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by Bamber Gascoigne

Egyptian playwright, poet, actor, and critic, whose literary career lasted two decades and who became a legend in his lifetime. From the late 1960s and during the 1970s until his death Naguib Surur was one of the most prominent and disputed figures of the Egyptian theatre. His verse dramas received wide acclaim on the stage, but his personal problems and self destructive life style led to his untimely death at the age of 46.

I am the son of misery
I am the product of the cattle shed and the maṣṭaba11
In my village, all of them are wretched
In my village, there is a major like a god
He surrounds our necks like destiny
[...]
I have hated the God
And each God I have becomes a horrible image
Since this day I have learned my revolution
And then I went with the caravan
('Al-ḥidhāʾ' by Najīb Surūr, quoted in 'Rewriting Resistance: The Revival of Poetry of Dissent in Egypt after January 2011 (Surūr, Najm and Dunqul)' by Atef Botros, in Commitment and beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s, edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil, Wiesbaden: Reichert Verlag, 2015, p. 52)

Naguib Surur (Najīb Muḥammad Surūr) was born in the village of Akhtab, in Daqahlia governorate. To earn extra income for the family, Surur worked in the cotton fields in his childhood. After Surur broke with other young boys into the mansion of the local Pasha, a symbol of tyranny in his later works, he was beaten by Pasha's men. His father, who was a tax collector, was fired from his job, and the family moved to Cairo, where he worked as school teacher.

Surur began writing poetry at an eartly age. The famous poem, Al-Hizaa, (The Shoe), was written as a reaction to an incident, in which his father was humiliated by the governor. Surur's nationalistic verses were published in various periodicals. His first plays Surur wrote in the late 1950s. While working as a censor at the Ministry of Culture, he became friends with the playwright Numan Ashur (1918-87).

By showing a green light for the production of Youssef Chahine's film Bab al-hadid (1958, Cairo Central Station), about the sexual obsession of a news-paper seller, Surur found himself in trouble at his job. After abandoning his studies at the law school of Ayn Shams University, Surur entered the Institute of Acting, graduating in 1956 and continuing his studies on a scholarship in the Soviet Union and Hungary. Surur studied the technique of Stanislavsky and worked for a short period in the Arab section of Radio Moscow and published articles attacking Gamal Abdel Nasser's government. In a public demonstration, Surur called Nasser "a fascist." 

Following a brawl in a café, Surur was beaten at a police station – the Soviet reality was not much different than that of his own country. He left Moscow for Budapest, Hungary, where he worked for the Arabic-language broadcasting and came into conflict with the Syrians. As a result, Surur lost his job, but during this period he wrote the poems, which were collected in Luzūm mā yalzam (1960, The Necessity of What is Necessary).

Upon his return to Egypt in 1964, with the manuscript of the verse novel Yasin and Bahiyya, Surur directed Anton Chekhov's Cherry Orchard at the Cairo Experimental Theatre, known as the Pocket Theatre. Yasin and Bahiyya staged by Karam Mutawi at the Pocket Theatre, was a great success in 1965. The play, inspired by Alexander Pushkin's Yevgeny Onegin (1827), was cast in the form of a folkloric tale about the love of a young man, Yasin, and his beautiful cousin, Bahiyyah, whose life is destroyed by a feudal lord.

For a period, Surur worked with  Damascus National Theatre Company in Syria, but not happy with the cultural atmosphere in the country. Until mid-1970s, he taught at the Academy of Arts and made five directorial projects and acted in four plays – he was a tall and good-looking man. Most of his works were directed by others.

Fired from the Academy and persecuted by the Secret police, Surur eventually sank into depression and was confined to an asylum, where he was brutally treated - "they applied to me the latest methods and techniques in torture! There with me were university students, high school freshmen, textile factory workers, university professors, engineers, fallāhīn, and atomic scientists," he said in a letter. (Conspiracy in Modern Egyptian Literature by Benjamin Koerber, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2018, p. 64) At one point of his life, Surur was said to have roamed the streets barefooted, dressed in raggeg clothes, and begging money for alcohol.

Surur's literary works include eight plays, three dramatic adaptations, five collections of poems, and four collections of essays, among them Riḥla fī thulāthiyyat Najīb Maḥfūẓ (1960, A Journey into Naguib Mahfouz's Trilogy), based on articles published in the magazine al-Thaqāfah al-Miṣrīyah.

Surur language is simple but colourful. He wrote both in verse and in Egyptian colloquial Arabic. Minīn ajīb al-nāss (1974, O, Would That I Had Listeners) combined acting, narration, song, folkloric chanting, and direct political commentary.  Mālik al-shaḥḥātīn (1970, The King of Beggars), directed by Galal al-Sharqawy, was an adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Dreigroschenoper. In many plays he used commenting narrator chorus derived from Brech't theater.

