A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  Born in 1927 in the Egyptian Delta to a relatively prosperous family, and a medical student in Cairo during the last years of the prerevolutionary regime, in his work Idris, like Mahfouz, attempted to forge a national literature, though for him this meant a greater focus on the lives of the poor and a more direct approach to the exposure of injustice and hypocrisy. Whereas Mahfouz cultivated an unruffled public image, Idris typically presented himself as a passionate, even angry, man.14 From his student days onwards, when he was arrested for left-wing political activities, Idris was a more obviously ‘committed’ writer than Mahfouz, arguing that literature should assist in the process of social change and in the struggle to bring in a more just social order. Like many writers at the time, he welcomed the 1952 Revolution and the collapse of the hated monarchical regime, identifying the agent of social change in the Nasser regime that replaced it. Perhaps inevitably he was disappointed in that regime’s actual record, becoming more and more disillusioned in later life and less and less productive in literary terms.

  Idris’s first collection of short stories, The Cheapest Nights, appeared in 1954, and, together with the volumes that swiftly followed it, contains some magnificent stories, some of the best written in Arabic, including ‘All on a Summer’s Night’, ‘The Dregs of the City’ and ‘The Shame’, filmed as The Sin in 1965 with Egyptian actress Faten Hamama in the lead role. Later pieces that have been widely noticed include the longer stories ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Black Policeman’.15 The former story is a study of the psychology of killing, the latter of the effects of torture, not on the tortured but on those doing the torturing.

  ‘All on a Summer’s Night’ is set in the Egyptian countryside and is the story of a group of boys, farm labourers, who meet by the irrigation canals on summer nights to dream of a better life, or at least of a life not so dominated by toil and sexual and other forms of frustration. ‘A handful of boys … their muddy faces full of cracks, their clothes in rags, their faces an indefinite blur of tanned hide’, they dream of going to the nearby town of Mansoura. This dream, however, is no sooner realized than it ends in an outbreak of violence and in the frustrated realization that ‘we were wretchedly poor, and that there was nothing in our homes but barking dogs and roaring fathers and screeching mothers and the suffocating smoke of the stove.’ ‘The Shame’ also ends in frustration and defeat. The story of Fatma, a young girl wrongly suspected of breaking the strict honour code that governs sexual behaviour in her village, it shows Fatma being eventually vindicated, though not before horrific violence is done to her.

  9. Still from the film of The Sin by Yusif Idris, made in 1965 with Egyptian actress Faten Hamama in the lead role

  Idris’s description of such modest lives is repeated in ‘The Dregs of the City’, in which a prim young judge, carried away by the obsequiousness he thinks of as his due, seduces a female servant from a poor area of the city. This he does mainly out of idleness, but also out of a desire to assert his power over her, the story pointing to connections between class difference and sexual exploitation. At the end of the story, the judge seeks out his servant among the ‘dregs of the city’, suspecting her of having stolen his watch. For a moment he feels ashamed at the performance he is putting on before this miserable woman: standing in the squalor of her home, demanding the return of a cheap watch, he catches a glimpse of the ridiculous figure he cuts. He feels much better when driving back into the better parts of the city, once the ‘orderly streets come into view’, where the ‘people are clean-shaven and well dressed and their features are fine.’

  Idris saw his writing as a mode of intervention in contemporary life, which is why, later in his career, he insisted that he could not engage in literary writing with the streets of Cairo flooded with sewage water, public services having broken down as a result of years of mismanagement, and with ‘economic anarchy … rampant’. Instead, he stepped up his activities as a journalist, contributing a regular column to the newspaper al-Gumhuriyya throughout the 1960s and to al-Ahram from the 1970s onwards. Moreover, Idris wanted to produce a ‘truly Egyptian’ national literature that should serve as a series of ‘revolutionary blasts’ against present conditions. He disliked both the ‘pale imitation of European literature fashionable in the late forties’, consisting of what he saw as the ‘aestheticism and the elitist conception of literature still fostered by “grand old men” like Taha Hussein’ and the result of the earlier generation’s desire to construct modern Arabic literature on the European model. He commented bitterly on what he saw as the ‘drudgery’ of Mahfouz’s Cairo Trilogy, for him a sort of vast pastiche of European realism.

