SELECTED STUDIES IN

MODERN ARABIC NARRATIVE:

HISTORY, GENRE, TRANSLATION
 RESOURCES IN ARABIC
AND ISLAMIC STUDIES

series editors

Joseph E. Lowry
Devin J. Stewart
Shawkat M. Toorawa

international advisory board

Maaike van Berkel

Kristen Brustad
Antonella Ghersetti
Ruba Kana'an
Wen-chin Ouyang
Tahera Qutbuddin

Number 8
Selected Studies in Modern Arabic Narrative:
History, Genre, Translation
 SELECTED STUDIES IN
MODERN ARABIC NARRATIVE:
HISTORY, GENRE, TRANSLATION

Roger Allen

Atlanta, Georgia
2019
 SELECTED STUDIES IN
MODERN ARABIC NARRATIVE:
HISTORY, GENRE, TRANSLATION
All rights reserved. No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or
by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying and recording, or by means
of any information storage or retrieval system, except as may be expressly permitted by
the 1976 Copyright Act or in writing from the publisher. Requests for permission should be
addressed in writing to Lockwood Press, P.O. Box 133289, Atlanta, GA 30333, USA.

© 2019, Lockwood Press

ISBN: 978-1-937040-76-5

Library of Congress Control Number: 2019930407

Cover design by Susanne Wilhelm

Cover image: Letter from ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf to Roger Allen, dated 18th November, 2001
(Courtesy of Roger Allen)

Printed in the United States of America on acid-free paper.

 Contents

Series Editors’ Preface vii

1. Arabic Literature Studies: A Retrospect (2009) 1
2. The Development of Fictional Genres: The Novel and Short Story in Arabic
(1997) 13
3. Sindbad the Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel (2000) 27
4. The Novella in Arabic: A Study in Fictional Genres (1986) 35
5. The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women (1995) 47
6. Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom (1995) 63
7. Arabic Fiction’s Relationship with Its Past: Intertextuality and Retrospect
Post-1967 (2006) 77
8. The Impact of the Translated Text: the Case of Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Novels, with
Special Emphasis on The Trilogy (1993) 87
9. Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā: A History and Interpretation (2011) 117
10. Autobiography and Memory: Maḥfūẓ’s Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya (1998) 145
11. The Autobiography of Yūsuf Idrīs? (2002) 155
12. ʿUrs al-Zayn by al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: Tradition and Change (2001) 163
13. Historiography as Novel: BenSalim Himmich’s Al-ʿAllāma (2008) 171
14. Translation Translated: Rashīd Abū Jadra’s Maʿrakat al-Zuqāq (1997) 181
15. Fiction and Publics: The Emergence of the “Arabic Bestseller” (2009) 193
16. Translation and Culture: Theory and Practice (2004) 197
Bibliography of Articles by Roger Allen on Modern Arabic Narrative 205
Index of Proper Names 213

v
 Series Editors’ Preface

No Western scholar has contributed as much to the study of modern Arabic narrative
as has Roger Allen. His doctoral dissertation was the very first Oxford D.Phil. in modern
Arabic literature, completed in 1968 under the supervision of Mustafa Badawi. That same
year, he took a position in Arabic language and literature at the University of Pennsyl-
vania.
Roger Allen has been phenomenally prolific since: fifty books and translations, and
two hundred articles, and counting, on Arabic language pedagogy, on translation, and
on Arabic literary history, criticism and literature. He is one of the most decorated and
acclaimed translators of Arabic literature. His most recent accolade is his selection as
translator of a collection of eighteen of Naguib Mahfouz’s “lost” stories.
This volume brings together sixteen of Roger Allen’s articles on modern Arabic nar-
rative—from 1986 to 2011—with a special focus on genre, on translation, and on literary
history, featuring analyses of the works of Rachid Boudjedra, Bensalem Himmich, Yusuf
Idris, Naguib Mahfouz, and Tayeb Salih. In reprinting the material, we have corrected
typos; made small changes or updates; included a bibliography of Roger Allen’s articles
on modern Arabic narrative; and supplied a simple index.
It is our distinct pleasure to include in this series a collection of articles by our very
own teacher.
We would like to thank Daniel Kaylor and Parvine Toorawa for typing up several
chapters, and to express our continuing gratitude to three friends with whom it is always
a pleasure to work: our cover designer Susanne Wilhelm, our publisher Billie Jean Collins,
and our distributor Ian Stevens.

Joseph E. Lowry
Devin J. Stewart
Shawkat M. Toorawa

vii
 1
Arabic Literature Studies: A Retrospect (2008)

A couple of months ago (I’m writing this in the summer of 2008), some of my former stu-
dents, all of whom are now university professors in their own right, invited my wife and
myself to dinner. At dessert time I was surprised to receive a file which contained the de-
tails of the series of articles that will constitute my Festschrift, to appear in three journals
devoted to my chosen field, Arabic language and literature. That, coupled to the fact that
I am “rising sixty-seven” and have received a kind invitation from Professor John Burt
Foster, combine to constitute the occasion for the retrospect that follows.
While my topic is Arabic literature studies in general, I am often asked what is the
path (or are the paths) by which a student may embark upon a career in such a field.
Equally often I am asked about my memories of my own motivations in doing so. Let me
therefore begin by describing my beginnings in the field of Arabic studies in general, and
Arabic literature studies in particular. Born in England and raised and educated in the
beautiful English city of Bristol (far more significant historically than its neighbor, Bath,
which American tourists insist on visiting), I was admitted to Lincoln College, Oxford in
1961 to study Greek and Latin (the “classical languages” to the Western academic mind-
set). I had started Latin at the age of seven and Greek at twelve, and it only required about
one term at Oxford, as I recollect, to persuade me that I had had more than enough of
weekly prose and verse compositions, although the treasures of the literary traditions of
Greek and Latin continued to impress me, as they still do. I vividly remember informing
my tutor that I wished to change subject—not a complete impossibility at Oxford (where
admission standards in any European language and literature program are extremely
high), but certainly difficult and unusual. After expressing a certain diffidence at my
decision, he suggested that I talk to various professors in such areas as modern Greek,
Serbo-Croat (as it then was), Portuguese, and “the Oriental group” (as he termed it). Be-
ing a first-generation university student from the rural wilds of Bristol, I naively asked
what that “group” might involve. Hebrew, Arabic, and Chinese were all mentioned, but
then there was a whole string of other languages: Prakrit, Khotanese, Syriac, and so on.
Undaunted I did indeed pay a series of visits to tremendous “eminences” in their relative
fields, none of whom provided me with information that would allow me to eliminate
any single one from a prospective list. Thus, when I am now asked what motivated me to
begin Arabic, my only response is that firstly I did not wish to study Latin and Greek any

1
2 Chapter One

more, and secondly that I essentially drew Arabic out of a hat, tempering that admission
by noting that I did observe at the time that it was the spoken language of a very wide
area of the world’s surface.
Thus, in April 1962 I commenced my studies of Arabic and the Middle East towards
the BA degree at Oxford. The first two years were fairly unexceptional, involving an unan-
ticipated continuation of the largely philological approach to language teaching that had
also characterized Latin and Greek learning, interrupted—mercifully—by an adventure
involving a summer trip to Lebanon and the renowned Arabic School at Shemlan—the
Middle East Centre for Arabic Studies (MECAS), where for the first time Arabic actually
came to life. In 1963 however, everything changed, in that Oxford appointed a specialist
in modern Arabic literature, Dr. M. M. Badawi, who was to become my academic supervi-
sor for the doctoral degree and who has remained an inspiration for me and countless
other students ever since. What an enormous privilege it is to see that he is one of the
contributors to my own Festschrift!1 Now, my intentions in changing subject, my prefer-
ence for the literary approach to the analysis of texts and my interest in the modern Arab
world, could come together.
My doctoral thesis, submitted in the summer of 1968, was the first one to be super-
vised by Dr. Badawi and the first doctoral degree at Oxford in modern Arabic literature
studies. It was based on research that I conducted in Cairo in 1966–1967 on one of the
pioneers in the development of a tradition of modern Arabic narrative. Muḥammad al-
Muwayliḥī’s ʿIsā ibn Hishām’s Tale (published in book form in 1907) is an interesting blend
of a very ornate traditional style and modern social criticism; in my dissertation I pre-
sented a study of the text and its history, and a translation into English. This latter aspect
was to prove a very useful prelude to what was to follow, in that, in the same year (1968),
I accepted a position as assistant professor of Arabic at the University of Pennsylvania,
with a specific brief to introduce modern Arabic into the expanding curriculum of what
has for over two centuries at the university been a traditional program of philology and
archaeology. I am in a sense still in my first job some forty years later.…
In addition to beginning my own career as a teacher of Arabic (indeed introduc-
ing modern Arabic as the language of focus) I was also asked to teach an undergraduate
course on modern Arabic literature. Here is where my history with teaching the subject
actually begins and my connection with translation, in that, along with Professor Trev-
or Le Gassick who had “crossed the pond” before me and has been at the University of
Michigan for many years, I now had to invent a syllabus (I might almost say to invent a
field) and find the texts to use in it. The published offerings at the time were not all that
promising: several volumes of big-print, fuzzy-edged, works by Khalil Jubran (Gibran), a

1. [M. M. Badawi passed away in 2012.—Eds] Al-ʿArabiyya: Journal of the American Association of Teachers
of Arabic 40-41 (2007–2008). Special Issue: Studies presented to Roger Allen on the Occasion of His 65th Birthday and
Commemorating 40 Years of Distinguished Service to Arabic Studies, ed. Shawkat M. Toorawa.
 Arabic Literature Studies 3

couple of novels (including the newly published and spectacular Season of Migration to the
North by Tayeb Salih, an excellent collection of Arabic short stories from Denys Johnson-
Davies—then as now the doyen of translators of modern Arabic literature into English,
and a most peculiar anthology of modern Arabic poetry prepared by A. J. Arberry, the
professor of Arabic at Cambridge. While, it almost goes without saying, all these publi-
cations were used in my initial course, there was an immediate need for a great deal of
other material: for more translations (which I undertook myself) and for critical studies
(which were largely non-existent). In those “early” days one really had the feeling of
working in isolation, but, all that said, two trends came to the aid of the incipient modern
Arabic literature specialist.
The first was the establishment of a journal devoted to the critical study of the Arabic
literary tradition, the Journal of Arabic Literature, founded in 1970 by a group of university
teachers of the subject at British universities—essentially the founding figures of a new
critical approach to the field, including Dr. Badawi, mentioned above, and published by
E. J. Brill in Leiden, The Netherlands. From its very first issue (in which I was privileged to
publish an article based on my doctoral dissertation), the annual summer publication of
critically- and theoretically-based studies of every period and aspect of Arabic literature
provided the small, but gradually increasing, community of specialists in the field with
valuable records of research and tools for teaching new generations of students; and that
has remained so to the present day when the journal, published in three issues a year, is
now in its 38th year.
In the mid-1970s another journal was added to it, with a broader purview and as
the direct result of a second interesting initiative that can be viewed in retrospect as a
gesture symptomatic of the period in question. In 1970, the then infant organization, the
Middle East Studies Association (MESA, founded in 1967) embarked upon an ambitious
project that involved an investigation into what was termed “the state of the art” in
Middle Eastern Studies. I was asked to serve as leader of the segment of the project (and
forthcoming conference) dealing with the discipline of “literature,” and invited two col-
leagues, William Hanaway (Persian literature) and Walter Andrews (Turkish literature)
to join me in the investigation of the theoretical parameters of our “discipline,” presum-
ably Middle Eastern literature studies (I might note parenthetically that, at this particu-
lar period (the early 1970s), the Hebrew language and the study of Israel and its culture,
were not subsumed under the terms of reference of “Middle East Studies” as defined by
the National Defense and Education Act of 1957. That situation has since changed, and in
any case Israeli literature soon came to be a necessary component of our purview). In the
context of this MESA project and the conference at Stanford that concluded it, we were
invited to consider the “state of the art” in literature studies devoted to Middle Eastern
cultures, and all within a framework heavily influenced by the rigorous disciplinary pa-
rameters of the social-scientific fields whose members were among the principal found-
ers of the Middle East Studies Association (MESA). In retrospect it is my impression that
this conference, and the “Literature” chapter in the volume, The Study of the Middle East
4 Chapter One

(ed. Leonard Binder, New York: John Wiley, 1976) that emerged from it, constitute an im-
portant way-station in the development of Arabic and Middle Eastern literature studies,
particularly in American institutions but potentially beyond as well. That seems to me
to be the case because not only were we being invited to contemplate a field of study, a
discipline, within which the different Middle Eastern literary traditions might be studied
within a comparative framework based on similar evaluative criteria, but also that such
a comparative framework might be ported to the broader realms of modern Middle East
studies in general and to the increasingly theoretically based discipline of comparative
literature or world literature in particular. I can still vividly recall the lengthy sessions in
which we tried to lay out the parameters for the introductory section to that “literature”
chapter, sessions that were to lead to the inevitable conclusion that the implementa-
tion of these initiatives would be stimulated by the foundation of a new journal through
which to advocate such theoretically based and comparative approaches. Thus was born
(in 1976) the journal, Edebiyât, which has continued in subsequent decades to reflect the
increasing reliance that emerging scholars in the fields of Middle Eastern literatures have
placed on the identification and implementation of literary-theoretical principles in the
conduct of their research. The journal has recently been combined with Middle Eastern
Literatures, another specialized journal in the field which began publication in 1998.
Many among the new generation of scholars that took up the challenge of this pro-
cess of adaptation to changing expectations in literature studies and of integrating the
heritages of Middle Eastern cultures into the environment of Western academe came
from educational backgrounds different from those of previous generations, where—
especially in Europe, a majority had come to the field from classical (Greek and Latin)
studies, myself included—rather than from the study of a Western literary culture such
as Spanish or French. Any listing of scholars who contributed to this process would be
extremely lengthy, but a ruthlessly pared listing would have to include, in Europe, Stefan
Wild, Boutros Hallaq, Yves Gonzalez-Quijano, Isabella Camera d’Afflitto, Valeria Kirpi-
chenko, Ed de Moor, James Montgomery, Robin Ostle, Paul Starkey, and Hilary Kilpatrick,
and, in the United States (in addition to names already mentioned), Fedwa Malti-Douglas,
Michael Beard, Adnan Haydar, Julie Meisami (also in Oxford), Peter Heath, Jerome Clinton,
Victoria Holbrook, Wolfhart Heinrichs, Jaroslav Stetkevych, and Suzanne Stetkevych, all
of whom helped initiate a process whereby the riches of Middle Eastern literatures in all
periods were studied within a more rigorously critical and theoretical framework. In this
same period (the latter 1970s and 1980s) there was also the beginning of a trend where-
by the broader field of comparative literature studies not only involved itself more and
more in literary-theoretical research per se, but also expanded its notion of “comparison”
to include within their purview non-Western literary traditions. While many, if not most,
comparative literature programs in the United States continued (and continue) to insist
on the centrality of literary theory in any assessment of the validity of their research,
there has also been a gradual shift away from the definition of “comparative” as involv-
ing “my literature plus one other,” that itself having long since been unacceptable within
 Arabic Literature Studies 5

the more multi-lingual context of Western European academe. In my own personal ex-
perience over the past two decades, the Arabic literary tradition in particular has come
to be accepted as an important component of many research projects undertaken within
the general framework of comparative literature studies. Needless to say, the 1988 award
of the Nobel Prize to an Egyptian novelist, to be discussed further below, has played a not
insignificant role in that process.
Much of what I have described thus far has been concerned with the situation in
research on Arabic literature and the anticipatable linkage between that and academic
studies at the graduate level. At least in the United States, and, I suspect, beyond that
limited sphere as well, the latter half of the twentieth century has been characterized
by an increased emphasis on the importation of programs and course offerings on non-
Western cultures (more often than not, encouraged, if not financed directly, by govern-
ment and educational agencies of one kind or another). The basic question that I found
myself facing in 1968 has remained the same: how is one to make the riches of Arabic
literature available to an undergraduate population, one that frequently needs persuad-
ing of the value of such an undertaking. The answer then, as now, has been through
translation. From the somewhat sparse beginnings in the late 1960s described above,
the availability of translated works of Arabic literature had certainly improved in the
ensuing decades, although the extremely small number of practitioners of the transla-
tor’s craft (a situation which still prevails) would regularly encounter the excuse of a
“lack of market interest” from all but a few publishers as they rejected manuscripts of
translated works of Arabic literature; and what publication did occur was mostly un-
dertaken within the academic environment of university presses. The situation reached
some kind of negative peak when the great American-Palestinian critic and intellectual,
Edward Said, presented a New York commercial publisher with a list of Arab authors who
deserved translation, only to be told that Arabic was a “controversial” language—an in-
teresting way of describing a language, but unfortunately symptomatic of the problems
that Arabic literature in translation has faced (and continues to face) in the anglophone
publishing world. Suffice it to note however that the 1970s and 1980s witnessed an in-
crease in the number and types of translations that were made available, although they
were almost exclusively confined to the products of 20th century creativity. In an impor-
tant aside, I should note that the availability of good, readable (literary?) translations of
pre-modern Arabic literature in its different genres continues to present an enormous
problem in the pedagogical context; Robert Irwin, in his anthology Night & Horses & the
Desert (New York, Penguin, 2000) does an admirable job of trawling all the scattered avail-
able sources, but large tracts of the pre-modern literary heritage of the Arabs continue to
be unavailable to English readers. The translated works culled from the modern tradition
that did appear were mostly in the form of fiction (also the most popular genre in the
Arabic-speaking world itself), with considerably less attention to poetry and almost none
to drama. In 1972 the American University in Cairo Press announced a project to trans-
late several novels by the then globally unknown Naguib Mahfouz. Miramar was the first
6 Chapter One

to appear (1978), prefaced by some admiring remarks from the English novelist, John
Fowles, and it was followed by a number of Mahfouz’s other novels (including my own
translation of Autumn Quail [1985], although, for a complex of reasons, not the renowned
Trilogy of novels (1956–1957) upon which his reputation in the Arab world was largely
based at that time.
In this rapid and personal survey of the development of Arabic literature studies in
Western (and mostly anglophone) academe, I would like now to focus on the decade of
the 1980s, because in many ways it seems to me to have been pivotal in bringing about a
series of changes that have impacted, and in both positive and negative ways, upon the
discipline since that time. In the first place, 1983 witnessed the publication of the first
volume in what would turn out to be a long-term project, the Cambridge History of Arabic
Literature. Some idea of the complexities involved in the very definition of the project’s
parameters can be gleaned from the fact that it was first mooted and planned in 1961, an
era when, it would appear, the more philologically based and generalist view of “litera-
ture” (as basically anything in written form) still prevailed—at least in Arabic studies in
England. With the appearance of the first volume in the series some two decades later,
the extent of the changes in approach to literature studies (which I have explored above)
became evident, in that this volume of essays devoted to the earliest era in Arabic liter-
ary history was severely criticized (by myself among others), not so much because of the
faulty nature of the data provided—although even there problems existed—but rather
because of a failure to take into account many of the more recent developments in liter-
ary research (the entire issue of the orality of the pre-Islamic tradition of poetry being
just one example). To be fair, the Press decided with the second volume in the series (on
the lengthy “Abbasid” period [750–1258]) to adopt a more current definition of “litera-
ture” (the term “belles lettres” was used in the title), but that decision required the pub-
lication of a third volume of studies (already commissioned and delivered to the Press)
devoted to the same “Abbasid” period but consisting (apart from criticism) of essentially
non-literary topic areas (or, perhaps more fairly, topics subsumed under the older defi-
nition of “literature,” such as “administrative literature” and “medical literature”). The
remaining three volumes in the series—devoted to the “modern” period, to the literary
production of al-Andalus (the Iberian Peninsula), and to the vast historical era, dubbed as
“decadent,” between approximately 1150 and 1840 (the last to be published in 2006)—all
adopted the latter definition of the topic, restricting their purview to texts whose value
lies, to quote the Oxford English Dictionary, “in beauty of form or emotional impact.” I have
cited this particular publication project because it seems to me to illustrate well the tran-
sitional stage in Arabic literature studies with which it coincides and whose successes
and problems it illustrates so well. On the broader scale one might suggest that such a
transitional stage, one that involves the integration of Arabic literature studies into the
broader context of comparative literature studies, is still in progress, a topic to which I
would like to return below.
 Arabic Literature Studies 7

A second trend in the 1980s to which I would like to draw attention occurred with
an area that inevitably affects the study of literature in a very direct way, that of (Arabic)
language acquisition. Since the 1960s, academic institutions in most Western countries—
with France and Russia in the vanguard—had been moving away from the more textu-
ally based grammar-translation approach to language-learning that had long since been
espoused by the philological tradition of humanistic learning towards a series of meth-
ods that would lay more stress on the communicative skills and the language currently
used in the Arabic-speaking world. This shift still permitted a wide variety of emphases
when it came to prioritizing language skills, and thus, while greater emphasis began to
be placed on the ability of communicate and even on the development of competence in
the colloquial dialects of Arabic, primary emphasis continued to be on the ability to read
texts in the language from a number of different periods and disciplines. It was during
the 1980s—at least in the United States—that “national needs” began to be cited as moti-
vating factors in a push towards a greater concentration on applicable language skills—
what became known as the “proficiency movement,” something that not only demanded
that real-life language skills be evaluated but that higher levels of competence were
needed for particular language functions in all four skills (speaking, listening, reading,
and writing). It almost goes without saying that, within such a context of language learn-
ing, the skill set needed for any engagement with the Arabic literary tradition, whether
in its modern or pre-modern manifestation, was viewed as being among the highest in
terms of language level needed. Within the specific field of Arabic literature studies what
this ongoing movement in language teaching and learning did was to enhance—albeit
gradually—the kind of competence that learners were encouraged to achieve and thus to
produce a new generation of literature specialists who were not only ready to interpret
the literary texts but also to spend increasing amounts of time conducting research in
the Arabic-speaking regions and to engage with the creative writers and critics who con-
tribute to the indigenous literary tradition.
This increasing engagement between the still small community of Arabic literature
specialists in the Western world and the writers and critics of the Arabic-speaking regions
was much enhanced by a marked increase in the number of opportunities for contact be-
tween the two. There had, of course, been a number of foreign research institutes in Arab
capitals—with Cairo certainly holding the prize for the largest number and of longest
standing: French, Austrian, German, Italian, Dutch, British, and American. Beyond those
facilities however, the “Maglis al-Aʿlā lil-Thaqāfa” (the Supreme Council for Culture—a
subdivision of the Egyptian Ministry of Culture) began under the enlightened leader-
ship of first ʿIzz al-din Ismail and later Gaber Asfour, both prominent literary scholars, to
organize conferences to which were invited creative writers, critics, and scholars from
across the Arabic-speaking world and also from all the Western and Eastern academic
communities. I can recall, for example, how remarkable it was to attend the conferences
devoted to the novel and to translation and to encounter not only the majority of the
region’s great writers but also colleagues from Russia, Japan, and China in addition to
8 Chapter One

others from as far apart as Morocco and Iraq. Such meetings have served (and continue
to serve) as an invaluable method for creating and maintaining contacts between litera-
ture specialists outside the Arabic-speaking regions and the practitioners within them,
resulting in a joint awareness—probably absent or unrealized in the past—that we are all
involved in an important joint enterprise, namely, of bringing an awareness of the riches
of the Arabic literary tradition to a much broader public, wherever it may be.
While on the topic of scholarly communities of this kind, I should also mention the
organization of modern Arabic literature specialists in Europe that began as EMTAR in
1992 (a conference at Nijmegen in the Netherlands convened by a much respected late
colleague, Ed de Moor) and more recently renamed EURAMAL (the European meeting of
specialists on modern Arabic literature). This biennial gathering of colleagues has served
in a similar way to bring specialists from different European nations together, and the
papers delivered at the thematically based conferences have been gathered together in
a series of publications that are important contributions to the field of Arabic literature
studies and, in particular, to the linkage of such studies to developments in literary criti-
cism and theory on the broader level.
But, to return to the 1980s, the most significant event for Arabic literature studies
occurred on October 13, 1988, when it was announced in Stockholm that an Egyptian
novelist, Naguib Mahfouz, was that year’s winner of the Nobel Prize in Literature. I can
well remember even now the mad scramble as newspapers, magazines, and publishers
sought to find out information about this writer, then almost completely unknown out-
side the Arab world itself. What was perhaps most disarming was the way in which all
these differing clienteles readily acknowledged their surprise that not only was such an
apparently important literary figure unknown and scantly available in English transla-
tion (Columbia University Press, the distributor of the novels published in the American
University in Cairo Press’s series of Mahfouz novels mentioned above, ran out of copies
on the very first day), but also that the Arabic literary tradition as a whole was almost
completely absent from all the major reference works and anthologies devoted to “world
literature” or even “non-Western literature” (where the overwhelming preference was
for East Asian and, more recently, African literary traditions). When the Arabic liter-
ary tradition was included, the selection consisted almost always of an extract from the
Qurʾan (which is not considered by Muslim believers to be “literature”) and another from
The Thousand and One Nights—a curious juxtaposition, to put it mildly. In retrospect there-
fore one can observe that the Nobel award served not only to bring the name of Mahfouz
to the attention of a much wider reading public but also to transform the situation of
presence-absence of Arabic literature in every kind of literary and cultural reference
work, upon the revenues from which so many Western publishers rely. The prominence
afforded Mahfouz also had a “kick-on” effect, in that other prominent Arab writers were
now able to have their translated works considered by Western commercial presses
(rather than be rejected out of hand as “unmarketable”). There is something of an irony
in the fact that, following the “bust” in the American economy in the late 1990s and the
 Arabic Literature Studies 9

continuing impact of 9/11, the willingness of the publication industry to take on the task
of publishing examples of Arabic literary creativity has now returned to the (bad) old
days, perhaps even worse. I will return to this topic in my concluding comments which
now follow.
By any yardstick that one may wish to apply the study of Arabic literature in West-
ern academe (and I will admit again here to having concentrated in the main on the
anglophone segment of that larger undertaking), it seems clear that the past half-cen-
tury has seen considerable change. The competence of its practitioners in the Arabic
language (and often its dialects as well) has broadened so as to make research visits and
prolonged periods in the Arabic-speaking regions not merely a desideratum but a neces-
sity, in that it provides links between specialists in the field from the region itself and
other world regions (not only the West). With a continuingly grateful tilt in the direc-
tion of the great achievements of the philological traditions of the past—the dictionaries,
anthologies, histories, text editions, and translations, for example, a new generation of
“literature specialists” has undertaken to train itself in the theoretical components of
the discipline of literature studies and specifically comparative literature studies (both
of them relatively new phenomena, as Terry Eagleton has reminded us (Literary Theory:
An Introduction, 1983) and to apply those principles to the Arabic literary tradition in all
its different eras and genres and from a variety of points of view. This trend has led in
turn to a gradual process whereby the Arabic literary heritage has come to be seen as
an interesting and potentially important element in a number of comparative literature
environments; in the particular case of Arabic, most obviously in the context of Hispanic
studies (or, more accurately, Hispano-Arabic studies), but equally within the context of
later Hellenistic research and African (and especially northwest African) studies. Along
with an enhanced and variegated language and cultural competence applied across a
number of different disciplinary fields and boundaries has come an increase in the num-
ber and quality of translations, mostly, to be sure, from the modern period, but in regret-
tably rare cases, also from the pre-modern era as well (and, in the anglophone tradition, I
would cite the work of Michael Sells, in particular, his translations of early Arabic poetry
(Desert Tracings, 1989) and of the later suras of the Qurʾan (Approaching the Qurʾan: The Ear-
ly Revelations, 1999). Needless to say, the availability of such a large and varied repertoire
of translated works of Arabic literature, and especially fiction, has made the offering of
undergraduate courses (and not only the field of literature studies) radically easier than
was the case when I began my career in 1968 (as described earlier in this essay).
In spite of these positive developments however, a number of issues continue to con-
front the community of Arabic literature specialists today. In addressing those issues,
what comes to my mind is the ancient saying of Hippocrates, usually cited in Latin: “Ars
longa, vita brevis.” The tradition of the Arabic literary art is indeed long in chronological
terms, stretching back to unidentifiable beginnings not later than the 5th century CE.
However, when we add to that purview the geographical spread of the Arabic-speaking
world during the post-Islamic period—in the ringing words of the former Egyptian Presi-
10 Chapter One

dent, Gamal ʿAbd al-Nasir (Nasser), a region that extends “from the [Atlantic] Ocean to
the [Arabian/Persian] Gulf ”—and the amazing variety of literary genres and subgenres
that we encounter within these chronological and geographical frames of reference,
then the task of the Arabic literature scholar becomes potentially enormous. It is in such
a context that the “vita brevis” part of the saying and its implications come into play. Life
is indeed (too) short to encompass even a small portion of the field (I myself now prefer
to state that I am firstly a narratologist, and secondly one who deals with the literary
production of the Arabic-speaking world, rather than making any claims to be able to
“cover” the entire field of Arabic literature). However, beyond that fairly obvious situa-
tion is the fact that the number of practitioners in the field of Arabic literature scholars
is extremely small (in comparison with other fields of foreign and comparative literature
studies), whether we are talking about the European traditions or those of the Far East.
I have become particularly aware of this situation in recent years as editor of the final
volume of the Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, devoted to what was termed (not
without its own controversy) the “post-classical period’—as noted above some seven cen-
turies between 1150 and 1840. If the number of specialists in Arabic literature studies
in general is relatively small, then there are large segments of the literary productivity
of this particular time-period for which there are no specialists at all—with the 16th–
18th centuries as a particular wasteland of research (a statement to which a recent and
excellent survey in French by Hilary Kilpatrick constitutes an almost unique exception
[see Histoire de la littérature arabe moderne, 1: 1800–1945, ed. Boutros Hallaq and Heidi Toelle
[Paris, Sindbad, 2007], 53–70). What complicates this situation even more is that the vast
majority of these specialist scholars working in Arabic literature studies find themselves
as the only scholars working in the field at a particular institution; rare indeed are aca-
demic institutions where a cluster of such scholars can be found. Whence, one might
suggest, the extreme value of the conferences and associations that have been convened
in order to bring scholars together in a single venue and around a particular topic, genre,
or region.
Turning to the public domain and thus including the world of publication, it has
been interesting for me, particularly in recent decades when I have had many contacts
with European colleagues, to observe the different postures towards the literary produc-
tion of the Arabic-speaking world and scholarship devoted to it. In that context France
and its system of university education has been far ahead of other nations and cultures
in its interest in the region and its literature; it goes without saying that that is partially
a response to colonial postures and initiatives arguably stretching back into the 18th
century, but a visit to any French bookstore should be sufficient to demonstrate that, for
reasons that need much more comparative research than my personal observations can
corroborate, there is a large French reading public for works of Arabic literature from all
periods, duly reflected in the interests of the book-review community in magazines and
newspapers. The same holds true, albeit as a more recent phenomenon, with the com-
parable communities in both Spain and Italy. In the case of Germany, recent initiatives
 Arabic Literature Studies 11

in publication have also led to a marked increase in interest among readers of literature;
the award of a national prize to the Libyan novelist Ibrahim al-Kuni, for the best foreign
novel of the year and the devotion of an annual Frankfurt Book Fair to a concentration on
Arabic literature are merely two examples of a larger trend. It remains a mystery to me
as to why, by comparison, the anglophone readership—implying Britain and the United
States—seems to be so uninterested in Arabic literature. As just noted, this entire topic
is in need of research.…
What is perhaps most dismaying about the current situation regarding publication
of works of and about Arabic literature involves consideration of a factor that needs to
be placed into a larger context: the future of the academic monograph and indeed of the
printed book as an institution. In an article for the journal, Comparative Studies of South
Asia, Africa and the Middle East (vol. 23/1 & 2 [2003]: 15–17), the editor of the American
Historical Review, Michael C. Grossberg, addresses with agreeable frankness the gradual
demise of the academic monograph as a commercial proposition and advocates the need
for the academic community to come to grips with the alternative means of publishing
research (and, equally important, for younger scholars seeking jobs and advancement
in the profession, of evaluating it). If the academic monograph in general finds itself in
hard times and confronting the demands of “market forces,” then such works devoted to
the Arabic literary tradition are in the process of completely disappearing as marketing
imperatives come face to face with prohibitive costs. In the wake of the events of Septem-
ber 11, 2001 in New York, there is a continuing demand for works devoted to Islam and
terrorism (preferably a combination of the two), to Middle Eastern finance and banking,
and to works by women of Middle Eastern origin that will appeal to the large number of
Western readers (and book clubs) that wish to have their prejudices confirmed. While
thousands of copies of books in this last category flourish in the market, the more accom-
plished and significant works by genuinely gifted women writers in the region struggle
to find a market and to remain in it: a short list would have to include Huda Barakat and
Hanan al-Shaykh from Lebanon, Salwa Bakr and Radwa Ashur from Egypt, Sahar Khalifa
from Palestine, and Layla al-ʿUthman from Kuwait.
And, as the group of scholars of EURAMAL (mentioned earlier) discovered in a dis-
cussion at their recent conference (May 2008) in Uppsala, Sweden, we now seem to be
encountering the emergence of the phenomenon of the “Arabic bestseller,” represented
by the fictional works of Ahlam Mustaghanimi from Algeria (such as Memory in the Flesh,
2000, ʿAlaʾ al-Aswani from Egypt (The Yacoubian Building, 2004), and Rajaʾ al-Saniʿ (Rajaa
Alsanea) from Saudi Arabia (Girls of Riyadh, 2007). What is particularly interesting about
this phenomenon is that all these works have been roundly condemned by the “literary
critical establishment” both inside and outside the region, and yet they continue to sell
large number of copies (and in the case of al-Aswani’s novel has been made into a highly
successful film). Here the Middle Eastern literary community—both creative writers and
critics—finds itself confronting an issue which neither it nor the Western community of
literature scholars has yet considered: where is to be the dividing line between fiction
12 Chapter One

that is considered to be “of literary merit” and other types of work that are evaluated as
being “unworthy” of critical attention, to be consigned perhaps to the category of “air-
port reading.” In the anglophone tradition, just to provide an illustration, is there a line
to be drawn somewhere in the sequence of Danielle Steele, Judith Krantz, Patricia Corn-
well, P.D. James, John Le Carré, Martin Amis, Zadie Smith, Don de Lillo, and Paul Auster?
Equally important, if a line is to be drawn, who is entitled to draw it and on the basis of
what criteria? This too is clearly a topic for further research and debate.…
The opening of Dickens’s A Tale of Two Cities talks in terms of “the best of days” and
“the worst of days,” a phrase that seems appropriate as a means of closing this recklessly
brief and highly personal essay (bearing in mind the breadth of its topic). Within the field
of Arabic literature studies today, standards of language competence and literary-critical
acumen are higher and more pleasingly variegated than ever before. More translations
of at least the literary production of the modern era are now available, and in many West-
ern languages, and more people than ever are involved in both those activities. And yet
the gaps in our basic knowledge of the literary heritage of the Arabs are enormous (and I
have not even discussed above the plethora of uncatalogued and unread manuscripts to
be found in the world’s libraries which, as my late and much esteemed colleague, George
Makdisi, continually reminded his students, may constitute a large percentage of what
we do not know about the Arab-Islamic heritage). Those few “laborers in the vineyard”
now confront a changed situation, one in which the palpable interest of so many people
in the Middle Eastern region is not reflected in an awareness of the crucial importance of
its literary traditions, and one where, in a maximal irony, it now becomes yet more dif-
ficult to correct such an imbalance through publication.
But then perhaps “t’was ever so.…”
 2
The Development of Fictional Genres:
The Novel and Short Story in Arabic

As translation continues to fulfill its function as a process of “carrying across” textual

expressions from one culture to another, it becomes clear that Arabic fiction today is in
a position to become not only a participant in, but an active contributor to, the creative
development of literary genres within the wider context of world literature. The award
of the Nobel Prize to the Egyptian novelist Najīb Maḥfūẓ in 1988 reflects this important
function of translated texts and serves perhaps as the most visible token thus far of the
increasing awareness on the part of a broader readership of the sheer existence and ar-
tistic merits of an Arabic literary tradition that, in its modern manifestations, has been
largely ignored outside the scholarly community that specializes in its productions.1 The
variety and vigor of this developing fictional tradition have been accompanied by the
emergence of an equally lively corpus of critical works that have analyzed the way in
which each genre has developed, mostly within the context of a single nation or geo-
graphical area within the larger Arab world. However, while we can look back today on
the process that has brought fiction to its present stage of development in the Arab world
and differentiate the various genres and their critical adjuncts, the situation at the outset
of that process is somewhat less clear. Discussion is complicated by two principal fac-
tors. The first is too well known to need underlining, namely, the generally poor state of
our knowledge of that large “black hole” in our understanding of Arabic culture termed
the “Period of Decadence” (13th–18th centuries, approximately). In the case of literary

For Georg Krotkoff, with admiration and affection.

1. A brief glimpse at most anthologies and encyclopedias of “world literature” confirms this impres-
sion. While volumes such as The Encyclopedia of World Literature in the 20th Century (New York: Ungar,
1981–1984) have been endeavoring to include the more famous modern Arab authors, a collection such
as Prentice Hall Literature: World Masterpieces (Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall, 1991) includes under the
rubric of “Persian and Arabic Literature” extracts from two texts that are not considered as “literature”
at all within the Arabic critical tradition itself, the Qurʾān and The 1001 Nights. The whole of modern
Arabic literature is represented by a poor translation of one short story of Maḥfūẓ.

13
14 Chapter Two

production, it seems clear that previous generations of scholars have, at least in the case
of elite literature, found themselves almost completely unsympathetic to the esthetic
norms of the period. With regard to popular literary expression, they have followed the
lead of the indigenous culture itself in not regarding such expression as part of the Ara-
bic literary canon at all. Thus, while a wide awareness in the Western world of the nar-
rative riches of The 1001 Nights, for example, is reflected in a vast number of studies, the
number in Arabic has, till recently, been extremely small; the same can, in fact, be said for
studies that analyze the tales in this famous collection as narratives.
The second complicating factor is the fact that classical Arabic narrative provides no
convenient parallels to the fictional genres that now predominate in the contemporary
Arab world. There is one classical narrative genre whose continuing popularity through-
out the intervening period we have just described clearly did reflect the esthetic norms
of the readership for Arabic literature, and this is the maqāma. It is thus hardly surprising
that one of the first manifestations of neoclassicism in the nineteenth century takes the
form of compositions in this genre, from direct imitations at the hands of Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī
(1800–1871) in his Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn, to the more innovative and complex experiments
of Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq (1804–1887) in Al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq. Meanwhile, many of the tales
from The 1001 Nights, segments of which had for centuries been performed in public by
storytellers at festivals and other societal and familial occasions, found their way into
another sphere of public performance, the developing genre of the drama.2

Novels and Short Stories

While both the novel and short story give every appearance of fulfilling their generic
purposes in the Arab world today, with a tremendous variety of themes and experiments
reflecting the various influences on and priorities of littérateurs in the various nations
involved, it is interesting to look back and notice that the pattern of development for
each genre shows signs of cross-fertilization and even of some confusion between the
two. This reflects a similar situation to be found at certain stages in the development of
the Western fictional tradition.
I have suggested elsewhere that nomenclature may contribute to the confusion
(while other critics would go further and suggest that the very concept of genres is the

2. Tales from The 1001 Nights have provided themes for plays by Abū Khalīl al-Qabbānī, Tawfīq al-
Ḥakīm, Alfred Faraj, and Saʿdallāh Wannūs—to provide just a short list of examples. Regarding public
performances in the nineteenth century, Edward Lane reported that “the great scarcity of copies … is, I
believe, the reason why recitations of them are no longer heard.” See Edward Lane, Manners and Customs
of the Modern Egyptians (London: Everyman, 1954), 420.
 Development of Fictional Genres 15

primary underlying factor).3 The use of the adjective short in the English term short story
(replicated in the Arabic qiṣṣa qaṣīra4) has led many critics to be concerned with the issue
of length, in some cases even resorting to the counting of words or, as with Poe, estimat-
ing reading time. This in turn has led to the development of a notion much resented by
short-story writers, namely, that the short story is a kind of testing ground for the more
arduous, time-consuming, and serious work of novel writing. These feelings are well rep-
resented in the following two quotations:

The short story is often seen as the “little sister” of the novel—and because
it is defined in terms of the novel, it is bound to fail in many respects when it
comes up for judgment.… Because it is short, the material must be fragmentary,
subjective, partial.…5

Even though academic critics continue to describe the short story as the poor
relation of the novel, neglected at every turn, the short story is, nonetheless,
the current contemporary form in fashionable currency.6

The question of contemporaneity is one to which I will return below in the Arab world
context. However, the extent to which short-story writers believe that theirs is actually
the genre that requires the greatest artifice and craftsmanship can be illustrated in the
following remark by H. E. Bates:

because a short story is short it is not therefore easier to write than a novel,
ten, twenty, or even thirty times its length—the exact reverse being in fact the
truth.7

Alberto Moravia supports this assessment:

3. See Roger Allen, “Narrative Genres and Nomenclature: A Comparative Study,” Journal of Arabic Lit-
erature 23/3 (November, 1992): 208–14.
4. The term uqṣūṣa is preferred by a few critics, precisely because of the issues that I am discussing
here. Qiṣṣa qaṣīra, however, remains the predominant term. See Ṣabrī Ḥāfiẓ, “al-Khaṣāʾiṣ al-bināʾiyya lil-
uqṣūṣa,” Fuṣūl (July 1982), 19–32.
5. Clare Hanson, “‘Things out of Words’: Towards a Poetics of Short Fiction,” in Re-reading the Short
Story, ed. Clare Hanson (New York: St. Martin’s, 1989), 23, 22–33.
6. William O’Rourke, “Morphological Metaphors for the Short Story: Matters of Production, Repro-
duction, and Consumption,” in Short Story Theory at a Crossroads, ed. Susan Lohafer and Jo Ellyn Clarey
(Baton Rouge: Louisiana State University Press, 1989), 198, 193–205.
7. H. E. Bates, The Modern Short Story, 1809–1953 (London: Robert Hale, 1988), 2.
16 Chapter Two

A definition of the short story as a distinct and autonomous literary genre, with
its own special rules and laws, may well be impossible, for, among other things,
the short story has an even wider sweep than the novel.8

In the context of this quotation, one can point to an interesting aspect of the apparently
self-conscious craft of the short story: it seems to have led a number of its practitioners
to analyze and explain their techniques and the techniques of others in a number of criti-
cal studies of the short-story genre itself. Besides H. E. Bates, one can cite V. S. Pritchett,
Katherine Porter, Hallie Burnett, Sean O’Faolain, and Nadine Gordimer. Shukrī ʿAyyād,
Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, and Yūsuf al-Shārūnī, all distinguished critics and short-story writers, have
shown the same tendencies (and devotion) in the Arab world.
In the Western context, then, the short story has continued vigorously to assert its
right to separate and equal status as a literary genre. To achieve this, it has carved out its
own creative and critical space in a fictional arena already populated by the formidable,
popular, and variegated genre of the novel (and its even earlier forebear, the novella). I
will suggest below that the process of generic development within the Nahḍa may have
led to interestingly different sequences of development in the Arabic context, but the
beginnings of the tradition, with the complexities that I have tried to outline above, pre-
sented those who would create works of fiction (and analyze them) with a task of monu-
mental proportions. What terms were to be used to identify these new types of stories?
And with what could they be compared or contrasted? Without going into an elaborate
discussion of the defining characteristics of each genre, the following quotations may
suggest the difficulty of the task that confronted the literary communities in the coun-
tries of the Arab world as they tried to distinguish examples of the different categories
of Western narrative, and, in particular, the novel—Hegel’s “burgher’s epic,” Trilling’s
“agent of the moral imagination”—from the short story.

[The short story] is the glancing form that seems to be right for the nervous-
ness and restlessness of modern life.… The novel tends to tell us everything
whereas the short story tells us only one thing, and that intensively.… Above all,
more than the novelist who is sustained by his discursive manner, the writer of
short stories has to catch our attention at once not only by the novelty of his
people and scene but by the distinctiveness of his voice, and to hold us by the
ingenuity of his design; for what we ask for is the sense that our now restless
lives achieve shape at times and that our emotions have their architecture.9

8. Alberto Moravia, “The Short Story and the Novel,” in Short Story Theories, ed. Charles E. May (Ath-
ens, OH: Ohio University Press, 1976), 147.
9. V. S. Pritchett, “Introduction,” in Oxford Book of Short Stories, ed. V. S. Pritchett (London: Oxford
University Press, 1981), xi and xiv.
 Development of Fictional Genres 17

The short story is much more end-oriented than the novel; that is … the short
story is carefully constructed so as to give us a feeling of completion at its con-
clusion.… [T]he plotting functions more neatly to lead to a conclusion that is a
true denouement.10

These two quotations supply examples of contexts within which the novel and the short
story have been analyzed and compared. The criteria can be applied to examples from
the contemporary Arabic literary tradition that I outlined in my opening paragraph, but
clearly the features that these authors identify are the result of a prolonged process of
development involving both creative writing and critical analysis. For those in the Arab
world who endeavored to follow these Western generic models, whether as creative writ-
ers or critics, the process whereby these genres were introduced, translated, adapted,
and imitated produces some interesting variations.

The Development of Modern Arabic Fiction

There is one feature that can be identified immediately as being common to the develop-
ment of fiction in both the West and the Arab world: the role of developing technology
in providing increased publication opportunities and, most particularly, the institution
and rapid expansion of a press tradition. While printing in Arabic had been available for
some time, advances in printing techniques that became available in the Arab world in
the nineteenth century made the publication of books considerably more convenient.
This obviously had a direct impact on libraries, whether private or public, as with the
Egyptian Dār al-Kutub, founded in 1870 under the direction of ʿAlī Mubārak, himself the
author of a work of fiction entitled ʿAlam al-dīn (published in Alexandria between 1881
and 1892).11 The speed with which newspapers proliferated, particularly after the arrival
of a number of Christian émigrés from Syria in the 1870s and 1880s, can be gauged from
the documentation provided in Fīlīb dī Tarrāzī’s well-known study.12
Within the context of a discussion of the emergence of fictional genres, what is clear-
ly of major importance is first, that publication avenues became more available and con-
venient; second, that, as newspapers became the favored locus for political expression, a
more direct link could be forged between political and societal issues and literary expres-
sion; and third, that the readership was vastly expanded and, as is emerging from more
recent research, included a large number of women readers (who had access, among oth-

10. Viktor Shklovsky, quoted in Robert Scholes, Introduction to Structuralism, New Haven: Yale Univer-
sity Press, 1974) 85.
11. See J. Brugman, An Introduction to the History of Modern Arabic Literature in Egypt (Leiden: Brill, 1984),
65–68.
12. Fīlīb dī Tarrāzī, Tarīkh al-ṣiḥāfa al-ʿarabiyya, 4 vols (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Amīriyya, al-Maṭbaʿa al-
Amrīkiyya, 1913–1933).
18 Chapter Two

er things, to journals and magazines published for such a readership).13 But, in addition
to these changes in the social context of fiction, the press was instrumental in another
important change, namely, in language usage and attitudes to style. As newspapers and
journals came to be appreciated as a powerful force for debate and change, many writers
began to realize the need to clarify and to simplify the level of discourse that was used to
communicate information and opinion to an ever-widening readership. Pioneers such as
ʿAbdallāh Nadīm and Yaʿqūb Ṣannūʿ used their publications to offer examples of articles
and short narratives that transcribed the colloquial language into a written representa-
tion of the liveliness of spoken dialogue. Needless to say, this was a crucial precedent to
the appearance of an authentic expression of dialogue in any emerging fictional genres.14
Within this press tradition, a large number of literary works were published during
the earliest stages of the Nahḍa: poems, anecdotes (such as those of ʿAbdallāḥ Nadīm),
fictional essays (such as the famous examples of al-Manfalūṭī), and serialized novels.
Initially, many of the novels to be published were translations—a pattern repeated in
other Middle Eastern countries such as Turkey, and the fact that one of the first and most
popular selections was Dumas’ The Count of Monte Cristo gives us some idea of popular
tastes at the time and also points to some of the perceptions of both the generic purpose
of the novel and the direction(s) it might take—at least initially. Special journals were
established to publish both translated novels and the early efforts at imitation that soon
followed.15 As had been the case many centuries earlier with Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ (d. 757) and
his translations into Arabic, the sheer process of translating Western fiction in this way
was another contributor to the process of change in the written language that would
make available a clear and malleable vehicle for fictional expression. It is interesting
to speculate what may have been the more practical effects of such serialization in the
press on perceptions regarding the particular features of fictional genres. From the point
of view of plot and structure, for example, we know that Dickens was clearly influenced
by the reception of his serialized works in the press and made adjustments of some sig-
nificance. The same holds true of Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī (1858–1930) and his Ḥadīth

13. See, for example, the introductions to My Grandmother’s Cactus, tr. Marilyn Booth (London: Quar-
tet Book, 1991); and Opening the Gates, ed. Margot Badran and Miriam Cooke (London: Virago; Blooming-
ton: Indiana University Press, 1990).
14. For discussions of the writings of these two pioneers, see Roger Allen, A Period of Time (Reading,
England: Garnet, 1992), 23–25; Pierre Cachia, An Overview of Modern Arabic literature (Edinburgh: Edin-
burgh University Press, 1990), 62–64; Sabry Hafez, The Genesis of Arabic Narrative Discourse (London: Saqi,
1993); and Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press,
1983), 43–66.
15. Examples include Salīm al-Bustānī, al-Huyām fī jinān al-Shām (1870) and serialized in al-Jinān; and
Saʿīd al-Bustānī, Dhāt al-khidr, published in al-Ahrām in the 1880s.
 Development of Fictional Genres 19

ʿĪsā ibn Hishām.16 However, considering some of the criteria for differentiating the fiction-
al genres that have been identified above with regard to their development within the
Western tradition, one can begin to see clear reasons as to why the development of each
genre should have taken different paths and at different paces. For example, not only
does the publication of a novel in serial form make each segment of a length quite similar
to that of a short story, but also when the work in question is as diffuse in structure and
plot as some examples of the incipient novel in Arabic, the task of learning “to see the
wider and deeper relationships of life on a large scale” and “to understand the unity and
inner logic of a whole epoch” (to cite Medvedev/Bakhtin) is rendered especially difficult,
if not impossible.17

The Short Story

As we turn to considering the way each genre developed, the context of the press and
the new readership for fictional writing that it created and fostered provides another
parallel:

The fact of serial publication, and the popularity of serialized novels among the
English middle classes inadvertently gave the short story its break.18

The narratives that Nadīm and al-Manfalūṭī published in Egyptian newspapers in the late
nineteenth century may not contain all the features of the short story as identified by
Pritchett above and by many others. We should obviously not be too concerned at this
early stage with “ingenuity of design,” but there can surely be no denying in their writ-
ings the concision of expression that needs to be the stock in trade of anyone writing in
the journalistic realm; and their short narratives certainly reflect “the nervousness and
restlessness of modern life” as it impacted upon Egyptian society at the time. In the fi-
nal decades of the nineteenth century when these writers were publishing their stories,
there was much discussion and argument concerning the status of women in society,
particularly with regard to educational opportunities. This was a cause for which Qāsim
Amīn (1865–1908) became famous as an advocate. The very same theme was picked up by
both Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān (1883–1931) and Mikhāʾīl Nuʿayma (1889–1988) in their earliest
stories, composed in the first two decades of this century. The trials of “Martā from Bān,”
snatched from the rural simplicity of her home and placed in the dens of iniquity in the

16. See Roger Allen, A Period of Time, 35–44. [Cf. Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us,
ed. and tr. Roger Allen, 2 vols (New York: NYU Press, 2015).]
17. These are features of the novel as presented by P. N. Medvedev and M. M. Bakhtin: The Formal
Method in Literary Scholarship (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978), 134–35.
18. Suzanne Ferguson, “The Rise of the Short Story as a Highbrow, or Prestige Genre,” in Short Story
Theory at a Crossroads, ed. Lohafer and Clarey, 182.
20 Chapter Two

evil city, and of “Warda al-Hānī,” who deserts a comfortable home with a husband she
hates in order to live with her real love—these stories are told by Jubrān with both pas-
sion and sentimentality.19 Mikhāʾīl Nuʿayma’s early stories show a greater sense of both
subtlety and detachment, something that he acquired, no doubt, from his extensive read-
ings in the works of Russian masters of the short story, such as Chekhov and Gogol; their
influence is clearly visible in the themes and techniques of stories such as “Sanatuhā
al-jadīda” and “Maṣraʿ Sattūt.”20
Such early experiments in short fiction as these, matched somewhat later in other
parts of the Arab world,21 laid the thematic and linguistic groundwork for the emergence
of a remarkable outpouring of talent in Egypt. The pioneer of the group was, by gen-
eral consent, Muḥammad Taymūr (1892–1921), who, in spite of his early death, made a
major contribution to the development of the short-story genre.22 He was followed by a
group of writers known as al-Madrasa al-Ḥadītha (The New School)—including such major
figures as Maḥmūd Taymūr (1894–1973, younger brother of Muḥammad), Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī
(1905–1992), and Maḥmūd Ṭāhir Lāshīn (1894–1954), who brought the short-story genre
in Arabic to a truly remarkable level of technical and artistic sophistication. Space does
not allow a full assessment of the achievements of this group; in the context of a discus-
sion of the development of the short-story genre in Arabic, however, I would suggest that
the remarkable rapidity with which a genuine maturity was achieved in this genre may
be due in no small part not only to the appropriateness of its generic characteristics for
the literary expression of the societal needs of the time (with the analysis of the status of
women at the head of the list) but also to the fact that the development of the short-story
genre itself and, in particular, its Russian and French traditions (from which these Arab
pioneers clearly derived so much inspiration) is itself of comparatively recent vintage.

19. Jubrān Khalīl Jubrān, “Martā al-Bāniyyah,” in ʿArāʾ is al-murūj, tr. H. N. Nahmad as “Martha,” in
Nymphs of the Valley (New York: Knopf, 1968), 3–9 [abridged]; “Warda al-Hānī,” in al-Arwāḥ al-mutamarri-
da, tr. H. N. Nahmad as “Warde el-Hani,” in Spirits Rebellious (New York: Knopf, 1969), 3–28.
20. See Nadeem Naimy, Mikhail Naimy: An Introduction (Beirut: American University in Beirut, 1967),
85–105; and C. J. Nijland, Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿaymah, Promoter of the Arabic Literary Revival (Istanbul: Nederlands
Historisch-Archaeologisch Instituut, 1975), 18 and 49–63. For the stories, see “Sanatuhā al-jadīda” in Kān
mā kān (Beirut: Maṭbaʿat al-Ittiḥad, 1937), tr. John Perry, in A New Year (Leiden: Brill, 1974), 23–32; and
“Maṣraʿ Sattūt,” in Akābir (Beirut: Dār Ṣādir, 1956), 18–26.
21. The situation in Iraq, for example, is described by ʿAbd al-Ilāh Aḥmad in Nashʾ at al-qiṣṣa wa-
taṭawwuruhā fī al-ʿIrāq 1908–35 (Baghdad: Maṭbaʿat Shafīq, 1969). For Tunisia, see Muḥammad Ṣalīḥ al-
Jābirī, al-Qiṣṣa al-Tūnisiyya: Nashʾatuhā wa-ruwwāduhā (Tunis, 1975). For Egypt, the list of studies is long;
among the most famous are Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, Fajr al-qiṣṣa al-Miṣriyya (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma
lil-Kitāb, 1975); ʿAbbās Khiḍr, al-Qiṣṣa al-qaṣīra fī Miṣr mundhu nashʾatihā ḥattā sanat 1930 (Cairo: al-Dār
al-Qawmiyya li-l-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr, 1966); and Sayyid Ḥāmid al-Nassāj, Taṭawwur fann al-qiṣṣa al-qaṣīra fī
Miṣr min sanat 1910 ilā sanat 1933 (Cairo: Dār al-Kātib al-ʿArabī, 1968).
22. Muḥammad Taymūr’s contribution is well discussed in the recent Un oiseau en cage: Le discours lit-
téraire de Muḥammad Taymūr (1892–1921), ed. C. M. de Moor (Amsterdam: Rodopi, 1991).
 Development of Fictional Genres 21

The Novel

It is hardly surprising that the development of the novel, in comparison with the short
story, was a more complex and even disjointed process. The ability to project aspects
of “life on a large scale,” to place realistically drawn characters into authentic environ-
ments, and to do so in a style that was palatable to a newly emerging readership—these
were skills that needed a lengthy and concentrated period of application and technical
development, something that was—in many cases remains—a luxury that many would-
be novelists cannot afford.
Pioneers in modern Arabic prose writing honed their descriptive skills in a series
of works that discuss visits to Europe and its various institutions, from the narratives of
Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ al-Ṭahṭāwī (Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz) and ʿAlī Mubārak (ʿAlam al-dīn) to
the maqāma-inspired works of Nāṣīf al-Yāzijī, Aḥmad Fāris al-Shidyāq, and Muḥammad
al-Muwayliḥī. Incidentally, this theme (of Arabs visiting Europe) was to become a ma-
jor focus of the Arabic novel in the course of its development. In a succession of works
by Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm, Shakīb al-Jābirī, Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān
Munīf, one can follow the course of a love-hate relationship between two cultures; while
for Ṣāliḥ, Europe is an arena for violent confrontation, for Munīf it serves (as is all too
frequently the case in real life) as a place of exile. However, before al-Muwayliḥī sends
his narrator, ʿĪsā ibn Hishām, to Paris to visit the Great Exhibition of 1899 (in the “sec-
ond journey” [al-riḥla al-thāniya] of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām), he has already made a crucial
contribution to the development of modern Arabic fiction in the first part of his famous
book. ʿĪsā ibn Hishām conducts a pasha from the previous generation on a tour of Cairo
in the 1890s. Recognizable Egyptian stereotypes are shown behaving in characteristic
ways in settings that, although depicted in rhyming prose of the utmost classical virtu-
osity, were sufficiently accurate and indeed witty enough to make the work an instanta-
neous success when it was published in 1907. One crucial feature of novel writing—the
depiction of contemporary society in the often confrontational process of change—had
been put into place. However, al-Muwayliḥī’s work illustrates for us at the same time a
feature of society that was to remain a stumbling block in the development of the novel
in Arabic for some time. Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām has extremely few female characters; the
only one who emerges from the background and participates in the action in any real
sense is a dancer/prostitute. In one of the latter chapters that depicts a visit to a theatre,
al-Muwayliḥī uses one of his “characters” to make it abundantly clear that he finds it ut-
terly inappropriate that women should be seen in public or portrayed in amorous situa-
tions in a literary text.23 Implications of this type of attitude were to affect the choice and
portrayal of female characters in Arabic novels for some time to come.

23. See Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī, Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (Cairo: al-Dār al-Qawmiyya, 1964), 278–79; tr.
Roger Allen, in A Period of Time, 368–77.
22 Chapter Two

We have just drawn attention to the brilliant style in which al-Muwayliḥī’s depiction
of the realities and foibles of Egyptian society are drawn. The work was published in seri-
alized form in the al-Muwayliḥī newspaper, Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq, and was enjoyed by readers
from among the intellectual elite. However, some exercises in neo-classicism were clearly
not designed to appeal to an expanding popular readership, whatever the subject matter
might be. It was part of the literary (and commercial) genius of the Lebanese émigré jour-
nalist Jurjī Zaydān (1861–1914) to appreciate that popular interest in the growing library
of adventure novels could be exploited for educational and even nationalist purposes.
Using his own magazine, al-Hilāl (founded in 1892), he published a whole series of histori-
cal novels. The episodes that he selected from Islamic history allowed him to portray in
fictional form significant events from the Arabic national heritage. The benefit of histori-
cal distance allowed him to make each scenario the framework for a local “human inter-
est” story, often including a pair of lovers. But clearly a major feature of these works that
may account for their continuing popularity (they remain in print today) is the style in
which they are written. In contrast to al-Muwaylihī, for example, Zaydān set out to write
works that could be accessible to a wider audience, using familiar vocabulary and un-
complicated sentence structures. Following Zaydān’s example, a number of writers made
use of such journals as Al-Riwāya Al-Shahriyya (Monthly Novel) to publish historical fiction,
including Nīqūlā Ḥaddād (d. 1954), Yaʿqūb Ṣarrūf (d. 1927), and Faraḥ Anṭūn (d. 1922).
Somewhere in the midst of these divergent trends we must place Muḥammad Ḥusayn
Haykal’s novel Zaynab, published in Egypt in 1913, but apparently written in France at an
earlier date (1911?). Zaynab has often been termed “the first real Arabic novel” in that,
unlike many of the other works that we have described above, it depicts authentic Egyp-
tian characters in an indigenous setting. To a certain extent this may be true, but even
when compared with the descriptive detail of al-Muwaylihī’s work of a decade earlier,
Zaynab comes up short on “authenticity.” The countryside of Egypt is depicted with the
overwhelming sentiment of a writer in a foreign country, recalling it in its most idealistic
and romanticized garb—man at one with his environs. Apart from the epistolary mode
used for communication between the hero, Ḥāmid, and his cousin, ʿAzīza—a favorite de-
vice among early writers of love fiction—the behavior of male and female characters
in Zaynab can hardly be considered authentic; by way of comparison, consider, for ex-
ample, the remarkable short story written several decades later by Yūsuf Idrīs, “Ḥādithat
sharaf,” in which he gives a vivid description of the “fishbowl” atmosphere of a similar
microcosm.24 However, there is one area in which Haykal does make a gesture towards
realism in Zaynab, and that is in the use of the colloquial dialect in the dialogue; even

24. Yūsuf Idrīs, “Ḥādithat sharaf,” in Ḥādithat sharaf (Cairo: ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 1971), 94–123, tr. Nadia
Farag, “Peace with Honour,” in Arabic Writing Today: The Short Story, ed. Mahmoud Manzalaoui (Cairo: Dar
al-Maaref, 1968), 234–55.
 Development of Fictional Genres 23

though there is rather little of it, it represents an important step in an area of continuing
debate on the language of fiction.
In the light of a historical retrospective such as this, Zaynab emerges as a significant
stage on the path to the development of the novel in Arabic but one that would clearly
benefit from being relieved of the burden of being designated “the first” of any particular
subcategory, a role that it does not fulfill with particular success. It is here, I would sug-
gest, that the course of development of the short story becomes relevant. Following the
end of the First World War and the 1919 Egyptian Revolution, the 1920s were a period of
great expectations, changes, and political upheavals. The period witnessed further ad-
vances in the continuing debate on the status of women. An Egyptian Feminist Union was
founded in 1923, and there was a significant increase in publications by and for women.
All this ferment was reflected in the short stories that were published at the time, includ-
ing the highly successful first anthologies of short stories by Maḥmūd Taymūr.25 Male
and female characters were portrayed in vignettes culled from real-life situation within
the family and in society at large; their tales were told in a language that was both acces-
sible and adaptable. Moreover, in 1926, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn published in serial form an account
of his early childhood, which in its skillful use of fictionalizing devices, showed a keen
awareness of narrative techniques.26
The Arabic novels that appear in the 1930s reveal a group of authors experimenting
with aspects of the craft of writing in a new genre: Ibrāhīm al-Māzinī, Tawfīq al-Ḥakīm,
ʿAbbās Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād, Maḥmūd Taymūr, Shakīb al-Jābirī, Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb, Tawfīq
Yūsuf ʿAwwād. Each author brings a concern with particular aspects of the novelistic
craft to bear and contributes to the larger project. The very fact that such a montage of
distinguished Arab littérateurs should be experimenting with the composition of nov-
els (and with such varying degrees of success) two decades after the initial publication
of Zaynab is surely further evidence of the need for a more realistic assessment of its
qualities and place in the development of this complex fictional genre. During this same
decade of the 1930s, a member of a younger generation of writers, Najīb Maḥfūẓ, at first
tries his hand at the short story, but then, having translated in English work on Egyptol-
ogy into Arabic, begins a long career as a novelist with three works set in ancient Egypt.
At the same time, he sets himself the task of reading novels from all the major Western
traditions and of equipping himself for the process of turning the eye of the novelist in
Arabic to a critical analysis of the ills of his own society and people. Maḥfūẓ undertook
this assignment in the early 1940s, and the Arabic novel has been in his debt ever since.

25. The earliest writings of Maḥmūd Taymūr are discussed in detail by Rotraud Wieland in Das er-
zählerische Frühwerk Mahmud Taymurs: Beitrag zu einem Archiv der modernen arabischen Literature (Beirut:
Franz Steiner, 1983).
26. This craft has been analyzed with great perception by Fedwa Malti-Douglas in Blindness and Auto-
biography: Al-Ayyam of Taha Husayn (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1988).
24 Chapter Two

Reflecting the concerns of an entire generation of readers across the Arab world in the
decades following the Second World War, his works have stimulated a whole younger
generation of writers, who have been able to use the solid basis that his oeuvre provides
to explore reality on all the ways that make the novel genre a continuing focus of experi-
ment and debate.

Conclusion

Each of the fictional genres that we have been discussing here is fulfilling an important
role in the intellectual life of all the nations of the Arab world. While the vagaries of in-
fluence and a host of local factors may produce a considerable diversity in both subject
matter and literary quality, recent years have seen the appearance of a number of jour-
nals (and critics who write for them) that are willing to view Arabic fiction within a more
than purely local perspective.
Among general issues that seem to impinge upon fictional writing, the status of the
writer within society is clearly one that has a major impact. Censorship is a given in
many of the societies in which Arabic fiction is published. Some writers have gone to
prison for their opinions, even though expressed through the supposed ironic distance of
fiction; others have preferred either silence or exile. Beyond these direct assaults on the
fictional endeavor, however, we need to bear in mind the fact that creative writing is still
not a career by which one may earn a living in the Arab world. The more fortunate writ-
ers may obtain a job in a conducive field, such as journalism and magazine editing (often
subjecting themselves even further to the control of the state’s cultural apparatus), but
for many other writers, even this is not an option. It is thus hardly surprising that the
short story is currently the Arab world’s most popular literary genre, both because the
process of composition is comparatively shorter than the process required for the novel
and also because there is a plethora of publications to which to submit short fiction.
Here we note an interesting difference between the situation in the Arab world and
the West. A large number of Arab-world authors publish short stories for the first time in
various magazines and newspapers and then, at a certain point, gather a group together
and publish them. In the Western world, by contrast, the process of publishing short
story collections in book form is a much more arduous task. We thus return to the ques-
tion of attitudes to the two genres that was discussed earlier. Except at the hands of the
most illustrious practitioners of the short story craft, the genre in the West tends to be
regarded as a somewhat ephemeral phenomenon, appearing in a number of well-known
monthly magazines on a regular basis, but then disappearing.27 By contrast, the time and
commitment required to produce a novel become a considerable handicap for the would-

27. Yūsuf Idrīs, arguably the Arab world’s most accomplished writer of short stories to date, made
this point to me with a certain amount of glee in our final telephone call before his death in 1991.
 Development of Fictional Genres 25

be novelist writing in Arabic. The list of those who have written just one such work and
then moved on to the other genres and spheres is a large one. Other writers have perse-
vered, often in the face of considerable personal and societal odds. Better publication op-
portunities and book distribution, not to mention contacts between scholars and critics
in the Middle East and the West, mean that we have a better awareness than ever of the
breadth and depth of new fiction writing across the Arab world.
The different paths taken by these fictional genres in the various parts of the Arabic-
speaking world, the ways in which each has influenced the development of the other, and
failures and successes of various experiments—these have been explored briefly above
in an attempt to reveal the way in which the generic purposes of each found appropri-
ate expression at the different stages of the complex process known as the Nahḍa. The
vibrant creative and critical tradition that has emerged shows clearly that, from such
early experiments—some successful, others not—a lively tradition of fiction has resulted.

 3
Sindbad the Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel

A major problem of imbalance confronts those who would endeavor to trace the course
of development of Arabic literary genres during the 19th century. For, while we possess
an abundance of information and critical opinion concerning the state of Western liter-
ary genres at that period and also regarding the means by which they were introduced
to the Middle East, the same does not hold true of the indigenous literary tradition. Our
knowledge of the literary production of the centuries preceding the 19th is scant indeed,
reflecting in large part a sense that, whatever works may have been written, the esthetic
norms of the period were completely alien to those of subsequent eras. As a result, it
has been possible to declare the period one of “decadence” and to posit relatively little
connection between the revival movement of the 19th century (al-Nahḍa) and the period
immediately preceding it.
However, in the particular realm of narrative there is, of course, one great source
within the Arabic tradition, albeit it within the “popular” sphere, that had already moved
from the Middle East to Europe, the world-famous collection of tales known as A Thou-
sand and One Nights. The earliest part of this collection (approximately the first 250 or
so Nights) had been translated into French by Antoine Galland and published in French
between 1704 and 1717. In the decades that followed, that translation was rendered into
a number of European languages, and a concerted effort began to expand the original
collection (which has now been published in the wonderful Arabic edition of Muhsin
Mahdi)1 so as to fill out the complete number of 1001 Nights. A variety of other tales
and tale collections was added; one such was the collection of Sindbad the Sailor (which
Galland himself had translated), another was the moral fable of “The City of Brass”; still
another was a collection of animal fables. As is well known, this expanded collection was
to become one of the most widely read works in European culture during the 18th and
19th centuries, making its way into the forms of artistic expression within many national

1. Kitāb Alf Laylah wa-Laylah, ed. Muhsin Mahdi, 2 vols. (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1984); English translation of
this edition: The Arabian Nights, tr. Husain Haddawy (New York & London: W. W. Norton and Co., 1990).

27
28 Chapter Three

cultures. It is within this particular context that I wish to place the current short study,
dedicated to Issa Boullata, a dear colleague who has shared my own interest in modern
Arabic narratives, in that I will try to provide one small link between the gradual process
that led to the emergence of modern Arabic fictional genres and the indigenous tradition
that precedes it.
One of the more obvious avenues through which Western fictional genres came to
the attention of the still-small reading public in the Arab world was through the process
of translation. Motivations for this transfer of texts from one culture to another var-
ies: from the religious with the project fostered by the Protestant Churches to trans-
late the Bible into Arabic in Lebanon, to the more military goals of Muḥammad ʿAlī in
Egypt whose missions of students to Europe were a direct consequence of his personal
encounter with the technical superiority of the French army. However, whatever the ini-
tial goals may have been, the purview of the translators inevitably expanded to include
other texts and genres. In the latter half of the 19th century, this expanded interest in
translation coincided (and indeed was fostered by) a rapid expansion in opportunities
for publication afforded by the emergence of a vigorous press tradition. As had been the
case in the Western world, newspapers and periodicals provided an ideal medium for the
publication of varieties of translated materials (alongside the more traditional types of
expression, such as the occasional ode in celebration of some important state event or
anniversary). The very same process of serialization that had provided the medium for
the initial publication of the novels of Dickens was now available in the Arab world.
Among the earliest of works of European fiction that were serialized in this fashion
was the renowned novel of Alexandre Dumas père, The Count of Monte Cristo.2 Records of
press publications at the time suggest that it had been translated into Arabic twice, serial-
ized, and published in book form by 1870.3 It has always struck me as significant that this
novel was among the first to be rendered into not only Arabic, but Persian and Turkish
as well.4 Its repertoire of adventure, deception, intrigue, lost love, enormous wealth, and
revenge are, of course, more than enough to link it to any number of narrative traditions
and thus to make it an obvious choice for translation in its own right. Bearing in mind
the immense popularity that was to be achieved in subsequent decades by historical and

2. For the purposes of this study I am using the English translation: Alexandre Dumas, The Count of
Monte Cristo, ed. David Coward (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1990 [a reprint of the anonymous 1852
version]).
3. See Matti Moosa, The Origins of Modern Arabic Fiction (Washington: Three Continents Press, 1983),
78.
4. For details concerning the Turkish translation [1871], see Ahmet Evin, Origins and Development of the
Turkish Novel (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1983), 41–49. The Persian translation was completed in
1873 but not published until 1891. For details, see Christophe Balay and Michel Cuypers, Aux sources de
la nouvelle persane (Paris: Recherches sur les civilisations, 1983), 50. I am grateful to my colleague, Prof.
William Hanaway, for the latter reference.
 Sindbad the Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel 29

adventure romances that were penned by Arab writers in emulation of the highly attrac-
tive models provided by this and other works of Dumas, not to mention those of Jules
Verne, the process of development from translation, via imitation, to the emergence of
an incipient tradition of the Arabic novel, and particularly the historical novel, seems a
natural one. However, having just completed a rereading of Dumas’s novel after many
years, I must confess to having been struck almost from the outset by another process of
transfer that its text so clearly reveals.
Edmond Dantes, who is to emerge from his unjust and lengthy imprisonment as the
Count of Monte Cristo, is first introduced to the reader as an accomplished sailor. As the
novel opens, the boat in which he has been sailing, itself called “Le Pharaon,” has been
plying the Mediterranean from Smyrna in Turkey, via Naples, to Marseille. Upon the
death of the ship’s captain at sea, the nineteen-year-old youth is on the point of being
declared its new captain when he is falsely accused of involvement in a political con-
spiracy and consigned to the dreaded Château d’If. But, just in case this nautical theme
and its allusive power is overlooked, the author makes sure that the Count continually
adopts a very particular pseudonym as he goes about the pursuit of his goal of rewarding
the virtuous and seeking revenge on those who have plotted against him: that of Sindbad
the Sailor. As such he has sailed “over the immense lake, extending from Gibraltar to
the Dardanelles, and from Tunis to Venice.”5 He has a “seraglio in Cairo, one at Smyrna,
and one at Constantinople”; furthermore, he has a Nubian slave named ʿAlī to whom he
talks in Arabic.6 And, as this enormous narrative reaches its closure, the Count’s vessel is
spotted by the young lovers whom he has reunited sailing away from the island that has
given him his name. The sailor, returned from the sea, ends his narrative by setting his
sails once more.
The adoption of the pseudonym Sindbad guarantees that his evocative reference to
the hero of Middle Eastern lore will recur throughout the narrative, but it is just one
among a number of instances that link the novel and collection of tales to each other. It
is perhaps an indication of the pervasiveness of the influence that The Arabian Nights—to
use the favored title of European versions—had at this time that a dialogue in the text of
the novel itself asks:

Have you read the Arabian Nights?

What a question!7

The fabulous atmosphere invoked by the tales is referred to at many points in the narra-
tive: its heroes, its princesses, its enormous treasures, and (of course) Ali Baba and “open

5. Count of Monte Cristo, 1084.

6. Count of Monte Cristo, 939; 381, 486, 865–66, 1054.
7. Count of Monte Cristo, 400.
30 Chapter Three

sesame.”8 The vogue for imitating “Arabian manners” is mentioned at several points. An
“Oriental feast … of such kind as the Arabian fairies might be supposed to prepare” is de-
scribed in detail, as is the custom of eating bread and salt as a symbol of friendship, and
of drinking coffee “in the original Arabian manner.”9 For those interested in the linkages
between Western and Middle Eastern narratives, however, the most remarkable of these
passages of Dumas is the description of the room of Haydee, the Greek princess who,
through capture and enslavement, has become the Count’s property:

The rooms had been fitted up in strict accordance with the Eastern style, that
is to say, the floors were covered with the richest carpets Turkey could pro-
duce; the walls hung with brocaded silk of the most magnificent designs and
texture; while around each chamber, luxurious divans were placed, with piles
of soft and yielding cushions, that needed only to be arranged at the pleasure
or convenience of such as sought repose…. Haydee was reclining on soft, downy
cushions, covered with blue satin spotted with silver; her head, supported by
one of her exquisitely moulded arms, rested on the divan immediately beneath
her, while the other was employed in adjusting to her lips the coral tube of a
rich narghile, whose flexible pipe, placed amid the coolest and most fragrant
essences, permitted not the perfumed vapour to ascend until fully impregnated
with the rich odours of the most delicious flowers.10

When the Sudanese novelist, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, seeks to depict the extent of cultural mis-
understanding between the Middle East and the West in his famous novel, Mawsim al-
Hijra ilā al-Shamāl (1966; Season of Migration to the North, 1969) and makes use of two rooms,
one in London, the other in the Sudan, to serve as potent symbols of the gap involved, he
would need to look no further than passages such as the one just cited.11
These linkages to the fabled East are matched by invocations of historical context.
The earlier part of The Count of Monte Cristo and the intrigues that it narrates are much in-
volved with the career and fate of Napoleon Bonaparte and the restoration of the French
monarchy, as careers and fortunes are won and lost depending on the political influences
and allegiances at work. These references to historical events place the novel in a very
particular period of French (and European) history, but the narrative also makes refer-
ence to Middle Eastern events. The fate of Haydee, mentioned above, draws attention
to the fighting in the Balkans and in particular to the battles and intrigues involving
Ali Pasha (1741–1822) who maintained dominion over the region until he was ousted by
Ottoman forces commanded by Khurshid Pasha and put to death. It is these events that

8. Count of Monte Cristo, 291, 549, 764, 390.

9. Count of Monte Cristo, 636, 701, 767.
10. Count of Monte Cristo, 499–500.
11. See al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, Mawsim al-Hijra ilā al-Shamāl (Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwda, 1967), 34–35, 147; Season of
Migration to the North (London: Heinemann, 1969), 30–31, 146.
 Sindbad the Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel 31

are integrated into the narrative of the novel itself when they are recounted by Haydee
herself as part of the evidence at the trial of Monsieur de Moncerf, as Fernand Mondego
(who has married Dantes’s beloved, Mercedes) has come to call himself in his new Pari-
sian persona.12 There is also mention of Muḥammad ʿAlī (1769–1849), the Albanian-born
commander of the Ottoman forces sent to Egypt against Napoleon’s invading force who
rose to become the founder of the ruling dynasty of that country that lasted until the
revolution of 1952.13
The sense of contextual symmetry that is established by these historical references
and the framing motif of sea travel is a reflection, needless to say, of Dumas’s extreme
interest and involvement in the events of his time and of his long acknowledged skill in
controlling the course and structure of extremely lengthy narratives.14 However, within
that framework the reader soon discovers that the sequencing of the complex story itself
is of a diffusiveness that is very redolent of the narrative logic of the tale collection that
has so clearly inspired the author. For further evidence of this we can consider the form
of the novel itself and the mode of its composition and publication.15 The work consists
of 117 chapters; the first thirty are set in Marseille, the following nine in Rome; and the
remainder in Paris. The length of each chapter is clearly a reflection of the circumstances
of the work’s publication: as is the case with many early novels, The Count of Monte Cristo
appeared first in serial form in a newspaper, Le Journal des débats (beginning in 1844).
The idea for the novel had come to Dumas while reading an account of an actual series
of events that occurred in 1807 and involved a man of Marseille named François Picaud.
Prompted by his publisher to make novelistic use of this story, Dumas composed first the
chapters set in Rome (31–39); in other words, dealing with the immediate consequences
of his emergence from his lengthy prison term and the whereabouts of his friends and
enemies (and their offspring). Dumas then wrote the initial chapters in which he lays out
the circumstances that will furnish the motivations for what is to follow: his knowledge
of the entire Mediterranean region, his probity, his devotion to his aged father and to the
Morrel family who have provided his means of support, his love for the fiery Mercedes
(and her love for him in spite of the continuing attentions of Fernand—as noted above,
later to become M. de Moncerf), and—particularly important—his immense learning
gained during his years spent in the Château d’If at the hands of his fellow prisoner, the
Abbé Faria, who also shares with him the secret of the fabulous treasure hidden on the Is-

12. Count of Monte Cristo, 860–69.

13. Count of Monte Cristo, 235, 669, 401.
14. Indeed Dumas gives an indication of such control when he refers his readers back to the novel’s
chronological beginnings (“which our readers must have been familiar with at the commencement of
this story”), Count of Monte Cristo, 1058.
15. For further details, see John Coward’s “Introduction” to The Count of Monte Cristo (cited in note 2).
32 Chapter Three

land of Monte Cristo.16 The publication of this portion of the novel (the first 39 chapters)
was completed in 1844, but it was another two years before the rest of the novel (chapters
40–117) was published, involving the lengthy and complex process whereby the Count
seeks out his enemies in their prominent positions in Paris and uses his immense wealth
to provide the circumstances whereby their own deeply flawed selves can bring about
their own downfall.
These details of the novel’s composition, coupled to Dumas’s own artistic instincts
and priorities, serve to explain in large part the digressive nature of the narrative that
is The Count of Monte Cristo. When, at chapter 31, we are suddenly transported to Rome
under the heading “Sindbad the Sailor,” we come to realize that we are dealing with what,
from one point of view, is the actual “beginning” of the work itself. But, alongside the
spatial aspects of such rapid narrative shifts, there are those of time. The Count spends
some fifteen years in prison; the fifteen months needed to carve out an escape tunnel are
covered in three paragraphs.17 On the other hand, the intrigues and stratagems needed
to establish and then punish the crimes of the Count’s enemies cover a six-month pe-
riod but are elaborated by the author through a series of detailed descriptions, copious
dialogues, and digressions that occupy the rest of the narrative (some 57 chapters). The
descriptions of gardens, of architecture, and above all, details of arias from the latest
operas performed in Paris, clearly reflect a desire on the author’s part to place his narra-
tive into an “authentic” context, but the many digressions (such as the one on poisons)18
are of an elaboration that would appear to be more a reflection of the lengthy process
of publication and the sheer delight in the display of learning than of a novelist’s quest
for a clearly cohesive and dynamic narrative. The linkages of the incipient novel in the
various European cultural traditions to earlier narrative types have been much explored,
and critics have drawn attention to the wayward quality of what one might term the
“plot-line” in such narratives as Tom Jones. In pointing out certain linkages here between
Dumas’s famous novel and some narrative features that are typical of A 1001 [Arabian]
Nights, I am obviously not endeavoring to remove the former from its place in the history
of the European novel, but merely to suggest that, since Dumas makes such a deliberate
and frequent practice of referring to the collection of Arabic tales at almost every stage
in the novel, it is not out of the question to suggest that the linkages between the two
go beyond the mere use of names, places, and “manners.” Above all, when the process of
translation of European works into Arabic gained pace in the 19th century, the choice of
The Count of Monte Cristo—with its Arabic-speaking hero who calls himself “Sindbad the
Sailor” and its copious reference to the Middle East—was a natural choice for early trans-
fer to a new cultural environment.

16. Count of Monte Cristo, 144ff.

17. Count of Monte Cristo, 146.
18. Count of Monte Cristo, 529ff.
 Sindbad the Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel 33

Dumas’s choice of a crime report as the basis for a novel that would be set within the
political intrigues of post-Napoleonic France provided a clear model for those who would
attempt to replicate the historical romance novel in Arabic. None of the latter would
rival the size of Dumas’s works, but then the circumstances of sponsorship were very dif-
ferent. Dumas became a very rich man as the result of his publications, even to the extent
of building a Château de Monte Cristo, but in a close replication of the events of one of
his own novels, he proceeded to squander most of his wealth. The Lebanese writer, Jūrjī
Zaydān (1861–1914), who emigrated to Egypt and established his own Hilāl publishing
house there, set himself to emulate the European tradition of historical novels. Zaydān’s
examples in Arabic are more modest than those of Dumas in size and scope, and, while
they do not introduce the Arab reader to an almost mythological super-hero of the type
of the Count of Monte Cristo, they do follow the lead of European models like Dumas by
incorporating a local, “human interest” story of family life and love into the larger his-
torical framework that, in the case of Zaydān, is clearly the major focus of his educational
intentions. Zaydān was clearly more judicious than Dumas in financial matters, in that
he used his publishing house to publish not only a whole series of novels set in different
periods of Arab and Islamic history but also to provide the ever-increasing Egyptian and
Arab-world readership with studies of its history and culture. However, reverting for one
last time to the chronological context of Dumas’s novel, one is left to wonder what moti-
vations may have led Zaydān to commence his novelistic survey of the history of his own
region with three works that deal with the most recent period in Egyptian history in the
18th and 19th centuries.19

19. Jūrjī Zaydān, Al-Mamlūk al-Shārid, 1891; Asīr al-Mutamahdī, 1893; Istibdād al-Mamālīk, 1893. See ʿAbd
al-Muḥsin Ṭāhā Badr, Taṭawwur al-riwāya al-ʿArabiyya al-ḥadītha fī Miṣr: 1870–1938 (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif,
1963), 93–106, 409, and Moosa, Origins, 157–69.
 4
The Novella in Arabic: A Study in Fictional Genres

Before broaching the main topic of this study, there seem to me to be two general issues
involving terms in the title which need to be addressed: The one concerns nomenclature,
the other the question of genres.
A certain vagueness colors most attempts at definition of the term “novella,” some-
thing which seems the result of both the way in which the term has developed and the
considerable differences of opinion among critics.1 Thus the Oxford English Dictionary
seems to reflect the relatively recent interest in the genre in the English-speaking world
by not including the word at all in the main part of the dictionary and by defining it in
the Supplement as “a short novel (as in the stories of Boccaccio’s Decameron).” As Howard
Nemerov points out, however, “the term ‘short novel’ is descriptive only in the way that
the term ‘Middle Ages’ is descriptive—that is, not at all, except with regard to the ter-
ritory on either side.”2 The index to the English translation of Todorov’s Poetics of Prose
lists: Novella, see Tale.3 Such entries as these do at least convey to us the notion that the
novella operates somewhere along a fictional spectrum, the two poles of which are the
novel and the short story, but that is all. In search of more precision, the Oxford Dictionary
may offer us some help under the entry “nouvelle” which is defined as “a short piece of
fictitious narrative, frequently one dealing with a single situation or a single aspect of a
character or characters.” The Standard College Dictionary takes us further along the road
to detail by talking of “a short tale or narrative, usually with a moral and often satiric, as
the stories in Baccaccio’s [sic] Decameron.” 4
If there seems to be a certain vagueness in the terminology of the European languag-
es, the situation in Arabic with reference to fictional genres in general is no better. I have
recently suggested elsewhere that the two major fictional genres mentioned above have

1. For the history of the terms, see Gerald Gillespie, “Novella, Nouvelle, Novella, Short Novel? A Re-
view of Terms,” Neophilologicus, 51 (1967): 117–27 and 225–29.
2. Howard Nemerov, quoted in J. H. E. Paine, Theory and Criticism of the Novella (Bonn, 1979), 9. See also
Mary Doyle Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella (Chicago, 1975), 4.
3. Tzvetan Todorov, The Poetics of Prose, tr. Richard Howard (Ithaca, 1977), index.
4. See the Standard College Dictionary (New York, n.d.), s.v. “Novella.”
35
36 Chapter Four

generally acknowledged technical terms attached to them in Arabic: riwāya for “novel”
and qiṣṣa qaṣīra for “short story.”5 This suggestion on my part is based on the term used
by what seems to me to be the majority of critics whose works I have encountered on
the subject, but I acknowledge that there are some notable exceptions. Two studies by
Muḥammad Yūsuf Najm, for example, use the term “qiṣṣa” (without any accompany-
ing adjective) to mean “novel.” His term for short story is “uqṣūṣa.”6 Muḥammad Zaghlūl
Sallām does the same.7 The second edition of the Encyclopaedia of Islam uses the article
“ḳiṣṣa” to discuss the novel and its development. On the other hand, Fārūq Khūrshīd uses
the term “riwāya” to refer to the traditional narratives of an earlier period, although the
title is, no doubt, intended to evoke the possibility of a continuum within the tradition.8
Needless to say, it is not for me to comment further on the process of natural develop-
ment in language usage, but only to note that, in such circumstances, it is hardly surpris-
ing that no specific term exists in Arabic for the novella, apart, one supposes, from the
European term transliterated into Arabic characters.
Turning to the topic of genre per se, we might well suggest that this very issue of
definition may represent something desirable, particularly in an era in which, to quote
Geoffrey Hartman, “something has gone wrong—flamboyantly, inter­estingly wrong—
with the idea of separate or hierarchical genres.”9 Needless to say, the notion of genres
has been under challenge for some time. Benedetto Croce, for example, reacted strongly
to the application of “natural selection” to literature, pointing out that, while genres
might have some practical convenience as modes of classification, they were of little use
in aesthetics. As a result, “the field is littered with the ruins of past definitions which
have convinced no one save their author, and the advance of modern writing is so vast
and multifarious that all classifications crumble in front of it.”10 However, as Northrup
Frye has pointed out, “the purpose of criticism by genres is not so much to classify as
to clarify such traditions and affinities, thereby bringing out a large number of literary
relationships that would not be noticed as long as there were no context established for
them.”11 Perhaps one might suggest: Si la nouvelle n’existait pas, il faudrait l’inventer.
On a humbler plane we might perhaps pick up the phrase “practical convenience” with
reference to criticism by genre and suggest that, while convenience may not represent

5. See Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Syracuse, 1982), 93, n. 99.
6. Muhammad Yūsuf Najm, Fann al-qiṣṣa (Beirut, 1966); al-Qiṣṣa fī al-adab al-ʿarabī (Beirut, 1966).
7. Muḥammad Zaghlāl Sallām, Dirāsāt fī al-qiṣṣa al-ʿarabiyya al-ḥadītha (Alexandria, 1973).
8. Farūq Khūrshīd, al-Riwāya al-ʿarabiyya: ʿaṣr al-tajmīʿ (Cairo and Beirut, 1975).
9. Geoffrey Hartman, New York Times Book Review (5 April 1981): 11.
10. Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics, ed. Alex Preminger (Princeton, 1974), “Genres,” 308,
col. 2.
11. Northrop Frye, Anatomy of Criticism (Princeton, 1957), 247–48. See also Rene Wellek and Austin
Warren, Theory of Literature (New York, 1956), 234.
 The Novella in Arabic 37

the highest aspirations of literature scholar­ship, particularly in this age of what Denis
Donoghue has termed “ferocious alphabets,”12 it is not without use or merit.
The immediate stimulus to attempt this application of novella theory to Arabic lit-
erature came from a rereading of the several articles on fiction which have appeared in
the Journal of Arabic Literature. The word “novella” is used several times to refer to a small
number of works, suggesting perhaps a general, if tacit, consensus.13 However, part of the
general issue of genre definition can be gauged from the following selected montage of
opinions. Katrina McClean describes Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s Qindīl Umm Hāshim as “this short sto-
ry or rather novella,” while Professor Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud reviews the same work as
a novel.14 Constance Berkley describes al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s ʿUrs al-Zayn as a novella “though
briefer than most novels.” Aḥmad Naṣr also describes Ṣāliḥ’s work as a novella,15 while
Denys Johnson-Davies terms ʿUrs al-Zayn, Bandar Shāh, and Maryūd as both novellas and
short novels.16 The present writer has to place himself in the arena, having described
Yūsuf ldrīs’s Qāʿ al-Madīna as being “in the form of a novella.”17 In what follows I would
like to survey some general works on the novella genre and then see how far the findings
are applicable to three works in Arabic fiction: Qindīl Umm Hāshim, ʿUrs al-Zayn, and Qāʿ
al-Madīna.18
As we attempt to describe and analyze the novella genre, the comments of scholars
on the uselessness of prescriptive genre categories are well taken. The German school
of Novellentheorie has been a particularly fertile source of characteristics and typologies,
as scholars such as E. K. Bennett, J. H. E. Paine, and Judith Leibowitz have pointed out.19
There has been a great deal of interest in the genre on the part of both German writers
and critics, and it is probably this, coupled with the vigor of the French and Spanish tra-

12. “Denis Donoghue, Ferocious Alphabets (New York, 1981). The title is a quotation from a poem of
Wallace Stevens.
13. Mustafa Badawi, in Journal of Arabic Literature (= JAL) I (1970): 145; Fatma Moussa­-Mahmoud, JAL 7
(1976): 151; Susan Gohlman, JAL 10 (1979): 117; Katrina McClean, JAL 11 (1980): 80; Aḥmad Naṣr, JAL 11
(1980): 88; Constance Berkley, JAL 11 (1980): 109.
14. McClean ibid. and Moussa-Mahmoud ibid.
15. Berkley ibid. and Naṣr ibid.
16. Denys Johnson-Davies, Azure 8 (1982): 16–17. Besides Nemerov’s comment noted above, we might
cite Judith Leibowitz: “This is an unfortunate confusion because the short novel is a short version of the
novel genre of fiction, whereas the novella is a different literary form, coinciding occasionally only in
length with the short novel.” See her Narrative Purpose in the Novella (The Hague, 1974), 9.
17. Yūsuf Idrīs, In the Eye of the Beholder, ed. Roger Allen (Chicago and Minneapolis, 1978), Introduc-
tion, xvi.
18. Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, Qindīl Umm Hāshim, Iqraʾ series no. 18 (Cairo, n.d. [1944?]); al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, ʿUrs al-
Zayn (Beirut, 1970); Yūsuf Idrīs, “Qāʿ al-Madīna,” in A laysa kadhālika (Cairo, 1957).
19. E. K. Bennett, A History of the German Novelle (Cambridge, 1934, 1974). For Paine, see note 2, and for
Leibowitz, note 16.
38 Chapter Four

ditions, which led Henry James to make his well-known and typically acerbic comment
about the novella:

It had taken the blank misery of our Anglo-Saxon sense of such matters to orga-
nize, as might be said, the general indifference to this fine type of composition.
In that dull view a “short story” was a “short story” and that was the end of it.20

However, Harry Steinhauer points out the negative side of this situation in Novellentheorie
when, in an article hopefully entitled “Towards a Definition of the Novella,” he lists in
horror no less than twenty-nine criteria for the genre, many of which are directly con-
tradictory.21
The positioning of the novella along a spectrum between the novel and short story
has tempted some critics to essay a definition based on length.22 Since all such descrip-
tions will be relative and suggest merely that most novellas are longer than short stories
and shorter than novels, this seems not particularly helpful. A more fruitful tack seems
to be found in the suggestion that the novella concentrates on one event, situation, or
character.23 Traditional criticism has attempted to refine these guidelines further by de-
creeing that the novella should be concerned with something unusual or striking: Georg
Lukacs expresses the concept as “an extreme situation.”24 There should be some concrete
symbol within the fabric of the work which is expressive of an inner meaning. There
will often be manipulation of the element of time, a process in which the technique of
framing may be involved. But the most persistent of the more traditional characteristics
of the genre is that of the “turning-point” (Wendepunkt), a term usually associated with
the Novellen writer and critic, Ludwig Tieck.25 According to this prescription the novella
builds up to a single climax , as a result of which a distinct change is to be seen in the life
and/or behavior of the character who is the work’s primary focus.
More recent criticism has been unsympathetic to this type of categorization, as
might be expected from some of the above comments on the application of genre theory.
The notion that such a list can constitute a kind of sine qua non in identifying novellas has
been challenged. Judith Leibowitz, for example, notes that, while these criteria may be
found in some or even several novellas, “a study of techniques will not lead to an under-
standing of generic narrative purpose.” An investigation of the effect produced by the
genre will be more satisfactory than a “definition” based on a mere listing of its devices.

20. Theory of Fiction: Henry James, ed. James E. Miller, Jr. (Lincoln, 1972), 104.
21. Harry Steinhauer, “Towards a Definition of the Novella,” Seminar 6, 2 (1970), 154–74.
22. For example, Mary Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella, 9.
23. Ibid., 129: “serious action centered on a single character.”
24. Georg Lukacs, Solzhenitsyn (London, 1969), 8.
25. The very term is used in Ṣāliḥ’s Urs al-Zayn, although not in the technical sense. Ṣāliḥ, ʿUrs al-Zayn
(Beirut, 1970), 31; tr. Denys Johnson-Davies, The Wedding of Zein (London, 1969), 42.
 The Novella in Arabic 39

For her, the primary feature of the novella is its unique ability to combine the economy
of the short story (which she terms “intensity”) with the openness of the novel (termed
“expansion”). While the theme is kept under the strictest control, implication and sug-
gestion serve to expand the work’s impact.26 In the colorful phrase of Walter Silz, the aim
is “to compress infinite riches in a little room.”27
As we turn from a summary of theory on this subject to its application in Arabic fic-
tion, it is, no doubt, already clear to those who are familiar with Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s Qindīl Umm
Hāshim, long since acknowledged as one of the abiding masterpieces of modern Arabic
literature, that it is the dream of the more traditional novella theorist.28 The work is un-
equivocally focused on a single character, Ismāʿīl, the Egyptian brought up in traditional
surroundings who travels to Europe to study medicine (actually ophthalmology) and who
returns to his native land to confront all the complex issues implicit in the meeting and
clash of cultural values. The course of the narrative selects with the greatest care only
those elements which contribute to the analysis of Ismāʿīl’s upbringing; for, as Mustafa
Badawi notes, this work is “of the type of writing … known as the Bildungsroman.”29 While
all this may not be enclosed within the more traditional frame-story encountered in,
say, Alf layla wa-layla, we can point to the fact that the third-person narrative concerning
Ismāʿīl is actually narrated by his nephew, who, along with a more generalized “we” and
“us,” provides an outer layer of first-person narration.30 Furthermore, the manipulation
of the element of time in this work is one of its more obvious and notable features, a
process which involves the identification of those aspects which will contribute directly
to the major theme of the work as a whole. There is to all this much of the circularity
associated by Joseph Campbell and other critics with the great monomyth, along with
all the implicit possibilities of parallelism and repetition.31 Thus the first two sections
before Ismāʿīl’s departure are set in the family home and the mosque square in turn, and
the same order is followed in sections eight and nine following his traumatic return from
England. However, as we have noted above, the most prevalent element in traditional no-
vella theory has been that of the “turning-point,” an extreme event which brings about
a radical change in the life of the principal character. If the title of Ḥaqqī’s work gives
us some assistance, then the contents provide copious evidence of the centrality of the
mosque lamp (and, by extension, its oil) in the narrative. In fact, the initial sections of

26. Leibowitz, Narrative Purpose, 15–16, 18.

27. Walter Silz, quoted in ibid., 51.
28. I should make it clear that in this analysis of Ḥaqqī’s work and those of Ṣalīḥ and Idrīs which fol-
low it, I am not aiming to present a comprehensive analysis of each work, but only to identify or even
isolate those features which are germane to a theoretical discussion of the novella genre.
29. Mustafa Badawi, JAL 1 (1970): 145.
30. Ṣalīḥ, ‘Urs al-Zayn, 6, 39, and 58, also 25 and 47; Wedding of Zein, 2, 25, and 28, also 16 and 30.
The matter of narrative point of view is investigated by Susan Gohlman, JAL 10 (1979): 117–18.
31. Joseph Campbell, The Hero with a Thousand Faces (Princeton, 1949, 1968), prologue, 3–46.
40 Chapter Four

the work give a powerful impression of the prevalence of Islamic belief in the life of the
family and community. Ismāʿīl’s father’s business flourishes “through the blessings of
Umm Hāshim,” and “the future was in the hands of God.”32 The dome of the mosque is
“diffused with an irridescent light growing now dim and now bright,” and the lamp itself
gleams with “a blinding light.” It is “his last memory of Cairo before leaving.”33 When
Ismāʿīl revisits the mosque towards the end of the story once the crisis is over, the lamp
is described with a simile which seems of great significance: it was “burning like a beau-
tiful eye,” the point of similarity being precisely that very part of the body which is the
object of his scientific expertise, something which has at that point in the story failed to
cure the illness of his fiancée, Fāṭima.34 Upon his return from England he has smashed
the bottle of oil; now he asks Sheikh Dardīrī for more. Within this total narrative frame-
work, the smashing of the lamp of Umm Hāshim using his father’s own stick becomes
the central act and indeed the turning-point of the entire story. The religious faith with
which he leaves for study in Europe is initially “replaced by a stronger faith in science,”
but, as a result of the series of events which follow his return to his homeland and trigger
a reassessment of his values and beliefs, he comes to realize that science and religion are
not totally incompatible. This process of reconciliation carries over to his relationships
with his fellow countrymen and family. We are led to believe that it brings about the
recovery of Fāṭima,35 and that the remainder of Ismāʿīl’s life is a happy one. The explicit
statement “There can be no science without faith” surely makes Qindīl Umm Hāshim the
apologue of the novella theorist’s dreams.36
If Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s masterpiece offers such a rich supply of characteristics identified by
novella theorists, it can also be used to illustrate the notions of intensity and expansion
as preferred by less prescriptive critics. Here a large theme with considerable spread of
both time and place is treated in a compara­tively brief work in a way that is both aes-
thetically satisfying and thought­provoking. We have already suggested some of the ways
through which this is achieved: the limited number of characters involved and the means
used to portray them; the use of flashback and repetition to underline the significance
of key events in the narrative; and, above all, the skillful use of symbols (and I have cer-
tainly not identified all of them here) to suggest ways in which the events and characters
portrayed may be seen in a larger framework.37 And, while this is not the occasion for a

32. My quotations are from Mustafa Badawi’s excellent translation, The Saint’s Lamp and Other Stories
(Leiden, 1973), 2 and 7. See also Qindīl Umm Hāshim, 6 and 13.
33. Ḥaqqī, Qindīl Umm Hāshim, 11, 17, and 24; The Saint’s Lamp, 5, 10, and 15.
34. Ibid., 54; ibid., 36. Others have noted the theme of light and blindness as a central motif: Badawi,
JAL, 1 (1970), 160, and McClean, JAL, 11 (1980), 80.
35. For a discussion, see Badawi, JAL, 1 (1970), 159.
36. Ḥaqqī, Qindīl Umm Hāshim, 54; The Saint’s Lamp, 36. See Mary Springer, Forms of the Modern Novella,
18ff.
37. The imagery of the work is well explored by McClean, JAL, 11 (1980): 80–87.
 The Novella in Arabic 41

detailed analysis, mention should also be made of Ḥaqqī’s superb style which, through its
economy, imagery, and skillful use of the colloquial medium adds in a unique way to the
total impact of this great contribution to modern Arabic fiction.
As several critics have noted, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s ʿUrs al-Zayn is not so much a work
which should be viewed in isolation but rather one of a whole series of fictional works
which deal with the author’s own environment, primarily a village on the Nile in the Su-
dan. This is not, of course, to maintain that they have to deal with the same theme. Each
of the works looks at the community as a whole and at certain of its characters from a
different perspective, or, as it were, through a different lens.38
As is the case with Ḥaqqī’s work, Ṣāliḥ’s ʿUrs al-Zayn does not present the sequence
of events in chronological order. If anything, the manipulation of time is even greater in
Ṣāliḥ’s work: the beginning takes the form of a reaction by three villagers to the news
represented by the title itself, that al-Zayn is to get married. This occurs relatively late
in the ordering of events included in the story, and is repeated several times. Indeed,
on the last occasion the three villagers whose reactions are recorded at the beginning
are presented in the same order; yet again the element of repetition is present.39 The
use of these techniques in the treatment of time has a number of ramifications. In the
first place, the narration begins by focusing on the villagers and their amazement that
al-Zayn should be getting married. Not only does this arouse the reader’s curiosity as to
why such a fact should be amazing (something which is soon revealed), but it places the
operative level of the narration on the village as a whole. While al-Zayn himself, Niʿma,
Sayf al-Dīn, and the Imām, are treated as separate individuals, thus confirming their im-
portance within the narrative, there is always a return to the village level, culminating in
the communal festivities of the wedding itself. This is not a story about a village as place;
we learn almost nothing about its geography or outward appearance. Instead it is about
the village as groups of people, and their attitude to their surroundings is captured in a
small but remarkable section in the center of the work in which there is no mention of
village people whatsoever. Instead the Nile and the land that it irrigates are described
in a passage replete with metaphor: “the Nile’s breast, like that of a man in anger, swells
up,” “the moon’s face is rounded,” the land is “as though it were a woman of boundless
passion preparing to meet her mate,” and the earth has its bowels “astir with gushing
water.”40 The unique quality of this short section emphasizes the impact of nature—the
Nile and the earth—on the village community, but while this background is always im-
plicit, the concentra­tion in this work is on people.

38. For such overviews of the works of al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, see Johnson-Davies in Azure 8 (1982)
and Aḥmad Naṣr in JAL 11 (1980): 88–104. There is also extensive discussion in Constance Berk-
ley’s unpublished Ph.D. dissertation (New York University, 1979).
39. Ṣāliḥ, ʿUrs al-Zayn, 5, 41, 87, and 116; The Wedding of Zein, 31, 47, 78, and 107.
40. Ibid., 47–48; ibid., 50–51.
42 Chapter Four

It will be recalled that a frequent characteristic of the novella genre cited above
was the use of a relatively small number of characters. The treatment of an entire vil-
lage might seem to render that impossible in this instance, and yet such is not the case.
Throughout the work the village community is presented in groups. This is most obvious
later in the work when the community is subdivided into three “clearly divided camps”
according to its reactions to the Imām.41 The same technique is to be found elsewhere:
“Maḥjūb’s gang,” as they are called late in the work, appear as a group throughout (al-
though each gets a thumbnail sketch at one point),42 and the women divide into two
groups over the feud between āmina and Saʿdiyya.
In such a context the singling out of a character for particular attention is obvi-
ously a matter of some consequence. Niʿma stands out for her great beauty, something of
which the village is well aware, for her “sense of responsibility,” her education, and her
tenderness towards al-Zayn, the more so after his visit to the hospital.43 It is also presum-
ably significant that the section describing Niʿma immediately follows the section on na-
ture just mentioned and that she imagines to herself: “As the Nile floods its banks, storms
rage, the date palms produce their fruit each year, as the corn sprouts, the rain pours
down and the seasons change, so would her marriage be.”44 Sayf al-Dīn, who represents
everything that is antagonistic to the village’s interests—family loyalties, public moral-
ity, and support of the indigent—first attacks al-Zayn and then is almost killed when the
latter takes his revenge. The Imām, as we noted above, serves as the symbol of official
religion in the village and as the major catalyst for the subdivisions within the male
segment of the small community, but he is also clearly identified as “perhaps the only
person al-Zayn hated.”45 Thus each one of these characters has a particular role to play
vis à vis al-Zayn himself, whose central place, implicit from the title, is thus confirmed.
That al-Zayn is unusual is clear almost from the outset of the story. His birth, appear-
ance, laughter, and behavior are all extraordinary.46 He is prepared to tackle hard tasks
and breaks down barriers between the village and the surround­ing nomadic communi-
ties.47 He is popular with the young and makes a special effort to take care of those un-
fortunates “whom the villagers regarded as abnormal,” the crippled and lame.48 If these
traits are unusual, then his relation­ship with al-Ḥanīn brings into the story an element
of mystery or even the mystic. He is described as a saint of God and “a pious man wholly

41. Ibid., 97; ibid., 90.

42. Ibid., 20, 62, 67, 78, 95, 100, 105–6, and 109; ibid., 38, 58, 64, 73, 88, 93, 96–97, and 101. The thumb-
nail sketches are on ibid., 108 and ibid., 99.
43. Ibid., 52 and 61; ibid., 52 and 57–58.
44. Ibid., 54; ibid. 54.
45. Ibid., 100; ibid., 93.
46. Ibid., 15; ibid., 33ff.
47. Ibid., 26 and 28; ibid., 40 and 41.
48. Ibid., 21 and 36; ibid., 38 and 45.
 The Novella in Arabic 43

dedicated to his religious devotions.”49 It is he who dubs al-Zayn “the blessed one of God,”
a term which is picked up and expanded by the villagers into “the legendary leader …
perhaps an angel sent down by God.”50 It is al-Ḥanīn who admonishes Maḥjūb that “Al-
Zayn’s no imbecile … he’s a blessed person. Tomorrow he’ll be marrying the best girl in
the village.”51 It is, of course, this relationship between al-Ḥanīn and al-Zayn and the fact
that the villagers pay such credence to a personification of popular Islam as al-Ḥanīn
that is the root cause of the ill feelings between al-Zayn and the Imām.
Al-Zayn thus emerges as a powerful symbol of the village’s better instincts and more
charitable virtues. When Sayf al-Dīn attacks al-Zayn and sends him to hospital, the latter
gets a glimpse of another world (one with clean sheets, no less). When he returns to the
village, it is “as though al-Zayn had been transformed into another person.”52 It is this
changed person who attacks Sayf al-Dīn with “an immensely terrifying strength with
which no one could deal.”53 It is only the intervention of al-Ḥanīn which saves Sayf al-
Dīn in what seems a classic example of a turning-point. Al-Zayn has already undergone a
transforma­tion, but “the incident of al-Ḥanīn” (as it is called) is followed by the “year of
al-Ḥanīn,”54 and changes of all kinds come thick and fast. The government decides out of
the blue to begin a whole series of projects in and around the village, and this, coupled
with a good price for cotton, improves the village’s economy. The earth becomes very
fruitful, and so do the women of the village. Sayf al-Dīn is completely transformed , too,
much to the amazement of the villagers, and is reconciled with al-Zayn. As the narra-
tor tells us, “miracle followed miracle in a fascinating manner.”55 All these changes also
affect the Imām and the villagers’ relationships with him: Sayf al-Dīn, the hero of the
unbelievers, now becomes a staunch member of the Imām’s “camp.”56 This entire process
of transformation is brought to a climax in the ritual joy of al-Zayn’s wedding. Al-Zayn
and the Imām are at least partially reconciled, the outlying communities are all involved,
and the new-found prosperity and fertility are symbolized by the wedding of Niʿma to al-
Zayn. The latter’s only regret is that al-Ḥanīn is not present to witness it.
Once again I believe that many of the elements generally associated with the novella
genre have been shown to be present in abundance in this superb contribution to Arabic
fiction. A work which shows a comparative economy in its portrayal of character and in
its choice of events manages to evoke images and themes far beyond the people and pas-
sions of a small Sudanese village on the Nile.

49. Ibid., 80 and 35; ibid., 75 and 44.

50. Ibid., 36, 65, 90, and 37; ibid., 45, 63, 82, and 46.
51. Ibid., 67; ibid., 64.
52. Ibid., 61; ibid., 64.
53. Ibid., 63; ibid., 61.
54. For example, ibid., 78, 81, and 101; ibid., 73, 77, and 94.
55. Ibid., 81, 89, 78, and 81; ibid., 77, 80, 73, and 77.
56. Ibid., 101–2; ibid., 95.
44 Chapter Four

Yūsuf Idrīs’s Qāʿ al-Madīna forms part of what a recent critic has called “a decade of
realism,” a vast outpouring of short stories, plays, and novels which Idrīs saw published
in book form beginning in 1954.57 While many of these works have been the subject of
detailed analysis, Qāʿ al-Madīna seems to have encountered a certain reticence on the part
of critics, at least on the basis of those reference works which are available to me. While
there can be no doubt that Idrīs’s output in the realm of the short story played a major
role in the continuing development of that genre, it is perhaps a certain doubt as to
where exactly Qāʿ al-Madīna fits along the spectrum of fiction already referred to which
may account for this situation, even though it looms comparatively large—literally—in
any list of Idrīs’s earliest published output.58
The analyses of the works of Ḥaqqī and Ṣāliḥ which we have essayed above may have
illustrated strong affinities with what might be termed the classic novella tradition, and
it is perhaps worthy of mention once again at this point that many contemporary theo-
rists of fictional genres would not regard the identification of such characteristics as a
requirement for identification of a novella. Yūsuf Idrīs’s story presents us with a case in
point, in that it has to be stated from the outset that Qāʿ al-Madīna does not display all the
more traditional novella characteristics. However, those scholars who are aware of Idrīs’s
undoubted abilities as one of the most imaginative and spontaneous geniuses in the his-
tory of modern Arabic fiction will probably not be surprised by that fact. We search in
vain, I believe, for the unusual or mysterious in Qāʿ al-Madīna. Judge ʿAbdallāh, for ex-
ample, is portrayed by the narrator as being completely ordinary; his life is described as
“boring and monotonous,” while he himself is “average in everything.”59 The entire work
is an illustration of the author’s ability to portray both character and, above all, back-
ground with a vivid realism and economy—two features which have contributed directly
to the appreciation of his short stories. The latter feature is no more evident than in the
memorable journey to the “city dregs” of the title, a passage which, in my opinion, quali-
fies as one of the most brilliant descriptive pieces in the whole of modern Arabic fiction.
That there are few characters in the story is obvious from even a cursory reading, but
what must be investigated further is the narrative strategy of the work.
It will be recalled that the central part of the story is taken up with an account of the
Judge’s relationship with Shuhrat, the married woman who comes to his flat purportedly
as a cleaning woman but actually to serve as the object of his complex sexual frustrations
and urges. This account is told by the Judge himself to his old friend, the actor Sharaf.

57. P. M. Kurpershoek, The Short Stories of Yūsuf Idrīs (Leiden, 1981), chapter III.
58. In Kurpershoek’s bibliography (see note 57) it is the first work to have required more than a
single issue of a newspaper or journal for first time publication (in this case, six issues of al-Jumhūriyya
in August, 1956).
59. Yūsuf Idrīs, A laysa kadhālika (Cairo, 1957), 280 and 282; Yūsuf Idrīs, In the Eye of the Beholder, 19
and 20.
 The Novella in Arabic 45

A great deal is made of Sharaf ’s abilities as a listener to stories and, in particular, to the
Judge’s accounts of his activities.60 The situation portrayed by the Judge himself and the
ensuing events serve to place a particular focus on Shuhrat herself. Other features sup-
port this notion. The first chapter of the work is devoted to a wonderfully sardonic por-
trait by the narrator of the Judge and his various speculations as to how he might have
lost his watch. The second chapter begins with the single short sentence: “It must have
been Shuhrat.”61 This is the first mention of her name, and its introduction in this fash-
ion, coupled with the story’s fierce concentration on her conduct, home environment,
and eventual downfall, all serve to make her, in my opinion, the primary focus of the
author’s narrative purpose, albeit through the agency of the Judge’s actions and motives.
Can we not regard the new blouse which Shuhrat (now called Amīra) is wearing at the
conclusion of the study as a concrete symbol of her fate?62 The Judge himself has already
guessed the significance of the change from milāya to blouse and skirt and has refused
to pay for the purchase of a new blouse; hence the need for her to steal the watch.63 The
final scene in the story is merely a confirmation of his worst suspicions, although, in
keeping with his own moral weakness so well portrayed at the beginning of the story, he
shows no signs of remorse.
Qāʿ al-Madīna describes a situation in which two lives come into contact and then
proceeds to develop it in one direction: moral weakness in one contributing to moral
downfall in the other. This is achieved through manipulation of time and also by fram-
ing, and the downfall itself is symbolized in a vivid fashion. All this occurs within an
economical narrative environment in which characters and characterization, time and
space, are restricted to those elements necessary to the narrative purpose of the work.
Qāʿ al-Madīna does indeed seem to show ele­ments of “intensity and expansion.”
What conclusion, if any, can we draw from this brief foray into the question of the
novella in Arabic fiction? Those who have moved to what Paul Hernadi terms “Beyond
Genre” will say that I have merely shown three works of Arabic fiction to be somewhere
along a spectrum which has an infinite number of positions based on a whole host of
criteria, with prescriptive devices near the bottom of the list of priorities, if present at
all.64 These are works of narrative fiction, and that is all. However, I have in each case
attempted to link any features which have been identified to the narrative purpose of
the work, and in Frye’s words to “clarify affinities.” The works of Ḥaqqī and Ṣāliḥ seem
to emerge as clear examples of the classic European novella tradition, while that of Idrīs

60. Ibid., 294; ibid., 29–30.

61. Ibid., 292; ibid., 28.
62. Ibid., 364; ibid., 77.
63. Idrīs, A laysa kadhālika, 329 and 332; Idrīs, In the Eye of the Beholder, 53–54 and 73.
64. Paul Hernadi, Beyond Genre: New Directions in Literary Classification (Ithaca, 1972).
46 Chapter Four

may be linked to them within the terms of reference of what might loosely be termed—at
least within the Anglo-American tradition—the post-Jamesian theorists.65
I would like to finish on a more historical note. The newly published first volume of
The Cambridge History of Arabic Literature states in its Editorial Introduction:

Contemporary Arabic writing owes much to European models, … but it is gradu-

ally changing into a literature in its own right, rich in prose, verse … and writing
for the stage.66

With reference to fiction, this addresses a subject to which I have referred earlier in a
work on the Arabic novel. One of the more interesting recent trends in fiction has been
the use to which earlier historical and literary texts have been put by writers such as
Jamal al-Ghītānī in Al-Zaynī Barakāt and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf in al-Nihāyāt (and the list
is by no means restricted to these). Here the writings of the past are being utilized in
new and creative ways to illustrate possible directions for a vigorous tradition of Arabic
fiction. The study under­taken here has continually suggested to me certain elements
of continuity in the tradition of Arabic narrative. If critical schools have been in search
of time manipulation, framing, symbol, and the mysterious or striking, do we need to
look further than Arabic’s largest and most famous collection of tales, allusion to which
is still as powerful as ever as seen in the title of a recent novel by Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Layālī
alf layla?67 Here the work of such scholars as Fārūq Khūrshīd and Shawqī ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm,
both significantly creative writers in their own right, become both indicative and useful,
suggesting that the discovery of “affinities” such as those attempted here may illustrate
a continuing tradition in Arabic, something on which Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā has long insist-
ed.68 While the influence of Western literature has been and will probably remain strong,
continuing investigation of and experiment with the narrative heritage may through
an invigorating oxymoron prove to be for some writers of fiction one of the elements
of modernity (al-ḥadātha). In the words of the author of one of the works analyzed here,
al-Ṭayyib Ṣālih:

Actually, one of the most significant things modern thought is doing is taking
another look at things of value to be found in the past.

(Bal min ahammi mā yafʿaluhu ’l-fikru ’l-ḥadīth fī wāqiʿi ’l-amri huwa annahu yuʿīdu
’l-naẓara wa-yaftaḥu ’l-ʿuyūn ʿalā ’l-ashyāʾ ’l-qayyima fī ’l-māḍī).69

65. Leibowitz, Narrative Purpose, 51.

66. Cambridge History of Arabic Literature. Vol. 1, Arabic Literature to the End of the Umayyad Period (Cam-
bridge, 1983), x.
67. Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Layālī alf layla (Cairo, 1982).
68. Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, Yanābīʿ al-ruʾyā (Beirut, 1979), 68–71.
69. “Tafāṣīl fī ʿālam al-Riwāya,” Al-ādāb 1 (1981): 4.
 5
The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women

This essay will attempt to link the theme of women in society to a particular genre in
modern Arabic literature, what in English is termed the short story. The initial focus will
be on the way that changes in the status of women in Middle Eastern societies have been
reflected in the development of the short story, as seen in the themes and techniques
that writers have selected to express their creative vision of this general topic. A second
section will examine the narrative voice in a sampling of contemporary Arabic short
stories, concentrating in particular on those in which the genders of author and narrator
are different.
The short story in Arabic, as developed at the hands of its early exponents, managed
to make full use of its generic characteristics to explore particulars while alluding to the
wider implications that were often examined in early Arabic novels with a certain lack of
subtlety or specificity, as, for example, in Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal’s Zaynab and ʿAbbās
Maḥmūd al-ʿAqqād’s Sāra. What is remarkable about the Arabic short story, however, is
not only the number of examples that deal with issues associated with women in society,
but also the fact that the comparatively short chronological divide between the develop-
ment of the short story in Arabic and its European precedents seems in part to account
for the emergence of a truly mature literary genre in Arabic within a remarkably short
time frame.

The Status of Women in the Modern Arabic Short Story

The Individual within the Traditional Family Structure

From the earliest stages in the development of the Arabic short story, a good deal of at-
tention has focused on the status of women in society. The traditional perspective of that
predominantly male society has been that the primary aspiration of its female members
is marriage. From the very beginnings of the short-story tradition in modern Arabic lit-
erature, writers have cast a mostly critical eye on the institution of marriage—its prece-
dents, rituals, and consequences—using the gradual and often confrontational processes
of change within it as one of their most frequent themes. The depiction of the sequence

47
48 Chapter Five

from young girl, to adolescent woman, to wife, to mother, has continued to provide the
short story writer with a plethora of opportunities for the exploration of the conventions
that govern the lives of women in the Arab world.
The short story often chooses to describe the position of the young girl within the
protective cocoon of the family by portraying a relationship with one particular family
member. Especially characteristic of the extended family that still survives as a Mediter-
ranean institution is the role of the young girl as granddaughter.1 In the Lebanese writer
Ḥanān al-Shaykh’s (b. 1945) story, “Ḥammām al-niswān” (Women’s Bath), the girl’s moth-
er has died and it is the older generation, with its traditional and completely different
values, that has to assume the responsibility for taking the young daughter of a Shiʿite
family to a newly opened swimming pool for women in the capital city of Beirut.2 Among
the poorer segments of society, young girls are often part of the workforce. In “Naẓra” (A
Glance), a typical vignette from the Egyptian Yūsuf Idrīs’s (1927–1991) earliest creative
period, we see a young girl deftly weaving her way through the chaos of the city traffic
carrying a tray of food; there is presumably a lesson in the fact that it is the narrator who
is almost knocked down in trying to observe her progress.3 Another of Idrīs’s insightful
portraits, albeit from a different class, “Laʿbat al-bayt” (Household Game), provides a
somewhat sardonic commentary on sex roles in family life to be gleaned from the pos-
tures adopted by two young children. Fātin, the young girl, leaves in tears when Samīḥ,
her young playmate, adopts an aggressively male role in their enactment of grown-up
married life.4
With the onset of puberty and adolescence, the protective cocoon of the family
comes to be seen in an entirely different light. Customs, rituals, etiquette and taboos
combine to make this particular phase in the life of the majority of women into one of
familial and societal constraint. The Arabic short story provides us with very few “boy
meets girl” fairy-tales where women manage within the context of societal convention
to find the person of their own choice and, in the time-honored phrase, “live happily ever

1. The negative side of this larger family structure is described and discussed by E. Accad, Sexuality
and War: Literary Masks of the Middle East (New York: NYU Press, 1992), 29.
2. Ḥanān al-Shaykh, “Ḥammām al-niswān,” in Wardat al-ṣaḥrāʾ (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-Jāmiʿiyya lil-
Dirāsāt wa-l-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1982), 9–18. The figure of the grandmother also appears in the titles of
the Egyptian Suhayr al-Qalamāwī’s early collection of short stories, Aḥādīth jaddatī (Cairo: n.p., 1935),
and of Marilyn Booth’s recent collection of short stories written by Egyptian women, My Grandmother’s
Cactus, tr. Marilyn Booth (London: Quartet Books, 1991).
3. Yūsuf Idrīs, “Naẓra,” in Arkhaṣ layālī (Cairo: Dār al-Kātib al-ʿArabī, n.d.), 11–12, translated by Trevor
Le Gassick as “A Stare,” in In the Eye of the Beholder, ed. Roger Allen (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica,
1978), 3–4; also P. M. Kurpershoek, The Short Stories of Yusuf Idris (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1982), 98–100.
4. Yūsuf Idrīs, “Laʿbat al-bayt,” in Ākhir al-dunyā (Cairo: Muʾassasat Rūz al-Yūsuf, 1961); see Yūsuf
Idrīs, al-Muʾallafāt al-kāmila: al-qiṣaṣ al-qaṣīra (Cairo: ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 1971), 378–89; translated by Roger
Allen as “Playing House,” in In the Eye of the Beholder, 79–87.
 The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women 49

after.” The Tunisian writer Muṣṭafā al-Fārisī’s (b. 1931) story, “Man yadrī …? Rubbamā”
(Who knows …? Maybe), manages to bring two young lovers together in marital bliss
after some preliminary jealousies and suspicions have been averted, but the point of the
tale is not in the ending—the couple living happily in a new apartment, the kind of ter-
minal prize that Henry James finds so unsatisfactory5—but in the narrator’s wonderfully
sardonic intrusions into the reader’s encounter with the text.
Pursuing this somewhat illusory theme of fairy-tale romance one stage further, the
Egyptian story-teller Salwā Bakr (b. 1949) provides a carefully drawn picture of con-
temporary “marital bliss.” In the title story of her collection, “ʿAn al-rūḥ allatī suriqat
tadrījiyyan” (The Spirit That Was Stolen Step by Step), we follow the life of a married
couple who not only have a flat with plants and a cat, but also respond to the communal
pressures to purchase all the gadgets that modern life offers. It is the gradual process
implied by the title—the disenchantment with evening excursions to the cinema, the
first signs of a middle-aged paunch and, unkindest cut of all, the reliance on television
soap-operas—that comes to symbolize the meaninglessness of a marriage dominated by
the demoralizing routines of modern life.6
Still within the family structure, the figure of the brother often assumes authorita-
tive dimensions. In the Egyptian Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s (1905–1992) “Kunnā thalātha aytām” (We
Were Three Orphans), the first-person narrator is a brother who finds the tables turned
on him; or, as he himself expresses it in a proverb at the conclusion of the story, “rāḥ
yaṣṭād … iṣṭādūhu” (“He went hunting but they hunted him”).7 Left as an orphan with
two attractive sisters and made fully aware of his brotherly responsibilities, the narrator
moves with them into a flat in Cairo’s Garden City district that they cannot really afford,
so as to provide them with better “prospects.” In the end, it is he who finds a match in the
much idealized person of Saniyya.8
Such apparent fraternal neglect seems positively benevolent, however, in the con-
text of other narratives involving brothers and sisters, ones in which the familial author-
ity vested in the brother figure leads to sheer violence. In “al-Thalj ākhir al-layl” (Snow at
the End of the Night), the Syrian Zakariyyā Tāmir (b. 1931), one of the most accomplished

5. Muṣṭafā al-Fārisī, “Man yadrī …? Rubbamā,” in al-Qanṭara hiya al-ḥayāh (Tunis: Dār al-Tūnisiyya,
1968), 87–102. Henry James’ comment is as follows: “A distribution of the last of prizes, pensions, hus-
bands, wives, babies, millions, appended paragraphs and cheerful remarks.” See Henry James, “The Art
of Fiction,” in Theory of Fiction: Henry James, ed. J. E. Miller Jr. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press,
1972), 32.
6. Salwā Bakr, “ʿAn al-rūḥ allatī suriqat tadrījiyyan,” from ʿAn al-rūḥ allatī suriqat tadrījiyyan (Cairo:
Miṣriyya lil-Nashr wa-l-Tawzīʿ, 1989), 19–25.
7. Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī, Qindīl Umm Hāshim (Cairo: Dār al-Maʿārif, [1941?]), 74–87; translated by M. M. Badawi
as “The Three Orphans,” in The Saint’s Lamp and Other Stories (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), 50–58.
8. See Ḥaqqī, Qindīl, 81–2/Saint’s Lamp, 55–6. See also Miriam Cooke’s comment on this description in
The Anatomy of an Egyptian Intellectual (Washington, D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1984), 70.
50 Chapter Five

writers of symbolic stories, brilliantly captures the atmosphere of blind hatred that the
norms of the society can arouse in a tyrannical father (whose daughter has run away
from home) and transfer them to the son; it is only when the girl’s brother envisages the
act of slitting her throat that memories of their childhood together come flooding back
to temper and then curb his relish at the thought of carrying out such communally con-
doned murder.9 Tāmir’s story is a complex picture of the mind of a young man tortured
by the incompatibilities of societal convention. The Iraqi writer May Muẓaffar’s (b. 1948)
story, “Awrāq khāṣṣa” (Private Papers), takes the convention still further, in that the
brother, self-appointed guardian of the family honor, shoots his sister dead on the street
as she walks hand in hand with her beloved.10
The didactic purpose of many early short-story writers makes the “one slip” theme
a popular choice, “a fate,” if you will, “worse than death.” One of the earliest stories of
all, the Lebanese Khalīl Jubrān’s (1883–1931) “Martā al-Bāniyya” (Martha, the Girl from
Bān), is an example of this, as is the Iraqi Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb’s (1908–1988) “Sāqiṭa” (The
Harlot).11 The heroines of both these tales have fallen into a life of prostitution, aban-
doned to their fate by their families. The vigorous didactic purpose implied by this no-
tion of irretrievable loss of honor and family acceptability finds a more forgiving voice
in the Egyptian Maḥmūd Taymūr’s (1894–1973) story, “Najiyya ibnat al-shaykh” (Najiyya
the Shaykh’s Daughter), in which a father who has thrown his daughter out for making
“one slip” is reconciled with her on her death-bed and then rails at a preacher in the
mosque who consigns whores and adulterers to hell-fire.12
The tragedies represented in these narratives and their didactic motives represent
the extreme end of a spectrum that is used by short-story writers to reflect a situation
fraught with both potential and actual tension. In an early example of a less tragic variety,

9. Zakariyyā Tāmir, “al-Thalj ākhir al-layl,” in Rabīʿ fī al-ramād (Damascus: al-Fann al-Ḥadīth al-ʿĀlamī,
1963), 7–20; translated by M. Shaheen as “Snow at Night,” in Arabic Writing Today: The Short Story, ed.
Mahmod Manzalaoui (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1968), 269–75.
10. May Muẓaffar, “Awrāq khāṣṣa,” in al-Bajaʿ (Baghdad: Wizārat al-Thaqāfah wa-l-Funūn, 1979), 17–
26; translated by Simone Fattal as “Personal Papers,” in Opening the Gates, ed. Margot Badran and Miriam
Cooke (London, Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1990), 180–85.
11. Khalīl Jubrān, ʿArāʾis al-murūj (Beirut: Maktabat Ṣādir, 1980 [New York: Al Mohajer, 1906); trans-
lated by H. N. Nahmad as “Martha” in Jubran Khalil Jubran, Nymphs of the Valley (New York: Knopf, 1968),
3–9 (abridged); Dhū l-Nūn Ayyūb, al-Āthār al-kāmila, vol. 1: al-Qiṣaṣ (Baghdad: Wizārat al-Iʿlām, 1977),
95–103 (from the collection, al-Ḍaḥāyā [1937]). The most infamous quotation on this theme is that of
Yūsuf Wahbī, the famous Egyptian actor: “A girl’s honour is like a single match.” Quoted by Ghāda al-
Sammān in Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, ed. E. Warnock Fernea and B. Qattan Bezirgan (Austin:
University of Texas Press, 1977), 395.
12. Maḥmūd Taymūr, “Najiyya ibnat al-shaykh,” in al-Shaykh ʿafāʾ Allāh (Cairo: al-Maṭbaʿa al-Salafiyya,
1936), 115–22. See Rotraud Wielandt, Das erzählerische Frühwerk Maḥmūd Taymūrs: Beitrag zu einem Archiv
der modernen arabischen Literatur (Beirut: Orient-Institut der Deutschen Morgenländischen Gesellschaft;
Wiesbaden: in Kommission bei Franz Steiner, 1983, 1983), 381–84.
 The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women 51

“Fatāt al-jīrān” (The Girl Next Door), Maḥmūd Taymūr explores (with the obvious didac-
tic purpose characteristic of the period) the ridiculous aspect of parental attitudes, as a
young man’s interest in the daughter of Greek neighbors is only aroused when he over-
hears his mother talking about his moral probity.13 Much more psychologically penetrat-
ing is another story by Zakariyyā Tāmir, “Wajh al-qamar” (“The Face of the Moon”), in
which the narrator tells us the story of Samīḥa, who was raped as a child and has recently
been divorced by her husband. She has failed to make the required transition from a
cloistered girl slapped by her father for revealing too much leg, to a passionate lover
endeavoring as best she can to imitate the movements and groans of the sexual act that
have been rapidly taught to her by her female relatives in anticipation of her marriage.14
The fishbowl atmosphere within which so many of these surreptitious relationships
are supposed to occur, and the suspicions and conspiracies that arise as a result, are well
captured by Yūsuf Idrīs in “Ḥādithat Sharaf ” (A Case of Honor), a story that begins with
the narrator informing his readers, “I think they still refer to love over there [i.e., in
the provinces] as ‘the shame.’”15 An entire community, that of a country estate—with all
its jealousies and complex relationships—is possessed by the idea that “something may
have happened” between Fāṭima and Gharīb, its two most beautiful young people. In fact,
it is proved that nothing has happened, but at the end of the story the narrator makes it
clear that what has been lost is a sense of innocence.
In contrast with all these stories in which young people do manage to meet, what-
ever the consequences, we may cite examples from the Arabian peninsula in which the
situation is portrayed in even more restrictive terms. Ḥanān al-Shaykh’s “Bint ismuha
Tuffāḥa” (“A Girl Named Apple”) tells the story of an oasis woman who, while hoping for
the prospect of marriage, continuously resists the communal means of advertising her
availability, namely, putting a colored flag on the roof of the house—the color depend-
ing on the age of the prospective bride.16 It is hardly surprising that, as the tradition of
fiction has developed in the Arabian peninsula, the frustrations resulting from society’s
attitudes toward the status of unmarried women has been one of the most prevalent
themes.17

13. Maḥmūd Taymūr, “Fatāt al-jīrān,” in ʿAmm Mitwallī (Cairo: n.p., 1925), 69–82; see Wielandt, Das
erzählerische, 239–40.
14. Zakariyyā Tāmir, “Wajh al-qamar,” in Dimashq al-ḥarāʾiq (Damascus: Manshūrāt Wizārat al-Thaqāfa
wa-l-Irshād al-Qawmī, 1973), 95–103; translated by Husam Al-Khateeb as “The Face of the Moon,” Journal
of Arabic Literature 3 (1972): 96–100.
15. “Ḥādithat Sharaf,” in Hādithat Sharaf (Cairo: ʿĀlam al-Kutub, 1971), 94–123.
16. Ḥanān al-Shaykh, “Bint ismuhā Tuffāḥa,” in Wardat al-ṣaḥrāʾ, 121–26; translated by Miriam Cooke
as “A Girl Named Apple,” Translation 11 (Fall 1983), 4–8; reprinted in Badran and Cooke (eds), Opening the
Gates, 155–59.
17. This can also be gauged from recently published anthologies in English: see The Literature of Mod-
ern Arabia, ed. Salma K. Jayyusi (London: Routledge, 1988); and Assassination of Light: Modern Saudi Short
52 Chapter Five

From the outset, the institution of marriage itself has been the focus of a large num-
ber of narratives. The convention of arranged marriage and the modes of coercion fre-
quently involved aroused Khalīl Jubrān into homiletic ire in both “Warda al-Hānī” and
“Maḍjaʿ al-ʿarūs” (The Bridal Couch).18 More recently, the entire process of marriage be-
tween cousins and the repulsiveness of marital rape and infidelity are explored in terse
reminiscence by the Egyptian Alīfa Rifʿat (1930–1995) in “Fī layl al-shitāʾ al-ṭawīl” ([In
the Long Winter Night), a story whose impact is heightened by the fact that the hero-
ine’s mother informs her that the situation described is simply the way things are: “All
men are like that.”19 While these stories lay heavy stress on the intolerable situation in
which these married couples live, dysfunctional marriage appears in a variety of guises.
In “Zawjatuhu” (His Wife), Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb allows his narrator to provide a very male-
oriented picture of a curious relationship. Two friends walking down the street bump
into a woman (who, we are obligingly told, is “unusual”).20 It emerges that she is the wife
of one of the two men and has married him after a bet with a girlfriend. He has left her in
disgust, but she has grown to love him. They remain married, but only in name.
The locus classicus for the dysfunctional marriage within the tradition of the Ara-
bic short story, however, must surely be the miniature masterpiece of Yūsuf Idrīs, “al-
Martaba al-muqaʿʿara” (The Hollow Mattress), where the expectations of the opening
sentences are dashed in a nihilistic parable of life in general as seen through the minimal
communications of a married couple.21 Some stories portray attempts to bring about
change in the marital situation. An example of this is Maḥmūd Taymūr’s story, “Inqilāb”
(“Revolution”), where a letter from a wife to a woman friend informs her that she has
transformed her marriage by deliberately making her husband jealous.22 On a more psy-
chological plane, Yūsuf Idrīs’s “ʿAlā waraq sīlūfān” (“In Cellophane Wrapping”) takes
the pampered wife of a pediatric surgeon into the operating theatre to show her an as-
pect of her husband’s personality that she had never realized existed. By the conclusion,
the husband has emerged as a powerful tyrant in his professional life whose apparent

Stories, translated by A. Molnar Heinrichsdorff and Abu Bakr Bagader (Washington, D.C.: Three Conti-
nents Press, 1990).
18. Khalīl Jubrān, al-Arwāḥ al-mutamarrida (New York: Jarīdat al-Muhājir, 1908); translated by H. N.
Nahmad as Spirits Rebellious (New York: Knopf, 1969), 3–28, 47–64.
19. Alīfa Rifʿat, “Fī layl al-shitāʾ al-ṭawīl,” in Fī layl al-shitāʾ al-ṭawīl (Cairo: Maṭbaʿat al-ʿĀṣima, 1985),
5–14; translated by Denys Johnson-Davies as “The Long Night of Winter,” in Distant View of a Minaret and
Other Stories (London: Quartet, 1983), 55–59.
20. Dhū al-Nūn Ayyūb, al-Āthār al-kāmila, vol. 1: al-Qiṣaṣ, 181 (from the collection, Ṣadīq [1938]).
21. Yūsuf Idrīs, “al-Martaba al-muqaʿʿara,” in al-Naddāha (Cairo: Dār al-Hilāl, 1969), 70–71; translated
by Roger Allen as “The Concave Mattress,” in In the Eye of the Behlder, 119–20; also Kupershoek, Short
Stories of Yusuf Idris, 161–64.
22. Maḥmūd Taymūr, “Inqilāb,” in Firʿawn al-ṣaghīr (Cairo: n.p., 1939), 101–14; translated by G. M.
Wickens as “Revolution,” Nimrod, 24/2 (Spring/Summer 1981), 129–34.
 The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women 53

submissiveness to his wife in their domestic situation is a reflection of his wish to meet
her every need. It is, however, presumably a male narrator who comments on her sexy
appearance at the story’s outset, and the adulation that she feels toward her husband at
the end seems somewhat overdrawn.23
With the role of the wife frequently comes that of the mother.24 The traditional crav-
ing for male heirs is reflected in dire form in the Lebanese writer Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿayma’s
(1889–1988) well-known story, “Sanatuhā al-jadīda” (Her New Year), in which a village
frame is placed around the dark secrets in the household of Shaykh Abū Nāṣīf. After giv-
ing birth to seven daughters, the shaykh’s wife is pregnant again; the newborn child is a
girl, but this time the shaykh buries it alive, announcing to the world that it was a still-
born son.25 In short stories dealing with marriage and the family, children are frequently
present, although their presence is often implicit. Stories that focus on children tend to
be about them and their world, rather than on their role within the larger family struc-
ture. Where children do seem to be a factor is when they are the cause of a problem. In
the Kuwaiti Laylā al-ʿUthmān’s (b. 1945) story, “al-Raḥīl” (Departure), a couple about to
leave for an extended stay abroad sift through their belongings and come across a doll
belonging to their dead child.26 The Lebanese Laylā Baʿalbakkī’s (b. 1936) “Safīnat ḥanān
ilā ʾl-qamar” (Ship of Tenderness to the Moon) is also about a couple with no children,
but, while the sexual allusions in the story are controversial enough, what is even more
so in societal terms is that the female narrator is refusing her husband’s desire to have
children.27 If the homes in these last two stories are childless, the opposite is the case

23. Yūsuf Idrīs, “ʿAlā waraq sīlūfān,” in Bayt min laḥm wa-qiṣaṣ ukhrā (Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwda, 1971), 37–
58; translated by Roger Allen as “In Cellophane Wrapping,” in In the Eye of the Beholder, 169–89.
24. “For the Arab man, women exist in various personifications: virgin, girl, wife, mother. There is no
room for the woman friend or lover.… There is no love, only sexuality.… Marriage is a sexual pleasure on
the one hand and a means of procreating on the other; the image of the wife is thus identified with that
of the mother.” A. Khalīlī quoted in M. Salmān, “Arab Women,” Khamsīn 6 (1978), 26; quoted in Cooke,
Anatomy of an Egyptian Intellectual, 163, n. 4. Najīb Maḥfūẓ puts the following comment into the mouth of
Khadīja in his novel, al-Sukkariyya: “If a bride doesn’t get pregnant and have children, what use is she?”
See Najīb Maḥfūẓ, al-Sukkariyya (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1956), 349; translated by W. Maynard Hutchins
and A. Botros Samaan as Sugar Street (New York: Doubleday, 1992), 274.
25. Mīkhāʾīl Nuʿayma, “Sanatuhā ʾl-jadīda,” in Kān mā kān; translated by J. R. Perry as “The New Year,”
in Mikhail Naimy, A New Year: Stories, Autobiography and Poems (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1974), 23–32.
26. Laylā al-ʿUthmān, “al-Raḥīl,” in al-Raḥīl (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1979), 47–59; translated by Olive
Kenny and N. Shihab Nye as “Pulling Up Roots,” in Jayyusi (ed.), Literature of Modern Arabia, 483–88.
27. Laylā Baʿalbakkī, “Safīnat ḥanān ilā ʾl-qamar,” in Safīnat ḥanān ilā ʾl-qamar (Beirut: al-Maktab al-
Tijārī, 1964), 179–90; translated by D. Johnson-Davies as “Spaceship of Tenderness to the Moon,” in
Modern Arabic Short Stories, tr. Denys Johnson Davies (London: Oxford University Press, 1967), 130–36. For
a transcript of the trial at which Baʿalbakkī was accused of obscenity, see Fernea and Bezirgan (eds.),
Middle Eastern Muslim Women Speak, 173–90.
54 Chapter Five

in “al-Wāfida” (The Newcomer) by the Iraqi Daisy al-Amīr (b. 1935).28 The daughter of a
family with nine children and struggling to make ends meet is desperately afraid that her
mother is pregnant again, but, when she confronts her, it is to discover that her father’s
overriding will has been expressed in another way: her sister is to be married off.
In a society in which women’s functions are a reflection of the presence of men in
one role or another, the status of the widow is often problematic. This ranges from the
brutal murder of Haniyya by her male relatives in the Egyptian writer Edwār al-Kharrāṭ’s
(1926–2015) “Ḥīṭān ʿāliya” (High walls) to the sweet reminiscences of Helena, the recent-
ly widowed woman in the Lebanese Tawfīq Yūsuf ʿAwwād’s (1911–1989) “al-Armala” (The
Widow).29 Once again, however, it is Yūsuf Idrīs—in “Bayt min laḥm” (“House of Flesh”),
an almost tactile portrait in words of loneliness and sexual deprivation in the home of a
widow with three daughters and no male presence—who best captures the frustrations
aroused by social convention.30

The Individual Outside the Family Structure

Within the stories surveyed thus far, the family and its members are clearly seen as one
of society’s most cogent repositories of traditional mores. The changes that occur in the
larger framework of society as a whole are shown in their impact on the family struc-
ture but through its individual members. That process of change, however, inevitably
involves a far greater transformation in societal attitudes, as women have begun to move
out of the confines of the familial environment and into society at large, into educational
institutions and eventually into the workplace itself.
It is hardly surprising that the process of representing the complexities of this social
transformation in fictional form is intimately connected with the growth of educational
opportunities and the raising of women’s consciousness on the issue of their rights. In
Egypt—for which we appear to have the most available information—Hudā Shaʿrāwī’s
(1879–1947) founding of the Egyptian feminist movement in 1923 was followed by a pro-
liferation of periodicals that addressed women’s issues; the availability of such publica-
tions provided increased opportunities for expression in fictional form. The year 1935
saw the appearance in the public domain of the first collection of short stories by a

28. Daisy al-Amīr, “The Newcomer,” in Iraqi Short Stories: An Anthology, ed. Y. T. Hafidh and L. al-Dilaimi
(Baghdad: Dar al-Ma’mun, 1988), 283–88.
29. Edwār al-Kharrāṭ, “Ḥīṭān ʿāliya,” from Ḥīṭān ʿāliya (Cairo: self-published, 1968; Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb,
1990); and Tawfīq Yūsuf ʿAwwād, al-Ṣabī al-aʿraj (Beirut: Dār al-Thaqāfah, 1963), 175–89.
30. Yūsuf Idrīs, “Bayt min laḥm,” in Bayt min laḥm wa-qiṣaṣ ukhrā, 5–13; translated by Mona Mikhail as
“A House of Flesh,” in In the Eye of the Beholder, 191–98; and by Denys Johnson-Davies as “House of Flesh,”
in Egyptian Short Stories (London: Heinemann; Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1978), 1–7. See
also Fedwa Malti-Douglas, “Blindness and Sexuality: Traditional Mentalities in Yūsuf Idrīs’ ‘House of
Flesh,’” Literature East and West 25 (“Critical Pilgrimages,” 1989), 70–78.
 The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women 55

woman, Aḥādīth jaddatī (Stories of My Grandmother) by the Egyptian Suhayr al-Qalamāwī

(1911–1997), a pioneer here as in the academic sphere. As women writers have begun to
join their male colleagues in giving fictional expression to their ideas and emotions, they
have brought new perspectives and voices to the depiction of the social reality they wit-
ness. Al-Qalamāwī herself clearly suggests her views regarding these changing roles in
a story entitled “Imraʾa nājiḥa” (A Successful Woman). Her readers are given a portrait
of a young woman, Naʿīma, who seems to have let all the “right” opportunities pass her
by: the attraction she feels for her hairdresser boss is thwarted when he marries a richer
woman; when she returns with her mother to their village, it is only to find that her
cousin has married too. In the end, however, we are led to believe that she is the winner.
She opens her own hairdressing salon and is highly successful. Meeting her former boss
in the street one day, she is struck by how much he has changed; but she cannot pause for
long, since she has to collect the day’s takings from her business.31
In the period since the Second World War, the pace of social change has quickened.
In particular, the revolutionary decade of the 1950s had a major impact on every country
and society in the Arab world, and in several societies that provided a conducive context
for a further expansion of woman’s role in society. The almost inevitable tensions that
arose as women began to enter the workplace in Egypt are well portrayed in several
of the vignettes in the Egyptian Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s (1911–1988) interesting work, al-Marāyā
(Mirrors). In fact, the narrator himself draws a specific contrast between the arrival in his
office of ʿAbda Sulaymān in 1944 (the first woman to be appointed a civil servant in the
secretarial department) and Camelia Zahrān in 1965 (“old faces … had all disappeared,
and a new wave of civil servants, half of them members of the fair sex, had invaded the
scene”).32 These societal transformations, and a gradual but palpable increase in publi-
cation opportunities, have both been reflected in the output of short stories by female
authors that take up the subject of the changing role of women in contemporary Arab
society.
The situation described by Maḥfūẓ in al-Marāyā is seen in an entirely different light in
the Egyptian Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī’s Mawt maʿālī al-wazīr sābiqan (Death of an Ex-Minister).33
A minister, who believes that a woman’s place is in the home, narrates a sequence of
events as he finds himself confronted with a female employee who, while punctilious
in her duties, stares him straight in the eye and steadfastly refuses to be overawed by

31. Suhayr al-Qalamāwī, “Imraʾa nājiḥa,” from al-Shayāṭīn talhū (Cairo: Dār al-Qalam, 1964), 147–56.
32. Najīb Maḥfūẓ, al-Marāyā (Beirut: Dār al-Qalam, 1972), 268, 353; translated by Roger Allen as Mirrors
(Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1977), 180, 239. See also Yūsuf Idrīs’ novel, al-ʿAyb (Cairo: Muʾassasat
Rūz al-Yūsuf, 1962), which provides a rather superficial view of the situation in the workplace, showing
the way in which the first woman employee in an office that thrives on corruption is herself gradually
corrupted both financially and sexually.
33. “Mawt maʿālī al-wazīr sābiqan,” from Mawt maʿālī al-wazīr sābiqan (Cairo: Manshūrāt Dār al-Ādāb,
1980).
56 Chapter Five

his masculine presence. The situation obsesses him to such an extent that he loses his
concentration during an important meeting and is fired. In this story not only do we
find a woman serving as a professional in the workplace, but we also learn the details
concerning this clash of traditional male expectations and more modern professional
norms from a male narrator. Many other short stories depict women in professional roles
from a female perspective. The narrator in Daisy al-Amīr’s “Marāyā al-ʿuyūn” (Mirrors
of the Eyes) is annoyed and defiant. A professional woman attending a conference, she
is the only female in a mirror-lined hotel restaurant. Withstanding the barrage of stares
while she waits for her food to arrive, she eventually returns to her room in disgust.34
For the air stewardess narrator of the Egyptian Zaynab Rushdī’s (1936–1998) “Taṭābuq
al-muwāṣafāt” (Congruence of Specifications), an encounter with a male passenger on a
flight from Cairo to Paris brings childhood memories flooding back, but she is frustrated
when, upon arrival in the French capital, the man prefers to visit the Louvre on his own.35
Stories such as these depict the wide variety of situations and reactions as women
enter the professional workplace within the urban business environment. It should, of
course, be emphasized that the traditional norms among the poorer classes of society
and in the countryside have always permitted, indeed expected, women to work along-
side their male counterparts. Such venues have not in general been the favorite topics
of writers of modern Arabic fiction, most of whom by both background and predilection
have preferred to focus on the urban middle class and its multi-faceted problems. Among
notable recent portraits of the struggles and aspirations of poorer women is Salwā Bakr’s
deliciously ironic narrative, “Zīnāt fī janāzat al-raʾīs” (Zīnāt at the President’s Funeral),
in which the protagonist succeeds in extending her small hovel and expanding the scope
of her “business” with the local schoolchildren against a backdrop of attempts to com-
municate with the president by letter, initiatives that come to an abrupt end when the
president dies.36
In those societies where traditional norms are prevalent, the process of change has
begun relatively later. In Saudi Arabia, for example, the short story is fulfilling its il-
lustrative and didactic function through a number of interesting insights into the lives
and aspirations of women, and at the hands of both male and female authors. A primary
focus of developments in the lives of women has been that of education. The Saudi writer
Khayriyya al-Saqqāf (b. 1951), for example, writes about a girl who is called home from
her boarding school in the middle of term to learn from her parents that they have ar-
ranged her marriage. The title, “Ightiyāl al-nūr fī majrā al-nahr” (Assassination of Light

34. Daisy al-Amīr, “Marāyā al-ʿuyūn,” in Wuʿūd li-al-bayʿ (Beirut: al-Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya lil-Dirāsa
wa-l-Nashr, 1981), 17–20.
35. Zaynab Rushdī, “Taṭābuq al-muwāṣafāt,” in Yaḥduth aḥyānan (Cairo: Muʾassasat Dār al-Shabʿ,
1975), 38–42.
36. Salwā Bakr, “Zīnāt fī janāzat al-raʾīs,” from Zīnāt fī janāzat al-raʾīs (Cairo: n.p., 1989), 19–25.
 The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women 57

at the River’s Flow], may be somewhat melodramatic, but it says a great deal about the
way in which one contemporary Saudi writer regards this way of destroying a woman’s
aspirations for an education and possibly a career.37
War is one effective vehicle for challenging and often destroying prevailing societal
values. Civil war, in particular, may radically dislocate traditional norms; the aftermath
of such tragic conflicts rarely, if ever, permits a return to the status quo ante. Women
writers of fiction in Lebanon have clearly viewed the civil war in their homeland as such
a transforming event; their literary contributions have of necessity placed them in the
vanguard of discussions concerning the changing role of women within Arab society and
the depiction of it in fictional genres. Ghāda al-Sammān (b. 1942) and Emily Naṣrallāh
(1931–2018), from Syria and Lebanon respectively, have written short stories and longer
works that provide graphic illustration of the horrors involved and reflect on the crucial
anchoring force that women try to provide in such circumstances, often in the face of
insuperable odds.38 In two separate studies of Lebanese women’s fiction, Miriam Cooke
and Evelyn Accad have shown clearly the way in which the utterly inhuman and illogical
behavior engendered by the civil war has forced women into a more self-assertive and
aggressive role that challenges many of the givens of that particular society and, at least
by implication, of others in the region as well.39
As these writers have addressed themselves in their fiction to the unspeakable, they
have endeavored at the same time to prepare the way for a more logical tomorrow; sev-
eral of them posit a society in which their own role and rights will be different. The pro-
tagonist in the Palestinian Nuhā Samāra’s (1944–1992) “Wajhān li-imraʾa” (Woman with
Two Faces) is a schoolteacher who is left to care for her ailing father on her own when
her businessman husband decides to accept his company’s offer of a posting to Paris.
Musing about the drudgery of her married life against the backdrop of the daily destruc-
tion of Beirut, she decides to liberate herself. She cuts her luxuriant head of hair (that
her husband adores) very short and makes contact with Munaḥ, the handsome leader of
a guerrilla cell who is also a friend of her husband. She gives clear voice to the view that,
if she has been left by her husband to cope with the insanity of the Lebanese civil war,
then the initiative to act in the present so as to prepare for the future is hers; in making

37. Khayriyya Ibrāhīm al-Saqqāf, An tubḥira naḥwa ʾl-abʿād (Riyadh: Dār al-ʿUlūm lil-Ṭibāʿa wa-l-Nashr,
1982); translated by A. M. Heinrichsdorff and Abu Bakr Bagader in Assassination of Light, 47–51.
38. Ghāda al-Sammān, Bayrūt 1975 (Beirut: Manshūrāt Ghāda al-Sammān, 1975); and Kawābīs Bayrūt
(Beirut: n.p., 1980); Emily Nasrallāh, al-Yanbūʿ (Beirut: n.p., 1978); and al-Marʾa fī 17 qiṣṣa (Beirut: Nawfal,
1983). Several of Naṣrallāh’s stories about the war are translated in the collection, Emily Nasrallah, A
House Not Her Own, translated by T. Khalil-Khouri (Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island: Gynergy Books,
1992).
39. See Miriam Cooke, War’s Other Voices (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1988) and Accad,
Sexuality and War.
58 Chapter Five

that decision she feels no obligation to act on her own or to lead the cloistered life of a
dutiful wife to an absent husband.40

The Narrative Voice

The emergence of the female voice in the short story in a more individualized and even
revolutionary light is, needless to say, a gradual process, and one that is directly con-
nected with the increase in the number of women who have had the interest, not to say
the opportunity, to become creative writers. It has often proved frustrating; as Marilyn
Booth observes, their reality has tended to be “shaped and usually constrained by the
rigid social expectations surrounding home management and childbearing in marriage
as women’s prescribed roles.”41 In other words, a decision to embark upon a writing ca-
reer has, more often than not, implied adding an extra dimension to the obligations,
professional and/or familial, that already exist.
Against this background those women writers who wish to assert their individual-
ity through a new kind of fictional voice have clearly had to seek for different narrative
modes of expression. In the realm of the novel, the appearance of Laylā Baʿalbakkī’s Anā
aḥyā (I Am Alive) in 1958 is viewed by many critics as a landmark in that process. The very
title presents a forceful statement, a challenge. The account of family relationships and
feelings is no longer given within the framework of a distanced, omniscient third-person
narrative, but shifts to a direct first-person experiential montage. As a French commen-
tator notes, “What particularly shocked some Arab readers is the frankness with which
this young woman tackles the problems involved in family and sexual relationships.”42 In
the early 1960s, the Syrian Colette Khūrī (b. 1931) renewed the challenge implied in the
title of Baʿalbakkī’s novel by publishing Ayyām maʿahu (Days with Him) and Layla wāḥida
(One Night).43 When Ghāda al-Sammān’s collection of short stories, ʿĀynāka qadarī (Your
Eyes, My Fate), appeared in 1962, some people assumed that yet another voice was be-
ing added to what were often regarded as fictional confessions by women writers. Al-
Sammān herself, described by Miriam Cooke as “someone who seems to treat the whole
of life as an absurdist stage, with herself as the main character playing out whatever role
suits her at the moment,” seems to have been at some pains to cultivate such a persona
by publishing some juvenilia in a still later collection, entitled Ḥubb (Love). Here readers

40. Nuhā Samāra, “Wajhān li imraʾa,” in al-Ṭāwilāt ʿāshat akthar min Amīn (Beirut: Manshūrāt Zahīr
Baalʿbakka, 1981), 93–112; translated by Miriam Cooke as “Two Faces, One Woman,” in Opening the Gates,
304–13.
41. Booth, My Grandmother’s Cactus, 6. For Virginia Woolf ’s views on the subject, see Accad, Sexuality
and War, 39.
42. Anthologie de la littérature arabe contemporaine: le roman et la nouvelle, ed. R. Makarious (Paris: Seuil,
1964), 330.
43. Colette Khūrī, Ayyām maʿahu and Layla wāḥida (Beirut: n.p., 1961).
 The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women 59

find themselves confronted with titles such as “Li-annī uḥibbuka” (Because I Love You),
“Ataḥaddāka bi-ḥubbī” (I Defy You with My Love), “Li-mādhā ayyuhā ʾl-shaqī?” (Why,
You Wretch?) and “Kuntu atamannā yā zawjahā” (I Wished, O Husband of Hers).44 The
aim of these writers, as Ḥalīm Barakāt has suggested, is “to shock and defy society” and
while, from a more detached historical perspective, Ḥanān ʿAwwād notes that the works
“generated heated discussion in literary, social and legal circles.”45 As late as 1964, in the
famous legal case against Baʿalbakkī in which she was charged with public obscenity,
attempts in Lebanon to put a stop to this confrontational process through court action
failed. Following Anwar al-Sādāt’s assassination in 1981, Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī emerged from
prison more forthright than ever, to write her memoirs of the experience.46
But what has been the effect of these efforts on the development of the short story as
a literary genre? In a laudatory introduction to Laylā al-ʿUthmān’s short-story collection,
Fī al-layl taʾtī al-ʿuyūn (“In the Night the Eyes Arrive”), Ḥannā Mīna (1924–2018) finds a dif-
ference between the voice in al-ʿUthmān’s stories and those of “the many women writers
in the Arab world in the second half of this century.” She is not interested, he says:

in writing for sheer fame, in telling stories that will get some gripe off her chest
or present women’s matters completely divorced from their social motivation
… tales confined to the kind of sexual titbits which have bored us to death in the
works of some women writers; the volume of cheap animal thrills in them has
disgusted us all.47

Mīna clearly belongs to a group of writers who have been so shocked by the forthright-
ness of these contributions to the short story that they would deny them any role in
bringing about changes in narrative strategy or, equally significant, in readership.
In the introduction to a collection of short stories by Egyptian women, Yūsuf
al-Shārūnī discusses what he regards as one of the major problems associated with the
issue of narrative voice. He notes that, in the case of women writers, too many critics
confound the difference between author and narrator, assuming the two to be one and
the same. In the context of the kind of narrative approach represented by some of the
women writers that we have just mentioned, it is interesting to note that al-Shārūnī goes
on to attribute this tendency on the part of critics to the fact that:

44. Ghāda al-Sammān, Ḥubb (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1973).

45. Ḥalīm Barakāt, Visions of Social Reality in the Contemporary Arab Novel (Georgetown: Institute for
Arab Development, Center for Contemporary Arab Studies, Georgetown University, 1977), 24; and Han-
an Ahmad Awwad, Arab Causes in the Fiction of Ghāda al-Sammān 1961–1975 (Sherbrooke, Canada: Naaman
1983), 19.
46. Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī, Mudhakkirāt sijn al-nisāʾ (Cairo: Dār al-Mustaqbal al-ʿArabī, 1984); translated by
Marilyn Booth as Memoirs from the Women’s Prison (London: Women’s Press, 1986).
47. Laylā al-ʿUthmān, Fī ʾl-layl taʾtī al-ʿuyūn (Beirut: Dār al-ādāb, 1980), 9.
60 Chapter Five

The majority of our women writers make use of the first-person narrative voice,
the voice of confession, thus giving the impression that they are talking about
some personal experience. As a result, the reader does not want to believe that
the pronoun only refers to the character in the story and not to the author.48

We seem to have some kind of double standard at work here, at least if al-Shārūnī’s as-
sessment of the reader’s attitude is valid, particularly those readers who are critics. A
good deal of modern criticism posits the disappearance of the author. Harold Bloom
notes that the current vogue for making authors disappear may be due to what he terms
“Parisian preferences” and that, like shorter skirts, they will certainly reappear.49 One
assumes, however, that he does not envision such a reappearance as taking place within
some process of revalidating the intentional fallacy! In the light of the current expansion
of women’s writing in Arabic literature, it seems particularly important to apply similar
critical techniques and standards to writings by authors of either gender and thus to
allow Laylā Baʿalbakkī, Ghāda al-Sammān and others the right of authorial detachment
from the statements and reflections of their fictional protagonists. In retrospect, it seems
reasonable to suggest that writers such as Baʿalbakkī, al-Sammān, and al-Saʿdāwī, what-
ever one’s verdict may be about the literary merits of their fiction, have considerably ex-
panded the creative space within which contemporary writers of both sexes may portray
their worlds. In other words, the fictions that they create and the narrative strategies
that they employ to bring them into existence are to be regarded as contributions to
the technical repertoire of Arabic fiction, quite apart from whatever kind of adjustment
of balance or advocacy of change they may be effecting in the broader societal frame.50
Turning to the issue of the creative use of gender ambiguity in the narrative voice,
one can, of course, cite many well-known examples of the multi-faceted potential of
the interplay between the various categories of narrator and protagonist(s) where gen-
ders differ. Two pioneers of the short story, the Egyptians ʿĪsā ʿUbayd (1890–1922) and
Maḥmūd Taymūr, both make use of the obvious and well-tested strategy of the letter
as a means of permitting a female narrator-protagonist to recount her experiences in
marriage.51 But as narrative techniques become less overt and more subtle, the narra-
tive contract is not always satisfactorily concluded. In Yūsuf Idrīs’s “Bayt min laḥm,” for
example, the description of the widow and her three daughters fully matches the title in
its emphasis on the corporeal, a depiction that strongly suggests a male narrative voice,

48. Al-Layla al-thāniyya baʿd al-alf: mukhtārāt min al-qiṣṣa al-nisāʾiyya fi Miṣr, ed. Yūsuf al-Shārūnī (Cairo:
Nādī al-Qiṣṣa, 1975), 14–15.
49. Harold Bloom, Ruin the Sacred Truths (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1987), 3.
50. With regard to Laylā Baʿalbakkī, this view is shared by Muḥyī al-Dīn Ṣubḥī, al-Baṭal fī maʾzaq (Da-
mascus: Manshūrāt Ittiḥād al-Kuttāb al-ʿArab, 1979), 206.
51. ʿĪsā ʿUbayd, “Mudhakkirāt Iḥsān Khānum,” in Iḥsān Khānūm (Cairo: al-Dār al-Qawmiyya lil-Ṭibāʿa
wa-l-Nashr, 1964), 1–8; Taymūr, “Inqilāb.” See also Wielandt, Das erzählerische, 393–94.
 The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women 61

and yet at one point the story also contains the following sentence: “Poor dears! They
had yet to learn about the world of men. How could they know that you don’t rate a man
by his eyesight?”52
One might argue that this represents an interpolation of an authorial comment into
the narrative, something that occasionally interrupts and even disrupts the fictions of
Idrīs, a writer who was often anxious to include within his stories references to the nar-
rative act itself. It might also be suggested that the voice in question is that of the wid-
owed mother. But, if that is the case, it is a unique instance in the story. Here, then, we do
not find ambiguity but rather inconsistency. The same may be said of Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī’s
Mawt maʿālī al-wazīr sābiqan, although it has to be admitted that the narrative artifice is of
a more complex variety in that the reader is confronted with a male narrator-protagonist
who addresses his story to his mother in the first person.53 The resulting story provides
a telling commentary on the effects of woman’s emergence into the workplace on the
psychology of male authority figures, but the incorporation of such a large burden of
feminist societal content into a short story in which the male protagonist is the teller of
the tale produces an inconsistency between narrative voice and character.
One of the more subtle exploiters of the narrative voice in the contemporary Arabic
short story is Laylā al-ʿUthmān. While one may disagree with Mīna’s comments about
the motivation of other Arab women writers, his verdict concerning al-ʿUthmān’s ac-
complishments is certainly justified in terms of the variety of techniques that she uses.
Certain stories seem almost to tease the reader concerning the narrative voice. In “al-
Maqhā” (The Café), for example, the first-person narrator is sitting in a crowded café in
a state of considerable disillusionment and loneliness. His/her self-reflections proceed
to tantalize us: there are comments about the male customers’ gleaming shoes that have
obviously been shined by their wives while the women’s shoes are scruffier, but it is
not until we are well into the story that a flashback provides us with a female name and
identity to assign to our narrator.54 In “al-Ruʾūs ilā asfal” (Heads Downwards), we are
immediately thrust into the protagonist-narrator’s bitter musings: “I left prison without
delay.”55 If we wonder about the narrator’s gender, it cannot be for long, in that we soon
discover that he has been imprisoned for eighteen years for murdering his wife. The
story consists of the narrator’s rediscovery of the outside world mingled with memories
of his dysfunctional marriage, an experience which leads him to conclude that, for him
at least, life was freer inside prison.

52. Idrīs, “Bayt min laḥm,” 7–8.

53. Al-Saʿdāwī, Mawt maʿālī al-wazīr.
54. Laylā al-ʿUthmān, “al-Maqhā,” in Ḥālat ḥubb majnūna: qiṣaṣ (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-Miṣriyya lil-Kitab,
1989), 101–11. The same process occurs in “ʿAlā safar,” except that the narrator emerges as a male; Laylā
al-ʿUthmān, Fatḥiyya takhtār mawtahā (Beirut: Dār al-Shurūq, 1987), 51–58.
55. Laylā al-ʿUthmān, “al-Ruʾūs ilā asfal,” in al-Ḥubb la-hu ṣuwar (Beirut, 1983), 52–63.
62 Chapter Five

As noted at the beginning of this essay, the roles that women play in society have
been a constant, indeed inevitable, topic of the short story in Arabic. The examples men-
tioned above, a tiny fraction of the output across the Arab world, have attempted to show
that women writers are not only contributing new perspectives to the topical corpus
of the genre but are participating vigorously in that experimentation in technique that
guarantees an interesting future for the genre and its critics. It is one of the short story’s
most accomplished recent practitioners, Salwā Bakr, who points out that women’s writ-
ing has an important role in converting and enlightening and that men stand to be the
beneficiaries of that process as much as women.56

56. Salwā Bakr, al-Majālis, 27 June 1987; quoted in Ferial Ghazoul, “Balāghat al-ghalāba,” in Bakr, ʿAn
al-rūḥ, 103.
 6
Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom

I laugh in the dark,

I cry in the dark;
in the dark I also write
till I no longer distinguish pen from finger.
Every knock at the door, every rustle of the curtain,
I cover my papers with my hand like a cheap tart in a police raid.
From whom have I inherited this error,
this blood as skittish as the mountain panther?
No sooner do I spot an official form on the threshold
or a helmet through a crack in the door
than my bones and tears start to shudder,
my blood scatters to the four winds
as though some eternal squad of progeny police
were chasing it from one vein to the next.

from Muḥammad Māghūṭ, “Al-Washm,” from Al-Faraḥ laysa mihnatī

Introduction

The topic chosen by a revered and beloved teacher is rich in potential significances. On
the purely semantic level, the word “quest” implies the process of searching or looking
for something, implying thereby, of course, that the entity that is the object of such a
project is currently lack­ ing. Within the context of narratives and, in particular, the study
of them by specialists in folklore, the quest has often been placed within the frame-­
work of a journey, one that has on occasion consumed an entire lifetime. And then there
is the word “freedom,” a concept which, in the wake of the rationalizations of Western
politicians regarding recent events in Eastern Europe and the Arabian Gulf, has come to
be almost meaningless. However, the very same word was clearly replete with signifi-
cance for American slaves in the 19th century, such as the renowned Frederick Douglass;
in their narratives the freedom to have charge of one’s own life and identity was indeed

63
64 Chapter Six

a quest.1 The word “freedom” may be followed by any of the following: “from,” “of,” or
“to”: freedom from oppression–colonialism, forced marriage, censorship; freedom of
thought and expression, or religious belief; freedom to write, to read, to criticize.
When Najīb Maḥfūẓ was asked recently what is the subject closest to his heart, the
one he most likes to write about, his unequivocal answer was:

Freedom. Freedom from colonization, freedom from the absolute rule of a king,
and basic freedom in the context of society and family. These types of freedom
follow from one to the other.2

In narrowing down such a broad spectrum of possibilities, I have chosen as my starting

point a quotation from I. F. Stone’s book, the Trial of Socrates, where he states his belief
that

no society is good, whatever its intentions, whatever its utopian and libera-
tionist claims, if the men and women who live in it are not free to speak their
minds.3

I wish to investigate the issue of freedom of expression as a factor in the development of

modern Arabic fiction; in particular, novelists in prison, novels about writers in prison,
and the imprisonment of the novel.

Novelists in Prison

In broaching the general topic of writers’ freedom, I am acutely con­scious of the old
proverb: “People in glass houses shouldn’t throw stones.” The publication history of D. H.
Lawrence’s Lady Chatterley’s Lover, James Joyce’s Ulysses, and Henry Miller’s Tropic of Can-
cer, not to mention the fate of Solzenitsyn’s oeuvre, should be sufficient to prevent us
becoming too superior about Western notions of freedom of publica­tion. And, lest those
examples should be thought somewhat dated in 1993, let me refer you to the recently
published book of Joan DelFattore entitled, What Johnny Shouldn’t Read (New Haven: Yale
University Press, 1992), which details the mostly successful efforts by Christian fundamen­

1. Frederic Douglass, Narrative of the Life of Frederic Douglass, an American Slave (London: Penguin Books,
1986).
2. Najīb Maḥfūẓ , interviewed by Charlotte El Shabrawy in Paris Review 123 (Summer 1992): 70. More
recently, Maḥfūẓ has opined that: “If anything like that (the publication of pioneering works by the
likes of ʿAbd al-Rāziq or Ṭāhā Ḥusayn) were to occur in these times, it would bring down disaster on its
author. The all-pervasive atmosphere of terror squelches freedom, thought, and creativity, all of them.”
Al-Shumūʿ 26 (Oct.–Dec. I992): 20.
3. I. F. Stone, The Trial of Socrates (Boston: Little, Brown, 1988).
 Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom 65

talists in the southern states of America to have certain texts banned from school librar-
ies and curricula.
The freedom of writers of fiction in the Arab world to write and publish their cre-
ative output is restricted in varying degrees and by a number of methods, both overt and
covert. Among the most obvious is imprisonment. Jean Fontaine begins a recent study
on Arabic fiction with a chapter on the Egyptian novel since 1975. He notes that, of the
fourteen writers with whom he had been able to discuss their works, ten had spent time
in prison.4 These include Edwār al-Kharrāṭ, Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm, Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī, Yūsuf
Idrīs, ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm Qāsim, and Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī. I am told by a number of Egyptians
that, such was ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm ʿāmir’s wrath on reading Tharthara fawq al-Nīl in 1967, that
Najīb Maḥfūẓ only avoided being a member of this list as a result of the personal inter-
vention of Tharwat ʿUkāsha, the then Minister of Culture, with President ʿAbd al-Nāṣir.
While this list and its implications for writers’ freedom are regrettable, to put it mildly,
it needs to be put into a broader context: at least these facts about Egyptian novelists are
known. Reference to the Index on Censorship shows with disarming regularity that writers
in several other countries in the Arab world who cross the line of officially established
acceptability may suffer still worse fates: life imprisonment and even death, sometimes
announced, some­times not. When certain contemporary critical schools postulate the
disappearance of the author, they are clearly not envisaging such a literal interpretation
of their theoretical explorations by governmental authorities.
Imprisonment and death are, needless to say, effective means of silenc­ing the criti-
cal voices of those who would paint a picture of society that is somewhat at variance
with the officially orchestrated image nurtured by the government. But, at least in Egypt,
many writers have emerged from prison to continue and, in some cases, to start a writ-
ing career. One has to express unbounded admiration for the courage of those who, hav-
ing been deprived of their liberty in this way, choose to use imprison­ment as a theme
or motif in their writings: thus, Edwār al-Kharrāt in Rāma wa-l-tinnīn (1979), Ṣunʿallāh
Ibrāhīm in Tilka al-rāʾiḥa (1966 [banned]; 1969 [incomplete]; 1986) and Al-Lajna (1982),5
Nawāl al­-Saʿdāwī in Mudhakkirātī fī sijn al-nisāʾ (1983),6 and her husband, Sharīf Ḥatāta, in

4. Jean Fontaine, Romans arabes modernes (Tunis: IBLA, 1992), 12.

5. Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm, Tilka al-rāʾiḥa (Casablanca, 1986); tr. Denys Johnson­Davies as The Smell of It (Lon-
don: Heinemann Books, 1971). Until the publication of the first complete edition of this work in 1986,
the English translation appears to have been the only complete version of the work. The first chapter of
Al-Lajna was published in Al-­Fikr al-muʿāṣir in May 1979; a translation of it by the present author will be
published as part of An Anthology of Modern Arabic Fiction ed. Salma Khadra Jayyusi (New York: Col­umbia
University Press, 2005).
6. Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī’s Mudhakkirātī fī sijn al-nisāʾ (1983) has been translated by Marilyn Booth as Mem-
oirs from the Women’s Prison (London: The Women’s Press, 1986).
66 Chapter Six

Al-ʿAyn dhāt al-jafn al-maʿdiniyya (1981).7 While these works are clearly very different in
their goals and means, they possess in common a value as courageous expressions of the
modern Arab intellectual’s quest for the most basic of freedoms.
The lifeblood of all artists, whether acknowledged or not, is the recep­tion of their
works by a public; in the case of fiction, a readership. Knowledge of that reality provides
a further series of possibilities for those who would deprive novelists of their freedoms.
Except in the case of the most famous authors, novel publication in many countries of the
Arab world may already be an ephemeral affair, although the situation has been improv-
ing in recent decades, but requirements that one belong to a Writers’ Union and even
adhere to explicitly stated moral standards have been used to restrict rights to publish.
Faced with such situations and the others already described, it has been the lot or choice
of many modern Arab writers to leave their natural and most immediately accessi­ble pub-
lics and go into exile. In an article entitled “Al-Ightirāb: ṣamt aw ibdāʿ,” Jabrā Ibrāhīm
Jabrā, himself an exiled Palestinian novelist, speaks tellingly on this subject:

If alienation is both obvious and painful when one is absent from the homeland,
then it is even more so when one is physically still here. This situation is valid
for a whole host of intellectuals throughout the world, in both advanced and
backward societies, but it is particularly acute among Arab intellectuals who
are living through one of the hardest periods in Arab history, one in which op-
posing pressures, whether political or social, are the cause of such psychologi-
cal trauma.8

And, if the fate of Palestinian writers to be in exile, whether internal or external, remains
emblematic in both its continuity and sheer variety, the dislocations of a novelist such
as ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf from his native Saudi Arabia to Egypt, Yugoslavia, Iraq, France,
and Syria are a clearly unsought extension of the peregrinations of his own bedouin fore-
bears.
Munīf has been deprived of his Saudi citizenship, and his books are banned in
his homeland. His quintet of novels, published under the general title, Mudun al-Milḥ,
clearly presents a cutting portrait of the rul­ing family of an unnamed Middle Eastern
country, the discovery of oil, and the destruction of the traditional life and values of
the Gulf region that is not to the taste of the Saudi authorities. The recent novel of
the Lebanese writer, Ḥanān al-Shaykh, Misk al-Ghazāl (1988), is also banned in Saudi
Arabia (and elsewhere), but, while the picture that it paints of that anonymous Arab

7. Sharīf Ḥatāta [Sherif Hetata] has translated his own novel into English as The Eye with an Iron Lid
(London: Onyx Press, 1982).
8. Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, Taʾammulāt fī bunyān marmarī (London: Riyad EI-Rayyes Books, 1989), 44. A
similar listing of measures available to government authorities is listed by Nazīh Abū Niḍāl, Adab al-
sujūn (Beirut; Dar al-Ḥadātha, 1981), 14.
 Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom 67

society in which women may not leave their homes unescorted is far from complimen-
tary, the reason lies less in the political realm than in that other region where censorship
is frequently to be encountered, namely, sexual morality and especially in this case, its
treat­ment at the hands of an Arab woman author. It has to be admitted that the sexual
content of this recent novel is explicit even in the context of her earlier work, Ḥikāyat
Zahra (1986), where, to my mind, it is integrated into the psychological framework of the
novel in a more convincing fashion.
These two instances represent just the tip of a very large iceberg, the daily reality
of the censorship of literature in the Arab World. The topic is too broad for discussion
in detail here, but I would merely like to draw attention to some of its consequences.
The use of heavy layers of sym­bolism has often been cited as one of the subterfuges to
which writers have resorted in the face of the censor’s pen, what one recent writer has
termed “a culture of artistic allusion and linguistic evasion.”9 Many writers, while point-
ing out the undoubted creative potential of symbolic fiction, have also acknowledged the
more practical aspects in the need to resort to such a strategy during certain periods of
their careers. In con­versation with me in 1971 while completing the writing of Al-Marāyā,
Najīb Maḥfūẓ discussed both the utility of symbolism as an obscurantist device and the
difficulties he was encountering at that particular time in ridding his writing style of
its conventions. However, for many authors, and most especially young ones with less
secure sources of livelihood, the possibility of having a novel text censored after all the
effort expended in writing it has served as a strong disincentive to begin or continue
writing novels. Sabry Hafez’s article on the Egyptian novel points out how many authors
have produced only one example of the genre.10 In many cases the preferred resort has
been either to another genre, particularly the short story, or to silence.
And yet, in spite of all these factors, writers in the Arab world continue to produce
novels; and new names continue to appear. Edwār al-Kharrāṭ asks himself the pertinent
question and endeavors to answer it:

Why do I write? I write because I don’t know why I write. Does the impulse
come from some powerful outside force? I know I use it as a weapon in order
to bring about change, change both in the self and in others … for something

9. The full quotation (regarding the situation in East Germany) is instructive: “As in other East
Bloc countries, in East Germany there was a culture of artistic allusion and linguistic evasion. Censors
worked full-time to catch double- and triple-entendres.” See Katie Hafner, “A Nation of Readers Dumps
Its Writers,” New York Times Magazine Section (Jan. 10, 1993): 24. Salma Jayyusi’s comment regarding the
Arab world is very similar: “Because they live in oppressive times and suffer from reactionary social
and political conditions, they cannot always resort to direct statement; they often employ ambiguity,
various kinds of obliquity, and complex systems of imagery to express their visions.’’ See Modern Arabic
Poetry: An Anthology, ed. Salmā Khaḍrā al-Jayyūsī (New York: Columbia University Press, 1987), 28.
10. Sabry Hafez, “The Egyptian Novel in the Sixties,” Journal of Arabic Literature 7 (1976): 68–84.
68 Chapter Six

better, something yet more beautiful perhaps … something warmer so as to

fend off the bitter chill of barbarity and loneliness … something soothing in the
oppressive heat of violence and suffocation.…11

Given the risks that writers face in testing the limits of their creative freedom in many
countries of the Arab world, many choose to place their fiction in what might be termed
politically uncontroversial areas. How­ever it is quite remarkable how many authors have
been prepared to address themselves in fiction to the some of the very situations that
have just been described. I now turn to a closer consideration of certain works by writers
who have felt themselves constrained to concern themselves with the portrayal of the
withdrawal of the most basic of human freedoms, a fate that is the inevitable consequence
for fictional characters who choose to challenge the authority and societal priorities of
the governmental structure.

Novels about Prison

The Syrian literary critic and novelist, Nabīl Sulaymān, the author of a novel entitled Al-
Sijn,12 wrote a review article in 1973 under the title “Naḥwa adab al-sujūn.”13 After chal-
lenging a comment by Ghālī Shukrī in a December 1972 issue of the magazine, Al-Ṭalīʿa, to
the effect that there are relatively few works of Arabic literature, and specifically Egyp­
tian works, on prisons, he endorses Shukrī’s general verdict on the sub­genre of prison-
novels that, in spite of the direct experience of prisons that the majority of writers have
had, the treatment in the novels rarely goes beyond that of an externalized montage.
The work under review in Sulaymān’s article is Al-Qalʿa al-khāmisa by the Iraqi novelist,
Fāḍil al­ ʿAzzāwī.14 After describing in detail the way in which the experience of prison
is depicted in the novel, Sulaymān finishes by roundly criticizing the author’s resort to
reportage and didacticism.
The prison, with its routine and its personnel, is an institutionalized social leveler;
within its walls, variety and individuality are ruthlessly squelched. Its routines carry
loneliness, tedium, and, more often than not, brutality to extreme levels. Those novelists
who have chosen to use the specific chronology of a prison term, the immensely confined
space of the cell, and the procedures of the jailed and their jailers, as the organizing
matrices for their fiction have tended to produce works that come very close to the kind

11. Edwār al-Kharrāṭ, Al-ādāb (Feb.–Mar. 1980): 110.

12. Nabīl Sulaymān, Al-Sijn, 1972.
13. Nabīl Sulaymān, “Naḥwa adab al-sujūn,” Al-Mawqif al-adabī 3/1 & 2 (May–June 1973): 137–41. See
also Samar Rūḥī Fayṣal, Al-Sijn al-siyāsī fī al-riwāya al-ʿarabiyya (Damascus: Manshūrāt Ittiḥād al-Kuttāb
al-ʿArab, 1983).
14. Fāḍil al-ʿAzzāwī, Al-Qalʿa al-khāmisa (Damascus: Ittiḥād al-Kuttāb al-ʿArab, 1972). See also Nazīh
Abū Niḍāl, Adab al-sujūn, 87–90.
 Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom 69

of reportage identified by Ghālī Shukrī. Bear­ing in mind the nature of the experience to
which many such writers have been exposed, it is, needless to say, reasonable to expect
in this area that the linkage that always potentially exists between fiction and autobiog-
raphy will be intensely felt. Ironically perhaps, Nabīl Sulaymān himself, having criticized
the documentary nature of al-ʿAzzāwī’s novel, seems to overlook the implications that
stem from a strategy that he adopts in his own novel, al-Sijn—itself a particularly grue-
some chronicle of the way in which a political prisoner “graduates” through a series of
stages (and chapters), from the most barbaric torture in solitary confine­ment to a more
communal prison environment. Feeling a need to explain how prisoners come to assign
particular names to their different cells, he resorts to the device of providing a footnote,
a procedure that, needless to say, cannot fail to disrupt the ironic contract of the narra-
tive.15 Time does not permit a broad exploration of the variety of techniques employed
in the several examples of this subgenre that often makes extremely creative use of fic-
tion to explore this drastic means of depriving writers of their freedom.16 I will therefore
confine my comments to two works in which the imprisoned hero is a writer, one who
discusses his attitudes to writing and his role as a writer in the light of his prison experi-
ence: ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf ’s Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ [1975] and Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm’s Tilka
al-rāʾiḥa.

“If Rajab were still alive, he’d have written a novel for you or something else
that you’d all enjoy reading. But he’s dead, long dead. All I can do now to honour
his memory is to smuggle the papers he brought back with him over the border
and have them published as they are.”17

This is the way that Anīsa, Rajab Ismāʿīl’s married sister, begins her third and last nar-
ration in Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ. She alternates the narra­tion with her brother. For Rajab, a
politically active intellectual and writer, present time is a voyage on the boat Achilleus
plying between the Middle East and France; as is usually the case with Munīf ’s spatial di-
mension, the exact place is undefined and thereby assumes a more comprehensive func-
tion. However, he has some words of warning for the citizens of Paris about this generic
place to the east of the Mediter­ranean:

15. Nabīl Sulaymān, Al-Sijn, 42.

16. The sheer variety of approaches to imprisonment as a major theme can be gauged from the fol-
lowing partial listing of novels: Yūsuf Idrīs [Egypt], Al-ʿAskarī al-Aswad (1962); ʿAbd al-Karīm Ghallāb
[Morocco], Sabʿat abwāb (1965); ʿAbd al-Majīd al­Rubayʿī [Iraq], Al-Washm (1972); Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī [Egypt],
Al-Zaynī Barakāt (1974); Najīb Maḥfūẓ [Egypt], Al-Karnak (1974); Al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār [Algeria], Al-Lāz (1974);
and Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, Al-Baḥth ʿan Walīd Masʿūd [1978].
17. ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf, Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ (Beirut: Al-Mu’assasah al-ʿArabiyya li-al-dirāsāt wa-
al-nashr, 1979), 144.
70 Chapter Six

You people of Paris, if you brought your books to the eastern shores of the Med-
iterranean, you’d spend your entire life in prisons. You’d rue the day you ever
wrote, you’d disavow everything. Above all, make sure you never even think
about political parties; the slightest allusion to them would be assumed to be a
conspiracy, subversion. Your words would cost you your entire life, to be spent
in desert jails, where you’d catch tuber­culosis or typhoid; and then you’d die.”18

This has been Rajab’s fate. For him, the past takes the form of one of the most nightmar-
ish accounts of the barbaric aspects of imprisonment in the whole of Arabic fiction: soli-
tary confinement, varieties of torture, brutal interrogation, murder of other prisoners,
disease, starvation, and a vicious struggle to maintain psychological control. But this
novel is not about imprisonment alone, for Rajab has been released. But that release
has come at a heavy cost, one that preys on Rajab’s mind as he con­templates writing his
novel. He has become very ill in prison—probably the tuberculosis that he himself refers
to—and secures his release by signing a confession concerning his political activities and
those of his colleagues. He is not the first to have done so. However, once he has, in his
own words, fallen,19 the lives of his colleagues in prison are clearly in the greatest danger.
The burden of that knowledge is completely over­whelming.
The narratives provided by Rajab’s sister provide a poignant alter­native perspec-
tive to this tortured vision, but they also reveal a further way in which this writer’s life,
and by implication that of other politically active citizens, is completely beset. While
he is away in France seeking a cure and weighing the alternative possibilities of writing
about his experiences in fictional form or as a report to the Human Rights Com­mission
in Geneva (the Declaration of which forms the preface to this novel), his sister and her
husband, Ḥāmid, have to serve as his guarantors and are pestered by Rajab’s torturers. It
is only when a friend of the family writes to Rajab in France to explain the pressures that
his sister is under that Rajab decides to return home to an inevitable death after another
spell in prison. Even so, Anīsa is alone at the novel’s end; the never-ending cycle of terror
has continued. A European news report con­cerning torture of political prisoners in the
Middle East has pointed a finger in Rajab’s direction; because he is dead, it is now Ḥāmid’s
turn to spend time in prison.
Rajab has passed information to colleagues in Europe; Anīsa is prepared to smuggle
documents out of the country. These defiant gestures reflect the influence of the char-
acter in this novel whose attitude to this nightmare society towers over the misery to
which all its characters are subjected: the mother of Rajab and Anīsa. Initially horrified
when she discovers his covert activities, she comes to relish his defiance and adopts it as
her own. Withstanding foul abuse and numerous beatings from police and prison guards

18. Munīf, Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 130–31. A similar passage is addressed to the Achilleus on 82.
19. “Rajab Ismāʿīl has fallen; that single phrase explains the endpoint on this road I’ve travelled.”
Munīf, Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 119.
 Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom 71

she haunts ministries, police stations, and prison gates until she is sure that her son is
still alive; thereafter she takes clothes and fresh food to the prison every day in the hope
of his release.20 Her death is a devastating blow to Rajab as he languishes in prison; his
black despair at this loss clearly influences his “downfall.”
While Rajab is thinking about writing his novel, he wonders to himself how he can
possibly write about a figure such as his mother.21 He also wants to incorporate into this
work the character of Hādī, his colleague who has been brutally murdered in prison.22
But how, he wonders, can fiction begin to encompass such barbarities and to what effect.
Writing is clearly important to Rajab as he seeks a physical and psychological recovery;
as he explains silently to a French woman in Marseille who is watching him writing in
Arabic, “our mode of writing is the only thing of value left to us, the one thing that hasn’t
changed. Everything else is valueless, particularly human beings.”23 But Rajab wrestles
with the issue of the kind of writing to use. At one point, he seems to have a clear answer:
How can I have been such a simpleton when contemplating writing about tor-
ture? The whole thing seems ridiculously simple. Writing a story is not what’s
needed. No! It doesn’t matter how the events I’ve witnessed are recorded; how-
ever it’s done, they can serve as a sentence of condemnation against those mur-
derers.24

Rajab’s enforced return to his homeland prevents him from answering this question de-
finitively by writing. His now husbandless sister is left with the task of smuggling out
the documents that he did leave behind. Whether they are in fictional form or not, the
implications of this novel and its preface are that writing needs to escape from a society
where, in the words of a French doctor who is treating Rajab, the whole people is a pris-
oner.25
lbrāhīm’s protagonist-narrator in Tilka al-rāʾiḥa emerges from prison to pick up the
pieces of his life within his own society. He too is a writer of stories, although, unlike the
character in Munīf s novel, that aspect of his life does not preoccupy a large part of his
attention; such is his sense of alienation from his surroundings that the sheer process of
living seems to consume all his mental energy.26 The very opening of the work cap­tures
the atmosphere well. As he leaves prison, he informs the officer in charge that he lives
alone and has no one to take care of him; that is why no one has come to collect him. To

20. Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 42.

21. Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 120.
22. Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 89.
23. Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 122–23.
24. Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 123.
25. Sharq al-Mutawassiṭ, 128.
26. Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm, Tilka al-rāʾiḥa (Cairo: Maktabat al Anglo-Miṣriyya, 1971), 57 and 64.
72 Chapter Six

underline the oppressive atmosphere of indifference that confronts the protagonist as he

attempts to put his life back together and to reestablish contacts with acquaintances, the
nar­rative present is punctuated at regular intervals by the sound of the door­bell to sig-
nal the arrival of a policeman whose task it is to check on his whereabouts by signing in
a book. The impact of the time in prison on the narrator’s psychological state is revealed
in other ways too. The nar­rative reveals an obsession with minute details and mundane
routine: the process of going to bed, getting up, washing himself and his clothes, shaving,
taking a shower, smoking, these activities are all recorded with great precision. The au-
thor’s preferred mode of travel is the Metro, and every occurrence is duly noted; the ride
serves as a suitable occasion for observing the habits of his fellow Egyptians and gauging
their mood without the need to run the risks of contact and conversation. Through his
narrative eyes, they all seem quite as alienated as he is. Is it any wonder then that, as the
narrator blandly records without further com­ment, showings of the film “It’s a Mad, Mad
World” are fully booked until further notice?27 The total effect of this repetition of the
utterly ordinary is deliberately disconcerting; the techniques adopted by the author lead
us inevitably to the conclusion that the narrator has left a prison with bars for another
one where the restraints are no less alienating for being invisible.
In the beset and fragmented consciousness of this narrator the past impinges
through a series of flashbacks. Early memories recall life in prison and especially the
death of friends at the hands of jailers, since visits to the wives of these men and de-
scriptions of how their husbands spent their final days provide one more aspect of his
unenviable role in society. These memories also tell us about former love-affairs, but
here too is another part of his life rendered more problematic since the nar­rative reveals
a mind putting up its own protective cordons even beyond those imposed by the police
on a released political prisoner. The lengthiest flashback occurs towards the end of the
narrative: it is a child’s memory of riding on the tram with his father, full of the warmth of
sheer nostalgia for both place and time. How abrupt then is the ending where it is left to
the narrator’s grandmother to inform him that his mother had died just a week earlier
without even mentioning his name. After a moment’s silence, the protagonist stands
up and leaves. He is, of course, on his way to the Metro, to wander around this societal
labyrinth into a totally obscure future; he is indeed like the young man whom he has
described: rowing on the Nile, losing an oar, and being swept along with no control over
either direction or pace.28
The contrast between the sheer ordinariness of so many of the incidents in this novel
and the sexual and psychological tensions pent up inside its narrator make it a truly dis-
tinctive contribution to the genre. The very terseness of the language used serves to
amplify the mood of callous indifference still further. That Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm should be

27. Tilka al-rāʾiḥa, 87–88.

28. Tilka al-rāʾiḥa, 86.
 Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom 73

such an accomplished pioneer in this genre is hardly surprising since his own career
provides living testimony to the links between imprisonment, writing fiction, and cen-
sorship. Tilka al-rāʾiḥa, briefly published in 1966 and banned, was written—one must as-
sume—directly after a period of imprisonment lasting from 1959 to 1964. The self-same
atmosphere of latent terror is created in the context of a truly sinister process of inter-
rogation and cross-examination in the later work, Al-Lajna, first published in part in 1979.29
In discussing the course of his fictional writing career, Marilyn Booth is surely correct in
suggesting that it reflects “the experience of a generation.’’30

The Imprisonment of the Novel

The novel has always been a revolutionary genre. As contributors to it in may parts of
the world have discovered, the conjunction of fiction and politics has often proved a
dangerous enterprise. When one recalls that what may be termed the ‘’art’’ of contempo-
rary politics increasingly involves the creation and manipulation of public perceptions
through carefully crafted images and scenarios, it follows that those societies which be-
lieve themselves empowered to co-opt fiction to the cause of fostering and reflecting
such visions will clearly find attempts at under­cutting their message to be a political
threat. Both Maḥfūẓ’s Tharthara fawq al-Nīl and Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm’s Najmat Aghusṭus take a
cynical look at the processes and consequences of such image-building within the Egyp-
tian context.’31
In the decades following the Second World War when many Arab nations found
themselves forced to deal with the political and social con­sequences of independence,
fiction was clearly co-opted as a means of creating worlds in which reality conformed
reasonably closely with officially sanctioned versions of it. In the aftermath of the June
War of 1967 such orchestrations of past and present fell apart. Indeed, whatever the
political desirability of social-realist writing may have been, realism had increasingly
come to be regarded as one among many possible modes of writing, the result of just as
much artifice as any other mode of expressing consciousness. Arab novelists turned to
other methods of recording their critical visions, ranging from the multi-textured nar­
ratives of al-Ghīṭānī, to the contemporary epic saga with ʿAbd al­-Raḥmān Munīf, and to
the stark and terse narratives of Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm. However, while critical strictures
about the intentional fallacy and the ironic privileges of fiction may have been well un-

29. “Al-Lajna” [chapter 1], Al-Fikr al-muʿāṣir, (May 1979): 193–206; Al-Lajna (Beirut: Dār al-Kalima,
1981).
30. “The experience of a generation,” Index on Censorship 16/9 (Oct. 1987): 19–22.
31. Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Tharthara fawq al-Nīl, Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr. 1966; now available in English transla-
tion as Adrift on the Nile (sic) tr. Frances Liardet (New York: Doubleday, 1993); Ṣunʿallāh Ibrāhīm, Najmat
Aghusṭus (Damascus: lttiḥād al-Kuttāb al-ʿArab, 1974).
74 Chapter Six

derstood among the community of writers and critics in each society, the novel remains
beset within the larger societal environment. Within a group of societies whose culture
provided the West with its largest repertoire of the fan­tastic, Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā,
Munīf ’s Mudun al-Milḥ, al-Shaykh’s Misk al-Ghazāl, belong to the category of “riwāyāt”
and, because of the potential impact of their content, they have had their fictional privi-
leges withdrawn. The topics they discuss, the way in which their narratives are told,
and the publics they may reach, are apparently regarded as being more dangerous than
those of al-Ghīṭānī’s Al-Zaynī Barākāt, for example, or Ismāʿīl Fahd Ismāʿīl’s Al-Mustanqaʿāt
al-ḍawʾiyya.32 And, as Salman Rushdie has discovered, the status of the novel in Middle
Eastern societies is such that even the most extravagantly crafted narrative strategies
are not sufficient to distance the author who broaches con­troversy from his fictional
representations. And, when that controversy involves religion, we rapidly discover how
the political map of the region has been changed in recent years. It is the son of Iḥsān
ʿAbd al-Quddūs, the Egyptian novelist, who can describe art—and thus presumably, the
environment of novel-writing—in these starkly simple terms:

Does Islam forbid art or permit it … The correct answer is that art is a two-
bladed weapon … It can be in the service of heavenly teaching … or it can be a
tool of Satan!”33

If such is to be a context for the novel, then its creative path into the future will involve
the search for new ways to circumvent the bars of the prison with which certain seg-
ments of the society try to surround it.

Conclusion

In the quest for freedom through literature, the prison has served as a powerful symbol
of freedom’s denial in both fact and fiction. My focus here on its more literal aspects
means that I have not paid any attention to that large segment of society whose writings
are increasingly voicing the opinion that, for them, cultural values within the society as a
whole represent a virtual prison, namely, women. Nawāl al-Saʿdāwī has, of course, given
forthright expression to this view and others, and the resulting imprisonment has made
her perhaps the first, or at least the most famous, woman writer to add her depiction of
prison life to those of her male colleagues. A large number of women writers of fiction
throughout the Arab World are now giving voice to their desire for change. For male and
female writers alike, the novel genre will continue to demand innovation in both the top-

32. Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī, Al-Zaynī Barakāt (Damascus, 1974); translated in English by Farouk Abdel Wahab,
Zaynī Barakāt (London: Penguin Books, 1988); Ismāʿīl Fahd Ismāʿīl, Al-Mustanqaʿāt al-ḍawʾiyya (Beirut: Dār
at-ʿAwda, 1972).
33. Muhammad ʿAbd al-Quddūs, Financial Times (July 18, 1992), Section II: 10.
 Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom 75

ics tackled and the means of doing it. While this artistic responsibility is already a heavy
one, the works and writers discussed in this study remind us that, as they write, Arab
novelists also have other factors to keep in mind.
 7
Arabic Fiction’s Relationship with Its Past:
Intertextuality and Retrospect Post-1967

One of the primary features of “intertextuality,” the critical approach to which this es-
say is addressed, is cultural contextualization and thus inevitably retrospect. As Julia
Kristeva notes, “every text is from the outset under the jurisdiction of other discourses
which impose a universe on it.”1 In commenting on Kristeva’s writings and those of other
theorizers in this domain, Jonathan Culler notes that intertextuality “calls our attention
to the importance of prior texts,” but that it moves beyond the more traditional games of
allusion to become an investigation into a text’s “participation in the discursive space of
a culture.”2 Intertextuality then aims to identify and then explore the creative tensions
between present and past that are an intrinsic part of the reading of any text. In such a
context the designation of that past and the principles involved in its definition become
of primary importance. I would suggest that it is precisely for that reason that, in the
context of a discussion of intertextuality in Arabic literature, the date of 1967 moves
beyond the merely exclusive delineation of a time-period to become one of those his-
torical watersheds that not only divide a certain historical period from another but also
call radically into question the very principles by which literary-historical periods, and
therefrom the definitions of what the relationships between present and past might be,
are established in the first place.

Post-1967

The chapter in Albert Hourani’s renowned A History of the Arab Peoples that is devoted to
the post-1967 period is entitled “A Disturbance of Spirits,” an apt commentary on the
generally unpromising cultural environment within which the texts that we are to con-

1. Julia Kristeva, La revolution du langage poétique (Paris: Seuil, 1974), 388–89, quoted in Jonathan Cull-
er, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1981), 105.
2. Culler, The Pursuit of Signs, 103.

77
78 Chapter Seven

sider have been created, published, and read.3 Such severe and practical realities as the
fragility of the right to freedom of expression and the direct linkage of publication possi-
bilities to the interests of the cultural establishment in many, if not most, Arab countries,
these impose heavy restrictions on creative writing and thus inevitably compromise the
picture of “cultural context” within which an investigation of intertextuality can take
place. The June War of 1967 itself produced some notable fictional commentaries on this
general situation; one thinks, for example, of Ḥalīm Barakāt’s novel, ʿAwdat al-ṭāʾir ilā al-
baḥr (translated as Days of Dust) and the series of shocking short-stories that Najīb Maḥfūẓ
penned in the immediate aftermath of ‘the setback’ (al-naksah).4 Over the longer term the
post-1967 period was marked by a profound reexamination of the very bases of Arab cul-
ture, leading to the publication of a whole series of extremely important contributions to
the reexamination and even redefinition of Arab culture and approaches to its heritage.
The authors of these works were distinguished Arab scholars: Ḥasan Ḥanafī, Muḥammad
ʿĀbid al-Jābirī, ʿAbdallāh al-ʿArwī, and al-Ṭayyib Tizzīnī (to name just some of the major
contributors).5 While the ramifications of these writings have obviously been widely de-
bated within the cultural communities of the Arab world, I would like to suggest that a
very particular concern within the context of post-1967 Arabic literature, and thus the
application of intertextual notions to it, is the need to revisit and even to redefine the
historical framework of the cultural context and its concept of heritage, both recent and
more distant. More topically, one might pose the following questions: what are those
“prior texts” that impose themselves on our readings of post-1967 Arabic literature, and
how exactly did they achieve their status?
I would like to illustrate this problematic by reference to an author and circum-
stance which is familiar to many: the career of Najīb Maḥfūẓ. In any literary historical
perspective from the year 1967 (and I have been in this field for long enough to be
able to recall such a scenario) the novels of Maḥfūẓ would have been placed, indeed
were placed, into an intertextual framework that was grounded heavily, or perhaps
exclusively, in the development of the various European traditions of fiction. In such
a literary-historical context a work like al-Muwayliḥī’s Ḥadīth ʿῙsā ibn Hishām (What ʿĪsā

3. Albert Hourani, A History of the Arab Peoples (New York: Warner Books, 1991), 434–58.
4. Ḥalīm Barakāt, ʿAwdat al-ṭāʾir ilā al-baḥr (Beirut: Dār al-Nahār, 1969), English translation: Days of
Dust, tr. Trevor Le Gassick (Wilmette, IL: Medina Press International, 1974); Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Taḥta al-miẓalla
(Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1968), English translation of several stories in God’s World, tr. Akef Abadir and
Roger Allen (Minneapolis: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1973).
5. Ḥasan Ḥanafī, Qaḍāya muʿāṣira, 2 vols (Cairo: Dār al-Fikr al-Arabī, 1977); Muḥammad ʿĀbid al-Jābirī,
Naḥnu wa-l-Turāth (Dār al-Ṭalīʿa, 1980); ʿAbdallāh al-ʿArwī, al-ʿArab wa-l-Fikr al-Tārīkhī (Beirut: Dār al-
Ḥaqīqah, 1973); Al-Ṭayyib Tizzīnī, Mashrūʿ ruʾyā jadīda li-al-fikr al-ʿArabī min al-ʿaṣr al-jāhilī ḥattā al-marḥala
al-muʿāṣira, 1. Min al-turath ila al-thawra (Beirut: Dar Ibn Khaldūn, 1978). These works and others are
analyzed in Issa J. Boullata, Trends and Issues in Contemporary Arab Thought (Albany: State University of
New York Press, 1990).
 Arabic Fiction’s Relationship with Its Past 79

ibn Hishām Told Us) is seen as a kind of bridge between a so-called classical tradition
and the emergence of modern fiction in Arabic, a process that brings to the fore, as we
all know, the familiar names of Haykal, al-Ḥakīm, al-Māzinī, and so on (with their ana-
logues at different times in other Arab-world regions). Within such a cultural frame-
work this process of novelistic development is seen as culminating in the novels of
Maḥfūẓ. However I would like to suggest that the kind of historical scenario that I have
just essayed represents a highly problematic intertextual situation that I am inclined
to term “translational,” not in the particular sense of translation as a textual process
but in its literal sense of “carrying something across” two or more cultural traditions.
The situation has, I believe, been clearly illustrated by the Nobel Award of 1988 and its
aftermath. Exactly twenty-one years after 1967 Maḥfūẓ was awarded the international
recognition that accompanies the West’s most prestigious literary award, and yet he
found himself regularly termed “the Balzac [or Zola, or Dickens, etc.] of Cairo.” There
was a severe chronological disjuncture here, but I would suggest that more is involved
than merely that.
I wish to make it clear at this point that I am not talking here (although I have else-
where) about whether the Nobel Award certified the ability of an Arab author to write
the kind of European family saga that was so popular in the 19th and early 20th centuries
in Europe. What I am more concerned with in the context of our combination of intertex-
tuality and post-1967 is that the Nobel Award in 1988 conspicuously ignored and ignores
those later works of Maḥfūẓ that, along with those of his younger colleagues, represent
those trends in fiction that not only encourage the invocation of different intertextual
approaches but also call radically into question the balance in the selection of “prior
texts” that is characteristic of many pre-1967 studies of modern Arabic fiction, including,
I admit, some of my own. It is to two of these post-1967 trends that I now turn.

Ḥabῑbῑ and Al-Ghῑṭānῑ

I would like to suggest that, in the wake of the 1967 “setback” and the profound period
of self-examination that followed, two important works of Arabic fiction appeared that
not only brilliantly reflected the zeitgeist of the 1970s but, equally, if not more, impor-
tant, required of their readers that the works in question be culturally contextualized
in ways radically different from those that I have just discussed with reference to the
pre-1967 works of Maḥfūẓ. In other words, their intertextual frame of reference was
one that reflected a totally different attitude towards and utilization of the relation-
ship of present to past. I refer, as is probably already clear, to Emile Ḥabībī’s Al-Waqāʾiʿ
al-gharība fī ikhtifāʾ Saʿīd Abī al-Naḥs al-Mutāshāʾil (1972, 1974) and Jamāl al-Ghīṭānī’s
al-Zaynī Barakāt (1975). Both these texts have now become some kind of “classics” in
modern Arabic fiction, and rightly so. As such, they have been widely studied and from
many points of view. It is not my intention here to add to the list of studies devoted to
these two works (not least, because I have already contributed some of my own in my
80 Chapter Seven

book, The Arabic Novel),6 but rather to suggest that the timing of their publication in a
post-1967 Arab world is no accident of chronology but is representative of an emerging
new and different approach to the heritage of the past and, in the context of intertextual
approaches, a renewed interest in the relationship between history and narrative in the
pre-modern era. One might suggest that the possibility of a new retrospective continuum
was being investigated by these two authors.
In the case of Ḥabībī’s narrative, we can begin with the very title itself: its preposter-
ous length, the bane of librarians, and its predilection for word-play inevitably call to
the reader’s mind the elaborate and sajʿ-laden titles given to Arabic works in all fields, a
phenomenon that may be seen as reaching a high (or low) point during the pre-modern
era. The juxtaposition of Al-Waqāʾiʿ al-gharība to such contemporaneous (i.e., post-1967)
fictional contributions as Maḥfūẓ’s Al-Marāyā (1972) and Hikāyāt ḥāratinā (1974) or, to cite
another Palestinian author, Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā, in Al-Safīna (1969), only serves to em-
phasize the nature of Ḥabībī’s gesture. Incidentally, I mention those two works of Maḥfūẓ
in particular at this point because, in spite of my observations above about the reception
of Maḥfūẓ’s works, both Al-Marāyā and Hikāyāt ḥāratinā illustrate clearly that he was as
aware of the tensions in the relationship of modern Arabic fiction to its indigenous past
as were his younger contemporaries. Neither of these two works by Maḥfūẓ was initially
designated as being a “novel”; indeed the preface to the original publication of the for-
mer specifically noted that the series of vignettes was something new, but not a novel,
while the latter work was initially termed “qiṣaṣ qaṣīra,” then “shakhsiyyāt wa-mawāqif”
(and I wonder if the Sufi connotations of the latter term were intentional), and finally
“riwāya.”7 But, returning to Ḥabībī’s narrative, we can point beyond the title itself to the
role of the narrator, the discrete function of each episode, the games with language and
allusion, and many other features so redolent of the earlier traditions of Arabic narra-
tive—and especially that of the maqāma.8

6. Among recent contributions, see Peter Heath, “Creativity in the Novels of Emil Habiby, with Spe-
cial Reference to Saʿid the Pessoptimist,” in Tradition, Modernity, and Post-Modernity in Arabic Literature: Es-
says in Honor of Professor Issa J. Boullata (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 158–72; Maher Jarrar, “A Narration of
‘deterritorialization’: Imīl Ḥabībī’s The Pessoptimist,” Middle Eastern Literatures 5/1 (January 2002): 15–28;
and Rula Jurdi Abisaab, “The Pessoptimist: Breaching the State’s da‘wâ in a Fated Narrative of Secrets,”
Edebiyat 13/1 (May 2002): 1–10. Cf. Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction, 2nd
ed. (Syracuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1995).
7. For Al-Marāyā see the preface to the original episodes published in the magazine, al-Idhāʿa wa-l-
Televisyūn (beginning on May 1, 1971); for Hikāyāt ḥāratinā see the changing designations in the listing of
Maḥfūẓ’s oeuvre in subsequent fictional works.
8. As I have already suggested in “Literary history and generic change: the example of the maqāmah,”
in Studies in Honor of Clifford Edmund Bosworth. Vol. 1, Hunter of the East (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 2000), 3–14, esp.
12.
 Arabic Fiction’s Relationship with Its Past 81

In the case of al-Ghīṭānī’s novel, the linkage of present and past involves not merely
an act of interpretation but also a direct encounter with historical texts and pastiches of
them—a process that some critics have dubbed “transtextuality.”9 Al-Zaynī Barakāt con-
tains not only citations from Ibn Iyās’s history of Egypt describing events in the 16th
century, but also brilliant replications of historical accounts, public proclamations, and
“translations” of accounts by a Venetian traveler, all from the pen of al-Ghīṭānī him-
self. With al-Ghīṭānī there is a move beyond earlier evocations of history in novel form,
whether for purposes of community-building through general education or merely for
entertainment, to the replication of a particular historical period—that surrounding the
Ottoman capture of Cairo in 1516—but for a very contemporary purpose, a trenchant
analysis of Egyptian society in the wake of the June War of 1967. The record of the se-
cret police system operated by Zakariyyā ibn Raḍī and the rise to fame and power of
al-Zaynī Barakāt, as recorded by Ibn Iyās and his 20th-century replicator, remind the
reader of Santayana’s famous quotation that “those who cannot remember the past are
condemned to repeat it.” Furthermore al-Ghīṭānī’s resort in his evocation of the past to
transtextuality, the incorporation of other texts within his own fiction, places his novel
into the very context that I alluded to above. The genres of Arabic adab have such citations
and pastiches of them as a primary characteristic, and no more so than in the maqāma, as
any number of studies of the generic imitations contained within al-Hamadhānī’s oeuvre
have shown.
In the remainder of this study, I would like to examine the works of a few of those
writers who may be considered al-Ghīṭānī’s successors, but not before suggesting that,
if indeed Al-Zayni Barakāt merits such significant status in the post-1967 period of Arabic
fiction, do its intertextual strategies not lead us back, as indeed do those of Ḥabībī’s fic-
tional masterpiece, to strong precedents in earlier works such as al-Shidyāq’s Al-Sāq ʿalā
al-Sāq (1855) and al-Muwaylihī’s Ḥadīth ʿῙsā ibn Hishām (1898, 1907), where pastiches of
other genres and styles not only look back to earlier periods but also presage a reexami-
nation of the past in the post-1967 era?

The Uses of History

In my brief discussion above of the cultural context in the post-1967 era, I mentioned the
fragility of the right to freedom of expression that is a daily reality for many, if not most,
writers of Arabic fiction. Those realities clearly have a major impact upon what creative
writers choose to write about and what not to write about. However at the same time I
think we are all abundantly aware of the fact that that very situation serves to establish

9. Among many studies of al-Ghīṭānī’s novel that seem particular relevant to the current topic, I
would mention Samia Mehrez, Egyptian Writers Between History and Fiction (Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press, 1994), esp. 96–118.
82 Chapter Seven

not only a linkage between literary creativity and political interpretations of it that is
much closer than tends to be the case in most Western literary traditions, but that it also
fosters a readership that is almost inevitably attuned to the process of “reading between
the lines,” which is what the term “intertextuality” presumably implies on the most lit-
eral level. In a period from 1967 to the present day (2003) when we have seen Hourani’s
“disturbance of spirits” illustrated on international, regional, and local fronts, “read-
ing between the lines” and a recontextualization of fiction’s focus on the need for and
process of societal change has been the primary means for the expression of the politi-
cally controversial and often unexpressable. That the revival and exploitation of history,
its genres and textual strategies—what Harold Bloom refers to as “the family archive,”
should be a principal resort in such a political context is hardly surprising.10
While the works of many authors could be cited as examples of more recent contri-
butions to this trend in fiction, I will concentrate in what follows on certain Maghribi
authors, a reflection, I admit, of my own recent interest in the Arabic fictional output
in that region. The most obvious candidate for analysis is probably BenSālim Ḥimmīsh
(Himmich). Indeed, having published a study of Ibn Khaldūn’s historical method, Al-
Khaldūniyya fi ḍawʾ falsafat al-tārīkh (1998; “Khaldūnism in Light of the Philosophy of
History”), he then proceeded to write a novel, Al-ʿAllāma (2000; The Polymath), winner
of the 2002 Naguib Mahfouz Prize in Cairo, in which the world-renowned historian Ibn
Khaldūn, now resident in Cairo, is portrayed as discussing with his amanuensis, Hamu
al-Hihi, his approach to historical writing in the light of his own lifelong experience with
the capricious nature of power and the rampant abuses of both political and religious
authority. The process involves, almost automatically, the citation of extracts from both
Al-Muqaddima and Al-Taʿrīf, along with samples of Ibn Khaldūn’s own poetry, his favorite
samples of Andalusian verse, and criticism of the methodology of his much–travelled
contemporary, Ibn Baṭṭūta in Tuḥfat al-nuẓẓār. Here, one might suggest, the linkage of
fiction and history becomes almost vertiginous, as a novel is penned by a contemporary
Moroccan philosopher of history about a historian utilizing his own earlier studies of
history to muse about the role of history and its relationship to contemporary power
structures. To be sure, the novel itself has its cerebral qualities, but, as with Himmich’s
other prize-winning novel, Majnūn al-ḥukm (1990), the invocation of a particular histori-
cal period and personage (in this latter case, the Fatimid Caliph, al-Ḥākim) and the use
of historical texts and pastiches of them to analyze the abuse of religious and political
authority are not lacking in contemporary relevance.11

10. So described by Culler, Pursuit of Signs, 108.

11. [See Roger Allen, “Historiography as Novel: Bensalem Himmich’s Al-‘Allāma,” in Transforming Loss
Into Beauty: Essays on Arabic Literature and Culture, ed. Marlé Hammond (Cairo: American University in
Cairo Press, 2015), 269–80.]
 Arabic Fiction’s Relationship with Its Past 83

The text of Ibn Khaldūn’s famous study of history and its theorization is also cited
in another Maghribi novel, Maʿrakat al-zuqāq (1986) by Rashīd Abū Jadra (Boudjedra),
which also exists in a French version, La prise de Gibraltar (1987). However, in the context
of intertextuality, the strategies of the author and the processes of reading seem to be
completely different from those of Himmich’s novels. For, whereas Himmich’s works, by
their citation of actual historical sources and their incorporation into the narrative of
pastiches of various genres and styles of text, clearly seek to utilize an Arabic textual past
for contemporary purposes, Abū Jadra’s work places Ibn Khaldūn’s descriptions of the
conquest of Al-Andalus into a much more complicated intertextual and indeed intercul-
tural environment. As is well known, the Algerian novelist and poet began his career by
writing in French (with La répudiation [1969] as his most famous novel of that period). In
1981 he announced that henceforth he would be writing his fiction in Arabic; Maʿrakat al-
zuqāq thus belongs to this latter period. However, many scholars have wondered out loud
quite what the implications of this process of language transfer actually are; one possibil-
ity among many suggests that the Arabic version of a work originally conceived either
in French or a mixture of French and Arabic is now the first to be published.12 Whatever
the case may be, Abū Jadra’s works provide a wonderful example of that post-colonial
métissage that is so characteristic of much fictional writing in the Maghrib. The reader
of Maʿrakat al-zuqāq is introduced to the obsessive musings of Ṭāriq, a doctor in contem-
porary Algeria whose memories of childhood are emblematic of the entire course of the
Algerian Revolution and of attempts to place it within a historical framework. Ṭāriq’s
very name provides a direct linkage to part of that framework; his father, totally obsessed
with history in general and the linkage of the Maghrib to Al-Andalus in particular, has
named his son after Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād. A visual intertext—if such a concept is permitted—is
provided by elaborate and lengthy descriptions of a miniature (attributed in the French
version only to al-Wāsiṭī) showing the Muslim forces in the year AD 710 massed in prepa-
ration for the crossing of the straits to Gibraltar, which gives its names to both Ṭāriqs,
the historical and the contemporary. When Ṭāriq’s school-teacher casts doubts on the
veracity of the historical account, and especially of Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād’s ringing address to
his troops, the contemporary Ṭāriq’s father and indeed his school friends who are heav-
ily involved in the Algerian revolutionary movement declare that the teacher is a traitor.
History and historical texts are thus portrayed as having a crucial contemporary func-
tion in nation building.
Neither the Arabic nor French versions of this highly complex novel are complete
versions of the other; each has substantial additions and omissions not found in the
other language version. However, Ibn Khaldūn’s account does appear in both texts (in
varying quantities), thus providing a linkage to the Arab-Islamic past. Ṭāriq finds himself

12. I have discussed this issue in detail in “Translation Translated: Rashīd Abu Jadra’s Maʿrakat al-
Zuqāq,” Oriente moderno 16 (72), n.s. 2–3 (1997): 165–76 [reprinted as chapter 14 in this volume].
84 Chapter Seven

compelled by his school-teacher and, above all, by his father to read and memorize parts
of Al-Muqaddima, but at the same time his school curriculum also requires him to trans-
late passages from the account by the Roman general, senator and historian, Sallustus
(d. 34 BC), of his war against the Numidian ruler, Jugurtha—yet another link to Maghribi
history. Given Abū Jadra’s fondness for elaboration, it comes as no surprise to find the
Latin text included in the novel, along with the process where Ṭāriq’s father requires that
he prepare vocabulary lists—also incorporated into the text.
This attempt at describing Maʿrakat al-zuqāq comes about as the result of a process
of reading that might itself almost be called a “maʿraka” of intercultural and intertex-
tual proportions. Throughout the text there is a truly obsessive concern with particular
scenarios that are repeated over and over again: al-Wāsiṭī’s miniature, the Ibn Khaldūn
passage, and the contemporary Ṭāriq’s traumatic and brutal treatment by the shaykh at
the Qur’an school (kuttāb), these are just a few among many. Narrators are switched on a
regular basis, and with little or no indication as to their identity except via the process
of reading (and indeed rereading). While there is some punctuation, sentences will often
blend into each other; single noun sentences are common, often accompanied by as-
sociations which are appended in parentheses followed by a question mark. Thus, while
Ibn Khaldūn and al-Wāsiṭī may lead the reader in one direction, these discourse features
and the pervasive mood of narrative plurality and uncertainty reveal a close affinity with
another cultural tradition and intertext, namely the French nouveau roman. It is here, of
course, that the existence of a French version of the novel (with its different title) and
the fact that it is described as having been translated “with the author’s collaboration”
becomes particularly interesting. In this context it is also interesting to note, as my col-
league Richard Serrano has, that La prise de Gibraltar (and my use of the French title here
is deliberate) owes a great deal to the model provided by Claude Simon in his novel, La
bataille de Pharsale (1969). Whatever the case may be regarding Abū Jadra’s language or
original creativity, there can be little doubt that this novel and others create a vivid and
complex picture of the social and cultural environment of his much troubled homeland
which has ever since its long and violent revolution been emblematic of the post-colonial
condition. It is perhaps ironic in such a context that, whatever the original language of
the fictional work in question, the intertextual linkages to the French tradition still seem
the more prevalent and applicable.

Conclusion

This brief examination of the applicability of the methods of intertextuality to the fic-
tional output of Arab litterateurs in the post-1967 period has shown, I believe, the rich-
ness and variety of the tradition as it pursues its course along paths that are quite differ-
ent from each other—differences that reflect creative explorations of language, genre,
and regional attitudes of the writers of the present in their confrontation with the gen-
eral and particular past. Indeed, such is that variety and so specific are some of the lo-
 Arabic Fiction’s Relationship with Its Past 85

cal factors, both contemporary and historical, that, having suggested elsewhere that at-
tempts to subsume so much productivity under the single rubric of “Arab” or “Arabic”
become so general as to be less than useful, I would now posit that, in the particular
context of intertextual analyses, we now need to pose the question as to precisely which
“discursive space” and in which “culture” we are proposing to base our discussions. How-
ever, whatever bases we choose for anchoring our chosen texts in a “culture,” I would
suggest that the especially useful function of modern Arabic literature, indeed of the
Arabic literary heritage in general, is its intercultural aspect. In a return to my open-
ing comments, I might suggest that the founding figures of the intertextual approach
seem to have grounded their theories in a generally unicultural or at least Eurocentric
context (but one might suggest that, in Western comparative literatures studies, there is
little new about that situation). With that in mind, the sheer richness of the patterns of
trans-regional and trans-cultural influence that have always been and remain a primary
feature of Arabic literature seems to provide a source of potentially fruitful studies of and
adjustments to the concept of intertextuality. To such efforts this gathering is clearly a
significant contribution.
However, I cannot close without returning once again to a problem that seems to
me to impact directly on the efficacy of our researches in this domain. It relates to the
concepts of heritage and literary canon and how the works identified within such terms
of reference are categorized and historicized. As we continue to wrestle with the orga-
nization of a history of modern Arabic literature in which a continuingly problematic
concept of “Nahḍa” is preceded by several centuries, the literary products and esthetic
criteria of which we have studied so little, we must surely suggest that the application of
intertextual approaches requires—almost as a prerequisite—a more detailed questioning
of the basic validity of Arabic’s “family archive.”
 8
The Impact of the Translated Text:
The Case of Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Novels,
with Special Emphasis on The Trilogy

Those familiar with the paradigms of the Latin verb will be aware that translation in-
volves a process of transfer, of “carrying across.” The Romance languages prefer the con-
cept of “leading across” (Fr.“traduction,” It. “traduzione”). If Robert Bly’s well-known
work The Eight Stages of Translation describes and quantifies the linear extent of the pro-
cess, there is a good deal of linguistic research that investigates the complexity of the
translation process at each stage of the transfer, the move from source text, via intertext,
to target text.1 In his famous article “The Task of the Translator,” Walter Benjamin sug-
gests that translation is a mode, and that “To comprehend it as a mode one must go back
to the original, for that contains the law governing the translation: its translatability.”
The role of the translator is “to liberate the language imprisoned in a work in his re-
creation of that work.”2
Benjamin is talking about the decision-making process that the translator embarks
on in the course of bringing a translated text to fruition. I would like to explore this no-
tion of “translatability” by examining some translated texts of Najīb Maḥfūẓ, the Egyp-
tian novelist and 1988 Nobel Laureate in Literature. I will investigate the principles that
translators have followed, the difficulties that they have faced, and the features of the
resulting translations. However, alongside the “transfer” process from source to target
text, I would suggest that the concept of “translatability” must also imply another as-
pect. The task of the translator, that of producing a version of the original text in the

A first version of this study was presented at the annual meeting of the Middle Eastern Library Semi-
nar in Princeton in March 1991. The general title of the meeting was “The Impact of the Translated
Text.” I am, as always, indebted to the insightful comments of several colleagues during the discussion
that followed this and other presentations.
1. Robert Bly, The Eight Stages of Translation (Boston: Rowan Tree Press, 1983).
2. Walter Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator: An Introduction to the Translation of Baudelaire’s
Tableaux Parisiens,” in Illuminations, ed. Hannah Arendt (New York: Schocken Books, 1969), 69–82, at 70.

87
88 Chapter Eight

target language, is only one link, albeit a significant one, in a long chain of decisions
and actions. In the context of assessing the impact of translations, a further process of
transfer is involved. The translated text presented for publication in the target culture
is thereafter subject to reception by a reading public. A further series of criteria will
come into play as editors and publishers decide on their preferred mode of carrying the
author’s (and translator’s) text across a cultural divide and of leading the reader through
the process of dealing with what is essentially the defamiliarization of the unfamiliar.
To the best of my knowledge, little has been written on the reception of translat-
ed texts. Furthermore, it is my impression that works on translation theory have been
largely devoted to the study of languages and cultures that tend to share, in varying de-
grees, aspects of a common heritage with respect to both history and language: French
to German, English to French, and so on. It is with these perceptions in mind that I would
like to attempt to consider some of the issues involved in both the theoretical and the
actual impact of the translated text between two non-contiguous language systems and
cultures, those of Arabic and English, by examining not only the translations of some of
Maḥfūẓ’s novels but also the circumstances in which these works have been presented to
a Western reading public. I will preface my analysis of the texts themselves with a brief
historical survey of the translation situation at the time that Maḥfūẓ was awarded the
Nobel Prize.

Translation of Maḥfūẓ and the Impact of the Nobel Prize

The Nobel Committee’s published criteria make it very clear that, in endeavoring to keep
track of developments in non-Western literatures, they rely entirely on translations into
European languages and on advice that is regularly requested from specialists in those
literary traditions.3 In the case of Maḥfūẓ, before 1988 the availability of translated texts
presents an interesting picture. Trevor Le Gassick’s translation of Zuqāq al-Midaqq (Midaq
Alley) had been published originally in 1966; Philip Stewart’s of Awlād ḥaratinā (Children
of Our Quarter, generally known in English by the title of an early translation, Children of
Gebelawi) had been completed for an Oxford degree in the late 1960s (although not pub-
lished commercially until 1981); and the short story anthology God’s World, compiled by
Akef Abadir and myself, had appeared in 1973. In 1972 the American University in Cairo
Press had obtained rights to the English translation of eight Maḥfūẓ novels, to which
others were added at later stages. At some point before the Nobel Award announcement,
Maḥfūẓ assigned to the American University in Cairo Press world rights to translations of
his works into all languages. While a few of his novels were also available in French and
German, the representation was considerably less in those languages than in English.
What is particularly interesting about this corpus of translated works is that, while the

3. See Roger Allen, “Arabic Literature and the Nobel Prize,” World Literature Today 62/2 (1988), 201–3.
 The Impact of the Translated Text 89

series of novels that Maḥfūẓ wrote in 1960s was well represented (except for the curious
omission of Tharthara fawq al-Nīl [“Chatter on the Nile,”1966], high on Maḥfūẓ’s personal
desiderata list), the one major work that was not available in English was The Trilogy. Its
three volumes had been part of the original 1972 list for which rights had been secured
by the American University in Cairo Press, but the first attempts at translation, samples
of which I saw in Cairo as early as 1975, were considered so unsatisfactory that they were
completely scrapped. The versions now being published were originally the work of Ol-
ive and Lorne Kenny and were started at least a decade ago, but even they had not been
released by the time of the announcement of the award of the Nobel Prize to Maḥfūẓ.
The citation of the Nobel Award Committee makes it clear that The Trilogy played
a large part in their decision, but the version in question was the French translation of
the first two of its three volumes prepared by Philippe Vigreux and “the stories of God’s
World.” While Arab critics were able to identify the first English title as a reference to
Awlād ḥāratinā (1959 in newspaper articles form, 1967 in book form), the mention of God’s
World was seen by many as a reference to the 1963 short story collection Dunyā Allāh,
whereas the anthology in English culled from a variety of short story collections was in
fact the one intended.
Since Maḥfūẓ was characterized and praised as an Arab or Egyptian novelist, it is clear
that the selection of translated works cited by the Nobel Committee posed some prob-
lems for those who were to present his works to an English-speaking readership. Almost
every article and critical review concerned itself predominantly with the “Cairo Trilogy,”
relaying to a curious and expectant audience the comments of specialists to the effect
that it was a novel of generations in the great social-realist tradition, depicting life in
Cairo in masterful detail. In describing Maḥfūẓ, commentators made use of phrases such
as “the Dickens of Cairo” or “the Balzac of Cairo,” no doubt with the laudable aim of eas-
ing that process of cross-cultural transfer, but at the same time confirming the worst
suspicions of those Arab-world critics who were already attacking Maḥfūẓ for having
sold out, namely, that the Nobel Prize was simply a congratulatory pat on the head for
trying a bit harder to master a Western literary genre. The only problem with all this was
that English readers who kept hearing about the great work had no access to it. But the
citation listed another work, Children of Gebelawi. Here, the commentators and interview-
ers tended to find considerably more fruitful ground, as it soon emerged that the work
had been banned in Egypt soon after its initial publication in 1959. But as they and others
set themselves to read this latter work (one of those kept in circulation in the pre-Nobel
era through the devoted efforts of Donald Herdeck at Three Continents Press), the gen-
eral reaction, at least if my own experiences are any guide, was one of politely expressed
bafflement and even disappointment. How could this novel purport to be the work of
someone who claimed to be the Balzac or Dickens of Cairo? To what were all its obscure
allusions referring? Perhaps a semester-long course in comparative religion, with a par-
ticular focus on Islam and not a few details about the quarter system in Cairo, would
help in the reading process. In contrast, I have neither heard nor read any reactions to
90 Chapter Eight

the volumes of The Trilogy in English translation that mention any such difficulties in the
process of reading their narratives after their transfer to a different cultural context,
although there have, of course, been comments on the quality of the translation itself.
In concluding this brief survey of the practicalities involved in the more public as-
pect of the reception of Maḥfūẓ’s works in the West following the award of the Nobel
Prize in Literature in 1988, I would like to suggest that, if the process had already been
rendered problematic by the scant availability of translated texts, Maḥfūẓ’s support of
Salman Rushdie’s rights as a writer, and the linkage of Children of Gebelawi and its treat-
ment of the issue of religion with the Satanic Verses controversy, was to prove even more
deleterious during the course of his “Nobel Year.”4

Title and Names

I would like to begin this investigation into the transfer processes involved in “carrying
across” the Arabic text of Maḥfūẓ’s novels into English by looking at issues surrounding
the very first item that most readers will encounter: the title. Since the titles of many of
Maḥfūẓ’s novels (including those of The Trilogy) are names of places, and thus the deci-
sions made with reference to the title will inevitably carry over into the text itself, I will
also consider the entire issue of the rendering of place-names.
Let me begin with another text that was clearly of some considerable interest to
the Nobel Committee, and has become even more so in the light of subsequent debate
in Egypt over Maḥfūẓ’s attitudes towards Islam. Children of Gebelawi, the title of the Eng-
lish translation, shows a significant change from that of the original, “Children of our
quarter” (Trevor Le Gassick has, as I recollect, even rendered it as Kids from Our Quarter).
What, one wonders, are the motives involved in such a decision? The current English title
almost certainly provokes an interest in the mind of the reader of the translation to dis-
cover who Gebelawi may be, but I would suggest that not only does the change diminish
the symbolic impact of the original but substantially distorts its significance. The word
ḥāra (“quarter”) is one that Maḥfūẓ has used in the titles of several works, and clearly
carries a good deal of symbolic resonance.5 This is of more than a passing importance,
in that this title, used for the first time in 1959, is given to a work that follows a series of

4. This subject is discussed in greater detail in Roger Allen, “Najīb Maḥfūẓ and World Literature,” in
The Arabic Novel Since 1950: Critical Essays, Interviews and Bibliography, ed, Issa J. Boullata (Cambridge, MA,
Dar Mahjar Publishing and Distribution, 1992) = Mundus Arabicus 5 (1993): 121–42.
5. One can mention the long short story, “Ḥārat al-ʿUshshāq” (Lovers’ Lane) in Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Ḥikāya
bi-lā bidāya wa-lā nihāya (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1971), 100–159; and Maḥfūẓ, Ḥikāyāt Ḥāratinā (Cairo: Mak-
tabat Miṣr, 1975), a work the generic confusion of which is amply demonstrated by the fact that, when
first published, it was termed “qiṣaṣ qaṣīra” (short stories), then “shakhṣiyyāt wa-mawāqif” (personalities
and attitudes), and at some later stage “riwāya” (novel). It is available in English translation as Naguib
Mahfouz, Fountain and Tomb (Washington D.C.: Three Continent Press, 1988).
 The Impact of the Translated Text 91

novels in which the specific names of actual quarters or streets of Cairo are used as titles.
Thus the move from “Children of Our Quarter” to Children of Gebelawi is, I would suggest,
not only an act of interpretation that moves from the potentially allusive to the par-
ticular, but also an alteration of Maḥfūẓ’s purpose in assigning a non-specific title to his
work. One may perhaps go further and note that the original title points in the direction
of “the quarter,” leaving the figure of Gebelawi unmentioned and thus separate in his
walled house outside the confines of the city. Given that the narrative assigns to Gebelawi
a role symbolic of the deity (an interpretation that finds support in the response of al-
Azhar to the work’s original appearance, namely, to ban its further publication in Egypt),
the clear physical separation between the quarter and Gebelawi implicit in the original
title may perhaps be seen on a symbolic level as a reflection of the Islamic perception of
a supremely transcendent God. In such a frame of reference, the English titles implies an
association which seems more in a Christian frame of reference.6
The titles that have been used for both the French and English translations of The
Trilogy reflect the dilemma faced by anyone wishing to translate them for a Western
readership, namely, that they refer to actual quarters or streets in Cairo. It is with the
decisions that have actually been made, and with the resulting “impact,” that I wish to
argue. At some stage of the transfer process a decision of the translator, editor, and/
or publisher—it has clearly been felt that a Western readership is unable to cope with
the unfamiliarity of place names such as Bayn al-Qaṣrayn (“Palace Walk”) Qaṣr al-Shawq
(“Palace of Desire”) and al-Sukkariyya (“Sugar Street”) which occur both as titles and in
the text of the novels. The solution adopted has been that of producing as direct a trans-
lation of the original name in the target language as possible.
In commenting on this decision, one might begin by noting that another quarter
novel, Zuqāq al-Midaqq, has for many years been the most popular of the English transla-
tion of Maḥfūẓ’s works in spite of the fact that it is not entitled “Pestle Alley.” But, mov-
ing to questions of principle, we are obliged to examine the criteria which may have
been behind the decision that Cairene place names are in need of translation. How would
things work in the reverse situation? Should we assume that in translations into Arabic
one should use Ghābat sharābat al-rāʿī for Hollywood, al-Jazīra al-ṭawīla for Long Island, and
al-Kūkh al Swīsrī as the closest equivalent to Swiss Cottage? If the answer to that question
(one that on the purely linguistic level seems to involve a simple exercise in reversal) is
in the negative, then a series of interesting questions arises as to why translation should
be required in one direction—Arabic to English—and not in the other, and what criteria
are being invoked. We will return to this larger issue below. Meanwhile, one wonders
whether any forthcoming translation of Maḥfūẓ’s novel Khān al-Khalīlī will appear as “al-

6. “Children of God” occurs in several places in the New Testament, for example, to describe the
“peacemakers” in the Sermon on the Mount: Matthew 5:9. “Les enfants de Dieu” is the title of one of
the nine meditations for organ on the theme of Christmas by the French composer Olivier Messiaen
(b. 1908).
92 Chapter Eight

Khalili’s Inn.” In this context, there is another potentially useful resource to consult: the
treatment of place names in the works of any number of Arab novelists who place the
action of their narratives in Western countries. In the works of Ḥalīm Barakāt and Jabrā
Ibrāhīm Jabrā, to name just two, all place names, however obscure (and in Jabrā’s novels,
they are often very obscure indeed), are transliterated directly from the source language.
Their very unfamiliarity becomes an intrinsic and significant part of the process of read-
ing and interpreting the work in question. Analogy would suggest strongly that the solu-
tion adopted with regard to the transfer of place-names in the translation of Maḥfūẓ’s
Trilogy may not be a happy one.
Moving from principle to practice, one can also comment on the link between the
printed medium and the visual. The front cover of Palace Walk conveys what seems an
appropriate visual image with a judiciously chosen print of a street in Cairo. However,
the title, Palace Walk, puts me more in mind of Jane Austen’s Bath than of Maḥfūẓ’s Cairo.
A “walk,” at least to this reader brought up in a British context, implies a thoroughfare
restricted to pedestrians that will be found in park areas and exclusive neighborhoods,
something that is most carefully manicured; in other words, nothing even closely re-
sembling Bayn al-Qaṣrayn. In this context the French title, Impasse des deux palais, at least
manages through the use of “impasse,” to avoid some of the implications of the Eng-
lish title. With the second volume things become far more problematic. Palace of Desire,
a dutifully accurate translation of Qaṣr al-Shawq (replicated in the French translation, Le
palais du désir) is surely designed to evoke in the minds of Western readers imaged of the
fabled Orient stretching back to Scheherezade, Hārūn al-Rashīd, and The Arabian Nights:
precisely the type of false image of the Middle East that it has been goal of much recent
scholarship to change. The visual image on the cover of the English translation, a print
of a boat on the Nile moored alongside some palm trees, only seems to underline the dis-
juncture between title and context. With the third volume, al-Sukkariyya, we seem to note
an interesting parting of the ways between the French and English versions. The former
would appear to have decided to abandon the principle of direct translation by choos-
ing Le jardin du passé, an interesting and substantial act of interpretation in itself. Not so
the English translation: Sugar Street. However admirable the accuracy of the translation
may be, and without exploring the potential evocative force of that English title, I would
submit that, in this case, al-Sukkariyya would be definitely preferable.
The titles of all three volumes refer to the various residences where the members
of different generations of the ʿAbd al-Jawwād family live. It is thus hardly surprising
that the names make their way on a regular basis into the text of all three volumes,
where they join a host of other place names. The principles at work in rendering these
important identifications of place into the target language differ between the French
and English versions. There would appear to be three “levels” at work: full translation,
partial translation, and no translation. Beginning with the titles themselves, we note
that the English version uses “Palace Walk” as the street name within the text, whereas
the French, in spite of the title Impasse des deux palais, prefers “Bayn al-Qaṣrayn” for the
 The Impact of the Translated Text 93

street name in the text itself. To be fair, it has to be acknowledged that the English and
French versions show a significant difference of principle: the French translations resort
to footnotes on a regular basis (a point to which I shall return below); the English ver-
sion prefers what I will term “the inserted explanation,” such as “Palace Walk, or Bayn
al-Qaṣrayn,” “al-Naḥḥāsīn, or Coppersmiths Street,” and “Palace of Desire, or Qaṣr al-
Shawq.” Another example is “Mutawalli Gate, known as Bab al-Zuwayla.”7 The use of such
interpolations within a translated text is, needless to say, a subject of debate. While they
obviously provide useful information for the reader in a seemingly “natural” way (the
implication presumably being that footnotes do not), I would suggest that any analysis
of narrative point of view makes it clear that such insertions are anything but “natural”;
rather they intrude into the narrative contract between the “speaker” and the reader.
Moving from titles to other place-names, we find that they too provide ample dem-
onstration of the variety of options that translators have considered appropriate. Shāriʿ
al-Madrasa (Qaṣr al-Shawq, chapter 23) is assumed to be a street name in the English ver-
sion and is thus translated in full as “School Street,” but the French seems to assign it a
descriptive function by rendering the phrase “la rue de son [Aida’s] école.” “New Street”
(“Nouvelle Avenue”) is also translated in full in both versions rather than being left as
“al-Sikka al-jadīda.” “Goldsmiths’ Bazaar” is rendered as such in English, but the French
version leaves it as “Sagha.” Here the French translations seems to achieve some minimal
consistency by rendering “al-Naḥḥāṣīn” as “le quartier de Nahhasin,” whereas the Eng-
lish chooses “Nahhasin Street” (although it is translated at the beginning of Palace Walk
[2] and again later [416]). One is left to wonder why goldsmiths are translated, whereas
coppersmiths are mostly left in the original language. But then “Bayt al-Qāḍī,” “Bayt
al-Māl,” “Khān Jaʿfar,” “Bāb al-Futūḥ” and “Wajh al-Birka” are all left in their original
Arabic form, even though their translation would seem no more problematic than oth-
er names that have been rendered in English. With “Hammām al-Sulṭān” (The Sultan’s
Baths) the English and French again part ways: the English curiously leaves the name in
the original, while the French opts for “le bain du Sultan.” With “Darb Ṭayyāb” we have
the opposite: the French translation leaves it as is, while the English version (Palace of
Desire, chapter 36) renders it “Massage Alley.” “Ḥārat al-Waṭāwīt ”(Alley [or is it Quarter?]

7. The French translation of the second volume Palais du désir has a footnote (note 46) explaining
the actual meaning of “Bayn al-Qaṣrayn,” while retaining the Arabic name in the French text. The same
observation may be made about quotations from the Qurʾan with which the original texts are filled. The
English translation chooses to insert the references within parentheses in the translated text itself; the
French version prefers the use of footnotes. Regarding the usage of “Bayn al-Qaṣrayn,” “al-Naḥḥāsīn,”
and “Qaṣr al-Shawq” in the English translation, see Mahfouz, Palace Walk (New York: Doubleday, 1990), 2,
75, 77, 111, 414. Since place-names occur throughout the texts of both the volumes of The Trilogy under
consideration here, I will not provide detailed references to every occurrence. In the analogous area
of clothing, it is interesting to observe that the French translation renders “gallabiyya” as “galabiyye”
(Mahfouz, Le palais du désir [Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1987]), 201, while the English resorts to “ankle-length
skirt” (Mahfouz, Palace Walk, 171).
94 Chapter Eight

of the Bats) seems to involve an intermediate procedure, rendered as “Watawit Alley” in

English and simply “Al-Watawit” in French (where it is treated as the name of a quarter
and not merely a single alley).
Whatever else these examples may suggest, they seem to point to a decision-making
process that is not a little complex and even confused; the results are, I would suggest,
at least inconsistent. One must assume that the primary principle involved is grounded
in a feeling that the process of reading works from non-contiguous or unfamiliar cul-
tures, such as Maḥfūẓ’s novels in translation, places an unusual interpretive burden on
the Western reader, and that the load of such unfamiliarity needs to be removed, or at
the very least lightened, if the work is to be made readable. Such a perception raises in
turn crucial questions in the context of the impact of translations and the role of the
translator (and those who, as noted above, make a translated work available to the read-
ing public). To what extent, for example, should it be the role of the translator, perhaps
particularly one who focuses on a culture that may be considered remote from that of
the target language, to familiarize the source text for the target readership? To what
extent should the reader expectations and presuppositions be anticipated or challenged?
The essay of Walter Benjamin from which I quoted earlier lays great emphasis on this
point, quoting Rudolf Pannwitz in Die Krisis der europäischen Kultur:8

Our translations, even the best ones, proceed from a wrong premise. They want
to turn Hindi, Greek, English into German instead of turning German into Hindi,
Greek, English. Our translators have a far greater reverence for the usage of
their own language than for the spirit of the foreign works.… The basic error of
the translator is that he preserves the state in which his own language happens
to be instead of allowing his language to be powerfully affected by the foreign
tongue. Particularly when translating from a language very remote from his
own he must go back to the primal elements of language itself and penetrate to
the point where work, image and tone converge. He must expand and deepen
his language by means of the foreign language.

The mention of Hindi suggests that, for these critics at least, the question as to whether
or not the source and target languages and cultures are contiguous should not constitute
a factor in the decision-making process. Indeed, their view seems to be diametrically op-
posed to the principles which appear to have guided the selection of at least the titles of
the translations of Maḥfuẓ’s novels discussed above. With that in mind, it is interesting
to turn to Peter Theroux’s verdict on the English translation of the second volume of The
Trilogy:9

8. Benjamin, “The Task of the Translator,” 80–1.

9. Peter Theroux, in New York Times Book Review (27 January 1991), 15.
 The Impact of the Translated Text 95

Fortunately, the translators of “Palace of Desire,” William Maynard Hutchins,

Lorne M. Kenny and Olive E. Kenny, are equal to the task of animating rather
than embalming Mr. Mahfouz’s elegant and often explosive text. In the diffi-
cult choices presented by the religious flourishes of Cairene Arabic—“May God
spare us evil” and “all power and might are God’s”—they choose literalism, and
preserve the true color and peculiarity of Egyptian speech at only a slight cost
to the flow of credible conversation.

Mr. Theroux is himself a translator of Arabic fiction and so writes with a particular sen-
sitivity towards both the text and the task of the translator.10 More typical perhaps is
Brad Kessler, “former associate editor of Interview magazine,” who suggests during the
course of an article in the New York Times Magazine that “To read him [Maḥfūẓ] in English
requires a little imagination and a lot of charity.”11 One would hope, of course, that the
use of “a little imagination” is not restricted to the reading and interpretation of works
of translated fiction alone; but the mention of “charity” suggests that, for at least one
reader, Pannwitz’s firmly expressed opinions and their implications for the reader are
seen as imposing a hardship that may render the work unattractive to many. This brings
us, of course, back to the issue of the extent to which the reader of Arabic novels in trans-
lation needs to be shielded from the unfamiliar. At least one translation of a Maḥfūẓ novel
adhered somewhat to this principle in its first edition. Midaq Alley, the English version of
Zuqāq al-Midaqq,12 was regarded as a remarkable achievement of translation, and indeed
it was and is such. However, the original edition of 1966 was not a translation of the com-
plete text; careful readers of the original soon noticed that material that required an en-
counter with the excessively unfamiliar—including precisely those “religious flourishes”
to which Peter Theroux draws attention—were omitted. Najīb Maḥfūẓ commented disap-
provingly on this fact when we met in 1970, and when the translation was republished in
a new edition in the 1970s, Trevor Le Gassick reinserted many of the omitted passages.
Thus at least one implication of Pannwitz’s comments would seem to be that, if it is part
of the translator’s task to “carry across” elements from the source culture and to enrich
the target language thereby, the reader of the resulting texts should be prepared or even
eager to encounter such unfamiliar elements during the reading process.13 Indeed, it is
difficult to understand why a reader who is not possessed of “charity” or even a poten-

10. Theroux translated ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munịf ’s Cities of Salt (New York: Random House, 1988) and
would go on to translate Children of the Alley (New York: Doubleday, 1995).
11. Brad Kessler, “Laureate in the Land of the Pharaohs,” New York Times Magazine (3 June 1991), 62.
12. Mahfouz, Midaq Alley, tr. Trevor Le Gassick (Beirut: Khayat, 1966); Maḥfūẓ, Zuqāq al-Midaqq (Cairo:
Maktabat Miṣr, 1947).
13. Gayatri Spivak carries the translation process to a very personal level in commenting that: “For
me, translation is the most intimate way of reading. You become invested in the text.” Gayatri Chakra-
vorty Spivak, “The Politics of Translation,” in Outside the Teaching Machine (New York: 1993), 85.
96 Chapter Eight

tially less supercilious virtue would disapprove of an encounter with the unfamiliar in a
work of translated literature.14
I would like to conclude this segment on place-names by suggesting that, while I
do not wish to diminish facing the translator in making decisions regarding this issue,
the particular case of translations of Maḥfūẓ’s novels from Arabic into English and the
reaction to them may be seen as pointing towards an even broader issue, one that can be
linked to what might be termed cultural hegemony. If one of the purposes in translating
works such as Maḥfūẓ’s novels into other languages is to make a broader world reader-
ship aware of his works (and, one hopes, of those of other littérateurs from the Arab
world) and of the way in which they provide insight into his own universe and world
view, are we not in fact doing him and his colleagues a disservice by trying to familiarize
the unfamiliar in this way? Are English readers of French works presented with Elysian
Fields, the Arch of Triumph, or the Halls (or Markets)? Is not the process of confront-
ing such names and places an important and intrinsic part of the reading process, and
particularly of placing the fictional work its own authentic setting? Cairo has no street
called “New Road,” and particularly not one called “Palace of Desire or Qaṣr al-Shawq.”
In such a context, the decision to remove elements of the unfamiliar from translations
of works from “non-contiguous” cultures diminishes their impact by neutralizing that
very authenticity that draws the Western reader towards the encounter in the first place.

“Translatability,” Narrative Strategy and Style

The above section on titles and names may serve as a good example, I believe, of factors
beyond the more obvious linguistic aspects of “translatability” that may impinge upon
the impact of a translated literary on its target culture. I would now like to return to
what clearly emerges as the primary arena within which Benjamin’s concept operates:
the series of decisions that go into the process of determining that the work of a par-
ticular author can be effectively rendered into another language. While such decisions
may operate at a number levels, the generic and thematic for example, I would like to
concentrate here on the question of the link between narrative technique and style, and
the impact that these features will have on the “translatability” of the works concerned. I
will concentrate primarily on translations of The Trilogy, the work that was the particular
focus of the Nobel Committee’s attention, and the first two volumes of which are cur-
rently available in both English and French translations, but will also consider transla-
tions of some novels of the 1960s.

14. I have made this point earlier in my Introduction to an anthology of short stories by Yūsuf Idrīs,
In the Eye of the Beholder, ed. Roger Allen (Chicago: Bibliotheca Islamica, 1978). On the issue of omission
and paraphrase, it is instructive to compare the translation of “Qā ʿal-Madīna” by Pierre Cachia in In the
Eye of the Beholder (17–77) with that of Wadida Wassef in Yūsuf Idrīs, The Cheapest Nights (London: Heine-
mann, and Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1978).
 The Impact of the Translated Text 97

For an illustrious author of Arabic fiction whose works have been the object of much
scrutiny, it is remarkable how far the balance of critical attention devoted to Maḥfūẓ’s
novels has been titled in favor of studies of themes and implications, to the detriment
of detailed analysis of specific features of narrative method and style (and the necessary
links between them) at different stages in his career as a novelist. Among the few writers
who have essayed such an analysis is Sasson Somekh in his authoritative 1973 study on
Maḥfūẓ, The Changing Ryhthm, from which I will cite a montage of quotations in order to
show not only some of the features of Maḥfūẓ’s language to which I have just alluded but
also the way in which they are transformed at different stages in his career:15

Idiosyncrasies of style are hard to find [describing the quarter novels of the
1940s].

The use of words is now more creative, the dialogue more natural, and finally
the author makes greater use of his own metaphor [referring to The Trilogy].

The novels of the sixties herald a new quality, which combines the terse with
the connotative. Gone is the urge to portray everything in plain words and to
report conversations in full. The new language is infinitely more concise and
evocative.… Dialogue now takes the place of much of the description. Internal
monologue intermingles with copious but terse dialogue to produce a dynamic
effect.

The third of these quotes looks back to The Trilogy from the late 1960s as belonging to an
earlier period in Maḥfūẓ’s career in which there was an “urge to portray everything and
report conversations in full.” Such a description, of course, identifies a particular nar-
rative method. Many studies of fiction have focused on the extent to which a particular
piece of fiction “tells” its story as opposed to “shows.” While it would be incorrect to view
this mode of analysis as necessarily reflecting a universal shift in fictional narrative itself,
it certainly illustrates developments in the critical analysis of narrative point of view and
of the “narrative contract” with the reader. In the context of the creative process itself,
it has been suggested that, in a modern world where man has become much more aware
of his own place in the animal kingdom and of the immensely complex functions of the
human mind, writers have often tended to eschew the use of the omniscient narrator
mode and to reflect the complexities of modern life by exploring other narrative strate-
gies that communicate with the reader in more complex ways.16 While modern Arabic
fiction may participate in this process of development at a chronological distance from
its counterpart in Western traditions, I have suggested elsewhere that the sequence has

15. Sasson Somekh, The Changing Rhythm (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), 94,133, 187, 189.
16. These comments, needless to say, summarize a vast topic. “Showing” and “telling” and the role of
narrators are discussed in Wayne C. Booth, The Rhetoric of Fiction (Chicago: University of Chicago Press,
1961).
98 Chapter Eight

been basically the same. In the particular case of Maḥfūẓ, this hardly comes as a surprise
when we bear in mind the attention he devoted to the study of Western fiction early in
his writing career.17
The Trilogy may thus be seen as marking an intermediate stage in a process of de-
velopment: it clearly marks the crowning point in a series of social-realist novels that
Maḥfūẓ wrote in the 1940s. Many aspects of works with such generic characteristics are
clearly present: the narrator, for example, “tells” his readers in great detail about many
aspects of time, place and character. In a novel that compresses a period of approxi-
mately thirty years, with all its events, real and fictional, into even a three-volume work,
a good deal of “telling” is to be anticipated.18 It is the task of any effective translation to
consider the most effective ways of transferring such narrative features to the target
culture. However, The Trilogy is, I would suggest, not so conveniently buttonholed. In the
context of “telling” and “showing” it marks a transitional phase, one that looks ahead
to a further stage in Maḥfūẓ’s development as a writer. Evidence within the text itself
suggests that he is becoming increasingly aware of the potential offered by the tech-
nique of “showing,” a shift in emphasis that becomes marked in the novels of the 1960s
(as Somekh’s comment above makes clear). The process of reflecting this subtle shift
in narrative technique in translation is perhaps an even greater test of the translator’s
strategic skill.
Turning to the more precise matter of Maḥfūẓ’s language and style, I had the follow-
ing to say in my book on the Arabic novel, albeit briefly and in a comparative frame of
reference:19

It has been my impression from reading Maḥfūẓ’s novels for a number of years
that his total lexicon is not particularly large and that his style lacks the more
poetic qualities of some other Arab novelists, including Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā and
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf … Maḥfūẓ’s style tends to reflect the skills of a careful
craftsman who has spent much of his life as a civil servant and who writes very
much on a regular, almost routine, basis.… I should make it clear that my com-
ments here are intended to be more a description of differences in style than a
criticism of the writer whose name personifies the Arabic novel’s achievement
of genuine maturity.

17. For a comparison of the historical patterns in the development of the Arabic fictional tradition,
see Roger Allen, The Arabic Novel: An Historical and Critical Introduction (Syracuse: Syracuse University
Press, 1982). For Maḥfūẓ’s study of Western fiction, see Somekh, The Changing Rhythm, 44–5.
18. In this context, Maḥfūẓ’s Trilogy seems an obvious candidate for the kind of analysis of different
kinds of narrative time suggested by Gerard Genette, Narrative Discourse, tr. Jane E. Lewin (Ithaca, NY:
Cornell University Press, 1980).
19. Allen, The Arabic Novel, 107
 The Impact of the Translated Text 99

Even with the final caveat, my remarks brought forth the following comment from Jar-
eer Abu-Haidar: “That Maḥfūẓ’s style should be compared unfavourably with that of his
contemporaries by the author is a matter which is open to question or, more fairly, to
protest.”20
Abu-Haidar takes my comments on breadth of lexicon and non-poetic discourse as a
critical statement, an attribution of value, whereas I believe the passage makes clear that
the primary focus is a comparative one, the emphasis being on differences in style rather
than an evaluation of any of the authors mentioned. The novelists used in making this
brief comparison were both non-Egyptians. As I consider the issue of the translatability
of Maḥfūẓ’s fictions, and particularly the transfer process between the Arabic originals
and published English translations, I will again make use of two other authors in order to
suggest elements of difference and to provide some kind of yardstick: the two Egyptian
writers of fiction, Edward al-Kharrāṭ and Yūsuf Idrīs.
Having found my only attempt at translating al-Kharrāṭ quite the most difficult ex-
ercise in rendering modern Arabic fiction in English that I have undertaken, I would
have to agree with the doyen of translators of Arabic works into English, Denys John-
son-Davies, when he notes that “his [al-Kharrāṭ’s] preoccupation with language and a
convoluted style reminiscent of Proust present special difficulties to the translator.”21
Within the context of the impact of such translated works and the role of the implied
reader, I would in fact go further and suggest that such is the piling up of image after im-
age that characterizes so much of al- Kharrāṭ’s writing that, in spite of heroic attempts
by a number of translators, the resulting translated texts retain a large proportion of
their intrinsically Arabic elements in their English versions and thus demand an inordi-
nate amount of effort on the part of the reader.22 Yūsuf Idrīs works impose difficulties
of a different kind. As opposed to al- Kharrāṭ’s immense concern with the pictorial and
allusive qualities of language and its enduring musicality, Idrīs presents a different

20. In making this comment Abu-Haidar (review of Allen, The Arabic Novel, in Journal of the Royal Asiatic
Society [1983], 108) seems to overlook an earlier comment where I observe that in his novels “Maḥfūẓ
restricts his milieus to those with which he is familiar: the scene is, more often than not, the lives of
the bourgeois, bureaucrat class. With this in mind, style and content are well wedded” (Allen, The Arabic
Novel, 61). I might add here that, if Abu-Haidar finds my comments so out of line, what, one wonders,
would he have to say about the following comment from Yūsuf al-Yūsuf, written after the Nobel Prize
award had been announced: “The style of Najīb Maḥfūẓ is lacking in grandeur (ʿuluw); nay rather, we
may even suggest that Maḥfūẓ’s style hardly rises above the level of daily journalese”: see Yūsuf Sāmī
al-Yūsuf, “Najīb Maḥfūẓ wa-jāʾizat Nobel,” al-Ḥurriyya (23 October 1988), 38. I would like to thank Ṣādiq
al-ʿAẓm for providing me with a copy of this and other articles published in the Arab world in the wake
of the Nobel Prize announcement.
21. Denys Johnson-Davies in Arabic Short Stories (London: Quartet Books, 1983), x.
22. Al-Kharrāt has himself participated in one such project, the translation of short story “Jurḥ
maftūḥ” as “Open Wound,” in Flights of Fantasy, ed. Cesa Kassem and Malak Hashem (Cairo: Elias Mod-
ern Publishing House, 1985), 77–90. See also Catherine Cobham, “An Open Wound by Idwār al-Kharrāṭ:
Translation and Commentary,” Journal of Arabic Literature 15 (1984): 121–34.
100 Chapter Eight

stylistic picture, relying on the inspiration of the moment and almost always refusing
to reconsider what he has written. This has given his best stories (and there is a large
number of them) a tremendous spontaneity and liveliness, the features of which are too
numerous and complex to explore here. Fortunately, they have been analyzed in depth
and with great sophistication by Sasson Somekh in both Arabic and English. As Somekh
observes, not the least of the difficulties facing the translator of Idrīs is his predilection
for the syntax and lexicon of the colloquial dialect, not only in dialogue but within the
course of the narrative itself. 23
It is in the context of an assessment of the translatability of works by various writ-
ers that the novels of Maḥfūẓ would seem, at least from the point of view of matters of
language and style, to have a more obvious translatability; expressed differently, that at
least the process of transferring a source text by Maḥfūẓ into the intertext stage of an
English translation would seem to present problems of a smaller order of magnitude.24
I will now examine these issues and suggestions in the context of the translated text of
the novels.

Translations of The Trilogy

The detailed descriptions of people, places, and events, the creations of “atmosphere,”
aspects of the element of “telling,” these are features of The Trilogy that have made it a
landmark in the development of the modern Arabic novel. The narrative tells the story of
several generations of a single family, and perhaps the most memorable descriptions at
the larger level are those that manage to encapsulate the extended family within a single
time and place; thus the happy occasion of ʿĀ’isha’s wedding in Palace Walk (chapter 40)
and the less happy tensions engendered by family squabbles in Palace of Desire (chapter
3).25 But, as noted above, the volumes are replete with detailed descriptions of individu-
als and groups in particular times and places. Among the best examples are their opening

23. For this feature of his writing Idrīs was roundly condemned by Ṭāhā Ḥusayn in his otherwise
laudatory Introduction to the short story collection, Arkhaṣ layālī (Cairo: Dār Rūz al-Yūsuf, 1958). See
also Sasson Somekh, “Language and Theme in the Short Stories of Yūsuf Idrīs,” Journal of Arabic Lit-
erature 6 (1975): 85–100; Somekh, Lughat al-qiṣaṣ fī adab Yūsuf Idrīs (Tel Aviv: Tel Aviv University Press,
1984); Somekh, “The Function of Sound in the Stories of Yūsuf Idrīs,” Journal of Arabic Literature 16 (1985),
95–104.
24. I would add however that the question cannot be reduced to the simple equation of Milton
Viorst’s remark (“Man of Gamaliya,” New Yorker [2 July 1990]: 33): “as a stylist Mahfouz writes with re-
markable precision … and that this makes his prose easy to translate.” The ellipsis marks the omission
of a comment about the “imprecision” of the Arabic language, one of many attempts at simplifying
complexities to have appeared about Maḥfūẓ in the general press that are better ignored.
25. For ʿĀ ʾisha’s wedding, see Maḥfūẓ, Bayn al-Qaṣrayn (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1956); Mahfouz, Impasse
des deux palais (Paris: J. C. Lattes, 1985) and Palace Walk. (It should be noted that the French translation
does not number the chapters according to the original.) For tensions in the ʿAbd al-Jawwād family, see
 The Impact of the Translated Text 101

paragraphs. The way in which novels begin has long been acknowledged as an important
aspect of the novelist’s craft, to such an extent that the ingenuity of the nation’s literati
is challenged in an annual competition to see who can produce the worst opening para-
graph. Maḥfūẓ clearly devotes a good deal of attention to his beginnings, something that
in his novels of the 1960s produces paragraphs of discourse akin to prose poetry, a feature
examined in more detail below. The opening of the first volume of Trilogy, for example,
establishes a narrative contract that will clearly lay stress on a detailed and meticulous
depiction of “reality,” placing a prominent character firmly into a spatial and temporal
context, in the latter case implying the middle of the night:26

Fī muntaṣaf al-layl istayqaẓat ka-mā iʿtādat an tastayqiẓ fī hādhā al-waqt min kull layla
bi-lā-staʿāna min munabbih aw ghayrih wa-lākin bi-īḥāʾ min al-rughba allatī ʿalayhā
fa-tuwāẓib ʿalā īqāẓihā fī diqqa wa-amāna

The first impression is one of time, a feature that, as noted above, is to play a key role
in these novels as in others of their type.27 The word order of the opening phrase gives
emphasis to this factor, and the impression is further amplified by the use of other time
words and the reference to the alarm clock. But perhaps the most remarkable aspect of
the sentence is the way in which the syntactic structures of Arabic allow for the inclu-
sion of so much detail within a single sentence. The French version captures these fea-
tures well: “Sur le coup de minuit, elle se réveilla comme à son habitude à cette heure
de la nuit, sans le secours d’un réveil quelconque, mais poussée par un besoin ténace qui
s’obstinait à lui faire ouvrir les yeux avec une ponctualité sans faille.”28
Faced with these facets in the style of the original, the English version adopts a dif-
ferent approach and, I would suggest, finds itself in immediate difficulty: “She woke at
midnight. She always woke up then without having to rely on an alarm clock. A wish that
had taken root in her awoke her with great accuracy.”29 One may begin by observing that
the single Arabic sentence is reproduced by three in English. Even if we concede that
English, and most especially contemporary American English, tends to prefer shorter
sentences than the longer periods more commonly associated with German, Latin, and
even British prose, the first sentence seems extremely short, particularly in view of the
fact that it is the opening sentence of a Trilogy of over one thousand pages. Apart from
that, it inverts the order of the original, thus diminishing the significant role assigned
to time by the original word order. What, one wonders, prevented something along the

Maḥfūẓ, Qaṣr al-shawq (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1957); Mahfouz, Palais du désir; Palace of Desire (New York:
Doubleday, 1991).
26. Maḥfūẓ, Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 5.
27. For a view of the role of time in fiction that seems especially appropriate in this context, see
Georg Lukacs, The Theory of the Novel, tr. Anna Bostock (Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1971), 125.
28. Mahfouz, Impasse des deux palais, 9
29. Mahfouz, Palace Walk, 1.
102 Chapter Eight

lines of: “At midnight she woke up as usual.…”? The decision to subdivide the original
sentence still further results in a most unhappy rendering of the last part of the descrip-
tion, including the ugly repetition of “her.”30
Many of the places where the characters in The Trilogy congregate are depicted in the
most precise detail. The room of Zubayda, the singer, may serve as an example:31

The chamber was remarkable for its attractive, Egyptian look. A row of com-
fortable sofas with brocade upholstery, suggesting both luxury and dissipation,
stretched out on either side of the sultan’s divan, which was flanked by mat-
tresses and cushions for her troupe. The long expanse of floor was covered with
carpets of many different colors and types. On a table suspended from the right
wall, halfway along it, candles were arranged in candelabra where they looked
as lovely and intense as a beauty mark on a cheek.

So also may the depiction of a café in Palace of Desire: 32

The interior consisted of a spacious square courtyard with large, cream-colored

tiles from the village of al-Maʾasara. There was a fountain in the center sur-
rounded by carnations in pots. On all four sides stood benches covered with
cushions and decorative mats. The walls were interrupted at regular intervals
by cell-like alcoves, without doors or windows. They resembled caves carved
into the walls and were furnished with nothing more than a wooden table, four
chairs, and a small lamp, which burned night and day and hung in a niche on
the back wall.

Both these extracts are taken from descriptive passages that are much longer and more
detailed. The primary impression that the reader gains is of a narrator anxious to pro-
vide as accurate a picture of the spatial context in which his characters are to operate as
can be put down on paper, a recording of the visual aspect that seems so accurate in its
observation of detail that the reader can almost use it to create an architectural drawing

30. I have to admit that the availability of the French and English translations and the resulting
possibilities of comparison present a temptation to which I, as a translator myself, have succumbed.
However, I should make it clear at this point that I do not intend to indulge in some sort of three-way
analytical process, including a French-English dimension. My primary concern is with the notion of
“translatability,” specifically that between a set of Arabic original texts and translations published in
a target culture. Both process and reception in the transfer of Arabic to English and Arabic to French
will thus automatically involve significant elements of difference, not the least of which is the purely
linguistic dimension of current literary discourse in the target language. Thus, while acknowledging
the important role that the French versions played in the award of the Nobel Prize to Maḥfūẓ, I will only
make use of them to assess and contrast the translations principles that have been adopted in particular
contexts. A contrastive analysis involving the difficulties of the transfer process between Arabic and
French and Arabic and English is a task beyond the scope of this study.
31. Mahfouz, Palace Walk, 97; cf. Impasse des deux palais, 108–9 and Maḥfūẓ, Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 110–11.
32. Mahfouz, Palace of Desire, 68; cf. Palais du désir, 87–88 and Maḥfūẓ, Qaṣr al-Shawq, 76.
 The Impact of the Translated Text 103

of the location in question. The same care is devoted to the description of people, as can
be gauged from this portrait of ʿĀʾisha, the younger daughter of Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Jawwād,
in Palace Walk:33

Aisha was in her prime at sixteen. She was the picture of beauty. She was of
slender build and figure, but in her family circle this was considered a defect to
be remedied by the ministrations of Umm Hanafi. Her face was as beautiful as
the moon. She had a white complexion suffused with rosy highlights and her
father’s blue eyes, which went well with her mother’s small nose. Unlike all the
others, she had golden hair, inherited from her paternal grandmother, thanks
to the laws of genetics.34

But beyond descriptions of physical attributes such as these, the narrator also pro-
vides accounts of impressions and emotions, as when the reader is made privy to the
thoughts of Fahmī, the eldest son of Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Jawwād and Amīna, at the sight of his
neighbor’s daughter, Maryam, at a wedding.35
In all these instances in which the narrator “tells” the reader information, the ge-
neric purpose and the language used to carry it out seem to be well matched. This would
tend to support the often expressed opinion that with The Trilogy Maḥfūẓ had indeed
brought the social-realist novel in Arabic to a new level of achievement. The passages of
description with which the work is filled reflect a great deal of research on the author’s
part, a keen eye for detail, and a willingness to incorporate the occasional intertextual
reference in order to evoke in the reader’s mind memories of bygone eras.
This matching of purpose and language seems to carry over well into the transla-
tions themselves. Indeed, the translated texts would seem to suggest that in this aspect
we find Maḥfūẓ at his most translatable, providing an abundance of what might best be
termed “local color,” a phrase that has tended to become somewhat less than compli-
mentary in a touristic context but which, in the framework of realistic fiction translated
between non-contiguous cultures, becomes, I would suggest, an important commodity.
I suggested that in The Trilogy we find Maḥfūẓ’s fictional technique at a transitional
stage. It is in the “showing” aspect of his craft that this process is at its most noticeable,
most particularly in the handling of that most dramatic aspect of fiction, dialogue. Here
we enter an area that has been the topic of much debate with reference to modern Ara-
bic drama and to dialogue in fiction, namely, the choice of language. In brief, is a writer
to follow the lead of pioneers such as Muḥammad Ḥusayn Haykal (in his novel Zaynab

33. Mahfouz, Palace Walk, 27; cf. Impasse des deux palais, and Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 34
34. Note the comparison of ʿĀʾisha’s face with the moon, a simile the classical tradition of love po-
etry in the same way as the “beauty mark” image does in the extract describing the café. Other visual
descriptions of characters include those of Umm Ḥanafī (Palace Walk, 15); Kamāl (48); Yasīn’s mother on
her death-bed (429); and Mrs Bahīja (119).
35. See Mahfouz, Impasse des deux palais, 276ff., Palace Walk, 258ff.; Maḥfūẓ, Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 296ff.
104 Chapter Eight

[1913]) and Ibrāhīm ʿAbd al-Qādir al-Māzinī (in Ibrāhīm al-Kātib [1931]) by couching the
dialogue in the colloquial dialect of the region, a level of language that many critics are
not prepared to accord the status of a mode of discourse; or to compose the dialogue in
the literary language, a mode of discourse that is not the spoken language of any native-
speaker of Arabic; or to adopt some form of compromise between these two positions?
Maḥfūẓ’s solution to the dilemma has been to compose his dialogue in the literary
language, a process to the complexities of which Somekh refers in describing the dia-
logue as becoming “more natural.” Two points might be made in this context: firstly
that a number of literary critics (not to mention linguists) would suggest that it is hard
to “naturalize” a level of discourse in dialogue that is not used for daily conversation;
and secondly that, in addressing the issue of dialogue in The Trilogy, we are involved, as
Somekh implies by his use of the comparative (“more natural”), with a process of devel-
opment in fictional technique, one that has continued to preoccupy Maḥfūẓ in his latter
works of fiction.36
In this element of “showing,” the deliberate choice that Maḥfūẓ has made regarding
language would seem to present a particular issue of translatability, namely, an assess-
ment of the “naturalness” of the use of dialogue in his fiction in its original language and
the most effective mode of transferring it to the target language. When the author’s inter-
polations of internal monologue are added to the process, the task facing the translator
becomes that much more complex. A perusal of the way in which the translations of The
Trilogy have dealt with these issues leads me to suggest that the author’s relatively early
experiments with internal monologue (as contrasted with those to be found in many of
his later novels, especially those of the 1960s) and his frequent juxtaposition of dialogue
and internal monologue (particularly in Palace of Desire through the portrayal of Kamāl,
the youngest son of the ʿAbd al-Jawwād family) produce segments of conversation that
seem not a little stilted and unnatural in their original form. In this context, one of the
larger ironies that confronts those who would assess Maḥfūẓ’s oeuvre and translations
of it is that the work chosen to present his achievements to the English reader in the
post-Nobel period is one written over forty years ago and that may be seen as represent-
ing a medial stage in its author’s artistic development. While The Trilogy clearly stands
as a landmark within its own literary tradition and the chronological development of its
genre in Arabic, the issues raised by the author’s approach to “showing” are, if anything,
compounded in the translations published many years later; furthermore, the problems
already inherent in the original texts have, if anything, been emphasized by the way in
which conventions of dialogue have been treated in the translated texts.

36. While Maḥfūẓ’s choice of language for dialogue is generally as noted, it should be added that he
has never been afraid of using individual words from the colloquial when they seemed appropriate to
the context. For the most part, the syntax of the written language has been maintained, although, even
there, it must be admitted that the novel of the later decades show an increasing tendency to utilize col-
loquial “structures,” all within an overall syntactic pattern which remains that of the written language.
 The Impact of the Translated Text 105

Within the framework of his decision regarding the level of language to be used in di-
alogue, Maḥfūẓ is able to enliven the narrative with some good passages of conversation,
most notably those between members of the ʿAbd al-Jawwād family.37 In other places he
is also able to reflect the formal nature of particular occasions by using dialogue that is
appropriately stilted, for example, in the notable encounter between Aḥmad and the
widow of his neighbor, Muḥammad Riḍwān, in his store.38 In passages such as these the
conversation succeeds admirably in “showing” us aspects of several of the many charac-
ters who people the novels, most notably their emotions and their often earthy humor.
Unfortunately it cannot be said that Maḥfūẓ manages to maintain the level of liveliness
in dialogue in many other situations during the course of the narrative; the dialogue is
often stilted and wooden in situations that do not demand such treatment. Such vari-
ability can hardly avoid rendering the translatability of the text that much more prob-
lematic; indeed the translation process tends to accentuate the inherent features of the
original. It is therefore all the more unfortunate that the English version manages to
draw attention to this problem in that whatever forward momentum is present in the
passages of dialogue is hampered by the decision to replicate the conventions of the
original Arabic text in English. For example:39

The woman turned her head towards al-Sayyid Ahmad and told him threat-
eningly: “This is what happens to people who get out of line.”
Pretending to be alarmed, he replied: “But I came to learn how to get out of
line.”
The woman struck her chest with her hand and shouted, “What cheek! … Did
you all hear what he said?”
More than one of them said at the same time, “It’s the best thing we’ve heard
so far.”
One of the group added, “You ought to hit him if he doesn’t get out of line.”
Someone else suggested, “You ought to obey him so long as he stays out of
line.”

In Arabic, the normal convention with dialogue is to place the verb that introduces direct
speech (“he said,” “she asked,”etc.) and any further description of the speaker before the
speech itself. However, this is not the way in which dialogue is normally reproduced in
English fiction, and particularly not one that is supposed to reflect the repartee of an oc-
casion such as the party at the home of the singer, Zubayda, depicted in this passage. The
following alternative version is provided merely to suggest how the passage might have
been rendered following the usual conventions of English fictional dialogue:

37. For example, those between Fahmī and Amīna (Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 138ff.; Palace Walk, 122ff.); and
between Khadīja and ʿĀʾisha (Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 162ff.; Palace Walk, 144ff.).
38. Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 388ff.; Palace Walk, 340ff.
39. Palace Walk, 100; cf. Bayn al-Qaṣrayn, 113–14.
106 Chapter Eight

The woman turned towards al-Sayyid Ahmad. “That’s what happens to peo-
ple who step out of line,” she said threateningly.
“But stepping out of line is what I came here to learn,” he replied, pretending
to be alarmed. The woman struck her chest. “What a nerve!” she yelled. “Did
you all hear what he said?”
“That’s the best thing we’ve heard so far!” responded more than one voice.
“Actually,” one of the group went on, “you ought to hit him if he doesn’t step
out of line.”
“As long as he stays out of line,” someone else suggested, “you ought to obey
him.”

