The Novel and the Rural Imaginary in Egypt 1880-1985 (Routledgecurzon Studies in Arabic and Middle Eastern Literature)

THE NOVEL AND THE RURAL IMAGINARY IN EGYPT, 1880–1985

This book places the field of modern Arabic literature studies in the context of contemporary debates in the humanities about the relaionship between narrative, history and ideology. In this sense, it addresses pressing issues raised by literary theory, literary history and postcolonial studies, and grounds these broader discussions in a tudy of a particular narrative genre – the novel – as it has been constructed and produced over a century in a local/global context. The book locates questions of languages, genre, textuality and canonicity within a historical and theoretical framework that foregrounds the emergence of modern nationalism in Egypt. The ways n which the cultural discourses produced by twentieth-century Egyptian nationalism created a space for both a hegemonic and counter-hegemonic politics of language, class and place that nscribed a bifurcated narrative and social geography, are examined. The book argues that the rupture between the village and the city contained in the Egyptian nationalism discourse is reproduced as a narrative dislocation that has continued to characterize and shape he Egyptian novel in general and the village novel in particular. Reading the village novel in Egypt as a dynamic intertext that constructs modernity in a local historical and political context, ather than rehearsing a simple repetition of dominant European iterary-critical paradigms, this book offers a new approach to the construction of modern Arabic literary history, as well as to theoretcal questions related to the structure and role of the novel as a worldly narrative genre. Samah Selim is an independent scholar of Arabic literature. Her main research interests are nineteenth-and twentieth-century fiction n Egypt and the Levant.

ROUTLEDGECURZON STUDIES IN ARABIC AND MIDDLE EASTERN LITERATURE Editors James E. Montgomery University of Cambridge Roger Allen University of Pennsylvania Philip F. Kennedy New York University RoutledgeCurzon Studies in Arabic and Middle Eastern Literature is a monograph series devoted to aspects of the literatures of the Near and Middle East and North Africa, both modern and premodern. It is hoped that the provision of such a forum will lead to a greater emphasis on the comparative study of the literatures of this area, although studies devoted to one literary or linguistic region are warmly encouraged. It is the editors’ objective to foster the comparative and multi-disciplinary investigation of the written and oral literary products of this area.

SHEHERAZADE THROUGH LOOKING GLASS Eva Sallis

THE

THE PALESTINIAN NOVEL Ibrahim Taha OF DISHES AND DISCOURSE Geert Jan van Gelder

MEDIEVAL ARABIC PRAISE POETRY Beatrice Gruendler MAKING

GREAT BOOK SONGS Hilary Kilpatrick THE

O

THE NOVEL AND THE RURAL IMAGINARY IN EGYPT, 1880–1985 Samah Selim

THE NOVEL AND THE RURAL IMAGINARY IN EGYPT, 1880–1985 Samah Selim

First published 2004 by RoutledgeCurzon 11 New Fetter Lane, London EC4P 4EE Simultaneously published in the USA and Canada by RoutledgeCurzon 29 West 35th Street, New York, NY 10001 This edition published in the Taylor & Francis e-Library, 2004. RoutledgeCurzon is an imprint of the Taylor & Francis Group © 2004 Samah Selim All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reprinted or reproduced or utilized in any form or by any electronic, mechanical, or other means, now known or hereafter invented, including photocopying and recording, or in any information storage or retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publishers. British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library Library of Congress Cataloging in Publication Data A catalog record for this book has been reequested ISBN 0-203-61144-6 Master e-book ISBN

ISBN 0-203-33688-7 (Adobe eReader Format) ISBN 0–415–31837–8 (Print Edition)

TO MAGDA AND TO MY PARENTS, HOSNY AND SAFIYYAH

CONTENTS

Preface Acknowledgments Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative in Egypt 1

viii x 1

The garrulous peasant: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue

25

2

Novels and nations

60

3

Foundations: pastoral and anti-pastoral

91

4

The politics of reality: realism, neo-realism and the village novel

127

5

The Land

159

6

The exiled son

185

7

The storyteller

214

Conclusion

229

Notes Bibliography Index

234 257 264

PREFACE

This book is not so much a book about the Egyptian peasant, as it is a book about the relationship between politics, ideology and fiction in twentieth-century Egypt. I have chosen to use the village novel as a way of approaching this subject, since of all the themes in modern Egyptian fiction, the village novel, in both structural and thematic terms, has consistently articulated the dialectic of modernity as a historically constructed and hence deeply contested social and political terrain. In this intertextual narrative corpus, the socioeconomic materiality of peasant struggle and the political realities in which that struggle is embedded emerge, from time to time, as the driving force behind the representation of the village. More frequently, the village is written as a central trope around which the problem of individual and collective identity in relation to history is imagined and organized. The two themes often overlap in the form of the social and discursive antagonisms between the marginalized and exploited masses – ‘the wretched of the earth’ – and the coercive hegemony of a modernizing nation-state. Modernity therein becomes a fluid and disputed historical process, rather than a monolithic and rigid ontology that splits the world into binary concepts of ‘progress’ and ‘development’. By exploring this trope as an unfolding form, we can then begin to understand the powerful ways in which a society articulates its experience of history as a dynamic, conflictual and incessant movement between past, present and future. In this sense, the book attempts a kind of interpretive reading that, in Raymond Williams’ words, explains ‘in related terms, both the persistence and the historicity of concepts’ within a cultural canon. Such a reading would, for example, more usefully examine the rural novel, wherever it may be found, as simultaneously inscribing a universal human, and viii

P R E FA C E

historically specific social experience within the context of a shared modernity, of ‘a history repeated in many lives and many places’. Similarly, the history of a genre forms one of the major concerns of this book. I use the novel about the village as a way to explore the historical pressures that shaped the formal articulation of the genre as a whole, beginning with its foundational period at the turn of the century. In doing so, I have tried to offer an alternative model to the standard developmentalist one presented by both orientalist and nationalist critics and literary historians. This model, which describes the Arabic novel as proceeding from an originary point of translation and assimilation of European literary modernity to ‘mature’ local production, reproduces the binary articulation of modernity referred to above. Certainly, any discussion of the novel as a representational mode and a literaryhistorical movement in the Arab context cannot hope to avoid the determining moment of the great, nineteenth-century European novel as a kind of shadowy presence that haunts the local recognition and mapping of narrative form. The impulse here is always to compare and contrast, to locate a prototype in European literary history rather than to take up the much more difficult task of constructing a new critical language with which to describe local forms of modern narrativity. This is not to suggest that Arabic fiction has not been imbricated by European forms, or to invoke an exhausted particularism that relegates modern Arabic literature to an atavistic cultural margin divorced from the global reach of capitalist modernity. Rather, I have attempted to point to a critical methodology that uncovers the relationship between form and ideology as an expression of historical hegemony, and then examines the various narrative strategies and social pressures through which this relationship is formally reproduced, qualified, distended or subverted in local narrative praxis. Only then does it become possible to describe, in general or comparative terms, the formal and discursive structures of a genre outside of the literaryhistorical space of nineteenth-century Europe, and to break the rigid cultural and disciplinary discourses that obscure the worldly historical and human spaces in which culture is commonly produced.

ix

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This book is the product of a lengthy intellectual and personal journey that began at Columbia University under the invaluable guidance of my sorely missed mentor, friend and colleague, the late Magda al-Noweihi. Without her many years of unflagging encouragement and support, it may have never indeed seen the light of day, and for that, as well as for the brilliant example she set, both as a scholar and as a human being, I owe her my deepest gratitude. I would also like to thank Pierre Cachia for first introducing me, many moons ago, to the wonderful world of Arabic literature and for alerting me to the strategic importance of language, diglossia and folk genres in Egyptian literature. More recently, I am also grateful to him for reading portions of the manuscript and for the insightful comments he was kind enough to offer. Many thanks are also due to George Saliba and Hamid Dabashi for the advice and encouragement they offered me over the years, and for making Columbia the exciting and intellectually stimulating place that it continues to be. Large portions of the book were written in Cairo with the generous financial support of the Social Science Research Council and the National Endowment for the Humanities. The research leave allowed me by the Department of Near Eastern Studies at Princeton University was also instrumental in its completion. Neither would this book have been possible without the friends and colleagues who gave unsparingly of their time, energy and enthusiasm. The Egypt Seminar that met during the fall of 1999 at Princeton University was immensely valuable in helping me to clarify and contextualize my ideas, and I am grateful to Beth Baron, Ellis Goldberg, Eve Trout-Powell, Robert Vitalis, Khaled Fahmy and Robert Tignor in this regard. For valuable and detailed x

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

comments on the present text, I am greatly indebted to Peter Gran, who read the chapters carefully and critically, and who consistently challenged me to think comparatively. I am also grateful to Hani Hanafi, Samer Shehata and Salim Tamari for having read and commented on earlier drafts of portions of the book. I owe special thanks to my editors, Roger Allen and Philip Kennedy, for their time and their invaluable suggestions. My long and meandering conversations with Daniel Heller-Roazen and Sameh Mahran about language, modernity and the politics of identity also contributed in great measure to some of the ideas presented in this book. I would also like to thank Hosam AboulEla, Nancy Coffin, John Hedigan, Karen Kern, Imaan Selim and Muhammad Al-Wakeel for the advice and support they generously offered me over the years. Last but not least, I would like to acknowledge the prodigious tea-making ability of my sister Mona Selim, and to thank Muhammad Hasib and Alex Mikhail for contributing a large dollop of fun to the solitary and sometimes arduous process of writing.

xi

INTRODUCTION The peasant and modern narrative in Egypt

n the twentieth century, the Egyptian peasantry – for millennia the backbone of a rich and sophisticated agricultural and commercial economy – came to dominate the social discourse and political deology of the modern Egyptian nation-state, and the fallah uddenly emerged as a potent emblem of national identity. For centuries, despised and ignored by urban elites, the fallah has now come to be so closely identified with national culture that much of he artistic and intellectual production in Egypt is made in his image and the state itself rules in his name, or at least claims to do so. Beginning in the 1920s, poets, composers, visual and plastic artists and writers began to focus intensely on the peasant as the proper subject of a new national art. The musical compositions of Sayyid Darwish, the monumental sculptures of Mahmud Mukhtar, and the novels of Taha Husayn and Tawfiq al-Hakim all contributed to the delineation of this new figure. Popular intellecuals like Salamah Musa and Muhammad Husayn Haykal wrote essay after essay celebrating his ancient lineage and national authenticity (asalah) while aristocratic politicians such as the Wafdist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul, and even King Farouk himself, loudly proclaimed their peasant origins – a state of affairs which would have been unthinkable a mere fifty years earlier. The Egyptian revoution of 1952 was made in his name, and post-revolutionary artistic and intellectual production continued to focus on peasant culture. Throughout the second half of the twentieth century, iction, poetry, film and television soap operas depicted the village and the peasant in graphic detail in an attempt to describe the ills of Egyptian society and to point to a better future. The fallah came to epresent Egypt itself, and to claim peasant origins was now, perhaps for the first time in the many centuries of Egyptian history, a mark of distinction and pride. It was to be a true Egyptian. 1

INTRODUCTION

This major transformation in the imagery and political discourse surrounding the fallah can be traced back to the early nineteenth century at least. Broadly speaking, colonialism and Egypt’s integration into a global capitalist economy produced the social and political conditions that made this transformation possible. These conditions included the institutionalization and consolidation of the modern nation-state, the emergence of nationalism and the anti-colonial struggle, the massive demographic changes that took place in Egypt as a result of dizzying rural migration, the spread of literacy and higher education, and finally, the peasantry’s increasing consciousness of its own radical role as a political and economic force in modern Egypt. As a direct consequence of these material changes a whole mythology, an entirely new and singular, if quixotic, discursive structure grew up around the figure of the Egyptian peasant over the course of the twentieth century. The elaboration of this mythology was linked to two central and simultaneous historical processes. The first of these was the emergence and consolidation of the modern national state in Egypt, particularly in its later colonial phase at the end of the nineteenth and beginning of the twentieth century. The second was the creation and gradual canonization, beginning around the turn of the century, of a series of new literary genres: the journalistic essay, the short story and the novel. Many of the Egyptian novels written over the course of the twentieth century have rural settings. Most of Egypt’s writers have written at least one novel about the fallah and his village. Prior to the revolution of 1952, the luminaries of the Nahdah made important, foundational forays into this field: Taha Husayn, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini, Tawfiq al-Hakim, and Muhammad Husayn Haykal for example. In the post-revolutionary period, many writers and novelists, such as ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah, Yusuf al-Qa‘id, Khayri Shalabi and ‘Abd al-Fatah al-Jamal, have focused almost exclusively on the village. Others, like Yusuf Idris and Baha’ Tahir, have produced at least two or three seminal village novels. Nobel laureate Naguib Mahfouz aside, much of the modern Egyptian narrative canon is made up of village novels. Even properly urban fiction is almost always haunted by the presence of the village, as an intensely problematic geographical and historical place of origins. This phenomenon is partly due, as the following pages will argue, to the growing centrality of the peasant and land question in modern nationalist consciousness and the ideology of the 2

INTRODUCTION

state. The Arabic novel – in Egypt as elsewhere in the Arab world – is a political novel and hence the political importance of the idea of al-ard wal-fallah (Land and Peasant) is necessarily reflected in the fiction of the twentieth century. The village novel also reflects issues related to the sociology of culture in the modern Egyptian context. The problem of social identity in both a personal and a political sense is repeatedly articulated in the novel through the trope of the ‘clash’ between the country and the city as it is lived by individuals and by entire communities. From a specifically literary point of view, this phenomenon is also rooted in the nature of the narrative structure of the novel as it emerged in Egypt: the problematic of realism and mimesis (taswir al-waqi‘), the narrative subject (al-dhat al-riwa‘iyyah) and the process of narration itself (al-‘ilaqah bayn al-dhat wal-mawdu’). This book will focus on the seminal relationship between the Egyptian village and the novel as it emerged and developed in Egypt from the first decades of the century until its end. I will argue that the structural and thematic components of the genre itself were intrinsically linked to the historical process by which the fallah emerged as a subject of social science and of a new narrative discourse, as well as an insurgent force in modern Egyptian history.*** In his book, Colonising Egypt, Tim Mitchell has explored the complex institutional and intellectual nature of a colonial enterprise based on the twin processes of discipline and representation. Mitchell argues that the construction and consolidation of the modern nation-state in Egypt both required and produced a new method of social and political administration, a new disciplinary technique of power that was organized and reproduced institutionally in the form of the national army, state-supervised education, and urban planning and architecture. Egypt’s projected modernity was shaped by the economics of capitalist world markets and the epistemologies of enlightenment and imperialism. The national state – as Partha Chatterjee and others have pointed out – emerged from the logic of this dynamic, and particularly from the structures of extant colonial administration. Mitchell describes the process by which the British colonial government in Egypt – and prior to that, the government of Muhammad ‘Ali (widely credited with creating the first ‘national’ state) rested on new legal and administrative structures and economic policies designed to ‘discipline, coordinate and increase what were now thought of as the “productive powers” of the country’.1 In nineteenth-century Egypt, 3

INTRODUCTION

the bulk of the productive powers to which Mitchell alludes were located in the countryside, both in terms of manpower and agricultural resources. It was Muhammad ‘Ali who began the process of centrally planned and institutionalized exploitation of these resources through land-tenure reforms and the legislation that created Egypt’s first modern, standing army. Later in the nineteenth century, Muhammad ‘Ali’s grandson, Isma‘il, contributed to the creation of large, private agricultural estates, further altering the relationship between the state – and by extension, the urban elite and intelligentsia – to the rural hinterlands. The British colonial administration consolidated this process through further agricultural legislation and the elaborate micro-management of rural infrastructure and production. It was around this time that the fallah began to enter the discourse of nationalist intellectuals and politicians as a potential (if problematic) national subject (as opposed to simply a dumb and dispensable – if, at times, fractious – ‘laboring hand’). It was also around this time that new Arabic narrative genres were being forged. The fallah emerges as a central subject of nationalist discourse and of fiction at the juncture of these two historical forces. As contact between city and village increased in the nineteenth century, and as the modern state began, consciously and systematically, to mobilize the resources of the rural hinterlands, reformist and nationalist intellectuals became increasingly preoccupied with the peasantry’s role in the project of national renaissance (Nahdah), first as a labor force and second as a potential citizenry.2 Political dissidents, like the satirist and dramatist Ya‘qub Sannu‘, recognized in this peasantry an important and powerful force in the struggle against European imperialism in Egypt, as well as against the monarchy. Others identified it as the guardian of a stagnant and underdeveloped national character that had to be systematically reformed by a vanguard of national elites before Egypt could truly take its place in the community of independent nation-states. At the same time, some intellectuals questioned the social and cultural legitimacy of the new Egyptian elites, and began to explore the consequences of unchecked colonial acculturation, as well as the meaning of individual and collective identity, within the framework of a host of new social ideologies: liberalism, Social Darwinism, nationalism. This ambivalent historical dynamic gave rise to an existential split or rupture in the nationalist imagination that would continue to haunt Egyptian intellectuals throughout the twentieth century. The 4

INTRODUCTION

foundational intellectuals of the Nahdah constructed modernity as a binary cultural space rooted in orientalist history. The masses were relegated to the outskirts of this modernity, which could only properly accommodate an elite subjectivity and historicity. As part of this model, the fallah emerged as both a romanticized emblem of the nation and a potent symbol of its historic decadence. Simultaneously, the cosmopolitan urban intellectual who saw himself as the vanguard of the Nahdah began to articulate his identity in traumatic terms. He saw himself as an alienated and isolated individual, incapable of connecting to a mythic national collectivity whose language and culture was forever lost to him in the mists of past time and whose sense of selfhood, of individual identity, was therefore essentially fissured, constructed, incomplete. The introduction of a new kind of Arabic narrative fiction – the novel and short story – onto the cultural stage in Egypt participated in this larger process. The urban, nationalist, bourgeois intelligentsia of the late nineteenth and early twentieth century was now beginning to ponder its identity as the voice of a new class and a new society. The narrative representation of this class’ social environment (al-waqi‘ al-ijtima‘i) was one of the mechanisms by which this process of self-reflection unfolded. The fallah provided the raw material for the new nationalist literary imagination while also figuring as an archetypal narrative other for the cosmopolitan, urban subject. This dynamic is written into the twentieth-century Egyptian village novel in the form of a fundamental rupture between the social and narrative spaces of the text; a rupture which the narrative, or biographical, subject (whether first-person narrator or central protagonist) comes to internalize. One of the main subtexts of the village novel is thus the story of the subject’s attempt to narrate and exorcize this rupture between self and other. This trope emerges again and again throughout the century, and its persistence illuminates a seminal political and existential problem at the heart of Egyptian modernity. It is a problem of collective and individual origins and hence of identity. It is also a problem that contains a history of acute and deepening social struggle.

5

INTRODUCTION

Early nationalist intellectuals and the discourse of social reform Urban writers and intellectuals began to pay increasing attention to the fallah in the last decades of the nineteenth century. The intellectuals affiliated with the ‘Urabi movement strove to mobilize the peasantry against the Ottoman and British regimes in Egypt. As part of this process, a discourse of social reform grew up around the figure of the fallah as the representative of a putative national character. In order to assume their role as an efficient and modern labor force, the peasants would have to be educated out of their slothful and ignorant habits and customs. The idea of education as an urgent national project emerged around this time. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim was one of the most important and prolific champions of national education and social reform, and in this respect, he wrote extensively about the fallah in his journals. Men like ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and Muhammad ‘Umar were writers who clearly identified with an emergent middle class, distinct and qualitatively different from both the acculturated, aristocratic upper classes and the vulgar, teeming masses of the poor, both urban and rural.3 The luminaries of the early Nahdah – Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Qasim Amin and Ahmad Lutfi alSayyid, who are widely considered to be amongst the ‘founding fathers’ of Egyptian intellectual modernity – came from the upper echelons of Egyptian society. Most of these men were Westerneducated members of the latifundist urban elites as well as prolific writers and reformers. Their reformist ideas were influenced by nineteenth-century European positivism, which was being widely disseminated in turn-of-the century Egyptian intellectual circles through the translation of social theorists like Jeremy Bentham, Herbert Spencer and Gustave Le Bon. Unlike Nadim and ‘Umar, many of them wholeheartedly admired and identified with Western liberal culture, and saw themselves as the elite vanguard of Egypt’s social and political renaissance. They were concerned with a variety of pressing contemporary issues. Al-Muwaylihi criticized the chaos and injustice of the mixed courts system and the decadence of the ‘ulama in Egypt. Amin championed the education of women and Fathi Zaghlul and Lutfi al-Sayyid wrote extensively about the need to foster a liberal political culture amongst the emergent Egyptian middle classes. Regardless of the specific issue at hand, this group of intellectuals viewed ‘society’ itself as an abstract entity, determined by universal, scientific laws 6

INTRODUCTION

and principles of organization (al-hay’ah al-ijtima‘iyyah). Mitchell argues that the diagnosis and reform of this abstract social order – ‘conceived in absolute distinction to the mere individuals and practices composing it’ – was the principal object of nationalist reformers across the political and social spectrum.4 Nationalist historiography has tended to canonize this generation as the founders and champions of the early anti-colonial nationalist movement. Other scholars have suggested that it formed a self-interested comprador bourgeoisie with ambiguous ties to both the British and the Palace.5 Mitchell has pointed to the common network of professional, social and financial interests that distinguished them as a class from the vast majority of Egyptians: [Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, Qasim Amin and Ahmad Fathi Zaghul] were all members of the same social and literary salon, where they mixed with fellow government servants, magistrates and prosecutors, with members of the country’s important Turkish families, with British officials, and with visiting Oriental scholars. The concern among those who gathered in such salons towards the end of the nineteenth century was not so much the colonial occupation, from which as landowners, merchants and government officials their families were beginning to benefit even as they resented the fact of European control, but the crowd that threatened in the streets and cafes outside.6 Mitchell’s’ description of these intellectuals tends to obscure the complexity and diversity of their political ideologies, as well as the nuances of their political affiliations.7 These were men who sought to cast off what they saw as the shackles of a formalist, sacral and traditionalist culture and to actively engage the values of a seemingly superior, liberal-democratic Europe in an effort to refashion indigenous social and political institutions. In spite of their affluence and power, they were however, keenly conscious of their status as colonials – a consciousness that produced a kind of cultural and psychological dislocation in the imagination of the intellectual, which grew more urgent as the history of European imperialism unfolded in the twentieth century. Mitchell’s point is an important one, however, for it uncovers the extremely ambiguous attitude towards local popular culture, the poor, the 7

INTRODUCTION

working classes (the ‘masses’) implicit in the reformist discourse produced by turn-of-the-century intellectuals. The undifferentiated Egyptian masses were indeed often the target of their polemic. It was this ‘crowd’ – the illiterate, promiscuous, diseased urban riffraff and the persecuted, restive, landless rural peasantry – invading the city in ever-increasing numbers – that threatened the material interests of the new bourgeoisie, and by implication, the prosperity and progress of the nation itself. The new social sciences were introduced into turn-of-thecentury intellectual circles through the translation of the nineteenth-century European positivists, particularly Herbert Spencer, Gustave Le Bon and Edmond Demolins. Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul translated Demolins’ A quoi tient le superiorité des anglosaxons? into Arabic in 1899, Gustave Le Bon’s Les Lois Psycologiques de l’evolution des peuples in 1913 and his Psycologie des foules in 1909. Fathi Zaghlul also produced an unfinished and unpublished translation of Spenser’s Man versus the State and in 1892, a translation of Jeremy Bentham’s An Introduction to the Principles of Morals and Legislation.8 Taha Husayn translated Le Bon’s Psycologie de l’education in 1922 followed by his book, La civilisation des arabes. Le Bon’s description of a ‘collective mind’ or ‘mental constitution’, evolving over many generations of a nation’s history, was intended to demonstrate the difference between advanced and backward nations. Moreover, his claim that the ‘spirit’ of a nation belonged to its cultural and social elites who ‘constituted the true incarnation of the forces of a race’ resonated with an Egyptian intelligentsia that believed itself to be the vanguard of national progress and enlightenment.9 The ‘problem’ of society for these intellectuals was how to educate, organize and manage this chaotic, disruptive and potentially dangerous multitude in order to arrive at the Hegelian stage of European modernity. The writings of Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul and Ahmad Lutfi alSayyid are representative of the social ideology of this elite generation of secular, liberal intellectuals. Fathi Zaghlul and Lutfi al-Sayyid were both sons of wealthy provincial landowners. They were educated in Europe, spoke fluent French and moved in the same social and political circles. Moreover, they were close friends and colleagues. A lawyer by training, Fathi Zaghlul sat on the panel of judges that meted out the infamous sentence in the Dinshaway trial of 1906, while Lutfi al-Sayyid’s Liberal Constitutionalist Party occasionally conspired with the British 8

INTRODUCTION

against both the Palace and the Wafd when this suited the financial and political interests of its propertied constituency. Fathi Zaghlul and Lutfi al-Sayyid were classic liberals who believed that ‘the best social and political principles were not those that aimed at impossible ideals…[but were] related to the character and habits of thought of a particular people’.10 They supported the implementation of a constitutional monarchy and were extremely suspicious of democracy as a political system. They firmly believed in the mission of their class as a national vanguard, and blamed the Egyptian masses for the country’s political and social decline. Fathi Zaghlul believed that national strength was measured by the strength of its elite class (al-tabaqah al-mumtazah, al-tabaqah al‘aliyah) which inherited its intellectual capacity, along with its nobility. He referred to the masses as al-ghawgha’iyyah (the rabble) and al-tabaqat al-nazilah (the debased classes) and claimed that ‘the elite build and the rabble destroy’. This elite was responsible for guiding Egypt to its rightful place amongst the enlightened European nations. If it were to abdicate this role, poverty and chaos would necessarily ensue.11 Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid almost single-handedly inspired the social and political thought of the following generation of writers and intellectuals associated with the influential journal al-Siyasah, most prominent of whom was Muhammad Husayn Haykal, author of the foundational Egyptian novel Zaynab, and one of the main theorists of National Literature. In keeping with his lifelong belief that reform of Egypt’s national character necessarily preceded the possibility of social or political reform, al-Sayyid wrote extensively on the defects of this character, which was shaped by the historic indolence, cunning, passivity and lack of self-respect of the Egyptian people. Like Fathi Zaghlul, Lutfi alSayyid believed in the historic duty of his class to ‘descend to the level of the masses and share their crude sentiments, in order to gain their confidence and lead them unawares in the direction of their real interests’.12 This elite vanguard did not properly belong to the defective ‘society’ imagined by Zaghlul, al-Sayyid and their contemporaries. Rather, as a class, it stood over and above the teeming, chaotic, dissipated mass of Egyptians in urgent need of correction. It analyzed them, represented them and spoke on their behalf. Society was now the abstract object of the elite thinker’s gaze. Real political authority, historical agency and even individual subjectivity were the sole prerogatives of this thinker as an

9

INTRODUCTION

individual confronting his environment in a deeply problematic existential and political relationship. It was this dialectic that shaped the construction of the character of the fallah in the writing of early reformist intellectuals (and that one also finds reproduced in the discourse of colonial administration). The Egyptian peasant was essentialized as being lazy, superstitious, cunning, submissive and generally unfit for the rights and responsibilities of modern citizenship. After 1919 a new, romantic and equally paternalist description of the peasant became dominant. High nationalist discourse represented the fallah in idyllic, pastoral terms, claiming the peasant and the village as the millennial source of national specificity and authenticity and celebrating rural labor as a natural and timeless activity. In his excellent study of peasant revolts in twentieth-century Egypt, Sayyid ‘Ashmawi has demonstrated how the hegemonic social discourse that grew up around the ‘character’ of the Egyptian peasant in the first three decades of the century was an explicit ideological response on the part of the bourgeoisie to the very real threat of rural revolution.13 Thus in spite of the numerous and often quite violent strategies of resistance employed by peasant communities all over Egypt from the nineteenth century onwards (which included, but were not limited to organized revolt against the authorities – both colonial and native – and the large landowners that they represented) the pre-1952 nationalist intelligentsia continued to manufacture a peaceful and idyllic picture of the peasant and of rural culture in general. As the political and economic status quo in Egypt became increasingly untenable in the 1930s and 1940s, and urban and rural agitation reached a fever-pitch, a new generation of radical, socialist intellectuals began to attack the discursive edifice of elite romantic nationalism and to represent the peasant as a politically mature and insurgent subject. This generation understood the implicit relationship between social ideology and culture, and it was for precisely this reason that they were labeled enemies of the state by a succession of Egyptian regimes.

The novel and the problematic subject As in Europe, the novel in Egypt emerged as a socially contested literary terrain.14 Its critics attacked the genre as an immoral and corrupting influence on the impressionable minds of tender youth, while its champions defended it as a tool for educating the sensi10

INTRODUCTION

bilities of the emerging middle classes in a style and language which they could understand without difficulty. Ahmad Ibrahim al-Hawwari has written a fascinating study of the attitudes prevalent amongst turn-of-the-century critics who explicitly identified narrative fiction as the most appropriate literary form for ‘instilling moral principles, improving habits, smoothing rough edges, and turning men of taste and intellect into educators of the indolent and the vulgar…amongst the masses, in the shape of amusement and humor’.15 ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr identifies Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi as the father of this trend and includes the satirical writings of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi, the philosophical narratives of Farah Antun and the historical novels of Jurji Zaydan in his discussion of the process by which original Arabic narrative fiction was produced side-by-side with the numerous contemporary translations of European romantic fiction. AlHawwari also focuses on popular journalism as an experimental site of explicitly didactic narrative, and suggests that much of this new narrative was concerned with the relationship between the sexes – the novelties of romantic love and companionate marriage for example.16 In fact, most of the cultural journals of this period had a great deal to say about this subject in particular, and domestic issues in general. ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s immensely popular journal, al-Ustadh, included a semi-regular feature entitled ‘Madrasat al-Banat’ (The Girls’ School) that revolved around a dialogue between a mother and daughter in which the mother habitually dispenses sound domestic advice to her daughter. Even a highbrow periodical like al-Muqtataf included a section called ‘Tadbir al-Manzil’ (Household Administration). Al-Hawwari follows an ongoing debate, conducted in this section of alMuqtataf between 1905 and 1907, on the moral perils of novel-reading, particularly as regards the young of both sexes.17 Lutfi al-Sayyid contributed to the debate on the role of the new literature in a specifically nationalist context: literature is not, as superficial thinkers imagine, merely an instrument to amuse litterateurs. Nor are its tales merely a beautiful way of killing precious time. The fact is that a literature and a literary history are among the strongest identifying marks of a nation; serving to link its past generations with the present one, defining its particular character, and rendering it distinct from all others. And so, its personality is perpetuated through time, the area of 11

INTRODUCTION

similarities among its individual members becomes broader, and the bonds of solidarity among them grow stronger.18 During this period, reformist intellectuals conceived of the new literature as a kind of social cement. By educating and improving the collective character of the Egyptians, it would prepare them for citizenship in the modern nation-state. On the other hand, these intellectuals understood popular, oral narrativity as the antithesis of modern narrative, repeatedly attacking the former as both a cause and a symptom of the corruption of the masses. The social context of the cafe-based hakawati reinforced the slothful, vice-ridden habits of these masses, while the marvelous themes of the popular epic cycles (sira) and the folk tale (haddutah) contributed to their superstition and gullibility. This specific – and often quite fervid – prejudice against the dominant medium of popular culture was built into much of the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century critical discourse that contributed to the elaboration of fiction as a new and inherently modern narrative genre, and it has continued to color literary history until recently. Mitchell has argued that, by the nineteenth century, Europe had produced an ontology that split the world into subject and object; observer and observed, reality and its representation. This was ‘a place where one was continually pressed into service as a spectator by a world ordered so as to represent’, and ‘where the real world…was something created in the representation of its commodities’.19 Moreover, as Edward Said has shown, the power to represent was the power to order, administer and colonize. Thus the histories of capitalist modernity, imperialism, the expansion of the nation-state and of realism as an aesthetic philosophy are inextricably linked. Nineteenth-century realism, in painting as in fiction, depended on a point-of-view that was imaginatively rooted in a centered and stable position of absolute authority and yet of absolute invisibility. This point-of-view attempted to mimic the dispassionate ‘objectivity’ of scientific truth. Mitchell speaks of ‘the great historical confidence’ of nineteenth-century Europe, where the wealth and power of national bourgeoisies and the unimpeded colonial expansion of the state was at its height. The ‘political certainties of the age’ were reflected in ‘the certainty of representation’ characteristic of realism and reproduced in the exhibit, the museum, the spectacle. The representation of ‘reality’ thus implied a fundamental alienation and masked a basic strategy 12

INTRODUCTION

of power. It was not a natural or ‘accurate’ or ‘real’ reflection of the exterior world, but rather the projection of ‘an effect called “reality” ’ onto an exterior world now marked as illegible and disordered.20 Similarly, the narrative structure of the new fiction that emerged in the first decades of the twentieth century also implied a radical break with the old modes of the Arabic literary canon. In the same way that society came to be understood as a distinct and abstract field of human knowledge constructed around a subject/object relationship, so the act of narration itself came to reproduce the split implied in this new ontology. The narrator was no longer the custodian and transmitter of an accumulated civilization or turath – a clearly defined, visible and yet transparent figure through whom spoke the voice of history and collective wisdom. The new narrator was rather an individual standing ‘outside’ the collectivity, observing it, describing it, narrating it, not as a communal historian, but from a position that embodied a subjective but nonetheless authoritative and hegemonic point of view. In the novel proper, this new narrative subject emerges as a biographical subject whose interiority dominates the text. The project of reform (tahdhib al-akhlaq) was intimately bound up with the process of representation (taswir al-mujtama‘). The act of narration thus came to embody a slippery relationship between the narrating subject (al-dhat al-riwa’iyyah) and the ambiguous, abstract collectivity defined as ‘society’ which represented a putative national reality (al-waqi‘). Michel Zeraffa describes the novel in Europe as the record of the bourgeoisie’s rise to power as an articulated and hegemonic class: The novel was brought into being for men who wanted to find their place in historical continuity, and were moreover aware of constituting a certain stratum of society. So, as against the global, systematized and partly supernatural ordering propounded by myth, the novel set out to express an order established by a group in the process of instituting itself as a class, which enjoyed finding in novels explicit and chronological records of its past as well as explicit characteristics of its power, virtues and pleasures.21 Marxist criticism identifies the classic realist novel in Europe as the expression of a bourgeois epistemology which sets the self 13

INTRODUCTION

against society in a relationship characterized by the commodifications of the capitalist mode of production. Narration becomes the process through which the problematic of the anomic individual confronting society is negotiated, managed, resolved. Realism, in fact, is produced in the novel as a social narration of the individual as problem: what, where, how is the meaning of the individual in this prosaic world, confronted thus by society, by history? The novel ceaselessly makes sense for the individual, brings him or her…into this new field of reality, into recognition, knowledge, meaning.22 In its efforts to create its own social destiny, this artificial, autonomous self contains and resolves the ontological contradiction embedded in the novel and emerges as a kind of ‘mirror’ of the social body as a whole. The novel in Egypt, in both its romantic and realist phase, emerged under a set of different historical circumstances than the novel in Europe. Unlike its European counterpart, the Egyptian bourgeoisie did not have the opportunity to consolidate its hegemony as a social class with a deeply rooted cultural and political tradition. Its emergence onto the historical stage as a class in the nineteenth century was almost immediately challenged by the simultaneous emergence of a politically conscious and insurgent mass of urban and rural poor, galvanized and radicalized by the experience of imperialism, the ‘Urabi revolt and the British occupation. At the same time, its position as a class within the larger economic and financial structures of world-capitalism limited its ability to manufacture a solid national hegemony based on the same kinds of political and economic concessions reluctantly granted by the European bourgeoisies to their working poor. The Egyptian revolution of 1952 accelerated and magnified this process. This historical dynamic is inscribed into the novel genre – and particularly the village novel – over the course of the twentieth century. The narrative self, in both its romantic and realist form, has constantly been beset by the consciousness of its own historical and discursive limits, its own irrelevance in relation to the sweep of history and the powerful, teeming presence of the masses of marginalized and silenced peoples that have laid powerful claim to this same history. ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr traces this problematic relationship between the narrative subject and the collectivity to the second 14

INTRODUCTION

decade of the twentieth century, in the period immediately following the end of the First World War and the Egyptian revolution of 1919. This was the period in which ‘National Literature’ emerged as a dominant literary ideology in the critical writing of Muhammad Husayn Haykal and Salamah Musa among others, and it is also the period from which Badr dates the emergence of ‘the artistic novel’ (al-riwayah al-fanniyyah) in Egypt. He describes the raison d’être of this artistic novel as ‘the expression of the writer’s perception of the world that surrounds him’, i.e. ‘reality’ (al-waqi‘). The early-century bourgeois writer described by Badr is an acculturated intellectual, caught fast between two worlds and two identities: The middle classes were unable to transform society and hence, its culture and arts, in any significant way. Education remained a scholastic enterprise and radical intellectuals were a weak and marginal minority with no significant popular support. Progressive and reformist projects such as the liberation of women or the advancement of literature had no roots in social reality but were imposed by the influence exercised by a superior European civilization. This influence moreover mostly held an abstract intellectual appeal and did not penetrate people’s hearts. Indeed, in some cases, it failed to penetrate the hearts of its actual partisans.23 The ideological and filiative malaise described in this passage is translated into the structure of the novel – and the village novel in particular – through the figure of what Badr alternately calls the narrative or narrating self (al-dhat al-riwa’iyyah; al-dhat alrawiyyah), and what I have previously referred to as the narrative or biographical subject. He is an alienated, frustrated subject, incapable of connecting with the reality which it is his national and artistic duty to picture. He is doubly acculturated: first, as a colonial subject and later, as a national one. The rural hinterlands in which he was born represent both the hereditary domains of his power and the borders of his own marginality. The fallahin – the people who inhabit these domains – are the source of his wealth and of his romantic identity. They are simultaneously the objects of his curiosity, pity, suspicion – the source of his malaise. This subject is a fractured and dislocated subject, and it is between the poles constructed through this divided selfhood that the village 15

INTRODUCTION

novel emerges as a narrative sub-genre in twentieth-century Egypt.24

The literary fallah Prior to the nineteenth century, the fallah was not considered a fit subject of high literature. Poetry and belles-lettres, written in classical Arabic, confined themselves to properly urban subjects and figures: courtiers, warriors and statesmen, ‘ulama, wealthy merchants and even the picaresque riff-raff of the urban underworld. Even linguistically hybrid popular narrative – such as the Thousand and One Nights and Sirat Baybars (The Epic of Baybars) – took its themes and characters from specifically urban settings and for the most part treated the countryside as the beginning of the end of the civilized world – ‘the regions of the marvelous and the supernatural’.25 Literature proper was a purely urban affair, both in terms of production and consumption: the storytellers love to dwell on the adventures of sons of kings, of politic ministers, of wealthy merchants, of shopkeepers, artizans, water-carriers, and even ass-drivers; but they disdain to waste the efforts of their imagination upon anything of fallah, or rather of country origin.26 Though medieval shadow-plays occasionally included peasant characters, the only extent pre-nineteenth-century narrative that deals exclusively with the fallah is Yusuf al-Shirbini’s seventeenthcentury work, Hazz al-Quhuf fi Sharh Qasidat Abi Shaduf (The Convulsion of the Cranium in the Analysis of Abi Shaduf’s Ode).27 Shirbini was a religious scholar who hailed from the village of Shirbin but resided in Cairo, nonetheless doing frequent business in his native village, most likely in the capacity of a money-lender. Shirbini’s work purports to be a gloss on a poem by a certain fallah, the Abu Shaduf of his title, but is in fact an extensive satire on the Egyptian peasant and his way of life, from the viewpoint of an urban sophisticate, scholar and merchant with important financial interests in the countryside. Gabriel Baer notes that the prejudices against the fallah reflected in Hazz al-Quhuf were most likely based in popular oral anecdotes and stories that circulated widely in seventeenth-century Cairo, and hence represented the general urban attitude towards the countryside and its inhabitants.28 The main conceit of the work lies in the second part 16

INTRODUCTION

of the book, which is written as a satiric commentary on Abu Shaduf’s poem, while the lengthy introduction contains ‘stories, legends, poems, jokes, suggestive witticisms, and in particular obscenities’ revolving around the figure of the fallah and Shirbini’s description of his daily life.29 Shirbini’s fallah is stupid, materialistic, vulgar and stingy. He is cunning and dishonest – a born thief – and moreover, is totally ignorant of the basic precepts of his own religion. Consequently, he is ritually unclean, totally immoral and even sexually perverse.30 Unlike a number of Egyptian critics who commented on Shirbini’s manuscript in the 1950s and 1960s, Baer concludes, first, that Shirbini’s main purpose in composing Hazz al-Quhuf was the sheer amusement of his readers and peers, and second, that the text is an anomaly in the Arabic literature of the period.31 In either case, it affords a glimpse into pre-modern urban attitudes towards the fallah – attitudes which persist strikingly in the reformist discourse of the early nationalist period in Egypt and beyond, and which continued, paradoxically, to exist side-by-side with the modern romantic ideology that placed the fallah at the center of an emergent nationalist discourse. In the modern period, the fallah begins to appear as a recognizable and recurrent literary character in the late nineteenth-century drama and journalism of Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim. Both men were fervent supporters of the ‘Urabists, before and after the revolt of 1881, and as such, their invention of the fallah as a literary figure is intimately bound up with the intellectual and political project of this seminal nationalist movement. Both men were also virulent critics of the Egyptian royal family – particularly the Khedive Isma‘il and his son Tawfiq – as well as the Ottoman and European establishment in Egypt at this time; and as such, they used the figure of the fallah as a means of developing a political and cultural critique of imperialism and state tyranny. Sannu‘ created his fallah in the image of the oppressed and rebellious ‘son of the soil’, while Nadim developed a more ambiguous peasant character that both embodied the backwardness and ignorance of the Egyptian national character and acted as a kind of proto-nationalist foil to the corrupt, Europeanized bourgeois who naturally disdained his native culture and hence rejected the ties and obligations that bound him to his country. It was in this context that Sannu‘ and Nadim pioneered the modern literary use of the colloquial – a fact which had important and lasting consequences for the structural development of the novel, since it is from this point on that the fallah voice came to be associated with 17

INTRODUCTION

a critique of hegemonic discourse – a counter-language so to speak – embedded in the literary inscription of the colloquial Egyptian dialect. Drama, the dramatic sketch and the dialogue – the genres which Sannu‘ and Nadim pioneered – were particularly suited to the inscription of what M. M. Bakhtin has called ‘polyglossia’ or ‘the interanimation of languages’ – the essence of the dialogic imagination and hence the main structural component of the novel genre. Sannu‘ and Nadim were thus responsible for creating a lasting dialogic voice for the fallah that would emerge as a central one in the twentieth-century Egyptian novel. The maqamah was also well suited to the elaboration of this dialogic narrative structure, not only because of its traditionally picaresque themes, but because of its generic inscription of multiple voices and linguistic registers representing the underworld of cosmopolitan urban society. Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s masterful turn-of-the-century maqamah-influenced narrative, Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham (The Narrative of ‘Isa Ibn Hisham) – widely considered to be a prototype of the emerging Arabic novel – also featured a fallah character: the delightfully and yet deceptively naive ‘Umdah, the country bumpkin who arrives in the big city to taste its pleasures and falls into the clutches of a wickedly funny group of urban scoundrels.32 Muwaylihi’s encyclopedic romp through fin-de-siècle Cairo is a biting critique of the moral and political corruption afflicting all sectors of this colonial society. His Cairo is a dark portrait of a world which has lost its moorings; a predatory world set adrift from all notions of historical and collective meaning, identity and responsibility; a world in which a cynical, dissolute and mindlessly Europeanized hautebourgeoisie, a mediocre and medieval intelligentsia, a rapacious and fraudulent financial and political establishment and a morally corrupt and wasted urban underclass rub elbows like so many hostile strangers in a train station. Against this background of urban colonial mayhem, the character of the ‘Umdah takes on a doubled narrative function. He is a historical anachronism, a social dinosaur. His gauche country manners and vulgar sensibility, his primitive sensuality and his excessive gullibility are drawn as signs of a deeply flawed native character corrupted by money, marginalized and rendered ludicrous by the inevitable thrust of modernity. And yet this fallah is perhaps the most sympathetic of Muwaylihi’s cast of dubious characters. Read within the larger context of Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham’s brave new world, his clownish voice speaks up and through the grain of the 18

INTRODUCTION

text to contest its decadent values. In this way, vulgarity and sensuality become simplicity of manner and purity of conscience, while his famous gullibility marks the underside of true generosity. In the same way, then, that Sannu‘ and Nadim’s fallah voice is deployed as a critique of brute power (Sannu‘) and the discourses of social hegemony (Nadim), Muwaylihi uses the fallah character to suggest a possible critique of colonial modernity in Egypt. In the first decades of the twentieth century, the representation of the peasant and the village in both popular and high culture became increasingly routinized. Muwaylihi’s hapless ‘Umdah was echoed and immortalized on the popular stage by Nagib alRihani’s comic character Kish Kish Bek, while Taha Husayn created the first ‘realistic’ description of the Egyptian village and what were to become its stock characters – the kuttab teacher, the local preacher, the Sufi Shaykh – in the first volume of his autobiography, Al-Ayyam (The Days) (1929). The tragic peasant of romanticism emerged between these two poles. Mahmud Khayrat’s pair of novellas, Al-Fata Al-Rifi (the Country Youth) and Al-Fatat Al-Rifiyyah (The Country Maiden) (1903–1905), prefigured the pastoral romance of Haykal’s Zaynab, while ‘Isa ‘Ubayd’s 1921 short story, ‘Ma’sat Rifiyyah’ (A Rural Tragedy), in which a Pasha’s son and a poor fallah fight to the death over a local peasant girl, constructed a melodramatic allegory of rural class conflict. Mahmud Taymur’s short story, ‘Fil-Qitar’ (On the Train), and Yahya Haqqi’s story, ‘Al-Qitar’ (The Train) foreground what was later to become a dominant theme in Egyptian fiction: the clash between the country and the city and the resulting historical dislocation imposed on rural culture and rural identity. The social(ist) realism and neo-realism that emerged onto the literary scene in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s reinterpreted the village as a site of social struggle, foregrounding the realities of peasant experience in relation to an oppressive economic and political regime, as well as a deeply embedded and deadening system of social convention. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s 1952 novel Al-Ard (The Land)33 initiated this trend, while Shawqi ‘Abd al-Hakim’s Ahzan Nuh (The Sorrows of Noah) (1963) described, in graphic detail, the poverty and squalor of village life as well as the complex and dissonant psychological interiority of its rural characters – an interiority that had previously been the monopoly of the cosmopolitan subject. However, whether romantic or realist, a number of central motifs and narrative strategies recur 19

INTRODUCTION

again and again in village fiction throughout the century. One of these revolves around the ruptures and continuities of geographical space. The train then comes to symbolize the possibility and significance of movement between culturally and socially defined geographies. Taymur and Haqqi’s train is repeatedly invoked in later narrative, from Yusuf Idris’ Al-Bayda’ (The Fair-skinned Girl) (1970) and Fathi Ghanem’s Al-Jabal (The Mountain) (1958) to ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim’s 1969 Ayyam al-Insan al-Sab‘ah (The Seven Days of Man) of 1969. Another motif is the rural love-triangle as a metaphor for social conflict and resolution in a nationalist context. Muhammad ‘Abd al-Ghani Hasan notes that many early twentieth-century writers set their romances in the village because of the relative freedom of action and movement that peasant woman enjoyed in relation to their veiled and cloistered urban counterparts. The credibility – as well as the propriety – of the love-story depended on this social difference: ‘that pure, rural intercourse with which city-girls are unblessed’.34 This was the period when Qasim Amin’s controversial ideas on the education and unveiling of Egyptian women were circulating in middle-class society. The character of the ‘free’ and yet chaste rural maiden was constructed, in the 1910s and 1920s, as an intervention into the debate sparked by Amin’s ‘new woman’. This character contained a number of significations. She was a kind of anthropological ‘artifact’ of a utopian rural society, and as such represented an implicit critique of urban society, defined as decadent, artificial and repressive. She was also a symbol of the nation as a whole, newly emerging from its age-old slumber. Beth Baron’s description of the feminization of Egyptian nationalist iconography points to the significance of a variety of socially ambiguous representations of femininity in nationalist discourse.35 The figure of what I shall call ‘the national feminine’ is absolutely central in twentieth-century Egyptian fiction in general and village fiction in particular. In this trope, (rural) woman is constructed as a metaphor of the nation. This womanhood then oscillates between rigid moral poles. Concepts of feminine virtue, chastity, purity are all assimilated into the idea of national authenticity and health, while their moral opposites – sexual agency and social ambition – allude to the corruption and decay of the nation as a whole. Rural female characters like Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s Sitt alDar (‘Adhra’ Dinshaway [The Maiden of Dinshaway]), Haykal’s famous heroine Zaynab (Zaynab) and Naguib Mahfouz’s Zahra 20

INTRODUCTION

(Miramar) are examples of the former. Their moral virtue mirrors and amplifies their function as emblems of the ‘natural’ (national pastoral) order. On the other hand, the corrupt national feminine is rife in modern fiction. The greedy and unfaithful wife of Mahmud Tahir Lashin’s story ‘Hadith al-Qaryah’ (Village Chat), Yusuf Idris’ ‘Al-Naddahah’ (The Siren), Naguib Mahfouz’ Zuqaq al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley) and Baha’ Tahir’s Qalat Duha (Doha Said) embodies the mortal perils of a diseased nation. The contest over the right to ‘possess’ or discipline this national feminine then inscribes a set of questions about the destiny of the nation itself. This contest often allegorizes the consciousness of a historical class struggle, as in ‘Isa ‘Ubayd’s story ‘A Rural Tragedy’, or an ideological one, as in Mahfouz’s Miramar, or a social one, as in Sharqawi’s The Land.36 Another even more significant contest is enacted in the village novel throughout the century through the inscription of the relationship between language and representation as an essentially political terrain. The subaltern peasant voice existed in vernacular literatures in Egypt – such as the folk genre of the mawwal and the urban shadow-play – throughout the medieval and premodern period. Beginning with Sannu‘ and Nadim, this subaltern voice officially enters modern narrative as the voice of a contrarian and/or insubordinate subject. The rigid discursive lines marked out by Arabic diglossia facilitated the dialogic structures that occasionally emerge in modern fiction, particularly in relation to the socioeconomic location of the peasant in history and his perennially problematic position vis-à-vis political authority. This is partly the reason why the twentieth-century debate over narrative language – fusha versus colloquial – was so controversial. The use of the colloquial as an explicitly contestatory language in Egyptian fiction was as much as anything else, a political act. This strategy is not unique to the Arabic novel. Lennard Davis’ description of European novelistic discourse as forming a normative language that reproduces and simultaneously masks the connection between class hegemony and social knowledge is an accurate description of a particular strand of the European realist tradition and not of the genre as a whole, and in all its historical locations. An alternative world-novelistic tradition wherein language is understood and inscribed as a contested social terrain certainly exists, even in the very midst of the European canon. The violent vulgarity of the speech of Fernand Celine’s urban underclasses is a case in point, as are the wickedly funny satirical dialects of 21

INTRODUCTION

Charles Dickens’ shady East Enders. Some twentieth-century American southern writers, such as William Faulkner and John Kennedy Toole, participate in this tradition, as do the AfricanAmerican novelists who created Black dialect as an alternative and oppositional literary language that went against the grain of a brutally racist and repressive society.37 In the Egyptian village novel, folk narrativity is constructed in a dialectial opposition to the languages of the modern subject. These antithetical narrative modes – the former circular, paradoxical, public and filiative; the latter linear, pragmatic and private – represent radically different epistemologies and hence relationships to power. In many of these novels, the inscription of subaltern, ‘folk’ language thus becomes a strategy for challenging the subject’s narrative hegemony and the various forms of social hegemony embedded in normative, nationalist representations of the rural community.*** The present book attempts to move beyond the dominant paradigm constructed by critics and literary historians of the Arabic novel. This latter is a teleological paradigm that reads the process of genre-formation as a process of technical reproduction of an ideal form rooted in Europe. Accordingly, the novel emerges in the Arab world after a period of translation and assimilation of the nineteenth-century European novel, then gradually ‘develops’ into a mature local form that properly corresponds to a canonical European one. Narrative genres that fall outside of the framework of this methodology become textually and historically problematic and are hence treated as perhaps interesting, but nonetheless abortive attempts to produce the novel genre in Arabic. Matti Moosa’s The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction is a good example of this paradigm. Moosa explains the literary history of the Nahdah in terms of an East-West binarism in which modern Arabic fiction remains locked in the throes of an eternally frozen antithetical tension with superior European narrative genres. Popular theater and epic and the maqamah for example, are dismissed as heterodox and archaic narrative forms that hamper the attempt to forge ‘modern’ genres, while the porous boundaries between all of these and hybrid twentieth-century genres like drama, novel and romance remain unexplored. On the other hand, novels that do not reproduce the recognizable, canonical structures of the European model are judged, in the previously quoted words of Sabry Hafez, to be products of ‘the rudimentary treatment, narrow experience and deficient technique of the writer’.38 Hilary Kilpatrick describes the history of the Arabic 22

INTRODUCTION

novel as an uneven process of ‘catching up’ with the West.39 As an alternative to this paradigm, I have tried to explore the process of genre-formation as one that is embedded in complex and contested social ideologies and social experiences. The work of M. M. Bakhtin, Raymond Williams and Lennard Davis has been particularly useful in this respect. All of these writers have in one sense or another engaged the seminal relationship between culture and ideology as the foundational site in which genres are produced and deployed as hegemonic (or counter-hegemonic) social narratives. Language, the idea of ‘character’ and narrative point-of-view are central features through which both the novel genre and modern social hegemonies are constructed. In generic terms, the history of the novel can thus be read as the history of a dialogue and a conflict between classes, discourses and ideologies. This is true of the European and even more so of the Arabic novel. When read in this way, the particularities of the Arabic novel’s structural features acquire their own technical and social logic and ‘deficient technique’ or ‘technical (in)competence’ emerge as a deliberate articulation of representational authority and autonomous creativity. The following chapters will explore these and related issues through a close reading of seven seminal village novels that span the twentieth century, as well as through an outline of the cultural and literary history in which these representative texts are embedded. I have chosen these novels in particular because they are, each in its own way, foundational novels and because they form a canon that crystallizes an ongoing social and textual dialogue. The intersection between cultural, political and literary history is thus an important theme that runs throughout the book, as are the formal narrative processes by which these histories are translated into fiction. Chapter 1 explores the emergence of the peasant as a literary figure and a subaltern textual voice in the late nineteenth-century drama and dramatic sketches of Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah Al-Nadim. Chapter 2 offers a brief literary history of early twentieth-century fiction as forming part of a hegemonic nationalist project that attempted to institutionalize a new social construction of the self and subjectivity. The chapter also explores this self’s relationship to the collective – a relation understood in its totality as ‘national reality’. As such, the chapter deals extensively with ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr’s foundational study of modern Arabic literature in Egypt, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al‘Arabiyyah al-Hadithah Fi Misr (The Development of the Modern 23

INTRODUCTION

Arabic Novel in Egypt). Chapter 3 looks at three early village novels (Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s The Maiden of Dinshaway, Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Zaynab and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Yawmiyyat Na’ib Fil Aryaf [The Maze of Justice]) in an attempt to unravel the structural features of the genre from the fabric of developmentalist literary history and criticism, and to lay the groundwork for a reading of the village novel as an intertextual genre. Chapter 4 presents a historical description of the ways in which the role of the writer and the narrative text changed after the Second World War and throughout the Nasser period and the ‘Open Door’ decade of the 1970s. It also suggests a critical rereading of realism as a representational mode and a political intervention in modern Egyptian fiction. The remaining three chapters illustrate and elaborate on this thesis by offering close readings of four post-1952 village novels (‘Abd al-Rahman alSharqawi’s The Land, ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim’s The Seven Days of Man, Baha’ Tahir’s Sharq al-Nakhil [East of the Palms] and Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah’s Al-Tawq wal-Iswirah [The Band and the Bracelet]).40

24

1 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT Ya‘qub Sannu‘, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim and the construction of the fallah in early drama and dialogue The writings of ‘Abdallah al-Nadim – and to a lesser extent, those of Ya‘qub Sannu‘ – are widely considered to be narrative forerunners of modern Arabic fiction. Critics identify Nadim’s innovative experiments with the language of narrative, and both men’s pioneering inscription of dramatic dialogue, as the foundation on which the subsequent invention of the Arabic short story and the novel was constructed. Moreover, it was Nadim and Sannu‘ who ingle-handedly created the figure of the Egyptian fallah as a modern literary character. This character figures prominently in Sannu‘ ’s assorted one-act plays and in Nadim’s narrative sketches and essays. As part of the larger linguistic and literary experiment n which Nadim and Sannu‘ were involved, they invented a particular kind of language and persona for this fallah character – a anguage and persona which were to remain structurally embedded n twentieth-century fiction. This fallah is a subaltern character – at times, wretched, ignoant, exploited; at others, articulate, rebellious and cunning. In either case, he speaks in a vulgar, parodic voice that often interrogates the languages of authority in which it is enmeshed. Subsequent Egyptian fiction – particularly the village novel – has continued to negotiate the rough and mocking fallah voice created by Sannu‘ and Nadim. At times it is entirely suppressed, at others, oregrounded and celebrated. The recuperation of this voice in modern Arabic literature nonetheless paved the way for the emergence of narrative dialogia and hence, the novel genre itself. The figure of the fallah appeared in popular drama in Egypt prior to the nineteenth-century narrative and dramatic sketches of Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim. Both M. M. Badawi and acob Landau refer to the existence of fallah characters in the hadow-plays and qaraquz performances of the late-medieval 25

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period. According to Badawi, these pieces ‘were often satirical in intent, designed to point out the excesses and shortcomings of society, at times emphasizing the injustice of those in power and the helplessness of the poor and hard-pressed peasant’.1 An extant eighteenth-century manuscript, discovered and edited by Hasan Al-Qashshash in the nineteenth century, features one such play – Lu‘bat al-Timsah (The Crocodile Play) – which centers around a landless peasant who is swallowed by a whale while attempting to master the art of fishing in order to feed himself and his family.2 Badawi notes that the import of this play was a political comment on the oppression of the peasantry. According to Ahmad Taymur, the play was still being performed in nineteenth-century Cairo.3 Edward Lane and Gerard de Nerval both described witnessing an Arabic play staged at one of the Khedival palaces on the occasion of the circumcision of a grandson of Muhammad ‘Ali. De Nerval notes that the play ‘represented the Pasha’s liberation of the Fallah from Tyranny’.4 The play features an indebted fallah, abused and imprisoned by the local authorities and finally released after his wife manages to bribe them all with food, money and sexual favors. From Lane’s description of the plot, Badawi concludes that the play was intended ‘to draw the attention of the ruler of the country to the malpractices of his tax-collectors’.5 It would seem that a pointed awareness of the general exploitation of the fallah at the hands of governors and tax collectors permeated popular consciousness in medieval and early modern Egypt, and that this theme occasionally found its way into literature. It was not until the late nineteenth century, however, and the social and political ferment of the ‘Urabist period, that this latent apprehension of the peasant’s wretched condition was fully and consistently articulated in literary production. Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim almost single-handedly developed what was in essence a popular and occasional comic character into a powerful political symbol and national archetype, as well as a distinctly modern narrative figure. They did this primarily in the essays, narrative and dramatic sketches and one-act plays published in the pages of their respective satirical journals: Sannu‘ Abu Naddarah Zarqa (The Man with the Blue Glasses) (1877)6 and Nadim’s Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit (Jesting and Censure) (1881), and Al-Ustadh (The Teacher) (1892–3). Both Sannu‘ and Nadim were fervent supporters of the ‘Urabists, before and after the revolt of 1881 and the British occupation and restoration of the following year. Though initially 26

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patronized by various members of the royal family, by the late 1870s they had become its most virulent critics – singling out Isma‘il and his son and successor Tawfiq for their printed attacks and public ridicule. Though they never actively collaborated, and though Sannu‘ was some years Nadim’s senior, they were professional contemporaries and fellow disciples of the great Jamal al-Din al-Afghani.7 Both men were political agitators, and both men paid for their convictions and their activism in the form of permanent exile from Egypt. Ya‘qub Sannu‘ (1839–1912) was a Cairene Jew whose father had emigrated to Egypt from Livorno in the early 1830s and eventually acquired a position at the Khedival court as a consultant to Ahmad Pasha Yakan. Sannu‘ claims in his autobiography that his mother – a local Jewish girl – raised him as a Muslim in order to avoid the fate of early death that had claimed her previous four children, though most scholars believe the story to be apocryphal. Whatever the case may be, by the age of twelve, Sannu‘ had reportedly memorized the Qur’an in Arabic and the Torah in Hebrew and could compose poetry in French, Italian and Arabic. His father’s patron, Yakan Pasha, was so taken with him that he sent him to study in Italy for three years, from 1852 to 1855.8 Upon his return, Ya‘qub was forced to take up work as a tutor in order to support the family after his father’s untimely death. In 1863 he was appointed as a language instructor at the polytechnic school, where he taught the generation of young officers who would eventually fight under ‘Urabi’s banner. Sannu‘ formed a theater troupe that performed his Arabic comedies under the patronage of Isma‘il, who reportedly dubbed him ‘Egypt’s Molière’ – so pleased was the Khedive with Sannu‘ ’s Egyptian theater. In 1872, the Khedive abruptly withdrew his patronage and the theater was forced to close down.9 For the next six years, Sannu‘ continued to write plays in addition to his journalistic activity. It was his scathing criticism of Isma‘il published in Abu Naddarah Zarqa that finally earned him his exile from Egypt in 1878. In Paris, where he spent the rest of his life, Sannu‘ remained deeply involved in Egypt’s political affairs. He continued to publish satirical journals in the spirit of Abu Naddara (some in both Arabic and French) which were smuggled into Egypt and avidly read by the restless population. In spite of the many political and professional similarities between the two men, ‘Abdallah al-Nadim came from a very different social background and often moved in entirely different 27

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circles than the cosmopolitan, aristocratic ones inhabited by Sannu‘. Though no stranger to the most important urban salons of his day, Nadim had both living roots in the countryside and direct experience of its contemporary social and political realities. Moreover, he knew no European languages and never traveled to Europe. Nadim was the son of an Alexandrian baker of Muslim peasant origin. His father had emigrated to Alexandria from the village of al-Tiba in Sharqiyyah province to work in the royal shipyards. When these were closed down after the establishment of the European Debt Commission, he remained in Alexandria and opened a bakery instead of returning to his native village as so many other rural émigrés had done. Nadim was born in Kafr ‘Ishari – a working-class Alexandria neighborhood – and attended the kuttab there until the age of fifteen, when his father kicked him out of the house for neglecting his Qur’anic studies in favor of more questionable literary pursuits. He spent the next six months wandering around the countryside, barely earning his keep as a zajjal (a popular, colloquial poet), before traveling to Cairo where he began a long career as a writer, educator and political activist. In 1875, when Nadim was dismissed from his post as a royal telegraph operator for criticizing Isma‘il, he moved around the villages and provincial capitals of the Delta, working alternately as a tutor, shopkeeper and professional zajjal. In 1878 he returned to Alexandria and collaborated with Adib Ishaq and Salim Naqqash on two political journals, Misr (Egypt) and al-Tijarah (Trade). In the same year he joined Misr al-Fata (Young Egypt), a multi-ethnic and multi-denominational secret society with masonic affiliations which later evolved into a platform for the ‘Urabists. With his colleagues in Misr al-Fata, Nadim founded the Islamic Charitable Society, a reformist association dedicated to disseminating the teachings of al-Afghani. Nadim established and directed a charity school under the auspices of this society but he was dismissed from his post and the school was eventually closed by the authorities. In 1881 Nadim founded his short-lived but immensely influential satirical journal, Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit. Later that year and at the urging of the besieged ‘Urabi government, Al-Tankit was transformed into Al-Ta’if (the Traveler) and continued publication until the British occupation in September of 1882. Al-Ta’if became the mouthpiece of the ‘Urabists, excoriating the European imperialists – the British in particular – as well as the treachery of the Khedive Tawfiq, and exhorting the peasantry to rise against the latter and rescue Egypt’s national government. Nadim himself 28

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was dispatched to the countryside in this capacity, and his rousing orations on behalf of the ‘Urabists during this critical period became legendary. It was for this reason that his name topped the list of wanted ‘traitors’ after ‘Urabi’s defeat and the restoration of Tawfiq to the throne. Nadim went into hiding in the countryside that he knew so well. He spent the next nine years wandering the Delta in various disguises and settling for short periods of time in friendly villages. He was finally discovered, arrested and sent into exile in Palestine in 1891 but returned to Egypt the following year after the death of Tawfiq and the ascension of ‘Abbas Hilmi to the throne. Nadim’s second satirical journal, al-Ustadh, began publication in August 1892, was shut down by royal injunction in June 1893 and Nadim himself sent once more into exile to Palestine and then to Istanbul, where he died three years later.10 Sannu‘ and Nadim’s creation of the fallah character was intimately bound up with the reformist social and political project of the late nineteenth-century nationalist movement in Egypt as embodied by the early Hizb al-Watani (Nationalist Party) and the ‘Urabists. They used the figure of the fallah as a means of developing a political and cultural critique of imperialism and state tyranny. Sannu‘ cast his fallah in the role of the oppressed and rebellious son of the soil, forever at the mercy of rapacious Ottoman officials and an unscrupulous colonial regime. Nadim developed a more ambiguous peasant figure that both represented the shameful backwardness and ignorance of the Egyptian national character and acted as a kind of foil to the corrupt, Europeanized Egyptian bourgeois who naturally disdained his native culture and hence rejected the ties and obligations that bound him to his country. The usage of the word fallah that emerged in the years leading up to the ‘Urabi revolution masked a certain political and semantic ambiguity that has continued to color subsequent nationalist discourse and historiography. The term clearly referred to actual peasant cultivators and petty landowners, but in the later decades of the nineteenth century it also came to mean simply a native Egyptian regardless of occupation or class affiliation. In this sense, the word carried the same resonance as al-sha‘b (the people) and al-misriyyun (the Egyptians) or abna’ Misr (Egypt’s sons). Peasant culture was now becoming reified as a millennial national culture by an emergent nationalist discourse that sought to disassociate Egypt from its Ottoman legacy. Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s famous pseudonym, Misri Fallah, can certainly be traced 29

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back to this seminal period when rural notables were beginning to feel and exercise their power as a class against the old Turkish and Circassian aristocracy represented by the leftover scions of the Mamluk dynasties, the Ottoman bureaucratic elite and the Khedival house itself. Isma‘il’s land tax legislation of 1871, by which many of these notables had acquired outright legal ownership of their large landholdings, and the formation and constitutional lobbying activities of the newly formed Nationalist Party, contributed to this process. Moreover, Sa‘id’s promotion of previously marginalized native Egyptians in the army had created a new and increasingly politicized cadre of nationalist officers who resented the privileges of their Ottoman superiors and who proudly wore the badge of their undiluted roots in the Egyptian countryside. In this context, Misri Fallah came to mean a ‘pure’ Egyptian, a ‘son of the soil’ so to speak and not, obviously, a mere peasant cultivator, whether small-holding farmer or penurious sharecropper. Hence ‘Urabi referred to himself as a fallah, as later did Sa‘d Zaghlul and, stretching a point, even King Farouk himself. Though both Sannu‘ and Nadim contributed to this broad, nationalist usage in their polemical writings, they nonetheless foregrounded a class-specific representation of the coarse, earthy, downtrodden cultivator in their figuring of this new fallah character. This dramatic inscription was in perfect consonance with the activist strategy of Misr al-Fata and the ‘Urabi movement’s political project, which was influenced by eighteenth- and nineteenth-century European republicanism (the French Revolution, the Paris Commune, Mazzini and the Italian republicans) and which urgently sought to mobilize the Egyptian countryside against the corrupt and autocratic regime of the Khedives and the European powers. It was also very different from the romantic and paternalistic representation of the fallah produced by a later generation of nationalist intellectuals, beginning with Muhammad Husayn Haykal and finally ending with ‘Abd al-Rahman alSharqawi.

