Literature: Arabic

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LITERATURE: ARABIC

Arabic literature of the nineteenth and twentieth centuries diverged substantially from inherited practices.

Arabic literature has its roots in pre-Islamic odes, enshrining prosodic and thematic conventions that remained unchallenged centuries after the ethos of desert life had ceased to be widely applicable. The emergence of historic Islam in the seventh century c.e., together with the dogma that the Qurʾan is the actual word of God and that its superhuman eloquence is the miracle that proves the genuineness of the Prophet's mission, gave the language of that period an all but hallowed character that was perpetuated in formal writing but displaced by local uninflected vernaculars in everyday Arabic speech.

The literary tradition was therefore tinged with a conservative and puristic quality that gave it uncommon homogeneity and continuity. Its conservativeness also insulated it from daily concerns, so that the uneducated majority turned instead to regional folk literatures that were ignored or even despised by the establishment. Nevertheless, changes did occur. One was a growing taste for verbal ornaments, such as the pun and the double entendre. What modern Arabs inherited from the immediate past, therefore, was the literature of a conservative elite in which correctness, convention, and linguistic virtuosity were prized above content or originality.

By the 1800s, the encroachments of Europe brought new perceptions to Arab intellectuals, who came to admire the very power that the colonialists used against them and sought the knowledge that made it possible. By the 1870s, especially in Egypt and the Levant, a new westward-looking elite had emerged. From it came the producers and consumers of the new literature.

New Direction

The conscious adaptation of literary standards to changed conditions was gradual. The earliest Arab intellectuals with extensive opportunity to get to know Europe, such as the perceptive Rifaʿa Rafi alTahtawi (1801–1871) and the more mercurial Faris (later, Ahmad Faris) al-Shidyaq (1804–1887), were aware that Europeans had different concepts of literature than Arabs did, but they deemed them inferior. And yet a new form of writing was coming into being, which was evident wherever there was a need to convey information (as in the books of Shidyaq and Tahtawi). It was fostered in translations, even nonliterary ones, where Arabic had to accommodate notions never before expressed; and it was important to a new Middle Eastern profession born of an imported technology: journalism.

The new direction was strikingly illustrated in the career of Abdullah al-Nadim (1845–1896), the fiery orator of the Urabi rebellion. He was well established as a master of finely bejeweled rhymed prose, but when he took to journalism, he faced up to the need to reach a wide public. He experimented, briefly, with writing an occasional piece entirely in the vernacular, but the choice he deliberately made was to use a vocabulary as close as possible to that of everyday speech without deviating from the rules of classical Arabic grammar. Others have since wrestled with the strains and anomalies of writing in the Arabic idiom that no one speaks and, indeed, the colloquial has gained a large measure of acceptance in the theater and a more grudging one in the dialogue of novels and short stories. But al-Nadim's practice has prevailed among prose writers for at least eighty years, with only a few in the last generation allowing themselves liberties with the syntax as well.

The transformation was not merely stylistic; by the 1870s, admiration of Europe's successes in science and technology was extended, by a loose association, to political, social, and philosophic endeavors as well. The adoption of European aesthetic norms could not lag far behind. By the turn of the twentieth century, direct and unadorned prose was widely recognized as not only functional but also literarily desirable. Because the learned were few, the principal medium of dissemination was the periodical press, so some major literary works were serialized before appearing in book form.

With little to encourage specialization in any one genre, the recognized stylists found their main vehicle in short prose pieces, such as the moralistic essays and tearful narratives of Mustafa Lutfi alManfaluti (1876–1924). Indeed, the first half of the twentieth century was dominated by immensely prolific and versatile writers, among whom were Taha Husayn (1889–1973) and Abbas Mahmud al-Aqqad (1889–1964). They were virtually all secularist and liberal sociopolitically, and romantic in their literary inclinations. Although few set out their aesthetic

principles systematically, they accustomed their generation to seek neither formalism nor virtuosity in literature but sincerity and emotion. Experience and maturity, the events of World War II, the subsequent decline of Britain and France, and above all, the challenges of independence in tandem with the turmoil of the Palestinians caused the next generation to turn away from romanticism. The keynote of postwar Arabic writing has been political commitment and realism, strongly tinged with socialism.

Prose

The prose style of the West fostered genres previously unknown in Arabic literature. In particular, narratives were discredited as no more than folk art, and the only form to have gained the critics' acceptance as serious literature was the maqama, pioneered by Badi al-Zaman al-Hamadhani (968–1008). It was a short piece that usually recounted, in highly ornate prose, some petty fraud perpetrated by an amiable rogue. By the end of the nineteenth century there was growing public demand for short stories and novels of the European type. The demand was readily met by translations, adaptations, or imitations. The short story proved particularly suitable to the needs of journals and an excellent medium for the piecemeal propagation of new ideas and perceptions. In its Arabic garb, it was brought to a high level of sophistication as early as the 1920s by such authors as Mahmud Taymur (1894–1973).

The novel was a more difficult form, especially in the absence of an Arabic tradition. Translations and adaptations aside, a pioneering attempt at a long narrative was made by Muhammad al-Muwaylihi (1858–1930) in Hadith Isa ibn Hisham (The Discourse of Isa ibn Hisham), in which a resurrected pasha had a series of adventures that offered opportunities to comment on social changes. The fact that it borrowed the name of the narrator and, in places, the style of (al-Hamadhani), caused it to be labeled an extended maqama, but the purpose it served was different, and its link to the novel form was tenuous.

