Modern Arabic Literature

MODERN ARABIC LITERATURE IP. J. E. Cachia The intrusion of the West into the Arabic-speaking world, which began with Napoleon's invasion of Egypt in 1798, may be thought of as a rock cast into a stagnant pond; the changes that have taken place in the past 150 years are the ripples and the upsurge of silt resulting from this disturbance. I The stagnation of eighteenth-century Islam must not be overstressed. Throughout the Ottoman empire, changes were taking place in the body politic which presaged either a new balance or complete collapse, and in the rise of the Wahhiibi movement then, and of the Saniisi order a little later, it is possible to see harbingers of a revival from within Islam. Nevertheless, so far as literature is concerned, no significant new current of fresh and invigorating ideas was discernible by the end of the eighteenth century. Education itself started from the premiss that there was nothing new to discover: learning consisted of the accumulation of facts known to previous generations. In village schools, children learnt to memorize and to decipher the Qur)an. In the more advanced schools attached to certain mosques-f much greater and juster renown as a poet-was perhaps inlIuenced by these as well as by folk-tales in the romances he wrote in the last years of the nineteenth century. His Llidilas, for example, is a rambling, inconsequential, often ludicrous tale of an ancient Egyptian hero who makes a fetish of a log of wood that has saved him from drowning, carries it with him through countless hair-raising adventures, until-having inexplicably turned traitor to his king-he uses it to fashion a throne for himself. Somewhat surprisingly, the 22 historical novels written by the indefatigable Jurjl Zaidan, founder of Egypt's most renowned journal (al-Hi/til) and author of several histories and critical works, although they glorified past Arab history and were not devoid of romantic interest, did not inspire any immediate imitators. The first original, imagined narrative to make a mark was The Discourse of 'lsa ibn Hishiim, by IbrahIm al-Muwailihi (1858-1930), which tells of the adventures of a Pasha from Muhammad cAll's time, resurrected into the changed world of the early twentieth century. Because the name of the narrator, CIsa ibn Hisham, is borrowed from classical maqiimas and because the narrative element in it is slight, it is usually referred to as "an extended maqiima." But it also bears the clear imprint of its origin as a newspaper serial: it is episodic, and offers opportunities for comment on contemporary issues. Even this, though it led to some imitations at the time, was not 292 P.J.E.CACHIA destined to leave a lasting line of succession. The taste was for heartwringing romantic novels. Free translations of Werther, of Paul et Virginie, of Les Miserables, of Alphonse Karr's Sous les til/euls, these were immensely popular. Yet it was not until 1917 that the first original Arabic novel appeared. It was a simple story of star-crossed lovers entitled Zainab; it was published anonymously but has since been acknowledged as the work of Muhammad Husain Haikal. Since then, innumerable novels have been written, mostly love stories, not a few with a historical setting, many of them sentimental, some with pretentious theses to put forward, some competent, many remarkable for flashes of insight into personal or social attitudes. Yet none is great, none strikes one throughout as a genuine Arab novel. There are several reasons why the Arab novel has been so tardy in its appearance and so mediocre in its attainments. The writers themselves complain that the cleavage between the spoken and the written idiom makes it difficult for them to hold a mirror up to nature. Also the genre demands among other skills powers of sustained and consistent imagination and invention, which neither the classical tradition nor recent developments have fostered. More fundamentally still, the good novel presupposes an underlying philosophy, a unified outlook on life hard to find in a hybrid culture. Specifically, the mainstay of most novels is the conception of love that has grown in modem Europe. This conception the modem...