A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature (20 page)

However, there has also been another trend pressing on the Arab literary scene over the last two decades or so, and this has been the growing intolerance of literary expression generally, which has made what was always perhaps a minority activity into one that is now that of a sometimes embattled minority. Religious conservatism tends not to value literature on the liberal model – literature, in other words, that carves out a space for intellectual exploration and freedom of expression – since this can challenge religious truths. In the contemporary Arab world writers have been threatened and their works banned as a result of religious pressures, these pressures being possibly stronger than those that in the past used to come from the
state. Mahfouz, for example, was attacked in Cairo in 1992 by assailants inspired by a
fatwa
, or religious judgment, against his work by an Islamist preacher. He was badly wounded and lost the use of his right arm. Similarly, Nawal al-Saadawi, one of the Arab world’s best-recognized feminist writers, has received threats from religiously inspired elements not sharing her views or not agreeing with her right to express them. Even in the comparatively liberal environment of Cairo, literary works have been withdrawn from sale as a result of religious pressures, pressures that are greater in some other parts of the Arab world. These developments seem to recapitulate campaigns that had once been thought to belong to the history books, such as the campaign mounted by traditionalist elements against Taha Hussein in the 1920s, resulting in the withdrawal of his book on pre-Islamic poetry.
¹
While the development of the Internet in recent years has greatly extended possibilities for free expression, both for bloggers and for literary use, there have also been many attempts to police it. When Shohdy Surur, an Egyptian webmaster, published poems by his father Naguib Surur on the Web in 2002, for example, he soon discovered the limits of free expression, being sentenced to one year in prison for offences against ‘public morality’.
²

Long-term observers of the literary scene, such as the critic Pierre Cachia, have written of the special kind of elitism that characterizes modern Arabic literature ‘in a part of the world where the majority [was] illiterate and where the modern Renaissance [the
nahda
] was sparked off mainly by contact with European culture.’ Moreover, that elitism has sometimes been considered out of touch with what might be called the ‘traditional’ culture: ‘most Arab writers look upon themselves as nothing less than the cultural and social guides of their contemporaries through troubled times,’ but the guidance they offer, ‘of western origin, … [is] likely to be shunned by those with a more traditional turn of mind.’ While Political Islam has emerged as the most important contemporary social and political trend in the Arab
world, able to mobilize populations in a way Arab nationalism no longer seems able to do, ‘there is scarcely any sign of approbation or even recognition [of this] in the literature of the elite.’ Whereas earlier generations of writers ‘patronized the masses but meant well by them’, the present generation seems to have lost the confidence that it has anything to say to them, adding to the sense of crisis that reigns in parts of the Arab world.
³
These are Cachia’s views. Another more recent survey of the development of modern Arabic literature ends with the comment that ‘the outlook for the sort of literature discussed in this volume remains a somewhat precarious one’.
⁴

Nevertheless, literature continues to get written, and readers continue to read it, and recent decades have even seen an increase in the outlets and the money available to authors, following the expansion of the media and literary publication in the Gulf. Moreover, many more Arab writers have successfully made a name for themselves outside their countries of origin and in translation, and some of them have even managed to escape the traditional niches into which Arab authors have tended to be put, as was noted in
Chapter 1
. In concluding this book, one could do worse than consider the fortunes of two recent novels, popular in the Arab world, which have also struck chords with western readers and which seem to augur well for the continuing vitality of Arabic literature. These novels,
Gate of the Sun
by the Lebanese writer and journalist Elias Khoury, and
The Yacoubian Building
by the Egyptian writer Alaa Al Aswany, already mentioned in
Chapter 6
, conform to conceptions of literature outlined in this book, while also suggesting that Arabic literature has now become a literature like any other as far as international readers are concerned. Humphrey Davies’s translation of
Gate of the Sun
won the UK Banipal Prize for Arabic Translation in 2006, for example, while
The Yacoubian Building
has become an international bestseller, a first for any novel originally written in Arabic.
⁵

