Through a Comedic Glass, Darkly – On Humour, Satire and Alienation in Egyptian (or Arab) Speculative Fiction

By Emad El-Din Aysha, PhD

“I used to think it was clever to confuse comedy with tragedy. Now I wish I could distinguish them.”

— John le Carré, A Murder of Quality

Egyptians like humour in all works of art and walks of life. For Egyptians, it’s a necessity of life, like air to breathe and bread to eat. Our most successful movies and plays are comedies, and our most successful actors are comedians, from the era of black and white cinema and television onwards. Writing and literature may be a more serious affair in Egypt, but humour nonetheless is there, along with its second cousin, satire. And so the subject of this article is humour in Egyptian science fiction and fantasy, which can range from biting political criticism and social commentary to the more general topic of comedy and jokes. The emphasis here will be on the younger generation of authors, in part because of my direct knowledge of them (friends and colleagues) but also because much has already been written about the larger names in satire when it comes to Egyptian science fiction – Ahmed Khaled Tawfik’s Utopia and Basma Abdel Aziz’s The Queue (Bakker, 2021). One particular case in point is 2063 and Other Stories (2025), a collection of satirical and darkly humorous stories by struggling author Moataz Hassanein, and translated by yours truly.[1] The names here are virtual unknowns, as are the non-Egyptian names I end this piece with to look at prospects for the future. Just getting the original 2063 (2016) novella published in English took something like, oh, nine years. A satirical story in its own right!

In Complaint, from the Mundane to the Otherworldly

Comedy is a necessity for Egyptians because it’s quite literally a safety valve, especially when you live in a surreal country like Egypt. I’ll give you an all too personal example. My mother passed away some years ago and I organised an azaa (funeral or farewell ceremony) consisting of bitter coffee, chairs, and a Quran reciter for family and friends. The ceremony should have cost no more than 400 Egyptian pounds, but cost something closer to 3000, because of the taxes and customs duties involved to a rent a place for the ceremony and getting permission for the burial. Here, even when you’re dead, they don’t leave you alone – as we say in Egypt. There’s mountains of paperwork that go into anything in this country, in addition to kickbacks and the ever-present threat of demolitions. So again, it’s either humour or the madhouse for the majority of us, and science and speculative fiction are no different.

Let’s begin with Moataz Hassanien from above. He’s a fantasy writer originally, but he’s most well-known in sci-fi circles on account of his original dystopian novella 2063, which became the centrepiece of his translated collection of works. Here, Egypt resides under a foreign military occupation that legitimizes its rule by guaranteeing jobs for everybody and legalizing all the once tabooed pleasures (drugs, alcohol, and extramarital sex). The only catch is that books are banned, and people have to take a monthly citizen’s satisfaction test. If a citizen is only 95% satisfied, they will be put to sleep. The testing facility is located in the once-grand Library of Alexandria, and the city itself is walled in, preventing people from seeing the majesty of the Mediterranean.

Hassanien confessed to me that he got the idea in 2016 when he heard a government official on TV complaining that negative news and criticism would make people suffer from depression and lose faith in the regime and so should be disallowed. Straight away he got this maniacal image of a regime dedicated to people’s happiness at any cost. The narrator himself is the son a former Tahrir square revolutionary and thinks his father’s generation were fools, preferring the life of soft certainty that comes with the occupation. Only his instincts betray him, failing his latest satisfaction test. Nonetheless the novella ends on a positive note, with the hero smuggled out of the facility by an intern there. In Adam and Eve fashion they take refuge with an underground group that calls itself the Paradise Society, with the hero’s collection of books (inherited from his father). With time they get tired of being cooped up in the Society, despite all the pleasures they have at their disposal – a deliberate parody of the occupation regime, Hassanien revealed to me – and then they make a break for it with these de facto rebels after their establishment is raided by the authorities. The important thing is that they are out in the open and trust their fate to luck.

The upshot is, to quote myself being quoted by somebody else:

You can literally find novels and quasi-memoirs by young Egyptian authors out on the street labelled ‘Alienation,’ in English!

