Arabic Literature for the Classroom

Teaching Methods, Theories, Themes and Texts

Mushin J al-Musawi, Mushin J al-Musawi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• ISBN:
  9781315451633
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Littérature
• Subtopic: Littérature du Moyen-Orient

Arabic Literature for the Classroom argues for a more visible presence of Arabic within the humanities and social sciences, stressing the need to make Arabic literature available as a world literature, without damaging its own distinctive characteristics.

The nineteen chapters which make up this book broach theoretical and methodical cultural concerns in teaching literatures from non-American cultures, along with issues of cross-cultural communication, cultural competency and translation. While some chapters bring out the fascinating and ever tantalizing connections between Arabic and the literatures of medieval Europe, others employ specific approaches to teaching particular texts, potential methodologies, themes and a variety of topics that can place Arabic widely in a vast swathe of academic application and learning. Topics that are explored include gender, race, class, trauma, exile, dislocation, love, rape, humor, and cinema, as well as issues that relate to writers and poets, women's writing and the so called nahdah (revival) movement in the 19 th Century.

The comparative framework and multi-disciplinary approach means that this book injects new life into the field of Arabic Literature. It will therefore be an essential resource for students, scholars and teachers of Arabic Literature, as well as for anyone with an interest in learning more about Arabic culture.

PART I

Theory and method

1

Proxidistant reading

Toward a critical pedagogy of the nahḌah in US comparative literary studies

Shaden M. Tageldin

Courses that teach modern Arabic literature, particularly those that address non-specialists, often focus on relatively recent exemplars of the canon. Most engage texts that hail from the mid- to late twentieth century – a period in which the fate of “new” narrative genres (for example, the novel) is well established – rather than those that evoke a time when the boundaries between “tradition” and “modernity” were in flux. Yet a critical pedagogy of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arab “renaissance” (nahḌah) could bring modern Arabic literature more squarely into the fold of empire and postcolonial studies, critical translation theory, and world and comparative literature. This essay reflects on both the theoretical importance and the practical experience of teaching the dynamics of early Arab literary modernity to non-specialist audiences – undergraduate and graduate – in comparative literature. Two problems emerge in this context: first, the self-Orientalism of nahḌah texts, which often uphold a thesis of post-Ottoman “decline” and post-European “awakening” and thus reinforce Orientalist views of Arab-Islamic culture in a post-9/11 era of anti-Arab and Islamophobic sentiment; and second, a relative dearth (to date) of high-quality, in-print, and affordable English translations.

Conjoining comparatist methods of “close” and “distant” reading, I propose a twofold praxis of proxidistant reading to address these problems of world, time, and access: a praxis that connects modern Arabic literature to modern Western and world literatures in ways that assume neither easy equivalence nor absolute non-relation between adab and literature, and the modifiers Arabic, Western, world. First, while nahḌah intellectuals reengineered the Arab-Islamic idea of adab – once coterminous with knowledge itself – to translate the modern Western idea of literature, premodern adab and its modern Arabic “nemesis” share more than nahḌah ideology concedes: both can be narrowly “literary” or radically transdisciplinary, belletristic or “lowbrow,” formal (fuṢḥā) or dialectal (‘āmmiyyah). Thus I propose that we read nahḌah texts as testimonies to the discontinuous continuity – or continuity in death – of premodernity and modernity, “Wests” and “Easts,” interrogating conceptions of world and time that exaggerate either the proximity or the distance of literary-cultural epistemes, genres, and modes of expression across these postulated divides. Second, I propose that we read translations of nahḌah “literature” both up close to and afar from original texts and from the imagined purview of the “literary.”

To impart a prismatic vision of the nahḌah to students who must rely on limited English translations, I suggest peri-literary approaches – “time travel” to the nahḌah through secondary sources, as well as primary sources (e.g. novels) set in the era yet composed in later periods – and para-literary readings that place the many forms that nahḌah “literature” actually took (historical, sociopolitical, scientific, popular) alongside those that fit its belletristic theoretical mold. By teaching an earlier “modern” than the “modern Arabic literature” comparatists typically teach, and by comparing the nahḌah with similar “renaissances” elsewhere in the non-Western world, we can help students understand Arabic-speaking cultures not as objects of global modernity but as complex subjects thereof – and develop a complementary (or contestatory) vision of the rise of world and comparative literatures usually imputed to nineteenth-century Europe.