Genre: the drama, the dialogue and the dramatic sketch While most critics of Arabic literature agree that modern drama was an imported literary genre that was assimilated by nineteenthcentury Arab writers from mature European models, Sannu‘ and 30

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Nadim’s pioneering inscription of dramatic dialogue can certainly be traced to the popular medieval tradition in Egypt, which lasted until well into the same century. Though M. M. Badawi and Jacob Landau preface their discussions of modern Arabic drama with a brief survey of medieval forms like the shadow-play, the Qaraquz performance and the Shi’i Ta’ziyyah plays, they both agree with Matti Moosa that ‘such performances cannot be considered the ancestor of the modern Egyptian theater or drama’.11 Shmuel Moreh and Philip Sadgrove suggest that a live Arabic dramatic tradition based on popular oral genres existed throughout the classical and medieval period until the nineteenth century, when Nahdawi authors deliberately turned to European drama for inspiration.12 Scholars nonetheless generally tend to trace modern drama to Napoleon’s arrival in Egypt with an expeditionary force that included professional actors and musicians, and the regular performances of French plays for his troops. Moosa reports that a number of amateur and impromptu theaters were established in Cairo by French and Italian troupes who either remained behind after the departure of the French soldiers or arrived subsequently in Egypt as part of a steadily growing community of European technicians, entrepreneurs and fortune-seekers.13 By mid-century, a number of plays by Molière and Racine had been translated into Arabic and were being performed by Arab troupes for mixed audiences. Arab writers traveling in Europe were afforded further opportunity to observe Western drama. Marun al-Naqqash and Ya‘qub Sannu‘ had first-hand experience of the Italian theater, having both traveled to Italy in their youth. In his autobiography, Sannu‘ cites Molière, Goldoni and Sheridan as the dramatists that most influenced his own work. The Naqqash brothers and Adib Ishaq produced translated European plays and original Arabic pieces on stages in Beirut and Alexandria. By the century’s end, there was a thriving Arabic-language theatrical oeuvre that had migrated from Beirut to Cairo and Alexandria and that included a varied repertoire of French, Italian and Arabic plays. Critics are less decided on the generic origins of the narrative sketch or the dramatic dialogue elaborated by ‘Abdallah al-Nadim in Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit. These sketches lie somewhere between essay, story and play. They are short, satirical and/or didactic pieces that include narrative and dialogue. Some of the sketches are predominantly made up of a first-person narrative – a comic anecdote or story – while others are mainly an extended dialogue between two or more persons which are nonetheless introduced by 31

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a narrator – often Nadim himself in the character of ‘the teacher’ or moral commentator. Sabry Hafez notes that Nadim created this unprecedented type of ‘narrative discourse’ with the needs and tastes of a newly literate middle-class public in mind: ‘His concern was with everyday activities and issues, the small talk of housewives and their affairs, the domestic scene in middle-class homes, the hardships of the peasants, the simple discussion of ordinary people about their problems and the various themes which touched upon the country’s major problems’.14 In keeping with his tireless role as a social and political reformer, Nadim invented a new genre and a new language that would appeal to the widest possible audience. His own description of this literary project in the inauguratory editorial for al-Tankit (6 June 1881) is suggestive of the generic and linguistic hybridity that would become his hallmark: I am urged by a sense of duty and patriotism and by love and care for you, O speaker of the Arab tongue, to introduce this simple journal. It is a literary and reformative magazine which introduces wisdom, literary anecdotes, proverbs, jokes and other entertaining and useful items to you in clear and simple language, which does not earn the derision of the learned nor compel the simple man to seek help in order to comprehend it. It describes incidents and events in an attractive and pleasing way capable of touching the heart and soul. Even when some pieces seem ostensibly improper they will reveal valuable meaning if you scrutinize them…There is wit and humor beneath its satire and slander, and rebuke behind its praise and adulation. It shuns verbal embellishments, avoids figurative adornment and refrains from attracting attention to the eloquence of its editor, for it resorts to familiar language and everyday concerns.15 The various terms used to refer to these pieces by critics reflect their generic instability. Sabry Hafez uses the term ‘narrative sketch’, while Matti Moosa prefers ‘popular dialogue’. Arab critics on the whole simply refer to the pieces as maqalat (essays), maqalat hiwariyyah (essay-dialogues) or fusul16 – the term which Nadim himself used (fusul tahdhibiyyah – didactic pieces).17 Hafez traces the roots of Nadim’s fusul to journalism, folk literature (such as Kalilah wa Dimnah and The Arabian Nights) and 32

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the maqamah. He locates Nadim’s polemicism and simple linguistic style in the relatively young Arab journalistic tradition to which Nadim himself greatly contributed, and he further attributes Nadim’s use of allegorical devices, picaresque characters and authoritative narrators to folk literature and ‘traditional narrative genres’ like the maqamah. Both Hafez and Moosa read Nadim’s writing as a brilliant but essentially flawed narrative experiment. Moosa casts Nadim as a failed dramatist who successfully turned his literary skills to the short popular dialogue,18 while Hafez rues the ossified traditionalism of his characterizations: Despite his innovation in the realm of narrative language and dialogue, Nadim’s characterization remained in the grip of traditional narrative strategies. Most of his characters are merely types representing professions, social classes, human behavior in general, or abstract ideals, and their narrative predecessors can be found in the onedimensional characters of the maqamah.19 This critical assessment is shaped by the prejudices of the developmentalist model of literary history, which derives narrative modernity from European realism.20 Nadim’s remarkably innovative, flexible and dynamic use of language and generic pastiche represents a vibrant dialogue between local literary languages and traditions. Nadim wrote his fusul in a combination of fusha and colloquial Egyptian Arabic that depended on the context and the social status of the speakers. While the narrative sections of the fusul were often written in a greatly simplified classical Arabic, the characters speak in the linguistic register appropriate to their class, ethnic and geographical origins, profession and level of education. Similarly, while Sannu‘ wrote his plays exclusively in the colloquial, he also used a polyphonic linguistic register that created a broad range of contrapuntal voices based on the contemporary Egyptian socioscape. In both Sannu‘ ’s and Nadim’s oeuvre, this masterful linguistic play is deployed as a parodic tool. Their foundational transcriptions of a variety of colloquial and hybrid, diglossic languages were specifically intended to reflect the different social elements of an emergent nation (watan), of which the fallah was certainly an important type. These languages were also deployed to critique and satirize both the old Turkish military and bureaucratic aristocracy, and a new class of urban elites with 33

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ambiguous Western cultural and political affiliations: European tourists, businessmen and orientalists speaking pidgin Arabic, and pompous Westernized Egyptians showing off the superior accoutrements of their acquired culture. This essentially political, parodic use of dramatic language and situation – hybrid, ‘vulgar’, streetwise – can be directly traced to the saturnalian tradition of popular medieval drama. Badawi himself admits as much in his discussion of the ‘indigenous dramatic tradition’ in Egypt when he notes in passing that ‘certain features of modern Arabic drama, both on the structural and the thematic levels…are clearly the product of some deeply rooted attitudes and tendencies inherited from the past history of indigenous dramatic or semi-dramatic entertainment’.21 Social and political satire using characters ‘drawn from the lowest strata of society’ was one of the most important of these features. Badawi calls this type of satiric comedy ‘buffoonery’22 and identifies it as one of the main conventions of the shadow-play genre. That it was perceived by the authorities as being politically and socially subversive can be deduced from Sultan Junjuq’s fifteenth-century order to ban the shadow theater and burn all puppets.23 Linguistically, the shadow-play bears many resemblances to the drama and the dramatic dialogue pioneered by Sannu‘ and Nadim. Ibn Daniyal used a hybrid diglossic language ‘ranging from the classical to the colloquial with an admixture of obscure jargon and even gibberish when the need arises’, and his characters speak in voices appropriate to their class and professions.24 In addition, Badawi notes that ‘the mispronunciation of Arabic words by foreign characters’ – a frequent theme in both Sannu‘ and Nadim’s work – was a consistent source of humor in the early- and late-medieval shadow theater.25 Finally, the medieval figure of the presenter (al-Rayyis or al-Miqaddim), who is puppeteer, stage-master and narrator all rolled into one, is echoed by Nadim’s strategic use of an ubiquitous authoritative narrator in his fusul and of Sannu‘ ’s insertion of his own writerly character (Abu Naddarah) into his plays.26 Nadim’s fusul and Sannu‘ ’s playlets were firmly rooted in this satiric popular tradition. A distinct and fully developed popular, local dramatic tradition with which both Sannu‘ and Nadim must have been conversant certainly existed in Egypt in the late nineteenth century. If we resituate Sannu‘ ’s drama – particularly the one-act lu‘bat – and Nadim’s fusul within this larger, local context, many of the uncomfortable features remarked upon by critics – such as ‘flat’ 34

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character types, ‘faulty’ construction, didacticism and the introduction of ‘extraneous’ characters – emerge as part of an innovative and resonant modern dialogue with an established popular tradition. The most important aspect of this dialogue is the controversial, non-canonical use of language that Sannu‘ and Nadim pioneered within a literary and textual context heretofore reserved for classical Arabic and highbrow belles-lettres.

Language: the nineteenth-century controversy Canonical, classical and medieval Arabic literary genres – poetry, maqamah and adab literature – were composed in a classical Arabic that remained formally and ideologically rooted in the linguistic purity and excellence of pre-Islamic poetry and the Qur’an. Medieval genres that incorporated vernacular structures and vocabulary – like the mawwal, the popular epics of Baybars and the Banu Hilal, as well as the stories of Kalilah wa Dimna and the Thousand and One Nights – were considered non-canonical and hence non-literary.27 The Nahdah’s experimentation with old literary genres like the maqamah and its creation of new ones, like the journalistic essay (maqalah) and the novel (riwayah) went hand-in-hand with a conscious effort to reform literary Arabic, to simplify it and render it more syntactically and morphologically flexible. The emergence of a new kind of literate middle-class readership towards the end of the nineteenth century (what ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr calls ansaf al-muthaqqafin – the semicultured)28 accelerated this process and led to the increasing vernacularization of literary Arabic. As previously mentioned, Nadim was one of the pioneers of this process of linguistic reform. In the first editorial of al-Tankit, quoted above, he describes to his readership the new language to be employed in the journal: We do not want it to be embellished with metaphors and metonymy, or ornamented with allusion and equivocation, or to be vainglorious with the grandiosness in its style and eloquent sentences, or to show off the richness of its knowledge and the sharpness of its intelligence. But we want it to talk to you in an intimate tone, to use language which we are accustomed to hear, and to introduce topics with which we are familiar. It should not require you to look up a word in the dictionary of alFayruzabadi.…It will not need an interpreter to explain 35

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its subjects or a sheikh to simplify its meanings. But it will keep you company as a friend who talks to you about what concerns you, or a servant in your house who only asks for what he knows you can grant him, or an entertainer who tells you the things that amuse you.29 In spite of its historical importance, the use of the colloquial as a literary language in the nineteenth century was limited to a handful of innovative writers who specifically wrote for popular audiences, or with the aim of popularizing highbrow literature as a means of spreading the new culture of the Nahdah. The use of the colloquial was thus part of a larger didactic, and later, nationalist project. In the 1850s and 1860s, Muhammad ‘Uthman Jalal translated several comedies by Molière, a number of Racine’s tragedies and La Fontaine’s fables into colloquial Egyptian. Sannu‘ wrote his plays exclusively in the colloquial, and Nadim’s journals deployed a mixture of rhymed classical prose, a simplified, flexible narrative prose style that approximated colloquial syntax and vocabulary, and straightforward colloquial dialogue (though the latter two predominated for the most part). However, though both Sannu‘ and Nadim were pioneers of the literary colloquial, their reasons for using colloquial language differed somewhat. Both men insisted on the pedagogical value of writing in a simple, easily understandable colloquial, while Sannu‘ also recognized its aesthetic importance for drama. He championed it as the living language of men and women, and hence the natural language of the theater. Sometime in the early 1870s, the Maltese orientalist Baron de Malortie had attacked Sannu‘ for writing his plays in the colloquial instead of classical Arabic.30 Sannu‘ responded to this attack in his play, Mulyir Misr wa ma Yuqasih (The Trials of Egypt’s Molière) when he has a character indignantly affirm that ‘never in their lives do authorities and learned men communicate with each other in grammatical language’.31 By the next decade however, the debate over language had become increasingly politicized. Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit (and later al-Ustadh) occupied the center of this debate and, in spite of his continuous use of colloquial Egyptian in his writing, Nadim emerged as the most vociferous defender of a national language based on a supple and rejuvenated classical Arabic.32 In the second issue of al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, Nadim published an article entitled Ida‘dat al-Lughah Taslim lil-Dhat (The Neglect of Language is Tantamount to Self-surrender) in which he laid out 36

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his position regarding the importance of modernizing the Arabic language as a means of encouraging social reform and reviving national culture. Some critics read this article as a rejection of the debased Egyptian colloquial in favor of fusha, but this reading makes no sense in light of Nadim’s continuous use of the colloquial in his writing. Rather, Nadim directed his argument (as he did much of his polemic) against the contemporary trend in Egyptian society – particularly amongst Westernized urban elites – which viewed European languages as being superior to Arabic. According to Nadim, these elites were systematically destroying the illustrious Arabic language by educating their children in English and French and polluting their native language with foreign words and phrases. To Nadim, this was the single most pernicious effect of imperialism, as it created an indigenous class with stronger cultural ties to the invaders than to their own society, and he continued to attack it throughout his career: My dear brother (though we were not born in the same womb): Language is the secret of life and the dividing line between man and beast. Through it, the tongue translates the heart’s desires and reveals the fruits of the mind.…It is language that enables you to inspire the tenderness of your mother and father, to share your brother’s confidence, to incline your friend’s affection towards you, to become intimate with your neighbor and acquainted with your fellow-citizen, and to receive your guest. Language is you yourself, if you know not who you are. It is your country, if you know not your country.33 But Nadim’s position on language was nonetheless criticized by a number of intellectuals of his day, as well as by various European orientalists.34 The Syrian émigré lawyer and writer Amin Shumayyil wrote a letter to al-Tankit describing Arabic as a dying language and calling for its abandonment in favor of the more truly scientific languages of Europe and the living language of the people, whatever form it happened to take,35 and, in November of 1881, Al-Muqtataf published a long editorial calling for the composition of scientific texts in the colloquial.36 Nadim continued to debate this issue in the pages of al-Ustadh. In 1893, the British engineer William Wilcox published an article in the journal al-Azhar ascribing the lack of creativity in Egyptian literature to its continued attachment to the Arabic language. Wilcox 37

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suggested that Arabic must be allowed to go the way of Latin and that the language of literature should become the local vernacular – the true source of cultural creativity and progress. Wilcox was restating a position already taken thirteen years earlier by the German orientalist Wilhelm Sebta (then director of the National Archives) who had also likened Arabic to Latin and blamed it for the decadence of literature and culture in Egypt. Going one step further, Sebta actually advocated replacing the Arabic alphabet with the Latin one as a means of facilitating Egypt’s cultural and scientific renaissance. This extreme position was further politicized by the fact of the British occupation of Egypt in 1882, and the massive influx of Europeans into the Egyptian bureaucracy. English and French were fast becoming the languages of science, administration and the liberal professions, and ‘Ali Mubarak’s decision, as minister of education, to make English the official language of the Egyptian school curriculum gave an increased urgency to the debate on the appropriate language for the Nahdah. Nadim’s position on language must thus be seen as primarily a defensive, nationalist one. Mahmud Fahmi Hijazi remarks that for Nadim, ‘language was the symbol of [national] affiliation and therefore its preservation was viewed as the foundation for the construction of a modern state’, – a state, one might add, that would emerge as a bastion of resistance to the colonial powers and their imperial project in Egypt.37 Moreover, Nadim (and the Syrian Christian Jurji Zaydan among others) argued that language was the very fabric of a people’s history and culture. The classical Arabic language not only bound Egyptians to their sacred texts and traditions and their rich literary heritage, but to other Arabic-speaking peoples to the east and west. Thus to abandon Arabic meant to abandon the very heart of one’s historical and religious identity. In the heat of this debate, Nadim vowed to suspend his colloquial pieces in al-Ustadh, but under intense public pressure, he resumed writing the popular skits almost immediately. In fact, though Nadim’s creation of what ‘Awad calls ‘the third language’ (al-lughah al-thalithah) was extremely popular in his own lifetime and eventually re-emerged in the twentieth century as the dominant language of modern narrative literature (the novel and short story), the colloquial continued to be the subject of controversy in literary circles. The late nineteenth-century Syrian émigré novelists (Jurji Zaydan, Niqula Haddad) wrote their novels exclusively in simplified classical Arabic, including the dialogue.38 In the first 38

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decades of the twentieth century, the emergence of a literary school that consciously set out to create a ‘national literature’ paved the way for the return of colloquial as the appropriate language for narrative dialogue. The group of writers that coalesced around the New School (al-Madrasah al-Hadithah) advocated a linguistic compromise, reminiscent of the ‘third language’ developed by Nadim. ‘Isa ‘Ubayd’s critical preface to Ihsan Hanim, his collection of short stories published in 1921, reflected the general consensus of the new generation of writers that had rejected the extravagant romanticism of al-Manfaluti and Mustafa ‘Abd al-Raziq. [‘Ubayd] admitted that the requirements of realism dictated the use of the vernacular, but he did not want Egyptian literature to sever its bonds with standard Arabic language and literature, and therefore suggested a compromise: writing the dialogue in simple fusha amalgamated, when necessary, with some colloquial words and colored with an identifiable local or parochial touch. Through this compromise, narrative discourse could achieve the required verisimilitude without sacrificing its role in serving Arabic language or abandoning its links with both tradition and a rich literary heritage; by maintaining this balance he could participate in creating modern Arabic literature capable of expressing a distinctive national character.39 In 1925, Mahmud Taymur called for the writing of narrative dialogue exclusively in the vernacular, ‘the natural language of the speaker’, but two years later, he renounced this position in favor of a return to a unified ‘literary Arabic’ throughout the text.40 Taymur was eager to gain admittance to the Arabic Language Academy, which did not accept authors who wrote in the colloquial.41 Writers continued to debate this issue throughout the 1920s, but it was eventually the ‘third’ or vernacularized standard Arabic described by Sabry Hafez above that emerged as the dominant language of narrative and particularly, narrative dialogue. Some writers however continued to use colloquial for dialogue – Tawfiq al-Hakim and the great writers of the mid-century social realist school, like Yusuf Idris and ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, for example – but these were, for the most part, in the minority, and the significance of their inscription of narrative diglossia will 39

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be discussed in later chapters. The writing of narrative proper in colloquial – a brief experiment conducted in the late nineteenth century by Muhammad ‘Uthman Jalal and Nadim, as we have seen – was totally abandoned in the twentieth century, with two major exceptions: Luis ‘Awad’s 1964 memoir, Mudhakkarat Talib Bi’thah (Memoirs of an Exchange Student) and Bayram al-Tunisi’s Al-Sayyid wa Miratuh fi Bariz (The Gentleman and his Wife in Paris) of 1953. The latter was a comic novella that followed the misadventures of a middle-class Egyptian couple in Paris, while the former was a formal experiment in the use of the colloquial for ‘serious’ narrative purposes. ‘Awad describes this experiment in the preface to the book: I decided to try using colloquial prose as the language of narration, description and analysis, but within the bounds of serious thought, high sentiment and formal experimentation, thereby discovering the practical – as opposed to the abstract and polemical – potentials of the colloquial language towards an application for which intellectuals have deemed it inappropriate.42 ‘Awad’s reference to the non-canonicity of the colloquial in contemporary narrative practice is suggestive of the specialized, satiric function which it had acquired with its inception as a literary language in the nineteenth-century writings of Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, and which continued to define its strategic use as a narrative language throughout the twentieth century.

Satire, parody and the colloquial language I have already suggested that the social and political satire and the linguistic strategies that shape Sannu‘ ’s playlets and Nadim’s sketches are largely derived from the saturnalian tradition of popular medieval drama. M. M. Bakhtin has described the historical penetration of popular saturnalian genres in medieval Europe as a ‘parodic-travestying literature’ produced by a combination of the linguistic and generic diversity of Roman and early medieval European culture (‘polyglossia’) and a satiric, carnivalesque folk sensibility (‘the culture of laughter’): ‘Where languages and cultures interanimated each other, language became something entirely different, its very nature changed: in place of a single, 40

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sealed-off Ptolomeic world of language, there appeared the open Galilean world of many languages, mutually animating each other’.43 Bakhtin further identifies heteroglossia within a single, national language as a major component in the emergence of popular, parodic-travestying literature and not incidentally, as the essential structural feature of the modern novel genre. In classical and medieval times, the great cities of the Arab Islamic empire – Damascus, Baghdad, Cairo – were certainly such centers of polyglossic culture where the languages and literary traditions of a variety of peoples met, intermingled and clashed. These languages were courtly, bureaucratic, military, ecclesiastical, scientific, literary, commercial and ‘sub-cultural’ (i.e. the languages of the urban underworld and its assorted ‘professions’) and ranged from formal Arabic, Persian, Turkish, Aramaic and Nubian to a variety of local spoken professional and regional dialects. The shadow-play and the qaraquz puppet-shows were the products of this cosmopolitan social melange and linguistic polyglossia. Nineteenth-century Egyptian society was no less socially and linguistically diverse. Over the course of the century, English joined Arabic and Turkish as the languages of politics and administration. Classical Arabic remained the language of literature and scholarship, while English, French, Italian and Turkish were recognized as the languages of high society, and a wide variety of Syrian, Nubian and Egyptian Arabic vernaculars functioned as the languages of everyday life. This linguistic and cultural hybridity corresponded to the generic ferment produced by the translation and migration of European literatures into Arabic. Not only was a whole range of new genres gradually incorporated into the Arabic canon during this period, but the previously rigid line of demarcation between ‘high’ and ‘low’ literary genres was being blurred and modified. The inscription of the colloquial as a literary language was both a reflection of this dynamic and cosmopolitan culture and an exuberant play with the political and discursive possibilities of language. In Sannu‘ ’s and Nadim’s writing, the various social languages of the late nineteenth century exist in a dialogic relationship. They speak to, comment on, critique and poke fun at each other as discursive forms, as languages, representing different classes and social types. It is in this context that the colloquial ‘language’44 emerges as a powerful satirical tool, for in both Sannu‘ and Nadim it becomes partly associated with the rough, earthy, often vulgar voice of the subaltern, speaking to and against the assorted languages of power, be they political, administrative or cultural. 41

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It seems that this satiric function quickly became a fixed and widely acknowledged feature of the literary colloquial in narrative. This is partly demonstrated by the continuing intellectual distaste for the use of ‘vulgar’ language in literature. In the preface to the second edition of al-Shaykh Jum‘ah (1927), in which Mahmud Taymur renounces his earlier call for colloquial dialogue in fiction, he gives the following explanation for his decision: I was fully convinced initially that the dialogue in short stories must be written in the colloquial in order to come closer to reality. I have changed my views after practical experience proved them wrong. The gap between the two languages does exist, and when the formal and the colloquial are juxtaposed, the one for description and the other for conversation, the incongruity between them is marked and shocks the reader as he moves from one linguistic level to another. Thus the writer must write the entire story, narrative and dialogue, in one language – literary Arabic.45 The central problem that Taymur here alludes to is the juxtaposition of the two languages. Clearly, there is a sense of dissonance and corruption involved in his description of the textual interaction between them, as though the vulgar colloquial somehow distorts or undermines the harmonious flow of the ‘formal’ language in the reader’s mind. Moreover, the concerted call for a ‘national literature’ in Egypt in the wake of the 1919 revolution was predicated on dismantling the linguistic hybridity of the nineteenth-century social text – ‘nationalizing’ it, so to speak – and hence unifying the language of narrative into a standard Arabic with minor variations of syntax and vocabulary that would mimic local speech patterns. The creation of a distinctive Egyptian ‘national character’ in fiction thus involved the construction of a generic composite that would be immediately identifiable as such. The erasure of linguistic and cultural deviations from this national type was one part of this project. But this suppression of the colloquial contributed to its status as an extra-national, subaltern textual language, occasionally and strategically employed by uneducated women, urban riff-raff and, of course, the peasant. As already mentioned, it was Sannu‘ and Nadim who created this modern subaltern voice for the peasant. Sannu‘ ’s critique of 42

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the Egyptian court and British imperialism in Egypt was pointedly political. He distinguished between European culture – which he unreservedly admired – and the colonial project of the European powers, Britain in particular. Consequently, he deploys the figure of the fallah in his dramatic work, primarily as a potentially powerful political challenge to state tyranny in whatever form it happened to take – Turkish, Khedival or British. Sannu‘ ’s satiric inscription of the mongrel languages of these elites is hence meant to highlight their political illegitimacy in Egypt. Nadim’s writing, on the other hand, demonstrates a dominant anxiety vis-à-vis the question of culture in an imperial context.46 Nadim was first and foremost a social reformer who believed that education held the key to national renaissance and progress. Hence the subtitle of alUstadh: majalah tahdhibiyyah ta‘limiyyah tarfihiyyah (an educational, refining, recreational journal). He reserves the bulk of his satire for an inanely Westernized and ineffectual native elite, totally alienated from Egypt’s social realities. On the other hand, Nadim sharply criticized the lethargy, moral vice and ignorance and superstition of the Egyptian popular classes, both urban and rural (al-sha‘b). It was these ‘national’ traits that were partly responsible for keeping Egypt imprisoned in backwardness and dependence, and only by reforming the national character through proper education could Egypt regain its independence and strength. In this context, Nadim’s fallah plays a dual role. He is at one and the same time the archetype of the authentic native, and the symbol of Egypt’s stagnation; the indigenous cultural other of the Westernized fop and the difficult object of the nationalist pedagogue’s reform.

Lu‘bat al-T Tiyatriyyah Ya‘qub Sannu‘: Al-L By his own account, Sannu‘ wrote thirty-two long plays which are for the most part domestic comedies that revolve around romantic intrigues and forbidden marriages, and satirize, in the process, the contemporary social mores of the Egyptian middle-classes.47 Sannu‘ also wrote twenty-five one-act plays, which he named lu‘bat tiyatriyyah (theatrical plays).48 These dramatic pieces were all published in the pages of his Parisian journals between 1879 and 1911. Najwah ‘Anus, who has published an edited anthology of eighteen of the lu‘bat, notes that some of them were originally written in French and subsequently summarized and translated into Arabic by Sannu‘.49 The lu‘bat are biting critiques of the 43

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Egyptian government and the royal court. They invariably dramatize the greed and corruption of these imperial ruling elites and their ceaseless oppression and exploitation of the native Egyptian middle and lower classes: soldiers and military officers, petty tradesmen and peasants. Sannu‘ ’s purpose in composing these plays was didactic and political. He felt that reporting and commenting on current events in the form of short, easily digestible dramatic pieces, which could be performed by artists at local gatherings, was the best way to disseminate political information and ‘impress people’s minds’.50 ‘Anus remarks on the inflammatory nature of Sannu‘ ’s subjects in these plays, which she suggests were meant to ‘incite the people to revolt’ against the Khedive and his colonial regime.51 As such, many of Sannu‘ ’s characters recur in the various lu‘bat. These characters are either allegorical types or real political personalities – cabinet ministers, members of the royal family or British officials – who bear comical names that are either descriptive, based on pun, or that refer to a representative historical character.52 For example, the character of the Turkish policeman (qawwas) is alternately named Kurbaj (whip) Agha or Tartur (clown) Agha, while the Ottoman provincial governor (sanjaq, mudir) is named Dhalim (tyrant) Ughlu. Isma‘il appears in many of the plays as Shaykh al-Hara (the neighborhood boss), Far‘un (pharaoh) or Qaraqush,53 his son Tawfiq as al-Wad al-Ahbal (the idiot kid) or al-Wad al-Miri’ (the scamp). The minister Nubar Pasha becomes Ghubar (dust) – a reference to the general destruction that he visited on Egypt during his tenure, while Riyad Pasha’s name is diminutized to AbuRaydah, apparently an affectionate mock-nickname bestowed upon him by the British ‘thanks to his betrayal of the Egyptian people’.54 Finally, the entire royal cabinet is aptly named Jam‘iyyat al-Taratir (The Council of Clowns). While various village headmen and generic peasants people the lu‘bat, Abu l-Ghulb and Abu-Shaduf are cast as archetypes of the oppressed and long-suffering Egyptian peasant.55 They are nonetheless intelligent and garrulous. They talk back to their greedy and ruthless masters, poke fun at them in amusing asides and even rebel against them when the opportunity arises. In Hukm Qaraqush: Lu‘bah Tiyatriyyah Tarikhiyyah Hasalat fi Qibli fi Ayyam al-Ghuzz Sanat 1204 (The Rule of Qaraqush: A Historical Play set in the South in the Days of the Ghuzz, 1204 A.H.),56 Dhalim Ughlu has the village headman, Abu Nafusa, dragged into his presence on the end of a rope by Tartur Agha in 44

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order to demand payment of a long list of irrigation fees, accrued interest, land taxes and corvée assessments, to the amount of ten pounds. When Abu Nafusah complains that he has already sold his crop, his ox and his wife’s jewelry to pay his debts and that they might as well go ahead and beat him to death, Dhalim Ughlu forces the elderly Shaykh ‘Abdallah to agree to marry Abu Nafusah’s spinster daughter for a dowry of ten pounds, his last savings. Dhalim Ughlu then confiscates the sum and leaves the hapless men to ‘contract the marriage or not – it’s all the same to me’ (‘iktibu kitab mish iktibu, kullu wahid’). Abu Nafusah and Shaykh ‘Abdallah exit the scene with the following ironic comment on contemporary Egypt: ‘That’s Qaraqush’s rule for you. Thank God that in these happy days, this kind of tyranny doesn’t exist in our country!’. In il-Wad il-Miri’ w-Abu Shaduf il-Hidi’ (The Scamp and the Sharp-Witted Abu Shaduf),57 not only do Abu Shaduf and his son Abu Qas‘ah manage to best the dull-witted and vain mudir, Nabwat Bek, they finally break out in open rebellion against the provincial authorities represented by Nabwat and his police, as well as the Khedive himself, Tawfiq, the ‘scamp’ of the title. The play is the longest in the collection and contains the most developed exposition of the plight of the fallah. The first scene opens in the village diwan with a discussion between Shafqat Efendi (Nabwat Bek’s assistant) and Falta’us, a Coptic scribe: Good morning Falta’us, how goes it today? Fine, fine sir, everything’s fine since you’ve been in the district, though we’ve seen enough to turn children’s heads gray recently – not just in the father’s day, but also in his son’s!58…God keep you and preserve you for us – whoever named you Shafqat [pity] hit it on the head being that you pity the wretched peasants who’ve been skinned alive by Nabwat Bek, if you’ll excuse the expression. And Kurbaj Agha’s beat their soles bloody, mind you.…Oh, if only the walls didn’t have ears I’d have told you all about the suffering of the peasants before you honored us with your arrival. But what’s the use of talking? It’s God Almighty who punishes tyrants. But just between you and me: take the Big Man himself:59 he was the one who stopped the crocodile’s taste for local meat and peasants: did he come to a good end? They kicked him out like a dog. Neither sultan nor state gave him a hand…as for Tawfiq, they say he’s a good-looking boy. I don’t

SHAFQAT: FALTA’US:

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know if it’s true, but it’s too bad that he’s given the reins to his minister. They say that one’s in cahoots with the foreigners and that he gives them the best jobs, letting them play around with the budget as they please as long as he gets his three or four percent from them…as for Egypt’s sons, no offence, but they’re like a bunch of women, no stomach! SHAFQAT: Well, well, Mr Falta’us, you should have been a preacher! The midwife must have pulled you out of your mother’s belly by the tongue. The next scene contains a comic dialogue in which Falta’us pokes merciless fun at the tyrannical and pompous Nabwat Bek in sly asides and double-entendres that exploit the latter’s vanity and ignorance of Arabic and the local Sa‘idi dialect in particular. Falta’us then proceeds to read a letter from Riyad Pasha to the illiterate mudir, announcing the imminent visit of the Khedive and his entourage to the district and his instructions to prepare an appropriate reception including a panegyric speech by the fallahin addressed to the Khedive. In scene three, Nabwat has Kurbaj Agha summon the village headman Abu Shaduf and his son AbuQas‘ah, in order to inform them of this duty. Unlike Falta’us, the two peasants make openly belligerent jibes at the mudir, which Shafqat attempts to soften by pretending that it is peasant carnival and the fallahin are obliged to make outrageous jokes all day in celebration of the festival: Abu-Shaduf! Here I am right in front of you, don’t you see me? What’s wrong with your eyes you ass? They’re usually wide open all day and whenever they land on a poor peasant they say ‘hand over the money or taste the whip till you drop dead!’ NABWAT BEK: (angrily) Enough words, good-for-nothing, you! [‘kharsis nu bu kalam’]. SHAFQAT: The peasants have a feast today that they call the feast of jokes – a fantasy feast. See? That’s why Abu-Shaduf is kidding, meaning he’s only joking with you sir… ABU-QAS‘AH: By God, the day we laid eyes on Nabwat Bek and Kurbaj Agha was the day that all feasts said goodbye and took off forever. FALTA’US: Hold your tongue boy and let your father speak. NABWAT BEK: ABU-SHADUF:

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The cunning Abu-Shaduf agrees to prepare a panegyric speech for the Khedive. He exits, and Nabwat Bek tells Shafqat to ‘take hundred pounds from diwan accountant and make you decorations stage then we know get money from cursed peasant.…This night, five o’clock, ten men go to house Abu-Shaduf, he and son him, put them in irons’. In the final scene, Abu-Shaduf and his son proceed to inform Tawfiq of the wretched condition of the peasantry and exhort him to reform his government in the name of justice for Egypt’s sons. Tamalluq Bek (one of Tawfiq’s entourage whose name means ‘Sycophant’) and Nabwat Bek vainly attempt to twist their rough words into praise for the king, while Tawfiq himself – ‘the idiot kid’ – is completely at a loss to understand anything that is going on around him. Forget about all that stuff – the peasants are saying that the sugarcane and a bunch of other crops were ruined by our dear king’s ascension [to the throne] and that there was a big fire in Asyut when His Grace passed through and that they’ve made all the country people sell every last thing they own – crops and animals – in order to pay the zillion taxes that they owe and that today they’re demanding a huge sum for these decorations and such. But you won’t hear about that from us… THE IDIOT KID: What’s Abu-Qas‘ah saying? I was thinking about my poor Daddy, far away, all alone. I didn’t hear anything he said.60 TAMALLUQ BEK: He’s saying that the peasants were waiting for your highness to appear like the crescent-moon on the eve of the feast-day. He’s saying that today is a blessed day, the flowers have bloomed and the sun is shining to welcome your Eminence. ABU-QAS‘AH:

Tamalluq Bek attempts to withdraw with the king, advising Nabwat Bek to ‘teach his peasants a lesson’ whereupon AbuShaduf grabs Tawfiq by the throat (‘mommy, help! The peasants are going to strangle me!’) and he and his son then beat Nabwat Bek and Kurbaj Agha senseless. They escape on horseback, promising to return (‘one day soon we’ll come back to our country, victorious over our tyrannical rulers’) while the royal entourage retreats, pell-mell, to the train-station. The British colonial authorities were also a target of Sannu‘ ’s criticism and his fallah’s irreverent satire. Abu-Shaduf reappears in 47

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Yalla Bina ‘Ala-l-Sudan (Let’s go to Sudan),61 where he acts as a kind of one-man chorus, commenting in scathing asides on the hypocrisy, selfishness and tyranny of the principal actors.62 In the first scene, Abu-Shaduf is present at a discussion between Sir Evelyn Baring (alias Lord Cromer, ‘Egypt’s British Khedive’), Tawfiq, (‘the Idiot Kid’) and Riyad Pasha (‘Minister of Lies’) about sending a military expedition to fight the Mahdi in the Sudan. Baring demands £100,000 for the expedition, while Riyad and Tawfiq try to put him off and Baring responds with veiled threats: RIYAD: No BARING: If

matter, we’ll fight the Sudanese next year. we don’t fight them this year, they’ll fight us next year. They’ll invade Egypt and put you, Milord Tawfiq, in a cage and send you to Khartum. As for you Mr Riyad, they’ll slit your throat and steal your property! THE FALLAH: (aside) God willing! That’d be the day I’d dance and scream for joy like a woman! In the second scene, Baring reviews the assembled troops: The sight of our English troops gladdens the heart and raises the spirits. Lions who’ll devour the Sudanese wolves and bring us the Mahdi, ‘Uthman Daqmah, and all their princes in chains. Then all of the Nile Valley, Sudan, and the army will be ours. This whole world belongs to the British!

BARING:

When the specter of Gordon Pasha, risen from the grave, appears to warn the troops of this useless adventure against the brave and indefatigable armies of the Mahdi, the soldiers flee in fear of their lives. The sirdar attempts to cover up this scandalous retreat by making the remaining men promise never to breathe a word of what has taken place, and Abu Shaduf is left chuckling to himself: As for our friend, the sharp-witted fallah, he laughed out loud and said to himself: ‘Am I crazy to cover up for the English? They’re the ones forcing our soldiers to fight our Sudanese brothers when we’re all Muslims amongst Muslims. I’ll go to Shaykh Mansur and tell him the whole story and he’ll tell it to our Shaykh, Abu Naddara, who’ll put it in a “gurnal” [newspaper]. When he comes, we’ll fete him

ABU SHADUF:

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with drums and horns and he’ll help us to beat our enemies’.63 Sannu‘ ’s construction and manipulation of a variety of representative languages in his plays is perhaps the most remarkable aspect of the lu‘bat. This pioneering process of transcribing oral languages into the written text necessarily involved a good deal of experimentation, since no standard usage in terms of diction, pronunciation and spelling yet existed. Sannu‘ ’s genius lay in his ability to render the linguistic instability and diversity of oral, colloquial speech into a series of textual languages that simultaneously represented and parodied the social hierarchies of nineteenth-century Egypt. Thus, each character type in the lu‘bat speaks in a ‘dialect’ appropriate to his or her class, ethnicity and locality. The Scamp and the Sharp-witted Abu Shaduf is perhaps the best example of Sannu‘ ’s linguistic register. Nabwat Bek and Kurbaj Agha speak in an ungrammatical, pidgin Arabic that mingles Turkish and colloquial Egyptian vocabulary in a corrupted Arabic syntactical framework (iktibtu kitab mish iktibtu – kullu wahid), with comic results. Shafqat, the Egyptian bureaucrat, speaks in a standard, urban colloquial while the Coptic scribe Falta’us’ Sa‘idi dialect is heavily peppered with popular proverbs and Coptic turns of phrase. Tamalluq Bek holds forth in a pompous, colloquial rhymed prose that parodies a courtly saj‘ style. Tawfiq on the other hand speaks in a comical effeminate upper-class colloquial. All these languages are intimately bound to one another in a dialogic relationship built on satire, mimicry, punning and parody. In this context, the coarse, earthy voice of the ‘sharp-witted’ peasant emerges as the voice of the rebellious subaltern, constantly foregrounding and critiquing the corrupt languages of power through irony and parody. This figuring of the articulate, rebellious fallah was entirely unique to Sannu‘ and was not to reappear in narrative literature until ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s celebrated 1952 novel, The Land. Even Muhammad Tahir Haqqi’s novel about the tragic events of 1906 in Dinshaway did not reach the incendiary heights of Sannu‘ ’s vision of the fallah as a potentially revolutionary political agent. It was rather the ambiguous image of the fallah created by ‘Abdallah al-Nadim that was to persist in the nationalist discourse of post-1919 writers and intellectuals.

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‘Abdallah al-Nadim Although ‘Abdallah al-Nadim was a dedicated ‘Urabist and a tireless political activist, travelling ceaselessly back and forth between the countryside and the front during the battles of 1882, he did not cast the fallah in his writing as an insurgent political actor, as Sannu‘ did in his plays. Nadim continued to build upon the dialogic text and the satiric fallah voice developed by Sannu‘, but he created his fallah in the image of the despoiled, stagnant nation – a nation that could only raise itself from the trough of decadence in which it was submerged through education. If Sannu‘ was primarily concerned with the terrible consequences of political tyranny and economic imperialism for Egyptians, Nadim was equally obsessed with the effects of colonialism on national culture. Nadim located this authentic national culture in the Egyptian countryside and in the traditions and ‘character’ of the fallah. And yet he viewed the degradation and moral turpitude into which this national/fallah culture had fallen as being the root of Egypt’s backwardness and defeat. The Egyptian peasantry and the urban underclasses were wretchedly impoverished and exploited, by they were also indolent, ignorant and vice-ridden. On the other hand, the native bourgeoisie was culturally corrupt, slavishly imitating its European masters in every detail of speech, dress and lifestyle and rejecting its social and political duties as a national vanguard. Two types of character thus appear repeatedly in Nadim’s writing: the naive and exploited fallah (who is also at times lazy, superstitious and addicted to drugs) and the preening, acculturated urban fop. These characters are two sides of the same coin. They are constructed in a dialectical relationship that can only be mediated and normalized through the intervention of a properly nationalist understanding of the role of language and culture in society. ‘Arabi Tafarnaj (A Westernized Arab), published in the first issue of al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, is perhaps the best know of Nadim’s narrative sketches and perfectly illustrates the manner in which Nadim constructed his polemic on national culture.64 The humor of the piece is based on the clash of languages – the one, a folksy, native Egyptian Arabic, the other an artificial melange of foreign and native speech – and the ensuing misunderstandings. The names of the three characters are taken directly from Shirbini’s eighteenth-century satire Hazz al-Quhuf, thus placing the sketch within a particular textual and cultural tradition.65 In this sketch, 50

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a young man returns to his native village from Europe where he has been sent to study on a government scholarship. The young man has become an arrogant and ridiculous dandy who speaks in a mongrel Franco-Arabic and shows nothing but contempt for his simple parents and their rural habits. Upon arriving in Alexandria, he refuses to embrace his father, preferring to greet him ‘politely’ in French: For God’s sake, this Muslim habit of embracing is really disgusting. MU‘IT: How shall we greet each other then, son? ZI‘IT: Say, Bun Arifi [‘bonne arivée’] and just shake my hand. MU‘IT: But son, I never said that I wasn’t a Rifi [peasant]. ZI‘IT: Not ‘Rifi’, man! You sons of Arabs are just like animals! ZI‘IT:

Later, at home, Zi‘it has a similar conversation with his mother Mu‘ikah, who has cooked a typical Egyptian dish in his honor: ZI‘IT: Why have you used too much of the… MU‘IKAH: Of what, Zi‘it? ZI‘IT: Of that whatchamacallit… MU‘IKAH: What son – pepper? ZI‘IT: Nu, nu! [‘non, non’], that plant stuff… MU‘IKAH: Barley, son? ZI‘IT: Nu, nu! The thing that grows underground. MU‘IKAH: I swear I didn’t put any garlic in it, son. ZI‘IT: The stuff that makes your eyes water is

called unyun [‘onion’]. MU‘IKAH: I swear son, there’s no ‘unyun’ in it, it’s just meat with onions [basal]. ZI‘IT: Si sa! [‘c’est ça!’], basal, basal! MU‘IKAH: Oh Zi‘it son, you’ve forgotten what onions are and you used to eat nothing else! Like much of Nadim’s writing, ‘A Westernized Arab’ demonstrates an intense anxiety over the deleterious effects of unchecked and wholesale Westernization on the Egyptian middle-classes. Throughout the pages of al-Tankit wal-Tabkit Nadim continually seeks to wrest the conventional definition of al-tammadun (civilization) from the grip of a contemptuous imperial discourse that equates ‘civilization’ with ‘Westernization’. In a discursive gesture that turns the imperial hierarchy on its head, Nadim renames this 51

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kind of mindless and unqualified acculturation, al-tawwahush (barbarism).66 This is not to say that Nadim was unaware of the obvious benefits of a European education. Rather, he insisted on the need to embed this type of education in a solid, nationalist affiliation. This is the moral of ‘A Westernized Arab’ and many other sketches, anecdotes and essays that appear in al-Tankit walTabkit. In the words of the skit’s narrator: Your son was not properly educated as a child. He never learned the duties imposed on him by his country and his language. He was never made to understand the Ummah’s honor, nor the fruits of guarding family tradition, nor the virtues of nationalism. He has acquired learning (ta‘llamah ‘uluman) but it has not benefited his country in any way for he does not love his brothers, preferring only those who know [Western] languages. He has become like the partridge that wanted to imitate the crow’s way of walking and having failed, was unable to return to its first nature and was reduced to hopping about. Your son has departed from the bounds of nationality [jinsiyyah] and the nature of his kind [naw‘iyyah], as befits a base man who is ignorant of his birth. How many young men have been educated in Europe and returned, preserving their beliefs, traditions and language, and using their knowledge for the progress of their country and its children? They have not deserved the title of ‘Arabi Tafarnaj! The figure of the fallah emerges here as a native foil against the monstrous child of European acculturation. However, the symbolism latent in this emergent ‘national character’ takes a negative cast from the nineteenth-century discourse of reform elaborated by Nadim. While privileging the fallah as the guardian of native culture, Nadim marks him as the symbol of the nation’s ills. If Egypt is politically weak and culturally backward, it is because this native national character is defeatist, vice-ridden and indolent. Though sincerely generous, good-natured and, at times, possessor of a cunning intelligence, Nadim’s common man and/or fallah is variously a lazy, drug-addicted, credulous fatalist given to general dissipation and inordinately fond of storytellers and bogus mystics. In the sketch, ‘Nihayat al-Baladah: Kullaha ‘Isha wilAkhra Mut’ (The Consequences of Stupidity: We’re All Going to Die in the End), the narrator pays a visit to the countryside where 52

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he spends the night at the house of a local peasant. He is woken by a thief attempting to enter and rob the house, and when he desperately tries to rouse the peasant to foil the robber’s attempts, the man counters all the narrator’s pleas and arguments with a tour de force of popular proverbs and prophetic traditions that enjoin submission to fate and God’s will, and he promptly goes back to sleep.67 In ‘Muhtaj Jahil fi Yadd Muhtal Tami‘ ’ (An Ignorant and Needy Man in the Hands of a Greedy Scoundrel), an unscrupulous merchant tricks an illiterate peasant into signing an IOU on his present and future crops by taking advantage of his ignorance of basic arithmetic.68 In ‘Taghfilah wa Jahalah’ (Foolishness and Ignorance), a beautiful and cunning young peasant bride tricks her ugly husband into divorcing her by masquerading, in dead of night, as a jealous succubus.69 In ‘Mit Ghamr’, Nadim lists all the bars and hashish dens frequented by the various social classes in that village and goes on to excoriate the moral corruption and indolence of the local peasantry.70 Indeed, al-Tankit wal-Tabkit contained semi-regular columns entitled ‘takhrifah’ (A Bit of Silliness) or ‘jahalah’ (A Piece of Ignorance) that contained various anecdotes meant to exhibit and critique some outrageous local custom, belief or practice. But Nadim clearly lays part of the blame for this miserable state of affairs on the Egyptian elites, who have seriously neglected their duties as a national vanguard by blatantly exploiting and openly loathing the peasantry. Nadim addresses his essay, ‘La Anta Anta wala al-Mathil Mathil’71 to this elite, chiding them severely for regarding the fallah as no better than a foul beast of burden when in reality their own riches and material comfort derives from the ceaseless labor of this wretched majority. He describes the filth and poverty to which the fallah is condemned in great rhetorical detail, and he enjoins his readers (ayyuha al-mutamaddin – oh, civilized man) to take their share of responsibility in educating the fallah and raising him from his abysmal condition – not as a step along the road towards political and social equality, but as the only real way of guaranteeing the proper functioning of a stable and productive national hierarchy. Only then will the fallah understand his rights and duties as an actor on the national stage, only then will he truly honor his masters, gladly serve in the army and willingly remain on his land, happily increasing its productivity for the greater national good:

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When these principles are fulfilled and this new motivation flows through [the hearts of] our people, our lands will become a delightful garden, a mighty fortress, a blessed abode. But if we content ourselves with the luxurious ways of city-dwellers, cursing the fallah as an ignoramus and denying him the fruits of knowledge, we sleep in security and wake in fear. For the foreigner lurks in our midst, enticing the fallah to follow him, teaching him hostility towards his own kind and tempting him to rob his brother and defy his master in order to corrupt his morals, adding thereby hatred of his own kind and of his nation to his ignorance. Thus if we remain negligent and heedless, and if you, oh civilized man [ayyhuha al-mutamaddin] persist in your sophistication, going out in carriages and about with princes, proud of the company of foreigners and wits and abandoning the fallah to his narcotic state, he will descend to an utter ruin which you will be unable to penetrate, and the nation will cry out to you: la anta anta wala al-mathil mathil.72 In spite of the reformist bent of al-Tankit wal-Tabkit and Nadim’s openly didactic and rhetorical tone in many of its essays, it is important to keep in mind that the journal was primarily intended to provide easily accessible and entertaining satire on contemporary Egyptian mores. This is clear from the journal’s title and subtitle (Jest and Censure: A Humorous, Nationalist, Literary Weekly – sahifah wataniyyah usbu‘iyyah adabiyyah hazaliyyah). Nadim’s satirical sketches and anecdotes were meant to expose the ignorance and moral corruption of Egyptians, and yet this straightforwardly didactic project was colored by the scintillating humor and the vibrant characters that Nadim created in his writing. Nadim’s reformist message is often overshadowed and even subverted by the lively, comic situations and characters that he brings to life in his earthy colloquial prose and dialogue. His alcoholics, drug dealers, debauchees and credulous peasants emerge as witty, shrewd and delightfully funny characters in their own right. This tension runs through most of Nadim’s writing, and is intimately bound up with the question of language as a discursive formation. In 1878, Nadim wrote three one-act plays – Al-Watan (The Nation), Al-Nu‘man73 and Misr (Egypt) – which were performed by the drama students of the Islamic Charitable Society School. 54

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The performance of the plays, which attacked the political authorities and the country’s Westernized elites, resulted in the official dissolution of the drama group and Nadim’s dismissal as director of the school. Al-Watan is the only one of these plays that has been preserved. Its general theme is the importance of education for social and political reform. The play was intended to encourage the formation of private educational societies and the establishment of charitable schools, like the Islamic Charitable Society School of which Nadim was the director. More generally, it exhorts poor Egyptians to send their children to the public schools established by the royal family instead of the traditional kuttab schools, as the only effective means of raising them above the level of cattle (baha’im) and thereby contributing to the nation’s development (al-‘umran). The drama revolves around the allegorical figure of al-Watan, an earnest and somewhat pathetic character, who bemoans his sorry circumstances and berates the assembled dramatis personae for neglecting their duties towards him in stiff classical Arabic. The other characters are presented in pairs and represent a crosssection of Egyptian society. Abu Da‘mum and Abu Zalafi are coarse peasants. Al-Hajj Husayn and Abu l-‘Ila as well as AlSayyid ‘Ali and Al-Sayyid Ibrahim are dissolute urban loafers – the former pair are hashish-smokers while the latter are sexual ‘peverts’ and habitués of local parties, popular weddings and so forth. Al-Hajj Razija and Abu Rajab are proletarian Alexandrian boatsmen. ‘Izzat Efendi and Mazhar are dandified petty bureaucrats and barflies. Finally, four characters are vaguely introduced at the end of the play as ‘Arabs’ who had ‘left their country and are now returned’, and who proceed to extemporize classical nationalist poems, including a panegyric to the Khedive and his entourage. While al-Watan and the exiled poets speak in classical Arabic, the remaining characters speak in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. More specifically, each pair speaks in a dialect or jargon that reflects their class and occupation: the peasants use coarse, ‘agricultural’ language that is extremely difficult to decipher. The loafers employ a more standard urban colloquial peppered with appropriately vulgar turns of phrase. The boatsmen speak in a gruff, clipped Alexandrian dialect, while the dandies use an effeminate mixture of middle-class urban colloquial and French and Italian bons mots. Each of these languages is inscribed as a comic counterpoint to the rhetorical classical Arabic of al-Watan and in 55

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relation to each other. Thus each pair of characters exits the stage with a mocking comment on the speech of the newly entered pair: AL-SAYYID ‘ALI: Welcome Sayyid Ibrahim, AL-SAYYID IBRAHIM: That’s right, let’s

step this way. hang out here for a

while.74 Let’s get out of here Abu l-‘Ila, these guys say they’re gonna ‘cut up’ some time, ha, ha!75

AL-HAJJ HUSAYN:

The humor built into the larger dialogic interchange of the play is based on satire and parody. Al-Watan’s high-flown nationalist rhetoric is repeatedly made to be the butt of the characters’ irreverent jokes and puns. A certain discursive ambiguity is thus produced by this ‘juxtaposition’ of languages to which Mahmud Taymur was to refer almost half a century later. The necessity of replacing a decadent popular culture with a properly nationalist one forms the overt message of the play, and indeed, by the end of the play, the characters are all won over by al-Watan’s preaching. And yet the discourses of nationalism and reform are themselves parodied and interrogated by these mocking popular languages. This discursive ambiguity is dramatized in the discussion that takes place between al-Watan and ‘Izzat Efendi surrounding the importance of education (al-ma‘arif). The latter claims that the sole purpose of education is to enable a body to make a living and live for a joke (al-nuktah), ‘the fruit of humanism in our country’ (thamrat al-insaniyyah fi biladinah). Al-Watan replies that this culture of jesting (ahl al-nuktah) is the root of his affliction (i.e. the nation’s), and its absence in Europe the cause of European political and cultural power and global hegemony.76 The fallah characters figure prominently in al-Watan. The play begins and ends with an extended dialogue between them and alWatan. In the opening dialogue, Abu Da‘mum and Abu l-Zalafi present a string of complaints against the political and religious authorities in the village and demonstrate a nuanced, if merely instinctive, understanding of class hierarchies and the complicities between knowledge and power. In keeping with the discursive ambiguity implied in the relationship between popular culture and nationalist language, Nadim inscribes their coarse voices as a comic foil against al-Watan’s didactic idealism and his fancy speech. In fact, in an ironic role reversal, it is the peasants who teach the ignorant Watan a thing or two:

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Where are my people, where my children, where my men? Lost and wandering am I, knowing not how he who sees me thus may treat me as he wonders unto himself, is this the Egypt beloved of all men? ABU-DA‘MUM: Bug off brother. What’s there to love about you… ABU L-ZALAFI: Come on man, don’t insult him, poor guy… ABU DA‘MUM: So, if his ‘people’ are going around cutting each other to pieces, the big guy robbing the little guy, the rich man murdering the poor man, why should anyone love him? AL-WATAN: If you do not reform yourselves, then who shall reform you, and if you do not care for me, then who shall care for you? ABU DA‘MUM: You mean we should all stand together and act like one man? AL-WATAN: Yes, for you will never succeed unless you are united! ABU DA‘MUM: Ok, so I’m somebody [wahid min al-nas] – show me some guy who really cares about me. AL-WATAN: Amazing! Is my family [ahli] thus at odds? ABU L-ZALAFI: What ‘family’ you ass! The son only loves his father. AL-WATAN: The cause of all this is ignorance! ABU DA‘MUM: Come on man! Here’s the village preacher, every Friday morning he says, oh worshippers of God, obey God, and nobody obeys for shit [wala hadd biyittiqi wala bi zarwat]. ABU L-ZALAFI: Yeah, the preacher preaches while the headman’s working the whip. If the preacher said ‘boo’, he’d beat him to a pulp too. AL-WATAN:

[…] Al-Watan: The degradation of the Learned [‘ulama] is the first sign of the country’s ruin. Oh shame! Abu l-Zalafi: Just pray that some police-chief doesn’t get a hold of you – he’d sure make you quit talking about the learned and the ignorant! Al-Watan: To such heights has the tyranny of the police-chief advanced? Abu Da‘mum: Forget the police-chief you idiot, Girgirius the money-lender’s a real tough! Al-Watan: Once again I say, the cause of all this is ignorance. Abu Da‘mum: May God send us a qawwas who’ll talk some Turkish gibberish to you and give you a kick in the belly 57

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that’ll knock this learning and ignorance business right out of your skull! Abu l-Zalafi: Yeah, and if he says ‘boo’, he’ll stick a pistol into him and send his soul straight to heaven. […] Al-Watan: Shame on you, neglecting yourselves to this extent! Why don’t you complain to the government.…If you act as one and take your complaint to the village headman, he will no doubt relieve you of these tyrants. Abu l-Zalafi: Huh! The day they tell me to go talk to the headman, I’ll take my kids and scram. So who’se got the guts to go stand in front of the boss?77 The critical, mocking peasant voice created by ‘Abdallah alNadim and Ya‘qub Sannu‘ in the nineteenth century remained embedded in twentieth-century narrative fiction, in a selfconscious dialogic relationship with that of the urban nationalist intellectual who emerges as the biographical subject of the new novel, particularly the village novel. Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s Hamid (Zaynab) is the most articulated type of this subject, but he continues to appear as an emblematic figure in the rich intertext of Egyptian village fiction, from Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Muhsin (‘Awdat al-Ruh [The Return of the Spirit]; ‘Asfur Min al-sharq [Bird of the East]) to ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim’s hero, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz (The Seven Days of Man). From the nineteenth century onwards, the representation of the fallah was tied, in a fluid and fluctuating relationship, to an equally original conception of the middle-class and its intelligentsia. This relationship was shaped by the nascent nationalist discourses emerging in Egypt towards the end of the last century. Whether it was written as a harmonious, paternalistic one (as in some early examples of village narrative, like Zaynab and The Return of the Spirit) or a hostile and/or a neurotic one (The Land, The Seven Days of Man) depended on the historical context and the changing socioscape of twentieth-century Egypt. The dialogic structure of the relationship remained however, deeply embedded in the national literary imagination and gave rise to a set of binary textual themes and strategies that embodied a fundamental split or rupture in the supposedly syncretic categories of nationalist discourse: city/village, individual/community, alienation/authenticity, tradition/modernity.

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Language is an essential component of this relationship, and occasionally asserts itself as a strategic and powerful tool of resistance to the textual hegemony of the biographical subject’s consciousness. Bakhtin traces this dialogic function of novelistic speech in the European literary tradition to the parodic-travestying discourses of pre-novelistic forms such as saturnalia and Greek farce. He argues that polyglossia – or ‘the interanimation of languages’ – produced by parodic, folk language pries open the ‘sacred’ text, dominated by the myth of a monolithic and unified language and consciousness. The strategic use of parodic voice forms a major subtext in the twentieth-century village novel in Egypt, and its discursive consequences supersede the conventional political and literary debate surrounding Arabic diglossia and the ‘propriety’ of using colloquial as a literary language. It is in this respect that Sannu‘ and Nadim made their most important contribution to the practice of what Sabry Hafez calls ‘Arabic narrative discourse’ in the twentieth century. Their invention of the parodic voice contributed to the emergence of the dialogic narrative text. Moreover, it effectively created a contrapuntal voice for the fallah that would remain structurally embedded in the modern novel as a challenge to the discursive hegemony of the biographical subject. Partha Chatterjee has argued that the nationalist imagination, in its most articulated form, attempts to create consensus and the myth of a unified identity through the suppression or ‘sanitization’ of dissonant cultures and voices – those of women, minorities, social outcasts and the poor.78 This discursive project is primarily enacted through the process of representation as a disciplinary act which encodes a dominant point-of-view and a strategic relationship to social and political power. The writing of the early twentieth-century village novel involved just such a disciplinary project – one which was nonetheless challenged and subverted, due in part to the diverse and contestatory languages written into the narrative text by Sannu‘ and Nadim in the nineteenth century. It is in this fluid and dynamic nineteenth-century context that the fallah’s voice is first articulated as the voice of an emergent national authenticity and at the same time, a potentially radical critique of all hegemonic discourses, including that of nationalisms.

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2 NOVELS AND NATIONS

The rise of the novel as a modern literary genre in Egypt, as elsewhere in the colonial world, was linked to the emergence of liberal nationalist ideologies. While critics may debate the origins of the genre in the Arab context, there is a general consensus that its structural and discursive features and its representation of time and place are all located within the new historical space of the emergent nation-state. Benedict Anderson’s 1983 work, Imagined Communities, investigated the link between the historical discourses of nationalism, the emergence of print media and the novel genre. In Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, Lennard Davis has described the process by which journalism and the rise of print ideologies embedded in a truth/falsehood dialectic engendered the ambivalent novel genre. Anderson’s work has led to a spate of postcolonial theory on the dialectical relationship between novel and nation, both within and without the modern Western context.1 In this writing, the general consensus is that the inscription of a new kind of narrative mimesis – no longer the product of popular orality or stylized literary convention – became enmeshed in the sociocultural fabric of the emerging nation-state. Thus the novel’s ‘realistic’ representation of a variety of ‘national’ landscapes, languages and character types offers up a literary analogue to the syncretic social and political project of nationalism. Tim Brennan sums this relationship up nicely: It was the novel that historically accompanied the rise of nations by objectifying the ‘one, yet many’ of national life, and by mimicking the structure of the nation, a clearly bordered jumble of languages and styles. Socially, the novel joined the newspaper as the major vehicle of the national print media, helping to standardize language, 60

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encourage literacy, and remove mutual incomprehensibility. But it did much more than that. Its manner of presentation allowed people to imagine the special community that was the nation.2 The new fiction, and particularly the novel, was especially suited to this social project. After some initial controversy, nationalist intellectuals and writers across the colonial world recognized and advocated the practice of novel-writing and reading as a didactic tool that, if properly undertaken, could help to refine the moral sensibilities of their compatriots and familiarize them with their rights and duties as devoted and productive citizens of a single nation. In Iran for example, the early twentieth-century writer and reformer Ali Ahmad Jamalzadeh, praised the new genre for its syncretic and didactic potential – what Anderson has described as the delineation of a ‘knowable community’ which can and must incorporate lands, peoples, classes and languages from within and without the literate, urban centers: The novel informs and acquaints various groups of a nation with one another: the city-dweller with the villager, the serving man with the shopkeeper, the Kurd with the Baluch…the Orthodox with the Sufi…and in so doing removes and eradicates many thousand differences and biased antagonisms which are born out of ignorance and lack of knowledge and information.3 In Egypt, Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid claimed a similar role for the new fiction. The following generation of Egyptian writers and intellectuals further elaborated this project of ‘national literature’ in numerous prefaces, essays and newspaper articles, and assiduously set about putting it into practice in the burst of fiction produced throughout the 1920s. National fiction did not emerge out of a narrative vacuum, however. In advocating the practice of this type of writing, reformist intellectuals and authors were clearly reacting to other kinds of fiction that were being produced for popular local markets, and that were angrily dismissed as being vulgar pulp fiction, serving no purpose other than the cheap entertainment of a naive and marginally educated readership. By the beginning of the twentieth century the new novel genre was understood in some sense to have replaced decadent popular narrative genres, like the 61

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stories of The Thousand and One Nights and Abu Zayd al-Hilali. Similarly, throughout the 1920s, national fiction was theorized and produced in direct competition with the serialized novelistic fiction and romances (riwayat) that had become tremendously popular amongst the new reading public. The new critical concept of ‘national literature’ was a pivotal element in the later development and canonization of the novel genre in Egypt. Its three main distinguishing features are setting, character and time: Egyptian landscapes and Egyptian characters, urban and rural, and an overarching sense of national history were identified as the necessary ingredients for a genuinely national literature. Equally important was the construction of narrative subjectivity through the medium of a character, or characters, with a developed interiority and a distinct point of view. This could be the central character in the fiction or the narrator himself. In either case, this narrative subjectivity was a largely unprecedented feature in Arabic narrative before the end of the nineteenth century, and its elaboration in fiction was inextricably bound to the linked ideologies of nationalism and romantic individualism as they emerged in Egypt roughly around the time of the 1919 revolution.

