UPDATE: Ahmed Naji was released from prison December 22, 2016, after serving 1 year of a 2 year sentence. He will appear again in court in April to determine if he is acquitted or if he must serve the remainder of his sentence.

Ahmed Naji is an Egyptian novelist who is currently serving a two-year sentence for “injuring public modesty,” for which he was sentenced on February 20, 2016. Naji is a prominent author associated with Egypt’s avant garde movement, and was charged based on the contents of his third novel The Use of Life (Arabic: Istikhdam al-Hayah.) In the novel, a work of fiction about a mysterious secret society, characters smoke, drink alcohol, and have sexual relationships.

Naji’s novel was originally published in Lebanon, and required approval by Egyptian censors before entering the country, as is the case for all imported literature. His work was given approval by the censorship authority, and was published in Egypt without issue.

In August 2014, issue 1097 of the state-run literary journal Cultural News (Arabic: Akhbar Al-Adab) published chapter six of The Use of Life as an excerpt. It was in that journal the the 65-year-old Hani Saleh Tawfik read Naji’s work. Tawfik claimed that the sexual content of the excerpt caused him to experience heart palpitations, a drop in blood pressure, and general sickness, in addition to threatening his sense of morality.

State prosecutors sued both the author Ahmed Naji and Cultural News’ editor-in-chief Tarek el-Taher on the behalf of the morally offended reader. On January 2, 2016 both men were acquitted, but when the state prosecution appealed to a higher court, Naji was sentenced to two years in prison while Taher was fined roughly $1,250 USD for publishing the material.

Two years is the maximum prison sentence for the charges Naji faced.

In a bizarre confusion of fact and fiction, prosecutors seemed unable to grasp the difference between acts undertaken by Naji and acts undertaken by the characters of his work of fiction. Naji recalled that at one point, because his protagonist smokes hashish, the prosecution threatened to charge him with dealing drugs.

The language used by Ahmed Naji in his novel is not uncommon to Egyptian literature. His writing style draws on a form of classical Arabic similar to that found in the Quran, and uses themes common to classical Arabic literature. This includes the work’s straightforward description of body parts and their function. Naji stated that, indeed, some of the words considered to be against public morality can be found in the Hadith, traditional biographies of the Prophet Mohammed.

Ahmed Naji’s imprisonment has been met with extreme criticism in Egypt. Seven framers of Egypt’s 2014 Constitution have called the case against Naji unconstitutional, and over 500 Egyptian writers and artists signed a joint statement condemning the government’s attempt to silence free expression.

Ahmed Naji is currently imprisoned in Cairo, Egypt, where he is scheduled to remain until February 20, 2018. You can read chapter six of The Use of Life translated in English here.