I would suggest that the second version reflects the expectations of readers of English
fictional texts more closely by placing the segment of speech at the beginning of each
paragraph rather than starting it with the description of it. Once again, I would empha-
size that my concern here is more with the principles of translation and the impact of the
resulting text than with criticizing segments of the English translation per se. In this case
however, we are focusing on a decision regarding dialogue conventions that is applied
throughout the translated English text. With that in mind, I must turn an issue of trans-
lation principle into a general criticism and state that, when Maḥfūẓ’s dialogue, with its
varying degrees of success in fulfilling its dramatic potential, is rendered into English us-
ing such principles and conventions, the resulting conversations often fail to fulfill their
function within the framework of the narrative as a whole.
Returning to the original text and the “showing” function, it is when Maḥfūẓ en-
deavors to experiment with internal monologue that serious problems begin to arise.
The character whose thoughts and emotions are portrayed to the largest extent by this
fictional technique is Kamāl, most notably in Palace of Desire. Kamāl has been described
in the first volume; but it is in the second volume that the combined crises of his en-
counter with Darwin and modern science on the one hand and his hopeless love for the
aristocratic ʿĀʾida Shaddād on the other produce a positive flood of introspection. In the
contexts in which Kamāl’s anguish is portrayed, the strained nature of the conversation
is entirely appropriate, whether he is endeavoring to explain to a furious father how he
can reconcile adherence to his faith with an article he has written on Darwin or whether
he is vainly struggling to put his infatuation with ʿĀʾida into words.40 In both situations,
Kamāl’s conversational skills are utterly inadequate to convey the extent of his wracked
emotions, and in this context the interplay between Kamāl’s stumbling attempts at self-
expression and the internal monologues into which he pours the full force of his real
feelings is extremely well handled.41 Here however is a complex problem of translatabil-
ity; the issue of levels of language and the ways that they are indicated and differentiated

40. See, for example, Qaṣr al-Shawq, 193ff.; Palace of Desire, 174ff.

41. Maḥfūẓ had, of course, experimented with this interplay between what is said and what is thought
in earlier works. Among the most successful essays is that in Zuqāq al-Midaqq between the matchmaker
 The Impact of the Translated Text 107

becomes a crucial one. Maḥfūẓ’s solution to the problem in Arabic, it will be recalled, is
to couch the conversation in the standard written language, in other words at the same
level as the internal monologue. Bearing in mind the complexities in the use of levels
of language in modern Arabic novels discussed briefly above, readers of the Arabic text
have presumably learned to deal with these differentiations on their own terms. How-
ever, when we consider this issue in the context of translation, the question of appro-
priateness of language becomes important. But even before the reader encounters such
issues, the conventions governing the visual recognition of the different levels have to
be addressed.
In dealing with a language such as Arabic which had no printed punctuation con-
ventions per se until relatively recently, the means by which the presence of internal
monologue is to be marked has been a matter of experiment and discussion. Many re-
cent works have resorted to the use of different fonts as a means of differentiating dia-
logue from internal monologue. Maḥfūẓ writing in the 1940s (or, perhaps more accu-
rately, Maḥfūẓ’s publisher printing in the 1940s and 1950s), does not distinguish visually
between description and internal monologue, but utilizes a dash to indicate the begin-
ning of a segment of conversation. Needless to say, the presence of the description of
the dialogue (“he replied with a smile,” etc.) indicates to the reader that conversation is
involved, but otherwise it is the task of the reader of the Arabic original to differentiate
description from introspection. The French translation chooses to distinguish the differ-
ent aspects of the narrative by using the dash for conversation and the quotation mark
for internal monologue, thus going beyond the Arabic original where only dialogue is
indicated. The English translation mixes conventions, occasionally replicating those of
the descriptive passages with the interpolation of “he mused,” “he told himself,” and so
on. However, the most common practice adopted is one that indicates both dialogue and
internal monologue through the same convention, the quotation mark; the results are
often extremely confusing. Consider the following example:42

This enchanting discussion made him oblivious to everything including his

troubles. He replied, “She should then love the one who loves her most sin-
cerely.”
“How can she pick him out from the others?”
“If only this conversation could last forever,” he wished.
“I refer you once more to the proverb: ‘Hearts communicate directly with
each other.’ ”

One is left to wonder how the reader is supposed to assess as part of the initial reading
process that Kamāl’s private thought (“If only this conversation …”) is a piece of internal

Sitt Saniyya ʿAfīfī and the mother of Ḥamīda. See Zuqāq al-Midaqq, 125ff., and the extremely successful
transfer into English in Midaq Alley, 134ff.
42. Palace of Desire, 201; cf. Le palais du désir, 235 and Qaṣr al-Shawq, 226.
108 Chapter Eight

monologue rather than a contribution to the dialogue. This practice seems to demand
that the reader reread every such instance in order properly to follow the thread of the
conversation. With that in mind, it is indeed ironic that the use of a normal word order
for dialogue here (with “he wished” at the conclusion of the thought) only serves to
underline the reader’s expectation that the sentence beginning “If only …” is part of the
conversation itself. Whatever the translator’s (or editor’s) reasoning may have been, the
effect of the English version seems to be to narrow or even to eliminate (at least in an ini-
tial reading) that carefully crafted interplay between the two types of discourse, dialogue
and internal monologue; this particular reader spent much of the central part of Palace of
Desire (in which Kamāl’s infatuation with ʿĀʾida is described) being continually thwarted
by these visually cued interruptions to the flow of conversation between characters.
That such a situation could have been avoided can be demonstrated by quoting a
paragraph such as the following where Kamāl is in the midst of his crucial discussion
with his father concerning Darwin:43

What a disaster this was! The essay had not been intended for the general pub-
lic and especially not for his father. “It’s a long article, Papa. Didn’t you read it,
sir? I explain a scientific theory in it …”

That this paragraph begins with a sample of Kamāl’s thoughts to himself is abundantly
clear from the nature of the discourse used. When he actually addresses his father, there
is a switch to quotation using the accepted printing conventions. The confusions illus-
trated above have been avoided and, equally important, the process whereby the reader
is able to differentiate instantaneously between the two levels replicates the unambigu-
ous printing conventions of the original text.
In this lengthy section I have concentrated on the translations of Maḥfūẓ’s Trilogy.
My aim has been to identify those aspects of Maḥfūẓ’s fictional technique in these par-
ticular works that may either contribute to or hamper the process of translation. My
conclusion is that The Trilogy, precisely because of its status as a culminating point in
Maḥfūẓ’s succession of social-realist novels penned during the 1940s and early 1950s,
presents the would-be translator with very translatable texts. There is a plethora of de-
scription that can be transferred into a target language with relatively little difficulty.
Questions raised by Maḥfūẓ’s choice of language and by his treatment of dialogue and
internal monologue are somewhat more complex but not, I would suggest, of the order
of complexity to be encountered in his later works. This is not, of course, to suggest that
there is anything easy about rendering any Arabic novel into English, but rather that, in
the case of Maḥfūẓ, the source texts of The Trilogy do not present issues of translation of
the order of magnitude that may be associated with some of his later works or indeed
with those of certain other writers of Arabic fiction.

43. Palace of Desire, 334; cf. Palais du désir, 379 and Qaṣr al-shawq, 371.
 The Impact of the Translated Text 109

Beyond these aspects of the source text, there are, as I noted in the introductory
comments, other factors that enter into the matter of the impact of translated text upon
its reader. Thus I have also chosen to focus on some of the issues raised by decisions made
by translators and/or editors of the published translations. In my analysis I have en-
deavored to illustrate the principles involved, whether explicit or implicit, but inevitably
such remarks have involved criticisms of the resulting translations. Having concluded
my investigation of the translated texts, let me state outright my belief that on every
count the translations into French represent much more successful transfers of the origi-
nal texts into the target culture than do the English versions. Using the yardstick of other
translations of Maḥfūẓ into English, Palace Walk and Palace of Desire are clearly notable
achievements, but in the post-Nobel era different standards should be involved. Under
such terms of reference they fall somewhat short.

Translations of Later Novels

With respect to translations of The Trilogy it was noted that this monumental three-vol-
ume work sits in a central position within Maḥfūẓ’s total oeuvre and clearly illustrates
certain aspects of its author’s continuing experiments in fictional technique. The com-
ments of Somekh cited earlier identify significant changes in emphasis in novels written
in the 1960s, most notably in those areas that have been the subject of our analysis of The
Trilogy: description, dialogue, and internal monologue. This transformation of method
involves the use of an increasingly economic, terse and allusive discourse to support
the interplay between these elements in the narrative. Sabry Hafez describes this de-
velopment as “the use of words in all their poetic values, so that language is used in a
particularly suggestive and resonant way, imparting more than one level of meaning to
the narrative.”44
The narrator of The Trilogy takes great pains to give his readers a detailed description
of place, time, and people, a characteristic that, as suggested above, may also serve to
endear him to translators and their readers. The narrator of the novels of the 1960s is far
more sparing in his background information and allusive in his references. The reader
of translations, who in The Trilogy could wander as a kind of fictional tourist through the
descriptions of the quarters and their people, is now confronted with the unfamiliar in
an uncompromising manner. Maḥfūẓ’s narrator still hails from the same cultural com-
munity, but there is now an implicit assumption that all his readers are willing and able
to become more involved in the creative process of interpreting the more allusive as-
pects of the text. The words used by Somekh and Hafez to describe the discourse—terse,
connotative, suggestive, resonant—all point to a mode of discourse and, in the current
context, a translation process that will involve obvious differences in approach, if not

44. Sabry Hafez, “The Egyptian Novel in the Sixties,” Journal of Arabic Literature 7 (1976): 68–84, at 75.
110 Chapter Eight

difficulties. From the point of view of the source texts, several novels might serve as good
illustrations of such differences—al-Liṣṣ wa-l-kilāb (1962), for examples, or Tharthara fawq
al-Nīl (1966). However, the work in which both the fictional techniques of the original and
the modes used in the transfer to English seem to offer the largest scope for discussion
is Mīrāmār (1967).
Again, the opening of Mīrāmār provides us with an excellent example of the quality
of the text and the issues associated with its translation:45

Al-Iskandariyya akhīran. Al-Iskandariyya qaṭr al-nadā, nafthatu al-saḥābati l-bayḍāʾ,

mahbat al-shuʿāʿ al-maghsūl bi-mā al-samāʾ wa-qalb al-dhikriyyāt al-muballala bi-l-
shuhd wa-l-dumūʿ.

One of Maḥfūẓ’s most luxuriant openings, this passage begins a novel set in Alexandria,
a city for which he harbors a well-known affection, something that finds echoes in many
of his novels and short stories as well as explicit acknowledgment in many non-fictional
writings and interviews. In a veritable prose-poem, it combines elements of the exter-
nal world—dew, clouds, and rain—with those of the world of the mind-memories and
grief. If we compare this passage with the opening of Bayn al-Qaṣrayn (Palace Walk) cited
earlier, the contrasts are immediately apparent. The narrator here is establishing an at-
mosphere, a mood; one might suggest that, in a work where much of the focus will be
on the interactions between a group of Egyptian characters inside the enclosed space
of an Alexandrian pension, the mood conveys a sense of air and freshness. Above all the
use of language is connotative, allusive, completely different from that invoked to de-
scribe Amīna at the outset of Palace Walk or indeed Aḥmad ʿAbd al-Jawwād in the opening
paragraph of Qaṣr al-Shawq (Palace of Desire).
The English translation renders the passage as follows:46

Alexandria. At last. Alexandria, Lady of the Dew. Bloom of white nimbus. Bosom
of radiance, wet with sky-water. Core of nostalgia steeped in honey and tears.

The careful choice of words that are neither the most obvious nor literal announces to
the reader of this translation that the primary concern here is not merely with the pro-
duction of a readable English version, but one in which an attempt is made to go be-
yond that limited goal and to imitate the literary effects of the original in the context
of English fictional discourse. In this case, the transfer to the target culture is also seen
as involving two other processes, the principles of which take us back yet again to the
discussion of issues relating to The Trilogy. The first involves the differentiation between
dialogue and internal monologue. In Mīrāmār several characters narrate their stories and

45. Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Mīrāmār (Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr), 7.

46. Naguib Mahfouz, Miramar, tr. Fatma Moussa-Mahmoud (London: Heinemann; Washington D.C.:
Three Continents Press, 1978), 1.
 The Impact of the Translated Text 111

reflect on their current status within Egyptian society; it is thus replete with internal
monologue. The original text follows the same convention as that adopted for The Trilogy:
the discourse itself indicates whether narrative or internal monologue is involved, while
a dash is used to introduce dialogue. The English translation makes copious use of the
italic font to differentiate between levels, a procedure that certainly proves helpful in the
case of the sections in which ʿĀmir Wajdī, the aging Wafdist journalist, reminisces about
former times. One such reminiscence also allows us to demonstrate the allusive quality of
the text: “La-qad akramaka llāh bi-timthālayn wa-l-mawt.”47 Bearing in mind ʿĀmir’s Wafdist
leanings, it comes as no surprise to learn that the addressee here, who is only identified
in the text as “the Pāshā,” should be recognizable as Saʿd Zaghlūl. However, when the
English translation was being edited for publication, it required a consultation with the
author himself to learn that the “two statues” referred to the fact that there is a statue of
Zaghlūl in both Alexandria and Cairo. Thus, while a reasonably direct translation would
be something like “God has honored you with two statues and death,” the readership of
the English translation is clearly in need of more information. The version included in the
translated text thus seeks to convey some aspects of these allusions without rendering
the result too obvious: “It was a kindness of God to give death when he did—with a couple
of statues as your memorial.”48
The second issue concerns the process whereby the reader is to be provided with
even more information than can be incorporated into the text in this way. In discussing
translations of The Trilogy, a distinction was made between the French translation which
made use of footnotes and the English which indulged in a variety of types of insertion
within the text itself. In a work as full of allusions as Mīrāmār, the need for the provision
of supplementary information for the reader of a translation is evident. In this particular
case it takes the form of no less than sixty-six endnotes that provide a wealth of helpful
detail to enrich the reading experience without interrupting the narrative text itself.49
The kind of insertion used in Palace Walk and Palace of Desire would clearly be out of the
question here, something that both illustrates the varying degrees of translatability be-
tween different aspects of the two texts and suggests that the footnoting procedure of
the French version of The Trilogy may present a feasible and indeed preferable solution.
The use of language to experiment with the interplay between dialogue and internal
monologue noted above in the case of The Trilogy is seen in abundance in Mīrāmār. We
have already noted the different levels represented in ʿĀmir Wajdī’s opening and closing
sections. In the tortured world of Manṣur Bāhī, the disillusioned Egyptian leftist, we have
another notable portrait that is well captured in the English version. But from the view
of translation, it is in the section of Ḥusnī ʿAllām, the utterly reckless son of the landed
gentry, that a considerable challenge lies. Here Maḥfūẓ makes use of the sheer forward

47. Mīrāmār, 17.
48. Miramar, 8.
49. See Miramar, 133–41.
112 Chapter Eight

momentum of language and most especially dialogue to convey the picture of a young
man who feels displaced from his own society and chooses to console himself with a hell-
ish concoction of drink, fast cars and women, all at a speed marked presto. Once again,
the English translation shows an awareness of the need to transfer more than just the
surface meaning of the text by invoking the historic present, a stylistic device in the tar-
get language that succeeds to a remarkable degree in conveying the breathless quality
of the original.
In these and other instances the translation of Mīrāmār involves some major pieces
of interpretation; the English version is indeed a new and in some ways a different text.
Not everyone will be satisfied with the results. However, bearing in mind the issues of
translatability of Maḥfūẓ’s novels to which I have been referring and the impact of the re-
sulting translated texts, it is my opinion that the English translation of Mīrāmār remains
the most successful essay at translating a fiction of Maḥfūẓ into English.50
Whatever may be one’s verdict concerning the English translation of Mīrāmār, it is
clear that, at the time of its publication in 1978, the amount of attention paid to the
principles of translatability and the potential impact of the published English version
constituted a new kind of yardstick. In the context of such great care and attention, it is
all the more disappointing to have to opine that the English versions of the other novels
from the 1960s are considerably less satisfactory, in some cases barely venturing beyond
the intertext phase of the translation process. The absence of that editorial attention
to detail that so characterizes the English version of Mīrāmār is regrettably evident in
almost all of these versions; I do not exempt my own translation of Autumn Quail from
this criticism.51 I believe it is true to say that better things were anticipated during the
editorial phase by those first translators of the works with whom I am acquainted. What
is even more unfortunate, to put it mildly, is that these English translations have been
republished by Anchor Books during the post-Nobel period without any further editorial
work whatsoever. That constitutes, I believe, a disservice to Maḥfūẓ. Let me illustrate
with just one example, the opening paragraph of Al-Ṭarīq, translated as The Search: 52

50. At the meeting of the Middle East Literary Seminar in Princeton in March 1991 (where a first
version of this study was presented), my colleague at Princeton University, Professor Margaret Larkin,
made some telling points about the translation of Mīrāmār before coming to an opposite conclusion to
the one that I have expressed. In the discussion that followed, there was a good deal of debate about, on
the one hand, those elements of accuracy that make a translation an acceptable version of the original
and, on the other, the extent to which extreme acts of interpretation render a translation a completely
different kind of work, albeit one that readers of the translation find enjoyable and profitable.
51. I am referring here primarily to a process that has been adopted from the outset in the PROTA
(Project of the Translation of Arabic) series of translations. The first translator’s work is checked for
its accuracy against the original and is then set to a creative writer who works in the target language.
The final process is the production of a target text, that of viewing the text transferred to the target
language with the critical eye of a littérateur, is thus assigned the same importance as the other phases.
52. Naguib Mahfouz, The Search, tr. Mohamed Islam (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 1987), 1.
 The Impact of the Translated Text 113

Tears filled his eyes. In spite of his control over his emotions and the repug-
nance he felt at weeping before these men, he was quite overcome. With moist
eyes he looked at the corpse as it was removed from the coffin and carried to
the open grave, the dead body seemingly weightless in its white shroud. Oh how
you’ve wasted away, Mother.
The scene faded and he could see only darkness, and the dust stung his nos-
trils, and the unpleasant stench of the men around him filled the air.

Here, as in the example from the opening of Bayn al-Qaṣrayn cited earlier, we admittedly
have to face the issue of dealing with a lengthy period. However, by any yardstick one
cares to use, the English version is both clumsy and unidiomatic. The problems implicit
in transferring the language and narrative techniques of these novels of the 1960s, so well
addressed in the version of Mīrāmār, are accentuated by this English text, not resolved.
On the basis of this albeit brief analysis of translations of some of Maḥfūẓ’s more al-
lusive works of the 1960s, I hope that it is clear that I cannot agree with the statement
of Brad Kessler that “its [Trilogy’s] style is not as accessible as that of his later works.”
Indeed, the situation would seem to be more accurately represented by the opposite con-
clusion. It is for that reason that I await the translation in English of Tharthara fawq al-Nīl
with anticipation and not a little trepidation.53 In the closed world created by that bril-
liant novel, words possess a connotative power more often associated with the tautest of
short stories.
As a footnote to this section, I should note that I have not mentioned translations
of any works written since the June war of 1967. In another study I have referred to the
works that Maḥfūẓ has written over the past two decades as “retrospective” phase.54 It
is significant that few of them have attracted the attention of translators, and that those
that have are of more interest for the socio-political message they convey than for their
intrinsic literary merits.

Conclusion

Najīb Maḥfūẓ is undoubtedly the Arab world’s most prolific writer of fiction; in a region
where creative writing cannot be a full-time profession, his output is truly remarkable.
Beyond the question of sheer quantity, however, lies that of quality, and here too we wit-
ness a writer who, through a combination of voracious reading of other writers, sheer
application in often unfavorable conditions, and a willingness to experiment, has made
so many of his works genuine contributions to the traditions of the Arabic novel. Indeed,
one should go further and suggest that not only do several works constitute landmarks in
the novel genre in Arabic, but that his continuing search for new techniques, structures

53. [Adrift on the Nile, tr. Frances Liardet (New York: Anchor, 1994)–Eds]
54. Allen, “Najīb Maḥfūẓ and World Literature.”
114 Chapter Eight

and styles has made him, at least until the 1970s, a major pioneer in the genre. This vast
output has been the subject in turn of a large number of studies in book, article, and
thesis form. In the last twenty years or so, specialists in Arabic literature studies in the
West have also made him a primary focus of their research; with one or two exceptions,
that same group has also been responsible for the fact that Maḥfūẓ is the most widely
translated of modern Arab writers of fiction.
The role and repute of Maḥfūẓ within the tradition of modern Arabic fiction is of
course largely responsible for the fact that a large number of his novels are available in
translation; quite apart from the high reputation that he holds as an artist and penseur.
However, here I have concentrated on the principles involved in the process of transla-
tion. I have investigated the possibility that, for several reasons that I have identified,
Maḥfūẓ’s works are extremely suitable for translation—in a word, translatable. I have
also suggested that while the process of transferring a text from Arabic to English across
their respective cultural boundaries poses some universal issues of translation, Maḥfūẓ’s
own development as a writer presents the would-be translator with different sets of
questions concerning the various phases in his career. My conclusion is that, contrary to
some opinions, the novels written during the 1960s pose greater problems of translation
than do the earlier works, a verdict that appears to find some corroboration in the rela-
tive merits of the published English translations.
In the title of this study I used the word “impact.” I have therefore moved beyond
the principles involved in translating texts from one language to another to devote some
attention to the more practical issues that impinge upon the reception of the translated
text. The process whereby the translated text has an impact on a potential readership is
complicated by a number of decisions that are made after the completion of the trans-
fer process. While that also applies to any text published within a particular cultural
milieu, it is rendered considerably more complicated in the case of translations. On the
most practical level, what troubles me about the possible “impact” of these translation
of Maḥfūẓ and the implication for the future is that the spirit of crass entrepreneurship
that has characterized the publication of Maḥfūẓ’s works in translations since the Nobel
Prize announcement has conspired to present the reader of his works in English with
what amounts to a two-tier repertoire: in the first I would place Mīrāmār, Midaq Alley (in
its revised version) and the volumes of The Trilogy, with the possible addition of Children
of Gebelawi; the second would contain all the other works, in a descending scale of read-
ability. It is here that Kessler’s “charity” may well be a much needed quality in the reader.
If the name of Maḥfūẓ is to survive in a broader context than that of specialists in
modern Arabic literature (and there is surely considerable doubt as to whether it will),
it seems clear that it will do so primarily on the basis of the impact of The Trilogy, a work
completed almost forty years ago. While acknowledging a clear link with the European
tradition of the social-realist novel, it will also serve to confirm Maḥfūẓ’s status as an
important figure in the history of modern Arabic literature. Perhaps nothing illustrates
some of the ironies involved in this forty-year disjuncture and the issues associated with
 The Impact of the Translated Text 115

the impact of translated texts as well as a report published in the 18 February 1991 issue
of Newsweek.55 A section on books, entitled “A Guide to the Gulf,” details the American
public’s desire to know more about the Middle East and Islam. We read that “Even sales
of Middle East fiction are getting a boost; ‘Palace of Desire’ and ‘Palace Walk’ by the Egyp-
tian author Naguib Mahfouz, one of the more obscure Nobel laureates of recent years,
unexpectedly jumped onto the best-seller lists in San Francisco and Washington.”
As Maḥfūẓ begins to disappear from the public gaze, and indeed to relish the very
obscurity that he has lost for two years or more, his works in translation carve out their
own space in the markets of a West whose general attitude to and awareness of his region
is aptly reflected in the use of a novel about Cairo begun in the 1940s as a potential source
of information on the background to the Gulf War in 1991. Can one wonder that the “im-
pact” of his works is difficult to predict? Meanwhile, he has his well-earned reward and
the Arabic novel proceeds in a variety of directions, the occasional translation reminding
us of its continuing creativity.56

55. Newsweek (18 February 1991), 61.

56. Among publications that seem to reflect the more creative aspects of the tradition, I would men-
tion: Gamal al-Ghitani, Zayni Barakat, tr. Farouk Abdel Wahab (London: Penguin Books, 1988); Emile
Habiby, The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ill-fated Pessoptimist, tr. Salma Khadra Jayyusi and Trevor Le Gassick
(New York: Vantage Press, 1982); Cities of Salt (see n. 10 above); and Hanan al-Shaykh, The Story of Zahra,
tr. Peter Ford (London: Quartet Books, 1986) and Women of Sand and Myrrh, tr. Catherine Cobham (Lon-
don: Quartet Books, 1989).
 9
Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā: A History and
Interpretation—A Retrospect

On October 13, 1994 Najīb Maḥfūẓ (1911–2006),1 the Nobel Laureate in Literature for 1988,
came as close as one can conceive to being assassinated on a Cairo street right outside his
apartment building in ʿAgūza. But for the existence of the Police Hospital just a few yards
away, he would certainly have died at that time. Following this heinous crime, the Egyp-
tian government arrested and tried a number of members of a popular religious group,
and thirteen of them were found guilty.2 While the situation regarding the means of ob-
taining the information remains unclear, it emerged at the trial that the people involved
in the assassination attempt believed themselves to be carrying out the expressed wishes
of the blind Egyptian popular preacher, ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān—wishes expressed origi-
nally in a newspaper interview. The context of the preacher’s earlier (1989) statement
involved the furore that had erupted late in 1988 and on into 1989 as a result of the pub-
lication in England of a novel by Salman Rushdie, Satanic Verses. The claim was made by
ʿAbd al-Raḥmān that Rushdie would never have dared to publish his controversial novel
if the appropriate measures had been taken earlier to punish Najīb Maḥfūẓ for the publi-
cation of his novel, Awlād ḥāratinā, in 1959.3

1. Najīb Maḥfūẓ, Awlād ḥāratinā (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1967), although the original form of its publica-
tion was serialized in the newspaper: see al-Ahrām (September to December, 1959). The issue of publica-
tion and its consequences will be discussed in detail below, as will the issue of translations in English.
I am transliterating the Nobel Laureate’s name as Najīb Maḥfūẓ, that being the preferred Library of
Congress version, although his name is generally transliterated in the Anglophone world as Naguib
Mahfouz.
2. I am indebted for many of these details to the translator’s introduction to the latest edition of
Philip Stewart’s translation of Awlād ḥāratinā, as Children of Gebelawi (Pueblo, Colorado: Passeggiata Press,
1997). I will be discussing the two translations of the work in more detail below. A detailed description
of the trial can be found in Raymond Stock, “How Islamist Militants Put Egypt on Trial,” Financial Times
(4/5 March 1995).
3. ʿUmar ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (b. 1938–[d. 2017]) was arrested by the Egyptian authorities soon after this
pronouncement (in March 1989). Expelled to the Sudan, he succeeded in obtaining an American visa,
came to Brooklyn, New York, in July 1990, and was subsequently arrested for involvement in the (first)

117
118 Chapter Nine

The announcement of the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature was made in Stock-
holm, Sweden on October 13, 1988. In normal circumstances, that would have marked
the beginning of a period of at least a year during which Maḥfūẓ’s name would have be-
come familiar in literary circles world-wide; and to a certain extent that did occur. How-
ever, another event within the same context was substantially to overwhelm that normal
trend, namely, the aftermath of the publication of Rushdie’s novel in England. Beginning
among the British Muslim community, and specifically the Yorkshire town of Bradford,
the outrage over the contents of Satanic Verses rapidly intensified. The book was sent first
to Pakistan, and thence to Iran, where in a now infamous decision, the supreme ruler of
Iran, Imam Khomeini, pronounced a fatwa on February 14th 1989 condemning Rushdie to
death because of the blasphemous content of his novel. In vain did Rushdie point out that
not only was the book a work of fiction and thus entitled to the privileges of irony but
also he was not in fact a practicing Muslim (although his Indian forebears were part of
that community).4 Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād ḥāratinā had, in fact, been one of the works mentioned
by the Nobel Committee in announcing its award (it being already available in English
translation—a crucial criterion for any writer in the context of consideration for the
award of the Nobel Prize). However, since the concentration of the announcement was on
“the Cairo Trilogy,” two volumes of which were now available in French (although not yet
in English5), little attention was drawn to the work that had aroused so much controversy
at an earlier date.
When Maḥfūẓ was duly invested with the Order of the Nile by President Mubarak
as a further celebration of his world-wide recognition, a reporter asked the President
what was clearly a trick question: did the President believe that all the Egyptian Nobel
Laureate’s works should now be available. Mubarak, clearly responding to the splendor
and uniqueness of the occasion, replied that he did. The next morning, Cairo’s newspa-

bombing of the World Trade Center (February 23, 1993). In October 1995 an American court sentenced
him to life in prison.
4. The entire issue of the process of “reading” this novel is one that brings about a confrontation
between those modes of narratological interpretation that acknowledge the presence of irony in fiction
and the many possibilities for manipulation of the narrator’s viewpoint on the one hand and on the
other the absence of such notions from the interpretive lexicon of many readers who found the novel so
objectionable. One suspects that very few of those who objected so strongly to the content of the novel
actually took the trouble to read the entire work; had they done so, they would surely have realized
that the “narrative contract” clearly established at the very beginning of the work is one that demands
a maximally ironic approach to the “veracity” of the work’s contents. One might also observe that the
term in Arabic generally used as an equivalent of the term “irony,” mufāraqa, is a neologism frequently
misunderstood even by that segment of the population that habitually reads works of fiction. I have dis-
cussed the unhappy conjunction of the publication of Satanic Verses and Maḥfūẓ’s “Nobel Year” in “Najīb
Maḥfūẓ and World Literature,” in The Arabic Novel Since 1950: Critical Essays, Interviews, and Bibliography, ed.
Issa J. Boullata (Cambridge, MA: Dar Mahjar, 1992) = Mundus arabicus 5 (1992): 121–41.
5. The English translation of the Trilogy did not appear until the 1990s: Palace Walk (1990), Palace of
Desire (1991), and Sugar Street (1992), all translated by William Hutchins.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 119

pers were full of the news that the President of Egypt had advocated the publication of
the still-banned Awlād ḥāratinā (the precise circumstances of which are explored below).
Shortly afterwards, the authorities at the al-Azhar Mosque-University (an acknowledged
seat of authority in Sunni Islam and especially within Egypt) announced that the original
ban, first formulated in 1960 and made official in 1968, was still in place. And yet, Maḥfūẓ,
the new Nobel Laureate in Literature, now duly besieged by requests for interviews, tele-
vision specials, and the like, remained essentially unaffected by the earlier controversy,
a situation that was only to last for a short period. As the furore over Rushdie’s novel
became louder and more widespread, the Nobel Laureate was asked for his opinion about
the controversy that was now exploding into the public domain throughout Europe and
the Middle East. He initially responded that he was a firm advocate of freedom of expres-
sion, particularly when it involved fiction; at the same time he noted that he had not as
yet read Rushdie’s work. Once he had read it, he would declare that, while he still sup-
ported the principle of freedom of expression, he did not like Satanic Verses and indeed
found its content distasteful.
This then was the general context and sequence of events that placed Maḥfūẓ and
his earlier narrative into a much broader intercultural context, one that almost cost him
his life. In what follows, I will discuss the publication history of the novel in more detail
and then turn to a consideration of its narrative features and the broader implications
of its message.

Awlād ḥāratinā: A Brief Publication History

I mentioned above that Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād ḥāratinā was first published as a weekly series
of articles in the Cairene newspaper, al-Ahrām, between September and December 1959
and that the series was almost immediately challenged by the religious scholars at al-
Azhar. It is, no doubt, a symbol of radically altered times and circumstances that, as we
look back from the perspective of 2007, the ensuing discussions have an entirely differ-
ent dynamic from that of recent controversies over book publication in Egypt. In 1959,
Egypt was still in the first decade of its post-revolutionary (1952) era. President Gamāl
ʿAbd al-Nāṣir (Nasser) had consolidated his power-base in Egypt (and the wider Arab
world) on the basis of a string of successful international engagements: the Bandung
Conference in 1955, the Suez debacle of 1956 and subsequent withdrawal of European
and Israeli forces, and the formation of the United Arab Republic with Syria in 1958.
Communists and the Muslim Brethren, both of whom had joined with other political
configurations in the movement to oust the corrupt ancien régime and its monarchy,
had not merely been sidelined but suppressed in subsequent years as the new Egyptian
authority structure set about the task of identifying itself and its political and social
platform. Within this general context, socialist and secularist ideas were to the fore, and
religion, while continuing to hold a significant place in private lives, had a compara-
tively muted role in the public sphere.
120 Chapter Nine

Whence the interesting scenario that saw itself played out during the publication
of Maḥfūẓ’s serialized novel in 1959. As the protests over the alleged implications of the
work’s contents became louder, the entire issue entered the public arena. The renowned
editor of the newspaper, Muḥammad Ḥasanayn Haykal, generally regarded as one of
President ʿAbd al-Nāṣir’s closest confidants, whose weekly editorial was widely viewed
as a direct expression of current government thinking, refused to stop publication (and
rumor has it that the decision had the president’s backing) and allowed the series to
proceed to its conclusion. It is at this juncture that we need to point out that, in spite of
the controversy which continued to surround this work, the original version has always
been available for reading in the archives of the newspaper. We learn from a variety of
interviews with the author that, following the completion of the initial publication of
Awlād ḥāratinā in December 1959, he acceded to the wishes of the al-Azhar authorities to
the extent of agreeing that the novel would never be published in book form in Egypt. He
was to stick to the terms of that agreement (and often refer to it) thereafter.
During the 1960s Maḥfūẓ published a whole series of novels, beginning with al-Liṣṣ
wa-l-kilāb (1961) and culminating in Mīrāmār (1967), which reflect a continuing, indeed
increasing, disillusion with the course of the Egyptian revolution and its social impact;
novels many of which are, in my opinion, his very best contributions to the Arabic novel
genre. Within the context of such productivity during the 1960s and the focus on the ills
of Egyptian society, it was therefore something of a surprise when a book edition of the
now proscribed Awlād ḥāratinā was published by Dār al-Ādāb, the Lebanese publishing
house in Beirut, in 1967, something that Maḥfūẓ always insisted was done without his
permission or knowledge. The original newspaper version of Awlād ḥāratinā published in
1959 had itself appeared after a significant gap in the publication of any fictional works
by Maḥfūẓ (al-Sukkariyya, the third volume of the Trilogy had been published in 1957,
although the entire work had been completed in April 1952—in other words, before the
Revolution of July 1952). Now here was yet another work appearing in book form after a
temporal gap, this time some seven years after its initial and highly controversial debut.
This book version of the novel has been, it almost goes without saying, the text that has
been used by scholars since that time. However, a reliance on that particular version of
the text is, it now appears, not without problems.
The basis of these problems lies in what may be termed the complete lack of any
kind of manuscript collection of Maḥfūẓ’s works. While he was still capable of writing
on a regular basis (in other words, before the October 1994 attack on him which literally
affected his ability to write), he wrote his manuscripts out in long-hand and in a meticu-
lous, clear script. However, having submitted them for publication, he apparently had no
more concern with them and they seem to have been discarded.6 However, for reasons

6. Raymond Stock, Maḥfūẓ’s designated biographer, has looked assiduously for manuscript copies of
his novels, and managed to locate part of a manuscript of Mīrāmār in the autor’s apartment. However, at
least up till now, no other manuscripts have been discovered. It is somewhat daunting to contemplate
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 121

that have never been satisfactorily explained, the manuscript of Awlād ḥāratinā seems to
have been an exception to this situation. One must assume that the manuscript of the
text was at some point in 1959 placed into the hands of the personnel at the newspaper,
al-Ahrām, who undertook for a period of some three months to typeset the text from
the author’s manuscript. In the process mistakes were made, and indeed words were
omitted; neither of those situations being all that unusual in the typesetting process,
especially when a handwritten manuscript is involved. Philip Stewart, who pioneered
the translation of Maḥfūẓ into English with his 1962 translation of Awlād ḥāratinā, has
undertaken a close study of the texts of the original newspaper articles and has com-
pared them with the text of the 1967 Beirut book edition.7 It seems clear from his valu-
able research that the Beirut book version had to be based on a manuscript of the text,
in that some of the words missing from the newspaper article version are found in the
book, while some of the passages omitted from the book (for reasons that are not clear,
but seem to be connected with a desire to omit some of the most controversial material)
are to be found in the newspaper articles. We can do no better at this point than to cite
Stewart’s conclusion:

Unless and until the original manuscript resurfaces, the author’s exact inten-
tions will have to be deduced from comparison of A [the newspaper articles]
and B [the book version].8

As a corollary to that statement by Stewart, one might add that, until such time as an Ar-
abic edition of Maḥfūẓ’s text is prepared according to the principles he cites or, by some
chance, the original manuscript is recovered, Stewart’s English translation would appear
to be the most complete realization of the author’s original text and intentions—albeit
seen through the admittedly distorting lens of translation.
Having now investigated some of the complexities associated with this work’s text
and context, let me now turn to a consideration of the work itself, suggesting as I do so

the fact that, when Maḥfūẓ completed his Trilogy in April 1952, he took the entire hand-written manu-
script to the offices of ʿAbd al-Hamīd Jawdat al-Saḥḥār, the owner of the publishing house, Maktabat
Miṣr. When the publisher informed him that he could not possibly publish such an enormous work,
Maḥfūẓ departed, leaving the manuscript behind. It was later to be published in 1956 and 1957, divided
into three separate volumes.
7. See Philip Stewart, “Awlād ḥāratinā: A Tale of Two Texts,” Arabic and Middle Eastern Literatures 4/1
(January 2001): 37–42. Stewart’s English translation, Children of Gebelawi, appeared originally as a thesis
submitted at Oxford University in 1962; it was subsequently published as a book by Three Continents
Press (Washington D.C.) in 1981, and in a new third edition by Passeggiata Press in 1997, which includes
not only a new Introduction but also samples of the pages of both the newspaper article version and
the Beirut text—along with the omissions and errors in both (xxii–xxv). The other English translation
of Awlād ḥāratinā is Children of the Alley, tr. Peter Theroux (New York: Doubleday, 1996), based entirely on
the less than satisfactory Beirut book version.
8. Introduction to Children of Gebelawi (1997), xviii.
122 Chapter Nine

that those very complexities seem to have preoccupied the attention of most scholars
who have written about the text to the virtual exclusion of any discussion of its literary
qualities.

A Reading of Awlād ḥāratinā

a. Introduction

The text of Awlād ḥāratinā9 consists of an introductory section (termed iftitāḥiyya [exor-
dium, opening] in the book version only, on which see further below) and five chapters,
each one named for the principal figure depicted within it: Adham, Jabal, Rifāʿa, Qāsim,
and ʿArafa. These chapters are subdivided into 114 sections, that being, as it so happens,
the number of suras in the text of the Qurʾan. While that may be of some significance, not
least because the novel clearly treats in allegorical form the life-histories of some of the
prophetic figures to be found in the Qurʾan, Maḥfūẓ consistently remarked that the num-
ber was not intended to be of any particular significance; indeed, he remarked, if the in-
troductory section was included, the number was no longer the same. Whatever the case
may be with regard to number, it is clear that Maḥfūẓ is in no way interested in following
the dubious path of some of his pre-modern forebears in Arabic literature—especially the
two renowned poets, al-Mutanabbī (d. 965) and al-Maʿarrī (d. 1057)—namely, by attempt-
ing to imitate the style of the Qurʾan, thus posing a direct challenge to the doctrine of
“iʿjāz al-Qurʾan” (the inimitability of the Qurʾan).10 Neither the style nor the sequencing
of materials in this novel are to the slightest degree similar to that of the Qurʾan.

9. The publication (or rather non-publication) history of Awlād ḥāratinā noted earlier has meant
that, until recently, there have been comparatively few studies in Arabic devoted to it, particularly in
the author’s native Egypt. More recently, printed versions have become more available, and studies in
book form devoted to Maḥfūẓ’s oeuvre have begun to include references to and analyses of it. Among
these, we would mention: Muḥammad Amanṣūr, al-Tajrīb al-riwāʾī ʿinda Najīb Maḥfūẓ (Cairo: Al-Majlis
al-Aʿlā li-l-Thaqāfa, 2006), 159–201; Dīb ʿAlī Ḥasan, Najīb Maḥfūẓ bayn al-ilhād wa-l-īmān (Beirut: Al-
Manāra, 1997), 163–73; and Muḥammad Bassām Malṣ, Min aʿmāl al-kātib Najīb Maḥfūẓ (Amman: Dār Sirāj,
2005), 185–208. Among essays in English devoted to this work in particular I would mention: Jareer
Abu-Haidar, “Awlād hāratinā by Najīb Maḥfūẓ: an event in the Arab world,” Journal of Arabic Literature
16 (1985), 119–31; Kenneth Cragg, The Pen and the Faith (London: Allen & Unwin, 1985), 144–64; Rashid
el-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London: Routledge, 1993), 141–44; Menahem Milson,
Najīb Maḥfūẓ the Novelist-Philosopher of Cairo (New York: St. Martin’s Press, 1998), passim; Matti Moosa, The
Early Novels of Najīb Maḥfūẓ (Gainsville: University Presses of Florida, 1994), 274–92; Mattityahu Peled,
Religion, My Own: The Literary Works of Najīb Maḥfūẓ (New Brunswick: Transaction Books, 1983); Sasson
Somekh, The Changing Rhythm (Leiden: E. J. Brill, 1973), 137–55; Muḥammad Siddiq, Arab Culture and the
Novel (London: Routledge, 2007), 101–53; and Shawkat M. Toorawa, “Modern Arabic Literature and the
Qur’an: Creativity, Inimitability … Incompatibilities?” in Religious Perspectives in Modern Muslim and Jewish
Literatures, ed. Glenda Abramson and Hilary Kilpatrick (London: Routledge, 2006), 239–57.
10. For a translation of an extract from al-Mutanabbī’s pseudo-Qurʾan (taken from al-Tanūkhī’s
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 123

As the initial decade of the Egyptian revolution proceeded towards its conclusion in
1959, it was becoming clear to the Egyptian people, and especially to its intelligentsia,
that, while they may have expelled a corrupt monarchy and the colonial forces that sup-
ported it, they had now entered a new phase in their social and political life, one that
was full of uncertainties, shifting identities, and not a little suppression of free thought
(through the functions of an increasingly evident secret police apparatus). If literature
had played an important role in political life in Egypt for some considerable time, this
was particularly so in the post-revolutionary period; but it now required a resort to the
artifices of the writer’s craft to an increasing degree; prime amongst which was the in-
vocation of the symbolic. To readers who were rapidly becoming inured to such realities,
the appearance of Awlād ḥāratinā in Cairo’s most important newspaper source was in
some ways a surprise for those who had so admired the Cairo Trilogy that had been pub-
lished just three years earlier—with its lovingly detailed descriptions and evocations of
the quarters of old Cairo, but in other ways it encountered a reception situation that was
fully equipped to penetrate beneath the surface layer of the narrative and to interpret
the text, its “characters” and their behavior, as symbols of broader phenomena. Thus it
was that the naming of the chapters following the introduction was almost automati-
cally and instantaneously subjected to a process of decoding. By dropping the “h” from
Adham the name of Adam appeared (aided by the equal proximity of Idrīs to Iblīs [the
Devil]); Jabal is the Arabic for “mountain,” thus invoking Sinai and Moses; Rifāʿa means
“resurrection,” implying Jesus; and Qāsim means “arbitrator,” thus Muḥammad. With the
fifth of these names, ʿArafa, we have the Arabic word for “scientia”—in the dual sense of
knowledge and science. All these chapter-title characters operate within the context of
the “alley” (Arabic ḥāra). Beyond this “alley” and outside the city-walls lies the house of
Jabalāwī (his name associated with the same word “Jabal” and thus implying “Mountain-
Man”11), a cryptic and powerful figure who serves as guardian of the waqf (religious en-
dowment) represented in part by the “alley” and who keeps an ever watchful and critical
eye on the goings-on in his “alley.”
The above summary-scheme of the novel’s overall structure is, of course, easy to
construct on the basis of the printed book edition of the work. However, when we bear in
mind the forceful nature and immediacy of the reaction to its publication in serial form
in 1959 and the tragic consequences that were to emerge at a later date, it is clearly sig-
nificant also to consider the work within such terms of reference—namely, as a gradual
process of “revelation” that took some three months to disclose in total. To an Egyptian
readership that was now familiar with the name of Najīb Maḥfūẓ (he had been awarded

Nishwār al-muḥāḍara [Table-talk of a Mesopotamian Judge, tr. D. S. Margoliouth (London: Royal Asiatic
Society, 1922)], see Ilse Lichtenstadter, Introduction to Classical Arabic Literature (New York: Twayne
Publishers Inc., 1974), 345.
11. The use of “Gebelawi” in the title of Philip Stewart’s translation reflects the Egyptian pronuncia-
tion of the word.
124 Chapter Nine

the newly established State Prize for Literature immediately following the publication of
the third volume of the Cairo Trilogy, al-Sukkariyya, in 1957) and was equally inured to the
way in which his novels of the 1940s displayed his lovingly detailed accounts of the older
quarters of Cairo—all of them recounted by fully omniscient narrators who make use of
the well-tried devices of social-realism, to such a readership the appearance of this new
work on the 21st of September 1959 must have been the cause of both pleasure and sur-
prise. Egypt’s acknowledged master of fiction was publishing a new work, and yet it must
have been obvious to readers of the very first episode that this was not the Maḥfūẓ of
earlier works. The first episode begins simply with the title, Awlād ḥāratinā, and then pro-
vides the author’s name, “by Najīb Maḥfūẓ.”12 The very title, translated literally as “Sons
of Our Alley” (although neither English translation chooses to be that literal) introduces
readers to what is, in many subsequent works of Maḥfūẓ, to become a major symbol,
but, unlike his earlier works, this “alley” is not named (consider, for example, the novel
Zuqāq al-Midaqq [Midaqq Alley] from the 1940s, that being the name of an actual street in
old Cairo—to which the novelist, Jamāl al-Ghītānī, takes Maḥfūẓ on a sentimental return
during one of the many television specials devoted to the Nobel Laureate following 1988).
With the very title, we are, it would appear, leaving the realms of the specific and engag-
ing with a more symbolic space. That space is created, as the opening sentence of the
work informs the reader, not by a single tale (and it is interesting to note that the tradi-
tion term, “ḥikāya,” is used—to be replicated in the later and equally symbolic, Ḥikāyāt
ḥāratinā [1974, Tales of Our Alley13]), but rather by a number of them related by storytellers
over generations. In other words, right at the start of this “new” novel in 1959, Maḥfūẓ
is indicating that his period of silence over the past five years (at least, from writing fic-
tion) has not been an idle one and that his technique is undergoing a conscious shift;
in this case, one that involves an awareness of metafictional allusions and even earlier
indigenous traditions of storytelling.

b. The Prefatory Section

From title and titles we can now move to a consideration of the opening section (Stewart
in his translation uses the term “Prologue,” while Theroux prefers “Preface”).14 In fact,
the original episode provides no specific title of this kind, but simply plunges straight
into the narrative. We have already pointed out the way in which Maḥfūẓ uses the act of

12. I must express here my profound thanks to my Oxford colleague, Philip Stewart, who has provid-
ed me with a copy of the original episodes in al-Ahrām. The song, upon which the title is based, is found
in the printed text of Awlād ḥāratinā, 225, and in the translation, Children of Gebelawi, 200.
13. The English translation is entitled Fountain and Tomb, tr. Soad Sobhy, Essam Fattouh and James
Kennesen (Washington D.C.: Three Continents Press, 1988).
14. The first “episode” of the series, “Awlād ḥāratinā,” includes the text as far as page 13, line 5, in
the 1967 book edition.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 125

storytelling as a means of drawing attention to the multi-generational aspect of the pro-

cess whereby the narratives have been collected—presumably an assertion of fictional
privilege that was to be denied him, just as it was later to Salman Rushdie. However, in
the following pages (or, more accurately in the original context, columns), the careful
reader soon realizes that these opening paragraphs provide an essential context and in-
deed narrative contract for everything that is to follow (and, as was and is the case with
Satanic Verses, as noted above, one is left to wonder quite how many of those who chose to
protest at aspects of this narrative really read these pages with any care or attention). In
the first place, a first-person narrator notes clearly that, while he has been a contempo-
rary of ʿArafa, the last of the five “chapter-headers,” he has had to rely for accounts of the
other four—Adham, Jabal, Rifāʿa, and Qāsim, who significantly are cited in these opening
paragraphs separately from ʿArafa—on accounts “related by our numerous bards … just
as they have been heard in the local café or handed down in the family, and such have
been my only sources.”15 Later in this introductory session we learn that this same nar-
rator is one of the few people in the quarter who can write; it has been suggested to him
that it would be useful “if [he] wove them reliably into a single complete account for
people to use.”16 In a telling conclusion to his statement of purpose, he notes that “my
job is to write down the complaints of those who are oppressed or in need,” and that the
recording of his narrative has made him aware of “people’s secret sorrows.”
The narrator’s stated goal then is to create, to organize, a record of the ways in which
time and events have led to situations in which “the children of our alley” have suffered
from oppression and need and, it would appear, continue to do so. That the narrator
has fulfilled his goal is already evident from the introductory section. The four heroic
figures from the past (Arabic “amjād”) are mentioned, and their individual narratives are
arranged in a chronological sequence in the chapters that follow, from the “beginnings”
with the record of Adham up to the contemporary period of ʿArafa (and the narrator).
Within such an arrangement, the passage of large amounts of time is, needless to say,
implicit. The narrative itself concentrates on five eras during which the specific “lead-
ers” of “the alley” are alive and functioning within the community; the significant tem-
poral tracts that make up the interstices between those eras are referred to by the bards,
and always in terms of misery, oppression, and violence. However, within this broader
chronological sequencing, there is within each individual chapter another element of
sequencing, namely, repetition. Similar events and linkages are described, and the re-
petitive effect so engendered, clearly a deliberate part of the narrator’s organizational
method, affords the narrative a quality that can best be characterized as “cyclical.” Such

15. For the purposes of this study, I am using the translation of Philip Stewart (for reasons that have
already been given and reference to which has been cited in footnotes 3 and 8 above). I shall also cite the
original text from the Beirut edition of 1967 (see note 2 above). For this passage, see Children of Gebelawi,
1; Awlād ḥāratinā, 5.
16. Children, 3; Awlād, 7.
126 Chapter Nine

a concept is, of course, commonly associated with certain approaches to historiogra-

phy—as with Ibn Khaldūn and later Arnold Toynbee, but Mikhail Bakhtin mentions the
term in a narratological context, specifically in his renowned study of the chronotope—
“the intrinsic connectedness of temporal and spatial relationships that are artistically
expressed in literature”—and associates it with the folkloric approach to narration, not-
ing that

The mark of cyclicity, and consequently of cyclical repetitiveness, is imprinted

on all events occurring in this type of time.17

This aspect of the narration of Awlād ḥāratinā (or, at the very least, of the narrator’s de-
scribed posture towards it) finds a strong echo in the use of the word “ruwāt” (bards, sto-
rytellers) to depict his sources for earlier eras and indeed of the equally significant word
“sīra” (used as the term for both Prophetic biography and popular sagas [in the latter
case, with the addition of the adjective “shaʿbiyya”]), both of them linked to traditional
modes of narration and reception.18
Also identified and organized in these introductory pages/columns are the notion
of place, the principal characters to be encountered in the ensuing chapters, the forces
at work within the “alley,” and the major concepts that are to symbolize the import of
everything that follows. With regard to place, we learn that “the alley” in which the com-
munity lives is in a district of Cairo that is close to the desert, with the Muqaṭṭam Hills
to the East; the districts neighboring this “alley”—like the mention of Cairo itself, refer-
ences to actual quarters of the city—are similarly located in the older Fatimid city (as op-
posed to the 19th century “Ismāʿīliyya” quarter closer to the River Nile). At the end of the
alley, we learn, is the house of the distant, powerful, and mysterious figure of Jabalāwī
(“man of the mountain”) and another house belonging to the Governor (Arabic “wālī”).
To these two identified structures is later to be added a third, that of the alley’s principal
“futuwwa” (for which Stewart’s choice of “strongman” captures much of the significance
of the Arabic term—to be explored below). With regard to the linkage and inter-rela-
tionship of time and place then, the opening section of Awlād ḥāratinā clearly indicates a
significant shift away from the more “realist” approach to be found in Maḥfūẓ’s earlier
novels of the 1940s and early 1950s (culminating in the Trilogy) towards a more cyclical
and fixed mode, one that is clearly more in line with his broader allegorical purposes.19

17. See Mikhail Bakhtin, “Forms of Time and the Chronotope in the Novel,” in The Dialogic Imagination,
ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of Texas, 1981), 84 and 210.
18. For the use of both these terms, see Awlād ḥāratinā, 5.
19. I might observe at this point that the same mode is employed by Maḥfūẓ in his short story,
“Zaʿbalāwī,” written—in all likelihood—after Awlād ḥāratinā (it was published in the collection, Dunyā
Allāh [Cairo: Maktabat Miṣr, 1962]), a work which might well be regarded as a kind of postscript to the
1959 novel and indeed perhaps a commentary on reactions to it.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 127

As already noted, this prefatory section also introduces the reader to the princi-
pal characters in the narrative. The three houses mentioned above are the residences
of personages who fulfill important roles vis-à-vis the alley. In the “great house” lives
Jabalāwī (the man of the mountain). He is depicted as everyone’s ancestor and as an
enormous riddle (lughz min al-alghāz); his name is given to the alley (Jabalāwī’s alley) and
he is the person who set up its endowment (awqāf). He is also described as being a “fu-
tuwwa,” but “not like the others. He never extorted protection money from anyone, nor
did he strut about the world proudly.”20 Jabalāwī is a presence throughout the narrative,
and yet, from the time of Adham, he is an absent presence, remaining sequestered inside
the great house. The people of the alley are more concerned about “the endowment”
and its disposition, and about the “ten clauses” contained in “the book” residing in the
great house, they being “the source of the conflict that has been raging every since I was
born, which has grown more dangerous with every generation up till this time—and the
next.”21
While the figure of Jabalāwī remains a constant throughout the narrative, the two
other occupants of the houses at the end of the alley are constantly changing: firstly, the
nāẓir (administrator) who oversees the waqf. The relationship established at the outset
between the all-powerful figure of Jabalāwī and the nāẓir does not last beyond the earli-
est period of Adham, and in later times (and chapters) the would-be administrator of the
endowment is more often in league with, and beholden to, the succession of futuwwāt,
who, unlike Jabalāwī, tyrannize the community and often resort to excessive violence
against individuals and the community as a whole in order to maintain their position of
influence.22 Following the expulsion of Adham from the great house, it is the tyranny of
these clusters of “strongmen” that is opposed by the figures of Jabal, Rifāʿa, Qāsim, and
later ʿArafa, while during the intervals between them oppression and misery are the rule
of the day.
As we have already noted, the prefatory section makes a particular point of separat-
ing the mention of Adham, Jabal, Rifāʿa, and Qāsim, all of whom are described as being
heroic figures, from that of ʿArafa. The narrator links his own time to that of ʿArafa, and

20. Awlād, 6; Children, 2.
21. Awlād, 6; Children, 2.
22. The term futuwwa has a long history. Its semantic origins are connected with the idea of youth
(fatan), but in pre-modern times it had links to Sufism, to chivalry, and to the establishment of profes-
sional guilds. As the late historian, P. J. Vatikiotis, points out in a pioneering article on Awlād ḥāratinā
(in which he concentrates on the theme of violence), Robin Hood would be an example of this “good”
category of futuwwa. Over time, however, the word came to have other, more negative connotations,
until a stage is reached—basically co-terminous with Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s own youth (as he reports on sev-
eral occasions)—when its means “thug” or “gang-leader.” It is this very creative ambivalence about
the meaning of the word that allows Maḥfūẓ to use the term in Awlād ḥāratinā. See P. J. Vatikiotis, “The
Corruption of Futuwwa: A Consideration of Despair in Nagib Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāritnā,” Middle East Studies
7/2 (May 1971): 169–84.
128 Chapter Nine

indeed credits one of the latter’s friends for suggesting that the story of the alley needs
to be recorded in a systematic fashion that will avoid “the whims and prejudices of the
traditional bards” (“ahwāʾ al-ruwāt wa-tahazzubātihim”). In a further piece of sequencing
and indeed framing, we are thus presented with a matrix that will involve a chapter of
beginnings and, to conclude, a chapter of that kind of ending which of necessity does not
bring any closure.
With this prefatory section then (and indeed with the initial episode of the newspa-
per publication of the work in September 1959—which also includes the opening pages
of the “Adham” chapter), Maḥfūẓ certainly provides his readers with plenty of clues as
to the nature of the allegory that he has created, allusions that are to be elaborated in
the chapters that follow. But it is also important to note that, with the introduction of
elements of the secular into the description of place and community, he is also making
unequivocally clear the themes of oppression, violence, and the politics of community-
building that are to be central to the import of the work in the ensuing chapters.

c. The Adham Chapter

With the matrix for the narrative established and outlined, the first chapter—“Adham”—
opens with Jabalāwī summoning his five sons and informing them that he has decided to
hand over the management of the endowment to someone else; for the purpose he has
selected his son, Adham. Adham is not the eldest son, but even so he is selected for the
task by his father because of his personal qualities, his innate goodness and reliability. A
fatal opposition is thus set up involving Adham on the one hand and another son, Idrīs,
on the other. The latter protests against his father’s decision to favor Adham and is “cast
out” of the house. While Idrīs wanders around outside, cursing his father and taunting
his brother, Adham administers the endowment and enjoys the privileges of his father’s
favor inside the great house, with its luxuriant garden. His bliss is further enhanced
when he marries Umayma. The fraternal split occasioned by Jabalāwī’s choice and Idrīs’s
continuing intrigues inevitably point towards calamity. Idrīs tweaks his brother’s inter-
est concerning the book inside the great house, the one that contains the “ten clauses”;
above all, Idrīs is anxious to know about his own future. In this quest Idrīs is joined by
Umayma, who asks her husband whether he is not also anxious to know what the docu-
ment actually says.23 Adham succumbs to their joint requests, enters the house, and is
consulting the book when he is interrupted by his infuriated father. Confessing that he
has been put up to this nefarious deed by his brother, Idrīs, Adham too is expelled from
the house and emerges to the guffaws of his brother, now content that the tables have
been turned.

23. Awlād, 42; Children, 34.

 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 129

While Adham now finds himself forced to earn a meager living, his father retreats
inside the great house to become the distant and unseen figure of the ensuing chapters.
Adham curses his fate and also his wife for her part in his downfall, but a degree of joy
reenters their life together when they are blessed with the birth of twin sons, Qadrī and
Humām. As the two sons grow up, they too emerge as different personalities, and with
different relationships to their uncle, Idrīs. What seems to be a fatal pattern is repeated
when a summons is issued from within the great house demanding that Humām, and he
alone, come to the house. The favored grandson is offered the job that his father, Adham,
once had, and similar consequences ensue. The enraged and jealous Qadrī kills his broth-
er and hides the corpse. It is Idrīs who informs his brother that Jabalāwī’s plans for his
offspring have led to the ejection of two sons and the murder of a grandson. Crushed by
these realities and the desolation of Umayma at the loss of her son, Adham can only re-
flect on what might have been: “Time has turned the laughter of childhood in the garden
to frowns and tears.”24 And yet, in spite of everything, Adham “imagines” (“khuyyila ilā
Adham”) that his father comes to his hovel, forgives him for his errors, and informs him
that the “endowment” will be for Adham’s descendants.
The narrator now ends the beginning, as it were, by recording that a sense of com-
munity (ʿumrān) began to spread as a result of the benefits of the endowment, and that
“the sons of our alley” are all descended from these initiating individuals (implying both
Adham and Idrīs) and events from the distant past.
In this brief summary of the chapter devoted to the first of the five “figures” in Awlād
ḥāratinā I have used the names that are to be found in the narrative itself. With the sym-
bolic allusions of the prefatory section already discussed in mind, it is hardly necessary
to point to the linkage of Adham and Umayma to Adam and Eve and to their “fall,” nor
to that of Qadrī and Humām and Cain and Abel. Intertwined with the story of Ad[h]am
is that of his brother, Idrīs, whose name can be closely tied to that of Iblīs, one of the
names in Arabic for “the Devil.” All these allusions are clear enough to readers familiar
with the biblical accounts, and especially the Book of Genesis (beginnings), and, it would
appear, were equally obvious to the readers of the first “episode” of Awlād ḥāratinā pub-
lished in al-Ahrām in September 1959—most especially, those scholars at al-Azhar who
objected to the clear implications of the allegory. However, at this initial stage in our
discussions of this sequence of narratives, it is also important to record that the incidents
involved are also regularly detailed in a particular Islamic genre, the so-called qiṣaṣ al-
anbiyāʾ (prophetic narratives), two of the more famous contributions to which are that of
al-Thaʿlabī (d. 1035) and a further set of varied provenance that tradition has attributed
to a certain al-Kisāʾī (to be differentiated from the renowned 8th century grammarian
of Basra). I will be exploring later in this study the question as to what a reading of the
text of Awlād ḥāratinā suggests regarding the nature of Maḥfūẓ’s sources for this work

24. Awlād,110; Children, 96.

130 Chapter Nine

and the relevance of that topic to any assessment of the ways in which it was received
within its host culture. For the time being it is sufficient to note that the collection of al-
Kisāʾī includes reports (ḥadīth) about Adam’s and Eve’s creation, about Iblīs (who is duly
cursed—laʿanahu Allāh), and Cain and Abel, all of them supported by citations from the
text of the Qurʾan.25

d. The Chapters of Jabal, Rifāʿa, and Qāsim

The foundational elements established by Adham’s chapter—his expulsion from the gar-
den of the great house, his troubled relationship with his father, Jabalāwī, the violent
death of one of his son’s at the hands of his own twin-brother, and the ongoing taunts
of Idrīs— in subsequent chapters become the stuff of exemplary stories narrated to the
“children of the alley” by successive generations of bards. While the lessons may be there
to be learned, it is already clear from the opening of Jabal’s chapter that they have not
been assimilated or that their implications have been ignored in the face of conflicting
values. This is seen most obviously in the existence of a new third house alongside that
of those of Jabalāwī and the Governor (wālī), namely, that of the currently dominant chief
“futuwwa,” a figure who is a far cry from the kind of values represented by Jabalāwī in the
previous chapter. The role of this different category of futuwwa is firstly to beat all his
rivals for the post and then to serve as enforcer for the Governor and extort protection
money from people of the alley.
How, the narrator wonders out loud, could things have come to such a pass?26 The
answer is, of course, that Jabalāwī has retired inside the great house, leaving the admin-
istration of the endowment to the succession of Governors that ensues. Initial charitable
instincts towards the people of the alley have now been replaced by greed and corrup-
tion. The three chapters that now follow are devoted to the different ways in which three
community leaders—Jabal [mountain/Moses], Rifāʿa [resurrection/Jesus], and Qāsim [ar-
biter/Muḥammad]—succeed in bringing the children of the alley some relief from the
seemingly endless oppression to which they are subjected by their rulers and imbuing
some sense of moral purpose. ʿArafa’s final chapter that follows these three finds the
alley divided up into three “sectors”—the Jabal followers, Rifāʿa followers, and Qāsim fol-
lowers, each with their own futuwwa, but the bards who keep reminding the community
of the events of the distant past are continually adjusting and adding to their stories in
order to show the various ways in which each leader has managed to revive and repre-
sent an approximation of the idealized society that Jabalāwī had originally aspired to
create and foster.