Al-d dhat al-rriwa’iyyah: the emergence of the narrative subject What exactly is a novel? This question is a seminal one in the modern Arabic context, in terms of both literary theory and history. As previously noted, Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s novel Zaynab is widely considered to be the first Arabic novel in spite of the fact that numerous examples of Arabic fiction existed prior to it, beginning around the middle of the nineteenth century.4 A group of Syrian writers – Salim al-Bustani (1846–1884), Francis Marrash (1836–1873) and Nu‘man ‘Abduh al-Qasatli (1854–1920) – published a number of extended works of fiction around this time. In Egypt, ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr documents 167 novels published before Zaynab, between 1834 and 1914.5 Among the most important of these were the historical and philosophical novels and romances written by Jurji Zaydan, Niqula Haddad and Farah Anton. Zaydan – historian, novelist, critic and the founder of al-Hilal, the longest-lived cultural journal in the Arab world – published no less than twenty-three historical novels between 1891 and 1914. Haddad published twenty-two society 62

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melodramas between 1901 and 1950, while Farah Anton published six philosophical romances and historical novels between 1899 and 1906. Most literary historians, however, tend to dismiss this prolific fictional production prior to Zaynab as a series of imperfect experiments in an evolving process of adaptation and assimilation of an imported genre. This paradigm traces the origins of the Arabic novel to the concerted translation of European fiction in the nineteenth century. An extended period of apprenticeship follows, during which the Arabic novel undergoes its steady path towards ‘maturity’, finally culminating in the work of Naguib Mahfouz. The nineteenth-century European novel, in both its high realist and early modernist phase, is the prototype against which the ‘developing’ Arabic novel is read and evaluated. The numerous translations, adaptations and original texts produced by Arab writers by the beginning of the twentieth century are thereby relegated to the outskirts of the national canon. The prejudices implicit in this model of cultural production are rooted in the attitude of orientalism towards the colonial subaltern. They are, moreover, shared by the attitude of the nationalist critic towards indigenous popular culture, and further complicated by the historical hegemony of realism as an aesthetic ideology. In an attempt to deal with the problems involved in the periodization and classification of this diffuse and generically unstable modern narrative corpus, Badr distinguishes between three historical and modal types of novel in the foundational period between 1870 and 1938. They are ‘the didactic novel’ (al-riwayah alta‘limiyyah), ‘the recreational novel’ (riwayat al-tasliyah wal-tarfih) and ‘the artistic novel’ (al-riwayah al-fanniyyah). This classification roughly follows a historical chronology. In the first category, Badr includes nineteenth-century narrative travelogues like Rifa‘a al-Tahtawi’s Takhlis al-Ibriz and Ali Mubarak’s ‘Alam al-Din, Farah Anton’s philosophical allegories, Jurji Zaydan’s historical novels and Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s maqamah-influenced narrative, Hadith ‘I‘sa Ibn Hisham. ‘The recreational novel’– which comprises by far the largest section of Badr’s bibliography – features the work of Niqula Haddad and includes the dozens of little-remembered writers who published their novels serially in the many literary journals that began to emerge in Egypt around the turn of the century.6 Finally, ‘the artistic novel’ includes the canonical narrative texts of the Nahdah, beginning with Zaynab, and continuing throughout the twenties and thirties 63

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with the novellas of the New School writers as well as the novels of Taha Husayn, Tawfiq al-Hakim and ‘Abbas Mahmud al‘Aqqad. Badr’s critical methodology is rooted in two related generic and ideological premises. The first of these is a very particular kind of understanding of the structural features and historic mission of the novel genre itself. The second lies in the reformist intellectual’s ambiguous attitude towards an ‘extra-’ or ‘pre-’ national indigenous popular culture and narrative tradition. Badr’s typology is characterized by an ongoing tension between ‘high’ (nationalist) and ‘low’ (popular) culture. He attributes the decline of medieval Arab culture to its linguistic and literary ‘vernacularization’, as exemplified by the flawed style and usage of medieval writers from Ibn Iyas to al-Jabarti, and more generally, by the growing cleavages within what he views as a unitary, canonical cultural tradition: The most prominent aspect of the age’s cultural life was first, the rupture between contemporary culture and the true intellectual and literary tradition of classical Arab civilization and second, the rupture between this tradition and [the culture of] the popular masses.…Consequently, most of the age’s literary arts deteriorated into the realm of popular literature.7 According to Badr, these same symptoms continued to afflict Arabic literary culture in the nineteenth and early twentieth century. For while the ‘didactic novel’ sought to address the great political and philosophical issues of the day as well as the decadence of contemporary society, the great majority of the novels produced during this period was made up of commercially profitable romances, adventure-stories, crime-fiction and the like, geared towards a popular audience, newly – and yet marginally – literate. This is Sabry Hafez’s ‘new reading public’. Badr refers to this metamorphosed popular audience as ‘the semi-cultured’ (ansaf al-muthaqqafin) and, in a pregnant hypothesis, goes on to suggest that the popular novel (i.e. ‘the recreational novel’) was, structurally and thematically, the direct descendent of traditional popular narrative. This ‘semicultured’ readership ‘turned…towards translated novels – which only differed from popular literature in that they were somewhat more believable’.8 Jurji Zaydan’s remarks on the popular novel are relevant here: 64

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The writers of the Nahdah translated many of these books – which are today called ‘novels’ (riwayat) – from French, English and Italian. These translated Arabic novels are numberless and most of them are intended to be read for amusement – rarely for social improvement or historical value. Educated Arab readers have welcomed these novels in order that they may replace the stories authored in medieval Islamic times, popular amongst the masses up until now. For example, the stories of ‘Ali alZaybaq and Sayf Bin Dhi Yazan and al-Malik al-Dhahir and the Banu Hilal, etc., in addition to the old stories like ‘Antara and A Thousand and One Nights. [These readers] found that the translated novels were closer to reality and hence better suited the spirit of the age, and so they became a dedicated audience.9 In this passage as in much of nahdawi and nationalist writing on the novel, the new genre is implicitly linked to the ideal of ‘social improvement’ (al-fa’idah al-ijtima‘iyyah). The novel was thus understood as a strategic tool by writers and critics engaged in a battle of sorts with the Cairean version of Grub Street. While popular narrative – both oral and novelistic – was understood to constitute a deliberate, formal act of deception, national fiction or ‘the artistic novel’ represented social and individual truth. Realism was championed as the formal mechanism for rendering this quixotic identity between fiction and truth. Though many of the novels that Badr classifies under the rubric of ‘the recreational novel’ were certainly directly translated from European languages, a greater number were ‘adaptations’, very loosely based on French, English or Russian plots, or original texts that claimed to be translations in order to take advantage of the vogue for foreign novels. Mustafa Lutfi al-Manfaluti’s immensely popular translations were condensed and Islamicized adaptations of romantic French novels like Dumas fils’ La Dame aux Camélias and Bernardan de St Pierre’s Paul et Virginie. Matti Moosa notes that he ‘often took extensive liberties with the original to fit the theme to a Muslim background and to promote his own didactic purposes’.10 The prolific and colorful Tanius ‘Abduh carried with him sheets of paper in one pocket and a French novel in the other. He would then read a few lines, put the novel back in his pocket, and begin to scratch in a 65

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fine script whatever he could remember of the few lines he had read. He wrote all day long without striking out a world or rereading a line.11 Clearly, this unorthodox method raises important historical and theoretical questions about authorship and the migration of genres across social spaces. Moreover, it is not unjustified to suppose that many of the unattributed ‘translations’ serialized in the popular fiction magazines of the day were in fact, original works that sought to cash in on the vogue for translated European fiction. In this context, Badr mentions an anecdote about Niqula Haddad, who had written two original novels – Al-Haqibah al-Zarqa’ (The Blue Case) and ‘Ayn bi ‘Ayn (An Eye for an Eye) – set them in Europe and tried to pass them off as translations, whereupon Jurji Zaydan convinced him to acknowledge his own authorship.12 These popular novels were generically hybrid romances and adventure stories, often set in exotic foreign lands or in a legendary historical past. Their subtitles are not only amusing, but also offer an important insight into the fundamental generic instability of the novel form: Labib Abu Satit’s novel The Innocents (al-Abriyya’) was subtitled ‘a literary, romantic policier’; Muhammad Ra’fat al-Jamali’s The Beauty’s Sustenance or The Lovers’ Sorrow (Qut al-Fatinah aw Alam ‘Ashiqayn) carried the subtitle ‘An Egyptian Historical, Psychological Romance’, and Ahmad Hanafi’s The Beautiful Vendor (al-Ba’i‘ah al-Hasna’) was described as ‘a literary, historical, social love-story’.13 As previously noted, Badr locates the generic antecedents of this illegitimate phase in the history of the Arabic novel in popular Arabic narrative and translated romances. The key structural features that relegate the recreational novel to its stillborn status as pulp fiction are all features that properly belong to what contemporary critics saw as the archaic and corrupt realm of aladab al-sha‘bi – the stuff of romance, adventure, the amazing and the improbable. These structural features are setting, character, plot, narrative mode and language. The recreational novel almost always takes place in distant times and places. Consequently, the characters that people these novels are usually foreigners and aristocrats or mythical historical personages, kings, warriors, and so forth. Moreover, the plots of these novels rely mainly on epic stories of adventure and battles, or melodramatic intrigues, all tied together by a series of coincidences or highly ‘improbable’ events. Finally and most 66

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importantly, Badr describes the dominant mode of narration in these novels as being ‘documentary’ (uslub taqriri) rather than ‘representational’ (uslub taswiri) – a feature which also has much in common with the typical narrative mode of popular epic and romance. In the latter, the narrator is an omnipresent voice, shaping and modulating the sequence of events, not by developing a steady temporal progression of cause and effect through the exclusive use of what Davis calls ‘the median past tense’, but rather by constantly moving between narrative tenses and locations. His omniscience and the authority which this omniscience endows emanates from his professional role as the vested custodian of his community’s social and historical knowledge rather than the textual artifice of authorship and authorial omniscience. Popular narrativity involves a kind of collective performance whereby the narrator situates himself as a physically present interlocutor between the narrative and the audience, who participate in turn, in the unfolding of the narrative through their comments and interjections. This immediate narrative presence supplies what the reader of the printed text now comes to perceive as the missing links of temporal and spatial causality in pre-modern or pre-realist narrative: the tale, the story, the popular epic. Moreover, the language of this narrative is generically complex and intertextual, typically incorporating poetry and proverb into the text as a way of amplifying and embellishing the events and their moral significance. Finally, as in epic and fairy-tale, character and location in popular narrative are the function of event and plot, not the other way around. The idea of individuality or personality – of interiority – does not exist in popular narrative, for it is a character’s actions that determine his or her destiny within the preordained limits imposed by divine will and communal custom, and not the unique interior moral landscape of individual consciousness. Similarly, location or setting is abbreviated, generic and symbolic. Description as a way of foregrounding the materiality and specificity of the object or the landscape was also a later narrative practice (and one of the more opaque and irritating features of the new novel in Egypt, according to Mahmud Khayrat, who declared the penchant of European novelists for endless description of places and things to be ‘boring’ for the Arab reader).14 Badr uses a 1905 novel by Zaynab Fawwaz as a case-study of the recreational novel’s wholesale adoption of archaic and decadent popular narrative structures:

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In structure and plot, this novel is representative of the recreational novel due to its haphazard accumulation of events and their subjection to fate and coincidence, and its reliance on adventure and the romantic plot. The author intervenes into the narrative by commenting on the events and addressing the reader directly, and [she] attempts to tie the chapters together quite arbitrarily for lack of any real connection. Moreover, this novel is characterized by the style of popular epic because the author comments on the events with poetry, describes the action using language similar to that of the popular epic and connects the chapters together in the same way that the popular narrator would do.…For example, she says: ‘This is what befell that scoundrel, and as for Shakib and Naguib…’ or ‘as for Shakib, he continued to wander until he arrived at the very edge of Riyad al-Zahirah…’ or ‘here we leave him and take the reader in the direction of Jabiyah to find out what befell Jabir…’, etc. The author’s’ need for such strategies to unite her narrative lies in the lack of determinacy or causality in the novel. Hence the ending is not the final culmination of a logical sequence of events, but rather it is simply the result of the author having exhausted all her tricks and stratagems.15 A particular pair of assumptions about the form and function of modern fiction underpins Badr’s analysis of the recreational novel as an underdeveloped or intermediate genre. The first has to do with the contemporary hegemony of realism as an aesthetic ideology, while the second revolves around the ontology produced by nationalism, which requires the outside world, the individual’s environment, his ‘reality’, to fit into the discursive parameters generated by the idea of the nation. Badr identifies the ‘denial’ of Egyptian ‘reality’ (al-hurub min waqi‘ al-bi’ah al-Misriyyah) as the single most salient fracture at the heart of the recreational novel. This flaw informs all the structural features mentioned above. Time, settings, characters, narrative mode do not ‘reflect’ the particular historical, social and existential environment of the contemporary Egyptian subject. They remain rooted in the mythic past, in the marvelous, the exotic realm of the imaginary other and in no way contribute to the representation of a properly national reality, whether this reality is understood as a social environment or an interior, psychological landscape: 68

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These authors’ escape from the Egyptian environment to other environments did not mean that they succeeded in representing these new locations through the events of their novels. As we have already noted, [their failure] was due to the fact that they were busy satisfying their readers’ curiosity with a string of marvelous and intricate events which did not submit to rational analysis but rather, to coincidence and fate.…Consequently, the author did not bother with cause and effect, nor with explanations and justifications. He simply wanted to present the strange and miraculous – a fact which binds his novels to the popular story. The author had not yet moreover perceived the necessity of giving expression to human experience, and the consciousness of a particular environment and of the unique individual that emerges from this perception. For this reason, he did not write in a representational style [uslub taswiri], which presents the details of experience and its minutiae. Rather, he wrote in a documentary style [uslub taqriri] which rests on the mere summary of events and the narration of their broad outlines.16 The ‘artistic novel’ in Egypt emerges at the juncture of these twin ideas of the unique individual and the specificity of a historical environment referred to above. Around the first decade of the twentieth century, ideas associated with psychoanalysis, romanticism and bourgeois liberalism had begun to shape the notion of the primacy of the individual subject, while nationalist ideology negotiated a particular kind of relationship between this new individual and his exterior environment. Badr pinpoints 1919 as the seminal date from which the new national subject in Egypt emerges with a radical consciousness of his identity as an individual and of the historical specificity of his social environment. In this context, the idea of independence acquires an aesthetic and existential dimension in addition to the straightforward political one usually associated with this period in modern Egyptian history. Most critics agree that it is during this period that the psychological and aesthetic concept of ‘national character’ originates in Egyptian intellectual history. The ‘exotic romance’ and popular narrative techniques of the recreational novel were not adequate to the needs of this emergent national character, newly conscious of his subjectivity and of the social specificity and political urgency of his 69

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world. A new literature and a new narrative mode was needed to express this consciousness – one that privileged the individual’s subjectivity and point-of-view while simultaneously representing the outside world, with its places and peoples, as a properly national landscape.

Ways of seeing: genre and ideology The canonical, ‘artistic’ novel in Egypt acquires its legitimacy precisely because it inscribes a new ideology of the individual in relation to place. Badr distinguishes between the old role of the writer as an ‘illusionist’ and his modern role as a realist: ‘the goal of the artistic novel is to express the writer’s perception of the world that surrounds him. For this reason he turns his attention to reality rather than relying on deception [al-iham]’.17 The ‘realistic’ representation of place and of the individual self’s experience of place merge to create the proper narrative space of the modern novel. As Davis has argued, this idea of reality and its unmediated representation by a unified narrative self is as much of an artifice as the ‘deception’ practiced by romancers and hack novelists. Novelistic subjectivity or interiority is not some natural effect of the progressive evolution of human narrative practice, but rather the finite product of a specific ideological moment in the history of modern societies. In Europe, this was the moment, in the eighteenth century, when a mercantile, and later, an industrial bourgeoisie began to come into its own as a dominant national and imperial class. Similarly, in Egypt, the ‘artistic’ novel emerges at the point when a properly nationalist bourgeois intelligentsia begins self-consciously to articulate its role as a powerful and exclusive political and cultural vanguard. Novels do not depict life, they depict life as it is represented by ideology. By this I mean that life is a pretty vast and uncoordinated series of events and perceptions. But novels are pre-organized systems of experience in which characters, actions and objects have to mean something in relation to the system of each novel itself, in relation to the culture in which the novel is written, and in relation to the readers who are in that culture. When we ‘see’ a house in a novel…the house we ‘see’ in our mind is largely a cultural artifact. It must be described as a cultural phenomenon with recognizable signs to tell us 70

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what kind of a house, what class, whose taste and so on. All of this description will depend on ideology – that is the vast signifying system that, in its interpenetration with the individual psyche, makes things ‘mean’ something to a culture and individuals in that culture. Ideology constitutes the sum of that which a culture needs to believe about itself and its aspirations as opposed to what really is. Ideology is in effect the culture’s form of writing a novel about itself for itself. And the novel is a form that incorporates that cultural fiction into a particular story. Likewise, fiction becomes, in turn, one of the ways in which the culture teaches itself about itself, and thus novels become agents of inculcating ideology.18 Davis’ description of the novel genre as a particular kind of cultural artifact illuminates the ways in which character and setting function as narrative sites of ideology in the modern European context. Of all genres, it is the novel that insistently claims to represent the realities of human consciousness and the social world, and yet this realistic representation of the world is based on an elaborate system of simplification and manipulation of the chaotic and incoherent jumble of experience that human beings live on a day-to-day basis. The late nineteenth-century French Naturalists were certainly aware of this paradox of realism. ‘All Realists of genius’, wrote Guy de Maupassant in 1887, ‘should really be called Illusionists’, imposing a quiet and invisible ‘order’ onto ‘the most differing, unforeseen, contradictory, ill-assorted things’.19 In this sense, the ‘reality’ depicted by the novel – whether physical or psychological – is as much of an artifice as the fantastic landscapes and heroic adventures of popular storytelling. From Robinson Crusoe’s desert island to Jane Austen’s provincial drawing rooms, the creation of novelistic space inscribed a particular set of attitudes about ‘the nature of property and lands, foreign and domestic’ that encoded the European bourgeoisie’s reification of property and its obsessive commodification of the material world.20 Thus Davis’ hypothetical fictional house is not just a house in the mundane, quotidian, unremarkable sense. Rather, it is an elaborately constructed narrative space, whose architecture, location and contents are meant to signify the particular social, economic and, indeed, moral status or psychological state of its owner. Far from being gratuitous ‘filler’ or disruptive 71

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marginalia, this ‘thick description’ of locations that Mahmud Khayrat found so tedious in European novels was intended to inscribe the all-important nuances of class hierarchies and the social relationships between ownership, social power and moral character that existed in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Europe. The construction of narrative subjectivity and character in this context was also an ideologically loaded project that projected the immense historical self-confidence of an affluent imperial bourgeoisie and that encoded a dominant middle-class valuesystem privileging individualism, industry and self-reliance as the keys to social and moral success. Indeed, Davis’ remarks on the ‘civilizing’ mission of the novel in nineteenth-century Europe could equally apply to the Arab context in the early twentieth century: By this point in the nineteenth century, the novel was seen as important for the furthering of civilization and culture – particularly as the base of readership began to spread to the lower classes. The ideological role of character was certainly part of the civilizing, or if you will, the socially indoctrinating aspect of the novel.21 The portrayal of character and the process by which it is shaped through a combination of heredity, environment, circumstance and personal choice, was meant to illustrate the evils of sensuality and moral turpitude, and the rewards of moderation, thrift and sexual virtue. Novelistic subjectivity – the minute charting of an individual self’s interior moral and psychological landscape – was the necessary narrative medium through which contemporary bourgeois ideology was refracted, negotiated and disseminated. Its ideological efficacy rests on its pretensions to representing a very particular and yet very universal ‘reality’ – the reality of the individual’s consciousness as it attempts to negotiate the world in which it finds itself. This realistic ‘development’ of individual character is precisely the single most important feature which Badr and a host of other critics of modern Arabic literature find to be fatally missing from early Arabic novelistic practice, while its narrative inception marks the beginning of the canonical novel in Arabic. While the recreational novel emerged from a social context in which established modes of popular narrative intersected new cultural marketplaces and patterns of consumption amongst the 72

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literate masses, the writing of the artistic novel in Egypt was associated with the rise and growing self-consciousness of an acculturated, nationalist bourgeoisie. In Egypt, as in much of the periphery, the distinct social and economic formations created by global capitalism varied somewhat from the models of the imperial center. As in Europe, the rise of the novel in Egypt nonetheless accompanied the emergence of a middle-class broadly defined, with new and distinct social characteristics and political interests from those of either the old merchant and ‘ulama classes, the masses, or the aristocracy of the khedival court. Jabir ‘Asfur suggests that the intelligentsia of this new bourgeoisie appropriated the novel genre as a way of challenging and dismantling the old Ottoman and Arabic social and literary hierarchies. If classical poetry was the proper genre of the courtly aristocracy and the folk tale that of the popular classes, then the novel was the perfect literary vehicle by which the emergent nationalist middle classes could assert their dominance on the cultural stage.22 More specifically, Badr remarks upon the recreational novel’s exclusive focus on a non-native Egyptian and non-Muslim aristocracy as yet another sign of its social and literary illegitimacy. The canonical novel is written both by and for the native middle classes, exploring their subjectivity and their particular milieu.23 The spread of secular, Western-style education and the consequent growth of the modern professions, in addition to the massive new wealth generated by the emergence and consolidation of capitalist markets, contributed to the rise of this class, while colonialism galvanized its self-consciousness and its growing assertiveness as a national vanguard. In this respect, 1919 is a landmark date from both a historical and literary point of view. The 1919 revolution against the British occupation and the overwhelming popular demand for independence under the banner of the Wafd party that it crystallized stimulated the Egyptian bourgeoisie’s sense of its own identity and its role as a cultural and political vanguard. The aesthetic ideology of romanticism further contributed to its intelligentsia’s call for the liberation of the individual from the shackles of ‘dead tradition’ and antiquated social mores, and the creation of a new and properly national literature that would explore the experience of this individual within the context of his contemporary social milieu. The novel now begins to be written and read as the mature expression of individual and collective identity. This is why Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s novel Zaynab is considered to be ‘the first’ Egyptian – and indeed, Arabic – novel, and why 73

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Tawfiq al-Hakim’s The Return of the Spirit is regarded as an undying national classic. But if 1919 is a seminal date in both the literary and political history of modern Egypt, so too is 1906 – the year in which Egyptians digested the shocking news that four peasants from the Delta village of Dinshaway had been sentenced to hang by a colonial court for the accidental death of a British officer. Though in the immediate aftermath of the Dinshaway incident, the Egyptian press reacted with a certain indifference – some newspapers even blaming the villagers for the altercation which ended in the officer’s death – the subsequent trial and the barbarous sentence quickly turned the case into a cause célèbre and eventually resulted in Alfred Lord Cromer’s departure from Egypt.24 Most importantly, as Yahya Haqqi has noted, Dinshaway once again thrust the peasantry into the forefront of national consciousness, permanently tying the fallah and the rural hinterlands to the nationalist project, and consolidating an enduring discursive space within that project for the Egyptian village as a contested zone in the struggle against colonialism on the one hand and underdevelopment on the other. From now on the fallah and Egypt’s villages would play a central role in the construction of the national novel. The two central elements of national literature (al-adab alqawmi) that emerge in the critical writing of the early Nahdah are character (al-shakhsiyyah) and environment (al-bi’ah). They are linked through the idea of a national ‘reality’ (al-waqi‘) on both the objective level of landscape and the subjective level of experience. The idea of a national ‘reality’ focused on the quotidian landscape of the city and its various markets, streets and residential quarters, but also on the countryside, the rural landscape of Egypt’s villages and vast agricultural estates. Character was a more ambiguous element, however. Badr divides the early artistic novel in Egypt into two categories: ‘the analytic novel’ (al-riwayah al-tahliliyyah) in which an omniscient and ‘objective’ narrator explores the psyche of a particular character or group of characters drawn from the ranks of the urban middle classes or the city’s popular quarters. Muhammad Tahir Lashin’s Hawwa’ Bila Adam (Eve without Adam) and Mahmud Taymur’s Rajab Efendi are examples of this type of novel. As implied in the terminology, character in ‘the autobiographical novel’ (riwayat al-tarjamah aldhatiyyah) is crystallized by a central third-person voice (Taha Husayn’s Al-Ayyam [The Days]) that closely constructs the interiority of a semi-fictional protagonist. This protagonist’s consciousness 74

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mediates and dominates the fabric of the text (Haykal’s Zaynab, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s Bird of the East). In this type of novel, the demarcating line between protagonist, narrator and author is indistinct. Not incidentally, most of these latter types of novels take place, either exclusively or partially, in a rural setting.

National fiction, ‘The New School’ and novelistic character As previously noted, the idea of national independence in the writing of nadhawi authors incorporated an aesthetic and existential component in addition to the obvious political one. The anti-colonial struggle also involved a struggle to liberate the Egyptian sensibility from the chains of social convention and blind imitation of what was now seen as an aging and decrepit literary canon. One of the most important strategies by which this new Egyptian man would create his world afresh in his own image was literature – particularly the novel, itself a new genre, unfettered by the shackles of a burdensome and now largely irrelevant medieval tradition. The aesthetic of Romanticism was a major influence on the way in which Egyptian intellectuals understood and formulated the idea of the autonomous individual in both the social and literary sense. The romantic and iconoclastic literary production of the Diwan school – poetry, criticism and, to a lesser extent, fiction – was instrumental in shaping the new literary sensibilities of the age. The invention of narrative subjectivity was a corollary to this process which privileged and celebrated the inner life of the artist – a process Haykal describes as taking Arabic literature from ‘mere storytelling to the prominence of the Self [buruz aldhatiyyah]’.25 Already in 1911, Lutfi al-Sayyid was positioning the idea of a historically distinct and homogeneous Egyptian Ummah in opposition to the ideological breadth of the Ottoman imperium. Egypt was a distinct nation with its own specific geography and cultural character formed by shared language, religion, color and blood. Moreover, he clearly recognized that literature must have a significant part to play in the consolidation of a modern national consciousness. In a lecture delivered at the Egyptian University in 1918, the critic Ahmad Dayf further elaborated Lutfi al-Sayyid’s ideas on the role of literature in the nationalist project:

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We wish to have an Egyptian literature which will reflect our social state, our intellectual movements, and the region in which we live; reflect the cultivator in his field, the merchant in his stall, the ruler in his palace, the teacher among his students and his books, the Shaykh among his people, the worshipper in his mosque or his monk’s cell, and the youth in his amorous play. In sum, we want to have a personality in our literature.26 It is this notion of ‘personality’ or ‘character’ (shaksiyyah) which was to become the dominant element in subsequent formulations of a properly modern and national literature. The new generation of writers that was coming of age in the teens of the century keenly felt the burden of an archaic and highly stylized literary tradition that seemed largely irrelevant, both on the level of language and content, to the needs and concerns of the modern age. These writers deeply admired the examples of nineteenth-century French, English and Russian fiction, drama and poetry with which they were acquainted either through translation or in the original language, and the lack of comparable native genres appeared to them to be yet another humbling example of European might and cultural superiority. To Haykal and his disciples, this cultural backwardness was inevitably associated with an Arab/Islamic heritage maligned and forever tainted by the racialist thought of philologists and social philosophers like Hippolyte Taine, Ernest Renan and Edmond Demolins.27 With a few exceptions, the classical and medieval canon was rejected by the more zealous amongst the Egyptian modernists as yet another alien legacy oppressing an authentic Egyptian nation that traced its deepest roots to a glorious pharaonic past to which the entire world – including the European master himself – paid rightful homage. The ‘New School’ writers, whose short-lived journal, al-Fajr (1925–1927), was dedicated to the dissemination of the Egyptian short story, were largely responsible for the invention of this new national character in narrative. Mahmud Taymur, one of the New School writers, reflects on this period in Egyptian literary history. The birth of the modern Egyptian story was bound up with other new beginnings which equally encompassed the institutions of our social, economic, political, intellectual and cultural lives.…The outline and specificity of the 76

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Egyptian character were obscure, lost amongst foreign currents, and so all intellectual effort turned towards the reform and foregrounding of this Egyptian character and to the exploration of its strengths and capabilities in life.…During this period, the nationalist forces were preparing to rid the country of the colonial yoke and to expel the foreign exploiter as a first step in the struggle for renewal and productivity. The new writers responded to the calls for modernization that demanded the creation of a properly Egyptian literature that would express Egyptian feelings and experiences in a narrative form modeled on western literature.…And when Egypt’s national revolution of 1919 ignited and the Egyptian character burst forth, shining, in all the various walks of life, the modern artistic story immediately responded, representing, describing and analyzing this authentic popular character which was both the genius and the child of the revolution.28 The New School writers were trying to define an entirely new relationship between fiction and the real; the quotidian social world in which they lived. They were specifically reacting against what they saw as the deceptive and fantastic characters and landscapes of contemporary popular fiction, and frequently complained of the impervious popularity of these serialized novels, translated and otherwise, in their writing.29 This world was, as we have seen, constructed in terms of a national coheherence and specificity. Reality and the real in fiction were thus understood to be refracted through the prism of individual, yet metonymic ‘character’. In other words, the concept of realism in fiction was developed by these writers as a formal technique of metonymic social signification. ‘Isa ‘Ubayd, another of the writers associated with the New School, dedicated his first volume of short stories, Ihsan Hanim (1921), to the Wafdist leader Sa‘d Zaghlul. In this preface, ‘Ubayd describes the method of realist narrative as follows: The purpose of fiction must be the investigation of life and its sincere portrayal as it appears to us. [The writer must collect] the greatest number of observations and documents so that the story becomes a kind of ‘dossier’ in which the reader can peruse the history of an individual’s 77

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life or a page from that history. The writer uses this individual history as a means of studying the secrets of human nature and the hidden recesses of the obscure human heart, as well as the moral and social development [of men] and the role of civilization, environment and heredity [in that development].…For the function of the writer is to dissect the human soul and to record his discoveries [in writing].30 The language of this passage appears repeatedly in critical writing of and about the formative period in question, and illuminates the central technnique of representation at the heart of the new realism. Narrative fiction is now concerned with the private, the hidden and the interior aspects of ‘human nature’. This interiority is constructed in both human and material terms. From the battlefields, aristocratic courts and salons, and the criminal public streets of the recreational novel, fiction now moves into the enclosed and private spaces of the social world: the domestic parlor, the bedroom, ‘the obscure human heart’. Lennard Davis’ insight into the essentially voyeuristic and libidinous nature of realist fiction is certainly relevant here.31 More importantly, this private ‘dossier’ of an individual human life was required to express a set of moral and social truths about ‘Egypt’ and ‘Egyptians’. But which Egypt and which Egyptians? Far from simply being a neutral and/or ‘maturing’ mimetic strategy of representation – as implied in ‘Ubayd’s idea of ‘the dossier’, as well as by developmentalist critical discourse – realism in nahdawi fiction encoded a specific social ideology, a specific set of social attitudes towards class, gender and culture as they were in the process of being instituted. These attitudes were naturally centered and produced in colonial Egypt, but they were also immediately and universally recognizable features of a social modernity and of a modern novelistic canon whose foundations were located in nineteenth-century Europe. Muhammad Husayn Haykal and Ibrahim al-Misri suggested that a proper understanding of Egypt’s millennial history could further serve to mold and shape narrative character in the new fiction. Pharaonic civilization in particular was singled out as the purest and most glorious moment of Egyptian history. Haykal claimed that the contemporary Egyptian character still preserved links to that of its ancient ancestors, and that it was the duty of national literature to foreground this continuity by producing 78

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historical fiction that would endow pharaonic characters with modern subjectivity and a modern language, in order to foster Egyptians’ awareness of, and pride in their world-renowned patrimony.32 Above all, Haykal privileged the artist/author’s individual sensibility as the single most important element in the creation of a genuine national literature equal to those of Europe. ‘Mere storytelling’ was part and parcel of the corrupt past, while true subjectivity shaped by the feeling and experience of the individual artist was the key to cultural renaissance.

Muhammad Husayn Haykal and the rural imagination Though Haykal only wrote two novels and a handful of littleremembered short stories in his lifetime, he is nonetheless given a foundational role in the history of the modern Arabic novel. This status derives from his first novel, Zaynab, which quickly acquired the status of a national classic after its anonymous publication in 1913, as well as from the prolific criticism that he produced throughout the 1920s on the subject of the new national literature. Though writers like the Taymur brothers and the ‘Ubayd brothers had made a series of scattered and tentative attempts to theorize the new fiction in the first half of the decade, it was Haykal who was largely responsible for systematizing and popularizing the aesthetic credo of national literature in the pages of his widely read weekly journal, Al-Siyasah al-Usbu‘iyyah, either by his own pen, or by encouraging and publishing similarly inclined young essayists and writers. Muhammad Husayn Haykal was the son of an affluent landowning family from the Delta region. A model of the secular and cosmopolitan young intellectuals of his generation, he was sent to Paris in 1909 to complete his post-graduate studies in law, during which time he traveled extensively in Europe, returning to Egypt in 1912. Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, who was a distant relative of the family, assumed the role of political and intellectual mentor to the young man throughout the 1920s and 1930s. In Egypt, Haykal embarked on a successful career in politics and rose to a position of prominence in the Ummah Party. He was an extremely active journalist, contributing articles to the party’s paper al-Jaridah between 1908 and 1915, assuming the editorship of al-Siyasah in 1922, and founding the weekly cultural supplement al-Siyasah alUsbu‘iyyah in 1926. When al-Jaridah ceased publication under 79

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British pressure in 1915, Haykal and a group of young writers that included Taha Husayn, Ahmad Amin, ‘Isa ‘Ubayd and Muhammad Taymur, founded the literary journal al-Sufur (1915–1924). The journal, which championed Qasim Amin’s controversial views on the liberation of Muslim women and attacked the elaborate sentimentalism of the al-Manfaluti school of fiction, was instrumental in paving the way for the subsequent elaboration of national literature. Ahmad Dayf’s influential book Muqadimmah fi Balaghat al-Arab (An Introduction to Arabic Literature) of 1921, which incorporated the series of lectures given at the Egyptian University a few years earlier and referred to above, was published by the journal’s press and quoted in ‘Isa ‘Ubayd’s preface to Ihsan Hanim. Al-Fajr continued where alSufur had left off in 1924.33 Haykal’s close association with this core group of young authors in the teens and early twenties certainly molded his subsequent writing on national literature. Throughout the twenties, Haykal’s critical writing was characterized by a certain contradiction that arose from the competing influence of Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Hippolyte Taine. David Semah has documented the centrality of Taine’s social determinism on Haykal’s understanding of ‘objective criticism’.34 Briefly stated, the theory of objective criticism that Haykal elaborated in the pages of al-Siyasah al-Usbu‘iyyah held that the critic’s personal taste or subjective valuation of a work of art was irrelevant to a true understanding of its historical and aesthetic significance. The meaning and value of the text could only be uncovered by firmly locating the artist and his work in his specific social and historical milieu, and then proceeding to analyze this totality in an objective, scientific fashion. This ‘scientific method’ was the application of a theory which presupposes that the individual human being has no separate existence and that the study of the natural and social environments, and of the customs and emotions to which they give rise, is the only means by which the motivation of all human activities, including literary creations, can be adequately understood.35 Taine’s thought – which Haykal was almost single-handedly responsible for disseminating in Egyptian intellectual circles – was central in the construction of Egyptian nationalist ideology, and by extension, in the formulation of the theory of national literature in 80

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Egypt.36 On the other hand, the influence of Rousseau’s ideas on the relationship between the individual and society is evident in both Haykal’s writing on national literature and in his fiction. Here, rather than objectively shaping character and molding it into a proper national genius, society becomes an artificial construct that inhibits and corrupts the autonomous individual’s natural liberty and primitive innocence. Traces of this philosophy can be seen in Haykal’s emphasis on the importance of the role of the individual artist’s unique vision in picturing the world around him. Moreover, Zaynab, like Rousseau’s Emile, is precisely the story of innocent youth rebelling against the artificial and destructive tissue of social custom. Thus ‘character’ assumes an ambiguous significance in Haykal’s work. It is both the fixed product of a specific natural and social environment and as such, the expression of a genuine national spirit. At the same time, it is the figure of the enlightened individual standing alone, above or against this society, and trapped in its hypocrisy and its contradictions. In 1925, Haykal published a seminal essay – a manifesto of sorts – on the new national literature as a historical imperative. Entitled simply al-Adab al-Qawmi (National Literature), it drew its inspiration from French romanticism and emphasized natural environment and national history as the main sources of true artistic inspiration. Haykal begins the essay with a reminiscence on an acquaintance that he had made with a young Canadian woman in Paris. The lady in question was traveling through Europe with her mother, and they happened be staying at Haykal’s hotel in the spring of 1910. Upon learning that he was a writer, the young woman declares: ‘how I wish you would write Egypt’s history in fictional form, as Sir Walter Scott did with English history. Even though I do not know Egypt, I feel that it must be a beautiful country, and that its history and its ruins deserve to be shown and made familiar to people in pleasing narrative images. Perhaps, if you do so, you will dedicate the first of these historical novels to me’.37 Though Haykal did not, in fact, dedicate his first novel to this young lady, the essay itself is an attempt to address the question implied in her wish. Throughout the essay, Haykal is profoundly conscious of an immense qualitative difference between European 81

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and Egyptian literature, the former embodying the natural genius of proud and mighty national cultures and the latter trapped in a false or warped sense of its own cultural identity.38 Why, he asks, do Egyptian poets and writers prefer to celebrate the green meadows of France and Switzerland or the shimmering deserts of Arabia instead of the natural wonders of their own Egypt? The answer lies in the habit of blind imitation of foreign textual traditions and canons rather than careful observation of one’s own natural environment mediated by true ‘feeling’. Thus it is the Egyptian writer’s duty ‘to speak of his country and its history and beauty’,39 and, ‘if art would reveal the beauty of their country to Egyptians, they would do their utmost to cultivate this beauty out of pride and awe’.40 It is significant that Haykal uses the expression khalaqaha khalqan (to create out of nothing) in his description of this artistic imperative.41 His choice of language, in addition to the concerted critical and narrative effort to establish the new national literature in Egypt, belies Sabry Hafez’s consistent implication that this generation was indeed trying to recover or resurrect an already extant, if obscured, national character or heritage.42 Benedict Anderson’s description of the imaginative process by which modern nation states (always ‘loom[ing] out of an immemorial past’43) manufacture a contemporary discourse of community and continuity across time and space, is certainly a more appropriate context in which to position Haykal’s literary project. Haykal was indeed concerned with creating a new national canon to match, and even to challenge, those of Europe. On a brief visit to Rome, he describes, in the same essay, how the sight of the Tiber failed to impress him in any meaningful way until he set out to educate himself in its long and canonical history (through the arts: poetry, fiction, painting and music). Then and only then is he truly able to appreciate the ancient and divine glory of the Nile upon his return to Egypt. It is thus the duty of Egypt’s writers to elaborate a new and specifically Egyptian literary canon for the benefit of all Egyptians. Pharaonic history, the Nile and its valley are capable of being the source of inspiration for a national literature that would depict Egypt’s past and present powerfully and truthfully and of impressing the spirit of her children as well as foreigners.…Thus they would know the authentic Egypt, not the Egypt that

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propaganda has defaced out of political, and other motivations.44 In keeping with the romantic influences that shaped his education and tastes, Haykal’s nationalist vision – cosmopolitan and urban at its source – is centered in the Egyptian countryside and mediated by the primacy of the artist’s individual sensibility. Haykal opposes this conception of a unique artistic sensibility (alhiss) to mere imitation of received tradition. National literature is the product of the fusion between the genius of the local landscape and the artist’s subjective perception of this landscape. Thus Haykal’s environmental and historical determinism was nuanced – even dominated – by the centrality of subjective consciousness in artistic expression. Haykal elaborated this narrative subjectivity in both his critical writing and in his fiction, simultaneously rooting it in an enchanted pastoral landscape representing ‘Egypt’ and creating an enduring, if problematic, discursive link between the biographical subject and the Egyptian countryside. When he returns to his family’s estate from Paris in 1911, he declares I forgot Europe, its countryside, its people and everything else about it and I felt my heart expanding and my soul transported with joy…as though I were once again mingling with every branch, with every leaf of these trees and every drop of water in these canals and every particle of this breeze – the breeze of our small and beautiful village.45 Further on in the same essay, he describes the sublime image of the flooding of the Nile – recollected, in a Wordsworthian sense – while he sits writing at his desk: The peasant in my soul awoke! I saw with his eyes, heard with his ears and felt with his heart.…During those three hours I was entranced by the scenery of the beloved homeland and its magical beauty more than any other landscape of beauty…I feel as though these vital, abundant waters course through my deepest soul, my blood and veins.…They undulate prettily, with their limpid hues and waves, coursing firmly between the banks of the canals edged with green grasses, bushes and trees, the green fields spread out behind them on the horizon blanketed by 83

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wheat and cotton…and stretching out to it, the laboring hand, which cultivates, from this water and this soil, all these bounties that God has granted to the people of Egypt.46 This passing reference to a disembodied ‘laboring hand’ (al-yad al-’amilah) is the single reference to the peasant, the rural worker, located in the interstices of a particular network of social and economic relations. Here, s/he is reduced to a ‘hand’ whose only function can be to cultivate nature’s bounties for the rest of the nation’s benefit. For Haykal, it was precisely these timeless natural bounties that were most relevant to the construction of national consciousness.47 Zaynab is a case in point, for even though the novel purports to describe the customs and mores of a rural working class, a greater part of the narrative is taken up by a lengthy and highly romantic description of the natural beauty of the countryside. In fact, in direct opposition to the abbreviated, pastoral image of the peasant presented in Zaynab, Haykal, like Lutfi al-Sayyid before him, at times expressed the urban reformist’s pointed distaste for rural life. Of a tour of the Delta provinces he took with his mentor in 1911, he had this to say: I confess that the conditions I observed in the countryside left a deep impression on my mind. We entered many houses of ‘Umdahs [village headmen] whom we knew to be relatively affluent and yet they were almost like those of the poorest classes, except for a simple room that the ‘Umdah might use to receive ‘the rulers’ [al-hukkam] as they call them, by way of keeping up appearances. As for the children in the kuttabs, their dress and appearance was an offense to the eyes. The roads between villages were not wide enough to accommodate carriages, and the dust flew whenever an animal walked on them. Not all of this was the result of poverty, but rather of ignorance and fear.48 This ambiguous attitude was shared by many of the writers and intellectuals of Haykal’s generation who constantly had before them the glowing image of a healthy and happy European polity to compare with their own nation’s poverty and ignorance.49 The reformist impulse of Zaynab, however, is almost exclusively 84

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concerned with the contemporary problems of gender roles, love and marriage in a fast changing world. The poverty and degradation of peasant life is not only barely touched upon, but largely masked by the romantic pastoral trope that informs the novel. By the end of the decade however, some nationalist writers were explicitly tying the fallah to the concept of national character as a cultural and literary ideal. Like the nineteenth-century Russian narodniks, they imbued the Egyptian peasantry with an essentialized racial and cultural authenticity that perfectly reflected the millennial genius of the Egyptian nation, from pharaonic times to the present. Salamah Musa and Ibrahim alMisri, among others, repeatedly called for an increasing focus on the peasant, his character and lifestyle, in modern fiction in order to produce ‘an authentic Egyptian literature which describes Egyptian life and which is intimately connected to the Egyptian soil’.50 Salamah Musa, one of the most radical of ‘Egyptianist’ intellectuals writing in the 1920s and 1930s, declared ‘if you see a writer who is not concerned with the Egyptian fallah, this means only that he does not care for him. If he does not care for him, he also hates Egypt, for all of us are fallahin’.51 Though the events of Dinshaway in 1906 had already pushed nationalist writers to establish a discursive link between the historic nation and the Egyptian folk, pharaonist intellectuals certainly rendered the most visible and systematic articulation of what was, in essence, a quasi-metaphysical relation between the great, once-and-future nation and a conservative, racially pure Egyptian peasantry. Egypt’s historic national unity and natural sovereignty was derived directly from a countryside, frozen in time, that offered the clearest testimony to an unbroken cultural authenticity and specificity. The bond between this vision of an antique and renascent Egyptian nation and an idealized image of the fallah was realized, most importantly, through cultural production: the plastic and visual arts, music, and of course, literature in its broadest sense. At the unveiling of Mukhtar’s monumental sculpture Nahdat Misr (Egypt’s Awakening) in 1928, then Wafdist prime minister Mustafa Nahhas praised the piece as a symbol of the bond uniting different phases of Egyptian history, past, present and future.…It represents a picture of young Egypt preoccupied with the Sphinx so that it may revive through her and she through it.…If there is a single nation 85

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whose ancient past vindicates its current rebirth, that nation is Egypt.52 By then, the metaphor implicit in this twin image of peasant and sphinx was a familiar and resonant one in the minds of the urban intelligentsia. The magnificent archeological discovery of Tutankhamun’s tomb in 1922, among other such finds, contributed to the increasing popularity of pharaonism as a dominant nationalist discourse around which a variety of artists, intellectuals and competing political parties could rally. Throughout the 1920s, Haykal (along with Salamah Musa) was perhaps the most active proponent of pharaonism. His 1926 essay ‘Misr al-qadima wa Misr al-jadida’ (Egypt: Old and New) called for a concerted attempt to study the linguistic, cultural and social continuities between ancient and modern Egypt.53 Pharaonic civilization, the timeless flooding patterns of Nile valley and Delta agricultural production, and the undisturbed genealogy of this landscape’s native inhabitants all converged in the figure of the fallah – the authentic embodiment of the nation. This quintessential ‘native son’ was himself a living monument to Egypt’s past and future greatness. From the First Dynasty down to the present, he was conservative, hardworking, patient, devoted and humble. He typified the meaning of the word asalah (authenticity), unconsciously preserving the habits of his forefathers for 5,000 years of history. In Zaynab, the fallah gladly and unquestioningly spends his life laboring in the service of Mother Nature and his landlords, just as his ancestors had done millennia ago. This theme proliferated throughout the arts and literature of the period. In addition to Haykal, most of the leading lights of Egyptian letters, at one point or another, wrote in the pharaonic idiom, many of them making an explicit connection between the fallah and Egypt’s glorious history. In Tawfiq al-Hakim’s novel The Return of the Spirit, which famously opens with a quotation from the Egyptian Book of the Dead praising Osiris/Sa’d Zaghlul, the fallah raises the pyramids of Giza, willingly shedding blood and tears in the name of al-ma’bud – the great pharaoh/god – in the same spirit with which he diligently tills the fields of Muhsin’s paternal estate. ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, in his book on Sa‘d Zaghlul, celebrated a rigidly conservative, patriarchal peasant family structure as the embodiment of a millennial national unity and harmony. These writers elaborated a rudimentary yet fairly

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coherent social psychology of the fallah as the core metaphor of an enduring national culture. This rhetorical paradigm illuminated one reality while masking another. On the one hand, echoing the disastrous ‘Urabi revolt of 1881, the events of 1919 had made it clear to urban elites that, demographically and politically, the peasantry was indeed a massive, restive (if not downright dangerous) force to be reckoned with in the construction of a new national polity. On the other, the socioeconomic and cultural affiliations of many of the reformist politicians and intellectuals of this period inclined them, as a class, to despise this self-same ‘national’ peasantry. The Liberal Constitutionalist Party, the Ummah Party and the later Wafd represented anti-democratic and anti-peasant, capitalist, landowning interests. The disembodied ‘laboring hand’ which Haykal glorifies in his essay on national literature belonged, in reality, to the legions of men, women and children – sharecroppers and penurious migrant agricultural workers – who greened the fields of Egypt’s vast estates. The idyllic ‘rural scenes and manners’ of Zaynab plot the geography of a new national romance in which the only true subjectivity and voice belongs to the young heir, Hamid, who is literally and metaphorically the master of all he surveys. In a remarkable turnaround from his pean to the Egyptian peasant in The Return of the Spirit, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s 1937 novel The Maze of Justice makes no such romantic fuss over what its narrator constantly refers to as ‘cattle’, ‘flies’, ‘worms’, and ‘monkeys at the zoo’ – the villagers of his district. Rather than forming the enduring backbone of the law-abiding nation, this filthy, poverty-stricken, ignorant rural multitude becomes the main obstacle to its fulfillment. Here we have the central paradox inherent in early nationalist/reformist thought regarding the peasant: the fallah was simultaneously conceived of as noble, authentic, industrious, primordial and squalid, stupid, obsequious, cunning, lazy, archaic. Thus the environmental determinism of early nationalist discourse, and particularly of pharaonism, implicitly and ironically tied the essential continuity and specificity of the Egyptian (peasant) character to a lengthy catalog of its supposed social, anthropological and political deficiencies.

The village novel and the divided self The convergence of the village novel and ‘the autobiographical novel’, in the specific sense outlined by Badr and Jabir Asfur, is 87

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not coincidental. A good many of Egypt’s nahdawi writers and intellectuals came from families with strong ties to the countryside. Some, like Taha Husayn and al-‘Aqqad, grew up in large rural families of moderate means and with limited access to education, while others, like Haykal and Al-Hakim, were sons of affluent notables and landowners with established connections to a cosmopolitan urban cultural and political milieu. These families were able to afford to send their sons to Cairo, and later Paris or London, for an education that would allow them to take up one of the new middle-class professions, like the law. While the schoolyear would be spent in the city living with relatives, holidays were spent back home in the village on the paternal estate. Year after year, and even after a successful career had taken these men farther and farther afield from their provincial and rural origins, this pattern continued deeply to mark their sense of identity, and indeed, in the case of the more affluent amongst them, to buttress and amplify their social and economic status. Hence it comes as no surprise that the village would appear as a major theme and landscape in their writing. Moreover, the growing centrality of the village and the peasant in nahdawi reformist discourse and nationalist ideology – not to mention the influence of Russian and French romanticism on the Egyptian bourgeoisie’s imagination – further contributed to the articulation of the rural theme in their writing. In the most basic sense, then, writers like Haykal and Husayn were writing fictional or semi-fictional narratives about their own experience of growing up in the countryside, as well as addressing some of the most important social and political issues of the day regarding the Egyptian village and the peasantry: poverty, illiteracy, ignorance and the evils of colonial administration, for example. And yet, on a deeper level, the Egyptian village novel, as it was being written in the 1910s, 1920s and 1930s, inscribed an enduring national narrative about the fundamental dislocation produced by the historical processes of modernity as experienced by an acculturated nationalist intelligentsia. These were men (and to a lesser extent, women) bent on creating a new world for themselves while suffering from a profound sense of alienation from the one in which they actually lived. Their passionate admiration for European culture in conjunction with the secular, anti-Ottoman nationalism that they espoused led them to reject ‘tradition’ on all levels, cultural, social and political. Thus the institution of the caliphate and the Arab/Islamic literary canon, as well as a diverse 88

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array of contemporary social practices from gender segregation and arranged marriages to popular religious rituals, were all identified as marks of cultural decadence and inferiority. In effect, their desire to reform society was shaped by the scientific disciplines and intellectual discourses of an imperial, racialist European epistemology that essentialized the Orient as its corrupted other. It was also shaped by their very real political and economic interests as a ruling class. The contradictions inherent in their cultural and social position condemned nahdawi intellectuals to an impossible existential situation. Compared to Europe, their own society appeared to them like an image in a carnival mirror: distorted, absurd, repellant – and yet they belonged to this very society, tied to it as they were through birth and kinship, language, religion. Even more, they understood themselves to be its elites, its vanguard, and hence somehow responsible for it and to it. Though newly taught to prize the Egyptian village and its rude inhabitants as the very essence of an enduring millennial national spirit, they nonetheless privately preserved the traditional, urbanite’s contempt for the peasant and his culture, as well as a clearly defined sense of hereditary social privilege which maintained and fixed the fallah in his subaltern role. The creation of narrative subjectivity in the 1910s and 1920s was rooted in the existential dilemma produced by this rupture between discourse and experience amongst a broad section of the Egyptian intelligentsia. Badr describes this aesthetic dilemma as the fundamental inability of the early nationalist intelligentsia ‘to perceive their reality completely and profoundly’ (‘adam qudratihim ‘ala al-ihasas bi waqi‘ihim ihsasan kamilan ‘amiqan),54 while Jabir ‘Asfur defines the autobiographical novels that they produced as ‘the story of the individual who is unable to represent the collective’ (riwayat alfard alladhi la ya‘raf an yakun sigha lil-jam‘).55 Badr further attributes the hegemony of this fractured and self-conscious subjectivity in the Arabic novel to the agonistic relationship between the narrative self (al-dhat al-riwa’iyyah) and its environment or ‘reality’: Perhaps the most dangerous problem that afflicts the vision of the Arab writer is the dominance of the Self [tadakhkhum al-dhat] which renders the author incapable of moving closer to his reality and fusing with it. For this reason he appears to be preoccupied with his private life and with his own problems in his narrative work. This 89

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private preoccupation makes him jealous of guarding the Subject’s independence within the novel.…If this author then confronts reality he does so from the point of view of the preacher, guide or judge, and the shadow of the Self may expand and grow to loom over the entire world of the novel.…The Arab writer thus finds himself in an untenable situation. He takes a hostile position towards his world while at the same time being unable to rid himself of it, for his roots strike deeply in its soil. His thought is composed of idealistic concepts derived from a reality other than the one in which he lives, but he imposes these concepts onto his own reality in spite of itself.56 The twentieth-century Egyptian novel has consistently dramatized this existential dilemma wherein the modern, acculturated subject, seeking at one and the same time to assert his historic individuality and to discover his roots in a utopian community, is caught in a confrontation with the collectivity, in this case, the massed inhabitants of the rural hinterlands. This confrontation is modulated by the discourses of enlightenment, which inscribe a binary opposition between essentialized categories like ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’; ‘faith’ and ‘rationality’. In this structure of feeling, the village becomes a natural theatre for the enactment of the modern subject’s self-interrogation and for a constant reworking of the meaning of community itself, whether defined as national, local or mythic. Thus the ‘autobiographical’ village novel in Egypt becomes a narrative space in which the limits of subjectivity – and indeed, the limits of ‘modernity’ – are explored, negotiated and contested.

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3 FOUNDATIONS Pastoral and anti-pastoral

n the first three decades of the twentieth century, nationalist intelectuals were inscribing the figure of the peasant and the landscapes of the countryside as heraldic markers on the newly imagined map of the Egyptian nation. This rural landscape and its inhabitants came to embody the millennial spirit of Egypt’s cultural and politcal unity and sovereignty. At the same time, the ‘problem’ of Egyptian modernity became increasingly defined as one that was essentially rooted in the conflict between the social and cultural values of the modernizing city and its other – a vast rural zone peopled by an impoverished and cryptic multitude. This discursive ension is reflected in the experience of the narrative subject in the iction of the Nahdah. This chapter will examine the unfolding of his process in three seminal novels that together construct a foundational narrative space which continues to be echoed, interrogated and parodied in the village novel throughout the second half of the century. If Zaynab (1913) is the foundational text of the new Egyptian ubject and the new Egyptian nation-space, then Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s The Maiden of Dinshaway (1906) and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s The Maze of Justice (1937) are, in a sense, counter-texts that both lluminate and strip the neurotic national romance presented in Zaynab of its discursive gestures and its rhetorical structure. All hree novels are set in the familiar and yet liminal space of the rural provinces and all three employ a similar set of key narrative devices and strategies in their construction of the national novel. The centrality of the narrative subject in connection with the early village novel has already been discussed, and is certainly a major mode hrough which the problematic of modernity is refracted in these novels. Al-Halabawi, Hamid and the unnamed prosecutor of The Maze of Justice present a series of mirror images of the deracinated 91

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and unstable individual at war with both himself and the world around him. Paradoxically, this is a subject whose story has no beginning and no end; a subject embattled and paralyzed by the doubled vision implied in the competing allegiances that claim him. Language is also a major strategy modulating the construction of character and narrative space within this larger problematic. The use of language is especially significant in light of the specific conditions created by Arabic diglossia and the historical and discursive problems associated with it. The social cleavages between the subject and the collectivity – the masses, the peasantry, the organic community – are enacted through language. In this context, narrative language, the language of the subject and the language of the subaltern all exist in a contrapuntal relation to one another. In Zaynab, where the subject’s interiority dominates the text, the peasant’s voice is largely erased. On the other hand, The Maze of Justice’s inscription of ‘realistic’ peasant voices creates a discursive challenge to the canonical languages of authority and produces a rupture in the text dominated by the monologic voice of the subject. Finally, the symbolic figure of the national feminine is also central to these novels. The beautiful and chaste peasant maiden, Sitt al-Dar of Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s novel, prefigures the more complex character of Zaynab, while Tawfiq al-Hakim’s mysterious Rim is deployed as a sly, intertextual wink at the now stock character of the national feminine and a comment on the obscure nature of narrative symbol in general. A comparative study of these three texts can thus shed light on both the rhetorical and structural processes involved in the formation and canonization of the novel genre in Egypt in roughly the first quarter of the twentieth century, as well as the broader discursive conditions under which village fiction was being produced during this seminal period in modern Egyptian history.