In the 1950s Surur acted in a number of plays. He made a cameo appearance in the 1969 film al Hilwah 'Azîzah (The Pretty Aziza), directed by the box-office king Hasan al-Imam. Hind Rustum, Egypt's Marilyn Monroe, was cast in the role 'Aziza and Surur, a rejected suitor, assails her: he flings a bottle of acid on her face. For the Folk Theater in Cairo, he directed his own play, Shajarat al-zaytūn (The Olive Tree) in 1958. As a stage actor Surur had perhaps his most memorable performance in Shawqi Abdel-Hakim's Okazion (1977, Sale). In the production Surur played the part of an unemployed drunken playwright, actor and director, whose tragedy drew material from his own turbulent career.

Surur's dramas have not yet been translated into many European languages. Luzūm mā yalzam was translated into Spanish by Santiago Alba y Javier Barreda under the title Hacer imprescindible lo que es necesario. Translation into Italian from different works by Surur ('Ḥiwār maʿa Lūrd Bayrūn,' 'Kalimāt fī al-ḥubb,' 'Ughniya ʿan ṭā’ir,' etc.) has been published in Chiara Fontana's Poesie scelte di Najīb Surūr. Studio critico e traduzione (2025).

Brūtūkūlāt ḥukamā' Rīsh! (1974, Protocols of the Elders of the Café Riche) drew on the notorius The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, an anti-Semitic forgery made in Russia. It was first published in 1903 in a St. Petersburg newspaper. The "document" list methods by which the leaders of international Jewry propose  to take over the world. It was plagiarized extensively from Maurice Joly's political satire Dialogue aux enfers entre Machiavel et Montesquieu ou la politique de Machiavel au XIX e siècle (1864). (Cults and Conspircies: A Literary History by Theodore Ziolkowski, Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2013, p. 159) Surur believed in a "Jewish-Zionist-Masonic" plot to infiltrated and destroy Arab culture: Zionists are out there in the streets of Cairo. And he was the victim of the conspiracy.

In his critics Surur uncompromisingly considered the quest for "popular tradition" as inability to connect with the present. On the other hand, Surur's works have been seen as a reaction to the Western cultural influence as stated a Finnish history of literature. ('Arabialainen kirjallisuus,' in Otavan kirjallisuustieto, edited by Risto Rantala and Kaarina Turtia, Helsingissä: Otava, 1990, p. 48) During the final years of his life, Surur suffered from alcoholism, paranoia, and recurring bouts of depression. His last article for al-Kātib magazine dealt with the poet Adonis

Naguib Surur died on October 24, 1978, after a lenghty illness, which kept him mostly bedridden. A collection of articles, Hākadhā qāla Juḥā (Thus Spake Juha), was published posthumously by Dar al-Thaqafah al-Jadidah in 1981. Minīn ajīb nās (Where Do I Go to Find People), based on a folk song, was staged by Munir Murad after Surur's death in 1984.

With his first wife Sasha Korsakova, whom he met and married in Russia, Surur had two children. After divorce he married the artist Samira Mohsen. "Naguib was a decent man, who loved his wife dearly, and I never heard him utter obscene word during all our meetings," said the Syrian dramatist, critic, and diplomat Riad Ismat. "He despised a system that obliged female actresses to offer sexual favours in exchange for their career advancement, and expressed how much he feared that Damascus' own intelligence apparatus-the equivalent of Cairo's in his eyes-was putting him under surveillance. . . . I know for sure that Naguib's only relief was the presence of his wife, the actress Samira Mohsen." ('Mamdouh Adwan, Mahmoud Diyab & Naguib Surur,' in Artists, Writers and The Arab Spring by Riad Ismat, Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave Macmillan, 2019, p. 134)

In Qulū li-ʿayn al-shams (1973, The Eye of the Sun) Surur expressed his anger and frustration of Egypt's defeat in the 1967 war with Israel. The the humiliating military loss triggered heated debate in the Arab world. Surur's most controversial poem, the banned Kuss-ummiyyāt (1969-1974, Naguib's Mother's Cunt), is a satirical attack on the official culture and Egyptian politics, whom he blaimed for the humiliating defeat. This stream-of-conscious work, over over 6,000 words, remained unpublished for long period (it would never have passed the censors), but cassette tapes of it were circulated in underground.

After publishing the poem on the Internet, Surur's son Shohdy Surur was arrested and charged of possessing "immoral booklets and prints". Sentenced to imprisonment for a year, Shohdy fled in 2002 to Moscow into exile. ('Son Naguib Surur forced into exile after posting poetry on web,' Poetry International, January 18, 2006; https://www.poetryinternational.com/en/. Accessed 1 July 2025) He did not return to Egypt for his appeal trial.

