A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  These novels, the one filling a large canvas and dealing with post-war Palestinian experience, the other describing life in a Cairo apartment building, are as good an introduction as any to contemporary Arabic literature. Both books focus on issues such as the meanings to be found in the past, the options available for the present, and the often cruel predicaments in which men and women from various social backgrounds find themselves. Khoury’s novel, postmodernist in its use of narrative and its ‘polyphonic’ texture, compares interestingly with the more straightforward realism employed by Al Aswany. Yet, the issues these novels raise, and the literary conceptions on which they draw, are perhaps the bread and butter of modern Arabic literature.

  Notes

  Introduction

  1. In his Modern Arabic Literature in Translation: A Companion (London: Saqi, 2005), Salih Altoma even speaks of a ‘linguistic iron curtain’ separating the Arab world from the West.

  2. Suggestions for further reading are also given at the end of this book.

  3. Soueif is the author of The Map of Love, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. Matar’s The Season of Men, a Libyan memoir, was shortlisted for the same prize in 2006. Ghali’s novel was published in 1964 (London: Andre Deutsch). An Arabic translation was published in Cairo in 2007.

  4. Franck Mermier’s Le Livre et la ville, Beyrouth et l’édition arabe (Arles: Actes sud, 2005) is a useful recent account of Arab publishing.

  5. Salih Altoma (Modern Arabic Literature in Translation, London: Saqi, 2005) gives statistics for English translations of Arabic fiction between 1947 and 2003: ‘most of the 322 titles listed … (about 170 titles) are Egyptian. The remaining titles represent: Algeria (2), Iraq (11), Jordan (3), Kuwait (1), Lebanon (26), Libya (7), Morocco (8), Palestine (22), Saudi Arabia (11), Sudan (5), Syria (11), Tunisia (2), United Arab Emirates and Yemen (2).’

  6. Modern Arabic Literature, edited by M. M. Badawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

  7. L’Ecrivain (Paris: Julliard, 2001). The names are Franco-Algerian transliterations of those of Egyptian writers and intellectuals. Khadra is the author of detective novels featuring Commissioner Brahim Llob of the Algiers Police Department. Originally written in French, some of them have been translated into English.

  8. Comme un été qui ne reviendra pas, Le Caire 1955–1996 (Arles: Actes sud, 2001). Berrada gives the names of Egyptian musicals from the 1940s, which starred singers such as those he mentions. Taha Hussein, Tawfiq el-Hakim, [al-] Manfalouti and Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayyed are Egyptian writers.

  9. Robert Irwin, in a review of Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed., Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), that appeared in the London Review of Books (18 August 2005).

  10. Mermier (Le Livre et la ville, 2005) describes publishing across the Arab world, focusing on centres like Cairo and Beirut. Readership figures for Egyptian authors are suggested in R. Jacquemond, Entre scribes et écrivains: le champ littéraire dans l’Egypte contemporaine (Arles: Actes sud, 2003), an indispensable guide. An English translation of this book is due from the American University in Cairo Press in 2008.

  Reading Arabic Literature

  1. Quotations from E. Said, Orientalism (London: Penguin, 1995).

  2. See Robert Irwin’s For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and their Enemies (London: Allen Lane, 2006).

  3. Denys Johnson-Davies, ‘On Translating Arabic Literature’ in Ferial J. Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow (eds.), The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature (Cairo: AUC Press, 1994). The same author’s Memories in Translation: A Life Between the Lines of Arabic Literature (Cairo: AUC Press, 2006) contains additional discussion.

  4. Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘The Latin American novel in English translation’ in Efrain Kristal (ed.), The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

  5. Salih J. Altoma, Modern Arabic Literature in Translation (London: Saqi, 2005).

  6. Robin Waterfield in Prophet: the Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran (London: Allen Lane, 1998).

  7. ‘In the States, as of April 1996, [Gibran’s] The Prophet had sold over 9,000,000 copies since publication … In the rest of the English-speaking world, about another 25,000 copies are sold every year.’ These figures make Gibran not only the most successful Arab writer ever, but also ‘probably the best-selling individual poet of all time after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu’ (Waterfield).

