A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (7 page)

Perhaps best read as a lesson in humility rather than as an attack on science,
The Lamp of Umm Hashim
reflects on identity and on the need to act in continuation with the past rather than reject it by imitating Europe. However imperfect the inherited culture may be, the novella seems to be saying, it is a part of Ismail’s own past and his own identity. At the end of the novella Ismail seems to have found an accommodation between the ‘Egyptian’ and the ‘European’ sides of his personality, the one representing traditional culture and the other new ideas, including scientific ideas, just as the former represents family and community and the latter individual ambition. While dualisms of this kind were already staples of intellectual debate, Hussein’s autobiography suggesting a different kind of accommodation, for
example, to substantially the same dilemmas, Hakki’s novella is a concise representation of his generation’s thinking. This, it might be thought, aimed at the modernization of Arab culture without changing its essential character or severing its roots in tradition.
¹²

Other important works by this pioneering generation include those by the Egyptian novelist and playwright Tawfiq al-Hakim, whose prose works make fascinating reading for anyone interested in the development of a modern literary milieu in the Arab world, with all its rivalries, financial worries and promises of fame and fortune.

5. Egyptian playwright and man of letters Tawfiq al-Hakim, one of the ‘pioneers’ of modern Arabic literature

The son of a prominent lawyer, al-Hakim himself disliked the law and early on began to dream of writing plays for the nascent Egyptian theatre. However, like many playwrights before and since he discovered that ‘serious’ drama does not pay, particularly in a commercial theatre world where song-and-dance routines seemed to be the norm, and his frustrations are recorded in his many volumes of autobiography, among them
The Prison of Life
.
¹³
In this volume, published in Arabic in 1964, al-Hakim looks back on a career spent in the theatre. Like Hussein and Hakki, al-Hakim studied in Europe, though probably with less application, and during a period spent in Paris he immersed himself in the literature of the time, starting to write plays in a new style informed by fashionable dramatists like
Pirandello on his return to Egypt. Al-Hakim’s theatre work is discussed later. For present purposes, two works from the early 1930s, the novels
Return of the Spirit
and
Diary of a Country Prosecutor
, will be examined.
¹⁴
Had al-Hakim not gone on to write anything else apart from these two works, his place in Arabic letters would be secure on the strength of them.

Written while al-Hakim was himself a lawyer in the Egyptian Delta,
Diary of a Country Prosecutor
, like many works both before and since, capitalizes on the comic possibilities offered by the law. Apparently a murder mystery, though one that is never solved, the novel records the frustrations of a minor official sent out from Cairo into the alien world of the Egyptian peasantry, his instructions being to enforce the law. That law, however, is alien to the villagers with whom he deals, and the life of the anonymous public prosecutor in the novel is not made any easier by the habits of his fellow officials. One judge, in the job too long and used to cutting corners, gets through a day’s cases in a couple of hours; another, of a more anxious disposition, insists on every document in every case being perfect, stretching hearings long into the evenings at the expense of the prosecutor’s much-needed rest. In the face of such abuses, the novel’s anonymous narrator reflects on the absurdity of his situation, being condemned to listen to sentences being passed on illiterate villagers much in the manner of the Queen in
Alice in Wonderland
. However, he also reflects on his activity as a writer, and what this might entail in a society where the vast majority of the population can neither read nor write. ‘By nature I am fitted to be a hidden observer of people strutting across the stage of life,’ he writes, but for all that he is an observer who has a responsibility to record, and to protest against, the injustices that he sees around him. Literature, in the hands of Hakki and al-Hakim, thus served both to dramatize the dilemmas of a rapidly modernizing society that seemed in danger of losing its moorings and to expose the social injustices suffered by the population.

Such issues receive more ample treatment in al-Hakim’s longer novel
Return of the Spirit
. This work, published in Arabic in 1933, is a less approachable, probably less successful, work in translation than the
Diary
, though it is one that once again draws upon al-Hakim’s gift for observation, as well as on his own experiences, this time of his student days in Cairo. It is a humorous, even slapstick, work. However, the novel also broaches explicitly nationalist themes, and it is said to have been favourite reading of Nasser, later president of the republic established in Egypt following that country’s 1952 Revolution. In this novel, al-Hakim suggests that the fight against British occupation, which had reached its climax in 1919, should be seen as part of a ‘return of the spirit’ of the nation, in other words of a kind of general awakening after years of slumber. It was part of the general renovation of Egyptian society after centuries of first Ottoman and then British rule. For these reasons, the novel, much like the works of Hussein or Hakki, is often seen as an important statement of the Arab
nahda
, or renaissance, if in a provincial Egyptian form.

