An Egyptian government minister has been ordered to withdraw a book from sale after a court found she had plagiarised work from a journalist.
Culture Minister Gihan Zaki was found in breach of the intellectual property rights of author Soheir Abdel Hamid in a biography of Egyptian aristocrat Kout El Kouloub.
In its final decision, Egypt's Court of Cassation confirmed an earlier verdict by the Economic Court, under which Ms Zaki was ordered to pay 100,000 Egyptian pounds ($2,050) in compensation to Ms Abdel Hamid and withdraw the book from circulation. The latest ruling is not subject to appeal.
The government has yet to announce any move regarding Ms Zaki’s position, but the ruling has already raised questions about ministerial vetting, accountability and the credibility of Egypt’s cultural leadership at home and abroad.
Ms Abdel Hamid filed the lawsuit in July last year, alleging that large sections of her book, The Assassination of Kout El Kouloub Al‑Demerdashiya, Lady of the Palace, had been copied into Ms Zaki’s work, Coco Chanel and Kout El Kouloub: Braids of Formation and Treason.
Ms Abdel Hamid's book was published in 2022. Ms Zaki's book was launched at the 55th Cairo International Book Fair in 2024.
The lower court had appointed a three-member panel of intellectual property experts to compare the two volumes. It found extensive copying and long, unattributed passages from Ms Abdel Hamid’s book, to the point that the court ruled that Ms Zaki's text had lost its independent creative character.
The panel estimated that about 50 per cent of the original work had been plagiarised, and concluded that Ms Zaki had exceeded any permissible level of quotation or fair use.
Ms Zaki lodged two appeals in September last year after the Economic Court ruled against her.
In an interview with a local news outlet after the ruling, Ms Abdel Hamid said Ms Zaki had previously sought an out‑of‑court settlement and asked her to drop the case “in exchange for anything”, but that she had refused.
According to her resume, Ms Zaki holds a PhD in Egyptology from Universite Lumiere Lyon 2 in France and has built a career in academia, heritage diplomacy and international cultural institutions.
She was an adviser to Egypt's Ministry of Antiquities and Unesco's Cairo office until 2012, when she became the first woman to lead the Egyptian Academy of Fine Arts in Rome, a post she held until 2019.
She went on to lead the Grand Egyptian Museum as chief executive starting in May 2024 before being replaced by Ahmed Ghoneim, the museum’s current head, just five months later.
She was appointed Egypt's Culture Minister in February this year, becoming the third woman to hold the post.
The court's ruling has prompted criticism of Ms Zaki, with commentators highlighting the contradiction between her role as guardian of Egypt’s cultural heritage and intellectual property and the fact that she plagiarised another author’s research and text.