This proposition challenges a prevailing US view of the Arab world and Islam as anti-European and premodern, already explored in Edward Said’s Orientalism: a view that accepts Samuel Huntington’s “clash of civilizations” thesis and posits a “medieval,” unchanging Arab-Islamic world.¹ (Witness a Washington Post news story of 10 April 2010, reporting the political foment in Egypt on the eve of the 2011 presidential elections. Its headline, “Political Stirrings in Egypt, a Land of Little Change,” compounds the absurdity of its lead: “‘Change’ is not a word often associated with Egypt.”² Not long after this article appeared, the revolution of 25 January 2011 would topple Egyptian President ḥusnī Mubārak.) The fact that the nahḌah took place, then, contests the Orientalist logic of Eastern stasis. Yet the prevailing intellectual mood of the nahḌah itself – read closely – is steeped in Orientalism. If teaching the modern Arab “renaissance” forces students in the US academy to collapse the Occident/Orient binary assumed by Orientalist thought – to replace the post-9/11 question “Why do they hate us so?” with the question “Why did they once love us so, and perhaps do still?” – the textual corpus of the “renaissance” itself too often reifies Orientalist binaries.

Indeed, throughout late nineteenth- and especially early twentieth-century Arabic literary history and criticism, the scholar of the nahḌah encounters Arab self-murder. The Arab must die to awaken. In his Tārīkh ādāb al-lughah al-‘arabiyyah, often considered the first modern Arab foray into literary historiography, Jurjī Zaydān dates the beginning of the modern Arab renaissance – what he calls “al-nahḌah al-akhīrah” (“the latest renaissance”), in one of the earliest conscious uses of the term – to the French retreat from Egypt in 1801.³ While Zaydān concedes that the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 “rattled the nerves” of the East (“ihtazzat lahu a‘Ṣābuhu”), he ignores the possibility that the theses of pre-1798 “decline” and post-1798 “renaissance” that so permeate his historical account of Arab literary modernity might issue from what Jean-Paul Sartre (prefacing Frantz Fanon) dubbed the “nervous condition” of the colonized native.⁴ Zaydān insists that eighteenth-century Ottoman Egypt and Syria languished in “backwardness and corruption” (“al-ta’akhkhuri wa-l-fasādi”) punctuated only by “nūran Ḍa’īlan” (“faint light”) from the intellectual labors of Syrian Christian monastic orders.⁵ (Even the latter are described only to be dismissed: “Yet this [activity … was] not enough to illuminate this darkened atmosphere,” presumably because it was primarily “religious” – non-secular, hence non-“scientific” and non-“modern.”⁶) To prove the Arab-Islamic world’s “backwardness” in the centuries just prior to its first encounter with modern imperial Europe, Zaydān turns to the testimony of “French philosopher,” historian, and Orientalist Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney (1757–1820) in his two-volume travelogue Voyage en Syrie et en Égypte.⁷ Twice he gives Volney the final word on pre-nineteenth-century Arab cultural and material production, authorizing as “truth” the Frenchman’s ascription of “ignorance” and inferiority to both Ottoman Egypt and Syria and his concomitant valorization of Europe: the presumed catalyst of “that blessed spark” of Arab renewal.⁸ To his credit, Zaydān makes it clear that this European-inspired nahḌah is neither unique nor absolute, but only the latest such “renaissance” in Arab-Islamic history. He also suggests that Europe is not the only source of Arab literary modernity; although modern Arab writers had translated “countless” European novels by 1913 and had imitated the European novel form in their fiction, Zaydān argues, the Arabs had possessed the form “earlier.”⁹ Still, he makes it clear that this “latest renaissance” is also the first in a long time – since the heyday of the ‘Abbāsid period (750–1258) in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Between the ‘Abbāsid world of Hārūn al-Rashīd, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century world of Bashīr al-Shihābī in Syria and of the Khedives Ismā‘īl and ‘Abbās ḥilmī II in Egypt, on the other, yawns an abyss of near-inertia.¹⁰ Abdelfattah Kilito captures the time warp well: as modern Arabic literature, he maintains, “jumped from its own calendar to another, alien one [the European], memory lost its bearings and plunged into another memory and another time frame.”¹¹ What develops from this darkroom of forgetting and “rememory” (after Toni Morrison) is the image of an Arab-Islamic world roused by Europe from long, deathlike “sleep.”

