A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  Finally, a major source for the drama of this early period is al-Hakim’s memoirs, notably The Prison of Life. In this book al-Hakim gives a picture both of the pioneers discussed in this chapter and of his own early thinking, for example that behind the writing of Return of the Spirit (‘an effort it was my duty to exert, to the development of the genre’ of the novel in Arabic). He describes the condition of Arab theatre as he found it in Cairo in the 1910s and 1920s, with originally Lebanese impresarios, such as Georges Abyad, ‘Egyptianizing’ or ‘Arabizing’, in other words loosely ‘translating’, European plays for Arab audiences. This was a process that could lead to some fascinating conundrums: ‘when adapting a foreign play in which a man and a woman met, we were getting into a can of worms. How could we put on an Egyptian stage a man and a woman face to face if they were not related?’ (The wearing of the full, ‘Turkish’ face veil was de rigeur for women of the middle and upper classes in Egypt at the time and would remain so until well into the 1920s.)

  Wanting to write plays in the manner of ‘Ibsen, Pirandello, Bernard Shaw, [and] Maeterlinck’, al-Hakim found himself without an audience and in need of a ‘serious theatrical environment’. ‘The fact is,’ he writes, that ‘literature and a career solely in it were not taken seriously in a society that gave respect, prestige, and wealth only to Pashas [aristocrats] or to men of authority and position in government.’ This complaint is echoed by Naguib Mahfouz in his portrait of Kamal, a struggling journalist and writer to whom he bears more than a passing resemblance, in the second and third volumes of his Cairo Trilogy. Many things would change when states across the Arab world began seriously to support the arts following the end of colonial rule after the Second World War, though with sometimes mixed results, as we shall see.

  The Novel and the New Poetry

  Political circumstances in the Arab world in the decades following the end of the Second World War were in some ways propitious and in some ways unpropitious for literature. The end of European colonial control in the 1950s meant that greater stress than ever before was laid on the development of education and culture. This could not help but be positive for literature, and many Arab writers welcomed the removal of regimes linked to the colonial order, for example in Egypt in 1952 or Iraq in 1958. However, with the new regimes came new pressures on Arab writers. Not only did the revolutionary regimes insist upon the support of writers and intellectuals, but those who did not support the new regimes could expect censorship or worse. As the decades wore on, and the hopes that the new regimes had given rise to were either disappointed or defeated, it became clear that though there were now more professional writers than ever, together with a great deal more money to support them, their lives were in many respects scarcely easier than they had been before.

  Some of these pressures can be seen in the career of the giant of the writing of the post-war period and of modern Arabic literature more generally, the late Egyptian novelist Naguib Mahfouz. No introduction to the subject would be complete without extended consideration of his work, and non-Arabic-speaking readers are fortunate in that almost all of Mahfouz’s work in book form has been translated into European languages, including much of his juvenilia, journalism and other writings. Mahfouz, unlike almost any other modern Arab writer, and unlike even figures of the stature of those discussed in the previous chapter, can thus be seen in the round by non-Arabic-speaking readers and his career appreciated as a whole.

  7. Naguib Mahfouz, the greatest of all Arab novelists

  Born in 1911 to a middle-class family in Cairo, Mahfouz graduated from Cairo University, then called Fu’ad 1 University, in 1934 with a degree in Philosophy, and he seems at first to have intended to follow an academic career. However, instead he joined the Egyptian civil service, eventually retiring nearly four decades later. Following a period in which he experimented with historical novels, he found his true subject in the lives of the Cairo lower and lower-middle-classes. Early novels such as Midaq Alley and The Beginning and the End demonstrated a commitment to realism,1 dwelling in particular on the explosive social inequalities of the post-war years. A decade later, in 1956, Mahfouz published his greatest work, the Cairo Trilogy of Palace Walk, Palace of Desire and Sugar Street, novels that trace the life of a Cairo family across successive generations from the early decades of the twentieth century to the late 1940s against a background of social change.2 This work, almost unparalleled in its scope and richness in modern Arabic literature, established Mahfouz as the major novelist of his generation.

