In winning the 2025 International Prize for Arabic Fiction (IPAF) for his third novel The Prayer of Anxiety, Mohamed Samir Nada constructs a fictional Upper Egyptian village—Naga Al-Manassi—and uses President Gamal Abdel Nasser’s resignation speech after the 1967 defeat as the novel’s point of departure.
Blending satirical political allegory with speculative fiction, the novel unfolds through eight testimonies—six men and two women—after a comet crashes into the village. Most of the villagers are illiterate, working manual trades: a beekeeper, a tanner, a carpenter.
The regime’s representative, Khalil Al-Khouga, prints a one-page newspaper, Voice of the War, distributed by his son Hakeem, whose tongue was mysteriously amputated. A minefield encircles the village after rumours spread that enemy paratroopers might land there.
Only camouflaged military vehicles can enter, bringing Al-Khouga supplies and postal orders sent by conscripted sons, 25 percent of which he skims “for the war effort.” He also traffics in hashish and alcohol.
For ten years, no children are born—except one: the carpenter’s wife conceives after menopause. Children memorize the Qur’an but cannot read or write, a metaphor for rote learning devoid of knowledge.
Throughout the novel, ghostly scenes of fleeing or fallen soldiers recur, evoking the trauma of 1967. The first narrator is Sheikh Ayyub, son of a saint believed to have returned from the dead. After the comet’s fall, he loses all his hair—like the rest of the village—and envies Al-Khouga’s authority, believing himself more worthy.
A collective “epidemic of anxiety” engulfs the Naga. Villagers isolate themselves, forbid their children from attending Qur’an classes, and cover their baldness. Movement becomes sluggish, as if turtle-like; they fear light and recoil from sound.
Graffiti appears on house walls, exposing personal secrets. One accuses Wedad, the midwife, of killing deformed newborns. She confesses, claiming divine permission. Now obsolete due to a decade of infertility, she withdraws completely, waiting for death.
Noah, the beekeeper, a sceptic, turns to drink. After the 1952 Revolution, he was arrested and tortured for information on a fugitive leftist. Later, when his only son, Murad, is conscripted illegally, as an only son, Noah begs Al-Khouga for news, in vain. In an act of rebellion, he breaks Nasser’s statue.
He suspects Al-Khouga of inserting a fabricated verse into the Qur’an, crediting Nasser with the liberation of Jerusalem—an outrage Sheikh Ayyub does not contest.
Others, like Mahrous the tanner, accept Al-Khouga’s propaganda uncritically. But even Mahrous is tormented with worry over his two sons, who volunteered for the army and sent back only money.
Akef, the animal breeder, proposes digging a tunnel under the minefield. Mahgoub the carpenter sabotages the plan, then adopts it himself, convinced his miracle child is destined to be a prophet, a belief shaped by a Jewish fisherman’s stories of Hebrew prophets.
Wedad’s adopted daughter, Shawahi, a belly dancer, represents unrestrained desire. Alone with Hakeem, she is one of the few whose hair remains. She opens a bar with Sheikh Gaafer’s blessing, and village elders become regulars.
Zakaria the weaver is the son of a Palestinian fedayee who returned to Egypt post-Nakba. Convinced the Arab armies betrayed Palestine, Zakaria becomes deeply disillusioned. His sons volunteer for the war to escape the Naga. When he challenges Al-Khouga, he is drowned. One son, Saadoon, dreams of becoming a doctor.
The final testimony is from Sheikh Gaafer himself. Having once risen from the dead, he reflects on the “bliss of the grave” and admits he’d rather doubt God than question the sanctity of the Leader, because the latter carries harsher consequences. In solidarity with the village, he joins their invented “Prayer of Anxiety,” a ritual created by Sheikh Ayyub to exorcise communal fear.
But the prayer is never performed. Noah interrupts, urging the congregation to rise. “The people believed in the idol’s sanctity,” he says, “and the idol believed in his own holiness. So he toured among his subjects, spreading mischief and libertinism.”
In the final chapter, we learn that Hakeem—the silent, tongueless boy—has been the narrator all along. Shawahi saves him during the villagers’ fiery raid on Al-Khouga’s house, where many die. Another group tosses the remains of Nasser’s statue into the canal. The regime, claiming contagion, hunts down and kills fleeing villagers.
Eleven years later, Hakeem is institutionalized. Unable to speak, he writes 1,500 pages to his psychiatrist, who turns out to be Saadoon Zakaria. Hakeem implies that Al-Khouga murdered his mother when she discovered that Nasser had died and might tell others. The doctor concludes that Hakeem’s narrative blurs memory and hallucination.
The novel is divided into 13 chapters, each prefaced with four lines from Abdel-Halim Hafez’s patriotic songs. Some sections drag—particularly the repeated effects of the comet—and at times, illiterate characters articulate complex metaphors. Questions of plausibility arise: how did Shawahi and Wedad survive for ten years indoors? Did Sheikh Gaafer’s lengthy monologue on the afterlife add meaningfully to the plot?
Still, The Prayer of Anxiety is a dense and ambitious allegory of state propaganda, historical trauma, and collective paralysis. Nada deliberately obscures the boundary between truth and delusion, leaving readers, like the villagers, uncertain of what is real and what is myth.
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