An especially cynical story by Hassanien is “The Last Client” (2019), which is about a ragamuffin in a tough neighborhood who dreams of leaving this godforsaken country once and for all. One of his tasks is to act as an illicit tour guide for foreigners coming to the country because they are fed up with their easy lives in Europe, and the latest victim is the one who is going to help him save enough money to finally get out of here. The foreigner complains to him all the time about how restrictive and intellectually stultified life is in Europe and how poverty, misery, and desperation help one to be creative, something the hero has had his fill of. You can hardly walk in the poor neighbourhoods from the overflowing sewers and heaps of garbage everywhere, contrasted to the gated communities that are no go areas to commoners like him. (The tourist isn’t allowed to wear a respirator while in Egypt, just a regular surgical mask like everybody else. If he dies as a consequence, it’s not the tour guide’s responsibility; the foreigner signed the release form). In one of the more harrowing and hilarious episodes in the story, you have the hero showing the foreigner the hospitals where the poor donate blood or organs out of their own free will. By the end of the story, after finally amassing the money he needs to get out, the protagonist reaches a government bureaucrat who tells him he cannot leave the country despite accumulating enough points on his record. There is some computer jam preventing them from granting him a legal exit. This happens all the time in Egypt, and at the most inconvenient times, in all places ranging from telecom providers and banks to government agencies to embassies. This forces the protagonist to stay in Egypt, only for the tourist to pour vinegar on his wounds by consoling him, saying that he really isn’t missing anything in the West. (This obnoxious client was originally planning his honeymoon on Mars, with his Afghani sweetheart, which prompted his misery tour since she ran away with someone else).

By the end of the story the hero compares himself to Sisyphus, or a Kafkequse hero, a call-back in itself to an earlier scene where the tourist picks up a book about Kafka from the hero’s bookshelves, thinking mistakenly that it is The Metamorphosis. The hero doesn’t correct him, laughing on the inside at someone who has everything but feels as tormented and trapped as the late great Franz Kafka. (Albert Camus is mentioned in 2063 to raise issues of identity and personal volition). Another cultural reference is The 1001 Nights, with the tourist lamenting how his Afghani sweetheart couldn’t speak Arabic to reprise the role of Scheherazade; the story is clearly fond of lampooning stereotypes of the exotic East in Western discourse, and welcome to it.

For the more explicitly surrealistic stories we have “The Morning After the End of the World” (2017). Here the hapless hero is the quintessential worker bee, heading off to work as usual, despite the empty streets and underground train station, the day after it’s announced on TV that the world will end. The world’s leaders all commit collective suicide, but the hero’s got more important things to worry about. Even more surreal is “The Other” (2015), with a lonely individual being told by a friend that he checked out certain books from the public library on such-and-such a day. The hero insists he stayed home that day, only to find he did in fact check out those books – The Life of Hunger and Mercury (Amélie Nothomb) and Coming Up for Air (George Orwell). Not coincidentally, the young man is a fan of The Walking Dead, and he sees people as skeletal remains at one point in the story, hoping to head off to the moon on his microbus ride.

What Hassanien does, very cleverly, is sneak these concerns and references into his proper sci-fi works to help his protagonists break out of their pre-programmed routines in an attempt to make them rebel. It doesn’t always work, but the lesson is not lost on the reader. I can add a surreal moment of my own here. On one occasion, in a government agency, we were told to wait our turn. We waited longer than usual only to find there was no one before us and found the receptionist, who’d told us previously, forgetting who we were while she was staring at us. Now take a look at Hassanien’s latest story, also in the 2025 book Isolation Hotel. The story is about a suicidal young man trying and failing to recover from his fiancée’s death. (He, like all the loved ones of the girl, is assigned a therapist. That was in the insurance provisions for the girl). Through a fortuitous coincidence, he gains a new lease on life and makes up his mind to go to what are now termed isolation hotels, where people go into self-styled exile to cope with problems. There are government-owned hotels, but they’re abysmal – such hotels have become a constitutional right in this future world – and so the protagonist signs up with the private sector, picking the most expensive and extensive package deal – seven years of total isolation. The receptionist tries to talk him into the median plan of three years but he’s made his mind up. (She almost behaves like a robot, with programmed responses, not used to personal volition on the part of clients). After handing over most of his lifesavings he signs a stipulation exonerating the hotel from any charges should he commit suicide in their care, along with agreeing to go out once in a while to get some sunlight, do a regular psych evaluation and – most regretfully for him – have a family get-together before going into exile. As he explains through his narrative voice, the whole point of going into exile is to get away from your so-called loved ones, the kind of people who drive you over the edge as it is!