  8. R. Jacquemond, Entre scribes et écrivains: le champ littéraire dans l’Egypte contemporaine (Arles: Actes sud, 2003), Chapter 5.

  9. Jacquemond, Entre scribes et écrivains, 2003, p. 157. Jacquemond extends his discussion in ‘Translation and Cultural Hegemony: the Case of French–Arabic Translation’ in L. Venuti (ed.), Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology (London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 139–158.

  10. Robert Irwin in The Arabian Nights: A Companion (London: Tauris, 2003).

  11. André Lefevere discusses nineteenth-century Arabic translation in Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame (London: Routledge, 1992), Chapter 6, ‘The Case of the Missing Qasidah’.

  12. A. J. Arberry (ed. and trans.), Modern Arabic Poetry: An Anthology with English Verse Translations (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1967).

  13. Naguib Mahfouz, Palace Walk, trans. William Maynard Hutchins et al. (New York & London: Alfred A. Knopf, 2001).

  14. Tayeb Salih, Season of Migration to the North, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Penguin, 2003).

  15. Al-Khidr, or al-Khadir, meaning ‘the green man’, appears in the Qur’an (sura 18) as a guide, subsequently appearing in popular stories and legends. The meaning of al-Khidr’s enigmatic behaviour has been the subject of generations of commentary. See the article by A. J. Wensinck, ‘al-Khadir (al-Khidr)’ in The Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C.E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W.P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 2007 [Brill Online]).

  16. Appearances of Solomon in the Qur’an are detailed in J. Walker, ‘Sulayman b. Dawud’ in The Encyclopaedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 2007 [Brill Online]).

  17. The Arabian Nights, vol. 2, trans. Husain Haddawy (New York: Alfred A. Knopf [Everyman’s Library], 1998).

  18. Gamal al-Ghitany, Le Livre des illuminations (Paris: Seuil, 2005), trans. Khaled Osman, who supplies a lengthy introduction and notes.

  19. See Jaroslav Stetkevych, The Modern Arabic Literary Language: Lexical and Stylistic Developments (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1970).

  20. The prefaces and postscripts al-Hakim wrote to his plays set out the linguistic issues. See W. M. Hutchins (ed. and trans.), The Plays, Prefaces and Postscripts of Tawfiq al-Hakim: Vol. 2, Theater of Society (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1984), esp. pp. 337–342.

  21. Tahir Wattar, The Earthquake, trans. Bill Granara (London: Saqi, 2000); Mohamed Choukri, For Bread Alone, trans. Paul Bowles (London: Telegram, 2006). The Moroccan novelist Tahar Ben Jelloun’s French translation of the latter work is published as Le Pain nu (Paris: Seuil, 1998). For Laredj, see Fleurs d’Amandier trans. Catherine Charrauau (Arles: Actes sud, 2001), and Le Livre de l’Emir, trans. Marcel Bois (Arles: Actes sud, 2006).

  22. See Mermier’s study (Le Livre et la ville, 2005), from which this information is taken. Jacquemond’s (Entre scribes et écrivains, 2003) is one of the few books available on the sociology of literature in the Arab world.

  23. See Jacquemond (Entre scribes et écrivains, 2003), Mermier (Le Livre et la ville, 2005) and Marina Stagh, The Limits of Freedom of Speech: Prose Literature and Prose Writers in Egypt under Nasser and Sadat (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell, 1993), for discussion.

  24. Elleke Boehmer’s Colonial and Postcolonial Literature (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995) is a useful introduction.

  25. Translation studies are introduced by Susan Bassnett-McGuire in Translation Studies (London: Routledge, 2002).

  26. F. Moretti, ‘Conjectures on World L
iterature’, New Left Review, January–February 2000, pp. 54–68; further articles appearing in 2003 and 2004. See also the same author’s edited collection, The Novel (2 vols., Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2006), originally published in Italian.

  27. Pascale Casanova, La République mondiale des lettres (Paris: Seuil, 1999).

  The Modern Element

  1. Quotations from Robert Solé, Bonaparte à la conquete de l’Egypte (Paris: Seuil, 2006). The ‘Mamluks’ were members of a distinct caste that then ruled Egypt under nominal Ottoman suzerainty.

