A Brief Introduction to Modern Arabic Literature Read Online Free

the manner of European travel literature though with greater claims to authenticity, or answered to particular western agendas, such as the desire to see the Arab world as ‘backward’, enlightenment coming to it as a result of the impact of the West, or Arab women, in particular, as repressed, achieving freedom through their adoption of what were seen as western ideas of female emancipation. The French writer Richard Jacquemond, for example, comments that Taha Hussein’s autobiography,
The Days
, and Tawfiq al-Hakim’s novel
Diary of a Country Prosecutor
(discussed in Chapter 2 ), were translated into French in the 1930s, probably in part because both works draw a contrast between a ‘backward’ native society and the impact of enlightened European ideas. This contrast is also apparent in translated works by Arab women, both then and now, those that are the most often translated drawing a contrast ‘between the liberating values associated with the West that their authors defend and the sexual oppression of the ‘oriental male’ that they denounce’. 8 This has led to decades of controversy over the translation and promotion inthe West of works by Arab women, from those of Out el-Koloub (written in French), criticized in the 1930s by Taha Hussein, to those of Nawal al-Saadawi, Alifa Rifaat and others, discussed in Chapter 6 .
    Following Mahfouz’s award of the Nobel Prize, however, the translation of modern Arabic literature received a tremendous fillip, though this success was not without ironies of its own. Arabic literature was still expected to conform to a particular western image of it, and anything not doing so found a foreign market only with difficulty, or not at all. While Mahfouz was remarkable for having reinvented himself more than once over the course of a long career, many of his most accomplished novels, dating from the 1950s, are written according to the familiar canons of nineteenth-century realism. This means that much of his best work is not representative of the work of Arab writers from the 1970s to the present day. Yet, such features of Mahfouz’s career, and of the post-war development of modern Arabic literature more generally, were flattened out in the reception of the novels in the West. For many western readers, modern Arabic literature was understood to be simply rather like the earlier works of Naguib Mahfouz. Moreover, while Mahfouz is often read in the Arab world as an experimental, or even subversive writer, in western societies he has tended to be seen as a kind of latter-day Dickens, accomplished certainly, and containing lots of local ‘colour’, but easily assimilated as a kind of fluent foreign pupil of established European styles. Jacquemond, for example, comments that Mahfouz has commonly been received abroad as the ‘ethnographer of the “ordinary people of Cairo”, who have been frozen into the “brightly coloured” image that their “chronicler” has produced of them, like figures in an orientalist painting.’ 9 Nothing could be further from the truth.
    Taken together, these factors have tended to produce an image of modern Arab literature that is both old-fashioned and picturesque, even Mahfouz’s success with international readers having produced anidea of the literature as a whole that is in many respects misleading. Who would have guessed from the reception of Mahfouz’s earlier novels that their author was also the author of experimental, ‘modernist’ thrillers? Or that the earlier novels are politically engaged? Or, indeed, that modern Arabic literature, at least from the 1960s on, has in large part consisted of writing that is quite unlike the earlier or later works of Mahfouz? (It has, of course, been even more unlike the works of Gibran.) Fortunately, the greater availability of translations today, and the greater transparency of the Arab world in the post-cold war period, has meant that many, though by no means all, of these preconceptions are