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 ARABIC
SCIENCE FICTION

IAN CAMPBELL
 Studies in Global Science Fiction

Series Editors
Anindita Banerjee
Department of Comparative Literature
Cornell University
Ithaca, NY, USA

Rachel Haywood Ferreira

Department of World Languages and Cultures
Iowa State University
Ames, IA, USA

Mark Bould
Department of Film and Literature
University of the West of England
Bristol, UK
Studies in Global Science Fiction (edited by Anindita Banerjee, Rachel
Haywood Ferreira, and Mark Bould) is a brand-new and first-of-its-
kind series that opens up a space for Science Fiction scholars across the
globe, inviting fresh and cutting-edge studies of both non-Anglo-Amer-
ican and Anglo-American SF literature. Books in this series will put SF
in conversation with postcolonial studies, critical race studies, compara-
tive literature, transnational literary and cultural studies, among others,
contributing to ongoing debates about the expanding global compass of
the genre and the emergence of a more diverse, multinational, and mul-
ti-ethnic sense of SF’s past, present, and future. Topics may include com-
parative studies of selected (trans) national traditions, SF of the African
or Hispanic Diasporas, Indigenous SF, issues of translation and distribu-
tion of non-Anglophone SF, SF of the global south, SF and geographic/
cultural borderlands, and how neglected traditions have developed in
dialogue and disputation with the traditional SF canon.

Advisory Board Members

Aimee Bahng, Dartmouth College
Ian Campbell, Georgia State University
Grace Dillon (Anishinaabe), Portland State University
Rob Latham, Independent Scholar
Andrew Milner, Monash University
Pablo Mukherjee, University of Warwick
Stephen Hong Sohn, University of California, Riverside
Mingwei Song, Wellesley College

More information about this series at

http://www.palgrave.com/gp/series/15335
 Ian Campbell

Arabic Science Fiction

Ian Campbell
Georgia State University
Atlanta, GA, USA

Studies in Global Science Fiction

ISBN 978-3-319-91432-9 ISBN 978-3-319-91433-6 (eBook)
https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91433-6

Library of Congress Control Number: 2018941877

© The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s) 2018

This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the
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The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland
To Eleanor, for whom I can now be Fun Dad again.
 Preface

This book arose from the primary source readings for a follow-up to
my 2013 monograph on postcolonial Arabic-language Moroccan novels
from independence in 1956 through 1972. Among the notable works
of the next period was Muḥammad ‘Azīz Laḥbābi’s 1974 The Elixir of
Life, which was framed by a Moroccan scholar as a work of social criti-
cism that made use of tropes from classical Arabic literature. Yet it soon
became clear that it was also a work of SF, which is and has been my
favorite literary genre in English, and upon which I had already pub-
lished professionally in 2010 with an examination of gender essential-
ism and libidinal economy in two of Neal Stephenson’s novels. I had
not expected to see SF at such an early date in Arabic; research quickly
showed that there was essentially no critical discourse in English on the
subject. Further research in Arabic bibliographies led me to a vibrant
genre dating all the way back to 1965 as self-conscious SF, but this body
of work was entirely cut off from scholars of SF who cannot read Arabic.
I wrote an analysis of how The Elixir of Life functioned both as social
criticism and SF; the editors of Science Fiction Studies were welcoming of
and enthusiastic about Arabic SF; they made it clear to me that scholars
of SF in English and other languages would like to hear more. Because
two novels, ’Aḥmad Khālid Tawfīq’s 2008 Utopia and ‘Abbās and
Bahjar’s 2013 HWJN, had been translated into English, I settled upon
them as subjects for critical readings in order to open up the discourse
to Anglophone scholars: the three articles were published in 2014 and
2015. My research on Arabic SF (ASF), which had begun as a personal

vii
viii    Preface

project, quickly became my main research interest, primarily because the

scholars of SF in English and other languages who contacted me after
the articles were published were so enthusiastic about integrating works
in Arabic into the overall critical discourse on SF. In 2017, I published
an article on another early Moroccan SF novel, ’Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Salām
al-Baqqāli’s 1976 The Blue Flood, and in the same month presented a
paper on what I term “double estrangement” in Egyptian writer Nihād
Sharīf’s 1972 The Conqueror of Time at the International Conference on
the Fantastic in the Arts. I was immediately urged to write a monograph
on the subject, which I had already begun to do and which has taken
these last ten months to prepare.
This study is intended for three audiences. The first is scholars of SF
who cannot read Arabic but who are interested in how SF manifests in
Arabic and what are its primary tropes and concerns, especially to the
extent that these differ from, or pose an implicit critique of, standard
models of Anglo-American SF. The second is scholars of Arabic litera-
ture well-versed in analysis of the canonical literary fiction that has for
so long dominated discourse on Arabic literature and who wish, as part
of a still relatively newfound critical interest in genre fiction, to under-
stand more about ASF and about the body of theory and criticism that
has developed around SF in English and other languages. Because ASF is
by definition a postcolonial literature, but differs from most of the works
studied as postcolonial literature, not only because it is in Arabic rather
than a colonial language such as French or especially English, but also
because it does not tend to foreground questions of identity, the study
may prove to be of interest to scholars of postcolonial literature and the-
ory, as well. The focus of the study, however, will be on close readings of
some of the major works of the early period of ASF, especially in light of
the body of theory that Arabic scholars of Arabic literature and ASF have
begun to develop on the subject. If this study is to make an original con-
tribution to knowledge, it is to be hoped that it will enable scholars of
SF, of Arabic literature and of postcolonial literature and theory to inte-
grate into their own research the content and concerns of this formative
period of ASF.