That’s a common sentiment in Egypt, and much of the Arab world, and alienation again is the clear overarching theme in all of his stories cited here (Bakker, 2021, pp. 85-87). More like self-styled alienation since the true alien in Egypt is the one who mingles and loses his soul and identity in the process. (The story is open-ended, with the hero making it to the hotel, overjoyed). It just goes to show that we have so much to complain about here in Egypt, both outside the house and inside the house. The both amount to the same thing, psychologically. Bureaucracy in this country alone is dehumanising, never mind the endless rules and routines you have to surmount in our home life. Now for some other youthful authors with similar if less extreme sentiments, complaints and constructions.

For instance, Wael Abdel Raheem, one of the most consistently funny science fiction authors I know. His story “Abducted Alien” (2017) has an extra-terrestrial held captive in a room, being interrogated by its captors. The abductors are ecstatic that they have finally proven that alien life exists, only for the reader to discover in the end that the extra-terrestrial abductors come from a planet named dirt or earth. Typically the abductee is a hapless individual, literally walking down the street, minding his own business in the middle of the night in an effort to make ends meet. That’s the prototypical Egyptian in our way of thinking. Alienation, just in a less biting fashion.

Another story of his, “Al-Kharab” (2022) or “Garbage Heap,” is set in what appears to be a very destitute neighborhood in Cairo, with women from the countryside selling vegetables and greens in traditional fashion. There is poverty, drugs, and hoodlums on display – all images from the present-day Egypt. However, the reader discovers at the end that the story takes place in the future, and these people are living in a formerly posh neighborhood built for the government and its cronies. The reason it is such a horrid place is that the rich people on earth have vacated the planet for greener pastures elsewhere, leaving this world to the poor to do with as they please. (The implication, Wael insists off the record, is also environmental; the elites exhausting the resources of the planet). In another story, “U.A.C.N” (2022), he depicts a more favorable future for Arab nations. The story begins with a Chinese official preparing for a summit meeting with the help of autonomous household devices, dressed in traditional Arab garb and enjoying Arabic hit singles. Covid has turned the world upside down, with the USA and Europe sinking into hunger and anarchy and the United Arab Nation emerging powerful through active cooperation with China in managing world affairs. United, the Arabs finally become technological leaders and fashion trend-setters, with China now joining their union to make the U.A.C.N. There’s only one condition to joining, however, which is to give up eating disgusting, unsanitary foods (in Islamic discourse) – like bats, of course.

The story is more wishful thinking than an actual attempt to chart a future history of progress. If anything it is the Arabs who need to learn from the Chinese, and other great powers like the European Union – Arab union is our perennial dream and our constant disappointment, despite our shared language, heritage, geography and ample resources. Consequently the satirizing seems to be more directed at Arabs than anyone else. All they need is unity and they could become leaders of the Global South, as China in fact is, along with its growing impact on the world of pop culture (The Three-Body Problem and Wandering Earth are becoming household names in Egypt). So what if the Chinese eat bats? The closing scene in the end has a Chinese individual smuggling a cooked bat to eat in private – God help us all.

Another stellar example, and I mean that literally, is Eslam Dewan. His most distinguished science fiction work to date is a half-satire, the two-part story “The Egyptian Planet and the End of the World” (2016). The story is told through the eyes of a young and gifted scientist with a loving mother who goes off to work at a top research centre in Egypt, a country that in the distant future has become a de facto planet. Surreal, but a surprisingly grounded story at the same time. The narrator first explains how the country became a monarchy through a legal loophole, and how the president-turned-king saved the nation from the brink of collapse. He began his reign by cutting the country off from the outside world, economically and intellectually, and then forcing people to work on agricultural land in exchange for food, clothing, and education. Being unemployed was made illegal, private tuition became a capital offense, and a strict two-child policy was imposed. Then industrial and scientific revolutions took place in this future Egypt, making NATO and the USA terrified of this new economic powerhouse. They responded by firing top secret stealth missiles underneath the ground, which launched the country into a sub-lunar orbit, along with some other countries that refuse to obey the West blindly, such as China and Japan. Nonetheless, on the sub-lunar orbit, the resourceful Egyptians have a breathable atmosphere thanks to gravity and find a way to harvest water from the sky. They also make an alliance with other floating states and then take over earth’s telecommunications from their vantage point in the heavens. They also start harvesting the moon for minerals and start exploring the galaxy. In the second part of the story, the whole of humanity is forced to take refuge on another planet, and the Egyptians lead the way, finding a world that is almost identical to earth, down to the continents, and with a human population to boot. The only catch is that a xenophobe on that world claims to be the Messiah and leads an anti-earth movement there. Even so, the clear lesson is that nothing is impossible, and every situation, no matter how dire, can be turned to one’s advantage with good, sound scientific planning. Querying the author, he explained that the story actually began as a scenario for a movie about Egypt’s possible future and what would need to be done for the country to become scientifically advanced (Dewan, 2024).