Khoury, born in Lebanon, has dealt in his work with the fortunes of
that country and with the experience of Palestinians made homeless by the declaration of the state of Israel in 1948, the year in which he was born.
Gate of the Sun
gives a panorama of this experience, including references to events in 1936, 1948, 1970 and 1971 and after 1975 during the civil war in Lebanon. It does this through the character of Khaleel, a doctor in a refugee camp in Beirut charged with taking care of Yunis, a Palestinian fighter on his deathbed. Yunis’s career seems to recapitulate Khaleel’s own experiences and those of his generation, but how do these fading memories of a dying man relate to the present? Can a coherent story be made out of them that can serve as a guide for the future? The novel, Khoury notes, is a relatively new literary genre in Lebanon, as it is elsewhere in the Arab world, but it is one in which history can be written on a human scale and historical themes given concrete expression. While ‘Lebanon’s new ruling class wants to make the country part of the petro-dollar system and to convert it into a small Hong Kong,’ he says, there are other options including making the country ‘part of the search for democracy, identity and change in the Arab world.’
⁶
His novel, designed to be part of the exploration of those other options, shows Khoury taking seriously his role as the conscience of the nation.

Al Aswany’s
The Yacoubian Building
also deals with history, though this time the focus is Egypt. He introduces easily recognizable characters and presents social issues in concrete form, and as a result it has much in common with popular forms of television drama, as critics have noted. It cannot have done the book any harm either that the Yacoubian Building of the title in fact exists (it is an apartment building located in a mixed commercial district), and it is easy to imagine Al Aswany’s characters crossing each other on this building’s stairway as they do in the pages of the novel. Among these characters are Zaki Bey el-Dessouki, an impoverished representative of the class that ruled Egypt until the country’s 1952 Revolution, various members of the
nouveaux riches
who have profited from the country’s opening
to the international capitalist system from the 1970s onwards, and representatives of the country’s increasingly pauperized lower-middle and working classes. There is also Taha el Shazli, whose story draws attention to the restricted options available to young people: the son of the building’s doorman, his ambitions to become a police officer founder because of his modest social origins and he is drawn towards extremist violence. Al Aswany’s novel draws attention to the atmosphere of nostalgia that seems to have taken hold in today’s Egypt, idealizing the past in contrast to a disappointing present and to a future that seems blocked. Above all, he illustrates the makeshift compromises that almost all the characters have to resort to in order to get by in a society in which corruption has become rife, notably in politics and the business world, making life, for many, into a kind of bitter choice between poverty or emigration. A second novel by Al Aswany,
Chicago
, was published in Cairo in 2007, and it cannot be long before this too is available in translation.
⁷

These novels, the one filling a large canvas and dealing with post-war Palestinian experience, the other describing life in a Cairo apartment building, are as good an introduction as any to contemporary Arabic literature. Both books focus on issues such as the meanings to be found in the past, the options available for the present, and the often cruel predicaments in which men and women from various social backgrounds find themselves. Khoury’s novel, postmodernist in its use of narrative and its ‘polyphonic’ texture, compares interestingly with the more straightforward realism employed by Al Aswany. Yet, the issues these novels raise, and the literary conceptions on which they draw, are perhaps the bread and butter of modern Arabic literature.

1
.   In his
Modern Arabic Literature in Translation: A Companion
(London: Saqi, 2005), Salih Altoma even speaks of a ‘linguistic iron curtain’ separating the Arab world from the West.

2
.   Suggestions for further reading are also given at the end of this book.

3
.   Soueif is the author of
The Map of Love
, shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1999. Matar’s
The Season of Men
, a Libyan memoir, was shortlisted for the same prize in 2006. Ghali’s novel was published in 1964 (London: Andre Deutsch). An Arabic translation was published in Cairo in 2007.

4
.   Franck Mermier’s
Le Livre et la ville, Beyrouth et l’édition arabe
(Arles: Actes sud, 2005) is a useful recent account of Arab publishing.

