ABSTRACT
While Al-Zayni is today considered one of the landmarks of the 1960s, Maqtal al-rajul al-kabir is more of an underground text that continues to be circulated and read within the Egyptian literary milieu. Despite the difference in subgenre, one that this chapter will situate within a political context (Al-Zayni being a historical allegory that deals with the present by casting it in the past, while Maqtal al-rajul al-kabir is a satirical political thriller that immerses the reader in the details of current local and global politics) between them, these two texts map out some 30 years of the relationship that binds the intellectual field to the political power structure in the country. At the heart of this relationship, as depicted in the texts, is the contest over knowledge and truth: both sought by the intellectual and masked and/or mystified by the political apparatus. Both texts present the reader with substantially different understandings and hence representations of a “Big One”: a political power against which the figure of the intellectual in the text is juxtaposed. The very nature, manifestations and workings of this Big One will be analysed, moving from the all-powerful, alloppressive, self-contained police state of the 1960s, to a weakened, transparent and more globally dependent one in the 1990s.
