La fantascienza nella letteratura araba by Ada Barbaro (review)

It is a sadly common habit to look at Arab literary production through the lenses of trite stereotypes that are not easy to get rid of and that exclude the Arab world from conceptual modernity. Therefore, the newly released book by Italian scholar Ada Barbaro, which is completely devoted to Arabic science fiction (SF), comes as a pleasant surprise. This literary genre has struggled to be accepted in the Western literary canon, and a number of SF authors have been only retrospectively included in it. In the Arab world, SF emerged only in the second half of twentieth century and is still trying to gain mainstream legitimacy and canonization. In addition to concerns about its literary value by critics, SF has been challenging cultural, historical, and political taboos over the years. Moreover, it has usually demonstrated “a rather controversial relation with religion, considering that many authors are self- declared atheists” (80). In countries where Islam is an identity- producing value and where a discernible mistrust affects anything that might question faith, the diffusion of SF has been not favored over time.

Barbaro’s study offers a wide overview of SF literary production, considering authors from the Maghreb to the Middle East and including unexpected works even from Mauritania and Yemen. The book might be divided into two sections: the first (chapters 1 and 2) is methodological and presents a descriptive outline of the basic features of SF in the Arab world; the second (chapters 3 and 4) is devoted to the analysis of different novels, with particular interest given to their historical, social, and literary milieu. The author here also identifies Space and Time as the two main coordinates to analyze SF works, which find their immediate literary expression in the two most narrated topics: journeys through the cosmos and time travel.

The study opens with a meticulous introductory note on terminology. Arabic has had to face a whole new lexicon, mainly of English origin, because English was— and still remains— the privileged language for expressing modern scientific and technological concepts and is, therefore, the immediate reference for SF authors all around the world. This linguistic note begins with the way the expression “science fiction” itself has been translated into Arabic. Almost literally, it becomes al-khayālal-‘ilmī (scientific imagination), by recourse to qiyās (analogy), a common mechanism used along with qālab (calque), to form neologisms in Arabic in order to expand the language repertoire by adding new semantic value to existing words that can conceptually reproduce their English equivalents. After this terminological discussion, an overview of the literary antecedents of SF in Arabic literature follows, with reference to themes and images that range from fantastic to marvelous and whose seeds belong to the classical Arabic literary heritage. Examples of this kind of proto–science fiction might be found within One Thousand and One Nights: fantastic journeys, an undersea adventure, an ebony horse, or robot- like ancient machines. In addition to the medieval tradition, the author does not underestimate the undeniable role of the most renowned works of English SF in the emergence of Arabic SF production. The original foreign models have not been imitated verbatim, though, but have been mostly used as distinguished inspirations to be molded according to local aesthetics and realities.

Throughout the whole book, what emerges as the deepest power of SF is its ability to inspire and trigger new ideas, giving society the chance to reflect upon itself. Nihād Sharīf (1930–2011), who is almost unanimously considered the father of modern Arabic SF literature, acknowledges SF’s “vital role” because it generates “debate on topics of crucial importance . . . and while prompting these discussions, SF recurs to a wholly original language which gives voice to the inscrutable mysteries that have always haunted human beings” (65). From this perspective, SF has a pedagogical and political—in the broadest sense of the term— function. Some examples might be found in Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm...