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Proxidistant reading
Toward a critical pedagogy of the nahážah 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 â a period in which the fate of ânewâ narrative genres (for example, the novel) is well established â rather than those that evoke a time when the boundaries between âtraditionâ and âmodernityâ were in flux. Yet a critical pedagogy of the nineteenth- and early twentieth-century Arab ârenaissanceâ (nahážah) 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 â undergraduate and graduate â in comparative literature. Two problems emerge in this context: first, the self-Orientalism of nahážah texts, which often uphold a thesis of post-Ottoman âdeclineâ and post-European âawakeningâ 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 âcloseâ and âdistantâ 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 nahážah intellectuals reengineered the Arab-Islamic idea of adab â once coterminous with knowledge itself â to translate the modern Western idea of literature, premodern adab and its modern Arabic ânemesisâ share more than nahážah ideology concedes: both can be narrowly âliteraryâ or radically transdisciplinary, belletristic or âlowbrow,â formal (fuáčąáž„Ä) or dialectal (âÄmmiyyah). Thus I propose that we read nahážah texts as testimonies to the discontinuous continuity â or continuity in death â of premodernity and modernity, âWestsâ and âEasts,â 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 nahážah âliteratureâ both up close to and afar from original texts and from the imagined purview of the âliterary.â
To impart a prismatic vision of the nahážah to students who must rely on limited English translations, I suggest peri-literary approaches â âtime travelâ to the nahážah through secondary sources, as well as primary sources (e.g. novels) set in the era yet composed in later periods â and para-literary readings that place the many forms that nahážah âliteratureâ actually took (historical, sociopolitical, scientific, popular) alongside those that fit its belletristic theoretical mold. By teaching an earlier âmodernâ than the âmodern Arabic literatureâ comparatists typically teach, and by comparing the nahážah with similar ârenaissancesâ 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 â 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 Saidâs Orientalism: a view that accepts Samuel Huntingtonâs âclash of civilizationsâ thesis and posits a âmedieval,â 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, âPolitical Stirrings in Egypt, a Land of Little Change,â compounds the absurdity of its lead: ââChangeâ is not a word often associated with Egypt.â2 Not long after this article appeared, the revolution of 25 January 2011 would topple Egyptian President áž„usnÄ« MubÄrak.) The fact that the nahážah took place, then, contests the Orientalist logic of Eastern stasis. Yet the prevailing intellectual mood of the nahážah itself â read closely â is steeped in Orientalism. If teaching the modern Arab ârenaissanceâ forces students in the US academy to collapse the Occident/Orient binary assumed by Orientalist thought â to replace the post-9/11 question âWhy do they hate us so?â with the question âWhy did they once love us so, and perhaps do still?â â the textual corpus of the ârenaissanceâ itself too often reifies Orientalist binaries.
Indeed, throughout late nineteenth- and especially early twentieth-century Arabic literary history and criticism, the scholar of the nahážah encounters Arab self-murder. The Arab must die to awaken. In his TÄrÄ«kh ÄdÄb al-lughah al-âarabiyyah, often considered the first modern Arab foray into literary historiography, JurjÄ« ZaydÄn dates the beginning of the modern Arab renaissance â what he calls âal-nahážah al-akhÄ«rahâ (âthe latest renaissanceâ), in one of the earliest conscious uses of the term â to the French retreat from Egypt in 1801.3 While ZaydÄn concedes that the French invasion of Egypt in 1798 ârattled the nervesâ of the East (âihtazzat lahu aâáčąÄbuhuâ), he ignores the possibility that the theses of pre-1798 âdeclineâ and post-1798 ârenaissanceâ that so permeate his historical account of Arab literary modernity might issue from what Jean-Paul Sartre (prefacing Frantz Fanon) dubbed the ânervous conditionâ of the colonized native.4 ZaydÄn insists that eighteenth-century Ottoman Egypt and Syria languished in âbackwardness and corruptionâ (âal-taâakhkhuri wa-l-fasÄdiâ) punctuated only by ânĆ«ran ážaâÄ«lanâ (âfaint lightâ) from the intellectual labors of Syrian Christian monastic orders.5 (Even the latter are described only to be dismissed: âYet this [activity ⊠was] not enough to illuminate this darkened atmosphere,â presumably because it was primarily âreligiousâ â non-secular, hence non-âscientificâ and non-âmodern.