  2. See Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), chapters 16–20.

  3. Bernard Lewis describes attempts to modernize Ottoman society, including the Empire’s Arab provinces, in The Emergence of Modern Turkey (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1961), chapters 3–5. Albert Hourani surveys the intellectual background to modernization in Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

  4. Ibrahim Abu-Lughod, The Arab Rediscovery of Europe (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1963).

  5. Quotations from Pierre Cachia, Taha Husayn: His Place in the Egyptian Literary Renaissance (London: Luzac, 1956).

  6. The three volumes are available in an omnibus edition published by the American University in Cairo Press (1997). They include An Egyptian Childhood (trans. E. H. Paxton), The Stream of Days (trans. Hilary Wayment) and A Passage to France (trans. Kenneth Cragg).

  7. Hourani (Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1962) gives context and background on Taha Hussein.

  8. Sabry Hafez’s Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Saqi, 1993) notes ‘the interaction between the awakening of national consciousness, the composition of the reading public, its role in the creation of the new sensibility and the rise of narrative genres’ in the period.

  9. The locus classicus for the growth of Arab nationalism in the early decades of the twentieth century is Georges Antonius, The Arab Awakening, first published in the 1930s. Hourani gives a more up-to-date view (Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples, 2002).

  10. Yehia Hakki, The Lamp of Umm Hashim, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (Cairo: AUC Press, 2004). There is an earlier translation by M. M. Badawi (Leiden: Brill, 1973).

  11. Granddaughter of the Prophet Mohamed and sister of al-Hussein, Sayeda Zeinab sought refuge in Cairo following the latter’s defeat at the battle of Karbala in 680 ce (see footnote 4 to the next chapter). She is buried at the site where her mosque now stands.

  12. Hakki’s relationship to the Arab nahda is explored in Miriam Cooke’s study, The Anatomy of an Egyptian Intellectual (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1984).

  13. Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Prison of Life, trans. Pierre Cachia (Cairo: AUC Press, 1992).

  14. Tawfiq al-Hakim, Return of the Spirit and Diary of a Country Prosecutor, trans. William Hutchins (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1990) and Abba Eban (London: Saqi, 2005), respectively. Eban’s translation first appeared under the title Maze of Justice in 1947.

  15. Paul Starkey’s From the Ivory Tower is particularly good on al-Hakim’s conception of literature and his relation to the Egyptian and Arab environment (London: Ithaca Press, 1987).

  16. S. Somekh in ‘The Neo-classical Arabic Poets’ in M. M. Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 36–81. The quotations are from this essay.

  17. R. C. Ostle, ‘The Romantic Poets’, in M. M. Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 82–131. Further quotations from this essay appear later in this paragraph.

  The Novel and the New Poetry

  1. Naguib Mahfouz, Midaq Alley and The Beginning and the End, trans. Trevor Le Gassick (London: Heinemann, 1976) and Ramses Awad, respectively (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1984).

  2. These novels, translated by William Maynard Hutchins et al., are available in an omnibus edition (New York: Knopf, 2001).

  3. Sassoon Somekh provides details of Mahfouz’s career in his The Changing Rhythm (Leiden: Brill, 1973), which deals with all the novels published until the end of the 1960s.

  4. The mosque of al-Husayn, or al-Hussein, is opposite al-Azhar in Cairo. Hussein, grandson of the Prophet Mohamed, was killed at Karbala in what is now Iraq in 680 ce. His body is sometimes said to be buried in Karbala, his head in Cairo. (See L. Veccia Vaglieri, ‘(al-) Husayn b. ‘Ali b. Abi Talib’ in the Encyclopaedia of Islam, edited by P. Bearman, Th. Bianquis, C. E. Bosworth, E. van Donzel and W. P. Heinrichs (Leiden: Brill, 2007 [Brill Online]).

  5. Naguib Mahfouz, Children of the Alley, trans. Peter Theroux (New York: Doubleday, 1996). There is an older translation by Philip Stewart, published as Children of Gebelaawi (London: Heinemann, 1981).

