Prison literature and Torture
Writers in the Arab world have often served as a voice that questions, arguments, criticises, and evaluates society. For many novelists their writing in the periods of radical and societal change that the Arab world has seen after 1948, has not always coincided with the political and social goals of the regimes. Many authors have experienced arrests, imprisonment, and torture, leading to a separate genre in literature: Prison Literature (‘Adāb al-Sijn’).
Three types of prison literature can be distinguished: literature written inside the prison, literature written after imprisonment, and fictional prison literature.
This section will include these three types of prison literature in a general section, followed by these subsections: Effects of Prison and Torture, Female Prison Experiences, and Infamous Prisons.