A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

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by David Tresilian


  3. The Cairo International Book Fair, held every January, attracts thousands of visitors who buy books published across the Arab world

  Nevertheless, while Arab authors now have a greater range of outlets for their work and at least in theory better distribution of it, it still remains the case that Arab writers are poorly professionalized. Publishing contracts are non-standard or non-existent, copyright protection is poor, and books sell in very small numbers given the size of the potential readership. There are few literary agents in the Arab world, and censorship remains a problem in many Arab countries. Furthermore, the present climate of religious conservatism in the Arab world has meant that some ‘secular’ authors have either fallen silent or have gone into exile following threats against them, or they have seen their work banned following press and religious campaigns against it. Under such circumstances, some writers have sought to develop a reputation abroad and in translation instead, though this strategy too is not without its costs.23

  Arabic literature does not exist in isolation, and it can also be looked at comparatively as a variety of ‘postcolonial’ literature, though still a relatively unfamiliar one, as well as a case study in the arena of ‘world literature’.

  Postcolonial studies are perhaps more indebted to Arabic literature than their later inflections might suggest, since one of the foundational texts of this academic discipline, Said’s Orientalism, dealt precisely with representations of the Arab world in Europe and the West. Questions of representation and reception have since become the stock-in-trade of postcolonial studies in universities worldwide, though theorists have tended to restrict themselves to works originally written in English, among them those by Anglo-Indian novelists such as Salman Rushdie, as well as works written for European audiences, such as those by Frantz Fanon.24 In addition to questions of representation should be added the study of translation as such; in other words, of the movement of texts across cultural and linguistic boundaries. Postcolonial studies have done this through an emphasis on hybridity, the creative mixing of forms and languages, but there is another academic field devoted to questions of translation alone, and Arabic literature makes an intriguing subject for anyone working in ‘translation studies’, as it is hoped that this chapter has suggested.25

  A second approach relevant to reading modern Arabic literature is the study of ‘world literature’, recently associated with continental European critics such as Franco Moretti and Pascale Casanova. The former’s ‘Conjectures on World Literature’ in particular put the study of literary geography back on the map, as it were, substituting what he called ‘units that are much smaller or much larger than the text’ such as ‘devices, themes, tropes – or genres and systems’ for individual novels, plays or poems.

  ‘If the text disappears,’ Moretti wrote, ‘it is one of those cases when one can justifiably say, less is more. If we want to understand the system in its entirety, we must accept losing something.’ The ‘system’ Moretti had in mind was the ‘literary world system’, modelled in terms of centre and peripheries using language taken from economics. The same author’s later pieces have sought to show how his proposed ‘graphs, maps and trees’ can be used to understand the spread of literary forms such as the novel from their origins in Europe to the rest of the world, drawing out lines of extension from a mass of detail.26

  Casanova has examined similar issues in her book La République mondiale des lettres.27 She again proposed the existence of a ‘literary world system’, this time modelled in terms of nations competing for dominance within it. Why had Goethe originally shown interest in the notion of ‘world literature’, for example? Because he lived ‘precisely at the moment when Germany was entering international literary space’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century and was contesting the ‘intellectual and literary hegemony’ of France. A country finding itself at the margins of Casanova’s system has the option of trying to build up its literary ‘capital’ and seek out areas of comparative advantage. The system thus has its own form of dynamism, born of competition. Furthermore, writers coming from peripheral areas can draw up strategies for entry and even dominance. According to Casanova, Joyce and Beckett, for example, damned by provinciality, entered the international literary system by adopting the latest aesthetic innovations, thereby gaining recognition. While this came at the price of cutting themselves off from their local Irish roots and audiences, it nevertheless meant that they were able to build up enough prestige to bring about a change of taste among those local audiences.

  Casanova’s book is marvellously inventive. Some of the ‘strategies’ used by the Irish, Latin American, Bulgarian, Czech and other writers she considers in their attempts to conquer international literary space can be seen as reminiscent of those used by Arab authors, either in their decisions to become ‘international’ writers or to remain purely ‘local’ ones.

  The Modern Element

  The advent of modernity in the Arab world has traditionally been given a precise date. Although the picture of the historical development of Arab societies of which this date is a part has since been modified, if not rejected, there is still some justice in supposing that the French invasion and occupation of Egypt in 1798, lasting until French forces were driven out by the English three years later, was a crucial event both in the development of Egyptian society and in that of Middle Eastern and Arab societies more generally. This is so because France’s brief adventure in the Middle East decisively changed the region’s relationship with Europe.