5
.   Salih Altoma (
Modern Arabic Literature in Translation
, London: Saqi, 2005) gives statistics for English translations of Arabic fiction between 1947 and 2003: ‘most of the 322 titles listed … (about 170 titles) are Egyptian. The remaining titles represent: Algeria (2), Iraq (11), Jordan (3), Kuwait (1), Lebanon (26), Libya (7), Morocco (8), Palestine (22), Saudi Arabia (11), Sudan (5), Syria (11), Tunisia (2), United Arab Emirates and Yemen (2).’

6
.   
Modern Arabic Literature
, edited by M. M. Badawi (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1992).

7
.   
L’Ecrivain
(Paris: Julliard, 2001). The names are Franco-Algerian transliterations of those of Egyptian writers and intellectuals. Khadra is the author of detective novels featuring Commissioner Brahim Llob of the
Algiers Police Department. Originally written in French, some of them have been translated into English.

8
.   
Comme un été qui ne reviendra pas, Le Caire 1955–1996
(Arles: Actes sud, 2001). Berrada gives the names of Egyptian musicals from the 1940s, which starred singers such as those he mentions. Taha Hussein, Tawfiq el-Hakim, [al-] Manfalouti and Ahmed Lutfi el-Sayyed are Egyptian writers.

9
.   Robert Irwin, in a review of Salma Khadra Jayyusi, ed.,
Modern Arabic Fiction: An Anthology
(New York: Columbia University Press, 2005), that appeared in the
London Review of Books
(18 August 2005).

10
.   Mermier (
Le Livre et la ville,
2005) describes publishing across the Arab world, focusing on centres like Cairo and Beirut. Readership figures for Egyptian authors are suggested in R. Jacquemond,
Entre scribes et écrivains: le champ littéraire dans l’Egypte contemporaine
(Arles: Actes sud, 2003), an indispensable guide. An English translation of this book is due from the American University in Cairo Press in 2008.

1
.   Quotations from E. Said,
Orientalism
(London: Penguin, 1995).

2
.   See Robert Irwin’s
For Lust of Knowing: the Orientalists and their Enemies
(London: Allen Lane, 2006).

3
.   Denys Johnson-Davies, ‘On Translating Arabic Literature’ in Ferial J. Ghazoul and Barbara Harlow (eds.),
The View from Within: Writers and Critics on Contemporary Arabic Literature
(Cairo: AUC Press, 1994). The same author’s
Memories in Translation: A Life Between the Lines of Arabic Literature
(Cairo: AUC Press, 2006) contains additional discussion.

4
.   Suzanne Jill Levine, ‘The Latin American novel in English translation’ in Efrain Kristal (ed.),
The Cambridge Companion to the Latin American Novel
(Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2005).

5
.   Salih J. Altoma,
Modern Arabic Literature in Translation
(London: Saqi, 2005).

6
.   Robin Waterfield in
Prophet: the Life and Times of Kahlil Gibran
(London: Allen Lane, 1998).

7
.   ‘In the States, as of April 1996, [Gibran’s]
The Prophet
had sold over 9,000,000 copies since publication … In the rest of the English-speaking world, about another 25,000 copies are sold every year.’ These figures make Gibran not only the most successful Arab writer ever, but also ‘probably the best-selling individual poet of all time after Shakespeare and Lao-tzu’ (Waterfield).

8
.   R. Jacquemond,
Entre scribes et écrivains: le champ littéraire dans l’Egypte contemporaine
(Arles: Actes sud, 2003),
Chapter 5
.

9
.   Jacquemond,
Entre scribes et écrivains
, 2003, p. 157. Jacquemond extends his
discussion in ‘Translation and Cultural Hegemony: the Case of French–Arabic Translation’ in L. Venuti (ed.),
Rethinking Translation: Discourse, Subjectivity, Ideology
(London: Routledge, 1992), pp. 139–158.

10
.   Robert Irwin in
The Arabian Nights: A Companion
(London: Tauris, 2003).

11
.   André Lefevere discusses nineteenth-century Arabic translation in
Translation, Rewriting and the Manipulation of Literary Fame
(London: Routledge, 1992),
Chapter 6
, ‘The Case of the Missing
Qasidah
’.