  However, Idris also disliked the experiments with the Arab ‘heritage’, in other words with pre-modern literary materials, that other writers were turning to in a desire to produce a literature less contaminated by foreign influences. ‘Our cultural heritage is crammed with nonsense,’ he wrote, ‘so much so that when contemplating those hundreds of thousands of books in the National Library I curse the day we learnt to write Arabic.’ Perhaps Lytton Strachey felt something similar when contemplating what he felt were the cartloads of stuff produced by the British nineteenth-century writers he satirized in Eminent Victorians. Perhaps one can see in Idris a figure like Ismail in Hakki’s fable The Lamp of Umm Hashim, desiring to liberate himself from the past, even at the risk of smashing it entirely, yet at the same time seeing in that past reflections of the deepest parts of his personality.

  Idris wrote of the ‘huge, strange gulf that separates our written language from the simple and fluent idiom in which we speak’, meaning that ‘literature’, elevated conceptions of which Idris disliked, almost inevitably sounded artificial for reasons explored earlier in this book. This gulf was social as much as intellectual, separating the educated classes from the masses, and Idris dramatizes such issues in his stories, not only in pieces like ‘The Dregs of the City’, where the realities of the class structure are exposed, but also in those stories where ‘preachers, authorities and reform-minded intellectuals … deliver ex cathedra speeches to admiring or stunned peasants … their grandiloquence [being] only partly understood, if at all.’ He had a ‘deep-seated dislike of the established literary and linguistic authorities’, notably the ‘bunch of eccentrics’ making up bodies like the Arabic Language Academy, who sometimes spoke in literature’s name.16

  Idris’s writings, in their frustrations as well as in their impatience for change, are typical of a strand of Arabic literature in the 1950s and 1960s that insisted on literature having a clear social message and its authors a clear ‘commitment’ to change. In this respect, Arabic literature was within the international mainstream (this was the decade of the ‘Angry Young Men’ in Britain), and ‘committed’ writers like Idris had little time for their elder peers, for whom ‘literature is an end in itself’.17 A typical novel of the period is Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi’s Egyptian Earth, well translated by Desmond Stewart, which focuses on the lives of Egypt’s peasant farmers, the fellaheen, and protests against their ill-treatment.18 The poetry of the period displays similar qualities, as explained below.

  Outside Egypt, prose writers such as the Sudanese Tayib Salih and the Saudi national Abdelrahman Munif are among the most important writers of the post-war period. Salih came to prominence in the 1960s, and Munif’s writing career began in the 1970s, only ending with his death in 2004. Salih’s best-known novel, at the time of writing the only work by a modern Arab author to appear in the ‘Penguin Classics’ series of world literary works, is Season of Migration to the North, already referred to above. Other works include a collection of short stories set in Wad Hamid, the same village in the Sudan that features in Season of Migration, brought together in English in a volume entitled The Wedding of Zein. There is also Bandarshah, a later, longer work that represents a development from the world presented in Season of Migration and that is Salih’s most recent published work.19

  Born in 1929 in northern Sudan, Salih’s professio
nal career led him to posts in various international organizations in Europe and elsewhere, as well as to a great deal of journalism. In his literary writing, he has focused on the relationship between a poor and swiftly developing post-colonial society, in this case the Sudan, and the European society that contains both the former colonial power and represents the promise, or threat, of change. This theme of the meeting of cultures, dramatized through the experiences of either an Egyptian man travelling to Europe, or of Europeans coming to the Arab world, had been mined by others long before Salih turned his attention to it, notably by al-Hakim in Return of the Spirit, in which Egypt is compared positively with Europe, and Hakki in The Lamp of Umm Hashim.20 However, Salih’s novel, published in Arabic in 1966 ten years after Sudanese independence, gives a new, harder edge to this relationship in its examination of two characters, the anonymous narrator of the novel whose journey to Europe takes place at the beginning of the post-colonial period, and the older figure of Mustafa Sa’eed, who made a similar journey in the 1920s during the period of Anglo-Egyptian colonial rule. Whereas the works of both al-Hakim and Hakki suggest that anxieties raised by the encounter of Europe and the Arab world can be laid to rest in a kind of ‘higher synthesis’, there being no necessary conflict between traditional ways of thinking and new and foreign ideas, Salih’s work is altogether less sanguine. Though written at a time of optimism at the possibilities held out by development in the immediate post-colonial period, Season of Migration might nevertheless be understood as a rather bleak, pessimistic work.