Much of the novel is set in Cairo, where the protagonist, Muhsin, is a student lodging with his extended family in a tiny flat in the crowded district of Sayeda Zeinab. However, the episodes that concern us here take place later in volume two of the novel, when Muhsin travels outside Cairo to the Nile Delta. On the train from Cairo, for example,
Muhsin falls into conversation with the other passengers in his compartment, a veritable cross-section of Egyptian society, and the conversation turns to the differences between Egyptian and European society. In Egypt, the passengers agree, ‘kinship and spiritual solidarity’ are important values. Europeans, by contrast, have sacrificed these to ‘efficiency’, competition and dog-eat-dog individualism. Al-Hakim thereby returns to the theme, familiar from works by Hussein and Hakki, of the possible differences between Arab and European societies, pointing to the allegedly soulless materialism of the one and the greater spiritual satisfactions to be had in the other. Yet, even more striking than this assertion of national unity built in opposition to European values is a later discussion between an Egyptian landowner, a British irrigation inspector and a French archaeologist, the latter two imported into the novel for the occasion. The French archaeologist begins a disquisition on the rural labourers he sees around him, contrasting their present poverty to a ‘force within them that they are not conscious of’. This ‘force’, or ‘spirit’, is the legacy of the ancient Egyptians, he says, and it explains ‘those moments of history during which we see Egypt take an astonishing leap in only a short time and work wonders in the wink of an eye.’ Don’t be surprised, he says, if these people, who stand together as one and who relish sacrifice, bring forth another miracle besides that of the pyramids.

Though rather crudely inserted into the novel, this is a striking statement of national rebirth and of the heights that will be reached once the nation has been rid of ignorance, illiteracy and foreign domination. It represents the hopes of an entire generation.
¹⁵

Works by Hussein, Hakki and al-Hakim are among the ‘classics’ of modern Arabic literature, these three writers being leading members of the generation that is often seen as having established it. However, these men wrote in prose, and this can obscure the fact that the poetry and drama of the time were also concerned with questions of identity
and with the renovation of Arab society and the building of national consciousness. Poetry and drama also had a different status from prose writing, with poetry being perhaps the most prestigious of all Arab literary forms and drama perhaps the least.

Unlike prose fiction, poetry was not a recently developed form or one of foreign origin, and it is still sometimes referred to as the form of writing that best expresses the literary genius of the Arabs. However, poetry too was believed to have fallen into decay during the long centuries of Ottoman rule, and it was therefore also due for renovation. Various solutions to the form that this might take were considered. While ‘neo-classical’ poets like Ahmed Shawqi and Hafez Ibrahim in Egypt experimented with introducing new subject matter into poetry written in classical language and in traditional forms, the ‘Romantic’ and
Mahjar
poets used a simpler vocabulary and simpler forms and placed the emphasis more on subjective experience than on virtuoso display. (
Mahjar
means emigrant, these poets having emigrated, usually to the United States, from Syria or Lebanon: Gibran, encountered in
Chapter 1
, is an example.)

Both Shawqi, the ‘prince of poets’, and Ibrahim are firmly installed in the canon of modern Arabic poetry, and familiarity with their works is essential for any educated speaker of Arabic. This means that acquaintance with them is often made at school and seldom renewed in later life. For the foreign reader things are made more complicated by the absence of accessible translations of these poets’ work, and it is easy to gain an idea of Shawqi or Ibrahim as impressive, if rather dilapidated, poetic monuments, rather like Victorian poets such as Tennyson. In fact, however, both Shawqi and Ibrahim played a significant role in giving new subject matter to Arabic poetry, introducing social and political themes to it together with a marked nationalist component and following in the footsteps of the earlier nationalist poet Mahmoud Sami al-Baroudi
(who had also been a prime minister of Egypt). Thus, while in formal and linguistic terms they opted for a ‘return to sources’, setting out ‘to bridge the gap of long centuries of immobility’ by a return to medieval models, in the words of one critic,
¹⁶
theirs was not entirely a poetry of pastiche. Encased in all the medieval flummery there was a core message of national and cultural origins; the antique style, while implausible in the context of the 1920s, could at least suggest a story of historical continuity. Shawqi wrote a large amount of ‘occasional’ poetry, for example, befitting his position as court poet to the aristocracy, including a 1904 panegyric to the Khedive, ruler of Egypt at the time, and ‘Tutankhamun’, which ends on a note of praise for the Egyptian King Fu’ad. The latter is a ‘poem about the fate of a nation’, in which Shawqi draws connections between past glories, represented by the discovery of the ancient Pharoah’s tomb, and present possibilities. Similarly, Ibrahim in poems such as ‘Hailing the Muslim Year’ writes public poetry commenting on current events. In Ottoman Turkey, for example, ‘the constitutionalists [have] made a breakthrough’, while in Iran ‘the wicked Shah is still at the helm’. In Egypt, by contrast, ‘the days of slumber are gone and a new spirit has animated the Egyptian nation.’

The ‘Romantic’ and ‘
Mahjar
’ poets, emerging on the poetic scene a little later, took a different view of modern Arabic poetry, and they jettisoned both the public themes and classical language adopted by Shawqi and Ibrahim in favour of a simpler, lyric style designed to convey the poet’s emotions. Romantic poets such as the members of the ‘Diwan School’ in Egypt, among whom are Ibrahim Abdel-Qader al-Mazini and Abbas Mahmoud al-Aqqad, together with Ilya Abu Madi, a
Mahjar
poet, and Abu al-Qasim al-Shabbi in Tunisia, and the slightly later Egyptian ‘Apollo School’, ‘achieved nothing less than a revolution in the language of poetry and in general poetic sensibility.’
¹⁷
As a result, they ‘introduced a vital
phase of flexibility and experimentation into both form and metre which prepared the way for the prosodic transformations of the late 1940s and early 1950s’, creating ‘nothing less than a new language of poetry in Arabic’. These later transformations are discussed in
Chapter 3
.