The Reader’s Consciousness – Sayyid Mahmood

A few days ago I attended a seminar at the 19th Alexandria International Book Fair, organized by the Alexandria Library. This year’s book fair has achieved many positive developments, and its cultural program includes many important seminars, in which many influential figures in cultural life have participated.
But I noticed – and no doubt others have noticed too – that Alexandria’s creative contribution to the exhibition has declined, which is a matter of concern and reflection, especially because Alexandria is not a marginal city but an active central city as a global cultural pillar, and it also has cultural players and creatives in many fields, so the lack of attention to their presence needs to be re-examined.
I am sure that the library director, the great sociologist Dr. Ahmed Zayed, will take this observation into account in order to increase the library’s influence in its general environment, especially since he has made extraordinary efforts to follow up on this issue. Many of the exhibition’s seminars were prepared by an outstanding team, and he has also tirelessly sought to increase the budget allocated to the project. Reading has also announced several competitions whose main goal is to cultivate reading habits and attract new groups of young readers.
Among the seminars I was able to attend, I would like to focus on the discussions, one of which was about horror literature, a topic that deserves attention, tracking and analysis due to its influence, the authors of this literature, the publishing and distribution market and reading trends not only in Egypt but in most countries of the world.
As followers know, for various reasons, most of today’s book sales are almost exclusively between crime books and horror literature, and I was keen to follow the discussions that took place at the seminar, because what I had read about this phenomenon did not satisfy my interest, nor did it answer. Therefore, I wanted to understand its true scale by listening directly to some influential stars, most of whom have a large audience, many of whom consider themselves students of the school founded by the late Ahmed Khaled Tawfiq and Dr. Nabil Farouk.
In addition to the testimonies given by male and female writers who participated in the seminar; what really sparked my interest was the awareness of readers who attended and talked about it, many of whom recounted their connection with horror literature and the reasons for their passion for its content, reasons that revealed a limited understanding of the value of literature in general, its cognitive function, and its classification criteria, in addition to the lack of the same aesthetic experience that every true reader needs.
One audience member told about her experience writing a horror novel about members of the spirits that besiege the protagonist of the novel, but the author said that whenever she wanted to write a particular chapter, the computer would malfunction for no understandable reason, but she attributed the cause of the malfunction to the presence of spirits in the text, as she confirmed that one of her colleagues had read a draft of the novel and the spirits completely ruined her life, and conversations about spirits and their representation in life and religious texts became prevalent.
Likewise, from my point of view, most of the comments made by these different audiences are an offense to this type of literature, they limit its role to entertainment and adventure and nothing else, and they also interpret creative texts based on this creative imagination, and bring them back to the religious circle instead of imagination, and their judgment depends on the extent to which it conforms to a superficial understanding of religion that responds first and foremost to the beliefs of these individuals with limited culture and education, in the supernatural and miracles, in addition to their complete acceptance of the role of jinns, demons and other invisible things, which are far from science and have no real connection with what Dr. Ahmed Khalid Tawfiq is looking for in his exploration… Emphasize the value and status of science, instead of completely denying it as those who see themselves as readers and standard setters do, which is an impasse and a disaster.