Arab Culture and the Novel
eBook - ePub

Arab Culture and the Novel

Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction

Muhammad Siddiq

Share book
  1. 272 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Arab Culture and the Novel

Genre, Identity and Agency in Egyptian Fiction

Muhammad Siddiq

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

This book explores the complex relationship between the novel and identity in modern Arab culture againsta backdrop of contemporary Egypt. It uses the example of the Egyptian novel to interrogate the root causes– religious, social, political, and psychological – of the lingering identity crisis that has afflicted Arab culture for at least two centuries.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Arab Culture and the Novel an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Arab Culture and the Novel by Muhammad Siddiq in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Islamic Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2007
ISBN
9781135980504

1
A GENRE AT WAR

Literary form and historical agency

This introductory chapter aims to map out major areas of intersection and overlap between imaginative and discursive representations of identity in the Egyptian novel. The mapping will identify and examine in some depth instructive instances of the overarching identity discourse against the fluid backdrop of contemporary Egyptian culture, politics, and history. Subsequent chapters will take up and interrogate further the trajectories of the novel and the nation as these interface and intertwine across multiple sites of identity formation.
To launch the investigation, let me begin with a categorical assertion about the state of the Arabic novel. Nearly a hundred years after its halting debut in Arab culture, the novel, in Egypt as elsewhere in the Arab world, remains a highly conflicted and fiercely contested genre.1 The reasons, grounds, and manifestations of this condition vary, but the phenomenon itself is pervasive and pertains equally to the novel’s subject matter and to its formal attributes and theoretical standing. Indeed, until recently the very name of the genre, Riwāya, vacillated in both scholarly and popular parlance between play, story, novel, and narrative in general.2 Occasionally, the tension inherent in the novel’s anomalous condition bursts violently onto the social scene to challenge some of the underlying philosophical and epistemological foundations of modern Arab thought and culture. The attempt on the life of Egypt’s, and the Arab world’s, foremost novelist, Naguib Mahfouz (NajÄ«b Maáž„fĆ«áș“) on October 14, 1994, occasioned such a rupture.
But Mahfouz is by no means alone in this regard. Other writers, scholars, and intellectuals have been subjected to equally horrid forms of harassment on account of their non-conformist thinking and writing. Some, like the Azharite shaykh DhahabÄ« and Faraj FĆ«da have paid with their lives for expressing unorthodox or unpopular views. Others, like NaáčŁr កāmid AbĆ« Zayd, Sayyid al-QimnÄ«, ‘Alā’ កāmid, Makram Muáž„ammad Aáž„mad, and កasan កanafÄ« have so far endured threats against their lives, loss of livelihood, religious renunciation, exile, and imprisonment.3 Recently the reprinting in Egypt of a novel by the Syrian writer កaydar កaydar unleashed massive demonstrations by students of al-Azhar that rocked the Egyptian capital for several weeks and caused a minor crisis in the country’s political establishment. This controversy followed fast on the heels of yet another that had erupted in the Egyptian press nearly two years earlier over the “propriety” of assigning the celebrated fictional autobiography of the Moroccan writer, Mohamed Choukri (Muáž„ammad ShukrÄ«), in a class of modern Arabic literature at the American University in Cairo. In the wake of that controversy, Choukri’s work, and a spate of others, were summarily banned by the government. In addition to the perennially contraband text of The Thousand And One Nights, the list included ‘Abdullāh al-NadÄ«m’s al-MasāmÄ«r (1898; The Nails) and Khalil Gibran’s masterpiece The Prophet.4 The banning of the last two works in particular bristles with irony because al-Nadim was the spokesman of the first genuine patriotic revolt against foreign rule in the history of modern Egypt, the 1881 ‘UrābÄ« uprising, and Gibran’s masterpiece had been translated into exquisitely elegant Arabic in the 1960s by none other than Tharwat ‘Ukāshah, who was twice minister of culture in Egypt.5
These inopportune events raise many troubling questions, but one in particular demands urgent attention here. It concerns the inordinate convergence of rival political, social, religious, and cultural forces at the site of the novel in Egypt. This convergence inevitably turns the space of the novel into an arena for lively debates over the critical issues confronting modern Arab culture and identity, even as that space continues in the main to house imagined characters engaged in contrived fictional actions and plots. The double take evident here occludes forthwith any option of viewing Arabic fiction exclusively in aesthetic or literary terms. By the same token, it necessarily implicates the novel (and the novelist) in extra-literary issues and conflicts. How this extensive overlap between novelistic and cultural domains impacts the poetics of the Arabic novel in Egypt is one overarching concern of this study.
