A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (6 page)

By the beginning of the twentieth century, questions about tradition and modernization and about what was authentic and what was foreign in national life had become part of the common currency of Arab intellectual debate, with modernizers wanting to bring Arab societies into line with Europe and traditionalists insisting on the primacy of inherited patterns of thought. While the modernists had mostly been educated in the new institutions, either those set up by modernizing regimes such as in Egypt, or in the mission schools and other institutions set up by foreigners, for example in Lebanon, this was by no means always the case. One of the outstanding figures of the age, the Egyptian writer and intellectual Taha Hussein, for example, was educated at al-Azhar in Cairo, according to the traditional religious curriculum. The story of his absorption of that curriculum and subsequent study in France makes one of the most fascinating life-stories in any language. Hussein’s accumulation of the ‘treasures of popular lore and traditional sciences’, his rediscovery of ‘a more vital and vigorous past’ than that offered at al-Azhar, and his falling ‘under the spell of Westernization’ are parts of a representative intellectual trajectory from an age that described itself as marking the ‘rebirth’ (
nahda
), or ‘enlightenment’ of Arab societies and culture.
⁵
This rebirth, Hussein and other writers of his generation thought, would
come about as a result of a renewed interest and pride in the Arab past and a desire to emulate the modern achievements of the Europeans.

4. The Egyptian writer Taha Hussein, known as the ‘Dean of Arabic Literature’

Born in 1889 to a poor rural family, and afflicted by blindness from an early age, Hussein attended village school before registering, in 1902, at al-Azhar in Cairo. This institution, founded a thousand years earlier, was primarily a theology college at the time, training young men in religion. By the time that Hussein attended it, it had fallen into decay, its curriculum fossilized and it having been outflanked by modern institutions that offered superior career options. Indeed, Hussein says in the first volume of his autobiography,
An Egyptian Childhood
, part of what was to become a three-volume work entitled
The Days
,
⁶
that his elder brother, who died tragically young of cholera, was destined for medical school, not al-Azhar. While al-Azhar still enjoyed prestige as a centre of traditional and religious culture, though perhaps chiefly in rural areas, its graduates no longer played a major role in the modern economy or in the professions.

Hussein, a ‘young sheikh’, managed, mostly successfully, to memorize the
Qur’an
by the time he was nine years old, though not without the sometimes comic lapses of memory recorded in his autobiography. He was a sensitive, solitary child, and perhaps it was thought that, being blind, his best chance of a job would be as an assistant in a
religious school. However, if this was the case he was to prove such ideas wrong, going on to become Rector of Cairo University, Egyptian Minister of Education and one of the most important representatives of the country’s modern intelligentsia that tried to find an accommodation between traditional values and developing modern ways, while at the same time working towards a more sophisticated conception of tradition and the renovation of Arab literary culture.

In
The Stream of Days,
for example, Hussein gives a fascinating account of student life at al-Azhar in the early years of the twentieth century and the hopes he invested in his education. As a result of being separated from his peers by his blindness, the young boy’s solitude comes across strongly, as does his poverty, as he lies awake at night listening to various creatures scratching about in the walls of his lodgings. However, Hussein also often refers to Mohamed Abdu, who had been a leading teacher at the institution shortly before and had engaged in a struggle for its modernization and for the renovation of religious culture more generally. Hussein’s sympathies clearly lie with ‘the Imam’, and his memoirs are full of references to the uselessness of many of the al-Azhar teachers at the time, together with his contempt for the atmosphere of ‘intrigue, backbiting, [and] imposture’ that reigned in the institution.
⁷