â6) To prove the Arab-Islamic worldâs âbackwardnessâ in the centuries just prior to its first encounter with modern imperial Europe, ZaydÄn turns to the testimony of âFrench philosopher,â historian, and Orientalist Constantin-François de Chasseboeuf, comte de Volney (1757â1820) in his two-volume travelogue Voyage en Syrie et en Ăgypte.7 Twice he gives Volney the final word on pre-nineteenth-century Arab cultural and material production, authorizing as âtruthâ the Frenchmanâs ascription of âignoranceâ and inferiority to both Ottoman Egypt and Syria and his concomitant valorization of Europe: the presumed catalyst of âthat blessed sparkâ of Arab renewal.8 To his credit, ZaydÄn makes it clear that this European-inspired nahážah is neither unique nor absolute, but only the latest such ârenaissanceâ in Arab-Islamic history. He also suggests that Europe is not the only source of Arab literary modernity; although modern Arab writers had translated âcountlessâ European novels by 1913 and had imitated the European novel form in their fiction, ZaydÄn argues, the Arabs had possessed the form âearlier.â9 Still, he makes it clear that this âlatest renaissanceâ is also the first in a long time â since the heyday of the âAbbÄsid period (750â1258) in the ninth to eleventh centuries. Between the âAbbÄsid world of HÄrĆ«n al-RashÄ«d, on the one hand, and the nineteenth-century world of BashÄ«r al-ShihÄbÄ« in Syria and of the Khedives IsmÄâÄ«l and âAbbÄs áž„ilmÄ« 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, âjumped from its own calendar to another, alien one [the European], memory lost its bearings and plunged into another memory and another time frame.â11 What develops from this darkroom of forgetting and ârememoryâ (after Toni Morrison) is the image of an Arab-Islamic world roused by Europe from long, deathlike âsleep.â
ZaydÄnâs view typifies the dominant psychology of the modern Arab renaissance. Echoes of his logic sound in the later work of Aáž„mad AmÄ«n (1886â1954), a leading Egyptian Muslim intellectual of the twentieth century. Certainly AmÄ«nâs ZuâamÄâ al-iáčąlÄáž„ fÄ« al-âaáčąr al-áž„adÄ«th (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 Muáž„ammad âAbduh, takes a more critical view of the European-Arab encounter. AmÄ«n is keenly aware that the political pressures of European colonialism drove the selective adoption of Western civilization, in its material (mÄddiyyah) and its spiritual (maânawiyyah) 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 ZaydÄn, AmÄ«n cites Volneyâs account to certify an Arab-Islamic âdeathâ that demands ârebirthâ through Europe.13 If, as Said has argued, the repetition of idĂ©es reçues about the Arab-Islamic Orient masquerades as objective âtruthâ in much modern European Orientalist scholarship, AmÄ«n enacts a native repetition of foreign Orientalism by citing Volneyâs impression as fact, taking the Europeanâs dim view of the Orient as his own.14 AmÄ«n dubs the pre-nineteenth-century Islamic world a âdecrepit old man whom the events [of history, especially the Crusades] had destroyed,â comparing this deteriorating subject to a Europe that âhad begun ⊠to awaken since the Crusades and to create a new civilization for itself.â15 So radical is the European-inspired âawakeningâ of the nineteenth-century Arabic-speaking world, contends AmÄ«n, that âthe 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.â16 If AmÄ«n tacitly imputes the ârenaissanceâ of Western Christendom (from supposed âDark Agesâ of its own) to its transformative encounter with Arab-Islamic cultures during the Crusades, he overtly ascribes the âawakeningâ of the âEastâ to the pressures of European conquest.
Other nahážah intellectuals would judge Arabic even less generously. Writing in 1928, the Egyptian Muslim literary critic Aáž„mad áž„asan al-ZayyÄt â later editor of the Cairo periodical al-RisÄlah (The Message) â describes Arabic literature (virtually from its inception) as a âbrackish creek,â stagnant water over which âgnats buzz.â17 This âdeathâ awaits Western rejuvenation; the young Arab, al-ZayyÄt maintains, drinks the (presumably fresh) water and âluscious fruitsâ of European literature because it speaks to life, his life in the present.18 Al-ZayyÄt 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 âchaosâ and to failure as âliterature.â19 ZaydÄn, at least, ascribed other ârenaissancesâ to earlier ages of Arabic literature and gave a nod to indigenous as well as foreign precursors of literary modernity; AmÄ«n, intimating the impact of colonial power on the modern Arab renaissance, unwittingly invites his reader to denaturalize the ideas of âdeclineâ and ârenaissanceâ and to reinterpret both as ideological constructs. Al-ZayyÄtâs self-Orientalization is more absolute.
Teaching such texts in comparative literature, we might reinforce the âtruthâ of ZaydÄnâs, AmÄ«nâs, and al-ZayyÄtâs assumptions â shared by many of their time â that the Arab-Islamic world was in âdeclineâ 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 âbackwardâ threat to the âprogressiveâ West. That those like al-ZayyÄt 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 nahážah, 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 ârenaissanceâ functions here as an ideologically motivated and translational term â translingual, transcultural, and transhistorical. Recovering Greco-Roman antiquity, the European Renaissance assimilated a once-rejected âpaganâ literature to a Christian worldview, thereby forging a new humanism â at once sacred and secular â 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 nahážah, Islam once had represented a symbiosis of reason and faith and had...