It is possible to state this dilemma in slightly more metaphorical terms as the interlocking of trajectories of novel and nation in contemporary Egypt. Ominously, perhaps, the wave of attacks on nonconformist writers, unorthodox scholars, and unconventional books that characterized the last decade of the twentieth century also ushered in the first decade of the new century and the new millennium. What is especially remarkable about this fact is that the books in question had been written or published much earlier and had been available in Egypt for decades. This is as true of Mahfouz’s Awlād កāratinā (1959; Children of Gebelawi, 1981; Children of Our Alley, 1996)6 and the Arabic translation of Gibran’s The Prophet (1966) as it is of Mohamed Choukri’s al-Khubz al-កāfÄ« (1982; For Bread Alone, 1982) and Haydar Haydar’s WalÄ«mah li-A‘shāb al-Baáž„r (1983; A Banquet for the SeaWeeds). Al-Nadim’s work, of course, has been in existence for over a century, and The Arabian Nights for nearly a millennium.
As a cultural phenomenon, this compulsive return to earlier, presumably outgrown, phases and sites of contestation may bespeak the presence in the culture of elements it can neither fully assimilate nor decisively reject. From all appearances the phenomenon strongly suggests a return of the culturally repressed in fictional disguise. Examples of this recurrent pattern in modern Arab culture can be traced back at least to the end of the nineteenth century. If the radical vacillation that characterized the past century is at all indicative of the future, Arab novelists and writers in decades to come may well find themselves grappling with the same fundamental questions of identity that bedevilled successive generations of their predecessors all the way back to the onset of modern Arab history. A gloomy prospect, no doubt, but one not easily wished away or negotiated.
To pursue this line of investigation further is to raise still more troubling questions about the general predicament of modern Arab culture and the vast scholarship of it. One such broad and fundamental question is whether Arab culture has reached a historical impasse, of which the recurrent pattern described earlier is only a symptom. By impasse I do not mean to suggest lack of movement, only the absence of a clear direction or a cumulative, irreversible progress towards a discernible telos or horizon. From this perspective, the crisis of the novel may betray a projection and a displacement of real cultural tensions onto the virtual realm of fiction. Whether this displacement is spontaneous and fortuitous, as often appears from the angry public response to (largely unread) literary texts, or strategic and manipulated for political gain by the powers that be, is yet another question that deserves bearing in mind while assessing the role of the novel in Egypt. Finally, if Arab culture is indeed at a historic impasse, have Arab scholars and intellectuals who studied this predicament extensively under the rubric of “crisis” mistaken a permanent condition for a transient one? For few keywords figure in as many titles of scholarly works on modern Arab culture and identity as does the word azma (crisis). “There is a strong feeling in our Arab world that culture is in crisis,” begins an article by the prominent Egyptian intellectual Fu’ād Zakariyyā. Instructively enough, the article is entitled: “How to consider the cultural crisis?”7 Even if not quite an oxymoron, the compund “chronic crisis” is hardly more meaningful, especially if the “crisis” lasts a century or two.8
With these preliminary observations in mind, let me return briefly to the list of writers mentioned earlier, which, incidentally, comprises writers of fiction and non-fiction. What these writers share across boundaries of disparate genres, disciplines, and discourses is less evident than the uniformly hostile response their writing has elicited from certain quarters of Egypt’s religious and political establishments. [The list of “indicted” writers could be multiplied at will by expanding the geographic scope to encompass other Arab countries, or by extending the temporal span to cover earlier periods of Arab/Islamic history.] One remarkable by-product of the general predicament of writers and intellectuals in the contemporary Arab world has been the emigration of many of them to Western countries and the emergence there of a new form of writing on exile, homeland, and identity. Even outside the Arab world, these writers continue to write on Arab concerns in both Arabic and European languages, primarily in English and French.9
