The Emperor Has No Clothes: Class, Color and Transgression in the Films of Ahmed Zaki (1)

by Laura Bier

I well remember the first time I saw an Ahmed Zaki film. The year was 1998. It was late at night and I was sitting in my Dokki apartment taking a break from Arabic homework That night, Channel Two was showing the film (The Wife of an Important Man, 1988), directed by the venerable Mohammed Khan. Set against the backdrop of the turbulent events of the late 1970s—the consolidation of a new political and social order created by then-president Sadat’s policy of infitah (“opening”), the 1977 bread riots and the violent repression of political opposition in their wake—the film is at once a devastating political commentary on state violence and a meditation on its intimate connections with domestic violence and masculine control.

In the film, Zaki plays Hisham, a man of modest background who by dint of ambition and sheer determination has risen to become a ranking officer in Egyptian state security. The story of Hisham’s rise (and subsequent fall) is told through his courtship of and marriage to Mona (Mervat Amin), an engineer’s daughter who was raised in comfort.

At once sadistic and seductive, Hisham is a controlling narcissist who tortures dissident Egyptian students at work and rules his wife at home through a combination of raw sexual power and masculine domination. Mona’s only comfort and refuge from spousal abuse lies in the songs of Abdel Halim Hafez, which she listens to hour after hour in an attempt to escape from the brutal reality of her marriage. Abdel Halim’s music provides a constant backdrop to the film’s events, evoking nostalgia for an idealized and more innocent past, which appears all the more remote and fleeting as Mona is forced to confront the political realities of her status as “the wife of an important man”: she has been unwittingly manipulated by her husband into spying on her politically progressive friends and colleagues at the university.

Ultimately, Hisham loses everything. When President Anwar Sadat decides in 1977 to raise the price of bread, violent protests break out, and the state employs brutal methods to quash the political unrest. But when this strategy is called into question, Hisham is made to take the fall for his superiors and is dismissed from his position in disgrace. Mona finally finds the courage to leave him. The film ends with Hisham’s last desperate attempt to regain control over his own destiny. Arriving at Mona’s father’s home, he attempts to shoot her, and when he fails, he kills himself.

I sat there as the credits rolled by, stunned and intrigued. Zawjat Rajul Muhimm was completely different than the older black-and-white Egyptian movies I was most familiar with. It was a dark inversion of the modernist cinematic narratives so typical of classic Egyptian films of an earlier era, where upward mobility signifies redemption and a satisfying conclusion. In an earlier era, the story of the courtship between a military officer of humble background and an educated middle-class girl might have been conceived as a melodrama in which Hisham, through virtue rather than domination, overcomes social obstacles and prejudices to win the girl of his dreams. Needless to say, Zawjat Rajul Muhimm’s ending would have been unthinkable in that context. Nor did Zaki’s portrayal of Hisham fit well within one of the other staples of melodrama, the evil villain who gets his well-deserved comeuppance in the end. The repeated scenes of Hisham leaving the house to go to “work,” long after he has lost his job, are surprisingly poignant, as he attempts to preserve his reputation in front of his neighbors. Zaki’s performance renders Hisham simultaneously vicious, charming, brutal, sexually magnetic and, in the end, heart-wrenchingly pitiable. Thus began my fascination with Ahmed Zaki.

What makes a sex symbol? Certainly Ahmed Zaki was an improbable one given the norms of masculine beauty prevalent in the Egyptian cinema when he first began making a name for himself as an actor in the late 1970s. Dark-skinned, with unruly black hair, full sensual lips and penetrating, melancholy eyes, his look was a departure not only from the studied elegance of male film icons of the 1950s and 1960s, such as Omar Sharif and Rushdy Abaza, but also from Hussayn Fahmi and the other younger, lighter-skinned actors who arose to take their places.

Much has been made in the obituaries following Zaki’s death in 2005 of the ways in which he broke color barriers in Egyptian film, as well as class barriers in his own life. Zaki was born into a relatively impoverished family in Zagazig, and he was training to become a plumber when he was discovered and taken in hand by actor Wafik Fahim. The account the obituaries provide of Zaki’s life and career is most often a narrative of transcendence: in spite of his humble beginnings and lack of connections, in spite of his dark skin and unconventional looks, his talent allowed him to overcome formidable obstacles. In the wake of his death, he appears as the real-life embodiment of a classic Egyptian modernist narrative: the ibn al-balad who, through ability, hard work and determination, becomes a beloved national icon.

This reading of Ahmed Zaki’s life has an intriguing irony to it: what made him unique (and uniquely revered) among his generation was not his ability to transcend, but his ability to transgress and therefore subvert the boundaries of class and color embedded in elite narratives of the nation. His ability as a method actor, his rejection of the techniques of melodrama in favor of performances that were subtle, ambivalent and ambiguous was, in many ways, profoundly destabilizing of such narratives.

In her article “Modern Subjects: Melodrama and Post-colonial Difference,” Lila Abu-Lughod has argued that in Egypt (as in many other post-colonial contexts), melodrama has been an important vehicle for the molding of national community and the inculcation of national values (2). Its purpose, as one famous Egyptian television writer put it, is to “portray reality as it ought to be.”(3) Therein lies the pedagogic function of melodrama: it teaches moral lessons by drawing easily recognized boundaries between heroes and villains, the oppressed and the oppressors, backwardness and enlightenment.