The Maiden of Dinshaway Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s The Maiden of Dinshaway has been recognized by many critics as a narrative antecedent to Zaynab, both predating and paving the way for Haykal’s national classic which was published almost a decade later. The text is often treated as a rudimentary novel or as representing an intermediate stage in the process of the development of the genre in Arabic. 92

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Haqqi’s short novel is rather a complex narrative that incorporates a sophisticated orchestration of abbreviated novelistic devices. The Maiden of Dinshaway offers one of the earliest, and yet most articulated examples of narrative dialogia in modern Arabic fiction, not only through its extensive and once controversial inscription of colloquial (peasant) language in dialogue, but also in its strategic juxtaposition of a range of narrative languages and genres in what is essentially a political critique of the hegemony of imperial discourses. Mahmud Tahir Haqqi authored a number of plays, collections of short stories and journalistic essays during his uneven career, first, as a secretary at the khedival court, and later at the National Theatre Company. He was a prolific and active intellectual, patronized by various political and literary luminaries of the day – the famous poets Ahmad Shawqi and Khalil Mutran among them – though these connections did not manage to protect him from the political storm unleashed by his first novel.1 First published serially in 1906 in the pages of the journal al-Manbar and then in book-form in that same year, it immediately became a national bestseller that ran into many subsequent editions. The novel dramatizes the events that took place in the Delta village of Dinshaway in 1906. A party of British officers out pigeon hunting near the village were attacked by a group of peasants to whom the pigeons belonged. In the confrontation that followed, an officer was severely wounded and subsequently died of sun-stroke. The British reprisal was swift and brutal – a military trial ended in the execution of four villagers – and the popular outrage that ensued eventually led to Lord Cromer’s departure from Egypt. The novel was thus written as a direct political response to the ruthless interventions of colonialism. In his introduction to the 1963 edition, Yahya Haqqi explicitly asserts the novel’s priority over, and influence on Zaynab. He lays claim to it as ‘the first Egyptian novel to speak of the peasants’, and asserts that it ‘paved the way for the general reader’s acceptance of the fictional genre (al-fann al-qasasi)’ (p. j). Yet more important is Haqqi’s acknowledgment that the first, popular Egyptian novel should also happen to be about the Egyptian peasant is no mere coincidence, but a result of the simultaneity of two long and complex historical processes: the birth of the novel and ‘the birth of a unified people in trial; its self-realization and its need to express this self’ (p. d). This emphasis on the idea of national selfhood is significant in more than one way. In his 93

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comment, Haqqi implicitly identifies the oppressed Egyptian peasantry as the central emblem of the nation’s selfhood, and yet the novel offers the reader a variety of highly problematic national ‘selves’ or personalities as part of its critique of colonialism. Haqqi’s comments on the representational and syncretic nature of the new genre are especially significant and deserve to be quoted at length: Most readers discovered through [The Maiden of Dinshaway] that the novel was a modern genre with its own rules and that it was a wonderful way of expressing both individual and popular sentiment. For it shook the emotions strongly in a way of which the maqamah or the ode or speech or journalistic article was incapable.…They found that the novel was superior to all these genres because of its ability to incite the imagination and speak honestly of love…The Maiden of Dinshaway was the first novel to unite the people’s feelings through a realistic contemporaneity and this is the source of fiction in the modern sense.…I’ll even go one step further and say that The Maiden of Dinshaway is the first Egyptian novel to speak of the peasants – it describes their life and problems and transmits their speech to us with their pronunciation and manners and ways of conversing. All this shows them to us [yadullu kullu hadha ’alayhim] framed by the natural landscape of the countryside – its sky and trees, days and nights, fields and barns, pens and dovecotes. (pp. b–j) Haqqi’s catalog of the socioscape of the Egyptian countryside – one which he declares to have been not only ignored, but actively maligned by urban populations and their literati2 – recalls Anderson’s elaboration of the fictional tour d’horizon: the ‘sociological solidity’ produced by ‘the succession of plurals’ of remote villages, monasteries, Indians, Negroes’ which ultimately allows an implied national readership to ‘imagine’ or ‘know’ itself as a diverse and yet temporally and spatially unified community.3 In the Maiden of Dinshaway – and to an even greater extent in Zaynab – this socioscape is marked by the narrator through a series of explicit addresses to the urban reader, drawing attention to the peculiar customs and material artifacts of peasant life. Moreover, the author’s exclusive use of the colloquial for peasant 94

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speech was also intended to offer a realistic portrayal of fallah language and culture for an educated urban audience that was still largely unused to reading the colloquial in a serious literary context – especially one that featured garrulous peasant characters as protagonists and even heroes. This certainly must have been the single most original aspect of Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s work for Egyptian audiences. Never before had a group of simple, coarse villagers been the subject of a serious narrative text, and never before had the fallah’s political agency been so extensively constructed through speech and dialogue in a mimetic narrative context. The novel opens with the setting sun – a kind of pagan mothergoddess worshiped by the villagers as ‘the secret of their life’ – tenderly bidding farewell to Sitt al-Dar, the young girl after whom the novel takes its name, as she returns home from a day’s work in the fields. Sitt al-Dar, as indicated by the title, is the novel’s central, emblematic character. Her name literally means, ‘the mistress of the hearth’, and through a set of associated natural metaphors linking her to the agricultural rhythms of the earth, she emerges, like Zaynab, as a symbol of the purity and fecundity of the land itself. She is introduced as ‘the sweetest and purest girl under the sun’, and further described as a paragon of unsullied beauty. Her teeth shine like pearls that would be envied by the daughters of the rich, and her filthy black clothes yet reveal ‘a pure, white heart’. Chastity, legendary physical beauty and spiritual innocence are all part of the fluid complex of metaphorical character traits that invests the figure of the national feminine in the village novel. She is above all an elusive object of desire, and as such this female archetype echoes and amplifies the proprietary masculine attitude towards land and the rituals of husbandry. And yet this simple, pastoral image of woman/land with which the novel opens is disrupted and modified by a chain of events unleashed by colonial encroachment. The village, ‘the home’, the land necessarily acquires an insurgent political meaning in this context, and the national feminine is, as such, masculinized through the defensive act of resistance to the tyrannical invader. She acquires a doubled signification: first as the hyper-feminine object of male desire and textual allegorization, and second as the unbridled and heroic vanguard of collective insurgency. It is the seemingly obedient and meek Sitt al-Dar who first instigates the villagers to rebel against the indiscriminate incursions of the British, and she who continues to encourage them and goad them on after the 95

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debris has settled on the furious battle that breaks out in the village and they are left terrified and cowed. The central question of Sitt al-Dar’s rightful mate is also part of this larger complex of doubled significations. She is engaged to Muhammad al-‘Abd and steadfastly rejects the advances of Ahmad Zayid. The competition of the two suitors for her possession – the one legitimate, the other illegitimate – mirrors the struggle in the novel for political legitimacy in a nationalist context. Sitt al-Dar’s father refuses the dastardly Ahmad Zayid’s suit at all costs, knowing full well what the consequences may be. The rejected suitor unjustly denounces Sitt al-Dar’s father to the British, who is then executed in front of his family with the other unfortunate victims. This is not to say that the novel presents a monochromatic image of good and evil as represented by a blameless and victimized nation on the one hand and maleficent colonizers on the other. On the contrary, it portrays an extensive, indigenous hierarchy of power, corruption and opportunism that aids and abets the imperial order, from the ‘Umdah and the local landlords who entertain the British hunting expedition with sumptuous feasts and who ignore the complaints of the villagers, to the would-be suitor Ahmad Zayid who willfully betrays his own community out of personal spite. Moreover, in the figures of al-Halabawi, the Egyptian lawyer who prosecutes the defendants, and ‘Abd al-Saqr, the hapless military translator, we have an embryonic and heavily politicized characterization of the native brokers of colonial power. Yahya Haqqi’s provocative claim that the figure of the acculturated and hence tragically conflicted intellectual represented by al-Halabawi can be viewed as a prototype of Haykal’s protagonist, Hamid, contains some truth while masking another. Haqqi’s analysis of Hamid describes an embattled and problematic subject trapped in an uneasy alienation from his rural roots – an alienation produced by his cultural and intellectual affiliations with a modern European sensibility. Similarly, al-Halabawi: Both novels mirror the same problem: the problem of unity between the rural intellectual [al-rifi al-muthaqqaf] and his community. There is no doubt that this was one of the most painful problems dealt with by intellectuals at that time, out of their extreme fear of the dangers of alienation – their alienation from society and society’s alienation from them. They longed for a society whose 96

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classes would live in unity and that would be ruled by spiritual and rational harmony.…These are the hallmarks of the nation’s quest for itself. (p. z) While typically masking the pivotal problems of class and power through the leveling discourse of nationalism, Haqqi’s comparative reading of this figure illuminates its sinister subtextual aspects. After all, despite his initial and brief qualms of national and ‘tribal’ conscience, al-Halabawi zealously prosecutes the defendants, using a peculiar but telling combination of colonial discourse and the very discourse of nationalist affiliation against them: Honorable judges, you don’t know the Egyptians. They are a people most naturally inclined to every evil and abomination, a people undeserving of pity or mercy, a people whose face God has blackened with lies and slander! Take me as an example, honorable judges, and decide! I was born poor and deprived, a village peasant from a family like those of Hasan Mahfudh and Muhammad ‘Abd al-Nabi. Then God granted that I should enter alAzhar and my education distinguished me from amongst my companions. I’ll never forget how I spent my days gnawing on wood out of hunger. But God lifted me up to the world of high society and I was dazzled by it. Little by little I became famous amongst my people and they helped me to their utmost ability. I started wearing silk instead of sackcloth and eating croissants instead of cornbread and all this thanks to the assistance of my compatriots and their trust in my patriotism and my love of my country. Consider, oh honorable judges, my current position and take it as an example. Consider how I gladly accepted this position and easily renounced my patriotism and burnt my principles and became a searing flame [upon] my country, demanding the execution and destruction of its sons. How then would you judge a people to whom I belong? Would you respect them after having heard my story and the extent of my feelings towards this wretched nation? Without further ado, I demand that the court crush the village of Dinshaway in its entirety and 97

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rule for the execution of all of the foul-smelling accused. (pp. 66–67) [42–43] This remark on the foul smell of the defendants refers to an earlier incident during the trial scene that belies al-Halabawi’s pathos-laden claim to a poverty-stricken rural childhood. Yahya Haqqi remarks that it acquired legendary status in the imagination of contemporary readers, so much so that it was repeated and accepted by people as an actual incident that had occurred at the real trial instead of a fictional comment on the prosecutor’s character. When the trial first opens, al-Halabawi vehemently protests against the nasty odor generated by the prisoners and sends out for a bottle of English cologne (‘Atkinson’) with which to dispel it: As soon as he pronounced this word, everyone burst out laughing and the accused imagined that ‘Atkinson’ was an amnesty clause in the lawbooks. The presiding judge was forced to demand order, then he turned to al-Halabawi and said, ‘Mr prosecutor, don’t you know that there is no Atkinson to be had in Shibin al-Kum?’ – ‘Strange that the peasants should have no cologne!’ – ‘They have cologne, but not the kind you want’. Ahmad bey Habib, the ‘Umdah of Na‘urah replied, ‘Your honors, we have a cologne called ‘Spikenard and Lavender’. Would you like some?’ The judge nodded yes but the head prosecutor was highly displeased because he’d never heard of this brand in his life and because, from childhood, he’d grown used to Atkinson. (p. 53) [36] The imported bottle of cologne becomes a textual marker for the natural complicity between colonialism and an acculturated professional elite. It is the same bottle of cologne, as erotic offering, that the young narrator of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s novel, The Land, uses in an adolescent attempt to seduce Wasifah, the village belle, almost fifty years later. The point made by the farcical trial in The Maiden of Dinshaway, and further foregrounded by Yahya Haqqi’s introductory remarks, is that a specific class affiliation must inevitably supersede prior (as in alHalabawi’s case) or largely imaginary (as in Hamid’s) tribal/communal affiliation. The Maiden of Dinshaway thus occupies a more nuanced critical position in relation to the textual 98

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enactments and occlusions of high nationalism as exemplified by Zaynab. The potential consequences of this unveiled affiliation are both political and textual, and are inverted in al-Halabawi’s brutal opportunism as well as in Hamid’s stilted monologic consciousness. Indeed, Mahmud Tahir Haqqi’s brief sketch of al-Halabawi’s conflicted character compresses and encapsulates the entire history of the biographical subject in both its European form, and as it appears later in the Egyptian village novel throughout the century. The central moral dilemma of the hero of the bildungsroman is condensed and summarized in The Maiden of Dinshaway. The fact that al-Halabawi’s character is first delineated through a singular two-page monologue is significant in this respect. His is the only character in the novel invested with a rudimentary, yet powerful interiority – an interiority that, for all its brevity, summarizes the fundamental political and existential rupture that lies at the core of the narrative subject in village fiction. The attempt to narrate this ruptured interiority can only lead to betrayal or death; a distortion or disruption of the narrative process. Al-Halabawi betrays his country and his principles in the name of personal ambition. Zaynab’s Hamid and the narrator of Al-Sharqawi’s novel The Land simply disappear from the text, while the protagonists of ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim’s The Seven Days of Man and Baha’ Tahir’s East of the Palms suffer cataclysmic nervous breakdowns that twist and shape the structure of the text in ways that force open the mold of conventional realist narration. The novel’s brief but pointed exploration of this ruptured interiority is embedded in a textual pastiche that juxtaposes a variety of languages and genres mimicking, interrogating and parodying each other. This textual dialogue opens up a space within the novel for a genuinely critical perception of the intentional and constructed nature of representational narrative discourse. The text constantly shifts between languages and genres. Some scenes – like the one in which the British officers conduct their hunting expedition – are staged as drama, with minimal narrative sequences that function as stage directions, including sound effects such as the noise of firing rifles (‘tirik, tirik, trumb!’). Other scenes are constructed entirely around dialogue, without even the insertion of minimal narrative markers (i.e names of speakers or ‘he said’, ‘she said’). Farce and slapstick – dramatic modes associated with staged spectacle – are also incorporated into these scenes and further imbue the text with theatrical resonance. Journalistic 99

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reportage is incorporated into the text in the final courtroom scenes, which employ a brisk and abbreviated documentary narration to describe the proceedings. At other times, the text employs the language of straightforward expository prose, addressing the reader directly in an attempt to communicate anthropological information or comment on other cultural texts: It is the habit of peasants to spend a good part of the evening chatting with each other. During [these conversations] they discuss agricultural subjects and other matters of concern to them. Sometimes they entertain each other with stories of ‘Antara and Abu Zayd al-Hilali as well as jokes about ‘uncle’ Abi Nuwwas and ‘hajj’ Goha. If one of them has a complaint or a problem, he puts it before the assembly and they attempt to solve it. If they are unable to do so, they take it to the ‘Umdah. Thus we hope the reader will allow us to call this assembly a ‘club’ in all its senses, for its members all belong to the same class, think the same way and live and work in the same village. Peasants moreover, exercise freedom of thought and argument. The son may contradict his father, the brother may dispute with his brother and it is no shame for the youth to argue with his elder. Women have the fortunate right of public assembly and discussion just like men, exactly as our dear friend, author of The Emancipation of Woman would wish! (p. 13) [19]4 The peasant is here framed within a binary dialectic. The utopian description of fallah culture presented in this passage for the consideration of the reader implies an other, anti-utopian and urban subject whose culture is marked by social anomie, complexity and authoritarianism. On the other hand, an organic and democratic fallah society is held up as an ideal image of the once-and-future nation. This variegated textual fabric is framed by the conventional rhetorical style of contemporary romantic fiction. The novel begins and ends with the declamatory prose style made popular by al-Manfaluti and later modified and modernized by Haykal and al-‘Aqqad among others. In the Maiden of Dinshaway, this highflown rhetorical style is only one among many equally expressive and useful generic modes. The strategic juxtaposition of these 100

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styles inverts the richness and interdependency of a variety of cultural texts, and foregrounds the dialogue between them in the process of narration. The strategic inscription of language is also part of this larger dialogic process. In this respect, Haqqi’s manipulation of linguistic registers is reminiscent of Ya‘qub Sannu‘ ’s parodic juxtaposition of contrasting modes of speech in his playlets. The peasant voices in the novel are written in a straightforward mimetic mode that attempts to duplicate the vocabulary and syntax of an earthy everyday speech. They are the only group of characters in the novel who are represented by this authentic ‘national’ (colloquial) language. The British officers on the other hand speak in a modern standard idiom with a strategic admixture of English words and phrases transcribed into Arabic (‘goddamn bloody fool!’). The effect intended by this incongruous melange of fusha and Arabized English is obviously partly comic, but it also serves to caricature and delegitimize the voices of the British invaders, much in the same way that Sannu‘ did with his Turkish Ottoman officials and Nadim with his Egyptian dandies. Al-Halabawi’s interior monologue, as well as his courtroom speeches, are constructed through a grandiloquent classical diction that mirrors the fatuousness and arrogance of power. In this larger context, the courtroom scenes become a dialogic tour-de-force in which all of these languages jostle against each other in the same physical and moral space. It is not only the political and moral legitimacy of colonialism itself that stands trial in these scenes, but also the discursive structures of power that normalize and support this legitimacy. While the defendants cower in their box, awed and uncomprehending of the formidable legal and rhetorical jargon brought to bear against them, both the prosecutor (Halabawi) and the defense attorney use the very language of imperial supremacy – here and there ‘nativized’ for greater effect – to argue for their conviction. The extreme affectations of this discourse are reproduced in the text as farce. Halabawi’s previously quoted speech is an example of this strategy, as is the defense attorney’s impromptu prayer for the soul of the dead British officer whose life is most certainly worth ‘the killing of a peasant woman and ten more like her’ (p. 66) [42]: After this [speech], Isma‘il Bek ‘Asim stood up, raised his hands and declaimed in his beautiful, resonant voice: ‘Paul, Paul, may God have mercy on your soul Mister 101

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Paul, and well compensate the English nation for your loss. Oh Mister Paul, God bless and rest your soul. To heaven, to heaven, you flower of the English officer corps! Oh mighty and generous God, sole bestower of blessings and boons, suffer your servant and son of your servant, the khawaga Paul, son of Adam and Eve into the paradise of Your eternity, for You are Master over all things!’ Then he turned to the court and requested that it find the defendants innocent. (p. 68) [43] The Maiden of Dinshaway reproduces the discursive split embedded in ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s characterization of late nineteenth-century Egyptian society. In this splitting, a collective national culture is opposed to that of the acculturated subject. However, the novel explicitly and perhaps for the first time in Arabic narrative, presents a collectivist fallah culture as the emblem of a postponed national utopia, while maintaining and further developing the image of a dangerously flawed and fundamentally alienated individual biographical subject. The novel nonetheless proposes a possible resolution to this discursive dichotomy through the dialogic power of narrative language and of a novel genre.

Zaynab Curiously enough, though Zaynab is widely considered to be a primary text in the history of the modern Arabic novel, a haze of uncertainty surrounds the dates of its publication. Some sources give 1913 as the date of the first edition, others 1914 and yet others 1916. Haykal appended the pseudonym Misri Fallah (A Native Egyptian) to the first edition, and it was only after the novel had been successfully received, and after Haykal had abandoned his career as a provincial lawyer, that he acknowledged authorship with the second edition in 1929. The novel was made into a film in 1930, and Brugman notes that it immediately became wildly popular with the generation of young writers and intellectuals who were coming of age in the interwar period.5 According to Brugman, it was a 1933 essay by the British orientalist Sir Hamilton Gibb that was responsible for canonizing Zaynab as the ‘first’ Arabic novel.6 Jabir ‘Asfur suggests that Zaynab was the first work of Arabic narrative fiction to dethrone 102

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poetry as the dominant literary genre of the Arabic canon.7 Contemporary Western and Arab critics have continued to affirm the canonical status of Zaynab as marking a fundamental rupture with a prior tradition while acknowledging the existence of earlier, less ‘mature’ novelistic experiments in Egypt and the Levant. The canonicity of Muhammad Husayn Haykal’s novel lies in its being particularly situated at the confluence of two powerful and intersecting historical narratives: the narrative of Egyptian nationhood and the European narrative of the history of the novel. On the one hand, Zaynab inverts a complete and coherent pastoral image of the nation in terms of both plot and setting. On the other it offers an original inscription of a fully developed and autonomous narrative subject – the essential foundation on which a variety of European versions of the history of the novel have been constructed. European critics have placed the emergence of this self-conscious and autonomous subject at the origins of the novel as a distinct and modern narrative genre, though from different theoretical perspectives. Georg Lukács’ famous hero struggling to fulfill his destiny in a world abandoned by God, Ian Watt’s description of the bourgeois mercantile individual emerging from the decaying social and economic structures of the ancien régime, and Marthe Robert’s Oedipal narrative of the child-hero’s rejection of the family and his subsequent quest for self-realization all posit the self-motivated subject as the narrative engine of the new genre. It was through French romanticism that Haykal appropriated both of these foundational narratives, inscribing them into the text in the form of Hamid’s overarching interiority and his sentimental relationship to his natural/national environment. In his introduction to the third edition of the novel, Haykal discusses this influence: Perhaps it was simply nostalgia that impelled me to write this story…I was a student in Paris…when I began to write it and no sooner would I remember all I had left behind in Egypt…than I would be filled with a sweet and sharp nostalgia for my country…I was afire with French literature in those days. I didn’t know much French when I left Egypt but when I began to study that language and its literature, I discovered it to be completely different from what I knew of English or Arabic literature – I found it to be fluid and simple but also purposeful and detailed in description and expression. My passion for 103

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this new literature and my longing for home intertwined in my soul. Thus I set out to describe my memories of Egyptian places, scenes and events.8 The particular influence of Rousseau’s Emile on Zaynab has been noted by Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr and others.9 The idea of ‘natural’ man, instinctively rebelling against decadent social mores and gradually educated into genuine self-realization through the exercise of a complete sensual and moral freedom, is a model to which Hamid assiduously aspires. This self-absorbed, autonomous subject is an unprecedented narrative construct in Arabic literature. Badr admits as much in his brief concession to the literary and historical centrality of Zaynab: It is the exemplary artistic work that, while exhibiting the signs of intense labor-pains, paved the way for a realistic literature as opposed to one dominated by mythic heroism. [Haykal] understood that the writer’s selfhood demanded expression and that this self was in conflict with society.10 The image of Haykal sequestering himself in his shuttered room and writing by lamplight in order ‘to cut myself off from Paris and see, in my isolation, the life of Egypt etched into my memory and imagination’ (p. 11) is a recurring metaphor for this new subject’s relationship to its (now) dialectical opposite – the world outside the window – the other. We glimpse it in Hamid’s periodic nervous withdrawals to his room, far away from the teeming life of the estate fields, in his cousin ‘Azizah’s cloistered, epistolary existence, in the voluntary and repeated seclusion of The Maze of Justice’s narrator who spends his nights silently and laboriously transcribing and ordering the chaotic daily experience of the dirty village in which he lives and works. In the village novel, this subject’s other is the massed, cipher-like collectivity, the ancestral rural community, the raw material of the national imagination. And as Haykal, the writer, was torn between an idealized, syncretic nationalism and his personal class affiliations, so is Zaynab – and to a lesser extent The Maze of Justice – molded by the narrative corollary of this conflict: the struggle between the emergent narrative self and the voiceless mass, the rural multitude. Zaynab revolves around the figure of Hamid – the young son of a wealthy provincial family who regularly returns to his 104

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family’s estate from Cairo during school holidays. Bored, restless and bursting with sexual energy and romantic longings, Hamid whiles away his time by wandering around his father’s fields, reflecting on nature and love, and pursuing the beautiful Zaynab, a poor laborer on the estate who is eventually married off, against her will, to a well-to-do local peasant. At the same time, he flirts with the idea of being in love with his secluded cousin, ‘Azizah, who also ends up in an arranged marriage. Though Zaynab responds to Hamid’s advances, she is in love with Ibrahim, another poor laborer who is conscripted into the British army and sent to the Sudan. Zaynab wastes away while pining for her absent lover and eventually dies. Perpetually torn between conflicting desires and allegiances, Hamid simply disappears from the novel, leaving behind a long letter for his father in which he explains the reasons for his disillusionment with love and life. In Zaynab, the narrative self emerges in a state of dynamic opposition to its social and cultural environment. Hamid’s character internalizes the clash between an ‘old’ world of archaic and repressive social mores and a utopian ‘new’ world, glimpsed through the prism of nineteenth-century European liberalism and romantic fiction. Hamid is thus the archetype of the acculturated and alienated generation of young Egyptian intellectuals in an uneasy state of rebellion against a society in dizzying flux. His fragmented identity is constructed around a series of binary categories that reflect this fundamental rupture between ‘archaic’ and ‘modern’ identities: East/West, sex/love, rich/poor, reality/imagination. Unable to resolve the conflict between these binary categories, the subject withdraws from the text, leaving behind an open-ended narrative instead of the authoritative biographical closure characteristic of the bildungsroman. The narrative self is thus born in canonical Arabic fiction as an untenable subject. Romantic love and companionate marriage are central issues around which the plot of Zaynab is constructed, and are linked, through Hamid’s relationship to Zaynab, to the largely occluded structures of property in the novel.11 Again, European literature – particularly French romantic fiction and poetry – played a large part in the dissemination of the concept of romantic love as an ideal social relationship and as an essential prerequisite to marriage amongst Haykal’s generation of rebellious young intellectuals. Moreover, the immense popularity of Qasim Amin’s writings on the emancipation of Egyptian women – at least amongst the more liberal sectors of the intelligentsia – also 105

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contributed to this generation’s interrogation of conventional, middle-class mores regarding the place of woman in Egyptian society and the hollowness of traditional gender roles in marriage and family-life. Both of the female protagonists in the novel are forced into loveless marriages by their families – with disastrous consequences – and Hamid himself is obsessed with the ethical issues surrounding the traditional role and function of arranged marriage in Egyptian society. The models of womanhood presented in the novel reflect the larger binary structure through which Hamid views his world. ‘Azizah is chaste and totally asexual while Zaynab is the epitome of unfettered, primordial sexuality. Hamid’s anguished attempt to choose between the poor, simple peasant girl and his educated cousin reflects this larger historical dilemma. The impotent ‘Azizah is associated with the possibilities of romantic love and companionate marriage, while Zaynab is constructed by Hamid as the object of guilty sexual desire, though he tries to rationalize this desire as a liberatory social and psychological gesture. In Zaynab, this dilemma remains unresolved. While ‘Azizah, his cousin, is his social equal and thus his natural mate, she is a timid prisoner of social convention and hence unable to respond to his passionate yearnings except through surreptitious gestures and tormented letters. Zaynab on the other hand possesses a greater degree of physical and moral freedom. Unlike ‘Azizah, she is both passionate and spontaneous, but her freedom is specifically a function of her low social and economic status and her moral naivety (fitriyyah). The monumental social constraints surrounding Hamid’s relationship to ‘Azizah force him to approach her with trepidation and anxiety, while his empowering libidinal desire to ‘possess’ Zaynab is shaped by his proprietary and paternalistic relationship to her. Not only is she a mere laborer on his father’s estate, but her very beauty and uncorrupted sensuality are linked in the text to a powerful animal spirit that further embeds her character in the novel’s reified structures of property and ownership. Hamid cannot accept either of these problematic examples of womanhood presented in the novel. In the end, he resigns himself to a life of disappointed bachelordom. The title, Zaynab, belies the narrative centrality of Hamid’s interiority, closely and almost exclusively developed by the thirdperson narration. This interior monologue is played out against the backdrop of gorgeous rural scenery and in Zaynab’s exemplary parallel plot. Zaynab escapes the circle produced by this 106

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monologic subjectivity through the same primordial force of her sexuality, which is also ironically a mark of her objectification and conventionality. It is Zaynab who defies sexual and social taboos in the name of her great passion for Ibrahim. The animal sexuality with which she is associated in the novel ultimately allows her to break free – at least morally and psychologically – from the traditional imprisonment of loveless marriage and to offer herself, freely and fully, to her hapless lover. She stays her course till death. This is an ethical choice that Hamid, also trapped, but in the prison of his own obsessive consciousness, is simply unable to make. He can neither love his veiled and cloistered cousin ‘Azizah, who represents the repressive social conventions of his own class, nor Zaynab, nature’s own daughter, a poor and dumb rural laborer. After a string of erotic affairs with a series of ‘naive’ peasant girls (‘amilat sadhijat) that leave him racked with guilt and self-hatred, he simply disappears into the wide world where, as he explains in a long letter to his father, he will try to seek true love despite the odds society has imposed against him. In her essay, ‘Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America’, Doris Sommer traces the erotic narrative syntax of national consolidation and legitimation in the nineteenthcentury Latin American novel: Whether the plots end happily or not, the romances are invariably about desire in young, chaste heroes for equally young and chaste heroines in order to establish conjugal and productive unions which represent national unification and which can be frustrated only by illegitimate social obstacles. Overcoming these obstacles produces the desired end.12 These obstacles are invariably the political and geographic forces that resist centralization and national consolidation: race, class, region. Sommer thus sees desire in the typical and individualized love plot as the perfect, ‘relentless motivation for [this] literary/political project’. And if woman is the conventional literary object of desire, whether she becomes rhetorically synonymous with the land, as she often does, or with the ‘naturally’ submissive races and classes that the hero will elevate through his

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affection – [she] is that which he must possess in order to achieve harmony and legitimacy.13 Zaynab of course represents both. She is much more than Sitt alDar, Nature’s own daughter, and she is also the singular and idealized representative of her class through which this collectivity is both mediated and marginalized. Indeed, Zaynab’s relation to Nature is explicitly eroticized in passages like the following: Here is nature gazing at Zaynab…with the eye of a lover. She lowers her eyes modestly and raises her lashes slowly, slowly, to see the effect of her coquetry on that lover, then lowers them once again. She had absorbed the joy of her surroundings which served to increase her beauty and sweetness, thereby multiplying the cosmos’ passion for her, as well as her own attachment to, and love for it. And so whenever one bestowed a glance upon the other, it went straight to the depths of the soul. Totality was imprinted on the girl’s heart and she was crowned with the vital spirit of the existence that surrounded her. (p. 21) Strong, passionate, free of movement, she accepts and returns Hamid’s kisses and embraces with a sexual force that surprises and discomfits him. Similarly, her passionate love for Ibrahim leads her finally to seek an adulterous union with him (a union that is frustrated by his conscription into the army and his departure for the Sudan). Hamid explicitly associates her with a healthy yet mute animal vitality, and rationalizes his attraction to her by reference to the evolutionary principle of natural selection and the instinctual human drive to procreate (takhlid al-nu‘) (p. 274). His intense class-consciousness, moreover, provides a logical corollary to this animalization of the national feminine. The dominant king/subject, master/servant paradigm that informs the network of material and human relations in the novel is also extended metaphorically to Hamid’s relationship with Zaynab. If indeed all he surveys – land, nature, people – is his ‘glorious dominion’ (mulk ‘adhim) (p. 225), then Zaynab too, who is, in spite of her double commitment to husband and lover, ‘more obedient to him than his own hand’ (atwa‘ lahu min yadihi) (p. 216), is his natural right. But Hamid’s oscillating and at times desperate desire for Zaynab cannot transcend the narrow confines of his class affilia108

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tion. He is in fact fully conscious of this unbridgeable gap between his desire and his social status. Even before Zaynab’s marriage he admits that a similar class and social milieu (tabaqah wa ta’ifah) are necessary prerequisites for lasting romantic love and a successful marriage (p. 51). Moreover, Hamid explicitly defines his overpowering sexual desire for Zaynab as an unforgivable social impropriety that diminishes his personal and caste dignity, further generalizing this transgression against class and self as the natural consequence of a diffuse and dangerous feminine evil: What force was this that had stripped Hamid bare? What madness had afflicted him? Was he that same rational, strong-willed man of yore? No matter how charming that simple rural naivety that endows the peasant girl with beauty in the eyes of the beholder and makes her savage movements and gestures the object of attention, no matter how attractive she may be, did it suit his station to descend to that which he had descended? Woman is nothing but a cursed devil, a snare upon which wretched men blindly pounce. She is pure evil, concealing misfortune like electricity in material objects – if a man touches her, she unleashes an unspeakable force that throws him to the ground and crushes his dignity and greatness.…Must he descend from the heavens of virtue where innocent angels dwell to the level of ignorant humans? Must he betray what everyone knew of his rectitude and devoutness in a moment and without reason? And then, all this with whom? With a simple female laborer! (p. 172) This passage reflects Hamid’s profound ambivalence towards the contemporary modernist ideal of emancipated womanhood – an ambivalence shared by a great many of the male-authored novels of the day that explored the subject of women and love in a changing world.14 Thus the ‘illegitimate social obstacles’ that Sommer speaks of are legitimized from early on in the novel, and Hamid’s desire for Zaynab assumes an explicit sexual cast that is both morally and socially reprehensible. Neither can he accept his cousin ‘Azizah, the silent and veiled apparition of a woman, whose ‘virtue’ he bitterly lashes out at a few pages later. So in the

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end, he literally vanishes from the text, uncommitted, defeated and still trapped in the long letter of his tormented interiority. The problem of love and gender roles in Zaynab is part of a larger, binary rhetorical structure that permeates the novel and shapes the moral and psychological make-up and destinies of all three central characters. Haykal constructs Hamid’s interiority and ‘Azizah’s long-suffering character around the overarching and fatal split between reality (al-waqi‘) and imagination (al-khayal) which is a symptom of the historical dilemma of an entire generation of young men and women unable to make peace with an opaque and hostile world: In this Egyptian milieu and type of upbringing similar to the one in which Hamid was raised, it is impossible for a youth to grasp a true picture of life’s realities. Rather, he lives in an unbounded world of imagination out of which he creates for himself joy and suffering as well as phantom images of the present and future.…And in spite of the fact that their actual perceptions give the lie to their imagination, the tyranny of this imagination is strong enough to overcome their sense [of reality], so that they refuse to believe what they see with their own eyes and fail to judge it correctly and reasonably. (pp. 26–27) An overactive imagination is the product of confinement and social alienation. ‘Azizah is physically imprisoned when she reaches adolescence, and hence cut off from any meaningful interaction with the world around her. Hamid’s confinement takes the form of his summer vacations in his ancestral village. His family’s severe, aristocratic habits, his deprecatory attitude towards the ‘simple’ and ‘ignorant’ peasants and his largely self-imposed solitude clear the local rural environment of any potentially jarring human realities, and allow his imagination free play – again, with disastrous consequences. He spends his days listlessly wandering the fields and fantasizing alternately about ‘Azizah and Zaynab in between romantic rhapsodies on the beauties of nature. His textual ‘suicide’ is the result of his inability to escape the bonds of this imagination which tyrannizes and paralyzes him, both emotionally and morally, and renders him literally incapable of love. Zaynab’s adulterous love for Ibrahim flourishes against the backdrop of her arranged marriage. Like Hamid, she withdraws 110

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into the shell of her fevered fantasies, silently and adamantly nourishing her passion for her absent lover, refusing all unnecessary contact with family and friends and firmly rejecting all the generous and affectionate advances of her noble husband. Meanwhile, ‘Azizah suffers through an epistolary passion for a young man who is in effect, a total stranger to her. Her secret letters to Hamid reproduce the language and affectations of the heroines of romantic novels, and Hamid, to whom ‘Azizah is equally a stranger, responds in kind. In fact, Haykal explicitly associates this diseased imagination with the solitary and corrupting act of novel-reading. ‘Azizah, and to a lesser extent Hamid, are both victims of the cheap, ‘translated’ romances that they avidly consume, and their inability to face reality is both a cause and a symptom of this illegitimate reading. ‘Azizah begins reading novels (aqasis al-hubb) at the age of fourteen after her parents take her out of school and seclude her at home. Hamid’s father traces the cause of his son’s misery to the same kind of unfruitful, escapist reading: The love poetry with which he had become obsessed had enchanted his soul, afflicting his heart and causing its wounds to bleed, occupying and ruling over his whole being. He was also influenced by the stories of lovers – those who perish at their beloved’s side, and those who die for love. Thus he came to scorn the absurdity of the dull, meaningless life which most people spend in worrying about feeding themselves and satisfying their material needs. Instead, the beauties of that other passionate life spent amongst dreams and imaginings by the side of the beloved who commands the fate of the lover revealed itself to him. (pp. 264–265) Historically, the emergence of the novel-genre, in Egypt as in Europe, was met with suspicion and even hostility amongst the guardians of social morality and literary propriety. Many critics attacked the erotic underpinnings of the typical love-plot and questioned the dubious moral influence of such fictions on the minds and virtue of susceptible youth. The subject is a fascinating and fertile one for scholars and deserves fuller exploration, but it is worth noting here that the moral and literary ambivalence surrounding the inception of the genre in the Arab context is 111

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reproduced in the village novel as a symptom of the rupture between generations and between cultural geographies. In these novels, beginning with Zaynab, the practice of ‘novel-reading’ acquires a metafictional aspect. The inscription of ‘novels within novels’ usually refers to the existential and historical dilemma produced by the process of acculturation. Characters who are ‘novel-readers’ are characters who are differentiated from the organic community. They are educated, urbane, affluent, ‘Westernized’, but above all, they are alienated and cut off from their ancestral identity and communal tradition. In a remarkable twist of signification, novel-reading thus becomes the mark of liminality. It is this liminality that finally destroys both ‘Azizah and Hamid. ‘Azizah simply vanishes into the cage of an arranged marriage, while Hamid crumbles under the collapsing pressure of the manichean world that he has elaborately constructed in his imagination, where, as he explains to his father, ‘the black sorrow into which my pain had engulfed me transformed goodness into evil, happiness into misery, hope into despair’ (p. 253): Where can a young man find…gratification in Egypt? Where is it permitted to him to find happiness? He is a miserable wretch. He is trapped between two [choices], both equally bad: either he remains in that death-like state that is no doubt the product of that traditional lifestyle that he and his elders are required to adhere to, or he can devour the rotten scraps that the happy, criminal west has tossed to poor countries. Indeed, the first [choice] is certain death…the second is corruption and perdition. (p. 189) The depiction of village life and peasant characters in Zaynab is also constructed through the prism of Hamid’s distorting khayal. The novel’s subtitle, ‘Manadhir wa Akhlaq Rifiyyah’ (Rural Scenes and Manners), points to a formative duality in its structure, the Rousseauian duality between nature and society. It is a duality that allows Hamid to worship nature while simultaneously erasing it of its human inhabitants. While the ‘scenes’ of rural Egypt are endlessly eulogized, the ‘manners’ of its people – insofar as they exist independently of their benevolent Mother Nature – are elided and sanitized. Hamid’s ‘glorious dominion’ is both a physical property and an extensive interior landscape through which he wanders unimpeded and unchallenged. The two main textual 112

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strategies that refract this social and textual authority are narrative mode and the controlled (dis)use of dialogue. Nature is Hamid’s refuge from his family and from society in general. The long and solitary walks through the estate fields with which he whiles away the listless hours of his summer vacations are punctuated by tortuous inner monologues and lengthy descriptions of the marvels of nature. He is most at home here in ‘a paradise of dreams and imagination’ (p. 93) and expresses intense annoyance whenever disturbed by the appearance or greetings of a stray peasant or villager: Hamid trembled. He was seized by a kind of awe as though entirely lost to his surroundings, oblivious to the fast-rising sun and its increasing heat, as to the passers-by heading towards their fields individually and in gathering groups. Their numbers increased, finally disturbing him from his reverie with their greetings. He was thus forced to return home to be rid of this annoyance [mudayaqah wa ‘iz‘aj] and to be alone with himself in his room. (p. 104) This scenario is repeated throughout the novel. Only Zaynab is allowed to infringe on Hamid’s physical and emotional space. She serves, in a way, as the sole human mediator between his magnified subjectivity and the distant and obtrusive world of the naive and simple-minded laborer. The novel employs two distinct narrative techniques to frame Hamid’s distancing of the other – devices that we might call ‘staging’ and ‘windowing’ respectively. Hamid’s inner monologue creates the overarching narrative and psychological space of the novel. The other is narrated, collectively, as an exterior and immobile tableau vivant or a kind of stage-prop against the background of which the subject’s interiority is played out. The culmination of this type of distancing narration, which specifically posits an undifferentiated and largely silent grammatical collective (‘they’) against Hamid’s hegemonic and finely nuanced subjectivity, is the insertion of a peculiar, second-person imperative at key descriptive moments in the narration. By addressing the reader suddenly and directly, the narrator invites him to participate in Hamid’s own discrete and touristic movement through the scenic landscape of the other:

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If luck should be your guide of a summer eve and you should go out on a moonless night, its blackness dimly lit by sparkling stars, or if you should be luckier still and have the moon as a companion on an evening stroll through those boundless fields, you would find yourself taking a certain path, not knowing why, attracted by some irresistible force and the sweet evening breeze, your feet guiding your head, exuding pleasant sighs and calling the echoes of night to reply.…Then you would arrive at a point where you would suddenly stop, being unable to move your feet in any direction you willed them to go. Transported by beauty, the breeze playing with your heart, you would become oblivious to your surroundings. The voice that brought you here would suddenly rise again and you would listen with all your heart. It is Zaynab’s song punctuated by the chorus of the female laborers. That summer evening song sends the wind’s melody to the ears of sleeping creation and consoles the hearts of the laborers in their long, sleepless night. If you continued to follow your path and approached that song you would see…children and girls bent over, grasping the piled-up stalks of wheat in their left hands and in their right, the sickle – that iron half-circle, born in the age of Pharaoh and descending through the centuries into our own modern age. You approach the workers, with Zaynab at their head flanked by two rows of peasant girls. In the midst of their earnest work, they echo her chorus and the wind carries its melody on its waves and calls to the omnipresent silence of the night. (pp. 18–21) This type of guiding narration occurs in the text whenever Hamid encounters a human scene that escapes the narrow boundaries of his exclusive interiority. It is thus produced as the picturesque – a delightful, static and safely contained image of the domesticated collective. Similarly, the secluded ‘Azizah contemplates the life and beauty of the surrounding countryside through the limited and imprisoning frame of her bedroom window – a scene reminiscent, as she sits to compose her letter to Hamid, of Haykal’s voluntary seclusion in Paris while composing Zaynab, its scenes pictured through the narrow window of his memory and imagination. But ‘Azizah is herself an object of Hamid’s devouring 114

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and distancing imagination. She is as much imprisoned within the force of his alternating desire and repulsion as she is by the four walls of her seclusion. The single and poignant moment at which she finds her doomed voice is to express a hungry longing for the world outside her window; to exchange places, in effect, with her carefree servant – to cross over to the other side – in an instance of the potentially liberatory female sexuality discussed in connection with Zaynab. Occasionally, Hamid bemoans the hard lot of the laboring peasant, but always in essence insisting on the natural history and role of this fate. Rural labor is defined, not as work, but either as play (the peasants sing joyfully to accompany their long and sleepless nights at harvest in the fields) or as a timeless function whose lineage stretches back to a golden pharaonic age, as necessary and natural as the changing of the seasons: The harvest season ended in its turn and [the peasants] moved on to other work, exchanging the breezy moonlit nights full of hopes and dreams for the scorching sun of summer. But they didn’t notice this [transformation] nor were they pained by it, having grown accustomed to it as their fathers before them had also done. They were born accustomed to it, acquiring it through heredity and environment, becoming habituated to constant bondage and succumbing to its authority without complaint or worry. Thus do they work tirelessly and watch over the blooming, verdant fruits of their labor. (p. 21) It is not the will of the (incidentally) benevolent landowner that they must obey but that of history and of nature, of which they are merely a dumb human extension much like the uncomplaining beasts of the field. This elaborate pastoral trope accomplishes two goals. First, it weaves an idyllic image of the natural nation and second, by masking the brutal network of relationships that determine this idyllic rural order, it allows Hamid’s expansive subjectivity free narrative play, untouched by the inconvenient experience of others or by any kind of moral or political complicity in this experience. For example, when Hamid learns that Ibrahim (‘that simple peasant who does not and cannot understand’ what is happening to him) has been conscripted into the colonial army, he bemoans the sad fact that the poor man 115

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cannot even raise the necessary twenty pounds with which to bribe the village ‘Umdah and thus avoid his fate (a sorry fate in Hamid’s eyes only because Ibrahim would be serving in the army of the foreign occupier rather than a national one) (p. 233). The fact that the ‘Umdah is merely an intermediary link in the oppressive chain that binds the landless laborer to the wealthy landlord (in this case, Hamid’s own family) and, in turn, to the colonial overlords, is entirely erased from Hamid’s consciousness. He is merely a detached and somewhat sympathetic observer faintly echoing the reformist rhetoric on the long-suffering Egyptian peasant that was common in liberal intellectual circles in the first few decades of the century. This rhetoric is moreover framed by the larger generational clash in the novel. His criticism of the traditional, feudal relationship between landlord and peasant is part and parcel of his total rebellion against the old social and moral order, and as such is merely an aspect of the existential dilemma that afflicts him. The brief moment in the novel when he considers flouting the social norms of his class and actually marrying Zaynab under the philosophical umbrella of a vaguely apprehended Social Darwinism, collapses into a firm reaffirmation of caste solidarity. Similarly, his mournful reflections on the ageold oppression of the fallahin vanish into thin air, leaving behind an unambiguous description of a mute and degraded rural underclass: I have now made up my mind – though I am ashamed of this confession – that in spite of the many grave faults I had found with the social milieu to which I belong, I still regard the classes that we have oppressed with idle pride. And if I had once found men from amongst the peasantry whose appearance, speech and charm pleased me, and women who are no doubt more lovely, polite and intelligent than most of the girls of other classes, I now feel that there are divisions between the classes difficult to bridge. (Unless we simply wish to amuse ourselves with these classes – whereupon we press our bodies up against theirs, as equals in deed, while at that very moment and for always, despising them). (p. 260) The linguistic strategies of the text reflect this rhetorical structure. Much has been made of Haykal’s original use of colloquial 116

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dialogue in Zaynab. In fact, there is little actual dialogue in the novel – Hamid’s interior monologue taking up the dominant portion of the narrative. The brief verbal interactions that do take place between various peasant characters are transcribed in a simplified classical Arabic that, while attempting to mimic the syntax of colloquial speech, erases all traces of ungrammatical vernacular usage. The single attempt to reproduce the specificity and ungrammaticality of colloquial speech in the novel descends into pointed comic vulgarity. In a short dialogue between Hamid’s aunts, the gossip surrounding the exploits of a brutal, wife-beating local peasant are avidly discussed by the provincial and illiterate pair in a jarring, gutter vernacular that incorporates snatches of indirect quotes from a quarrel between the man and his wife. At the end of the conversation, the stupidity and bestiality of all peasants is ruefully and dutifully noted. The discursive subtext of this dialogue is twofold: it simultaneously condemns and ridicules the crude model of ‘traditional’ womanhood as well as that of the coarse and bestial peasant through the inscription of a shared, ‘low’ language. Both models of subaltern speech are set off by the classical language of the subject. Hamid’s interior monologues – such as the long one in the first chapter of part 2, on love and marriage – are rendered in an oratorical, mellifluous classical idiom. Similarly, the epistolary correspondence between Hamid and ‘Azizah. In hindsight, there is nothing particularly unusual about this linguistic strategy, as it quickly became the dominant one in fiction. What is worth noting is the way in which the text binds a particular kind of fusha to narrative interiority. The binary relationship between the proper language of the subject – an elevated classical language – and that of the subaltern – a standard or degraded one – inscribes a hierarchical and authoritarian narrative relationship between classes. It is, moreover, a central structural feature that persists in the village novel, and the possibilities of its transformation and/or deconstruction pose a significant narrative problem for subsequent authors.

The Maze of Justice If Zaynab is the canonical Egyptian national romance, reprinted in the decades after the Second World War to inspire successive generations of young nationalists, Tawfiq al-Hakim’s 1937 novel The Maze of Justice can be read as a brilliant parody of Haykal’s imperfect utopia.15 Al-Hakim’s biography repeats that of Haykal 117

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in many respects. The son of an affluent, provincial family, he was sent to secondary school in Cairo and then to France to complete his doctoral studies.16 However, he never obtained his law degree, having spent most of his time abroad enthusiastically observing the Parisian cultural scene – particularly theater – and reading many of the same thinkers that had inspired the young Haykal before him. He returned to Egypt in 1927 with the completed manuscript of his first novel, The Return of the Spirit, and subsequently embarked on his long career as an essayist, novelist and playwright. Both Brugman and Badr note that al-Hakim’s first intellectual and artistic allegiance was to his adopted culture. Badr points to the intense hostility towards the cultural ‘prison’ of his native Egypt exhibited in his autobiography. Like Zaynab, The Return of the Spirit – a celebration of the 1919 revolution in Egypt, and a stunning rehearsal of the new aesthetic of national literature and pharaonism that had come into vogue in Egypt in the 1920s – was written in Paris and partly in French. In his autobiography, Zahrat al-‘Umr (The Blossom of Life), al-Hakim remarks that ‘my writing period started only after my departure for Europe when I was able to drink from the sources of true culture [al-thaqafah al-haqiqiyyah]’.17 Al-Hakim thus represents another instance of the ambivalent affiliations and rhetorical positions of the cosmopolitan intellectual of the period. The Return of the Spirit is partly a grandiloquent nationalist eulogy on the noble Egyptian peasant. The first part of the novel is set in Cairo and its lively dialogue, full-bodied characters and brisk pace reflect the author’s easy command of this quotidian urban setting. The second half deals with the countryside. Muhsin, the young protagonist, returns to his parents’ estate during school holidays. There, he overhears a debate between a French archeologist and a British official – guests at his parents’ house – on the fallahin and their role in Egyptian history. In this debate, the Egyptian peasant becomes the quintessential embodiment of the Egyptian spirit through a discursive contortion of the meaning of servitude. The French archeologist conflates the peasants, laboring in full view of the verandah on which the characters are seated, with their noble pharaonic ancestors, the slaves who built the pyramids of Giza. He eulogizes these antediluvian Egyptians in the following manner: We are simply unable to comprehend those feelings that united this people into a single unit, capable of carrying huge blocks of stone on their shoulders for twenty years 118

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and smiling all the while, joy filling their hearts, accepting pain for the sake of their Lord [al-ma‘bud]. I am certain that those hundreds of thousands that built the pyramids were not hatefully forced to do so as Herodotus the Greek so ignorantly and stupidly claimed. Rather, they labored while singing the anthem of their lord, as do their contemporary offspring at harvest time. Yes, their bodies were bloody but this filled them with secret pleasure; the pleasure of participating in hardship for the sake of a shared cause. Do you hear those voices, united, though emerging from numerous, individual hearts?…I assure you that those people are joyous in their shared toil. This is also another difference between us and them. If our workers experience hardship, they become infected with the germs of rebellion. But their peasants secretly rejoice in their hardship. What amazing and industrious people!18 The ‘germs of rebellion’ to which Al-Hakim here alludes obliquely refer to the contemporary advance of the communist labor movement, then at its height in Europe, and threatening to spill over beyond the confines of the continent.19 The reactionary social and political rhetoric of this passage illuminates the sinister underside of pharaonic nationalism, particularly in its discourse about the countryside and the peasantry. Badr notes that ‘the psychological motives that led [al-Hakim] to write The Return of the Spirit were never repeated in his lifetime’, for he subsequently withdrew into an avowed political neutrality – a suggestion that Ghali Shukri and others have challenged.20 Nonetheless, Badr sees the radically different attitudes towards the peasant in the two novels, The Return of the Spirit and The Maze of Justice, as being essentially two sides of the same coin. They are both a function of al-Hakim’s aesthetic and political idealism, which, like Hamid’s guilty confession of ‘idle pride’ masks a profound contempt for the native lower classes in general, and the fallah in particular. The most important point to be culled from this observation is that a hegemonic, syncretic cultural discourse necessarily contains the seeds of its own deconstruction. As such, The Maze of Justice presents an inscription of the political and narrative limits of the hegemonic nationalist project in Egypt. The narrator of The Maze of Justice is a cynical, overworked district prosecutor assigned to a small Delta village. He spends his days investigating the petty crimes committed by the locals, list119

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lessly attending innumerable and interminable court sessions and shuffling through endless legal dossiers while his solitary evenings are spent with his sole companion and refuge – his journal. Like Muhsin and Hamid before him, the Prosecutor experiences the countryside as a place of exile, a primitive wilderness primarily filtered through the lens of his solitary imagination. The novel takes the form of his journal entries. Eleven entries frame the time of the novel, narrating eleven consecutive days of his life, which focus on the mysterious circumstances surrounding the murder of a local peasant. The novel is thus a ‘whodunit’ of sorts, a hapless detective story in which murderer, victim, witness and motive form a cryptic constellation of characters and events that defy comprehension and resolution. Like Hamid, the Prosecutor is most at ease when allowed the opportunity to be alone with his journal and his thoughts. He thoroughly despises the local population, from notables and bureaucrats down to peasants and laborers, and writes them into his journal as a single social chain forged by the same hypocrisy, corruption and ignorance. The law (here specifically the imported Napoleonic Code) is the monolithic and incomprehensible authority that presides over this moral and social chaos. Twisted and manipulated beyond belief by a corrupt and inefficient bureaucratic hierarchy, it is administered to the dead letter upon an impoverished and illiterate community that simply cannot understand why eating one’s own wheat (reserved by the government in lieu of back taxes) or making off with a providentially lost cargo of brand-new clothes is a crime in the eyes of the state. No one is innocent in al-Hakim’s village, except for the law itself, which, in its purity and magisterial indifference, represents the moral legitimacy of a universalist modernity that takes the shape of the Nation as an ideal category. None of the characters in the novel – with the exception of the exasperated Prosecutor – is able to rise to the spirit of this law: the Cairene judge whose sole concern is the daily purchase of ‘real country meat’ in time to catch the 11 o’clock train back to the city, the chief surgeon who blithely holds court at his abattoir-like operating table, the miserly and obsequious shari‘ah court judge busy fattening his pockets through embezzlement, the police commissioner in charge of falsifying election results, all the way to the corrupt government of the moment in Cairo itself. Nature itself – where it exists in the novel – mirrors the squalor, filth and general intractability of the human population. Even the 120

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peasants conspire in their own ignorance and bestiality. They are collectively described by the Prosecutor as ‘flies’, ‘worms’ and smelly ‘monkeys at the zoo’, and as being entirely incapable of grasping the advanced logic of modern law. ‘No!’ the Prosecutor exclaims in dismay after a particularly unproductive police line-up, ‘these procedures which we follow in legal work in accordance with up-to-date regulations really ought to take account of the intelligence of these people and the extent of their mental capabilities. The only alternative, of course, is to raise their mentality to the level of our laws!’. (p. 101) Unlike the peasants in Zaynab, however, the illiterate villagers in The Maze of Justice speak in a parodic colloquial reminiscent of the unconventional peasant language of Sannu‘ ’s playlets. Zaynab’s villagers speak only in the occasional and stilted ‘third language’ appropriate to their narrative staging. Their voices are hollow and obedient to the logic of Hamid’s authoritative textual presence. Those of the sundry peasant characters that people alHakim’s novel are loud, insistent and consistently critical of the institutional discourses brought to bear against them. Moreover, the novel’s peasant narrators constantly threaten the linear, rational narration of the recording Prosecutor with the circular, tangential and overwhelming deluge of stories and anecdotes that they mobilize in self-defense. Their languages form a sharp counterpoint to the hegemonic language of the narrative subject, who, like the industrious little mouse that shares his lonely room, can only silently and solitarily nibble away, with pen and ink, at a lived reality that escapes the power of his conventional imagination. The textual device of judicial cross-examination and police interrogation adroitly frames this kind of dialogic interaction, and the immensely entertaining variety of defensive languages – including the endlessly tangential stories within stories that express the villagers’ irrepressible narrative agency – are inevitably cut short by the frustrated and distracted keepers of the law for whom language is a precise, pragmatic and strategic tool: A woman’s name was called. It was the village prostitute. She had blackened her eyelashes with the point of a match and smeared her cheeks with the glaring crimson color 121

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which can be seen on painted boxes of Samson cigarettes. On her bare arm was tattooed the picture of a heart pierced by an arrow. She was wearing on her wrist several bracelets and armlets made of metal and colored glass. The judge looked at her and said, ‘You are charged with having stood at the entrance of your house…’ She put her hand on her hip and shouted, ‘Well, darling, is it a crime for someone to stand in front of his house?’ ‘You were doing it to seduce the public.’ ‘What a pity! By your honor’s beard, I’ve never seen this Public – he’s never called in at my place.’ ‘Twenty piasters. Next case.’ (p. 35) And again: When I had issued enough of these orders to please God and the police station, I went to have lunch. I came back in the afternoon to interrogate the woman. There was endless discussion, from which I could extract no information except that the young suitor was called Husayn, and was not a local resident, but a man from a neighboring village. ‘Husayn – what, my good woman? There are hundreds of Husayns in these parts. What is his family name? ‘I don’t know his name, sir. the girl said his name was Husayn, so why should I ask about his family, and all the rest of it? I’m a poor, simple woman, as you see; I don’t hold with a lot of chatter. All my life round here I’ve kept away from a lot of talk and questions. What’s it got to do with me? You know the saying – “If you get between the onion and the peel, all you’ll get is a nasty smell”, as they say…’ ‘Oh, shut up, you’re making my brain tired, and all for nothing. May God worry the head of whoever sent you here. Look – if we produce the young man, would you know him?’ ‘Would I know him, sir? Would I know him? Bless my soul! I should hope so – I’d be quite blind if I couldn’t. Saving your presence, sir, do I look as if…’

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‘Enough! You’re a woman, thank God, who doesn’t like to talk much, and…’ ‘Talk much? Of course not, by your life and honor. I’ve kept away from that ever since…’ ‘Silence!’ (p. 98) This potential deluge of highly unconventional and circular colloquial speech that constantly threatens the ‘visionary pastures’ in which the Prosecutor seeks to roam, belies and challenges his mournful reference to ‘this silent countryside’ (hadha al-rif alsamit)21 and provides the reader with a salient example of the parodic juxtapositions that mark the text as a whole. Mahmud Taymur’s remarks on the ‘shocking’ effect of incorporating ‘low’ vernaculars into the modern narrative text is certainly relevant here. The linguistic juxtapositions in The Maze of Justice inscribe a doubled attitude towards the subaltern voice. On the one hand, their shock-value derives from the incongruous and comic contrast of gutter speech with polite, standard fusha. On the other hand, this circular, comic gutter language suggests the possibility of a popular, folksy critique of all hegemonic discourse, including that of bourgeois narrative fiction. The novel’s would-be detective plot further parodies the myth of character and temporal causality in narrative fiction, particularly the national romance. The constellation of figures directly or indirectly involved in the murder are all iconic, elusive characters, randomly appearing and disappearing from the text, speaking in riddles and penning anonymous accusations against non-existent suspects. Novelistic ‘character’, as a social (national) and narrative signifier, is unraveled in the text into a series of constitutive references. The silent and stunningly beautiful Rim is a central suspect in the murder of her brother-in-law, Qamar al-Dawlah, not because of any actual evidence against her, but because of her sudden and mysterious disappearance halfway through the novel. Rim is a kind of playful summary of the – by now – stock figure of the village heroine, a sly reference to the textual constellation of symbols and metaphors that constitute the national feminine in fiction. She is thus pure signifier, and as such, open to different ‘readings’ by the other characters. To the lascivious chief of police, she is an object of lust; to the narrator, a mysterious herald of platonic beauty, and to Shaykh Asfur – himself a narrative riddle – she is the key actor in a profound metaphysical drama. Her death, 123

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which serves as the only possible and partial closure to the unsolved murder, and to the novel itself, prompts the Prosecutor’s following comments: I reflected in silence on our misfortune; not because of any professional failure or because Rim was one of the keys to the case. It was because she had been such a dazzling spectacle and had moved us all deeply – the mad and the sane amongst us alike. This sweet creature had given us some bright moments. It was as if a zephyr breeze had blown on the parched desert of our emotions in this decrepit village. (p. 122) The reference to ‘the mad…amongst us’ is of course to Shaykh Asfur, the vagrant Sufi whose role in the novel is as much of a mystery as Rim’s. He is both an informer and an accomplice, a wise fool who leads the authorities a merry dance. Alternately vanishing and appearing and speaking exclusively in rhymes and riddles, he is explicitly associated with the mythic figure of the popular saint, al-Khidr. It is he who first leads the police to suspect Rim: ‘Watch out for women; they’re the mark of ruin to men’s pride/My loved one’s eyelash, long and dark, would span an acre wide!’ (p. 26). His ambiguous relationship to Rim could be that of father, lover, even murderer, but in any case he steadfastly refuses to inform on her whereabouts. Indeed, their bizarre association and strange disappearance suggests the supernatural or magical relationships of popular romance: It’s absolute witchcraft, I tell you! The dog of a Shaykh must have bewitched the girl. Just imagine! From early morning, right up to now, there isn’t a single field in the district – not a single sugar-plantation or water-wheel or mill or hamlet or canal or ground or path or country road or flaming hell – which we haven’t turned upside down and searched inch by inch. If they had turned into birds of the field or fish of the sea, we would have found them. (p. 65) The mysterious logic of the folk imagination is counterposed to the ‘rational’ logic of modern narrative, and the equally impenetrable relationships between the marginal and intractable 124

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characters of the rural hinterlands defy the legal and moral authority of the Prosecutor. These relationships – their significance, causes and consequences, from Rim’s unidentifiable and incidental suitor Husayn, to the anonymous author of the letter that provides the initial clue to his existence, to the murder victim himself – constantly elude the limited, institutional scope of the narrator’s imagination and of realist narrative convention. The novel simply ends with an unsolved crime and ‘a tone of bitter mockery’. The lengthy and spectacularly detailed autopsy of a gunshot victim in the final pages of The Maze of Justice can be read as a piercing metaphor of the novel’s subversive re-enactment of the syncretic national romance presented in Zaynab: The scalp was removed, revealing the thin membrane which is closest to the brain itself. The doctor incised it with his scalpel and began to inspect the vicinity of the wound, dictating all the time: ‘Violent hemorrhage in the cervical tissue…’ Eventually he lost control of his temper and exclaimed ‘Why do all this? Let’s take the brain out whole! With both hands he removed the contents of the skull until he had emptied it like a clean bowl. He then divided the brain into four parts, of which he gave one to each of his assistants, ordering them to look carefully for the bullet. So they began to knead this substance, which is said to be the source of all human eminence, until they had reduced it to liquid paste. ‘This is the human brain’, I whispered to myself.…There awoke in me a strong curiosity to see this whole body opened for my inspection. If I had seen the brain – well, I might as well see the heart, the liver, the intestines. The man was no longer a man in my sight. He was just a great clock, stretched out before me, which I wanted to open and behold its screws and springs, its wheels and bells.…The doctor set to work in real earnest and some impatience, running his scalpel all over the body. I stood behind him, saying, ‘Go on, cut away!’ I was seized by a strange fever in which I had lost all human perception. I began to talk to the doctor: ‘Show me the lungs! Show me the intestines! Sow me the gallbladder…!’ (p. 121) 125

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This elaborate dissection of the divinely-inspired human body inverts the textual ‘stripping away’ of the layers of accumulated discourse that construct other narrated bodies – the social body and the body politic – to reveal an elusive chaos of discrete parts. The narrator’s frenzied and nightmarish vision intoxicates him and wounds him. It is a bleak vision and yet a liberatory one that marks the beginning of a new stage in the construction of the nation in the Egyptian village novel: ‘I had thought man to be something greater than this. No – we ought never to see ourselves from within. The image of what I had just beheld would never vanish from my mind’s eye’ (p. 122). The three foundational village novels discussed in this chapter set the structural and thematic framework within which village narrative was constructed by later generations of authors. The pastoral love-story, the village uprising, the bureaucratic investigation of rural criminality, are repeated tropes through which the realist and neo-realist village novel explore the social and political conflicts that modulate rural experience. The rebellious villagers of The Maiden of Dinshaway reappear in ‘Abd al-Rahman alSharqawi’s The Land, as does the romantic and insecure hero of Zaynab. Many novels re-inscribe the theme of illicit love and arranged marriage in rural society, whose prototype is of course, the tragic Zaynab herself. Other novels construct their plots around a mysterious rural crime and the clash between an exploitative legal system and autonomous cultural codes and concepts of social and economic justice. The conflict between the anomic self – ‘the individual who is unable to represent the collectivity’ and the ancestral and/or insurgent rural community persists throughout all of these narratives. Throughout the remainder of the century, the attempt to exorcize this rupture forms the central project of the village novel in Egypt.

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4 THE POLITICS OF REALITY Realism, neo-realism and the village novel

n 1952, ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s novel The Land exploded onto the Egyptian literary scene with a radically new kind of repreentation of the peasant and the village. With The Land, and perhaps for the first time in Arabic literature, the fallah is written as a revolutionary historical agent and as the fully articulated subject of narrative. This remarkable literary intervention was an expresion of the broader social, political and ideological changes that wept through the Arab world between the two World Wars, eading into the revolution of 1952 and the experience of the turbuent Nasser years. The Land thus marks a major turning point in he history of the Egyptian village novel in both a sociopolitical and a literary sense. From the 1950s onwards, the village novel begins explicitly to interrogate the relationship between power and deology in Egyptian society and to foreground the coercive nature of this alliance. In the 1950s this challenge took the form of committed or ‘socialist’ realism. Realism quickly gave way to various forms of neo-realist writing that relied on narrative pastiche, incorporating a variety of strategies like flashback and nterior monologue, as well as older, classical and folk narrative tructures such as historical chronicle and the genres of popular orality. In either case, the Arabic novel in Egypt, and the village novel in particular – heretofore the ideological medium of a dominant national bourgeoisie – was now produced as a critique of the centers of political power and social hegemony by writers who were or would become officially marginalized and, at times, severely persecuted by the state. Though this process began well before the revolution of 1952, it was heavily inflected by the experience of the Nasser years and the ubsequent ‘Open Door’ decade of the 1970s. In this chapter I will attempt to explore the continuities between what are often read as 127

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three distinct periods in modern Egyptian cultural history – prerevolutionary, Nasserist, Open Door – by looking first at the way in which the idea of the intellectual and the writer had already changed dramatically before the revolution, and second, by examining the disastrous institutionalization of the relationship between the writer and the state that began after 1952 and that has continued to dominate cultural life in Egypt well into the present day. Throughout this period, writing was practiced as a political act that involved a whole set of contested social and ideological relationships. Committed realism was only the beginning of this literary praxis. I will argue that the formal shift in narrative fiction that occurred in the 1960s and 1970s was not simply, as some critics have suggested, a fundamental break with committed realism and a regression into cultural atavism or mysticism symptomatic of the larger ‘defeat’ of the nationalist project in 1967. Rather, I would like to complicate this reading somewhat by suggesting that both committed realism and neo-realism are essentially political interventions into ‘reality’, or what Stephen Heath has called ‘the space of discourse’ within which cultural ideologies repeat themselves.1 The real world is not, after all, mechanically reproduced in fiction but represented by it, through language, which is in turn a socially constructed medium. Once realism is considered separately from the formal tradition enshrined in nineteenth-century European fiction, it can be understood as the expression of a strategic relationship between the self, the real world and the social discourses through which that world is produced at a particular historical moment. It then becomes possible to detect the symphony of representational modes that inhabit both the realist and the neo-realist text, and to re-conceptualize the ambiguity of literary categories that has plagued modern Egyptian criticism. This is not to say that all novels are realist novels. Clearly, there is a big difference between romanticism and realism as representational modes, or more specifically between a novel like Zaynab on the one hand and The Land or even Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah’s The Band and the Bracelet on the other. The difference lies not so much in the mechanics of representation as in its politics. Romanticism idealizes both the self and the world, while realism attempts to ‘uncover’ them. The inscription of language is a central element in this divergence. The romantic text cannot transcend the language of the self. It is monologic and narcissistic. The realist text understands language as both a social act and a social discourse and hence as being both 128

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plural and contingent. In Egypt, both the committed realism of the 1950s and later neo-realism share this relationship to the politics of reality. And it is through precisely this shared space – and not through a particular political pedagogy (i.e. ‘commitment’) – that modern fiction mounts its political challenge to hegemony. While The Land, Fikri al-Khuli’s Al-Rihlah (The Journey) (1987) and Khayri Shalabi’s Al-Awbash (Riff Raff) (1978) describe the struggle against oppression as a process of political enlightenment and insurgency, The Seven Days of Man (1969) and East of the Palms (1985) write this process as the individual’s struggle to achieve self-knowledge and social agency within the limits imposed by collective tradition. The Band and the Bracelet (1975), Yusuf Al-Qa‘id’s Akhbar ‘Izbat al-Munisi (News from the Munisi Estate) (1971) and Yusuf Idris’ Al-Haram (The Sinners) (1959) on the other hand organize this problematic through the trope of sexuality and sexual transgression within a rigidly patriarchal and authoritarian society. Fathi Ghanem’s novel The Mountain (1958) describes it as a conflict between the country and the city, with all of the associated ideas that these conceptual categories carry. Though their narrative strategies differ significantly, all of these novels deploy the village as the central theater of this social struggle. This is both a political choice and a discursive strategy. In twentieth-century Egypt, to narrate the possibilities of rural insurgency is to intervene radically and directly in a perilous political arena. Situating the dialectic of modernity itself in the village is also a way of representing Egypt as a whole and of giving it a particular political and discursive significance. In both cases, Egypt becomes identified with its peasantry. This is why the image of the peasant and the village continued to be culturally contested throughout the second half of the twentieth century. Writers like Muhammad ‘Abd al-Halim ‘Abdallah kept writing village pastorals and creating romantic village heroines well into the 1960s, while films and television soap operas still manufacture idyllic rural landscapes and stock peasant characters for urban viewers.2 This is a way of domesticating, of sanitizing the realities of rural oppression and of eliding the threatening possibilities of rural rebellion. It is simultaneously a way of normalizing and managing national identity. Language is a central strategy through which the post-1952 village novel attempts to render the realities of peasant life, whether by directly inscribing ungrammatical vernacular peasant voices or by deploying a variety of rural narrative languages – 129

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such as the languages of Sufi tradition or of folk ballad – within the text. Again, this is a political as well as a formal strategy that underlines the necessary relationship between language and representation. The radical re-presentation of the village required an equally radical language that would break with the old forms and literally recreate the village and the peasant in ways that more truly reflected a contemporary historical dynamic. In 1952, The Land accomplished just that. The novel shattered the romantic idiom of the nahdawi novelists, producing a dizzying and unprecedented universe of insurgent peasant voices and drawing the portrait of a revolution in the making. By 1969, however, Sharqawi’s village could no longer adequately represent the complicated experience of a new historical reality, one in which the very meaning of words like nation, tradition, truth and liberation were being scrutinized and interrogated by a new generation of writers and by society at large. The era that ended with the defeat of 1967 had demonstrated that reality was not transparent and that words could, and did, indeed mean their opposite. The attempt to uncover and communicate the real in literature was crystallized in the fields of language and representation, now more than ever understood and molded as contested political terrains. The group of writers in Egypt loosely referred to as ‘the generation of the sixties’ were not bent on escaping from reality, but on finding an alternative to the petrified, overdetermined discourses through which reality had been constructed and power wielded in Egypt’s social and political life during the years of the revolution. The period between the publication of Sharqawi’s seminal novel and the decade of the 1970s witnessed the deconstruction of the normative discourses through which the peasant and the village were understood and managed, whether these languages were those of romanticism or of social(ist) realism. If commitment is understood as the political praxis of a progressive and oppositional literary vanguard, then it becomes possible to trace the continuities rather than the ruptures in this period, and to offer a critical re-mapping of form in modern fiction.

