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 rela-
ionship 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 fore-
grounds 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 theoret-
cal 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 pre-
modern. 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 THE MEDIEVAL ARABIC PRAISE

LOOKING GLASS POETRY
Eva Sallis Beatrice Gruendler

THE PALESTINIAN NOVEL MAKING THE GREAT BOOK O

Ibrahim Taha SONGS
Hilary Kilpatrick
OF DISHES AND DISCOURSE
Geert Jan van Gelder 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 viii
Acknowledgments x
Introduction: the peasant and modern narrative
in Egypt 1

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 234
Bibliography 257
Index 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 materi-
ality 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 alter-
native 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 literary-
historical 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 recogni-
tion 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 exam-
ines 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 literary-
historical 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 Aboul-
Ela, 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 intellec-
uals 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 revo-
ution 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 demo-
graphic 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 journal-
istic 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 impor-
tant, 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 ques-
tion 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 enter-
prise 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 institu-
tionally 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 agri-
cultural 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 nine-
teenth 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 systemati-
cally, 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 colo-
nial 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, incom-
plete.
The introduction of a new kind of Arabic narrative fiction – the
novel and short story – onto the cultural stage in Egypt partici-
pated 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 mecha-
nisms by which this process of self-reflection unfolded. The fallah
provided the raw material for the new nationalist literary imagina-
tion 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 funda-
mental 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 exis-
tential 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 mobi-
lize 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 puta-
tive 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 qual-
itatively 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 al-
Sayyid, 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 Western-
educated 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 crit-
icized the chaos and injustice of the mixed courts system and the
decadence of the ‘ulama in Egypt. Amin championed the educa-
tion 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 genera-
tion 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 offi-
cials, 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 seem-
ingly superior, liberal-democratic Europe in an effort to refashion
indigenous social and political institutions. In spite of their afflu-
ence 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 riff-
raff 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 pros-
perity and progress of the nation itself.
The new social sciences were introduced into turn-of-the-
century 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 anglo-
saxons? 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 descrip-
tion of a ‘collective mind’ or ‘mental constitution’, evolving over
many generations of a nation’s history, was intended to demon-
strate 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 enlight-
enment.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 al-
Sayyid 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 finan-
cial 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 respon-
sible 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 al-
Sayyid 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 indi-
vidual 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 char-
acter 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 authen-
ticity 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 orga-
nized 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 intel-
lectuals 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 sensi-

10
 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 preva-
lent 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 satir-
ical 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. Al-
Hawwari 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 enti-
tled ‘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 al-
Muqtataf 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 expan-
sion 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 civi-
lization 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 puta-
tive 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 more-
over aware of constituting a certain stratum of society. So,
as against the global, systematized and partly supernat-
ural 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 plea-
sures.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 commodifica-

tions 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 cease-
lessly 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 contradic-
tion 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 histor-
ical circumstances than the novel in Europe. Unlike its European
counterpart, the Egyptian bourgeoisie did not have the opportu-
nity 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 politi-
cally 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 struc-
tures 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 bour-
geoisies 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 revolu-
tion 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 advance-
ment 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 pene-
trate 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 al-
rawiyyah), 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 clas-
sical 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 under-
world. 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 begin-
ning 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 shop-
keepers, 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 seventeenth-
century 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 exten-
sive 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 repre-
sented 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, material-
istic, 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 strik-
ingly 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 recogniz-
able 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 – particu-
larly 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 rebel-
lious ‘son of the soil’, while Nadim developed a more ambiguous
peasant character that both embodied the backwardness and igno-
rance 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 conse-
quences 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 under-
world 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 decep-
tively 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 histor-
ical and collective meaning, identity and responsibility; a world in
which a cynical, dissolute and mindlessly Europeanized haute-
bourgeoisie, 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 sensi-
bility, 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 al-
Rihani’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 autobi-
ography, 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) fore-
ground 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 geograph-
ical 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 controver-
sial 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 nation-
alist 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 al-
Dar (‘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 rela-
tionship 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 pre-
modern 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 narra-
tive 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’ descrip-
tion of European novelistic discourse as forming a normative
language that reproduces and simultaneously masks the connec-
tion 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 African-
American 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, nation-
alist 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 exten-
sively 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 re-
reading 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 al-
Sharqawi’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 forerun-
ners 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 partic-
ular 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, igno-
ant, exploited; at others, articulate, rebellious and cunning. In
either case, he speaks in a vulgar, parodic voice that often interro-
gates 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 emer-
gence 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
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 exploita-
tion 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 litera-
ture. 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 occu-
pation and restoration of the following year. Though initially

26
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 profes-
sional 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 even-
tually 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
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 tele-
graph 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 authori-
ties. 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 publi-
cation 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
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 publi-
cation 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 inti-
mately 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 devel-
oping 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 nation-
alist 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 disas-
sociate Egypt from its Ottoman legacy. Muhammad Husayn
Haykal’s famous pseudonym, Misri Fallah, can certainly be traced

29
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 owner-
ship 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 fore-
grounded a class-specific representation of the coarse, earthy,
downtrodden cultivator in their figuring of this new fallah char-
acter. 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 nine-
teenth-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 al-
Sharqawi.

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 nineteenth-
century Arab writers from mature European models, Sannu‘ and

30
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 audi-
ences. 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
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 house-
wives 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 intro-
duce 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 adula-
tion. 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 litera-
ture (such as Kalilah wa Dimnah and The Arabian Nights) and

32
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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 tradition-
alism 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 charac-
ters are merely types representing professions, social
classes, human behavior in general, or abstract ideals, and
their narrative predecessors can be found in the one-
dimensional characters of the maqamah.19

This critical assessment is shaped by the prejudices of the develop-

mentalist model of literary history, which derives narrative
modernity from European realism.20 Nadim’s remarkably innova-
tive, 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 collo-
quial, 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 foun-
dational 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
 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

ambiguous Western cultural and political affiliations: European

tourists, businessmen and orientalists speaking pidgin Arabic, and
pompous Westernized Egyptians showing off the superior accou-
trements 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 indige-
nous 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 charac-
ters 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 resit-
uate 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’

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character types, ‘faulty’ construction, didacticism and the intro-

duction 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 semi-
cultured)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 equivoca-
tion, 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 intro-
duce topics with which we are familiar. It should not
require you to look up a word in the dictionary of al-
Fayruzabadi.…It will not need an interpreter to explain

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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 enter-
tainer 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, nation-
alist 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 champi-
oned 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

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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 collo-
quial 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 confi-
dence, 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 litera-
ture to its continued attachment to the Arabic language. Wilcox

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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 politi-
cized 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 foun-
dation 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 collo-
quial 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 domi-
nant 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

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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 amalga-
mated, 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 main-
taining this balance he could participate in creating
modern Arabic literature capable of expressing a distinc-
tive 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 collo-
quial.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 domi-
nant 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

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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 experimen-
tation, 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 histor-
ical 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,

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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 poly-
glossic 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 satir-
ical 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.

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It seems that this satiric function quickly became a fixed and

widely acknowledged feature of the literary colloquial in narra-
tive. 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 collo-
quial 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 juxtapo-

sition of the two languages. Clearly, there is a sense of dissonance
and corruption involved in his description of the textual interac-
tion 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, occasion-
ally 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

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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 al-
Ustadh: 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.