Perhaps I should hasten to interject here that there is nothing peculiar to Arab history or culture in all of this. The sorry record of censorship, book burning, and maligning of unorthodox thinkers and writers throughout human history shows that the phenomenon is too universal to dismiss by laying it at the door step of a single culture. To put matters in some historical perspective, it may help to remember that not too long ago James Joyce’s masterpiece Ulysses was banned in the United States of America and that, still more recently, many prominent American writers were regular guests on the White House’s blacklist.10 But my immediate interest here is in the role of the novel in modern Arab culture, as that role unfolds in the Egyptian national setting.
In many fundamental respects the Arabic novel in Egypt encapsulates and epitomizes the characteristic formal traits, thematic interests, and cultural and structural constraints of the Arabic novel in general. In large measure this coincidence flows from a rare combination of historical and cultural circumstances that render the experience of modern Egypt typical not only of other Arab countries but perhaps also of other Islamic and Third World former colonies that became independent “nation-states” in the course of the twentieth century. Like Egypt, the novel in such conflicted “nation-states” as India, Nigeria, Brazil, and Ireland, for example, cannot be fully comprehended apart from the evolving wider quest for a viable sense of collective identity.11
In the last three decades or so this problematic has come under increasing theoretical and critical scrutiny, both within the novel and in culture-oriented novel criticism. To suggest the range of views on this matter it may suffice to juxtapose the egregiously satirical treatment of the national question in Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and Fredric Jameson’s valorization of the Third World novel, primarily in its doubling as a “national allegory.”12 Benedict Anderson’s seminal concept of “imagined communities” bridges the ontological gap between the novel’s simultaneous dual roles: its participation in defining the norms under which a motley human mass becomes a cohesive “national” community, and its assumption of such an entity as a discursive backdrop for contrived fictional characters and events.13 This may be another way of restating the perennial tension between the constitutive–performative and the mimetic– descriptive deportments of literary texts, albeit in the case of the novel a tangible shift in emphasis from moral to epistemological concerns is often discernible. Whether the novel procedurally describes or mimics pre-existing types of personality and modes of behavior, or enacts into being such types and modes through the act of narration, is still a moot question.14 In either capacity, however, the novel’s intrusive and all-encompassing reach inevitably pits it against competing visions, representations, and epistemologies within the shared space of national culture. Paramount among these for the Arabic novel, though by no means the only one, is the Islamic epistemological paradigm. In the case of Egypt, the presence of al-Azhar, the Islamic world’s oldest and most prestigious center of Islamic learning, in the heart of Islamic Cairo, “city of a thousand minarets,” perforce privileges the religious discourse in Egyptian cultural life. What tensions and strains inhere in this situation for the novel will become clear, I hope, as this study progresses. But first, an additional differentiation is in order here.
Other genres of modern Arabic literature share with the novel aspects of the general predicament postulated earlier, but none as extensively or as intensely. The highly charged question of provenance, for example, and the host of related issues concerning the politics of cultural borrowing and the anxiety of consignment to derivative status that attend to it, bedevil in varying degrees modern Arabic poetry, Arabic drama, and the Arabic short story—which comprise, with the novel, the four recognized genres of modern Arabic literature. By way of controversy what these have in common is a dubious pedigree, namely, their putative common descent from Western origins.15 The key to the singularity of the novel lies in its unique ability to (re)present a convincing illusion of total reality and lived experience. In large measure, what makes this infinitely repeatable feat possible in widely different languages and cultures is the constitutive commitment of the novel to the principle and rhetorical strategies of verisimilitude, without which the novel, as it has evolved in modern history, is hardly conceivable.16