This is all a mirror, held up for present-day Egyptians to see not only what is wrong with their country but also what could go right. The country is not destined to be poor, but it is being held back, and mostly by local actors. Our inferiority complex vis-à-vis the West is also crucial here, hence the temporary isolationist policy of the first king. But that in turn is meant to make you question how ‘independent’ we think we are as Arabs under the so-called populist regimes that took over through coups labelled revolutions. How better to lampoon the 1952 Nasserist takeover than to bring back monarchical rule? A satirical tool only an Egyptian would understand!

A Final Reckoning

Egypt is a special case in satire given that it is the literal heart of the Arab world; the most populace country and the leader in literature and cinema, and comedy – dark comedy included. Nonetheless outside of Egypt, Arab science fiction writers are pretty erudite themselves. What is more, they all seem to be developing a common language of their own – motifs and cultural references they can all draw on, without even knowing it. Yemeni author Mohammed Al-Shaibani has an incredibly satirical science fiction novel, Resident of the Nebula (2017), that tackles extremism and terrorism head on but through the unlikely instrument of an international crew of astronauts in the Andromeda nebula (Al-Shaibani, 2022). The lone Arab member of the team is an experimental subject having been spliced with plant DNA so he can photosynthesize. This was meant to help him survive life on another planet but in the process the experiment fails and his serotonin levels plummet, pushing him into depression, making him susceptible to the preachings of an Islamic fundamentalist cleric back on Earth. What finally tips him over the edge is a female member of the crew, a foreign girl he was in love with, who spurned him because of his tainted blood, making him a low-class individual in her eyes. In one of the funniest scenes in the novel, she has sex with a fellow crew member, an experiment to see how copulation works in outer space, with the whole crew ‘observing’ what’s going on. The female astronaut is described hilariously as being more naked than a peeled onion.

But, more to the point, this motif of a human-plant hybrid seems common fair in the Arab world. A Palestinian-Jordanian author, Subhi Fahamawi, has a subplot in his sci-fi novel Alexandria 2050 (2009) where one of the Palestinian characters undergoes a similar gene-splicing experiment involving plant DNA in an effort to transform him into someone as docile as a potted plant. This is a clear reference to the Palestinian cause, taming it into obscurity. In the case of Resident of the Nebula the plant DNA is a reference to how you can’t plant something in foreign soil and expect it to grow and thrive; we are explicitly told this in the story. The Arab astronaut himself was a hip youngster, drinking alcohol and fornicating, only to turn into a fanatic thanks to being rejected by the West. The West itself is in dire straits in this future world because AI has stolen people’s jobs, even lawyers and judges, while prostitutes themselves have gone broke thanks to sexbots. The West has stopped standing for anything, and so is no longer desirable as an ideal to someone in the East – hence the sex scene.

Weirder still a Mauritanian author, Moussa Ould Ebnou, has his own satirical science fiction story where a Muslim living in America in the future wants to go on pilgrimage to Mecca and so signs up to a tourist company to make his trip more eventful. The package he signs up for includes gene-therapy, involving plant DNA, whereby you become a more spiritual person because you no longer have to eat meat and can photosynthesize instead. (The would-be pilgrim is a Shiite, so a bonus option in the package includes ‘pleasure marriage’). Notice the proliferation of plant/human hybrids in these stories?

Another Palestinian author, Elise Stephens, has plants aplenty in her hard sci-fi stories, and not just as part of the household background or reflection of the personality of the characters. Its symbolism, pure and simple, and of the benign variety. Hence her story “Common Speech” (2023) where human colonists die from a lethal bacterium on a planet, with sentient alien plants trying to give them the cure through an unconventional means of communication. Sadly, the humans belittle the aliens, thinking they’re no different than passive potted plants.