25. See Badʾ al-khalq wa-qiṣaṣ al-anbiyāʾ lil-Kisāʾī, ed. al-Ṭāhir ibn Sālima (Tunis: Dār Nuqūsh ʿArabiyya,
1998), 108–48. There is an English translation of the text: The Tales of the Prophets of al-Kisa’i, tr. W. M.
Thackston Jr. (Boston: Twayne Publishers, 1978), 23–85.
26. Awlād, 116; Children, 100.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 131

All three of these chapters show a similar structure and sequence, albeit with indi-
vidual variations. The bards who tell the tales of these three community leaders are the
means whereby memories are to be preserved and invoked, all within a general atmo-
sphere characterized by forgetfulness. In fact, all three chapters conclude by observing
the extent to which the community seems to be all too able and indeed willing to for-
get.27 The tales told within the chapters themselves and the bard’s references to earlier
periods are also cumulative, a reflection—needless to say—of the allegorical purpose of
the work as a whole; and, since I am concerned in this study with a consideration of the
narrative qualities of this important work within the context of Maḥfūẓ’s total oeuvre,
I will also draw attention here to the author’s developing skill in constructing such a
complex and interwoven narrative, one that had already been seen as a distinct feature
of the construction of his previous work, the above-mentioned Trilogy, and was to be-
come a primary characteristic of several of his later contributions to Arabic fiction.28
One notable feature of the way in which these interpolations of bardic references to the
past, and specifically Adham’s era, are part of the structuring of the each of the Rifāʿa
and Qāsim chapters, is the way in which they increase in number. There are none in the
Jabal chapter, two in that of Rifāʿa, and three in that Qāsim. This, of course, reflects the
way in which each successive community leader builds on and refers back to the era of
his predecessor(s), but what is particularly significant about these bardic recitations is
that they consist of exact repetitions of the texts of the narratives to be found in Adham’s
chapter.29 Within the context of any consideration of the “narrative contract” that has
been established by the opening section of Awlād ḥāratinā (discussed above), it is impor-
tant at this point to note that these bardic performances remind the reader that the
entire narrative is the result of recitations by generations of storytellers; in other words,
as reliable a record of the past as the fallibilities of memory will permit. In the words of

27. Awlād, 210, 305, 443; Children, 187, 274, 399.

28. In the context of this concern with structure and cross-referencing within a single work, I am
thinking in particular of al-Marāyā (1972); English translation: Mirrors, tr. Roger Allen, 2nd ed. (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 1999); and Ḥadīth al-ṣabāḥ wa-l-Masāʾ (1987); English translation Morn-
ing and Evening Talk, tr. Christina Phillips (Cairo American University in Cairo Press, 2007). Many commen-
tators have pointed to Maḥfūẓ’s career as a civil servant and his obvious proclivity for a highly organized
life as being in no small way responsible for this facet of many of his works. He himself admitted that, in
preparing to write his Trilogy—a work that is clearly on a vast historical scale previously untried in Arabic
fictional writing—he had kept a separate file on each of his major characters in order to be able to keep
track of their features and movements and to be able to make precisely these kinds of cross-references.
One might suggest that his novel, Ḥaḍrat al-Muḥtaram (1975; English translation: Respected Sir, tr. Rashid
el-Enany (London: Quartet Books, 1986) is its author’s commentary on the bureaucratic career.
29. These bardic interpolations occur as follows (and I include here the reference to the page number
first and the earlier passage to which it returns second): in the Jabal chapter, Awlād, 132 [100]; Children,
115 [87]; in the Rifāʿa chapter, Awlād, 201 [27], 260 [46–7]; Children, 225 [34–5], 290 [55]; in the Qāsim chap-
ter, Awlād, 288 [96], 307 [89], and 352 [77]; Children, 323 [110], 344 [103], and 393 [89]; and in the ʿArafa
chapter, Awlād, 459 [109], Children, 412 [95].
132 Chapter Nine

the very opening sentence of the novel, “this is the story of our alley, or, more accurately,
the stories of our alley.” Within the context of any assessment of the allegorical nature
of the narrative, its symbolic resonances, and the place of irony in the interpretation of
this and other works of fiction, the implications of this experiment of Maḥfūẓ with the
organizational principles of oral narratives and the role of memory (and forgetting) are
clearly central to any interpretation of the novel as a whole (or, at least, they should be
and should have been …).
The way in which each of these three chapters begins is a reflection of this human
forgetfulness. A moral void has been allowed to develop. Jabalāwī’s assignment of the
endowment (waqf) to the people who inhabit his alley and intended for their joint benefit
has over time been flouted by action of the overseer (nāẓir) and the futuwwāt. The latter
group serve to enforce the former’s will and also to feather their own nests, always at the
expense of the people of the alley—who begin to subdivide themselves into separate sec-
tors—Jabalites, Rifāʿites, and Qāsimites (the last group being originally termed “jarābīʿ,”
translated by Stewart as “desert rats”)—and always involving a resort to oppression and
violence. In each of the chapters the people of the alley, long since inured to this situ-
ation, discover that someone has arrived or emerged in their midst who has the moral
vision and standing necessary to counter these tyrannical forces. The new leader, indeed
the new kind of leader, gradually gathers people to him, forms a community based on
particular values—often related to the “ten clauses” of the book that resides in Jabalāwī’s
great house, and then confronts the current authority structure. In the case of Jabal and
Qāsim the process involves some brutal fighting, but Rifāʿa insists that there be no vio-
lence. What unites all three leaders and serves to mark them as uniquely endowed people
is that they all have personal and individual contact with the figure of Jabalāwī himself.30
Significantly, in Qāsim’s case, the contact occurs through the mediation of “Jabalāwī’s
servant,” Qindīl. In each of the chapters the actions of the community leader and the
changed moral purpose that is engendered by his presence among the people of the al-
ley leads to an entirely new relationship between the overseer and the people; indeed,
such as is moral authority of the three leaders that, for a while at least, even the ability
of the futuwwāt to terrorize the people of the alley in general or their particular “sector”
is curtailed. Jabalāwī remains as remote as ever in his house, but his appearance to these
specially identified figures implies that the intentions of his handing over the endow-
ment are being fulfilled, if only for a time.
We described the time-place combination in this novel above as sharing qualities of
sequentiality and cyclical structure, suggesting thereby a frequently encountered fea-
ture of those tradition oral narratives which the narrator of this novel announces as
providing the major organizing principle of the work’s contents. However, while each
of these three chapters which recount the births, lives, and deaths of the community

30. Jabal: Awlād, 177; Children, 156; Rifāʿa: Awlād, 247; Children, 220; Qāsim: Awlād, 335; Children, 314.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 133

leaders shares many features—some of them outlined in the previous paragraphs, there
are obviously many elements of difference, reflecting the individual careers and priori-
ties of each leader. It is, it goes without saying, in these distinct and individual features
that the allegorical linkages between the “characters” as portrayed in this novel and the
prophetic figures to be found in the sacred scriptures of the three monotheistic faiths
can be explored.
Jabal—the Moses figure—for example, is discovered in the river-reeds in a box and
brought up by “Hudā Hānim,” the wife of the overseer, now termed the “Efendi.” Such is
the atmosphere of violence and resentment among “the people of Ḥamdān” and their
resentment at their overlords that Jabal finds himself indulging in violence of his own.
Forced into exile, he is apprenticed to a snake-charmer and marries one of his daughters.
Returning to his native quarter, he confronts the Efendi, demanding that the people have
access to the endowment. When he is rebuffed, there occurs a plague of snakes; and when
the futuwwāt come to finish him and his followers off, they all fall into a big hole and are
killed. Now that Jabal is the leader of the alley, there is a debate as to whether Jabalāwī is
the ancestor of all the people or only of the Jabalites. He begins to share the endowment
with the people, but also practices a strict form of justice, including the literal imposition
of the notion of “an eye for an eye.” At the end of the chapter, the bard presents a picture
of Jabal that balances his strict imposition of laws against his innate sympathy for the
poor and downtrodden.31
Rifāʿa—the Jesus figure—is born to a couple who have had to flee the quarter be-
cause of the ongoing oppression they are suffering. The man is somewhat older than his
wife and a carpenter; his wife is pregnant. Rifāʿa, their son, grows up in exile and learns
his father’s trade. Upon his return with his family to the quarter some twenty years
later, he is immediately made aware of the multiple ways in which violence is used to
impose order and solve problems. His handsome features soon attract the attention of
Yasmīna, a neighbor and lady of easy virtue; when she is involved in an altercation with
two of her more violent regular customers, Rifāʿa agrees to marry her. He spends a great
deal of time talking to people; during such conversations he is willing to justify Jabal’s
resort to violence when necessary, but he himself advocates a different approach, one
that involves non-violence and mercy. As he gradually begins to move away from “Jabal’s
people,” he gathers to himself four particular friends. Almost inevitably the existence
of such a radical little group draws the attention of the futuwwāt who detect a challenge
to their authority. Rifāʿa and his friends plan to escape, but they are betrayed by none
other than Yasmīna herself. The small group of friends is ambushed in the desert by the
futuwwāt, and Rifāʿa is killed, uttering one last cry to Jabalāwī. When the futuwwāt return
the next day to bury the body of their victim, it is nowhere to be found. In the wake of

31. For these particular incidents, see Awlād, 131, 140, 188, 196, 203, 207, and 209; Children, 114, 122,
167, 174, 181, 185, and 187.
134 Chapter Nine

Rifāʿa’s death, the people once again have access to the benefits of Jabalāwī’s endow-
ment. The Rifāʿites now have their own sector alongside that of the Jabalites.32 However,
after their leader’s death, they proceed to abandon his pacifist principles and kill not
only the futuwwāt but Yasmīna as well.
Qāsim—the arbitrator, the Muḥammad figure—is orphaned at an early age and grows
up in the house of his uncle, Zakariyyā; Qāsim and his cousin, Ḥasan, are thus very much
like brothers. Beginning his working life as a barrow-boy for his uncle, Qāsim is soon
recognized for his skill in trade and his ability to resolve disputes. He attracts the atten-
tion of an older widow, Qamar, and, after successfully conducting her business for her,
marries her. When he receives Jabalāwī’s message via the latter’s servant, Qindīl, it is first
to Qamar that he reveals his portentous news. Whereas she believes him immediately,
his friends and relatives are not so readily convinced, especially his uncle, Zakariyyā.
Qāsim, like his forebears in the leadership role, now begins to reveal what he is being
told regarding the endowment: the trust is intended for the people of the alley, includ-
ing its womenfolk. Harking back to the eras of Jabal and Rifāʿa and their resort to force
and love respectively, Qāsim declares that the principle he has been instructed to apply
is one of “force when needed, love always.” However, as the group of Qāsim’s follow-
ers becomes more assertive about the alley’s rights to the endowment, a confrontation
develops with the current authorities. At this crucial juncture, his beloved wife, Qamar,
dies; with the loss of her protection and the continuingly threatening atmosphere in the
alley, it becomes necessary for Qāsim to flee. Following the path of his predecessors to
the Muqaṭṭam hills, he reflects on the fate of Jabalāwī’s endowment and the way in which
the alley’s people flout their founder’s wishes. In spite of Qāsim’s expressed opposition to
violence, it is now necessary for the group to fight a series of battles against the united
futuwwāt. In a final conflict Qāsim’s group is victorious and returns to the alley to find
the overseer’s house abandoned. Announcing to the people of the various subsectors of
the alley that everyone is equally closely related to Jabalāwī, he proceeds to distribute
portions of the endowment to the people. The bard finishes his account by noting the
unrivaled virtues of Qāsim as a leader, moral symbol, and counselor, dwelling also on his
love for women and his continuing concern for their welfare within the community that
he has established.33
In the preceding three paragraphs I have deliberately excerpted from the complete
chapters those narrative elements which can easily be related to the accounts of the
lives of Moses, Jesus and Muḥammad that are to be found within the scriptural and
hagiographical traditions of Judaism, Christianity and Islam. However, I would immedi-
ately suggest that, while such allegorical linkages can readily be made—and clearly were

32. For this sequence of events in the Rifāʿa chapter, see Awlād, 213, 221, 245, 254, 268, 281, 295, 299,
and 304; Children, 189, 197, 218, 226, 239, 250, 264, 268, and 277.
33. Concerning the above features of the Qāsim chapter, see Awlād, 310, 320, 340, 355, 393, 405, 438,
441, 443; Children, 276, 286, 305, 314, 352, 363, 394, 396, 398.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 135

made by the authorities of al-Azhar who objected to the work so vigorously in 1959—
these detailed events, when coupled to the structurally unifying features of all three
chapters noted above, suggest that a much larger purpose is at work than a desire to
write a sequential account of the lives and influence of these four (including Adham/
Adam) community leaders. The three lifetimes represented by Jabal, Rifāʿa and Qāsim
are merely temporal interstices placed into the midst of a continuing existence for the
“people of the alley” that is characterized by the combination of tyranny, corruption,
exploitation, and violence engendered by the “authorities” who rule the alley in direct
contravention of Jabalāwī’s known injunctions through his endowment. The themes of
just rule, political violence, and the relative role of the sacred and secular thus emerge
as powerful, overriding issues within this narrative, issues, one might observe, that were
hardly irrelevant to Egypt and the Arab world in 1959, still the first decade of a post-colo-
nial, independence era for Egypt and many other Arab-world countries as they explored
different models of political organization and identity-formation.
The end of the Qāsim chapter points out that the establishment of the “Qāsimite”
community within the alley is supposed to have put an end to the endemic “forgetful-
ness” that has characterized previous eras and their identification with particular com-
munity leaders, but clearly rues the fact that no such thing actually happened.34 All of
which brings the reader to the final chapter and the era of ʿArafa.

e. The ʿArafa Chapter

As noted in the prefatory material with which Awlād ḥāratinā begins, the chapter devot-
ed to the appearance of the final leader of “the alley,” ʿArafa (literally “knowledge,” but
therefrom “scientia” [science]) brings the reader to a chronological point within living
memory of the “narrator” who, as the reader learns at the beginning of the work, has
been asked to record these bardic narratives. The opening of the chapter is all too famil-
iar: the endowment has yet again been purloined, and futuwwāt are again practicing their
habitual level of thuggery; indeed each subcommunity has a futuwwa of its own besides
the principal one who occupies the house reserved for the apparently perennial symbol
of violence and tyranny over the people of the alley. And yet, this time the sense of loss
and disillusion occasioned by this situation is especially powerful. Bearing in mind the
set of principles that Qāsim had established for his people and the other communities of
Jabalāwī’s alley and the hopes expressed at the end of his narrative that the forgetfulness
characteristic of the aftermath of previous eras would not recur, such has indeed been
the case. Dissension had begun almost immediately following Qāsim’s death, in that his
cousin, Ḥasan, had claimed that his extreme closeness to Qāsim implied that he should
be the one to lead the community. But his claims had been rejected (a clear enough refer-

34. Awlād, 443; Children, 399.

136 Chapter Nine

ence to the Sunni-Shiʿi schism occasioned by the status of ʿAlī), and, following a period in
which the endowment had been distributed fairly, there had been a gradual and, it would
appear, inevitable slide into tyranny and exploitation. With the passage of time the three
community leaders—Jabal, Rifāʿa and Qāsim—have become historical figures from some
idealized past, to be celebrated in narratives by bards in cafes, while their adherent de-
scendants quarrel and fight with each other.35
It is to this typically unpromising scenario that a long-absent son of the alley, ʿArafa,
arrives with his companion, Ḥanash. ʿArafa practices “magic” and takes up residence in
the Rifāʿa quarter; at a local cafe his attention is drawn to a picture on the wall, showing
flattering images of the current powers-that-be and at the very top Jabalāwī taking the
body of Rifāʿa into the great house.36 And yet, in spite of Rifāʿa’s well known advocacy
on non-violence, violence is everywhere in evidence, in this sub-quarter as well as in the
others. ʿArafa manages to place himself right in the middle of such violence when, after
setting himself up as a purveyor of all kinds of medicines and charms for different pur-
poses, he is attracted by the young and beautiful ʿAwāṭif, who has also caught the roving
eye of one of the futuwwāt. Making use of the protection of the Rifāʿite futuwwa in whose
sub-quarter he resides, ʿArafa marries ʿAwāṭif and thus causes hard feelings and almost a
pitched battle between the futuwwāt, that is, until their chief intervenes. It is as part of a
conversation between the two newlyweds that ʿArafa declares that he has heard enough
talk about Jabalāwī and the time has come for the alley to take its representations to the
great house.37 Realizing that ʿArafa has received no charge from the alley’s great ancestor
in the way that predecessor “leaders” have done, she is worried about his desire to go to
the house, to which ʿArafa counters that his experiments with “magic” have taught him
not to trust anything that he has not been able to prove with his own eyes.
The actual excursion to the great house takes place in darkness and ends in disaster.
Having made his way into the very same room that Adham had entered generations ear-
lier, ʿArafa finds himself facing an old black man lying on a bed; in an uncontemplated
gesture he lunges at the old man and proceeds to strangle him. Next day, the alley is
informed that Jabalāwī himself has died, devastated by the news of the murder of his
servant. Even now, the various sub-quarters of the alley argue about the arrangements
for the founder’s funeral. Devastated by the implications of what he has wrought but still
convinced of the overriding powers of his magic, ʿArafa now embarks on a plan that, he
says, will bring Jabalāwī back to life.38
His scheme involves getting rid of the chief of the current futuwwāt. Him too he mur-
ders, only escaping after he has committed the crime by using an explosive concoction
on which he has been working. However, whatever ʿArafa’s motivations may be—and

35. Awlād, 448; Children, 402.

36. Awlād, 452; Children, 406.
37. Awlād, 484; Children, 434.
38. Awlād, 451; Children, 502.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 137

both Ḥanash and ʿAwāṭif express their doubts about the subject, they are thwarted by the
elaborate spy-system of the current overseer, Qadrī. Summoning ʿArafa to the overseer’s
house, the latter makes it clear that he is well aware of the identity of the culprit in both
murders; ʿArafa finds himself compelled to place his “magic” powers at the disposal of
the authorities. ʿArafa and ʿAwāṭif move to the overseer’s residence, but ʿArafa manages
to adjust himself to the new lifestyle much more readily than his wife. Even now, ʿArafa
admits that his newly acquired authority does not come from the same powers of persua-
sion by the word as did that of Qāsim.39 Each of the three sub-sectors’ futuwwāt is now
eliminated, leaving the overseer and ʿArafa in control. Gradually the overseer manages
to corrupt ʿArafa by means of drugs and the availability of sex with his maids; almost
inevitably, ʿAwātif learns of her husband’s trysts, leaves their current abode, and returns
to their former residence. It is at this point, when ʿArafa’s cooptation by the corrupt rul-
ing authorities reaches its lowest point that, early one morning, he passes by the great
house in a drugged stupor and is stopped by an old woman. She is the servant whom he
saw during his fatal visit to Jabalāwī’s house. First she informs him that her master died
of shock over the death of the old man strangled by ʿArafa, but then she reveals that
Jabalāwī declared on his death-bed that he was “pleased with ʿArafa”; when he responds
with shock and fury, she repeats the statement.40 And, when ʿArafa proceeds to point out
that people have accused him of killing Jabalāwī, the old woman responds that he could
not be killed by anyone.
Stunned by the implications of this information, ʿArafa decides to escape from the
alley and his involvement in the current authority structure, but once again the over-
seer’s spy-system thwarts his intentions. While Ḥanash manages to get away, ʿArafa and
his wife are captured, cruelly beaten and then buried alive. However, with the passage of
time, the people in the alley come to believe even more in the power of ʿArafa’s magic,
preferring it to the would-be benefits of rehearsing yet again the eras of Jabal, Rifāʿa and
Qāsim. As the chapter and the novel conclude, they are once again subject to the tyran-
nical hold of the authorities of the day, although they still entertain the hope that, one
day, “we shall see in our alley the death of tyranny and the dawn of miracles.”41 The ever-
present chronotope of the novel—the residences of authority and the alley set against
the march of time and oppression—remains constant till the end.
In analyzing this final chapter, I have again selected from its numerous subsections
and incidents those which seem the most significant for any allegorical reading (or mis-
reading) of the chapter and text as a whole. As an initial corollary and before I attempt to
summarize this entire study, it seems important to point out that any attempt to inter-
pret the symbolic implications of this chapter needs a far more nuanced approach than
one that has frequently been adopted: namely, that ʿArafa’s “murder” of Jabalāwī implies

39. Awlād, 516; Children, 464.

40. Awlād, 538; Children, 484.
41. Children, 497; Awlād, 552.
138 Chapter Nine

some kind of Nietzschean “death of God.” The statement, noted above, that Jabalāwī is
not someone who can be killed, coupled to ʿArafa’s decision to escape from the situation
in which he has allowed himself to be placed, must surely run counter to such an unsubtle
interpretation of the events of the chapter. One might add at this point that subtlety does
not seem to have been a characteristic of readings of this controversial work in general.42

Conclusion

With the death of Maḥfūẓ in 2006, it has now become possible to take a retrospective
look at his total oeuvre and to assess not only the way in which he used and returned to
particular themes in his fictional works but also the changes in fictional techniques that
he applied to the writing process. Within such a frame of reference, it becomes clear that
Awlād ḥāratinā, for all the controversy that it caused at the time of its publication in 1959
and after the award of the Nobel Prize in Literature to Maḥfūẓ in 1988, needs to be placed
into a much broader frame of reference—and in terms of both its contribution to devel-
opments in Arabic fiction and the implications of its allegorical message—than has been
essayed up till now. It seems unfortunately the case that the heat of the controversy that
it aroused has tended to deter many critics from undertaking such assessments.
I have already alluded above to the significance of the year 1959 as the time for the
initial appearance of Awlād ḥāratinā in serialized form, in terms of both the politics of the
newly independent Egypt and Maḥfūẓ’s own writing career; in the latter case involving
a five-year pause which he has often attributed to an uncertainty about the new society
that was emerging (although one can also point out that the intervening years were ones
of concerted activity within the cinema sector).43 Many critics have chosen to view the
publication of Awlād ḥāratinā at this time as a completely new direction in the author’s
writing career, and to a certain extent it is possible to agree with that point of view. Tak-
ing Awlād ḥāratinā as a starting point, we can trace a progression of concern with mat-
ters of religion and modernity through the already-mentioned short story, “Zaʿabalāwī”
(published in the collection, Dunyā Allāh in 1962) to the deliberate echo of the 1959 title

42. In a footnote above (note 19), I referred to Maḥfūẓ’s short story, “Zaʿbalāwī,” and suggested that it
may be seen as a kind of commentary or “follow-up” on Awlād ḥāratinā and the controversy that erupted
around it in 1959. In that story, the narrator goes in quest of a “holy figure” who possesses saintly quali-
ties but whose reputation has been discredited (he is being chased by the police on a charge of “false
pretenses”). At the conclusion of the story, the narrator has not actually encountered Zaʿbalāwī (the
similarity of whose name to that of Jabalāwī is surely clear enough), but yet he has become convinced of
the existence of such a “holy figure.” In spite of the pressures of modern life and contemporary politics,
it would appear, the idea of Jabalāwī/Zaʿbalāwī still persists.
43. For more details, see Hāshim al-Naḥḥās, Najīb Maḥfūẓ ʿalā al-shāsha, 2nd ed. (Cairo: al-Hayʾa al-
Miṣriyya al-ʿĀmma, 1990).
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 139

in Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā of 1974,44 to Riḥlat Ibn Faṭṭūma of 1983,45 and, perhaps most remarkable
of all, Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya of 1995.46 And this list is to mention only the most obvious
of his titles; many other works also contain less specific and insistent allusions to the role
of religion in society—including many of the novels of the 1960s.
On the other hand, if we take a longer-term view of Maḥfūẓ’s career, this notion of
a radical change in his novelistic career demands a greater degree of nuance as we look
backwards from 1959 as well as forwards. His initial decade or so as a writer of novels
certainly reflects the intellectual trends of the period in question. He himself records
the impact that the sensational discovery of the treasures of Tutankhamun in 1922 had
on young Egyptians of his generation, already enthused by the nationalist aspirations
advocated by the great Egyptian leader, Saʿd Zaghlūl (a personal hero of the author, as a
novel such as Mīrāmār makes abundantly clear). This had led him not only to conduct re-
search on the ancient period of his homeland but also to accept the advice of his mentor,
the Coptic intellectual Salāma Mūsā (d. 1958) that he translate a history of ancient Egypt
written in English, James Baikie’s Ancient Egypt into Arabic (thus becoming his first pub-
lished book [1932]). As a direct consequence of these interests, it would appear, Maḥfūẓ’s
first three novels are set in the ancient period of Egyptian history, and a whole series of
others was planned.47 Also it was in the mid-1940s that, under the impetus of the appall-
ing hardships that were being faced by the Egyptian people—especially in Cairo—during
the Second World War and the equally appalling manipulation of political power that
marked the same period, Maḥfūẓ began to pen his series of quarter-novels, beginning
with Khān al-Khalīlī (1945?) and culminating, as already noted, with the Trilogy (com-
pleted in 1952 but not published until 1956–1957).48
All this duly acknowledged however, we need also to bear in mind that Maḥfūẓ had
been a student of philosophy at Cairo University and that, while the above-mentioned
works form the earliest part of his publication record, they are in fact preceded by other
works, mostly in newspaper article form, that remain unpublished. The first record-

44. English translation: Fountain and Tomb (1988).

45. English translation: The Journey of ibn Fattouma, tr. Denys Johnson-Davies (New York: Doubleday,
1992).
46. English translation: Echoes of an Autobiography, tr. Denys Johnson-Davies (New York: Doubleday,
1997). See also Roger Allen, “Autobiography and Memory: Maḥfūẓ’s Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya,” in Writing
the Self: Autobiographical writing in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor and Stefan Wild
(London: Saqi Books, 1998), 207–16.
47. They are: ʿAbath al-aqdār (1939; English translation: Khufu’s Wisdom, tr. Raymond Stock (Cairo:
American University in Cairo Press, 2003); Radūbīs (1943; English translation: Rhadopes of Nubia, tr. An-
thony Calderbank (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003); and Kifāh Tībā (1944; English trans-
lation: Thebes at War, tr. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003).
48. The precise order of publication of these novels of the 1940s, and indeed of the earliest short-
story collection, Hams al-junūn (1938?), is quite unclear. For more details, see Somekh, The Changing
Rhythm 198–99.
140 Chapter Nine

ed example of such articles was published, amazingly enough, when Maḥfūẓ was just
eighteen years of age, but I would suggest that, in our current context of a discussion
of the relative significance of different and recurring themes in a consideration of his
lifelong output, its title is of some importance: “Iḥtidār al-muʿtaqadāt wa-tawallud al-
muʿtaqadāt” (The Demise and Birth of Religious Beliefs).49 During this same time-frame
(roughly equivalent to the 1930s), Maḥfūẓ also began to publish short stories that were
assembled in his first collection, Hams al-junūn. As if to confirm his continuing linkage
of these various facets of his intellectual development at this time, one of those stories,
“Yaqẓat al-mūmiyāʾ,” contains a specific reference to both Levi Bruhl and Durkheim.50 It
hardly needs stressing that the life-long interest of the latter of these two French phi-
losophers, self-consciously cited in this early story, in the role of religion in a modern
society could scarcely be more relevant to any discussion of not merely Awlād ḥāratinā in
its particular chronological context but to its author’s continuing interest in the applica-
bility of these ideas to his own homeland in its quest for post-independence identity and
an understanding of the dimensions of modernity. A recent citation of Durkheim by one
of his contemporary French successors may serve to illustrate the point:

No society can exist that does not feel the need regularly to sustain and reaf-
firm the collective feelings and ideas that constitute its unity and personality.
This moral remaking can be achieved only by means of meetings, assemblies,
or congregations in which individuals, brought into close contact, reaffirm in
common their common feelings: hence those ceremonies whose goals, results,
and methods do not differ in kind from properly religious ceremonies. What es-
sential difference is there between an assembly of Christians commemorating
the principal moments in the life of Christ, or Jews celebrating either the exo-
dus from Egypt or giving of the 10 commandments, and a meeting of citizens
commemorating the institution of a new moral charter or some great event in
national life?51

49. These articles are listed as an appendix to ʿAbd al-Muḥsin Ṭāhā Badr, Najīb Maḥfūẓ: al-ruʾyā wa-l-
adāt (1) (Cairo: Dar al-Thaqāfa, 1978), 489–93. Among articles in the list, some are devoted to discussions
of philosophers, both ancient and modern (including two devoted to Bergson’s discussion of humor),
psychology, the concept of God in philosophy, and pictorial elements in the Qurʾan. One can only hope
that some effort may now be made to publish these early, yet valuable indications of Maḥfūẓ’s intellec-
tual interests and concerns.
50. See Hams al-junūn (Cairo: Maktabat Misr, 1938?), 86–103; there are two English translations: “The
Mummy Awakes,” tr. Roger Allen, in The Worlds of Muslim Imagination, ed. Alamgir Hashmi (Islamabad:
Gulmohar, 1986), 15–33 and 212–15; “The Mummy Awakens,” tr. Raymond Stock, in Naguib Mahfouz,
Voices from the Other World (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003), 29–51.
51. Emile Durkheim, The Elementary Forms of Religious Life (1912), tr. Carol Cosman (Oxford: Oxford
University Press, 2008); cited by Jacques Bouveresse, “Debate: The Need to Believe,” Le Monde diploma-
tique (March 2007): 14.
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 141

What emerges from the previous paragraphs, I would suggest, is that the general theme
that Maḥfūẓ broaches in Awlād ḥāratinā is far from being a “new” one. It reverts not only
to one of the primary subjects of his own post-graduate studies but also to a series of ar-
ticles that he penned during one of the most formative stages in his career. All of which
may help to explain firstly why, after “postponing”—as it were—a novelistic investiga-
tion of the issue in favor of earlier forays into historical and social-realist fiction, he felt
the urge to return to a favorite theme during the first decade of the Egyptian revolution;
and secondly how what seems to have been an ongoing process of reflection on issues
connected with science, religion, society, and modernity could be placed so readily in
1958 (or whenever he began the process of writing Awlād ḥāratinā) into a narrative con-
structed with such characteristic care. It is to some of the principal features of that care-
fully crafted narrative structure that I now turn, discussing (and partially summarizing
the above discussions) structure, style, and sources.
The discussion of Awlād ḥāratinā’s structure takes us back to the notion of Bakhtin’s
chronotope and thereby, as Bakhtin himself notes, has major ramifications for the orga-
nization and interpretation of the entire work. While the introductory (and originally
untitled) section lays the framework for the “narrative contract” that is to follow (a fea-
ture that, as we have already suggested, seems to have been substantially overlooked
by those readers who have chosen to interpret the novel in particular ways), the two
outlying chapters—those of Adham and ʿArafa—seem to portray and reflect a temporal
continuity, one that is created within the Adham chapter and reflected in the general
situation that emerges from the ʿArafa chapter (or at least from a more careful read-
ing of its events and their implications). In these chapters, the chronotope—the way(s)
in which time and place are linked and utilized—allows for the creation of a spatial as-
pect involving houses of authority on the one hand and the alley on the other in an
apparently ongoing (quasi-permanent) state of confrontation, with all the explicit and
implicit violence involved. By contrast, the three inner chapters—those of Jabal, Rifāʿa,
and Qāsim—constitute attempts to break out of this pattern and the apparently ongoing
confrontation and violence that is otherwise the “normal” situation. Static or permanent
time is thus placed in contrast to a more linear approach, one in which a succession of
figures is presented and the nature of the succession is illustrated by the text’s continual
references back to previous eras and leaders through citations from the text of the novel
itself (and most frequently to the era of Adham, “the beginning,” in which the basic pa-
rameter of Jabalāwī’s distancing of himself from the alley has been established as an ap-
parently ongoing reality. What emerges from this analysis of the novel’s structure is that
the reader is presented with a narrative in which, following an introduction in which
the metafictional aspects of the narration is clearly established, a frame of continuity
is established (Adham and ʿArafa) within which three exceptional eras are depicted and
cross-referenced. An almost inevitable consequence of this process of structuring is that
the narrative is characterized by the cyclical element that was noted above and therefore
by the presence of repetition, itself a distinct feature of those orally narrated sagas that
142 Chapter Nine

are the stock-in-trade of the traditional bards to which the narrator ascribes the perfor-
mance of the stories in the introductory segment. Needless to say, the implications of
such an analysis for any assessment of the development of the author’s technique as a
writer of fiction are considerable (most especially if we bear in mind the linearity of his
previous “quarter” novels, with their reflection of the principles of social-realist fiction
and their avoidance of repetitive discourse).
In a previous article devoted to an analysis of translations of Maḥfūẓ’s Trilogy, I sug-
gested that that particular work—so much celebrated in the period following the award
of the Nobel Prize and now perhaps the work by which he is best known on a worldwide
scale—is actually a product of a “middle period” in the author’s development as a writer
of fiction.52 I pointed out that one aspect of the novelistic craft in which the translation
process tended to reveal a continuing process of experimentation and development was
in the efficacy of dialogue.53 In the Trilogy, there are, it seems to me, some residual prob-
lems concerning the spontaneity of dialogue and, in particular, in the relationship be-
tween dialogue proper and internal monologue (most particularly in the portrayal of the
character of Kamāl, the younger son of the family patriarch, as seen in the second vol-
ume, Qaṣr al-Shawq).54 I went on to suggest that the novels that Maḥfūẓ wrote in the 1960s
show a much more sophisticated ability to include effective dialogue within the fabric of
those narratives (and one might wonder here to what extent his experience in preparing
film scenarios in the mid-1950s contributed to that development). However, what I would
like to suggest at this juncture is that a close analysis of the dialogue in Awlād ḥāratinā
will show that the process of development towards a tighter and more spontaneous use
of dialogue is already underway, although such a development has only been noted by
critics in commentaries on the novels of the 1960s—which certainly contain their own
controversial and critical elements but certainly not of the same kind or degree as those
that caused such a violent reaction to Awlād ḥāratinā, both in 1959 and 1988–1989.
Any discussion of the possible sources to which Maḥfūẓ referred in composing this
novel inevitably brings us close to the core of the controversy that erupted around it at
the time of its original publication in 1959, but even here I would suggest that there is
more to be said (and indeed still to be investigated). For while, as I have noted above, the
general outlines of the allegorized figures and their hallowed place within the frame-

52. Roger Allen, “The Impact of the Translated Text: The Case of Najib Maḥfūẓ’s Novels, with Special
Emphasis on the Trilogy,” Edebiyat N.S. 4/1 (1993), 87–118 [reprinted as chapter 8 in this volume].
53. As a translator, I can observe here that, having translated recently Maḥfūẓ’s novel, Al-Karnak
(1974; Karnak Café [Cairo American University in Cairo Press, 2007]), and being now involved in a trans-
lation of the much earlier Khān al-Khalīlī (1945?), I am particularly aware of the enormous distance that
the author traversed in the intervening years in the development of this particular aspect—the compo-
sition of dialogue.
54. Qaṣr al-Shawq (1956); English translation: Palace of Desire, tr. William Hutchins (New York: Double-
day, 1991).
 Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā 143

work of Islam and its textual genres are clear enough, one has also to note that, while the
principal aspects of the life-stories of the three “leaders” are certainly included within
the relevant chapters, there is a great deal of other detail that does not, to the best of
my knowledge, occur in what I will term the “canonical” text traditions of any of the
three monotheistic faith-systems. All of which raises, of course, the fascinating question
as to the nature of Maḥfūẓ’s sources, not excluding—needless to say—his own widely
acknowledged erudition and breadth of reading. We may thus perhaps assume that he
was familiar not only with the text of the Qurʾan, but also with the Hebrew and Christian
biblical materials as well, whether through his own readings or through any number
of conversations and discussion with Coptic friends (and it is well to remember that he
himself was named Najīb Maḥfūẓ in honor of the Coptic physician who delivered him).
However, just to cite one instance, whence came his knowledge of the non-Biblical lit-
erature that deals with the purported relationship between Jesus and Mary Magdalene,
at least insofar as the relationship (and marriage) between Rifāʿa and Yasmīna may be
regarded as an allusion to such speculations? While one suspects that Maḥfūẓ was not
entirely au fait with more recent research and discussions concerning the non-canonical
Christian gospel literature that includes a Gospel of Mary Magdalene, one must assume
that he had some means of access to such challenges to the carefully scripted versions of
canonical scripture.55
Is it, one wonders, the fate of certain books that arouse controversy—and particu-
larly controversy about religious belief—at the time of their publication to be placed
in some special category, one that places them outside the normal contexts of literary
evaluation and indeed outside the line of development in their authors’ artistry; in some
sort of “limbo” where one is to place notorious books? With regard to the evaluation of
Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād ḥāratinā, both as an individual work for discrete analysis and within the
context of his total oeuvre (which, following his death in 2006, we may now consider), the
above situation would seem to be the case. In this study I have tried to demonstrate that
a process of rereading is demanded within both frames of reference. Quite apart from
the novel’s significant, indeed central, role in the development of his fictional technique
(which we have endeavored to illustrate above), even the interpretation and analysis of
the work’s principal topic needs refinement. On the back cover of Philip Stewart’s trans-
lation, Children of Gebelawi, Maḥfūẓ is quoted as suggesting that Jabalāwī is “not God, but a

55. For the Gospel of Mary Magdelen, see Elaine Pagels, The Gnostic Gospels (New York: Vintage Books,
1989); also a novelistic version: Margaret George, Mary Called Magdelene (New York: Viking Press, 2002).
One obvious candidate for such a source might appear to be the famous novel of Nikos Kazantzakis, The
Last Temptation of Christ (O Teleutaios Peirasmos), originally published in Greek in 1951 but only published
in English in 1960 (New York: Simon and Schuster). Philip Stewart informs me that he specifically asked
Maḥfūẓ in 1962 whether he had read the Kazantzakis novel, but the novelist replied that he had never
heard of it. In an eerie foretaste of the fate of Awlād ḥāratinā in 1959, Kazantzakis’s novel was banned by
the Vatican in 1954.
144 Chapter Nine

certain idea of God that men have made.” The reading that we have essayed in this study
clearly shows that the concept of a transcendent God has been consistently appropriated
by successions of religious movements and communities who, while paying lip-service
to the existence and beliefs of other communities, have used the concept of monotheism
(‘their own God”) to their own ends, often with violent consequences. Awlād ḥāratinā, it
seems to me, demands of its readers a profound reexamination of the implications of
separate monotheisms. While originally published in the 1950s, it almost goes without
saying that there could hardly be a more relevant topic to place within the framework of
contemporary discourse on the role of religious belief within modern societies through-
out the world, most especially within the context of a horrific world-view envisaged in
the notion of a “clash of civilizations.”56

56. The term “clash of civilizations,” used as the title of an article (Foreign Affairs, Summer 1993), then
a book, by Samuel Huntington (New York: Foreign Affairs, 1996), was actually coined by Bernard Lewis
in an early article, “The Roots of Muslim Rage,” Atlantic Monthly 266/3 (September 1990): 47–60. On a
personal note, I recently conducted a small seminar with my colleague, Professor Theodore Friend,
on the topic of “monotheism and violence.” For the purposes of discussion we combined readings of
Awlād ḥāratinā and Regina Schwartz’s book, The Curse of Cain: The Violent Legacy of Monotheism (Chicago:
University of Chicago Press, 1997). In a further personal note, I can report that, on the very day that I
completed writing this study (April 2007), I happened to begin reading an early work of C. S. Lewis that
I recently discovered in a bookshop. The Pilgrim’s Regress (originally published in 1933; Grand Rapids,
Michigan: William Eerdmans, 1992), is an allegorical work in which a young boy named John is given a
set of “rules” by a “Steward” and is told that there is a “Landlord” who lives in a remote castle and can
decide at any time to “end the lease” of anyone renting his property who displeases him in any way …
 10
Autobiography and Memory:
Maḥfūẓ’s Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya

From the outset of Maḥfūẓ’s recognition in the Arab world as a great novelist, he has
never fought shy of acknowledging the autobiographical element in his works nor in-
deed of discussing the topic in some detail with critics and columnists. To the substantial
printed repertoire that such conver­sations have produced, we can since 1988 add scenes
from television programmes in which he has revisited the places of his childhood and
recounted his view of the ways that both they and the memories that they evoke have
been incorporated into his works of fiction.1 On a series of consecutive Fridays between
11 February and 8 April 1994, the Cairo news­paper al-Ahrām published a new work by
Maḥfūẓ, a series of extremely short, mostly single-paragraph, segments, each with its
own title. The title of the series, Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya (Echoes of [the?] Autobiography),
confronts the reader with a number of fascinating questions of the kind that Maḥfūẓ
delights in posing.2 What, for example, is intended by the word “echoes,” with its impli-
cation of hints or allusions and, above all, of a sequential and imitative relationship to
another source; and what is implied by the definiteness of al-sīra al-dhātiyya: is it to be
interpreted specifically or generically, “echoes of autobiography,” or “echoes of the auto-
biography”? Since the publication of this latest of Maḥfūẓ’s works, his life has once again
been transformed, and not only by the vicious attack on him in October of the same year
but also by the way in which that incident has been exploited. Awlād ḥāratinā, the single

1. On Maḥfūẓ’s use of place in this way, see Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī, as translated by Mona Mikhail in “From
Naguib Mahfouz Remembers,” in Naguib Mahfouz: From Regional Fame to Global Recognition, ed. Michael
Beard and Adnan Haydar (Syracuse, 1993), 38ff.
2. I should point out at the outset that my reading of this work is based on the assumption that, such
is the prestige of Najīb Mahfūz and so close is his relationship with the personnel in charge of the Friday
cultural page of Al-Ahrām, the format of this publication is a true reflection of his wishes. I realize that,
on the basis of the way in which some previous works have been treated by newspapers and publishers
alike, that may be a rash assumption. At least, however, I wish to make it clear that here my reading is
entirely based on the text published in al-Ahrām. [It subsequently appeared in Cairo in 1995; and was
translated by Denys Johnson-Davies as Echoes of an Autobiography (New York, 1997).]

145
146 Chapter Ten

work among many that political trends of the 1980s and 1990s have placed at the centre
of his career as a writer, has been invoked, as it was in the Nobel year 1988–89, to dog his
latter days. Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya has also become a participant in that situa­tion, in that
a translation of several of its segments was published in the English-language al-Ahrām
Weekly in October 1994—the sixth anniversary of the Nobel announcement, accompanied
by an article by Mursī Saʿd al-Dīn condemning the attack on Maḥfūẓ and translations of
statements by writers such as Laṭifa al-Zayyāt, Maḥmūd al-Wardānī, Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Muʿṭī
Ḥijāzī and Ibrāhīm Aṣlān, all under the title, “An act of madness, a moral disaster.” 3
The series of articles which make up Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya contains 210 separate
segments. With the 112th of them (entitled “al-Samʿ waʾl-ṭāʿa” [“Hearing and Obey-
ing”])—the first segment of 25 March—a figure is introduced who is to dominate the
latter half of the work, Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih. The introduction of this personage
essentially divides the work into two halves, most particularly from the narrative point
of view. In both halves the ordering of segments gives the appearance of being random-
ized: in the first part, two segments in the form of dreams (“Fī al­ ḥujra al-wāsiʾa” [“In
the Wide Room”] and “al-Laḥn” [“The Melody”]) form a pair in that the latter is termed
“a second dream.”4 In the second part, the Shaykh is introduced without description of
either himself or his entourage; those details and the narrator’s relationship with the
Shaykh are provided in a cluster of segments which form the beginning of the page on
1 April. But, apart from these symptoms of organizational logic, each of the series of seg-
ments—memories, aphorisms, homilies, anecdotes—seems discrete.
The first half of Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya is told, for the most part, by a first-person
narrator whose thoughts and emotions make clear that he is an old man. Several seg-
ments treat of a lifetime in a few brief sentences:

These old photographs bring together members of my family; others are of

friends from the old days. I looked at both sets till I was flooded in memories. All
the faces look bright and serene, a picture of life; there’s not the slightest sign of
what lies hidden beyond. And now they’ve all gone; not one of them is left. Who
can say whether the happiness was real or just a fanciful dream?5

There are reminiscences of childhood, adolescence and youth—family, holidays, trips, of

teachers, of job interviews, of trysts, of fights, of night visits from detectives. There are
several descriptions of funerals which inevitably invoke an awareness of the imminence
of death, the pains of old age—the loss of those who have gone and the incapacities of

3. See Al-Ahrām Weekly (20–26 October 1994), 11.

4. Al-Ahrām (4 March 1994).
5. Al-Ahrām (11 February 1994). In this context, the comment of James Miller seems appropriate:
“Personal memories … (if one is honest) are inherently uncertain, often contradictory, and usually
tinged with emotion.” See London Review of Books 16( 17) (8 September 1994), 3.
 Autobiography and Memory 147

those who remain, and memories that are sometimes pleasurable but more often painful
with their realization of failure or lost opportunity. “Al-Saʿāda” (“Hap­piness”) is a good
example:

After a long gap I went back to the old street for a funeral ceremony. There was
no trace of its golden aura. In place of the old villas, tall buildings had been con-
structed; it was overflowing with cars, dust, and waves of swarming humanity. I
remembered with pride how wonderful it had looked and how it had smelled of
jasmin. And I remembered the beautiful girl in the window-frame emitting her
aura to passers-by. Where, I wondered, is her blissful grave in the city of those
who have departed? Now I recall what my Wise Friend said: “First love is a train-
ing process which benefits the fortunate among initiates.”6

This segment is one of many that introduce us to a wide variety of emotions that colours
the whole of the first half of the work. A feeling of wistful nostalgia and regret accompa-
nies the narrator’s realization that the inex­orable process of change has destroyed the
past, friends and colleagues have died, and children have left home. What makes matters
more frustrating is the process of forgetting:

He blocked my path and held out his hand with a smile. We shook hands. Who
could this old man be, I asked myself, as he took me to one side on the pave-
ment. “Have you forgotten who I am?” he asked. “I’m sorry,” I apologized, “it’s
old age!” “We were neighbours in primary school days,” he went on, “and in our
spare time I used to sing to you all in a beautiful voice. You used to love stanzas
on the Prophet.” With that he gave up on me completely. “I musn’t delay you
any longer,” he said, stretching out his hand again. How awful it is to forget, I
thought to myself, it’s like nothingness; in fact, that’s exactly what it is. But I
certainly did enjoy those religious poems; in fact, I still do.7

If memory itself, its extreme selectivity and frequent failure, is a constant theme of these
recollections and character sketches, then so is the theme of love. A large number of seg-
ments involve encounters with women who are or were always beautiful. Sometimes a
recollection will be prompted by a dried-up rose found in a library or on the street,8 but
memories, sweet or sour, of a plethora of fleeting love affairs and longer relationships are
triggered by a passing rain shower, a return to old haunts, and chance encounters on the
street or the beach.

6. “Al-Saʿāda,” Al-Ahrām (11 February 1994).

7. “Al-Ṭarab,” Al-Ahrām (11 February 1994).
8. “Al-Risāla,” Al-Ahrām (11 February 1994); “Al-Risāla,” Al-Ahrām (25 March 1994); “al-Shadā,” Al-
Ahrām (11 February 1994).
148 Chapter Ten

Besides these reminiscences the first part of the work also includes some anecdotes
told as third-person narratives:

The bus started its route from Zaytūn at exactly the moment when the man’s car
set out from his house in Hulwan. Each of them speeded up, slowed down, and
even stopped for a minute or more according to the traffic it met on the road.
However they both reached Station Square at the same moment; in fact, they
had a minor collision which broke one of the lights on the bus and smashed the
front of the car. A pedestrian was crushed between the two vehicles and died.
He was crossing the square to reserve a seat on the train to the South.9

Other segments take us into different levels of consciousness, most partic­ularly dreams
and visions. In the former there are encounters with beautiful women—slave-girls of the
Sultan, and offerers of advice, admonitions and gifts. The fantasies are often more omi-
nous in their message:

At a crucial point in my life when love was driving me to the brink of passion
and despair, a voice whispered in my ear at dawn: “Good news! It’s time to de-
part.” Forced by the sensation to close my eyes, I saw my own funeral with me
walking in front carrying a large cup full of the nectar of life.10

Into this montage of reminiscences and visions the narrator introduces a number of
places to serve not only as locations but also as sources of symbolic power: the old city,
the quarter, the square, the mosque, the river, the fountain, the monastery, the desert. It
is the imagery created around these places—an imagery that clearly invokes the reader’s
memories of many of Maḥfūẓ’s other works—that may be seen in retrospect as providing
the groundwork on which the second half is to be founded.
The narrative strategy of the second half announces itself immediately and, in so
doing, also proclaims its origins within the textual tradition of Islam: “Said Shaykh ʿAbd
Rabbih al-Tāʾih” or, as a later segment puts it, “Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih narrated
and said.”11 Except where the narrator is recounting one of his own experiences with
the Shaykh, this phrase begins all the remaining segments; indeed in two cases, a seg-
ment will consist of three separate statements by the Shaykh, each one introduced by the

9. “Rajul yahjiz maqʿadan,” Al-Ahrām (25 February 1994).

10. “Hamsa ʿinda al-fajr,” Al-Ahrām (4 March 1994).
11. “Alā washk al-hurūb,” Al-Ahrām (25 February 1994). The verb for “narrate,” ḥaddatha, thus invok-
ing not only the tradition of ḥadīth, with its need to identify the narrator at the outset and to test the
reliability of the report in question, but also its imitation (parody?) in the opening phrase of the maqāma
genre.
 Autobiography and Memory 149

phrase.12 The final episode in the series (8 April) is made up of no fewer than 45 segments,
each one containing the briefest ofaphorisms:

Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih said: The only thing more stupid than a stupid
believer is a stupid infidel.

Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih said: The present is like a light that flickers be-
tween two shadows.

Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih said: The most powerful people of all are those
who forgive.13

The beginning of the Shaykh’s story appears in the segment that carries his name as its
title, the first in the issue of l April:

Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih’s first appearance was when he was heard shouting: “Lost
child, you men of good-will!” When he was asked to describe the lost child, he
replied: “I lost it seventy years ago, and I can’t recall any of its features.” He was
known as ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih. We’d meet him on the street, in the cafe, or at
the cave. At the desert cave he’d get together with his companions, and there
the rapture of ecstasy would send them into a transport of delight. For them to
be termed drunkards and the cave a tavern seemed eminently reasonable.
Ever since I met him, I’ve done my best to keep his company as time and lei-
sure have permitted. His companionship brings pleasure, his words evoke joy,
even though at times they can be difficult to compre­hend.

I used above the expression “the beginning of the Shaykh’s story,” implying the earliest
event in the narrator’s encounter with him, as per Gérard Genette’s histoire—the order
in which the events actually occurred. The récit, the order in which the events are told
in the story, has already introduced the Shaykh and made clear not only the narrator’s
relationship as his follower, but also the venue and atmosphere of their meetings. To
get to the cave where the evening meetings (sahra) are held, one must leave the city and
traverse the desert. In such a context—needless to say—the Shaykh’s very name, “the
servant of his Lord who wanders in the wild­erness,” transcends his role as narrator of the
segments to become a figure of great symbolic force. Once there, the talk is of life and
death, of love for things both heavenly and earthly:

12. “Al-Muṭārid,” Al-Ahrām (25 February 1994); “al-Kidhb al-ṣiddīq,” Al-Ahrām (1 April 1994).
13. “Al-Ghaba,” “al-Ān,” “al-Safh,” Al-Ahrām (8 April 1994).
150 Chapter Ten

I told Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih that I’d heard people criticizing his intense
love of this world. Love of this world, he replied, is just one sign of gratitude, an
indication of a craving for all that is beautiful, one of the signs of love.14

Through a series of dreams, visions, homilies and anecdotes, the Shaykh describes how
the worldly becomes a vehicle for transport to another level of consciousness where all
is rapture and ecstasy:

Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih said: But for the wonderful whispers of joy that fill
the firmament, grief would pounce mercilessly on the earth.15

On occasion the narration tells how the contemplation and ecstasy become the stimulus
for action in this world: the Maʾmūr who disapproves of the Shaykh’s sayings and actions
is given a glimpse of ʿIzrāʾīl, while an angry voice from heaven provokes a move to clean
up corruption in the market­place.16
Ecstatic visions, drunken trances, images of beauty, companionship in rapture, the
absolute need to contemplate the relationship between this world and the next—these
are a familiar part of the repertoire of themes and imagery associated with the huge
literature of mystical writing in Arabic. Indeed, not only does Maḥfūẓ’s use of it in Aṣdāʾ
al-sīra al-dhātiyya call to mind several of his own previous works that will be discussed
below, but also his adoption of a tone that combines the homiletic, aphoristic and con­
templative (which I have only briefly illustrated here) seems deliberately intended to
invoke comparisons with a variety of texts from the classical period. The structural as-
pects I have just described and illustrated, the imagery invoked, and the insistence on
discourse elements such as questions, commands and, above all, repetition, all seem to
me redolent of a writer such as al-Niffarī (d. c. 965). In such a context, repetition moves
beyond its sound functions in poetry and music to enter the more insistent world of
liturgy and entrancement. A few examples may illustrate this. The 27th Station (mawqif)
in the Kitāb al-mawāqif is entitled “The Station of ‘I Have Cherished Friends’” (“Mawqif lī
aʿizzā”):

He stationed me and said to me: I have cherished friends. They have no ephem-
eral world; thus they will have a life to come.
And he said to me: The world to come is a reward for the one who in truth
masters the ephemeral world.

While in the Kitāb al-mukhāṭabāt (Book of Colloquies) we find:

14. “Dhālika al-ḥubb,” Al-Ahrām (25 February 1994).

15. “Mā yamlaʾ al-fidāʾ,” Al-Ahrām (8 April 1994).
16. “Izrāʾīl,” Al-Ahrām (25 March 1994); “al-Shakwa,” Al-Ahrām (1 April 1994).
 Autobiography and Memory 151

O servant, know who you are; it will be more secure for your foot, more serene
for your heart …
O servant, grievous anxiety is like a pickaxe in a collapsing wall …
O servant, the vision of the ephemeral world is but a prelude to the vision of
the world to come.17

I hasten to add that I am not suggesting here any direct influence of one writer upon
another; that al-Niffarī, for example, is, in Harold Bloom’s terms, the “strong poet” who
causes Maḥfūẓ anxiety. I am merely using al­Niffarī’s works as an illustration of the inter-
esting linkages that would appear to tie this work of Maḥfūẓ , along with others from his
recent creativity—to be examined briefly below—to the heritage of classical Arab­ic prose
genres. Maḥfūẓ’s text, at least as currently constituted, concludes with a remarkable seg-
ment entitled “al-Faraj” (“Release”):

The cave brought us all together on the festival night; no one was late. Outside
the freezing winds howled and roared. Inside every breast contributed its own
affection till melodies of ecstasy prevailed.
Shaykh ʿAbd Rabbih al-Tāʾih said: Here’s to those who have done their duty in
the market or resisted distress. Closing our eyes on this life, we listened to the
nay of the old shepherd. Look at the entrance to the cave, the Shaykh told us,
and don’t look away. Hearts pounded as we awaited a release. Through our very
yearning it could be seen by insight and heard by conscience.18

Conclusion

What then are the linkages which can be made between the Nobel Laureate whose name
appears at the head of each episode, the text itself, and autobio­graphy? I will begin the
process with a consideration of some precedents. Discussions of the autobiographical
Maḥfūẓ will usually invoke first the character of Kamāl in the Trilogy; as Somekh puts it,
he shares “some of the author’s own experiences.”19 It is true that, in the portrait of Kamal
and particularly the description in Qaṣr al-shawq (1957; Palace of Desire, 1991) of his clash
with his father over the question of religion and science and of his agonizing love for

17. See Muḥammad al-Niffarī, Kitāb al-Mawāqif wa-yalīhi Kitāb al-Mukhāṭabāt, ed. A. J. Arberry (Cai-
ro, London, 1935), 51, 146, 155, and 164 (Arabic text); the English translations are mine. After I had
completed writing this, I was delighted to note that the Cairo literary weekly, Akhbār al-adab 85 (26
February 1995), included extracts from Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya in an issue devoted to “al-Adab wa-l-
Taṣawwuf,” which includes extracts of works by, among others, Ibn al-ʿArabī, al-Tawḥīdī, Ibn al-Fāriḍ,
and al-Suhrawārdī al-Maqtūl.
18. “Al-Faraj,” Al-Ahrām (April 1994).
19. See Sasson Somekh, The Changing Rhythm (Leiden, 1973), 118, also 107; and Rasheed El-Enany,
Naguib Mahfouz: The Pursuit of Meaning (London, 1993), 85.
152 Chapter Ten

ʿāʾida, Maḥfūẓ surveys from a temporal vantage­point of a little more than a decade the
struggles, internal and external, that confronted the members of his student generation.
But it must also be recalled that, for all its historical importance, the Trilogy is represen-
tative of a particular phase in the career of a writer who has continually been anxious to
develop his fictional techniques. The somewhat awkward way in which Kamāl’s agonized
musings—for all their reflection of the author’s own concerns and feelings—are spread
between passages of dialogue and internal monologue finds a very different and, I would
suggest, more accom­plished vehicle in the subtle and allusive modes that Maḥfūẓ honed
during the 1960s and continued to develop thereafter. Within the context of family sa-
gas, the structure and style of Bāqī min al-zaman sāʿa (Only One Hour Left, 1982) provides a
vivid illustration of the contrast resulting from the direction that Maḥfūẓ’s fictional craft
had taken. The terse and allusive style of Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya, its layer of intertextual
reference involving works by himself and others, and its extremely “episodic” structure
(to cite Rasheed el-Enany’s term),20 these features suggest linkages to several of the nar-
ratives that Maḥfūẓ has published in more recent times.
Some of the segments in the first part of Aṣdāʾ the very first, for example, Duʿāʾ—with
the narrator recalling his pleasure as a 7–year-old at being sent home from school be-
cause of revolutionary riots—are very reminiscent of similar childhood memories from
works such as al-Marāyā (1972; Mirrors, 1977), in the final vignette, “Yusriyyah Bashīr.”21
With the publication of Ṣabāḥ al-ward (1987) and Qushtumur (1988), the wistful tone ac-
quires an edge of frustration and even resentment that also makes its way into segments
of Aṣdāʾ where, for example, accounts of playing in the street and of train rides to al-
Qanāṭir al-khayriyya are accompanied by feelings of regret at the impact and pace· of
change.22 And then there are the dreams, the language and imagery of which not only
recall a host of intertexts from the cultural heritage of Arabic literature but also serve as
a link to another interesting recent work by Maḥfūẓ, the story Raʾayt fī mā yarā al-nāʾim,
where the resort to a repeated beginning for each segment of the tale is not the only
aspect that finds an echo in Aṣdāʾ.23
For all these links, however, the mood established in Aṣdāʾ seems most reminiscent
of another multi-sectional work, Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā (1975; Fountain and Tomb, 1988), its
very title containing that element—the ḥāra (quarter)—that has become such a central

20. See El-Enany, Naguib Mahfouz, chapter 6.

21. “Duʿāʾ,” Al-Ahrām (11 February 1994). For “Yusriyya Bashīr,” see Najīb Maḥfūẓ, al-Marāyā (Cairo,
1972), 411–13 = Mirrors, tr. Roger Allen (Minneapolis, 1977), 276–77. The title section of Sabāḥ al-ward
([Top of the Morning] Cairo, 1987), ends with the phrase: “What a curse it is to have a memory!“ (98).
22. See, for example “al-Ayyām al-ḥulwā,” Al-Ahrām (11 February 1994); “Qiṭār al-mufājaʾa,” Al-Ahrām
(18 February 1994); “Suʾāl baʿd thalāthīn ʿām,” Al-Ahrām (28 February 1994).
23. Najīb Mahfūz, Raʾaytu fī mā yarā al-nāʾim (Cairo, 1982). See Fedwa Malti-Douglas’s exploration of
this theme and work in “Mahfouz’s Dreams,” in Naguib Mahfouz, ed. Beard and Haydar, 126–43.
 Autobiography and Memory 153

symbol in many of Maḥfūẓ’s works.24 Like al-Marāyā, Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā is multi-sectional

(with 78 ḥikāyāt) and contains a plethora of names; also significant is the fact that the
generic identity of both works has been the subject of considerable debate.25 In Ḥikāyāt
ḥāratinā, however, the vignettes are longer and indeed are often clustered around par-
ticular themes: Saʿd Zaghlūl and the 1919 revolution, friends at school, love stories, and
futuwwāt. The emphasis is on childhood days: there are fights, there are dreams—often
filled with the images of beautiful girls—there are friendships, fleeting and enduring, but
the spectre of death rarely intrudes. But for the relative expansiveness of its style, the
25th story could be included in Aṣdāʾ: after many decades the narrator encounters a love
of his youth, Fatḥiyya, at a funeral:

We shake hands and she gives me a simple smile that triggers so many old mem-
ories. Something deep inside me stirs, and I am overcome by a wave of nostalgia
and sadness. I feel crushed by the sheer burden of time stretching out behind
me.26

Framing these tales of “the quarter” are two stories of the narrator and his encounters,
or imagined encounters, with “al-Shaykh al-kabīr” in his dervish lodge (takiyya). As the
narrator tells us:

Thus did I create a myth and thus did I demolish it. Even so my alleged vision of
the Shaykh is stored away deep inside me like a memory of inexorable sweet-
ness.27

These then are some echoes of the “echoes” (aṣdāʾ) that attempt to situate Aṣdāʾ al-
sīra al-dhātiyya in the Maḥfūẓian corpus. From this discussion it emerges clearly, I
believe, that, whatever organizing principles and narrative strategies may be in-
volved, this work cannot be considered as “the story of Maḥfūẓ’s life written by him-
self. The ambiguity built into the definiteness of the term “autobiography” in the
title is thus no accident; this montage of segments can perhaps be viewed as a project
in autobiography writing, dealing with themes and moods that are germane to the
genre. Introducing the author himself, Najīb Maḥfūẓ, to the discussion at this point,
we might suggest that, of all personality types, he seems among the least likely to ar-
rogate to himself the task of writing his autobiography; that is especially so at a time

24. See Hakīm Mīkhāʾīl Shahāta, “Ḥārat Najīb Maḥfūz,” Al-Hilāl (June 1991), 2 and 84–87.
25. Najīb Maḥfūz, Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā (Cairo, 1975). Regarding al-Marāyā, Najīb Maḥfūz explicitly stated
in the preamble to the first issue in al-Idhāʿa wa-l-Televizyūn (1 May 1971) that he did not regard it as a
novel, but more in the form of a biography. Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā was initially termed qiṣaṣ qaṣīra (short sto-
ries), then shakṣiyyāt wa-mawāqif, before eventually being designated a riwāya (novel).
26. Maḥfūz, Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā, 54.
27. Ibid., 5.
154 Chapter Ten

when he is cooperating on the preparation of his authorized biography.28 It would

appear that what Maḥfūẓ has preferred to do in Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya is to continue
his exploration of those structures and modes of narration that have characterized
many of his recent contributions to fiction; perhaps one might say that the source of
these “echoes” is the autobiographical element in those very fictional narratives. His
use of many of the themes, modes and moods that are characteristic of the autobio­
graphical genre—old age, nostalgia, death, memories, childhood, loves, reflections,
visions and dreams—makes it an interesting contribution to his list of fictional works
and, on a more general level, a further sample of that “special kind of fiction” that
constitutes autobiographical writing.

28. Currently in preparation by Raymond Stock.

 11
The Autobiography of Yūsuf Idrīs?

Introduction

The question mark that is part of the title of this study is intended to reflect the fact that,
if we consult the many useful bibliographical sources related to the work of Yūsuf Idrīs
(1927–1991), the acknowledged genius of the Arabic short-story genre, we find noth-
ing that is recognizable as an autobiography.1 There is no work that terms itself a “sīra
dhātiyya” or provides us with the criteria carefully outlined for us by Philippe Lejeune in
his renowned study of autobiography:

“a retrospective prose narrative written by a real person concerning his own

existence, where the focus is his individual life, in particular the story of his
personality.”2

one indeed in which, as Lejeune goes on to explain, the identity of the author whose
name appears on the cover is the same as that of both the narrator of what lies within
and the narratee who is the focus of the account itself. Yūsuf Idrīs left us no such account
among his repertoire of works in Arabic. This might be a matter for considerable regret,
given what we know about the varied and colourful life that he led—from his rustic up-
bringing to his medical studies at university, his initial career as a doctor and medical
inspector in old Cairo, and his eventual concentration on a career as a renowned littéra-
teur and ever-controversial cultural figure. However, we now live in an era in which the
rigorous strictures of the so-called New Critics, with their heavy condemnation of the

1. Bearing in mind the central position that Yūsuf Idrīs occupies in the development of modern Ara-
bic fiction, and especially the short story genre, it is surprising that his works have not been the focus
of more studies. Two sources in English are: P. M. Kur­pershoek, The Short Stories of Yūsuf Idrīs, Leiden:
E.J. Brill, 1981; and Critical Perspec­tives on Yūsuf Idrīs, ed. Roger Allen, Colorado Springs: Three Continents
Press, 1994.
2. See Philippe Lejeune, On Autobiography, tr. Katherine Leary (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota
Press, 1989), 4.

155
156 Chapter Eleven

“intentional fallacy” (the attempt to find information about an author from a reading of
his or her works), have been somewhat modified to incorporate the necessary presence
of elements of the autobiographical in even the most theoretically, stubbornly fictional
of narratives.3
Within such a context the fiction of Yūsuf Idrīs certainly provides ample food for
investigation. One of the hallmarks of Idrīs’s early collections of short stories was, it must
be remembered, the astonishing way in which he managed to encapsulate life outside the
city. Here was Yūsuf Idrīs’s narrative homeland, and in countless stories he captured it
with an unprecedented and unparalleled mastery. He was especially adept at portraying
the fishbowl atmosphere of the small village community, an atmosphere within which
the smoldering tensions connected with the observance of social norms and sexual mo-
res played themselves out.4 One can say much the same about his portraits of the urban
poor: the little girl crossing the street in “Naẓrah” and the increasingly desperate juice-
seller in “Mārsh al-ghurūb,” not to mention one of the greatest passages of description in
all of modern Arabic fiction, the journey taken by Judge ʿAbdallāh into “Qāʿ al-madīna.”
Lastly I might mention the various uses that Idrīs makes of hospitals and opera­tions, as
in “al-ʿAmaliyyat al-kubrā,” “ʿAlā waraq sīlūfān,” and, at its most gruesome, “al-Aʾurṭa.”
A reading of Yūsuf Idrīs’s works confirms that, whether we talk in terms of the topics
and scenarios of his fiction or the modes of narration, he was never shy about revealing
aspects of his own personality. I will return to these linkages between Yūsuf Idrīs’s fiction
and the autobiographical later in this study, but now I need to return to the question-
mark of my title and to change context.

Yūsuf Idrīs’s Autobiography

In fact Yūsuf Idrīs did leave us an autobiographical work, but he wrote it in English.5 He
sent it to me and to the editor of the periodical, World Literature Today, on the 15th of
November, 1983, accompanied by a letter of apology. It appears that health reasons had
prevented him from accepting the invitation that I had issued to him to be a member of
the international jury that each year adjudicates the Neustadt Prize in Literature, a pres-
tigious award at the University of Oklahoma that in recent years has been given to such
writers as Nūr al-dīn Faraḥ and Assia Djebar. Anticipating his acceptance of the position

3. For further consideration of the impact of the “New Critics” and the aftermath of their influence,
see Jonathan Culler, The Pursuit of Signs: Semiotics, Literature, Deconstruction (Ithaca, New York: Cornell
University Press, 1981), 3–17.
4. Two notable examples are the short-story, “Ḥādithat sharaf,” and the novel, Al-Ḥarām.
5. Idrīs’s medical training took place at the University of Cairo immediately after the Second World
War. The university’s Medical School was and is the largest English-spea­king facility of its kind in the
African continent; the certification process for medical spe­cialties was conducted by visiting teams of
British (and often Scottish) doctors.
 The Autobiography of Yūsuf Idrīs? 157

on the jury, I had asked him to prepare a short sketch of his career. We had received no
response, and indeed I had assumed a lack of interest on his part. But then a two­-page
letter and a twenty-page account arrived. In his letter Idrīs apologizes for his English
and invites me to publish it or not and to edit it as I see fit. It will probably not surprise
anyone to know that I decided to publish it (and I should note that his English really re-
quired minimal editing, especially since I was anxious to preserve that unique texture of
Idrīs’s style that I had come to know and love). Thus it was indeed published in English
in 1994 as the introduction to a series of critical essays that I edited.6 Ironically, since it is
an original English text, I suspect that it may be unknown to other scholars working on
modern Arabic literature, and for that reason I must express my gratitude to my dear col-
league, Gamāl al-Ghīṭānī, who had it translated into Arabic and published in the weekly
Cairene literary newspaper, Akhbār al-Adab.7
In what follows, I would like to take a brief look at Idrīs’s autobiogrpahical account,
which is actually concerned with that most formative of periods, his childhood, that pe-
riod for which Tetz Rooke has recently provided us with a useful study.8 However, before
I do so, I feel that I may be able to further our understanding of the complexities of Idrīs’s
persona by quoting from his letter to me (again with an abso­lute minimum of editing):

I must ask your forgiveness because I could not imagine that it would be so dif-
ficult to “face” myself or, more precisely, my childhood. I had never tried before
to write about my own life, and particularly those early years of mine. Not only
that, but it proved even harder to “speak” about it to many of the psychiatrists
I consulted. Actually I have spent most of the last fifteen years suffering from
acute and chro­nic depression, which on several occasions amounted to actual
“death.” It would have been sheer hell if I had not been able to grab hold of my
last self-made theory about the causes of my sickness and to cling to it desper-
ately. I would never have been cured nor would I have regained my full capac-
ity as a writer and a human being. The cause was always my sufferings during
my childhood and boyhood. To write about it, even to try to remember it, is
something I have never attempted in my entire life. My problem was rat­her to
forget it. That is why I have now tried to remember as a response to your kind
letter, but I have found myself facing unforeseen complications, things I never
imagined would happen, and all simply as a result of the mere trial of writing
about those early days. And that is why I have resor­ted to my second language,
English, to do it. That was a “must,” so that I could feel that perhaps I was writ-
ing about somebody else.9

6. Critical Perspectives on Yūsuf Idrīs, 5–13.

7. Akhbār al-Adab 66 (14 May 1994): 28–29.
8. Tetz Rooke, In My Childhood: A Study of Arabic Autobiography (Stockholm: Almqvist & Wiksell Inter-
national), 1997.
9. Yūsuf Idrīs, personal communication, 15 November 1983.
158 Chapter Eleven

From these frank and touching sentiments in the letter, there is a direct segue into the
narrative itself. Idrīs resorts to that narratorial uncertainty that is so much a feature of
his short-story beginnings:

I did not get the sensation all that often, but, when I did, I really felt that I had
to be the most miserable child on earth.

Even at the outset of what is stated to be an autobiographical narrative Idrīs seems un-
able to forget his instincts as a short-story writer. Indeed I am inclined to suggest that
what he has done with this short nan·ative is to write a childhood autobiography in the
form of a short story. The very technique of the beginning is completely characteristic of
Idrīs, designed to draw the reader inexorably into the narrative itself. The way in which
the narrative as a whole is structured reveals other concerns with fictional technique.
The final section could hardly be clearer in its move towards closure, opening with the
phrase: “So there is a sketch of my life as a child.” Furthermore, the narrative is inter-
rupted in the middle, in order that Idrīs can indulge in further musings about his cur-
rent psychological state as autobiographer through what turns out to be a return to the
beginning:

It may sound strange, but this is the way it really happened. I have been asked
to write a sketch about myself as a writer … I started and found myself return-
ing to that area of my life that I have always tried to avoid remembering, my
earliest childhood … I wrote several pages, then stopped. I tried again. but was
obliged to stop again. This time, the cause was a severe migraine that attacked
me several times a day … I can think of no other cause for the onset of these
migraines than my sudden decision to face my childhood.10

He continues this commentary on the writer and the writing process with a further
metafictional gesture:

Now that l have written about it, I have not found it as unbearably ghastly as I
used to imagine it would be. Writing about it is far different from actually living
through it.

Here indeed is Yūsuf Idrīs, the instinctive genius of short story writing, bringing all his
characteristic techniques, including metafiction, to bear in constructing a narrative
about that other person who was himself as a child.
The disarming candour of the narrative’s first sentence is the clearest possible an-
nouncement of an autobiographical text that is intended to serve as a kind of therapy,
as katharsis, a search for a childhood that never was. From a narratological perspective

10. Critical Perspectives, 10.

 The Autobiography of Yūsuf Idrīs? 159

it is also a most effective means of drawing the reader into the text, curious to discover
why a childhood could have been so utterly miserable as to merit such fore­grounding in
the sequencing of the text. One kind of answer comes immediately: the six year-old boy
is separated from his family (“a family I scarcely even knew”) and sent to live with his
grandmother some 25 miles away where:

I had to live as a stranger among strangers, an orphan whose parents were still
living, yet totally out of reach. And, from this point on, I remain for most of
my life in a state of profound nostalgia, needing a family of my own, a father, a
mother, a brother or a sister.11

Behind this set of circumstances lies a tale, needless to say, and it is one that involves
his parents. Idrīs’s father was an agricultural consultant who became maʾmūr (govern-
ment administrator) of the local district. Desiring a healthy son who might survive the
onslaught of disease he married a third wife, considerably younger than himself and the
acknowledged village beauty. She is described by her own son, Yūsuf, as “young , beauti-
ful, and healthy, she was and perhaps still is one of the most aggressive characters I have
ever known.”12 She fulfilled expectations by bearing a son, but the baby soon succumbed
to what Idrīs terms summer diarrhoea. During a furious argument his father pronounced
the divorce formula, only to realise soon afterwards that he was actually very much in
love with this younger wife. The process of persuading her to remarry him took four
years and clearly involved an almost total surrender of control over his financial affairs.
Some ten months after the remarriage another son was born, Yūsuf Idrīs. Thereafter,
seven other children came from the same union, and, to quote Idrīs again,

He surrendered to her whims unconditionally, giving her not only love, care,
and attention, but everything she wanted, money, jewelry, even ready cash.13

For a few blissful years, Yūsuf Idrīs lived in his family home, worshipping his father. “My
love for him was so great that I used to burst into tears whenever I remembered him … he
was the kindest and most loving man I have ever known.”14 Yūsuf ’s status as the maʾmūr’s
son gave his a privileged position in the community, one that he seems to have exploited:
his description of games that he used to play with the younger peasant girls is typically
frank. He also expresses his sense of empathy with the peasant class as a whole, and espe-
cially those who eked out a living through migration from one region to another.
But then comes the grim moment when he has to make the day-long journey (“a
one-way trip,” as he calls it) to the house of his mother’s mother. His mother had come

11. Critical Perspectives, 8.
12. Critical Perspectives, 7.
13. Critical Perspectives, 8.
14. Critical Perspectives, 7.
160 Chapter Eleven

from a very poor family, and Yūsuf suddenly finds himself in a single-room house where
twenty-five adults members of the family from various generations live, eat, sleep; and
attempt to indulge in normal conjugal relations. The harshness of his new life is made all
the harder by the incredible contrast to the home life that he has now left behind. Idrīs’s
bed year-round is the top surface of the bread-oven, and from it he can touch the ceiling,
the crossbeams of which he compares, in a characteristic reference to his profession, to
the ribs of a skeleton’s chest.15 It is from this house that every week-day Idrīs undertakes
his two-hour walk across the irrigation-tracks of the countryside to his school. He arrives
dirty, of course, and is punished for his scruffy appearance with strokes of the cane on
his hand. As he points out, none of his relatives had ever been to school, and, what made
matters worse, his mother was so stingy that she bought his clothes in sales—summer
clothes for winter and vice versa. All this made him the laughing-stock of his fellow pu-
pils.
Those of you who are familiar with Idrīs’s short-story collections may already have
heard echoes of some of his well-known narratives within this childhood account, but he
is not quite finished. He goes on to provide us with details of the two principal ways in
which he sought consolation from the accumulated misery that he had to face every day.
The first was by day-dreaming all the time, “of discovering and inventing things, becom-
ing very rich, being as mighty as a king or as a Count of Monte Cristo, being a magician
or musician.”16 The one thing he never dreamed of becoming was a writer, he tells us in
what is clearly a comment in the context of the past that is very much intended for the
present, because “writers are so uninfluential in a society such as ours … Instead they
remain just as helpless as I was then, failing to earn a decent living and devoting them-
selves to bookworm jobs and meaningless words.”17 The second means whereby Idrīs
found consolation from his misery was by listening to the tales that his ninety-year-old
great-grandmother would tell him, “about every minute detail of family life and all the
different personalities in the family group, both wicked and good.” These “two avenues
of escape,” as Idrīs terms them, were “the moments when I really existed … The rest, life
as it really was, was just one long escape from being, from the miseries of existence.”18
Idrīs, the narrator and narratee, once again invokes story-telling technique in the
process of bringing his account to a rapid close. The rest of his life is dealt with in a single
paragraph, one that begins:

The longest journey in my life was the period from the ages of 16 to 21. After
that, everything constituted a short cut.19

15. Critical Perspectives, 9.
16. Critical Perspectives, 11.
17. Critical Perspectives, 11–12.
18. Critical Perspectives, 12.
19. Critical Perspectives, 13.
 The Autobiography of Yūsuf Idrīs? 161

And in this telling at least it does indeed. The medical career, participation in the nation-
alist movement, and the beginnings of a life of writing all pile up into a single sequence.
It concludes by noting no difference between the world he confronted then and now, but
all possible difference between the world he dreamed of and the one he is actually living.
This then is Idrīs’s venture into the realms of autobiography, “a sketch of my life as
a child.” Idrīs, the storyteller and medical doctor uses it not only to recall his childhood
as an adult but also to use the occasion in order to indulge in a kind of self-analysis and
katharsis through the very writing process. How significant therefore that he should fin-
ish by suggesting that the very differences that this text has revealed and explored serve
for him as a continuing motivational force:

That may be why I am still writing. Or, to be honest with my innermost feelings,
that is why I feel that I have not yet begun to write.20

Conclusion

I noted earlier that Idrīs’s gift for imagining the minutest incidents from life in the coun-
tryside and the poorer quarters of the city as subjects for his short stories and his ability
to bring the inhabitants of those scenarios to life with an unparalleled empathy may
reflect particular features of his own upbringing; in other words, they may constitute an
aspect of the autobiographical in his fictional writing. Having now examined the auto-
biographical text that he has left us, I might also claim the reverse: that the very compo-
sition of this “sketch of his life as a child” reflects features of the short story in general
and of his short stories in particular. The young boy on his two-hour walk to school,
day-dreaming as he went, might well encounter scenes and characters who populate so
many of his stories: that odd group of men drinking tea in “Rihān,” for example, and the
man leading a cow back from market who becomes increasingly aggravated by the in-
quisitive questions of passers-by in “Sūrat al-Baqara.” One might assume also that any of
the peasant girls whom he might recall with nostalgia from his days at his parents’ house
might serve as a model for his “Gioconda miṣriy­ya.” And, as a final example, that enforced
proximity of genders inside the home and the taboo topic of sex, thrust upon the young
boy as he joined his grandmother’s household, are graphically portrayed in that superb,
almost tactile, study in tension, “Bayt min Laḥm.”
Recent trends in narratology have tended to view a wide variety of genres as entities
along a spectrum rather than as participants in a series of separate categories, whether
they be termed factual or fictional or considered under such generic labels as novel, his-
tory, or autobiography. Hayden White, for example, is one who has insisted on the fact

20. Ibid.
162 Chapter Eleven

that historians compose narratives.21 Within such a context, autobiography—with its

tendency towards first-person narration, its strong reliance on the power of memory,
and its high degree of selectivity—emerges as an especially fruitful area of investigation.
The example provided by Yūsuf Idrīs’s contribution to this genre is, it has to be admitted,
short. But I would suggest that, in spite of the author’s dramatic gesture of composing it
in a language other than his own, it still needs to be (or to become) part of any serious
investigation into his contribution to modern Arabic fiction. It furnishes those interested
in autobiography and the oeuvre of this great modern Arab writer with invaluable in-
sights into the nature and sources of his artistry.

