The life story of Mohamed Khalil Qassem highlights the social and political challenges that Egypt faced prior to the 1952 Revolution. Qassem’s life bears testimony to the marginalization experienced by Nubia during that era. Nubia suffered from social and political exclusion as the British-backed Egyptian monarchy focused on developing the urban areas in the north of the country. Under the monarchical system, Nubia, with its rich cultural history and unique identity, found itself marginalized from Egypt’s political sphere, enduring abject poverty, with Nubians treated as second-class citizens.
Mohamed Khalil Qassem, through his political and literary work, would present a different Nubian identity. He tried to marry the preservation of Nubian cultural identity with active engagement in the Egyptian revolutionary liberation project. His adherence to the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (referred to as “Haddato”) was a response to the conditions faced by the Nubian community, as he recognized the importance of transcending regional identity to achieve the goal of building a revolutionary state. As a Marxist, Qassem focused on social justice and economic equality as fundamental components of his revolutionary project. This vision was not limited to political change; it also aimed to establish a socio-economic system which upheld the basic rights of every individual, whether they be from the north or the south, the city or the countryside. It also called for the eradication of class-based exploitation and racial discrimination that Nubians were enduring.
Qassem believed that radical change could only be achieved through a comprehensive revolution that would cover all aspects of life. Through his novel titled Al-Shamandura (“The Buoy” in English) and his participation in “Haddato,” Qassem gave voice to the concerns of his community, striving to present an accurate portrayal of the lives of Nubians who lived on the margins of Egyptian society. The novel, published in 1968, gives voice to those suffering and to the isolation endured by Nubians under the harsh conditions of poverty and discrimination, particularly after the second elevation and expansion of the Aswan Dam.
Qassem struggled to assert the existence of Nubians in a homeland that did not really seem to recognize them as its own. Qassem was not simply advocating for the rights of Nubians. He envisioned a more just and equitable Egyptian society—one that would be free from classism and racism, and open to cultural and social diversity.
Qatta:
Mohamad Khalil Qassem was born in Qatta, a Nubian village, on July 15, 1922. His father was a farmer, but became a merchant in the wake of the flood provoked by the second elevation of the Aswan dam. The flood came to be viewed as an utter disaster. It had submerged houses and wreaked havoc in the land, leaving behind ruin and destruction. This catastrophe would create much sorrow in the hearts of Nubians. Many would thereafter try to build new lives on the nearby rocky lands and in between the mountainous areas by the Nile River. Able-bodied people would also flee to other areas in search of work, amidst a deep sense of bitterness and alienation, leaving behind only people who, due to some vulnerability or constraint, could not move to other areas. As a child, Qassem would sit above the fountain, his heart heavy, and his eyes stretching far into the horizon, recalling memories of the past, taking stock of the palm trees that had been uprooted and scattered.
As soon as he had learned the alphabet, Qassem started to assist his father in running the family’s retail shop. Before long, he was invited to write letters for the families of migrants and to read them letters they had received. Qassem thus became privy to the secrets and the pains of the village-folks. He even came to know about the love and affection that women had for their expatriated spouses, as they pleaded with them to return to the village after a long absence. All of these secrets were committed to his heart. Qassem received his primary education in the village’s primary school. He then enrolled in the middle school in Aniba village. After receiving his primary school diploma, Qassem had to move north to enroll in high school, which was based in Aswan. He would forever recall the sense of sadness that imbued his home as he prepared to leave the village.
It was during this period that Qassem’s literary talent as a poet started to blossom. His verse was full of images of rebellion and nature, with him dallying on the banks of the Nile. It was his gift for poetry that got him into the competitive high school. Having obtained his high-school diploma, the next step for Qassem to take was to move to Cairo to attend university, having shown little desire to stay in Aswan.
Cairo:
During his university years, Qassem read books on literature, philosophy and politics. As he would recount, the lectures and the seminars that he attended led him to accidentally join the Muslim Brotherhood, albeit for a short period of time. What really drew his attention were the social and political activities organized by fellow Nubians at the Nubian Club in downtown Cairo and the interesting exchanges with his comrades Zaki Murad and Maher Zaki, at the Club’s headquarters on Ibrahim Basha Street (currently, Al-Jumhūriah, “Republic,” Street.) Nubians hailing from different villages would gather and reminisce about their community life prior to the 1933 floods. It was during this period that Marxist ideas began to penetrate his and his comrades’ minds as the British occupation was well underway. The masses were in the grips of poverty, ignorance, disease, and exploitation. Anti-colonial sentiment had grown, as after years of British deferment, people came to realize that Egypt would never be liberated through truces, concessions, alliances, or compromises, but rather through armed struggle and revolution.
The lines were drawn between people dedicated to ending colonialism, at any cost, and the Royal Household, parties, and organizations that represented entire classes of influential landlords, who wanted the occupation forces to stay in Egypt. These classes dreaded the people more than they did the colonizers, for they were more closely bound to the occupiers by common interests than they were to the national territory.