The committed intellectual In the 1940s, the role of the intellectual and of literature in society began to change dramatically throughout the Arab world. While recognizing the achievements of the previous generation of ‘foundational’ intellectuals (jil al-ruwwad), the new intelligentsia that 130

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came of age in Egypt during the Second World War rejected outright the liberal nahdawi model of the writer as well as the corrupt political establishment with which he had become associated. Two decades of cloak-and-dagger liberal constitutionalism, culminating in the dictatorship of the Sidqi regime, in addition to the unchecked expansion of local capitalist markets in open alliance with European imperial interests, had brought Egypt to the brink of a historic crisis. The Great Depression had inflicted devastating losses on the Egyptian economy and resulted in massive land dispossessions and waves of rural migration to the already crowded cities. The 1936 Treaty of Independence once and for all delegitimized the Wafd in the eyes of its natural constituents and left behind a major political vacuum. Peasant and labor unrest was growing and becoming increasingly radicalized, while the British military re-occupation of Egypt during the Second World War further contributed to popular unrest and a general insurrectionary mood. The new intelligentsia that emerged in the 1940s was profoundly shaped by these volatile circumstances. Educated for the most part in secular government secondary schools and at Cairo University by men like Taha Husayn and Ahmad Amin, they were both deeply indebted to the older generation and profoundly critical of it. The social composition of this intellectual vanguard set it apart from its mentors in significant ways. These young men and women belonged to the urban and rural petite-bourgeoisie. They were part of a new demographic trend (that accelerated dramatically after 1952 with the institutionalization of universal free education) that brought waves of middle- and lower-middle-class Egyptian youth into the secular school system, and took them through increasingly higher levels of education. Unlike the landed intellectuals of the ancien régime, however, their social affiliations and political aspirations were rooted in the lower and middle strata of Egyptian society. Their aim was not so much to join the establishment and to reform it from within as to reshape it fundamentally from without. It was this class of intellectuals in a putative alliance with the downtrodden Egyptian masses that now claimed for itself the role of the vanguard of the Nahdah in Egypt. Many of them were socialists or communists. Many belonged to illegal or quasi-legal political organizations. Some fought in scattered guerilla operations against the British in the Canal Zone. All of them, however, shared two basic sets of beliefs. The first was a clear and unambiguous rejection of Western imperialism in 131

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all its forms – political, economic and cultural. This position emerged out of the general disillusionment with the civilizational discourse of the Western powers as a result of the mass slaughter and unabashedly imperial objectives unleashed by the two world wars. The partition of Palestine and the creation of the state of Israel in 1948 further contributed to the perception of Western hypocrisy and imperial aspirations in the region. The singleminded adulation with which the secular nahdawi intelligentsia had read and re-inscribed the civilizational narrative of Europe in the 1910s and 1920s was no longer possible after 1948. Neither was the accomodationist attitude towards British colonialism in Egypt, developed by a certain segment of the early nationalist intelligentsia beginning with Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid. Later developments in the form of the sustained Euro-American offensive against Third-World liberation movements around the globe (Suez, Algeria, Vietnam, etc.) only served to reinforce this deep divide between the politics – cultural and otherwise – of the two generations. This was the beginning of an epistemological shift in Arab thought – one that had profound political, social and cultural consequences throughout the remainder of the twentieth century.3 The second set of beliefs shared by the new intelligentsia was based on the rejection of political and economic liberalism and the championing of socialism as the only viable model for national development and independence. Political independence was no longer a sufficient strategy in and of itself. Social and economic justice was now perceived to be equally important for the goal of national liberation in its broadest and most inclusive sense. The penetration of socialist thought into progressive Egyptian circles in the 1940s was rightly perceived to be a grave threat to the status quo by establishment politicians and intellectuals alike. In the 1910s and 1920s, national elites (including prominent Wafdists) may have been sincerely bent on liberating Egypt from the British colonial yoke and gaining genuine formal independence. But liberating the peasantry from the yoke of domestic agrarian capitalism or allowing urban labor to organize independent trade unions and agitate for greater control of production was an entirely different proposition, and one that directly threatened their own political and economic interests. As far as these elites were concerned socialism was a dirty word, and one that was frequently leveled at anyone who dared to challenge any aspect of the status quo, either in politics or art.4 132

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For the most part, progressive intellectuals and writers welcomed the revolution of 1952, and though the relationship that developed between the Nasser regime and this generation was an ambivalent and at times quite rocky one, the regime’s official ideology opened up a space in which an activist left-wing culture took root. One key aspect of the revolution’s domestic policy was, of course, agrarian reform and, as a corollary to this, the interest in things rural expanded significantly during the 1950s and 1960s. Consequently, institutional support for folk studies as one important aspect of a socialist national culture increased significantly throughout the 1950s and 1960s. Academics, journalists, writers and artists began to explore a variety of aspects related to the peasant question, from the political economy and sociology of the countryside5 to the traditional folk arts of peasant culture.6 In 1958 the Ministry of Culture founded the Center for Popular Folk Arts (Markaz al-Funun al-Sha‘biyyah) and an institute and library of folklore studies.7 No less than twenty-two village novels were published between 1952 and 1970, and a number of these were made into major motion pictures. Literary critics also began to pay increasing attention to village fiction as a distinct genre in Egyptian literature, as well as to the genres of popular folk literature.8 This intense preoccupation with rural Egypt unleashed by the revolution was Janus-faced. In part it was a revisionist political project that sought to foreground peasant culture as well as the oppressive structures of agrarian capitalism in all their socioeconomic specificity. In Anwar ‘Abd al-Malik’s words, ‘the essence of the national question in Egypt is the peasant question’.9 In the same year that ‘Abd al-Malik made this declaration, Ibrahim ‘Amir set out to prove it in his famous book on Egypt’s political economy, The Land and the Peasant: The Agricultural Question in Egypt.10 In this sense and for the first time, the peasant was located at the center of Egyptian history, not as a passive victim or, for better or worse, as a fixed and essentialized symbol of an antediluvian past, but rather as a living subject and an agent of historical change. At the same time, the institutional ‘folklorization’ of the peasant and of rural culture proceeded apace. The pastoralist discourse of the 1910s and 1920s persisted in this strain of populist folklore studies and the fiction and filmic genres associated with it. The nostalgic idea of the continuity and authenticity of patriarchal peasant society developed by writers like Haykal, Ibrahim al-Misri and al-‘Aqqad persisted in the more conservative circles of the official cultural establishment even after 133

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the revolution. The strength and resiliency of a homogeneous and unified – if insurgent – nation and the corporatist structure of the Nasser regime depended to a certain extent on this continued reification of Egyptian rurality. This tension between a new kind of materialism and an older romanticism in post-1952 Egyptian cultural discourse on the countryside was essentially refracted in the political struggle between the left and right wings of the intelligentsia and the regime itself, including after 1972, the year of Sadat’s putsch and the inauguration of the Open Door, or neoliberal phase of contemporary Egyptian history. The vanguardist writers and critics associated with the midcentury revolutionary period in Egypt are among the luminaries of modern Egyptian literary history. In the field of criticism, Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim and ‘Ali al-Ra‘i laid the basis for committed realism in fiction and drama, while Luis ‘Awad pioneered free verse and a colloquial poetics in Egypt. In the theater, playwrights like Alfred Faraj, Nu‘man ‘Ashur, Sa‘d al-Din Wahbah and Salah ‘Abd al-Sabbur, not to mention ‘Abd alRahman Al-Sharqawi, appropriated the rich narrative traditions of Islamic history and Arabic folk literature to stage explosive contemporary social and political allegories. In fiction, Yusuf Idris, Fathi Ghanim and Sharqawi created new narrative languages adequate to the experience of the contemporary subject – the peasant, the urban lumpen, the petty civil servant – in a state of rebellion against the repressive social values and institutional structures of the past. This is not to imply that all of these men shared a single language or a single political vision, or even that their individual literary praxis or their political attitudes did not change over the course of their careers. Certainly, the way in which both the political fortunes of the 1952 revolution and the ideology of the Nasser regime developed over the course of twoodd decades influenced the thought and the writing of progressive intellectuals. Moreover the complex and problematic nature of the relationship that developed between the state and these intellectuals during the late 1950s and early 1960s also contributed to a strategic shift in their critical discourse and to the gradual marginalization of the language of socialist realism as an effective intervention into culture and politics. Beginning in the mid-1960s, and especially after 1967, a new generation of young, iconoclastic writers began to question the narrative of national rebirth and social revolution elaborated by their immediate predecessors, in ways that reflected the oppressive circumstances of a new era. 134

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Rather, the central contribution of the generation of the 1940s to the literary and intellectual history of modern Egypt lies in their having inaugurated a radical critique of the conservative cultural and political ideologies of the ancien régime and the elite bourgeoisie with which it was associated. In fiction, this amounted to an outright rejection of romanticism and the elaboration of narrative realism as both a strategy of representation and a political intervention. While the demise of Nasser and of Nasserism as an official ideology in the early 1970s unleashed what Ghali Shukri has called ‘the counter-revolution’ in Egypt and the gradual undoing of the center-pieces of Nasserist policies at home and abroad, the political radicalism and the critical cultural vision of this intellectual vanguard remain to this day models of the writer’s engagement with society and with the hegemony of the state and its authoritarian discourses. ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi exemplifies the figure of the committed intellectual and writer in modern Egyptian literary history. Sharqawi grew up in a small Delta village in the Shibin alKum district of Minufiyyah province. The son of a small farmer, he received most of his education in Cairo, graduating from the Faculty of Law in 1943, though he spent more time attending the lectures of Taha Husayn and other luminaries at the Faculty of Literature than preparing for his degree. He practiced law for two years, after which he held a number of appointments in government ministries as well as editorships of various journals, including Ruz al-Yusuf, from which he resigned in 1977 under pressure from Anwar al-Sadat. Moreover, he was an extremely varied and prolific writer, publishing essays, poetry, drama, novels and short stories throughout his life. Sharqawi began publishing The Land, his first novel, serially in the pages of al-Katib al-Misri in 1952, the same year of the Free Officers’ coup. As previously noted, the generation of intellectuals who came to maturity towards the end of the Second World War had already been radicalized by the political and psychological experience of the war itself, by the growing intensity of peasant and labor unrest throughout the 1940s, the spread of socialist and communist ideology on university campuses, and last but certainly not least, the war in Palestine and the creation of Israel in 1948. While ruthlessly repressing both Egyptian communists and Muslim brothers at strategic points during the 1950s and 1960s, the Nasser regime nonetheless opened up a space in which an activist Arab nationalism and Third-Worldism, as well as a limited engagement with 135

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socialism, was encouraged and even allowed to flourish. Though strategically recognized and even honored by the state as individual writers and journalists, Sharqawi and his generation of progressivist intellectuals (muthaqqafun taqaddumiyyun) were often victims of the political ambiguities and contradictions of the Nasser period. Many of them spent years in state prisons, both before and after the 1952 revolution. Sharqawi himself was imprisoned for varying lengths of time between 1946 and 1956, though he firmly denied ever having been a communist. Perhaps more significantly, he was blacklisted on and off by the regime between 1953 and 1971, and hence effectively prohibited from publishing in the state-owned press for a good part of almost two decades. In keeping with the political radicalism of Sharqawi’s generation, a new understanding of the role of the intellectual and of literature emerged in the post-World War II era. In contrast to the romantic conservatism of what came to be perceived as the ‘ivory tower’ model of the previous generation of Egyptian writers, Sharqawi’s generation asserted the primacy of the intellectual as an effective social and political actor (lil-muthaqqaf al-dawr alfa‘al fil-mujtama‘), ‘for the intellectual, more than anyone else [in society] is conscious of the imperatives of the age in which he lives and the dynamics of its structural relationships’.11 In an extensive series of interviews with Mustafa ‘Abd al-Ghani, conducted over four years between 1982 and 1986, Sharqawi further elaborates on the political role of the new intellectual of the 1940s and 1950s: At that time, the word ‘progressive’ meant a citizen with socialist tendencies. This citizen was a nationalist, socialist activist [munadil] fighting for national liberation and the liberation of his economy, culture and society. Here it might be useful to note that ‘liberation’ was a terrifying word that was basically synonymous with ‘communism’.…The progressive activist was a citizen dedicated to the spread of world culture, be it Egyptian, Islamic, Greek or Arab. He also believed in the nationalist democratic struggle for liberation from the yoke of colonialism or underdevelopment or tyranny. These new expressions had a fearful ring and a threatening reality,

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for there was much anxiety about the invasion of socialism. To better understand the significance of this expression, we should stop for a moment at the decade of the forties: We were confronted by the massive power of the [official] trade union and of feudalism, which enslaved the peasantry on the lands of their masters. We had no choice but to take this progressive path, the path that meant the liberation of mankind. I remember later on that when I published my book Muhammad, Messenger of Freedom, someone openly remarked ‘Abd al-Rahman Al-Sharqawi has turned Islam into Marxism. He’s turned the Prophet Muhammad, God’s Peace and Blessings upon him, into Marx!’.12 Sharqawi and his contemporaries rebelled against the intellectual and literary monasticism associated with writers like Tawfiq al-Hakim (rahib al-fann/rahib al-fikr), the conservative romanticism of Haykal and al-‘Aqqad and the uncompromising classicism of Taha Husayn. The new intellectual was one who was obliged to plunge headlong into left-wing political activism and to dedicate his writing to this end. On a purely literary level, this generation echoed the position taken two decades earlier by the iconoclastic writers of the New School, who vehemently rejected the sentimentalism and the neo-classicism of their predecessors. In fact, in 1945, Sharqawi along with a number of colleagues founded a journal entitled Al-Fajr al-Jadid, in what was an explicit reference to the short-lived journal of the New School writers, sahifat alhadm wal-bina’ (The Journal of Destruction and Rebuilding). Al-Fajr al-Jadid proved to be equally short-lived. The group of writers who founded the journal called themselves ‘Lajnat Nashr al-Thaqafah al-Jadidah’ (the Committee for the Dissemination of the New Culture)13 and it has been suggested that the Egyptian communist party (HDTW) was indirectly involved in the Committee’s activities.14 Sharqawi recounts that while the journal featured nationalist analyses of sociopolitical and economic issues, the committee primarily directed its attention to literary activities – lectures, symposia, and the like: ‘as for the committee’, Sharqawi reminisces, ‘it was mainly concerned with literature – “progressive literature” to be precise. At that time, progressive literature was new and unfamiliar. It became popular after the Second World War’.15 The journal was shut down by order of prime minister 137

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Isma‘il Sidqi in 1946, many of its writers were imprisoned (including Sharqawi), and the Committee was forced to go underground.16 Sharqawi had this to say of his first stint in jail: ‘We were imprisoned in 1946, but no sooner were we released after Sidqi’s “conspiracy”…than we were once again on the offensive’.17 This offensive was to last for at least two decades of literary production and critical journalism. ‘Progressive literature’ broke with the nahdawi literature of the previous generation both formally and thematically. Reflecting the left-wing political activism of the new intellectual, literature began to focus on the poor and the dispossessed, the peasant, the urban lumpen proletariat, ‘the millions of workers, peasants, students and civil servants [who] work in the factories, fields, workshops and offices’18 of Egypt, as well as on the evils of colonialism and local capitalism. While such themes had been very occasionally treated in the writing of jil al-ruwwad – Taha Husayn’s AlMu‘adhdhibun fil-Ard (The Wretched of the Earth) for example – they were distorted by their excessive romanticism and their highbrow classical language. An explicitly politicized version of realism was deployed in fiction, while free verse (al-shi‘r al-hurr) offered a major challenge to the poetic canons of the past.19 The practice of ‘progressive literature’ in Egypt in the late 1940s and early 1950s was not an isolated phenomenon. Rather, it was part of the larger literary iconoclasm and political radicalism that swept the Arab world between 1948, when the Iraqi poets Nazik al-Mala’ika and Badr Shakir al-Sayyab stunned the literary establishment with their experiments in unmetered and unrhymed poetry, and 1953, when the Lebanese journal Al-Adab published its inauguratory manifesto on literary commitment (al-adab almultazim): It is the conviction of this Review that literature is an intellectual activity directed to a great and noble end, which is that of effective literature that interacts with society: it influences society just as much as it is influenced by it. The present situation of Arab countries makes it imperative for every citizen, each in his own field, to mobilize all his efforts for the express object of liberating the homeland, raising its political, social and intellectual level.…The main aim of this Review is to provide a platform for those fully conscious writers who live the experience of their age and who can be regarded as its 138

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witness. In reflecting the needs of Arab society and in expressing its preoccupations they pave the way for reformers to put things right with all the effective means available. Consequently the kind of literature which this Review calls for and encourages is the literature of commitment [iltizam] which issues from Arab society and pours back into it.20

The new realism But what exactly was this new committed literature? Was literary commitment simply a question of the author’s thematic choices? Or did it constitute a specific literary school with common formal and linguistic strategies? There is a good deal of ambiguity surrounding this question in the analysis of contemporary critics. In many instances, terms like ‘progressive’ or ‘committed’ literature, ‘new realism’ (al-waqi‘iyyah al-jadidah) and ‘socialist realism’ (al-waqi‘iyyah al-ishtirakiyyah) have been used more or less interchangeably to describe the type of politically engaged fiction that emerged in the 1950s, and to distinguish it from other kinds of realist writing. Sa‘id Al-Waraqi, for example, favors ‘optimistic realism’ (al-waqi‘iyyah al-mutafa’ilah) as a way of describing Sharqawi’s and Idris’ fiction, while relegating midcentury writers like Naguib Mahfouz, Yahya Haqqi and Yusuf al-Sharuni to four other subcategories of realism.21 In this section, I will attempt to offer a brief, formal description of mid-century committed realism in order to distinguish it from other kinds of realist writing in Egypt – that of the New School and of Mahfouz’s pre-trilogy novels, for example. Historically speaking, Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim and ‘Abd al‘Azim Anis’ critical manifesto of 1955, Fil-Thaqafah al-Misriyyah (On Egyptian Culture) formally inaugurated the era of ‘new realism’ in Egypt. The book is a collection of essays centering around the fierce literary debate that broke out in 1954 in the pages of the newspaper Al-Jumhuriyyah between the authors on the one hand (representing the views of the new generation, named ‘the free writers’ – al-kuttab al-ahrar – by Al-‘Alim), and Taha Husayn and al-‘Aqqad on the other. On Egyptian Culture simultaneously broke with the established canons of nahdawi romanticism and rejected the type of social realism represented by Mahfouz’s pre-trilogy phase as reactionary and bourgeois. Al‘Alim and Anis declared that literature was the proper reflection 139

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of progressive social conflict and that the writer’s historic responsibility was to represent this ongoing social struggle in an effective and optimistic light. It is not enough that the writer’s [social] consciousness be comprehensive. It must also be progressive. This is the only position that respects mankind and has faith in its future. It is a position that transforms writing into a vocation and the writer into a committed prophet.22 The revolutionary hero who represented the masses’ progressive struggle for social and political liberation was the central axis of the new realism that Al-‘Alim and Anis celebrated. This was later to become the working definition of socialist realism as elaborated by critics like Ahmad Muhammad ‘Atiyyah in Egypt and Husayn Muruwwa in Lebanon. Put in crude terms, realist fiction was supposed simply to tell the story of insurgent workers or peasants in a clear, positive and optimistic light. Conservative or reactionary fiction on the other hand ‘ignores – intentionally or not – the dynamic of historical progress and the new forces developing [in society]. Instead, it concerns itself with the social class that obstructs this process of birth and renewal, while asserting its interests and glamorizing its values’.23 The realism of Naguib Mahfouz and Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus was thus equally judged to be reactionary and decadent because these authors wrote about the middle classes and because their characters were complicated, riven individuals often defeated by time and circumstance. On the other hand, the wooden sermonizing of Muhammad Sidqi’s 1956 collection of short stories al-Anfar (The Migrant Workers) was proclaimed to be nonetheless ‘quivering’ with political purpose and only mildly lacking in ‘social maturity’.24 Ghali Shukri has correctly noted that the socialist realist school, as it developed in Egypt and elsewhere in the Arab world, was an ideological school of criticism rather than a practical one offering a formal and historically grounded critical methodology. Midcentury socialist realist critics were primarily concerned with the explicit content of fiction rather than an analysis of its formal features and its implicit, dialectical relationship to history and ideology. Thus al-‘Alim and Anis’ exemplary ‘new realism’ referred primarily to the text’s political commitment to the social and national struggle rather than the specific types of narrative and linguistic strategies that would serve to distinguish it from 140

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other kinds of ‘non-realist’ ones. Almost twenty years later, Ahmad Muhammad ‘Atiyyah defined the committed writer as a kind of soldier in the service of partisan ideology.25 By disrupting the dialectical relation of narrative form and content, this critical dualism has had deleterious effects on both Arabic practical criticism and literary history. Shukri further notes that not only was the methodology practiced by socialist realist criticism divorced from the actual practice of contemporary creative writing in Egypt, but that it exercised a kind of critical ‘terrorism’ on young would-be writers who were persuaded to conform to what had essentially become a Stalinist literary trend and produce fiction according to the dictates of an increasingly ossified left literary establishment. In any case, a preliminary distinction needs to be made between what I have been calling ‘committed realism’ in fiction and the ideological socialist realism practiced by some Marxist critics and their disciples. In some ways, the two types of realism converged in the fiction of the period. Sharqawi, Idris and Ghanem were committed realists in the sense that they wrote about the historical conflict between social groups and institutions and the possibility of individual and collective liberation. They were not all socialist realists in the rigid sense invoked by al-‘Alim and Anis in 1955, because their inscription of this conflict did not exclusively revolve around the irrepressibly optimistic revolutionary hero and end with the requisite signposts pointing the way to the new utopia. Their vision was more nuanced and complex than this, as was their use of language and narrative structure. They were in varying degrees radical intellectuals, but also literary iconoclasts, whereas many socialist realists tended to reproduce political and aesthetic dogma. As it developed in the wake of Al-‘Alim and Anis’ manifesto, socialist realism proper began to diverge quite significantly from the great examples of mid-century committed realism. As both a critical and literary school it increasingly came to mirror the authoritarianism and didacticism of the regime’s political discourse. Already by 1958, some writers and critics like Naguib Surur and ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr were attacking the superficiality and false optimism of socialist realism and demanding an alternative.26 During this period it seems that anyone who wrote fiction about lower-class characters and threw in a respectable measure of political sloganeering expected to be considered a serious writer and a ‘realist’. In 1960, the popular novelist Ihsan ‘Abd al-Quddus was able to distinguish between ‘communist literature’ 141

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and ‘socialist literature’ and to claim that his own brand of facile and rather romantic fiction was an example of the latter. It is at this point that yet another kind of ‘new realism’ emerges as the avant-garde of fiction writing in Egypt in the mid-1960s, a point that shall be taken up later. The practice of narrative realism certainly predated the new kind of writing championed in the 1950s and 1960s by committed critics and writers. For example, in the 1920s, the New School writers conceived of themselves as literary iconoclasts precisely because of their declared goal of recuperating national reality in their fiction. They produced short stories and critical prefaces that attempted to analyze and represent this reality by focusing on the psychology of narrative character as determined by the specificity of national environment. New School fiction was usually constructed around the story of a central character caught in the contradictions of contemporary Egyptian society. Examples like Mahmud Taymur’s Rajab Efendi, ‘Isa ‘Ubayd’s Ihsan Hanim and Mahmud Tahir Lashin’s Eve without Adam readily come to mind. In these texts, an omniscient narrator inscribes narrative character within the framework of fixed social and psychological factors. Character is produced as a kind of national pathology that is primarily constructed around the clash between the old and the new, ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. Inevitably, these emblematic characters are destroyed by the relentless social and psychological contradictions produced by this duality. The early twentieth-century autobiographical novel repeated and amplified this strategy and this dilemma. Mid-century realism shifted the discursive space of fiction, from the fixed morphology of the biographical mode to the social mode in which social reality is written as a contested field of power between classes and social institutions. Though this process could certainly be refracted through the prism of individual character, committed realism rejected the hegemony of the biographical subject and emphasized instead the fluid web of social and economic relationships within history as the proper fabric of narrative realism. To a large extent, the conventional realist text, as represented by writers like the early Mahfouz and Yahya Haqqi, collapsed under the pressure of this new understanding of the social role of narrative, producing a new synthesis of narrative modes and strategies within the same text. The Land is a case in point, as is Ghanem’s 1963 novel Tilka al-Ayyam (Those Days). 142

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The committed realists rejected the autobiographical mode of the Egyptian novel. In their fiction, the dominance of the narrative subject is muted, dismantled or altogether discarded. Some favored a straightforward third-person narration that completely erased all reference to the authorial voice, while foregrounding the voices and languages of the subaltern. Naguib Mahfouz and Fathi Ghanem used multiple narration as a means of de-centering narrative authority. Where a first-person narrator exists in the fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s, his voice is framed, interrogated and finally marginalized by the voices of other characters. Ghanem’s 1957 novel The Mountain is a good example of this strategy. The narrator is literally forced to give way to other narrators who proceed to tell their own story in terms which push him into the painful revelation of his own liminality. Echoing al-Hakim’s The Maze of Justice, the model of the narrator in The Mountain is a government inspector who travels to a remote southern village to investigate a criminal complaint against its impoverished inhabitants. In this model, the disciplinary protocols of bureaucratic investigation (tahqiq) act as a metaphor for the conventional process of narration itself. The narrator’s questions and his attempts to reconstruct events lead nowhere. He is only able to solve the mystery when he gives up the reins of his own narrative authority and allows the villagers’ stories to capture his imagination and his empathy. In the end, fragile and disillusioned, but nonetheless drawing a new strength from the encounter, he returns to Cairo with an empty dossier and resigns from his post. The Land employs a similar strategy in relation to its first-person narrator, who simply disappears halfway through the text. The novel begins and ends in the conventional autobiographical mode, making explicit reference to its canonical predecessors (Zaynab, Ibrahim the Writer and The Days), while framing a story and a cast of characters that spill over the conventional narrative boundaries marked by the genre. As in The Mountain, the narrator finally re-enters the text, chastened and transformed by the revelation of his own marginality in a world he had thought to master. Committed realism formally re-introduced narrative dialogia into the Arabic novel as part of a deliberate political strategy. In the 1920s, the New School writers had attempted to stabilize linguistic usage in both narration and dialogue through syntactic and lexical simplification and standardization. The narrative phrase was stripped of the ornate rhetorical devices associated with neo-classical prose and the romantic lexicon, and brought 143

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closer to the syntax of everyday speech. The more problematic inscription of dialogue was rendered through an abbreviated and standardized colloquial or, more commonly, through the use of the compromise third language, later perfected and canonized by Naguib Mahfouz in his pre-trilogy novels. With the advent of the new realist aesthetic in the 1950s, narrative language again emerged as a flashpoint in contemporary literary debate. Sharqawi had quarreled with Taha Husayn in 1953 over his extended use of the colloquial for dialogue in The Land. Husayn had accused Sharqawi and his contemporaries of neglecting the Arabic language and of making a mockery of its literary canon.27 Sharqawi, Yusuf Idris and Nu‘man ‘Ashur among others insisted on writing dialogue in the vernacular, claiming it as an artistic imperative and an essential tool for the realistic representation of character. Indeed, one of the hallmarks of the new fiction was precisely its skillful and largely unprecedented elaboration of extended dialogue as a central narrative axis. One only need compare Zaynab to The Land or al-Mazini’s Ibrahim the Writer to Idris’ The Fair-Skinned Girl or Ghanem’s Those Days to note the huge difference in the emphasis placed by the two generations on the importance of narrative dialogue. Moreover, this difference did not simply mark a process of technical development in the Egyptian novel over the course of thirty-odd years. Rather, it underlines the essentially political relationship between narrative form and social ideology. The insistence of committed realist writers on the necessity of faithfully reproducing a variety of social speech in their fiction was a political as well as a technical strategy. It was no longer adequate to directly narrate the character of a peasant or an urban lumpen, or to represent his or her voice as a muted extension of the narrator’s own voice. The new fiction deliberately set out to liberate the voice of the subaltern from the tyranny of the bourgeois text, in both its romantic and conventional realist versions. In this fiction, narrative language is consciously deployed as a central dynamic in the variegated and contested social terrain called ‘reality’. The contrapuntal subaltern languages created by Ya‘qub Sannu‘ and ‘Abdallah al-Nadim reappear in the writing of the committed realists, both in dialogue and in the narrative languages of popular orality. In their fiction, the highbrow classical language of the romantic subject and the correct modern fusha of the Mahfouzian phrase rub shoulders and correspond with a whole range of ungrammatical and non-canonical voices and generic languages. In formal terms, then, an 144

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example of great mid-century committed realism like The Land belongs to a modern literary genealogy inaugurated by Muwaylihi’s Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham and Haqqi’s The Maiden of Dinshaway rather than the novelistic canon of the first half of the century, beginning with Zaynab.

Neo-realism and the crisis of representation The relationship that developed between the Nasserist state and Egyptian intellectuals was a profoundly ambiguous one. The regime needed intellectuals to disseminate its ideology through cultural production, but it was at the same time extremely distrustful of them, especially the left wing of the intelligentsia that had been active in radical politics throughout the 1940s. The July Authority was and remained staunchly anti-communist to the very end. One of the Authority’s first acts after taking power was the brutal suppression, in 1953, of the Kafr al-Dawwar labor strike and the summary execution of its leaders. The regime continued actively to persecute communists and socialist intellectuals at strategic points throughout the 1950s and 1960s. While similar actions were taken against the right as represented by political and bureaucratic segments of the pre-revolutionary royalist government and by the Muslim Brothers (particularly after 1956), some members of the regime were known to be sympathetic to the Brothers as well as to the dispossessed liberal establishment. From 1956 onwards, the regime became increasingly divided between competing ideological tendencies. As a way of mediating this incipient conflict between its left and right wings and the larger social and economic interests that they represented within Egyptian society, the regime developed a corporatist ideology that emphasized statism, populism and social reform while firmly rejecting class-based social theory. Instead, an idealized vision of national unity in which all classes would join hands to work together for national development and liberation was presented as the new face of ‘Arab Socialism’. However dedicated Gamal Abd al-Nasser may have been personally to the project of structural land reform and to bettering the wretched lot of the Egyptian peasant, the regime was not prepared to tolerate peasant radicalism or organized rural insurrection as demonstrated by the Kamshish incident of 1966.28 Instead, and in keeping with the corporatist model of social organization adopted by the state, the official Nasserist attitude towards the Egyptian peasant occupied a 145

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precarious position between an older, pre-revolutionary model of historic national permanence, tradition and ‘authenticity’ and a newer model of the peasantry as an active and central segment of the revolution’s social base – but within limits, of course. In Nasserist ideology, the peasant was once again mobilized to represent a mythic national unity and consensus, but this time in the name of the revolution and Arab Socialism. Thus Muhammad Hasanayn Haykal could offer the following ingenuous definition of peasants and workers in 1961: ‘Anyone who lives on the land, whether he owns it or rents it, is a peasant. Anyone who earns a wage, however small or large, is a worker’.29 This ideological obscurantism was also reflected in literary production. The state had an important stake in the representation of the peasant and the village. While leftist writers like Sharqawi and Yusuf Idris were developing a model of the peasant as an insurgent narrative subject, others, such as Muhammad ‘Abd alHalim ‘Abdallah, Yusuf al-Siba‘i and Tharwat Abadha continued to articulate the image of the peasant and the village within the framework of a conservative political and narrative paradigm. Ignoring the radical experiments in narrative language that were sweeping through the Arab literary world in the 1950s and 1960s, they reproduced the romantic classical idiom of Haykal and Taha Husayn (‘Abdallah), or the modern standard language perfected by Naguib Mahfouz (Al-Siba‘i), framing the central social and political conflicts of the village in terms of the sentimental loveplot. It is not surprising, then, that these writers were consistently favored by the regime with honorary state prizes and important official posts within the cultural apparatus. Al-Siba‘i’s 1955 novel Rudda Qalbi (Requite My Love) provides a good example of the intersection between fiction and ideology that was nurtured by the regime throughout the period in question. The novel domesticates and resolves rural class conflict by transforming it into the story of love triumphant. The Pasha’s daughter and the gardener’s son are impossible childhood sweethearts, but the young man, who advances through the officer corps in the years preceding the revolution, returns to claim her as a triumphant Free Officer in the wake of July 1952 and in the teeth of her now-ruined family’s token opposition. This victorious conjugal union functions as a metaphor for the peaceful ascension to power of a new class on the ruins of the old aristocracy, and produces a historic social compromise which precludes the necessity of class struggle. The hero can only win the hand of his aristocratic beloved after he has 146

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been elevated through the professional and ideological mechanisms of the new nationalist military bureaucracy. She, on the other hand, atones for the sins of her class by happily condescending to be his wife. The marriage is thus an exercise in mutual social and political legitimization, and heralds the emergence of the ‘new class’ of military administrators and technocrats that came to power in Egypt towards the end of the decade. It is no surprise, then, that the 1957 film version of Siba‘i’s novel quickly became the dominant cultural emblem of the post-revolutionary political establishment. To this day, it is annually televised on 26 July, the anniversary of the Free Officers’ coup.30 The struggle between the left and right wings of the Nasser regime became especially acute after the National Pact of 1962, when it became clear that Nasser was embarking upon an accelerated path towards state socialism. The power struggles that ensued were reproduced in the arena of culture, which was largely controlled and manipulated through various institutions like the Ministry of Culture and of Information, the state-owned press and the Socialist Union. Moreover, various quasi-official organizations, like the Writers’ Union and the Journalists’ Syndicate, were the targets of intense behind-the-scenes intervention by interested parties within the state apparatus.31 After the Egyptian communist parties agreed to dissolve themselves in the wake of the National Pact, the left lost its only independent base vis-à-vis the regime and descended into organizational chaos. Elections and the ensuing hierarchies of power within these syndicates reflected the struggles for power within the regime itself. After 1962, leftist intellectuals who were not either strategically co-opted by the state or actively persecuted by it found themselves in the unfortunate position of having to rely on the regime for support in their battle against the forces of reaction (Islamist, anti-socialist and anti-Arab nationalist) within the cultural establishment. A salient example of the way in which this battle was conducted in the literary arena was the concerted attack waged by conservative Egyptian critics on committed realism in general and on avant-garde poetry in particular, which were alternately perceived to be communist and Christian conspiracies against Islamic Egyptian ‘tradition’. In 1965, and after the closure of the avant-garde poetry review Shi‘r, the Poetry Committee of the Ministry of Culture issued a memorandum ‘which proclaimed new poets to be against Islam and the Arabic language, and supporters of class war and the loss of traditional morals. The Committee asserted its right “to oversee all 147

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publication and broadcasting media through which these poisons reach the people”.’32 The riot that broke out in 1965 at the annual elections of the Story Club (Nadi al-Qissah) over the Iraqi poet ‘Abd al-Wahab al-Bayati’s attendance at the proceedings heralded the bitter political struggle that was to gather force after the catastrophic military defeat of 1967.33 The young writers who came of age in the 1960s found themselves trapped in an impossible historical position. They were both the children of the revolution and its strategic enemies. The revolution’s educational policies had produced a whole new generation of university graduates coming from the lowest ranks of Egyptian society and reared on the anti-imperialist nationalism and populist ideologies of the Nasser years. They were enthusiastic, radical activists who believed in the future of the revolution, yet they emerged onto a pointedly hostile political and cultural scene in which they were effectively denied the right to act and speak as writers and intellectuals. Ghali Shukri draws a poignant description of this historical dilemma: A new Egyptian generation was born at the moment in which the role of the preceding generations came to an end.…The new literary generation gestating in Egyptian society since the middle 1960s experienced severe labor pains that culminated in the defeat of 1967, which was like a simultaneous cry of death and re-birth. Perhaps the Socialist Union’s Youth Organization was the first political harbinger of the emergence of this new generation. Perhaps the Vanguard Organization [al-tandhim al-tali‘i] and the Higher Institute of Socialist Studies were principle sources of this generation’s life-blood. Perhaps the journals, Al-Tali‘ah [The Vanguard] and Al-Katib [The Writer] were the seminal pulpits that influenced its formation. In any case, there is no doubt that the social composition of this new generation, as well as its experience, its strategies and its direction surpassed all of these institutional foundations in cultural and political terms. It had taken root in a new and singular soil, completely unlike the soil that produced its teachers and professors. The law of universal free education at all levels had allowed hundreds of thousands of students from amongst the sons and daughters of the peasantry and working classes to enroll at university. Moreover, the [regime’s] 148

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relative tolerance towards the socialist camp had opened up the Egyptian market to the major sources of scientific socialist thought.…Thus were the seeds of the new generation sown in an economic, social and cultural environment completely different from that of the forties. This generation was only ‘the generation of the July Revolution’ in the sense that it was raised between the walls of its institutions. In reality, it was the generation of the new revolution. For this reason, none of the [regime’s] pre-fabricated and officially sanctioned molds were capable of containing it. This contradiction became clear every time a new class graduated from the Socialist Institute or the Youth Organization. They weren’t able to enter the arena of political activism. Instead, they were thrown into jail, as though this were the natural result of all their classes and student projects. They were bigger than the channels of the regime, in spite of their youth, and in spite of its educational programs and the cultural policies of [state] radio, cinema and television. They were more mature, their thought more profound, due to the contradictions of the daily experience which they lived in all its social and economic detail. And in spite, moreover, of the hegemony of the conservative cultural celebrities that ruled over the press and the publishing sector, they were able to forge ahead.34 The writers, activists and intellectuals of ‘the generation of the sixties’ were thus engaged in a bitter political conflict with the state and its cultural establishment, especially after the stunning military defeat of 1967. This date was widely regarded as marking a major crisis in the nationalist project as the evolving historical process by which Egyptian Arab modernity had been articulated and constructed over the past century. It revealed the material and moral corruption at the heart of the regime and the new class of apparatchniks that had come to dominate it. The student and labor uprisings of 1968 and 1972 were a direct response to this crisis. The emperor had once again lost his clothes, and a space consequently opened up for the dynamic possibilities of renewed political action and discussion. After 1967, the Nasserist state was faced with a major political crisis and a popular challenge to its authority. The cultural field was a central site through which this battle was waged, and the 149

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regime consequently made a concerted and at times violent effort to reassert its control over the means of cultural production through organizations like the Socialist Union’s Youth Organization and the Writers’ Union. Shukri recalls that the 1969 Zaqaziq conference on literature organized by the former was presided over by the Minister of the Interior, to the surprise and consternation of the delegates who had been expecting Naguib Mahfouz. The Writer’s Union, also founded in 1969 by state decree, was boycotted by much of its intended membership on account of its patently undemocratic charter. In the same year, Yusuf Idris’ play al-Mukhattatun (The Hypocrites), which attacked the opportunism and corruption of the apparatchnik class at the centers of power in Egypt, was shut down on its opening night. The same fate befell the alternative writers’ union Kuttab al-Ghad (Tomorrow’s Writers), set up by dissident intellectuals in response to the official government union, along with its short-lived journal Gallery 68.35 Throughout the late 1960s and early 1970s, the new generation of radical young writers and journalists was prevented from publishing in the state media and presses and was subjected to concerted public attacks by establishment intellectuals who labeled these writers ‘immature’, ‘anarchists’ and ‘cultural ignoramuses’.36 The Sadat regime accelerated the official persecution of dissident intellectuals with the formation in 1972 of ‘The Regulatory Committee’ (Lajnat alNidham), a special organ of the Socialist Union which proceeded to fire hundreds of writers and journalists from their government posts. At the same time, many of the intellectuals who had openly supported the student uprising of 1972 were arrested and imprisoned over the course of the next three years. The result of all this was what Shukri calls ‘the most pernicious phenomenon in the history of Egyptian culture and journalism’. Frustrated and embittered, scores of Egypt’s most promising young writers and intellectuals chose a desolate exile in various Arab and European countries, their only other alternative being ‘silence, dissimulation, suicide or madness’.37 The fiction produced by this generation reflected this critical shift in the relationship between culture and ideology that developed in the years between the revolution and the 1967 defeat. Sun‘allah Ibrahim’s first novel, Tilka l-Ra’iha (The Smell of It) (1966), which exploded like a bombshell onto the contemporary literary scene, inaugurated yet another era in Egyptian fiction. It was received with a good deal of shock and not a little disgust by 150

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established critics like Yahya Haqqi, who characterized the novel as ‘repulsive’ and complained in his introduction to the 1986 edition of the vulgarity and irrelevance of the graphic masturbation scenes.38 It was not so much the novel’s content – an ex-political prisoner’s journal – that disturbed critics, but its language. Ibrahim used what he was later to call a ‘telegraphic’ realist style, emptied of all adjectival and adverbial modifiers and limiting the sentence to its bare syntactical bones. The sense of extreme detachment produced by this style was disorientating to critics used to the expansive construction and luxurious assonance of the modern literary phrase. To Haqqi, it was not so much the theme of masturbation itself that appeared pornographic, but rather the matter-of-fact and impassive language that Ibrahim’s narrator uses to describe the act. The novel broke with both the mimetic and empathic languages of committed realism as well as the bland psychological realism of 1960s pulp fiction. Moreover, The Smell of It referred back to the biographical subject – albeit in a new and mutilated form – as the central voice through which the experience of the real was crystallized. The economic corruption and political bankruptcy of Egyptian society in the years leading up to the defeat of 1967 are refracted in the novel through a subjective language from which all emotion and will have been drained away. Muhammad Badawi suggests that this new approach to narrative language was essentially a political strategy based on the rejection of hegemonic cultural discourses, which by 1966 certainly included the discourse of socialist realism.39 The languages of the revolution had become compromised by the populist discourse of an increasingly authoritarian and bankrupt regime. For the generation of the 1960s, these were both identified with a facile, paternalistic vernacular endlessly reproduced by the cultural and political bureaucracy in official documents, speeches and journalism, as well as in popular fiction. In this sense, the narrative complexity and linguistic opacity of neorealist fiction was not simply a withdrawal from the political arena into the alienated self. Rather it was a way of writing against the ideology of the regime and against the grain of its hegemonic languages, of reclaiming language from the grip of a defunct and oppressive power structure, and rescuing art equally from the clichés of hard-core socialist realism and romantic pulp fiction.

The village revisited The Egyptian village continued to function as a central axis of this renewed political and discursive contest in fiction throughout the 151

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decade of the 1970s. If anything, the writing of village fiction increased during this period. Many of the new young writers, like Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim, came to the city from poor rural backgrounds and wrote about this experience in their novels and short stories. Village fiction of the 1970s increasingly turned to marginal, idiosyncratic and ‘irrational’ forms of communal belief and ritual, in order to explore not only the mythopoeic nature of folk culture but also the coercive and liminal underside of rural society, and by implication, of Egyptian society as a whole. ‘Abdallah, Qasim, Yusuf al-Qa‘id and Edwar al-Kharrat constructed their villages through the prism of Sufi mysticism or an occult pharaonic symbolism or both. In their writing, collective knowledge is ancestral and cyclic, sustaining and reproducing itself at the expense of the individual, and often destroying him or her in the process. Moreover, the historicized and progressive social conflict represented in mid-century realist village fiction is partly rewritten in the 1970s as a cryptic and solitary libidinal struggle. The protagonists of The Seven Days of Man, The Band and the Bracelet, News from the Munisi Estate, and Kharrat’s short story ‘Jurh Maftuh’ (An Open Wound) are all involved in an intense psychic struggle that pits individual desire against social custom. Sexual transgression and the honor crime become dominant tropes around which the struggle for freedom and the quest for personal and social knowledge are organized. It is in this context that the auto/biographical narrative subject reappears in the neo-realist village novel of the 1970s. The acute social and political crisis that came to a head in the mid-1960s prompted this textual re-enactment of a chronic existential dilemma – the same dilemma, though differently articulated, as we find earlier in the century, in Zaynab for example. That is, the crisis of the modern subject, as an individual essentially disconnected from his ancestral social milieu, once again defined as archaic, primal, existing at the boundaries of history. Of course, this dilemma had not simply disappeared during the heyday of committed realism. It lurked in the background of this generation’s writing, complicating and vexing their social and political identities as vanguard intellectuals and bursting forth in abbreviated, magnified passages like the following one from Yusuf Idris’ extraordinary 1955 novel The Fair-Skinned Girl: As soon as I find myself ensconced within the crumbling and yellowing walls of our dilapidated old house with the 152

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decrepit old dog, and the decaying cistern, I come to my senses. As though our life in the city is one long dream from which we only awake when we return to our villages. And there we find the truth. There we understand that we are nothing but poor, beaten folk taking refuge in tricks and stratagems in order to survive. In the city, we try to seem like city people, but we don’t fit in. Because we’re peasants, we want to outdo them, in our dress and in our lifestyle. We want to be rid of the taint of being peasants. But when we come back we discover the naked truth. Our origins. Our relatives in their dirty, patched clothes and our bare-foot siblings.…As soon as I find myself between the walls of our house, I come to my senses. I feel as though I were a wicked criminal, dallying in the city while his poor, good-natured family go without shoes. They look at him as though he were a god, as though some invisible power had elevated him above them and favored him over them. They see that he’s no longer one of them. He’s become a ‘gentleman’ from whom they hide their secrets and their faults. They treat him as though he’s no longer their son. The city has adopted him. But even after I’ve come to my senses and repented, I cannot act. As if a curse had befallen me and changed me forever. All I feel is that I’m amongst people who are strangers to me. I merely observe them, my heart breaking to pieces for their sakes, but I know that something has come between us. I belong to a different world now, a world that has nothing to do with theirs. I experience the city and my life in it as a grand revolt, an act of insubordination that I have committed and continue to commit, and it seems that I will never really repent.40 This passage invokes and summarizes the social and psychological rupture between the self and the collectivity that re-emerges as one of the major themes of 1970s village fiction. This self is the acculturated subject, once again trapped between two worlds and two identities. The city, object of this subject’s ineluctable desire, represents the movement of history: knowledge as ‘science’ and the engine of progress, wealth and purchased pleasures. The village, on the other hand, occupies a space at the margins of this history and becomes the city’s inverse image. There is, however, one important difference between the realist and neo-realist 153

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inscription of this dilemma. Whereas in both cases, the subject’s alienation is organized through the trope of ‘culture’, Idris understands culture as the product of material socio-economic structures. It is ultimately a brute, physical poverty that lies at the root of the vast gap between Yahya and his family. In The Seven Days of Man, the reverse is true. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s violent rejection of his family is based on his conflicted perception of their cultural impoverishment. In that novel, the squalor and gluttony of the Sufi Brotherhood’s feast-making is linked to the atavistic culture of popular rural pietism that governs the village and its inhabitants. This intense preoccupation with culture and identity in the writing of the neo-realists was part of a broader interest in the question of national identity and national character that reemerged in full force after the defeat of 1967. Around this time, an older discourse about the countryside and the peasant begins to reappear in social studies, one in which the village again becomes the site of permanence but also of cultural and historical decadence. The genre of ‘national character’ studies, in which a popular taxonomy of peasant social psychology was constructed and circulated, began to proliferate from the late 1960s onwards. This taxonomy echoed the language and attitudes of nahdawi discourse on the peasant and the countryside. Both this early liberal intelligentsia and the post-1967 generation of intellectuals approached the peasant ‘problem’ in Egypt in terms of culture, rather than of political economy or social history. In his 1967 classic Shakhsiyyat Misr (The Character of Egypt), Gamal Hamdan gave definitive expression to this rehabilitated discourse. Hamdan was essentially trying to explain what was widely perceived in Egypt as the failure of the nahdawi nationalist project in the wake of June 1967. He did so by rooting this failure in a corrupted national social psychology derived from the oriental despotism model of history. This backward national character was ultimately a millennial rural one. Hamdan described an immutable and undifferentiated peasant culture as the metaphor of a stable, if degraded, national culture. In this national character genre, the fallah is a fixed, transparent and immediately recognizable icon. Hard-working, patient, humble, religious, conservative, pragmatic, he is above all ‘moderate’ (mu‘tadil): in other words, a stranger to ‘extremism’ (tatarruf). According to Hamdan, it was precisely for this reason that Egyptians had been forever prey to the tyranny of an extractive state and had never made a true revolution. This historic ‘failure’, however, implies a serious flaw in the 154

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national character, one that Hamdan was at pains to explain satisfactorily. He thus reproduced the paradox of early reformist thought regarding the fallah in its entirety and identified this paradox as the essential problem of Egyptian identity. We still glory in our authenticity and invoke our indigenous, archaic, threadbare values and the exhausted, backward, petrified customs and traditions of our villages, which in the end, are solely representative of the accumulated residues of tyranny and submission, and the values and traditions of slavery and hypocrisy.41 Establishment intellectuals, on the other hand, tended to eulogize the fallah’s piety, docility and sanguine industriousness. Their construction of peasant culture was based on their view of the peasantry as a natural and abundant rural labor force in the service of the national state. They held up the ideal of the patriarchal rural family as a happy mirror image of the stable hierarchy of the national family – an ideal assiduously fostered by the paternalist Sadat regime. Sadat’s ‘Law of Shame’ of 1977 implied that any breach of this ‘traditional’ social and moral hierarchy, rooted in the very character of the Egyptian countryside, was an explicit transgression against the state itself (as represented by Sadat, the natural and sovereign ‘head’ or father of the Egyptian family). The enduring irony of Sadat’s laborious attempts to position himself as the supreme guardian of an authentic rural Egyptian tradition lies in his historic reversal of the land reform laws instituted in the Nasser years, as a result of which thousands of peasant families throughout Egypt were dispossessed and pauperized.42 The neo-realist village novel consistently interrogated the social and political forms of this representation of the Egyptian village and the Egyptian peasant. Whether telling the story of rural insurgency or narrating the dark underside of rural culture, novels like Yusuf al-Qa‘id’s Yahduth fi Misr Al’an (What’s Happening in Egypt Now), Khayri Shalabi’s Riff Raff (1978) and ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Jamal’s Al-Khawf (Fear) (1972) challenged the conventional, urban middle-class image of the fallah, his world, and his place in official nationalist iconography. A number of significant motifs and strategies that invert the essentially extra-national position – the ‘irrational’ intractability, or, conversely, the socially and politically radical affinities – of the rural collectivity are repeated again and again in these novels. The material and ideological trappings 155

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of the nation’s authority are consistently foregrounded as symbols of an alien institution with questionable legitimacy. For example, the law – and its affiliated discursive and civil institutions (‘justice’, the courts) – are primarily inscribed as centralized, administrative sites of systematic, state-controlled oppression. The neo-realists appropriated and re-articulated the landscapes, images and symbols associated with an ancient, enduring Egypt – the pharaonic temple, the ancestral catacomb, the village mastabah, the laboring peasant – in a counter-narrative that pried open the discursive cleavages between state, nation and people, and interrogated the ideological hegemony of nationalist history and iconography. In their writing, the linear, ‘calendrical’ time of the realist novel is disrupted and molded to accommodate this new vision of history. Flashback and doubled temporal narration is a common strategy in 1970s fiction. East of the Palms jumps back and forth between the past and the present in order to produce a syncretic dialogue between the binary experience of self and community, city and village. The elliptical time of folk narrativity is also reproduced in some of the novels of the period. The Seven Days of Man mimics the holistic, self-contained time of a mystical textual tradition, while The Band and the Bracelet deploys the abbreviated and magnified narrative time of folk epic, thereby dislodging the text from the conventional chain of causality that governs realist fiction. Invoking Yusuf Idris’ 1955 classic, The Sinners, Khayri Shalabi’s Riff-Raff describes the experience of a fractured and warring community marginalized, not by the accumulated weight of its own history, but by contemporary forms of political and economic exploitation. The novel explores the complex hierarchies and divisions within a single village made up of the local and urban authorities, ahl al-balad (‘the people of the village’) and algharabwah (‘the outsiders’), or the migrant agricultural workers who frequently people Shalabi’s work. Though they work side-byside under the whip of the overseer in the fields of the village estate as anfar (hired laborers), the local villagers and the outsiders traditionally cling to a segregational identitarian politics that is rooted in the geography of ancestral place. The locals despise the gharabwah for being impoverished, rootless outsiders for hire (literally, for ‘abandoning the cemeteries of their forefathers’) and they return the feeling in kind. Strict communal distinctions are rife throughout the novel, but eventually, through their enforced contact, the local villagers and the anfar come to 156

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realize that it is their exploited labor that defines their common identity. In the words of the local constable: The stable is for the laborers…we don’t care if they’re from the estate village or far away. Whoever works on the estate is a laborer whether he likes it or not. And since he’s a laborer he sleeps in the stable and whoever sleeps in the stable, you asses, you cattle, better thank God if he finds a spot to lay down his head.43 The novel’s plot also echoes that of Tawfiq al-Hakim’s The Maze of Justice. An obscure crime lies at the center of the story and the district authorities set about solving it. But unlike alHakim’s novel, the crime is solved, not by the inadequate intervention of a mystified efendi district prosecutor, but by the newly radicalized peasants themselves. Through the complicity of the guilty ‘Umdah, the villagers and the outsiders stand accused of the theft and, after a long day of enforced labor, they are imprisoned nightly in the estate stable. The stable becomes a symbolic space that is implicitly contrasted with the Pasha’s palace, which looms ominously in the background, their juxtaposition offering competing models of community, the former horizontal and filiative, the latter hierarchical and legislative. Though the stable is a center of dismal squalor and sporadic strife, its inhabitants come to acknowledge the potential of their immediate solidarities. The stable is transformed into a site of resistance – a vast theater in which the massed actors are free to exchange their stories and their simmering grievances away from the whip of the overseer. In this symbolic, filiative space, narrative or the act of narration (as opposed to the law or ‘tradition’ enforced by the palace) is offered as the strategic cement of community. It is the young, illegitimate protagonist, Tal‘at, who unites the anfar as an insurgent audience through his nightly reading and glossing of the mysterious papers that hold the key to the ‘Umdah’s conspiracy. After the pitched battle between the peasants and the pasha’s guards, and the subsequent fire that burns the stable to the ground and leaves scores of its residents dead and dying, the survivors join hands to bury their dead, native and foreign alike, in the village cemetery – a grim yet radical act of affiliation that once and for all destroys the old barriers of segregational identity. Riff-Raff articulates communal identity as being neither stable nor static but rather continually re-forged in the dynamic crucible 157

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of history and experience. The simple, harmonious village of the romantic nationalist imagination is exposed as a stratified and discordant community where the naked structures of power and domination are not only clearly understood as such by all involved, but sporadically challenged and bested by its victims through the radical act of communal imagination or counter-narration. Moreover, the sanctified idea of the stable patriarchal family itself is exploded in the novel. Tal‘at is a bastard child, abandoned by his mysterious efendi father before his birth, and the perpetually exiled gharabwah are born into a wretched life of economic bondage and servitude that systematically destroys traditional structures of kinship and ancestral community. The novel examines the hidden ways in which narration itself is a constructed and hence political act, dissecting and exposing the coercive structure of hegemonic narratives while simultaneously pointing to the possibility of other, liberatory kinds of narrative praxes. The following chapters will offer a detailed reading of four seminal village novels that roughly span the second half of the century, beginning with The Land and ending with The Band and the Bracelet. These novels all explore the ‘problem’ of the peasant and of rurality as it is embedded in the larger discourse of modernity in twentieth-century Egypt. Though very different in terms of structure and style, they all nonetheless engage the crucial relationship between history, social agency, community and the individual’s place in this nexus. They also share a complex and deeply nuanced understanding of the essentially political, and hence foundational nature of language and representation. In this sense, they are all examples of ‘committed’ fiction while at the same time provoking us to take a closer look at the forms and the social uses of representation and of narrative realism.

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5 THE LAND

There is no doubt that ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s The Land is one of the most important Arabic novels of the twentieth century.1 From the moment of its publication in 1952, it was widely praised n progressive intellectual circles across the region. Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim and ‘Abd al-‘Azim Anis hailed the novel as a brilliant example of the new fiction then emerging in Egypt. It is still egarded as a classic of modern Arabic literature, both inside and outside Egypt, and has acquired canonical status as a revolutionary, ocial(ist) realist text. It was made into a major film by acclaimed director Yusuf Shahin in 1970, and contemporary critics continue o revisit the novel in numerous books and journal articles. Much critical analysis of the novel, both in Arabic and English, has ocused primarily on its explicit political agenda as crystallized by he plot, treating it as an essentially problematic text that is either oo didactic2 or too bourgeois3 or both.4 On the other hand, leftist critics who have expressed unqualified admiration for the novel have based their praise precisely on what they perceive to be its evolutionary political content and its exemplary socialist realism. All of these critical positions share a near-exclusive concern with content (al-madmun) – plot and the topmost layer of the text’s political discourse – and hence the perceived ambiguities of the ext’s overt position in relation to political ideology, i.e. is it a adical socialist or liberal bourgeois novel?, etc. This positivist approach cannot explain the novel’s formal singularity or even adequately explain the complexity of the text’s strategic political positions. The following pages will attempt to shift the critical focus on the novel away from the debate on content, and to explore the ways in which formal structures like language, narration and the delineation of space (al-shakl) define and reiterate the text’s broader political project. 159

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The Land has acquired its place in the modern Arabic literary canon as an exemplary social realist novel because of its deromanticization of the village and the peasant, its story of a revolution in the making, and its scrupulously mimetic inscription of colloquial dialogue. As Ghali Shukri has noted, however, the committed trend in Arab criticism that emerged in the 1950s, and that has largely contributed to The Land’s canonical status, has mostly based its critical methodology on a positivist analysis of content rather than a sustained theoretical engagement with narrative structure and language. Thus it becomes possible to lump a variety of texts – such as Yusuf Idris’ The Sinners, Fathi Ghanem’s The Mountain, Shawqi ‘Abd al-Hakim’s The Sorrows of Noah, and The Land itself – under the general rubric of (social) realism, without taking into account the sharp differences in style and structure that separate these novels. While praising the strident realism of The Land’s characters and plot, Al-‘Alim admitted that he was unable to identify how al-Sharqawi was able to accomplish this feat on a formal level.5 More importantly, in his minor criticisms of the ‘flaws’ in the novel’s realism – such as the sudden appearance and disappearance of characters and the lack of a central protagonist – he singles out the very narrative elements that make it a unique and radical text, in both the political and the literary sense.6 In the following pages, I would like to re-examine the narrative fabric of The Land in order to offer a more nuanced reading of the ways in which committed realism as a discursive political project is shaped and molded by non-realist structures within the text. In other words, I will try to answer the question, how does The Land articulate its radical political and literary project in narrative terms? Does Egyptian social realism of the 1950s and 1960s simply reproduce the forms of Russian or American social realism of the 1930s and 1940s? Or does the very nature of this project in the Egyptian context impose a particular engagement with other, local kinds of non-realist narrativity? Related to this question is the issue of the critical hegemony of the realist novel in Europe. Many European critics and theorists of the novel, beginning with Lukács, have identified the genre with the centrality of the individual, bourgeois subject. In this model, the most articulated form of the genre becomes the bildungsroman, with its emphasis on the moral development of the representative biographical subject. Lennard Davis has even suggested that the political novel is a literary non-sequitur, due to 160

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the genre’s structural inability to accommodate a collective subject in action: Because of its reliance on personal biography, one thing the novel finds almost impossible to describe is collective action – and where collective action appears…it is doomed to failure and compromise. When a novelist does include such collective action or solution, the novel quickly falls apart or becomes boring.…It is as if the novel’s reliance on the biographical mode must always oppose the individual to the collective. Given the requirements of creating a recognizable and easily distinguished character in novels, individuality is clearly going to be given a very high priority. The group in novels is almost impossible to portray since it is by and large outside the bounds of this individuality.…In essence, the collective or the group represents the threat of the dissolution of character.7 Davis further notes that the representation of the collectivity in novels is transposed into ‘the crowd’, which in turn denotes chaos, monstrosity and the threat of primeval violence. But is this exclusively the way in which the collective can be represented in fiction, or is it possible to trace a novelistic tradition both inside and outside Europe that foregrounds a collective subject in both thematic and structural terms? One that crystallizes the movement of history in the network of social relationships that bind a community together in time, rather than in the lone figure of an individual, exemplary hero? A close reading of The Land suggests an alternative. As we shall see, the novel attempts to construct a collective subject and a collective narrative voice, ‘the clear objective reality as subjectively – but by a collective subject – experienced’8 in order to transfigure the ideological hegemony of the bourgeois subject. It does so by literally expelling this subject from the text and challenging the languages of authority with which he is associated, as well as by articulating a dynamic synthesis of folk and epic narrative structures and an elaborate web of scrupulously mimetic, mocking dialogue.

The disappeared narrator As in Zaynab and The Return of the Spirit, The Land takes place during a summer vacation spent by the young narrator in his family’s village. The time is the turbulent mid-1930s when Isma‘il 161

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Sidqi and the Sha‘b party ruled the country with an iron fist, having first replaced the liberal Wafdist constitution of 1923 with one more pleasing to both the British and the Palace in 1930. Sidqi’s regime provoked intense popular resistance from both the urban petite-bourgeoisie and the peasantry throughout the decade, and the novel’s plot refracts these events through the microcosm of an insurgent Delta village, fighting to save its water and its land from the clutches of the government and the local landowner. Sharqawi was born and spent his earliest years in a small Egyptian village before heading to Cairo for further education. Most of the writers of the Nahdah fit this biographical paradigm, as did many of the generation that followed Sharqawi’s. This is perhaps the most obvious reason why the inception of what Jabir ‘Asfur has called the autobiographical novel in Egypt coincided with the beginnings of the village novel as a distinct narrative genre that developed a proper set of structural and thematic features.9 One of these is the trope of the native son’s return to the village from his adoptive urban milieu, most often in the context of summer holidays from school. Clearly, one of the subtexts of this trope is the clash between ‘the country and the city’, or a set of social values associated with the hero’s rural origins on the one hand and his cosmopolitan urban education on the other. At the same time, this conflict and the hero’s experience of his ‘return’ – which usually takes the form of nostalgia – is played out in significantly different ways between the narrative inscribed by nahdawi authors in the 1910s and 1920s, and that of subsequent generations of leftist, realist and neo-realist writers, beginning with Sharqawi on through to the generation of the 1960s. In the writing of the former, the hero experiences his return as an alienation that is masked and attenuated by abstracted nostalgia. He is somehow ill at ease amidst the severe protocols of his aristocratic domesticity (a domesticity which is opposed to the free-wheeling din of his city life) as well as the unfamiliar and mute mechanisms of rural labor which surround him. He tames this cipher-like laboring collective either by naturalizing it (Zaynab) or nationalizing it (The Return of the Spirit) or both, thereby effectively emptying the ancestral rural territory of its problematic human content and rendering it an open and neutral space for the painful process of self-encounter. In the post-nahdawi village novel, the hero’s alienation is produced by his movement away from the village.10 Nostalgia acquires historical specificity in this process, and the village is imaginatively transformed into a lost Eden (The Seven Days of Man) or the 162

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central theatre of a profound social and historical struggle (The Land). In both cases, the village community is foregrounded as a complex and dynamic collective organism, while the hero stands at the margins of this community as a helpless outsider or a sympathetic observer (or even, as happens in later village narrative, as a reviled outcast). His psychic and intellectual metamorphosis finally takes place, not in the vacuum of solitary imagination, but as part of the community’s collective struggle for political or historical agency. The narrator of The Land signals this strategy from the very first page of the novel: I don’t wish…to write a long novel, narrate the history of a group of men or women or write my memoirs. Nor do I mean to beguile the reader in order to steal his interest and deprive him of his vigilance. On the contrary – I assure him that the characters that agitate these chapters are entirely imaginary. I don’t intend to deceive the reader to this extent…for our imagination, in the end, is incapable of creating beings that move with life, heavy with life: dreaming, suffering, experiencing pleasure and despair, passion and tears, laughter and obscure hope, making the future with a melancholy persistence. Nor do I claim to know the story of those of whom I speak, for we in Egypt can hardly know an individual’s entire story…a person’s story in Egypt appears suddenly and advances, monotonous, listless, convulsed by trouble and strife for a time then subsides and becomes submerged, little by little, like water poured onto sand. Such was the life of Wasifah and ‘Abd al-Hadi, of Khadrah and ‘Ilwani, Muhammad Abu Swaylam and Shaykh Yusuf, Shaykh Shinnawi, Muhammad Efendi, Shaykh Hassunah and all those men and women and children of my village that I have known for the last twenty years.11 In this remarkable preface, the narrator refers to his literary ancestors while at the same time subtly undermining the very possibility of narrative authority at the core of the realist mode and the biographical subject’s voice. The contradictions built into the competing claims made by this narrator, and the rejection of the basic conventions of the realist, biographical mode, which is built on beginnings and endings, are all part of this subversive 163

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strategy. The narrator inserts himself forcefully into the text, declaring his intentions (or lack of them), only to deny the authority of his own voice and to foreground the artifice of realist convention. In the following passages, the ritualistic repetition of the phrase, ‘and I know [my village] well’ functions as an ironic jab at the occlusions and silences of nahdawi village narrative rather than a claim to hegemonic knowledge. It expresses an essentially political understanding of the internal and external historical pressures that shape the life of a struggling rural community, thus setting the stage for the ‘imaginary’ stories to follow. Moreover, the solemn, heraldic litany of the assembled cast of characters at the end of the passage, from the most particular (Wasifah, ‘Abd al-Hadi) to the most general (‘all those men, women and children of my village’) foreshadows the hybrid, folk narrative structures that compete in the novel with realist representation. This cast of characters partakes of the archetypal and proverbial modalities common to folk epic and folk ballad. At the same time they enact a dynamic historical plot, as discrete, ‘realistically’ constructed individual personalities. The tension between the self-conscious and ineffective narrative voice and the necessity of some kind of authoritative narration is soon resolved in the text by the occlusion of the narrator in the third chapter of the novel – an occlusion that critics have often read as a technical flaw in the novel produced by the pressures of serialization12 – and the sudden, but nonetheless seamless switch from first person to third person that takes up all but the last two chapters. There are thus two distinct narrative voices in the novel: that of the adult who narrates snatches of memories from a specific moment of his childhood, and the omniscient narrator who tells the village’s story. The adult narrator sets the novel’s events in motion by returning to his memories of the summer holiday in his native village immediately following his completion of primary school in Cairo. Like Haykal’s Hamid, he is both of the village and an outsider, and like Hamid he amuses himself by chasing the village belle, Wasifah, his childhood playmate. However, Sharqawi’s narrator is fully conscious of the critical nuances of his ambiguous position in relation to the village community. His childish dreams of acquiring the new suit, long pants and wristwatch of a properly dressed secondary school student – a costume explicitly associated with the privileges of an urban, ‘colonial’ education – are frustrated by his family’s limited income: ‘But even so, I continued to dream about the watch and 164

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would imagine myself, sitting in French class and occasionally glancing at it’ (p. 14). In the very next paragraph, these childish daydreams spill over into fantasies of nationalist heroism, reinforcing the narrator’s consciousness of his own immaturity and marginality in relation to the revolutionary action being played out both in the capital and in his little village: Even more than this, I dreamt of participating in the demonstrations that the secondary school students were organizing and chanting the same slogans along with everyone else. I had heard a lot from my older brothers about the uproar at the university when Taha Husayn was expelled, and since then, his very name filled us with an obscure awe. (p. 14) ‘The story of the long-pants, the British, the watch, Sidqi and the Constitution’ (p. 15) is a jumbled, obscure narrative which the boy-narrator, like the other characters each in his or her own way, attempts to untangle in order to arrive at the real web of relationships that affect their lives and their struggle. Instead of asking him, as usual, to ‘speak English or laugh in English’ (p. 4), the village boys discuss local crises and demonstrate a working understanding of their relations to national politics that leaves the young narrator – used to showing off and being the natural center of attention – literally speechless. The narrator’s inadequacy is further highlighted by his midnight rendezvous with Wasifah, whom he lures to a dark spot by the river with the promise of a bottle of perfume. Having lied about the perfume, he presents her instead with a ten-piaster coin. The comic verbal exchange that ensues points to the boy’s inability to speak even the same language as the object of his desire, who cannot or refuses to understand the fanciful discourse of romantic novels. In a reversal of roles, Wasifah attempts to seduce him but fails miserably due to the boy’s childish terror and inexperience. Mistaking her genuine sexual advances for gratitude, he rationalizes his impotence as a point of honor: But Wasifah didn’t at all feel that I had bought or had tried to buy something from her, for when I pushed her away, she laughed and said, ‘don’t be afraid’, and continued to embrace me. Then she grabbed my hand and 165

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pulled me inside the prayer-hut. We fell to the floor and she clung to me in a powerful embrace, panting audibly, while images of hellfire, fornication and the corruption of a poverty-stricken girl filled my heart with remorse and a feeling of grievous dishonor. Finally, she stood up, visibly upset, and gave me a violent push in the chest…: ‘you’re just a kid.…So why d’ya bring me up here anyway? The hell with this…’…I tried to explain myself and paint a picture of the feeling of dishonor that oppressed me because I was buying these sweet moments from her, but she merely shook her head and mockingly replied, ‘for God’s sake, I don’t understand a word you’re saying. Save it for your school-friends and your efendis’. (p. 34) [29] The boy’s sexual impotence can thus be read as an analog of his narrative (in)competence, for he literally speaks a different language than that of the village. It is the language of Hamid and Muhsin, even of the awesome Taha Husayn himself, a language that is utterly inadequate to the requirements of the village’s collective story. Now the boy silently withdraws from the text and the third-person narrator takes over. But his temporary occlusion is not a complete absence, for when he reappears at the end of the novel, he discovers himself to be a different person. His intellectual and emotional maturity is shaped by the collective development of the village’s political consciousness and agency. Only now is he capable of understanding and critiquing the obscurantism of his romantic literary sensibility: As I sat by the water-wheel, I recalled the books I had read over the summer: The Days and Ibrahim the Writer and Zaynab…and I wished that my village too was trouble-free, like Zaynab’s village – Its peasants not fighting over water, the government not denying them this water or wresting away their land, not sending men in yellow clothes to whip them into submission, its children not eating mud, no flies covering their pretty eyes. My village too was as beautiful as Zaynab’s, its sycamore and mulberry trees casting their interlaced shadows on the river’s surface.…And on the canal-bank – where the government was still confiscating land – fields of brilliant, white cotton lay spread out, the sky stretching 166

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endlessly over the dancing corn fields.…The women in my village also carried clay jars, like the women in Zaynab’s village, and they too had ‘bosoms’. But Zaynab’s village hadn’t tasted the whip, nor the disruption of its wateringcycle, nor been forced to drink horse-urine.13 Neither had Zaynab’s village known the pride of victory while successfully defying fate, the British, the ‘Umdah and the government for a time. (p. 314) [220–221] In this passage, Sharqawi explicitly locates The Land in a specific modern narrative tradition, fondly invoking the canonical titles of the genre and at the same time gently criticizing their idealized and deceptive representations of village life. The comment on the village girls’ bosoms (wa kanat lahunna aydan nuhud) is an ironic and amusing reference to Haykal’s ornate, rhetorical style in Zaynab, and is one example of the way in which The Land foregrounds the encounter between competing textual and social discourses. The first-person narrator of The Land can only re-enter the story once he is able to distinguish between language and discourse and to understand the political implications of narration itself.