Ya‘qub Sannu‘: Al-L

Lu‘bat al-T
Tiyatriyyah
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

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Egyptian government and the royal court. They invariably drama-

tize 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 infor-
mation 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 Abu-
Raydah, 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

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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 devel-
oped 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:

SHAFQAT: Good morning Falta’us, how goes it today?

FALTA’US: 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

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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 Abu-
Qas‘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:

NABWAT BEK: Abu-Shaduf!

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.

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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 decora-
tions 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 peas-
antry 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.

ABU-QAS‘AH: 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.

Tamalluq Bek attempts to withdraw with the king, advising

Nabwat Bek to ‘teach his peasants a lesson’ whereupon Abu-
Shaduf 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

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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 matter, we’ll fight the Sudanese next year.

BARING: If 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:

BARING: 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!

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:

ABU SHADUF: 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

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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 repre-

sentative 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 simultane-
ously 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 bureau-
crat, 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 nation-
alist discourse of post-1919 writers and intellectuals.

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‘Abdallah al-Nadim
Although ‘Abdallah al-Nadim was a dedicated ‘Urabist and a tire-
less 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,

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 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

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:

ZI‘IT: 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!

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’ demon-

strates 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 (civi-
lization) 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

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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 wal-
Tabkit. 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 knowl-
edge 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 wil-
Akhra Mut’ (The Consequences of Stupidity: We’re All Going to
Die in the End), the narrator pays a visit to the countryside where

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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 enti-
tled ‘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-muta-
maddin – 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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 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

When these principles are fulfilled and this new motiva-

tion 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 luxu-
rious 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-muta-
maddin] 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.

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 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

The performance of the plays, which attacked the political author-

ities 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 cross-
section of Egyptian society. Abu Da‘mum and Abu Zalafi are
coarse peasants. Al-Hajj Husayn and Abu l-‘Ila as well as Al-
Sayyid ‘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 bureau-
crats 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, ‘agri-
cultural’ 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 effem-
inate 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

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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, step this way.

AL-SAYYID IBRAHIM: That’s right, let’s hang out here for a
while.74
AL-HAJJ HUSAYN: Let’s get out of here Abu l-‘Ila, these guys say
they’re gonna ‘cut up’ some time, ha, ha!75

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’ irrev-
erent 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 al-
Watan. 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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 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

AL-WATAN: 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: 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

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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 al-

Nadim and Ya‘qub Sannu‘ in the nineteenth century remained
embedded in twentieth-century narrative fiction, in a self-
conscious 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 repre-
sentation 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, alien-
ation/authenticity, tradition/modernity.

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 THE GARRULOUS PEASANT

Language is an essential component of this relationship, and

occasionally asserts itself as a strategic and powerful tool of resis-
tance 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 contri-
bution 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 relation-
ship 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 else-

where 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 nation-
alism. 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,

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encourage literacy, and remove mutual incomprehensi-

bility. 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, nation-
alist 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 intellec-
tuals 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

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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 char-
acters, 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 indi-
vidualism 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 philo-
sophical 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

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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 rele-
gated to the outskirts of the national canon. The prejudices
implicit in this model of cultural production are rooted in the atti-
tude 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 histor-
ical hegemony of realism as an aesthetic ideology.
In an attempt to deal with the problems involved in the peri-
odization and classification of this diffuse and generically unstable
modern narrative corpus, Badr distinguishes between three histor-
ical and modal types of novel in the foundational period between
1870 and 1938. They are ‘the didactic novel’ (al-riwayah al-
ta‘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-influ-
enced narrative, Hadith ‘I‘sa Ibn Hisham. ‘The recreational
novel’– which comprises by far the largest section of Badr’s bibli-
ography – 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

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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 partic-
ular 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 gener-
ally, 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 commer-
cially 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 ‘semi-
cultured’ 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:

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 N O V E L S A N D N AT I O N S

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 al-
Zaybaq 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

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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 insta-
bility 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 previ-
ously 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 al-
adab 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 myth-
ical 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

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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 loca-
tions. His omniscience and the authority which this omniscience
endows emanates from his professional role as the vested custo-
dian 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 inter-
locutor 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 signifi-
cance. 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 interi-
ority – 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 speci-
ficity 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 narra-
tive structures:

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 N O V E L S A N D N AT I O N S

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 chap-
ters 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 determi-
nacy 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 envi-
ronment or an interior, psychological landscape:

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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 explana-
tions 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 environ-
ment and of the unique individual that emerges from this
perception. For this reason, he did not write in a represen-
tational style [uslub taswiri], which presents the details of
experience and its minutiae. Rather, he wrote in a docu-
mentary 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 histor-
ical environment referred to above. Around the first decade of the
twentieth century, ideas associated with psychoanalysis, romanti-
cism 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 indi-
vidual 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 indi-
vidual 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

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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 eigh-
teenth 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 repre-

sented 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

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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 consti-
tutes 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, contradic-
tory, 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 provin-
cial 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 partic-
ular social, economic and, indeed, moral status or psychological
state of its owner. Far from being gratuitous ‘filler’ or disruptive

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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 value-
system 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 indi-
vidual’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

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literate masses, the writing of the artistic novel in Egypt was asso-
ciated 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 impe-
rial 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 appropri-
ated 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 specifi-
cally, 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 intelli-
gentsia’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 contempo-
rary 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

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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 colo-
nial 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 underdevel-
opment 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 al-
qawmi) 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 experi-
ence. The idea of a national ‘reality’ focused on the quotidian
landscape of the city and its various markets, streets and residen-
tial 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 charac-
ters 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 al-
dhatiyyah) 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

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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 existen-
tial 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 formu-
lated 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 al-
dhatiyyah]’.25
Already in 1911, Lutfi al-Sayyid was positioning the idea of a
historically distinct and homogeneous Egyptian Ummah in oppo-
sition 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 signifi-
cant 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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 N O V E L S A N D N AT I O N S

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, intellec-
tual and cultural lives.…The outline and specificity of the

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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 land-
scapes 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 ‘char-
acter’. 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

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life or a page from that history. The writer uses this indi-
vidual 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 illumi-
nates 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 interi-
ority 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

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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 patri-
mony.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 little-
remembered 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 litera-
ture. 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 popu-
larizing 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 al-
Usbu‘iyyah in 1926. When al-Jaridah ceased publication under

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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 al-
Sufur 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 charac-
terized 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 activi-
ties, 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

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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 destruc-
tive 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 contradic-
tions.
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 beau-
tiful country, and that its history and its ruins deserve to
be shown and made familiar to people in pleasing narra-
tive 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

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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 tradi-
tions 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 moti-

vations.44

In keeping with the romantic influences that shaped his educa-

tion 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 (al-
hiss) 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 home-
land 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

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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

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concerned with the contemporary problems of gender roles, love

and marriage in a fast changing world. The poverty and degrada-
tion 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 al-
Misri, 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, liter-
ature 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

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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 domi-
nant 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 civi-
lization, 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 quintessen-
tial ‘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), uncon-
sciously 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, implic-
itly 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

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not coincidental. A good many of Egypt’s nahdawi writers and

intellectuals came from families with strong ties to the country-
side. Some, like Taha Husayn and al-‘Aqqad, grew up in large
rural families of moderate means and with limited access to educa-
tion, 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 school-
year 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 accultur-
ated 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

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array of contemporary social practices from gender segregation

and arranged marriages to popular religious rituals, were all iden-
tified 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 epis-
temology 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 experi-
ence 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 al-
fard 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 environ-
ment 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

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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 drama-

tized 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 subjec-
tivity – 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 intel-

ectuals 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 polit-
cal 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 foun-
dational 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

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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 peas-
antry, 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 myste-
rious 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 twen-
tieth 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.