  What changed above all in that relationship was the Arab world’s insulation from European politics and from the strategic calculations of the European powers. Noting that Egypt was likely to become increasingly important to British interests in India, the French sent their most promising young general, Napoleon Bonaparte, to Egypt at the head of invading forces. While the main aim of this was to ‘chase the English from their possessions in the Orient,’ as Talleyrand, French foreign minister, put it at the time, the invasion also had other, subsidiary aims. These included liberating the country from ‘Mamluk tyranny’, re-establishing Ottoman control in the country with the help of France, and taking the ideas of the French Revolution eastwards. As Napoleon put it in a declaration, ‘the Genius of Freedom, which has made the French Republic the arbiter of Europe, now desires that it should be so for the most distant seas and countries,’ including Egypt and other parts of the Middle East.1

  Whether the emphasis is put on French revolutionary altruism, or on a desire to frustrate English power, from this date onwards Egypt, the Eastern Mediterranean, and, with it, the Ottoman Empire of which most Arab countries were then a part, were increasingly subject to European intervention. In short, the famous ‘Eastern Question’ that was to bedevil nineteenth-century diplomacy had begun, and the European powers began to jockey for position amongst themselves, hoping to make gains in the Middle East at each other’s expense, as well as at that of the Ottomans and other local rulers. Ideas originating in Europe, notably modern nationalism, began to gain a foothold, and in the wake of European influence came direct colonial control. Algiers was occupied by French forces in 1830, and by 1847 the hinterland had been brought under French rule. Tunisia was declared a French protectorate in 1881. Egypt was occupied by the British in 1882. Morocco became a French protectorate in 1912. Libya was annexed by Italy also in 1912. Following the break-up of the Ottoman Empire after the First World War, Syria, Lebanon, Palestine, Trans-Jordan and Iraq, all of which had been Ottoman provinces until 1918, were ‘mandated’ to France and Britain, respectively, by the new League of Nations. All this indicates the background of colonialism and dependency against which modern Arabic literature at least at first was written. (Syria and Lebanon went to France, Palestine, trans-Jordan, and Iraq to Britain.)2

  Yet, while European influence in the Arab world sooner or later led to direct European control, it also led to the modernization of Arab societies along lines suggested by the encounter with Europe. In Eg
ypt, for example, a new, explicitly modernizing regime came to power in 1805 following the French invasion. Led by a former Ottoman soldier of Albanian origin, Mohamed Ali, this regime focused on modernizing state and society in an effort to ‘catch up’ with the Europeans in ways being tried at the same time by the Ottoman government in Istanbul. The first Egyptian educational missions were sent to Europe in the 1820s in order to learn from European science and technology; the army was reorganized, as were the state institutions; new schools and educational establishments were founded. Modernization also took place elsewhere in the region. In the countries of the Fertile Crescent (roughly speaking the Levant and Iraq), for example, under tighter Ottoman control, it began in earnest with the tanzimat (reforms) as the authorities in Istanbul attempted to shake up what was then a notoriously ramshackle way of doing things in the Arab provinces of the empire. In the Maghreb, Algeria was brought under French control, destroying pre-colonial society. Local dynasties in Morocco, and, especially, Tunisia, also set out on the path of modernization and reform.3

  In short, the nineteenth century was the period of the ‘Arab rediscovery of Europe’, as a well-known work on the period has it,4 and while it was a period that revealed Ottoman and Arab inferiority with regard to European economic and military power and technology, it also suggested ways in which this could be made up for through the adoption of European ways. However, this adoption, though laudably meant, was also fraught with dangers. Not only could it lead to the development of an increasingly polarized society, part of which was ‘modern’ and looked towards Europe, and part of which remained ‘traditional’ and distrusted the new, foreign ways, but it could also call the foundations of that society as a whole into question. Should Arab societies remain ‘traditional’, for example, and reject the modern ways in an attempt to safeguard their identity, or should they become ‘modern’ and transform themselves on a European pattern at the risk of losing some of the things that made them most themselves? Was there perhaps a third possibility: that the ‘rebirth’ of Arab societies would come about through their modernization along lines suggested by Europe after a long period of Ottoman domination? It was this third possibility that was explored by the pioneering writers of the modern period. While questions of this sort probably confronted all societies at the time that either fell under the influence of Europe or were colonized by one or other of the European states, in the Arab world they gave rise to particularly acute debates.

  By the beginning of the twentieth century, questions about tradition and modernization and about what was authentic and what was foreign in national life had become part of the common currency of Arab intellectual debate, with modernizers wanting to bring Arab societies into line with Europe and traditionalists insisting on the primacy of inherited patterns of thought. While the modernists had mostly been educated in the new institutions, either those set up by modernizing regimes such as in Egypt, or in the mission schools and other institutions set up by foreigners, for example in Lebanon, this was by no means always the case. One of the outstanding figures of the age, the Egyptian writer and intellectual Taha Hussein, for example, was educated at al-Azhar in Cairo, according to the traditional religious curriculum. The story of his absorption of that curriculum and subsequent study in France makes one of the most fascinating life-stories in any language. Hussein’s accumulation of the ‘treasures of popular lore and traditional sciences’, his rediscovery of ‘a more vital and vigorous past’ than that offered at al-Azhar, and his falling ‘under the spell of Westernization’ are parts of a representative intellectual trajectory from an age that described itself as marking the ‘rebirth’ (nahda), or ‘enlightenment’ of Arab societies and culture.5 This rebirth, Hussein and other writers of his generation thought, would come about as a result of a renewed interest and pride in the Arab past and a desire to emulate the modern achievements of the Europeans.