  While Mahfouz was to live for a further five decades, later establishing himself as a leading experimentalist, the Cairo Trilogy is perhaps his single most important achievement. One reason for this is its ambition and scope: running to over 1,200 pages in the omnibus edition, the work allows the novelist to record historical events from the nationalist agitation against the British in the early decades of the century in volume one, to the politics and pre-revolutionary disturbances following the Second World War in volume three, making the work a primary source for Egyptian history and the development of Arab society. However, beyond this perhaps Mahfouz’s achievement in the Trilogy lies in his having produced an Arabic novel that unites the European form of the realist novel with local Egyptian content, exploring the public, and perhaps even more importantly, the private, lives of his characters in unprecedented detail. Rather like the characters created by the great nineteenth-century European novelists, such as Dickens or Flaubert, these characters have since detached themselves from their author’s control and entered the culture in their own right.3

  Few readers are likely to forget the character of Ahmad Abd al-Jawad, ‘so wealthy, strong, and handsome, who stayed out night after night’ on various jaunts, or that of his wife, Amina, waiting patiently for him at home, in volume one of the Trilogy. Nor are they likely to be blind to the careful way in which the characters of the couple’s children, Fahmy, Yasin (Amina’s stepson), Kamal, Khadija and Aisha are drawn. Episodes from this novel, such as Amina’s visit to the Mosque of al-Husayn accompanied by her youngest son Kamal, causing her to be temporarily expelled from the family home, have something of the same standing in Arab culture as, say, Pip’s visits to the aged Miss Havisham in Dickens’s Great Expectations have in English. Mahfouz has Amina explain ironically to her son, a portrait of the author, that there is nothing wrong in his not being as good-looking as his brothers, or in his having a head that is out of all proportion to his body. Had not the martyred head of al-Husayn, the young boy asks himself before his trip to the mosque with his mother, ‘after being severed from his immaculate body, chose[n] Egypt from all the world for its resting place? Immaculate, it came to Cairo, glorifying God, and settled to the ground where al-Husayn’s shrine now stands.’4

  Few readers, either, are likely to forget the elegant way in which characters and relationships established in volume one are developed in the two following volumes, or the way in which Mahfouz skilfully mixes personal tragedy with large, public themes, such as occurs with the death of Fahmy during anti-British demonstrations at the end of volume one. ‘Who could have imagined this,’ Fahmy asks himself before his death at the hands of British soldiers. ‘There’s never been a demonstration like this before. A hundred thousand people, wearing modern fezzes and traditional turbans – students, workers, civil servants, Muslim and Christian religious leaders, the judges … This is Egypt.’ This Egypt, complicated enough in 1919, though temporarily united against the British, has become a good deal more so by the end of volume three of the Trilogy, in which the children of volume one now have children of their own. Kamal’s own nephews, Ahmad and Abd al-Muni’m Shawkat, for example, are now on opposite sides of the political divide, the former a journalist and member of an illegal leftist party, in which he meets women of the type that his grandmother, illiterate throughout her life, could scarcely have imagined, the latter a member of the Muslim Brotherhood and someone who has directly opposing views of Egyptian identity and society. B
oth men find themselves in prison at the end of the Trilogy.

  Following the publication of the Trilogy, Mahfouz was silent for several years, only beginning to publish a new novel, Children of the Alley, in the Egyptian newspaper al-Ahram in 1959.5 This, however, marked a new departure, and it began a long period of experiment. For while the Trilogy represented one answer to the question of the form the Arabic novel could take, Children of the Alley looked for inspiration to religious narrative and to allegory rather than to realism. A kind of history of the world in five chapters, the novel recounts the stories of five main characters, Adham, Gabal, Rifaa, Qassem and Arafa, the first loosely modelled on the story of Adam, expelled by God from Paradise, the four that follow based on the lives of key figures in the Judaeo-Christian and Muslim religious traditions. Gabal, for example, recapitulates the story of Moses, while Rifaa and Qassem draw upon the lives of Jesus and the Prophet Mohamed, respectively. Arafa, for his part, represents modern man whose attitudes are more scientific than religious. Owing in part to its religious content, the novel is, among other things, a fascinating case study of the limits of literary expression in Egyptian and Arab society and how these have changed over time.6

