A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature

by David Tresilian

  26. Abd al-Rahman Munif, Story of a City: A Childhood in Amman, trans. Samira Kawar (London: Quartet, 1996).

  27. This account is indebted to Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 1977). The first volume of this two-volume work contains an account of Arabic poetry more or less up to the outbreak of the Second World War. The second volume, from which the quotations in this and following paragraphs are taken, takes the story up to the 1970s.

  28. See Abdul Wahab al-Bayati, Love, Death and Exile, trans. Bassam K. Frangieh (Washington: Georgetown University Press, 1990), a bilingual selection of poems.

  29. Adonis, Introduction to Arab Poetics, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Saqi, 1990).

  30. A convenient anthology of post-war Arabic poetry is Modern Poetry of the Arab World (London: Penguin, 1985), edited and translated by Abdullah al-Udhari, which contains versions of the poems mentioned. Modern Arab Poets, edited and translated by Issa J. Boullata (London: Heinemann, 1976) is similar, focusing on poetry published between 1950 and 1975. Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s Anthology of Modern Arabic Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987) is a larger work and contains an introduction summarizing views presented in her Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 1977).

  31. Jayyusi in her Trends and Movements in Modern Arabic Poetry (Leiden: Brill, 1977).

  Occupation and Diaspora: the Literature of Modern Palestine

  1. See Ilan Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004), esp. chapters 4 and 5.

  2. Ghassan Kanafani, Men in the Sun, trans. Hilary Kirkpatrick (London: Heinemann, 1978) and All That’s Left to You, trans. May Jayyusi and Jeremy Reed (Cairo: AUC Press, 1992).

  3. Emile Habiby, Secret Life of Saeed the Pessoptimist, trans. Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick (London: Zed, 1985).

  4. Pappe (A History of Modern Palestine, 2004, Chapter 5) gives details of the discrimination Palestinian refugees faced, and face, in many Arab countries.

  5. Halim Barakat, Six Days, trans. Bassam Frangieh and Scott McGehee (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1990).

  6. Halim Barakat, Days of Dust, trans. Trevor Le Gassick (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1983).

  7. Fadwa Tuqan, A Mountainous Journey, trans. Olive Kenny (London: Women’s Press, 1990).

  8. A second volume has appeared in French: Le Cri de la Pierre, trans. Joséphine Lama and Benoît Tadié (Paris: L’asiathèque, 1998).

  9. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The First Well, trans. Issa J. Boullata (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1995).

  10. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, The Search for Walid Masoud, trans. Roger Allen and Adnan Haydar (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 2000).

  11. Jabra Ibrahim Jabra, Princesses’ Street, trans. Issa J. Boullata (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005).

  12. Legal, political and social issues surrounding the Palestinian refugees are examined in Farouk Mardam-Bey and Elias Sanbar (eds.), Le Droit au Retour: le problème des réfugiés palestiniens (Arles: Actes sud, 2002).

  13. Sahar Khalifeh, Wild Thorns, trans. Trevor Le Gassick and Elizabeth Fernea (Northampton, Mass.: Interlink, 2003).

  14. See Pappe, A History of Modern Palestine, 2004, chapters 6 and 7.

  15. Winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Medal for Literature (American University in Cairo). The English translation (Cairo: AUC Press, 2000) is by Ahdaf Soueif.

  16. See the anthologies by al-Udhari and Jayyusi (1986 and 1987), mentioned earlier. There is a book of selected poems translated by Munir Akash et al. (Unfortunately it was Paradise, Berkeley: University of California Press, 2003) and an earlier one translated by Denys Johnson-Davies (The Music of Human Flesh, London: Heinemann, 1980). The best place to start is al-Udhari’s Victims of a Map (London: Saqi, 2005), a bilingual anthology of poetry by Darwish, Adonis and Samih al-Qasim.

  17. Mahmoud Darwish, Memory for Forgetfulness, trans. Ibrahim Muhawi (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1995).

  18. Mahmoud Darwish, Le Palestine comme métaphore (Arles: Actes sud, 1997).

  Disillusion and Experiment

  1. The story is in The Time and the Place and Other Stories, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (New York: Doubleday, 1992), containing stories published in Cairo from the 1950s to 1980s.

  2. Stefan G. Meyer, The Experimental Arab Novel (Buffalo: State University of New York, 2001).

  3. Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction: Essays on Naguib Mahfouz, Sonallah Ibrahim, and Gamal al-Ghitani (Cairo: AUC Press, 1994).

  4. Sonallah Ibrahim, The Smell of It, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, 1971).

  5. See Mehrez, Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction (1994) for publication history and the quotation from Ibrahim. Stagh (The Limits of Freedom of Speech, 1993) describes the controversy in detail.