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Haqqi’s short novel is rather a complex narrative that incorpo-

rates 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 controver-
sial 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 hege-
mony 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 inter-
ventions 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 accep-
tance 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

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comment, Haqqi implicitly identifies the oppressed Egyptian peas-

antry 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 ‘socio-
logical 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

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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 mother-
goddess 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 spiri-
tual 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

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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 legiti-
macy 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 victim-
ized nation on the one hand and maleficent colonizers on the
other. On the contrary, it portrays an extensive, indigenous hier-
archy 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 accultur-
ated and hence tragically conflicted intellectual represented by
al-Halabawi can be viewed as a prototype of Haykal’s protago-
nist, 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 alien-
ation 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

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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 subtex-
tual 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 colo-
nial 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 al-
Azhar 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 corn-
bread 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 destruc-
tion 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

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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 char-
acter. 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 fore-
grounded by Yahya Haqqi’s introductory remarks, is that a
specific class affiliation must inevitably supersede prior (as in al-
Halabawi’s case) or largely imaginary (as in Hamid’s)
tribal/communal affiliation. The Maiden of Dinshaway thus occu-
pies a more nuanced critical position in relation to the textual

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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 conscious-
ness.
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 inte-
riority 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 inser-
tion 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

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reportage is incorporated into the text in the final courtroom

scenes, which employ a brisk and abbreviated documentary narra-
tion 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 conversa-
tions] 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 argu-
ment. 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 high-
flown rhetorical style is only one among many equally expressive
and useful generic modes. The strategic juxtaposition of these

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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 repro-
duced 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

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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 defen-
dants innocent.
(p. 68) [43]

The Maiden of Dinshaway reproduces the discursive split

embedded in ‘Abdallah al-Nadim’s characterization of late nine-
teenth-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 funda-
mentally 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 aban-
doned 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 orien-
talist 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

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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 nation-
hood 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 appro-
priated 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

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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 litera-
ture. 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 tran-
scribing 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

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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 char-
acter 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 cate-
gories that reflect this fundamental rupture between ‘archaic’ and
‘modern’ identities: East/West, sex/love, rich/poor, reality/imagina-
tion. 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 intel-
lectuals. 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

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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 monu-
mental 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 woman-
hood 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 third-
person narration. This interior monologue is played out against
the backdrop of gorgeous rural scenery and in Zaynab’s exem-
plary parallel plot. Zaynab escapes the circle produced by this

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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 tradi-
tional 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 nineteenth-
century 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 unifica-
tion 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 al-
Dar, 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 depar-
ture 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 affilia-

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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 misfor-
tune 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 recti-
tude 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 genera-
tion 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 inter-
action 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 soli-
tude 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

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into the shell of her fevered fantasies, silently and adamantly nour-
ishing 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

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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 phys-
ical property and an extensive interior landscape through which
he wanders unimpeded and unchallenged. The two main textual

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strategies that refract this social and textual authority are narra-
tive 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 descrip-
tions 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 magni-
fied 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 immo-
bile 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 bound-
aries 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 contem-
plates 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

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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 sleep-
less 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 envi-
ronment, 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 deter-
mine 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

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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 oppres-
sive 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 age-
old oppression of the fallahin vanish into thin air, leaving behind
an unambiguous description of a mute and degraded rural under-
class:

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 intelli-
gent 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 struc-

ture. Much has been made of Haykal’s original use of colloquial

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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 peas-
ants 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 narra-
tive relationship between classes. It is, moreover, a central
structural feature that persists in the village novel, and the possi-
bilities 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

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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 subse-
quently 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 auto-
biography, 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 posi-
tions 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 holi-
days. 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

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 F O U N D AT I O N S

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 contem-
porary offspring at harvest time. Yes, their bodies were
bloody but this filled them with secret pleasure; the plea-
sure 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, list-

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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 compre-
hension 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 govern-
ment 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 falsi-
fying 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

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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 accor-

dance 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 al-
Hakim’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 coun-
terpoint 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 imagina-
tion.
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

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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 infor-
mation except that the young suitor was called Husayn,
and was not a local resident, but a man from a neigh-
boring 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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 F O U N D AT I O N S

‘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 al-
samit)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, particu-
larly 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 refer-
ences. 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,

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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 associ-
ation 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 impene-
trable relationships between the marginal and intractable

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characters of the rural hinterlands defy the legal and moral

authority of the Prosecutor. These relationships – their signifi-
cance, 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 gall-
bladder…!’
(p. 121)

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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 investiga-
tion 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 al-
Sharqawi’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 collec-
tivity’ 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 repre-
entation 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 expres-
ion 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 turbu-
ent 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 domi-
nant 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

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three distinct periods in modern Egyptian cultural history – pre-

revolutionary, 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 exam-
ining 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 ideo-
logical 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 symp-
tomatic 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 essen-
tially 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 nine-
teenth-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-concep-
tualize 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 romanti-
cism 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 repre-
sentation as in its politics. Romanticism idealizes both the self and
the world, while realism attempts to ‘uncover’ them. The inscrip-
tion 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

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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 patri-
archal 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 signifi-
cantly, all of these novels deploy the village as the central theater
of this social struggle. This is both a political choice and a discur-
sive 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 peas-
antry. 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 domesti-
cating, 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 –

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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 repre-
sentation. 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 unprece-
dented 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 libera-
tion 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 genera-
tion 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 opposi-
tional 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 ‘foun-
dational’ intellectuals (jil al-ruwwad), the new intelligentsia that

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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 associ-
ated. 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 circum-
stances. 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 dramati-
cally 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 funda-
mentally 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

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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 single-
minded 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 devel-
opments 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 liber-
ating 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

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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 impor-
tant 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 revi-
sionist 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 ques-
tion’.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

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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 reifi-
cation 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 intelli-
gentsia and the regime itself, including after 1972, the year of
Sadat’s putsch and the inauguration of the Open Door, or neo-
liberal phase of contemporary Egyptian history.
The vanguardist writers and critics associated with the mid-
century 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 al-
Rahman 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 two-
odd 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 intellec-
tuals 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.

