LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

17Writing the Nation: The Emergence of Egyptin the Modern Arabic NovelJeff ShalanIn his classic study on the rise of Arab nationalism, George Antonius writes:‘Without school or book, the making of a nation is in modern times inconceivable’(1946: 40). Of course, modern nations are not built in schools and booksalone; but one need not discount nationalism’s socioeconomic determinants,nor its historical specificity, to accept the premise of Antonius’s argument: thatis, the effect of culture and cultural institutions on the political formation of thenation-state. Though the nature of that effect is itself overdetermined, itslocation can in part be inferred from what Antonius then goes on to writeconcerning certain educational reforms initiated in Syria in 1834: ‘[They] pavedthe way, by laying the foundations of a new cultural system, for the rehabilitationof the Arabic language as a vehicle of thought’ (ibid). In other words, onemight say, a modern nation is inconceivable apart from a language in which itcan be conceived and communicated as such. By articulating this linguistic linkbetween nation and thought, Antonius thus points to the site of culture, or acultural system, as the specifically ideological field in which nationalism is sownand from which national identities are reaped.I draw attention here, through the above metaphor, to the organic character ofthis relationship between culture and nationalism not because, as Ernest Gellnerargues, there is anything natural about it, but because it is almost invariably fromthe field of culture that proponents of nationalism first posit an idea of the nationas an organic entity, one which pre-exists its geopolitical formation. 1 Whether itbe language, territory, race, religion, ethnicity, the presumed historical continuityof a people, or any combination thereof, which serves as the organic and unifyingprinciple of the nation, the idea itself typically takes shape in and is transmittedby way of a cultural system. In this sense, then, the ‘vehicle’ of a rehabilitatedlanguage becomes as important as the thought it carries. 2 If a standardisedArabic were eventually to come to serve as one of the pillars of modern Arabnationalism, around which a people could be gathered, and through which theycould communicate and come to identify with one another as members of anation, then it would have to be made accessible to more than a select fewschooled in its classical idiom. And together with the rise of an indigenous printmedia, schools and books became the primary means towards this end.— 128 —www.taq.ir