Qassem believed that socialism was congruent with the concerns and interests of Nubian people. He also believed that it was comprehensive enough to provide a pathway for millions of miserable, toiling people to confront social injustice. This is why Qassem joined the Democratic Movement for National Liberation (“Haddato”) in the early 1940s. Upon entering the movement, Qassem, together with some fellow Nubians, established the Nubian Section of the movement. The activities of the Section commanded the interest and participation of a large proportion of Nubians based in Cairo, though they were scattered among various districts, such as Abdeen, Bulaq Abul-`Ula, and in Misr Al-Qadeemah (the “Ancient Egypt” district). The activities of the Nubian Section consisted in forming associations and clubs with pre-existing Nubian charities. They would typically organize solidarity campaigns intended to offer assistance and solace to the families of the deceased in the Nubian community.
Between 1945 and 1948, Qassem and his comrades tried to revitalize these Nubian charities by including educational, cultural, and sporting activities. The Nubian Section tried to address the adverse working conditions of Nubian workers in Cairo and Alexandria, and the suffering of Nubians living in the areas surrounding Aswan, whose displaced dwellers were given little financial compensation. “The joint struggle of Egypt and Sudan against a common enemy” was the slogan adopted and launched by Haddato, which believed in the unity of the struggle undertaken by the peoples of the Nile Valley to get British military forces to withdraw from Egypt and Sudan and the right of the Sudanese people to self-determination. This slogan was diametrically opposed to the motto of the liberal parties or the representatives of large landowners, “one people, one crown.”
Qassem would write articles for Omdurman, a magazine published by the Sudanese Section of Haddato, which included the likes of Abdul-Khaliq Mahjoub, Babakr Mohamad Ali Fadl, Al-Junaid Ali Omar, and Ahmed Salman. The establishment of this Section was intended to develop Sudanese communist circles until they became sufficiently independent. It eventually adopted the name “the Sudanese Movement for National Liberation” (refered to as “Hasstu”), which thereafter proclaimed itself the Sudanese Communist Party. Omdurman, which was edited by Abdou Dahab, was barred from entering Sudan by the British administration and was thereafter banned altogether, along with other newspapers, on July 8, 1946.
Qassem would also establish party cells. He played a pivotal role in organizing the February 9, 1946 mass demonstration, involving thousands of students, following a student conference at Cairo University. Resolutions were then passed demanding the cessation of all negotiations with the British and the immediate evacuation of British forces from Egypt and Sudan. Students marched towards Abdeen Palace to present the resolutions to King Farouk. As the demonstration was crossing Abbass Bridge, the army and the bridge company opened the bascule bridge and attacked the demonstrators. Many students fell into the Nile and scores were injured. This event sparked massive popular anger in various cities across Egypt and led to more intense demonstrations in the ensuing days, spanning from February 10 to March 4, 1946. During February, the student movement took root and assumed a new class-conscious dimension, the clearest expression of which was the establishment of the National Workers’ and Students’ Committee on February 18 and 19, 1946. The Committee – which brought together Wafd party members, Marxists, workers, and unionists - called for a general strike, dubbed “Evacuation Day” to be held on February 21, 1946. On that day, a massive crowd of about 100,000 people gathered, including 15,000 workers from Shubra Al-Kheima alone (with Shubra Al-Kheima textile workers being prominent in this movement). British occupation forces clashed with the protestors, killing 23 demonstrators, and wounding 121. The following day, the National Students’ and Workers’ Committee called for a second general strike on March 4, 1946 known as “Martyrs’ Day.”
The following day, Ismail Sidqi’s government arrested hundreds of communist students, writers, journalists, members of the National Committee, as well as labor union activists. Newspapers, such as Al-Fajr Al-Jadid [New Dawn], Oumdurman, Al-Wafd Al-Masri, and Al-Dameer [Conscience], were shut down. Qassem was sentenced to a five-year term to be served at Al-Hadra prison in the Alexandria Governorate—the very prison which witnessed the death of Anton Maroun, one of the founders of the Egyptian Marxist movement, in 1924.
Qassem was released from prison in 1953. This novelist-activist lived during a period marked by waves of national liberation movements across Africa and the Arab world. By virtue of his Nubian origin—a region straddling the border between Egypt and the Sudan and deeply embedded in the African context—he was acutely aware of the artificiality of colonial borders. He believed the struggle against European colonialism could unite peoples of both regions. His writings contributed to the discourse of national liberation, reflecting his vision of the commonalities between Arabs and Africans in their common fight against colonialism. Unlike Ali Mazrui, the Kenyan-Omani historian, Mohamed Khalil Qassem did not explicitly address the fusion of African and Arab identities. As a Nubian, he grew up in a society with a strong African identity, yet one that was deeply engaged with Arab culture. His life and work nevertheless embodied the encounter between Arab and African politics and nationalism.