An insufficiently studied, though important by-product of this generic peculiarity of the novel has already been intimated earlier. I mean the novel’s uncanny ability to manipulate its formal structure and verisimilar effects to challenge prevalent social and cultural norms in the process of “rendering” reality into fiction. Under restrictive conditions, where the exercise of political and cultural authority rests more on coercion than on consent and persuasion, and where freedom of thought and expression are severely curtailed, this aptitude of the novel acquires transgressive and, potentially, subversive power.17 The very enactment of the real and the quotidian in the structure of the novel tends to legitimate them and, by extension and implication, to question discourses that would deny them representation. A considerable part of the appeal and power of the Arabic novel issues precisely from its sustained effort to reinstate in the Arab public domain “uncomfortable” subjects and discourses long banished from it, such as genuine philosophical investigation, oppositional politics, religious and cultural diversity, the human body, sexuality in all its forms and orientations, overt eroticism, folklore, and popular literature composed in the vernacular, among other tabooed or disparaged concerns.
It is hard to imagine this largely remedial sociocultural work on a large scale without a prerequisite condition, namely, the private nature of the reading experience. As Benedict Anderson argues in Imagined Communities, this option is itself a function of a happy coincidence between the novel genre, on the one hand, and mass printing, circulation, and common literacy, on the other. In the case of the Arabic novel, this empowerment has been double-edged. It has made possible the readmission of tabooed subjects into the public realm, albeit in fictional disguise, and has thereby incurred the wrath of one segment of Arab authority or another. Simultaneously, the high level of illiteracy in the Arab world has severely restricted the dissemination of novelistic discourse and ideational import beyond the narrow confines of the small, occasionally vocal, but always vulnerable literate, or, more precisely, literary elite. Against the avowed populist and public disposition of the genre, the Arabic novel has thus far impacted modern Arab history primarily through its private influence on remarkable Arab individuals. By far the most outstanding example of the novel’s role as a catalyst of direct historical change is the formative effect certain novels are said to have had on the political consciousness of President Nasser in his youth.18 I shall return to this seminal instance shortly. Here let me hasten to note that, no matter how discreet, the intimate liaison of the novel with arbitrary political power is seldom without a price. The extraordinary circumstances of Mahfouz’ most controversial novel, Children of Our Alley, and the writer’s ambiguous attitude towards the Nasserist experiment, amply illustrate the complex dynamics of this relationship.
However, it is precisely through the intimate but highly problematic relation to reality that the novel alone among the genres of modern Arabic literature has been able to mount a sustained and credible resistance to authoritarian practices and discourses that claim exclusive right to represent modern Arab culture and identity—invariably, it seems, in uniform, monolithic, and completely homo - genized narratives. Over against discourses that claim such a prerogative in the name of one supreme imperative or another—whether that be religious, moral, political, or ideological—Arabic novels have, in practice, consistently defended the right to the dialogic, the hybrid, and the heterogeneous. In this fundamental respect, the battle over the identity, status, and legitimacy of the Arabic novel metonymically reenacts the larger battle that rages on contiguous grounds over modern Arab consciousness, culture, and ultimately identity. Indeed, few major concerns have exercised Arab intellectual and artistic energies more than the question of identity and its attendant, janus-faced affinity to the modern world, on the one hand, and to hallowed tradition, on the other. This has been the case, in any event, since the onset of the Arab nahឍa (awakening)—itself another fiercely contested concept that is variably located between the French expedition to Egypt (1798–1801) and the end of the nineteenth century.19 How pervasive and enduring this preoccupation with the subject of identity has been in Arab and Egyptian culture may be gathered from the fact that a hundred years after the extravagant Khedive, Ismā‘īl (1863–1879) declared Egypt an integral part of Europe by a Khideval fiat, President Sadat, the self-proclaimed last Pharaoh of Egypt, was still pondering the issue in his aptly titled, but highly questionable autobiography, In Search of Identity.20
Admittedly, preoccupation with identity is peculiar neither to Arabic nor to modern literature. In fact, as Northrop Frye puts it, “the story of the loss and regaining of identity is, I think, the framework of all literature.”21 Although Frye is referring to individual identity here, the logic of his statement presupposes a larger, more generalized sense of identity against which the loss and recovery of person...

Table of contents