  8. For most of his career Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz published with the Cairo publisher Maktabat Misr, which gave his books a perhaps misleading visual identity. The cover of Mahfouz’s novel Sugar Street is pictured

  Mahfouz’s interests shifted again in the 1960s, with the publication of The Thief and the Dogs in 1961, the first of what was to become a series of short novels that are very different in form and tone from what had gone before. This novel, like those that followed it, shows the influence of European existentialism, then at its height in the Arab world thanks to the reception given to the work of Sartre. The story of a thief, Said Mahran, who has been released from prison and is now determined to avenge himself on the false friends who helped to send him there, the novel is typical of this phase in Mahfouz’s career in its focus on sometimes extreme states of mind, often through the use of internal monologue, and on the predicament of a single character. It was followed by works such as Autumn Quail, The Search, The Beggar, Adrift on the Nile and Miramar, all short novels, often experimental in form and typically told from the perspective of a first-person narrator, or narrators, whose various predicaments form their subject matter.7

  In Autumn Quail, Mahfouz focuses on Isa ad-Dabbagh, a promising civil servant whose career has been cut short by the purges that followed the 1952 Revolution. Finding himself without a role in life, ad-Dabbagh slowly loses himself in dissipation even as his friends are able to adjust themselves to the new circumstances. There is a similar pattern in The Search and The Beggar. In the former novel, crime seems to offer a way out of crisis; in the latter, life seems to offer little purpose aside from private gain, particularly when public affairs are firmly under one-party rule. While this is not enough for the novel’s main character, Omar al-Hamzawi, a successful lawyer afflicted with a kind of existential malaise, it seems to suit his friends and colleagues well enough. One of these, a successful writer and journalist, advises him to abandon his search for any other purpose in life. ‘Be content with popular acclaim and the material rewards,’ he tells him. After all, ‘the art of our age is simply diversion,’ like ‘selling popcorn and watermelon seeds.’

  The idea that political circumstances, because deeply undemocratic, have removed a sense of purpose from literature is repeated in Adrift on the Nile, this novel also suggesting that artists and writers can nevertheless now expect to be rewarded as they never have been before as the ornaments of the regime. A group of professionals – ‘the director of an accounts department, an art critic, an actor, an author, a lawyer, a civil servant’– meet regularly on a houseboat on the Nile. ‘For the first half of the day we earn our living, and then afterwards we all get into a little boat and float off into the blue’. The novel consists of fragments plucked from this drug-induced haze, these also being recycled as the subject matter for a literary work by one of the characters. Great play is made of the forms that creative work can now take, it having broken with traditional realism, among them the type of experiment associated with ‘the Absurd’. The problem is that none of these new options seems to fill the void, either because, the real decisions being made elsewhere, a writer’s choices are trivial ones, or because no choice a writer makes will bring him an audience outside the circle of his peers. All of these are, like him, ‘adrift on the Nile’. As one of the characters puts it in the earlier novel The Search, from ‘anti-novel … to the Theatre of the Absurd … If you can’t attract the public’s attention by your profound thoughts, try running naked through [Cairo’s] Opera Square’.

  Perhaps the best novel Mahfouz wrote during this stage of his career is Miramar.8 Set in a small guesthouse or pension (the ‘Miramar’) in Alexandria in the 1960s, the novel is divided into five parts, each of which relates the same material from a different character’s point of view. While the novel suggests considerable scepticism about the achievements of the 1952 Revolution and the role of the writer under the revolutionary regime, this scepticism is voiced by characters who are themselves in various ways compromised, the author himself disappearing into the background.