Atlanta, USA Ian Campbell

 Contents

1 Introduction 1

2 Postcolonial Literature and Arabic SF 17

3 Arabic SF: Definitions and Origins 47

4 Criticism and Theory of Arabic SF 77

5 Double Estrangement in Nihād Sharīf’s

The Conqueror of Time 119

6 Continuity Within Rupture in Two Novels

by Muṣṭafā Maḥmūd 153

7 “Utopia” as a Critique of Utopia in Ṣabrī Mūsā’s

The Gentleman from the Spinach Field 185

8 Male Gaze as Colonial Gaze in ’Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Salām

al-Baqqāli’s The Blue Flood 219

9 Mysticism and SF in Ṭālib ‘Umrān’s Beyond the Veil

of Time 253

ix
x    Contents

10 Inheritance and Intertextuality in a Three-Novel Series

by Ṭība ’Aḥmad Ibrāhīm 277

11 Conclusion 311

Index 317
 Transliteration

All Arabic words in this study are transliterated into Roman characters
using the standard International Journal of Middle East Studies system,
with a few exceptions. The nisba ending on adjectives is here represented
by -i or -iya instead of the more technically correct -iyy or -iyya, sim-
ply for ease of reading. The letter tā marbūṭa is represented by final -a
instead of -ah. Case markings are not represented. Personal and place
names well-known in their English renderings, such as Naguib Mahfouz
or Gamal Abdel Nasser, are written that way instead of in proper
­transliteration.

xi
 CHAPTER 1

Introduction

Reuven Snir, in the only English language examination of Arabic SF

(ASF) prior to 2015, considers a short story, Imra’a fī Ṭabaq Ṭā’ir
[“A Woman in a Flying Saucer,” 1981] (Sharīf, pp. 121–133), by Nihād
Sharīf, a prolific Egyptian author of ASF’s formative decades. Snir
describes the story as a rendering into SF of a trope characteristic of
classical Arabic literature: the retreat from city life into seclusion, which
brings a mystical vision. In Sharīf’s story, the narrator is an astronomer,
and the vision is in fact a space traveler who has come to warn him that
humanity is too bellicose: her advanced society is prepared to take action
should Earth break into nuclear war. For Snir, this work and others give
ASF a distinctive feel of mixing SF set in the Arab world with traditional
genres of Arabic literature, especially those genres most closely related
to religious experience. He also draws our attention to the prevalence of
utopian societies in ASF, arguing that utopia is the common denomina-
tor of those works of ASF framed as belonging to canonical Arabic litera-
ture. Yet, he also argues that:

…unlike in the West, Arabic SF in general has as yet not generated any
serious inquiry into the nature of contemporary social reality and most of
the writers, instead of using the genre as “medium for social comment”,
are still too prone to serve amusement or didactic aims. (Snir, p. 280)

This study will use close readings of formative texts to argue that Snir’s
dismissal of ASF as lacking social commentary does not stand up to

© The Author(s) 2018 1

I. Campbell, Arabic Science Fiction, Studies in Global
Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91433-6_1
2 I. CAMPBELL

close examination: from its initial period, the genre is deeply involved in
reflecting Arab society in a distorting mirror. This study’s primary con-
cern is to explore ASF in its own terms and those of its critics, especially
its critics writing in Arabic. This will inevitably touch upon the theories
that Western critics have developed to understand how SF functions.
For example, when Snir implicitly states that Western SF is a medium
for social comment, scholars well-versed in SF theory will under-
stand that he’s referring to Darko Suvin’s understanding of SF as facil-
itating “a dynamic transformation rather than a static mirroring of the
author’s environment” (Suvin, p. 10). Suvin, arguably the most influen-
tial Western theorist of SF, views the genre as functioning via cognitive
estrangement, where the “cognitive” denotes scientific plausibility within
the world of the particular work and “estrangement” a means of making
the familiar seem unfamiliar in order to facilitate a critical perspective on
the familiar.
Estrangement comes from the works of playwright Bertolt Brecht,
who defined it as “a representation [that] allows us to recognize its sub-
ject, but at the same time makes it seem unfamiliar” (Willett, p. 192).
Brecht uses the word Verfremdung, which translates directly as “aliena-
tion,” but Suvin renders it as “estrangement.” The use of Verfremdung
in Brecht’s theory of drama is complex and often polyvalent: it centers
around the negation of deceptively familiar surface reality in order
to provoke a new and more complete recognition of the “realer”
world heretofore masked. Suvin, whose Marxism explicitly informs
his approach to SF, reserves the word “alienation” for the German
Entfremdung, whose doctrinaire meaning within Marxism is the aliena-
tion of workers from the products of their labor, or more generally, of
humankind from possibilities (Bottomore, pp. 9–15). Verfremdung/
estrangement can be politically motivated—and generally is, for Suvin—
but can also be a more strictly epistemological estrangement, whereas
Entfremdung/alienation is always political (White, pp. 120–126).
According to Suvin, Brecht’s goal in writing theater for a scientific era
was to create estrangement in order to permit us to recognize the por-
trayed object, but at the same time to render it unusual, forcing us to see
it from a different perspective and thus reproduce the conditions of sci-
entific discovery. The object in SF in Suvin’s theory is, for the most part,
the society that produced the work. This leads to Suvin’s full definition
of SF:
 1 INTRODUCTION 3

…a literary genre whose necessary and sufficient conditions are the pres-
ence and interaction of estrangement and cognition and whose main
formal device is an imaginative framework alternative to the author’s
empirical environment. (Suvin 1979, p. 10)

For Suvin, the alternative imaginative framework of a work of SF con-

tains a novum or new thing. This novum is plausible as an extrapolation
from currently understood science or as a rewrite of history based on the
appearance of the novum before the time in which a work is set, hence
cognitive. The work uses the consequences of the presence of the novum
to reflect upon or question the current conditions in the author’s society.
Suvin borrows the term novum from one of his chief influences, Ernst
Bloch, defining it as a “totalizing phenomenon or relationship deviat-
ing from the author’s and implied reader’s norm of reality.” This is not
unknown in other genres such as fantasy, but SF’s novum entails a scien-
tifically plausible change in the universe of the work and is thus the pri-
mary point of departure for analysis of the work. This in turn entails that:

…the essential tension of SF is one between the readers, representing a

certain number of types of [hu]Man[kind] of our times, and the encom-
passing or at least equipotent Unknown or Other introduced by the
novum. This tension in turn estranges the empirical norm of the implied
reader. (Suvin 1979, p. 64)

The novum in SF need not be a gadget or machine, but the alterna-

tive imaginative framework must be based on a realistic, even if implied,
extrapolation from the world of the work’s creation. For a work to be
SF, the novum needs to be hegemonic: “so central and significant that it
determines the whole narrative logic—or at least the overriding narrative
logic—regardless of any impurities that might be present” (Suvin 1979,
p. 70). This excludes much of what is sold in bookstores as “science fic-
tion” from SF, placing it within what Suvin calls the “misshapen subge-
nre” of science fantasy, where the scientific plausibility of the narrative
can be revoked at the author’s whim. SF, therefore, both differs from
folktale, myth, or fantasy in the cognitive plausibility (and dynamicism)
of its novum and is also always already fundamentally about politics or
sociology. Suvin later cites Bloch in saying that SF provides “a shock-
ing and distancing mirror above the all too familiar reality” (Suvin 1988,
p. 34). Suvin renders this as:
4 I. CAMPBELL

Strangers—utopians, monsters, or simply “different” beings—are mirrors

of humankind, just like the unknown country is the mirror of [our] world.
But we must understand that this mirror doesn’t just reflect: it distorts; it’s
a virgin matrix and an alchemical dynamo. The mirror is a crucible. (Suvin
1977, p. 13)

Pure extrapolation for its own sake, then, is bad SF for Suvin because
it is a “one-dimensional, scientific limit-case of analogy”. Good SF is
multidimensional analogy: an “aesthetic hypothesis akin to the proceed-
ings of satire or pastoral rather than those of futurology or political pro-
grams.” (Suvin 1979, pp. 76–80) Its cognitive value lies in its analogical
relationship to its author’s present, not its predictive value. Estrangement
reflects society in a mirror that distorts, and thereby focuses on, a par-
ticular aspect of society in order to render the work of SF a medium for
social comment through an examination of contemporary social real-
ity. The woman in the flying saucer in Sharīf’s story has not come to
Earth in order to spread enlightenment and pacifism; rather, her society
needs a resource found only on Earth and is prepared to destroy human-
ity should access to that resource be threatened. She is a familiar figure
in Arabic literature, especially that of the medieval period when Arabic-
speaking1 Muslims were the dominant technological power; she is at the
same time a colonist from a more advanced, and foreign, civilization,
who threatens violence should her access to a commodity be blocked.
SF critic John Rieder argues that Western colonialism, the imbalance
of societal power and the Social Darwinist ideologies that explained
and justified colonialism were deeply imbricated in Western proto-SF
of the turn of the twentieth century (Rieder, pp. 2–3). He traces at
length and in detail the complex interrelationships between proto-SF or
early SF narratives in the West and the Western experience of the colo-
nial encounter in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. “Explorers”
would meet natives who had much lower levels of physical technology,
and extrapolate from there that the natives were distant from them in
time as well as place, and that the explorers represented the end of a
developmental process that began with the natives:

Europeans mapped the non-European world, settled colonies in it… In

the process of all of this, they also developed a scientific discourse about

1 If only as a common language.

 1 INTRODUCTION 5

culture and mankind. Its understanding of human evolution and the rela-
tion between culture and technology played a strong part in the works of
[H.G.] Wells and his contemporaries that later came to be called science
fiction.
Evolutionary theory and anthropology, both profoundly intertwined
with colonial ideology and history, are especially important to early science
fiction… scientific accounts of humanity’s origins and its possible or prob-
able futures are especially basic to science fiction. Evolutionary theory and
anthropology also serve as frameworks for the Social Darwinian ideologies
that pervade early science fiction… Emergent English-language science
fiction articulates the distribution of knowledge and power at a certain
moment of colonialism’s history. (Rieder, p. 2)

For Rieder, echoing other postcolonial theorists, this encounter makes

of colonized peoples the object of the colonial gaze, which comes from
a position of unassailable military, economic, and technological power,
buttressed by the theoretical apparatus of social sciences. The colonized
have no real choice but to submit to the former, and only later, once
they’ve begun to educate themselves in these discourses, do they under-
stand the extent to which they’ve been compelled to submit to the lat-
ter. At its heart, the colonial gaze is about recognition and the master/
slave dynamic: the colonizer looks at the colonized, subjects them to
classification as Other and as inferior—the two go hand in hand—and
demands that the colonized recognize the colonizer as the master. The
master/slave dynamic is always incomplete unless and until the colonized
acknowledges their inferior status. The colonized were simultaneously
aware of their own technological inferiority and unwilling to recognize
the colonizers as masters. Many colonized subjects submitted in order
to survive; many others benefitted from the colonial relationship, which
often enabled the disenfranchised within their own culture to advance in
status or power. The narratives of social science could be parroted back
to the colonizers by these colonized subjects, who could seem more
Western and thus higher up in the hierarchy and so deserving of ben-
efits, both because they worked with the colonizers and also because
they confirmed the colonizers’ sense of mastery. In the first decades of
ASF, we often see the colonial encounter retold from the perspective
of the colonized rather than the colonizer. This restaging or retelling is
the dominant trope of postcolonial literatures; it should not astonish us
that it occurs in ASF in multiple forms. The science and technology of
6 I. CAMPBELL