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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 bour-
geoisie with which it was associated. In fiction, this amounted to
an outright rejection of romanticism and the elaboration of narra-
tive 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 al-
Kum 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 govern-
ment 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 radi-
calized 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 ruth-
lessly 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 nation-
alism and Third-Worldism, as well as a limited engagement with

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socialism, was encouraged and even allowed to flourish. Though

strategically recognized and even honored by the state as indi-
vidual 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 genera-
tion, 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 al-
fa‘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 colo-
nialism 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 expres-
sion, 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 intellec-

tual and literary monasticism associated with writers like Tawfiq
al-Hakim (rahib al-fann/rahib al-fikr), the conservative romanti-
cism 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 sentimen-
talism 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 al-
hadm 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

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Isma‘il Sidqi in 1946, many of its writers were imprisoned

(including Sharqawi), and the Committee was forced to go under-
ground.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 offen-
sive’.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 Al-
Mu‘adhdhibun fil-Ard (The Wretched of the Earth) for example –
they were distorted by their excessive romanticism and their high-
brow 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 estab-
lishment 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 al-
multazim):

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 influ-
enced 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 plat-
form for those fully conscious writers who live the
experience of their age and who can be regarded as its

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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’ litera-
ture, ‘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 ‘opti-
mistic realism’ (al-waqi‘iyyah al-mutafa’ilah) as a way of
describing Sharqawi’s and Idris’ fiction, while relegating mid-
century 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

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of progressive social conflict and that the writer’s historic respon-

sibility 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 voca-
tion 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 reac-
tionary 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. Mid-
century 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

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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 criti-
cism 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 ideo-
logical 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 indi-
vidual 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 superfi-
ciality 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’

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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 icono-
clasts 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 omni-
scient 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, ‘tradi-
tion’ and ‘modernity’. Inevitably, these emblematic characters are
destroyed by the relentless social and psychological contradic-
tions 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 indi-
vidual 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 under-
standing 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).

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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 narra-
tive 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 inhabi-
tants. 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 imagina-
tion 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 bound-
aries marked by the genre. As in The Mountain, the narrator
finally re-enters the text, chastened and transformed by the revela-
tion 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

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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 char-
acter 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 reap-
pear 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-canon-
ical voices and generic languages. In formal terms, then, an

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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 intellec-
tuals 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 increas-
ingly 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 ideal-
ized 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 corpo-
ratist model of social organization adopted by the state, the official
Nasserist attitude towards the Egyptian peasant occupied a

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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 repre-
sent 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 al-
Halim ‘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 love-
plot. 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 revo-
lution, 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

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been elevated through the professional and ideological mecha-

nisms of the new nationalist military bureaucracy. She, on the
other hand, atones for the sins of her class by happily conde-
scending 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 acceler-
ated 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 organiza-
tions, 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 memo-
randum ‘which proclaimed new poets to be against Islam and the
Arabic language, and supporters of class war and the loss of tradi-
tional morals. The Committee asserted its right “to oversee all

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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 them-
selves trapped in an impossible historical position. They were both
the children of the revolution and its strategic enemies. The revo-
lution’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 descrip-
tion 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 polit-
ical 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 jour-
nals, Al-Tali‘ah [The Vanguard] and Al-Katib [The
Writer] were the seminal pulpits that influenced its forma-
tion. In any case, there is no doubt that the social
composition of this new generation, as well as its experi-
ence, 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]

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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 gener-
ation 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

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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 intellec-
tuals 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 jour-
nalists was prevented from publishing in the state media and
presses and was subjected to concerted public attacks by establish-
ment intellectuals who labeled these writers ‘immature’,
‘anarchists’ and ‘cultural ignoramuses’.36 The Sadat regime accel-
erated the official persecution of dissident intellectuals with the
formation in 1972 of ‘The Regulatory Committee’ (Lajnat al-
Nidham), 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 impris-
oned 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 embit-
tered, 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 devel-
oped 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

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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 compro-
mised 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 repro-
duced 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 neo-
realist 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

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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 soli-
tary 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 reap-
pears 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, compli-
cating 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

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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 under-
stand 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 some-
thing has come between us. I belong to a different world
now, a world that has nothing to do with theirs. I experi-
ence 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 psycholog-

ical 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

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inscription of this dilemma. Whereas in both cases, the subject’s

alienation is organized through the trope of ‘culture’, Idris under-
stands 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 re-
emerged 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 deca-
dence. 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, prag-
matic, 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 revo-
lution. This historic ‘failure’, however, implies a serious flaw in the

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national character, one that Hamdan was at pains to explain satis-

factorily. 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 indige-

nous, 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 patriar-
chal rural family as a happy mirror image of the stable hierarchy
of the national family – an ideal assiduously fostered by the pater-
nalist 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 insur-
gency 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 politi-
cally radical affinities – of the rural collectivity are repeated again
and again in these novels. The material and ideological trappings

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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 interro-
gated 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 hierar-
chies and divisions within a single village made up of the local and
urban authorities, ahl al-balad (‘the people of the village’) and al-
gharabwah (‘the outsiders’), or the migrant agricultural workers
who frequently people Shalabi’s work. Though they work side-by-
side 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 forefa-
thers’) 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

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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 al-
Hakim’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 impris-
oned 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 filia-
tive, 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 subse-
quent 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

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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 moder-
nity in twentieth-century Egypt. Though very different in terms of
structure and style, they all nonetheless engage the crucial rela-
tionship 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.

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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 de-
romanticization 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 narra-
tive 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 criti-
cisms 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

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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 exclu-
sively 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 objec-
tive 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

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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 signifi-
cantly different ways between the narrative inscribed by nahdawi
authors in the 1910s and 1920s, and that of subsequent genera-
tions 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

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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 narra-
tive, 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 inca-
pable 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

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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 repre-
sentation. 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, ‘realis-
tically’ 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

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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, rein-
forcing 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 relation-
ships 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 under-
standing 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

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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 intellec-
tual 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 obscu-
rantism 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

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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 watering-
cycle, nor been forced to drink horse-urine.13 Neither had
Zaynab’s village known the pride of victory while success-
fully 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 implica-
tions 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 some-

body 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 oppres-
sive – 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

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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 narra-
tive 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 identi-
fies – 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 domi-
nant 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 char-
acter. ‘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 characteris-
tics of the national feminine – purity, chastity and docility – are
inverted in Wasifah’s case and the rebelliousness and unconven-
tionality 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

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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 some-
thing 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 conse-
quently 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 tran-
scends 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 al-
Hadi 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 prereq-
uisite 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

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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 emascu-
lated 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 contex-
tual – 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 third-
person 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

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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 mecha-
nism 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

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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 counter-
punning, of engaging in witty, earthy repartee, is an end in itself,
and large portions of the novel are given over to this kind of seem-
ingly 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 inces-
santly 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 re-
narration. 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 repres-
sive urban society and an egalitarian rural one. In The Land, as in
The Seven Days of Man, this rural chat is written as a contra-
puntal subaltern dialogue that both exemplifies peasant culture
and challenges the efficacy of centralized narration. In contradis-
tinction to what Lennard Davis has called ‘the single-voiced,
anti-social quality of literary conversation’,22 this type of ‘rough-
edged, mocking give and take’23 is a basic component of what M.