Epic realism and the collective voice ‘All villages tell stories’, writes John Berger in the introduction to Pig Earth, his collection of poetry and short fiction about rural life in the French Alps: Most of what happens during a day is recounted by somebody before the day ends.…This combination of the sharpest observation, of the daily recounting of the day’s events and encounters, and of lifelong mutual familiarities is what constitutes so-called village gossip. Indeed the function of this gossip which, in fact, is close, oral, daily history, is to allow the whole village to define itself. The life of the village…is perhaps the sum of all the social and personal relationships existing within it, plus the social and economic relations – usually oppressive – which link the village to the rest of the world…it is also a living portrait of itself; a communal portrait, in that everybody is portrayed and everybody portrays. As with 167

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the carvings on the capitals in a Romanesque church, there is an identity of spirit between what is shown and how it is shown – as if the portrayed were also the carvers. Every village’s portrait of itself is constructed, however, not out of stone, but out of words, spoken and remembered; out of opinions, stories, eye-witness reports, legends, comments and hearsay. And it is a continuous portrait; work on it never stops.14 The real story of The Land is precisely this; a village daily weaving its own brilliant narrative tapestry; speaking, singing, creating and recreating itself as a community in living history, in intricately patterned relationships between its individual members as well as to the world at large. In this contextual reading, the conventional third-person narrator becomes a mere formality, giving way to the village itself as the primary voice that tells the story of its own evolving history and identity. Sayyid ‘Abdallah ‘Ali traces a binary split in the novel’s narrative mode, between ‘European’ realism and indigenous folk narrative. He sees this conflict as the corollary of an essentially ideological city/country, nation/colonizer duality that mars Sharqawi’s vision: Al-Sharqawi offers…folk literature as being closer to the village’s reality than romantic literature, which he identifies – as official literature – with ‘the government/the British’. But in spite of this, the vestiges of folk narrative are scant and insignificant compared to the hegemony of the realist mode (which is essentially European in its origins). Thus, even though al-Sharqawi tries to posit folk literature as a literature that depicts the reality of ‘the village/the nation’, he ultimately succumbs, consciously or unconsciously, to a European realist mode of narration.15 Contrary to ‘Ali’s claim that the traces of folk literature are minimal in the novel, the empowering narrative and political model of the informal genres of popular epic and ballad is a dominant and recurring leitmotif in the novel. Unlike the child-narrator’s impotent and incomprehensible textual repertoire, Shaykh Yusuf’s ‘big, yellowed book’ is a source of comfort and inspiration for the war-weary grocer:

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It was the story of ‘Antarah, the enslaved black hero who defeated all the rulers of Egypt, the Levant and all the Arab countries combined! Shaykh Yusuf kept on reading to himself in a loud voice about how ‘Antar defended the land, his voice gradually reviving as he recited the poetry that defied fate, the worst of circumstances and the highest authorities. (p. 200) This theme is picked up elsewhere in the novel; at the ‘Umdah’s funeral, where the heroic resistance of the Cairo demonstrators is described in elliptical, epic form (p. 299); in the child-narrator’s final affirmation of the greater relevance of these epic cycles to ‘the tragedy of my village’ (p. 317); and in the explicit association of ‘Abd al-Hadi with the infamous folk hero, Adham al-Sharqawi (p. 320).16 This broad thematic structure is in turn refracted through character. ‘Abd al-Hadi and Wasifah are undoubtedly the novel’s organizing, centripetal force, their opaque love-affair infusing the narrative with the elemental, mythopoeic story of desire and quest. They are painted with the broad and colorful brush strokes of folk epic and ballad, recalling the immortal couples of rural balladry like Shafiqah and Mitwalli, and Hasan and Na‘imah.17 Wasifah is certainly a unique female character in modern Arabic literature. She is combative, self-willed and sexually aggressive – traits that are positively associated with the village’s collective struggle for empowerment and liberation. The typical characteristics of the national feminine – purity, chastity and docility – are inverted in Wasifah’s case and the rebelliousness and unconventionality of her character come to represent the larger emancipatory project depicted in the novel. She is as intense as ‘a thousand women’ (p. 37), her lithe body and her sharp tongue weapons with which she braves her hard destiny, both as a woman and as a member of an oppressed and struggling community. Even as a child, she outclimbs, outruns and outfights the village boys, who look up to her as their natural leader in fun and in mischief, spreading tales of her bravery and her defiance of traditional gender roles. The novel opens with the scandalous game of ‘wedding night’ which she invents as a young girl on the verge of adolescence (pp. 6–12), and it is she who leads the village women in the unprecedented uprising against the ‘Umdah (pp. 224–233). Her beauty, pride and independence are legendary and she is thus 169

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deemed, by the community at large, to be ‘Abd al-Hadi’s fit consort. However, speculation as to whom she will choose as her husband is still unresolved by the end of the novel. She is something of a mystery, but only because she refuses to bow to pressure of any kind in making her choice – even to the persistent and violently jealous ‘Abd al-Hadi himself – and her name is consequently connected in whispers and hints to Muhammad Efendi, the mysterious ‘Amm Kassab and even to Sergeant ‘Abdallah. Desired by all, attained by none, she, like the maiden of Dinshaway, symbolizes the land itself. Both ‘Abd al-Hadi and Diyab make this implicit association; the one out of a kind of proprietary desire, the other out of greed and lust. But unlike the silent and largely passive heroines of yore, her character transcends the symbolism of its predecessors, and, cursing and swearing her way through the novel, she becomes the textual personification of uninhibited desire; of human agency in its struggle with mutability and the exigencies of an unknown destiny, ‘her tall, slender body parting the evening shadows, awesome, as though it were defying the powers of the unknown’ (p. 38). The boy-narrator’s anxiety over her fate in the last pages of the novel is an implicit reflection of his anxiety over the fate of the entire village, as though this fate somehow hinged on Wasifah’s ability to exercise her representative agency in the choice of a husband. Similarly, from the very first chapters of the novel, ‘Abd alHadi is introduced as the poet-hero who ‘stays up all night long’, by his irrigation-wheel, ‘whiling away the time by singing long ballads of…heroes and life and love’ (p. 42). He is the best singer and the undefeated quarterstaff champion in the village and like Zayn, Al-Tayyib Salih’s memorable hero, his presence is a prerequisite at weddings and festivals.18 His selflessness, generosity and kindness are unparalleled, as demonstrated by his noble treatment of ‘Ilwani and Khadrah, despised and ill treated by the rest of the village, and by the steadfastness of purpose with which he leads the village in battle against the authorities – in spite of the fact that his own interests are unaffected by the land confiscations. Moreover, like Adham, he is the most industrious and committed farmer of all his peers, ‘his feet firmly planted in [the] soil’, from which he draws his epic strength: This vast land spreading out before him filled him with a feeling of permanence, of rootedness and honor. He 170

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couldn’t see it in the dark but he knew it by heart…every canal and path that ran through it and every stalk of tender corn that had slowly begun to sprout from the earth.…He well knew the story of this land from the time when, as an eight year old boy, he would drive the ox’s peg into the ground.…He still remembered the story of this land and would never forget it, and his son, in turn, would memorize it after him. One of the first things he had understood in his life was the land’s birthing of corn and hay and cotton. His father had planted it a garden, then he himself had sown it with marrow and it had repaid him with plenty. He had sown it with sugar-cane, and it had repaid him with plenty. He had sown it with fenugreek and beans and it had never betrayed him but had raised his head high for all time. (p. 47) [40] ‘Abd al-Hadi is thus the opposite of the ineffective and emasculated intellectual; the narrative subject who, like Halabawi, Hamid, and The Land’s young narrator himself, is torn between cultures, between value-systems, between languages. In an echo of the image describing Wasifah’s monumental body ‘parting the evening shadows’, the powerful metaphor contained in the image of the defiant ‘Abd al-Hadi ‘entering the village with steady strides, the blood boiling in his veins, his cane thrusting aside the silence of the evening shadows’ (p. 56, italics added) describes the supraverbal and integral mastery and efficaciousness of the epic hero. His identity and his strength are superlative but also contextual – firmly rooted in and defined by a particular place and a particular community. Indeed, the village’s assessment of and pride in ‘Abd al-Hadi is negotiated through a singular narrative strategy that itself belongs to the fabulous rhythms of folk genres; a strategy that often punctuates, and even eclipses, the overall thirdperson narration: The whole village began to talk admiringly about the events that had taken place by the canal; how the battle had started and how it had ended, how the ox had fallen into the well, the heroism of the men who raised it with their bare hands and the courage of those who had broken the canal open. As for the children, they were filled with pride as they recounted what ‘Abd al-Hadi had done – for he had single-handedly beaten all the men of 171

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the eastern bank and when an ox belonging to his neighbor had fallen into the well, he had saved it all by himself.…The young girls whispered happily amongst themselves about ‘Abd al-Hadi and how he had raised his hoe and broken the government’s canal and let the water gush forth easily from the river to the fields, thus defying the government’s tyranny and that of its fancily suited and tarbooshed hirelings. (p. 166)19 This type of collective ‘re-narration’ is employed frequently throughout the novel. The collective subject, ‘the village’, becomes the primary agent through which communal events, memories and aspirations are orally and publicly reconstructed and endowed with a shared structure and meaning. ‘The village’ thus takes on a separate life of its own, whispering, speaking, celebrating and laughing at the incidents, small and large, that make up its daily life.20 This incessant, oral narrative impulse is the central mechanism through which the village is constructed. It is also the raw material of legend and folk tale, and allows the village to recreate both itself and the outside world in epic terms that are at once inspiring and empowering. The imaginative transformation of Sergeant ‘Abdallah, the leader of the Nubian soldiers sent by the government to reimpose its authority on the rebellious village, is a perfect example of this. After having brutally whipped the local inhabitants into submission on his first day in the village, he repents and is slowly befriended by the population, who then affectionately accord him a formidable, legendary status in their stories and personifications: I had heard a lot about Sergeant ‘Abdallah and what he had done in my village, and I thus imagined him to be tall as a door, stout as a sack of cotton, black as the inside of an oven, his teeth as white as cheese, never laughing or uttering a word, knowing nothing but the lash of the whip! Indeed, I had heard the most amazing things about him since he arrived in my village, for the people fill their time (yamla’una hayatahum) with stories about him to the point that he has become a part of their proverbs and traditions. For if a plump, dark-skinned peddler-woman came to the village, they whispered amongst themselves, ‘Sergeant ‘Abdallah!’, and if someone yelled, they laughed 172

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and said, ‘Does he think he’s Sergeant ‘Abdallah?’. And when the kids played, one of them would pick up a mulberry branch and threaten his pals with it, shouting ‘I’m Sergeant ‘Abdallah!’, while another kid would perhaps face him with his branch and jump up and down and say, ‘Ok, so I’m ‘Abd al-Hadi!’ There had never been a match between Sergeant ‘Abdallah and ‘Abd al-Hadi, but the kids constantly pretended and wondered who of the two would win. (p. 315) [221–2]

Language and the culture of laughter The Land’s lively dialogue has often been praised by critics. The extensive inscription of a meticulously rendered colloquial dialogue is in fact one of the most remarkable features of the novel. The pleasure of speaking, chatting, punning and counterpunning, of engaging in witty, earthy repartee, is an end in itself, and large portions of the novel are given over to this kind of seemingly gratuitous play. These group conversations – conducted at a leisurely pace, usually around sunset when the day’s work is done – are the true narrative centerpiece of the novel, carefully and affectionately illuminating the subtle and dynamic relationships between the various characters, major and minor. ‘Ilwani’s incessantly fawning interjections into Shaykh Yusuf’s vainglorious discourses, ‘Abd al-Hadi’s comic verbal battles with Shaykh Shinnawi and Shaykh Hassunah’s running diatribe against his obsequious nephew, Muhammad Efendi are just a few of the conversational circles in which the entire village participates at one point or another, whether directly or second-hand through renarration. In another context, Muhammad Badawi has called this narrative strategy, stratijiyat al-samar al-rifi.21 We may recall that, in The Maiden of Dinshaway, Mahmud Tahir Haqqi approvingly invokes the ritual of ‘rural chat’ as a central feature of Egyptian peasant culture, distinguishing, in the process, between a repressive urban society and an egalitarian rural one. In The Land, as in The Seven Days of Man, this rural chat is written as a contrapuntal subaltern dialogue that both exemplifies peasant culture and challenges the efficacy of centralized narration. In contradistinction to what Lennard Davis has called ‘the single-voiced, anti-social quality of literary conversation’,22 this type of ‘roughedged, mocking give and take’23 is a basic component of what M. 173

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M. Bakhtin has described as a culture of laughter that spontaneously springs from the interrogative, mocking folk attitude towards canonical textual and cultural discourses. Bakhtin locates the origins of novelistic discourse in ‘the genres of familiar speech found in conversational folk language and also in certain folkloric and low literary genres’.24 Narrative dialogia emerges out of the ‘interanimation of languages’ inscribed into the novel genre. The representation and juxtaposition of clashing social languages and textual discourses in the novel are what distinguish the genre from a monoglot classical canon – scripture, epic and tragedy: ‘only polyglossia fully frees consciousness from the tyranny of its own language and its own myth of language’. Bakhtin labels this emancipatory narrative strategy ‘parodic-travestying literature’ – a critical category that has significant implications for a revisionist reading of The Land in relation to its textual predecessors. It is important to keep in mind here the problematic nature of the colloquial as a literary language in the modern Arabic context. Vernacular dialogue was widely considered to be both an aesthetic and a social impropriety because it challenged the supremacy and the dignity of the classical Arabic language and canon, and because it represented a vulgar transgression against the moral and social sensibilities of the nationalist bourgeoisie. The compromise ‘third language’ that emerged in the 1920s in Egypt was intended to address this problem, by standardizing the content of ‘national character’ and culture and by erasing the uncomfortable potential for the emergence of narrative voices and languages that did not fit the dominant political and linguistic model. In Zaynab for example, the voices of the peasantry are imprisoned within the hegemonic language of the subject. The Maze of Justice cautiously and briefly explores the potentially chaotic and destructive consequences of unleashing these voices into the text. While remaining firmly rooted in a nationalist sensibility, The Land, by contrast, foregrounds these repressed and marginalized voices in order to challenge the discursive authority of institutional power in a rural context. The two major discourses that are challenged and parodied in the novel are those of literary romanticism and religion. The former is a discourse associated, through both its language and its canonical texts, with the figure of the acculturated intellectual. This character, as represented by the boy-narrator and in a truncated comic form by the pompous village school-teacher, Muhammad Efendi, is set apart from the village community by 174

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virtue of his urban education and a private social ambition that often puts him at odds with the collective aspirations of the rebelling villagers. He is differentiated from the community by the privileges of his acquired social status and in contradistinction to the oral folk traditions of the village, his cultural world is constructed around the texts of popular romanticism and nahdawi modernism. Where these languages meet in the novel, the result is parody. The boy-narrator’s frustrated attempt to communicate his passion to the impatient Wasifah is an excellent example of the persistent debunking of the language of romantic fiction in the novel: I gathered my courage and tried to grasp Wasifah’s shoulders so that I could speak flaming words to her, the two of us losing consciousness in a passionate embrace that would last till morning – exactly as I had seen in films and read about in the stories published in ‘Al-Fukahah’, ‘AlGama‘ah’ and ‘Al-Sabah’ and in the stories from A Thousand and One Nights. But my hands only reached a part of her waist. So I said to myself, ‘Well and good. Now she should lean backwards and sigh and say, “oh, my beloved!” ’ just like in the popular stories I had read in Cairo. She was tall and full-figured – just like in the stories – proud as an Indian princess. But unfortunately, I had yet to become a medieval knight (just like in the stories!). In any case, I gave it a try. I grasped her waist violently, held her tight and, in a voice that I tried to make as gentle as possible, said, ‘Oh my dearest…how I love thee…’ She grabbed my arms with her rough hands and said, ‘Ouch! Speak up a little…cat got your tongue?’ I repeated myself, a little louder this time, and waited for her to close her eyes in astonishment or gaze into the distance with, at least, half-closed eyes. I waited for her full lips to quiver…to moan, for her breast to rise and fall as she asked me ‘is true then? Oh my darling!’ Then she would lay her head on my shoulder, her black hair, thick as a perfumed forest, falling over her face. I would lift her

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head between my palms and gaze into her eyes passionately, then we would cling to each other in a kiss… I waited for all this to happen…but Wasifah didn’t oblige me with a single one of these fancies. Instead, she pulled away abruptly, nose in the air, rubbed her face vigorously, stared, and said, ‘what a bunch of hooey! Why are you talking like that, man? I can’t make it out. I don’t understand that English stuff, see? Just give it to me straight…tell me what you want, sweetie’. (pp. 29–30) [24–5] Since the nuances of Arabic diglossia are difficult to translate into English, the parodic use of language in this passage is largely lost. However, the juxtaposition of an exaggeratedly romantic classical language in both the boy’s narration of the scene and in the words he speaks to Wasifah (ya habibati, kayfa uhibbuki!) and Wasifah’s coarse colloquial response (in addition to the burlesque of her physical gestures) is clearly intended to parody the former, as well as to ridicule the figure of the would-be city intellectual.25 Similarly, the men who gather to petition the government regarding the new irrigation rules nominate Muhammad Efendi to write it, based on his obvious (and in general quite useless) literary qualifications, which are nonetheless humorously perceived by the villagers to be an adjunct of his ridiculous vanity: “Come on Muhammad Efendi, write it up, this minute, and we’ll stick our thumb-prints on it. Is this grand or is this grand? And put some of those foreign school-words in it too – like la siyyama [especially] and ‘indama [when] and qablama [before]. Sure, and maybe some of the stuff you read us from the [newspaper]’ (p. 70). The rhetorical style of classical Arabic grammar and prose is again invoked as a target of folk mockery and is implicitly contrasted to the earthy non-standard language of the peasants. Muhammad Efendi accepts the commission and solemnly declares that he will write the petition ‘in the style of al-Manfaluti’ (p. 72), to the great consternation of the men who have no idea who ‘this Manfaluti’ might be. Davis’ description of novelistic dialogue as a kind of ‘nationalized language…which equates knowledge, status and power…with [normative] linguistic usage’ is turned upside down in The Land. These normative textual languages are clearly associated with affluence and exploitative power in the novel, be it the occupying English, or the native oligarchs over whom Muhammad Efendi habitually fawns. The illiterate villagers are suspicious of 176

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them and intuitively apprehend them as the potential instruments of illegitimate authority. Wasifah’s impatience and her mocking refusal to acknowledge the colonial authority of the boy-narrator’s alien and imposing discourse is paralleled by the villagers’ strategic use of this discourse (via Muhammad Efendi) to petition the distant and awesome institutions of the Cairo government. The discourse of religious authority is also scrutinized and challenged by The Land’s villagers. Muhammad Abu-Swaylam and ‘Abd al-Hadi make numerous jabs at the local imam’s incessant and pompous preaching. The relationship between ideology, religion and a brutal political status quo is foregrounded in the novel through Shaykh Shinnawi’s hypocritical and treacherous alliance with the local brokers of the government’s power – the ‘Umdah and Mahmud Bey. It is Shaykh Shinnawi who facilitates the ‘Umdah’s betrayal of the village by shepherding the illiterate peasants – ‘in the name of God and his prophet’ (p. 104) – into providing their seals for the false petition against the new irrigation rules. This petition turns out instead to be the calamitous document granting the government the right to build a road over a good part of the village’s farmlands. Shaykh Shinnawi’s hypocrisy and meanness are further highlighted by his pious refusal to give Khadrah – the impoverished village prostitute found dead in mysterious circumstances – a proper burial while having solicited a large donation for the local mosque from her sister, a wealthy Cairene brothel-keeper. ‘Abd al-Hadi is the slippery renegade who constantly eludes the imam’s efforts to make a praying man out of him, and speaks truth to power. It is he who fiercely points out this flaw in Shaykh Shinnawi’s pietistic language based on a clear understanding of the intersections between class and social morality: ‘Come on man, which sister is the “impure” one – the one who earns her bread by the sweat of her brow or the one whose fancy cabaret keeps her in gold?’ (p. 192). It is also ‘Abd alHadi who objects to the Shaykh as possible author of the irrigation petition, framing his irreverent objection in terms of the obscurantist nature of theological discourse: ‘Humph. He’ll just stick in a bunch of stuff about hellfire and judgment day, the government’ll get pissed off and spite us even more. They’ll say, “ok, let’s see his angels rain down water for ’em from the heavens” ’ (p.71). The enraged Shaykh is finally appeased by the bemused heathen’s conciliatory appeal to his semantic decorum and to his stomach:

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if this petition works out and they give us our water back, I’ll throw a party for God’s people. There – happy? I swear, I’ll even roast a goat! You appreciate a good chunk of goat meat, don’t you? Let God’s people eat and be merry – and you too my good Shaykh! (p. 71) Even the text of the Qur’an itself is not exempt from this kind of affectionate profanation. The villagers joke about the ludicrous luxury implicit in the idea of their sleeping in beds, punning in the process, on straightforward Qur’anic language: ‘That’s right Muhammad Efendi, like we really sleep on beds! Or on “couches raised” [surur marfu‘ah] or maybe on “cushions scattered” [namariq mabthuthah], or maybe even on “sofas ranged” [ara’ik masfufah]…lord, we must be in heaven!’ (p. 81).26 The festive audience that attends and ecstatically comments on the Qur’an reciter’s inspirational reading of 2:259 at the ‘Umdah’s funeral (pp. 300–304) interacts with the sacred text on two levels. First, it appropriates and recreates the solemn text of the chapter as carnival, to be profanely, sensually and, above all, collectively read and celebrated. Second, it directly participates in the reciter’s parodic political reading, intended to humiliate the local landlord, the police commissioner and his officials in attendance at the funeral. The reciter’s choice of the verse is in and of itself a comment on the arrogance of power. Moreover, his insistent and exaggerated repetition of the line ‘look at thine ass’ (undhur ila himarik) is understood by his audience as a specific reference to the dignified guests.27 Through their vocal acclaim and ecstatic interjections, the delighted villagers engage in the traditional practice of inviting the reciter to repeat and elaborate the tone of the line in order to discomfit the authorities even further. Meanwhile, as a corollary to this ritual, a heated political discussion breaks out, at the end of which the landlord and the police officials are ejected from the funeral. This communal, festive and ultimately political appropriation of holy writ is described by Bakhtin as being the very essence, historically and structurally, of ‘the dialogic imagination’, for with it, ‘two myths perish simultaneously: the myth of a language that presumes to be the only language, and the myth of a language that presumes to be completely unified’.28 If reading in the novel is presented as a collective, critical project whereby the sacrosanct nature of the text and of textuality in general is interrogated and strategically appropriated by the 178

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villagers, so too is the act of writing redefined as a filiative process. In marked contrast to the solitary image of the sequestered and aloof writer, lost in the corridors of his imagination or dutifully laboring away in the service of art and individual conscience, The Land celebrates writing as a collective project of empowerment and solidarity. This emancipatory model of writing is marked by the effective intersection between the oral and the textual. The drawing up of the famous irrigation petition embodies this attitude towards the collectively authored text. The spoken word, and the process of collective and democratic textual criticism, are incorporated into the final document. The entire village loudly participates in this process, contributing ideas, comments, and even the material instruments with which the document is to be produced: Muhammad Abu Swaylam stood behind Muhammad Efendi with the lamp…and the rest of the men stood in front of him. He read out loud every single word he wrote, balancing the paper on his knee, the ink-pot held out for him by one of the men. When he had finished, he read the whole thing out loud, word after word, pausing proudly while pronouncing some of them…and patiently explaining others to which some of the standing men objected.…Then Shaykh Shinnawi got up, went outside and brought back a handful of dirt which he placed on the document.…After it had thoroughly dried, Muhammad Efendi said, ‘Alright men’, and Muhammad Abu Swaylam triumphantly added, ‘the petition’s finished, soldiers!’. (p. 73) [61] The assembled men then add their signatures or seals, one by one, in a procession that is at once solemn and festive, each proudly conscious of his own role in the writing of a common destiny.

The country and the city Many critics of The Land have faulted the novel for what they have described as its unrealistic politicization of the Egyptian village. According to this paradigm, village culture is characterized by its simplicity and an entrenched political naivety, while the city 179

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remains the true locus of sophisticated political knowledge and activism. ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, who devotes a lengthy chapter to Sharqawi’s novel in his study of the village novel, praises it for its strident historicity while finding fault with its unrealistically radical political depiction of the Egyptian peasant. For, While it is entirely logical that an Egyptian village would violently resist any exploitation of its land – its source of bread and life – it is perhaps difficult to believe that this village would act in defense of abstract principles such as freedom, the constitution or the Wafd, or against what it perceives to be Sidqi’s comprador bourgeois regime.29 Badr identifies the cosmopolitan city with the possibility of organized political resistance, while the country is defined by the limits of its own immediate and narrowly provincial concerns – ‘bread and life’. Sayyid ‘Abdallah ‘Ali takes a similar binary approach to the novel which sets up a dialectical opposition between the village/the land/the nation and the city/the government/the pasha (all those who are ‘against the nation’).30 The struggle for liberation in the novel is thus defined spatially and archetypically and in essentialized moral terms. ‘Ali implicitly reverts to an idealized image of the peasantry as the unspoiled collective repository of the nation’s greatness, while isolating and rejecting the city as decadent, tyrannical, ‘anti-nation’. A closer reading of the text, however, shows that The Land’s genius lies precisely in its rejection of the idea of essential cultural or geographical specificity and in its diachronic vision of time, place and the nature of power, authority and resistance. The story of The Land is ultimately about the process through which oppressed communities, both urban and rural, struggle to acquire knowledge and freedom. Raymond Williams has offered this narrative project as a radical alternative to the dominant model of the regional novel, which typically presents the life of the provinces as an a-historical and autonomous zone unaffected by the spread of capitalist modernity. Williams suggests the possibility of writing novels rooted in region and class…[and] seek[ing] the substance of those finer-drawn, often occluded relations and relationships which in their pressures and interventions at 180

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once challenge, threaten, change and yet, in the intricacies of history, contribute to the formation of that class or region in self-realization and in struggle, including especially new forms of self-realization and struggle.31 This ‘self-realization in struggle’ is the proper action of The Land, for while the conclusion of the village’s rebellion against the government is left in doubt at the end of the novel, the individual characters and the village community as a whole have undergone a definitive social and political transformation that heralds the beginning of a new era of expanded consciousness and larger solidarities. Shaykh Hassunah, the venerable headmaster who returns to his native village from his exile in Cairo, is the main agent of the radical pedagogy that lies at the heart of the novel. His repeated exhortations to one and all (but particularly to his ignorant nephew) to ‘understand’ (ifham!) and ‘to know’ (i‘raf!) express The Land’s most basic political imperative, which is the relentless unmasking and critique of the real network of coercive relationships – stretching from the local ‘Umdah to international finance capitalism – in which the village and the country at large are enmeshed. This expanded, radical consciousness is perhaps most succinctly expressed in Hassunah’s frustrated advice to Muhammad Efendi: Look…kick out the British and the Sha‘b party too and bring back the constitution, and the cotton will be fine – or don’t you understand yet? Muhammad…enlighten yourself…read the papers man! Sa‘d Pasha said it’s no use as long as the British are here. (pp. 252–253) It is this consciousness, steadily, if dearly acquired, that enables a number of significant developments in the novel’s characters: Diyab’s transformation from a dull-witted, surly and selfish child, constantly hiding behind his brother’s coattails, to a purposeful and independent young man; his brother Muhammad Efendi’s progress from frivolous neophyte to a serious and dependable teacher; the boy-narrator’s metamorphosis from adolescence to maturity, and even the entire village’s dearly acquired solidarity. Moreover, the city/country opposition that both Badr and ‘Ali read into the novel is most certainly submitted to the same kind of 181

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critical, deconstructive scrutiny. Instead of a cultural and political space dominated by ideologically determined geographic discriminations, the novel offers the alternative vision of a community of struggle that stretches from the village to the capital itself, and that is defined, not by competing notions of country and city, but by shared oppressions and resistances. It is this radical consciousness that enables the Nubian soldier, Sergeant ‘Abdallah, himself a peasant, to rethink his affiliations and empathize with the persecuted lower Egyptian villagers. Moreover, the boy-narrator repeatedly points to the miserable poverty afflicting both Cairo and his small village, and Shaykh Yusuf is twice reprimanded by Shaykh Hassunah for his incessant jibes at the unemployed youths who have returned to the village from Cairo through reference to the bravery of similar young men demonstrating and ‘dying right now in the streets of Cairo, Alexandria, Banha, Mansurah, Bani Swayf and Asyut’ (p. 210). This large-scale urban resistance functions as a constant backdrop to the village’s smaller, but no less significant, uprisings against local and central authority. The women’s uprising against the ‘Umdah and his men after the imprisonment of their sons and husbands in the bandar (the district capital) is a central example of the human potential for spontaneous resistance to injustice and oppression. It is described as ‘an unprecedented event’ in the life of the village (p. 236), and far from signaling a tragic rupture with an organic, traditional past, it enables a whole series of new strategies for solidarity and struggle. Moreover, the men’s harrowing incarceration in the bandar becomes an affirmation of the potential solidarities between the dispossessed of both city and country, for it is in prison that the villagers are further politicized and encouraged by fellow (urban) prisoners. The spontaneous demonstration that erupts in town during the official visit of state functionaries, and the renewed sense of purpose and understanding it gives the villagers, leads to a near-total, liberatory collapse of the traditional structures of authority in the village itself. Anything becomes possible: on the one hand, Sergeant ‘Abdallah’s beating of the vicious Police Commissioner and the ‘Umdah’s guards’ open rebellion against their master; on the other hand, Shaykh Yusuf’s sudden defection to the government’s contractors and his selfserving pursuit of the vacant ‘Umdaship. The second imprisonment with which the novel closes is this time experienced as a festive occasion: as the men feast on the meal smuggled into their makeshift cell, ‘Abd al-Hadi and ‘Ilwani’s laughing repartee 182

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can be clearly heard from without, a token of continuing solidarity and struggle in the face of temporary defeat. In this context, the mysterious figure of Uncle Kassab emerges as a symbol of the integrative possibilities of the future. Appearing suddenly for the first time at the end of the novel, his origins and his role in the community are vague. To the boy-narrator, he is an object of fascination and awe, even reverence. The little that is known of his checkered past suggests that he is an urban jack-ofall-trades and a political exile of sorts: Uncle Kassab the driver fell silent for a moment as he shook his head and gazed into the distance. Then he told me that he knew it all…he had lived in Alexandria and worked as a carriage-driver during the war and had seen how foreign soldiers behave when they descend upon a large, poor city. He also knew what a bunch of [native] soldiers with a little change in their pockets could do in a small village whose land was being stolen away. He sighed and continued, saying that he had worked a hundred different jobs – carriage-driver, school janitor, barrackslaborer, textile-worker. He had participated in the revolution while in Alexandria and after the revolution, in the workers’ strikes and he had been imprisoned and seen hell. (p. 342) He tells the boy that he is waiting out the expiration of his prison parole in order to return to Alexandria and begin anew. His reflections on the difficult necessity of learning from experience as the only viable revolutionary way to live and grow provokes the boy to yet another advanced stage of self-realization. ‘His words seemed dense with memories and experience; with a knowledge of life’s secrets of which I was completely ignorant – I who had studied at school and learned how to map the four continents’ (p. 377). Moreover, it is Uncle Kassab whom the narrator suspects will eventually marry Wasifah, saving her from the disgrace of working for the corrupt government contractors, and it is Uncle Kassab who will go into partnership with Muhammad AbuSwaylam – now divested of his land by the new road – to set up a mill on the selfsame road. Thus loss and defeat are transformed into the promise of a new beginning that incorporates the old and the new: ‘I recalled what [Uncle Kassab] always used to say; that a 183

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man mustn’t fall, and that in any circumstances, he has to learn how to start over again’ (p. 385). And so, on the narrator’s return journey to Cairo, he hears ‘a sad song echoing from a corner of the village’ at which the train has stopped: ‘ “I hope to meet my love on the new road/From dusk to dusk I walk out to the new road” ’ (p. 387). The incontrovertible fact of the new road being built – causing so much loss and devastation in its wake – has already been assimilated and transformed by the powerful mythopoeic imagination of folk song in a creative act of redemption and renewal; a mark of the strength and resilience of the collective will to live and move forward in spite of all. The boy’s entry into Cairo is described as an epiphany of sorts. He sees the thronging life of the city with new eyes; a poignant affirmation of the myriad, busy hopes, dreams and struggles of ordinary people everywhere, in the city and in the country: As I sat by my brother’s side [in the carriage], I stared at the Cairo streets, captivated by the noise, the mule-drawn carts, the fancy, colorful cars, the women in dresses and men in suits, the tram, the barefooted pedestrians in dull galabiyyas…and the soldiers! I was moved by these sights from which I had been separated by four long summer months and it was as though I were seeing a new city for the first time: A crowded vision of hundreds of fathers and mothers and children moving between the shops. ‘School’s starting soon’, my brother murmured and his words echoed strangely, deep inside me. Our carriage advanced slowly in the crowd, mixing with my dreams…as we proceeded through the streets of Cairo, my veins throbbing with memories of my village, memories that I will never be able to forget. (p. 388) [251]

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By the end of the 1960s, Egyptian writers and intellectuals had begun to re-articulate their experience of history as an existential dilemma – a rupture between an anomic, disoriented self and a epressive, archaic society. In a short essay entitled ‘Glimpses of My Experience As A Novelist’, ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim reflects on the undamental existential and historical cleavage that has consistently nformed his writing on the village: ‘the tortuous journey’, that, echoing ‘the clatter of the train’s wheels on the tracks’, runs between ‘the hell of a terrifying reality and the futility of the imposible dream’.1 This dream/reality opposition, in which men and women seek to evade the brutality and mutability of their daily existence, is further elucidated by its temporal analog, the conflict between past and present in the life of the community. Impotence and sterility are the inevitable consequences of the attempt to escape ‘reality’ or the present by immersion in the dream of the past. Qasim asserts that it is the critical role of the writer to explore and expose this false duality whenever and wherever it may exist: As I became more aware, both of myself and of the world around me, I understood that my critical vocation hadn’t just dropped upon me from the sky, prophecy-like. Human reality is affirmative, and, indeed, my people reject this duality, this fragmentation. During revolutionary periods in our history, people were able to raise themselves above this passivity and decadence and to resist their reality with vitality and seriousness of purpose; to put the dream – the ancestral past – in its true place: not as an escape and a refuge, but as a force with which to multiply resistance. During the [present] age of decadence and disastrous defeat, this fragmentation prevails once again but the 185

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people can never fall back to the same point from which they began.2 In these brief lines, Qasim traces the twenty-odd year gap that separates the world of The Land from that of his 1969 novel, The Seven Days of Man. The conflict between two mutually antagonistic worlds of which Qasim speaks – and which can be rendered in a number of analogous dualisms (past/present; tradition/modernity; country/city) – is realized, in The Seven Days of Man, through the familiar trope of the divided self now returned in a decade of lost hopes and unities. The primary historical emblem of this loss is the monumental military and political defeat of 1967. The infamous Six Day War marks an immensely significant juncture in modern Arab history, equally important, if not more so, than 1952, the year of Nasser’s revolution and the beginning of those heady, if troubled years of independence and pan-Arab nationalism. The stunning Israeli victory of June 1967 and the consequent occupation of a significant chunk of strategic Arab lands – including Egypt’s Sinai Desert – heralded the end of the ailing Nasserist regime; a regime whose numerous internal contradictions and increasingly authoritarian and repressive domestic policies had already significantly alienated its popular and intellectual base, and sown the seeds for Anwar al-Sadat’s ‘counter-revolution’. The devastation inflicted on what Edward alKharrat terms ‘the national ego’ by the defeat of 1967 forced writers and intellectuals to reconsider not only the nature of the modernist project, defined as committed, socialist, realist and historically progressive, but the very legitimacy of the national state itself.3 Sadat’s ‘open door’ effectively put an end to the national struggle for economic independence, political non-alignment and the creation of a democratic socialist, pan-Arab bloc. With the advent of the 1970s, the Sadat decade, Egypt and other Arab countries knew an almost diametrical reversal of fortunes…: the Camp David talks and the ‘Peace’ Treaty with Israel…the severance of Egypt’s diplomatic relations with almost all the other Arab countries; the open-door policy of Sadat; the growing ascendancy of consumerist ‘values’ and the attendant recession of ‘socialist’ ideologies and practices alike; the ‘brain drain’ and the intellectuals’ emigration; the occasional outbreaks of communal violence and the re-affirmation of Islamic 186

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fundamentalism; the rampant monetary inflation, and the decline of both moral and material resources. This period saw the first decade of the protracted Lebanese fratricidal civil war, the second exodus of the Palestinians after the Israeli invasion of Lebanon, the continued occupation by Israel of what remained of the old Palestine, the supremacy of the oil countries, the floundering discrepancy of the Arab States’ policies, the national rifts and ethnic conflicts in Morocco, Iraq and Sudan, and the almost total eclipse of Pan-Arabist ideology. With this rapid and tumultuous course of events, the very precept of reality came to be questioned in Arabic literature.4 As far as literature is concerned, al-Kharrat views this catastrophic series of events as liberatory, enabling a final rejection of the hegemony of a sterile and derivative realism, and the creation of new narrative forms – what he named, ‘the new sensibility’ (alhasasiyyah al-jadidah) in Arabic fiction.5 Though this process certainly began before the year of the June defeat, as we have seen in Chapter 4, the decade of the 1970s accelerated and institutionalized the political and economic corruption that had lurked underneath the surface of Nasser’s Egypt. After 1967, the new village novel foregrounds and magnifies the subject’s historical dislocation in terms of a geographical and existential rupture. While in the fiction of the 1950s and early 1960s this structure of feeling is articulated in a minor key, it becomes an organizing trope in the neo-realist village novel. Qasim describes this resurgent dilemma in terms of a historic illegitimacy: The problem manifested itself for me as a conflict between two worlds: the first, oppressive, but real and hence, inevitable; the second, a refuge, an escape and hence, a dream…I began to negotiate [the discrepancy between] the two worlds – that of my village, where I was born and raised and that of the city, where I was educated and worked – with the will of a fox. The train carried me away from my village – from that slow, twilight realm, reaching upward to the heavens and downwards to the beginning of time and history. It carried me to the city, blazing with a light that mercilessly illuminated the corners of dim consciousness, and raging with a din that drowned out the whispers of the human 187

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soul. I would be seized with tormented rapture and fierce alienation. I would rush back to my refuge. There, in the village, I found that my speech echoed the rhythms of the city, and my heart would curse and rage against it. Once again, I was a stranger. I realized that the clatter of the train’s wheels on the tracks was my own fate, my own voice; A bastard, I; my loyalties forever divided.6 In The Seven Days of Man and Baha’ Tahir’s East of the Palms, the subject is written as an outcast, both rejecting and rejected by his family and his community. This organic collectivity is in turn marginalized by the social and technological transformations of modernity, understood as the ineluctable movement of history, but a history made by and for others. The subject now experiences a doubled alienation from both strands of his bastard lineage: the numbing refuge of the native village and the seductive promise of the glittering city. Disinheritance becomes the dominant metaphor of this experience. The protagonists of both novels are literally cut off from their ancestral and material patrimony and forced to negotiate a new relationship to the collective body. Moreover, this is not properly speaking a moment of ‘postcolonial’ liberation from the burden of an antiquated past, but one of neo-imperial crisis that forces a profound re-examination of collective history and identity.

The Seven Days of Man The Seven Days of Man explores the encounter between rural culture and the disciplinary discourses of modernity. This encounter is repeatedly evoked in modern Arabic fiction, most notably in Yahya Haqqi’s novella Qindil Umm Hashim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim) and much of al-Tayyib Salih’s writing, for example. In The Seven Days of Man, the subject grows to internalize the binary discourses articulated by modernity (faith/intellect, the body/the spirit) in an essentially destructive and disorienting process of rebellion against the community. In the profoundly pietistic culture of the Sufi village, the mystic ‘way’ (altariq) represents a cosmology in which human desire and appetite are inseperable from the mystery of divine creation. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s growing obsession with the material functions of the body is linked in the novel to the stages of his education in the city, and his internalization of the modern protocols by which this body is managed and contained. While the body’s self-gratification – food, 188

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hashish, sex – is mediated by the Sufi cosmology as an aspect of ‘the way’ – the meandering path to divine love – it is unequivocally condemned by both the orthodox keepers of religious law and by the modern secular reformer. The mature ‘Abd al-‘Aziz is bitterly ashamed of his kinfolk’s ‘backwardness’: the gluttony and squalor of their lives. As in The Lamp of Umm Hashim, the novel’s climax provokes a naked confrontation between the ‘blind’ reformer and the multitude – the hosts of men and women silenced and relegated to the margins of history, ‘God’s folk…whose very steps shake the Throne’. The ‘seven days’ of the novel’s title are seven discrete moments in the life of a young man growing up in a small Delta village. Each chapter describes a consecutive stage in the cyclic Sufi year that revolves around the village’s annual pilgrimage to the Saint’s shrine in Tanta (al-Sayyid al-Badawi) and delineates a specific stage in the child/man’s development as he outgrows the primeval communal circle and is eventually exiled from the secret of its cohesion and its magical, regenerative time.7 It is a profoundly moving story that captures the anguish of separation and individuation as psychological and historical processes. In Origins of the Novel, Marthe Robert explores the psychological and mythic structure of the genre in Europe, primarily through the triadic Oedipal model, or the ‘family romance’. Robert argues that the faiseur du romans, the hero/novelist, teller of stories, unable to cope with the parental disappointments of early childhood, invents a new, magical or aristocratic lineage for himself: royal parents who have lost or abandoned him through some trick of fate, thus marking himself out for an exceptional destiny as against the poverty and mediocrity represented by his ‘foster parents’. Having once idealized these parents, he now despises them as harsh reality sets in and they are revealed to him in their true, unexceptional, tyrannical and, especially, sexual natures. He thus recreates himself as the disowned foundling of myth and fairy-tale who must discover and reclaim for himself this other, noble lineage and destiny as his due right. According to Robert, this is the archetypal space in which the novel is constructed.8 Transposed to a sociological context, this model becomes particularly useful for a reading of the historical dislocation produced in The Seven Days of Man, and indeed, in the narrative production of an entire generation, trapped between the ritual memory of an idealized past and the contemporary experience of a world out of joint. The reverberations of this essential conflict acquire partic189

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ular resonance in the space demarcated by the village novel, the rural hinterland being the ‘essential’ repository of immutable tradition, ancestral memory, and the organic collective body. We have seen the collectivity discretely managed as theatrical prop in Zaynab, satirized in The Maze of Justice and dialogically negotiated through speech and communal storytelling in The Land. The Seven Days of Man takes this type of representation to another level. Lennard Davis’ analysis of the novel genre’s problematic representation of the collective has been discussed in Chapter 5. While it is true that, generally, ‘masses of people tend to be portrayed metaphorically as forces of nature’, – a swarm of bees, the pulsing veins of a leaf – Qasim recreates the collectivity as a monolithic, organic body: the many-headed dragon of myth and fairy-tale whose power and monstrosity is both fearsome and seductive, but most importantly, irresistible. This remarkable symbol appears in novels as far-removed in time and space as Edwar Al-Kharrat’s Rama wal Tinnin (Rama and the Dragon) and Emile Zola’s Germinal. In Rama, it appears in the guise of the laboring peasants viewed by the narrator from a passing train; in Germinal, it is the furious, rushing mob of striking miners bent on destruction. This same monster appears to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz – the hero of The Seven Days of Man – in the form of the ecstatic worshippers in Tanta on the night of the Great Feast (Al-Laylah al-Kabirah), carrying him away with the force of its own monumental volition. In Qasim’s novel, the body of the dragon is metaphorically subsumed into the body of the king/father, whose regal virility, literally ‘unclothed’, signals the beginning of the end of his reign and the kingdom over which he rules. The Seven Days of Man is molded by the tension between ‘the way’ of this monolithic collective body and the modern subject’s competing libido. Structurally speaking, this tension is delineated by the different narrative strategies employed in the first and second halves of the novel. Roughly, the first three to four chapters of the novel narrate the structural permutations of this collective body through a rich, multi-layered rendering of time, space and narrative voice, while the remaining chapters directly reflect ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s by now fully individuated and linear pointof-view. The echoes of a primeval, pre-national time and place haunt the opening chapters of Qasim’s novel. Muhammad Badawi’s description of this time as ‘stretching’, throughout the history of Arab, Islamic civilization, ‘with a continuous, regular beat’ till the 190

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moment of its catastrophic and irrevocable disruption by Western colonialism, is itself an example of the mythical, exilic history that informs the psychic space of the novel.9 The novel mimics this organicist concept of history by simultaneously and directly incorporating many times and voices into the text. Time and space are organized around the village’s sacred cult of the dead. The living and the dead of generations immemorial form a single, continuous living chain in which historical, linear time becomes a meaningless category. Real time is the sacred time of divine eternity, while worldly time can only be usefully marked through the static, cyclical stages of the Sufi year. The dead are commemorated weekly at Hajj Karim’s Friday gatherings as brothers who were the flowers of these evenings, then death folded them into their graves, but the devotees never forget them.…Muhammad Kamil suggests a prayer for the soul of each: They are the abode of eternity and we, the abode of temporality.10 This cult of the dead is also marked annually in the solemn feast day procession to the cemetery where each grave is lovingly tended and saluted with the greeting, ‘God’s peace and mercy upon the abode of a faithful people. You are the leaders and we, the followers’ (p. 26). As the leader of the Sufi brotherhood that dominates the life of the village, Hajj Karim, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s formidable father, is also the leader of this cult. The imposing scion of an ancient order, he rules from the diwan of his ancestral house, which claims the entire village’s kinship and allegiance. The haunted ancestral house thus emerges as a central, symbolic space in the novel. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz recalls his paternal aunt’s house in a distant village, vast…with long, dark corridors. The family’s great grandfather was buried between its walls. They had placed a lamp on this tomb that was never permitted to die out and would cast fearful glances at it whenever passing by. A strange people; their oldest daughter a spinster whose body brimmed with spirits. (p. 43) In the same way that the living and the dead share a single physical and symbolic space, time in the first part of the novel 191

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revolves in an unbroken circle. The first four chapters, describing ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s childhood and early adolescence, are marked by a multi-dimensional, continuous trajectory of narrated time in which past, present and future are seamlessly interwoven. A typical instance of this circular time uses the present as its point of departure in narrating a central, communal event in ‘Abd al‘Aziz’s development (often signaled by the chapter titles themselves: ‘Baking Day’ (Al-Khabidh); ‘The Journey’ (Al-Safar); ‘The Hostel’ (Al-Khidmah), then suddenly switches to the imperfect or future tense in order to further elaborate the static and repetitive nature of this event in the life of the village and in the young boy’s memory, before once again switching back to the present.11 As ‘Abd al-‘Aziz matures and rebels against his family and the world that it represents, this temporal circle is gradually broken and the narrative becomes conventional and linear. The complex texture of narrative voice(s) parallels the novel’s multi-layered temporality. Throughout the early chapters, the third-person narration closely follows ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s compressed and poetic stream-of-consciousness, but also regularly incorporates sharply foregrounded snatches of ungrammatical colloquial dialogue and the impersonal, ‘proverbial’, Sufi voice, producing an immediate, polyphonic effect that complicates and disrupts the hegemony of realist narration. In the first chapter particularly, the combination of three-dimensional time and a generic, liturgical or proverbial voice highlights the extent of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s primary integration into the village’s ritualized collective psyche: Hajj Muhammad – Hajj Karim’s father – possessed vast lands, cattle and horses, then need and loyalty to the brothers whisked it all away. At the time, Hajj Karim was a tender youth, who rode about mounted on his steed like a prince. People are merely the guardians of that which they possess not and the purpose of life is that which lies beyond life. An obscure, magical, tranquil world inflames the heart, and Hajj Karim lights his lamp every evening for the brothers, as he lights up the gathering with his sweet conversation. Happy is he who opens his heart to friendship and purity; his few acres many, with God’s everlasting grace. (p. 13, italics added) [7] And again: 192

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The carpenter Salim Al-Sharkasi’s wife, tall and fair, gave him six daughters though the man’s deepest desire was for a boy-child. He became increasingly irritable and a note of despair haunted his voice. Thus it came to pass that he was drawn to the Way. His wife gave birth to a son whom they named Shahhat [Beggar], for we are all beggars and the scraps and pleasures of this world are but few. (p. 28, italics added) [22] The voices of the brothers – profoundly ir/reverent and syntactically archaic – create a grammatical disjunction in the narration that at first complements and later competes with that of the third-person narrator, but on the whole, produces a ‘haunting’ of the narration analogous to the ancestral haunting of the living community. The early narrative moves through a succession of enclosed, sacred spaces that locate the devotional activities of the collective body: from the crowded family bedroom where ‘Abd al-‘Aziz sleeps head-to-toe with his parents and many siblings to the enchanted circle of Hajj Karim’s Friday gatherings, to the dark kitchen where the boy’s mother presides over the annual baking of the saint’s bread. When the father finishes telling his prayer-beads, he piles them into his pocket, slaps the foot tucked under his other leg and sighs deeply, whispering the name of the Sultan.…At that very moment ‘Abd al-‘Aziz expects his father to call for the lamp, for tonight, everything has its time and place. The boy returns with the huge lamp, full of kerosene, its glass polished. The father lights it with a match and the boy carries it to the reception room, climbing on top of a chair in order to fix it in the lantern that hangs from the ceiling, then fastens the panel shut. Its golden rays spreads across the white walls, the gilded engravings come alive casting glittering, illuminated patterns into the darkness, and a wide circle of soft light traces itself on the tiled floor, its boundaries continually shifting with the lantern’s gentle sway. (p. 9) [3] This is the circle weekly occupied by the initiated; those who, in spite of the unrelenting and endless toils of the day, seek ‘the secret of generation and decay’ at Hajj Karim’s Friday gatherings. The 193

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child ‘Abd al-‘Aziz attends ‘the brothers’ in silent awe and delight as they come together to regularly reaffirm their love and friendship, their membership in the collective body that is their mystic order and, by extension, the tightly knit social fabric of the Sufi village. The meetings are an amalgam of good fellowship – storytelling, gossip, ribald joking – and religious ritual; a blending of the sacred and the profane which essentially defines the community’s popular and profoundly humanistic reading of divine creation. In this reading, sensual appetite is but one of the many possible approaches to the divine, which is ultimately defined, in the Sufi cosmology, as love attained through desire. Thus all human activities, including indulgence in food, sex and even drugs and alcohol, can be assimilated to the vast space of divine love and mercy. A profound and gently humorous compassion infuses the village’s popular religion, for the saint, Al-Sayyid al-Badawi himself, is ‘vast-bellied, caring nothing for sin’ (he swallows a stolen chicken whole so that the thief’s children would not be tainted by her crime! [pp. 58–59]). Similarly, Shaykh ‘Abbas, the local Azhari drop-out, declares hashish to be lawful as it is merely a plant that is, moreover, not specifically prohibited by the Qur’an (p. 139) and he also presides over a comic legal discussion on theft: ‘By God, Shaykh ‘Abbas, you deserve a shrine of your own! Your stomach is bigger even than Sayyid Badawi’s!’. But Mistikawi, assuming a sullen air, mimics alSharqawi: ‘Tell me Shaykh ’Abbas, is mule-theft lawful or prohibited?’. To which Al-‘Ayiq replies in mock-earnestness, ‘It’s not prohibited Mistikawi – but it pains the angels’ hearts’. The entire gathering breaks out into riotous laughter and ‘Abbas curses them all, ‘You drugged-out sons of bitches!’. (p. 92) [82] As a child, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz intuitively inhabits this profoundly plural, tolerant world, simultaneously pious and saturnalian. He fears and loathes the implacable village preacher, ‘that awesome giant who stands amongst the congregation, screaming at the top of his lungs about the terrors of hell-fire – the fate of liars, thieves and fornicators’ (p. 17) and pities his poor little mule, forced to 194

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bear the insupportable weight of his bulk much like the erring villagers themselves. The obverse side of the collective body’s saturnalian hermeneutics is the sacral reading of a popular, oral, counter-hegemonic textuality. The symbolic ritual at the center of Hajj Karim’s enchanted circle is the regular, collective recitation of the sacred texts of the order (hagiologies, popular epics and ballads). These ‘awesome books’, as ‘Abd al-‘Aziz perceives them, are contained in a magical box that stands at the center of the lamp-lit circle: ‘Abd al-‘Aziz watches it being carried in on the shoulders of one of the brothers and placed on the rug at the head of the row of seated dervishes.…People go off to the hardship of a day’s work in the fields, the streets wax empty and the silence weighs heavily on his heart, so he sneaks into the inner room where that huge box is kept and pushes open its heavy lid revealing piles of yellowed books with tiny, cramped script. He boldly ventures to pick one up, terrified, and examine those orderly, compact letters filling pages upon pages, but fails to decipher their secret…how then do these yellow pages transform themselves into a magic that lights up the skies of the brothers’ meetings, as when Hajj Karim sits cross-legged in his spot on the divan and slaps his left foot…: ‘The lamps, Shaykh Ahmad…light up the gathering with the glorious deeds of the virtuous!’. The Book of the Virtuous is brought to Ahmad Badawi and he begins to chant. Obscure images unfold and men, unlike any men, move through the four corners of the earth. Nails pounded into their limbs and their backs scourged with leather whips yet some strange part of them remains unbloodied, untouched by the torture. And when Hajj Karim’s eyes begin to fill with tears, ‘Abd al‘Aziz’s heart collapses in the effort to unravel the unimaginable secret. (pp. 21–22) [15–16] It is this dreadful, fabulous secret, spilling out from the confines of the magical box into the dervishes’ enchanted circle of love and light, that the youthful ‘Abd al-‘Aziz desperately strives to unlock; ‘the secret of generation and decay’, of history as the unfolding of human and divine love – a secret alive in the vast skies above the 195

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village’s ecstatic Dhikr and in the alchemic yeast used to prepare the bread for Al-Sayyid Al-Badawi’s feast day. This expansive, communal Sufi reading of time and history is contrasted to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s school primers, and later to the novels he reads in jealous solitude. As in Zaynab and The Land, novels occupy an ambiguous position in ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s development. The primer, and later the romantic novel, are fabulous products of the rationalist, urban society to which he is increasingly drawn as he pursues his education in Tanta. The primer is explicitly associated with an alien, unreal world populated by clean, neatly coifed boys and girls while the chaste and sentimental novels that ‘Abd al‘Aziz jealously devours as an adolescent isolate him even further from the blunt, robust sensuality of his community. Both of these texts are associated with the disciplinary languages of modernity. The primer offers a model of the nuclear family as the cornerstone of an organized and rational society, while the romantic novel celebrates the individual as a unique and self-sufficient cultural icon. As in Zaynab and The Land, this particular type of reading creates a meta-narrative of emergent subjectivity that is both a model and ‘a refuge’ for the modern subject. Another enactment of the elusive secret takes place at the end of the first chapter, as the enchanted circle expands to include both the entire village and all of creation in another kind of sacred reading – the Dhikr. In the Sufi calendar, this Dhikr takes place a week before the pilgrimage to Tanta for the saint’s feast. The villagers congregate under the open sky to participate in the ecstatic circle in an attempt to connect with the divine spirit. Badawi insightfully describes the dense narration that shapes this scene, which effortlessly moves across both worldly and divine times and places. ‘In a concise and abbreviated, though heavily connotative manner, the narration becomes a deep portrait of a complete world’. This type of three-dimensional, dense narration parallels the dizzying, spiritual and spatial expansion released by the Dhikr; what Badawi calls ‘magic, transformative space’.12 As the dervishes begin their incantation, the dusty, crowded square with its wretched masses suddenly becomes A brilliant world: deserts and sands, seas and rivers, trees and clouds, atoms and solid mass in the heart of each and every creature – beating powerfully though nothing but a mere mote suspended in a ray of sunlight – a warm, beating heart, praising God’s name and praying over his 196

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most glorious creation. And on this strange journey through the regions of the universe, distant firmaments and bottomless depths, these hearts blaze with desire, voices rise and ululations fill the four corners of space. (pp. 40–41) [34] The sacred text itself (the Burdah of Al-Busayri) fills all of creation, its pages magically projected onto the walls of the mosque by the green and white light of its windows for the worshippers to read and marvel at: ‘ “Look boy! Read! The entire Burdah is written on the walls of the mosque”.…Al-Busayri Mosque in Alexandria. The salty smell of the sea fills the air and the letters pulse, alive, in the colored light’ (p. 41) The alchemic yeast at the center of the women’s Dionysian baking circle is also a mystery associated with the magical secret of generation and decay, and most explicitly with the rich fecundity of human sexuality. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s tyrannical mother is the ‘sorceress’ (kahinah) who jealously guards the sacred yeast and presides over the rites of insemination: A large basin piled high with soft flour, sifted silken. ‘Abd al‘Aziz’s mother dips her hand into the salt-jar and brings up the yeast. This is where she jealously guards it. After adding it to the dough, she extracts a piece to put back in the salt jar. From time immemorial, this blessed yeast has moved from dough to dough. She never lends it out, she surrounds it with a veil of secrets and mysteries. In a small pan, she mixes it with some warm water, digs a deep hole in the white flour and pours the warm yeast into it carefully, reverently, trembling as she mutters invocations to the Lord. The girls sitting around the basin wear strangely solemn faces, whispering the same invocations with trembling lips as the warm liquid seeps into the flour.…They fall upon the mixture, kneading it with their hands, thrusting their arms in up to the elbow and pulling out with difficulty. All participate, the adept teasing the novice, strands of hair plastered on sweaty brows, laughter and intoxicated breathing, the sound of arms striking the dough, small breasts, dark, delicate nipples peeping over gaping neck-lines, the heat of kneading thrilling them with laughter. (pp. 61–62) [54]

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The passage inscribes the seamless blending of the sacred and the profane in a single, simple human activity, celebrated as ritual, communal event. This is the women’s circle, a dark, close domain, dominated by the mysteries of the flesh and of fertility as a kind of pantheistic, universal life principle. But whereas the brothers’ circle of light is liberatory and expansive, the primordial fecundity embodied in the women’s’ baking circle inflames, confounds and oppresses the adolescent boy. It is this ‘Baking-Day’ chapter that marks the proper beginning of his libidinal individuation from the collective body as he slowly becomes aware of its stifling, monolithic corporeality. Later, this sexualized corporeality becomes implicitly associated by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz with the squalor and gross sensuality of the rural poor’s ‘backwardness’. In stark contrast to the light and space of the first chapter, ‘Baking-Day’ opens with the claustrophobic imagery of the malodorous human body. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz awakens in the hot, cramped family bedroom to the acrid smell of stale urine and his father’s ‘huge, choking’ presence, embodied in a fat, hairy arm ‘rising to strangle him’. The father’s body, stripped bare, delegitimized, oppresses the young man. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s discovery of his father’s fleshy nakedness and that of his sleeping siblings fills him with ‘a terrifying feeling of sin’, and the image of a gluttonous and predatory nature makes its first appearance in the novel with the tree-snake that swallows a sparrow whole (p. 49). In the following chapter, this snake metamorphoses into ‘a disgusting mouth, fangs dripping pus and poison, uttering the most obscene, impious words’ (p. 82). This is the first moment in ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s rebellion. It is instigated by the child’s sudden apperception of the violence of the flesh; the bestial sex act at the core of his inception and of his very being. The benevolent ‘gathering’ of chapter 1 now becomes the stinking, sweaty nakedness of the communal bedroom; ‘a huge animal lying prostrate under a blanket of sleep’ (p. 48). A succession of increasingly distorted natural metaphors for the collectivity follows, in this and subsequent chapters. At first, these metaphors are neutral and even affectionate: the villagers’ journey, on foot, to the shrine of the saint in Tanta is likened to ‘a swarm of bees who prefer walking to riding those hellish contraptions with their satanic drivers; who prefer walking and talking, conversation, the inexhaustible pleasure of the road’ (p. 103). In the same passage, the narrator draws an aerial image of dynamic community, exquisite in its detail and scope: ‘From every village, people going to the Feast, small flowing streams 198

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between the fields, like veins running through a green leaf’ (p. 102). However, as the novel progresses and ‘Abd al-‘Aziz pursues his education in Tanta, he becomes increasingly alienated from that ‘vast body’ that he simultaneously loves and hates. They are now likened to flies, filthy, prostrate cows, a staring mob that gawks at the city sights ‘with one dazzled eye’ (pp. 114–116). In contrast to the filth and poverty of the village, the city is first offered as the site of a rational and well organized modernity, the site of beauty, knowledge and enlightenment: ‘this is Tanta, ornamented, boisterous, clean and strong’ (p. 132), proudly standing on the ruins of a village just like ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s own. But as he penetrates deeper into its heart, an almost hallucinatory vision of its predatory, decaying structure and the human despair it breeds reveals itself to him: As he pressed on, descending to the heart of the city, the bright, clean colors faded, stained gray, the crowds thickened…bellowing cars, spouting thick smoke from their hoods and tailpipes. The facades of buildings grew darker, dirtier, plastered with advertisements for doctors and lawyers, shops lining both sides of the street – grocers, tobacconists, even auto-repair garages. The little parks scattered here and there seemed decrepit and forlorn, their pretty fences broken apart. People roughly trampling the grass, people with clothes that seemed to have lost their bloom, slightly soiled even, pale, gray faces, tired and obstinate, the laughter that rings out a product of cynical patience, not sweet, gentle happiness. (p. 115) [103–104] ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s growing revulsion at the squalor, ignorance and carnality of his own people is gradually paralleled by the realization that the city itself is inhabited by the same impverished, ‘peripheral’ populations he has come to so despise. Thus ‘Abd al-‘Aziz notes the recognizable peasant faces of the sinister and omnipresent policemen who terrorize the villagers upon their arrival at the Tanta train-station, and finds himself wondering whether this ‘cruel city will one day transform him into a policeman…carrying a cane and spewing insults in the language of the city’ (p. 128). The figure of Al-Hamuli, a compatriot and dear friend of Hajj Karim who has ‘conquered’ Tanta by making good with ‘a filthy shop’ and a slew of children who happily defecate on the sidewalk (p. 134) reflects an equally chilling moment of self-recognition. In both cases, the 199

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educated efendi, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, confronts the squalid image of his own ambiguous origins and tenuous future. The city is a painted whore and the men and women who flock to it, its diseasestricken lovers. The gradual contraction of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s youthful and innocent world from the vast, sacred space of the open-air Dhikr in ‘The Gathering’ (Al-Hadar) to the cramped and filthy Tanta hostelry of ‘The Great Feast’ (Al-Laylah al-Kabirah) is thus paralleled by the deterioration of his ability to intuitively grasp the spiritual and social resonance of the great secret, as it shapes the life of both the village and the city. His new affiliations and his social ambitions prevent him from identifying with his people, whom he now sees through different eyes altogether: they are the dirty, ragged, ignorant masses who invade the hostile city in search of adventure, in search of sustenance, material and spiritual. He has become an outsider, viewed with ‘hope and fear’ by the brothers, simultaneously loved and distrusted by them (p. 127). The scene with which the explosive ‘Great Feast’ chapter opens is the diametric opposite of the expansive space of the Dhikr: a tiny, crowded apartment in the Tanta hostelry where the brothers and their entourage set up shop in preparation for the feast, crawling with cockroaches and stinking of urine and the fetid smell of frying fat. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz is utterly revolted and as he watches his father complacently presiding over ‘the horrendous banquet’, ‘a cigarette stuck between his greasy fingers’, he conjures up the fantastically horrific image of evolving humanity as mindless and omnivorous amoebae greedily devouring their way through history: Rooms spread with mats, piled high with crouching people, but rebellious inside, boisterous, leering, irreverent. The stomach moves history; the history of these creatures born of mud, sticky, jelly-like things, shaking and elongating, devouring, expanding, fermenting, millions and millions of microscopic mouths…this is the history of humanity; gelatinous creatures, multiplying over the ages till they became ordinary, smiling people but preserving those same bellies deep inside. (p. 155) [140–141] The tolerant compassion of ‘the large-bellied’ saint is invoked and shattered in this image. Rather than representing sensuality as 200

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the bond which unites men and women in a divine cosmology, the body, its needs and desires, are assimilated to a grotesque parody of human history. But the villagers confront and challenge this dehumanization and attempt to transcend ‘their wretched, toiling lives’ through the power of their communion and of sukhriyah, or irony. Badawi calls this resistance strategy al-samar al-rifi (rural chat); a term that usefully incorporates both Berger and Bakhtin’s description of the relationship between folk narrativity and historical agency. Encompassing the entire range of storytelling, gossip and jokes of the rural community, it is essentially the same kind of re-narration of the world that endows the peasants with their most powerful manifestation of collective agency and subjectivity. ‘The single bedazzled eye’ with which the villagers behold the fantastic sights of the city transforms the awesome vision – and the cruel abuse of hostile urbanites – into amusing stories that sustain them back home throughout the year, until their next appointment with the great adventure of the saint’s feast: the evening talk flows on porches and doorsteps. Hilarious stories those, if containing a kernel of pain. Their mockery turns one’s stomach over with laughter, for these people have an incredible capacity for jest and those observant eyes spare no fault or irony. (p. 116) One of the most poignant scenes in the novel takes place when a crowd of jeering city urchins assails the brothers with the taunt, ‘peasants! You cattle!’. A stricken silence follows in which each man is left to ruminate on the truth of this charge. Ahmad Badawi gloomily responds, ‘I sleep with the cattle in one room, get up early with them and on to the field and the muck.…I guess that makes us cattle’ (p. 144). But the comic anecdote that follows and the profound compassion and convivial fraternity that binds these men to each other ‘like live electrical wires’ (p. 154) empowers them to transcend both their romanticization and their brutal objectification: ‘Once I was on the train and a fancy man and his woman were sitting opposite. The gentleman keeps saying how the countryside is so great, all milk and honey. I said, man, that’s all talk. We spend the whole year eating bread and old cheese and clover. The woman leans over to the 201

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efendi and whispers, “Clover, Hamdi? That’s what we give to the geese, that stuff they pick out of the cattle feed?”. So I said to her, “Indeed it is lady, we take it right out of the cow’s mouth and eat it ourselves. We’re the same lot” ’. The men are all quiet, grief flows through ‘Abd al‘Aziz’s veins, heavy as drops of mercury. He loves the city – why doesn’t the city love his people? The pain almost strangles him. They are his people in spite of everything. That light that glimmers in their eyes, never dying, flickers in his own soul. ‘We’re the best’. Smiles light up the eyes and the corners of mouths, maybe because he’s owned them for once. ‘Yes, we’re the best…’ Al-‘Ayiq bursts out laughing and starts to imitate the lady on the train. ‘Clover, Hamdi? Yes, lady, clover. Silly whore. Her guts are probably burned out from eating onions. Doesn’t know what clover is. A peasant through and through, but God gave her an efendi with a case of sun-stroke. Brought her up in the world’. (pp. 144–145) [131] The novel’s violent climax occurs halfway through the ‘Great Feast’ chapter. Driven from the revels at the hostelry by his revulsion and despair at his own alienation, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz wanders the mobbed Tanta streets. The peasants have invaded the city and a powerful barrage of disjointed, frenzied images of teeming, carousing humanity assails him from all sides: ‘The people are a river flowing down both banks of the street, thousands of feet scraping the pavement in unison, a stubborn, determined rustle of heavy steps, faces cracked with laughter’ (p. 160). The saturnalian crowd of worshippers becomes an irresistible monster of gigantic proportions. Like al-Kharrat’s Tinnin and Zola’s Dragon, it is a ‘huge, fabulous beast stretched out in the city’s streets’ (p. 160), ‘a single corpus of flesh, thousand-headed’ (p. 165). This is the collective body stretched to its colossal, terrifying limits, a single, orgiastic body writhing in the ecstasy of its communion. ‘Abd al‘Aziz is born away on the shoulders of this fantastic beast, and even as he is desperately conscious of his powerlessness to resist, he gives himself up to the intoxication of this primeval union, lost in the Eden of his childhood and only nostalgically glimpsed from afar forever after. The clashing imagery surrounding the phantom 202

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stranger of the following passage expresses the ambiguity of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s memory and desire. At the Badawi mosque, he feels a light tap on his shoulder, a gentle blow. He turned to find a face with flared nostrils and gleaming eyes, laughing in mocking defiance, proud, tender, stretching out his hand with a theatrical gesture. ‘Give me a light’. But the man didn’t have a cigarette to light. ‘Abd al‘Aziz handed him his own cigarette, like a sleepwalker. The man laughed victoriously, his laughter sending ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s heart soaring high. ‘God light your heart in love of the Sultan’. He let out another ringing laugh as he receded through the crowds – ‘Abd al-‘Aziz gazing at his shoulders swaying in rhythm with his light, agile step – then disappeared. (p. 168) Badawi’s reading of this massive feast procession as an orgy of gross sensuality, escapism and impotence is, in this sense, superficial, and moreover reproduces the typical discourse of the kind of deeply imbedded reformist nationalist discourse that informs the writing of many twentieth-century intellectuals regarding rural culture. This is precisely the kind of uncomplicated and hegemonic discourse that The Seven Days of Man attempts to unravel and examine. The Great Feast episode inscribes the sum total of the painful conflicts and ambivalences that shape the experience of the divided subject. The crowd is a kind of atavistic monster, but it is also an immensely powerful social body that momentarily seizes control of time and anchors it in its own version of history. Back at the hostelry, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s hysterical eruption against the brothers, in which he repeats the same accusation of bestiality made earlier, provokes a feeling of dazed fear similar to that ‘created by the words of the preacher when he screams at the people’ (p. 171). This is the same preacher who is hated and feared by ‘Abd al-‘Aziz as a young boy for his vicious diatribes on sin and hellfire and for his oppressive abuse of his pretty little mule (see pp. 12–13). As Badawi notes, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz has now exchanged places with this figure of authority and hegemonic orthodoxy.13 There is no room in the discourse of either – the one, religious, the other modernist/ reformist intellectual – for the 203

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compassionate sacral pluralism of the populist Sufi village. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz draws down his father’s momentous curse; a curse which re-enacts his deepest fears of individual annihilation in the monolithic, ‘devouring’ collectivity: ‘ “Your people…your family…animals, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz? God’s folk who’ve come from the ends of the earth with joy in their hearts…their very steps shake the Throne…you ignorant fool…move aside…get away from us…move, or you’ll be stepped on and leveled to the ground, you infidel!” ’ (p. 172). Like the sudden shattering of an age-old spell in a fairy-tale, or the blinding moment of recognition by which the foundling lays claim to the father’s throne, this final moment of crisis signals the end of a world. ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, like Isma‘il, the hero of Yahya Haqqi’s Qindil Umm Hashim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim) cannot perceive the tremendous power of a community united in faith and experience. The charm is violently undone and the enchanted circle of Hajj Karim’s kingdom begins to unravel. Time now begins to move forward in a conventional calendrical motion. Hajj Karim’s stroke leaves him debilitated, frail and dying. He is ruined financially. Age, death and personal disasters have dispersed the brothers, and a new generation has come to dominate the village, a generation of men that, like ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and his hapless ox, like Shahhat al-Sharkasi, the brutish matricide, and like the men that crowd the new coffee-house, has irrevocably stepped outside the timeless circle of the mythic, utopian community; mythic because imaginatively constructed, as dream, as refuge. The sudden intrusion of calendrical time into the last pages of the novel is almost startling. The local coffee-house is a raucous, crowded place where men listen to the radio and vociferously debate ‘politics, cooperatives, Feudalism, oppression, the public sector, Kennedy and Kruschev’ (p. 234). Echoing The Land’s ringing call to know, to understand (ifham!), it is ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s own uncle who clamors for the news broadcast with the cry, ‘we want to learn something you idiots! [‘awzin nifham ya bagam] Are we going to stay asses all our lives?’. Contrary to Badawi’s claim that this declaration constitutes the transition in real time from the old world to the new, the fact that it is spoken by Hajj Karim’s brother suddenly reveals the startling reality of the coexistence of these two worlds. In this alternate community, the loud, political space of the coffee-house once and for all replaces the fragile dream-world of the past, and reflects the real pressures and interventions of a historical time that is common to both the village 204

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and the city. It is a world of different solidarities and concerns; a world in which community is still negotiated through speech, but a speech that is hungry and high-pitched: The radio-announcer’s voice is dignified, and the din is unabated as though no one were listening, but after a while you hear scattered comments on the newscast and realize that they are in fact following it. ‘So-and-so arrived…’ ‘Why’s he come here, that son of a bitch?’ ‘If I were there I’d have spat in his face and sent him home…’ ‘Abd al-‘Aziz suddenly found himself talking away, calmly at first, then excitedly, yelling [like the rest of them]. The announcer drones on and…the clamor rises, everyone’s talking, someone comments on his remarks and he replies, the others locked in conversation, argument, laughter and insults. He plunged into their midst, his heart full of the same bitterness, anger and pain as theirs, his brow, moist with sweat as he kept up his part in the raging debate. A hand offered him the water-pipe. He took a deep breath. It made him dizzy and he coughed, but he didn’t stop talking and took another breath, and another. It tasted fabulous, a hundred cigarettes in one puff. The smoke billowed out of his mouth, thick, blue, and the words spilled out, sharp and loud. (pp. 234–235) [217–218] The novel ends on this note of vitality and inevitability. ‘Abd al‘Aziz finds himself in this furious din. He is once again reconciled to the community, but one that has actively thrown itself into the stream of history and collectively redefined itself as a community in open, angry rebellion against its own marginalization and oppression.