  6. Sonallah Ibrahim, The Committee, trans. May St Germain and Charlene Constable (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 2001) and Zaat, trans. Anthony Calderbank (Cairo: AUC Press, 2001).

  7. Ibrahim may be making a joke here: many Arab public figures have awarded themselves doctorates.

  8. See Bertolt Brecht, Brecht on Theatre, trans. John Willett (London: Methuen, 1978).

  9. Included in the English translation of The Smell of It.

  10. Sonallah Ibrahim, Dhat (Cairo: Dar al-mustaqbal al-arabi, 1992).

  11. Sonallah Ibrahim, Bayrut, Bayrut (Cairo: Dar al-mustaqbal al-arabi, 1988).

  12. French translations are available: Sonallah Ibrahim, Charaf, ou l’honneur (Arles: Actes sud, 1999) and Amrikanli: un automne à San Francisco (Arles: Actes sud, 2005).

  13. Thus Frédéric Lagrange: modern Arabic ‘literature often displaces the shock of the encounter with the West into the arena of sexuality … homosexual sexuality [appearing] as a sign of decay … in the literature of leftist and nationalist writers’ and contributing to the ‘normalization’ of sexuality in present Arab societies. (‘Male Homosexuality in Modern Arabic Literature’, in Mai Ghoussoub and Emma Sinclair-Webb (eds.), Imagined Masculinities: Male Identity and Culture in the Modern Middle East, London: Saqi, 2000, pp. 169–198).

  14. Sonallah Ibrahim, al-Talasus (Cairo: Dar al-mustaqbal al-arabi, 2007).

  15. Gamal al-Ghitany, Zayni Barakat, trans. Farouk Abdel-Wahab (London: Penguin, 1988). The other work is Pyramid Texts, trans. Anthony Calderbank (Cairo: AUC Press, 2007).

  16. Gamal al-Ghitany, What Happened in al-Maqshara, trans. Mona Anis and David Tresilian, in Cairo Today, April 1992.

  17. Egypt was conquered by the Ottomans in 1517.

  18. Mehrez (Egyptian Writers between History and Fiction, 1994) calls the pastiche of historical styles in Zayni Barakat ‘a symbolic act against the censor … [since] there is no “I” to be held responsible’ for the novel’s political content.

  19. Edwar al-Kharrat, City of Saffron and Girls of Alexandria are translated by Frances Liardet (London: Quartet, 1989 and 1993, respectively). Rama and the Dragon is translated by Ferial J. Ghazoul and John Verlenden (Cairo: AUC Press, 2003).

  20. Quotations from al-Kharrat’s essay ‘The Mashriq’ in R. Ostle (ed.), Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East, 1850–1970 (London: Routledge, 1991), pp. 180–192.

  21. See the pieces by Adorno, Benjamin, Bloch, Brecht, Lukacs and others in Ernst Bloch et al., Aesthetics and Politics (London: Verso, 2007).

  22. Quotations from Jayyusi’s ‘Modernist Poetry in Arabic’ in M. M. Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature (op. cit., 1992), pp. 132–179. In her anthology Modern Arabic Poetry (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), Jayyusi writes of the ‘crisis’ and ‘metaphorical chaos’ of Arabic poetry in the 1970s.

  23. Ferial Ghazoul and John Verlenden. The quotation is from the introduction to Matar’s Quartet of Joy (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1997).

  24. On Nigm and the ‘ibn al-balad’, see Kamal Abdel-Malek, A Study of the Vernacular Poetry of Ahmad Fu’ad N
igm (Leiden: Brill, 1990). Nigm has since moved from al-Darb al-Ahmar to Mouqatem in the hills outside Cairo, where he now has a mobile phone.

  25. Marilyn Booth’s article ‘Poetry in the Vernacular’ in M. M. Badawi (ed.), Modern Arabic Literature (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 463–482, surveys the field.

  26. Quotations from M. M. Enani (trans.), Angry Voices: An Anthology of the Off-Beat Egyptian Poets (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2003).

  27. European dramatists have looked to classical models for inspiration, but there is nothing comparable in the history of Arabic literature. The quotation, like those that follow, is from M. M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Drama in Egypt (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1987).

  28. The theatre of the period is vividly described by an American visitor to Cairo at the time. See Irving Brown, ‘The Effervescent Egyptian Theatre’ in Boullata (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, 1980, pp. 332–340.

  29. Tawfiq al-Hakim, The Tree Climber and Fate of a Cockroach, both trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Oxford University Press, 1966 and London: Heinemann, 1973, respectively).