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M. Bakhtin has described as a culture of laughter that sponta-

neously 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-trav-
estying 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 consid-
ered 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 transgres-
sion 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 stan-
dardizing 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 peas-
antry 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 discur-
sive 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 trun-
cated comic form by the pompous village school-teacher,
Muhammad Efendi, is set apart from the village community by

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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 shoul-

ders 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’, ‘Al-
Gama‘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 passion-

ately, 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 rhetor-
ical 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 associ-
ated 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

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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 chal-
lenged 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, reli-
gion 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 peas-
ants – ‘in the name of God and his prophet’ (p. 104) – into
providing their seals for the false petition against the new irriga-
tion 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 al-
Hadi who objects to the Shaykh as possible author of the irrigation
petition, framing his irreverent objection in terms of the obscuran-
tist 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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 THE LAND

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 prac-
tice 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

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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 imagina-
tion 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

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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 orga-

nized 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 libera-
tion 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 deca-
dent, 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 possi-
bility of writing novels

rooted in region and class…[and] seek[ing] the substance

of those finer-drawn, often occluded relations and rela-
tionships which in their pressures and interventions at

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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 espe-
cially 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 soli-
darities.
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 relation-
ships – 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

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critical, deconstructive scrutiny. Instead of a cultural and political

space dominated by ideologically determined geographic discrimi-
nations, 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 conscious-
ness that enables the Nubian soldier, Sergeant ‘Abdallah, himself a
peasant, to rethink his affiliations and empathize with the perse-
cuted 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 func-
tions 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 rebel-
lion against their master; on the other hand, Shaykh Yusuf’s
sudden defection to the government’s contractors and his self-
serving 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

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can be clearly heard from without, a token of continuing soli-

darity 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-of-
all-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, barracks-
laborer, 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 Abu-
Swaylam – 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

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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 redemp-
tion 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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 6
THE EXILED SON

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 impos-
ible 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

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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 antago-
nistic worlds of which Qasim speaks – and which can be rendered
in a number of analogous dualisms (past/present; tradition/moder-
nity; 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 contra-
dictions and increasingly authoritarian and repressive domestic
policies had already significantly alienated its popular and intellec-
tual base, and sown the seeds for Anwar al-Sadat’s
‘counter-revolution’. The devastation inflicted on what Edward al-
Kharrat 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 diplo-
matic 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

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 THE EXILED SON

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 discrep-
ancy 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 catas-

trophic 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’ (al-
hasasiyyah 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 institution-
alized 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 resur-
gent 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

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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 nego-
tiate 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 inter-
nalize 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’ (al-
tariq) 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,

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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 unequivo-
cally 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 individu-
ation 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 particu-
larly 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 partic-

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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 prob-
lematic 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 monu-
mental 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 chap-
ters 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 point-
of-view.
The echoes of a primeval, pre-national time and place haunt the
opening chapters of Qasim’s novel. Muhammad Badawi’s descrip-
tion of this time as ‘stretching’, throughout the history of Arab,
Islamic civilization, ‘with a continuous, regular beat’ till the

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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 incor-
porating 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 grand-

father 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

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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 imper-
fect 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 incorpo-
rates 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:

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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 syntacti-
cally 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

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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 friend-
ship, 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 – story-
telling, gossip, ribald joking – and religious ritual; a blending of
the sacred and the profane which essentially defines the commu-
nity’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 al-
Sharqawi: ‘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

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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 hermeneu-
tics 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 hard-
ship 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 them-
selves 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

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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 ratio-
nalist, 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

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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 fecun-
dity 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, whis-
pering 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, mono-
lithic 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, delegit-
imized, 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 rebel-
lion. 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

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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, orna-
mented, 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 thick-
ened…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

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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 disease-
stricken lovers.
The gradual contraction of ‘Abd al-‘Aziz’s youthful and inno-
cent 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 paral-
leled 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, irrev-
erent. 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

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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 histor-
ical 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

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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 revul-
sion 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

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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 disap-
peared.
(p. 168)

Badawi’s reading of this massive feast procession as an orgy of

gross sensuality, escapism and impotence is, in this sense, superfi-
cial, 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

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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 mono-
lithic, ‘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 commu-
nity; 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 inter-
ventions of a historical time that is common to both the village

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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, argu-
ment, 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.

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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 indi-
vidual alienation and despair.14
The historical circumstances surrounding the student demon-
strations 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 dissi-
dent 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 nota-
bles. 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, impo-
tent, 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, sacri-
ficial 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

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by a repressive social and political authority. The modern history

of Palestine is directly woven into the novel through the introduc-
tion 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 recre-
ating 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 commu-
nity. 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 irrele-
vance 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 hinter-
land) 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 magni-
fies this traumatized subject as the symptom of a deeply polarized
historical conflict between ‘tradition’ and ‘modernity’. East of the

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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 relation-
ship, be it an individual one forged in love or friendship, or an
extended network of collective affiliation (family, clan, revolu-
tionary 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 narra-
tion 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 demonstra-
tions 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

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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 granary-
thieves.…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 disap-
pear 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

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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 moti-
vates 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 hori-
zontal 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 identifi-
cation. This identification is implicitly contrasted to ‘people made
of stone’, people like the policemen, the villagers (first and fore-
most 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.

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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 engen-
ders 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

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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, aston-
ished 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-imag-
ining 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 indi-
vidual 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 water-
buffalo – 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 loca-
tions, from the village to the metropolitan capitals of the north.
Repeating the primary political insight of ‘Abd al-Rahman al-
Sharqawi’s The Land, both novels reveal ‘reality’ as a subjective
understanding of human agency in relation to history. The trau-
matic dislocation of the conventional narrative subject is finally
exorcized by means of this revelation, which articulates subjec-

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tivity as a contingent point-of-view rooted in the sum of the indi-

vidual’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 perse-
cuted 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 chap-
ters:

The new literature taking shape at the margins of the

cultural establishment was the true expression of the trans-
formations 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

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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 suppres-
sion 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 move-

ment, 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 emer-
gence 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-trav-
eled 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 al-
Fadil’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 vantage-
point; the resonant, mythopoeic space between the stunning,
magnitudinous archetype and the poignant, emotive, human
detail of the popular tale.

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 T H E S T O RY T E L L E R

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 indi-
vidual 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 system-
atically 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 story-
teller’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 indi-
vidual – 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 tran-
scendence, 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 informa-
tional 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

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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 conse-
quence 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 inde-
pendent 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 l-
bashar) – 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 fore-
shadows her own eventual death at the hands of her cousin.
The realist novel’s manipulation of time and space is also radi-
cally 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 firma-
ment 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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 T H E S T O RY T E L L E R

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 struc-
ture, 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 char-

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 T H E S T O RY T E L L E R

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 inces-
tuous 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 oppo-
site 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

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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 ulti-
mately 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 chick-
peas, 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 bird-
feeder. 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

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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 under-
stood 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 osten-
sibly 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 affilia-
tion is precisely to his wealthy, aristocratic father, de facto lord of
the village. Lurking at the margins of the text, he is the mirror-
image of Haykal’s Hamid; the educated, urbanized schoolboy
who, in the eyes of Nabawiyyah and indeed of all the village girls,

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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 immedi-

ately 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 fore-
grounded 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 mate-
riality 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 impreg-
nates Fahimah and lingers on as such in her fevered fantasies.

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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 fairy-
tale. 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 friend-
ships. 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 intru-
sion 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 granu-
lated – 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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 T H E S T O RY T E L L E R

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 labor-
gangs 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 al-
Bishari’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 represen-
tation 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

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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

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 T H E S T O RY T E L L E R

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

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 T H E S T O RY T E L L E R

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 repro-
duced 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 repre-
sentation through which it has been articulated from the
foundational period onwards. The opacity of the novel’s abbrevi-
ated, 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 overdeter-
mined narrative of origins and identity which is coextensive with
the history of the novel itself.