  For Hosni Allam, a ‘gentleman of property’ ruined by the Revolution, things are quite clear-cut: ‘… you don’t believe any of this rubbish about socialism and equality. It’s simply power … Have you actually seen any of that gang walking around in poverty lately?’ But his views are contextualized both by those of Sarhan el-Beheiry, a member of the Socialist Union, the single party of the time, and by those of Amer Wagdi, a retired liberal journalist. El-Beheiry has done well out of the new order, and he asks his fellow guests to be reasonable: ‘look at it this way: what other system could we have in its place? If you think clearly, you’ll realize that it has to be either the Communists or the Muslim Brotherhood. Which of those would you prefer …?’ Wagdi, though nostalgic for the pre-revolutionary liberal order and ‘living proof that the past was no illusion’, reflects that whatever the excesses of the regime’s nationalism, one day the city ‘had to be claimed by its people,’ as a once cosmopolitan Egypt has now been claimed by an aggressively nationalistic regime.

  Miramar’s display of pluralism might be Mahfouz’s way of hedging his bets: a quintessentially liberal writer, his natural bent in this novel is to give a voice to every side without appearing to endorse any. Nevertheless, he tips the scales a little in his treatment of the servant girl, Zohra, a newcomer from the countryside. It was for her, or for people like her, that the Revolution at least in part was made, yet now she appears like ‘a faithful dog astray, looking for its master’. She is indifferent to politics, and she is rejected by el-Beheiry following his clumsy attempts to seduce her: what’s the good of marrying a girl like Zohra, el-Beheiry asks himself, ‘if it doesn’t give me a push up the social ladder?’ The only character who comes close to Zohra, this lost representative of ‘the people’, is Amer Wagdi, himself a survival from the pre-revolutionary regime, though Mahfouz does not suggest that nostalgia represents any kind of solution. There is no such easy exit from the Pension Miramar. This novel, hinting at the corruption and murky compromises that characterized life in Egypt in the 1960s, might be compared to The Man Who Lost His Shadow, written at the same time by the prolific Cairo journalist and writer Fathy Ghanem. In Desmond Stewart’s gripping translation, the latter novel conveys what success under the new regime could involve, and it is told in a similar experimental style.9

  Among Mahfouz’s later novels, Respected Sir, Karnak Café and Wedding Song might be picked out.10 Each continues the preoccupations of the 1960s, with Karnak Café being a tour de force of protest against the excesses of the Nasser regime. Mirrors is a rewarding work, both in formal terms (it is written in short, named sections, sometimes almost entirely in dialogue), and in terms of its content (a series of sketches of the unnamed narrator’s friends and acquaintances, bui
lding up into a kind of portrait gallery of the Egyptian middle class). It contains some of the most telling, though typically veiled, indications of Mahfouz’s own political and social attitudes.11 However, in the 1970s Mahfouz’s writing also entered a new phase, as he began to experiment with new forms, bringing him close to the experiments carried out at the same date by the younger writers of the ‘generation of the 1960s’ in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world. These are discussed in Chapter 5. While Mahfouz’s writings from this time onwards will not strike every reader as being among his best, their consistent search for new forms and subject matter bears witness to a continually exploratory mind. They include works such as The Harafish, Arabian Nights and Days and The Journey of Ibn Fattouma.12 The first of these, written in the shadow of the riots that broke out in Cairo in January 1977, is often considered Mahfouz’s last great work, the disturbances of the time causing him to revisit the theme of the formation of modern Egypt and the connections between the old, pre-modern system and the increasingly troubled modern state. With regard to what might be seen as consistently his best work, on the other hand, published between the 1940s and the 1960s, the foreign reader might well agree with the Iraqi critic who writes that Mahfouz was not only the writer who, more than any other, did the most to develop the Arabic novel, ‘rooting’ the form in Arab culture, but that he was also in his own way ‘the most critical, the most radical and the most subversive of all Arab writers’.13

  Among Egyptian writers, Mahfouz’s greatest rival in the 1950s and 1960s was Yusuf Idris, a short-story writer, dramatist and journalist, whose work compares interestingly with his. Whereas Mahfouz always tended to disappear behind his books, fashioning a self-deprecating public personality, Idris had an arguably closer relationship with the regime and a rather different conception of literature.