  30. Sabry Hafez describes the atmosphere of the decade in his ‘The Egyptian Novel in the Sixties’ in Boullata (ed.), Critical Perspectives on Modern Arabic Literature, 1980, pp. 171–187.

  31. The Egyptian critic Nehad Selaiha writes a column in English in the Cairo newspaper al-Ahram Weekly that is essential reading for anyone interested in Egyptian and Arab theatre (www.ahram.org.eg/weekly)

  32. Saadallah Wannous, Une mort éphémère, trans. Rania Samara (Arles: Actes sud, 2001).

  The Contemporary Scene

  1. Jacquemond in Entre scribes et écrivains (2003).

  2. See Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996).

  3. Miral al-Tahawy, Blue Aubergine, trans. Anthony Calderbank (Cairo: AUC Press, 2002).

  4. Ahmed Alaidy, Being Abbas el Abd, trans. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: AUC Press, 2006).

  5. Miral al-Tahawy, The Tent, trans. Anthony Calderbank (Cairo: AUC Press, 1998).

  6. A collection edited by Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke presents the range of Arab women’s writing: Opening the Gates: An Anthology of Arab Feminist Writing (Bloomington: University of Indiana Press, 2004).

  7. Qassem Amin, The Liberation of Women and The New Woman, trans. Samiha Sidhom Peterson (Cairo: AUC Press, 2000).

  8. Quotations from Leila Ahmed, Women and Gender in Islam (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1992), Chapter 8.

  9. Quotations from Shaarawi’s autobiography, translated as Harem Years by Marilyn Booth (New York: Feminist Press, 1987).

  10. Ahmed writes that Shaarawi’s ‘perspective was informed by a Western affiliation and a westernizing outlook and apparently by a valorization of Western ways as more advanced and more “civilized” than native ways’ (Women and Gender in Islam, 1992).

  11. Ihsan Abdel-Quddus, I Am Free, trans. Trevor Le Gassick (Cairo: General Egyptian Book Organisation, 1978).

  12. Leila Baalbaki, I Live, French trans. by Michel Barbot as Je vis (Paris: Seuil, 1961).

  13. Leila Baalbaki, ‘A Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon’, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies, in Modern Arabic Short Stories (London: Heinemann, 1976), pp. 128–134.

  14. As noted by Roger Allen in his survey of ‘The Mature Arabic Novel outside Egypt’ (in M. M. Badawi, ed. Modern Arabic Literature, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992), pp. 193–222.

  15. Latifa al-Zayyat, The Open Door, trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: AUC Press, 2001). There is a well-known film version of this novel starring Faten Hamama (dir. Henri Barakat, 1964).

  16. Both Nawal al-Saadawi’s Women at Point Zero (London: Zed, 1983) and The Hidden Face of Eve (London: Zed, 1980) are translated by Sherif Hetata.

  17. Quotations from Nawal al-Saadawi, Memoirs of a Woman Doctor, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Saqi, 1988).

  18. Quotations from Nawal al-Saadawi, Memoirs from the Women’s Prison, trans. Marilyn Booth (London: Women’s Press, 1986).

  19. May Telmissany, Dunyazad, trans. Roger Allen (London: Saqi, 2000).

  20. Stories collected in Alifa Rifaat, Distant View of a Minaret, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, 1983).

  21. Stories collected in Salwa Bakr, The Wiles of Men, trans. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Quartet, 1992).

  22. See Hourani (A History of the Arab Peoples, 2002), Chapter 25.

  23. Quotations from Miriam Cooke’s War’s Other Voices: Women Writers on the Lebanese Civil War (1996). Cooke calls this group the ‘Beirut Decentrists’.

  24. Hanan al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra, trans. Peter Ford (London: Quartet, 1991).

  25. Hanan al-Shaykh, Women of Sand and Myrrh, trans. Catherine Cobham (New York: Doubleday, 1992).

  26. Hanah al-Shaykh, Only in London, trans. Catherine Cobham (London: Bloomsbury, 2002).

  27. Ghada Samman, Beirut Nightmares, trans. Nancy Roberts (London: Quartet, 1997).

  28. Stephan Guth’s essay ‘The Function of Sexual Passages in some Egyptian Novels of the 1980s’ is a useful tour d’horizon, arguing that descriptions of sexuality are intended to ‘widen the scope of reality’ and what can be publicly discussed (in R. Allen, H. Kilpatrick and Ed de Moor (eds.), Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic Literature, London: Saqi, 1995, pp. 123–130).

  29. See the legal survey by the International Lesbian and Gay Association at www.ilga.org, which also indicates the social stigma involved.

