FILE - Cairo Criminal Court overturned an earlier court order to impose a travel ban on novelist Ahmed Naji over his sexually explicit novel “Estikhdam Al Hayah” (Using Life)
CAIRO – 30 May 2018: Cairo Criminal Court decided on Tuesday to lift restrictions on traveling abroad for controversial and recently- vindicated writer Ahmed Najy.
Following a long streak of court battles, Najy was stripped of charges relating to harming public decency through his novel "Istkhdam el-Hayah” (Using life) that was believed to have contained sexually-explicit content.
The case dates back to 2015, when a reader of state-run Akhbar Al-Adab lodged a complaint against Naji claiming that he was offended by an excerpt from the novel “Istkhdam el-Hayah” for containing explicit content.
In his complaint, the reader said that once he read the excerpt, “his heartbeat got quicker and his blood pressure lowered.”
In October 2015, Central Cairo Prosecution referred Naji and editor in chief of Akhbar el-Adab (Literature News) to the Criminal Court, stating that there was evidence that confirms the involvement of the defendants in harming public morality.
In his re-trial, Cairo Criminal Court overturned the two-year imprisonment sentence handed down to Naji over his sexually explicit novel “Estikhdam Al Hayah” (Using Life) and fined him LE 20,000.
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