the twentieth and twenty-first centuries are themselves colonial powers

in the contemporary Arab world: they, like the novel as a genre, come
from without and are perceived as destabilizing foreign threats. ASF will
always already be an archetypally postcolonial literature, in that it uses
the language of the colonizer—the tropes and discourse of science and
of SF—to examine, critique, and even resist that colonizer’s power.
If we read with sufficient attention both to the linguistic details of the
source texts and to the Arabic literary and philosophical traditions, we
can understand the extent to which these texts are engaging in cognitive
estrangement.
In order to examine the manifestations of cognitive estrangement in
ASF, however, we need to take into account the literary, legal, and sci-
entific contexts of “Arab society,” insofar as we can say the latter exists
as an aggregate of more than twenty different Arabic-speaking countries
with a multiplicity of cultures, dialects, religions, and sects. Arab socie-
ties in the 1960s and 1970s, when the first ASF novels were published,
were newly, and nominally, independent but still trying to apprehend the
shock of having been colonized. While postcolonial literatures and the-
ories grapple with this problem in general, it is especially salient in Arab
society, because Arabic-speaking Muslims were once the colonial power
and Europeans the colonized: a thousand years ago, nearly all advanced
scientific and technical discourse around the Mediterranean basin was
written in Arabic. The same literary and philosophical traditions that Snir
notes with approval in ASF have a deep and lasting preoccupation both
with the past glory of the Arab world, especially in scientific and tech-
nological matters, and with the subsequent stagnation and decline that
led to European colonialism as a very recent memory when the first ASF
novels were published. Science and technology, once a strong point of
these societies and still a point of pride in cultural memory, has become
an external threat: the tension between these two points of view will
affect both the cognition and the estrangement in ASF, rendering them
easy to misrecognize or misapprehend. The Arab critics of ASF whose
work is examined in Chapter 4 will include multiple perspectives on how
ASF can both provide continuity between modern science and the scien-
tific paradigm of the past and also address the threat, which critics often
frame as dehumanizing, that science and technology pose to contempo-
rary Arab societies.
A second factor in considering the social commentary presented by
ASF is the effectively total lack of formal legal protections for freedom
 1 INTRODUCTION 7

of expression in the modern Arab world. This is especially true to the

extent that such expression addresses political concerns: directly, in
the sense of domination by the unelected despots who rule the various
countries, often as a manifestation of neocolonialism; or indirectly, such
as the general material, intellectual, or spiritual welfare of the ordinary
people of the country or region. In either case, voicing concerns about,
or especially critique of, the established regime often has immediate and
violent consequences for the critic, even today. Arab writers in all gen-
res, especially the canonical literary fiction to which ASF aspires, have
learned to conceal their critique under layers of story in order to provide
plausible deniability in the face of scrutiny by their regime. It’s likely too
extreme to suggest, as Fredric Jameson has, that all Third World liter-
ature is national allegory (Jameson, p. 69), but it’s equally undeniable
that allegory is a dominant mode in twentieth-century Arabic literary
fiction (Kilpatrick, pp. 254–258). The social commentary that ASF pre-
sents thus is often rather subtle, to the extent that it may be difficult for
the casual reader to perceive, especially if that reader is working from a
translation or has less than complete fluency in the high literary Arabic of
(aspirationally) canonical fiction. Arab readers, much more accustomed
to reading between the lines, will find the estrangement function of ASF
reasonably clear in its staging and effects, but Western readers of ASF
may find the distorting mirror too transparent—or too distorting. The
preponderance of allegory as a form of estrangement in Arabic literary
fiction also alters the emphasis and function of estrangement in ASF to a
certain degree: ASF engages in social commentary not so much because
this is a primary function of SF, but rather because engaging in social
commentary through estrangement is the primary means of signifying
that ASF has, or aspires to have, the status of literary rather than genre
fiction and is thus to be taken seriously by critics and readers.
We must also consider the links between ASF and different precur-
sor genres in the Arabic literary and philosophical traditions. These tra-
ditions have three primary influences upon Arab culture in general and
ASF in particular. They are historical genres: they flourished in the past,
and as such implicitly reinforce the manifest reality in which Arabs live,
where historical memories of glory and dominance linger among the
effects of (neo)colonialism, with its imposition of technology from with-
out and the concomitant threat it presents to Arabic language, ­culture(s),
and values. These traditions are also, for the most part, centered upon
the irrational: the mystic vision that the astronomer in Sharīf’s story
8 I. CAMPBELL

finds when he seeks seclusion is a religious experience well outside the

magisterium of science. There is, in general, less separation between the
cognitive and the mystical in ASF, but this is not a matter of misappre-
hending the cognitive so much as authenticating it through reference
to traditional forms. Secondly, the linkage of ASF to precursor gen-
res in Arabic literature reinforces this blending of the rational with the
irrational. These precursor genres—the fantasy of the 1001 Nights; tales
of marvels superficially grounded in the experiences of travelers; qua-
si-scientific narratives intended to promote the blending of Islam with
rational inquiry; more clearly scientific descriptions and investigations of
the natural world; engineering texts that describe how to produce seem-
ingly marvelous phenomena—weigh on ASF, precisely because of the
perceived need to combat, or critique, or reverse the colonial encounter
by rooting ASF in the Arabic literary tradition. The inclusion of spiritual
motifs or fantasy tropes in ASF can be viewed not as examples of the
immaturity of the genre, but rather as a form of authentication.
Moreover, these precursor genres were from their inception deeply
interested in describing and critiquing social reality, especially in their
links to the utopian. The Western utopian tradition moved from fara-
way places to future times, enabling readers of these works to look at the
curve of technological and social development and thereby conceptual-
ize a world that is gradually moving toward perfection, or at least some
specific understanding thereof. In the Arabic literary tradition, however,
utopia is located in the past, and it has a specific incarnation: the com-
munity in Madīna where the prophet Muḥammad ruled as both political
and spiritual leader from 622 to 630 CE. The utopias of ASF may be
driven by secular or liberal values: by science, by an egalitarianism that
differs from the egalitarianism before God and prophet that character-
ized the community in Madīna, by secularism, by mid-twentieth century
leftism, or even by conservatism. But all of them, in their links to the
Arabic literary and philosophical traditions, have as a background refer-
ence this paradigmatic utopian community that actually existed, though
much of the discourse surrounding it belongs more properly to legend
than to history. From the perspective of the Arab world, the stagnation
and decline that led to its colonization by the West, and its continued
domination by the West, both politically and in science and technology,
almost inevitably lead to a more problematic depiction of utopia, espe-
cially when the utopia is located in the future.
 1 INTRODUCTION 9