East of the Palms Set during the massive Cairo student demonstrations of January 1972, Baha’ Tahir’s 1983 novel explores the crisis of the subject as a symptom of a profound social and political crisis affecting the larger community: in this case, the national ‘family’ in both its urban and rural permutations and its larger regional associations. 205

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East of the Palms can thus be read as a national allegory in Frederic Jameson’s sense, as well as a lyrical exploration of individual alienation and despair.14 The historical circumstances surrounding the student demonstrations of 1972 that frame the events of the novel are described in great detail by Ghali Shukri in his comprehensive sociological study of the Sadat regime, Egypt: Portrait of a President.15 The demonstrations were sparked by the celebration of Palestine Week at Cairo University, and fueled by the ad-hoc creation of the dissident writers’ union, Kuttab al-Ghad, to support the student’s demands: an outright rejection of both UN Resolution 242 and the Rogers Plan, and renewal of the war with Israel on two major fronts – the reclamation of Sinai and the liberation of Palestine. The novel’s unnamed young narrator hails from an obscure village in the south. He is a failed student, an aimless, tortured alcoholic, obsessed with a family tragedy that is narrated through scattered flashbacks. This family tragedy revolves around a land dispute between the narrator’s uncle and the local family of notables. The uncle and his son – Husayn, the narrator’s cousin and childhood friend – steadfastly refuse to cede their paternal birthright to the might and greed of the rival clan, and eventually pay for it with their lives. The narrator’s father has refused to intervene on his brother’s behalf, in spite of the dubious power he wields as a notorious usurer who controls much of the rival clan’s lands, and the narrator himself is racked with crippling guilt for failing to intervene decisively in the looming crisis. Back in the city, he abandons his studies, his friends and his lover and devotes himself to a nightly ritual of alcoholic oblivion. Enfeebled, impotent, he is entirely unable to act, to commit himself to anything beyond his own misery. Meanwhile, this story unfolds against the backdrop of the political upheaval in Cairo that involves all of the main actors in the narrator’s urban world: Samir, his roommate; Suzy, a local prostitute; and Laylah, his lover. In spite of his consistent refusal to participate, to take sides, he too is slowly and irresistibly drawn into the violent fray and the spontaneous, sacrificial act of love with which the novel ends signals the beginning of his salvation. The archetypal drama that is played out in the village, with the patrimonial land as its central symbol, re-enacts a larger historical tragedy – the loss of Palestine and the rest of the Arab world’s complicity in this loss – as well as the tragic, existential dilemma of the isolated individual, everywhere silenced and marginalized 206

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by a repressive social and political authority. The modern history of Palestine is directly woven into the novel through the introduction of ‘Isam, a minor Palestinian character who is responsible for Samir’s eventual politicization. ‘Isam’s account of his family’s loss of land/nation to the Zionist armies closely parallels the thematic structure of Husayn and his father’s struggle to retain their own land in the village. Samir’s description of his political awakening is emblematic: ‘I saw Halhul [a village in Palestine] in Egypt and Egypt in Palestine and thousands of my ancestors who died, like ‘Isam’s grandfather…and father after him, and that the disaster and the grief are one and the same’.16 The novel’s allegorical structure enables Tahir to deconstruct the familiar dualisms that mark village narrative – city/village, self/other, tradition/modernity – by largely emptying them of their dialectical content and recreating them as parallel spaces for the narrative enactment of a single personal and collective drama. Affiliation is thus imagined not as organic, ‘family’ membership, but as a deliberate act of identification across the boundaries of marginal identities defined tribally or in terms of class or gender. In this sense, though the novel exploits and plays upon a number of familiar themes and tropes common to the genre, East of the Palms is not, strictly speaking, a village narrative in the traditional sense, since it is not ‘about’ the village’s discrete and problematic altereity. Rather, the village is constructed as one of many locations of the conflicts and tragedies that beset the larger national and transnational community. Thus the natural imagery by which the marginal collective other is conventionally represented and consumed is rejected in the text as being physically and morally untenable: Faridah’s plaintive wish that people were ‘like the crops’, living and dying simultaneously so that ‘no one would have to grieve for anyone else’ (p. 243) presents a deeply nihilistic image of human irrelevance against which the text explicitly struggles. In this sense, the novel participates in the radical, secular spirit of The Land and picks up exactly where The Seven Days of Man leaves off – with the loud, angry masses (here, the demonstrating students, the native intellectuals, and the sons and daughters of the rural hinterland) in open revolt. The figure of the alienated subject in village narrative dates back to the reformist period, as we have seen in Zaynab and The Maze of Justice. The Seven Days of Man resuscitates and magnifies this traumatized subject as the symptom of a deeply polarized historical conflict between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. East of the 207

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Palms, however, generalizes this condition and raises it to the level of a universal political and moral crisis afflicting all levels of society. The narrator’s militant apoliticism is a symptom of his inability to act, to commit himself to any type of human relationship, be it an individual one forged in love or friendship, or an extended network of collective affiliation (family, clan, revolutionary group, nation). He is marginalized by his own fear. Indeed, fear as a kind of moral paralysis that obstructs the possibility of affiliation is a major theme of East of the Palms. Husayn’s narration of his childhood encounter with the terrifying vision of the nomadic shepherd underlines this point. The child takes the dirty, naked Nubian tribesman, collapsing from thirst and exhaustion, to be a jinn, and he flees, but his father forces the terrified boy to return and give water to the prostrate man (pp. 260–261). Husayn learns this lesson well. Samir’s answer to his own question – why did Husayn choose to die with his father, rather than moving aside for the bullets to find their sole target? – is emblematic: ‘maybe…he wanted to give an example’ (p. 299). Cowed, indifferent spectators populate both the village and the city. The murder of Husayn and his father is played out to an audience of silent onlookers. The village thus both witnesses and indirectly participates in their murder. Similarly, the demonstrations in Cairo and the security forces’ brutal attack on the students are also occasionally met with the indifference and even hostility of the callous, the self-interested and the cowardly. The novel delineates a manichean ethic in which choice – the exercise of the individual’s inalienable agency and free will – is imperative. Alienation, passivity and apathy are thus equated with active participation in a corrupt and brutal society. The soldiers who ruthlessly enforce the will of this society are then no different than the village spectators who acquiesce in its violence. Another significant trope common to village narrative – the precious patrimonial inheritance – is also expanded and recast as the symbol of an abstract moral and political dynamic in Tahir’s novel. In Zaynab and The Return of the Spirit, this inherited bond with the land is the mark of the peasant’s historical servitude. In The Land it is the ever-fertile source of ‘Abd al-Hadi’s epic strength and determination; the essential root of the village’s radical solidarity. In The Seven Days of Man it becomes an ambiguous, oppressive legacy. At its epicenter stands the figure of the legendary patriarch, the heroic warrior/farmer who cultivates the barren desert with nothing but his bare hands and the force of 208

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his epic will. East of the Palms reproduces this trope in the form of a creation myth: On moonlit nights, your grandfather would dress in white and mount his white horse. On moonless nights, he dressed in black and mounted his black steed, merging with the shadows, the better to catch the granarythieves.…Do you know how he reclaimed the land? His entire inheritance consisted of the Eastern palms and an adjacent plot of barren desert. Your grandfather began to travel to the other side of the mountain and return, his horse loaded with red earth.…Whenever he would disappear there for a few days, people supposed him to be lost or devoured by the wolves, but he would return… with the red clay that he had discovered there and that no man has been able to find since. People laughed at him. They didn’t understand. His horse was no longer enough and he began to hire camels, leading the caravan into the distance himself and returning with the bags of red earth that he used to fertilize his land. With his bare hands, he planted orange trees and fig trees there, and it became his garden. No one believed that life would grow in that dead earth.…But the trees blossomed, the crops blossomed, and the wasteland grew green. Your grandfather’s hand was blessed, my son. (p. 257) In The Seven Days of Man, Hajj Karim, like his father before him, is ‘the king of tillers’; the land is his obedient bride and he, her cruel lord: ‘ “if you don’t plunge your blade into the very heart of the earth, it’s no use at all” ’.17 In Tahir’s novel, the patriarch’s generosity and courage are unparalleled and he is credited with saving the village from the catastrophic flood, much like Hajj Karim, who is remembered for his heroic efforts during the cholera epidemic that strikes his own village. East of the Palms elaborates on this creation myth trope with reference to scripture. The two sons who inherit the grandfather become mortal enemies, the one ‘a noble chevalier [like his father], the other, my father’ (p. 258), a miserly, violent-tempered usurer who refuses to come to his brother’s aid in his moment of trial. The blood ties invoked by the narrator’s uncle are plainly a metaphor for a counter-hegemonic principle of justice as moral imperative. Like the narrator’s father 209

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who lamely appeals to the courts for the execution of justice, an empty concept of naked power disguised as legal authority motivates the officer who leads the raid on the narrator’s apartment in search of Samir: He stared at me in astonishment. ‘Angry? Why should I be angry, son? I’m just doing my job. If Samir and his friends were the ones giving the orders, I’d follow them too, but unfortunately for them, someone else does. That’s all there is to it, really’. (p. 281) In this simple confession, the authority of the state is exposed as an empty ideological construct; form without content. Genuine membership in the resistant collective is thus envisioned as a horizontal rather than a vertical process of affiliation, forged through individually constructed bonds of reciprocal empathy, as much as any abstract, hegemonic ideology of shared nationality: ‘In the midst of every people there’s a bunch that lick the boots of whoever throws them a bone, and what’s more, that same yelping dog exists in each man’s heart. The important thing is to silence it’ (p. 298). Suzy, the prostitute, embodies this evolved humanity. Her active sympathy for the demonstrating students is a product of the same vast compassion and courage that compels her to vigorously defend the frail old pedestrian against the brutal indifference of the policeman’s response, ‘it’s none of my business’ (p. 287). Like the narrator himself in the novel’s final pages, this is how she achieves the redemption she seeks. She is startlingly mistaken for a demonstrator and the derogatory label ‘one of those’ now becomes a tremendously empowering and transformative identification. This identification is implicitly contrasted to ‘people made of stone’, people like the policemen, the villagers (first and foremost among them, the narrator’s father), the listless denizens of bars and cafes, the reactionary old man on the tram who betrays the wounded student to the police, the corrupt doctor who first seduced Suzy, the black-market currency dealer in his flashy Mercedes and even the narrator himself. The novel thus reconciles the thematic conflicts of The Seven Days of Man – the profound, binding love and compassion of the utopian community and the naked anger and revolt of the ‘new’ man – in one grand allegorical sweep. 210

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The text makes use of cinematic flashback to incorporate the distant world of the village directly into a turbulent, fast-paced (urban) present tense. Otherwise, the narrative distinctions that mark the dualities of space and time in The Seven Days of Man, for example, are also noticeably absent. Though memory engenders the narrative tense that marks the space of the village, mythic memory is replaced by therapeutic memory, and the historical present is posited as the immediate heir of an urgently relevant past, not as its antithesis. Thus, for example, a moment of crisis or epiphany in the narrative present directly recalls an affinitive moment in the narrator’s memory. Suzy’s retelling of the incident on the tram, in which the passengers take various positions around the figure of the bleeding student, triggers the lengthy flashback that narrates a corresponding moral crisis in the narrator’s personal history (pp. 251–253). Similarly, when the narrator finally exercises his affinitive agency by shielding Laylah with his own body from the incessant blows of police batons – in a replica of the final, sacrificial posture assumed by Husayn with relation to his encircled father – it is a profoundly healing memory of childhood defiance that comes to him in his subsequent delirium: The singing grew louder, the chanters rocking back and forth in the middle of the house, the tambourines beating louder, there, in the middle of the house, and there, on the high bench, on the sheep-skin, sat my father and the Sufi Shaykh…I was standing apart and my father motioned to me and smiled and said come here boy, kiss the master’s hand. But I didn’t move. He rose and came towards me and said do you defy your father, you dog? So I fled, running to my mother, and I cried and said to her, I won’t kiss his hand, I won’t kiss his hand.…If you’d kissed his hand you’d be no son of mine, she said. Then she said come, and picked up the gas lamp and took me by the hand to that place I love best, to the upstairs room, always locked and forbidden to us children, and in the spacious room were big armchairs and a huge sofa draped in white, and in the corner a tall glass case that contained dolls and mechanical toys and porcelain cups and saucers covered with all sorts of pictures. My mother opened the case and took them out, lining them up carefully on the table in a row and said, touch them as you wish, but don’t 211

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break them. The pictures on the drawings were bright and colorful. Mustachioed men wearing blue caftans with red flowers, leaning forward, gazing out with wide, astonished eyes and holding broad swords that tapered at the handles. I sat, examining them, touching them and they were smooth and beautiful and I loved them. My mother stood at a distance, tall and slender in her dark gown, watching me and smiling. (p. 306) Though the past and the village are of central significance in East of the Palms, they are neither synonymous, nor defined as mythical Eden, but as sites of struggle over truth, justice and the will to love and bond, as is the city. In a firm appraisal of a contested present and future, Tahir’s novel finally dissolves the ideologically obstructive opposition between the country and the city and points toward the possibility – the necessity – of re-imagining community in ways that transcend the restrictive and ultimately dehumanizing limits of the ancestral past. Similarly, The Seven Days of Man slowly unravels the deeply embedded mythologies of national culture and the atavistic structures of identification that feed into it. Qasim lovingly constructs a child’s microscopic experience of ‘belonging’ to a rural microcosm in order ultimately to explore this experience as a process of individual and collective nostalgia. The simple fiction of the village as a utopian brotherhood of faith and fellowship, or on the other hand the site of a primary and corrupt sensuality, is dismantled in the novel. So is the parallel fiction of the city as either a modern Eden or a vast and squalid human brothel. The collective power of the multitude – ‘God’s folk’ whose ‘very steps shake the Throne’ – is everywhere present in both the country and the city. Hajj Karim’s death and the catastrophic loss of the family’s waterbuffalo – its sole means of income after the loss of its land – finally pushes the adult ‘Abd al-‘Aziz into the furious din of ‘the real world’ – a world that is penetrated through and through by the material structures that mold geographical and cultural locations, from the village to the metropolitan capitals of the north. Repeating the primary political insight of ‘Abd al-Rahman alSharqawi’s The Land, both novels reveal ‘reality’ as a subjective understanding of human agency in relation to history. The traumatic dislocation of the conventional narrative subject is finally exorcized by means of this revelation, which articulates subjec212

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tivity as a contingent point-of-view rooted in the sum of the individual’s choices. Both ‘Abd al-‘Aziz and the tormented protagonist of East of the Palms go through what is essentially a political process of self-recognition that ultimately allows them to find their place in history, as individuals and as members of a living and struggling community.

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7 THE STORYTELLER

In the foreword to his 1991 novel Khalti Safiyyah wal-Dayr (Aunt Safiyyah and the Monastery), Baha’ Tahir discusses the formative historical pressures that shaped his generation of writers: ‘the generation of the sixties’. Tahir dismisses this term as being largely meaningless given the fact that the extensive web of authors to which it loosely applies in no way constitutes a particular aesthetic school, but rather includes a broad and nuanced range of formal and thematic narrative praxes. Having made this point, however, he goes on to affirm the essentially common political position that these writers occupied at a particular juncture in contemporary Egyptian history, in relation to the state and to a conservative and authoritarian society. Unlike the social(ist) realists of the preceding generation, whose progressive ideologies of commitment were largely co-opted by the cultural institutions of the post-revolutionary nationalist state, this was a generation of writers marginalized and even actively persecuted by these selfsame institutions, now hardened into the propaganda apparatuses of a defensive and autocratic regime. Tahir characterizes the literary output of this period as ‘a shout of protest and rebellion’ against ‘a fissured state and the fissured human spirit’ it engendered, as represented now by the sudden appearance on the narrative scene of the anti-hero or ‘the defeated hero’ – a figure we have examined in some detail in previous chapters: The new literature taking shape at the margins of the cultural establishment was the true expression of the transformations taking place: The rational edifice of realist fiction came apart at the seams and the story no longer had a definitive beginning, middle and end. Society ceased 214

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to be the clear-cut medium that the hero struggled to transform through positive action. Rather, the new writer, unlike the realists, stood impotent before this society.…Thus the anti-hero, or, more accurately, the defeated hero came to replace the optimistic, virile hero of realism, steadfastly bearing the banners of the coming Revolution. The experience of inner defeat – the suppression of the individual’s right to free expression and positive agitation – was the most marked feature of the new realities of the sixties, and the fetishization of the object and the fragment became the [aesthetic] emblem of the newly unhinged psyche come face to face with a rigid, severely defined outer world.1 In Edwar al-Kharrat’s description of the new literary movement, an iconoclastic reconstruction of the turath that synthesizes rigidly compartmentalized ‘high’ (classical, urban, courtly) and ‘low’ (popular, oral, folk) narrative forms comes to embody the challenge of a vital, indigenous modernism. One strain of this post-realist, turath-inspired modernism can be traced in the emergence of the popular, oral story as the formal vehicle of a contemporary and heterodox narrative vision. Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah’s The Band and The Bracelet (1975) shifts its narrative focus from the fractured psyche, the exiled subject, of The Seven Days of Man and East of the Palms, to the collectively enacted mechanisms of suffering and liminality that shape the organic rural community as a whole. In language and style, it exhibits the structural and psychological features of the Story, narrative domain of ‘peasants and seamen…past masters of storytelling’. Walter Benjamin’s characterization of storytelling as an amalgam of ‘the lore of faraway places, such as a much-traveled man brings home, [and] the lore of the past, as it best reveals itself to the natives of a place’,2 aptly describes the spatial and psychological tensions implicit in the location of the modern subject; the author/narrator who, like al-Shaykh alFadil’s son in The Band and the Bracelet, is strategically situated at the interstices of a vast temporal and geographical divide. The Band and the Bracelet’s omniscient, prophetic narrator shares this simultaneously panoramic and intimate vantagepoint; the resonant, mythopoeic space between the stunning, magnitudinous archetype and the poignant, emotive, human detail of the popular tale. 215

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Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah was reputedly a great storyteller with a prodigious memory, who would effortlessly recite his work, word for word and without the aid of a manuscript, at various literary gatherings and cafes in his adopted Cairo.3 Edwar al-Kharrat notes that this was a conscious attempt on ‘Abdallah’s part to ‘close the distance between the writer and the popular storyteller’.4 Benjamin’s definition of the storyteller as a man who combines the lore of faraway places with the lore of the past aptly describes ‘Abdallah’s cultural position as the traveler/native, the source of his creativity inherent in these psychic disjunctions of time and place.5 Baha’ Tahir’s fond recollections of his mother’s prodigious corpus of stories about her native Upper Egyptian village illuminates the genealogical, didactic and affinitive functions of the Story in popular culture: The details of life in the village, the histories of its families, the relationships between them and the fate of their individual members were her favorite subject. She had a native talent for telling stories (she, who never learned to read or write), and she practiced this genius constantly, especially when our relatives from Upper Egypt came to visit.…The most precious moments of my childhood (and even much later) were those when I would sit, spellbound, and listen to her tell these stories in minute detail and in the exact language of the village, as though she still lived in her native birthplace.6 The poignant image that emerges in these lines – that of the exiled mother, weaving her tales as a talisman against this exile and systematically bequeathing them to her son as history and as lesson – distills the functional essence of the Story. Benjamin calls this essence ‘something useful [which] may, in one case, consist in a moral; in another, in some practical advice; in a third, in a proverb or maxim. In every case, the storyteller is a man who has counsel for his readers’.7 Benjamin here implies the strategic function of the storyteller’s direct presence in his own story. Unlike the disembodied text, the Story is incomprehensible without the figure of the storyteller himself, who can either be a character in his own tale or an active commentator on the significance of its events. The narrator of The Band and the Bracelet makes use of the latter strategy, inserting himself at certain key moments in the text to comment on the actions

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of a particular character or the significance of a particular event in the life of the community, of which he is both a member and an outsider.8 This ‘counsel’ of which Benjamin speaks, moreover, assumes its greatest significance, its ‘transmissible form’ at the moment of death: ‘Death is the sanction of everything the storyteller can tell. He has borrowed his authority from death’.9 The ineluctable figure of death assumes tangible form in the colossal, winged angel that stalks the beaten generations in The Band and the Bracelet. In the folktale, ‘there is always a battle against time, against the obstacles that prevent or delay the fulfillment of a desire or the repossession of something cherished but lost’.10 Time, fate, death: the monumental enemies against which the individual – and by extension, the community itself – must do battle, and must inevitably lose. These are the (paradoxically) liberatory themes of the Story; liberatory because they are object-lessons transmitted to the community of listeners/readers that serve to illuminate the archetypal human struggle for freedom, for transcendence, precisely as inevitable process, as inalienable legacy. Perhaps it would be useful at this point to attempt a formal distinction in critical terminology between the textual inscription of the Story as a discrete narrative genre and the novel proper, as a necessary prelude to a discussion of the former’s structural features. Benjamin opposes his notion of the didactic function of the Story – the tale as epigrammatic exemplar – to the informational thrust of the novel, which relies on ‘explanation’ and ‘psychological connection’ for its cohesion.11 We might draw a corresponding distinction between the generic Arabic terms riwayah and qissah. The former was etymologically deduced by the Nahdah to name the new genre of the novel; the latter had traditionally served to identify the popular story in a variety of heterodox, oral forms, and later came to be identified with the modern short story (qissah qasirah) – a text-based narrative genre with an altogether different set of formal and psychological features. The temporal difference implicit in the verbal roots of both terms is telling. The act of narration implicit in rawa is chronological, tracing a succession of externally coherent events played out in historical time. Qassa however, lacks this explicitly historical temporality. Its verbal movement, primarily derived from the action of cutting or trimming, implies a timelessness and precision achieved through the near-invisible elisions of the psychological and temporal connectors essential to the novel.12 ‘The secret of the story lies in its economy: the events, however 217

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long they last, become punctiform, connected by rectilinear segments, in a zigzag pattern that suggests incessant motion’.13 The Band and the Bracelet exemplifies this essential narrative economy; what Sabry Hafez has alluded to as the haunting absences that punctuate and ultimately define the text, structurally and thematically.14 In The Band and the Bracelet, ‘Abdallah dismembers the connective tissue of circumstance in which conventional realist narrative is embedded, preserving only the act and the consequence as singular, discrete events, magnified into a consecutive series of dense, static images. The story is divided into fifteen sections that comprise short, terse fragments – often no more than four or five lines – whose titles gloss or name a central dramatic action or image. At times, these glosses simply signal an event, as in ‘A Letter’ or ‘To the Market’. At others, they assume an independent thematic resonance that simultaneously guides and comments on the narrative movement: the prophetic echo of the title of the early series of passages that narrate Bikhit al-Bishari’s death – ‘Of That Which Man Most Fears’ (ma yakhafuhu lbashar) – is picked up towards the end of the novel by the section entitled ‘Of That Which no Man Can Prevent’ (alladhi la yaqdir ‘ala man‘ihi ahad). The pun here is on the fateful moments of death and sexual consummation. The passage couples these moments in the apocalyptic death of the village’s Sufi Qutb (pole/anchor) and Nabawiyyah’s sexual fall, which explicitly foreshadows her own eventual death at the hands of her cousin. The realist novel’s manipulation of time and space is also radically disassembled in the story. The ‘calendrical’, horizontal, progressive time, and the descriptive ‘sociological landscape’ that Benedict Anderson ascribes to the genre,15 and that forms the essential phenomenological and discursive tissue of the village novel in particular, is, like the ever-elusive object of desire, absent in The Band and the Bracelet. Its Upper Egyptian landscape is a savage, mythic terrain, bounded by the vast, unrelenting firmament and inhabited by the maleficent spirits of Karnak’s ancient gods. The house and the temple inscribe its severe geographical and metaphysical boundaries. Unlike the angel of death, the story’s characters do not move freely through this landscape; rather, like Bikhit al-Bishari, the invalid patriarch, they are fixed and imprisoned by it:

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At the end of those long years that had passed like a boat, lifted from a spot of sun and deposited in a spot of shade, he took to gazing at the sun running through the sky and shouting at times, ‘I want the sun’ and at others, ‘I want the shade’. Thus all day long. Thus the day passes. Thus the days that make up a life pass. She and her daughter carry the boat, from the sun to the shade and from the shade to the sun. (p. 345) Time is measured positively, through the primeval, cyclic rituals of birth, death and fecundity; and negatively, through the absence of the object of desire. The succession of events that culminate in Nabawiyyah’s death and the family’s final destruction is marked by Hazinah and Fahimah’s painful and meticulous accounting of the years and months of Mustafa’s absence from the village. The novel literally opens with this absence: The Absent One

With the men, Mustafa departed for Sudan, while still a child. A year passed, and the twelfth month of the second year came to its end without news of the absent beloved. (p. 345) Mustafa’s stroke at the news of his niece Nabawiyyah’s murder, absents him from the narrowly circumscribed world of The Band and the Bracelet a second and final time. Bikhit al-Bishari’s house becomes entirely empty of life and light save for the now totally deaf and blind Hazinah. The Band and the Bracelet is a dense and painful chronicle of loss; of frustrated desire; of the human struggle to escape the repressive, murderous prison of social convention elevated to the status of an unyielding fate. The circular, imprisoning metaphor of the novel’s title recurs in a variety of images: the house (dar, etymologically related to da’irah, ‘circle’) as confining social structure, symbol of female seclusion and male impotence; the spinning wheel at which Hazinah sits weaving her interventions into the family’s destiny, and the cyclic structure of the story itself, which begins and ends with the mother and the male invalid – an emblem of the impotence and sterility that afflicts the novel’s char219

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acters. The same fate – total paralysis – befalls father and son, Mustafa and Bikhit al-Bishari. Any attempt to escape this circle or to circumvent fate is doomed. Desire that is not sanctioned by the rigid social convention of the confined community is necessarily transgressive and is inevitably punished as such. Mustafa, his sister Fahimah and his niece Nabawiyyah all fall victim to this vengeful fate. Fahimah, whose primary sin is her submerged incestuous passion for her brother, literally wastes away from libidinal starvation. Her marriage to the impotent Haddad culminates in her desperate, surreal encounter in the temple with the naked black god who impregnates her with his ‘unveiled organ’. The encounter is engineered by the cunning Hazinah in an attempt to cheat her daughter’s harsh destiny as a divorced and reputedly sterile woman, but the issue of this attempt – the beautiful Nabawiyyah – is doomed to re-enact her mother’s illicit desire and consequently to suffer a doubled retribution. Fahimah finally accepts death as a merciful lover, but Nabawiyyah reaches for the vast, star-studded skies that her mother could only gaze at in fear and longing.16 Nabawiyyah’s world is narrow: their house, the palm orchard, Shaykh Fadil’s house, the river. But she deems her world vastly spacious. […] In love with the river is she: the sun paints the water with a myriad colors and the birds flutter their wings and pluck the dead, floating fish from its surface. The boats with their white sails stretched full and round by the wind and the huge mountain and the yellow sands on the opposite shore and the houses tiny against the mountain like grazing goats. (p. 385) Nabawiyyah’s budding desire momentarily transforms the imprisoning circle into deep, fertile space. The elements and the natural landscape weave an image of serene but vital beauty that stands in sharp contrast to their fierce personification in the novel as a whole, where the sun is a merciless enforcer of passing time; the wind, the awesome harbinger of winged Death’s arrival; and the distant mountain, the border of his terrifying domain. Her affair with Shaykh Fadil’s young son – an affair conceived in the 220

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purity and innocence of first love – is her transcendent but ill fated bid for freedom from the poverty and brutality of what she is ultimately forced to recognize as her lot in life: ‘I will remain here in this house until a suitor acceptable to my uncle and grandmother comes to take me to his mother’s house. As for him, he will never ask for my hand. He is the sky and I, the earth, and sky cannot embrace earth till the Day of Judgment. I will remain in this, my place, with my grief, soaking beans and chickpeas, sweeping and washing the dust from the house and listening to the old woman’s talk. The old woman’s chatter increases day after day and there’s no one else but me to hear, every day, that the past is sweet and the present, bitter. Even the river is denied me for they’ve hired a water-carrier. I, wool-spinner, hat-maker and birdfeeder. Will he come to see me, bringing me his clothes to wash?’. (p. 405) Nonetheless, she stubbornly pursues her desire, and when the scandalous news of her pregnancy spreads, death comes to her as the Avenging Angel (her cousin, the obsessed lover and rejected suitor) in a brutal image that illuminates the implicit violence of the familiar patriarchal agrarian and sexual metaphor of sowing and reaping: He drew, from between the folds of his torn garments, the sharp-toothed scythe and seized the grimy bundle of lunatic black hair as he would grab hold of a bundle of clover, and he sheared (hasada) the long, proud neck. The dovecote tottered and the pigeons took flight and the wolf howled at the sight of the spurting blood soaking his garments and running, snake-like, in the dust. Howling, he carried off the head, its eyes still shining with life. (p. 408) The full force of this powerful image is incomplete without a description of the girl’s physical position vis-à-vis her assassin. At this point in the story, Mustafa has buried his niece upright in the courtyard of the house in order to force her to name her seducer. Only her head, like a cotton-plant, remains exposed to the 221

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elements and to Al-Sa‘idi’s deadly scythe. This ‘honor-crime’ is the most explosive moment in a harshly patriarchal social order permeated by a misogynist violence that twists and perverts the psyches of men and women alike: Mustafa literally ‘beats virtue’ into his older sister Fahimah with the knowledge and approval of their parents. She internalizes this violence by eroticizing it, and the ideal image of masculinity becomes inextricably entwined in her imagination with her brother’s punishing body (pp. 346–347). Mustafa himself is ultimately trapped in the untenable logic of this masculinity. He cannot quite bring himself to fulfill his duty by killing Nabawiyyah himself. This small mercy cannot be understood as compassion by the unforgiving community, but rather as yet another kind of impotence that compounds and refracts his social and economic failures. The guardians of this community’s values are both male and female. It is Hazinah, the long-suffering grandmother, who discovers Nabawiyyah’s secret and delivers her to the community’s fierce retribution. Surrounded by the stony judgment of his peers in the marketplace, Mustafa, who has returned to his village after his long years of fortune-hunting, cuckolded and penniless, experiences this final failure as a death that mimics his niece’s. He wills the stroke that leaves him lifeless: Mustafa gasped like an animal whose throat had been slit: ‘I…I…and after all these long years’. He asked his Self to give him his heart’s desire: utter paralysis of speech and movement and sight and sound, and his Self complied. (p. 410) The male characters of The Band and the Bracelet, though ostensibly the lords and masters of their world, are equally powerless to challenge the inexorable dictates of this world. Bikhit al-Bishari, al-Haddad, Mustafa and even al-Sa‘idi – driven to exile and madness by his desire and vengeance – are all victims of the choking circle that defines their own liminality: the death, disease, ignorance, poverty and the ancient cycle of vicious social mores that stalk the isolated rural community. One significant exception to this pattern is the elusive figure of Shaykh Fadil’s son, unnamed perhaps because his primary affiliation is precisely to his wealthy, aristocratic father, de facto lord of the village. Lurking at the margins of the text, he is the mirrorimage of Haykal’s Hamid; the educated, urbanized schoolboy who, in the eyes of Nabawiyyah and indeed of all the village girls, 222

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represents the inscrutability and vast freedom of the near-mythical outside world: He wears trousers and shirt and jacket. He goes to the movies in town every Thursday and sits in the balcony. He rides a bicycle, his soft hair flying in the wind and covering his clear, dark eyes. His father possesses many acres and vineyards, horses and oxen, donkeys and cows and goats. His mother is of a noble line: her grandfather is Yusuf ‘Abd al-Karim Agha, her mother is Zannubah and her father is ‘Abd al-Sami‘ ‘Abd al-Qadir. (p. 385) Shaykh Fadil’s son is identified and objectified by an immediately recognizable series of conventional narrative markers that include the very same uniform (the long pants; the watch) that the young narrator of The Land wistfully longs for. Like Mustafa, his metaphorical absence from the real world of the village marks him as an elusive object of desire. Nabawiyyah is enraptured by his endless store of stories, culled from his schoolbooks and his cosmopolitan experience: The boy has many pretty stories. He brings them from school and tells them to Nabawiyyah. She listens and sometimes laughs and accuses him of talking nonsense. This angers him, but she makes up with him and he tells her another story. (p. 383) In a dramatic narrative reversal, the subjective voice of the ‘simple’ peasant girl, textual object, (Nabawiyyah/Zaynab) is foregrounded while the conventional subject – the acculturated intellectual – (Shaykh Fadil’s son/Hamid) is himself objectified and narrated as pure signifier. Nabawiyyah is endowed with the agency of desire vis-à-vis her textual and social master. The materiality of the socioeconomic relationship that exists between the lovers is explicitly foregrounded in the novel. Nabawiyyah performs small tasks in Shaykh Fadil’s house in exchange for the ‘generous’ payment of ‘a cucumber, a slice of watermelon or a handful of dates’ (p. 385). Shaykh Fadil’s son is the outsider; an anomaly, a fairy-tale – like the mythical black god who impregnates Fahimah and lingers on as such in her fevered fantasies. 223

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The entire house of Shaykh Fadil represents a kind of obscure, exterior reality that mediates the fantastic world of the nation as imagined in the novel. To Nabawiyyah – and her mother Fahimah before her – King Faruq and his doings are the pure stuff of fairytale. The son obliges Nabawiyyah’s demands for ‘the story about the King’ (ihkili hikayat al-malik) – a recurrent opening motif in popular folk-tale – with a narration of his school’s attendance at Faruq’s legendary state visit to Karnak (p. 384). Shaykh Fadil’s house is connected to this legendary royalty and its affiliated national(ist) intelligentsia through distant family ties and friendships. As such, it also participates in the exterior historical time and discourse of the distant Nation. The cyclic, epic time of The Band and the Bracelet is subtly molded by the exterior pressures of historical time. The novel is set in the 1940s, during the broad period spanning the Second World War. The political travails of the nation – war, occupation and the anti-colonial nationalist movement – are incorporated into the text as affective processes. We may usefully contrast the intrusion of World War II and that of the war in Palestine into the narrative. In an example of the narrator’s direct intervention into the text, he bewails the immediate effects of the war on the village itself, in the chapter entitled ‘All of This Came out of the Blue’ (‘Ala Ghayr Tawaqqu‘ Hadatha Kullu Hadha): This war has nothing to do with us. But even so, the authorities demand our children for combat and base service in the camps of the accursed Redskins [i.e. the English]. Those able, pay the price of exemption and the poor man beseeches his son to cut off his trigger-finger. Some goods dwindled, some disappeared, and the price of necessities skyrocketed. That which cost a half-penny, now cost a penny. Even sugar – raw, cubed and granulated – disappeared and tea was sweetened with hard candy, stubborn to melt. Gas, oil and candles became scarce and lamps were lit with twine dipped in animal fat. Some people grew rich but most grew poor and theft spread across the land. No letters reached our sons and none arrived. Would to God this fire consume the English and Hitler and the grocers and the King and the shroud merchants! (p. 376)

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The monumental historical event of this great war is thus summarily narrated as yet another hardship imposed from above on the struggling village. Allies and Axis, local politicians and merchants are all equally indicted as ruthless players in a game in which the villagers of Karnak – and by extension all struggling peoples outside the circles of power – are hapless pawns. However, the dynamic historical time so briefly marked in this lone paragraph does not otherwise affect the static, archetypal time of the village, but is rather metonymically assimilated into it. Mustafa’s absence – the central axis around which the novel is organized – is caused by his conscription into the massive laborgangs organized by the British army for service in Palestine and Sudan. Similarly, the catastrophic war in Palestine – at first obliquely narrated as popular parable – is subsumed into the fateful and mournful movement of time in the developing story of Nabawiyyah’s approaching adolescence and imminent fall. The following passage is thus a dirge of sorts for both Palestine and the ill-starred child: The Zionist gangs massacred the sons and daughters of the Arabs, and the English left Palestine and handed it to the Jews in fulfillment of their old promise. The Arab armies were broken by treachery and defective arms – but God has pledged [His word] and God’s covenant is true, and He will not break His appointment. Children grow up, even in refugee camps. And in the late Bikhit alBishari’s house, the rabbits multiplied and grew in number.…while Nabawiyyah, the orphan, blossomed into adolescence.17 (p. 388) Moreover, the loss of Palestine is also subtextually narrated largely through the elaboration of its microscopic effects on the lives and destinies of the novel’s characters – particularly Mustafa, who is forced to return to Egypt following the war and take up the life of a marauding gang-leader, an Ali Baba or Robin Hood of sorts who, guerilla-like, preys on the camps of the British army. This same chapter ends with a singular and dissonant representation of the highbrow discourse of nationalism, as both a discrete language and a mythological topos rooted in the affectations and interests of the ruling classes. The section is divided into short subsections that move from a general description of the post-war 225

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political scene, to Shaykh Fadil’s incidental subscription to the nationalist papers, to the detailed notes of a well known journalist who is a friend of Shaykh Fadil’s family. He is a total stranger to the text, whose sudden appearance and equally sudden disappearance parallels the transience and incommensurability of the language of his social affiliations. Inflamed by a patriotic Umm Kalthum song, the journalist, Muhammad Ahmad al-Sharqawi, returns home from an evening spent at Shaykh Fadil’s house determined to write, ‘in an exquisite Kufic hand’ a nationalistic piece comprised of ‘some proverbial verses of poetry [and] some exemplary sayings’. The notes that follow are a series of emboldened catch-phrases with explanatory glosses whose urbane, epigrammatic language forms a stark contrast to the oblique, ritualized language of the novel: (1) My country, my country, To you, my love and fealty18 An anthem sung by Darwish for the 1919 Revolution. Suitable for all insurrections and voices. Wonderful when sung in chorus…Why? (2) ‘If I were not an Egyptian, I would ardently desire to be an Egyptian’. Mustafa Kamil was a lawyer who loved French civilization. Turkish blood ran in his veins – but he was born in Egypt, grew up in Egypt and drank of her Nile’s waters. […] (4) If immortal fame should distract me from my country, Immortal, my soul would yet yearn for it. Even palace life cannot distract the poets from love of the Nation.19 (p. 391) This quixotic intervention into the text starkly foregrounds the social and discursive tensions inherent in the high-pitched language of nationalism – a generic, declamatory language constructed by an urbane, elite class and bordering on empty cliché. It is a leisured, hypertextual language, in the sense that it quite literally grows out of other, remote texts (the patriotic lyrics of a song; the national anthem and various pithy quotations and 226

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lines of poetry) and not the lived experience of the long-suffering, liminal community which it perhaps claims to represent, yet which nonetheless effectively exists at its farthest margins and outside of the logic of its historical hegemony. The narration of place in the novel – community, ‘home’ – is defined by a primal language of generic locations (here/there, inside/outside, the earth/the heavens). The home (al-dar), with all its ambiguous connotations of haven and prison, is implicitly contrasted with bilad al-nas (the land of God’s people) – the distant lands outside the home – which is at once a profoundly transcendent, human identification and an awesome, mythic one. The following is Fahimah’s description of the Sudan, where Mustafa labors for the British army: They sleep in neighboring tents, and the blessed earth thirsts for water. They carve canals and lay railroad tracks. Black soldiers who jabber in the tongue of the red Englishmen share their tents and their work. The men hear the distant howl of the beast. The snakes are huge, winged, their necks ringed with black collars. Scorpions also abound. Sudan is the land of saints and of the virtuous. Sudan is the land of magic and charms and the long awaited savior [mahdi]. Some of its people prefer human flesh, but they inhabit the forests, far from the men. (p. 349) The stirring call to arms with which the section (and chapter) ends – ‘If the People should one day choose to live, Fate must comply, Night must give way to Day, and the chains [that bind them] must break’ – is also a poignantly ironic comment on the sharp tension between discourse and experience, for it is precisely this radical individual and collective emancipation (from al-Qadar – Fate) that finally eludes the characters of The Band and the Bracelet.20 The novel ends with a chilling image of utter defeat: the deaf and blind Hazinah left alone in the dark house with her paralyzed son and the ghosts of her dead, while outside the cycle of days and nights endlessly repeats itself. The Band and the Bracelet represents a singular intervention into the writing of the village novel. While invoking some of the genre’s central motifs and strategies – the urbanized schoolboy, the illicit romance and the love-triangle, and the foregrounding of language as an affect of social power for example – the novel 227

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articulates the experience of the rural community through and against the contemporary discourse of national character and national failure. The ‘exhausted, backward, petrified customs and traditions’ of Gamal Hamdan’s Egyptian villages are revealed as bitterly contested sites of human struggle, rooted in brute poverty and the social and political hierarchies in which power is reproduced and maintained. On the other hand, the transparent pastoralist ideal of village life and of the stable, pious, patriarchal peasant family is exposed in the novel as a mythic topos that properly describes the lifestyle of the landlords rather than the villagers themselves. Sexual transgression and social impotence mark the poles of the impoverished villagers’ experience. Few of the novel’s characters are employed as peasant-cultivators. They are mostly landless and unemployed like Bihkit al-Bishari, or migrant laborers and outlaws like his son Mustafa. The entire village is a kind of blank and barren landscape in which all the physical and symbolic details of genealogy and prosperity belong exclusively to the House of al-Shaykh al-Fadil. More importantly, The Band and the Bracelet encodes this bleak vision of rurality in a dramatically new narrative language, thereby fully disengaging the village from the conventional and symbolic structures of representation through which it has been articulated from the foundational period onwards. The opacity of the novel’s abbreviated, poetic language and the elision of conventional narrative point-of-view embed the novel in a competing folk narrativity. All of the representational and discursive strategies that have typically anchored the village in a national text – horizontal, calendrical time, visible landscapes, mimetic dialogue – are disarticulated in the novel, as is the metaphor of community that is repeated in so many novels. In The Band and the Bracelet ’Abdallah finally removes the village from its national significations – the overdetermined narrative of origins and identity which is coextensive with the history of the novel itself.

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n Fathi Ghanim’s 1963 novel Those Days, the distinguished histoian Salim ‘Ubayd is obsessed with the project of discovering the elusive ‘truth’ of Egypt’s enduring history and of coming to terms with his own failure, as a historian, to uphold this truth in the face of official suppression. Salim returns to Egypt from the Sorbonne in 1930, with his controversial book The Corvée and the Whip. The book is banned by the government and Salim fired from his post at Cairo University. Thanks to the intervention of his connections, he s allowed to return to the university and to his promising career after he has issued an apology to the royal family. The historian has never quite recovered from this betrayal of his vocation and his conscience. Salim articulates this vocation in terms of an absolute dentity between personal biography and national history – the self and the collectivity: Salim had read, and been deeply affected by a phrase in Spengler’s book. It was this phrase that had led him to write The Corvée and the Whip. In Spengler’s introduction, Salim read: ‘The history I am writing is my history, for it courses through my very blood’. These words rumbled in his breast and filled him with deep excitement. He imagined that if he listened closely to the blood that ran in his veins, he would know history as it should be written. Salim asked: Who am I? What is it that whispers in my blood? If I answer this question, I will be able to write Egypt’s history. It’s logical. I am an Egyptian. I’ve eaten Egyptian food: old cheese and onions and radish and beans. I’ve smelled the breeze of Egypt, I’ve smelled the odor of cow-dung and 229

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brushwood. I’ve filled my nostrils with the scent of the khamasin storms, and country roses and jasmine. I’ve seen Egypt with my own eyes.…Yes. I am an Egyptian. Egypt’s history is in my blood.1 Salim’s lengthy catalogue of rural Egyptian artifacts and images – irrigation-wheels and canals, milk pastry and corn-bread, ‘the songs of childhood and the mawwal’ – is a metonymic landscape that gradually leads into the details of his family history. Salim has escaped from his family and his village to Cairo, to Paris and back to Egypt’s capital and the life of a celebrated and affluent professional. As in East of the Palms, Those Days alternates between the two spaces in attempt to solve the dilemma posed by Salim’s quest for ‘the truth’ as a failed historian and as a failed husband. This powerful social metaphor, which ties individual meaning to a collective history, and specifically a rural one, lies at the core of the Egyptian (village) novel. The subject is constructed through this triangular metaphor as a problematic self that is unable or unwilling to assume its integrative social and symbolic function. From Halabawi to ‘Abd al-‘Aziz, the subject is trapped in a painful structural and existential conflict with the community and the culture that represents his rural origins. Many twentieth-century novels, like Zaynab and The Seven Days of Man, have narrated this dilemma while others – The Fair-Skinned Girl and The Band and the Bracelet for example – have alluded to it as a foundational theme. The question of narrativity as a social form and a social act is related to this structure of feeling. The village novel has repeatedly articulated a powerful opposition between epistemologically and geographically defined modes of narration, the one, linear, pragmatic and disciplinary, the other circular, affinitive and subaltern. Disciplinary narrativity is associated with the positivist epistemologies of an urban, national and rationalist institutional culture, while the subaltern mode emanates from a popular (rural) and usually insurgent oral culture. In this context, the precarious history and critical language through which narrative realism and its formal antipodes have been constructed can be read as symptoms of this social and ideological dialectic, rather than fixed narrative categories rooted in other times and other places. John Berger’s description of ‘village gossip’ as a typical form of collective rural self-representation points to the autonomy of folk narrativity as well as to the ways in which it competes with and challenges the dominant point-of-view of the urban imagination. 230

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In the Egyptian village novel, the language of the ‘modern’ subject – which is molded by hegemonic institutional and national discourses – often clashes with this autonomous subaltern narrativity. The Maze of Justice foregrounds this clash, as does The Land and The Band and the Bracelet. The modern bourgeois figuration of the primacy of the individual in relation to society is also dissected as part of this contest. Narrative agency thus becomes an aspect of social agency in an unfolding interrogation of modernity as a fluid and elastic historical process. The inscription of ‘imagination’ (khayal) as a doubled strategy for articulating individual experience and social knowledge mirrors this broader dialectic. Subjectivity is then defined between the two poles of creative identification – the one egocentric and imprisoning, the other filiative and expansive. Hamid’s ‘diseased’ imagination, shaped by romantic novels and the dominance of individual desire, replicates and reinforces his social alienation. In The Seven Days of Man, ‘Abd al-‘Aziz is caught between a rationalist and self-centered perception of social reality and a mythopoeic communalist one that transforms time and space into a powerful cosmology, privileging and celebrating the experience of the impoverished and downtrodden masses. Again and again in these novels, the social and narrative space of the text is defined in terms of a continuing struggle against the coercive social, political and discursive structures through which authority is reproduced and exercised: the hegemonic self, the father, the law, the state. The languages and institutions of the modernizing nation-state are written as ambiguous – if not downright oppressive – historical formations. For example, through the recurring figure of the travelling schoolboy, education becomes both a process of enlightenment but also of estrangement and dyslexia. Similarly, the law – national, tribal and domestic – is written as a tool of individual and collective oppression and hence a contested site of justice. The village novel is still being written in Egypt in ways that parallel the increasingly dizzying rate of mass rural migration and the consequent atomization of stable family and community structures, the resurgence of a colonial regime and economy, the return of neo-feudalist patterns of land ownership and farming practices, and the penetration of mass media and technologies into the countryside. The dislocations produced by this old/new social history is inscribed into the contemporary village novel in the form of an allegorical and parodic metanarrative. In ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Jamal’s 1992 novel Muhibb, the village itself becomes a comic anti-hero, 231

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narrating the story of its own incidental origins and historic liminality in a playful, kaleidoscopic pastiche of extreme languages. The village of Muhibb slides back and forth between the most arcane classical Arabic prose and the most vulgar, ‘deviant’ vernacular, often in the same sentence, foregrounding this ‘juxtaposition’ as a contemporary, syncretic and farcical textual voice. Muhibb spontaneously springs to life from a piece of phlegm sneezed out by Egypt as she takes a walk along the Nile: It is told, in an oft-repeated story, that Egypt was one day out strolling in her northernmost parts, making the rounds and inspecting [her lands], getting to know the creatures of night and day, or more likely – as the story goes – exercising her legs which had grown numb from immortality. As she stretched out her long neck, camel-like, over the river-bank near Dumya, she choked…then sneezed, wiped her mug and her tearing eyes with her sleeve, looked around and not seeing anyone to say ‘God bless you, Egypt’ she turned her proud head to the right, lifted her big toe and pressed it against her left nostril, pursed her mouth and blew with the determination of her illustrious ancestors. Like a rocket, her snot flew out, dear Egypt’s snot, to the highest of heights. It landed…at a distance of about two kilometers from the river and remained there from that day on in an entirely insignificant spot on her map… This is my lineage – I, Muhibb.…Yes, a snot, but not just any snot: rather, Egypt’s own.2 This brief passage compresses and plays upon a number of familiar tropes: the national pastoral, the national feminine and the subject’s narrative voice. The nation, lampooned as a gigantic, ribald caricature of the simple and lovely peasant girl, gives ignoble birth to the tiny forgotten village of Muhibb, while the narrative subject is transformed into the quixotic figure of a collective, omniscient, first-person narrator. The novel invokes and resolves the discursive binarisms around which the narrative of identity has been constructed in the village novel over the past century – binarisms that are organized through language and voice, subjectivity and geographical spaces. Salim ‘Ubayd’s narcissistic and ambitious equation of personal and historical identity is 232

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executed in Muhibb as parody. In this sense, the novel signals the end of an era. In his 1971 study of the Egyptian village novel, The Novelist and the Land, ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr alludes to the social and political sensitivity of the project as a whole. Badr notes that many writers who take the village as their subject face a certain existential and representational, as well as political, dilemma: Writers who wish to be rid of this embarrassment write of the city because it is their world. As for those who burden themselves with writing about the village and the peasant – a sensitive social and political subject – some of them do so with romantic enthusiasm and some from a didactic feeling of duty towards their ignorant countrymen. Only a very few are able to picture this world truly.3 This passing, introductory remark foregrounds the challenge that rural narrative has posed to urban, nationalist epistemologies and institutional discourses in Egypt. Whether the village is written as a microcosm of the nation or as a space alterior to it, it is a narrative inscription that has consistently explored and negotiated the disciplinary forms of narration itself, as well as the fissures between discourse and experience, between ideology and the dynamic process of lived communal affiliations and collective historical agency.

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INTRODUCTION 1 2

3

Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1991, p. 35. The Arabic term Nahdah (which literally means ‘arising’ or ‘awakening’ from the Arabic root nahada, ‘to rise’) refers to both a specific historical period and a more general historical project in modern Arab history. In the first sense, it is widely used to describe the period roughly from the middle of the nineteenth century to the first third of the twentieth, when the Arab world was engaged in the process of nation building and the ‘translation’ of European liberal thought. As such, the term is rooted in a cultural teleology that traces the origins of Arab modernity to the encounter with Europe (taking the form of the Napoleonic invasion of Egypt in 1798) and largely ignores the inner economic and cultural logic of late medieval and early modern Arab societies. Recently, scholars have begun to debunk this paradigm, with important results for the study of modern Arab history and culture (see for example Peter Gran, Islamic Roots of Capitalism, Egypt: 1760–1840, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1996). In the latter sense, the term denotes a continuing historical project of constructing a national culture, which acquired increasing urgency in the Arab world in the wake of the Second World War. In this sense, it is invoked by Arab critics to describe a period of modern Arab history that ends with the 1967 Arab-Israeli war, the demise of Nasserism, the Camp David Accords and the hegemony of market ideologies and structural adjustment (see Ghali Shukri, Al-Nahdah wal-Suqut fil-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, n.p.: Al-Dar al-‘Arabiyyah lilKitab, 1983.) For a general work on the historical Nahdah, see Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, 1789–1939, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983. In his 1902 book, Hadir al-Misriyyin wa Sirr Ta‘akhkhurihim (The Present State of the Egyptians and the Secret of Their Backwardness), Muhammad ‘Umar cataloged the contemporary social mores of the three classes of Egyptian society, reserving the bulk of his criticism for ‘the rich’ (al-aghniya’) and ‘the poor’ (al-fuqara’). See Roger Allen, A Period of Time, Reading MA: Ithaca Press, 1992, pp. 25–28, for a

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4 5 6 7

8 9 10 11 12 13 14

15 16

17 18

19 20

description and discussion of the work. There is some doubt, however, as to ‘Umar’s real identity. Allen has carefully noted the striking similarities between the ideas and the language of Hadir alMisriyyin and Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham, thereby suggesting the possibility that Muhammad ‘Umar may have been a psuedonym used by Muwaylihi for strategic political and literary reasons. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 127. See for example Ra’uf Abbas and Asim Dasuqi, Kibar al-Mullak walFallahun fi Misr 1837–1952, Cairo: Dar Qiba’, 1998. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 116–117. For example: when ‘Abdallah al-Nadim was finally captured and imprisoned in 1891 For his role in the ‘Urabi revolt and after nine years spent in hiding in the Delta, it was Qasim Amin, the resident prosecutor, who allowed him to escape from his jail-cell in Tanta. Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul, on the other hand, was one of the presiding judges at the Dinshaway trial of 1906 that sentenced four innocent peasants to hang. Ahmad Zakariyyah al-Shalaq, Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul wa Qadiyyat alTaghrib, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1987, pp. 31–32. Ibid., p. 124. Jamal Muhammad Ahmad, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 89. Shalaq, Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul wa Qadiyyat al-Taghrib, p. 45. Ahmad, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism, p. 91. Sayyid ‘Ashmawi, Al-Fallahun wal-Sultah, Cairo: Mirit lil-Nashr walMa‘lumat, 2001. See Lennard Davis, Factual Fictions: The Origins of the English Novel, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1996, for an excellent study of the social and political controversies surrounding the emergence of the genre in England. Ahmad Ibrahim al-Hawwari, Naqd al-Riwayah al-Arabiyyah fi Misr, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1978, p. 27. Jabir ‘Asfur notes that the early twentieth century novel, beginning with Zaynab and including works like Al-Mazini’s Ibrahim al-Katib, Al-‘Aqqad’s Sara and Mahmud Tahir Lashin’s Hawwa’ Bila Adam, was primarily preoccupied with the problems of love and marriage in the age of ‘the new woman’, and that the obsession with this controversial theme went hand-in-hand with the genre’s rebellion against the literary canon itself. Zaman Al-Riwayah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah alMisriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1999, pp. 111–113. Al-Hawwari, Naqd al-Riwayah al-Arabiyyah fi Misr, pp. 28–29. Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, al-Muntakhabat, Cairo: Dar al-Nashr alHadith, 1945, quoted in Charles Wendell, The Evolution of the Egyptian National Image, Los Angeles: University of California Press, 1972, p. 275. Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 12–13. Ibid., p. 31.

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21 Michel Zeraffa, Fictions: The Novel and Social Reality, trans. Catherine Burns and Tom Burns, London: Penguin Books, 1979, p. 12. 22 Stephen Heath, ‘Realism, Modernism and “Language Consciousness” ’, in Realism in European Literature, eds Nicholas Boyle and Martin Swales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 109. 23 Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al-Arabiyyah alHadithah fi Misr, Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1992, p. 210. 24 Many critics have identified this dialectic as the central trope of postrealist fiction in Egypt, or what is commonly referred to as the writing of ‘the sixties generation’ (jil al-sittiniyyat). Muhammad Badawi describes the fractured narrative subject as ‘the problematic hero’, (Muhammad Badawi, ‘Riwayat al-Sittiniyyat: Madkhal li Ijtima‘iyyat al-Shakl al-Riwa’i’, Fusul, 2:1–2, 1981–1982, pp. 125–142), while Sami Khashabah prefers ‘the epic hero’ as a way of foregrounding the self’s magnified and logocentric presence within the post-realist text (Sami Khashabah, ‘Jil al-Sittiniyyat fil-Riwayah al-Misriyyah’, Fusul, 2:1–2, 1981–1982, pp. 117–123). Sabry Hafez describes this subject as being essentially ‘incomplete’ and ‘fragile’ as a result of its traumatic collision with ‘external reality’: In many novels this fragility of character is not due to internal conflict within the novel, but is rather the product of the rudimentary treatment, narrow experience, and deficient technique of the writer, and his inability to present the innermost complex anxieties of a personality. Hafez’ explanation of this subject in terms of a particular epoch in Egyptian fiction elides its repeated articulation throughout the twentieth-century novel and reduces the history of the Egyptian novel to a developmentalist model. Sabry Hafez, ‘The Egyptian Novel in the Sixties’, Journal of Arabic Literature, VII, 1976, p. 82. 25 One important exception to this observation is the Egyptian folk ballad or mawwal, performed entirely in the colloquial by itinerant rural singers for rural audiences. Pierre Cachia has produced a unique study of this genre in English: Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt, Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1989. 26 Bayle St John, Village Life in Egypt, London, 1852, quoted in Gabriel Baer, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East, London: Frank Cass, 1982, p. 24. 27 Yusuf al-Shirbini, Hazz al-Quhuf fi Sharh Qasidat Abi-Shaduf, Cairo: Al-Matba’ah wal-Maktabah al-Hamudiyyah bi Misr, n.d. Gabriel Baer’s monograph, Fellah and Townsman in the Middle East, includes a chapter on Hazz al-Quhuf with a useful bibliography of Arabic language criticism. Two other English-language studies of Shirbini’s text exist in addition to Baer’s: Geert Van Gelder, ‘The Nodding Noodles, or Jolting the Yokels: A Composition for Marginal Voices by al-Shirbini’, in Marginal Voices in Literature and Society, ed. Robin Ostle, Strasbourg: European Science Foundation, 2000; and Mohamed-Salah Omri, ‘Adab in the Seventeenth Century: Narrative and Parody in al-Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf’, Edebiyat, 11:2, pp.