228
 8
CONCLUSION

n Fathi Ghanim’s 1963 novel Those Days, the distinguished histo-

ian 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
 CONCLUSION

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 collec-
tive 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 struc-
tural 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, prag-
matic and disciplinary, the other circular, affinitive and subaltern.
Disciplinary narrativity is associated with the positivist episte-
mologies 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 symp-
toms 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 collec-
tive 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
 CONCLUSION

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 narra-
tivity. The Maze of Justice foregrounds this clash, as does The
Land and The Band and the Bracelet. The modern bourgeois figu-
ration 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 ratio-
nalist 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 coer-
cive 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 indi-
vidual 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 struc-
tures, 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 coun-
tryside. 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
 CONCLUSION

narrating the story of its own incidental origins and historic limi-
nality 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 ‘juxta-
position’ 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 narcis-
sistic and ambitious equation of personal and historical identity is

232
 CONCLUSION

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 existen-
tial 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 narra-
tive 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.

233
 NOTES

INTRODUCTION
1 Timothy Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, Berkeley: University of
California Press, 1991, p. 35.
2 The Arabic term Nahdah (which literally means ‘arising’ or ‘awak-
ening’ 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 lil-
Kitab, 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.
3 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

234
 NOTES

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 al-
Misriyyin 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.
4 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, p. 127.
5 See for example Ra’uf Abbas and Asim Dasuqi, Kibar al-Mullak wal-
Fallahun fi Misr 1837–1952, Cairo: Dar Qiba’, 1998.
6 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 116–117.
7 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.
8 Ahmad Zakariyyah al-Shalaq, Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul wa Qadiyyat al-
Taghrib, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1987,
pp. 31–32.
9 Ibid., p. 124.
10 Jamal Muhammad Ahmad, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian
Nationalism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960, p. 89.
11 Shalaq, Ahmad Fathi Zaghlul wa Qadiyyat al-Taghrib, p. 45.
12 Ahmad, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nationalism, p. 91.
13 Sayyid ‘Ashmawi, Al-Fallahun wal-Sultah, Cairo: Mirit lil-Nashr wal-
Ma‘lumat, 2001.
14 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.
15 Ahmad Ibrahim al-Hawwari, Naqd al-Riwayah al-Arabiyyah fi Misr,
Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1978, p. 27.
16 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 contro-
versial theme went hand-in-hand with the genre’s rebellion against the
literary canon itself. Zaman Al-Riwayah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-
Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1999, pp. 111–113.
17 Al-Hawwari, Naqd al-Riwayah al-Arabiyyah fi Misr, pp. 28–29.
18 Ahmad Lutfi al-Sayyid, al-Muntakhabat, Cairo: Dar al-Nashr al-
Hadith, 1945, quoted in Charles Wendell, The Evolution of the
Egyptian National Image, Los Angeles: University of California Press,
1972, p. 275.
19 Mitchell, Colonising Egypt, pp. 12–13.
20 Ibid., p. 31.

235
 NOTES

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 al-
Hadithah fi Misr, Cairo: Dar al-Ma‘arif, 1992, p. 210.
24 Many critics have identified this dialectic as the central trope of post-
realist 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 trau-
matic 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 rudi-
mentary 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 twen-
tieth-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.

236
 NOTES

169–196. An English translation of Hazz al-Quhuf is currently being

prepard by Humphrey Davis.
28 Baer, Fellah and Townsmen in the Middle East, p. 24.
29 Ibid., p. 7.
30 In the essay cited above, Mohamed-Salah Omri concludes that ‘it
would be too simplistic to regard the book as a vicious attack on peas-
ants’, 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.
31 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.
32 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.
33 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 transla-
tions 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.
34 Muhammad ‘Abd Al-Ghani Hasan, Al-Fallah fil-Adab al-‘Arabi,
Cairo: Dar al-Aqlam, 1965, p. 80.
35 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.
36 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.
37 See for example: Ferdinand Céline, Voyage au Début de la Nuit;
Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities; John Kennedy Toole, A

237
 NOTES

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 M. M. Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, Cambridge: Cambridge
University Press, 1988, p. 29.
2 Jacob Landau, Studies in the Arab Theater and Cinema, Philadelphia:
University of Pennsylvania Press, 1958, pp. 26–27.
3 Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, pp. 26–27.
4 Luis ‘Awad, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, Cairo: Maktabat
Madbuli, 1986, p. 277.
5 Badawi, Early Arabic Drama, p. 12.
6 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 al-
Ummah 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.
7 Philosopher, writer, orator, journalist and political activist, Jamal al-
Din 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 al-
Afghani’s life and works.
8 ‘Awad suggests that Sannu‘ fell under the spell of Mazzini and Italian
republicanism during this soujourn in Italy. Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-
Hadith, pp. 273–274.
9 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 refer-
ence to his own domestic condition. However, both ‘Awad and
Badawi reject this hypothesis and suggest instead that Sannu‘ ’s polit-
ical enemies had intrigued against him with the Khedive (this is
Sannu‘ ’s own explanation as well). ‘Awad tells us that the play, Al-
Sawwah wal-Hammar (The Tourist and the Donkey-Driver),
infuriated the Khedive’s British entourage for its satirical portrayal of

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 NOTES

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.
10 ‘Awad notes that ‘Abbas Hilmi’s nationalist inclinations and his popu-
larity 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 democ-
racy, and focused on attacking British colonial power and European
influence in general in Egypt in the pages of Al-Ustadh. Ibid., p. 361.
11 Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, Boulder: Three
Continents Press, 1997, p. 24.
12 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 degen-
erate, 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)
13 Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, pp. 25–26.
14 Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, London:
Saqi Books, 1993, p. 129.
15 Ibid., p. 116.
16 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.
17 Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 120. See also
‘Awad, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith; Mahmud Fahmi Hijazi, ‘Al-
Ru’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.
18 Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction, p. 72.
19 Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse, p. 127.

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 NOTES

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 polit-
ical 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 nine-
teenth 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, ‘Al-
Ru’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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 NOTES

42 Quoted in Dus, ‘Al-‘Amiyyah al-Misriyyah ‘inda ‘Abdallah al-

Nadim’, 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 diver-
sity 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 news-
paper 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 indige-
nous 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: Al-
Hay’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 addi-
tion 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

241
 NOTES

Sannu‘ ’s Lu‘bat as a stock peasant figure, garrulous, rebellious and

often very funny.
56 Abu Naddarah Zarqa, no. 4, 1878. ‘Anus, Ya‘qub Sannu‘: Al-Lu‘bat
al-Tiyatriyyah, pp. 23–26.
57 Al-Nadharat al-Misriyyah, no. 9, 15 April 1880. Ibid., pp. 89–102.
58 The father and son referred to here are Isma‘il and Tawfiq.
59 This is a reference to the exiled ‘Urabi.
60 Isma‘il, Tawfiq’s father, was sent into exile by the British in 1879.
61 Misr lil-Misriyyin, no. 5, 29 June 1890. ‘Anus, Ya‘qub Sannu‘: Al-
Lu‘bat al-Tiyatriyyah, pp. 139–143.
62 The wars in the Sudan were a hot-button issue for turn-of-the-century
Egyptian writers. Allen notes, for example, that Muhammad al-
Muwaylihi 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.
63 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 Il-
Wad il-Miri’ w-Abu-Shaduf Il-Hidi’, where the latter threatens
Nabwat with Abu-Naddarah’s imminent arrival. ‘Anus, Al-Lu‘bat al-
Tiyatriyyah, pp. 95–96,
64 ‘‘Arabi Tafarnaj’, Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 1, 6 June 1881, pp. 7–8
65 They [the peasants] have names like those of goblins:

Barghut, Zi‘it, Mu‘it, and ‘Ifish. They habitually name their chil-
dren 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)
66 For further elaboration of this theme, see the sketch ‘Jahl al-‘Awaqib
Jalib al-‘Awatib’, Ibid., no. 4, 3 July 1881, pp. 94–95.
67 Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 4, 3 July 1881, pp. 56–58.
68 Ibid., no. 1, 6 June 1881, pp. 11–12.
69 Ibid., no. 10, 15 August 1881, p. 162.
70 Ibid., no. 10, 15 August 1881, p. 165.
71 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’.
72 Al-Tankit wal-Tabkit, no. 10, 15 August 1881, pp. 155–157.