The complications of having the ideal community located in the past

drives the third major factor in the social commentary presented by ASF:
the conflict between the progressive social values that generally accom-
pany SF and the traditional conservative social values driven by scripture
and tradition. Most writers of ASF come from the more modern side of
the social spectrum; but progressive social values, like computers, mobile
phones, drones, and the internet, come, or are perceived to come, from
without, and can thus be an implicit threat. Works of ASF that estrange
or critique dependence upon or advocacy for conservative or reactionary
social values have to tread carefully, for reasons not dissimilar to those
that force them to swathe their political critiques in layers of opacity or
allegory. If authors aspire to give to their works canonical status as liter-
ary fiction, which their language, form, and use of estrangement demon-
strate clearly that they do, they must take special care to be subtle in
their critique of tradition, not only for fear of backlash, but also and
more importantly out of concern that this might disrupt the very link to
traditional forms and tropes that enables their works to have that aspira-
tion. Furthermore, these novels often engage in what critic Muḥammad
Najīb al-Talāwi calls tarqī‘ or “patching.” In the early period, the
novum of an ASF novel, whether advanced ­ technology or modern
social values, will be erased by the end of the text. The story turns
out to be a dream; the formula for the serum is lost; the lab is buried
when the mountainside collapses. This has the effect of containing
the threat, keeping it within the bounds of the text and thus render-
ing it a safe experiment rather than a direct challenge to the dominant
paradigm. This is notably the case with respect to the emancipation
of women. Nearly all the early writers of ASF are men; their uneven
attempts to present women as coequal members of their future uto-
pias, all while remaining subject to the influence of the ideal community
located in the past, where women were valued but still subordinate, cre-
ate complications and contradictions within the text and threats to the
society without.
The primary theoretical contribution this study will make to the
extant body of criticism by mostly Arab critics of ASF is that the most
salient aspect of ASF as a genre is its use of what I will term double
estrangement. Arab authors have grown accustomed to estranging
their own societies in literary fiction because of the lack of formal pro-
tections for freedom of expression. The prejudice against genre fiction
among Arab literary critics is quite pronounced, precisely because most
10 I. CAMPBELL

genre fiction doesn’t perform this estrangement, nor does it aspire to

the status of literary fiction. ASF, therefore, tends to engage in this sort
of sociopolitical estrangement as a means of signaling that it’s intended
to be perceived as serious literature. At the same time, works of ASF
often engage in a second layer of estrangement that draws attention to
the drop-off in scientific and technological innovation in the Arab world
since the glory days of Arab/Muslim dominance. Double estrangement
is more extended, and hence more visible, in novels, but in the case of
Sharīf’s story, one layer of its double estrangement critiques sovereign
Egypt as still pinned down by the colonial gaze, while the other critiques
Egyptian culture as still subject to the tropes of medieval mysticism, even
though it is capable of producing astronomers. The specifics of the first
layer of double estrangement will vary greatly from one novel to the next,
as this first layer tends to focus on conditions specific to a given country
or regime; the second layer tends to be more consistent in drawing atten-
tion to the discontinuity between past progress and present stagnation. As
we will see in the close readings of formative texts that comprise the bulk
of this study, the second level of double estrangement, as befits a more
paradigmatic critique, is generally rather more subtle than the first, even
though the first layer, which presents a more specific critique, is likelier to
have more problematic, and direct, potential consequences for the author.
The theoretical apparatus in this study also takes into account a num-
ber of other interrelated phenomena. Because of the issue of “diglossia”
in Arabic, where the language used in literature, journalism, and other
formal discourses differs vastly from those used in colloquial speech, SF
in Arabic is always already linked to the classical and medieval periods
and therefore is in tension between possible futures, estranged present,
and the archaic language of the glorious past. ASF tends to have char-
acters who are musaṭṭaḥ or “flattened,” a term borrowed from E. M.
Forster by Talāwi, both because of the primacy of the allegorical mode in
Arabic literary fiction, wherein shallow characterization allows a character
to stand in for a demographic group, and also because of a belief shared
by many Arab critics that scientific and technological development leads
to dehumanization. This section will also address tarqī‘ or “patching” a
work by eliminating its problematic elements before the end of the text.
Arab critics also view ASF as partaking in tanabbu’, which means “pre-
diction,” but with a hint of “divination”: the effect on Arab societies
of the introduction of advanced science and technology. This, for many
Arab critics, is the primary purpose of SF, as the estrangement function
 1 INTRODUCTION 11