Rebelling against the ‘gross taste and jaded wits of the Azhar’, Hussein turned away from the official curriculum and towards the study of classical Arabic literature, falling under the influence of men seeking to renovate and develop the country’s intellectual life within the framework of Egyptian and Arab nationalism. He also started to contribute articles to the newspapers of the day. ‘I know of nothing in the world which can exert so strong an influence for freedom, especially on the young, as literature,’ Hussein writes, remembering his efforts to escape from what seemed to him to be the narrow limits of traditional learning as conceived of at al-Azhar. He had, he says, a
‘long-cherished dream of entering the lay world of the
tarboush
’ at a time ‘when he was sick to death of the turban and all that it implied.’ (Hussein writes in the third person throughout his autobiography, though translations do not always preserve this.) While the ‘
tarboush
’, or ‘
fez
’, was part of a modern style of dress, representing the styles of thought then being sought from Europe, the turban represented the traditionalist mentality incarnated by al-Azhar, which, in Hussein’s view, was urgently in need of renovation.

If there is a single leading theme in Hussein’s autobiography, then it is the broadening of horizons that came about with the widening of his own education, first at al-Azhar, then at the new Egyptian University founded in 1908 along European lines, and then at university in France. By the end of volume two of his memoirs, Hussein has joined the Egyptian University. In the third volume, entitled
A Passage to France
and not published until the year of Hussein’s death in 1973, he describes the new forms of teaching and learning that he found there, as well as the developing ambitions these awoke in him. ‘I would come to hold the place in Egypt that Voltaire had occupied in France,’ he writes, staging himself as, like Voltaire, a ‘bringer of enlightenment’ – the translation of the Arabic expression – or at least as a kind of critical gadfly to traditionalist mentality. Hussein’s determination, as well as what must have been his unusual energy and resourcefulness, then took him to study at the Sorbonne in Paris, submitting a thesis on the medieval Arab historian Ibn Khaldoun that was supervised by Durkheim.

Hussein’s experiences are relevant to the creation of modern Arabic literature in the early decades of the twentieth century because they express not only the idea of the ‘rebirth’ of Arab culture through the renovation of tradition and through contact with European ideas, but also the adoption of European literary forms and of a liberal idea of literature. Hussein is sometimes credited with writing the ‘first’ modern autobiography in Arabic in
The Days
, for example, and other
members of his generation are referred to as ‘pioneers’, being responsible for the first novel, the first short stories and the first plays written in Arabic. Moreover, these works, heavily influenced by the translation into Arabic of European novels, plays and other materials at the time, held out the possibility of giving new purpose to literature in general. While this was, or could be, a source of entertainment, as perhaps it had traditionally been in Arab societies in which literary writing was admired above all for the writer’s skills, it could also serve as a form of veiled instruction and as a vehicle for the articulation of social themes, as had been the case, for example, in the nineteenth-century European novel. There was a marked connection with the development of national consciousness. Conditions for the emergence of the pioneering works written by members of Hussein’s generation are picked out below, together with various works and authors.

A first condition for the growth of a modern literature was the existence of a new intellectual class, educated at European-style institutions or in modern ways and desiring to create a literature in Arabic on the European model. These men would wear the
tarboush
, rather than the turban. As has been seen, Hussein identified himself as a member of that class, and his impatience with traditionalist ways is often palpable. In addition, new forms of publication were required, as was the education of a reading public, the latter ideally sharing the high values the new generation of writers projected onto the new literature, even if it was sometimes slow to read it. The first of these two requirements at least was met by the development of Arabic newspapers in the later decades of the nineteenth century, often by Lebanese entrepreneurs, which provided a forum for debate. Hussein, for example, describes his early experiences as a journalist in
The Stream of Days
, writing for the magazine
al-Garida
. Finally, the period also saw the development of a recognizably modern intellectual milieu, which now began to organize itself into groups with common
aims and around group publications, in a manner familiar from the development of many intellectual avant-gardes.
⁸

However, beyond all these things the period was one of excited political debate, fuelled by the rise of nationalism and the possibility that the Arabs, having detached themselves from Ottoman rule, whether slowly as in Egypt, or as a result of the dismemberment of the Ottoman Empire following the First World War, were now both rediscovering their heritage and building a future of national self-rule for themselves. In Egypt, this debate culminated in the 1919 Revolution against British rule, though this was by no means the end of British colonialism in the country. Elsewhere, things were much less satisfactory, with the former Arab territories of the Ottoman Empire being divided under British and French colonial control under a system of League of Nations ‘mandates’ and having to wait decades for independence. Nevertheless, various forms of literary and cultural experiment were a part of the nation-building process, and by the 1920s conditions were in place for the growth and flourishing of modern Arabic literature.
⁹