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 NOTES

73 The title is ‘named after the sixth-century Arab Lakhmid King al-
Nu‘man Ibn al-Mundhir’, and according to Moosa, is ‘sometimes
called al-‘Arab (the Arabs) because it was meant to portray the excel-
lence 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 gene-
ology 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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 NOTES

15 Ibid., p. 156.
16 Ibid., p. 148.
17 Ibid., p. 198.
18 Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels: Ideology and Fiction, New York:
Methuen, 1987, pp. 24–25.
19 Guy de Maupassant, ‘The Novel’, Pierre and Jean, trans. Leonard
Tancock, London: Penguin Books, 1979, pp. 26–27.
20 Lennard Davis, Resisting Novels, p. 54.
21 Ibid., p. 117.
22 ‘Asfur, Zaman al-Riwayah, pp. 106–110.
23 Badr, Tatawwur al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah al-Hadithah, p. 160.
24 Ramzi Mikha’il, Al-Sahafah al-Misriyyah wal-Harakah al-
Wataniyyah: 1882–1922, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah
lil-Kitab, 1996, pp. 42–49.
25 Muhammad Husayn Haykal, Thawrat al-Adab, Cairo: Dar al-
Ma‘arif, 1986, p. 12.
26 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.
27 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.
28 From a broadcast interview with Mahmud Taymur, published in Al-
Adab, no. 9, September 1960, p. 11. Quoted in Badr, Tatawwur
al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah, pp. 206–207.
29 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.

244
 NOTES

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 dimen-
sions 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:

245
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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 al-
Jadidah’, 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 al-
Misriyyah 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 El-
Gabalawy 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 square-
bracketed 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.)

246
 NOTES

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 al-
Mu‘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 al-
Sha‘biyyah, 1974, p. 92.

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 NOTES

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, Fil-
Thaqafah 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 intellec-
tuals. 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 al-
Rahman al-Sharqawi, Cairo: Al-Majlis Al-A‘la lil-Thaqafah, 1996, p. 23.
5 For example, Muhammad ‘Atif Ghayth, Al-Qaryah al-
Mutaghayyirah: Dirasah fi ‘Ilm al-Ijtima‘ al-Qarawi, Cairo: Dar
al-Ma‘arif, 1964; Mahmud Abu Rayyah, Hayat al-Qurah, Cairo: Al-
Dar 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: Al-
Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1973.
7 The Center launched a journal in 1965, entitled Al-Funun al-
Sha‘biyyah: ‘The journal identified for itself three tasks: study of
folklore using scientific methodology, study of the folk arts devel-
oping 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 al-
Ghani Hasan, Al-Fallah fil-Adab al-‘Arabi, Cairo: Dar al-Qalam,
1965; ‘Abd al-Muhsin Taha Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, Cairo: Dar al-
Ma‘arif, 1971; Hasan Muhassib, Qadiyyat al-Fallah fi al-Qissa
al-Misriyyah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Ta’lif wal-
Nashr, 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.

248
 NOTES

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 wal-
Tawzi‘, 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 disserta-
tion 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 enter-
tainment’. ‘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 al-
Mu‘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-articu-
lated 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 Fil-
Qissah wal-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal

249
 NOTES

al-‘Arabi, 1994; Al-Ibda‘ wal-Dalalah, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-

‘Arabi, 1997.
25 Consequently, Zionist literature becomes an exemplar of truly
committed literature. Ahmad Muhammad ‘Atiyyah, Al-Iltizam wal-
Thawrah fil-Adab al-‘Arabi al-Mu‘asir, Beirut: Dar al-’Awdah, 1974.
26 Shukri, Mudhakkarat Thaqafah Tahtadir, pp. 148–149.
27 ‘Abd al-Ghani, I‘tirafat ‘Abd al-Rahman al-Sharqawi, pp. 22–23.
28 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.
29 From ‘Azmat al-Muthaqqafin’, quoted in Ghali Shukri, Al-Nahdah
wal-Suqut fil-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, Cairo: Al-Dar al-‘Arabiyyah lil-
Kitabah, 1983, p. 80.
30 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.
31 Memoirs are a fertile source of information on this subject. See in
particular Fathi Ghanem, Ma‘rakah bayna al-Dawlah wal-
Muthaqqafin, 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.
32 Kendall, ‘Literature, Journalism and the Avant-garde in Egypt: From
al-Hilal to Gallery 68’, p. 85.
33 Shukri, Al-Nahdah wal-Suqut fil-Fikr Al-Misri al-Hadith, pp. 86–87.
34 Ibid., pp. 94–95.
35 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.
36 Shukri, Al-Nahdah wal-Suqut fil-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, p. 97.
37 Ibid., p. 102.
38 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).
39 Badawi, Al-Riwayah al-Jadidah fi Misr, p. 259.
40 Yusuf Idris, Al-Bayda’, Cairo: Maktabat Misr, n.d., pp. 47–48.
41 Jamal Hamdan, Shakhsiyyat Misr: Dirasah Fi ‘Abqariyyat al-Makan,
vol. II, Cairo: Madbuli, 1994, p. 50. See Mahmud Amin al-‘Alim, Al-
Wa‘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.

250
 NOTES

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 home-
space. ‘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

251
 NOTES

of long passages with square-bracketed page numbers. The passage

here cited was deleted from the Stuart translation.
12 See for example, Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, p. 124; and Al-‘Alim and
Anis, Fil-Thaqafah al-Misriyyah, p. 126.
13 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.
14 John Berger, Pig Earth, New York: Pantheon Books, 1979, pp. 8–9.
15 ‘Ali, ‘Ard al-Sharqawi’, p. 63.
16 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.
17 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.
18 Al-Tayib Salih, ‘Urs al-Zayn, Beirut, 1967.
19 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 accom-
plished, 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.
20 Examples of this collective re-narration are many. See pp. 19–21 for
the story of Wasifah’s legendary encounter with ‘Ilwani in the water-
melon 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.
21 Badawi, Al-Riwayah al-Jadidah fi Misr, pp. 20–45.
22 Davis, Resisting Novels, p. 179.
23 Raymond Williams, ‘The Ragged-Arsed Philanthropists’, in Writing in
Society, p. 254.

252
 NOTES

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 ‘Abd al-Hakim Qasim, ‘Malamih Tajrubati al-Riwa’iyyah’, in Al-
Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah: Waqi‘ wa Afaq, Beirut: Dar Ibn Rushd, 1981,
p. 362.
2 Ibid., p. 364.
3 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.
4 Edwar al-Kharrat, ‘The Mashriq’, in Modern Literature in the Near
and Middle East, ed. Robin Ostle, New York: Routledge, 1991, pp.
186–187.
5 Edwar al-Kharrat, Al-Hasasiyyah al-Jadidah: Maqalat fil-Zahirah al-
Qasassiyyah, Beirut: Dar al-Adab, 1993.
6 Barrada, Al-Riwayah al-‘Arabiyyah: Waqi‘ wa Afaq, pp. 361–362.