21. Hayden White, Metahistory (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1973); Topics of Discourse,
(Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1978).
 12
ʿUrs Al-Zayn by Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ:
Tradition and Change

If we consult a map of the Sudan, we discover that there is a town named Wad Ḥāmid situ-
ated on the Western bank of the River Nile. It lies just to the north of a point at which the
great river takes a spectacular turn to the East for many miles before turning once again
towards the south. As is well known, of course, the River Nile itself actually flows from
south to north, but in the region that lies just to the south of the town of Wad Ḥāmid it
flows from east to west. The town of Wad Ḥāmid and its surrounding region thus actu-
ally exists on the map and in reality, but for many, many readers of fiction in both the
Arab world and, through translation, in virtually every world culture, it has come to as-
sume an almost mythic status through the works of one of the acknowledged masters of
Arabic fiction, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ. Applying to the task of writing fiction an array of talents
and background—not only his own vast knowledge of, and great affection for, the Arabic
literary tradition, but also his broad experience as a broadcaster from England and as a
philanthropist in different regions of the Middle East, and his particular moral (and often
sardonic) view of our present-day world and its widely different cultures, with all this at
his disposal al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ has succeeded in using his works to create a series of lively
fictional worlds, worlds that, at the most symbolic level of myth as a reflection of na-
tional or regional consciousness, manage to convey to readers of Arabic and other world
languages a very special vision of the effects of the continuing and inexorable process of
change on the cultures of Africa and, by extension, elsewhere.
Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ reveals to his readers the different aspects of this town of Wad
Ḥāmid—its struggles, its network of familial and communal relationships, and its aspi-
rations for change and a better life—not only by writing a series of fictional works that
are all set in the same spatial environment, but also (and perhaps more significantly) by
making use of different fictional genres—novels, short stories, and novellas—as a means
of utilizing particular aspects of this mythical entity—a town and community on the
banks of the Nile—in order to convey a moral vision that finds its impetus in the con-
frontation of traditional African values and “the other,” represented in large part by im-
ported forces of change. Ṣāliḥ’s short stories are splendid examples of this linkage of
163
164 Chapter Twelve

theme to genre. “Dūmat Wad Ḥāmid,” of course, names the town that is to be the site
of his fictional explorations, and the doum-tree itself comes to assume a mythic status,
serving as the location of the town’s sense of identity and adherence to traditional beliefs
and customs in direct opposition to “the other.” In this case, as in many other examples
from Arabic fiction, that “other” takes the form of a government and its bureaucrats
who, from far away in the inimical city, try to impose aspects of “modernization” on the
remote community by destroying the doum-tree, the community’s symbol of, and direct
link to, the mythical past and its sense of history and values.1 “Ḥafnat tamr” invokes
another segment of living nature—the cultivation of dates—as a means of introducing
to Ṣāliḥ’s readers the power of the family structure within the society, as the young nar-
rator finds himself operating under strong influence of a grandfather figure. That same
grandfather is to be a central cultural and religious foundation in the complex world
of the narrator in Ṣāliḥ’s great novel, Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl, a work that I have no
hesitation in declaring the best Arabic novel to have been written thus far.2 The narra-
tor’s tale of his complex relationship with his “double,” Muṣṭafā Saʿīd, is placed within
the context of an encounter in the community of Wad Ḥāmid, but here the confrontation
with “the other” is transferred “to the north,” in fact to the colonial center in England
where the full dimensions of the cultural conflict and the mutual misunderstandings that
so color the history of the colonial period is explored in all its complexity. The narrator’s
hesitations and self-reflections serve as a reenactment of the complexities of Muṣṭafā
Saʿīd’s life and mysterious “disappearance” in the River Nile. Above all, his unfulfilled
relationship with Muṣṭafā Saʿīd’s widow, Ḥusna, a name which—needless to say—implies
“beauty” and represents all that is most prized about African culture, is totally symbolic
of the psychological and cultural complexes that the narrator is obliged to confront but
avoids doing until the very end of the novel. Unnamed in Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl but
later called Muḥaymid,3 the narrator finds himself, like Muṣṭafā Saʿīd, at a crossroads.
Indeed at the end of the novel the reader finds him repeating the actions of Muṣṭafā
Saʿīd, swimming desperately in the middle of that most central of symbols of life in Wad
Ḥāmid, the River Nile. Is it, one wonders, significant that, at that bend in the River Nile
that I mentioned above, the narrator’s symbolic position in the middle of the river—in
other words, between east and west—may, beyond the bend in the river and its east–west
orientation, also be considered as a position between north and south?

1. Among many works focusing on the inimical city, I would mention ʿAbd al-Ḥamīd ibn Hadūqa’s
(Abdelhamid Benhadouga) Rīḥ al-Janūb, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf ’s Al-Nihāyāt, ʿAbd al-Nabī Ḥijāzī’s Al-
Ṣakhra, and Ismāʿīl Fahd Ismāʿīl’s Kānat al-samāʾ zarqāʾ.
2. I happen to be writing this tribute to al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ in Tunis in December 1999. I might thus ex-
press my admiration for Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl in a slightly different way, by stating that it is, in
my view, the best 20th-century Arabic novel.
3. See al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, Bandar Shāh: Ḍawʾ al-Bayt (Beirut: Dār al-ʿAwda, 1971) .
 ʿUrs Al-Zayn by Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ 165

Each of the above-mentioned works has been translated into several languages and
has also been the subject of numerous studies; Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl in particular
has been the topic of a complete collection of studies in English.4 In this study however
I would like to concentrate on another of Ṣāliḥ’s works that has been very popular, ʿUrs
al-Zayn. The feature of this work that first attracted my attention was the difficulty that
critics seem to have in categorizing it: some termed it a “short novel,” while others pre-
ferred to categorize it as a “long short story.” The answer that I provided to this question
came in the form of a long study devoted not only to ʿUrs al-Zayn but also to Yaḥyā Ḥaqqī’s
Qindīl Umm Hāshim and Yūsuf Idrīs’s Qāʿ al-madīna; I concluded that ʿUrs al-Zayn belongs
to the specific genre of the “novella,” a subgenre of fiction about which little has been
written in Arabic and for which Arabic has no generally recognized term (apart from
“novella” in transcription).5 However, I will not go into specific details about generic clas-
sification here, but instead will concentrate on other aspects of this wonderful narrative.

ʿUrs al-Zayn

The title of al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s novella6 points to a ceremony and a personality. As is the case
in most societies, this wedding is an occasion for joy, for celebration, and for a gathering
of the community in a ritual that acknowledges the linking of two people in marriage
and therefrom the hope for a continuity of human life. In ʿUrs al-Zayn the description of
the wedding itself comes as the culmination of the narrative, a ceremony of singing and
dancing and an occasion when the difficulties and personal feuds of everyday life are
forgotten. However, al-Zayn is an unusual character, and the way in which his wedding is
described make it clear that this particular celebration is intended to serve as a reflection
of his own unusual qualities and concerns.7 Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ gives his readers an unforget-
table portrait of his hero. Firstly, there is his appearance: tall and gangling, he is nick-
named “the giraffe”; and he has lost all but one of his teeth.8 He is prodigiously strong;
five men cannot control him when he is sufficiently angry. Al-Zayn’s “community” ex-
tends beyond the bounds of the town in which he lives, in that he establishes links to the
Bedouin and migrant workers (and their womenfolk) who are normally shunned by the
people of the town. He also looks after the elderly and disabled. Al-Zayn is the village

4. Tayeb Salih’s Season of Migration to the North: A Casebook, ed. Mona Takieddine Amyuni (Beirut: Amer-
ican University of Beirut, 1985).
5. My study in English was published as: Roger Allen, “The Novella in Arabic: a Study in Fictional
Genres,” International Journal of Middle East Studies 18/4 (November 1986), 473–84 [reprinted as chapter 4
in this volume].
6. The edition of ʿUrs al-Zayn that I am using is that of Dār al-Jīl in Beirut, which unfortunately carries
no date. The work was written in 1962 and originally published in 1964.
7. Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ, ʿUrs al-Zayn (Beirut: Dar al-Jil, n.d.), 96–112.
8. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 7, 8.
166 Chapter Twelve

prankster, full of fun and mischief, and his outrageous behavior flouts all social conven-
tions. He specializes at gate-crashing weddings, thus evoking the traditional figure of the
“ṭufaylī.” The way in which he uses his discriminating eye to identify the most beautiful
girls in the village and to proclaim their names in public for everyone to hear reminds
the reader of the tradition of ʿUdhri love poetry where, even though the unfortunate
poets, Jamīl and Majnūn, may find themselves for ever separated from their beloveds—
Buthayna and Laylā, the fame that the poets have brought the women is sufficient to see
them married off very quickly to eligible men. One might suggest that the love myth as
seen in Arabic love poetry may strive to perpetuate one aspect of the situation between
the lovers, but the practicalities (and finances) of marriage lead in other directions. In
al-Zayn’s case however, the situation is different. The womenfolk of the town are very
quick to realize the benefit that al-Zayn’s publicity can bring; their daughters are soon
married to the most eligible of men. Thus al-Zayn manages to convert his extraordinary
behavior into a profitable enterprise; profitable since not only does he get to visit many
homes and see many young girls, but he is also well fed, both in those homes and at the
many weddings he attends. Al-Zayn’s own wedding is thus a celebration of the commu-
nity; and, because of al-Zayn’s status in the town, it becomes a ritual celebration of the
wedding institution itself.
The woman whom al-Zayn is to marry is not like the many other young women that
he has encountered. Niʿma is, perhaps like Ḥusna in Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl men-
tioned above, a paragon of African womanhood, beautiful, intelligent, and determined.
She has persuaded her father to send her to the local kuttāb where she has excelled all
the boys in learning the Qurʾan,9 she refuses her father’s and brother’ attempts to marry
her off to a number of suitors, and she herself informs al-Zayn that they are to be mar-
ried to each other.10 Niʿma is indeed a remarkable woman; as her father notes: “this girl
was neither disobedient nor refractory, but that she was propelled by an inner counsel to
embark upon something from which no one could deflect her.”11

Structure and Time

The wedding of al-Zayn to Niʿma comes then as the conclusion of al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s nar-
rative, but the news that it is going to happen forms its beginning, or rather, as is usual
in al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s games with structure and time, it provides the context for several
beginnings. The scenario with which the novella begins, one where a number of differ-
ent characters in the town first learn about al-Zayn’s forthcoming marriage, is repeated

9. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 33.

10. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 92.
11. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 33; The Wedding of Zein, tr. Denys Johnson-Davies (London: Heinemann, 1968), 54.
 ʿUrs Al-Zayn by Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ 167

a number of times through the narrative.12 In ʿUrs al-Zayn and in other works, al-Ṭayyib
Ṣālih reveals himself to be one of Arabic’s greatest masters at manipulating the element
of time in his fiction, ensuring that the narrative and the requirements of the fictional
genre that he is using—in this case, the novella—reflect an organizing principle other
than that of a merely chronological sequence of events. Thus, the news that al-Zayn is to
get married is enough to cause surprise and shock to a number of people in the town, but
it is the elaboration of those feelings and the flashbacks that fill in the background to the
events leading up to the wedding that provide the bulk of the narrative. Showing all the
principles of economy that are a major feature of the novella genre, ʿUrs al-Zayn intro-
duces its readers to a community that consists of individuals. But, while the characters
who have the most important symbolic functions are described in some detail, the com-
munity as a whole is portrayed as a series of groups.13 Among the menfolk in the town,
the most influential group is clearly the “gang” that clusters around the figure of Maḥjūb
(“ʿaṣabat Maḥjūb” [89]); they hold important positions within the community and sit on
influential councils; their regular gatherings are described throughout the narrative.14
This “gang” is also listed as the third group in another subdivision of the town’s menfolk,
the criterion being their reactions to and feelings towards the important but generally
unloved figure of the Imam. The Imam is obviously intended to be the representative in
the town of official, orthodox Islam, but he is pictured as a remote figure, concerned only
about the specifics of religious obligations; he shows little interest in the daily lives of
the people in the community. As the narrator expresses it, “He was, in the opinion of the
village, an importunate man, a talker and a grumbler, and in their heart of hearts they
used to despise him because they recckoned him to be practically the only one among
them who had no definite work to do.”15 It is these generally negative feelings towards
this “official” representative of Islam that divide the community into groups: the devout,
agnostic young men, and Maḥjūb’s “gang.” There is also a fourth group, but it consists, of
course, of al-Zayn on his own; as the text notes, “The Imam was perhaps the only person
Zein hated.”16 The women of the town are similarly divided into camps, the principal
one being the two groups (“farīqayn” [26]) created by the enmity between Amīna and
Saʿdiyya, the mother of Niʿma and wife of al-Ḥājj Ibrāhīm. No one can quite remember
the details of the incident that led to this enmity between the two women, but a number

12. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 1, 26, 65, 97.

13. For individuals: ʿUrs al-Zayn, 7ff.; Niʿma: ʿUrs al-Zayn, 32ff.; Sayf al-dīn: ʿUrs al-Zayn, 50ff.; al-Ḥanīn:
ʿUrs al-Zayn, 46ff.; and the Imam: ʿUrs al-Zayn, 74ff. The “camps” (muʿaskarāt) are mentioned on 77ff. and
82ff.; “Maḥjūb’s group” is mentioned throughout the narrative.
14. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 12–13, 41, 48, 49, 58, 79, 84ff., 89, 93, 100.
15. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 74–75; The Wedding of Zein, 87.
16. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 82; The Wedding of Zein, 93.
168 Chapter Twelve

of possible versions of the story exist; and so are the town’s myths created and elabo-
rated….

The Turning Point: Sayf al-dīn and al-Ḥanīn

These methods of portraying the community by means of the interaction of different

groups constitute a principal method whereby al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ is able to use the features
of the novella—and especially its desire for the coverage of broad issues through the most
economical means—in the course of narrating al-Zayn’s curious story. Another major
feature of the novella genre is the so-called “turning-point,” a major event, often involv-
ing the use of a powerful symbolic image or character, that leads to a transformation in
the narrative scenario. While we have already alluded to a number of antagonisms and
enmities within the town’s community (such as those between al-Zayn and the Imam,
or between Amīna and Saʿdiyya), there is one that surpasses them all: that between al-
Zayn and Sayf al-dīn. If al-Zayn himself is the town’s prankster, marriage-facilitator, and
carer for the poor, the needy, and the socially rejected, then Sayf al-dīn is his exact op-
posite. The utterly spoiled son of a wealthy father (the jeweller, al-Badawī), Sayf al-dīn
has squandered his father’s wealth on a life of easy living and dissipation, both in the city
and in his own town.17 These two men, al-Zayn and Sayf al-dīn, with their totally differ-
ent backgrounds and values, are virtually guaranteed to confront each other within the
narrative, and so it happens. The event itself takes the form of a dreadful fight during
which, in spite of the efforts of many men to control al-Zayn’s anger, Sayf al-dīn is almost
killed.18 Several versions of the event, including that of Sayf al-dīn himself, assert that he
did in fact die, but at the height of the drama, the mysterious figure of al-Ḥanīn appears.
Al-Ḥanīn is a deeply mystical figure with whom al-Zayn has a very close affinity; al-Ḥanīn
operates beyond the bounds of the town and certainly outside the confines of orthodox
religion as personified by the figure of the town’s Imam. Al-Ḥanīn is in every sense a
symbol of the power of popular religion in its ability to interact with the lives of ordinary
people on their own level—precisely the sort of skill that the Imam lacks. At the very
climax of this tense confrontation between al-Zayn and Sayf al-dīn, only one command is
needed from al-Ḥanīn’s gentle voice. Al-Zayn immediately releases his vice-like grip on
Sayf al-dīn’s throat; once the latter has recovered, al-Ḥanīn insists that the two men be
reconciled with each other. The reader now learns that this dreadful conflict has arisen
because Sayf al-dīn has previously attacked al-Zayn with an axe; it happened because of
al-Zayn’s conduct towards Sayf al-dīn’s sister at her wedding. That previous attack has
sent al-Zayn to hospital in a terrible state. However, he has returned from the time in
hospital with many tales to tell his friends about the facilities, the food, and, above all,

17. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 50–58.

18. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 43–45.
 ʿUrs Al-Zayn by Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ 169

the nurses; most importantly he himself has gone through a kind of transformation—not
least because he has been given a new set of teeth.19

Resolution

This transforming event, the fight between al-Zayn and Sayf al-dīn and its resolution by
al-Ḥanīn, is regarded by the townsfolk as a miracle; it is referred to as “ḥādithat al-Ḥanīn”
and the year following it as ”ʿām al-Ḥanīn.” Many “miracles” happen during this subse-
quent period. One of the most remarkable is that Sayf al-dīn himself completely changes
his character and becomes a devout follower of the Imam; how strange it is for the people
in the town to hear him chanting the call-to-prayer.20 But perhaps the most incredible
thing of all is that, as with “Dūmat Wad Ḥāmid,” the government far off in the capital
city—“hādha al-makhlūq alladhī yushabbihūnahu fī nawādirihim bi-l-ḥimār al-hārūn”21—not
only remembers that the town exists but actually implements some projects there and
opens up an army camp near by—a ready source of income for the community.
Thus, while many of the feuds that exist between the different individuals and
“camps” in the town still remain unresolved, the community has obviously prospered
in the time that has followed the “miracle” of al-Ḥanīn. Sayf al-dīn has reformed his be-
havior, and al-Zayn has remained a faithful follower of al-Ḥanīn, but the latter has since
died and been buried in the local graveyard. And now the time has come to celebrate the
wedding of al-Zayn, the town’s symbol of concern and sympathy for others and at the
same time of some of the more frivolous aspects of life. At the very end of the narrative,
the wedding guests lose track of al-Zayn. They look everywhere but without success, un-
til someone suggests that they try the graveyard. There they find al-Zayn weeping by the
grave of his spiritual mentor, al-Ḥanīn. It is Maḥjūb who reminds al-Zayn that weddings
and graveyards do not mix and that life must go on. At the novella’s end, al-Zayn has
returned to the celebration. He stands in the middle of a circle of dancers as they gyrate
joyfully in celebration of his marriage to Niʿma, all of them viewing it as a sign of hope
for continuing prosperity and fruitfulness in the community.

Conclusion

Thus does al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ manage to use this short narrative as a commentary on some of
the larger issues of tradition and change that are a constant feature of the human condi-

19. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 39–40 and 41. At this point in the narrative, Niʿma, al-Zayn’s future bride, notices: “it
struck Ni‘ma, as she stood among the ranks of people come out to meet him, that Zein was not in fact
devoid of a certain handsomeness” (The Wedding of Zein, 58).
20. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 93.
21. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 62.
170 Chapter Twelve

tion and that impinge with particular insistence on the societies such as those of his own
Sudan. He has indeed succeeded, to use Walter Silz’s phrase in describing the effect of
novellas, in “compressing infinite riches into a little room.”22
As I noted earlier in this study, al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ uses his scenario and characters as
a kind of continuum. One of the members of “Maḥjūb’s gang” in ʿUrs al-Zayn is named
Ḥamd Wad Rayyis, who is always especially keen to hear about the racy details of al-
Zayn’s escapades with women.23 Both he and Maḥjūb are presumably to reappear in the
same community in Mawsim al-hijra ilā al-shamāl; in the case of Wad Rayyis the results of
his sexual proclivities, as seen in his ill-fated marriage to Muṣṭafā Saʿīd’s widow, Ḥusna,
will be tragic indeed. With such continuities between different narratives does al-Ṭayyib
Ṣāliḥ choose to explore the rich variety of fictional genres as they can be applied in their
differing ways to the society that he knows and loves. We are all the beneficiaries of his
great mastery of both generic expectations and complete cultural authenticity.

22. Walter Silz, quoted in Judith Leibowitz, Narrative Purpose in the Novella (The Hague, Paris: Mouton,
1974), 51.
23. ʿUrs al-Zayn, 42 and 89 (“Hamad Wad Rayyis had a sensitive ear for scandal”); The Wedding of Zein,
99.
 13
Historiography as Novel:
BenSalim Himmich’s Al-ʿAllāma

Introduction

In writing this contribution to a volume in memory of a much-respected and much-loved

scholar, Magda Al-Nowaihi, I have come to consider it as something in the form of a debt
repayment. During the early 1990s, I had invited Magda to give a lecture at the University
of Pennsylvania. In accepting the invitation, she told me that she wanted to talk about a
Moroccan novelist, Muḥammad Barrāda, and his novel, Luʿbat al-nisyān.
While, like many other specialists on modern Arabic fiction, I was already aware of
the existence and even the importance of the ever-growing tradition of Arabic fiction in
the countries of the Maghrib, my interest up to that point was, I must confess, of a some-
what token nature. Indeed, I can seek a certain refuge in the fact that even today there
is extremely little written in English about the Maghribi novel by which to contextualize
the project as a whole. It was Magda’s presentation that—typically—presented that tradi-
tion as a significant factor in Arabic novelistic creativity, one that could not be ignored.
Listening to and later reading that presentation, with its sophisticated analysis of
Barrāda’s narrative techniques, I became even more acutely aware of the need to study
the works of Maghribi novelists in greater detail.1 This study of one of them, BenSalim
Himmich (that being the author’s preferred spelling of his name in European languages,
the final consonant being the Arabic shīn), itself a direct consequence of my recent focus
on Maghribi fiction, is thus a belated acknowledgment of Magda’s role as both pioneer
and astute critic of literary trends.

1. Magda Al-Nowaihi, “Committed Postmodernity: Muhammad Barrada’s the Game of Forgetting,”

in Tradition, Modernity, and Post-Modernity in Arabic Literature: Essays in Honor of Professor Issa J. Boullata
(Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000), 367–88. Boullata is the translator of the English version of the novel, The Game
of Forgetting (Austin, Texas: University of Texas Press, 1996).

171
172 Chapter Thirteen

Al-ʿAllāma

The novel in question is Al-ʿAllāma, the winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize for Fiction
awarded by the American University in Cairo Press in 2002.2 At the time the award was
announced, I had in fact already been working for several years on the novels of Himmich
and of other Moroccan and Maghribi novelists, and had completed a translation of one
of Himmich’s earlier novels, Majnūn al-Ḥākim (1989), a work that is devoted to a novelistic
portrayal of the much discussed reign of the Fatimid caliph, al-Hakim bi-Amr Allāh. I was
invited by the American University in Cairo Press to translate Al-ʿAllāma into English (it
has now appeared as The Polymath), and my earlier translation of Majnūn al-Ḥukm is due
to appear in 2005 (under the title The Theocrat). Since I have already discussed the latter
novel elsewhere, I will concentrate my remarks here on Al-ʿAllāma.3
BenSalim Himmich, born in Meknes in 1949, teaches philosophy at the University
of Muhammad V in Rabat, Morocco. He himself has written an academic study of Ibn
Khaldūn’s philosophy of history, Al-Khaldūniyya fi Ḍawʾ Falsafat al-Tārīkh (Khaldūnism in
the Light of the Philosophy of History, 1998). One can perhaps surmise that the process
of preparing for and writing such a study may have provided at least part of the impetus
for following it up with a novel devoted to the same basic subject. The Polymath’s focus
assumes almost vertiginous proportions: a professor of the history of philosophy who is
also a historical novelist here presents his readers with a novel that explores the later
life, thought, and motivations of a world-renowned historian, Ibn Khaldūn (d. 1406). Ex-
iled from his native region of the Maghrib, Ibn Khaldūn (or ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, as he is
described for much of the novel, using one of his forenames) spends his latter days in
Egypt. He suffers a tremendous personal tragedy when his wife and children drown at
sea on their way to join him in the Egyptian capital. The aged and lonely historian lives in
Cairo and ekes out a modest living by teaching and serving as judge of the Maliki school
of law—whenever, that is, he is not being dismissed because of the rigor that he brings to
his judicial functions and his unwillingness to take external (i.e., political) contingencies
into consideration in passing judgment. To compensate for his loneliness and disillusion,
he decides to revisit his earlier works on history and its science and to revise those sec-
tions of them that are in need of either reconsideration or complete rewriting in the light
of the tumultuous events he himself experienced with rulers and tyrants in North Africa.
In Al-ʿAllāma then, a historical novelist and philosopher of history is writing a novel about
a historian rewriting his own historical record and his theoretical conclusions based on
an analysis of its contents—a historiographical novel, one might suggest.

2. BenSalim Himmich, Al-ʿAllāma (Rabat: Maṭbaʿat al-Maʿārif al-Jadīda, 2000); English ed., The Poly-
math, tr. Roger Allen (Cairo: The American University in Cairo Press, 2004).
3. Roger Allen, “Lords of Misrule: History and Fiction in Two Moroccan Novels,” Middle Eastern Litera-
tures 9/2 (August 2006), 199–209.
 Historiography as Novel 173

Himmich’s novel begins with an “opening” section (“Fātiḥa”), the name also given
to the first sura in the Qur’an. This section sets up the narrative in a number of ways.
The historical context is that of the Mamlūk Dynasty of Egypt, the remarkable institu-
tion made up of slaves imported from the Crimean region whose manumission was re-
quired for them to be eligible for the position of Sultan. In particular we are in the reign
of al-Ẓāhir Barqūq, a notable builder in Cairo whose monuments continue to remind
visitors to Egypt’s capital of the splendor of his era. We are introduced to Ibn Khaldūn,
a renowned figure whose fame and controversial opinions have previously gained him
prominent administrative and judicial positions with a variety of rulers in Spain and
North Africa. From the machinations and intrigues involved in such a career, he has now
retreated, in the hope of spending his final years in relative tranquility in Cairo. In his
house close to the River Nile we also encounter his faithful servant, Shaʿbān, who takes
care of the lonely widower—still grieving for his wife and children, whose loss has marred
his plans for a happy retirement. Into this domestic scene comes another figure from the
Maghrib: Ḥammu al-Hīhī, initially requesting a legal opinion regarding the request of
his young and beautiful wife, Umm al-Banīn, to be allowed to take promenades along the
banks of the River Nile and around Cairo’s beautiful quarters, but thereafter offering his
services as amanuensis to the great scholar as he revisits the theoretical issues confront-
ing those who would write history.
The novel closes with a section entitled “Tadhyīl,” which, like the “Fātiḥa” used for the
opening segment, is a traditional term for the closing section of a text; the word dhayl,
of which is it a derivative, means ‘tail,’ and thus it is linked to the use of the Italian word
coda in musical notation. In this tail to the tale, as it were, things have come full circle.
Ibn Khaldūn once again finds himself alone with his servant, as was the case when
the narrative began. Intimations of his own mortality are becoming ever more insistent.
Himmich assigns the narration of this closing chapter to Ibn Khaldūn himself in the first
person, thus replicating the second of the three central chapters in the narrative. As this
second chapter’s title, “Between falling in love and operating in the shadow of power,”
suggests, this other essay in first-person narrative combines the very personal story of
Ibn Khaldūn’s increasing infatuation with Umm al-Banīn, the widow of his amanuensis
(whom he subsequently marries) and the subsequent birth of their daughter, al-Batūl,
with his accounts of the court of the Mamlūk Sultan, al-Ẓāhir Barqūq.
Extraordinarily detailed descriptions of buildings—palaces, mosques, stables, col-
leges, parks, and ceremonials—are linked with often highly critical opinions about the
moral and political atmosphere surrounding the Sultan.
By contrast, the first of these lengthy central chapters finds a third-person narrator
describing an entirely different scene inside Ibn Khaldūn’s house, as he meets at the end
of each month with his amanuensis, Ḥammu al-Hīhī. There is much concern here with
texts and textuality, including the addition of several footnotes to the narrative itself.
The two men discuss current political events; the dialogue format permits Ibn Khaldūn
to record his reflections on the various ways in which his previous writings on history,
174 Chapter Thirteen

most notably the renowned al-Muqaddima (Introduction) to his work on history, Kitāb
al-ʿIbar, and his autobiographical work, al-Taʿrīf, are in need of revision or wholesale re-
writing. In this process Himmich the novelist carefully crafts the role of al-Hīhī as the
deft poser of precisely the right kind of questions to provoke Ibn Khaldūn into radical
re-expressions of his earlier theories. This applies most particularly to the most signifi-
cant and renowned of those ideas: that ʿaṣabiyya (group solidarity) is a primary factor
in the acquisition and maintenance of political hegemony and that such traits are to be
found primarily among the inhabitants of desert regions, the Bedouin. The life of the city
(ḥaḍar) leads inevitably to a weakening of such a sense of tribal identity and the virtues
that go with it; as new and stronger tribal confederations emerge, the cycle of history
repeats itself. During this chapter, with its seven nights of dictation and discussion, Ibn
Khaldūn thinks back on his own career in political and judicial service, a life of accommo-
dation to intrigue, rebellion, and sycophancy (including his own poems of hypocritical
praise to various tyrant rulers), a life of imprisonment, high office, and survival that has
eventually brought him to old age in the Mamlūk capital of Cairo. Once more in and out
of office as judge and teacher according to political whim, he is determined to record in
written form his reactions to everything he has been through by revisiting his previous
ideas on history and historiography. At the very end of this lengthy chapter, the reader
learns that Ibn Khaldūn has been permitted to leave Cairo in order to make the pilgrim-
age to Mecca. He carries with him the prayers of Umm al-Banīn, his amanuensis’s wife,
that she be blessed with the gift of children. In fact, our eminent historian confesses to
the reader that he spends entirely too much time during the holy pilgrimage thinking
about his companion’s beautiful young wife. Thus, when he returns to Cairo to discover
that during his absence Ḥammu al-Hīhī has died and he is now under some obligation to
take care of her, it comes as little surprise that, once she herself has agreed to the idea,
he takes little persuading to marry the much younger widow.
The chapter describing Barqūq’s palace and its protocol, mentioned above, had al-
ready made occasional reference to the looming menace of the Mongol invasions that
had been threatening the West Asian region for some two centuries. This applies es-
pecially to its latest and direst manifestation in the much-feared figure of Tīmūr Lang,
known in the West—including Christopher Marlowe’s play—as Tamerlaine (or Tambur-
lain). The third of these central chapters is devoted to the encounter between the pro-
verbially ruthless and astute invader, Tīmūr Lang, and Ibn Khaldūn, the most renowned
historian of his age. This particular segment of the novel’s narrative is recounted in the
third person, although close to the beginning we have a further variant: Ibn Khaldūn’s
late-night discussion of strategy with an ailing Sultan Barqūq takes the form of a drama-
tized dialogue (albeit with occasional interpolations by the judge’s somnolent colleague).
It is not long afterward that the Sultan dies, leaving behind a young heir, al-Naṣīr Faraj,
who is portrayed as not only subject to the rampant manipulation of his own courtiers
but also—at the age of thirteen—a habitual drunkard. It is with considerable misgivings
that Ibn Khaldūn accompanies the young Sultan and his army to Damascus to await the
 Historiography as Novel 175

arrival of the Mongol army. As time passes, the eminent historian’s sense that a Mongol
victory is inevitable only increases.
The novel now paints for the reader a detailed portrait of a city—Damascus—its peo-
ple, its Citadel guards, its judges, its markets, as they all await their fate at the hands
of a tyrannical invader whose savage treatment of other cities (including the already
captured Aleppo) augurs nothing but the worst. Ibn Khaldūn is, of course, consulted by
the city’s judicial authorities on matters political, juridical, and historical. He befriends
one judge in particular, Ibn al-Mufliḥ, a native of the city who takes his Maghribi col-
league on an extensive tour of Damascus and its environs, thus affording Himmich’s nar-
rator the opportunity to display a considerable knowledge of the historical city, its rivers,
gardens, monuments, hills, and restaurants. As tensions mount and political arguments
flare, the Mamlūk army gradually retires. Eventually the Sultan himself, al-Naṣīr Faraj,
sneaks away with his retinue, on the pretext of suppressing an incipient revolt against
him in Egypt. The people of Damascus are now left to their own devices and at the mercy
of Tīmūr’s infamous troops. Sober reflection among the judges and grandees of the city
makes it clear that the city’s only option is surrender in return for a guarantee of safety.
The enormous repute of Ibn Khaldūn is reflected in the Mongol Khan’s specific request
that he be present at the negotiations. The encounter between the great strategist and
the scholarly historian is now set.
Once Ibn Khaldūn has been admitted to the presence of the Great Khan and offered a
sumptuous meal, it emerges that the Mongol leader is anxious to question the renowned
sage about the linkage of Islamic belief and history. The historian thinks it wise to open
with a sycophantic encomium of Tīmūr’s achievements—all duly translated for the Khan
by his translator, Ibn al-Nuʿmān. Once discussion turns to more current and specific mat-
ters, the novel paints a wonderful portrait of Ibn Khaldūn’s internal calculations as he
finds himself negotiating with both his own sense of what is judicious and the parallel
sensitivities of the translator as to what opinions he is to put into words and how far
he is permitted to go in his commentary on Tīmūr’s conduct toward Damascus and its
people. Eventually agreement is reached to surrender the city to Tīmūr’s forces, and Ibn
Khaldūn has to watch as Mongol soldiers ravage much of the city. Even Tīmūr himself
expresses regret that the excesses of his fighting men have led to a disastrous fire in the
Great Umayyad Mosque, one of Islam’s most illustrious sites.
Throughout this lengthy process, Ibn Khaldūn has been continuously aware of his
lengthy absence from his young family in Cairo, a feeling made worse by a total lack of
communication from them. In a touching scene, Tīmūr compares Ibn Khaldūn’s long-
ing for his wife in Cairo with his own feelings for his beloved consort in Samarqand. Ibn
Khaldūn is eventually allowed to return to Egypt, but his journey back meets disaster
when the caravan is attacked by Bedouin marauders and the entire company is robbed
and stripped.
The novel’s “Conclusion” brings Ibn Khaldūn eagerly back to his Cairo home, only
to discover that his wife, believing rumors that he has died, has taken their daughter
176 Chapter Thirteen

back with her to Fez in the far Maghrib. Messages are sent to the Maghrib to inform her
that her husband is alive, but with no result. Every request that he makes to travel to the
Maghrib himself is countered by the drunken Sultan al-Naṣīr Faraj who keeps appoint-
ing him judge, and, after dismissal a few months later, reappointing him (this happens
on five separate occasions). Eventually, word gets through and Umm al-Banīn returns,
but without her daughter who is ailing. She receives a rather strange welcome: instead
of rushing to greet his beloved wife, Ibn Khaldūn spends a great deal of time in extra
prayers and then proceeds to upbraid her for leaving in the first place. Once marital har-
mony is restored, she begs her husband to come back with her to Fez where their daugh-
ter is recuperating; she tells him that, at all events, she herself will have to return in a few
months. Ibn Khaldūn looks forward to the prospect of returning to the lands of his birth
and packs up his books and belongings. However, a request to the Sultan for permission
to leave is greeted by another appointment as Maliki judge in Cairo, and so Umm al-Banīn
returns westward without her husband—embracing him in Alexandria for what neither
of them realizes will be the last time.
Ibn Khaldūn is now left as a pawn in the frivolous hands of the Sultan. His judicial re-
sponsibilities—whenever he is not being dismissed for rigorous application of the law—
prevent him from rejoining his family. He is struck down by a debilitating illness; a period
of apparent recovery is followed by a relapse. The novel ends with that most permanent
of closures, death, as the ever cognizant religious scholar reflects on the evident decay of
his own body and launches into a description of some of the phenomena of the Last Day,
all recounted with a theologian’s eye for detail and appropriate phrase.

History, Historiography, and the Novel

In al-ʿAllāma, then, Ibn Khaldūn is the central character, and his works are one of the
principal topics. The novel is certainly one that fits into the category of historical novel,
but, one might suggest, in a way that is somewhat different from many previous con-
tributions to that subgenre. As noted above, there is a great deal of attention to detail:
Ibn Khaldūn’s life experiences are set into the context of a bewildering succession of
dynastic changes, of murders, imprisonments, and diplomatic missions, to all of which
he was in one way or another a party (and I might note here that the preparation of the
novel’s translation required the production of an enormous glossary of names, places,
and technical terms connected with his life’s itinerary across the entire Maghrib and al-
Andalus to Egypt and Syria). In terms of space, we learn a great deal about ceremonies
and the buildings in which they take place (Sultan Barqūq’s weekly attendance of the
Friday sermon, for example) and about the topography of Damascus and its environs.
Readers of Ibn Khaldūn’s own writings, whether we are talking about al-Muqaddima or
al-Taʿrīf, will already be aware that his approach is characterized by an atmosphere of
studious detachment, seen at its most obvious perhaps in the somewhat terse way in
 Historiography as Novel 177

which he describes the loss of his family in the latter work (a passage duly included in
the text of the novel itself):

This situation coincided with a personal tragedy involving my wife and child.
They were coming to Egypt from the Maghrib by ship. There was a storm, and
they were drowned. With them went existence, home, and offspring. The pain
of this loss was enormous.4

In the novel, however, this somewhat remote figure is personalized by the inclusion of
the story of his love for Umm al-Banīn and the birth of their daughter, al-Batūl. This part
of the novel seems to be a creation of the novelist himself, and it helps to tie this novel,
qua historical novel, to earlier examples, not least those of the great pioneer in this sub-
genre, Jurjī Zaydān (d. 1914). Zaydān, who wrote some twenty historical novels begin-
ning with Jihād al-Muḥibbīn and Istibdād al-Mamālīk in 1893, would regularly insert into
the particular historical era that was his primary topic a piece of “local interest,” usu-
ally focused on a family and, more often than not, a love story. In Shārl [Charles] wa-ʿAbd
al-Raḥmān (1904), for example, that particular love story involves the renowned affair
between the poet, Ibn Zaydūn, and the Umayyad princess, Wallāda. In Zaydān’s novels
however, the love story is always ancillary to the main events of the historical narrative;
the “characters” involved may be directly affected by what is going on around them, but
the love affair does not impinge upon the broader stage of history. At this early phase in
the development of the Arabic novel, such a narrative strategy seems to have played a
major role in popularizing the genre (not least through its publication in Zaydān’s own
magazine, al-Hilāl) while at the same time providing his readers with a valuable series of
accounts of their own history—an essential adjunct to the developing awareness of the
need for an Arab national sentiment in order to counter the increasing role of British
and French imperialism in the region. By contrast, what Himmich does in al-ʿAllāma is
to entwine the story of Umm al-Banīn (and that of her highly problematic transvestite
brother) into the framework of the account of Ibn Khaldūn’s residence in Cairo and his
journey to Damascus to meet Tīmūr, thus enabling the author to insert elements of the
fictional within the narrative framework of a highly authentic rewriting of Ibn Khaldūn’s
account of his own later life. It needs to be added that even these fictional insertions are,
as noted above, replete with carefully researched descriptions of the multifarious fea-
tures of life in Cairo (and Damascus) in the late fourteenth and early fifteenth centuries.
So we are dealing here with a historical novel, one that depicts the later life of Ibn
Khaldūn, and, through his own recollections in the company of his amanuensis, a good
deal of his earlier life as well. And yet, it is also more than that, hence my use of “historio-
graphical” in the title above. As we have already noted, Ibn Khaldūn is himself a historian

4. Himmich, Al-ʿAllāma, 12; idem, The Polymath, tr. Roger Allen, 6.

178 Chapter Thirteen

(indeed Himmich, our novelist, is a student of his historiography). Such is Ibn Khaldūn’s
repute that a very large number of scholarly studies have been published about his ap-
proach to history in both Arabic and European languages. One of the more interesting
opinions on the topic is expressed by the great Egyptian critic, Ṭāhā Ḥusayn (d. 1973),
who in his doctoral thesis submitted to the Sorbonne in Paris (“La Philosophie sociale
d’Ibn Khaldoun”) suggested that, while the material in al-Muqaddima was clearly of enor-
mous significance, the work of history itself displayed a surprising credulousness in the
way that information was recorded (an opinion that, no doubt, also reflects the views
of his French supervisors at the time, including Durkheim, Casanova, and Levi-Bruhl).5
Whatever may have been Ibn Khaldūn’s approach to the compilation of the historical
record itself, there is little doubt that his introduction to it (al-Muqaddima) has been the
focus of the lion’s share of attention among scholars who have seen it as a foundational
stage in the establishment of the principles of social-scientific research. It is clearly this
aspect of Ibn Khaldūn’s thought that also interests Himmich as both scholar and nov-
elist. Following the “Fātiḥa” in which the historian’s situation in Cairo is presented, it
is to the principles involved that the substantial first chapter (Faṣl awwal) is devoted—
fully one quarter of the novel’s text. Here too scholarship finds fictional expression, as
Himmich uses his own knowledge of the philosophy of history in order to posit certain
adjustments to statements made earlier in the text of al-Muqaddima. In such a context,
Himmich’s own statements on the role of history and its linkages to fiction give us some
insight into his interests and motivations, as, for example, in this “testimony” (shahāda)
at a novel conference, in which he draws attention to a number of examples of historical
fiction (including Umberto Eco’s The Name of the Rose) and then discusses his own ap-
proach to fiction:

Authentic writing has no choice but to interact with precedents and with forms
and styles that emerge from them, not so much in order to imitate them, but
rather to place them within the fulcrum of change and thus enrich them with
the added value of modernity.6

The American critic David Cowart has written a study on the tremendous contemporary
relevance of such trends as these on a broader cultural scale.7 His categorization of his-
torical fiction includes a fourth type: “fictions whose authors project the present into
the past.” A clear illustration of this category within modern Arabic fiction is provided
by the Egyptian writer Gamāl al-Ghīṭāni’s famous novel, al-Zaynī Barakāt, 1971; English tr.

5. An excellent study of this topic is Abdelrashid Mahmoudi, Taha Husayn’s Education: From the Azhar
to the Sorbonne (London: Curzon, 1998).
6. See “Thaqāfat al-riwāya: shahāda,” Muqaddimat/Prologues 13–14 (Summer–Autumn 1998): 136.
7. David Cowart, History and the Contemporary Novel (Carbondale: Southern Illinois University Press,
1989).
 Historiography as Novel 179

Zayni Barakat, 1988). The novel is set in Cairo approximately one century after the events
described in al-ʿAllāma, but the real import of the novelist’s accurate depiction of the ac-
tivities of a secret-police force in sixteenth-century Cairo were not lost on Arab readers
during the 1970s. Mutatis mutandis, the same comment may also be invoked to refer to
Himmich’s work under discussion here. The nature of good rulership, continuing turn-
overs of government, the place of religion and religious law within society, the theories
behind the recording of what is termed “history,” the possibility of speaking one’s mind:
these issues and others that confront Ibn Khaldūn as he attempts to make a record of Is-
lamic history, and to remake and revise it in the light of experience, are hardly irrelevant
to the Arab world of the present day—in President Nasser’s hackneyed phrase, the region
that stretches “from the Ocean to the Gulf.” And one might add that, when Western lead-
ers can invoke the Crusades in the twenty-first century within the context of justifying
military incursions into distant lands and cultures, is it surprising that inhabitants of the
Arabic-speaking region as a whole should resort to texts depicting invaders of the past
and that Arab novelists in particular should resort to history and its texts in order to
challenge their present, both local and international?
To be sure, the scholar Himmich is as present in this novel as he was in the earlier
Majnūn al-Ḥukm. Both works display an enviable knowledge of historical texts and an
ability to work them into contributions to Arabic fiction that are interesting and complex
examples of contemporary narrative. However, both novels also depict periods in the his-
tory of the Arabs during which struggles for power among ruling elites caused immense
suffering to the peoples of the region and indeed, as al-ʿAllāma makes very clear, rendered
the task of recording accounts of historical events both complex and dangerous. In the
context of the contemporary Arabic novel as it seeks for fresh modes and topics, and this
particular novel about the theory of history, one is inclined to invoke: plus ça change.…
 14
Translation Translated: Rashīd Abū Jadra’s
Maʿrakat al-Zuqāq

The novel of Rashīd Abū Jadra [Boudjedra], Maʿrakat al-zuqāq (“literal” translation:
“Struggle in the Straits”), was published for the first time in Algiers in 1986. The French
version of the work, La prise de Gibraltar, appeared one year later in Paris in what is termed
a translation by Antoine Moussali “in collaboration with the author.”1 The difference be-
tween the two titles is, of course, immediately striking: the greater specificity of place in
the French and the focus on a result, as opposed to the concern with process in the origi-
nal Arabic. As the reader enters the world created by this novel, she soon discovers that
this is a narrative very much concerned with texts and their transfer from one culture
to another. In this article I propose to examine Abū Jadra’s novel in its two separate ver-
sions in order to consider the complexities of cultural transfer as they are reflected both
within the narrative itself and in the intertextual arena between what is presumed to be
the Arabic original and its French translation. I will therefore begin with a consideration
of the novelistic text itself, endeavoring to trace the complicated linkages between its
themes and techniques, not the least of which is, in this case, that of translation itself. I
will then “step outside” the text to consider the broader issues raised by the two versions
of the novels.
It was in 1981, Rashīd Abū Jadra tells us, that he decided to change from a process
of writing his fiction originally in French and then participating in its translation into
Arabic to the reverse. Before that announced decision, his most famous work was his first
novel, La répudiation (1969), which earned him a wide reputation in France.2 Here was an
Algerian writer not merely depicting the general social malaise of his native country

1. Rashīd Abū Jadra, Maʿrakat al-zuqāq (Algiers: al-Muʾassasa al-Waṭaniyya lil-Kitāb, 1986); Rachid
Boudjedra, La prise de Gibraltar, tr. Antoine Moussali (Paris: Denoël, 1987). In view of the comments that
are to follow, I should explain the procedure that I have used in preparing this article: my first reading
was of each of the several parts of the Arabic version of the novel; following that, I then read the French
novel, comparing it—to the extent possible—with the Arabic that I had already read.
2. For further details on Abū Jadra’s earlier novels, see Farida Abu Haydar, “The Bipolarity of Rachid

181
182 Chapter Fourteen

after independence but also exposing to public view the utterly different nature of fa-
milial relationships and the often terrible consequences for the members of that family,
both male and female. The completely frank and open discussion of such subjects as
incest, rape and homosexuality were shocking enough to French readers; their impact,
needless to say, within the more traditional elements of Maghrebi society were even
more severe. However, beyond the shocking exposés of society in this and other novels
that followed, there was the matter of style. Abū Jadra is also a published poet, and his
obvious delight in the power and potential of language is abundantly clear in the highly
elaborate, indeed particular, style in which he couches his works of fiction (an aspect that
will be examined in detail below). These traits are to be carried over into what we might
term his “Arabic” phase. This is most obvious in the novel, al-Marth (1984; La macération)
which places Rashīd, the principal character (“victim,” perhaps) of La répudiation, into a
more retrospective frame of reference through a revisitation of the events and person-
ages within his dysfunctional family. To these already interesting complexities is added
a further element in the intertextual potentialities offered by the inclusion of segments
from The 1001 Nights and Abū Ḥayyān al-Tawḥīdī, Ibn Baṭṭūta, and Ibn al-ʿArabī.
Abū Jadra’s continuing concern with the complexities of his native Algeria, the
linkages of a post-revolutionary society to its colonial past and the role of its institu-
tions—educational and familial—in that process are also central to the novel that I wish
to discuss in detail here, Maʿrakat al-zuqāq; and here the intertextual aspect is even more
central to the novelistic project. The mode is again a retrospective one, a comment that
refers to both the contemporary and pre-modern periods. As is the case with the novels
we have just outlined, Maʿrakat al-zuqāq is not a novel that places a set of characters into
a series of events that in one way or another (or, expressed differently, through one mode
of chronological sequencing or another) proceeds from a certain point to another. Rather
this work’s concern is with a set of scenarios, of set pieces, each of which is repeated,
reworked, and revised; the cumulative effect conveys a sense that is almost obsessive.
In this context present time is situated at a point some twenty years after the conclu-
sion of the Algerian Revolution, that prolonged and vicious event in social and political
transformation (sometimes called “the War of a Million Martyrs”) that lasted from 1954
till 1962 and the effects of which are still felt within the fabric of Algerian society. Place
in this novelistic present time is the capital city of Algiers. However, as is the case in Abū
Jadra’s other novels, the past and memories of it play a major role in the construction
of this work. One stage in the retrospective process involves a journey in memory back
to the time of the revolution (the mid-1950s) and to the city of Constantine, the site of
much popular opposition to the French occupying forces. The memories involved are al-
most all painful ones, whether the context is family, school, or society at large, a society

Boujedra,” Journal of Arabic Literature 20/1 (March 1989): 40–56. La répudiation was translated into Arabic
twice: al-Taṭlīq (1982) and al-Inkār (1984).
 Translation Translated 183

in turmoil and at war with its colonial occupiers and with those who would cooperate
with them. But the text of the novel, already enriched by these mostly agonizing acts of
recalling childhood memories, is further complexified by reference to a more distant
place and time: the traversal of the Straits of Gibraltar by the Berber general, Ṭāriq ibn
Ziyād, in AD 710.
This double process of retrospection from the novelistic present allows history—the
nature of history and the interpretation of historical sources—to become a significant
factor in the analysis of a very fraught and complex present filled with social dissen-
sion. History becomes thereby a burden, and the charge weighs heavily on the principal
character in the work who is significantly named Ṭāriq.3 He has been given that name by
his father who has an enduring fascination with the historical figure of Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād,
to the extent of not only naming his son after him but also hanging on the wall in his
import-export office a miniature (which the French edition of the novel identifies as be-
ing the work of an artist name al-Wāsiṭī) that depicts Ṭāriq’s troops preparing to cross
the Straits. This father is concerned with the texts that his son is studying in school, in
Arabic, French, and Latin, and closely supervises his son’s preparation for class; to the
extent of demanding the compilation of written glossaries that are duly recorded in the
text of the novel.4 Such is the father’s obsession with the historical Ṭāriq as a genuine
Berber hero that, when his son’s school-teacher suggests that a stirring speech attribut-
ed to Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād and recorded in the texts of several later historical accounts is prob-
ably apocryphal, the father goes into a rage and confiscates his son’s history book. This
portrait of the father-figure depicts a personage who is disturbingly distant physically
and emotionally; in the Arabic version—and we will explore the differences between the
two versions below—he is called ṣāḥib al-qarār (the decision-maker, the all-powerful one).
The French version provides the more elaborate of the two texts in revealing the extent
of Ṭāriq’s hatred for his father, not merely for his frequent absences on business but also
for his dalliance with other women and his desertion of Ṭāriq’s mother.
The very nature of this father-son relationship (repeated in several of Abū Jadra’s
other novels) also complicates—needless to say—the mother-son relationshi Here too,
the authority structures of a male-dominant society interfere, The tyrannical father
takes his young son to the kuttāb (Qurʾān school) in the local mosque and hands him
over to a sadistic shaykh (whom the French text describes as a pederast).5 Set to memo-
rize the Qurʾanic text and to recite it out loud, Ṭāriq finds himself compelled to read
out a passage concerning female menstruation and impurity: “They will question thee

3. As when Ṭāriq asks: “Why is history this way?” (French version: “Pourquoi l’histoire est-elle tou-
jours faussée détournée maquillée et déguisée?”): Arabic, 99; French, 183.
4. As French version says in its typically expansive fashion: “son savoir incroyable, son fanatisme ef-
frayant et sa passion pour la traduction.” La prise de Gibraltar, 258–59.
5. See La prise de Gibraltar, 224 (not found at Maʿrakat al-Zuqāq, 123).
184 Chapter Fourteen

concerning the monthly course. Say: ‘It is hurt; so go apart from women during the
monthly course, and do not approach them till they are clean.’”6 Ṭāriq refuses to recite
the passage and, as the other pupils watch with cackles of laughter, he is pinned to the
ground and, with feet raised, subjected to a barbaric bastinado. Still protesting to the
teacher that his mother is clean, he is forced to walk on his bloody feet; the sadistic scene
continues as his gait is compared to that of the American comedian, Bud Abbott. Wad-
dling home to his mother, Ṭāriq seeks her out in the house and eventually finds her in
that hidden part of the garden where she hangs her undergarments to dry. She slaps him
for intruding into her intensely personal space. As the retrospectives that permeate the
novel make abundantly clear, the combined effects of this episode on Ṭāriq, coupled with
the burdens of history thrust upon him by the very name his father has given him, af-
fect his entire outlook on life into his adulthood; not least because, as a practicing doctor
now, he realizes that the thyroid condition from which he suffered thereafter may have
been triggered by the psychological trauma of it all. History once again impinges in that,
while the characteristically cruel children in the kuttāb continue to compare the increas-
ingly fat Ṭāriq to Bud Abbott, his father uses his fatness to make a comparison to Mūsā
ibn Nuṣayr, the equally corpulent governor of the province of Africa in the time of Ṭāriq
ibn Ziyād. Indeed, through the citation of actual historical texts, the novel illustrates for
us how the modern Ṭāriq’s father compulsively explores the motivations that led Mūsā
to order his Berber general to halt the conquest of Spain in order that he, Mūsā, could
claim the credit.
But, as the French title of the novel reminds us in bringing history back to the pres-
ent, it is Ṭāriq’s name that is memorialized by the name of Gibraltar. The novel’s ret-
rospective on the Algerian revolution, filtered through this tortured consciousness of
Ṭāriq, focuses on two characters. One is that of his mother. For, in addition to the familial
context that we have just outlined, she is clearly a courageous woman. The daughter of
a former Communist railway inspector, she joins in with her female contemporaries in
a famous demonstration in August 1955 during which the women of Constantine took
to the streets to demonstrate against the French. To the complex, interlacing set of im-
ages and memories to which Ṭāriq’s memory continually reverts —motherly affection,
female purity, menstruation, and acute pain—is thus added the picture of black-clad
women surging through the streets of the city, French gunfire which kills his mother, the
corpses floating in the river Rumāl (Rhumel), and women washing his mother’s body for
burial. The other significant character in this context is that of his cousin, Shams al-Dīn.
If Ṭāriq’s relationship with his father is dysfunctional, then that of his cousin to Ṭāriq’s
uncle, ʿAmm Ḥusayn, is one of undiluted enmity. Shams al-Dīn is a childhood friend of his
cousin, Ṭāriq, and they are joined in their boyish escapades by Kamāl, the school’s most
handsome boy who is also a genius at mathematics (the French version of the novel adds

6. Q Baqara 2:222. I use The Koran Interpreted, tr. A. J. Arberry (London: Allen & Unwin, 1955), 59.
 Translation Translated 185

that, for that reason, he is given the nickname “Short-Circuit” for the speed with which
he can find simple answers to complex algebraic problems, which are, of course, incor-
porated into the text itself). However, during times of revolution (or, as the novel’s text
continually states it: “It was a war”), schooldays for teenage boys are far from normal,
and they are inevitably sucked into clandestine activities against their colonial occupi-
ers. They chalk anti-French and pro-nationalist slogans on walls, on the roofs of their
houses, and in the bathrooms at cafés. Following an explosion at a bar in which four
French soldiers are killed, the French army scours the town in search of the culprits.
Soldiers come to Ṭāriq’s house where he and his cousin have rushed following the chaos
in the bar. Finding anti-French slogans chalked on the roof, they take Shams al-Dīn away
for questioning; he has in fact been betrayed by his own father who has become an in-
formant for the French.7 Shams al-Dīn is removed to a distant school where the French
interrogate political prisoners. He is subjected to some barbaric forms of torture, but
does not yield; as he asks disarmingly, what is fear in any case and what can the French
possibly do to him that his father (and here the French version expands the description
of ʿAmm Ḥusayn with some particularly colorful French argot) has not already done to
him throughout his childhood years?
It is twenty years later that Ṭāriq meets his uncle on the street in Algiers. The now
older Ṭāriq listens respectfully as his uncle prattles on about his brother’s (Ṭāriq’s fa-
ther’s) failures with women, but, when he calls his own son (Shams al-Dīn) a useless
drunkard, Ṭāriq loses patience and rounds on his uncle. Shams al-Dīn, Ṭāriq yells in an-
ger, is an authentic national hero. If his life now lies in ruins, it is because he was betrayed
by his own worthless father who is nothing more than a coward and a traitor.8 Here then
is a scene in the novel that manages to encapsulate the modern history of Algeria, and
at both the familial and national level. Ṭāriq’s mother has been one of those Algerian
women who participated to the full in revolutionary activity; she herself has been killed,
but her sisters have been forced back into the straitjacket of the traditional female role
within the family. Ṭāriq’s own uncle has betrayed both him and, above all, his son. As
Ṭāriq looks back, he continually asks himself and his friends where their childhood has
gone: for him, this novel has been a quest “à la recherche d’une enfance perdue.” Twenty
years after (to cite yet another French novel’s title) his memories still fail to provide an-
swers to his musings about the present, both personal and national.
In what is surely the novel’s most ironic twist of all, the most recent time-frame
of the novel finds Ṭāriq in Gibraltar, the rock named for his illustrious and eponymous
predecessor. The modern Ṭāriq’s father has managed, in spite of the fraught relationship
that he has with his son, to instill into him a segment of his own obsessive fascination

7. This incident is (typically) referred to many times during the course of the novel, but the fullest
details emerge during a conversation between Ṭāriq and his mother: Arabic, 101; French, 187.
8. Arabic, 138; French, 244.
186 Chapter Fourteen

with the history of the region. As a consequence, Ṭāriq ruefully acknowledges that he too
has been “bitten by the bug”; he and his childhood friend, Kamāl, are thus visiting Gibral-
tar as tourists in search of relics of the Muslim invaders from the 8th century.
The preceding paragraphs have endeavored to provide a summary of a work that
very deliberately sets out to render the reading process itself, and thus any attempt at
synthesis, a maximally complex exercise. As noted above, it is not a narrative of sequence
but of repeated scenario. At the beginning of the novel readers find themselves compelled
to accommodate the obscurities and apparent lack of any linkages that confront them;
it is only through persevering with the process of reading and rereading that anything
akin to the above summarization becomes possible. While the text itself does provide
occasional paragraph markings and even periods at the end of sentences, the switching
between scenes—whether simultaneous or chronologically antecedent—will more often
than not occur without any indication; indeed quotations from the Qurʾan and histori-
cal sources may be inserted into the middle of a sentence which then continues beyond
the quotation. The Arabic version, Maʿrakat al-zuqāq, makes large assumptions about its
readers’ knowledge of both geography and recent history: for example, only the mention
of the River Rumāl places the childhood context in Constantine, while it is, no doubt, a
reasonable decision to suppose that every Algerian knows both the date and place of the
women’s demonstration in August 1955. Fortunately for someone such as myself who
has read both versions of the novel, the French version incorporates such more-specific
information into the text itself.
What ties all these different levels of time, place, and consciousness together into
a single narrative is Abū Jadra’s use of language. Before considering the ways in which
the Arabic and French versions differ, let us first look at the common strands that serve
to bind the text together. A major linking factor in the novel is the use of color, and
especially yellow. The work opens and closes with a scene that is a point of reference
throughout: Ṭāriq, looking out of his office window, watches a yellow crane (with the
name “Potain” written on the side) as it moves backwards and forwards. That yellow,
yellowish, yellowing image (I am trying here to replicate both the Arabic and French
adjectives) transfers easily into the yellow aura of the miniature showing Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād
as he prepares to embark for Gibraltar and Spain; and from there we are able to move
with great regularity to historical texts (such as those of Ibn Khaldūn and al-Maqqarī)
and debates over their veracity, to Ṭāriq’s father and his obsessions with history and
translation, to the Qurʾan school, the impurity of women, Ṭāriq’s beating, and his re-
lationship with both his father and mother. Also of a yellowish hue is the chalk used in
school, but also employed to fill walls and roofs with anti-French slogans, and demanded
by Shams al-Dīn as a token of defiance during his interrogation and torture by the French.
This concern with color, which is often elaborated in the lengthy descriptions of the
miniatures, segues in a similar fashion into lengthy and impressionistic passages on the
garden in Ṭāriq’s house with its characteristic mulberry tree; the yellows, reds, browns,
and greens of the flags being carried by the warriors in the miniature (and the swinging
 Translation Translated 187

back and forth of the cranes) transfer to the swaying branches of trees and the plumage
of birds. It is in passages like these the Abū Jadra’s clear delight in the potentialities of
language, that of the poet that he is, are most evident. From many possible examples I
will cite just one in both version (the Arabic in transliteration) in which horsemen in the
miniature are being described:

Tuḥawwiluhā fī ʿayn al-nāẓir ilā manẓūma kūriyūgrāfiyya rāqiṣa mutarabbima mu-

kaddifa (?) mutaṭāwila mutashannija mutashāmiha mutaṭāriba mutaʿāzifa mutaṣāriʿa
mutagāliya mutafāwita mutasābiqa il ilkh …

Ce qui faisait apparaître les cavaliers quelque peu affectés, sclérosés, figés, prudents,
ralentis, hésitants, fuyants, impersonnels, voire inexistants! 9

And here we note, with the ilkh (meaning “etc”) in the Arabic, replicated elsewhere also
in the French, another feature of Abū Jadra’s textual strategizing, whereby he appears
to invite the reader to join him in his game of words and assonances by continuing the
long strings of epithets with which he often fills his descriptive passages. His habit of
including parentheses, with alternative word choices and explanations, often completed
with a question mark, is another facet of his same attitude towards the openness of the
text itself.
Primary among the textual features of this work is, of course, the linkage between
the miniature that Ṭāriq’s father owns (and that so preoccupies the attention of his son),
the citations of historical texts that it invokes, and the translation processes that result
from the father’s tyrannical concern with his son’s schooling and with the historical
figure of Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād. Here, of course, we enter precisely the area that is of interest
to Abū Jadra himself and in which a simultaneous consideration of these two novelistic
texts places us: the processes of transfer of texts and their import from one language
and culture to another. If the above passages have demonstrated Abū Jadra the poet’s
somewhat traditional, indeed “maqāma-like,” concern with the virtuoso exploitation of
the morphological potential of the Arabic language, then the text also shows the inter-
est of someone who is much involved with the translation process itself, and between
a number of languages. The Arabic text is written in the standard written language of
modern literary discourse, but conversations among the schoolboys is reproduced in a
transliterated version of Algerian colloquial dialect. In addition to the anticipated trans-
lations from Arabic into French and vice versa, there are citations (and translations) of a
Latin text by the Roman historian, Sallust (1st century BC), concerning the wars against
the Numidian ruler, Jugurtha (2nd century BC), occasional use of English terms,10 and
a certain amount of swearing in Berber, the linguistic aspects of which are duly com-

9. Arabic, 105; French, 196.

10. This reaches a somewhat comic level when Ṭāriq’s curse about Gibraltar and its heat is mis-spelled
188 Chapter Fourteen

mented on in the text itself. The continuing struggles of Ṭāriq, the schoolboy, to translate
these texts makes him something of a lexical authority among his peers, and the text is
frequently interspersed with disquisitions on the various meanings of verbal roots as
found, for example, in the renowned dictionary of Ibn Manẓūr, Lisān al-ʿArab. However,
Ṭāriq’s father, the severe task-master, insists that his son do a word-for-word translation
and without the help of any dictionary.
Abū Jadra has thus crafted a highly complex novelistic text that concerns itself with
the problematics of history and culture and their effects on the contemporary life of
his homeland. Algeria is in so many ways, positive and negative, a casebook study of
the post-colonial experience, and Abū Jadra here makes excellent use of the very pro-
cesses of translation—of “carrying across” cultural information and values—as a mode
of exploring these aspects of inter-cultural confrontation. The focus on the processes
and complexities of translation within the text itself, one might suggest, serves as an
intertextual medium through which the novel’s focus on the post-colonial condition and
its placement in two different linguistic and cultural contexts can be explored and il-
lustrated. In such a frame of reference, the relationship of Maʿrakat al-zuqāq to La prise
de Gibraltar becomes a matter of extreme interest, and it is to that issue that I now turn.
Translation has, of course, long been acknowledged as an expansive medium; the text
designed for the target culture and readership will, more often than not, exceed the size
of the original. That is certainly the case with La prise de Gibraltar. However, beyond such
surface features, a comparative analysis of the two “versions” of this novel suggests that
Abū Jadra (and his translator colleague) have decided to use the preparation and publica-
tion of the French novel as an opportunity to expand on the original in other ways in the
process of introducing it to the milieu of novels written in French. At the most obvious
level, one can begin by noting that La prise de Gibraltar differs from the Arabic version in
that each of the novel’s six chapters is prefaced by the citation of an extract from a poem
by Saint-John Perse. Part of this expansion process can be explained (as we have already
suggested) by the need of a less cognizant French readership for further detail regarding
names of people and places and for greater specification of time-frames, but the oppor-
tunity that the French version offers for elaboration is clearly seized upon with relish.
This applies most notably in the sections of description; of the garden, for example,
and of the miniatures.11 At a level of greater detail, some of the larger differences be-
tween the two versions would appear to be based on issues connected with language and,
more particularly, on the elaborate nature of its use by Abū Jadra: a lengthy passage of
Ṭāriq’s stream-of-consciousness in Algerian colloquial is omitted from the French, while

in the Arabic text: the English swear-word “shit” is rendered (in European characters) as “sheet”; Ara-
bic, 154; French, 272.
11. Arabic, 47 and 74–75; French, 100 and 145.
 Translation Translated 189

a detailed excursus on the Latin text of Sallust is excluded from the Arabic.12 In some
other instances, the differences between the two versions are harder to explain: the re-
sponse of a citizen of Gibraltar to Ṭāriq’s request for directions is in English in the Arabic
version, and in Spanish in the French; one of Ṭāriq’s patients make a rude remark to the
nurse in his clinic (“fit une remarque désobligeante”) in the French, where in the Arabic
he suggests that she’s about to become an Egyptian film star.13 And are we, one wonders,
supposed to read some element of cultural difference into the fact that, when Ṭāriq,
Shams al-Dīn, and Kamāl scrawl obscene anti-French remarks on the walls of the filthy
toilet in a bar, the Arabic version records the words of the slogans while the French text
appends to them a picture of a phallus.14
Each of these novelistic texts by Abū Jadra, Maʿrakat al-zuqāq and La prise de Gibraltar,
inserts itself into the narrative tradition of its language-culture, the Arabic and French.
The latter version, published in Paris, is available to a reading public that is cognizant
with the great tradition of the French novel, of Hugo, Balzac, Stendhal, and Zola. How-
ever, because of the provenance of its author, it also joins the repertoire of French novels
published by francophone Maghrebi writers, the very language of which proclaims the
period of colonial domination of the region by France and in particular the highly effec-
tive “gallicization” of the educational systems that the French were able to achieve in
those countries in the period before independence. The process of “arabizing” (taʿrīb)
those systems and, by extension, the cultural milieu as a whole has not been either rapid
or easy, a situation that seems to apply especially in Abū Jadra’s native Algeria. The com-
plexities that this interaction and confrontation of cultures and traditions has brought
about has, needless to say, provided a primary topic for a large number of Maghrebi writ-
ers of fiction, including such well-known names as Kateb Yacine, Mohammed Dib, Taher
Bel Jelloun (who won France’s most illustrious prize for fiction, the Prix Goncourt), Assia
Djebbar (whose novel L’amour, la fantasia [1985] traces the beginnings of the French colo-
nial occupation in the 1830s), and Abdelkabir Khatibi.
It is precisely the continued predominance of French as the language of cultural
discourse in the Maghreb that renders the situation of the Arabic version of Abū Jadra’s
novel, Maʿrakat al-zuqāq, more problematic. Abū Jadra and his Arabic-writing novelist col-
leagues in Algeria such as al-Ṭāhir Waṭṭār and al-Wāsīnī al-Aʿraj face problems of reader-
ship on both the local and wider levels. Within the context of the Arab world as a whole
one might hope that such efforts at retrieving the status of Arabic in the Algerian cul-
tural domain would meet with approval, if not direct support, but here the patterns of
colonialism seem to impinge once again. For, while Algerian novels in Arabic will certain-
ly be available to a readership within the Maghreb itself and, to a lesser extent, in other

12. Arabic, 77–80 and 103; French, 153 and 190–91.

13. Arabic, 114 and 32; French, 209 and 64.
14. Arabic, [21]; French, 38.
190 Chapter Fourteen

formerly French-dominated regions such as Lebanon and Syria, the ineffective system of
book distribution and—it must be admitted—the continuing prevalence of certain cul-
tural localisms conspire to render the Algerian novel in Arabic relatively unknown or un-
available in other regions of the Arab world. To these somewhat practical considerations
regarding the reception of Arabic novels from Algeria should be added the relationship of
the novel genre to the linguistic and narrative tradition of the Arab-Islamic heritage. The
novel is a relatively young genre in Arabic, particularly so in its manifestations within
the Maghreb region. In the earlier phases of its adoption into the Arabic literary milieu
it represented a clear turning away from the categories of narrative that had been in-
herited from the past, whether that be in the culturally acceptable form of anecdotes,
vignettes, and philosophical stories subsumed under the category of adab (with its at-
tendant notions of “polite letters”) or in the more widespread form of popular narratives
that, because of their “lower” linguistic level, were not considered part of the literary
canon at all (of which The Thousand and One Nights is the most illustrious among many
possible examples). However, as the novel genre has developed in the Arab world during
the course of the 20th century, it has come to participate in many of the intellectual de-
bates regarding both language and culture, and, as a direct consequence, contemporary
novelists are able to confront both linguistic variety and the heritage of the past in ever
more-creative ways. It is in this particular context that the case of the Maghrebi novel
becomes a fascinating participant in that process of change that is an intrinsic character-
istic of the novel genre as well as being its primary topic.
One of the Moroccan novelists whom we have already mentioned, Abdelkabir Khatibi
(who is also a prominent literary critic [d. 2009]), has discussed the problematic of novel
writing for himself and his Maghrebi colleagues in several works, and most notably in
Maghreb pluriel and Le roman maghrébin.15As he points out (and as I hope to have illustrat-
ed with reference to Abū Jadra’s novel discussed above), the topic of the post-revolution-
ary culture of the region and its individual nations is closely linked to the processes of
languages of the non-indigenous cultural systems for new, post-colonial purposes; while
that obviously implies French to a large degree, it needs to be recalled that, for the Ber-
ber speakers of the region (duly reflected in Abū Jadra’s novel by the identification with
the Berber hero, Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād), such a designation would also include Arabic.
For writers like Khatibi and Abū Jadra who are “bi-langue” the result of such creative
tensions is what he terms an “écriture métissé,” implying not merely a mixing of lan-
guage and cultural values but also a process of dismantling prevalent scenarios in order
to open up the possibility of creating new ones.
In this central realm of writing, placed between the cultures and literary traditions
of French and Arabic, metafiction—the process of incorporating references to the prob-

15. Abdelkabir Khatibi, Maghreb pluriel (Paris: Denoël, 1983); Khatibi, Le roman maghrébin: essai (Rabat:
Société Marocaine des Editeurs Réunis, 1979).
 Translation Translated 191

lematics of fiction writing and language into the work itself—and the exploitation of the
potential of intertextuality—a resort to the use of textual allusion and citation that, in
this case, is a fully conscious one become primary methods for a simultaneous recogni-
tion and confrontation with the two “master” cultural narratives between which the
novelist is operating. Characteristic of these works are references to points of grammar
and rhetoric, inclusion of passages that make use of regional dialects, and citation of
historical and religious texts.
The novel of Abū Jadra that has been the focus of this study clearly participates in the
exercise of “métissage,” at least in its French version which appears to join itself easily to
his French-language repertoire. In such a context, however, his decision to “change di-
rection” and to compose his works initially in Arabic (if that is indeed the case) becomes
especially interesting. For, while the Arabic versions of this and other novels are clearly
attempts to take Arabic fiction in new directions, they will need the attention of a much
wider readership if they are to achieve their desired impact. In the context of today’s
Arabic novel tradition, the voice of Rashīd Abū Jadra is startlingly, indeed sometimes
shockingly, original in its willingness to expose the often gruesome nature of familial and
political realities within his homeland through experiments with language and narrative
structure that are a “métissage” of his French and Arabic inspirations. What they need
and lack is a larger public to react to the challenges that they present.
 15
Fiction and Publics: The Emergence
of the “Arabic Bestseller”

While I was attending a conference on Arabic fiction in the Emirate of Sharjah in May
2008, a newspaper correspondent asked me during the course of an interview for my
opinion of a novel published relatively recently, namely, Banāt al-Riyāḍ by Rajāʿ al-Ṣāniʾ.1
Before answering the question, I asked him why he had singled out that particular work,
and he replied that he was one among many literary critics with a continuing interest in
trends in contemporary Arabic fiction who were perplexed as to why a novel written by
a twenty-three year old Saudi female dentist in the form of e-mail messages exchanged
between four girls living in the Saudi capital should have been deemed worthy of trans-
lation and publication in English (and by Penguin Books, no less). My response was to
the effect that this particular novel seemed to me to be symptomatic of what might be
termed the “lid-off” category of writing by Middle Eastern women, one that Western
publishers seem eager to snap up in order to cater to a market that is particularly inter-
ested in such apparent “insights” into what is widely viewed as a closed world. I went on
to point out two things: firstly that the novel had been roundly criticized by the British
press as a contribution to fiction;2 and secondly that this particular work seemed to me
to be part of a wider phenomenon in publishing, one that poses interesting challenges to
existing norms of evaluation, most particularly in the intercultural realm of translation
and its publication. I went on to suggest two other works which, in their different ways,
raise similar issues: Dhākirat al-jasad by the Algerian writer Ahlām Mustaghānimī, and

1. Rajāʾ al-Ṣāniʿ, Banāt al-Riyāḍ (Beirut: Dār al-Sāqī, 2006); English translation: Rajaa Alsanea, Girls of
Riyadh, tr. Marilyn Booth (London and New York: Penguin Books, 2007).
2. A convenient montage of such criticism can be found at: www. complete-review. com/reviews/
arab/alsanea.htm. In the context of the issues raised by this short article, particular attention needs to
be paid to the contents of the letter that Marilyn Booth, the novel’s translator, felt compelled to send
to the Times Literary Supplement (28 September 2007) concerning her role in the process leading to the
publication of the English version of the text.