Jurji Zaydan (1861–1914), the indefatigable owner and editor of the journal al-Hilal, published more than a score of romances, each twined around some episode of Islamic history—but invention in them is minimal. The first novel of recognized merit rooted in contemporary Arab life was Zaynab, the story of a village girl married against her will; it was written by Muhammad Husayn Haykal (1888–1956) in 1910/11 and first published anonymously. No others of consequence were published until the 1930s, when several writers with already established reputations, such as Taha Husayn, Mahmud Taymur, and Ibrahim Abd al-Qadir al-Mazini (1890–1949), turned to the novel. Greater progress was made under the banner of realism, notably by Najib Mahfuz (b. 1911), the first Arab to devote most of his energies to one genre. His abundant, varied, and highly competent production earned him the Nobel Prize for literature in 1988.

Theater

Even more than the novel, dramatic literature was hindered by the absence of any regional precedent, except as folk art, and by resistance to the use of the Arabic colloquial—even between unlearned characters and before mixed audiences. Yet drama made a comparatively early start; the first performance was The Miser, a play which, although not a translation of Molière's play, owed a great deal to the great French comedic playwright (1622–1673). It was produced in Beirut (Lebanon) in 1847 by Marun al-Naqqash (1818–1855). His company, and several others that branched out of it or imitated it, found acceptance in Egypt, but their activities were looked upon as mere entertainment. In fact, although some writers established in other genres also tried to write plays, no Arab acquired a reputation as a playwright until the 1930s, when Tawfiq al-Hakim (1898–1987), who had had experience as a hack writer for a theatrical company, returned from a period of study in Paris determined to give drama a recognized place among literary arts. His long career, marked by productivity and versatility even into old age, brought him fame and inspired an impressive group of new playwrights.

Poetry

In contrast to the newly imported genres, Arabic poetry has a long and rich tradition. In the first three-quarters of the nineteenth century, poets perpetuated the highly ornate style of their immediate predecessors. When the times called for a less ornamental and more purposeful poetry, the practice of the most talented turned not to European models but to the example of early poets from an equally dynamic age. By the turn of the century, a school now known as the neoclassical quickly attained a high level of accomplishment, emulating the grandiloquent odes of Abbasid poets but addressing the public issues of the day. Its leading exponents were Ahmad Shawqi (1868–1932) and Muhammad Hafiz Ibrahim (c. 1872–1932).

Resonant as they were, their voices were not the only ones to be heard. Others favored more radical initiatives and the expression of more personal emotions. From outside the Arab heartlands, Syrian Christian émigrés to the Americas headed by Kahlil Gibran (1883–1931) echoed a type of poetry
long accepted in the West. Not least influential were the leading critics al-Aqqad and Taha Husayn, who harried the neoclassicists for not equaling the subtleties of the British poet Percy Bysshe Shelley (1792–1822) or the French poet Alphonse de Lamartine (1790–1869). The leanings of these various groups were unmistakable, and after the death of Ahmad Shawqi and Hafiz Ibrahim, the romanticism already evident in prose became evident in poetry as well.

Another new note was sounded in 1949 when two Iraqis, Badr Shakir al-Sayyab (1926–1964) and Nazik al-Malaʾika (b. 1923), almost simultaneously published their first experiments with free verse. The adoption of lines of uneven length with muted rhymes irregularly arranged, or with no rhymes at all, was the most radical departure ever from classical Arabic poetry. No less significant is that the movement grew—and has continued to grow—out of perceptions shared with Western poets of international stature, especially T. S. Eliot (1888–1965). Most revolutionary of all has been its purpose; for it has given rise to a host of committed poets often able to give voice to their predicaments as individuals and, at the same time, as Arabs and as human-ists.

All Genres

All along, Arab writers have given expression to the fervor and then to the disappointments and antagonisms generated by the succession of Western ideologies embraced by the elite. This expression has to some extent been tinged by the prestige of the world power most closely associated with each ism. In the second half of the twentieth century, following growing disappointment in the way the liberalism and secularism associated with Western Europe had worked out, the dominant doctrine has been socialism, but the collapse of the Soviet Union undermined confidence in its forthcoming triumph. Very few carry their disillusion to the extent implied in a short story by Mahmud al-Rimawi (b. 1948) titled "The Train" and included in his Liqa lam yatimm (2002). In it, a train running to an unknown destination and stopping only at deserted stations is packed with people who have been on it long enough for a baby girl to be born to one of them, and the name she is given is Palestine. More confidently, contributors to all literary genres view themselves as individuals sharing a distinctive experience but informed by a universal consciousness, and dealing with issues that have a humanistic as well as an Arab dimension.

see also gibran, kahlil; hakim, tawfiq al-; husayn, taha; ibrahim, muhammad hafiz; mahfuz, najib; malaʾika, nazik al-; sayyab, badr shakir al-; shawqi, ahmad; shidyaq, ahmad faris al-; tahtawi, rifaʿa al-rafi al-; zaydan, jurji.