The 1952 Revolution:
Qassem’s support for the 1952 revolution and the Free Officers’ Movement emanated from a long history of militancy. From the outset, Qassem’s position was supportive of the national bourgeois revolution. But, he disagreed a great deal with the Free Officers’ regime and with Gamal Abdel Nasser, criticizing their anti-communist tendencies and their heavy-handed methods. He was also at variance with them concerning the concept of democracy and their hostility to mass movements, along with their political and intellectual parties. He likewise disapproved of them when they cracked down on workers and executed two activists from Kafr Al-Dawar.
Qasem was arrested again in 1954 and given a ten-year sentence to be served at a military prison, following the so-called 64 Case. From the military prison, he was transferred to Mahariq prison at Wahat Al-Kharga (or, Al-Kharga Oasis), where he mobilized the members of the Haddato organization in 1959. By the end of 1962, all communist currents, together with their advocates and sympathizers, had gathered within the Wahat prison—an establishment from which Mohamed Khalil Qassem was not released until 1964. That year also coincided with the completion of his one and only novel, Al-Shamandurah [The Buoy].
The Novel and the Detention Center:
Qassem wrote prolifically during his detention. He translated the writings of Polish-American political scientist and policymaker Zbigniew Brzezinski. He wrote poems that were published in an anthology titled Qassāid Masriah [Egyptian Poems], together with Zaki Murad, Kamal Abdelhalim, Mahmud Tawfiq, and Palestinian poet, Moein Bseissou. He published a second anthology, titled Sirb Al-Balashun [A Flock of Herons], along with a group of Nubian poets (namely, Mohamed Shindy, Zaki Murad, Abdedaim Taha, and Ibrahim Shaaraoui). Qassem deemed prison to be a venue where he could teach people and learn from them. He taught illiterate jailers to read. Word quickly spread to other detention centers and soon jailers asked to be transferred to Al-Wāha detention center, where Qassem and Communist inmates offered literacy classes. Qassem served as the headmaster of this school and he supervised the education process ably until his jailers came to call him the Honorable Headmaster. Together with his comrades, he likewise set up a stage, where he presented a number of plays.
While in detention, Qassem also completed his most important literary work, the novel Al-Shamandurah [The Buoy], which had been germinating for a long time. Between 1946 and 1961, Qassem had stayed up long nights for months, maybe years, by candlelight, writing on small Bafra sheets, a cigarette wrapping paper. The Haddato Central Command provided Qassem with all the means necessary to complete the writing of Al-Shamandurah, relieving him of all party responsibilities, allocating a single room to him to write his novel, and providing him with tea and cigarettes.
Qassem endured all of this because he wanted to immortalize the lives of his people in the first novel ever written about Nubians in history. Although the novel centers on the predicament of one Nubian village, Qatta, it presents a comprehensive picture of Nubian life and the suffering endured by various Nubian villages. Al-Shamandurah revealed the world of a Nubian village, its struggle with nature, injustice, oppression, and the flood. Qassem arranged the events in an easy and simple style that was nonetheless poetic. The descriptions are enlivened through dialogue between the protagonists.
With his political awareness and revolutionary thought, Qassem was able to connect the local struggles of the Egyptian countryside and Nubian villages, on the one hand, and the macro-level battles against colonial oppression and tyranny, on the other hand. The flood itself came to be viewed as a social catastrophe created by the ruling class. Tragedy is at the center of Al-Shamandurah. The novel is the first Nubian literary work to depict the disaster of the flood candidly, and the Nubian community’s larger struggle for survival.
The End of the Journey
On June 10, 1968, Qasim passed away after suffering a severe heart attack in his home in Boulaq Ad Dakrour. His funeral was attended by Nubian mourners and ordinary people, alongside intellectuals, writers, and journalists. A touching sight was the presence of his students—those he had taught to read and write in prisons and detention centers—bidding him a final farewell. His funeral procession departed from the Nubian Club in downtown Cairo. Forty days after his passing, a memorial service was held at the Chamber of Commerce in Bab El-Louq, where the renowned writer Youssef El-Sebai delivered a eulogy in his honor. After Qasim’s departure, death swiftly claimed the rest of his family. His elder sister, who had been like a mother to him, soon followed. His younger half-sister, afflicted by uremia, also passed away. His half-brother, devastated by addiction, wandered the streets of Cairo until he his final days.
With the loss of Qasim Hamd Khalil Qasim, the committed communist who loved his homeland and people, and who dedicated his life to the causes he believed in, a beacon of resilience was extinguished. Honoring his memory must begin with the effort to republish and translate Al-Shamandoura, a work that remains unparalleled in the history of Nubia, as well as in Egyptian and African literature.
Translated from the Arabic by Saber El Asri