  One recent critic has suggested that Salih’s novels may be seen as ‘episodes in a continuous narrative … that gives full expression to the state of dissolution experienced throughout Arab societies’ as a result of European influence, something in the manner of what the Nigerian novelist Chinua Achebe achieved in his Things Fall Apart, which describes the decay of traditional society in West Africa following British incursion. All Salih’s works show a ‘progression from an initial state of peace and being at home in the world to one of profound estrangement or crisis,’ often coming about as a result of the impact of foreign rule or ideas. This estrangement has to do with a wider crisis of ‘Arab ideology’, polarized between a ‘vain attempt to mimic the West’, broadly speaking the aim of the writers and thinkers associated with the nahda, and more recent ‘nostalgic call[s] for a “return” to tradition’, associated with various ‘fundamentalist’ thinkers arguably concerned to re-establish what they see as certain basic values after a period of foreign domination.21

  Thus, in Season of Migration Salih’s characters, the one the ‘prize pupil of the English’, the other a specialist in English literature marooned in his own society, are confronted by problems of identity and belonging. Mustafa Sa’eed, a ‘westernized’ intellectual, is ‘a lie’, neither truly western, nor, as a result of his ‘migration to the north’, truly Sudanese. He bricks up his English books and English past in a room of his house, forbidden to visitors in a twist of plot reminiscent of ‘Bluebeard’s Castle’, and attempts to live the life of a simple farmer, apparently eventually committing suicide. The narrator, for his part, is at first convinced that he, at least, is not ‘a lie’ and that there need be no conflict either between the two sides of his personality, or between traditional society and the new ideas coming from outside. Slowly, however, he identifies himself more and more with Sa’eed, eventually entering the latter’s forbidden room. In a striking illustration of the ‘crisis’ afflicting this society as it attempts to hold together western and traditional ideas, a young woman, Hosna Bint Mahmoud, kills the elderly husband forced on her by her family, leading to a general sense of catastrophe. ‘It’s the first time anything like this has happened in the village since God created it. What a time of affliction we live in,’ comments the narrator’s grandfather.

  While Salih introduced a new tone to Arabic writing hailing from the rural areas of the Sudan, Munif, too, has focused almost exclusively on the history and society of his own native country, in this case Saudi Arabia. In his best-known work, the multi-volume work published in Arabic in the 1980s as Cities of Salt, three volumes of which have been translated into English (Cities of Salt, The Trench and Variations on Night and Day22), Munif describes the history of an unnamed society bearing a family resemblance to those in the Gulf or to Saudi Arabia, which in the space of just a few decades has gone from being a partially nomadic society based around desert oases to something like what can be seen today, all thanks to oil. The novels paint a thinly veiled portrait of the history of Arab Gulf society from the 1920s to the present. Before his recent death, Munif was considered to be one of the most controversial Arab novelists, not only because of the importance of his subject matter, but also because Munif himself was not afraid to offend powerful interests in his presentation of it. He was stripped of his Saudi citizenship and lived most of his later life in Syria, Lebanon or Iraq.