  4. The Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, known as the ‘Dean of Arabic Literature’

  Born in 1889 to a poor rural family, and afflicted by blindness from an early age, Hussein attended village school before registering, in 1902, at al-Azhar in Cairo. This institution, founded a thousand years earlier, was primarily a theology college at the time, training young men in religion. By the time that Hussein attended it, it had fallen into decay, its curriculum fossilized and it having been outflanked by modern institutions that offered superior career options. Indeed, Hussein says in the first volume of his autobiography, An Egyptian Childhood, part of what was to become a three-volume work entitled The Days,6 that his elder brother, who died tragically young of cholera, was destined for medical school, not al-Azhar. While al-Azhar still enjoyed prestige as a centre of traditional and religious culture, though perhaps chiefly in rural areas, its graduates no longer played a major role in the modern economy or in the professions.

  Hussein, a ‘young sheikh’, managed, mostly successfully, to memorize the Qur’an by the time he was nine years old, though not without the sometimes comic lapses of memory recorded in his autobiography. He was a sensitive, solitary child, and perhaps it was thought that, being blind, his best chance of a job would be as an assistant in a religious school. However, if this was the case he was to prove such ideas wrong, going on to become Rector of Cairo University, Egyptian Minister of Education and one of the most important representatives of the country’s modern intelligentsia that tried to find an accommodation between traditional values and developing modern ways, while at the same time working towards a more sophisticated conception of tradition and the renovation of Arab literary culture.

  In The Stream of Days, for example, Hussein gives a fascinating account of student life at al-Azhar in the early years of the twentieth century and the hopes he invested in his education. As a result of being separated from his peers by his blindness, the young boy’s solitude comes across strongly, as does his poverty, as he lies awake at night listening to various creatures scratching about in the walls of his lodgings. However, Hussein also often refers to Mohamed Abdu, who had been a leading teacher at the institution shortly before and had engaged in a struggle for its modernization and for the renovation of religious culture more generally. Hussein’s sympathies clearly lie with ‘the Imam’, and his memoirs are full of references to the uselessness of many of the al-Azhar teachers at the time, together with his contempt for the atmosphere of ‘intrigue, backbiting, [and] imposture’ that reigned in the institution.7

  Rebelling against the ‘gross taste and jaded wits of the Azhar’, Hussein turned away from the official curriculum and towards the study of classical Arabic literature, falling under the influence of men seeking to renovate and develop the country’s intellectual life within the framework of Egyptian and Arab nationalism. He also started to contribute articles to the newspapers of the day. ‘I know of nothing in the world which can exert so strong an influence for freedom, especially on the young, as literature,’ Hussein writes, remembering his efforts to escape from what seemed to him to be the narrow limits of traditional learning as conceived of at al-Azhar. He had, he says, a ‘long-cherished dream of entering the lay world of the tarboush’ at a time ‘when he was sick to death of the turban and all that it implied.’ (Hussein writes in the third person throughout his autobiography, though translations do not always preserve this.) While the ‘tarboush’, or ‘fez’, was part of a modern style of dress, representing the styles of thought then being sought from Europe, the turban represented the traditionalist mentality incarnated by al-Azhar, which, in Hussein’s view, was urgently in need of renovation.

  If there is a single leading theme in Hussein’s autobiography, then it is the broadening of horizons that came about with the widening of his own education, first at al-Azhar, then at the new Egyptian University founded in 1908 along European lines, and then at university in France. By the end of volume two of his memoirs, Hussein has joined the Egyptian University. In the third volume, entitled A Passage to France and not published until the year of Hussein’s
death in 1973, he describes the new forms of teaching and learning that he found there, as well as the developing ambitions these awoke in him. ‘I would come to hold the place in Egypt that Voltaire had occupied in France,’ he writes, staging himself as, like Voltaire, a ‘bringer of enlightenment’ – the translation of the Arabic expression – or at least as a kind of critical gadfly to traditionalist mentality. Hussein’s determination, as well as what must have been his unusual energy and resourcefulness, then took him to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, submitting a thesis on the medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldoun that was supervised by Durkheim.

  Hussein’s experiences are relevant to the creation of modern Arabic literature in the early decades of the twentieth century because they express not only the idea of the ‘rebirth’ of Arab culture through the renovation of tradition and through contact with European ideas, but also the adoption of European literary forms and of a liberal idea of literature. Hussein is sometimes credited with writing the ‘first’ modern autobiography in Arabic in The Days, for example, and other members of his generation are referred to as ‘pioneers’, being responsible for the first novel, the first short stories and the first plays written in Arabic. Moreover, these works, heavily influenced by the translation into Arabic of European novels, plays and other materials at the time, held out the possibility of giving new purpose to literature in general. While this was, or could be, a source of entertainment, as perhaps it had traditionally been in Arab societies in which literary writing was admired above all for the writer’s skills, it could also serve as a form of veiled instruction and as a vehicle for the articulation of social themes, as had been the case, for example, in the nineteenth-century European novel. There was a marked connection with the development of national consciousness. Conditions for the emergence of the pioneering works written by members of Hussein’s generation are picked out below, together with various works and authors.

 

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