These diverse set of Arab authors don’t seem to be communicating with each other or reading each other’s works but, with all of that, their imaginations are moving in the same direction. As Arabs we love plants and greenery, and fruits and vegetables and water fountains, surrounded as we are by desert and sheer arid desolation. A Syrian researcher of Arab science fiction, Mohammed Abdullah Alyasin, himself has found that when aliens are benign in our stories they tend to be either humanoid or sentient plants (July 2009, p. 38). That’s exactly what you see in Elise Stephens. She further adds that what she loves about plants isn’t just because they are “resilient, quietly peaceful, and lovely” but that they “require care” and are our “way to bring the wilds of the outdoors into the ‘tamed’ indoors of a home” (Stephens, 2024). Even I’ve fallen afoul of this green instinct with my children’s science fiction story “Cat’s Paw” (2019). An inventor, an out of work engineer more accurately, sees a cat scratching its claws on a harsh metal light pole (painted green) and it gives him an idea. He uses a tree as a source of renewable electricity, using leaves as solar panels to power a light-bulb, and in the process the cats can scratch their nails safely on the trunk of the tree instead of on harsh metal. And I got the idea myself while walking down the street and seeing a poor cat scratching and hurting its claws on an actual light pole, painted green probably as a feeble replacement for actual trees. The cats additionally serve as protection for the tree from anyone who wants to chop it down or defecate next to it. The engineer starts out as cynical and not respectful of nature, or how God can create things that always outdo the creations of man. A tree provides shade and shelter while letting the wind blow naturally, unlike a rooftop or air conditioning, something a family friend actually told us once.

It’s a common observation from people in our part of the world and so a perfect plot-point to begin a story about harnessing nature to better protect it. It’s certainly something I wanted to introduce the foreign audience to by penning my story in English, using humour and a little sarcasm to get the point across without it sounding like preachy exposition. That’s the contribution we can make as Arabs, Egyptians and Muslims to the international comedic stage, bringing both our jokes and our brand of concerns to a wider audience that is eager to learn how other people cope with problems and learn to laugh at themselves. Hence, this essay.

If not my entire English-language career in writing about Egyptian and Arabic science fiction!

Emad El-Din Aysha
July 2026

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Ahmed Salah Al-Mahdi, Blaze Ward and Jörg Matthias Determann.

Works Cited

Alyasin, Mohammed Abdullah. (July 2009). “Conquering the Universe in Science Fiction: Beings and Worlds,” Science Fiction, pp. 26-47.[Arabic]

Al-Shaibani, Mohammed. (21 October 2022). “Yemeni SF, a Galaxy in the Waiting – An interview with Mohammed Al-Shaibani”, The Liberum, https://theliberum.com/yemen-stakes-its-claim-to-arabic-sci-fi-an-interview-with-mohammed-al-shaibani/.

Bakker, Barbara. (2021). “Egyptian Dystopias of the 21st Century: a New Literary Trend?” Journal of Arabic and Islamic Studies, Vol. 21, No. 1, pp. 79-94, https://journals.uio.no/JAIS/article/view/9151/7711.

Borgmeier, Raimund. (1989). “Satire and Science Fiction”, Zagadnienia Rodzajów Literackich, vol. 32, no. 1, pp. 5-20, https://dspace.uni.lodz.pl/handle/11089/44167.

Dewan, Eslam. (8 January 2024). “Planet Imperfecta – Egypt in centuries to come, according to Eslam Dewan”, The Liberum, https://theliberum.com/planet-imperfecta-egypt-in-centuries-to-come-according-to-eslam-dewan/

Stephens, Elise. (20 December 2024). “The Spud of Creativity – Elise Stephens on communicating Palestine”, The Liberum, https://theliberum.com/the-spud-of-creativity-elise-stephens-on-communicating-palestine/.

[1] This was published electronically through Pubshare, https://pubshare.com/books/2063-other-titles.

Emad El-Din Aysha – Digital Hydra (AI-generated image)

Emad El-Din Aysha, with a PhD in International Studies from the University of Sheffield, took up writing science fiction in 2015 and is now a member of the Egyptian Society for Science Fiction and the Egyptian Writers’ Union. He is also a freelance translator and journalist and has one (Arabic) sci-fi anthology to his name and one non-fiction book, Arab and Muslim Science Fiction: Critical Essays (McFarland, 2022). He divides his time between his (many) work duties and promoting Arabic science fiction at international for a like Discon III, FUTURE·CON 2021, “Muslim Futurism: Definitions, Explorations, and Future Directions”, RACS (Religion and Astrobiology in Culture and Society) Network, BaltimoreCon 56 convention, Chicon 8: The 80th World Science Fiction Convention, RAWIFest and FiyahCon2020.

Featured Image: Photo of Moataz Hassanien provided by himself and combined photo arranged by Emad El-Din Aysha.