  Born in 1933 in Amman of mixed Saudi and Iraqi parentage, Munif worked for much of his life in the oil industry, first in Syria and then in Iraq, experience that stood him in good stead in writing his novels. He was also involved in politics. The first of his literary works, the strangely named Trees and the Assassination of Marzuq, appeared in 1973, and in it Munif announced the twin themes that dominate the rest of his fiction: the ‘destruction of a rural community and its way of life that had become the experience of so many ordinary Arabs’, notably as a result of the coming of the oil industry, and the ‘exposure of the rampant corruption and lies that dominate public life in the Arab world’. Trees and villages are destroyed, together with the ways of life that they have sheltered, with corruption and lies emerging to take their place. A second novel, East of the Mediterranean, followed in 1976, and in it Munif exposed the use made of torture in some Arab countries at the time, particularly against political prisoners. According to the Egyptian critic Sabry Hafez, from whose essay on Munif the above quotations are taken, East of the Mediterranean should be compared to a whole body of work in modern Arabic literature that takes imprisonment and torture as its theme.23

  However, it is the first of Munif’s major themes, the destruction of a rural or nomadic community and its way of life, that marks out Cities of Salt, at least its first volume. A short novel, Endings,24 had already moved onto this terrain, focusing in its reconstruction of traditional life in the village of al-Tiba on what its translator describes as the ‘values which have survived the passage of time and the events of history, at least up till now’. These traditional values include both a keen sense of the village’s ecology and a sense of its communal history, orally transmitted from generation to generation in traditional narrative forms. However, it is precisely these aspects of village life – communal storytelling, remembering, the close relationship with nature – that are most at threat from modern developments. The villagers ‘hear the sound of axes smashing into the trunks of dessicated trees, and the whole thing makes them feel as though they are the ones being throttled.’ Younger people, returning to the village from the expanding cities nearby, give the villagers ‘the impression that they are listening to someone else’, not a member of the community, ‘or that the city has managed to corrupt them completely and made them talk that way’. One might say that in Endings Munif the novelist writes al-Tiba’s epitaph, doing much the same thing at greater length for the community of Wadi al-Uyoun in Cities of Salt.

  An ‘outpouring of green amid the harsh, obdurate desert’, life in Wadi al-Uyoun is disrupted too, this time by the arrival of foreigners, Americans, who ‘certainly didn’t come for water’. At first, these newcomers pose no obvious threat: ‘the wadi has seen and heard more people come through than there are grains of sand’ comments Mitel al-Hathal, a leading member of the community, ‘and none of them ever left a trace.’ However, this time they return, bringing machines, ‘huge yellow hulks [that] move along and roar,’ with them; watching from the wadi’s edge, ‘deep inside him[self]’ al-Hathal ‘knew, when the thund
er stopped, that the world had ended.’ The villagers are expelled and the village obliterated. Anyone ‘who remembers those long-ago days,’ the narrator comments, ‘when a place called Wadi al-Uyoun used to exist, and a man named Miteb al-Hathal, and a brook, and trees, and a community of people used to exist,’ will remember ‘the tractors which attacked the orchards like ravenous wolves.’ ‘How is it possible,’ he asks himself, ‘for people and places to change so entirely that they lose any connection with what they used to be?’

  Later novels in the series leave the rural environment and focus instead on politics. The part played by foreign interests in the transformation of traditional society has been noticed in Cities of Salt, and in his following novels, The Trench and Variations on Night and Day, Munif turns his attention to the ways in which these interests operated. In the latter novel, for example, he begins by remembering the ‘dawn of the [twentieth] century – the opening decades’, when ‘the great powers,’ specifically Britain, ‘did not … have the time to deal with the huge number of small emirs and sheikhs’ then ruling the region and therefore put one of them, Khureybit, in charge of the others. In due course the latter becomes a British client, charged with ‘protecting the caravan roads, and … keep[ing] a watchful eye on the neighbours, the Turks and the eastern coast.’ Used by the British to further their interests, he prospers and takes over neighbouring territories in a series of wars. In all of this he is tutored by the sinister Hamilton, a British agent, who talks of ‘how Britain thought and how people of the desert thought. What Britain wanted … and what the Sultan wanted. The rest of the time they talked about horses, history, tribal genealogy and the battles of yesteryear,’ obscuring political interests behind reassuring clouds of orientalism.