is a defining feature of modern Arabic literary fiction in general. The

readings of Arab critics of ASF in Chapter 4 will engage in detail with
these phenomena in order to enable the close readings of formative texts
in the subsequent chapters to stick more closely to how Arab critics of
ASF formulate their understanding of the functions of the genre.
Let us consider the Arabic word for “tradition” itself. The word
taqlīd literally means “imitation,” in the sense of a child learning by
imitating its parents (Cowan, pp. 919–920), whereas its English coun-
terpart comes from the Latin word tradere, “to deliver,” as in the mail.
Readers of SF in English can have the old ways delivered, but choose
to alter, ignore, modify, or discard them; in Arabic, the sense of tradi-
tion is rather more compelling. It is upon this sort of analysis—of how
the Arabic grammar and diction of these works of ASF add nuance to
or reinforce the social commentary in which the texts are engaged—that
I will consistently focus in this book. Chapters 5–10 of Arabic Science
Fiction will each engage in a close reading of one or more texts by a
single author. This will undeniably force me to set aside for the sake of
(relative) brevity a number of works now considered at least semi-canon-
ical, but I believe that word- and sentence-level analysis as a means of
showcasing and critiquing the characteristic tropes, concerns, and themes
of the genre will serve first and foremost to firmly anchor these attrib-
utes in the texts themselves. In subsequent studies, I plan to bring the
works set aside into the theoretical framework that will be developed in
the first three chapters of this study. Chapter 2 will address two issues.
We will begin by exploring the approaches of postcolonial theorists to
the colonial encounter and to SF and how these perspectives have man-
ifested in other studies of non-Western SF. This section will focus most
closely on the perspectives of Homi Bhabha on the notion of ambiva-
lence, “the complex mix of attraction and repulsion that character-
izes the relationship between colonizer and colonized” (Ashcroft et al.,
p. 10), and of Neil Lazarus, whose critique of postcolonial literary stud-
ies and its dependence upon a very narrow palette of literary works will
prove invaluable. Our readings of ASF novels in this study will also
read the concept of ambivalence through the lens of the attitude of
the texts toward modernity. The analysis will then shift to a brief sur-
vey of the prevailing theories of SF, including Suvin’s: in addition, we
will look at Norman Spinrad’s and Hugo Gernsback’s definitions of SF,
and the more detailed approaches of Samuel Delaney, Brian Aldiss, Carl
Freedman, and Adam Roberts. Arabic Science Fiction is also intended
12 I. CAMPBELL

to be a resource for scholars of Arabic literature, who have their own

theoretical frameworks and perforce may not be fully acquainted with
SF theory. The final section of the chapter will briefly encapsulate what
Western literary genres the various theorists argue are the main precursor
genres of Western SF.
Chapter 3 takes on first the Arabic term for SF, al-khayāl al-‘ilmi, lit-
erally “knowledgy ficiton/imagination,” but one in which the sort of
knowledge is imprecise: ‘ilm can mean both scientific knowledge and
traditional religious scholarship. This slippage in terminology colors
the view of Arabic critics of the genre. Next, I rely on the work of Ada
Barbaro, one of the very few Westerners to have written about ASF,
and her work on the precursor genres that Arab writers and critics have
argued ground ASF in the Arabic literary tradition. The chapter exam-
ines ‘ajā’ib or mirabilia literature before moving to cognitive estrange-
ment in medieval philosophical texts, most notably Ibn Ṭufayl’s twelfth
century CE Ḥayy ibn Yaqẓān. The chapter next examines the cognitive
estrangement found in certain tales within the 1001 Nights, then the lit-
erary subgenre of discourses on technological marvels. The final section
of the chapter explores Arabic literature’s utopian tradition, which also
greatly informs ASF: in this section, I undertake readings of the Arab
scholars Barbaro uses as her sources. Chapter 4 sets up the theoretical
apparatus through which the readings of ASF novels in the rest of this
study will be examined. It relies primarily on the work of those Arab
critics who have taken ASF as their subject, but also takes into account
Barbaro’s insights and those of Western theorists of SF. It is in this chap-
ter that the theory of double estrangement will be developed at length.
Chapter 5 begins the series of readings of different works of ASF,
taking into account double estrangement and the other perspectives
the novels foreground. The chapter is an extended and close reading of
one novel, Sharīf’s Qāhir al-Zaman [“The Conqueror of Time,” 1972];
this reading concentrates on double estrangement. I argue in the chap-
ter that the novel, in which megalomaniac scientist Ḥalīm discovers how
to freeze and revivify human subjects, estranges on one level the rule of
charismatic dictator Gamal Abdel Nasser, and on another the much-re-
duced pace of scientific and technological development in Sharīf’s native
Egypt since the late medieval period. Sharīf uses the novum of the book,
cryogenics, as a means of estranging Egyptian society as frozen in time.
Chapter 6 examines two novels by Muṣṭafā Maḥmūd: al-‘Ankabūt
[“The Spider,” 1965], in which a mad scientist develops a serum that
 1 INTRODUCTION 13

enables him to experience past lives, and Rajul Taḥta al-Ṣifr [“Man
Below Zero,” 1967], in which a scientist in 2067 invents a means of
transforming himself into radio waves. The analysis of both novels
centers on their depiction of the rupture and lack of historical continu-
ity that characterizes the presence of advanced science and technology
in ASF. In The Spider, the contrast between the rational, scientific pres-
ent, and the experience by the narrator and the scientist of past lives,
which are uniformly characterized by despotism and brutality, demon-
strates that a rational, scientific present cannot exist in Egypt2 without
a rupture from the past. In Man Below Zero, the future history narra-
tive within the text demonstrates a trope found in Conqueror as well: no
future advanced Arab world can exist absent a rupture with the present,
usually a nuclear war or plague, wherein the Western world is effectively
destroyed. The effect of these ruptures is to estrange the lack of pro-
gress in the Arab world: if the only way Egypt can regain its status as the
world’s scientific capital is through holocaust, this says much about the
current state of affairs.
Chapter 7 undertakes an extended reading of Egyptian writer Ṣabri
Mūsā’s al-Sayyid min Ḥaql al-Sabānikh [“The Gentleman from the
Spinach Field,” 1987], which depicts the one man in a hyper-organized,
overpopulated, superficially benevolent future utopia who wakes up and
understands that things are not as they seem. This chapter and the next
engage Jameson’s exploration of utopia, drawing on both his work and
that of Arab critics to examine how the novel estranges looking back to
the glorious past, with its idealized utopian community, as a response to
the colonial encounter. The novel very carefully sets up the protagonist
and those who agree with him as sympathetic, then pulls a switch near
the end and makes it clear that it is impossible and counterproductive
to return, or to wish to return, to the past. It also enables us to reread
Jameson’s contention that SF’s relation to utopian fiction is to impose
upon utopia the limits of production.
Chapter 8 examines Moroccan novelist ’Aḥmad ‘Abd al-Salām
al-Baqqāli’s al-Ṭūfān al-’Azraq [“The Blue Flood,” 1976]. In this chap-
ter, I will focus on its portrayal of a utopian community and the conse-
quences of this utopia for conservative social values. The reading here