One important group of early writers is the so-called ‘Modern School’ that grew up in Egypt in the 1920s. Members of this group included Mahmoud Taymour, whose short stories, modelled on those of Maupassant, gave Egyptian content to an originally European form that had now begun to flourish in the new newspapers, and, a little later, Yahya Hakki, editor of the group’s house journal
al-Fajr
(‘The Dawn’) which served as a showcase for these writers’ work. Hakki in particular played an important role in the development of modern Arabic literature, both at this early stage and much later in the 1950s and 1960s when he had retired from his extra-literary career as a diplomat. He is the author of a novella,
The Lamp of Umm Hashim
,
¹⁰
which is often considered a representative text from this early period.

The Lamp of Umm Hashim
describes the experiences of a young man,
Ismail, who is impatient with his own society, having been educated as a medical doctor in Europe. Yet, while he at first rejects his own country, describing it on his return from Europe as ‘a sprawling piece of mud that has dozed off in the middle of the desert’, he later comes to see that the contrast between modern science, rational habits of thought, and economic and political development, all represented in his eyes by Europe, and superstition, backwardness and poverty, all qualities he projects upon his own society, is not as clear cut as he had at first imagined. At the end of the story he is reconciled both with himself and with his society.

The story is thus a kind of moral fable that illustrates possible consequences of the Arab encounter with Europe and with the ideas of scientific and social progress that the latter appeared to represent in Arab eyes. Ismail’s foreign education is made possible by the sacrifices of his family, the older generation ‘annihilating itself so that a single member of its progeny might come into being’, but when he returns from Europe and looks at the Cairo district in which he was born and grew up he sees only chaos and a superstitious population that ‘makes[s] pilgrimages to graves and … seek[s] refuge with the dead.’ The district is built around the Mosque of Sayeda Zeinab, and a lamp, the lamp of Umm Hashim (another name for Sayeda Zeinab), hangs above her shrine.
¹¹
The lamp contains oil believed to have healing properties because of its religious associations, and Ismail is appalled to discover that his mother has been using it to treat the eyes of a young woman to whom he had been engaged to be married. ‘You should be ashamed of yourself at the harm you’re doing,’ he shouts. ‘How can you accept such superstition and humbug?’

Ismail begins to treat Fatima’s condition according to the lights of modern medicine instead. Going to the shrine, he sees the lamp of Umm Hashim, ‘its thin ray of light … a standing advertisement to superstition and ignorance,’ the shrine itself surrounded by people ‘like wooden props, paralysed, clinging to its railings.’ He raises his
stick and smashes the lamp, believing that in doing so he is ‘delivering a
coup de grâce
to the very heart of ignorance and superstition’ and that he is hauling, if necessary by force, his countrymen out of the past and into the modern world. Unsurprisingly, his gesture is misread, and he is set upon by visitors to the shrine. He suffers from a kind of psychological breakdown, made no better by the fact that the treatment he is giving Fatima does not improve her condition. ‘Who can deny Europe’s civilization and progress, and the ignorance, disease, and poverty of the East,’ Ismail asks himself. However, though he has returned from Europe ‘with a large quiver stuffed with knowledge’, this proves insufficient in Egypt. Slowly he comes to realize that some kind of reconciliation with the past is necessary, the novella indicating that an attitude of respect for the past and for the traditional ways of life and thought that have emerged from it will make Ismail both a better doctor and a better human being. Going back to medicine, he cures Fatima’s eye disease and opens a clinic in a poor Cairo district, where he performs operations ‘using methods that would have left a European doctor aghast’, relying ‘first and foremost upon God, [and] then on his knowledge and the skill of his hands.’