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28 29 30

31

32

33

34 35 36

37

169–196. An English translation of Hazz al-Quhuf is currently being prepard by Humphrey Davis. Baer, Fellah and Townsmen in the Middle East, p. 24. Ibid., p. 7. In the essay cited above, Mohamed-Salah Omri concludes that ‘it would be too simplistic to regard the book as a vicious attack on peasants’, arguing instead for an interpretation based on a study of the ways in which parody is orchestrated in the text through the multiple layers of voice and genre. ‘Adab in the Seventeenth Century’, p. 188. Post-revolutionary critics either read Hazz al-Quhuf as a powerful indictment of the historic oppression of the Egyptian peasant, or a reformist critique of the peasant’s cultural decadence. Baer, Fellah and Townsmen in the Middle East, pp. 25–28. See Allen, A Period of Time: A Study and translation of Hadith ’Isa Ibn Hisham, by Muhammad Al-Muwaylihi, for a detailed discussion of Muwaylihi’s literary biography and historical context as well as an excellent full-length translation of the text. Egyptian Earth is the title of Desmond Stuart’s English translation of Al-Ard, which I have translated in subsequent chapters of this work as The Land (see Chapter 5, note 1). With this exception, I will use the English titles of existing translations to refer to the texts cited in this book (where no title translation is given, the title is a proper name). Moreover, I have not always made use of available English translations of the novels discussed in greater detail in this book for purposes of textual citation. In the case of three of these – ‘Adhra’ Dinshaway, Al-Ard and Ayyam al-Insan al-Sab‘ah – though translations do exist, I have chosen to use my own translations of the passages I cite. I have found this to be necessary because of the subtle nature of these texts’ linguistic structures, which ultimately form the basis for the larger argument about diglossia, dialogia and modern Arabic narrative that I make in this book. In my own translations, I have therefore attempted to foreground the polyphonic linguistic and temporal valences of the original Arabic texts, which often tend to be elided by translators for the sake of clarity and general readability in the target language. Muhammad ‘Abd Al-Ghani Hasan, Al-Fallah fil-Adab al-‘Arabi, Cairo: Dar al-Aqlam, 1965, p. 80. Beth Baron, ‘Nationalist Iconography: Egypt as a Woman’, Rethinking Nationalism in the Arab Middle East, eds I. Gershoni and J. Jankowski, New York: Columbia University Press, 1997. In any case, this is certainly one of the reasons why the attempt to construct a female voice outside of the discursive parameters of the nation – Nawal al-Sa‘dawi’s novel Imra’a Tahta Nuqtat al-Sifr (Woman at Point Zero) for example – has met with heated rejection in some Arab critical circles. See Jurj Tarabishi’s Woman Against her Sex, trans. Basil Hatim and Elisabeth Orsini, London: Saqi Books, 1988. See for example: Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au Début de la Nuit; Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; John Kennedy Toole, A

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Confederacy of Dunces; and the fiction of Zora Neale Hurston, Ralph Ellison and James Baldwin. 38 See note 24 above. 39 Hillary Kilpatrick, ‘The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to 1980’, in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. M. M. Badawi, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992, p. 259. 40 See the bibliography for references to English translations of the novels cited in this book. 1 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT 1 2 3 4 5 6

7

8 9

M. M. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988, p. 29. Jacob Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema, Philadelphia: University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958, pp. 26–27. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, pp. 26–27. Luis ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli, 1986, p. 277. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, p. 12. The original Abu Naddarah Zarqa was published in Cairo over the course of two months in 1877. Fifteen issues were produced during that period. However, the journal had many lives. Sannu‘ published a number of variations on the original journal in Paris between the years 1878 and 1889. They were: Rihlat Abu-Naddarah Zarqa (The Voyage of the Man with the Blue Glasses) (1878–1879); Abu Naddarah Zarqa (1879, 1882); and Abu Naddarah: Lisan Hal alUmmah al-Misriyyah al-Hurrah (The Man with the Blue Glasses: The Voice of the Free Egyptian Nation) (1881). See ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, p. 298. Philosopher, writer, orator, journalist and political activist, Jamal alDin al-Afghani (1838–1897) was a seminal figure in the nineteenth-century Islamic revival. See Albert Hourani, Arabic Thought in the Liberal Age, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1983; and Nikki Keddie, An Islamic Response to Imperialism: Political and Religious Writings of Sayyid Jamal al-Din al-Afghani, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1968, for a discussion of alAfghani’s life and works. ‘Awad suggests that Sannu‘ fell under the spell of Mazzini and Italian republicanism during this soujourn in Italy. Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri alHadith, pp. 273–274. The usual reason given for Isma‘il’s closure of Sannu‘ ’s theater is the performance of the play Al-Durratayn (The Two Co-wives) which poked fun at polygamy and which Isma‘il interpreted as a sly reference to his own domestic condition. However, both ‘Awad and Badawi reject this hypothesis and suggest instead that Sannu‘ ’s political enemies had intrigued against him with the Khedive (this is Sannu‘ ’s own explanation as well). ‘Awad tells us that the play, AlSawwah wal-Hammar (The Tourist and the Donkey-Driver), infuriated the Khedive’s British entourage for its satirical portrayal of

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10

11 12

13 14 15 16

17

18 19

a bumbling British orientalist in Cairo. According to ‘Awad, this personage was supposed to be the Maltese orientalist Baron De Malortie, who acted as General Censor in Egypt under Isma‘il and who had criticized Sannu‘ for writing his plays in colloquial Egyptian Arabic. Ibid., p. 282. ‘Awad notes that ‘Abbas Hilmi’s nationalist inclinations and his popularity with the Egyptian middle classes tended to mute Nadim’s well established enmity for the royal family. Consequently, Nadim dropped his public support for the constitution and a parliamentary democracy, and focused on attacking British colonial power and European influence in general in Egypt in the pages of Al-Ustadh. Ibid., p. 361. Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, Boulder: Three Continents Press, 1997, p. 24. Traditional Arab drama had been performed for centuries by itinerant players…or the presenters of shadow-plays, in private homes and public places, as entertainment on feast days and for the diversion of family celebrations. It was considered by many as immoral and degenerate, corrupting the population with its vulgar sexual comments and gestures. This may be the reason why the nineteenth-century Arab pioneers turned to Europe, and why traditional drama was frowned upon by the literati, and subsequently rejected and not adapted to the modern stage. Medieval Arabic drama, in its criticisms of the rulers, the judiciary, government officials and the other targets of its satire, may have innocently amused the majority, but it had over the centuries declined in the eyes of many into a socially unacceptable, salacious, satirical dramatic form. (Shmuel Moreh and Philip Sadgrove, Jewish Contributions to Nineteenth Century Arabic Theatre, New York: Oxford University Press, 1996, pp. 15–16) Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, pp. 25–26. Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, London: Saqi Books, 1993, p. 129. Ibid., p. 116. A fasl can be translated as a section or a chapter of a text, or as an act in a play. It is important to note here that the nomenclature for the new Arabic narrative genres was not stabilized till the 1920s, when qissah (story) came to refer to the short story and riwayah (narrative) to the novel. In the late nineteenth century, qissah and riwayah were often used interchangeably for any kind of non-canonical narrative genre, and moreover a play could also be called a riwayah. Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 120. See also ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith; Mahmud Fahmi Hijazi, ‘AlRu’yah al-Lughawiyyah ‘inda ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’, and Madihah Dus, ‘Al-‘Amiyyah al-Misriyyah ‘inda ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’, in Buhuth Nadwat al-Ihtifal bi Dhikra Murur Mi’at ‘Am ‘ala Wafat ‘Abdallah al-Nadim, Cairo: Al-Majlis al-A‘la lil-Thaqafah, 1995. Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 72. Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 127.

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20 See Chapter 2, ‘Novels and Nations’ for a discussion of the role of narrative ‘character’ in the modern Arabic canon. 21 Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, p. 7. 22 He translates it from the word mujun used by Ibn Danyal himself to describe his shadow-plays. Alternate translations of the term that foreground its satiric function would be ‘raunchiness’ or ‘impudence’. Ibn Danyal’s full phrase is tarafan min al-mujun alladhi ma ‘ib (a bit of acceptable impudence). Ibid., pp. 14–15. 23 Badawi attributes this decree to the theater’s ‘bitter social and political satire which spread feelings of irreverence and disrespect for the Sultan and his court’. Ibid., p. 24. 24 Ibid., pp. 20–23. 25 Ibid., p. 28. 26 Sabry Hafez attributes the use of this character to the influence of the medieval maqamah on Nadim. See The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 127. 27 Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al-Arabiyyah al-Hadithah, p. 20. Badr attributes the decline of literary culture in Egypt in the middle ages to the vernacularization of the text. He names this phenomenon, al-‘ajz ‘an al-ta‘bir (the impotence of the expressive faculty) and cites Ibn Iyas and al-Jabarti as examples of writers who succumbed to this decadence of the age. 28 Ibid., p. 98. 29 Quoted in Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 118. 30 ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, p. 377. 31 Quoted in Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 53. 32 See Nafusa Zakariyyah Sa‘id, Tarikh al-Da‘wa ila al-‘Ammiyyah, Alexandria: Dar Nashr al-Thaqafah, 1964, for an authoritative study of the language controversy in Egypt from the middle of the nineteenth century to the interwar period in the twentieth. 33 ‘Ida‘dat al-Lughah Taslim lil-Dhat’, Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 2, 19 June 1881; Cairo: al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1994, p. 19. 34 ‘Awad mentions that Ahmad Samir, co-editor of Al-Ta’if, referred to ‘a long debate between a group of Egyptian writers which finally ended with Nadim elaborating a middle position between all the opposed viewpoints’. Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, p. 380. 35 ‘Kilmat Ghayyur ‘ala Lughatihi’, Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 5, 1 July 1881. See Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, pp. 378–380; Hijazi, ‘AlRu’yah al-Lughawiyyah ‘inda Abdallah al-Nadim’, p. 286. 36 ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, p. 380. 37 Hijazi, ‘Al-Ru’yah al-Lughawiyyah ‘inda ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’, p. 283. 38 Zaydan was a great defender of classical Arabic and responded to Wilcox’s article in a lengthy essay in al-Hilal, ‘Al-Lughah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Fushah wal-Lughah al-‘Amiyyah’. Hijazi, ‘Al-Ru’yah al-Lughawiyyah ‘inda ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’, p. 287. 39 Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 181. 40 Ibid., p. 212. 41 I am grateful to Pierre Cachia for this insight.

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42 Quoted in Dus, ‘Al-‘Amiyyah al-Misriyyah ‘inda ‘Abdallah alNadim’, p. 292. 43 M. M. Bakhtin, ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’ in The Dialogic Imagination, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1981, p. 65. 44 I encase the singular word ‘language’ in quotes here because though Sannu‘ and Nadim were the first modern writers to transcribe a variety of unstable oral dialects into textual Arabic, and though they attempted to preserve some measure of this oral instability and diversity within the text, the attempt to ‘nationalize’ and hence standardize these dialects into a single, easily recognizable textual language nonetheless necessarily begins with them. 45 Quoted in Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 212. 46 An exception to this general observation are the explicitly political articles that Nadim wrote for Al-Ta’if, the short-lived ‘Urabist newspaper which he edited between 1881 and 1882, as well as his famous colloquial poetry which attacked the political corruption of the Egyptian ruling classes and their economic exploitation of the poor and downtrodden. 47 See Muhammad Yusuf Najm, Al-Masrah al-Arabi: Ya‘qub Sannu‘, Beirut: Dar-al-Thaqafah, 1961. 48 The word lu‘bah is a literal translation of the English word ‘play’. It was eventually replaced by masrahiyyah (from masrah, stage). Lu‘bah preserves the original comic or carnivalesque character of the indigenous theater, and moreover refers to the satiric function of punning as a central dramatic feature in this tradition. 49 Najwah ‘Anus, Ya‘qub Sannu‘: Al-Lu‘bat al-Tiyatriyyah, Cairo: AlHay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1987. ‘Anus omits these later lu‘bat from her anthology due to what she describes as their ‘journalistic’ quality. Moreover, in her introduction to the volume, ‘Anus admits to having deleted all ‘repugnant’ words and phrases from the text of the plays, a good illustration of the nationalist anxiety over language in relation to the canon. 50 Ibid., pp. 6–7. 51 Ibid., p. 7. 52 Sannu‘ often set his one-act plays in an allegorical past. Many of them take place in the Mamluk era (i.e. the days of al-Ghuzz), while others are set in Pharaonic times. ‘Anus suggests that this strategy, in addition to the symbolic names that Sannu‘ gave his characters, was intended to confound the censors. Ibid., p. 7. 53 An Ayyubid minister renowned for his ruthlessness and cruelty. Badawi notes that Cairo’s medieval Qaraquz (puppet-show) troupes were possibly named after this historical figure. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, pp. 12–13. 54 ‘Anus, Ya‘qub Sannu‘: Al-Lu‘bat al-Tiyatriyyah, p. 7. 55 Moosa translates Abu l-Ghulb as ‘the suffering one’, and Abu-Shaduf as ‘he who irrigates the land with the primitive shaduf’. The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 54. Abu Shaduf is the name of the fictitious poet-peasant of Shirbini’s Hazz al-Quhuf, and reappears frequently in

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56 57 58 59 60 61 62

63

64 65

66 67 68 69 70 71

72

Sannu‘ ’s Lu‘bat as a stock peasant figure, garrulous, rebellious and often very funny. Abu Naddarah Zarqa, no. 4, 1878. ‘Anus, Ya‘qub Sannu‘: Al-Lu‘bat al-Tiyatriyyah, pp. 23–26. Al-Nadharat al-Misriyyah, no. 9, 15 April 1880. Ibid., pp. 89–102. The father and son referred to here are Isma‘il and Tawfiq. This is a reference to the exiled ‘Urabi. Isma‘il, Tawfiq’s father, was sent into exile by the British in 1879. Misr lil-Misriyyin, no. 5, 29 June 1890. ‘Anus, Ya‘qub Sannu‘: AlLu‘bat al-Tiyatriyyah, pp. 139–143. The wars in the Sudan were a hot-button issue for turn-of-the-century Egyptian writers. Allen notes, for example, that Muhammad alMuwaylihi dealt with it extensively – and particularly the British role in Sudan – in his journalistic writing, particularly in the pages of the newspaper Misbah al-Sharq. Roger Allen, A Period of Time, Reading MA: Ithaca Press, 1992, pp. 45–46. This direct reference to Abu-Naddara (i.e. Sannu‘ himself) as teacher, activist and a champion is a common occurrence in the Lu‘bat. See for example the dialogue between Nabwat Bek and Abu-Shaduf in IlWad il-Miri’ w-Abu-Shaduf Il-Hidi’, where the latter threatens Nabwat with Abu-Naddarah’s imminent arrival. ‘Anus, Al-Lu‘bat alTiyatriyyah, pp. 95–96, ‘‘Arabi Tafarnaj’, Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 1, 6 June 1881, pp. 7–8 They [the peasants] have names like those of goblins: Barghut, Zi‘it, Mu‘it, and ‘Ifish. They habitually name their children by using exclamations pronounced at the moment of birth. And so, if they hear ‘Ya ‘Imish’ [Hey, dirty!] they name him ‘Ammush and if they hear ‘Hat al-Zabl’ [Bring the pigeon shit], they name him Zibilah. They also give names like Abu Riyalah [drooler], Abu Zi‘iza’ [bean-pole], Abu Qadah [a measure for weighing grain], Abu Hashisha [grass], Abu Kanun [clay oven] and Barbur [snot]’. (from Hazz al-Quhuf, quoted in Ahmad Amin, Qamus al-‘Adat wal Taqalid wal-Ta‘abir al-Misriyyah, Cairo: Matba‘at al-Jinnah lil-Tarjamah wal-Ta’lif wal-Nashr, 1953, p. 311) For further elaboration of this theme, see the sketch ‘Jahl al-‘Awaqib Jalib al-‘Awatib’, Ibid., no. 4, 3 July 1881, pp. 94–95. Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 4, 3 July 1881, pp. 56–58. Ibid., no. 1, 6 June 1881, pp. 11–12. Ibid., no. 10, 15 August 1881, p. 162. Ibid., no. 10, 15 August 1881, p. 165. Literally translated, this phrase would mean something like, ‘you are not yourself nor is the copy a copy’. In reference to the essay which it describes, the title could be rendered as ‘you are an imposter and so is your double’. Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 10, 15 August 1881, pp. 155–157.

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73 The title is ‘named after the sixth-century Arab Lakhmid King alNu‘man Ibn al-Mundhir’, and according to Moosa, is ‘sometimes called al-‘Arab (the Arabs) because it was meant to portray the excellence of the Arabs’. The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 70. 74 The colloquial Arabic phrase is niqta‘ waqt, which literally means to ‘cut up’ or ‘lop off’ time, i.e. to pass time. 75 Sulafat al-Nadim, Cairo: Matba‘ah Hindiyyah bi Misr, 1914, p. 39. 76 Ibid., pp. 48–49. 77 Ibid., pp. 34–35. 78 Partha Chatterjee, The Nation and Its Fragments, Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1993. 2 NOVELS AND NATIONS 1 See for example Bill Ashcroft and Helen Tiflin, The Empire Writes Back: Theory and Practice in Postcolonial Literatures, New York: Routledge, 1989; Homi Bhabha (ed.) Nation and Narration, New York: Routledge, 1990; Gregory Jusdanis, Belated Modernity and Aesthetic Culture: Inventing National Literature, Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1991; and Laura Chrisman and Patrick Williams (eds) Colonial Discourse and Postcolonial Theory; A Reader, New York: Columbia University Press, 1994. 2 Timothy Brennan, ‘The National Longing for Form’, in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 49. 3 Sayyed Mohammad Ali Jamalzadeh, preface to Yaki Bud, Yaki Nabud. Translated and quoted in full in Haideh Daraghi, ‘The Shaping of the Modern Persian Short Story’, in Thomas Ricks (ed.) Critical Perspectives on Modern Persian Literature, Washington DC: Three Continents Press, 1984, p. 113. 4 Recently, critics have begun to question this canonical literary geneology and to refer to the existence of prior or alternative texts that enrich and complicate the standard reading of the history of the Arabic novel. See for example Roger Allen, ‘Literary History and the Arabic Novel’, World Literature Today, 75:2, spring 2001, pp. 205–213, and Jabir Asfur, Zaman al-Riwayah. 5 See Badr, Tattawur al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Hadithah fi Misr, pp. 413–431. 6 For example, Al-Rawi (1888), Musamarat al-Nadim (1903), Musamarat al-Sha‘b (1904–1906), al-Musamarat al-Usbu‘iyyah (1909), Musamarat al-Muluk (1912) and Musamarat Shahrazad (1932). Ibid., pp. 126–127. 7 Ibid., p. 19. 8 Ibid., p. 122. 9 Ibid., p. 122. 10 Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 111. 11 Ibid., p. 107. 12 Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Hadithah, p. 144. 13 Ibid., pp. 175–180. 14 Ibid., p. 143.

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15 16 17 18 19 20 21 22 23 24 25 26 27

28 29

Ibid., p. 156. Ibid., p. 148. Ibid., p. 198. Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction, New York: Methuen, 1987, pp. 24–25. Guy de Maupassant, ‘The Novel’, Pierre and Jean, trans. Leonard Tancock, London: Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 26–27. Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels, p. 54. Ibid., p. 117. ‘Asfur, Zaman al-Riwayah, pp. 106–110. Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Hadithah, p. 160. Ramzi Mikha’il, Al-Sahafah al-Misriyyah wal-Harakah alWataniyyah: 1882–1922, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1996, pp. 42–49. Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Thawrat al-Adab, Cairo: Dar alMa‘arif, 1986, p. 12. Quoted in Israel Gershoni and James Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, New York: Oxford University Press, 1986, p. 192. Renan’s theories circulated widely in Haykal’s time – Haykal himself was greatly influenced by the determinist social and literary thought of Hippolyte Taine, whose views on ‘the Semitic race’ were virtually identical to Renan’s. From a broadcast interview with Mahmud Taymur, published in AlAdab, no. 9, September 1960, p. 11. Quoted in Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah, pp. 206–207. Mahmud Taymur describes popular fiction thus: Non-artistic fiction shuns truth and reality, and the non-artistic author chooses the path of least resistance [in his writing], indifferent to all but the execution of his purpose. He is not guided by the natural movement of his characters’ lives but forces them to take the direction he chooses and delivers them to the ends that he has constructed, thereby creating an artificial and deceptive chain of cause and effect with a cheap skill and a temporary varnish.…These non-artistic stories are a fertile grazing ground for uncultured audiences and greatly influence – albeit in a fleeting manner – the inferior classes of this audience in particular.

(Fann al-Qisas, Cairo: Matba‘at Dar al-Hilal, 1948, pp. 44–45) 30 ‘Isa ‘Ubayd, Ihsan Hanim, Cairo: Matba‘at Ramsis, 1964, p. 9. 31 Davis, Factual Fictions, pp. 58–59. 32 See ‘Al-Tarikh wal Al-Adab al-Qawmi’, in Haykal, Thawrat al-Adab, pp. 121–132. Haykal himself tried his hand at this type of fiction, without much success. Examples are included in Thawrat al-Adab. 33 J. Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984, p. 249. 34 David Semah, Four Egyptian Literary Critics, Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974, pp. 70–74. 35 Ibid., p. 72.

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36 Semah notes that Haykal published a comprehensive study of Taine’s philosophical and critical works – entitled Tarajim Misriyyah wa Gharbiyyah – in al-Siyasah al-Usbu’iyyah in 1928. Ibid., p. 70. For a broader discussion of the influence of Taine and Gustave Le Bon’s geographical determinism on Haykal and his generation of nationalist intellectuals, see Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs, pp. 130–136. 37 Haykal, Thawrat al-Adab, p. 105. 38 For example, Haykal discusses the role of the fireplace as both a motif and a source of artistic inspiration in European culture and literature. He notes that this ‘northern’ social institution is responsible for much great art in the European tradition, including the literary theme of romantic love, while ‘here we are, surrounded by an enchanting natural environment of which only a minor trace appears in the odes of our poets and the stories of our authors’. Ibid., pp. 114–116. 39 Ibid., pp. 111–112. 40 Ibid., p. 120. 41 Ibid., p. 116. 42 See chapter 2, ‘The Reading Public and the Change in Artistic Sensibility’, in Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, for numerous examples of this implicit approach: ‘The occupation was not to be short or temporary…and Egypt realized that she had to struggle to regain her lost independence and to recover her national character, which the occupying forces were attempting to obliterate’ (p. 73). Indeed, Hafez’s thorough documentation of the discursive infrastructure of change is contradicted by his theoretical analysis of its textual dynamics. In his discussion of Tahtawi’s education reform efforts in the field of geography and history – a project he connects to the need to change the concept of time and space in narrative (based on Ian Watt’s seminal study of the origins of the English novel) – he admits that these new spatial and temporal connections were actively produced for consumption by the new readership: ‘For without a strong awareness of the vitality of geographical and historical dimensions of being, it would have been impossible for the cohesive links of nationhood, watan, to replace the old spiritual or blood bonds with connections of space and time’. (p. 98). 43 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 11. 44 Haykal, Thawrat al-Adab, p. 120. 45 Ibid., p. 106. 46 Ibid., p. 118. 47 Raymond Williams has explored a similar process in eighteenth- and nineteenth-century English literature. See The Country and the City, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1973. 48 Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Mudhakkarat fil-Siyasah al-Misriyyah, Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahdah al-Misriyyah, 1951, vol. I, p. 48. 49 For example, in the same memoir Haykal goes on to say of this provincial tour:

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The sight of all this pained me. And what increased my pain was that mere months before this, I had traveled with my friend Shuhdi Butrus to visit the Loire region in France. We traveled by carriage from town to town and village to village and if we happened to notice something that offended our eyes from lack of cleanliness or taste, we considered it an exception.…But the exception in France is the rule in Egypt. So you can imagine my sorrow and pain. And the fact that the landscape in France is no more beautiful or fertile than the Egyptian landscape only increased my sorrow. There is no doubt that life in Egypt would become beautiful and valuable if only true knowledge and a generous spirit would cultivate it with a steadfast vigilance. (Ibid., pp. 48–49) 50 Tawfiq Mikha’il Tuwaj, ‘Tatawwur al-Adab al-Misri wa Aghraduhu’, Al-Siyasah Al-Usbu‘iyyah, 25 May 1929, 18. Quoted in Gershoni and Jankowski, Egypt, Islam and the Arabs: The Search for Egyptian Nationhood, p. 205. 51 Salamah Musa, Ahlam al-Falasifah. Quoted in Egypt, Islam and the Arabs, p. 206. 52 Ibid., p. 187. 53 See Muhammad Husayn Haykal, ‘Misr al-Qadimah wa Misr alJadidah’, Al-Siyasah al-Usbu‘iyyah, 27 November 1926, 10–11, reprinted as ‘al-Tarikh wal-Adab al-Qawmi’, in Thawrat al-Adab, pp. 121–131. 54 Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Hadithah fi Misr, p. 215. 55 ‘Asfur, Zaman al-Riwayah, p. 56. Asfur plays on the grammatical sense of the words ‘fard’ (the singular) and ‘jam’ ’ (the plural) in this phrase. 56 Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah alMisriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Ta’lif wal-Nashr, 1971, pp. 39–40. 3 FOUNDATIONS 1

Haqqi was forced to resign from his post as secretary to the Minister of Endowments after the novel’s publication. Yahya Haqqi, ‘Introduction’ to Adhra’ Dinshaway, Cairo: al-Maktabah al-‘Arabiyyah, 1963, p. m. Adhra’ Dinshaway has been translated into English by Saad ElGabalawy in Three Pioneering Egyptian Novels, Fredericton: York Press, 1986. All further references to the text will cite the Arabic edition in parenthesized page numbers and the English translation in squarebracketed page numbers.

2 The peasant used to be…nonexistent in the concerns of the urban population. Moreover, he was viewed with contempt and scorn. It wasn’t long ago that the book Hazz al-Quhuf fi Sharh Qasidat Abi-Shaduf [appeared], describing the peasant in the most extreme manner, cursing him in the most obscene way and presenting him as being no different from the cattle. (Ibid, p. d.)

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3 Anderson, Imagined Communities, p. 30. 4 The reference to ‘our dear friend, author of The Emancipation of Woman’ (1899) is of course to Qasim Amin, lawyer, reformist and author who wrote extensively on women’s education and role in modern Egypt. 5 Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt, p. 240. 6 Brugman also notes that already in 1926, Mahmud Taymur had made this same point about Haykal’s novel in his preface to his collection of short stories, Al-Shaykh ‘Abit. Ibid., pp. 210–211. 7 ‘Asfur, Zaman al-Riwayah, p. 113. 8 Muhammad Husayn Haykal, ‘Preface’ to Zaynab, Cairo: Maktabat al-Nahdah al-Misriyyah, 1967, p. 10. All further references to the novel will cite this edition in parenthesized page numbers. 9 See Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, p. 52. 10 Ibid., p. 71. 11 Charles D. Smith traces the biographical and historical sources of this trope in his essay, ‘Love, Passion and Class in the Fiction of Muhammad Husayn Haykal’, Journal of The American Oriental Society, 99:2, 1979, pp. 249–261. 12 Doris Sommer, ‘Irresistible Romance: The Foundational Fictions of Latin America’, in Bhabha, Nation and Narration, p. 82. 13 Ibid., pp. 84–85. 14 For example, Al-‘Aqqad’s Sara, al-Mazini’s Ibrahim al-Katib, Lashin’s Hawwa’ Bila Adam and al-Hakim’s Al-Ribat al-Muqaddas. 15 Yawmiyyat Na’ib fil-Aryaf (Diary of a Country Prosecutor) has been translated by Abba Eban as The Maze of Justice, Austin: University of Texas Press, 1989. Unless otherwise noted, all references to the novel will cite this edition of the translation in parenthesized page numbers. 16 J. Brugman notes that, as in Haykal’s case, the young al-Hakim’s trip to France was instigated by Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, who was also a friend of al-Hakim’s father. An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt, p. 279. 17 Quoted in Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt, p. 279. 18 Tawfiq al-Hakim, ‘Awdat al-Ruh, Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1937, pp. 59–60. 19 Al-Hakim deals extensively with this subject in his 1938 novel ’Asfur Min al-Sharq (Bird of the East). In Paris, Muhsin befriends a French worker and engages him in a series of discussions that essentialize labor as a product of cultural specificities. Thus the deluded Bolshevik worker is a product of materialistic ‘Western’ culture, whereas the ‘Eastern’ worker incorporates his labor into his harmonious, ‘Eastern’ spirituality. 20 Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, p. 89. See also Ghali Shukri, Thawrat alMu‘tazil: Dirasah Fi Adab Tawfiq al-Hakim, Beirut: Dar al-Thaqafah Al-Jadidah, 1983. 21 Tawfiq al-Hakim, Yawmiyyat Na’ib fil-Aryaf, Beirut: al-Maktabah alSha‘biyyah, 1974, p. 92.

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4 THE POLITICS OF REALITY 1 Stephen Heath, ‘Realism, Modernism and “Language Consciousness” ’, in Realism in European Literature, eds Nicholas Boyle and Martin Swales, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1986, p. 113. 2 Muhammad ‘Abd al-Halim ‘Abdallah (1913–1970) was a popular and prolific Egyptian novelist whose works, whether set in the country or the city, are characterized by the kind of melancholy – if not morbid – romanticism popular with contemporary middle-class audiences (see Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim and Muhammad Anis, FilThaqafah al-Misriyyah, Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafah al-Jadidah, 1989, for a critical discussion of his work from a socialist realist perspective). 3 It would be impossible, in particular, to overstate the importance of 1948 as a transitional historical moment in the Arab world. The partition of Palestine and the Arab-Israeli war of 1948 that resulted in the Nakbah (Disaster) had profound consequences for Arab intellectuals. For a concise and insightful discussion of this moment, see Salma Khadra Jayyusi’s introduction to Modern Arabic Poetry: an Anthology, New York: Columbia University Press, 1987. 4 Taha Husayn himself was accused of being a communist by King Fu’ad because of the sympathetic depiction of the poor in his book, Al-Mu‘adhdhibun fil-Ard. Mustafah ‘Abd al-Ghani, I‘tirafat ‘Abd alRahman al-Sharqawi, Cairo: Al-Majlis Al-A‘la lil-Thaqafah, 1996, p. 23. 5 For example, Muhammad ‘Atif Ghayth, Al-Qaryah alMutaghayyirah: Dirasah fi ‘Ilm al-Ijtima‘ al-Qarawi, Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1964; Mahmud Abu Rayyah, Hayat al-Qurah, Cairo: AlDar al-Qawmiyyah lil-Ta’lif wal-Nashr, 1966; Zaydani Abd al-Baqi, Ilm al-Ijtima‘ al-Rifi wal-Qura l-Misriyyah, Cairo: Jami‘at al-Azhar, 1974. 6 For example, Abd al-Hamid Yunis, Difa‘an ’an al-Fulklur, Cairo: AlHay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1973. 7 The Center launched a journal in 1965, entitled Al-Funun alSha‘biyyah: ‘The journal identified for itself three tasks: study of folklore using scientific methodology, study of the folk arts developing in the new post-revolution socialist society, and discovery of folk elements in high literature’. Elisabeth C. Kendall, ‘Literature, Journalism and the Avant-garde in Egypt: From al-Hilal to Gallery 68’, unpublished dissertation, University of Oxford, 1997. 8 For example, Ahmad Shawqi ‘Abd al-Hakim, Adab al-Fallahin, Cairo: Dar al-Nashr al-Muttahidah, 1958; Muhammad ‘Abd alGhani Hasan, Al-Fallah fil-Adab al-‘Arabi, Cairo: Dar al-Qalam, 1965; ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, Cairo: Dar alMa‘arif, 1971; Hasan Muhassib, Qadiyyat al-Fallah fi al-Qissa al-Misriyyah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Ta’lif walNashr, 1971; and numerous journal articles published by ‘Abd al-Basit ‘Abd al-Mu‘ti, Fawzi al-‘Antil, Fu’ad Dawwara, Fathi Faraj and Suhayr al-Qalamawi among others. 9 Anwar ‘Abd al-Malik, ‘Al-Ard wal-Fallah fi Tarikhina’, Al-Masa’, 25 August 1958.

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10 Ibrahim ‘Amir, Al-Ard wal-Fallah: Al-Mas’alah al-Zira‘iyyah fi Misr, Cairo: Matba‘at al-Dar al-Misriyyah lil-Tiba‘ah wal-Nashr walTawzi‘, 1958. 11 ‘Abd al-Ghani, I‘tirafat ‘Abd al-Rahman Al-Sharqawi, p. 34. 12 Ibid., pp. 47–48. 13 They included Sa‘id Khayal, Sa‘d Labib, Nu‘man ‘Ashur, ‘Ali al-Ra‘i, Ibrahim ’Abd al-Halim and ’Umar Rushdi. Ibid., p. 44. 14 Ibid., p. 110. 15 Ibid., p. 42. 16 The Committee was subsequently renamed ‘The Popular Vanguard for Liberation’, ‘The Workers’ Vanguard’, and finally ‘The Egyptian Communist Workers and Peasants’ Party’. Ibid., p. 47. 17 Ibid., p. 47. 18 Al-‘Alim and Anis, Fil-Thaqafah al-Misriyyah, p. 25. 19 Sharqawi himself published a long poem in free verse in 1953 entitled ‘A Message to President Truman from an Egyptian father’, for which he was roundly attacked by ‘Abbas Mahmud al-‘Aqqad, who detested al-shi‘r al-hurr. Mustafa ‘Abd al-Ghani notes that the poem was written in Paris in 1951 and circulated surreptitiously in (Cairo I‘tirafat ‘Abd Al-Rahman Al-Sharqawi, pp. 107–108). 20 Quoted in M. M. Badawi, Modern Arabic Literature and the West, New York: Ithaca Press, 1985, pp. 12–13. In her important dissertation on avant-garde literature and journalism in Egypt, Elisabeth Kendall details the debates on literary commitment in Egypt. Throughout its years of publication, the Egyptian review Al-Adab (1956–1966) featured numerous articles as well as an ongoing debate on the meaning and role of commitment in literature, claiming, in one of its editorials, ‘a belief in the majesty, honor, influence and position of art, for art is no longer that wanton pastime nor dissolute entertainment’. ‘Literature, Journalism and the Avant-Garde in Egypt: From al-Hilal to Gallery 68’, p. 75. 21 They are: social realism (al-waqi‘iyyah al-ijtima‘iyyah), philosophical realism (al-waqi‘iyyah al-falsafiyyah), analytic realism (al-waqi‘iyyah al-tahliliyyah) and subjective realism (al-waqi‘iyyah al-fardiyyah). Sa‘id al-Waraqi, Ittijahat al-Qissah al-Qasirah fil Adab al-Arabi alMu‘asir fi Misr, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-‘Ammah al-Misriyyah lil-Kitab, 1979. 22 Al-‘Alim and Anis, Fil-Thaqafah al-Misriyyah, p. 26. 23 Husayn Muruwwa quoted in Ghali Shukri, Mudhakkarat Thaqafah Tahtadir, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah Al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1995, p. 123. 24 Ibid., p. 144. In the roughly half-century since On Egyptian Culture was first published, Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim has revised and re-articulated his critical positions in significant ways, especially with regards to the question of form in narrative. See for example Al-Riwayah al‘Arabiyyah Bayna al-Waqi‘ wal-Dalalah, Al-Ladhiqiyah: Dar Al-Hiwar lil-Nashr wal-Tawzi‘, 1986; Al-Bunyah wal-Dalalah FilQissah wal-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal

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25 26 27 28

29 30

31

32 33 34 35 36 37 38 39 40 41

al-‘Arabi, 1994; Al-Ibda‘ wal-Dalalah, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al‘Arabi, 1997. Consequently, Zionist literature becomes an exemplar of truly committed literature. Ahmad Muhammad ‘Atiyyah, Al-Iltizam walThawrah fil-Adab al-‘Arabi al-Mu‘asir, Beirut: Dar al-’Awdah, 1974. Shukri, Mudhakkarat Thaqafah Tahtadir, pp. 148–149. ‘Abd al-Ghani, I‘tirafat ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, pp. 22–23. In 1966, the peasants of the Delta village of Kamshish, led by peasant organizer Khalid Maqlad, occupied the lands of the village’s main landowning family, who had aggressively resisted nationalization and redistribution efforts over the past decade. Maqlad was assasinated and the regime resisted the villagers’ attempts to equitably resolve the ongoing crisis. For more information, see James Toth, Rural Labor Movements in Egypt and Their Impact on the State, 1961–1992, Gainsville: University Press of Florida, 1999; and Hamied Ansari, Egypt, the Stalled Society, Albany NY: State University of New York Press, 1986. From ‘Azmat al-Muthaqqafin’, quoted in Ghali Shukri, Al-Nahdah wal-Suqut fil-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, Cairo: Al-Dar al-‘Arabiyyah lilKitabah, 1983, p. 80. Similary, Naguib Mahfouz’s 1962 novel Al-Summan wal-Kharif (Autumn Quail) celebrates the productive post-revolutionary union between a corrupt and disillusioned ranking bureacrat of the ancien regime and a former prostitute with a heart of gold. This novel was also made into a classic film in 1967. Memoirs are a fertile source of information on this subject. See in particular Fathi Ghanem, Ma‘rakah bayna al-Dawlah walMuthaqqafin, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1995. Also, Ghali Shukri, Al-Muthaqqafun wal-Sultah Fi Misr, Cairo: Akhbar al-Yawm, 1990. Kendall, ‘Literature, Journalism and the Avant-garde in Egypt: From al-Hilal to Gallery 68’, p. 85. Shukri, Al-Nahdah wal-Suqut fil-Fikr Al-Misri al-Hadith, pp. 86–87. Ibid., pp. 94–95. See Kendall, ‘Literature, Journalism and the Avant-garde in Egypt’, for a detailed discussion of Gallery 68 and its role in the literary and political ferment of the period. Shukri, Al-Nahdah wal-Suqut fil-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, p. 97. Ibid., p. 102. Haqqi’s introduction to Tilka al-Ra’iha has been translated by Marilyn Booth and published in Index on Censorship, 16:9, 1987, p. 22 (London: Writers and Scholars International). Badawi, Al-Riwayah al-Jadidah fi Misr, p. 259. Yusuf Idris, Al-Bayda’, Cairo: Maktabat Misr, n.d., pp. 47–48. Jamal Hamdan, Shakhsiyyat Misr: Dirasah Fi ‘Abqariyyat al-Makan, vol. II, Cairo: Madbuli, 1994, p. 50. See Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, AlWa‘y wal-Wa‘y al-Za’if Fil-Fikr al-‘Arabi al-Mu‘asir, Cairo: Dar al-Thaqafah al-Jadidah, 1986, for a critique of national character studies.

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42 See ‘Ashmawi, Al-Fallahun wal-Sultah, and Toth, Rural Labor Movements in Egypt and their Impact on the State, 1961–1992. 43 Khayri Shalabi, al-Awbash, in al-A‘mal al-Kamilah, Cairo: al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1993, p. 124. 5 THE LAND 1 ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi’s novel Al-Ard has been translated in abridged form by Desmond Stuart as Egyptian Earth, London: Saqi Books, 1990. 2 Hillary Kilpatrick and Pierre Cachia have both more or less taken this position, which is perhaps most succinctly expressed by Cachia in his description of the novel as being marred by its overt and unrealistic political agenda. Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic Literature, Edinburgh: Edinburgh University Press, 1990, p. 117. See also, Hillary Kilpatrick, The Modern Egyptian Novel: A Study in Social Criticism, London: Ithaca Press, 1974, pp. 126–133. 3 See ‘Atiyyah, Al-Iltizam wal-Thawra fil-Adab al-Arabi al-Hadith, pp. 25–27; Sayyid ‘Abdallah ‘Ali, ‘Ard al-Sharqawi: Muhtawa al-Shakl wal-Waqi‘iyyah al-Ma’dhumah’, Adab wa Naqd, 11:104, April 1994, pp. 56–78. 4 See Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, pp. 115–153. 5 Al-‘Alim and Anis, Fil-Thaqafah al-Misriyyah, p. 120: I don’t know how al-Sharqawi manages to take possession of our hearts with these images, but the truth is that by representing life so realistically in The Land, he has proven that he is a true poet, capable of profoundly moving human emotions. He makes you laugh and cry as though you were experiencing real life. 6 Ibid., pp. 125–131. 7 Davis, Resisting Novels, p. 119. 8 Raymond Williams, ‘Region and Class in the Novel’, in Writing in Society, London: Verso, 1985, p. 237. 9 ‘Asfur, Zaman al-Riwayah, p 107. 10 In his reminiscences about his childhood and early youth, Sharqawi describes his first departure for primary school in a neighboring village and his second departure for secondary school and university in Cairo as two distinct and consecutive stages of ‘emigration’. Significantly, the Arabic term ightirab also negatively connotes a process of acculturation; of nostalgic loss or exile from the homespace. ‘Abd al-Ghani, I‘tirafat ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, pp. 14–15. This personal description is quite similar to the terms in which ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim described his own emotional experience of ‘emigration’ from village to city and back again (see Chapter 6). 11 ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, Al-Ard, Cairo: Dar al-Kitab al-Arabi lil-Kitabah wal-Nashr, 1968, p. 3. All further references to the text will cite this Arabic edition in parenthesized page numbers. For reasons discussed in note 32 of the Introduction to this book, I will be using my own translations of all passages cited from the novel. Wherever possible, I will also cite the corresponding Stuart translation

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12 13 14 15 16

17

18 19

20

21 22 23

of long passages with square-bracketed page numbers. The passage here cited was deleted from the Stuart translation. See for example, Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, p. 124; and Al-‘Alim and Anis, Fil-Thaqafah al-Misriyyah, p. 126. This reference alludes to an episode in which a group of imprisoned villagers is forced to drink horse-urine by their jailers in order to torture and humiliate them. John Berger, Pig Earth, New York: Pantheon Books, 1979, pp. 8–9. ‘Ali, ‘Ard al-Sharqawi’, p. 63. The historical figure of Adham al-Sharqawi is veiled in some mystery. It seems that he was a farmer who took up banditry after having been severly persecuted by the government’s tax authorities. In any case, he has become a hero of the folk imagination and his exploits form the subject of a number of popular folk poems or mawwals. See Pierre Cachia’s excellent study on this genre of popular literature, Popular Narrative Ballads of Modern Egypt. Post-revolution avant-garde theater often took its themes from rural balladry. Novelist, folklorist and playwright Shawqi ‘Abd al-Hakim composed a play based on the ballad of Hasan and Na‘imah, while poet and playwright Najib Surur dramatized Yasin and Bahiyyah. Both of these plays were perfomed at the celebrated avant-garde Pocket Theater (Masrah al-Jayb) in 1965. Shawqi ‘Abd al-Hakim, Hasan wa Na‘imah, and Najib Surur, Yasin wa Bahiyyah, Cairo: Majallat al-Masrah, 1965. ‘Abd al-Hakim also wrote the screenplay for the controversial 1978 film production of Shafiqah and Mitwalli. Al-Tayib Salih, ‘Urs al-Zayn, Beirut, 1967. This passage refers to a central dramatic episode in the novel: when the new, reduced irrigation cycle goes into effect, the farmers quarrel over who has the right to water his fields first, and for how long. A savage fight breaks out in which most of the combatants are severely injured. Suddenly, one of the villagers’ oxen falls into a nearby well and the bleeding men immediately forget their enmity and rush over to rescue the wretched peasant’s beast. As soon as this is accomplished, everyone makes up and ‘Abd al-Hadi decisively effects the only possible solution to the irrigation problem, breaking open the canal so that all the peasants may have simultaneous and unlimited access to the precious water. Examples of this collective re-narration are many. See pp. 19–21 for the story of Wasifah’s legendary encounter with ‘Ilwani in the watermelon patch; pp. 304–305, for the commentary on the hilarious Qur’anic reading at the ‘Umdah’s funeral and the night the villagers threw Sha‘ban, the ‘Umdah’s henchman, and the government’s construction materials into the river; and pp. 310–311 for the jokes and stories about how Sergeant ‘Abdallah and his mounted soldiers chased and whipped the ‘Umdah’s officious lieutenant. Badawi, Al-Riwayah al-Jadidah fi Misr, pp. 20–45. Davis, Resisting Novels, p. 179. Raymond Williams, ‘The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists’, in Writing in Society, p. 254.

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24 Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, p. 50. 25 In his reading of this parodic scene, Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim adroitly contrasts it to a parallel scene in Muhammad ‘Abd al-Halim ‘Abdallah’s novel, Sakinah, in which the young Alexandrian hero and the simple peasant girl engage in a passionate tête-à-tête in the most mellifluous classical Arabic prose. Fil-Thaqafah al-Misriyyah, pp. 134–136. 26 The Qur’anic reference here is to Surah LXXXVIII, Al-Ghashiyyah (The Overwhelming): On that day [of judgment] other faces will be calm, glad for their effort past, in a high garden where they hear no idle speech. Wherein is a gushing spring, wherein are couches raised [surur marfu‘ah] and goblets set at hand and cushions ranged [namariq masfufah] and silken carpets spread. 27 From The Cow, 2:259 Or [bethink thee of] the like of him who, passing by a township which had fallen into utter ruin, exclaimed: How shall Allah give this township life after its death? And Allah made him die a hundred years, then brought him back to life. He said: How long hast thou tarried? [The man] said: I have tarried a day or part of a day. [He] said: Nay, but thou hast tarried for a hundred years. Just look at thy food and drink which have rotted! Look at thine ass! And, that We may make thee a token unto mankind, look at the bones, how We adjust them and then cover them with flesh! And when [the matter] became clear unto him, he said, I know now that Allah is able to do all things. 28 See Bakhtin’s discussion of medieval scriptural saturnalia in ‘From the Prehistory of Novelistic Discourse’, in The Dialogic Imagination, pp. 68–83. 29 Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, p. 120. 30 ‘Ali, ‘Ard al-Sharqawi’, p. 57. 31 Williams, Writing in Society, p. 238. 6 THE EXILED SON 1 2 3

4 5 6

‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim, ‘Malamih Tajrubati al-Riwa’iyyah’, in AlRiwayah al-‘Arabiyyah: Waqi‘ wa Afaq, Beirut: Dar Ibn Rushd, 1981, p. 362. Ibid., p. 364. Qasim, along with most of the authors of the ‘sixties generation’, understands the writer as a dissident intellectual: ‘The moment of the writer’s birth means the moment of rebellion against the authority of the state’. Ibid., p. 365. Edwar al-Kharrat, ‘The Mashriq’, in Modern Literature in the Near and Middle East, ed. Robin Ostle, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp. 186–187. Edwar al-Kharrat, Al-Hasasiyyah al-Jadidah: Maqalat fil-Zahirah alQasassiyyah, Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1993. Barrada, Al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah: Waqi‘ wa Afaq, pp. 361–362.

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7 See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995, for a discussion of the novel and a detailed summary of its plot. 8 Marthe Robert, Origins of the Novel, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1980, pp. 21–40. 9 Thus we see a civilization woven together and unified by Islam in a dynamic, homogenous social fabric, solid and self-contained. Or, to put it differently, Islamic societies – particularly Arab, Islamic societies – lived a specific history that stretched out [through time] with a regular, continuous beat which was suddenly disrupted by the…cannons… spies and scientists…of the West. This caused a fissure in the entire world-view [of Islamic society] and the familiar became incomprehensible. (Badawi, Al-Riwayah Al-Jadidah Fi Misr, p. 191) 10 ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim, Ayyam Al-Insan Al-Sab‘ah, Dar al-Katib al‘Arabi, n.d,, p. 26. The novel has been translated by Joseph Bell: Abdel-Hakim Kassem, The Seven Days of Man, Evanston: Northwestern University Press, 1996. All future references to the text will cite this Arabic edition in parenthetical page numbers with bracketed italicized page numbers refering to the corresponding long passages in Bell’s English translation. 11 Examples are many. See in particular the description of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s journey by camel to the train station, pp. 100–104; the train-trip to Tanta itself, pp. 107–110 and the account of Hajj Karim’s regular visits to the city, pp. 119–124. 12 Badawi, Al-Riwayah al-Jadidah Fi Misr, p. 35. 13 Ibid., p. 27. 14 Frederic Jameson, ‘Third World Literature in the Era of Multinational Capital’, Social Text, 15 (1986), pp. 65–88. 15 Ghali Shukri, Egypt: Portrait of a President (Al-Thawrah al-Mudadah Fi Misr) London: Zed Press, 1981. 16 Baha’ Tahir, Sharq al-Nakhil, in Al-A‘mal al-Kamilah, Cairo: Dar alHilal, 1992, p. 298. All future references to the text will cite this edition in parenthetical page numbers. 17 Qasim, Ayyam al-Insan al-Sab‘ah, p. 11. 7 THE STORYTELLER 1 2 3 4 5

Baha’ Tahir, foreword to Khalti Safiyyah wal-Dayr, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1996, pp. 21–23. Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, New York: Schocken Books, 1985, p. 85. Ghalib Halasa, Udaba’ ‘Allamuni…Udaba’ ‘Araftuhum, Beirut: alMu’assasah al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Tawzi’ wal-Nashr, 1996. p. 186. Edwar al-Kharrat, biographical introduction to Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah, Al-A‘mal al-Kamilah, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi, 1984, p. 5. ‘Abdallah’s biography is representative of an entire generation’s emigration from the peripheral villages of the Egyptian countryside to

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6 7 8

9 10 11 12

13 14 15 16

the capital. He was born in 1936 in Karnak – the upper Egyptian village in which the events of The Band and the Bracelet take place. His father was a Qur’anic teacher at one of the local Kuttab schools and his relatives were mostly farmers, while some were involved in the vital tourist trade generated by the area’s archeological treasures. In 1959, after having acquired a secondary school diploma in agriculture, he moved to the nearby city of Qina where he worked for a while at the Ministry of Agriculture. In 1962 he moved to Cairo, remaining officially unemployed and devoting himself to his writing, until he died in a car accident in 1981 at the age of forty-five. Tahir, Khalti Safiyyah wal-Dayr, pp. 6–7. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 86. The narrator intervenes directly into the text to question, prophecy and bewail the events of his story. See pp. 361, 363, 374 and 376 of The Band and the Bracelet for examples of this strategy. Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah, ‘Al-Tawq Wal-Iswirah’, in Al-A‘mal al-Kamilah, Cairo: AlHay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1993. All future references to the text will cite this edition in parenthetical page numbers. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 94. Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York: Vintage Books, 1993, p. 37. Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 89. This formal distinction may incidentally help us to solve the related critical problem of length in determining genre. For example, the question of whether The Band and The Bracelet – a work under one hundred pages long – is a novel, novella or ‘long short story’ becomes moot, for the structure of the Story (Qissah) as an independent, internally coherent generic form supersedes length as a determining factor. Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 35. Sabry Hafez, ‘Qisas Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah Al-Tawilah’, Fusul, 2:1–2, 1981–1982. Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 25–30. A blazing star flared up high in the blue sky and died before it reached the earth: If it were to touch man, animal, plant, or even jinn, they would immediately be transformed to dust.…And here, the girl [Fahimah] gazes at her shooting star with beating heart: How distant this deep blue sky – how terrifying you are, dear, absent brother, despite your absence. (pp. 346–347)

17 The idiomatic expression used in the text is ‘shabbat ‘an al-tawq’. While the verb shabba, on its own, specifically means ‘to become a youth’, the addition of al-tawq, with its implications of prohibitive boundaries, both echoes the title of the novel and specifically links Nabawiyyah’s budding (sexual) maturity to her yearning for transcendence and her impending transgression. 18 These are the opening lines of the Egyptian national anthem. 19 The Egyptian neo-classical poet, Ahmad Shawqi, was closely affiliated with the khedival court through birth and patronage. 20 From the Diwan of the Tunisian poet ‘Abd al-Qasim al-Shabbi.

255

NOTES

CONCLUSION 1 2 3

Fathi Ghanim, Tilka al-Ayyam, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 2000, pp. 108–109. ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Jamal, Muhibb, Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1992, pp. 1–2. Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, p. 41.

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Novels cited (first editions) ‘Abd al-Hakim, Shawqi, Ahzan Nuh, Cairo: Al-Dar al-Qawmiyyah lilTiba‘ah wal-Nashr, 1963. ‘Abdallah, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Halim, Ba‘d al-Ghurub, Cairo: Matba‘at Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi, 1949.

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‘Abdallah, Yahya al-Tahir, Al-Tawq wal-Iswirah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah alMisriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1975. Al-‘Aqqad, ‘Abbad Mahmud, Sara, Cairo: Matba‘at Hijazi, 1938. Ghanim, Fathi, Al-Jabal, Cairo: Dar Ruz al-Yusuf, 1958. ——Tilka al-Ayyam, Cairo: Ruz al-Yusuf, 1963. Haqqi, Mahmud Tahir, Adhra’ Dinshaway, Cairo: Al-Maktabah al‘Arabiyyah, 1906. Al-Hakim, Tawfiq‘, ‘Awdat al-Ruh, Cairo: Matba’at al-Ragha’ib, 1933. ——Yawmiyyat Na’ib Fil-Aryaf, Cairo: Maktabat al-Adab, 1937. ——‘Asfur Min al-Sharq, Cairo: Matba‘at Lajnat al-Ta’lif wal-Tarjamah wal-Nashr, 1938. ——Al-Ribat al-Muqaddas, Cairo: Matba‘at al-Ragha’ib, 1944. Haykal, Muhammad Husayn, Zaynab, Cairo: Matba‘at al-Jaridah, 1913. Ibrahim, Sun‘allah, Tilka al-Ra’ihah, Cairo: Maktab Yulyu lil-Tab‘ walNashr, 1966. Idris, Yusuf, Al-Haram, Cairo: al-Shirkah al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Tiba‘a walNashr, 1959. ——Al-Bayda’, Beirut: Dar al ‘Awdah, 1970. Al-Jamal, Abd al-Fatah, Muhibb, Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1992. ——Al-Khawf, Cairo: Matba‘at ‘Abduh wa Anwar, 1972. Al-Kharrat, Idwar, Rama wal-Tinnin, Beirut: Al-Mu’assasah al‘Arabiyyah lil-Dirasat wal-Nashr, 1980. Khayrat, Mahmud, Al-Fata al-Rifi, Cairo: Al-Matba‘ah al-Misriyyah, 1905. al-Khuli, Fikri, Al-Rihlah, Cairo: Dar al-Ghad, 1987. Lashin, Mahmud, Hawwa’ Bila Adam, Cairo: Matba‘at al-I‘timad, 1934. Mahfuz, Najib, Miramar, Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1967. ——Zuqaq al-Midaq, Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1947. Al-Mazini, Ibrahim, Ibrahim al-Katib, Cairo: Dar al-Taraqqi lil-Tiba‘ah, 1931. al-Qa‘id, Yusuf, Akhbar ‘Izbat al-Munisi, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1971. ——Yahduth fi Misr Al’an, Cairo: Matba’at Dar Usama, 1977. Qasim, Abd al-Hakim, Ayyam al-Insan al-Sab‘ah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah alMisriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1969. Al-Sa‘dawi, Nawal, Imra’ah ‘inda Nuqtat al-Sifr, Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1975. Shalabi, Khayri, Al-Awbash, Cairo: Mu’asassat Ruz al-Yusuf, 1978. Al-Siba‘i, Yusuf, Rudda Qalbi, Cairo: Maktabat al-Khanji, 1955. Al-Sharqawi, ‘Abd al-Rahman, Al-Ard, Cairo: Dar al-Thina’ lil-Tiba‘ah, 1954. Tahir, Baha’, Sharq al-Nakhil, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal, 1985. ——Qalat Duhah, Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1985. ——Khalti Safiyyah wal-Dayr, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1996.

263

INDEX

‘Abd al-Hakim, Shawqi 19 ‘Abdallah, Muhammad ‘Abd alHalim 129, 146 ‘Abdallah, Yahya al-Tahir 24, 128, 152, 215 ‘Abd al-Malik, Anwar 133 ‘Abd al-Quddus, Ihsan 140–1 Abu Shaduf 16, 17, 44, 48 al-Adab 138 al-Afghani, Jamal al-Din 27–8 ‘Ali, Muhammad 3–4, 26 Al-‘Alim, Mahmud Amin 134, 139–40, 159–60 Amin, Ahmad 131 Amin, Qasim 6–7, 20, 80, 105 Anderson, Benedict 60–1, 82, 94, 218 Anis, Abd al-‘Azim see al-‘Alim, Mahmud Amin Antun, Farah 11, 62–3 al-‘Aqqad, Mustafa 64, 86, 88, 133, 137, 139 asalah see authenticity ‘Ashur, Nu‘man 134, 144 authenticity 1, 20, 59, 86, 146 ‘Awad, Luis 40, 134 Badr, ‘Abd al-Mushin Taha 14–15, 141, 180; and the divided self 89, 233; and history of the novel 63–70, 73 Bakhtin, M.M. 18, 23, 40–1, 59, 174 al-Bayati, ‘Abd al-Wahab 148 Benjamin, Walter 215–17

Bentham, Jeremy 6, 18 Berger, John 167–8, 230 bildungsroman 99, 105, 160 Céline, Ferdinand 21 colloquial 17–18, 49, 94–5, 100, 116–17, 173–4; controversy over 21, 35–40; and parody 33–5, 41–2; and social realism 144–5; see also diglossia commitment see realism Cromer, Alfred Lord 48, 74, 93 Darwish, Sayyid 1 Davis, Lennard 23, 60, 78; and ideology 70–2; and novelistic language 21, 176; and political novel 160–1 Dayf, Ahmad 75, 80 Demolins, Edmond 8, 76 Dickens, Charles 22 diglossia 21, 34, 39, 59, 92; and third language 38–9, 121, 124, 174 Dinshaway 8, 49, 74, 85, 93 drama 18, 22, 30–1; see also popular culture al-Fajr 76, 80 al-Fajr al-Jadid 137 Faraj, Alfred 134 Faulkner, William 22 Fawwaz, Zaynab 67 folklore 133–4 Free Officers 135, 146–7

264

INDEX

Gallery 68 150 Ghanem, Fathi 134, 141; al-Jabal 129, 143; Tilka al-Ayyam 142, 144, 229

khayal 110–13, 231 Khayrat, Mahmud 19, 67, 72 kuttab 19, 28 kuttab al-ghad 150, 206

Haddad, Niqula 38, 62–3, 66 al-Hakim, Tawfiq 88, 117, 137; ‘Awdat al-Ruh 74, 118–9; Yawmiyyat Na’ib fil-Aryaf 87, 91–2, 119, 143, 157; and pharaonism 86 Hamdan, Gamal 154–5, 228 Haqqi, Mahmud Tahir: ‘Adhra’ Dinshaway 49, 91–3, 145, 173 Haqqi, Yahya 19–20, 188, 93–4, 96–8, 142, 150–1 Haykal, Muhammad Hasanayn 146 Haykal, Muhammad Husayn 29, 79, 88, 133, 137, 146; and national literature 15, 76, 78, 81–4, 87; and objective criticism 80; and pharaonism 86; Zaynab 58, 62, 92 Husayn, Taha 8, 19, 80, 88, 131, 146; in al-Ard 165–6; al-Ayyam 74; and social realism 137–9, 144

land reform 3–4, 30, 155 Lashin, Mahmud Tahir 21, 74, 142 Le Bon, Gustave 6, 8 Liberal Constitutionalist Party 8, 87 liberalism 4, 6, 8–9, 105, 132 Lukács, Georg 103, 160

Ibn Daniyal 34 Ibrahim, Sun‘allah 150–1 Idris, Yusuf 129, 144, 150, 156; alBayda’ 152, 154; and social realism 134, 141 Ishaq, Adib 28, 31 Islamic Charitable Society 28, 55 Isma‘il, Khedive 4, 17, 27–8, 30, 44 Jalal, Muhammad ‘Uthman 36, 40 al-Jamal, ‘Abd al-Fattah 155, 231–2 Jamalzadeh, Ali Ahmad 61 al-Jaridah 79 Kalilah wa Dimnah 32, 35 al-Katib al-Misri 135, 148 al-Kharrat, Edwar 152, 186–7, 190, 215–16

Mahfouz, Naguib 21, 63, 146, 150; and realism 140, 142 al-Manfaluti, Mustafa 39, 65, 80, 100, 176 maqamah 18, 22, 33, 35 Maupassant, Guy de 71 mawwal 21, 35, 230 al-Mazini, Ibrahim ‘Abd al-Qadir, 2, 144 Misr al-Fata 28, 30 al-Misri, Ibrahim 78, 85, 133 Mitchell, Timothy 3–4, 7, 12 Molière 27, 31, 36 Mubarak, ‘Ali 38, 63 Mukhtar, Muhammad 1, 85 al-Muqtataf 11, 37 Musa, Salamah 1, 15, 85–6 Muslim Brothers 135, 145 al-Muwaylihi, Muhammad 6, 11; Hadith ‘Isa Ibn Hisham 18–19, 63, 145 al-Nadim, ‘Abdallah 11, 17, 26–9, 50–8, 101–2; and language 35–8; narrative sketch 31–4; and peasant voice 18–19, 25–6, 30, 41–3, 59 al-Naqqash, Marun 31 al-Naqqash, Salim 28 Nasser regime 127, 186–7; and culture 133–5; and intellectuals 136, 145, 147–9 national character 4, 9, 154–5; and fallah 6, 10, 17, 52, 228; and fiction 69, 123, 142, 174

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national feminine 30–1, 92, 95, 108, 123, 169–70, 232 national literature 15, 42, 61–2, 73–4; and pharaonism 78–9; and the village 81–7; see also New School Nationalist Party 29–30 Nerval, Gerard de 26 New School 39, 76–8, 137, 139, 142–4 nostalgia 162–3, 212 Nubar Pasha 44 Open Door 24, 127–8, 134, 186 orientalism ix, 5, 63 Palestine 29, 132, 135, 206–7, 224–5 pharaonism 78–9, 85–7, 118–19 popular culture 7, 19, 56, 63–4, 216; and drama 25–6, 31, 34, 41; and fiction 61–70, 77; and narrative 12, 22, 35, 61–2, 65–7, 195, 230 [al-Ard 164, 168–73]; see also colloquial al-Qa‘id, Yusuf 2, 129, 152, 155 al-Qashshash, Hasan 26 Qasim, ‘Abd al-Hakim 58, 99, 152, 185–8 Qur’an 27, 35, 178, 194 Racine 31, 36 realism 12, 68, 71–2; and commitment 19, 127–9, 134, 138–44, 147; neo-realism 19, 127–30, 151–2, 156; see also New School Renan, Ernest 76 al-Rihani, Naguib 19 Riyad Pasha 44, 46, 48 Robert, Marthe 103, 189 romanticism 73, 75, 128, 130, 134–5; and al-Ard 174–5; and Haykal 81, 88, 103 Rousseau 80–1, 104, 112

al-Sadat, Anwar 134–5, 150, 155, 186 Said, Edward 12 Salih, al-Tayyib 170, 188 Sannu‘, Ya‘qub 4, 17, 27, 31, 101; and language 33–4, 36, 41–3; al-lu‘bat al-tiyatriyyah 43–50; and peasant voice 18–19, 25–6, 29–30, 121 al-Sayyid, Ahmad Lutfi 6, 8–9, 11, 75, 79, 84, 132 Shalabi, Khayri 2, 129, 155; AlAwbash 156–8 al-Sharqawi, ‘Abd al-Rahman 19, 98, 127, 144,162; and commitment 134–9 Shi‘r 147 al-Shirbini, Yusuf 16–17, 51 Shumayyil, Amin 37 al-Siba‘i, Yusuf 146–7 Sidqi, Isma‘il 131, 138, 162 al-Siyasah 9, 79 al-Siyasasah al-Usbu‘iyyah 79–80 Social Darwinism 4, 116 social realism see realism socialism 132, 136, 145–6, 147 Socialist Union 147–8, 150 Spenser, Herbert 6, 8 Sudan 48–9, 105, 108, 225, 227 al-Sufur 80 Tahir, Baha’ 21, 99, 214, 216 al-Tahtawi, Rifa‘a 11, 63 al-Ta‘if 28 Taine, Hippolyte 76, 80 Tawfiq, khedive 27–9, 44–5, 47–8 Taymur, Mahmud 19–20, 39, 42, 56, 74, 76, 80; see also New School third language see diglossia Thousand and One Nights 16, 32, 35, 62 Toole, John Kennedy 22 al-Tunisi, Bayram 40 turath 13, 215 ‘Ubayd, ‘Isa 19, 21, 39, 77–8, 80, 142; see also New School ‘Umar, Muhammad 6

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Ummah Party 79, 87 ‘Urabi revolt 6, 14, 17, 28–30, 87

Writer’s Union 147, 150; see also kuttab al-ghad

Wafd Party 9, 73, 87, 131, 162 Watt, Ian 103 Wilcox, William 37–8 Williams, Raymond vii, 23, 180

Zaghlul, Ahmad Fathi 6–9 Zaghlul, Sa‘d 1, 30, 77, 86 Zaydan, Jurji 11, 38, 62–4, 66 Zola, Emile 190, 202

267