2 Most of the initial wave of ASF in the 1960s and 1970s was by Egyptian writers: Egypt

is the most populous Arab country by a wide margin and has long dominated literature and
other forms of mass media.
14 I. CAMPBELL

will focus on the novel’s estrangement of religion and of Arab societies’

response(s) to feminism. Blue Flood estranges the association of reac-
tionary social values and authoritarianism with the exercise of religion,
a habit by no means unique to Arab societies. By treating the women
in the text as interchangeable bodies, the novel critiques both the ret-
rograde attitude towards women and how that same attitude manifests
among the modern, liberal scientists in the community. This reading
enables us to place Jameson’s view of the utopian community as being
effectively outside the limits of time and history, and of SF as reinscribing
those limits, in the context of the common trope in Arabic literature of
portraying its cities as enclaves in a hostile environment.
Chapter 9 takes as its subject Syrian novelist Ṭālib ‘Umrān’s early
novel Khalfa Ḥājiz al-Zaman [“Beyond the Veil of Time,” 1985], a
mystical tale reminiscent of Sharīf’s short story. Here, rather than seclu-
sion leading to enlightenment, we have another classical trope, the
romantic relationship as a metaphor for a union with the divine. The
text serves as an introduction to SF and renders space exploration more
cognitive within the Arabic literary tradition. Yet within its narrative is a
strong critique of the belief that a society based on reason is the answer
to the ills that plague the world. ‘Umrān’s harmonious otherworldly
utopia conceals violence, slavery, and exploitation: this estranges the
argument that a scientific, benevolent socialist utopia will solve the prob-
lems of despotism.
Chapter 10, our final reading, takes us through a series of three novels
by Kuwaiti writer Ṭība ’Aḥmad Ibrāhīm, the first major woman writer of
ASF. The texts, al-Insān al-Bāhit [“The Pale Person,” 1986], al-Insān
al-Muta‘addad [“The Multiple Person,” 1990] and Inqirāḍ al-Rajul
[“The Extinction of Men,” 1992] address the effects of cryogenics and
cloning upon a family with roots both in Kuwait and in an estranged
version of the USA. Each work has its own particular concerns, but
throughout the three texts is a long and detailed double estrangement
of Ibrāhīm’s own society. Her Kuwait is unable to cope with the irrup-
tion of colonialism of both the traditional sort and the more modern
influx of technology and liberal social values, because the traditional legal
and social frameworks cannot account for the changes they engender.
Modernity is too attractive to the tiny intellectual class and too inimi-
cal to the traditional values held by the majority to enable her society
to either embrace or reject it. The final novel uses a far-future setting
as a means of estranging the images and practice of the First Gulf War,
 1 INTRODUCTION 15

enabling Ibrāhīm to speak clearly about the effects of the war while
retaining plausible deniability.
The study will end with a brief review in Chapter 11 of how our close
readings have extended or resituated both double estrangement and the
perspectives of other critics, and an examination of how ASF has ena-
bled us to problematize or reframe some of the concepts of postcolonial
theory. It is to be hoped that Arabic Science Fiction will establish ASF
as a maturing genre worthy of serious study by scholars of Arabic liter-
ature as well as scholars of SF. It may also serve as a resource for future
scholarship on the ways in which Arab writers have addressed the colo-
nial encounter with SF by using its structures and tropes to create their
own perspective on the subject.

Works Cited
Ashcroft, Bill, Gareth Griffiths, and Helen Tiffin. 2007. Post-colonial Studies: The
Key Concepts. 2nd ed. London: Routledge.
Bottomore, Tom, ed. 1983. A Dictionary of Marxist Thought. Cambridge:
Harvard University Press.
Cowan, James M., ed. 1994. The Hans Wehr Dictionary of Modern Written
Arabic. Ithaca, NY: Spoken Language Services.
Jameson, Fredric. 1986. “Third-World Literature in the Age of Multinational
Capitalism.” Social Text #15 (Autumn), 65–88.
Kilpatrick, Hilary. 1992. “The Egyptian Novel from Zaynab to 1980.” In
Modern Arabic Literature, edited by M.M. Badawi, 223–269. Cambridge:
Cambridge University Press.
Rieder, John. 2008. Colonialism and the Emergence of Science Fiction.
Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press.
Sharīf, Nihād. 1981. ’Alladhi Taḥaddā al-‘Iṣār [“The One Who Defied the
Hurricane”]. Cairo: Rewayat al-Hilal.
Snir, Reuven. 2000. “The Emergence of Science Fiction in Arabic Literature”.
Der Islam 77:2, 263–285.
Suvin, Darko. 1979. Metamorphoses of Science Fiction. New Haven: Yale
University Press.
———. 1988. Positions and Presuppositions in Science Fiction. Kent, OH: Kent
State University Press.
White, John J. 2004. Bertolt Brecht’s Dramatic Theory. Rochester, NY: Camden
House.
Willett, John, ed. 1964. Brecht on Theatre. New York: Palgrave Macmillan.
 CHAPTER 2

