LITERATURE AND NATION IN THE MIDDLE EAST

writing the nationI do not mean to imply in this way an inversion of the historical chronologyof events. Clearly, as Antonius argues, it is only after the nineteenth-centurynahda, or Arab cultural renaissance, is well underway that the first glimmers ofwhat could be called a national consciousness become visible. And it is onlyafter that point that the link between nation and language could then beconsciously forged as one of the central tenets of Arab nationalist thought.What Antonius thereby makes apparent in his analysis is that a nation does notspring forth of its own in the minds of a people, full-grown from the earth, likeAthena from the head of Zeus. Rather, in both Western and non-Westernnationalism, it has typically first taken shape in the heads of a cultural elite, as atentative and ill-defined response to the crises and disruptions in social relationsand modes of production resulting from modernisation and often, as concernsthe non-West, the encroachment of Western imperialism. In the case of Arabnationalism, it was the nineteenth-century nahda, itself already set in motion bysuch changes, that provided fertile ground for the burgeoning national consciousnessof that cultural elite.But generalising references to a cultural system cannot alone explain themanner in which an emergent ideology, whose formation can to some extent belocated among a cultural elite, achieved the hegemony that allowed for itstransformation into various political movements and parties with substantialpopular support. The institutions of a rejuvenated cultural system, such asschools and the press, can account for the method of transmission, but not forthe equally important modes of internalisation whereby a nationalist ideologytakes root in the lives of individuals to become an essential part of their worldview.And the importance of this process of internalisation cannot be underestimatedinsofar as nationalism’s success as an ideology is predicated on thecollective appeal it makes to an inclusive group of individuals, many of whommay in fact have no knowledge of and little or nothing in common with oneanother. 3 It is for this reason that I have chosen to focus here on a relativelyneglected but arguably significant offshoot of the relationship between thenahda and the rise of Arab nationalism: the emergence of the modern Arabicnovel. Even as Antonius himself made a courageous if perhaps misplacedattempt to locate the beginnings of Arab nationalism in a poem inscribed onthe famous placards of his narrative, studies on the nahda in its relationship toArab nationalism, such as Albert Hourani’s seminal work, typically touch uponthe novel, and literature in general, in only the most cursory way. 4 Likewise,studies devoted to the rise of the modern Arabic novel, where they even broachthe issue of nationalism, do so, at best, in schematic or incidental fashion. 5Without inflating its importance in this context, it nonetheless seems apparentthat the modern Arabic novel developed in conjunction with a specificallynationalist mode of thought, and that it was instrumental not only in the— 129 —www.taq.ir