For further reading: Poesie scelte di Najīb Surūr. Studio critico e traduzione by Chiara Fontana (2025); 'Arabic Poetics and Prosody in Practice: Najīb Surūr's Experimentalism in ʻKalimāt fī-l-ḥubbʼ ('Love Words')' by Chiara Fontana, in Arabic, Persian, and Turkic Poetics: Towards a Post-Eurocentric Literary Theory, edited by Hany Rashwan, Rebecca Ruth Gold, and Nasrin Askari (2024); Artists, Writers and The Arab Spring by Riad Ismat (2019); 'Naguib Surur: The Poetics and Politics of Niyāka,' in Conspiracy in Modern Egyptian Literature by Benjamin Koerber (2018); 'Rewriting Resistance: The Revival of Poetry of Dissent in Egypt after January 2011 (Surūr, Najm and Dunqul)' by Atef Botros, in Commitment and beyond: Reflections on/of the Political in Arabic Literature since the 1940s, edited by Friederike Pannewick and Georges Khalil (2015); Egyptian Verse Drama: The Case of Naguib Surur by Gordon Lee Witty (2010); World Encyclopedia of Contemporary Theatre: Volume 4: The Arab World, edited by Don Rubin (2005); The Undergraduate's Companion to Arab Writers and Their Web Sites by Dona S. Straley (2004); 'Folk Themes in the Works of Najib Surur' by Pierre Cachia, in Arabic & Middle Eastern Literature, Volume 3, Issue 2 (2000); ''Arabic Drama Since the Thirties' by Ali al Ra'i, Modern Arabic Literature, edited by M.M. Badawi (1992)

Selected works:

• Shajarat al-zaytūn, 1958 (play) [Olive Tree]
  
• Riḥla fī thulāthiyyat Najīb Maḥfūẓ, 1960 (essays) [A Journey into Naguib Mahfouz's Trilogy]
  
• Luzūm mā yalzam, 1964 (poetry)
• Yāsīn wa-Bahiyya, 1964 (play)
  
• Ḥiwār maʿa Abī al-ʿAlā, 1965 (poetry)
  
• Yāsīn wa-Bahiyya, 1965 (play) [Yassin and Bahia]
• Ḥiwār maʿa Dāntī, 1967 (poetry)
• Yā Bahiyya khabbirī-nī, 1967 (play)
  
• al-Trājīdiyā al-insāniyya, 1968 (poetry)
• Ah yā layl yā qamar!, 1968 (play) [Oh Night, Oh Moon]
  
• Alūh yā Miṣr, 1968 (play) [Hello Egypt]
  
• Mirāmār, 1968 (play)
• al-Kalimat al-mutaqati'ah, 1969 (play) [The Crossword Puzzle]
  
• Hiwār fī al-masraḥ, 1969 (criticism) [A Dialogue about Theatre]
  
• al-Ḥukm qabla al-mudāwala, 1969 (play) [Sentence Before Deliberations]
• al-Dhubāb al-azraq, 1971 [Blue Files]
  
• Humūm al-adab wa al-fann, 1971 (essays) [On Literature and Art]
  
• Mālik al-shaḥḥātīn, 1970 (The King of Beggars, adaptation of Bertolt Brecht's Dreigroschenoper)
  
• al-Dhubāb al-azraq, 1971 (play)
  
• Qulu li-'ayn al-Shams: ma'sah shi'riyah, 1972 (play) [The Eye of the Sun]
• Minīn ajīb al-nāss, 1974 (play) [O, Would That I Had Listeners]
• Brutukulat hukama' rish: shi'r, 1974 (poems) [Protocols of the Elders of the Café Riche]
  
• Rubāʿiyyāt, 1974 (poems) [Quatrains]
• al-Nigma Umm Dayl, 1974 (play) [The Comet]
• Ḥiwār maʿ Lūrd Bayrūn, 1975 (poetry)
• Wathīqa Shaksbīriyya hāmma, 1976 (play)
  
• Afkār junūniyya fī daftar Hamlit, 1977 (play) [Mad Thoughts in Hamlet's Notepad]
• Ah yā layl yā qamar!, 1980 (play)
  
• Hākadhā qāla Juḥā, 1981 (articles)
• Minīn ajīb nās, 1984 (play) [Where Do I Go to Find People]
• Humūm al-adab wa al-fann, 1989 (essay)
  
• al-Aʿmāl al-kāmila, 1993-1997 (works; 4 vols.)
• Kuss-ummiyyāt, 2002 (online)
• Luzūm mā yalzam, 2006 (poetry)
  
• Brūtūkūlāt ḥukamāʾ Rīsh!, 2006 (poetry)
• Riḥla fī thulāthiyyat Najīb Maḥfūẓ, 2007 (essay)
  
• Tahta 'aba'at Abi al-'Ala', 2008 (essays) [Under the Mantle of Abu Alaa]