Postcolonial Literature and Arabic SF

Scholarship in recent years has addressed the productive relationship

between postcolonial theories of literature and SF produced outside the
metropolitan West or in marginalized areas within the West. Eric Smith
traces several streams of thought in this relationship, beginning with
Edward Said’s observation that the novel as cultural artifact is unthinka-
ble outside its proximate relation to imperialism. Smith addresses Istvan
Csicery-Ronay Jr.’s argument that what Smith calls “canonical” SF has:

…three requisite conditions: the technological expansionism of the imperi-

alist will to power; the intercession of a mediating popular culture at home
to absorb and transcode the contingent trauma of the imperial project; and
the pseudo-utopian imaginative projection of an “achieved technoscientific
Empire.” (Smith, p. 2)

SF generates a certain amount of support for imperialism and colonialism

by rooting itself in the societies produced by these conditions, while at
the same time critiquing these drives by estranging them. Whether the
specific example is humans landing on an alien planet, or giant bureau-
cratic space empires with lax policies toward the placement of auxiliary
exhaust ducts, the colonial encounter is and always has been one of SF’s
most consistent tropes.
Before addressing this argument within the context of Arabic SF
(ASF), let us examine the general approach of postcolonial theory to the
colonial encounter and to its role in postcolonial literature. Leela Gandhi

© The Author(s) 2018 17

I. Campbell, Arabic Science Fiction, Studies in Global
Science Fiction, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-91433-6_2
18 I. CAMPBELL

characterizes the diversity, complexity, and (sometimes intentional)

­contradictions of the postcolonial approach as a result of its origins in
two different and not always compatible philosophical discourses: post-
structuralism, with its critique of the nexus between language and mean-
ing, and Marxism, with its emphasis on the material. She argues that
both discourses are essential to understanding the colonial encounter:

While the poststructuralist critique of Western epistemology and theori-

sation of cultural alterity/difference is indispensable to postcolonial the-
ory, materialist philosophies, such as Marxism, seem to supply the most
compelling basis for postcolonial politics. Thus, the postcolonial critic has
to work toward a synthesis of, or negotiation between, both modes of
thought. (Gandhi, p. ix, italics in original)

For Gandhi, it is this very commitment to practical politics in addition to

the more purely theoretical that makes the discourse most valuable. With
respect to the production and criticism of postcolonial ASF, the link
between practical politics and cultural alterity is necessarily attenuated.
These texts are reflections upon postcolonial Arab societies and calls for
reflection rather than for action; their status as texts in Modern Standard
Arabic, a self-consciously archaic and complex language that is largely
removed from the lived experiences of the masses, render their useful-
ness as inspiration to political action indirect. Moreover, insofar as novels
from the formative period of ASF critique epistemology, which they do,
and theorize cultural alterity or difference, which is rather less clear, it
is not Western epistemology they critique, but rather the mindset(s) of
the postcolonial Arab states. These paradigms include the belief that reli-
gious fundamentalism or an embrace of traditional culture is best suited
to combat the onslaught of modernity, technology, and capitalism that
come from without even in the postcolonial era. Another mindset that
ASF critiques is the embrace of or acquiescence to authoritarian despot-
ism as the best or only means of resisting that very turn to the past.
Postcolonial theory began to coalesce in the 1980s among a group of
scholars focused on Subaltern Studies involving the literatures, usually in
English, of the independent states that had once formed the colonies of
British India. Significantly, none of the body of texts that these scholars
examined was SF. Subaltern, a polyvalent word, once simply meant “of
inferior rank,” but in Antonio Gramsci’s formulation means those sub-
ject to the hegemony of the ruling classes (Ashcroft et al., pp. 198–199)
 2 POSTCOLONIAL LITERATURE AND ARABIC SF 19

and in postcolonial theory generally denotes the voiceless within

­discourses of power or knowledge. That by speaking and being heard,
especially in the language of the former colonizer, a subaltern becomes
to a certain extent no longer subaltern was and remains an enduring con-
cern. The tension among the various understandings of “subaltern” car-
ried over into the initial debate over the name of the field: hyphenating
it as “post-colonial” to mark that these literatures came after colonialism
was over mostly gave way to the conclusion that “the postcolonial condi-
tion is inaugurated with the onset rather than the end of colonial occu-
pation” (Gandhi, p. 3).1
The focus of postcolonial theory broadened to include the colonial
encounter, both initial and ongoing, because while the formal independ-
ence of postcolonial states implied a break with the past and a conscious
reinvention, the concerns of postcolonial literatures tended to center on
the persistence of colonization in the minds of those states’ citizens:

The emergence of anti-colonial and ‘independent’ nation-States after colo-

nialism is frequently accompanied by a desire to forget the colonial past.
This ‘will-to-forget’ takes a number of historical forms, and is impelled
by a variety of cultural and political motivations. Principally, postcolonial
amnesia is symptomatic of the urge for historical self-invention or the need
to make a new start—to erase painful memories of colonial subordina-
tion… In response, postcolonialism can be seen as a theoretical resistance
to the mystifying amnesia of the colonial aftermath. It is a disciplinary pro-
ject devoted to the academic task of revisiting, remembering and, crucially,
interrogating the colonial encounter. (Gandhi, p. 4)2

A branch of postcolonial theory addresses the sudden realization of one’s

own subordination that characterizes the colonial encounter for the

1 She argues that there were other debates, such as that between “postcoloniality”, a con-

dition of being, and “postcolonialism”, which might be viewed as a dogma: for Gandhi,
“the controversy surrounding postcolonial vocabulary underscores an urgent need to dis-
tinguish and clarify the relationship between the material and analytic cognates of post-
colonial studies.” This study will acknowledge the complexity of these debates, but use
“postcolonial theory/studies” as a general rule for the sake of consistency.
2 The single quotes and odd capitalization are in the original. This study will continue

to say “the colonial encounter”, when there are of course many, both in congruence to
the general practice among theorists and in order to emphasize the structural relationships
therein.
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