Zaydān’s view typifies the dominant psychology of the modern Arab renaissance. Echoes of his logic sound in the later work of Aḥmad Amīn (1886–1954), a leading Egyptian Muslim intellectual of the twentieth century. Certainly Amīn’s Zu‘amā’ al-iṢlāḥ fī al-‘aṢr al-ḥadīth (Leaders of Reform in the Modern Era, 1948), a study of ten major Muslim reformists of the nineteenth century that culminates in a biography of Muḥammad ‘Abduh, takes a more critical view of the European-Arab encounter. Amīn is keenly aware that the political pressures of European colonialism drove the selective adoption of Western civilization, in its material (māddiyyah) and its spiritual (ma‘nawiyyah) forms, by Muslim reformists from India to Egypt and Turkey to Tunisia.¹² Yet this awareness does not extend to an epistemological critique of the decline/renaissance thesis. Like Zaydān, Amīn cites Volney’s account to certify an Arab-Islamic “death” that demands “rebirth” through Europe.¹³ If, as Said has argued, the repetition of idées reçues about the Arab-Islamic Orient masquerades as objective “truth” in much modern European Orientalist scholarship, Amīn enacts a native repetition of foreign Orientalism by citing Volney’s impression as fact, taking the European’s dim view of the Orient as his own.¹⁴ Amīn dubs the pre-nineteenth-century Islamic world a “decrepit old man whom the events [of history, especially the Crusades] had destroyed,” comparing this deteriorating subject to a Europe that “had begun … to awaken since the Crusades and to create a new civilization for itself.”¹⁵ So radical is the European-inspired “awakening” of the nineteenth-century Arabic-speaking world, contends Amīn, that “the difference between sons and fathers in the nineteenth century was wider than the difference between the people of the eighteenth century and [those] of the fifteenth.”¹⁶ If Amīn tacitly imputes the “renaissance” of Western Christendom (from supposed “Dark Ages” of its own) to its transformative encounter with Arab-Islamic cultures during the Crusades, he overtly ascribes the “awakening” of the “East” to the pressures of European conquest.

Other nahḌah intellectuals would judge Arabic even less generously. Writing in 1928, the Egyptian Muslim literary critic Aḥmad ḥasan al-Zayyāt – later editor of the Cairo periodical al-Risālah (The Message) – describes Arabic literature (virtually from its inception) as a “brackish creek,” stagnant water over which “gnats buzz.”¹⁷ This “death” awaits Western rejuvenation; the young Arab, al-Zayyāt maintains, drinks the (presumably fresh) water and “luscious fruits” of European literature because it speaks to life, his life in the present.¹⁸ Al-Zayyāt paints Arabic literature as a still birth, arguing that its linguistic heterogeneity (first dialectal, later translingual) from pre-Islamic times onward has doomed it to “chaos” and to failure as “literature.”¹⁹ Zaydān, at least, ascribed other “renaissances” to earlier ages of Arabic literature and gave a nod to indigenous as well as foreign precursors of literary modernity; Amīn, intimating the impact of colonial power on the modern Arab renaissance, unwittingly invites his reader to denaturalize the ideas of “decline” and “renaissance” and to reinterpret both as ideological constructs. Al-Zayyāt’s self-Orientalization is more absolute.

Teaching such texts in comparative literature, we might reinforce the “truth” of Zaydān’s, Amīn’s, and al-Zayyāt’s assumptions – shared by many of their time – that the Arab-Islamic world was in “decline” and needed Europe to resurrect it.²⁰ Such a pedagogical prospect is all the more ethically troubling at a time when global Islamophobia is ever more strident. One risks ratifying mainstream Western media and popular culture, which ceaselessly represent the Arab-Islamic world as a “backward” threat to the “progressive” West. That those like al-Zayyāt often ventriloquize, rather than speak in their own voice, Orientalist assumptions of Muslim decline and regeneration is a nuance subtle enough to get lost in the classroom.²¹ In teaching the nahḌah, we risk upholding Orientalism even as we undo it.

To counter this problem, we might assign primary sources that encourage students to construct a thick description of the impact of European colonialism on nineteenth-century Arab and Muslim self-understanding. Such sources might help students see that “renaissance” functions here as an ideologically motivated and translational term – translingual, transcultural, and transhistorical. Recovering Greco-Roman antiquity, the European Renaissance assimilated a once-rejected “pagan” literature to a Christian worldview, thereby forging a new humanism – at once sacred and secular – that prefigured the more radical rationalism of the European Enlightenment. The nineteenth-century Arab renaissance less often recouped forgotten antecedents from its own past. Rather, it reoriginated the Arab-Islamic present in the past that Europe had recently reclaimed. To ideologues of the nahḌah, Islam once had represented a symbiosis of reason and faith and had...