift was a sign: "Ibda – the house of creativity for journalism, publication and distribution". I could believe in the "creativity" bit.
But the veiled and polite lady on the 11th floor was all ignorance. "We never published such a book," she said, and called her female boss, who was at the Cairo Book Fair. She called us back on our mobile and insisted – quite truthfully – that Saddam Hussein was not her work. Not only did she deny all knowledge of the forgery – her assistant weighed us down with her own genuinely produced books of literary endeavour.
Saef and Yasser debated our problem. The publishing details in the front of the book were clearly wrong. But the frontispiece announced that the book had been registered for circulation with the Egyptian government – in other words, it has been cleared for sale by the official censor. So, Detective Inspector Fisk decided that a visit to the Dar al-Kutb – the official "House of Books" attached to the Ministry of Culture – was our next destination. Had the forger, the so-called Magdi Chukri, been smooth enough to legalise his illegally produced book with the oh-so-law-abiding Egyptian government of President Hosni Mubarak?
"This is not good enough!" our driver, Yasser, roared at me. "Mr Robert, the people of Egypt will think you wrote this book. You must go to the British embassy, you must go to the Egyptian government, you must go to the police, you must go to our intelligence services." I had been through this kind of trust curtain before. Despite all evidence to the contrary, Egyptians still evince a blind confidence in Ottoman authority.
The Brits wouldn't care a damn about this forgery and the Egyptians even less – always supposing "Magdi Chukri" hadn't slipped the civil servants a few piastas for registering a book by "Robert Fisk".
We arrived at the Ministry of Culture, a bleak Stalinist office block next door to which we found "House of Books". On the first floor was an emporium – I hesitate to call it an office – of books, a vast atrium of volumes and manuscripts. They lay feet high on desks, metre high on shelves and – so it seemed – miles high from the floor. Hundreds, nay thousands, of books were stacked in Dickensian rows, floor to ceiling, bodice-rippers and Arabic fiction and treatises on Islamic jurisprudence and physics textbooks. Two veiled ladies and two bearded men sat at a desk amid this forest of literature, one of them – there is always a miracle in Cairo – in front of a grimy, faded-yellow desktop computer.
I asked if my favourite volume had been approved by the Egyptian government for sale. "By Robert Fisk?" the man asked.
.. snip ..