Actors who excel at melodrama do so because they are successful in drawing out the appropriate emotional responses from the audience. Their performances encourage the audience to identify with “the right side.” In the melodramas of the 1940s, 1950s and 1960s the characters with which the audience was meant to identify invariably embodied the values of bourgeois nationalism against those of its enemies: corrupt landowners, old money aristocrats, arrogant British officers and ignorant rural patriarchs. Certainly the heroes of such films were not always themselves bourgeois. But even heroic characters from the humblest of backgrounds could triumph through virtuous behavior and sober hard work. That was, in fact, part of the message.

Ahmed Zaki’s performances refused such simplistic dichotomies or easy moral messages. He excelled at the exploration of characters whose moral choices were conditioned not by the requisites of nationalist pedagogy but by their profoundly ambivalent relationship to the nation and its hegemonic narratives of inclusion. His collaborations with directors Mohamed Khan and Atef al-Tayeb, which resulted in much of his best work, are particularly notable in this respect. In the 1980s Khan and al-Tayeb spearheaded the movement in Egyptian cinema that came to be known as “New Realism.” Unlike the social realist films of the 1960s, which drew heavily on the conventions of melodrama to convey political messages that largely re-inscribed state ideology, the films of the “New Realism” turned those conventions on their head. Their protagonists were neither larger-than-life heroes, villains or victims, but ordinary people whose quotidian struggles with social and political authority often revealed the fundamental bankruptcy of that authority. With a physical appearance that average audiences could identify as “typically Egyptian” (as opposed to the idealized whiteness of other male stars) and a talent for naturalistic interpretation of character, Ahmed Zaki was an ideal vehicle for such projects.

In al-Bari’ (The Innocent, 1986), directed by Atef al-Tayeb, Zaki plays Ahmad Radwan al-Fuli, a simple-minded farmer who is conscripted to serve as a guard at a detention camp for political prisoners. Told by his superiors that the prisoners are “enemies of the state,” he participates in their torture and execution with few moral qualms, until an educated friend from his village is brought to the camp. Forced to face his own role in the camp’s brutal, state-sanctioned regime, al-Fuli goes mad. Taking his gun, he climbs to the top of a watchtower and massacres both the officers and the rank and file. (4) In the hands of a less skillful actor, al-Fuli’s character could easily have become one-dimensional, his complexities crushed under the weight of the political message his story was meant to convey. In Zaki’s understated rendering, however, he appears both as victimizer and victimized, an ordinary man forced to make difficult choices within a morally bankrupt system that both relies on his complicity and denies his essential humanity

Zaki brings a similar humanity to his portrayal of Eid, the charming, ne’er-do-well husband of a downtrodden maid in Mohamed Khan’s film Dreams of Hind and Camilia. Eid is a streetwise punk who becomes alternately a petty thief, a con-artist, a micro-bus driver, a black marketeer and ultimately a prison inmate. He successfully courts and marries Hind, an impoverished young woman who, along with her friend Camilia, makes a living cleaning the houses of Cairo’s elite families. His get-rich-quick schemes frequently involve breaking the law, and his willingness to exploit his wife and her friend to get what he wants provides a foil to the bonds of female solidarity that allow Hind and Camilia to survive in a world in which they are nearly powerless. But Eid’s amoral charm and his repeated failure to do right by his wife appear less as character flaws or object lessons than they do tactics of survival

Like al-Fuli and Eid, most of the characters that Zaki played were prisoners of circumstances, either marginalized outsiders, the throwaways of a corrupt and elitist society, or those who are corrupted by their collaboration with it (Didd al-Hukuma, another al-Tayeb film, in which he plays an opportunistic, unscrupulous lawyer, is perhaps the most notable example). But they are also characters who act in ways that are at turns virtuous, despicable, morally questionable or simply practical to resist those circumstances and gain control of their own destinies. Ahmed Zaki’s subtle explorations of the profound limitations faced by everyday characters confronting everyday struggles created, as one astute writer from al-Ahram Weekly put it, “an image ordinary people could hold up to both lofty and quotidian oppressions.” (5) By using his art to depict life not “as it ought to be” but as it really is for millions of Egyptians denied the status of elites and excluded by elite narratives of national community, Ahmed Zaki showed, in effect, that the emperor has no clothes. He is greatly mourned and sorely missed.

Laura Bier is a professor of Middle Eastern History at the Georgia Institute of Technology in Atlanta.

1. I want to thank Jessica Winegar for suggesting the title of this essay. I would also like to thank Jessica, Elizabeth Smith and Mohammed al-Ganoubi for sharing their astute reflections about Ahmed Zaki and his career.
2. Lila Abu-Lughod, “Modern Subjects: Egyptian Melodrama and Post-colonial Difference,” in Questions of Modernity, ed. Timothy Mitchell (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2000), 87–115.
3. As quoted in Abu-Lughod, 91.
4. This scene was cut by censors, ending with al-Fuli’s yell of pain and defiance from the top of the watchtower just before he mows down his commanding officers and fellow soldiers standing below.
5. Youssef Rakha. “Sky Colors,” al-Ahram Weekly, 31 March–6 April, 2006, online edition.