193
194 Chapter Fifteen

ʿImārat Yaʿqūbiyān by the Egyptian writer (and also dentist!), ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī.3 It was only
one month after this conversation in Sharjah that Dr. Tetz Rooke of Goteborg University
used the same triad of novels in broaching the topic of what he termed “the Arabic best-
seller” in a paper presented at the conference of the European Meeting of Teachers of
Modern Arabic Literature (EURAMAL) in Uppsala, Sweden in June 2008.
Here then we find ourselves confronting a situation in which three novels from dif-
fering regions of the Arabic-speaking world have met decidedly mixed evaluative recep-
tions from their local critical communities, and yet, in spite of that, have sold unusually
large numbers of copies.4 Beyond that, their translated versions have also sold extremely
well in Western markets. In the paragraphs that follow, I would like to examine this situ-
ation in more detail. In so doing, space does not allow me to add further opinion to the
supply of evaluations that have already appeared. Instead I will consider some of the
implications of a situation in which general reading publics, and of both the original
and translated versions of these novels, seem in reaching evaluative conclusions to be
applying criteria that are considerably different from those of the community of critics,
whether functioning within the public domain or in the academic realm.
In a more theoretical approach to the issues involved, I am reminded that, at the
same Uppsala conference mentioned above, Dr. Stephan Guth (University of Oslo) drew
our attention to a new project on what he terms “Post-Postmodernism.”5 Within the

3. Ahlām Mustaghānimī, Dhākirat al-jasad (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1993); English translation: Ahlem Mo-
steghanemi, tr. Baria Ahmar Sreih, Memory in the Flesh (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2003);
ʿAlāʾ al-Aswānī, ʿImārat Yaʿqūbiyān (Cairo: Merit, 2002); English translation: Alaa el Aswani, The Yacoubian
Building tr. Humphrey Davies (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004). Mustaghānimī has writ-
ten two other novels, Fawḍā al-ḥawāss (Beirut: Dār al-Ādāb, 1998); English translation: Chaos of the Senses,
tr. Baria Ahmar Sreih (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press, 2004) and ʿĀbir sarīr ([“Bed-passer”]
Beirut: Manshūrāt Ahlām Mustaghānimī, 2003). Al-Aswānī has written Shīkāgū (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq,
2007); English translation: Chicago, tr. Farouk Abdel Wahab (Cairo: American University in Cairo Press,
2008). In what must be considered an exceptional gesture, al-Aswānī was the subject of an article in the
Sunday magazine section of the New York Times: Pankaj Mishra, “Where Alaa Al Aswany is writing from,”
New York Times Magazine (27 April 2008).
4. While, as I noted above, I am not concerned here with the evaluation of these novels, I need to
observe that, of these three “best-selling” novels, that of Mustaghānimī has received by far the most
positive reception from certain members of the community of critics, at least in discussions of its
content. See, for example, Aida Bamia, “Dhākirat al-Jasad (The Body’s Memory): A New Outlook on Old
Themes,” Research in African Literatures 28/3 (Fall 1997): 85–93; and Ellen McLarney, “Unlocking the Fe-
male in Aḥlām Mustaghānamī,” Journal of Arabic Literature 33/1 (2002): 24–44. Memory in the Flesh was the
winner of the Naguib Mahfouz Prize in Fiction in 1998 (awarded annually in December at the American
University in Cairo). However, I would suggest that, in spite of these plaudits, this novel has not earned
the respect of those critics concerned with the development of Arabic fictional genres, although I will
be the first to admit that such opinions as I have heard have not appeared in printed form, at least thus
far (Summer 2008).
5. A description of the project can be found at: www-conference.slu.se/euramal.
 Fiction and Publics 195

context of Arabic fiction, he notes “a ‘return’ to ‘traditional’, pre-(post)modernist modes

of writing (critical realism, simple chronologies, non-fragmentation, omniscient narra-
tors.” While, as I noted above, the three novelists whom I have identified come from
different regions of the Arabic-speaking world and adopt very different narrative ap-
proaches, they are united in their avoidance of that ambiguity, uncertainty, and stylistic
and generic complexity that is characteristic of much recent novelistic production in Ar-
abic, and at the hands of writers as varied as Ilyas Khūrī, Ibrāhīm Naṣrallāh, and Ibrāhīm
al-Kūnī (to provide just a few from among a large number of possible names). During
the 1980s the Egyptian novelist, Idwār al-Kharrāṭ, had identified another aspect to the
critical discussions of the nature of modernism, in his coinage of the term “al-ḥassāsiyya
al-jadīda” (new sensitivity) to describe recent trends in novel-writing, prime amongst
which were a resort to trans-generic writing and a deliberate stylistic complexity (offer-
ing several examples in his own fictional production). In such a context the three novels
discussed above do indeed seem to indicate “a return to the traditional” (to cite Guth’s
phrase), a turning away from the ambiguities and complexities of post-modernist fiction,
and, one might suggest, an abandonment of the “dialogic” approach to the role of narra-
tion and narrator in fiction (to invoke Mikhail Bakhtin’s famous terms) in favor of a more
“monologic” approach.6 While some of these novels may use the narrative to describe
the presence of more than one voice, the reader is invited to sit back and allow the nar-
rator to “tell” rather than to “show.”
Still within the more theoretical realm, a number of issues arise concerning the
translations of these novels, the reasons for their selection, and the translation process
itself. Here I find myself reminded of the famous article on translation method by the
German philosopher, Schleiermacher, where he posits only one of two possibilities:

Either the translator leaves the author in peace as much as possible and moves-
the reader towards him, or he leaves the reader in peace and moves the writer
towards him.7

Lawrence Venuti, the well-known scholar of translation, points out that a less than de-
sirable aspect of current trends in economic “globalization” is that, within the world of
language-usage, there is an increasing tendency towards monolingualism in a number of
social and cultural sectors and that, in the world of translation, it leads to what he terms a
“domesticating” approach, most especially in the anglophone publication world—clearly
a reflection of the second of Schleiermacher’s two possibilities. That process of “leaving
the reader in peace” certainly would appear to be the case—albeit to different degrees—

6. See Mikhail Bakhtin, The Dialogic Imagination, ed. Michael Holquist (Austin, Texas: University of
Texas Press, 1981).
7. Quoted in The Translation Studies Reader, ed. Lawrence Venuti (London & New York: Routledge,
2004), 49.
196 Chapter Fifteen

with these three Arabic novels, particularly so in the case of Girls of Riyadh because, as
Marilyn Booth, the would-be translator of the work into English, notes in her letter of
protest to the Times Literary Supplement (see note 2 above),

the resulting text, with its clichéd language, erasures of Arabic idioms I had trans-
lated, and unnecessary footnotes, does not reflect the care that I took to pro-
duce a lively, idiomatic translation conveying the novel’s tone and language …”

On a more practical level but still within this same context of translation and its recep-
tion, a point that is frequently mentioned is that the kind of writing reflected in these
novels is “courageous,” in that the novelists take on a number of pressing social and
political issues and write about them within societies where the existence and applica-
tion of the concept of “freedom of expression” is at best ambiguous and subject to a
number of generally unfavorable local pressures. It is, of course, this very aspect that ini-
tially draws the attention of Western publishers (and their implied readerships) to these
works. Whether we are talking about Mustaghānimī’s Algeria, al-Aswānī’s Egypt, or al-
Ṣāniʿ’s Saudi Arabia and whether the topic is politics, corruption, or sex, these works find
a ready readership for what they purport to reveal in fictional form. Even though such
novels in translation are entitled to the privileges of fiction and ironic reading, they are
clearly read all too often as “exposés.” One wonders, for example, how many readers of
Girls of Riyadh have also read or will be persuaded to read the works of Ḥanān al-Shaykh,
Hudā Barakāt, Saḥar Khalīfa, Radwā ʿĀshūr, or Laylā Abū Zayd, to name just a few other
female novelists from across the region. All of which again raises the issues of esthetic
principles, who is to apply them, and on what basis.…
These three novels then have found their publics in a world in which globalization
is increasingly monolingual, the visual is tending to supplant the (printed) textual, and
translations demand domestication, in all cases involving the English language and the
cultural and intellectual norms of its readerships. Schleiermacher’s clear preference for
“foreignization” of translations clearly encounters considerable difficulties when publi-
cation decisions are based primarily on marketing (i.e., economic) factors that are found-
ed on the above “norms.” In the realm of Arabic fiction, its translation and study, I have
for some time been suggesting that, just as history needs constantly to be rewritten (as
Oscar Wilde reminds us), so does that subset of it that is literary history.8 My emphasis
thus far has been on the beginnings of the tradition in the 19th century, but the examples
represented by these three novels clearly demand, as Stephan Guth’s project and Tetz
Rooke’s essay suggest, another look at the parameters whereby more recent trends are to
be evaluated and integrated into an updated history of Arabic fictional genres.

8. See Roger Allen, “Literary History and the Arabic Novel,” World Literature Today (Spring 2001):
205–13, and Allen, “Rewriting Literary History: The Case of the Arabic Novel,” Festschrift for Jaroslav
Stetkevych = Journal of Arabic Literature 38/3 (2007): 247–60.
 16
Translation and Culture: Theory and Practice

In the context of a discussion of translation theory and practice, I have participated in

the processes involved in a number of different ways. I have translated works of mod-
ern Arabic literature, mostly in narrative form, by writers who include Muḥammad al-
Muwayliḥī, Naguib Mahfouz, Yūsuf Idrīs, ʿAbd al-Rahman Munif, Zakariyya Tamir, Mayy
Telmissany, Bensalem Himmich, and Ahmad al-Tawfiq. With Arab colleagues, I have co-
operated on the translation of the fiction of other authors, including Jabra Ibrahim Jabra,
Naguib Mahfouz,1 and Halim Barakat. I have participated in projects aimed at translating
a number of different kinds of work into one or more Western languages: the PROTA proj-
ect, for example, directed by Salma Jayyusi, which has published numerous anthologies
and individual works; and the “Mémoires de la Mediterranée” (Dhākirāt al-Mutawassiṭ)
project, which devoted its attention to memoirs by Arab authors. At my own university,
I have taught doctoral students literary translation in theory and practice. I have also
edited special issues of several journals devoted to either translated texts or to discussion
of the translation process itself.2

Terminology

The Arabic dictionary seems to be of two minds when it comes to the origins of the
word tarjama. Is the tāʾ part of the root of the word, or is it actually a derivative of R-J-M?
Whatever the origins of the word, what is clear is that the basic meaning refers to the
process from a point of view different from that of European terms, of which the English
is translation. Tarjama implies “interpretation.” In the context of a particular work that is
proposed for transfer across cultural and linguistic boundaries, the term refers to the ac-
tion of dealing with words, with text. At least by implication, the English term translation,
with its combination of trans- (meaning “across”) and -lation (or “carrying”) is equally

1. Notably God’s World (1973), the anthology of short stories in English mentioned in the Nobel cita-
tion in 1988.
2. Including Nimrod 24/2 (1981), Translation 9 (1983), and Translation Review 65 (2003).

197
198 Chapter Sixteen

concerned about the direction in which the project is heading. In the context of any dis-
cussion of the role and place of culture, of course, it is this process of carrying something
across a cultural divide that is a crucial element in the success of any translated work.
In fact, within such a context the use of the Arabic verb naqala in this sense comes much
closer to the implications of the English terms.
In analyzing this intermediate space between two texts and two cultures, translation
theory chooses to identify a “source text” and its “source culture,” a “target text” and its
“target culture,” and in between the two an “inter-text” phase within which the com-
plexities of cultural transfer and the specific problems of translation from one particular
language and culture to another are to be explored and, to the extent possible, resolved.
In this article, I explore aspects of each of these three entities and examine the ways in
which the translation of works, mostly fictional, from Arabic to English, illustrates some
of the significant issues involved.

Source Text and Culture

The first question that needs to be posed is, of course, what exactly is the source text? Ex-
pressed slightly differently, who chooses the text and on what grounds? For many years,
the process of selection within the context of Arabic literature and its transfer to other
cultural environments was done primarily by the translator, mostly with little or no con-
tact with the author. Increased contact between Western specialists and Arab authors
has transformed this situation; the process has been much aided both by the improve-
ment of language skills among Western specialists in Arabic literature and by the willing-
ness of many Arab nations—with Egypt at the top of the list—to serve as hosts to visiting
scholars and translators.3 Literary prizes have also had a major impact on the selection
process. The most obvious example of this is, of course, the case of Naguib Mahfouz re-
ceiving the Nobel Prize in 1988. For the first time, an Arab author was able to hold con-
sultations with a publishing house in order to maintain control over which works were
to be translated into any of the world’s languages and what was to be preferred order of
texts selected for translation. The processes involved have been discussed in many plac-
es, most recently by William Hutchins, who translated Mahfouz’s renowned Trilogy into
English.4 The Naguib Mahfouz prize, awarded by a committee appointed by the Ameri-
can University in Cairo Press, has also played a role in establishing linkages between the
author, the translator, and the publisher at an early stage in the publication process.
Similarly, the Arabic translation award of the University of Arkansas requires translators

3. I discuss many of the issues involved in a paper presented at the first Cairo Novel Conference and
since published as “Al-Maʿrakah fi al-sūq: makānat al-riwāya al-ʿArabiyya fi al-siyāq al-ʿālamī,” Fuṣūl
16/3 (Winter 1997): 15–21.
4. William M. Hutchins, “Translating Arabic: A Personal Note,” Translation Review 65 (2003), 7–15.
 Translation and Culture 199

to obtain the author’s permission before submitting their manuscripts for evaluation.
The “Mémoires de la Mediterranée” European translation project went beyond these
principles by inviting me to be present at a conference at which all the translators (who
were translating the works into no less than six Western languages) were present. The
result was in most cases an interesting exercise in face-to-face interaction that, in my
opinion, should form the basis of any future projects in the domain of literary translation
from Arabic to other languages. However, in spite of the many advantages of the process,
not everyone was satisfied with the results. Yet another prize for translation is the one
awarded annually by the British newspaper The Independent. In this case, already pub-
lished English translations are evaluated for the prize for best foreign novel translated
and published in England in any particular year. In 1999, I was involved in translating
Mayy Telmissany’s short novel, Dunyazād, a work that was selected for translation by a
number of European colleagues.5 When the English version was published, it received a
number of good reviews. However, one reviewer, an Arab poet and scholar named Mohja
Kahf, had this to say about the selection process itself, which is the subject of my current
concern here: “To translate such an uneven work is a misuse of translation resources that
tries the patience of those who seek fine Arabic literature in English translation … In the
meantime, translators of Arabic fiction ought to find more substantial texts to publish.”6
A few months after this review was published, I received notice (as did Mayy in Canada)
that the English version of Dunyazād had been selected by a jury as one of the five
outstanding foreign novels published in England in the year 2000. Here is what one of
jurors had to say about the novel:

In fact, I read this short text in a single sitting and found it overwhelming. It
is beautifully understated, harrowing in its restraint. What is not said burns
the page. The dead child haunts the scenes, her absence shapes what is there.
Her fading is necessary to the narrator’s recovery. The book is also about Egyp-
tian culture in transition, the tensions in a society pulled between tradition
and modernity. Dunyazad is written on the cusp of fiction and autobiography
and draws strength from the best of both modes of writing. I hate sentimental,
ingratiating confessional books, but this text has the contours of austerity, and
is stronger for its refusal to indulge in cheap emotions.7

We must assume, of course, that there will be differing opinions about literary works and
their value, but it is in the context of the selection of works for translation that the wide
gap illustrated by these two opinions becomes interesting.

5. Mayy Tilmisani (Telmissany), Dunyazād (Cairo: Dār al-Shurūq, 1997).

6. Mohja Kahf, Review of Dunyazad (see note 3 above), World Literature Today 76/1 (Winter 2002): 227.
7. Patricia Duncker, “Very Foreign Parts,” Planet (April 2001): 90–93.
200 Chapter Sixteen

Target Text and Culture

The history of translations from Arabic into English suggests that the introduction of the
translated text into the target culture is a crucially important phase in the total process,
one in which original intentions can be lost in a clash of motivations. The most enduring
example of this is the famous history of European versions of the popular narrative col-
lection, The Thousand and One Nights, in which Richard Burton’s absurdly erotic additions
to the source text succeeded in opening up whole vistas of suggestion in the English
readers’ imaginaire. Once Burton’s version and even the expurgated translation of his
contemporary, Edward Lane, have been read, the actual Arabic text published in 1984 by
Muhsin Mahdi (and translated into English by Husain Haddawy), comes as something of
a shock.8 In the more modern context, it is now rare for the actual content of a text to be
subject to the kind of variation (implying both addition and omission) that characterizes
the translations of The Thousand and One Nights. However, I would immediately add that,
in my previous study on translation for the first Cairo Conference on the novel, I chose
the word “market” very deliberately. The logic of Western publishing is now driven very
much by marketing considerations, and that reality has an impact in such areas as choice
of title and design of the cover (including illustrations—the use of Maydān Sulaymān
Pāshā/Ṭalʿat Ḥarb on the cover of Sugar Street, the English translation of Mahfouz’s Al-
Sukkariyya, for example). That said, however, it should be noted that Naguib Mahfouz has
often commented on his lack of involvement in the choice of title for his short story col-
lections and once wondered to himself in my presence as to when one of his books would
be published without a woman’s picture on the cover.
The science of marketing is, of course, very concerned with the identifications of
readerships and publics, and with the analysis of their tastes and expectations. It is here,
of course, that the issues connected with “cultural interaction” become extremely im-
portant, I can ask the question, as I have done elsewhere, as to what a Western reader
who has learned to appreciate the almost universal theme and technique of Mahfouz’s
Trilogy in its English version is supposed to make of Echoes of an Autobiography, the English
version of Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya. Or, to cite another example, what is the reader who has
enjoyed the desert environment of ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf ’s Al-Tīh, the first volume of
the quintet Mudun al-milḥ (Cities of Salt), supposed to make Ibrahim al-Kūnī’s ʿUshb al-layl
(“Night Plant”) let alone his continuing series of ḥikam.9 It is precisely at this point that
the “interactive” part of the translation process becomes crucial, since we are discussing
the elements of cultural similarity and difference and the critical principles involved in

8. Muhsin Mahdi (ed), Alf Laylah wa-laylah (Leiden: E. J. Brill,1984). Translated by Husain Haddawy
(New York: W.W. Norton, 1990).
9. Such as Ibrāhīm al-Kūnī, Amthāl al-zamān (Beirut: Dār al-Nahār 1999). [Cf. Ibrahim al-Koni, A Sleep-
less Eye: Aphorisms from the Desert, tr. Roger Allen (Syracuse University Press, 2014).]
 Translation and Culture 201

the evaluation of the products of the “cultural other.” How far is any foreign readership
prepared to confront, negotiate with, and even enjoy difference when it comes to read-
ing literary texts? In the English-speaking world, why is it that certain cultures, those
of East Asia, for example, seems more attractive in this context than others (such as the
Arab world). There is little research to help us answer these questions, but what seems
reasonably clear is that the answers involve cultural attitudes that extend back far into
the past and also find a more recent motivation in the colonial adventures of the 18th
and 19th centuries.
It is in the area of identification of the most appropriate ways to bring about the
importation of the “source culture” into the “target culture” that the element of “in-
tercultural cooperation” can be and needs to be most effective. While the awarding of
the Nobel Prize to Naguib Mahfouz has certainly opened doors (in the world of literary
anthologies and encyclopedias, for example, the “Mahfouzian moment” for Egyptian and
Arabic literature is now merely a memory. New initiatives are urgently needed if Arabic
literature is to gain its rightful place as part of the community of readers of world litera-
ture.

Intertext

Finally, we examine the most complicated phase in the translation process, the one that
lies in between the source and target cultures and in which the translator attempts the
impossible (as al-Jāḥiẓ observed many centuries ago regarding the translation of poetry):
to find equivalent meanings in one language for the words and styles of the original text
and gradually transfer them from one cultural environment to another.
As noted in a footnote above, it is possible to translate either on one’s own or with
a colleague, or with a group of colleagues. In those processes, the question may arise as
to how many versions of the text there should be before it is decided that the target is
ready to be introduced to its target culture. In such a context, Robert Bly seems to be at
the high end by suggesting, with regard to poetry, that eight stages are involved. 10
Within a more theoretical framework, one can ask what principles should be applied
as part of the translation process. A first issue might involve an assessment of the textual
features and contents of the original text. The larger question is how many features of
the original should be transferred to the target text. We can cite some examples here.
One is the use of phrases that invoke the name of God as an intrinsic part of everyday
life in the Arab and Islamic world: the phrases in-shāʾa-llāh, mā-shāʾ-llah, and aʿūdhu billāh
are all regularly used by speakers of Arabic in works of literature. The problem is not so
much one of translating them into English but rather of avoiding an almost automatic

10. Robert Bly, The Eight Stages of Translation (Boston: Rowan Tree Press, 1983).
202 Chapter Sixteen

process whereby the use of such phrases in English conveys to the reader of English
translations a kind of “Arabian Nights” flavor, since most of the translators of that great
collection of stories (and the producers of atrocious Hollywood films that imitate their
use of language) used such phrases in order to “exoticize” their English texts. It is this
aspect that is, as is well known, exploited by al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ in his great novel, Mawsim
al-hijra ilā al-shamāl (Season of Migration to the North). Trevor Le Gassick faced this issue in
his translation of Mahfouz’s Zuqāq al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley), the earliest English translation
of a Mahfouz work to be published. Not wishing in 1966 to convey an “Arabian Nights”
aspect to a translation of a modern Egyptian novel, he omitted many of these phrases
(although in later editions he reinserted many of them). I have mentioned elsewhere the
question of street names in the Trilogy and especially in the titles. Why do English readers
who can say Champ Elysées to describe Paris street not also learn to say Qaṣr al-shawq (Pal-
ace of Desire) for a street in Cairo? Beyond this there are questions relating to the inclusion
or exclusion of descriptions of local customs. The English version of Hanan al-Shaykh’s
Ḥikayat Zahra (The Story of Zahra), for example, leaves out large segments of the original
text that discuss Lebanese traditions; indeed, the process of publishing an English edi-
tion of some of her works has led to a further decision to make the same revisions to the
original Arabic text. 11
The way in which translated works of fiction introduce their readers to the unfa-
miliar, the different, even the exotic presents the translator and publisher with a series
of questions concerning information. Should there be a foreword, for example, that at-
tempts to introduce the reader to the world of the work in question, or should the reader
confront the difference without any preliminaries? Should the text include footnotes?
In preparing my translation of Bensalem Himmich’s Al-ʿAllāma (The Polymath), I found
it necessary to consult a wide variety of scholarly sources in order to find out about the
battles, sultans, tribes, and buildings in both Cairo and Damascus that were described
in considerable detail in the novel. When the amount of unfamiliar reference reaches a
certain level, is it not part of the translator’s task to provide the reader with information?
One solution to this problem, the one adopted in the translation of Mahfouz’s Trilogy for
example, is to insert a kind of footnote or explanation into the text itself, as for example
when a street-name is translated as “Shariʿ al-Nahhasin or Coppersmith’s Street.”
It is in this central space between the two cultures, the source and the target, that the
element of cultural interaction is primarily negotiated and implemented. While a pro-
cess of “transfer” is definitely involved there is also a powerful process of cultural blend-
ing for which the French have coined the term métissage. The term is more concerned
with the cultural dimension than with the purely linguistic aspects of textual transfer,
and it has been applied in particular to the works of creative writers in the Maghrib. One
of the most fascinating examples of this phenomenon is the Algerian novelist and poet

11. Personal communication from the author.

 Translation and Culture 203

Rachid Boudjedra (Rashīd Abū Jadra), whose novels have appeared in both French and
Arabic. He began his career by publishing his works in French, but in 1981 he announced
that he would henceforth write in Arabic. His novel Maʿrakat al-zuqāq (“Struggle in the
Straits”), for example, was published in Arabic in 1986 and a French “translation,” La prise
de Gibraltar (“The Capture of Gibraltar”) by Antoine Moussali (“with the author’s collabo-
ration”) in 1987. A close examination of both works shows a text that, while published
initially in Arabic, is very heavily influenced by the style of the French nouveau roman
and particularly the work of Claude Simon. In fact, it is even questionable as to whether
the French version is actually a “translation” of the Arabic: a large number of pages and
individual references from each of the two texts are not to be found in the other version.
As I have suggested elsewhere with reference to this text and other fictional works of Abū
Jadra, he seems to compose his novels in that central space between cultures where the
translational intertext operates.12 While they may be situated spatially in him homeland,
the style and cultural reference invoke a process of métissage, which has to be adapted
before each text can be introduced into its target culture.

Conclusion

It is within this central space that two cultures come together and negotiate the process
whereby one text will become another. It goes without saying, therefore, that if we ex-
clude those few fortunate people who are bicultural or multicultural by birth or lifestyle,
it is in this central space that the opportunities for greater cooperation between creative
writers of literature, specialists in Arabic literature, translators, and cultural adminis-
trators become not only possible but necessary. While the consequences of awarding
the Nobel Prize to Mahfouz may not have been quite as spectacular as many may have
wished, there are opportunities open now that were not available just a few years ago.
I would urge upon those who have any concern for the presence and expansion of an
awareness of Arab cultural values within the societies of the Western world the need to
expand upon existing contacts between us and to embark upon an ambitious plan so that
the largely unknown riches of Arabic literature, both contemporary and pre-modern,
may become more widely known to readers worldwide. Translation always has been and
remains one of the major avenues through which such contacts may be established.

12. Roger Allen, “Translation Translated: Rašīd Abū Ǧadra’s Maʿrakat al-Zuqāq,” Oriente moderno 16/2–
3 (1997): 165–76 [reprinted as chapter 14 in this volume].
 Bibliography of Articles by Roger Allen
on Modern Arabic Narrative

(Articles that appear in this volume are preceded by an *)

“‘Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām’: The Excluded Passages,” Die Welt des Islams N.S. 12 (1969): 74–89
and 163–81.
“Writings of Members of ‘the Nazli Circle,’” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt
8 (1969–1970): 79–84.
“Hadith ʿIsa ibn Hisham by Muhammad al Muwailihī: A Reconsideration,” Journal of Arabic
Literature 1 (1970): 88–108.
“Najib Mahfuz, and His World of Literature,” Arab World (Sept.-Oct. 1970): 7–14; (Nov.-Dec.
1970): 9–10.
“Mahfuz’ ‘Mirrors,’” American Research Center in Egypt Newsletter 79 (Oct. 1971): 9–14.
“‘Mirrors’ by Najīb Maḥfūẓ,” Muslim World 62/2 (April 1972): 115–25; 63/1 (January 1973):
15–27 = “‘Marāyā li-Najīb Maḥfūẓ,” Fuṣūl 16/3 (Winter 1997): 236–51.
A Study of Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām: Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s View of Egyptian Society during
the British Occupation, with an English Translation. Albany: State University of New
York Press, 1974.
“Some New al-Muwayliḥī Materials, or The Unpublished Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām,”
Humaniora Islamica 2 (1974): 139–80.
“Poetry and Poetic Criticism at the Turn of the Century,” in Studies in Modern Arabic Litera-
ture, ed. R. C. Ostle, 7–17. Warminster: Aris & Phillips, 1975.
“A Study of ‘Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham’: Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s View of Egyptian soci-
ety during the British occupation,” Etudes arabes et islamiques: actes du XXIXè Congrès
international des orientalistes. Vol. 1, Histoire et civilisations, 20–22. Paris: l’Asiatique,
1975.
“Some Recent Works of Najib Mahfuz,” Journal of the American Research Center in Egypt 14
(1977): 101–10.
“Contemporary Egyptian Literature,” Middle East Journal 35/1 (Winter 1981): 25–39.
“The Artistry of Yusuf Idris,” World Literature Today 55/1 (Winter 1981): 43–47.
“Beginning and Ending: Aspects of Technique in the Modern Arabic Short Story,” World
Literature Today 60/2 (Spring 1986): 199–206.

205
206 Bibliography of Articles by Roger Allen

*“The Novella in Arabic: A Study in Fictional Genres,” International Journal of Middle East
Studies 18/4 (November 1986): 473–84.
“Nationalism and Arabic Literature,” in Essays on Nationalism and Asian Literatures, Leonard
P. Alishan et al. Austin, Texas, Department of Oriental and African Languages and
Literatures, University of Texas, 1987 = special issue of Literature East and West 23
(1987): 127–43.
“Arabic Literature and the Nobel Prize,” World Literature Today 62/2 (Spring 1988): 201–3.
“Incorporating the Other,” The World and I 3/2 (Feb. 1989): 378–87.
“Old Age in Arabic Literature,” in Perceptions of Aging in Literature: A Cross-Cultural Study, ed.
Prisca von Dorotka Bagnell and Patricia Spencer Soper, 113–30 (including 17r “An
Old Photograph” (by Najib Mahfuz): 118–26). New York, Greenwood Press, 1989.
“Najib Mahfuz: Nobel Laureate in Literature, 1988,” World Literature Today 63/1 (Winter
1989): 5–9.
“The Nineteen Eighty-Eight Nobel Prize in Literature, Najib Mahfouz,” in Dictionary of Liter-
ary Biography: Yearbook 1988, ed. J. M. Brook, 3–12. Detroit, Gale Research Inc., 1989.
“Al-Tajdīd fi tarjamat al-adab al-ʿArabī,” Al-ʿArabī 365 (April 1989): 33–34.
(with Michael Hillman) “Arabic Literature in English Translation,” in Critical Pilgrimages:
Studies in the Arabic Literary Tradition, ed. Fedwa Malti-Douglas, 104–16. Austin, Uni-
versity of Texas, 1989 = Literature East and West 25 (1989): 104–16.
“The Beginnings of the Arabic Novel,” in Modern Arabic Literature, The Cambridge History of
Arabic Literature, vol. 5, ed. M. M. Badawi, 180–92. Cambridge University Press, 1992.
“The Mature Arabic Novel Outside Egypt,” in Modern Arabic Literature, The Cambridge History
of Arabic Literature, vol. 5, ed. M. M. Badawi, 193–222. Cambridge University Press,
1992.
“Najib Mahfuz in World Literature,” in The Arabic Novel Since 1950: Critical Essays, Interviews
and Bibliography, ed. Issa J. Boullata, 121–42. Cambridge, MA: Dar Mahjar Publishing
and Distribution, 1992 = Mundus Arabicus 5: 121–42.
“Narrative Genres and Nomenclature: A Comparative Study,” Journal of Arabic Literature
23.3 (November 1992): 208–14.
“Naguib Mahfouz and the Nobel Prize: The Historical Context,” in Naguib Mahfouz from Re-
gional Fame to Global Recognition, ed. Adnan Haydar and Michael Beard, 28–36. Syra-
cuse, NY: Syracuse University Press, 1993.
*“The Impact of the Translated Text: The Case of Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Novels, with Special
Emphasis on The Trilogy,” Edebiyât N.S. 4/1 (1993): 87–117.
“Yusuf Idris’s Short Stories: Themes and Techniques,” in Critical Perspectives on Yusuf Idris,
ed. Roger Allen, 15–30. Washington, D.C., Three Continents Press, 1994.
*“Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom,” Journal of Arabic Literature 26/1 and 2 (March–
June 1995) (Festschrift for M. M. Badawi): 37–49.
*“The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women,” in Love and Sexuality in Modern Arabic
Literature, ed. Roger Allen, Hilary Kilpatrick and Ed de Moor, 77–90. London: Saqi,
1995.
 Bibliography of Articles by Roger Allen 207

“Jabrā Ibrāhīm Jabrā: al-fann al-riwāʾī wa-fann al-tarjama,” in Al-Qalaq wa-tajdīd al-ḥayāh
(Festschrift for Jabra Ibrahim Jabra), ed. Fayṣal Darrāj and ʿAbd al-Raḥmān Munīf,
58–63. Beirut: al- Muʾassasa al-ʿArabiyya, 1995 = “The Novels of Jabra and the Art of
Translation,” Jusoor 7/8 (1996): 91–101.
“A Different Voice: The Novels of Ibrahim al-Kawni,” in Tradition and Modernity in Arabic
Literature (Memorial volume for Mounah Khouri), ed. Issa J. Boullata and Terri
DeYoung, 151–59. Fayetteville, University of Arkansas Press, 1997.
*“The Development of Fictional Genres: The Novel and Short Story in Arabic,” in Human-
ism, Culture, and Language in the Near East: Studies in Honor of George Krotkoff, ed. Asma
Afsaruddin and A. H. Mathias Zahniser, 105–18. Winona Lake, IN: Eisenbrauns, 1997.
“Fikrat al-ʿuṣūr al-wusṭā wa-ishkāliyyāt kitābat tārīkh al-adab,” in Fī Miḥrab al-maʿrifa:
dirāsāt muhdāh ilā Iḥsān ʿAbbās, ed. Ibrāhīm al-Saʿāfīn, 167–73. Beirut, Dar al-Ṣādir,
Dār al-Gharb al-Islāmī, 1997.
“Hadith ‘Isa ibn Hisham by al-Muwaylihi: Thirty Years Later,” in Dirāsāt ʿArabiyya wa-
Islāmiyya muhdāh ilā al-Duktūr Marsden Jones, ed. Thabit Abdullah et al., 117–24.
American University in Cairo Press, 1997.
“Maʿrakat al-sūq: al-makānat al-ʿālamiyya lil-riwāya al-ʿarabiyya,” Fuṣūl 16/3 (Winter
1997): 15–21.
*“Translation Translated: Rashid Abu Jadrah’s Maʿrakat al-Zuqaq,” Oriente Moderno 16 (77)
(1998): 165–76.
*“Autobiography and Memory: Maḥfūẓ’s Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya,” in Writing the Self: Au-
tobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor and
Stefan Wild, 207–16. London, Saqi Books, 1998.
*“Sindbad the Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel,” in Tradition, Modernity, and Post-Modernity
in Arabic Literature: Essays in Honor of Professor Issa J. Boullata, ed. Kamal Abdel-Malek
and Wael Hallaq. 78–85. Leiden: Brill, 1999.
“‘The Best of Stories’: Three Versions of the Joseph Narrative,” in The Balance of Truth: Es-
says in honour of Professor Geoffrey Lewis, ed. Çigdem Balım-Harding and Colin Imber,
23–34. Istanbul, Isis Press, 2000.
“The Struggle in the Marketplace: The Global Status of the Arabic Novel,” in La Traducción
de la literatura árabe contemporánea: antes y después de Naguib Mahfuz, 95–105. Toledo:
Escuela de Traductores, 2000.
“Arabic Literature at the Cusp of the 21st Century,” in Remembering for Tomorrow, 5–10.
Toledo: European Cultural Foundation and Escuela de Traductores de Toledo, 2000.
“Muḥammad al-Muwayliḥī’s Côterie: The Context of Ḥadīth ʿIsā ibn Hishām,” in Literary
Innovation in Modern Arabic Literature: Schools and Journals = special issue of Quaderni
di studi arabi 18 (2000): 51–60.
“The Status of Modern Arabic Literature Studies: The Anglophone Scenario,” Awraq: Estu-
dios sobre el Mundo Arabe y Islámico Contemporáneo 21 (2000): 133–51.
“Literary History and the Arabic Novel,” World Literature Today 75/2 (Spring 2001): 205–13
= “al-ʿArabiyya wa-l-riwāyāt,” Akhbār al-adab [Cairo] 410 (20 May, 2001): 34–35.
208 Bibliography of Articles by Roger Allen

*“ʿUrs al-Zayn lil-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: al-turāth wa-l-taḥawwul,” in Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: Dirāsāt naqdi-
yya (volume in honor of al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s 70th birthday), ed. Ḥasan Abshar al-
Ṭayyib, 233–41. Beirut: Riyāḍ al-Rayyis lil-Kutub wa-l-Nashr, 2001.
“Yumkin iʿtibāruhā naṣṣan athariyyan: al-Thulāthiyya al-mithāl al-akthar ṣafāʾan lil-
riwāya allati taʿkisu al-taghayyur wa-tudāfiʿ ʿanhu,” tr. Yasir Shaʿban, Akhbār al-
adab 438 (2 Dec. 2001): 33.
*“The Autobiography of Yūsuf Idrīs?” in Autobiografía y literatura árabe, ed. Miguel Her-
nando de Larramendi, Gonzalo Fernández Parrilla, Bárbara Azaola Piazza, 279–88.
Collección Escuela de Traductores de Toledo no. 11. Cuenca: Ediciones de la Univer-
sidad de Castilla-La Mancha, 2002.
“Translating Arabic Literature,” Translation Review 65 (2003): 1–5
“Al-dirāsāt al-gharbiyya lil-adab al-ʿArabī” and “Three Maqāmāt” (Western Studies on
Arabic Literature), in Conference on Orientalism: Dialogue of Cultures, ed. Sami A. Kha-
sawnih, 156–66, and 10, 204–5. Amman, University of Jordan, 2004.
*“Translation and Culture: Theory and Practice,” Shuʾūn Ijtimāʿiyyah: Journal of Social Affairs
21/83 (Fall 2004): 13–23.
*“Intertextuality and Arabic Fiction After 1967,” in Intertextuality in Modern Arabic Litera-
ture Since 1967, ed. Luc Deheuvels, Barbara Michalak-Pikulska Deheuvels and Paul
Starkey, 1–12. Durham: Durham Modern Language Series, University of Durham,
2006.
“al-Taṭbīq wal-naẓariyya bayn al-thaqāfa wal-tarjama” in al-Tarjama wa- tafaʿul al-thaqāfa,
343–59. Cairo: al-Majlis al-Aʿlā lil-Thaqāfa, 2006.
“Lords of Misrule: History and Fiction in Two Moroccan Novels,” Middle Eastern Literatures
9/2 (August 2006): 199–209.
“Cairo (The Cairo Trilogy, Naguib Mahfouz, 1956–1957),” in The Novel. Vol. 2, Forms and
Themes, ed. Franco Moretti, 706–13. Princeton University Press, 2006.
“Arabic, Flavor of the Moment: Whence, Why and How?,” Modern Language Journal 91/2
(Summer 2007): 258–61.
*“Historiography as Novel: BenSalim Himmich’s ‘Al-ʿAllāmah,’” in Transforming Loss into
Beauty”: Essays on Arabic Literature and Culture in Memory of Magda Al-Nowaihi, ed.
Marlé Hammond and Dana Sajdi, 269–80. American University in Cairo Press, 2008.
“Rewriting Literary History: The Case of the Arabic Novel,” Journal of Arabic Literature 38/3
(2008): 247–60.
*“Arabic Literature Studies: A Retrospect,” Recherche littéraire/Literary Research 25 (Sum-
mer 2009): 5–16.
“Rewriting Literary History: The Case of the Arabic Novel,” in Arabic Literary Thresholds:
Sites of Rhetorical Turn in Contemporary Scholarship, ed. Muhsin J. al-Musawi, 1–16.
Leiden, Brill, 2009.
*“Fiction and Publics: The Emergence of the ‘Arabic Best-seller,’” in Viewpoints Special Edi-
tion: The State of the Arts in the Middle East, 8–12. Washington D.C.: Middle East Insti-
tute, 2009.
 Bibliography of Articles by Roger Allen 209

“The Works of Ibrāhīm al-Muwayliḥī (1844–1906).” Middle Eastern Literatures 13/2 (August
2010): 131–39.
“The Happy Traitor: Tales of Translation.” Comparative Literature Studies 47/4 (2010): 472–
86.
“Rewriting Literary History: The Case of Moroccan Fiction in Arabic.” Journal of North Afri-
can Studies 16/3 (2011): 311–24.
*“Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā: A History and Interpretation,” in From New Values to
New Aesthetics: Turning Points in Modern Arabic Literature. Vol. 1, From Modernism to the
1980s, ed. Gail Ramsay and Stephan Guth, 33–58. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011.
“Arabic and Translation: Key Moments in Trans-Cultural Connection,” in Translation in a
Global Context: A Companion to Translation Studies, ed. Sandra Berman and Catherine
Porter, 191–203. Oxford: John Wiley & Sons, 2014.
“The ‘Second journey’ (Al-Rihla al-thaniya) of Muhammad al-Muwaylihi’s Ḥadith ʿIsa
Ibn Hisham Revisited,’ in Studying Modern Arabic Literature: Mustafa Badawi, Scholar,
Critic, ed. Roger Allen and Robin Ostle, 102–17. Edinburgh University Press, 2015.
“Translating Arabic Fiction,” Journal of Arabic Literature 36/2–3 (2015): 157–67.
“The Arabic Novel and History,” in The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, ed.
Waïl S. Hassan, 49–66. Oxford University Press, 2017.
“Egypt until 1959,” in The Oxford Handbook of Arab Novelistic Traditions, ed. Waïl S. Hassan,
185–20. Oxford University Press, 2017.
 Permissions

1. “Arabic Literature Studies: A Retrospect”: from Recherche littéraire/Literary Research

25 (Summer 2009): 5–16.
2. “The Development of Fictional Genres: The Novel and Short Story in Arabic”: from
Humanism, Culture, and Language in the Near East: Studies in Honor of George Krotkoff,
ed. Asma Afsaruddin and A. H. Mathias Zahniser, 105–18. Winona Lake, IN: Eisen-
brauns, 1997.
3. “Sindbad the Sailor and the Early Arabic Novel”: from Tradition, Modernity, and Post-
Modernity in Arabic Literature [Festschrift for Issa Boullata], ed. Terri DeYoung and
Wael Hallaq, 78–85. Leiden: E. J. Brill, 2000.
4. “The Novella in Arabic: A Study in Fictional Genres”: from International Journal of
Middle Eastern Studies 18/4 (November 1986): 473–84.
5. “The Arabic Short Story and the Status of Women”: from Love and Sexuality in Mod-
ern Arabic Literature, ed. Roger Allen et al., 77–90. London: Saqi Books, 1995.
6. “Arabic Fiction and the Quest for Freedom”: from Journal of Arabic Literature 26/1–2
[Festschrift for M. M. Badawi], (March-June 1995): 37–49.
7. “Arabic Fiction’s Relationship with Its Past: Intertextuality and Retrospect Post
1967”: abbreviated version of “Intertextuality and Arabic Fiction After 1967,” from
Intertextuality in Modern Arabic Literature Since 1967, ed. Luc Deheuvels, Barbara Mi-
chalak-Pikulska and Paul Starkey, 1–12. Durham: Durham University, 2006.
8. “The Impact of the Translated Text: The Case of Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Novels, with spe-
cial emphasis on The Trilogy”: from Edebiyât N.S. 4/1 (1993): 87–118.
9. “Najīb Maḥfūẓ’s Awlād Ḥāratinā: A History and Interpretation”: from New Values to
New Aesthetics: Turning Points in Modern Arabic Literature. Vol. 1, From Modernism to
the 1980s, 33–58. Wiesbaden: Harrassowitz, 2011).
10. “Autobiography and Memory: Mahfuz’s Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya”: from Writing the
Self: Autobiographical Writing in Modern Arabic Literature, ed. Robin Ostle, Ed de Moor,
and Stefan Wild, 207–16. London: Saqi Books, 1998.
11. “The Autobiography of Yusuf Idris?”: from Autobiografia y literatura arabe, ed.
Miguel Hernando de Laramendi, Gonzalo Fernandez Parrilla, Barbara Azaola Pi-
azza, 279–88. Toledo: Escuela de Traductores, 2002.
12. “ʿUrs al-Zayn by al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: Tradition and Change”: English version of “ʿUrs
al-Zayn lil-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: al-turāth wa-l-taḥawwul,” from Al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ: Dirāsāt
naqdiyya [volume in honor of al-Ṭayyib Ṣāliḥ’s 70th birthday], ed. Ḥasan Abshar
al-Ṭayyib, 233–41. Beirut: Riyāḍ al-Rayyis lil-Kutub wa-l-Nashr, 2001.
13. “Historiography as Novel: BenSalim Himmich’s Al-‘Allamah”: from Transforming
Loss into Beauty: Essays on Arabic literature and Culture in Honor of Magda al-Nowaihi,

211
212 Permissions

ed. Marle Hammond and Dana Saidi, 269–80. Cairo: American University in Cairo
Press, 2008.
14. “Translation Translated: Rashīd Abū Jadra’s Maʿrakat al-Zuqāq”: from Oriente Mod-
erno 16/2–3 (1997): 165–76.
15. “Fiction and Publics: The Emergence of the ‘Arabic Best-seller’”: from Viewpoints
Special Edition: The State of the Arts in the Middle East, 8–12. Washington D.C.: Middle
East Institute, 2009.
16. “Translation and Culture: Theory and Practice”: from Journal of Social Affairs/Shuʿūn
Ijtimāʿiyya 21/83 (Fall 2004): 13–23.
 Index of Proper Names

(The definite article is ignored for purposes of alphabetization)

ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm, Shawqī, 46 Anā aḥyā (I Am Alive), 58

ʿAbd al-Quddūs, Muḥammad, 74n33 “Safīnat ḥanīn ilā al-qamar” (Ship of Tender-
Abū Jadra, Rashīd (Rachid Boudjedra), 84, 181, ness to the Moon), 53
91, 203 Badawi, M. M., 2, 3
La répudiation, 83, 181 Bakr, Salwā, 11, 62
Maʿrakat al-zuqāq (Struggle in the Straits)/La “ʿAn al-rūḥ allatī suriqat tadrījiyyan” (The
prise de Gibraltar, 82–84, 181–91, 203 Spirit That Was Stolen Step by Step), 49
Al-Marth (La macération), 182 “Zīnat fī janāzat al-raʾīs” (Zīnat at the Presi-
Al-Ahrām, 18n15, 119, 121, 129, 145 dent’s Funeral), 56
Akhbār al-Ādāb, 157 Barakāt, Ḥalīm
Alf layla wa-layla. See Thousand and One Nights ʿAwdat al-ṭāʾir ilā al-baḥr (Days of Dust), 78
ʿAlī, Muḥammad, 28, 31 Barakāt, Hudā, 11
Amīn, Qāsim, 19 Barrāda, Muḥammad, 171
al-Amīr, Daisy Luʿbat al-nisyān (Game of Forgetting), 171
“Marāyā al-uʿyūn” (Mirrors of the Eyes), 56 Ben Jalloun, Taher, 189
“Al-Wāfida” (The Newcomer), 54
Anṭūn, Faraḥ, 22 Cambridge History of Arabic Literature, 6, 46
al-ʿAqqād, ʿAbbās Maḥmūd, 23, 47 Chekhov, Anton, 19
Sāra, 47
Arabian Nights. See Thousand and One Nights Dib, Mohammed, 189
al-Aʿraj, al-Wāsīnī (Waciny Laredj), 189 Djebbar, Assia
al-ʿArwī, ʿAbdallāh, 78 L’amour, la fantasia, 189
Asfour, Gaber, 6 Dumas (Père), Alexandre, 18, 28, 33
ʿAshūr, Radwā, 11 The Count of Monte Cristo, 18, 28, 32, 33
al-Aswānī, ʿAlāʾ, 11
ʿImārat Yaʿqūbiyān (The Yacoubian Building), Eco, Umberto
11, 194 Name of the Rose, 178
ʿAwwād, Tawfīq Yūsuf, 23 Edebiyât, 3
“Al-Armala” (The Widow), 54 E. J. Brill, 3
ʿAyyād, Shukrī, 16
Ayyūb, Dhū al-Nūn, 23 Farag, Alfrīd (Alfred Faraj), 14n2
“Al-Sāqiṭa” (The Harlot), 49 al-Fārisī, Muṣtafā, 49
“Zawjatuhu” (His Wife), 52 “Man yadri…? Rubbamā ” (Who knows…?
al-ʿAzāwī, Fāḍil, 68–69 Maybe), 49
al-Qalʿa al-khāmisa (The Fifth Citadel), 68
al-Ghīṭānī, Jamāl, 46, 65, 73, 79–81
Baʿalbakkī, Laylā, 58, 60 Al-Zaynī Barakāt 46, 74, 81, 115n56, 178–79

213
214 Index of Proper Names

Gibran, Khalil. See Jubran Qāʿ al-madīna (City Dregs), 37, 44–45, 156, 165
Gogol, Nikolai, 20 “Rihān” (Wager), 161
“Sūrat al-Baqarah” (Sura Baqarah), 161
Ḥabībī, Emile, 79–80 Ismāʿīl, Ismāʿīl Fahd, 74
al-Waqāʾiʿ al-gharība fī ikhtifāʾ Saʿīd Abī al-Naḥs Al-Mustanqaʿāt al-ḍawʿiyya (Light Swamps), 74
al-Mutashāʾil (The Secret Life of Saeed, the Ismāʿīl, ʿIzz al-dīn, 7
Ill-Fated Pessoptimist), 79–80, 115n56
Ḥaddād, Niqūlā, 22 al-Jābirī, Muḥammad ʿĀbid, 78
al-Ḥakīm, Tawfīq, 14n2, 21, 23, 79 al-Jābirī, Shākib, 21, 23
Ḥaqqī, Yaḥyā, 16, 20, 21, 37, 38, 39, 40, 44, 45 Jabrā, Jabrā Ibrāhīm, 66
“Kunnā thalātha aytām” (We Were Three Al-Safīna (The Ship), 80
Orphans), 49 al-Jāḥiẓ, 201
Qindīl Umm Hāshim (The Lamp of Umm Hashim), Johnson-Davies, Denys, 3
37, 39–41, 165 Journal des Débats, Le, 31
Ḥanafī, Ḥasan, 78 Journal of Arabic Literature, 2
Ḥatāta, Sharīf (Sherif Hetata), 65 Jubrān, Khalīl Jubrān (Khalil Gibran), 2, 19, 52
Al-ʿAyn dhāt al-jafn al-maʿdiniyya (The Eye with “Maḍjaʿ al-ʿarūs” (The Bridal Couch), 52
an Iron Lid), 65–66 “Martā al-Bāniyya” (Martha, the Girl from
Haykal, Muḥammad Ḥusayn, 22, 47, 79, 103, 120 Bān), 19, 50
Zaynab, 22, 23, 47, 103 “Warda al-Hānī,” 20, 52
Al-Hilāl, 22
Ḥimmīsh, BinSālim (BenSalim Himmich), 82, 171, Kateb Yacine, 189
172, 202 Khalifa, Sahar, 11
Al-ʿAllāma (The Polymath), 82, 171–79 Kharrāṭ, Idwār (Edwār), 65, 67–8, 99, 195
Majnūn al-ḥukm (The Theocrat), 172, 179 “Ḥīṭān ʿāliya” (High Walls), 54
Ḥusayn, Ṭāhā, 23, 178 Rāma wa-l-tinnīn (Rama and the Dragon), 65
Khatibi, Abdelkabir, 189, 190
Ibn al-ʿArabī, 182 Maghreb pluriel, 190
Ibn Baṭṭūṭa, 82, 182 Le roman maghrébin, 190
Ibn Khaldūn, 82, 172, 173–78 Khūrī, Colette, 58
Ibn al-Muqaffaʿ, 18 Ayyām maʿahu (Days with Him), 58
Ibrāhīm, Ṣunʿallāh, 65 Layla wāḥida (One Night), 58
Al-Lajna (The Committee), 65 Khūrī, Ilyās, 195
Najmat Aghusṭus (August Star), 73 Khūrshīd, Fārūq, 46
Tilka al-rāʾiḥa (That Smell), 65, 69, 71–73 Kilpatrick, Hilary, 10
Idrīs, Yūsuf, 22, 37, 44, 65, 99, 155–62 al-Kūnī, Ibrāhīm, 195
“ʿAlā waraq sīlūfān” (In Cellophane Wrap- ʿUshb al-layl (Night Plant), 200
ping), 52, 156
“Al-ʿAmaliyyat al-kubrā” (The Great Opera- Lāshīn, Maḥmūd Ṭāhir, 20
tion), 156 LeGassick, Trevor, 2, 88, 90, 95, 202
“Al-Aʾurṭa” (The Aorta), 156
“Bayt min laḥm” (House of Flesh), 54, 60–61, “al-Madrasa al-Ḥadītha” (The New School), 20
161 Maḥfūẓ, Najīb (Naguib Mahfouz), 6, 8, 13, 23, 46,
“Ḥādithat sharaf ” (A Case of Honor), 22, 51 64, 67, 78, 79, 87, 142, 145, 198
“Laʿbat al-bayt” (Household Game), 48 Aṣdāʾ al-sīra al-dhātiyya (Echoes of an Autobiog-
“Mārsh al-ghurūb” (Sunset March), 156 raphy), 139, 145–54, 200
“Al-Martaba al-muqaʿʿara” (The Hollow Mat- Awlād ḥāratinā (Children of the Alley, Children of
tress), 52 Gebelawi), 74, 88, 89, 90–91, 114, 117–44, 146
“Naẓra” (A Glance), 48, 156 Bāqī min al-zamān sāʿa (Final Hour), 152
 Index of Proper Names 215

Dunyā Allāh (God’s World), 88, 139 Mudun al-milḥ (Cities of Salt), 74, 115n56, 200
“Fī al-ḥujra al-wāsiʿa” (In the Wide Room), 146 al-Tīḥ (The Wilderness), 200
Hams al-junūn (Whispers of Madness), 140 Al-Nihāyāt (Endings), 46
Ḥikāyāt ḥāratinā (Fountain and Tomb), 80, 139, Sharq al-mutawassiṭ (East of the Mediterranean),
152, 153 69–71
“Ihtidār al-muʿtaqadāt wa-tawallud al- Mūsā, Salāma, 139
muʿtaqadāt” (The Demise and Birth of Mustaghānimī, Aḥlām (Ahlem Musteghanemi),
Religious Beliefs), 140 11, 193
Al-Karnak (Karnak Café), 142n53 Dhākirat al-jasad (Memory in the Flesh), 11,
Khān al-Khalīlī, 91, 139, 142n53 193–94
“al-Laḥn” (The Melody), 146 al-Muwayliḥī, Muḥammad, 2, 18, 21, 22
Layālī alf layla (Arabian Nights and Days), 46 Ḥadīth ʿĪsā ibn Hishām (ʿĪsā ibn Hishām’s Tale; A
al-Liṣṣ wa-l-kilāb (The Thief and the Dogs), 110, Period of Time; What ʿĪsā ibn Hishām Told Us),
120 2, 18–19, 21, 78–79, 81
al-Marāyā (Mirrors), 55, 67, 80, 152 Muẓaffar, May
Mīrāmār, 6, 110, 112, 115, 120 “Awrāq khāṣṣa” (Private Papers), 50
Qushtumur, 152
Riḥlat Ibn Faṭṭūma (The Journey of Ibn Fattouma), Nadīm, ʿAbdallāh, 18, 19
138 Nahḍa, 16, 18, 25, 27, 85
“al-Saʿāda” (Happiness), 146 Najm, Muḥammad Yūsuf, 36
Ṣabāḥ al-ward (Morning of Roses to You), 152 Naṣrallāh, Emily, 57
“al-Samʿ wa-l-ṭāʿa” (Hearing and Obeying), 146 Naṣrallāh, Ibrāhīm, 195
al-Summān wa-l-Kharīf (Autumn Quail), 6 Neustadt Prize in Literature, 156
al-Ṭarīq (The Search), 112–13 al-Niffarī, 150, 151
Tharthara fawq al-Nīl (Adrift on the Nile), 73, 89, Kitāb al-Mawāqif and Kitāb al-Mukhāṭabāt, 150
110, 113 Nobel Prize in Literature, 8, 13, 89, 119
al-Thulāthiyya (The Trilogy): Bayn al-qaṣrayn Nuʿayma, Mikhāʾīl, 19
(Palace Walk; Le jardin du passé), Qaṣr “Maṣraʿ Sattūt” (Sattūt’s Death), 20
al-shawq (Palace of Desire; Palais du désir), al- “Sanatuhā al-jadīda” (Her New Year), 20, 53
Sukkariyya (Sugar Street), 6, 89, 90, 92–109,
110, 111, 120, 124, 139, 151, 200, 202 Prix Goncourt, 189
“Yaqẓat al-mūmiyāʾ” (The Mummy Awakens)
140 al-Qabbānī, Abū Khalīl, 14n2
“Zaʿbalāwī,” 138 al-Qalamāwī, Suhayr
Zuqāq al-Midaqq (Midaq Alley), 88, 91, 95, 114, Aḥādīth jaddatī (Stories of My Grandmother), 55
124, 202 “Imraʾa nājiḥa” (A Successful Woman), 55
al-Manfalūṭī, Muṣtafā, 19 Qāsim, ʿAbd al-Ḥakīm, 65
Maqāma, 14, 21, 80, 81, 187
al-Māzinī, Ibrāhīm, 23, 79 Rifʿat, Alīfa
Ibrāhīm al-Kātib, 104 “Fī layl al-shitāʾ al-tawīl” (In the Long Winter
Mémoires de la Mediterranée (Dhākirāt al- Night), 52
Mutawassiṭ), 197 Al-Riwāya al-Shahriyya (The Monthly Novel), 22
Middle East Studies Association (MESA), 3 Rushdī, Zaynab
Middle Eastern Literatures, 3 “Taṭābuq al-muwāṣafāt” (Congruence of
Minā, Ḥannā, 59 Specifications), 56
Miṣbāḥ al-Sharq (Light of the East), 22 Rushdie, Salman, 74
Mubārak, ʿAlī, 16, 21 The Satanic Verses, 125, 126, 127
ʿAlam al-dīn, 16, 21
Munīf, ʿAbd al-Raḥmān, 21, 46, 66, 69, 73 al-Saʿdāwī, Nawāl, 59, 60, 65
216 Index of Proper Names

Mawt maʿālī al-wazīr sābiqan (Death of an Ex- Sindbad the Sailor, 27–33
Minister), 55, 61 Somekh, Sasson, 97
Mudhakkirātī fī sijn al-nisāʾ (Memoirs from the Stewart, Philip, 121
Women’s Prison), 65 Sulaymān, Nabīl, 68–9
Ṣāliḥ, al-Ṭayyib (Tayeb Salih), 3, 21, 30, 37, 41, 44, Al-Sijn (The Prison), 68
45, 46, 163, 165, 166, 202
Bandar Shāh, 37 al-Ṭahṭāwī, Rifāʿa Rāfiʿ, 21
“Dūmat Wad Ḥāmid” (The Doum Tree of Wad Takhlīṣ al-ibrīz fī talkhīṣ Bārīz (An Imam in Paris),
Ḥāmid), 169 21
“Ḥafnat tamr” (A Handful of Dates), 164 Tāmir, Zakariyyā
Maryūd, 37 “Al-Thalj ākhir al-layl” (Snow at the End of
Mawsim al-hijra ila al-shamāl (Season of Migra- the Night), 49
tion to the North), 3, 30, 164, 165, 169, 202 “Wajh al-qamar” (The Face of the Moon), 51
ʿUrs al-Zayn (The Wedding of Zein), 37, 41–43, Ṭāriq ibn Ziyād, 83, 183, 190
163–70 al-Tawḥīdī, 182
Sallām, Muḥammad Zaghlūl, 36 Taymūr, Maḥmūd, 60
Samāra, Nuhā, 57 “Fatāt al-jīrān” (The Girl Next Door), 51
“Wajhān li-imraʾa” (Woman With Two Faces), “Inqilāb” (Revolution), 52
“Najiyya bint al-Shaykh” (Najiyya the
57
Shaykh’s Daughter), 49
al-Sammān, Ghāda, 57, 58, 60
Taymūr, Muḥammad, 20, 23
“Ataḥaddāka bi-ḥubbī” (I Defy You with My
Telmissany, Mayy
Love), 59
Dunyāzād, 199
ʿAynāka qadarī (Your Eyes Are My Fate), 58
Theroux, Peter, 94–5
Ḥubb (Love) 58–9
Thousand and One Nights, 8, 14, 27, 28, 32, 39, 92,
“Kuntu atamannā yā zawjahā” (I Wished, O
182, 190, 200
Husband of Hers), 59 Tizzīnī, al-Ṭayyib, 78
“Li-annī uḥibbuka” (Because I Love You), 59
“Limādhā ayyuhā al-shaqī?” (Why, You ʿUbayd, ʿĪsā, 60
Wretch?), 59 ʿUkāsha, Tharwat, 65
al-Ṣāniʿ, Rajāʾ (Rajaa Alsanea), 11 al-ʿUthmān, Laylā, 11, 59, 60
Banāt al-Riyāḍ (Girls of Riyadh), 11, 193, 196 “Al-Maqhā” (The Café), 61
Ṣannūʿ, Yaʿqūb, 18 Fī al-layl taʾtī al-ʿuyūn (In the Night the Eyes
al-Saqqāf, Khayriyya, 56 Arrive), 59
“Ightiyāl al-nūr fī majrā al-nahr” (Assassina- “Al-Raḥīl” (Departure), 53
tion of Light at the River’s Flow), 56–57 “Al-Ruʾūs ilā asfal” (Heads Downwards), 61
Ṣarrūf, Yaʿqūb, 22
Shaʿrāwī, Hudā, 54 Wannūs, Saʿdallāh, 14
al-Shārūnī, Yūsuf, 16 Waṭṭār, al-Ṭāhir, 189
al-Shaykh, Ḥanān, 11, 66–67
“Bint ismuhā Tuffāḥa” (A Girl Named Apple), al-Yāzijī, Nāṣīf, 14, 21
51 Majmaʿ al-baḥrayn (The Confluence of the Two
“Ḥammām al-niswān” (Women’s Bath), 48 Seas), 14
Ḥikāyat Zahra (The Story of Zahra), 67, 115n56,
202 Zaydān, Jurjī, 22, 33, 177
Misk al-ghazāl (Women of Sand and Myrrh), 66, 74 Istibdād al-mamālīk (The Despotism of the Mam-
al-Shidyāq, Aḥmad Fāris, 14, 21 luks), 177
Al-Sāq ʿalā al-sāq (Leg Over Leg) 14, 81 Jihād al-muḥibbīn (The Struggle of Lovers), 177
Simon, Claude, 203 Shārl wa-ʿAbd al-Raḥmān (Charles[Martel] and
La bataille de Pharsale, 84 ʿAbd al-Raḥmān [al-Ghāfiqī]”), 177
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Number 9
A History of the Encyclopaedia of Islam (2018)
Peri Bearman

Number 8
Selected Studies in Modern Arabic Narrative: History, Genre, Translation (2019)
Roger Allen

Number 7
Studies in Medieval Islamic Intellectual Traditions (2017)
Hassan Ansari and Sabine Schmidtke

Number 6
Social Life under the Abbasids (2019)
Muhammad Manazir Ahsan
edited by Shawkat Toorawa, with a foreword by Julia Bray

Number 5
Sibawayhi’s Principles: Arabic Grammar and Law in Early Islamic Thought (2016)
Michael G. Carter

Number 4
Al-Ma’mûn, the Inquisition, and the Quest for Caliphal Authority (2015)
John Abdallah Nawas

Number 3
Hadith, Piety, and Law: Selected Studies (2015)
Christopher Melchert

Number 2
The Economy of Certainty: An Introduction to the Typology of Islamic Legal Theory (2013)
Aron Zysow

Number 1
A Reader of Classical Arabic Literature (2012)
Seeger Bonebakker and Michael Fishbein