  30. Raouf Moussad writes on these issues in his ‘Objectively Marginalised’, al-Ahram Weekly, 6 July 2006 (online at: http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2006/802/cu6.htm).

  31. Brian Whitaker, Unspeakable Love: Gay and Lesbian Life in the Middle East (London: Saqi, 2006), quotations from Chapter 7.

  32. Frédéric Lagrange gives the historical background in his ‘Male Homosexuality in Modern Arabic Literature’, already cited in connection with the novels of Sonallah Ibrahim (see footnote 13 to the previous chapter).

  33. Hoda Barakat, The Tiller of Waters, trans. Marilyn Booth (Cairo: AUC Press, 2001).

  34. Hoda Barakat, The Stone of Laughter, trans. Sophie Bennett (Reading: Garnet, 1994).

  35. Interview with Hoda Barakat in Le Monde (15 June 2007).

  36. Idris Ali, Dongola, trans. Peter Theroux (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 1998) and Haggag Hassan Oddoul, Nights of Musk, trans. Anthony Calderbank (Cairo: AUC Press, 2005).

  37. Ibrahim al-Koni, The Bleeding of the Stone, trans. May Jayyusi and Christopher Tingley (New York: Interlink, 2001).

  Conclusion

  1. Sabry Hafez describes this atmosphere in his ‘The Novel, Politics and Islam’, New Left Review 5, September–October 2000, pp. 117–141, which focuses on the withdrawal of the novel A Banquet for Seaweed by Syrian writer Haydar Haydar. Taha Hussein was forced to withdraw his book on pre-Islamic poetry – poetry written before the advent of Islam – in 1926 ‘because it suggested a critical method which, if applied to the texts of religion, might cast doubt on their authenticity, and … it struck at the roots of the traditional structure of Arabic learning’ (A. Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962).

  2. See Khaled Dawoud’s ‘Control without bounds?’ at http://weekly.ahram.org.eg/2002/593/eg6.htm. Naguib Surur (d. 1978) was recognized as a poet and playwright of genius by his peers from the ‘generation of the 1960s’.

  3. Quotations from P. Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990).

  4. Paul Starkey, Modern Arabic Literature (Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 2006).

  5. Elias Khoury, Gate of the Sun (London: Vintage, 2006) and Alaa Al Aswany, The Yacoubian Building, trans. Humphrey Davies (New York: Harper, 2006). The novels have also been made into films: The Yacoubian Building (dir. Marwan Hamed, 2006), and Gate of the Sun (dir. Yousry Nasrallah, 2004).

  6. See the wide
-ranging interview with Khoury, ‘Politics and Culture in Lebanon’, on the Lebanese Center for Policy Studies Website (http://www.lcps-lebanon.org/pub/breview/br5/khourybr5.html).

  7. Alaa Al Aswany, Chicago (Cairo: Dar el-Shurouq, 2007).

  Further Reading

  Most references are given in endnotes to the text. However, it may be useful to have the following standard or reference works listed in one place.

  For listings of the works of individual Arab authors in English translation, see Salih J. Altoma, Modern Arabic Literature in Translation (London: Saqi, 2005). Other bibliographical or reference works include those edited by Paul Starkey and Julie Scott Meisami, Encyclopedia of Arabic Literature (London: Routledge, 1998, 2 vols.), which includes entries on classical Arabic literature as well as on modern, and by John J. Donohue and Leslie Tramontani, Crosshatching in Global Culture: A Dictionary of Modern Arab Writers (Beirut and Würzburg: Orient-Institut and Ergon Verlag, 2004, 2 vols.), which gives biographical or autobiographical entries for Arab authors and full bibliographies. A French reference book is Jamel-Eddin Bencheikh (ed.), Dictionnaire de littératures arabe et maghrébine francophone (Paris: Presses universitaires de France, 2000).

  Useful anthologies of modern Arabic literature are given in endnotes to the text. In addition, there is Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology (New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), edited by Salma Khadra Jayyusi, and, easier to handle, The Anchor Book of Modern Arabic Fiction (New York: Anchor, 2006), edited by Denys Johnson-Davies. A convenient general history is Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (London: Faber & Faber, 2002), which may be supplemented by historical works by country and topic. Hourani’s book includes an extensive bibliography, unfortunately not updated since 1991. A standard work on the earlier period is Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1962). For Egypt, The History of Modern Egypt (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins, 1991) by P. J. Vatikiotis is especially useful. An essential reference work on all aspects of traditional and religious culture is The Encyclopedia of Islam (Leiden: Brill, 12 vols.). A monument of scholarship edited by authorities in the field, the Encyclopedia is now on its third edition, and articles from this and from the second edition can be consulted online.