  6. See Marina Stagh, The Limits of Freedom of Speech, 1993, an indispensable guide. Somekh’s ‘The Sad Millenarian: An Examination of Awlad Haratina’ is a critical evaluation, collected in Trevor Le Gassick (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Naguib Mahfouz (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1991), pp. 101–114.

  7. English translations of all Mahfouz’s novels appeared following his award of the Nobel Prize for Literature in 1988.

  8. Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar, trans. Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud (London: Heinemann, 1978).

  9. Fathy Ghanem, The Man Who Lost His Shadow, trans. Desmond Stewart (Cairo: AUC Press, 1994 [1966]).

  10. Respected Sir and Wedding Song are available in the Doubleday/AUC Press series (trans. Rasheed el-Enany and Olive E. Kenny, respectively). Karnak Café has been translated by Roger Allen (Cairo: AUC Press, 2007).

  11. Naguib Mahfouz, Mirrors, trans. Roger Allen (Cairo: AUC Press, 2000).

  12. Rasheed el-Enany calls these ‘episodic novels’ in a recent study (Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning, London: Routledge, 1993), describing their experimentation with traditional Arab literary forms. All three novels are available from Doubleday and AUC: The Harafish translated by Catherine Cobham (1994), and Arabian Nights and Days and The Journey of Ibn Fattouma translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (1995 and 1992).

  13. Kadhim Jihad Hassan, Le Roman arabe (Arles: Actes sud, 2006).

  14. See the autobiographical piece, written in English in 1983, in Roger Allen (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Yusuf Idris (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1994).

  15. The English translation of The Cheapest Nights (Cairo: AUC Press, 1990) by Wadida Wassef includes stories taken from five short-story collections published in Cairo in the 1950s and 1960s. ‘The Stranger’ and ‘The Black Policeman’ are in Rings of Burnished Brass, trans. Catherine Cobham (Cairo: AUC Press, 1990).

  16. The quotations in these paragraphs are taken from P. M. Kurpershoek’s study The Short Stories of Yusuf Idris: A Modern Egyptian Author (Leiden: Brill 1981). The Cairo Arabic Language Academy was founded in 1934, taking the Academie Française as a model and carrying out similar functions. Rather like the French Academy, the Cairo body can appear to be detached from actual usage. There are similar bodies in Damascus and elsewhere.

  17. The quotation is from Taha Hussein and is taken from M. M. Badawi, ‘Commitment in Contemporary Arabic Literature’ in Issa J. Boullata (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1980), pp. 23–44.

  18. Abdel Rahman al-Sharqawi, Egyptian Earth, trans. Desmond Stewart (London: Saqi, 1990 [1962]).

  19. Salih’s work has been translated into English by Denys Johnson-Davies, including The Wedding of Zein and Other Stories (London: Heinemann, 1969), Season of Migration to the North (London: Penguin, 2003) and Bandarshah (London: Kegan Paul/UNESCO, 1996).

  20. See Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, ‘Modern Arabic Literature and the West’ in Issa J. Boullata (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1980), pp. 7–22.

  21. Quotations from Wail S. Hassan, Tayeb Salih. Ideology and the Craft of Fiction (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2003).

  22. Abdelrahman
Munif, Cities of Salt, trans. Peter Theroux (New York: Vintage, 1989); The Trench, trans. Peter Theroux (New York: Vintage, 1993) and Variations on Night and Day, trans. Peter Theroux (New York: Vintage, 1993).

  23. Sabry Hafez, ‘An Arabian Master’, New Left Review 37, January–February 2006, pp. 39–68. There is a French translation of East of the Mediterranean (Paris: Sindbad, 1985).

  24. ‘Abd al-Rahman Munif, Endings, trans. Roger Allen (New York: Interlink, 2005).

  25. Neither of these works, published in Arabic in 1999 (Land of Darkness) and 2004 (Notes on History and Resistance), has been translated into English. The quotation is from Sabry Hafez (‘An Arabian Master’, New Left Review 37, January–February 2006, pp. 39–68). See also Abdel-Khaleq Farouq’s review of the latter book in al-Ahram Weekly (Cairo), 18 March 2004, at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2004/682/bo1.htm