253
 NOTES

7 See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical

Introduction, Syracuse: Syracuse University Press, 1995, for a discus-
sion 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 soci-
eties – 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 brack-
eted 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 al-
Hilal, 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 Baha’ Tahir, foreword to Khalti Safiyyah wal-Dayr, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah
al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1996, pp. 21–23.
2 Walter Benjamin, ‘The Storyteller’, in Illuminations, New York:
Schocken Books, 1985, p. 85.
3 Ghalib Halasa, Udaba’ ‘Allamuni…Udaba’ ‘Araftuhum, Beirut: al-
Mu’assasah al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Tawzi’ wal-Nashr, 1996. p. 186.
4 Edwar al-Kharrat, biographical introduction to Yahya al-Tahir
‘Abdallah, Al-A‘mal al-Kamilah, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal al-‘Arabi,
1984, p. 5.
5 ‘Abdallah’s biography is representative of an entire generation’s
emigration from the peripheral villages of the Egyptian countryside to

254
 NOTES

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 agricul-
ture, 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.
6 Tahir, Khalti Safiyyah wal-Dayr, pp. 6–7.
7 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 86.
8 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: Al-
Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1993. All future references
to the text will cite this edition in parenthetical page numbers.
9 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 94.
10 Italo Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, New York:
Vintage Books, 1993, p. 37.
11 Benjamin, Illuminations, p. 89.
12 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, inter-
nally coherent generic form supersedes length as a determining factor.
13 Calvino, Six Memos for the Next Millennium, p. 35.
14 Sabry Hafez, ‘Qisas Yahya al-Tahir ‘Abdallah Al-Tawilah’, Fusul,
2:1–2, 1981–1982.
15 Anderson, Imagined Communities, pp. 25–30.
16 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 transcen-
dence 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 Fathi Ghanim, Tilka al-Ayyam, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-
‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 2000, pp. 108–109.
2 ‘Abd al-Fattah al-Jamal, Muhibb, Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1992, pp. 1–2.
3 Badr, Al-Riwa’i wal-Ard, p. 41.

256
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

Books and articles in English

Ahmad, Jamal Muhammad, The Intellectual Origins of Egyptian Nation-
alism, Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1960.
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Books and articles in Arabic

Abbas, Ra’uf and Dasuqi, Asim, Kibar al-Mullak wal-Fallahun fi Misr
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‘Abdallah, Yahya al-Tahir, Al-A‘mal al-Kamilah, Cairo: Dar al-Mustaqbal
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‘Anus, Najwah, Ya‘qub Sanu‘: Al-Lu‘bat al-Tiyatriyyah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah
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1936.
‘Asfur, Jabir, Zaman al-Riwayah, Cairo: Maktabat al-Usrah, 1999.
‘Ashmawi, Sayyid, Al-Fallahun wal-Sultah, Cairo: Mirit lil-Nashr wal-
Ma‘lumat, 2001.
‘Atiyyah, Ahmad Muhammad, Al-Riwayah al-Siyasiyyah, Cairo:
Maktabat Madbuli, 1981.
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‘Awad, Luis, Tarikh al-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, Cairo: Maktabat Madbuli,
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Badawi, Muhammad, Al-Riwayah al-Jadidah Fi Misr: Dirasah fil-Tashkil
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Nashr wal-Tawzi‘, 1993.

260
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Maktabat Madbuli, 1966.
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‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1993.
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Kitabah wal-Nashr, 1968.
Shukri, Ghali, Al-Nahdah wal-Suqut fil-Fikr al-Misri al-Hadith, n.p.: Al-
Dar al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Kitab, 1983.
——Al-Muthaqqafun wal-Sultah fi Misr, Cairo: Akhbar al-Yawm, 1990.
——Mudhakkarat Thaqafah Tahtadir, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-
‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1995.
——Al-‘Anqa’ al-Jadidah: Sira‘ al-Ajyal fil-Adab al-Mu‘asir, Cairo: Al-
Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-’Ammah lil-Kitab, 1993.
——Thawrat al-Mu‘tazil: Dirasah Fi Adab Tawfiq al-Hakim, Beirut: Dar
al-Thaqafah Al-Jadidah, 1983.
Tahir, Baha’, Al-A‘mal al-Kamilah, Cairo: Dar al-Hilal, 1992.
Taymur, Mahmud, Fann al-Qisas, Cairo: Matba‘at Dar al-Hilal, 1948.
Al-Tunisi, Bayram, Al-Sayyid wa Miratuhu fi Bariz, Alexandria: Al-
Markaz al-‘Arabi lil-Nashr, 1982.
‘Ubayd, ‘Isa, Ihsan Hanim, Cairo: Matba‘at Ramsis, 1964.
‘Umar, Muhammad, Hadir al-Misriyyin aw Sirr Ta’akhkhurihim, Cairo:
Dar Misr al-Mahrusah, 2002.
Al-Waraqi, Sa‘id, Ittijahat al-Qissah al-Qasirah fil-Adab al-‘Arabi al-
Mu‘asir, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-Misriyyah al-‘Ammah lil-Kitab, 1979.

Novels cited (first editions)

‘Abd al-Hakim, Shawqi, Ahzan Nuh, Cairo: Al-Dar al-Qawmiyyah lil-
Tiba‘ah wal-Nashr, 1963.
‘Abdallah, Muhammad ‘Abd al-Halim, Ba‘d al-Ghurub, Cairo: Matba‘at
Dar al-Kitab al-‘Arabi, 1949.

262
 BIBLIOGRAPHY

‘Abdallah, Yahya al-Tahir, Al-Tawq wal-Iswirah, Cairo: Al-Hay’ah al-

Misriyyah 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‘ wal-
Nashr, 1966.
Idris, Yusuf, Al-Haram, Cairo: al-Shirkah al-‘Arabiyyah lil-Tiba‘a wal-
Nashr, 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 al-
Misriyyah 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 al-
Halim 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
264
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
 INDEX
Gallery 68 150
Ghanem, Fathi 134, 141; al-Jabal
129, 143; Tilka al-Ayyam 142,
144, 229
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
Ibn Daniyal 34
Ibrahim, Sun‘allah 150–1
Idris, Yusuf 129, 144, 150, 156; al-
Bayda’ 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
265
khayal 110–13, 231
Khayrat, Mahmud 19, 67, 72
kuttab 19, 28
kuttab al-ghad 150, 206
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
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
 INDEX
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
266
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; Al-
Awbash 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
 INDEX

Ummah Party 79, 87 Writer’s Union 147, 150; see also

‘Urabi revolt 6, 14, 17, 28–30, 87 kuttab al-ghad

Wafd Party 9, 73, 87, 131, 162 Zaghlul, Ahmad Fathi 6–9
Watt, Ian 103 Zaghlul, Sa‘d 1, 30, 77, 86
Wilcox, William 37–8 Zaydan, Jurji 11, 38, 62–4, 66
Williams, Raymond vii, 23, 180 Zola, Emile 190, 202

267